Henry Wilson's Mischief: Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson's rise to power, 1917-1918.

Henry Wilson was the most politically adept member of the most politically aware generation of soldiers the British army has seen since the Commonwealth. He was, for this reason, disliked by most of his fellow soldiers, and distrusted by many politicians. The focus of Wilson's politics was the Irish Question - he was an Ulsterman - up until the time of his death at the hands of I.R.A. gunmen on the steps of his London home in 1922. Like all soldiers who become generals, Wilson was ambitious. Like most of the generals of his time, Wilson was quite prepared to use his politics either to advance his career or further the cause of whichever military policy he happened to be expounding at the moment. Like most humans, Wilson was perhaps never truly able to draw a line between what was best for himself, and what was objectively and generally best.

It is the purpose of this paper briefly to describe what it was about Wilson's political machinations - his self-confessed "mischief" - that brought him to the attention of a Lloyd George, not disposed to forgive his involvement in the prewar Ulster imbroglio, and saw Wilson rise from being a general without a job, and with no record of outstanding wartime service, in the summer of 1917, to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (C.I.G.S.) in February 1918. Wilson, if we concede to his biographers that he was an able man, was also a political animal of considerable ability. The two pictures are not inconsistent; rather they are two sides of the same coin. Setting aside for a moment the fact that ambition and cunning are hardly unfavourable attributes in a man seeking leadership in time of war, had Wilson been merely able, it is highly unlikely that his talents would have had any chance for expression. In a leadership pond dominated by sharks like Lloyd George and Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, C.I.G.S. since 1915, Robertson, Wilson would have remained a footnote had he not been equally ruthless and devious. What follows is not to be read as an attempt to attack Wilson's character, but to fill a gap which endures; the while, perhaps, providing some little insight into the political context in which attempts to work a strategic revision proceeded.

Wilson owed his rise to two factors: firstly, his strategic views, by the summer of 1917, were much closer to those of Lloyd George than those of any other senior British general; and secondly - a factor largely forgotten - his political activities gained Wilson the prime minister's car and left Lloyd George little choice but to find Wilson useful employment. Had he not been useful, Lloyd George would never have used him; had Wilson not been dangerous, Lloyd George might never have become acquainted with how useful he might be. And yet, while there has been some discussion of Wilson's strategic views, his wartime political activities have received much less attention.

For the generation which had fought the war, when not entirely ignored, the nature and fact of Wilson's "mischief' seem to have been accepted as self-evident and therefore, as said without saying.(1) More recently, Wilson has become, in more general works, just another factor in the Lloyd George-Robertson duel.(2) For their part, his modem biographers (Basil Collier and Bernard Ash), while good on Wilson employed, are much less adequate on Wilson's activities while looking for a job. Both note Wilson's political manoeuvring in the summer-autumn 1917 and take his stated intention to enter politics if not found suitable employment seriously, but neither develops this theme.(3) This is an important omission. Wilson may have risen partly from merit, and partly because he was a useful counterbalance for the Haig(4)-Robertson(5) combine - which Lloyd George had come to hate, distrust and view as the principle barrier to a much desired redirection of the war away from the Western Front - but he rose, as well, because he made himself a political factor which could not be ignored. Wilson did not rise merely because he was clever, nor because he made himself over into being the principle exponent of an alternative strategy to that being followed, but also because he was cunning, ambitious, and willing to employ political weapons to ensure that he gained, and maintained the prime minister's ear. Lloyd George heeded him not only because Wilson was self-evidently correct, but because he was left with precious little choice. This aspect of Wilson's rise is not sufficiently described by either Collier or Ash, perhaps because both were, if anything, overly sympathetic to their subject. Collier, for instance, describes Wilson as being:

temperamentally incapable of nursing a grievance for much longer than it took him to make an entry in his diary. He had not thought of carrying his differences with Robertson to the point of conspiracy against a fellow soldier's interests. As for supplanting him . . . he was in no hurry to step into a thankless job which in any case was bound to come to him in time.(6)

