The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (103 page)

The Block could be left to the mercies of Lloyd George, who now began his intricate campaign to dethrone the prime minister and then replace him. Churchill, meanwhile, had to deal with a new commander in chief. His wife wrote him: “Do you know Sir Douglas Haig? Did he agree to your appointment or was it finally settled before he supervened? He looks a superior man, but his expression is cold and prejudiced, & I fear he is narrow.” Actually, he and Winston had been acquainted in the early Edwardian years, when he was a major and Winston a young MP, but that had been long ago, and Haig, a dour Scot, was elusive even to those who were close to him. At Oxford he had been regarded as “head-strong, bad-tempered, and intractable.” In the army he had learned to control his temper, and he brought valuable qualities to Saint-Omer: a remarkable grasp of detail, tranquillity under pressure, and absolute self-confidence. He was blindly loyal to military tradition, however. “The role of the Cavalry on the battlefield,” he wrote, “will always go on increasing”; bullets, he believed, had “little stopping power against a horse.” One has the distinct feeling that to him, machine guns, tanks, and aircraft were, if not contemptible, at least bad form. His greatest assets in his rise had been his powerful social connections. His wife had been a member of the royal household, and he knew the King well enough to write him that French, his immediate superior, “is quite unfit for his command at a time of crisis in our nation’s history.”
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The way to break through the German trench line, Haig thought, was to use horses in “mass tactics”—a theory which, as Leon Wolff points out, had been abandoned by even the most ardent cavalry officers. The official British history of the war would tactfully conclude that he was “not swift of thought.” Bernard Shaw, who visited GHQ shortly after Haig took over, wrote: “He was, I should say, a man of chivalrous and scrupulous character. He made me feel that the war would last thirty years, and that he would carry on irreproachably until he was superannuated.” Haig and Sir William (“Wully”) Robertson, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, were exponents of attrition. Churchill, attrition’s heretic, could expect little from them. No compromise was possible between his concept of war and theirs. After reading a Churchill memorandum on the use of tanks and mortars, Leo Amery wrote in his diary: “Whatever his defects may be, there is all the difference in the world between the tackling of a big problem like this by a man of real brain and imagination, and its handling by good second-rate men like Robertson and Haig, who still live in the intellectual trench in which they have been fighting.” On arriving in France, Winston had headed straight for the front to see for himself what it was like. In the whole course of the war, Haig never visited the trenches. Scenes of carnage, he said, might influence his judgement. Afterward Churchill etched him in acid. Haig, he wrote, reminded him of “a great surgeon before the days of anesthetic, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.”
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This judgment lay in the future on December 18, 1915, Sir John French’s last day as commander in chief, when, after picnicking in the countryside with Winston, French returned to GHQ and approached Haig on what he called “a delicate personal matter.” He explained the broken promise to Churchill—broken by Asquith—and then, according to Haig’s diary, said he was “anxious that Winston should have a Battalion. I replied that I had no objection because Winston had done good work in the trenches, and we were short of Battalion CO’s.” The new commander in chief then sent for Churchill, who wrote Clementine that evening: “He treated me with the utmost kindness & consideration, assured me that nothing wd give him greater pleasure than to give me a Brigade, that his only wish was that able men shd come to the front, & that I might count on his sympathy in every way.” Beaming, Winston asked whether Haig would like to read “Variants of the Offensive,” a memorandum on trench warfare he had written while the grenadiers were in the rear area. He wrote home that Haig replied that “he wd be ‘honoured’—! So I am back on my perch again with my feathers stroked down.” Spiers wrote: “WC has Douglas Haig to heel. DH is ready to do anything for him.”
