Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Asquith, who had finally decided to act as Leader of the Opposition, made no response, but when a moment later Lloyd George criticised the practice of no record being kept of cabinet meetings, he intervened to say that it is ‘the inflexible unwritten rule of the Cabinet that no member shall take any note or record of the proceedings except the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister does so for the purpose – and it is the only record of the proceedings kept – of sending his letter to the King.’186 Lloyd George retorted that ‘that is the real difference between the War Committee and the Cabinet’, making the matter emblematic of his new order. The War Committee, of whose proceedings notes had been taken, and the War Cabinet were now the same thing.

  Lloyd George addressed other pressing issues. ‘The food problem,’ he said, ‘is undoubtedly serious and will be grave unless not merely the Government but the nation is prepared to grapple with it courageously without loss of time.’187 The 1916 British harvest had been dismal; and because of poor weather only three-eighths of what should have been sown for 1917 was sown. The harvests in Canada and the United States had been poor; Russian grain was unavailable and there were transport problems with Australian foodstuffs. He asked ‘the affluent’ to refrain from over-consumption and, as the nation was ‘fighting for its life’, to ‘play the game’.188 He declared that ‘every available square yard’ had to be used to grow food.189

  After describing what many of the nation’s men had endured in the trenches – including an unprecedented admission about ‘the horrors of the Somme’ – he proclaimed:

  You cannot have absolute equality of sacrifice. In a war that is impossible, but you can have equal readiness to sacrifice from all. There are hundreds of thousands who have given their lives, there are millions who have given up comfortable homes and exchanged them for a daily communion with death; multitudes have given up those whom they love best. Let the nation as a whole place its comforts, its luxuries, its indulgencies, its elegances on a national altar consecrated by such sacrifices as these men have made. Let us proclaim during the War a national Lent. The nation will be better and stronger for it, mentally and morally as well as physically. It will strengthen its fibre, it will ennoble its spirit. Without it we shall not get the full benefit of this struggle.

  He detailed potential sacrifices. Law would seek to sequestrate the gains of profiteers, as in the munitions industry; and the government might have to compel every man not in the Army to engage in ‘work of national importance’.190 Men unfit or too old for military service would have to accept direction about where they worked for the duration, to discharge the same moral obligation that fit men were under. The War Cabinet had decided on 14 December to appoint a director of National Service, to whom a military and civil director would report. The former would take charge of recruiting, and hand over men to the War Office; the latter would work according to a schedule of industries in order of national priority, drawn up by the director of National Service.

  Vital ones, such as agriculture, would have the first call on labour; less vital ones would have it rationed to them. He explained: ‘Labour … from non-essential and rationed industries will be available to set free potential soldiers who are at present exempted from military service and to increase the available supply of labour for essential services. This labour will be invited to enrol at once and be registered as war workers on lines analogous to the existing munitions volunteers, with similar provisions as to rates of pay and separation allowance.’191 All this was possible only because Henderson, in Lloyd George’s absence in his sickbed, and his equally patriotic colleague John Hodge, a former puddler at an Ayrshire ironworks and the first man to be appointed minister of labour, had met and persuaded senior trades unionists to accept some sort of conscription for work. Humbert Wolfe, a civil servant closely involved with the establishment of the Labour Department of the Ministry of Munitions, reported that while the labour movement ‘might be willing to be conscribed to die for an idea, they were not willing to live (as it might be put) for private profits.’192

  Lloyd George said the system would be voluntary at first; but if there were insufficient volunteers he would not hesitate to return to Parliament and seek powers to conscript men for industry. ‘The nation is fighting for its life,’ he said, ‘and it is entitled to the best services of all its sons.’193 He had chosen Neville Chamberlain, Lord Mayor of Birmingham, son of Joe and half-brother of Austen, to be the first director of National Service, after Montagu had refused. It had been with ‘very great difficulty’ that Chamberlain had been persuaded to take the job, so dedicated had he been to maximising his city’s contribution to the war. Now, he would be responsible for creating a ‘large industrial army’. Lloyd George did not exaggerate Chamberlain’s reluctance: his half-brother had told him it was his duty to do ‘national work, Imperial work’, rather than simply serve Birmingham, to which Neville had replied: ‘I suppose I have no right to refuse.’194 Neville had long nursed a poor opinion of Lloyd George, believing he had mismanaged some munitions disputes, encouraging workers elsewhere to cause trouble by making needless concessions. He took the job with few illusions, and quickly found it a task he lacked both the authority and the machinery to do properly. Montagu had been shrewd to refuse, for whoever would take the blame for a failure to create this new civilian army it would not be Lloyd George.

  The new prime minister also mentioned Ireland, about which his conscience could hardly have been clear, and about which even now he could not be frank. ‘I wish it were possible to remove the misunderstanding between Britain and Ireland which has for centuries been such a source of misery to the one and of embarrassment and weakness to the other. I wish that that misunderstanding could be removed. I tried once. I did not succeed.’ An Irish MP told him to ‘try again!’ Lloyd George continued: ‘The fault was not entirely on one side. I felt the whole time that we were moving in an atmosphere of nervous suspicion and distrust, pervasive, universal, of everything and everybody … It was a quagmire of distrust which clogged the footsteps and made progress impossible.’195 Perhaps he was making excuses in advance for his impending failure to address the realities of Ireland.

