The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (114 page)

Thus the momentum shifted to the Allies. Slowly their line crept forward. By August 26 the British forces on the Somme had regained all the ground lost in the spring and were back where they had been in Flanders. Churchill, after two weeks in London, flew back to follow the Allied armies. In Ploegsteert, he wrote Clementine, “all my old farms are mere heaps of brick & mouldering sandbags…. I missed Ploegsteert’s church. We ran past the place where it had stood without recognizing it! My strong dugout however wh I built at Lawrence farm has stood out the whole two years of battering, & is still in use…. Otherwise utter ruin.” In early September he drove from the Château Verchocq to Paris. “I was alone,” he wrote her, “& took the road by Montdidier in order to see the ruin the war has brought on this unlucky town.” He drove for an hour “through devastated, shell pitted facias—scraggy shreds of woods—along the road where Clemenceau & I had stood on that melancholy April day when the whole front was quivering & buckling back. Montdidier is a heap of ruins. But bad as it is, it does not reach the utter destruction of Bailleul & Meteren in the North. There the British artillery has been at work—regardless of expense—& nothing but red smears of brickbats mark the site of what was [sic] in the spring thriving townships.”
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Foch was charting an “arpeggio” of drives against the Hindenburg line. “Everyone is to attack as soon as they can, as strong as they can, for as long as they can,” he said, and:
“L’Edifice commence à craquer. Tout le monde à la bataille!”
Actually, it was better organized than that. There was a master plan, and the American army was its fulcrum. Pershing’s troops now held ninety-four miles on the extreme right of the Allied line. In the center were the French, with the British to their left and King Albert of Belgium on the sea, leading a combined group which included two American divisions. The main American force, 1.2 million doughboys, would join in the tattoo of attacks, advancing through the deeply fortified Forêt d’Argonne, but their chief strategic task would be to crack the whip, with the Belgians swinging free on the other end. Six weeks of rain, fog, and heavy fighting followed. Then, abruptly, the weather cleared, revealing the trees in their autumnal splendor—coppery, golden, purplish, deep scarlet. The Allies surged forward. “There is no hope,” Ludendorff concluded. “All is lost.” On the first day of November, the enemy’s last scribbly ditches caved in, and four days later the Germans had no front at all. Their rear guard, Sergeant Alexander Woollcott wrote in the
Stars and Stripes,
resembled an escaping man who “twitches down a chair behind him for his pursuers to stumble over.”
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Apart from the stolid German machine gunners, who kept their murderous barrels hot to the end, the Second Reich’s soldiers had become a disorderly mob of refugees. Reports from their fatherland were appalling. Ludendorff had been sacked, there was revolution in the streets, and the fleet had mutinied when ordered off on a death-or-glory ride against the British. Each chill dawn the doughboys, Tommies, and poilus went over the top in fighting kit, driving the frail wraiths in
feldgrau
up against the hills of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Bulgaria had surrendered on September 28 and Turkey on October 21. Austria was next. “A drizzle of empires,” Churchill said, was “falling through the air.” On October 28 he had been invited to review British soldiers parading in Lille’s Grande Place—among the party in the reviewing stand was one Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Law Montgomery, the Forty-second London Division’s chief of staff—and he was at his desk in the Metropole on November 10, when Hindenburg advised Berlin that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of the army and the kaiser fled into Holland. The Eiffel Tower in Paris beamed directions to the enemy’s peace envoys, telling them which trenches to approach and where to pick up their guides. That evening Lloyd George invited Churchill to join a special cabinet which would study the implications of the peace. At five o’clock the next morning the German envoys signed Foch’s dictated terms in his railroad car at Compiègne. All firing was to cease six hours later. Churchill would recall that full moment: “It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I stood at the window of my room looking up Northumberland Avenue towards Trafalgar Square, waiting for Big Ben to tell that the War was over.” It struck, and he could hear the baying of the crowds outside, but he felt no jubilation. “Scarcely anything which I was taught to believe had lasted,” he wrote. “And everything I was taught to believe impossible had happened.” Since 1914 Britain had lost 908,371 dead, 2,090,212 wounded, and 191,652 missing. Victory had indeed been “bought so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” Then Clementine arrived and proposed that they go to Downing Street and congratulate Lloyd George. Twenty excited revelers, cheering wildly, jumped on their car as it moved slowly through the rejoicing mass. F. E. Smith and Sir Henry Wilson were already with the prime minister. Others joined them. They discussed the advantage of calling an election now, whether or not to intervene in the civil war raging between Red and White Russians, and what peace terms should be presented to Germany. The “fallen foe,” Churchill pointed out, was close to starvation. He proposed rushing “a dozen great ships crammed with provisions” to Hamburg. His colleagues eyed him coldly. (That evening Wilson would write in his diary: “LG wants to shoot the Kaiser. Winston does not.”)
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Outside, the rapturous demonstrations continued through the afternoon, frolickers romping over the Mall, throwing firecrackers and confetti. Suddenly the weather took an ominous turn. The sky darkened. Rain began to fall, hard. Some Londoners sought refuge in the lap of Queen Victoria’s statue, but after huddling there a few minutes they climbed down. They had found little shelter there, and less comfort. The arms were stone cold.
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I
n a Pomeranian military hospital a twice-decorated German noncommissioned dispatch runner, who had been temporarily blinded during a heavy gas attack on the night of October 13, learned of the capitulation from a sobbing pastor. The invalided noncom was still ready to fight, still throbbing with patriotic fervor, but now there would be no more fighting. Six years later the future Führer of the Third Reich set down a description of his reaction in November 1918. Night after night he lay awake, blazing with hatred for those whom he believed responsible for what he considered a betrayal:

