Crisis and Controversy
By H. WILSON HARRIS
THE months with which Mr. Lloyd George's third volume deals, December, 1916, to about June, 1917, were a period crowded with crisis. There fell in them—apart from the formation of Mr. Lloyd George's own Government—the German and American peace proposals of the end of 1916, the growth of the submarine peril to its peak period, the first Russian revolution, the Nicelle offensive and America's entry into the war. The volume itself is not less crowded with controversy. Its main thesis is simple. The admirals were incapable of running the war at sea ; the generals were incapable of running it by land ; the Asquith administration was incapable of running a war at all. From which premisses certain obvious inferences naturally follow.
On half the questions with which Mr. Lloyd George deals an acute difference of opinion still prevails. He challenges contradiction on every other page, and it is manifestly out of the question to discuss his assumptions and conclusions within the compass of any ordinary review. The embers of the change of Cabinet episode have been raked over often enough of late, and there is small temptation to renew the process, though Mr. Lloyd George makes it almost inevitable by the bitterness of his attacks on some of his former colleagues, notably Mr. Runciman, in whose case he supplements his own strictures by quoting remarks derogatory to the President of the Board of Trade made by Lord Kitchener in what was an obviously private conversation. Lord Kitchener, who could equally be quoted in appreciation of Mr. Runciman, is not here to explain. In the military sphere the issues were, and still are, as controversial as in the political. The Prime Minister, as an impenitent Easterner, is at perpetual loggerheads with Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson, for whom the Western Front was the War and everything else a sideshow. On that the critics, military and civilian, can go on arguing till the end of time, for everyone is entitled to his own belief as to what the outcome would have been if other plans had been adopted. Mr. Lloyd George girds at the generals for failing consistently to bring off the surprise attack which alone promised any hope of success. There is much in what he says, but as usual the case is overstated. For example : " The main battle of the Somme was a perfect illustration of a prolonged effort to inform the enemy beforehand, and in time, of our intentions . . . it was in no way a surprise attack." The Germans ought to know whether they were surprised or not, and Ludendorff, whom Mr. Lloyd George quotes several times, but not here, declares specifically that they were.
The Rome Conference in January, 1917, brought the con- flict between easterners and westerners to a head. Mr. Lloyd George describes the conference in detail, and comments on it characteristically. He was bent on an Italian offensive, supported by British and French artillery temporarily with- drawn from the Western Front, against the Austrians. A good case could be made for it, but his plan was fully dis- cussed and rejected. The British Generals were against it ; the French Ministers and Generals were against it ; the Italian Commander-in-Chief, General Cadorna, did not favour it. Now the Lloyd George plan may have been a stroke of genius. It may have been a profound mistake to reject it. On the other hand, it may have been rejected simply because it was a bad plan. An enemy enjoying the benefit of interior lines can much more easily surprise than be surprised. But for Mr. Lloyd George, even as he reviews the War Memoirs of David Lloyd George. Vol. III. (Ivor Nicholson" and Watson. 21s.) situation after nearly nineteen years, there is only one ex- planation. The generals were jealous of one another ; generals always are. Falkenhayn was jealous of the Austrian Conrad ; " for Falkenhayn substitute Nivelle—for Conrad take Cadorna " ; in Robertson's case " a territorial advance of a few kilometres there Pn France] was more desirable than a decision elsewhere " ; as for Cadorna himself, he had been got at and his better judgement overridden. Such is the hypothesis elaborated as alternative to any admission that the plan may have been turned down because its author's colleagues—rightly or wrongly, but honestly—disbelieved in it.
This inflexible resolve to show how right Mr. Lloyd George was and how wrong everyone who differed from him was (the one mistake he acknowledges in this volume was his appointment of Mr. Neville Chamberlain as Director of National Service) gives his book the character of a polemic rather than a history. And that is in many respects a pity, for when Mr. Lloyd George chooses to write objectively he can do it extremely well. The best chapters in this instalment of his work are those on the Russian Revolution (the March, not the November, revolution) and the submarine peril, though the latter is dis- tinguished by the usual series of jibes at the admirals. The revolution story is in a sense an irrelevance, for all that mat- tered from the War point of view was the fact that it took place ; but the exposure of the rottenness, corruption and inefficiency against which army and people alike reacted into Menshevism and then into Bolshevism is a useful corrective to the laudatores temporis acti, who in defiance of all his- torical fact exalt the golden days of the Little Father as an era of peace, plenty and content by comparison with the present. Viewed in terms not of Nicholas II but of Rasputin, the immediate pre-revolution era is seen in its true colours. As to the actual military situation, Mr. Lloyd George repro- duces some rather startling official documents suggesting that the whole outlook on the Russian front, and consequently on every front, would have been substantially different if a British armaments firm had not failed to deliver munitions which were to have reached the Russians early in 1915.
The chapter on the submarine situation in the early months of 1917 is admirable. Even now the straits to which unre- stricted submarine warfare had reduced the Allies by April of that year are inadequately realized. Mr. Lloyd George sets out the facts soberly, and for that reason the more effectively, though to be just his figures of German submarine losses (5 in 1914 and 69 in 1918) should be set in their right proportion by a mention of the number of submarines operating in the various years. More are naturally destroyed when there are more to destroy. In 1914 there were only 10 at work outside German waters. In 1918 there were 140. The struggle, in the teeth of Admiralty opposition, to get the convoy system instituted is graphically told, and the convoy system, in view of what the situation was, may be said to have won the War. At any rate the War without it would have been lost.
If 1918 was the year of victory 1917 was the year of effort which staved off defeat and made victory possible. That the vigour and imagination of Mr. Lloyd George himself were an asset of high value his fiercest critics will not deny. A fighter from the first, he was displaying his innate qualities on an immense stage as head of a War Cabinet. But they are not the qualities that make for balanced narrative. The result in that field is likely to be good copy but bad history. Actually this particular copy is not always good, for too many tedious pages are devoted to needlessly detailed descriptions of food-supply organization and the like.
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