CHAPTER XX

[103]See the correspondence published in Appendix B.

[104]He had taken rooms at St. James’s Court.

[105]“The conversion has been swift, but Mr. Asquith has never been slow to note political tendencies when they become inevitable.”—Leading article,Times, December 4th, 1916.

[106]Mr. Herbert Samuel was offered office, and refused. Mr. Montagu finally joined as Secretary for Ireland.

CHAPTER XX

“Many hot inroadsThey make into Italy.”Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Sc. iv.

“Many hot inroads

They make into Italy.”

Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Sc. iv.

Atthe opening of the year 1917 the general situation of the World-war in Europe offered fair promise for the cause of the Entente Allies. On the Western front the immense latent resources of the British Empire were now coming effectively into play and were creating an opportunity for a really serious and formidable offensive. Tremendously reinforced in men and munitions through the powers of the Munitions and Military Service Acts, our gigantic armies inspired every observer with immeasurable hopes of victory. The soldiers themselves were full of that and fresh sanguine spirit in which the valour of the British race has always expressed itself. France was now recovering from the grievous losses of men endured in the first two years of the war; and the new Generals, men of the younger school like Nivelle and Pétain, were looking forward with no less confidence than ourselves to the results of a new Western aggressive on a larger and more effective scale.

But the Western front was only a portion of that far-flung line of embattled hosts who were holding back the great Teutonic armies from desolating the fairestregions of Western and Southern Europe. Far away across the snowy barriers of the Alps and beyond the interval of neutral Switzerland the Italian armies lay in caves and trenches stretched from the eastern frontier of the Swiss Canton Ticino right across the eastern Alps down to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. On the west of this hazardous line the Italians still held the Austrian armies to the edges of the main Alpine ridge. On the east they had pressed them in a series of heroic onslaughts through the mountains and across the deep valley of the rushing Isonzo. They had captured the high and coveted city of Gorizia, and they were threatening the suburbs of Trieste. They seemed on the eve of momentous conquests. But the very achievements of their heroic valour, so splendid to the outward eye, concealed a perilous and precarious military position.

“No one,” said Mr. Lloyd George later on at Paris, “can look at these frontier mountains without a thrill of respect for the gallantry that has stormed them in face of the entrenched legions of Austria.” Certainly no one who, like the present writer, has escaladed those peaks in days of peace. There are no greater episodes in this war than those of that titanic, gigantesque conflict amid the mighty jagged precipices and the deep gloomy abysses of the Eastern Alps.[107]

But the greater the effort, the greater the exhaustion. It is written large in letters of fire and blood across the history of the World-war that any excess of human loss is in itself one of the gravest of military perils. Italy poured out her blood without stint. Alone amongthe Allied nations she possessed one organised party—the official Socialists—genuinely opposed to the war. Taking advantage of this weakness, the Germans had made a special effort to weaken her home front. The great industrial centres of the north of Italy—Turin and Milan—had been the objective of perhaps the most sustained effort of German peace propaganda. The missionaries of this strange crusade had crossed the Alps by every mountain path and had mixed themselves among the armies, scattering their poisoned leaflets among the tired troops. Thus every preparation had been made for an easier assault. Like Hannibal when he crossed the Alps in a greater campaign, they had melted the rocks with vinegar.

The military position, indeed, was not so strong as it looked. The right wing of the Italian army was lunging forward victoriously, while the centre and left were still entangled in the mountains. These things were not clear to observers in the west of Europe; but there were English visitors with the Italian armies who became uneasily aware of them.

In the absence of any unified control it was impossible to take any effective steps to avert the coming danger. The British military chiefs had their views about the position of the Italian army; many Italians themselves had their views. But though these views were platonically interchanged there was no machinery by which they could be compared and collated, or produce any real effect on the course of the campaign. In other words, there was no central power of vision or action—no active organism that was responsible for the war as a whole, right from the North Sea to the Adriatic. As Mr. Lloyd George afterwards pointed out in the Houseof Commons, “there was a sort of feeling that that front was not our business.”[108]

This did not, indeed, prevent Mr. Lloyd George from using such opportunities as presented themselves for urging his views. In January of that year (1917) there was an important Conference at Rome between the Allied Premiers and Generals; and at that Conference the whole European situation was surveyed in one of the most candid and exhaustive discussions that had taken place up to that time. These conversations extended over the whole ground, from the political relations between Italy and her neighbouring Allies to the question of the proper strategy for the Italian frontier. Mr. Lloyd George boldly placed before that Conference his own views as to the proper campaign to be adopted in the war between Italy and Austria. He pointed out the grave dangers to which Italy was exposed; and his own characteristic remedy was a reinforced aggressive across the Eastern Alps into the plains of Austria. That proposal afterwards tentatively put forward in his Paris speech received much foolish ridicule from English critics. If those critics would follow the advice of the late Lord Salisbury, and study large maps, they would observe that the most vulnerable flank of the Central Powers was to be found precisely through that very Alpine door north of Trieste round which the battle was then raging. While Berlin is remote from the Teutonic frontiers, Vienna is dangerously exposed to attack from the south and east, and every student of European wars knows thatthe great captains of war, like Napoleon, have always availed themselves of that fact.

This proposal was a revival in a more modest form of Mr. Lloyd George’s earlier scheme for seeking a military decision on the Eastern front; and subsequently in his Paris speech he stoutly maintained that if there had been in January 1917 a proper unified machinery for military debate and execution the history of that year (1917) might have been different.[109]

But at that time both the Premiers of the Allied nations and the Generals of the Allied armies were fighting the war in water-tight compartments. It was not yet realised that the Italian front was actually a back door to the West. It required more startling events to convince the Allies that if either side broke through the line at any point, East or West, the whole line would be in peril. Until those events occurred there was not enough political or military driving power behind any proposal for unified control.

