by Paul Ham
Lansdowne’s plea fell on barren ground. A strong majority in Cabinet supported the war, and would accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender. A peace deal that failed to secure this, they declared, for which so many had paid the supreme sacrifice, was not worth the paper it was printed on. The huge casualty lists reproached both sides of the argument: those who would politicise the soldiers’ sacrifice to justify further slaughter in the guise of vengeance; and those who would undermine the sacrifice by negotiating an ‘unworthy’ peace.
Lansdowne looked forlorn when, on 12 December 1916, the Allies received Berlin’s notorious ‘Peace Note’, signed by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. From a position of ‘indestructible strength’, having won ‘considerable successes’, it declared, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey would ‘not seek to crush or annihilate’ their adversaries. On the contrary, ‘conscious of their military and economic power’ and their readiness ‘to carry on to the end, if they must, the struggle that is forced upon them’, they proposed ‘to enter even now into peace negotiations’.8
The tone of haughty triumphalism struck entirely the wrong note: the German Peace Note was risible, London, Saint Petersburg and Paris swiftly decided. It made no concessions, failed to mention the restoration of Belgian and Serbian sovereignty, and amounted to a display of Teutonic chest thumping. Russia rejected the Note on 15 December, followed by France and Britain two weeks later. It coincided with the appointment of a new British Liberal prime minister who would attempt to rejuvenate the nation and transform the mood of despair into a new faith in victory.
A formidable political leader with the hide of a rhino and the personal drive to bind the Liberal–Conservative coalition in an all-out effort to defeat Germany: that was how David Lloyd George sold himself as the fittest man to rule Britain at war – and, by extension, the Dominion armies. We haven’t the space to navigate the full circumference of this colossus of British politics. (I recommend biographies by Roy Hattersley, John Grigg and Peter Rowland.)9 We aim chiefly to distil the personal attributes of this immensely gifted, exceptionally self-confident and deeply duplicitous character that helped or hindered his leadership in the darkest year of the war, after which the memory of Passchendaele would weigh on his conscience for the rest of his life.
David Lloyd George was a genuine radical of British politics. The English instinctively distrusted this Welsh firebrand. And yet, to call him ‘the Great Outsider’ is half-accurate: his huge ambition, forceful personality, soaring oratory and divisive political style compelled others to conform to him, rather than he to them. Iconoclastic, contemptuous of (English) tradition, Lloyd George used his points of difference to bend the establishment to his will and recreate the political order in his image. By 1917, ‘the Great Insider’ more accurately described his central place in British power, dominating the four-man War Cabinet that he appointed to run the war: the great outsider would soon turn the inside out.
Lloyd George’s ability to slash away at impediments to action and bully his opponents into submission won the grudging support of his harshest critics and most avowed enemies. These were the personal attributes with which, as minister of Munitions (a department he created), he had broken the shell famine, launched the tank-building program and reorganised procurement; as chancellor, introduced old-age pensions and laid the foundations of the modern welfare state; and as prime minister, transformed the Cabinet and the nation into a war-winning political machine. That is the familiar, outward character of Lloyd George. To cut a keener profile of his leadership during Third Ypres requires a sharper scalpel.
Born in Manchester and raised in a Welsh village, David George lost his father as a boy and grew up under the powerful influence of his uncle, Richard Lloyd, who was determined to ensure that his gifted nephew received a solid religious education. We need not dwell on the small Baptist sect in which the Georges worshipped, except to say that the Children of God, or the ‘Campbellites’, as they were known, gave the boy his first taste of English ‘oppression’. Young David found it intolerable that the Welsh nonconformist faith should be subject to the laws and traditions of the Church of England and would later deploy his sense of outrage at this ‘injustice’ as a political weapon.
