by John Kelly
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CONTENTS
1. Never Again
2. Again
3. Europe in Winter
4. Searching for Something Spectacular
5. Chamberlain Misses the Bus
6. The Rogue Elephant
7. “There Faded Away This Noise Which Was a Great Army”
8. A Certain Eventuality
9. The Italian Approach
10. “Good Morning, Death”
11. “We Were No Longer One”
12. End of the Affair
13. Land of Hope and Glory
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About John Kelly
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
For Jack Dawson Kelly
CHAPTER ONE
NEVER AGAIN
London, July 18–19, 1919
The showers and cool temperatures predicted for July 19 arrived from Ireland a day early. By midafternoon on the eighteenth the air was heavy with the smell of rain, and the low, cheerless sky above Parliament had the look of trouble about it. In Kensington Gardens, transformed into a temporary billet for Allied and Empire troops, fifteen thousand soldiers sat in unheated tents, cursing the foul English weather in Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Japanese. At Albert Gate, where the Horse Guards had just finished a final drill for the next day’s Victory Day Parade, a Guards colonel scanned the sky, then ordered a work crew to hurry and sweep up the horse droppings before the rain began. In Whitehall and Westminster, where the prestige of the British Empire was a perpetual preoccupation, there was concern about an international embarrassment should a heavy rain suppress turnout. Toward evening, with the sky still stubbornly overcast, almost the only outposts of hope remaining in the imperial capital were the War Office, which, despite the rain threat, had had a bust of Lord Kitchener moved down to the entrance for the parade, and the Daily Mail, which fearlessly predicted that “rain or no rain,” the crowds would be huge; and so it proved.
Even before the lamplights were turned off at 5:00 a.m., people were gathering along the six-mile parade route that ran in a rectangle through central London. By 8:00 a.m. Trafalgar Square had become a throbbing mass of humanity. By 9:00 a.m. the swelling tide had spilled over into Whitehall; people stood six and seven deep. To provide more standing room, some merchants removed the glass panes from their display windows, but it was like putting a finger in a dike. Through the early morning hours, the throngs in central London swelled and swelled again. Veterans came on crutches and in wheelchairs; widows came in mourning black; the young, who had known nothing but war, came, eager to see what peace looked like; and the old came grieving for the Victorian world of their youth, when no one knew yet what a century of industrial revolution could do to the human body.
Not one in ten of the troopers assembled in the staging area at Albert Gate below Hyde Park had expected to be alive to see this day; some had begun to wonder whether their children would live to see it. Yet here it was, after a thousand savage dawns and three million Allied dead: victory, glorious victory. As the crowd looked on, the troops were briefed on the parade route. Big Ben chimed 10:00 a.m., church bells pealed from every point in the imperial capital, and the Americans, whom alphabetical order dictated come first, marched out of Albert Gate. Pine-tall and still fresh-faced after only a few months of heavy combat, the cocky Yanks were a reminder of what European soldiers had looked like before the machine gun and the artillery barrage found them. Rifles slung over the shoulder, arms swinging in unison, the Yanks disappeared into the crowd singing, “Over there, over there, we won’t be over till it’s over, over there.” The Belgians, who came next, were short and stumpy, and the state of their beards and mustaches did not speak highly of their personal hygiene. Still, unlike the Americans, the gallant little Belgians had been in the fight from the beginning, from August 1914, and the crowd was determined to find virtues in them, even if the virtues had to be invented. “There [is] something very citizen-like” about the Belgians, declared one spectator. The appearance of the French caused a frisson of excitement. Here was le glorie itself in an Adrian helmet and horizon-blue uniform. No army had emerged from the war with more prestige, and no Allied army, except the now-defunct Czarist Russian army, had paid so high a price for le glorie—1.3 million dead and 4.2 million wounded in a population of 40 million. Everywhere along the parade route, confetti and cheers showered down on the poilus, who had endured at Verdun, at the Marne—who had endured on battlefields even stones had found unendurable. Forty-five minutes of Serbians in brightly colored sajkacas—an indented cap that looked alarmingly like a collapsed birthday cake—Italians in jaunty, feathered alpine hats, and Japanese in faux European uniforms followed. Then the moment the crowd had been awaiting arrived. The British Expeditionary Force, given pride of place at the end of the parade, marched out of Albert Gate behind their commander, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, a handsome blond cavalryman who, the Manchester Guardian would note the next day, looked even more handsome on a horse.
