The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (78 page)

He spent long days in his new nest. Eddie Marsh wrote a friend: “Winston stays until at least 8 every day…. Even Sundays are no longer my own, as I have spent 3 out of the last 4 on the
Enchantress.
We have made a new commandment. ‘The seventh day is the Sabbath of the First Lord, and on it thou shalt do all manner of work.’ ” Officers at the Admiralty were on duty twenty-four hours a day, alert for a surprise attack. In Churchill’s office hung a large chart of the North Sea with flag pins marking the position of every German warship; he studied it each morning on first entering the room “to inculcate in myself and those working with me a sense of ever-present danger.” The
Pall Mall Gazette
described him as “quite” a naval enthusiast, and after he had visited a submarine the
Daily Express
reported: “He had a yarn with nearly all the lower deck men of the ship’s company, asking why, wherefore, and how everything was done. All the sailors ‘go the bundle’ on him, because he makes no fuss and takes them by surprise. He is here, there, and everywhere.” Everything about the Admiralty excited him, from the twin stone dolphins guarding the building’s entrance to the furniture within, each piece of which was adorned with golden dolphins dating from Nelson’s time. His delights, like Antony’s, were “dolphin-like.”
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Like Antony he was also accustomed to infusing his public roles with high drama. But this time it was appropriate. What had been absurd at the Colonial Office—depicting a dubious African chief as a martyr—became sublime at the Admiralty. It is arguable that the first lord’s burden was greater than the prime minister’s. He was answerable for England’s safety. Only the fleet could protect the island from invasion, move British troops to the Continent, bring regiments home from India, replace them with territorials, and prevent what an Admiralty paper called Britain’s likeliest peril: “the interruption of our trade and destruction of merchant shipping.” Two-thirds of England’s food was imported. The British merchant vessels which fetched it still accounted for over half the world’s seaborne trade. Enemy sea raiders, unless held at bay, could sink every one of them. Afterward Churchill wrote of the Royal Navy that its ships “were all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century, all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended on them. Open the sea-cocks and let them sink beneath the surface… and in a few minutes—half an hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole Empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly out of control, and falling a prey to others; and Europe after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.”
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He had no doubts about the identity of England’s enemy. His mission, he said at the outset, was to put the fleet into “a state of instant and constant readiness for war in case we are attacked by Germany.” Looking back, he wondered how he could ever have been gulled by Berlin’s protestations of peaceful intent. In 1900, when he had been first elected to Parliament, the kaiser already presided over the most powerful army in Europe. That year
Seine Majestät
had proclaimed: “In order to protect German trade and commerce under existing conditions, only one thing will suffice, namely, Germany must possess a battle fleet of such strength that even for the most powerful naval adversary a war would involve such risks as to make that Power’s own supremacy doubtful.” Nautically, only one nation could be this “most powerful adversary.” Since 1889 Britain had been committed to what was called the “two-power naval standard,” meaning that England’s navy must be as great as any two other navies combined. Its supremacy posed no threat to the Second Reich. England had nothing to gain on the Continent. But sea power was its lifeline, and throughout the Edwardian years the kaiser’s shipbuilding program had put it at increasing hazard. In a note to Grey on January 31, 1912, four months after taking over as first lord, Churchill wrote that while “at present… several of the German Dreadnts are vy often the wrong side of the Kiel Canal wh they can’t pass & therefore must make a long detour,” that consolation was only temporary: “The deepening of the Canal by 1915 will extinguish this safety signal.” Then he submitted a formal memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence: “The whole character of the German fleet shows that it was designed for aggressive and offensive action of the largest possible character in the North Sea or the North Atlantic…. The structure of the German battleships shows clearly that they are intended for attack and for fleet action. They are not a cruiser fleet designed to protect colonies and commerce all over the world. They have been preparing for years, and continue to prepare… for a great trial of strength.”
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To end this insanity, Haldane visited Berlin early in 1912. He seemed the right man to send; a barrister with a passion for German philosophy, he was known at the War Office as “Schopenhauer among the generals.” But the first lord was better informed about the Reich’s new naval program, due to be introduced in May. The kaiser, in the naive assumption that their friendship transcended geopolitics, had sent him a copy via Sir Ernest Cassel. On February 7, with Haldane still on the Wilhelmstrasse, the Churchills were in Victoria Station, waiting for a train, when Winston picked up the late edition of an evening newspaper and read the German emperor’s speech opening the Reichstag. One sentence struck him: “It is my constant duty and care to maintain and strengthen on land and water the power of defence of the German people, which has no lack of young men fit to bear arms.” Two days later, after comparing this with the kaiser’s May plan, Churchill spoke out in Glasgow. “This island,” he said, “has never been, and never will be, lacking in trained and hardy mariners bred from their boyhood up in the service of the sea…. We will face the future as our ancestors would have faced it, without disquiet, without arrogance, but in stolid and inflexible determination.” He could not understand the kaiser’s motives: “The British Navy is to us a necessity and, from some points of view, the German Navy is to them more in the nature of a luxury.”
