HL Deb 16 November 1915 vol 20 cc359-86
LORD ST. DAVIDS

had the following Questions on the Paper—

To ask His Majesty's Government whether their attention had been called to a number of reports in the Press stating that during the recent fighting in France there had been man complaints as to failures in Staff work; and whether they could, with advantage, give any information as to the composition and numbers of the British Headquarters Staff in France, and of the Army and Divisional Staffs, and as to how they compare in numbers with the Headquarters Army and Divisional Staffs of the French Army.

To ask His Majesty's Government whether they have any information as to the numbers of the Headquarters Staffs, and also of the Army and Divisional Staffs in the German and Austrian Armies.

The noble Lord said: my Lords, I have two Questions on the Paper. I propose to address myself to the first and to reserve my right to put the second and say something about it if necessary later on, according to the course of the debate, if there is any debate, upon my first Question. I have been very slow to move in the direction of putting this Question on the Paper. I had thought of doing so a good many months ago, and looking back at what has happened I wish now that I had. But I want the House to understand that I have not put this Question until I have endeavoured, without discussing the matter in public, to remedy a state of things which appears to me to be wrong. I have delayed putting the Question down for a number of reasons. One was that a man who is living at home at ease does not like to take up the position of criticising to any extent men who are serving their country abroad and risking their lives. That, I think, is a natural feeling. But in my case it has been modified by observing from statistics that nowadays, what with Zeppelin raids and the Lighting Order, life in London is, I think, quite as precarious as any chance of serious casualties among the members of the Headquarters Staff in France. That is, at any rate, my observance of the casualty lists. At a very early stage in the war I often heard regimental officers say that the difference between the service of an officer on the Staff and of a regimental officer was that on the Staff you got fifty per cent. of the decorations and two and a-half per cent of the casualties, while the regimental officers got fifty per cent. of the casualties and two and a-half per cent. of the decorations. That was at a very early stage in the war. I think this state of things would be even more observable now

In my Question I call attention to a number of reports in the Press. I have always endeavoured in your Lordships' House to be as concise in my remarks as I can. I have a number of Press reports here, but unless the Government wish me to do so I will not occupy time in reading them. I did not begin to look for these reports immediately after the battle of September 25. If I had begun to take heed of them then, I should have had many more. But I have reports here all criticising Staff men in France, some very severely, some less severely. I have in my hand extracts from fourteen different newspapers—the Morning Post, the Daily Express, the New Statesman, the Glasgow Daily Record, the Naval and Military Record, the Scotsman, the Daily Telegraph, the Sussex Daily News, the Nation, the Liverpool Courier, the Globe, the Evening Standard, the Army and Navy Gazette, and the Daily Chronicle. It is a sufficiently varied list. What these extracts, if I may be allowed to sum them up in a nutshell, say is this-that our Staff in France is larger than any Staff in the world's history, and that the Staff has been built up very largely not on account of the military records of the men put on it, but from I family and other considerations. These newspapers allege that the Staff work has been bad, that over and over again victory has been stopped because of the badness of the Staff work.

But I would build up a case to-day not only upon what newspapers have said, I but upon what everybody in England is learning from his own friends who have been home on leave. I should say that with certain exceptions, which I will give, the reports of officers who have returned from abroad are practically unanimous. They make certain notable exceptions. Everybody who has spoken to me has said one thing—namely, that the com missariat is excellent. Every one has referred to that, and that, I think, is a very gratifying feather in the cap of the War Office. The commissariat has hardly ever broken down, and if it has it has probably been because a sudden movement of troops made its normal working almost impossible. As I say, all these officers praise the commissariat; and as regards some of the Staffs they have nothing but words of praise. I have never heard anything but praise for the Staff of the Guards' Division and for the Staff of Sir Douglas Haig. The men from the trenches tell you that the members of these two Staffs go to the trenches and know what is going on—they are soldiers. But as regards the Headquarters Staff, for months past I have not heard one soldier from abroad—and I know very many—say a good word of the Staff and its works. If any noble Lord thinks I have pitched this too highly, I would challenge him to do this. When this sitting of the House is over, I challenge him to ring up on the telephone the first half-dozen of his friends, taken at random, who have sons in the Army whose sons have been on leave, and ask what their sons say about the work of the Staff. If every member of the House did that I do not believe you would get even half-a-dozen reports that men on leave had said that the Staff work was satisfactory. That is the Army view; I am convinced of that.

That being so, I, who am a civilian and am confronted with this position of affairs and this practical unanimity of Army officers, ask myself, Why is it? I have seen one or two criticisms of my action. It has been said, "What is the good of putting this sort of question? Can it do any good with the Headquarters Staff? Can the Staff be changed?" These people take a pessimistic view. They seem to regard the Headquarters Staff of the British Army as if it were an act of God, as if it were a visitation like a plague, a thunderbolt, or an earthquake. It is not an act of God; it is the act of man. This Staff was made by man, and it was not made in the usual way. Most great Generals of modern times have tried to get a band of expert soldiers round them. What has happened in this case from the beginning of the war? I ought to give figures, but I cannot; I am asking the Government for figures. I cannot give figures because the usual methods of informing myself are not open to me, the Army List being no longer on sale. But I would observe this—and anybody who has read the Gazettes from the beginning of the war must know it—that you have had men crowded on the Staffs, men of rank, men of position, men of money. I am not going to say for a minute such an absurd thing as that men of rank amt position should not be on Staffs. Far from it. I know only too well the excellent, the magnificent work that men of rank and position are doing in this war, and the obligations we are under to them. I do not want my observations to be taken in that sense. The men I am alluding to are men who for years had been out of the Army. At the beginning of the war we saw many cases where men who had been in the Army for a few years and then had retired to take up polities, to take op business, or to amuse themselves in social life, who had had for years no experience of soldiering whatever, were crammed on to the Headquarters and other Staffs. Why was this done? Then you had other eases where men who had never been in the Army at all joined the Army at the beginning of the war and were put straight on to Staffs. You had other cases too, cases where men did not even join at the beginning of the war. There have been cases where men have only joined the Army in the last six months, men who had no burning patriotism that drove them in at the first minute, men who joined late: they, too, have been put upon Staffs.

