After reading this Lloyd George told Sir George Riddell that it was “on the whole part true.” He and Asquith had become convinced, in the words of Martin Gilbert, that “the imaginative, constructive, hard-working colleague of prewar years was being eaten up by personal ambition, and that his judgment had been impaired.” Winston learned of this and thought it incomprehensible. It was one thing to be slandered by Balfour, Bonar Law, and Lord Derby. That was politics. The Tories were only giving as good as they had got from him. But to be distrusted, suspected, and even condemned by men who had long been friends as well as colleagues was beyond his understanding. It was not, however, beyond Clementine’s. Others fawned on him and then cut him behind his back. She told him, and wrote him, that he was sometimes curt, insensitive, and inconsiderate; that he was too given to extravagant overstatement; that his manner was dictatorial and often insulting. It was not enough to be right. His assumption that he alone should stand at the center of events, she said, offended men whose own achievements entitled them to share the stage and disagree. He lacked patience and tolerance. He was often strident and scornful, and because this had alienated first-rate men, he was driven to seek the company of others, who, as she saw it, could do him no good and might bring harm. When they had left Admiralty House, Clementine thought she had seen the last of Lord Fisher. To her horror, Winston continued to correspond with him, sent him birthday greetings, and even invited him to Cromwell Road as an honored guest. There she could not contain herself. F. E. Smith heard her tell the old admiral: “Keep your hands off my husband. You have all but ruined him once. Leave him alone now.” Sometimes Churchill himself realized that he had fallen among companions who were, if not evil, at least unworthy. At one function he approached a fellow guest and said shakily: “Get me a stiff whisky and soda, and get it quick. I have just done something I hoped I would never have to do. I have shaken hands with de Robeck.”208
Max Aitken, who remained constant, later wrote of Churchill in this dark time: “he cared for the Empire profoundly, and he was honestly convinced that only by his advice and methods could it be saved. His ambition was in essence disinterested. He suffered tortures when he thought that lesser men were mismanaging the business.” Another friend described him as “a character depressed beyond the limits of description…. When the Government was deprived of his guidance he could see no hope anywhere.” He told Riddell: “I am finished. I am banished from the scene of action.” On July 5 he wrote Archie Sinclair: “I do not want office, but only war direction…. I am profoundly unsettled: & cannot use my gift. Of that last I have no doubts. I do not feel that my judgments have been falsified, or that the determined pursuance of my policy through all the necessary risks was wrong. I wd do it all again if the circumstances were repeated. But I am faced with the problem of living through days of 24 hours each: & averting my mind from the intricate business I had in hand—wh was my life.” In his anguish he sent his brother a long, tormented letter on July 15. “Is it not damnable,” he asked, “that I should be denied all real scope to serve this country, in this tremendous hour?” Asquith, he wrote, “reigns supine, sodden and supreme.” Then: “Tho’ my life is full of comfort, pleasure and prosperity I writhe hourly not to be able to get my teeth effectively into the Boche. But to plunge as a battalion commander unless ordered—into this mistaken welter—when a turn of the wheel may enable me to do 10,000 times as much would not be the path of patriotism or of sense…. Jack my dear I am learning to hate.”209
The western front haunted him—both its futility and the thought that there, at least, he might be contributing something, if only a mite, to the war effort. “I look back a gt deal to our Plugstreet days,” he wrote Sinclair later in the year, “& wish I cd have cut myself more adrift from London & its whirlpools and been more content with the simple animal life (& death) wh the trenches offered.” Forgetting his pledge to Kitchener, he declared: “When I am absolutely sure there is no prospect of regaining control or part of it here, I shall return again to that resort & refuge.” He was struck by a bitter irony. Volunteering to fight had been “a costly excursion” for him; in doing so he had sacrificed the power he now craved. “If I had stayed Chancellor of the Duchy and shut my mouth & drawn my salary, I shd today be one of the principal personages in direction of affairs…. Under a fair pretence of fine words, there is a gt déconsideration of all who wear uniform. Not one of these gallant MPs who has fought through the Somme at the head of their battalions, stands a chance agst less clever men who have stopped & chattered at home. This to me is the most curious phenomenon of all. It is quite inexplicable to me.”210
