It was also that Mr. Lloyd George, in his great munitions campaign, took so many ideas from the French and realised in a moment, across the gulf of language, the extraordinary swiftness and power of the French mind, their amazing courage and capacity in enterprise and organisation. We have seen how, early in the war, he sat at the feet of the French Socialist Minister, M. Albert Thomas; and how, at the Boulogne Conference of June, 1915, he learned from the French gunners. It would be foolish to pretend that Mr. Lloyd George talks French very well. But he has learnt to understand their spoken language when it is uttered by masters like M. Briand and M. Thomas.
But it was not till 1916 that Mr. Lloyd George stood out to the French with a bright, particular light of his own. Amid the doubts and hesitations of their own politicians they caught a glimpse of a man across the Channel who dared to lead—who ventured to tell the people the unpleasant truths, and to direct them to unpleasant duties.
“A speaker full of free and generous inspiration,” says M. Georges Leygues in the Evènement of July 7th, 1916, greeting his appointment to the Ministry of War, “he never fails in his perception of realities, and he goes straight to the fact. Passionate interpreter of the soul of his people, which he knows so well in all its phases—living incarnation of the ardent Welsh race, he enjoys a real ascendency over the masses. He can make them understand and accept the length of the effort necessary to shake that which most offends the proud people of the West—that boastful and brutal barrack-yard spirit under which the German military caste designed to bring the free mind of the world.”
In December, 1916, during the great ministerial crisis which led to the Lloyd George Premiership, these French writers saw far more clearly than the journalists of London what was at stake. In London, on both sides, the writers and politicians were too much absorbed in the personal and party issue—they regarded it too much as a conflict of newspaper “combines.” In France, on the other hand, the journalists all realised that the difference turned round great issues—great questions of method in the conduct of the war. Here is what that great journal, Le Temps, wrote on December 7th, 1917:
“The English ministerial crisis is just a conflict, at an acute stage, of two principles and methods of government. One represents the normal maintenance of traditions, or rather of conventions, which have stood the proof of long administration—the ordinary march of the governmental machine. According to this view, that machine can give us its full value, if only all its wheels are strengthened without being modified. The other view holds that there must be new simplifications of the machinery. The driving power must be organised and concentrated in one control—and that a control of energy. The time of good intentions has passed. This is no longer an affair of ‘Wait and see.’ Mr. Lloyd George takes his stand clearly and simply on the side of decisive action.”
The Temps was not alone. Philippe Millet, writing in L’Œuvre on the same day, showed that he had a glimpse of the same issue:
“It is necessary to look beyond the conflict of persons. Then one discovers a practically unanimous desire to constitute at last a true War Government. What England has in her mind is the formation of a sort of Committee of Public Safety.”
England, he perceived, had become more revolutionary than France.
“Conscription had made a greater change in England because it was in itself a revolution. Beginning later than ourselves, the English have taken on the habit of changing their political organisation at great speed and as fast as the war compels them; and their acquired pace is probably in this stage superior to ours. It is in England rather than in France that one sees at this moment the spirit of Carnot reviving.”
Here surely was a very profound political observation. With the same keenness of insight M. Clemenceau, writing on July 1st, 1917, in L’Homme Enchaîné, saw in Mr. Lloyd George a great political experimentalist adapting his course always to the actual events of the war: