CHAPTER XIV

“I will not cease from mental strife,Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,Till we have built JerusalemIn England’s green and pleasant land.”

“I will not cease from mental strife,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.”

Before drafting the Bill he took a prolonged and careful survey of the condition of the people: in Mr. Charles Booth’s books, in the Poor Law Commission Reports, and from every possible source of the written and spoken word. He was appalled; and he expected every one else to be appalled. Carried forward by his own emotion, he did not perhaps realise the power of familiarity, the force of usage, the strength of vested interest.

He was greatly surprised and disappointed by the attitude of the doctors. He had always held the medical profession in the highest admiration[59]; and perhaps he expected more from them than any organised profession could supply. He had been so absorbed by conferences with the Friendly Societies that he perhaps did not sufficiently realise the importance of constant consultations with the doctors in the preparation of his schemes.

He was also sincerely surprised at the attitude of the well-to-do classes. He had imagined that the enforcement of contributions would disarm their hostility. As it was, he lost on both sides; though he never regretted his decision in favour of contributions. With all his sympathy—perhaps because of it—he entertained a great horror of a pauperised working-class.

Here, too, he had to face a revolt of the timid within his own party. There arose in the autumn of 1911the same cry for “postponement”—always the first step to abandonment. He resisted it steadily; pushed forward his Bill, this time with the help of the strongest closures; and in December the House of Lords, perhaps chastened by events, allowed the Insurance Act to pass into law.

So ended the first stage of that great scheme of social reform with which he designed to change the face of England. Insurance against sickness and kindred ills was combined with an Act for insurance against unemployment; and for the first time in our history labour was backed by security.

Then, in 1912, amid the distractions of the growing crisis in Ireland, Mr. Lloyd George proceeded to approach the greatest of all fastnesses of privilege—the English Land Laws. Here was a more formidable enterprise than any he had yet undertaken. He had to carry out his own inquiries—for it had been proved by experience that the tenants of English land were in too precarious a position to venture an open disclosure of their wrongs to an open Commission. He appointed an able Land Committee, of which Mr.(now Sir) Arthur Acland became the Chairman. That Committee carried out its work with great courage and ability, and published two books which are still classical summaries of the main features of our land system, stated with fairness and thoroughness.[60]In a series of great speeches, Mr. Lloyd George in 1912 and 1913 announced his intention of making legislative proposals and carrying out the conclusions of this Committee.

But, in the meantime, across this great endeavour,there had arisen a hue and cry which had given new hope to the friends of the existing order. The great controversy of the Marconi shares seems now very far away. The whole case fabricated against Mr. Lloyd George in those days seem very ridiculous now. The perspective has changed very much since one of the great English political parties could deliberately set out to ruin a political opponent on account of one act of carelessness.[61]

But it does not do to throw stones. Party strife is an ugly business at best; and he would be a bold man who should say that, in similar circumstances the Liberal Party would have shown a spirit very much better. In this matter of rushing readily to false accusations we have all sinned pretty deeply in our public life. Suspicion is the peculiar vice of democracies; and he would be bold who should say that the real scandal of the Marconi affair—the scandal of accusation so poisoned and exaggerated as to amount to calumny adopted as a policy and a cause—will not occur again.

Mr. Lloyd George suffered very much through this affair. For the moment it achieved its object of holding up his whole activities in furthering his Land Campaign. But at last the fever of the assault died away, and men began to return to the light of common reason, and to see the thing in its real proportions. Then there succeeded in the public mind a fit of remorse which worked in Mr. Lloyd George’s favour; and both in London and in Wales he was banqueted and acclaimed. For, if the victims survive the rigours of the “ordeal by torture,” then the populace applauds.

From another campaign of the same sort at an earlier date (1908) Mr. Lloyd George had emerged victorious in the Courts with damages of £1,000, which enabled him to adorn his native village of Llanystumdwy with a very handsome Institute, where all his fellow villagers can now read the newspapers and enjoy the advantages of a well-chosen library. So out of evil sometimes good proceeds.

In 1914 Mr. Lloyd George resumed the preparations for his Land Bills. It was his intention to introduce them into the House of Commons during the Session of this year, thus placing them before the country with a view of the General Election already looming ahead.

