Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Over the Easter recess Auckland Geddes was charged with drawing up a Bill to solve the military manpower problem. It reflected the desperation of the political class, and an existential threat to the British polity, that had arisen since the 21 March offensive. Military age would be lowered to seventeen and raised to fifty-five – subsequently lowered to fifty when it became clear the military use of men so old, except as doctors, was limited. Tribunals would be scrapped, with medical fitness and occupation being the only criteria for whether a man could serve; and not just the Irish – on French’s advice – but also residents of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands would be called up. Fears of invasion, dormant since the early weeks of the war, flared up again. Hankey told Esher that ‘the Admiralty are well prepared for the worst that can happen, and have been considering for days and planning what they will do, if the Channel ports are threatened, or seized by the enemy.’229

  Conscious that many men of military age were to be found in civilian life, the police reintroduced round-ups, handing over suspects to the Army to question. One Saturday evening in June twenty such men were detained at a cinema in Finsbury Park.230 A comb-out continued in agriculture, in heavy industry and even in Whitehall. A system of summer camps for schoolboys was instituted to replace the 30,000 adult men combed out from farms, so the harvest could be brought in. Three thousand young women from universities and teacher training colleges, who also lived under canvas, brought in the flax harvest in Somerset and in the fens around Peterborough.

  Lloyd George addressed the Commons on 9 April, following the Easter recess, and a day after Repington had written in the Morning Post: ‘Why have the reiterated demands of the Army for men remained unanswered? Who but Mr Lloyd George is responsible for the failure to supply the Army’s needs? I think we shall have to be more ruthless towards Ministers who have failed the country and that our easy tolerance of incompetence is a public danger.’231 This was also the debate in which Lloyd George set out his plans for Irish conscription, so it was no wonder that when Hankey lunched with him beforehand he found him ‘rather depressed and nervous and ill at ease.’232

  In proposing new measures to help win the war he told MPs that ‘they will involve, I regret, extreme sacrifices on the part of large classes of the population, and nothing would justify them but the most extreme necessity, and the fact that we are fighting for all that is essential and most sacred in the national life.’233 Anxious to acquit the government of blame for the recent reverses, he stated: ‘Notwithstanding the heavy casualties in 1917, the Army in France was considerably stronger on the 1st January, 1918, than on the 1st January, 1917.’ Similarly – conscious of how he had prevented reinforcement of the British sector of the Western Front – he protested there ‘was no proof that the full weight of the attack would fall on us,’ and this had made it ‘exceedingly difficult’ for the generals to decide where to deploy their troops.234

  He explained the necessity of cancelling soldiers’ leave, and because of the ‘emergency’ the need to send boys of eighteen and a half, after just four months’ training, to France, instead of waiting until they were nineteen. But the country had to train more soldiers: 100,000 medically fit men were being taken from the munitions industry; 50,000 had already been taken from the mines, and another 50,000 would be called. All men in the civil service under twenty-five who passed the medical would have to serve. Confirming the rise in the maximum military age, he said: ‘There are a good many services in the Army which do not require the very best physical material, and it would be very helpful to get men of this age to fill those services, in order to release younger and fitter men to enter into the fighting line.’235 Similarly, they could replace younger men in home defence who could be sent to France.

  By the time the Military Service Bill had its second reading the next day the government had modified some of the proposals. Men aged between forty-two and fifty would mostly not be called up, because many were skilled workers in industries of national importance; though Law, when he spoke (Lloyd George resumed his absence from the Commons, despite the importance of the measure), admitted the effect on trade and production would be serious. With the exception of doctors, who were desperately needed, men between fifty and fifty-five would, Cave said, be called up only ‘in some very great national emergency’; which some MPs thought had already arisen.236 Clergymen and other ministers of religion would be required to serve, but could choose between combatant and non-combatant units. MPs would be given the choice of serving or staying in the Commons: it having been deemed by the government that their constituents had elected them to do ‘work of national importance’.237

