The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (111 page)

Their motorcade set out at ten o’clock in the morning. At Beauvais they mounted a stone staircase, passed through double doors which were opened at their approach, and were welcomed by the diminutive, mustachioed Foch. He led them into a huge, elegant conference room. Pinned to a wall before him was an enormous map of the front. “General Foch seized a pencil,” Churchill recalled in the
Strand Magazine
of December 1930, “as if it were a weapon, and without the slightest preliminary advanced upon the map and proceeded to describe the situation.” Everything about his method of delivery impressed Winston: “his animation, his gestures, his habit of using his whole body to emphasize and illustrate as far as possible the action which he was describing or the argument which he was evolving, his vivid descriptiveness, his violence and vehemence of utterance.” Most of the time he spoke in French, and his tongue was so quick that Churchill missed phrases and sometimes whole sentences, but the generalissimo’s meaning was quite clear. He pointed to the German gains on the offensive’s first day and cried: “Oh! Oh! Oh! How big!” Then his pencil sketched the second stage of the drive, also huge:
“Deuxième journée d’invasion. Ah! Ah!”
The third lunge, again enormous:
“Troisième journée. Aie! Aie!”
But as he progressed it became clear that each day’s conquests grew steadily smaller. It was Churchill’s water-bucket metaphor translated into geography. Finally he said:
“Hier, dernière journée d’invasion,”
and “his whole attitude and manner,” wrote Winston, “flowed out in pity for this poor, weak, miserable little zone of invasion which was all that had been achieved by the enemy on the last day…. The hostile effort was exhausted. The mighty onset was coming to a standstill. The impulse which had sustained it was dying away. The worst was over.” Abruptly Foch cried: “Stabilization. Sure, certain, soon. And afterwards. Ah, afterwards. That is my affair.” There was a silence. Then the premier moved toward him, murmuring:
“Alors, Général, il faut que je vous embrasse.”
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It was spectacular, but it did not, of course, answer the question Churchill had brought from London. When were the French going to lance the German canker? Leaving Foch, the motorcade proceeded to the closest British headquarters, in Drury, twelve miles south of Amiens. It was rough driving. The road was rutted with new shell holes. Obviously Ludendorff was close. At their destination, as in Montreuil, telephones never stopped ringing. Haig was there. One by one his officers described their emergency. The BEF had been stumbling backward for ten days. Churchill asked one British general if his men could regroup and form a new line. “No one can tell,” the general said. “We have hardly anything between us and the enemy except utterly exhausted, disorganized troops… dead from want of sleep and rest.” The presentation ended. It was, all agreed, the worst show any of them had seen—perhaps the worst in history. Finally Clemenceau, who had been feasting on chicken and sandwiches as he heard them out, sat back contented and raised his voice above the phones. He said in English: “Very well, then, it is all right…. Never mind what has been arranged before. If your men are tired, and we have fresh men, our men shall come up at once and help you.” But instead of attacking the German flank, poilus would be fed into the line where the British were weakest.
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Churchill relayed Clemenceau’s decision to Lloyd George over one of the telephones. The French premier then rose from his lunch and said: “I claim my reward. I wish to pass the river and see the battle.” The British remonstrated, but the Tiger waved them off. He pointed to his military aide and said: “A few shells will do [him] good.” Back at the cars he said: “Mr. Winston Churchill, we are in the British lines. Will you take charge of us? We will do what you say.” Winston, delighted, asked: “Where do you want to go?” The premier replied: “As far as is possible. But you shall judge.” Winston sat beside the driver in the lead car, map in hand, and off they went, across the bridge and toward the battlefield. He saw streams of Tommies, many of whom “walked as if they were in a dream, and gave no notice of our file of brightly flagged cars. Others again, recognizing me, gave me a wave or a grin, as they would no doubt have done to George Robey or Harry Lauder”—music hall stars—“or any other well known figure which carried their minds back to vanished England and the dear days of peace and party politics.” Presently they heard shells moaning and rumbling overhead. Some burst in the fields on either side of the road. Next small-arms fire became audible. A heavy rain was falling, and mists of evening began to gather. If they followed the map much farther, they would encounter Germans. “On our left towards the enemy,” Churchill wrote, “was a low ridge crowned with trees about three hundred yards away. Among these trees a few dark figures moved about…. I thought on the whole that we had gone about far enough.”
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The Western Front 1918

