IN 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.
In time all these would be avenged. Von Hipper would be intercepted on his next sortie and so badly mauled that he would never reappear on the high seas. Von Spee and his entire squadron would be sunk in the waters off the Falkland Islands. An Australian cruiser would annihilate the Emden. Only the U-boats would venture to take the offensive after that, and while their toll was spectacular, their torpedoing of American merchantmen trading with England would eventually bring the United States into the war. But in late 1914 all that lay in the future. The Admiralty’s initial defeats shocked Britons. They had thought their navy invincible. The shelling of their coast, the threat to transports bringing Indian troops back to fight in France, the sinking of their proud warships, evoked cries of pain and anger. Inevitably the Admiralty’s first lord, the most visible member of the government, paid a price for his flamboyance.
The lord mayors of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough demanded coastal artillery and dreadnoughts anchored off their beaches. The Indian government telegraphed that Madras must be protected. The Morning Post found that “grave doubt is expressed on every hand” about Churchill’s competence: “In the War Office we have a soldier in whom the Army and the nation have confidence. In the Admiralty, upon the other hand, there is a First Lord who is a civilian, and cannot be expected to have any grasp of the principles and practice of naval warfare.” Thomas Bowles, a former Tory MP, published a pamphlet charging that the three cruisers had been lost off the Netherlands “because, despite the warnings of admirals, commodores and captains, Mr Churchill refused, until it was too late, to recall them from a patrol so carried on as to make them certain to fall victims to the torpedoes of an active enemy.” The House was hostile; when he triumphantly announced the naval fliers’ air raids on Germany, he was castigated for violating Swiss airspace. “What’s the Navy doing?” hecklers cried, and he could not reply without jeopardizing missions and men. “In spite of being accustomed to years of abuse,” he later wrote, “I could not but feel the adverse and hostile currents that flowed about me.”9
Some flowed very close. Lloyd George told his secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson, who kept a diary, “Churchill is too busy trying to get a flashy success to attend to the real business of the Admiralty. Churchill blames Admiral Cradock for the defeat in South America—the Admiral presumably having gone down with his ship & so unable to clear himself. This is characteristic of Churchill.” Asquith wrote the King that the Cabinet felt the naval losses were “not creditable.” The King, who already regarded Churchill as unreliable and irresponsible, was disgusted with his Liverpool speech. After the loss of the three cruisers, His Majesty’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, wrote: “Indeed seeing what alas! happened today when the rats came out of their own accord and to our cost, the threat was unfortunate and the King feels it was hardly dignified for a Cabinet Minister.” Even Kitchener, usually steadfast, despaired during one cabinet meeting, saying that a German invasion was not only possible, but that England would not be able to stop it. Churchill challenged him to have the brightest experts in the War Office pick any British beach, any day, and work out the logistics of landing 150,000 men. The Admiralty would then show how they could hurl those men back into the sea.10
Nevertheless, someone’s head had to roll. It was scapegoating time again, and the choice of the victim reflects ill upon all who participated in his undoing. Since the outbreak of the war the first sea lord had been the target of a vicious witch-hunt. The press had hounded him, and every minister had been inundated with anonymous letters questioning his loyalty. Lord Charles Beresford, Fisher’s bête noire, told the House that while Prince Louis was an “exceedingly able officer,” nothing could alter the fact that he was a German, had German servants, owned property in Germany, “and as such should not be occupying his present position.” Churchill warned Beresford not to repeat those remarks: “The interests of the country do not permit the spreading of such wicked allegations by an officer of your rank, even though retired.” Violet Asquith wrote that her father’s reaction to the smear campaign was one of “disgust.” That is not the impression left by his letters to Venetia Stanley, however. He wrote her that he was not, “entre nous, very trustful of the capacity of Prince Louis.” Then: “Our poor blue-eyed German will have to go.” And then: “He must go.”11
He went. Churchill told the King that the attacks on the first sea lord’s “name and parentage” had subjected Louis to an intolerable strain: “The exacting duties and heavy responsibilities of his office have no doubt affected his general health and nerves, so that for the good of the service a change has become necessary.” Back at the Admiralty, he wrote Louis that he and Asquith agreed that “a letter from you to me indicating that you felt in some respects yr usefulness was impaired & that patriotic considerations wh at this junction must be supreme in yr mind wd be the best form of giving effect to yr decision. To this letter I wd on behalf of the Govt write an answer.” There was more of this, all of it lamentable. He closed: “No incident in my public life has caused me so much sorrow.” Their parting interview may have caused him more. The prince had just learned that his young cousin, Maurice, a grandson of Queen Victoria and an infantry lieutenant, had been killed in France. With great dignity the grieving father said that “as a loyal subject of His Majesty” he was leaving “the great service to which I have devoted my life” to ease “the burden laid on His Majesty’s Ministers.” Thus Louis Alexander of Battenberg, GCB, GCVO, KCMB, PC, was evicted from office on shabby charges of disloyalty to which a Liberal government capitulated. At the King’s request Louis changed his name to Mountbatten. One day his younger son, Dickie, then fourteen, would vindicate him.12
The question of his successor was a momentous one. Haldane had written Churchill that if Lord Fisher were returned to active duty, it would “make our country feel that our old spirit of the Navy was alive and come back.” Violet Asquith had “not a shadow of doubt that Winston would wish to appoint Lord Fisher…. There was a magnetic mutual attraction between these two and they could not keep away from one another for long.” The old salt had been bombarding Churchill with advice, sometimes on profound matters, sometimes on trivia: “Why is standard of recruits raised 3 inches to 5 feet 6?… What d——d folly to discard supreme enthusiasm because it’s under 5 feet 6. We are a wonderful nation! astounding how we muddle through! There’s only one explanation—We are the lost 10 Tribes!” He was now seventy-four. On his frequent visits to the Admiralty, Winston, in his words, “watched him narrowly to judge his physical strength and mental alertness” and had “the impression of a terrific engine of mental and physical power burning and throbbing in that aged frame.” He sounded him out “and soon saw he was fiercely eager to lay his grasp on power.” No one else would do, Winston told Asquith. When the prime minister agreed, the first lord was elated. Violet, seeing him immediately afterward, said: “No one knows his weather better than you do—and you are no doubt prepared for squalls ahead.” Winston said: “I know him—and I know that I can manage him.”13
