Still, he felt it his duty, as a citizen and a Minister, to run all the risks of personal misunderstanding that might arise from honest and vigorous expressions of his own mind. For, rightly or wrongly, he took a very serious view of the situation at the end of 1914. He felt his responsibility all the heavier for the knowledge which he possessed. The British public were looking only at the splendid achievements of our armies in the West. What they did not see was the heavy thundercloud in the East—the great German armies gathering themselves for a mighty, tigerish spring on to some of the fairest provinces of our great Eastern Ally.
Here was the loss side to this account—the achievements in the East of those German divisions which had been withdrawn from the advance on Paris, and had left their diminished armies to fall back on the Marne.
Mr. Lloyd George refused to regard those defeats of the Russian armies as inevitable. He would never consent to be a fatalist. He represented the vigorous energy of the Western man—eager and insistent to strive against the shocks of fortune.
Frankly he was not content with the measures taken to grip the situation. He did not feel that any military plans were being considered adequate to face the perils that threatened us. He was unhappy and dissatisfied with the plans he knew of; he felt little confidence that others would be devised more fit to avert these perils.
It was at this time that he first suggested day-to-day sittings of the War Committee for the conduct of the war. It was the first appearance of that proposal for a small War Cabinet which afterwards developed so stormily from the stress and travail of the war. Not before three years of trying the old bottles was the new wine to find a vessel fit for its feverish ferment.
During the Christmas holidays Mr. Lloyd George carefully surveyed the situation. With the opening of 1915 this is how he saw it.
Russia was in danger of a blow at the heart. In the West the military situation had reached a deadlock[[63]]; and it was not yet physically possible that the armies at this time raised by us should drive back the German invader in any time that then seemed reasonable from the North of France and Belgium. On those lines the war seemed certain to last a very long time, though not even he at that time cast his eyes beyond the historic three years fixed by Lord Kitchener. He wished, at all possible costs, to avoid a long war.
Looking across Europe, he asked himself—Was there not some alternative way? Some road to a quicker ending of this world-agony?
He found it in the Near East, at that point where the Teuton power touched the Danube, and was still at that time held back by the heroic resistance of the Serbians.
The plan that framed itself in his mind was to combine the Balkan States—to revive the Federation—to send a great British army to their help, and attack with these combined forces—perhaps amounting to 1,000,000 men—the Eastern flank of the Central Powers.