From The Spectator, 7 November 1914:
We say without hesitation that if every town and urban district and village in England had a Guard formed on the lines of the Mitcham Town Guard, something would have been accomplished that might prove most valuable in the event of invasion.
We shall no doubt be asked by many military critics whether we really believe that these Village and Town Guards, composed of boys under nineteen and middle-aged men from thirty-eight to sixty-five, would be of any sort of use from the military point of view. Our answer is, in the first place, that men who have learned the use of the rifle, and still more have learned how to act together under orders, cannot be regarded as less worth having than citizens who cannot shoot and cannot drill, and have no sort of organization and no leaders. They would not, of course, be of any use to pit against the best German troops, or to carry trenches held even by the latest levies from the Landsturm. To put them at the lowest, however, they would be of very great use in steadying the civil population, and, if they got intelligible orders, in helping the military authorities in preparing what we may call “emergency positions” with the spade. By this we do not mean constructing great entrenchments, which are more in the nature of temporary fortifications, but helping to throw up field works, obstructing roads, or, again, clearing away obstructions made in the roads by the enemy. It would be one thing for the military authorities vaguely to tell people of a village that they had got to fell the trees in a particular road or ravine and obstruct the German advance, and quite another to tell the leader of a coherent body of three hundred to four hundred. Town Guards to take his men and use them to do a particular piece of work with the hatchet or the spade. Such work would be done far better and far more quickly by a Town Guard or Village Guard than by a leaderless mob.
But we will go further than this, and say that in many cases—that is, in cases where the Town Guard or Village Guard had thrown up a leader or leaders of courage and capacity—it is conceivable that the Guard, if they were armed with rifles, might do a certain amount of combatant work in delaying an enemy’s advance. Now comes a very crucial matter. We not only think it might be quite worth while to form Town Guards and Village Guards under proper orders and discipline of the kind we have suggested, but we think it would also be worth the Government’s while to give such persons rifles and ammunition, provided—a very big proviso, we admit —that the Government had the rifles and ammunition to spare, i.e., had not other and more advantageous means of using them. When we speak like this we must not be supposed to be suggesting that the Government are short of rifles. Their difficulties in this respect have, we know, been surmounted, and they are now well supplied. Still, no Government has an unlimited supply of material, and the military authorities must be left to decide the best way in which to make use of their rifles and cartridges. It would be madness for civilians to make such a clamour to be armed that the properly organized military units should go short or be in danger of going short.
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