When you see all that, are you not entitled to put two and two together and to say that these Staffs have been constituted as no Staffs in the world have ever been constituted before? And when you find that the result is bad—the result is admitted to be bad—are you not entitled to suggest that it may be no accident but simply a case of cause and effect? I would like to see an inquiry. It could be private if you wish, as private as ever you like, but it should be made. I would like to see any soldier at the War Office go through these Staffs one by one to find out how the men got there: and then I venture to say that no soldier, if he had to make a report upon his honour, could deny that numbers, large numbers, of men had been added to the Staffs for no military reason whatsoever. There are some things so ridiculous that one can hardly say them. I will tell you my own belief. If I were challenged to go through the list of Staffs with a soldier, I believe I could point to the names of one or two who had been put on for the most absurd reason you could think of—because they are men who could give you a good tip and give you a winner if you were racing. It seems incredible, but I believe it is absolutely true—they are men, at any rate, whose other qualifications are not outstanding—and that in itself, though it may be an estimable quality, does not seem to me to be a thing which entitles a man to be put upon one of the Staffs of His Majesty's Armies.

I am not going for a moment to say that there should not be a few men upon every Staff who did not need any military experience. I know as well as anybody that a General wants some aides-de-camp to run about and do his odd jobs, and that they may very well be young men of no military training and experience. But, after all, the number of men who can be wanted upon a Staff for purposes like that is very small. Therefore I ask the Government, What is the number on the Headquarters Staff; and what are the numbers on the other Staffs? As I said, the Army List is not published and one does not know, but I have been told that the number on the Headquarters Staff is 150 or 160. I have even been told they number 200, and I have heard people give still larger figures. At any rate this is information we are entitled to have, because a large body on a Staff means taking a very large number of men from the ordinary duty of soldiers. It means servants, grooms, chauffeurs being employed in looking after them. It means an army of clerks, if, indeed, these Staff gentlemen do any work at all. It means an absolute small army who might very well be employed in the trenches, especially when yon know that the one thing our Armies are short of is trained regimental officers. All these young men could be very useful in the trenches, and I venture to think that it is in the trenches they ought to be and not in a place of comfort and of safety.

In my Question I also ask how the numbers of this Staff of ours compare with General joffre's Staff. Our Army at the Front, we know, is not anything like so large as the French Army; yet I have been told—and my information is only what I have picked up from officers who have returned—that our Headquarters Staff is five or six times as large as that of General Joffre. If so, my Lords, and if the result is not good, surely we are entitled here to ask why. Then I have had a hint that I think is probably an uninformed one—that Sir John French did not have the choosing of his own Staff, that he is not responsible for the enormous number, whatever it may be, and that a great many of these people were forced upon him. I cannot think that this is the case. I put the suggestion with very great deference, not believing it to be true. I should like, however, to be told whether it is true or not; and, if anybody has forced people upon the Staff, who it is that did it, and why. Surely this is a matter that it was time should be raised. We are in the greatest, crisis the nation has ever gone through. We are pouring out our money as if it were water. We are losing the best of the young lives among our people, and we are entitled to give our men at the Front the best, the very best of everything this country can produce. They are entitled to the best arms, to the best munitions, and I think we ought to be grateful to the Government for the efforts they are making fully to equip our Army. They are entitled, as I say, to the best arms and to the best munitions. Are they not entitled, still more, to the assurance that in the directing force of the Army there should be the best brains the country can produce? That is what we want to see.

I know it has been said that at the beginning of the war you had not the Staff officers. At that time you had a little Army of under 200,000 men and only a trained Staff equal to that Army. You had not a Staff equal to cope with two millions of men or more; that is very true. But what I would point out is that these ornamental members of the Staff were added very largely in the first months of the war, when our Army was a tiny Army of under 200,000 men. Supposing the Government say they had not then enough trained Staff officers and had to put upon the Staffs a number of men who were untrained, am I not entitled to reply "At the beginning of the war you had very few Staff officers, but that is not the case now"? After all, what was Staff training? A man was taken from the Army and sent through the Staff College, where he was shown what was likely to happen in war and what he was likely to deal with. That, I take it, was the essence of Staff training. But you have had the finest school of war for fifteen months; you have had hundreds of regimental officers who have gone through that hard school for fifteen months, who have survived its dangers and learned its lessons. If at the beginning of the war there was a case for putting untried men on the Staff there is now no such case. To-day from the best of the regimental officers I am sure you could find the finest Staff that it would be possible to produce. Considering that now all the best young brains of the country are in the Army surely we can call upon the Government to use them.

I have to be shy of dealing with definite cases. I am a civilian. I do not claim any expert knowledge. I do not want to pose as an amateur strategist like many other people, or as a military expert, and what I have heard from officers from the Front—specific cases naturally—I cannot put before you with their authority and with their names. But here is a definite thing that I think the House ought to consider. In June last—ten months after the beginning of the war— our men in France, when they were not in the front trenches, were employed two or three nights a week digging a second line of defence only three or four hundred Yards from the German lines. Three or four hundred yards from the German lines our men were digging a second line of defence! Why was that not done eight months before? For eight months our men had been more or less on those lines. Surely we are entitled to ask that the men who direct our Armies at the Front shall use every reasonable caution. What is genius but an infinite capacity for taking pains? We know about the German lines. Our men broke through them the other day for from two to three miles. They had to get through three entirely separate lines of defence, and if they had gone on further we do not know how many more there were behind. What is the advantage of piling up line after line of defence? It means that the Germans are able, and have been able, to hold those lines of theirs with an inferior force. In France where we are opposed to the Germans we know that our Armies are more numerous than theirs, yet because they have built up these repeated lines they are able to hold us back with a smaller force. Are not we British civilians entitled to say that our Generals ought to have put us in the same position? Our Generals from the beginning ought to have said, "We may some day be in inferior force here as regards numbers; some day Great Britain may want to use her Army in other fields, and therefore we will build up line after line all the way, if necessary, to Calais." I say this, and I challenge the Government to answer it, that the fact that our commanders in France did not have even a second line as near as three to four hundred yards from the German trenches is a very grave case of neglect and typical of very much else that has happened in the management of our Army abroad.

