Asquith (62 page)

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 recorded
¹
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
.”
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¹
_{He dealt with this 1915 incident in his somewhat loosely entitled boo
k,
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 unfailing 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.

For a few days Asquith tried hard to dissuade Fisher from resignation. First, he had to track him down—his early morning resignation letter to Churchill announced that he was leaving immediately for Scotland—but in fact he had locked himself in a room in the Charing Cross Hotel. There Asquith had delivered to him a sharp letter ordering him, in the King’s name, to return at once to duty. This at least had the effect of bringing Fisher to Downing Street, and the Prime Minister tried upon him a combination of his own magisterial manner, Lloyd George’s cajolery and McKenna’s appeal to old friendship. None of these were of much effect, although Fisher did go back to the Admiralty for a few days. While there he composed various ultimata against Churchill, including a remarkable statement of the conditions on which he would stay and “ guarantee the successful termination of the war.” He would serve under neither Churchill nor Balfour nor indeed under any other First Lord unless the powers of the civilian were so restricted that he occupied “ the same position towards me as Mr. Temiant, M.P., does to Lord Kitchener (and very well he does it).” Fisher also demanded the dismissal of the rest of the Board of Admiralty.

This document convinced Asquith that he was dealing with a megalomaniac, and he let him go without further remonstrance. By the time that he received it (May 19th) Fisher’s presence in office had ceased to be important. On the 17th, confronted with the threat of a vicious Tory attack in the House of Commons upon the whole administration of the Admiralty, which would have been most damaging both to the Government and to its hopes of enticing a wavering Italy into the war,
¹
Asquith had quickly agreed that a coalition was
the only way out.

¹
_{Grey was away ill, and Asquith, in temporary charge of the Foreign Office, was closely engaged in these delicate negotiations.}

He laconically conveyed his decision to Stamfordham (for the King) that evening:

After much reflection, & consultation today with Lloyd George and Bonar Law, I have come decidedly to the conclusion that, for the successful prosecution of the war, the Govt, must be reconstructed on a broad and non-party basis.
^g

On the 19th Bonar Law formally signified his agreement. Such an arrangement meant that Churchill would have to leave the Admiralty. This was a clearly understood Tory condition for joining. Fisher could therefore be allowed to throw himself overboard.