by N S Nash
I must frankly admit that I am in many respects very little moved by the Report of the Commission. Nothing can exceed the feelings of horror with which everybody must read of the tragic events, which followed the retirement of the British force, but the general character and the manner in which the Commission has approached this question is not the proper method of dealing with these great state affairs. Anybody who listened with attention, as I am sure most Honourable Members of the House did, to the speech of my Right Honourable Friend the Secretary for India must have felt that the Commission, after that speech, is quite as much on its trial as any of the gentlemen whom it has arraigned. [Author’s emphasis]
I must frankly add that I profoundly dissent from the expediency of the course which my Right Honourable Friend [Chamberlain] has thought it right to pursue. I believe it to have been wrong, although right in intention, in my opinion, in substance. I do not believe, personally … merely on the ground that this Commission has casually imputed some share of responsibility to my Right Honourable Friend or anybody else for their share in these transactions, that they are right in withdrawing themselves from the service of the country. Something has been said by the honourable gentleman who has just sat down [Mr King] and by others about the case of Lord Hardinge. Lord Hardinge, as soon as the Commission reported, tendered his resignation to me. I did not accept it.
Mr Joseph King: I beg the Right Honourable Gentleman’s pardon. I never said a word in my speech about Lord Hardinge.
Mr Arthur Balfour: I apologise. The Honourable Member was indulging in general invective, and I confess that I thought he included Lord Hardinge.
Mr Joseph King: Might I ask the Right Honourable Gentleman whether he reads the despatches in the Foreign Office as carelessly as he listens to my speeches?
Mr Arthur Balfour: I read them with quite as much care and much less interest. The Honourable Gentleman will hardly deny that Lord Hardinge has been made the target of the most virulent and persistent attacks, reflected perhaps more in questions which have been asked by honourable gentlemen, including, I think, the Honourable Gentleman himself, but I am glad to see that they have sensibly diminished in virulence since we entered upon this debate this afternoon. I wanted to tell the House, and I think it is fair that I should state it, that Lord Hardinge offered his resignation to me quite early in the stages of this controversy, and I declined to accept it. He offered it again and pressed it on me in a letter, which I received yesterday, and I again refused to accept it. I refused to accept it on the broad ground, which I think ought to move everybody who really feels what the country requires of its citizens in a time of war. Those who want Lord Hardinge to resign or want him to leave his present place want him at this crisis in this nation’s history to give up all efforts towards carrying on the great struggle in which we are engaged. That is a liberty, which we do not give to anybody in this country. Many of the civil servants in my department have desired to go to the front and take their part in the fighting line. They have been refused, and they have been told that their duty to their country requires them to stay in the Foreign Office. Am I to be told that the head, permanent, civil servant at the Foreign Office …
Mr Swift MacNeill: He has no right to be!
Mr Arthur Balfour: Am I to be told that he is to have a liberty, which is denied to his subordinates?
Colonel Collins: Twenty-one generals were sent home from Mesopotamia as failures. Why should not the same law apply to the Viceroy of India?
Mr Arthur Balfour: I do not know what the Honourable and Gallant Gentleman means. I wholly fail to follow his reasoning. Does anybody suggest that Lord Hardinge is incompetent to carry out the duties on which he is now engaged?
Mr MacNeill: I suggest it. It is an outrage.
Mr Arthur Balfour: If a Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office is to be dismissed from his place because his superiors pursue a particular policy, how are you going to carry on the Civil Service of this country? Why is Lord Hardinge responsible for Lord Grey’s policy? He is not responsible. Nobody knows better than the two Honourable Gentlemen who interrupted me just now that if you were to accept these principles your so-called permanent civil servants would go out of office as often as your political heads of departments. [Hon. Members: ‘No!’] Of course they would. If they were to be made responsible for all that the heads of their departments do, how can it be otherwise?
