Asquith (71 page)

In the middle of May, when Asquith was in Dublin, Kitchener received an invitation from the Czar to visit Russia. For a month or so the Government had been considering sending a mission to help with the military and supply situation there. Kitchener, although he had worked much better with Robertson than might have been expected, was restless with his lack of power and eager to get away for a time. Once again, although less urgently on this occasion, his colleagues were anxious to see him go. A plan for Lloyd George to accompany Kitchener and deal with the munitions side of the problem was abandoned when he accepted the Irish assignment. Except for a small staff Kitchener went alone. He left London on the night of June 4th. On the following evening he was drowned off the Orkneys. The news was published at noon on June 6th.

On May 30th Asquith had called on Lady Scott for one of his regular conversational exchanges. She recorded in her diary:

The Prime Minister came in the evening. He was wonderful. Talked a great deal about Kitchener. I asked him why he was going to Russia. First he said “ to occupy his leisure, incidentally to talk about munitions, finance, etc.” Later he said “ He’s abdicated. He’s going to be abused in the House tomorrow,” & the P.M. said “ I suppose I must defend him, I can’t leave it to little Tennant, but upon my word I don’t know what I shall say, he’s
such
a liar! ”

“ In South Africa . . . they thought they’d got a plain bluff soldier in Kitchener and a subtle diplomat in Milner. They were wonderfully wrong. If K. can put a thing in a tortuous fashion he always prefers to—& then he repeats himself so horribly; he came to me this morning to say a thing which could be said in 2
minutes— & he said it in 2 minutes, & then began again, & then
again”

Yet there remains considerable doubt as to whether these disillusioned, harsh words represented Asquith’s final view of Kitchener. Lady Scott’s diary never catches the exact turn of Asquith’s phraseology. His cynicism was softer, more tolerant, less brittle, than she allows. Hankey, who knew Asquith very well at this time, supplies an element of confirmation for Lady Scott by saying that, when he first told him that Kitchener wanted to go to Russia, “ Asquith . . . was rather amused.” But Hankey also wrote, admittedly as part of a posthumous justification of Kitchener, that the latter never lost the confidence of those who knew him best and about whose opinion he cared most, the King and the Prime Minister.
^a
And Asquith wrote in his own memoirs of the importance which he attached to Kitchener’s mission to Petrograd: “I have always thought, and still think, that his arrival there might have deflected the subsequent course of history.”
^b

No doubt the truth, allowing for all the changing moods of human feeling, lies somewhere between Lady Scott and this. But whatever opinions he left behind him, Kitchener was dead. Twice in five days the country had been rocked by news of great events. On May 31st and June 1st Admiral Jellicoe had engaged the German High Seas Fleet in the drawn battle of Jutland, and the first communique had presented a picture still less encouraging than the reality. Now Kitchener, who was still such a public legend that rumours denying his death persisted for years, had gone. Greatly though his power had been pared, he left vacant, at a critical stage in the struggle, one of the offices most vital to its prosecution. Asquith’s next problem was whom to make Secretary of State for War.

It was three weeks before a decision was made and another week after that before the new Minister—Lloyd George—took over the department. The currently accepted view of what took place during this interval is that Asquith found himself confronted by two almost equally unwelcome candidates for the post—Lloyd George and Bonar Law; that he decided to procrastinate in the hope that time would enable him to slip Lord Derby in between the two as a more accommodating occupant of the office; but that Law and Lloyd George frustrated this plan by getting together at Lord Beaverbrook’s Leather-head house on Sunday, June 11th and agreeing that Lloyd George should have the job. On the following morning — Whit Monday —
Law drove from Leatherhead to the Wharf to see Asquith
¹
and present him with a joint ultimatum. Asquith countered by offering the job to Law himself, as the lesser of the two evils. But when Law told him it was too late for that, he capitulated and agreed to accept Lloyd George.
^c