As he rose in the world, by stages a journalist, lawyer and politician, Lloyd George honed his talent for speech-making into a crushing ad hominem style. His political oratory sizzled with personal rancour, burning off much of the substance that lay within it. His speeches advanced like an artillery barrage and were ‘almost entirely destructive’, observed Hattersley: ‘Demolition of his opponents’ arguments was rarely followed by the construction of something to put in their place. There was never a suggestion of an underlying ideology or philosophical principle – both of which were alien to his nature.’10 As Lloyd George himself observed, he was never quite sure what he really stood for. In spirit a pacifist – he had opposed the Boer War – he abandoned any outward show of pacifism during the Great War. He entertained no ideology or set of guiding principles. ‘I know I have the religious temperament,’ he wrote as a young man, ‘but if an angel from Heaven came to demand it, I could not write down what my convictions are.’11 He cleaved to his own gut feel and ideas rather than to those of any political party or creed.
As a mature politician, Lloyd George relished the role of fixer and arch manipulator, for whom everything was in flux and nothing beyond his will to amend or reverse. Under Lloyd George, ‘Was it rule by a dictator or a democrat?’ wondered the Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan. ‘Did any consistent principle animate the “man in the saddle”, or was it all opportunism gone berserk?’12 Even Lloyd George’s closest associates were unable to answer with certainty. John Maynard Keynes later alleged that the values of Wales’s ‘Great Commoner’ were ‘rooted in nothing’.13 The prime minister’s friendships were as fragile as his sense of loyalty, a virtue he used sparingly. Nowhere would he find a natural ‘fit’ in the partisan swim of politics; rather, he sought to enmesh the fish that surrounded him in his school of thought. One idea that possessed him was the iniquity of unearned income (rentiers, inheritors, investors, and so on), and he waged a lifelong campaign against inherited wealth of the kind that had enriched his future commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig.
On 10 April 1908, Prime Minister Asquith formally offered Lloyd George the job of chancellor of the exchequer. Despite Lloyd George’s many enemies, who accused him of leaking the news to the press in order to pre-empt a royal veto (King Edward VII disapproved of his philandering), his success as president of the Board of Trade couldn’t be overlooked. Lloyd George’s letter of acceptance revealed the man in full: ‘Men whose promotion is not sustained by birth or other favouring conditions are always liable to be assailed with suspicions of this sort.’14
Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914 won Lloyd George over to the hawks, whose war he’d hitherto opposed. Some construed his conversion as brazen self-interest masquerading as principle; yet who in politics has not mixed principle with self-interest? His decision to back the war combined his abhorrence of military aggression, his support for Britain’s treaty obligations to Belgium, and his political ambitions. Suddenly, the war was very popular, and so was Lloyd George.
Once he’d declared his hand, he threw all his verbal and political powers at rallying the people to the war effort. ‘It will be a terrible war,’ he boomed, in his great speech at Queen’s Hall, London, on 19 September 1914. ‘But in the end we will march through terror to triumph.’ Invoking his homeland in the famous metaphor ‘I know a valley in North Wales between the mountains and the sea … a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered’,15 he warned the British people that they had been living in a valley like it for too long and had turned selfish and indulgent. The war would shake them to their senses.
Lloyd George took a close interest in military strategy – close enough (he felt) to pass judgement on the authority of Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchen
er. The hero of the Battle of Omdurman (1898), commander-in-chief of India, and now war secretary knew a thing or two about drill. By contrast, Lloyd George had spent a testing week or so in the militia. That did nothing to dissuade the latter from pressing Kitchener to open a third front outside France, an idea Winston Churchill embraced. Intensely irritated, Kitchener knocked the idea down. (Churchill would soon bring it disastrously back to life, in the Dardanelles.)
Kitchener’s aristocratic hauteur did little to inhibit the Baptist upstart from the Welsh hills, who would later describe the war secretary as ‘a good poster but a bad general’,16 and uncharitably dismiss him, after his death in 1916, as ‘a driving force’ with ‘no mental powers’.17 Lloyd George’s scornful assessment of the then highest ranking British soldier was a mere shadow of his bruising relationship with the soft-spoken, straightforward Scot soon to become commander-in-chief of the British forces on the Western Front, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.
