
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: The King's Grace 1910-1935
Author: Buchan, John (1875-1940)
Photographer: W. and D. Downey studio
Photographer: Hopp, Emil Otto (1878-1972)
Date of first publication: April 1935
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Hodder and Stoughton, April 1935
   [third printing]
Date first posted: 30 October 2011
Date last updated: 30 October 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #878

This ebook was produced by:
David T. Jones, Ross Cooling, Al Haines
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






[Illustration: _By kind permission of "The Times"_

  THE KING
  Broadcasting at Sandringham

"May I add very simply and sincerely that if I may be regarded as in
some true sense the head of this great and widespread family, sharing
its life and sustained by its affection, this will be a full reward for
the long and sometimes anxious labours of my reign of well-nigh
five-and-twenty years."]




  THE KING'S GRACE
  1910-1935

  BY
  JOHN BUCHAN



  HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.
  LONDON




  _First published_       _April, 1935_
  _Reprinted_             _April, 1935_
  _Reprinted_             _April, 1935_



  _Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton Limited,
  by Wyman & Sons Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham_




"The Englishman is taught to love the King as his friend, but to
acknowledge no other master than the laws which himself has contributed
to enact."

  Goldsmith: _Citizen of the World_.




  PREFACE


This book is not a biography of the King, the time for which has happily
not yet come, but an attempt to provide a picture--and some slight
interpretation--of his reign, with the Throne as the continuing thing
through an epoch of unprecedented change.

I have incorporated a few passages from my _History of the Great War_,
published in 1922.

  J. B.




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                          PAGE

       PROLOGUE                      11


  PART I

    I. THE PAGEANT OF SUCCESSION     17

   II. AN UNEASY HERITAGE            24

  III. THE RESTLESS YEARS            55

   IV. DESCENSUS AVERNI              89


  PART II

    I. CONTACT                      119

   II. THE FORTRESS                 147

  III. THE SALLIES                  183

   IV. SURRENDER                    216


  PART III

    I. SOUR-APPLE HARVEST           243

   II. THE CHANGING EMPIRE          272

  III. A HOUSE IN ORDER             292

       EPILOGUE                     316

       INDEX                        321




  PROLOGUE


For fifteen centuries there have been kings in Britain, and for more
than three hundred years there has been a single kingship. It has
changed in character since the old monarchs, who ruled by virtue of
their ownership of lands or their prowess in battle, but it has
succeeded always in adapting itself to the changing character of our
people. Like many of the deeper truths of government, it cannot be
readily defined. Parliament can alter the laws at will, but the
seventeenth-century doctrine still holds--that there is a "law
fundamental," which may not be tampered with as long as the nation
remains what it is. So kingship, which during the ages has shed much of
its old power, yet maintains its central function, and continues to be a
primary instinct of our people. A great revolutionary like Cromwell
might upset one form of it, but only to spend himself in the effort to
find another. We have rebelled against kings, but never against
kingship.

In the last two hundred years, while the Throne has lost in definable
powers, it has gained in significance. There have been wise monarchs and
some not so wise, but the inherent and accumulated majesty of the office
has increased. It is not only higher than any other human estate, but of
a different kind from any other, for it is the mystical, indivisible
centre of national union. It is the point around which coheres the
nation's sense of a continuing personality. In any deep stirring of
heart the people turn from the mechanism of government, which is their
own handiwork and their servant, to that ancient, abiding thing behind
governments, which they feel to be the symbol of their past achievement
and their future hope.

But the Throne has altered in other things besides constitutional
practice. It has come closer to the lives and interests of the citizen.
The King is to-day far more a people's king than when an Edward or a
Henry returned in triumph from the French wars. The office has come into
the light of common day without losing its traditional glamour. Its
dignity has not declined, but affection has been joined to reverence.
Since the Tudors the phrase has been the King's Majesty. To-day the
older form of words is the more fitting, the King's Grace.

There is nothing quite like the status of our Crown in the modern world,
and I cannot find any close parallel in history. In law it can do no
wrong; its Ministers alone are responsible and accountable. In a season
of turmoil it remains a _punctum indifferens_, a calm at the heart of
the storm. The King is of no class, being above classes; he is as much
akin to the worker in the mine and to the labourer in the field as to
the highest nobility. He can have no party bias, for his only bias is
towards the whole people. He cannot initiate policies, though he creates
the atmosphere that makes policies feasible. What is done in his name in
the ordinary business of government is the work of others, and to them
goes the blame or the credit. Of his own accord he does not interfere,
unless there is a turning of distracted partisans to him, as to the
traditional bulwark of the nation. Pinnacled above all, he is yet closer
to the national consciousness than even the most famous Minister. His
duty is not to act but to _be_, to represent the ultimate sanctities of
the land which endure behind passing fevers and bewilderments: like
Time,

  "who in the twilight comes to mend
  All the fantastic day's caprice."

When in a high mood of exaltation or sorrow the nation becomes a
conscious unity and turns to him, then and only then does he intervene.

But the pedestal on which the King is placed is also a watch-tower.
Having the whole people in his care, and having no prejudice of class or
dogma or party, he is concerned only with the greater things, the
profounder movements of national destiny. So in this year of his Silver
Jubilee I have tried to present the spectacle of his reign with the
Throne as the abiding background--such a spectacle as might be viewed
from a high tower; and to attempt what interpretation of its
significance is permitted to one who is himself a dweller in the
confused lowlands.




  PART I




  CHAPTER I

  THE PAGEANT OF SUCCESSION


A new reign opens with ceremonial, the pageant of death and of life. A
king has gone; the King lives. On May 6th 1910 King Edward VII died. His
body at first lay in state in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace,
whence it was conveyed in solemn procession to Westminster Hall. There
for three days it rested on a great bier, guarded day and night by his
soldiers, while all classes of his people filed silently past. On Friday
May 20th came the State Funeral, when the dead king was carried through
the thronged London streets on his way to Windsor, and was laid to rest
in the vaults of St. George's Chapel with the stately rites which attend
a monarch's burial. The voice of Garter King-at-Arms announced that it
had pleased Almighty God to call a great prince out of this transitory
world unto His Mercy, and that his son King George now reigned in his
stead.

To the spectators who watched the _cortge_ pass along the Mall in the
bright May weather, it seemed that all the splendour of all the earth
had come to pay its tribute. It seemed, too, that monarchy was
entrenched in the world beyond fear of attack or decay. Besides the new
King of England, eight kings followed the coffin--the German Emperor,
the King of the Belgians, the sovereigns of Norway, Greece and Spain, of
Bulgaria, Portugal and Denmark. The ex-President of the United States,
Theodore Roosevelt, was there, on his way home from his African
hunting-trip, and there were some thirty royal princes apart from our
own. It was not given to such a spectator to see the shadow of doom
which hung over the glittering throng, or to guess what havoc the next
decade would make with their thrones. Still less could he know that some
of these figures would in a few years be protagonists in a drama which
concerned the very existence of Britain. For in the procession were the
Emperor William of Germany, his future ally King Ferdinand of Bulgaria,
his future army commander, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, and the man
destined to be his last Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden; King
Albert of Belgium, who was to read Europe a lesson in kingly duty; and
the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose death was the tocsin that
summoned the nations to war.

King Edward had reigned only nine years, but he had been long familiar
to his people and his influence had been spread over many decades. His
mother had in the end become an institution and a tradition, but he was
always a vivid personality. He was a man whose talents were so well
proportioned that in the aggregate they gave him a singular justness of
perception. The long reign of Queen Victoria had prevented him from
assuming responsibility in the plenitude of his powers, but the
difficult apprenticeship had enabled him to acquire a wide experience of
public affairs, for he was always an assiduous worker. It had enabled
him, too, to cultivate those social gifts which he possessed in a high
degree--the power of laying his mind alongside others of every rank and
race, a sensitiveness to atmosphere, a quick sympathy, and a warm
humanity. He had few prejudices, either personal or national, and
therefore he could see into the heart of many diverse classes and
nations.

As a constitutional monarch he was above reproach, for, though some of
his Ministers were more sympathetic to him than others, he made no
favourites; he never interfered in policy, though in the Budget crisis
before his death and in the quarrel between Lords and Commons he
exercised his right to counsel moderation. During his mother's last
years Court ceremonial had become slipshod, and he restored it to its
old decorum, for he had an acute sense of the proper appurtenances of a
throne. To his people he was at once royal and homely; he was what they
looked for in a sovereign; they understood him, and felt that in turn
they were understood. He had dignity, but he had also a deep human
kindness; he enjoyed life and desired that others should enjoy it; above
all he was wholly sincere. He was widely popular, for he made the Crown
a democratic institution. He was his people, and, in Mr. Asquith's
words, had no self apart from them.

To have acquired such a repute was in itself a great achievement. In the
sphere of foreign policy he was credited with having brought about
positive results, notably a _rapprochement_ with France. Undoubtedly the
personal liking which he inspired among the French people contributed
greatly to the breakdown of old suspicions, but in foreign affairs his
conduct was always scrupulously regular. He did not attempt himself to
start alliances; he only made them possible. His purpose was always
conciliation and peace. His nephew, the German Emperor, was one of the
few people in the world of whom he was not altogether tolerant, but he
did not permit this private lack of sympathy to bias him against the
German nation. The dream of encircling Germany, with which he was
credited, never entered into his head. His last visit to Vienna, which
in Berlin was believed to be an attempt to seduce Austria from the
Triple Alliance, was in fact devoted to seeking Austria's help to bring
about a friendlier feeling between Germany and Britain.

    *    *    *    *    *

The new King was about to complete his forty-fifth year. Eighteen years
earlier he had become heir-presumptive on the death of his elder
brother, the Duke of Clarence, and two years later he had married
Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. Before that he had had a distinguished
professional career as a sailor, serving in a variety of craft in many
seas, and attaining in 1891 the rank of Commander. He relinquished the
Navy on his brother's death, and his duties thenceforth were those which
fall to an eventual wearer of the Crown. With a happy family circle as a
background, he interested himself in every aspect of the nation's life.
In 1899 he visited Ireland, and in the first year of his father's reign
he and his wife travelled in the _Ophir_ to Melbourne, opened the first
Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth, and visited New Zealand,
South Africa and Canada on their return journey. To the public he was
not yet a familiar figure, but wherever he went he attracted affection,
for he radiated friendliness and courtesy.

His father's Ministers were in an anxious mood, for the times were
unquiet, and the position of the Throne might soon be delicate. His
reception of them gave them confidence. Mr. Asquith was "deeply moved by
his modesty and good sense." At his first Council, held on May 7th, Sir
Edward Grey was touched by the profound sorrow with which he spoke of
his bereavement, and "the modesty and also the earnest public spirit
with which he addressed himself to the task before him."

During the following months the customary deputations and addresses were
received from every variety of public body. The Coronation was fixed for
June 22nd 1911, and in the month preceding it a ceremony took place
which was in the nature of a dramatic prologue. On May 16th came the
unveiling of the new Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham
Palace. The German Emperor, her grandson, was present in the uniform of
a British Field-Marshal, the last occasion in which he was to be seen by
the British people. The King, in his address, spoke words which were not
only a tribute to a great Queen but were also a testimony to his
conception of kingship:

    As time passes and the years unfold, events are revealed in
    their true character and proportion. We are sure that the
    tribute we pay to-day will not be disputed by posterity. Her
    life was devoted to the discharge of her solemn public duty. Her
    authority was exercised on all occasions with sincere respect
    for constitutional usage and tradition. No Sovereign in history
    reigned so long over so many millions of mankind; no ruler saw
    so many wonderful changes come to pass, or witnessed such a vast
    expansion in the scale and power of human arrangements; no reign
    in this kingdom ever gathered up more carefully the treasures of
    the past, or prepared more hopefully the path of the future. No
    woman was ever held in higher honour. No Queen was ever loved so
    well.

The Coronation of King Edward had been the first seen in England for
sixty-five years. The new King's had not this novelty, but, unlike his
father's, it did not take place under the shadow of war. It was a year
of peace and of abounding prosperity, the weather was gracious, and
crowds gathered such as London had never known. A Coronation is a
domestic event, to which foreign countries send delegates but not their
rulers; but the Empire sent its Premiers, and it was the occasion of an
Imperial Conference. No part of the great ceremony lacked its historic
romance and spiritual significance; the splendid procession through the
streets of the capital; the entry by the west door of the Abbey; the
Recognition, when the King showed himself to his people; the music of
Henry Purcell, who had written anthems for the Coronation of James II;
the Oath and the Anointing; the presentation of the Spurs and the Sword;
the investiture with the Royal Robe; the delivery of the Orb, the Ring
and the Sceptre; the supreme moment when the Archbishop of Canterbury
placed on the King's head the Crown of St. Edward; the presentation of
the Bible with the words: "Here is wisdom; this is the royal Law; these
are the lively Oracles of God"; the Enthronement; the homage of the
Princes of the Blood and the Peers of the Realm; the Coronation of the
Queen; the solemn Communion with the Threefold Amen of Orlando Gibbons,
written for Charles I in Scotland; the thunder of the _Te Deum_; the
last procession, when the Sceptre was laid on the Altar. It was, in the
King's words which I have quoted, a gathering up of the treasures of the
past and a preparing of the path of the future.




  CHAPTER II

  AN UNEASY HERITAGE


  I

No epoch in the life of a nation is exactly outlined by a sovereign's
reign. The Victorian Era contained many different stages, and the
so-called Edwardian Age was not a self-contained period, exactly
definable. In so far as it represented the breakdown of nineteenth
century security it began long before the Queen's death, while certain
vital changes in the position of affairs and in the temper of the people
did not show themselves till after King Edward had been several years on
the throne. What may fairly be said is that various forces moved in the
reign to a crescendo, and that what had hitherto been conjecture was
revealed as fact.

The nineteenth century began as an era of hope, and till near its close
was in Britain an era of confidence. After its fashion it was an age of
faith. There is a passage in Mr. Gladstone's diary, under the date
January 19th 1834, which startles the reader. At the age of twenty-five
he returned for a week-end to Oxford--almost his first visit to the
place since he had gone down. He had just entered Parliament, and was
already marked out as a rising man. On such a visit the ordinary young
politician might be expected to spend his hours in conviviality, perhaps
a little in sentimental recollection, in friendly talk, in the natural
ruffling of a distinguished stranger. The diary reveals that Mr.
Gladstone devoted his time to the reading of "Pickering on Adult
Baptism." I have no doubt that the book was dull, I suspect that it may
have been futile, but the very name of it moves me like a spell. I see
it, preposterous and yet magnificent, the symbol of a lost security of
soul which was long ago dropped by the wayside.

The simpler Victorian confessions were assailed by the sceptical
influence of a fast-developing physical science, and the iconoclast was
at first as passionate in his faith as the orthodox. But about the
nineties a certain languor set in in all belief. Most of the famous
creeds, orthodox and heterodox alike, were shaken in popular esteem.
They had either lost their votaries, having become disconsidered
commonplaces, or a newer dialectic was questioning the authority even of
the novelties. The nineteenth century had carried a full load of dogma;
the twentieth was sceptical of its predecessor's gods, and had not yet
found those of its own which could awake the same serious fervour. The
prevalent mood was in all things opportunist, and the bold
reconstructions of earlier thinkers were out of fashion. The Victorian
scepticism, which had led to strong anti-orthodox faiths, was replaced
by a failure of intellectual vitality, and a mood which could be at once
sceptical and credulous. In religion, in politics, in social science
there was everywhere a tendency to exalt emotion and to appeal to the
heart rather than to the head. When creeds were thus in solution, and
there were few boundaries left fixed, the way was opened to those vague
and potent eruptions of the human spirit which, like the inroads of the
Barbarians on the Roman Empire, make a sharp breach with the past, and
destroy what they could not have created.

This weakening of intellectual foundations was accompanied by an
apparent loosening of civilisation's cement, which is a reverence for
law and order and a general goodwill. A more violent, a less equable
temper was growing up in the world. Mr. Churchill, so far as Britain was
concerned, dates it, probably with truth, from the Jameson Raid in 1896.
Thereafter politics became more feverish and party feeling more extreme.
This was true of all nations, which seemed to be possessed by new
ambitions and new fears. Elsewhere it might be explained by a dawning
sense of insecurity; in Britain the temper was due largely perhaps to a
wounded pride. In the Victorian hey-day she had been the leader of
Europe, with her liberal institutions an acknowledged model for her
neighbours. That glory had passed, but in the nineties it was replaced
by a new vision of Empire. Her possessions, acquired at random, were
suddenly seen as the material of a world-wide polity, which offered
illimitable opportunities to her youth. Her poets sang of it with an
Elizabethan passion, no statesman omitted it from his perorations, and
Mr. Chamberlain was recognised as its business manager.

The ill-contrived South African War was like a douche of icy water on
this national confidence, and it left a sobered but somewhat
ill-tempered people. The party game grew embittered. Liberals complained
of the tactics of the Khaki election of 1901; the tariff reform
controversy was conducted with surprising heat; Conservatives in turn
made a grievance of the dear food and Chinese slavery cries; and the
Liberal Government entered upon power in 1906 with popular enthusiasm
behind it, but with its opponents in a temper which did not promise an
easy course. "We see," Mr. Churchill has written, "a succession of
partisan actions continuing without intermission for nearly twenty
years, each injury repeated with interest, each oscillation more
violent, each risk more grave, until at last it seemed that the sabre
itself must be invoked to cool the blood and the passions that were
rife." In her politics Britain seemed to have lost that common measure
of agreement between parties which had been one of the secrets of her
strength. In home affairs, as in the world at large, the former
conventions and decencies were slipping out of public affairs.

In one respect the new century was the child of the old. The great
discoveries of physical science had borne fruit in a vast increase of
wealth and its wider diffusion. There was everywhere on the globe a
feverish hunt for riches and a craze for luxury. If one form of
self-confidence had weakened, another had been enlarged--a belief in the
omnipotence of the huge scientific and social machine which had been
created. If men were shy in the face of dogmas, they were confident
about certain facts, and that manly humility which theology calls the
fear of God was not a common mood. The power of plutocracies was
everywhere in the ascendant, and the aristocracies, even the most
ancient and reputable, found their prestige dwindling. In Britain the
great families were still in the governing class, and the great houses
were still maintained, but they counted for less. The catholic tastes of
King Edward had opened fashionable society to many who a generation
before would have knocked in vain at its doors. Much of this change was
for the good, since it broke down old foolish barriers and did much to
kill a false gentility. But it had also its malign effects, for it meant
that the chief asset of the rich, their wealth, came to set the standard
of life, and it tended to coarsen and vulgarise the public temper.

The increasing parade of luxury involved the growing discontent of the
poor. It was a prosperous time; unemployment, judged by later canons,
was a small thing; the standard of living and the conditions of labour
among the working classes had been vastly improved. But the spread of
education had made the worker ask questions, and the spectacle of
wealth, which new facilities of transport and the popular press thrust
under his notice, sharpened his interrogatories. Antagonism towards
those in possession and a new class-consciousness were growing up among
the dispossessed. Social democracy aimed at a revolution and a new
world, and, following the example of its opponents, its aims were
largely material. It sought rather to master the world's wealth than to
regenerate the world's spirit. This aim, combined with the large share
which the people had won in the government of most lands, led to an
intense nationalism in practice, whatever might be the theory. The
workers of one country, controlling the administration of that country,
were prepared to set up any barrier that would secure the wealth which
they sought to share from being pilfered by strangers. The consequence
was that, while men were little disposed to contend for ideals as these
used to be understood, they were very willing to struggle for material
good things. The old romantic nationalism had decayed, and in its place
had come a new nationalism of the pocket. Europe was moving towards
materialism and the self-contained and jealous state.

It was a world which was still in the main good-humoured, being
comfortable, and there was much goodwill about and much philanthropic
experiment. But it was a world without a strong common faith and
purpose, fumbling with ill-understood novelties, already half the
servant of the intricate machine it had devised. It was a world
self-satisfied without contentment, a world in which prosperity was no
index to happiness. Mankind was drifting into jealous cliques, while
every day its economic bonds became more subtly interlinked. Yet few
recognised the danger signals. Only here and there a disconsidered
prophet foretold that such a situation could not endure, and that sooner
or later must come the thunderstroke to rend the lordly pleasure-house.

In such a difficult "climate of opinion" the new reign began.


  II

The Liberal Government in power was a remarkable assembly of varied
talents. Its first head, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was indeed a man
of ordinary gifts, but he had great parliamentary skill and a profound
knowledge of human nature. He had in full measure one half of the
statesman's equipment, for if he was not always subtle enough to deal
with things, he was simple enough to deal with men. His successor, Mr.
Asquith, was the classic type of British statesman--an accomplished
scholar, a successful lawyer, who brought a highly trained mind to the
task of government. Mr. Morley at the India Office, Mr. Haldane at the
War Office, Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office were also types which
might be paralleled from many eras of our political history. But two
ministers broke the traditional uniformity. Mr. Churchill was then only
thirty-six, the heir to a famous parliamentary name, one who had already
made his mark in soldiering and letters, and who sat a little loose from
ordinary party interests, since his active mind was more concerned with
fundamental problems than with party _expertise_. The other, Mr. Lloyd
George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a dozen years older, but
had not lost the daring of youth. He was in touch, as no other Minister
was, with the new currents of feeling in the British democracy, and his
imagination and his instinct for what must come to be were drawing the
Government into paths a little shocking to decorous Liberals.

Many causes had contributed to the Liberal victory of 1906--satiety with
a party which had fought a costly and not very glorious war; fear of
the new protectionist crusade and its effect on the cost of living;
dislike of the Chinese labour experiment in South Africa. But one potent
reason was that historic Liberalism, repressed since 1895, now for the
last time mustered its forces. Its devotees, chiefly older men who had
known Mr. Gladstone's spell, held their creed with an almost religious
fervour. Its articles were the maintenance of free trade,
disestablishment, free and non-sectarian education, Irish Home Rule,
temperance, peace, and a modest social reform. To the advocacy of these
large aims it brought a long tradition of expert electioneering. It was
hostile especially to Mr. Balfour's Education Act of 1902, which
permitted rate aid to denominational schools; a somewhat narrow margin
of dispute which Mr. Balfour ironically described as an identification
of "the frontier which eternally separates right and wrong with the
transient line which technically distinguishes local from national
taxation."

The new Government was not fortunate in meeting the wishes of its oldest
and most loyal supporters. Chinese labour was indeed brought to an end,
and this necessarily led Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to devise and
carry through the greatest achievement of his career--the grant of
self-government to the new South African colonies, which in 1909 was
followed by an Act establishing the Union of South Africa. But the
Education Bill to redress Mr. Balfour's wrongdoing was rejected by the
Lords. A Plural Voting Bill was rejected by the Lords, a Licensing Bill
was rejected, and other measures were cruelly emasculated. Only a Trade
Disputes Bill, which restored peaceful picketing, safeguarded trade
union funds, and took strikes out of the law of conspiracy, was
permitted to pass by the Upper House on the not very defensible ground
that it did not wish a quarrel with Labour. The Government with its huge
majority was beginning to fall into discredit. Such a majority is apt to
be a misfortune, for it is inclined to lead rather than to follow, and
to keep it together means a strict attention to the prejudices of the
often ignorant rank and file. It was necessary to win back respect by
leaving the conventional rut--those ancient causes which woke enthusiasm
only among elderly loyalists. Mr. Lloyd George came forward as the
Great-heart to lead his party to the Promised Land. The reforms which he
proposed could be embodied in a Budget, on which no House of Lords would
dare to lay sacrilegious hands.

So in the Budget of 1908 a scheme of Old Age Pensions was included, and
was duly passed into law. But in 1909 Mr. Lloyd George unmasked his full
batteries. For his proposed system of sickness and unemployment
insurance he needed money, and in his Budget of that year he proposed to
raise the extra fourteen millions partly by an increase of the income
tax, super-tax and death duties, and partly by taxes on undeveloped land
and on land's unearned increment. The Conservative party were stirred to
fury. They did not confine themselves to criticism of the dubious land
taxes, but denounced the whole programme as a policy of spoliation and a
class vendetta; its only logical justification, they said, was the
anarchist maxim that all property was theft; it was a wicked attempt to
rouse a class war. Mr. Lloyd George did not conciliate his opponents by
his methods of defence, which were mainly picturesque vituperation of
the "haves" on behalf of the "have nots." The serious argument for his
policy--that the time had come when the State must concern itself more
closely with the life of the citizen, and that the citizen must pay for
it--a doctrine to which most thinking men consented--was scarcely heard
in the hubbub; if it had been, it would have deeply disquieted many
orthodox Liberals.

The House of Lords, after a good deal of heart-searching, rejected the
Budget by a large majority, on the ground that it was not a measure to
raise the necessary revenues for the year, but an attempt to work a
revolution through a finance bill. The reason alleged by the Lords was
intelligent enough, whatever may be thought of their tactical wisdom.
Matters had now come to the point of crisis. The Upper House, so far
from being an independent Second Chamber, was, it appeared, only an
appanage of the Conservative party, which with its aid was always in
power, whoever might be in office. It had already massacred a host of
Liberal innocents, and now the cup of its iniquities was full. It had
challenged the central and historic privilege of the House of Commons.
An appeal to the country was necessary, and the Prime Minister made it
clear that he asked from the electorate not only an approval of the
Budget but a mandate to bring the Lords to reason. He carried a
resolution in the House of Commons that their action was "a breach of
the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons," and in
a speech at the Albert Hall he announced: "We shall not hold office
until we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be
necessary to the legislative utility and the honour of the party of
progress. . . . We are going to ask the electors to say that the House
of Lords shall be confined to the proper objects of a second chamber.
The absolute veto must go." He was reverting to the scheme of a
suspensory veto which John Bright had once fathered, and which in 1907
had been the subject of a resolution proposed by Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman.

The election of January 1910 had an unexpected result. The Government
majority, which in 1906 had been 356, was now only 124. Moreover, 82 of
it were Irish, and, if the Irish voted with the Opposition, the
Government would fall. Now the Irish had not loved the Budget, and,
indeed, had opposed it on the second reading. In Great Britain the
election had been fought chiefly on that Budget, no constituency showing
much interest in the Lords question. The result was a mandate for Mr.
Lloyd George's policy, but only if the Irish supported it, and for that
they must have their reward in the shape of a Home Rule Bill. No Home
Rule Bill, however, would pass the Lords in their present form;
therefore as a necessary preliminary the Second Chamber must be dealt
with. For a week or two the fate of the Government hung in the balance.
The Cabinet was by no means united, the Prime Minister desiring to
confine himself to the suspensory veto, while other ministers were
anxious to link this with Second Chamber reform. The Opposition had been
presented with a formidable cry. The Lords were to be attacked not for
their faults but for their virtues; they were the only barrier against
secession, and their destruction was the price to be paid for the
precious Budget to separatists who were otherwise hostile to Mr. Lloyd
George's adventure.

The danger was tided over. In early April the House of Commons carried
three resolutions on the subject of the Lords and the first reading of
the Parliament Bill which embodied them. The Irish having been thus
appeased, the Budget passed through both Houses on April 20th, the
Lords reserving their fire. The King's death found Government and
Opposition ordering their battle lines for a constitutional clash of the
first magnitude.


  III

Side by side with these heavy domestic preoccupations, Ministers from
1906 onward had to carry a burden of external cares--grave problems of
foreign policy and defence. These for the most part had to be kept
secret; they could not be shared with their followers or give
opportunity for moving perorations.

Ever since the close of the South African War a certain satiety with
overseas politics had fallen upon the British people. The dream of
imperialism, the closer union of the British race in one great pacific
commonwealth, had lost something of its glamour, tending to sink to a
form of race chauvinism or a mere scheme of commercial protection.
Imperialism had at its best meant a political vision extending beyond
these shores, and, as it faded in popular esteem, the British people
inclined more and more to be absorbed in internal problems. There had
been a time in their history when, under Palmerston and Gladstone and
Disraeli, foreign affairs had been an integral part of their interests,
and elections had been lost and won on diplomatic programmes. But for
twenty years the doings of Europe had concerned them little. The
imperialist who thought that Britain was an extra-European Power
depending on the control of the sea, and the social reformer who
regarded foreign policy as a lure to distract the nation from more
urgent matters, had alike contributed to this result.

In 1910 the people of Britain were less alive to the significance of
what might happen beyond their borders than many a humble continental
state. To an electorate excited by partisan warfare, dragooned by
sleepless party caucuses, and scared or exhilarated by the prospect of
large social changes, the husks of foreign policy were not acceptable.
Warnings of the possibility of war were regarded as merely a trick to
distract. Expenditure on defence was a waste of money which might be
spent on objects from which there was a sound return. These things had
no electioneering value, and the comfortable delusion was fostered that,
so long as Britain chose to desire peace, peace would follow. There were
men in the Government who to their honour refused to prophesy smooth
things, but the cotton-wool with which the atmosphere was thick deadened
their warnings.

Yet in a sense this public apathy was a fortunate thing, for it enabled
weighty matters to be discussed, as it were, _in camera_. When King
Edward ascended the throne Britain stood in a perilous isolation. She
was disliked by Germany, suspected by France, and looked upon by Russia
as the eternal enemy. When he died she had been brought again into the
European family. By an alliance with Japan she had safeguarded her
position in the Far East. There was an understanding with France, daily
becoming more cordial, and one of the first acts of the new Liberal
Government had been to authorise conversations between the British and
the French army staffs with a view to collaboration should the need
arise. The defeat of Russia by Japan had turned the mind of the former
away from more distant parts of a globe where her interests might have
clashed with ours, certain outstanding questions with Britain had been
settled, and her alliance with France made her more complaisant towards
a country which was France's friend. Britain was now to all intents an
associate of the Dual Alliance, though the fact was scarcely realised by
the majority of her people. The Triple Entente had come into being.

We had entered the European game at a disturbed moment. The cat-fish in
the pool was Germany. If she had discarded Bismarck's policy, as well as
the subtlety of his methods, the arrogant spirit of the Iron Chancellor
remained. She felt, not without reason, that her dignity had been
offended by the agreement between Britain and France which settled the
questions of Morocco and Egypt without consulting her, and in the
spring of 1905 Prince Blow suggested to his master that the occasion
had come for a dramatic _coup_ to retrieve his country's weakened
prestige. On the last day of March in that year the Emperor landed with
a retinue at Tangier, proclaimed the integrity of Morocco, promised the
Sultan to defend his independence, and demanded that the whole Moroccan
question should be reopened. A weak cabinet in Paris bent to the storm,
M. Delcass, the Foreign Minister, was sacrificed, and a conference of
the Powers was summoned at Germany's instigation. But for her the result
was a bitter disappointment. She was revealed as, except for her
faithful Austria, alone in the world; Italy deserted her colleagues of
the Triple Alliance and supported her Latin neighbour; Britain and
Russia stood solidly beside France. The Algeciras arrangement of April,
1906, provided no lasting settlement, but it made clear the new grouping
of the European peoples. Germany had irritated and alarmed the world by
showing too nakedly her hand. It was certain that she would look
forthwith for fresh methods to satisfy her pride.

Her next _coup_ was more adroitly handled. In the summer of 1908 the old
regime in Turkey was swept away by revolution, the Young Turk party came
into power, and by their liberal professions attracted for a little the
sympathy of Western Europe. At first the change seemed against
Germany's interests, for she had sedulously cultivated the Hamidian
Government, and would have to start again from the beginning. But she
saw a chance of fishing profitably in the troubled waters. Austria
seized the occasion to annex the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, of which she had long had the administration. Serbia was
alarmed, for she saw her hope of union with the Bosnian Serbs
extinguished. Russia, as Serbia's protector, shared her annoyance at
this annulment of the work of the Congress of Berlin, and Italy was
disquieted by Austria's advance into the Balkan peninsula. But Austria
had Germany at her back, and the protests of the Triple Entente were
received with a cool contempt. The Emperor William made his famous
speech about Germany's "shining armour," and the Entente, unprepared for
a European War in such a cause, had to acquiesce with the best grace it
could muster. It was a proof of the strong foundations of the new
friendship between France, Britain and Russia that it survived
unimpaired so grievous a diplomatic defeat. The situation had been
anxious, and Mr. Asquith told Mr. Balfour that he had never known Europe
nearer to war.

The first German move had failed at Algeciras; the second had succeeded;
the third was to end in a dangerous fiasco. It came in the spring of
1911. There had been a revolt in Fez and French troops had entered the
city. To Germany it seemed that the Shereefian Empire was breaking up,
and she was determined to share in the spoils. If France was to have the
task of reconstructing the country, Germany must have territorial
compensation; in the words of her Foreign Minister, "If one wants to eat
peaches in January, one must pay for them." The gunboat _Panther_ was
despatched to Agadir, and the German press claimed Western Morocco as
their country's right. But France in 1911 was not the France of 1905. M.
Caillaux, who showed signs of temporising with Germany, was swept from
power, and the new Ministry, under Raymond Poincar, included Delcass,
who was not inclined to truckle to Berlin. Britain sent a warship to
Agadir to lie alongside the _Panther_, and proclaimed in unmistakable
terms her support of France. Germany, not yet ready for a world-war,
abated her pretensions, and the Moroccan question was settled by various
cessions of territory by France in Central Africa.

All through that summer, during the ceremonies of the Coronation and the
bitter dispute about the Lords, Ministers had on their hands this
controversy which presently might reach flash-point. There was a day in
August when the crash seemed likely to come before the week was out. The
affair had two important consequences. Hitherto it had been supposed,
especially in Germany, that the Cabinet was not united in this matter,
and undoubtedly a large section of the Liberal party was averse to any
foreign commitments and suspicious of any increase in the national
defences. But now the idol of this group, Mr. Lloyd George himself,
announced to the world that a pacific Britain did not stand for peace at
any price. In a speech at the Mansion House on July 21st he declared
that "if a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only
be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position which
Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing
Britain to be threatened where her interests are vitally affected, as if
she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations, then I say
emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable
for a great country like ours to endure." These words revealed to an
audience, which comprised his foremost critics, another side of the man;
he was "varminty," as an admiring sportsman put it, in other things than
class warfare. The second consequence was that Germany was filled with a
sullen fury against France, and not less against Britain, her ally. From
that moment her war party dropped all talk of compromise and pursued
naked aggression.

The burden of this foreign crisis, the duty of watching every move and
of persuading an unwilling nation to prepare adequate defences, fell,
apart from the Prime Minister, especially upon two men, Sir Edward Grey
and Mr. Haldane, to whom was now added Mr. Churchill, the new First Lord
of the Admiralty. Mr. Haldane, an enthusiast for German philosophy and
letters, had, with the consent of King Edward, paid a visit to Berlin in
the summer of 1906 to examine the possibility of a friendly
understanding, and had reached the conclusion that, while there were
dangerous forces at work within the German polity, the influence of the
Emperor and his chief advisers was on the side of peace. To cherish this
inclination and to nurse it into a steady warmth must be the object of
Britain, and meantime at the War Office he laboured to make the British
army a fit instrument for a task which might one day fall to it.

Sir Edward Grey worked to the same end. Representing a very ancient and
honourable type in British statecraft, the country gentleman with no
vulgar ambitions who would have much preferred a private station, he had
toiled in office to maintain the peace of Europe, and his grave
simplicity of character, his moral dignity, and his gift of sound
judgment and conciliatory statement had done much to keep the tottering
fabric together. But no man was more conscious than he that he was
treading a hazardous road. He was accustoming Britain to interfere in
continental affairs when she was not armed on a continental scale, and
when the whole trend of her immediate interests was away from national
defence. If Germany chose to be arrogant he could not compel humility,
for he had no adequate sanction behind him. To an ally he could not
promise such immediate assistance as would enable her to speak with her
foe in the gate. His arms were historical prestige, wealth, a great
navy; but these were not quite _in pari materia_ with those of the
Powers with whom he thought to treat. He was a voice, a grave,
reasonable, weighty voice, but behind it was not the appropriate weapon.

Ministers during the summer of 1911 might well have had wrung from them
Lord Salisbury's cry that "politics was a cursed profession." They had
on their hands a domestic programme which had evoked wild excesses of
partisanship, and had attracted to them an odium from at least one-half
of the people which had been unknown since the first Reform Bill. They
were committed to a policy of constitutional change of which they could
not foresee the end. And behind it all they saw a fermenting Europe,
which promised perilous brews and deadly gasses, a Europe of which the
larger part of their following was wholly ignorant--and must be kept
ignorant, since a popular scare would beyond doubt kill all chance of a
peaceful settlement. Mr. Churchill has well described the comfortless
dualism of their lives.

    Those whose duty it was to watch over the safety of the country
    lived simultaneously in two different worlds of thought. There
    was the actual visible world with its peaceful activities and
    its aims; and there was a hypothetical world, a world "beneath
    the threshold," as it were, a world at one moment utterly
    fantastic, at the next seeming about to leap into reality--a
    world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations
    through vistas of fathomless catastrophe.


  IV

In such an hour of strife and confusion at home and of crisis abroad the
new King was called upon to make a grave decision.

The powers of a constitutional monarch must always be indeterminate and
delicate, brittle if too heavily pressed, a shadow if tactlessly
advertised, substantial only when exercised discreetly in the
background. But they are none the less real for that, since he has the
privilege and duty of advising his advisers (the phrase was Sir Wilfrid
Laurier's), the custody of his custodians; and he may have in the last
resort the heavier duty of deciding on his own account a weighty
constitutional problem. The prerogative may have to be called in to cut
the tangle.

The first task King Edward had skilfully and happily performed. He
rather liked a political crisis, and Lord Esher has told us that he
enjoyed the excitement caused by Mr. Chamberlain's resignation in 1903.
He had protested to the Prime Minister about the platform style of his
Chancellor of the Exchequer, protests which Mr. Lloyd George received
with complete good humour and with unfulfilled promises of amendment.
He had endeavoured to avert the rejection of the Budget by the House of
Lords, and had summoned Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour to confer with
him. The second duty he was not yet called upon to face, but he saw it
approaching. He saw that the problem of the Second Chamber had been
raised and could not be dropped, and the resolutions passed by the
Commons in December 1909 and Mr. Asquith's pre-election speeches made
the Government policy clear. He did not like it; he thought it meant the
destruction of the House of Lords; he had his own scheme of reform,
which he discussed with Lord Crewe at Windsor in January, 1910, and
which would have confined the right of voting to one hundred peers.

After the election King Edward realised that the crisis was near. A bill
would be introduced to limit the power of the Lords; they would not
accept it: what then? A dissolution would not help matters if the nation
returned the same verdict. If government was to be carried on, the only
way was the use of the royal prerogative. A request to know the
Cabinet's intention brought, on February 11th, the discreet reply that
Ministers did not propose to advise any exercise of the prerogative
until the actual necessity arose. Ten days later Mr. Asquith announced
that he had sought no guarantee from the King and had received none; it
would be wholly improper to ask in advance for a blank authority. But
private conversations had carried the matter further. The King had made
it clear that he recognised that the new Parliament Bill must go on the
statute-book if the nation plainly demanded it, but he asked that the
nation's approval should be sought by an election fought definitely upon
that issue. The Prime Minister was therefore justified in assuming that,
if this condition was carried out and the result of the election was a
decisive verdict, the royal prerogative would be brought into play to
give that verdict effect. "In no case," he told the House of Commons on
April 14th, "will we recommend dissolution except under such conditions
as will secure that in the new Parliament the judgment of the people as
expressed in the election will be carried into law."

King Edward's death in May flung everything into the melting-pot. Could
not some way be found of settling the quarrel which would not force upon
a new and inexperienced monarch the necessity of a difficult decision?
Moreover, the King's death had revived a feeling for our historic
institutions which took some of the heart out of the Liberal crusade. A
conference was agreed upon, and eight honest gentlemen, four from each
side, sat down in June round a table to try to settle terms. At first
they seemed to be making progress, but very soon it appeared that
neither side had sufficient small change with which to purchase the
assent of the other. There were not enough free assets to bargain with.
The Conservative members desired that measures involving constitutional
change should be put into a separate category, but under
"constitutional" there fell the business of Irish Home Rule, on which
the fate of the Government depended. Few people were surprised, and many
were relieved, when on November 11th it was announced that the
Conference had drawn to a fruitless close.

The time had come to approach the new King to discover if he took his
father's view. On November 11th the Prime Minister went to Sandringham
and put the matter fully before him. The King had hoped for much from
the Conference, and was greatly distressed at its failure, but he
realised that the responsibility must now lie on his own shoulders. If a
deadlock came, the opposition of the Lords could be overcome only by
limiting or increasing their numbers. The first way--of withholding
writs of summons--was invidious and possibly unconstitutional, but the
prerogative of new creation was undoubted and had fairly recent
parallels. In Mr. Asquith's view the mere knowledge that such a step was
contemplated would probably bring about agreement. On the 15th the
Cabinet drew up and dispatched to Sandringham a memorandum which advised
an immediate dissolution. "His Majesty's Ministers cannot take the
responsibility of advising a dissolution, unless they understand that in
the event of the policy of the Government being approved by an adequate
majority in the new House of Commons, His Majesty will be ready to
exercise his constitutional powers, which may involve the prerogative of
creating Peers, if needed, to secure that effect shall be given to the
decision of the country." Next day Mr. Asquith and Lord Crewe went to
Buckingham Palace for their answer.

The King liked the Lords policy of the Government no more than his
father had done. To him it seemed the destruction of an ancient and
precious thing. Burdened as he was with the thought of the foreign
situation, he felt that it would not increase our prestige in the world
"to see Britannia," as Lord Rosebery put it, "in her old age casting
away her helmet . . . apparently prepared to revise at ten days' notice
the constitution of eight hundred years." But what other course
remained? If the coming election showed a clear popular verdict, the
obstinacy of the Lords would mean the Cabinet's resignation. A
Conservative Government would not survive for a week, and in the
dissolution which must follow the Sovereign would become a subject of
debate, and that kingship of which he was the trustee would be
grievously compromised. After a long discussion he said that he saw no
other way but to assent to the Cabinet's advice. He made one
proviso--that the Parliament Bill should be submitted to the House of
Lords before the election. Mr. Asquith had not received a guarantee in
the formal sense, but he had achieved what he described as a
"hypothetical understanding."

