Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Determined, irrespective of the proprieties, to seek alternative advice, Lloyd George had the War Cabinet summon Wilson and French as well as Robertson to give their views on the question on 10 October. Robertson was incensed at his two fellow generals being asked, believing it was a vote of no confidence in him: that evening he offered Derby his resignation. Derby refused it and consulted colleagues: Curzon told him to tell Robertson that Lloyd George had merely been consulting widely, and wisely, before taking a big decision, as Asquith had been wont to do. However, Robertson was conveniently on hand to be blamed for the failure of the latest offensive, and Lloyd George’s old yearning for a unified command not run by his CIGS was becoming unstoppable.

  The day before the War Cabinet meeting Robertson told Haig: ‘He is out for my blood very much these days.’188 He correctly realised that Lloyd George would no longer suffer what he deemed poor military advice in silence, and that anything that did not advocate Allied unity of command constituted such poor advice. He also told Haig: ‘Milner, Carson, Curzon, Cecil, Balfour have each in turn expressly spoken to me separately about his intolerable conduct during the last week or two and have said they are behind us.’189 He hoped matters would come to a head because ‘I am sick of this damned life.’ Wilson dined with Lloyd George on 17 October and noted that ‘it became very clear to me to-night that Lloyd George means to get Robertson out, and means to curb the powers of the C in C in the field.’190 This was exactly what Wilson had wanted and advised.

  However, the prime minister had to proceed with caution. More than just Robertson’s amour propre was at stake: Curzon stressed to Hankey that if Robertson were forced out all leading Tories, except possibly Law, would leave the government, which would inevitably be brought down. Law was of little use at that moment; the second of his three sons had been killed in Palestine in April, a heavy blow then compounded by the loss of his eldest, an RFC pilot, in France in late September; while loyal to Lloyd George, he was for weeks hors de combat in political terms. Hankey impressed on Lloyd George the need to tread carefully, and he ‘took the hint very quickly.’191 Eric Geddes also intervened, apparently decisively, telling Robertson the War Cabinet’s consulting widely was no reason to resign. Robertson stayed, but the drama continued. Wilson and French were asked to state their views about a Supreme War Council in writing; and Robertson demanded to see their reports. Both men recommended a central staff of generals in Paris as part of an Allied council, and independent of national general staffs; both argued against a Flanders offensive in 1918, which was Robertson’s policy. French heavily criticised other policies of Robertson and Haig. Lloyd George and Hankey had seen these reports, and realised that were Robertson to read them he would resign again.

  Lloyd George asked French to rephrase parts of his report before Robertson saw it. French agreed solely because he did not wish to be accused of personal bitterness against Robertson; but declined the prime minister’s suggestion to say something positive about Haig. Lloyd George and Robertson had a conciliatory talk on 26 October, which included Lloyd George promising to see whether the Supreme War Council could be situated in London. Nonetheless, the failure of the Flanders offensive, and the huge loss of life, increased Lloyd George’s determination to effect change. In self-exculpatory mood, the prime minister told Hankey on 18 October – two days after sending Haig a congratulatory telegram on behalf of the War Cabinet for the ‘achievements’ of the Army at Ypres – that ‘no-one would have voted for that offensive had they not been considerably influenced by his [Haig’s] optimism.’192 Yet Haig, whose main mistake had been to believe he could make the decisive strike of the war without French direction and before American troops arrived to take a share in the glory, would not be the scapegoat when Lloyd George realised the direction of the Army could not continue as it was.

