Officers on other ships assumed that a lucky howitzer gunner had hit Bouvet’s magazine. The six newly arrived battleships bombarded the banks; by four o’clock enemy fortress fire had ceased altogether and the British minesweepers advanced. They were working skillfully, cutting mine cables with their kites, when a howitzer shell landed among them; then they panicked and turned about. Another line of trawlers advanced; the same thing happened. This was irritating, but hardly worrisome. Graver by far was the misadventure of Inflexible, which was mysteriously hit at 4:41 P.M. not far from the place where Bouvet had gone down. Listing heavily to starboard, Inflexible left the battle line. De Robeck suspected a mine. Less than five minutes later a third battleship, Irresistible, was struck near the same spot. She, too, was out of action. Now senior officers were both alarmed and mystified. The trawlers had swept these waters. De Robeck believed there was only one explanation: the enemy was floating mines down with the current. He broke off action and ordered a general retirement. During the withdrawal a fourth man-of-war, Ocean, was lost the same way and in the same waters as Bouvet, Inflexible, and Irresistible.

Keyes, who stayed behind to direct the rescue of the stricken vessels, moving back and forth in a cutter by the light of a few surviving Turkish searchlights, was far from discouraged. Both banks of the Dardanelles were quiet. He had, he wrote afterward, “a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 P.M. I knew he was beaten at 4 P.M.—and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting about could, and must, be overcome.”⁹³ Returning to the Queen Elizabeth, he was, therefore, astounded to find de Robeck distraught. His career was ruined, the admiral moaned; his losses would never be forgiven; as soon as the Admiralty saw his action report, he would be relieved and dismissed from the service. Keyes replied that Churchill would never act like that. The day had been anything but a disaster. Except for the crew of Bouvet, fewer than seventy sailors had been hit. The disabled ships could be repaired; all were destined for the scrap heap anyway. Obviously the next step was to convert British destroyers into sweepers—the tackle, wire mesh, and kites were available on Malta—and continue the attack. They were bound to break through.

The enemy agreed. De Robeck’s misfortune, they knew, was a freak. His four unlucky ships had been hit because they had sailed too close to shore. Ten days earlier a Turkish colonel had supervised the laying of a string of twenty mines parallel to the Asian bank of the Dardanelles, just inside the slack water. The British sweepers had missed them, but they weren’t much of an obstacle; in skirting them the Allied warships would still have an eight-thousand-yard-wide channel in which to maneuver. Surely, the Turks reasoned, the English admiral would not repeat his error. British fleets had ruled the world’s waves for two hundred years. They could hardly be stopped by the shattered defenses left at the Narrows. The Turkish guns still in service were almost out of ammunition—some were completely out—and no more shells were available. Once the Allies were past Chanak they would face nothing but a few ancient smooth-bore bronze cannon aimed in the wrong direction. Mines would not trouble them. The Turks had none left. Those which had been laid in the Dardanelles had been collected from mines which the Russians had been floating down the Black Sea in hopes of blowing up the Goeben and Breslau.

Already the exodus from Constantinople had begun. Gold, art treasures, and official archives had been moved to Eskişehir, in western Turkey. Two special trains, their fires banked, stood ready in the station at Uskudar, just across the Bosporus, to carry the sultan, his harem, his suite, foreign ambassadors, and wealthy pashas and beys into the interior. There was an air of panic in the streets. The city’s two arsenals, visible from the water, could be easily destroyed by naval gunfire. After the war the Turkish general staff declared that “a naval attack executed with rapidity and vigor” would have found the capital’s garrison “impotent to defend it,” and Enver Pasha, Turkey’s wartime military dictator, added: “If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.” The Goeben and Breslau had weighed anchor and were preparing to steam away across the Black Sea. Otto Liman von Sanders, the senior German general on this front, said afterward that if de Robeck had ordered a renewal of his attack on March 19, he would have found the city undefended. “The course of the World War,” he said, “would have been given such a turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the struggle without Turkey.” Keyes steamed through the strait in 1925. His eyes filled. He said: “My God, it would have been even easier than I thought. We simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.”⁹⁴