The difficulty was that Fisher felt the same way about Churchill. And there were doubters even then. Clementine was apprehensive; she was afraid the old admiral would be “like the curate’s egg.” Beatty wrote his wife: “The situation is curious; two very strong and clever men, one old, wily, and of vast experience, one young, self-assertive… but unstable.” Aitken believed that Churchill had “co-opted Fisher to relieve the pressure against himself,” but had no “intention of letting anyone else rule the roost.” He foresaw a duel between a first lord and a first sea lord “both bent on an autocracy.” Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss predicted: “They will be thick as thieves at first until they differ on some subject, probably as to who is to be Number 1, when they will begin to intrigue against each other.” The most determined opponent of the appointment was George V. The “Sailor King” had served fifteen years before the mast, and he distrusted Jacky Fisher. He summoned Churchill to Buckingham Palace, where, according to Stamfordham’s account of their conversation, the King said that Winston’s choice was “a great surprise.” His Majesty thought that “Lord Fisher has not the confidence of the Navy; he is over 73 years of age. When First Sea Lord… he created a state of unrest and bad feeling among the officers of the service.” Churchill replied that no other admiral was fit for the job. The King ended the audience by saying that he could not approve until he had seen Asquith. Stamfordham bore the sovereign’s message to No. 10: “The proposed appointment would give a shock to the Navy which no one could wish to cause in the middle of this great War.” Lord Fisher, the royal message continued, had become aged; he talked and wrote a great deal, but his opinions changed “from day to day.” Asquith himself was troubled by Fisher’s “strangely un-English” face, with its “twisted mouth” and round eyes, “suggesting the legend (which I believe quite untrue) that he had a Cingalese mother,” but he replied that he supported Churchill’s decision. The King, having done all a constitutional monarch could do, signed the appointment but wrote the prime minister: “I do so with some reluctance and misgivings.”14
He then sent for the appointee. Churchill had coached Fisher carefully. The meeting lasted an hour, and afterward the King wrote in his diary: “He seems as young as ever.” The two agreed to meet once a week. Winston wrote Asquith and Grey that the old admiral “is already a Court Favourite.” The choice seemed inspired. It was immensely popular with the country. Since the old admiral usually awoke at 4:00 A.M., between them he and Churchill could keep an almost unsleeping watch at the Admiralty. Winston loved Fisher’s wit, his contempt for pomp, his devotion to the service. He wrote him: “Contact with you is like ozone to me.” To Clementine he wrote: “Tomorrow old Fisher comes down to the yacht with me. This always has a salutary effect.” Certainly Fisher’s energy was astounding. He wrote a friend: “Thanks for your dear letter! Isn’t it fun being back? Some d——d fools thought I was dead and buried! I am busy getting even with some of them! I did 22 hours work yesterday but 2 hours sleep not enough so I shall slow down! SECRET. The King said to Winston (I suppose dissuading) that the job would kill me. Winston was perfectly lovely in his instant reply: ‘Sir, I cannot imagine a more glorious death’! Wasn’t that delicious? But burn please!” He wrote Jellicoe: “Let everyone be optimistic, and shoot the pessimists!” To Beatty he said: “It’s not numbers that tell, but GUNNERY! Gunnery, gunnery, gunnery! All else is twaddle. Hit the target!”15
At the outset the first sea lord’s relationship with the first lord was as Wemyss had predicted: superb. In Churchill’s words, “As long as the port and starboard lights shone together all went well.” The old man proposed a daring plan to force an entry into the Baltic Sea and secure command of it, cutting Germany off from its Scandinavian supplies and freeing Russian troops for an amphibious assault on Berlin. Winston, with his love of adventure, was delighted. He authorized the building of landing craft. Then he questioned Fisher about details. Before the Baltic could be entered, the Elbe River must be blocked. How could this be done? Could British warships enter the Baltic while Tirpitz’s fleet was free to sortie from the Kiel Canal and attack the ships left behind in Scapa Flow? How could the Baltic islands be seized while barring the Elbe? The admiral was vague; clearly he hadn’t thought it through. Slowly Churchill began to realize that the King had been right, that the aged first sea lord “was very old. In all matters where naval fighting was concerned he was more than usually cautious. He could not bear the idea of risking ships in battle.” Winston had trapped himself. Fisher was his man, confirmed despite the protests of, among others, the sovereign. If the old salt turned on him, Churchill would be alone. And they were bound to find themselves on a collision course eventually, for Winston believed in taking chances—“It is not right to condemn operations of war simply because they involve risk and uncertainty,” he told the cabinet—while his first sea lord, so audacious in conversation and letters, was transformed into an archconservative when the prospect of action loomed. “He settled,” Churchill wrote bleakly, “upon a doctrine widely inculcated among our senior naval officers, that the Navy’s task was to keep open our communications, blockade those of the enemy, and to wait for the Armies to do their proper job.”16
But the armies were not doing their proper job. The assumption had been that Belgium would be the battleground. That was the gist of the War Office summary Winston had sent Clementine on August 9. Three days later Punch had run its first wartime cartoon, showing a brave little Belgian boy in wooden shoes barring the way to a fat German trespasser, with the caption “No Thoroughfare!” Heavy casualties had not been expected. When Winston learned that his young cousin Norman Leslie had been killed in action he thought it bad luck. Even in South Africa death had come to relatively few. He had no way of knowing that fifteen thousand British soldiers had fallen in five days—and that their losses had been light compared to those of the French. On the morning of August 24, three weeks after Germany had declared war on France, he looked up from his desk and saw Kitchener standing in the doorway. K of K’s face was peculiar. Winston had “the subconscious feeling that it was distorted and discoloured as if it had been punched with a fist. His eyes rolled more than ever.” Wordlessly he held out a telegram from the commander of the BEF, Sir John French. The Belgian fortress of Namur had fallen to the enemy. At the time this was considered a disaster. Namur was fifty-seven miles from the German frontier and the gateway to France. Neither Kitchener nor Churchill could have envisioned what lay ahead: a further BEF retreat of 157 miles, putting the Tommies just outside the suburbs of Paris before they rallied. To cheer up the war minister, Winston took him to the Other Club and proposed, after dinner, his intention to break the club rule forbidding any toast but that to the King; with a flourish he raised his glass to “success to the British arms.” He beamed at Kitchener, who drank but still looked pummeled.17
