The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (89 page)

They were the first men to be exposed to poison gas, massed machine-gun fire, and strafing airplanes, and they lived with rats and lice, amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, staring up at the sky by day and venturing out only by night. Separated by the junk of no-man’s-land, the great, impotent armies squatted month after month, living troglodytic lives in candle-lit dugouts and trenches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Bassée clay, or ladled from the porridge of swampy Flanders. In the north the efficient Germans tacked up propaganda signs (
Gott strafe England; Frankreich, du bist betrügen
) and settled down to teach their language to French and Belgian children while the Allies counterattacked furiously. These titanic struggles were called battles, but although they were fought on fantastic scales, strategically they were only siege assaults. Every Allied wave found the kaiser’s defenses stronger. The poilus and Tommies crawled over their parapets, lay down in front of the jump-off tapes, and waited while their officers studied the new gadgets called wristwatches before blowing their zero-hour whistles. Then the men arose and hurtled toward as many as ten aprons of ropy wire, with barbs thick as a man’s thumb, backed by the pullulating Boche.
Morituri te salutamus
. A few trenches would be taken at shocking cost—the price of seven hundred mutilated yards in one attack was twenty-six thousand men—and then the beleaguerment would start again. In London, newspapers spoke of “hammer blows” and “the big push,” but the men knew better; a soldiers’ mot had it that the war would last a hundred years, five years of fighting and ninety-five of winding up the barbed wire.

It was a weird, grimy life, unlike anything in their Victorian upbringing except, perhaps, the stories of Jules Verne. There were a few poignant reminders of prewar days—the birds that caroled over the lunar landscape each gray dawn; the big yellow poplar forests behind the lines—but most sounds and colors were unearthly. Bullets cracked and ricochets sang with an iron ring; overhead, shells warbled endlessly. There were spectacular red Very flares, saffron shrapnel puffs, and snaky yellowish mists of mustard gas souring the ground. Little foliage survived here. Trees splintered to matchwood stood in silhouette against the sky. Newcomers arriving from Blighty (“The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs,” said Carson) were shipped up in box-cars built for
hommes
40 or
chevaux
8 and marched over duckboards to their new homes in the earth, where everything revolved around the trench—you had a trench knife, a trench cane, a rod-shaped trench periscope, a trench coat if you were an officer, and, if you were unlucky, trench foot, trench mouth, or trench fever.
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In the course of an average day on the western front, there were 2,533 men on both sides killed in action, 9,121 wounded, and 1,164 missing.

Even in quiet sectors there was a steady toll of shellfire casualties—the methodical War Office called it “normal wastage.” The survivors were those who developed quick reactions to danger. An alert youth learned to sort out the whines that threatened him, though after a few close ones, when his ears buzzed and everything turned scarlet, he also realized that the time might come when ducking would do no good. If he was a machine gunner he knew that his life expectancy in combat had been reckoned at about thirty minutes, and in time he became detached toward death and casual with its appliances: enemy lines would be sprayed with belt after belt from water-cooled machine guns to heat the water for soup. Hopes for victory diminished and then vanished. After one savage attempt at a breakthrough Edmund Blunden wrote that “by the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.”
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A month after Antwerp, Churchill received a letter from Valentine Fleming, an MP and fellow officer in the QOOH, now serving in France: “First and most impressive,” Fleming wrote, were “the absolutely indescribable ravages of modern artillery fire, not only upon all men, animals and buildings within its zone, but upon the very face of nature itself. Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves…. Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men…. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1,000 yards apart…. In these trenches crouch lines of men, in brown or grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven, hollow-eyed with the continual strain and unable to reply to the everlasting run of shells hurled at them from 3, 4, 5 or more miles away and positively welcoming an infantry attack from one side or the other as a chance of meeting and matching themselves against
human
assailants and not against invisible, irresistible machines….” Winston sent this to Clementine with a note: “What wd happen I wonder if the armies suddenly & simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute! Meanwhile however new avalanches of men are preparing to mingle in the conflict and it widens and deepens every hour.”
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Asquith felt desperate. “I am profoundly dissatisfied with the immediate prospect,” he wrote his beloved on December 30. He saw the war as “an enormous waste of life and money day after day with no appreciable progress.” Over the holidays Lloyd George drew up a memorandum predicting that a few more months of trench warfare “will inevitably destroy the
morale
of the best of troops” and “any attempt to force the carefully-prepared German lines in the west would end in failure and in appalling loss of life.” Under these conditions, Churchill believed, victory would be “bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.” There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged. The answer to immovable defense, he reasoned, was irresistible assault employing new tactics. He suggested what he described as “the attack by the spade”—some three hundred interconnected tunnels dug over a two-mile front toward the enemy’s lines and emerging within sixty yards of his trenches, where they would be inaccessible to his artillery. Then he proposed a collective metal shield, “pushed along either on a wheel or still better on a Caterpillar,” behind which several men could hide while crossing no-man’s-land.
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The War Office dismissed these as absurd, and in fact they were impractical. But he was groping toward something effective. His search had begun on September 23, before the Antwerp crisis, when he had been looking for a way to protect his airmen at Dunkirk. Buying up all available Rolls-Royces, he had ordered them clad in improvised armor. “It is most important,” he wrote, “that the… armed motor-cars should be provided to a certain extent with cars carrying the means of bridging small cuts in the road, and an arrangement of planks capable of bridging a ten-or twelve-feet span quickly and easily should be carried with every ten or twelve machines.” The bridging apparatus didn’t work; it couldn’t reach across a double line of trenches. But an army colonel attached to GHQ in France believed it could be made to work. He approached Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the cabinet. Hankey approached Churchill, and on January 5, 1915, Winston sent Asquith a memorandum. It would be simple, he wrote, to quickly “fit up a number of steam tractors with small armoured shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bullet-proof.” A “caterpillar system would enable trenches to be crossed quite easily, and the weight of the machine would destroy all wire entanglements.” A fleet of them could make “many
points d’appui
for the British supporting infantry to rush forward and rally on them. They can then move forward to attack the second line of trenches.” The cost would be slight. “If the experiment did not answer, what harm would be done? It should certainly be done now.”
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The idea was not new. H. G. Wells had conceived it in 1903. But it had been science fiction then. Now, with superior steel plating, improved internal-combustion engines, and caterpillar tracks, it was practical. Asquith forwarded Winston’s memo to Kitchener, who passed it along to his ordnance general, who pigeonholed it. In February, however, the matter came up again. Dining at the home of the Duke of Westminster, Churchill met Colonel Ernest Swinton, an officer fresh from the BEF who believed a large cross-country armored car could scale almost any obstacle. The following morning Winston summoned Captain Eustace Tennyson D’Eyncourt, an Admiralty designer, and asked him to devise a “land ship” using caterpillar treads. Secrecy was urgent; to mislead the Germans, everyone connected with the project would tell others in the Admiralty that they were making “water carriers for Russia”—vessels to carry large vats of drinking water into the czar’s front lines. Colonel Swinton predicted that the War Office would designate them “WCs for Russia.” He suggested they be called “tanks” and Churchill agreed.
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On February 20 Winston had the flu, so the first meeting of the “Land Ship Committee” was held in his Admiralty House bedroom. Four days later he initialed its recommendations “as proposed & with all despatch.” An order for a prototype was placed with Messrs. Fosters of Lincoln, which suggested using a tractor as a model. By the end of the month Churchill had persuaded Asquith to earmark £70,000 for the committee. On March 9 Winston was shown the first designs. He minuted: “Press on.” Eleven days later D’Eyncourt asked him to approve manufacture of eighteen tanks. Churchill wrote him: “Most urgent. Special report to me in case of delay.” His one fear was that the invention would be disclosed prematurely, before enough of them were ready, thereby destroying the element of surprise and alerting the enemy to the new weapon. But when the first one clanked weirdly across the Horse Guards Parade under his eager eyes, observers from the War Office said tanks weren’t wanted at all; they would be unable to cope with mud. Even in the Admiralty the project was called “Winston’s Folly.”
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“Winston’s Folly”