  VII

  It seemed in early April that the Germans had run out of steam: it was later learned that this was because of a breakdown in the loyalties between men and their officers, and because of supply shortages attributable to the Royal Navy’s blockade that largely prevented the import of goods to Germany by sea. The difficult terrain of the old Somme battlefield was also partly responsible. Thus the Germans looked for new points at which to attack; though the capture of Armentières on 10 April, as the Commons debated the second reading of the Military Service Bill, raised new fears that they might reach, and take, the Channel ports. The French were still reluctant to pour troops into that sector to hold up the advance, even though before long Paris would be in the Germans’ sights. The next day Haig, master of optimism, issued an order whose words have passed into the British cultural memory, and that at last dripped with realism: ‘Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.’238 It was enough to ensure the Military Service Bill was passed, despite Irish outrage.

  Others sought to apportion blame for Britain’s predicament. For Gwynne, who had done so much to get Asquith out, Lloyd George was the culprit: ‘He has lied to everybody, including the House of Commons and now, with the enemy battering at our gates, he still wants to play his dirty little political games,’ he told Lady Bathurst on 16 April.239 ‘I don’t believe he is sincere, even in his desire to conscript Ireland. He has played fast and loose with England and will bring her to the dust … whoever succeeds him must be better. He has surrounded himself with the rotters of finance and the newspaper world. There is neither good nor conscience nor any sense of right in him – only low political cunning.’

  The dishonesty of Lloyd George’s statement that the British Army was stronger in France in January 1918 than a year earlier horrified Maurice. It also caused outrage in France when word reached the trenches, where the men driven back by the German offensive knew they were outnumbered and that they had not, as Lloyd George had implied, been beaten by a smaller army. More to the point, soldiers such as Maurice knew the Army was outnumbered solely because the War Cabinet had refused reinforcements when warned of the likelihood of an attack. Lying was not solely Lloyd George’s prerogative. Maurice recorded on 9 April that ‘Curzon made a number of absolutely untrue statements in the House of Lords’ about manpower: whether he knew they were untrue was another matter.240

  On 17 April it was announced that Derby had been offered, and had accepted, the post of ambassador and minister plenipotentiary on a special mission to France. The King, ‘not only surprised, but hurt’, according to Stamfordham, at not being consulted, even though he had just had a long talk about the cabinet with Lloyd George, was unhappy with the move. He argued against removing Lord Bertie, an experienced diplomat trusted by the French, and a good friend of Clemenceau, at a sensitive time, to replace him with a novice: but he also sensed one of his closest friends was being demoted, and that he would lose the counsel of one he trusted implicitly in the cabinet.241

  Lloyd George had flirted with the idea of becoming war secretary, but appointed Milner after objections from the King. The small reconstruction allowed Austen Chamberlain’s appointment to the War Cabinet, without portfolio. This induced moc
kery from the Northcliffe press, which regarded him as an ‘ineffective mediocrity’; Northcliffe had noted the impact Chamberlain’s attack on the press had had on the public.242 Others saw the appointment as calming Unionist tensions after the Robertson affair, and as proof that Lloyd George could, when he chose, defy Northcliffe. Chamberlain was under no illusions about Lloyd George, but found the prospect of a change of government ‘unthinkable’ and told the prime minister: ‘The crisis is so grave that those of us who support the Government must do so ungrudgingly and give whatever help you require of us.’243

  It was in this state of crisis that Lloyd George’s statement on 9 April about the greater size of the Army compared with 1917 came back to bite him. Sir Godfrey Baring, a Liberal MP, asked in the Commons whether the numbers included labour battalions and other non-combatant units; a War Office under-secretary told him the fighting strength was greater year on year; but that was not true. Colonel Kirke of the War Office had sent figures to the under-secretary, Ian Macpherson, that were wrong because they inadvertently included soldiers on the Italian front. Nor was this the only error. Maurice read in The Times on 24 April that Law had said, in the Commons the previous day, that British and French commanders had earlier agreed to extend the British front, taking over a French sector, without the government disregarding advice from Haig and Robertson. Maurice knew that was untrue too, and it had badly overstretched the BEF: as did Haig, who complained to Milner about the same report.244

