Woodward D. Lloyd George and the Generals

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On December 23 Robertson entered his new office at Whitehall determined to

dictate British strategy. For the first time he was forced extensively to deal with

civilians. Unlike Kitchener, he was up to the task. There was little give and a great

deal of take in his relationship with the ministers. “He knew what he wanted,”

Hankey has written, “and he nearly always got his way.”

Debate with the

civilians was avoided at all costs. “Where the politician goes wrong,” he once

explained, “is in wanting to know the why and the wherefore of the soldier’s

proposals, and of making the latter the subject of debate and argument across a

table. You then have the man who knows but who cannot talk discussing important

questions with the man who can talk but does not know, with the result that the

man who knows usually gets defeated in argument and things are done which his

instinct tells him are bad.”

With the lives of tens of thousands of British soldiers

at stake, this position was untenable.

Secrecy was one of Robertson’s most effective means of controlling the

ministers. They could not argue against what they did not know or understand.

Murray’s practice of briefing the ministers with weekly appreciations was

discontinued. Instead, Wully gave a weekly “summary” which included nothing

that Britain’s s war leaders could not get from their daily (and heavily censored)

newspapers. Hankey viewed these “summaries” as “really almost an insult to the

intelligence of the War Committee and the Cabinet.”

Robertson’s orders to his

commanders in the field were secret. He even went to the extreme of moving and

making preparations to move divisions to the West without the War Committee’s

knowledge.

Robertson’s vast power encouraged him to want more. Fresh from a War

Committee meeting in which the ministers had once again displayed in his view

“an inability to govern,” he wrote the following identical statement to Haig and

Archibald Murray, who had been given command of the Egyptian Expeditionary

Force, that hinted at a military dictatorship: “I am writing this with the object of

saying that practically anything may happen to our boasted British Constitution

before this war ends & that the great asset is the army—whose value will be fixed

largely by the extent to which we at the top stick together and stand firm.”

Wully’s obduracy, secrecy, and strategical views were bound to bring him into

conflict with Lloyd George. Shortly after Robertson became C.I.G.S., Lloyd

George gave a small dinner party at the Savoy in his honor. It was immediately

obvious to Hankey, who was a guest, that the chemistry between the two men was

not right.

Strategy, rather than opposite personalities, however, created the

unbridgeable gulf between the two men.

The reader will recall that Lloyd George’s early advocacy of a Balkan offensive

and his position in the government as the supplier of war material to the Entente

had given him a broad view of the conflict. He wanted all of the many theaters to

be treated as a single front. If Russia and Italy needed guns and ammunition, they

should be provided, even at the expense of home defense or the requirements of

the British Expeditionary Force. Furthermore, he was always alert to any political

advantages which might be gained. Robertson, however, argued that all political

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS 67

objectives, no matter how important, had to be subordinated to offensive

operations in the West, once arguing strenuously against Lloyd George’s proposal

to send a few machine guns to neutral Rumania for political purposes.

Robertson got the best of this argument with Lloyd George over British strategy.

The Dardanelles fiasco had discredited the leading “Easterners,” with the

exception of Lloyd George, who had favored the Balkans over the Straits.

Furthermore, Lloyd George could advance no alternative strategy which offered

any chance of defeating the German army in the foreseeable future. He could argue

within the War Committee—as he did in January and April 1916—that the wisest

course of action was to contain Germany in the West and defeat Turkey. But he

could not explain how Turkey’s defeat would win the war. It was even more

difficult to demonstrate how an offensive from Salonika against the Bulgarians

by the relatively small and poorly equipped Allied force there would shake the

foundation of the Central Powers. The most opportune time for action in the

Balkans had been sacrificed to the Dardanelles venture and Joffre’s cult of the

offensive. If total victory remained Britain’s goal, Germany had to be defeated.