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Had he understood their beastly language, he would have used another word. The German press translated it as
Luxus,
which has other implications; it denotes extravagance, or sumptuousness. In the Reich, as Churchill later wrote, it became “an expression passed angrily from lip to lip.” In London the Tories were critical; even the
Daily News,
which had been one of his most ardent supporters, commented: “It is difficult to reconcile Lord Haldane’s mission with Mr Churchill’s speech at Glasgow…. Lord Haldane is on a mission to cultivate good feeling between the Governments and peoples of England and Germany…. Mr Churchill will pass and be forgotten. What we trust will remain and work is Lord Haldane’s mission and determination to come to an understanding with Germany which doubtless it represents.” The kaiser, told of Winston’s statement, realized that he had miscalculated. Feeling betrayed by a former guest and protégé, he demanded an apology. None was forthcoming. Asquith said that although his first lord’s choice of language had perhaps been unfortunate, he had nevertheless made “a plain statement of an obvious truth.” And Haldane, upon his return from Berlin, told the cabinet that, “so far from being a hindrance” in his negotiations, “the Glasgow speech had been the greatest possible help.”
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Regrettably, he added bleakly, it had not been enough to crown his efforts with success. He had talked to the emperor, to Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg, and to Grossadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Their price for accepting Britannia’s rule of the waves had been exorbitant—an English pledge of neutrality in the event of war between Germany and France. Haldane had concluded that once “the war party got into the saddle” in Berlin, they would push “not merely for the overthrow of France or Russia but for the domination of the world.” None of them seemed to realize that the English were as sensitive on the naval issue as the French on Alsace-Lorraine. They vigorously supported the German Navy League, whose hundred thousand members, corps of paid lecturers (paid by Krupp, shipbuilders to
Seine Majestät
), and magazine
Die Flotte
were flooding the Reich with chauvinistic literature and posters with such slogans as “England the Foe!” “Perfidious Albion!” “The Coming War!” “The British Peril!” “England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” Apparently Bernard Shaw was right; the Germans were a people with contempt for common sense.
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Or perhaps their problem was their critical adoration of authority. Haldane was convinced that the root of it was the kaiser,
der hohe Herr.
It was he who had told them: “Germany’s future is on the water.” Apparently someone had given him a book by an American, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s
Influence of Sea Power upon History
. Reading it, he had become convinced that his empire could never be truly great until it had mastered the seas. In addition,
der hohe Herr
had become paranoid. That was the explanation for his mischief-making and saber rattling. He believed his enemies were encircling the Reich and saw a powerful German fleet as a cleaver to cut through that investment. His navy, he predicted, “will bring the English to their senses through sheer fright,” after which they would “submit to the inevitable, and we shall become the best friends in the world.”
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Winston sat stone-faced through Haldane’s report and, at the end, gloomily commented that the secretary for war had confirmed his worst suspicions. The German shipbuilding program scheduled to start in May, he pointed out to the cabinet, represented an “extraordinary increase in the striking force, in ships of all classes,” providing Tirpitz with five fresh battle squadrons, each attended by flotillas of destroyers and submarines, each “extremely formidable.”
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M
eeting this challenge—keeping England afloat—was Churchill’s responsibility, but first he had to make peace within the Admiralty, a task he compared to “burrowing about in an illimitable rabbit-warren.” The relationship between civilian administrators and naval officers could hardly have been worse. The first called the second “boneheads”; the second referred to the first as “frocks” and shared the conviction of Douglas Haig, now a lieutenant general, that the word
politician
was “synonymous with crooked dealing and wrong values.” Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the first sea lord, had been McKenna’s undoing. Wilson was, among other things, the chief obstacle to the creation of a naval war staff. He thought it would undermine his authority. The admiral was nearly twice Churchill’s age, but Winston was unintimidated. Believing that Wilson dwelt “too much in the past” and was “not sufficiently receptive of new ideas,” the new first lord decided to fire the old first sea lord. He didn’t know whom to appoint in his place, so he sent for Lord Fisher.
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Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher—“Jacky” Fisher to England’s adoring masses—had retired to Lake Lucerne with a peerage four years earlier. He was a legend, “the greatest sailor since Nelson,” and he was immensely old. In 1854, when he had joined the navy as a midshipman, British men-of-war still carried sails. He had been a captain, commanding a battleship, when Winston was born. His great period had been between 1904 and 1910, when, as first sea lord, he had scrapped ships which he said could “neither fight nor run,” conceived the dreadnoughts, introduced submarines and 13.5-inch guns, revised the naval educational system, and built 161 warships, including 22 battleships of over 16,000 tons. Quick-tempered, emotional, with burning black eyes and a curiously Mongoloid face, he liked to portray himself as “ruthless, relentless, and remorseless.” The description was accurate. Officers who had questioned his policies had been ruined professionally; he had branded them traitors and declared that “their wives should be widows, their children fatherless, and their homes a dunghill.” Nevertheless, he was indisputably a genius. If Germany and England went to war, the navy Tirpitz would fight would be Fisher’s creation.
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Churchill had met him in 1907, when both were visiting Biarritz. They had begun corresponding that April, and Fisher’s first letter, inspired by a sugar strike in the British West Indies, provides a fair sample of his style: “St Lucia quite splendid! Dog eat dog! You are using niggers to fight niggers! For God’s sake don’t send British Bluejackets inland amongst sugar canes on this job or we shall have to set up a War Office inside the Admiralty & goodness knows
one
War Office is enough! I enclose a very secret paper.
Don’t let anyone see it.
The best thing ever written in the English language bar the Bible & Robertson’s Sermons & letters from a Competition Wallah. Kindly return the print with your improvements in the margin—study it closely.”
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The enclosure has not survived. It could have been anything. The admiral was given to superlatives and overstatements; his letters were peppered with exclamation marks and words underscored two or three times. A prudent minister would have shunned him, but Winston was never that; he believed that his own vision, married to Fisher’s experience, would make a brilliant union.