Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Haig was summoned to Downing Street on 19 October to give his views on the state of the German army, and on what terms should be offered if the Germans sought an armistice. He believed the Germans remained disciplined enough to defend their country, even if driven out of France and Belgium; they would not accept unconditional surrender. He remarked that the French army seemed to have decided the war was over, and the Americans, lacking an experienced officer class, were insufficiently trained and organised to be of much use. As for terms, he suggested the immediate evacuation of Belgium and occupied France; Alsace and Lorraine to be surrendered and occupied by the Allied army; and the return of French and Belgian rolling stock and of civilians to those areas. Lloyd George asked Haig what he thought the consequences would be of offering terms so stiff that Germany carried on fighting; Haig replied that the Allies should offer only what they were prepared to hold themselves to: ‘We should set our faces against the French entering Germany to pay off old scores,’ something for which he felt the British would not wish to fight.

  He emphasised in a telegram to the Germans that the only acceptable armistice would be one that ‘would leave the Allied and Associated Powers in a position to enforce the arrangements made, and to make the renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.’17 The president also stressed that there would be no negotiations, but rather a demand for surrender, until Germany removed the Hohenzollerns and became a republic. Germany accepted Wilson’s terms the next day, and it was left to his military advisers to draw up the exact details of how those terms would be enforced. Wilson communicated none of this to the Allies officially until 23 October.

  Pending German acceptance of Wilson’s proposals and Allied agreement to them, the fighting continued, with Allied and American troops now routinely prevailing. Meanwhile, throughout October British troops were conquering Syria and Mesopotamia as Ottoman forces were routed. However, Haig and Sir Henry Wilson remained cautiously pessimistic – Haig perhaps realising the harm he had done himself in the past by claims of success. They warned Lloyd George in late October that the German retreat was orderly rather than disorganised; that their army was not actually shattered; and that when attacked they hit back hard. Wilson could see no reason why Germany should surrender, and Haig pointed out that the numbers of guns captured had fallen. However, the soldiers did not understand the fast-changing political situation in Germany, and the collapse of civilian and service morale there, which had prompted acceptance of President Wilson’s terms. The loss of allies such as Bulgaria and Turkey had not helped. Exhausted and short of supplies, the German army on the Western Front could at best hold the ground it had: its commanders did not expect breakthroughs.

  Between 28 October and 4 November there were ten meetings of the Supreme War Council in Paris to settle the terms Germany would be offered. The Allied and Associated Powers discussed the fourteen points at the Quai d’Orsay – the French Foreign Ministry – on 29 October. Lloyd George arrived with an instruction from the War Cabinet not to concede freedom of the seas. Clemenceau supported Lloyd George: House, Wilson’s representative and (in Hankey’s view) the author of the point about freedom of the seas, threatened that if it were not accepted America might have to conclude a separate peace with Germany. In that case, Lloyd George and Clemenceau concurred, the Allied Powers would carry on fighting. Lloyd George told House that Britain was not a military nation, but a naval one, and its power was its Fleet: and it would not give up its right to use its Fleet as it saw fit. The next day that reservation, and another about the need for Germany to compensate civilians whose property their aggression had damaged, was communicated to Wilson. America did not conclude a separate peace, and on 3 November Wilson said he ‘sympathetically’ recognised the Allied concerns, and the question of blockade.18

  Before that meeting on 29 October Lloyd George had told Haig how he wanted to maintain a strong Army for a year after the peace, while letting classes of key workers return to civilian life – notably miners. ‘He evidently feels that we may have to face both internal troubles, as well as difficulties with some of our present Allies.’19 Meanwhile, the Central Powers continued to implode. On 28 October Czechoslovakia and Poland declared their own governments. On 29 October the German High Seas Fleet mutinied. On 30 October the Ottoman Empire brokered its armistice with the Allies, and Austria requested an armistice with Italy. Kaiser Karl of Austria–Hungary saw his empire crumbling and his peoples longing for an end to the war: the Dual Monarchy was consigned to history. The Austrian fleet was handed to the Jugo-Slav National Council. On 3 November Austria and Hungary concluded armistices with the Allies.

