MR. CHURCHILL'S BOOK ON THE WAR.*

Ma. Caunclur.s., as statesman-author, is more nearly than anybody else a successor to Disraeli. He bids for the attention of both the simple and the subtle ; he has a flair.; he has a grand manner, but he is often.not guiltless of grandiosity. He is frequently eloquent, but sometimes what was meant to be eloquence becomes a purple patch. On the whole, however, he saves his literary soul alive, and his outlook is always dignified by his intellectual hunger and curiosity. If he were a novelist and if he ever became Prime Minister, the public would wait for his stories as eagerly as they waited for Endymion. There is no other statesman of to-day who has quite this combination of literary qualities. Lord Rosebery has always been too fastidious for the many ; the public does not read a philosophical excursus by Lord Balfour, nor a similar work by Lord Haldane ; it thinks of Mr. Asquith as a speechmaker, not a writer, and of Lord Grey of Fallodon as• a writer on natural history. But it read and acclaimed Mr. Winston Churchill's Life of his father, and if we are not mistaken there is a great reception waiting for this story of the world's agony.

For Mr. Churchill has the art of narrative. Instinctively he rejects the unessential. Coherence emerges from the wilder- ness of material. Moreover, when he is himself excited, as he often evidently is, he makes his reader excited too. He is unlike most excited writers, who become confused or foolish, or both. It is -difficult to find exactly the .right words to describe the impression made upon us by Mr. Churchill's writing, but we shall perhaps describe it most closely if we say that his manner is comparable with a flashing eye and an elaborate gesture in a man speaking. Mr. Churchill writes, in fine, with enormous zest. Although it would be very unjust to say that he is not a man of sensitive feeling (for this first volume of his History provides plenty of evidence that he was most heavily oppressed by disasters and by the loss of friends), it is nevertheless probably true to say that the joy Of battle has always been uppermost in his mind. We mean joy in battle of every kind—political battle and diplomatic battle, and not merely battle on the field.

It is with a genuine power of dramatic selection that Mr. Churchill picks out the international incidents which were the precursors of Armageddon. " The Vials of Wrath " and "Milestones to Armageddon " he calls his first two chapters— titles which struck us with a chill till we found them at least excused, if not justified, by the stimulations of Mr. Churchill's method. Of course, he does not fail to give its due sensational value to Mr. Lloyd George's conversion to the belief that Germany was, and deliberately intended to be, the enemy. The preacher of naval reduction became the principal warner of Germany in a famous speech at the Mansion House, after the incident at Agadir. Alas I that Mr. Lloyd George should have swung back to his old -position and encouraged the war makers of Germany once more by demanding a reduction eine World Crisis, 1911-1914. By the-114 Boa. Wlaston8. Mu:chi% C.S. London; Thornton-Butterworth. i39c-net.-1

of the British Navy only a few months before the War broke out !

Very characteristic, again, is Mr. Churchill's touch when he describes how, after the Agadir crisis, he was invited by Mr. Asquith to go to the Admiralty by exchanging offices with Mr. McKenna. In his bedroom that night he saw a large Bible. He opened it at random and read : " Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself," &c. " It seemed," he writes, " a message full of reassurance." Nobody will dispute the reassurance that can be derived from texts casually selected from the Bible, nor, probably, will anybody doubt how little Mr; Churchill required to have his natural assurance reinforced ; but one cannot help feeling that a man who accepts omens of this kind is in a very real sense incalculable, and therefore dangerous. Mr. Churchill was " ever a fighter." He was

always hoping, if not searching, for a thrill, always thrusting forward into new fields ; and we are not in the least surprised to read that during-the Agadir crisis, when he was Home Secretary, he took •both the Admiralty and the War Office to task for not placing special guards upon the Naval maga- zines, and insisted that this should be done practically on his own authority. One can almost see him and Lord Fisher

reacting upon each other, each taking his turn at inflating the other with the wind of tempestouus thoughts. Mr. Churchill, having become First Lord, gazes upon the greatest ships of the Fleet lying peaceably and silently at anchor in Portland Harbour, and then he bursts out with an apostrophe : "- Guard them well, admirals and captains, hardy tars and tall marines ; guard them well and guide them true ! " The change to the Admiralty had on him the effect of a sparkling wine. His particular task at the Admiralty was to form a War Staff, and it was then for the first time that he met Admiral Beatty :-

" I was, however, advised about him at the Admiralty in a decisively adverse sense. He had got on too fast, he had many interests ashore. His heart it was said was not wholly in the Service. He had been offered an appointment in the Atlantic Fleet suited to his rank as Rear-Admiral. He had declined this appointment- s very serious step for a Naval Officer to take when appointments were few in proportion to candidates—and he should in consequence not be offered any further employment. It would be contrary to precedent to make a further offer. He had already been un- employed for eighteen months, and would probably be retired in the ordinary course at the expiration of the full three years' un- employment. But my first meeting with the Admiral induced me immediately to disregard this unfortunate advice. He became at once my Naval-Secretary (or Private Secretary, as the appointment was then styled). Working thus side by side in rooms which communicated, we perpetually discussed during the next fifteen months the problems of a naval war with Germany. It became increasingly clear to me that he viewed questions of naval strategy and tactics in a different light from the average naval officer : he approached them, as it seemed to me, much more as a soldier would. His war experiences on land had illuminated the facts he had acquired in his naval training. He was no mere instrumentalist. He did not think of materiel as an end in itself but only as a means. He thought of war problems in their unity by land, sea and air."