There are one or two other matters upon which I will say only a word. One is this. A good many months ago, at the beginning of the war, it was stated that there were ladies visiting at the British Headquarters. The names were given in the papers at the time. Since then no names have appeared in the papers, but, if report is true, those visits then were not by any means the only ones. I am not going into that at length. I merely ask this question. Do the Government defend the presence of ladies at the Great Headquarters, the thinking machine, of the British Armies in France? I am not going to ask how many there have been—I only ask Aye or No, do you justify it, do you defend it? There never was a time when the debates in this House were as important or read with the same interest as they are to-day. I am very glad of it. This is the one place in Great Britain where you can put questions and get an answer; this is the one place in Great Britain where you can expose things that ought to be exposed. Therefore to that question I want the Government to say "Yes" or "No."

One thing more, and this I heard from a friend of mine on whose judgment and truthfulness I can absolutely rely—he is not and never has been a soldier; he is a civilian. Some three or four months ago he was visiting Army Headquarters on Army business and arrived early in the morning. He went round to the office with which he had to deal, but there was nobody there. He went round again, and nobody arrived at the office until just upon half-past ten. Some people came then, and they apologised for not being there before. They said that they were later than usual because they had been up very late the night before at bridge. And that is the Headquarters of the British Army in France! We are sending our sons out there to be commanded in the field and to risk their lives under the direction of men who act in that way. Is it not about time that some of these things that every regimental officer knows, that every regimental officer talks about, that every regimental officer tells his people about, were said in public? I think so, my Lords, and that is why I put down this Question to-day.

I would say this to the Government. Do they not think it is about time they gave our gallant Army a fair chance? A noble Lord with whom I very seldom agree, Lord Courtney, made a speech a few days ago in which he asked your Lordships, to put it shortly—I do not want to misrepresent him—to "throw up the sponge" on the first available opportunity, because, as he put it, both the German lines and the Anglo-French lines in France were unbroken and unbreakable. He thought that those lines were unbroken and unbreakable. What are the facts? On September 25 our gallant men broke the lines, all three of them—they were clean through them. There would have been a great victory. But there was bad Staff work; there were no reinforcements, and the whole thing fell through. The lines unbreakable? Why, they were actually broken. Pretty much the same thing in France has happened not once but several times. I ask, When are the Government going to take steps to stop it? Mr. Bonar Law, in the House of Commons yesterday, used a phrase which I have myself used in this House; he adopted it and made it his own. He said that in these times no Government could justify its existence unless it had success. He said it very markedly, and I was glad to read it. Ought not you to say the same thing, quite as markedly, about a General in the field? Do not you want success among your Generals even more than among your Statesmen? Over and over again you have had this gallantry of our soldiers and regimental officers—gallantry the world has never seen surpassed—and you have witnessed the whole of these efforts and results thrown away at horrible loss of life because of muddling in high places. I ask the Government this, Is it not about time that the efforts of these men should be recognised, that a General who is never successful should be removed, and that our men at the Front should be given a fair chance for life and for victory?

LORD NEWTON

My Lords, like everybody else I am quite aware of the fact that in the Press and elsewhere there has been unfavourable criticism of the Staff. I believe that this is by no means an uncommon phenomenon. At all periods of history there have always been irresponsible critics who are ready to find fault with the operations of armies in the field, and I expect that if the noble Lord were to search the columns of foreign newspapers he would find a certain amount of criticism—perhaps not quite so vigorous as his own—in French, in German, and in Austrian newspapers directed against the operations of the campaign as conducted by their respective Staffs. However, I am not going to undertake the defence of this body. There are noble Lords present who are far more capable than I am of dealing with the somewhat remarkable and sensational charges and allegations which have just been made, and I shall leave that task to them.

With regard to the Question that appears upon the Paper I am unable, for reasons which have been given already in the House of Commons, to disclose the numbers of the General Administrative Staff. But with regard to the other points I am able to inform the noble Lord that the Divisional Headquarters Staff consists of seventeen officers; that the Staff of an Army Corps Headquarters consists of twenty officers; and that the Headquarters of an Army consists of thirty-five officers. As to the second portion of the noble Lord's Question—that which deals with the numbers of the French General Headquarters Staff—that request has already been put in the House of Commons, and the Government, for reasons given at the time, found themselves unable to accede to it. But if the noble Lord likes to accept unofficial information from myself, I may tell him that when I visited the French Headquarters Staff at an early period of the war I inquired what the number of officers was, and I think I was told that the number approximated to 100. The noble Lord, however, must not take that figure as official, because it is quite possible that my information may not have been absolutely accurate. In any case the organisation and functions of the French General Headquarters Staff and our own are, I believe, in many respects entirely different.

VISCOUNT HALDANE

My Lords, it is always good that Parliament should be open for such criticism as is necessary for securing that affairs which have gone wrong are straightened out. But I cannot but regret that my noble friend should have launched the charges he has against the Headquarters of the British Army and the Field-Marshal Commanding in France without more adequate information than I think he possesses. He told us tales which came from newspaper correspondents and from officers who have come home and from all and sundry who have accumulated the mass of tales which always exist about an army in the field. I do not know of any campaigns of which I have read in which the kind of criticism to which we have listened to-night has not been constantly made. These criticisms are founded very largely upon a misunderstanding of what is the organisation in the field. I do not think that anybody should venture to criticise the arrangements of the Army in France who has not looked at the pattern upon which it is based—the pattern which is laid down in the Field Service Regulations. I will say a word about those in a moment.