A great attack in the West in 1916 might not bring victory, but there was intense

pressure on the civilians to make the attempt. The Allied commanders had agreed

at the Chantilly military conference in early December to launch simultaneous

attacks. The British Expeditionary Force, which would rise to fifty-seven divisions

by the middle of the year, was expected to do its duty.

At his first War Committee meeting as C.I.G.S., Robertson came away with an

important victory. The ministers accepted his position that Gallipoli must be

abandoned. Wully next moved to get the civilians to accept the offensive strategy

of the Chantilly military conference. In a short note to the War Committee, he

sought unequivocal support for the generals’ cult of the offensive.

To his chagrin, he discovered that, although the “Easterners” had been

weakened by their failures, they had not been silenced. Lloyd George and the

slender, handsome Balfour, who had replaced Churchill as the first lord of the

Admiralty, took the lead in expressing the civilian doubts about the results of a

big offensive in the West justifying the cost. A bachelor in his sixties, Balfour was

of a philosophical bent. He could ably state his case for a particular course of

action, but his arguments were often weakened by the suspicion of some of his

colleagues that he had few firm convictions and could just as easily argue the case

of the other side. Still, this senior Conservative statesman was Lloyd George’s

most important ally at this juncture in his conflict with the military over the conduct

of the war.

Robertson’s second conclusion in his note to the War Committee provoked the

most discussion. He had written: “Our efforts are to be directed to carrying out

offensive operations next spring in the main theatre of war in close co-operation

with the Allies and in the greatest possible strength.”

Balfour pointed out “that

if it were possible for the Allies really to pool their resources he could not imagine

that they would undertake an offensive on the West. On that side the defensive

positions had never been broken, and they were increasing in strength every day….

68 “WESTERNERS” IN THE ASCENDANCY; THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

It seemed to him that possibly there might be a better chance of success in the

South or the East.” Lloyd George gave strong support to the first lord of the

Admiralty: “General Joffre had always favoured this idea of a great offensive on

the West: he had always been confident, and he had always been wrong…. Though

the General Staff in their Appreciation favoured an attempt to break through the

German front on the West, it was nowhere stated how this was to be done.”

Bonar Law cut short these criticisms by asking the crucial question: If the

general staff’ s view were rejected, how, then, could Britain hope to defeat

Germany? Balfour lamely suggested—to Robertson’s utter amazement— that “the

weakest part of the German line was the Russian front.” Lloyd George was silent.

In the end Robertson’s conclusion was accepted with the qualifying words: “Every

effort is to be made to prepare to carry out the offensive.”

In the following days, Balfour and Lloyd George, fearing that the generals

would assume that a great British offensive had been okayed, continued to make

life miserable for Robertson. “Do not German theories of war, as well as German

internal necessities,” Balfour asked in a memorandum, “compel them, rightly or

wrongly, to attempt the offensive? And is not this what, from our own point of

view, we ought most to desire?” After the Teutonic force had spent itself in futile

attack, it might then be defeated. Balfour also believed that the General Staff s

fixation on the western front, although based on sound military principles, ignored

political considerations. “Our prestige in the East has a military value, and,

irrespective of political interests or national pride,” he concluded, “it may therefore

be worth while sending soldiers away from the ‘main theatre of war’ in order to

support it.”

Largely because of Balfour’s persistence, the War Committee once again

discussed the proposed offensive. The “Easterners” scored a minor triumph over

the General Staff. The government’s position on the offensive was further

amended to read: “Every effort is to be made to prepare for carrying out offensive

operations next spring in the main theatre of the war in close co-operation with

the Allies, and the greatest possible strength, although it must not be assumed that

such offensive operations are finally decided on.”

