Asquith (82 page)

General Maurice, who was Director of Military Operations at the War Office until late April (when he was removed by the C.I.G.S. Sir Henry Wilson), wrote to denounce this statement. “ (It) implies,” he said, “ that Sir Douglas Haig’s fighting strength on the eve of the great battle which began on 21st March had not been diminished. That is not correct.” He also denied the accuracy of a statement by Bonar Law about the circumstances in which a recent extension of the British line had been agreed upon, and of another by the Prime Minister relating to troop strength in the Middle East. He referred to Law’s statement as “ the latest of a series of mis-statements which have been made recently in the House of Commons by the present Government.” He used the phrase “ that is not correct ” as a reiterative chorus after each of Lloyd George’s claims. He passed to a justification of his own action. The falseness of these statements was appreciated by a large number of soldiers and “ this knowledge is breeding such distrust of the Government as can only end by impairing the splendid morale of our troops.”

“ I have therefore decided,” he ended, “ fully realising the consequences to myself, that my duty as a citizen must over-ride my duty as a soldier, and I ask you to publish this letter, in the hope that Parliament may see fit to order an investigation into the statements I have made.”
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The letter was a heavy challenge to the Government. It was also a clear breach of military discipline, as Maurice himself admitted by implication. But was it in addition, as Lloyd George insisted in his
War Memoirs,
part of a general Asquithian plot “ to blow up the Government ”? The evidence is against this. Maurice was well-known to Asquith, who held him in high regard, and the general no doubt looked to the former Prime Minister to press the matter in Parliament. But he had not consulted him beforehand, although he had very nearly done so. The first that Asquith heard was when he received the following letter from Maurice on the morning of publication :

20, Kensington Park Gardens,

6.
5.
1918

Dear Mr. Asquith,

I have today sent to the press a letter which will, I hope, appear in tomorrow’s papers. When I asked you to see me last Thursday, I had intended to consult you about this letter, but on second thoughts I came to the conclusion that, if I consulted you, it would be tantamount to asking you to take responsibility for the letter, and that I alone must take that responsibility. I ask you to believe that in writing the letter I have been guided solely by what I hold to be the public interest.

Believe me,

Yours sincerely,

F. Maurice
^f

Even without prior consultation, Asquith acted rapidly. That afternoon he asked a private notice question of Bonar Law (as leader of the House). Law replied that the Government proposed to ask two judges to act as “ a court of honour ” and to enquire into the alleged mis-statements. During supplementary questions the idea of a judicial enquiry came under heavy fire, and not only from Asquith. Another Liberal, George Lambert, first put forward the alternative demand for a select committee of the House of Commons. Carson, who had 
once again resigned from the Government, made several menacing interventions about the need for Cabinet and (perhaps more significantly) ex-Cabinet ministers to be absolved from their oaths of secrecy when appearing before the enquiry. Asquith demanded a debate before a decision. Law countered by offering to let Asquith nominate the two judges. Asquith refused to be mollified by this and persisted in his demand that the issue must be debated before the court of enquiry was set up.

As soon as he left the chamber Bonar Law found that his offer was as ill-received by some of his colleagues in the Government as by the Asquithians and Carson. Churchill
¹
argued vehemently against a judicial enquiry on grounds of high principle, and carried the Prime Minister with him. A minister, he said, should never ask judges to enquire into his own integrity.
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In view of this sudden movement of opinion it was fortunate for the Government that Asquith had not immediately accepted Law’s offer.

¹
 
_{He had joined Lloyd George’s Government as Minister of Munitions in July 1917.}

The debate came on two days later. Asquith moved that a select committee of the House of Commons be set up. His speech was brief and restrained, but uncertain and therefore unconvincing in tone. He disclaimed any desire to censure the Government. He had believed that they might accept his motion. Drawing with some effect upon his experience of the Parnell Commission, he pronounced against the method of judicial enquiry. But when an interrupter suggested that the Marconi select committee provided an equally unsatisfactory precedent for this method, he returned no adequate answer. He was also put out when he asked the rhetorical question: “What is the alternative (to the select committee)? ” and received from a somewhat jingoistic miners’ member, the reply of “ Get on with the war.”
¹

¹
 _{The member was Charles Stanton (Keir Hardie’s incongruous successor at Merthyr Tydfil), and Lloyd George, no doubt a partial witness, said that the interjection was received with one of the biggest cheers he had ever heard in the House of Commons.}

At the conclusion of his speech Asquith drew from Bonar Law the typically stark argument that a select committee could never be impartial because there was no member of the House who was not “ either friendly (to) or opposed to the Government.” After expressing his dismay at hearing such unparliamentary statements from the leader 
of the House, but without any attempt to weave his own points into a final crescendo of argument, Asquith sat down. There was no sense of a great parliamentary occasion about his speech. He had chosen a minor key, and had played it without his usual sureness of touch.

Lloyd George, who followed, struck a different note. He spoke for 1¼ hours, nearly twice as long as Asquith, but the pace of his speech was much faster. He was determined to escape from the judicial enquiry offer, to force the issue there and then, to refute and discredit Maurice, to accuse Asquith of having been party to a fractious plot to bring down the Government, and to secure an overwhelming vote of vindication from the House of Commons. He succeeded in all these objectives. He not only destroyed the demand for a select committee. He also laid down the principle, which prevailed for the rest of the war, that House of Commons criticism of the Government’s military leadership was equivalent to disloyal sabotage of the national effort. His speech was a great parliamentary
tour de force.

Asquith felt the force of the storm, but did not bow before it. Wisely or unwisely, he had committed himself to put down his motion and, if necessary, to vote for it. He had argued the case on purely procedural grounds, whereas Lloyd George had insisted, with daring persuasiveness, in bringing the substance of the matter before the House. This unbalanced the debate from the beginning, and the critics of the Government never recovered their equilibrium. But Asquith did not feel that he could be driven into withdrawal by Lloyd George’s aggressive tactics. He watched passively the unsatisfactory unfolding of the debate. It lasted less than three hours after the Prime Minister sat down. Carson turned about and gave almost wholehearted support to Lloyd George. Three Conservatives—General Croft, Colonel Archer-Shee and Lord Hugh Cecil—delivered damaging criticisms of the Government, Croft in particular applying himself to the substance of the dispute, and said they would abstain. Joynson-Hicks and two others, one a Liberal and one a Conservative, said that they had come with open minds, but had been convinced by the Prime Minister that there was no case for an enquiry. Colonel Josiah Wedgwood said that he had three times changed his mind as to how to vote,
¹
and appealed despairingly for some further guidance from the front opposition bench.

¹
 
_{In fact he too abstained.}

He appealed in vain. McKenna was there, Runciman was there, 
Samuel was there. But none of them rose to wind up. The debate petered out, with brief inconclusive speeches and increasingly impatient shouts of “ divide, divide.” Asquith mustered a vote of 108 (including the two tellers), made up of 100 Liberals and a minority of the Labour members. The Government had 295, including 71 Liberals. Asquith and his followers went gloomily home. They could not have been pleased with themselves. They had been badly out-manoeuvred. But they had no idea that they had participated in one of the great divisive debates of history, in an event from which Lloyd George would never allow the Liberal Party to recover.

What were the merits of the argument? Did Asquith eagerly seize upon the false accusations of a sour and neurotic general (as Lloyd George insisted on regarding Maurice 
¹
) or did the Prime Minister tear up the truth in order to discomfort his critics and gain a spurious House of Commons victory? Lloyd George, in his speech, rested upon two sets of alternative defences. The first was that his statements were correct, but that, even if they were not, the responsibility was Maurice’s who, as Director of Military Operations, had supplied him with the figures. The second was that, in making his comparison between January, 1917 and January, 1918 he had not included the non-combatant troops (labour battalions etc.), which had grown greatly in strength in the interval, but that he would in fact have been justified in doing so, as the distinction was an unreal one.

The last point would have been a difficult one to sustain in detailed argument, and in any event it had been discounted in a parliamentary answer by the under-secretary for War on April 18th. So far as combatant troops were concerned, however, the final War Office (pre-debate) figures did not bear out Lloyd George’s contention. Those prepared on May 7th gave a total of 1,198,032 in January, 1918, as compared with 1,283,696 in January, 1917.
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Yet Lloyd George had acted in good faith and on War Office authority when he made his statement on April 9th; and Maurice was directly involved in providing that authority.

How, then, did the discrepancy arise? Part of the explanation was provided four years later. General Maurice, seeking to vindicate himself, and after a careful review of the facts, wrote to Lloyd George in July, 1922. The War Office document upon which Lloyd George’s first statements was based, he said, had been prepared in a hurry. By mistake the strength of the armies in Italy had been included in those in France. This mistake was quickly discovered, however (so one would hope, for the sake of General Maurice’s reputation as head of the Military Operations department), and a correction was sent to Lloyd George within a few days. When the Prime Minister made his May 9th statement, therefore, he did so on the basis of information which he knew had since been amended.

But did he? In 1922 he brushed Maurice’s letter aside. He was never a man for the careful unravelling of past mysteries, particularly if the process might be embarrassing to him. He preferred the events of the moment, and he wanted no dealings with Maurice. At this stage, therefore, the matter remained unresolved. But in 1934 Lady Lloyd George (then Miss Frances Stevenson and still, as she had been for many years, one of Lloyd George’s most trusted secretaries) made an entry in her diary. And in 1956 Lord Beaverbrook, making use of his vast store of early twentieth century political papers, revealed this entry. It ran as follows:

Have been reading up the events connected with the Maurice Debate in order to help Ll.G. with this chapter in volume v (of the
War Memoirs
), and am uneasy in my mind about an incident which occurred at the time and is known only to J. T. Davies
¹
and myself. Ll.G. obtained from the W.O. the figures which he used in his statement on April 9th in the House of Commons on the subject of manpower. These figures were afterwards stated by Gen. Maurice to be incorrect.

I was in J. T. Davies’ room a few days after the statement, and 
J.T. was sorting out red despatch boxes to be returned to the Departments. As was his wont he looked in them before locking them up and sending them out to the Messengers. Pulling out a W.O. box, he found in it, to his great astonishment, a paper from the D.M.O. containing modifications and corrections of the first figures they had sent, and by some mischance this box had remained unopened. J.T. and I examined it in dismay, and then J.T. put it in the fire, remarking, “ Only you and I, Frances, know of the existence of this paper.”

There is no doubt that this is what Maurice had in mind when he accused Ll.G. of mis-statement. But the amazing thing was that 
the document was never fixed upon
.... I was waiting for the matter to be raised, and for the question to be asked: Why did L.G. not receive these supplementary figures? Or did he? But the questions never came and I could not voluntarily break faith with J.T., perhaps put L.G. in a fix, and who knows, have brought down the Government!

I suppose it is too late for the matter to be cleared up and I had better keep silent. But I will talk it over with J.T. In any event, no good could come of any revelation made now...
 
ⁱ

¹
_{Sir J. T. Davies, 1881-1938, Lloyd George’s principal private secretary from 1912 until the end of his premiership. Subsequently a director of the Suez Canal Company and a trustee of the Lloyd George Fund.}