A WAR MAN
“O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole.”
TENNYSON.
FROM the moment that war was declared (August 4th, 1914), Mr. Lloyd
George put aside all his doubts and hesitations. The perplexities of the
previous week passed away like so many clouds from a summer sky. He
became from that instant a war man, intent on nothing but achieving
victory.
“I can understand a man opposing a war,” he used to say, “but I cannot
understand his waging a war with half a heart.” In regard to the
attitude of various friends in political life, he would always express a
certain whimsical tenderness for those who were entirely opposed to the
war. “Ah,” he would say, “I was in that position once myself, and I know
how difficult it is!” Wholly wrong as he thought them, dangerous as he
thought their activities to the country, he could not shake off a
certain admiration for their courage. But the men for whom he had no
tolerance were those who waged the war with a backward glance over their
shoulder all the time at the lost vision of peace. That seemed to him a
confusing and weakening attitude. Peace was to be achieved, of course;
that must always be the very aim of war; but once war began peace could
only be retrieved across the gulf of war itself. That being the
situation, he saw nothing for it but to bend the whole energies of the
State to the sole purpose of conducting the war with the utmost power.
He realised at once that Great Britain was up against the most terrible
danger that had ever faced it in the whole course of its existence. He
knew Germany; he had a thorough understanding of German efficiency.
Especially did he grasp the full strength and power given to the German
Government by the patriotism of the German people. In entering upon this
mighty enterprise, he approached the matter with the utmost gravity and
seriousness. I never saw him so grave-minded as he was during those
first months of the war. We rallied him one morning at breakfast for
refusing to laugh at some jest. “The times are very serious,” he said,
and once more he seemed lost in his own thoughts again. He used to
describe the moment when the Western world paused from peace to war as
the most solemn and awful in his whole life. “We sat waiting for Big Ben
to strike the hour when the ultimatum expired. We all fell quite silent.
As the great blows of the hammer sounded on the bell we seemed to be
passing into another world.”
From the very first he took Lord Kitchener’s view of the seriousness and
probable length of the war. He was not a war “pessimist.” He would not
accept that phrase. “I look at the facts,” he would say, “I merely
refuse to live in dreamland.” When people used to come to him in that
bouncingly cheerful mood which patriots tried to cultivate in those
days, he used to look at them gravely and say, “Have you read all the
bulletins?” And then he would go on: “Have you read the bulletins on
both sides?” Or to another he would say, “Have you looked at the maps?”
For he always saw the war as a whole: he grasped it in the East as well
as in the West. It was not that he was particularly disturbed by
untoward incidents; he rarely discussed any such incident. It was the
proportions of the vast forces at issue which filled his mind and
imagination.
There were several consoling theories popular during the first year of
the war for which he had little taste. There was the idea, preached in
many powerful quarters, that German man-power would soon be exhausted.
Mr. Lloyd George was an open sceptic on that point. It was not merely
that the Germanic Powers had far more men than most English people
realised at that time; it was also his fixed imaginative feeling that
the resisting power of a country does not ultimately depend on numbers.
It was the spirit of Germany that he feared—ruthless to others,
merciless to itself. In a public speech he expressed that once as the
“potato-bread” spirit.
Then there was the theory that Germany would soon be starved into
submission. There again his imagination came to his help. “How do you
know?” he would say. “How can you tell at what point a nation will cry
for mercy? That does not depend upon the amount of food; it depends upon
the spirit of the nation. History shows that there is little limit to
what some nations will endure before they surrender.”
The practical upshot of all this was that he could see no alternative to
a clear and clean military victory. The only reason, in fact, why he
combated such theories as “attrition” and “hunger-surrender” was that he
regarded them as excuses unconsciously put forward to avoid the strain
and stress necessary for that achievement. He saw men at that period
cultivating optimism as a means of concealing from themselves the stark
realities. He saw others preferring short views to long preparations. He
perceived that too many were seeking for any or every other means of a
softer outlet; and yet, to his mind, the sole chance of obtaining a
satisfactory close to the war lay along the iron road of victory. It was
in that way that he came to regard the people he met as too sanguine;
for that reason he set himself to preach a more sombre view.
So much did this view afterwards prevail that it is difficult to recall
now those amazingly cheerful forecasts so popular during the first six
months of the war. Public opinion soon recovered from the first shock of
the retreat from Mons. There were even a considerable body of people who
persuaded themselves to regard that valorous series of rear-guard
actions as a crowning victory. When, on September 9th, 1914, the Germans
stopped their advance and began to retire to the line of the Marne,
there were some who talked as if the war were already ended.