  Ludendorff, as German Quartermaster General, had been deeply unhappy with his country’s agreement to Wilson’s terms. To start with he was reluctant to swallow them, and then proceeded to decide that they were completely unacceptable. He then thought he had convinced himself, at the end of October, that Germany should fight on. A month earlier he had believed the war was lost. However, he quickly realised, and told his government, that German forces could not defend central Europe. In the event of holding the Western Front (which was extremely unlikely, as soldiers were continuing to surrender in their thousands as the Allies advanced, with 18,000 capitulating in the first week of November) the Reich would be under assault from the south and east.20 It was becoming clear to the German political class that their people would not tolerate another winter of war that left them hungry and without fuel; their soldiers saw the great offensive had been beaten back and, unlike the Allies who had hundreds of thousands of Americans ready to pour into France, they had no more resources to plumb. Order started to break down in German cities, with workers’ soviets being formed, and revolts in cities as far apart as Hamburg and Munich. Once this happened, it became clear to all but the most blinkered Germans that defeat was unavoidable.

  At the 1 November meeting of the Supreme War Council the proposed terms for an armistice, which Lloyd George had with other Allied leaders and plenipotentiaries earlier approved, were read out. Haig thought them ‘very stiff’: the Germans to withdraw 40 kilometres east of the Rhine, surrendering 5,000 guns and much rolling stock as well as evacuating territory.21 Political and military leaders in Britain were against a ‘humiliating’ peace being inflicted on Germany, Milner and Derby describing the prospect as ‘against the best interests of the British Empire.’22 However, for some, what was being proposed was not enough: Northcliffe, who spoke for a considerable proportion of the public, called for unconditional surrender via The Times. Just before the Armistice, after a series of increasingly short-tempered meetings with Lloyd George in which Northcliffe warned him against lenient treatment of Germany, repeated his demands to know who was being considered for the government, and possibly asked for a place on the delegation at the forthcoming peace conference, the prime minister supposedly told him to ‘go to Hades’.23

  II

  As the tide turned on the Western Front, speculation began that Lloyd George would call a general election ‘in the late autumn’: those around the prime minister fed the speculation, on his orders.24 He told Riddell in August that he was ‘strongly in favour of an appeal to the country in November’ because, with the tide by then having turned, he thought it would favour him, and he could deny any such advantage by saying it had, in any case, been almost eight years since the last election, and this was the earliest opportunity to have one.25 It gave the political class something to talk about during the recess; and the imminence of a new register that had ‘completely changed the electoral map and revolutionised the machinery of elections’ made an early election irresistible, whether or not the war still raged.26 Yet when the subject was first discussed, it was believed the war might continue for another year or two.

  There was, objectively, an overwhelming case for an election, as the Parliament was three years past its normal span, having had five Acts of Parliament passed at different times to extend its duration by a few more months. Half the House o
f Commons had not been returned at the December 1910 poll, but in by-elections since, most of them uncontested and therefore unreflective of democracy. Moreover, not only was there a huge new electorate that ‘enfranchised new classes like the soldiers of 19 years of age and a new sex in women’, but on 23 October the Commons debated a resolution put down by Samuel that a Bill should be passed to allow women to become Members of Parliament too; two hundred and seventy-four MPs, including the once implacable Asquith, supported it, with only twenty-five against, despite calls for a new House of Commons to make the decision. As Samuel put it, ‘you cannot say that 6,000,000 women shall be voters, but that not one shall ever be a legislator. By our deliberate action in passing the Representation of the People Bill we have given up the old narrow doctrine that woman’s sphere was the home and nothing but the home.’27 However, Admiral Meux observed that ‘I do not think this House is a fit and proper place for any respectable woman to sit in … what about all-night sittings, sitting up till two or three in the morning? “Who goes home?” It will be a question of “Who will take me home?”’28