Such an account is not wholly convincing, although it contains substantial elements of truth. Asquith did delay over the appointment. He wrote to the King on June 8th to say that he did not intend to rush into a precipitate solution. He did make a tentative offer to Bonar Law on the Monday, and a firmer one to Lloyd George on the Tuesday evening. But there is no indication that he regarded his hands as tied after the Law interview, or that this was decisive in securing the appointment for Lloyd George. The latter, in his
War Memoirs
, writes as though he assumed from the beginning that the office was available to him, provided he was prepared to take it on the terms which Robertson had imposed upon Kitchener.^ Mr. Robert Blake says that the forcing of a modification of this agreement was an essential part of the Bonar Law-Lloyd George compact. But was this even raised, let alone agreed, during Law’s brief discussion at the Wharf? It may have come up during the Prime Minister’s interview with Lloyd George on the Tuesday; but it may not have emerged until another interview two days later. On the Thursday evening (June 16th) Asquith told Lady Scott, with apparent surprise, that “ Lloyd George was behaving absurdly, & suggesting tremendous powers for himself at the W.O.— much more than K. had had. Also he was suggesting leaving the Cabinet altogether, saying he could be more useful outside it.”

On the Friday Lloyd George followed up the interview by writing a perhaps purposely obscure letter :

My dear Prime Minister,

I have given a good deal of consideration to your kind offer of the War Secretaryship and I have come to the conclusion that I should be rendering a greater service to the country in this emergency by not accepting it. As I told you at our interview I thought then I should be of greater use in another sphere. I am still of that opinion. There is another—an insuperable—difficulty. I have taken a strong line in the Cabinet on the question of enfranchisement of our soldiers. I feel they have a right to a voice in choosing the Government that sends them to face peril and death. Were I now to accept a new office in the Government it would fetter up my action when the Cabinet comes to decide that great issue, as they must soon. It is better therefore from your point of view as well as mine that you should give no further thought to my appointment as War Minister. I thank you all the same for the offer.

Yours sincerely,

D. Lloyd George
^e

Obviously Lloyd George was playing hard to get. He could hardly have expected his “ insuperable difficulty ” of soldiers’ votes at some hypothetical general election to be taken seriously. But how hard was he prepared to play? On the same day he wrote another, much longer letter to Asquith. This was also a letter of resignation, but it gave his real reasons for wanting to go. There was no mention in it of soldiers’ enfranchisement. Instead there were strong attacks on the generals, a demand for much greater powers for a civilian Secretary of State for War, and general criticism of the whole direction of the war “ which we are undoubtedly losing.” Only the importance of his munitions task, which was now discharged, had prevented him from “long ago (joining) Carson with whom I have been in the main in complete sympathy in his criticisms of the conduct of the
war.
”
^f

There was another difference between this letter and the first one. This one was never sent. Lloyd George, influenced by Reading, Law and Carson, thought better of it. What effect it would have had on Asquith it is difficult to say. At this stage, contrary to the view of the “ Beaverbrook historians,” he was probably genuinely in favour of Lloyd George having the War Office. Right through from 1908 he had never hesitated to give him big, difficult, worth-while assignments. That same Friday evening he argued strongly to Stamfordham that Lloyd George was one of the only three remaining “ Englishmen ”
¹
with a reputation abroad (the others were Grey and himself). With Kitchener gone, Lloyd George’s presence at the War Office would have a good effect upon the Allies. But Asquith did not believe that tearing up the Robertson agreement was remotely practicable—or indeed

¹
_{Lloyd George might not have liked the word.}

Even without this he was finding enough difficulty in persuading the generals (backed by the Palace) to look with grudging favour upon Lloyd George.

Their view, and that of the King, was that much the best solution was for Asquith to take the job himself. Lord French had been to see him on the Thursday and “ on behalf of the whole Army . .. begged him ” to do this. Stamfordham wrote that the whole Army Council wanted it. This solution had its attractions for Asquith. He always enjoyed exercising his deft quality of effortless administration upon a department, and he was particularly fond of the War Office, of which he had again been in charge since Kitchener’s death. But he realised that there might be political objections.

