Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  It was at the War Council meeting on 15 January that approved the Dardanelles campaign when Haldane raised the question that would come to dominate the political debate in 1915: what would be called ‘conscription’ – his term was ‘compulsion’. He took Kitchener’s view that the war would be long, and it would be necessary continually to replenish the ranks of the wounded and fallen. The French had called up every adult man, and Germany had a huge army. Haldane’s argument that ‘by the common law of this country it is the duty of every subject of the realm to assist the Sovereign in repelling the invasion of its shores and in defence of the realm’ was not universally accepted.90 Haldane, a considerable lawyer, admitted this claim rested on no statute, but was ‘inherent in our constitution’. The view was that compulsion was not yet necessary: but might become so and, if it did, it would be not just commensurate with but inherent in the idea of the state. Compulsion would require an Act of Parliament, but such an Act would be compatible with the constitution. The Times, normally no admirer of Haldane, pronounced there was an ‘overwhelming’ view that ‘the Government should fight this war with the whole strength of the nation and every weapon at its disposal.’91 It spoke for a group of prominent Unionists who, led by Curzon, were now volubly saying the government could not be allowed to proceed uncritically. ‘We shall have to take steps for the purpose of defining our own attitude towards HMG,’ Lansdowne told Law on 28 January. ‘We can scarcely leave matters where they are.’92 Curzon complained to Law that the alternatives were to muddle on or face a coalition; Law replied: ‘I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the only proper course for us in the meantime is to continue along the lines on which we have acted since the war began.’93

  At the Admiralty, relations between Churchill and Fisher were combusting after less than three months. Hankey – an old friend of Fisher – saw Asquith on 20 January to warn him that the First Sea Lord was in ‘a very unhappy frame of mind’: he liked Churchill personally but resented how the First Lord, who knew little about naval matters, overruled him, with his sixty years’ experience.94 Fisher thought few of the Navy’s ships were in the right place, and that plans for where to move them were unsound. Fisher had written to Jellicoe the previous day to express concern that a Dardanelles operation would remove from the Grand Fleet ships ‘urgently required at the decisive theatre at home.’95 He had shared his fears with Hankey, who (despite his presence at the creation of the Dardanelles plan) passed them to Asquith. That same day Churchill admitted to Kitchener that ‘until the bombardment of the Dardanelles forts has begun, we cannot tell how things will go.’96

  ‘Tho’ I think the old man is rather unbalanced, I fear there is some truth in what he says,’ Asquith told Miss Stanley. Disagreements continued to multiply, with Fisher making plain to Asquith through the channel of Hankey his objection to the idea of the naval campaign in the Dardanelles. On 21 January Fisher elaborated on his misgivings in a letter to Jellicoe, telling him he believed the operation would impair the naval protection of Britain; and it would only work if supported by 200,000 troops, a view he believed Kitchener would share. Esher noted in his diary that Fisher ‘finds Winston very brilliant, but too changeable; he has a different scheme every day.’97 He deduced that Asquith was ‘acting as arbitrator upon their differences.’

  Churchill counted on Kitchener’s support in the War Council, and on that of Balfour and Grey. Fisher, however, remained sceptical and when the War Council discussed the Dardanelles on 28 January the First Sea Lord – who had very nearly not attended at all because ‘I am not in accord with the First Lord and do not think it would be seemly to say so before the Council’ – first motioned to leave the room, until persuaded by Kitchener that duty dictated he should stay.98 He then ‘maintained an obstinate and ominous silence. He is always threatening to resign & writes an almost daily letter to Winston, expressing his desire to return to the cultivation of his “roses at Richmond”,’ Asquith said.99 Churchill was livid about Fisher broadcasting the fact of their differences to Hankey, Asquith and Jellicoe, which suggested his Admiralty team was not coherent. He strove to confirm Fisher’s backing, and when in 1916 the Dardanelles Commission questioned him about it, he claimed he would never have proceeded had Fisher not unequivocally promised his support. Asquith maintained that Fisher objected not because the plan was doomed to fail, but because (as he had told Asquith on the morning of 28 January, before the War Council met that afternoon) he preferred an assault on the Baltic.100

