The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (106 page)

The Western Front June 1916

F. E. Smith wrote an introduction to this analysis and had it printed for the cabinet. Everyone else discounted it. Even before it had gone to press Hankey wrote in his diary that Sir William Robertson had “told me that F. E. Smith was writing a paper to show that the big offensive in France had failed. I suspect that Ll George & Winston Churchill are at the back of it. Personally I think it is true but it is a mistake to admit it yet.” A copy of the memo reached Saint-Omer. To Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting him there, Haig insisted that the drive must continue, and Northcliffe, convinced, wrote the editor of
The Times:
“Let me once more say and urge that what is taking place on the Somme must not be measured in metres. It is the first time we have had a proper scientific attack. There are no complaints of bad Staff work…. If we wrote communiqués as well as the Germans, we would lay much more stress on the German losses, which are
known
to be immense.” In fact, the campaign, when it finally petered out, had cost the British 481,842 men to the enemy’s 236,194—and the only gain was a few square miles of worthless mud.
The Times,
however, never mentioned Churchill’s warning.
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The
Daily Mail
accused him of conspiring against Haig and Robertson, and therefore against England. “The country,” it reported when the Somme bloodletting was at its height, had “seen a Cabinet minister who had just enough intelligence to know that Antwerp and Constantinople were places of importance and yet was mad enough to embark on adventures in both places…. In the Dardanelles affair in particular a megalomaniac politician risked the fate of our Army in France and sacrificed thousands of lives to no purpose.” He had dragged “too pliant officers” with him “into these reckless and hopeless ‘gambles’ ” at a time when his sole duty “was simply to supply the Navy with men and material.” Tragedy would have been averted if the admirals had been “men of the stamp of Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson.” The lesson was:
“Ministerial meddling means military muddling.”
Churchill was put on notice: “No politician who remembers the contemptible fiasco of Antwerp and the ghastly blunder of Gallipoli need expect either patience or forgiveness from the British public if he interferes with the soldiers in charge of our operations.” H. A. Gwynne of the
Morning Post
wrote Asquith of “a sort of plot whose ramifications I am not altogether able to trace”; its purpose was “to get rid of DH,” and its ringleader, he believed, was the former first lord. The
Spectator
accused Churchill of playing “the part of a political adventurer… with a want of scruple and want of consideration for public interests, and with a reckless selfishness, to which our political history affords no parallel.”
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After reading this Lloyd George told Sir George Riddell that it was “on the whole part true.” He and Asquith had become convinced, in the words of Martin Gilbert, that “the imaginative, constructive, hard-working colleague of prewar years was being eaten up by personal ambition, and that his judgment had been impaired.” Winston learned of this and thought it incomprehensible. It was one thing to be slandered by Balfour, Bonar Law, and Lord Derby. That was politics. The Tories were only giving as good as they had got from him. But to be distrusted, suspected, and even condemned by men who had long been friends as well as colleagues was beyond his understanding. It was not, however, beyond Clementine’s. Others fawned on him and then cut him behind his back. She told him, and wrote him, that he was sometimes curt, insensitive, and inconsiderate; that he was too given to extravagant overstatement; that his manner was dictatorial and often insulting. It was not enough to be right. His assumption that he alone should stand at the center of events, she said, offended men whose own achievements entitled them to share the stage and disagree. He lacked patience and tolerance. He was often strident and scornful, and because this had alienated first-rate men, he was driven to seek the company of others, who, as she saw it, could do him no good and might bring harm. When they had left Admiralty House, Clementine thought she had seen the last of Lord Fisher. To her horror, Winston continued to correspond with him, sent him birthday greetings, and even invited him to Cromwell Road as an honored guest. There she could not contain herself. F. E. Smith heard her tell the old admiral: “Keep your hands off my husband. You have all but ruined him once. Leave him alone now.” Sometimes Churchill himself realized that he had fallen among companions who were, if not evil, at least unworthy. At one function he approached a fellow guest and said shakily: “Get me a stiff whisky and soda, and get it quick. I have just done something I hoped I would never have to do. I have shaken hands with de Robeck.”
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Max Aitken, who remained constant, later wrote of Churchill in this dark time: “he cared for the Empire profoundly, and he was honestly convinced that only by his advice and methods could it be saved. His ambition was in essence disinterested. He suffered tortures when he thought that lesser men were mismanaging the business.” Another friend described him as “a character depressed beyond the limits of description…. When the Government was deprived of his guidance he could see no hope anywhere.” He told Riddell: “I am finished. I am banished from the scene of action.” On July 5 he wrote Archie Sinclair: “I do not want office, but only war direction…. I am profoundly unsettled: & cannot use my gift. Of that last I have no doubts. I do not feel that my judgments have been falsified, or that the determined pursuance of my policy through all the necessary risks was wrong. I wd do it all again if the circumstances were repeated. But I am faced with the problem of living through days of 24 hours each: & averting my mind from the intricate business I had in hand—wh was my life.” In his anguish he sent his brother a long, tormented letter on July 15. “Is it not damnable,” he asked, “that I should be denied all real scope to serve this country, in this tremendous hour?” Asquith, he wrote, “reigns supine, sodden and supreme.” Then: “Tho’ my life is full of comfort, pleasure and prosperity I writhe hourly not to be able to get my teeth effectively into the Boche. But to plunge as a battalion commander unless ordered—into this mistaken welter—when a turn of the wheel may enable me to do 10,000 times as much would not be the path of patriotism or of sense…. Jack my dear I am learning to hate.”
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The western front haunted him—both its futility and the thought that there, at least, he might be contributing something, if only a mite, to the war effort. “I look back a gt deal to our Plugstreet days,” he wrote Sinclair later in the year, “& wish I cd have cut myself more adrift from London & its whirlpools and been more content with the simple animal life (& death) wh the trenches offered.” Forgetting his pledge to Kitchener, he declared: “When I am
absolutely
sure there is no prospect of regaining control or part of it here, I shall return again to that resort & refuge.” He was struck by a bitter irony. Volunteering to fight had been “a costly excursion” for him; in doing so he had sacrificed the power he now craved. “If I had stayed Chancellor of the Duchy and shut my mouth & drawn my salary, I shd today be one of the principal personages in direction of affairs…. Under a fair pretence of fine words, there is a gt
déconsideration
of all who wear uniform. Not one of these gallant MPs who has fought through the Somme at the head of their battalions, stands a chance agst less clever men who have stopped & chattered at home. This to me is the most curious phenomenon of all. It is quite inexplicable to me.”
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He seldom addressed the House now. C. P. Scott of the
Guardian,
calling on him in South Kensington, urged him to keep his flag flying in Parliament. Eventually, he predicted, recruits would rally to him. Winston shook his head. Except in Scott’s paper, his remarks were unreported. Indeed, they were largely unheard; few members came in to hear him—“what a contrast with the old days, when my rising was the signal for the House to fill!”
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He preferred to reach his public through the
Sunday Pictorial.
Writing an article took no longer than preparing a speech; every word was printed, and he was paid £250, about five shillings a word, for each piece. That was important. He needed every penny he could make. His brother, now fighting under Haig, had only his officer’s salary. Jennie, who had let her own house and moved into 41 Cromwell Road while Winston was in the trenches, contributed £40 a month, but with three adults, and five children in the nursery under a nanny, they had to run a tight ship. The Christmas holidays were another matter. Sunny invited them all to Blenheim—his political quarrels with Winston and Clementine had been long forgotten—and they welcomed the new year with an enormous bonfire. Winston tossed an effigy of the kaiser on the flames. Across the Channel, at the stroke of midnight, the Germans filled the sky with brilliant green flares. A British battery fired ten shells, paused, and fired seven more. It was 1917.

