Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  In 1916 Billing had founded a John Bull soundalike periodical called the Imperialist (later renamed the Vigilante), which he had filled with his conspiracy theories, almost all of which involved networks of Jews and homosexuals. He believed the Germans had a list of 47,000 British ‘perverts’, supposedly including the Asquiths and, inevitably, Haldane, whom they were blackmailing to undertake espionage.83 In the summer of 1918 he was victor in a notorious libel trial, brought by Maud Allan, an actress, whom he had in a charmingly headlined Vigilante article, ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, accused of lesbianism (which was true) – or as it was reported, of her having ‘associated herself with persons addicted to unnatural practices’ – and of conspiring with the Germans (which was not), and being one of that legion of 47,000 perverts.84 Among those who gave evidence for Billing was Lord Alfred Douglas; Miss Allan – ‘lewd, unchaste, immoral’ – had made her name as a scantily dressed Salome. The Lord Chamberlain’s censor had banned Wilde’s play for public performance; Miss Allan had appeared in a private subscription performance.

  The case led Curzon, at a meeting of the War Cabinet, to demand press censorship in the case because ‘opportunity was being taken to attack every section of society, and the social effect must inevitably be bad’.85 Sir George Cave, the home secretary, said the judge, Mr Justice Darling, had asked the press not to publish certain parts of the evidence; but had said he could not hold the trial in camera because of the ‘suspicion and talk which would have arisen outside court’ if he had. Billing’s eventual victory, won not least by his persistent attacks on the judge, but also by the jury accepting his contention that anyone who acted in Salome was manifestly degenerate, was the signal for Northcliffe to take up his allegations, and to demand further round-ups of aliens and their prohibition from coastal areas. There were allegations of people who were really Germans owning banks and businesses, and an ‘Intern Them All’ campaign.

  Northcliffe ordered both his national newspapers to stay on the attack throughout July. He had decided the government would not pursue a proper aliens policy because of Milner’s membership of it, and urged the editor of The Times to demand a statement about Milner’s ancestry. Milner had been born in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1854, to British parents, but his father’s mother had been Prussian. Several hard-right MPs espoused the cause, asking numerous questions about the alien ‘problem’. Frederick Leverton Harris, a junior minister in the Department of Blockade, was harried because his wife had visited an internment camp to see a family friend, Baron Leopold von Plessen. When Cecil, his senior minister, heard a rumour that Law had advised Harris to resign, he wrote to Law that ‘if he does I resign too – I had rather sweep a crossing than be a member of a ministry at the mercy of Pemberton Billing and his crew.’86 Law rowed back; Harris stayed, but chose not to fight the next election. Churchill was furious because some expert scientists at Munitions were of German origin, forcing the War Cabinet to agree that a ban it imposed on aliens working for government departments should be variable ‘for definite reasons of national importance.’87 It was pointed out that many of the soldiers arriving in Britain with the American forces had German parents, or had been born in Germany.

  To seek to calm the hysteria, now led not least by local government worthies, Lloyd George formed an Alien Committee. It demanded the internment of all male aliens aged eighteen years and over, the repatriation of all females (or their internment, if repatriation was not feasible), the review of all naturalisations of enemy aliens since 1 January 1914, the removal from public office of anyone with German origins, the banning of aliens from prohibited areas and the closure of all German businesses. The War Cabinet decided that ‘no person not a natural-born British subject should be permitted to change his name without a licence, this rule to be made retrospective for the period of the war.’88 Cave acted on most of the recommendations, though not the removal of aliens from public office, which might have included Milner. An Aliens Investigation Committee, chaired by a High Court judge, examined the circumstances of 6,000 Germans and 18,000 other enemy aliens. The Mail attacked the committee for only getting round to questioning 300 of them. The National Party organised rallies to demand mass internments, and to institute local Committees of Public Safety: the party, founded the previous year, organised a ‘monster petition’ of 1.25 million signatures, on a roll two miles long. A shift of fortunes in France would silence the hysteria.

