Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Three days later he berated Kitchener at cabinet about setting up Irish and Welsh battalions in the volunteer army, which he thought would enhance recruitment but which Kitchener regarded with suspicion. If Kitchener were to accept a Welsh corps the men should, he argued, not speak Welsh on parade or in their billets. It was not their first argument: a month earlier when Kitchener had complained about sending Nonconformist chaplains to the front, Lloyd George compared this unfavourably with Sikhs and Gurkhas, who could have religious men of their faiths with them. ‘If you intend to send a Church of England Army to the front, say so!’ Lloyd George proclaimed, ‘but you cannot fight with half a nation.’67 Kitchener backed down: but this time, he told Asquith that ‘no purely Welsh regiment is to be trusted: they are (he says) always wild and insubordinate & ought to be stiffened by a strong infusion of English or Scotch.’68 Lloyd George also attacked him for the War Office’s dismal administration of the separation allowance, which was causing hardship; and, when Kitchener bridled at being rebuked, he reminded him he must take criticism like the rest. Kitchener was conscious of another, far graver, problem: on 29 October, the day after this row with Lloyd George, he told Asquith he believed both sides would soon run out of ammunition: he estimated that seven times as much ordnance was being used each day compared with any previous conflict.

  Given the urgent need for men, Mrs Asquith took Kitchener’s attitude to change and innovation as proving his ‘stupidity and want of imagination’. She had asked him whether the recruiting post on Horse Guards Parade, visible from her bedroom window, should have a shelter built on it so men did not have to queue in the rain; and a military band playing next to it so that ‘their womenfolk, often in passionate tears, should feel they were heroes.’69 When Lloyd George failed to persuade Kitchener about the national battalions, he started to shake his fist at him and told him: ‘You think you are a Dictator! You are only 1 of 18!’ The Field Marshal allegedly replied: ‘All right, if you think you can do things so much better than I can, come over and do my job’, while pointing out of the window at the War Office. He conceded the point to Lloyd George, with a touch of resentment: they soon appeared to be on good terms again, though any affection on either part was almost certainly superficial and for the sake of form.

  To give ministers – especially Asquith – more time to reflect, cabinet meetings had moved from daily to thrice weekly by early November. For the moment naval matters were a prime consideration. Kitchener argued that the Germans, stymied on continental Europe, would attempt an invasion. It was an argument advanced more in hope than fear: ministers and service chiefs were confident any attempt would end in a debacle for the German navy, confirm supremacy of the seas, demoralise the enemy and be a significant step towards victory. One of Fisher’s first tasks, with the full approval of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, was to bring battleships to the southern North Sea and the English Channel to meet any invasion attempt. The question of command of the seas was not, however, straightforward. As well as effecting the sinking of Audacious, extensive German minelaying had taken down several smaller ships and merchant vessels. Royal Navy minesweepers cleared ‘safe’ channels in the North Sea, which friendly shipping was warned to use and which the Navy patrolled; but U-boats still picked off British ships in the Straits of Dover, such as the cruiser HMS Hermes on 31 October.

  The ability to fight successful land battles was, however, of constant anxiety. Asquith’s concerns about the situation on the Western Front caused tensions with the Army, putting Kitchener, as a soldier and now a politician, in an invidious position. Worse, there were tensions within the Army too. French had heard that the government had lost confidence in him – which was untrue, even though he and Kitchener had poor relations as brother senior officers. He sent his aide-de-camp, Freddie Guest – a Liberal MP and cousin of Churchill – back to London to convey his displeasure, which Asquith strove to assuage by writing him a long and laudatory letter. Unfortunately, the handling of the BEF had been attacked in cabinet, and Kitchener had immediately offered to replace French with General Sir Ian Hamilton, commanding the anti-invasion force in southern England: so French was right to be concerned. To make matters worse, the account Guest brought Asquith of conditions at the front was ‘appalling’.70 The newspapers were full of the short obituaries of regular Army officers killed at the front, many well known to those prosecuting the war in Westminster and Whitehall; under-appreciated were the numbers of NCOs and men also being slaughtered. Losses had so reduced the Army that ‘a Corps now numbers little more than a division’, and reinforcements were taking too long to reach the front. Hankey, in whom Asquith was coming to place enormous trust, advised him the BEF needed a rest, which could happen only if it were relieved by French troops – which seemed impossible.