On the Monday (June 20th) he became aware of a new difficulty. Not more than four Secretaries of State could, by law, be in the House of Commons. Grey, Samuel, Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain already made up the complement. “ So that rules out the Gnat (Lloyd George) and the P.M.,” was the assumption of Lady Scott, with whom he discussed the matter. This set him to work upon the political jigsaw, another activity which he always enjoyed. Perhaps Law could be asked to give up Colonies—it does not sound as though Asquith was very intimidated by him at the time, although a non-departmental office was no doubt to be offered in exchange—and Harcourt moved there with a peerage. Perhaps “ a figurehead, say Derby ” could be brought in, and “ the work (left) to carry on as it does very well at present.
^g

This is the first Asquith mention of Derby in this connection, and not a very flattering one. But that peer, whose public reputation, largely without foundation, was so great that he was sometimes spoken of as a possible Prime Minister, was singularly accommodating. He wanted very much to be Secretary of State,
¹
but he was prepared to serve as under-secretary, preferably in support of Asquith or Bonar Law, but of Lloyd George if need be.

¹
_{“I should like the office—like it very much—but I can’t bring myself to ask for it,” he wrote to his brother-in-law on June 23rd. “ If however you could do anything to get my claim considered, the P.M. need have no fear of my loyalty. . . .” (Randolph Churchill:
Lord Derby
, p. 212). This letter is completely incompatible with the view that he was throughout “ Asquith’s candidate ” for the job.}

T
his made it easier for Asquith to get the generals to accept Lloyd
George. Derby would give them confidence and act as a commodious cushion between them and the new Secretary of State. Two further changes eased Lloyd George’s appointment. The first was Asquith’s discovery that Grey would be glad to lessen his burdens by becoming a peer. The second was that Lloyd George himself tacitly withdrew his conditions about the amendment of the Robertson agreement. It was he and not Asquith who capitulated on this point. Between June 24th and 26th he exchanged inconclusive but barbed letters with the C.I.G.S. They were an inauspicious augury for the future, but they changed little for the present. Lloyd George accepted the office on virtually the same terms that Kitchener had latterly held it. It was all settled by June 28th.

When Margot Asquith heard of the new appointment, she wrote in her diary: “ We are out: it can only be a question of time now when we shall have to leave Downing Street.”
^h
Her husband did not take an equally dramatic view. He saw the outcome rather as a more or less satisfactory solution which he had managed to find for another wearisome problem.

After this War Office arrangement the remainder of the summer of 1916 unfolded itself without much encouragement. There was some light but also a great deal of heavy, lowering cloud. The Russians made sweeping progress in their offensive against the Austrians north of the Roumanian frontier. It was their outstanding success of the war. But on the Somme the British casualties mounted to unprecedented heights, without any corresponding gains. In the first twenty-four hours of this offensive there were 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded. Within three weeks the casualties had risen to 120,000. At this stage there came the disappointment of the Irish failure. And in the shadow of it, in Han-key’s view, Asquith committed his greatest parliamentary blunder of the war. He agreed to Commissions of Inquiry into the Dardanelles expedition and the Mesopotamian failure which had culminated in the surrender of Kut in April. The trouble had started on June 14th, when Bonar Law had promised, with little consultation, to lay the Gallipoli papers before the House of Commons. The departments concerned protested violently. Such publication, they held, would have disastrous military and diplomatic consequences. As a result, after six weeks’ disputation by the War Council and the Cabinet, it was decided that the promise must be rescinded. Asquith announced this to the House on July 18th. His statement was badly received on all sides, and he and the
Cabinet felt forced, two days later, to offer the sop of secret Commissions of Inquiry with published reports.