So throughout those months from August to October 1917 the military control was practically left to each set of military chiefs in his own section of the war. The communications and consultations between them were casual and uncertain; and naturally each set played for their own hand. For, other things being equal, the first duty of a soldier is the care of his own army. In our country it seemed the wisest course for the War Cabinet to leave all important military decisionsto the military chiefs. The previous Government, indeed, had fortified the Generals with an Order in Council which practically gave them strategic control. It was considered best for the time being to fall in with that arrangement. There was, indeed, no alternative. “Never,” as Mr. Lloyd George said afterwards in the House of Commons, “never in the whole history of war in this country have soldiers got more consistent and more substantial backing from politicians than they have had this year (1917). . . . No soldiers in any war have had their strategical dispositions less interfered with by politicians. There has not been a single battalion, or a single gun, moved this year except with the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack ordered in any part of the battle-field by British troops except on the advice of the General Staff—not one. There has not been a single attack not ordered. The whole campaign of the year has been the result of the advice of soldiers.”

If the sole control of war by military authority was to be put to a decisive test, the campaign of 1917 supplied a crucial instance.

The vital need revealed by that test on the Eastern front was unity of control. But the same need was even earlier revealed on the West also.

There the year opened with smiling auspices. The retreat of the Germans from the Somme Valley and the final abandonment of the Verdun attack seemed to give the greatest hope for a successful Allied move forward against the foe. As at Waterloo, the moment seemed to have come to cry “Up Guards and at them!” Nor can it be said that there was any hesitation or lackof utmost heroism in the attack when it was delivered. On the contrary those attacks of 1917 displayed British and French valour at their highest point. But the want of co-operative effort and unified control led to a great reduction of war profits in the final balance-sheet of the year’s efforts.

Sir Douglas Haig has frankly taken the world into his confidence as to the incidents of divided counsel. In his published despatches on those great events he has spoken freely. Sir Douglas Haig himself, a discreet and moderate man, had entertained the highest hopes, and had even gone so far as to express them through public channels. He was sanguine of a complete break-through. General Nivelle, the French Commander-in-Chief, was almost equally hopeful. It is no small gain to great armies when their chieftains start out with such high expectations.

Whether those expectations would have been fulfilled if the efforts of the British and French armies had been backed by unified control it is now impossible to say. But it is quite certain that the want of unity placed every obstacle in the way of victory. There were, indeed, shadows of control—scattered, intermittent efforts to bring the great armies into some form of combined action. But these efforts lacked authority or decision. There was a military conference of Allied Generals at the end of 1916; there was even an agreement to make a combined attack in Flanders. But the decisions of that conference do not seem to have carried with them any permanent effect on the Allied war councils. Probably the swift movement of events made a mockery of such long-laid schemes. At any rate, we have the fact that General Nivelle made aseparate attack in Champagne in the spring of the year, with the result that our armies had to delay their advance until that great effort was brought to a decision.

General Nivelle aimed at a great mark. He, too, aspired to break the German lines. He succeeded in part, but at a cost of life too great for France at that moment. General Nivelle had to pay the price. He ceased to be Commander-in-Chief of the French armies. His place was taken by General Pétain, with the understanding that he should adopt a less aggressive policy. The result was that the British attack was delayed, and when it took place was undertaken alone. It achieved great objects, but not so great as had been hoped. The August fighting round Lens—the September onslaughts of Haig’s armies east and north of Ypres, the assault of Passchendaele—all these battles displayed the valour of British, Canadian, and Australian troops at their highest point.

But there was no break-through. At the critical moment the British armies were checked by the mud and rain of the Flanders autumn. Heroism was literally choked in slime. The cold and gloom of winter descended on those splendid British stormers before their great task could be achieved.

Such were the fruits of divided control.

It was fated that there should blaze out a sign in the heavens even more startlingly blood-red before the forces of national and army particularism could be safely and successfully defied.

On October 24th (1917) the Italian eastern front was suddenly shaken by a hammer-blow from the German central command. A new army under the redoubtableMackensen, secretly assembled behind the screen of the mountain ridges, took over the attack from the nerveless Austrians.[110]This German force made a sudden assault under cover of mist against a weak point in the Italian line. They attacked and penetrated the Second Italian Army in the neighbourhood of Tolmino on the Upper Isonzo. Only one Italian regiment gave way, probably weakened by enemy influences. But at such a critical point one was enough. It was like a small hole in a great dyke. The flood of German invasion swept in, and soon began to submerge the plain of Venetia. During the following week the Austro-German armies advanced by forced marches from the north-east and captured Cividale and Udine. The heroic Third Italian Army, conquerors of Gorizia, held on to the line of the Isonzo for a time. But they were taken in the rear, and it was necessary to command a retreat. Those brave regiments—the Alpini and the Bersaglieri—suddenly fell back, many of them preferring annihilation to retirement. The whole host rallied on the line of the Tagliamento; but in the terrible confusion of the great surprise the Italians lost 300,000 men and 2,000 guns.

Italy was now faced with a fearful peril. It was already clear that the line of the Tagliamento could not be held; it was uncertain whether any other line could be held. For if the Germans and Austrians could attain mastery of the Alps to the north every one of those river lines of Venetia would be outflanked; the whole northern plain of Italy would be invaded; the exquisite prize of Venice and the great industrial citiesof Turin and Milan would fall as victims to the spear of the enemy. Southern Italy would be cut off from the Western Allies; and, indeed, the whole peninsula would be in danger, and with it our own naval hold on the Mediterranean Sea. None of the Western Allies could be indifferent to the threat of such calamities.

Mr. Lloyd George determined in a moment that Britain could not stand by indifferent. He resolved at once that he would not be responsible for a repetition of the calamities which had overwhelmed Serbia and Rumania. The year 1917 should not close as 1915 and 1916 had closed—with the head of a kingdom on a charger presented to the German Herod.

But it was necessary to act instantly. There was not a moment to be lost. Mr. Lloyd George decided to go to Italy; and he resolved to go armed with new powers of central control for the conduct of the war. He had made up his mind that it was at last necessary to relieve the Generals of their divided responsibilities by establishing a definite organism of central control.

Before starting for Italy he prepared and passed through the British Cabinet a document drawing up in a series of resolutions the constitution of a new central council for the conduct of the war. With that in his pocket he started to meet the Allied Premiers and Generals at the little seaside town of Rapallo, a gem to the east of Genoa on the Italian Riviera.

