Ordeal by Battle

in it which I wish to change in view of that event. This book was not undertaken with the

r. Lloyd George, and Mr. Churchill have all made mistakes. In a great crisis it is the bigger characters who are most liable to ma

ur present troubles. Lawyer-statesmanship, which failed to foresee the war, to prepare against it, and to conduct it with energy and thoroughness when it occurred, still occ

e emergency, and having received an infusion of new blood (which may be expected to bring an

e future. The country realises this fact, and accepts it as a matter of course—accepts it indeed with a sigh of relief. But

ich showed how far, during the past nine months, public opinion has moved away from the professionals of politics; how

s, though unreported, of equally perturbed unionists have also been held. An idea seems still to be prevalent in certain quarters, that what has just occurred is nothing more important than an awkward and temporary disarrangement of the party game; and that this game will be resumed, with all the old patriotism and good feeling, so soon as war is ended. But this appears to be a mistaken view. You cannot make a great mix-up of this sort without calling new parties into existence. When men are thrown into the crucible of a war such as this, the true ore will tend to run together, the dross to cake upon the surface. No matter to what parties they may have originally owed allegiance, the men who are i

estinies ever again to the same machines, to be driven once more to disaster by the same automatons? To all except the automatons themselves—who share with the German Supermen the credit of having made this war—any such resumption of business on old-established lines appears incredible. There is something pathetic in the sight of these hucksterin

vi

r 1912 and January 1913, various meetings and discussions took place under Lord Roberts's roof and elsewhere, between a small number

as was the case in France. But some kind of British policy there must surely be, notwithstanding the fact it had never been disclosed. What were the aims of this policy? With what nation or nations were these aims likely to bring us into collision? What armaments were necessary in order to enable us to uphold this p

em we always returned—even those of us who were most unwilling to travel in that direction—to the same result. So long as Britain relied solely u

13—that this private Memorandum should be recast in a popular form suitable for publication. I was asked to undertake this, and

most acute and dangerous stage. Lord Roberts put off the meetings which he had arranged to address during the ensuing months upon National Service, and threw his whole energies into the endeavour to avert the schism which

in Ireland continued to march from bad to worse—up to the very day when

ject of our efforts to avert, it seemed to me that there might be advantages in publishing some portion of our conclusions. The form, of course, would have to be entirely dif

tain but little of the former Memorandum, and much which the former Memorandum had never contemplated. So many of our original conclusions, laboriously hammered out to convince the public in the spring of the year 1913, had become by the autumn of 1914, the most trite of commonplaces. And as for the practical scheme which we had evolved—endeavour