by Mark Rowe
This part of the British army, at least, sounded beaten; it did not sound like an army at all. After the Germans mauled half of the BEF at Le Cateau, the BEF made sure to retreat until they had outrun the Germans. From Le Cateau on August 24, the RFC moved airfields ten times in the next 11 days. Stevens walked 20 miles with the convoy as far as La Fere, where he had his machine repaired again. Stranded again, he went a dozen miles more, to Laon, where - maybe because he had in ignorance strayed away from the rest of the BEF -gendarmes held him for two days until an English officer freed him. His war for the time being was over.
V
In his great novel August 1914 Alexander Solzhenitsyn sends his main character, Colonel Vorotyntsev, into and around the battlefields of the Masurian Lakes to show how badly the brave and faithful Russian soldiers were led, so that the more agile Germans first exhausted them, then surrounded them - as the Germans in the west would have done to the British, given more of a chance. As Montgomery said, it was a ‘wise decision’ of Sir John French’s to retreat from Mons (though would it not have been even wiser not to have gone there in the first place?). In the climax to the book, Vorotyntsev tells his story to the commander in chief, the czar’s uncle, Grand-Duke Nicholas, in front of the failed and guilty headquarters staff, with the hope that the truth will lead to change for the better. Vorotyntsev fails; he is asking too much for the system to reform itself. Solzhenitysn and his readers knew well what followed; the fall of the czar, and a much worse, soviet, tyranny. Yet would a real, British Vorotyntsev have done any better? The nearest equivalent - a piece of journalism from a roving reporter, not a staff officer - suggests not.
Though a necessary character as a thread through the novel, Vorotyntsev is believable, as a man with permission to rush from battlefield to commander’s table. Journalists, from neutral countries, or allies, or even following their own troops, were not welcome on any battlefield. This was, partly, for their own good. In any war, before and since, strangers or foreigners asking questions were suspect. Reporters could easily find themselves under arrest, as spies. The British authorities, as much as their French hosts, did not want journalists finding out things for themselves, in case what they printed gave the enemy clues, or encouragement. No news was good news. In mid-August The Times noted that they had heard very little from Russia since its mobilisation began in July 30; it had to suppose that the ‘grim silence of Russia means much’. The silence was ignorance; and the ignorance a sign of incompetence. In Solzhenitysn’s novel and in reality Russian officials said little about the battle of Masurian Lakes, the crushing of their invasion of East Prussia, and instead talked up a lesser, flawed, victory over the hardly more competent Austrians.
Hence The Times’ news of a ‘broken’ and ‘beaten’ British army in one of their special Sunday editions on August 30 was so shocking, both unexpected and as an outbreak of truth; an unwelcome shock, to the Liberal government. In the House of Commons the day after, Asquith commended the ‘patriotic readiness of the whole of the press from the beginning of the war’, with the ‘very regrettable exception’ of the Times on an ‘alleged disaster’ to the British army. By the formal standards of the day, the prime minister was condemning The Times. What proved to be the single piece of news nearest the truth - the setback to an army that everyone, then and since, took for granted as the best that ever left Britain - was deplored, for rocking the boat.
Why then had the censor, the Unionist politician F E Smith, allowed the article - and, bizarrely, even added a few lines, to urge readers to join the army? With more honesty, Asquith did admit that the country was ‘entitled to more prompt and efficient information’ from the war. With that line he might have been - again, without rocking the boat - putting pressure on the army to tell the people (including the politicians) what was going on. In his war memoir Lloyd George recalled how the cabinet at this time had no news of the BEF for days, and was ‘bewildered by the scrappy and incoherent reports given to it each morning by Kitchener’.