But across all these designs there came, in June and July 1914, a flood of reverberating events—the Ulster crisis, the officers’ revolt, the gun-running, first of Larne and then of Dublin. Like other Ministers, Mr. Lloyd George was absorbed in a situation which threatened instant civil war.

Then once more, across the threat of civil war, came the even greater menace of an even vaster peril—world-war.

In the tremendous crisis that followed Mr. Lloyd George took the middle course. He was not for war against Germany at all costs. On Saturday, August 2nd, he was inclined to vote for peace; and if, necessary, to resign for peace.

On that day—as he has told the world—the biggest financiers in the City, including the Governor of the Bank of England, came to him, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and urged that peace should be preserved,and that we should stand aside from the strifes of Europe. On Monday it was known that Germany had invaded Belgium. At once all these men swung over to the side of war.

Mr. Lloyd George himself, separately and independently, followed the same course. Eager as he had been in the past for peace, he had no hesitation from the moment that Germany invaded Belgium.

We had pledged our word; and we must keep it.

On Monday he was for war.

He had definitely chosen his part.

[57]Old Age Pensions were then estimated to cost £9,000,000, but were found to cost £13,000,000 (now (1920) £28,000,000). There was also the new Dreadnoughts, and so forth. The deficit for 1909 thus amounted to £16,000,000 even in prospect.

[58]His majorities in the Carnarvon Boroughs have been rising on the whole steadily since the first election in 1890. In 1892 he defeated Sir John Puleston by 196, as against 18 in 1890. In 1895 he again defeated Mr. Nanney by 194. In 1900 he defeated Colonel Platt by 296. In 1906 he won by 1,224; January 1910 by 1,078; in December by 1,208.

[59]There is a remarkable and eloquent passage on the doctor’s work in the Limehouse speech.

[60]The Land. The Report of the Land Inquiry Committee, Vol. I. Rural, and Vol. II, Urban. (Hodder & Stoughton, 1913.)

[61]It is a strange fact that nothing worse was ever distinctly charged against him by his worst foes, although much was insinuated.

CHAPTER XIV

“O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soulOf Europe, keep our noble England whole.”Tennyson.

“O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul

Of Europe, keep our noble England whole.”

Tennyson.

Fromthe moment that war was declared (August 4th, 1914), Mr. Lloyd George put aside all his doubts and hesitations. The perplexities of the previous week passed away like so many clouds from a summer sky. He became from that instant a war man, intent on nothing but achieving victory.

“I can understand a man opposing a war,” he used to say, “but I cannot understand his waging a war with half a heart.” In regard to the attitude of various friends in political life, he would always express a certain whimsical tenderness for those who were entirely opposed to the war. “Ah,” he would say, “I was in that position once myself, and I know how difficult it is!” Wholly wrong as he thought them, dangerous as he thought their activities to the country, he could not shake off a certain admiration for their courage. But the men for whom he had no tolerance were those who waged the war with a backward glance over their shoulder all the time at the lost vision of peace. That seemed to him a confusing and weakening attitude. Peace was to be achieved, of course; that must always be the very aim of war; but once war began peace couldonly be retrieved across the gulf of war itself. That being the situation, he saw nothing for it but to bend the whole energies of the State to the sole purpose of conducting the war with the utmost power.

He realised at once that Great Britain was up against the most terrible danger that had ever faced it in the whole course of its existence. He knew Germany; he had a thorough understanding of German efficiency. Especially did he grasp the full strength and power given to the German Government by the patriotism of the German people. In entering upon this mighty enterprise, he approached the matter with the utmost gravity and seriousness. I never saw him so grave-minded as he was during those first months of the war. We rallied him one morning at breakfast for refusing to laugh at some jest. “The times are very serious,” he said, and once more he seemed lost in his own thoughts again. He used to describe the moment when the Western world paused from peace to war as the most solemn and awful in his whole life. “We sat waiting for Big Ben to strike the hour when the ultimatum expired. We all fell quite silent. As the great blows of the hammer sounded on the bell we seemed to be passing into another world.”

