FRENCH AND ENGLISH STAFF OFFICERS.

Louis de Bonfils is a captain in the corps of état-major, or the staff corps of France. I have known him for several years, and always found him an honourable upright soldier; in every sense of the word, a gentleman. According to our insular ideas of decorum, the captain is, perhaps, rather too much given to swaggering about with his hands in the far-down pockets of his red trousers, and is slightly addicted to swearing when ladies are not by. An English cavalry captain might think Louis awfully slow, because he does not know or care anything about racing, is proud of, and wears, his uniform at all times and on all occasions, and has but one suit of plain clothes to his name. Moreover, since he commenced his career in the army, the captain has thought of, and worked for, nothing but his profession, and has, consequently, succeeded in making himself what the state pays him to be—a useful active wheel in the great mass of French military machinery. Not but that my friend has his failings and shortcomings like other men; but he knows full well that unless he keeps pace with—and, to do so, he must strive to outrun—his comrades on the staff in the race for professional pre-eminence, he will be cast aside as a useless encumbrance on the army list of France. Besides his rank of captain in the staff corps, Louis de Bonfils is attached to the depôt général de la guerre at Paris; where he is assisting, together with several others of his own rank and regiment, in completing a magnificent series of military maps of France, on a larger scale than any that have yet been published. The captain lately returned from the Crimea, where he was attached as aide-de-camp to the staff of a general of division; but, being sent to Paris in charge of some valuable topographical papers relating to Russia—which he had compiled when in camp by order of his superiors—the minister of war attached him, for the present, to the aforesaid depôt de la guerre.

I met Captain de Bonfils the other day in Paris, and asked him to tell me what were the qualifications required for a staff officer in his service, and how he had been fortunate enough to obtain employment in so distinguished a corps. This request he complied with at once; assuring me that the career of one officer in the corps d’état-major may be taken as an exact sample of all, and that the same qualifications are required from every one who aspires to the honour of holding a commission in that regiment.

To apply the term regiment to the French staff is perhaps not quite appropriate, as the corps consists entirely of officers. Belonging to this body are thirty colonels, thirty lieutenant-colonels, one hundred chefs d’escadron (who would be termed majors in the English service), three hundred captains, and one hundred lieutenants. No one can join the regiment unless he passes through the special school instituted in eighteen hundred and eighteen for that purpose, and now called L’École Impériale d’Application d’État-Major. This my friend, Captain Louis de Bonfils, of course, did. There are sixty pupils in the establishment, one-half of whom leave it every year; thus creating thirty annual vacancies. Of these thirty, three are selected from the École Polytechnique; the remaining twenty-seven places in the staff-school are filled by competition from amongst fifty-seven candidates, thirty of whom must be sub-lieutenants who have been at least one year in the service, and must be under twenty-five years of age; and twenty-seven from the pupils of the military school of St. Cyr. Captain de Bonfils was one of the latter class. He had already spent his regulated time of three years at St. Cyr; and having passed the required examination for a commission in the line, might have joined a regiment without delay. Being one of the twenty-seven pupils at the head of the list amongst the hundred who had passed in his term, he entered his name as a candidate for admittance into the École d’État-Major, and, as he was successful, joined that institution. Here he remained two years, going through the regular course of instruction in military science; and—although, like the rest of the pupils, he held the rank of a commissioned officer—under almost as strict military and collegiate discipline as any school-boy. Winter and summer, the young men in this college rise at six o’clock, and, with the exception of an hour for breakfast, half-an-hour for recreation in the middle of the day, and the same in the afternoon, work at one or other branch of their studies until five in the afternoon; at which hour they dine, and are then at liberty to go where they like, until ten in the evening. When they want to be out of college later, leave must be asked and obtained from the governor of the establishment. During the two years they remain at the staff-school, their time is divided regularly every day, each hour bringing its allotted task. The course of studies includes all the higher branches of mathematics, topography, geography, and fortification, together with statistics, military history, the English, German, and Italian languages, drawing, and the theory of military manœuvres—artillery, cavalry, and infantry—on a grand scale, and separate as well as combined. One hour every day is devoted to lessons in equitation in the riding-school; and every pupil is provided with an excellent charger at the cost of the state. The young men have each their own room, which is large enough to form, with comfort, a sleeping apartment and a study. They breakfast and dine together in the refectory, the former meal being served at nine, and the latter at five o’clock.

