by N S Nash
That will be entirely for the tribunal to decide after they have read the Minority Report. The whole of the Report will be read by the tribunal, and the tribunal will act, and they will have Lord Hardinge before them. I may point out that when Lord Hardinge came before the Commission my honourable and gallant friend did not cross-examine him.
‘No,’ replied Wedgwood, ‘that is to his advantage and not mine.’ Smith did not agree and forced Wedgwood onto the back foot by riposting:
I am not so sure about that. I think that is a very strange doctrine. My Honourable and Gallant Friend in the Minority Report has made reflections of a very grave character upon Lord Hardinge’s discharge of his official duties. Lord Hardinge goes before that Commission, he is compelled to attend for the purpose of being cross-examined, but my Honourable and Gallant friend did not cross-examine him when he was there. In fact, he made no effort at all to get Lord Hardinge there to cross-examine him, and then he made his Minority Report.
The debate raged on, conducted in the most civilised tones, with great attention paid to the possible means by which those named in the Report might be called to judicial account. The different status and conditions of service between military and civilian was an issue discussed in mind-numbing detail. Colonel Sir Mark Sykes interjected to say:
It is difficult for one who has little or no legal experience at all to follow the speeches which have just been made. One thought that passed through my mind … during the two hours and a quarter which have been occupied in the speeches we have heard was, how many men have been killed at the front and how much we have done towards preventing them being killed or towards helping on the War? If the result of these Debates is to set up permanent Courts which go on inquiring … into one scandal after another, with fresh questions raised, with further depreciation of our prestige in the eyes of our Allies, I do not see how we are helping on the War in any way whatever.
Sykes had a point; the debate thus far had been entirely focused on legal procedure and had yet to reach any sort of conclusion. The time was fast approaching 1900 hrs when Sir Henry Craik rose to speak. Refreshingly, unlike many of those who had preceded him he wanted to talk in specific terms about the principal issue. That is to say, the medical debacle and the suffering of British and Indian soldiers, and the manner in which that was reported. He said:
I cannot find, after carefully studying the Report, anything in their conclusions that are not vague and indiscriminate, and even contradictory. I would like to illustrate my point by quoting some of the contradictory references from the Report. In paragraph 111 they say: ‘There are passages in the evidence of Lord Hardinge, Surgeon General Hathaway and other responsible witnesses which might lead to the inference that the medical breakdown in Mesopotamia was due to the shortage of ordinary river transport, for which, of course, the medical authorities were not responsible.’ If this were true, it would follow that the medical authorities must be relieved of blame for the results of the breakdown. One would have thought that, but how do they go on? They say: ‘We cannot agree with such a contention.’ On page 113 of the same Report they say: ‘The defects of medical provision caused avoidable suffering to the sick and wounded, and during the breakdown in the winter of 1915–16 this suffering was most lamentably severe. The deficiencies, which were the main causes of the avoidable suffering of the sick and wounded, were in the provision of the following: River hospital steamers, medical personnel, river transport, ambulance land transport.’
In the other part of the Report they point out that if the medical authorities were not responsible for the ordinary river transport they must be relieved of all blame, and in another part of the Report they say: ‘In our opinion the known shortage of ordinary river transport, if anything, aggravates rather than palliates the omissions of the medical authorities.’ Surely we have a right to ask how are we to reconcile these ridiculous contradictions between different parts of the Report. The real fact is that there seems to be a sort of determination to find some scapegoat for that which has attracted more attention than any other part of the Report in the public minds – the lamentable, scandalous, and dreadful way in which our sick were treated during that campaign.
Although Sir Henry had identified contradictions that damaged the veracity of the MC Report, none of the following speakers expanded or challenged Sir Henry’s thrust. Later in the day, Mr Austen Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for India, made his contribution and conceded that, as he was named, his conduct might be called into question by any future tribunal. He continued:
Accordingly, Sir, my resignation, my final resignation, is in the hands of my Right Honourable Friend the Prime Minister, and I only speak from this bench at this moment because, owing to His Majesty’s absence from London on public work, it has been impossible to take His Majesty’s pleasure upon it. With that personal explanation of my position, I will proceed at once to deal with some of the matters on which I think the House has a right to call for a statement from me.
He then went on to make his statement, in which he defended General Sir Edmund Barrow, Sir John Nixon and Sir William Meyer and poured scorn on the MC Report for its selection of information and the emphasis it put on an incomplete picture. Chamberlain was speaking in his own defence and of those who answered to him. He was fluent and persuasive, but he was obliged to concede that the arrangements in Mesopotamia were severely flawed.