From the very first he took Lord Kitchener’s view of the seriousness and probable length of the war. He was not a war “pessimist.” He would not accept that phrase. “I look at the facts,” he would say, “I merely refuse to live in dreamland.” When people used to come to him in that bouncingly cheerful mood which patriots tried to cultivate in those days, he used to look at them gravely and say, “Have you read all the bulletins?” And then he would go on: “Have youread the bulletins on both sides?” Or to another he would say, “Have you looked at the maps?” For he always saw the war as a whole: he grasped it in the East as well as in the West. It was not that he was particularly disturbed by untoward incidents; he rarely discussed any such incident. It was the proportions of the vast forces at issue which filled his mind and imagination.

There were several consoling theories popular during the first year of the war for which he had little taste. There was the idea, preached in many powerful quarters, that German man-power would soon be exhausted. Mr. Lloyd George was an open sceptic on that point. It was not merely that the Germanic Powers had far more men than most English people realised at that time; it was also his fixed imaginative feeling that the resisting power of a country does not ultimately depend on numbers. It was the spirit of Germany that he feared—ruthless to others, merciless to itself. In a public speech he expressed that once as the “potato-bread” spirit.

Then there was the theory that Germany would soon be starved into submission. There again his imagination came to his help. “How do you know?” he would say. “How can you tell at what point a nation will cry for mercy? That does not depend upon the amount of food; it depends upon the spirit of the nation. History shows that there is little limit to what some nations will endure before they surrender.”

The practical upshot of all this was that he could see no alternative to a clear and clean military victory. The only reason, in fact, why he combated such theoriesas “attrition” and “hunger-surrender” was that he regarded them as excuses unconsciously put forward to avoid the strain and stress necessary for that achievement. He saw men at that period cultivating optimism as a means of concealing from themselves the stark realities. He saw others preferring short views to long preparations. He perceived that too many were seeking for any or every other means of a softer outlet; and yet, to his mind, the sole chance of obtaining a satisfactory close to the war lay along the iron road of victory. It was in that way that he came to regard the people he met as too sanguine; for that reason he set himself to preach a more sombre view.

So much did this view afterwards prevail that it is difficult to recall now those amazingly cheerful forecasts so popular during the first six months of the war. Public opinion soon recovered from the first shock of the retreat from Mons. There were even a considerable body of people who persuaded themselves to regard that valorous series of rear-guard actions as a crowning victory. When, on September 9th, 1914, the Germans stopped their advance and began to retire to the line of the Marne, there were some who talked as if the war were already ended.

This was not by any means entirely the fault of the public, for a strict censorship had concealed from us in Great Britain that gigantic defeat of the Russians at the end of August known now as the battle of Tannenberg. There the Russian General Samsonoff had been drawn on to the lakes of East Prussia by Hindenburg, and a second Cannæ had been achieved. A vast number of Russians had been killed and captured;90,000 had been taken prisoners, and no less than 516 guns captured.[62]

All these things were known to Mr. Lloyd George; and he did not possess the faculty, somewhat common in high places, of persuading himself that an inconvenient fact must necessarily be untrue. Nor was he so bemused by the censorship as to believe that you could make an unpleasant fact untrue simply by keeping it secret. He knew by the beginning of September that the theory of the Russian “steam-roller” must be set aside. He had realised already that the main effort would now lie with England. That was what gave so much sobriety to his outlook.

As the last months of 1914 passed by, the situation as a whole certainly did not improve. The Russian invasion of Eastern Prussia was definitely stayed. There were indeed certain compensations. In September the Russians seized Eastern Galicia and the Bukovina. In those months the Serbians, with heroic valour, three times drove back the invading Austrians from their little country. But it became obvious that the Russians, however daring in combat, lacked the generalship required for reaping the fruits of their successes. At the beginning of October Germany came to the help of Austria, and there was a great rally of the Austro-German forces. The Russians were driven out of Western Galicia, and in October a large part of Western Poland was seized by the Germans. In November there was another spasmodic recovery of the Russians; but again in later November they were driven back to within forty miles of Warsaw, and theopening of 1915 saw Russia practically on the defensive.

The meaning of all these events to Mr. Lloyd George was, that if we were to achieve victory we must prepare for a very great and prolonged effort; and he determined to set himself to the task of tuning the country up to the pitch of the highest endeavour.

