WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

542 WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
Up to the time when Marshal Joffre was removed from the
Chief Command of the French he tried, with poor results indeed,
but still he tried, to assume and exercise a kind of benevolent
control over all the Allies, but his position was not sufficiently
exalted, his powers were not sufficiently great to admit of
success.
Since then we have tried many expedients but always with
most disappointing, sometimes even with disastrous results. We
have had frequent meetings of Ministers, constant conversations
between Chiefs of Staff, deliberations of Commanders-in-Chief,
mass meetings of all these high officials in London, in Paris,
in Rome. We have tried the experiment of placing one Commander-in-Chief
under the orders of another and all these endeavours
have failed to attain any real concerted coordinated
effort in diplomacy, in strategy, in fighting or in the production
of war material. ... I do not wish to exaggerate, but
human nature being what it is and our Commanders-in-Chief and
Chiefs of Staff being what they are — all men of strong and
decided views, all men whose whole energies are devoted to their
own fronts, and their own national concerns, we get as a natural
and inevitable result a war conducted not as a whole, but as a
war on sections of the whole, i.e., a war on the British Front, a
war on the French Front, a war on the Italian Front; and the
stronger and the better the various Chiefs, the more isolated
and detached the plans.
It seems to me that all this confusion, overlapping and loss
of collective effort are due to the same causes which throughout
the whole war have led to a narrow vision, and too limited outlook
over the whole colossal struggle; and the better the sectional
Commanders-in-Chief are, the more loyal and responsive the
Chiefs of the Home Staffs, the more we see the whole of the national
effort restricted to the national fronts.
The net result seems to me to be that we take short views instead
of long views, we look for decisions to-day instead of laying
out plans for to-morrow, and as a sequence we have constant
change of plans, with growing and increasing irritation and inefficiency.