The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (109 page)

Churchill had joined the cabinet too late, and with too small a power base, to influence Haig’s Flanders offensive of 1917. He had known it was coming. On May 10, still a political outcast, he had begged the House, in secret session, not to permit “fresh, bloody and disastrous adventures” on the western front. Parliament was unresponsive. Thus the stage was set for the terrible, heartbreaking struggle known to historians as the third battle of Ypres and to the men who fought there as the battle of Passchendaele, Passchendaele being the Belgian crossroads village which the BEF hoped to reach in its first lunge. By any name it was Haig’s masterpiece and should never be forgotten. He was convinced that he could break through the German wire, take the ridges overlooking the British position, and then recapture the vital Channel ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Antwerp. On May 1 he wrote in his diary: “Success seems reasonably possible. It will give valuable results on land and sea. If full measure of success is not gained, we shall be attacking the enemy on a front where he cannot refuse to fight, and our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to.”
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Sir Douglas Haig

“Our purpose of wearing him down will be given effect to.”
That syntactical atrocity sums up the scripture of attrition. Its high priest was Haig’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, a tall, morose professional soldier who had been commandant of the Staff College in 1914. J. F. C. Fuller, who later became a tank commander, was one of his students there. Fuller recalled afterward that “the only thing I distinctly remember his saying was, ‘In the next war we must be prepared for very heavy casualties.’ His theory of war was to mass every available man, horse, and gun on a single battlefield, and… wear down the enemy until his last reserves were exhausted, and then annihilate him.” In one of those small collapses of prewar integrity which increased as the desperate war wore on, Jellicoe was persuaded to lie to Lloyd George, solemnly predicting: “If the Army cannot get the Belgian ports, the Navy cannot hold the channel and the war is as good as lost.” Brigadier General John Charteris, Haig’s chief of intelligence and a co-conspirator, later wrote: “No one really believed this amazing view, but it had sufficient weight to make the Cabinet agree to our attack.”
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The balloon went up, as they said then, on July 31. Nine days earlier Churchill, newly appointed and still facing his by-election in Dundee, had written the prime minister of his apprehensions over any “renewed offensive in the west” and begged him to “limit the consequences” of any drive which had already been approved. This merely justified the Tories’ fears. They saw it as proof that he had no intention of confining himself to his ministry. Hankey, who came to tea at Lullenden, noted in his diary: “Lloyd George had given him [Churchill] my War Policy report & he was already well up in the whole situation and knew exactly what our military plans were, which I thought quite wrong.” Soon Winston was taking an active interest in the Admiralty and the War Office, transferring some of Haig’s howitzers to the Russian front, advocating anti-submarine techniques, and urging that heavy battleship guns be moved ashore. The secretary for war protested and the first lord threatened to resign. Lloyd George soothed their ruffled feelings and reminded Winston that he was not a member of the War Cabinet. Churchill, unchastened, crossed to Flanders for a firsthand look at such tiny villages as Bullecourt and Messines, where so much British blood had been spilled. One of Haig’s generals barred him from the trenches. Haig himself was more cordial—“quite genial and cracked several jokes,” Marsh wrote—but inflexible about his objectives. That evening the commander in chief observed in his diary that Churchill “means to do his utmost to provide the army with all it requires, but at the same time he can hardly stop meddling in the larger questions of strategy and tactics; for the solution of the latter he has no real training, and his agile mind only makes him a danger because he can persuade Lloyd George to adopt and carry out the most idiotic policy.”
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George later wished that had been true. Actually, the prime minister had been among those gulled by the high command. Marsh had noted that “the tone of GHQ is tremendously optimistic.” The servile press served as GHQ’s megaphone.
Punch
was running cartoons of cringing Germans whimpering
“Kamerad!”
to insouciant Tommies. The
Spectator
reported: “Our Staff work in the field seems to be irreproachable…. The infantry, whose losses are said to be comparatively light, march behind the moving curtain of shells and bless the gunners as they go.” German newspapers were carrying accurate accounts of the fighting, but
The Times
headlined a summary of them
ENEMY LIES EXPOSED
:
What the Germans Are Told—Falsification of Battle News—The Lie as a Buttress of Morale.
Communiqués from across the Channel reported that the enemy was “visibly cracking,” that patrols found enemy troops “preparing for emergencies,” and that there were signs which could be interpreted as being “preliminary to withdrawal.” The War Cabinet questioned none of this. “It naturally pleased Haig,” Lloyd George would bitterly recall, “to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little tidbits of ‘intelligence’ about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties, and diminishing German morale served up to him…. He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little community reeked of that sycophantic optimism which is the curse of autocratic power…. As for General Kiggell, the Chief of Staff, he had the air of a silent craftsman, whose plans, worked out by his art in the seclusion of his workshop, were turning out well and proceeding inexorably without a hitch to the destined end.”
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The reality was horrible beyond imagining. Here, as on every front in the war, including Gallipoli, defensive strengths had spiked the attackers’ guns, sheathed their bayonets, broken their swords, and left the once proud war-horse to forage behind the lines, entangling communications. The British infantry never had a chance. Haig’s long preliminary bombardment had deprived them of surprise and, at the same time, destroyed the Flemish drainage system. The water, having nowhere else to go, flooded the trenches, and to make the field soggier, the rains were among the worst in thirty years. After three and a half months in this dismal sinkhole, the British army had barely taken Passchendaele village. The filthy, bleeding, battered men were exhausted. Many, burdened by their heavy packs, fell into brimming shell holes and drowned. In London the ambulance trains unloaded at night, smuggling casualties home out of consideration for civilian morale. Siegfried Sassoon wrote of those who fought on: “Shoulder by aching shoulder, side by side / They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.”