It must be remembered that at this time he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, and therefore not directly concerned with war matters. All his arguments and interventions both in war policy and foreign policy were liable to be regarded, according to the prevailing traditions of our Cabinet rule, as trespasses from the straight and narrow path of direct responsibility.

Still, he felt it his duty, as a citizen and a Minister, to run all the risks of personal misunderstanding that might arise from honest and vigorous expressions of his own mind. For, rightly or wrongly, he took a very serious view of the situation at the end of 1914. He felt his responsibility all the heavier for the knowledge which he possessed. The British public were looking only at the splendid achievements of our armies in the West. What they did not see was the heavy thundercloud in the East—the great German armies gathering themselves for a mighty, tigerish spring on to some of the fairest provinces of our great Eastern Ally.

Here was the loss side to this account—the achievements in the East of those German divisions which had been withdrawn from the advance on Paris, and had left their diminished armies to fall back on the Marne.

Mr. Lloyd George refused to regard those defeatsof the Russian armies as inevitable. He would never consent to be a fatalist. He represented the vigorous energy of the Western man—eager and insistent to strive against the shocks of fortune.

Frankly he was not content with the measures taken to grip the situation. He did not feel that any military plans were being considered adequate to face the perils that threatened us. He was unhappy and dissatisfied with the plans he knew of; he felt little confidence that others would be devised more fit to avert these perils.

It was at this time that he first suggested day-to-day sittings of the War Committee for the conduct of the war. It was the first appearance of that proposal for a small War Cabinet which afterwards developed so stormily from the stress and travail of the war. Not before three years of trying the old bottles was the new wine to find a vessel fit for its feverish ferment.

During the Christmas holidays Mr. Lloyd George carefully surveyed the situation. With the opening of 1915 this is how he saw it.

Russia was in danger of a blow at the heart. In the West the military situation had reached a deadlock[63]; and it was not yet physically possible that the armies at this time raised by us should drive back the German invader in any time that then seemed reasonable from the North of France and Belgium. On those lines the war seemed certain to last a very long time, though not even he at that time cast his eyes beyond the historic three years fixed by Lord Kitchener. Hewished, at all possible costs, to avoid a long war.

Looking across Europe, he asked himself—Was there not some alternative way? Some road to a quicker ending of this world-agony?

He found it in the Near East, at that point where the Teuton power touched the Danube, and was still at that time held back by the heroic resistance of the Serbians.

The plan that framed itself in his mind was to combine the Balkan States—to revive the Federation—to send a great British army to their help, and attack with these combined forces—perhaps amounting to 1,000,000 men—the Eastern flank of the Central Powers.

This great scheme must not be confused with the subsequent expeditions to Gallipoli and Salonika. It was something far larger in conception, and far more splendid in grasp and sweep of action.

It was a proposal for employing the new British armies, before they were wearied by being set to the tasks that break men, for fortifying our Allies, and for snatching success before the watching neutrals of the Near East—Bulgaria, Greece, and Rumania—were divided and distracted by doubt and failure.

It was also an essential part of his larger hope that such an effort would relieve the pressure on Russia and finally perhaps draw off the bulk of the German armies from the West to the help of Austria.

In his view the plan entailed far less risk than shaped itself in the minds of the timid. A visit to the Western front had impressed him with the feeling that this was not then the easiest place for a successful assault on the Central Powers. Here you would meet them justat the point where they had the greatest mastery over their defensive. The West, it seemed to him, was the proper place for a persistent, concentrated, and even vigilant defensive. But at that time the spot for a more prosperous offensive had, in the view strongly impressed upon him by observation, to be sought elsewhere.

His policy was to make the Western line impregnable; but, with the forces that could be spared beyond that necessary effort, to prepare and execute a great strategical diversion along the line of the Danube, striking into territory inhabited by men sympathetic to the Western Allies, and supporting our own weaker Allies among the Balkan States. In this way he hoped to save Serbia, to prevent the German “break-through” to the East, and in the end to divert the great German hosts from their assaults on Great Britain and Russia.

