AT THE LIBERAL GRAVE-SIDE
" ... 'I am no goatherd,' said Faiz Ullah. 'It is against izzat
[my honour].'
'When we cross the Bias River again we will talk of izzat,' Scott
replied. 'Till that day thou and the policeman shall be sweepers
to the camp, if I give the order.'
'Thus, then, it is done,' grunted Faiz Ullah, 'if the Sahib will
have it so'...."
RUDYARD KIPLING: _William the Conqueror_.
I
Those who left London for a rare, short holiday between 1914
and 1918 were liable to find that the war followed them into
the country with agitated headlines and with the daily rolls of
honour, inevitable and inexorable, with gloomy letters and with
vast departmental files bursting through their official envelopes.
Those who were drawn to America at any time before the end of
1917 found there a people which seemed to realise the war as
little as the English had realised it in 1914: the bitterness of
death was not yet come. The excitement and preparation of her
first entry into world-politics sent hardly a shiver through
that warm atmosphere of peace and plenty; only the hard-bought
experience of disorganisation and want, of jealousy and mistrust,
of disappointment and impatience could bring home to America
the suffering and losses, the occasional hopelessness, the
recriminations and intrigues, the decline and abandonment of
ideals which had overtaken one after another of the belligerents.
It was only two and a half years since idealists in England had
talked of a "war to end war," of international justice and the
rights of small nations, of self-effacement and sacrifice, of a
crusade and a new way of life. For a few weeks England displayed
a great religious enthusiasm: the futility and squalor of the old
world was sloughed off; a wave of disinterested pity swept over
the country; there was a rush to arms and to work; old feuds were
forgotten in a magnanimous handshake. How and why did the change
come?
Perhaps the conversion was too abrupt; perhaps long uncertainty
and fear, long expectation and sudden knowledge of loss impose too
heavy a strain on tender, unhardy greatness of soul. Death had
hitherto been, for most, a release from suffering or the gentle
termination of old age; for very few the mutilating rape of youth.
At one moment, every one in England was clamouring to serve up
to and beyond the limits of his capacity: in the race to the
recruiting-stations, the old and the halt disguised their age and
hid their infirmities; at another, each man inclined to see first
what his neighbour was doing. Why should A fight while B shirked?
Why should C give all he had, while D amassed riches? Why should
E's husband be left alive when F's had been killed?
Trust was driven out by suspicion; and for the suspicion there
was but too good ground. Some men did evade military service or
shelter themselves in fire-proof billets; some made their country's
necessity their own opportunity; some hoarded coal and gold, food
and oil; there were mistakes of policy and errors of judgement,
as there were German spies and pro-German agents. Of all such,
however, there is abundance in every country in every war; and it
is illuminating to find that Ludendorff holds up the morale of
Great Britain as a model to his own countrymen. Was the strain,
were the people's defects of character sufficient to justify the
wholesale jettisoning of all the early ideals?
Or was their sacrifice rejected, were their early ideals betrayed
by a government which cared too little about everything to see
clearly about anything? Two and a half years of war achieved a
series of contrasts so violent that a man might well rub his eyes
and wonder whether he was in the same country. Great Britain,
at least by the letter of her professions, had entered the war
disinterestedly to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and to pay a
debt of honour to France; she had since surrendered so completely
to the acquisitive side of imperialism that she was collecting vast
tracts of territory in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, promising
Constantinople to Russia, Trieste and the Trentino to Italy--the
former ally of Austria--and Alsace-Lorraine to France. In 1914
the prime minister had stirred the world with the eloquence of
his plea for the small nationalities, but the stress of war
induced him, with colleagues, supporters and opponents bleating
joyous acquiescence, to suspend the home rule act which promised
independence to at least one small nationality. In an England
lately taught to loathe militarism and autocracy, the life and
liberty of the subject lay so much at the mercy of autocratic
regulations that criticism was stifled. Conscription had been
imposed, with every kind of base capitulation, first to the
incompetence of the War Office, then to the urgency of the press,
then to sectional rivalries between married and unmarried men. The
rights of minorities and the pleadings of conscience were left to
assert themselves within the four walls of a prison-cell.