British casualties were 448,614. In Flanders fields the poppies grew between the crosses, row on uncompromising row, that marked more than 150,000 fresh British graves. The offensive had gained less than six miles of wasteland. Yet the red-tabbed generals of the high command were exultant. Against all evidence, Charteris reported that the German losses had been enormous. They congratulated one another, pinned new decorations on one another’s tunics, and agreed that it would all have been over long ago if only the politicians had left the fighting to the professionals. Robertson, whose job it was to deal with the government, actually held it in contempt. He wrote Haig that Lloyd George “is a real bad ’un. The other members of the War Cabinet seem afraid of him. Milner is a tired, dyspeptic old man. Curzon is a gas-bag. Bonar Law equals Bonar Law.” Churchill, not being a member of the War Cabinet, wasn’t even mentioned. Yet he was the one public figure who saw precisely what was happening. Gaining access to the casualty lists, he asked: “If we lose three or four times as many officers and nearly twice as many men in our attack as the enemy in his defense, how are we wearing him down?” Haig insisted that, whatever the result, he had saved the French army by distracting the enemy. This, as Churchill later pointed out, was mythical: “The French Army was no doubt saving its strength as much as possible, but the casualty tables show that during 1917 they inflicted nearly as many losses on the Germans as did our own troops.” He continued: “Accusing as I do without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done? And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai, ‘
This
could have been done.’ ” At Cambrai, launched as the Passchendaele drive petered out, 381 of Churchill’s tanks, lurching forward without an artillery bombardment, broke through the enemy defenses on a six-mile front, gained over forty-two square miles, and captured ten thousand Germans at a cost of fifteen hundred British soldiers. “This in many variants, this in larger and better forms,” he wrote, “ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.”
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To see for himself, he crossed the Channel and visited a sector in which, after a tank thrust, the enemy position had been overrun by British infantry. In his report to Lloyd George he wrote that he “went on up to the extreme high watermark of the attack.” The German trench was deep, defended by a belt of wire nearly a hundred yards broad. “This wire was practically uncut and had only little passages through it, all presumably swept by machine guns. Yet the troops walked over these terrific obstacles, without the wire being cut, with very little loss, killed many Germans, took thousands of prisoners and hundreds of machine guns.” The same was true of the enemy’s second trench line, which was “almost as strong and more deceptive.” Farther on, however, Germans in “just a few little pits and holes” had inflicted heavy losses on the British infantry. Here, he concluded, “the troops had got beyond the support of the Tanks, and the bare open ground gave no shelter.” He felt vindicated. He had, he believed, found the way to beat the trench.
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Lloyd George was uncomforted. He knew now that the Flanders campaign had been a criminal blunder. At the end of 1916 he had said gloomily: “We are going to lose this war.” Nearly a year had passed, and the prospect now was far bleaker. Yet it was part of his tragedy, and England’s, that he himself had become a strut in the web of deceit. He wrote: “The people are not ready to pay any heed to good counsel. They still cherish illusions of a complete victory.” And he encouraged them. He felt that the mood of the country left him no alternative. Here, again, British journalists bore much of the blame. In October, when Haig lost nearly twenty-six thousand men in taking an insignificant ridge, Lloyd George had bitterly called it “still another smashing triumph a few hundred yards ahead.” But the
Times
correspondent had described it as “the most important British victory of the war” and applauded the commander in chief’s “calm, unhurried persistence” which compelled “the admiration of the world” because “with each successive stride the arrangements grow more exact, the results more certain, the losses lighter.” Philip Gibbs of the
Daily Chronicle
interviewed a German prisoner, “a professor,” who told him: “It will not be long before Germany makes a great bid for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By mid-winter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine; Russia will remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany will get back some of her colonies.” In the climate of public opinion created by such dispatches, Lloyd George did not dare break openly with his high command. Instead, he promoted Haig to field marshal and doggedly said, in an impromptu speech at Birkenhead: “We shall just win.” The irrepressible
Nation
inquired: “Win What?”
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