In a speech at Bedford he identified his primary objective: the production of “masses of guns, mountains of shells, clouds of airplanes.” Always the total warrior, he was indignant when told that the International Red Cross had proposed outlawing poison gas and that the French were sympathetic. He sharply pointed out that it was after all the Germans who had introduced gas to the battlefield, at Ypres in April 1915. To Louis Loucheur, France’s under secretary of state for munitions, he wrote: “Apparently France is strongly in favour of our offering to give up this form of warfare, or at any rate of accepting a German offer. I do not believe this is to our advantage…. Anyhow I would not trust the German word.” He predicted that the enemy would let the Allies “fall into desuetude” and then break the agreement. Far from banning it, he favored “the greatest possible development of gas-warfare, and of the fullest utilisation of the winds, which favour us so much more than the enemy.” His view prevailed, and he doubled the British output of gas shells; by 1918 one out of every three shells fired by Haig’s artillerymen contained gas. The Red Cross protested that it was inhumane. So, Winston replied, was the rest of the war. No principle was exempt from sacrifice. The Allied Aeroplane Works was strikebound. Churchill simply took over its factories in the name of the government and ignored The Times’s comment that there was “no precedent for such a measure.” Munitions workers walked out in Coventry, Manchester, and Birmingham. Lloyd George temporized. Christopher Addison, the previous munitions minister, was among those who breakfasted with Winston to discuss the crisis, and he noted in his diary that Churchill came “out hotfoot against the strikers, his prescription being a simple one, viz., that their exemptions should be withdrawn and that they should be called up for military service. There was considerable demur, with which I agreed, to using the Military Service Act as an agent in an industrial dispute.” But when 300,000 munitions workers threatened to strike in Leeds, Winston persuaded the prime minister to threaten them with conscription. The warning worked, though British labor, which has a long memory and had not forgotten Tonypandy, put another black mark against his name.230
It was Churchill’s energy, efficiency, and imagination which had brought him back to office, and with Eddie Marsh at his elbow, he invigorated a ministry which until now had been grim and dull. Presently countless new projects were flourishing under his direction, and he kept himself informed about all of them by ordering that all reports submitted to him must be “on a single sheet of paper.” During his first eight months in the Metropole he visited France four times, questioning generals on their munitions needs. Often he slept in his office. This, he wrote a friend, “has many conveniences from the point of view of getting work done. It enables me to work up to dinner, and to begin with shorthand assistance as early as I choose in the morning.” He invested his tasks with drama and color. He was, he boasted, “the Nitrate King.” Writing in the Sunday Pictorial while still a back-bencher, he had argued that technological innovations could be used as “a substitute for men.” Now he ordered a thousand warplanes, assigned a task force of engineers to improve trench mortars, and, in his spare time, sketched extraordinary Leonardesque machines of war. Most were absurd. Two weren’t: prototypes of the amphibious landing craft and man-made “Mulberry” moorings of World War II. As the father of the tank he gave it priority.* This, he said, was the surest way to “beat the trench,” to “augment the power of the human hand and shield the sacred chalice of human life.” Its present role was “miniature and experimental,” he wrote, but “the resources are available, the knowledge is available, the result is certain: nothing is lacking except the will.” On the afternoon of January 3, 1916, one of his darker days at Ploegsteert, he had been summoned to Haig’s GHQ, told that the Operations Division of the War Office wanted to explore his concept of a “caterpillar,” and asked “who to apply to in England about them.” Churchill, furious, had written Clementine that evening: “This after 9 months of actual manufacture and committees unending. God, for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.” He had the authority and the staff now, and he set two goals: 4,459 tanks by the spring of 1919 and twice that by the following September. Not everyone approved. The military hierarchy was skeptical. Haig in particular took a jaundiced view of Churchill’s emphasis on armor. “This is done,” he complained in his diary, “without any consideration of the manpower situation and the crews likely to be available to put into them.” But the grumbling in GHQ was predictable. The relationship between the commander in chief and the munitions minister had become dissonant even before Churchill took office, borne only because neither could survive without the other. Even Haig could not ignore Winston’s accomplishments. In another diary entry he wrote warily: “For the time being he is most friendly and is doing all he can to help the Army. He has certainly improved the output of the munitions factories very greatly, and is full of energy in trying to release men for the Army, and replace them by substitutes.” The key phrase, however, is “for the time being.” In the long run, Haig knew, he could expect nothing but trouble from Winston. The new minister had, in fact, become his savage critic.231
