A Short History of the Great WarPollard, A. F. (Albert Frederick)
History
A Short History of the Great War
Pollard, A. F. (Albert Frederick)
World War, 1914-1918
Mr. Lloyd George was the antithesis of his former leader, a Celt of
the Celts, with all their amazing emotion, versatility, and intuition.
There is a true story, which has even found its way into French
literature, of how the Welshmen were stirred to defeat an
all-conquering New Zealand football team by the strains of the "Land
of my Fathers." That was the sort of tonic the British public found in
Mr. Lloyd George, and it would not have been so much to their taste at
a less emotional time. He was the very embodiment of an emotion that
was not overburdened with scruples, and of an impulse which hardly
troubled to think. He imported the temperament and the methods of the
religious revivalist into the practice of politics, and he enlisted
strange allies when he found a vehicle for his patriotic fervour in
the language of the prize-ring. He prided himself on his aptitude for
political strategy, and professed a sympathy with the mind of the man
in the street which was keener even than that of Lord Northcliffe. His
views were always short-sighted, and he had the most superficial
knowledge of the deeper problems of war and politics. Before the war
broke out he had complained that we were building Dreadnoughts against
a phantom; in August 1914 he estimated our daily expenditure of
three-quarters of a million as a diminishing figure; in the following
April he was as much in the dark as Mr. Asquith himself about
munitions, and denied that conscription would assist our success in
the war. According to one of his colleagues, he was the only member of
his Cabinet who favoured British participation in the Pacifist
Conference of Stockholm; in the November before the great German
offensive in the West he quoted with approval a plea for concentration
at Laibach; and the views he expressed on the Salonika expedition
varied with the fortunes of war and the fluctuations of popular
favour. His remark after the armistice that we had achieved nothing in
the time of his predecessor except two defeats at the hands of the
Turks, was an epitome of his own intellectual limitations; and the
intensity of his convictions was discounted by the infirmity of his
principles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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