Asquith (72 page)

“Certain it is,” Hankey wrote, “ that the Coalition never recovered from (this) decision. For the last five months of its existence the function of the Supreme Command was carried out under the shadow of these inquests .... A good deal of mutual suspicion was engendered. Such homogeneity as the Government had possessed gradually weakened.. . . Before long .. . the power of decision in difficult questions was affected.”
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1

¹
Hankey was perhaps a little jaundiced by the fact that, between July 24th and September 27th, he had to spend 174 hours of his “ free ” time preparing the Government case for the Dardanelles Commission. He lost his August holiday (which would have been his first since 1913) but felt partially compensated by Asquith’s assurance that the result of his work was “the greatest State paper he had ever read”; Curzon’s letter of congratulation, accompanied by the offer of a week-end party to meet the Queen of the Belgians, he found less of a recompense.
(The Supreme Command
,

n, p- 523).

On the other hand, Hankey, before this diversion, was a considerable partisan of the British system of Supreme Command as it had evolved under Asquith. His retrospective judgment was that it was certainly superior to the German system. The November, 1915, arrangements were a great advance on anything which had gone before: “ The machinery of the War Committee was at this time (the first eight months of 1916) working smoothly. An Agenda paper was issued before each meeting. Full records were as before kept in manuscript. The conclusions after being approved and initialled by the Prime Minister—in this matter Asquith was prompt and punctilious—were circulated to the Cabinet whose members were thus kept fully abreast of what was going on.”

Hankey’s conclusion was that, “ with a loyal and united team,” this system might have been adapted to meet the requirements of the latter part of the war. “ But, with a Government composed of members of opposite political parties who had never been able entirely to forget their differences and in an atmosphere poisoned by the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia Commissions, this proved impossible even under so patient and experienced a leader as Asquith.”
(ibid.,
11, pp. 543-4).

The consequences of this “ blunder ” took time to make themselves felt. August was a calm month politically, although the Battle of the Somme ground on. Plans for the Speaker’s Conference on electoral reform were put in hand. There were financial difficulties with the French, and Asquith had to pay a hurried visit to Calais on the 23rd.

Early in the month the Italians gained an expensive but real victory and occupied Gorizia. Late in the month the Roumanians entered the War on the Allied side, and there were false hopes that this might change the whole Balkan balance; within three months they were smashed and the Germans were outside Bucharest. The French went over to the offensive before Verdun, but continued to bleed themselves white.

In the last week of August Asquith escaped for a few days to the Wharf. Then, at the beginning of September, he went with Hankey, whom he described at about this time as “ the most useful man in Europe—he has never been wrong,” on a visit to the front. They were both greatly interested in the plans for the first employment of the tanks or “ caterpillars,” which, stemming from Churchill’s original directive of March, 1915, were now ready for service in small numbers. Hankey pressed the two principal staff officers at G.H.Q. not to fritter away the shock of their first use in limited attacks over the unfavourable (because heavily shell-scarred) terrain of the Somme. They should be kept for a new offensive over less weary ground. Asquith, he said, urged the same point of view upon Haig.
¹

¹
_{Asquith stayed at a G.H.Q. house during this visit. After dinner the first evening Haig wrote in his diary: “ Mr. A. and I had a long talk after dinner.....He seems fully determined to fight on till Germany is van
quished”. After the second evening he wrote to his wife: “You would have been amused at the Prime Minister last night. He did himself fairly well—not more than most gentlemen used to drink when I was a boy, but in this abstemious age it is noticeable if an extra glass or two is taken by anyone! The P.M. seemed to like our old brandy. He had a couple of glasses (big sherry glass size) before I left the table at 9.30, and apparently he had several more before I saw him again. By that time his legs were unsteady, but his head was quite clear, and he was able to read a map and discuss the situation with me. Indeed he was most charming and quite alert in mind.”
(The Private Papers of Douglas Haig
, p. 164)}

_{Haig’s picture fits in well with other accounts of Asquith’s dining habits. For the last ten or fifteen years of his life, at least, he was a fairly heavy drinker. Occasionally this made him look a little unsteady (even in the House of Commons) late at night. But no one ever suggested that his mind lost its precision or that there was any faltering in his command over what he did or did not want to say.}

The visit was also notable for a meeting between Asquith and his
eldest son, and for the close experience of the Somme battlefield which it gave to the Prime Minister. Hankey described how, on September 6th, a “ glorious hot day,” they motored up from G.H.Q., through the ruined town of Albert, to the three-storied dug-out headquarters of the 7th Division, which was in action at the time:

Near Fricourt we met Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s eldest son, who was waiting at a cross-roads, having ridden over on horseback to meet us. As we jolted up the broken shell-smitten road ... I heard the curious whizz of a large howitzer shell. . . .

As we came through the “street” at Fricourt—as a matter of fact there was literally not one stone left on another—another shell came and burst not more than a hundred yards away. We got out of our cars and hurried to a “ dug-out.” Just as we arrived a third shell greeted us and landed not fifty yards away—but I am not sure that it burst. We had to wait some considerable time in the “ dug
out ” until the shell shower had passed over..... The Prime
Minister was as usual quite composed, but I thought his hand was trembling rather, and no wonder.
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Asquith’s comment on his meeting with his son was that he found him looking “ so radiantly strong and confident that I came away from France with an easier mind.”^ On the next day he and Hankey motored to Crecy, where they had a chance encounter with Edwin Montagu, who had succeeded Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions; and Asquith derived considerable and typical amusement from Montagu’s ignorance of the fact that they were on ground which had seen an earlier battle.