  News then came of Italy’s disastrous defeat, by what Haig had asserted was the demoralised German army and the Austro-Hungarian army, at Caporetto, allowing the Central Powers to advance 100 miles in a fortnight. Half the Italian army had either been killed, or had surrendered, or been wounded, or simply run away after Caporetto, provoking decades of jokes about Italy’s martial prowess. Lloyd George took the opportunity to call an Allied conference in London, setting in motion his plan for a permanent grouping.193 The Supreme War Council’s first meeting took place at Rapallo on 7 November, where it agreed to investigate assistance for Italy. On his way there Lloyd George stopped at Paris, and consulted Haig about setting up the Supreme War Council. Haig insisted it was unworkable. ‘The PM then said that the two Governments had decided to form it,’ Haig noted. ‘So I said, there is no need saying any more then!’194 The two men had a stand-off about Italy: Haig urged Lloyd George not to take troops from his command to send there; the prime minister countered that he would decide that when he saw how bad things were. In the end, five divisions were sent to Italy.

  The prime minister berated Haig about attacks on himself in the press that he believed were ‘evidently inspired by the Military.’ Haig had recently had the editors of the Morning Post, the Westminster Gazette and the Daily News out to France, so may not have been entirely innocent. Lloyd George accused him of having briefed Asquith’s friend J. A. Spender, the Gazette’s editor, about prime ministerial interference in military tactics. Haig denied it and promised to write to Spender – at which Lloyd George, presumably because he had no evidence for this somewhat paranoid assertion, begged him not to. Haig wrote that ‘his position as PM is shaky and [he] means to try to vindicate his conduct of the war in the eye of the public and try and put the people against the soldiers. In fact, to pose as the saviour of his country, who has been hampered by bad advice given by the General Staff!’ The clash of egos was almost as terrible as that of the Allies and the Central Powers.

  With Lloyd George’s plan for the Supreme War Council now accepted, the new body agreed to meet monthly, its members kept daily informed by their military representatives, of whom Britain’s was Wilson and France’s Foch. Contrary to Lloyd George’s promises to Robertson, it would meet at Versailles. Hankey, whose opinions had become oracular to the prime minister, had long disliked Wilson for his conspiratorial and self-serving behaviour; but – and this would be crucial to Wilson’s progress – Hankey had recently modified his opinion, and told Lloyd George so. This inflicted collateral damage on Robertson, who was unequal to the politics that was now taking place. Esher wrote of him on 10 November: ‘He was not the Wully of a month ago, but rather a pathetic shadow.’195 He added something of which Robertson was already well aware: ‘It is placing himself in a false position, if, now that he is no longer the sole military adviser of the Government, he remains CIGS.’ Amery, appointed liaison man between the secretariat of the War Cabinet and the new Council, noted: ‘Looking back over the best part of a year at the Cabinet, I cannot recollect Robertson on a single occasion indicating what he thought the enemy was really likely to do or what we might do ourselves, beyond expressing the general hope that we were going to obtain our objectives in the West.’196

  On his way home Lloyd George stopped in Paris again on 12 November to speak on the dangers of Allied disunity, and to give the public his reasons for setting up the Supreme War Council. There was a further chance for Esher to discuss Robertson with him; Lloyd George disclosed that he thought Robertson, too, was using the press against him. ‘He would have no objection if Wully spoke his mind, however vigorously, but he added, “Robertson gives a grunt and then sends for Gwynne and Leo Maxse.”’197

  The prime minister included in his speech a snide remark about the alleged victories on the Western Front, and how the ‘appalling casualty list’ made him wish ‘it had not been necessary to win so many.’198 This had the presumably unintended effect of sowing divisions within the government in London. Derby was so alarmed at the tone of the speech and the aspersions cast on the Army that he wrote to Haig to ‘express my entire confidence in you and your men.’199 Haig believed political expe
diency motivated Lloyd George and ‘would like to make the soldiers the scapegoat in the hope of remaining in power for a little time longer.’200 He feared that ‘with such a dishonest fellow as prime minister’ victory would be impossible. Haig and Lloyd George deserved each other.

