“No bargain had been entered into,” wrote Churchill, but “We were morally committed to France.”128 Churchill concedes that he and Grey were morally committed to a war they knew the Cabinet and Parliament opposed. “In other words,” concludes historian Jim Powell, “Churchill believed that if Grey had operated openly, Britain might not have been able to get into the war!”129 As Francis Neilson, who had resigned from the House over the war, wrote, both “Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain said after the First World War—that if Grey’s commitments had been laid before the House, they doubted whether…[the war] would have taken place.”130
The importance of Grey’s secret collusion with France is difficult to overstate. Had he been open with the Cabinet and sought to persuade them of the necessity of committing Britain to France, they would have rejected his alliance. France and Russia, knowing that they could not rely on the British to fight beside them, would have been far more disposed to compromise in the Balkan crisis of July 1914. By secretly committing Britain to war for France, Grey, Churchill, and Asquith left the Kaiser and German Chancellor in the dark, unaware a war with France meant war with the British Empire. Had he known, the Kaiser would have made his belated effort to abort a war far sooner and more successfully. Churchill concedes it in The World Crisis: “[O]ur Entente with France and the [secret] military and naval conversations that had taken place since 1906 had led us into a position where we had all the obligations of an alliance without its advantages.”131
Adds Neilson, “[I]f Balfour had been in power, they would have made no secret of the understanding with France and Russia and there would have been no war.”132 “We went to war,” said Lord Loreburn, “because we were tied to France in the dark.”133
An anecdote related by British naval historian Russell Grenfell in his Unconditional Hatred has about it the ring of historical truth:
British embroilment in the war of 1914–18 may be said to date from January 1906, when Britain was in the throes of a General Election. Mr. Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, had gone to the constituency of Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, to make an electioneering speech in his support. The two politicians went for a country drive together, during which Grey asked Haldane if he would initiate discussions between the British and French General staffs in preparation for the possibility of joint action in the event of a Continental war. Mr. Haldane agreed to do so. The million men who were later to be killed as a result of this rural conversation could not have been condemned to death in more haphazard a fashion. At this moment not even the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, let alone other members of the Cabinet, knew what was being arranged.134
“WINSTON IS BECOMING A REAL DANGER”
EVEN FRIENDLY BIOGRAPHERS AND memoirists seem astonished by Winston Churchill’s lust for war in 1914. “Amid the gathering storm,” writes Roy Jenkins, “Churchill was a consistent force for intervention and ultimately for war.”135 Lord Morley, Gladstone’s biographer, spoke of the “daemonic energy” of “that splendid condottiere at the Admiralty.”136
From the first inkling that war might come, Churchill acted like a war leader. He was decisive, unconflicted, resolute. Hearing a Turkish crew was about to take possession of two dreadnoughts ordered from British shipyards, he “requisitioned” the ships and ordered their Turkish crews repelled “by armed force if necessary,” should they attempt to board.137
In 1911, the Turks had sounded out Great Britain on an alliance, but Churchill, “with the arrogance of his class in that time, had replied that they had ideas above their station.”138 He warned the Turks “not to alienate Britain which ‘alone among European states…retains supremacy of the sea.’”139 Churchill’s insults would prove costly. On August 2, Germany and Turkey signed a secret alliance and in 1915 Turkish troops inflicted on British and Anzac troops at Gallipoli one of the greatest Allied defeats of the war. Churchill’s affront to the Turks was “an almost unbelievable act,” writes William Manchester, that tore down “a British bulwark and thereby set the stage for a disaster whose chief victim would be he himself.”140
On August 1, Churchill had requested the Cabinet’s authorization to mobilize the fleet. The Cabinet refused. Late that evening, learning of Germany’s declaration of war on Russia, Churchill went to 10 Downing Street to tell Asquith he was calling up reservists and ordering the Royal Navy onto a war footing, unless ordered otherwise. Asquith, bound by the Cabinet decision, “simply looked at me and said no word…. I then walked back to the Admiralty across the Parade Ground and gave the order.”141
On learning the 23,000-ton German battle cruiser Goeben was in the Mediterranean, Churchill ordered British warships to hunt her down and prepare to attack. “Winston, who has got on all his war paint, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of tomorrow morning, resulting in the sinking of the Goeben,” Asquith wrote on August 4, “the whole thing fills me with sadness.”142 When a British diplomat discovered Goeben in Taranto harbor, the First Lord was tempted to order her sunk before the 11 P.M. ultimatum expired. Churchill feared Goeben would slip away in the dark. She did. After war was declared, he would cross the Channel to discuss tactics and strategy with field commanders, prompting Lloyd George to remark, “Our greatest danger is incompetent English junkers. Winston is becoming a great danger.”143
Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues were both awed and repelled by his lust for war. On September 14, Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley, “I am almost inclined to shiver, when I hear Winston say that the last thing he would pray for is Peace.”144 Yet, that same month, Grey wrote to Clementine, “I can’t tell you how much I admire his courage & gallant spirit & genius for war.”145
In January of 1915, half a year into the war, with tens of thousands of British soldiers already in their graves, including his own friends, Churchill, according to Margot Asquith’s diary account, waxed ecstatic about the war and his historic role in it:
My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me (eyes glowing but with a slight anxiety lest the word “delicious” should jar on me).146
Consider the change that had taken place in the character of the First Lord, now relishing “this glorious delicious war,” from the twenty-six-year-old MP who had stood with his late father against the folly of excessive armaments. Said young Churchill to the House of Commons in May 1901:
A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heart-rending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentration to one end of every vital energy of the community [and] can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings….147
Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.”148
Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral. In December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war.