The December election removed the hypothetical element, for the
Government was returned with a majority of one hundred and twenty-six.
In January the King insisted on having an interview with Lord Lansdowne
at Windsor, not to ask for advice but to find out at first-hand the
views of the Opposition--a perfectly correct step, to which surprisingly
Mr. Asquith at first raised objections. But the air was electric and
even the stout nerve of the Prime Minister was shaken. The Parliament
Bill was introduced in the Commons on February 22nd, and early in May
had been carried through all its stages. The Lords had sought at first
to counter it with their own scheme of reform, but the atmosphere was
not congenial to the construction of a brand-new Second Chamber, one of
the most difficult enterprises of statecraft. The Coronation interrupted
the debates for the better part of a month, and they were resumed by the
Lords in a rising temper. Amendments were carried there which wholly
altered the measure, and on July 14th the Cabinet submitted a memorandum
to the King, pointing out that the expected deadlock was approaching, in
which "it will be the duty of Ministers to advise the Crown to exercise
its prerogative."

Up till then no mention had been made by Mr. Asquith or his colleagues
of the understanding arrived at in the previous November. But now it was
necessary to make it plain to the Conservative leaders, in the hope that
the knowledge might enable them to control their followers. The King
himself was anxious that the facts should be published. So on July 20th
Mr. Asquith wrote to Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour to inform them that
the House of Commons could not accept the Lords amendments; that, should
the need arise, the Government would advise the King to exercise his
prerogative by the creation of new peers; and that His Majesty had been
pleased to signify that he would act on this advice. It was the signal
for violent outbursts. On July 24th the Prime Minister was shouted down
in the Commons. Votes of censure were moved in both Houses, and
Ministers were accused of having shattered constitutional etiquette in
the interest of a corrupt bargain over Irish Home Rule. On August 8th
Lord Crewe, in the Lords, explained what had happened at the interview
with the King the previous November, and how there had been no request
for unconditional guarantees.

The final debate there on August 10th and 11th was tense and dramatic.
Lord Lansdowne urged that the Bill be passed lest a worst thing should
befall, but the irreconcilables under Lord Halsbury refused to yield.
Lord Morley, who had at first been opposed to the use of the
prerogative, read a formula which the King had approved: "If the Bill
should be defeated tonight His Majesty will consent to the creation of
peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of
the different parties in opposition by which the Parliament Bill might
be exposed a second time to defeat." Till the last moment no one dared
to forecast the result. In the end the majority of the peers abstained,
and the measure became law by one hundred and thirty-one votes to one
hundred and fourteen, thirty-seven Conservatives and thirteen bishops
voting with the Government.

    *    *    *    *    *

It was a controversy which interested the politicians rather than the
people of Britain. The ordinary man would probably have resented the
abolition of the House of Lords, but he had no objection to its being
taught its place. Under the Parliament Act it was deprived of all
control over the Budget of the year, if certified as a money Bill by the
Speaker, and its power of rejection was limited to measures sent up no
oftener than twice within two years by the Commons. To those who argued
that the whole scheme was slovenly and unscientific there was no real
answer, except that this was the way that changes had always come to
Britain. Elaborate constitutional reform in cold blood seems to be
beyond our national capacity; we correct an immediate abuse by a piece
of hasty extemporisation, and trust to Providence to make it work. We
have always preferred the provisional to the absolute. The Parliament
Act turned part of our constitution into a written word, but it did not
finish the sentence; there was no full-stop, only a line of dashes.

But to the King, just entering upon his reign, the situation was most
delicate and perplexing. He had not behind him his father's wide
political experience. He had had no training in the _arcana imperii_,
the imponderables of our paradoxical government. He was dependent upon
the counsel of one set of advisers; etiquette forbade him to take advice
from their opponents; his personal suite might be consulted, but they
were not experts; in the end he had to act alone. In these difficult
circumstances he behaved with strict constitutional probity, because he
had to guide him that instinct which he shared with the majority of his
subjects--the good sense of the plain man. In this common touch was to
lie the true secret of his power. The Parliament Bill wrangle was an
auspicious beginning.




  CHAPTER III

  THE RESTLESS YEARS


  I

In November 1911 the King and Queen sailed for India. In his
proclamation of November 2nd, 1908, on the fiftieth anniversary of the
assumption of the Government of India by the Crown, King Edward had
declared that he looked back "on the labour of the past half-century
with clear gaze and good conscience." The words were justified, for
history records no wiser and more generous example of imperial rule. The
charter of modern India was the royal proclamation of 1858, in which
Queen Victoria guaranteed existing rights, and offered to the Indian
people the hope of a partnership in government. "We desire no extension
of our present territorial possessions; and while we will permit no
aggression upon our dominions or our rights to be attempted with
impunity, we shall sanction no encroachment on those of others. We shall
respect the rights, dignity and honour of native princes as our
own. . . . It is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects of
whatever class or creed be fully and freely admitted to any offices the
duties of which they may be qualified by their education, abilities and
integrity duly to discharge." These sentences were a pledge the purpose
of which was clear, but the interpretation of which might not be easy.

A succession of Viceroys had toiled at the interpretation. The Viceregal
ritual, stiff as cloth-of-gold, was well calculated to maintain the
majesty of the Throne, but behind its magnificence lay a most arduous
and practical toil. In administration, in economics, in education there
had been steady progress in the direction of drawing the people of India
into a closer partnership in government and in fitting them for that
partnership. But the work was yearly becoming more difficult. The wider
diffusion of Western education was bringing in Western ideas which,
transplanted to an alien soil, often assumed fantastic forms. Britain's
laggard victory in the South African War had lowered her prestige; above
all, the rise of Japan, and her triumph over Russia, had inflamed the
pride of all Eastern peoples and dulled the glamour which had once
attended the white races. Lord Curzon's viceroyalty, too, a monument of
courage, industry and far-sighted devotion, had perhaps provided for
India a diet which, for all its high quality, was too large in quantity
for ready digestion.

India was uneasy, and when Lord Minto went there in 1905 he found a
stirring on the face of the waters. Crimes of violence were increasing,
ugly secret movements were afoot, and even honest men were beginning to
chafe under paternal government, and to demand that they should be
permitted to blunder for themselves. It was necessary to adopt coercive
measures, but Lord Minto and Mr. Morley, the Secretary of State, were
convinced that reform should go hand in hand with a firm rule.
Accordingly the Indian Councils Act in 1909 made a modest start in
representative government. Lord Minto considered that much of the unrest
was perfectly loyal, and neither he nor Mr. Morley had any intention of
what the latter called "loosening the bolts" of British power and
responsibility. Their view of India was that of Mill--"a kingly
government, free from the control, though strengthened by the support,
of representative institutions." But it was clear that they had taken
the first step on a path whose direction could not be foreseen, and that
their structure was at the best provisional, since an immovable
executive and an irresponsible legislature could not, according to the
lessons of history, make for harmony.

In such an atmosphere of uncertainty and disquiet the royal visit took
place. Its purpose was wise, for the Throne was the basis of our Indian
rule--that part of our complex government which the humblest Indian
peasant understood and reverenced. Moreover, the oriental mind
appreciates the outward trappings and the visible emblems of royalty,
and is impressed and inspired by ceremonial. Already in the winter of
1905 their Majesties, as Prince and Princess of Wales, had visited the
country and had been received with enthusiasm. Now the visit was a
matter of high state. The King had come in person to announce his
coronation, and, as is the secular custom of the East on such occasions,
to commemorate it by certain marks of especial favour.

The journey was one long triumphal procession and, whatever were the
hidden fires, no smoke from them marred the splendid ceremonies. The
King's speeches were extraordinarily happy. At Bombay he reminded his
hearers that the city had once been the dowry of a British queen. On the
historic Ridge of Delhi he addressed the Imperial Legislative Council,
and to municipalities and universities he spoke of India's problems with
sympathy and knowledge. The supreme occasion was the great Coronation
Durbar at Delhi. On December 7th their Majesties made a state entry into
the ancient Mogul capital. A vast new city of camps had sprung up almost
in a night, a hint to the discerning of what the principal "boon" was to
be. On the 12th, in a scene in which the long-descended pageantries of
both East and West were mingled, the King spoke from the throne to the
Indian princes and people, and received the homage of feudatories and
subjects. "I rejoice," he said, "to have this opportunity of renewing in
my own person those assurances which have been given you by my revered
predecessors of the maintenance of your rights and privileges, and of my
earnest concern for your welfare, peace and contentment."

Then he announced the boons. As a concession to native feeling the
partition of Bengal would be reversed, and that presidency constituted a
Governorship, with a new Lieutenant-Governorship in Council for Behar,
Chota Nagpur and Orissa, and a Chief Commissionership for Assam. But the
principal change was that the Government of India would be transferred
from Calcutta to the traditional capital, Delhi, and that a new imperial
city would arise there. Three days later he laid its foundation stones.

The announcement was received with excitement, surprise, commendation,
but also with criticism which has not yet died away. It was beyond
question a bold step, inspired by that rare thing in policy,
imagination. It linked the record of the British Raj with another famous
page in India's history. It was grateful to the Mohammedan section of
the people. The new seat was in the heart of India, and not in the
eastern corner, and so had certain political and strategic advantages.
But it was a slight to Bengal, though she had received compensation,
and it involved a vast expenditure by a not over-rich land. The most
serious criticism was that made at home by ex-Viceroys like Lord Curzon
and Lord Minto, that its direct association with the King-Emperor's
visit put upon the Sovereign the responsibility for a scheme which at
the best involved what Burke called "great varieties of untried being."
Its true justification was as a symbolic act. If India was about to
enter upon a new course it was well that there should be a dramatic
departure from the tradition of John Company and a return to what had
been the glory of an earlier Empire.


  II

The King came back in February to a greyer but not more peaceful scene.
I have called the years 1912 and 1913 the restless years, and in the
retrospect they seem a period of continuous effervescence and ferment.
Even at the time one was conscious of walking on unsubstantial ground.
Behind all the self-confidence of prosperity there was a sense of
impermanence, as if good things would not last, and black clouds were
banking beyond the horizon. At home there was constant agitation, but
not, as in the past, as part of a coherent and rational plan. Most of
the clamour was apt to be episodic and unrelated, demanding specific
things without troubling about what in the long run the effect might be.
It seemed to be rather evidence of short tempers and jangled nerves than
of serious purpose.

The difficulties with Labour were a case in point. The Government had
done much to put the trade unions in a privileged position, and had
overridden certain ancient common law principles for the purpose. On the
day that the Lords passed the Parliament Bill the House of Commons
decided upon the payment of members, a step admittedly taken in the
interest of Labour. But Labour was not content, and presently the
Government found itself compelled to depart from the old custom of
letting the parties in an industrial dispute fight it out between
themselves. People had been slow to realise the change in the temper of
British Labour which had been coming in the previous decade. The cheap
press had informed the working man of many things about which he had
once been ignorant. He understood as never before the huge profits which
capital was earning, and naturally desired a larger share. The Liberal
victory in 1906 had excited his hopes. The bold experiments in social
reform of the new Government had whetted his appetite. He had come to
realise not only his needs and his rights, but his strength in
combination. In every great industry there was a grumbling
discontent--in the railways, in the cotton mills, among seamen and
dockers and transport workers, above all in the coal mines. Strikes
broke out like jets of steam from volcanic soil, and, however trivial
the professed cause, they showed an ugly tendency to extend both their
area and their purpose. The sympathetic strike was becoming more than an
example of human _camaraderie_; it was proof now of the solidarity in
purpose and spirit of great masses of men.

In the hot summer of 1911, at the height of the Agadir crisis, there had
been a railway strike after twenty-four hours notice, a strike of both
skilled and unskilled employees, for the Amalgamated Society and the
Engineers and Firemen were acting along with the General Railway
Workers. A strike was now a matter not of minor tactics but of grand
strategy. This one was soon settled by the promise of a special
commission of inquiry. But in March 1912 came something more serious, a
miners' strike for a national minimum wage, which, beginning in Wales,
brought out more than a million men in the different coalfields. This
was a new and disquieting thing, a nation-wide strike in a key industry,
which if it continued might dislocate the whole of the country's life.
The Government, which might have been content to keep the ring in a
local or sectional dispute, was compelled to interfere. Within a week it
passed through both Houses a bill, which admitted the principle of a
minimum wage and provided local machinery for fixing it, and the miners,
not without difficulty, were brought back to work by the middle of
April, having secured the larger part of their demands. Mr. Asquith,
called to a novel task, had met it in a way which, he was satisfied, did
not conflict with the Liberal creed. To fix a wage by act of Parliament
would be an impossible paternalism, but it was another thing to provide
the apparatus for fixing it by local and expert knowledge.

Yet no ingenuity could disguise the boldness of the innovation, and no
optimism could blind thinking men to the dangerous pass to which the
industrial world was hastening. Trade unions were becoming a power which
might soon dictate harshly to the nation. There was theory behind it,
the dogmas of syndicalism and Marxian socialism, and sober Englishmen
were beginning to talk a strange jargon, but to the ordinary trade
unionist doctrine had little to do with it. The plain fact was that he
was becoming conscious of his strength, and resolute to use that
strength to maintain what he considered to be his rights. He was
beginning to see possibilities in direct action, for, if that caused not
only loss of wealth to certain employers but a paralysis of the national
life, then he could talk with any Government in the gate.

If Labour was becoming self-conscious, so was Capital. Alarmed by the
Government's social experiments and still more by the Government's
taxation, capital was tending to draw together its forces and to prepare
for a pitched battle. There were many employers who, like Lord Devonport
in the strike of the transport workers against the Port of London
Authority in 1912, regarded all attempts at conciliation as futile, and
desired to fight it out. Since Labour was inclined to be truculent in
its demands, Capital followed suit in its answers. There was a good deal
of futile talk of "smashing" the workers' organisations before they had
become too powerful, and in every dispute there appeared a new
intransigence and bitterness. In a time of perfect peace industry seemed
to be massing for a conflict, and already the metaphors of war were
freely used.

Side by side with this class war had appeared the beginnings of a sex
war. The illogical exclusion of women from votes had long been the
subject of a decorous agitation which had effected nothing. Private
members' bills on the subject were respectfully discussed, and
ruthlessly shelved. Now the advocates of women's suffrage took to
militant methods, and to their unanswerable dialectic added an attempt
to make unworkable the government machine in which they had no part.
These years furnished a spectacle of both heroism and folly, which, if
it did not persuade an unsympathetic Cabinet, went far to make its life
unbearable. No political meeting, no occasion of public ceremonial, was
safe from the Suffragists' interruptions, often farcical, but sometimes
tragic. The cause found willing martyrs, and the hunger strikes of
imprisoned women gave the Home Secretary an insoluble problem.

There has rarely been a more devoted body of agitators, and those who
represented them as mainly neurotics and degenerates were far from the
mark. The general emancipation of the sex and its admission to the
universities and the professions had brought to the suffrage cause women
of great ability and high attainments. Moreover, as the conflict
continued, a curious thing happened; many women, who either detested
militancy or cared nothing for the question, found themselves insensibly
drawn by a kind of sex loyalty into sympathy. The result was the same as
in industry; great bodies of human beings were slowly massed into
opposition. At the time it seemed a terrible thing, but it had its value
for the future. Who shall say that the discipline of the labour
struggles did not do something to equip the British soldier for the
field of battle, and the suffrage crusade train in self-reliance the
many thousands of women who wrought so nobly in the War?

There was as little peace in Parliament as in the country. Mr. Lloyd
George had indeed during the Conference of 1911 been in favour of a
patriotic coalition Ministry, from which, if it would increase its
usefulness, he was willing to be excluded. But with the breakdown of the
Conference, party spirit revived in all its fury. In November of that
year, Mr. Balfour, whose detachment had drawn much criticism from his
followers, resigned the Conservative leadership, and was succeeded by
Mr. Bonar Law, a middle-aged business man, who had never held Cabinet
office. The change was not likely to increase the amenities of debate,
for Mr. Bonar Law had none of Mr. Balfour's urbanity, and on the major
issue of Irish Home Rule he had the passionate convictions of a Scots
Covenanter.

Home Rule was not the only anxiety of harassed Ministers. A bill to
disestablish the Welsh Church, an old Liberal promise, was introduced in
April 1912, and excited impassioned controversy and dismal forebodings;
forebodings happily to be falsified by events, for the disestablished
Church in Wales, under wise leadership, was to enter upon a fresh youth.
The Insurance Act did not come into effect without many anxious moments
for its projectors. In order to get the benefit of the Parliament Act
for its measures the Government was compelled to work the House of
Commons hard, and Parliament sat continuously from February 14th 1912 to
March 7th 1913, with only two months of a summer recess. The Opposition,
with the Lords now in shackles and the Commons dragooned under a strict
time-table, had some reason to complain that representative Government
had become a farce, and that Parliament existed only to register the
decrees of an autocratic Cabinet. There was a hair-trigger to the temper
of both sides, and explosions and disorderly scenes were sadly frequent.

Nothing revealed the new bitterness in politics so clearly as the
Marconi case, which in the autumn of 1912 blew up with the suddenness of
a desert sandstorm. The Government were engaged in contracting with the
Marconi Company for the creation of a chain of wireless stations. There
was a rumour that Ministers had been dealing in Marconi shares, and it
required a libel action against a French newspaper to make it clear that
there had been no such speculation. What came out, however, was that
three Ministers, the Attorney-General, the Chancellor of the Exchequer
and the Chief Whip, had received private information which encouraged
them to invest in the American Marconi Company, a corporation which had
no connection with the English one. The source of this information was
the managing director of the English company. These Ministers,
therefore, by accepting a tip from its manager, had put themselves under
an obligation to a company which had with their Government a contract
not yet settled, and still liable to be reviewed by two of the Ministers
in their official capacity. The rumours grew so fierce that Mr. Asquith
was compelled to appoint a committee to inquire both into the
desirability of the contract and the conduct of the three Ministers. The
committee reported in June 1913, and on the personal question announced
that "all the Ministers concerned have acted throughout in the sincere
belief that there was nothing in their action which would in any way
conflict with their duty as Ministers of the Crown." An Opposition
motion in the House, condemning the want of frankness of the three, was
easily defeated, and Mr. Asquith, in summing up, acquitted his
colleagues of having infringed any "rules of obligation," but considered
that they had not fully observed the "rules of prudence"--which was
indeed the common sense of the matter.

This "wretched subject," as Mr. Balfour called it, is only worthy of
mention as an example of a change in the standards both of controversy
and of conduct. It was obvious that there had been no corruption, but
equally obvious that there had been indiscretion. Yet the Opposition in
the press and on the platform talked as if Britain were back in the
worst days of the eighteenth century, and, more excusably, made play
with the new order of the Little Brothers of the Rich, the spectacle of
Ministers who had made a speciality of attacks upon idle wealth suddenly
appearing among the candidates for that status. The Government's
supporters were equally extreme, declaring that there had been not only
no corrupt motive, but no improper conduct, and one egregious newspaper
announced that Mr. Lloyd George's behaviour had in some mysterious way
"sweetened and ennobled public life." Some members of the Liberal party
were gravely shocked by the whole business, and the gloss of earnest
piety, with which Mr. Gladstone had once endowed their creed, was now
patchy and tarnished. But to the great majority of the people it seemed
a storm in a tea-cup--which was in itself a proof that private and
public standards had declined. Fifty years before the Ministers
concerned, however innocent their motives, would have found their
careers at an end. Men had forgotten the words of Halifax the Trimmer:
"An honest man must lose so many occasions of getting that the world
will scarcely allow him the character of an able one."


  III

The irritation caused by the new taxes and the insurance scheme, and the
impotent bitterness aroused by the Parliament Act, came to a head in
April 1912, when Mr. Asquith introduced an Irish Home Rule Bill on Mr.
Gladstone's model. It differed from its predecessor in having more of a
federal colour, being according to the Prime Minister only the first
step in a comprehensive system of devolution for the whole United
Kingdom. During the drafting of the Bill there was some talk of
excluding the Protestant counties of Ulster for a certain number of
years, but it was finally decided to omit this provision and to keep it
as an ultimate bargaining counter. The measure was hotly debated for the
better part of a year and did not pass its third reading till January
16th 1913. A fortnight later it was rejected by the Lords.

At first the line of the Conservative party was opposition to Home Rule
of any kind for any part of Ireland. On this all sections of the party
had always been agreed, and that summer took place the final fusion of
the Conservative and Unionist wings. But there was an increasing number
of federalists in its ranks, and had the Irish question been made part
of a reasoned scheme of devolution there might well have been a split.
Many of the younger men recognised the cumbrousness of the existing
machine of government, and the need, while there was still the chance,
of satisfying Catholic Ireland, the more so as it was clear that the new
generation of Irishmen might soon fret under the old Nationalist
leadership and follow darker counsels. The reason why the Cabinet, most
of them federalists, did not attempt the larger scheme was the same as
that which prevented them from essaying the reform of the House of
Lords--the matter was too difficult and their time was too short.

But one fact kept the Opposition united, and overrode all the other
criticisms of an ill-considered and ill-drafted measure. This was the
whole-hearted opposition of Protestant Ulster. If Ulster's exclusion
from the Bill would be resented by the Nationalists, it was blindingly
clear that her inclusion would be stoutly resisted by Ulster. In
September 1912 the Ulster Unionists took time by the forelock, and began
to recruit an Ulster Volunteer Force. That same month a solemn Covenant
was signed by hundreds of thousands, pledging the signatories never to
recognise a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin. Of this agitation the leader
was Sir Edward Carson, formerly a law officer of the Crown. The
Government were invited, and declined, to prosecute him for high
treason, to which he would cheerfully have pleaded guilty. In February
1913 Mr. Churchill went to Belfast and could only speak under military
protection. Civil war was apparently imminent so soon as the Parliament
Act made the new measure law. Mr. Asquith might preach sweet
reasonableness, and point out that it was absurd for a minority to
dictate to a majority "upon an apprehension that at some future date
they might be injured." The taunt fell on deaf ears, both Ulster and
British. "I can imagine," Mr. Bonar Law declared, "no length of
resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to
support her."

The roots of Ulster's suspicion, part racial and part religious, lay
deep in history. That suspicion was beyond the reach of argument, since
it was intertwined with the soul of a people who were perfectly ready to
suffer for their convictions. They would not be put in subjection to
another race, which they distrusted as Cromwell had distrusted it, and
to a Church which they feared as Cromwell had feared it. If they were to
be driven out of their birthright of British citizenship it would only
be at the bayonet's point. There could be no question about the grim
reality of this resolve, and it was not confined to Ulster. I can
remember as a young man, then nursing my first constituency in Scotland,
feeling more deeply on the matter than I had ever felt in my life before
about a public question. In the Scottish Lowlands there were thousands
of signatories of the Ulster Covenant, and many a man there spent his
last pre-War Sunday in the study of large-scale maps of County Tyrone.
Now, if a serious and law-abiding people decide that a certain policy is
so subversive of their principles and so fatal to their future that it
must be met by armed revolution, it is usual for a democratic Government
to call a halt and find some other way. But if the Government in its
turn concludes that such resistance is factious and unreasonable and
must be crushed, then it would appear to be its business to arrest the
ringleaders and quell the movement. Mr. Asquith's Government did
neither. It allowed Ulster to raise and train an efficient army, and it
went on with its Home Rule Bill--which was to make the worst of both
worlds.

The Opposition could set out a damaging case. This was not the honest
attempt at constitutional reform on the lines of devolution, the need of
which it was hard to gainsay. It was an ancient Liberal scheme, in which
till the year before Liberals seemed to have lost interest. It had been
revived only as part of the Budget bargain. It had never been directly
put before the electorate, for the last election had been fought on the
House of Lords question with echoes of the Budget. It could not be
maintained that Britain as a whole had spoken with a clear voice, and
yet it was for this antique relic, most inadequately sanctioned, that
the Government proposed to run the risk of civil war.

[Illustration: _Photo: W. and D. Downey_

Their Majesties the King and Queen]

Ministers could only reply that the deferring of Ireland's hopes would
not lead to peace, but they were conscious of the extreme difficulty of
the situation, and all the year 1913 was spent in private efforts to
negotiate. Unhappily both sides had begun by stating their case so
intransigently that compromise was difficult. The King laboured to bring
them together; in the early autumn Lord Curzon and Mr. Bonar Law were at
Balmoral, and later the Prime Minister had conversations with the latter
and with Mr. John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson. Mr. Redmond saw great
difficulties in the exclusion of Ulster, but he was prepared to give her
local autonomy and privileged representation in the new Irish
Parliament. Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law were determined upon
exclusion at the start, at any rate, of the four north-east counties as
well as Tyrone and Fermanagh. To this Mr. Redmond at first would not
agree, but before the end of the year he was willing to allow the
Protestant Ulster counties to exclude themselves by plebiscite for a
term of years. Sir Edward Carson, who on the matter was at once shrewder
and more conciliatory than Mr. Bonar Law, required that no inclusion
should be contemplated at any date except under some general scheme of
devolution sponsored by the Imperial Parliament. By the end of the year
something had been gained, in that the question was no longer a blank
negation of Home Rule in any form, but the exclusion from the scheme of
Ulster or some part of it permanently or for a time. The atmosphere was
clearer, and the outlook had at least a ray of hope.

The King had played a large part in these attempts at compromise, and
the narrowing of the question was largely his doing, for he had
patiently striven to present to each side the difficulties of the other.
He had cause to be anxious, for he saw looming before him a crisis far
graver than the Parliament Act. Correspondents everywhere were
appealing to him to use his royal power, and the leaders of the
Opposition were turning their eyes to the prerogative. Mr. Bonar Law
considered that the King had the right to dismiss his present Ministers
and force a dissolution so that the will of the nation could be
ascertained. Lord Lansdowne held that, since the Parliament Act had
destroyed the power of the Lords to compel an election, that power was
now vested only in the Crown, which could either force a dissolution or
decree a referendum. Mr. Balfour thought that the King had a right to
insist on an election in order to consult the country, and that the
country would appreciate such a course. This was also the view of
lawyers like Professor Dicey and Sir William Anson. Lord Rosebery, on
the other hand, believed that for the King to refuse his assent to the
Home Rule Bill, for which he had no personal responsibility, would be a
breach of constitutional practice.

Mr. Asquith's views were fully stated in a memorandum which he wrote
that September:

    A constitutional monarch . . . is entitled and bound to give his
    Ministers all relevant information which comes to him; to point
    out objections which seem to him valid against the course which
    they advise; to suggest (if he thinks fit) an alternative
    policy. . . . But in the end the Sovereign always acts upon the
    advice which Ministers, after full deliberation and (if need be)
    reconsideration, feel it their duty to offer. They give that
    advice well knowing that they can, and probably will, be called
    to account for it by Parliament.

After pointing out that the only departure from this rule for 130 years
had been the request by William IV for the resignation of Lord
Melbourne--a disastrous precedent which Queen Victoria had always
refused to follow--he continued:

    Nothing can be more important, in the best interests of the
    Crown and of the country, than that a practice, so long
    established and so well justified by experience, should remain
    unimpaired. It frees the occupant of the Throne from all
    personal responsibility for the acts of the Executive and the
    Legislature. . . . If . . . the king were to intervene on one
    side, or in one case--which he could only do by dismissing
    Ministers in _de facto_ possession of a parliamentary
    majority--he would be expected to do the same on another
    occasion and perhaps for the other side. Every Act of Parliament
    of the first order of importance, and only passed after acute
    controversy, would be regarded as bearing the personal
    _imprimatur_ of the Sovereign. He would, whether he wished it or
    not, be dragged into the arena of party politics.

Words could not express more clearly the normal constitutional practice
of Britain. But the Prime Minister's statement did not exhaust the
question. It was conceivable that a Government, placed in power by an
election on a different issue, might attempt some measure which offended
the great majority of the nation. What if such a measure were certain to
lead to civil war? Edmund Burke had written: "I see no other way but the
interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall
appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation,
that these representatives are going to overleap the fences of the law
and establish an arbitrary power." Might it not be the duty of the King,
as the trustee of the people, in such a desperate case to use the
prerogative and permit this popular interposition? Mr. Balfour thought
so, and he was a sober councillor with a nice perception of
constitutional points. The personal responsibility would be terrible,
the risk to the prestige of the Throne incalculable, but might it not be
right to face that risk rather than the calamity of a mutinous army and
a war between citizens? It was a graver problem than any sovereign had
had to face for two hundred years. Small wonder that the King was
assiduous in his labours for peace.


  IV

During 1912 and 1913 the other main concern of Ministers, the situation
abroad, became more tangled and menacing than ever. Italy fought Turkey
over Tripoli; Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro allied themselves
against a crumbling Turkey and won a victory: the conquerors quarrelled
over the division of the loot, the other allies flew at Bulgaria's
throat, and Bulgaria was left angry and despoiled. The settlement after
these Balkan wars was, in Sir Edward Grey's words, "not one of justice
but of force," and it left a store of troubles for the future. The
British Foreign Minister did his best to prevent the mischief spreading
by calling a conference of the Ambassadors of the Powers, which sat in
London from December 1912 to August 1913. The immediate danger was
averted, but the Treaty of Bucharest left an open wound in south-eastern
Europe. Austria's hopes of a port in the gean had received a final
blow, and a new and formidable Slav Power now stood in the way of
Germany's _Drang nach Osten_, with behind it Russia, the protector of
the Slav peoples.

The situation drew Germany, still sore over Morocco, to reflect most
seriously upon her position. She saw the various avenues to world-power,
on which she had formed her plans, rapidly closing up. The Near East
might soon be shut by the new Slav renaissance; the Far East was too
dangerous with Japan at its door; South America was barred to her
adventures by the United States, and most of the rest of the world by
Britain. Her navy had come to maturity--it now stood second in the
world--and was eager to win laurels. She was already the greatest
military Power on earth. She saw the Triple Entente solidifying into an
alliance, an alliance accompanied by a steady growth of sympathy and
good will. She was afraid of Britain's naval strength and the twenty
million addition to Britain's naval estimates; to her, as a World Power,
it seemed intolerable that any single nation should be so omnipotent at
sea. She did not appreciate the necessities of an island, administering
a world-wide Empire, and read ambition into schemes based only on
administrative needs and the desire for a decent security. To Germany it
appeared that her neighbours sought to isolate her, to ring her round
with hostile alliances and then overwhelm her with the weight of an
armed coalition. Her forward policy, entered upon under the impulse of
national self-confidence, began now to quicken its pace under the spur
of baseless but not wholly unnatural fears.

Early in 1912 Lord Haldane, who had left the War Office for the
Woolsack, paid a private visit to Berlin at the request of Sir Edward
Grey. He met the Emperor, the Imperial Chancellor, Admiral von Tirpitz
and others, and went fully into the whole international situation and
all possible matters of dispute. Throughout his difficult task he played
the part of a conciliatory but faithful British envoy, jealous alike for
his country's interests and his country's honour. He stood out stiffly
against Tirpitz for a modification of the German naval programme as a
guarantee of good faith. He was scrupulously loyal to Britain's
unwritten obligations to France, and kept in close touch with M. Jules
Cambon, the French ambassador. A provisional agreement was reached on
many points, but on two there could be no settlement. Germany was
resolute to proceed with her new naval programme, and the magnitude of
the increases provided for made it impossible for Britain to do
otherwise than lay down two ships to her one. On that matter our
attitude could not be compromise, but watchful competition. Again,
Germany insisted, as the basis for an understanding, upon a formula of
Britain's unconditional neutrality in the event of a European War, to
which Britain could not assent without a betrayal of France. The
conference ended with expressions of friendship, but without much
practical result, though undoubtedly it did something to clear the air.

Lord Haldane returned home with a divided mind. There were many things
to disquiet him--the personality of Tirpitz, the spirit of the General
Staff, the character of the latest German naval law; above all, the
unconditional neutrality formula. On the other hand, he believed that
the Emperor and his civilian Ministers sincerely desired peace in their
then mood, and there is reason to think that in the spring of 1912 this
was true. Lord Haldane and his colleagues came to a definite conclusion
as to their immediate policy. They must avoid any pinpricks, and any
blowing of warning trumpets in Britain, for these would be misconstrued
in Germany, and would strengthen the hands of those who clamoured for
war. By judicious quiescence on their part the Imperial Faustus might be
prevented from making a bargain with the devil. Such a decision was
acceptable to a Government perplexed and a little weary. It was
acceptable to the Prime Minister, in whose philosophy of life the
doctrine of a "friendly Universe" held a conspicuous place, and who
considered that most political questions, if left alone, would settle
themselves. It was acceptable to Sir Edward Grey, whose success as a
conciliator had inclined him to the belief that patience and good humour
would tide over the worst times. On the information then at their
disposal the decision was natural and right.

But, so far as we can read the dark riddle of these years in Germany, in
1913 there came a change of mood, which British Ministers did not
diagnose. Their minds were monopolised by their difficulties at home,
and the whole political atmosphere prevented any close attention to the
creeping shadows and broken lights of the European situation. That year
saw the completion of the first quarter-century of the Emperor's reign,
and the celebrations, with their awakening of historic memories, sent a
sudden surge of pride through the German people. The time had come to
make a settlement with rivals not by the slow methods of diplomacy, but
by the summary power of the sword. It was the year of the new German
army law, and every military chief, from the younger Moltke downward,
was busy with arrogant defiances to the world. As early as April the
French Government received a secret report setting forth the purpose for
which the swollen army of Germany was to be used at the appropriate
moment. In November the Emperor told the King of the Belgians at Potsdam
that he looked upon war with France as inevitable and close at hand.
About the same time M. Jules Cambon warned his Government that the
balance had now clearly swung to the side of the war party, and that the
Emperor would not resist them. Fear of Russia was perhaps the chief
motive; the Austrian Conrad von Hoetzendorff had been pressing the need
for the "great solution" on the German Staff, and the Emperor was a
convert to an "inevitable war between East and West."

No exact date can be fixed for this momentous change. It was no doubt a
gradual process, at first a subtle altering of outlook and perspective
which slowly drew to a conscious policy. So far as we can judge the
Emperor's mind, he did not then conceive of the coming conflict as a
world conflagration; Britain would stand out--on that point Germany,
plentifully supplied with the reports of secret agents, was positive;
France would speedily be broken; after some sullen fighting in the East
the Slav peril would be checked; Germany would emerge as indisputably
the greatest of the Powers, heavy indemnities would pay her bills, and
her mailed diplomacy would not be denied in future conclaves of the
peoples.

It was the decision primarily of the army and navy chiefs, whose
influence with Emperor and nation far outweighed that of the civilian
ministers. But there were many elements in the new Germany on which it
could count for support. There was the Prussian squirearchy which had
made the army; there were the new kings of trade whom success had
smitten with megalomania; there were the theorists who from Treitschke
had learned a strange doctrine of history and from Nietzsche a perverted
philosophy of life. There was no great dmonic figure who imposed his
creed upon the people; the preceptors were for the most part excited
mediocrities; but there was deadly peril in the conjunction of a
flamboyant Emperor ambitious of ranking with the makers of history, an
army and a navy burning to prove their prowess to the world, an
aristocracy intolerant of all democratic ideals, rulers of industry at
once exultant and nervous, popular teachers preaching a gospel of race
arrogance, and throughout the nation a vague half-mystical striving
towards a new destiny.

The British Government, faced with a risk of war which was not yet a
certainty, were bound to take no steps to insure that certainty. The
most that can be said in criticism of them is that too many sedatives
were applied to the national mind. For example, Lord Roberts's scheme
for national training, impossible as it may have been, was repelled by
the ordinary Government apologist with arguments that were foolish
except on the assumption that the age of Saturn had returned. One thing,
however, was efficiently done. The Haldane regime at the War office had
produced an army as perfect for its size as any in the world; the latest
German navy bill forced Britain proportionately to expand and equip her
Fleet. That Fleet, by an arrangement with France, was concentrated in
home waters, and the new maritime front was the North Sea. There was a
great naval assembly in the spring of 1912 at Portland, when for four
days the King abode among his sailors. Mr. Churchill, whose post was now
the most vital in the Government, made the Admiralty yacht his office
and his home.

The increased naval estimates for 1914 were strongly opposed by a
section of the Cabinet, and for a month it seemed as if the First Lord
must resign. Even for this, our traditional first line of defence, it
was hard to get proper attention, since their opponents had always made
a specialty of it, and in the embittered state of party feeling to
appear to agree with the Opposition seemed to many of the Government
followers a betrayal of principles. Yet all the time the weightier
members of the Cabinet had in their hearts the knowledge that behind the
crudities of their opponents' criticism there was much deadly truth, and
that at any moment what they labelled as scaremongering might be
terribly justified as foresight. Mr. Lloyd George, "forgetting the
bright speed he bore" at the Mansion House in the Agadir crisis, joined
the ranks of the prophets of smooth things. On January 3rd 1914, in a
press interview, he deplored the folly of outlay on armaments, with
special reference to naval expenditure, praised the unaggressive temper
of Germany, declared that the prospects of the world never had been more
peaceful, and implored Liberalism not to betray its trust.


  V

After his return from India the King was at the disposal of his subjects
for those ceremonial duties traditionally associated with the Throne.
Buckingham Palace, once the dingiest object in London, had its faade
reconstructed and no longer shamed the dignity of St. James's Park.
There were a few big functions, like the Windsor garden party in the
summer of 1912, and the State banquet to President Poincar in June
1913, when the King spoke eloquently of "l'esprit de confiance et de
franchise mutuelles avec laquel la France et la Grande-Bretagne ont
abord ces divers problmes." In May 1913 their Majesties visited
Berlin, where they were well received, and the King had luncheon with
the officers corps of the dragoon regiment which bore Queen Victoria's
name and of which he was colonel-in-chief. But for the most part his
work lay in getting into touch with the varied activities of his people.
He visited ancient schools and new universities; he had a long tour in
South Wales, where he laid the foundation stone of the new National
Museum of Wales at Cardiff; he saw something of the mining areas, both
north and south; he paid a week's visit to Lancashire, after a tour of
the Potteries; he laid the foundation stone of the new London County
Hall. He had his father's concern for the work of the great
municipalities and especially for their housing schemes. In these
tasks--a new form of royal progress--he gained an insight into aspects
of the nation's life to which few politicians attain. He had a quick and
catholic interest in all human activities, he made friends readily, and,
having a tenacious memory, he did not forget what he heard and saw.

For the rest, the life of the Court was a peaceful enclave to which the
eyes of his subjects could turn with comfort. It was simple and
homelike and very close to their own. In 1912 the Prince of Wales
entered Magdalen College like any other undergraduate, very different
from his grandfather's secluded and pedestalled university career. The
King shared fully in the interests and tastes of the ordinary man. His
chief relaxation was shooting; he was one of the two or three best shots
in England--the first monarch since Charles II who had been in the first
rank as a practitioner of a field sport. It was a Court without
courtiers. The King had no favourites, no inner circle of the
privileged, but he had a thousand attached friends.

There was need of some such cool and orderly background in England, for
in these years there was a fevered spirit abroad. The
internal-combustion engine had speeded up the pace of life. The old
horse-bus had disappeared from the streets, and motor-cars or
motor-bicycles were now common in every class. London had become notably
noisier and less attractive to quiet people. The first stages had been
won in the conquest of the air, and in 1913 M. Pgoud was "looping the
loop" and giving the world a new notion of what air stability meant. The
defence services had to adjust their ideas; motors were beginning to
replace horse-transport in the army, the immense importance of the
submarine was being slowly understood, and in the beginning of 1912
Lord Fisher was writing to Mr. Churchill, "For God's sake trample on and
stamp out protected Cruisers and hurry up Aviation." In society the
financier was more popular than he deserved to be, and the parade of
luxury had increased and the craze for quickly-won wealth. There was
everywhere a kind of comfortless excitement, a vulgarity of outlook, a
coarsening of fibre, and what looked to old-fashioned people like a
weakening of stamina. The Russian ballet had popularised new types of
dancing, and from America came rag-time music, and from outlandish
places various uncouth forms of motion. In the ball-room a novel type of
young man appeared, with lank hair plastered back from a lean brow. I
remember in 1913 a French visitor calling my attention to them, and
quoting Falstaff's "cankers of a calm world and a long peace."

It was a world formally at peace but with no ease, a world without
strong faiths or inspirations, confident, but with its confidence often
nervously cracking. Now and then something happened to "tease us out of
thought." The sinking of the _Titanic_ in April 1912 showed that Nature,
which we thought we had shackled, could turn in her bonds and make sport
of us. And the news which came to England early next year of the death
of Captain Scott and his comrades in the Antarctic wastes, a failure
more glorious than any victory, reminded us, almost with a shock, of
that virtue which is the chief end of man.




  CHAPTER IV

  DESCENSUS AVERNI


The first seven months of 1914 saw the British nation living like some
prosperous settlement on the glacis of a volcano--a merry and full life
with a background of creeping fears. One part of the volcanic skirts was
already shaken with tremors, and to this anxious eyes were turned when a
preoccupied people had leisure for thought. But another part was in the
mind only of the few. This had threatened danger in the past, but it was
for the moment quiescent, and only an occasional muttering told of the
hidden fires. But these few understood only too well how thin was the
crust, and how at any moment it might be rent by chaos and death.


  I

The immediate preoccupation was Ireland. Ulster had organised a
provisional Government, to come into force if the Home Rule Bill became
law, and a volunteer army to resist coercion. Arms were being imported,
and men were drilling in every parish. This challenge could not be
ignored by the Nationalists, and a similar activity was soon afoot in
Dublin. Mr. Redmond believed that the best policy was to let Ulster
alone, in the hope that the trouble would blow over, for he feared that
any coercion of the north would wake in the south new forces of
disorder, of whose power he was already cognisant and which he knew that
he could not control. The British Government accepted his advice the
more readily as the discussions of the previous year had shown them that
the Ulster leader was no irresponsible rebel.

Sir Edward Carson, himself not an Ulsterman, had begun his crusade in
the hope that Ulster's resistance would kill Home Rule for the whole
island. He had been an impenitent die-hard on the House of Lords
question, and would have accepted the creation of new peers, because he
believed that it might lead to a reformed Upper House, and that any such
chamber would make the Government's Home Rule scheme impossible. His
policy was for Ireland as a whole, not for a province. But as the months
passed he became convinced that Ulster's problem must be taken as a
thing by itself, and that the best tactics were to insist upon her
exclusion from the Bill. On this point the Cabinet had shown itself
willing to treat, and the dispute was now a question of details. He was
proving himself much less intransigent, as he was much less rhetorical,
than the non-Irish Conservative leaders, for he realised, as few
Ministers realised, that our decorous British democracy had elements in
it of peril and surprise, and that sleeping dogs were being roused which
it was better to let lie.