  As Spears put it: ‘He [Maurice] took this answer to be a clear proof of the Government’s determination to avoid any shadow of responsibility for the present near disaster.’245 Maurice did not believe Law knew he was inaccurate, but whoever had prepared the answer for him had done so to ensure the government escaped blame. On 30 April he wrote to Wilson, as CIGS, to tell him the statements about manpower had had a seriously destabilising effect on morale among those on active service, who knew of the severe reduction in battalions since 1 January; and said another statement to correct this misunderstanding would be advisable. He received no reply.

  On 7 May, the government having refused to correct the record, Maurice wrote to the Morning Post, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Chronicle and the Daily News to say Lloyd George and Law had lied to the Commons about the strength of the Army in France. He had told his son and eldest daughter that ‘you know for some time past that the Government has not been telling the truth about the War. The object is to show that they did everything possible and that the blame rests with the Generals. This is absolutely untrue, and I am one of the few people who know the facts.’246 He knew he was breaching military discipline, but believed this was a rare occasion ‘when duty as a citizen comes before duty as a soldier’.

  Haig, hearing the news in France, was unimpressed. He thought Maurice’s actions ‘a grave mistake’ because ‘no-one can be both a soldier and a politician at the same time. We soldiers have to do our duty and keep silent, trusting to Ministers to protect us.’247 This was shocking hypocrisy: Haig had seldom kept silent when confronted by Lloyd George’s dishonesty, running either to Robertson when he was CIGS, or to his friend in Buckingham Palace. One must assume Haig was embarrassed to have let this grotesque lie pass unchallenged himself, for what it said about his moral courage and leadership. Amery noted that ‘there is no doubt that Maurice has been got hold of by Repington’, which Maurice had not.248 Lloyd George’s initial view, from which he would not be shaken, was that a political conspiracy was directed at him to bring him down and replace him with Asquith, and he would fight ruthlessly to defend himself.

  All the papers except the Telegraph printed the letter. It said Law’s statement on 23 April had given ‘a totally misleading impression’ of discussions at Versailles about extending the British front; ‘the latest in a series of misstatements which have been made recently in the House of Commons by the present Government.’249 He talked about Lloyd George’s untruths on 9 April, adding that he had taken ‘the very grave step’ of writing the letter because ‘the statements quoted above are known by a large number of soldiers to be incorrect, and this knowledge is breeding such distrust of the Government as can only end in impairing the splendid moral [sic] of our troops at a time when everything possible should be done to raise it.’250 He demanded a parliamentary investigation into his assertions.

  Maurice was a straight-as-a-die soldier of the old school. Spears, who worked under him and who was by this time head of the British Military Mission to Paris, described him as ‘the soul of military honour’ and one who ‘suffered acutely from the tactics of the politicians and their too subtle methods.’251 Spears observed that ‘Lloyd George in particular he came to distrust profoundly’, and that Maurice ‘ruined his career in the Army … by defying the all-powerful Prime Minister and telling the nation the truth that was being withheld from it.’ Spears, a highly intellectual soldier, observed Lloyd George closely, and dismissed his grasp of strategy as ‘amateurish’ and of military matters as ‘ignorant’. Robertson had regarded Lloyd George’s views as ‘silly, too silly to argue about.’252 Spears saw that the generals ‘failed to realise the supreme importance of carrying with them the political leader of the nation.’253 The generals had written him off after his attempt to put the BEF under French command before the Nivelle offensive.

