by Simon Heffer
The War Cabinet was ‘in a panic and talking of arrangements for falling back on Channel ports and evacuating our troops to England.’141 Wilson, with reckless understatement, called it ‘an anxious day’ and admitted that although the French had promised reinforcements these would take three days to arrive.142 Sir Philip Sassoon, Haig’s aide-de-camp, felt he knew exactly where the fault lay. He wrote to Esher on 23 March: ‘The situation is a very simple one. The enemy has got the men and we haven’t. For two years Sir DH has been warning our friends at home of the critical condition of our manpower; but they have preferred to talk about Aleppo & indulge in mythical dreams about the Americans.’143 However, Haig – whose own publicity had it that he had worn down the German army in 1916 and 1917 – had never imagined that, unlike the BEF, it could roll his troops over and advance as it had.
The news was markedly worse the next day: even Haig, to that point bullish about the fighting spirit of his men despite their having to retreat, sent a message to Whitehall conceding that ‘the situation is serious.’144 ‘They have broken through,’ Lloyd George told Riddell, ‘and the question is what there is behind to stop them.’145 Churchill, threatened with losing 25,000 munitions workers with military experience, and Wilson demanded Lloyd George authorise a mass conscription of men over age and in other reserved occupations. The northern part of the front was holding but the retreat in the southern sector was becoming a rout. On 25 March, when The Times’s first leader proclaimed ‘a grave situation’ and called for even greater sacrifices, the War Cabinet began to discuss extending compulsion to Ireland – a measure of the extreme desperation this sudden collapse had caused – and changing the age limits to seventeen and a half at the bottom and fifty at the top.146 Conscripting men previously medically discharged as unfit for service was also considered. It conceded that ‘expert opinion’ was ‘divided’ on ‘the probable fighting value of conscripted Irishmen.’147 Duke, at a War Cabinet meeting on 27 March convened specifically to discuss Irish conscription, argued that the gesture would be pointless: and would unite all shades of Catholic opinion against Britain. It would concentrate ‘many dangerous men’ in Irish fighting units.148 He was ignored. The government was more concerned that while it scraped the barrel in Britain, non-conscription in Ireland would cause outrage.
It was also agreed that men aged nineteen and twenty could be released from munitions factories to fight, and by July 120,000 had been: but Churchill fought, successfully, against releasing any more. The Germans were now rampaging across the Somme battlefield, despite its being the most difficult territory to overrun, full of craters and other obstacles. Hankey concluded that they could only be doing so well because the British were exhausted. There was a further drive to get women into the war effort – particularly, as summer approached, on the land. On 2 May an appeal was made for 50,000 ‘girls’ for farm work. Those who responded were assured they would be properly billeted and have ‘at least’ a shilling a day in their pockets once all had been found: but even their numbers were running low.149
Lloyd George, although ostensibly calm and resolute, feared ‘disaster’; but not everything was going Germany’s way, and Churchill sought to stiffen him. ‘Even if the land war collapsed the sea, the air, & the United States will give us the means of victory. But now is the time to risk everything.’150 Furthermore, despite the Allies being driven into retreat, the main strategic objective of the attack – to separate the British and French armies – did not succeed. There was also a tremendous success in arms production: in each of the three months after the German advance Woolwich Arsenal produced 48 million small-arms rounds, which entailed some of its employees working 100 hours a week.151 By this stage 3.4 million people, three-quarters of a million of whom were women, were working in munitions. The system for manufacturing arms and ammunition was now so efficient that supply easily met demand, and made a key contribution to the eventual turning of the tide on the Western Front.