But in the early spring one of these dogs stirred uneasily. If no
agreement was reached and Ulster in fact rebelled, coercion might
follow, as it had followed half a century before in the American Civil
War. The instrument of such coercion must be the British Army. What was
likely to be the temper of that Army? There was already acute anxiety
among many officers, and it was decided--wisely enough--that, if the
Army had to be used against the Ulster volunteers, officers with an
Ulster domicile should be excused service without prejudice to their
professional careers. Now began a series of disastrous blunders. It was
obviously necessary to take steps to protect stores and munitions in the
disaffected areas, and the measures adopted for the purpose were
needlessly inflammatory. Mr. Churchill arranged that the forthcoming
practice of one of the battle squadrons should take place off the island
of Arran, which is not very far from Belfast Lough. Wild rumours reached
the House of Commons, and on March 19th, in the debate on a vote of
censure, Sir Edward Carson declared that the Government were mobilising
troops for coercion, and walked out of the House; while Mr. Bonar Law
laid down the doctrine that in a case of mere disorder the Army must
obey, but that in a civil war soldiers were citizens like other people.
Next day that happened at the Curragh which put a match to the tinder.

Sir Arthur Paget, the Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, summoned his
officers and assured them that permission would be given in certain
contingencies for officers domiciled in Ulster to "disappear," a
concession already familiar in the Indian Army. But he went further; he
told the rest that, if they were not willing to carry out any duties
assigned to them, they must say so at once and be dismissed. The natural
assumption was that officers were being ordered to express their views
on Government policy, and to declare their willingness to serve against
Ulster or to leave the service. Brigadier-General Hubert Gough and
fifty-seven of his colleagues of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade accepted their
dismissal.

The fat was now fairly in the fire. There was a cry of mutiny among the
Government followers, but there could be no mutiny in men accepting one
of the alternatives put before them by their superiors. The Cabinet had
been imperfectly advised about the whole business, and so great was the
muddle that the King had not been informed at all. General Gough and the
others were summoned to London and the situation explained to them,
after which they returned to their duties. A Cabinet memorandum, issued
later as an Army order, laid it down that "no officer or soldier should
in future be questioned by his superior officer as to the attitude he
will adopt, or as to his action, in the event of his being required to
obey orders dependent on future or hypothetical contingencies," and that
"an officer or soldier is forbidden in future to ask for assurances as
to orders which he may be required to obey." The Prime Minister took his
stand on the principle laid down by the elder Pitt during the Jacobite
Rising of 1745. "The right of inquiring what measures may conduce to the
advantage and security of the public belongs not to the Army but to this
House. . . . Our armies have no better right to determine for themselves
than any other body of men, nor are we to suffer them to prescribe laws
to the legislature, or to govern those by whose authority they subsist."

But the chapter of blunders was not ended. Colonel Seely, the Secretary
of State for War, in forwarding this memorandum to General Gough, added
two paragraphs on his own account, one of which declared that the
Government had no intention of using the forces of the Crown "to crush
political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill,"
and the addendum was initialled by Sir John French, the Chief of the
Imperial General Staff, and by the Adjutant-General. This, in Liberal,
Labour and Nationalist eyes, was selling the pass with a vengeance.
Colonel Seely and the two soldiers resigned, and Mr. Asquith himself
took on the War Office. The debates in the Commons during March were
bitter and confused, the Prime Minister repeating his refusal to permit
the entrance of "hypothetical contingencies" into a soldier's duties,
and Labour members pointing out gleefully what an excellent precedent it
all afforded for the next industrial dispute. The hidden fires were
beginning to crackle.

They crackled more noisily in the following weeks. At the end of April
there was a great gun-running on the Ulster coast, when, with the
assistance of 12,000 men, 25,000 rifles and 3,000,000 cartridges were
landed and distributed. Police proceedings were useless, for no jury
would convict. There was a violent scene in the House of Commons on May
21st, when the third reading of the Home Rule Bill was moved. After it
was carried Sir Edward Carson left for Belfast "to make arrangements for
the final scene." It was known that in southern Ireland there was
already a fighting force of 100,000 volunteers.

If it was a difficult time for Ministers, it was more difficult for the
King. He was head of the Army, and the Curragh incident had revealed to
him that the partition had worn thin between order and anarchy. He was
being urged from every side to intervene, to refuse the royal assent to
the Home Rule Bill, to appeal himself to the nation, to avert at any
cost civil war. Throughout the agitation he had kept a cool head, and
had been untiring in his efforts for peace. But few men have ever been
in a harder position, and there was pathos in his quotation, in a letter
to Mr. Asquith at the beginning of June, of a sentence from his
Coronation message: "Whatever perplexities or difficulties may lie
before me and my people, we shall all unite in facing them resolutely,
calmly, and with public spirit, confident that, under divine guidance,
the ultimate outcome may be to the common good."

He made one last effort to achieve this hope, and gladly acceded to the
Prime Minister's request that he should summon in his own name a
conference of the party-leaders at Buckingham Palace. Only two points of
controversy remained: the exact size of the excluded Ulster, and the
terms on which a future union with the rest of Ireland might be
effected. There were eight members of the Conference--the Prime Minister
and Mr. Lloyd George for the Government, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar
Law for the Opposition, Mr. Redmond and Mr. Dillon for the Nationalists,
and Sir Edward Carson and Captain Craig for Ulster. For the second time
in four years the King had called into council others besides his
official advisers. The Conference held only four sittings, and on July
24th its failure was announced to the world. Two days after there was a
big gun-running at Howth, near Dublin, which involved a conflict with
British regular troops. The Home Rule Bill must become law at once in
order to take advantage of the Parliament Act. When that moment arrived
it seemed that nothing but a miracle could prevent civil war.

A world earthquake was to forestall a local landslide. Would that
landslide have come if the greater shock had not intervened? I find it
hard to believe it. Both of the parties in the dispute had allowed
themselves to be manoeuvred into a position where concession was
difficult. But the ultimate core of difference had become ludicrously
small--a few parishes in County Tyrone, and certain provisions about the
future. It is true that most of the great contests of history have been
fought on fine points and narrow margins, but these points and margins
have been matters of principle, not of detail. Mr. Asquith's intention
was to pass concurrently with the Bill an amending measure, which would
allow the disputed counties to vote themselves in or out, and would drop
the proposal for Ulster's automatic inclusion under a Dublin Parliament
after a term of years. Moreover, he would have announced that after a
short winter session the Government would go to the country early in
1915.

It is difficult to believe that Sir Edward Carson, who was by far the
most powerful agent in the matter, would have allowed things to proceed
to extremities. He had shown himself the most conciliatory of his party.
He was well aware that the success of his cause depended largely on how
it was regarded by the people of Britain. He was not forgetful of the
solemn appeal which the King had made when he summoned the Conference:

    We have in the past endeavoured to act as a civilising example
    to the world, and to me it is unthinkable, as it must be to you,
    that we should be brought to the brink of fratricidal strife
    upon issues apparently so capable of adjustment as those you are
    now asked to consider, if handled in a spirit of generous
    compromise.

Had there been no world war, it seems likely that, with the amending
Bill and the promise of an early dissolution, the change of feeling in
England and Scotland would have had a cooling effect on Ulster, and that
after the election in the beginning of 1915 a Conservative Government
would have come into office which would have removed her fears. How such
a Government would have placated southern Ireland is another question.


  II

On the afternoon of Friday, July 24th, a dispirited Cabinet was
considering the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace Conference, and the
kind of announcement that must be made to Parliament. At the end, just
as Ministers were rising to go back to the Chamber, Sir Edward Grey's
voice was heard with a special gravity in it. He was reading a document
which had just reached him from the Foreign Office. It was Austria's
Note to Serbia.

On the more perilous part of the volcano's skirts during the first half
of 1914 there had been a curious peace. In the principal continental
countries there was much military and naval activity and no decrease of
suspicion, but there were few untoward incidents. All suggestion of
limiting naval competition between Britain and Germany was, indeed,
received by the latter with scorn, and the mission of the American,
Colonel House, in May was no more successful than the mission of Lord
Haldane in 1912, or Mr. Churchill's proposed naval holiday in 1913. But,
apart from that, there seemed to be a better understanding between the
two countries, and most of the old matters of difference appeared to
have been settled. There was a German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, now
in London, who was widely popular and who made no secret of his desire
for friendship and peace. In spite of Ireland there was a more
optimistic feeling in Britain, aided by the Budget with its surplus of
nine millions, and the magnificent trade returns. The King had visited
Paris in April as an ordinary matter of etiquette, and the golden spring
weather and the warmth of his welcome had made the occasion seem a
festival of peace. . . . But Sir Edward Grey, who accompanied him, had
had odd premonitions. He observed that one of the soldiers riding beside
his carriage was not the ordinary robust cavalryman, but slender and
frail and with the sensitive face of a poet, and he realised with a
shock what conscription meant and the awful menace of war.

    *    *    *    *    *

On Sunday, June 28th, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were
murdered in the Bosnian town of Serajevo. The heir to the Austrian
throne was not a popular figure, a morose, silent man, oppressed with
the imminence of a fatal disease, whose one passion was for holocausts
of game at shooting-parties; and his federalist politics were anathema
to the Austrian governing classes. But he was an intimate of the German
Emperor, and a fortnight before, among the roses of Konopischt, they had
pledged their friendship. The crime that June morning of a printer's
devil and a schoolboy stripped off the diplomatic covering, and laid
bare certain iron facts to the eyes of the world.

This is not the place to trace the tangled skein of events, some of them
still uncertain, which brought about war. The Serajevo murder gave
Austria the chance, for which she had been waiting, of removing once and
for all the Slav menace. Her General Staff had long had an understanding
with the German Staff, which provided for co-operation in a war in which
the opponents were envisaged as Russia and France. Berlin encouraged her
in making demands on Serbia, which Serbia could not accept without
ceasing to be a nation, and this with full appreciation of the fact that
Russia could not stand aside. A dispatch from the German Ambassador in
Vienna was annotated by the German Emperor, "Now or never." At a meeting
at Potsdam on July 5th, a letter was read from the Emperor Franz Joseph,
and Germany promised Austria support in whatever course she pursued. In
Vienna Count Berchtold had his way, and the warnings of the far abler
Count Tisza were disregarded. With the cognisance of Germany an
impossible Note was presented to Belgrade, at a moment when there were
domestic troubles in each of the nations of the Triple Entente and their
diplomatic machines were out of gear. Serbia, having consulted Russia,
went to the extreme limit of complaisance, accepting all Austria's
demands, with two reservations, on which she asked for a reference to
the Hague Tribunal. But the Austrian Note was in the nature of a
rhetorical question: it did not expect an answer. Forty-five minutes
after Serbia's reply was received the Austrian Minister left Belgrade.
On July 28th Austria declared war.

The consequences that followed were as startling and inevitable as the
explosions which attend the firing of a powder train. Russia could not
look on unmoved, and on the 29th ordered a partial mobilisation.
Germany, determined on some kind of war, but anxious to limit it if
possible, and unwilling to drop the mask of reasonableness, made a
parade of peace-making. It is needless to trace the steps in these
clumsy manoeuvres which deceived nobody. The soldiers were in charge,
and there could be no going back. In Russia partial mobilisation was
followed by a general one; Germany mobilised in turn and sent Russia an
ultimatum; France was compelled to follow the example of her ally. By
the end of the month Austria was at war with Serbia, and Germany, France
and Russia were waiting to march. Mobilisation is the first step in a
campaign, and Germany from long preparation was in that game far ahead
of her rivals; she could afford to wait, for her well-oiled machine
moved fast. The question of the responsibility for the War will no doubt
be debated for many years, but certain facts stand out clear in the
mists of ingenious dialectic. Austria was the immediate cause, but the
spur behind her was Germany. As for personalities, Berchtold and Conrad
in Austria must bear the chief blame, and in Germany the army and navy
chiefs. The German civilian statesmen were negligible, and the Emperor a
bombastic echo of stronger men.

But it is with Britain that we are concerned. The burden in that last
week lay especially upon two men, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime
Minister, who was now also Secretary of State for War. Sir Edward Grey,
to whom the duty of first action fell, had two purposes--to persuade the
Powers concerned to come into conference, and to keep Britain's liberty
of ultimate decision uncompromised. There must be no risk of our
drifting blindly into war. He had three convictions: that a general
European war under modern conditions would be an unthinkable disaster;
that Germany, who controlled Austria, had the key of the situation;
that, if war came and France was involved, Britain dare not stand aside.

His first step was to approach Germany, France and Italy with a view to
calling a conference in London to mediate in the Austro-Serbian quarrel.
It was perhaps a blunder that Austria was not included in the
invitation. From Paris and Rome he received a cordial response, from
Berlin a flat refusal. He returned to the charge, and proposed that, if
the principle of mediation were accepted, Germany herself should suggest
the lines on which it should be conducted. On the 28th Bethmann-Hollweg,
the Imperial Chancellor, sent for the British Ambassador and told him
that a conference was impossible, since it would look like sitting in
judgment on sovereign Powers, but that he was anxious for peace, and was
advising Vienna to negotiate directly with Petrograd. Next day Sir
Edward Grey very seriously and courteously warned Prince Lichnowsky of
the dangerous road Germany was walking. "While [the situation] was
restricted to the countries actually involved, we had no thought of
interfering in it. But if Germany becomes involved in it, and then
France, its area might be so great that it would involve all European
interests; and I did not wish him to be misled by the friendly tone of
our conversations--which I hoped might continue--into thinking that we
should stand aside." It was on a report of this talk that the Emperor
scribbled: "The low scoundrel! genuinely English!"

On Thursday the 30th arrived Germany's bid for British neutrality. It
was the result of a council at Potsdam the night before. Provided
Britain remained neutral, Germany undertook to seek no territorial gains
at the expense of France, at any rate in Europe; and as for Belgium, "if
she did not side against Germany, her integrity would also be respected,
when the war was over." This meant that Germany had resolved upon war,
and it had an ominous hint of tampering with Belgium. Sir Edward Grey
replied in words that could not be misconstrued. He rejected utterly
the suggestion that Britain should bind herself to a disgraceful
neutrality. He appealed once more to Germany to work with him to
preserve the peace of Europe, and he concluded with the expression of a
hope for a future league of nations, which at the moment seemed a vague
academic notion, but which the terrors of war were one day to make a
reality.

During the next two days Germany disclosed her hand. The partial
mobilisation of Russia, which to Sir Edward Grey seemed a reasonable
defensive precaution, was treated by her as a hostile act. She offered
France neutrality on insulting terms. She proposed to Belgium a
commercial bargain for the right to use her territory, which Belgium
refused. For a moment it appeared that Austria was wavering, and Sir
Edward Grey saw an eleventh-hour chance of peace. But by midday on the
31st ultimatums had gone from Germany to both Russia and France;
henceforth the doings of Austria had no importance, for the conduct of
affairs had been taken into stronger hands.

On the morning of the 31st the British Cabinet met to consider M. Paul
Cambon's appeal for an assurance that Britain, if war came, would stand
by France's side. The reply was that it could not yet guarantee the
intervention of Britain, but must wait for the situation to develop. Sir
Edward Grey was uncertain of the attitude of his countrymen. Long
insensitiveness to foreign politics had unfitted British opinion to read
the signs now written large on the sky. Mr. Bonar Law was doubtful about
the views of the Conservative party, and high finance and the extreme
Radical press were at one in their determination to avoid war. The
Foreign Secretary was not less uncertain about his colleagues. There
were perhaps four other men in the Cabinet of his own way of thinking,
men who had been specially concerned with foreign or defence questions.
But the majority refused to admit the possibility of Britain being
involved--a perfectly honourable attitude on the facts before them. It
would have been a disgrace had there not been a peace party when the
situation was so uncertain. The enforced caution of Britain had no
effect on German policy. Had the news of a military alliance between
France and Britain been published that day Germany would not, and could
not, have swerved one hair's breadth from her plan.

That day the King received a message from the President of the French
Republic, who, while admitting that Britain was under no formal
obligation, appealed to her to declare herself on France's side as
offering the one chance of peace. That chance had already gone, but M.
Poincar's message is proof, if proof were needed, of the earnest desire
of France to avert war. The King, after consulting his Ministers,
replied on the following morning with the same answer as Sir Edward
Grey had already given to M. Cambon. There was still a faint hope of
peace, and till that had departed the pledge asked for could not be
given. But before many hours had passed that hope had vanished even from
the minds of the British Cabinet.

On Saturday, August 1st, came the German order for general mobilisation,
followed in the afternoon by France's. War between Germany and Russia
began that evening. The centre of interest now moved to Belgium. Sir
Edward Grey had asked the French and German governments for a promise
that they would respect Belgium's neutrality so long as no other Power
violated it. France gave the assurance gladly, but the German reply was
disquieting. She could not answer without "disclosing part of her plan
of campaign in the event of war ensuing"; besides, she considered that
Belgium had already committed certain hostile acts. It looked as if the
stage were being set for a new version of the fable of the Wolf and the
Lamb. With this news Sir Edward Grey attended a meeting of the Cabinet.
The situation was changing and some of the strongest
non-interventionists had begun to waver. Belgium was clearly threatened,
and the question of Belgium directly touched British interests and
British honour. It was resolved that Germany must be warned that here
lay a plain cause of strife, unless the required pledge were forthwith
given.

The week-end was such as no one then living had ever known. For so
widespread a sense of foundations destroyed and a world turned
topsy-turvy we must go back to the days of the French Revolution. In
Britain it was fortunately the season of the August Bank Holiday, and,
though the Bank rate had risen to ten per cent
., the chaos into which
markets were falling was not widely realised. But an air of great and
terrible things impending impressed the most casual spectator. Crowds
hung about telegraph offices and railway stations; men stood in the
streets in little groups; there was not much talking, but long spells of
tense silence. The country was uneasy. It dreaded war; it was beginning
to realise the immensity of the crisis; many feared, too, a
dishonourable and improvident peace.

In the broiling weather of Sunday, August 2nd, things marched fast in
Europe. Shortly after dawn German troops entered Luxembourg territory,
and about the same time German cavalry patrols crossed the Alsace border
and had a brush with French pickets. That evening Germany presented her
ultimatum to Belgium, demanding a passage for her troops. In London the
Cabinet sat from eleven till two, and again in the late afternoon, and
revealed much difference of view. But anxiety about Belgium was making
converts. Sir Edward Grey was authorised to inform France that if the
German fleet came into the Channel or through the North Sea to attack
the French ports, the British Navy would give her all the protection in
its power. It was a step which in common decency we were bound to take,
since France by arrangement with us had depleted her Atlantic and
Channel defences and concentrated in the Mediterranean. That day the
Opposition leaders, collected hurriedly from distant country houses,
sent the Prime Minister a note offering their unqualified support in any
step which he might take on behalf of the honour and security of
Britain. It was now plain that, if Belgium resisted, our entry into the
war was assured.

On the morning of Monday the 3rd, twelve hours after the receipt of the
ultimatum, Belgium made her answer. "The Belgian Government, if they
were to accept the proposal made to them, would sacrifice the honour of
their nation and betray their duty towards Europe. . . . They are firmly
resolved to repel by all the means in their power every attack upon
their rights." This bold defiance, delivered while Britain still seemed
to hesitate, was like the sudden wind that sweeps a morning fog from the
valleys. At the same hour King Albert telegraphed to King George making
a last appeal for the diplomatic intervention of Britain to safeguard
the integrity of his country. But the hour for diplomacy had passed,
since the enemy was already marching. When the British Cabinet met that
morning it was now unanimous, having shed its dissidents. In Sir Edward
Grey's words, we "began all to face the same way, for we had our backs
to the same straight wall." Mr. Churchill informed his colleagues that
he had taken timely steps, and that the whole sea power of Britain was
in readiness for war. An hour before, Lord Haldane, acting for the Prime
Minister at the War Office, had ordered the mobilisation of the Army, an
act of incalculable importance at a time when every hour was vital.

The views of the House of Commons had still to be ascertained. The day
was a Bank Holiday, and that afternoon everywhere in the land crowds
waited at post offices for the first news of the Foreign Secretary's
speech. His statement was such as only he could have made. It was the
expression, in plain words without rhetoric or passion, of a most honest
and peace-loving mind, which had left no channel of mediation untried,
which had striven against every rebuff to avert calamity, and which now
sadly but inevitably was forced towards war. The gist of his speech was,
in the words which he wrote later, that "if we did not stand by France
and stand up for Belgium against this aggression, we should be isolated,
discredited and hated, and there would be before us nothing but a
miserable and ignoble future." The House of Commons received his
statement with almost unanimous approval. The twelve days had ended
when diplomacy had laboured to buttress the tottering barrier. Britain,
thanks partly to the wisdom of her leaders, but mainly to chance, faced
war with a united government, a united people, and a united Empire.

Ever since that day it has been debated whether an earlier decision on
our part might not have averted tragedy. Hypothetics is at its best a
barren game, but it is one to which the human mind is prone, when it
remembers its fallibility. It is certain that any attempt in the years
before 1914 to enlarge the British Army to a continental scale would
have precipitated the crisis. What is arguable is that the
transformation of the _entente_ with France into a defensive alliance,
could it have been accomplished peaceably at an earlier date, might have
given pause to Germany's ambition. The right answer seems to be that it
was not possible in the then mood of the country, and that any
Government which had proposed it would have been turned out of office;
the criticism on this score is not of British statesmen but of the
British nation.

On the policy of the final month two things may be said. So unprepared
was the national mind to contemplate war as a fact, that a declaration
that we would stand by France, if made any time before August 3rd, would
have split the Cabinet, would have been repudiated by the House of
Commons, and would probably not have been accepted by the great majority
of the people. Britain had to be educated into a new mood, and it was
only the crisis of Belgium which expedited that education. The second
thing is that such a declaration would not have altered Germany's
purpose one jot. She was in the grip of the military machine which she
had fashioned, and whose heavy movement, once it began, could not be
checked without a general disruption. She did not believe that Britain's
entrance into the War would make much difference. Her civilian statesmen
and, intermittently, her Emperor had heavy thoughts, but the monster
which they had begot brushed them aside. When at the very end the
Emperor would have left Belgium alone and turned his eyes eastward, he
was told by Moltke that the advance of armies of millions of men was the
result of years of painstaking work and could not possibly be changed.
The truth is that the pent-up forces of strife had been weakening the
containing walls for a decade, and no last-moment reinforcement could
have saved the dam. The War was made by the General Staffs, not of
Germany only, with behind them as a propelling force a great weight of
popular arrogance and greed and fear; and no action on the part of
Britain, a Power outside that sinister community, could have held them
back. In all history there is no more solemn warning of the calamity
which ensues when the servant becomes the master.


  III

The imagination fastens on the ultimate stage of the drama, the moments
before the storm broke. The last official acts of Britain were curiously
informal. The overrunning of Belgium, which began on the morning of
Tuesday the 4th, had raised a moral issue which put all political
consideration out of court. The Cabinet left the drafting of the
ultimatum to Germany to the Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey. Unless a
satisfactory reply was given before midnight the British Ambassador in
Berlin was instructed to ask for his passports.

Every man now in middle life who was then in England must retain a sharp
recollection of how the War came to him. In my own memory certain scenes
stand out from the blurred impression of crowded streets and faces
hourly growing more anxious. One is of a dinner of Conservative members
of the House of Commons less than a week before the climax, when all
were sceptical of Britain entering the War, and one or two well-known
politicians were as firm in their pacifism as any Radical. Another is of
the City, which resembled nothing so much as a beehive which has been
overturned. There were leaders of finance who fortunately kept their
heads and faced the unknown bravely and calmly, but there were many
distracted prophets of doom, who succeeded in impressing Lord Morley
but not the robust Prime Minister. "The greatest ninnies I ever had to
tackle," Mr. Asquith wrote. "I found them all in a state of funk like
old women chattering over tea-cups in a cathedral town." Small blame to
them, perhaps, for they saw the structure on which their life's work was
based dissolving furiously before their eyes, and could conceive of no
possible resurrection.

I have also memories of some of the protagonists: Sir Edward Grey, when
I breakfasted with him on the Saturday morning, pale and a little
haggard but steadfast as a rock; Mr. Churchill's high spirits, which
sobered now and then when he remembered the desperate issues; Lord
Haldane's uncanny placidity; Prince Lichnowsky's grey face and tragic
eyes. Then, as the hours passed and war became certain, one's friends in
the Services disappeared on urgent errands. The Fleet had already moved
into the northern solitudes. A man of letters, sailing his boat past the
English capes, had a strange vision at dawn.

    Like ghosts, like things themselves made out of mist, there
    passed, between me and the newly risen sun, a procession of
    great forms, all in line, hastening northward. It was the Fleet
    recalled. The slight haze along the distant waters had
    thickened, perhaps, imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of
    the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, for
    whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration. It was seen
    for a moment, and in a moment it was gone. Then I knew that war
    would come, and my mind was changed.[1]

The mind was changed; that is the truest description of what happened to
the British nation during those ultimate days. People were desperately
puzzled; they could not step, as the French could, immediately into
recognition of a catastrophe which had always been at the back of their
thoughts. But everyone realised that a great test had come, that Britain
had not strayed idly into war, but must meet with clear eyes a challenge
which threatened her existence and every decency of life. What would be
left at the end of it not only of material comfort but of spiritual
health? Men faced the question according to their natures, and the
enforced idleness of the Bank Holiday gave opportunity for thought.

One conviction was universal: it was a monstrous hazard about which
prediction was futile. To many serious men it seemed like the drawing
down of a black curtain on all that was old and happy. Sir Edward Grey,
watching from the windows of the Foreign Office the lights springing out
in the dusk, said to a friend, "The lamps are going out all over Europe;
we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Whatever happened, the
world would never be the same again, for we were embarking upon untried
and uncharted seas. To some, especially young men perplexed and
disillusioned by the pre-war confusion, it seemed like the opening of
barred doors into a freer air. Many, behind their anxiety, felt almost
a sense of relief. The unknown peril which they had so long dreaded had
at last taken concrete form, and could be faced and fought. There was a
stirring, too, throughout the whole land of national pride, the sense of
a common interest knit together again after all the envious rents of
party strife, and people drew towards the mystic centre of their unity.
On the Sunday night great masses surrounded Buckingham Palace and
acclaimed the King and Queen, and the duties of statesmen in Whitehall
were performed to the accompaniment of echoes, borne across the Park, of
the National Anthem and the Marseillaise.

    *    *    *    *    *

When the British ultimatum arrived in Berlin the Imperial Chancellor was
speaking in the Reichstag the historic passage in which he defended his
country's action in Belgium by that necessity which is above law. "The
wrong--I speak frankly--that we are committing we will try to make good
as soon as our military goal is reached. He who is threatened as we are
threatened and is fighting for his all can have but the one thought--how
he is to hack his way through." In the evening he saw the British
Ambassador. He was deeply agitated. "He said that the step taken by His
Majesty's Government was terrible to a degree: just for a
word--'neutrality,' a word which in war time had so often been
disregarded--just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make
war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends
with her." Had Britain considered the price? he asked excitedly; to
which the Ambassador answered that fear of consequences was not an
excuse for breaking solemn engagements. Germany made no formal reply to
the ultimatum which expired at midnight. By ten o'clock the news had
leaked out, the newsboys in the streets were shouting war with Britain,
and presently the crashing of glass in the Embassy windows told that the
Berlin mob had awakened to the fact that the strife was not to be
confined to the continent of Europe, but was to rage through the wide
world. "The British change the whole situation," the Emperor told Mr.
Gerard a few days later. "An obstinate nation! They will keep up the
war. It cannot end soon."

In London the last hours passed calmly. "Truth hath a quiet breast." The
Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey sat in the Cabinet room in Downing
Street, a silent place except for the far-away singing of the great
crowds around the Palace. Big Ben struck eleven--midnight by German
time--and War had come. Presently Mr. Churchill arrived from the
Admiralty. The war telegram had gone to every ship of the British Navy
throughout the world.

[Footnote 1: H. Belloc: _The Cruise of the Nona_.]




  PART II




  CHAPTER I

  CONTACT


  I

War in older days had been a gladiatorial show in which, in a
circumscribed area, a selected manhood fought on a narrow issue. Now it
was to cover the whole earth, and the combatants pitted against each
other the sum total of their physical endurance, national resources, and
moral vigour. The scale was so large that it passed beyond the scope of
any single directing mind or group of minds. Therefore its story cannot
follow the neat model of earlier campaigns, but must be a tale of sound
and fury, signifying much indeed, but without pattern or logic, for
millions of men blundered blindly towards a decision.

Three things must be noted at the start. The problem before the world
prior to 1914 was how to use its new mastery of nature to maximise human
life. Needing peace for constructive work more than any preceding age,
it was swept suddenly into a barbarous struggle for mere existence. The
General Staffs might have their plans, but the peoples were in
confusion. Again, the State in recent years had become a more potent
thing, and the dogmas of a dozen schools of political thought had
exalted its authority; men looked to it to provide a new way of life,
and, having acknowledged this sovereignty, they submitted when they were
offered a new way of death. It was a war of nations, and of docile
nations. Lastly, it was a struggle which enlisted the enthusiasm of a
youth long puzzled and uneasy. The legend that young men were sacrificed
by bellicose dotards is childishly false. The elderly laboured for peace
and faced the inevitable with heavy hearts. But in every belligerent
capital youth clamoured for war.

Mr. Asquith, when on August 6th he moved the Vote of Credit, laid down
the purpose of Britain as the fulfilment of a solemn international
obligation and the vindication of law against lawless force. For this
task, which the nation accepted with few dissidents, what assets could
we furnish? Our Army was meagre as compared with those of our allies and
opponents. Britain had deliberately chosen to limit herself to a small
highly trained force, trusting to the protection of her Navy to allow
her to improvise an adequate Army in the event of a great war: she had
followed Raleigh's precept--"There is a certain proportion both by sea
and land beyond which excess brings nothing but disorder and amazement."
She had reserved her strength for a long sustenance of effort; as
Germany hoped for immediate victory, so Britain thought of the ultimate
battle. Her resources, provided the issue were not decided in the early
months, would steadily grow, for, unlike her neighbours, she had but
skimmed the cream of her man-power for the first trial and had not
depleted her wealth by extravagant armaments.

But for immediate use she had only her Expeditionary Force, which
numbered 160,000 troops of all arms. Small as this striking force was,
it was not to be compared with any continental army of the same size.
The British regulars were beyond question the most professional in the
world. A large proportion of both men and officers had had actual
experience of war, and a man who has already led or followed
successfully under fire has learned something that no textbook or staff
college or manoeuvres can teach. In Carnot's famous words: "It is not
pirouetting up and down a barrack-yard, but active service that makes an
old soldier." Behind it lay the Territorial Force, not yet brought up to
strength and still imperfectly trained, and behind that the civilian
manhood of the country, now flocking to every recruiting station.

Britain was not, like certain continental states, a nation in arms, but
she had exceptional facilities for becoming a nation at war. She had in
her industrial machine an almost unlimited means of producing war
material, she had great wealth, and she had a world-wide network of
commerce. The use of these advantages and the feeding of her people
depended on keeping her naval predominance unimpaired. She had never
been stronger afloat than when at 8.30 on the morning of August 4th her
Grand Fleet put to sea. Her naval strength was far greater than that of
Germany and Austria combined; she had been a pioneer in every modern
invention, and in every class of craft she had a superiority both in
numbers and quality. In two respects only was the Navy at a disadvantage
as compared with the Army. Modern warfare for it was still an untested
thing. Scarcely an admiral had had any experience of actual
sea-fighting. We had to prove in practice a new technique under
conditions which we could forecast but which we did not know. Again, on
our Navy depended utterly our hope not of victory alone but of national
survival. Expeditionary force after expeditionary force might be beaten
and disappear, but they could be replaced; but a decisive defeat at sea
would mean the end of Britain and the downfall of her allies. In Mr.
Churchill's words, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was
the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.

So with a small expert Army, capable of indefinite expansion, and a Navy
omnipotent by all reasonable presumptions, we entered upon a war of a
type wholly novel in our history. Hitherto in the great European
struggles we had subsidised continental allies, had controlled the seas,
and, using our sea power, had flung in small armies at vital points.
Now we had to take our place in the forefront of the main theatre. There
was no commander anywhere who had been trained to war on the grand
scale; the continental staffs had worked out grandiose schemes, but
their solutions were only academic; it was realised that most of the
problems would be different from those of the past.

But all the world failed in exact prevision, and in the necessary
guessing guessed wrong. It was universally assumed, for example, that
the coming war would be one of movement and manoeuvre. It was believed,
too, that modern numbers and weapons would make the struggle most
desperate but also short, since flesh and blood would soon be brought to
the breaking point. No belligerent recognised the immense increase of
strength given by modern weapons to the defence over the attack, and the
consequent impregnability of field entrenchments. Again, none foresaw
the vital problem of the superior direction of the whole Allied
strength, the need of finding some controlling mind which was capable of
disregarding all but the simple essentials and taking the broad synoptic
view. Men looked for too little from the new factors in war, and they
looked for too much. In many ways the world was blind to the meaning of
its own progress, but in other respects it was too ready to assume that
the former things, the eternal truths of strategy, had passed away.

That such problems did not trouble the mind of statesmen more acutely at
the start was due to the fact that the contest was regarded as likely to
be brief. The thing would be like the clashing of two great forces of
nature, and the human mind must be content in large measure to wait upon
fortune. No man foresaw that presently the whole strength of every
belligerent would be involved, that scarcely a corner of the globe would
be free from turmoil, and that the supreme need on each side would be
some central direction, political, moral and military, such as in the
Seven Years' War the elder Pitt gave to his country.

Britain was fortunate in having at the outset one great combatant figure
on which the popular mind could lean. Lord Kitchener was stopped at
Dover as he was leaving for Egypt, and on August 6th became Secretary of
State for War. It was a wise appointment, for the public had created an
image of him to suit its fancy, and that image, false as it was in many
points, was well calculated to win confidence. He was no politician, and
Britain was surfeited with politics. He had that air of mystery and
taciturnity which the ordinary man loves to associate with a great
soldier. His splendid presence, his iron face, his glittering record,
raised him out of the ranks of mere notabilities to the elect circle of
those who even in their lifetime become heroes of romance. As it
happened, the popular judgment, though right in spirit, was wrong on
most of the facts. Lord Kitchener had little gift for detail and he was
a poor administrator. He was fond of summary methods, and the result was
often confusion. He was not a comfortable member of a team. So far from
being a man of iron and granite, he was often lonely and conscious of
it, often undecided, too loyal sometimes to be wise, and too
tender-hearted to be just. His underrating of the Territorials was to be
a grave hindrance to the British effort. But he had the invaluable gifts
of foresight and imagination, though to his long-sighted eyes the
foreground might sometimes be dim. He did not foresee trench warfare and
was perplexed when it began, but his instinct told him that the war
would be lengthy and he made his preparations accordingly. In Mr. Lloyd
George's apt image, he illuminated by flashes and not by a steady glow,
"like one of those revolving lighthouses which radiate momentary gleams
of revealing light far into the surrounding gloom, and then suddenly
relapse into complete darkness."

The one war plan which mattered at the start was Germany's, as laid down
by Schlieffen. This was to hold Russia with small forces, and direct the
main weight of her strength to a surprise encirclement of France on the
north. If France attempted an attack on her weak left wing by way of
Lorraine, so much the better, for the thing, as Captain Liddell Hart has
put it, would be like a revolving door--if a man pressed heavily on one
side the other side would swing round and hit him in the back. France,
under the influence of the mysticism of the _offensive  outrance_,
underestimated the strength of the German right wing and the width of
its sweep, and her ill-fated Plan XVII aimed at meeting it by a
counter-attack on the enemy centre and left. The French intelligence
system was faulty, and the campaign opened with the British
Expeditionary Force--in spite of the doubts of Kitchener and French and
Haig--stuck on as an appendix to the French left in what was to prove
the most perilous part of the battle-field. Germany not without reason
hoped for an early and crushing victory, a "battle without a morrow"
before the leaves fell. France, with less reason, put blind trust in her
historic prowess in war and in the proven valour of her sons. Britain
launched her little army into the void with the anxiety with which men
and nations face something which is new in their experience but on which
hang mighty issues.

      Far other is this battle in the west,
  Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth
  And brake the petty kings.



  II

In this place we are not concerned with a detailed history of the War,
but only with its main tidal movements, as seen from the viewpoint which
is given by the lapse of two decades.

Germany in the first stage had the odds on her side. She was superior to
any combination of her enemies in the number of trained men she could
put straightway into the field; she had a smooth and powerful military
machine, built up patiently during a generation; she had a centralised
command and a colleague subject in all matters to her will. She was
aware that her opponents had greater potential strength, but it would
take time to become actual, and long before that day dawned she hoped
for victory. She came near succeeding. The Belgian defence scarcely
delayed her time-table. France's counter-move in the south failed
bloodily, and her dislocated armies, ill-placed along a wide frontier,
were faced with the ruin of all their elaborate plans and a deadly
menace from the north. The French left just escaped in time from the
net, and the British army, in a predicament still more hazardous, was
compelled like its neighbour to a retreat which was not strategic but
enforced and blind.

Nevertheless two delaying actions, at Le Cateau by the British and at
Guise by the French, upset in turn Germany's calculations. Her right,
instead of encircling and taking Paris, wheeled inward to attempt a
second Sedan, Schlieffen's plan was abandoned, and while the speed of
the advance slackened from fatigue and failure of supplies, a new
envelopment was attempted on her left and left centre by way of Nancy
and Verdun. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, divined this fumbling
in the German High Command, reshuffled his forces, and revised his
earlier plans. In the first days of September a flank attack, of which
Gallini, the Governor of Paris, was the inspirer, so embarrassed the
German right that a thirty-mile gap was created between the armies of
Kluck and Blow. Verdun and Nancy stood firm against the assault on the
other flank; the British force, turning at long last, marched into the
gap on Blow's right; on September 9th Blow began to fall back, and by
the 11th the whole German army was in retreat.

Such were the elements of the First Battle of the Marne, which to the
British people, disheartened by the _dbcle_ in the north and straining
their eyes anxiously into the mist, came as a miracle and a mystery. The
Allies had snatched a strategic victory from the enemy's blunders. The
central guidance on Germany's side had gone to pieces, and Moltke in
consequence disappeared. Germany failed, as Marmont failed at Salamanca,
because she allowed a perilous crack to open in her front, a crack due
to the defects in her whole strategy of envelopment. That strategy
demanded the impossible, and placed a burden of co-ordination and
control upon her High Command which it could not sustain. The First
Marne was a relic of the old regime of war, a battle of movement,
surprise, improvisation--which is to say that it was won less by the
machine than by the human quality of the soldier. Joffre, surmounting
his earlier delusions, managed tardily to seize the strategic
initiative, aided by the inspired audacity of Gallini and the stubborn
defence of Foch and Sarrail and Castelnau. It was the most significant
battle of the War--decisive, inasmuch as it shattered the first German
plan of campaign. The "battle without a morrow" had gone beyond hope,
for the battle had been fought and the morrow had come.

But in another sense it was not decisive; it did not, like Jena, destroy
one of the combatant forces, or make peace inevitable, like Sadowa and
Solferino. Germany kept her armies in being, and made a skilful retreat
in the face of an unskilful pursuit. By September 13th she had re-knit
her front on the north bank of the Aisne, and established the first
battlements of that fortress which she was to hold for four years. But
she was not yet on the defensive. The plan of Falkenhayn, who had
succeeded Moltke, was to envelop the Allied left flank, and secure those
Channel ports which might have fallen to Germany as easy fruit during
the Allied retreat in August--a peril which would have crippled the
British effort and to which only Mr. Churchill seemed awake. The Allies
retorted with attempts to turn their enemy's right flank, and the
campaign took the form of a race to the sea.

Germany's first business was to get rid of the Belgian Army, based on
the fortified camp of Antwerp. Her powerful artillery blasted a hole in
the defence, the Belgian field force withdrew to the Flanders coast
covered by the newly arrived British 7th Division, and, though the
garrison was strengthened on Mr. Churchill's initiative by three British
brigades of marines and naval volunteers, the city was forced to
surrender on October 10th. Its resistance had not been in vain, for it
had delayed the main German outflanking movement long enough to enable
the Allies to fill the seaward gap. For a fortnight the latter believed
that they were engaged in a promising offensive, and optimism reigned in
the minds of both French and British commanders, who speculated
pleasantly on what date they were likely to cross the enemy frontier.
But by October 20th they began to realise that their task would be a
desperate effort to hold their ground, for Falkenhayn, bringing troops
from his left and centre and using his new formations, was staking
everything on a break through to the west and an outflanking which he
believed might be decisive.

So began the First Battle of Ypres, on the rim of upland east of the old
Flemish city. In the north the Belgian Army held its ground in the mud
of the Yser, having opened the sluices and flooded the plain; on the
south the Messines ridge was lost after heavy fighting; but in the
centre, in the half-moon of the Ypres salient, the troops of Britain and
France for a fortnight beat off the attack in a string of confused and
costly actions. There was no general plan and no central leading. Foch
and French rarely understood what was happening and contributed little
beyond an ill-founded optimism; the brunt fell upon Haig, his divisional
and brigade commanders, and above all on the regimental officers. There
were moments, as on October 29th, 30th and 31st, and November 11th, when
only a miracle seemed to save our thin front from destruction. It was,
like Albuera, a soldiers' battle, won by the dogged fighting quality of
the rank-and-file, rather than by any tactical brilliance; there was no
room and no time for ingenious tactics. Much of it was a wild mellay in
which units became hopelessly mixed and strange things happened. A
subaltern often found himself in command of a battalion; a brigadier
commanded one or two companies, or a division, as the fates ordained.
The price paid was high. On the British side whole units virtually
disappeared. One divisional general, ten brigadiers, nearly a dozen
staff officers fell, and eighteen regiments and battalions lost their
colonels. Scarcely a house famous in our stormy history but mourned a
son. Wellesley, Wyndham, Dawnay, Fitz-Clarence, Cadogan, Cavendish,
Bruce, Gordon-Lennox, Fraser, Kinnaird, Hay, Hamilton--it was like the
death-roll after Agincourt or Flodden. But it was a victory, for it
achieved its purpose. The Allied line stood firm from the Oise to the
sea, and the enemy's short-lived initiative was over.