  Many years after the war and after Lloyd George’s death, Spears wrote that his claim to be ‘the man who won the war’ was a ‘fallacy’: ‘Because he refused to heed the warnings of his military advisers in the spring of 1918, he brought us nearer to defeat than at any other period in the war.’254 He blamed the heavy British casualties of the first four weeks of the German offensive – 70,000 higher than the fourteen weeks of Passchendaele – directly on the prime minister’s ‘strategic conceptions’. In a memorandum written after his retirement, Maurice said that on the eve of the battle on 21 March 1918 the infantry was 100,000 men weaker than on 1 January 1917; in all there had been a reduction not of 120 battalions as expected, but 140, and two cavalry divisions had been broken up; and he contradicted the claims that soldiers had been brought back from Salonica to reinforce the Western Front. The figure Lloyd George touted had been inflated thanks to the presence at the front of 300,000 unarmed labourers and Chinese coolies, whom he included.

  Asquith, to whom Maurice had sent a copy of his letter on the eve of publication – but whom he had not consulted, to avoid his having to take responsibility for it – questioned Law about the letter in the Commons. Maurice had told Asquith that ‘I have been guided solely by what I hold to be the public interest,’ and Asquith did not doubt it.255 Law said a Court of Honour, comprising two senior judges, would inquire and report as swiftly as possible. Asquith sought a debate on the subject, and Law agreed – after the judges had reported. The inquiry would be held in private and those questioned would not be on oath. This prompted Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux to announce that the Army and Navy were ‘sick to death of the way things are going on in the House of Commons.’256 Asquith pressed for the debate before the court sat, and Law, sensing an ugly mood rising, agreed.

  Hankey called the episode ‘a veritable bombshell’.257 The meeting of the War Cabinet on 8 May discussed it, and Lloyd George, thanks to extensive research by Hankey, outlined the defence he would make; he asserted that his main problem was not that he lied, but that defending himself thoroughly was impossible because of not wishing to disclose information of use to the enemy. The War Cabinet worried that Haig had felt ‘under an obligation’ – in other words, pressured by the government – to take over more of the front.258 Hankey did find that the Army’s rifle strength had decreased by 100,548; almost exactly as Maurice had said: he found the only way to defend Lloyd George was to engage in hair-splitting nonsense about whether ‘rifle strength [is] the only criterion of fighting strength’.259

  The Commons debate the next day, 9 May, was the only time the official Opposition divided the House against the government during the
war. Repington had briefed Asquith the previous evening, calling unannounced at Cavendish Square before dinner and, so Asquith told his wife, ‘vibrant with indignation’.260 Repington claimed to have up-to-date figures proving Lloyd George was wrong. Asquith called for a select committee to investigate Maurice’s claims. He denied he was attempting effectively a vote of censure on the government. Asquith thought the government would have accepted his request without demur; that assumption was partly because he thought Maurice’s accusations would so concern ministers that they would want them properly scrutinised without delay. After all, said Asquith, ‘It was a letter written by a general who must have known when he wrote it that he was committing a serious breach of King’s Regulations, and that he was really putting in jeopardy the whole of his military future. He, therefore, presumably, would not have taken a course so obviously fraught with possible and even probable disaster to his own prospects unless he was writing under a grave sense of responsibility and of public duty.’261

  Asquith knew Lloyd George too well, and how with him all had not always been what it had seemed. He sensed with some disgust the change of tone and manners that accompanied Lloyd George’s administration. He did not want to believe what some of the consequences of this might have been. He upheld the old values, values the ‘new men’ felt dispensable. ‘I say most emphatically,’ he intoned, ‘that in this House we are accustomed to accept—we are bound to accept—statements made by Ministers of the Crown upon their authority as accurate and true, unless and until the contrary be proved, and I hope we shall always uphold that well-founded Parliamentary tradition.’262 He believed much hinged on the probity of ministers: ‘In the interests of the Government, in the interests of the Army, in the interests of the State, in the interests of the Allies, in the supreme interest of all, namely, the unhampered prosecution of the War itself, it is our duty to set up a tribunal of inquiry which, from its constitution and from its powers, will be able to give to Parliament and to the country a prompt, a decisive, and an authoritative judgment.’263