by Jack Beatty
Venetia competed with the war for his attention. He would divert himself from discussions on strategy to write her a few lines. For example, on January 13, 1915: “We are now (4 p.m.) in the midst of our War Council, wh. began at 12 … A most interesting discussion, but so confidential and secret that I won’t put anything down on paper, but I will talk fully to you to-morrow (if we meet then) or if not in the course of our drive Friday.” A letter from her had arrived at three, and he had stirred himself by “taking one or two furtive glances” at it while his ministers debated the next act of the war and the afternoon waned and “to-morrow” approached. He said nothing until the end, “when I intervened with my conclusions.” One of these was to attack the Dardanelles.42
They didn’t. This painting was made by an Anzac soldier serving on Gallipoli. It expresses the strategic conception behind the attack and the imperial swagger soon lost in dubious battle. The Anzacs “were in constant trouble with the British authorities responsible for discipline.” General Allenby would not have them in his Egyptian theater. In France “they were the bane of authority,” providing “the highest rates of desertion, insubordination and venereal disease.” See Douglas Gill and Gloden Dallas, “Mutiny at Etaples Base in 1917,” Past & Present, no. 69 (November 1975): 100.
Blamed for what the Morning Post called THE DARDANELLES BLUNDER, which it defined as overriding the advice of “his naval colleagues” that “the Navy alone” could not carry the straits, Churchill was forced out of the Admiralty in May 1915 as the Tories’ price for forming a coalition government with the panicky Liberals.* Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, suggests that Asquith only agreed to pay it because his heart was broken.43
For Venetia Stanley, whose “guiding principle” was in her words to get “the maximum of fun” out of life, the secret sharer relationship with the prime minister had become a “crushing and frightening emotional burden,” Asquith’s biographer, Roy Jenkins conjectures. Asquith sensed something was wrong. “I thought once or twice yesterday, for the first time in our intercourse, that I rather bored you,” he mildly complained after a weekend visit with her at the end of April. On May 12, “the soul of my life” shattered him with the news that she had decided to marry Edwin Montagu, Asquith’s former parliamentary private secretary and current holder of the minor cabinet office of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Montagu had asked for Stanley’s hand at least twice since 1912, pressing his suit (“O, how I pant for you”) despite her declarations that she found him physically “repulsive.” A more formidable barrier for a young woman raised in country-house luxury was the condition in Montagu’s father’s will that to inherit his fortune Edwin had to marry within the Jewish faith. When Venetia converted to meet that condition, she earned her family’s censure for “turning Jewish for 8000 pounds a year.”44
Venetia as a “Jewess” Asquith found “repugnant and repulsive.” On May 14, he wrote her:
Most Loved,
As you know well this breaks my heart.
I couldn’t bear to come and see you.
I can only pray God to bless you—and help me. Yours45
Three days later, with Churchill girding to defend the government’s handling of the Dardanelles before Parliament, Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, sought out Lloyd George at the Treasury to warn him to expect dirty weather from the opposition over Churchill, the Dardanelles, and the sensational charge printed in the Times on the fourteenth that the army was running out of shells. Lloyd George saw that the only way to forestall a damaging Conservative attack on the Liberals’ conduct of the war was to invite the Tories into the government. He asked Law to wait and, taking the private passage running from the back of the Treasury, walked over to No. 10 Downing St. To Asquith he conveyed Law’s threat and added his own—that he would resign unless Asquith removed the scandal-scarred production of munitions from Lord Kitchener’s portfolio of responsibilities. With uncharacteristic precipitation Asquith said yes to both demands. “His torment had undermined his resolve,” Gilbert concludes, echoing the opinion of Asquith’s daughter-in-law, Cynthia, who confided to her diary: “Perhaps, if truth were known it is really the cause of the Coalition.”46
Churchill’s torment—“I am finished!”—will strike us as premature.47
9
HOME FRONTS II
We were hungry all the time; we had forgotten how it felt to have our stomachs full.