    *    *    *    *    *

On the Eastern Front the great spaces and the slower concentration of
armies made the first stage of the campaign more tentative and diffused.
Russia at once invaded East Prussia, which eased the situation in the
west by drawing two German corps from the Marne. But when Hindenburg and
Ludendorff succeeded the incompetent Prittwitz, the invasion came to a
disastrous end in the annihilation of Samsonov at Tannenberg and the
flight of Rennenkampff across the border. Meantime Austria had got
herself into difficulties. Her invasion of Poland had been checked by
the end of August, her right wing in Galicia was threatened, and by the
close of September she was in general retreat. With the help of Germany
a fresh attempt was made to advance to Warsaw, but it was checked by the
movement of a group of Russian armies against Silesia. Hindenburg used
his smaller forces to brilliant purpose, and retired, destroying the
scanty Polish communications. Intercepting the enemy's uncoded wireless
messages, he drove a wedge into the Russian front, forced one half back
on Warsaw, and at Lodz decisively defeated the other. The end of the
year saw the Russian armies stubbornly on the defensive on the river
line west of the Polish capital.

Austria had a luckless autumn. She failed to clear Galicia, and relieve
the beleaguered Przemysl, and the most she could do was to hold the
enemy on the line of the Donajetz, and to block the Carpathian passes
and the way to the Hungarian cornlands. She was no more fortunate in
Serbia. Her first attack had been beaten off, and a later and more
elaborate invasion was shattered in a great battle in the first week of
December, when her army lost most of its guns and was reduced to a mob
of fugitives. Midwinter, which on the Eastern Front meant a certain lull
in the fighting, found Austria, with a record of misfortune behind her,
on the defensive less than forty miles from Cracow, and Russia, after
checks, defeats and confusions, in a like attitude about the same
distance from Warsaw. The honours were with Germany.

At sea there had been no surprises. Till the defences of Scapa Flow
were ready the Grand Fleet led a dangerous nomadic life among Scottish
inlets. But from the first day of war the British Navy had its
stranglehold upon Germany, to whom only the Baltic was left of the
waters of the globe. Opportunities were missed, as when the German
cruisers _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ were suffered to escape, and thereby
Turkey's hostility was assured, and at the start there was some fumbling
on minor points which led to losses, but in all the greater matters its
competence was supreme. The Expeditionary Force crossed to France
unhindered. On August 29th our battle-cruisers and destroyer flotillas
successfully raided the Bight of Heligoland. German warships on foreign
duty were hunted down, and Von Spee's success at Coronel was avenged by
his destruction on December 8th at the Falkland Islands. Our sea-power
enabled us to gather in the German colonies, and to dispose of German
merchantmen on the high seas.

Sir John Jellicoe, realising that the British Navy was the main buttress
of the Allied armies, was ready for battle, but was resolved not to
imperil the future by unwisely seeking it, since without a battle he was
able to reap most of the fruits of victory. The cautious Fabian in the
north had now his corrective and complement at the Admiralty, for at the
close of October Lord Fisher became again First Sea Lord. Explosive,
erratic, a dangerous enemy, a difficult friend, this "proud and
rebellious creature of God" had the breadth of imagination and the
sudden lightning flashes of insight which deserve the name of genius.
Behind a smoke screen of rhodomontade, his powerful mind worked on the
data of a vast experience. His policy in war might be too bold or too
whimsical, but it would never be timorous or supine.


  III

Had some celestial intelligence, such as Mr. Hardy has presented in _The
Dynasts_, kept an eye on the campaign--an intelligence with a vision
unhindered by time or by space--he would have had certain comments to
make at the close of the year 1914. He would have observed the War
quickly extending its area. Its periphery was still in flux, but in the
centre, which was the Western Front, the dynamic was fast hardening into
the static. Britain, he might have commented, was being drawn into a
mode of war which was a new thing in her history, and which was alien to
all her former principles. Her alliance with France had bound her for
the moment to a military creed which was not her own, and which was
based on the mysticism of Clausewitz and a popular misinterpretation of
Napoleon. In the past she had for the most part fought with a wary
business eye, and her mind had not been bemused with notions of an
"absolute" war, which her great captains like Cromwell and Marlborough
would have rejected with scorn. She had never believed in battles for
their own sake, but had endeavoured to fight only when she could fight
at a profit. She had used her command of the sea, her industrial power,
her wealth and her geographical position to wise strategic purpose. But
now she was in danger of nullifying her traditional assets by letting
herself be interlocked in a land struggle of brute force, engaging the
enemy at his strongest instead of at his weakest point, and without
far-sighted purpose. She, the freest of all the belligerents, was
drifting into bondage to a false theory and an out-moded machine. Would
she liberate herself before it was too late?

The commentator would have admitted that Germany's torrential invasion
of France made it necessary for a British force at once to cross the
Channel, but, remembering the effect on the enemy mind of a single
brigade of marines at Ostend, and of the resistance of Antwerp, he would
have reflected that the view of French and Haig was perhaps right, and
that its proper place was on the Belgian coast on the flank of the
invader. He would have had only praise for the conduct of the retreat
from Mons, when the British force was left in the dark by its allies and
pitchforked headlong into a novel and intricate campaign. But he would
have been critical of many details of its turn at the Marne, since a
more resolute advance should have brought it to the river by the night
of September 8th; of the too leisurely assault on the Aisne position,
which might well have been pierced on the 13th; above all, of the
failure to send across the Channel some of our Territorial divisions and
mounted brigades, which before and during the race to the sea might have
worked havoc with the German communications. There was no controlling
mind on the British side which was capable of the larger strategical
purpose, a misfortune perhaps inevitable in the first stages of a new
and unfamiliar mode of war.

The commentator would have had much to say of the fundamental errors of
France and Germany--the folly of the former's initial plan: the
departure of the latter from Schlieffen's careful provisions, a
departure which nullified the advantage of her ruthlessness and made her
sin to no purpose against international ethics. He would have found many
points to criticise in Moltke's leadership, such as his withdrawal of
two corps to the Eastern Front during the crisis of the Marne, and the
lack of all proper control by Great Headquarters. He would have noted
Falkenhayn's failure during First Ypres to follow Grner's advice and
transfer six corps to his right wing, a failure which cost him the
battle; and, while admitting the moral effect of the Allies' stand
there, might have hinted that, if Haig had followed his first idea and
withdrawn to the line of the canal, many thousands of British lives
would have been saved in the coming years, and many futile offensives
been prevented.

But all wars are a tissue of blunders, and that side wins which makes
the fewest and the least material, and the commentator might have
concluded that the ominous fact was not mistakes but the absence of
positive artistry. It looked as if the minds of the combatants were
sinking into a dull acceptance of the obvious, as if they were content
to continue in the rut into which accidents of position and munitionment
had led them. So far there had only been two gleams of the higher
intelligence--Gallini's flank movement on Kluck, and the much-abused
British expedition to Antwerp. The result was something very like a
deadlock on both land and sea.


  IV

The first mood of the British people was enthusiasm and an uninformed
confidence. This was presently succeeded by acute anxiety, as news came
of the retreat from Mons, of the tumbling down of French and Belgian
fortresses, of our little army astray in some unknown corner of France.
The Marne gave us hope again, a hope scarcely impaired by rumours of the
weakness of Russia, and the heavy death-roll of First Ypres was made
endurable by a sense that our manhood had been gloriously tested. There
was a rising tide of anger in the popular mind, as reports reached them
of German barbarities and the hosts of Belgian fugitives gave the
evidence of eyewitnesses. Ugly mob passions were awakened; a mania for
spy-hunting began; the maker of the new British Army, Lord Haldane, fell
into disrepute because of his former friendliness to Germany, and a
great sailor, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was compelled to resign his
post. But among plain folk there burned a very pure and simple fire of
patriotism. The nation was wonderfully united. The Government had not to
face the kind of attacks which Pitt suffered at the hands of Fox and his
allies, and which in a lesser degree appeared in the South African War.

An opposition quickly formed, but it was small in numbers and
intellectually inconsiderable. It contained the men who, whether from
generosity or perversity of spirit, must always side with the minority.
It was sufficient for such that Germany should be widely unpopular;
instantly they discovered merits in the German case. Others were so
rooted in a stubborn British confidence that they could not conceive of
any danger to their liberties, and, distrusting after the British
fashion all politicians, convinced themselves that their country's
interests were being sacrificed to some shoddy political game. Some out
of a gross spiritual pride conceived that the ethical principle which
brought the nation into war must needs be wrong, since it was so
generally accepted. There were the few genuine pacifists to whom war on
any ground was abhorrent; there were various practitioners of minor
arts and exponents of minor causes who resented anything which
distracted attention from them and their works. But whether the cause
was moral arrogance, or temperamental obstinacy, or vanity, or mere
mental confusion, the anti-war party was negligible. The nation had
never been so wholly at one.

But it was not yet completely awake. The ordinary Briton was indignant
with Germany because of her doings in Belgium, because she seemed to him
to be the author of the war, and because her creed violated all the
doctrines in which he had been taught to believe. He was determined to
beat her and to draw her fangs. But he had as yet no realisation of the
hideous actualities of modern battles, or of the solemnity of the crisis
for civilisation, for his country, and for himself. It was still to him
a professional rather than a national war. The human mind is slow to
visualise the unknown, and the smoke of a burning homestead is a more
potent aid to vision than the most graphic efforts of the war
correspondent or the orator. We were unfortunate, too, in our handling
of the press. Britain, with her free traditions, made a bad censor, and
in official secrecy she went far beyond what was demanded by military
requirements. The people knew little of the doings of their army, and
regiments were rarely mentioned. A civilian First Lord at the Admiralty
and a civilian Home Secretary dealing with many military questions,
involved as their logical corollary a large measure of free public
criticism. To withdraw this right by withdrawing reasonable information
was to make of our constitution a bureaucracy without a bureaucracy's
efficiency.

In spite of these hindrances the system of voluntary recruiting did not
break down; indeed it justified itself beyond the hopes of its warmest
advocates. Britain could not call upon her youth to enlist, as France
could, for the defence of home and kin; she could only ask it to fight
for her honour and interests--great matters, no doubt, but appealing to
a more limited class than a call to resist direct invasion. Yet in the
mellow autumn weather every training-camp was crowded, and the English
roads echoed to the tramp of hundreds of thousands of stalwart lads,
singing ribald songs to hymn tunes. The wind was blowing "which scatters
young men through the world." First came the Territorials, honest
fellows who in apathetic years with small encouragement had prepared
themselves for their country's defence. After them followed the natural
adventurers, those whom we call born soldiers, and the scallywags who
sought nothing better. Next came the sober conscientious men, like
Cromwell's New Model, who had a cause to fight for. And then the wind
blew louder, and thousands were gathered in who had never dreamed at the
start that the call was for them, but who were moved by those queer
unrealised impulses which are deeper than thought. By Christmas fully
two millions of the inhabitants of the British Isles were under arms,
either for home defence or foreign service.

The British recruitment was aided by the superb response of the British
Empire. Germany had always despised this loose friendly aggregation,
believing that the first whiff of grape-shot would shatter it, for to
Germany Empire meant a machine, where each part was under the exact
control of a central power. But the British conception was the reverse
of mechanical. She had created a spiritual bond--

  Which softness' self, is yet the stuff
  To hold fast where a steel chain snaps.

By her gift of liberty she had made the conquered her allies, and the
very men she had fought became in her extremity her passionate
defenders.

The muster of the Empire was a landmark in British history, greater
perhaps than the War which was its cause. No man can read without
emotion the tale of those early days in August when from every corner of
the globe poured in appeals for the right to share in our struggle.
Would that we had had a Homer to write a new Catalogue of the Ships! The
free Dominions offered all their resources. In South Africa, Louis
Botha, the ablest of our recent opponents in the field, became a British
general. No unit, however small or remote, was backward in this noble
emulation. India, whose alleged disloyalty had been a prime factor in
German calculations, rose in every quarter and class to the supreme
heights of sacrifice.

Small wonder that the news stimulated recruiting in Britain, for there
was a sense of a vast new comradeship which stirred the least emotional.
This rally of the Empire brought under one banner the trapper of
Athabasca, the stockman from Victoria, the Dutch farmer from the
back-veld, the tribesman of the Khyber, the gillie from the Scottish
hills, and the youth from the London back streets. Racially it united
Mongol and Aryan, Teuton and Celt; politically it drew to the side of
the Canadian democrat the Indian feudatory whose land was still
medival; spiritually it joined Christianity in all its forms with the
creeds of Islam, Buddha, Brahma, and a thousand little unknown gods. The
British commonwealth had revealed itself as that wonderful thing for
which its makers had striven--a union based not upon statute and
officialdom, but upon the eternal simplicities of the human spirit. In
1909 Lord Morley had taken as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the dream of
Empire the notion that Australia would ever consent to pay for a war
undertaken on behalf of Belgian neutrality. Yet now Australian troops
were on the sea to give their lives in that cause.


  V

To the King, as to his subjects, the outbreak of war meant the quieting
of old feuds and an end to the threatened constitutional impasse. But,
as to his subjects, only in a higher degree, it brought new and crushing
anxieties. He saw men closely akin to him by blood the subject of
popular odium and in the forefront of the nation's enemies. The people
in the crisis had turned instinctively to him, and their deep and
universal trust increased the burden of his responsibilities. Unlike his
Ministers in council and his soldiers in the field, he had no plain task
which could absorb his energies. His duty was only to wait and watch,
while the old fabric of Europe was crumbling. The words which he had
spoken the month before his Coronation must have often recurred to his
mind. The "treasures of the past" were in jeopardy, and dark indeed was
"the path of the future."

On the last day of November he paid his first visit to the Front. He saw
Sir John French at St. Omer, and the headquarters of every corps and
division; he inspected the base and field hospitals, and from the little
hill of Scharpenberg looked over the battle-ground of Ypres. President
Poincar, M. Viviani and General Joffre joined him at St. Omer, and at
Furnes he met the King of the Belgians. It was the first time that a
King of England had visited a French battle-front where his troops
fought in company with their ancient foe. A dramatic proof of the new
alliance was that descendants of Napoleon's marshals, Ney and Murat,
were attached to the British Staff.

That visit in the bleak December weather had a special significance, for
at Ypres an older world had vanished. A fortnight earlier, within
hearing of the enemy guns sounding their last challenge, had passed our
most famous soldier. Lord Roberts had come to visit his beloved Indian
troops, had fallen ill of pleurisy, and had died on the night of
November 14th. It was fitting that the master-gunner should die within
hearing of his guns, and that the most adored of British leaders should
breathe his last amid the troops he had loved so well. With him went the
army which he had commanded and done much to create. First Ypres saw the
apotheosis of the British regulars, but also their end. A large part of
the old "Contemptibles" was dead, and what was left was soon to be
distributed among a thousand new battalions.

But the memory of the type remains--perhaps the most wonderful fighting
man that the world has seen. Officers and men were curiously alike.
Behind all the differences of birth and education there was a common
temperament; a kind of humorous realism about life, a dislike of tall
talk, a belief in inherited tradition and historic ritual, a
rough-and-ready justice, a deep cheerfulness which was not inconsistent
with a surface pessimism. They generally took a dark view of the
immediate prospect; therefore they were never seriously depressed. They
had an unshakable confidence in the ultimate issue; therefore they never
thought it worth mentioning. They were always slightly puzzled;
therefore they could never be completely at a loss; for the man who
insists on having the next steps neatly outlined before he starts will
be unnerved if he cannot see his way; whereas others will drive on
cheerfully into the mist, because they have been there before, and know
that on the further side there is clear sky.

It was the end of an old army, and an older and freer mode of war. For
now a huge, cumbrous mechanism had cast a blight of paralysis on human
endeavour. The fronts had been stricken by their vastness into
stagnation. Already a man could walk by a chain of outposts from
Switzerland to the Vosges, and in a ditch from the Vosges to the North
Sea.




  CHAPTER II

  THE FORTRESS


  I

At the beginning of 1915 the sky for the Allies was overcast, but the
clouds were not yet threatening. Japan had joined them, but her effort
must be confined to the Far East; Italy was moving to their side; Turkey
had declared for Germany, while Bulgaria, Greece and Rumania were uneasy
neutrals. Politically there was no cause for disquiet; but on the
battle-field there was an ugly jam. In the East the steam-roller of
Russia seemed inclined, if anything, to roll backwards, and in the West
the Allies found themselves set down before a bristling fortress. The
front there could not be turned, since there were no flanks; the only
methods that appeared possible were investment and direct assault, and
the first was slow and the second costly.

To the French command this prospect was not discouraging. They believed
that the War could be won only on the front which was on French or
Belgian soil, and that steady attack--_la guerre d'usure_--would
presently wear down resistance. Such a plan, since surprise was
impossible, could only succeed by so great an accumulation of munitions
and men as would by brute force blast a way through. It underrated the
enemy's material strength and the stubbornness of his spirit. This
unimaginative loyalty to the commonplace was to cripple the Allied
strategy at the moment when it had the chance of a free field, and
before its blunders had made escape impossible.

To Britain it fell to make an effort to break this bondage, and, because
she made it half-heartedly, to fail. The Western Front was clearly the
_main_ theatre of war, but was it necessarily the _decisive_ theatre?
Might not an effort elsewhere so weaken Germany that defeat in the West
would become inevitable? The British Government early in January, having
received an urgent appeal for help from Russia, began to ask themselves
questions. Was there nothing to be said for the traditional British
strategy of using our naval power to apply military force at unexpected
points? Was there not a danger that Joffre's policy of attrition might
be so slow as to entail the bankruptcy of the conqueror? We were
confronted in Europe with a veritable fortress, but, if the principal
gates were strongly held, were there no unguarded back-doors? A great
scheme-making began among Ministers and their technical advisers. Lord
Fisher favoured a descent on the Schleswig-Holstein coast; Mr. Lloyd
George's fancy dwelt at first on Salonika; but in the end the plan which
won unanimous support was Mr. Churchill's for the clearing of the
Dardanelles and the taking of Constantinople. Success there would give
immense and perhaps decisive results, for it would open the way for
supplies to Russia, would bring in Italy and the wavering Balkan Powers
on the Allied side, would put Turkey out of the war, and would make
possible a deadly flank assault against Austria, Germany's ally.

In the words of the official historian of the enterprise, the Western
Front was a gamble with pounds for a gain of pence, the Dardanelles
scheme a good chance of pounds for a stake of pennies. For the wager at
the first was small. It was proposed to make the attack by sea alone,
and to use in it some of our older battleships, destined presently for
the scrap-heap. There were obvious dangers, and the weight of historical
authority was against the success of ships' guns against land forts, but
it was fair to argue that the advance in naval gunnery and the use of
aeroplanes for spotting had changed the situation.

What followed is a tragic example of an opportunity missed, and of a
great enterprise nullified by a failure of nerve. On March 18th the
attack on the Straits was launched. Most of the forts were silenced, and
the thing seemed to be proceeding well until suddenly three battleships
were lost from drifting mines. The action was broken off, and Admiral de
Robeck declined to renew it until an army was ready to support him.
Turkey at her last gasp was to her amazement given a breathing-space,
of which she made brilliant use. Her resistance that day was the last
effort of which she was at the moment capable, for she was almost
destitute of munitions. Her Government had its papers packed, and was
ready to leave for the uplands of Asia Minor. It was the drifting mines
which decided our naval staff, and their presence was a fantastic
accident. Ten days before a little Turkish steamer, the _Nousret_, had
eluded the British night patrol of destroyers and laid a new line of
twenty mines in Eren Kui Bay. On March 16th some of these mines were
found and destroyed by our sweepers, but we did not realise that they
were part of a line of mines, and so we did not look for more. Had we
made a different deduction there would have been no casualties on the
18th, and de Robeck on the 19th or 20th would have taken his fleet into
the Sea of Marmora. The officer in charge of the little _Nousret_
probably never knew of the fatefulness of a deed which altered the whole
course of the War.

Britain was now committed to a joint expedition, for it appeared that
there were troops available for an attack by land. But success depended
upon the provision of adequate forces, and that again depended upon a
temporary defensive on the Western Front and a refraining from expensive
assaults. Lord Kitchener unhappily halted between two opinions. He chose
to fight at Gallipoli with only the loose fringe of British military
strength, which was patently insufficient even for a first blow, and
reinforcements for which could only be wrung from the West in the face
of bitter opposition. It was the old story of the Sibylline books. We
purchased failure in the end at a price which a month or two before
would have assured triumphant success. Mr. Churchill's summary is the
bare truth:

    Three divisions in February could have occupied the Gallipoli
    peninsula with little fighting; five could have captured it
    after March 18th; seven were insufficient by the end of April,
    but nine might just have done it. Eleven might have sufficed at
    the beginning of July. Fourteen were to prove insufficient on
    August 7th.

The story of the Dardanelles is one of the noblest and cruellest in the
War. Had it been possible for the Allies to forgo their futile
offensives in the West in 1915, for which they were not ready, to hold
the line there to the stalemate which Germany's preoccupation in Russia
would not have permitted her to break, and to concentrate on cutting
their way through to Constantinople, they would have succeeded, and the
final battle on the Western Front would have been antedated by months,
perhaps by years. But such prevision is for the immortals and not for
fallible men; and in the spring of 1915 there seemed to be cogent
reasons for the wrong conclusion. The tale of the campaign is one of
superb feats of arms, from the landing on April 25th to the final
August failure at Suvla, when fine troops were squandered by old and
feeble generals. Of the commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, it may
fairly be said that he made few mistakes, and that he showed a resource
and a resolution which were only too rare in British leadership. _Si
Pergama dextra defendi possent etiam hac defensa fuissent._ The
expedition closed with a miracle, when at the end of the year the
peninsula was evacuated, in defiance of all precedent, without a
casualty. The European shore of the Narrows had now become not less
famous than the opposite coast and the plain of Troy. Had the fashion
endured of linking the strife of men with the gods, what strange myth
would not have sprung from this rescue of British troops in the teeth of
winter gales and uncertain seas! It would have been rumoured, as at
Troy, that Poseidon had done battle for his children.


  II

On the Western Front 1915 was a year of dupes. France, passionately
eager to recover her lost territory, fell into a strategic coma, with
the consequence that her armies and those of Britain were hurled idly
against a fortress-wall and broken. We believed that each assault
weakened the enemy's resisting power, and by a fantastic arithmetic
convinced ourselves that his losses were out of all proportion to our
own, when the truth was that the attrition fell on the attack rather
than on the defence.

The strength of the German fortifications was now recognised, and a
theory of the offensive was developed. If a sufficiently powerful
artillery fire was accumulated upon a section of the front, parapets and
wire entanglements could be blown to pieces, and if the artillery,
lengthening its range, were able to put a barrage between the enemy and
his supports, then infantry might advance in comparative safety. The
difficulty came with the next step. The British attack at Neuve Chapelle
in March, and the attempts at Festubert and in the Artois in the early
summer, failed because of the narrowness of the front of assault. To
tear a rent no more than five miles wide meant that time was given for
local reserves to come up and hold the gap, so that the enemy's front
hardened like concrete before the advance.

In April the Germans introduced a new weapon by their use of poison gas
in the action known as the Second Battle of Ypres, but, having
inadequate reserves, they were unable to exploit their success. The
innovation was in defiance of the etiquette of civilised war, but it was
no more inhumane than shells and bayonets and liquid fire. One
consequence of that action, in which Britain suffered especially, was
to draw popular attention to our weakness in munitions, and to
inaugurate a strenuous campaign for increased production. In September
Joffre gathered his strength for a great effort on each side of the wide
salient now formed by the German lines in France. The assault was to be
in Champagne and in the Artois, delivered on broad fronts, and preceded
by a sustained and intensive bombardment, which it was hoped would
smooth the path for the infantry, but which at the same time gave ample
notice to the enemy. The French advance conspicuously failed; that of
the British between Lens and La Basse won at Loos a remarkable initial
success, which could not be exploited because of the bungling of the
British High Command and the supineness of the French on our right.

The chief lesson of Loos was the need of still more artillery power, a
lesson readily learned; but there was a further moral which was only
drawn by the discerning few--that, even with a wide front of attack, in
a frontal assault of which the enemy was forewarned, wearied troops
would be met by fresh reserves, and the battle would become stereotyped
and end in stalemate. There was another omen, too, to which all were
blind. In the first hours of Loos a Highland brigade advanced four
miles, and passed beyond all but the last German trench line. Behind
them there was no tactical plan, and no certainty of support, and their
feat was set down as a noble madness. Nevertheless that madness
contained the seeds of future success, for it had in it the rudiments of
"infiltration"--the tactics by which storm-troops found weak places in a
front and filtered through. Three years later, when we had learned what
the enemy could teach us, the same method was applied by a master hand
to break in turn each of the German defences.

Sir John French's conduct of Loos made his position impossible, and
before the end of the year he was relieved of his command. He had many
of the best qualities of the British soldier: he was humane, kindly, in
close touch with his men; but he was too old and too set in his ways for
this kind of war. He had himself little to contribute in the way of
ideas, and his mind was shut to those of other people. He fought
confusedly and gallantly by a plan which was not of his making, and
which he often imperfectly understood. Haig, his successor, was of a
different stamp. With greater steadfastness of character, he had far
higher powers of mind. He, too, had prepossessions to get rid of, and,
for one of his dogged, precise and conservative temperament, the process
was slow. On this point alone he can be fairly criticised. There is a
close parallel with Foch. The Frenchman was at the start too hasty and
high-flying, the Scot too rigid and deliberate. When disaster and
disappointment had sobered the one and quickened and clarified the mind
of the other, they became great soldiers.

    *    *    *    *    *

On the Eastern Front the year began with brighter promise for Russia.
The winter battles in Masuria had indeed driven her back to the Niemen,
but she had still her hold on Galicia, where in March she captured
Przemysl, and she still menaced the Carpathian passes. Austria,
foreseeing that Italy would soon take the field against her, threatened
to make a separate peace unless her ally came to her rescue. Hindenburg
and Ludendorff pressed her case, and Falkenhayn, who was contemplating a
great attack upon the British right in France, unwillingly consented to
use in the East his fresh reserves. It was a momentous decision, for a
German attack upon the ill-munitioned British Army, before its new
troops were ready, might have decided the war. The German generals in
the East, and the Austrian Conrad, believed that by a great effort
Russia could be finally put out of action. Falkenhayn differed; she
would be crippled, he thought, but no more; and he would consent only to
a limited operation, which if necessary could be broken off to permit of
a transfer of troops to the West.

Yet the attack which opened on May 2nd on the line of the Donajetz was
so brilliantly directed and so overwhelmingly successful that at first
it seemed as if Hindenburg's dream had come true. It was led by
Mackensen, a master of speed and surprise, and his chief of staff was
Seeckt, who after the war was to rebuild the German Army. Tactically it
was the forerunner of the method of infiltration. Although outnumbered
by nearly half a million, Mackensen in three days was in open country,
and in a fortnight had advanced ninety-five miles. By the end of May the
Russians were behind the San and the Dniester. In June Lemberg was
retaken, and there was no enemy left in Galicia. The task was now to cut
off the Warsaw salient, and on August 4th Warsaw fell. But Russia was
now retreating on better communications, and, though Kovno and Brest
Litovsk and Vilna were abandoned, by the autumn she had found a line on
which she could stand. For Germany it was a conspicuous triumph in the
field, and she now had Poland in her hands. But her enemy was
unconquered, for Russia had retreated into those wastes of wood and
water which had baffled Napoleon. . . . She was presently to retreat
into more impenetrable wastes of the spirit.

On the rout of Russia there followed the overrunning of Serbia.
Bulgaria, at last convinced of where her interests lay, threw in her lot
with Germany, and in October German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies,
under the direction of Mackensen, advanced against the little country
from north and east. The Allies could give no effective aid, though
weak British and French forces had landed at Salonika. The Serbs, a race
of natural warriors who had few superiors, were driven in retreat
through the Albanian mountains, and scarcely 100,000 soldiers reached
the coast. British and Italian ships carried them to Corfu, where the
remnant was rested and refitted and next year joined the Allies at
Salonika. With the retreat went the aged King Peter, in whose strange
soul burned the stubborn courage of his people. "I have struggled a
great deal in my life," he said, "and I am tired, bruised and broken.
But I shall not die before I see the victory of my country."

    *    *    *    *    *

The year closed for Britain in shadows. Nowhere on the globe had the
Allies improved their position. The various battles in the West had won
little and cost much. Russia had retreated almost off the fighting map.
Serbia had disappeared. Italy had entered the alliance, but was making
little progress on her difficult fronts. The Gallipoli expedition had
failed conspicuously, and had only been saved by a miracle from
destruction. Our army in Mesopotamia, having attempted a vain dash for
Bagdad, was now beleaguered in Kut. Our troops at Salonika were holding
on grimly to a narrow littoral. The German submarine menace was daily
growing, and the liner _Lusitania_ and many merchant vessels had been
sunk. German aircraft were bombing our coasts from the Thames to the
Tyne, and official secrecy increased the rumours of our casualties. The
honours of the year lay clearly with the enemy.

The inevitable result was criticism, the angry and often unjust
criticism of a confused people. Hatred of the enemy was growing, fed by
true and false tales of atrocities, and, since Britain is always a poor
hater, the new mood made her acutely uncomfortable. The purpose of the
nation was beyond question, but it was not being told what to do in
order to achieve it. Men clutched at any proposal for organisation and
discipline. Drink was the enemy, said Mr. Lloyd George, and the
consequence was a dispute in which all sense of proportion was lost. In
the end a compromise was reached under which Government control was
established in scheduled areas, and the King set the example of
voluntary abnegation by ordering that during the War no intoxicants
should be served in the royal household. The country, it was widely
felt, was not yet organised for war, and the questions of man-power for
the armies and labour for the factories began to trouble the public
mind. But first, as is the British habit, the critical blast fell on the
civilian Government.

The fighting in the spring had made acute the business of munitions.
The War Office was blamed for the shortage, though the blame was
post-dated, for the improvement in the situation in September was to the
War Office's credit. A Munitions Committee was formed in April, and a
Ministry of Munitions in June, with Mr. Lloyd George as the presiding
genius. He had found in the conduct of the War a cause which absorbed
that energy which had once been given to domestic reform. A change in
the Government was naturally demanded, and at the close of May the old
Liberal Ministry was replaced by a coalition, which brought into the
Cabinet Conservatives like Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Lord Lansdowne, Mr.
Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Bonar Law, and a representative of Labour in
Mr. Arthur Henderson. One grotesque result was that Mr. Churchill, who
was like a panther among polar bears, was relegated to the lowest
Cabinet post, and that Lord Haldane, the Army's creator, was left out
altogether. The new Cabinet had no great merit beyond its novelty, for,
though it was composed of able men, the machine was too cumbrous for
swift and consistent action. The most hopeful fact was that in the work
of the Munitions Ministry an attempt was at last being made to enlist
business talent in the public service. It was not till November that the
mechanism was improved by the creation of a small strategic Cabinet of
five--the Prime Minister himself, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr.
Balfour, Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Lloyd George.

There was also heard for the first time criticism of our military
leadership. Lord Kitchener had lost much of his earlier prestige, for he
had had to bear the blame for all our failures. But there were
profounder causes of disquiet. The nation was militarily too
uninstructed to grasp the faults of our battle tactics in the West, but
many were beginning to realise that, taking the War as a whole, we
lacked any serious and consistent strategic plan. We had made adventures
without counting the cost, we had drifted into impossible situations,
and had suffered the enemy to dictate our line of policy. Reasonable men
had come to believe that a reform of our military machine, and not a
shuffling of Ministers, was the vital question. The first need was for a
competent General Staff at home, for Lord Kitchener had been compelled
to act as his own General Staff, and before the end of the year Sir
William Robertson was brought back to the War Office. It was an
improvement in our domestic mechanism, but it left untouched the more
urgent question of a central command for all the Allies in the West.

But the two subjects which most agitated the popular mind were the
temper of Labour and the matter of conscription. There had long been
troubles on the Clyde, in South Wales and elsewhere, and the new
munitions policy, with its wholesale suspension of trade union rules,
increased the tension. Much foolish and unjust recrimination followed,
which did not help matters, and till the end of the War, in spite of the
high wages, industrial troubles were always on a hair-trigger. It was
inevitable. There was a work-weariness as well as a war-weariness,
factory-shock as well as shell-shock. British Labour reflected the mood
of the country; it had its moments of revolt and discontent as well as
its steady hours of resolution. As the demand for an increase of the
armies became more clamant it assumed a special importance. The first
step was Lord Derby's attempt to organise recruiting on a more
scientific basis. By the end of the year it was apparent that this
organised voluntaryism had failed. The figures were published early in
1916, and after that it was only a matter of months till conscription
followed.

There was small opposition in the country, and the attitude of organised
Labour was one of the most characteristically British performances in
the campaign. A Labour congress in January 1916, by a majority of a
million card-votes, instructed the Labour Party in Parliament to oppose
the measure. At the annual conference three weeks later the members
approved of the War by a majority of nearly a million, rejected
conscription by large majorities, by a small majority decided not to
agitate for repeal should the measure become law, and by a very large
majority agreed that the three Labour members should retain their posts
in the Government. The result was a typical product of our national
temperament, and only the thoughtless would label it inconsistent. The
Labour delegates were honest men in a quandary. They were loath to give
up a cherished creed even under the stress of a dire necessity. But they
were practical men and Englishmen, and they recognised compelling facts.
If they could not formally repudiate their dogmas, they could neglect
them.

In the bewilderment of the year there was one incident which keyed the
national temper to that point where resolution acquires the impetus of a
passion. An Englishwoman, Miss Edith Cavell, the head of a nursing
institute in Brussels, had been active in assisting the escape of
wounded Allied soldiers. She was arrested, tried, and condemned, and on
October 11th suffered death, in spite of the efforts of the American and
Spanish Embassies to save her. Her execution was legal, since on the
letter of the German military law she was liable to the extreme penalty,
but in the case of a woman and a nurse, who had ministered to German
sick and wounded, the pedantry which exacted that penalty was an outrage
on human decency. In France and Britain, in Holland and America, her
execution woke a profound horror, for it seemed to reveal as by a
flashlight the psychology of that German "culture" which sought to
regenerate the world. So noble a death should not be tarnished by facile
praise. She was not the least of that sisterhood of great-hearted women
who have taught the bravest men a lesson in courage. M. Clemenceau spoke
the tribute of the people of France: "Since the day of Joan of Arc, to
whose memory I know that our Allies will one day seek to erect a statue,
England has owed us this return. She has nobly given it."

    *    *    *    *    *

The King since his accession had enjoyed remarkably good health; indeed,
save for his attack of typhoid fever in 1898, he had never had a serious
illness. But on his visit to the front in October 1915 he met with an
accident, carefully concealed from the public, which might have had the
gravest consequences. He landed at Boulogne and inspected the base
hospitals. Thence he travelled to Rouen and Havre, and saw much of both
the British and the French work behind the lines. These visits were
strenuous affairs, for, apart from busy days filled with long journeys,
the King worked every morning assiduously at the papers forwarded from
London. At Aire he found Sir Douglas Haig and reviewed troops, and at
Doullens he met President Poincar, who was splendidly attired in a blue
yachting cap, a blue cape coat, and yellow leggings. The next halt was
Amiens, where he was joined by General Joffre, and there was a parade
of four corps of the Arme Coloniale. At Cassel he reviewed the British
Second Army under General Plumer, and afterwards at Bailleul the
Canadian Corps.

On Thursday, October 28th, came the accident. At Labuissire the King
was received by Sir Douglas Haig, and reviewed the 4th Corps of Sir
Henry Rawlinson and the 1st Corps of Sir Hubert Gough. He was proceeding
to inspect a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, when an unexpected
outbreak of cheering made his horse rear and fall back on him, slipping
on the muddy ground. For a moment the King lay very still, and the
onlookers feared the worst. But he struggled to his feet, and was
carried to his car and taken back to Aire. So serious his accident
seemed that the Prince of Wales left at once to report to the Queen. For
two days the King remained in bed, but on November 1st he decided to
return home. He was carried on a stretcher aboard the train and a
hospital ship, and, after a rough crossing, reached Buckingham Palace in
a motor ambulance at 8 p.m. He was well again in a day or two, but it
was only by a narrow margin that Britain escaped what would have been
the crowning mischance of a melancholy year.


  III

When the year 1916 opened, the main front had been irrevocably fixed in
the West. The vast material and mechanical power involved in the new
type of war made it impossible to alter readily the type of campaign
which had once been set, or to use the whole world-front to strategic
purpose. The unimaginative methods of frontal attack and attrition, as
practised in 1915, were the only ones of which the High Command could
conceive, since they seemed to follow naturally from the cumbrous
mechanism behind them. The fact that they were costly was obscured by
the hope that they were still more costly to the enemy. There was
perhaps some reason in the view that the German will to conquer could
only be broken by a holocaust of suffering, and not by some ingenious
strategical triumph which might have given the Allies a victory on
points, for we were fighting not only the pride of a monarch and an army
but the megalomania of a great people.

The War had been thus stereotyped on a pattern, and the chief criticism
must be that the pattern was not used to the best purpose. There was no
unity of direction among the Allies in Western Europe, and a dreadful
barrenness in tactical resource. As to the second, it may be said that
the nature of the campaign was such as to atrophy tactical ingenuity; as
to the first, that no Allied Government at that stage could have
proposed a unity of command, which would place its armies under a
foreigner, without falling from power. Nor can much of the blame for
the deadlock be laid on the British commanders. They had been compelled
to conform to a mode of war which was not of their planning, and from
which they could not now escape. The most that can be said is that, out
of a kind of professional loyalty, they had been too ready to defend the
indefensible. What could Haig have achieved had he protested against the
whole system? A radical change of military policy in the throes of a
campaign would be like the uprooting of mandrakes.

Failing the appointment of a Generalissimo for the whole front who had
an eye for realities, the only hope of escape lay in the civilian
Government of Britain, for that of France was bound to the
chariot-wheels of her General Staff. Only British statesmen could break
the bondage of a leaden and ineffective machine. If any charge is to be
brought against them, it is not that they interfered unduly with the
soldiers, but that they did not interfere enough, and in the right way.
In a war of nations it is the civilian who must direct the general
strategy, for, as Sir William Robertson has pointed out, in the total
effort of a people in war only twenty-five per cent. is purely military.
The French politician was right who said that war had become too grave a
business to be left to the soldier. But the distinction between what is
technical and professional, and therefore the soldier's special
province, and what has a wider significance, is always hard to draw;
and at this stage there was no British statesman or British soldier who
could see our work in the field in its true relation to the central
purpose of the war.

The Chantilly Conference of December 1915 laid down the Allied plans for
the coming year. There was to be a co-ordinated offensive on the
Eastern, Western and Italian Fronts, and the minimum of effort
elsewhere. Germany, aware of this scheme, resolved to forestall it.
Falkenhayn regarded Russia as half paralysed and Italy as unimportant.
The soul of the enemy attack was Britain, and she could only be reached
through her ally France. Though outnumbered in the West by three to two,
he would attack France at a point which she was bound to defend and at
which her defence would bleed her to death. On February 20th 1916 his
guns opened against Verdun, that border fortress whose fall in 1792 had
drawn from Danton his famous "De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours
de l'audace."

The defence of Verdun was France's greatest feat of arms in the
campaign. She had much leeway to make up from past carelessness, but the
peril steeled the spirit and steadied the nerve of the nation. First
Ptain and then Nivelle, who in this task made his name, held the ground
with a noble obstinacy. There were moments when all seemed over, but
always there came some miraculous revival. For five desperate months
the battle continued, and the recapture by the French of Thiaumont on
the last day of June and the failure of the German attack at Souville on
July 11th may be taken as the end of the main battle. Germany, believing
like all the world in France's _lan_ in attack, had misjudged her power
of maintaining a long and desperate defence. As the weeks passed Verdun
became for France a watchword, a mystic symbol of her resolution.
Mankind must have its shrines, and that thing for which much blood had
been spilled becomes holy in its eyes. Over Verdun, as over Ypres, there
will brood in history a strange aura, the effluence of the sacrifice and
fortitude of the tens of thousands who fell before her gates. Her little
hills are for ever consecrated by her dead.

The summer advances of Russia and Italy did something to relieve the
pressure on Verdun, but the real distraction came on July 1st, when the
main battle moved from the shattered Meuse uplands to the sluggish Somme
and the green downs of Picardy. As the weary French infantry scrambled
over the dbris of Thiaumont, a hundred miles to the north-west on a
broad front the infantry of Britain and France were waiting to cross
their parapets. This had been fixed at Chantilly as the main effort of
the year, but Verdun had seriously limited the French divisions
available. Haig would have preferred an attack in Flanders, and indeed
it is hard to see why Joffre chose the Somme area, for the German
position there was immensely strong, and success offered no strategic
advantage.

The first day brought only slender results. There was no chance of
surprise, the lengthy bombardment, owing to the poor quality of the
ammunition, completely failed of its purpose, and the front of assault
was too wide and the pressure too uniform. We were attacking a fortress
without concentrating on the weak spots. The battle, which continued
till it was stopped by the November rains, degenerated into a colossal
effort of attrition. The later phases showed more tactical ingenuity
than the earlier, and they were made notable by the use--the premature
use--of a new weapon, the credit of which belonged wholly to Britain.
This was the Tank, which, after more than a year of controversy and
delay, was first tried on September 15th. Its success did something to
convince the wiser minds in the British Command that here had been found
the method of overcoming the defence of machine-guns, trenches and wire
entanglements which had hitherto paralysed the attack.

The Somme was the first great effort of the new armies of Britain, and
in it they won much glory and a grave. The "tawny ground of Picardy,"
which Shakespeare's Henry V discoloured with blood, was to become
memorable for the English people, since few households in the land had
not contributed to it a son. It was the final witness of the entry of
the manhood of Britain into war. Most of the troops engaged had twenty
months before been employed in peaceful civilian trades. In their ranks
were every class and condition--miners from the north, factory hands
from the industrial centres, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and
shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who
in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose
chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. This fighting stuff,
which Germany had decried, proved a match for her Guards and
Brandenburgers.

