The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (84 page)

Of the eighteen ministers present, twelve went on record as being opposed to any support of France. Morley, John Burns, Sir John Simon, and Lewis Harcourt threatened to resign if they were overruled. Because of his seniority, Morley was their acknowledged leader, but the most vociferous pacifist was Lloyd George. George wasn’t even sure he would fight over Belgium. If the Germans took the direct route to France, he said, they would only cross a corner of the little country; it would just be a “little violation.” (Berlin would soon describe its earlier guarantee of Belgian neutrality as “a scrap of paper.”) Liberal back-benchers were even more vehement. That afternoon, in an informal caucus, they voted four to one for neutrality, “whatever happens in Belgium or elsewhere.” When news of the vacillation at No. 10 reached Printing House Square, the editor of
The Times
wrote his aunts: “Saturday was a black day for everyone who knew what was going on—more than half the Cabinet rotten and every prospect of a complete schism or a disastrous or dishonouring refusal to help France…. Winston has really done more than anyone else to save the situation.” But in doing it he was once more alienating members of his party, who had, Hankey wrote his wife, “not the smallest enthusiasm for war.”
²¹⁵

Churchill had invited Bonar Law and Grey to join him for dinner that Saturday evening. The Tory leader declined and Grey then withdrew, so Winston dined alone in Admiralty House. At 9:30
P.M.
F.E. Smith and Max Aitken dropped in; two Admiralty officials joined them, and they sat down to bridge, Aitken being odd man out. The cards had just been dealt when a messenger arrived with a large red dispatch box. Winston produced his key, opened it, and drew out a single sheet of paper bearing six words: “Germany has declared war against Russia.” Showing it to the others, he gave Aitken his cards and rang for a servant to bring him a lounge coat. He was going to No. 10. Aitken observed: “He left the room quickly…. He was not depressed; he was not elated; he was not surprised…. Certainly he exhibited no fear or uneasiness. Neither did he show any signs of joy. He went straight out like a man going to a well-accustomed job.”
²¹⁶

In Downing Street he told Asquith that he intended to issue an immediate order for full naval mobilization: summoning forty thousand reservists to the colors to man the Third Fleet, putting all dockyards on a war footing, and directing cruiser squadrons and armed auxiliaries to police the world’s trade routes. That was precisely what the cabinet had forbidden him to do. Once more the prime minister gave silent consent. In Churchill’s words, he “simply sat and looked at me and said no more. No doubt he felt himself bound by the morning’s decision of the Cabinet. I certainly, however, sustained the impression that he would not put out a finger to stop me. I then walked back to the Admiralty and gave the order.” On the way he met Grey, who said: “I have just done a very important thing. I have told Cambon that we shall not allow the German fleet to come into the Channel.” At 1:00
A.M.
, Winston wrote Clementine: “Cat-dear, it is all up. Germany has quenched the last hopes of peace by declaring war on Russia, & the declaration against France is momentarily expected.” He knew that she, like most Liberals, was praying for peace. “I profoundly understand your views,” he continued. “But the world is gone mad—& we must look after ourselves—& our friends…. Sweet Kat—my tender love—Your devoted W.” He added a postcript: “Kiss the kittens.”
²¹⁷

Years later, Churchill pointed out to Aitken that “the mobilization was actually ordered against Cabinet decision and without legal authority.” On Sunday Asquith’s ministers faced a hard choice. Either they ratified the actions taken by the first lord and the foreign secretary during the night, or the government fell. Reluctantly, they gave their approval, though Grey was instructed to tell the French that no British troops could be sent across the Channel. Thus England, carrying the whole Empire with it, slowly tilted toward France. No overt action was authorized—the British fleet would intervene only if the Germans tried to attack France by sea—but the Liberal rift nevertheless deepened. Morley and Burns resigned; Lloyd George abstained. Asquith said: “We are on the brink of a split.” After they broke up, Winston, with a careless disregard for party loyalty, approached F.E. Smith and said the Liberals were seriously divided. Would the Conservatives consider the formation of a coalition government? F. E. sounded out Bonar Law, who sensibly replied that any such proposal should come from the prime minister. He did, however, empower F.E. to tell Churchill that the overwhelming majority of Tory MPs favored backing France to the hilt.
²¹⁸