He had sensed this at the time. So had Churchill. Far from recalling de Robeck, when Winston read his report of the March 18 action he immediately dispatched four more battleships to his command. The French similarly replaced the Bouvet with the Henry IV. The French admiral, unlike the British, was eager to return to the Narrows. Jacky Fisher was not. He had waxed hot and cold on the operation, and Winston never knew, from one day to the next, what stand his first sea lord was going to take. Before the struggle in the Narrows he had grumbled, “The more I consider the Dardanelles, the less I like it.” Yet after the battle it was Fisher, not Churchill, who first proposed to make good the British losses with new battleships. “De Robeck is really better than Carden,” he said, “so Providence is with us.” On the afternoon of March 19, when the Admiralty’s director of naval intelligence brought them newly intercepted German messages, providing details of the shell shortage in the Narrows forts, Fisher read the report aloud, waved it over his head, and shouted: “By God, I’ll go through tomorrow!” Winston scanned it and said: “That means they’ve come to the end of their ammunition.” Fisher danced a jig and cried again: “Tomorrow! We shall probably lose six ships, but I’m going through!” Yet a few hours later, at a somber meeting of the War Council, he declared that it was impossible to “explain away” the losses of such great vessels, that he had always feared that the price of forcing the Dardanelles would be twelve sunken battleships, and that he would prefer to lose them elsewhere.⁹⁵

What troubled him? It was Gallipoli. He cried to Lloyd George: “The Dardanelles! Futile without soldiers!” And he said: “Somebody will have to land on Gallipoli sooner or later.” Before the attack he had sent Churchill a memorandum: “Are we going to Constantinople or are we not? If NOT—then don’t send half a dozen battleships to the bottom which would be better applied at Cuxhaven or Borkum. If YES—then push the military co-operation with all speed & make the demonstration with all possible despatch at both extremities of the Gallipoli Peninsula.” Admiral Jackson concurred and set forth his reasons: “To advance further with a rush over unswept minefields and in waters commanded at short range by heavy guns, howitzers, and torpedo-tubes, must involve serious losses in ships and men, and will not achieve the object of making the Straits a safe waterway for the transports. The Gallipoli peninsula must be cleared of the enemy’s artillery before this is achieved…. The time has now arrived to make use of military forces to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula, and clear away the enemy on that side. With the peninsula in our possession, the concealed batteries on the Asiatic side, which are less formidable, could be dealt with more easily… and the troops should be of great assistance in the demolition of the fortress’s guns.”⁹⁶

This was, of course, a gross distortion of the situation. No one had suggested rushing over unswept minefields, the battleships were invulnerable to the shore batteries in the Narrows, and the artillery at the mouth of the strait, which had been cast in the days of sailing ships, was useless even against trawlers, whose helmsmen could steer beyond their range. Nevertheless, Fisher had a point. Eventually someone would have to occupy Gallipoli. That was why Churchill, supported by a majority of the cabinet, had wanted to send out the Twenty-ninth Division and the Australians and New Zealanders (Anzacs) in February. After Kitchener had vetoed that, the operation became what Winston called “a legitimate war gamble.” It was a good gamble. Liddell Hart has described it as a “sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled even in British history.” Once Constantinople fell, the Turks would have been unable to fortify the peninsula. Russians—and, almost certainly, new Balkan armies—would have been lunging across their frontiers. Had the czar not been a dolt, the conquest of Gallipoli would by now have been complete. Peter Wright, a member of the War Council, later wrote: “Our navy was in command of the sea; the Greeks were eager to join us and attack in the peninsula with their whole army. The Gallipoli campaign should have succeeded without the loss of a single English soldier.”⁹⁷

Before the year was out it would cost over a quarter-million Allied casualties, counting 47,000 Frenchmen sacrificed in support operations. All were lost in vain; every inch of the peninsula would remain in enemy hands. The lion’s share of the blame must be laid at the door of Lord Kitchener. Unlike French, Haig, and Wilson, mesmerized by the butchery in France, K of K grasped the possibilities in the east. He had told the War Council that if the fleet could not “get through the straits unaided, the Army ought to see the business through.”⁹⁸ Yet he had been evasive when Churchill argued passionately for a combined military and naval operation, and, at a time when a relatively small British expedition could have done the job, he had mulishly refused to release the idle Twenty-ninth Division. Gallipoli was no natural fortress. Except for a series of jutting heights known as Sari Bair, it was relatively flat and largely barren, covered with stony soil, coarse scrub, a few olive trees, and scattered flocks of sheep and goats. Thinly held, as it was before the tumult in the Narrows alerted the Turks, Gallipoli could have been seized in a few days, almost without bloodshed.