At that meeting he passed the resolutions contained in that document almost without an alteration, so ready were the French and Italians now to consent to anyscheme for increasing the power of central decision.[111]

That was the first step in setting up the Versailles Council.

From Rapallo Mr. Lloyd George proceeded to Turin and Milan, everywhere encouraging the Italians and promising them speedy aid. He went as far as Peschiera, where he met the young Italian King, whose heroic devotion to his armies has rightly earned him the fervent love of true Italy. Mr. Lloyd George discussed fully with him all the details of the assistance that should be sent. Then with all speed he proceeded to organise and expedite the arrival of British and French reinforcements. Within a few days French and British infantry and artillery were speeding through the Monte Cenis tunnel to Italy.

For the moment, indeed, there was no need to bring the new powers of the Rapallo Conference into force. It was, at any rate, clear to every mind at this crisis that the whole front was one. It was apparent to any one who glanced at the map of Europe that the conquest of Italy by Germany would shake the whole Allied combination. It was obvious to the French, at any rate, that it might bring Germany to the back door of France.

Faced with such possibilities, British and French Generals vied with one another in helping Italy. What divisions could be spared from the Western front were spared. The young men of Western Europe marched through the vineyards and maize-fields of those beautifulplains of Northern Italy in the waning autumn to the help of the Italian armies now pressed back to the Piave. The coming of this help put new heart into the Italians. As our British boys advanced through the little white villages between Milan and the front they were greeted as crusaders. They were met by cascades of flowers from the joyful villagers, now recovering from the terror of a cruel invasion. For it was known by the Italians that the Germans were sending even Turkish and Bulgarian soldiery to the invasion of the fair Italian provinces.

So sustained and fortified—with such a sense of comradeship behind and beside them—the Italian regiments rallied. Along the line of the Piave they put up that splendid resistance which redeemed the name of Italy and inspired their people with a new strength and unity. To the north, among the mountains, they were helped by French and English battalions, thus forging between the peoples of Italy and Western Europe new links imperishable and without price.

Certainly so far the principle of unified control was justified by its results.

[107]Signor Philippo Philippi has brought from this phase of the war a wonderful photographic record which will make its glories lasting.

[108]November 20th, 1917. In the same speech Mr. Lloyd George delicately expressed the fact that we were aware of the Italian peril but unable to find any effective expression for our views.

[109]“I should like to be able to read to you the statement submitted to the Conference in Rome in January (1917) about the perils and possibilities of the Italian front this year, so that you might judge it in the light of subsequent events. I feel confident that nothing could more convincingly demonstrate the opportunities which the Allies have lost through lack of combined thought and action” (November 12th, 1917).

[110]Ludendorff’sWar Memories, Vol. II, pp. 497-99. He reveals that the attack was undertaken to prevent the collapse of Austria Hungary.

[111]“In substance it was the document prepared here, discussed line by line in the Cabinet, and which I had in my pocket after the last Cabinet meeting which was held a few hours before I left” (November 20th, 1917. Mr. Lloyd George’s speech in the House of Commons).

CHAPTER XXI

“Besides, he says, there are two councils held;And that may be determined at the oneWhich may make him and you to rue at the other.”Shakespeare’sRichard III, Act III, Sc. ii.

“Besides, he says, there are two councils held;

And that may be determined at the one

Which may make him and you to rue at the other.”

Shakespeare’sRichard III, Act III, Sc. ii.

Italywas saved for the time; but if it was to be saved for all time, and if other dangers were to be averted, it was not enough to pass resolutions at Allied Conferences. The proceedings at Rapallo must be followed up by more effective action.

Mr. Lloyd George has always the instinct in his heart that no public purpose can be thoroughly achieved without the help of the peoples concerned. He is above all things a “crowd-compeller.” It was now his imperious instinct that he should appeal from a secret conference to the great peoples of Western Europe. It was his powerful conviction that he must take them into his counsel as to the reasons for a new centralisation of war-control—in short, that he must appeal over the heads of the Governments to the nations.

If the new Versailles Council was to be anything more than an Aulic assembly, forcibly-feeble, strenuously impotent, it was necessary to rally behind it all the great democratic forces of the Western world. It was urgent to give it a new authority derived directlyfrom the peoples. If this was to be achieved the peoples must be given a franker explanation of the strategy of the war, of the reasons for failure, and the motives for a new policy.

These are the reasons why, quite deliberately, on the way home from Rapallo, on November 12th, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George made that remarkable speech at Paris which was perhaps the frankest utterance of the war.[112]

This Paris speech fluttered all the dovecots of Europe, and some of the eagles’ nests as well. It seemed to come as a caprice, a child of sudden impulse, from the brain of the British Premier. And yet the speech was most carefully prepared; a copy of it was sent to the War Cabinet in time for correction in case of need; it was handed over for interpretation before being uttered.[113]

There was nothing sudden about it. For the speech represented the slowly matured results of two years of observation, the fruits of prolonged meditation on the events of the war.

The step towards unity which was the central point of the speech represented his profoundest conviction on the strategy of the war.

Ever since the beginning of the war, indeed, Mr. Lloyd George had been an international as well as a patriot. As in the war itself, so in the Alliances, he was always against half-measures. If we were to be true Allies of France and Russia—or later on of Italy and the United States—then we must always work with them hand in hand, take close counsel with them as friends, act always together, not as separate States but as parts of one common organisation; the real beginning of a new “League of Nations.” From the very outset he had no use for national sectarianism; he could not understand the idea of a tepid alliance, a Laodicean friendship, timorous of mutual help, suspicious of common counsel, feeble in reciprocal aid.

His reading of history had taught him that this kind of suspicion, especially strong in island countries, had been the sleeping sickness, the wasting paralysis, of all former mixed European Alliances. It was just this same aloofness, this same separatist pursuit of national aims, that robbed Marlborough of the fruits of his victories. It was precisely the same want of common planning that melted all Pitt’s alliances like wax before the fire of Napoleon’s energy. In more recent days, it was the similar want of understanding between the British and French Generals that prolonged the Crimean War.