  More worrying, Fisher – who knew he was outnumbered on the Dardanelles plan – claimed to Hankey that even Jellicoe, who was supremely level-headed, was now beginning to worry about some of Churchill’s orders; and (like Hankey) was concerned about Fisher’s reluctance to speak up against a First Lord whose judgement on naval dispositions seemed highly questionable, and who was increasingly unwilling to take advice. Unfortunately, Churchill’s questionable judgement about the Dardanelles was matched by his failure to consider the worst outcome, and his expectations about how the drain of troops required to carry out his plan would increase Allied vulnerability in the west were wildly wrong. On 25 February he would tell the War Council that ‘there is no reason to believe that Germany will be able to transfer to the West anything like 1,000,000 men at any time.’101 In fact, German numbers increased from 1.5 million men on the Western Front in January 1915 to 2.35 million thirteen months later, at the start of the Battle of Verdun.

  Important dispositions were taking place on the Western Front too, with the British Army taking over the extreme left flank from the sea eastwards, and the French concentrating on the eastern end of the line. Whether fairly or not, the British political and military leadership had been unimpressed with the performance of the French, and separating the two forces into two distinct sectors, after a negotiation between French and his counterpart Marshal Joseph Joffre, made the British feel they could act without constant French interference, and regain some autonomy.

  As Britain struggled in the early weeks of 1915 to define a new and more successful strategy, it also had to face a novel and even more direct challenge: the sinking of British merchant vessels by U-boats. On 21 January a ship bound from Leith to Rotterdam was sunk. It had not yet become official German policy: but in early February the Kaiser and his Chancellor announced that Britain would now suffer a blockade. The Germans proposed to challenge the supremacy of the Royal Navy with unrestricted submarine warfare. Neutrals were warned that any ships entering what the Germans decreed the ‘war zone’ around the British Isles would be liable to be sunk. However, the campaign was not quite what it seemed: the Germans, at that stage, had only twenty-two submarines, far too few to run an effective operation. The King was appalled at the attacks on unarmed ships: ‘It is simply disgusting that Naval Officers could do such things,’ he said.102

  On 1 March Britain responded, an Order in Council announcing that ‘the British and French governments will hold themselves free to detain and take into port ships carrying goods of presumed enemy destination, ownership or origin.’103 The Germans had dug their own grave, because for the rest of the war they could trade with hardly anyone except their immediate neighbours, which by late 1916 would cause severe shortages. They were warned off the Straits of Dover after 10 April, when a net barrage caught a U-boat. Germany’s willingness to adopt a policy that could threaten the lives of civilians turned opinion further against it, notably in America, and by the autumn American protests caused it to be suspended. The British blockade, however, continued.

  Asquith announced on 8 February that the BEF had sustained 104,000 casualties – killed, wounded and missing – since reaching the Western Front.104 The public, used to long casualty lists, received the news without surprise and with remarkable equanimity. Support for the troops remained unequivocal. When word arrived that British prisoners of war were freezing in German camps, a national campaign to make and send them warm clothing was started. The National Canine Defence League even ran a s
uccessful appeal for funds to pay the dog licences of recruits so their four-legged friends would not have to be put down if the 7s 6d annual fee was unaffordable. There was also an awareness that some soldiers were suffering from ‘traumatic neurasthenia and cases of mental strain’, and Tennant told the Commons on 4 February that a special Red Cross Military Hospital had been opened to treat such cases.105

