Draft rules for an inter-allied war council

The chronology of the principal events of the war, published in 1922 by the historical section of the British Committee of Imperial Defence, records under 29 December 1915 that draft rules for an inter-allied war council were approved. In the index of the same publication the entry reads: “agreement reached” on the matter. It concerned the body whose principle British and French ministers had accepted in Paris on 17 November: a joint council that was to co-ordinate the allies’ actions better. Over the following weeks London and Paris exchanged drafts of its constitution. The available sources do not, however, make it possible to establish what exactly happened on 29 December: whether it was the day one of the governments formally adopted the draft, or only the day the two sides agreed the text.

The British draft

Most of what is known about this work comes from the memoirs of the secretary of the British War Committee, Maurice Hankey. According to him, on the evening of 17 November the British ministers met the French government, presided over by President Poincaré, at the Élysée Palace. There the conclusions of the conference were approved, together with “a sort of embryo constitution” for future conferences, and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was asked to work it out in detail. Hankey set about the British draft as soon as he returned to London. After approval by the War Committee, the text was taken to Prime Minister Aristide Briand by a French liaison officer, Captain Doumayrou of the Spahis, who together with Hankey had drafted the conclusions of the Paris conference. By the same route the two sides then exchanged comments for a long time. Hankey gives no dates for the individual stages. It is known that the day before the date in the chronology, 28 December, the War Committee met and settled British war policy for 1916.

According to Hankey, the final text provided for a permanent committee of an advisory character. Its conclusions were to require the approval of the governments, and its membership was to be as flexible as possible: the prime ministers of any of the allied states and as many ministers and staff officers as the matters under discussion required. Meetings were, where possible, to be preceded by an exchange of views between the general and naval staffs and other departments of the states concerned, and conclusions were to be drawn up after each of them. Each government was to appoint a secretary and liaison officer, who would be joint secretary of the council and ensure permanent contact between the governments. Hankey wrote that the scheme was almost identical with the British plan, which deliberately transferred the working principles of the Committee of Imperial Defence to international relations.

The secretariat that never was

Asquith’s draft also provided for a permanent secretariat for the council. Briand, however, insisted on striking it out, and the British gave way. Hankey called this “a blot on the new organisation”, which without it might have gained a strong position at so early a stage of the war. The historian Elizabeth Greenhalgh admits that she was unable to establish why Briand rejected the secretariat. The biographer of the British diplomat George Clerk, who pressed for the secretariat, writes that it was opposed not only by Briand but also by the French foreign ministry. From the start Paris thought of the council differently from London. As early as 22 November Briand told the Russian ambassador Alexander Izvolsky that he rather envisaged periodic conferences in Paris, to which the matters for discussion would be submitted in advance. Russia would be represented by its ambassador, since a minister could not be expected to come from Petrograd. Izvolsky warned his government that in such company Russia might play a subordinate role.

The Italians, too, had reservations. On 18 December Izvolsky reported that, according to the French foreign ministry, the government in Rome looked unfavourably on the plan for an allied conference in Paris, because it did not want to admit to its work its ambassador in France, Tommaso Tittoni, who was regarded as a supporter of Giolitti. In public the allies spoke of unity. On 21 December Asquith assured the House of Commons that the government wished to offset the advantage that unified direction gives the enemy by “greater unity and concert of strategic direction among the Allies”, and praised the first joint meeting of the staffs of France, Russia, Italy and Britain, held two weeks earlier.

What came of it

Hankey recalled that the two prime ministers initialled the text at their next meeting in January 1916. According to Greenhalgh, the rules were first applied at the allied conference in Paris at the end of March 1916, and the Italians refused to join such a body. Greenhalgh herself admits that the new organisation achieved little. Its significance lay in its being the first step towards a formal structure for joint allied decision-making. A Supreme War Council with a permanent staff and secretariat was set up only in November 1917, after the Italian defeat at Caporetto.