Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  In all military matters the Secretary of State for War was supreme. He had a politician (H. J. Tennant, Margot Asquith’s brother) under him, who was useful for dealing with the House of Commons, but there was no question of one being over him. Not only was he impregnable in his own department, but he had enough spare prestige to exert considerable influence over naval dispositions. His voice was an important one in favour of the Dardanelles plan, but he gave his blessing to the naval part of the expedition while retaining complete freedom as to whether or not to commit any troops.

  Fisher enjoyed no such power in his own department, let alone the right to interfere in others. Above him he had a highly political, determined and argumentative First Lord, who was 34 years his junior. In peacetime and during the early months of the war Churchill and Fisher worked together well enough. The admiral was grateful to the politician for having brought him back into active service; they warmed each other with mutual congratulations on the Navy’s readiness for the conflict; and the fondness of the one for working from the early hours of the morning and of the other for continuing far into the night meant that the high command of the Admiralty was virtually on a shift system and that these two dominant personalities did not see too much of each other. At the close of 1914 Fisher was still concluding letters to Churchill with assurances that he was “ yours till hell freezes.” But alas, as Churchill pointed out in The World Crisis, the moment soon came when this improbable event had apparently occurred. As the plans for the Dardanelles were driven forward by the force of Churchill’s eloquence, Fisher became increasingly apprehensive and sulky. On January 28th Asquith wrote: Another personal matter which rather worries me is the growing friction between Winston and Fisher. They came to see me this morning, before the War Council, and gave tongue to their mutual grievances. I tried to compose their differences by a compromise, under which Winston was to give up for the present his bornbardment of Zeebrugge, Fisher withdrawing his opposition to the operation against the Dardanelles. When at the Council we came to discuss the latter—wh. is warmly supported by Kitchener and Grey and enthusiastically by A.J.B.1—old “ Jacky ” maintained an obstinate and ominous silence. He is always threatening to resign & writes an almost daily letter to Winston, expressing his desire to return to the cultivation of his “ roses at Richmond.” K. has now taken on the role of conciliator, for wh. you might think that he was not naturally cut out!

  1 What peculiar manifestation of “ enthusiasm ” by Balfour, one wonders, can have caused Asquith, so rarely loose with language, to differentiate between this and the “ warmth ” of Kitchener and Grey?

  Here then was the rift at the Admiralty, which despite the efforts of Asquith, Kitchener and other would-be conciliators was never again to be fully healed. This departmental quarrel eventually brought down a government which over 8½ years had suffered and survived almost every known political vicissitude. Before that could happen, however, the quarrel had to be exacerbated and Conservative distrust of Churchill increased by failure to achieve a quick success in the Dardanelles. These two conditions were abundantly fulfilled by the middle of May. The naval action started reasonably well at the end of February and reached its first climax on March 18th, when the fleet carried out a major bornbardment and advanced to within a few miles of the Narrows. Had there been troops available for a large-scale landing at this stage, or had the navy pressed on relentlessly on its own, a quick break-through to Constantinople might well have been achieved. But the troops were not available. It was not until March 10th that Kitchener agreed to the despatch from England of the 29th Division, the employment of which had been at issue throughout February; and it was not until March 12th that he gave command of the expeditionary force to Sir Ian Hamilton.

  Asquith allowed himself, perhaps against his better judgment, to accept Kitchener’s procrastination. The movement of his mind on the issue is clearly shown by two letters to Miss Stanley. In the first, dated 23rd February, he wrote:

  We are all agreed (except K.) that the naval adventure in the Dardanelles slid, be backed up by a strong military force. 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... . One must take a lot of risks in war, and I am strongly of opinion that the chance of forcing the Dardanelles, & occupying Constantinople, and cutting Turkey in half, and arousing on our side the whole Balkan peninsula, presents such a unique opportunity that we ought to hazard elsewhere rather than forgo it. If he can be convinced, well & good: but to discard his advice and overrule his judgment on a military question is to take a great responsibility. So I am rather anxious.

  Kitchener was not convinced. And on February 26th Asquith wrote:

  Our War Council lasted nearly 2½ hours. Winston was in some ways at his worst—having quite a presentable case. He was noisy, rhetorical, tactless & temperless—or full. K., I think on the whole rightly, insisted on keeping his 29th Division at home, free to go either to the Dardanelles or to France....

  Close on the heels of this military delay there followed an even more damaging piece of naval delay. Paradoxically, it appears to have arisen directly out of Kitchener’s eventual decision to commit a large force to the theatre. After the partially successful bornbardment of March 18th the Turks waited with apprehension for an early renewal of an attack which they were in poor condition to withstand. Such a renewal was the original intention of de Robeck, the British admiral in command. But on March 22nd he conferred with Hamilton, who had just arrived in the Aegean, and who persuaded him, perhaps without too much difficulty, to wait until the expeditionary force was assembled for a simultaneous thrust.

  This news was received by Churchill with incredulity and by Asquith with disappointment.

