HL Deb 06 August 1919 vol 36 cc479-90

My Lords, there is a second Motion which stands in my name about which I do not propose to make a second speech, because it would be more apposite to include the few remarks which I have to make about it in this speech. That Motion runs—

That this House accords its profound sense of admiration and gratitude for the supreme services rendered to the British Nation by Field-Marshal Foch, Marshal of France, as Generalissimo of the Allied Armies, in which great position he displayed a military genius worthy of the foremost Captains in history.

This, my Lords, is a novel, and so far as I know an unprecedented but a very fitting, addition to the tribute we are paying to-day. It will be impertinent for me here, a mere civilian, to eulogise the merits or services of this great soldier. Those who know him best and have worked with him in the war will tell you that clear-minded, far-sighted in conception, swift in decision, and alert in action, Marshal Foch is one of the great captains of history. Character and intellect seem to be blended in him in most harmonious proportion. No one ever heard Marshal Foch say a superfluous word, rarely has he been convicted of taking a rash or ill-considered step. At the critical moment he stepped into the breach. When he was appointed Generalissimo he was not found wanting. And, my Lords—may we not regard this with a special pleasure—Marshal Foch was one who always believed in the British Army. He showed it in the first battle of Ypres, and when he became Allied Commander in the spring of 1918 he gave to Field-Marshal Haig his constant and invaluable support. Finally, my Lords, when the moment came for taking the offensive, well did he choose the moment of assault, and skilfully did he co-ordinate the successive attacks of the Allied Forces. "A great Commander and a gallant gentleman" will be, I suggest, the verdict of history upon the latest addition to the Field-Marshals of Great Britain.

In offering this tribute to Field-Marshal Foch, I like to think that we are tendering it not merely to him as an individual but to all the Allies whom he commanded. Do not let us ever forget, in our own jubilations, that throughout this war we fought alongside great and noble nations whose sacrifices and sufferings have been, in some cases, much greater than our own. With them we have bled, and with them we now triumph. The gallantry of Belgium, the unflinching and invincible ardour of France, the indomitable spirit of Italy, the heroic endurance of Serbia, Greece, and our smaller Allies—all these were component factors in the victory. And in thanking our own heroes. I ask you to bear in mind that we also eulogise them. We are all proud to have lived to see this day; and in inscribing this Resolution, as I hope your Lordships will now do nemine contradicente, on the Records of this House, we shall be associating ourselves, in a spirit of the most profound and admiring gratitude, with some of the greatest achievements that have been written in the records not only of the British Empire but of the human race. I beg to move.

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

My Lords, the noble Earl was surely right in regarding this Motion as the final and conclusive expression of the nation's gratitude towards those who have in many different capacities served the Crown in this war. Those who have served have already shared with us the thanksgiving to Almighty God for the victory which they were enabled to win. They have enjoyed the approval of the Sovereign, they have been acclaimed by millions of their fellow-citizens as they marched through our streets, and they have received the historical tributes of our great civic corporations. And now, following, as the noble Earl has pointed out, the custom of centuries past, both Houses join in this formal Motion of Thanks—formal, but expressing the deepest feeling of all our hearts. It is indeed an old and worthy custom. Blake, Rodney, and Nelson, Marlborough, Wellington, and Cohn Campbell, all in turn received the thanks of Parliament as men who helped to create or to save the British Empire. But this occasion differs from all others in this, that behind the Regular Service, of whom we first think, even behind the ordinary reserves and auxiliaries of the Fleet and the Army, there came out that vast host of men and women, ranged behind the Regular Forces, who exchanged their quiet civilian existence for hard and dangerous service both by sea and. land.

