The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (117 page)

By now reports of barracks disturbances were arriving from commanding officers in France, Flanders, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Greece, and Italy. Haig warned that unless the stampede was stopped, “the Germans will be in a position to negotiate another kind of peace.” Churchill was more worried about the impact upon the Bolsheviks, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, who were calling for uprisings by soldiers all over the world. There were Communist agitators in Britain, too, particularly around military and air bases. Sir Henry Wilson noted in his diary that the new war minister directed him to bring home “all reliable troops, i.e. Household & other Cavalry, Yeomanry, Home Country Rgts: etc.” At the same time Winston decided that no men would be mustered out who had fought less than two years in France; eligibility for discharge would be determined by age, length of service, and wounds. But young conscripts would still be needed to police the new territories being absorbed by the Empire. No one liked compulsory service—until three years earlier the country had never known any form of conscription, even in wartime—but there was no alternative. Since Lloyd George was at Versailles, the cabinet had to act in his absence. After consulting Austen Chamberlain, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill drew up plans for an army to garrison the British Zone in occupied Germany. The War Cabinet approved and advised George of its action. An announcement was prepared. By the time it was released to the press, Wilson wrote in his diary, “the great adventure of ‘compulsing’ a million men in time of peace to serve abroad will have begun.” In his view it came in the nick of time, because “all our power over the Army is slipping away.”
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Britons accustomed to wartime regimentation accepted the extension of conscription, partly because the new demobilization scheme seemed fair. In the meantime, however, Milner’s old regulations had kindled a major revolt in Calais, where five thousand Tommies, newly arrived from England, demanded that they be returned home immediately. Haig reported to Winston that their attitude was “threatening, insubordinate, and mutinous.” At his direction, he said, General Henry G. Sandilands sent a brigade with fixed bayonets into their camp and arrested the three ringleaders. He wanted them executed; otherwise, he believed, “the discipline of the whole Army will suffer, both immediately & for many years to come.” Churchill disagreed. Execution, Winston wrote, “should be used only under what may be called life and death conditions, and public opinion will only support it when other men’s lives are endangered by criminal or cowardly conduct.” The field marshal spared the three men, but he was incensed by what he regarded as civilian meddling. He noted in his diary that he had the “power by Warrant” to put men before firing squads without consulting the War Office. His days of wielding such power were numbered, however. Parliament awarded him £100,000 and made him an earl, but the historians were beginning to catch up with Douglas Haig. Lesser generals were appointed to lofty civilian roles: governor-general of Canada, high commissioner for Egypt, high commissioner for Palestine, governor of Malta, offices in the Indian Empire. London never summoned Haig from his retirement in Scotland. Forgotten and ignored, he died of a heart attack in 1928.
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By the end of January, 1919, some 980,000 soldiers had been repatriated, and eight months after assuming office, Churchill had reduced Britain’s military expenditures by nearly 70 percent. Britain’s army, he said, had “melted away.” The demobilization had been a triumph of organization, but it left him uneasy. England, he believed, now needed a large standing army. Postwar Europe had become dangerous. In the spring some 70,000 of Ludendorff’s former troops, marching under the banner of the Rote Soldatenbund (Red Soldiers’ League), had seized a cache of arms in Bochum, defeated a right-wing
Freikorps
in a pitched battle, and occupied six Ruhr cities, proclaiming workers’ republics in each. Under Versailles the Ruhr was out-of-bounds to German and Allied troops, but Berlin sent in troops of the Reichswehr, the Weimar Republic’s army, and suppressed the revolt; rebels were tried before
Freikorpskämpfer
military courts and shot. Britain, Italy, and the United States approved the Reichswehr action, but the French, infuriated by this invasion of the “neutral” Ruhr, countered by occupying four German towns. In Paris, Winston discussed the incident with André Lefevre, the French minister of war. He told him that French had “committed a grave error in tactics and had lost far more in prestige and authority than they had gained.” The present threat to Western civilization, he said, was not German militarism; it was bolshevism. By now the Ruhr was quiet. The Rote Soldatenbund having been shattered, both Berlin and Paris withdrew their troops. Churchill’s anxiety over the spread of communism did not fade, however. Years later Bernard Baruch wrote him recalling one day in Paris, when the Versailles talks were in progress and the two of them “were walking through the Bois de Boulogne, talking of the problems which burdened a world exhausted by war and groping for peace.” A wind had risen; the sky was darkening; Baruch expressed concern about the weather. His letter continued: “Suddenly you broke your brisk stride, paused and, lifting your walking stick, pointed to the East. Your voice rumbled ominously: ‘Russia! Russia! That’s where the weather is coming from!’ ”
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I
n the spring of 1918, when Ludendorff was plunging his bloody fists into the Allied line in France and Belgium, the Bolsheviks in central Russia stood naked to invasion. And no regime, not even Napoleon’s, had ever been threatened by more formidable enemies. Led by the czar’s professional officers, over 300,000 “White” Russians, loyal to the Romanovs, were forming armies on the Reds’ five-thousand-mile front—over ten times the length of the western front. On December 30, 1917, Japan had become the first foreign country to intervene in Russia’s internal struggle, landing troops at Vladivostok in Siberia. Two battalions of Tommies from Hong Kong occupied Murmansk next, and, six weeks later, with Frenchmen at their side, Archangel. American doughboys joined them. Meanwhile, British soldiers from Salonika and Persia seized the Baku-Batum railroad while British warships blockaded Russia’s Black Sea and Baltic ports. National motives varied. All felt vindictive toward an ally who, as they saw it, had betrayed them by signing a separate peace, and they were determined to recover vast stores of munitions they had shipped to Russia—arms which the Germans, in that last crisis of the war, were bent on capturing. Japan also wanted to annex Russian territory. The Americans were determined to prevent that and, at the same time, to free beleaguered Czechoslovaks.

