After twelve months of war.By the Rt. Hon. C. F. G. Masterman ...

After Twelve Months
of War.

BY

The Rt. Hon. C. F. G. MASTERMAN

(formerly Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
and a Member of the British Cabinet).

LONDON :
DARLING & SON. LIMITED.

1915.

1

o

QJ

M

o

hj

2

H^

S

o

^^1

o

c i §
1 § ^

p^

^

«u S

Pn

§ £-^

s

Ig^

<:

553

fu

S o «

1-^

Wall

'ERSITV

Speci

Pi
<

^

w

s

s

After Twelve Months

of War.

BY

The Rt. Hon. C. F. G. MASTERMAN

(formerly Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
and a Member of the British Cabinet).

M

LONDON:

DARLING & SON, LIMITED.

1915.

M53

After Twelve Months of War.

Byrne Rt. Hon. C. F. G. MASTERMAN.

Just a year ago, on Tuesday, August 4,
those men who were entrusted with the
awful responsibility of the government of
the British Empire, assembled to ratify a
demand which they knew must mean a
declaration of war. It was a company of
tired men, who for twelve hot summer
nights, without rest or relaxation, had de-
voted all their energies to avert this thing
which now had come inevitably to pass.
No one who has been through the experi-
ence of those twelve days will ever be quite
the same again. It is difficult to find a
right simile for that experience. It was
like a company of observers watching a
little cloud in the East, appearing out of
a blue sky, seeing it grow day by day
until all the brightness had vanished and
the sun itself had become obscured. It was

(5949r— 8.) Wt. — G 5181. 12000. 9/15. DkS,. Gr. 2.

like the victim of the old media3val torture
enclosed in a chamber in which the Avails,
moved by some unseen mechanism, steadily
closed on him day by day, until at the end
he was crashed to death. It was most like
perhaps those persons who have walked on
the solid ground and seen slight cracks
and fissures appear, and these enlarge, and
run together and swell in size hour by hour
until yawning apertures revealed the boil-
ing up beneath them of the earth's central
fires, destined to sweep away the forests and
vineyards of its surface and all the kindly
habitations of man.

And all this experience — the development
of a situation heading straight to misery
and ruin without precedent — was continued
in the midst of a world where the happy,
abundant life of the people flowed on un-
concerned, and all thoughts were turned
towards the approaching holidays and the
glories of triumphant summer days.

The Fateful Week.

I remember leaving a Cabinet Avhich was
in practically perpetual session, in the middle

of the most fateful week Europe has ever
seen, with almost sounding in my ears the
physical noise of the messages pouring in
by wireless and code from Paris and Berlin
and Vienna and Petrograd — Europe falling
to pieces like a great house falling — to fulfil
an eno^aofement in an immense political
meeting at a provincial city. J remember
devoting the bulk of my speech to this
problem of war, possibly immediate and
dreadful. I think half the audience thought
that I was insane and the other half that
the Government was so anxious not to make
any pronouncement on the Irish questions
and other controversies of moment that they
would only talk about subjects which had
no meaning or relevance to the controversies
of the day. I remember a few days later
coming out from conferences in which,
within, we all realised that the end had
come, to find under the hot August sun-
light great crowds of silent men and women
crowding Whitehall and all the way from
Downing Street to Parliament : just waiting,
hour after hour, in a kind of awe and
expectation, to know whether the world in
which they had lived and moved all their

lives, had ceased to exist. I wonder how
many of them to-day have gone out mto
regions in which the raging of nation
against nation must count as a very little
thing.

It will be twenty years or thirty — it may
be a century — before the history of the
Cabinet meetmgs held during all those
twelve days can be disclosed. But it is
breaking no Cabinet secret to assert to-day,
on the anniversary of the final apparent
failure, that all the thought and passionate
effort in the mind of every member of that
body was the preservation of the European
peace. Europe had suddenly become
paralysed, like the caterpillar which is
suddenly stung by the fly which desires a
habitation for its children., 'ihe Chan-
celleries of Europe — as can be read in the
official papers — seem simultaneously to have
thrown up the sponge and simply waited
for the inevitable collapse. Only Sir
Edward Grey refused, without some struggle,
to accept so desperate a conclusion. Every
day, almost every hour, he showered
proposals amongst the Ambassadors. He
endeavoured to mobilise the forces which

still made for peace. He pleaded for time.
He pleaded for a Conference of disinterested
Powers. He pleaded for any alternative
proposition : when refused one he proffered
another. He was willing to perform almost
any act, to violate even the stiff diplomatic
conventions, to drop the " formulas " of con-
ventional communication, in order to get
back to the world of reality — so long as
Europe might be saved.