I will not presume to reiterate any of the tributes paid by the noble Earl in the course of his eloquent speech, either to the great naval and military leaders individually, or collectively to the ninny branches of the Public Service enumerated in the course of the Motion. There is one comparatively small omission from that list which I would venture to correct. Nothing is said of the special and gallant service rendered in many parts of the world by the ministers of religion belonging to many different Churches, who ministered to the spiritual needs of the Army and of the Navy, and who in most cases risked and in ninny cases sacrificed their lives for the common cause. The country is of one mind in desiring that the honours conferred by the Crown and the rewards voted by the representatives of the people should be awarded with no grudging or careful hand. But to those who receive them, and to the whole of the Services, behind and above all these things is the knowledge which they possess that they have done their duty, and that in doing it they have earned the undying regard and respect of millions of their fellow-citizens.

The Motion in its final paragraph tells of those who have passed beyond that knowledge, of whom the noble Earl spoke with so much feeling. Perhaps, although one does not desire to enumerate names, I may be pardoned if I mention in this connection the name of my colleague and friend Lord. Kitchener, not merely because he was the creator of the new Army but because he was the only British Field-Marshal and the only British Minister who ever laid down his life in war. One thinks, too, of the gallant Admirals who went down with their ships—Cradock, Hood, Arbuthnot—and of all the innumerable crowd of men of the most mature service and achievement, and of boys of boundless promise who were the light of their homes, and who will return no more to their native country. In this war the country has passed through the fire. It is due to those whom we are honouring and commemorating that it was not a consuming fire; and it is for the country, sobered and strengthened in a steady resolve, to see that it is a cleansing fire, through which having passed, we shall become a wiser and a better nation.

One word on the second Motion of the noble Earl, that in honour of the great French soldier to whom we desire to pay a unanimous tribute. Marshal Foch, from all one knows of him, seems to be the ideal French soldier, and to represent in the fullest degree the genius of Southern France to which he belongs; always cheerful, tirelessly energetic, and exercising a magnetic influence over the men whom he commands. We have sometimes observed a tendency to depreciate bookish soldiers. Marshal Foch, as we all know, is a scientific military writer of the first rank. But in spite of that fact he has lost nothing of a fierceness in attack which might seem to belong rather to the mere gladiator type of soldier. The fact is that the unity of command with which the war so fortunately concluded depended on the existence of a French Commander able to undertake that high office. It is no depreciation of that grate soldier Marshal Joffre to say that while he was Commander-in-Chief it would have been premature to attempt that unity of command. What we can join in saying with fervour is what Sir Douglas Haig said at the Mansion House, that it was indeed fortunate that when the hour arrived the man was there—such a man as Marshal Foch.

THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

My Lords, there is little need to add words to the tribute paid in language of stirring eloquence to those whom we are honouring to-day. The two speakers to whom we have listened have very largely covered the ground. This is one of the occasions on which we can count on there being no discordant note. But I venture to ask you to let me supplement quite briefly one or two things which have been already so admirably said. Both the noble Earl and the noble Marquess have referred, as was indeed fitting, to former occasions upon which votes of thanks have been proposed and carried with unanimous voice by Parliament to those who have fought and conquered in great wars. But there is in the comparison a good deal that is worth pursuing. There is a very marked difference which sets apart the facts of to-day from the facts of those former times, and it seems to me it bears significantly upon the reality and the value of the vote which is given by us in the name of a united country.

When on former occasions votes were passed and carried those who had staved at home and had had little personally to do with the war or its events, I think we may say without exception, were thanking those who had gone forth and fought for their protection and for the safety of the country. On this occasion—not merely because of the enormously augmented size of the armies and of the Navy and to the consequent penetration into every home of associations and personal links with the men on service—but for other reasons as well we have all of us had a knowledge of what has been happening day by day; we have been immersed in the whole facts of the war, and even perhaps engaged in definite work in connection with it to a degree which gives quite a different character to the vote which we, with that full knowledge, are passing to the men to whom we owe just everything, for their leadership, their bravery, and all that is meant by the victory which they have won.