  Beaverbrook, Northcliffe’s master at the Ministry of Information, fed up with the Foreign Office blocking his initiatives, put in his resignation on 24 June. Balfour held his ground, saying there could not be two ministers making foreign policy, which is what Beaverbrook, through the messages he wished to insert in propaganda to enemy countries, seemed determined to do. It was, as with Neville Chamberlain’s appointment, an example of how Lloyd George’s determination to overhaul government caused conflicts, and required him to intervene to solve them – which he lacked time to do. After days of wrangling the government agreed to resume ‘bombing’ Germans with propaganda leaflets, and Beaverbrook rescinded his resignation. However, complications meant the leaflet drops from aircraft (as opposed to balloons) did not resume until the last days of the war, three months later.

  IV

  The Supreme War Council met at Versailles on 30 January 1918. It was occupied largely by a discussion about manpower shortages, and the possibility of reducing divisions considerably in size. Lloyd George, who believed he had produced plenty of men for his campaign in the Holy Land – what Repington called his ‘insane plan of winning the war by fighting Turks’ – asked for the evidence of these shrinking numbers.89 He and Robertson fell out further when the latter challenged him over the security of the Western Front during the meeting: Lloyd George later berated the CIGS for disagreeing with him in front of foreigners – ‘having given his advice in London, it was not necessary for him to have it repeated here.’90 To be fair to Lloyd George, Robertson seems, in his frustration with the prime minister, to have forgotten a basic truth about the chain of command, which partly explains the prime minister’s determination to sideline him, however bad his methods of doing so. Yet Robertson believed in the essential sovereignty of his position as CIGS, and that the British Army should not be in any way under French control or influence: and never diverted from the belief that the war could be won only on the Western Front, with the Germans driven out of territory they illegally occupied.

  The press was ordered not to report the Supreme War Council’s deliberations, the details of which were also shaped by French resentment at Britain never, in France’s view, having pulled its weight on the Western Front. The reason given for the censorship was that the details would help the enemy, but Maurice believed it was ‘really to prevent discussion which would be harmful to the government.’91 The key political point, however, was an agreement between Lloyd George and Clemenceau to give executive powers to the Supreme War Council, allowing it to move British and French troops to wherever on the Western Front seemed most vulnerable. That, for the moment, was kept strictly secret, but rumours soon spread.

  Robertson, with support from the King and Asquith that he ought to have realised compromised him even further with Lloyd George, refused to work with the Council, which he correctly saw had been set up as an alternative source of military advice. Lloyd George, on 22 January, had met Stamfordham and made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the Army’s leadership. Who would take responsibility for deploying a strategic reserve of thirty divisions, to be formed jointly with the French, had become the main casus belli. It was intended that Sir Henry Wilson, as the man in Versailles, would have that power, overriding Robertson, Haig and the Army Council if he chose. Edward Spears, the main liaison officer between the British and French armies, regarded Wilson ‘as a man in whom laziness first, then ambition, had destroyed all the military virtues with which he had been endowed.’92 He also had ‘a very arresting personality and a fascinating ugliness of which he was quite proud
, boasting that somebody having addressed a postcard to the ugliest man in London it had come straight to him.’93

  Robertson had told Lloyd George that the CIGS had to retain that power, ‘because he was the only person directly responsible to the Army Council and the Government for the British Army.’94 He would not contemplate any other arrangement, ‘because it would involve the handing over of executive power to a committee which would not be responsible for the consequences of its actions.’ Robertson expressly felt that his job was not just to give advice; it was to ensure the welfare of the soldiers of the Army of which he was head, and to stop anything that might imperil that welfare. Executive authority had to be accompanied by responsibility: so any Anglo-French strategic reserve would have to be administered jointly by Robertson and Foch. An American and Italian representative would sit on the committee, even though hardly any American soldiers were in Europe, and Italians were deployed only on the Italian front. So there were those on the Supreme War Council with no soldiers in the field who would influence the movement of British and French troops without having to face the consequences.

