3
It was characteristic of O'Rane that he went back to Melton at the end of his leave without hinting to anyone what he was going to do. After his wife and Grayle left "The Sanctuary," I waited for perhaps ten minutes to see whether he wanted my opinion or advice, but he made no reference to the scene at which we had all been present. All that he said to the Oakleighs was, "Well, I'm rather tired. I think I shall go to bed." He disappeared as quietly and suddenly as he had come; perhaps we were to see him back in six weeks' time at the end of term, but even this was uncertain.
The advent of autumn, bringing with it the recognition that there must be another winter in the trenches, roused the country from the uncaring optimism or placid resignation in which the summer had been passed. In the London press, at the Club, in the House and at private dinner tables, I found very general agreement that the war had entered upon a new phase. A timid minority earnestly confided to discreetly chosen audiences that the people who talked about a deadlock and a stale-mate peace were proving right after all. With the exception of Beresford, who thought no opinion worth holding unless he shouted it from the house-tops, the new peace-school was obviously frightened of being called unpatriotic or pro-German. Bertrand would shake his head gloomily and begin sentences half-jocularly with—"I suppose I shall be called the Hidden Hand next, but all I can say is...." Whatever it was, he said it in an undertone and made sure of his man before saying it. Others tried to avert personal attacks by discussing war and peace in the abstract, adducing uncertain historical parallels and wondering academically whether it was wise to aim at humiliating a great country too much; were we not sowing the seeds of future wars?
The discussion seldom continued to be academic, and the peace school by its furtiveness and timidity invited persecution, as does the mild urchin at school who never stands up for himself and becomes a legitimate target for his fellows' kicks. Early in December there was much talk of the American "peace-kite." President Wilson had been re-elected, his hands were free, and for four years he could mould the policy of the United States without fear of an election. It was said that his patience was nearing its limits, that he was ready to break off diplomatic relations with Germany and that the "peace-kite" was a last attempt to arrive at terms of settlement before deciding to plunge his country into war.
The rumours of peace discussions and possible terms produced an immediate repercussion in London and developed a greater intensity of political feeling than had been known since the war began. There was said to be a peace-party in the Cabinet; the blunders and catastrophes of more than two years were set down to the malevolence of Ministers who had been driven to war against their will and were only anxious for an immediate end, even if such an end meant victory for the enemy; I heard once again Lady Maitland's confident assertion that the Government was in German pay.... There could be little academic discussion in such an atmosphere, and the one public attempt which I heard Bertrand make was literally shouted down.
"All I say," he kept repeating one night at Ross House, "is that I see no reason why we should be successful in 1917, when we've failed in 1916. I may be wrong; I don't pretend to have sufficient data. I only warn you that in six months' time you may have to accept worse terms than you could get now—with a balance of half a million or a million lives the wrong way. That's a big responsibility."
"You'd let Germany keep all she's got," Lady Maitland asked, "as an instalment?"
"Germany's broken, as it is," Bertrand answered. "She can never make good her losses and she'd gladly discuss terms. But, good Heavens! even if we didn't accept the terms, there's surely no harm in discussing them!"
Maitland shook his head sagely.
"When I'm dealing with the burglar who's collared my silver," he said, "I prefer not to argue until he's divested himself of what I believe is called the swag."
"You may prefer not to. Can you enforce your preference?" Bertrand asked rather curtly.
"Then let's go down fighting," Lady Maitland proposed valiantly.
"With great submission, a live dog's better than a dead lion," said Bertrand. "I've so much faith in the potentialities of my country that I want to preserve her."
Lady Maitland turned on him with unaffected ferocity. "If you make peace now, you'll disgrace her!" she cried. "We shall never be able to hold up our heads again!"
Young Lady Loring, who was between Bertrand and me, was no less strong.
"Uncle Bertrand, you can't be serious!" she exclaimed. "We should be faithless to those who've died, if we didn't hold on. I—I would sooner have my husband killed a second time than go back on the dead!"