It is curious to test such a comparison between those former occasions and the present. You can test it very markedly with regard to our literature. A hundred years ago in the first decade of the nineteenth century England was in the throes of the Napoleonic Wars. If any of your Lordships will take the pains to look over a list of the popular books, read and known by everybody, that were published at that time you would be startled to find how one after another sees the light, obtains a wide circulation, and lives on with practically no reference to what was happening at that time. Between 1808 and 1815 there were numerous books—Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen again and again, Charles Lamb, George Crabbe, Sydney Smith and a great many more—which received at once a wide circulation and immense popularity, some of which were introduced by prefaces of a. good deal of deliberation; and hardly any of them made reference to the fact that a great war was being waged throughout the world, and that even soldiers were fighting across the seas. We do not forget, of course, that there were vivid and forcible war pamphlets, and there were marked exceptions to what I have said—the sonnets of Wordsworth and a great many more war sonnets and other bits of literature; but speaking generally, if any of your Lordships doubt the fact, I would ask you to take any handbook of literature, and see what the result is, and test the literature to-day in a similar way. Ask any expert in the handling and publication of the books of to-day, and he will tell you that in the first eighteen months or two years of the war practically nothing was published, or at least found sale, except books about the war, or the countries in which the war was being waged. Practically nothing else. Then came the next stage when the shops were filled with books bearing indirectly upon the war—essays about the war and democracy—which had an exceptional circulation for books of the serious and solid sort that many of these were. Then there have been other books bearing less directly but pretty closely upon the war and its facts, and notably there has been the extraordinary product of poetry which the war has brought to light.

Every one of your Lordships knows how certain men—some of whom have laid down their lives and some of whom are still with us—have learnt in the discipline of the field something which bore fruit in the work of their pens as poets. Now for the first time we are, so the experts tell us, beginning to go back to comparatively normal conditions in the literary world. How does that bear upon our thanks to-day? It seems to me to hear very closely. It means that the people of England—in whose names we are thanking the Navy and the Army to-day for the leadership they gave, the courage they showed, and the victory they have, under God, achieved for our country and our Empire—are offering thanks as men and women who know of what they are speaking, who have watched it bit by bit, who have traced it along its course, and who have seen what the issues involved were and how those issues have been dealt with as the war has run on. They have read and talked and worked in connection with very little else but this during these years of strenuous war. In short, although the war of to-day in the large sense of the word is a far more complex and elaborate thing then the wars of former times, the subject has been far better understood than ever was the case ire days gone by, at any rate with regard to civilians. I think that has beep first, because of the constant intercourse between our people at home and the men, mainly the wounded, who have returned. That daily intercourse for which in other ways we are so thankful— of the womanhood of England with the wounded in our hospitals, has had the result that they have become acquainted at first hand and with extraordinary rapidity with the actual facts of what was happening, and the scenes and incidents of war have become familiar in a way that was impossible before. Every one who has experienced it has realised the extraordinary rapidity with which that has taken place.

It has fallen to me on many occasions to speak to men lying comfortably in our London hospitals who were wounded on the previous afternoon, and, on one occasion, the same morning. What that means in the tribute it bids us pay to the organisation which rendered such a thing possible, goes beyond all words. But it has had the other effect of keeping people abreast of what was happening and made them familiar with a thoroughness of knowledge and intensity of erring which would have been impossible in any other way. That rapidity is an entirely novel thing. I do not know whether many of your Lordships can carry your memories back to reading De Quineey's essay on the English Mail Coach, where he describes in detail how during the Napoleonic Wars the laurelled coaches went through the country bringing to the people news of events that happened a few weeks before. If we contrast that with what has been happening in this war, how people were kept abreast day by day with what was taking place, and for that reason how much more interesting and important is the vote of thanks which people are able to give to-day to those people because of their intimate acquaintance with the work they have been doing. We know now what it is for which we are thanking them—the leadership of our soldiers and sailors in strife more gigantic in its scale, and more terrific in character than the world has ever known.

