BOOKS.

UNDER THE STONE.* Go into a shady part of the garden, or better still, into a damp shrubbery, and lift up some big flat stone. Underneath you will find a quantity of crawling creatures, disturbed by the light so suddenly let in upon them. There are red hairy things with innumerable legs and very attenuated bodies and they scuttle off in a hurry. There are fat, white, bloated-looking things which hardly move, even more disgusting than those with a more active sense of self-preservation. There are black things with hard

• The First World War, 1914-1918. By Colonel Itepington. Constable 2 vols. [42s. net.] shells and brown things with softer cuticles ; ants and other little insects. All are frightened, but some so bewildered that they go on with their own little business. Over the whole teeming piece of mould are fragments of decayed vegetable matter, skeleton leaves, rotting twigs, pieces of mouldy wood and a whole debris of sodden nastineas.

Such a garden adventure recurs irresistibly to the mind as one reads Colonel Repington's diary of the war years. The question whether he should or should not have published the book has already been discussed by us, and to this matter we shall not return. As to the enlightenment which his book should bring in regard to the way in which public affairs are too often handled, as to the advantages of the lessons to be learnt, and finally as to the value of this first step in the reform which comes with knowledge, we have no doubt whatever. It is good for the public to know how they are governed in times of stress. In order to prevent that levity of action, which has unfortunately almost come to be a tradition in our politics, we must one and all fully understand the disease. Then we can, if we will, apply the remedy. Indeed, that remedy will be automatic. If once our public men and politicians know what is expected of them and recognize that the country will not stand being played with, they will conform to their masters' wilL Clearly all depends on whether the picture presented by Colonel Repington's records of London life during the war are truthfuL We believe them to be truthful, or rather perhaps we should say sincere. That is, we feel that Colonel Repington put down from day to day what he believed to be the truth and did not deliberately and with malicious intent state as true something that he knew not to be true, or record as an impression something which was not really his impression, but which he asserted in order to damage an enemy or to back up a friend. But even granted this, the picture he presents may not be a truthful one. It may be coloured by the prejudices of the recorder. That it is sometimes so coloured we do not doubt, though, on the whole, we take it to be representative, since it corresponds with the public form of the most important of the persons spoken about.

And here we will say once more that disgusting as is the spectacle of the scurrying creatures, white, red, hairy, or bare, skinny or bloated, their faults and failings are not on a grand scale. The political world shown us is, in fact, that depicted by the gay irresponsibility of Melbourne rather than by the grim cynicism of Walpole. When the pious lady asked Melbourne whether he did not fmd mankind terribly venal, he replied, "No, ma'am; no, not venal, only damned vain." Walpole volunteered the desperate saying, " There should be very few Prime Ministers. It isn't good that many people should know how bad men are." Those who read Colonel Repington's book may at any rate shut it with the feeling that our political world, if damned vain, damned casual, damned cowardly and above all cursed with a damnable levity, is not in any sense an Inferno such as that of which Walpole had experience.

Now for the book. Now for War London with the lid off. Now for London Society under the stone. Not for a moment did " The Skin Game " of politics, ambition, pride, and jealousy cease. We see the professional politicians alternately courageous through a foolish optimism, or paralytic through a still more foolish terror. We see the great men planning how to force themselves to the front, how to hold back or sterilize a rival, how to keep in with the Left without frightening the Right, how to avoid committing themselves to any particular plan or cause too thoroughly lest it should after all prove unpopular. We see the smaller of the great men, and a disgusting sight it is, illustrating that saying of Halifax, " The dependence of a great man upon a greater shows a degree of subordination of which the ordinary ,person has no conception." Worst of all, we see statesmen, instead of pro-

tecting their servants and the servants of the public, that is, the soldiers, trying to relieve themselves of responsibility and placing it upon the shoulders of these servants—men whom they ought to have dismissed if they thought them incompetent, but whom they should have supported through thick and thin so long as they did not dismiss them.

No doubt, Colonel Repington, as a soldier, is inclined to side with his own cloth, but we have no doubt that the

drawing here shown is not out of proportion. In his pages, the soldiers stray into the political underworld with a sense of bewilderment, for soldiers are as a rule politically innocent. These men from Prance with the smell of fire still upon them

and their eyes still alight with the flame of battle form the tragic relief of this squalid drama. They enable one still to feel that man is a noble animal, splendid in life and in death, and never nobler than when he serves the future hour in arms.