When the Germans accommodated Britain’s war party by regarding the 1839 treaty as a “scrap of paper,”
the relief of Grey and Churchill must have been immense. The declaration of war was their triumph. And when British divisions crossed the Channel, the troops were sent, as the secret war plans dictated, not to brave little Belgium but straight to France.
How did the American people see the war in Europe?
“On August 5 the British Navy dredged up and cut the German cables, and on August 6 there was not a single Berlin or Vienna dateline from the American press.”149 The First Lord had made certain the British would decide how the Americans viewed their war.
CHAPTER 3
“A Poisonous Spirit of Revenge”
INJUSTICE, ARROGANCE, DISPLAYED in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven.1
—LLOYD GEORGE, 1919
Those three all-powerful, all-ignorant men…sitting there carving continents with only a child to lead them.2
—ARTHUR BALFOUR
AS WELLINGTON SAID of Waterloo, it had been a “damn near-run thing.” After the Italian rout at Caporetto and the defeat of Rumania and Russia, a million German soldiers had been released in 1918 to join their comrades on the Western Front for the last great German offensive of the war. By April, Ludendorff’s armies were back on the Marne and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was issuing his order recalling Nelson at Trafalgar: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each of us must fight on to the end…. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement.”3
In the end, the Americans proved decisive. By spring 1918, 300,000 doughboys were in France; by summer, 1,000,000. With Yanks moving into the front lines at 250,000 a month, German morale sank and the German lines buckled.
On October 5, 1918, Prince Max of Baden sounded out President Wilson on a peace based on the Fourteen Points he had laid out in January. Three days later, Wilson asked Prince Max if Germany would accept the points. On October 12, Prince Max gave assurances that his object in “entering into discussions would be only to agree upon practical details for the application” of the Fourteen Points to a treaty of peace.4
Wilson now began to add conditions. Safeguards must be provided to guarantee Allied “military supremacy” and a democratic and representative government must be established.5 Prince Max agreed. The Kaiser had to go. On October 23, Wilson took the German offer to the Allies.
The British and French, after four years of bloodletting that had cost them together two million dead and six million wounded, balked at Wilson’s mild terms. Under a threat from Colonel House of a separate peace, Prime Minister Lloyd George went along, with one reservation. Britain could not agree to the second of Wilson’s points: freedom of the seas. The Royal Navy must be free to do whatever necessary to protect the empire. France succeeded in inserting a claim to full compensation “for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.”6
Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the Catholic Center Party who had urged fellow Germans to agree to an armistice, was given the thankless task of meeting Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, and signing the armistice in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest on November 11, 1918. Erzberger would be assassinated in the Black Forest in 1921 for the “crime of November 11.”7
“HANG THE KAISER!”
IN GREAT BRITAIN, a “khaki election” was called by the government to exploit the triumph of British arms and war’s end, as the Unionists had done in the first khaki election in 1900, when Joe Chamberlain had campaigned on the slogan “A seat lost to the Government is a seat won by the Boers.”8
In echo of Wilson, Lloyd George began his campaign November 12, one day after the armistice, with a statesmanlike call for a magnanimous peace.