The Responsibility for War.

He failed ; but it was no inglorious fail-
ure : and the efforts remain recorded to-day
and will be approved to-morrow with an
intensity increasing with the realisation of
how rightly the British Cabinet appre-
hended the magnitude of the destruction
into which, with a kind of light -hear tedness
and (it must be confessed) with a kind of
insolence, the Germanic Powers were
hurrying the civilisation of the West. God
alone can fix the ultimate responsibility of
a war which, even it were concluded to-
day, would demand a generation for
recovery : and the end is not yet. But

8

one can surely safely prophesy that those
who so lightly brushed aside a year ago the
British Foreign Secretary's requests, even
for a few hours' delay, must now, after a
year of it, feel some sentiments of self-re-
proach and misery : that if only the
inexorable course of time could be put
back a year their decisions would certainly
be otherwise. The proclamation of war
was cheered by delirious crowds in Berlin
and Vienna. I wonder what kind of a
crowd, in either capital, could be gathered
together to cheer that proclamation to-day !
Looking back on the whole course of
those negotiations embodied for history to
judge in the " White Book," which, I
suppose, is the most interesting volume
produced for many centuries,, one can now
understand what it was difficult to under-
stand in the changing hours of that terrific
strain— something of the German attitude
towards the proposals of the British Cabinet.
Starting, as at least the War Party started,
in Berlin and Vienna, with the firm convic-
tion that " England would not fight," they
must have thought all Sir Edward Grey's
efforts to be but a series of gigantic " bluffs "

— proposal after proposal put forward,
which could be as cheerfully and blandly
set aside as the proposals of a helpless child.
I think that attitude explains more than
anything else the combination of truculence
and contempt which runs through all the
German communications, and caused those
who received them in London from day to
day and hour to hour, to think that God
must have made them quite blind.

In the midst of the tragic week of diplo-
macy the British Foreign Secretary did
indeed inform the German Ambassador
that this was real and not sham business ;
that it was no cowardice or uncertainty
which held us back, but merely an appre-
hension of the enormous nature of the
calamity which would come upon the world
if war came ; a calamity whose dimensions
in destruction of human life, of accumulated
treasure, and of moral ideals, is certainly
without parallel since the Roman Empire
went down before the barbarians, and the
Eoman civilisation perished. It was not a
" war " in the ordinary sense of the word,
like the Napoleonic contests, or the last
fight between France and Germany : it was

10

a smashing to pieces, on a scale comjDared
to which every previous war has been mere
child's play, of a laboriously created in-
dustrial civilisation of centuries. It might
mean, before its termination, the destruction
of the whole social order, the end of a
world. The German Ambassador here was
probably under no illusions. But all his
warnings were brushed aside, and the
greatest war machine in Europe was put in
motion, trampling through neutral nations
and violated treaties, in conformity with
the accepted theory that territories, pros-
perities, and even the moral spirit of a
people could only be maintained by the
brutal work of military conquest.

The fact that England disappointed all
expectation, and decided — after repeated
warnings — to keep its pledged word, has
caused a particular fury amongst the Grer-
manies, who seemed to think that because
they had assumed we should stay inert
spectators, therefore it was " perfidious "
and an outrage on our part that these
expectations were not fulfilled. But I
think that history will justify our Govern-
ment in labouring to the eleventh, the

11

twelfth, even the thirteenth hour, to prevent
the smashing of a civilisation, in which, at
the end, the victors can only be a little
better oiF, as they count their losses, than
the vanquished. The effort failed, but it
was worth the making ; and the result of
the effort was that we entered into the
struggle a united nation and Empire, whose
action was approved by all the neutral
Powers of the world.

