Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 Part 10

The point is suggested by the "Conclusions" in the "First Report" of the Dardanelles Commission. The Commissioners gave it as their opinion that at the time of the initiation of the venture against the Straits, "the Naval Advisers should have expressed their views in Council, whether asked or not, if they considered that the project which the Council was about to adopt was impracticable from a naval point of view." The Commissioners also gave the decision on this point in other words, but to the same effect, in another paragraph. Mr. Fisher, who represented the Commonwealth of Australia on the Commission, while subscribing to the Report in general, emphatically demurred to the view taken by his brother Commissioners on this point, and Sir T.

Mackenzie, who represented New Zealand, agreed with Mr. Fisher although he did not express himself quite so forcibly on the subject.

Mr. Fisher wrote: "I dissent in the strongest terms from any suggestion that the departmental advisers of a Minister in his company at a Council meeting should express any views at all other than to the Minister and through him, unless specifically invited to do so. I am of opinion it would seal the fate of responsible government if servants of the State were to share the responsibility of Ministers to Parliament, and to the people on matters of public policy." Which view is the right one, that of the seven Commissioners representing the United Kingdom, or that of the two Commissioners representing the young nations afar off?

The answer to the question can perhaps best be put in the form of another. Does the country exist for the Government, or does the Government exist for the country? Now, if the country merely exists for the Government, then Mr. Fisher's contention is unanswerable.

Whether it receives the opinion of the expert or not, the Government is responsible. For a Minister to have an expert, within his own Department of State and therefore his subordinate, blurting out views contrary to his own is likely to be a sore trial to that Minister's dignity, and this is not altered by the fact that the expert is likely to be infinitely better qualified to express opinions on the subject than he is. Supposing that the War Council, or the Cabinet, or whatever the body happens to be, ignores or is unaware of the opinion of the experts, and that it lands the country in some hideous mess in consequence, it can always be called to account for the lapse. The doctrine of responsibility which is regarded as of such paramount importance will be fully upheld--and what more do you want? Gibbets can be erected, the Ministers who have got the country into the mess can be hanged in a row, and a fat lot of good that will do towards getting the country out of the mess.

But if, on the contrary, the Government merely exists for the country, then in times of emergency it is the bounden duty of everybody, and particularly is it the duty of those who are really competent to do so, to help the Government and to keep it out of trouble if they can.

One feels cold inside conjuring up the spectacle of a pack of experts who have been called in to be present at a meeting of the War Council or the Cabinet, sitting there mute and inarticulate like cataleptics while the members of the Government taking part in the colloquy embark on some course that is fraught with danger to the State. _Salus populi suprema lex_. Surely the security of the commonwealth is of infinitely greater moment than any doctrine of responsibility of Ministers, mortals who are here to-day and gone to-morrow. Indeed--one says it with all respect for a distinguished representative of one of the great British dominions overseas--it looks as though Mr. Fisher did not quite realize the position of the expert, and a.s.sumed that if the expert gave his advice when asked it made him responsible to the country. The expert is present, not in an executive, but in a consultative capacity. He decides nothing. The Ministers present decide, following his advice, ignoring his advice, failing to ask for his advice, or mistakenly imagining that the expert concurs with them as he keeps silence, according to the circ.u.mstances of the case.

Naturally, the expert should try to induce the head of his department to listen to his views on the subject before the subject ever comes before the Cabinet or the War Council. But if the Minister takes a contrary view, if the matter is one of importance and if the Minister at the meeting fails to acquaint his colleagues that he is at variance with the expert, or again if the question crops up unexpectedly and the expert has had no opportunity of expressing an opinion, then the duty of the expert to the country comes first and he should say his say. It may be suggested that he ought to resign. Perhaps he ought to--afterwards. But the matter of vital importance is not whether he resigns, but whether he warns the Government of the danger. The country is the first consideration, not the Government nor yet the expert.

One great advantage of the War Cabinet system introduced by Mr. Lloyd George was that there was none of this sort of flapdoodle. At a War Cabinet meeting the expert never hesitated to express his opinion, whether he was asked for it or not. The work that I was doing in the later stages of the war did not involve me in problems of major importance, but when summoned to a War Cabinet meeting I never boggled over giving my views as to what concerned my own job. I have heard Sir W. Robertson, when he thought it necessary to do so, giving his opinion similarly concerning questions of great moment, and n.o.body dreamt of objecting to the intervention.

