by Simon Schama
The war that materialized tortured Churchill’s impatience, as well as his perfectly decent wish to spare prolonged slaughter. Along with many others in command, both political and military, he greeted the beginning of fighting with a strange euphoria, but at the same time felt sheepish about his reaction (‘Is it not horrible’). And as the war developed into a hideous, man-devouring stalemate, Churchill became desperate for something other than the strategy of men ‘eating barbed wire’. It was this compulsion to experience action that had prompted him to go to Antwerp in October 1914, after consulting with the foreign secretary, Grey, and the war minister, Lord Kitchener. There he took command of its defences, even offering, rather amazingly, to resign from the admiralty if the government felt he would be better used in a position of military rather than political command.
Flanders made him understand the critical importance of the western front about which the generals and Kitchener kept on hammering away to the cabinet. But Churchill’s pessimism – entirely justified, as it turned out – about a breakthrough there encouraged him to push for an altogether different strategy. Why not attack the German alliance at what must be its weakest point – the Ottoman Empire of Turkey?
Churchill’s plan, seconded by Fisher, was to ‘force the Dardanelles’, the narrow strait separating the Mediterranean from the Black Sea, and take Constantinople. This would have the double advantage of securing Egypt, not to mention the oilfields in Persia and Mesopotamia, from German attack, and of persuading Balkan countries such as Romania, which was still sitting on the fence, to commit firmly to the side of the Allies.
It did not work according to plan. The optimal strategy was for a combined naval–military operation, with warships softening up Turkish forts before the army landed a large expeditionary force. But Kitchener balked at the commitment of troops, so on 19 February 1915 Churchill went ahead independently with a naval assault. None of its objectives was realized. Minesweepers failed to sweep adequately; battleship guns failed to take out the Turkish fort artillery. Three ships, including a French battleship, were sunk by mines. When Kitchener finally gave his authorization, an attempt was made to land a combined Australian–New Zealand–Franco–British force (including Winston’s younger brother, Jack) of 70,000 on a rocky peninsula called Gallipoli, but thousands were mown down from entrenched Turkish artillery positions. A beach-head and a hilltop were taken, which afforded a good view of the bodies lying in the sand and shallows.
The butchery at Gallipoli in early 1915 came close to destroying Churchill’s career. It didn’t help that Jacky Fisher now resigned and denied ever having supported an assault on the Dardanelles in the first place. Someone was going to have to take the blame and, without a strong party base, that someone was inevitably going to be Churchill. When Asquith formed a coalition government with the Conservatives in May 1915, one of the items on their shopping list was the eviction of the man who had betrayed them in 1904 and who had taken so much pleasure in savaging them through the campaign for the People’s Budget. Churchill was duly demoted to chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, an all but meaningless job in wartime. This was bad enough for someone desperate to perform some active wartime service; but after another attempt to land troops in Turkey failed in August that year, the campaign was abandoned and the inner-circle military-operations committee wound up.
Out of favour, out of power, out of sorts, Churchill crashed into one of his ‘black dog’ depressions. For a while Clementine, with some reason, feared for his sanity. Wandering around his brother’s garden, in a state of incoherent misery, he came across his sister-in-law ‘Goonie’ (Gwendeline) painting watercolours. She put a brush in his hand. It saved his mind, lifted him out of self-annihilating gloom and, more important, gave him a campaign he knew he could win: ‘The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury.’ But he seemed not to be able to paint his way out of a guilty conscience, nor to get rid of the consuming frustration that he had been denied a chance to harness his tireless energy to the all-important end of hastening victory.
This left only one route to redemption, active service, and Winston took it. He was now in his early 40s but continued to insist that he was, after all, a soldier. Not any old soldier, of course, but one who rather fancied he might, as a brigadier, lead a regiment. This was aiming a bit high – even, or especially, for an ex-cabinet minister. So Churchill, growling, had to make do (eventually) with the rank of colonel and the command of a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers. The service was not very long – six months in all – and punctuated by leaves home and periods at staff HQ. When he did get to Ploegsteert, the Fusiliers’ assigned position, in January 1916, the orders were to hold it rather than embark on some frontal assault of the German lines. It was real service all the same. Winston made a point of experiencing the trenches, and he got a proper dose of them over the winter of 1915–16. He stomped around the rat-run duckboards and half-frozen mud; ducked with the rest when the ‘whizz bombs’ came over; looked mournfully at the half-buried bodies; even – by mistake – went walkabout in No Man’s Land, to find when he returned that his usual post in the trench had taken a direct hit. Amidst all these discomforts and terrors, Churchill kept up his usual ebullience and slightly uncoordinated surges of zeal, together with frequent exhibitions of disregard for his own physical safety. It helped, of course, that he used Clemmie like Fortnum & Mason. In November 1915, at Bout-de-Ville, he wrote to his wife:
My darling,
We have finished our first 48 hours in the trenches. … I have spent the morning on my toilet & a hot bath – engineered with some difficulty. … The line of trenches … built along the ruins of other older lines taken from the Germans. Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet & clothing breaking through the soil, water & muck on all sides; and about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle & machine guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets w[hich] pass over head. … Will you send now regularly once a week, a small box of food to supplement the rations. Sardines, chocolate, potted meats. … Begin as soon as possible. … Do you realize what a v[er]y important person a Major is? 99 people out of any every hundred in this g[reat] army have to touch their hats to me. With this inspiring reflection let me sign myself. … Kiss Randolph, Diana & that golden Sarah for me.
When he did get his colonel’s rank and his Scots Fusiliers, Churchill saw at once that they were badly mauled and demoralized from the traumatic experience of the battle of Loos. He had just two weeks to get them combat-ready again for their assigned place on the line at Ploegsteert in Flanders. Junior officers and especially NCOs not unnaturally resented having this middle-aged, paunchy, noisy VIP foisted on them and were aghast at his unorthodox approach to parade and drill, generally the kind of enthusiastic shambles that did not go down well with the regulars. But it soon became obvious that Winston was genuinely prepared to share the perils and hardships (though not the sardines); that he had real loyalty to his men and determination that they should not suffer needless casualties. And even though their orders were only to hold their position, so that they never had to face going over the top in one of Field Marshal Haig’s lethal Big Pushes, the dead and wounded rate in Churchill’s battalion was far lower than the norm. This did not, however, prevent Clementine from worrying herself sick over her husband’s fate; an anxiety not helped, perhaps, by the fact that he had already made his will.
But if Clementine was anxious about his departure, she was even more aghast to see him back so soon, in March 1916. Try as he might to be a good, steadfast soldier, it was not in Churchill’s blood to abandon politics altogether. Parading his service as though he had been in uniform since 1914, he made a sudden, exceptionally ill-advised appearance in the Commons, where he attacked the naval conduct of the war since his departure from office and – to general consternation and dis
belief – called for the return of the ancient, extremely unstable Jacky Fisher. The speech went down like a lead balloon. It did not, however, prevent Churchill from fighting an election (pursued by cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’), nor – in the teeth of Tory hatred – prevent the new prime minister Lloyd George from listening whole-heartedly to his advice, and eventually naming him in July 1917 the new minister of munitions. As it turned out, this was a brilliant choice. Much of what Churchill was to do in the Second World War was anticipated by his work in 1916–18: the ferocious push to solve the perennial ‘shell shortage’; the frank acceptance of conscription before anyone else in the government was brave enough or realistic enough to see it as inevitable; and the advocacy of a radically new weapon that might break the stalemate – the Land Ironclad or tank, an idea taken, as Churchill admitted, from one of his friend H. G. Wells’s prophetic visions. Kitchener, predictably, dismissed the tank as a ‘mechanical toy’ and, to Wells’s and Churchill’s disgust, made sure the new fighting machines were initially used only as a defensive novelty rather than as a reconceptualized cavalry. But when unleashed as assault vehicles, they proved their worth at the battle of Cambrai in November 1917, advancing the British lines 5 miles in some places.
