BOOKS.

SIR CHARLES CALLWELL'S REMINISCENCES OF THE WAR.* SIR CIIARDIS Cemarem.'s unfailing jocularity does not, or at least should not, disguise the fact that he is one of the soundest military critics in the country. He is a vigorous writer ; he has had varied experience in the field ; he has read military history, and he has thought long and carefully about military problems. It was no wonder that he was called out of hie retirement to serve the nation directly war broke out, though he would not, of course, have been appointed to so high a position as that of Director of Military Operations at the War Office if the General Staff had been kept together. As every one knows, the General Staff, carefully chesen before the war, was as carefully broken up when war began. Meat of its members went across the Channel with the Expeditionary Forces. It thus came about that General Callwell succeeded to the position of General Henry Wilson. General Calle-ell does not feel at all sure, however, that even if all the members of the General Staff had remained in England, Lord Kitchener would have kept it in existence as an operative unit.

The first thing we have to note among Sir Charles Callwell's impressions is his unceasing admiration of Lord Kitchener's feat in creating the New Armies. In his opinion Lord Kitchener had to his credit the greatest single achievement in the war. Having acknowledged this, Sir Charles Callwell seems to derogate little from Lord Kitchener's merits when he implies over and over again that in the administration of what he had so wonder- fully created Lord Kitchener made many mistakes. Lord Kitchener over-centralized in contra-distinction to Sir William Robertson, who had to a perfect degree the art of decentralizing. We daresay that if Sir Charles Calla-ell felt at liberty to tell tho whole truth he would make Lord Kitchener's feat seem even more remarkable, for he hints that at the beginning nobody but Lord Kitchener himself believed in the possibility of raising and training the huge new armies quickly enough to be of any use. Picture the situation. The Expeditionary' Force which had been rushed across the Channel was perfectly trained and admirably equipped, but by comparison with the hordes of Germany it was a pigmy. It was hurled back like leaves before an autumn wind, and we can well believe that those who had built it up and cherished it could not help feeling almost that its dissipation meant the end of the military hopes of the British Empire. Probably all the British officers at the front longed for everybody at home who could use a musket, or who had ever acted as a non-commissioned officer, or who had even stood in the ranks and "formed fours," to be hurried across the water to the rescue. But, of course, if Britain had been denuded of a nucleus of experienced men who could train others, there would have been no new armies. Even at the War Office Lord Kitchener's scheme was not received with sympathy. We do not suggest for a moment that anybody failed to serve Lord Kitchener loyally, but it is certain that most men who are not convinced in their own minds =con- sciously fail to give the best kind of service. Lord Kitchen was a lonely figure, but ho was adamant. He had made im * ExPois.ssit 51 ,5 Thsg-Otti. 101440I5. By Major-General Sir C. E. Wheel% E.C.B. With a Prmtleplece. Landon: Constable. (1011. set.]

his mind from the first moment that the war would be a long one, and he felt, as we understand it, that even if the British troops then in France were driven into the Bay of Biscay it would still be necessary patiently to create new armies. In his view nothing in the long run could be done without them. Preliminary reverses, however heart-rending, did not count.

It is impossible to discuss all the interesting and important matters with which General Callwell deals. The best we can do is to pick out a few. Let us take first General Callwell's tribute to Lord Kitchener for having had the courage to recall practically all the Regulars on foreign service at the beginning of the war. "Would any War Minister other than Lord Kitchener," General Callwell asks, "have had the courage to denude India of British regdlar troops, artillery as well as infantry, to the extent that he did ? Supposing any other War Minister to have proposed such a thing, would the Government

have backed him up ? It was the handiwork of a very big man." We agree with Sir Charles Callwell that this particular act of Lord Kitchener's has been generally overlooked, for it

has been overshadowed by the larger act of creating the new armies.

Sir Charles Callwell's sense of proportion is never at fault when he discusses the relative value of the various operations in the war. He is a convinced Westerner. He sees that

Germany had to be defeated where she was strongest, and that we could not defeat her by easy and empty successes in parts of the world where the German soldiers did not happen to be. Neverthelezs, he admits that some of the side-shows were inevitable. Take Palestine, for example. Egypt, of course, had to be protected, and the right way to protect Egypt was not to sit upon the Suez Canal but to carry on an offensive.

defensive to the east of the Canal. Once admit this and it becomes reasonable to admit further that it was profitable to pursue the campaign eastwards and northwards—at least, so long as the troops used were chiefly Indians. Unfortunately, far too many white soldiers were diverted from Europe in the

early stages. General Callwell, stout Westerner though he is, points out that early in the war there was a time when it might

have paid to cut the Turkish communications at Alexandretta, but the opportunity was lost. For side-shows which were not inevitable, and particularly for side-shows which were purely wanton, General Callwell has nothing but indignant scorn. Ho is particularly severe about Salonica and the Dardanelles. He represents both Lord Kitchener and Lord Fisher as having been over-borne by Mr. Churchill in the adventure of the

Dardanelles, and he remarks that when the Dardanelles was seen to be a positive danger to us Lord Kitchener began for the first time to show a loss of confidence in his own judgment.

There are several racy descriptions in the book of Lord Kitchener "making things hum" at the War Office and acting in splendid disregard of conventions which the War Office held dear but of which Lord Kitchener, who had spent most of his life out of the country, had never heard. But let us choose for quotation the description of Lord Kitchener's

attitude towards the Serbian Military Attache. The Attache wanted to win Lord Kitchener's approval of an attack upon

Bulgaria by Serbia, though Bulgaria was still neutral.