The Director of Military Intelligence was, more or less _ex officio_, a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence in pre-war days, and consequently I attended one meeting of this body shortly after mobilization. There was a huge gathering--the thing was a regular duma--and a prolonged discussion, which as far as I could make out led nowhere and which in any case dealt with matters that nowise concerned me, took place. Those were busy times, and, seeing that Lord Kitchener and Sir C. Douglas attended these meetings as a matter of course, I asked to be excused thenceforward. The Committee of Imperial Defence was obviously not a suitable a.s.semblage to treat of the conduct of the war, seeing that it was only invested with consultative and not with executive functions, and that it bore on its books individuals such as Mr. Balfour and Lord Esher, who were not members of the Government, nor yet officials. It therefore at a comparatively early date gave place to the War Council, which captured its secretariat (a priceless a.s.set), and which later on became transformed into the Dardanelles Committee. The Government did not, however, wholly lose the benefit of Mr. Balfour's experience and counsel. One day--it must have been in December--there was an informal discussion at the War Office in Lord Kitchener's room, he being away in France at the time, in which General Wolfe-Murray and I took part, and besides Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Churchill and Sir E. Grey--I do not think that Mr. Asquith was there--Mr. Balfour was present.

Up till the early days of May, I attended no War Councils. Very soon after that, the Coalition Government was formed, and thereupon the War Council, which had been quite big enough goodness knows, developed into the Dardanelles Committee of twelve members, of whom, excluding Lord Kitchener, six were members of the former Liberal Government, and five were Unionists. Sir E. Carson only came in in August, making the number of representatives from the two factions equal and raising the total to the lucky number of thirteen. What object was supposed to be fulfilled by making the War Council such a bloated inst.i.tution it is hard to say. Almost the only members of the Cabinet who counted and who were not included on its roll were Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Long.

Be that as it may, the result was virtually to const.i.tute the Dardanelles Committee the Cabinet for general purposes of the war, and to lead to its dealing with many matters quite distinct from the prosecution of the campaign for the Straits. I have a vivid recollection of one meeting, which probably took place late in June (Lord Kitchener was not present), and at which the att.i.tude to be a.s.sumed by us with reference to Bulgaria and Greece, particularly Bulgaria, was discussed. Sir E. Grey wanted a "formula" devised to indicate to the Sofia Government what that att.i.tude was; as neither he nor anybody else knew what the att.i.tude was, it was not easy to devise the formula. Formula is an odious word in any case, recalling, as it does, algebraical horrors of a forgotten past; but everybody present wrote out formulae, and dialecticians had the time of their lives. Mr.

Balfour's version was eventually chosen as the most felicitous. But the worst of it was that this masterpiece of appropriate phrase-mongering did not bring in the Bulgars on our side. The triumphant campaign of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front somehow proved a more potent factor in deciding Tsar Ferdinand as to what course to pursue, than a whole libraryful of formulae could ever have effected.

At another meeting, at which Lord Kitchener likewise was not present, a marked and disagreeable tendency to criticize Sir I. Hamilton for his ill-success made itself apparent. I was the only representative of the army present, and it was manifestly impossible for an officer miles junior to Sir Ian to b.u.t.t into a discussion of that kind. But Mr. Churchill spoke up manfully and with excellent effect. The gist of his observations amounted to this: If you commit a military commander to the undertaking of an awkward enterprise and then refuse him the support that he requires, you have no business to abuse him behind his back if he fails. That seemed to me to fit the situation like a glove; it did not leave much more to be said on the point, and no more was said, thanks to the First Lord's timely remonstrance.

There was any amount of chatter at these musters; but on the other hand one seldom seemed to find oneself much forrarder. That is the worst of getting together a swarm of thinkers who are furnished with the gift of the gab and are br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with brains. Nothing happens. If a decision was by any chance arrived at, it was of a non-committal nature. The spirit of compromise a.s.serted itself and the Committee adopted a middle course, a course which no doubt fits in well with many of the problems with which governments in ordinary times have to wrestle, but which does not const.i.tute a good way of conducting war.

The full Cabinet of twenty-three was carrying on _pari pa.s.su_ with the Dardanelles Committee. It did undoubtedly take some sort of hand in the prosecution of the war from time to time, because one day I was summoned to stand by at 10 Downing Street when it was sitting, soon after the Coalition Government was formed and when Lord Kitchener happened to be away, on the chance of my being wanted. They were hardly likely to require my services in connection with matters other than military. After an interminable wait--during the luncheon hour, too--Mr. Arthur Henderson, who was a very recent acquisition, emerged stealthily from the council chamber after the manner of the conspirator in an Adelphi drama, and intimated that they thought that they would be able to get on without me. In obedience to an unwritten law, the last-joined member was always expected to do odd jobs of this kind, just as at some schools the bottom boy of the form is called upon by the form-master to perform certain menial offices _pro bono publico_.