Some 8 million dead combatants and 25 million additional deaths later, the war ground to an end. On 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, Wells described military trucks riding around London picking up anyone who wanted a ride to anywhere, and ‘vast vacant crowds’, consisting mostly of students, schoolchildren, the middle-aged and the old, and home-front soldiers, choking the streets: ‘Everyone felt aimless, with a kind of strained and aching relief.’ A captured German gun carriage was thrown on to a bonfire of ‘Hun’ trophies in Trafalgar Square. But Wells, at least, thought exhaustion and sorrow overwhelmed the rejoicing: ‘People wanted to laugh, and weep – and could do neither.’ Vera Brittain, who had left Oxford University to be a nurse, noticed that ‘the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: “We’ve won the War!” They only said: “The War is over.”’ Even this relief gave way to a stunned, chilly gloom, for almost all her best male friends were dead: ‘The War was over; a new age was beginning, but the dead were dead and would never return.’
Perenially ebullient as he was, Churchill nonetheless understood this strange mix of emotions. As the new minister of ‘war and air’ (and an eager trainee flyer, until a crash impelled Clemmie to forbid Winston the cockpit), he was responsible for handling demobilization, which, before he took office, had become a source of immense anger and distress for all those who had survived the inferno. They were supposed to be discharged according to industrial and economic priorities, which inevitably meant slowly. Judging this inhuman, Churchill speeded up the rate of discharge and made wounds, age and length of service the priorities instead.
It was the least that could be done. At least 700,000 British servicemen had perished in the Great War, and a million and a half had been wounded. Another 150,000 were lost to the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. Some 300,000 children had lost at least one parent. One in ten of an entire generation of young men had been wiped out. One of them was Rudyard Kipling’s only son, and the grief turned the great imperial tragedian towards deeper melancholy. In his wonderful Mr Britling Sees It Through, published in 1916, Wells (though his own sons were too young to serve) imagined the ‘little Brit’ similarly bereaved, along with a German father in the same torment: ‘Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darknesses of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again.’ A predictable, perfectly human response would be to ‘flounder with the rest’, to indulge again in ‘Chestertonian jolliness, the Punch side of things. Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood as mankind had blundered in.’ But for Wells, as for like-minded writers such as Shaw and Arnold Bennett, this had to be the moment, perhaps the last, when the conditions that had produced the general massacre were removed. Away with preposterous empires and monarchs and the tribal fantasies of churches and territories. Instead there would be created a League of Free Nations, advocated also by Shaw, Bennett and the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. This virtual international government, informed by science and motivated by disinterested guardianship of the fate of common humanity, must inaugurate a new history – otherwise the sacrifice of millions would have been perfectly futile, the bad joke of the grinning skull. All of these ‘new Samurai’, as Wells called them in his book The Modern Utopia (1905), were to be bitterly disappointed by what they took to be the vindictiveness of the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the blame and the cost of the war on Germany. Wells was also frustrated by the limited authority given to the League of Nations, made even weaker by the United States Congress’s repudiation of the treaty.
At home there were misleading signs that this new era, when the fate of the common man and woman would truly be the concern of their rulers, might actually come about. The burial of the Unknown Soldier in the nave of Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 1920 seemed, at least symbolically, to herald just such a chastened democracy. The idea had been floated by the Reverend David Railton, a vicar from Margate in Kent who had served as an army chaplain at Armexntières and had written to the Dean of Westminster. The battlefields were, of course, strewn with unmarked, improvised graves and this would be the ordinary soldier’s counterpart of the Cenotaph, the monument to the war dead designed by Lutyens and erected in Whitehall. The king was against it and the appointment of Lord Curzon, not noted for his sympathy with or knowledge of the common man, as chairman of the committee did not bode well. But Lloyd George, presiding over the coalition government (with a huge majority), saw its propaganda value and the scheme went ahead in the deliberate glare of publicity. Six parties were sent out to six cemeteries in Flanders to exhume a body from each, and the anonymity of the soldier selected was preserved by blindfolding the officer who made the final choice. A coffin of English oak was prepared and inscribed, as would be the plaque of black Belgian marble in the abbey, with the utmost simplicity and gravity: ‘A British warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’. Six destroyers escorted the coffin across the Channel, where it received a gun salute from Dover Castle; then it was moved by train to Victoria Station in London, from where on 11 November it was carried through the streets of the capital, the king following on foot. The pall-bearers included the three chiefs-of-staff, Field Marshal Haig, Admiral Beatty and Air Marshal Trenchard. In the tomb, at the feet of statues of the famous and the mighty, were buried, along with the soldier, 100 sandbags of earth from each of the great battlefields of the war. Over 1 million people came to pay their respects in the first weeks of the interment, and 100,000 wreaths were laid at the newly built Cenotaph.