  The Army Council closed ranks against political interference and unanimously endorsed Robertson’s view. The idea behind the Versailles plan ‘struck at the root of every elementary principle of command’; and the council sent the War Cabinet a memorandum saying so.95 Lloyd George had been heavily influenced on this point by Milner, who had supplied the intellectual justification for this change. However, Milner had failed to see, or had ignored, the probability that the military mind would not easily accept a bureaucratic, or technocratic, intervention such as this in its way of doing business. On 9 February, having consulted Derby to try to prevent him resigning, Lloyd George decided to solve the Robertson problem by making him British Permanent Military Representative at Versailles, swapping jobs with Wilson. Haig had told Lloyd George he would not accept Wilson giving orders from Versailles, but was not consulted about the move. Lloyd George told Robertson he would remain a member of the Army Council; he would have equality of status with Foch and with him share responsibility for deploying the strategic reserve; and (in a gesture that said more about Lloyd George than it did about Robertson) would receive a £1,000 annual salary increase, and a house in Paris free of charge. This would create, effectively, a dual command, with Wilson as CIGS, and the two men competing for Lloyd George’s ear.

  Robertson, who received a formal memorandum from Derby setting out his proposed role on 11 February, declined the job, as his integrity demanded; though Haig urged him to take it because he would, if he became the man at Versailles, essentially be ‘Generalissimo’. Although he could not contemplate working with Wilson in that capacity, continuing what would effectively have been his existing relationship with Robertson presented him with no problems.96 Derby also urged Robertson to stay: ‘if I had thought this was derogatory to you I should not have assented’.97 But Robertson told Lloyd George that to accept it would mean ‘he would be accepting a principle which both he and the Army Council had condemned.’ Having failed to persuade Robertson not to resign, Haig asked the King to intervene, as ‘in the first place it was necessary for all soldiers to work together at this time, and secondly, Robertson might save us from defeat by opposing Lloyd George’s desire to send troops to the East against the Turks.’98 The King never acted in any matter that might require him to criticise his prime minister without consulting Stamfordham; and Haig found the private secretary ‘slow in understanding the present situation’, a failure perhaps on Haig’s part to appreciate that Stamfordham felt this was a fight the King did not need to have and, indeed, constitutionally could not have. If he opposed this executive act by Lloyd George and Lloyd George stuck to his guns he would have no choice but to resign, causing massive destabilisation and undermining all the King’s previous efforts to appear to be at one with his people and their elected representatives.

  However, on 13 February Stamfordham did express the King’s ‘surprise’ – for which read ‘outrage’ – that he had not heard of this plan until the preceding day.99 Lloyd George was certainly angry at the lengths to which Robertson and his comrades had gone to try to thwart him, but as so often when dealing with matters in which the King took a close interest he had made the situation worse by either a lack of courtesy or deliberate concealment of the facts. Stamfordham told Lloyd George ‘that the King strongly deprecated the idea of Robertson being removed from the office of CIGS, that his loss in that capacity would be an incalculable one to the Army, would be resented in the country, rejoiced in by the enemy.’ Lloyd George told Stamfordham he entirely disagreed; if the King had heard of Robertson being so highly regarded then the opinions must have been fabricated. ‘He did not share His Majesty’s extremely favourable opinion of Sir William Robertson’; and if that was fighting talk, it paled against what followed – that if the King insisted on Robertson’s staying ‘the Government could not carry on and His Majesty must find other ministers.’100 Seeing he was beaten, Stamfordham backed down. He found, also, that Derby (who usually followed the line of least resistance, and had no desire to referee a fight between Lloyd George and Robertson) was so fed up with the CIGS being ‘unreasonable’ that he simply wanted to resign as war secretary. The King wrote in his diary: ‘I am much worried as the PM is trying to get rid of Robertson, if he doesn’t look out his Govt will fall, it is in deep water now.’101

