Papers of the War Cabinet's Eastern Committee [‎113r] (225/544)

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continue to be directed from England. He was in favour of unity o
command, but not that that command should be directed by the
Indian Government. His second point was, in whose hands should
the single command be ? It must be entrusted to an officer ol great
experience and sound judgment. He was opposed to placing this
command in the hands of a Committee as had been suggested by
Lord It. Cecil. General Smuts, proceeding, said that he had not nng
to say against General Marshall as a fine lighting soldier, but he had
not been impressed by the judgment and coherent grasp ol the
situation shown either by General Marshall or by Sir C. Marling.
His impression was, that our men on the spot were not properly m
touch with affairs and failed to give the Committee adequate
material on which to form a sound judgment. Marshall had, in the
first instance, been given a simple, soldier’s, job, which was to exploit
the Tigris valley. Since then, great complications bad arisen.
Had Marshall shown himself equal to dealing with this more compli
cated situation ? For months the Committee had impressed upon
him that Mesopotamia was now, at any rate for the P 1 .® 8611 ^
relatively unimportant, that he was being out-flanke<i m the JNort ,
and that the forward movement of the enemy towards the Caspian
constituted a grave menace to India. What the Committee had
instructed him^ to do was to threaten the Turkish flank on the new
and more formidable route to the East, which they were opening up
by the Caucasus and the Caspian. Instead of realising the position,
Marshall was constantly raising objections to the carrying out of our
policy and harping on the difficulties of reinforcing and holding the
Hamadan-Kasvin road, on which, however, the lurks m the earlier
days of the war, had managed to maintain considerable forces.
General Smuts said it was clear to him that Marshall did not under
stand the situation and he thought that his want of insight consti
tuted a danger at the present juncture. His eyes were always
turned directly northwards ; he could no doubt take Mosul to-morrow,
but that was not our present objective. What we wanted to do was
to block the new Eastern route. Marshall persisted m regarding
Dunsterville’s move to the Caspian as an unsound diversion of force,
which indicated that, although he might be a good fighting General,
the present strategical situation was one which he and his btatt were
unable to grasp. Who then was to be given the command in his
place ? He had been struck by General Monro’s telegrams, which
crave evidence of sound and ripe judgment, and General Smuts
thought that the reason why General Munro wished to control
operations in the Middle East himself was that he saw that things
were going wrong and thought that his suggestion offered a solution
to the problem. "To give an instance of his clear-sightedness, General
Munro in a recent telegram, pointed out that the present danger was
to Enzeli rather than to Ramadan. For the above reasons
General Smuts thought that General Monro seemed to be the right
man to be on the spot, and he suggested that he should vacate his
present position as Commander-m-Chief in India, temporarily, if
necessary, and be replaced there by a man who would work with
him loyally and in close co-operation, as this theatre depended on
India for troops, rails, supplies, &c.
The Chairman interposed to say that he thought there were
precedents for a Commander-in-Chief in India vacating his position
temporarily in time of war and being replaced by a locum tenena, and
cited the case of Sir F. Haines who, in the Afghan War, left Simla
in order to take the field. There was also the case of Sir Power
Palmer who had temporarily filled the post ol Commander-in-Chie
in India after Sir William Lockhart’s death until Lord Kitchener,
Commander-in-Chief-designate, could be spared from South Africa.
General Smuts, continuing, said that he regarded the present
situation as being very grave. We now held large slices ot Turkish
territory which we did not desire to hand back to them, io-day the
tide had turned in the West and the Germans were in retreat. In