The Course oe the Yv^'ae.

With our entrance— with the slow but
inevitable throttling influence of sea power
and the dogged resolution of a nation which
never has known that it is beaten — the
defeat of Germany was assured ; just as
to-day the sane minds of Germany, though
Germany occupies Belgium and half Poland,
and the flower of industrial France — know
that a German victory is impossible ; that
the most they can hope for is to treat for
terms. We are calculatmg not the possi-
bility of ultimate success, but the efforts to
be taken to make that success as speedy as
possible ; to shorten the period of loss and

u

longing and the destruction of life and
treasure. We know that we are fighting
with loyal Allies ; but we know that we
should fight on even if those Allies were to
leave us, or their powers of resistance to be
destroyed. England alone, more than once,
a hundred years ago, maintained resistance
to the Napoleonic domination, after he had
stamped out coalition after coalition on the
Continent. And England, for months or
years, if Germany occupied Paris or Petro-
grad, and established an Empire from the
Urals to Finistiere, would fight on, un-
dismayed, through years or decades, until
the purposes for which she entered the war
were fulfilled, and she could sheath the
sword as honourably and gladly as honour-
ably and reluctantly she drew it ; being,
before God, unable to do otherwise just a
year ago.

One who had some right to prophesy (not
a Minister) informed me then of the course
of the war. " A year of preparation : a
year of conflict : a year of victory." A
military expert dogmatically declared that
within two months after its declaration the
Germans would be occupying Paris and

13

Warsaw. They will never occupy the first :
they have taken ten months instead of two
in reaching the suburbs of the second. No
one who had any kind of concern v/ith the
British decision believed that this was going
to be a short and triumphant contest.
There was none of the lightheartedness and
optimism which (according to history) has
characterised the plunging into former con-
flicts— no '• k Berlin," no " Pretoria in six
months." Indeed after a year of it, despite
losses whicii have darkened the light in so
many homes, and expenditure which the
work of many generations will not recover,
the position to-day, however grave, would
seem to most of us far better than we could
have imagined when we decided that we
had no alternative but to strike for the
honour of England.

A Year's Achievements.

Xo one in his wildest dreams — volun-
taryist or conscriptionist — would have
imagined a year ago to-day that within
12 months we should have 3,000,000 men
who have volunteered for service oversea —

u

a thing unprecedented in any country — in
any time. No one would have imagined
that we could have raised a thousand
millions for war services, and yet main-
tained the position of London as the centre
of the world's financial operations, and our
factories and workshops in real if modest
prosperity. Few would have imagined
that in the first year of the war England
(whose strength is on the sea and who has
never been a land military Power) in
combination with its dependencies and
Dominions, giving their best to Imperial
service, would be conducting eight simul-
taneous, and for the most part, successful
military campaigns ; would not only have
swept off the sea the German fleet and the
German mercantile marine, and sealed up
the German ports like the locking of a
great door ; but would also have conquered
practically the whole German Empire
abroad, would be battering at the gates of
the Dardarnelles, traditionally impregnable,
and with troops from India, Canada, Aus-
tralia, New Zealand — each one volunteered
— assisting our AlHes on the European
arena.

15

No : there has been much to learn since
those memorable twelve days and much to
unlearn : the fainthearted have found 12
months' endurance more than they could
bear, and the hysterical have cried and
wept because success has not come more
speedily. But to-day in comparison with
the possibilities of failure which were in the
minds of all who knew the facts last
August, the wonder is not that of the little-
ness of the result, but of the magnitude of
the achievement. We may doubt what of
Europe may be left at the end of this
gigantic calamity. We may mourn over
the high hopes of progress and human
welfare suddenly cut short by the indescrib-
able calamity of war. We may count the
cost in human life — the flower of the
nations — young men cut off in what seemed
to the ancients the height of human tragedy
— before the faces of their parents. But of
one thing we never had any doubt at all.
We were sure of victory when we launched
the ultimatum a year ago, telling Germany
to clear out of Belgium or challenge the
might of the British Empire. We are sure
of victory to-day.