Asquith (73 page)
Eventually a sop was found. Asquith wrote to the King on November 6th: “ The Cabinet resolved (the Prime Minister dissenting) to introduce a Bill to compel the enlistment of unnaturalised aliens of allied countries (mostly Russian Jews) giving them at the same time an option to emigrate to some other country.”
q
By this time the situation had been exacerbated by the final collapse, after 400,000 British casualties and very small territorial
gains, of the Somme offensive; by the imminent surrender of Roumania; and by the increasing menace of shipping losses to U-boats.
The War Council attempted to deal with these and other lesser problems by meetings of mounting frequency. It had swollen to a membership of nine regular members—Asquith, McKenna, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Balfour, Grey, Crewe, Curzon and Austen Chamberlain—with Runciman and Montagu as additional frequent participants, and Robertson, Henry Jackson and Hankey always present in their professional capacities. Day after day, in the early part of November, it would meet at 11.30 and adjourn at 1.15 or 1.30 with many of the agenda issues unresolved. “ These have been really dreadful War Committees,” Hankey wrote.
It was not that the chairmanship was bad. It was rather that the lack of trust between members was so great, and the external pressures so demoralising, that agreement had become impossible. On November 1st Asquith spoke almost casually of there being “ some six resignations looming.” On November 8th a further element of instability was introduced into the Unionist side of the Coalition by the humiliation of Bonar Law in the House of Commons. In a debate on the somewhat peripheral issue of the disposal of enemy property in Nigeria, for which as Colonial Secretary Law was departmentally responsible, Carson had attacked him with the utmost ferocity. In the division which followed the Government was sustained mainly by Liberal votes. 65 Unionists voted with Carson, 73 with Bonar Law, and 148 were either absent or abstained. The minority was made up not only of Unionists, and not only of those who felt strongly about the pattern of ownership in Lagos, but of a general alliance of malcontents.
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Churchill, who, against Asquith’s advice, had returned from the front to politics in the spring of 1916, was with them; and Lloyd George, who had been dining with Carson that same evening, did not vote.
Into this atmosphere of mutual mistrust and recrimination there was inserted the naked light of the Lansdowne memorandum. It was ironical that such an explosive document should have been provided by such an unflamboyant character. He wrote it in response to a
general invitation from Asquith that members of the Cabinet should circulate their views about the prospects for the next phase of the war and the terms upon which the country might be willing to conclude peace.
1
One of Carson’s supporters met F. E. Smith in the lobby and told him that Law had been saved by the votes of “ the paid members.” “ We will cross off the votes of the members who are paid,” Smith said, “ if you cross off those who want to be paid.” (Blake:
The Unknown Prime Minister
, p. 299).
It was an eminently sensible time for general stocktaking and Lansdowne discharged his part of the task faithfully. His document was long, cogent, and extremely pessimistic. With his usual quiet ruthlessness he refused to leave any question unasked:
We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands. . . . The financial burden which we have already accumulated is almost incalculable. . . . All this it is no doubt our duty to bear, but only if it can be shown that the sacrifice will have its reward. If it is to be made in vain, if the additional year or two years or three years finds us still unable to dictate terms, the war with its nameless horrors will have been needlessly prolonged, and the responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it. . . . Many of us must of late have asked ourselves how the war is ever to be brought to an end. ... it seems as if the prospect of a knock-out ” was, to say the least of it remote. ... Is it not true that unless the apprehensions which I have sketched can be shown ... to be groundless, we ought at any rate not to discourage any movement, no matter where originating, in favour of an interchange of views as to the possibility of a settlement ?
r
This memorandum was circulated on November 13 th. Its conclusions did not represent Asquith’s view. He believed, and had expressed in a speech at the Guildhall four days before, that the moment for peace overtures had not come and that the war must be fought on, probably for a long time to come. But he also thought, as did Grey and most of the other Liberals in the Cabinet, that Lansdowne was perfectly within his rights, and might indeed be performing a public service by raising the questions which he did. This view was not taken by Lloyd George or Bonar Law within the Government, or by Carson or Northcliffe outside. The memorandum almost immediately became public property. Cabinet security at this time was appallingly bad. A few months before action had been threatened against any newspaper which published the details of Cabinet disputes. But no one thought it worthwhile to try and stop the leaks at source —a different situation from that of two and a half years earlier
when Asquith had circulated his magisterial rebuke to his colleagues.
Hostile critics outside used the memorandum as a stick with which to beat most of the Government, and Asquith in particular. The Cabinet, it was suggested, was hopelessly divided, not merely about the conduct of the war, but about whether it should continue to be fought at all. Lansdowne’s views were fathered upon Asquith and Grey. Clearly he was acting as their stalking horse. The whole incident, coming at a time of dissension and dismay, was made into a further piece of evidence of the Prime Minister’s lukewarmness about the national effort which he was trying to direct.