Lloyd George and Balfour then forced a discussion of future British military

policy. Obviously concerned that no decision by the civilians would give the

initiative to the French and British generals by default, he reminded his colleagues

“that it had to be remembered that we had already undertaken two offensive

operations, both of which had come to nothing. We could not afford to have

another of the same sort. This would amount to a defeat. Therefore we ought to

delay until we were really strong enough.” Later in the discussion, Lloyd George

attempted to keep alive interest in Eastern operations:

…if it was a question of a general offensive, we should do as the Germans

did—we should attack their ally so as to force the Germans to do what we

had to do in Servia. If they made a big attack in France they could not do it

elsewhere. He concurred in Mr. Balfour’s idea [Eastern operations in early

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS 69

1916]. In the main, it was our business to sit tight on the Western frontier,

and then take the offensive in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Salonica. If we

attacked in either of these places, the Turk must be there, and the German

must come to his assistance. We could not do both things. It meant the

selection of an alternative.

Lloyd George’s and Balfour’s rearguard action had mixed results. The rest of the

War Committee were not prepared to buck the unanimous opposition of the

soldiers against expanding the British commitment in the outer theaters. On the

other hand, the War Committee readily accepted Lloyd George’s suggestion that

an Anglo-French conference on munitions requirements be held. This would

enable the ministers to decide if and when the offensive should be launched.

After this meeting Robertson wrote Haig and singled out Lloyd George as one

of the “wobbling” ministers. The minister of munitions’ opposition to an attack

before large supplies of shells had been accumulated, he warned, was “the thin

end of the wedge for deferring matters.”

Robertson and Haig were determined to keep the ministers on course. Haig, the

eternal optimist, was convinced that he could break through the German lines and

prove the correctness of his “Western” strategy. Unlike Haig, Robertson was not

as confident of a breakthrough in 1916. He resorted more to the policy of attrition

to justify a prolonged general offensive. “Even if our success be no greater than

that obtained in the past,” he wrote in a memorandum for the War Committee,

“the attempt would appear to be justified. The Germans are approaching the limit

of their resources….”

Although Robertson and Haig could make an excellent case for concentrating

on the West in 1916, they could advance no convincing argument that the British

attacks in 1916 would be a marked improvement on those in 1915. Robertson’s

explanation of the initial Anglo-French failures was that the generals were dealing

with “conditions without precedent in war,” and the required “amount of force to

break through the enemy’s front…could only be arrived at by experiment.”

When asked by skeptical civilians why a general offensive would succeed in 1916

when all others had failed with considerably higher losses than the enemy, Wully

fell back on the argument that more men and shells were going to be used this

time.

This line of reasoning meant an increased emphasis on “mass” and an

acceptance of casualties unprecedented in British military annals. “The vastness

of the material and mechanical power available in modern war,” Cruttwell has

perceptively written, “seemed to produce a kind of dull megalomania in which

ingenuity of execution was sacrificed to the immensity and elaboration of the

preparation.”

The single most important innovation in land war, the tank, was

thought by Wully to be “rather a desperate innovation.” Even after the tank had

demonstrated its potential, he cautioned Haig not to request too many. “Besides

the men they absorb,” he wrote, “they also take up a great deal of steel, which is

now rather scarce, and in general the tanks should not be ordered unless you think

they are really necessary.”

70 “WESTERNERS” IN THE ASCENDANCY; THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

Following the January 13 meeting of the War Committee, the ministers’

queasiness toward the offensive subsided somewhat. This was largely due to

Kitchener’s assurances that there would be no repetition of the unimaginative

slaughter of Loos and Champagne. He told Balfour and others that he favored a

series of limited attacks to wear down the enemy rather than a spectacular and

prolonged general attack.

Kitchener’s reassuring words were worthless because

he had no influence at general headquarters, which was responsible for planning

and executing the offensive.

On January 28, Lloyd George left for Paris to attend a conference on munitions

requirements. Prone to seasickness, he was more apprehensive than usual. A letter

from a psychic had warned him to beware the twentyeighth and twenty-ninth of

the month. And indeed his trip was unusually hair-raising. His passage across the

mine-infested Channel was delayed until high tide, when the mines would be

deeper in the water. The destroyer which took him across was torpedoed the next

day. Safely ashore, he missed a Zeppelin attack on Paris by thirty minutes.

noteworthy event of his trip was his first meeting with Haig. Although Lloyd

George attempted to be ingratiating, Haig thought him “shifty and unrealiable.”