It is not easy to judge fairly a battle of which the guiding plan was so
wasteful and uninspired. Yet its results were vital, and the gains were
on the whole to the Allies. The losses on each side were approximately
half a million--the Germans a little less, the Allies a little more. The
British armies were given experience and were not discouraged: the
Germans lost notably in confidence, and their whole military machine was
put out of gear. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had now replaced
Falkenhayn, found a very real decline in _moral_ in the West. "The
German army," the latter wrote, "had been fought to a standstill and was
utterly worn out; if the war lasted, our defeat seemed inevitable."
Britain had lost in officers three times as much as her opponents, but
she had great resources to draw upon, and the losses of Germany in this
class could not be replaced. The spirit both of her men in the field and
of the nation at large was gravely depressed. The Somme became a name of
terror, that "blood-bath" to which many journeyed and from which few
returned. Of what avail her easy conquests on the Danube when this
deadly cancer in the West was eating into her vitals? On the Somme
attrition became at last a menace to Germany, for it was acute
attrition: not like the slow erosion of cliffs by the sea, but like the
steady crumbling of a mountain to which hydraulic engineers have applied
a mighty head of water.

From July 1st Britain took over the major share of the fighting on the
Western Front. France in the year had won great fame, but she had lost a
million men and she was very weary. The fighting quality of her sons had
been proved beyond dispute, but so unhappily had the weakness of her
High Command. Her staff work, which the world had been taught to admire,
was faulty both in theory and practice, and the pre-war doubts of
Germany were amply justified. The realism, which had been its boast, was
a blend of sentimentality and prejudice, and its superficial logic could
no longer conceal its futility. Those few of France's soldiers, who
were longer sighted and had the courage of their opinions, were soon
discarded. Before the War ended she was to produce great leaders, but
they were not in high command at the start. Most dangerous of all was
her General-in-Chief. Joffre was the typical French bourgeois, a soldier
expert in the orthodox parts of his profession, a character stalwart and
imperturbable, but suspicious of subordinates and jealous of colleagues,
a mind inelastic and infertile. At the start his optimism and rock-like
placidity had been valuable to his country, but the value had gone. His
intellectual mediocrity had become too glaring, and his supersession was
inevitable.

    *    *    *    *    *

There were no decisive events elsewhere on the long battle-fronts. In
the East Brussilov's great summer offensive won much ground and
expedited the break-up of Austria; but he could not develop his success,
and his losses of over a million still further lowered the spirit of his
own command. It led, however, to the dismissal of Falkenhayn, to the
failure of Austria's offensive against Italy, and to the entry into war
of Rumania on the Allied side. Rumania made nothing of her tardy
resolution. She was presently overrun by Mackensen and put out of
action, but her conquest did little to improve Germany's military
position, since it lengthened the Eastern Front for her by 250 miles.
For the rest the Allies were virtually immobilised at Salonika, and
Townshend's army was forced to surrender at Kut in April. The
Mesopotamian enterprise ended in disaster, but, considering the nature
of the country and our inferiority in numbers and supplies, it had been
no disgrace to British arms. The events of the year were a lesson in
what could be done under difficulties, if war were conducted not by a
loose partnership but by a single and concentrated control. They had
brought into supreme power Germany's natural leaders, Hindenburg and
Ludendorff, the massive character and the orderly brain. One consequence
was that all her resources of production were combined under an iron
dictatorship.

On the naval side there befell one event which might have changed the
destiny of the world. The British blockade, in spite of difficulties
with the United States, had been steadily growing tighter, and the
answering German submarine campaign more active. The Grand Fleet in
Scottish waters gave little sign of life, nor that hidden behind the
bulwark of Heligoland. But the British Navy was winning without striking
a blow. Besides the army in France, it and our merchant service were
providing for four distant campaigns, and at the same time keeping
Britain herself fed and supplied. With the advent of Scheer to high
command Germany changed her waiting tactics, and sought to isolate and
destroy some portion of the British Grand Fleet. On May 30th it was
clear that part of the German Fleet had come out of port, and Beatty
with his battle-cruisers was ordered to sweep the eastern part of the
North Sea, and then join Jellicoe, who with the Grand Fleet was moving
in the north. A casual Danish merchantman drew out ships from both
Hipper's and Beatty's battle-cruiser squadrons to inspect it, and so
contact between the adversaries was brought about on the afternoon of
May 31st.

So began the Battle of Jutland. Beatty, heavily punished by Hipper,
turned north and drew him towards Jellicoe. He had escaped from the
trap, and now it was the turn of Hipper and Scheer to enter it. The
details of what followed will no doubt be debated for centuries; here we
need say only that the two adversaries made contact, that Scheer and
Hipper narrowly escaped, and that in a night of gloom the Germans
slipped round the British and returned to port with smaller losses than
their opponents. Jellicoe had fought the battle which he always intended
to fight, taking no undue risks, since he believed that so long as the
British Grand Fleet was unbeaten it was victorious. Jutland, the
uncompromising details of which were at once published by the British
Admiralty, did us no good, but it also did us little harm. In a fog of
uncertainty Jellicoe handled the affair ably, and, if he was also
cautious, such was not only the nature of the man but the essence of his
policy. He could not have destroyed Scheer without taking risks which
might have destroyed himself, and with him would have gone down the
Allied cause. It was a war of peoples, and even the most resounding
triumph at sea would not have ended the contest, while a defeat would
have struck from the Allied hands the weapon on which all others
depended. If it be argued that such considerations belong to
statesmanship rather than to naval tactics, it may be replied that the
commander of the British Grand Fleet must be statesman as well as
seaman.

A week later the cruiser, which was carrying the Secretary of State for
War on a mission to Russia, was sunk by a mine west of the Orkneys, and
Lord Kitchener went down with it. The news filled his country and the
Allied nations with profound sorrow. Labour leaders, trade union
delegates, and the patrons of the conscientious objector were as sincere
in their mourning as his professional colleagues and the army which he
had created. At the time he was beyond doubt the most dominant
personality in the Empire, and the foremost of Britain's public
servants. Yet in a sense he was fortunate in the hour of his death, for
his work was done. In twenty-two months he had expanded six divisions
into seventy and made a great army. Now he was living in an unfamiliar
atmosphere. He did not understand, nor was he understood by, certain of
his colleagues. For politics in the ordinary sense he had no aptitude.
After the smooth mastery of his earlier career, he was often puzzled and
unhappy in the vortex in which he found himself. His epitaph might well
be the words written of a very different figure, but applicable to any
career of splendid but incomplete achievement: "A little space was
allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a high design;
then, with all things unfinished before him and behind, he fell asleep
after many troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone wearier to the
grave; none with less fear."[2]

[Illustration: _Photo: W. and D. Downey_

The King. A War-time portrait]


  IV

The temper of Britain, as the year 1916 wore to its close, was becoming
different both from the excitement of the first months of war and the
exasperation and confusion of 1915. We were beginning to learn the
meaning of the task we had undertaken. The old civilian fury against the
enemy had gone; the mood of the people had become more like that of the
men in the field, in its ironical resignation and the sense that the
business was too grave to permit of any "vileinye of hate." The War was
no more a reported tale; enemy aircraft had stricken down men and women
in English streets, the life of the trenches could be envisaged by the
dullest, and death, which had left few families unbereaved, was becoming
once more the supreme uniter.

But this new seriousness and poise must inevitably make a nation more
critical. There was a growing belief that the Government was trying to
cure an earthquake with small political pills. The Coalition formed in
May 1915 had not been a mobilisation of the best talent of the nation,
but a compromise between party interests. Its machinery, too, was not
fitted for the prompt dispatch of business. During the autumn men of all
classes were beginning to ask themselves whether a Government so
constituted was capable of winning the War. It is probable that for many
months the great majority of the people of Britain had been convinced
that a change was necessary, but the Government was slow to read the
weather signs. Hence, when the blow came, there was a tendency to
attribute it to a malign conspiracy and a calumnious press. But in the
crisis of such a war no Government could have been driven from office by
backstair intrigues alone or by the most skilful newspaper cabal. The
press which criticised owed its power solely to the fact that it echoed
what was in most men's minds. The nation felt that the results achieved
were not adequate to its sacrifice or its spirit.

Mr. Lloyd George was, now as ever, the interpreter of the subconscious
popular mind. Alone of his Liberal colleagues, he realised that the
political _expertise_, of which they had been such masters, was as much
in the shadow as the champion faro-player in a Far Western township
which has been visited by a religious revival. His powerful intelligence
was turned into other channels, and he brought to the conduct of this
war between nations the same passion which in other days he showed in
the strife between classes. When he succeeded Lord Kitchener at the War
Office he found himself with little authority; he was convinced that
things were being mismanaged at the front, and he was determined to
infuse into their conduct a fiercer purpose, and to win back policy and
major strategy to the control of the Cabinet. To do this he must either
be Prime Minister himself, or head of a small War Directory which had
full executive responsibility. At the close of November he put the
latter proposal before Mr. Asquith.

In the beginning of December the matter got into the newspapers. The
Conservative leaders, when consulted by Mr. Bonar Law, showed little
love for Mr. Lloyd George, but were anxious that Mr. Asquith should
resign in order that he might reconstruct his Cabinet; they themselves
were willing to tender their resignations, but it was clear that they
hoped that the new Cabinet would not include the War Minister. Mr.
Asquith thereupon accepted Mr. Lloyd George's proposal for a small War
Committee, of which he should not be a member, but over whose decisions
he should have control. But, partly because of an apparently inspired
campaign in the press and partly on the advice of his Liberal
colleagues, he presently changed his mind and withdrew his consent. Mr.
Lloyd George resigned, and Mr. Asquith made the mistake of also
resigning, since he believed himself indispensable. The King sent for
Mr. Bonar Law, who declared himself unable to construct an
administration, and on December 7th Mr. Lloyd George kissed hands as
Prime Minister. Owing to the magnanimity of Mr. Balfour, who accepted
the Foreign Office though Mr. Lloyd George had long been trying to oust
him from the Admiralty, the Conservative statesmen came in, and a
Government was duly formed. Its most important feature was a War Cabinet
of five--Mr. Lloyd George; Mr. Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer; Lord Curzon, the Lord President of the Council; and, as
Ministers without departments, Mr. Arthur Henderson, the Labour leader,
and Lord Milner, in whose political faith imperialism was joined to
wide dreams of social reconstruction.

It is easy to criticise the whole business--to point out, for example,
that Mr. Lloyd George became president of the War Cabinet while in his
first proposal he had insisted that the Prime Minister should not be a
member of it. The momentous transformation was no doubt tarnished by
intrigue and personal ambition, and by much ungraciousness in the manner
of it. Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, who had laboured long in the
service of their country, retired to the accompaniment of coarse abuse
from a section of the press. Yet beyond question the change was
necessary, and it had behind it the assent of a people not careless of
the decencies. That new leaders should be demanded in a strife which
affects national existence is as natural as the changes of the seasons.
Few men are so elastic in mind that, having given all their strength to
one set of problems, they can turn with unabated vigour to new needs and
new conditions. The nation, again, must be able to view its masters with
hopefulness, and in all novelty there is hope. There was that, too, in
the temperament and talents of the Prime Minister himself upon which men
had begun to look coldly. He left on the ordinary mind the impression
that he thought more of argument than of action. It seemed to his
critics impossible to expect the unresting activity and the bold
origination which the situation required from one whose habits of
thought and deed were cast in the more leisurely mould of an older
school of statesmen.

When a people judges there is usually reason in its verdict, and it is
idle to argue that Mr. Asquith was a perfect, or even the best
available, leader in war-time. But history will not let his qualities go
unacclaimed. He had admirable nerve and courage, and as a consequence he
was the most loyal of colleagues, for he never shrank from accepting the
burden of his own mistakes and those of his subordinates. He was
incapable of intrigue in any form. He had true personal dignity, caring
little for either abuse or praise, and shunning the arts of
self-advertisement. And if his optimism had at times an unfortunate
effect, there can be no doubt that his coolness and patience did much to
keep an even temper in the people during months of disappointment and
darkness. History will see in him a great parliamentarian, a great
public servant, and a great gentleman.

[Footnote 2: Swinburne on Byron.]




  CHAPTER III

  THE SALLIES


Up till now the War had been fought largely on traditional methods, by
combatants whose national integration was still intact. But with 1917 a
change came over the scene. Ancient constitutions began to crack, old
faiths to be questioned, potent, undreamed-of powers to be released.
Everywhere in the world was heard the sound of things breaking.

In half-conscious anticipation of this change there began a fumbling
movement towards peace. The wiser heads in every country were coming to
fear that their nations might crumble through sheer weariness, and that
absolute victory, even if it were won, might only mean absolute chaos.
The first move came from Germany, but her peace offer of December 1916
was framed in the arrogant terms of one who felt that she held the
winning cards. Her main motive was prudential. The Somme had shown her
that her military machine was being strained to breaking-point; if it
broke all would be over, and at any cost that catastrophe must be
averted. If the belligerents consented to treat, she believed that she
had certain advantages in any conference. She had much to give up which
she could not hold, and her renunciation might win her the things she
considered vital for her future. Moreover, once her opponents were
entangled in discussion, there was a chance of breaking up their unity
and shifting the argument to minor issues. It was a matter of life and
death to her that a rift should appear in the Allied lute before she
suffered any irremediable disaster. She had also an eye on neutral
states, especially America, who would not be likely to welcome a summary
bolting of the door against negotiations. Finally, there was a tactical
motive. She was contemplating new and anarchic methods of naval warfare,
and to justify herself she had to appear as an angel of peace who had
been rudely repulsed. Action which proceeds from so many mixed reasons
is apt to be a blunder, and the impression left by the German overtures
on men's minds was one of maladroitness carried to the pitch of genius.
The reply of the Allies on December 30th exposed their emptiness, and
the German Chancellor at long last assented to the policy of
unrestricted submarine warfare which was to come very near being the end
of Britain.

The effects of the War were so catastrophic and terrible that the
historian, looking back, is not inclined to be contemptuous of any
effort to end it. But it is clear that the German offer was impossible.
There was more hope in the overtures of Austria, whose new Emperor
Charles, through the medium of his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of
Bourbon, made secret proposals for a separate peace. They shipwrecked
principally upon the opposition of Italy and France, whose reply was
that of Lucio's comrade in _Measure for Measure_--"Heaven grant us its
peace, but not the King of Hungary's!"

Nor could there be any practical issue from President Wilson's offer of
mediation in the closing months of 1916. He had just been re-elected as
a peace-President, but he saw the clouds thickening ahead, and he felt
that he must be able to justify himself to his people if he were forced
to a course which was not pacific. He asked for a definition of war
aims--"that soundings be taken in order that we may learn, the neutral
nations with the belligerents, how near the haven of peace may be for
which all mankind longs." The Allied Governments, in spite of a certain
irritation among their peoples, had the wit to see Mr. Wilson's purpose.
In a remarkable document they set forth patiently and temperately, not
indeed their war aims in detail, since these could not be formulated
till the hour for negotiation arrived, but their general purpose, which
was wholly consistent with American ideals. Nearly two years before the
coming of peace they stated almost all the principles on which that
peace was founded.


  I

Alone of the Allies Britain had now attained a certain unity in the
direction of the War, for she had a Prime Minister who could draw
together and maximise all the powers of the nation. Mr. Lloyd George's
pre-War record had shown that he had unsurpassed demagogic talents, and
that rarer gift, a sense of political atmosphere. He might err in his
ultimate judgments, but rarely in his immediate intuitions; if his
strategy was often erroneous, his tactics were seldom at fault. His
interest was not in doctrine but in life, and his quick sense of reality
made him at heart an opportunist--one who loved the gross persistency of
facts, and was prepared to select, if need be, from the repertory of any
party. This elasticity, combined with his high political courage, had
made him even in his bitterest campaigns not wholly repugnant to his
opponents, for he was always human, and had none of the dogmatic
rigidity, the lean spiritual pride, of the elder Liberalism.

Now he had found his proper task, and was emerging as one of the most
formidable figures in the world. Lord Milner, who had historical
perspective and did not praise unadvisedly, considered him the greatest
War Minister since Chatham. He was a born coalitionist, sitting always
loose to parties, a born War Minister, since strife was his element, and
a born leader of a democracy. Of democracy, indeed, both in its strength
and weakness, he was more than a representative--he was a
personification. He had its fatal facility in general ideas, its
sentimentality, its love of picturesque catchwords; and he had also its
incongruous realism in action. Devotees of consistency were distressed
by his vagaries, for a tyrant or an oligarchy may be consistent, but not
a free people. He had a democracy's short memory, and its brittle
personal loyalties. Perhaps his supreme merit as a popular leader was
his comprehensibility. No mystery surrounded his character or his
talents. The qualities and defects of both were evident to all, and the
plain man found in them something which he could himself
assess--positive merits, positive weaknesses, so that he could give or
withhold his confidence as if he were dealing with a familiar. This
power of diffusing a personality, of producing a sense of intimacy among
millions who have never seen his face or heard his voice, is the
greatest of assets for a democratic statesman, and Mr. Lloyd George had
it not only for Britain but for all the world.

His character and mind were curiously of a piece. He had no petty
vulgarities in his composition, though he was shrewdly aware of them in
others and knew how to use them; he was good-humoured and friendly; he
had little personal vanity, for the monotonous infallibility of his
later _Memoirs_ does not fairly represent the man in his great days.
Lacking the normal education of British public servants, he had large
gaps in his mental furniture, and consequently was without that
traditional sense of proportion which often gives an air of wisdom to
mediocrities. He had a unique power of assimilating knowledge, but not
an equal power of retaining it. Hence his mental processes were somewhat
lacking in continuity; all was atomic and episodic, rather than a steady
light. His mind had in it little of the scientific, it was insensitive
to guiding principles, and there was no even diffusion of its power
through many channels.

But his virtues were to a notable degree the qualities of his defects.
The lack of ordinary knowledge saved him from the dominion of the
ordinary platitudes. The fact that his mind was not a _continuum_, as
the phrase goes, but a thing discrete and perpetually re-made, kept him
from lassitude and staleness. The world to which he woke each morning
was a new birth of time, to be faced with all the interest of the
pioneer. And the fact that one subject must at the moment exclude all
others gave him in that one subject a tremendous velocity, that
one-ideaed concentration which is a most formidable weapon in war. His
loose hold on principles kept him from formalism, and opportunism is
often the right attitude in a crisis. The whole combination--limited
knowledge, limitless ardour, absorption in the task of the moment,
adventurous interest--spelled that first of virtues in a War Minister,
_courage de tte_, fearlessness in the face of a swiftly changing world.
He did not ask to see a map of the road, but he was prepared without
reservation to grapple with any and all of the terrors of pilgrimage.

As the months passed, critics were found to depreciate his wisdom, his
honesty, even his talents, but none ever denied his vitality. His
physical appearance was a clue to the man; the thick-set figure, the
deep chest, the bright, wary swordsman's eye--all spoke of ebullient and
inexhaustible life. He was exhilarated rather than depressed by
misfortune, even though he might be also a little scared. His strength
was that he overflowed at all times with zest and interest and fervour.
The Allied cause now made the same appeal to him that the handicaps and
sufferings of the poor had made in earlier days. He was not only
energetic himself but an inspirer of energy in others, for, like a
gadfly, he stung all his environment to life. Many of his endowments,
such as his parliamentary tact, his subtlety in the management of
colleagues, his debating skill, even that eloquence which at its best
was a noble poetry, however invaluable to a statesman in normal times,
were of less account in war. But that one gift he had which is so rare
and inexplicable that it may rightly be called genius. In the darkest
days his vitality soared above the fog and made a kind of light by its
very ardour. He might be himself impatient of the long view and the wise
course, but the magnetic effluence was there to inspire sager heads and
not less resolute hearts. He could not be defeated, because his spirit
of buoyancy and zeal was insatiable, and therefore unconquerable, and
that spirit he communicated to the nation.

The machine which he fashioned, the War Cabinet, worked on the whole
with vigour, if not always with precision. Much was due to its
secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, who in every circumstance of the War
showed an uncanny foresight and a supreme competence. The special
executive duties fell chiefly on two men. One was General Smuts, who in
a certain kind of informal diplomacy had no equal, and who was in
consequence often charged with impossible missions. The other was Lord
Milner, who from the start of the War Cabinet bore the weight of its
most difficult tasks. He was the ablest living British administrator,
and no more powerful intellect and purer and more resolute character
have been devoted in our time to the public service. Caring nothing for
popularity and without oratorical gifts, he was by a fortunate chance in
most things the natural complement of the Prime Minister.

If a further proof be needed of Mr. Lloyd George's miraculous vitality,
it will be found in the fact that he could spare interest for matters
which extended beyond the fortunes of the War. He made the War Cabinet a
council of the whole Empire by summoning to its special meetings
representatives of India and of the Dominions. Well might the Prime
Minister of Canada declare that this meant the writing of a new page in
imperial history. If it be said that there was a war purpose in such a
step, since the whole Empire was in arms, and a war purpose is a measure
like the Corn Production Act, which opened up a new vista for British
agriculture, there could be none in the inquiries which Mr. Lloyd George
set afoot and which resulted in Mr. Fisher's great Education Bill, and
the drastic scheme of electoral reform which admitted women to the vote,
and the inception of the Whitley Councils. Under the pressure of war the
old individualism of industry was breaking down, the State was enlarging
its sphere of interest and duty, and on some there broke the vision of a
new and wiser world coming to birth while the old things were dying.


  II

The first of the old things to die was the Tsarist regime in Russia. A
_coup d'tat_, supported by most of the troops, ended on March 16th 1917
with the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of a provisional
Government. But the revolution was only beginning. The Liberal
intellectuals now in office believed that they could conduct both a
revolution and a war. They were soon undeceived, for it was against the
War that the revolution was aimed. Kerensky, an emotional Girondin, who
became Prime Minister, flung his energies into a great Russian
offensive, but all discipline had gone from the army, and the last
Russian attack of July 1st miserably failed. After that events marched
fast. Outlaws long in exile were assisted by Germany to return to their
native land, and among them came that strange being, Vladimir Ulianov,
familiar to the world as Lenin, who was to be the Messiah of a new
gospel. He and his Bolsheviks, knowing precisely what they wanted,
prevailed against a leader who believed that rhetoric could hold a
starving and dispirited people.

The army ceased to be an orderly force, and became a mob of peasants,
clamouring for bread, for peace, and for land. Throughout the summer
Kerensky laboured at his hopeless task, while the underground forces
were growing stronger. Then Germany struck, and Riga fell; Kornilov, the
one fighting general left, wasted his strength in futile quarrels; a
weary people turned to whatever offered leadership; and in October the
Bolshevik revolution, inspired by Lenin and organised by Trotsky,
marched swiftly to power. On November 7th its triumph was complete, the
triumph of a handful of determined men. An armistice soon followed, and
at Brest Litovsk before the close of the year the new Russian rulers
accepted from Germany a degrading peace.

Such is the bare record of a great tragedy. The tragedy was for the
Russian people, who against terrible handicaps had struggled for two
years with patient heroism, and were now condemned to a more horrible
carnival of famine and blood; not for the Tsarist regime, which most
amply deserved its fate. It had become an anachronism in the modern
world, a medival fragment in line neither with the blundering German
absolutism nor with the freedom of the Western peoples. History can only
regard the gentle, ineffective, tragically-fated Emperor with
compassion. He was born to a destiny too difficult; his very
virtues--his loyalty, his mercifulness--contributed to his undoing. The
worst influence was the wife whom he deeply loved, and who so surrounded
him with rogues and charlatans that his Court stank in the nostrils of
decent citizens. The autocracy collapsed from its own inherent
rottenness. The old order crumbled at the first challenge, for it had
become mere lath and plaster.

Russia's revolution, unlike the French, had not come from the burning
inspiration of a new faith, but from sheer weariness of mind and body,
from utter loss of nerve and heart. There had always been in her people
a certain lack of bone and fibre; as someone has said, they had the
courage to die, but not to live. She had never wholly emerged from the
servile state, and she was now to experience another type of serfdom.
For upon her enfeebled frame a new faith fastened like a leech. The
Bolsheviks were a mere fraction of the people, and they had many
diverse types among them, but they owed unswerving allegiance to
Lenin--the squat, smiling figure with the contemptuous eyes, who was
known to admit that in every hundred of his followers only one was a
true believer, and that of the residue sixty were fools and thirty-nine
knaves. They were class maniacs, and in their own eyes class martyrs,
and their day of revenge had come. They would liberate not only from the
last shackles of Tsardom, but from the tumid constitutionalism beloved
by the pedants of the West.

They were Marxists, but not orthodox Marxists, for they claimed a right
to a free interpretation of their master. Capitalism was to disappear,
and in the single-class community the co-operation of all would take the
place of exploitation by the few. But before the unfeatured desert of
their ideal could be attained rough places must be crossed, and the
method must be a temporary dictatorship, the dictatorship of the
workers, till capitalists and bourgeois were forcibly
eliminated--converted or destroyed. Toleration was unthinkable, a
synonym for weakness: the majority rule of democracy was equally
impossible, for communists would never be a majority till they had
purged the State by civil war. They were resolved to simplify society
with the knife; a small elect minority, they would force the rest to do
their bidding, because they were prepared to go to any lengths of
terror and crime. It was class-rule carried to its logical conclusion,
and murder exalted to be a normal function of the State. In this
nightmare certain categories of Western thought made unholy alliance
with the dark fatalism and the ancient cruelties of the East.

Beyond the Atlantic a second thing broke down, America's patience and
her traditional isolation. On February 1st Germany entered upon
unrestricted submarine warfare, proclaiming a state of blockade in all
the approaches to Europe, and her intention to sink at sight any vessel
whatsoever found in those waters. The German Ambassador at Washington
was promptly given his passports, but it was not till five American
vessels were sunk in March with loss of life, and secret overtures were
discovered from Germany to Mexico, that Mr. Wilson took action. On April
2nd the President asked Congress for a declaration of war. He outlined
means for the preparation of America and for supplying the Allies with
what they needed, and he concluded almost in the strain of Lincoln's
Second Inaugural:

    It is a fearful thing to lead this great and peaceful people
    into war. . . . But the right is more precious than peace, and
    we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our
    hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to
    authority to have a voice in their own government, for the
    rights and liberties of small nations, for the universal
    dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall
    bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself
    at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our
    fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have,
    with the pride of those who know that the day has come when
    America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the
    principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace that
    she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

With a strong people a slow change is a sure change. America flung
herself into the preparations for war with a disciplined enthusiasm. Her
coming seemed to make victory certain, and the right kind of victory,
for she entered upon war not for any parochial ends, but for the
reorganisation of the world's life on a sane basis. She brought with her
enormous assets. She was the largest workshop on earth; she had immense
wealth to put into the common stock; she had a powerful fleet and a
great capacity for shipbuilding; her reserves of man-power made her army
capable of almost unlimited expansion. Mr. Wilson's achievement should
not be forgotten. He had brought the whole nation into line on a matter
which meant the reversal of every traditional mode of thought: and one
who remembers the centrifugal tendencies of American life and its stiff
conservatism must admit that such a feat demanded no small genius in
statecraft.

But during these months there was another thing in danger of breaking--a
thing whose destruction would have condemned the Allies to defeat long
before America could take the field. Germany in her new submarine
campaign had calculated that in five or six months she could bring
Britain to her knees by cutting off sea-borne supplies. She was
beginning herself to realise that in the long run the home front was the
vital front. For a little it looked as if her calculations were right.
She had five times as many submarines as in 1915, and she made ample use
of them. In the closing months of 1916 the average loss of British
tonnage had been 300,000: in February 1917 it rose to 468,000; in March
to 500,000, and in April to 875,000. In the last month all our western
sea approaches became a cemetery, and one ship out of four that left
British ports never returned. Only six weeks' supply of corn remained in
the country.

It was the darkest moment in the War for Britain, but it was not
realised except by the Government and the Admiralty. The Prime Minister
rose to the crisis. It was impossible to reply by an offensive--by
laying a mine-field close to the German bases, or by attacking these
bases, for Jutland had left us without the full command of the North
Sea. Much was done by rationing, by increasing home production, and by
expanding our shipbuilding, but the real remedy, which before the summer
was gone relieved the situation, was a new plan of defence. The convoy
system was pressed upon an unwilling Admiralty--let it be said in
fairness that at the time we had not the promise of a multitude of
American destroyers--and with the help of some of the younger naval
officers it was finally accepted and put into force. It worked like a
charm. The losses to convoyed ships were only one per cent., and by
September the monthly tonnage lost was under 200,000. When peace came
88,000 merchant vessels had been convoyed with a loss of only 436.
Moreover, by various devices life was made more precarious for the enemy
submarines. By the end of the War more than half of the German U-boats
had been destroyed, all but a handful by the British Navy.


  III

The new Government in Britain attempted to infuse its own spirit of
vigour into the land campaign. But there it found itself confronted with
a tougher problem. Mr. Lloyd George had never believed in the dogma of
his military advisers that the Western Front was the only decisive area.
He did not greatly believe in soldiers, since he distrusted all
hierarchies and was constitutionally disinclined to submit to the
dictation of experts. He thought, not without reason, that, since they
were engaged in a new kind of war, the ordinary staff officers had
little to their credit except a certain familiarity with an out-of-date
technique. He was blind to the gains of the Somme battles, but he was
acutely alive to their cost. He could see small co-ordination in the
many desperate Allied attacks of the past two years. When he was told
that they had a common purpose, the attrition of the enemy, he replied
that attrition in the third year of war could not be a serious policy,
but a confession of the absence of a policy. If we were wearing Germany
down we were wearing ourselves out of existence, and competing in a
futile race towards bankruptcy.

His instinct was right, but it was not easy to find means to enforce it.
He still hankered after a switching of the main attack to a flank, and
early in 1917 leaned to the sending of large bodies of troops to the
Italian front for a knock-out blow against Austria. But it is doubtful
if at this stage of the campaign such a transference was possible, since
the two main forces had become _accrochs_, hooked together on the front
in the West. Nor was his first effort to obtain some central direction
more happily inspired, for it meant putting Haig and his army in a
quasi-subordination to Nivelle, the new French Commander-in-Chief. But
it is only fair to recognise the soundness of the instinct which
inspired these adventures. Of all the civilians I have known Mr. Lloyd
George seems to me to have possessed in the highest degree the capacity
for becoming a great soldier. But he might have lost several armies
while he was learning his trade.

In November 1916 a conference at Chantilly had laid down the French and
British plans for the coming year. It was agreed that the main burden
must fall on the British Army. The chief effort was to be an attack by
it north of the Somme, and by the French south of the Oise, with a
subsidiary movement in Champagne, to be followed in the summer by a
British advance towards the enemy bases on the Belgian coast. Nivelle's
advent changed all this. He decided to confine Haig to the Arras region,
and to deliver himself a mighty assault on the Aisne plateau. His
purpose was not a series of methodical advances, but a complete
break-through and a limitless pursuit. Haig and Ptain were sceptical,
but he secured the approval of the two Governments, for to the civilians
this seemed to be at any rate something more hopeful than the weary
_guerre d'usure_.

Germany intervened to dislocate the plan. Ludendorff, aware of his
diminishing man-power, set himself to reorganise his armies, and to
prepare the way for that victory on land which he believed must follow
the submarine triumph. Across the chord of his great salient in the west
from Lens to Rheims he built a gigantic series of defences, which were
named after the heroes of German mythology, and which Britain knew as
the Hindenburg Line. Then he withdrew his front towards it, devastating
all the area relinquished. It was a wise and provident plan, perfectly
executed. It gave Germany a shorter and far stronger line. Above all it
delayed and compromised the Allies' offensive. They could not now strike
before April, and Germany, instead of being pinned down, as Haig
desired, to an awkward position, had a margin for refitment and rest.

The tale of the Allied campaign that year--in the West, for there was
presently no Eastern Front--is one of difficult beginnings, successes
which led nowhere, and desperate battles which all but broke their
hearts. On April 9th Haig opened at Arras, captured the Vimy Ridge
(which was to prove an invaluable gain in a year's time), and was
compelled to continue long after attack was fruitless. For meanwhile, on
April 16th, Nivelle struck on the Aisne, with a poor tactical scheme and
no chance of surprise, since the enemy knew his plans in detail. He
suffered a costly check. For a little it seemed that the strength of
France might melt away, since mutiny ran through the army, and at one
moment it was believed that there were only two loyal divisions between
the enemy and Paris. Ptain restored confidence and order--it was the
greatest achievement of a fine soldier; but it took him all summer to
nurse his armies back to health, and meantime Britain had to bear
unaided the brunt of the war. At Messines in June we carried out a
perfect model of a limited advance--it has been rightly described as the
only true siege-warfare attack made throughout a siege war. But Britain
could not rest; it had been the word of the British Prime Minister
himself, at the conference in Paris in May which put new hope into
France, that no respite must be given to the enemy. Haig turned to the
offensive towards the Belgian coast, which had always been his main
plan.

This is not the place to tell the melancholy story of that battle of a
hundred days which is known as Passchendaele or Third Ypres. There was
some merit in its conception, but little in its execution; the weather
early made success impossible, and it was continued long after the
mud-holes and ridges aimed at had lost all strategical meaning. The
German defence showed great tactical ingenuity, but their strength was
strained to its utmost and their fangs against France were for the
moment drawn, since this cruellest action of the war cost them 300,000
men, if it cost us 100,000 more. Whatever the reason for the tragic
prolongation--the uneasiness of the French, the inelasticity of our
military machine--one alleged cause may be ruled out, the personal
vanity of Haig. Such was not the nature of the most modest and
single-hearted of men.

While our troops were dying in the Flanders bogs the usual autumnal
sacrifice of an ally was all but consummated. On October 24th on the
middle Isonzo an army of nine Austrian divisions and six German burst in
the misty morning through the Italian front, and in a fortnight's
fighting forced it back from river line to river line with a loss of
600,000 men. Eventually standing ground was found on the Piave, which
covered, but only just covered, Venice. Britain and France sent
reinforcements, and British and French generals assisted in
reconstituting the broken forces of Italy. Meantime at Cambrai on
November 20th Britain, by the use of some 400 tanks, at last achieved a
surprise, and for a moment almost brought back the war of manoeuvre. The
fatal drain of Passchendaele had depleted our reserves, and we were
unable to develop our initial victory, or to prevent a vigorous German
counterstroke ten days later. Our reach had exceeded our grasp: yet
Cambrai remains one of the key actions of the War, for it offered us a
way of release from siege bondage which, after some fumbling, we were to
follow. For the first time we learned the true value of the new weapon
of which we were the exponents.

We were pioneers at Cambrai in new tactics, of which, fortunately for
us, the enemy did not grasp the meaning. But he, too, had been fruitful
in tactical novelties. His problem was to discover a method which would
restore open warfare and give a decision, and he deserves all credit
for a brilliant departure from routine, a true intellectual effort to
re-think the main problem of modern war. All former offensives had after
a shorter or longer time come to a halt for the same reason--wearied
troops were met by fresh reserves. The attacker continued hammering at
an unbreakable front, because he had set the stage for action in that
one area, and could not easily shift his batteries and communications.
In a word, all offensives lacked mobility. Germany's first business,
therefore, was to make the battle mobile and bring in the element of
surprise.

Her plan was not a break-through in the older sense, but a general
crumbling. It was based upon the highly specialised training of certain
units, and the absence of any preliminary massing near the point of
attack. Again, there was no long bombardment to alarm the enemy. The
advance was made by picked troops in small clusters, carrying light
trench-mortars and many machine-guns, with the field batteries close
behind them in support. The actual mode of attack, which the French
called "infiltration," may be likened to a hand, of which the
finger-tips are shod with steel, and which is pushed into a yielding
substance. The picked troops at the finger ends made gaps through which
others passed, till each section of the defence found itself outflanked
and encircled. It was no case of an isolated stroke, but of a creeping
sickness which might demoralise a hundred miles of front. The first
experiment was made at the capture of Riga in September, but the true
test came in October at Caporetto. The final proof was the
counterstroke at Cambrai. There the attack on the British left, carried
out in the old fashion, signally failed, while the assault on the
British right, after the new fashion, as signally succeeded. But the
Allied Staffs were slow to grasp the meaning of the new method.
Caporetto was explained by a breakdown in Italian nerve, and Cambrai by
defective local intelligence. Four months later the armies of France and
Britain read the true lesson in letters of fire.


  IV

After Passchendaele and Caporetto some inquisition into military methods
was inevitable. The first changes were at British Headquarters. The
Prime Minister would fain have seen an alteration in the chief command,
but Haig would not be forced from his place, though certain lesser
resignations were compelled, much to the advantage of his staff's
efficiency. But he made a bold bid for more unity in command. After
Caporetto it was decided that a War Council should sit at Versailles,
consisting of the Prime Minister and one other statesman from each of
the Allies, with four military delegates to act as advisers. The
soldiers objected naturally to being mere advisers without executive
power, and in January 1918 a revised machinery was framed--a military
Committee with Foch as president, empowered to create a general reserve
by contributions from the Allied armies. The device had few merits. The
same authority that controls general operations must control reserves,
and a committee cannot with success command an army--these are
elementary principles in war. But the scheme was never tried, for it
shipwrecked upon Haig, who, when asked to allocate divisions to the
reserve, refused, since he believed that he had none to give.

The controversy led to the resignation of Sir William Robertson, who was
succeeded as Chief of the Imperial General Staff by Sir Henry Wilson.
Robertson had done valuable work in creating the new British Army, but
it was his misfortune to be the sole conduit between two much abler men,
neither of whom he could interpret to the other. He could not expound
Haig's mind to Mr. Lloyd George or the Prime Minister's mind to Haig.
This unfortunate lack of contact was the cause of misunderstandings for
which neither party was altogether to blame. The Prime Minister at the
time was wrong on many points. His view that the Western Front was "over
insured" was wrong: his proposal for a great Palestine offensive was in
the circumstances a dangerous folly; he was wrong as to the Versailles
machinery, wrong in his anticipation of Germany's plans, wrong in his
starving of Haig and the impossible task which he laid on him. But there
is something to be said on his side. He saw the danger of disunion and
proposed a remedy; it was a faulty one, but the soldiers contented
themselves with criticising. If in the beginning of 1918 Haig and
Robertson had demanded a Generalissimo and had proposed Foch, they would
certainly have carried their point, in spite of the Prime Minister's
declaration of the previous November. He might fairly have complained
that he did not get sufficient help from his official military advisers,
and he turned naturally to the fertile, if fantastic, mind of Sir Henry
Wilson. In a democracy relations between soldiers and statesmen must
always be delicate, but they were notably less strained in Britain than
in France or Italy. The War Cabinet never interfered with Haig as
Jefferson Davis interfered with Lee before Fredericksburg, and as
Lincoln interfered with every Northern general save Grant.

At the close of the third year, for British opinion the outline of the
War, which had seemed clear and firm, was now blurred again. Russia had
fallen out of line, and new and unknown quantities had entered the
problem. It had been a depressing year, which, beginning with the
promise of a decision, had closed for the Allies in a deep uncertainty.
They had won no indisputable successes except in remote lands; the
taking of Bagdad and Jerusalem affected only Turkey, and while it
weakened her extremities did not strike at her heart. Discomfort was
growing in every British home, since lights were darkened and rations
were reduced, and there was the unvarying tale of losses to rend the
heart. The Russian revolution, followed by the Stockholm Conference, let
loose a flood of theorising; there were incessant disputes with Labour,
war-weary, puzzled, suspicious, poisoned to some extent by false
propaganda. All zest and daylight had gone out of the struggle. The
cause for which we had entered it was now half forgotten, for men's
minds had grown numb. Civilians at home, as well as soldiers in the
field, felt themselves in the grip of an inexorable machine.

It was a dangerous mood--dangerous to the enemy, for it meant that grim
shutting of the teeth which with Britain is a formidable thing. But it
was dangerous also to ourselves, for it might have resulted in a
coarsening of fibre and a blindness to the longer view and the greater
issues. That this was not its consequence was in large part due to the
King, who by his visits to every industrial centre kept before dazed and
weary minds the greatness of the national purpose and the unity of the
people. Wherever he went he seemed to unseal the founts of human
sympathy. He visited the Clyde, the Tyne, and most of the chief munition
works; and, to the disquiet of the War Cabinet, he went to Lancashire
during a strike and was most royally welcomed. Let me set down his Prime
Minister's tribute: "The loyalty of the people was heartened and
encouraged . . . by the presence of their Sovereign in their midst, and
by the warm personal interest he showed in their work and their
anxieties. In estimating the value of the different factors which
conduced to the maintenance of our home front in 1917, a very high place
must be given to the affection inspired by the King, and the unremitting
diligence with which he set himself in those dark days to discharge the
functions of his high office." To the workers he seemed to come not only
as monarch but as comrade, with the words of Richard II on his lips: "I
live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends."


  V

With the coming of 1918 the initiative passed to the enemy. Russia's
collapse enabled him to put larger forces on the Western Front than the
Allies could muster. They had resigned themselves to a defensive
campaign till America could send her armies; it was Germany's purpose
before that date to reach a decision in the field. It was her last
chance. The submarine campaign had failed, and daily the menace from
beyond the Atlantic drew nearer. Her people were weak with privations
and sick with hope deferred. A little longer and their wonderful
fortitude would break. With all the strength she could muster, with her
new tactics to aid her, and with a desperate necessity to goad her, she
undertook the last great sally and staked everything on victory.

Ludendorff's general plan was to isolate the British Army, roll it up
from its right, and drive it into the sea, or pin it down to an
entrenched camp between the Somme and the Channel--a Torres Vedras from
which it would emerge only on the signature of peace. This done, he
could hold it with few troops, swing round on the French, and put them
out of action. He must strike, therefore, with all his might at the
point of junction of Haig and Ptain, on the western face of the great
salient, where the Allies were weakest and the ground easiest. His
position on interior lines gave him the chance of surprise, for till the
actual attack the Allies would not know on which side of the salient the
blow was to fall. His admirable communications would enable him to
obtain a great local predominance. For the first stage of the great
battle he had sixty-three divisions in line or in immediate reserve.