Five days later another member of the club suffered a similar shock. That Saturday afternoon F. E. Smith, the official press censor, was handed a dispatch from Arthur Moore, the war correspondent of The Times. Moore had written that the Allied forces had virtually disintegrated under an “immediate, relentless, unresting” enemy advance. He was awed by the “irresistible vehemence” of the Germans, whose numerical superiority was so great that “they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea.” The BEF, a “retreating, broken army,” was being “forced backwards, ever backwards,” suffering “very great losses” reducing it to “bits of broken regiments” that were “grievously injured” and some divisions which had “lost nearly all their officers.” F.E. suspected that the correspondent was simply windy. Nevertheless, he passed what became known as “the Amiens dispatch” in the shrewd belief that it would make excellent recruiting propaganda. Thus it was that members of the English establishment sat down to breakfast Sunday morning and found themselves confronting a front-page headline, FIERCEST FIGHT IN HISTORY, followed by the subheads Heavy Losses of British Troops—Mons and Cambrai—Fight Against Severe Odds—Need for Reinforcements. In a box the editor explained that the story was being run to alert the country to the “extreme gravity of the task before us.” H. G. Wells thought: “It was as if David had flung his pebble—and missed!” Asquith indignantly scolded the paper, but F.E. had been right; Monday morning recruiting posts were packed with young men eager to rescue their brothers in France. “Kitchener’s Army” had begun to form.18
F. E. Smith
What had happened? Part of the explanation is Gallic stupidity. There is a theory that the last competent French general lies in Napoleon’s tomb, and nothing that happened on the fluid front that summer refutes it. Ever since Louis Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians a generation earlier, cadets at Saint-Cyr-l’École had been imbued with the belief that, as General Ferdinand Foch put it, “There is only one way to defend ourselves—to attack as soon as we are ready.” This was the doctrine of the offensive à outrance, of cran, of charging mindlessly while shouting: “Vite, vite! Allez, allez!” Field regulations stipulated that “the French Army henceforth admits no law but the offensive… the offensive alone leads to positive results.” The bible of this faith was the general staff’s Plan XVII, its blueprint for an irresistible march to the Rhine. The instant war was declared, they would invade German-occupied Lorraine with their right wing and advance through Alsace. As the Germans met the threat by transferring troops from their center, the French would hit the center with everything they had. Voilà: a quick, decisive victory.19
Plan XVII was hopelessly flawed. It assumed parity in the populations of the two countries, and there was none. Since 1871 German Fraus had been conceiving far more frequently than Frenchwomen; despite the Reich’s commitment in the east, against Russia, the kaiser had mobilized over 1.5 million men in the west, enough to guarantee superiority in the first clash. The French plan’s total commitment to massed attacks overlooked the changes in warfare wrought by modern technology—the machine gun, heavy artillery, barbed wire—all of which had been obvious to European observers of the Russo-Japanese War ten years earlier. Most grievous of all, the French generals were guilty of what Napoleon had called the cardinal sin of commanders: “forming a picture”—assuming that the enemy will act in a certain way in a given situation when in fact his behavior may be very different. It seems never to have occurred to them that the Germans, too, might have a plan. But they did. It was the Schlieffen Plan, completed in 1906 by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, then the kaiser’s chief of staff. The count had anticipated Plan XVII. He intended to draw the French right into Lorraine in a “sack maneuver” while his own right wing, a million Soldaten, swept down through Belgium like a swinging scythe, cutting a swath seventy-five miles wide and enveloping France’s extreme left flank.
Germany’s enemies should have been aware of this. In 1912 Henry Wilson, cycling through the Low Countries, saw that all new German railroad construction in the area converged on Aachen and the Belgian frontier. But Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, constable of France and the French commander in chief, was blind to it. Immediately after the declaration of war he marched triumphantly into Lorraine, not suspecting that the slowly retreating enemy was luring him into a trap. Meanwhile, Alexander von Kluck, commanding the German right, wheeled down through Belgium, overwhelming the fortresses of Liège and Namur. His men, their feldgrau uniforms coated with white dust from shattered buildings, advanced across Belgium almost unopposed, burning villages and shooting hostages as they went. General Charles Lanrezac commanded the French left wing, lying in Kluck’s path. As early as August 8 Lanrezac warned Joffre’s headquarters, Grand Quartier Général (GQG), that he might be flanked. His concern, he was told, was “premature.” GQG informed him that a flanking maneuver was “out of proportion to the means at the enemy’s disposal,” that the enemy columns his scouts had sighted must be on some “special mission,” probably serving as a screen. As evidence of their strength accumulated, Joffre actually rejoiced. It meant, he said, that they were thinning their ranks in the center, where he was about to strike.20
He struck on August 21 in the wilderness of the Ardennes. As American GIs discovered thirty years later, the Ardennes is ill-suited to fighting. Thickly forested, slashed with deep ravines, and fogged with mists rising from peat bogs, it resembles a scene in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Caesar, who took ten days to cross it, called it a “place of terrors.” Moreover, its slopes were such that the French would be charging uphill. They found the Germans dug in and ready. Bayonets fixed, Joffre’s men lunged upward in an attaque brusque. Machine gunners slaughtered them. During the four-day battle of the Frontiers, of which this was a part, 140,000 Frenchmen fell. Yet even this massacre failed to discourage Joffre. The British, who had lost only 1,600 at Mons, were defeatist, but the word from GQG was that although Joffre’s drive in the center had been “momentarily checked,” he would “make every effort to renew the offensive.”21 That was fantasy. The German right, outnumbering the defenders two to one, was about to roll up Joffre’s left, and if he didn’t know it, Lanrezac did. Learning that the French attackers in the Ardennes not only had failed but were actually retreating, Lanrezac saw himself facing encirclement. On the evening of August 23 he ordered a general retreat. It spread along the entire Allied line. Plan XVII had crumbled. The last chance for a short, victorious war had vanished. Urgency, even panic, was in the air. The French fell back and back. The German advance was relentless. The Allies would be lucky to save Paris. Actually, they didn’t; it was Kluck who saved it for them. He blundered, swinging east of the capital on September 3 and thereby offering his flank to Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the retired officer charged with the city’s defense. After the first skirmishes there the exhausted German infantrymen gave ground. The French rallied on the Marne, and after a seven-day battle involving more than 2,000,000 men, Kluck recoiled and dug in. Then the sidestepping began, the lines of the opposing armies extending westward and then northward as each tried to outflank the other in a “race to the sea.” The possibility that eventually they might run out of land seems never to have occurred to them. The sacrifices in the opening battles had been so great on both sides—in August the French alone had lost 206,515 men—that the thought of stalemate was unbearable.