Robertson’s recent warning that Lloyd George must be watched carefully at the

munitions conference so that he would not “queer our pitch” no doubt colored the

commander in chief’s opinion of the minister of munitions.

What Lloyd George learned on his trip to France set off alarm bells in his head.

Contrary to what Kitchener had been telling the ministers, it appeared that Joffre

was determined to launch a general offensive along the lines of the costly attacks

of 1915. When Lloyd George brought this to the attention of the War Committee,

he was brushed aside.

On February 21, the Germans unleashed a bombardment of unprecedented fury

against the French defenses at Verdun. In all, two million shells fell upon the

French defenders. The ten-month Battle of Verdun had begun. The ferocity of the

German assault reinforced Lloyd George’s correct belief that the generals were

underestimating Germany’s staying power. At a War Committee meeting the day

after the Battle of Verdun began, he insisted that “the time had arrived to discuss

the projected summer campaign.” But before the civilians made a decision, they

must know more about the strength of the respective forces: “It was impossible

for us to measure the forces of the opposing sides unless we had knowledge of the

resources available.… before the offensive could be contemplated the relative

forces in men and materials should be carefully weighed. Perhaps the War Office

were in possession of this information.” When Robertson remarked that this matter

would be taken up by the Allied commanders at a military conference in early

March, Lloyd George pointedly said that the War Committee should discuss the

question first. More than resources would be examined if he had his way. The

civilians would also address the question of “breaking through either on the West

or East.” A long and muddled discussion of the respective strength of the opposing

forces then ensued, with Lloyd George adhering to his position that “if we had no

facts to go upon, he did not understand how we could decide on offensive action.”

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS 71

Lloyd George’s words made as much impression as a light rainfall on the desert.

To Robertson he was an irritating though ineffective critic. The Welshman stood

virtually alone in the War Committee. Already estranged from the Liberals, he

saw his Unionist support drop away in late 1915 and early 1916. Bonar Law, who

earlier had given him support, now viewed him with suspicion and often

challenged his criticism of the military in the War Committee debates. Churchill

accurately assessed his standing in a letter to his wife: “LG by all accounts is

isolated. He has been vy foolish in his relations with me, Bonar Law, FE [Frederick

E.Smith, the attorneygeneral, 1915–19] & Curzon. He might have combined us

all. As it is he has earned the deep distrust of each.”

Lloyd George even had difficulty getting his dissenting views recorded in the

minutes. When he received his copy of the minutes of the February 22 meeting of

the War Committee, he was shocked to learn, as he immediately wrote Hankey,

that “the whole of the very important discussion on this question of the offensive,

and the directions given to the War Office and myself with regard to the furnishing

of further information is omitted from the minutes.” He also questioned a

conclusion that indicated that the War Committee had ruled out an offensive in

southeastern Europe for the present.

Hankey, with the approval of the prime

minister, then inserted some qualifying remarks in the conclusion in question

which served to mollify the “Eastern” sensibilities of Lloyd George. As for the

pending offensive in the West, Hankey responded that the prime minister intended

to take up the question at the next meeting of the War Committee.

This important discussion, however, was delayed. As Hankey wrote Lloyd

George:

The original intention had been to raise the question of the offensive, as

suggested by you at the last meeting. The Prime Minister is inclined to think,

however, that it would be better to postpone the subject. The C.I.G.S. has

represented that he cannot give any opinion worth having, owing to the

events now going on at Verdun, and he considers that we cannot usefully

pursue the subject until the situation has cleared up.