I wish to point out, in the first place, that my noble friend seemed to have a very vague notion of the distinction between the Staff and the General Staff. If you go to that quiet little town in France which is the Headquarters of the British Army, as I have done more than once, you will find a certain number of officers who have had very little to do with military affairs in the early part of their life, and who are there to carry out the business and everyday administrative arrangements of the General Commanding-in-Chief. But if you walk a quarter of a mile away you will come to a plain building where the real staff of the Field-Marshal Commanding is at work. You will find there just about as competent a General Staff as anybody could wish to see, presided over by General Robertson, one of the most competent heads in any Army that is engaged in this great war, who has some twenty-four experts under him, many of whom I know personally to be about the best trained officers we have turned out in the last ten years.

It is quite true that we have suffered in this war from the want of an organised Staff, and by that I mean a General Staff, not what is commonly known as the Staff. The General Staff is an evolution out of the Staff which there has always been at the Headquarters of armies; it is an evolution which has taken place as the science of war has become more and more difficult and complicated. As armies have grown greater and the strategical problems have become more difficult and much more intricate, the General Staff has become a college of high priests trained to sit apart and work at these great problems of war. When we are comparing our Army with Armies that have had a General Staff for a hundred years or more, as is the case with the German Army, no doubt we have been at a disadvantage, and no doubt our disadvantage has been the greater because we have had to expend our Army in France to something like five times the size at which it started. But none the less there has been General Staff work of the highest order. The General Staff is composed of men who have had such a training as has fitted them for the work, and these men have been of the utmost value and have shown the most praiseworthy diligence in the war which is now going on. In the building of which I spoke just now, at the Headquarters of the British Army, there are, as I say, twenty-four or twenty-five of these extremely competent officers, not of the kind my noble friend has in his mind but men who have spent laborious days and nights in the study of their profession, and who have brought the training of the Staff College to great perfection by their own studies in the field. These men are the advisers at Headquarters of the Field-Marshal Commanding, and these are the men who constitute the real working Staff of the British Army.

It is all very well for people who have not the vaguest notion of the difference between a General Staff and the personal staff of the General or the Administrative Staff and the other Staffs there necessarily are to come home and tell the sort of things my noble friend has recounted to you to-night. These are people who do not know what to look for, and if the noble Lord had told you that any competent person had seen in the General Staff things of the character one would gather from my noble friend's speech to-night then I, for one, should have been very astonished, and should have felt bound to offer the strongest contradiction. What is true of the General Staff Headquarters is also true of the General Headquarters. A better Headquarters Staff than that in General Haig's Army I defy anybody to find. I doubt if there is a better in any Army. I doubt if there is a General who has more aptitude for General Staff work than General Haig and the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief; and if the General Staff works up to the level of the chiefs it would be of the most efficient kind in the field.

My noble friend, as I have said, has a somewhat vague notion of the relation of the different sections of the Army to one another. If he will read Part II of the Field Service Regulations, in that little book which anybody can buy in the shops for sixpence or a shilling, I forget which, he will find a description of the Army in the field which will enlighten him as to what to look for. The Field Service Regulations were finally completed by the General Staff, I think after some two years work, in 1910, and they govern the whole of the arrangements of the Staffs in the field. Under the plan of these Regulations, all that the Army Council does is to send in men, supplies, munitions, and the thousand and one things that an Army needs. They are sent in to be dealt with in the theatre of war in this fashion. There are three sections of the Staff of the General who will ultimately command in chief, three sections which are prepared for him in advance. There is the General Staff. Then there is his Adjutant-General, who looks after discipline and personnel. His relation to the General Staff is this. The General Staff makes the plans, advises the General, and prepares the operations; the Adjutant-General supplies the Army and the personnel required. Then the Quartermaster-General looks after the whole of the business concerned with supplies and the medical arrangements in time of war. Under these circumstances each of these great officers has his own Staff, and each Army commander has a Staff fashioned upon the same pattern, with the division in the General and Administrative Staffs. Over and above the whole of that there is the personal Staff of the General, his aides-de-camp, officers he has who must be there to entertain distinguished foreign officers who are coming to see him, to take people about, and look after things. And if you go to France you will find that it is such there as you will find in any Army. You will find always with the General Commanding-in-Chief a certain number of Staff Officers who are there for the very purpose of keeping the Commander-in-Chief free.

What does my noble friend think is the life of Sir John French? I will tell him from my own personal observation. He gets up at six o'clock every morning. He is at work with his General Staff from a very early hour. He then goes down to a conference with his officers at half-past nine, having been already at work in the morning. He is conferring with them when he is riding round a little later on. His day is spent in visiting troops over the large theatre of war or holding conferences with his Army commanders. He comes back in the afternoon for further conferences, and goes down again to Headquarters and holds long conferences up to dinner-time. He goes in to his dinner at a late moment and leaves early for yet further conferences, and then goes to bed at 11 o'clock to rise again at six o'clock the next morning.

As to the place where the officers were said to have been playing bridge and were late in the morning in consequence, I for myself do not recognise any such picture among the many Staffs I have visited at Army Headquarters. No doubt in every Army there are a certain number of people who are slack, but I am satisfied that this has not been the character of the Staffs we have in the British Army, who, remember, were carefully selected for this campaign, and who had worked and thought everything out in order that, in the event of war, they should fulfil the supreme conditions of an efficient Staff—readiness to take responsibility, the possession of initiative, and the ability to give counsel.