The Germans were masters of northern France, but the Belgians still held out. In Brussels on August 17 their premier, Count de Broqueville, had reported to King Albert that the enemy, outnumbering his forces four or five to one, were attacking across the Gette River, fifteen miles away. Liège had fallen; Namur was doomed. During the night of August 18 the king, executing a skillful disengagement maneuver, withdrew his five divisions from Brussels and the Gette and retreated into the great port of Antwerp, Belgium’s strongest fortress. They reached there, intact, two days later. The disappointed Kluck reported to Oberste Heeresleitung, the kaiser’s headquarters, that Albert’s army had “managed to escape our grasp.” He was forced to leave two corps—60,000 men, badly needed on the Marne—to invest Antwerp. Even so, on August 25 the Belgians sortied and fell on the rear of Kluck’s army, driving it back on Louvain. Shots were fired, and Kluck’s men shouted: “Die Engländer sind da!” “Die Franzosen sind da!” General von Luttwitz, the military governor of Brussels, summoned the American minister and told him that Louvain civilians had either fired on the Reich’s troops or signaled the attackers. “And now of course,” he explained, “we have to destroy the city.” It was burned to the ground as an example for those who felt tempted to defy German might.22
Zeppelins bombed Antwerp, but until the second month of the war the fortified city faced no serious threat. On September 5, however, de Broqueville warned the British Foreign Office that the enemy troops besieging the port were being heavily reinforced. He asked for weightier artillery, aircraft, and antiaircraft guns. Four days later the kaiser ordered the capture of the city whatever the cost, and on September 28, 420-millimeter Krupp howitzers began pounding the outworks with 2,000-pound shells. The question of Antwerp’s value to the Allies now arose. Was its defense vital? The cabinet was indecisive. In 1911 Fisher, then in full possession of his faculties, had written that in the event of war between Germany and an Anglo-French alliance, the “overwhelming superiority” of the British navy, not Britain’s army, would “keep the German Army out of Paris…. It is Antwerp we shall seize,” he concluded, “and not go fooling on the Vosges frontier.” But provisioning Antwerp was a logistical nightmare. The port’s link with the North Sea was the Scheldt River, which belonged to the Netherlands, and the frightened Dutch, determined to remain neutral, were turning back all incoming ships except those bearing food and medicine. With Antwerp’s sea approach barred, the only other route open was a thin, exposed, fifty-mile-long land corridor. Kitchener, replying to the September 5 note, said he had no munitions to spare and even doubted the port was in danger. “I expect they will hang on to Antwerp,” he wrote. On the second day of the war Churchill had vetoed sending an expeditionary force there on the ground that while he could guarantee a safe passage across the Strait of Dover, he couldn’t protect troop transports taking the longer route across the North Sea to the Scheldt, then still open.23
Winston had not yet grasped the connection between Antwerp’s resistance and holding the Channel ports—Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne—but he was alert to the necessity of denying the ports to Kluck. So was Joffre. Early in September the constable had asked that British infantry be landed at Dunkirk, to make a demonstration on the Germans’ right flank. Churchill’s naval fliers were already based there, and Kitchener asked him to supervise the landing party. His departure was kept secret; even the cabinet wasn’t told. Asquith wrote Venetia on September 9: “Winston is just off to Dunkirk… he will be back by lunch tomorrow. Don’t say anything of this, as he doesn’t want the colleagues to know.” He commanded a detachment of marines and the Oxfordshire Hussars, his reserve regiment, of which Sunny was colonel in chief. The episode reflects little credit on Churchill. He requisitioned several naval vehicles and eight three-ton trucks to provide Sunny and his officers with all the comforts of their Blenheim maneuvers. “Probably no other regiment,” wrote Adrian Keith-Falconer in The Oxfordshire Hussars in the Great War, “went to France accompanied by such a fleet of motor transport solely for its own personal use.” Winston’s orders were: “Select your point and hit hard.” His men were joyously received by villagers, but their feint left no impression on the enemy; Kluck wasn’t even aware of their existence. The Tommies called them the “Dunkirk Circus.” And Churchill, with his incorrigible love of panoply, lent the ineffective foray a touch of opéra bouffe by appearing in the full-dress regalia of an Elder Brother of Trinity House. A French officer asked him what uniform he wore. “Je suis un Frère Aîné de la Trinité,” he replied. “Mon dieu!” gasped the Frenchman. “La Trinité!”24
The moth could not resist the flame. Less than a week later Winston was back in France, driving from Calais to British GHQ in Fère-en-Tardenois with the Duke of Westminster. To avoid being swept up by Kluck’s advance, they had to take a wide detour, traversing the entire British front. Near Soissons, Churchill had a long talk on a haystack with a major general, Sir Henry Rawlinson. Winston wrote afterward: “I saw the big black German shells, ‘the coal boxes’ and ‘Jack Johnsons’ as they were then called, bursting in Paissy village…. When darkness fell I saw the horizon lighted with the quick flashing of the cannonade. Such scenes were afterwards to become commonplace: but their first aspect was thrilling.” Four days later he returned to Dunkirk, kibitzing at air-raid briefings. He had scarcely returned to London when he alerted the light cruiser Adventure to take him over again. The cabinet was beginning to mutter about his absences. Clementine warned him: “Now please don’t think me tiresome; but I want you to tell the PM of your projected visit to Sir John French. It would be very bad manners if you do not & he will be displeased and hurt…. Of course you will consult K. Otherwise the journey will savour of a week-end escapade & not a mission. You would be surprised & incensed if K slipped off to see Jellicoe on his own.” He took her advice, and K of K, more tolerant than his colleagues, replied: “No objection—I hope you will counteract any wild talk.” Nevertheless, Churchill was trifling with fate. Having made so many unnecessary appearances at the front, he would be hard pressed later to defend trips which were essential.25