We must not allow any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, any grasping desire to over-rule the fundamental principles of righteousness. Vigorous demands will be made to hector and bully the Government in the endeavour to make them depart from the strict principles of right and to satisfy some base, sordid, squalid idea of vengeance and avarice. We must relentlessly set our faces against that.9
Lloyd George had misread the mood of his country and of press baron Alfred Lord Northcliffe, the Napoleon of Fleet Street whom he had denied a place on the delegation to the peace conference. Whipped up by Northcliffe’s papers, the public rejected such noble sentiments and took up the cry “Hang the Kaiser!” Ever attentive to popular opinion, Lloyd George was soon pledging to bring home a peace in which Germany would be made to pay the “full cost of the war.” They will pay to the utmost farthing, he roared to one crowd; “we will search their pockets for it.”10
“Squeeze the lemon until the pips squeak!” was the theme of one Liberal candidate. The Parliament elected that December that gave Lloyd George a majority of 340, the greatest in British history, has been described as “one of the most insular, reactionary and benighted in the annals of Westminster,” made up, said Stanley Baldwin, of “hard-faced men who look as if they had done well out of the war.”11
From the House of Commons to Lloyd George came a “Round Robin” letter signed by 237 coalition members, a “vengeance telegram,” demanding “the utmost severity for Germany.”12 The signers wanted every last pound of German flesh. Among its chief sponsors was the MP for the Ripon Division of Yorkshire, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood. A generation later, “Major Wood,” now Lord Halifax, would be the foreign minister forced to deal with the consequences of the punitive peace he and his colleagues had demanded.
The khaki election of 1918 and the peace of vengeance British voters demanded that Lloyd George bring home validate the insight of George Kennan: “[S]uffering does not always make men better…. [P]eople are not always more reasonable than governments…[P]ublic opinion…is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics.”13
Arriving in Paris with a mandate for no mercy, Lloyd George found his resolve to impose a harsh peace more than matched by Georges Clemenceau, “the Tiger of France,” whose ravaged nation had lost 1.3 million of its sons.
The Tiger had one great love—France; and one great hate—Germany. As a young man of twenty-nine he had seen Paris under the heel of the German invader, and the smoke billowing up from the brutal burning of the palace at St. Cloud. As an old man of seventy-two, he had seen the gray German hosts pour into his beloved France. He was determined that it should not happen again. Motivated though he was by this great hate, he was not so vindictive as Marshal Foch or President Poincaré.14
Clemenceau was determined to impose on “le Boche” a treaty that would so cripple Germany she could never menace France again. His fear and hatred were caught in a remark attributed to him: “There are twenty million Germans too many.”15
“HELL’S DIRTIEST WORK”
“DEMOCRACY IS MORE VINDICTIVE than Cabinets,” Churchill had told the Parliament in 1901. “The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”16 The twentieth century would make a prophet of the twenty-six-year-old MP. And the peace the peoples demanded and got in 1919 would prove more savage, for, wrote one historian, “it was easier for despotic monarchs to forget their hatreds than for democratic statesmen or peoples.”17
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had sat with Castlereagh of England, Metternich of Austria, Alexander I of Russia, and Frederick William III of Prussia, the coalition that had destroyed Napoleon’s empire, to create a new structure of peace. At Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Germans and Russians had negotiated the terms. But though Germany’s fate was to be decided, no German had been invited, for the Allies had come to Paris to punish them as the guilty nation responsible for destroying the peace.
“We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering upon this war,” Wilson had said on April 2, 1917, as America entered the war.18 By 1919, Wilson had conclu
ded that people were “responsible for the acts of their government.”19
When German representatives were summoned to Paris to receive the terms of the Allies, they were stunned at the amputations to be forced upon them. Eupen and Malmédy were to be taken from Germany and given to Belgium. Alsace and Lorraine were to be reannexed by France.
Clemenceau wanted to annex the Saar but Wilson balked. The Saar was placed under the League of Nations—de facto French control—and its coal mines given to France. The 650,000 Germans of the Saar were granted the right, in fifteen years, to vote on whether they wished to return to Germany. Should they so decide, Germany must buy her mines back. In Schleswig, a plebiscite was to be held to divide the land with Denmark.
The East Prussian port of Memel was seized by Lithuania.
Only on the insistence of Lloyd George, who reportedly said he would no more transfer Upper Silesia to the Poles “than he would give a clock to a monkey,” was a plebiscite held in those lands that had been under German sovereignty for centuries.20 In the plebiscite, 60 percent of the people voted to stay with Germany, but five-sixths of the industrial area and almost all the mines were ceded to Warsaw. A disgusted British observer, Sir Robert Donald, called the plebiscite a “tragic farce” and the stripping of Upper Silesia from Germany “robbery under arms.”21
The Hanseatic League port city of Danzig, German for centuries, was declared a Free City and placed under League of Nations administration and Polish control. East Prussia was separated from Germany by a “Polish Corridor” that put a million Germans under Warsaw’s rule.
Versailles stripped from Germany one-tenth of her people and one-eighth of her territory. Germany’s overseas empire, the third largest on Earth, was wholly confiscated. All private property of German citizens in German colonies was declared forfeit. Japan was awarded the German concession in Shantung and all German islands north of the Equator. The German islands south of the Equator went to New Zealand and Australia. Germany’s African colonies were divided among South Africa, Britain, and France. Germany’s rivers were internationalized and she was forced to open her home market to Allied imports, but denied equal access to Allied markets.
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 8