It was not until March 21 that the ministers returned to the proposed British

offensive. The catalyst for their discussion was a meeting of the Allied

commanders at Joffre’s home at Chantilly on March 12. As Robertson attempted

to describe the results of this conference, it became clear that once again the Allies

had failed to achieve a common policy. The Russians seemed inclined to attack

prematurely; the Italians, not at all; and the French, tied down at Verdun, appeared

to want the British to bear the burden of the offensive. “It was all very slippery

and sloppy,” said Asquith.

Lloyd George fumed. “both the allied armies had ammunition and we might

find one evening that they were launched on a great attack without any reference

to the War Committee,” he said. Later he commented that we “ought to know

72 “WESTERNERS” IN THE ASCENDANCY; THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

whether the Committee were to consider the offensive or leave it to Gen. Haig; in

the latter case there was nothing further for the War Committee to say.”

Lloyd George looked on with great foreboding as the British army moved closer

to a general and possibly premature offensive. In an attempt to divine the motives

of Joffre, who previously had largely determined the strategy of the British

Expeditionary Force, he asked Major-General John P.Du Cane, the director

general of munitions design in the Ministry of Munitions, to comment on a

statement made by Joffre in mid-March on the military situation. Suspicious of

Robertson and generally kept in ignorance about military questions, the

Welshman, in his own words, was “groping in the dark & crying for guidance.”

Du Cane told Lloyd George in a private memorandum that the British army

might have to launch an attack “for one of two reasons:” to bail out the French at

Verdun or to participate in a counter-attack to turn the Battle of Verdun into a

decisive Allied victory. If Britain did nothing while the Ger mans destroyed the

French army at Verdun, Du Cane emphasized, it would be “a disgrace to British

arms.” Only if the German army exhausted itself at Verdun “without precipitating

a crisis” would it be possible for the British to postpone their offensive.

By the beginning of April it was clear that the ministers could no longer delay

their decision on the offensive. Joffre had written Haig proposing “a joint attack

on the largest possible scale.” Would the civilians, Haig wanted to know, give him

permission to proceed?

Haig’s letter had a chilling effect on the civilians. It

seemed clear what lay ahead. The attack was to be all out and the casualties might

run into the hundreds of thousands. Lloyd George still withheld his support. Was

it really wise to launch a general offensive with the objective of achieving decisive

results rather than powerful though limited blows? “We must have a superiority

in men and material,” he told the War Committee. “He did not see how we could

enter on a very great offensive now”

Robertson tried to encourage the civilians by promising that Haig would not

allow Joffre to misuse the British army. Haig, he correctly asserted, was

determined not to go off until he was convinced that the British army was prepared;

and, although the British commander approved of a big attack, he “would not make

a fool of himself.” Kitchener chimed in with the not so reassuring words that the

government “must trust that they [the French] would not make the same mistakes

as before. He did not think they were such fools as to repeat them.”

As the War Committee drew closer to giving the generals what they wanted,

Lloyd George predictably made an attempt to get the ministers to look eastward.

He “personally held to the plan of holding the Germans up, and smashing the

Turks. That would be very unpleasant for Germany.” Robertson quickly brought

the discussion back to the central question— Haig’s request for authority to attack.

The minister “must say one way or the other,” he emphasized.

There could now be no pretense of holding back. The civilians had to either

accept or oppose an offensive on the generals’ terms. They agreed. Their only

hope was that Haig, as Robertson had assured them, would employ his forces

prudently.

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS 73

Another consideration for the minister of munitions in early 1916 was that there

was now talk of a compromise peace within the government. In February the

British leaders had been confronted with President Wilson’s s dramatic offer to

mediate the war on terms which were not unfavorable to the British but fell far

short of total victory.

Only Grey expressed qualified support for American

mediation when it was discussed within the War Committee in February and

March, but the Welshman believed that other ministers, most notably McKenna,

were sympathetic to a compromise peace.