It is true, of course, that when you get to what one may call the subordinate Staffs you get less and less efficiency How are you to find adequate Staff officers for all the Divisions and Brigades that have come into existence during the war? It is impossible. The expansion of the Army has made it hopeless to do those things. In the year 1806 the German General Staff came fully into being. The German General Staff developed and enlarged the great War College for the training of the General Staff which was set up in Berlin and brought to perfection about that time. Ever since then they have been training General Staff officers and sending them into the Army to permeate the command and other kinds of Staffs. They have had a hundred years in which to do what we have been trying to do in ten years, and they have probably a very much larger proportion of men who have gone through the mill, so to speak; but we, although it has been done under a good deal of pressure, have been turning out progressively more each year of trained Staff Officers both for the General Staff and for the Administrative Staff. The result has been that, although we have been comparatively at a great disadvantage in the field owing to not having the large reserve of thoroughly trained Staff officers which foreign Armies have, we have still not been as badly off as people might conceive. No doubt it has been true that on the Staffs there have been a considerable number of people who have not been able to do the work as well as they ought to have been able to do it, and front no fault of their own, but because they did not have and could not have the opportunity of going through the proper training. These are the improvised Staff officers who have been called into being. But to generalise from mistakes which have been made through the absence of a sufficient number of thoroughly trained Staff officers is very unfair to an Army which has been tried as our Army has been.

My noble friend instanced two or three cases. The first was a very vague one—of trenches not being dug. He said the second line trenches should have been dug much earlier than June last. This is one of those questions which has to be decided upon the field and by the military experts. The only thing I am certain of is this. If the noble Lord thinks that any of the Army commanders, or the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, or the General Staff of the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief failed to realise what ought to be done because they did not go there, then I am sure he is mistaken. The Staff is moving about a good deal, and although in some Armies there has been much more visiting of the trenches than in others, in this case I am sure it was not through want of zeal that the work had not been done.

Then my noble friend spoke of September 25. He said there were no reserves ready to bring up. He is quite wrong. There were reserves ready, and the Field-Marshal Commanding was down there the night before seeing that the reserves were up and in their places ready. Into the reason why, although they were there and ready, they did not succeed in what they ought to have done I will not enter. It is a matter which concerns the Divisions themselves; it had not in any material degree, as far as I can judge, anything to do with any question of organisation. Certainly it was not from any want of care and attention on the part of the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief that the mishap occurred, if it did occur.

My noble friend said something about ladies being at Headquarters. Let me assure him in that that is mere gossip. Personally I doubt if there have been a couple of ladies at Headquarters since the beginning of the campaign, and if they did get there it was in spite of many great difficulties put in their way and owing to the determination which is characteristic of their sex. At any rate their stay there would be very short. I made inquiries and was informed that the apparition was mythical.

It is quite true, as my noble friend has said, that in a War like this a great deal depends upon Staff work. In the old days we used to win by bravery and determination, and sometimes by numbers. In these days you cannot win by mere bravery and determination, and you may not be able to win even by numbers. The military problems are of a difficulty and intricacy which require mind to be brought to bear. For years I thought that where we were asleep in connection with the Army was in our want of recognition of the absolute fact that the next great war would be a war of mind against mind. If you are going to play chess against a body like the great General Staff of Germany you must train your chess players for a long while beforehand. I have felt for long that the really great problem of the British Army was the problem of its General Staff, and I rejoice to think that among our Generals to-day there are some men who, sharing that conviction, have made it the business of their lives to train as General Staff officers ought to be trained. We cannot give too much attention to that. We cannot overlook the necessity of so fashioning our organisation that brain and organisation may be the chief things, with the confidence that the national spirit will add everything else. But brain and organisation cannot be improvised. You have to prepare beforehand, and if we have too small a Staff to-day, or if it is not perfect, it is because, as I said, we did not wake up to this great military problem early enough but frittered away our energies in controversies between voluntary and national service and other matters which were really irrelevant to the great point on which we were to be tested.

I felt that I could not sit still after listening to what my noble friend said—I am sure with absolute sincerity and with the greatest desire to serve the public—I could not remain silent because I know that much of what he said does not represent the facts, and because some of those who are leading the troops in France, some in supreme command, are not only old friends of mine but old colleagues with whom I have worked side by side, and whom I have seen perfecting the organisation which they are now administering. They are men who have put passion into their work, and to say at the end of fifteen months that their work has been a failure is to give expression to what is very far from the truth. After all, it is a great feat to have held and to have reduced practically to impotence—perhaps to permanent impotence—that tremendous organisation, that tremendous military machine, greater than any one realised, which Germany brought to bear at the very beginning of the war. We owe a great deal to the leaders of the French and British Armies who brought that about, and I, for one, am not disposed to look closely at defects which are of an ordinary character compared with the sterling qualities which those leaders have exhibited.

LORD SYDENHAM

My Lords, I think that as a general rule criticisms of all operations in the field during their progress ought to be avoided; and I feel that we who sit at home at ease find it difficult if not impossible to realise the tremendous responsibilities that fall upon our Generals in the field in the special difficulties which the circumstances impose upon them. I feel also that without full and complete knowledge no one is justified in attempting to impute blame or to accord praise to anybody. Still, in spite of the eloquent and learned dissertation on Staff duties which the noble and learned Viscount has given us, I think no harm will be occasioned by the question which the noble Lord has raised.

The noble and learned Viscount did not explain certain phenomena with which we are faced, and to which the noble Lord (Lord St. Davids) briefly referred. The Censor has permitted us to know that in the great attack in the region of Loos in September a great victory was all but gained. There must be some reason why that victory was not won. Some reason must be assigned. Most undoubtedly it was not want of gallantry on the part of our troops. The noble Lord who raised this question hinted that it was due to such faulty Staff arrangements as prevented the bringing up of the reserves at the proper time. I understood the noble and learned Viscount to say that the reserves did come up to time. If so, why was not the ground which was carried, and carried without very much difficulty in the first advance, held afterwards? In this trench warfare, which is not new, as is often assumed, but which is now on a far vaster scale than has happened before, we have learned that the most important thing of all is to bring up your reserves and supports at the right moment. Therefore in the framing of orders the essential matter is that the vital element of time should be so studied as to ensure the reasonable certainty that sufficient reserves will arrive at the right moment. If that is not secured then there is at least some evidence of faulty Staff work—

VISCOUNT HALDANE

The noble Lord has missed the point of what I said. I cannot say that the reserves got there in time. I said that they were in their places in ample time. It was not faulty Staff work at all; it was that they did not get from their places across the ground in time.

