THE DARDANELLES REPORT. T HE Dardanelles Report contains matter far too
serious to be made the ground for party or personal strife and condemnation. Moreover, it is published at a time when, more than at any other period since the beginning of the war, steadiness, patience, concentration of effort, and above all unity of action by the whole nation are required. To take this document (one per se reasonable, just, and moderate) and to use it as an instrument of attack on Mr. Asquith and other members of the late Ministry would at this moment be absolute madness. If we are told that by refusing to take this line we are saving certain statesmen from the penal- ties they deserve, we can only say : " That must be their good fortune. We would rather, assuming their offence justly punishable, that they went scot-free than imperil our chances of winning the war, as they must be imperilled by a faction fight at Westminster. There must be no waste of time or of force in making scapegoats."
To support our contention we have only to glance at the effects that must follow from the policy which certain organs of the Press which hate Mr. Asquith call " impeaching the old gang." Remember first of all that you cannot impeach the " old gang " without impeaching the leader of the new gang. Mr. Lloyd George was a member of the War Council whose actions are impugned by the Report of the Commission. It may be arguable that he took little or no part in the actual decisions, and that therefore his responsibility was technical rather than real. That might suffice to excuse a member of the outside Cabinet. It cannot suffice to protect the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Cabinet so prominent as Mr. Lloyd George. Great popularity, great position, and especially the holding of the purse-strings of the nation involve responsibilities for great acts of State from which no man can escape. Mr. Lloyd George is too big a man and, we expect, also far too brave a man to attempt to use the argu- ment—" Please, Sir, it wasn't me." He either erred with his colleagues, or else he erred quite as greatly by delegating to them powers which a Minister in his position had no right to delegate. No one would ever have condemned him if he had said " I cannot allow such a big business as this, one which may involve the expenditure of untold millions, to be carried on without my acquiescence. If I am unable to have a direct share in its management I must either resign or else assent, giving my colleagues a blank cheque and taking the eonsequences." But can any sane person believe that it would be wise at this moment to begin a campaign which if successful must end in extinguishing the present head of the Government as well as the late Prime Minister ? Does any one really wish to be left alone in the dark with the "yellow ' Press ?
Though we deprecate foolish and impracticable talk about impeachments and demands that the whole of the evidence should be published—evidence dealing with matters which involve the most delicate negotiations with foreign Powers— it must not be supposed that we hold that, since the Report has been published, no lessons are to be learnt from it, either political or naval and military. There are two great lessons, and upon these we propose to dwell. The first is that though the Government of late years have broken the old rule that the expert is the servant of the Cabinet Minister, and that no responsibility ever rests upon him but only upon the Minister who took his advice, we have not reached any clear or proper understanding as to the true functions of the expert or his locus standi in the councils of the State. Nothing is clearer from the Report than that the experts supposed to be con- sulted considered that their duty was to be silent until their advice was definitely asked on a specific point. They were to be like books upon a shelf, dumb till some hand took them down, turned their pages, and extracted their information. To apply a more honorific analogy, they were oracles which never spoke till they were spoken to. But Ministers took an entirely different view of the situation. They believed that if they summoned experts to the Council Board, and those experts heard the discussions and were aware of the decisions come to and said nothing, it was proper to assume that they had no objections to make and did not dissent from the proposals put forward and accepted by the Council. Appal- ling as it may seem, the War Councils at which the Dardanelles Expedition was decided upon in principle and in detail seem to have misunderstood completely the functions and duties of the experts who attended them. As things turned out, it would have been far better if the experts had not been there, because then it might have occurred to somebody to insist upon their opinions being frankly disclosed. As it was, the War Council showed a cheerful reliance upon the proverb " Silence gives consent," and plunged into their policy quite oblivious of the fact that in the minds of the experts silence had no such meaning. It may be true, and probably is true, that if the particular experts had spoken they would not have cared to take the responsibility of vetoing or attempting to veto the scheme, but that does not make the misunderstanding any the less.