If the most junior Guards officers, like Oliver Lyttleton, felt so opposed to ‘outsiders’ joining them, we can imagine how the army would resent journalists scratching around for news. Newspapers, so the generals and politicians liked to think, ought to know their place like everyone else - for newspapers did have a place: printing what rulers chose to tell them. Thus for example, the day before The Times made its stink, Lady French, the wife of the BEF commander, sent an appeal to the newspaper, “for knitted socks &c for our troops. It is indeed a crying need as the War Office allowance is only three pairs for each man and a long day’s march will wear socks into holes.” Local newspapers widely picked this up from The Times. Similarly, a few days later in Staffordshire newspapers Lord Dartmouth appealed for ‘comforts’ for the troops: “Socks, Coloured Pocket Handkerchiefs, Shirt Collar Studs, Towels, Soap, Tooth Brushes, Pipes, Tobacco, and later on Woollen Helmets and Warm Underclothing.” As that list suggested, the authorities by now were expecting the war to run into winter. As with the families left behind by the soldiers, it was taken for granted that charity (collected by a small committee of ladies, Dartmouth suggested) would make good hardships. Yet was it not asking too much of the state, to give enough socks? The state did give a soldier a rifle and a uniform (a reservist had his old uniform which, hopefully, he had not grown out of). Did the War Office not know that a soldier might march for days?
Who was responsible? The administrators, or the ministers of either main political party, in and out of office every few years? The king and his family? Because King George V and his relatives, even the more German-sounding ones, such as Louis Battenberg, took particular interest in the military, because it was one of the few jobs fit for them, and the army was the ultimate institution that kept a monarch in power (or not, as the German kaiser and Russian czar would soon find out). Did the politicians keep the army so short of money, that it could not afford more socks, or was there a lack of sympathy, a sense that three pairs of socks were plenty for the common man? As for the officers, a sword had long been no good as a weapon or as protection against bullets; so why carry one? These small things mattered on the retreat, as men’s feet ached and every unnecessary load rankled. Such institutional shortcomings - being set in their ways, always preparing for the war they had last fought, or not preparing at all because a quiet life was easier - were hardly only Britain’s, though only Britain had the cheek to call itself ‘great’. If you rocked the boat by asking questions, of any institution, you rocked them all.
VI
That was why so many people did not like Winston Churchill. He was a boat-rocker. A grandson of a Duke of Marlborough, the son of the Unionist politician Lord Randolph Churchill, he was in rather too much of a hurry, too obviously ambitious, for some tastes. He made a name for himself, first, in the army and as a war correspondent, and then in his father’s footsteps in parliament - only to rather spoil it, by switching from the Unionists to the Liberals. Churchill had a way of getting on by ‘being Winston’, energetic and sure of himself, not by attracting a following - which was as well, judging by the diary of Richard Holt, the businessman turned Liberal MP. Holt seldom made comments on politicians; he made an exception for Churchill, who clearly riled him. “I don’t like the clever Home Secretary Winston Churchill. He has a bad face,” Holt wrote in May 1911. To Holt, someone ‘clever’ seemed suspect, for in July 1911 he called F E Smith ‘clever’, ‘too clever, and unprincipled; a nice pair with his friend Churchill’. Soon after, Churchill switched to the Admiralty, and nettled more people; or the same people, in new ways. Ben Tillett in speeches in 1914 singled out Churchill as an imperialist, for wanting to build more battleships while families had to do without food or chairs.
Why did Churchill get up the noses of such different people, without, it seemed, even trying? Neither Holt nor anyone else might mind a clever person; it was what Churchill did, or tried to do, that annoyed people, whether he was proved wrong or rig
ht. By August 1914, not quite 40, he was one of the leading, rising Liberal politicians; much of the dislike he provoked may have been envy. Some would have liked his job, or would have been glad to see him out of his job.
VII
The trouble for Churchill by later August 1914 was that his job - any job, except the very top job in British politics - was not enough for him. The British army reached France safely; the German navy was not showing fight. The Admiralty warned the home fleets on August 12 to beware that the ‘extraordinary silence and inertia of enemy’ might be hiding an attempt at invasion; as days passed, the silence looked simply like inertia.