“Urgent. German ship
Goeben
at Taranto,” read a telegram to Winston from the British consul in that Italian seaport. Churchill instantly wired Milne: “
Goeben
must be shadowed by two battle cruisers.” But the admiral bungled the job; the German ship reached Messina a few hours after Italy’s declaration of neutrality, fueled, and steamed eastward toward Turkey. Everything now was being cut very fine. By a little maneuvering the kaiser could still have kept England out of the war. Instead, he declared war on France on Monday and informed the Belgians that German troops would enter their country within twelve hours. That turned Lloyd George around. He decided that British public opinion wouldn’t stand for it. If the Germans refused to withdraw their threat to Belgium, he said, England must fight. There were more resignations from the cabinet, and Morley bitterly accused George of succumbing to “the influence of the splendid condottiere at the Admiralty,” but Redmond guaranteed the support of the Irish Nationalists, and when the prime minister, chancellor, foreign secretary, and first lord entered the House, they received a standing ovation. Pale and haggard, Grey declared that if England deserted Belgium, “we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world.” As they left the Treasury Bench together, Churchill asked him, “What happens now?” “Now,” Grey replied, “we shall send them an ultimatum to stop the invasion of Belgium within twenty-four hours.” Back in the House the member for Burnley, Philip Morrell, rose to protest the abandonment of neutrality. He was drowned out by shouts of “Sit down! Sit down!” Morrell’s wife, Lady Ottoline, and her lover, Bertrand Russell, glumly walked the streets of Bloomsbury, trying to console each other. Most other Bloomsbury intellectuals were despondent. Lytton Strachey was an exception. “God has put us on an island and Winston has given us a navy,” he said. “It would be absurd to neglect those advantages.” The most prescient remark, oddly, came from Grey, that elegant, childless widower who had done more than anyone else to commit Britain’s youth. Standing at a window with a friend that evening, watching the street-lamps being lit, he said: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It was an epitaph with special application to 750,000 English boys, children only yesterday, soon to be slain in battle:
²¹⁹

Thus the rush of cataclysmic events came down to Tuesday, August 4, 1914, when at midnight Berlin time—11:00
P.M.
in London—Grey’s ultimatum to Germany would expire. In Pear Tree Cottage, Clementine, troubled by the peremptory retiring of Admiral Callaghan, was writing her husband, begging him to consider “the deep wound in an old man’s heart….
Please
see him yourself & take him by the hand and (additional) offer him a seat on the Board, or if this is impossible give him
some
advisory position at the Admiralty…. Don’t think this is a trivial matter. At this moment you want everyone’s heart & soul.” It was excellent advice; Winston had made altogether too many enemies, some on matters of principle but others through sheer thoughtlessness, and the moment was rapidly approaching when he would need every friend he could find. That Tuesday was not the day to start making them, however. There wasn’t time. He was alerting the captains of all British merchant ships, which flew the red ensign, and he was engrossed in the movements of the
Goeben.
Two British warships had sighted her at 9:30
A.M.
He wired: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” He wanted to attack at once. “Winston with all his war paint on,” Asquith wrote Clementine’s cousin, the beautiful, worldly young Venetia Stanley, with whom he was infatuated, “is longing for a sea fight to sink the
Goeben.
” The prime minister had no objection, but the cabinet vetoed the firing of a single shot before the expiration of Grey’s deadline. Prince Louis pleaded with Churchill to give the British gunners a green light before dusk, but the first lord felt he had been insubordinate enough. Night fell and the enemy battle cruiser escaped.
²²⁰

Winston dined at Admiralty House with his mother and brother. Heavy fighting was reported in Belgium. Berlin had ignored Grey’s note. The largest human event since the French Revolution was now imminent. The last minutes of peace were ticking away, and vanishing with them, though no one knew it, was England’s century of security and supremacy—its “intolerable hegemony” in world affairs, as the German Matthias Erzberger called it. Churchill left the table to give a council of admirals and captains their final instructions. Big Ben struck the fatal hour. The message went out:
²²¹

It was a warm night. Through open windows Churchill could hear a throng outside Buckingham Palace, cheering and singing “God Save the King.” Custom required that he now report to the prime minister. All the other ministers were already there, sitting in a glum circle around the green baize of the cabinet table. Margot Asquith had been waiting with them. She had just decided to retire, and was pausing at the foot of the stairs, when she saw Winston entering No. 10 and, “with a happy face, striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.”
²²²