  In late August, as another early sign of the government’s electioneering mood, it was announced that a film recounting the life of Lloyd George would be released to cinemas in November, which further fuelled election speculation. On 12 September he opened what was effectively his campaign with a speech at Manchester, where he received the freedom of the city of his birth. He did not mention an election: but expressed hopes of the future, beginning with the certainty of victory – ‘the Germans have no America.’29 He expressed the aspiration of a League of Nations. He also mentioned reconstruction, better transport and better use of Britain’s ‘human material’; and stressed improved health care – perhaps his most celebrated remark was that ‘we cannot maintain an A1 Empire with a C3 population’, and his claim that a doctor had told him an extra million men could have been under arms ‘if the health of the country had been properly looked after.’ He had formulated these views earlier, knowing that a promise of change had to be paramount. In August, discussing the future with Riddell, he had mentioned ‘disquieting’ statistics given him by Auckland Geddes that showed ‘the physique of the people of this country is far from what it should be, particularly in the agricultural districts where the inhabitants should be the strongest.’ He continued: ‘This is due to low wages, malnutrition and bad housing. It will have to be put right after the war.’30

  He had planned a tour of northern cities: but he keeled over on the evening of his Manchester speech and was diagnosed with Spanish flu. A bedroom was made for him in the city’s Town Hall, with the trams diverted from the side of the building in which he was resting to give him peace and quiet. One of Manchester’s leading specialists attended him; he recovered and returned to London, still enfeebled, on 21 September.

  He started to sound out colleagues about who could be in a government of all the talents, to reconstruct Britain after the war. He was even, at that stage, prepared to include Northcliffe, though was warned by friends that he would be impossible to work with. Beaverbrook, in his unreliable memoir Men and Power, claimed that during the anxious months before Amiens Northcliffe had enlisted him and Reading to advocate to Lloyd George that he should become Lord President of the Council, and assist Lloyd George in saving the country. There is no other evidence for this; and such stories detract from the fact that Northcliffe was doing a superb job in his propaganda work, the shattered morale of the German army being further undermined by the leaflet drops that, in the last phase of the war, were again under way. Even before aircraft were used balloons dropped 7,820,367 leaflets between June and August, causing an alarmed Hindenburg to warn his troops of the Allied war on ‘the German spirit’.31

  For all Northcliffe’s achievements, and Lloyd George’s readiness to consider him for a cabinet post, the prime minister realised he could not be trusted. But then neither could Lloyd George: one of Northcliffe’s great gripes was that he thought Lloyd George had promised to call an election the moment the new register was in force: but did not. Northcliffe then demanded to know, through Riddell, the names of those whom Lloyd George was considering including in a new cabinet, as he would not use his papers to support an administration including men from what he called ‘the Old Gang’ – the Asquith coalition. This was too much for Lloyd George, who sent back word that he would ‘give no undertaking as to the constitution of the Government and would not dream of doing such a thing.’32 As nothing would possess him to take Northcliffe into his confidence in that way, or seek his approval for what he might or might not do, he realised the support of his newspapers – vital given that Lloyd George effectively had no party – could be withdrawn. Since the prime minister was determined to have an election the moment circumstances permitted, he needed another means of press support.

  He had for months known the nature of British politics was about to change. At a dinner at Haldane’s house in the spring he had told his host and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were also present, that ‘the future would lie between two new parties, with the old Liberal Party split between them.’33 The plans for the election of December 1918 – a contest between supporters of the existing coalition and the remnants of other parties – were drawn up long before it was clear it would be a post-war election, but rather in expectation that the main issue would be whether the war was fought to a finish or an attempt was made at a negotiated peace. Lloyd George was determined to secure the former, many Asquithian Liberals (though probably not Asquith himself) the latter.34 Guest, the chief whip, had as early as July 1918 been drawing up lists of MPs who deserved government support.35