If Britain were not prepared to accept

the “lame peace”

which Lloyd George abhorred, it appeared obvious that Britain

must put up a good fight in the West in 1916. As Grey had grimly warned the

government at the beginning of the year: “I believe that the only chance of victory

is to hammer the Germans hard in the first eight months of this year. If this is

impossible, we had better make up our minds to an inconclusive peace.”

Lloyd George’s position on two questions before the government— Salonika

and general conscription—was influenced by the April 7 decision. The

government’s commitment to the offensive seemed to make imperative the

drafting of more men into the army. Earlier, Asquith had attempted to keep his

coalition government together on this explosive issue through a series of

compromises. First, in the autumn of 1915, he had sought to mollify the

compulsionists with an “ingenious evasion”

—the Derby plan, a complicated

system which kept the voluntary system alive by requesting that married and

unmarried men attest by a government pledge their willingness to serve. In January

1916, Asquith had been forced to retreat one step further with the Compulsory

Military Service Act which applied to bachelors. This gave Asquith and the anti-

compulsionists only temporary relief. By mid-April Lloyd George and the

Unionists were manning the ramparts again. Having gotten the single men, they

wanted the married ones, too. The corridors of Whitehall were rife with rumors.

Everyone seemed on the verge of resignation. One day it was Lloyd George and

the Unionists. The next day it was Asquith. Indeed, the prime minister wrote on

May 19 that he was “preparing to order my frock-coat to visit the Sovereign this

afternoon.”

Lloyd George and the Unionists had the upper hand in this war of

nerves because of the military’s support. For once, the minister of munitions was

full of praise for Wully. Stevenson recorded in her diary, “He thinks a lot of Sir

William Robertson who has written a very able memorandum on the need for men,

and saying that nothing but compulsion for all will be of any use; and D. [for

David] feels that with this document behind them they can make a firm stand.”

Asquith soon caved in, extending conscription to both married and single men

between the ages of eighteen and fortyone.

Lloyd George’s wholehearted support of the War Office’s position on

conscription was not without its opportunistic and paradoxical side. Although he

opposed the “Westerners,” he fought to give them the men to support their strategy.

He even used arguments which he knew to be false, once telling Stamfordham

that if the British at Ypres and Loos” ‘could have pushed in a fresh division we

should probably have won.’ “Although no one in the government believed more

74 “WESTERNERS” IN THE ASCENDANCY; THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

strongly that the civilians must not leave the conduct of the war exclusively in the

hands of the generals, he bluntly told Stamfordham that he preferred turning the

war completely over to the military to Asquith’s lackadaisical leadership. “‘I

would rather see old Derby (sic) with a strong General Staff conducting the War

than that it should continue to be run as it now is by the present Government,’”

he asserted.

It is no wonder that the prime minister believed that “the only really

difficult person in the Cabinet was Mr. Lloyd George who he was afraid did wish

to destroy the Govt.”

As for Salonika, with the British course firmly charted in the West, Lloyd

George believed that little, if anything, could be done in the Balkans for the present.

He was alive to the possibility that a premature and feeble assault from Salonika

might result in a Dardanelles-like fiasco, thereby rendering impossible any future

attack in southeastern Europe. Recently, another “side show” had resulted in an

unmitigated disaster for British arms. In the Mesopotamian theater, a British army

had surrendered unconditionally to the Turks on April 29 at Kut-el-Amara after a

143-day siege. The beaten force had then been “herded like animals across the

desert, flogged, kicked, raped, tortured, and murdered.”

The French, however, to the intense displeasure of the British government,

continued to pressure London, with Joffre writing Robertson on April 25, urging

a Balkan offensive against Bulgaria.

When the War Committee discussed

Joffre’s request, strange sentiments were uttered by Britain’s leading Balkanite:

“He was not in favour of it because General Joffre simply asked for it.… 300,000

was not enough to make an impression in the Balkans.”