Even an appalling civilian tragedy could not undermine this superlative work. On 1 July 1918 eight tons of TNT blew up at the National Shell Filling Factory at Chilwell in Nottinghamshire, the most productive such factory in Britain. It made 19 million shells between 1915 and the Armistice. The explosion killed 134 people; only 32 could be identified, because of bodies being blown to pieces. Another 250 were injured. The blast was heard 30 miles away, and was the worst ever disaster in Britain caused by an explosion. It was three days before an official announcement was made, and the censor heavily restricted press coverage. Churchill, as the responsible minister, sent a telegram praising the morale of the factory workers; the managing director of the plant replied that their only concern was to maintain the war effort. Work resumed the next day. Lord Chetwynd, who had founded and designed the factory after the shell shortage in 1915, claimed the explosion was the work of saboteurs. It seems more likely it was caused by failure to observe safety procedures while working with an inherently unstable substance on a hot day, as the factory strove to beat its own production records.
Further evidence of this new industrial superiority came from closer to home. On 19 May London witnessed its biggest air raid of the war: forty-three German bombers attempted it but thirteen either crashed or were shot down. However, it would also turn out to be its last. Because of shortages of materials the planes had been poorly constructed, and were more liable to be destroyed. The raid claimed forty-nine lives with one hundred and seventy-seven people injured, and several villages in Kent and Essex were bombed. From then on, the deteriorating German position demanded the use of the aircraft on the Western Front. This, too, was down to greater efficiency in manufacturing aircraft in Britain for the RAF. In 1914 just 245 planes had been manufactured; in 1918 the total was 32,018, more than twice the 1917 figure.152 The air superiority this conferred on the Allies became another crucial factor in reversing the German advance. Also, at a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet in London in June, Lloyd George highlighted the far smaller shipping losses, the superior anti-submarine campaign of the Royal Navy and internal strife caused by food shortages in Germany and Austria: there were reasons for optimism.
French, still settling scores with Haig, offered his political masters another analysis when invited to the War Cabinet on 26 March. He said Haig was ‘no judge of men, had surrounded himself with stupid people and bad commanders … Haig had badly let down the Army in shattering it in the hopeless Flanders offensive.’153 Haig, writing on 26 March, indicated that he believed the Germans had twenty-five divisions in reserve; such an assertion, uttered at a time when the Germans had made the war mobile again, only confirmed the desperate need to find more men. This was great even though the French were now pouring men into the sector against the Germans, thus slowing them down – not least because the enemy were, for the first time since September 1914, within 75 miles of Paris, which huge guns were now bombarding even from that distance.
V
The main damage that French did at the War Cabinet’s 26 March meeting, however, was idiotically to advise ministers that conscription could be applied to Ireland with relative ease, with only a few more troops required there ‘to maintain order’.154 This contrasted greatly with the Irish view. W. B. Yeats wrote to Haldane in April, ‘because you are a man of letters, and we, therefore, may speak the same language.’155 He continued: ‘I have met nobody in close contact with the people who believes that conscription can be imposed without the killing of men, and perhaps of women … there is in this country an extravagance of emotion which few Englishmen, accustomed to more objective habits of thought, can understand. There is something oriental in the people, and it is impossible to say how great a tragedy may lie before us.’ Yeats called the apparent frame of mind of the British government ‘strangely trivial’, its policies based on having canvassed opinion from those who knew the Irish least. He feared that if the determination to make Irishmen die for England continued, ‘all the work of my lifetime … to clarify and sweeten the popular min
d, will be destroyed and Ireland, for another hundred years, will live in the sterility of her bitterness.’ Nor was it just the Irish who felt that. Duke was deeply opposed to conscription, and indeed Lloyd George had until recently agreed with him. He had told Riddell in February 1917 that Irish conscription would recruit just 160,000 men, but only ‘at the point of a bayonet’ and many would claim a conscientious objection.156 As with the majority of Lloyd George’s opinions, this would prove fluid.
Desperate to find more conscripts, the War Cabinet took counsel about Ireland beyond French’s. It should have been alerted by the view of Brigadier General Sir Joseph Byrne, head of the Royal Irish Constabulary, that to proceed with the Bill would be ‘a mistake’; and by the ‘grave doubts’ harboured by Duke, who observed at the War Cabinet on 27 March that ‘we might almost as well recruit Germans’.157 General Sir Bryan Mahon, the General Officer Commanding, Ireland, said conscription could be enforced, ‘but with the greatest difficulty.’ Mahon said extra troops would be required not just to implement compulsion, but to impose martial law, which would be required to control an enraged Ireland after the law was imposed. Oddly, none of the senior officers asked how any man forced to join the British Army would be made to accept military discipline or to fight, since an attempt to force them at the point of a rifle would presumably end in mutiny. French, naively, believed the men drilling for Sinn Féin could be turned into fine British soldiers if only they could be removed from the poisonous influence of their leaders.