—A German man, recalling his wartime childhood
As snow crusted the Flanders mud in late November and early December 1914, Belgium nettled its British friends no less than its German conquerors. America had adopted “plucky little” Belgium, its travails publicized in full-page ads in major newspapers and on movie screens everywhere, and both sides were leery of offending opinion in the great neutral democracy.
To be sure, for Americans of articulate conscience (and British sympathies) it was already too late for Germany. By breaking its treaty commitments to honor Belgium’s neutrality; by pulverizing Belgium’s frontier fortresses with a terror weapon, the long-range 420 mm Big Bertha howitzer firing cement-crushing shells weighing over seventeen hundred pounds; by incinerating whole villages and towns and cultural monuments like the fifteenth-century library at the University of Louvain; by using Belgian civilians as human shields in firefights with Belgian and French troops and, from panic over phantom guerrillas, by executing at least six thousand other civilians—atrocities given early and sensational circulation in the United States by British propaganda—Germany had irretrievably alienated a formidable current of American opinion. “That an innocent nation in no way involved in the quarrel of these nations should thus be made the battlefield and offered as a sacrifice on the altar of German militarism is the tragedy of the twentieth century,” wrote one American editor, speaking for many others. “History will look long with angry countenance on this crime and follow it with its nemesis.”1
Belgium was devastated, Belgians hungry. How hungry the British learned in late September when an emissary from Antwerp arrived in London to purchase food and plea for help. An extraordinary American answered the call.
In a January letter to Woodrow Wilson the American ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, described meeting “a simple, modest, energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven … But for him Belgium would have starved.” An American can’t read about the relief of Belgium without wistful pride in the can-do spirit of Herbert Hoover and his America.2
The forty-year-old Hoover was among the world’s most successful mining engineers, with interests in silver, lead, zinc, and copper pits from Bolivia to Siberia. For years he had lived in London, the center of international finance for the mining industry. England was not the likeliest social fit for the blunt, square-jawed American described by a French banker as “the type of American businessman” with “a face somewhat brutal, fruste [rough, unpolished].” An orphan at nine, raised by a succession of relatives, so poor that he lived in a shack off the Stanford campus as a member of its first class, Hoover, every inch the self-made man, felt the sting of British snobbery. On a transatlantic trip to America, he related in his autobiography, he shared a table with “an English lady of great cultivation” with whom he enjoyed good talk at mealtimes. At the farewell breakfast, she asked, “ ‘I hope you will forgive my dreadful curiosity, but I should like awfully to know—what is your profession?’ I replied that I was an engineer. She emitted an involuntary exclamation and [said], ‘Why, I thought you were a gentleman.’ ”3
Weeks before Europe fell into war, Hoover and his wife, Lou, booked passage on the Lusitania to take their boys to school in America. On August 3, in a changed world, Hoover “inquired by telephone of the steamship office if the ship would be sailing as scheduled. The young woman at the other end said, ‘Sure, she will be sailing to Germany. Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ I concluded that the Lusitania would not sail.” He could not know it at the time
, “but on Monday, August 3rd, my engineering career was over forever.” Later that day a call from the American embassy in London put him on “the slippery road of public life.”4
Herbert Hoover in 1917
Partly on a reputation for inspired competence earned during the war, he commanded that road until he slipped on the Great Depression. Leave it to the “wonder boy,” President Calvin Coolidge remarked about a problem he bequeathed to his successor. Coolidge spoke sardonically, but at both ends of the Great War, Europeans would have meant “wonder boy” sincerely. Recalling a time when people were eating coal dust, wood shavings, and sand, Peter Drucker, a pioneer of Hoover’s discipline of management, testified, “Like practically every child in Vienna, I was saved by Herbert Hoover whose feeding organization provided school lunches. They left me with a lasting aversion to porridge and cocoa—but definitely saved my life and that of millions of children throughout Continental Europe.”5
