Art. 14.-BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND WAR.

THE New Year of 1916 opens the decisive phase of the war. How long the material and moral endurance of the combatants may yet prolong the conflict no man can say. But the main issue will, in all human probability, be settled in favour of one side or the other before next autumn. The struggle, if it continues after that, will be not so much to upset the verdict of next summer's battlefields as to garner in the harvest of victory, or resist the payment in full of the debt of defeat. Upon this decisive phase the Allies enter with many advantages in their favour. They have resisted unbroken the enemy's first and most formidable onset. They have inflicted very heavy losses upon him. Their reserves of man-power are still superior to his. Their deficiency in munition-power is slowly but surely being made good. Their economic resources, intrinsically far greater, have not yet been too seriously impaired by extravagance and defective organisation. The strain of the great blockade is a constant pervasive factor telling steadily upon the enemy's nerves and intensifying that craving for peace which may one day become irresistible.

If there is anxiety as to the outcome, it is not from any doubt as to the value of these assets in our favour, but from a growing conviction, based on the experience of the past year, that the supreme direction of Allied policy and Allied strategy has failed to manifest either the foresight, the concentration of effort, or the ruthless energy required for victory. It is not only the Alliance, as such, that has been characterised by the defects. The co-operation of partners so equal in status and so widely different in their outlook and in their interests must almost inevitably fall short of the degree of concentration and efficiency displayed by Germany in conducting her own affairs and those of her dependent allies, though it is satisfactory to note an increasing improvement in this respect, more particularly in the result of recent conferences between the British and French authorities. But the Allied Governments have each separately shown certain weaknesses. And, for us, the defects of our own Government-both because we are most directly concerned with it, and because we believe their persistence or

their cure to be the determining factor in the issue of the war-are matters of supreme interest at this moment. The failure to take the problem of munitions in hand at the beginning, the neglect of the recruiting situation throughout last summer and autumn, the haphazard inconsequence of the Dardanelles adventure, the futile efforts to square the diplomatic circle in the Balkans, the pitiful oscillations of our military policy in that region while our enemies were steadily and remorselessly extirpating a gallant ally-these are not things we can afford to repeat another year and still hope to defeat an adversary like Germany.

Where lies the responsibility for our failures, and what are the steps we must take to ensure that the mistakes of the past year will not be repeated in the year now before us? The answer to the first question is threefold. We have failed, firstly, owing to the defective character of our central military direction; secondly, owing to the unsuitability of Cabinet government, such as it has become in recent years, for carrying on war; and thirdly, owing to the deadening effect of our whole political system upon the very qualities most requisite for waging war. The answer to the second question is that we must reorganise the War Office, devise a new instrument of government, and-last but most important step of all-summon to the direction of affairs men who are free from the vices of our political system and who possess in themselves the qualities of constructive thought, of decision and driving power which are essential to victory. What is more, we must do all these things without delay.

Our military organisation underwent a searching test in the South African War. The experience of that war showed conclusively that the over-centralisation of all control over the various branches of military organisation in a single Commander-in-Chief was destructive of real responsibility and efficiency. Above all it showed that the most important function of all, that of planning and thinking out military policy for the future, was bound to be hopelessly neglected if it was entrusted or subordinated to any individual or department already occupied with the engrossing cares of administrative routine in any shape or form.

It was upon these conclusions that Lord Esher's Committee in 1904 based their scheme of War Office reorganisation. The office of Commander-in-Chief was abolished and an Army Council created, consisting of the heads of the great military administrative servicesthe Adjutant-General, the Quarter-Master-General, the Director-General of Ordnance-and, with them, the head of a new department responsible solely for policy and strategy, namely, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Over this Council presided a civilian Secretary of State, entrusted with a double function-that of representing, and in the last resort enforcing, in the Army Council the views and general policy of the Cabinet, and that of representing and defending in the Cabinet the considered military policy of the Army Council.

