Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  On 16 June, after four hours of talks, he had a signal success. He met representatives from forty-one unions who agreed that all union rules would be suspended in munitions workshops for the duration; that all workers in them would be placed under military discipline and made punishable for breaches of regulations; that work would be voluntary unless the unions failed to enlist the necessary workers; and that no private firm could engage a munitions worker without a certificate from his or her previous employer, to avoid ‘desertion’. In return for these concessions, all war profits would be annexed by the state. The same day that Lloyd George exhorted the workers of Bristol, the Socialist National Defence Committee called for an end to ‘the wasteful gamble and chaos of private enterprise’ and wholesale nationalisations to maximise the war effort. It would not be long before the coalition pursued such a strategy, with government-owned munitions factories and state control of a railway network starved of maintenance and investment. Beatrice Webb noted that ‘from all one hears Lloyd George is going the way of Chamberlain, exchanging the leadership of the Radicals for the leadership of an imperialist nationalist party … his present subservience to the Tories is pitiable; in politics the greatest enemies, once they get over their enmity, become the closest of conspirators.’333

  At the Ministry of Munitions Addison, Lloyd George’s junior minister, was charged with finding out how bad things were. His report, compiled with the head of the Statistics Department, was so alarming that Asquith banned its printing and circulation: those ministers who wished to read it, including even Lloyd George, were told to do so in Addison’s office, which the report was not to leave. Although Kitchener wanted seventy divisions, the Army had enough small-calibre artillery – 18-pounders – for twenty-eight; enough 60-pounders for thirty-one; and enough howitzers for seventeen.334 It would, at the then rate of supply, have taken until the 1920s to equip the army he wanted. There were enough rifles for thirty-three divisions, and between August 1914 and May 1915 only enough machine guns to equip twelve to a minimal standard. The War Office wanted 70,000 grenades a day delivered to France: the actual total was 2,500. The other difficulty was accommodating munitions workers near the new factories the government was proposing to build, or near existing ones that were being expanded. There was no manpower to build permanent structures: so an appeal was launched for donations to build temporary accommodation, under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association – prefabricated huts which workers could assemble themselves. Given the urgency of distracting the new industrial army from drink and the opposite sex, the YMCA was regarded as an ideal landlord.

  To get production on course, between 19 and 26 June questionnaires were sent to 65,000 manufacturers to establish exactly what capacity was at the country’s disposal. Once the answers were in, the ministry would put in its orders, monitored by local boards. Also in June, Lloyd George brokered an arrangement with the trades unions to set up a system of War Munitions Volunteers. These would be people who agreed, if required, to leave their present job and work for government contractors; full-page advertisements appeared in the press, and Lloyd George warned that if there was an inadequate response workers would have to be brought in by compulsion. In the first week 46,000 skilled workers volunteered, but it then slowed down dramatically: by November 107,000 had come forward, but because their existing employers could object, relatively few – about 10 per cent – were drafted.335 The ministry set up its own National Factories, and extended the plant at existing ones, and many of these workers were transferred to those. While the working class transferred their skills into such factories, middle- and upper-middle-class women volunteered wherever they could. Two of Asquith’s daughters-in-law – Katharine and Lady Cynthia – were typical, the former working in a canteen at Euston station, the latter spending some afternoons making respirators for the troops.

  Although the report was suppressed, the dire situation soon became known, and Lloyd George – who told Henry Wilson, back from France to be knighted, that ‘we are going to be beaten’ – set about seeking more power to put things right.336 On 1 July Sir Henry Dalziel – one of his cronies, a Liberal MP and newspaper proprietor – asked in the Commons for the Ministry of Munitions to take over von Donop’s Ordnance Department. Mrs Asquith believed Northcliffe had planted the question so it could be reported in The Times, and that Lloyd George was complicit. Haldane broke his post-resignation silence to defend von Donop, causing Lloyd George to denounce Haldane’s version of events: The Times gave a good show to the denunciation in its 8 July edition. Mrs Asquith was now systematically seeking to settle scores with those she held responsible for her husband’s difficulties. When French returned from the front to brief the War Cabinet on 2 July she told him: ‘If you had hated me and my man, you could not have done us a worse turn than you did by seeing swine like Northcliffe and Repington.’337 She told him that if Kitchener had not reacted sufficiently to the shell problem, he should have written to Asquith direct: an unfortunate interpretation of the chain of command. She thought one of French’s staff had briefed Repington, which was not the case: had she realised French himself had done it, he might not have left the room alive.