Out of the year, eight months are passed at Paris, and are devoted to hard work at the desk; three are spent in military surveying in various parts of France; and one entire month is required for the annual examinations. On entering the institution, and for twelve months afterwards, the pupils are attached to the second division, or lower school. After a year has elapsed they pass an examination, and, if found qualified, move into the higher, or first class. Any young man who cannot pass this examination is forthwith remanded to one of the regiments of the line. Serious sickness for any length of time is considered the only allowable excuse for any want of proficiency in their studies. At the end of the second year another examination has to be gone through, and is considered the final test of qualification. If passed, the pupil leaves the school with the rank of lieutenant in the staff corps. But, although enrolled as one of that distinguished body, he has yet to go through another and a longer ordeal of learning in practice that which, as yet, he has only been taught in theory. For two years he is attached to a regiment of infantry; after that, for a like time, to a cavalry corps, and then, for one year, to a battery of artillery. With each of these branches of the service he has to do duty as a troop or company-officer for half the period; during the other half he is employed as a supernumerary-adjutant, under the orders of the colonel.

During the five years that he is attached to various regiments, the staff-lieutenant has to prepare and transmit regularly to his own corps, maps, papers, drawings, and surveys, which he is ordered to employ his time upon. My friend, Louis de Bonfils, after leaving the staff-college, was attached for two years to a regiment of infantry in Algiers, after which, he passed a like term with a cavalry corps in France, and then was ordered again to Algiers with a battery of artillery. Having completed his ten years’ military education—viz., three at the College of St. Cyr, two at the staff school, and five attached to regiments of the three arms of the service, Captain de Bonfils commenced his career as a full-blown staff-officer: that is to say, he joined his corps with the rank of captain, and was then eligible for such appointments as officers of his grade can hold. It is from this class—and from this only—that the aides-de-camp of French general officers are selected, and it is amongst the captains of the corps d’état-major, that my friend de Bonfils takes his place. The French staff is not divided, like that of England, into two separate departments of adjutant-general and quarter-master-general. With our neighbours, these form one and the same staff, and every officer belonging to the staff corps is perfectly qualified to fulfil all duties relating to both departments. Nothing whatever is left to chance, or to the hazard of personal selection. The marshals of France alone, have the right to nominate their own aides-de-camp—each having two, one a colonel, the other a lieutenant-colonel of the corps d’état-major. All other officers who are entitled to aides-de-camp must take such as are nominated to their staff by the minister of war; and to ask for a friend or relative being appointed, would in France be thought an unsoldierlike and unpardonable liberty. Louis de Bonfils tells me that in about a year’s time he expects to be promoted to the rank of chef d’escadron in the staff corps, and that he will then probably be sent either to one of the bureaux d’État-Major, which are attached to the various military divisions of France, or to the staff of some general in the Crimea. As I mentioned before, the Corps d’État-Major consists of one hundred lieutenants (who are attached to various regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery), three hundred captains, one hundred chefs d’escadron (or majors), thirty lieutenant-colonels, and thirty colonels; so that, without counting the junior rank, here is always in France an effective body of four hundred and sixty officers who have received the most finished military education it is possible to attain in the world, and who are always ready to fill up vacancies in the higher departments, or to form a staff for an army taking the field.

Is there any difference, O my countrymen, and what difference, between this system and the system of the English service! Amongst my friends on this side the Channel, I can also number a staff officer, whom I have known some years. A better fellow, or more honorable man than Charley Benson does not exist; but what there is in him to make a staff officer out of I never could imagine. He entered the service about five years ago, and, having an uncle a general officer in command of an Irish district, was made aide-de-camp to that relative when he had done two years’ duty with his regiment. The war in the Crimea broke out, and his uncle having good interest at the Horse Guards, got Charley named a deputy-assistant quartermaster-general with the army. What the duties of the appointment may be, I don’t exactly know, and I am very certain Charley himself does not. He writes me that he has a lot of paper-work and returns to make out; but that with a good sergeant for a clerk, he manages to make it all serene.

Poor Charley! I can imagine how sorely puzzled he would be if left to his own resources with pen, ink, and paper. He can write a reasonably sensible letter when he likes, (it is not often that he does like,) but is decidedly eccentric in his orthography. As to the higher branches of mathematics, he knows nothing whatever of them. He can add up the various sums of money set down in the fly-leaves of his cheque-book, and so tell whether he has overdrawn his account with Messrs. Cox, the army agents; but beyond this his capabilities for figures does not extend. Topography, fortification, military drawing, military history, and military statistics, he denounces—when they are mentioned in his presence—by the energetic monosyllable—rot! As to military manœuvres on a grand scale, Charley says he got through his drill under the adjutant of his regiment, and what more would you have? Moreover, he is now on the staff, and having good interest, intends to remain there for some time; so what use, to him, would be any further drilling? When the war is over he is to join his uncle, an elderly gentleman, who, after having been thirty years on half-pay, was appointed not long ago to the command of an Irish district, and is now about to proceed out to India as commander-in-chief of an Indian Presidency, where he will reign supreme over a native army, of whose language he does not understand one word, in a country he has never so much as read of. In Bombay or Madras he will enjoy a salary of twelve hundred pounds a-year.