C
lementine had seen the way to sever his knot of agony nearly a year earlier, while he was still in Flanders. Once the facts about the Dardanelles were made public, she believed, her husband would be absolved of all blame, for both the failure to force the strait and the subsequent tragedy on the peninsula. On January 11 she had written Winston: “If you ask the P.M. to publish the Dardanelles papers let me know what happens. If he refuses or delays I beg you not to do anything without telling me first & giving me time to give you my valuable (!) opinion on it…. If he dissents I fear you will have to wait. If you insisted on publication against his wish you would have against you all the forces of cohesion & stability including every member of the Cabinet. On the other hand when the papers are eventually published his refusal to do so earlier will have a very bad effect for him…. I am very anxious that you should not blunt this precious weapon prematurely.”
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That same day, Churchill had read in
The Times,
Carson had said in the House that the expedition against Turkey had been “admirably conceived.” From Lawrence Farm, Winston had written his wife: “Gradually people will see what I saw so vividly this time last year, but alas too late forever.” It was never too late to correct the record, she replied, and when he returned to Parliament as a civilian he found that in this case it was imperative. During a debate over conscription Asquith had proposed that Ireland be exempt. The Easter rebellion in Dublin the previous April had been followed by executions; feeling ran high there. Winston, disagreeing with the exclusion, said: “This is a time for trying to overcome difficulties and not for being discouraged or too readily deterred by them.” An Irish Nationalist shouted: “What about the Dardanelles?” It was a cry he was to hear again and again, in the House, in meeting halls, and on the streets. Clementine had been right. He had to clear his name. And only the truth—in the documents—would do it.
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On June 1, 1916, in what was surely one of the most ill-advised political decisions of his life, the prime minister agreed. The decision was reported in the next day’s
Times.
Bonar Law, speaking for Asquith, told the House that all papers relevant to the campaign would be assembled and laid before the country. Churchill wrote the prime minister the next morning, offering to help sort them out. Ian Hamilton’s reputation was also at stake, and although his hopes for exoneration were less realistic than Winston’s, he nonetheless cherished them. Three days later he and Churchill dined at the general’s home in Hyde Park Gardens. Afterward they reviewed Hamilton’s copies of twenty telegrams he had sent to the War Office from Gallipoli. Not one of them, Churchill realized, had been laid before the cabinet. This was powerful evidence of negligence on Kitchener’s part. There seemed to be no way he could explain it away. While they talked, a voice became audible on the street outside. Someone was shouting K of K’s name. As Hamilton told it in his memoirs: “We jumped up and Winston threw the window open. As he did so an apparition passed beneath us. I can use no other word to describe the strange looks of this newsvendor of wild and uncouth aspect. He had his bundle of newspaper under his arm and as we opened the window was crying out ‘Kitchener drowned! No survivors!’ ” The war minister, on a mission to Saint Petersburg, had been aboard H.M.S.
Hampshire
when she hit a mine. Hamilton wrote: “The fact that he should have vanished at the very moment Winston and I were making out an unanswerable case against him was one of those
coups
with which his career was crowded—he was not going to answer!”
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