Milner becomes Secretary of State for War

The British chronology of the war records under 20 April 1918 that Lord Derby resigned as Secretary of State for War and was succeeded by Viscount Alfred Milner. The change had already been announced on 18–19 April, and according to the British official history Milner took up his duties at the War Office on 20 April. In exchange Derby received the embassy in Paris, succeeding the 73-year-old Francis Bertie, who had held it since 1905. At the same time Austen Chamberlain joined the War Cabinet.

Derby had headed the War Office since December 1916, when David Lloyd George formed his government. He was a wealthy aristocrat with great influence among the Conservatives and the author of the voluntary recruitment scheme of 1915. In the disputes between the prime minister and the generals he usually sided with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, William Robertson, and Field Marshal Douglas Haig, but was unable to defend them effectively. Haig himself wrote of him in January 1918, in a letter to his wife, that he was like a feather pillow, bearing the marks of the last person who had sat on him. In February, during the crisis that ended with Robertson’s dismissal, Derby long considered resigning with him, consulted many people about it, even the King, and in the end stayed. He did not thereby win the confidence of the prime minister, who was already looking for someone more decisive to replace him.

Milner was one of Lloyd George’s closest associates. A former Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner in South Africa, he had sat in the War Cabinet since December 1916, when it had only five members. In recent weeks he had played an important part in the question of unified command: on 26 March at Doullens he signed on behalf of the government the agreement entrusting General Foch with coordinating the operations of the Allied armies, and on 14 April he took part in Foch’s meeting with Haig at Abbeville, on the day Foch became Commander-in-Chief. He favoured close cooperation with the French and got on well with the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Henry Wilson.

On 19 April, on his way from France to London, Milner stopped at Haig’s headquarters. The Field Marshal showed him Foch’s request that worn-out British divisions be moved to quiet sectors of the French front in exchange for French divisions sent to Flanders. Milner agreed that this had to be accepted, but only for a time. One of the first matters he found waiting for him at the War Office was the removal of General Gough: the inquiry Gough had demanded was refused, but in a letter from the War Office, drafted by Milner himself, the general was assured that the minister did not consider him unfit for a command appropriate to his rank.

Milner headed the War Office until the end of the war, and in January 1919 moved to the Colonial Office. Derby remained ambassador in Paris until 1920, including during the peace conference.