Such was the “Near Eastern idea” in its large scope and purpose. Those who held it were necessarily opposed to the earlier frontal assaults in the West, chivalrously and splendidly undertaken before we had an unquestionable superiority in numbers and guns. Like Botha in South Africa at the later stage of the Boer War—like every great general when he is outnumbered and out-gunned—they were seeking a “way round.” It was a very big “way round”—by Durazzo or Salonika—but the point is that it seemed at the time the only possible way round.

We must remember that the submarine menace had not yet developed, that Bulgaria had not yet declared war, that we were still as much masters of the Mediterranean as ever in our long history. Austria had notyet stiffened her army with German troops, and Russia was still uninvaded. All these were governing facts in this great scheme.

It was characteristic of his buoyant faith that he firmly believed that the appearance of a great British army in the Balkans would surely bring in both the Rumanians and the Greeks to our aid. In his view those nations were at the moment hypnotised by the fate of Belgium.

They genuinely feared the military power and terror of Germany. What they wanted was a convincing proof of our land strength. They knew us as a naval power; but that was not enough for this war. Here was this new thing—our growing military potency. Very well, let us display this side of our strength to the world. Let us land our new armies in the Near East.

Such was the large design, boldly schemed and boldly started, which he set before his political and military colleagues in the early months of 1915. He firmly believed that it would inspire our arms with a new force and vigour. It would give our young soldiers a new hope. It would confuse and embarrass the German defence. It would present them for the first time in this campaign with that dash of the sudden, secret, and unexpected which was so often their own special way. It would knock away the German props by threatening her Allies; and it would build up new props for us by heartening ours. Such were the broad and daring ideas which underlay his thoughts.

We know that this great scheme did not prevail at the time, although pale ghosts of it lingered on andhaunted the stricken fields of war. The flesh and substance of the plan evaporated in the atmosphere of doubt. Between all the Allies and the Chancelleries of the Allies, in the chilling alleys and by-ways of debate and diplomacy, this great enterprise lost “the name of action.” It was “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Tradition, convention, convenience—all combined to strangle it.

We cannot say now how it would have prospered. The fortunes of war are always, after all, on the knees of the gods. No mortal can command success; we can only deserve it.

Such opportunities do not occur twice. The Near Eastern vision faded. The country set itself grimly to solve by direct methods the problem of the West. How heroically, how tenaciously the British race would set its teeth into that endeavour perhaps no one could then quite foresee; but, casting our minds back over these bloodstained years, the question cannot but again recur—Might there not have been a shorter road?

[62]See the full account in Ludendorff’sWar Memories(vol. i. pp. 41-72).

[63]See the remarkable survey of the military situation in January 1915, contained on page 19 of the Dardanelles Commission’s First Report (Cd. 8490). That survey confirms Mr. Lloyd George’s views at that time.

CHAPTER XV

“For East is East, and West is West,And never the twain shall meet.”Rudyard Kipling.

“For East is East, and West is West,

And never the twain shall meet.”

Rudyard Kipling.

Itis characteristic of Mr. Lloyd George that, when his mind once seizes hold of an idea, he is wholly possessed with it until either he can bring it to accomplishment or he is fully convinced of its impracticability. It was so with regard to this great scheme of outflanking the Central Powers by an attack from the Near East. The more he reflected upon it the more there seemed to lie in this plan one great chance of bringing a speedy decision to the war. But, for better or for worse, the reinforcements were now being directed to the Western Front; and the policy of the Western Allies was more and more concentrated on that sphere of offence and defence—France, from absorption in her immediate danger, and Great Britain for her instinctive military preference for campaigning nearer to her sacred seas.

Out-voted in that larger proposal, Mr. Lloyd George now fell back on a smaller design. The cautious diplomacy of the Allies had shrunk from the large, bold strokes necessary for combining the Balkan States as an eastern wing of our offensive against the Central Powers; their military chiefs had hesitated to supplythe means. Never at that stage did the Governments of the Allies fully realise the full proportionate value of the Balkan States in the vast scheme of the great European struggle.

