The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  More hate for the Hun. Churchill displeased the king by denouncing as “baby killers” the German sailors who launched five hundred shells at the undefended town.

  Casualties were about the equivalent of a day’s “wastage” on Britain’s 130-mile sector of the western front. No foreign enemy had killed Britons on British soil in over a century. The Royal Navy had prevented it.

  At the Admiralty, confidence was high that the “baby killers” would be sunk by noon. The position and puissance of the several British squadrons marked on the map between the Germans and their base promised to distract the public from Scarborough and Hartlepool with victory. But it was not to be. Fog, luck, and insouciant signaling by the British admiral, Sir David Beatty, saved the raiders at four different moments, and by midafternoon they were gone. Speaking for the country, the coroner at the Scarborough inquest asked, “Where was the Navy?”21

  “We had to bear in silence the censures of our countrymen,” Churchill wrote in The World Crisis (1923). “We could never admit for fear of compromising our secret information where our squadrons were, nor how near the German raiding cruisers had been to their destruction.” As cover for Room 40, the rumor that Britain ran a peerless spy system in Germany was officially encouraged.22

  On November 30, 1914, the editor of the Nation, H. W. Massingham, registered a consensus view of Britain’s wartime leader: “If you want a tonic … have a look at the Prime Minister. Unquestionably Mr. Asquith is carrying his burden with great courage; with a steady, massive, self-reliant and unswerving confidence which is in itself a moral asset of no slight value.”23

  War had rendered Herbert Asquith’s British phlegm bracing. As early as August, Punch had spied out this paradox in a cartoon, “Cool Stuff,” depicting Asquith keeping his wry countenance despite the kettles-full of hot criticism being poured over him. “His personality is worth to the Empire an army in the field, a squadron of Queen Elizabeths at sea,” a Conservative politician wrote as late as March 1915. A postwar critic, with the full record of Asquith’s two years as wartime prime minister available to him, questioned whether Asquith’s personality was the right stuff for a country at war. After nearly a decade in office, Asquith, a bibulous social lion who did not start work until eleven thirty A.M., was calm because spent, “a cistern and not a fountain.” Sir William Robertson, the chief of the Imperial General Staff in late 1916, when Lloyd George led a successful cabinet revolt that toppled Asquith from power, drew a similar distinction between Asquith and his successor: “Asquith was too judicious a temperament to run a war, whereas Lloyd George by contrast was the only civilian leader who could say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ without hesitation.” Yet, in the supreme crisis of the early war, the cool leader caught fire, the cistern overflowed, H. H. Asquith said no.24

  British phlegm. It was reassuring in the first months of the war, but Asquith had to transcend it to save France.

  Crashing blindly into a German army of two hundred thousand on its march into Belgium, the seventy-five-thousand man British Expeditionary Force (BEF) suffered severe casualties and was retreating alongside its French ally when, in an August 30 telegram, Sir John French, the British commander, informed London that the BEF was “shattered” and insisted on withdrawing it from the battle line for at least eight days and marching it south, for refitting behind Paris.25

  “Eight days! Eight days! Within eight days, will not the Germans be in Paris?” Raymond Poincaré desperately noted in his diary. The French president appealed to Asquith to overrule his general. Breaking from his bridge game, Asquith called an emergency postmidnight meeting of the cabinet. To the few ministers reachable at short notice he read out Poincaré’s moving letter, then paused, as if waiting for a volunteer to speak his mind for him. “He never spoke a word in Council if he could get his way without it,” Churchill observed of his taciturn chief. But now Asquith spoke: “If [the BEF quits the field] the French will be left uncovered, Paris will fall, the French Army will be cut off and we shall never be able to hold our heads up in the world again. Better that the British Army should perish than that this shame should fall on us.”26

  Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, initially favored letting General French act as he thought right—but Asquith’s words swayed him. Grey voted with a unanimous cabinet to dispatch that totem of British militarism, Lord Kitchener, Kitchener of Khartoum (K of K) newly (and eagerly) recruited by the Liberal government to serve as secretary of state for war, to France “to put the fear of God” into General French.* Asquith’s intervention saved the Anglo-French alliance, the French army, and in all probability, France.27

  On a military decision with political implications, and stiffened by K of K, Asquith could wrest control of the war from his generals. But suppose the politics were opaque, and Kitchener obdurate. What would Asquith do then? Events set in motion at the turn of the year would soon answer.