  Meeting her husband off a train at Charing Cross in early June, Mrs Asquith was allowed on to the concourse of a station otherwise closed to the public while an ambulance train was unloaded. The sight of rows and rows of wounded and dying men laid out on stretchers on the ground, ‘lying perfectly flat like so many corpses’, stunned her.338 Such trains were mostly timed to arrive late at night or during the early hours, not least so the fleet of ambulances meeting them would avoid the public gaze. There could no longer be any doubt about the terrible scale and effect of the conflict. A few months before, in mid-January 1915, a correspondence in The Times settled a question vexing its readers: the struggle in which the nation was now engaged body and soul was to be known as ‘the Great War’.339

  CHAPTER 4

  CONSCRIPTION

  I

  As the first anniversary of the outbreak of war approached, the conflict still had general public support, but the enthusiasm of August 1914 had long since passed. A sense of unease at the high level of deaths, and the reorientation of the country into a nation at war, began to be palpable. The Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations urged MPs to address meetings in their constituencies on the anniversary. Kitchener hoped to turn a commemoration at St Paul’s on 4 August into a recruitment rally, but the clergy dismissed the suggestion. The sense that young men were being sent off to die pointlessly, leaving families bereaved, was taking hold, and made the job of those charged with running the war increasingly difficult. Instead, a rally was arranged at the Guildhall on 9 July at which Kitchener pleaded for more recruits. ‘In every man’s life there is one supreme hour towards which all earlier experience moves and from which all future results may be reckoned,’ he said. ‘For every individual Briton, as well as for our national existence, that hour is now striking.’1

  The government exerted such control over the public in the supply of information that it took time for many people, Kitchener’s exhortations notwithstanding, to understand how bad things really were. Until 6 July anodyne newspaper headlines talked of one courageous battle after another in the Dardanelles: but that day General Sir Ian Hamilton’s dispatch, dated 20 May and dealing with events until 4 May, was published, and began to show what a debacle the operation had been. The government had admitted on 31 May that 7,500 officers and men had been killed; the public started to fear that the numbers would have risen substantially since. It was clear that the tremendous bravery of the troops, of which Hamilton made no secret, had been sacrificed to the incompetence of the planning that had led to a lack of coordination of the military and naval forces.

  Soldiers wounded and on leave brought word back from Flanders, where the Second Battle of Ypres had been fought for five weeks from late April, of new horrors inflicted on them. The Germans used poison gas for the first ti
me during the battle, a prime example of ‘frightfulness’ to rank with the sinking of the Lusitania. As the casualty lists were published it became clear that all parts of society had suffered: the summer commemoration events at Oxford were muted because 300 of the 8,000 alumni believed to be serving had been killed. Eton – some of whose boys were working five-hour shifts in a nearby munitions factory – decided to raise funds for ambulances, something the nation’s lady mayoresses had been doing across Britain. It was estimated one officer in ten in the land forces thus far killed was an Old Etonian.2 At an opposite extreme, 19,648 boys who had been through reformatories had served by late June 1915, almost 600 of whom had died: but three had won the Victoria Cross, twenty-five the Distinguished Conduct Medal and twenty were mentioned in dispatches. Perhaps most remarkably, eight of these former miscreants had been commissioned.3 The casualties among officers for May 1915 alone were little short of those for the whole Second Boer War – 2,440 against 2,752. In February 1916 The Times published a list of forty-five heirs to peerages thus far killed; six of their deaths left peerages without an heir, including that of Lord Stamfordham, the King’s private secretary.4

  In his memoirs Bob Boothby, a fourteen-year-old Etonian when war broke out, recalled the cumulative effect the war had on his generation:

  It is difficult to exaggerate the traumatic effect of the casualties in France upon the lives of boys who grew to maturity during the years between 1914 and 1918. Every Sunday the names of the fallen were read out in college chapel. As we saw all the heroes of our youth being killed, one by one, and not far away, our whole attitude towards life changed. ‘Eat and drink and try to be merry, for tomorrow you will surely die,’ became our motto. Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele bit deep into our small souls. If early and bloody death was apparently an inevitable consequence of life, what was the point of it?5

  The war was coming closer to home, increasing pressure for a decisive response. Despite the censorship of news from the Dardanelles, the sheer number of families who had been notified of deaths from that theatre of war ensured that various versions of the truth spread rapidly by word of mouth. Then on 7 September there were Zeppelin raids on south London, the capital’s docklands and Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. The next day Zeppelins bombed London’s Farringdon Road, killing twenty-two people and injuring eighty-six, the most damaging single bombing raid of the war; and attacked a benzole plant in Yorkshire. (In 1917, in a well-judged act of defiance, 61 Farringdon Road was rebuilt as the Zeppelin Building.) A further Zeppelin raid on London and the eastern counties on 13 October killed seventy-one and injured a hundred and twenty-eight. Complaints by politicians and the public about the lack of anti-aircraft protection were beyond the wit of the censor to stop, with the Globe newspaper organising a public meeting, chaired by Lord Willoughby de Broke, in London the day after the raids, and demanding reprisals. The Northcliffe press complained that it was unclear which minister was in charge of defending London – an astonishing indictment of Asquith’s attention to detail – and it fell to Balfour, as First Lord of the Admiralty, to take that responsibility.

  However, if the Germans hoped to break British resolve, another of their acts against a civilian in the autumn of 1915 would prove instrumental in hardening it more than ever. On 12 October the Germans shot Edith Cavell, the English matron of a training school for nurses in Brussels, for helping an estimated 200 British and French prisoners and Belgian civilians escape into Holland. France had shot two nurses in Paris during 1915 for assisting the escape of German prisoners; Miss Cavell had known the likely consequences of her actions, undertaken as part of the Brussels underground network. It was disclosed decades after her execution that she had also been gathering intelligence. She could have left Brussels in the autumn of 1914 when the Americans arranged for seventy Allied nurses to leave, but chose to stay. The Foreign Office had monitored her case since her arrest on 5 August, though had kept details out of the press. It had concluded it could do nothing to help. Her trial began on 7 October and she was condemned to death on the 11th.

  The American ambassador to Berlin made the strongest representations, and the Spanish legation in Brussels tried to intervene; but diplomats were lied to about the intention to carry out the sentence. A promise to discuss the matter with the Americans before anything happened was broken. The civil governor, Baron von der Lancken, believed Miss Cavell should be reprieved, but he was subordinate to the military authorities. One of his colleagues, Count Harrach, expressed his regret that he did not have a few more Englishwomen to shoot. That was close to the view of the military governor, General von Sauberzweig, who ordered the sentence to be carried out. The Revd Stirling Gahan, an Anglican chaplain, was allowed to see Miss Cavell on the eve of her execution to give her Holy Communion. He found her ‘perfectly calm and resigned.’6 She said: ‘I have no fear nor shrinking; I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.’ Her last words to him as he left were ‘we shall meet again.’ Word of her execution reached London via the American embassy on 14 October.