Now he determined to strike while the iron was white hot. The fire burned, and he spake with his tongue. While the events in Italy were still fresh in the memory of Europe he pointed the lesson in vivid and biting language. It was certainly the first time that such a speech had been uttered at such a half-private function—an official luncheon of the Premiersarranged to give him an interval of relaxation in his journey back to England. No wonder the orthodox were alarmed.

Frankly and roughly, like a man in a hurry who has no time for honeyed speech, Mr. Lloyd George gave to the world his own innermost reasons for pressing forward the machinery of central control.

For the Versailles Council was to be a real and not a shadow control. He made it clear that he intended it to possess a genuine authority over the national military staffs. Even so, his proposals did not go so far as America and France desired; for France already wished for a Generalissimo, and the United States, being too far from the war even to aim at exercising control, were frankly willing to delegate the entire military power to the men on the spot.

But, even so, Mr. Lloyd George’s plan contained the heart of the matter. Every one engaged in the controversy was aware that, once the germ of unified control was established, it would grow. No local control could compete with it. On that main principle Mr. Lloyd George was quite clear and definite. He stated outright that he would not stay in office unless his plan was adopted. “Personally,” he said, referring to the Rapallo decision, “I had made up my mind that, unless some change were effected, I could no longer remain responsible for a war direction doomed to disaster for the lack of unity.”

Mr. Lloyd George was far too old a bird to have any doubt as to what troubles this speech would bring on his head. He was speaking, as he himself said, “with perhaps brutal frankness at the risk of misconceptionhere and elsewhere,”—perhaps even, he admitted, at the risk of encouraging the enemy.

He knew all that. But he also knew that there are times when such risks have to be taken. There are moments when an electric shock is necessary if men are to be really aroused to the duty of change. Eyesight, they say, is sometimes restored by a flash of sudden light. The same method may remove blindness of other kinds.

The new Council, he said, had already started work. It must have the support of public opinion if it was to have any genuine power. There must be a new central strength to resist sectional and national influences. What they wanted for victory was not sham unity, but real.[114]

The Paris speech was followed by an outcry even greater perhaps than Mr. Lloyd George had expected. The clamours of offended tradition and convention filled the air of London, especially of the London clubs. The uproar lasted for a full week, and then it found voice in the House of Commons, where Mr. Lloyd George was subjected to a kind of impeachment by Mr. Asquith and the Opposition leaders.

“This animal is wicked,” wrote the French fabulist; “it defends itself.” Such seems to be the feeling behind much of the fury provoked by Mr. Lloyd George on such occasions. Such events must be taken with tranquillity. The mutual play of criticism and defence goes to form the strength of our public life, and Mr. Lloyd George is the last man to appeal for mercy. Speaking this time in the House of Commons on November19th he apologised for nothing. He manfully stood his ground in defence of the policy of the Versailles Council.

He revealed the important fact that Lord Kitchener was the first war-chief who proposed closer co-operation between the Allies. Lord Kitchener made that suggestion as far back as January 1915. It was then far more difficult to carry out. But the disasters of 1917 had made it easier.

He made even a more startling revelation. It was that the same proposal had been made in July of that very year (1917), not by the statesmen, but by the soldiers at a meeting of the Commanders-in-Chief at which Sir William Robertson, General Cadorna, and General Foch had been all present. So it was not true, as suggested in so many quarters, that this was a case of civilians forcing an idea of their own upon reluctant soldiers.

Then Mr. Lloyd George passed to that spirited personal defence of his Paris speech which has since become famous. It was, in many respects, an apology which extended to his whole career. It was an explanation of his own favourite political methods.

Briefly put, it was that he deliberately made a disagreeable speech in order to arouse public opinion. It was not enough to pass resolutions. What he wanted was public support. To obtain that he had resolutely and in cold blood set out to give a shock to the public mind.

“It is not easy to rouse public opinion. I may know nothing about military strategy, but I do know something of political strategy. To getpublic opinion interested in a proposal and to convince the public of the desirability of it is an essential part of political strategy. That is why I did it. And it has done it.”

Here is a precise statement of his favourite method—the method which he has constantly used from the moment of his early defiance of the magistrates in North Wales right up to that famous interview of the “Knock-out Blow.” It may be called the application to politics of the military method of the “Counter-attack.”

The proof of the pudding is, after all, in the eating. The result, for instance, of these two speeches—the Paris speech and the Commons defence—was so to familiarise and popularise the idea of central military control that we now read them with some surprise at their moderation. We feel some astonishment that such apologies should have had to be uttered for a system of unified control which afterwards became a commonplace of Allied strategy. The hammer-blows of fate proved even more effective than the power of words in the House of Commons. But we must remember that at the moment Mr. Lloyd George was beating up against the wind. He had great forces working against him both within Parliament and without. He had to face a remarkable alliance between military professional pride, national feeling, and party tactics. The triumph of these speeches is that such forces have proved so powerless in the upshot against the overwhelming case for unity of control.

But the struggle was now only transferred from the debating-chamber to the council-room. There Mr.Lloyd George was met with a very resolute opposition from a body of military opinion supported by a very able and pugnacious Press. The military opinion, at any rate, was as honest as it was stubborn. The power of great national traditions was linked to the strength of professional feeling. It was hard and painful to come into conflict with men like Sir William Robertson. But the issue had to be fought through; and no Government would have been worth its salt which allowed a great political and international issue to be decided by military opinion. Mr. Lloyd George was fighting for one of the oldest principles of the British Constitution when he asserted the final supremacy of civilian control.

Yet it was not remarkable that the debate on this issue should have puzzled the minds of many honest men. For it raised the old question—should not matters of war be left entirely to the soldiers? Those who maintain that view seemed to have a very strong weight of common sense on their side. For how should civilians know anything of war?

A simple child,That lightly draws its breath,And feels its life in every limb,What should it know of death?

A simple child,

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

And is not the civilian a mere child in the fiery matters of war?

In any ordinary war it would seem to be the right policy for statesmen to hand purely military matters to the soldiers and keep negotiations for themselves. The business of the statesman would appear to be to stand by as a possible peace-maker; although there have been wars which have been not only skilfully conductedbut also wisely concluded by soldiers. Lord Kitchener, for instance, was never greater than in the negotiations which ended the Boer War.