Lloyd George quickly came to be seen as the war leader in waiting: who else had the energy and mental toughness to lead Britain to victory? Who else could win over the people? The glaring answer took shape in his mind, until ‘winning the war became … an aspect of his destiny which had to be fulfilled’.18 Even his Tory enemies accepted his accession as inevitable. The former Conservative prime minister Lord Balfour disagreed with his policies yet came to see Lloyd George as the saviour of the nation: ‘[T]he only man who can, at this moment, break down the barriers of red tape and see that the brains of the country are made use of’.19 Indeed, if he believed in anything, Lloyd George believed in action, in getting things done. At 7.30 pm on 7 December 1916, Lloyd George ‘accepted’ the prime ministership from the incumbent, Herbert Asquith, as head of a precarious Liberal–Conservative coalition.
The war, not Lloyd George, had destroyed Asquith. The death of his son Raymond, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, on the Somme in September 1916 had reduced the Liberal prime minister to a ghostly presence in Westminster. Unbearable grief rendered him unfit to govern the nation at war, as he later admitted. ‘Whatever pride I had in the past,’ he wrote of his son’s death, ‘and whatever hope I had in the future, by much the largest part was invested in him. Now all that has gone.’20
Lloyd George had secured the leadership of the Conservative-dominated coalition government, in cahoots with several powerful Conservatives and two press barons.21 A condition for the Tories’ support carried a heavy hostage to fortune: they would not abide the sacking of Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British and Dominion forces in France. That condition grated, for Lloyd George had repeatedly made public his abhorrence of Haig’s methods. There would be no more Sommes, he had warned, in November 1916. Glaring at the journalist Charles à Court Repington, the new prime minister repeated the message on 9 February 1917: ‘I am not prepared to accept the position of a butcher’s boy driving cattle to the slaughter.’ Repington dismissed this as sentimentality.22
Lloyd George’s revulsion at the losses on the Somme was sincere, and he would spend the rest of the war championing a third front, in an effort to minimise British casualties. The prime minister failed or refused to accept his commanders’ conviction that the war must be fought and won on the Western Front, at Germany’s strongest point, and that the only way was to continue battering away at the enemy’s trench lines with vast armies, machine guns and heavy artillery. The seeds of a disastrous relationship were sown.
The new prime minister took charge of a nation reeling from her recent ‘victories’. A pall of grief hung over thousands of British and Dominion homes. The very real fear of defeat animated the highest officers in the realm: German and Austro-Hungarian forces had stalled Russia’s advance, held the Italians, and overrun Romania; German U-boats were sinking a rising toll of British shipping; the French were mutinous and exhausted; and the Americans would not arrive in strength until mid-1918. Lloyd George would have none of this defeatism. His greatest political asset was his war-winning confidence and calm in the face of destruction. He flourished in adversity. There would be ‘no compromise, no deals done, no talk of peace’ under a Lloyd George government. ‘How shall we win’ was the only counsel the War Cabinet listened to.23
In his first weeks in power, the prime minister moved to put the nation on a total war footing. The primacy of supply was second nature to the man who had created the Ministry of Munitions. In this spirit, he cut the size of the War Cabinet, to make it more responsive, and able to make fast decisions. Almost immediately, he created a string of new ministries to address the emergency: Shipping, Labour, Food and Pensions – and, later, National Service and Reconstruction – all of them radiating outwards from the ‘supreme arbiter’, the prime minister.24 With admirable pragmatism, he struck up an effective partnership with the Conservative leader and chancellor, Andrew Bonar Law, who would remain quietly loyal to his ideological opponent even as Lloyd George bypassed him and assumed increasingly dictatorial powers.
The War Cabinet met every day or so, to confront the myriad challenges of the war effort. Their immediate concerns were pooling manpower, fixing the prices of the 1917 harvest and putting down strikes. The most exigent was the soaring cost of the war: Britain would have to borrow US$1.5 billion from America (an enormous sum at the time, equivalent to US$30.5 billion in today’s money) to finance the war up to March 1917, the War Cabinet learned on 9 December 1916. ‘We must strain every nerve to obtain the money,’ advised Morgan, Grenfell & Co., the government’s agents in New York, whose agents confessed that they were ‘staggered’ by the amount.25
Lloyd George’s gravest political concern was manpower. The shortage of fighting men threatened to derail the great offensives planned for the summer of 1917. In late 1916, Haig had requested 500,000 more, infuriating Lloyd George. In the prime minister’s eyes, Haig had already wasted hundreds of thousands of lives, for meagre results; he should not be allowed to do so again. The prime minister’s preferred strategy was to use non-British troops on his proposed third front; to join France’s defensive war; or to inflict a knockout blow that would end the war soon. Of one thing he was clear: Haig’s war of attrition was politically unacceptable, and somehow must be stopped or changed.