  Winston Churchill is “irredeemably associated with the operation at the Dardanelles,” the debacle depicted in the 1981 film Gallipoli. But blaming Churchill for the Dardanelles is like blaming Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, for the Iraq War. Like President Bush in 2003, Asquith in 1914 was the “decider,” not Churchill. Asquith’s responsibility for the Dardanelles can be traced through some unusual documents—his love letters.28

  The war had transformed the prime minister’s epistolary romance with Venetia Stanley, his twenty-seven-year-old confidante and his daughter Violet’s closest friend, from an indiscretion into a crime. Specifically, what the smitten sixty-two-year-old was doing—sharing intelligence with Venetia that German spies would kill for—violated the Official Secrets Act enacted by his own government in 1911. At a time when the government was monitoring homing pigeons lest they be used to send messages to the enemy, its leader was tipping Venetia off about matters ranging from the sinking of the battleship Audacious by a mine to this revelation of December 21, 1914: “By the way, Winston revealed to me as a profound secret, wh. he is not going even to breathe to Grey, that to-morrow (Tues) the Germans are contemplating a new naval adventure against us. So keep your eyes open, as I shall. I shall say nothing to any other human being.” That the Admiralty had advance knowledge of German naval movements was Britain’s top secret. Asquith’s indiscretion looks especially flagrant when set against this Admiralty directive issued by Churchill: “The less said to outsiders about naval matters, by speech or letter … the better. Many of the most harmful disclosures are made innocently and unwittingly … They are not in any circumstances to write letters which have the slightest reference to naval matters, without submitting them to the Censor beforehand.”29

  Venetia got the inner history of the Dardanelles livened by declarations like “I love you more than ever—more than life!” and “I can honestly say that not an hour passes without thought of you” (plausible considering that in August 1914, a consequential month in British history, he wrote her twenty-six letters, some upwards of three thousand words long).* Asquith played up the role of Churchill, who appears—her letters to Asquith have not survived—to have fascinated Venetia, rousing flashes of jealousy from the prime minister: “I did not know until your letter today that you liked Winston quite so much as all that.” In early November, days after the British lost two ships in an action off the coast of Chile “far from glorious to the Navy,” Asquith warned his first lord of the Admiralty that it was “time he bagged something & broke some crockery.” His hold on office weakened by growing criticism of his conduct of it, Churchill did not need to be prodded twice. “His volatile mind is at present set on Turkey and Bulgaria … he wants to organize a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to which I am altogether opposed,” Asquith confided on December 3. On Christmas Eve, Churchill “[is] meditating fearsome plans of a highly aggressive kind to replace the present policy of masterly inactivity.” Asquith shared his young minister’s frustration with the siege warfare of the trenches, and he approvi
ngly quoted to Venetia Churchill’s question from a crucial December 30 memorandum: “Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?”30

  Alternatives were explored, but when, on January 2, Grand Duke Nicholas, commander in chief of the Russian army, asked Kitchener for “a demonstration of some kind against Turks elsewhere, either naval or military” to relieve Turkish pressure on the Russian army in the Caucasus, the War Council settled on the Dardanelles, the forty-mile strait between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara flanked by the barren Gallipoli Peninsula and the Asian mainland. To Venetia, Asquith mocked the expertise on the Near East displayed by some makers of Near East policy, telling of finding Lloyd George “searching for Gallipoli on a map of Spain.”*31

