London conference on the peace notes

On 26 December 1916 an Anglo-French conference met at 10 Downing Street in London. The talks lasted until 28 December. The host was David Lloyd George, Prime Minister for less than three weeks, together with the members of the new War Cabinet. From France came the Finance Minister, Alexandre Ribot, the Minister of Munitions, Albert Thomas, and Philippe Berthelot, a close associate of the Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, who presented his personal position. Briand himself did not come. Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs that he was kept away by indisposition, and the British official history that he could not leave Paris because he had to look after his majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, also took part in the talks. The conference had been called earlier on the questions of Greece, Salonika and unity of command on the Western Front, but replies to two fresh notes were added to the agenda.

The reply to the peace notes

On 12 December the Central Powers had proposed peace talks in a note passed on by the neutral states, without stating any terms. On 18 December the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, asked all the belligerents to declare what they were fighting for. The British War Cabinet discussed Wilson’s note on 21 and 23 December. Drafts of the replies were to be prepared by Lord Robert Cecil and the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour. The British set aside a draft reply to Wilson sent by Briand as too vague and evasive. They wanted the Allies to say clearly what they were prepared to go on paying for in blood.

At the conference the British also raised objections to some passages of the French draft reply to the Germans. Cambon presented a new text, which was adopted after amendments. With a passage on Belgium added later, it became the joint note of all the Allies. The reply to Wilson took longer to agree. The French firmly opposed separate notes, so it was decided to send a joint one. Cecil passed on the advice of the American ambassador, Walter Page, to treat the Americans as openly as possible. Balfour proposed listing the war aims: the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the union with Italy of the Italian lands under Austrian rule, the unification of the Serbs and the Romanians in their own states, the fulfilment of at least some of the aspirations of the Poles, and the liberation of Christians from Turkish rule. The finished reply reached the Americans only on 10 January 1917.

Salonika and Greece

After the fighting in Athens on 1 December the Allied troops in Macedonia had the hostile army of King Constantine in their rear, and the Allies were considering whether to withdraw from Monastir, taken in November. The French general commanding there, Maurice Sarrail, was already preparing a rear line of defence just in case. According to the British official history of the Salonika front, the ministers discussed this on the afternoon of 26 December, without military advisers, and decided nothing. On 27 December the French demanded reinforcements for Salonika. The British agreed for the time being to send only drafts, needed to bring their divisions back up to full strength. Lloyd George proposed that the whole matter be discussed soon by a wider conference with the Italians and the military commanders. At first a meeting in the south of France was mentioned, but in the end it met in Rome on 5–7 January 1917.

The Nivelle plan

The fiercest dispute was over the Western Front. General Robert Nivelle, for two weeks Commander-in-Chief of the French armies, was planning a great offensive for the spring and wanted the British quickly to take over a long stretch of the front from the French. General Douglas Haig agreed to this in principle on 25 December, but to begin with only on a sector of about 13 kilometres up to the Amiens–Saint-Quentin road, from 1 February, instead of the roughly 32 kilometres Nivelle demanded. Nivelle then wrote to the Minister of War asking that Lloyd George be persuaded at the London conference to put pressure on Haig.

Ribot demanded on behalf of the French government that the British agree at once, without consulting the soldiers, to the Nivelle plan and to the participation of their army in it. Lloyd George replied that the government had learned of the new plan only the day before, that Nivelle had been in command for two weeks and that the cabinet would not change its war plans without hearing Haig. The War Cabinet received the French request sympathetically, but decided first to give the two commanders time to come to an agreement between themselves. In his memoirs Lloyd George noted that he had been struck by the transformation of the usually cautious Ribot, carried away, like the whole of France, by the hope of victory according to Nivelle’s recipe. Haig, appointed field marshal on 27 December, went to Chantilly on 31 December to talk to Nivelle in person. The British official history also suggests that it was British pressure at the conference that led France to send General Noël de Castelnau to the forthcoming Allied conference in Petrograd.

In the end the London conference settled little. It did, however, agree the text of the rejection of the German offer and began the discussion of the Nivelle plan. In the spring of 1917 the British and the French paid a high price for that plan.