Lloyd George on war aims

On Saturday afternoon, 5 January 1918, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George gave a speech in London to trade union delegates in which, for the first time in such detail, he set out his country’s war aims. According to most accounts he spoke at Caxton Hall in Westminster; some historians give the neighbouring Central Hall. The United States ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, reported to Washington the next day that the text of the speech had been discussed beforehand by the whole Cabinet, and that in Britain more weight was attached to it than to any British statement since the beginning of the war.

Why the trade unionists

The speech was set within talks on manpower. The army was short of soldiers, and the government wanted to call up young workers in the munitions industry, until then protected by exemptions promised to the trade unions in 1915–1916. The Minister of National Service, Auckland Geddes, who since November had been in charge of recruitment, called a general conference of union representatives at the beginning of January, followed by conferences for individual branches of industry. On 14 January he told the House of Commons that this series of meetings had given the Prime Minister a “happy opportunity” to make a statement on war aims.

Lloyd George explained this plainly at the outset. Since the government was asking organised labour for help in maintaining the strength of the army, its representatives had the right to demand that doubts be dispelled as to what that strength was to be used for. When millions of men are called upon to suffer and die, they have the right to know what they are sacrificing for. At the end of December a special conference of the Labour Party and the trade unions had adopted its own memorandum on war aims, and in the last days of the year the Prime Minister had discussed it with labour leaders. He had also talked with the Liberal leader Herbert Henry Asquith, the former Foreign Secretary Edward Grey and representatives of the Dominions. He could therefore assure his audience that he spoke not only for the government but also for the nation and the whole Empire.

The second reason was the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. On 25 December the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, declared on behalf of the Central Powers that they accepted the Russian formula of peace without forcible annexations and indemnities, provided all the belligerents subscribed to it. London could not pass over such a proposal in silence. At the War Cabinet meeting on 3 January Lloyd George said it should be used to announce Britain’s own war aims, which would sustain morale at home and, if possible, weaken morale in the enemy’s camp. The Cabinet inclined towards a declaration going “to the extreme limit of concession”, which would show the British, the Allies and even the peoples of Austria, Turkey and Germany that the aim of the war was not the destruction of the enemy states.

What we are not fighting for

The Prime Minister began with what Britain was not fighting for. It was not waging a war of aggression against the German people and had never sought the break-up of Germany. It had entered the war in defence of the violated public law of Europe and of the treaty that Germany had trampled on by invading Belgium. Nor did it wish to destroy Austria-Hungary or to deprive Turkey of its capital and of the lands of Asia Minor and Thrace inhabited mainly by Turks. It was not fighting to change Germany’s system of government, although it considered its military autocratic constitution a dangerous anachronism. Germany’s adoption of a truly democratic constitution would be the best proof that the spirit of military domination was dead, but that was a matter for the Germans themselves.

He recalled that more than a year earlier President Woodrow Wilson had called on the belligerents to state their war aims, and the Allies had replied in a note of 10 January 1917, while the Central Powers remained silent. He called Czernin’s statement of 25 December “deplorably vague”. The promise that no one would seize occupied territories by force or deprive of independence the nations that had lost it could be reconciled with almost any scheme of conquest. It was not clear whether Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania would be as free as Germany, or would receive independence of an inferior kind. The Central Powers rejected reparations for Belgium, regarded the autonomy of the Arabs, Armenians and Syrians as an internal affair of the Porte, and firmly demanded only one thing: the return of all the German colonies.

The peace terms

The basis of any territorial settlement, according to the Prime Minister, was to be the consent of the governed, and the first condition respect for treaties. Lloyd George listed in turn:

• the complete restoration of the political, territorial and economic independence of Belgium and reparation for the devastation of its towns. This was not a war indemnity like the one imposed on France in 1871, but a recognition that the law had been broken;
• the restoration of Serbia and Montenegro and of the occupied parts of France, Italy and Romania, with the withdrawal of foreign armies and reparation for injustice;
• standing by the French democracy “to the death” in its demand for a reconsideration of “the great wrong of 1871”, when two provinces were torn from France against the will of their population. This wound, he said, had poisoned the peace of Europe for half a century;
• an independent Poland, comprising all genuinely Polish lands whose inhabitants wished to belong to it, as “an urgent necessity for the stability of Western Europe”;
• genuine self-government for the nationalities of Austria-Hungary that had long desired it. Like Wilson in December, Lloyd George gave assurances that the break-up of the monarchy was not a war aim;
• the union of the Italians with those of their own race and tongue, and justice for men “of Romanian blood and speech”;
• the maintenance of the Turkish state with Constantinople as its capital, with the internationalisation and neutralisation of the Straits. Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine were entitled to recognition of their separate national conditions and could not be restored to their former rule;
• the placing of the German colonies at the disposal of the peace conference, which was to be guided above all by the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants;
• reparation for injuries done in violation of international law, with remembrance of the seamen and the crimes committed at sea.

Of the agreements concluded with the Allies, that is the secret treaties that the Bolsheviks had just made public, the Prime Minister said only that changed circumstances, such as the collapse of Russia and its separate negotiations, had altered the conditions under which they had been made, and that Britain was ready to discuss them with its allies.

Russia

Lloyd George did not want to speak about the Russian lands occupied by the Germans, because Russian policy had changed so rapidly since the revolution that it was hard to foresee what it would look like when peace was made. He recalled that Russia had entered the war in defence of Serbia, France out of loyalty to its alliance with Russia, and Britain because of its obligations to Belgium. Russia’s present rulers were now conducting separate negotiations with the common enemy without consulting the Allies. “I am not making reproaches”, he stressed, but Britain could not be responsible for decisions taken without it. He warned that Prussia would give up none of the Russian provinces it had occupied and would force the rest of Russia into economic and political servitude. The Allies would gladly fight on alongside the new Russian democracy, but if its leaders acted on their own, they had no means of averting catastrophe. “Russia can only be saved by her own people.”

An international organisation

Finally Lloyd George reproached the Central Powers for one omission. Peace must not carry within it the seed of a future war, but that was not enough. The burden of armaments, “the increasing evil of compulsory military service” and the waste of wealth on preparations for war he called a blot on civilisation. A great attempt must therefore be made to create some international organisation that would replace war as a means of settling disputes. To the question of what the Empire was fighting for he answered: for a just and lasting peace, which required three conditions. The sanctity of treaties, territorial settlements based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed, and an international organisation that would limit the burden of armaments and diminish the risk of war. On these terms the British Empire would welcome peace, and to secure them its peoples were ready to make even greater sacrifices.

Poland and Alsace

For Poles the most important sentence was the one about an independent Poland. In April 1917 London had assured the Provisional Government of its support for an independent and united Poland, and in October it had recognised the Polish National Committee as an official Polish organisation. Now the Prime Minister publicly included an independent Poland among the war aims, although cautiously: it was to comprise only those lands whose population itself wished to belong to it. There was no mention of access to the sea. On Alsace and Lorraine he spoke more strongly than ministers had previously done in the House of Commons, but he used the word “reconsideration” rather than “return”. Eight days earlier the French Foreign Minister Stéphen Pichon had demanded in the Chamber of Deputies outright that both provinces be restored to France.

Reception

The speech was very well received at home. According to Page it dispelled the gloom with which the British had begun the new year. It was backed by one of the Labour leaders, Arthur Henderson, which according to The New York Times particularly surprised Berlin. The Italian government and Catholic press praised the speech for setting the Allied aims in order; the socialist press was critical. The former Russian government’s ambassador in Paris, Vasily Maklakov, on the other hand complained to the Americans that the Prime Minister’s words about Russia could only harm it. In private conversations Lloyd George said that he had “gone as near peace as he could”, and that the speech was a counter-offensive against the German peace terms, calculated to reach the German people and detach the Austrians. He did not believe, however, that the Germans could accept the terms on which Britain had to insist.

The speech preceded Wilson’s address by three days. The President already had his own programme ready and, according to Colonel Edward House, when the text of the speech reached Washington on Saturday afternoon, he briefly considered giving up, because the British terms were very close to his own. House persuaded him that Lloyd George had cleared the air and that the President’s statement was all the more necessary. On 8 January Wilson announced his Fourteen Points and praised the Prime Minister for having spoken “with admirable candour”. The Reich Chancellor Georg von Hertling replied to both only on 24 January. He conceded that Lloyd George had changed his tone, but saw in his words no serious will for peace.