But it was soon clear that, if the Western Powers were inclined to leave the Balkan States to themselves, the Central Powers had no such intention. Quite early in the war Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill scented the danger of German intrigue in the Balkans, and the vast lure of that easy “corridor” to the East offered by the trans-Balkan railway system. In September 1914 they induced the Foreign Office to send the Buxton brothers to Sofia; and the proposals which those delegates brought back in January 1915 played an important part in the negotiations of February.[64]

Some time before the end of January 1915, indeed, the British Government got to know that Germany was already preparing a large army for the invasion of Serbia. Mr. Lloyd George instantly realised the gravity and urgency of this peril. It was largely due to his initiative that a note was sent to Greece and Rumania, urging those states to come to the assistance of Serbia.

No note was sent to Bulgaria. It was already dimly realised that this State was being drawn into the far-flung net of the Central Powers. The “Prussia of the Balkans” presented too rich a field to be left unharvested by the needy gleaners of Germany. Theanxious and hard-pressed diplomats of Berlin, seeking eagerly for friends in a world growing more and more hostile, were already tapping at the doors of Sofia, offering golden and honeyed gifts to a State which had fed too long on the east wind.

Rumours of these approaches grew so strong and convincing that Mr. Lloyd George was moved by them to take fresh action along his old lines. It was now no longer a question of a great offensive with a gigantic army on the Near Eastern flank of the enemy. Fate does not repeat her opportunities; and the chances of that great diversion were already slipping away. It was now rather a question whether we should be in time even to save our smaller friends in the Near East—whether we should be able to prevent this threatened gigantic “sortie” of the Central Powers from the siege of the Entente Allies. Already, in January, Mr. Lloyd George saw, in that flashing way of his, all the tragic possibilities that might flow from a German “break-through” in the Balkans. Already he foresaw the fearful and disastrous fate of a conquered Serbia.

With this tragedy ever clearly in his mind’s eye, Mr. Lloyd George left no stone unturned to avert it. In the middle of January he succeeded in persuading his colleagues to offer a whole army corps to Greece on condition that she would agree to join us in the war. Lord Kitchener agreed to spare the troops, and approved the wording of the offer. But it was necessary to obtain the approval of the Allies.

France was not for the moment happy at the idea of sending troops to the Near East. There came from across the Channel a breath of acute anxiety, the anxiety of an invaded and ravaged country.

The result was that the official note was held back and somewhat modified. The military offer of help to Greece and Serbia began to become vaguer. The army corps began to become a little ghostly. We can see the great plan still further dwindling into shadows.

Then, on January 26th, a new development occurred. M. Venizelos sent to London the Greek reply to the first note of the Allies, asking for help on behalf of Serbia. The reply was that, on certain conditions, Greece agreed to join in the war on the side of the Allies. If those conditions were fulfilled, then Greece—so the answer ran—was willing to give its assistance to Serbia, and to place the whole of its resources at the service of a “just and liberal cause.”

But the chief of the conditions was that Bulgaria should come in as well on the Allied side. If not, then Rumania must come in and Bulgaria remain neutral.[65]

So far, so good. It now remained to persuade France.

On February 5th there was to be held in Paris one of those Allied Conferences on policy and strategy which have been held periodically throughout the war.

These Conferences were, indeed, originally Mr. Lloyd George’s own special and favourite plan for bringing the Allies into a better sympathy of mind andpurpose; and he had always promoted them with zeal and enthusiasm, which grew with his friendship for M. Albert Thomas. On this occasion—February 5th, 1915—he had been selected to go over himself to Paris as the British delegate.

He proposed that M. Venizelos should come from Greece and meet him in Paris. But the domestic crisis in Greece was now passing into a stage far too acute for M. Venizelos to leave Athens. That eminent man was making his last effort to work with King Constantine.

Mr. Lloyd George went to Paris and won his case. That gallant nation, anxious to help the weak, and threatened even in the midst of her own agony, consented to join in the expedition. The French Cabinet were willing to send a French division to work with the British division to which Lord Kitchener had already agreed.

Returning to London, he informed the British military authorities, who in their turn offered to “go one better,” and to spare two British divisions.

Mr. Lloyd George was now all eager for instant action.

