Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  In the meantime Asquith had made progress with another piece of military re-organisation. For the first year of the war, Kitchener had operated without a General Staff. He had attempted to do everything himself: to inspire the war effort of the Empire; to run the administrative machinery of the War Office; and to be the sole adviser to the War Council and the Cabinet on all matters of military strategy. By the early autumn of 1915 the other ministers had lost faith in his ability to discharge this last task, and Kitchener himself was sufficiently on the defensive to agree to the re-creation of an Imperial General Staff How big a change this was likely to mean would depend principally on whether the new C.I.G.S. was to be a man who could get his way against Kitchener. The appointment was unsettled when the Secretary of State for War departed for the Eastern Mediterranean.

  There were two possible candidates of strength, two men of utterly contrasting character and ability. The first was the subtle and serpentine Sir Henry Wilson, who had been liaison officer with the French High Command. He might have got his way by the ingenuity of his intelligence and the determination of his intrigue. But he was the one officer whom Asquith never forgave for his part in the Curragh trouble. “ That poisonous tho’ clever ruffian Wilson,” he had written of him a few months before. The other was Sir William Robertson—dour, unimaginative, but highly competent and resolute. He was a man of humble origin, the one “ ranker ” general in a caste-ridden army. But he allowed no feelings of inferiority to weaken his force. He rarely made the mistake of talking too much. His favourite reply to an argument with which he did not agree was “ I’ve ’eard different ”—a singularly difficult one to controvert if delivered with sufficient authority.

  Robertson was Asquith’s choice for C.I.G.S. It was known that he would not accept unless his powers were clearly and extensively defined in a written agreement with the Secretary of State. But this made him no less attractive a candidate. By November 30th, the date of Kitchener’s somewhat unwelcome return from Gallipoli, Asquith had Robertson available in London, willing to be nominated on these terms.

  Kitchener drove straight from the railway station to Downing Street. Suspicious of what had happened to his powers in his absence he immediately told Asquith that he wanted to resign. The Prime Minister, in return, told Kitchener that he had changed the Comman-der-in-Chief, that he had transferred some of the functions of the War Office to the Ministry of Munitions, that he wanted Robertson to be C.I.G.S. with very wide powers, but that it was nevertheless Kitchener’s duty to remain in office as “ the symbol of the nation’s will to victory.”® Kitchener accepted everything that had been done and withdrew his resignation. He even invited Robertson to dine with him at York House that same evening in order to begin negotiations.4 It was one of Asquith’s most successfully persuasive interviews, and it was the culmination of four weeks’ determined and effective work at the War Office. The department which he handed back to Kitchener was substantially different from the one which he had taken over from him. Several festering boils had been lanced.

  Unfortunately, Asquith’s plans for a more effective general political direction of the war ran up against greater difficulties. The Gallipoli decision was the first test of the new War Council. Kitchener had telegraphed on November 22nd recommending the immediate evacuation of Suvla and Anzac, but the retention for the present of the bridgehead at Helles. The War Council met on the following morning and unanimously endorsed the first part of the recommendation, although it thought it wise to evacuate Helles as well. So far, so good. The decision was reported to the full Cabinet on November 24th, but the report was not accepted. Curzon launched the full force of his rhetoric against the course recommended, and Crewe and Lansdowne supported him to the extent of asking for a short delay. The Cabinet adjourned the matter until two days later. By this time Curzon had circulated what Hankey described as “ one of the most able papers I have ever read.” The result was further disagreement, and a further postponement of decision until Admiral de Robeck got back to London on December ist.

  On December 3rd the Cabinet met again, with the benefit of an anti-withdrawal paper from Hankey and a further expostulation from Curzon. Influenced by these the “ no evacuation ” party appeared to be gaining strength—F. E. Smith (who had replaced Carson), Balfour, even Kitchener, were attracted by the new arguments. These arguments were based on the assumption that Salonika would be evacuated instead. But by December 6th it became clear that the French would not agree to this, and that too much pressure could not be put upon them without endangering the life of the Briand Government. For this reason, the Cabinet, at its meeting of December 7th, at last came round to endorsing the War Council recommendation on Suvla and Anzac (but not Helles).

  The delay, as it happened, was not serious. The evacuations were carried out, with great efficiency and without loss, on the nights of December 18th-19th and 2oth-2ist.1 Asquith wrote of “ the intense relief of knowing the almost incredible, and indeed miraculous, methods and results of the evacuation at Suvla and Anzac.” “ It is the most wonderful retirement in war history,” he continued, “ far surpassing even Sir John Moore’s at Corunna.”r Had a half the military skill been applied to the landings, he might have added, Constantinople would long since have been in the hands of the Allies.

  1 The evacuation of Helles, decided on by the Cabinet on December 27th, was equally successfully carried out on the night of January 8th~9th.