LORD SYDENHAM

I am afraid I cannot follow the noble and learned Viscount. The Staff work should be so calculated as to bring the troops up at the moment when they are wanted, and if the time was miscalculated I should certainly say that was bad Staff work. I turn to the handling of the reserves as a whole. The main reserves might either have been retained in the hands of the Commander-in-Chief of the whole force or given over to the General in command of the army directed to make this great attack. The distinction is very important. In the one ease, the Headquarters Staff of the whole force would be responsible for the arrangements for bringing up the reserves. In the other, that responsibility would fall on the Army Staff concerned. I do not know what actually happened; but in any case it must be clear that the proper arrangement would have been that the reserves intended to be used should have been under the Army Stall which was about to make the attack. The reason for that is obvious, because it would concentrate the responsibility in one man, and in such matters as this any division of responsibility is always dangerous.

We have been told—and I think the Censor let us know—that in this attack two divisions of troops which had never been under fire and knew nothing of trenches were hurried up and flung tired and hungry, after a long march, into the fiery furnace of this great attack. Why was that? I fear that that must be explained by some faults in the Staff arrangements. It is certain that the Divisional Commanders would have made arrangements for the feeding of their men, and if those arrangements miscarried, as they must have miscarried, it must have been that they clashed with orders from superior authority; in other words, the orders were not as harmonious as they should have been. Some features of the story of Loos bear a strong resemblance to what occurred in the great attack at Neuve Chapelle in March last, where for some reason—whether bad Staff arrangements or not, I do not know—a great victory was not gained as there was every reason to think would be the case. And, as the noble Lord has said, there have been other occasions in Flanders where some of the same occurrences have taken place.

Again at Suvla Bay either the time arrangements were faulty or t he movements of the troops did not correspond to the plan. I am sure we all feel that the drafting of orders for great attacks like these cannot be an easy matter, and one speaks with great diffidence in criticising them. Their main feature must be that each subordinate commander of a unit must be told exactly what is expected of him and must communicate all necessary information to all those under his command. The orders must be harmonious and perfectly free from ambiguity, and, as I have said, the vital element of time must dominate the movements of supports and reserves. In this quasi siege warfare, no plan of attack should be drawn up without consultation with some one who has all possible personal knowledge of the ground which has to be covered. I may be wrong, but I am informed that that has not been the case in many instances in the recent fighting, and that the consequences have been naturally unfortunate. Mistakes, even great mistakes, will always occur in war; but they ought not to be repeated. The experience of many months ought to have eliminated some, at least, of the possible sources of error. I have not the slightest wish to impute any blame, and I have not nearly enough knowledge to enable me to arrive at a clear judgment. But I hope that the Government have made careful inquiry into the circumstances, because these circumstances seem to have robbed our splendid troops of the full reward of their great efforts and heavy sacrifices. I am sure that no one in your Lordships' House desires scapegoats in any form. But I believe—I say so most seriously—that there is a strong feeling in the Army and among the gallant troops from the Dominions that no steps should be neglected which will enforce the great lessons of these fifteen months on all those who are entrusted with the conduct of our operations in the field. If this feeling exists, it ought not to be ignored.

LORD TENTERDEN

My Lords, I am averse to offering any criticisms on this subject, but I should like to ask two questions. First, whether the telephone wires now in use are encased in armour plated cables so that the trenches can be properly communicated with with less fear of the wires being broken by artillery fire; and, secondly, whether bomb-proof shelters have been provided with first-aid for the wounded in the support trenches. Those are matters of vital importance in the public interest, and it is only for that reason that I bring them forward.

THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (THE MARQUERS OF CREWE)

My Lords, with reference to the two questions just asked, my noble friend (Lord Newton) who represents the War Office will be obliged if the noble Lord would place them on the Paper in the ordinary course, because we are not able to answer them off hand.

The speeches of the noble Lord on the Cross Benches (Lord Sydenham) and of the noble and learned Viscount below the Gangway (Lord Haldane) have covered a great part of the ground on which my noble friend who started this discussion ventured, and so far I am relieved front discussing it; but at the same time it will no doubt be desired that a member of the Government should give some reply to specific questions raised by my noble friend Lord St. Davids. I confess I was not a little sorry in observing the tone of my noble friend's speech. Throughout it he seemed to suppose that there is a sort of natural hostility between the regimental officer and the Staff officer, that they must be regarded as sets of men carrying out almost opposing functions, and not united, as one would hope, by ties of comradeship. I do not think that is at all a fair description of the position. The most successful Staff officers have served a long apprenticeship with distinction as regimental officers, and, so far as my personal acquaintance goes, they are all most willing to admit the supreme advantage which that part of their career has given them, and they always speak with the utmost respect and regard of regimental work and of those officers who perform it. I was sorry, therefore, that my noble friend Lord St. Davids repeated the remark as to the large proportion of casualties suffered by the regimental officers. In the natural course of things that is bound to be so; and I cannot believe that if the remark was made with some resentment, as I gathered from what my noble friend said, it could be intended to refer to those genuine Staff officers who actually do the Staff work, but possibly more to the quite different class of Staff officer of the more ornamental although by no means useless kind to whom my noble friend alluded.

