496
PARTISAN REVIE""
more than a few miles. through open country or more than a few hundred
yards in the big towns without coming upon a knot of armed men. Morale
can be relied on absolutely, though willingness to commit sabotage and go
on fighting in theoretically occupied territory will probably vary accord·
ing to the political complexion of different units. There are great and
obvious difficulties in the way of keeping a force of this kind in the field
for more than a week or two at a time, and
if
there should be prolonged
fighting in England the Home Guard would probably be merged by de–
grees in the regular army and lose its local and voluntary character. The
other great difficulty is in the supply of officers. Although there is-
in
theory no class discrimination, the Home Guard is in practice officered on
a class basis more completely than is the case in the regular army. Nor
is it easy to see how this could have been avoided, even if the wish to avoid
it had been there. In any sort of army people from the upper and middle
classes will tend to get the positions of command-this happened in the
early Spanish militias and had also happened in the Russian civil war–
and in a spare-time force the average working man cannot possibly find
enough time to do the administrative routine of a platoon-commander or
company-commander. Also, the Government makes no financial contribu–
tion, except for a token payment when men are on duty all night, and the
provision of weapons and uniforms. One cannot command troops without
constantly incurring small expenses, and
£50
a year would be the very
minimum that any commissioned officer spends on his unit. What all this
has meant in practice is thr:t nearly all commands are held by retired
colonels, people with "private" incomes or, at best, wealthy business men.
A respectable proportion of the officers are too old to have caught up
with the 1914 war, let alone anything subsequent. In the case of prolonged
fighting it might be necessary to get rid of as many as half the officers.
The rank and file know how matters stand and would probably devise
some method of electing their own officers if need be. The election of
officers is sometimes discussed among the lower ranks, but it has never
lJeen practiced except, I think, in some of the factory units.
The personnel of the Home Guard is not quite the same now as it was
at the beginning. The men who flocked into the ranks in the first few days
were almost all of th£m men who had fought in the last war and were too
old for this one. The weapons that were distributed, therefore, went into
the hands of people who were more or less anti-fascist but politically un·
educated. The only leavening was a few class-conscious factory-workers
and a handful of men who had fought in the Spanish civil war. The Left
as usual had failed to see its opportunity-the Labour Party could have
made
the
Home Guard into its own organisation if it had acted vigorously
in the first few days-and in leftwing circles it was fashionable to describe
the Home Guard as a Fascist organisation. Later the idea that when
weapons are being distributed it is as well to get hold of some of them
bgan to sink in, and a certain number of
leftw~ng
intellectuals found