Mr. Churchill explains that the test mobilization of the Fleet, which, by a miraculously fortunate accident, was carried out at the end of July, 1914, had been planned as long before as October, 1918. Although there was no legal authority to compel reservists to come up for this test upwards of 20,000 men presented themselves. The Grand Review of the 17th and 18th July was incomparably the greatest assem- blage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world. The next few days brought the dire threats of war, and ships and men were not allowed to disperse. Mr, Churchill and Prince Louis of Battenberg deserve every credit for the decision.

We cannot do more than pick out two or three passages for quotation, and among these certainly must be Sir John French's remarks in -a letter' to Mr. Churchill about Lord

Kitchener's famous visit to the Front at the end -of August, 1914 :-

" I can't understand what brought Kitchener to Paris. I am writing to you as one of my greatest friends and I know you'll let me write freely and privately. His visit was really most unfor- tunate. He took me away from the Front to visit him in Paris on a very critical day when I should have been directing the operation most carefully, and I tell you between ourselves strictly that when I returned to my Headquarters I found a very critical situation existing (8 p.m. ! ) and authoritative orders and directions badly needed. It was the day when the Guards and a Cavalry Brigade were so heavily engaged. I do beg of you, my dear Friend, to add one more to all the many great kindnesses. you have done me and stop this interference with field operations."

As regards the loss of the three cruisers, the ' Hogue,' the

' Cressy,' and the Aboukir,' Mr. Churchill lays the blame partly on the War Staff and partly upon those on the spot. We cannot profess to be quite satisfied. Orders were continu- ally issued from the Admiralty, and the ominous and penetrat- ing nick-name of this cruiser patrol, " the live bait squadron," was extraordinarily significant. The prominent part played by Mr. Churchill at Antwerp originated in a special mission, with which he was entrusted to inquire and report. It is made quite clear that the mission was not of his own invention.

He represents himself in a breathless record as having been caught up in the web of circumstance, so that it was events and not his will which made it seem to him imperative that he should offer to take *command of the whole situation :-

" I therefore telegraphed on the 4th to the Prime Minister offering to take formal military charge of the British forces in Antwerp and tendering my resignation of the office of First Lord of the Admiralty. This offer was not accepted. I have since learned that Lord Kitchener wrote proposing that it should be, and wished to give me the necessary military rank. But other views prevailed : and I certainly have no reason for regret that they did so."

Mr. Churchill vindicates the popular belief that Lord Kitchener remained in fear of an invasion of these shores long after the Navy considered such a thing impossible. Lord Kitchener's caution was, no doubt, a remnant of the early uncertainty, which had certainly been shared by the Navy. There was real alarm in the Navy at first about the very unsafe position of our ships in harbour. On October 17th, 1914, Lord Beatty wrote a private letter to Mr. Churchill on this subject :—

" At present we feel that we are working up for a catastrophe of a very large character. The feeling is gradually possessing the Fleet that all is not right somewhere. The menace of mines and submarines is proving larger every day, and adequate means to meet or combat them are not forthcoming, and we are gradually being pushed out of the North Sea, and off our own particular perch. How does this arise ? By the very apparent fact that we have no Base where we can with any degree of safety lie for coaling, replenishing, and refitting and repairing, after two and a-half months of war. This spells trouble. It is a perfectly simple and easy matter to equip Scapa Flow, Cromarty, and Rosyth, so that vessels can lie there undisturbed to do all they want, and for as long as they want, provided material and men are forthcoming... The one place that has put up any kind of defence against the submarine is Cromarty, and that is because at Cromarty there happens to be a man who grapples with things as they are, i.e., Commander Munro, and because they have trained artillerymen to man their guns."

Mr. Churchill is not so skilful in verbal defence as he is ecstatic in attack. His apologia for the conduct of the Govern- ment at the time of the Curragh incident, when ships were

assembled at Lamlash to descend upon the Ulster coast, seems to us lame. It is a tepid exposition of a reckless policy.

Again, it would be easy to show that his condemnation of Admiral Cradock for attacking the German ships without the help of the big guns of the Canopus' does not square with his implied condemnation of Admiral Troubridge for refusing to attack the Goeben ' under similar conditions. We cannot escape the conclusion that the Admiralty interfered too much

with the men on the spot. Mr. Churchill tries to distinguish between the strategy which was frequently dictated and the

tactics which were left to the decision of the officers at sea, but the distinction broke down in practice, as in the cases of Admirals Cradock, Milne and Troubridge, and the result was confusion.

Mr. Churchill's volume thrills us as it no doubt thrilled him to write it. It will endure. But when we have praised its great skill as it deserves we are left with a regret. After all, Mr. Churchill's characteristic spirit is not the best in which to write of such an agony. His exhilaration on the whole approaches too nearly to a revelling in the great play of forces to be acceptable in a statesman who bore responsibilities for humanity that were terrible even though they were stimulating.