The mystery observed in connection with these Cabinet meetings was not unimpressive. But the accepted procedure--without a secretary present to keep record of what was done and with apparently no proper minutes kept by anybody--was the very negation of sound administration and of good government. Such practice would have been out of date in the days of the Heptarchy. Furthermore it did not fulfil its purpose in respect to concealment, because whenever the gathering by any accident made up its mind about anything that was in the least interesting, everybody outside knew all about it within twenty-four hours. And in spite of all the weird precautions, I actually was present once for a very brief s.p.a.ce of time at one of these momentous sittings. It came about after this wise. On the rising of a Dardanelles Committee meeting, one of the Ministers who had attended drew me into a corner to enquire concerning a point that had arisen. There was movement going on in the room, people coming and going, but we were intent on our confabulation and took no notice. Suddenly there was an awe-inspiring silence and then Mr. Asquith was heard to lift up his voice. "Good Lord!"

e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed my Minister (just like that--they are quite human when taken off their guard), "the Cabinet's sitting!" and until back, safe within the War Office portals, I almost seemed to feel a heavy hand on my shoulder haling me off to some oubliette, never more to be heard of in the outer world.

A less teeming War Council than the Dardanelles Committee was subst.i.tuted for that a.s.semblage about October 1915, and I only attended one or two of its meetings. Sir A. Murray was by that time installed as C.I.G.S., and things were on a more promising footing within the War Office. It was this new form of War Council which was thrown over by the Cabinet with reference to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, as related on pp. 103, 104. As far as one could judge, when more or less of an outsider in connection with the general conduct of operations but none the less a good deal behind the scenes, this type of War Council, const.i.tuted out of the Ministers who were directly connected with the operations, besides the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the First Sea Lord and C.I.G.S. always in attendance, worked very well during the greater part of 1916. But Mr. Lloyd George's plan of a War Cabinet, in spite of certain inevitable drawbacks to such an arrangement, was undoubtedly the right one for times of grave national emergency. Its accessibility and its readiness to deal with problems in a practical spirit are ill.u.s.trated by the following incident within my own experience.

We had got ourselves into a condition of chaos in [p.216] connection with the problem of Greek supplies at the beginning of 1918. There was an extremely vague agreement with the French, an unsigned agreement entered into in haste by representatives on our side of little authority, under which we were supposed to provide all sorts of things for the h.e.l.lenes. But the whole business was extremely irregular and it was in a state of hopeless confusion--it will be referred to again in a later chapter. In the War Office alone, several departments and branches were concerned, including my own up to a certain point. The Ministries of Munitions and s.h.i.+pping were in the affair as well, together with the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, and last but not least, the Treasury. But what was everybody's business was n.o.body's business. Each department involved declared that some other one must take the matter up and get things unravelled, and at last in a fit of exasperation, although my branch was only a 100 to 3 outsider in the matter, I took the bull by the horns and wrote privately to Sir M.

Hankey, asking him to put the subject of Greek Supplies on the Agenda for the War Cabinet on some early date and to summon me to be on hand, which he did. When the matter came up, Mr. Lloyd George enquired of me what the trouble was. I told him that we were in a regular muddle, that we could not get on, that several Departments of State were in the thing, but that it hardly seemed a matter for the War Cabinet to trouble itself with. Could not one of its members take charge, get us together, and give us the authority we required for dealing with the problem? Mr. Lloyd George at once asked Lord Milner to take the question up, not more than five minutes of the War Cabinet's time was wasted, and within a very few hours Lord Milner had got the business on a proper footing and we all knew where we were.

Now, supposing that instead of the War Cabinet it had been a case of that solemn, time-honoured, ineffectual council composed of all the princ.i.p.al Ministers of the Crown, gathered together in Downing Street to discuss matters which the majority of those present never know any more about than the man in the moon, what would have happened? We of the War Office might among us, with decent luck, have managed to prime our own private Secretary of State, and might have sent him off to the Cabinet meeting with a knowledge of his brief. But, unless the Ministers at the heads of the other Departments of State concerned had been got hold of beforehand and told what to do and to say, they would among the lot of them have made confusion worse confounded. If by any chance a decision had then been arrived at, it would almost inevitably have been a perfectly preposterous one, totally inapplicable to the question that was actually at issue.