By now he saw the strategic significance of Antwerp. Grey had sent identical notes to the Admiralty and the War Office: “Time presses for the Belgians. I am afraid we can do very little if anything, but if we can do nothing the Belgians may surrender Antwerp very soon.” Kitchener was as yet unalarmed. Churchill, however, drew up a list of equipment he could dispatch at once and ended: “WE MUST HOLD ANTWERP.” Even though the Germans were retreating from the Marne to the Aisne, the release of their two corps, still tied down by the entrenched camp at Antwerp, would permit Kluck to dash to the Channel ports and seize them before English troops were dug in. By September 29 Winston had converted Kitchener. The war secretary was ready to send men and field guns. “We had a long Cabinet this morning,” Asquith wrote his beloved the following afternoon. “The Belgians are rather out of ‘morale,’ & are alarmed at the bombardment of Antwerp…. They are sending their archives & treasure over here, & talk of moving the seat of Government to Ostend. Kitchener has given them some good advice… to entrench themselves with barbed wire &c in the intervening spaces, & challenge the Germans to come on.”26
The following morning de Broqueville described his situation as “very grave”; only Allied troops could “save Antwerp from falling.” Asquith sent Venetia a note: “The fall of Antwerp would be a great moral blow to the Allies, for it would leave the whole of Belgium at the mercy of the Germans. The French telegraph that they are willing to send a division (of 15,000 to 20,000) & put it under a British general…. We resolved at the Cabinet to-day that, if the French cooperation is satisfactory, we would divert our 7th Division (of the finest troops) wh was just going to join Sir J. French.” The next day, Friday, October 2, he wrote her: “The news from Antwerp this morning is far from good & gives me some anxiety. The Germans battered down 2 of the forts, and what is worse got in between them & drove a lot of Belgians out of their entrenchments.” He was pessimistic: “It is a very difficult situation—particularly as our officer reports that it is the morale of the Belgian commanders rather than of the men wh shows signs of collapse.” He wanted to boost their spirits. “But it is no good to lure them with false hopes.” With that, he left for Cardiff to make a speech at a recruiting rally. Thus he was absent when the crisis came.27
The Belgian government, despairing, had resolved to pack up and leave for Ostend Saturday morning. They predicted that their troops in Antwerp would hold out for another five or six days, but the British ambassador there, Sir Francis Villiers, thought it “unlikely that when the Court and Government are gone resistance will be much prolonged.” Antwerp was the only Allied fortress left between Kluck and the Channel. If the enemy reached Calais, Kitchener thought, an invasion of England would be feasible. That evening he and Grey conferred at Kitchener’s house in Carlton Gardens, between Pall Mall and St. James’s Park. With the prime minister away, they needed the opinion of another senior minister, so they decided to consult Churchill. He was aboard a train, bound for Dover. On their orders, the engineer reversed direction, and from Victoria Station a waiting car drove Winston to Carlton Gardens. After listening to their analysis he recommended sending the Admiralty’s marine brigade to the city. Then he volunteered to go to the beleaguered city himself and report to them by telephone and telegraph. They agreed, and shortly after midnight he was off again. Grey wired Sir Francis: “First Lord of the Admiralty will be at Antwerp between 9 and 10 tomorrow. He is fully acquainted with our views, and it is hoped he may have the honour of an audience with the King before a final decision as to the departure of the Government is taken.” Sir Francis wired back that the evacuation had already begun, but de Broqueville would summon an emergency cabinet meeting now to reconsider that decision. As a result of the meeting, all Belgian troops were ordered to remain at their posts. In London that morning Asquith, returning to the fait accompli, wrote Venetia that he was “anxiously awaiting Winston’s report. I don’t know how fluent he is in French, but if he was able to do himself justice in a foreign tongue, the Belges will have listened to a discourse the like of which they have never heard before. I cannot but think that he will stiffen them up to the sticking point.”28
Churchill’s car, roaring up to Antwerp’s hôtel de ville in a cloud of dust, reminded one observer “for all the world of a scene in a melodrama where the hero dashes up bare-headed on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine, or the old homestead, or the family fortune, as the case may be.” In undress uniform—no epaulets, no cocked hat—he conferred with de Broqueville and assured him that, in addition to the two thousand seasoned marines who would arrive that evening, he was sending for his two naval brigades, two million rounds of ammunition, and five days’ rations. Albert and the Belgian premier, much moved, promised to defend the city for at least ten more days provided the Allies launched a major relief operation within seventy-two hours. Winston cabled Kitchener and Grey: “I must impress on you the necessity of making these worn and weary men throw their souls into it, or the whole thing will go with a run.” Sunday morning he toured the city’s outer forts in a Rolls-Royce. Henry Stevens, the naval rating who drove him, later recalled that although he was out of earshot most of the time, he could see that “Mr Churchill was energetic and imperative. He discussed the situation with his own Staff and some of the Belgian officers, emphasising his points with his walking stick…. His actions were emphatic. He appeared on occasions to criticise the siting and construction of the trenches…. Mr Churchill dominated the proceedings and the impression formed that he was by no means satisfied with the position generally. He put forward his ideas forcefully, waving his stick and thumping the ground with it…. At one line of trenches he found the line very thinly held and asked where ‘the bloody men were.’ He certainly was not mollified when he was told that was all that were available at that point.” Winston was in fact deeply disappointed. Back at the hôtel de ville he telegraphed Kitchener that the defenders were “weary and disheartened,” that because many of the outworks had been flooded to thwart the Germans, only shallow trenches could be scooped out of the waterlogged earth, furnishing little shelter “to their worn out and in many cases inexperienced troops.”29
The marines landed and were greeted by ecstatic Belgian citizens. Kitchener cabled that the cabinet approved of the immediate dispatch of the naval brigades. He had formed these units, first called “Churchill’s pets” and then “Churchill’s innocent victims,” just before the war. They were green and largely untrained. The officers lacked revolver ammunition. Many of the men had neither fired rifles nor dug trenches. Among their officers were Asquith’s son Arthur (“Oc”) and the young poet Rupert Brooke, whom Eddie Marsh had introduced to Winston in quieter days. Churchill had been unwise to ask for them and his colleagues had been unwise to agree, but it was a heady moment; the prime minister wrote Venetia: “I have a telegram from Oc sent off from Dover pier on Sunday evening: ‘Embarking to-night: love.’ I suppose most of the territorials & recruits would envy him, being sent off after 3 days to the front! I am sure he will do well, but it is a hazardous adventure.” It was also an uncomfortable one. Brooke, who had assumed that after crossing the Channel they would spend a month “quietly training,” wrote home that they bivouacked their first night under shellfire in the deserted garden of a château and were awakened at 2:00 A.M. “So up we got—frozen and sleepy—and toiled off through the night. By dawn we got into trenches—very good ones—and relieved Belgians.”30