He seldom addressed the House now. C. P. Scott of the Guardian, calling on him in South Kensington, urged him to keep his flag flying in Parliament. Eventually, he predicted, recruits would rally to him. Winston shook his head. Except in Scott’s paper, his remarks were unreported. Indeed, they were largely unheard; few members came in to hear him—“what a contrast with the old days, when my rising was the signal for the House to fill!”211 He preferred to reach his public through the Sunday Pictorial. Writing an article took no longer than preparing a speech; every word was printed, and he was paid £250, about five shillings a word, for each piece. That was important. He needed every penny he could make. His brother, now fighting under Haig, had only his officer’s salary. Jennie, who had let her own house and moved into 41 Cromwell Road while Winston was in the trenches, contributed £40 a month, but with three adults, and five children in the nursery under a nanny, they had to run a tight ship. The Christmas holidays were another matter. Sunny invited them all to Blenheim—his political quarrels with Winston and Clementine had been long forgotten—and they welcomed the new year with an enormous bonfire. Winston tossed an effigy of the kaiser on the flames. Across the Channel, at the stroke of midnight, the Germans filled the sky with brilliant green flares. A British battery fired ten shells, paused, and fired seven more. It was 1917.
Clementine had seen the way to sever his knot of agony nearly a year earlier, while he was still in Flanders. Once the facts about the Dardanelles were made public, she believed, her husband would be absolved of all blame, for both the failure to force the strait and the subsequent tragedy on the peninsula. On January 11 she had written Winston: “If you ask the P.M. to publish the Dardanelles papers let me know what happens. If he refuses or delays I beg you not to do anything without telling me first & giving me time to give you my valuable (!) opinion on it…. If he dissents I fear you will have to wait. If you insisted on publication against his wish you would have against you all the forces of cohesion & stability including every member of the Cabinet. On the other hand when the papers are eventually published his refusal to do so earlier will have a very bad effect for him…. I am very anxious that you should not blunt this precious weapon prematurely.”212
That same day, Churchill had read in The Times, Carson had said in the House that the expedition against Turkey had been “admirably conceived.” From Lawrence Farm, Winston had written his wife: “Gradually people will see what I saw so vividly this time last year, but alas too late forever.” It was never too late to correct the record, she replied, and when he returned to Parliament as a civilian he found that in this case it was imperative. During a debate over conscription Asquith had proposed that Ireland be exempt. The Easter rebellion in Dublin the previous April had been followed by executions; feeling ran high there. Winston, disagreeing with the exclusion, said: “This is a time for trying to overcome difficulties and not for being discouraged or too readily deterred by them.” An Irish Nationalist shouted: “What about the Dardanelles?” It was a cry he was to hear again and again, in the House, in meeting halls, and on the streets. Clementine had been right. He had to clear his name. And only the truth—in the documents—would do it.213
On June 1, 1916, in what was surely one of the most ill-advised political decisions of his life, the prime minister agreed. The decision was reported in the next day’s Times. Bonar Law, spe
aking for Asquith, told the House that all papers relevant to the campaign would be assembled and laid before the country. Churchill wrote the prime minister the next morning, offering to help sort them out. Ian Hamilton’s reputation was also at stake, and although his hopes for exoneration were less realistic than Winston’s, he nonetheless cherished them. Three days later he and Churchill dined at the general’s home in Hyde Park Gardens. Afterward they reviewed Hamilton’s copies of twenty telegrams he had sent to the War Office from Gallipoli. Not one of them, Churchill realized, had been laid before the cabinet. This was powerful evidence of negligence on Kitchener’s part. There seemed to be no way he could explain it away. While they talked, a voice became audible on the street outside. Someone was shouting K of K’s name. As Hamilton told it in his memoirs: “We jumped up and Winston threw the window open. As he did so an apparition passed beneath us. I can use no other word to describe the strange looks of this newsvendor of wild and uncouth aspect. He had his bundle of newspaper under his arm and as we opened the window was crying out ‘Kitchener drowned! No survivors!’ ” The war minister, on a mission to Saint Petersburg, had been aboard H.M.S. Hampshire when she hit a mine. Hamilton wrote: “The fact that he should have vanished at the very moment Winston and I were making out an unanswerable case against him was one of those coups with which his career was crowded—he was not going to answer!”214