A summons to attend a War Cabinet meeting was not, however, an unmixed joy. There was always an agenda paper; but it was apt to turn out a delusion and a snare. The Secretariat did their very best to calculate when the different subjects down for discussion on the paper would come up, and they would warn one accordingly. But they often were out in their estimate, and they had always to be on the safe side. Some quite simple and apparently straightforward subject would take a perfectly unconscionable time to dispose of, while, on the other hand, an apparently extremely knotty problem might be solved within a few minutes and so throw the time-table out of gear. The result was that in the course of months one spent a good many hours, off and on, lurking in the antechamber in 10 Downing Street.

Still, there was always a good fire in winter time, and one found oneself hobn.o.bbing, while waiting, with all sorts and conditions of men. There would be Ministers holding high office but not included in the Big Five (or was it Six?), emissaries just back from some centre of disturbance and excitement abroad, people who dealt with wheat production and distribution, knights of industry called in over some special problem, and persons purporting to be masters of finance--which n.o.body understands, least of all the experts. Who could possibly, under any circ.u.mstances, be angry with Mr. Balfour? But he was occasionally something of a trial when one was patiently awaiting one's turn. Although the Agenda paper might make it plain that no subject was coming up with which the Foreign Office could possibly be in the remotest degree connected, he would be descried sloping past and going straight into the Council Chamber, as if he had bought the place. Then out would come one of the Secretary gang. The Foreign Minister had turned up, and was setting them an entirely unexpected conundrum inside; the best thing one could do was to clear out of that, as the point which one had been summoned to give one's views about had not now the slightest chance of coming before the Cabinet that day.

At the various forms of War Council at which the prosecution of the war was debated, one was necessarily brought into contact with a number of politicians and statesmen, and was enabled to note their peculiarities and to watch their methods. I never to my knowledge saw Lord Beaconsfield; but in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties Mr.

Gladstone was sometimes to be met in the streets, and, even if one thought that he ought to be boiled, one none the less felt mildly excited at the spectacle. That aphorism, "familiarity breeds contempt," does put the point a little crudely; but the fact remains that when you are brought into contact with people of this kind, about whom there is such a lot of talk in the newspapers, they turn out to be very much like everybody else. Needless to say, they will give tongue to any extent, but, apart from that, they may even be something of a disappointment to those who antic.i.p.ate great things of them.

Still, it is only right to acknowledge that the majority of Ministers met with during the Great War were sensible enough in respect to military matters. The amateur strategist was fortunately the exception in these circles, and not the rule. Most of them picked up the fundamental facts in connection with any situation that presented itself quite readily; they grasped elementary principles when these were explained to them and they were able to keep those principles in mind. But there were goats as well as sheep. You might just as well have started dancing jigs to a milestone as have tried to get into the heads of one or two of them the elementary fact that the conduct of war cannot be decided on small-scale maps but is a matter of stolid and unemotional calculation, that imagination is a deadly peril when unaccompanied by knowledge, and that army corps and divisions cannot be switched about ash.o.r.e or afloat as though they were taxi-cabs or hydroplanes.

Mr. Henderson shaped well when military matters were in debate; he looked portentous and he held his tongue. Then there was Sir E. Carson who, during the few weeks that he figured on the Dardanelles Committee, was an undeniable a.s.set. His interjections of "Mr. Asquith, we really must make up our minds," uttered with an accent not unfamiliar to one who had pa.s.sed youthful days in the vicinity of Dublin, and accompanied by a moody stare such as his victim in the witness-box must find rather disconcerting when under cross-examination at the hands of the famous K.C., had no great effect perhaps. But the motive was unexceptionable. He and Mr. Bonar Law used to sit together and to press for decisions, and it was unfortunate that Sir Edward resigned when he did. Mr. Bonar Law was within an ace of resigning likewise very shortly afterwards. He invited me to go over to the Colonial Office to see him and to talk over matters, and I expressed an earnest hope that he would stick to the s.h.i.+p. An artist in letter-writing (as was shown in his momentous epistle written on behalf of the Unionist leaders when Mr. Asquith's Cabinet were in two minds at the beginning of August 1914), his memorandum which is quoted in the "Final Report"

of the Dardanelles Commission, and in which he insisted upon the advice of the military authorities with reference to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula being followed, indicates how fortunate it was that he remained at his post.