In Haig’s eyes, Lloyd George misunderstood the nature of the war and the sacrifices necessary to win it. Indeed, a contradiction lay at the heart of the prime minister’s war: he would never reconcile this determination to win it with his condemnation of the way his commanders were fighting it. Not until many years after the armistice would he put these feelings on public display (see Chapter 17).
Intensifying the British manpower crisis was the German decision on 5 December 1916 to conscript all males aged between seventeen and sixty, with the exception of those employed in vital war-related industries. The forcible recruitment of able-bodied German men – passed by 235 votes to fourteen in the Reichstag – deeply disturbed the British War Cabinet. Earlier in 1916, Downing Street had relaxed constraints on employees in war industries, in order to ‘comb’ the nation for new recruits. Now Britain would match Germany and conscript them: on 12 December 1916, the War Cabinet approved the adoption of compulsory national service for all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty. It came into force on 2 March 1917. Thus far, the Military Service Act had prevented, as far as possible, the dispatch of anyone under nineteen to the front line. Henceforth, grandfathers, school-leavers and those with physical defects (poor eyesight, flat feet, etc.) were deemed eligible for overseas service. If an eighteen-year-old wanted to serve at the front, he should be sent, the War Office advised the government on 9 January 1917.26 At a stroke, school-age boys could be dispatched to the Western Front.
On 18 December, the government went further, withdrawing war service badges and certificates that had exempted men with jobs in war industries. Now they, too, were eligible for combat duty, and punished with up to six months’ hard labour and a fine of £100 if they refused.27 Nor was the ‘dad’s army’ of half a mill
ion men deemed necessary to defend the home front: two divisions of these, too, were released for active service.28
These measures would never deliver Haig’s 500,000. At any rate, Lloyd George refused to send so many British troops. He fastened instead on Britain’s overseas allies as the next best source of manpower: the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and the colonies of India and parts of Africa. On 23 January, the War Cabinet approved the recommendations of the Army Council to shake down the ‘Available Resources of Man-Power, both White and Coloured, in the Overseas Dominions and Dependencies of the Empire’. The Australian Government should ‘be urged to take steps at once for the formation of a sixth Australian Division’; New Zealand encouraged ‘at once’ to form a second New Zealand Division; and the Canadian Government persuaded to dispatch as soon as practicable a fifth division to France and ‘to examine the possibility of raising a sixth’.29
Australia disobliged the Mother Country. In vain, Britain pressed the government of Billy Hughes to deliver up the ‘large reserve’ of Australian manpower, but a slim majority of people voted against conscription at a referendum on 28 October 1916 (and again in December 1917), removing any hope of the country of 4.75 million sending a further division and even putting at risk the maintenance of the existing five then serving in France. The New Zealanders were less reluctant. Here, the British Government had identified a further 30,000 men ‘for disposal’, enough to form a division with five months’ reserves. The New Zealand people were ‘extremely alive’ to the importance of a bigger contribution, reported The Dominion newspaper. That, noted the British Army Council contentedly, ‘could hardly fail to stimulate similar efforts from other Dominions’. Canada, Newfoundland, India and South Africa also sent troops, to the extent that they were able, though the Canadian Corps would not exceed four divisions. In the event, Britain would shoulder the burden of the Anglo-Saxon war effort, enlisting 16.08 per cent of its male population of 22,485,501; compared with about ten to twelve per cent in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (see Appendix 2).30 By these measures, Haig would get most of the men he needed for his huge 1917 offensive.