By sheer force of will, Churchill had taken charge of Antwerp’s defense. He was rounding up men, searching for weapons and ammunition, directing troops, siting guns, and telegraphing the Admiralty for high explosive shells, shell fuses, fire-control balloons, steel rope, entrenching tools, field telephone sets, and “30 Maxim guns on tripod mountings, with establishment of proportionate ammunition.” Excited, aroused, even elated, he sent Asquith a remarkable wire early Monday, suggesting that he quit the cabinet and lead troops: “If it is thought by HM Government that I can be of service here, I am willing to resign my office and undertake command of relieving and defensive forces assigned to Antwerp in conjunction with Belgian Army, provided that I am given necessary military rank and authority, and full powers of a commander of a detached force in the field.”31
The prime minister was astounded. At the end of a letter to King George, in which he reported that “Mr Churchill has been in Antwerp since Saturday afternoon & has successfully dissuaded the King & his Ministers from retiring to Ostend,” he noted that he had “this morning received from Mr Churchill a patriotic offer to resign his office & take command of the forces at Antwerp,” but, while appreciating the first lord’s “zeal and skill,” he had replied that “his services could not be dispensed with at home.” To Venetia, Asquith was more frank. He thought the proposition “a real bit of tragi-comedy.” His response to Winston had been “a most decided negative.” When he read it to the cabinet, “it was received with a Homeric laugh.” Kitchener, the only soldier in the cabinet, did not join in the laughter. He thought the idea sound and was prepared to commission Winston a lieutenant general.32
Asquith wouldn’t hear of it. The command would go to General Rawlinson, now in Dunkirk. Rawlinson was having difficulty getting through, however, and Winston telegraphed Kitchener: “In view of the situation and the developing German attack, it is my duty to remain here and continue my direction of affairs unless relieved by some person of consequence.” The British marines went into action that Monday afternoon and threw back an enemy attack. Early in the evening Churchill inspected their lines. They were, he told Kitchener, “cheerful and well dug in.” Gino Calza Bedolo, war correspondent for the Giornale d’ Italia, was visiting a position near Lier, southeast of Antwerp, when he saw a striking figure standing in the midst of a group of officers. “He was still young,” Bedolo told the London Lyceum Club several weeks later, “and was enveloped in a cloak, and on his head wore a yachtsman’s cap. He was tranquilly smoking a large cigar and looking at the progress of the battle under a rain of shrapnel, which I can only call fearful. It was Mr Churchill, who had come to view the situation himself. It must be confessed that it is not easy to find in the whole of Europe a Minister who would be capable of smoking peacefully under that shellfire. He smiled, and looked quite satisfied.”33
Churchill at Antwerp, October 1914
That night Rawlinson couldn’t get closer than Bruges, fifty-one miles away. The Belgians and the Royal Marines were exhausted. Churchill’s only reserves were the six thousand inexperienced men in the naval brigades. He didn’t want to use them now, and was determined not to expose them to the ferocity of the enemy’s storm troops, so he assigned them to a defensive position between the front and the city. At 1:00 A.M. he wired London: “All well. I have met Ministers in Council, who resolved to fight it out here, whatever happens.” In the early hours of Tuesday, October 6, the weary Belgians actually counterattacked, but were quickly beaten off. Asquith wrote that “under Winston’s stimulus the Belgians are making a resolute stand. I have just seen a telegram which shews that this morning both the Belgians & our Marines were pushed back. The inner forts (it says) are being held by our naval brigade [sic]—which shows that Oc & his companions have arrived & are already within range.” Rawlinson was “expected shortly.” Presumably the British “7th Division & Cavalry & the French Marines” were on their way. “It is to be hoped that they will arrive in time, but it is an anxious situation. Winston persists in remaining there, which leaves the Admiralty here without a head…. I think that Winston ought to return now that a capable General is arriving. He has done good service in the way of starching & ironing the Belges.”34
At 5:00 P.M. Rawlinson finally arrived. But he was alone, and his forty thousand men had not even come ashore. For the king and his ministers, that was the last straw. Already the Germans were close enough to pulverize the city with their howitzers. Because of the Belgians’ “complete exhaustion and imminent demoralisation,” Churchill wired, they were evacuating Antwerp. The eight thousand British troops would hold the inner line of defense as long as possible and then follow. Churchill toured the three brigades, one marine and two naval, for the last time. His reception was mixed. Green troops are always shocked by the primitive conditions of life in the field and usually blame those who put them there. These boys had shivered all night in thin oilskins, and one wrote his father: “We cursed a car containing Churchill who came out to see what was going on & we were glad when he departed.” After hearing from his son, Asquith wrote Venetia: “Strictly between ourselves, I can’t tell you what I feel of the wicked folly of it all. The Marines of course are splendid troops & can go anywhere & do anything: but nothing can excuse Winston (who knew all the facts) from [sic] sending in the other two Naval Brigades.”35
Churchill reached Dover Tuesday night. There he learned that all three brigades of the naval division were fighting in the front line, that Rawlinson had moved his headquarters back to Bruges, and that Clementine had given birth to a daughter. Thursday morning, when he reported to the cabinet, Asquith thought him “in great form & I think he has thoroughly enjoyed his adventure. He is certainly one of the people one would choose to go tiger-hunting with…. He was quite ready to take over in Belgium, and did so in fact for a couple of days, the army the navy & the civil government.” Grey wrote Clementine: “I cant tell you how much I admire his courage & gallant spirit & genius for war. It inspires us all.” Haldane called the journey “a great and heroic episode.” Lloyd George told him it was a “brilliant effort” and then asked: “What are the prospects?”36