  In early November Asquith, intensely dependent on Venetia Stanley as a form of psychiatric social worker and complaining to her, on 18 November, that ‘I feel very solitary’, sought to reorganise his own management of the war.71 To streamline decision-making he put his Council of War on a more formal basis, and changed its name to the War Council. Hitherto it had comprised whomever Asquith wanted – whichever ministers or service chiefs happened to be around when he needed to discuss developments. Now, under his leadership, it would include Lloyd George, Grey, Churchill and Kitchener. The First Sea Lord would accompany Churchill, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff would come with Kitchener. As a concession to the Opposition – but also because Asquith valued his experience – Balfour was asked too. Hankey acted as secretary.

  The War Council was not a day-to-day decision-making body, which was what was needed. Like the cabinet it usually met without an agenda, much to Hankey’s annoyance.72 Its numbers swelled to thirteen by March 1915, mainly because of Asquith’s refusal to rebuff colleagues who felt excluded; it often replicated discussions held in cabinet, but with – as Edwin Montagu, who joined the cabinet in early February 1915 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, put it – ‘a different set of spectators’. Montagu thought the council ‘should be used by its political members to get a frank opinion of the military experts.’ He told Hankey that Asquith should state this as its specific purpose.73 Matters were becoming more complicated, since Britain and France had declared war on Turkey on 5 November, because of the Ottomans’ alliance with the Germans and a Turkish attack on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Troops were sent to Egypt, including shiploads of men from Australia and New Zealand, as a potential force against the Turks in case they attacked the Suez Canal (in early February they did, and it was a disaster for them). With the naval encounters in the South Pacific and Atlantic, the war was taking on a global aspect.

  The stalemate between the British and German armies divided the political class into Easterners and Westerners. The former, led by Lloyd George and Churchill, who as well as being motivated by patriotism saw an opportunity to hasten the war to its conclusion that would, coincidentally, benefit them, believed the attack should move to the east, and be concentrated on Germany’s allies in Austria–Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The Westerners, led by Asquith and Kitchener and including most Army top brass, believed the war could be won only on the Western Front, and that to take troops from there for another theatre of war would simply allow the Germans to overrun the French, especially if they could leave fighting on a second front to the Austrians or the Turks. Some ministers, notably Lloyd George, wanted Britain to send troops to defend Serbia; Asquith, fearing overstretch and realising how fragile things were in Flanders, resisted this. There was also the prospect of annexing Palestine from the Ottomans, making it a British protectorate and encouraging Jews to resettle there: Wells had suggested this in a letter in the Daily Chronicle the previous November, and Chaim Weizmann, leader of the British Zionists, had recruited Samuel, the first Jewish cabinet minister, to the cause. Ironically, British anti-Semites also embraced Zionism, as a means of removing Jews from British society.

  There w
as a determination to help Russia in the Caucasus: but all such aid came at the expense of the battle in the west. On 7 October Asquith, who as a committed Westerner was just beginning disagreements with Lloyd George about strategy, noted that at a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence invasion was discussed but ‘everybody agreed that nothing of the kind was likely to occur at present, which is just as well, as during the next fortnight we shall have fewer regular troops in the country than has ever happened before.’74 By the time politicians went home for Christmas in 1914 the east–west debate, like the war, was becoming entrenched. Whether or not new fronts were opened, much more cannon fodder would be needed: the maximum recruiting age, originally thirty and then thirty-five, was raised to thirty-eight. The Army had by then ruled out an attempted German invasion, but feared isolated raids launched by anything up to 10,000 men. A home defence force was essential, but the government had no choice but to send more regular soldiers to France. Every military consideration had serious political ramifications, a problem that would stretch the capabilities of politicians for whom these were unprecedented circumstances. As the ensuing campaign in the Dardanelles would show, no strategy could work unless it was properly planned.