  Finally, he sought to justify himself in the guise of paying tribute to Asquith.

  May I say, and I say it in all sincerity, that it is one of the deepest regrets of my life that I should part from the right hon Gentleman. Some of his friends know how I strove to avert it. For years I served under the right hon Gentleman, and I am proud to say so. I never had a kinder or more indulgent chief. If there were any faults of temper, they were entirely mine, and I have no doubt I must have been difficult at times. No man had greater admiration for his brilliant intellectual attainments, and no man was happier to serve under him. For eight years we differed as men of such different temperaments must necessarily differ, but we never had a personal quarrel.196

  He claimed he had put country before party throughout the war ‘because I realised from the moment the Prussian cannon hurled death at a peaceable and inoffensive little country, that a challenge had been sent to civilisation to decide an issue higher than party, deeper than party, wider than all parties – an issue upon the settlement of which will depend the fate of men in this world for generations, when existing parties will have fallen like dead leaves on the highway. Those issues are the issues that I want to keep in front of the nation, so that we shall not falter or faint in our resolve.’197

  Asquith showed great magnanimity, congratulating his successor ‘with all my heart.’ He spoke from the Opposition front bench ‘not because I claim in any sense to be the Leader of what is called an Opposition … I do not care for the moment by whom the Government of the country is conducted, although I am very glad to see a man of such ability as my right hon Friend in the place which he so worthily occupies – whatever experience I have gained, whatever it is worth, is at the disposal of the Government.’198 That, too, was not entirely true, or Asquith would have been in the Lords, as Lord Chan
cellor. He said party differences were only ‘in abeyance’ and would one day ‘revive’.199 That was why he had stayed in the Commons.

  He admitted that ‘on the one hand it is to me a relief, and in some ways an unspeakable relief, to be released from a daily burden which has lately been carried under almost insupportable conditions, and, on the other hand, a matter for natural and deep regret that I should be compelled to leave unfinished a task at which I have so long and so strenuously worked.’ He added that, under his rule, ‘errors of judgment, defects of method, there may have been and there undoubtedly have been.’ However, he continued: ‘But that there has been slackness or lethargy, infirmity of purpose, above all want of thoroughness and want of wholeheartedness in our concentration upon our common task, not only on my behalf, but on behalf of my late colleagues, as well those who sit upon that bench as those who sit upon this, I emphatically deny. The full story cannot, of course, yet be told.’200 He concluded: ‘I am quite content, when all the facts come to be disclosed, to leave my Administration, and the part which I myself played in it, to the judgment of history.’ Few noticed Asquith’s contribution, it being overshadowed by the speech of his successor: which The Times, forsaking understatement, described as ‘a great event in the history of the Empire and of mankind.’201 Six months later, Mrs Asquith was still steaming: ‘I’ve never got over his abominable treatment by our own men as well as Ll George,’ she wrote on 28 May 1917, addressing posterity in her diary.202 ‘You may take it from me – we all know it was a put-up job! And I hope the whole country will know every detail of the most squalid political intrigue of my time or yours or anyone’s!’

  After consultation with the French on Boxing Day 1916, the Allies rejected the Central Powers’ peace notes via the US ambassador in Paris. They told President Wilson they wanted the evacuation of all occupied territories, the restoration of their governments, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reparations and guarantees of good behaviour: much as insisted upon at Versailles two years later. The fighting would, the Allies announced, continue until victory. Thus 1917 dawned with no end in sight. However, the man now running the British government had more power vested in him than anyone since the Protectorate; the country could not afford for him to fail.

  CHAPTER 8

  DICTATORSHIP

  I

  Barely had Lloyd George put his administration into place than a new German offensive, this time at sea, presented a critical threat to Britain. However, it also caused a sequence of events that helped the Allies win the war. President Woodrow Wilson of America had striven to keep his country neutral, not least because of anti-British feeling among Americans of German and Irish descent: but then Germany’s renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare on 31 January 1917, with U-boats seeking to sink any ship approaching British waters, led to losses of American shipping that public opinion in the United States could no longer tolerate. The Germans resumed this policy despite the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and the Kaiser having agreed in 1916 that to do so would draw America into the conflict, which would lead to a ‘war of exhaustion’, the end of Germany as a great power and quite possibly the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty.1 They were more right than they knew. Wilson was left with no option politically but to bring America into the war and to try to defeat Germany. This radical change of circumstances in which the war was fought not only gave Britain a new major partner, but also transformed an international relationship.