The Versailles Council miscalculated both the place and the date of the
attack. Haig's Intelligence service informed him of the exact hour, but
he had neither the time nor the resources to prepare an adequate
defence. He held 130 miles of line, and these the most critical in the
West, with approximately the same numbers as he had had two years
before, when his front was only 80 miles long and Russia was still in
the field. An initial German success was almost predestined. Nineteen
divisions in line and thirteen in reserve can scarcely stand against a
first attacking wave of thirty-seven divisions, which was presently to
grow to sixty-three.

This most perilous stage for the British Army--and, except for the First
Marne, the most perilous for the Allied cause--opened in the fog of the
early morning of March 21st, when at a quarter to five four thousand
German guns were released against the British front, while all the back
areas were drenched with gas, which hung like a pall in the moist air.
The fortnight of the Somme retreat cannot be told in a simple Homeric
narrative; it was a medley of confused operations, improvised plans,
chances, mischances, and incredible heroisms. On the first day forty
miles of the British line were submerged, and, in a week, forty miles
off the enemy tide was lapping the walls of Amiens. Ludendorff achieved
much, but he did not achieve his main purpose, for by April 5th the
battle had died down, Amiens was not taken, the front had been restored,
and the French and British were not separated. This failure was due to
many causes; he was false to the spirit of his own tactics, and, instead
of exploiting weakness when he had found it, wasted his strength on the
steadfast bastion of Arras; half-way through he fumbled, forgot his true
aim, and became the hasty improviser. Perhaps he sought to achieve the
impossible, for his troops outmarched their supplies and their stamina,
and, accustomed to short commons, lost discipline often when they found
Allied stores to plunder. Yet he won a notable victory, and, to the
ultimate advantage of the Allies, was encouraged to continue, for, had
his blow been parried at the start, he might have relapsed on the
defensive, and thereby protracted the war.

The British Army had written a shining page in its history, for a
retreat may be as glorious as an advance. By the end of March
seventy-three German divisions had engaged thirty-seven British. The
disparity was in reality far greater than two to one, for, owing to the
German power of local concentration, in many parts of the field the odds
had been three or four to one. After the second day we had no prepared
lines on which to retire, and the rivers parallel to our front were
useless from the drought. It was a marvel that our gossamer front
wavered and blew in the wind but never wholly disappeared. Again and
again complete disaster was miraculously averted. Scratch forces held up
storm troops; cavalry did work that no cavalry had ever done before in
the history of war; gunners broke every rule of the textbooks. The
retreat was in flat defiance of all precedent and law, and it succeeded
only because of the stubborn value of the British soldier.

The moment was too solemn for half-measures. A divided command could not
defend the long, lean front of the Allies against Germany's organised
might, directed by a single brain towards a single purpose. One strong
hand must be on the helm, and one only. On March 23rd Haig, after seeing
Ptain, telegraphed to London for the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff. At the request of the Prime Minister Lord Milner also crossed the
Channel on the 24th, and on the 26th he and Sir Henry Wilson met
Clemenceau and Poincar, Haig, Foch and Ptain at Doullens. This
conference, held amid the backwash of the great retreat, was in a sense
the turning point of the war. The proposal for a supreme
commander-in-chief, urged by Milner and supported by Clemenceau, was
accepted by Ptain and welcomed by Haig, and for the post Foch was
unanimously chosen. The Allies in their extremity turned with one accord
to the slight, grizzled, deep-eyed man of sixty-six, who during a
laborious lifetime had made himself a master of war.

The ordeal was the source of other blessings. America increased her
recruiting, and strained every nerve to quicken the dispatch of troops,
so that she might soon stand in line with her allies. Mr. Lloyd George
and M. Clemenceau appealed to President Wilson, and no appeal was ever
more generously met. General Pershing postponed his plan of a separate
American section of operations, and offered to Foch every man, gun and
lorry which America had in Europe. France showed that quiet and almost
prosaic resolution to win or perish which two years before had inspired
her troops at Verdun. In Britain the threat of industrial strikes
disappeared, and of their own accord the workers gave up their Easter
holiday in order to make up by an increased output for lost guns and
stores. On April 10th the House of Commons passed by a large majority a
Bill raising the limit of military age to fifty, and giving the
Government power to abolish the ordinary exemptions. Divisions were
transferred from Palestine and Salonika to France, the old precautions
against invasion were dropped, and, within a month from March 21st,
355,000 men were sent across the Channel.

But when the King visited his armies in France in the last days of March
the situation was still on a razor's edge. He had gone to them for a
week during the flood-tide of the Somme battles; he had visited them
again, accompanied by the Queen, on the eve of Passchendaele. Now he
went to them in the throes of their sternest trial. He saw remnants of
battalions which had been through the retreat, and he saw units which in
a week or two were to be engaged in the not less desperate stand on the
Lys. The battle-field was a solemn place, for already we had lost more
men than in the whole thirty-four weeks of the Dardanelles campaign. The
King's visit was an appeal to his troops to "take counsel from the
valour of their hearts," an appeal which Haig, the least rhetorical of
men, was a fortnight later to put into grave and memorable words:

    There is no other course but to fight it out. Every position
    must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With
    our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our
    cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of
    our homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the
    conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.




  CHAPTER IV

  SURRENDER


  I

On April 1st came Ludendorff's second blow. Originally designed as a
mere diversion, it grew by its startling success into a major effort,
and thereby further compromised his main strategy. His aim was to push
through between La Basse and Armentires, and then, pressing
north-west, to capture Hazebrouck and the hills beyond Bailleul. This
would mean a general British retirement and a direct threat to Calais
and Boulogne, and would eat up the Allied reserves. It achieved that
indeed, but it also ate up his own. In three days he had advanced eleven
miles, and for a week and more there was a stern resistance against
odds. Foch, by his delay in sending help, tried Haig's patience high,
but the issue proved that he was wise. The British front sagged and bent
but it held, and by the end of April Ludendorff realised that he must
try elsewhere.

He was becoming desperate; his original strategical scheme had gone, and
his efforts were now in the nature of a gambler's throw. On May 27th the
new storm broke on the Aisne heights, and by the evening the French
gains in three great actions had vanished like smoke, and the enemy was
across the river. On the second day he was beyond the Vesle, and on the
third his vanguard was looking down from the heights of the Tardenois on
the waters of the Marne. It was the swiftest advance made in the West
since the beginning of trench warfare. But Ludendorff could turn it to
no account. He tried to press westward and failed; on June 9th he tried
to cut off the Allied salient between the two great dents which he had
made, and failed again. His position was brilliant but without hope. He
was the victim of his own successes.

His last offensive came on July 15th, east and west of Rheims. It
achieved nothing, for, though the enemy crossed the Marne, it was only
to enter the Allied trap. Hitherto Foch had stood patiently on the
defensive, hoarding his assets. He had tried almost too highly the
fortitude of the British soldier. Now he had got his reserve, and Haig,
to augment it, had, to the consternation of the War Cabinet, dangerously
thinned his own front in the north. The moment had come to use it. On
July 18th he struck at the right flank of the new German salient and
drove it in. It was not the great counterstroke, but the blow which
stops a boxer's rush and forces him to pause and consider. Ludendorff
realised what it meant, halted, and began to withdraw from the Marne
pocket. He had lost the initiative, and had begun his long retreat.

Foch had now freedom of movement, for with him at last was the new
American army. In July there were already a million Americans in France.
The German command had long been aware of the greatness of this menace,
but the German press and people had been told that it was only a force
in buckram. Even up to July this newspaper belittlement continued. But
at Chateau-Thierry in June an American contingent had fought with
furious gallantry; and on July 15th in the same area one American
division and elements from another had rolled back the German assault.
These were the troops who, according to the German belief, would not
land in Europe unless they could swim like fishes or fly like birds.
Like the doubting noble of Samaria, the enemy had declared "If the Lord
would make windows in heaven, might this thing be?" The inconceivable
had been brought to pass. Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane.

On August 8th at Amiens came the true counterstroke, the first stage of
the three months' battle which compelled Germany's surrender. The plan,
the choice of the place, and the ordering of the attack were wholly
British. Haig had now come to the height of his powers, and was a
different man from the cautious, orthodox soldier of earlier days. He
had not always been happy with his French colleagues: he was in some
ways too like Ptain, and in every way too unlike Foch, to be quite at
ease with either of them. But now his mind and Foch's seemed to move
towards a closer partnership. The Generalissimo was big enough to take
advice, and from Haig he drew not only his chief weapon, the tank, but
much of his tactics, and certain vital points in his strategy. The
British army in the past months had suffered far more than the French,
but nevertheless they now took the chief rle, and retained it to the
last day of the war. It was Foch's proof of the reverence in which he
held his ally.

The Battle of Amiens lasted from August 8th to August 12th, when our
advance was halted by the tangled wastes of the old Somme battle-field.
It was the most brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed of any
British action on the Western Front. Its success was due to the profound
secrecy in which the forces of attack had been assembled--for example,
the moving from the north of the Canadian corps, which the enemy
regarded as storm-troops, was most ingeniously concealed; to the absence
of a preliminary artillery bombardment, and the use instead of a swarm
of 456 tanks; to the ground mist of the early morning; to the continuity
in the use of reserves; and to the wise parsimony which did not press it
too far.

On paper the material gains did not appear excessive, for, both in
ground won and in the number of prisoners, Germany had often exceeded
them. But it achieved the essential purpose of all fighting, it struck a
deadly blow at the spirit of an already weakening enemy. Ludendorff has
confessed that "August 8th was the black day of the German army in the
history of the war. . . . It put the decline of our fighting force
beyond all doubt." "We are at the end of our resources," said the
Emperor; "the war must be ended." At a conference held at Spa the
Generals informed the Emperor and the Imperial Chancellor that there was
no chance of victory, and that peace negotiations should be opened as
soon as possible. The most that could be hoped for was an orderly
retirement to the prepared defences of the Hindenburg Line, a strategic
defensive which by its vigour would win reasonable terms from the
Allies. Ludendorff himself offered his resignation, which was not
accepted. He had lost hope of any gains, and his one aim was to avoid an
abject surrender--not a promising mood in which to enter upon the most
difficult of the operations of war.

Foch was resolved to defeat his hopes, and to hustle him out of all his
positions before he could entrench himself, driving the whole vast army
back to the narrow gut which led to Germany. But he anticipated at this
time a slow advance which would protract the war into the next year. His
strategical plan was now in course of revelation. The battle must begin
mobile and be kept mobile; therefore, after striking a blow, he would
stay his hand as soon as serious resistance developed. He would not
permit himself to become _accroch_, as the British had been on the
Somme, at Arras, and at Third Ypres, and as Ludendorff had been before
Amiens and on the Lys. But, having stayed his hand, he would attack
instantly in another place. Tanks permitted him to mount a new offensive
rapidly and frequently, and gave him a means of obviating the clumsiness
of the modern military machine. His policy must be a perpetual
_arpeggio_ along the whole front, which would wear down the enemy's line
and diminish by swift stages his reserves. He would be like a fencer
pinking his antagonist, baffling him, wearying him, drawing much blood.
There must be no attempt to give a premature _coup de grce_. Following
Napoleon's maxim, he made it his business to keep the battle "nourished"
till the moment came for the last stage. He would not press in any
section for an ambitious advance or endeavour to force a decision. The
campaign must develop organically like a process of nature.

Of this great plan, to which he had contributed, Haig was to be the
chief executant. But the British commander, being closer to the actual
battle, was beginning to fix a different date for the last act. He was
steadily coming to believe that the curtain might fall before Christmas.


  II

The temper of Britain through the spring and summer was heavy and
apathetic, but now and then it revealed by little spurts of violence how
near men and women were living to the outer edge of their nerves. The
crisis of March and April had produced a new resolution, but it was a
resolution which had no exhilaration in it and little hope. People had
begun to doubt if the War would ever end. The night was still so black
that they had forgotten that the darkest hour might presage the dawn.
The exploit of Sir Roger Keyes at Zeebrugge on St. George's Day woke a
momentary thrill, for Britain will always react to a triumph of her
Navy. But as the months passed, and the word from the battle-field was
only of still further retreats and losses, the popular mind sank again
into a dull listlessness.

The news of the turn of the tide in early August did not stir it, for it
could not realise its meaning. Everybody was tired and underfed; the
alternation of feverish work and feverish gaiety had unsettled their
balance; an influenza epidemic, too, was each week claiming many
hundreds of victims. There was another bout of spy hunting--a sure proof
of frayed nerves. All over the country there were strikes among
munition-workers, followed by trouble with the transport services, with
the miners, and in August with the London police. These difficulties
were solved by the easy method of increasing wages, but sober people
began to wonder where this facile business of doles would end. Those in
authority, aware that the last stage was approaching, and knowing
something of the state of the German people, were anxiously questioning
themselves whether a rot might not set in at the very end to nullify all
our sacrifice. . . . And then, suddenly, in the autumn the country awoke
to the meaning of the news from France. At last we were winning--winning
beyond belief. Without excitement, but with a deep half-conscious
relief, Britain steadied herself, as a runner steadies himself for the
last lap of a race.

Slowly minds began to turn from the preoccupation of the Western Front,
and, since we were winning over the whole globe, to realise something of
the vastness of the War. It was a task for the imagination since no
man's experience could cover all the many fields. An observer on some
altitude in the north, like the Hill of Cassel, on some evening that
September, could look east and note the great arc from the dunes at
Nieuport to the coalfields at Lens lit with the flashes of guns and the
gleam of star-shells. That was a line of fifty miles--far greater than
any battle-field in the old wars; but it was a mere fragment of the
whole. Had he moved south to the ridge of Vimy he would have looked on
another fifty miles of an intenser strife. South, again, to Bapaume, and
he would have marked the wicked glow from Cambrai to the Oise. Still
journeying, from some little height between the Oise and the Aisne, he
would have scanned the long front which was now creeping round the
shattered woods of St. Gobain to where Laon sat on its hill. From the
mounts about Rheims he might have seen France's battle line among the
bleak Champagne downs, and from a point in the Argonne the trenches of
the Americans on both sides of the Meuse, running into the dim woody
country where the Moselle flowed towards Metz. Past the Gap of Nancy and
down the long scarp of the Vosges went the flicker of fire and the
murmur of combat, till the French lines stretched into the plain of
Alsace and exchanged greetings with sentinels on the Swiss frontier.
Such a battle-ground might well have seemed beyond the dream of mortals,
and yet it was but a part of the whole.

A celestial intelligence, with sight unlimited by distance, could have
looked eastward, and, beyond the tangle of the Alps, witnessed a strange
sight. From the Stelvio to the Adriatic ran another front, continuous
through glacier-camps and rock-eyries and trenches on the edge of the
eternal snows, to the pleasant foothills of the Lombard plain, and
thence, by the gravel-beds of the Piave, to the lagoons of Venice.
Beyond the Adriatic it ran through the dark hills of Albania, past lakes
where the wild fowl wheeled at the unfamiliar sound of guns, beyond the
Tcherna and Vardar and Struma valleys to the gean shores. It began
again, when the Anatolian peninsula was left behind, and curved from the
Palestine coast in a great loop north of Jerusalem across Jordan to the
hills of Moab. Gazing over the deserts, he would have marked the flicker
which told of mortal war passing beyond the ancient valleys of Euphrates
and Tigris, up into the wild Persian ranges. And scattered flickers to
the north would have led him to the Caspian shores, and beyond them to
the table-land running to the Hindu Kush, which was the cradle of all
the warring races. Passing north, his eyes would have seen the lights of
the Allies from the Pacific coast westward to the Urals and the Volga,
and little clusters far away on the shores of the Arctic sea.

The vision of such a celestial spectator, had it been unlimited by time
as well as by space, would have embraced still stranger sights. It would
have noted the Allied line in the West, stagnant for months, then
creeping on imperceptibly as a glacier, then wavering in sections like
a curtain in the wind, and at last moving steadily upon Germany. It
would have beheld the old Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Danube,
pressing westward, checking and falling back; breaking in parts,
gathering strength, and again advancing; and at last dying like a
lingering sunset into darkness. Behind would have appeared a murderous
glow, which was the flame of revolution. Turning to Africa, it would
have noted the slow movement of little armies in West and East and
South; handfuls of men creeping in wide circles among the Cameroons
jungles till the land was theirs; converging lines of mounted troopers
among the barrens of the German South-west, closing in upon the tin
shanties of Windhoek; troops of all races traversing the mountain glens
and dark green forests of German East Africa, till after months and
years the enemy had become a batch of exiles. And farther off still,
among the isles of the Pacific and on the Chinese coast, it would have
seen men toiling under the same lash of war.

Looking seaward, the sight would have been not less marvellous. On every
ocean of the world he would have observed the merchantmen of the Allies
bringing supplies for battle. But in the North Atlantic, in the
Mediterranean, in the Channel and the North Sea he would have seen
uncanny things. Vessels would disappear as if by magic, and little
warships would hurry about like some fishing fleet when shoals are
moving. The merchantmen would huddle into flocks, with destroyers like
lean dogs at their sides. He would have seen in the Scottish firths and
among the isles of the Orkneys a mighty navy waiting, and ships from it
scouring the waters of the North Sea, while inside the defences of
Heligoland lay the decaying monsters of the German Fleet. And in the air
over sea and land would have been a perpetual going and coming of
aircraft like flies above the pool of war.

The observer, wherever on the globe his eyes were turned, would have
found no area immune from the struggle. Every factory in Europe and
America hummed by night and day to prepare the materials of strife. The
economics of five continents had been transformed. The life of the
remotest villages had suffered a strange metamorphosis. Far-away English
hamlets were darkened because of air raids; little farms in Touraine, in
the Scottish Highlands, in the Apennines, were untilled because there
were no men; Armenia had lost half her people; the folk of North Syria
were dying of famine; Indian villages and African tribes had been
blotted out by plague; whole countries had ceased for the moment to
exist, except as geographical terms. Such were but a few of the
consequences of the kindling of war in a world grown too expert in
destruction, a world where all nations were part one of another.


  III

The advance to victory, like the Somme retreat, cannot be painted on
broad lines, for it was composed of a multitude of interlinked actions.
The first stage, completed by the first week of September, was the
forcing of the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line, an achievement made
certain by the breaking by the Canadians on September 2nd of the famous
Drocourt-Quant switch. In the south the Americans under Pershing cut
off the St. Mihiel salient, and prepared for their drive northward. The
next stage was the breaching of the Hindenburg defences, while Pershing
attacked towards Mezires and the Belgians in the north towards
Ghent--movements allotted to the last week of September.

It was now the turn of the British War Cabinet to have doubts, and, as
it would have put the brake on Allenby in Palestine, so it would have
held back Haig. But the British commander had reached the point which
great soldiers come to sooner or later, when he could trust his
instinct. On September 9th he told Lord Milner that the war would not
drag on till next July, as was the view at home, but was on the eve of a
decision. He had the supreme moral courage to take upon himself the full
responsibility for a step which, if it failed, would blast his repute
and lead to dreadful losses, but which, if it succeeded, would in his
belief mean the end of the War, and prevent civilisation from crumbling
through sheer fatigue.

He was justified of his fortitude. On September 26th forty British and
two American divisions faced fifty-seven weak German divisions behind
the strongest entrenchments in history. By the 29th they had crossed the
Canal du Nord and the Scheldt canal, and in a week were through the
whole defence system and in open country. By October 8th the last
remnants of the Hindenburg zone had disappeared in a cataclysm. Foch's
conception had not been fully realised; Pershing had been set too hard a
task and was not far enough forward, when the Hindenburg system gave, to
pin the enemy to the trap which had been set. Nevertheless by October
10th Germany had been beaten in a battle which Foch described as a
"classic example of the military art." The day of doom was only
postponed, and Ludendorff had now no refuge from the storm. Long before
his broken divisions could reach the Meuse Germany would be on her
knees.

For she was now losing all her allies. They had been the guardians of
her flanks and rear, and if they fell she would be defenceless. On
September 15th the Allied armies moved forward at Salonika, and within
a week Bulgaria's front had collapsed and she sought an armistice. On
September 19th Allenby in Palestine opened an action which must remain a
perfect instance of how, by surprise and mobility, a decisive victory
may be won almost without fighting. This last crusade would have
startled the soul of St. Louis and Raymond and Richard of England could
they have beheld the amazing army which undertook it. Algerian and
Indian Moslems, Arab tribesmen, men of the thousand creeds of Hindustan,
African negroes and Jewish battalions were among the liberators of the
sacred land of Christendom. Breaking the defence in the plain of Sharon,
Allenby sent his 15,000 cavalry in a wide sweep to cut the enemy's line
of communications and block his retreat, while Feisal and Lawrence east
of Jordan distracted his attention. The operations moved like clockwork.
In two days the Turkish armies west of Jordan had been destroyed, while
that on the east bank was being shepherded north by the Arabs to its
destruction. By October 1st Damascus was in our hands, Aleppo
surrendered on October 26th, and on the last day of the month Turkey
capitulated. Meantime on the anniversary of Caporetto Italy had made her
last advance, and the Austrian forces, which had suffered desperately
for four years and were now at the end of their endurance, melted away.
With her gallant army crumbled the country. On November 4th an
armistice was arranged, and at the same time the Dual Monarchy broke up
into fragments. The Emperor was left alone and unfriended in the vast
echoing corridors of Schnbrunn.

    *    *    *    *    *

While Foch continued to play his deadly _arpeggio_ in the West, Germany
strove by diplomacy to arrest the inevitable. Ludendorff stuck to his
idea of a strategical defence to compel better terms, till his physical
health failed and with it his nerve; but the civilian statesmen believed
that the army was beyond hope, and that there must be no delay in making
peace. They knew--what the soldiers did not realise--that the splendid
fortitude of the German people was breaking, disturbed by Allied
propaganda and weakened with suffering. The home front was dissolving
quicker than the battle front. The virus of revolution, which Germany
had fostered in Russia, was stealing into her own veins.

She appealed to President Wilson and attempted to secure peace on the
basis of his Fourteen Points, but he very properly replied that the
armistice which she sought was a matter for the Allied leaders in the
field. From the meeting at Spa on September 29th till the early days of
November there was a frenzied effort by German statesmen to win
something by negotiations which their armies were incapable of
enforcing. But "Time's wingd chariot" would not wait upon their
appeals, for the condition of their land was too desperate. Popular
feeling was on the side of Scheidemann's view, "Better a terrible end
than terror without end." The American President had curtly informed
Germany that, so long as he had to deal with military and monarchical
autocrats, he must require "not negotiation but surrender." But the
height of the storm is not the moment to recast a constitution, and for
the old Germany the only way was not reform but downfall.

No generous mind likes to contemplate the despairing surrender of a
gallant adversary. By the end of October the German Fleet had mutinied.
On the 26th Ludendorff resigned, and the High Command was superseded by
the new proselytes of democracy. Everywhere in Germany kings and courts
were tumbling down, and various brands of socialists were assuming
power. On November 9th the Emperor abdicated and fled to Holland. In the
field the German armies were not in retreat but in flight. An armistice
had now become a matter of life or death, and on November 6th the German
delegates left Berlin to sue for one. Haig and Milner were in favour of
moderation in its demands, but Foch was implacable--it must be such as
to leave the enemy no power of resistance, and be a pledge both for
reparations and security. The delegates had perforce to accept his
terms. Very early on the morning of the 11th the document was signed,
and it was arranged that on the whole front hostilities should cease at
11 a.m.

It is clear that the Armistice could not have been refused by the
Allies, both on grounds of common humanity and in view of the exhaustion
of their own troops. It is clear, too, that it was an unconditional
surrender, except that it was negotiated before the hands of the
fighting men were formally held up in the field. It provided the victors
with all that they desired and all that the conquered could give. Its
terms meant precisely what they said--so much and no more. Mr. Wilson's
Fourteen Points were not a part of them; the Armistice had no connection
with any later peace treaties. It may be argued with justice that the
negotiations by the various Governments between October 5th and November
5th involved a declaration of principle by the Allies which they were
morally bound to observe in the ultimate settlement. But such a
declaration bore no relation to the Armistice. That was an affair
between soldiers, a thing sought by Germany under the pressure of dire
necessity to avoid the utter destruction of her armed manhood. It would
have come about though Mr. Wilson had never indited a single note. In
the field since July 15th Germany had lost to the British armies 188,700
prisoners and 2,840 guns; to the French 139,000 prisoners and 1,880
guns; to the Americans 44,000 prisoners and 1,421 guns; to the Belgians
14,500 prisoners and 474 guns. In the field, because she could not do
otherwise, she made full and absolute surrender.

    *    *    *    *    *

In the fog and chill of Monday morning, November 11th, the minutes
passed slowly along the front. An occasional shot, an occasional burst
of firing, told that peace was not yet. Officers had their watches in
their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with
which they had fought. At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South
African brigade, which represented the easternmost point reached by the
British armies, a German machine-gunner, after firing off a belt without
pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow,
and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched
eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious
rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the
noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges
to the sea.


  IV

Victory dawned upon a world too weary for jubilation, too weary even
for comprehension. The crescendo of the final weeks had dazed the mind.
The ordinary man could not grasp the magnitude of a war which had
dwarfed all earlier contests, and had depleted the world of life to a
far greater degree than a century of the old Barbarian invasions. In
Britain the figures were too astronomical to have much meaning--nearly
ten million men in arms from the Empire, of whom over three million were
wounded, missing or dead; nearly ten thousand millions of money spent,
and shipping lost to the extent of seven hundred and fifty millions. The
plain citizen could only realise that he had come, battered and broken,
out of a great peril, and that his country had not been the least among
the winners of victory. Her fleet had conducted the blockade which
sapped the enemy's strength, and had made possible the co-operation of
Allies separated by leagues of ocean. Her wealth had borne the main
financial burden of the alliance. Her armies, beginning from small
numbers, had grown to be the equal of any in the world, alike in
training, discipline and leadership. Moreover, her steady resolution had
been a bulwark to all her confederates in the darkest hours.

He could reflect that such had always been her record in European wars.
At the beginning she is underrated as a soft and pacific Power already
on the decline. This, in the eighteenth century, was the view of the
continental monarchs--this, in 1914, was the view of Germany. She comes
slowly to a decision, enters upon war unwillingly, but wages it with all
her heart, and does not slacken till her purpose is attained. It had
been so in the days of Philip of Spain, of Louis Quatorze, and of
Napoleon. The "island Poland" ends by finding the future of the world
largely entrusted to her reluctant hands.

It was beginning to dawn, too, upon our people that they had been
fortunate in the leader to whom their manhood had been entrusted. Haig
could never be a popular hero; he was too reserved, too sparing of
speech, too fastidious. In the early days his limitations had been
obvious, but slowly men had come to perceive in him certain qualities
which, above all others, the crisis required. He was a master in the art
of training troops, and under his guidance had been produced some of the
chief tactical developments of the campaign. He had furnished the ways
and means for Foch's strategical plans. Certain kinds of great soldier
he was not, but he was the type of great soldier most needed for this
situation, and he succeeded when a man of more showy endowments would
have failed. Drawing comfort from deep springs, he bore in the face of
difficulties a gentle and unshakable resolution. Gradually his massive
patience and fortitude had impressed themselves on his armies, and after
peace his efforts for the men who had fought with him won their deep
and abiding affection. The many thousands who, ten years later, awaited
in the winter midnight the return of the dead soldier to his own land,
showed how strong was his hold upon the hearts of his countrymen.

    *    *    *    *    *

When Michelet, after the writing of his history, fell ill and rested, he
excused himself with the words "_J'ai abattu tant de rois_." Now there
was a clattering down of thrones in Europe, and the world was a little
dazed with the sound and dust. But to those that endured--in Britain, in
Italy and in Belgium--the peoples turned as to the symbol of the
liberties for which they had fought. On November 11th great crowds
assembled outside Buckingham Palace, moving thither from all quarters by
a common impulse, and the King and Queen appeared on the balcony to
receive such an acclamation as has rarely greeted the sovereigns of an
unemotional people. The next days were full of pregnant ceremonial. On
the 12th they went in solemn procession to St. Paul's to return thanks
to the Giver of victory. In the following week they drove through the
east and south and north districts of London, and paid a brief visit to
Scotland. On the 27th the King visited France. He had been on the
battle-field three months before during the great advance of August 8th,
and now he could examine at leisure the ground where victory had been
won, and greet his troops as they moved eastward to the German frontier.
In Paris, at banquets at the Elyse and the Htel de Ville, he spoke
words of gratitude and friendship to the French people.

On Tuesday, November 19th, in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of
Westminster, he replied to the addresses of the two Houses of
Parliament. There, in the presence of political leaders, and the great
officers of State, and representatives of India and of all the Britains
overseas, he expounded in simple words the debt of the nation to its
fleets and armies for their achievement; the pride of Britain in her
Allies; the unspectacular toil of the millions at home who had made
victory possible, and the task still before the nation if a better world
was to be built out of the wreckage of the old.

    In what spirit shall we approach these great problems? How shall
    we seek to achieve the victories of peace? Can we do better than
    remember the lessons which the years of war have taught, and
    retain the spirit which they have instilled? In these years
    Britain and her traditions have come to mean more to us than
    they had ever meant before. It became a privilege to serve her
    in whatever way we could; and we were all drawn by the
    sacredness of the cause into a comradeship which fired our zeal
    and nerved our efforts. This is the spirit we must try to
    preserve. It is on the sense of brotherhood and mutual good
    will, on a common devotion to the common interests of the
    nation as a whole, that its future prosperity and strength must
    be built up. The sacrifices made, the sufferings endured, the
    memory of the heroes who have died that Britain may live, ought
    surely to ennoble our thoughts and attune our hearts to a higher
    sense of individual and national duty, and to a fuller
    realisation of what the English-speaking race, dwelling upon the
    shores of all the oceans, may yet accomplish for mankind. For
    centuries Britain has led the world along the path of ordered
    freedom. Leadership may still be hers among the peoples who are
    seeking to follow that path. God grant to their efforts such
    wisdom and perseverance as shall ensure stability for the days
    to come.

It was an expansion of the words which he had spoken eight years earlier
in the month before his Coronation, a homily upon Milton's proud saying:
"Let not England forget her precedence of teaching the nations how to
live." He was entitled so to exhort his people, for he and his house had
played their part manfully in the struggle, unostentatiously performing
hard and monotonous duties, sharing gladly in every national burden. The
country knew this and turned to the King as to its best friend, with
something warmer than respect, profounder than loyalty. A year before
there had been an attempt in Germany to drum up monarchical sentiment by
films and lectures and articles showing the simplicity and devotion of
the Imperial household. There was no need of such artifices in Britain,
for royalism was the willing creed of all. Its most impressive
manifestation was not the crowds around Buckingham Palace, or the
splendid occasion in the Royal Gallery, but what happened on the late
afternoon of Armistice Day. In the wet November dusk the King and Queen
drove in a simple open carriage through the city of London, almost
unattended and wholly unheralded. The merrymakers left their own
occupations to cheer, and crowds accompanied the carriage through the
new-lighted streets, running beside it and shouting friendly greetings.
It was an incident which interpreted better than any formula the meaning
of a People's King.




  PART III




  CHAPTER I

  SOUR-APPLE HARVEST


  I

A war solves no problem but the one--which side is the stronger. In
November 1918 a menace had been defeated and a great arrogance
overthrown. These gains were indubitable, but what then? It is an old
assumption that some spiritual profit is assured by material loss and
bodily suffering; but it is certain that the moral disorder is at least
as conspicuous as the moral gain. One bequest of war is an impulse to
lawlessness. The passions of many millions cannot be stirred for years
without leaving a hideous legacy. Human life has been shorn of its
sacredness, death and misery and torture have become too familiar, the
old decorums and sanctions have lost something of their power. The crust
of civilisation has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of
the primordial fires. Again, with the suspension of a great effort,
there is apt to come a debauch of theorising. Principles, which seemed
fundamental, are a little weakened, and men are inclined to question the
cardinal articles of their faith. The world becomes one vast laboratory,
where ignorance clamours for blind experiments with unknown chemicals.

But the chief consequence of so great a war as this was mental and moral
fatigue. Minds were relaxed and surfeited, when they were not
disillusioned. They had had enough of the heroic. After the strain of
the distant vision they were apt to seek the immediate advantage; after
so much altruism they asked leave to attend to private interests; after
their unremitting labours they claimed the right of apathy. The
conundrums of peace had to be faced not only by jaded statesmen, but by
listless, confused peoples. Listless, but also restless; Mr. Lloyd
George found the right word for the malady when he described it as a
"fever of anmia."

The situation was the more dangerous for the Allies, because the
intricate business of peace should have been the work of the peoples, as
they had been the architects of victory. The War was not won by the
genius of the few but by the faithfulness of the many. It had been a
vindication of the essential greatness of our common nature. The problem
now was colossal, for, if many ramshackle structures had been
demolished, the ground was heavily cumbered with rubble, and there were
sharp differences of view as to the edifice to be built. But the peoples
seemed to stand aside, and cast the whole burden of settlement on
statesmen whose shoulders were already weary. Nothing was more striking
than the popular apathy about the business of peace-making. The
statesmen, too, had no great dominant mind and character among them. The
world was like Rome after the murder of Csar, like America after the
death of Lincoln. History will pay respectful tribute to the able and
tenacious men thrown up by the years of war, but it is doubtful if many
names will live in the popular memory. Perhaps only the fantastic
figures whose doings were like those of the heroes of fairy tales:
Lenin, the dark Ogre; D'Annunzio, the glittering Knight-Errant; Colonel
Lawrence, the eternal Younger Son.

Britain caught the same infection as the rest of the world. The
prevailing mood after peace was one of satiety with high endeavour, the
mood of the Restoration after Cromwell's discipline. The bow had been
stretched too tight and must relax. After toil there must be a
play-time. Older men turned to the job of settling themselves again. For
long they had been living on sufferance, with the feeling that in a
night all they possessed might vanish; now they suddenly felt secure,
and clung passionately to what remained of an ordered life. There was a
good deal of irrational optimism about. As for youth, it shut its ears
for a little to every call but the piping of pleasure. There was a
general loosening of screws and a rise in temperature. The War was a
memory to be buried. Young men back from the trenches tried to make up
for the four years of natural amusement of which they had been cheated;
girls, starved for years of their rights, came from dull war-work and
shadowed schoolrooms determined to win back something. Perhaps the
gaieties of the first months of peace had for their god Dionysus rather
than Apollo, but the reaction from gravity was inevitable and not
unwholesome.

            Tiny pleasures occupy the place
  Of glories and of duties: as the feet
  Of fabled fairies, when the sun goes down,
  Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove by day.

For the Government there could be no turning aside to leisure. They had
an urgent task in front of them and problems to solve where mistakes
might mean anarchy or revolution. Inevitably they did not grasp the full
meaning of the situation. They thought of their task as rather to
restore a damaged old world than to grapple with something novel and
undefined; they assumed, too, that the same vitality which had carried
the nation through war would not be wanting in peace. But they had the
wisdom to see that peace would not follow naturally on victory; that it
was in itself a construction, a slow and difficult attempt to bridge a
gap. Their aim was to maintain the same corporate national effort as had
been successful in war.

The purpose did them credit, but it was shallowly interpreted, and it
led to the blunder of the 1918 General Election. Statesmen, who had
criticised the soldiers harshly for their blindness, were now in their
own province to be not less myopic. The instinct which led to the
election was right, but its conduct was disastrous. It was desired to
obtain a fresh mandate from the nation for the work of peace-making and
to continue the coalition of all parties; both worthy aims, if they had
resulted in brigading behind statesmen the wisest and sanest patriotism
of the country. But for sitting members the test of patriotism was a
solitary division in the House of Commons in the preceding May on a
criticism of the Government by a distinguished staff-officer--a
criticism which may have been ill-timed, but was assuredly not factious
or unfair. The docile were given "coupons," the malcontents were
outlawed. The immediate consequence was a descent from the Prime
Minister's high words after the Armistice about a peace based on
righteousness, and the need of putting away "base, sordid, squalid ideas
of vengeance and of avarice." The coupon candidates swept the board, and
gave the Government a huge working majority with 484 members; Labour
returned 59 strong, and the non-coalition Liberals were reduced to
little more than a score. But the mischief lay less in the result than
in the conduct of the election campaign. Responsible statesmen lent
themselves to cries about "hanging the Kaiser" and extracting from
Germany impossible indemnities. Britain stood before the world as the
exponent of the shoddiest of false patriotisms, instead of the reasoned
generosity which was the true temper of the nation.

The result was one of the least representative Parliaments in our
history. A batch of leaderless trade unionists constituted the official
Opposition; the rest was, in Mr. Lloyd George's words, like a chamber of
commerce. It did not represent the intelligence of Britain, since it was
mainly an assembly of well-to-do mediocrities; it did not represent the
better side of the national temper; it left out certain vital elements
of opinion, which were in consequence driven underground. It mirrored
the nation in its worst mood, and it did much to perpetuate that mood.
The feverish vulgarities of the election created impatience in many
classes, in returning soldiers, in munition-workers, in the circles of
labour, which made infinitely harder the business of resettlement. It
gravely weakened the prestige of Parliament, which had been largely in
abeyance during the War, and which could not afford any decline in
dignity at a time when many minds were turning away from
constitutionalism. Above all it weakened the authority of Britain in the
coming peace councils. She alone could exercise a moderating and healing
influence, both from the authority which the War had given her, and from
her detachment from old European jealousies. But the Prime Minister
would go to these councils bound by extravagant election pledges: and
whatever words of conciliation he might speak would be obscured by ugly
echoes of the blatancies of the polls.


  II

The history of the Peace Conference in Paris, which filled the early
months of 1919, has been written in detail in many volumes. Its work has
been bitterly criticised, and on it have been blamed most of the later
misfortunes of Europe. But it is probable that our successors will take
a friendlier view, and will recognise more fully the difficulties under
which it laboured and the many valuable results which it achieved. Its
position was very different from that of the Congress of Vienna in 1814.
Then the victors held most of Europe and had armies ready and willing to
carry out their commands: now they were so weary that the further use of
force was almost unthinkable. Then a little group of grandees, akin in
temper, met in dignified seclusion. Now a multitude of plenipotentiaries
sat almost in public, surrounded by hordes of secretaries and
journalists, and under the arc-lamp of suspicious popular opinion. The
difference in the complexity and scale of the two inquiries is shown by
the resulting treaties. The 120 articles of the Treaty of Vienna were
signed by seventeen delegates; the Treaty of Versailles contained 441
articles and seventy signatures. The business was indeed so vast that
the mechanism was constantly changing. At first the main work was in the
hands of a Council of Ten, representing the five great Powers; then it
fell to the American President and the European Prime Ministers; at the
end the dictators were Mr. Wilson, M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George.

Had these three architects of destiny been fully agreed, or had they
been men of a different stamp, things might have gone better. But all
three were leaders of democracies, and they had to take many things into
consideration besides the merits of the case. M. Clemenceau was the
intense nationalist. Policy to him meant the security of France, and he
translated every world problem into the terms of an immediate and
narrowly conceived national interest. Mr. Lloyd George, subtler and more
far-seeing, took broad views, but his power was weakened in his
colleagues' eyes by the election he had fought and the intransigent
following which it had given him. From Mr. Wilson, who had lived apart
from the actual conflict, there might have been expected a cool and
dispassionate mind, as well as a unique authority. But he found himself
on unfamiliar ground, and his political mistakes in his own country had
made it doubtful whether America would ratify his conclusions. His
idealism, it soon appeared, was the voice of one crying in the
wilderness, and not the creed of a great people. His self-confidence
made him cast himself for too high a part, and he failed to play it; in
the end his decline in health forced him into aloof and impotent
criticism. The framers of the Treaty of Vienna a century before were
fortunate in that they were simpler men, whose assurance was better
based, and who were happily detached from popular passions. "There are
times when the finest intelligence in the world is less serviceable than
the sound common sense of a _grand seigneur_."[3]

The three main subjects were territorial adjustments, reparations, and
the provision of machinery to ensure peace. Under the first the map of
Europe was redrawn, and some parts of the map of the world. The
Conference, it should be remembered, did not start with a clean slate;
the Austrian Empire had already gone to pieces, and Poland had come
automatically into being. A number of treaties, of Versailles, of St.
Germains, of Trianon, of Neuilly, of Svres, laid down the new
boundaries, and mandates dealing with territory taken from enemy states
were settled later by Allied Ministers sitting as a Supreme Council.
Germany had her borders trimmed, but she was not dismembered. France
claimed the Rhine as her frontier, but was given instead a limited
occupation of the Rhineland, supplemented by a joint military guarantee
by Britain and the United States, which was dropped since the latter
Power declined to ratify.

As for the rest of Europe, there was a juggling with border lines and
populations which, since it was done in haste, could not be wholly
satisfactory. The ill-omened concept "self determination" hag-rode the
Conference, and was enforced on occasions where there was no serious
self to determine. Historic states were split into fragments, for which
there could be no hopeful future. The upshot was that in Europe, instead
of twenty-one sovereign states, there were now twenty-six, each with all
the appurtenances of exclusive statehood. The danger was obvious, but at
least it could be said that the arrangement was broadly in accordance
with the popular will. Mr. Churchill has calculated that now not three
per cent. of the European peoples "are living under Governments whose
nationality they repudiate."

The penal proposals, which had played so great a part in the British
election, were reduced more or less to the matter of reparations. The
disarmament of Germany was strictly enforced, but it was combined with a
solemn pledge by the other nations themselves to disarm, which promised
trouble in the future. It was resolved that the defeated Powers should
pay the whole cost of the War, which in effect meant Germany, since the
others were bankrupt. No victor has ever succeeded in reimbursing
himself for his losses, and a strange blindness seemed on this point to
have overtaken the public mind. Germany was rich indeed in capital
wealth, but it could not be conveyed to her creditors, and her
exportable surplus had never been great, and was now likely to be small.
She could only pay large sums by borrowing from one or other of the
Allies. Yet a committee of solemn pundits in Britain had fixed her
capacity to pay at the preposterous figure of 24,000 millions. The
Conference reduced this sum to less than half, and during subsequent
years it was whittled down to 6,000 millions, to 2,000 millions, and in
1932 further payments were dropped. More unfortunate still was the
clause which extorted from Germany a confession of her sole
responsibility for the War. It was not the business of any conference to
anticipate the judgment of history, and to force a proud nation to
confess that her sacrifice had been a crime was a breach of the human
decencies.