  “Winston came to see me about the Dardanelles,” the Prime Minister wrote late at night on March 24th. “ The weather is infamous there, and the Naval experts seem to be suffering from a fit of nerves. They are now disposed to wait until the troops can assist them in force, which ought to be not later than about April 10th. Winston thinks, and I agree with him, that the ships, as soon as the weather clears, & the aeroplanes can detect the condition of the forts & the position of the concealed guns, ought to make another push; & I hope this will be done.”

  But it was not done. Fisher stood out against Churchill's attempt to overrule de Robeck; and, once again, Asquith subordinated his own better (if tentative) judgment to the opinion of the professional experts. The delay which then followed was considerably longer than had been feared. It was April 25th before the combined attack could be mounted. The Turks, under their German commander, used the interval to great advantage. The Gallipoli landings, which took place on a coast which a month before had been deserted and unfortified, met with the stiffest resistance. Casualties were fearful and only the most constricted beachheads could be established. Within a few days the concept of a great war of movement in the Eastern Mediterranean had lost itself in a confrontation as immobile as that which prevailed on the Western Front.

  Meanwhile the fleet could do little but hang ineffectively about. At the end of the first week in May de Robeck proposed a further attempt at a naval forcing of the Narrows, but this was vetoed from London. Even Churchill was doubtful about a full-scale attack at this stage— mainly because he was trying to encourage the Italians into the war by offering to put some of the Dardanelles ships under their command. He and Fisher nevertheless managed to quarrel about the exact form in which the veto should be applied. Then, on May 12th, at the price of great bitterness from Kitchener, it was decided that the threat from man U-boats made it necessary to withdraw Queen Elizabeth from the Dardanelles. She was the flagship of the expedition and the only great modern vessel which had been committed. Her withdrawal was a heavy blow to morale and as near to a confession of failure as can easily be imagined. In these circumstances the tension within the Admiralty increased to breaking point, and Churchill’s reputation
outside (and particularly with the Tories) plunged downwards.

  This situation at the Admiralty and not the shell crisis, as French, Northcliffe, and, for different reasons, Churchill, wished to believe, was the real cause of the fall of the Liberal Government. “ Churchill did not know it,” Lord Beaverbrook wrote, “ but he was like a man chained to an enemy—so that both must live or die together. If you throw your chained enemy into the sea he pulls you after him.”c But the position was worse than that. Immersion did not depend upon Churchill’s volition. If Fisher chose to throw himself into the sea (which metaphorically is precisely what he did, early on the morning of May 14th) the First Lord had to go in too. And, for the moment, the Goverrment was chained to Churchill just as tightly as Churchill was chained to Fisher.

  This is not to say that the trouble about ammunition supply was without its effect on the Government’s standing, and on its internal cohesion. Shell shortage was perennial throughout the First World War. This was partly due to lack of energy and imagination in organising supply to meet the incredible rate of consumption involved in repeated assaults upon heavily fortified positions. It may also have owed something, as Mr. Alan Moorehead has suggested, to the fact that when the generals set themselves an impossible objective, and failed to achieve it, they had to blame something. As they would not question the rules by which they fought, they blamed the lack of ammunition: “ If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened d. But the miracles did not happen, and the generals blamed the politicians. The trouble was accentuated by the fact that Kitchener, who counted almost as a politician for this purpose, was congenitally mean about the expenditure of ammunition—as well as about some other things. He had won his reputation in a campaign fought on a shoestring, and he hated to see his juniors squandering money and material in France.

  The issue began to come to a head after the battle of Neuve Chapelle on March 10th. Nearly as many shells were expended in that doubtful success as in the whole 2¾ years of the Boer War. When it was over French began secretly to use the British Press for complaints against Asquith and Kitchener. Critical articles appeared in The Times, The Observer and the Morning Post. These in turn led to accusations of intrigue and mutual recriminations amongst ministers. Massingham (the editor of the Daily News) told Asquith on March 24th that Churchill was intriguing to get Grey replaced by Balfour at the Foreign Office, and Lloyd George, who came across to 10, Downing Street on the following day for “ his favourite morning indulgence (it corresponds to the dram drinking of the Clyde workmen)—a 10 minute discursive discussion of things in general,” gave Asquith his view that the story was substantially true. Then, on March 29th, McKenna told Asquith that Northcliffe was engineering a campaign to supplant him as Prime Minister and that both Lloyd George (the chosen successor) and Churchill were parties to the scheme. But Edwin Montagu, whom Asquith consulted at luncheon, said that McKenna and Balfour were the real mischief-makers, and this view, at least so far as it concerned McKenna, was reinforced with passion by Lloyd George, to whom Asquith put the story direct that evening. He denied his own part in it with such emotion that “ his eyes were wet with tears ” and Asquith was “ sure that, (for) all his Celtic capacity for impulsive and momentary fervour, he was quite sincere.”

