The Unopened Box and the Burnt Paper
BY LORD TEMPLEWOOD LRD BEAVERBROOK has written an absorbing thriller.* The momentous events of 1917 and 1918 give him just the right background. The figures that emerge from it are varied and very human, and at the head of them is his hero, Lloyd George, 'born in a cottage, brought up in a shoe- maker's shop,' hard put to it on two fronts, the German offensive looming threateningly in France, the battle between civilians and soldiers growing more embittered at home.
No one could be better equipped to write of these decisive years. As he tells us in the preface, he 'was there,' there' through all the changes and chances of wartime politics, 'there' to plan and advise, 'there,' in particular, to foresee with an eye that missed nothing the shape of coming events. The result is a story of political tactics and personal differences.
The plot is the rescue of the country from a terrible danger. The saviour is Lloyd George who, step by step, sets it on the road to victory. If some people think that the account is over- simplified, it is not from any desire to disparage the Prime Minister's achievement. For it should always be remembered that but for his insistence on convoys, the German submarines would almost certainly have starved us into submission. It is rather that the book seems to assume that all his devious methods were unobjectionable and indeed inevitable. When I read the vivid descriptions of the way in which he liquidated his critics, I ask myself whether it would not have been better if he had either boldly faced them or genuinely tried to harmo- nise the differences between them. Instead, he first marked them down and then cautiously stalked them like a cunning wildfowler until they were within close shot. Balfour, Jellicoe and Carson at the Admiralty, Robertson at the War Office, each in turn was got out of the way, and Haig would have suffered the same fate if the German offensive had not col- lapsed in the summer of 1918. All this may have helped the war, but does not enhance the Prime Minister's reputation.
I cannot speak at first hand of most of the events described in the book. I was overseas for almost all the war and I • MEN /ago PowER: 1917-1918. By Lord Beaverbrook. (Hutchin- son. 25&) scarcely ever went to the House of Commons. Once, how- ever, I did attend an important debate to vote in a decisive decision. While on leave from Italy I received an urgent Whip asking me to be in the House for the Maurice debate on May 9, 1918. I had known General Maurice when he was Director of Military Operations and I was serving under his colleague, General Macdonagh, the Director of Military Intelligence. I was, therefore, all the more impressed by his letter of May 7 to The Times and the Morning Post in which he accused the Prime Minister of giving a false account of the strength of the Army in France. As I knew the Director of Military Operations to be an excellent staff officer, I went to the House strongly prejudiced in his favour. I shall never forget what happened. Lloyd George made the speech of his life. Maurice stood convicted out of his own mouth, and the Opposition was so completely demoralised that although it was expected that Runciman or McKenna would make some kind of defence, not a word was said from the front Opposi- tion bench in reply to the Prime Minister's charges. From that day onward, Lloyd George's power was unquestioned, and within a few weeks he was deep in his preparations for the Coupon Election, the collection of the Lloyd George political fund, and the obliteration of the Asquithian Liberals, who had hopelessly compromised themselves by voting for Maurice.
And now, nearly forty years afterwards, Lord Beaverbrook has published a document that shows that not only was Maurice correct with his figures, but that J. T. Davies, the Prime Minister's principal private secretary, and Miss May Stevenson, the Prime Minister's personal assistant and future wife, burnt the paper that established Maurice's case without saying anything about it to anyone. What had happened had been that in the confusion of the Ludendorff offensive Maurice's department had in April added the figures of the British Army in Italy to the British figures in France and sent in an inaccurate statement, but that when the mistake was discovered, revised figures were sent to the Prime Minister that confirmed Maurice's contention that the British Army was weaker in France in 1918 than it had been in 1917. Lord Beaverbrook's description of what happened is worth record- ing at length. He quotes in full an extract from Lady Lloyd George's diary dated October 5, 1934.
`Have been reading up the events connected with the Maurice Debate in order to help Ll. G. with this Chapter in Vol V, and am uneasy in my mind about an incident which occurred at the time and which is known only to J. T. Davies and myself. LI. a obtained from the W.O. the figures which he used in his statement on April 9th in the House of Commons on the subject of man-power. These figures were afterward stated by Gen. Maurice to be inaccurate.
'I was in J. T. Davies' room a few days after the statement, and J. T. was sorting out red dispatch boxes to be returned to, the Departments. As was his wont, he looked in them before locking them up and sending them out to the Messengers. Pulling out a W.O. box, he found in it, to his great astonish- ment, a paper from the D.M.O. containing modifications and corrections of the first figures they had sent, and by some mischance this box had remained unopened. J. T. and I examined it in dismay, and then J. T. put it in the fire, remarking, "Only you and I, Frances, know of the existence of this paper."
`There is no doubt that this is what Maurice had in mind when be accused L. G. of mis-statement.'
Had the revised figures been published there would have been no parliamentary triumph for the Prime Minister, and no devastation of the old Liberal Party. The incident speaks for itself, and needs no further comment. Whilst it was com- mon knowledge that many odd things were happening in Downing Street, I do not think that anyone at the time would have imagined that the Prime Minister's two principal private secretaries would have burnt an important State paper and said nothing about it to anyone.
There is another curious incident that is vividly described in the book, and of which in later years I heard much from Lord Trenchard when I was at the Air Ministry--the double event of the almost simultaneous resignations of the Secretary of State for Air and the Chief of the Air Staff in the spring of 1918. Lord Beaverbrook evidently disliked Trenchard. The best that he can find to say of him in one of the potted biographies at the beginning of the book is that he was 'a man of common sense but limited ability' who had no political friends and 'enjoyed bitter hatreds.' A more serious criticism is that although Trenchard accepted the post of Chief of the Air Staff, he was violently opposed to the setting up of an independent Air Force, and that so far from being the founder of the Royal Air Force, he was in Lord Beaverbrook's words, a father who tried to strangle the infant at birth, though he got credit for the, grown .man.' The real story, as Trenchard told it to me, is very different. Trenchard was certainly opposed to starting the new independent force on the eve of the Ludendorff offensive—Haig was horrified at the idea—but he felt that he could not refuse the post of Chief of the Air Staff When it was pressed upon him at a critical moment of the war. All the time, however, he already had in his mind the concep- tion of the great independent force that he was soon to describe Publicly in his famous White Paper of December, 1919. It Was the White Paper and the singleness of purpose with which he carried out its provisions that gave him the claim to be regarded as the Father of the Royal Air Force and, indeed, the Father of all the Air Forces of the world.
But I must not end in a controversy with Lord Beaverbrook. For many years he and I saw much of each other in the world of politics, and more than once I received his help at moments of trouble. Let me therefore finish this account of Men and Power by saying that he has written a most vivacious book, and that although he sometimes sums to me to over-dramatise Political life and to underestimate those with whom he does not agree, he has by it established for himself a notable place amongst the memoir writers of today.
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