  Ignorance stimulated grandiosity. The attack was to be no mere demonstration. Its objectives were to occupy Constantinople, open the Bosporus to Russian shipping (enabling the tsarist government to finance its loans from the Allies) and Western arms shipments to Russia, drive Turkey out of the war, and draw the neutral Balkan states into it on the winning side. Churchill went further, imagining British gunboats steaming up the Danube to attack Vienna.32

  Seizing Constantinople would make tangible the British promise to Russia that as King George V assured the Russian ambassador in any postwar settling of accounts with the Turks, “this city must be yours.” Grey had urged the Straits on Russia to steer its foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, away from the alarming war aims he unveiled in September, one of which—the dismemberment of Germany—would be realized by Soviet Russia only after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Grey, in 1914, wanted to preserve Germany and Austria-Hungary, whose breakup Russia also sought, as Great Powers to maintain a postwar balance of power in Europe against Russia. His conception was “to keep Russia out of Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia [and Berlin] by installing it in Constantinople.” Russia must stay in the war, and if this required reversing fifty years of British policy on the Straits, or overriding French objections to awarding the Straits to Russia, or refusing Greek help in taking Constantinople, something anathema to Petrograd, so be it.33

  After the war, the Bolsheviks published the text of the Anglo-Franco-Russian Straits Agreement of 1914–1915 to expose the territorial motives of the Allies in what Trotsky labeled “the great imperialist slaughter.” From her cabinet seat (“What do you think, my darling?”) Venetia Stanley witnessed imperialism’s spoils being divvied up. Lapsing into the shorthand of empire used to check off exotic places and peoples on the map like the claret and sole on a gentleman’s club menu, Asquith explained that Russia’s claim to Constantinople and the Dardanelles was acceptable—provided “both we and France should get a substantial share of the carcase of the Turk.”34

  These maximalist war and postwar goals were to be achieved by minimal means: An all-naval attack on the Gallipoli forts by a fleet of obsolete battleships. The odd reference among the principals to the impressionable “Oriental mind” suggests the racial hauteur with which these Englishmen approached “the Turk,” who, their war plan assumed, would surrender at the sight of a British tar. “If the fleet gets through the narrows,” Kitchener assured one of his generals, “Constantinople will fall of itself.” This of a city of about one million people that with its sheltering bay, the Golden Horn, forms what one historian calls “a natural fortress, difficult … to attack.”35

  It might have worked—at least the ships might have got through the Straits—if the naval attack had been combined with a landing of troops on the European side of the peninsula, the troops to attack the Turkish forts from the rear while the fleet engaged them from the front. But at a February 24, 1915, meeting of the council, Kitchener set his face against sending troops.

  “We are all agreed (except K) that the naval adventure in the Dardanelles should be backed up by a strong military force,” Asquith wrote Venetia later that day. “I say ‘except K’ but he quite agrees in principle. Only he is very sticky about sending out there the 29th Division, which is the best one we have left at home … He wants to have something in hand, in case the Germans are so far successful against the Russians … as to be able to dispatch Westwards a huge army … to try & force through Joffre and French’s lines.” Cool, skeptical Asquith had fallen for the geostrategic romance of the attack: “One must take a lot of chances in war & I am strongly of the opinion that the chance of forcing the Dardanelles, & occupying Constantinople, & cutting Turkey in half, and rousing on our side the whole Balkan peninsula, presents such an opportunity that we ought to hazard a lot elsewhere rather than forgo it.” But Asquith, who was only the elected leader of the British people, understood the risk of challenging K of K. “If he can be convinced, well & good: but to discard his advice and overrule his judgment on a military question is to take a grave responsibility. So I am rather anxious.”36

  Backed by Kitchener, Asquith had overruled Sir John French, but French was only a general. Kitchener was a symbol. His iron stare, militant mustache, and pointing finger on the famous recruiting poster above the legend YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU helped motivate three million Britons to volunteer for service in the first two years of the war. “He is not a great man,” Asquith’s wife, Margot, reportedly said of him. “He is a great poster.” And therefore a great political problem. With his ties to the Tory Party and press, and a hold over the British public such that “angry crowds” burned copies of the Daily Mail in the London Stock Exchange and circulation fell by a million after it blamed Kitchener for a dearth of shells at the front, K of K had the last word on all matters military.37

