July 25, 1918 
Land & Water 
Government and War 
19 
THE book which lie^ before me is the chief pubHc 
pronouncement upon military policy which has 
appeared during the course of the war from the 
chief, and the only great student of military 
history in this country. It is a collection of ten 
essavs and lectures, the lectures (which form much the 
greater part of the book) being those dehvered at Oxford, 
in which University Mr. Wilkinson is Chichele Professor of 
Military History. It deals, as its title implies, not with the 
main strategical problems of this campaign or of its prepara- 
tion ; still less with tactical detail. It is wholly concerned 
with the policy of a nation at war and the methods in admin- 
istration, the type of administrative view whereby success in 
a great national war against equals can be obtained. 
I do not know whether the author of this remarkable and 
promising work will agree with me or not, but upon reading 
it I would be inclined to set down for its text this question : 
"Can an oligarchy conduct war?" 
In the last paragraph of the book, Professor Wilkinson 
answers finally thus : 
Unless the spirit in which the constitution has been 
worked for the last fifty years is chahged within the next 
six months, the constitution and those who have worked 
it will disappear in defeat and revolution. To-day the 
submarine and the aeroplane are telling all men that 
^the alternative is between defeat and victory. Victory 
cannot be won by a government of amateurs. A govern- 
ment that seeks victory must begin by entrusting the con- 
duct of war to men who understand war. 
This is the summary of what he has to say. There is but 
one point in which some of us would differ from the verdict. 
It is the word "fifty." If the present strain had come upon 
England fifty years ago the Government, though an oligarchy, 
was still sufficiently aristocratic to have met that strain. 
It is not conceivable that England fighting for her life in 
1864 would not have instinctively chosen the best and 
strongest public men to conduct affairs, nor is it conceivable 
that the instinct of these men in their turn would not at once 
have put the soldier and the sailor in control of the 
weapons by which alone the life of England could b'e saved. 
Substitute fifteen for fifty and you would be nearer the mark. 
There is another term in this brief verdict with which 
many would quarrel, but with which I, for one, profoundly 
agree. It is the word "defeat." Revolution is improbable. 
There is, I think, no case of active and successful popular 
revolution in all the history of aristocratic States. It is 
alien to their genius. The first action of the revolutionaries 
would be to submit themselves to a fairly large committee, 
and committees always compromise. But the word " defeat " 
is sound. For now four years it has been steadily main- 
tained in this paper that the mechanical repetition of a 
certain victory was as unintelligent as it was unmilitary. 
When equals meet victory is for providence or chance to 
decide. 
The author quotes with great effect a similar judgment 
delivered by him now nearly twenty years ago. In his 
preface he claims consistency as the' best gauge, both of 
truth in a writer and of value in his advice, and anyone 
who will read the words he wrote as long ago as the Decem- 
ber of 1899, will agree that exactly the same direct and 
fundamental conclusion appears there as appears in this 
boo)c, which passed through the Press at the very moment 
when the last great German offensive of March so nearly 
decided adversely the fate of Europe. 
A nation that is liable to war requires men of war in its 
Government, and, in the case of Great Britain, the place 
for them is in the Cabinet. The traditional practice of having 
a civilian Minister inside the Cabinet with all the authority, 
and a soldier with all the knowledge outside the Cabinet, 
was devised for electioneering purposes, and not for war. 
Here again there is one word which I personally should 
criticise, and which, therefore, as a reviewer I am bound to 
note. It is the word "electioneering." I do not think the 
system of having a professional politician set over the soldier 
and the sailor in time of war proceeds from the sense of party 
or f 1 om any electioneering spirit . I think the motive is simply 
to keep power in the hands of those who exercise it duringpeace. 