And hardly a voice had been raised in protest. When they found that
the policy of the cabinet was committing tens of millions, without
their knowledge, to war, a handful of ministers did indeed resign,
with less commotion than a man would cause in leaving a table where
the cards were marked; but of the others who had raved and argued
for non-intervention all were snugly ensconced in office. The major
complaisance made easy the minor; and the party which had left its
principles on the threshold before drifting into war drifted into
conscription without realising that it had any more principles to
abandon. Sir John Simon, who had stood forth as the champion of
the voluntary system, argued half-heartedly from the standpoint
of expediency and resigned when his political influence had
evaporated. And yet this servility to the dictates of government
was not the result of a splendid resolve to close the ranks and to
support the ministry in its hour of crisis: there was no union of
hearts comparable with that effected between the republicans and
the democrats in America. The united front at home broke down after
the battle of Neuve Chapelle; and from May 1915 till December 1916
there was such an orgy of political intrigue as Great Britain had
not seen in living memory.
The battle on the home front was joined on the morrow of the
campaign which registered the failure of the first British
offensive. Owing to disagreement or misunderstanding between the
military experts, Sir John French at General Headquarters and
Lord Kitchener at the War Office, the battle of Neuve Chapelle
was fought with much shrapnel and little high explosive; Mr.
Asquith, basing himself on his secretary of state for war,
spoke reassuringly at Newcastle on the shell position; but the
commander-in-chief had by now discovered that high explosive was
what he wanted, and on this subject it was impossible to speak
reassuringly. To secure an adequate supply Sir John French put
himself, through the medium of Captain the Honourable Frederick
Guest, into communication, not with the prime minister nor with
the secretary of state for war, but, behind their backs, with the
chancellor of the exchequer. Mr. Lloyd George, though equally
responsible with the rest of the cabinet, now posed before the
world as the one minister seriously concerned to supply the
army with munitions, and in his support the godliest and the
greatest rubbed shoulders: Bishop Furze of Pretoria hurried to the
assistance of the military experts by giving it as his considered
opinion that the Neuve Chapelle failure was due to lack of an
unlimited supply of high-explosive shells; _The Times_ lent its
weight in the same direction. A debate was threatened at the moment
when Italy was at last deciding to abandon her neutrality; and,
though Mr. Asquith had announced but a few hours before that he did
not contemplate forming a coalition government, his colleagues were
invited a few hours later to place their resignations in his hands
so that a coalition ministry might be formed.
The liberal party was not consulted until the decision had been
taken; and the men who had answered every demand on their loyalty
for five, six and eight years were sufficiently disgruntled to
call a meeting of protest. With the prime minister's entrance,
indignation turned to sympathy; he was urged into the chair, and
after an explanation in which nothing was explained, the meeting
dispersed, bright-eyed with emotion, to a murmured chorus of "Trust
the P.M." In the reconstruction of the ministry, room had to be
found for as many unionists as liberals; and, as at this time Mr.
Lloyd George was advertising for "a man of push and go" to control
the supply of munitions, the principle of coalition government was
defined as one in which the tories pushed and the liberals went.
This idea of fusion, with its amnesty of principles, its
abandonment of awkward party controversies and its escape from
embarrassing party opposition, was perhaps a greater novelty to
the House of Commons than to the new head of the new Ministry of
Munitions. To the coalition principle he is said to have been
attracted for years before the war;[35] he remained faithful to
it until the end; and, with the conclusion of the armistice, he
exalted it into an article of political faith, which to reject
was tantamount to instant death at the political stake; even now,
when peace has been signed, the need for coalition government has,
in his eyes, not yet abated. The change that overcame Mr. Lloyd
George's mind between the battle of Neuve Chapelle and the December
crisis of 1916 was that, in addition to the need for a coalition,
he saw the need for himself at its head.