  The desire to pursue the enemy within, or those considered sympathetic to them, remained unwavering. Between 17 October 1914 – before which no records were kept – and 30 January 1915, 2,821 enemy aliens who had been detained had been released, their cases vetted by a branch of the War Office under a cabinet order of 11 November, 717 of them in January alone.106 Nevertheless the search for scapegoats caused the campaign against Haldane to erupt again in early February, led by the Northcliffe press. Joseph King, the Liberal MP, raised it in the Commons on 8 February in a debate on the poor operation of press censorship. Introducing his defence of Haldane, King claimed the Press Bureau’s work seemed ‘guided by no clear principles, and has been calculated to cause suspicion and discontent.’107 One example of this was that information denied to the British public about their soldiers was freely disseminated on the Continent. He remarked that everyone knew about the naval losses – casualties had been published – but the press had not been allowed to state what they were, leading to ‘uneasiness, alarm, apprehension and even mystification as to the progress of the war’.108 But another example of the bureau’s incompetence was that one of its rules was not to allow attacks on ministers in case they damaged public confidence. King could not square this supposed principle with the ‘extravagant and absurd’ attacks on Haldane.

  He accused his persecutors of ‘terming him little better than a German agent’.109 The attacks had caused many constituents to write to their MPs to ask whether there was any truth in them, and the stories were beginning to depress morale. King wondered what the point was of the Press Bureau if it allowed such things. Northcliffe’s Times ignored the defence of the Lord Chancellor, preferring to attack ‘a policy which laboriously conceals disaster and deadlock for fear of making the people nervous, which refuses to tell them of the doing of their soldiers even after an interval of months, which confuses and minimizes the casualty lists, which works by stealth even in issuing orders to the public for their conduct in case of a raid.’110 Its suggestion was not to have a Press Bureau run by lawyers and amateurs, but instead to set up a new department.

  V

  The Royal Navy’s bombardment of forts in the Dardanelles began on 19 February; the previous week Fisher had ordered thirty new ships, in expectation of battles ahead.111 From the outset little went to plan. The straits were heavily mined and the Navy’s minesweepers proved vulnerable and ineffective; the weather conditions were bad; the Turks were better armed than expected; and putting together troops for a subsequent land invasion proved difficult, because of Kitchener’s caution at leaving the Western Front under-defended. Decisions that should have been taken by the War Council – a body that now met less and less frequently – were delegated to commanders in the field: so when General Sir Ian Hamilton arrived there in mid-March to command the military effort, it was left to him and his naval counterpart, Rear Admiral Sir John de Robeck, to decide when landings should take place. A naval attack on 18 March, just after Hamilton’s arrival, had proved fruitless, with two battleships sunk; ten days earlier three ships had been destroyed after entering a minefield. ‘The Admiralty have been very over-sanguine as to what they could do by ships alone,’ Asquith told Miss Stanley, recording another black mark against Churchill.

  French told Asquith that the trench warfare of mid-February had brought heavy casualties; but Kitchener remained convinced that the best-trained division still at home, the 29th, should stay there in case a sudden German breakthrough on the Russian front encouraged the enemy to send a big force west to try to smash the French lines. This caution led to trouble in the War Council on 6 March, when Asquith provoked Churchill by supporting Kitchener’s plea not to send the 29th Division to the Dardanelles, where Churchill wanted them to reinforce the attack. The prime minister found the First Lord ‘at his worst … noisy, rhetorical, tactless, & temperless – or – full’.112 When the decision went against him his response was ‘immense and unconcealed dudgeon’. Asquith believed the Dardanelles campaign was a risk worth taking. If it succeeded it would, he told Miss Stanley, mean ‘occupying Constantinople & cutting Turkey in half, and arousing on our side the whole Balkan peninsula’.113 The price of food and success in the Dardanelles were also inextricably linked, as Russian access to the Mediterranean would allow grain exports to resume: and the price of food was an increasing ministerial preoccupation. Ministers from Asquith downwards rubbished German propaganda claims that its navy was ‘blockading’ Britain. The prime minister stated that ‘the German Fleet is not blockading, cannot blockade, and never will blockade our coasts.’114 Yet it was undeniable that food prices were rising, and this left Asquith with a dilemma. A successful campaign in the Dardanelles would ease the pressure on food supplies, but it could be achieved only by taking the risk of sending troops against Kitchener’s advice. In the following days it became clear that both the French and the Greeks were prepared to send substantial numbers of troops to the theatre, but the Russians – looking at Turkey with expansionist eyes, and contemplating incorporating Constantinople and the Dardanelles into their empire – strongly objected to Greek involvement.

