WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

172 WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
work might be dealt with by a firing squad. The Revolutionary
Government of Russia resorted to this ultimate
sanction of military discipline just as ruthlessly as the
"bourgeois" Governments of the West. The civilians could
enjoy domestic comfort and personal freedom, and make
excess profits or earn extra wages too, that were often far
bigger than anything they had known in peacetime — and
certainly much greater than the pay drawn by their comrades
who were fighting in the trenches. Between these two
sections of the nation it was impossible to hold the scales
even and impose on them an equality of sacrifice. The full
use made of the voluntary system before we imposed conscription
had the result that in the later years of the War
an increasingly high proportion of those still in civil life
were men who were averse to military service, so that our
measures to secure further recruits from them to maintain
the strength of our Armies encountered an ever-stiffening
resistance.
Theoretically, no doubt, the logical solution of the difficulty
would have been to conscript the whole nation at a
blow and place alike the military and the civil sections under
the same kind of control. But a moment's reflection will show
that this logical solution was utterly impracticable. We had
not the Continental tradition and habitude due to a century
of conscription. Our civilian structure, industrial, commercial,
professional, counting occupations which ran into
many thousands of different classes and varieties, from
the great factory to the village carpenter, could not have
been brought under the rigid discipline that was possible and
necessary in trenches within range of the enemy's gunfire.
The ideal of nation-wide conscription for the varied tasks
of national defence could be adopted as a principle which
would justify all useful and feasible measures of Government
control. But it could not be applied in the sense of en-