Her intensity of feeling caused a stir, followed by an embarrassed pause. Maitland brought it to an end by shaking his head good-humouredly.
"I say, Oakleigh, old man, if I may say so, you oughtn't to talk like that, you know. You're a man in a responsible position, people quote what you say. It produces a devilish bad impression."
My instinctive sympathy is always with the minority, and I came mildly to Bertrand's support.
"I agree with Oakleigh to this extent," I said. "All of us here are either women or men over military age. We ought to check the easy impulse to make other people fight to the bitter end."
"You won't hear any peace-talk at the Front," interposed Maitland. "I've just come back from G.H.Q., you know."
Bertrand gave a snort of impatience.
"You won't find people lighting pipes in high-explosive factories," he answered. "It's against the rules. At the present time the policy of the war is dictated by people who can't conceivably be sent to carry it out. Stornaway's quite right. We fat old men sit at home and water the fields of Flanders with other people's blood. We say that, if they don't go on to the bitter end, there'll be another war in ten years. It's wrong, and we've been wrong every day we've gone on after we shewed the Germans that they couldn't overrun Europe at will. I went through the phase of dismembering Germany, deposing the Kaiser, commandeering the Fleet."
There was an unfortunate note of intellectual superiority in his voice, as though he alone had waded through the depths and shallows of folly and was at last (and alone) on dry land. His reward was immediate interruption by a chorus from every quarter of the table at once.
"Perhaps if you'd had a brother in solitary confinement for eight months because he called the guard a Schweinhund, which was the only word they'd given him a chance of learning——" began little Agnes Waring on my left with considerable heat.
"You wouldn't stir a finger to avenge Belgium?" demanded Lady Maitland.
"Oakleigh! Oakleigh!" her husband expostulated. "You're too old to fight yourself; for God's sake don't damp the ardour of those who can, those who'll go on till they've dictated their own peace terms—in—Berlin," he ended proudly.
As the chorus subsided for want of breath, Frank Jellaby, who was now one of the Liberal Whips in the Coalition, allowed his incisive, nasal drawl to rise and dominate the table.
"The trouble about you, Oakleigh, is that you go through so many phases; we poor, benighted folk can't keep up with you. There was a phase—quite a long one, for you—when any war with Germany was impossible, unthinkable. Didn't you run a paper to prove it? When the war came, someone twitted you in the House, and you made a personal statement—and a pretty complete recantation. You've been wrong here, wrong there.... If I may put it quite brutally, how are we to know you're not just as wrong now, how soon may we expect another personal statement?"
"Have all your prophecies been right?" Bertrand enquired.
"What prophecies have I made?" was the bland and temporarily safe rejoinder.
It was the one articulate effort which I heard at this time to determine the limits of military effort. It was derided and drowned; and from that—as we had to go on fighting—there was a short and easy road to criticism of present methods.
"We've put our hands to the plough," said Maitland placatingly, when the ladies had left us. "We can't turn back, Oakleigh. And I'm afraid I believe that the biggest trial's still ahead of us."
"And you're satisfied we shall come out of that any better?" Bertrand answered. "Your experience of the war leads you to expect that? God knows, the men don't lack courage or sticking-power, but can you find them generalship?"
"We must go on till we do."
Bertrand smoked for some moments in a reflective silence.
"It's a curious thing," he observed at length, "that a war of this size hasn't thrown up a single soldier of first-rate genius."
Maitland, for all that he had made the cleanest possible job of an Afghan raid and was now counter-initialling minutes in an extension of the War Office, took the criticism as personal.
"That is precisely what the soldiers say of you politicians," he retorted.
"The soldiers' job is to understand warfare and run a war," Bertrand propounded.
"The statesman's job is to govern," Maitland retaliated. "That's just what the Cabinet doesn't do and just what you M.P.'s don't make it do."