Churchill had joined the cabinet too late, and with too small a power base, to influence Haig’s Flanders offensive of 1917. He had known it was coming. On May 10, still a political outcast, he had begged the House, in secret session, not to permit “fresh, bloody and disastrous adventures” on the western front. Parliament was unresponsive. Thus the stage was set for the terrible, heartbreaking struggle known to historians as the third battle of Ypres and to the men who fought there as the battle of Passchendaele, Passchendaele being the Belgian crossroads village which the BEF hoped to reach in its first lunge. By any name it was Haig’s masterpiece and should never be forgotten. He was convinced that he could break through the German wire, take the ridges overlooking the British position, and then recapture the vital Channel ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Antwerp. On May 1 he wrote in his diary: “Success seems reasonably possible. It will give valuable results on land and sea. If full measure of success is not gained, we shall be attacking the enemy on a front where he cannot refuse to fight, and our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to.”232
Sir Douglas Haig
“Our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to.” That syntactical atrocity sums up the scripture of attrition. Its high priest was Haig’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, a tall, morose professional soldier who had been commandant of the Staff College in 1914. J. F. C. Fuller, who later became a tank commander, was one of his students there. Fuller recalled afterward that “the only thing I distinctly remember his saying was, ‘In the next war we must be prepared for very heavy casualties.’ His theory of war was to mass every available man, horse, and gun on a single battlefield, and… wear down the enemy until his last reserves were exhausted, and then annihilate him.” In one of those small collapses of prewar integrity which increased as the desperate war wore on, Jellicoe was persuaded to lie to Lloyd George, solemnly predicting: “If the Army cannot get the Belgian ports, the Navy cannot hold the channel and the war is as good as lost.” Brigadier General John Charteris, Haig’s chief of intelligence and a co-conspirator, later wrote: “No one really believed this amazing view, but it had sufficient weight to make the Cabinet agree to our attack.”233
The balloon went up, as they said then, on July 31. Nine days earlier Churchill, newly appointed and still facing his by-election in Dundee, had written the prime minister of his apprehensions over any “renewed offensive in the west” and begged him to “limit the consequences” of any drive which had already been approved. This merely justified the Tories’ fears. They saw it as proof that he had no intention of confining himself to his ministry. Hankey, who came to tea at Lullenden, noted in his diary: “Lloyd George had given him [Churchill] my War Policy report & he was already well up in the whole situation and knew exactly what our military plans were, which I thought quite wrong.” Soon Winston was taking an
active interest in the Admiralty and the War Office, transferring some of Haig’s howitzers to the Russian front, advocating anti-submarine techniques, and urging that heavy battleship guns be moved ashore. The secretary for war protested and the first lord threatened to resign. Lloyd George soothed their ruffled feelings and reminded Winston that he was not a member of the War Cabinet. Churchill, unchastened, crossed to Flanders for a firsthand look at such tiny villages as Bullecourt and Messines, where so much British blood had been spilled. One of Haig’s generals barred him from the trenches. Haig himself was more cordial—“quite genial and cracked several jokes,” Marsh wrote—but inflexible about his objectives. That evening the commander in chief observed in his diary that Churchill “means to do his utmost to provide the army with all it requires, but at the same time he can hardly stop meddling in the larger questions of strategy and tactics; for the solution of the latter he has no real training, and his agile mind only makes him a danger because he can persuade Lloyd George to adopt and carry out the most idiotic policy.”234
