Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Through the gruesome Gallipoli campaign, Herbert’s loathing of Winston Churchill grew. Waiting to invade in April he had written in his diary, ‘Winston’s name fills everyone with rage. Roman emperors killed slaves to make themselves popular, he is killing free men to make himself famous.’

  Three thousand miles away, in London, the dramatic resignation of ageing Admiral Jackie Fisher led to a political crisis. The Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (reeling from the news that his mistress was marrying another member of his cabinet) was forced to form a wartime coalition government with the opposition, Bonar Law’s Conservatives, who were described by Compton Mackenzie as ‘barren of policy yet greedy of place and patronage’. The Tories demanded two Liberal scalps as the price of coalition: Lord Haldane’s and Winston Churchill’s.

  On 26 May 1915, Churchill was ousted from the Admiralty, although he kept a seat in Cabinet and on the Dardanelles Committee to try and see the enterprise through. This was a tremendous shock for him – Violet Bonham Carter believed it ‘the sharpest and the deepest wound he suffered in his whole career’. Clementine Churchill told her husband’s biographer, Martin Gilbert: ‘I thought he would die of grief.’ Aubrey Herbert’s wife, Mary Vesey, dined at No. 10, Downing Street in June 1915, and was seated next to Winston Churchill:

  He was in a curious state, really rather dignified, but so bitter. He and Clemmy look very broken. He told me that if he was Prime Minister for 20 years it wouldn’t make up for this fall.

  Aubrey Herbert wrote back angrily from the peninsula, ‘As for Winston, I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here. But his only ‘agony’ you say is missing being PM.’

  The Tories in the government coalition blocked Churchill from going out in person to ginger up Gallipoli in July. Churchill could do nothing. The scheme was out of his hands. But the setback did give him something manual to occupy his mind – he started painting.

  Like a sea-beast fetched up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure … I had to watch the unhappy casting-away of great opportunities, and the feeble execution of plans which I had launched and in which I heartily believed … And then it was the Muse of Painting came to my rescue …

  Churchill started with his children’s paintbox one Sunday in July 1915. The next day he procured easel, canvas, oil paints, palette, brushes, and a long white dustcoat. For Churchill, painting a picture was a mixture of fighting a battle (but with ‘no evil fate’ to avenge ‘the jaunty violence’) and a sort of enchantment. His daughter Mary Soames said: ‘When he picked up a paint brush it was like picking up a magic wand.’

  Back in the Aegean, in August 1915, another painter, Norman Wilkinson, had climbed to the foretop of HMS Jonquil to observe, from a safe distance, the landings of the British 9th Corps at lightly defended Suvla Bay, in the last big push of the Dardanelles campaign. He called it ‘the living cinema of battle’:

  Glasses were necessary to distinguish the light khaki of our men against the scrub and sand. The troops marching in open order across the salt lake … crossed the unbroken surface of silver-white. Overhead shrapnel burst unceasingly, leaving small crumpled forms on the ground, one or more of which would slowly rise and walk shoreward, while others lay where they fell …

  Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, which is a masterpiece of narrative history, includes Norman Wilkinson’s painting of soldiers crossing the salt lake. Moorehead, writing forty years later, saw a new principle slowly being revealed in the Gallipoli campaign:

  Everything that was done by stealth and imagination was a success, while everything that was done by means of the headlong frontal attack was foredoomed to failure.

  This was true of the flank landings at Helles in April 1915, and of the way Gurkha Bluff was taken by the British on 12 May. It was true, too, of Compton Mackenzie’s deception initiative on Lesbos in July. The writer was sent in his Royal Marines uniform from GHQ to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. His orders were to make plans for establishing a ‘secret’ military base there, in readiness for a forthcoming big Allied attack on Smyrna on the Turkish mainland. No such attack was planned: the whole thing was a diversion. But Mackenzie told various people – the British Consul, The Times’ correspondent, the Civil Governor – about the plans, ‘in confidence’, and numerous Greek small businessmen soon came rushing forward with drachma bribes in the hope of future contracts with military forces. Mackenzie, of course, suavely but unconvincingly denied they were coming. This three-week deception operation, planned and set in motion by the staff officer Guy Dawnay, was effective and historically important.

