LORD HALDANE'S " APOLOGIA."*
LORD HALDANE'S defence of the policy adopted by the Liberal Government towards Germany between 1906 and 1914 deserves attentive reading. His little volume, mainly composed from the articles whioh he has published recently in various periodicals, has been hastily put together and contains a certain amount of repetition, but it is an obviously sincere attempt to explain and justify a policy that has brought much unmerited odium on the author. We may state his argument briefly. When he went to Berlin in 1900, the German peace party seemed to him to be much more influential than the war party, and the risk of an armed conflict with Germany was, In his opinion, inconsiderable. He insured against the risk by reorganizing the Army so that an Expeditionary Force of six or eight divisions would be ready to go abroad at very short notice, if required to defend neutral Belgium and the French Channel ports. When Lord Haldane revisited Berlin early in 1912, ho found, or thought ho found, that the peace party, headed by the Chancellor, Dr. Bethmann Hollweg, was still in the ascendant, but that the war party, personified in Admiral von Tirpitz, was very powerful and popular. Ho tried to induce the Emperor to abandon the new Navy Bill, then under consideration, but failed. The German Chancellor, on the other hand, sought in vain to persuade Lord Haldane to enter into an agreement by which we should remain neutral in the event of a war in which Germany could pretend to have been attacked by France or Russia. Lord Haldane returned from Berlin still hopeful of maintaining peace through the negotiations about the Baghdad Railway and about African colonies which were continued almost to the eve of the war. He asserts that " the reason why the war came appears to have been that at some period in the year 1913 the German Government finally laid the reins on the necks of men whom up to then it had held in restraint," but he does not think that the Emperor actually decided on war, regardless of consequences, until July, 1914. We may say, then, that Lord Haldane, with all his special knowledge of German affairs, honestly misjudged the relative strength of the German parties. As Lord Salisbury would have said, he put his money on the wrong horse. He thought that the advocates of peaceful penetration would carry the day. He did not think that Germany would be so foolish as to put all that she had won to the hazard of a world-war. He erred in good faith. There is no foundation whatever for the malevolent suggestion that Lord Haldane preached friendship with Germany regardless of British interests. As a matter of fact, ho made It very plain to the Germans—muoh plainer than they liked—that in the event of war Great Britain would help France.
Lord Haldane replies to the charge that he and his Liberal colleagues did not insure heavily enough against the risk of war. It is perfectly true that what they did has too often been underrated. Lord Haldane's reorganization of the Regular Army on a divisional basis, so that it could be mobilized very quickly, was a valuable piece of work. But for that we could not have lent efficient aid to the French in resisting the German onrush in August, 1914. The establishment of the Territorial Army was at any rate a step in the right direction ; the Territorial battalions proved of incalculable value, especially in the first winter of the war, when our small Regular Army was almost exhausted and the new levies were not ready for the field. But when Lord Haldane tries to persuade us that the Liberal Government did all that was possible, lie ceases to be convincing. Every one knows that Lord Kitchener's
• Befors tie War. By Lord Haldane. Loudon ; Cassell. [7s. CAL net.'
first act, when he went to the War Office on August 4th, 1914, was to call for men. He asked for a hundred thousand at once, and as many more as he could get. Had the War Office made any preparations for recruiting men on such a scale ? Could it feed or clothe or house them ? Had it any substantial reserves of rifles and ammunition, ready to be served out to the citizen soldiers who gladly obeyed the call to arms ? Were there any arrangements with munition-makers to supply guns and shells for an Army appreciably larger than the Expeditionary Force ? We are not doing the War Office an injustice if we say that it could not answer these questions satisfactorily when the war broke out. The Government believed until 1913 that such a war would not come ; that, if it did come, it would be a short, sharp conflict ; and that, as Great Britain might not have time even to train the Territorials for field service, it was hardly worth while to prepare for the training and arming of new levies. Lord Haldane assumes too readily that all his critics blame him for not trying to create a large professional Army after 1906, when the German menace was clearly visible on the horizon. That is not the true ground of complaint. A great deal might have been done at very small cost in the way of preparation for the citizen armies that were so obviously needed in August, 1914. It was not done, and Lord Kitchener's task was made needlessly burdensome through this lack of foresight on the part of the War Office. We must add that Mr. Lloyd George's outburst at New Year, 1914, against armaments, and especially a stronger Navy, becomes still more difficult to understand when we are told by Lord Haldane that in the previous year the Cabinet had virtually abandoned the hope of averting war with a bellicose Germany. The Radical attempt in the spring of 1914 to reduce the Navy Estimates was, in the light of this revelation, a more discreditable episode than it seemed at the time.
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