Would post-war Britain, then, as Lloyd George had promised, be a ‘country fit for heroes’? It would at any rate be a democracy of 27 million, even if the vote at last given to women in 1918 began at the age of 30 whilst 21-year-old men were deemed adult enough to exercise it; there would be no flapper franchise. A short, strong, post-war economic boom funded some, at least, of the government’s promises. Christopher Addison, the minister of reconstruction, oversaw the building of 200,000 homes – effectively the beginning of council-house construction in Britain. The liberal historian and president of the Board of Education, H. A. L. Fisher raised the school-leaving age to 14, a small act with immense significance, and standardized wages and salaries throughout the country. Old-age pensions were doubled, and unemployment insurance extended to cover virtually the entire working population of Britain.
It is not quite the case, then, that ‘reconstruction’ was the fraud that some historians have claimed. But where it was most visible, in the economics of heavy industry, ‘war socialism’ did indeed disappear as Lloyd George always meant it to; and with it went the sense, in the labour movement at least, that an activist government would do something to moderate the inequities of the old in
dustrial system. The men who ran the government were, after all, born Victorians, and they did not hesitate in their determination to dismantle as quickly and completely as possible the state control of raw material, manufactures, communications, wages and rents. And even though Lloyd George was the prime minister, the political complexion of the government was a strong shade of blue since his majority was completely dependent on the alliance with the dominant Tories and Ulster Unionists.
So any talk, strong amongst the unions, of nationalizing the coal industry, the docks or the railways was discouraged. And when the boom turned to slump in 1920–1, there was nothing to prevent the people whom Stanley Baldwin called ‘the hard-faced men who looked as though they had done well out of the war’ from resuming the tough tactics they had adopted in the first decades of the century: wage cuts and lock-outs.
In any event Lloyd George did not need persuading by the likes of Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative party, or the other hard-right figures in his government such as F. E. Smith and Lord Curzon that the termination of ‘war socialism’ was an important goal and the restoration of monetary orthodoxy was the sine qua non of British ‘reconstruction’. If anyone pointed out that he had ensured there would be two contradictory interpretations of what reconstruction meant – that of a social democracy and that of Tory traditionalism – the prime minister would merely beam disconcertingly back until the ingenuous dimly understood that divide-and-rule was the point. Either you got it or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you were outside Lloyd George’s charmed circle. Now, more than ever, he was convinced that he could govern through sheer charisma reinforced by tough political muscle. Up on a pedestal of his own making as ‘the man who won the war’, in his own mind (and in many others’ too) he was no longer a mere politician leading a party so much as the indispensable ‘statesman’. With the evaporation of the authority of the US president, Woodrow Wilson, and the short-lived office of the French wartime prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, his fellow post-war peacemakers, it was Lloyd George who filled the vacuum as the arbiter of Europe, which was to say the world. The more this became apparent, the better he liked it – strutting, flashing his cherubically wicked smile and treating the obliging press like the complaisant mistresses he so unapologetically enjoyed. The coalition faced virtually no threats in parliament, where the 59 Labour members provided the main opposition along with the withered rump of ‘pure’ Liberals ostensibly led by the frequently drunk, wispy-haired figure of H. H. Asquith, who had never got over his dethronement by Lloyd George in 1916. With not much to challenge him, the prime minister rarely deigned to put in an appearance in the Commons, presiding instead from Downing Street over a regime of flashy cronies. It was rule by dinner party; its weapons the artfully targeted rumour, the discreet business sweetener, the playfully or not so playfully threatening poke in the ribs. Honours were up for sale; insider commercial favours expected. And the more gangsterishly presidential Lloyd George became, the less love was lost between him and his only obvious rival – Winston Churchill.