II
Before the House of Commons and the country could be prepared for
the change of government in war-time, they had to be convinced
that the old administration not only had failed in the past, but
was doomed to fail in the future. One bird in the coalition nest
had to foul it until the offence cried to heaven; thereafter the
nest could be rebuilt and repopulated. So, for a year and a half,
there was always one member of the government to dissociate himself
from his colleagues and to point sorrowfully to mistakes for which
his sorrow appeared to absolve him from responsibility. Owing to
delay, mismanagement or lack of preparation, Neuve Chapelle, Loos
and the Somme by land, Jutland by sea had achieved no decision;
the Gallipoli and Mesopotamia campaigns had ended in smoke and
blood. The difficulty of raising new drafts, of equipping them and
of feeding the civilian population was magnified by a press which
ministers scorned to make sympathetic. Ireland had been goaded into
revolt and was being held quiet by force. As a record of failure,
much platform capital could be made out of the government's
succession of disasters.[36]
Whether any other government made fewer mistakes absolutely,
whether it was generous to emphasise these catastrophes and
to disregard the practical achievements, future historians
must determine. The whole of Great Britain and of the British
Empire had been brought unanimously and enthusiastically into
the war; an unmilitary nation had raised and armed millions of
men; it was spending thousands of millions of pounds each year;
it was blockading the enemy and policing the seas. It was not,
unfortunately, breaking the German line in the West nor the Turkish
line in the East. Generosity was not a conspicuous quality among
the men who were engaged in breaking the home front.
To Mr. Asquith's eternal credit he rated unity in cabinet and
country higher than any tactical advantage that he might have
secured by a dialectical brawl with his energetic lieutenant. Mr.
Lloyd George, who was now so anxious to "get on with the war," had
been less anxious to follow his chief into war at the outset; "too
late here," he complained, "too late there," but in every decision,
were it the Dardanelles expedition or the shell controversy, he
shared full and equal responsibility with the head and every member
of the cabinet, he could have resigned in protest--and with greater
dignity than he shewed in rounding upon his colleagues for mistakes
in which he participated. From the time of Lord Kitchener's death
until the December crisis, he was himself secretary of state for
war with a predominant voice in all military decisions.
It was easier to forget his own record and to focus the attention
of his audience upon the future. After the failure of the Somme
offensive, the apparent failure of the Jutland action, another
winter campaign became inevitable; food was running short and
would become shorter if German submarines were given free play;
the evidence collected by the Dardanelles commissioners threw
a disturbing light on the happy-go-lucky methods of cabinet
government; ministers were allowing themselves to be bullied
in the House of Commons; and from a hundred different quarters
there gathered a hundred thousand wisps and wreaths of fog which
intensified in a tarnishing cloud of mistrust and disapproval.
Under the military service act a man could appeal for exemption on
the ground that he was indispensable in his present employment;
from the first days of the war Mr. Asquith was hailed as the
indispensable prime minister. It is impossible to draw any chart
to shew the change in psychological attitude towards him; but by
the autumn of 1916, perhaps on the day when he persuaded parliament
to accept conscription and imposed it upon the country without
a revolution, he was no longer indispensable; very soon the
antagonism strengthened into a feeling that the war would never be
won so long as he remained at the head of the government.
This feeling was crystallised by Mr. Lloyd George in a memorandum
which proposed that a committee of three, excluding the prime
minister, should have full direction of the war. Discussion and
correspondence followed; the proposal was made public in _The
Times_ of December 4th; there was one day's more correspondence,
ending with Mr. Asquith's abrupt announcement on December 5th that
he had tendered his resignation to the king. It seemed unlikely,
to the outside spectator, that either Mr. Bonar Law or Mr. Lloyd
George would be able to form a new administration, if, as was
expected, the liberal and unionist ministers remained loyal to
their old chief in resisting an ambitious colleague's effort to
supplant him; but those responsible for the upheaval were leaving
nothing to chance in the "well-organised, carefully engineered
conspiracy" which Mr. Asquith described as being "directed" in
part against some of his late unionist colleagues, but in the
main against Lord Grey and himself. Mr. Bonar Law lost no time in
handing on to Mr. Lloyd George the opportunity of an experiment
in cabinet-making; the unionist members had been approached in
advance, Mr. Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil consented to take office
and the small fry followed their lead.