But this World-war was already seen to be no ordinary war. If the European side of the war alone had been confined to Flanders, then, as in the wars of Marlborough, both strategy and statesmanship might have been left to the same man; although in that conspicuous case it was the civilian statesman who had to intervene before peace could be achieved. But, with operations confined and aims defined, the part of the civilians often lightly limited to the choice of generals and the provision of armies.

Here, however, was a war in which operations could not be confined nor aims defined. Here was a struggle already (1917) limited to no country and to no continent; carried on in three elements—earth, sea, and air—a conflict enveloping a planet.

In Europe alone the battle-front stretched across the whole Continent from west to east; and Palestine and Mesopotamia belonged to the same front as Belgium.[115]

Such a war has multitudinous aspects. It has its politics as well as its strategy; its tactics of the council-room as well as its tactics of the field. Military decisions have often to be based on political considerations; the movements of armies are decided by the relations of the Allied countries. Even strategy itself is revolutionised; for in such a war strategy stakesmany new forms—there is the strategy of the air as well as the strategy of the earth; the strategy of the sea as well as the strategy of air. There is the strategy of continents as well as the strategy of countries. But all through the one distinguishing feature of the whole war was that nowhere in any aspect could strategy be wholly divorced from statesmanship.

The Germans recognised this fact throughout. The direction of their attacks—east or west—was often decided by political motives. War offensives were mingled with peace offensives, and the art of Machiavel added to the art of Napoleon. The hell’s broth at Berlin was cunningly brewed of the mingled herbs of war and peace. Perhaps it would have been as well if sometimes we had given to them the flattery which consists in imitation.

But in Great Britain there has always been a cruder division between the soldier and the politician. Just as the soldier is suppressed during times of peace so the statesman is allowed little say during times of war. We have yet to learn from our enemies that war is a form of politics, and that neither of the two activities of the State can be wholly divided from the other. The cry of “Hands off the war!” uttered to the statesman is equivalent to a cry of dismissal.

Mr. Lloyd George, at any rate, was not at all willing to accept this impotent conclusion. He was clear that if the soldiers were to conduct the whole strategy of the war they must be responsible for the politics of the war also. The only conclusion of that logic was a military dictatorship. But, to do them justice, none of the honest soldiers who contended with him nursed ambitions of that kind. The only end to the argument,therefore, was certain to be a vindication of the civil power. To win the war, the soldier and the statesman must work hand in hand. That was the sound and safe line of policy along which Mr. Lloyd George steadily worked.

He tried his best to win over those eminent soldiers who honestly held the other view and opposed the Versailles Council on principle. Sir William Robertson was offered the high position of British representative in the Council. From reasons which did him nothing but credit—reasons of honest conviction—he refused the position and took instead the Eastern Command. Another soldier, Sir Frederick Maurice (Director of Military Operations on the Army Council) carried his opposition further on retirement from the Council. He wrote a letter to the Press openly disputing the accuracy of certain statements made by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. Mr. Lloyd George offered a Court of Judges to try the case; but, on Mr. Asquith preferring a Committee of the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George decided to vindicate his own accuracy before the House of Commons itself. The result of his defence was that he obtained an overwhelming majority as a vote of confidence in himself and his Government. But it was necessary for the Army Council to vindicate discipline; and Sir Frederick Maurice was retired on half-pay.

Painful as this incident was to all who had regard for an honourable and high-minded soldier, it was a necessary and salutary assertion of civilian control over military.

British opinion, at any rate, steadily supported Mr. Lloyd George. Events at the front soon bore outonly too clearly the soundness of his views. It was noted that in the battle of St. Quentin the German armies stuck at the link between the British and the French forces with the sure instinct that there they would find the weakest point. The moral was only too obvious. Control must not be less united, but more. Without a protest from any responsible quarter in Great Britain the famous Frenchman, General Foch, was in 1918 appointed Generalissimo on the Western front.

Thus the policy of Rapallo triumphed, and the unity of control was attained.

[112]See his House of Commons defence (November 19th).“But I was afraid of this. Here was a beautifully drafted document in which you had concerned a considerable number of men, including a distinguished soldier—for a member of the General Staff was one who was most helpful to me in drafting the document—prepared, carried by the Allies at two or three conferences. Nothing happens, simply an announcement in the papers that at least we had found some means of co-ordination. There has been too much of that. I made up my mind to take risks....”

[112]See his House of Commons defence (November 19th).

“But I was afraid of this. Here was a beautifully drafted document in which you had concerned a considerable number of men, including a distinguished soldier—for a member of the General Staff was one who was most helpful to me in drafting the document—prepared, carried by the Allies at two or three conferences. Nothing happens, simply an announcement in the papers that at least we had found some means of co-ordination. There has been too much of that. I made up my mind to take risks....”

[113]“I considered it carefully.... If that speech was wrong I cannot plead any impulse. I cannot plead that it was something I said in the heat of the moment. I had considered it, and I did so for a deliberate purpose.” (House of Commons Defence, November 19th).

[114]Paris speech.Times, November 13th, 1917. See report inThe Great Crusade, pp. 151-62 (Hodder & Stoughton 1918).

[115]“We have gone on talking of the Eastern front and the Western front, and the Italian front, and the Salonika front, and the Egyptian front, and the Mesopotamia front, forgetting that there is but one front with many flanks; that with these colossal armies the battle-field is continental” (Mr. Lloyd George at Paris, November 12th).

CHAPTER XXII

“O God! Thy arm was here;And not to us, but to Thy arm alone,Ascribe we all.”Shakespeare’sHenry V, Act IV, Sc. viii.

“O God! Thy arm was here;

And not to us, but to Thy arm alone,

Ascribe we all.”

Shakespeare’sHenry V, Act IV, Sc. viii.

Thelast year of the Great War was undoubtedly the most critical and momentous year in the modern history of these islands. By an amazing combination of events, Western Europe was subject to a sudden revival of extreme peril exceeding in violence the menace of 1914. Looking back from the security of the present time (1920) it is easy to underrate the threat of that great attack by the Central Powers: and, indeed, in our present discussions there is an almost perilous oblivion of the dangers through which we have passed. But those who study the memoirs of the German War Leaders, which have poured out since the close of the war,[116]will realise the complete confidence of the German General Staff in the victory which seemed to lie ahead of them, as the natural climax to the series of smashing blows which they had delivered to their enemies during the two previous years (1916-17).