The truth is that resignations of the individual Minister seldom do any good from the point of view of the public interest, except when the individual Minister concerned happens to be unfit for his position--and then he generally seems immune from that "unwanted doggie" sort of feeling from which less ill.u.s.trious persons are apt to suffer when they are _de trop_. The cases mentioned on p. 144 in connection with the Army Council stood on an entirely different footing. When a body of officials resign, or threaten to resign, their action cannot be ignored; in the second case mentioned the mere threat sufficed. Lord Fisher paid me one of his meteoric visits on the morning that he submitted his resignation to Mr. Asquith, and he confided his reasons to me; the reasons were good, but it seemed doubtful whether they were quite good enough to justify the taking of so drastic a step.

There was no more edifying and compelling personality amongst the party who were in the habit of taking the floor in 10 Downing Street in 1915 than Lord Curzon. He, Mr. Churchill, and Mr. Lloyd George might almost have been called rivals for the role of _prima ballerina a.s.soluta_. The remarks that fell from his lips, signalized as they ever were by a faultless phraseology and delivered with a prunes, prisms and potatoes diction, seldom failed to lift the discussion on to a higher plane, to waft his hearers on to the serene hill-tops of thought, to awaken sublime sensations in all present such as the spectacle of some n.o.ble mountain panorama will summon up in the meditations of the most phlegmatic. Mr. Churchill, ever lucid, ever cogent, ever earnest, ever forceful, was wont to be so convincing that he would almost cause listeners to forget for the moment that, were the particular project which just then happened to be uppermost in his mind to be carried into execution, any small hopes which remained of our ever winning the war would inevitably be blotted out for good and all. As for Mr. Lloyd George in drab days before he became First Minister of the Crown in spite of his superhuman efforts to avoid that undesired consummation, he always loved to make his voice heard, and he always succeeded--just as a canary will in a roomful of chattering women.

CHAPTER XII

SOME INTER-ALLIES CONFERENCES

The Conference with the Italians in Paris in April-May 1915 -- Its const.i.tution -- Italians anxious that Allies should deliver big offensive simultaneously with advance of Italian army -- Impossibility of giving a guarantee -- Difficulties over the naval proposals -- Banquet given by M. Millerand at the War Office -- A visit to the front -- Impressions -- Mr. Churchill turns up unexpectedly -- A conference with General Joffre at Chantilly over Salonika -- Its unsatisfactory character -- Admiral Gamble races "Grandpere," and suffers discomfiture -- A distinguished party proceed to Paris -- A formal conference with the French Government -- Messrs. Asquith, Grey and Lloyd George as linguists -- The French att.i.tude over Salonika -- Sir W.

Robertson gives his views -- The decision -- Dinner at the elysee -- Return to London -- Mr. Lloyd George and the soldiers on the Boulogne jetty -- Points of the destroyer as a yacht -- Mr.

Balfour and Sir W. Robertson afloat -- A chatty dinner on our side of the Channel -- Difficulty over Russian munitions owing to a Chantilly conference -- A conference at the War Office -- Mr.

Lloyd George as chairman -- M. Mantoux.

The first meeting of importance with representatives of the Allies at which I was present took place in Paris at the end of April 1915, and has already been referred to on p. 63. Sir H. Jackson and I were sent over, as representing respectively the Admiralty and the War Office, to take part in a secret conference that was to be held between French, Russian, and British naval and military delegates on the one side, and Italian naval and military delegates on the other side in connection with Italy's entry into the war as an a.s.sociate of the Entente. That Italy was to join the Allies had already been arranged secretly between the four governments, and it was understood that she was to open hostilities in the latter part of May. The purpose of the Conference was to permit of the situation being discussed, and formal naval and military conventions were to be drawn up between the contracting Powers. Sir Henry and I were accompanied by small staffs, and we put up at the Ritz in the Place Vendome.

M. Millerand, who was French War Minister at the time, presided at the Conference which a.s.sembled in the War Office, and he made an ideal chairman--the French are always admirable at managing such functions.