Then my noble friend stated that he had a number of newspaper criticisms which he refrained front reading to the House. Some of those I have no doubt are of high value; others, probably, are of less value because founded upon less knowledge. I assume that he was referring all through to newspaper criticisms by military correspondents—many of whom are, as we know, soldiers who have served with distinction in the past—and not to the extracts from letters which we so often see printed in newspapers, because although extracts of that kind may also contain criticism it is, of course, of an entirely different character from that contained in the articles and almost essays which we see written by the regular military correspondents in the Press. But on this question of criticism I am sure there is no need to remind my noble friend—although it may be necessary to remind some outside—that it is important to keep clearly in mind the distinction between criticism which is founded upon genuine military appreciation of a military situation and that kind of rather random gossip which is naturally prevalent where large bodies of men are gathered together. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there is as much gossip going on at the front of any Army of any country as there is behind the scenes of a theatre. It is quite inevitable that it should be so. But it is important to draw the careful distinction which I have ventured to point out. Therefore when my noble friend suggests that we should ring up On the telephone friends of our own who might have obtained information or criticism about the Staff work in the Army from sons of theirs, lads home on leave, he, I am sure, would be the first to admit that that sort of criticism is not of the same kind or possibly of the same value as the more serious military appreciations to which he also alluded.

I have no doubt that the Headquarters Staff would fully agree that it is subject to criticism, and would welcome the criticism of informed persons like my noble friend on the Cross Benches (Lord Sydenham), either in or out of Parliament. I was very grateful to my noble friend Lord Haldane for drawing the distinction he did between Staff and Staff in a manner which was not made clear by my noble friend who initiated this discussion. The distinction between the General Staff under the Commander-in-Chief and the personal Staff at Headquarters is one which ought to be borne in mind with the utmost care. The same term is applied to two entirely different things. In passing, I should like to express the pleasure with which I heard the tribute which Lord Haldane paid to Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Staff, of whose energy and capacity, so far as I know, only one opinion exists both in and out of the Army. My noble friend (Lord St. Davids) spoke of people who were inadequate to their duties, whatever they might be, having been forced upon Sir John French by some person or persons unknown. As to that, I am afraid I cannot give him any information; but from a long knowledge of Sir John French I should think it is exceedingly unlikely that he would submit to have people forced upon his personal Staff, or upon any Staff which he commands, by the very small number of persons, if any such exist, who could possibly be in a position to do so.

Then my noble friend spoke of the apparent neglect of employing capable regimental officers instead of the incapable figures who, it is said, are engaged in doing Staff work at the Front. There, again, I think my noble friend was not drawing the distinction which I have endeavoured to emphasise between the working General Staff and the personal Staff. But in any ease I must remind him that Staff training is not the same thing as war experience. It may be, of course, that among regimental officers there are men possessed of the highest possible qualifications for Staff officers, but even they are bound to go through a certain round of technical training before they can attain to the merit of a man of equal capacity who has had the advantage of a Staff College training. Staff duties, I take it, can no more be learned without practice than can playing the violin, and all the qualities which go to make a first-class regimental officer which may be super-added to those qualities which make a first-rate Staff officer will not, without the training, enable a man to do the work as well as it, must be done. Therefore it is by no means impossible that the deficiencies or failures of which my noble friend speaks may be due in some cases to the very men whom he wishes to see employed—that is to say, officers of capacity and willingness and excellent brain, but who, owing to circumstances, are not provided with the particular kind of knowledge on a large scale which is necessary for Staff work in a high position.

My noble friend next spoke of the question of a second line of defence which, as he said, was only being prepared in June a few hundred yards from the German front, and he implied, I think, that that was due to Staff neglect, and I think also to the neglect which in one sense comes to much the same thing—the neglect of the Generals to visit the front themselves as often as they should. As my noble friend Lord Haldane said, there is no doubt a difference between the amount of personal inspecting and visiting which is carried on by Generals in high command, and I doubt if it is too much to say that to a great extent the success of a General, and to a greater extent still his popularity with his men and the confidence which he inspires in them, is due to that habit of regular visiting and of continual inspection. But in this particular instance I do not know, of course, to what precise area my noble friend alluded, and, supposing I did, it clearly would not do for me to say; but having at that time had a fairly accurate knowledge of what was going on I cannot help wondering whether my noble friend is strictly accurate in his statement. It may have been possible that there were places of short length where the defences second, third, or fourth, as many as may have been necessary, had not been finished or perhaps even begun at a particular time. I am speaking purely from conjecture. Is my noble friend quite certain that the particular instance he is thinking of may not have been due to the country having been flooded and therefore unapproachable for a certain time?

LORD ST. DAVIDS

As the noble Marquess asks me a specific question, I may say that my information comes from officers of high authority at the Front. It is obvious that I cannot give names and places.

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

I entirely appreciate my noble friend's discretion. He and I are equally debarred front naming either the officers who give the information or the places in respect to which they give it, but it is obvious that I cannot give a Satisfactory answer to my noble friend without knowing a great deal more than he can tell me.

Then my noble friend asked a question which the noble and learned Viscount also touched upon—namely, that of the presence of ladies at Headquarters; and he asked me to state, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, whether I thought ladies ought to go to Headquarters. I have no hesitation in saying that unless they have business there they most certainly ought not. If there were a Miss Florence Nightingale to-day we should be glad if she would spend the great part of her time at Headquarters or wherever she could do good work, but the idea that Headquarters should be visited for social objects is obviously one that would not commend itself to any of us any more than it does to my noble friend, and I am altogether unable to believe that such is the case then my noble friend mentioned an instance of a man who went to Headquarters on business and could not find anybody to attend to him because certain officers had been sitting up late the night before playing at cards. There, again, we have to bear in mind the distinction between the different kinds of Staff officers. In the one case a late appearance in the morning would involve a gross and grave neglect of duty, which obviously ought to be dealt with; in the other case—and the story sounds as though this were more likely to be the explanation—it appears to involve a neglect of courtesy in an officer not being there to receive those who presented themselves at Headquarters.