He urged that the new Joint Note, offering military aid, should be sent at once. He brushed aside for the moment the idea of arriving at a general Balkan agreement on the lines of the proposals brought back by the Buxtons from Sofia. The Bulgarian suggestion that Serbia should make a considerable surrender of territory seemed to him impossible for Serbia after their recent struggles and sufferings. He had already a very deep perception that Bulgaria was hardening against the Entente. He saw definite evidence of it in Germany’sknown willingness to lend her money. It did not seem to him conceivable that Germany should be advancing money to Bulgaria without some assurance as to Bulgaria’s action in certain contingencies. The Germans were not such fools.

Besides, Rumania seemed to him now less friendly. All the more need, then, for prompt and energetic action to clinch the friendliness of our most probable ally, Greece.

He felt very acutely at this moment the evil and harm of a dilatory policy. It was on his mind all the time that, if they failed to act in time to save Serbia, their responsibility would be a terrible one. Even days seemed to him to count in the great issues that lay before them.

It was a great design, greatly urged. It is impossible to say now whether it would have fulfilled the hopes of its chief sponsor. He had won over to his side all the chief forces in the West. The expedition that was about to start would have probably forestalled and averted that ill-starred enterprise of the Dardanelles-Gallipoli attack which opened on February 25th.

But just on the eve of fruition other forces intervened. While Mr. Lloyd George had been working in the West of Europe, the Central Powers had been busy in the Near East. On January 26th had come the conditional Greek offer to intervene in the war. On February 6th came their definite refusal.

The crash came suddenly. Russia had just promised 10,000 men towards the new Balkan enterprise. Then, at that moment of apparent success, M. Venizelos suddenly informed the British Minister at Athens that Greece had decided not to join the Allies in the war.

The refusal was abruptly worded, and the grounds given were very definite. They were that Greece found herself unable to obtain the conditions laid down in the reply of January 26th. One of those conditions was that Bulgaria should either join Greece in declaring war, or should promise neutrality. She had refused to do either. Another condition had been that Rumania should join. But Rumania, still hesitating between the two belligerent groups, would give no decided answer. It was at that moment the fear of Greece that, if she sent an army northwards to the help of Serbia, then Bulgaria would move to the south, seize Kavalla, and would strike westwards into Macedonia to drive a wedge between Greece and Serbia. In such a case it seemed more than possible that Greece would be crushed.

It is fair also to say that Bulgaria’s refusal of a promise of neutrality was for Greece an ominous and formidable fact. It is inevitable that Greece should have been looking rather at her resentful neighbour than at those larger aims of European interest which filled the policies of the Western Powers; it was natural and human that their first and possessing fear should be lest the work of the war of 1913 should be undone. For in that terrible war the price of victory had been appallingly high for so small a nation. No less than 30,000 Greek soldiers had been killed within a few days in that tremendous onslaught which had driven back the treacherous Bulgarian attack. Greece, with her small supply of men, could not lightly contemplate the repetition of such a sacrifice, or the loss of the gains which had been so fearfully purchased.

Mr. Lloyd George did not give up hope. He knewenough to foresee, for instance, that the new attack of Bulgaria was bound to come, and that the most prudent course was to forestall it. It was at this moment that the suggestion came from Greek sources,[66]that Mr. Lloyd George should himself go out to the Balkans as a Commissioner to bring together the Balkan States. Mr. Lloyd George himself consented; and Mr. Asquith approved. But it was soon found that Mr. Lloyd George was wanted too urgently at the centre to be spared for distant missions.

The Greek Government held to its refusal. The Greek General Staff had pronounced strongly against Greek military intervention as long as Bulgaria remained even neutral; and M. Venizelos had now grave cause to believe that Bulgaria was pledged to the Central Powers. He hesitated to bind himself with the Army and the Crown against him.

As for the Greek King Constantine, he was already drifting along that fatal course which led ultimately to his exile. It was reported to the British Government that he saw the German military Attaché every day, while he refused to see the British Attaché at all.

Thus cut off for the moment from effective intervention on the Danube, the British Government drifted towards that tremendous Dardanelles enterprise[67]which took the place of the Serbian proposal. The first bombardment of the Dardanelles forts (February 25th to 26th) seemed to go prosperously; and at the opening of March Russia began to do well. Once more there was a new twist in the designs of the Greek Crown Government; and on March 6th the CrownCouncil assembled at Athens offered the whole Greek fleet and one Greek division for co-operation in the attack on the Dardanelles.