The princ.i.p.al French military delegate was General Pelle, General Joffre's Chief of Staff; the Russians were represented by their Military Attache in Paris, Colonel Count Ignatieff, and the princ.i.p.al Italian military delegate was a colonel (whose name I cannot recall), a most attractive and evidently an extremely capable soldier, who unhappily was killed within a few months when in command of a brigade in one of the early fights near Gorizia. In so far as framing the military convention was concerned, that part of the proceedings gave little trouble. The Italian representatives, it is true, were anxious that the Allies should undertake to embark upon an offensive on the greatest possible scale practicable, simultaneously with the Italian army crossing the frontier about the Isonzo; but General Pelle and I could give no guarantee to that effect, the more so seeing that a Franco-British offensive had already, as it was, been decided upon to start in the Bethune-Vimy region within a few days and before the Italian army would be ready. One had a pretty shrewd suspicion that there was no opening whatever for an offensive on the Eastern Front in view of our Russian Allies' grave munitions difficulties, although the French seemed strangely unaware of the nakedness of the land in that quarter; still, it was no part of the game to hint at joints in our harness of that kind to the Italian representatives. Ignatieff, bluff and cheery, was careful not to commit himself on the subject. The end of it was that our military convention amounted to little more than an agreement that we were all jolly fine fellows, accompanied by cordial expressions of good-will and of a determination on the part of the four contracting Powers to do their best and to stick together.

The naval side of the problem, on the other hand, was beset by pitfalls, and that part of the business was not satisfactorily disposed of for several days.

Even to a landsman like myself, it was apparent that the Italian conception of war afloat in the year of grace 1915 was open to criticism. Our new friends contemplated employing their fleet very freely as an auxiliary to their army in its advance along the littoral towards Trieste, a theory of naval operations which came upon one with something of a shock at the very start. Pola and other well-sheltered bowers for under-water craft lie pretty handy to the maritime district in which King Victor's troops were going to take the field. For battles.h.i.+ps and cruisers to be pottering about in those waters serving out succour to the soldiers on sh.o.r.e, succour which would in all probability be of no great account in any case, suggested that those battles.h.i.+ps and cruisers would be transmogrified into submarines at a very early stage of the proceedings. One wondered if the Ministry of Marine away south by the Tiber had heard the tragic tale of the _Hogue_, the _Cressy_ and the _Aboukir_. Nor was that all. The Italian naval delegates put forward requests that fairly substantial a.s.sistance in the shape of war-craft of various types should be afforded them within the Adriatic by the French and ourselves.

All this struck even an outsider like myself as somewhat unsatisfactory, and that was clearly the view which Sir H. Jackson took. For, in some disorder, he let slip an observation to the effect that it looked like the recently acquired collaborator with the Entente being rather a nuisance than otherwise. The rendering of this expression of opinion of the Admiral's into French at the hands of our Naval Attache in Paris (Captain Hodges) was a masterpiece of diplomatic camouflage. In the end the Italian sailors were obliged to ask for an adjournment to allow of their communicating with Rome, and, if I recollect aright, the princ.i.p.al one of them had to proceed home to discuss the question at headquarters. All this took up time, and we did not finally get the conventions signed for nearly a fortnight.

M. Millerand gave a banquet at the War Office in honour of us delegates, at which we met M. Viviani, the Prime Minister, together with other members of the French Cabinet. I enjoyed the good fortune of sitting next to M. Delca.s.se, and so of making the acquaintance of one of the great Foreign Ministers of our time. Paris is at its best in spring, and had it not been war-time and had one not been in a fidget to get back to Whitehall, a few days of comparative idleness spent in _la ville lumiere_ after nine months of incessant office work, while the international sailor-men settled their differences, would have been not unwelcome. The pause, however, provided an opportunity for motoring down to St. Omer and spending a couple of days in the war zone--my first visit to the Front. Two points especially struck me on this trip. One was the wonderful way that the women and children of France (for scarcely an adult male was to be seen about in the rural districts) were keeping their end up in the fields. The other was the smart and soldier-like bearing of the rank-and-file amongst our troops, in striking contrast to the go-as-you-please methods which prevailed in South Africa, and to which, indirectly, some of the "regrettable incidents" which occurred on the veldt were traceable. It gave one confidence. Sir J. French and some of G.H.Q. were at advanced headquarters at Hazebrouck as offensive operations were impending, and Sir John, on the afternoon that I saw him, was greatly pleased at a most successful retirement of our line in a portion of the Ypres salient which General Plumer had brought off on the previous night. On getting back to Paris it transpired that the naval trouble was not yet settled.

One morning, sitting with Admiral Gamble who was over to help Sir H.