Anyone with an eye for such things could tell that the British contingent was composed of three different armies. The older men belonged to the prewar professional army, savaged during the encounter battles of 1914 and the early trench warfare of 1915; the younger men, to Kitchener’s volunteer army, decimated in the battles of 1916 and 1917; and the youngest troops, many just boys really, belonged to the conscript army that, in its turn, had been badly mauled during the German offensive and Allied counteroffensives of 1918. On this Victory Day, the British death toll stood at seven hundred thousand for the home islands and more than a million for the empire as a whole, and grave details were still digging up the remains of Oxford boys on the Somme, Canadian farmers at Passchendaele, and New Zealand and Australian sheepherders at Gallipoli. Not long before he was killed, the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen called the war a “carnage incomparable.” For fifty-one months, the cream of the British Empire had been marched into the mud of northwestern France and Flanders and been slaughtered. There was no other word for it; but the truth was too unbearable, so as the casualty lists mounted, the human need to find meaning in death, especially young death, had, with some help from the British government, turned the great carnage into the “Great Sacrifice.” Posters of a dead Tommy lying at the foot of the crucified Christ abounded, and rare was the school assembly that did not include a recitation of Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Soldier”:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Toward noon on Parade Day, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman emerged from the crowd in Whitehall, darted across the street, fell to her knees in front of the Cenotaph, and placed a bouquet of lilacs under the inscription at its base, “The Glorious Dead.” Those spectators still on speaking terms with God offered up a prayer for the woman; those who were not just stared, transfixed by her grief. Then the blare of military music brought the crowd back to life, and the BEF marched by at parade pace under a blazing canopy of brightly colored regimental flags embroidered with the place-names that had become household words in Britain: First Battle of Ypres, Second Battle of Ypres, Third Battle of Ypres, First Battle of the Marne, Second Battle of the Marne, Somme, Loos, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Gallipoli.
A year after the Victory Day Parade, the remains of six unidentified
British soldiers were retrieved from the mud of a Flanders field and sent to a military facility in France, where a blindfolded Guards officer chose one set for internment in England. An hour later the remains were placed inside a casket, specifically designed for the occasion by the British Undertakers Association, and on Armistice Day 1920 the remains were interred at Westminster Abbey with full military honors. For King George V, the Westminster ceremony was the second memorial event of the day. Earlier that morning, he had unveiled a new cenotaph in Whitehall; the temporary plaster and wood model created for the Victory Day Parade had proved such a success that the government had decided to commission a permanent stone version. Soon thereafter, Manchester, Southampton, and Rochdale also had cenotaphs, and as the idea caught on around the empire, so, too, did Toronto, Auckland, and Hong Kong. In the early postwar years, human memorials to the “Great Sacrifice” also abounded. There were the legions of young women—part of Britain’s 1.7 million “surplus women”—who gathered at the local cinema on weekends to dream about Ramón Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, now that all the boys they might have dreamed of had gone to a soldier’s grave. There were the ubiquitous one-armed porters, one-eyed barristers, and one-legged butchers. Mercifully, the government kept the grands mutilés, the grotesquely disfigured of face and limbless of body, out of view in military hospitals.
Contrasting the pre- and postwar mood of Britain, the historian Arnold Toynbee noted that before 1914, “Westerners and . . . British Westerners above all, had felt that they were not as other men were or ever had been . . . Other civilizations had risen and fallen, come and gone but [the British] did not doubt that their own civilization was invulnerable.” After 1918, vicars and public men continued to preach the same old verities in the same old ways, but the preaching had become reflexive, the way a body sometimes twitches after death. The young, having seen where patriotism leads, were throwing over God, King, and Country for pacifism, socialism, communism, trade unionism, internationalism, environmentalism, nudism, flapperism, Dadaism, anarchism, and any other ism they could get their hands on. And the intellectuals, having examined humanity from every imaginable angle, concluded that man’s dark impulses would keep what one of them called the “death ship” of war afloat in perpetuity. The bookstores filled with titles that breathed despair—The Dying Creeds, The Smoke of Our Burning, Life Against Death, and Can Civilization Be Saved? And the old, bewildered by it all and heavy with sorrow, stood in half-empty churches, intoning that most melancholy of English hymns, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
. . . Carried downwards by the flood
And lost in the . . . years.
Initially, there were great hopes that the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, would deliver a just and enduring peace to the world. But the French and, to a lesser extent, the British public found the treaty’s terms insufficiently onerous, while the Germans, who had come to Versailles seeking mercy, left vowing retribution. The treaty stripped Germany of its colonies, its western border on the Rhine, and transferred several historically German regions to other nations. Asked how long the treaty would last, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the final year of the Great War, evoked the death ship: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”
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Except for Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and a few other people the world had yet to hear from, Marshal Foch’s view was not widely shared in the early postwar years. More than 37 million men, women, and children had been killed or wounded in the Great War. That number was nearly five times greater than the population of prewar Belgium (7.5 million), only 3 million less than the population of prewar France (40 million), and only 9 million less than the population of prewar Britain (46 million). Ruminating on the lessons of the Great Sacrifice, the London Illustrated News concluded that all the lessons came down to the same lesson: Never Again. “So vast is the cost of victory, no price can be too high to pay for avoiding the necessity of war.”
During the 1920s, Never Again inspired a new international order based on collective security, disarmament, and the League of Nations. And for a time, the system seemed to work. The 1925 Pact of Locarno—signed by Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy—guaranteed the borders of Europe. Three years later the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy, and several other nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Plans were also laid for the World Disarmament Conference. By the late 1920s, European civilization seemed to have emerged from the “brown fog” of despair, cleansed and renewed—like sun after rain. In Britain, unemployment, which had risen to two million after the war, fell to a million, and overseas investments rose to near-prewar levels. People forgot their troubles and lost themselves in a new dance craze, the Lindy Hop, or in new fads such as the crossword puzzle and a Chinese game called mah-jongg. Then, on October 29, 1929, Wall Street crashed. A week later the economist John Maynard Keynes reassured Britons that “there will be no serious direct consequences in London resulting from the Wall Street slump.” He was wrong.
A good case can be made that 1931, the year Japan invaded Manchuria and the Depression reached full force, marks the end of the post–World War One era and the beginning of the pre–World War Two era. On one side of the date lay the Locarno and Kellogg-Briand Pacts and the sunlit uplands of collective security and disarmament; on the other side, the howl of the approaching whirlwind. In 1932, Oswald Mosley founded the British Union Fascists, the unemployment rate in Britain rose to 2.5 million, and the streets of Europe filled with thousands of men, hardened by war, disillusioned by peace, impoverished by the slump, and possessing loyalties—to Nazism, Fascism, communism—that transcended national borders. In 1933, Hitler came to power and Germany and Japan walked out of the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference. Less noted but also significant, in 1933 the British Chiefs of Staff issued their first warning about a new European war. “Germany is not only starting to rearm, but . . . she will continue the process until within a few years hence she will again have to be reckoned a formidable military power. . . . It would therefore seem that anywhere in the next, say, three to five years, we may be faced with military demands for an intervention on the Continent.” To deter the Germans, the chiefs recommended the creation of a British expeditionary force.
The politicians were horrified. The previous February, the Oxford Union had overwhelmingly carried this motion: “This house would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country.” Then in October—the same month the Chiefs of Staff issued their warning—a Labour candidate running on a platform of unilateral disarmament won a by-election in the reliably Conservative London constituency of East Fulham. A quarter of a century later, in his memoir The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill still sounded astonished by the East Fulham result.
