A Cautionary Tale for Statesmen
WAR technique changes quicker than the rhythm of peace. An after-dinner platitude will serve politicians for a century, where the same stratagem is scarcely good for half a campaign. One must be chary, therefore, of drawing parallels between the last war and this one. Nevertheless, from Sir Frederick Maurice's new study there are lessons to be remembered against the coming turmoils and triumphs.
The Allies of 1918 were caught unawares by victory. Even before the German offensive of March, 1918, there had been little hope of a successful issue until 192o. The developing German threat to Paris and the Channel ports seemed further to delay this time- table. Yet but four and a half months after the issue of Haig's famous "Back-to-the-Wall " Order, the German High Command decided that the war must be ended on the easiest terms obtainable. The Armistice was not attained without squabbles in the German camp. The Hohenzollern dynasty had to be thrown overboard. But it is illuminating to contrast the bickerings and indecisions of the Allies with the ingenious tenacity of the enemy commanders. The new bourgeois Republican Government was made, for instance, to carry the entire odium of capitulation. An armistice is a military procedure, to be negotiated between C.-in-Cs. But Foch, for all his shrewdness, was tricked into receiving an armistice commission appointed by ;he civilians, and from which the generals formally disassociated themselves ; and in order quickly to secure a Rhenish frontier, he refused, as Sir Frederick Maurice says, "to agree to the proposal that only so much of the German Army as was needed to secure internal order should be allowed to retain its arms. The result was that the German troops marched home in good order, with their arms, with bands playing, and with colours flying, having been told by their leaders that they had not been defeated, but that peace was required by the home front. This created an impression of which the fullest pialitical use was made. . . ."
But, on the whole, how sound was Foch's judgement! A man of reality, he did not, for a moment, nurse the illusion that a march on Berlin was possible. General Pershing was probably the only Allied commander to contemplate so vast an operation— and he was influenced by the comparative freshness of the American troops. Foch never lost sight of his main purpose—the hamstring- ing of German military power, and the safeguarding of France's eastern frontier. Mr. Lloyd George thwarted him in the first, by insisting on the reconstitution of the German army as a long- service force, which, when the tittle came, was to provide an ideal cadre of N.C.Os. The refusal of the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty of guarantee to France, in return for which Foch and Clemenceau had abandoned their claim to a Rhenish frontier, robbed him of the second.
The main value of Sir Frederick Maurice's book lies less in its chronicle of Allied mistakes, than in the sense it gives of almost Olympian continuity in German military policy. One tends -to look
askance at all who prate of secret bodies, and century-old con- spiracies to capture the world. But the fact remains that the German High Command has for two centuries, and with the most austere tenacity of purpose, pursued the ideal of German domina- tion. For us war is an expedient to which we reluetantly resort when diplomacy breaks down. For them peace is one of the many shifts and stratagems of war. And when, as in August, 1918, The phantom of victory recedes, they seek peace, even at the cost of some temporary humiliation, in order to prepare against a more favourable moment. At the present time the High Command seem gradually to be overtopping the Nazi Party ; and they may well have made up their minds to retire from the war at the earliest good opportunity. We must be prepared fcr a carefully staged collapse ; we must see to it that the German Army do not this time avoid the bitter draught of defeat ; and it is imperative that we do precisely what Mr. Churchill ' tells us is unthinkable—we must insist upon negotiating peace with none other than the present rulers of Germany (with whom the leaders of the armed forces must be formally associated) in order that upon the authors of this war may fall the entire odium of calamity. Otherwise the High Command and the German people will concoct another legend of invincibility and await only the giinstige gelegenheit for an-
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