The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (100 page)

When Kitchener joined his proselytes, Keyes seemed to have won. Asquith, Balfour, and Kitchener gathered to plan “an abrupt naval coup de main upon the Straits.” But Balfour, hedging his bet, said the navy would act only if the army also attacked—which would require Monro’s approval—and Law threatened to resign unless the whole Turkish theater was shut down. After a communications breakdown between London and the Aegean, Kitchener personally visited the peninsula. He met Keyes aboard the
Dartmouth.
“Well, I have seen the place,” he said. “It is an awful place, and you will never get through.” Keyes asked what had changed his mind. K of K was vague, but it is a fair guess that Monro had decided him. Hamilton’s successor was on the scene now, spreading defeatism. Kitchener wired London that the Suvla and Anzac beachheads should be evacuated. Cape Helles would be held “for the time being.”
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On November 6 the Dardanelles Committee was renamed the War Cabinet and Winston was excluded from it. It was time for him to go; past time. He had known it for weeks. Early in September he had asked Asquith for a field command, suggesting that a major general’s commission and the command of an army corps would be appropriate for someone with his knowledge and experience. The prime minister approached Kitchener, who said that he “would like to get rid of Churchill, but could not offend the Army.” Winston then proposed that he be appointed “Governor-General and Military Commander-in-Chief of British East Africa.” He felt sure he could raise an army of Africans. Balfour told Hankey and James Masterton-Smith, a veteran civil servant at the Admiralty, a version of this. Hankey entered it in his diary. Churchill, according to Balfour, had given Asquith “a scheme for attacking the Germans” in their African colonies “with armoured cars.” He added that perhaps if he succeeded in this, the “military objections to his [assuming] a high post of command would disappear. All this tickled Mr. Balfour so much that he positively pirouetted on one foot, looking very odd in his long frock coat, so that Masterton-Smith and I fairly roared with laughter.”
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The laughingstock of the cabinet submitted his resignation on November 11. Asquith accepted it the next day. Not many mourned his departure. The
Manchester Guardian
was one; an editorial described it as “a great national loss, for in our opinion—though we dare say there are few who now share it—he had the best strategic sense in the Government…. There have been two opportunities of winning the war. One was last October before the fall of Antwerp, the other was this spring when a great effort by land and sea would have won through to Constantinople and saved us all of our troubles in the East now. Mr Churchill saw them both at the time and though his ideas were adopted, neither in Flanders nor in the East did they have anything like a fair chance.”
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Churchill was without political office for the first time in ten years, and as was customary when ministers stepped down, he made a personal statement in the House of Commons—a privilege which had been withheld from him when he left the Admiralty. Later he expanded his remarks before the commission investigating the Turkish campaign. He denied that he had “foisted” a civilian plan upon “reluctant officers and experts.” He said: “You may condemn the men who tried to force the Dardanelles, but your children will keep their condemnation for those who did not rally to their aid.” In his peroration he cried: “Undertake no operation in the West which is more costly to us in life than to the enemy. In the East, take Constantinople. Take it by ships if you can. Take it by soldiers if you must. Take it by whichever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts. But take it; take it soon; take it while time remains.” Asquith rose from the Treasury Bench to acknowledge his departure briefly. He praised him as “a wise counsellor, a brilliant colleague, and a faithful friend,” but did not mention his own role in the Dardanelles decisions. His daughter, who had watched from the gallery, wrote Winston “one line to say I thought your speech
quite
flawless—I have seldom been more moved…. Is there anything you
haven’t
got for the Front? Compass? Luminous wristwatch? Muffler & Tinderlighter? If there is any lacuna in your equipment let me fill it.”
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There was one, but she could do nothing about it. He needed a command. At the very least, he thought, he should be given a brigade, preferably in a division fighting Turks. He didn’t get one. It was fashionable that fall, in Parliament and the War Office, to deride him as an attitudinarian who had been a “mere subaltern.” In fact, his military qualifications were more substantial than that. He was a reserve major who had commanded the defense of Antwerp. As a young officer he had seen fighting in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa. Twice he had witnessed German war maneuvers, an advantage no one on the general staff shared. He had made a thorough study of the arts of war and had published five books on military subjects. His years as first lord ought to have counted for a great deal. “Instead,” as Max Aitken wrote afterward, “he was extruded from the centre of action by men of lesser ability and initiative, and his knowledge and his inventiveness of mind—all were wasted.”
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Asquith and Kitchener ignored his every appeal. In the end he had only his commission in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars—that and his acquaintances among the redtabs in France, which, because of his genteel birth and public career, were several. He decided to join his regiment in France. There, at least, he would be among friends. He would see what else he could manage along the way.

On Tuesday, November 16, he held a farewell luncheon at 41 Cromwell Road, inviting Goonie, Nellie Hozier, Eddie Marsh, and Margot and Violet Asquith. Violet would later remember that “Clemmie was admirably calm and brave, the rest of us trying to ‘play up’ and hide our leaden hearts. Winston alone was at his gayest and his best and he and Margot held the table between them. They had always been an uneasy combination, as neither of them really enjoyed the other’s society and she could not forbear from rubbing in the evils which had followed in the wake of the coalition and reminding him that he had always wanted one. He made his stock reply, that we should have sought one, not in our hour of weakness but at a time of strength.” For the rest of the group, Violet thought, the lunch “was a kind of wake.”