  As befitted a man accused of being a dictator, Lloyd George had driven this crucial policy without consulting Parliament. Nor had he consulted President Wilson. He finally reported to the Commons on 14 November when reading out the terms of agreement between the British, French and Italian governments to have a Supreme War Council, stressing its advisory and not executive function. He had also heard from Colonel House, Wilson’s man in London, that House would recommend Wilson to appoint a military representative to the new Council. Robertson remained deeply hostile. Hankey learned from Asquith, who asked him to lunch on 15 November, that Robertson had consulted him, and Hankey concluded Robertson was ‘intriguing like the deuce.’201 A long Commons debate on the 19th revealed deep parliamentary opposition to diluting British power through the Supreme War Council. Nonetheless the plan was followed through, and the Council – by this time with unequivocal US support – met at Versailles on 30 November, under the presidency of Georges Clemenceau, the former doctor and journalist who, at seventy-six, had just become prime minister of France for the second time and its minister of war. Hankey wrote Lloyd George’s opening speech for the first main session the following day.

  Having secured this long-desired aim, Lloyd George continued to tinker with the machinery of government to try to deliver the victory. His next target – sensibly – was to combine the aviation capabilities of the Army and Navy into an air force. The idea had, in fact, been Smuts’s, but Churchill championed it with gusto. This annoyed Unionist ministers, who recalled recent assurances that Churchill would not interfere in war policy. The munitions minister stepped outside his department and, summoned to the War Cabinet on 24 August, argued for the formation of an Air Ministry to merge the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service and to control the new force, as the Admiralty and the War Office did for the Navy and Army. An Air Force Bill went through Parliament that autumn and the Air Ministry was formed on 2 January 1918; the Royal Air Force came into being on 1 April that year.

  If that boded well for the future, so too did the successful deployment, on 20 November 1917 in a minor offensive at Cambrai, of tanks that for the first time preceded the infantry into battle, destroying the German wire and allowing the overrunning of enemy lines: but the men who might have created a permanent breach in the line were on their way to Italy. Typically, Lloyd George held the ‘failure’ to capitalise on Cambrai against Haig and Robertson. Despite promises made to Haig, attacks on the leadership of the Army in what Haig called ‘the LG press’ continued through the autumn, even though Milner claimed to have warned Lloyd George to call his dogs off.202 Haig characterised the policy as one ‘of undermining the confidence which troops now feel in their leaders and [to] eventually destroy the efficiency of the Army as a fighting force.’ With the transfer of resources to the Italian front, Haig told all who would listen that any further attacks in France and Flanders would be impossible: which was what Lloyd George intended.

  However, while this squabbling went on in Whitehall, Germany appeared to be losing its self-confidence. On 19 September news had reached London via Sir Arthur Hardinge, the British ambassador in Madrid, that the Germans were again talking about peace negotiations, which the Vatican had been trying to broker since the spring. Germany’s new foreign minister, Richard von Kühlmann, had been deputed to see whether the restoration of Belgium, on the condition that Germany had a free hand in Russia so it could expand to the east, and the return of colonies seized in 1914, would be a basis for talks. Lloyd George had gone to Boulogne to meet Paul Painlevé, a professor of mathematics at the Sorbonne who days earlier had become French prime minister when Ribot had lost the support of Painlevé’s socialists, and would himself last only four months. No immediate decision had been reached. The Americans preferred to divide the German people, trying to persuade them they were ill-served by the quasi-autocracy that ruled them, and would benefit from overthrowing them and negotiating peace with fellow democrats. On 6 October, following a meeting between Balfour and representatives of other friendly countries, a message was sent to the Germans via Madrid asking for more details. There was no reply. On 9 October Kühlmann told the Reichstag there was no question of concessions in Alsace or Lorraine; and no mention was made of evacuating Belgium, so the discussions ended. Then news arrived from Germany of a naval mutiny in early October, and of plunging civilian morale caused by shortages of food and fuel, and despair of a military breakthrough. The Allies might have had their setbacks and disasters, but their enemy was manifestly far from invulnerable.