On the day after the memorandum was circulated Asquith went to Paris for a major Allied conference. The end of the 1916 Western offensives, accompanied by the crushing defeat of Roumania and growing signs of Russian exhaustion, made high-level re-appraisal urgently necessary. Asquith was accompanied by Lloyd George, Hankey and Bonham Carter, as well as by Robertson and General Sir Frederick Maurice, who with Haig, were to attend a parallel but separate military conference at Chantilly. Before their departure there had been dispute (but not of an acrimonious nature) about a Lloyd George draft for the Prime Minister’s opening speech at the conference. This was in many ways a curiously similar document to Lansdowne’s memorandum. The analysis was almost equally pessimistic and largely parallel, but the conclusions were different. Asquith insisted on toning it down. He cut out some of the pessimism and most of the offensive references to the Allied generals. In spite of this, and of all the other tensions within the curiously assorted group of travelling companions, it was, Hankey noted, “ an extraordinarily harmonious and almost hilarious party which travelled that day to Paris.” A shadow, he thought, came over them all as the train passed the “ great war cemetery at Etaples, already terribly full,” and Asquith’s thoughts turned to Raymond. But within a few minutes a bad joke of Robertson’s had restored the atmosphere.
s
In Paris the proceedings were not equally cheerful. Briand, harried by Clemenceau (then in opposition) was in an unreceptive mood, and the real decisions (in favour of making 1917 a repeat performance of 1916) were made by the generals at Chantilly. Lloyd George became increasingly discontented. On the evening of the third and last day he recorded that when the British delegates had returned to the Hôtel Crillon and the Prime Minister had “ retired to his usual rest before dinner,”
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he and Hankey went for a walk together. Lloyd George said he wanted to resign, but his companion argued against this course. Then, as they were passing the Vendome Column, Hankey paused and said:
You ought to insist on a small War Committee being set up for the day-to-day conduct of the War, with full powers. It must be independent of the Cabinet. It must keep in close touch with the P.M., but the Committee ought to be in continuous session, and the P.M., as Head of the Government, could not manage that.. . . The Chairman must be a man of unimpaired energy and great driving power.
t
Lloyd George was greatly attracted by the idea, even though they both agreed that it was important that Asquith should continue as Prime Minister. He tells us that he immediately telegraphed to Sir Max Ailken (later Lord Beaverbrook), asking him to arrange a meeting with Bonar Law for the following evening, so that the proposition might be put before the Unionist leader.
The next day they all travelled back to London. At Boulogne the Prime Minister, Hankey noted, “ was recognised on the quayside. .. by a number of British soldiers and given quite an ovation. This looked as if the attacks on him by the halfpenny Press had had less effect than might have been expected, at any rate so far as the Army was concerned.”
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But soldiers on the quayside at Boulogne did not choose British governments—nor would Asquith have wished them to do so. He never went abroad again as a minister.
1
This is the occasion on which Bonar Law,
via
Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Robert Blake, claimed to have found Asquith “ engaged in a rubber of bridge with three ladies.” (see p. 289/1,
supra).
2
This was typical of Lloyd George’s desire to see Asquith as a tired old man, and in sharp contrast with Hankey’s description, three evenings previously, of his late-night work being interrupted by “ the Prime Minister coming in from the Embassy at about midnight in a very talkative and communicative mood, and telling us a lot of interesting information he had picked up from Briand.” In fact, Asquith never rested before dinner. He merely liked, in a way that was incomprehensible to Lloyd George, to get away from conversation and to devote himself to private reading and writing.
1916
The idea of a small War Committee with himself as chairman was not in fact implanted in Lloyd George’s mind by Hankey during their walk through the Place Vendome. The colonel’s views merely gave useful support to a plan which he had already formulated, and on behalf of which, before leaving London, he had commissioned Sir Max Aitken to enlist the support of Bonar Law. In this task Aitken had, at that stage, achieved only a very limited success. He had talked at length to Law on the night of Tuesday, November 14th, but he had found him “ desperately ‘ sticky “ The root cause of the trouble,” Aitken wrote, “ was that Bonar Law had formed the opinion that in matters of office and power Lloyd George was a self-seeker and a man who considered no interests except his own.”
a
There was another consideration in Law’s mind. He had become obsessed by Carson’s increasing hold upon the Unionist Party. This was the significance of the Nigerian debate. It had convinced Law that, unless drastic changes were made, he could not long continue to control his own party. This, for him, would have been a disaster. His modesty and his sense of limited loyalty made him see himself as essentially a representative figure. In this respect he was like Henderson, and unlike Balfour and Curzon, who were quite content to operate as independent “ statesmen,” believing that their views required attention without regard to whether they were held by anyone else. Law did not therefore feel able to dismiss Lloyd George’s overtures out of hand, particularly when he was told that the Secretary of State for War was operating in close alliance with the dreaded Carson.