Now that England was committed in the Mediterranean, with Grey telling the council that failure there “would be morally equivalent to a great defeat,” Kitchener, speaking as secretary for war, told the startled cabinet that “the military situation is now sufficiently secure to justify the despatch of the XXIX Division.” The trench fighting at Neuve Chapelle was at its height; barring unexpected developments there, nineteen thousand Tommies could embark five days hence. The war minister, a firm believer in locking the barn door after the horse has escaped, had also decided to commit the Anzacs to Gallipoli. Altogether, counting the Egyptian garrison and the Royal Marines, the “Mediterranean Expeditionary Force,” as he called it, would number over seventy thousand. The council was excited; as Churchill wrote afterward, “Everybody’s blood was up.” The commanding general would be Kitchener’s protégé and Winston’s old friend, Ian Hamilton. K of K told Hamilton: “If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.”⁹⁹

Asquith thought Hamilton “a sanguine enthusiastic person, with a good deal of superficial charm… but there is too much feather in his brain.” His performance in small wars had been superb. He had fought well at Majuba, on India’s North-West Frontier, and in South Africa, and had been a keen military observer in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. None of this was evident in his appearance. He was scrawny, bowlegged, and birdlike in his movements, and his manner was almost effeminate. He also wrote poetry and kept a voluminous, gossipy diary, which diminished him in the eyes of bluff officer types. Clementine disliked him, but Winston regarded him as dashing and chivalrous; he wrote Kitchener of the appointment: “No choice could be more agreeable to the Admiralty, and to the Navy.”¹⁰⁰ Churchill wanted him in the eastern Mediterranean, and he wanted him there fast; on the first lord’s orders, a special train would take the general to Dover, he would cross the Channel on H.M.S. Foresight, another special train would rush him from Calais to Marseilles, and there H.M.S. Phaeton, a fast cruiser, would pick him up and carry him to his command. Churchill saw him off at Charing Cross Station, whence Chinese Gordon had left on his own fateful journey to Egypt over thirty years earlier. Because of Kitchener’s touchiness, Hamilton explained, there would be no communication between him and the Admiralty. Winston said nothing, but it was a deplorable decision. The train pulled away amid gay shouts, and the dainty general settled down to study a prewar report on the Dardanelles, an out-of-date Turkish army handbook, and a highly inaccurate map of Gallipoli.

Roger Keyes, John de Robeck, and Ian Hamilton

Heavy seas kept de Robeck’s fleet idle on March 19, but he and Keyes put the time to good use; on the following day the admiral reported to Churchill that sixty-two destroyers were being converted into mine-sweepers, all to be crewed by bluejacket volunteers, and steel nets would soon be laid across the strait to catch any loose mines. The French, de Robeck reported to London, had been “quite undismayed by their loss.” On all Allied warships “officers and men are only anxious to re-engage the enemy.” He ended: “It is hoped to be in a position to commence operations in three or four days.” Keyes wrote his wife from the Queen Elizabeth: “I am spoiling to have at it again.” The War Council had authorized Churchill to tell de Robeck that he could “continue the operations against the Dardanelles” provided he thought it “fit.” Clearly he did, but the first lord goaded him just the same: “Queen and Implacable should join you very soon; and London and Prince of Wales sail tonight…. It appears important not to let the forts be repaired or to encourage enemy by an apparent suspension of the operations. Ample supplies of 15-inch ammunition are available for indirect fire of Queen Elizabeth across the peninsula.”¹⁰¹

Everything was proceeding smoothly until Hamilton sailed up on the Phaeton, studied the Gallipoli shore through field glasses, ventured into the mouth of the Dardanelles, and then sailed off to establish his headquarters on Lemnos. De Robeck wrote him there: “We are all ready for another go, and not the least beaten or down-hearted.” The general took another view. He inspected the crippled Inflexible, talked to several army officers on the island, and telegraphed Kitchener: “I am most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the straits are not likely to be forced by battleships, as at one time seemed probable, and that, if my troops are to take part, it will not take the subsidiary form anticipated. The Army’s part will be more than mere landing parties to destroy forts; it must be a deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy.” This was an extraordinary rush to judgment. He hadn’t seen the Narrows, was unaware of the devastation there, and knew almost nothing about the capabilities of huge naval guns. Kitchener replied immediately: “You know my views, that the Dardanelles must be forced.” If troops were needed “to clear the way,” such operations, he said, “must be carried through.” On March 22, four days after the ship-to-shore fight in the Narrows, de Robeck anchored off the island to confer with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force’s commander in chief, who at this point had no army, no plan, but a strong distrust of swift action. Afterward they disagreed on who had said what. According to the general: “The moment he sat down de Robeck told us that he was now quite clear he could not get through without the help of all my troops.” According to the admiral, Hamilton spoke first, and having “heard his proposals, I now considered a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign…. To attack Narrows now with Fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a bigger and better scheme.”¹⁰²