But we must remember that the soldiers were by no means the only people who were sound in the war. The stone that Colonel Repington has lifted hides but a tiny patch of groufill in the garden—that tiny patch so absurdly called " Society." In thousands of rich men's homes, as in millions of poor men's, that is in the homes of the vast majority of our people, the war was endured with as much courage, as much dignity and as much sel f -sacrifice by stay-at-home fathers and mothers as by

their sons in the trenches and their daughters in the wards, in the munition works, on the land, or in the office. To say that Colonel Repington partakes of both classes would not be an unfair verdict on his book. Sometimes he shows himself as the good soldier. Sometimes he is the thing that he despises—the thing which turns the reader's stomach in his book, the man who, even in the war, joins In the petty scrimmages of the London skin-game. Remember, however, that Colonel Repington was always at work, that his work was of great importance—the appreciation of the war for the publio—and that it was good in kind and intense in degree.

In the drama portrayed by Colonel Repington we note Mr. Lloyd George's rise and fall in the estimation of the chronicler with intense interest. To begin with, we see him on the lowest rung possessed by the strange belief that we could avoid war by not carrying out our obligations of honour to France. We

see him next emerge as the inspirer of opposition to Lord Kitchener and as the hero of munitions. Soon he develops as the amateur strategist and the leader of the Easterners. Then comes the phase in which he lets the world know that the country

can still be saved, and that he is the man who can save it. Next comes the Premiership, an autocracy—tempered only by the autocrat's dread of responsibility and his old Parliamentary habit of never committing himself irrevocably. Finally comes, for Colonel Repington at any rate, the last phase, that of the pilot who has been found out, the man who is not to be trusted either as a politician or as a strategist, the man who seems, but only seems, to have a will like a dividing spear, but who is in truth only a man so skilled in the arts of management that he positively likes letting lodgings while the house is on fire I

The Diarist's disillusionment began over the question of man power. There Colonel Repington was absolutely unyielding— nobly willing to sacrifice himself, his career, everything, rather than compromise on a vital question. He would not pretend, because the politicians found this particular pretence oonvonient, that we could win the war without a cruel effort, a supreme sacrifice. He would not pretend that a camouflage sacrifice was as good as the real thing. In February, 1917, Colonel Repington, who up to that time had been an enthusiastic Lloyd Georgeito, began to get uneasy. Here is his account of a conversation with Mr. Lloyd George :-

" We then went into the Man-Power question, and I was thoroughly alarmed by the P.M.'s attitude. He seemed to me to be influenced by sentiment and prejudice, rather than by a reasoned view of the military necessities of the case, and although he had been the head and front of the demand for men under the Asquith leadership, he now seemed to me to be adopting an attitude which threatened danger for tho success of our arms. He said that he was ` not prepared to accept the position of a butcher's boy driving cattle to the slaughter, and that he would not do it.' In making this sort of statement he assumes a kind of rage, looks savage, and glares at one fiercely. I suppose that his colleagues and toadies quail under this assumption of ferocity. I said that he must place himself in the position of the soldiers who had a definite military problem before them, and must know, not only how many men they could have now, but also how many during the rest of the year. All organization, strategy, and even tactics, I told him, hinged upon this decision. I said that I thought we might be faced in the West with almost an equality of forces, and that, apart from the possibility of German economic exhaustion and the cracking of German moral, I saw no reasons on military grounds why he should expect a decisive victory in the West this year. We seemed to me, I said, to be preparing, at the best, for 1918."

A week afterwards comes an interview with Mr. Winston Churchill which throws a flood of light upon the first episode and also upon the relations between the Prime Minister and his colleague and subordinate :— " We then discussed Man-Power, but I soon saw that Winston had been foregathering with L.G., as he began to talk about driving cattle to market and so forth, just as L.G. had talked to me. I told Winston that this sort of talk was all very well for the baser sort of politician, but was unworthy

of responsible statesmen at such a crisis as this. I told him that if L.G. mistrusted Haig he ought to change his Commander, but that he should see that we could not win the campaign without men.

We should be deeply grateful to Colonel Repington for the way in which ho describes what we may call the eternal Statesman's "Butcher Outcry." In all Democracies, nay, in all States, politicians, though glad enough to steal the soldiers' wreath in victory and to say "Alone I did it," in the times of defeat, and if there has been great slaughter, as slaughters there roust be in war, are inclined to raise the cry of "Butcher!" to pretend that them was no need for so much bloodshed, and to hint that the callous Commander has thrown away the lives of his troops and so on. Mi. coin was face to face with this temptation, and nobly he withstood it. When the politicians and even some of the political soldiers shrieked " Butcher ! " about Grant Lincoln stood by his General.