Britain’s shipping crisis

was one powerful argument against this “side show,” but Lloyd George resisted

raising it with the French. His motive, in all likelihood, was that once this argument

was accepted, it would make difficult any further operation on the periphery. “If

the necessity was great,” he argued, “we could conceivably find the ships. If the

country was prepared to cut down their supplies, they could find them.”

The upshot of the Salonikan discussions was an usually firm stand by the War

Committee. A memorandum was prepared which stated that “the War Committee

are therefore definitely and unanimously opposed to any offensive operations from

Salonica.”

As usual, the French refused to bend and a special Anglo-French conference

met in London on June 9 to continue the debate. At the last moment Lloyd George

hesitated in his unfamiliar role as an opponent of a Balkan attack. He thought of

not attending and when the conference began at 10 Downing Street he was absent.

After an hour passed, however, he appeared, eventually delivering one of the most

dramatic speeches of the day. “To attempt the operation with inadequate strength,”

he emphasized, “was to discredit it.” Furthermore, “an unsuccessful offensive

would prejudice any further offensive on this flank. No government after the

failure would try it a second time. This indeed was the main reason for his

opposition.”

In spite of Lloyd George’s surprising opposition, the French

remained adamant and it was only agreed that the offensive should be postponed

until conditions were more favorable. This compromise suited Lloyd George, and

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS 75

he almost immediately began lobbying within the War Committee for the

strengthening of the offensive potential of the Allied force at Salonika.

It should not be assumed that Lloyd George’s support of Robertson on

compulsion and Salonika put him in the general staff’s camp. Along with Hankey,

he was in fact instrumental in leading a revolt of the ministers against the general

staff’s secrecy and high-handedness. On Monday, May 22, Hankey had a lengthy

talk with Lloyd George about the paucity of information the general staff was

furnishing the ministers. The minister of munitions readily agreed that something

must be done.

After all, the prime minister, at his urging, earlier had to force

Robertson to tell him how many battalions there were in the British army,

information which was obviously essential to the Ministry of Munitions.

Lloyd George’s request, Hankey placed the question of military information on

the agenda of the May 24 War Committee meeting. Hankey also wrote the prime

minister an unusually strong letter:

The War Committee is the Commander-in-Chief in commission of all the

forces and resources of the British Empire; the Members of the Committee

and not the General Staff are responsible to Parliament, the country, and the

Empire for the conduct of the war; and I would submit that the information

they at present receive, both from the Admiralty and the War Office, is

utterly inadequate for the proper discharge of their great responsibility.

A “frightful row”

occurred when the War Committee met on the twentyfourth.

The astonishing arrogance of the Army Council, the governing board of the army,

rather than the military’s secretiveness was the issue. On May 19, Washington

had made a fresh effort to revive its peace plan: the so-called House-Grey

Memorandum. When word of this reached the Army Council, its members, which

included Kitchener and Robertson, threatened resignation “if the War Committee

insisted on an inquiry into the peace question.”

At the start of the War Committee’s meeting, Hankey and the military advisers

were excused while the ministers discussed American mediation. No record was

kept, but McKenna told Hankey as they walked to lunch “that he, the P.M., Grey,

and Balfour had been in favour of accepting President Wilson’s good offices owing

to the black financial outlook, while Bonar Law and Ll. George were averse, as

they did not admit of the seriousness of the financial situation.”

In the end the

government once again backed away from a compromise peace. The military’s

opposition, along with Lloyd George’s and Bonar Law’s stand, made the

exploration of peace political suicide for Asquith’s government.

When the War Committee resumed its meeting after lunch, the ministers vented

their anger at the soldiers. No reference was made in the minutes to peace

discussions. Instead, the discussion focused on the high command’s insistence

that a vast number of horses must be maintained in France, many being used, it

should be emphasized, for transport rather than for the cavalry. (During the war,

the feeding of these horses, according to A.J.P. Taylor, took up “more shipping

76 “WESTERNERS” IN THE ASCENDANCY; THE SOMME OFFENSIVE