Reference has been made to the contrast between the scale of a war to-day and the scale of bygone wars. I doubt whether, until we look into it a little, we take in the extent of that contrast. I am one of those—there are several others in the House I am sure—whose boyhood was full of stories about and even had dim recollections of the Crimean War, and we believed that it had been a time of widespread and amazing carnage. It was in a sense. The losses were great in proportion to the number of men engaged. But do your Lordships know how many men from the British Isles actually died in battle in the whole of the Crimean War?—2,755. Of those who were wounded 1,847 died afterwards; making a total loss of 4,600 Men. We know that the losses from illness Were terrible; no less than 17,500 men, or something of that kind, died from that cause. But if we contrast those figures with what we are talking of to-day—the death of 700,000 subjects of the King, of whom 550,000 came from the United Kingdom—we see what the difference is between that death-roll and one of 2.755. Those facts are worth while calling attention to as a reminder of the magnitude of the issues which have been involved and of the things we have been allowed to see. We have been watching a war more terrible in its character and more far-reaching in some of its results than anything the world has ever seen.

If there is one man in this country who never exaggerates, whose words are spoken with a wealth of knowledge well weighed in their temperateness and sobriety, it is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. In a written document on the, subject Sir Douglas Haig says— Never has death taken so many forms at once so violent and so insidious as in these years; never has it been so ever present or its arms so fax-reaching; never has the mere act of living been so exacting and so burdensome. Yet neither the constant presence of death nor the prevailing discomfort of living was sufficient to break the spirit of the men many of them young, most of them but inadequately prepared by previous training for the tremendous tasks they were, called Tilton to perform. That is why from our hearts we are thanking the officers and men alike for the immense task they accomplished in rolling back forces whose triumph would have meant disaster for the world and the certainty of more and, perhaps, immediate wars to come. Once more I will quote the words of Sir Douglas Haig. He says— Nothing other than a creed such as theirs could have maintained them throughout the long, wearing agony of trench warfare, could have sustained them in the desperate struggles of 1916 and 1917, and after the supreme triumph of March and April of last year have carried them forward in triumph to the ultimate victory which is theirs to-day. I lay my reverent tribute to their great faith and unbounded patience their astounding cheerfulness and courage unsurpassed. I think it is well that we should have that testimony of one who will shortly take his place in this House.

It has been pointed out again and again by our foremost thinkers and speakers that it has been our lot in this generation to witness the most stupendous episode in the history of the human race. There have been great cataclysmic strokes in the world's story before—the invasion of the Barbarians of Europe, the French Revolution and what it meant, startled the world at that time, and the stories live in history as great incidents of the world's life. These, however, pale into comparative insignificance before this, in the truest sense of the words, great drama—the acting before the world of the whole story, its inception, its progress, its ending, bringing to an end what has been described as a moral anachronism which it was endeavoured to force upon the men and women of our time. It has been our lot to witness and to record it. I think it is well that the records should be complete, for I imagine that a few generations hence people will find it hard to credit certain incidents which have been happening in these tremendous years.

It is not a small thing or a small gain that it should have happened in the evolution of human science and knowledge that photography should have come in some degree to maturity in time to record in a manner which could never be wholly false, at any rate, events which years hence would not always be believed. And if passing from photography to human art and handicraft we look, for example, at such a collection of pictures as can be found here and there on the walls of the Royal Academy of this year, when we know that these pictures are exhibited not by people who know nothing about it but that thousands and thousands of those who witnessed the sights with their own eyes have criticised what is there shown, whether it be the horrors of the conflict or the devastation involved—we are glad to know that these things will go down to history and that the world may have on record what were the facts which the men and women of to-day had to face and dealt with in the actions for which we are giving thanks to them to-day. I am sanguine enough to believe that no future generation will ever see again what ours has seen. If they do see anything like these horrors, I suppose it is indisputable that, with the progress of science, they will be ten times greater than any we have known, if there should be a. recurrence of conditions which render them possible at all. Heaven forbid that we should relax any effort that is needed, or do anything that would leave us unprepared for what might occur. But may we not believe that the probability, though certainly not negligible, is comparatively small?