The treaty with Germany was signed at Versailles on June 28th, the
anniversary of the Serajevo murders. The place was the Hall of Mirrors,
where nearly half a century before the German Empire had been founded on
the degradation of France. For those whom history has taught to
distrust reapportionments of territory and experiments with
nationalities, the hopeful element lay in its prefix--the Covenant of a
new League of Nations, the one remnant left of Mr. Wilson's dreams. Once
again the world sought to bind itself by words to follow its better
nature, and wistfully hoped that the reaction against the horrors of war
might result in an abiding determination for peace.

A machinery was provided to give system to this desire. Membership of
the new League was open to any self-governing State which accepted its
principles; it required of its members to refrain from war until the
quarrel had been submitted to its judgment, and to take corporate action
against any breaker of the peace. It was not a super-state with a
military force as its sanction, but a league of states whose
effectiveness in a crisis would depend upon how far its members were
prepared to act collectively. There was no abandonment of sovereign
rights, except in a minute degree. It was to begin with to be a league
of the victorious and the neutral Powers, but the defeated Powers were
given the right of later entry. From the start it was handicapped by the
facts that it was widely regarded as the caretaker of the Peace treaties
and therefore suspect by those who found them irksome, and that America
refused to join, thereby weakening any chance of collective action. But
it was the best that could be got at the moment in the way of
international co-operation, and even its meagre provisions were soon
proved to be in advance of the general opinion of the world.

[Footnote 3: F. S. Oliver, _The Endless Adventure_: III, 109.]


  III

For a moment, but only for a moment, after the signing of the treaties,
there was a sense of peace and stability. Then everywhere in the world
came unsettlement and confusion, economic or political or both, save
where beyond the Atlantic the United States sat bland and impregnable.
Wise men had prophesied that the liquidation of the War would take a
generation to complete, and that a further sacrifice would be required
of many remnants of the old regime. The sixteen years since Versailles
fall in the retrospect into three divisions. For some five years there
was chaos in many lands and uncertainty in all. Then there seemed to
come a time when men everywhere drew breath, and found that they had at
any rate put together a makeshift shelter. But the liquidation had been
retarded, not completed, and at the end of the second quinquennium came
an economic collapse which shook even America's foundations. It was a
time which saw not only the death of old things but the birth of violent
novelties. After a forest fire, when the great trees have gone, new
seedlings spring up, and mysteriously they are often of a different
species from the growths that have been destroyed.

Britain, desperately busied with setting her house in order, was
compelled to lend a hand in straightening out the world's tangle.
Foreign politics were once again a vital interest to her, as they had
been in the days of Palmerston and Gladstone. No one of her domestic
problems but had affiliations with the ends of the earth. On the peace
and prosperity of the globe depended her export trade, her vast system
of overseas lending, her position as a financial centre, her hope of
building up a new and better society and thereby winning something from
the sacrifice of war; and the interest of her Empire was not less
vitally engaged. The background to any picture of post-War Britain must
therefore be the vast shifting kaleidoscope of the world.

    *    *    *    *    *

It may be questioned whether history can show a fortitude superior to
that of the German race, soldiers and civilians alike, during the four
years of war. Germany was at her last gasp before she surrendered.
Surrender did not break the tough spirit of her people. They crushed a
communist attempt to follow the Russian model, and produced, while they
were starving and bewildered, some semblance of a national Government.
They received the hard conditions of Versailles with protests but with
dignity. And then they set themselves against desperate odds to build
up their broken dwelling.

They had first to fight the spectre of famine. The blockade was
continued into 1919, and it was only the protests of the British
soldiers on the Rhine that forced the Allies to attend to their duty of
provisioning a starving land. As it was, a huge proportion of her
people, the children especially, were suffering from under-nourishment.
There was an extreme shortage of raw material, and she had neither the
money to purchase it abroad nor the shipping to import it. Her highly
developed system of agriculture was in ruins. She was saddled with an
enormous and undetermined debt. For four years she had lived under a
military discipline; that had disappeared, and the new republic had to
improvise a new social and governmental framework; there were a thousand
elements in her society which threatened anarchy, while Russia at her
door was waiting to fire the tinder of revolution. The fragments left of
the Dual Monarchy were in no better case. Austria was reduced to a great
city and a small surrounding enclave which could never be a true
economic unit. Hungary, also bankrupt, was sullen, perplexed and
impotent.

General Smuts signed the Versailles Treaty only on the ground that
something of the kind, however imperfect, was needed before the real
work of peace-making could begin. But the Treaty was to prove a grave
hindrance in that task. The key-point was Germany, for Austria and
Hungary were incapable of independent action and had to be nursed back
to life by the League of Nations. The German people on the whole
remained loyal to their bourgeois republic. Wounded pride made sporadic
nationalist risings inevitable, and a certain Austrian mason, Adolf
Hitler by name, took a hand in the Munich troubles, and was sent to
prison. The German Government could only maintain itself against
communist and nationalist opponents by a continuing protest against the
impossible severity of the reparations clauses of the Treaty. To the
disarmament provisions they docilely submitted. The problem of the next
few years was how to square what France regarded as her rights and her
necessities with the hard facts of the case.

For France the War had ended in anxiety and disappointment. Germany had
been defeated, but that defeat had not been her doing; without the help
of Britain and America she knew that she would have been beaten to the
ground. The glory, which was the due of her heroism, was revealed as
tarnished and unsubstantial. With a population of forty millions she had
to live side by side with a population of sixty or seventy millions, who
were not likely to forget Versailles. She was in the position of a
householder who has surprisingly knocked out a far more powerful
burglar, and it was her aim to see that her assailant was not allowed to
recover freedom of action. Therefore her policy, of which M. Poincar
was the chief exponent, must be to keep Germany crippled and weak, and
to surround her with hostile alliances. The terms of the Treaty, both as
to reparations and disarmament, must be interpreted according to the
strict letter. No one can deny that her fears were natural. It is easy
for those who live high above a river to deprecate the nervousness of
one whose house is on the flood level.

To Britain it seemed that, with every sympathy for French anxiety, it
was impossible to keep a great Power in perpetual tutelage, and that the
only hope for France, as for the world, lay in establishing a new
international system which would give political security and economic
co-operation to all its parts. Mr. Lloyd George, while he remained in
power, strove honourably for this end, and his policy was maintained by
his successors. Conference followed conference, each accomplishing
something, but not the whole. The amount of reparations was fixed,
reduced, and again reduced. But meantime Germany's finances were going
from bad to worse, and France chose to take her own way, moving, under
M. Poincar's direction, further and further from Britain. She
distrained on her debtor's assets by occupying in January 1923 the Ruhr
area, which was Germany's chief source of coal and pig-iron, in order to
obtain what she called "productive guarantees." The experiment was not a
success, for it was met by a vigorous passive resistance, and after nine
months she withdrew her troops. But the mischief had been done, a fatal
blow had been struck at the infant republic, and the German mark went
out of existence. Then Britain intervened, and appealed for the
co-operation of America; and a Committee, presided over by General
Dawes, laid down a new scheme of reparations, based "on business, not
politics . . . the recovery of debt, not the imposition of penalties."

For a little there was a rest from friction. The massive figure of
Hindenburg as President gave dignity to the republic, and the German
Government under Stresemann set itself to fulfil the Versailles terms,
and to make friends with its neighbours. The Locarno treaties of 1925,
under which Britain and Italy guaranteed her western frontier, seemed to
bring Germany again into the family of Europe. In 1929 the Dawes Plan
was superseded by the Young Plan, and for a little there was hope that
Stresemann's policy, continued by Brning, would lead her on the path of
international co-operation and a moderate constitutionalism. But the
mischief had gone too deep. The ruin of the mark had destroyed the
middle classes; youth found itself without opportunity; a proud people
knew itself to be defenceless while its neighbours had not disarmed.
Inspired by the Munich mason a great wave of nationalism surged through
the land, a nationalism combined with much revolutionary social
doctrine. If Germany were not given her rights she would take them by
force and defy the world.

Parliamentary government fell to pieces. Hitler became Chancellor in
1933, and proceeded to crush opposition by the familiar methods of the
dictator. On Hindenburg's death he became also President, and summoned
his country to a new and austere discipline. The League of Nations was
powerless; short of declaring war, France could do nothing; Germany was
again outside the European comity, speaking wild words and brandishing a
broken sword. But Hitler had given his country, and especially its
youth, a new hope. A spirit had arisen, arrogant, boastful, intolerant,
which was at any rate more promising than a flaccid passivity. Germany
was once again in the melting-pot, and another country was added to the
roll of those which had discarded democracy.

For the fashion of dictatorships was spreading. It looked as if in
critical times a people needed some intense concentration, and that this
was the simplest method for those who had not, like Britain, a long
tradition of self-government behind them. Austria had abandoned
parliamentaryism; so for a time had Greece and Spain; Hungary had never
had it. Russia had become half tyranny and half theocracy.

For a year after peace Britain continued the policy, which was justified
in the concluding stages of war, of assisting Russian armies which were
attempting to break the Bolshevik power. There may have been something
to be said for the plan of turning the still-embodied war strength of
the Allies, and perhaps of Germany, against the Moscow regime to blot
out a monstrosity--it would certainly have saved many million Russian
lives; but there was small justification for supporting limply anti-Red
armies which could not conquer. Our intervention only consolidated the
Bolshevik power. Russia had few friends in Europe except among the
dervishes of her own creed, since she preached war and practised
intrigue against the whole of Western civilisation. But, after an
invasion of Poland which was repelled with French help, she settled
within her natural bounds, and by the end of 1920 the new regime was
more or less established.

Lenin was a realist in his fanaticism, and modified the strict letter of
communism in his New Economic Plan to permit of a certain amount of
private property. He died in the beginning of 1924, but his policy
endured, and the communist purists were gradually replaced by more
practical visionaries, notably by the Georgian peasant Stalin, whose
ruthless sagacity served his country well. The new regime had now been
recognised by most of the Powers, and to-day the United States completes
the roll. Gigantic efforts were made by successive economic plans to
increase production, and remarkable advances were achieved in certain
public services. Russia, with apathy among most classes but with a fiery
enthusiasm among the young, was docile under the most exacting
paternalism that the world has known, with the mummified Lenin in his
tomb in the Red Square as the fetich-god of a land which had rejected
all other deities. It was ruled by a junta, and ultimately by the will
of one man.

Different in spirit but alike in kind were the governments in Italy and
Turkey. In Italy the parliamentary system had no deep roots, and after
the war it became little better than a farce. The land was weary and
disappointed: her Prime Minister had left the Versailles Conference in
disgust, and her nationalists complained with some reason that she had
been given the scantiest rewards for her sufferings. Had there been a
leader she might have followed the path of Russia, but the communists
who during 1920 seized factories and brawled in every industrial area
had no plan of action. A young ex-socialist journalist of thirty-seven,
Benito Mussolini, who had been wounded in the campaign, set himself to
combat this aimless revolution. He organised a confederation of
ex-service men, and smote anarchy wherever he found it, taking for his
badge the _fasces_ of the old Roman magistrates, and adopting the black
shirts of the Italian storm-troops in the war. His creed was nationalism
and royalism, combined with drastic industrial reforms. In October 1922
he led his followers to Rome, the Government fell, and a Fascist Cabinet
was formed. He then set himself to reorganise the social and
administrative life of the country, and in four years had Italy quiet
under his hand.

Parliamentary government in the common sense was abolished, and in its
place rose the corporative state, in which capital was permitted, but
controlled. All classes were integrated in a great national effort, in
which rights and duties were scrupulously balanced. The system involved
a dictator at the head, for there must be a final authority to supervise
the intricate machine; it involved, too, the disappearance of free
speech and a free press, since such personal activities interfered with
the smooth competence of the whole. Mussolini achieved astonishing
results; he suppressed disorder and enforced efficiency; he brought the
Vatican again into touch with the national life; he restored confidence
to a dispirited nation. He did not seek to make Italy like Russia, an
enclave for a fantastic experiment, but showed himself anxious to play
his part in the communal life of Europe. He faced the many economic
difficulties with courage and resource, and gave Italy all the
appurtenances of civilisation except individual liberty.

The case of Turkey was somewhat different, and her ascent to a
self-conscious nationalism was the chief of post-War romances. In
November 1918 she had seemed of all the enemy Powers to be the most
thoroughly beaten and broken, and to lie helpless in the hands of the
Allies. But the Turk was not dead, and he found his saviour in an
Anatolian soldier, Mustapha Kemal, who had won fame at Gallipoli. The
ill-inspired invitation to Greece, for which Britain was mainly
responsible, to occupy the Smyrna area kindled the embers of Turkish
patriotism. Kemal fell upon the Greeks and drove them into the sea; he
led his armies to the Dardanelles, where a clash with British troops was
only averted by the wisdom of the British commander; at Lausanne he
obtained a wholesale revision of the Treaty of Svres.

Then he set himself to rebuild his country on the strong foundation of
the Anatolian peasantry. He smashed the old unity of Islam and abolished
the Caliphate, but he gave Turkey, the nation, a unity which she had
never known before. She was now a republic under Kemal as dictator, and
his first task was to secularise her, and, in a year or two, to clear
away most remnants of traditionalism. Women were emancipated from their
former bondage, education was revolutionised, the whole machine of
finance and industry was recast. Kemal was not merely a domestic
reformer; like Mussolini, he showed himself a wise international
statesman. He made friends with Greece, exercised a soothing influence
in the Balkans, intrigued no more with Russia but turned his eyes
westward, and in 1932 brought his country into the League of Nations.
There are few precedents in history for such a national resurrection.

[Illustration: _Photo: E. O. Hopp_

The King. A recent portrait]


  IV

In fifteen years the prophets had been discomfited. So far from building
up again--with differences--the old regime on the old principles which
had been assumed to be elemental truths, all of Europe, save France and
Britain, had struck camp and set out to discover new habitations. The
War had been fought by the peoples rather than by leaders; now the
leaders had emerged and the peoples put their fate into their hands. New
monarchies had arisen on the ruins of the old, more arbitrary and
absolute, and names like Fhrer and Duce and Ghazi carried a weightier
spell than those of emperor and king. Never had personalities mattered
so much, for Stalin was Russia; Mussolini, Italy; Kemal, Turkey; and
Hitler, Germany. Democracy, which the War seemed to have glorified, was
largely in ruins. Russia and Turkey had cut adrift from their pasts, but
Italy sought to dignify her new creation by linking it to the glories of
ancient Rome, and Germany had evolved a most unhistorical theory of an
old Nordic culture to which she was returning. This last dream had an
ominous connotation. For it may be read in Tacitus how into the sombre
grove of the High God of the Teutons none might enter save with a chain
round his neck, to show his subjection to the divinity. The old legend
is a parable; those gods were tyrants, and their mandate was to enslave.
A hundred years before Heine had prophesied that some day the Gods of
the North would rise from their graves to the troubling of Europe.

This flight from democracy, this satiety with freedom, had been
accelerated by the War, but it was not its product, for it had been long
a-coming. Perhaps democracy had been too absolutely defined. Its
principles had been treated as universal truths for all peoples at all
times, when they could only be made to work under certain conditions.
The mystical view of the State, as an "end in itself," which must
override the individual life, had been emphasised by the discipline of
the War, but it was no new thing in the world. Mankind is always prone
to deify the work of its hands, and to make a god of the authority it
chooses, whether it be Holy Church, or Holy King, or Holy People. The
reaction which might have been looked for after peace was nullified by
the continued unsettlement of the world. Men were unwilling or unable to
stand alone; they huddled into hordes for safety and warmth, and were
glad to surrender their wills to whoever or whatever promised security.
The ordinary citizen had lost that confidence in himself which is the
only basis for democracy.

This instinct to crowd together might at first sight appear to offer
some hope for a union of nations. But unfortunately the new internal
integration of peoples was apt to be on a narrow chauvinist basis; the
refuge they sought must be isolated, exclusive, a Border keep bristling
with defences, and not an open law-abiding city to which all were
welcome. During the fifteen years from its foundation the League of
Nations passed through many vicissitudes. It did admirable work on the
less controversial international questions, and it proved a god-send to
the relics of the Dual Monarchy. But it was heavily handicapped by the
absence of America, and by the withdrawal from it in later years of
important States. Its machinery proved to be faulty, and too many of
its members were half-hearted. When its authority was challenged, as at
Corfu and in Manchukuo, it had no sanctions with which to enforce it. It
did many good things, but the work was not spectacular and won it little
prestige. The hubbub of conflicting nationalisms drowned its still,
small voice of reason.

One of its major tasks was disarmament. The question was debated at many
conferences, but was invariably blocked by national fears and jealousies
and technical difficulties. In this matter the record of Britain was
blameless, for she was not only the most vigorous supporter of a general
disarmament, but she had herself disarmed beyond any other Power. The
Kellogg Pact of 1928, which excluded war as a "legitimate instrument of
policy," could be no more than a declaration of pious opinion in the
absence of a specific machinery to enforce it. More hopeful at the time
seemed the Washington Conference of 1921, which limited the naval
construction of Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France and
Italy. This line was followed in numerous arbitration arrangements, and
in regional and group pacts such as the Locarno treaties. These at any
rate narrowed the possibilities of conflict, though to the peace
universalist they seemed a dangerous return to the old system of
alliances.

The comparative failure of internationalism was not due to the
insensitiveness of any country to the cataclysmic effects of another
war. The popular horror was deep-grained; indeed it is doubtful if at
any time since the Armistice it would have been possible to mobilise any
European nation for war without a certainty of revolution. Mr.
Churchill's solemn words were the general faith.

    Manhood, . . . without having improved appreciably in virtue or
    enjoying wiser guidance, has got into its hands for the first
    time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own
    extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which the
    glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do
    well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death
    stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready
    to shear away the peoples _en masse_; ready, if called on, to
    pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation.
    He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail,
    bewildered being, long his victim, now--for one occasion
    only--his Master.

The difficulty lay in the vicious circle into which the debates
inevitably moved. Fear produced armaments; that fear could only be
allayed by a system of collective insurance with the proper sanctions;
such a system involved interference with sovereign rights, which most
States were not prepared to accept. Fear, a very real fear, was not
strong enough to conquer national pride, a pride intensified by the
movement towards new national disciplines and integrations. The most
needful restoration of a people's confidence quickened that people's
pride and lessened its fear. The true spirit of peace-making had not yet
been generated, and the words of Bernard of Marlaix haunted many minds:

  _Pax erit omnibus unica, sed quibus? Immaculatis,
  Pectore mitibus, ordine stantibus, ore sacratis._

In such a flux of things Britain had a dual task. She had to interest
herself in the difficulties of other nations, as a world-wide Empire
which could not afford to be indifferent to any change in any part of
the globe, as a principal belligerent and therefore a principal
architect of peace, and as the one Power in the Old World which still
stood firmly in the ancient ways. But with these heavy preoccupations
she had also the duty of revising her own policy, which had suffered the
full blast of the winds blowing from the outer spaces. Except for one
brief moment after peace she caught no blink of the sun. For fifteen
years she had to struggle in the mire of that dismal thaw which is the
certain consequence of war.




  CHAPTER II

  THE CHANGING EMPIRE


The first British Empire ended with the loss of the American colonies,
the second with the first shots of 1914. During the political
interregnum of the war the third slowly came into being. Lord Rosebery
in a famous passage has spoken of the Empire "growing as trees grow
while men sleep," but the phrase is only half the truth. The progress of
any great and enduring thing is largely unconscious and secret, like the
growth of a plant or the changes of the seasons. But in the making of
the Empire there have been times when problems have had to be faced and
solved, and steps of high importance voluntarily and consciously
undertaken.

The War was such a season. In it the Empire may fairly be said to have
come of age, and become an alliance of adult nations. It was a unit in
1914, as a unit it entered upon war, and as a unit it made peace; but
its assistance in the field was wholly voluntary, its war effort
spontaneous and not dictated. During those four years autonomy acquired
a new meaning, for to the right of deciding on policy was added the
willing acceptance of executive duties. Dominion prime ministers sat in
London with British representatives as an Imperial War Cabinet. The
Dominions as national entities signed the treaties of peace. The old
dream of Imperial Federation had faded out of the air. The new
circumstances required a more elastic constitution.

The overseas territory taken from Germany enlarged the area of certain
of the Dominions and widely extended the direct responsibilities of
Britain. The Dominions were members of the League of Nations from which
the mandated authority sprang. For good or for ill they had been brought
into the orbit of international affairs, and must have an international
outlook of their own. At the same time their kinship with the Mother
Country and with each other had become a closer thing, after four years
of common sacrifice. The economic difficulties of the post-War world
were felt by them scarcely less acutely than by Europe. They realised
their common interest with Britain, and, as the political bonds
slackened and disappeared, there was a general instinct that new ones
must be fashioned, the ties of a working alliance which would enable the
Empire in practical matters to speak and act together.

The King was King of Britain, but also Emperor of India, and Sovereign
of all the Britains overseas. The Throne was the one binding link that
survived. During the controversies that followed it remained, except in
one case, the cherished centre of unity, around which union could grow.
As such its value was beyond price, for it provided a steadfast
foundation on which a new working mechanism could be constructed and a
new theory of Empire developed.


  I

The first problem was Ireland. Ever since the spirit of Elizabethan and
Cromwellian intolerance began to die at the close of the eighteenth
century the British people had been under two delusions. They imagined
that Ireland was a country which had, though in an imperfect form, the
same traditions and antecedents as Britain, and that the Irish were only
backward cousins of their own. The profound differences of race and
history were innocently forgotten. It is possible that in 1886 a chance
was given us to make Ireland a part of the United Kingdom in something
more than name, for there are moments in history when a bold act may
seal up the past and swing a nation's development into a new orbit. Be
that as it may, the chance was not taken. The old sores festered, the
old hostilities remained, and the unsettlement of the immediate pre-War
world, her unfortunate position in British party politics, and a revival
of interest in her native culture, fostered in Ireland, especially among
her youth, a spirit which would be content with nothing short of
national independence. This spirit was the more formidable since it
disregarded the former methods of controversy and set to work to devise
a new technique.

The solemnity of war might have turned the unrest into other channels,
but official pedantry checked at birth the growth of a new sentiment.
The consequence was that, while many thousands of Irishmen were fighting
in the armies of the Empire, several bodies in Ireland were preparing
on their own account for a different kind of war. The Easter Rising of
1916 revealed these hidden fires. That pitiful and heroic attempt of
young idealists to enforce a creed, which was dearer to them than life,
exasperated Britain, who could not understand why Ireland should try to
weaken her hand in a war which was fought not for Britain but for
civilisation, and who did not realise how alien the Irish vision was
from her own. It was easily suppressed, but the aftermath was tragic;
the barbarities were not all on one side, and the Government dabbled
alternately in mercy and in severity. The result was an immense
strengthening of Sinn Fein and Irish republicanism. Various later
efforts at conciliation were fruitless, and the proposal to apply
conscription in the spring of 1918 did not help matters. There remained
little of the Irish character as Bede had drawn it twelve hundred years
before, "a harmless people most friendly to the English."[4]

Peace came, but not to Ireland. In the election of November 1918 the old
Nationalist leaders had gone, and the old Nationalist party disappeared.
Sinn Fein won most of the Irish seats, and in January 1919 set up a
parliament of its own in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic. Mr.
Eamon de Valera, who had escaped from an English jail, became its
President, its supporters armed, and the King's writ ceased to run in
Ireland. In 1920 a new version of the Home Rule Bill was passed, setting
up parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. Ulster accepted the scheme, but
South Ireland scornfully rejected it. From now on the issue was war, war
between the levies of the Republic on the one side, and on the other the
police, enlarged by the "Black and Tan" auxiliaries, and a part of the
British army.

It was war, but, since it could not be conducted by the normal etiquette
of war, it was also a reign of terror. In the first half of 1921 there
were two governments in Ireland, and between these millstones were
ground what Sir Henry Wilson used to call the "decent, quiet, peaceable
people." It was a grim and hideous time, for both forces were out of
hand, and the spectacle was presented to the world of a great and
civilised Power sanctioning reprisals in kind for the atrocities of
banditti. Ministers were in an intolerable dilemma. They must either use
their military strength to stamp out a rebellion of British citizens at
Britain's door, or they must admit that this was no rebellion, but a war
of principles, and treat with the enemy. In the then temper of Britain
and her Government the latter course meant a heavy sacrifice of pride.

The impasse was ended by the King. Now, as ever, it was the duty of the
Throne to unravel the tangle into which people and Government had
drifted. On June 22nd 1921, the Parliament of Northern Ireland having
come into being in accordance with the act of the previous year, the
King, in Belfast, made one of the most notable speeches of his life:

    I could not have allowed myself to give Ireland by deputy alone
    my earnest prayers and good wishes in the new era which opens
    with this ceremony, and I have therefore come in person, as the
    Head of the Empire, to inaugurate this Parliament on Irish
    soil. . . .

    The eyes of the whole Empire are on Ireland to-day--that Empire
    in which so many nations and races have come together in spite
    of ancient feuds, and in which new nations have come to birth
    within the lifetime of the youngest in this hall. I am
    emboldened by that thought to look beyond the sorrow and the
    anxiety which have clouded of late my vision of Irish affairs. I
    speak from a full heart when I pray that my coming to Ireland
    to-day may prove to be the first step towards an end of strife
    amongst her people, whatever their race or creed. In that hope I
    appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of
    forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to
    join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace,
    contentment and goodwill. It is my earnest desire that in
    Southern Ireland, too, there may ere long take place a parallel
    to what is now passing in this hall, that there a similar
    occasion may present itself and a similar ceremony be performed.

    For this the Parliament of the United Kingdom has in the fullest
    manner provided the power; for this the Parliament of Ulster is
    pointing the way. The future lies in the hands of my Irish
    people themselves. May this historic gathering be the prelude of
    a day in which the Irish people, North and South, under one
    Parliament or two, as these Parliaments may themselves decide,
    shall work together in common love for Ireland upon the sure
    foundation of mutual justice and respect.

Such an appeal could not be disregarded. The Government, who had been
gradually moving towards some scheme of Dominion Home Rule such as Mr.
Asquith had long advocated, opened negotiations with the Irish leaders.
The latter were now tending to divide into two camps; the realists, like
Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, who wanted the substance of
independence and were not inclined to quibble about forms; and the
symbolists--the word is used in no contemptuous sense, for symbols are
precious and potent things--who sought not Dominion status but
independence with all the paraphernalia of independence, and to whom the
oath of allegiance and the headship of the King were badges of
servitude. It was a tragic irony that the stumbling-block should be the
Sovereign who was the most earnest advocate of peace. The Conference in
London lasted till December 6th, when a treaty was signed under which
the Irish Free State came into being, with the status more or less of a
self-governing Dominion. The result was a triumph for the diplomatic
finesse of Mr. Lloyd George; it was a triumph of character, too, for the
Conservative statesmen, like Lord Birkenhead and Sir Austen Chamberlain,
who imperilled their careers, and for the Irish delegates, who
imperilled their lives.

The Irish Parliament, Dail Eireann, passed the Treaty by a small
majority, but Mr. de Valera and the austerer republicans went into
opposition. He was not willing to accept the oath of allegiance; he held
that Dominion status was unworthy of a nation which was an ancient
kingdom and itself a mother country; his dream was of Ireland as a
separate Power, not within the Empire, but externally allied to it for
defence and foreign affairs. On this narrow margin the land was plunged
for a year in civil war. It is the fashion of revolutions to devour
their offspring, and Ireland's was true to type. That unhappy country
has been apt to discard or destroy her best. Arthur Griffith indeed died
in his bed: but Michael Collins and, later, Kevin O'Higgins perished by
violence; Sir Henry Wilson, always an Irishman first, was the victim of
assassins on the doorstep of his London house; and Erskine Childers,
than whom no revolution ever produced a nobler or purer spirit, was shot
by the order of the new Irish Government. Mr. William Cosgrave, who
succeeded Griffith as President, slowly broke the republican opposition
till Mr. de Valera, defeated but unconverted, called off hostilities.
Then for ten years he laboured to restore his country and patch up the
economic fabric, and incidentally gave it once again a worthy part in
imperial and international councils. The nations since the war have had
two kinds of leaders: the rhapsodists who inflame and embolden, and the
plain, homely realists who try to heal. In the latter class Mr. Cosgrave
has had few superiors.

But Ireland had not found peace. The symbolists were still powerful, and
their appeal was especially to uprooted and malcontent youth. In
February 1932 Mr. Cosgrave was defeated in a general election in which
his opponents offered no bribes except the chance of sacrifice and the
certainty of conflict. Mr. de Valera had the mind of some great
ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages, half mathematical, half mystical, and
to him the symbol was dearer than the fact. He had never accepted the
Treaty, and he set himself to whittle it away. He plunged his country
into a tariff war with Britain over his refusal to pay the land purchase
instalments, and pointedly disregarded all the formalities which
membership of the Empire involved. Since Ireland could not repudiate the
obligations of such membership and at the same time receive its
benefits, she became in fact an alien to the Commonwealth. So the
miserable position came about that Britain was forced to stand on legal
points which had little bearing on the true case, and to do much to kill
by her economic policy those elements in Irish life which made for
stability and progress.

Many have wished that the Treaty and its heritage of debate could be
blotted out and the cards dealt afresh, for the present situation does
justice neither to Britain's dignity nor to her generosity, and it
inflicts futile suffering on Ireland. The obstacle to a fresh deal is
not Britain's pride, but Britain's apathy about the whole business.
Once Ireland meant something to us, and now she means little. We
alternately scolded and petted her, which was a proof of interest, even
if the interest was chiefly in a political counter; now there is no
British election in which her name is mentioned. The horrors of 1921, of
which we naturally heard more of one side than of the other, inspired
wrath, which presently, after our fashion, changed to boredom. We had
had enough of Ireland; let her stew in her own juice and permit us to
attend to our own affairs. Yet this very popular apathy might make it
easier for statesmanship to break the vicious circle, for the present
situation offers no hope for the future. Grattan's words of Ireland
still remain true: "The Channel forbids union; the Ocean forbids
separation."

[Footnote 4: "Gentem innoxiam et nationi Anglorum semper
amicissimam."--_Hist. Eccles._, iv, 26.]


  II

The other imperial problems of those years concerned Egypt, and India,
that empire within the Empire. In the War the former became perforce a
British protectorate, and peace saw the rise of a violent nationalist
agitation, encouraged by the ill-omened Allied doctrine of
"self-determination." Britain, busied with many tasks, postponed any
settlement and deported Zaghlul, the nationalist leader; widespread
rioting followed, until Lord Allenby restored a semblance of order. Then
a little tardily the British Government sent out a mission under Lord
Milner to report on the future government of the country. The mission,
boycotted by the nationalists, advised that Egypt's independence should
be recognised, but it was not till nearly two years later that Britain
finally declared Egypt a sovereign state, with certain reservations
concerning defence, foreign affairs, imperial communications, and the
Sudan. This by no means satisfied the extremists, rioting and
assassinations were resumed, and an exasperated British Cabinet was
forced to strong measures. Egyptian troops were withdrawn from the
Sudan, the embryo parliamentary constitution was suspended, and
presently the Sultan Fuad and his Ministers took over the government as
a virtual autocracy. The situation was now much the same as under the
Cromer regime, except that Egypt had not the benefit of a great
Englishman and a band of competent and incorruptible British
administrators. The ancient land of the Nile has not yet found a self to
determine. More fortunate has been the fate of the two mandated states,
Palestine and Iraq. The second, after twelve years within the Empire,
during which it cost Britain much money and much diplomatic and military
effort, has now attained to independent statehood and membership of the
League of Nations. Palestine, where Britain in face of many difficulties
has laboured to carry out her pledge to create a Jewish national home,
is at the moment one of the few prosperous states in the world.

In India much history has been made since the King spoke at Delhi in
1911. The war served to hasten the growth of those national aspirations
which had been whetted by the Minto reforms. In 1917 the Secretary of
State for India, Mr. E. S. Montagu, made a momentous declaration in the
House of Commons:

    The policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the
    Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the
    increasing association of Indians in every branch of the
    administration, and the gradual development of self-governing
    institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of
    responsible government in India as an integral part of the
    British Empire.

These cautious but pregnant words were followed in 1919 by the
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, which in the Provinces divided the functions
of Government into two classes, some reserved exclusively for the
Governor and his Council, and some entrusted to Ministers responsible to
the new local Legislatures. A Central Legislature was also established,
consisting of two Houses, with important legislative powers, but with
the right left to the Viceroy to override its decisions. The plan was to
be revised within ten years. It was formally inaugurated at Delhi, in
February 1921, by the Duke of Connaught on behalf of the King-Emperor.

The new system had a disastrous birth. There was grave trouble on the
Afghan frontier, and in India itself; it was boycotted by the National
Congress, and Mr. Gandhi, the prophet of a kind of mystical reaction,
preached a crusade of pacific non-co-operation. Yet the complex, hybrid
system worked better than might have been supposed, and it was at any
rate an education for many Indians in the rudiments of parliamentaryism.
But revision was not only desirable but a statutory duty, and in 1927 a
commission under Sir John Simon went out to India to study the problem.
The Simon report, the ablest state paper of recent years, proposed full
responsibility for the Provinces, but not for the Central Government,
unless and until the Ruling Princes should enter the system, which might
then be on a federal basis.

There followed a series of Round-Table conferences and peripatetic
commissions to work out the details of the new constitution. The fact
that the Princes were willing to come in met the Simon conditions, and
it became possible to envisage a federal constitution with a large
measure of responsibility at the Centre. The Government plan was
embodied in a White Paper; this was submitted to an inter-parliamentary
committee, which, after sitting for eighteen months, published its
report in the late autumn of 1934. It accepted the main principles of
the White Paper scheme, which indeed were not only the logical and
inevitable conclusions of the Montagu declaration of 1917, but a
rational deduction from the changed conditions of the East and the new
temper of India and of the world.

Lord Minto, a plain country gentleman and no politician, was fond of
saying that the objection to governing a country against the will of its
inhabitants was not moral but physical; it was simply impossible; the
wildest tyranny must be at least acquiesced in or it would not last a
day. To govern 350 millions by force is not feasible, even if we wished
it; some co-operation by the people is necessary since politics in India
are fast spreading from the classes to the masses. Criticism of the
details of the British policy is inevitable, for it is beyond question a
long step forward into shadowy places. Yet there is general agreement on
the need of some such stride and on its direction. The Empire was not
won, and it has not been maintained, by standing stiffly in the old
ways, but by repeated bold experiments. That instinct, which has guided
us in the past, is to-day more vital than ever, since the events of the
last twenty years have been like a compounding of chemicals in which no
elements have been left unchanged. Every question requires a fresh
analysis. Many principles, once held to be ultimate verities, have been
revised, and the whole range of methods. In the realm of economics this
is universally admitted, and it is not less necessary in the
constitutional sphere.

Two further reflections may be added. It has been argued with truth that
political systems do not appear out of the void, but have their roots
deep in history, and depend for their success upon the nature of the
society to which they are applied. Parliamentary democracy is not a
thing which comes into being full grown; it has a slow genesis and
requires long preparation; a form of government which has served well in
the West cannot be indiscriminately applied to the East; western
civilisation has behind it the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the
French Revolution, and India has none of these things. The answer is
that the British scheme differs organically from any western
constitution. What is proposed is not a blind transference to alien
conditions of a highly idiomatic kind of government, but an attempt to
build upon the facts of modern India a special and appropriate type of
polity.

Lastly, it is said with some truth that parliamentary democracy has lost
caste in Europe. Why, it is asked, should we be ready to saddle India
with a discredited type of government? The answer is that happily it is
not discredited in Britain or in the British Empire. We are the
honourable slaves of our own achievements. For a century we have been
labouring to inspire India with our political philosophy, and we have
largely succeeded. We have welcomed her as an organic part of an Empire
which is based on that philosophy. We have helped to create in her
habits of thought of which that philosophy is the natural outcome. We
cannot exclude her from sharing in what we regard as our best.


  III

Meanwhile the self-governing part of the Empire was engaged in working
out in practical detail the new imperial doctrine which at the close of
the War had won general acceptance. In former days the handling of
foreign policy had been in the hands of the British Cabinet, and its
decisions had bound the Dominions. Under its auspices treaties had been
signed, and by its will war had been declared and peace concluded. But
the new conception of an alliance of sovereign States made this
procedure impossible. A Dominion could not pledge itself to war except
with the consent of its own Parliament; it must have the right to make
treaties in the name of the King; it must, if it so desired, have
diplomatic representation in foreign capitals. The problem was how to
combine these necessary functions with some unifying principle which
would enable the Empire to have a continuous foreign policy, and in a
crisis to speak to the world with a single voice.

When Mustapha Kemal's troops advanced to the Dardanelles in the autumn
of 1922 and for a moment Britain seemed to be on the verge of war, Mr.
Lloyd George appealed to the Empire for aid. The response of the
Dominions, half-hearted or resentful, was a warning that the old methods
had gone for ever. The ensuing Treaty of Lausanne was formally accepted
by Canada, but not any obligations arising from it, and at the Imperial
Conference that year it was resolved that "no treaty should be
negotiated by any Government of the Empire without due consideration of
the possible effects in other parts of the Empire." That year, too,
Canada arranged a fishery treaty with the United States, the signature
of which she insisted must be by the Canadian plenipotentiary under
powers issued to him by the King. From 1924 onward various Dominions
appointed their separate diplomatic representatives. In the Locarno
treaties the Dominions and India were specially excluded from the
British obligations arising thereunder, unless they specifically assumed
them.

The Empire was drifting into a constitutional tangle which it was the
business of the Imperial Conference in 1926 to unravel. A formula
drafted by Lord Balfour, attempted a definition of the relations of
Great Britain and the Dominions:

    They are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal
    in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of
    their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common
    allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the
    British Commonwealth of Nations.

From this certain consequences followed, of which the chief was that the
British Government, as Government, had no right of interference in
Dominion affairs, and that a Governor-General must represent the King
and the King alone, and be appointed on Dominion advice. A committee of
lawyers and officials sat in 1929 to work out certain conclusions, and
the result was the Statute of Westminster, which became law in 1931.
This enactment removed, with a few small exceptions, every shackle from
a Dominion's sovereign power. It left the Crown as the sole legal link
holding the alliance together, and it provided, therefore, that any law
affecting the Crown should require the assent of every Parliament in the
Empire.

If the scriptural _Via, Veritas, Vita_ be taken as a motto for any great
human undertaking, the two last words have been for the Empire
interpreted and fulfilled. From the days of the Elizabethans it has had
the Life. It has now by slow stages reached the Truth, a doctrine which
permits free growth within a generous framework. It remains to find the
Way, the machinery of an executive alliance, the means of giving
expression to its unity of spirit. These means we are still in process
of discovering in the various departments of economics, foreign affairs
and defence. The conference at Ottawa in 1932 was such an attempt: so
were the numerous trade arrangements negotiated in the last few years.
The pressure of economic problems is forcing the component parts of the
Empire into a closer collaboration, and correcting the fissiparous
tendency which was inevitable after the dissolution of the older bonds.

A court of law, I think, would have some difficulty in interpreting the
exact meaning of the Balfour Definition, or in pronouncing upon the full
implications of the Statute of Westminster. Can a Dominion remain at
peace if Britain is at war? In theory, perhaps, but scarcely in fact,
for no imperial statute would prevent Britain's opponent from bombarding
the Dominion's ports if it so desired. A Dominion may have the power to
secede from the Empire, but what then becomes of its relation to the
Crown? What is the right of the constituent provinces of a Dominion
against a Dominion Government, rights of which Britain in some cases
remains the trustee. What indeed is the true meaning of a Dominion? We
have left unexplored certain _arcana imperii_ in the hope that the need
for exploration may never arise. That has always been the British way.
When we start to write out a constitution we never make a complete job
of it. We do not believe that the meaning of an Empire, which is in
continuous growth, can be enshrined in any document. So instead of a
definition we have been content with spacious generalities.

But one thing has emerged from the debate, the tremendous meaning of the
Crown. It is the foundation of the new doctrine, the one principle which
gives unity to a vast growth whose destiny is unpredictable. Without it
no tie of sentiment or blood or tradition would bind for long. To the
Empire it provides a centre for its long memories and a personality for
its devotion. There can be no question but that it has acquired since
the War a far deeper and more intimate meaning for the Britains
overseas. The journeys of the Prince of Wales, and his power of charming
every class, have brought the royal life into the kindliest contact with
their own. When on Christmas Day in recent years the King has spoken to
all his people, his wave-length has been subtly attuned to their hearts.
He is not Sovereign or symbol, but the Head of the Family, who summons
his household round the hearth, and commends it to "the Father of Whom
every family in heaven or on earth is named."




  CHAPTER III

  A HOUSE IN ORDER


  I

Human nature loves to dignify the past and decry the present. The new is
disturbing, or at the best drab; to look back to a golden age is one
means of acquiring hope for the future, since what has once been may
come again. The earliest Babylonian tablet is a lament for the decay of
the age, and every epoch which seems brilliant to our retrospect had its
prophets of doom. There were doleful critics in the time of the
Antonines, and the peace of the Middle Ages seemed chaos to those who
lived under it; the Elizabethans had their pessimists; Wordsworth
thought the times degenerate during which Trafalgar was won and Napoleon
conquered; and the rock-like serenity of the Victorians appeared to
contemporaries a flimsy and febrile thing. The British people have
always made a speciality of a kind of self-abasement which depreciates
themselves and exalts their ancestors. In every decade we have had
honest men and sincere thinkers, the burden of whose plaint has been
_Troja fuit_.

After peace we had a full chorus of such croakers. In the first
confusion of resettlement the pre-War years, which had once appeared so
comfortless, seemed an unbelievable paradise of ease. The heroism and
discipline of the War were regarded as a supreme effort, in the making
of which Britain had exhausted herself. We had to face unparalleled
problems with wearied brains and slack sinews; the best of our youth lay
dead on the battle-fields, and the elderly and the old had to bend
their shoulders to tasks for which they were not fit. The decline of
Britain seemed to many a foregone conclusion. But, as Adam Smith on his
death-bed told a doubting friend, there is a good deal of ruin in a
country. I question if the historian will find in Britain's record a
more honourable page than that which tells of the decade and a half
after peace. Without the frosts of war to nerve her or the sun of
prosperity to warm her, she trudged most gallantly along the muddy roads
of the great thaw. With broken tools she built the rudiments of a new
dwelling which, if the fates are kind, may be a worthier edifice than
that which it has replaced.