He sought to defend the system of ‘private’ correspondence, saying that if it had been classified as ‘secret’ instead, the result would have been the same. This was misleading and untrue. A ‘secret’ document can be seen by anyone with the appropriate security clearance, and ‘secret’ is the lowest secrecy grading, with only ‘confidential’ and ‘restricted’ gradings below. A ‘private’ document is what it says – privy only to the person addressed. Chamberlain then admitted:
Quite frankly when I used this so-called ‘private’ form of telegram I was not aware that it was the practice of the India Office and of India that private telegrams should be regarded as the personal property of the official who sent or received them, and could be carried away by him when he left. We constantly use private telegrams to convey secret information directly one to the other, and then make them official afterwards, by which means they are placed on record. It is always within the competence of the Viceroy at the other end, or myself at this end, to place any private telegram on public record if we wish, but I was not aware of that particular procedure, and I only discovered it by accident on the day Lord Hardinge was leaving India. Had I been aware of it I should have made a number of these telegrams official after they had been sent as private.
Chamberlain still had points to make and turned to the perceived villain of the piece, Lord Hardinge. This was a man for whom he had worked over an extended period. It was Hardinge who misled the India Office in general and Chamberlain in particular with his concealed ambition to annex the whole of Mesopotamia. It would not have been unreasonable if Chamberlain had thrown Hardinge to the wolves. He did not do so. Instead, he had this to say:
I hope that the temper of the House today and the speeches which have been made will have done something to bring our countrymen outside to a juster [sic] appreciation of the great character and the great services of Lord Hardinge. The Viceroyalty of India is not the only office that he has held. He has spent a life in the service of his country. He has rendered great and exceptional services in the high posts, which he has filled. He was taken out of a career that he had made his own and, at the request of the Government of the day, was appointed Viceroy of India.
He went there at a time of difficulty, of disturbance and of danger, and he very nearly paid with his life for his acceptance of the post. He piloted India through these stormy years; he piloted her through the dark early months of the War. He stripped the country. He and Sir Beauchamp Duff stripped their own resources to make good our deficiencies here at home. They gave of their troops more than it had ever been supposed th
ey could have parted with. They reduced the British garrison to a lower point than safety had always been held to demand. They gave rifles, guns, military equipment of every kind, and at one fell swoop over 500 of the officers of their army were taken to officer our new armies here. Then, Sir, because, there has been a breakdown in military administration, Lord Hardinge is to be held up to public odium and contempt, his great services forgotten, and the most popular viceroy that India has ever had – one who won not merely the respect, but the affection of her princes and peoples in a measure that had never been accorded to any of his predecessors – is to be denounced and hounded down, and you hear people say that in no other capacity during his life is he fit to serve his country or his king.
This is a generous statement by any yardstick, but it should be noted that the giving of Indian assets to the national cause did not cause either Hardinge or Duff any personal inconvenience. It was nothing other than their bounden duty to deploy public assets to best advantage. To describe the debacle of Mesopotamia over the period September 1914 to April 1916 as a ‘breakdown in military administration’ is a masterly and misleading understatement. It appeared that the party line was to defend Hardinge, and Chamberlain had just aligned his toes along that line.
Colonel Sir Mathew Wilson followed Chamberlain and offered his regrets at the latter’s resignation, and then suggested that the House:
will agree with me in feeling that he bears little or no blame. These commissions are very dangerous things to have started. I believe you will never get a military officer in a high position to take on his shoulders any initiative if you elect to try men by court martial because they have failed to obtain the success which was hoped for at first.
The clock was striking nine o’clock when Sir John Jardine rose to speak at great length. He ranged widely over the MC Report. He reviewed the case for a new judicial tribunal and commented on the probable cost to the public purse. Turning to the performance of Lord Hardinge, he offered the view that:
The Commission’s findings absolve him from crime and misdemeanour, but point only to lack of judgment, lack of energy, or lack of grip. The House of Lords, in a judgment, once said negligence is often extremely like fraud, and a learned judge of long experience said it was sometimes difficult to tell whether a man was a knave or a fool, and I repeat that we do not find anything but lack of judgment and error, except it might be as to the private letters amongst friends, which, I should think, could be disposed of right away.
Sir John Rees did not agree, allied himself with the Minority Report and struck a very straightforward note when he said that the findings of the MC should be recognised and that the Viceroy should be held responsible for civilian failures and General Sir Beauchamp Duff for military failures. Sir Henry Craik spoke with some passion in defence of the Indian Medical Service and the Royal Army Medical Corps, then utterly damned Sir William Meyer by saying with heavy irony:
We are not deprived of the services of Sir William Meyer, a man who has risen in the service by constantly ingratiating himself with the financial authorities through cheese-paring, who must not be taken – I say this with all careful consideration – as a specimen of the Indian Civil Service of the better type, a man who has in every case injured and done his best to injure and curtail the usefulness of the Medical Service. We are not deprived of Sir William Meyer’s services because of any reflection cast upon him by this Report – indeed, I think he is appointed to some new, higher, and more important post.