The caller from the American embassy asked Hoover to help a crowd of Americans milling outside the gates—the first contingent of tens of thousands of travelers, including thirty thousand teachers, fleeing the war zone. They were angry. Many had run out of money. All wanted to get home now but, having booked passage on ships not scheduled to leave for weeks and unable to cash American checks at British banks fearing war-driven runs, had no idea how or with what. Something must be done. Doing was Hoover’s passion. He contacted his engineer friends in London and, shortly, “we were on top of our job”—raising and disbursing more than a million dollars and arranging passage to America for 120,000 people.6
That mass movement of humanity completed, Hoover was packing to return to America when a brother American engineer, just arrived from Brussels, visited him. Millard Shaler had slipped through the German lines with enough money to buy twenty-five hundred tons of food for the hungry citizens of Brussels. Refugees from other parts of Belgium reported hunger in their localities; the Germans were foraging all the food they could seize, leaving nothing to the natives. “It’s better that the Belgians starve than that we do,” the Prussian finance minister advised Bethmann Hollweg. Shaler was a member of the Committee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB) formed by a group of American expatriates to relieve the stricken country of nine million people. Hoover’s prodigies on behalf of his stranded countrymen made him the man to lead it.7
“I was not bothered over administrative matters such as purchase and overseas shipment and internal transport of large quantities of material,” Hoover wrote. “Any engineer could do that.” In a letter to a Belgian priest Hoover expanded on “that”:
To beg, borrow and steal nearly $1.8 million worth of food every week; to ship it overseas from America, Australia, the Argentine, and India; to transverse three belligerent lines; transport it through a country with a wholly demoralized transportation service; to see that it reaches civilians only, and that it is adapted to every condition from babyhood to old age and to do this with a machinery operated by the self-denial of volunteer effort, is a labor only rendered possible by the most steadfast teamwork on the part of all.
The team included a handful of American engineers, forty American Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford and recruited by Hoover to monitor food deliveries in Belgium—these few Americans and forty thousand Belgian and French women responsible for feeding 12,500 communes.8
Such Herculean administrative challenges did not trouble Hoover and his engineers. What did was the politics of hunger. The Belgian people were caught between “a German army of occupation and a British naval blockade.” Hoover worried that “the fixity of opinion on both sides as to the righteousness of their respective attitudes was such that the Belgians would starve before responsibilities could be settled.” The blockade barred shipments of food to Belgium. Winston Churchill had convinced his Cabinet colleagues that by feeding the Belgians the Allies would be relieving the Germans of the burden of ruling a starving people. The first lord of the Admiralty hectored the Foreign Office to charge Hoover, under suspicion for visiting Belgium, with being a German spy and haul him before the King’s Bench. “After tedious hearings,” Hoover wrote, “we were exonerated and eulogized.”9
Persuading the British not only to lift the blockade but also to pay for the food to feed their ally—private charity could not raise the needed sums—Hoover discovered his inner politician. In early December, Prime Minister Asquith agreed to see him. Hoover later told the American minister to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, his version of what transpired.
Beforehand, Hoover wrote out a letter to his fellow Stanford alumnus, Will Irwin, a well-connected journalist then in New York, instructing him to “hold this until I send a cablegram releasing it, then blow the gaff, and let the work of revictualing go up in a loud report that shall resound over the world to England’s detriment.” He brought the letter with him to see Asquith, and made his pitch for the Allies to feed Belgium. Asquith called that “a monstrous idea.” Britain would never allow food to be sent “simply to fill the vacuum created by the German requisitions.”10
The American farmer to the rescue. Persuading the British and German governments to let neutral America open its cornucopia to Belgium was not easy, but Hoover was up to the job. There was nothing, it seemed, he couldn’t do.
Hoover played the American card, declaring that England “had America’s sympathy only because America feels pity for suffering Belgium.” Then, handing Asquith a copy of his letter to Irwin, he threatened the PM: “I will send [this] telegram at once, and tomorrow morning the last vestige of pity for England in America will disappear. Do you want me to do it?”