  In the event, Robertson did not resign as CIGS, but was suspended from his post, having been asked by Stamfordham in the name of the King to make the proposed system work. Derby – effectively subordinated to Robertson in not being allowed to communicate with the commander-in-chief without the CIGS’s permission – was asked to offer General Sir Herbert Plumer, commanding the Expeditionary Force in Italy, Robertson’s job: but did so in terms that, according to Hankey, encouraged Plumer to refuse. Hankey redrafted the offer before it was sent, but Plumer declined anyway, expressing support for Robertson. ‘In conversations which took place during the next two days Lord Derby showed that he was now desirous I should remain CIGS,’ Robertson recalled, ‘and on February 13 he handed me a copy of a note which he had addressed to the Prime Minister proposing that this should be done.’102 Wilson was to stay at Versailles. So Lloyd George was left in the damaging position of having had two of the most senior generals turn down the job of CIGS because they objected to how the Supreme War Council would operate.

  On hearing that Robertson had dug in his heels, Milner – who having shaped Lloyd George’s thinking on the Supreme War Council was not willing to see Robertson frustrate it – told Hankey via William Ormsby-Gore, his parliamentary private secretary, that if Robertson did not resign, he would. On 12 February, in remarks on the King’s Speech, Asquith attacked Lloyd George over the management of the war, and especially on this aspect of it. Well aware – because both soldiers were briefing him – about what was going on beyond the public gaze, he marked out his territory by asserting that, for all the setbacks of the preceding months, ‘nothing … has in the least shaken the confidence of the nation and of the Empire in the two great soldiers, Sir Douglas Haig, our Commander-in-Chief, and Sir William Robertson, the head of our General Staff at home.’ He elaborated: ‘For more than two years, and amidst all those vicissitudes of fortune which during that time have befallen the Allied cause, they have proved over and over again their possession in a pre-eminent degree of the qualities of foresight, tenacity, patience, and unperturbed resolve, which go furthest to win and to retain the trust and loyal devotion of British troops. I am echoing the voice, not only of the House, but of the whole country, when I say that we owe them unstinted gratitude and unwavering confidence.’103

  Asquith’s other, related, concern was that Lloyd George was breaking a promise made when announcing the Supreme War Council, that it would have no executive function; for rumours of what had really happened at Versailles a fortnight earlier were now rife. This brought him back to Haig and Robertson:

 
The Commander-in-Chief and the Chief of Staff cannot serve two masters. The Chief of Staff can serve only one, and that one ought to be his own Government. Similarly, the Commander-in-Chief ought to get his orders through the Chief of Staff, and through the Chief of Staff alone. I should be very sorry to think that that which seems to me, until I am convinced of the contrary, a sound, practical maxim of carrying on the War, and which was recognised in the original constitution and definition of the functions of this Council, has been abandoned or seriously modified.’104

  Asquith taunted Lloyd George about rumours of changes at the top of the Army, and hoped he would get a ‘plain and definite answer’.105 In a practised de haut en bas tone, and exercising mockery with which many of his colleagues were unfamiliar, he continued: ‘I rule out as absolutely irrelevant in matters of this kind the wretched personal rivalries, intrigues, and squabbles, if such there be, of which we read. They are beneath notice, and I cannot believe—and until I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary I will not believe—that considerations of that kind can influence the action either of politicians or of military men.’ He knew that was exactly what was happening, and that the national interest was not being put first.

  As so often on important occasions, the prime minister was run-down and ill with a cold, and the government looked incompetent and ill at ease. He tried to accuse Asquith of discourtesy for not having given him notice of his questions. He told what was at best a half-truth about Haig and Robertson’s acceptance of the Versailles system: ‘Complete unanimity was reached,’ he claimed.106 ‘There was not a division of opinion on any resolution that was come to.’ He prevaricated about the Supreme War Council, alleging that he might disclose important information to the enemy were he to give Asquith the detailed answer he wanted; Asquith challenged him on this, and disputed it hotly. Asquith’s supporters heckled and interrupted Lloyd George, and the more they did, the shiftier he appeared. His means of running the war were not commensurate with being held accountable by Parliament and abiding by its traditions of honour.