De Robeck’s account is more convincing—until now he had never considered discontinuing his assault—but doubtless he was easily seduced. To naval officers who had risen to flag rank during the long peace, losing ships was a crime, and he had already blurted out to Keyes that he felt guilty. Moreover, he knew that Fisher, the very symbol of the Royal Navy, disapproved of the Dardanelles operation. Churchill backed it, but Churchill was a politician; politicians moved from one ministerial post to another, or dropped out of the cabinet altogether. At the Admiralty, first lords came and went, while the Royal Navy lasted forever. If the army wanted to take over here, de Robeck could only feel a sense of deliverance. He asked Hamilton if the troops would be put ashore on Bulair Isthmus at the top of the peninsula. No, said Hamilton, he would land on the southern tip and fight his way up from there. De Robeck asked when. Hamilton said he needed a little over three weeks. In that case, the admiral said, he would suspend his own drive until the fighting began on Gallipoli. He telegraphed the Admiralty that the army “will not be in a position to undertake any military operations before 14th April…. It appears better to prepare a decisive effort about the middle of April rather than risk a great deal for what may possibly be only a partial solution.”¹⁰³

Keyes felt “fearfully disappointed and unhappy.” Churchill was dumbfounded. As he later testified, he believed “that we were separated by very little from success. Although at the outset I should have rejoiced at the provision of an army, I saw the disadvantages which would attend its employment after what had happened…. Landing and storming the Gallipoli Peninsula, now that the Turks were fully alarmed, seemed a formidable business. It seemed to me a far more serious undertaking than the naval attack. It would commit us irrevocably if it failed, in a way no naval attack could have done. The risk was greater. The stakes were far higher… and above all I feared the inevitable delay.” Fisher, backed by Admirals Sir Arthur Wilson and Sir Henry Jackson, disagreed. Up to this point, they said, they had supported the attempt to force the strait because the commander on the spot had recommended it. But now that de Robeck and Hamilton had agreed on a joint effort, the Admiralty, in Fisher’s words, was “bound to accept their view.” Churchill later recalled: “For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table.” He drafted a telegram to de Robeck, ordering him to break through to the Sea of Marmara, but it was never sent, because he had to consult the War Council first, and although Asquith—and Kitchener—agreed with him, the prime minister refused to overrule three distinguished admirals.¹⁰⁴

The next day Winston drafted a personal telegram to de Robeck. Fisher wrote him: “Send no more telegrams! Let it alone!” It went out anyway. “What has happened since the 21st,” he asked, “to make you alter your intention of renewing the attack as soon as the weather is favourable?” The answer was ambiguous. Churchill lowered his sights, hoping that the delay would be temporary. Then events conspired against him. Word reached London from Constantinople that “during the last fortnight about 150 mines, any amount of ammunition, guns, &c, have been coming through Roumania from Germany…. The ammunition comes through quite openly, and there is nothing to prevent the Germans from bringing in even big guns.” To Winston this was a spur to instant action. The admirals, on the other hand, argued that it meant greater danger for their ships in the Dardanelles. Churchill urged Grey to protest this abuse of Rumanian neutrality. Grey said it would be useless. Then, on Friday, March 26, the British consul general cabled from Rotterdam that Dutch troops were massing on their frontiers; a German invasion was expected hourly. It was a false alarm, but it triggered anxiety about the strength of the Home Fleet. The second, third, and fourth sea lords took the extraordinary step of demanding written assurance from Fisher that the force in Scapa Flow was adequate to meet all challenges. Captain Richmond was spreading his poison in the Admiralty. The first lord’s “personal vanity,” he wrote typically, “occupies so large a place in the arrangements that the operation is either a fiasco or is most wasteful in lives or matériel—or both.” Finally, Grey urged caution. Italy was on the verge of declaring war on Germany. An unsuccessful attempt to break through the Narrows might discourage it.¹⁰⁵

Shortly before dawn on Saturday a long message from de Robeck reached the Admiralty. As a study in stagnation it is a remarkable document. Silencing the forts, he said, would require “an excessive expenditure of ammunition,” which “cannot be spared.” Complete conquest of the blockhouses on either side of the strait would require “demolishing parties. To cover these parties at the Narrows is a task General Hamilton is not prepared to undertake and I fully concur with his view.” The “mine menace” was “even greater than anticipated.” As he saw it, “the result of a Naval action alone might in my opinion be a brilliant success or quite indecisive.” It was a risk, and he wasn’t prepared to take it when the army could “occupy the Peninsula which would open up the Strait as guns on Asiatic side can be dominated from the European shore sufficiently to permit ships to pass through.” He concluded: “With Gallipoli Peninsula held by our Army and Squadron through Dardanelles our success would be assured. The delay possibly of a fortnight will allow co-operation which would really prove factor that will reduce length of time necessary to complete the campaign in Sea of Marmara and occupy Constantinople.”¹⁰⁶

