War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, Vols. Iii and Iv

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Little, Brown, $4.00 per volume]

Ms. LLOYD GEORGE is an expert in explosives. Now he detonates two volumes almost at once, and the blasts are tremendous. Both deal with the World War, and more especially with the wars personally waged by Mr. George. First, in the heaviest engagement since Jutland, he takes on the admirals. ‘The Lord High Admirals of the biggest navy in the world,’ men with ‘unparalleled knowledge of the technique of their profession,’ gave, says he, ‘a sorry exhibition of nervous impotence.’ It isn’t that they lack the ‘Nelson touch’; that could hardly have been hoped for. But war is a sequence of the unexpected, and, confronting the unexpected, admirals are helpless. Worse than that, they are hopeless. When it seemed a mathematical certainty that without effective counter-measures the food supply of England would be cut and her life line severed by the submarines, the Admiralty sank in despair, and it was civilian brains and civilian energy that instituted the construction of tramps, the reorganization of shipping, the arming of merchantmen, the control of supplies, the prodigious expansion of home-grown food, and finally the miraculous system of convoys. In that vast drama Mr. George played a hundred rôles, and every rôle a hero’s. His was the driving power which coped with the submarine. He it was who forced a rigorous control of food supplies. He framed the answers to peace notes. He spurred and checked Parliament. He hectored the admirals and belabored the generals. He rushed to the Paris Front, posted to the Roman Front, fought for the Eastern Front and the ‘side-shows,’ placated the Allies, heartened the people. During the terrible years ’16 and ’17, by every definition of greatness, George was a great man.

It is in 1917 that his story comes to a climax. His fiercest battle was the battle against the generals. No Tommy that ever survived the stench and brutishness of the trenches outvies George in contempt for G. H. Q. and the Brass Hats. Bitterness has boiled within him for sixteen years. Now that he tells the story of Passchendaele it overflows like lava. That was Haig’s work, and Robertson was Haig’s steadfast ally on the home front. The charge is not that they lacked genius. In a thousand years, fighting half the time, Britain has thrown up two, possibly three, geniuses in war, and miracles may be hoped for, but not expected. Haig was a competent soldier, steadfast, calm, unflinching. But George says that Haig was stubborn to the point of imbecility. And, more than that, he asserts that Haig was a cheat. George himself had opposed the murderous folly of Passchendaele from the first, but in the face of the popularity of the generals and the reverberant cry, ‘Keep the politicians off the Army,’ he was powerless to prevent the massacre. To prevent civilian interference the Cabinet were deliberately led to believe that Foch and Pétain supported the plan, while they were really against it. The Cabinet were tricked, too, by the information given them of the shortage of German reserves and the low quality of German troops in the third year of the war. The whole nature of the battlefield and its physical impossibility for tanks were misrepresented to them. In fact, almost every essential truth was willfully and skillfully kept from their cognizance, and when George went to the front in order to judge for himself, a picked batch of woebegone prisoners was paraded before him that he might utterly deceive himself. A promoter who ‘salts’ his mine is no more culpable than the man responsible for such a trick. The indictment is specific and devastating, but to know all may mean to forgive all, and there were things which even the Prime Minister did not know. All military secrets were not cntrusted to the politicians, and the French Government did not care to have it known how near the French army had come to demoralization but for the breathing spell which Passchendaele provided.

Haig and Robertson are dead. They died lapped in honors and rewards. We have abundant testimony to their high and stainless character. With all the detailed and documentary evidence which George adduces, it is hard to believe that these men entered into a conspiracy whereby 400,000 British soldiers were murdered in a sea of mud. As we Americans read the story with all its convincing attestations, our minds turn back to Grant and the taunts the ’butchery ‘ of Shiloh brought home to him. It is men of character who often make the supreme errors, and it is fair to recall that within two years of these events, with all their mistakes behind them, Haig and Robertson rode in triumph while all men cried out, ‘Well done, good and faithful servants!’

Yet, whatever the ultimate verdict, in these volumes of the desperate years there is truth, and history more ample, more thrilling, more overmastering, than you will read elsewhere. In another incarnation Lloyd George might have been a Judas Maccabæus, a Frederick, a Cromwell. A William the Silent, a Washington, a Lincoln, he never could have been.

ELLERY SEDGWICK