Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Law provoked cries of ‘Shame!’ for mocking Asquith’s assertion that a select committee would consider the question without prejudice. Asquith rounded on him, the ‘custodian and trustee’ of the ‘great traditions’ of the Commons as Law was, being the Leader of the House. ‘Is it right, or is it even decent, to suggest that you cannot get five men in this House not so steeped in party prejudices that, upon a pure issue of fact, they cannot be trusted to give a true decision?’

  Lloyd George, who spoke next, had set Hankey to work for a couple of days to provide all the information needed to rebut Maurice in a speech: knowing it would bring the government down if he failed, he had rehearsed it the previous evening to senior colleagues, including Milner, Chamberlain and Hankey, who suggested numerous changes. The prime minister made the obvious point that Maurice had never questioned the statement when still working in the War Office. He claimed to have had almost daily contact with Maurice, and had considered him a friend (whether Maurice agreed is highly debatable: Lloyd George was raising, cynically, the spectre of betrayal). He made his own counter-accusation:

  Was it not his business to come to me—especially if he thought that this was so important that it justified a great general in breaking the King’s Regulations and setting an example of indiscipline—was it not his business, first of all, to come to the Cabinet, or, at any rate, to come to the Minister whom he impugned, and say to him, ‘You made a mistake in the House of Commons on a most important question of fact’? He might have put it quite nicely. He could have said, ‘I dare say you were misled, but you can put it right.’ Never a word was said to me! Never a syllable until I saw it in the newspapers! I say that I have been treated unfairly.’264

  This display of wounded amour propre was brilliantly manipulative.

  He and his colleagues had decided against a select committee because it ‘was not the best tribunal for investigating facts when passions were aroused.’265 Judges, on the other hand, were ‘accustomed to examine facts’, which was what was required. However, Lloyd George was determined to lend the judges a helping hand. ‘The figures that I gave,’ he said, ‘were taken from the official records of the War Office, for which I sent before I made the statement. If they were incorrect, General Maurice was as responsible as anyone else. But they were not inaccurate. I have made inquiries since.’266 There was some hair-splitting: ‘Does anyone mean to tell me that they are not part of the “fighting strength” of the Army? Take the men who, when the British Army retreated, and had to abandon trenches which took months to prepare, and who had to improvise defences under shell fire to relieve the Infantry—are those men no part of the fighting strength of the Army? When you have not got them, you have to take Infantry out, and set them to that work.’267

  Lloyd George produced the document from Maurice’s office that contained the figures. When George Lambert, an Asquithian Liberal, asked whether it was initialled, Lloyd George said it was – by Maurice’s deputy. He expressed outrage at the ensuing laughter. ‘I do not suggest that he was the man who worked out these figures, but he was responsible for the document issued.’268 He added, maintaining his wounded tone: ‘If there was anything wrong in these figures, I got them from official sources, for which General Maurice himself is responsible, and I think he might have said that in his letter when he was impugning the honour of Ministers.’ In fact, the office responsible was the Adjutant General’s, but by this stage Lloyd George had transcended fact.

  After explaining why the British line had been extended, and on whose authority, Lloyd George made two final points: that Maurice’s intervention had undermined Army discipline and that, whatever Asquith maintained, his motion was a vote of censure. He deplored this, at a time when the Germans were still attacking and, he claimed, ‘preparing perhaps the biggest blow of the War’.269 His speech was designed to allow Unionists and his Liberal supporters to support him; it was not designed to prove he was a man of probity. Pringle, who spoke next, accused him of appealing to the emotions of the House, ‘an appeal which no man is able to make with greater skill and greater irrelevance than himself.’270 Lord Hugh Cecil observed that his speech had been an excellent attack on Maurice, but no defence of the government. Given its majority, though, no defence was necessary; the motion was defeated by 293 votes to 106.