I
N
that first week of the war six million European soldiers sprang to arms with medieval ardor, and a month passed before anyone knew what had happened to them. The void was quickly filled by wild rumors, especially in Britain, which was spending less of its revenues on the army, proportionately, than in 1901. Other belligerent nations had military objectives, conscription, programs for mobilizing civilian efforts. England had only the “War-Book” of 1911, prepared by the Committee of Imperial Defence at Haldane’s insistence. It was inadequate, and so the country was particularly vulnerable to sensational talebearers. The most extraordinary story, almost universally accepted at the time, described a force of between 70,000 and 100,000 Russians who were said to have landed in Scotland on their way to reinforce the Allies in France. An Edinburgh railway porter told of sweeping the snow from their boots. No one seems to have reminded him that they were in the middle of an August heat wave. Instead, otherwise responsible people chimed in; a laird swore that the czar’s soldiers had marched across his estate, and an Oxford scholar declared that one of his colleagues was acting as their interpreter.

Spy stories flourished on the Norfolk coast. “Foreign-looking” men were reported almost every day. Clementine wrote Winston about them. She said that Goonie had seen a British soldier corner a suspect and “give him a small prod with his bayonette,” which, “tho’ very exhilarating to the pursuers had the effect of making the ‘spy’ run so fast that Goonie fears he got away.” Another time “one of the cottager’s wives” saw two men walking along a cliff with odd bulges in their coats. They gave her evil glances “& spoke to each other in a foreign tongue.” Following furtively, she watched them “open their jackets & let fly 4 carrier pigeons!” Policemen, alerted, “pursued the men & caught them.” Clementine learned that a decoded message retrieved from one of the pigeons revealed details of a plan to kidnap her and fly her on a German plane to Berlin, where she would remain until her husband had paid a ransom of several dreadnoughts. She wasn’t intimidated: “If I
am
kidnapped I beg of you not to sacrifice the smallest or cheapest submarine or even the oldest ship…. I could not face the subsequent unpopularity whereas I should be quite a heroine & you a Spartan if I died bravely & unransomed.” Winston was alarmed, and his concern deepened when he learned that their car had broken down. “It makes me a little anxious,” he wrote her on August 9, “that you should be on the coast. It is 100 to one against a raid—but still there is the chance, and Cromer has a good landing place near. I wish you would get the motor repaired and keep it so that you can whisk away at the first sign of trouble.”
¹

Churchill himself caught the spy fever. Driving to the Loch Ewe anchorage of the Grand Fleet with two admirals and two commodores, he spotted a searchlight on the roof of a large private house. There were no Admiralty spotlights in the neighborhood. Conceivably, he reasoned, this one was being used to send the Germans information about fleet movements. They drove on, but when they arrived and Jellicoe told them an unidentified aircraft had been seen in the vicinity, Winston returned to the house at the head of a party armed with pistols and ammunition from H.M.S.
Iron Duke.
He was now convinced that he had discovered a nest of secret agents. At the door the butler told him that this was the home of Sir Arthur Bignold, a founder of the Kennel Club and former Tory MP. Sir Arthur himself appeared, was questioned, and gave an unlikely explanation for the searchlight; he used it, he said, to catch the gleaming eyes of deer on a nearby hillside so he would know where to stalk them in the morning. To his indignation, Churchill ordered the light dismantled and its vital parts taken away. Back at the Admiralty, Winston demanded that “the fullest report be made on the circumstances in which this searchlight came to be placed into position, together with all other facts about Sir Arthur Bignold, his guests, friends and servants.”
²
The improbable deer-stalking story proved to be true. Apart from its revelation of England’s preoccupation with intrigue, even on the highest levels, this incident, like the Sidney Street siege, adds further testimony to Churchill’s affinity to danger. The light might have aroused the suspicions of other ministers, but they would have sent subordinates to the scene. Only the first lord of the Admiralty would have arrived in person, gun in hand.

