French said of Sir Douglas Haig (11, 10), and yet not be a competent staff officer; but a competent staff officer must be a soldier. Haig was both. Wilson was only the one. There was a gulf between them. They were forever estranged by Wilson's preoccupation with civil government and his magisterial function as a teacher of young men in the Staff College, by which he lost sight of the executive duties proper to a staff officer. A man may be a professor, and have no experience in the application of the principles he professes to teach. With the profound instinct of the Army the instructors in the Staff College were classified as professors. But a professor must have for his function a subject that is a science, and War is not a science in the sense that the theory can be divorced from the practice. Sir Henry Wilson was a professor of war; he was an inveterate lecturer with pointer, maps, and diagrams. Three years before the War began, he gave a course of instruction to the Cabinet. He laid out the forces of the triple and dual alliances on the frontier: he put all his big maps on the wall, and lectured for an hour and three-quarters. He was profoundly dissatisfied with Grey and Haldane; they had no grasp of the subject; but he was rather hopeful of Winston (1. 99). In any case, England was not so unprepared for war in 1914 as many critical persons have assumed. The Cabinet had had lectures, but unfortunately the professor was wrong in his thesis.

An entertainment that pleased this Instructor in Strategy was 'playing a war game,' but he never had full scope for the exercise until he went to Versailles. There he had one half his young men represent the allies and the other half the enemy. He played the game for Sir William Robertson, and showed him the maps besides. He was a good deal knocked about by all this' (II, 51). The Americans were even more affected. Bertie Studd and Hereward played the game for them, and they were immensely struck by the whole thing. Bliss told me that we had made out an overwhelming case for America helping us with every single man possible in every possible shape. So,' he concludes, 'we did a good morning's work' (II, 53). But wars are not won in this way.

At every crisis of the War he was ready with a paper;

and these papers were written with the facility of a professor and the lucidity of a mathematician, who, as one of themselves has said, begins by assuming a set of illusions from which fresh illusions are developed. His most comprehensive paper is on the Dardanelles (1, 215). Let the Dardanelles be forced, it begins, 'a by no means difficult operation, if gun and rifle fire are not too great.' The events that may' follow then pour out like items from a machine. The paper on the Western Front is equally convincing: To break the German line is not only an operation of war, but a certain operation of war, given sufficient troops and sufficient ammunition' (1, 215). His most elaborate strategy was propounded in a paper written on Oct. 21, 1918, in which he 'showed that if Turkey gave in, and we had free access to the Black Sea, we could presently develop an attack from the Danube of 50-60 divisions, that this would knock out Austria, and then we could move into Germany from south and west and defeat the Boche armies on Boche territory' (11, 140). Sir Douglas Haig's plan seems much simpler, and it succeeded within the next few days. As Foch once said to him, 'Mais, mon cher Wilson, nous sommes militaires pas avocats.'

There are different ways of arriving at the same end. In the War two opinions developed. The soldiers, like Haig and Robertson, favoured the Western Front. All others believed that a decision could be reached in

6

other areas. These two opinions were in direct opposition, since the forces available did not permit the double experiment being tried. Sir Henry Wilson held both opinions at the same time. On March 17, 1915, he wrote as clearly as Haig or Robertson could have written (1, 215), The way to end this War is to kill Germans and not Turks. The place where we The place where we can kill most Germans is here, and therefore every man and every round of ammunition we have in the world ought to come here. All history shows that operations in a secondary and ineffectual theatre have no bearing on major operations, except to weaken the forces there engaged.' He soon lost sight of this principle, and adopted a contrary one, The Boche could not get a decision against us; we could not get one against him in the West; therefore we ought to try and knock out

the Turk (11, 52). How the Turk was to be knocked out was equally clear, We ought to push about like the devil in the Caucasus, and if possible push on in Palestine.'

His plan was to take troops away from France during the mud-months, and land them on the coast of Palestine' (II, 14). These five months of mud and snow from the middle of November to the middle of April during which we can do nothing,' he rubbed into' Lloyd George on Aug. 23, 1917 (II, 11). In the winter following, the Germans and Gough's Fifth Army discovered that March is not a mud-month when nothing could be done on the Western Front; Vimy Ridge had been carried in the first half of the previous April. This was one of the mad schemes of Lloyd George which terrified Haig and Robertson.' Most of Lloyd George's mad schemes originated in the great brains' (II, 2) of Henry Wilson. In October 1917, Lloyd George is mad to knock the Turk out during the winter on the plan I explained to him on Aug. 23, his difficulty being that Haig was hostile and Robertson was mulish, which he thought maddening. He wanted to know my advice. I repeated all I had said on Aug. 23, and expressed the strong belief that if a really good scheme was thoroughly well worked out, we could clear the Turks out of Palestine and very likely knock them completely out during the mud-months, without in any way interfering with Haig's operations next spring and summer' (II, 16). Had Haig been less hostile and Robertson less mulish, and the British army in Palestine rather than on the Western Front in March 1918, which was Wilson's 'mud-month next spring,' the War would have been lost.

