WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

CAMPAIGN OF THE MUD: PASSCHENDAELE 343
of their manufacturing strength to the output of ammunition,
especially of the lighter kind, and too little to the manufacture
of heavy guns. A curious vanity impelled them to build
up pyramids of excessive ammunition, the sight and record
of which gave great pleasure to parliamentary committees,
which love to feast on statistics. M. Albert Thomas, who
knew his committee men well, gorged them with prodigious
figures of output. He made them multi-millionaires with fieldgun
ammunition, but the priesthood of the soixante-quinze
would not give him the opportunity, of which he was the man
to make the best use, to manufacture in sufficient numbers
the heavy guns and howitzers which, whilst they would have
the effect of reducing the number of the output, would have
raised the French artillery to an equality in power with the
Germans. The fact of German superiority in this respect had
been either unknown to both the British and French High
Commands or carefully withheld by them from their respective
Governments. Why should they have done so? Was it
that the Army leaders had not yet fully comprehended the
extent to which this was a war of machinery? Or was it because
men with a plan, in their eagerness to try it, are apt
to overlook facts that do not fit in with its execution, and
these men knew that a revelation of Allied inferiority in
equipment on the Western Front would have led to a postponement
of their offensive?
Joffre, during the Battle of the Somme, had his attention
called to the French weakness in howitzers, and his visit to
me at Cavan's Headquarters in September, 1916, was
prompted by a desire to secure fifty of our six-inch howitzers
for use on the French Front. But they were utterly inadequate
to make up the deficiency.
It had been assumed that the disparity discovered during
the Battle of Verdun between the German and French
heavy calibres had since been made up. The enquiries instituted
after the Chemin des Dames revealed the disquieting