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Wednesday, Aitken arrived, bursting with energy, as always, and found “the whole household was upside down while the soldier-statesman was buckling on his sword.” He was also supervising the packing of cigars, port, vermouth, whiskey, camping equipment, and assorted creature comforts. “Downstairs,” Aitken saw, “Mr ‘Eddie’ Marsh, his faithful secretary, was in tears…. Upstairs, Lady Randolph was in a state of despair at the idea of her brilliant son being relegated to the trenches. Mrs Churchill seemed to be the only person who remained calm, collected and efficient.” On Thursday, Major Churchill crossed the Channel aboard a regular steamer to Boulogne, where, to his surprise, a car had been sent by Sir John French to meet him. After reporting to his regiment, he joined the BEF’s commander in chief for dinner at Saint-Omer “in a fine château,” he wrote home, “with hot baths, beds, champagne & all the conveniences.” French received him warmly; his own position had become highly precarious, and he could empathize with the fallen Churchill. More generous than Asquith or the War Office, he offered him a choice between serving here as an ADC or commanding a brigade. “The brigade,” Winston instantly replied. It was settled that he would first spend a training period with the Grenadier Guards. He wrote home: “Midnight. My dearest soul—(this is what the gt d of Marlborough used to write from the low countries to his cat) All is vy well arranged… but as I do not know to wh battalion I am to be sent, I cannot tell the rota in wh we shall go into the trenches.”
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Approaching the front in that war was a shocking experience. Winston hadn’t been in the field in fifteen years, and he had never seen anything like this. He was a middle-aged man, accustomed to indulgence, whose skin felt unchafed only when caressed by silk. There would be none of that here. On Saturday he lunched at La Gorgue and learned that he had been attached to the grenadiers’ Second Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George “Ma” Jeffreys, the only surviving officer of the original battalion which had gone into action here in 1914. They would be reentering the line that night in front of Merville, near Neuve Chappelle, one of the many villages, like Ypres, Bullecourt, and Messines, whose very names had become symbols for the suffering here. He was driven part of the way toward the thundering artillery and then proceeded on foot with Jeffreys’s sweating, heavy-laden, sleepy-eyed headquarters staff. “It was a dull November afternoon,” he would write in the March 1924 issue of
Nash’s Pall Mall.
“An icy drizzle fell over the darkening plain. As we approached the line, the red flashes of the guns stabbed the sombre landscape on either side of the road, to the sound of an intermittent cannonade.” After nearly four hours they reached battalion headquarters, “a pulverized ruin called Ebenezer Farm,” where they were provided with rations and “strong tea with condensed milk”—not his idea of liquid refreshment.
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Jeffreys greeted him coldly: “I think I ought to tell you that we were not at all consulted in the matter of your coming to us.” Winston respectfully replied that the decision had not been his; he ventured to say it would work; in any case they must make the best of it. After a long, hostile silence, the adjutant said: “I am afraid we have had to cut down your kit rather, Major. There are no communication trenches here. We are doing all our reliefs over the top. The men have little more than what they stand up in. We have found a servant for you, who is carrying a spare pair of socks and your shaving gear. We have had to leave the rest behind.” Churchill said that was “quite all right”; he was sure he would be “very comfortable.”
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No one spoke to him again as they moved up. He felt, he said afterward, “like a new boy at school in charge of the Headmaster, the monitors, and the senior scholars.” He knew why; every British soldier in France was bitter about the reinforcements which had been sent to Gallipoli, and he, of course, was to blame for that. At length they leapt over a parapet and rushed into the front-line trenches. There he was given his choice of sleeping quarters for the night, a signal office eight feet square, stiflingly hot, and occupied by four busy Morse signalers, and a dugout two hundred yards away. Having “surveyed” the signal room, he asked for directions to the dugout and was led there. It turned out, he later recalled, to be “a sort of pit four feet deep containing about one foot of water.” It was there, in the mud of Flanders, trapped in a deadlock he had tried so hard to break, that he learned the outcome of his hopes in the east. It came in a scrawled postscript to a letter from Clementine: “Large posters just out:—
TROOPS WITHDRAWN FROM DARDANELLES—OFFICIAL.
” After 213,980 British casualties, the evacuation of Gallipoli had begun. It would continue through December into January. Not a man fell in winding down the operation. Virtually all future losses would be here on the western front, where no end was in sight.
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S
o frosty a reception by fellow officers would have daunted almost any other newcomer, but Winston was too proud, and his ego too strong, to be scarred by petty slights. He was, he later wrote, “infinitely amused at the elaborate pains they took to put me in my place and to make me realize that nothing counted at the front except military rank and behaviour.” Here they were wrong. He expected special treatment and he got it. Soldiers’ mail was notoriously slow; letters to and from Cromwell Road, carried by a King’s messenger from the Admiralty, were delivered overnight. No other fighting man could speak to his wife over a telephone. Churchill did; he rode back to French’s GHQ and heard her over a special Admiralty line. After hanging up he wrote Clementine that because another officer had been in the room, “I cd not say much & even feared you might think I was abrupt.” She wrote that the conversation had been “very tantalising, as there is so much I want to say to you which cannot be shouted into an unsympathetic receiver!” But millions of husbands and wives would have given much to be so constrained, and so tantalized.
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