Sir Henry Wilson had not the intellectual equipment of a strategist nor the educated intelligence that enables a real soldier to make war from a contour map and history. There is evidence that in school he was incapable of making much use of the books he had. He failed twice to pass for Woolwich, and three times for Sandhurst. In July 1884 he was entitled to examination for a direct commission, and on Oct. 16 his name appeared fiftyeighth on the list of successful candidates. Ill-luck in examinations dogged him; in March 1895 he failed to pass for interpreter in German. It can well be imagined how he would laugh off 'these mishaps when he came to

hold appointments that were largely concerned with military studies' (1, 2, 3, 4). But defeat in war cannot be laughed off. He never was a soldier in the sense of consorting directly with fighting men and being of them, excepting for a few months in Burma on frontier patrol. His service dates from December 1882, when he was gazetted lieutenant in the militia, known in those days as the back-door of the Army. In time he was promoted for India. This is a terrible upset,' he writes, 'went and saw Military Secretary, who is afraid nothing can be done.' A medical board gave him four months' respite (1, 15). In the interval 'he played a good deal of polo, and was generally galloping for some general' (1, 16). But he never went to India again. In South Africa he was a brigade-major, and upon his return entered the Intelligence Department of the War Office, but for a short time he did command a provisional battalion in Colchester.

He never looked war in the face, never looked upon a stricken field or felt the thrill of victory at the moment when it comes. There is not in the whole book the faintest fellow-feeling or sign of sympathy with those who are about to die, not a suggestion that the reality of war is in the front line and there alone. In all his fleeting and fugitive visits to France, he never penetrated beyond general headquarters. Even when he commanded a corps he does not confess to having entered a front trench even from motives of curiosity. Of the dark background of war, the regimental aid-post, the dressingstations, he appears to have known nothing. The dead, the dying, the wounded, the sick for him had no existence. He does not appear to have seen a single soldier and not an officer under the rank of major-general. War to him was like a game of chess.

Sir Henry Wilson's single adventure into the field of war is fully described in a chapter of twenty-eight pages, although the strictly military operations demand only six. He took over the IV Corps from Rawlinson on Dec. 22, 1915, south of Bethune, with 70,000 troops of all ranks. 'The enemy was comparatively quiet,' and on the last day of the year he found time to drive to St Omer to a dinner for General Huguet 'who made a charming little speech and kissed me on both cheeks.' Three days later

he went on leave to London, where he had interviews with a number of prominent people.' He returned to his command on Jan. 30, after nearly a month's leave, and found that one of his divisions in his absence had been transferred to another corps. The next incident occurs on March 12, when his headquarters were moved to Ranchicourt, a delightful château planted down in a fine park traversed by a trout stream.' At the end of April, he went on leave again, and nothing of especial interest occurred until May 20, when he took over from General Byng some line about the western slopes of the Vimy Ridge.' On this first day in that important area, he occupied himself by taking the Archbishop of Canterbury on to the Nôtre Dame de Lorette heights to watch the gun-fire. Those Germans had a curious prescience of these changes of command and even the very name of the new commander who came to oppose them. Next day the blow fell. Sir Henry 'could only get contradictory and unsatisfactory reports as to what had actually been happening in the front line. Only late at night did it transpire that 1200 yards of the trenches had been lost and the whole line thrust back 300 to 600 yards. Owing to the dust and smoke that obscured the view, some doubt has ever since existed as to the hour at which the assault was actually delivered, for no one from the doomed companies in the front line returned to tell the tale' (1, 283). Had Sir Henry Wilson been as disinterested a spectator as he was at Ypres, when the Canadians were assailed by gas, he would doubtless have considered this capture of Vimy Ridge another 'fine performance' on the part of the German staff; but he is not now so expansive. A nasty little knock' is his appraisal of the disaster (1, 283). Vimy Ridge was lost and remained lost until it was retaken by the Canadians in the following year.

For some mysterious reason, the corps commander found his troops drifting away. Early in the year the 16th Division was transferred. After the ineffectual attack' upon him at Vimy, two more divisions went, then two heavy batteries. Finally his corps went into reserve, with headquarters at Domart; but Wilson with his personal staff located themselves at the Château de Vauchelles, some little distance away; the corps for