When Kitchener told the War Council that the army was now prepared to take over the job of opening the Dardanelles, Winston knew he was beaten. Though he felt, as he said, “grief-stricken,” he gracefully replied to de Robeck: “I had hoped that it would be possible to achieve the result according to original plan without involving the Army, but the reasons you give make it clear that a combined operation is now indispensable…. All your proposals will therefore be approved.” De Robeck now became Hamilton’s subordinate, providing naval support when and where requested. Every subsequent decision in the theater was made by either Kitchener or Hamilton. The navy never again tried to sweep mines, reduce forts, or break through the Narrows to the Sea of Marmara. Day by day the vision of victory receded, though Churchill was slow to abandon hope. On April 29 Sir George Riddell found him studying a map. In his diary Riddell set down Winston’s remarks. “This,” Churchill had said, “is one of the great campaigns of history. Think what Constantinople is to the East. It is more than London, Paris, and Berlin rolled into one are to the West. Think how it has dominated the East. Think what its fall will mean. Think how it will affect Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, and Italy, who have already been affected by what has taken place. You cannot win this war by sitting still. We are merely using our surplus ships in the Dardanelles. Most of them are old vessels. The ammunition, even the rifle ammunition, is different from that which we are using in France—an older type—so there is no loss of power there.” Then he said: “I am not responsible for the Expedition…. I do not shirk responsibility, but it is untrue to say that I have done this off my own bat.”¹⁰⁷

Nevertheless, the British public believed he had done it all off his own bat. Most of them think so today.

Silence descended upon the strait. As the weeks passed, the Turks realized that they had been granted a reprieve. In time they persuaded themselves that they had triumphed. The Westerners, to whom they had felt inferior, had been routed. Islamic xenophobia stirred in them; they wanted to express their savage new strength on any available enemy. The Armenians were available. They were Christians, they were clever, they prospered as moneylenders in cities and villages, and they were suspected of sympathizing with the Russians. Rumors spread. They were sending information to the czar’s troops, it was said; they were smuggling in arms and plotting a revolt. So a pogrom began. The men were tortured and shot; the women were recruited for harems; the very young and very old were sent down the roads to Syria, Persia, and Mesopotamia, where robbers stripped them naked and left them to die of hunger and exposure. Before it was over, 750,000 Armenians were dead.

Barbarism was one expression of the new Turkish mood. Another, which boded ill for Hamilton’s troops, was the soaring morale of the askar, or private soldier. The askari were in a fighting temper, and they knew where they were going to fight; Turkish spies were active in Cairo, watching British officers scour shops for Gallipoli guidebooks. British soldiers cruising in the waters off the peninsula watched the entrenchments grow there. Every morning found them higher and wider. By the middle of April—Hamilton had set his landing date back eleven days—Von Sanders had sixty thousand men behind barbed wire and machine guns, backed by heavy Skoda artillery from Bohemia. His field general would be Mustapha Kemal. Von Sanders was aware of Kemal’s Germanophobia, but he also knew he was fiercely patriotic and the best combat commander in the country. Both leaders were exceptionally talented. Their troops were ready. And they had plenty of time; five precious weeks intervened between the break-off of de Robeck’s naval attack and the arrival of Hamilton’s transports off the peninsula.

Gallipoli offers the invader four beaches: Bulair, at the neck, where de Robeck wanted Hamilton to land; Suvla Bay, halfway down the peninsula; Ari Burnu, south of there; and at Cape Helles, on the toe, where Royal Marines had walked in complete safety a month earlier. Five major landings were made on the cape, near the village of Sedd-el-Bahr. Casualties were heavy. A naval aviator flying overhead looked down on the Aegean, usually a brilliant shade of blue. He saw a strip “absolutely red with blood… a horrible sight to see” between the beach and fifty yards out.¹⁰⁸ The Anzacs were supposed to come ashore at Gaba Tepe, in the vicinity of Ari Burnu. A navigation error put them a mile to the north, where they faced precipitous cliffs from whose scrub-covered ridges the Turks could deliver a murderous, scything fire. Ian Hamilton remained at sea, riding around in the conning tower of the Queen Elizabeth, out of touch with his shore commanders and his staff. He refused to intervene, even when it became apparent that everything had gone wrong; officers on the spot, he said, were better qualified to make decisions. They, playing for safety, tried to establish beachheads—venturing inland was considered either impossible or too hazardous—while each evening their commander in chief, before retiring to his bunk on the battleship, wrote five-thousand-word entries in his diary, reflecting upon the mysteries and ironies of life.