Kitchener having joined the Glorious Dead, the K of K myth was strengthened tenfold. Blaming him was impolitic now; the number of those who shared the Dardanelles guilt had been diminished by one. Asquith then had second thoughts about a full disclosure of the documents. Two weeks later Hankey wrote Churchill that the prime minister had resolved not to open the minutes of the War Council on the ground that ministers, fearing that their remarks might be “liable to publication,” would be hesitant to speak out in future meetings, and that “it would be very difficult to resist a pressure to publish proceedings in regard to other aspects of the war which might not be in the public interest.” Winston protested to Asquith that only the council’s archive could show, among other things, “the strong support of the naval project given by you, Grey, Kitchener & A. Balfour” and his own “disclaimer of responsibility if a military disaster occurred through inadequate troops not being sent in time,” which “was not an ordinary incident of discussion, but that I asked formally & at that time that my dissent shd be placed on record.” It was inconceivable to him that the prime minister could not appreciate “that this fact is vy important for a true judgement on the event.” Asquith, replying, repeated the argument that “the public interest” might suffer. To Lloyd George, who had succeeded Kitchener at the War Office, Winston bitterly remonstrated that the promise to release the minutes had been given to the House “after prolonged consideration & with full knowledge both of the facts and of the suitability of the documents for publication at this juncture.” Surely the country had a right to know the role played by the prime minister, “who alone cd have co-ordinated the naval and military action & given to the war-policy of the country the necessary guidance & leadership.” That, of course, was precisely what the prime minister did not want the country to know. His ruling stood. Winston wrote his brother: “The Govt have decided to repudiate their pledge to publish the D’lles papers. My dossier was more than they could face. There will be a row, but there are many good arguments in the public interest against publishing: and many more good arguments in the Government interest!”215
But Parliament was not so easily gulled. There was a tremendous row in the middle of July, when Asquith informed the House that “the presentation of these papers must be postponed,” that his commitment to release them “cannot for the moment… be fulfilled” because it would entail “omissions so numerous and so important that the papers actually presented would be incomplete and misleading.” Carson led the attack on this position, and he had great support; Bonar Law’s assurance had been given, not to Churchill, but to the entire House, and the MPs’ curiosity was immense. Lloyd George proposed that a secret committee of MPs investigate the Turkish campaign. Asquith accepted the compromise. He announced the appointment of a select commission, comprising eight distinguished Englishmen headed by Lord Cromer, “to inquire into the conduct of the Dardanelles operations.” This Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Dardanelles did not satisfy Churchill. He told the House that it was a poor substitute for opening the books, “as was originally intended and promised by the Prime Minister, in the name of the Government.” But at least it would not be a whitewash. Cromer couldn’t be bought. And Winston would be allowed to testify and submit evidence.216
Churchill in the summer of 1916
The commission’s hearings opened on August 17. Winston devoted five months to his defense. “I am hopeful that the truth may be published,” he wrote Seely. “But failure & tragedy are all that are left to divide.” It was hard to reconstruct the past, key evidence was unavailable to him, he had to skirt the issue of Kitchener’s incompetence, and since the commissioners included a field marshal, an admiral, and a captain, it was difficult to criticize the conduct of officers in the strait and on Gallipoli. In one of his appearances, on September 28, he declared that the facts proved five points: there had been full authority for the assault, a reasonable chance of success, “all possible care and forethought exercised” in preparing for the attacks, “vigour and determination” in the execution, and no compromise of military interests elsewhere. “Everything I hear about the D’lles Commission encourages me,” he wrote Sinclair at the end of November. “The interim report cannot now be long delayed and I have good hopes that there will be a fair judgement. I sh’d like to have it out as soon as possible. But the days slip away.”217