In the altercation which followed I listened to Maitland and watched Jellaby. The first acted as a barometer to mark the variations of average, prejudiced, unthinking opinion; it was the business of the second to follow the daily movement of the barometer. I did not need a second look at Jellaby to know that he was worried. He and I had talked in odd half-hours at the House about the possibility of attaining the objects for which we had entered the war; when our prospects were far brighter, Jellaby had been more rationally despondent, and I chose to think that his attack on Bertrand was an inspired attempt to suggest that any consideration of peace was at present out of the question and that a hard-pressed Government had better use for its time and energies than debating-society resolutions. He made no defence or comment, however, when Maitland developed a damaging attack on the Cabinet, and I fancied that he could not speak without indiscretion. Whether the Press reflected the public or the public reflected the Press, there was a widespread feeling that an ungainly cabinet of twenty-two talked incessantly and decided nothing, that countries were overrun and opportunities thrown away, because no one acted in time and that, paralysing as this collective lethargy so often and so tragically proved, it was still no check on the spasmodic and misdirected energy of individual members. Bertrand was one of a school which scented Press intrigue in every political development, but, as Grayle was credited with having said, "A Government which can't down Northcliffe can't down the Germans."
Of Grayle I saw nothing at this time, though a fresh crop of rumours told me that he was engaged once more on the task which he had begun a year and a half before, after the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Watchful friends discovered him slipping in and out of the houses of Unionist ministers; there were tales of informal gatherings and chance week-end meetings at Brighton or on Shannon Wood golf-course.
"He wants a new coalition under Lloyd-George," Bertrand explained, "but the Tories aren't nibbling. You see, there's no popular cry that they can put up. George is at the War Office; if he and they can't make their will effective, they'd better resign like Carson, they mustn't proclaim their own impotence by whimpering. But they can't resign on the ground that the war's being mismanaged, because they're jointly and severally responsible for the mismanagement. There's no issue."
Later on he talked to me with a mixture of resignation and disappointment.
"If the Government falls, it will be simply because it doesn't know its own strength. It runs away every time anyone shakes a stick at it; it never says, 'Turn us out and be damned!' Meanwhile its authority is being sapped daily.... It's the old complaint I brought against it for eight years before the war. Ministers are so high and mighty that they never remember who it is that keeps 'em in power. 'Never explain, never complain!' It won't do! For months the Press has been urging that something must be done to raise fresh drafts after the Somme slaughter, that food prices must be controlled, that Ireland can't be left where she is. The Government goes about like Caesar's wife.... And everyone thinks it's doing nothing, and where should we be without Lord Northcliffe? And give us a Man! I don't know when or where the break will come, but I hear most ominous cracks."
The break came—unexpectedly, so far as I was concerned—in the first week of December. I say "unexpectedly," because I have yet to discover why the Government did not fall three months earlier or endure until three months later. Bertrand, who took on a new lease of life when the days of crisis approached, told me that the point of cleavage was the question whether more troops should be sent to Salonica. True or false, this was obscured by an ultimatum in which the Secretary of State for War called for a Merovingian War Cabinet in which the Prime Minister was to have no place.
As I walked home from my office, the contents bills bore the legend, "England's Strong Man to Go." George Oakleigh and one or two others were dining with me, and by the time that I was dressed the news was being shouted in the streets that the Government had resigned. I suppose that I am as near to an Independent as the caucuses and the House of Commons will allow, but, though I had opposed the old Liberal administration in fully half of its measures, I felt a sentimental regret that the long rule was over. It closed an epoch to me at a time of life when I did not want to close epochs.
"I had four years of it at the beginning," said George unenthusiastically. "I'm afraid that in my youth and inexperience I hoped more of it than it was capable of giving. And I was rather glad to be out when the war came along. Beresford's quite right, you know; for seven or eight years the fate of this country was in the hands of three or four men who accepted our support and never gave us an inkling where they were taking us. Are all political rank-and-filers treated as cavalierly as we've been? It goes on right to the end. The Coalition came into existence without consulting the Liberal Party and now it's gone out—every bit as much on its own. You and I don't know why; there was no vote, no trial of strength. Nobody can say how many supporters anyone else can claim; there isn't even the usual man who's defeated the Government for the King to send for. They have treated the party like dirt! Now it remains to be seen whether an alternative Government can be formed."