If the great victory for which we are thanking God and thanking our heroes to-day be indeed the ending of the world's great struggles, then deep should be our gratitude to those whose genius, prowess, and, courage have thus ended it. We thank the great Admirals and Generals who have fought and toiled and led our Forces to the victory that has been given to us all. They have been constantly reminding us that it is the morale of the troops rather than physical prowess that tells in the end. I was glad to hear the noble Marquess in his speech refer to one whose memory must be in the thoughts of many of us to-day—Lord Kitchener—because to him I feel we owe in no small degree the strength of purpose as regards the morale of our troops which was due in part at least to the pressure that he brought to bear, both in India and in England, upon all that belonged to the higher and the deeper side of the life of our troops, to keep that pure and clean and strong. His action has been followed by the great Generals who came after him, and to them we are returning thanks to-day. We are grateful to the combatants and grateful to the non-combatants who bore their place in these great years of war. I suppose the degree of medical skill that has been shown in the war is something that has no parallel in the stories of wars that happened before. We desire to thank the men whose self-sacrifice I think is sometimes not adequately remembered—the medical men giving up positions at home of real importance and influence and devoting themselves during long years in the most self-sacrificing way to the service of their fellow men.

The noble Marquess has also spoken of the chaplains. He has referred to the testimony of practically every General that we did not do wrong when we encouraged our chaplains and staff to offer themselves for the fullest possible service, which they were only too anxious to undertake in going forward in the deadliest parts of the front line and in embuing the forces with a spirit of fellowship. Our thanks are due to them for perhaps the unforeseen results of some of their great actions. I believe it, not to be in vain that so many of our men have passed through a period of the discipline which the Army gives. These nervous, excitable times that follow the war may seem to be a strange outcome of that disciplinary training. Speaking generally, however, I think we should be thankful for the lessons of discipline which the men have grown accustomed to and in many case; have learnt to value.

Above all, we are thanking our Admirals, Generals, and men for the conclusion of a great conflict which has been one of deep and fundamental principle. What it would have meant for Europe, for Asia, perhaps most of all for the child races of the world if Germany had won, one literally trembles to imagine. It is because the conflict had from the first for its basis and essence assertion of great principles that the issue uplifts our resolves to-day. Under such leadership and example from the Field our, people have acted worthily, and will, I believe, go on acting worthily in the days that lie ahead. A few years ago, in days of what looked liked assured peace, we wondered, many whether if the crisis should come it would indeed be as we have seen it to be. The crisis came and brought the answer to any craven fear. There was a gathering some ten or twelve years ago to recognise in grateful memory the heroes of the Crimea and the Mutiny. Among the words which that occasion called forth were these— One service more we dare to ask— Pray for us, heroes, pray, That when fate lays on us our task We may not shame the day. It is because, when our turn came and the task was laid upon them, our heroes did not shame the day, that we are thanking them with our whole hearts here and now.

THE EARL OF SELBORNE

My Lords, my noble friend the Leader of the House, has so perfectly expressed what we all feel about the services of the Navy that I have nothing to add to what he said. I would only desire to associate myself with every word that he so eloquently uttered, and with the thoughts of gratitude and admiration which lay below them. I should like, however, on this occasion to remind Parliament and the nation of the debt of gratitude which they owe to three great seamen whose names could not have been included within the ambit of this Vote of Thanks. I allude to Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sir Frederick Richards, Admiral-of-the-Fleet Lord Walter Kerr, and Admiral-of-the-Fleet Lord Fisher. These three then held the office of First Sea Lord consecutively over a period of more than fifteen years, and during those years the foundations of a modern Fleet were laid. It is no exaggeration to say that without the devoted work of these three officers, based as it was on profound professional skill, and without their long foresight and forethought, the Navy never could have achieved this stupendous sea triumph. I would not that England should forget them to-day.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

I shall proceed to put these Motions separately. The Question is, "That His Majesty's most gracious Message be considered, and that a humble Address of Thanks and of Concurrence he presented to His Majesty therefor."

On Question, Motion carried nemine contradicente.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

The Question is, ''That a Vote of Thanks be passed to the imperial Forces and to Marshal Foch."

EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON

May I respectfully suggest that we signify the exceptional character of this occasion by carrying the Vote standing?

Their Lordships accordingly rose, and, standing, agreed to the Motion nemine contradicente.