The MC Report had commented upon the management of public finances in India and its tone was generally negative, but Meyer was not singled out for censure. The cautious parochial and pedestrian attitude of the Indian Government towards its finances was a corporate matter and responsibility. Meyer was a leading member of that government. Craik’s acid attack was made despite Sir William being completely exonerated by the MC Report. However, like most of the vast volume of words spoken in the House, the personal attack did nothing to change anything. Meyer, incidentally and justifiably, did go on to greater things.
Despite the absence of any censure or any support for Craik’s view, Chamberlain chose to defend Meyer in these words:
I have dealt mainly with my own office and with myself, but I cannot leave the subject without saying something also about the high officials of the Indian Government who have been the mark for every kind of attack, and even for most scurrilous abuse in the campaign of invective which has followed upon the publication of the Commission’s Report. Among them is Sir William Meyer, the Finance Minister of India, a man who has given long years of service to the Crown, who was trusted by the late Viceroy and is trusted by the present Viceroy, who has piloted the finances of India so far with success through times the anxiety and the difficulty of which I think few Members of this House probably realise, and who is now held up to public odium and contempt. Why? Because when the construction of a railway was suggested to him on political, commercial, and military grounds, he said that he did not believe in the commercial success of the railway. He left the Government of India to decide upon the political grounds, and he said that if the Commander-in-Chief thought it necessary for military reasons it must be referred home for the decision of His Majesty’s Government. What else could he have done? If it were a military necessity it was not for him, but for the military authorities, to say so, and to put it forward on that ground. If it were recommended as a commercial speculation, then I agree with Sir William Meyer. He was right. I do not think that it was a good speculation, and, at any rate, it was not the time for building commercial railways in Mesopotamia or elsewhere.
Mr Joseph King rose to take another bite at the Government’s cherry and made the point that the MC Report had provided ‘a number of revelations, and established a large number of facts which are in direct contravention and contradiction to the statements made by ministers, on their solemn faith – I might almost say on their solemn oath – as being facts’.
He recalled that during 1915 and up to May 1917, the House had complained about the dearth of information provided on the Mesopotamia operations. King then struck a telling blow at the Prime Minister’s veracity, saying that it was not until 2 November 1915 that the Prime Minister eventually made a statement. King remembered that statement on Mesopotamia, which used the unfortunate words:
General Nixon’s force is now within measurable distance of Baghdad. I do not think that in the whole course of the war there has been a series of operations more carefully contrived, more brilliantly conducted, and with a better prospect of final success.
King, with forensic precision, then pointed out at the time the actuality was that Nixon’s force was well advanced on its passage to destruction. King then inflicted further wounds when he quoted Chamberlain, who, having been asked about the medical arrangements for the Mesopotamian expedition, answered that, ‘The condition of the wounded is very satisfactory, and the medical arrangements have worked well under difficult conditions.’ Adding a little later, when asked to give more information to the House on the expeditions generally, ‘I am unwilling to give the House any information as to the accuracy of which I cannot absolutely vouch.’
King was scathing and berated Chamberlain for giving assurances when the wounded and the sick were suffering such trials and horrible conditions. King said dismissively, ‘That is one episode of this miserable story which I think the House and the country ought to bear in mind. We have been misled, we have been shamefully misled.’
As the evening wore on it was evident that there was no clear consensus in the House. Mr Joseph King resumed his seat and the Speaker called the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr Arthur Balfour, who made what was perhaps the most telling contribution of the day. He certainly enlivened the debate after a gentle beginning. First he supported the Attorney General, who had fully explained to the House the broad principles on which the Government proposed to act and principles from which it could not depart. He said that he felt sure that
the House and the country would agree that to condemn, punish or remove anyone ‘merely on the strength of the Mesopotamia Commission Report, might be to inflict a grave injustice upon individuals, and we do not propose to do that under any temptation or pressure’.
71. Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, December 1916–October 1919. Previously, Prime Minister 1902–1905. (Internet source)
Arthur Balfour recognised that the country was responding to the horrors revealed in the MC Report and it was ‘natural and unavoidable’ to try to find somebody who was responsible and to punish them. However, it was the responsibility of the House to see that ‘this natural desire never exceeds the bounds of strict justice’.
He went on to say that there were two alternatives before the House and, since the speech by the Attorney General, His Majesty’s Government had sought to find the general feeling of the House and the direction in which it wanted the Government to move. The Foreign Secretary said that HMG was comfortable to proceed with either of the alternative tribunals and he commented that some members seemed to regard both alternatives as ‘a means of bringing criminals to justice or meting out a deserved punishment. I do not regard them in that light at all.’ He accepted that that might be one of the outcomes of a tribunal and speculated that ‘another result would be to show that some men have been most unjustly attacked by the Commission, and it would give them a much-needed opportunity of vindicating their character before the public.’ He continued by saying: