t's inadequately crossed. We miss the opening exordium of the Cromer Report with its masterly description of the British Government in war, and it required a subsequent question in the House of Commons to elicit the personnel of the various War Committees involved. In reply to a request for "(1) the names of the Ministers composing the War Committee of the Cabinet during the period covered by the Report of the Dardanelles Inquiry Commission, and (2) the names of the Ministers composing the War Committee of the Cabinet during the period covered by the Report of the Mesopotamia Inquiry Commission," Mr. Bonar Law, on behalf of the Prime Minister, answered (July 11):

The War Committee of the Cabinet during the periods covered by the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia Inquiry Commissions was known as:

(1) The War Council, superseded on June 7, 1915, by

(2) The Dardanelles Committee, superseded on November 3, 1915, by

The above formed the Supreme Direction of the war on our side at the given dates. The Twenty-Two or Twenty-Three had virtually delegated control of the campaigns to these War Lords, who were until the end of 1915 the British equivalent of the German General Staff, with Mr. Asquith in lieu of Wilhelm II as the "All Highest." There was not one single sailor in our War Government, nor was there a single soldier except Lord Kitchener, and though the General Staff was ultimately reconstituted under Sir William Robertson, and the Admiralty has to some extent been reformed, no soldier or sailor ever sat in the War Government until General Smuts was recently appointed, while to this day the Navy is still a super. This should always be borne in mind

* Mr. Montagu became a member of the War Committee on his appointment as Minister of Munitions vice Mr. Lloyd George, who became Secretary of State for War on the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916.

whenever the politicians shelter themselves behind "the experts." Lord Cromer's Report taught us that sailors and soldiers were played off against one another by the politicians, from whom they had the utmost difficulty in getting a hearing, which makes us somewhat suspicious of the latest theory, i.e. that the politicians are the mere echoes of the General in the field, without any volition of their own.

The main difference between the German and the British systems, which were thus pitted against one another, was that the enemy confided the management of the war exclusively to professional warriors who moved and lived and had their being in an atmosphere of war, in the study of which they were steeped, while their lives had been consecrated to preparation for this particular war, in which they were prosecuting a predetermined policy in accordance with a coherent and co-ordinated plan. We, on the other hand, entrusted our affairs-our policy as well as our strategy-almost exclusively to amateurs who were not only professedly and confessedly ignorant of everything connected with war, but gloried in their ignorance. They regarded war as an impossible relic of an obsolete past on which no selfrespecting statesman would permit himself to dwell, because it unthinkable" that our more enlightened and humane age would ever allow itself to revert to methods of barbarism. Even were other Powers so maniacal as to go to war, Great Britain, whose greatest interest was peace, would set a good example by remaining "too proud to fight."

was

The outstanding authority on all such matters on the Front Benches, to whom all other Front-Benchers, regardless of Party, deferred, especially Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour, was Lord Haldane, pre-eminent for Clear Thinking. He knew everything that was worth knowing about Europe in general and Germany in particular, thanks to his intimacy with confiding patriots of the type of Herr Ballin, who were understood to disclose their inmost thoughts to the British Lord Chancellor, who was fondly regarded by his admiring colleagues as Keeper of the Kaiser's Conscience as well as of the King's. Therefore, when Lord Haldane, in his omniscience, was able to inform the world, in the opening weeks of the year of Armageddon, that the European horizon was unclouded, how natural that his disciples should sleep comfortably in their beds" while pursuing the popular policy of starving British armaments, which, as we learn from the Mesopotamia Report, was extended to India via the Nicholson Commission on the very eve of war. It is, perhaps, a matter of some surprise that when the bursting of the storm showed that Lord Haldane had been bamboozled by the Germans, who had been sedulously organizing aggression behind his back, he never

theless remained one of our War Lords. As we are reminded by Mr. Bonar Law's schedule, Lord Haldane was one of the Inner Council that embarked on the modern Walcheren Expedition in the Dardanelles, one of the worst exhibitions of amateur strategy in British history, from which sprang the megalomania of Mesopotamia which captured all concerned during those dark days of October 1915, when Downing Street jumped at the suggestion of an oversanguine man on a distant spot, where he had so far been so brilliantly successful that he not unnaturally underrated the obstacles confronting him. Subsequent disaster and suffering came from the unfortunate decision to make a premature advance upon Bagdad with an inadequate force lacking almost every essential to so great an enterprise, especially defective in those administrative Services in which India was supposed to excel. Sir John Nixon is described as a man who "revelled in responsibility "surely a fault on the right side in this age of marvellous physical courage and corresponding moral cowardice. It were ungrateful to forget that England has been deeply indebted at various moments of her history to the rash and unreasoning optimism of men of action, whose own skins, be it remembered, are at stake. No civilian sitting comfortably at home, sheltered from the horrors of war by the Fighting Men, can consent that so gallant and devoted a soldier as General Nixon should be appointed as "chief villain of the piece.'

Dog doesn't eat dog. Parliamentarians invariably remember "the experts" when things go wrong. Their advice immediately becomes the irresistible and decisive factor. But when things go right we hear rather of the "statesmanship" which launched the expedition, with full knowledge of all the factors involved and sagacious appreciation of the risks and the stakes. We only learnt that General Nixon dominated the situation after the Battle of Ctesiphon and the failure at Kut. Hitherto he had been the successful agent of a prudent and far-seeing Home Government, whose considered opinion on the coming triumph was contemporaneously disclosed by Mr. Asquith in a characteristic period :

General Nixon's force is now within measurable distance of Bagdad. I do not think that in the whole course of the war there has been a series of operations more carefully contrived, more brilliantly conducted, and with a better prospect of final success. (Mr. Asquith, House of Commons, November 2, 1915.)

It was the same Mr. Asquith who had prophesied smoothly concerning Gallipoli, and whose fame as Supreme War Lord was established by his immortal dictum concerning shells:

I saw a statement the other day that the operations, not only of our Army, but of our Allies, was being crippled, or at any rate hampered, by our failure to provide

the necessary ammunition. There is not a word of truth in that statement. (Mr. Asquith, Prime Minister, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, April 20, 1915.)

Though it seems a hard saying to lawyer-politicians, War cannot be "picked up" in a day like a case at nisi prius or the threads of a Parliamentary debate-matters in which our War Lords excel. Some of them might make passable Law Lords, but war they never have and never will understand. It is doubtful whether they have learnt anything in three years.

The Mesopotamia Commissioners let their brother Parliamentarians off so lightly that were the latter wiser they would have hailed the former as prophets instead of branding them as criminals. Possibly their guilty consciences make Ministers realize that a day is coming when statesmen will be held effectually "responsible" for their acts, and the prevailing practice of seeking minor scapegoats will no longer serve. The Report thus crystallizes the judgment of the Commission :

The weightiest share of responsibility lies with Sir John Nixon, whose confident optimism was the main cause of the decision to advance. The other persons responsible were in India, the Viceroy (Lord Hardinge) and the Commander-in-Chief (Sir Beauchamp Duff); in England, the Military Secretary of the India Office (Sir Edmund Barrow), the Secretary of State for India (Mr. Austen Chamberlain), and the War Committee of the Cabinet. We put these names in the order and sequence of responsibility. The expert advisers of the Government, who were consulted, also approved the advance and are responsible for their advice, but the papers submitted to us suggest that the approval of the naval and military experts was reluctant, and was perhaps partly induced by a natural desire not to disappoint the hopes of advantage to the general situation, which the Government entertained.

Our Parliamentarians become unduly modest when it is a question of distributing blame-the soldier or the sailor, as the case may be, is forced into the foreground while the Cabinet is almost out of the picture. Downing Street merely said "Ditto " to the man on the spot as it is being continually invited to do by the "critics." Nevertheless, the Major Mandarins are beside themselves with rage that the existence of the Government should be remembered, and belabour Lord George Hamilton and his colleagues for this unheard-of violation of the sacred rule, "All the kicks for the soldier-all the kudos for the politician."

II. THE MAJOR MANDARIN AND THE
MILITARY SCAPEGOAT

[No more responsibility rested upon him (Mr. Asquith) than upon myself or Lord Lansdowne or any of the rest of the Coalition Government at that time, and to suggest that any one is deserving of special criticism or blame is a real travesty of the institutions of our political life.-EARL CURZON, House of Lords, July 13, 1917.]

SEVERAL passages in the Report absolutely damn pre-war Ministers, all of whom would be impeached under any rational regime, while a few stray sentences about the Mesopotamia muddle are calculated to make the thickest skins wince. But there is no serious attempt to drive the matter home, though the panicstricken speeches in the House of Commons prove the chief culprits to be aware of the case against them, which is not disposed of by Mr. Asquith's shrewish attack on the Morning Post, whose robust and single-minded patriotism makes it an honour to a profession which embraces too many semi-official journals, all currying favour with the Powers that Be.

As Prime Minister Mr. Asquith had the prime responsibility for the blunders of his Government, as for any triumphs with which it may be legitimately credited. For eight weary, lamentable, disastrous, and ignominious years we were summoned to bow down before the great man, round whom all the axe-grinders, every snob in search of a title, every place-hunter thronged, constituting a veritable Tammany Hall of all that was "rotten in the State of Denmark." Downing Street became the heaven of the Hyphenate. It may be little better to-day, but at any rate one set of Indispensables have been removed, so the country can hope to shake off some of the others. We must get a big move on before we attain safety. The Mesopotamia Report, following the Dardanelles Report, helps us to see things as they really are and not as the politicians would have us believe them to be, while it indicates how we should set our house in order.

Our first duty is one that many find peculiarly painful-namely, to discard Tweedledee and Tweedledum politics, which paralyse the nation and prevent patriotic action in any direction. So long as Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Lord Crewe, Lord Lansdowne, and the others are treated as beings belonging to different worlds, to be