Later another landing was made at Suvla. It was the same story. The force commander was an elderly, ailing officer who had made his reputation as a teacher of military history and had never commanded troops in war. Coming ashore, he sprained his knee. He sent word to Hamilton that “if the enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him till more guns are landed. All the teaching of the campaign in France proves that continuous trenches cannot be attacked without the assistance of large numbers of howitzers.”¹⁰⁹ There were no trenches and very few Turks. He had twenty thousand men ashore. Still, he was reluctant to advance. Following his commander in chief’s example, he returned to his ship and spent a safe, comfortable night aboard. Meanwhile, Mustapha Kemal arrived and occupied the heights overlooking the beach.

Winston’s brother, Jack, who had seen action as a major at Ypres and was now serving on Hamilton’s staff, wrote him from Helles that Gallipoli was “siege warfare again as in France. Trenches and wire beautifully covered by machine gun fire are the order of the day. Terrific artillery fire against invulnerable trenches and then attempts to make frontal attacks in the face of awful musketry fire, are the only tactics that can be employed.” In the first month Hamilton lost forty-five thousand men. The pattern continued. It was over-the-top carnage, with no gains of consequence. Jack wrote: “I don’t think another big push will be attempted until reinforcements arrive. We shall have to dig in and await the Turks’ attacks.” Gallipoli had become a mere extension of the deadlock on the western front. Hamilton knew it. He telegraphed Kitchener that he was watching his attack “degenerate into trench warfare with its resultant slowness.”¹¹⁰

“Damn the Dardanelles,” said Fisher. “They will be our grave.” Churchill had told Riddell that “Fisher and I have a perfect understanding.” In fact, they had no such thing. The old admiral had raised no objections to Hamilton’s landings, but the general’s subsequent frustration had depressed him. Winston kept trying to stir Fisher’s fighting spirit. “It is clear,” he wrote him on May 3, “that the favourable turn to our affairs in S. E. Europe arose from the initial success of our attack on the Dardanelles, was checked by the repulse of the 18th, & can only be restored by the general success of the operation. It is thus necessary to fight a battle, (a thing wh has often happened before in war) & abide the consequences whatever they may be.” The old salt was unconvinced. And he was beginning to recite his litany of complaints to outsiders. One afternoon at No. 10 Margot Asquith faced him down. She bluntly told him: “You know you have talked too much—all London knows you are against the Dardanelles expedition. Why didn’t you resign?” He muttered: “It’s a lie—I’ve seen no one, been nowhere, I’m far too busy.” But it was true. Word of the rift at the Admiralty had reached back-benchers in the House. An MP asked “whether Lord Fisher was consulted with regard to the March action on the Dardanelles by the Fleet; and whether he expressed the opinion that the attack ought not to be made in the circumstances in which it was made.” Winston replied: “If the insinuation contained in the question were correct Lord Fisher would not now be at the Admiralty.” Asquith had asked Churchill to carry on secret negotiations with the Italians on the terms under which they would enter the war against Germany. This entailed commuting to Paris, and during one of his absences Clementine, hoping to perk up the old salt, invited him to lunch at Admiralty House. It went well until, after Clementine thought he had left, she found him lurking in a corridor. She asked: “What is it?” He said: “You are a foolish woman. All the time you think Winston’s with Sir John French he is in Paris with his mistress.” Clementine was speechless. She was convinced Fisher was losing his mind. When Churchill returned, she told him what had happened. Fisher, she said, had been “as nervous as a kitten.”¹¹¹

In Hamilton’s failure Roger Keyes saw opportunity. Four days after this remarkable scene in London, the commodore persuaded de Robeck to convene all his admirals in the Queen Elizabeth’s wardroom. There he unveiled a new plan of naval attack. Leaving older battleships to shield the army’s beachheads, the destroyers which had been refitted as minesweepers would lead the Allies’ most powerful dreadnoughts through the Narrows. It would be accomplished in a single day. All those present, including de Robeck, enthusiastically endorsed the operation; Guépratte telegraphed his minister of marine: “A fin d’assister l’Armée dans son action énergique et rude, nous méditons vive action flotte dans détroit avec attaque des forts. Dans ces conditions il me faut mes cuirassés Suffren, Charlemagne, Gaulois dans le plus bref délai possible.”¹¹² The plan was forwarded to London for approval, which they took for granted. Fisher didn’t like it, of course; he wanted no part of any further action in the strait. And Churchill, from whom one would expect support, had a problem. Assuming that all hopes of forcing the Dardanelles had been abandoned, he had agreed to provide Italy with four battleships and four cruisers from de Robeck’s fleet. Yet the idea of reaching Constantinople was still exciting. He believed something could be worked out. He was arguing the issue with Fisher when an aide brought them word that a daring Turkish submarine commander had sunk H.M.S. Goliath south of the Narrows.