"The Attache protested eagerly, volubly, stubbornly, patheti- cally, but all to no purpose. Then, when at last we rose to our feet, Lord K., finding his visitor wholly unconvinced, drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to tower over the Attache, who was himself a tall man, and—well, it is hard to set down in words the happenings of a tense situation. The scene was one that I never shall forget, as, by his demeanour rather than by any words of his, Lord K. virtually issued a command that no Serb soldier was to cross the Bulger border unless the Bulgars embarked on hostilities. The Attach6 stood still a moment ; then he put his kepi on, saluted gravely, turned round and went out without a word. I followed him out on to the landing. 'Mon Dieu!' he said ; 'mon Dieu ! ' And then he went slowly down the great marble staircase, looking a broken man."

Surely no Englishman will read those words without pride.

Sir Charla; Callwell says that the War Office people came rather to dread the occasions when Lord Kitchener was going to

deliver one of his periodical speeches in the House of Lords.

"Singularly enough, he used to take these speeches of his, la which he took good care never to tell his auditors anything that they did not know before, quite seriously—a good deal more seriously than we did."

Of a typical interview with Mr. Asquith, Lord Callwell says :— " All the same, when instructions came to be given at the and of such an interview, they invariably were lucid, concise, and very much to the point. You knewi. exactly where you were. For condensing what was needed in e, case like this into a convincing form of words, for epitomizing in a single sentence the conclusions arrived at (supposing conclusions by any chance to have been arrived at) after prolonged discussions by a War Council, or at a gathering of the Dardanelles Committee, I have never come across anybody in the same street with Mr. Asquith."

There is an amusing passage in which General Callwell pokes fun at the business men who were called in to help the poor inexperienced soldiers in matters of organization. He tells us that the system of "Red Tape" was reproduced almost exactly by the business men, who, however, enjoyed the advantage of having their system known as "Push and Go." General Callwell was no doubt saved by his sense of the ridiculous from sheer despair when he was present at discussions of the War Cabinet about strategy.

"The glorious uncertainty of cricket is acknowledged to be one of the main attractions of our national game. But the glorious uncertainty of cricket is as nothing compared to the glorious uncertainty which obtains in time of war as to what silly thing H.M. Government—or some of its shining lights— will be wanting to do next. At this time the War Cabinet, or perhaps one ought rather to say certain members of that body, had got it into their heads that to send round a lot of Sir Douglas Haig's troops (who were pretty well occupied as it was) to the Isonzo Front would be a capital plan, the idea being to catch the Central Powers no end of a ' buff ' in this particular quarter. That fairly banged Banagher. For sheer fatuity it was the absolute limit."

Here is another and a worse example :— "Early in October, 1917, the War Cabinet hit upon a great notion. On the close of the Flanders operations a portion of Sir D. Haig's forces were to be switched thither to succour Generals Allenby and Marshall in their respective campaigns, and were to be switched back again so as to be on hand for the opening of active work on the Western Front at the beginning of March, 1918—a three months' excursion. This scheme seems to have been evolved quite au grand serieux and not as a joke. At all events, a conference (which I was called in to attend as knowing more about the Dardanelles business from the War Office end than anybody else) assembled in the Chief of the Imperial General Staff's room one Sunday morning— the First Sea Lord and the Deputy First Sea Lord with sub- ordinates, together with General Home, who happened to be over on leave from his First Army, and prominent members of the General Staff—and we gravely debated the idiotic project. . . . For, allowing for railing troops from the Western Front to the Cote Azure and embarking them, and for the inevitable delays in landing a force of all arms on a beach with improvised piers, the troops at the head of the hunt would already have to be re-embarking in Ayas Bay by the time that those at the tail of the hunt came to be emptied out on the shores of the Gulf of Iskenderun ; otherwise the wanderers would miss the venue on the Western Front."

One could wish that some trained psychologist would write an analysis of the feelings of Lord Haig while such discussions as these went on behind his back. He had the right to expect loyal support so long as he was retained, but the doubts and futilities of his employers sometimes welled up to the surface as though.to make his position still more difficult. For instance, Mr. Lloyd George made his wicked speech at Paris on the theme that a clever leader would find a back door to victory—as though there were any way to success except beating the enemy where he was—and that success could be won without much loss of life—an invitation to regard Lord Haig as a monster. But no—the psychological analysis will never be written, for Lord Haig will not help. Without guessing all his feelings, we know at least that he was a man and a sticker, and that is

perhaps enough. General Callwell writes some severe strictures on Mr. Lloyd George's handling of the munitions question. He genuinely admires the buoyancy and courage with which Mr. Lloyd George went through the most trying periods of the war, but he says frankly that he could never free his mind from a certain resentment against Mr. Lloyd George for the way in which General von Donop, who was Master-General of the Ordnance in the early part of the war, was thrown over. Mr. Lloyd George took for himself and for the new Ministry of Munitions the credit of the first great outpouring of munitions, though this outpouring, says Sir Charles Callwell, was wholly due to the War Office. "Happily," concludes Sir Charles Callwell, "such occurrences are rare in the public life of this country."

We notice a few misprints ; Captain Stephen Gwynn's name, for example, is spelt wrong, and General Guy Dawnay, possibly through a confusion with his cousin who was killed in the war, receives a courtesy title which is not his.