So perished the first coalition, the liberal party and the
political ascendancy of Mr. Asquith. Now, as before, his supporters
were not consulted any more than when he plunged them into the
first coalition or incurred that earlier debt of honour which
was not an obligation, but which had the compelling force of an
obligation in committing them to hostilities; though he expected
and received their fealty throughout the first two and a half
years of war, he never found it necessary to take them into his
confidence before sacrificing every principle of liberalism,
placing every liberal pledge in suspense and, at the end,
abdicating from his half of the political throne. Ministers had an
unchallenged, victorious majority; there was no adverse vote; the
white flag fluttered into view before a shot had been fired; and
it was not until he assembled the liberal party at the Reform Club
on December 8th and hinted at the conspiracy before which he had
retired that the party knew its fate. By that time the majority of
the party was grown restive under this one-sided loyalty.
Those were days of terrible passion and bitterness. No abuse was
too strong for the perfidy of Mr. Lloyd George on the one hand or
the lethargy of Mr. Asquith on the other. Ingratitude and bad faith
were spluttered from one set of lips; incompetence and indifference
from the other. A "defeatist" cabal in the cabinet was discovered
or invented; and ministers were accused of not winning the war
because they did not want to win the war. More than four years
have passed since that black week and it is still too early to
return an impartial verdict. No one is likely to question that Mr.
Asquith's loyalty and generosity to his colleagues are without
parallel in our political history: throughout the vulgarity of the
Limehouse campaign, the tragi-comedy of Mr. Churchill's Sidney
Street offensive and the squalor of the Marconi scandal, the prime
minister's wide and indulgent cloak was ever at the disposal of
the intemperate youngsters of his cabinet; never was indulgence
repaid with blacker treachery. Those who like to fancy the workings
of providence in human affairs may think that, as Mr. Asquith
neglected and misled his party more thoroughly than any other prime
minister, so he was overtaken by a more malignant nemesis.
To suggest that he would have lost the war, if he had continued in
office, is hardly less fantastic than to believe that Mr. Lloyd
George won it. A press-ridden people is liable to exaggerate the
difference between one prime minister and another; by 1917 a
number of amateurs had learned something of war, and the new prime
minister profited by experience as the old would have done; but
through the organised clamour and dust of the next two years it
is hard to discern a single act of courage or of decision which
ranks higher than the day-by-day courage and decision displayed
by the government in the first half of the war or which entitled
Mr. Lloyd George more than Mr. Asquith to be regarded as a great
war-minister. It was under Mr. Asquith's rule that the country was
converted from peace to war, that the great armies were raised and
all but one of the great alliances concluded. If Mr. Lloyd George
can claim credit for the unification of the higher command, he must
allow that from no one but Mr. Asquith would conscription have
been accepted; his own effort in 1918 to raise the age-limit and
to include Ireland was hardly a triumph of practical efficiency or
of political honesty. The difficulties of administration had, if
anything, decreased by 1917: if Russia was no longer dependable,
America--with all her resources of food, money and men--came to
redress the balance. While Mr. Lloyd George's buoyant and inspiring
optimism deserves all praise, Mr. Asquith's optimism, if more
restrained, was no less constant; his determination, even when no
longer in office, to prosecute the war with all possible vigour
was a cause of perplexity and of offence to those of his party who
wished him to lead a movement in favour of a negotiated peace and
to those who hoped to see him retaliating on the new government for
the guerilla so long waged against himself.
As the fate of the country they governed is more important than
that of either man, so the fate of the party they led is more
important than the transitory fortune of its leader. One who
lunched at the Reform Club on December 8th, in sight of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman's portrait, may perhaps be excused for thinking
of the library overhead and of the shattered host that listened
there to the belated apologetics of its leader; he may be pardoned
for putting on those kindly, shrewd lips the words: "_Vare, legions
redde_."