  At German-assisted Ottoman HQ, rumours garnered from various sources about British movements were alembicated into hard intelligence about the fictional attack on Smyrna. Enemy troops were braced and reinforced in the wrong places. Thus no U-boats were ready to stop the invaders when they eventually came to Suvla Bay in August. Meanwhile, 25,000 men were landed secretly, by night, at Anzac Cove, and then packed into concealed trenches. Australian tunnellers, many of them ex-goldminers, dug new saps towards the Turkish lines for a lightning surprise attack at Lone Pine on 6th August. Hopes were high for a coordinated breakthrough.

  Tragically, the Suvla landings and attacks fell apart in exhaustion and indecision because the chain of command did not join up the dots of what they were supposed to be doing. At Suvla, the elderly General Stopford thought his only job was to make camp by the bay and wait for the howitzers to be supplied. At Anzac, a desperate plan involving some of the best soldiers took terrible casualties because the mass of new English troops who were meant to sweep round from Suvla and help the Australians and New Zealanders capture the heights were still bathing on the beach.*

  It was all a great disappointment. Forty thousand men were killed and wounded on the peninsula in August to gain only a few square miles. September 1915 was made miserable by dysentery and diarrhoea, ‘between the Devil and the W. C.’ The Dardanelles project was slowly strangling, but the legs still madly kicked. In October, Churchill proposed using poison gas on the Turks, and Roger Keyes wanted to crash ships through the Chanak Narrows; in November Kitchener considered attacking Bulair, and there were other wild schemes.

  The Aegean was still glorious to look at that autumn. Norman Wilkinson’s watercolour sketches from Gallipoli make thirty full-page plates in his 1915 book The Dardanelles. These elegant sea-and landscapes depict no horrors. By the white tents of a dressing station on the white sands of ‘A’ beach at Suvla you see netting draped over poles, more for shade than for camouflage, not bloody bandages. You sense a large human enterprise nonetheless dwarfed by vast spaces of sea, sky and intractable land. There are long views of balloon ships, submarines, seaplanes, the Aquitania converted into a huge floating hospital. The bright stillness and depth of the paintings is like the slow daze of a holiday afternoon.

  And then, suddenly, the whole fleet sailed away. In a flash of fireworks, they vanished. At Troy, the departure of the Greek fleet was the prelude to the deception: the Trojan Horse was left behind on the shore with a special forces unit hiding inside. At Gallipoli, by contrast, the sailing away was the climax of the deception, leaving the Turks only empty trenches on the hills and burnt offerings on the beach.

  The evacuation of Gallipoli was the best thing about the campaign. A. J. P. Taylor called it ‘the successful end to a sad adventure’ and Brigadier John Monash, the Jewish engineer who fought in the Peninsula and went on to become Australia’s greatest WW1 general, said it was ‘a most brilliant conception, brilliantly organised, and brilliantly executed – and will, I am sure, rank as the greatest joke in the whole range of military history’.

  On 11 October 1915, Kitchener asked Hamilton what losses could be expected if the army pulled out: ‘50 per cent’, was the gloomy reply. So, on 16 October, Sir Ian Hamilton was relieved of his command and replaced by Sir Charles Monro, who visited Suvla, Anzac and Helles in one day
and on the next, 31 October, recommended evacuating the peninsula. ‘He came, he saw, he capitulated,’ said Churchill. (Most commentators call this bon mot unfair.) Lord Kitchener himself visited. He had come out eager to push on, but after seeing the rough terrain he sent a telegram to Asquith saying that ‘the country is much more difficult than I imagined’.

  Back home the architect of the Dardanelles scheme finally made his farewell speech to the House of Commons, resigning from Asquith’s coalition cabinet. Winston Churchill was off to join his regiment, as a major, in France. Kitchener was the only one of Churchill’s colleagues who formally visited him when he left the Admiralty, an act of kindness the younger man never forgot. But the age of Kitchener was ending in contradictions. His manly, moustachioed face concealed a love of fine china and furnishings, his decisive speech masked a havering temperament, and he simply could not make up his mind about what had to be done in Gallipoli. ‘K’ blew hot, ‘K’ blew cold; aides danced attendance and tried to decipher the icon’s intentions. Lloyd George had noted Kitchener’s ‘concealment of his limitations under a cloak of professional secrecy’; and John Buchan said that Kitchener was a poor administrator protected by ‘that air of mystery and taciturnity which the ordinary man loves to associate with a great soldier’. Herbert Asquith’s wife Margot dismissed him as ‘a great poster’, and the Prime Minister was already plotting to get rid of him; Sir William Robertson was rising to become CIGS in Kitchener’s place.