  A 1906 Admiralty study put before Asquith of a “Joint Naval and Military Attack upon the Dardanelles” did not so much as consider a ships-alone attack, citing Admiral Nelson’s dictum that “any sailor who attacked a fort was a fool” (he lost an arm attacking one). In 1911, Churchill himself had informed the cabinet that “it is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles and nobody should expose a modern fleet to such peril”—which by 1915 included 82 guns of large caliber housed in 35 forts and strongpoints that the Turks had been working on continuously for centuries, 230 mobile guns and howitzers, minefields protected by hidden batteries and swarms of floating mines. This history and those facts were why “every naval officer at the Admiralty … [has] come out strongly against unaided action by the fleet,” Maurice Hankey, secretary of the War Council, informed Asquith.

  Yet Asquith succumbed to Churchill’s “rugged fluency” on behalf of an all-naval attack. “The idea caught on at once,” Hankey recalled of this decisive January meeting of the War Council. “The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten.” When Churchill had “a scheme agitating his powerful mind … he is indefatigable in pressing it upon the acceptance of everyone who matters in the decision,” Lloyd George observed. At the War Council on January 13, 1915, Churchill was indefatigable. To prevail at such moments, he recommended “flair based on previous study.”38

  The first attack, on March 18, 1915, broke a good deal of Allied crockery: Out of the twelve battleships engaged, mines sunk three, one with the loss of nearly all hands. The Turks lost a handful of guns. Weeks earlier, in the Caucasus, the Russians had routed the Turkish army that Grand Duke Nicholas had asked the British to prevent being reinforced from the west with a “demonstration,” voiding the rationale for Gallipoli even “before a gun had been fired” there.* Resisting pressure to mount another attack from Churchill, in possession of an intercept from the kaiser to the German admiral at Constantinople indicating, wrongly, that the Gallipoli forts were out of ammunition, the British admiral on the spot, John de Robeck, decided that ships could not “take” the Dardanelles alone. Soldiers were needed to silence the Turkish forts, naval gunfire at ranges as close as seven hundred yards having failed. Kitchener, fearing that “the effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious,” promptly overruled himself and dispatched the soldiers.39

  The British had forfeited the only advantage
possessed by attacking troops in the war—surprise. All the advantages now lay with the defending Turks, who had time to reinforce their defenses with thousands of men and hundreds of guns from Austria’s Skoda works. The “British gave me four full weeks before their great landing,” General Liman von Sanders, commanding the German Military Mission in Turkey, recalled in his memoirs; “the time was just sufficient to complete the essential arrangements.” And with that landing on April 25 began one of the “the First World War’s human catastrophes,” an epic of fruitless sacrifice by the Australian, New Zealand, British, and French invaders and tenacious resistance by the Turkish defenders, “laying to rest the notion of the Turk as a worthless fighting man,” and creating a foundation myth of modern Turkey and its mythic hero, Mustafa Kemal. On April 25, in the decisive action of the campaign, he rallied his troops to hold the heights of Sari Bair against attacking Anzac troops with the instantly legendary command, “I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die.”40

  As for the fighting on Gallipoli: “We have been amusing ourselves by trying to discover the longest period of absolute quiet,” an Australian colonel wrote home from the Anzac Cove beachhead. “We have been fighting now for 22 days, all day and all night, and most of us think that … the longest period during which there was absolutely no sound of gun or rifle fire throughout the whole of that time was 10 seconds. One man says he was able on one occasion to count fourteen but nobody believes him.” That testimony supplies a mordant coda to Asquith’s flippancy to Venetia Stanley about a division of troops departing from England for Gallipoli: “How lucky they are to escape Flanders & the trenches and be sent to the ‘gorgeous East.’ ”41