Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  So angry was Northcliffe that, two months later, he made a rare speech in the Lords in a debate initiated by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who proposed the government set up ‘a fully-fledged Air Ministry’, a call seconded by Milner.209 Northcliffe, careful not to criticise Curzon by name, said the ministry should have a board of inventions and give greater encouragement to manufacturers, to stimulate the high levels of production necessary for the long war he expected. He demanded the government train more pilots immediately, saying that ‘I believe if we defer the training of large bodies of men until the autumn and winter we shall be lamentably short next year, when there will be a great need.’210

  On 22 February the government’s blockade policy, or lack of one, was also attacked in the Lords: too little, it was claimed, was being done to prevent supplies, particularly of food and raw materials, from reaching enemy countries. This was unfair: exports from America to Germany had fallen from £54 million in 1913 to £2.3 million in 1915.211 The next target was Sweden, still trading extensively with the Germans, but pressure was also brought on Denmark, Norway and Holland. Peers considered the existence of any such trade absurd given the strength of the Royal Navy. The government was accused of hiding behind international law that had no relevance in a life-or-death struggle; and Lord Sydenham accused it of having allowed huge exports of cocoa to Holland that had been passed on to Germany to fortify troops in the German trenches. Admiral Lord Beresford complained that only an ‘absolute blockade’ would win the war, which, he said, would have finished by now had the policy been operated sooner.212 That meant the Navy arresting ships on suspicion of carrying goods to the Central Powers and then taking the matter before a Prize Court. The cabinet was accused of not having taken a proper decision on this, as on other questions.

  It further illustrated the government’s propensity for muddle that Beresford was unclear who ran what passed for the existing blockade: the Foreign Office, the Board of Trade or the Contraband Committee. Various Orders in Council had contradicted each other. The solution adopted was to declare anything entering Germany ‘absolute contraband’, and that all enemy property in neutral ships should be confiscated.213 Lansdowne announced that a Ministry of Blockade would be established, under a cabinet minister – Lord Robert Cecil, appointed the next day. Its purpose was to blackmail neutral countries into not trading with Germany, threatening to starve them of supplies if they did, but offering to buy goods they would otherwise send there. This would be the policy that would help bring Germany to its knees in 1918.

  Once the first round of the conscription battle had ended Lloyd George found himself isolated in the cabinet. His fellow Liberals did not trust him, and most Unionists did not like him. It stoked his disillusion. He told Scott on 18 February of his ‘profound dissatisfaction with the whole conduct of the war’ and said he was going off to Walton Heath ‘to consider his whole position with a view to possibly resigning his place in the Cabinet.’ He felt that he, Carson and Churchill ‘would together make an effective opposition.’214 His views about the war were, unbeknown to him, shared by the BEF’s commander-in-chief. Haig complained the same day to Joffre that the British Army was ‘75,000 below strength in 39 divisions’, with many soldiers inadequately trained and the transport to move them lacking.215 To stave off the moment when married men would be called up, the government announced in late February that some attested married men would be moved to reserved occupations to replace single men, who would be sent to the front.

  The Navy, too, had its problems. On 17 February Jellicoe attended the War Committee and told it the Grand Fleet needed light cruisers, destroyers and minesweepers, and that the recruitment drive was badly slowing down the rate at which ships were being built. Fisher, who since his resignation the previous May over his differences with Churchill about the Dardanelles had become chairman of the Navy’s Board of Invention and Research, was asked to talk to the War Committee. When he did, he reiterated Jellicoe’s views. Churchill picked up the point on 7 March – less than three months before the Battle of Jutland, the crucial encounter of the Great War between the Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy – when the naval estimates were debated in the Commons.

  On leave from the front but in civilian clothes, Churchill made one prescient observation, that the German High Seas Fleet was unlikely to be kept in port for the duration of the war. He warned that it had proved easier to recover from the munitions shortage than it would be to recover from a shortage of ships, which threatened British naval ascendancy. Nor could he understand, given the prevalence of air raids, why naval pilots had not bombed the Zeppelin sheds in Germany. He felt that this, and all the other problems in the Admiralty, was because of ‘a lack of driving force and mental energy which cannot be allowed to continue … and can only be rectified in one way.’216 That way was straightforward: ‘I urge the First Lord of the Admiralty without delay to fortify himself, to vitalise and animate his Board of Admiralty by recalling Lord Fisher to his post as First Sea Lord.’