Ash, for his part, asserts that Wilson was absolutely unwilling to join with the British and French politicians in attacks on Haig.(7) The picture they present is of a man who, while generally considered in his own time to be a political operator of the highest grade, was, more properly understood, one who rose much more from ability than through conspiracy. And yet even a cursory examination of the Wilson diaries and correspondence indicates that Wilson was neither so disinterestedly noble, nor so innocent as this; that he did, in fact, knowingly conspire against both Robertson and Haig - and not only with British and French politicians, but with just about anybody military or political who was prepared to listen. As well, the almost daily refrain in Wilson's diaries that Haig and especially Robertson were "dunderheads" misconducting the war surely gives grounds for doubting that Wilson was quite so inconstant or forgiving as Collier describes. It should be remembered, of course, that both Collier and Ash reviewed Wilson's diary and so on, with a pre-existent idea of his character gained through interviews with friends and relations. Both tended to downplay those aspects of the diary not consistent with the picture so gained. That Wilson's papers were unedited at the time of his death gives grounds for greater confidence that we find there Wilson as he was rather than Wilson as he might have wished to seem to posterity. Understanding the man, his biographers effectively sanitized the way in which Wilson remembered himself, for himself.

In the first three years of the war, Wilson's star failed to shine. One of the coming men of the prewar generation, Wilson was obviously not managing to keep up with his peers. As a staff officer in France, 1914-15, he had not been a success. His performance as a corps commander, 1915-16, had been lacklustre. He had been packed-off to St. Petersburg with Milner at the end of 1916 to defeat Lloyd George's plotting to send Robertson there (thus getting him away from his power base in the General Staff), because he was thought safely "western," was sufficiently senior, and because the army hadn't any other use for him. Wilson's term of office as head of liaison to the French army, which followed his return from Russia, terminated with the failure and fall of his friend, the hapless Nivelle. He had simply been too closely linked to Nivelle to work with the sceptical Petain.(8) As well, there was the fact that Wilson had been chosen for this position not only because he was the most prominent Francophile in the army, but because he could be counted upon to ensure that the sceptical Haig toed the common allied line established by Quartier-General.(9) When the uneasy period of British subordination ended with the fall of Nivelle, Wilson's appointment became pointless because Haig was slated to enjoy far more independence alongside Petain than had been the case under Nivelle. By May 1917, therefore, the watchdog Wilson was not only under something of a cloud but unemployed; even, perhaps, unemployable - so closely associated had he been with Nivelle's failure and with a period of unhappy interallied relations which neither Haig nor Robertson could be expected to forget quickly. By this time, therefore, "would Wilson be given a job?," was a question far more germane than "what would he do next?." Haig had no use for Wilson - he neither liked nor trusted him. Nor was Robertson very well-disposed towards Wilson - though ultimately he was brought to concede that if Haig wouldn't have him, then something must be found for Wilson in the U.K., if only to keep him out of trouble.

In June 1917, therefore, when Wilson returned to Britain and began looking for suitable employment, the prospects were not favourable, and it began to seem possible that he might well spend the rest of the war on the shelf. This was, needless to say, a prospect that rankled. For one thing, Wilson was not a wealthy man and needed employment not only consistent with his rank and experience, but gainful. This was one spur. Another was the simple fact that Wilson was becoming increasingly convinced that those of his fellows - political and military - who were running the British war effort were mishandling it to the extent that Britain and its allies might well lose the war. Upon reading the proces-verbal of the inter-Allied Pads Conference, in May 1917, Wilson confided in his diary:

I have never read a more amazing document. Not one single member of the conference had come there with a clear mind as to what was good, what was practical, what was possible, with results that not one single thing was settled either on the West front or at Solonica [sic], or in Greece. An amazing state of affairs after nearly 3 years of war that our chiefs (Civil and Mil) should assemble & discuss all these subjects as though they had cropped up since breakfast had been finished. We certainly don't deserve to win, nor won't, if …