In 1934, the Chiefs of Staff again unsettled the politicians by urging the creation of a British expeditionary force capable of fighting a Continental enemy. First and foremost, Never Again meant no British soldiers on European soil. Even the famously bellicose Churchill balked at such a prospect. The last time Britain sent an expeditionary force to the Continent, nearly seven hundred thousand men had not come back. Furthermore, Churchill, like many other politicians who kept current with advances in military technology, did not see the need for such a force. Airpower, not ground power, would dominate the battlefield of the future.
Gas bombs, chemical bombs, sky-darkening bomber streams: in the interwar years, the air threat was viewed in the same apocalyptic terms as the nuclear threat is today. “Our cities will be rendered uninhabitable by chemical bombs. . . . We are faced with the wipeout of civilization,” declared an authority on aerial warfare. Films such as H. G. Wells’s Things to Come put images to the warnings. For a score of weeks in hundreds of British theaters, fleets of bombers throbbed across the gray English sky; beneath their notele
ss drone cities exploded, people exploded, fire and black smoke flared from the holes where Parliament and St. Paul’s had stood; civil defense workers tagged bodies in public parks, the underground collapsed on screaming passengers, and millions of refugees clogged the roads. A secret report compiled for the British government estimated that in the first two months of a new war bombing would produce 1.8 million casualties, including 600,000 dead.I
As airpower came to dominate the rearmament debate, a tortoise-and-hare contest developed. The hare was Churchill, quick-thinking, quick-speaking, quick-acting; the tortoise, Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative Party and three-time prime minister. No one had ever called Stanley Baldwin quick at anything. At Cambridge, he was asked to resign from the debating society because he never spoke. The prime minister’s chief attribute—indeed, his critics would say his only attribute—was likability. Baldwin, whose sagging English face gave him a certain resemblance to an amiable basset hound, was the most popular politician of the day. This fact in itself was a matter of no small wonder to his critics. As one historian has noted, Baldwin’s “indolence was a miracle in his time and a legend in ours.” The prime minister’s idea of a busy day was to avoid official papers in the morning and his fellow politicians at lunch and to spend his afternoons writing personal letters. Yet, in the eyes of the public, Stanley Baldwin could do no wrong. The average Englishman liked it that Baldwin found hiking more pleasant than thinking, doing nothing more pleasant than doing almost anything, and found foreigners as incomprehensible and beastly as he did. “Wake me up when you are finished with that,” Baldwin would say whenever foreign affairs were discussed at cabinet meetings.
On paper, Baldwin appeared badly overmatched by Churchill in the air debate. No one could imagine Stanley Baldwin saying anything as eloquent or clever as “I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers in Germany.” Nonetheless, Baldwin managed to hold his own—and, at some points in the debate, to more than hold his own. For this he owed no small debt to his second great attribute, luck. In the mid-1930s, Churchill was out of government and at the nadir of a long and checkered political career. To the public, he remained the Gallipoli man, the engineer of the ill-fated 1915 campaign that had produced little except three sunken battleships and misery and lamentation for mothers in Australia and New Zealand, whose sons had died in their thousands on the naked, sun-struck hills of Gallipoli. To the politicians, who knew Churchill more intimately, he was the witty, gifted, impulsive, erratic polymath who had two bad ideas for every good one and was unable to tell the difference between them. In a letter to a friend, Baldwin condensed Westminster and Whitehall’s view of the pre–World War Two Churchill into a few wonderfully malicious sentences: “When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, industry, eloquence, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts’ and picked up Winston and gave him such a shake and twist that with all of these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight in listening to him, we do not take his advice.” Not long after Baldwin wrote this appraisal, Churchill reminded the British public of just how bad his judgment could be. During the abdication crisis of 1936, even friends were baffled by his support for Edward VIII, a man of limited intelligence who gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-married American woman of limited character.