Another guide would have turned back, but if the Tiger found danger beguiling, so did Winston. The two of them left the motorcade and proceeded on foot among stragglers and bursts of shrapnel. They stood together on a small rise, surveying the disorderly scene. Several weary British officers recognized them, saluted them, and came over. Clemenceau and Churchill gave them the contents of their cigar cases. As they were leaving, a shell burst among a group of horses. One, wounded and riderless, “came in a staggering trot towards us. The poor animal was streaming with blood.” The old premier advanced toward it and quickly seized its bridle, bringing it to a halt. His aide hurried up and said they really must leave
tout de suite.
“Clemenceau,” Churchill wrote, “turned reluctantly towards his car. As he did so, he gave me a sidelong glance and observed in an undertone,
‘Quel moment délicieux!’
”
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After calling on General Henri Pétain, the commander of all French ground troops and therefore Haig’s counterpart, and dining with him in what Winston called his “travelling military palace,” they returned to Paris. At the Ritz in the small hours of the next morning Churchill wrote Clementine that it had been 1:00
A.M.
when “Clemenceau, alert and fresh as when we started, dismissed me. The old man is vy gracious to me & talks in the most confidential way. He is younger even than I am!” Then Winston wired Lloyd George a full account of the day. The British divisions, he reported, were “in many cases only skeletons,” but French reinforcements would soon be arriving “as fast as they can come up…. Nothing more can be done than what they are doing.” At 4:00
A.M.
his report went to London in cipher; it was decoded at the War Office and delivered to No. 10 at 8:30. Churchill saw the premier again at noon, and together they drafted an appeal to Woodrow Wilson for the speedy arrival of heavy American contingents. Winston telegraphed a copy of this to Lloyd George and, after lunching at the Ritz with Bender and Amery, set out alone for another tour of the front. Everything he saw convinced him that the war was approaching its climax. He wondered if this was appreciated at No. 10. Clemenceau could hardly have been more courteous, and Winston was never one to underrate his own importance, but premiers, he felt, should talk to premiers. Back at the Ritz he wired this to Lloyd George, adding: “It is considered certain here that the Germans will pursue this struggle to a final decision all through the summer and their resources are at present larger than ours…. Every effort must be made if we are to escape destruction.”
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The prime minister was handed this message when he awoke the next morning in Downing Street. He told his valet to start packing. Sir Henry Wilson joined him, and Churchill met their destroyer at Boulogne. Winston accompanied them as far as Montreuil, but the general staff insisted that he be excluded from the military talks. The council of war, held in Beauvais, included Clemenceau, Foch, Spiers (who acted as interpreter), and two American generals: John “Black Jack” Pershing and Tasker Bliss. The meeting formally endorsed the understanding Churchill had reached with the premier. In addition, Pershing brought President Wilson’s reply to the plea from Clemenceau and Churchill: 480,000 doughboys were on their way.

Lloyd George’s party, including Churchill, was back in London at 2:30 the following morning. Winston went straight to his desk at the Metropole. By the weekend the situation in France was reasonably clear. Montreuil had fallen, and one of the railways between Amiens and the capital had been cut. At that point, however, Teutonic discipline had collapsed. The starved German troops—starved by the Admiralty blockade Churchill had organized in 1914—had turned to pillage. By the time they re-formed, the hollow-eyed Tommies, their ranks thickened by French reserves from the south, had turned, anchored their lines, and were grimly holding on. Ludendorff had driven them back thirty-five miles, inflicted over 300,000 casualties, and created a huge bulge in the middle of the Allied line, but he hadn’t broken through. The first crisis was over. Churchill wrote on April 6: “I have been able to replace everything in the munitions sphere without difficulty. Guns, tanks, aeroplanes will all be ahead of personnel. We have succeeded in pulling the gun position round so completely since last summer that we can deliver 2000 guns as fast as they can be shipped. It has been touch & go on the front. We stood for some days within an ace of destruction.”
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As he sealed the envelope the second crisis was rising 136 miles to the east of him, in Flanders.

B
y early April Ludendorff had moved his “battering ram” (
Sturmbock
) opposite the old Ypres salient. A few minutes after midnight on Sunday, April 7, some twenty-five hundred muzzles roared in unison, sending the first of what would be thirty thousand shells toward Armentières and fouling the air with mustard gas. The German storm troops had fog again, and just before dawn Monday morning they buckled on their coal-scuttle helmets, climbed over their parapets, and lurched across no-man’s-land. Once again they ruptured the British trench line, this time on a thirty-mile front along the river Lys. Everything Haig had won in his Passchendaele drive was lost in a few days. By Wednesday evening Armentières had fallen; the loss of Ploegsteert, which Churchill had fortified as a battalion commander, swiftly followed. Spiers wrote in his diary: “Situation very critical…. British foresee severance with French & German objective gained.”
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On April 18, with the outlook obscure, Winston sent the prime minister an analysis of their strategic choices. If worst came to worst, there would be only two: “whether we should let go our left hand or our right: abandon the Channel ports, or abandon all contact with the French front line.” Loss of the ports would mean German dominance in the Strait of Dover, bottling up the Port of London, the shutdown of England’s key naval bases, and bombardment of “a large part of Kent and Sussex.” But the Allied line would be intact, with “the whole of France open for dilatory retirement or manoeuvre.” The alternative was worse. They could “wire in” and wait. Ludendorff would undoubtedly pivot southward toward the French. But after the Germans had crushed the poilus, “the British army would be at their disposal. They could deal with it at their convenience.” This, clearly, was the line Ludendorff hoped Britain would take. He appeared to be following an elementary principle: “Divide your enemy’s forces into two parts: hold off the weaker part while you beat the stronger: the weaker is then at your mercy.”
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A week later Churchill told the House that the Ministry of Munitions was in a position to deliver “a fairly good report.” Since the opening of the first German offensive five weeks earlier the BEF had lost about a thousand artillery pieces and some five thousand machine guns. Yet the troops now had “more serviceable guns as a whole, and more of practically every calibre, than there were when the battle began.” He crossed the Channel three days later to talk to Haig about shell supplies. Most of his time was now spent meeting the needs of the arriving Americans. Ludendorff, meanwhile, was battering his way toward the sea. On April 25 he took Mount Kemmel—a “mountain,” on the flat Flanders plain, being a peak 350 feet high—as his men, toiling up the slope, sang the gunners’ fighting song:
“Wenn einer wüsste, Wie einem ist!”
In the House, Churchill paid tribute to the British spirit: “No demand is too novel or too sudden to be met. No need is too unexpected to be supplied. No strain is too prolonged for the patience of our people. No suffering or peril daunts their hearts.”
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