Lloyd George had earlier rationalised the government’s failure to conscript Irishmen, arguing that many of them were producing food or working in factories, which was often as vital. Now, however, he dismissed half-measures, not because of the gravity of the situation in France, but because imposing conscription was essential if the Tories were to embrace Home Rule: something Sir Horace Plunkett thought ‘madness’.158 In a full-dress panic after the initial success of the German offensive, the prime minister seemed under some sort of delusion; when the cabinet considered the Irish Convention report on 6 April, which was supposed to provide a pathway to a settlement in Ireland, he glossed over the fact that the sizeable minority who opposed its findings were all Unionists, and that the report came to no new conclusions beyond the Nationalist majority wanting Home Rule. He told his colleagues that even Sinn Féin (who had ignored the proceedings) would have accepted the report, had it given Ireland fiscal autonomy. An equal state of delusion was driving him to demand Irish conscription, against which the convention, in a rare show of unanimity, also warned the government.
The Tories would not see why, when every available man in Britain was being called up, the Irish were not: but that was a wilful disregard of political reality. They were shocked by talk of an immediate announcement of Home Rule to sweeten the conscription pill: in that regard they had not moved on from the summer of 1916, when they had effectively exercised a veto that had only encouraged the success of Sinn Féin. Friends of Lloyd George, notably Scott, had warned him against such a move: ‘It is no part of statesmanship and must destroy all hope of a conciliatory policy in Ireland,’ Scott wrote to him on 7 April. It would, not least, sabotage all hope of the Irish Convention achieving anything. Events continued to conspire against a happy outcome: Redmond, the leader and personification of constitutional Nationalism, had died after a long period of poor health on 6 March. He had been paid extravagant tribute in London, where a funeral service was held at the Brompton Oratory, but in Dublin the obsequies were, according to Midleton, ‘perfunctory’. Dillon succeeded him as Nationalist leader; but the party was evaporating as Sinn Féin grew stronger, despite faltering in some spring by-elections. As Midleton said of Redmond, ‘his death was used to quash his policy.’159 The old, constitutional Irish Nationalism was effectively buried with Redmond.
The convention report, with its unanimous opposition to conscription, was made public on 8 April. Lloyd George nonetheless announced that policy the next day; it was the latest in a series of blunders in relation to Ireland since Asquith’s handing over of Irish rule to General Maxwell. It came the day after intelligence that de Valera would welcome conscription so Sinn Féin ‘could undertake systematic and violent opposition to its enforcement.’160 The government would, though, deny the existence of a quid pro quo in order to avoid exposing the split in the cabinet, or suggesting conscription was not important in itself; but on 11 April the War Cabinet ordered the immediate drafting of a Home Rule Bill.161
Lloyd George shared his intentions on Irish conscription in a debate on manpower in the Commons: ‘When an emergency has arisen, which makes it necessary to put men of fifty and boys of eighteen into the Army in the fight for liberty and independence … I am perfectly certain it is not possible to justify any longer the exclusion of Ireland.’162 Dillon shouted: ‘You will not get any men from Ireland by compulsion – not a man.’ The prime minister read out a declaration made by the Nationalists in 1914 that they were prepared to support ‘a war for the defence of the sacred rights and liberties of small nations, and the respect and enlargement of the great principle of nationality.’163 Alfred Byrne, an Irish Nationalist, observed pointedly: ‘We have had a revolution since then.’