The main concern for Britain, as for other nations, was economic--how to
keep body and soul together. In its preoccupation with material needs
all the world had gone Marxist. The problem was how to pass from the
unbridled extravagance of the war to a normal life. We had been living
on stimulants, and we must somehow transfer ourselves from dope to diet.
There was a brief gleam of prosperity just after peace, when the
replacement of stocks required still further expenditure, and then the
nation settled itself to a long thankless toil in the shadows. The first
tasks were extraordinarily difficult. The huge armies had to be somehow
fitted into civil life. A swollen officialdom had to be drastically
purged. Industries had to be freed from Government props and made to
stand alone. House-room had to be found for hundreds of thousands who
were houseless; the price of living must be brought down; wages, too,
must be reduced from war-time extravagance to some scale on which they
could continue. It soon became apparent that the War, whatever it may
have done for men spiritually, had left a hideous material mess to be
cleaned up.

The first duty was to cease spending more than we could afford; no easy
thing, for our obligatory expenses were almost beyond our earnings. We
had to face some eight thousand millions of war debt, and this meant a
scale of taxation which crippled industry and bore crushingly on all but
profiteers. There was a strenuous effort after economy in
administration, and presently some fifty millions were lopped off the
civil estimates, but a formidable difficulty remained. We had created a
great system of social services, which the well-being of the nation
required should be enlarged instead of diminished. They involved high
taxation, and that, and our wage level, greatly increased the cost of
production. But while our costs had risen our business was declining. We
had lost our industrial pre-eminence in the world's markets, since other
nations had climbed, or were climbing, to our level. Our exports,
visible and invisible, looked like soon ceasing to pay for our necessary
imports. The whole nineteenth century fabric of British trade was
breaking down. With shrinking markets, and the cost of Government, local
and central, nearly three times what it had been in 1913, with taxation
absorbing one-third of the nation's income instead of one-eighth, we
were ceasing to be able to pay our way. The industrial worker was
already receiving a higher remuneration than was warranted by the
sale-value of his product.

The situation was met by a vigorous effort on the part of industry both
to enlarge its house and to set it in order. Agriculture, which had for
a little during the War taken its old place in the nation, was allowed
to slip back into a melancholy trough, but industry in the face of the
gravest difficulties put its shoulder stoutly to the wheel. There was a
second industrial revolution, under which a variety of new businesses
arose, chiefly luxury products, and much of the green landscape of
southern England became hideous with raw factories. The War, too, had
stimulated research, and in many forms of production there was a notable
technical advance. But, while this improved the efficiency of the
machine, it dispensed with part of the human factor, and by increasing
unemployment increased industry's overhead burdens. To add to our other
difficulties there was the growing economic nationalism of much of the
world, an infection which had not yet seized on Britain, so that the
industrialist, heavily taxed, and encumbered with high costs, had to
compete abroad in lands hedged round by tariffs, and at home against
foreign imports, cheaply produced and often subsidised.

Under such handicaps the marvel was that our industrial system did not
crumble altogether. It had another drawback to contend with, for at the
start the national policy was a banker's policy. Deflation was the
watchword, and the international stability of money was regarded as the
key to trade revival. In April 1925 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr.
Churchill, took the fateful step of returning to the gold standard at
the pre-War parity. This was deflation with a vengeance, for the amount
of money was curtailed, and therefore internal prices dropped while
interest charges and wages were unreduced. This added to the cost of
production at home, while the price of British goods to the foreigner
was automatically increased. It was orthodox finance in the old sense,
and it re-established Britain as the world's financial centre, but it
crippled still further our export trade, and prepared the way for wage
troubles in our exporting industries.

Seven difficult years ensued. Other Governments followed the British
return to gold, but at something far below the pre-War parity. Meantime
unemployment grew, and it became clear that some of our heavy industries
had sunk permanently to a lower level. Money, the medium of trade, was
losing its old, stable flexibility. Under the futile system of war debts
and reparations a large part of the world's capital was diverted into
barren channels. The debtor countries could not pay their debts in
goods, since their creditors had erected colossal tariff walls, and the
consequence was that their exports were diverted to Britain, the one
great free-trade area that remained. But the payment received for these
goods did not go to buy British produce, but to purchase gold wherewith
to satisfy their creditors. Gold, instead of being a running and
fertilising river, had become a frozen glacier bringing death in its
train.

In these years the country sorely required some other heartening than
the obligatory optimism of statesmen. As in the War, the King did much
by his constant visits to distressed areas and to embarrassed cities to
keep the popular temper steady. His words were always of hope, a
reminder that Britain had passed through dark places before and yet had
emerged into the sunlight. Take, as one instance out of many, what he
said at Glasgow in 1931, when he opened a new dock on the Clyde:

    What chiefly impresses me is your present courage and
    enterprise. At a moment of industrial depression you are
    steadfastly preparing for the long-hoped-for trade revival. I
    believe that those who have faith in the future of our nation
    will not be disappointed, and will reap the full reward of their
    foresight.

    Two centuries ago Glasgow was the pioneer in the development of
    trade with North America. That enterprise, in the words of the
    best-known Glasgow citizen in literature, Bailie Nicol Jarvie,
    was the most fortunate event in her history, "since St. Mungo
    first caught herrings in the Clyde." Moreover, it was the first
    step which raised Scotland from a poor and backward country to a
    foremost place in all human activities. She has been the window
    from which Scotland especially has looked out upon the world.
    She has been the port from which Scotsmen have gone forth to
    colonise and develop new lands. For a century her ships have
    sailed every ocean, and there are few corners in the world,
    however remote, where you cannot find a Glasgow engineer.

    It is a great record, but I am convinced that it is not yet
    ended. There are still new worlds for Glasgow to conquer. . . .
    The motto of this great city is "Let Glasgow flourish." When
    Scotsmen aspire earnestly to a purpose, the purpose is already
    half accomplished. We shall watch with cordial interest the
    fulfilment of that hope.

Disaster was imminent, for the whole mechanism of the world's commerce
was out of gear. The climax began in the autumn of 1929 with the
downfall of America's swollen prosperity. Like the first break-up of the
ice in a river, cracks started in all quarters, and then came a slow
loosening and upheaving. Future historians will no doubt have as many
explanations of the cause of the great depression as of the origin of
the War, but certain facts are indubitable. The money system of the
world was no longer adequate to the complexities of the world's trade,
complexities increased by political troubles, by economic nationalism,
by the unbalanced position of gold, and by a distrustful and uncertain
popular temper. Increased production could not be brought into relation
to increased demand.

In Britain the crisis came in the late summer of 1931, when a Labour
Government was in power, a Government in which only a few were able to
read the signs of the times. The warnings of Mr. Snowden, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, had little effect upon some of his colleagues, whose
financial creed was a blend of mysticism and emotion. A creeping
sickness was spreading over the world, and during the summer the
symptoms became acute, first in Austria, then in Germany, and last in
Britain. A conference of European Ministers in London in July provided
no remedy. On the last day of the month the May Report was published,
which revealed that, on the present basis of income and expenditure,
there would next year be a deficit in the British budget of over 120
millions. There followed at once a heavy withdrawal of foreign balances,
and the Bank of England had to seek assistance from France and the
United States. On August 24th the Labour Cabinet resigned, and the King
invited the Prime Minister to form an emergency Government of all
parties. In September a supplementary Budget was passed by the House of
Commons, which by heavy economies and increased taxes provided a small
surplus for that and the coming financial year.

The emergency Cabinet was formed to keep Britain on gold. It found the
thing impossible. On Monday, September 21st, we left the gold standard,
an example speedily followed by a number of other nations. Next month
Ministers went to the country as a National Government, and were
returned to power by an immense majority. Their task was to restore the
international credit of Britain by scrupulously balanced budgets and by
a reasonable reduction of the adverse balance of trade. The gold
standard proved to have been largely a bogy; it had seemed the only
palladium when we were on it, but we found that we did very well without
it. The sterling group soon became a force in the world. There was no
fall in the purchasing value of the pound at home, and its depreciation
in terms of certain foreign currencies was in effect a bonus to our
export trade. We had redressed the inequalities of our 1925 ambitions.

The years since 1931 have seen Britain, by a great effort of sacrifice
and discipline, restored not only to an economic, but to a moral,
leadership among the nations, and her Dominions have walked in the same
path. She has eschewed flashy panaceas and perilous short cuts, and
stuck to the highroad of common sense. Difficult problems still confront
her, but more than any other Power she has attained poise, confidence,
and a measure of stability. The ill weather continues, but to meet it
she has strengthened her house walls. . . . But it is a new house. The
year 1931 marked the end of the Victorian regime which had given her
prosperity. Changed conditions have forced her to accept some degree of
economic nationalism, and free-trade in the old sense has departed. The
corporate effort of the War has had its effect, and the nation has been
ready to use more amply, when circumstances warranted it, the powers of
the community. Capital is more under State control, because it has often
to seek the help of the State. We are beginning to realise that the
machine, if wisely used, may play the part which the slave system played
in ancient Athens, and provide an ampler leisure for the citizen. Yet
the phrase, the "new socialism," is a misnomer. Collectivist methods are
used, not because they are deduced from any creed, but because they
happen to meet the case. In accordance with her secular practice,
Britain has troubled very little about political theory; she accepts
change under the potent compulsion of facts.


  II

To all this upturning of foundations Labour could not be insensitive. At
the end of the War it was in a difficult mood, conscious of its power,
shaken out of many of its old beliefs, uncertain of its future. The
example of Russia was disquieting, for, though the older and wiser saw
the tyranny under the veneer of that workers' dictatorship, younger men
were excited by the spectacle of a dream come true in a night. To such
evolution seemed a refuge for the feeble, and revolution the method for
the strong. Yet in the labour unrest there was very little that was
doctrinaire. Nationalisation was demanded not so much as an advance
towards state socialism as on the practical ground that private
ownership meant local inequalities, and--with the war mobilisation of
industry in mind--inefficiency; and a short working day because more men
could be employed. But the cardinal point was higher wages, to meet the
rise in prices, and to give the worker the margin above subsistence
which is the basis of freedom.

In the first two years of peace there was a big crop of trade disputes,
inevitable in the dislocation of economic life. Three great unions, the
Miners, the Railwaymen, and the Transport Workers, formed a Triple
Alliance. Through the early months of 1919 a Coal Commission sat on the
miners' problem, and from its somewhat confused findings there emerged a
shortening of hours and an increase in wages. That summer and autumn
there was serious trouble with the railwaymen. In April, 1920, the
Triple Alliance threatened a general strike in support of the miners'
case, a strike which was only called off at the eleventh hour. The
following year there was another stoppage in the coal industry, but the
other members of the Triple Alliance held their hand, and the miners had
to fight their battle alone. The trouble in that industry was not merely
a dispute between men and masters, but the fact that in the new
conditions of the world it simply could not maintain its old scale of
employment. Subsidies from the Government tided it over from year to
year, but it was becoming plain that the flash-point was not far
distant. In 1925 another Coal Commission was appointed which rejected
nationalisation, but proposed new wage scales and other reforms on a
national basis. The miners refused the terms, the Government subsidy
ceased on April 20th, 1926, and on May Day the General Council of the
Trade Union Congress decreed a general strike.

The General Strike--it was not general, for only certain key industries
were affected, and it was not quite a strike--marked the end of an epoch
in our industrial life. Labour had come to believe that it could dictate
to the nation, and it found that the nation was its master. The
Government, which had striven for peace until the last moment, used its
statutory emergency powers, and worked on a plan which it had
elaborately prepared. Food supplies were perfectly organised, a reduced
system of transport was provided, and order was strictly maintained. The
amateur proved that at a shift he could do the work of the expert. Youth
rose to the crisis as it had risen to the call to war, and the
universities emptied themselves into the dock, railway, and bus
services. There was no violence, and everywhere there was good temper
and a determined geniality. To the outside world it was an amazing
exhibition of coolness and common sense. The trade union leaders, who
had released the jinn from the bottle without considering the
consequences, were alarmed and bewildered. They realised that the
feeling of the nation was against them, and that their action might make
their funds liable at law for colossal damages. Almost at once they sued
for peace, and after nine days they called off the strike. The miners
struggled on alone till November, when they too capitulated, having
driven a good many more nails into their industry's coffin.

The events of May 1926 did much to clear the air and purge the mind of
Labour of certain post-War delusions. The unions had challenged the
nation--innocently but unequivocally--and had found the nation by far
the stronger. There was another wholesome result. All classes had served
together in the trenches, and a very solid respect had grown up in each
for the quality of the others. But the post-War youth had had no such
opportunity, and the notion had spread in Labour circles that the young
men of the middle and upper classes had not the same spirit and
hardihood as themselves. On this point the General Strike left no doubt,
and the foolish truculence which had characterised the previous years
was sensibly abated.

It was well that this should be so, for the Labour party was now the
second greatest of the political camps of Britain. Though its professed
creed was socialism, it had little in common with the socialist parties
of the Continent. Its backbone was the trade unions, which were the most
English thing in England. They were more radical than socialist, and in
a sense more conservative than radical. Their object was not to pull up
things by the roots, but to get their own roots deeper. Their faults lay
in an occasional blindness of eye and confusion of head, not in any
unsoundness of temper or heart. Their attempts at dictatorship were
bungled tactics, not a serious strategy. But, while they formed the
strength of the Labour party, from their sectional narrowness of outlook
they were also its weakness. They brought to the House of Commons a
refreshing realism, for they spoke as experts on many practical things,
and their stalwart vernacular was a joy amid the clipped conventions of
parliamentary speech. But larger questions they were apt to judge on too
low a plane and with imperfect knowledge. The corrective was to be
looked for in the socialist intellectuals, of whom they were inclined to
be suspicious, but who applied to policy a wider education and broader
sympathies. They were often viewy and pedantic, but as a group they were
serious students of public affairs, with a genuine scientific apparatus
behind them. It was well for Labour, and well for the country, to have
this laboratory of experiment and thought.

The conditions of working-class life had on the whole been greatly
improved since the War. Higher wages did not lead to waste, but to
higher standards of decency and comfort. The average household had
better food, better clothing, more margin for amusements, wider
horizons. Small wonder that they struggled to maintain what they had
won. That was for those in employment: for the unemployed, who had now
passed beyond the two million figure, there was a bare subsistence and a
tragic idleness, a steady loss of their technical skill, and a slow
souring and dulling of mind. Yet in the very tragedy there were elements
of hope. A problem of such magnitude required for its solution not only
the energies of the State but the thought and the goodwill of every
private citizen; and, largely owing to the work of the Prince of Wales,
these were forthcoming. People began to recognise a personal duty. Also
there was a stimulus to clearer thinking and to an effort to remake our
whole industrial machine. Hitherto the task had been to remedy the
defects of industrialism, now it was to transform industrialism itself.
One social danger was however forgotten--the embarrassed middle-classes,
especially their youth. When a young man of that class was unemployed,
he was the care of nobody; when he was employed, it was too often on a
job without light or horizon. From such natural discontent fascism, or
some other authoritarian creed, might draw many recruits.

Had some Rip van Winkle gone to sleep on the eve of the War, and
awakened any time in the first decade of peace to cast an eye over our
society, he would have been first impressed, I think, by the superficial
levelling up of classes. Men and women could no longer be judged by
their clothes. These had become simpler and more uniform. A clerk was as
well dressed, and in much the same way, as a Guards officer, and a
village girl as the lady of the manor. People--the women
especially--would have appeared to him slimmer and more vital. He would
have missed the old stately ritual of London life. The capital now
looked more like a provincial city, for the top-hat had largely gone,
club life was a declining thing, the great mansions had become blocks of
flats, and the "season," shorn of its old splendours, now lasted most of
the year. He would have been struck by the trimness and the healthier
appearance of youth. Parliament, perhaps, would have seemed to him
rather a shabby assembly. In the country he would have found towns
spreading into mushroom suburbs, and ancient villages blotched with
bungalows. He would have been amazed at the size and populousness of the
roads, and the scarcity of horses. Famous houses which he had known were
now either pulled down or turned into schools and asylums, the parks had
been ploughed up and built upon, and their owners had migrated to
suburban or continental lodgings with a few family heirlooms and the
war-medals of their dead. But he would have found village life gayer
and freer, if less idiomatic. He would have noted, too, that the hunt
meets were as large as ever, and that a new gentry had made its
appearance. As after the Wars of the Roses a small squirearchy was
growing up on the ruin of the grandees; and he would have consoled
himself by reflecting that it was the new modest manors which had
produced some of the greatest Elizabethans.

As he looked more closely into things our Rip van Winkle would have been
awed by the widespread passion for entertainment. He remembered that
Disraeli more than half a century before had told Lord Rowton that the
true revolution would come in Britain when the bourgeoisie took to
amusing itself. Games bulked larger than ever in the nation's eyes. The
cinema had become a universal habit; twenty millions visited it each
week. There were now seven million wireless sets, the remotest hamlets
were forests of wireless poles, and daily about half the population was
entertained and instructed from the air. Instructed!--that was what
impressed him. The demand for a greater margin of leisure involved the
means of filling that leisure, and almost every form of entertainment
had its educative side. There would soon be no more pleasant oases of
unsophistication. The workers and the peasants were getting to know how
their neighbours lived and how the world lived. Knowledge was being
diffused in the widest commonalty, shallow perhaps, but still
knowledge. A mighty transformation was in progress, managed by the
people themselves and not by their Government. But the Government too
was affected. The press might disparage or belaud a statesman, but that
statesman now broadcast _urbi et orbi_, and the whole nation could hear,
and judge, his words.

The awakened sleeper observed another thing. The cities were straggling
into the country as never before, but the nation was becoming alive to
the loss. It was as if the perils and discomforts of war had made people
more conscious of their heritage of ancient peace. The old distinction
between town-dweller and country-dweller was less rigid. New means of
transport took the urban population easily to remote places, the
interest in wild nature was spreading, men and women, whose eyes had
once looked scarcely beyond their own street, were now alive to the
riches of their native land. But if Britain awoke to the consciousness
of a great possession, this awakening would mean desecration unless the
possession were protected. The countryside, so long neglected, was
rediscovered and christened "rural England," and there was a vigorous
movement to preserve rustic beauty, now badly scarred but not beyond
hope, a movement springing not from the few but from the many.


  III

After every great effort there is a natural expectation of some
quickening and sublimation of the human soul. It may take the form of a
religious revival, or some sudden flowering of the creative mind. The
war with Spain was followed by the Puritan kindling of the religious
consciousness, by Shakespeare and Milton; the war with Napoleon by the
romantic revival in letters and the zealous evangelicalism of the early
nineteenth century. But the Great War had no such fruit. The instinct of
men to huddle into groups for comfort did indeed produce a few
mob-religions, and the dislocation of things and the breakdown of old
standards brought forth a host of new literary modes. But there was no
strong creative impulse to be discerned, or any notable enlargement of
spirit. The struggle had taken too heavy a toll of human vitality.

The characteristic note of the first post-War years was a certain
peevishness. A thing had only to have won general acceptance in the past
to be flouted. A starveling intellectualism discounted whatever to the
ordinary mind seemed moving and heroic. A kind of minor history became
popular, in which the writers strove to strip the aura from every great
character or great drama of the past, like some Greek of the decadence
who chipped the nose of an Apollo of Pheidias in order to make the Goths
laugh. In fiction the fashion was for the cloacal or the minutely
analytic; in poetry for a breakdown of all shape and a petulant defiance
of the orthodox. At the same time an antiquarian spirit was abroad;
obscure ancients were disinterred and deified, and the _pastiche_ became
a fashionable form. In belief, in morals, and in art there was a craze
for disintegration, which sought to reduce solid things to mere nebul
of atoms. The prevalent mood was one of bitterness and disillusion, and,
since the older standards were rejected, of an extreme arrogance. To be
modern was the only proof of quality, and the "post-War mind," brittle
and insecure, was regarded as the ultimate flowering of the human
spirit. All the familiar clichs of a decadence were in use, and an
imperfect education prevented the users from realising how hoary were
their darling novelties. This intellectual temper was matched in social
life by a kind of joyless gaiety, without manners or grace. Anxious
elders in their haste set down the new youth as trivial in soul and
shallow in mind.

The mood did not last. At first the younger generation, more demoralised
by the War than those who had fought in it, clamoured only for a safe
niche and a "soft option" in life. Ease and security seemed the only
ends. But presently youth found its bearings again. In letters there
appeared a manlier strain, a return of confidence, humanity and hope.
The writers might be extravagant and wildly empirical, but they were
cheerfully facing a new world and striving after a new interpretation.
If they had not found a gospel they recognised the need of one. To those
who had the chance of seeing much of the youth of Britain, the change
between the beginning and the end of the post-war decade seemed little
short of a miracle. In spite of growing difficulties in making a living,
young men carried their heads high. It was as if they realised that they
were living in a rough world, and must make certain that there was no
hardship in it which they could not face. There was an honest craving
for discipline and construction, for they had grown tired of the atomist
and the disintegrator. The appeal to many of creeds like communism and
fascism was simply the opportunity they gave for sacrifice. The new
temper had its perils, but it had also its splendid promise. The
idealism, which seemed to have gone to earth after peace, was now again
abroad in the world. There was visible, too, one incontrovertible gain
from the War. It had done much to break down class barriers and kill a
shoddy gentility. The young man of the educated classes to-day is at
home, as his father could never have been, in a Hull trawler, or working
on the soil with unemployed miners, or lending a hand with the Canadian
harvest. He is tougher in fibre, more resourceful, more human.


  IV

The older histories were built up on the fortunes of cabinets and
parliaments. Politics were "decontrolled," like other things, when the
Coalition Cabinet fell in the autumn of 1922, but the Governments which
ensued were not the milestones in the national progress which
Governments had once been. Mr. Bonar Law succeeded Mr. Lloyd George,
and, when ill-health compelled him to resign, he was followed by Mr.
Baldwin. The election in the autumn of 1923 brought for the first time a
Labour Government into office, a minority Government dependent on
Liberal votes. It fell in the next autumn, and for five years the
Conservatives were in power with a great majority. In 1929 a Labour
Government was again installed, also a minority Government, and in 1931
came the economic crisis and the formation of a National Government
under the Labour Prime Minister. But, except the last, these were
changes of no profound significance. Any Government, whatever its
election programme, had to face the same problems as its predecessor,
and very much in the same way. Urgent facts had played havoc with party
creeds. At no time in our history, perhaps, has party interest sunk so
low as in recent years. This is due in some degree to the fact that our
democracy is now plebiscitary, and with universal franchise an election
has become a scuffle and a gamble as compared with the old,
well-planned contests. But it is largely due to the fact that in a
crisis like war or impending bankruptcy the ordinary party business
means little. Its use will come again, but that day is not yet.

Few of the men remain who were the foremost public figures before and
during the War. The great sailors survive, but of the generals Haig and
three of his army commanders are gone. Asquith and Balfour, Curzon and
Milner have taken with them some of the high traditions of an earlier
Britain, dignity in speech and demeanour, subtlety and precision of
thought, a passionate belief in an imperial mission, and a supreme
administrative talent. This is not the place to write of those who are
left, except to say that the succession is not broken. War left a
lamentable gap in our youth, but happily there are brilliant younger
figures to bridge that gap. One fact may be noted. The War and the first
years of peace did not increase the prestige of Parliament, but the
downfall of constitutional government in Europe has revived it. Once
again Parliament means much to our people, a thing of their own
contriving which they will defend against all attacks, since it is
intertwined with their liberties. It is an opportune moment, if
statesmen are wise, for that reform in its procedure and in its mode of
election which will fit it to meet the stresses of a new age.
Plebiscitary democracy, unless it be wisely regulated, may relapse into
a meaningless see-saw.

In the disorder of the world every people has felt the need of
concentration. This has been done elsewhere by nations surrendering
their wills to dictators and camarillas. Britain, with a wiser instinct,
has clung to her old institutions, but has modified them to meet new
needs. The formation of a National Government in August 1931 was typical
of our land, which brought to the task all her constitutional resources.
And not least the Throne. On August 21st the King arrived at Balmoral
for his Scottish holiday; next day he returned to London. It was not for
him to have any economic policy or any preference as between parties.
The common procedure would have been for Mr. Macdonald to resign, and
give place to the Conservatives. But, as the trustee of the nation, the
King felt that a national emergency should be faced by a national front.
His view was accepted by Ministers, and a National Government was
formed. That it was also the desire of the people the ensuing election
gave instant proof.




  EPILOGUE


To cast the mind back over the last twenty-five years is to survey
changes such as no other quarter-century in our record can show. Never
before has the nation faced such stupendous "varieties of untried
being." But in a season of startling breaches with the past one thing
has been unbroken; one ancient institution has provided the cord on
which mutations have been strung--a cord stretching back to our earliest
annals. That cord, which has often been thin and sometimes frayed, is
now a sevenfold cable. What has become of the solemn nineteenth-century
flirtings with republicanism? The whole nation, the whole Empire, is
royalist to-day, not only in constitutional doctrine but in personal
affection.

One recent event was proof of this loyalty. In November 1928, at the
Armistice Day celebrations, the King caught a chill which developed into
a dangerous pleurisy. In December an operation followed, and at
Christmastime a shadow hung over the Palace. The Prince of Wales was
brought back in haste from Central Africa, a Council of State took over
the royal duties, and the people waited anxiously for news, as if the
sick man had been their closest kin. The treatment of the malady was a
fine example of medical team-work, but the chief hope lay in the
patient's resolute courage. Early in the New Year the crisis was passed,
and in February the King was able to leave London for the south coast.
On April 22nd he issued a message to the Empire:

    In looking back on my long illness and recovery, my heart is
    full of thankfulness of far deeper origin than any mere sense of
    relief.

    I have been brought back from the danger and weariness of the
    past months by the wonderful skill and devotion of my doctors,
    surgeons and nurses. And help has come from another source of
    strength; as month after month went by I heard of the widespread
    and loving solicitude with which the Queen and I were
    surrounded. I was able to picture to myself the crowds of
    friends waiting and watching at my gates, and to think of the
    still great number of those who, in every part of the Empire,
    were remembering me with prayers and good wishes. The
    realisation of this has been among the most vivid experiences of
    my life.

    It was an encouragement beyond description to find that my
    constant and earnest desire had been granted--the desire to gain
    the confidence and affection of my people. My thoughts have
    carried me even further than this. I cannot dwell upon the
    generous sympathy shown to me by unknown friends in many other
    countries without a new and moving hope. I long to believe it
    possible that experiences such as mine may soon appear no longer
    exceptional; when the national anxieties of all the peoples of
    the world shall be felt as a common source of human sympathy and
    a common claim on human friendship.

    I am not yet able to bear the strain of a public ceremony, but I
    look forward on some appointed day to joining with my people at
    home and overseas in thanking Almighty God, not merely for my
    own recovery, but for the new evidences of the growing
    kindliness significant of the true nature of men and nations.

The Thanksgiving Service was held in Westminster Abbey on July 7th, but
no ceremony could be more impressive than these simple words of the
King. His illness had evoked a passion of loyal concern which was
without a parallel. Science may discover some formula for the miracles
which may be wrought, even in the physical sphere, by the concentrated
will of great masses of men. Our ancestors, more piously and perhaps
more wisely, would have attributed his recovery to the prayers of his
people.

Majesty and Grace are in the royal office. Monarchy in some form is
universal to-day, for it seems to be a necessity in government.
Elsewhere it is elective and temporary, as in republics; or, as in
dictatorships, enforced and undefined in term. But a hereditary monarchy
is not only more enduring than such types, it has a special quality
which they can never win. A king, who reigns not by election or by a
sudden popular impulse but by right, has a sanction behind him which no
transient dictator or president can claim. His authority is interwoven
with the life and thought of his people. If, as in Britain, his ancestry
goes back to our dim beginnings, the office embodies the whole history
of the nation. Because it is beyond popular caprice, it is, as I have
said, the centre of the nation's conscious unity, a link between its
past and its future. It becomes a symbol, which needs no artificial
sanctity to give it power. With this firm foundation Britain is enabled
to be a bold pioneer in new construction, just as the man who would cast
his spear far must first find solid footing. It preserves her from the
wastefulness of revolution, and from the futile type of revolution which
we call reaction.

It has another supreme virtue. The essence of the British monarchy is
that the King, while lifted far above the nation, should also be the
nation itself in its most characteristic form. There is no place on our
Throne for the superman, whether he be conqueror or dreamer; its
occupant must be recognised by his subjects as of like nature with
themselves, exalted indeed, but with the same outlook on life, the same
traditions and tastes, the same staunch and familiar virtues. "The
Englishman," as Goldsmith wrote, "is taught to love the King as his
friend"; and friendship involves a noble equality. In the Platonic
utopia the king was the philosopher; it is more important that he should
be the plain man.

The office in itself is a great thing, but it may be made more potent by
the personality of him who holds it. It is not for a subject, in Dr.
Johnson's famous words, to "bandy civilities with his Sovereign." But
the historian must record that the King has added to the duties of the
Crown a graciousness which springs from his own character. He has given
to ceremonial the bloom of friendliness. He has always possessed a high
seriousness, and the note of faith and piety which he has often struck
has not been the mere convention of his office. He has walked securely
in more difficult constitutional paths than any of his immediate
predecessors. He has faced courageously crises which imperilled both his
people and his Throne. But, in addition to all this, he has diffused a
spirit of simplicity and charity which has profoundly affected the
national temper. His quick sympathy and kindliness have warmed the
country, and done something to warm a chilly world. When nerve was
breaking his steadfastness has restored it, and when strife was
fermenting he has spoken the healing word. The power of the Throne lies
in what it is: but the authority of the King lies both in what he is,
and in what he has done. With the Queen and his family to aid him, he
has made Britain not only a nation but a household.

Leadership does not consist only in a strong man imposing his will upon
others. In that sense it has no meaning for a British Sovereign. But in
a far profounder sense the King has shown himself a leader, since the
true task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to
elicit it, since the greatness is already there. That truth is the basis
of all religion, it is the only justification for democracy, it is the
chart and compass of our mortal life. The King has led his people, for
he has evoked what is best in them.




  INDEX


  Agadir, 42, 62, 85

  Aisne, first battle of, 129, 137;
    second battle of, 201, 217

  Albert, King, of the Belgians, 18, 82, 108, 145

  Algeciras, Conference of, 40, 41

  Allenby, Sir Edmund (Lord Allenby), 228, 230, 282

  Amiens, battle of, 218-220

  Arras, battle of, 201

  Asquith, H. H. (Lord Oxford and Asquith), 21, 31;
    in House of Lords dispute, 35, 41, 43, 47-52; 63, 67, 68;
    in Irish Home Rule dispute, 75, 76, 93-96, 278;
    at outbreak of War, 102, 112, 113, 116, 120;
    resignation, 179-182;
    character of, 182, 314

  Austria-Hungary, 20, 40, 78, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104;
    after War, 258, 262


  Bagdad, 158, 208

  Baldwin, Mr. Stanley, 313

  Balfour, A. J. (Lord Balfour), 32, 41, 47, 52, 66, 68, 75, 77;
    First Lord of Admiralty, 160, 161;
    Foreign Secretary, 180; 289, 314

  Beatty, Admiral Sir David (Lord Beatty), 175

  Belgium, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 127, 130, 131, 139, 237

  Belloc, H., quoted, 113_n._

  Berchtold, Count, 100, 101

  Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 79, 102, 115, 116, 184

  Bight of Heligoland, battle of, 134

  Bismarck, 39

  Bonar Law, Andrew, 66, 71, 73, 74, 75, 92, 105, 160, 180, 313

  Botha, Louis, 143

  British Empire, the, in the War, 142, 144;
    after War, 272, 273, 287-291

  Brning, Dr., 261

  Buckingham Palace, 17, 22, 50, 85, 115, 116, 165, 237, 240

  Budget of 1909, the, 19, 33, 34

  Bulgaria, 18, 147, 230

  Blow, Prince, 39

  Burke, Edmund, quoted, 60, 76


  Cambon, Jules, 79, 82;
    Paul, 104

  Cambrai, battle of, 203, 204, 205

  Campbell-Bannerman, Sir H., 30, 32, 35

  Caporetto, battle of, 203, 204, 205

  Carson, Sir Edward (Lord Carson), 71, 73, 74, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97

  Cavell, Edith, 163, 164

  Chamberlain, Sir Austen, 160;
    Joseph, 27, 46

  Charles, Emperor, of Austria, 184, 231

  Churchill, Mr. Winston, 31;
    as First Lord of Admiralty, 43, 71, 84, 87, 91, 109, 113, 116, 130,
      148;
    in first Coalition, 160;
    as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 296;
    quoted 26, 27, 45, 112, 151, 252, 270

  Clausewitz, 135

  Clemenceau, M., 164, 213, 214, 250

  Conferences, on Parliament Bill, 48-49;
    on Irish Home Rule, 95, 96, 97

  Congress of Vienna, the, 249, 250, 251

  Coronel, battle of, 134

  Crewe, Lord, 47, 50, 52

  Cromwell, Oliver, 11, 72, 136, 141, 245

  Curzon, Lord, 56, 60, 73, 160, 180, 314


  D'Annunzio, 245

  Danton, 168

  Dardanelles; _see_ Gallipoli Expedition

  Delcass, M., 40, 42

  De Robeck, Admiral John, 150

  Devonport, Lord, 64

  Disraeli, 37, 308


  Edward VII, King, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 28, 36, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48,
    50, 55

  Egypt, 39, 281, 282

  Esher, Lord, 46


  Falkenhayn, General E. von, 129, 156, 168, 172, 173

  Falkland Islands, battle of, 134

  Feisal, King, 230

  Festubert, battle of, 153

  Fisher, Lord, 87, 134, 135, 148;
    Mr. Herbert, 191

  Foch, Marshal, 129, 131, 156, 206;
    becomes Generalissimo, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 231, 233

  France, 38, 39, 80, 104, 105, 107, 110;
    after War, 258-260

  Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 18, 99

  Franz Joseph, Emperor, 100

  French, Sir John (Lord French), 93, 126, 131, 136, 144, 155


  Gallini, General, 128, 138

  Gallipoli Expedition, the, 149-152, 215, 265

  Gandhi, Mr., 284

  General Strike, the, 303-305

  George V, King, accession to throne, 20, 21;
    speech at unveiling of Queen Victoria Memorial, 22;
    coronation, 22-23;
    House of Lords dispute, 46-54;
    visit to India, 55-60;
    Irish Home Rule dispute, 74-77, 92, 94, 95;
    pre-War duties, 85-87;
    at outbreak of War, 105, 115, 140, 144;
    visits to the front, 144-145, 164, 165, 215, 238;
    work during War, 209;
    Peace ceremonies, 237-240;
    the Empire, 273-274, 291;
    Ireland, 277, 278;
    his illness, 316-318;
    summary of reign, 318-320

  Germany, 39-42, 78, 84, 98-111;
    after War, 256, 257, 258

  Gladstone, W. E., 24, 25, 37, 69

  Goldsmith, Oliver, quoted, 319

  Gough, General Sir Hubert, 92, 165

  Grey, Sir Edward (Lord Grey of Fallodon), 21, 31, 43;
    character of, 44, 77, 79, 81;
    at outbreak of War, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109,
      112, 113, 114, 116, 181

  Guise, battle of, 127


  Haig, Sir Douglas (Lord Haig), 126, 131, 136, 137, 155, 156, 164, 165,
      167, 170, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216,
      217, 222, 229, 233;
    character of, 236, 237, 314

  Haldane, R. B. (Lord Haldane), 31, 43, 44, 79, 80, 89, 109, 113, 139,
    160

  Halifax the Trimmer, 69

  Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 152

  Hankey, Sir Maurice, 190

  Henderson, Mr. Arthur, 160, 180

  Hindenburg, Marshal von, 132, 133, 156, 172, 174, 260, 261

  Hindenburg Line, the, 201, 220, 228, 229

  Hipper, Admiral, 175

  Hitler, Adolf, 258, 261, 267

  House of Lords problem, the, 19, 33, 34, 47-54


  India, 55, 60, 283-287

  Iraq, 283

  Ireland, Home Rule question, the, 32, 49, 69-77, 89-97;
    after the War, 274-281

  Italy, 40, 77, 102, 147, 156, 169, 237;
    after the War, 263, 265


  Jameson Raid, the, 26

  Japan, 39, 56, 78, 147, 270

  Jellicoe, Admiral Sir John (Lord Jellicoe), 134, 175, 176

  Jerusalem, 208

  Joffre, Marshal, 128, 144, 148, 154, 173

  Johnson, Dr., quoted, 319

  Jutland, battle of, 174-176, 197


  Kellogg Pact, the, 269

  Kemal, Mustapha, 265, 266, 267, 288

  Kerensky, 192

  Keyes, Admiral Sir Roger, 222

  Kitchener, Lord, 124, 125, 126, 151, 161, 176, 177

  Kut, 158, 175


  Labour, 61-64;
    during War, 162, 163, 208, 209, 223;
    after War, 302-306

  Lansdowne, Lord, 47, 51, 52, 75, 160

  Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 46

  Lawrence, Colonel T. E., 231, 245

  Le Cateau, battle of, 127

  League of Nations, the, 254, 255, 261, 269, 270, 283

  Lenin, 192, 194, 245, 263

  Lichnowsky, Prince, 98, 103, 113

  Liddell Hart, Captain, quoted, 126

  Lloyd George, Mr., 31;
    Budget of 1909, 33, 34, 36;
    speech at Mansion House on Agadir, 43, 46, 65, 67, 69, 84, 95, 125,
      148, 159;
    as Minister of Munitions, 160, 161;
    as Prime Minister, 179-181;
    character of, 186-190;
    views on Western Front, 198, 199, 205, 207, 244;
    in 1918 Election, 247-249;
    at Peace Conference, 250, 259, 288, 313

  Locarno Treaties, the, 260, 270

  Loos, battle of, 154, 155

  Louis of Battenberg, Prince, 139

  Ludendorff, General von, 132, 156, 172, 174, 200, 210, 212, 216, 217,
    218, 220, 231, 232

  Lys, battle of the, 215-216


  Macdonald, Mr. Ramsay, 300, 315

  Mackensen, General von, 157, 158, 174

  Marconi case, the, 67-69

  Marne, first battle of the, 128-129, 136;
    second battle of the, 217-218

  Mary, Queen, 21, 165, 215, 237, 240, 320

  Maximilian of Baden, Prince, 18

  Messines, battle of, 202

  Milner, Lord, 181, 186, 190, 213, 214, 229, 231, 233, 282, 314

  Minto, Lord, 56, 57, 60, 285

  Moltke, General von, 81, 111, 128, 129, 137

  Montagu, E. S., 283, 285

  Morley, John (Lord Morley), 31, 52, 57, 113, 143

  Morocco, 39

  Mussolini, Benito, 264, 265, 267


  Napoleon, 135, 145, 292

  Neuve Chapelle, battle of, 153

  Nietzsche, 83

  Nivelle, General, 169, 199, 200, 201


  Paget, Sir Arthur, 92

  Palestine, 283

  Palmerston, Lord, 37, 256

  Parliament Act, the, 36, 51-54

  Passchendaele; _see_ Ypres, third battle of

  Peace Conference, the, 249-255

  Pershing, General, 214, 228, 229

  Ptain, Marshal, 169, 210, 213, 214, 219

  Peter, King, of Serbia, 158

  Poincar, President, 42, 85, 105, 144, 164, 213, 259, 260


  Rawlinson, General Sir Henry, 165

  Redmond, John, 73, 90, 95

  Roberts, Lord, 84, 145

  Robertson, Sir William, 161, 167, 206

  Rosebery, Lord, 50, 75, 272

  Rumania, 147, 174

  Russia, 38, 39, 40, 41, 101, 106, 147, 151, 156, 169;
    Revolution 191-195, 208;
    after War, 262, 263


  Salisbury, Lord, 45

  Salonika, 158, 174, 230

  Scheidemann, P., 232

  Schlieffen, 128

  Scott, Captain R. F., 88

  Seeckt, General von, 157

  Seely, Colonel, 93, 94

  Serajevo murders, the, 99, 254

  Serbia, 98, 99, 100, 157, 158

  Simon, Sir John, 284

  Smuts, General, 190, 259

  Snowden, Philip (Lord Snowden), 299

  Somme, battle of, 169-172, 183, 199;
    the retreat, 211, 215

  South Africa, 27, 32, 37, 56, 139, 143, 234

  Spee, Admiral von, 134

  Stalin, 263, 267

  Statute of Westminster, the, 289, 290

  Stresemann, 260, 261

  Suffrage agitation, the, 64-65


  Tirpitz, Admiral von, 79, 80

  Tisza, Count, 100

  _Titanic_, sinking of the, 88

  Treitschke, 83

  Trotsky, 192

  Turkey, 40, 77, 147, 149, 150, 208;
    after War, 265, 266


  United States of America, 78, 174;
    enters the War, 195-196;
    her army in France, 218, 224, 229;
    after War, 252, 255, 256, 263, 298


  Verdun, battle of, 168-169

  Versailles Council, the, 206, 207, 211

  Victoria, Queen, 19, 22, 55, 76


  Wales, Prince of, 86, 165, 291, 306, 316

  Warsaw, fall of, 157

  Washington Conference, the, 269

  William II, German Emperor, 18, 20, 22, 40, 79, 82, 83, 99, 100, 103,
    111, 116, 220, 232

  Wilson, President, 185, 195, 196, 214, 231, 232, 233, 234, 250, 251,
      254;
    General Sir Henry, 207, 213


  Ypres, first battle of, 131-2, 137, 145, 146;
    second battle of, 153;
    third battle of, 202


  Zeebrugge, 222


  =Transcriber's Notes:=
  hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the original
  Page 165, to Aire So serious ==> to Aire. So serious
  Page 174, virtually immobolised ==> virtually immobilised
  Page 225, in a greap loop ==> in a great loop
  Page 311, be flouted A starveling ==> be flouted. A starveling




[End of The King's Grace 1910-1935, by John Buchan]