This system was sound in its essential principles. It established the great cardinal distinction between policy and administration, between nerve and muscle, which underlies all modern military organisation. It provided for that point of contact and medium for the interchange of ideas between the civil and military authorities which must exist somewhere or other, and which, under our present system of government, is on the whole best provided by a civilian capable of presenting the views of his military colleagues effectively in the Cabinet and before the country. The alternative of a military Secretary of State as member of a party Government, and making speeches in parliament, is not altogether attractive, apart from purely military objections, to which we shall refer later in connexion with Lord Kitchener's tenure of the office.

The new system was a decided advance on the old. Between 1904 and 1914 the organisation of the existing Regular Army was steadily improved with a view to war, and more specifically with a view to a war in Flanders, while the old casual Volunteer Force was fitted into a framework of military organisation, which greatly enhanced its potential value as a Home Defence Force and as a nucleus for expansion in an emergency. But changes in office organisation are of little effect unless they are accompanied by a change of outlook in those who control and drive the machine. And in this case the lessons of the South African War were only very imperfectly

absorbed by the politicians and soldiers who were concerned with the administration of the War Office in the decade before the present war.

Lord Haldane has a great fondness for talking of the importance of General Staff work, and of the need of the General Staff mind. His speeches, in fact, often convey the impression that the General Staff at the War Office, which was created by the late Mr Arnold-Forster, acting upon the report of the Esher Committee, was in some sort an invention of his own. But neither Lord Haldane nor, of course, the Government of which he was a member, ever admitted for a moment the first essential principle in preparation for war, namely, that it is for the General Staff to say what is the army required to carry out the national policy. On the contrary, he always frankly laid down the principle that all army organisation was strictly limited by two governing conditions - first, that our military budget should never exceed a fixed sum, equivalent to about five and a half days' expenditure in the present war; and secondly, that the strength of our Expeditionary Force should be determined by the number of men who had to be in the United Kingdom in any case in order to supply the drafts of trained soldiers for our garrisons in India, Egypt, and the naval stations. Within those limits the General Staff might think and plan to their heart's content. Whether those limits had anything to do with the requirements of Imperial security,

or

were compatible with the foreign policy pursued by the British Government during those years, was a question they were not supposed to ask.

But the fault was not all on the side of the politicians. It is easy to blame the politicians for overruling the 'experts.' But in an unorganised nation like ours there are very few real experts in the higher direction of war, as in many other matters. It is no reflection on the gallant and distinguished officers who in succession occupied the post before the war to say that they had not the grasp either of foreign policy, or of our own economic and industrial conditions, or of higher military organisation, requisite to lay down a military policy for the British Empire, with the knowledge and conviction which alone would have given it a chance of acceptance by a reluctant Cabinet. Nor had they the imagination

which would have made them insist that, even if they could not have the army required to cope with a great world-war, they should at least have, in the War Office itself, a staff adequate to study the various possible contingencies in detail, so that if the crisis came, and men could be improvised, there should be wellconsidered plans for their use. Two hundred officers would be by no means an excessive number to be employed continuously on working out possible schemes for the almost incalculable variety of operations in which our world-wide Empire might find itself involved. A large German dye-works would employ as many, and as well paid, expert chemists to conduct experiments for it. Our chiefs of the General Staff acquiesced in the work being done by about a tenth of that number. For one small corner of the field-the despatch of six divisions to take up their positions on the French left within a given number of days from the outbreak of war-the work was admirably done. The rest was barely touched.

In this condition the war found us. Half the General Staff at the War Office went to the front at once. Most of the rest followed in the course of a few months, and were replaced by 'dug-outs' and convalescents. Upon a body thus weakened descended a new portent in the shape of Lord Kitchener. It will always remain to Lord Kitchener's credit that he had the insight, from the first, to grasp something of the greatness and probable duration of this war, and the courage to resolve to create new armies to cope with it, in the teeth of the criticism of most of our professional soldiers, who believed the task impossible. But it is also true that Lord Kitchener became Secretary of State wholly unacquainted with modern General Staff methods, unaccustomed to the War Office organisation, or, indeed, to any formal system of organisation except the exercise of the power of a vigorous and forceful personality. If he had been a civilian, he might have been content to leave the organisation as it was, or been compelled to do so by the resistance of his professional colleagues on the Army Council, and confined himself to speeding up the machine. Being a soldier, he assumed from the outset the position, if not the name, of Commander-in-Chief. His colleagues