MR. ASQUITH, LORD FRENCH, AND THE SHELLS.
IN his speeches at Newcastle last week Mr. Asquith had something forcible to say about Lord French's disclosures, and about his own famous speech on shells at Newcastle in April, 1915, when, according to his critics, he " lulled the nation into a sense of false security." What Mr. Asquith said about Lord French was at once dignified and sensible. Lord French, he remarked, had taken " an unusual, and I think unfortunate, course " in giving to the world " at this stage what must be an ex parte narrative." Mr. Asquith undertook to defend only Lord Kitchener against Lord French's strictures, expressing the opinion that the living could take care of themselves. We are not so sure. Officers on the active list who have not the technical freedom from restraint enjoyed by a Field-Marshal may justly feel that they are prohibited for some time from making any reply. In remaining silent they would at all events be acting in accordance with the customs of the Service.
has written is in the main true or untrue ; we are ready to believe that a great part of it would stand the teats of contradiction ; but when all has been said, it seems to us most unseemly that the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, even before the Peace terms are signed, should have bitterly attacked his subordinate officers. Most ware have yielded their public, scandals ; but when, for example, Lord Luoan and Lord Cardigan quarrelled after the Crimean War, and their disputes and the echoes of their disputes were carried into the Law Courts, it was not a ease of a Commander-in- Chief abusing those who had served under him. In whas Mr. Asquith said in defence of Lord Kitchener there wit a fiat contradiction of Lord French. Mr. Asquith said that it was " wholly untrue " to suggest that either Lord Kitchener, who was then Secretary for War, or the Govern- ment contemplated superseding, or attempted to supersede, Lord French in the field. The Government, however, were seriously disquieted by communications from Lord French as to his intentions, and after due deliberation the Cabinet unanimously came to important conclusions on grounds of policy as well as of strategy. When Lord Kitchener went to Paris to explain these decisions of the Cabinet to Lord French, he went at the desire of the Government. " Lord Kitchener performed a service of the greatest value to the country, and, as the event showed, with the best results." Mr. Asquith concluded this passage of his speech with these words : " You may take this from me. Lord Kitchener's friends may wait in perfect serenity the process of dis- closure. I am sorry that I had to say that, but it had to be said." The ordinary reader of Lord French's articles, and of the excited comments of Lord Northcliffe's news- papers on them, must be wondering whether there is any motive for what seems to be an extreme anxiety to get in the first blow in a public quarrel. Mr. Asquith's words suggest as much as this. Meanwhile Lord Northcliffe's papers are making hay in these sunny days of imperfect information—they are making hay with Lord Kitchener's reputation, and asserting that everything they ever said m disparagement of him was obviously justified.
To turn to Mr. Asquith's commentary on his speech of April, 1915. The effect of it all was that his assurances in 1915 that the supplies of shells were sufficient referred entirely to the past, and that his whole purpose in going to Newcastle in April, 1915, was to stir up the country to a great effort.. He considered that from that point of view his 1915 speech had been entirely successful, as from that moment a specially great effort was made in the munition factories. Mr. Asquith described the manner in which his assurances as to the pest, given on the strength of Lord Kitchener's word—after Lord Kitchener had been in consultation with Sir John French—had been torn apart from their context, and pilloried as a wickedly untrue account of the situation at the front, as unparalleled in its unfairness. The speech, he said, had been " more unscrupulously and shamelessly travestied than perhaps any public utterance of our time." For our part, we think that on his own ground Mr. Asquith's defence was good. He relied upon the advice of his chief expert, and Lord Kitchener had told him that though there was an urgent need for more shells, the Army had not hitherto suffered appreciably from the shortage. Here in fairness to Lord French we must interpolate a statement which he made in Dublin on reading Mx, Asquith's speech of last Saturday. Lord French said that he adhered firmly to everything that he had written," and added that " he never gave Lord Kitchener to understand in any way what Mr. Asquith stated at Newcastle in April, 1915." Experience has proved that Mr. Asquith has a very accurate memory, and we should be surprised if he is mistaken in his recollection of facts. At all events: he may safely be trusted to have stated the facts with strict regard for the truth as he remembers it. His statement of what happened between the beginning of the war and April, 1915, was briefly as follows, As early as. September, 1914, a Cabinet Committee was formed, presided over by Lord Kitchener, and including Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Haldane, to deal with the stocks of munitions. " The Committee gave orders wherever orders could be given, and they substantially enlarged both the field and the machinery of supply." Even so, the supply threatened to fall short in a kind of fighting to which history afforded
Minister took the urgent course of going to Newcastle to im- plore the men of the Tyneside primarily, and•through them the rest of the community, to put their whole strength into the production of shells. Before Mr. Asquith left London on this errand he was assured by Lord Kitchener, as we have already seen, that so far operations had not been seriously hampered by the lack of munitions. Lord Kitchener said this after having been on the day before " in direct personal communication with Sir John French." Mr. Asquith's speech of 1915 ended with these words : There is not a single naval or military authority among us who, in view of the approximate and prospective require- ments, does not declare that a large and rapid increase in the output of munitions has become one of the first necessi- ties of the State. This then I say : What in the name of your King and country we ask you to do is to deliver the goods.'