The next big push on the Somme came on September 15th. The advice which Asquith and Hankey had given to Haig and his staff officers was then ignored. The tanks were frittered away. “ This priceless conception,” as Churchill wrote, “ . . . was revealed to the Germans for the mere petty purpose of taking a few ruined villages.” But that day brought far worse news for Asquith than that. In the first wave of the attack Raymond Asquith was killed.

On Sunday, September the 17th, we were entertaining a week-end party. . . . While we were playing tennis in the afternoon my husband went for a drive with my cousin, Nan Tennant. He looked well, and had been delighted with his visit to the front. . . .

As it was my little son’s last Sunday before going back to Winchester I told him he might run across from the Barn in his pyjamas after dinner and sit with us while the men were in the dining-room.

While we were playing games, Clouder, our servant... came in to say that I was wanted.

I left the room, and the moment I took up the telephone I said to myself, “ Raymond is killed.”

With the receiver in my hand, I asked what it was, and if the news was bad.

Our secretary, Davies, answered, “Terrible, terrible news. Raymond was shot dead on the 15th. Haig writes full of sympathy, but no details. The Guards were in and he was shot leading his men the moment he had gone over the parapet.”

I put back the receiver and sat down. I heard Elizabeth’s delicious laugh, and a hum of talk and smell of cigars came down the passage from the dining-room.

I went back into the sitting-room.

“Raymond is dead,” I said, “he was shot leading his men over the top on Friday.”

Puffin got up from his game and hanging his head took my hand; Elizabeth burst into tears.... Maud Tree and Florry Bridges suggested I should put off telling Henry the terrible news as he was happy. I walked away with the two children and rang the bell: “ Tell the Prime Minister to come and speak to me,” I said to the servant.

Leaving the children, I paused at the end of the dining-room passage; Henry opened the door and we stood facing each other. He saw my thin wet face, and while he put his arm round me I said:

“ Terrible, terrible news.”

At this he stopped me and said:

“ I know ... I’ve known it... Raymond is dead.”

He put his hands over his face and we walked into an empty room and sat down in silence.
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The blow to Asquith was a heavy one. Of the four sons of his first marriage Raymond was not the closest to him. Nor was he academically pre-eminent. But he was the most generally gifted. He had immense gaiety; he was a symbol of the talent of a generation;
and he was most like what Asquith himself, in his occasional moods of romantic impatience with what he sometimes regarded as his own pedestrian qualities and success, would have liked to be. “ Whatever pride I had in the past,” he wrote on September 20th, “ and whatever hope I had for the far future—by much the largest part of both was invested in him. Now all that is gone. It will take me a few days more to get back to my bearings.”
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In fact it took him much longer. Throughout the autumn he remained, for most people, withdrawn and difficult to approach. He missed several Cabinets, and on October 11th he was writing:

This has been a great blow to me and I am much shaken by it— there is or ought to be every kind of consolation and I have numberless letters from all parts of the world and all sorts and conditions of people. But I don’t know that it all helps one very much. ... Today I braced myself up to propose a vote of credit in the House of Commons; a trying and difficult speech, especially the latter part of it. I got on better than I expected as everyone was very kind and sympathetic.
ⁿ

This special public kindness was inevitably short-lived.
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, Lord Northcliffe’s twin scourges for the mortification of the Prime Minister, continued their attacks almost without respite. Asquith preserved his equanimity by taking little notice of what they said. He was never much of a newspaper reader, preferring always to have hard covers between his hands, and it is doubtful if he even looked at them at all regularly. But much of the rest of the country did. In an age of mass-literacy, before broadcasting, and with a House of Commons disorganised by coalition and too far removed from election to be effectively representative, Northcliffe exercised an influence greater than that of any newspaper proprietor before or since. Between them his two organs gave him a dominant grip on both ends of the London newspaper market. And their constant, unanswered denunciations of Asquith, while they may have provoked him less than they would have provoked most other men, did much to undermine his position.

Within the Government new quarrels had erupted after the August lull. In late September Lloyd George had given his so-called “ knock-out blow ” interview to an American newspaperman. In this interview he discounted entirely any possibility of a negotiated settlement. Britain would fight on to “a decisive finish,” however long the time, however great the sacrifice. His purpose was to warn off President Wilson who was thought to be contemplating a peace initiative. Several members of the Cabinet, including the Foreign Secretary, believed the interview to be ill-judged and unnecessarily intransigent. Grey wrote a letter of remonstrance, but Lloyd George replied jauntily: “You will find that it will work out all right. I know that American politician. He has no international conscience. He thinks of nothing but the ticket....”
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This was the beginning of a dispute which was to boil up again in November.

¹
_{This passage was expurgated from Lloyd George’s
War Memoirs,
although he published the rest of the correspondence.}

Lloyd George was a principal participant in most quarrels at this time. He allowed a bitter argument between Balfour and Curzon about the use of aeroplanes to pass over his head, but he was central to every other major dispute. In mid-October he exchanged wounding letters with Robertson over the C.I.G.S’s refusal to divert troops from the Western Front to Salonika. In the same week he was in the thick of an argument about the working of the Military Service Act. Car-son, an increasingly effective leader of the dissidents in the House of Commons, was waging a campaign, with wide newspaper support, to press more men into service. Lloyd George echoed this point of view in a speech on October 12th. Bonar Law commented a few weeks later that the Secretary of State for War was “ at the same time the right hand man to the Prime Minister and to the leader of the Opposition. But from where were the extra men to be pressed? Montagu threatened to resign if more were taken away from munitions. The Cabinet (for once) was nearly unanimous that conscription could not be applied to Ireland, although it noted sadly that recruiting there, and amongst the Irish in Australia, had come to an almost complete standstill. This was one price of the failure of the June and July negotiations. But neither the Press nor Carson accepted the facts which circumscribed the Government.