Dillon said he would have supported conscription had Ireland been allowed to decide her own fate. What had begun as a war to defend small nationalities had become, to the Irish, a war in which they felt the need to defend their own nationality against the English. Lloyd George could not admit that the mishandling of the Rising and its aftermath, in which he had played such a central part, had gravely limited his room for manoeuvre. When he said Irish conscription would be introduced by Order in Council ‘as soon as arrangements are complete’, William O’Brien, the veteran Nationalist MP for Cork, called out: ‘That is a declaration of war against Ireland.’164 His colleague Michael Flavin added: ‘And against Irishmen all over the world.’ Lloyd George then announced that ‘we intend to invite Parliament to pass a measure for self-government in Ireland,’ but Byrne told him: ‘You can keep it.’ The prime minister said each of the proposals would have to be judged on its merits as they were not conjoined; he ignored the (correct) claim that a non-sectarian subcommittee of the convention had unanimously opposed conscription in Ireland. Hankey, watching from the gallery, felt it a poor speech, not least because of Lloyd George’s weak grasp of detail. ‘It was not the trumpet call of a leader to the nation, which the moment demands.’165 He noticed how much Lloyd George – who had become fifty-five the previous January – had aged in the previous year: ‘His hair has turned almost white,’ he recorded.
Asquith (who, Hankey thought, did ‘much better’) wished to reserve his opinion on Lloyd George’s suggestions. But he feared that ‘never, in my judgment, since the War broke out, has this country been face to face with anything like so grave a situation as that which at this moment confronts us.’166 Lloyd George had refused to disclose casualties; Asquith said he did not doubt it would be ‘the most serious casualty list in the whole of this war’, given what he assumed were the numbers of guns and prisoners taken in the massive advance. He asked Lloyd George to think carefully about calling up middle-aged men, many of whom were struggling to run businesses denuded of younger men by the earlier call-up, and whose livelihoods might disappear if they went to fight, even if they survived. He did not talk about Ireland; but others in the debate did, and the mood turned ugly as Unionists and Irish Nationalists insulted each other about Ireland’s loyalty to the Crown and to civilised values, or lack of it. Dillon, in one of the more reasonable contributions, asked of Lloyd George: ‘Whom should he consult before he came to this decision? Have the War Cabinet consulted one single Irish representative? If so, let him name the man. Is that his idea of liberty, that he is to apply Conscription to Ireland, and the War Cabinet are to decide on that question, without consulting one solitary representative of the people of Ireland? That is worse than Prussianism.’167
The views of the convention had, he emphasis
ed, been completely ignored; and he said that in forty years in public life he had never known so serious a situation in Ireland as it now faced. He railed at Lloyd George: ‘You take a decision which plunges Ireland into bloodshed and confusion, and opens up a new war front, in addition to the Eastern and Western Fronts. You do that with a light heart, without consulting one solitary representative of Ireland or without reading the Report of your own Convention … I hope that for the sake of the country, and for the sake of this Empire, that [sic] the methods of the War Cabinet are somewhat different, in dealing with the War, from their methods in dealing with Ireland.’168 Dillon was furious that instead of a separate measure imposing conscription on Ireland, it had been ‘sneaked’ into an English Bill embodying other policies.
Yet perhaps the most scathing criticism came from Captain Daniel Sheehan, Nationalist MP for mid-Cork.
The one thing above all others which he is succeeding in doing is in uniting all Nationalist opinion in Ireland in resistance against this proposal. I speak myself with some feeling in this matter as one who, with his family, have humbly borne our part in this War, because we believed the principle for which the Allied side were fighting was righteous and just. Conscription cannot apply to me. Every grown-up member of my family has served. I have lost one son, another has been wounded, a third is at this moment in hospital in France, a brother-in-law has been killed, a nephew-in-law is a prisoner in Germany, and a brother of mine is serving in the Irish Guards. Therefore, I am able to speak with some earnestness and solemnity when I tell the right hon Gentleman the Prime Minister that he is heading, absolutely heading, for disaster if he attempts to apply Conscription to Ireland. There is not an Irishman worthy of his salt who will not resist it, and I say that any service we give in this War for this cause will be voluntarily given – it will flow from conscience and never from compulsion.169