  But it was a close run thing; less than sixteen hours after the last boat pulled away, a fearful storm broke. Even had the margin not been close, the method of decision-making which had been followed obviously made nonsense of the idea of a small, effectively functioning War Council. The Cabinet’s willingness to delegate authority was purely theoretical. Part of the trouble lay in the Prime Minister’s respect for the traditional power of “ the plenum of the Cabinet ” as he called it. And another part lay in the composition of the War Council. It was largely made up of departmental ministers — Balfour, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, McKenna — while the non-departmental ones — Curzon, Crewe, Lansdowne — were outside. In these circumstances the latter category, if only to find employment for themselves, were almost bound to interfere. It was a mistake which both Lloyd George in 1917 and 1918 and Churchill, in the Second War, were to try hard to avoid.

  Even this sad and early decline of the new War Council did not neutralise the effect of Asquith’s dynamic month at the War Office. As the turn of the year approached, his reputation stood much higher than had seemed possible at the end of October. It needed to be so, for the problems of 1916 cast daunting shadows ahead. The first was that of conscription, which could no longer be postponed, as the Derby scheme had obviously proved a failure. The Cabinet took cognisance of this at its meeting of December 22nd. “ The impression left upon me is profoundly disquieting,” Asquith wrote, “ ... w~e seem to be on the brink of a precipice. The practical question is ”—a familiar one for him to ask himself—“ shall I be able ... to devise and build a bridge?”s

  1 The point of this argument was that Asquith regarded the Ministry of Munitions as part of the War Office, the department which initially provided the whole of its staff.

  2 This seems a direct contradiction of the views which Balfour and Lloyd George had expressed in September, but precision in the use of words was never Crewe’s most notable characteristic.

  4 These negotiations, on the basis of Robertson’s tough conditions, giving him complete control over strategy, lasted until December 10th. Kitchener then accepted the substance of Robertson’s demands. “ He is tired and sore,” Esher wrote to Asquith from Paris (where the other two both were) on that day. “ He will find it a relief to get the substantial backing of Robertson’s knowledge and character.” Esher went on to say in effect that the French Government at this stage wanted both Kitchener and Joffre kept in their posts, not because they were competent but because they were points fixes in a dangerously fluid situation. (Asquith Papers, box xv, ff. 192-5).


  COMPULSION IN ENGLAND AND REBELLION IN IRELAND

  1916

  The salient fact about British military prospects at the end of the year 1915 was that the Army had passed into the firm control of determined “ Westerners.” Both Haig and Robertson were unswerving in their belief that the war could only be won by killing Germans in Flanders. And they were both prepared to accept without flinching the British share of the casualties which this must involve. At its meeting of December 28th the War Cabinet, under Robertson’s new guidance, gave general approval to a vast Allied offensive in the early spring of 1916. As it happened, this never took place. It was forestalled by the German offensive which began at Verdun on February 21st and continued until the first days of July, when Haig began his counteroffensive on the Somme. But it did not make a vast difference which side was attacking. In either event the gains were negligible but the killing was immense. The war of attrition was in full swing.

  In these circumstances the job of the politicians ceased to be that of looking for strategic alternatives and became concentrated upon supplying men and munitions for the slaughter. Appropriately, December 28th was not only the day on which the War Council made formal obeisance to the supremacy of the Western Front, but also that on which the Cabinet first came to real grips with the problem of conscription. Once it was clear that the Derby scheme had failed— 650,000 single men remained unattested—Asquith knew that compulsion for them could no longer be avoided. “ I do not need to tell you,” Austen Chamberlain wrote to his stepmother, “ that... the Prime Minister never hesitated.”a But several other Liberal ministers did.

  By December 29th four of them—Simon, McKenna, Runciman and Grey—had submitted their resignations, and a fifth, Birrell, had written to say that while he could accept compulsion as “ a disagreeable necessity,” he did not think that he could remain in a Government from which the others had resigned. If these were all to go, Asquith himself would be left in a singularly isolated position. Then, indeed, he would find himself “ surrounded and cut off,” as he had rather exaggeratedly described his situation to Redmond eight months earlier.

  All these resignations were not of equal authenticity. Simon’s was the most determined. He stuck firmly to the narrow point that it was wrong to compel men to be soldiers, and he attended no further Cabinet after that of December 28th. His letters to Asquith were full of regret and good feeling, and the latter felt no resentment against him. “ Poor Simon, I am so sorry for him in his self-righteousness,” was the harshest remark that he made.

  Grey, on the other hand, did not feel particularly strongly about the principle of conscription. “ . . . . On the point of compulsion for unmarried men,” he wrote, “ I am prepared to support you and the decision of the majority at the last Cabinet.”b But he agreed with McKenna and Runciman “ on general questions of economic and financial policy.” If they went there was no hope of these policies triumphing in the Cabinet. It was a tenuous reason for resignation; coupled with his telling Asquith that he felt increasingly uneasy about not having gone with Haldane in May, it suggested that he was looking for an excuse to leave a political scene which had become distasteful to him. Dissuaded by Asquith on this occasion, he tried again at least twice during the next six months, and during one of these attempts Asquith sharply reminded him that the two of them were more responsible than any other Englishmen for Britain being in the war, and that they had better both be prepared to see it out.

