Soldiers and Statesmen
1914-1918, by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1926. 8vo. xvi + 333 + 304 pp. Illus. $5.00.
Soldiers and Statesmen is by far the most important work on the conduct of the war that has come forth from either side in the struggle. As concerns works by Allied leaders, even this rather sweeping claim is an understatement: the book is really in a class by itself, the only one of its type. We have had many personal narratives, and a few collections of documents, but nothing embracing the general political-military problem.
Even in Lord Grey’s masterly contribution, with all its candor and fairness, the field is carefully narrowed down to certain selected aspects and to what comes comfortably within the personal angle. Nearly all the memoirs of outstanding Allied leaders fall within these same limitations: they are both fragmentary and personal—and tend toward a mixture of apologia and special pleading. Lord Asquith, after merely a distant glance at his proper subject, stands transfixed and dumb, — like Lot’s wife, — quite unable to approach the war itself. Winston Churchill develops into an imposing symphony of booming egotism that old and simple theme, ‘Alone in Cubia’—and his adroit revelations have the curious effect of concealing the truth about everything except the author. Hindenburg’s deft and sagacious touch produced merely an engaging romance, while Ludendorff’s memoir> were no more than a crude German rendering of the Churchill model.
Falkenhayn’s narrative offers the nearest approach to Soldiers and Statesmen. He surveys the conduct of the war as a whole; brings out the inconceivably baffling, maddening difficulties of framing an Interallied policy (anti-Allied would be the proper term); and sets forth not an external narrative of events but the full range of factors to be dealt with in so vast and complex a problem. Above all, he meets the test raised by Sir William Robertson’s complaint of the ordinary war book: ' We are told what was done, but not always why it was done, or who was responsible for causing it to be done. ’
As a first-hand contribution to history, Soldiers and Statesmen is remarkable first of all for the sense of proportion it reveals, and the clear, stubborn grasp of essentials. In writing as in doing, having once seized his main point Sir William holds to it with a grim bulldog grip Difficulties and obstacles, mischance and disappointments; argument, persuasion, opposition, and even the roughest measures applied to his own person, all serve to make him fix his jaws the more firmly rather than let go. Throughout the long struggle here recorded, one feels Lloyd George not so much fighting an antagonist as wriggling vainly out of the grip of the inescapable facts Sir William held up before him. ' More than once Mr. Lloyd George said to me his chief Complaint was that I would persist in always supporting what Haig did.’ The author may fairly take it as the finest citation in his record.
From this sense of proportion and this interest in the points which matter, personalities and personal issues are reduced to an insignificant scale. The pages bristle with starting points for such digressions; the author names the person and states the fact with unsparing precision, but he always passes straight on. He is not even interested in himself — from no reserve or conscious modesty, but because he is otherwise occupied. For this same reason, although he has to deal with one long series of controversies and disagreements, his book itself is not controversial. Those old favorites, ‘Easterners vs. Westerners’ and ‘politicians vs. soldiers,’ do not even appear in any recognizable form. Sir William himself never suffered from the illusion that a national war could be a purely military problem; and instead of harping on the old theme of political interference he sets forth more clearly than any one before him the political side of the equation and the baffling military problems the statesmen were sometimes called upon to face. Much of the time he had to hurry into the breach to make his own statesmen stand up against the French, and prevent British military ventures being made a football of French politics.
All in all, the book is a fitting memorial of the author’s record, He had to take over at a critical time the direction of the whole military effort of the Empire, and from confusion and failure brought it into order and coherence. With a determined enemy in front, difficult Allies at his side and another sinking out of the struggle, he had behind him a Government divided and uncertain and impossible to hold to a fixed course, a Premier working against him by devious paths and then openly hostile - and in the background an intriguer busily manœuvring to take his place. Against all these Sir William won out; for, although he was ousted just before the end, his successor instantly turned for salvation to the course he had fixed — and the Hundred Days’ Campaign of 1918 marked the triumph of his policy of concentrating the full strength of British man-power upon the Western Front.
T. H. THOMAS