Mr MacNeill: May I for one moment courteously interrupt the Right Honourable Gentleman? He knows perfectly well that Lord Hardinge was responsible for foreign policy when he went with the King as the King’s Minister to Kiel to hold a conversazione with the Czar.
Mr Arthur Balfour: I know nothing of that kind.
Mr MacNeill: It was in June, 1908.
Mr Arthur Balfour: Although I was not in office at that time but was a member of the Opposition, I am perfectly certain that if the Honourable Gentleman cares to inquire of the many distinguished persons who were Lord Grey’s colleagues at that time, they will confirm my statement that the Honourable Gentleman is labouring under a profound delusion.
Mr MacNeill: Oh, no!
Mr Arthur Balfour: Those are, broadly speaking, the grounds on which I do not propose to accept Lord Hardinge’s resignation, the ground being that Lord Hardinge is an excellent permanent head of the Foreign Office. Therefore, even if he did not do his duty in India, in my opinion that is no reason at all for telling him that he is not to do something else that has nothing to do with India.
Commander Josiah Wedgwood: Then do not dismiss the other people.
Mr Arthur Balfour: What?
Commander Josiah Wedgwood: Do not dismiss the generals.
Mr J. MacVeagh: Why allow Chamberlain to resign?
Mr Arthur Balfour: If the generals are occupied in some service to their country quite unconnected with the military profession, I do not see why they should not do it, simply because as military men they have failed.
Sir Henry Craik: You have suspended Sir William Babtie.
Mr Arthur Balfour: Does not the Honourable Gentleman see that he is suspended from doing the kind of work in which he is supposed to have failed? That is the point. Why should you suspend a man who is supposed to have failed in India from doing work which has nothing to do with India, and which is connected with a wholly different sphere of public activities? I do not think that Lord Hardinge has been fairly treated by the Commission. Even if he had been I should refuse to accept his resignation, but he has not been fairly treated. I do not suggest for a moment that the Commission, whatever blunders and mistakes they have made in the course of their investigations [author’s emphasis] ever intended to do anything but strict justice, but their method of dealing with these great questions makes, in my opinion, strict and fair justice almost impossible. What did we want from the verdict of such a commission? We wanted, if possible, to anticipate the views, which an impartial historian, fully acquainted with the facts, would take of recent transactions. That is not the way they looked at this question. Would any historian, trying to estimate Lord Hardinge’s services to India in general during his administration there, or his services to India and the Empire during the War, occupy himself, as the Commission have very much occupied themselves, with matters of such relative triviality, such as whether the telegram was an official or a private telegram? [Author’s emphasis]
* * *
Arthur Balfour was naive. The campaign in Mesopotamia, and specifically the period September 1914 to April 1916, has been the subject of study by a host of historians as the bibliography at the end of this book reveals. Many of those believe that Hardinge and others had a case to answer, and if sympathy was to be dispensed it was owed to the soldiers who fought an implacable foe in ghastly conditions, handicapped by the complete incompetency of their leadership, both military and political. That said, it is true that no crime had been committed and the offences, if there were any, were ‘administrative’ in genre.
Balfour, by dint of his appointm
ent, was in a position of enormous influence and as the superior of Hardinge in the Foreign Office he was in a position to arbitrate on the latter’s employment unless or until the Prime Minister or a body created by the House of Commons overruled him. His defence of Hardinge was not yet complete, and he continued:
The chief cause of a private telegram being sent to Lord Hardinge and not used by him has been entirely disposed of by my Right Honourable Friend [Mr Chamberlain], and the criminals there, are not Lord Hardinge nor theSecretary of State for India. They are the Commission. [Author’s emphasis] Does anybody doubt that statement? Can anyone doubt it after what my Right Honourable Friend has said? Then it is alleged that Lord Hardinge did not consult his Council sufficiently and that all the work was done by him and the Commander-in-Chief.