  The Germans realised they had had a lucky escape at Jutland and that another battle between the surface fleets would not necessarily end in a German victory. However, as victims of a blockade themselves they understood its effects, and sought to retaliate in kind. They were slowly losing the ‘war of starvation’, but believed poor harvests in 1916 in America, Argentina and Canada put Britain at serious risk of starvation too: which, because of British reliance on imported food, was correct. The growth in the U-boat fleet (from forty-one vessels in January 1916 to one hundred and three a year later) gave Germany an enormous advantage if it chose to use it, with, they wrongly believed, the possibility of making Britain sue for peace. As in August 1914, it was military men rather than politicians who forced the Kaiser’s hand. Restricted submarine warfare had pertained in the North Sea since October 1916, using vessels based in Zeebrugge: now, unrestricted, it would move to the Atlantic, despite Bethmann’s reservations.

  Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on 2 February. Most American lines kept their ships in port, and New York’s shipping activity almost ceased. As 60 per cent of America’s exports went to Western Europe this badly hit the American economy and the New York stock exchange. Wilson still hoped that, in keeping with the tradition of American foreign policy, he could avoid declaring a war that meant an intervention in European politics. But once Arthur Zimmerman, the German foreign minister, admitted the veracity of the so-called Zimmerman telegram on 3 March – it was an offer to Mexico to restore territory lost to America in return for Mexican support of Germany – momentum to bring America into what Wilson called ‘a war to end all wars’ became unstoppable.

  A Bill to allow the arming of merchant ships – which Wilson had initially resisted in case the Germans regarded it as a provocative act and declared war – was passed by the House of Representatives by 403 votes to 14 when the telegram’s contents were disclosed. Throughout March 1917 America endured shipping losses, and the US navy decided to recruit 27,000 more men and build 260 more ships to ‘chase’ submarines. Eventually Wilson realised he had no choice. On 2 April he set out his reasons for entering the conflict, claiming his quarrel was with Germany’s leaders for having started a war of aggression on the United States. Both Houses of Congress agreed to the declaration of war by large majorities, but without unanimity. America declared war on the German Empire on 6 April. In 1914 the German military elite neglected, in advocating the invasion of Belgium and the attack on France, to realise that the Schlieffen plan might fail; which was why, two and a half years later, their army was still bogged down on the Western Front. Now that elite would neglect to grasp the consequences of American participation in the war.

  When Parliament resumed on 7 February 1917 Lloyd George, sticking to his view that he had more important things to do than sit in the Commons, was attacked for what William Pringle, the Liberal MP, called the ‘studied disrespect’ of the House that his absence from the debate on the Gracious Speech seemed to signify: Law spoke in his place, and Asquith replied from the Opposition front bench.2 The prime minister’s neglect of the House of Commons seemed to play up to the accusations that he was behaving like a dictator – or certainly like an executive president. Labour made a formal protest; another Liberal MP, Joseph King, complained: ‘I wish to express my really profound surprise and disappointment. The House of Commons is not accustomed to this method of treatment, and in my opinion the sooner the Prime Minister finds time to attend to the business of the House of Commons the better the Government will get on with the war.’3 Lloyd George did not need the Commons. He would, like most dictators, deal with the legislature only when essential. MPs deplored that he found time to make speeches on public platforms and to announce policies there before sharing them with colleagues.

  Lloyd George believed the war could be fought as well with words as with weapons; and such was his determination to control the presentation of the government’s activities that he absorbed the War Propaganda Bureau, run from Wellington House by Masterman – which he regarded as ineffective and which his friends in the press despised for being too low-key and gentle – into a Department of Information, based in the Foreign Office. John Buchan was brought back from a job in intelligence in France (where he had written speeches and communiqués for Haig) and made director of the new department on 9 February 1917; a year later Lord Beaverbrook, as Aitken had just become, would be made minister of information. (For the moment Beaverbrook was busy, with the cooperation of both Lloyd George and Law, compiling a semi-auth
orised account of the December coup – or, as Lloyd George ingratiatingly put it on 31 January, ‘that interesting and memorable episode or series of episodes, in which you took such a determining part.’)4 Buchan had been Milner’s private secretary in South Africa and a key member of his Kindergarten, and earlier in the war had worked for the Press Bureau. His fame resided in his work as an adventure novelist, which had made him a hero of schoolboys and in clubland, not least for his spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, published in 1915, and its sequel of the following year, Greenmantle. Buchan was the war’s leading popular historian, for as well as turning out ripping yarns about white men he was also writing an instant history of the conflict, Nelson’s History of the Great War, in twenty-four volumes. He understood the propaganda uses of the press and the cinema far better than Masterman: and saw the importance of directing information about the war to America.

  Lloyd George engaged in business with an energy unknown in Whitehall, and radically differently from how Asquith had prosecuted the war. The War Cabinet met daily from Mondays to Fridays, sometimes at weekends and occasionally twice or three times a day. It spawned committees: and Lloyd George also summoned an Imperial Conference of prime ministers from the Empire, with Austen Chamberlain, as Secretary of State, representing India. In March 1917 this gave rise to an Imperial War Cabinet, just in time for America’s entry to the war. It met several times in London that spring, involving the governments of the main imperial territories with the conduct of the war. It, too, bred bureaucracy. By the summer of 1917 there were over a hundred interdepartmental committees, putting a huge strain on the civil service.