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He was ready to do nothing of the sort. It is doubtful that Haig read “Variants of the Offensive.” If he had, he probably wouldn’t have understood it. And had he understood it, he would certainly have felt affronted. Churchill proposed flamethrowers, improvised infantry shields, wire-cutting torches fueled by gas cylinders, and massive tunneling operations. And he looked beyond the siege warfare in France and Belgium to fluid movements in other theaters of action. “He was probably the only member of Asquith’s Cabinet,” Clement Attlee would later write, “who had a grasp of strategy.” Certainly he seemed to be the only British officer in Flanders who grasped the desperate need for innovations. Civilization was bleeding to death. “The chaos of the first explosions,” he wrote, “has given place to the slow fire of trench warfare: the wild turbulence of the incalculable, the terrible sense of adventure have passed…. A sombre mood prevails in Britain. The faculty of wonder has been dulled; emotion and enthusiasm have been given place to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar, and sorrow numbs. The world is in twilight; and from beyond the dim flickering horizons comes tirelessly the thudding of the guns.”
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O
n New Year’s Day, 1916, Haig appointed Churchill a lieutenant colonel and gave him an infantry battalion, the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers, consisting largely of Lowland Scots, many of them miners from the Ayrshire coalfields. Winston wrote home that he would be glad to see the last of Saint-Omer, “a desert” since French had left. He was now responsible for thirty officers and seven hundred men, and that evening he dined with the divisional commander at his headquarters in Merris. The grenadier colonel’s welcome had been cold, but here, he wrote, “they evidently will like vy much to have me. The general—Furse—is extremely well thought of here and is a thoroughly frank & broadminded man…. Most of the staff had met me soldiering somewhere or other, & we had a pleasant evening.”
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His assurance was premature. Cheery greetings from the general and his staff were one thing; the battalion was another. The Sixth Royal Scots had been badly mauled at Loos and were deeply attached to their commanding officer, whom Churchill was replacing. The switch was therefore unpopular with them. Hakewill Smith, the battalion’s only regular officer, later recalled that he heard of it with “horror.” “When the news spread,” wrote Andrew Gibb, the young adjutant, “a mutinous spirit grew…. Why could not Churchill have gone to the Argylls if he must have a Scottish regiment! We should all have been greatly interested to see him in a kilt…. Indeed, any position at all in the Expeditionary Force seemed not too exalted for Winston if only he had left us our own CO and refrained from disturbing the peace of the pastures of Moolenacker.” Winston arrived there mounted, at the head of a cavalcade bearing his luggage, bathtub, and a boiler for heating the bath water. Moolenacker Farm, the battalion’s reserve billet, consisted, in his words, of “squalid little French farms rising from a sea of soppy field and muddy lanes.” The farm wives were awed. They whispered:
“Monsieur le Ministre! Monsieur le Colonel!” “Ah, c’est lui?” “C’est votre Ministre?”
The soldiers were less impressed. His first parade, after lunch, was a farce. The men were standing at slope arms when their new CO rode up on a black charger and cried: “Royal Scots Fusiliers! Fix bayonets!” As a cavalryman he did not know that this order could not be carried out from the slope. A few men put their rifles on the ground and yanked their bayonets from their scabbards; the rest stood immobile, baffled. Gibb whispered to him that “Order arms” must intervene, and Churchill growled the command. He inspected his troops and then barked another cavalry order: “Sections right!” This meant nothing to the Jocks. They didn’t budge. Gibb had to rescue him again.
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But he was determined to learn. He got the drill down, enrolled in nearby machine-gun and bomb-throwing schools, and patrolled the battalion area each night with Archie Sinclair. His batman found warm, dry quarters for him in one of the farmhouses, where, he wrote home, “the guns boom away in the distance, & at night the sky to the Northward blinks & flickers with the wicked lights of war.” It never entered his mind that he was not entitled to every available comfort; nor, in that day, before the rise of the egalitarian passion, did it occur to his men. But he was not an insensitive officer. To boost morale, he organized a concert and games. He wrote: “Poor fellows—nothing like this has been done for them before. They do not get much to brighten their lives—short though they might be.” He decided to brighten each of their days with a lecture from their CO. One day he struck a dogged pose and announced sonorously: “War is declared, gentlemen—on lice!” There followed, in Gibb’s words, “such a discourse on
pulex Europaeua,
its origin, growth, and nature, its habit and its importance as a factor in wars ancient and modern, as left one agape at the force of its author.” And then the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers were thoroughly deloused.