For Balfour to suggest that the members of the MC were ‘criminals’ was excessive. Not in the least abashed, he refuted absolutely the suggestion that the Council for India was not consulted, saying that it was furnished with all the relevant documents at its weekly meeting; not, he claimed darkly, the practice of previous viceroys.
Balfour’s position was unvarnished, Hardinge had wide responsibility for a vast country with an enormous population and accordingly he could not be held to answer for the detailed travails in Mesopotamia. The Viceroy did ‘advise’ the advance on Baghdad, but in Balfour’s view that matter had already been disposed of. Nevertheless, he asserted:
If Lord Hardinge is called into question for that, if he is to be hauled before a tribunal, if he is to be prevented from serving his country in the office which he now holds, because he advised the advance on Baghdad, all the most important gentlemen on the Front Bench opposite and on this Front Bench also deserve precisely the same treatment.
Balfour’s argument is difficult to follow. Quite what responsibility the opposition front bench had to do with the advance on Baghdad is unclear. Balfour then addressed the general lack of adequate medical equipment. He did not suggest that there was sufficient explanation or excuse for the general deficiency of medical stores other than to say that England and India entered the war unprepared.
Balfour added, quite reasonably, that it was not Lord Hardinge’s fault that India entered the war unprepared. This statement was unlikely to be challenged; indeed it was not the cause of his censure and the parlous funding of the Indian Army was agreed to be the responsibility, ultimately, of the House of Commons.
Balfour then suggested, in the face of all the evidence, that Hardinge made every possible effort to support the Home Country despite the threat of outside aggression, frontier warfare, and internal dissension. Balfour pointed out that, under Hardinge’s leadership, India reduced her white troops at one moment to 15,000. Balfour believed that was evidence of Hardinge’s commitment to the war.
Lord Hugh Cecil remarked that the Council was ‘never officially consulted about Mesopotamia’. On the matter of the provision of troops for Mesopotamia, Commander Josiah Wedgwood then interjected: ‘Under explicit orders from home, they were relieved of all responsibility.’
Mr Arthur Balfour: And that was done under Lord Hardinge’s administration. India was bled white for war purposes before the Mesopotamia Expedition began; and then are you going to look with too critical, too microscopic an eye upon the fact that a country which had sent men, guns, officers, medical stores, and rifles was not fully equipped for dealing with the situation in Mesopotamia? You may hunt through the pages of the Report of the Commission and you will never find there broad considerations brought in.
Lord Hugh Cecil: My Right Honourable Friend evidently has not read the Report. He discusses these matters with only an indolent attention to fact. My Right Honourable Friend can see, if he looks, that these facts which he has himself stated, most properly, as important facts, all appear in the Report.
Arthur Balfour was not going to let that go, and said that Lord Hugh Cecil had done him an injustice. He suggested that the Report did not deal fairly with Lord Hardinge and his great efforts in connection with the war. He claimed that, ‘The Commission enumerated a lot of facts, not all correctly,’ and then at the end of the Report said that, ‘so and so is more responsible for this or that transaction.’
He again brought the ‘impartial historians’ of the future into his dissertation, arguing that they would say the war came as a great surprise to both India and the UK and that, as a result, mistakes, errors and human losses came at the beginning of the war because of imperfect preparation. He drew attention to the undisputed fact that the defects were gradually corrected, although the unhappy losses that they caused would never be repaired.
Balfour’s thrust was that in war there are always difficulties, and invited the House to imagine another commission of the same type appointed to look at every letter and study every telegram since August 1914 down to the end of 1915. He concluded that there was no defence for deficiencies in preparation. But, he predicted, at war’s end and in the future, what the Commission called ‘an atmosphere of economy’ would prevail. After an overly long and poorly argued speech, he finished by saying:
The deficiency of medical stores during the whole period of the Mesopotamia Expedition, and the great horrors which make one’s blood run cold, were largely due to a different set of causes. General Nixon was making a great invasion of a barbarous land and thought to gain a great and relatively easy success. He was wrong in his opinion, and he met with a great reverse. Where you have a great reverse in the course of a war in a savage country, where your wounded cannot be left behind for proper medical treatment, these horrors must occur with an army which is in retirement.