  This was an astonishing volte-face. The previous July Churchill, steaming about his demotion, had berated Balfour about his having given Fisher a minor Admiralty appointment: ‘This officer deserted his post in time of war. He was ordered by the Prime Minister to return to it in the King’s name. He defied this order … for 14 days there was no First Sea Lord. During that period the German Fleet put to sea, and it was necessary to send the whole British Fleet to meet it. The decisive naval battle of the world might have taken place, while Fisher was refusing to do his duty, and engaged in creating a political crisis from which he hoped to obtain added power.’217 It was a long road from there to where Churchill was eight months later: but just as sorting out the shells shortage had required someone as radical in approach as Lloyd George, and his ‘men of push and go’, so Churchill believed that only a force of nature such as Fisher, with his national prestige, could give the lead required to inspire the Board of Admiralty.

  He was not alone in wishing to see Fisher brought back: his friend Scott had advocated it, and had tried – and failed – to persuade Law to embrace the subject. He had, though, also lobbied Northcliffe, whom he had seen at The Times on 18 February, and had found ‘far from hostile’ to the idea and indeed ‘actively favourable’, though it was clear to Scott that Northcliffe disliked Fisher.218 Churchill had seen Fisher and they had agreed to let bygones be bygones; he had rehearsed his speech in front of Scott and Mrs Churchill, and it was only the latter who took exception to it. Asquith dined with the Churchills the night before the speech and Churchill informed him of what he intended to say. When he spoke, Fisher was in the gallery.

  Balfour, who Scott, also in the gallery, had noted ‘writhed visibly with irritation’ during Churchill’s performance, demolished him the next day.219 He called the speech ‘very unfortunate, both in form and substance’.220 He denied that naval construction was behindhand, although he did admit that obtaining skilled shipwrights was a problem. He added: ‘I will make no boast about the British Navy. I will not guarantee it against misfortune or accidents. But I say, in perfect confidence, that it is stronger in the face of any overt attack which it is likely to meet, that it is far stronger than it was at the beginning of the War, and is, I believe, stronger than it has ever been in its history.’221 As for Fisher, Balfour observed there could not have been a single person who had listened to that part of Churchill’s speech without ‘profound stupefaction’.

  He said Churchill had never concealed his view of Fisher, and crushed him with one of the better jokes in Parliament in the twentieth century: ‘The great ancestor of my right hon Friend, the first Duke of Marlborough, was always supposed to be more cool, more collected, more master of himself, more clear in thought amid the din of battle than he was in the calmer occupations of peace, and perhaps my right hon Friend shares this hereditary peculiarity. I venture to suggest that that clearness of thought which we all desiderate is bought at a rather costly figure if it involves a European war in o
rder to obtain it.’222 Churchill was allowed to speak next, and said Balfour’s case against him was ‘crudely exaggerated’: he failed to carry the House, not for the first or last time.223

  Churchill, written off by many after the Dardanelles and far from popular, was widely attacked for his speech. The Daily Mail, reflecting Northcliffe’s scepticism about him, savaged him. The prime minister told Scott that Churchill’s speech had been ‘a piece of the grossest effrontery’ and ‘impudent humbug’.224 It cannot have improved Asquith’s mood when Kitchener called on him to report that Churchill had asked to be relieved of his command ‘in order to grapple with the political situation at home.’225 As for Fisher, Asquith ‘shouted’ at Scott that for deserting his post the previous May ‘he deserved to be shot, and in any other country he would have been shot.’ Asquith sent for Churchill, who he also told Scott was ‘a little mad’, and reminded him that his father’s political career had been ruined by an absurdly capricious act.226 He advised Churchill not to persist in his demands; Churchill agreed, albeit with reluctance, his decision perhaps helped by the fact that Mrs Churchill had made the same point to him. He went back to France; but in his own mind this was only temporary, his return merely ‘a question of preparation and of opportunity.’227 He had not realised how much the old guard who ran the government disliked Fisher’s publicity-seeking exhibitionism, perhaps because he shared the same traits. Asquith, possibly realising how little of a threat Churchill had become, told him that if in future he wished to be relieved of his command – he had been promoted to the rank of colonel and commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers – ‘your relief will be arranged for, as soon as it can be effected without detriment to the Service.’228

