CRISES OF THE WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 July 1921, Page 10

CRISES OF THE WAR.

LORD MILNER'S PART IN FRANCE. London, Feb. 10. Relieved of duty as .Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Milner contemplates a long rest. The first part of this will be spent at Surrey, his home in Kent, and then he thinks of going abroad for a time. At a Privy Council at Buckingham Palace this week he returned to the King the seals of office. Referring to the last six years of Lord Milner’s work, Sir Sidney Low mentions that for the first eighteen months of the war he discharged a number of extremely useful, very laborious, and entirely unobtrusive functions of which, as a rule, the world knew little or nothing. Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet was glad to avail itself of his financial and administrative experience, and his capacity for mastering quickly, and accurately the details of any complicated question. He was entrusted with one important inquiry, or difficult task of organisation and reconstruction, after another, and the list of commissions and Departmental committees over which he presided would be a long one. Labor, economics, international trade, the provisioning of the country, were among the subjects he dealt with in one phase or another; he only just escaped being appointed to the thankless office of Food Controller.

The greatest of all the services Lord Milner rendered to his country and the Allied cause was his action in March, 1918, a few days after the opening of the great German attack and the defeat of the British Fifth Army. In the transactions which followed, and the reconstitution of the Allied High Command under General Foch, the part played by Lord Milner was of the utmost importance. At one of the great moments of human history, Lord Milner, during a few crowded hours, controlled the course of events, and deflected it to a sound and most beneficial'‘conclusion. AVhat he had accomplished was not understood at the time, and is even now not generally estimated at its true value. He went to France at the request of Colonel Amery, who was acting as Liahson Officer between the British Cabinet and the Versailles Council, and the outcome of the visit, after many serious cbnferences, was the appointment of Marshal Foch as commander of the Allied Forces. The idea had originated with Sir H. Wilson, who proposed to Lord Milner, what seemed then a fantastic idea, that Monsieur Clemenceau should be placed in supreme command of the . French, the British (and, if possible, the American) armies, with Foch as his “technical adviser.” Even at the eleventh hour, as Sir Sidney writes, all might, and almost certainly would, have been unavailing without Lord Milner’s keen perception of the situation when it had been made clear to -him, and his swift and resolute action at the decisive moment. He it was who uttered the “solving word,” and unravelled the tangle in which the Allied military policy had got itself enmeshed; not only accepting Foch as coordinator from the French, but, in fact, imposing Foch upon the French High Command and Clemenceau. And this he did entirely “off his own bat,” pledging the British Government, to concur in the arrangement without having the opportunity of consulting his colleagues; though he was, of course, fortified by the knowledge that .Mr. Lloyd George had always been in favor of a genuine unity of military policy among the Allies. After this striking achievement it was inevitable that Lord Milner should succeed Lord Derby as Secretary of State for War. At the Colonial Office from January, 1919, he has done something to ameliorate the always delicate relations between the Colonial Office and the sensitive Dominion Governments; and he has devoted close attention to the tropical dependencies and Crown colonies which may, in ‘ the future, come to be the special, perhaps the exclusive, interest of the office' he has vacated.