General Ludendorff finds the chief reason for the German defeat in the war spirit which had been aroused in England under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd George, and in France by the inspiration of M. Clemenceau. Neither of those leaders would admit that they alone could have achieved so great a triumph for liberty over the menace of militarism. It was the spirit of the peoples of France and Great Britain that really achieved resounding victory—the peoples who shrank from no sacrifice and faced every trial rather than accept defeat. I have in my memory the spectacle of a regiment of boys of eighteen and nineteen—London boys, freshly plucked from the counter and the van—whom I met one evening, at the height of the crisis in the spring of 1918, marching to be entrained from Norfolk to Northern France. “Shall we win the war?” shouted one half of them, and the other half replied with an echoing shout—“Yes!” Those youths had been cut off from all leave and were being plunged into the firing-line at a few hours’ notice. They went singing to almost certain death. They were the fit crusaders of a race that never contemplated defeat; and no man who had such a people behind him could vainly boast of his own single achievements.

Yet leadership counts for much, and vainly do the masses struggle if those at the top weaken and faint. There is no greater misfortune that can befall a race than failure of valour and resolution in high places. It was because Mr. Lloyd George kept, in the utmost stress of those events, his courage undimmed and his spirit unshaken, that he has rightly earned so large a part in the credit of victory.

Another scene comes back to me from those darkdays. I was standing in front of one of the large-scale maps at Downing Street, noting the point reached by the German legions in one of those tremendous and determined efforts to drive us into the sea during the April of 1918. There was the sound of a step behind us, and suddenly we turned to find the Prime Minister also observing the map with a close and concentrated gaze. We knew that things were serious, and that there were influences at the centre in favour of withdrawing our armies from France. But of all the company he was the serenest. “Serious? Yes!” he said. “But by no means desperate. Look here!” and he pointed to the north of Calais. “We can flood that area if necessary. Then, if they drive us south of Calais, we can still hold on. France is a large place, and it has many ports. Retire from France? No, we will stand by our Allies to the last!” And he went away singing, as undismayed as those boys whom I had seen marching to France. A worthy leader of a worthy nation!

On another day I remember him describing to me a visit he had paid to the fighting line at the most critical moment of that great peril. He spoke with flashing eyes. “We motored,” he said, “from the coast right up to the fighting front, and we did not meet a single British soldier in flight. Not one had turned his back to the enemy, not one!” Yet during that time the German guns were enfilading our trenches lined with English boys, and the chance of survival in that defence without death or injury had been reduced almost to the point of zero.

What was the cause of this last and most perilous phase? It was the collapse of Russia, produced bythe Bolshevistcoup d’étatin Petrograd on November 7th, 1917. On that day, Lenin achieved the purpose for which the Germans had given him his passports into Russia. He destroyed Kerensky, who combined revolution with national war, and he substituted a policy of international peace combined with civil war. Both edges of that policy were sharpened to the destruction of Russia as a war power, and on December 20th Mr. Lloyd George warned the House of Commons that the collapse of Russia, following on the Italian defeat, would require a new and still greater output of man-power by Great Britain. A Bill for that purpose was introduced into the House of Commons on January 14th, abolishing almost the last exemptions from military service. Events in Russia moved swiftly. On November 21st the Bolshevists made to the Germans a definite proposal for armistice, and peace negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk on December 2nd. The Bolshevists twice broke up the Constituent Assembly at Petrograd by force of arms. The Germans put forward peace terms of such severity that even the Bolshevists were dismayed, and Trotsky attempted to declare peace without signing the treaty. Thereupon the Germans advanced their armies into Russia, meeting with no resistance, and occupying Minsk in the north and Kieff in the south. Powerless in the face of this invasion, the Bolshevists signed the peace treaty on March 2nd, surrendering Lithuania, Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic Provinces, promising demobilisation of their armies and internment of their ships. Russia was out of the war. On March 5th the Germans followed this up by signing peace with Rumania, and on March 6th they signed peace with Finland.Their great armies in the East of Europe were now free to work their will on the West.

Ludendorff has told us that even then there was some debate among the German military chiefs between the policy of defence in the West and the policy of attack. But Mr. Lloyd George saw clearly that the Germans would be obliged to attack. They were compelled by the logic of the blockade. With all her feverish triumphs in the East of Europe, Germany was, at that moment, in a parlous plight. She was in the position of a besieged city. She had either to break out or to surrender. The fearful ravage which she perpetrated in Rumania and the Ukraine, and in the western provinces of Russia also, were really the measure of her need. Food and materials were more necessary for her at that moment than military triumphs, and she hastened to cash all her victories into material produce of one kind or another. Like a hungry tiger, she devoured her prey. But there were other beasts afoot in Eastern Europe at the same time, and we know now that the division of the loot caused extreme bitterness between Germany and Austria-Hungary, and that the resentment of the Ukraine forced Germany to keep troops in the East of Europe which might have struck the decisive blow in the West. Such is the Nemesis of greed.

But still Germany could realise immediately over 2,000,000 new fighting men for the grand sortie now planned on the Western Front, and Ludendorff has told us how quickly and strenuously he trained the troops for this gigantic effort. The blow came on March 21st, against the Third and Fourth British Armies between the Scarpe and the Oise. Forty Germandivisions attacked, and on the second day, the 22nd, there was a break-through west of St. Quentin. On the following days the British line had to withdraw nearly fifteen miles, back to the line of the Somme, losing prisoners all the way, but inflicting very heavy losses on the attacking division. The British line was broken, but not the British Army. During the following days the German divisions steadily poured through the gap, crossing the Somme, capturing Albert and Mezières, some 90,000 British prisoners, and over 1,300 guns.

The peril opened by this event both to France and the British Empire lasted for four months, and during that period there was scarcely a day on which the strain was relaxed. Colossal issues were at stake, and among the chief was whether the British Empire should survive. Mr. Lloyd George rose to the height of the crisis at once, and kept on the summit until the close. Day by day he never relaxed his energy or his courage. He did not abate, in those dark days, one jot of heart or hope. There was no resource or reserve of national strength which he did not bring to bear. There was no device that he left untried. It is easy to speak of the hurricane and storm when you have reached harbour, but there is little doubt that, unless we had had a good captain on the bridge, the great ship “British Empire” would have foundered.

He envisaged the problem in two ways—strategy and numbers. He saw the Allied Forces faced by overwhelming myriads of Teuton troops, combined under one central command. To resist this assault he was more than ever of the opinion that the defenders also must be placed under one command, and he carried hisfaith to the full logic of his conclusion. In April he agreed to the appointment of General Foch as supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. It was a step involving great risks and great faith. Fortunately Sir Douglas (now Lord) Haig agreed with Mr. Lloyd George, and played the game to the full, like the great soldier he was. Otherwise the thing could not have been done. The trial came for the British when, as the crisis deepened, Marshal Foch began to exercise his full powers, and to withdraw from the direction of the coast great British forces which had been placed there in reserve for the protection of the British line and the security of the Channel.

Like all great commanders, Foch himself had to take risks and to meet the German concentrations by great concentrations on his own side. For this purpose he had to wield full power over both British and French Armies, and he exercised it to the full in the great battles of that summer. It was an anxious time for the British Government. But Mr. Lloyd George had taken the full measure of Foch as a soldier: he fully believed in him, and he went to the whole extent of his faith. A working arrangement was come to by which Mr. Lloyd George went over to meet Clemenceau and Foch at Paris periodically, and the supreme conduct of the war was now in the hands of these three men. So far for the strategy which governed the great battles of that summer.

Then for numbers. Mr. Lloyd George saw in a moment that, unless drastic and exceptional measures were taken the Allied Forces would simply be snowed under by the hosts of the enemy. To meet this danger the natural counter-measure was to throw across theChannel all the troops in England sufficiently trained to go into the shock of battle. For this purpose he was obliged to suspend all the usual age limits from active foreign service and to send across the Channel the great army of youths enlisted under the Conscription Act, and hitherto prepared only for home defence. These great forces streamed across in the months of April, May, and June, and did something to fill up the gaps in the line. But as the weeks went by Mr. Lloyd George perceived that the British reinforcements alone would be unequal to the great task. The Germans were still straining every nerve, and they were fighting against time. Our Government could not precisely tell how many reserves the Germans still possessed, or how many men they could spare from their Eastern Front. The Germans were working on the calculation that the Americans could not come across till 1919 or 1920, and their submarines were operating feverishly to keep up the alarm on the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans themselves were too far removed from the scene of danger to realise at once the greatness of the emergency. But they only required the S.O.S. signal. Mr. Lloyd George determined to give it.

One morning that spring he made up his mind.

“We have to get 500,000 Americans over in four months, at the rate of 125,000 a month. How can that be done?” That was the problem as he saw it and as he expressed it. He began to send a series of telegrams to President Wilson through Lord Reading, explaining to Mr. Wilson the peril and the need of instant help. President Wilson immediately grasped the crisis. Mr. Lloyd George organised the Navy and the Merchant Service for the work of transport onthe British side of the Atlantic, and President Wilson did the same on his side. So began that great Armada of help from the New World. The American divisions poured across the Atlantic, overcrowded on their transports, packed almost to suffocation, but willing to suffer all things in the great crusade on which they were bent. The Americans, indeed, did far better than the British Government had expected. They sent a million men. It was a magnificent performance, and must ever be remembered to the credit of that great nation.

Then President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, acting together, went one step further. When the American troops arrived many of them were instantly brigaded with the British and French forces, and so they learnt with the greatest rapidity possible all the craft and ruses necessary for modern warfare. They did their utmost to acquire in a few months all those new arts of destruction which it had taken Europe years to evolve. To achieve this, for the time they gave up America’s great dream of a national army. But, after all, the greatest fact of all was their arrival.

Meanwhile, during these weeks of suspense and endeavour the German armies had struck again and again in the last desperate campaign for victory. Through April, May, and June the issue still hung in the balance.

The second great attack on April 4th, when twenty German divisions, advancing towards Amiens, attempted to divide the British Armies from the French. That attack came very near to success. We all know how the Germans arrived at positions from which they could bombard Amiens and paralyse thecommunications, and it is blazed on the records of fame how the armies of the British Empire—men from Australia and Canada—held the line at Villers-Brettoneux, and by their invincible blending of defence and attack kept the assailing German divisions from achieving their purpose.

A few days later a new attack developed, this time farther north, west of Lille. From the British point of view this was the most menacing attack of all. It was a determined attempt to drive the British armies into the sea. On April 10th Armentières was occupied and the bloodstained Ridge of Messines crossed. On the 15th Bailleul was taken, and on the 25th the attack came to a climax with the capture of Kemmel Hill under the eyes of the German Emperor. Yet the Germans could not gain the decision they require. The British troops gave ground, but always fought on. The line bent, but it did not break.

But, as the weeks went on, the British Government replied in stern deeds which the whole British people supported. Not only did the younger men stream across the Channel, but the older men lined up to take their places. It was on March 9th that Mr. Lloyd George introduced that last and tremendous Military Service Act, raising the age to fifty, with a reserve possibility of fifty-five, and threatening to extend conscription to Ireland. Such extreme measures became in the result unnecessary: but partly because the British people showed that they were possible.

Ludendorff has described to us the gradual waning of his hopes[117]in face of the unbroken resolution of theBritish people under Mr. Lloyd George, the swift dying off in the fire of battle of all their best troops, and the failing of human morale which took place under the stress of those costly onslaughts. There is no more dramatic story in history than his account of the way in which the revolutionary poison which the Germans had inoculated into Russia by the sending of Lenin returned back into the German Army and gradually destroyed by its discipline and undermined its desire for victory.[118]But there is another side to that story. Ludendorff describes, without apparently understanding the significance of his narrative, the way in which his troops, when they had captured a position, would spend the precious minutes in overhauling and devouring the stores of food which they found.[119]He seems to regard that as merely a sign of the weakening of military discipline. But the plain fact is that hunger has no respect for discipline; and it was hunger that was eating at the vitals of the German nation—hunger and want of all the essentials of war. The blockade was completing the work of our armies. For our prisoners found that the Germans were lacking in the most elementary medical necessities and that their transport had reached a point of decay which made it almost impossible for them properly to feed and maintain their armies.

Ludendorff blames the German nation for not supporting the German Army, but the fact is that this was not a war of armies, but a war of nations. The German Army was still capable of great deeds, but the German nation behind was stricken to the heart. Therefore, the strength of the Army, which drew itsvitality from the nation, was rapidly waning even in those moments of victory.

With his instinctive insight for the real facts of the situation, Mr. Lloyd George saw that even in the darkest hour here was the governing issue—which nation could hold out the longest. So now he set himself, with all his great powers, to hearten and encourage both the peoples and the Armies in France and Great Britain. He kept travelling between London and Paris, attending the meetings of the Versailles Council, visiting the armies at the front, and exchanging cheerful messages between the fighting men and the civilians. On the day Bailleul was captured, April 15th, he boldly declared that we had lost “nothing vital.” On May 3rd he returned from the Versailles Council with a message from the troops to the nation at home—“Be of good cheer. We are all right!”

But the crisis was by no means at an end. In May there came a third German attack, this time towards Paris, and before it was broken it had driven the British and French armies across the Aisne and the Marne and had come within almost thirty miles of Paris. Those were anxious days. But the lure of Paris was again to prove fatal to the German Army. Foch withdrew his armies only to prepare for a fiercer spring. “My left is driven back, and my right is driven back. I shall attack with my centre!” was his famous utterance. The Germans were drawn perilously on, until with a sudden smashing blow on July 18th Foch crumpled up the right side of the phalanx which they were driving towards Paris. Ludendorff tells us that, even after that unexpected defeat, the German Staff still cherished hopes of victory towards the north, although, to all outsideobservers, their aggressive powers seemed to be exhausted.

It was the attack on August 8th of the British and French troops together, aided by an army of tanks, storming the German lines east of Amiens, that came to Ludendorff as the final blow to his hopes. From that time onward, until November, is one long story of unbroken victory for the Allies. But it was victory dearly purchased by blood and endurance; for the German armies retired sullenly and inflicted heavy casualties.[120]We must not underrate the heroism of those months. It is no small thing that the armies endured to the end. It is clear, from the memoirs of the German chiefs, that they were still looking eagerly for any sign of weakness, and that the smallest symptom of war-weariness would have led to a renewal of German hopes. Mr. Lloyd George saw this clearly, and never to the end did he give way to boasting. “The worst is over,” he said at Manchester on September 12th, “but the end is not yet.”

We know now from Ludendorff that suggestions for an armistice were made by him to the German Government immediately after August 8th. But at first the civilian power, under Count Hertling, the German Chancellor, and his successor Hintze, was inclined to hold out. It was not until after the smashing up of Bulgaria on September 16th, ending with its surrender on the 30th, that Hintze resigned and gave place to Prince Max of Baden. It was now the turn of the German military chiefs to resist the civilians in theirpassion for surrender. For Ludendorff was in favour of a final rally, whilst Prince Max was resolute to make peace.

It was to President Wilson that Prince Max made his overtures for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points,[121]and the negotiations continued all through October. No one who lived through those days will forget the high, austere dignity of the American President’s replies, which fell on the German Government and people with all the inexorable force of impartial justice. He insisted that the Germans should leave all invaded soil, that they should cease their barbarisms on land and sea, and that the terms of Armistice must be such as to make a renewal of hostilities impossible.[122]

President Wilson carried the correspondence with Prince Max as far as he could without being in control of the armies, and then he telegraphed the letters to the Governments of his Allies in Europe. Mr. Lloyd George at once saw the practical peril of the new situation. It was that the German military chiefs might use the Armistice for a recovery of strength, and Ludendorff’s Memoirs show that he had full justification for that fear.[123]He resolved at once that the only safe armistice would be one of complete disarmament, and with that policy in his mind he went to Paris to meet M. Clemenceau and Marshal Foch. There at Versailles a full historic conference of all the Allies took place, and lasted a fortnight. The European Allies modified President Wilson’s terms on certain essential points. Great Britain excluded the control of theseas from the sphere of negotiations, and France insisted on a wider interpretation of President Wilson’s reparation demand. President Wilson agreed to both these modifications.

Then the Versailles Council passed to their immediate practical conditions. Marshal Foch insisted that the Germans must ask for an Armistice in the ordinary military way from himself, the Allied Commander. That being agreed, the terms were framed—and they were pretty drastic terms. The German armies must retire across the Rhine and must be demobilised. German guns and ships must be surrendered.[124]In fact, Germany must be rendered incapable of resuming the war. Only on those terms was an Armistice possible with an enemy who had given such dire proofs of ill-faith.

Faced with these terrible terms, Ludendorff made a last effort to rally Germany to a final war of defence. But he was too late. He himself had fatally weakened the German fighting power when he suggested negotiations in August. Then the civilians had protested. But now that they had been converted to peace, nothing could make Germany face the guns again. Their military strength suddenly collapsed. Turkey surrendered on October 31st, and Austria-Hungary on November 4th. The bell of doom had begun to toll.

On November 4th the German Government made a final effort to command their fleet on to the high seas. But the fleet mutinied, and from that mutiny a revolution began in Hamburg which soon spread over Germany. On November 7th the British troops enteredValenciennes: on the 8th Prince Max resigned and was succeeded by Herr Ebert. On the 9th the Kaiser abdicated and fled into Holland. On that day the German envoys were received by Foch at his headquarters and the new German Republic accepted the terms of Armistice. On the morning of the 11th the Canadians entered Mons, that little town where firing had opened more than four years before, and precisely at 11 o’clock on that very morning the Armistice began. There was a sudden stillness from the North Sea to the frontier of Switzerland.

“Germany is doomed!” cried Mr. Lloyd George, speaking at the Mansion House on November 9th; and he proved a true prophet.

The Allies had won the war. . . .

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