WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

546 WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
is a definite military success for Germany and a definite military
reverse for the Allies is in great measure also due to defects in
their mutual arrangements for conducting the War.
"As compared with the enemy, the fundamental weakness of
the Allies is that the direction of their military operations lacks
real unity. At a very early stage of the War Germany established
a practically despotic dominion over all her allies. She not only
reorganised their armies and assumed direction of the military
strategy, but she took control also over their economic resources,
so that the Central Empires and Turkey are to-day, to all intents
and purposes, a military Empire with one command and one front.
The Allies, on the other hand, have never followed suit. The direction
of the War on their side has remained in the hands of four
separate Governments and four separate General Staffs, each of
which is possessed of complete knowledge only of its own front
and its own national resources, and which draws up a plan of
campaign which is designed to produce results mainly on its own
section of front. Attempts have been made to remedy the defects
of this system by means of Inter-Allied Conferences, which have
lately been of increased frequency. But up to the present these
conferences have never been fully representative, and at best
have done little more than attempt to synchronise what are in reality
four separate plans of campaign. There has never been an
Allied body which had the knowledge of the resources of all the
Allies, which could prepare a single coordinated plan for utilising
those resources in the most decisive manner, taking into account
the political, economic, and diplomatic as well as the military
weaknesses of the Central Powers.
"The crushing of Serbia and the opening of the road to the
East in 1915, the total defeat of Roumania in 1916, and now the
break-through in Italy in 1917, may be largely, although not entirely,
traced to the attempt to conduct the War in a series of
water-tight compartments. It is very remarkable that each winter
the Central Powers have been able to make a crushing attack on
the weakest member of the Entente with complete success while
no adequate counter-preparation has been made by the Allies
to meet the danger, and that during these same winters no corre-