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Sometimes he was preposterous. The outline of one speech he made to his junior officers survives. He sensibly began: “Keep a special pair of boots to sleep in & only get them muddy in a real emergency. Use alcohol in moderation but don’t have a great parade of bottles in yr dugouts. Live well but do not flaunt it.” Then he said: “Laugh a little, & teach your men to laugh—gt good humour under fire—war is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile grin. If you can’t grin keep out of the way till you can.” In Churchill, G. A. Henty still lived. On the other hand, he was a source of invaluable advice on master masonry and the handling of sandbags, all of which would be immensely useful when they moved up on the line. He devised clever plans for shelters, scarps, counterscarps, half-moon dugouts, and ravelins. These might save their lives; they appreciated that. But when he announced that batmen must serve as bodyguards, sacrificing their lives, if necessary, for their officers, laughter drowned him out. Some of his schemes, said Gibb, were “too recherchés, too subtle to stand the practical test of everyday fighting.” If a parapet was hit during the day, he ordered, it must not be repaired until nightfall; that way, the Germans would not know what damage they had done. Later, under fire, bullets passed through the gaps and men were hit. The order was quietly countermanded.
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On January 24 they were ready. At eight o’clock that morning, with Churchill riding on his horse at the head of the column, they marched from Moolenacker Farm into the Belgian village of Ploegsteert, or “Plug Street,” as the Tommies called it—the jump-off point for a maze of paths and shallow communications trenches which led soldiers eastward to and from the front—taking casualties from the German shellfire along the way. Churchill lodged that night in a battered convent (the “Hospice,” he called it) belonging to the Sisters of Charity. It was the twenty-first anniversary of Lord Randolph’s death. He wrote his mother: “I thought of my father on Jan 24 & wondered what he would think of it all. I am sure I am doing right.” To his wife he wrote: “I am extremely well-lodged here—with a fine bedroom looking out across the fields to the German lines 3,000 yards away. Two nuns remain here and keep up the little chapel which is part of the building…. On the right & left the guns are booming; & behind us a British field piece barks like a spaniel at frequent intervals.” He contrasted the view from his Admiralty office, from which he had been able to see the Horse Guards Parade and the windows of the Cabinet Room at No. 10, to the prospect here: “2 bright red pigs rooting about among the shellholes.”
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In the darkness the battalion moved up to the front-line trenches. Churchill established his headquarters in a shattered building known as Lawrence Farm—he called it his “Conning Tower”—about five hundred yards behind no-man’s-land. He was responsible for a thousand yards of trenches. Following deep, winding, sandbagged gullies, he could move up to the British wire and then check the entire position. “It takes nearly 2 hours to traverse this labyrinth of mud,” he wrote. “On the average,” wrote Gibb, “he went around three times a day, which was no mean task in itself, as he had plenty of other work to do. At least one of these visits was after dark, usually about 1
A.M.
In wet weather he would appear in a complete outfit of waterproof stuff, including trousers and overalls, and with his French light-blue helmet he presented a remarkable and unusual figure.” Lieutenant Jock McDavid saw him “stand on the fire step in broad daylight, to encourage the Jocks, and to prove… how little danger there was of being hit.” He was undismayed when, from time to time, his experiments demonstrated that the danger was very great indeed. Once he and his adjutant were in an advance trench when Winston suggested they peer over the parapet, to get a better look at the German fortifications. They drew small-arms fire, and then shellfire. “Do you like war?” Churchill asked dreamily. “At that moment,” Gibb wrote, “I profoundly hated war. But at that and every moment I believe Winston Churchill revelled in it.”
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