George later wished that had been true. Actually, the prime minister had been among those gulled by the high command. Marsh had noted that “the tone of GHQ is tremendously optimistic.” The servile press served as GHQ’s megaphone. Punch was running cartoons of cringing Germans whimpering “Kamerad!” to insouciant Tommies. The Spectator reported: “Our Staff work in the field seems to be irreproachable…. The infantry, whose losses are said to be comparatively light, march behind the moving curtain of shells and bless the gunners as they go.” German newspapers were carrying accurate accounts of the fighting, but The Times headlined a summary of them ENEMY LIES EXPOSED: What the Germans Are Told—Falsification of Battle News—The Lie as a Buttress of Morale. Communiqués from across the Channel reported that the enemy was “visibly cracking,” that patrols found enemy troops “preparing for emergencies,” and that there were signs which could be interpreted as being “preliminary to withdrawal.” The War Cabinet questioned none of this. “It naturally pleased Haig,” Lloyd George would bitterly recall, “to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little tidbits of ‘intelligence’ about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties, and diminishing German morale served up to him…. He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little community reeked of that sycophantic optimism which is the curse of autocratic power…. As for General Kiggell, the Chief of Staff, he had the air of a silent craftsman, whose plans, worked out by his art in the seclusion of his workshop, were turning out well and proceeding inexorably without a hitch to the destined end.”235
The reality was horrible beyond imagining. Here, as on every front in the war, including Gallipoli, defensive strengths had spiked the attackers’ guns, sheathed their bayonets, broken their swords, and left the once proud war-horse to forage behind the lines, entangling communications. The British infantry never had a chance. Haig’s long preliminary bombardment had deprived them of surprise and, at the same time, destroyed the Flemish drainage system. The water, having nowhere else to go, flooded the trenches, and to make the field soggier, the rains were among the worst in thirty years. After three and a half months in this dismal sinkhole, the British army had barely taken Passchendaele village. The filthy, bleeding, battered men were exhausted. Many, burdened by their heavy packs, fell into brimming shell holes and drowned. In London the ambulance trains unloaded at night, smuggling casualties home out of consideration for civilian morale. Siegfried Sassoon wrote of those who fought on: “Shoulder by aching shoulder, side by side / They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.”
British casualties were 448,614. In Flanders fields the poppies grew between the crosses, row on uncompromising row, that marked more than 150,000 fresh British graves. The offensive had gained less than six miles of wasteland. Yet the red-tabbed generals of the high command were exultant. Against all evidence, Charteris reported that the German losses had been enormous. They congratulated one another, pinned new decorations on one another’s tunics, and agreed that it would all have been over long ago if only the politicians had left the fighting to the professionals. Robertson, whose job it was to deal with the government, actually held it in contempt. He wrote Haig that Lloyd George “is a real bad ’un. The other members of the War Cabinet seem afraid of him. Milner is a tired, dyspeptic old man. Curzon is a gas-bag. Bonar Law equals Bonar Law.” Churchill, not being a member of the War Cabinet, wasn’t even mentioned. Yet he was the one public figure who saw precisely what was happening. Gaining access to the casualty lists, he asked: “If we lose three or four times as many officers and nearly twice as many men in our attack as the enemy in his defense, how are we wearing him down?” Haig insisted that, whatever the result, he had saved the French army by distracting the enemy. This, as Churchill later pointed out, was mythical: “The French Army was no doubt saving its strength as much as possible, but the casualty tables show that during 1917 they inflicted nearly as many losses on the Germans as did our own troops.” He continued: “Accusing as I do without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done? And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai, ‘This could have been done.’ ” At Cambrai, launched as the Passchendaele drive petered out, 381 of Churchill’s tanks, lurching forward without an artillery bombardment, broke through the enemy defenses on a six-mile front, gained over forty-two square miles, and captured ten thousand Germans at a cost of fifteen hundred British soldiers. “This in many variants, this in larger and better forms,” he wrote, “ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.”236