Jackson, in the long alley-way of the Ritz where one enjoys early breakfast if that meal be not partaken of in private apartments, Commodore Bartolome, the First Lord's "Personal Naval a.s.sistant," was of a sudden descried in the offing and beating up for the Bureau.

"Good G.o.d!" exclaimed the Admiral, horror-stricken. "Winston's come!"

He had, so we learnt from Bartolome; but what he had come for n.o.body could make out. Telegraphic communication exists between Paris and London, and Sir H. Jackson was in constant touch with our Admiralty.

However, to whatever cause the visit was to be attributed, there was Mr. Churchill as large as life and most anxious to get busy; and I personally was glad to see him, because he told me all about what had been going on in the Gallipoli Peninsula since the landing of a few days before. One did not gather that the French were any more delighted at his jack-in-the-box arrival, and at his interventions in the Conference discussions, than were our naval representatives who had been officially accredited for the purpose. A satisfactory agreement was, however, at last arrived at over the Adriatic, the conventions were signed with due pomp and circ.u.mstance, and our party returned to England. While in Paris I had paid one or two visits to General Graziani, who was the Chief of the General Staff at the French War Office; but we in Whitehall never could make out exactly what were the relations between the military authorities in Paris and those at Chantilly. The very fact that General Joffre's Chief of Staff had been French military representative at our Conference, and not General Graziani or his nominee, seemed odd.

Some six months later, early in November, I again went over to France, this time with Sir A. Murray, to attend a discussion with General Joffre at Chantilly concerning Salonika. Admiralty representatives, including Admiral Gamble and Mr. Graeme Thomson, Director of Naval Transport, were of the party. Sir J. French with Sir W. Robertson, his Chief of the General Staff, and Sir H. Wilson came up from St. Omer.

It was by no means a satisfactory meeting. We from the War Office in London desired to circ.u.mscribe British partic.i.p.ation in this new side-show to the utmost, and to keep the whole business as far as possible within limits; but we got uncommonly little support from G.H.Q. Sir W. Robertson expressed no opinion, nor was he called upon to do so; he would have found it awkward to dissent from his commander-in-chief. But the result was that when a much more important conference over the same subject took place a few days later, this time between the two Governments, Sir J. French was not present while Sir W. Robertson was. These things do arrange themselves somehow.

As the discussion took place at Chantilly late in the afternoon, G.H.Q. and we put up at Amiens for the night. On our discovering that General Joffre contemplated crossing the Channel next day to have a chat with our Government, the C.I.G.S. prevailed upon Admiral Gamble to hurry on in his motor to Boulogne next morning so as to catch the packet there, to cross to Folkestone, and to get up to London in time to warn our people of the somewhat expansive Salonika programme which "Grandpere" had up his sleeve. The Silent Navy, it is hardly necessary to say, fairly rose to the occasion, for the Admiral was off under forced draught in the dog-watch. Chancing things, however, when weathering a promontory off Montreuil, he contrived to pile up his craft on a shoal in a bad position, and he would have missed trans-s.h.i.+pment at Boulogne altogether had he not got himself taken off in a pa.s.sing craft which was under charge of soldier-officers who were likewise making for the packet. So he got across all right in the end and he flashed up to town, only to find that old man Joffre had not played the game. "Grandpere" had slept peacefully in the train, had boarded a destroyer at some unearthly hour of the morning, and was already in Whitehall before our staunch, precipitate emissary had cast off from Boulogne.

On the occasion of that next pow-wow mentioned [p.228] above, Messrs.

Asquith, Balfour (now First Lord), Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey crossed over as our representatives. Sir H. Jackson (now First Sea Lord), Sir W. Robertson, who had been summoned over to London, and I accompanied them, as well as Colonel Hankey and some others. We travelled by specials and a destroyer and took the Boulogne route. Our wars.h.i.+p tied up to the _East Anglia_, hospital s.h.i.+p, at Boulogne, and as we pa.s.sed across her some of us had a few words with nurses and wounded on board, little antic.i.p.ating that she would be mined next day on the pa.s.sage over to England, with most unfortunate loss of life.

Eventually we arrived at the Gare du Nord about midnight, to be welcomed by a swarm of French Ministers and Lord Bertie, and to find all arrangements made for us with typical French hospitality.