Asquith fleered. He was prime minister. They were sitting in No. 10 Downing Street. He was not “accustomed” to being spoken to in that way. This American engineer was no a gentleman. “On the ground that my emotion for the results which must ensue from a negative reply on his part, was sufficient to justify any tone which I used,” Hoover apologized.
Asquith recovered his dignity sufficiently to say, “You told me you were no diplomat, but I think you are an excellent diplomat, only your methods are not diplomatic.”
Appearing before the whole cabinet (including Churchill) on December 7, Hoover again wielded “the club of public opinion” and again prevailed. Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, guided the cabinet in American matters, and it was his constant refrain that “the surest way to lose this war would be to antagonize Washington.” Subject to the condition that the Germans agree not to steal it and that Hoover warrant they didn’t, the British would sustain the Belgian people.11
In real time Hoover spoke no ill of the Germans. A week before Christmas, with the blockade lifted, he told the Times that of the ten million dollars’ worth of food already provided “not one mouthful has gone down a German throat yet—we have had nothing but help.” Truth waited for his Memoirs. Passing from Holland into Belgium for the first of forty visits, “I had an indescribable feeling of entering a land of imprisonment.” In Berlin he found “something … automatic and inhuman” in the officials, civilian and military, all in uniform, with whom he discussed the British deal.12
Diplomatically, he allowed that while shooting Belgian civilians during the war’s first days might be excused on grounds of military necessity—welcome words coming from a Quaker humanitarian—continued levies on Belgium’s meager foodstocks, inviting mass starvation, would brand Germany with the “mark of Cain” before history and American public opinion. Conversely, “No German act would do more to win over the American people” than ceasing that practice. Wall Street money was flowing into England and the seaboard elite was strongly Anglophile, but Berlin had not given up on the American heartland. Hoover knew when he played it that the American card would win this hand. The Germans accepted his terms and granted him the freedom of Belgium.13
Note to Herbert Hoover from Woodrow Wilson (1917)
At a feeding center in Brussels, he and Brand Whitlock wept as adults and children, some in wooden shoes, filed past
them for soup and bread and a special high-calorie cracker made of fats, cocoa, sugar, and “containing every chemical needed for children” cooked up by Hoover’s can-do-anything engineers. The food came from America. Each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties contributed a carload of flour; Salt Lake City, fifty cars; Alabama, a shipload from Mobile. Through contacts at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Hoover had worked the greater farm belt. The first shipments were gifts: thereafter, the British paid, but, with Old Glory stamped on every sack of flour or grain, the United States got the credit. A Belgian diplomat told Whitlock that no country in history had ever been so “kind” to another. In truth American farmers made money off Belgium relief. That hardly signified to the citizens of Brussels who, to celebrate Washington’s birthday, marched through the streets of their German-occupied city waving homemade American flags.14
Writing to an English friend at year’s end, the essayist M. Andre Chevrillon marveled at the transformation wrought by the declaration of war on August 4: “I thought I knew the French, but they astonish me. The change in less than a week from political agitation and the atmosphere of the Caillaux trial to discipline and silence and unanimous determination was marvelous. It shows how little one knows of the hidden depths that lie under the more or less tossy and frothy surface of the nation.”15
Featured in twenty New York Times stories and editorials in July, Joseph Caillaux received only two mentions in August and one in September noting his appointment as paymaster with the rank of lieutenant to an Army Corps headquartered at Bethune. He disappeared from the French press, the government fearing that his name might raise hopes for an early peace (Woodrow Wilson fell under the same ban).
The German press operated under no such constraint. German newspapers had criticized the inferior quality of France’s artillery powder, alleging that it often failed to ignite since profit-gouging arms makers made it from ground-up old vests rather than fine cotton. That is the background of the cartoon appearing in the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch on August 2, 1914, the day before Germany declared war on France, depicting two artillery officers consoling Madame Caillaux. “If Madame Caillaux had used a French cannon instead of a Browning,” the caption reads, “Calmette would still be alive.”16
