Mr. Lloyd George Continued
Ma. LLOYD GEORGE'S War Memories are developing on an increasingly expansive scale. He has needed two volumes of
seven hundred pages each to cover the year 1917, and it can hardly be supposed that a fifth will suffice to take us to the Armistice. The core of the present volume is Passchendaele. To it 160 pages arc devoted, and the discussion, not of the detailed tactics but of the wisdom of the whole undertaking, is abundantly documented. Mr. Lloyd George's main purpose is to prove incontrovertibly that no responsibility rests on him for the appalling slaughter of the autumn of 1917, and in that he succeeds completely. Anxious, as always, to strike the enemy at his weakest point (whether that would still be the weakest point when the blow was ready to be dealt is another question) he deprecated consistently any extensive operations on the Western Front. The French had fought themselves to a standstill in the abortive Nivelle offensive of April. The Americans would be in France in force by the spring of the following year. Mr. Lloyd George consequently shared the view of most of the French that the rest of 1917 should be spent in holding on in the West, and urged much more vigorously than they did a major offensive against the Austrians on the Italian front.
All that is clear enough. The case for Haig has yet to be put, though Robertson has dealt with Passchendaele pretty fully in his Soldiers and Statesmen. That the Commander-in. Chief was pressed heavily by the Navy to clear the Belgian coast and destroy the German submarine nests is well known. Mr. Lloyd George shows Sir John Jellicoe to have been in- sistent on it. What the French wanted is more debatable. Haig quoted them as anxious for the Chantilly Plan for 1917, of which the Flemish offensive was a part, to be duly executed. Mr. Lloyd George says that on the contrary Main was against the operation, and much more concerned for the British to take over a stretch of the French Line. But Mr. Lloyd George brings far more serious charges against the Commander-in- Chief than that, alleging that he not only misrepresented the views of the French, but deliberately concealed from the Cabinet a number of vital facts, notably the objection of his generals, particularly Gough and Plumer, to the whole operation. More will, no doubt, be heard of this.
. Two separate questions were in fact involved : the initiation of the enterprise and persistence with it after it was clear that its objective would not be attained and that the troops were being simply driven to mass-slaughter through the mud and water of the Flanders plains. In regard to that Mr. Lloyd George relates one curious and debatable episode. Dissatisfied with the views of the C.I.G.S., Sir William Robertson, who invariably supported Haig, he sought the advice of Lord French—who had been superseded by Sir Douglas Haig—and Sir Henry Wilson, who was described as " looking for a job," and did in fact get Robertson's job a few months later. Both gave opinions adverse to Haig and Robertson. Mr. Lloyd George defends his action by com- paring it with Mr. Asquith's invitation to distinguished soldiers like Lord Roberts, Sir Douglas Haig and Sir Henry Wilson to attend his War Council in the first month of the War. But the difference between that and the invitation to French and Wilson to criticize an operation in full progress is considerable. The Prime Minister's step may have been justifiable, but it must be defended on its merits, not by a false parallel.
On the political side the most interesting chapters in the book are those dealing with the peace-feelers associated with the names of Prince Sixte of Bourbon and of the German Foreign Minister von Kuhlmann. The latter never amounted to anything serious and von Kuhlmann himself abruptly extinguished by an intransigent speech in the Reichstag the hopes he had temporarily raised. Whether the proposals made by the Austrian Emperor Karl through his brother- in-law Prince Sixte of Bourbon, who was fighting in the Belgian army, could ever have led to anything is an interesting speculation. Mr. Lloyd George thought, and still thinks, they could. He was always a believer in the possibility of eliminating Austria, whether by defeat or by negotiation, but he never quite faces the real difficulty, which was that the Italians would agree to no peace which did not give them the Trentino, and that there was no earthly reason why Austria, which in 1917 was definitely dominant over Italy in the field, should surrender an inch of her soil. It is true that Prince Sixth seemed to think that the cession of the Trentino might be considered, but there was never anything like a definite undertaking, and all the probabilities were against it. Without it the whole peace proposal must lapse, as in fact it did. But the interchanges, as Mr. Lloyd George describes them with full documentation, form an extremely interesting episode.
The rest of the volume is devoted on the military side to the Palestine campaign, the Caporetto disaster and the formation of the Inter-Allied Council at Versailles, and on the political to the first Imperial War Cabinet, the creation of the Air Ministry, Labour Unrest, the Stockholm Socialist Conference and Mr. Henderson's resignation from the Cabinet : a subject on which Mr. Henderson may have his own alterna- tive version to submit, though Mr. Lloyd George writes of his colleague with restraint and respect. This volume, indeed, though it will disappoint no one who likes to see hard blows struck, is considerably more judicial in tone than its predecessor, and of considerably higher historical value in consequence.
Among secondary points worth mention are the striking appeal by Lord Willingdon (then Governor of Madras) as long ago as 1916 for liberality and imagination in the treat- ment of Indian aspirations ; the use made by Lord Allenby (at Mr. Lloyd George's suggestion) during his 1917 campaign of Sir George Adam Smith's books on Palestine ; and some caustic observations on the debt of the Turk to the British General Staff, e.g., " The real citadel of the Ottoman Empire was neither at Achi Baba, Baghdad nor Jerusalem—but in Whitehall. For three years this redoubt- able garrison of the effete beat off every attack made on the attenuated armies of the Turk. The War Office saved Gallipoli from falling : for two years it protected the feeble garrison of Palestine from meeting its doom."
H. WILSON HARRIS.
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