Of what use, therefore, can military education be to my friend Charley Benson? He is one of the fortunate men of this world, who, having good interest, need not trouble his head with the why or the wherefore of this or that science. As aide-de-camp, his chief duties are to dress well, carve well, dance well, ride well, help to do the honors of his uncle’s house, and occasionally attend that relative to the review or inspection of a regiment. His training for the staff consisted in going through a couple of years’ regimental duty with his corps; and, although whilst there he learnt nothing which could be of the slightest advantage to him either as an aide-de-camp or a deputy quartermaster-general, he now finds himself quite on a par with his brother staff-officers as regards any knowledge of his duties.

Nor is he altogether a bad specimen of the English staff-officer. There are some few holding such appointments who have in a certain degree qualified themselves for the post by a couple of years’ study at the senior department of the Military College at Sandhurst; but the certificates obtained by these gentlemen never got them on the staff. Their nominations were coincidences, and would have been equally certain had they no qualification whatever. In a work lately published by an officer of the English army, whose character and accomplishments guarantee the truth of what he asserts, the writer states: “I have reason to believe that from eighteen hundred and fifteen to eighteen hundred and fifty-four—a period of thirty-nine years—not one single appointment on the staff of the army has been made in consequence of the officer having graduated at Sandhurst.”[2] And further, the same author informs us that, according to the Army List for May last, twenty-five officers of the Guards hold staff appointments, of whom only five ever studied at Sandhurst, and not one of whom received a first-class certificate.

From another little work on military education,[3] which was published just before the present war commenced, we learn that out of ninety-one officers employed in the general staff of the army in eighteen hundred and fifty-two, seven only had graduated at the senior department of Sandhurst, and that out of one hundred and seventeen staff-officers of pensioners in the same year, three only had obtained certificates. But a stronger instance of the utter inutility of English officers studying to qualify themselves for the staff has yet to be told. According to a parliamentary return called for during the last session, and published early in the month of May, there were then one hundred and thirty-five officers serving on the staff of the army in the Crimea. Of these only nine had obtained certificates at Sandhurst. Not a single assistant quartermaster-general, nor brigade-major, nor aide-de-camp, had ever graduated at that college; whilst of eleven assistant adjutant-generals, one only had passed through that ordeal,—and amongst twenty-nine deputies of the two staff departments (of the adjutant and quartermaster-general), but five had ever obtained certificates of qualification at the senior department of the military college.

But what is this Senior Department of the Military College? The establishment of the Military College at Sandhurst is divided into two departments; the junior, intended for the education of lads, from thirteen to sixteen years of age, as preparatory to entering the army. What the military college of St. Cyr is to the French service, the junior department at Sandhurst is to the English, with this slight exception,—that whereas the former institution sends forth annually at least a hundred young men fully qualified for commissions in the line, our British establishment turns out about a dozen or fifteen in the same period. At the last half-yearly Sandhurst examinations—in October or November of the year just ended—the number of cadets who passed for commissions was less than half-a-dozen. The reason for this vast difference is, that in France there are but two doors whereby a candidate can enter the commissioned ranks of the army. The one is by enlisting as a private soldier, and rising through all the various subordinate grades to the distinction of wearing the epaulette; the other by commencing and going through the regular course of studies at the military college of St. Cyr. In order to qualify in the latter method, it is necessary to enter that establishment between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and to remain three years learning the duties of the profession, before the candidate can be admitted to the examination.