  Winter came hard and fast to Gallipoli on 27 November 1915. Twenty-four hours of heavy rain caused flash floods at Suvla that swept down ravines and through trenches and dugouts, drowning over 200 men and resurrecting the bones of the not-long dead. A southwest gale destroyed jetties, and beached a destroyer. Then the wind veered round to the north and temperatures plummeted for two days and nights; thousands of Anzacs experienced their first-ever snow and ice as severe exposure, frostbite and gangrene. Royal Fusilier sentries were found grey and frozen, dead at gelid parapets. Shivering men in stiffened blankets tried to thaw out over tiny flames, while the cruel potshot at enemies scavenging kindling in the open.

  On 7 December the British Government decided to evacuate Suvla and Anzac, but to stand firm in Helles at the toe of the peninsula. Anxieties about losing face before the Muslim world had to be squared with military realism. The next day Monro ordered General Birdwood to execute the plans that Colonel Aspinall-Oglander and Lieutenant Colonel Brudenell White had been carefully working up. After a quarter of a million casualties in eight months, it was time to cut and run.

  Complete secrecy now was vital: careless talk could cost thousands of lives. In cabinet in London on 24 November, a fearful Lord Curzon had painted the nightmare of a retreat being shelled to shambles, with awful political repercussions. The fact that Lord Milner and Lord Ribblesdale had loudly debated ‘Evacuation of the Peninsula’ in the House of Lords in October and November accidentally misdirected the Turks and Germans. They could not credit such stupidity and carelessness among intelligent people, so supposed the debate was just propaganda.

  In the days before Christmas 1915, life appeared to be going on as normal in daylight at Suvla and Anzac, with men disembarking, mules going up the line with stores, the occasional sniper-shot. In fact, the same teams of men were disembarking each day, and the panniers and boxes were empty. Every night, according to the plan, thousands of men were slipping away down to the beach and making their way to the boats, the sick and wounded first, then PoWs, then batches of infantry. There was fierce competition to be the last to leave; men who had been in the initial landings on 25 April won that risky honour. As the trenches emptied, the rearguard left behind rifles wedged in the parapet. They were rigged to self-fire by a wire or cord round the trigger, linked to a Heath Robinson mechanism of cans that dripped water or trickled sand till the lower can had enough weight to exert a finger’s pressure. Lone individuals tended their friends’ graves for the last time, moved from loophole to loophole, setting booby traps and mines and pulling barbed wire across communication trenches, then raced downhill with boots muffled by sacking. Evacuation was risky; the advance estimate of casualties ranged from 25,000 to more than 40,000. In the event, the British managed gradually to drain away in secret, until at 4 a.m. on Monday, 20 December 1915, 83,048 people had gone from Suvla and Anzac, with only a few minor injuries, most caused by alcohol.

  Incredibly, the miracle was repeated at Helles, starting on 28 December and ending early on 9 January 1916, two days after the Allies beat off a major Turkish attack. Through the hulk of the River Clyde and from other jetties, some 35,000 men, 4,000 animals, 110 guns and 1,000 tons of stores were all evacuated by 3.45 a.m. They tried to destroy everything they left: gun-spiking, sandbag-slashing, pouring away drink, spoiling flour and fuel. Men shot over 500 mules and horses on the beach (though the kinder ones freed their donkeys and left them with fodder for the Turks to find). Finally, they set off the charges under a mountain of oil-soaked kit: volcanic explosions mushroomed flames into the night sky, rained debris on the last boats leaving and started, too late, a terrific firework show of enemy shooting and shelling. When the Turks eventually put out the flames they still found more useful materiel than you could shake a stick at. It took two years to ship it all to Istanbul.