The prospects were wretched. Kluck’s bombardment was shattering the center of Antwerp. The French had decided not to send reinforcements. The marine brigade commander was preparing to abandon his trenches. On Saturday the Belgians surrendered while the British troops escaped along the narrow land corridor. Some wandered over the Dutch border and were interned. For the others, Rupert Brooke wrote, the flight “was like several different kinds of Hell—the broken houses and dead horses lit by an infernal glare. The refugees were the worst sight. The German policy of frightfulness had succeeded so well that out of that city of half a million, when it was decided to surrender, not ten thousand would stay…. I’ll never forget that white-faced endless procession in the night, pressed aside to let the military—us—pass, crawling forward at some hundred yards an hour, quite hopeless, the old men crying and the women with hard drawn faces. What a crime!” Asquith wrote: “Poor Winston is very depressed, as he feels that his mission has been in vain.”37
Others put it much more strongly. The previous Sunday, when prospects seemed relatively bright, Captain Herbert Richmond, the navy’s assistant director of operations and a venomous critic of the first lord, had written in his diary at the Admiralty: “The siege of Antwerp looks ugly. The 1st Lord is sending his army there; I don’t mind his tuppenny untrained rabble going”—he meant men like Brooke and young Asquith—“but I do strongly object to 2000 invaluable marines being sent…. It is a tragedy that the Navy should be in such lunatic hands at this time.” Now, after the capitulation, the Tory press was in full cry, led by H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the Morning Post. A Post leader called the stand at Antwerp “a costly blunder, for which Mr W. Churchill must be held responsible…. We suggest to Mr Churchill’s colleagues that they should, quite firmly and definitely, tell the First Lord that on no account are the military and naval operations to be conducted or directed by him.” Gwynne wrote six members of the cabinet that Antwerp was proof “that Mr Churchill is unfitted for the office which he now holds,” excoriating him as “a man who has shown most signally his incompetence at least in time of war.” There were vehement denunciations in The Times, and the Daily Mail, reprinting the Post attack, described the operation as “a gross example of mal-organization which has cost valuable lives and sacrificed the services during the continuance of the war not only of a considerable number of gallant young Englishmen but also of a considerable section of the Belgian Army.”38
Extraordinary stories were circulated. Sir Francis Hopwood, a civil lord of the Admiralty, wrote Lord Stamfordham that Winston had been aboard a train Friday evening when “somewhere along the way he heard that the Belgian Government intended to evacuate Antwerp. He rushed back to London and saw K and E. Grey in the small hours of the morning. Then in spite of their remonstrances he left for Antwerp.” Stamfordham, believing it, replied: “Our friend must be quite off his head.” Beatty wrote his wife: “The man must have been mad to have thought he could relieve [Antwerp]… by putting 8,000 half-trained troops into it.” The next day he wrote her again, prophesying that “this flying about and putting his fingers into pies which do not concern him is bound to lead to disaster.” Bonar Law called Antwerp “an utterly stupid business”; the first lord, he believed, had “an entirely unbalanced mind, which is a real danger at a time like this.” Even Churchill’s cabinet colleagues were critical. After reflecting upon the expedition, Lloyd George told Frances he felt “rather disgusted” with Winston. “Having taken untrained men over there, he left them in the lurch. He behaved in rather a swaggering way when over there, standing for photographers and cinematographers with shells bursting near him.” Asquith, smarting over his son’s discomfort, told his wife that the first lord was “by far the most disliked man in my Cabinet by his colleagues.” Margot wondered why. “He is rather lovable I think,” she said, “and though he often bored me before the war I’ve liked him very much since. I love his spirit of adventure—it suits me—and I love his suggestiveness.” Asquith replied irritably: “Oh! He is intolerable! Noisy, longwinded and full of perorations. We don’t want suggestion—we want wisdom.”39
Because the strategic consequences of Antwerp were being worked out in high secrecy, Churchill could not defend himself in public or in the House. In private letters he pointed out that he had acted with the fullest authority and could hardly be held responsible for the French failure to reinforce the garrison. Welcoming home the brigades on October 18, he pointed out that untrained troops had been used because the need “was urgent and bitter” and they “could be embarked the quickest”—an explanation that Asquith, in a letter to the King, had endorsed at the time. The real justification for Antwerp, however, was that, far from being an exercise in futility, it had provided an invaluable contribution to the Allied cause. Asquith knew it, and once his private grievance had healed, he wrote that Churchill, by delaying the fall of the city by at least a week, had “prevented the Germans from linking up their forces.” On October 29 he added: “The week at Antwerp was well spent, & had a real effect on the general campaign.” Afterward the British Official History of the War found that while “the British effort to save Antwerp had failed” it had “a lasting influence on operations. Until Antwerp had fallen the troops of the investing force were not available to move forward on Ypres and the coast… they were too late to secure Nieuport and Dunkirk and turn the northern flank of the Allies as was intended.” And in March 1918 King Albert told a British officer: “You are wrong in considering the RND [Royal Naval Division] Expedition as a forlorn hope. In my opinion it rendered great service to us and those who deprecate it simply do not understand the history of the War in its early days. Only one man of all your people had the prevision of what the loss of Antwerp would entail and that was Mr Churchill.” The delay, the king continued, “allowed the French and British Armies to move northwest. Otherwise our whole army might have been captured and the Northern French Ports secured by the enemy.”40