  The neutering of Churchill removed just one of the government’s welter of problems. At a by-election in East Hertfordshire on 9 March a Unionist candidate with Liberal backing was defeated by an independent who campaigned for a strong air policy. The failure of an air ministry to materialise was yet another example of the dithering of the coalition. Lloyd George railed about this lassitude to Miss Stevenson on 11 March: ‘Everyone tells the same tale – that the country is sick of the present Government & loathes & despises Asquith. And yet, now that there is no Opposition, it is very difficult to turn them out.’229 He went on: ‘Bonar Law is limp and lifeless; Balfour can never make up his mind about anything. There is no one.’ And Lloyd George himself could not force Asquith out as it would be attributed to ‘personal motives’, something of which he had an abundance.

  VIII

  Although Asquith had eventually admitted the need to start conscription, his position was increasingly precarious. The crisis had proved to Lloyd George and his supporters that the prime minister had failed to make the transition from a peacetime leader to a wartime one. Nor had the question of conscription of married men been settled, and opinion remained divided on that. Hankey feared there would be an attempt to ‘stampede’ the rest of the cabinet and Parliament into conceding compulsory military service for all men of military age the moment Asquith left, on 31 March, for Rome to persuade the Italians (who had the previous year declared war on Austria–Hungary) to enter the war against Germany.230 No such coup was attempted, and Italy did eventually declare war on Germany on 28 August. When Asquith returned he formed a cabinet committee of himself, Law, McKenna and Austen Chamberlain to try to reach a solution about general conscription.

  By the late spring of 1916 there were calls for a massive government reconstruction; and the sequence of events begun by the formation of the coalition a year earlier, and which would culminate in Asquith’s fall, accelerated. The Tory press – led by Gwynne’s Morning Post – openly called for Asquith to be replaced by a more dynamic leader, a job for which Gwynne had earmarked Carson. He had been de facto Leader of the Opposition since leaving the government, and enjoyed support among Liberal as well as Tory MPs. He became chairman of the Unionist War Committee and called for immediate conscription for married men, which Robertson supported, on the grounds of ensuring equality of sacrifice. Asquith had his critics among senior officers too. General Sir Henry Wilson, in utter disregard of the constitutional proprieties, corresponded with Law trying to persuade him to bring Asquith down and form a government to prosecute the war properly. (Law warned Wilson not to meddle – he said if the government fell it would require a general election, which would divide the country.) Even the King was rattled about Asquith, to the extent where he asked Hankey ‘very confidentially’ about his suitability as prime minister. Hankey loyally said: ‘he was the only man who could handle his team’. The King agreed, though spoke highly of Curzon, who had been overseeing shipping matters for the government, with his customary command and competence.231

  Asquith’s problems were stacking up further, however, as a familiar bugbear returned. Conscription had proved as contentious in practice as it had in principle. There was soon evidence that attested married men were organising in big cities around Britain to ensure none of them was called up until every unmarried man had been taken: the National Union of Attested Married Men held a rally in the Albert Hall on 31 March, at which a supposedly soothing statement by Derby about his loyalty to them was read out. It did not have the desired effect, being interrupted ‘by bursts of ironical laughter and cries of derision’. Cheering broke out only when Derby confirmed he felt bound by honour to resign if the pledge he had given was broken.232 He agreed to meet a deputation of them, and the government promised to reduce the number of reserved occupations.

