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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 493.-JULY, 1927.

Art. 1.—MR CHURCHILL AS HISTORIAN.

The World Crisis, 1916-1918. By the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill, C.H., M.P. Two vols. Thornton Butterworth, 1927.

THE story of war has fascinated mankind in all ages. The characteristics and the fate of great nations can be traced in pages which record shining deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice, brilliant examples of devoted patriotism, masterpieces of naval and military achievement, and failures pregnant with warning. The glamour which once illumined the battlefield on sea and land seems to have faded. Science has provided death-dealing weapons operating with mass effect in forms which appal the imagination. At the same time detailed descriptions, vivid and terrifying, are now widely disseminated, tending to cause war in general to be regarded as the worst of human evils, unnecessary and to be avoided at any cost. We know only in rough outline what happened at Salamis. The tragedy of the battle cruisers at Jutland has been painted in words that all can understand, and photographs now enable us to visualise disaster. The prolonged horrors which accompanied the retreat of the Grand Army from Moscow in 1812 are in great part shrouded from our eyes; but the sufferings of our magnificent troops in the paralysing mud of the trenches in Flanders and in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia have been brought home to us, and will haunt the memory of at least one generation. Internationalism being now in fashion, and Socialism being held up as the ideal which mankind must strive to attain, it is well to remember Voll. 249.-No. 493.

that Socialist theories, applied on the grand scale in Russia, have already caused a greater loss of human life, with suffering in more cruel forms, than the Great War.

How should history, including the history of war which, so far as we can see, mankind can never relegate to Saturn, be written? There is no agreement among the pandits; but a strain of fiction seems to be accepted as desirable. One authority has recently announced that, 'Even if truth has its uses, history is not the place for it.' Truth, however, still has its uses,' which democracies ignore, and if the past is to afford any teaching, it must find some 'place' in history. Mr Baldwin has shrewdly suggested that a certain measure of personal bias is necessary to make history tolerable to the general reader; but it is not easy to adjust the personal equation. Carlyle and Macaulay, in whose works bias was rampant, are eminently readable, and to the Duke of Wellington the latter appeared to be a master of his craft. Both have-irretrievably in many minds-injured the cause of truth.

The Great War stands out above all others in the intense complexity and novelty of its world-ranging operations, and in its revelation of the noblest qualities of the British peoples at the zenith of their capacity for united action and shared sacrifice. It is replete with records of gallantry never surpassed in our annals, and, as never before, to be lavishly found not only in the ranks of a professional navy and army, but among all classes of a whole nation in arms. It abounds with lessons of all kinds, going deeper than strategy and tactics to the political foundations of the State. All this and more must be faithfully registered lest we forget, even though half a century may be needed before the involved series of tremendous events can be placed in true perspective.

Mr Churchill's two final volumes complete a work in which the interest never flags. As a descriptive writer, he has few if any equals, and he paints alike men and happenings in vivid phrases which cling to the memory. His rhetoric is often dazzling, but here and there it strays dangerously near to the line at which bathos supervenes. There is bias in plenty, which leads to

judgments challenging criticism, while a far-ranging imagination induces speculations into the might-havebeens which, in war as in politics, may be barren of profit as well as misleading. In the first of these volumes, Mr Churchill goes back to the beginning of the War by recalling the wonderfully accurate forecast of General Michel in 1911 and his inspired plan of campaign, which were ruthlessly rejected by French military opinion. The Schlieffen plan had come to maturity before this time and was being perfected in detail by the Germans; but the French General Staff did not believe that Germany would make a turning movement through Belgium, certainly not through Northern Belgium,' and the 'offensive school,' led by Colonel Grandmaison, settled down to Plan XVII, which proved totally unsuited to the conditions in August 1914, and has since been riddled by French criticism. General Michel fell, and the execution of this disastrous plan rested with General Joffre, whose capacity Mr Churchill somewhat underrates, because he had never commanded an army nor directed ground manoeuvres even in a War Game,' though he possessed qualities which fitted him to render most useful service to the various fleeting French administrations which preceded the conflict.'

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Thus, at the start, political considerations deflected the course of the terrific Battle of the Frontiers,' and, as the older Moltke laid down, mistakes in the first dispositions of the troops cannot be remedied. In spite of what Mr Churchill calls almost fatal errors' on our side, the Schlieffen plan miscarried, and Paris was saved, partly by the timely retreat of General Lanrezac and Sir John French and partly by the dramatic intervention of General Galliéni, but also by certain mistakes of the German General Staff. The immediate and critical situation was relieved; but the French lost nearly 330,000 men, including a great part of the flower of their regular army, expended in most gallant attacks, badly directed though heroically led, against overwhelming numbers. The victory of the Marne, followed by the German retreat, blinded us to some important facts by which the whole course of the War was prejudiced, and Mr Churchill rightly states that 'the magnitude and terror' of the tremendous Battle of the Frontiers 'is scarcely

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