In the autumn of 1914 this was unknown. The British public wasn’t even aware that Rawlinson had brought the Belgian army out intact, covering their escape along the Flanders coast, to fight beside the Allies for the next four years. They only knew that the first lord was acquiring a reputation for designing madcap schemes and interfering with the duties of other ministers. Winston himself later concluded that he had erred in taking the field: “Those who are charged with the direction of supreme affairs must sit on the mountain-tops of control; they must never descend into the valleys of direct physical and personal action.” But at the time the fight for the city had merely whetted his appetite. Believing that the enemy was most vulnerable on his northern flank, he drew up plans for assaults on Borkum and Amesland in the North Sea and a proposal to “attack with explosives the locks of the Kiel canal or vessels in the canal.” His imagination ranged elsewhere, however; he envisioned campaigns on the Danube or amphibious landings at the Austrian seaport of Kotor on the Adriatic. He even contemplated violations of Dutch neutrality.41
Asquith described a long session with Winston, “who, after dilating in great detail on the actual situation, became suddenly very confidential, and implored me not to take a ‘conventional’ view of his future. Having, as he says, ‘tasted blood’ these last few days, he is beginning like a tiger to raven for more, and begs that sooner or later, & the sooner the better, he may be relieved of his present office & put in some kind of military command. I told him he could not be spared from the Admiralty, but… his mouth waters at the sight & thought of K’s new armies. Are these ‘glittering commands’ to be entrusted to ‘dugout trash,’ bred on obsolete tactics of 25 years ago—‘mediocrities, who have led a sheltered life mouldering in military routine’ &c &c. For about ¼ of an hour he poured forth a ceaseless cataract of invective and appeal, & I much regretted that there was no short-hand writer within hearing…. He is a wonderful creature, with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity (quite unlike Edward Grey’s), and what someone said of genius—‘a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’ ”42
In assuming that statesmen could conduct the war, Winston was dwelling in a world of illusion. The politicians having lost control of events and precipitated a general war, the professional militarists of every belligerent nation were in the saddle. The officer classes were declaring that no one should have a voice in the war unless he had spent forty years in uniform—which, as B. H. Liddell Hart acidly observed, would have disqualified Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Cromwell, Marlborough, and Napoleon. Antwerp, they said smugly, was an example of what you might expect if civilians were in command. The British public believed them. It was generally assumed in England that Churchill had been responsible for a pointless bloodletting in Belgium. The casualty lists told another story: 57 Englishmen had died at Antwerp; 158 had been wounded. In France, by the end of 1914, the cost was 95,654 British soldiers killed in action.
The race to the sea was over and no one had won it. A week after the Germans seized Antwerp, they reached the Channel coast and overran Ostend. There they pivoted, to turn the Allied flank. Joffre, however, asked the British to thwart them, and Churchill, in response, ordered heavy shelling from English warships offshore. It worked. Now the Allies attempted to turn the Germans, but by the end of the month it was obvious that the enemy could not be dislodged either. The front was deadlocked. A wavering seam of trenches, within which troops huddled, began on the Swiss border and ended 466 miles away on the shore at Nieuport, just below Ostend. Because the armies on both sides were enormous, the density of human concentration was unprecedented: there was one soldier for every four inches of front. Mobility, and the opportunity for maneuver, were gone. The deadlock was as obvious as it was intolerable. Surely, people thought, with the expensive and ingenious arsenals available to general staffs, an early breakthrough was inevitable. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even possible, because offensive weapons were no match for the weapons available to defenders. And whenever a position was in peril it could be swiftly reinforced; troop trains could rocket to the tottering sector, while the attacking infantrymen could plod no faster than soldiers in the Napoleonic wars.* The British Tommies, bewildered and increasingly fatalistic, turned a gay song into a dirge:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go
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.
Keep the home fires burning
Though the hearts are yearning
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.43 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.
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris:
qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
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.”44
There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams
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.”45
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.46
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.”47
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.48
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.”49
“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.
Churchill was keenly aware of the position’s military significance. On August 17, when Turkey was neutral, Asquith had written his wife: “The Turk threatens to give trouble in Egypt and elsewhere, and the Germans are doing all they can to get hold of him. Winston is quite prepared to send a swarm of flotillas into the Dardanelles to torpedo the ‘Goeben’ if necessary.” Two weeks later, before the battle of the Marne had even begun and with Turkey still a nonbelligerent, Churchill had persuaded Kitchener to send him two generals, who, with two admirals, would “examine and work out a plan for the seizure by means of a Greek army of adequate strength of the Gallipoli peninsula, with a view to admitting a British Fleet into the Sea of Marmara.” The following day, with Turkey still neutral, the cabinet had agreed to help Serbia and Rumania and, in Asquith’s words, “to sink Turkish ships if they issue from the Dardanelles.” The prime minister wanted to frighten the Turks out of the war. His first lord expected them to come in. At that same meeting, according to the diary of Joseph Pease, a fellow minister, Churchill proposed that once the first shots had been fired the Admiralty should concentrate on “landing Greek force on isthmus on west side of Dardanelles [Gallipoli] & controlling Sea of Marmara.” Grey, troubled, wrote him four days later: “I dont like the prospect in the Mediterranean at all, unless there is some turn of the tide in France.” Churchill replied: “There is no need for British or Russian anxiety abt a war with Turkey…. The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli wd no doubt be heavy, but there wd be no more war with Turkey. A good army of 50,000 & sea-power—that is the end of the Turkish menace.”51