  Churchill continued to trouble Asquith, who told him to concentrate on his own responsibilities as First Lord of the Admiralty. Perhaps therefore it was as well that he became more persistent about an eastern strategy after Britain declared war on Turkey on 5 November 1914. This, however, led to Churchill’s suggesting what Asquith termed ‘a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles to wh I am altogether opposed.’75 This was the revival of an idea of which Churchill had talked the previous August – even before Turkey was a formal enemy – about forcing the Dardanelles as a way to reach and occupy Constantinople. At the end of 1914 the plan took shape thanks to Hankey, who had concluded that it would be useful to open a second front; and it was endorsed by Lloyd George at a War Council meeting on 7 January 1915, at which he argued for the need ‘to get at the enemy from some other direction.’76 Churchill would persuade Vice Admiral Sir Sackville Carden, commander of the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron but a man of limited battle experience, to back the plan.

  Churchill believed that once Turkey was attacked Balkan nations such as Bulgaria would rise against it, before attacking Austria–Hungary – a view Grey shared. Hankey also wanted the Army to take on the Turks; Churchill had already advocated a new naval campaign, but his idea was to raid Germany from the Baltic, a plan that had little traction, hence his adoption of Hankey’s. He also, at least at first, had Fisher’s support. If the Navy could break into the Baltic and take command of it, it would allow the Russians to land troops 90 miles from Berlin: but it would entail violating Denmark’s neutrality en route, unless she could be prevailed upon to join the Allies. In early 1915 Churchill again pressed for the Baltic, even though by now the Admiralty was contemplating a landing in the Dardanelles, but the idea had no traction.

  Even though he won support for his Dardanelles plan, Churchill continued to be a nuisance. He invented excuses for frequent visits to the Western Front, a distraction beginning greatly to irritate Kitchener, because he feared they were helping to feed friction between French and himself. He sought to visit Dunkirk in December, and Asquith told him explicitly he should not try to see French. Just before Christmas Asquith met French and Kitchener at Walmer Castle (which Lord Beauchamp, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, had lent him for weekends), and French agreed with Asquith about the Churchill problem. Despite his ‘affection and admiration’ for the First Lord, French regarded his judgement as ‘highly erratic’.77 Churchill’s excitability was of a piece with that of the heir to the Throne, and similarly irritating to the Secretary of State for War. Esher noted on 18 December: ‘The King told me that when the Prince of Wales went to see Lord K, and pressed him to be allowed to go abroad, he said to Lord K, “I have plenty of brothers, what does it matter if I am killed!” and Lord K’s reply was: “I don’t mind your being killed, but I object to your being taken prisoner and you have no experience.”’78

  Nevertheless, Churchill understood earlier than most the unforeseen problems of trench warfare, not least in its shattering effect upon the armies fighting it. This did not justify his eastern strategy, but it helped explain the thinking behind it. Kitchener too was beginning to realise that what was happening on the Western Front was of a different order of magnitude to anything he had experienced – he told Grey: ‘I don’t know what is to be done. This isn’t war.’79 Hankey also thought like Churchill. In memoranda that they separately sent Asquith on 30 December they set out the murderous consequences of trench warfare, which makes it all the more alarming that they were ignored when planning the disastrous assault on the Somme eighteen months later.

  The continuous line of trenches meant that traditional outflanking operations – the sort of thing Kitchener understood by ‘war’ – were impossible. And, as Asquith told Miss Stanley, ‘the losses involved in the trench-jumping operations now going on on both sides are enormous and out of all proportion to the ground gained.’80 So great were those losses that on 26 December the remnants of the BEF were reorganised into the 1st Army (under Haig) and 2nd Army (under General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien). Hankey’s answer to the challenges was to suggest the development of, effectively, tanks, but with ‘petrol-throwing catapults’ to crush barbed wire and protect men from machine-gun fire, which caused Asquith to observe that ‘it will be strange if we are driven back to these Medieval practices.’81 Churchill suggested something similar.