But already the curt refusal of the previous overtures had driven the Allies to other designs; and the pro-Bulgarian influences in Russia were now very strong. Bulgaria was now astutely offering to lend her armies for an attack on Constantinople from the north-west while the fleets were hammering at the Straits. The old Russian Court Government, always fearful of Greek designs on Constantinople, leaned towards Bulgaria, and, now that a choice seemed possible, preferred Bulgarian help to Greek.

As far as we can peer through the mists of Balkan intrigue, the success of the earlier bombardments of the Dardanelles outer forts swung Bulgaria for the time away from her Teutonic bearings. She was for the moment inclined to join the Entente, if only from fear of the consequences.[68]Whether she had signed an agreement with Germany or not, does not seem to have troubled the statesmen at Sofia, and certainly not the King.[69]The sanctity of a treaty would probably not have affected the policy of a country already strongly bitten with the virus of Prussia’s world-politics. Bulgaria was, in fact, during that time making offers to both sides; she was, in vulgar language, waiting to see “how the cat jumped.” For the moment,therefore, she became “pro-Entente.” But immediately that the failure of the Dardanelles attack became apparent she swung back into the Teutonic orbit. The diplomatic situation was, as Lord Grey fairly claimed,[70]“overshadowed by the military.”

Deeply disappointed with Greece, Mr. Lloyd George now held aloof from her overtures, and was inclined, for the moment, to hope something even from the Bulgarian alternative. During the spring and summer of 1915 the Russian campaign diverted the German resources for a while from the meditated attack on Serbia. The position along the Danube became less threatening. It became the German design to throw back Russia from Galicia and Poland before she entered upon her great Near Eastern enterprise. The result was a temporary lull for Serbia.

The British Government hoped to avail herself of this lull to bring together the Balkan States. Bulgaria assumed a willingness to join the Allies on the condition of certain large concessions of territory from Greece and Serbia. M. Venizelos even went so far as to imperil his position in Greece by suggesting consent. Mr. Lloyd George was now more hopeful of bringing together the old Balkan Federation on these lines. His general idea was that the Allies should occupy the zone of Macedonia as disputed between Serbia and Bulgaria, on condition that if they could secure Bosnia and Herzegovina for Serbia in the final settlement they should then hand the disputed territory over to Bulgaria.

But the sacrifices of the Serbian people in the previous three years had been too great for the SerbianGovernment to be able to bring them to agree to so large a concession. The Serbians were still filled with the glow of their triple repulse of Austria; and for the moment the new danger seemed to have drawn off. The great European thunderstorm was now echoing far away in the mountains of Carpathia and the plains of Poland. It was difficult for the Serbians to realise at that moment that a time would come when security would be cheap at a great price.

In April there came another twist in the devious track of Balkan intrigue. M. Venizelos had tendered his first resignation, and Constantine was entering upon his first effort to build up an absolute monarchy in Athens. On April 15th the Crown Council made a sudden offer to bring Greece into the war on the side of the Allies. The Allies gravely suspected the honesty of this offer. They knew that Greece was already hand in glove with Germany; and there were strong reasons to believe that the Royalist Government could not be entrusted with Allied secrets. In any case, the Allies sent no reply; and it was not until Venizelos regained power that they resumed friendly negotiations with the Greek Government.

All through this time Mr. Lloyd George himself was resolute against having any dealings whatever with the King’s party in Greece. He took the strong line that the Allies, as guarantors of the Greek constitution, should refuse to negotiate with any Government which existed in contradiction to the elementary principles of democratic constitutionalism.[71]

At long last (1917) this policy prevailed. That ancient and historic torch-bearer of freedom, Greece, swung round to our side. She ended by resisting the despotisms of the North as she resisted the despotisms of the East in olden days. King Constantine went into exile. M. Venizelos became the ruler at Athens. He threw the sword of Greece into the trembling scales of the great European struggle, and helped to decide the issue.

The end justified the hope to which Mr. Lloyd George clung through the darkest hours of Royal Greek apostasy.

But who shall say what might have happened if he had not, through the black years of 1915 and 1916, kept alive in Western Europe the flickering sparks of faith in Greece?

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