  Asquith was universally deemed to have made a pitiful speech – not least because, declining to prejudge a select committee, he had avoided going in for the kill with Lloyd George. Haig, who to his wife had slightly altered his tune, told her: ‘Poor Maurice! How terrible to see the House of Commons so easily taken in by a clap-trap speech by Lloyd George. The House is really losing its reputation as an assembly of common-sense Britishers.’ Hankey was sufficiently embarrassed by the truth to suppress it from his memoirs over forty years later; what he actually recorded in his diary about Lloyd George’s speech was: ‘I felt all the time that it was not the speech of a man who tells “the truth; the whole truth; and nothing but the truth”.’271 Hankey knew Lloyd George had seen the Adjutant General’s revised figures and chosen to ignore them. Esher noted that ‘the danger now is that LG and his Entourage may get “swelled heads”. The triumph was easy, but in politics the wind veers in a moment.’272 The press, which knew barely half the story, jumped on the bandwagon to execrate Maurice and praise the government: The Times called the outcome ‘nothing less than annihilating’ to Lloyd George’s critics, and accused Maurice of being a ‘pawn’ in a ‘spiteful intrigue’ against Wilson by partisans of Robertson.273

  That Asquith could have cast such aspersions on his successor and former colleague as to demand an inquiry into his probity spelt the end of the Liberal Party. The Unionists supported Lloyd George in the Maurice debate not because his arguments were convincing, but because of their tribal dislike of Asquith. Northcliffe rallied the press to support the prime minister too, without troubling to analyse the facts. It was perhaps the greatest service the press baron afforded Lloyd George, for never did he come closer to being toppled until 1922. Hankey believed Asquith did not hit harder because he feared he could bring down the government, a tricky prospect at that stage of the war.

  Maurice admitted he had been ‘prepared for the abuse which was heaped upon me in a certain section of the press’, but not for ‘the methods pursued by the Government to defeat my request for an enquiry.’274 These included denying him access to official papers that would have substantiated his claims, and asserting – entirely falsely – that he had been in the Commons on 9 April and had heard Lloyd George’s statement, yet said nothing: this was a story spread by Sutherland, Lloyd George’s private secretary and press officer, who lied about a conversation he had on the subject with a lobby correspondent.275

  Maurice also believed Lloyd George had prejudiced his case by claiming – again dishonestly – that Maurice had made no representations to him or anyone else before leaving office; that he had not been at Versailles at the crucial meeting; and that Lloyd George’s claim on 9 April had been based on information supplied by Maurice or his department. On Versailles, Maurice had seen verbatim transcripts, so knew exactly what had happened. Aficionados of the Marconi scandal of 1912–13 will detect Lloyd George’s unscrupulous modus operandi.276

  The prime minister’s determination to include non-combatants in the numbers of soldiers went against all conventional practice; but that, too, was typical. Nor could Maurice recall ever being asked to supply, or supplying, the figures to which Lloyd George referred on 9 April. Most disingenuous of all, Lloyd George had been told of Kirke’s error on 8 May (presumably after the War Cabinet meeting, for it is not mentioned in its minutes) – and the number of troops in Italy wrongly included amounted to 86,000 – but chose not to mention it the next day, and instead deliberately used the wrong figure again. This shocked officials, who knew the truth; Kirke, indeed, offered to resign. It apparently also upset Milner, who was aware of the fact, and whom Lloyd George proceeded to isolate and marginalise. No correction t
o the record was made.

  Maurice knew there was no road back: the Army Council placed him on the retired list on 11 May, after he told them he knowingly breached discipline as ‘a matter of conscience’, and his retirement was announced on 13 May.277 The next day it was revealed that he had become military correspondent of the Daily Chronicle. He would serve there for five months until a proxy of Lloyd George, funded by money from the sale of honours, bought the newspaper and turned it into a mouthpiece for the prime minister. Maurice then moved to the Daily News. Out of spite he was retired not on the half-pay of a major general – £750 a year – but on that of a major, £225 a year. That appalled the Army Council, and the following October it was increased to the correct amount.

  Maurice would continue to badger Lloyd George to tell the truth for years after the war, with no success, and to the embarrassment of Lloyd George’s former colleagues, notably Balfour, who knew Maurice had been done a serious wrong. Lloyd George would, in 1936, attack Maurice in his memoirs, one of many passages that underlines that work’s unreliability and reinforces Lloyd George’s posthumous reputation as a consummate liar. Even Frances Stevenson, in her diary, admitted to the existence of the document sent to him setting out the true figures before his speech on 9 May, and says it was burned; Sir Joseph ‘JT’ Davies, a key member of Lloyd George’s secretariat, told her as he put it in the fire that ‘only you & I, Frances, know of the existence of this paper.’278

  VIII

  As summer approached, Britain continued to experience food shortages. Meat distribution broke down because of inadequate cold storage, with substandard food barely fit for human consumption reaching wholesalers. Dairy farmers protested about the price of milk, and claimed that some would be put out of business. On 15 July new ration books were issued for butter, margarine, lard, meat and sugar, though the size of rations had increased since the scheme was initiated, and some offal and meat products were off the ration. The next day Leo Amery noted that the cabinet secretariat were told to start making plans ‘for carrying on the war if France and Italy were out’ – what decades later he called ‘a 1940–43 situation’.279

  Despite the government’s continual references to the grave national emergency, industrial action remained rife. A strike of aircraft manufacturers in London was caused by a management refusal to recognise a system of shop stewards; an agreement was reached allowing for recognition, but not until obloquy had been directed at the ministry for allowing the strike in the first place: the assumption was, with the country in peril, that workers should have their demands met before serious damage was done. Then there was an outbreak of industrial action in munitions factories, beginning in Coventry, despite strong pressure from leaders of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers for its members to return to work. The strike was over the rationing out of skilled labour among munitions firms, and was overtly political, motivated by what Churchill (in a draft press statement that was never issued) called the ‘undercurrent of Pacifism, Defeatism and Bolshevism’ that held that if production of arms stopped then so too would the war.280 By 24 July 12,000 skilled men were out in Coventry, defying the ASE executive; it was reported that 100,000 men in Birmingham walked out the next day (the figure was then revised down to 15,000, which was damaging enough). As they did, representatives of, it was claimed, 300,000 men met in Leeds, and called a general strike for the following week.

  On 26 July the government put out a statement in Lloyd George’s name, but written by Churchill, that if the strikers did not return to work on 29 July they would be drafted into the Army under the Military Service Acts, for they were trying to force the government ‘to change the national policy essential to the prosecution of the war’; the threat to bring charges against anyone who incited a man to leave his job had already been made.281 The Times claimed it was ‘no ordinary labour dispute, but a plain challenge to the State.’282 The public, more set on victory than ever after the spring crisis, strongly supported the government’s threat; which, with the intervention of local union leaders to urge their members to see reason, rapidly brought a return to work.

  In 1914 there had been 9,500,000 men under the age of forty-three, and 6,100,000 of those had been recruited into the forces or into ‘National Service’ in work of national importance. All others were of a ‘very low’ physical standard; the nation had effectively run out of recruits, with 500,000, mainly boys and older men, taken since 1 January, putting a massive strain on essential industries.283 Women, aware of their importance to the war effort and their consequent industrial muscle, started to strike for equal pay and conditions. In mid-August conductresses on London buses and trams walked out after a weekly 5s war bonus was paid to men doing the same job, but not to them. It was argued that the women were mostly receiving separation allowances and therefore did not need the bonus. Such was the chaos their strike caused that the government sent in Sir George Askwith, Asquith’s industrial fixer from the Great Unrest, to sort matters out.284 The management decided to pay the women the 5s bonus too. A strike of Yorkshire miners over pay and conditions was quickly settled, because the government already feared shortages for the coming winter, and was urging people to get in supplies of logs instead: the War Cabinet learned on 16 August that there was ‘a very serious position’, with production down by around 40,000,000 tons a year, not just because of ‘combing out’, but because of the arrival in Britain in the summer of 1918 of the Spanish influenza epidemic.285 Sir Albert Stanley, president of the Board of Trade, asked for 42,000 men, in fitness categories A and B1, to be returned to the mines by 30 September.