The Conference took place at the Foreign Office on the Quai d'Orsay, M. Briand presiding. Several members of the French Government were present, besides Generals Joffre, Gallieni and Graziani; and with our party, as well as interpreters, secretaries and others, there was quite a gathering. After M. Briand had welcomed us cordially and in felicitous terms, Mr. Asquith got a charming little speech in French off his chest; it may perhaps have had a whiff of the lamp about it and had probably been learnt by heart, but the P. M. undoubtedly managed to serve up a savoury _appet.i.tif_, and we felt that in the matter of courtesy and the amenities our man had held his own. In the course of the discussion that followed, Sir E. Grey's minute-gun process of turning our host's delightful language to account afforded all present ample time to take in the drift of his cogent, weighty arguments and to appraise them at their proper worth. Had it been any one else, Mr. Lloyd George would have been voted an unmitigated nuisance on all hands. As a result of prolonged residence in the Gay City at a somewhat later date, the Right Honourable Gentleman is now, it is understood, in the habit of bandying badinage with the _midinettes_ in the _argot_ of the Quartier Latin. But at the time that I speak of his acquaintance with the Gallic tongue was strictly limited (although he did put forward claims to be able to understand "Grey's French"), and he kept from time to time insisting upon the proceedings being brought to a halt while a translation of something that had been said was furnished for his benefit, generally selecting some particularly unprofitable plat.i.tude which had been uttered by one of those present for the purpose of gaining time.

The French took up a strong line over Salonika. In a sense they drove our side into a corner, and the responsibility for hundreds of thousands of French and British troops being interned in Macedonia for years rests with them, and it was in great measure the outcome of that day's debate. Sir W. Robertson was called upon to state his views. He knows French perfectly well, but he absolutely refused to speak anything but English, and his remarks were translated, sentence after sentence, by a young French officer with a perfect command of the latter tongue. After each successive sentence had been rendered into French, Sir William, who was sitting beside me, would murmur, "Infernal fellow, that's not what I said," as though repeating the responses, the poor interpreter having in reality done his duty like a man. The gist of his remarks was what might have been expected, viz.

that the Germans were the real enemy and that the proper course for the Allies to pursue was to concentrate force against them and not to be hunting about for trouble in the uttermost parts of the earth.

Views of that kind, enunciated bluntly and with considerable emphasis, were very likely not wholly palatable to M. Briand; but it seemed to me that they were not regarded with disfavour by General Joffre, nor yet by General Gallieni, although those distinguished soldiers when invited to give expression to their views contrived merely to say nothing at considerable length. The end of it all was that we were committed to dumping down three more divisions at Salonika in addition to the two already there or disembarking, and that we were, moreover, committed to sending them thither without delay. When they got there it took ages to get their impedimenta ash.o.r.e owing to lack of landing facilities--as we had fully foreseen. The amateur strategist imagines that you can discharge an army out of a fleet of transports and freight-s.h.i.+ps just anywhere and as easily as you can empty a slop-pail.

We dined with the President and Mme. Poincare at the elysee that night, and most of the French Cabinet, as well as Generals Joffre and Gallieni, were likewise invited. Our Big Four were in some doubt as to what garb to appear in, seeing that it was not to be a full-dress function, sporting trinkets; and they eventually hit upon dinner-jackets with black ties. So Sir W. Robertson and I decided to doff breeches, boots and spurs, and to don what military tailors refer to as "slacks" but what in non-sartorial circles are commonly called trousers. The French civilians all wore frock-coats, so that there was an agreeable lack of uniformity and formality when we a.s.sembled. I sat next to M. Dumergue, the Colonial Minister, and between us we disposed of the German Colonies in a spirit of give and take--or rather take, because there was none of that opera-bouffe "mandate" which has since then been wafted across from the Western Hemisphere, included in our arrangements. In the course of the evening I managed to obtain General Joffre's views concerning the feasibility of withdrawing from the Gallipoli Peninsula without encountering heavy loss, a subject that one had constantly in mind at that time. Pere Joffre's opinion was that, subject to favourable weather and to the retreat taking place at night, the thing could be managed, and he emphasized the fact that the conditions of trench warfare rather lent themselves to secret withdrawals of that nature.

We made our way back to London on the following day, leaving Paris in the forenoon, and were to embark at Calais; but owing to some misunderstanding our special ran into Boulogne and out on to the jetty, where numbers of troops were a.s.sembled as a leave-boat was shortly to cross. This afforded me an opportunity of experiencing how very engaging Mr. Lloyd George can make himself when dealing with a somewhat critical audience. For the whole party got out, glad to stretch their legs, and I wandered about with the Munitions Minister.