G C Harper, the cadet, started the war well, on the cruiser HMS Endymion; on August 26 the captain raised him to midshipman, and Harper proudly added home-made patches of rank to his uniform. On August 31 he reviewed the month of patrolling. Like many on land and at sea, he always felt tired: “Every third day you get a day’s work of 24 hours with three hours sleep, ie from midnight to midnight, sleeping from four to seven in the morning. But the other two days you can get seven hours with good luck.” After four weeks of the same breakfast - ‘porridge, brown sugar, kippers, bacon and eggs, uneatable butter, bread and marmalade’ - he was sick of it, though he said he did not want to grumble (or grumbling to himself in his diary made him feel better). Otherwise, the sheer routine, domestic nature of his diary - and as he admitted, no real hardship - suggested he was having an uneventful time:
The main trouble is that you cannot get enough water either to drink, wash in or wash your clothes. I am speaking of the gun room of course. We have been at dinner without anything to drink. We often could not get a bath in the mornings; it was the utmost luxury to get a third of a can of warm water to bathe or wash in. It was very difficult to get people to wash clothes but I must say they did their best in spite of the lack of water and no drying arrangements. Of course starching and ironing was unknown. My collars are still holding out but when our collars run out we wear them soft ... as to food they make the great mistake of trying to keep up appearances and we have proper meals in style instead of giving us plenty of plain food. A typical dinner consists of one small fish, a perfectly microscopic helping of beef and potatoes and one sardine (as savoury). Perhaps some beastly dried fruit takes the place of the sardine and on a great occasion a small cup of nasty coffee follows. Now see how much more satisfactory dinner would be if it was an unlimited supply of good bread, eatable butter and jam with plenty of good coffee. Yet that would not be a proper dinner you see with the regulation courses. The butter is generally uneatably disgusting, there is no milk but the rest of the food (what there is of it) is good.
The navy did have a small battle, off Heligoland, in late August. It gave Oliver Lyttleton, still guarding the coast at Dovercourt on the north tip of Essex, something to write home to his mother about. It made a change from his own news (‘still no commission!’), his friends (‘Bobbety insists upon making the most infernal row on a mouth organ which is rather distracting’) and the war news from France (‘isn’t it awful!’). Lyttleton and his fellows visited the destroyers from the battle at Harwich, ‘the most thrilling thing I have ever done’. Lyttleton and friends went on the Laertes, ‘or rather were dragged on board’, by ‘a red bearded young naval officer’. He showed the shell holes on the ship, ‘one which went through three cabins and then burst’. British destroyers had attacked German destroyers to bring out the German cruisers, but for a while the British destroyers had to fight the bigger German cruisers. A ‘mouldy’ (a torpedo) disabled the Laertes; the disabled ship tried to hitch a hawser to another destroyer, the Laurel, but it broke. Men on the Laurel cheered; the naval officer telling the story to Lyttelton had shaken his fist at them and cursed. Just as German battle cruisers came out of the mist, and it seemed that the Laertes had a minute before destruction, “boom whroo-oo-oo zip the Crecy let off a broadside and one funnel was all that was left on the cruiser’s deck. ‘God I cried like a child,’” the naval story-teller said, “and upon my word he nearly wept again at the mere description of it,” Lyttleton added.
Otherwise, the threats to the navy were unglamorous: the floating mine and the submarine. An early loss was the Amphion, blown up in the North Sea by a mine, a German tactic Lady Goonie Churchill deplored in a letter to her husband Jack as ‘a low, base game’. The most junior of the Amphion’s four wireless operators, William Cash, at home on leave a few days later in Walsall, told the Wolverhampton daily paper the Express & Star on August 15: “I had been off duty for two hours and was asleep on the mess desk at the time the explosion occurred.” The reporter may have tidied his English. “The uproar was terrific and the first thing I remember was that I was going up in the air.” That Cash came out without a mark appeared miraculous, the reporter said to him. Cash laughed, as if he realised that civilians hadn’t a clue about war and what he had been through. “The first thing I did was to get out,” he said. That was obvious. What was of interest was the way that military drill had taken hold of the men, as they understood that a panic to save yourself would only make it worse for everyone. “Everyone was right quiet and the people behaved just as though they were at exercise in harbour. There was no rushing about and we were transferred to other boats in a few minutes.” Also foreshadowing what men home from the BEF would say soon, Cash said that he already felt anxious to go back: “We are all eagerly awaiting the chance to go back to have a pot.” Churchill, too, wanted a pot at the Germans.