I
T
was with feelings which do not lend themselves to words,” Churchill recalled afterward, “that I heard the cheers of the brave people who had borne so much and given all, who had never wavered, who had never lost faith in their country or its destiny, and who could be indulgent to the faults of their servants when the hour of deliverance had come.” One simple cheer, a curious eight-word antiphon now locked in the memory of history, was heard that Monday night and throughout the following day wherever London crowds gathered, in Mayfair and Whitechapel, Leicester Square and Regent’s Park, Streatham and Harrow-on-the-Hill. It echoed and reechoed, repeated by beaming, tearful, proud, grieving, exultant Britons who rejoiced in the irrefutable evidence that their sacrifices had been redeemed and the Glorious Dead had not, after all, died in vain. Someone in a throng would chant, “Who won the war?” and the rest would roar back, “
We
won the war!” Then once more: “Who won the war?” Again a thundering: “
WE
won the war!” And so it went. Eventually they grew hoarse, and the tedium of it drove them away one by one, until at last all had fallen silent. Nevertheless, every one of them believed it. They actually thought that Britain had won the war.
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A
t dawn’s first light on November 21, ten days after the Armistice, the light cruiser H.M.S.
Cardiff
steamed out of Scottish waters flying an enormous blue ensign. Twenty miles out, as prearranged, she rendezvoused with the German High Seas Fleet—the kaiser’s titanic armada, most of whose guns hadn’t even been fired since 1914: 179 battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and other vessels, now commanded by Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who was, that day, the most wretched seaman in Europe. Von Reuter had prayed for cloudy skies to mask his shame, but this was
Kaiserwetter,
clear, if blustery, and very bright.
Cardiff
led the humiliated enemy vessels back to May Island, in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, where Admiral Sir David Beatty, nineteen subordinate admirals, and 90,000 bluejackets awaited them on the decks of England’s Grand Fleet, the greatest concentration of sea power in history. Beatty presided over 370 warships, all of whose crews were at battle stations, their guns trained on their recent foe, their battle flags snapping angrily in the rising wind. The British warships formed two parallel lines, the classic Spithead formation. Thirteen squadrons of capital ships (among them the
Queen Elizabeth,
her role in the Dardanelles forgotten) escorted the defeated fleet into the firth and then ordered it to anchor. “The German flag,” Beatty signaled von Reuter, “will be hauled down at sunset today, Thursday, and will not be hoisted again without permission.”
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By dusk swarms of English pleasure boats were festively cruising around the wretched ships of the vanquished
hohe Herr,
hooting and beating buckets with bilge pumps.

Of all the belligerents who had lunged at one another’s throats four years earlier, only Britain, it seemed, had emerged strengthened. France’s loveliest provinces were a wasteland of denuded earth, barbed wire, and rotting corpses. The Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy was disintegrating. Czarist Russia had ceased to exist. The fallen Second Reich, founded by Bismarck, was racked by strife and a proliferation of
Femen,
or political assassins—Hans Kohn called this frightening new phenomenon “the sudden brutalization of German political life”—and for the next quarter century its menace would darken all Europe.
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England’s enormous prewar wealth was gone, but its factories were intact, its armed forces had never been mightier, and although England owed the United States five billion dollars in war debts, its continental allies were indebted to it for far more than that. At the Versailles peace conference Britain could, in effect, cast six votes because Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India, all separately represented, supported the Mother Country on most issues. Woodrow Wilson’s resistance to territorial acquisitions, and his insistence upon self-determination, was ingeniously met by the creation of the League of Nations mandates. Allied flags flew over these possessions, but, diplomats told the President with straight faces, they were not really annexations because ultimately—no one knew just when—they would become independent. Thus the Empire emerged from the Hall of Mirrors swollen by 988,000 square miles of new territory, inhabited by 13,000,000 people, many of whom had not even known a war was being fought. The Union Jack now flew over German New Guinea, South-West Africa, Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and Cameroon, more than a hundred German islands wrenched from the kaiser, and the Middle Eastern lands which later became Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and Israel. Rhodes’s dream of a Cape-to-Cairo corridor had been achieved at last.

