by-day conduct of the war in the War Cabinet, and in the War Councils of the Allies of which he was so keen a promoter; and he spoke comparatively seldom in the House of Commons save at critical moments, or in order to give Parliament from time to time an authentic statement of the progress of the national cause. But he took upon himself the duty of heartening and in- spiriting the nation, and made, as occasion served, eloquent ap- peals to his countrymen, sometimes by letters and messages, sometimes by speeches in the City of London or in big towns. In these he constantly sounded that note of sacrifice which had been the text on which he had preached in the first of his great war orations, in the City Temple in the autumn of 1914. Thus in Carnarvon in Feb. 1917 he appealed for support to the Govern- ment in men, money and labour, in the sacrifices of conveniences and even of comforts. In order to win, Britons must endure more. In the past the sacrifices had been too much relegated to the trenches. He appealed to housewives to see, each one in her own home, that not an ounce of food was eaten beyond the amount laid down by Lord Devonport, the Food Controller. Those who were doing nothing should do something; those who were doing something should do more and all should do their best. Every- one who had got enough land to grow a potato or a cabbage must use it for that purpose. If train services were inconvenient and fares increased, people should remember that the limitation of railway facilities helped the army in France. At Dundee in July he urged the cheerful acceptance of restrictions which, he de- clared, could not yet be regarded as privations. In a message to the nation at the beginning of the critical last year of war, he wrote:
The sacrifices which the men and the women also are making at the front we all know. Despite all that they have gone through, they are still facing frost and mud, privation and suffering, wounds and death, with undaunted courage, that mankind may be freed from the tyranny of militarism and rejoice in lasting freedom and peace. No sacrifice that we who stay at home are called to make can equal or faintly approach what is daily and hourly demanded of them. So long as they are called upon to endure these things let us see to it that we do not take our ease at the price of their sacrifice.
He appealed during this year to Labour men to surrender the pledges given them about recruiting, to farmers to concentrate on potato-growing, to women to abandon a life of ease and come upon the land, and to munition workers to remember their exemption from the dangers of the front and not imperil the national cause by wanton strikes.
At the same time he never failed to proclaim that victory could be won if all did their best and maintained a stout heart. At the Guildhall in Jan. 1917 he told his hearers that the feeling of the Allies at their recent conference in Rome was that if victory was difficult defeat was impossible. The Allied peoples were looking more and more to Great Britain. She was to them like a great tower in the deep: the hope of the oppressed and the de- spair of the oppressor. While there was much, he told the people of Carnarvon in Feb., in the existing state of affairs especially the " piratical devices " of the German submarine to cause anxiety, he had never had any doubt of ultimate victory; neither had he any doubt that, before we reached it, there were many broad and turbulent rivers to cross which the nation must help to bridge. Even at the period when the losses from submarines were greatest, he refused to be daunted and reassured the coun- try by his confidence in the Admiralty's plan of defence, and in the adequacy of the food supplies. He constantly declared that British difficulties were declining while those of the enemy were augmenting. He welcomed, in April, the entry of the United States into the war as not merely a vindication of the character of the struggle as a great fight for human liberty, but also as an assurance that the war would be effective and successful and would result in a beneficent peace. In her, he said in Oct., the Central Powers had to deal with a country of infinite resources that had never yet been beaten. He set her advent against the defection of Russia, which was a bitter disappointment to him, as he had hailed her revolution as a sure promise that the Prus- sian military autocracy would, before long, be overthrown, and as he clung, till the establishment of Soviet government in Oct.,
to the hope that the demoralization of her armies was not beyond repair. Still, although his war plans and those of the Allies, which had been based on the assumption that the Germans would have to retain large forces on the eastern front, were ruined by her ces- sation of fighting, he could point in Dec. to the number of battles fought during the year on the western front in which the Ger- mans had been beaten, and to the prestige which British arms had won by the capture of Bagdad and Jerusalem.
The critical situation produced by the rapid and victorious German advance in March 1918 called forth all his energy. He had already largely coordinated Allied military operations by means of the Supreme War Council at Versailles; he now, through his colleague, Lord Milner, secured a unity of military command at the front. He sent immediately across to France a large portion of the home defence force it was complained with some justice that he should have reenforced Sir Douglas Haig with these troops some weeks earlier; he effected a further drastic comb-out from essential industries; he introduced in Parliament a man-power bill of excessive stringency; he sent his most capable and vigorous colleague, Lord Milner, to the War Office; he was urgent with the American authorities to hurry up as many of their troops as possible into the fighting line. The situation was saved, owing mainly to the skilful strategy of Gen. Foch and to the magnificently efficient fighting machine into which Sir Douglas Haig had converted his armies. Accordingly, Mr. Lloyd George could assure the Empire, in a message on the fourth anniversary of the war in Aug., that although the battle was not yet won, yet, thanks to the extraordinary bravery of all the Allied armies, the prospects of victory had never been so great. All that was wanted was to "hold fast."
Mr. Lloyd George was reproached by his critics with too great a disposition to encourage and strengthen the various subsidiary fronts, such as Mesopotamia, Palestine, Salonika and Italy, at the expense of the western front, where the struggle must mainly be decided; and in this and other respects to overrule, on ques- tions of what may be called the higher strategy, the decisions of his military advisers. If that be so, he might plead the example of Chatham; and at any rate the eventual and dramatic success of what were called derisively " side-shows " contributed not a little to the downfall of the Central Powers. He was also charged with reducing his colleagues to ciphers, and acting as a dictator rather than a first minister. The loyalty with which he was served by eminent men who had been formerly in sharp antag- onism to him is sufficient to show that his colleagues recognized that he assumed no more authority than was inevitable when the State was in danger. But undoubtedly the system of a Supreme Council of the Allies represented by their Prime Ministers, which he helped to establish in war and which continued for a while in peace, tended to enhance his authority and position, and in particular to reduce the importance of his Foreign Minister. Moreover, it was impossible for him and his colleagues not to realize that it was preeminently in him, after Lord Kitchener's death, that the British nation and Empire trusted to bring them safely through the war. He never contemplated, or allowed the country to consider conceivable, any other termination of the war than a fight to a finish. He would not palter either with any of the insincere or inadequate German overtures, with President Wilson's early formula of "peace without victory," with the Russian phrase "no annexations and no indemnities," or with Lord Lansdowne's negotiated peace; he insisted on eliminating the doctrine of the "freedom of the seas" from President Wil- son's Fourteen Points. He steadily pressed for the war aims originally laid down by Mr. Asquith, though, an idealist himself, he expressed them in terms agreeable to idealists, such as Presi- dent Wilson and the loftier spirits among the Labour men. On the publication of Lord Lansdowne's letter he made his position clear. It was not the extreme pacifist, he said, who was the dan- ger, but the man who thought there was a halfway-house be- tween defeat and victory. To end a war entered upon to enforce a treaty, without reparation for the infringement of that treaty, merely by entering into a new and more comprehensive treaty, would indeed be a farce in the setting of a tragedy. " To stop