III
Even the rout of the liberal party is inconsiderable by
comparison with the death of liberalism which took place that
day. The old shibboleths of peace, economy, personal liberty and
internationalism were discarded; when next liberal candidates
made profession of faith, they deafened themselves with a cry for
revenge and for indemnities which could not be exacted, until the
"war to end war" culminated in a peace to end peace. Forgotten were
the aspirations of August 1914; nationality was blessed in the
distant security of Czecho-Slovakia but ignored in Ireland; of the
ideals with which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's lost legions had
come into power there remained not one, of practical achievement
their record shewed little more than a statute-book cumbered
by bold acts of parliament which their authors had rendered
inoperative.
The generation that saw the liberalism on which it had been
reared stricken to the ground by the annihilating onrush of war
still hoped that, with the halting approach of peace, liberalism
might raise its head again. Among the faithful are numbered the
ardent and generous spirits of every generation; and the faith
is imperishable even though from time to time it lack a prophet
or a leader. It is inspired by compassion for all who are any
way afflicted in mind, body or estate and it exists to relieve
affliction by the gift of freedom. Liberty to sleep and wake and
work and love, secure from the oppression of a despotic ruler or
a strong neighbour; liberty to win the best from life, unhampered
by hunger or thirst, by cold or disease, by ignorance or fear;
liberty to enjoy the fruits of labour and to engage in the pursuit
of happiness; liberty for a man to do whatsoever he wishes,
provided that he does not infringe the liberty of his neighbour:
all this is included in the faith of liberalism, which embraces
also the liberty of the smaller aggregates, which we call classes,
and of the larger aggregates, which we call nations, to mould their
own destinies and to pursue, each in its own way, its own ideal of
happiness. It is a militant faith, for, when compassion slumbers,
the need for liberty and the faith in liberty are dead; it is kept
ever alert and brightly armoured by the just young, who cannot
tolerate that millions of their fellow creatures should begin
life handicapped, and by the merciful, who believe that active or
passive cruelty is the root of all evil and the mark of original
sin. What a man becomes in later life is conditioned by the scars
which the struggle for existence leaves upon him; for the man who
was not a liberal in youth, there may be pity, but there can be no
hope. The men who risked anything or everything in the war attached
various labels to their political beliefs, but the act of sacrifice
made liberals of them.
After the crisis of December, 1916, fewer tears were shed for
fallen liberal idols than for unpedestalled liberal ministers,
and compassion was too much needed at home to be spared for
export; now, as then, less righteous indignation is engendered
by the collapse of liberalism than by the defection of prominent
liberals. Captain Guest and Mr. Shortt, Sir Alfred Mond and Mr.
Churchill, Dr. Addison and Mr. Macpherson, Sir Hamar Greenwood and
Mr. Harmsworth, Sir Gordon Hewart and Mr. Montagu are felt by "wee
free" liberals to have sold their master; a year ago,[37] some of
them were publicly acclaimed as "rats" and denied a hearing. Those
who remained loyal to Mr. Asquith dropped gently out of political
prominence until the general election of 1918 dropped them less
gently out of public life. A British political faith has never been
so completely and tidily demolished as was British liberalism, with
its organisation and its army, at the hands of a Welsh solicitor,
an Irish newspaper proprietor, a Canadian financier and their
satellites, aided by the inexorable logic of events.
The funeral of liberalism was carried out with more despatch
than solemnity. On the night of Mr. Asquith's resignation the
politicians separated at once into those who had surrendered
office and those who hoped to fill the vacant places. _Le roy
est mort; vive le roy!_ Though Irish, English and Scotch were
being killed on a dozen fronts, no time was being wasted at home;
as in the political crisis after Neuve Chapelle, more than one
soldier-politician had returned to London in full readiness to lay
aside his sword in exchange for a portfolio; and before Mr. Bonar
Law had visited the king, a "new gang" leader might have been
overheard enquiring of an "old gang" minister how much he had got
out of the "pool" of ministerial salaries. The mission to America
offered to its members a welcome holiday from English politics.
In those days any holiday from London would have been acceptable.
Most of those who passed their time in government offices were
overworked; almost all of them _ex hypothesi_ were in one way or
another unfit; all were stale. Their blood unfired by hand-to-hand
fighting, they became unconscious victims of despondency which
bore no accurate relation to the fluctuating fortune of war. While
it is probably true that in the winter before America entered the
war, when the reservoir of men was running dry, when food had first
to be rationed and England was threatened with the "unrestricted"
submarine campaign, there was better reason for depression than in
September 1914 or March 1918, when the danger was past before it
had been fully realised, it is also true that depression continued
when improving news from the front should have relieved it. There
is a close connection between a temporarily weakening morale and
the first decline in the standard of living: by the end of 1916
food was deteriorating in quality and quantity; digestion and
nerves were affected; bodily vitality became impaired. There is
a connection no less close between mental vitality and light; an
ill-lit room produces low spirits, and London was ill-lit after
the first threat of an air-raid. Further, the health of mind and
of body is dependent on sleep; and, if a civilian may criticise
the strategy of the German air-service, it may be suggested that
it would have done better to aim at breaking British morale by
keeping Britain awake at night. The material achievement of the
raiders must have been disappointing to the German general staff:
the destruction of life was insignificant; the damage to property
trifling; it may be doubted whether the bombs dropped on railways,
munition works and public buildings retarded the pace of the war by
an hour; there was no widespread panic; the civilian population was
never driven to sue prematurely for peace, the seat of government
was never transferred. To this extent the air-raids were a failure.
If this contention be just, the most successful phase of the
campaign was reached one week when there were six raid nights in
succession. London was, in consequence, fretful and neurotic. While
no one had the honesty to admit that he was frightened by raids,
a few would admit their effect on the nerves of others. With the
approach of evening the anxious Londoner calculated from the age of
the moon and the height of the wind that it was, perhaps, a "good
night for the Gothas." "I wonder whether they'll come to-night,"
he would observe conversationally, as he went in to dinner; and,
whether they came or not, the atmosphere was affected by vague,
hardly perceptible uneasiness. When the attack was inopportunely
timed, dinner would be interrupted while children were flushed from
bed and littered down in hall or cellar. Every taxi disappeared
from the streets, the tube stations were filled with highly
scented aliens and the anxious Londoner walked home between the
bombardments of the anti-aircraft guns, perhaps to find that he was
homeless, roofless or windowless. After a broken night, he awoke
with a headache; and, if government offices were representative of
London as a whole, a proportion of the morning would be spent in
exchanging anecdotes of the raid.
IV
At mid-day on the Wednesday in Easter week, after one or two false
starts, the members of Mr. Balfour's mission entered a private bay
at Euston, where the presence of a special train aroused among
the porters mild speculation which died away in the opinion that
the king was making an unadvertised journey. The Admiralty was
represented by Rear-Admiral Sir Dudley de Chair and Fleet-Paymaster
Lawford; the War Office by Major-General (Sir) Tom Bridges, Colonel
Spender-Clay, Colonel Dansey and Major Rees; the Foreign Office by
Lord Eustace Percy, Mr. Maurice Peterson, Mr. A. Paton and (Sir)
Geoffrey Butler; the Board of Trade by Mr. F. P. Robinson; the
Wheat Commission by (Sir) Alan Anderson; the Ministry of Munitions
by Mr. W. P. Layton and Mr. M. L. Phillips; the Bank of England by
its governor, Lord Cunliffe. Mr. Balfour's personal staff consisted
of Sir Eric Drummond, (Sir) Ian Malcolm and Mr. Cecil Dormer. A
later boat was to bring others who joined the mission in Washington.
At two o'clock the special train left Euston for a port chosen
by the Admiralty, but not disclosed. At a time chosen by the
Admiralty, the mission was to embark on an unknown ship for an
unknown destination on the western side of the Atlantic, there to
escape for a few weeks from the imminence of war and to look upon a
country which seemed own sister to the England which all had known
before August 4, 1914.