Colonel Repington did right to stamp on this insidious danger at its first appearance ; this undermining of the moral of the Army in the field, for remember that is what it is. If the statesman would show the courage required to remove the soldier whom he calla " Butcher ! " he could not be blamed. But he does not do so. He merely gives broad hints about the criminal waste of human life. What makes Colonel Repington's action so worthy of praise is the fact that he knew that his protests would in the end ruin him with his statesman friend. It was for him a real sacrifice, for he was a man who delighted in what the world calls " basking in the rays of the great man " and acting as the confidential military adviser of the Premier ! When, however, it was a question of what policy was most likely to win the war, Colonel Repington never hesitated for a moment as to which side he should take. He has plenty of faulta- " Sed miles, red pro Petrie."

Another very interesting account of the struggle on the " Butcher " question is to be found in the following passage written practically a year later, i.e., January, 1918. It is to be found in an interview with Sir Douglas Haig, who was on a short visit to England, and runs as follows :—

"The F.-M. was very critical of our conduct of the war, saying that we should either make war or make peace. L.G. has been to see him when he, L.G., was being criticized, and had practically accused him of inciting journalists against the Government. This accusation he had vehemently repudiated. He had asked the P.M. to name one journalist incited. The P.M. named S., whereupon Haig said that he would write to him, but the P.M. begged him not to do so. L.G. threatened A counter-offensive, and asked Haig what he would say if he, L.G., described Haig's offensive as useless slaughter when he spoke at the Guildhall, and if he said that the men had been smothered in mud and blood. Haig answered that he would consider such a speech to be highly unpatriotic, and then went

on to tell me that the spirit of an Army was a delicate plant, and would not remain uninfluenced at last by the constant attacks against its leaders. He said that if L.G. did not like his, Haig's, leading he should remove him.

In order to refresh our readers' memories, we may mention that this conversation was not very long after the notorious Paris speech by Mr. Lloyd George—a speech which, as we pointed out at the time, was in effect an accusation of butchery against our Generals. However, this is delicate ground, and we will not say more on this point.

The politician's inclination to suggest butchery by the Generals In order to avoid responsibility was bad enough, but later on In 1918 Colonel Repington had an even harder battle to fight. He found, for there were practically no war secrets unknown to him, that the Prime Minister was not inerely not insisting upon the maximum of men being sent to the Western Front, but was actually intent on diverting a quarter of a million of men from Lord Haig's army to Syria in order to carry out his dream of a great anti-Turkish offensive with .Aleppo as its centre ! Here is a passage showing what the Diarist calls "Lloyd George's insane plan of winning the war by fighting the Turks "

" I saw a distinguished soldier this afternoon. The Roches have now 165 divisions in the West—two more than the total of the Allies—and they are coming in at the average rate of nine a month. A nice moment to reduce our infantry in France by a quarter and go prancing off to the Holy Land to win the war there ! This soldier thought that it was quite time for me to repeat my indiscretion about the shells. Everything else had been tried without avail. The War Office had failed to move the Government fool from its folly, and the only chance of averting defeat was for me and some honest editor to speak

out.

Colonel Repington's action during the early part of 1918 caused him, among other things, to resign his poet on the Times another example of self-sacrifice. It was at the end of January, 1918, it will be remembered, that Colonel Repington became the military correspondent of the Morning Poet It was bystruggling hard in the public Press and privately in England and in France that Colonel Repington exhibited the insanity of the Aleppo scheme. It is indeed scarcely too much to say that it was his opposition which prevented the Germans, when they attacked in 1918, and when we were brought so near destruction, from finding that we had a quarter of a million men less than we actually had. The wise and plucky part played by Colonel Repington from the end of March till the first glimmer of the dawn in August must, however, be loft to the readers of the book to appreciate.

We must, in justice, make one more reflection. It must not be supposed that though we note Colonel Repington's view of British politics during the war, we wholly adopt it. Further, we must point out that there are one or two politicians who, even on Colonel Repington's showing, emerged scatheless from the war. There is one who stands out beyond all others, though he is by no means a special friend of Colonel Repington, and that is Sir Edward Carson. In a diary which damages so many reputations there is not a word of his recorded which is either foolish or unworthy of a man of sense and honour. Though they will not be surprised by this fact, Sir Edward Carson's friends may feel inclined to claim this fact as his best war monument. Another politician on whom there rests no stain is Mr. Austen Chamberlain. Colonel Repington's Diary is of truth an ordeal by fire. Scatheless also are Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson. They may indeed be said to be the heroes of the book.

We shall no doubt be told that we have spoken much too favourably of Colonel Repington. At any rate, we were not like many of his present detractors, his friends and confidants in the past, his adulators, during the war. Colonel Repington has never written for the Spectator. The only reference to it by name in the Diary is of a derogatory and hostile character. It is then without any prejudice that we maintain the book to be of public benefit in spite of its many errors of taste, and the fact that Colonel Repington belongs to the underworld which he exposes.