to His Majesty's Mugwumps. We should rejoice were they in the hands of the Sailors' and Firemen's Union or any other representative body of working men, whose first pronouncement would

be

" Victory or Free Trade?"

NO PEACE WITH THE HOHENZOLLERNS.

We have just published a little book likely to interest many of our readers. It is entitled Victory or Free Trade?* Its author resided in Germany for many years and has an unusual knowledge of that country and its people, who are not more attractive to insiders than to outsiders. He is anxious to "do his bit" in opening the eyes of his fellow-countrymen as to German competition, in peace as in war, and the vital necessity of our imposing terms on the enemy we must defeat unless we wish to be destroyed, which will save the world from another edition of this war. Unfortunately the shortage of paper has prevented us from printing as many copies of this book as we should like, but it appears at the right moment-following on Mr. Gerard's disclosures-to help us in doing our duty.

* Victory or Free Trade? by a British Resident in Germany. National Review Office, 43 Duke Street, St. James's, London, ordered through any bookseller or newsagent.

Price 2s. 6d. net. S.W.1. May be

SIR WILLIAM ROBERTSON AS CHIEF OF

THE IMPERIAL GENERAL STAFF

The men we look to in these days are men of the stamp of Sir William Robertson; and the best thing that men like myself and others in a similar position can do is to put our backs into the work that lies before us, and give them all the help we possibly can. We must look to their wisdom, experience, and judgment to show us the right way, and we must put our shoulders to the wheel and drive the coach as hard as we can on the road they mark out for us.-VISCOUNT MILNER (Minister without a Portfolio in Mr. Lloyd George's War Cabinet), at a New Year Party at Caxton Hall, January 1, 1917.

A FEW months ago Mr. Bonar Law stated in the House of Commons that the capture of Bagdad reflected the greatest credit on the General Staff. In spite of this recognition the references both in Parliament and the Press to the work of the General Staff have been so few and far between as to suggest that neither Ministers nor the general public have any idea of its importance. As a matter of fact, there are few people in this country who have any clear notion of the functions of a General Staff; nor is this surprising in view of the fact that before the war it was muzzled and powerless to affect national policy, that it ceased to exist for all practical purposes on the outbreak of war, which was carried on for seventeen months without it, and that it has only been since January 1916 that the country has possessed a General Staff in anything but name. The services of Sir William Robertson cannot be appreciated unless the state of affairs before he came to the War Office is realized.

On the outbreak of war practically the whole of the General Staff at the War Office became the Headquarter Staff of the Expeditionary Force, and accordingly went to France. It is true that the Chief of the General Staff himself, Sir Archibald Douglas, remained at the War Office; he had owed his appointment to the resignation of Sir John French in April 1914 in consequence of the Ulster episode, and had therefore only acted in that capacity for two

months before war broke out. Sir Archibald Douglas died a few months afterwards, and was succeeded by Sir James Wolfe-Murray. Neither of these Generals appears to have had any voice whatever in military policy, and were Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff only in name. The original constitution of that body is supposed to be one of the brightest jewels in the crown of that eminent military organizer, Lord Haldane. An organization by which the General Staff of the British Empire becomes on the outbreak of war the Staff of a field army of six divisions is certainly a remarkable and characteristic example of clear thinking! As for the valuable work performed prior to the war by the General Staff, without which we could have rendered no help to France in August 1914, that work was accomplished in spite of Lord Haldane, whose influence was cast during his fleeting tenancy of the War Office (August 3 to August 5) against the dispatch of the Expeditionary Force.