The loss could be borne. Goliath was no Goliath. She was a small, senectuous battleship which had been launched when Victoria was still Queen. But the presence of an enemy submarine in these waters frightened Fisher. There might be others. (There weren’t.) He insisted that Queen Elizabeth leave the Mediterranean at once. To appease him, Winston agreed. The meeting of the War Council the next day, on Friday, May 14, was, in Churchill’s word, “sulphurous.” Kitchener was infuriated. He had sent an army to Gallipoli with the understanding that the navy would force the Dardanelles, he raged; the first lord had enticed him by dwelling upon “the marvelous potentialities of the Queen Elizabeth,” and now Hamilton was being left in the lurch. K of K’s “habitual composure in trying ordeals left him,” Winston wrote. “He protested vehemently against what he considered the desertion of the army at its most critical moment.” At this, Fisher flared up. The ship “will come home,” he declared; “she will come home at once; she will come home tonight or I shall walk out of the Admiralty then and there.” He added that he was “against the Dardanelles and have been all along.” That enraged Churchill. “The First Sea Lord,” he retorted, “has agreed to every executive telegram on which the operations have been conducted.” Sending out the Elizabeth, indeed, had been his idea. The wounding words flew back and forth, and Asquith couldn’t stem them. To calm Fisher, the prime minister, on Hankey’s advice, had promised the old admiral on Tuesday that no action would be taken in the eastern Mediterranean without his consent. The Elizabeth would be recalled; two battleships, Exmouth and Venerable, would replace her.¹¹³

Back at the Admiralty that evening Winston went over the details with Fisher in the first sea lord’s office. They reviewed the entire operation. New orders would be drawn up for de Robeck. Churchill confined his recommendations to matters he knew the old admiral would accept. As he left, an aide heard him say: “Well, good night, Fisher. We have settled everything, and you must go home and have a good night’s rest. Things will look brighter in the morning and we’ll pull the thing through together.” Working later, as was his custom, he put everything in writing. At the last moment he added two submarines, which de Robeck had requested, to the Dardanelles naval reinforcements. He left the papers for the first sea lord with a note: “I send this to you before marking it to others in order that if any point arises we can discuss it. I hope you will agree.”¹¹⁴

At nine Saturday morning, May 15, he called at the Foreign Office to put the final touches on the Italian treaty. He was returning across the Horse Guards when his private naval secretary hurried up and said: “Fisher has resigned, and I think he means it this time.” He handed him the brief note from the first sea lord: “After further anxious reflection,” it began, “I have come to the regretted conclusion I am unable to remain any more as your colleague…. As you truly said yesterday I am in the position of constantly veto-ing your proposals. This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me. I am off to Scotland to avoid all questionings.” Churchill wasn’t perturbed; Fisher had submitted eight previous resignations. But when he discovered that he was nowhere to be found—that he had literally deserted—Winston took the letter to No. 10. Angered, Asquith instantly wrote Fisher: “In the King’s name, I order you to return to your post.” Delivering this command was another matter. That afternoon the old admiral was run to ground in a dingy Charing Cross hotel room. After a long argument, he agreed to see the prime minister. Lloyd George, encountering him in the No. 10 waiting room, was struck by the “dour change in him…. A combative grimness had taken the place of his usual genial greeting; the lower lip of his set mouth was thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously Oriental features were more than ever those in an Eastern temple, with a sinister frown. ‘I have resigned!’ was his greeting, and on my inquiring the reason he replied, ‘I can stand it no longer.’ ” He had made up his mind, he said, “to take no further part in the Dardanelles foolishness.” Lloyd George begged him to wait until Monday, when he could put his grievances before the War Council. Fisher refused to wait “another hour.” He told the prime minister the same thing. After a long argument, Asquith wrung from him a promise to remain in London, but the old man flatly refused to withdraw his resignation, to return to the Admiralty, or to see Churchill.¹¹⁵

He went back into hiding. At 10:00 P.M. a mutual friend brought him a letter from Winston, who was trying to find out what this was all about. The answer, in Fisher’s reply through their intermediary, was the two submarines. He wrote that “the series of fresh naval arrangements you sent me yesterday morning convinced me that the time had arrived for me to make a final decision—there being much more in those proposals than had occurred to me the previous evening when you suggested some of them.” This was absurd, of course; the vessels were insignificant, and Churchill had offered to talk it over. But Fisher had been looking for an excuse, and his hand shook as he scrawled on: “YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING—I know you so well!… You will remain and I SHALL GO—It is better so…. You say with much feeling that ‘it will be a very great grief to you to part from me.’ I am certain you know in your heart no one has ever been more faithful to you than I have since I joined you last October. I have worked my very hardest.” He moved to the Ritz and wrote Reginald McKenna, Winston’s predecessor at the Admiralty, that while he wouldn’t quote Churchill’s letter, “it absolutely CONVINCES me that I am right in my UNALTERABLE DECISION to resign! In fact I have resigned!… At every turn he will be thinking of the military and not the naval side—he never has done otherwise. His heart is ashore, not afloat! The joy of his life is to be 50 yards from a German trench!… I am no longer First Sea Lord. There is no compromise possible!”¹¹⁶