We repeat that, so far as the defence of his Newcastle speech of 1915 is concerned, Mr. Asquith has made out a good case. But honesty compels us to add that, though he has been grossly calumniated by those who professedly base their calumniations on that speech, the matter has its borders far outside the text of the 1915 speech, and indeed goes back much further than 1915, or even than the beginning of the war. To take first of all Mr. Asquith's conduct of affairs in the early part of the war. Everybody who knows the truth knows that he was a scrupulously loyal colleague to his fellow-members in the Cabinet. We are inclined to say that it was this very loyalty which was in one sense his undoing. He trusted so much to the word of his colleagues that, having got their word, he regarded a promise as indistinguishable from fulfilment, and an opinion as indistinguishable from a fact. Surely practical men of common-sense should not only have taken Lord Kitchener's word, but have watched very carefully to see that Lord Kitchener was doing his duty as fully as he, quite sincerely of course, considered himself to be doing it.' The issues for the nation were so desperate that nothing less than that was their duty. It was not enough to take the word of any single man in such a terrible plight. By every means and in every quarter they ought to have verified it. For all they knew, Lord Kitehener might have been passing through a phase of perilous optimism, or under the stress of the war might have temporarily exchanged precision for looseness of thought. They ought to have assured themselves that not a single need of the Army could possibly go unmet. They ought to have plied Lord Kitchener with questions, even though they might,have thought it necessary in the last resort to accept his answers in preference to their own. Again, in relation to the contractors, the Cabinet Committee to which Mr. Asquith has referred, and which included Lord Haldane and Mr. Lloyd George, ought to have ransacked the country to find out whether there were mechanical resources which were not yet being employed, or whether the already employed mechanical resources were being used to their full capacity. They ought not for a moment to have regarded a contract as being as good as completed because a contractor had signed it. Ordinary people know very well that it is the exception for a contractor to be up to his time. In this most desperate of all wars the Cabinet Committee ought obviously to have acted in accordance with common experience, and have perpetually, day in and day out, have kept the contractors up to the mark by asking them if they were working to time, and if not, why not.
Then as regards the period before the war—once more Mr. Asquith cannot be acquitted of blame. During the war Mr. Asquith himself confessed that Great Britain " has been too dependent on chances and risks which we did not adequately foresee, and against which we certainly did not satisfactorily provide." That is a condemnation, of course, which affects all Parties. We do not pretend that it applies only to Mr. Asquith or only to Liberals. Any honest politician ought to subscribe to those words. But it applies in a special sense to Mr. Asquith and his Liberal friends. When, for example, they were advocating a continuance of the fiscal policy of Great Britain they made a practice of assuring us that we could count upon an undisturbed peace. We as Free Traders thoroughly approved of the Liberal policy of Fred Trade, but we made the reservation that we should always yield to the " state of siege " argument, if the need for using that argument were shown to exist. In other words, we argued that we must put up with the expensive way of life rather than continue in the cheap way of life if the safety of the Empire depended upon our keeping within the Empire all the means of our own defence. Such an argument was never allowed any value by the Liberal Government. Being in possession of all the information of the Foreign Office, which was not available to outsiders, they gave us to understand that the peace party in Germany was growing in strength and that there was no need to fear war. Never- theless the Spectator for years argued that certain pre- cautions must be taken if we were not to run a terrible risk. We will not bore our readers by recalling the old controversies about National Service and the maintenance of a stock of at least a million rifles. In • the matter of National Service we did not get anything like enough support, and in the matter of the rifles—a very obvious pre- caution to take, because notoriously oursmall-arms factories were quite inadequate to produce a large number of rifles in a hurry—we got no support at all. We must never again become dependent upon Germany for our steel and for the refining of spelter and copper., or for the chemicals required for the manufacture of high explosives. Yet again in our food supply, we must never again allow the proportion of food produced in this country' to fall so low. Although Mr. Asquith had no difficulty in meeting his critics on the platform which he and they (foolishly enough) had chosen, he would be hard put to it to deny that his unhappy experiences in connexion with the Newcastle speeches were ultimately the Nemesis of his past policy.
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