  The prime minister had been keen since early in 1917 to have a friendly businessman buy the Daily Chronicle, whose circulation was 800,000 a day and which therefore had serious reach. It also, as already noted, had General Maurice as its military correspondent; so another motivation for Lloyd George to have a friend to buy it was to force Maurice out, and stop him writing disobliging articles about the conduct of the war. It was for sale for £1.1 million, with profits of roughly £200,000 a year (though £130,000 of that went in excess profits duty). The friendly businessman was Sir Henry Dalziel, the Liberal MP and owner of Reynolds News and the Pall Mall Gazette, who, helpfully, had been advanced to a baronetcy the previous January. Riddell, part of the conspiracy to buy the Chronicle, had noted in early September that there was ‘some difficulty’ in arranging the finance.36 It would soon be made public what the nature of the difficulties were.

  On 1 October the deal was done. ‘LG to have full control of the editorial policy through Sir H Dalziel, who will in effect be his agent,’ Riddell noted. ‘The experiment will be interesting.’37 The propriety of a prime minister using other people’s money – and money from a highly questionable source at that – effectively to own a newspaper seems never to have struck him, but then the morality of Lloyd George’s cronies was rarely superior to his. It was soon common parlance that money from the sale of honours had funded the purchase. Beaverbrook, highly improperly for a minister, had been closely involved in the conspiracy, which caused so much concern that it was discussed in the Commons on 15 October. ‘If the springs of public information come into the hands of a few groups or of one group, you really have a travesty of genuine democratic conditions,’ William Pringle, the Lanarkshire MP and a strong supporter of Asquith, said.38 He claimed entirely accurately that the Daily Chronicle was ‘really under the control of the government’.39

  The Asquithians knew that few voices in the press would speak for them, come the election, magnifying what Dalziel had achieved for Lloyd George. Pringle wanted the government to hold an inquiry into the sale of the paper: but there was more chance of it giving Belgium to the Germans. He put on the record reasons why there would not be such an inquiry. The government had honoured two earlier prospective purchasers, Lords Leverhulme, the soap and detergent magnate, and Colwyn, thus getting them out of the way; and Guest, as chief whip, had also had a
hand in those negotiations, so several distinguished politicians stood to be damaged by such an inquiry. Pringle challenged those present who knew the truth – Dalziel and Guest – to correct any error of detail. They remained silent.

  He continued by disclosing that an accountant had been asked to value the business, which he did at £900,000, less than the owners wanted; and this figure had been conveyed to Guest. ‘After this report was received it turned out that Lord Leverhulme was not the real person involved,’ Pringle continued, ‘but that behind the rays of Sunlight soap there was the interesting and significant figure of Lord Beaverbrook. That was at a time when Lord Beaverbrook was Minister of Information. It is a matter which, I think, concerns this House that the Minister of Information, a member of the Government and a responsible Minister, should have been negotiating for the purchase of a newspaper at a time when he was advertising himself as having divested himself of all control in another newspaper which he had previously owned.’40

  However, Pringle disclosed that Beaverbrook had backed out: the price was too high, and if the government wanted the Chronicle, party funds would have to pay for it. Beaverbrook had agreed that had he bought the paper he would have supported Lloyd George for a further five years: a promise he had been unprepared to make on behalf of the Daily Express. A further complication had been that the Chronicle’s proprietor, Frank Lloyd, had refused to sell it to a Tory. Learning this, Guest had tried to persuade Lloyd that Beaverbrook – whose entrée into British politics had been through Law, whose Conservative politics he shared entirely – was not in fact a Tory, even though he had been a Tory MP. Guest was not one of the ghastly ‘new men’ who had risen partly by sharp practice and duplicity, and should have known better: he was the younger brother of Wimborne, and Churchill’s cousin, and had won the DSO before being invalided out of the Army. Soiling his hands in this way gravely demeaned him.