Meanwhile, the insensate killing in France continued. By the end of November, 1914, Britain and France had suffered almost a million casualties. Their leaders were trapped by geography and the sheer mass of the men mobilized. What was needed,
The Times
suggested, was strategy with a “touch of imagination.”
⁵⁰
Vision,
perhaps, would have been a better word. Certainly the cabinet, preferring another battleground, almost
any
other battleground, was straining to look in all directions. Visible and close at hand was the North Sea island of Borkum, which, if seized, could be used in a variant of Fisher’s suggestion—as a staging area for an amphibious invasion of the German coast, twelve miles away. Violations of Dutch and Danish neutrality, regarded as unconscionable earlier, were now debated. The only other possibilities lay in the eastern Mediterranean, on the vulnerable edges of the tottering Turkish empire: Salonika in northeastern Greece, Syria, Gallipoli, and the Dardanelles, the strait separating Europe from Asia. Here in southeastern Europe, England might find new allies. Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Montenegro shared a common hatred of the oppressive Turks. Farsighted British imperialists had long dreamed of a Balkan league, a union of Christian states federated with the Empire. Now it seemed to be within reach. In the second week of the war Eleutherios Venizelos, the anglophilic Liberal Greek premier, had proposed an Anglo-Greek alliance and volunteered to send sixty thousand men to occupy Gallipoli. The War Office was enthusiastic; in peacetime, Britain’s general staff, like Greece’s, had studied the peninsula and concluded that it was ripe for plucking. But Grey, wary of extending England’s commitments, and believing he could change his mind later, rejected Venizelos’s overture.

If one conceives of the waters in that part of the world as a listing stack of irregular glass globes—the kind of weird, bubbling apparatus Dr. Frankenstein used in infusing life into his monster—the vessel on top would be the Black Sea. The Black Sea empties through a bottleneck, the nineteen-mile-long Bosporus, into the Sea of Marmara. Constantinople stands on both banks of the Bosporus strait. The Sea of Marmara, continuing downward, drains through a second channel, the thirty-eight-mile-long Dardanelles, into the Aegean Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean. Until the end of 1914, over 90 percent of Russia’s grain and half its exports had passed through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, also known as the Hellespont. For ships approaching from the south, the Dardanelles is the key to Constantinople. It is astonishingly slim. Viewed from a height, it looks more like a river, and is in fact no wider than the Hudson at Ossining. At its mouth, by Cape Helles on the Aegean, on the tip of Gallipoli peninsula, it is four thousand yards wide. The banks open up as you proceed upward but then close again at the Narrows, where the channel is less than a mile across. Byron swam it easily in March 1810. Gallipoli forms the western shore of the strait. A military force holding the peninsula would dominate the Dardanelles. In the autumn of 1914 it was defended by a skeletal garrison of Turks.