  Partly because of Asquith’s having to deputise at the Foreign Office for Grey, who was ill, the War Council, after its meeting of 19 March, did not meet again until 14 May: another sign of how little Asquith grasped the gravity of events on the Western Front and the deterioration in the Dardanelles, and the active response they required. Hankey and Esher agreed that troops should have been ready once the bombardment began, not brought in afterwards, and there should have been no press announcements of the assault. All element of surprise had been lost. Hankey told Esher on 15 March: ‘Now we have given the Turks time to assemble a vast force, to pour in field guns and howitzers, to entrench every landing place, and the operation has become a most formidable one.’115

  At the 19 March meeting reports from the east, including news of the sinking of three ships and the disablement of two others, confirmed the deficiencies of the Dardanelles campaign. When Lloyd George asked whether ‘any success had been achieved to counterbalance the losses’ he was told by Sir Arthur Wilson, another former First Sea Lord whom Churchill had recalled from retirement, that ‘so far as could be gathered … the forts had only been temporarily silenced.’116 Churchill claimed it was too early to tell, but agreed to authorise de Robeck to continue operations ‘if he thought fit’. Hankey noted: ‘Lord F and I in the rather unenviable position of being able to say “I told you so”.’117 Churchill would devote enormous energy for decades to seek to escape responsibility for the failure in the Dardanelles, but facts were against him.

  However, a new crisis now arose that would pose an even greater threat to the government’s stability. Because he had no experience of the trench warfare now prevalent on the Western Front, Kitchener instinctively felt French’s demands for munitions were unreasonable and exaggerated. He also disliked details of the munitions business being revealed outside the War Office. Before the war the weapons industry had been highly dependent on German technology, a ridiculously derelict situation given the widespread belief the next enemy would be Germany.118 It was only thanks to purchases of machine tools from Sweden, Switzerland and America that the industry could supply the Army with sufficient engines, because the British were incapable of making them quickly enough. The British chemical industry was also barely existent – it had relied on German imports – and this not only meant a shortage of proprietary medicines, but also of chemicals for ammunition and aircraft fuselages. The other obstacle to higher production was the unions, whose members had yet to adapt to practices unimaginable in peacetime.
The consequences of that period since the 1890s when the spending rather than reinvestment of dividends had smothered innovation were now apparent.

  Lloyd George had eased the restraints on arms expenditure and the government had subsidised the expansion of armaments factories. Asquith told the Commons on 1 March that by the end of the month the war would have cost £362 million or, given that it would by then have run for 240 days, an average of £1.5 million a day.119 He said the present cost was £1.7 million a day, and would rise to £1.9 million by the beginning of 1916. Nothing in the government’s calculations was based on a swift end to the war. However, Kitchener remained obstructive to any development in arms manufacture or supply that interfered with his control, even though as early as 11 February French had had his chief of staff, Sir William Robertson, warn Haig to be careful how many shells he was using. Asquith wished to give Lloyd George control of a new Army Contracts Directorate to oversee munitions production, something Kitchener would not countenance.

  Directly after the Treasury Agreement of March 1915 Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, Montagu – the new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and responsible for creating the administrative framework of how the munitions industry would now work – and Balfour met to design a new Munitions Committee, under Lloyd George, to control the process. Kitchener threatened to resign: he felt the committee was entirely unnecessary, because – in a move that confirms the grasp of political cunning he had shown in seeing off Curzon in India – he had set up his own committee in the War Office. Asquith, however, faced him down: on 8 April he told Kitchener that Lloyd George would take charge of munitions, and the change was leaked to the press on 5 April. The new committee could not come soon enough: it was estimated that in the fortnight around the offensive at Neuve Chapelle, which lasted from 10 to 13 March, the British Army used as much ordnance as in the entire Second Boer War.120