To see for himself, he crossed the Channel and visited a sector in which, after a tank thrust, the enemy position had been overrun by British infantry. In his report to Lloyd George he wrote that he “went on up to the extreme high watermark of the attack.” The German trench was deep, defended by a belt of wire nearly a hundred yards broad. “This wire was practically uncut and had only little passages through it, all presumably swept by machine guns. Yet the troops walked over these terrific obstacles, without the wire being cut, with very little loss, killed many Germans, took thousands of prisoners and hundreds of machine guns.” The same was true of the enemy’s second trench line, which was “almost as strong and more deceptive.” Farther on, however, Germans in “just a few little pits and holes” had inflicted heavy losses on the British infantry. Here, he concluded, “the troops had got beyond the support of the Tanks, and the bare open ground gave no shelter.” He felt vindicated. He had, he believed, found the way to beat the trench.237
Lloyd George was uncomforted. He knew now that the Flanders campaign had been a criminal blunder. At the end of 1916 he had said gloomily: “We are going to lose this war.” Nearly a year had passed, and the prospect now was far bleaker. Yet it was part of his tragedy, and England’s, that he himself had become a strut in the web of deceit. He wrote: “The people are not ready to pay any heed to good counsel. They still cherish illusions of a complete victory.” And he encouraged them. He felt that the mood of the country left him no alternative. Here, again, British journalists bore much of the blame. In October, when Haig lost nearly twenty-six thousand men in taking an insignificant ridge, Lloyd George had bitterly called it “still another smashing triumph a few hundred yards ahead.” But the Times correspondent had described it as “the most important British victory of the war” and applauded the commander in chief’s “calm, unhurried persistence” which compelled “the admiration of the world” because “with each successive stride the arrangements grow more exact, the results more certain, the losses lighter.” Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle interviewed a German prisoner, “a professor,” who told him: “It will not be long before Germany makes a great bid
for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By mid-winter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine; Russia will remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany will get back some of her colonies.” In the climate of public opinion created by such dispatches, Lloyd George did not dare break openly with his high command. Instead, he promoted Haig to field marshal and doggedly said, in an impromptu speech at Birkenhead: “We shall just win.” The irrepressible Nation inquired: “Win What?”238
After the Germans’ titanic attempt to take Verdun in 1916, this had become a quiet theater for the kaiser’s assault troops. Their communiqués routinely reported “Im Westen nichts Neues”—“All quiet on the western front.” Elsewhere their fighting men had provided plenty of news, however, nearly all of it good for them. Blessed with interior lines, they could strike anywhere by rescheduling trains, and as the deadlock continued in the west they crushed a weak eastern ally each autumn, thus releasing more troops for Belgium and France. In 1914 they mauled the Russians in East Prussia at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, where Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff made their reputations. In 1915, after de Robeck’s failure to force the Dardanelles, Bulgaria joined them to knock Serbia out of the war. In 1916 Rumania, encouraged by temporary Russian gains and hungry for land, threw in its lot with the Allies. The result was a fiasco. Rumania had doubled its army over the preceding two years, but was strategically isolated, and its officer corps danced in Bucharest while spies blew up a dump of nine million shells outside the city and a dozen enemy divisions, drawn from the western front, swarmed up the Carpathians. Just before winter snows sealed the passes the Germans broke through and Rumania quit. In 1917, with a succession of revolutionary governments sidestepping to the left in Russia, it was Italy’s turn. Germany sent a phalanx of picked divisions, with young Lieutenant Erwin Rommel among them, to reinforce Austria’s Caporetto sector in Italy. On October 24, two weeks before Passchendaele fell, they attacked out of the Julian Alps in a thick fog. In twelve hours General Luigi Cardona’s defenders were on the run. By November terrified Venetians were hiding the bronze horses of Saint Mark’s and preparing to flee.
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