  McKenna and Runciman, on account both of their reasons for resigning and of the firmness of their determination to do so, occupied an intermediate position between Grey and Simon. As almost the last representatives of a highly individualistic, nineteenth century businessman’s Liberalism, they were instinctively hostile to any form of State interference with private decision making. But they were not prepared to go to the stake on the narrow point of whether or not unmarried men should be compulsorily enrolled. They wanted, very sensibly, to fight their battle on the wider issue of the shape of the British war effort. Kitchener said that to fulfil her commitments Britain must have 70 divisions and a rate of enrolment of 30,000 men a week. McKenna and Runciman said that these were mistaken targets which, if hit, would destroy our capacity to act as the arsenal of the Alliance.1

  Asquith’s “ bridge-building ” in this situation took several forms. First, the anti-conscriptionists had to accept an immediate but limited measure of compulsion for single men. Anyone, like Simon, who stood out against this would have to go. Second, a very skilfully chosen Cabinet committee—the members were Asquith, McKenna and Austen Chamberlain—was appointed to investigate, over a period of a month, the competing military and economic claims. Third, Briand and Gallieni, under the guise of advice-seeking, were to have the central issue put bluntly before them. Which did they prefer: more men or more money? They must be made to see that they could not have both without limit.

  On the basis of these arrangements Asquith got through the first reading debate and division on January 6th without any resignation other than that of Simon. The majority was highly satisfactory. Simon had only a handful of Liberals with him. The Labour members split almost equally. Only the Irish Nationalists provided a solid phalanx of opposition. Then trouble came from a new quarter. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party came out flatly against the bill, and the parliamentary party took a majority decision to follow the Executive’s lead. Henderson, whose lack of self-regard made him always see himself as a purely representative figure, felt that he must resign. On January 10th he wrote a sad but clear-cut letter to Asquith:

  In consequence of the decision of Organised Labour to oppose the Military Service Bill I have no alternative but to tender you my resignation. ... I supported the . . . Bill in the Cabinet; I shall continue to do so in the House as the representative of my constituents on the ground of military necessity.c

  Roberts and Brace, the two Labour junior ministers, followed Henderson’s lead. The Cabinet, that same day, could think of no remedy other than that Asquith should himself meet the parliamentary Labour Party and endeavour to set their fears at rest. This he did on January nth—and was triumphantly persuasive. He did not convert them all to conscription, but he did get them to agree that Henderson and the others should stay in the Government. Another hurdle was past.

  The next day, McKenna began to have fresh doubts. Asquith’s irritation with him was not lessened by the fact that he thought he had a very good case. On the evening of January 13 th Asquith went to see Lady Scott, the widow of the Antarctic explorer, who at this time was one of his confidantes, and she wrote in her diary for that day:

  P.M. came at 6.30. I hadn’t seen him for a week. ... he has been so worried. Said McKenna changes ground so often. Three days ago he (Asquith) would have said they were practically out of the wood, yesterday he would have said things could scarcely be worse. McKenna isn’t insisting on the pecuniary impossibility of the compulsion bill, but adopting the Runciman depletion of industry attitude, and, added the P.M., “ the Dickens is that I so agree with him.”

  A month later, on the basis of mutual compromise by the War Office and the Board of Trade, the tripartite Military-Finance Committee (as Hankey, the secretary, called it) had succeeded, after daily meetings, in reaching agreement. But the process did not improve Asquith’s feeling about McKenna. Lady Scott is again the witness.

  “The P.M. told me,” she wrote on February'’ 13th, “ that the man who had disappointed him most for many a long year was McKenna. Said he proved himself unstable mentally and morally —moreover he hadn’t the excuse of a stupid man, nor the excuse of artistic temperament or any such thing—it saddened him.”

  But here again Asquith may have been influenced by a sneaking respect for McKenna’s views. Perhaps the best way for a minister to irritate his chief is stubbornly to advocate a policy which the Prime Minister would half like to follow, but knows he cannot, and to do it by always threatening resignation, while never carrying the
threat into effect. By this time, however, Asquith had got his bill safely through the House of Commons. And this achievement, even if it did not make him more tolerant of McKenna, at least gave him a short stretch of substantially calmer water.

  He used it to make his longest wartime trip abroad. He left London on March 25th and was away for ten days. After a conference with the French ministers in Paris, and a visit with Hankey to the Marne battlefield, he travelled on to Italy. A letter which he wrote to Margot from the train shows that, for important passengers, the French did not allow the agony of Verdun to interfere with the amenities of their railway service:

  We started from the Gare de Lyon at eleven in the forenoon and I have never travelled in such luxury—large saloons, eating car, wonderfully appointed bedrooms, etc; no stoppages except now and then to take in water. Apart from servants and attendants there were only four of us aboard—Bongie (Bonham Carter), O’Beirne (a diplomat), Hankey and self.d 1

  1 Hankey’s comment on the journey was: “ Never before or since have I so much regretted my ignorance of ‘ bridge,’ which compelled the others to play 'dummy ’ until we were joined in Italy by the Military Attache.” (The Supreme Command, 1914-18, n, p. 482).