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He started suddenly at the sound of some one moving in the hall. He knew instinctively it would be Gales. He jumped up. He did not want his loyal retainer to think him a fool. It would be the most terrible thing of all to appear ridiculous to Gales. He walked round the room, nervously peering at the floor. Gales blinked at him. He was in a dressing-gown, and he mumbled:

"I beg your pardon, sir."

He glanced at Gales, but said nothing. He continued searching the floor. Gales advanced into the room and coughed and looked at him curiously. He had never known Gales to look at him before in quite that way. He felt suddenly angry with the servant and wanted to get rid of him,

but at the same time he was self-conscious and afraid. He was aware of the level tones of Gales's voice murmuring:

"Excuse me, sir, may I help you? Have you lost anything? Can I-"

The horror came home to him with increased violence as he glanced at the puffy cheeks of the butler. He felt that he could not endure him for another moment. He almost ran to the door, calling out in a harsh voice as he did so:

"Yes, yes; I've lost something."

He brushed past the butler, his cheeks hot and dry, and his eyes blazing with an unforgiving anger. He did not. turn again, but hurried away like an animal that is ashamed to be seen, and ran whimpering up-stairs to his bedroom.

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ΤΗ THERE is a story which is popular in English circles to the effect that Mr. Asquith, during one of his visits to France, observed to a distinguished French general that it was remarkable that the war had not thrown up any great commander, and that the general genially replied, "No; nor any great statesman." The story is of course an invention. Mr. Asquith is brusk, but never gauche; direct, but not clumsy. Nor is it his habit to indulge in large and unfortified generalizations on subjects about which his knowledge is vague and necessarily incom

plete. No one knows better than he does that it is impossible in the midst of the war to form any just estimate of personal values. We must wait for the end of the trial before we give our verdict. Any departure from that sound maxim is likely to suffer the fate of Jeffrey's "This will never do," on Wordsworth. The one conspicuous departure from that maxim during the war has served to illustrate the danger of erecting statues to what one may call interim heroes. It is not without significance that it is in Germany and nowhere else that the popular mind has

betrayed this weakness, and already the colossal wooden statue of Hindenburg has become a European jest.

nence.

But though Mr. Asquith may be acquitted of responsibility for the story, the remark attributed to him undoubtedly represents the prevalent feeling in regard to the war. There is no military figure that has emerged from the vast welter to a decisive and unchallengeable preëmiMany men have caught the limelight momentarily, and in each case the world has been ready to cry, "This is he." But almost before the acclamation was uttered he has faded into the background. For one brief month Kluck overshadowed all other names, but in a military sense he perished at the Marne and has hardly been heard of since. The kaiser's military prestige ended with the failure of the attack at Ypres, and Moltke was offered as a sacrifice for that failure. Hindenburg's great, but quite episodic, achievement at Tannenberg made him for six months the outstanding figure of the war, but the long and futile struggle on the Dwina has quenched his glory, and those who look to Germany for the military hero of the war are now studying the campaigns of Mackensen and the politico-military strategy of Falkenhayn. The Russian reputations have been equally fleeting. Ruzsky had an hour of splendor at Lemberg, then suffered eclipse; emerged again on the Dwina, and now seems to have finally vanished from the stage. The Grand Duke Nicholas rose like a colossus on the crest of the Carpathians, and sank from sight in the heart of Russia, to reappear ultimately out of the Caucasus with the dazzling triumph of Erzerum. The most static reputation of the war has been that of General Joffre. It has been singularly. free both from sensation and from the swift alternations which have marked other personal valuations. In the judgment of the world he stands very much as he stood in the autumn of 1914-a stout-hearted, phlegmatic, cautious soldier; silent, remorseless; representing not the brilliant, imaginative tradition of French generalship, but the modern con

ception of war as a vast piece of engineering to be achieved by processes as practical as those of a plumber. He may in the end emerge as the supreme military figure of the war, but judgment is in suspense, and all that can be said is that he has neither advanced nor retreated in the estimate of contemporary criticism.

The challenge to his claim so far has certainly not come from the British army. The appointment of Sir Douglas Haig to the command of the British forces in France and Flanders is the confession that England is still seeking for a man equal to the occasion. The achievements of British generalship have so far been undeniably disappointing. There were two outstanding figures in active service at the beginning of the war, Lord Kitchener and Sir John French. Their reputations were very dissimilar in character. That of Lord Kitchener was the reputation of the organizer of war, that of Sir John French was the reputation of the brilliant commander in the field. Lord Kitchener's successes were founded on the slow and patient processes of the engineer, a railway driven through the desert, a system of block-houses constructed on the veldt. Sir John French's successes were the daring exploits by which he relieved Kimberley and cut off Cronje's retreat at Koodoosrand Drift, and the more definitely strategic skill with which for three months he held a much superior force in check at Colesberg. From the point of view of experience it might have been assumed that the British started with an indisputable advantage in the matter of generalship. At the outbreak of the war there were only two countries which had had large and recent acquaintance with actual warfare. In the case of Russia that experience had served only to discover the incapacity of its generals. No reputation survived the Russo-Japanese War, and the only general engaged in that war who was given a considerable command in August, 1914, General Rennenkampf, promptly disappeared as the result of two disastrous failures.

The case was otherwise with the Brit

ish. Their officers had seen fighting in many fields, and had had victory in all of them. But it may be doubted whether their experience of war was not a loss rather than a gain. It tended to make them shape their methods according to the teaching of that experience, and to assume that the European War was only different in scale from that in which they had learned their lessons. But it was not a difference of scale only or even chiefly; it was a difference of character. It was a warfare that had no points of similarity to the rounding up of dervishes in the desert or of Boer farmers on the veldt. It is not without significance that it was in the first three months, while the war in the West was in a fluid state, that the British achieved their really striking successes; that is to say, it was while the operations bore some resemblance to those with which our army had been familiar in the past that it proved its decisive superiority. This was no doubt due largely to the fact that the original army, though small, consisted of the most-seasoned soldiers in Europe; but it was due also to the fact that the demands on our generalship were demands with which that generalship was familiar. It is probable that history will find in the part which the little British army played in the retreat to the Marne the most momentous single fact of the war. The kaiser, for military, political, and personal considerations alike, flung the spear-head of his army at the British. The attack failed despite its overwhelming mass and impetus, and it failed not only because of the hard stuff of which the British army was composed, but because in that phase of the struggle Sir John French, Sir Douglas Haig, and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien were greater masters of the craft of war than the generals opposed to them. That wonderful apprenticeship at Colesberg, which General French and General Haig had served together, the one as commander, the other as chief of staff, had prepared them perfectly for such an emergency as this, and it is no extravagant claim to say that it played a governing part in saving the lib

erties of Europe in the moment of supreme crisis. And hardly less momentous and triumphant was the inspiration of Sir John French which led him to transfer his army from the Aisne to Flanders in the nick of time, and that daring which permitted him to spread out his line so thin that, as one may say, one could see the rents in it. The risk was as great as any ever taken by a general in the field; but it saved Calais and much more than Calais. Few know how narrow the margin was, how near at the end of the tendays' struggle before Ypres the power of resistance had approached exhaustion, how in that supreme moment the dauntless courage of General French inspired men. and officers alike to "hold on" until the surging tide of the German attack fell back shattered and despairing.

If the story of 1915 fell tragically below the high-water mark of the first battle of Ypres, it was because the war had assumed a character with which British generalship was unfamiliar, called for an equipment which the Germans had foreseen and the British had not, demanded methods which had been studied by the German general staff and ignored by British military thought. Criticism on this. phase of the war is a delicate task. It is difficult to disentangle the causes of failure and distribute their burden to the right shoulders. Who was it who was responsible for the belated appreciation of the fact that in trench warfare shrapnel was no match for high-explosive shells? British generalship cannot be blamed for the deficiency of guns and equipment in the early stages of the war: That was the natural consequence of the fact that Germany had prepared for the war and the British had not conceived of the possibility of fighting on the Continent with an army of Continental magnitude. But there was clearly a most disastrous failure to understand the lessons of the trench warfare. While the destructive power of the German high-explosive shells was apparent day by day, British military thought, dominated by the memories of the South African War, still obstinately

clung to its faith in shrapnel, and it was not until the intervention of the politicians both in England and France that the importance of the big gun and the explosive shell was thoroughly seized. The prevailing opinion is that in the conflict on the subject which is generally supposed to have taken place between Sir John. French and Lord Kitchener it was the latter whose belief in shrapnel survived quite decisive evidence to the contrary. But these and similar points of controversy cannot be decided in the present obscure state of knowledge on the subject.

And without that knowledge it is impossible to say how far the failures of 1915 are attributable to General French. The two great events of that period, Neuve Chapelle and Loos, were very similar in their broad features. They were successful beyond all expectations in their first phase and broke down completely in their second phase. Inadequate artillery preparation was undoubtedly a main cause of failure at Neuve Chapelle, but in the case of Loos the causes were more complex and more sinister. The attack, successful to a quite unexpected degree, outran its power of consolidating itself, and its supports were not only hopelessly in the rear, but were delayed by the chaotic condition of the roads. The long and unexplained interval between the British attack, which began at six in the morning, and the French attack on the right, which did not begin until noon, was also a contributory cause of the failure. It was obvious after Loos that a change in the command would be made. Sir John French's success in all the phases of mobile warfare had been indisputable, but in the static warfare of the trenches and the organization of an attack on a wide intrenched front he could not escape criticism, and his retirement was a matter of course.

If the appointment of Sir Douglas Haig was also a matter of course, the fact cannot be said to be due to any conclusive evidence that he was the man for so onerous a task. The utmost that could be claimed for him was that of the men in the running, he alone had survived as a

thinkable substitute. Sir Ian Hamilton's reputation had been eclipsed by the tragic episode of the Dardanelles, and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, whose handling of the Second Army Corps in the retreat to the Marne had been the most brilliant feature of that great incident, had been removed to a home command as the result of a collision of temperament as well as of opinion with his chief. Sir William Robertson, the chief of the general staff, and in many ways the most interesting figure in the army, was felt to be more adapted to the work of initiating the strategy of the war than to executive command in the field. He had risen from the ranks by sheer force of intellect to the position of head of the Staff College at Camberley, an achievement the magnitude of which can be appreciated only by those who understand the enormous part which social considerations play in the British army. It has been suggested that his origin stood in the way of his selection for the supreme command, and it is probable that he would have had to meet a considerable amount of prejudice that would have made his task difficult. No one who has moved among the higher ranks of the army will doubt that. But I do not think that this consideration was really the cause of the choice not falling on him. His career had been almost exclusively associated with the thinking branch of the army, and even in the South African War he had played little or no part in the field. His removal to the position of head of the general staff in London was the obviously right application of his genius to the purposes of the war, and no one appreciated the importance of that fact more than Sir Douglas Haig. "This war," he has said, "will be won in London by those whose thinking is the spring of our action here." There were several men who had come into prominence among the younger officers, most conspicuously General John Gough, a man of really brilliant parts who was widely spoken of as "the brain of the army," but who was unfortunately killed at Neuve Chapelle.

But there was no one who really chal

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