Best of all, for those who cherished old customs, the King-Emperor’s expansion could be attributed to his Royal Navy, which, as the “Senior Service,” had been England’s original instrument of imperial growth. The army had done the dying, but even before the Versailles treaty (or
Diktat,
as the resentful Germans called it) Britons knew that trench warfare had been futile. It was the Grand Fleet which had blockaded the enemy, starving them into surrender. So tradition had triumphed after all. Englishmen liked that. They were proud of their eccentricities, even the dowdiness of their women’s fashions and the odd customs of taking long hikes in the wet, bathing in cold water, flinging open windows in winter, deferring to bowler-hatted retired officers with bristling white mustaches, and driving on what was, for most of the world’s motorists, the wrong side of the street. As R. H. Tawney put it, “ ‘Back to 1914’ became a common cry.” Some wanted to go even farther back. On the eve of the war sophisticated Englishmen had felt uneasy about Britain’s hegemony. But as Churchill’s Harrow schoolmate Leo Amery told Lloyd George after Armistice Day, if the Empire grew mightier after the valor of its youth, “Who has the right to complain?”
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The Empire had flourished on certitude and myth. “It is the virtue of the Englishman,” Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had written in 1913, “that he never doubts. That is what the system does for him.” Englishmen treasured chivalric legends. In 1912 London children, and many who were no longer children, had packed the Savoy Theatre to see
Where the Rainbow Ends,
an improbable play about two innocents, brother and sister. They are threatened by a Dragon King. Enter Saint George. He seems inadequate: silver-haired and obscured by a billowing cloak. Then the girl says tremulously: “I am an English maiden in danger, and I ask for your aid.” Instantly, the cloak disappears and we behold a knight in dazzling armor, a great red cross on his breastplate and his hand on the hilt of a glittering Excalibur. The Dragon King boasts of degrading the British (“I flung my gold dust in the people’s eyes and lulled them into false security”), but Saint George reminds Britons of their duty to “fight aggression and foul tyranny.” As the end of the last act approaches he cries to the playgoers: “Rise, Youth of England, let your voices ring / For God, for Britain, and for Britain’s King!” They then stand and join the cast in singing “God Save the King.”
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The pull of such lore retained its power, on the home front at least, while the men in the trenches were fighting a very different struggle. At Mons, it was said, an angel had led lost Tommies to safety. The
Evening News
of September 29, 1914, had carried a poem by Arthur Machen, “The Bowmen.” In it an embattled British soldier about to be overwhelmed by waves of enemy infantry remembers and repeats Saint George’s motto:
Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius,
which he once saw on a plate in a London restaurant. Suddenly he hears “a great voice” calling: “St. George! St. George!… St. George for Merrie England!” Simultaneously, the attacking “grey men” begin “falling by thousands.” They have been shot by Agincourt bowmen in the sky. No sooner had Machen’s poem appeared than dispatches from France and Belgium began reporting dead Germans slain by arrows. As late as 1917, when, one would think, the truth about the war ought to have been evident to everyone, Henry Newbolt (“Play up! Play up! and play the game!”) published his
Book of the Happy Warrior,
full of chivalric fables about the events across the Channel, and E. B. Osborn brought out
The Muse in Arms,
in which he explained the gaiety of British soldiers going into action: “The Germans, and even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as sport; they do not know that sportsmanship is our new homely name, derived from a racial predilection for comparing great things with small, for the
chevaleries
of the Middle Ages.” Today this sounds inane, but it had some basis in fact. In at least two offensives British soldiers went over the top dribbling soccer balls across no-man’s-land. One occurred on July 11, 1916, when Captain W. P. Nevill and his company of the East Surrey Regiment booted a ball back and forth as they advanced along the Somme. Nevill and most of his men were killed in less than an hour. Ineluctably they inspired a poem:
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It is outrageous, it is preposterous, and to a later generation it is completely baffling. What
game,
in the name of God, were the Surreys playing? Ah, but they knew, and that was enough for them. Being mythical, that knowledge was imperishable, and its vitality was still strong on that sunlit morning when Beatty received the surrender of von Reuter’s fleet. As the German warships approached the Firth of Forth, the British crew on the battleship
Royal Oak
heard a mysterious drumbeat coming from the lower decks. It was audible on the bridge. Twice officers dispatched bluejackets to investigate. They found nothing, but the drum continued to roll until the enemy’s anchor chains ran out. The next day’s newspapers carried Newbolt’s old poem
Drake’s Drum:

Seven months later, on a prearranged signal from Admiral von Reuter, German crews pulled the sea cocks of his 10 battleships, 9 armored cruisers, 8 large cruisers, 50 torpedo boats, and 102 submarines, sending them to the bottom while the horrified, helpless British officers and ratings looked on. Among those witnessing this extraordinary event was a party of schoolchildren on an excursion from Stromness in the Orkneys. Being children, they thought the show was for them. It was. It was for everybody—a defiant gesture declaring that Germany had surrendered but had not quit. In Berlin, Ludendorff, dining with Major General Sir Neill Malcolm, the chief of Britain’s military mission in Berlin, explained in his tumescent, inarticulate way that his home front had let him down. “Do you mean,” asked Malcolm, “that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff pounced. “Stabbed in the back?” he repeated. “Yes, that’s exactly it. We were stabbed in the back [
Dolchstoss in den Rücken
].” Hindenburg heard the phrase from him and testified before a political committee of inquiry: “As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was stabbed in the back.” Stabbed by whom? Presently an answer emerged: the hilt of the dagger had been held by the Jews.
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