“I am writing in the Cabinet room, at the beginning of twilight,” Asquith wrote Venetia Stanley, “and thro’ the opposite window across the Parade I see the Admiralty flag flying & the lights ‘beginning to twinkle’ from the rooms where Winston and his two familiars (Eddie and Masterton) are beating out their plans.” Winston had already established the routine which would become part of the Churchill legend in World War II. Adopting the Cuban siesta, he worked until 2:00
A.M.
each day, woke at 8:00
A.M.
, and went through correspondence without rising. To Vice Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg he presented “a most extraordinary spectacle, perched up in a huge bed, with the whole of the counterpane littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colours, and a stenographer sitting at the foot—Mr. Churchill himself with an enormous Corona in his mouth.”
³

He was invigorated with immense gusto, enjoying his awesome responsibilities and volunteering to take over any that other ministers found burdensome. As many as twenty major Admiralty enterprises, all of them entirely dependent on sea power, were, he noted, “proceeding simultaneously in different parts of the globe.” Under his direction, the 70,000 men of Field Marshal Sir John French’s first British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were virtually secure from invasion because British warships were patrolling the 200,000 square miles of sea between Scotland and Norway, and both sides of the Strait of Dover had been mined. German and Austrian merchant ports were blockaded. Fast cruiser squadrons hunted down German sea raiders. The kaiser’s colonies overseas were seized or besieged with almost larcenous zest—“A month ago,” he remarked to the cabinet, “with what horror and disgust would most of those present have averted their minds from such ideas!” The body of a drowned German signalman yielded a secret cipher book; as a consequence, Winston and his staff in Room 40 at the Admiralty could track the movements of German ships. But the sea wasn’t large enough for him. Land and air warfare must also feel the Churchillian presence. He established a Royal Naval division of infantry. (“A band must be provided,” he minuted in a typical touch. “The quality is not important.”) His seaplanes hunted U-boats. The pilots who had been his flight instructors were directed, on August 27, to establish their own air base on the Continent at Dunkirk. Other naval fliers carried out, on his orders, a series of stunning raids on zeppelin sheds at Cologne, Cuxhaven, Düsseldorf, and Friedrichafen and shot down six of the German airships. When Kitchener became minister for war on August 5, he asked Churchill to take over the air defense of Britain, and Winston instantly agreed. He even found time for wartime diplomacy. At Asquith’s request, the first lord served on a war council whose other cabinet members were the prime minister, the foreign secretary, the chancellor, and the war minister. He secretly bargained with Italy and Japan over the terms under which they would join the Allies. “What should we do to bring the Japanese into the war?” he was asked. He replied grandly: “They can have China.” Grey said: “Winston very soon will become incapable, from sheer activity of mind, of being anything in the Cabinet but Prime Minister.” At a birthday party featuring a band and a magician, Churchill’s son, Randolph, the Chumbolly, shouted at the magician: “Man, stop! Band, play!” A relative sighed: “Just like Winston.”
⁴

A morning ride

The new secretary of state for war was the man of the hour. He had just been raised to an earldom, and on August 7 the blazing eyes, broad guardsman’s mustache, and pointing finger of Kitchener of Khartoum—“K of K,” the people now called him—appeared everywhere on a recruiting poster above the riveting message:
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU
! Some colleagues worried about the relationship between this hard, enigmatic man and the ebullient Churchill. Kitchener was twenty-five years older than the first lord and at one time had regarded him as an insubordinate pest. But Winston was another man now, and K of K, recognizing it, dropped him a note: “My dear Churchill…. Please do not address me as Lord as I am only yours, Kitchener.” Winston later wrote: “I found him much more affable than I had been led to expect…. In those early days we worked together on close and cordial terms. He consulted me constantly on political aspects of his work, and increasingly gave me his confidence in military matters. Admiralty and War Office business were so interlaced that… we were in almost daily personal consultation.” Later, after everything had gone wrong, it was Kitchener who gave Churchill the consolation he would treasure during the bleakest years of his life: “There is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.”
⁵

Churchill’s pace was exhausting. On August 9 he wrote Clementine: “I am over head & ears in work & am much behindhand.” Two days later he wrote her: “This is only a line from a vy exhausted Winston…. I wish I cd whisk down to you & dig a little on the beach. My work here is vy heavy & so interesting that I cannot leave it.” In her reply she warned of fatigue and urged him to remember: “1) Never missing your morning ride. 2) Going to bed well
before
midnight & sleeping well &
not
allowing yourself to be woken up every time a Belgian kills a German. (You
must
have 8 hours sleep every night to be your best self.) 3) Not smoking too much & not having indigestion. Now shall I come up for a day or two next Monday & tease you partly into doing these things?”
⁶