  In early April the pressure to extend conscription intensified, with Northcliffe taunting Asquith by running an editorial in the Daily Mail called ‘Fiddling While Rome Burns’.233 The Times had already assaulted the government on this issue, mocking Law for saying that he and his colleagues were still ‘examining all the figures’.234 It called the existing policy ‘ill-drafted and cowardly’ and observed that ‘great wars are won by courage and action’. The Tory press was similarly critical of McKenna, even though he had earned widespread applause on 4 April for a Budget it was felt underpinned British financial stability, despite a deficit of £1,323 million. He increased income tax to 5s in the pound and the excess-profits tax was raised from 50 to 60 per cent. However, he was also the principal opponent of extending conscription, on the grounds that it would start to cause serious damage to the economy: something pro-conscriptionists actively disputed. Northcliffe, who had made several visits to France, was angered that the Army had men ‘doing civilian and women’s work’, with the Pay Department ‘packed with young men doing the clerical work of girls.’235 He continued to blame all problems on the fact that a cabinet of twenty-three men ran the war, instead of a small group. This was not lost on Lloyd George.

  Attested married men aged twenty-five to thirty-two were called up on 7 April. Asquith met a deputation of them: they demanded that either the government do a better job of calling up unmarried men, or release the married ones from their pledge to serve. Asquith admitted that a clause in the Military Service Act that said men from a reserved occupation could be made to do military service for two months had been ‘abused’: but he would soon be forced to recognise that with the mood becoming so restive, it amplified the case for total compulsion.236 Opponents of conscription continued to mobilise against it. Supported by the likes of Russell, Lansbury and Snowden, Fenner Brockway, who would serve the Labour Party for much of the twentieth century, formed the No Conscription Fellowship. It held a rally in London on 8 April that Mrs Webb attended and noted was ‘packed with 2,000 young men’.237

  She observed the predominant type as being ‘the intellectual pietist … saliently conscious of their own righteousness’ and in whom she detected an unpleasant certainty. There were, too, ‘professional rebels’, who had alighted on the cause as a means, they hoped, to ‘smash the Military Service Act’. But she also noted ‘misguided youths who have been swept into the movement because ‘conscientious objection’ had served to excuse th
eir refusal to enlist and possibly might have saved them from the terrors and discomforts of fighting – ‘pasty-faced furtive boys, who looked dazed at the amount of heroism that was being expected from them.’ She detected they were ‘scared’ by the unanimity with which it was decided ‘to refuse alternative service’: those who would not work behind the lines, or on farms, to help the war effort faced being put under military discipline and court-martialled. A failure to agree on tactics – whether to pursue martyrdom or take non-combatant roles – split the movement, and rendered it ineffectual.

  A week later the Army Council formally advised Asquith to extend conscription. Robertson lunched with Repington afterwards, telling him that at the end of February the Army had recruited 250,000 men fewer than required, and of 195,000 men who had been due to appear under the Derby Scheme only 38,000 had come through, the rest either missing, unaccounted for or medically disqualified. Repington learned from Robertson that a quarter of the men who did appear were unfit for service.238 A cabinet was called for 17 April, at which Lloyd George agreed to ask Robertson to back down, it having been agreed that to present the Germans with a show of government division would have been highly damaging. However, Lloyd George told Scott on 13 April ‘of his strong and increasing dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and his intention to bring matters to a head if a measure of general compulsory service were not adopted on the lines of the “equality of sacrifice” motion of which Carson had given notice for the following Wednesday [19 April] after the Prime Minister had made his promised statement on Tuesday as to the intentions of the Government based on the report of the cabinet Committee.’239 Lloyd George, who was busy cultivating Carson, threatened to resign serially. Henry Wickham Steed, The Times’s foreign editor, quoted one of Lloyd George’s friends as saying that ‘he galloped gallantly towards the fence but, on reaching it, drew rein and looked round for a gate.’240 Arthur Lee, a Unionist MP who worked under him at Munitions, told his wife of the main reason he would not resign: Carson had told Lee that ‘if LG goes out, having practically no private means at all, he will drop from an income of £5,000 to the MP’s £400 a year.’241