This was not by any means entirely the fault of the public, for a strict
censorship had concealed from us in Great Britain that gigantic defeat
of the Russians at the end of August known now as the battle of
Tannenberg. There the Russian General Samsonoff had been drawn on to the
lakes of East Prussia by Hindenburg, and a second Cannæ had been
achieved. A vast number of Russians had been killed and captured; 90,000
had been taken prisoners, and no less than 516 guns captured.[62]
All these things were known to Mr. Lloyd George; and he did not possess
the faculty, somewhat common in high places, of persuading himself that
an inconvenient fact must necessarily be untrue. Nor was he so bemused
by the censorship as to believe that you could make an unpleasant fact
untrue simply by keeping it secret. He knew by the beginning of
September that the theory of the Russian “steam-roller” must be set
aside. He had realised already that the main effort would now lie with
England. That was what gave so much sobriety to his outlook.
As the last months of 1914 passed by, the situation as a whole certainly
did not improve. The Russian invasion of Eastern Prussia was definitely
stayed. There were indeed certain compensations. In September the
Russians seized Eastern Galicia and the Bukovina. In those months the
Serbians, with heroic valour, three times drove back the invading
Austrians from their little country. But it became obvious that the
Russians, however daring in combat, lacked the generalship required for
reaping the fruits of their successes. At the beginning of October
Germany came to the help of Austria, and there was a great rally of the
Austro-German forces. The Russians were driven out of Western Galicia,
and in October a large part of Western Poland was seized by the Germans.
In November there was another spasmodic recovery of the Russians; but
again in later November they were driven back to within forty miles of
Warsaw, and the opening of 1915 saw Russia practically on the defensive.
The meaning of all these events to Mr. Lloyd George was, that if we were
to achieve victory we must prepare for a very great and prolonged
effort; and he determined to set himself to the task of tuning the
country up to the pitch of the highest endeavour.
It must be remembered that at this time he was still Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and therefore not directly concerned with war matters. All
his arguments and interventions both in war policy and foreign policy
were liable to be regarded, according to the prevailing traditions of
our Cabinet rule, as trespasses from the straight and narrow path of
direct responsibility.
Still, he felt it his duty, as a citizen and a Minister, to run all the
risks of personal misunderstanding that might arise from honest and
vigorous expressions of his own mind. For, rightly or wrongly, he took a
very serious view of the situation at the end of 1914. He felt his
responsibility all the heavier for the knowledge which he possessed. The
British public were looking only at the splendid achievements of our
armies in the West. What they did not see was the heavy thundercloud in
the East—the great German armies gathering themselves for a mighty,
tigerish spring on to some of the fairest provinces of our great Eastern
Ally.
Here was the loss side to this account—the achievements in the East of
those German divisions which had been withdrawn from the advance on
Paris, and had left their diminished armies to fall back on the Marne.
Mr. Lloyd George refused to regard those defeats of the Russian armies
as inevitable. He would never consent to be a fatalist. He represented
the vigorous energy of the Western man—eager and insistent to strive
against the shocks of fortune.
Frankly he was not content with the measures taken to grip the
situation. He did not feel that any military plans were being considered
adequate to face the perils that threatened us. He was unhappy and
dissatisfied with the plans he knew of; he felt little confidence that
others would be devised more fit to avert these perils.
It was at this time that he first suggested day-to-day sittings of the
War Committee for the conduct of the war. It was the first appearance of
that proposal for a small War Cabinet which afterwards developed so
stormily from the stress and travail of the war. Not before three years
of trying the old bottles was the new wine to find a vessel fit for its
feverish ferment.
During the Christmas holidays Mr. Lloyd George carefully surveyed the
situation. With the opening of 1915 this is how he saw it.
Russia was in danger of a blow at the heart. In the West the military
situation had reached a deadlock[63]; and it was not yet physically
possible that the armies at this time raised by us should drive back the
German invader in any time that then seemed reasonable from the North of
France and Belgium. On those lines the war seemed certain to last a very
long time, though not even he at that time cast his eyes beyond the
historic three years fixed by Lord Kitchener. He wished, at all possible
costs, to avoid a long war.
Looking across Europe, he asked himself—Was there not some alternative
way? Some road to a quicker ending of this world-agony?
He found it in the Near East, at that point where the Teuton power
touched the Danube, and was still at that time held back by the heroic
resistance of the Serbians.
The plan that framed itself in his mind was to combine the Balkan
States—to revive the Federation—to send a great British army to their
help, and attack with these combined forces—perhaps amounting to
1,000,000 men—the Eastern flank of the Central Powers.