The fact is that she was dying for an excuse to be in the thick of it. Understanding that, and anxious to appease her appetite for news, Churchill took what was, under the circumstances, a remarkable risk. He sent her classified information by post. “My darling one,” he wrote. “The enclosed will tell you what is known officially. It is a good summary. You must
not
fail to burn it at once…. Kiss the Kittens for me. Tender love to you all. Your fondest & devoted W.” She consigned it to the flames and begged for more. Over the phone—in the Speyers’ cottage—she elicited his consent to put more in the mail. After hanging up she wrote him: “I am longing to get your letter with the secret news. It shall be destroyed at once. I hope that in it, you tell me about the expeditionary force. Do I guess right that some have gone already? Be a good one and write again & feed me with tit-bits. I am being so wise & good & sitting on the Beach & playing with my kittens, & doing my little housekeeping, but how I long to dash up & be near you and the pulse of things.” Apparently the letter, when it arrived, was a letdown. “It was most interesting,” she wrote him on August 10, “but I was disappointed because I hoped you were going to tell me about the Expeditionary Force. Do send me news of it. When it is going, where it will land, which regiments are in the first batch, etc. I long for it to arrive in time to save the Liège citizens from being massacred in their houses.”
⁷

Even Winston couldn’t tell her that. And until the BEF saw action, the public couldn’t even be told of its existence. If the Germans knew of its presence in France, they would alter their plans accordingly. It was indeed inherent in most of the Admiralty’s accomplishments that everything known about them had to be highly restricted. The transport of troops, the charting of courses for warship patrols, negotiations with the Japanese and Italians, Room 40—all these would have been compromised if revealed. Information about engagements at sea could be disclosed, but in the first phase of the war most of this news was bad. The
Goeben
and the
Breslau
entered the Dardanelles, and the sequel was worse than anything Churchill had imagined. The kaiser grandly announced that he was selling both vessels to Turkey as replacements for the two Winston had virtually buccaneered. The crews, however, remained German. They led the Turkish fleet across the Black Sea to bombard the Russian Black Sea ports of Odessa, Nikolayev, and Sevastopol. Russia, in retaliation, declared war on Turkey; England and France were then obliged to do the same. That was the price the Allies paid for Churchill’s high-handed “requisition” of July 28. If he had let the Turks have their ships their country might have remained neutral or even come in on England’s side.

In late August the sky briefly brightened. Beatty entered German home waters and won the war’s first naval battle, sinking three of Tirpitz’s cruisers, damaging three more, and killing or capturing a thousand men at a cost of one damaged ship and thirty-five British bluejackets. Clementine, back in Admiralty House with the children, sent Kitchener the news while Churchill dressed for dinner. “Winston,” she wrote, “thinks this is rather a ‘Coup.’ ” Then the Germans went underwater. Churchill, addressing an all-party recruiting rally in Liverpool, said he hoped “the navy will have a chance of settling the question of the German Fleet,” then added, “if they do not come out and fight in time of war they will be dug out like rats in a hole.” That was tempting fate. The British cruisers
Aboukir, Hogue,
and
Cressy
were patrolling the Dutch coast. Feeling “constant, gnawing anxieties about the safety of the Fleet from submarine attack,” he had ordered them withdrawn, but they were still there when, the morning after his Liverpool speech, a U-boat sank all three in less than an hour, taking 1,459 tars with them.
⁸
And that was only the beginning. Another U-boat entered Loch Ewe and torpedoed the cruiser
Hawke
. Next the dreadnought
Audacious
went down, followed by the
Formidable
. Clearly Scapa Flow was insecure; Churchill ordered the Grand Fleet to sea while the Orkney defenses were strengthened. During their absence, three battle cruisers of the German High Seas Fleet under the command of Franz von Hipper emerged from their Baltic Sea sanctuary, bombarded the British ports of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough, and sailed away without a scratch. Overseas, a squadron of fast cruisers under Maximilian von Spee roamed the Pacific Ocean, sinking British freighters almost at will. The cruiser
Emden
steamed into the Bay of Bengal, shelled Madras, prowled around the approaches to Ceylon, and destroyed fifteen Allied merchantmen. When a British force under Sir Christopher Cradock attacked von Spee off the Chilean coast, the Germans wiped out the British in a sensational battle and drowned Cradock.