  The next move was for Asquith to summon Lloyd George and McKenna to a tripartite meeting, by the end of which he thought that he had established a better feeling between them, but not before Lloyd George had accused McKenna of having inspired an article in the Daily Chronicle, which implicated the Chancellor in a plot against the Prime Minister. Asquith, in the midst of this spate of rumour and counter-rumour, plot and counter-plot, showed little sign of bad nerves. This may have owed something to complacency about his own position; but to a much greater extent it was due to a natural generosity of temperament which made it almost impossible for him to believe that others were not as contemptuous of intrigue as he was himself.

  Nevertheless, the poisoned atmosphere made it more difficult to set up a new Munitions Committee. Lloyd George was the obvious chairman, but he would not serve unless Kitchener were excluded from membership, and Kitchener threatened that if the body were constituted over his head he would resign. Eventually Lloyd George got his way, but only at the price of a blinding Cabinet row, during which Kitchener strode towards the door (which was fortunately blocked by J. A. Pease) and Churchill and McKenna gleefully joined in at the heels of the protagonists. Asquith eventually restored some semblance of unity and good humour, but the incident left him with a lasting sense of resigned distaste.

  “Not for years,” he wrote, after talking it over with Crewe, “ . . . have I on reflection been more disillusioned and from the personal point of view depressed. The man who came out of it best is Kitchener, clumsy and tactless in expression as he often is.... On the other hand the people who ought to have known better showed themselves at their worst. Winston was pretty bad, but he is impulsive and borne along on the flood of his too copious tongue.. .. The two who came out really worst were Ll.G., who almost got down to the level of a petty police court advocate, and McKenna, who played the part of a wrecker, pure and simple.

  It will take me a long time to forget and forgive their attitude and you know well that I am not prone to be censorious or resentful. . . I hate this side of politics, when it compels one to revise for the worse one’s estimate of men whom one likes . . .

  Four days after this incident Asquith went to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to make his “ munitions ” speech to employers and workmen. Before going he received a written assurance from Kitchener that French had told him that “ with the present supply of ammunition he will have as much as his troops will be able to use on the next forward movement.” On the basis of this assurance, Asquith, while urging great efforts in the future, congratulated the armament workers on what had already been done, and refuted any charge that they had let the country down. French subsequently recorded1 that, with this speech, he “ lost any hope that (he) had entertained of receiving help from the Government as then constituted.” Three weeks later, as the Commander-in-Chief watched the early stages of the battle of Festubert from a ruined church tower, this lost hope, so he later said, drove him to a sacrifice which he knew meant his certain recall from France: “ I could see that the absence of sufficient artillery support was doubling and trebling our losses in men. I therefore determined on taking the most drastic measures to destroy the apathy of a Government which had brought the Empire to the brink of disaster.”e

  1 He dealt with this 1915 incident in his somewhat loosely entitled book, 1914, published in 1919.

  These measures involved handing his carefully if partially documented case against the Government to the military correspondent of The Times and sending his politically agile A.D.C., Captain Guest, m.p., to England with instructions to lay it before Lloyd George, Balfour and Bonar Law. The direct result, French believed, was the fall of the Liberal Government and its replacement by the first Coalition.

  Whatever the exact merits of the shell dispute between the Commander-in-Chief and the Government, it is clear that this account by French is on several counts far too self-heroic. It is possible that Kitchener’s mid-April letter to Asquith was based on a misinterpretation of what French had said to him. But French was well capable of saying to different people what he thought they most wanted to hear. On May 20th, ten days after his “ drastic ” decision at Festubert, he wrote to Asquith in the following terms:

  For two days I have been hesitating to add an iota to the troubles and anxieties which must weigh upon you just now. You have, however, shown me so much true, generous kindness throughout this trying campaign that I venture at this critical juncture to convey to you what is in my inmost thoughts. I am sure in the whole history of war no General in the field has ever been helped in a difficult task by the head of his Government as I have been supported and strengthened by your unfa
iling sympathy and encouragement. I am sure therefore I may address you privately and informally as a friend f

  French then went on to complain bitterly about the treatment he received from Kitchener. But whatever the purpose of his letter, its tone was wholly incompatible with his view that he was fighting a resolute, reckless, selfless campaign against the lethargic head of a complacent Government. Nor, in reality, did he in any way sacrifice his own position by his actions that May. His removal from France did not take place until seven months and hundreds of thousands of casualties later; and it had nothing to do with the part he had or had not played in the fall of the Liberal Government. Nor even, as has been already suggested, was that part in fact decisive. This was largely accidental. The campaign in England which French mounted after his return from the Festubert church tower might well have been more effective than those which he was directing in France. But it was forestalled. Colonel Repington of The Times made use of his information in the edition of Friday, May 14 th. But soon after five o’clock that morning Fisher had stalked out of the Admiralty intent on resignation. Before The Times article could be digested news of his departure was beginning to seep out. Guest had given French’s memorandum to Lloyd George and Bonar Law two days before, but when they together saw Asquith on the following Monday morning it was the problem of the Admiralty rather than of the shell shortage which filled their minds. And by the middle of the next week, when other newspapers were taking up and embroidering the disclosures of The Times, the formation of a Coalition Government had been already announced.