But I have gone astray from my intention, which was to point out in what consists the senior department of the Military College at Sandhurst. The pupils of this division are all commissioned officers, and by the rules they must, before entering the establishment, have served with their regiment three years abroad, or four years at home. The number is limited to fifteen, which—considering there are in times of peace upwards of ninety officers employed on the staff of the army, and during the present war there are no less than two hundred and fifty—is rather a small proportion; but even so very short a list is seldom full, and but few officers avail themselves of the privilege. Nor can we wonder at it. The English military man is like his fellow-countrymen who follow other pursuits and employment. If he saw that study or application would advance him in his profession, he would work like a horse. If staff appointments were given to those who had qualified themselves in the senior department of Sandhurst, and if a certificate from that establishment were a sure and certain means of obtaining professional distinction and subsequent promotion, we should in England have in a very few years the best educated staff in the world. When he has an object in view, there is nothing that the Anglo-Saxon will not attempt, and few things he cannot accomplish. Let us not then blame such men as my friend Benson, but rather try all we can to reform a system which is at once a curse to the army and a disgrace to the nation. And here let me relate an anecdote.

Some years ago, the regiment in which I then held a commission, formed part of a very large force, assembled on the North-West frontier of India. For several months this army was together, saw much service, and went through several general actions. Besides a great number of the East India Company’s regiments, there were with us two dragoon corps, and eight or ten battalions of the Queen’s army. There was also a very numerous staff, belonging to which were a dozen or fourteen officers of her Majesty’s service. Of these latter gentlemen, not one had ever been at the senior department of Sandhurst, whilst there were no less than ten officers doing regimental duty with their respective corps in this very force, who had gone through the regular course of study at that establishment, and of these three had taken first-class certificates. Again, I say, let us not blame officers who don’t avail themselves of the senior department at Sandhurst to study, but let us insist upon a reformation of the present system.

We all know how elderly officers cry up, and Young England cries down, the heroes, habits, manners, and customs of our army during the Peninsula war. But in the matter of staff officers and their qualifications, the force under Wellesley in Spain was certainly in advance of that commanded by Codrington in the Crimea. According to a military authority I have already quoted,[4] there was during the Peninsula war “only one officer employed on the quartermaster-general’s staff who was not a graduate of the senior department of the Royal Military College.” And the same gentleman, writing about a year before the war with Russia broke out, says, “It is by many doubted whether, in the event of a new war, there exists in the British army the necessary materials for the construction of an efficient état-major, or corps of staff officers, such as accompanied the troops under Sir John Abercrombie to Egypt and Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal.”

Still stronger evidence against the existing system is afforded us a little farther on in the same pamphlet, where Captain Spearman states that, “as an introduction to staff employment, the officers of the army have long since abandoned the senior department at Sandhurst in hopeless despair.” The writer then asks “to what is the disinclination, not to say repugnance, so generally evinced by British officers to devote themselves to the study of war as a science to be attributed? Clearly to the want of due encouragement—to the practical denial of the usual reward of such devotion and toil.”

“Staff appointments” (in the English army), says Colonel Beamish in his work mentioned above, “are made without any reference to scientific qualification—because the wish of a lord is more potent than the judgment of a professor; and the most distinguished Sandhurst students have been left to look in vain for congenial professional employment, and some reward for their many hours of labour and anxious preparation.... How different,” continues the same writer, “is the practice with our enlightened neighbours! Staff employment in France is the reward of merit alone. It is sought for by the élite of the army, and obtained only by the severest study, and the most indisputable proofs of the possession of the highest degree of professional excellence and general intelligence. Thus are formed those well-instructed officers who constitute the état-major of the French army, and afterwards become their most distinguished generals of division and brigade.”

If more evidence were wanting to show what are considered the necessary qualifications for a staff-officer in the English service, a perusal of the list of lords, honourables, baronets, and sons of wealthy influential commoners, who form the staff of the Crimean army, would be quite enough to set the question at rest. With us interest—as with the French merit—is what the authorities make the sine quâ non for those who aspire to the staff. The consequence to England has been but too visible since the struggle with Russia commenced. With as brave regimental officers and soldiers as ever were sent forth by this or any other country, our army has never been able to effect half what it would have effected with proper organisation and efficient leaders. In France, what the École Impériale d’Application d’État-Major effects in training for the staff, regimental service does in preparing for the command of brigades, divisions, and armies. With a highly-educated staff it is impossible either to want competent generals, or to have every department of the service in that state of utter confusion which has so sadly distinguished our army since it first embarked for the East. Our general officers, commanders of division, brigadiers, adjutants-general, quartermasters-general, aides-de-camp, and others, are only now commencing to learn their various military duties with the army. Should peace be proclaimed to-morrow, and Europe enjoy twenty or thirty years respite from bloodshed, those officers who may then hold commissions in the service will, in the event of war, (our system remaining unchanged: which God forbid!) have in like manner to learn all their duties. In France, on the contrary, the government maintains its officers as we do our muskets or big guns—fit for immediate service in any part of the world.