WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

428 WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
arrival of the American troops in France in swelling numbers,
the failure of the Flanders offensive in 1917 might well have
been fatal to Allied prospects in 1918. It weighed down the
balance of man power still further to the side of the Central
Powers. The desertion of Russia and the defeat of Roumania
had already created an adverse balance. The gigantic
casualties of Passchendaele pressed down appreciably the
Allied end of the grisly scales. Our military leaders had acquired
the habit of prodigality in their expenditure of life.
One of the unavoidable evils of war is that it tends to
become an orgy of increasing extravagance. Gladstone, who
tried to run the Crimean War economically, thereby provided
an excuse for military negligence which created one of
the worst military scandals in history. Sir Michael Hicks
Beach's initial frugality prolonged the Boer War. In this
war, the skimping policy of the Indian Government ended in
conditions in Mesopotamia which exceeded the horrors of
Scutari. It is difficult in war to hold the balance even between
parsimony and profusion. By the third year of this War
everyone concerned was thinking in millions. The small
army of just over a hundred thousand was to-day contemptible
in size to British Generals. We had already called over
five million men to the colours. Shells which numbered thousands
in 1914 were fired by the million in a single battle in
1917. The first attack on the Passchendaele slope used up
about five million shells, but the supply flowed in at the rate
of millions a month. We were all shocked by the casualty list
of Neuve Chapelle in the spring of 1915. Compared with the
offensives that followed, the Neuve Chapelle losses were insignificant.
But these casualties, which had already run into
millions, had all been replaced. The British Army that entered
upon the Flanders campaign was larger than that which
had started the Somme fight, although meanwhile its losses
had considerably exceeded the million.