Commander Wedgwood: If they have not got sufficient transport.
Mr Arthur Balfour: My Honourable and Gallant Friend does not see the point. It is perfectly true that at the time his means of communication were on a very low scale, but on a scale that might have been sufficient, and I suppose would have been, if General Nixon had had the success he anticipated. It proved to be quite inadequate when a disaster occurred which compelled his retreat. But that he was going through, he thought, and the number of casualties he would have to provide for would be somewhere about 500, while it was 3,500. So that an army, which had it been successful, would have had ample means of carrying back the wounded through all these hundreds of miles to the base had not got them when the number of wounded was multiplied manifold, and when they had to be carried back in the face of a triumphant enemy.
This convoluted response by Balfour has to be read slowly for it to make any sort of sense, even though the argument is weak. He would have convinced no one, and certainly not Wedgwood, because Hansard recorded his immediate reply.
Commander Josiah Wedgwood: ‘There was no hospital ship – not one.’
Balfour took this as his cue, once more, to speak at length and in detail. He returned to the defence of Hardinge and in that process explained to Wedgwood the difficulty of recovering wounded men in a hostile land. This was more than a little patronising of Balfour, as Wedgwood had not only seen active service in two wars but had been decorated and had first-hand experience of recovering the wounded. To Wedgwood’s credit, he showed remarkable restraint and did not rise in protest.
Balfour conceded that ‘there was great miscalculation’ but denied that it was the responsibility of the Viceroy. He explained the vast burden of responsibility borne by Hardinge and emphasised that as soon as news of the breakdown of the medical service came to his notice he took action. Balfour asserted, ‘The idea that this inquiry was very greatly delayed is really untrue. In the middle of September [1916] Lord Hardinge had word of the matter and, by the end of the month, the inquiry was started.’ Balfour gave a brief résumé of the career of Lord Hardinge and lauded his diligence, experience and diplomatic skills. He remarked:
Let me, in conclusion, say this: Lord Hardinge is now engaged on matters which have nothing whatever to do with Indian administration – the work of the Foreign Office. That is a continuation of what,
after all, is his life’s work. His Indian experience was merely an episode.
Lord Hardinge has the confidence of the Office. He has the confidence of the Diplomatic Service. He is useful to his chiefs. He is not, of course, responsible for policy. He is responsible, and has great responsibility, like the permanent heads of other offices. This responsibility he carries out quite admirably.
I do not think that I should be serving the best interests of the country in a great crisis when the country has need of all that her sons can do in every sphere, because, forsooth, of some comments described in the Report of the Commission, or because those comments are going to be revised and reviewed by a tribunal that has yet to be appointed, to agree that Lord Hardinge should retire into private life and give up that admirable work that he is carrying on, that he, by training and ability, is most excellently suited for, and so deprive the country of the services that I can assure the House at this moment we can ill spare.
Balfour had dominated the debate in his all-embracing defence of Hardinge and casual denigration of the MC and its Report. By so doing and by ruling categorically on the continued employment of Harding, he had, effectively, reduced the likelihood of there being any future action against any of those censured.
Sir Archibald Williamson: It seems to me that it is the Commission that is on its trial tonight. We have listened to a series of very eloquent defences of the various gentlemen associated in this matter. I have every sympathy with the Foreign Secretary, who naturally does not wish to lose a colleague who is valuable to him. We have much sympathy with the Secretary of State for India when he complains of the difference between what the Commissioners say and what the newspapers have said they say. There is no doubt whatever that if the public read the Report of the Commissioners they will come to very different conclusions. One must have every sympathy with the Secretary for India and others on that account, and one has also sympathy with the Right Honourable Gentleman in regard to the telegrams, which have had to be paraphrased, and the omissions in those telegrams.