That night and for a day or two afterwards London was filled with a greater political excitement than I can ever remember at any other time. Bertrand told me that, in the interests of governmental and national unity, there had been a disposition to accept the terms of the ultimatum, but that a majority had decided that here at least a stand must be made.
"Now you simply must tell me what's happening!" young Deganway exclaimed when I met him dining late at the Club. "Bonar Law's been sent for, as you know, but I hear he's told the King he can't form a Government. That leaves only George. How much life do you give him? Three weeks? I want you to say three weeks, because I've got a fortnight bet on the other way with a man in the War Office and I'm rather inclined to hedge."
The next day it was announced officially that Mr. Bonar Law was unable to form a Government and that the King had sent for the Secretary of State for War. There was fresh furious speculation how short a time would suffice to shew that he would fail, as his predecessor had failed, but the speculation was incommoded by the intrusion of fact. Bertrand informed me that the Prime Minister-Elect had struck a bargain with Labour, but that the Liberal and Unionist members of the Coalition were refusing to serve under a man who had slain his master. I next heard that the Unionist attitude was modified, that it was felt the King's Government must be carried on, that pressure had been brought....
"Of course, when once the rot sets in!" cried George Oakleigh, when we met by the tape-machine at the Club. He was undisguisedly disappointed, which was interesting. For eight or nine years I had heard from him plain and bitter criticism of the Government, but the old faith in his political idols had survived unexpectedly to make him forget the war and become the most excited of partisans. No terms were too strong to describe the treachery which had laid the Government low; his new-born good-will towards the dead Ministry was only exceeded by his blind antagonism to any alternative. "There was a day when Lloyd George could not get a man near him; then the Tories began to rat and everyone tried to elbow his way in before his neighbour.... He'd got the liver in his pocket, everyone was afraid of being left out, the doors of the War Office weren't wide enough to let them all in. This latest development has rather disgusted me with politics. I shouldn't have minded, if it had been an ordinary peace-time political intrigue. I suppose I've been hoping for a higher standard since the war ... gratitude—things of that kind. How are you going to vote, Stornaway? Bertrand keeps saying that he must support the de facto Government. Is that your view?"
"I want to see the de facto Government first," I said.
"You've an intelligent anticipation here," he answered, handing me a copy of the "Night Gazette." "Sir John Woburn can be relied on to have good stable information."
The first page of the paper contained a streaming headline—"Do It Now" or "Wait and See?" Underneath came an obviously inspired forecast of the new ministry with the old Unionist and Labour members back in place as to some eighty per centum of their numbers; the old Liberal office-holders were collectively abstaining, and their place in the party scale was filled by consequential nobodies and by the leaders of the Liberal "ginger group."
"If they've got rid of the brains, at least they've kept the dead-heads," George observed. "I don't see stability or long life here, Stornaway. Everyone knows that Woburn and the Press Combine turned the Coalition out, and now, before a single name has been submitted to the King, the Press Combine's at work devouring its own child. The new Ministry's too much tarred with the brush of the old, Balfour and Robert Cecil and the less featherbrained are to be pushed out of their offices some time before they get into them. It's going to be a very clean sweep."
I heard later that the attack on the elder Unionist statesmen was abandoned on the day when the Unionist party threatened to withdraw its support from the new Coalition unless newspaper attacks on its members ceased immediately.
"Is Grayle included?" I asked, as George drew an expressive finger down the draft list.
"He gets a new Ministry of Recruiting. At least, when I say that he gets it," George corrected himself, "this is quite unofficial, of course. He's suggested for it."
"I wonder if he'll get it," I said.