  In a further memorandum, on the last day of 1914, Churchill accurately warned his colleagues: ‘The war will be ended by the exhaustion of nations rather than the victories of armies.’82 However, he still gave the impression of enjoying the war more than was tasteful. On 10 January 1915 he and his wife were among those staying at Walmer Castle with the Asquiths. In telling Mrs Asquith he had given up his ambition to be Viceroy of India – there was a vacancy – Churchill added: ‘This is living history. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling. It will be read by 1,000 generations – think of that! Why, I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me.’83 Even Churchill sensed the adjective ‘delicious’ was indelicate, and implored Mrs Asquith not to repeat it.

  Lloyd George spent Christmas fretting, drawing up a memorandum that he asked Asquith to circulate to colleagues. He joined the argument about opening a new front, in his case in Serbia and Syria. Beginning a strain of criticism that would run for two years and lead to Asquith’s downfall, he demanded ‘decisive measures to grip the situation.’84 He attacked a lack of military leadership, and called for a series of War Council meetings – ‘occasional meetings will end in nothing,’ he said. ‘A continuation of the present deadlock is full of danger.’ Asquith had no excuse not to realise the chancellor was watching him. This attempt to influence great strategic questions would not be the last.

  The new year began badly for Asquith. Percy Illingworth, the Liberal chief whip, upon whom he relied for his party management, died suddenly aged forty-five on 3 January, just two days after becoming a privy counsellor. The official version was that he had died of typhoid; the on dit was that his end came after eating a bad oyster. He had shown Asquith total loyalty and been a repository of innumerable confidences. The loss made Asquith even more dependent on Venetia Stanley, to whom he still wrote daily, and in ever more passionate terms: ‘My darling … yours through life – always – everywhere’ was a typical endearment, in the first of two letters on New Year’s Day 1915.85 Four days later he told her, in imploring her to write to him daily, that ‘I think of you every hour, and your love is the best thing in my life’.86 She had just started to train as a nurse, and Asquith’s suffocating demands were the last thing she needed. It would have unhinged him to know that relations between her and her other admirer, Montagu, were heating up, but it was something with which he would soon have to deal. />
  While Lloyd George and Churchill were coming up with their respective strategies French was annoyed that the War Council rejected his request to open a new front between Ostend and Zeebrugge, to come in behind the Germans, because the plan required fifty-five battalions of men and incomprehensible amounts of artillery. As things stood, Kitchener told Asquith on 12 January that he had 1,750,000 men under arms, despite having been at war just five months and having sustained 80,000 casualties, numbers of men that, although insufficient for French’s purposes, were nonetheless impressive from a standing start. French, despite all earlier reassurances, had convinced himself that, because of the stalemate he had achieved, once the first wave of Kitchener’s army was trained – by April or May – he would be displaced and Kitchener would become supreme commander; something Kitchener had indeed been considering (though he later denied it) and which had leaked through to the Western Front.

  Asquith and his colleagues may have disliked the stalemate, but they lacked the resources to change it; and Unionist criticism of the government was eroding public morale. It was in this context that the opening of a new front in the Dardanelles began to appeal to him. It also carried much weight with him that there was bipartisan support for an attack on the Turks. Balfour believed a successful blow ‘would cut the Turkish army in two; it would put Constantinople under our control; it would give us the advantage of having the Russian wheat, and enable Russia to resume exports … it would open a passage to the Danube.’87 The plan received the unanimous approval of the War Council on 15 January. Carden had planned the campaign: Churchill endorsed it at an Admiralty meeting on 12 January, and it was put to ministers the next day. Crucially – in the light of what followed – Churchill had consulted Carden, as a naval expert, about the plan’s practicability before proceeding; Carden had replied that he did not consider the Dardanelles could be ‘rushed’ but ‘they might be forced by extended operations with large number of ships.’88 Fisher, on 3 January, had said to Churchill: ‘THE ATTACK ON TURKEY HOLDS THE FIELD! – but ONLY if it’s IMMEDIATE! However, it won’t be!’89