Perhaps the most valuable individual chapter in the book 
is the seventh, entitled "The Theory of War." It was 
delivered as a lecture in that critical moment at the end of 
I-'ebruary, 1916, when the German attack on Verdun had 
begun and when its results were yet doubtful. We find in 
* " Government and the War." By Spenser Wilkinson. Constable, 6s. 
that chapter a very remarkable metaphor which I will quote 
for its terseness of expression and exactitude : 
In short, a Government in order to conduct a war rightly 
must be endowed with what I would venture to call a strat- 
egical conscience. I have sometimes thought that the use 
of strategy to a Government resembled that of a clock — 
a contrivance to tell the time. But there is nothing to 
ensure that when a man is making an important decision he 
will look at the clock ; he may forget to think about the 
time. A man's conscience is always with him, speaks to 
him unasked, and makes a spontaneous effort to prevent 
him going wrong. That is the service which the theory, 
the history, or the science of war, seated in its right place 
in the council chamber of government, can render to a 
nation. 
It is this, perhaps, which most distinguishes the military 
from the immilitary state of society. In the one that con- 
science exists and usually informs its government, or what 
takes the place of its government, once war has broken out. 
In the other the instinctive feeling for war is lacking. Men 
and the government they produce are perpetually, even in 
the crisis of the war, talking of something other than the 
supreme business. They are talking and thinking of what 
they will do after the war ; of how terrible war is ; of indi- 
vidual recriminations and ambitions — even of buying off 
the enemy. Their minds are not absorbed in the tremendous 
play of forces ; they are incapable of automatic reaction to 
meet a situation. 
Among the very numerous passages in the book to which 
the reader will turn with high interest, apart from its main 
thesis, he will note a judgment upon Lord Kitchener's posi- 
tion on pages 256 and 257 which is singularly conclusive 
and just. And in this connection should be mentioned the 
insistence laid by the author upon training, and especially 
upon the difference between the way in which the problem 
of training was envisaged in this country, accustomed tp a 
small and highly professional army into which recruits were 
drafted after a short training and became soldiers through 
long experience, and the conscript system of the Continent. 
It is in part this tradition which inevitably led to short 
training of recruits for such a war as this, and indirectly 
produced the large proportion of non-combatants to com- 
batants. But against this we must set the consideration 
that in no other way could the miracle (for it was no less) 
of calling up this enormous organisation in so short a time 
have been accomplished. 
The earlier part of the book, which gives us lectures delivered 
before the outbreak of war, naturally represents the theory 
then current that the war, when it came, would be in the 
main a duel between this country and Germany, and that 
diary is set forth at full length in the very valuable pages 
of the fourth and fifth chapters in which this sort of simple 
issue is taken for granted. Now, although the war has not 
taken this form, but broke out in the main as a Franco- 
Prussian war which England, after the delay of a few days, 
joined, there is this elementary truth in Professor Wilkin- 
son's position : That the ultimate object of Prussia was 
the weakening of British power. She envisaged acting 
against the undeveloped, unindustrialised, ill-educated, 
and socially largely inchoate mass of Russia upon 
the one side ; upon the other side, quite separate from 
her ally was the only opponent morally equal, 
heavily ha,ndicapped in material, handicapped also by the 
memory of defeat, and by the extreme unpopularity of its 
form of Government. I mean the French Parliamentary 
Republic. The latter represented a force numerically only 
a third of what Prussia controlled and in material far less, 
for the iron and the coal were with Central Europe. The 
probable result of such a conflict would have been the setting 
of the Prussian group as master over the Continent. Against 
such a Power Great Britain and its scattered system of 
Dependencies would not have held. Great Britain seemed 
to modern Prussia the chief antagonist, because Great Britain 
had achieved what modern Prussia most desires to achieve, 
an industrial and commercial civilisation of great wealth 
with Dependencies in varying order far oversea. Prussia 
and her system under the modern (and let us hope ephemeral) 
title of "The German Empire" seemed to the people of 
Great Britain the chief rival, because the rivalry was in 
things which had hitherto been chiefly desired. 
Here history teaches an ironic lesson which I will do no 
more than state and leave it at that : Most of the great 
conflicts of history have taken place over matters which 
seemed.even to an immediate posterity, unimportant. H B, 
