Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/42

36 The qualifying service for promotion of lieutenant-colonel to colonel, which was first fixed at five years, with strict limitation to officers holding substantive military appointments, has since been reduced to four years, while the limitations have been so extended as practically to include everybody. The result is that the number of colonels is already much in excess of the number of lieutenant-colonels in the army, – a reversal of the natural and proper order of things. The value of a rank so quickly reached is cheapened, while its utility as a means of reward is also lessened: the chances will be that the lieutenant-colonel whom it is desired to reward for distinguished services is already a brevet colonel, or that at most the special brevet will anticipate his regular promotion by only a few months. If the term of qualifying service were extended from four to six or seven years, or even longer, promotion to brevet colonel for distinguished service would be more often possible, and a much more substantial benefit to the officer, while furthering also the object which is surely to be aimed at in any system of promotion, of bringing the best officers to the top.

Another grave objection to the present rules which govern promotion to the rank of colonel, is the inordinate advantage which they give to those officers who get brevet promotion to lieutenant-colonel. This is now bestowed for the most trifling service, as if it were a mere titular distinction of little value; but since brevet rank qualifies in most cases as much as substantive, the result is that a major who gets his step for, perhaps, being present, or nearly present, in some trifling skirmish, thereupon supersedes all the other majors in the army, not only in the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but also in the rank of colonel, and subsequently in promotion to general officer. This enormous advantage does not attach to the brevet rank of major. A captain breveted as major gets no further advancement. His next step, if it is to be a brevet one, must be earned by fresh service; and the same rule ought to be established in regard to brevet lieutenant-colonels. The undue advantages which attach to what is nowadays a very cheaply earned honour has become a real abuse.

But in fact the whole system of "lieutenant-colonels and brevet-colonels" is perfectly obsolete and out of harmony with the actual conditions of the army as now organised. Except in the Artillery and Engineers, in which services the rank is a moribund one, soon to come to an end, there is now no such thing as a substantive colonel in the army: every colonel is a brevet colonel. The actual term "brevet" has indeed been abolished; the promotion is now made, not to "brevet" colonel, but to colonel "in the army": but virtually the practice still obtains – the rank is not recognised as a regimental one. This curious condition is, in fact, a survival from the old times, when, as we have explained, every regiment had a colonel who nominally commanded it, the actual command being exercised by his deputy, the lieutenant-colonel; and the rank of colonel was reached at uncertain periods, and by batches of officers at a time, under special "brevets." But all this having been abolished, and now that the promotion is made at fixed periods of service, why should that promotion be still termed "brevet" or "army" promotion? What is the peculiar virtue in the term as applied to the colonel? Now that there are no other colonels in the