One need not be a military expert to learn that the functions of our General Staff are threefold: first, those concerned with intelligence--that is, the collection of information respecting foreign armies and countries; secondly, those concerned with military operations that is, the drawing up of plans of campaign, the direction of the war in all theatres, and the defence of Imperial garrisons; thirdly, those concerned with the training and organization of the forces. These comprise all the functions directly concerned with the actual conduct of operations as distinct from those branches of military organization which are responsible for the maintenance of our armies in men, material, equipment, and supplies. It is obvious that the authority responsible for the conduct of a war must possess the necessary machinery for obtaining all the information it requires on which to base its plans; it must have the knowledge, judgment, and experience necessary to weigh all this evidence, to formulate its policy, and to carry through its plans. Further, it must be responsible for the organization and training of the forces which are charged with the execution of its policy. This work has long been regarded in Continental countries as so important that it should only be entrusted to officers most carefully trained and selected as possessing the peculiar qualities required, which are, as regards certain branches of General Staff work, entirely different from those required for the exercise of command in the field. At the head of

this organization is placed, not the soldier appointed to command the army in time of war, but the General who is to be responsible for the supreme direction of the war, the head of the whole military machine, the brain of the national defence.

Now the whole of this machinery was thrown out of gear in the first week of war, and the most important part of it-namely, that concerned with the formulation of military policy and the direction of operations-practically ceased to exist. The officers who held all the more important posts suddenly dropped out; other officers from the retired list were hastily appointed to take their places at a moment when a greatly increased burden was being placed on our whole military organization. If the reader can imagine a great industrial firm suddenly deprived of its board of managing directors, who are replaced at a very critical moment by men who know little of their predecessors' policy or methods, some of whom have no experience of the kind of business they are to control, an idea may be obtained of the state of the General Staff in that eventful August. It would, however, be unfair to suggest that there was any failure on the part of the new personnel. They did not fail, for the simple reason that they were never given the opportunity of performing the functions for which a General Staff exists. Still less must it be thought that the old General Staff had failed to prepare for the war. On the contrary, every problem connected with it had been most carefully studied, and plans for every contingency had been prepared, including a scheme for the expansion of the Army, based on the Territorial system. But the General Staff had never been taken seriously, the Cabinet had paid no attention to its opinions and its forecasts, nor had it the means of impressing its views upon the politicians; there was at its head when war broke out no authoritative figure universally trusted both by Government and people; a civilian Minister had always been regarded, and in fact was, the supreme military authority, and the natural instinct of the country at the beginning of the war was to look for a great soldier to take the place of the Secretary for War, whose mission it should be, not only to superintend the whole military organization and the raising of new armies, but to direct our strategy as well. Lord Kitchener was therefore called by the country to the War Office, became a member of the Cabinet, and was entrusted with powers superior to those exercised by any soldier since Cromwell. The need of

the moment was for organization, and Lord Kitchener was regarded as a great organizer. Nobody stopped to inquire whether he was a strategist nor whether the machinery at his disposal permitted of the effective conduct of war in three continents.

Now, in acting thus, the Government were placing a burden upon a man which would have taxed the genius of a Napoleon. They were, moreover, entrusting these powers to one whose whole reputation rested on the fact that every undertaking in his career had been a one-man show," whose success had been due, not, as many suppose, to any peculiar powers of organization, but to his persistence, iron determination, his vast capacity for work and for making others work, his skill in improvisation, and the extraordinary influence which he obtained over others by sheer force of character and of will. These qualities were invaluable at this crisis, for they enabled him to accomplish what no other man could have attempted, the transformation of a people unprepared and utterly ignorant of war into a great military nation, and it is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say that but for him we should have lost the war; but it is no discredit to his memory to point out that his whole training and career rendered it impossible for him to combine the task of organizing and raising armies with that of the direction of a war such as this. It is conceivable that a lesser man would not have attempted the task, would have frankly recognized its impossibility and the necessity of constituting a strong General Staff to guide him in his decisions. It must, however, in justice to Lord Kitchener, be pointed out that when he first went to the War Office the chaotic condition of the General Staff, the critical state of public affairs, and the necessity for instant decision probably compelled him to assume all the functions of organizer, administrator, and strategist, and prevented the delegation of authority to others; and it is not surprising that one of his temperament did not subsequently realize until too late the necessity of a change in the system. In all this no blame whatever attached to him. The fault lay solely in the policy of "Wait and See," which consists in drifting into a war, for the conduct of which no organization exists, in pitchforking people into impossible positions in a moment of emergency, and in waiting till the inevitable disaster occurs.

The veil which has rested over the first seventeen months of the war has been partially raised by the Dardanelles and Mesopo