Quite as important is the lesson to be drawn from the absolute failure of the very capable men who formed the War Council to see that they had adopted a scheme which, if they had been able to carry it out—which, thank God I they were not—was almost certain to be unsuccessful because it was conceived on thoroughly un- sound lines. The plan of the Government in the case of the Dardanelles Expedition had the worst fault which any naval or military plan, or naval and military plan combined, can have. It had no real objective, only an apparent one ; or rather, to put it in another way, it only had a vague and general objective, not one which was clear and specific and could be carried through by a series of definite acts, acts which could be connected and co-ordinated till the final stage was reached and the end gained.
The Government on January 13th; 1915, decided that "the Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula,with Constantinople as its objective." That, we do not hesitate to say, has every fault which a war decision could possibly have, and for this reason. No one had thought out or knew what the Fleet was to do after it had bombarded and taken the Gallipoli Peninsula. To say vaguely that Constantinople was its objective was nonsense. A tourist, a mere sightseer, might have Con- stantinople as his objective, but not a fleet or an army, or even a commercial traveller. The -objective of all three is action. A fleet might be told to summon Constantinople to surrender, or to lay the city in ashes, or—a madder sugges- tion still—to try to break through into the Black Sea. An army might be told to besiege the city, or assault it and take the Sultan prisoner, or what not. But to talk about Con- stantinople as the Fleet's objective is indeed to build a castle in the air. It merely means that the Government did not know, because they had never thought the matter out in specific terms, what the Fleet was to do if it got there. Of course members of the War Council, if pressed, would have said that they knew quite well. It can be seen from the Report, indeed, that generally and in a kind of woolly way they believed that if the British Fleet appeared within sight of Seraglio Point there would be some sort of a revolution or conspiracy, and that the city would open its gates and admit the invaders as conquerors, or even hail them as deliverers. There was a kind of feeling : "Get tl e British Fleet up the Straits and you'll soon sec—well, win t you will see." In truth, it was a case of a "general idea," but with no "special idea" to make it real. Nobody appar- ently did what is done by a wise Commander-in-Chief in the field when an attractive but dangerous plan is placed before him. What he says is : " Write out in detail the orders necessary to carry out your plan and let us see how it looks when translated into specific terms." We venture to say that if Mr. Winston Churchill had called upon his Naval Staff to write out the orders which would have to be given to the Fleet by the Naval Commander-in-Chief on arrival at Con- stantinople, in the event of the hypothetical revolution not taking place, and had brought them to the War Council, the Council would have abandoned the scheme at once. The roseate hues of a vague and general objective would soon have faded into the grey and sombre realities of specific ordera. The writing out of the orders would have shown the Govern. ment the essential difficulties of the situation. It would have projected them into the position occupied by an Admiral in the Sea of Marmora, " off Constantinople." They would have noted that he could not occupy a city of a million people because he had no troops to do it with. They would have begun to remember that the Turks are a bold people and do not mind taking punishment if they are not actually pushed with the bayonet, and to foresee that they would endure the bombardment as soon as they noticed that the Fleet had no troops to land, dared not fire away too many rounds of ammunition, and was obliged to use up coal by steaming about at night. Next would have come the consideration : How about the rapid movement of troops from Constantinople along both aides of the Dardanelles, European and Asian, to get possession of the Straits and close the door on our Fleet ? Then would have emerged the essential risk of the situation—i.e., that our Fleet might be shut up in the Sea of Marmora. If our Fleet had really gone into the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles and the Narrows would have been shut behind us, and our ships would either have had to sink themselves, to surrender, or else to run back through the Dardanelles under conditions which would have meant the most terrible losses. Curiously enough, this view was put forward by one of the naval experts, though not an expert who attended the War Council, with great force and fore- sight. Sir Henry Jackson clearly understood the realities of the situation, whoever else ignored them. On January 5th he wrote a memorandum which, though it did not, as the Commissioners note, pronounce any definite opinion either for or against the attack on the Dardanelles, insisted upon the extent of the forces that would be required, and especially upon the necessity of providing a large supply of ammunition. He added :-
"Assuming the enemy squadron destroyed and the batteries rushed, they would be open to the fire of field artillery and infantry, and to torpedo attack at night, with no store ships with ammunition, and no retreat without re-engaging the shore batteries, unless these had been destroyed when forcing a passage. Though they might dominate the city and inflict enormous damage, their position would not be an enviable ono, unless there were a large military force to occupy the town. Strategically, such a diversion would only be carried out when the object to be gained was commensurate with the loss the Fleet would sustain in forcing the passage. The actual capture of Constan- tinople would be worth a considerable loss ; but its bombardment alone would not greatly affect the distant military operations ' • and even. if it surrendered, it could not be occupied and hold without troops, and would probably result in indiscriminate massacres."