They were slipping away from Asquith, too. Less than a week later he was maneuvered into resigning, undone by Lloyd George and widespread Tory dissatisfaction with his conduct of affairs. George had finally made it. On December 7, 1916, he “set out,” in Winston’s words, “upon his march as High Constable of the British Empire,” with Balfour moving from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office and Bonar Law becoming chancellor of the Exchequer, leader of the House, and the government’s second in command. Since most of the Liberal ministers, offended by George’s coup, had resigned with Asquith, the old Welsh radical’s government was dominated by Conservatives. There was no place in it for Churchill. He had assumed there would be. But he was still widely regarded as a discredited adventurer. The World, a weekly journal which carried a popular column on politics, had commented on November 14: “Mr Churchill, in his frantic effort to reinstate himself in public esteem, is enlisting the support of some powerful newspaper interest…. But if a serious attempt is being made to foist Winston once more on the British public the matter would assume a different aspect…. Winston Churchill is responsible for the opéra bouffe Antwerp expedition which made the British nation ridiculous in the eyes of the world…. He was responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles expedition which ranks with Walcheren as one of the greatest military disasters of our time.”* There was still a spark of defiance in Lloyd George. He toyed with the idea of appointing Churchill and then bent to the storm. In his memoirs he recalled asking Bonar Law, “Is he more dangerous for you than when he is against you?” Law answered: “I would rather have him against us every time.” A colleague had drawn up a list of possible ministers. Churchill was not on it. George wrote in the margin: “? Air Winston.” But there was still no air ministry and he did not create one. The last blow to Churchill’s chances of office came on December 7, when four members of the new cabinet—Lord Curzon, Lord Robert Cecil, Austen Chamberlain, and Walter Long—told Lloyd George that they would serve only on the condition that Churchill be excluded.218
The Lloyd George Winston had once known would have bridled at a Tory veto. He didn’t now, but at the time Churchill knew of neither the challenge nor the submission to it. Discussing the political future with Scott of the Guardian, he had said, according to S
cott’s account, that “Lloyd George, ‘with all his faults,’ was the only possible alternative Prime Minister. I asked if in case George formed a ministry he could count on being included. He said he thought so—that George would desire it and that it would be in his interest.” In fact, he believed he would be offered a choice of posts. All things considered, he rather preferred a return to the Admiralty. The brutal fact that he would have nothing was revealed to him after a dinner in F. E. Smith’s Belgravia house. The new prime minister was there; the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the makeup of the new government. Incredibly, Lloyd George had suggested that Churchill be invited. Winston naturally took this to mean that he would be offered a seat on the Treasury Bench. Early in the conversation the guest of honor was summoned to Buckingham Palace. He asked Max Aitken to join him for the taxi ride. In the cab, George said that there would be no office for Winston and, Aitken later wrote, “asked me to convey a hint of this on my return to the party…. He thought Churchill too confident of high office in the new regime. It would be better if Churchill were dashed a bit at first.” Back at the table Aitken found the unsuspecting Winston in a jovial mood. Choosing his words carefully, Aitken said: “The new Government will be very well disposed towards you. All your friends will be there. You will have a great field of common action with them.” Aitken’s account continues: “Something in the very restraint of my language carried conviction to Churchill’s mind. He suddenly felt he had been duped by his invitation to the dinner, and he blazed: ‘Smith, this man knows that I am not to be included in the new Government.’ ” According to Aitken, an “almost ludicrous” scene followed: “Churchill changed from complete optimism to violent anger and depression. He abused me most violently, and when I got tired of it and replied in kind he picked up his hat and coat and, without even putting them on, dashed into the street. Smith ran out after him and tried to calm him, but in vain.” In the morning Winston telephoned to apologize. “It was really quite unnecessary on his part,” Aitken wrote. “It is impossible to feel hurt at anything Churchill says in this vein, for he is always so willing to take as good as he gives, and makes no complaint about the counter-blow.” Aitken himself was feeling resentful, but for another reason. He, too, had hoped for office. Instead, the new prime minister offered him a peerage. He reluctantly agreed. Thus he became—and spent the rest of his life regretting it—Lord Beaverbrook.219
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