  CHAPTER 9

  ATTRITION

  I

  The case for continuing the war was reinforced by a constant flow of morale-boosting – and circulation-boosting – newspaper stories designed to remind readers not only why the war was being fought, but to amplify the dangers of seeking to come to any kind of accommodation with a nation as barbarous as Germany. On 17 April 1917, for example, Northcliffe’s Daily Mail and Times printed stories about a German ‘corpse factory’ near Koblenz in the Rhineland, where dead soldiers’ bodies were said to have been taken to be boiled down and turned into glycerine for weapons, food for pigs or even margarine. The story, which had been picked up from an underground Belgian newspaper, was completely false and probably based on a mistranslation of the word Kadaververwertungsanstalt, which refers to boiled-down animals, not boiled-down (human) cadavers. (Helpfully, a number of German scholars wrote to The Times pointing this out, though they couldn’t prove it was the case in this instance.) Nonetheless, John Buchan’s Department of Information, some of whose staff moonlighted as ‘special correspondents’ on newspapers, so helping to ease the blurring between fact and fiction, published a four-page pamphlet about it, and Cecil, answering questions in the Commons, refused to rubbish the stories, not least because Robertson had told the War Cabinet it was true.1 The Germans inevitably denied that they were perpetrating such an outrage; within days even the French were dismissing the story as a misunderstanding, though the Northcliffe press continued to publish earnest accounts of the boiling down of humans – usually based on stories from Tommies who had taken German prisoners – and letters from correspondents who were themselves boiling at this predictable example of the savagery of the Hun. If such stories showed the desperation the authorities felt by this time in maintaining morale, they also displayed the credulousness of the public: such German atrocities seemed to them entirely plausible.

  As such matters were exposed they helped feed a mood of cynicism about the war that grew throughout 1917, as ever greater levels of sacrifice were countered by more stalemate and bloodshed. The feeling was shared by politicians and the public, and, of most concern to the authorities that were seeking to direct the war effort, began to be expressed by combatants too, against a background of sporadic, and futile, peace initiatives. Even before the 1917 summer offensive opened the more cerebral soldiers who had witnessed the realities of the Western Front were reaching the end of their tether. One was Siegfried Sassoon, who having won the Military Cross on the Somme had been on convalescent leave, and had come under the influence of the Morrells and Bertrand Russell. Returning to his battalion, encamped near Liverpool, he wrote a letter entitled Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration, and sent it to his commanding officer. One of the Morrells’ friends, John Middleton Murry – who would become the second husband of Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand writer of short stories – had helped draft it, though Murry was not a conscientious objector, having been declared unfit for military service. It was printed and distributed by Francis Meynell, a pacifist active on the Labour left who was business manager of George Lansbury’s Daily Herald. Meynell had pleaded a conscientious objection in 1916 and was ordered, but refused, to do war wor
k. Imprisoned in January 1917, he went on hunger strike. He was discharged from the Army after a fortnight, on the grounds that he would be unlikely to become an efficient soldier; but more likely because he had convinced the authorities of his determination to die rather than fight, and was too ill to survive forced feeding.

  The statement began by Sassoon defining his letter ‘as an act of wilful defiance of military authority’, provoked by his belief that the war was being ‘deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’2 He said he believed he was speaking for other soldiers; and he thought a war of ‘defence and liberation’ on which he had embarked had become one of ‘aggression and conquest’. Having seen so much slaughter, he felt he could ‘no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends I believe to be evil and unjust.’ He blamed politicians for sacrificing men, and attacked ministers for the ‘deception’ they were practising upon soldiers. It was only ‘callous complacence’ that allowed the war to continue, and which prevented those at home from abhorring ‘the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.’ The statement was sent to the press, its publication coinciding with that of the most scandalous novel of the year, Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth. Although mainly attacked for its mild depiction of schoolboy homoeroticism, it caused if anything even more offence for its mockery of the social conditioning undertaken by the public schools, tens of thousands of whose chivalrous products were already rotting in graves in France and Flanders and countless others of whom, such as Sassoon, had been mentally or physically damaged in the service of King and country.