One would have thought that this memorandum, even if it was not seen by Mr. Churchill till some time after it was written, as we gather from the Report, would have been enough to break to pieces the plan of naval action alone—the plan which we think we shall not be unjust if we describe as Mr. Churchill's hobby. Yet, strangely enough, it did not seem to have had this effect on the mind of anybody concerned. It is true that the idea of exclusively naval action gradually fell into the background, or rather was superseded by the adoption of amphibious war before such action was tried as it was in March, but for a long time after the memorandum was before the naval authorities an exclusively naval operation still nominally held the field and was apparently as much accepted by Lord Kitchener as by Mr. Churchill.
To sum up, nobody except Sir Henry Jackson seems to have had the hardihood to ask himself or anybody else : " What is the Fleet to do if it gets through the Dardanelles and reaches its objective, Constantinople ? " Again, the scheme was never tested by the two questions which have knocked so many apparently sound plans on the head. " What will it cost if measured, this time not in money but in terms of men and military and naval strength ? " should have been the first question. When that question had been answered, it should have been followed by : " Where are the men and the naval and military energy to come from ? " If those two questions had been pressed, the answers would have shown that the men and ships and the energy required could not be obtained without running risks too great to be run. The Emperor Napoleon was wont to say that when he made a plan he was the most pusillanimous man alive. He raised every objection, difficulty, and bogy that could possibly be raised. Every timid thought or vague anxiety was investigated and given its full importance, and every criticism found in the least valid was met by a precautionary measure. It was only after the plan had been thus gone over, an assurance sought on every point, and every link in the chain which led to the finial objective made as secure as human ingenuity could Rieke it, that Napoleon put himself into a mood which was the opposite of that in which he planned. Once his scheme was launched he knew no doubts and no fears. He fell upon his enemy like a thunderbolt. No such precautionary pusil- lanimity appears to have restrained or to have perturbed those who devised the Dardanelles scheme. They were content to envisage first the bombardment and then the taking of the Gallipoli Peninsula, with Constantinople as the objective. A less well-thought-out scheme it is difficult to imagine. In truth, the mood of the War Council reminds no of Dryden's famous description of Doeg
" They were too warm on picking-work to dwell, But faggoted their notions as they fell, And, if rhymed and rattled, all was well."
But though we must record these lapses from sound sense and good judgment, we cannot leave the subject without protesting most strongly against the vindictive criticism with which Mr. Asquith has been assailed, and still more aaainst the brutalities reserved for Lord Kitchener. One 0 would have thought that the claim for consideration, thrice hallowed by the grave, would have preserved him from such an attack as that in the Weekly Dispatch, but apparently our new journalism is rotten eggs not rapiers. In any case, it is futile as well as ignoble to taunt men who, if they erred, erred not from any malignity of aim, or from carelessness or the desire to avoid spending themselves in the nation's cause. We would far rather thank the " old gang " that they did not despair of the republic than try to play towards them the part of a Shylock and get from them every ounce of flesh that a strict and merciless rendering of their implied covenant with the nation may appear to justify.
Previous page