Chapter 22
An outing to Ostend
.... and another thing that appealed to us was that we would be travelling overseas and would be able to see what the other part of the world was like.
A Fortunate Life, Albert Facey (1981)
I
After it was all over, the expedition by Royal Marines to Ostend made excellent photos in The Graphic of September 5; the port and Belgian seaside resort hardly looked as if it were at war. It helped that readers who had journeyed to the Continent had quite likely passed through Ostend - and from there taken the train to more historic and beautiful places than the rather plain towns in northern France that the BEF was having to march forward and back through. One photo showed the Marines marching past the ‘Royal Yacht Hotel’. Ostend had that in-between feel - not England but not quite Belgium either - that, you suspect, satisfied neither the locals nor visitors.
Churchill had sent the Marines there, ‘for reasons which seemed sufficient to the Government and the military authorities’, he had told the House of Commons airily. Another picture showed Marines following the horse-drawn coffins of policemen, killed defending the town against German cavalry raiders. Evidently the war had come as far as this corner of Belgium, 60 miles from England. Yet the war was not raging enough to keep a large crowd, mainly of men, from the funeral; and clearly the Marines could spare men for the ceremony. The very fact that the newspapers had pictures suggested this was not the front line; or did the British have a reason for allowing publicity?
II
George Aston had had a busier August 1914 than many. He began the month as the second commandant at the Royal Marines barracks at Eastney, along the prom from Portsmouth. He was in his early 50s; the Marines had been his life. He had gone into staff-work at the Admiralty, and written some naval books. On Sunday August 2, after helping the called-up Marines reservists find uniforms that fitted, a telegram ordered him to the Admiralty the next morning. He left from the nearest station, Fratton, at 8.20pm and arrived at London Waterloo late, finding excited crowds cheering naval reservists. He checked in at the Grand Hotel. Next day he found himself a member of a special committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to look into ‘oversea attack’ and moving and escorting British troops by sea. Fourteen-hour days followed, of conferences that wore him out, ‘but intensely interesting’.
At 6.30pm on Tuesday August 25, he was asked whether he had any uniform, because he had to command a Royal Marine
brigade off Ostend, at once. Aston said that he had a brigadier-general’s uniform, at his tailor’s. He left at once, to collect it; then went to the home of a friend, Lady Tryous, to put it on. He had moved out of the hotel, to be a guest of George Tryous. He returned to the Admiralty, for ‘a hasty meal in my room and instructions from First Lord followed by official orders in writing signed by secretary at 9.20pm’. Aston caught the 10pm train from London Victoria for Chatham, to meet his new command. Aston was qualified, available, dressed for the part, and away within three and a half hours. But why Ostend? Why then? And why the hurry?
This was Churchill’s way, with what forces he had under his control, of taking part in the land battle. News from France was ‘disappointing’, as he put it in an Admiralty message on August 24. He warned that the Germans might ‘control Calais and the French coast’. In fairness, this was Royal Navy business. Ostend sounded even more at risk, judging from a Daily Mail reporter, who returned to England from the port on August 25 and rang the Admiralty with news at 8.30pm. (The press had its uses.)
The correspondent had left Ostend that day, as German troops were approaching. Ostend’s garrison of 4000 had gone along the coast to Antwerp the previous Friday, August 21, leaving only 200 gendarmes. They had seen off the 300 German cavalrymen. “The gendarmes suffered about 45 casualties and having defended the honour of the town now intend to surrender when larger forces of Germans arrive,” the Admiralty noted from the Mail reporter. Whether you thought the Belgians ought to try rather harder, or that the outnumbered defenders had done all they could, this did not sound promising territory to enter. “First Lord informed who decided to make no change to orders.” Churchill had indeed already told Aston to occupy Ostend, and to send cyclists on reconnaissance to the towns of Bruges, Thorout and Dixmunde, each about a dozen miles away. Churchill was asking Aston to create a diversion, ‘favourable to the Belgians who are advancing from Antwerp’, although the latest news had suggested the Belgians were doing exactly the opposite, and to threaten the western flank of the German southward advance. “It should therefore be ostentatious.”