This great scheme must not be confused with the subsequent expeditions
to Gallipoli and Salonika. It was something far larger in conception,
and far more splendid in grasp and sweep of action.
It was a proposal for employing the new British armies, before they were
wearied by being set to the tasks that break men, for fortifying our
Allies, and for snatching success before the watching neutrals of the
Near East—Bulgaria, Greece, and Rumania—were divided and distracted by
doubt and failure.
It was also an essential part of his larger hope that such an effort
would relieve the pressure on Russia and finally perhaps draw off the
bulk of the German armies from the West to the help of Austria.
In his view the plan entailed far less risk than shaped itself in the
minds of the timid. A visit to the Western front had impressed him with
the feeling that this was not then the easiest place for a successful
assault on the Central Powers. Here you would meet them just at the
point where they had the greatest mastery over their defensive. The
West, it seemed to him, was the proper place for a persistent,
concentrated, and even vigilant defensive. But at that time the spot for
a more prosperous offensive had, in the view strongly impressed upon him
by observation, to be sought elsewhere.
His policy was to make the Western line impregnable; but, with the
forces that could be spared beyond that necessary effort, to prepare and
execute a great strategical diversion along the line of the Danube,
striking into territory inhabited by men sympathetic to the Western
Allies, and supporting our own weaker Allies among the Balkan States. In
this way he hoped to save Serbia, to prevent the German “break-through”
to the East, and in the end to divert the great German hosts from their
assaults on Great Britain and Russia.
Such was the “Near Eastern idea” in its large scope and purpose. Those
who held it were necessarily opposed to the earlier frontal assaults in
the West, chivalrously and splendidly undertaken before we had an
unquestionable superiority in numbers and guns. Like Botha in South
Africa at the later stage of the Boer War—like every great general when
he is outnumbered and out-gunned—they were seeking a “way round.” It
was a very big “way round”—by Durazzo or Salonika—but the point is
that it seemed at the time the only possible way round.
We must remember that the submarine menace had not yet developed, that
Bulgaria had not yet declared war, that we were still as much masters of
the Mediterranean as ever in our long history. Austria had not yet
stiffened her army with German troops, and Russia was still uninvaded.
All these were governing facts in this great scheme.
It was characteristic of his buoyant faith that he firmly believed that
the appearance of a great British army in the Balkans would surely bring
in both the Rumanians and the Greeks to our aid. In his view those
nations were at the moment hypnotised by the fate of Belgium.
They genuinely feared the military power and terror of Germany. What
they wanted was a convincing proof of our land strength. They knew us as
a naval power; but that was not enough for this war. Here was this new
thing—our growing military potency. Very well, let us display this side
of our strength to the world. Let us land our new armies in the Near
East.
Such was the large design, boldly schemed and boldly started, which he
set before his political and military colleagues in the early months of
1915. He firmly believed that it would inspire our arms with a new force
and vigour. It would give our young soldiers a new hope. It would
confuse and embarrass the German defence. It would present them for the
first time in this campaign with that dash of the sudden, secret, and
unexpected which was so often their own special way. It would knock away
the German props by threatening her Allies; and it would build up new
props for us by heartening ours. Such were the broad and daring ideas
which underlay his thoughts.
We know that this great scheme did not prevail at the time, although
pale ghosts of it lingered on and haunted the stricken fields of war.
The flesh and substance of the plan evaporated in the atmosphere of
doubt. Between all the Allies and the Chancelleries of the Allies, in
the chilling alleys and by-ways of debate and diplomacy, this great
enterprise lost “the name of action.” It was “sicklied o’er with the
pale cast of thought.” Tradition, convention, convenience—all combined
to strangle it.
We cannot say now how it would have prospered. The fortunes of war are
always, after all, on the knees of the gods. No mortal can command
success; we can only deserve it.
Such opportunities do not occur twice. The Near Eastern vision faded.
The country set itself grimly to solve by direct methods the problem of
the West. How heroically, how tenaciously the British race would set its
teeth into that endeavour perhaps no one could then quite foresee; but,
casting our minds back over these bloodstained years, the question
cannot but again recur—Might there not have been a shorter road?
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[62] See the full account in Ludendorff’s _War Memories_ (vol. i. pp.
41-72).
[63] See the remarkable survey of the military situation in January
1915, contained on page 19 of the Dardanelles Commission’s First Report
(Cd. 8490). That survey confirms Mr. Lloyd George’s views at that time.