The Allies were united in their resolve to crush bolshevism, though in those months it appeared to be disintegrating without their help. The Ukraine had proclaimed its independence on January 28. In April and May similar declarations followed in the Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Lenin had agreed to the Germans’ terms at Brest-Litovsk in order to gain some “breathing space,” but every day the Bolsheviks had less space in which to breathe. By signing the treaty they had yielded Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. Now the Whites and the Allies vowed to take the rest. The Red Army was in a pitiful state. Some troops were approaching starvation. Few had coats; half of them lacked boots and underwear. Rifles were in short supply. So was ammunition. Weapons rusted because oil was unavailable. Horses died; there was no fodder. The logistical situation was appalling. Coal mines had been flooded. Factories had been demolished. The sources of fuel, steel, and iron were in White hands. Lenin had spoken grandly of riding to triumph on a wildly careening “locomotive of history,” but on Russia’s railroad tracks his trains labored forward at a speed of one mile an hour. His only two military assets were interior lines and the ingenuity of his commissar of war, Leib Davydovich Bronstein, who had taken the name of Leon Trotsky and who, over the next two years, was to prove himself a commander of genius.
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Even with Trotsky the Reds would have been doomed had they been forced to fight during the first winter of their revolution. But the White counterrevolutionaries were still gathering their forces, and the Allies were pinned down by the Germans. It was typical of this confused, tumultuous war that the first shots were fired by soldiers who were neither Reds, Whites, nor Allies. Before the overthrow of the czar, his officers had organized a Czechoslovakian legion comprising seventy thousand prisoners of war eager to fight the Austrians. These were the men who concerned Woodrow Wilson. Brest-Litovsk had stipulated they be disarmed by the Bolsheviks, but it wasn’t done, and the Allies had been unable to spare the shipping to evacuate them. They were being marched and countermarched aimlessly across the Urals and Siberia when they learned that the Reds were planning to disarm them. In June 1918 they revolted and seized a section of the Trans-Siberian Railway. That feat attracted the attention of the counterrevolutionary Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. He recruited them under his banner and opened the civil war’s first great offensive, capturing Omsk, Ekaterinburg, and, against negligible opposition, most of the country between the Volga and the Pacific. In Omsk the Siberians announced that they were now an autonomous nation—another territorial loss for the Bolsheviks. Among the casualties during this drive had been the czar, his family, their doctor, and three servants. They had been imprisoned in Ekaterinburg; when Czech troops approached in July, their guards shot them. They would have been killed anyway. The Reds had read Marat: “Woe to the revolution which has not enough courage to behead the symbol of the ancien régime.” But Trotsky was disappointed. He had looked forward to prosecuting Nicholas in a public trial, and had designated himself as public prosecutor.

By the summer of 1918 it seemed likely that Trotsky himself would stand in the dock, with Kolchak as his hanging judge. On August 6 the Red Army broke and fled from Kazan on the east bank of the upper Volga, over four hundred miles west of Ekaterinburg and the last important strongpoint between the Whites and central Russia. If Kolchak and his Czechs crossed the river there, they could pour across the open plain—that muddy okra-sown countryside grazed by brown, low-slung cows—and take undefended Moscow, which had become the seat of the new government in March. Nothing could stop them; the villages were completely indefensible. The Central Executive of the Soviets declared the regime to be in danger. Trotsky ordered conscription and left for the front aboard a train which would serve as his mobile headquarters for the better part of three years. Arriving in Svyazhsk, a village on the west bank of the Volga, opposite Kazan, he rallied his panicked soldiers with fiery eloquence and led them back to the front. There he boarded a rusty boat and summoned the sailors of Kronstadt to swell his ranks. Leaders who had joined their men in the rout were brought before him and sentenced to death. He issued a proclamation: “If any detachment retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, the next the commander…. Cowards, scoundrels, and traitors will not escape the bullet—for this I vouch before the whole Red Army.”
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Heavy fighting continued throughout that month and into the next, until, on September 10, the Bolsheviks recaptured Kazan. By the end of the month the entire Volga basin was back in their hands. Moscow had been saved. Trotsky celebrated the victory by executing hostages and launching his first Red Terror against civilians who had not actively supported his troops.

Meanwhile, the White general Anton Denikin was planning an attack with thirty thousand counterrevolutionaries from his base on the Don while a third counterrevolutionary army, under General Nickolay Yudenich, was bearing down on Petrograd, whose Red defenders were led by the Ossetian Joseph Stalin. It was at this point, in mid-1918, that Churchill’s participation in the Russian struggle began to be felt. He was still a junior minister then, and his role was severely limited, but he was the revolution’s most vehement British foe. He had been the first to grasp the strategic significance of the Czechs. At his urging, the cabinet voted to remain in Murmansk and Archangel, recognize the Omsk regime, send munitions to Denikin and the rebels in the Baltic states, occupy the Baku-Batum railway in the Caucasus, and establish a strong British expeditionary force in Siberia.

Winston then set out to warn the British public against what he called the “poison peril” in the East. In Dundee, he said: “Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism…. The Bolsheviks maintain themselves by bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders…. Civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.” In a memorandum he wrote: “Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a vy large country, a vy old country, a vy disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons & in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.” He understood England’s yearning for peace. “Unhappily,” he continued, “events are driving in a different direction, and nowadays events are vy powerful things. There never was a time when events were so much stronger than human beings. We may abandon Russia: but Russia will not abandon us. We shall retire & she will follow. The bear is padding on bloody paws across the snows to the Peace Conference.”
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