  The Press Bureau released a bulletin for the newspapers on 16 October that reported the simple facts of what had happened, though mis-stated the date of her death as 13 October. One of Britain’s most famous nurses, Mrs Bedford Fenwick, announced on behalf of the profession that Miss Cavell ‘had died a glorious death’.7 The outcry in England at this supreme example of German ‘frightfulness’, which went far beyond anything in the Bryce report in terms of its closeness to home, was deafening, a propaganda gift to a government constantly striving to maintain enthusiasm for the war by depicting the evil of the beastly Hun. The Bishop of London, Dr Arthur Winnington-Ingram – a serial and fervent Hun-basher who misunderstood what had happened and seemed not to know she had been nearly fifty years old – told a rally in Trafalgar Square that ‘the cold-blooded murder of Miss Cavell, a poor English girl deliberately shot by the Germans for housing refugees, will run the sinking of the Lusitania close in the civilised world as the greatest crime in history.’8

  Details of Miss Cavell’s last hours, and the dignified way in which she met her death at dawn at a firing range on the edge of Brussels, added a golden aura to her sacrifice. She had also told Gahan: ‘But this I would say, standing, as I do, in view of God and eternity. I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no bitterness or hatred towards anyone’ – words engraved on her monument just north of Trafalgar Square, erected after the war, but for which plans began to be laid immediately.9 Her last words, after saying she wanted her family to be told that she believed her soul was safe, were: ‘I am glad that I die for my country.’ It was a spectacular martyrdom; the Church of England would make the anniversary of her death a saint’s feast day. A powerful legend was created that exemplified the wickedness Britain was fighting against. The international obloquy rattled the Kaiser sufficiently that he issued an order a few weeks later that no woman was to be executed without his permission.

  The public outrage, too, was colossal; it inspired deeper loathing of the enemy, and impelled more men into uniform. Posters, books, pamphlets, penny dreadfuls, films, poems and almost every form of creative endeavour were applied to retelling the story of the German evil towards Nurse Cavell. Jocelyn Henry Speck, a clergyman from Bedford, wrote to The Times to announce that ‘if ever a challenge rang out to the chivalry of our young men of military age not yet enlisted, it is surely to be heard in the dastardly execution of an Englishwoman at the hands of an enemy for whom self-respecting nations in future can have but one feeling, absolute abhorrence.’10 The Revd Mr Speck continued that the Germans ‘have murdered chivalry’, and the 2 million young men it was believed had yet to answer the nation’s call would join up at once ‘if chivalry and manhood are not extinct in them.’ He concluded: ‘The call is a voice from the grave – the voice of Nurse Edith Cavell from that execution yard in Brussels. She being dead yet speaketh.’

  Lansdowne gave the government’s first reaction in
the Lords on 20 October:

  We have been during the last few months continually shocked by occurrences each more terrible and moving than its predecessor; but I doubt whether any incident has moved public opinion in this country more than the manner in which this poor lady was, I suppose I must say, ‘executed’ in cold blood not many hours ago. It is no doubt the case … that she may by her conduct have rendered herself liable to punishment—perhaps to severe punishment—for acts committed in violation of the kind of law which prevails when war is going on. But I have no hesitation in saying that she might at any rate have expected that measure of mercy which I believe in no civilised country would have been refused to one who was not only a woman, but a very brave and devoted woman, and one who had given all her efforts and energies to the mitigation of the sufferings of others.11

  The Times waited until after Lansdowne’s statement and the publication of correspondence between the Foreign Office, the Americans and the Spanish before leading the Establishment’s execration of the Germans. In its leading article of 22 October it mused whether the ‘disciples of Kultur’ were capable of appreciating what Grey, in thanking the Americans and Spanish for their exhaustive efforts, had called the ‘horror and disgust’ resonating around the civilised world at the story.12 ‘There is not in Europe, outside Germany and her Allies, a man who can read it without the deepest emotions of pity and shame.’ Miss Cavell ‘had devoted her life to the noblest and most womanly work woman can do,’ the paper said. She had saved the lives of Germans, and this was how her ‘charity’ had been requited. She had told the truth and her captors had shown her no mercy. The Spanish and Americans who sought clemency had been told not even the Kaiser would intervene; yet he intervened the moment the outcry erupted to reprieve two other women sentenced by the same tribunal for similar offences. Noting Miss Cavell’s last words, the paper proclaimed: ‘She did in very truth die for England, and England will not lightly forget her death … By killing her they have immeasurably deepened the stain of infamy that degrades them in the eyes of the whole world. They could have done no deed better calculated to serve the British cause.’