  German Intelligence found this magical coup de théâtre impossible, and promptly spread the plausible rumour that the British had bribed the Turks to let them slip away. Churchill himself wrote to his wife on 13 January 1916, ‘Perhaps a little money changed hands & rendered this scuttle of “imperishable memory” less dangerous than it looked.’ Noble-minded Henry Nevinson denied it: ‘That malignant depreciation of a most skilful enterprise was a libel both on the enemy and on our own officers and men. There was not a vestige of truth in it.’ There is no evidence of a deal. In 1916, however, the British offer of a £2 million bribe or douceur to the Ottoman Turks to release their besieged army, trapped in Iraq at Kut-al-Amara, is well attested. Anything is possible. In his Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18, Patrick Beesly tells what he himself calls the ‘somewhat unbelievable story’ that earlier in 1915 Admiral Reginald Hall had authorised two merchant agents in Turkey to spend up to £4 million to try and buy a passage through the Dardanelles from the Young Turks. If that bribe had worked, there would have been no Gallipoli campaign at all.

  * This is the climax of the famous 1981 Australian feature film Gallipoli, written by David Williamson and directed by Peter Weir. The film – which broadly suggests that decent Australians were sacrificed for English toffs – is mythic because, as L. A. Carlyon rightly observes, ‘Gallipoli has become Australia’s Homeric tale.’

  6

  Steel Trees

  The official historian, Brigadier General Sir James E. Edmonds, in A Short History of World War I writes: ‘Camouflage, already practised, was officially recognized under that name in June 1915, and by 1 January 1916 the service and the manufacture of material were definitely organized.’ In this statement, the former Royal Engineers’ director of works in France camouflages a lot of activity under bland bureaucratese.

  Major General Sir Robert Porter of the Second Army in France said that towards the end of 1915 one of his officers handed him a large file of papers with drawings and descriptions showing how troops, guns and camps could be concealed from the enemy. This packet came from the painter Solomon J. Solomon, last seen badgering The Times and doing experiments at Woolwich, who complained in his accompanying letter that he had been sitting on the steps of the War Office for six weeks trying to get an interview with someone about the importance of camouflage.

  Somehow Solomon’s papers got up to the Second Army commander, General Sir Herbert Plumer, a man who looked like David Low’s choleric cartoon figure Colonel Blimp, red-faced, white-moustached, pot-bellied. But Plumer knew cover was important from his experience of leading irregular troops in Matabeleland under Baden-Powell, fighting the Boers in South Africa. Plumer, known as ‘Old Plum-and-A
pple’ and respected as a conscientious general who looked after the lives of his soldiers, saw that Solomon was summoned to France to get concealment going. Early in December, the War Office arranged for Solomon to visit the front in France, to report on what French camoufleurs were up to and give an opinion on whether the British should be doing something similar.

  Solomon crossed the English Channel to the war zone on a crowded troopship, wearing an inflatable waistcoat under his fur coat lest he should be torpedoed. Near the harbour, he noticed the string of small craft supporting underwater steel netting that protected troopships against German submarines. In Boulogne he was met by a lieutenant from the Royal Engineers. The British Army had decided to put the new camoufleurs in with the sappers, on the grounds that if engineers built things, they could hide them as well. In his biography Kitchener: the Man behind the Legend, Philip Warner points out that camouflage and deception fall naturally into the province of the sappers not only because ‘they have materials for making replicas and deception targets, but because engineers look at landscapes with a more understanding eye than most other soldiers do’.

  The officer sent to meet Solomon, Lieutenant Malcolm Wingate of 459th Field Company, Royal Engineers, was the younger son of the Governor General of the Sudan and Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian Army, Sir Reginald Wingate. Malcolm Wingate went on to win the DSO, the MC and the Croix de Guerre before being killed in action near Arras on 21 March 1918, and Solomon always remembered his kindness. The painter was out of his depth in the military world; his artist’s temperament put him at odds with soldiers’ codes of rank, form and procedure, which he found meaningless and stupid. Wingate, however, made a gentlemanly escort for him, driving Solomon to GHQ at St Omer to dine with the engineer-in-chief, General Fowke, and the next day on to the French camouflage atelier at Amiens, the hub of invention and experimentation. Here artists were working out the right colours for disguising and screening and also making realistic dummies, including armoured trees for use as observation posts. Solomon hit it off famously with the French painters, some of whom had been, like him, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but he somehow also got the incorrect idea that camoufleurs were not under military control. Many of Solomon’s future frustrations and disappointments sprang from this misapprehension.