I come now to the infinitely more serious question which was indicated by my noble friend. I am bound to say with great care, and more fully developed by my noble friend on the Cross Benches, Lord Sydenham.

I mean the question of the attack at Loos in the later part of September, when, as was currently reported and as has been repeated by my noble friend to-night, a success was missed owing to the failure to bring up reserves at the proper time. Well, I am not able to enter into the discussion of that question at all this afternoon. The whole matter is in this sense sub judice that it is the subject of close military inquiry at this moment by the highest authorities; and in those circumstances it clearly would not be becoming in me to say anything upon it at all—in any case I should be most unwilling to embark on a discussion of the merits or demerits of a particular strategical movement undertaken on their own responsibility by Generals. But that, of course, is not precisely the point, because the question is rather one as to whether in this particular instance neglect took place, and, if there were neglect, who ought to be held responsible for it.

Here again I think it is important to draw a certain distinction. It is some times thought—I do not know whether it was said in so many words by my noble friend—that a lack of success, which on more than one occasion has attended an advance of that kind, is nothing more nor less than the difference between failure and a great victory. It is important to weigh one's words carefully in speaking of those results. If by a great victory is meant the throwing back of the German line—and I do not think that anything ought to be described as a great victory which does not bring about that result—it is not to be hoped that an operation carried out on a comparatively small front can produce that result. The progress of the war has shown that it is only by breaking through on what would be considered even now an enormously long front that you can hope to bring about the change in the general line of the enemy which alone ought to be described as a great victory. That is one of the lessons, as I understand, which this war has taught us—that even to break through the line of the enemy on either side, whether we broke the line of the Germans or the Germans broke the line of the Allies, for five or six miles, although it might be regarded as a considerable success and resulted in the taking of a great number of prisoners and loss to the enemy, as happened the other day in Champagne, yet even a success of that kind does not bring about those conditions which alone ought to be described as a great victory. I venture to impress that distinction on my noble friend, because we are sometimes apt to speak of successes which, though substantial and real as victories, yet are not victories in the sense that the battles of, for instance, Marengo and Austerlitz were.

I think I have covered most of the ground which was raised by my noble friend; and although, if I may quote from an illustrious example in another place, I would say that there are one or two things he said which I should prefer he had left unsaid, yet at the same time, like my noble friend on the Cross Benches. I do not complain of his having raised this subject or of his having given vent to some outspoken criticism, because I think it is not at all impossible that those who are the subject of it would prefer that it should be made in public rather than bandied about in private.

LORD ST. DAVIDS

I now put to His Majesty's Government the second Question which stands in my name on the Paper—namely, whether they have any information as to the numbers of the Headquarters Staffs, and also of the Army and Divisional Staffs, in the German and Austrian Armies. In doing so I may, perhaps, be allowed to make one or two remarks on the speech of the noble Marquess who has just sat down. The noble Marquess said that I had seemed to assume a position of hostility between the regimental officer and the Staff officer as being a natural thing. I think it is a most unnatural thing. It is most deplorable that practically every regimental officer who returns has only one opinion about the officers on the Headquarters Staff—it is an undoubted fact, as any noble Lord can find out for himself. The noble Marquess said that criticism by young officers was worthless or of not much value. These are not all young officers. The people who have been in London criticising the Headquarters Staff are many of them officers on leave from France in very high positions indeed; and their criticism is in much stronger terms than anything I have said this afternoon. I do not desire to follow the noble Marquess into detail, but I want to call the attention of the Government to the fact that they have given the numbers of the Staff of the Divisions but have refused to state the numbers on the Headquarters Staffs. The noble and learned Viscount (Lord Haldane) has given, I think, the numbers on the Headquarters Staff of the working men, of the men who are actually doing work in offices.

VISCOUNT HALDANE

Only one section.

LORD ST. DAVIDS

But what the Government have refused to do is to give the number of these young men in France on the personal Staff who cannot, in the vast numbers in which I believe they exist, be doing anything useful. Let us speak plainly. Those young men are not out there for anything useful. They are put there because the place is comfortable. At this moment, while we are sitting here nice and warm, there are in the trenches tens of thousands of young men up to their knees in icy water. I saw a letter only to-day from a man who was up to his waist in icy water. It is not a very gratifying thing for regimental officers to think that there is a great number—the Government refuse to state the figure, though surely it is not a military secret—of young officers of high position, of good connections, of influence—that there is a number of those young men who ought to be in the trenches and doing regimental work who have got on to the General Staff by influence, and are kept there because it is comfortable and safe. It is not a nice thing. It is a scandal, a scandal which the Government refuse to abate, but which I say they ought to abate.

LORD NEWTON

My Lords, I do not propose to follow the noble Lord in the remarks which he has just made and which refer to the previous Question. But in reply to his second Question I can inform him that according to the "Handbook of the German Army, 1912," the following would be the war organisation of Staffs:—Imperial Headquarters Staff: total strength about 225 officers and 46 officials. This would include the personal staff of the Emperor, his Military Cabinet, the Adjutantur, the Great General Staff, the Inspector of Field Artillery, the Inspector-General of Foot Artillery, the Inspector-General of Engineers and Pioneers, the Inspector-General of Lines of Communication and Railways, and various details. Army Staff: total strength about 37 officers and officials. Army Corps Staff: total strength about 27 officers. Divisional Staff: total strength about six officers. I should like to add that these numbers are only approximate. They are based upon the war of 1870, and it is highly probable that the numbers are at the present moment considerably greater. Then I come to the Austro-Hungarian Army. In the Headquarter Staff of an Army, including the Army Commander, his personal staff, and officers of Staff and train troops, there are altogether 50 officers and officials. In the case of the Headquarter Staff of an Army Corps, the number is 30; and the number on the Headquarter Staff of a Division is 23.

House adjourned at twenty-five minutes past Seven o'clock, till To-morrow, a quarter past Four o'clock.