  Even more alarming, on 30 August a Metropolitan Police strike over pay came ‘like a bolt from the blue’, according to Hankey.286 The home secretary, the commissioner of the metropolis and the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office were all on holiday; and that morning London was denuded of its constabulary. The officers, who had given a few hours’ notice of their walk-out, had no official union – an unofficial one, the National Union of Police and Prison Officers, had been founded before the war but was technically illegal – but were associated with the Workers Union, whose secretary, Charles Duncan, a Labour MP, advised them not to strike. He admitted to Lloyd George – who had just returned from Criccieth where he had been brainstorming about a possible election, and summoned him to Downing Street – that the police had ‘behaved badly’.287 The union wanted a war bonus of 12s a week increased to £1, as well as recognition of the union and reinstatement of an officer dismissed for being a union organiser. By late on 30 August 12,000 men were thought to be on strike, with only the plain-clothes Criminal Investigation Department and special constables (whom a procession of striking policemen booed as ‘scabs’ and ‘blacklegs’) defending the citizens of London.288 After an intervention by Smuts, 600 guardsmen were sent to stand outside key public buildings. Lloyd George ordered Duncan to see the police leaders, charging him to tell them that their grievances would be fully discussed on the condition that they return to work.

  Hankey’s solution was a drastic one of sweeping away local forces and establishing a national police, in which existing officers would be allowed to serve if they resumed duties at once; and in the meantime to have the Army police London. He did, however, believe the complaints about pay were legitimate. At an hour-long meeting on 31 August Lloyd George quickly agreed to pay them a second bonus in eight months’ time, and sacked Sir Edward Henry, the commissioner of the metropolis – even though the Home Office had allowed the grievances to multiply – with the consolation of a baronetcy. His replacement, Sir Nevil Macready, the former Adjutant General of the Army, calmed matters and embarked on reforms, including the recruitment of women officers. A month later workers on the Great Western Railway stopped the trains between South Wales and London: the government declared the strike illegal, and the threat of six battalions of soldiers moving in to restore order helped the strike evaporate. This was not so much a return of pre-war class conflicts as a recognition by organ
ised labour of the extent to which the country depended on its goodwill, and its preparation to have its voice heard in a new era of near-universal adult suffrage.

  Any form of industrial action was grave, because Britain still faced shortages for the coming winter: not just of coal – which caused the government to order the dimming of lights in public buildings – but of foodstuffs, despite the food controller’s efforts. Jam would be rationed from 3 November; milk was subject to a new and supposedly improved distribution system; potatoes were increasingly used to make bread; the price of fish was cut to persuade people to eat it instead of meat; the price of apples rocketed to 3s a pound. However, compared with Germany, Britain was a land of plenty. When a particular food was cheap people tended to eat it; when what had traditionally been cheap cuts of meat became expensive they ceased to represent value, and people went elsewhere. That fish were more plentiful showed the success the Navy had had in protecting the fishing fleet, providing an alternative to increasingly expensive, and unavailable, meat. It that sense, central direction succeeded in avoiding yet another crisis.

  It was a huge advantage to Britain to keep its people fed throughout the war. In Germany, by contrast, the successful blockade had by the autumn of 1918 led to a collapse in food supplies, driving down living and nutritional standards, especially for those in urban areas. Fuel and clothes were also in short supply. In large centres of population the fall in morale became infectious. This in turn spread to men at the front, who started to surrender rather than fight. These were the soldiers whom Allied and American forces (by the Armistice there were 2 million Americans on the Western Front) were now encountering, and consequently the entire complexion of the war changed.