Well, there was, and he was angling for it. He very much wanted to be back at the Admiralty, but with dictatorial powers. This surfaced in his subsequent attempts to negotiate with Asquith. He would serve under McKenna or Grey, he said, but not Churchill or Balfour. Admiral Wilson must leave the Admiralty, Fisher must be empowered to appoint his own Admiralty Board, the first lord would “be absolutely restricted to policy and parliamentary procedure,” and “I shall have complete professional charge of the war at sea, together with the absolute sole disposition of the Fleet and the appointment of all officers of all ranks whatsoever, and absolutely untrammelled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever.” In a postscript he added that these conditions “must be published verbatim so that the Fleet may know my position.” Hankey, to whom he delivered these terms, told him they were impossible. Asquith said the old man was either “traitorous” or “unhinged.” Fisher then sent word of his resignation to Bonar Law. That was malicious. His sole motive now was to ruin Churchill.¹¹⁷

After nine years in power the Liberal government was shaky, and frustration over the bloody, interminable war was at the root of it. Fisher wasn’t the only officer playing politics. Sir John French needed an excuse for the failure, the previous Sunday, of his offensive against Aubers Ridge, where 11,000 men fell without gaining a single yard. The newly knighted Henry Wilson had noted in his diary: “Sir J told me he thought it quite likely that K’s second army would go to Gallipoli. This must be stopped.” Churchill’s strongest argument for strengthening the drive against Turkey was that of the 644,000 Englishmen in uniform, 560,000, or 87 percent, were fighting in France, and, as he had told the War Council, he could not see “the smallest reason for believing” that there would be any change in “either the British or French lines.” To keep its flow of reinforcements coming from home, the BEF badly needed an alibi. Therefore French told Colonel Charles à Court Repington, the haughty military correspondent for the Northcliffe newspapers, that the politicians in London were mismanaging their end of the war. It was a lack of high-explosive shells, he said, which had prevented him from breaking through. On Friday The Times carried scare headlines: NEED FOR SHELLS. BRITISH ATTACK CHECKED. LIMITED SUPPLIES THE CAUSE. A LESSON FROM FRANCE. The problem, according to this line of reasoning, was that inadequate munitions were being sent to the western front. “British soldiers,” said The Times, “died in vain on Aubers Ridge on Sunday because more shells were needed. The Government, who have so seriously failed to organize our national resources, must bear their share of the grave responsibility.” Their error, it was argued, had been compounded by the creation of a second, pointless front. Of Gallipoli The Times declared: “The novel interests of that enterprise cannot be allowed to distract us from what is, and will remain, the decisive theatre of operations. Our first thoughts must be for the bent but unbroken line of battle in the West.” The Liberal editor of the Westminster Gazette agreed that “the war will be ended by killing Germans and in no other way.”¹¹⁸

Churchill was slow to grasp the threat to him. Gallipoli, after all, was Kitchener’s responsibility. But he was being held responsible for the entire campaign, land as well as sea. “Mr Churchill’s characteristics,” said the Morning Post, “make him in his present position a danger and an anxiety to the nation,” and, in another editorial, “Mr Churchill’s instincts for the melodramatic have blossomed into megalomania.” The Times charged that “the First Lord of the Admiralty has been assuming responsibilities and overriding his expert advisers to a degree which might at any time endanger the national safety…. When a civilian Minister in charge of a fighting service persistently seeks to grasp the power which should not pass into his unguided hands, and attempts to use that power in perilous ways, it is time for his colleagues in the Cabinet to take some definite action.” His absences from the Admiralty were noted and criticized. The government could not reveal that he was negotiating Italy’s entrance into the war, and when Tories in the House asked why he wasn’t at his desk, and Asquith evaded the question, they shouted: “Joy ride!” Rumors spread that he was intriguing against Kitchener. Lord Esher’s son wrote his father from Paris: “Why can’t he stick to his own job? He is becoming an object of amusement and some scorn here. The French are beginning to shrug their shoulders when he is mentioned—a bad sign.” Esher passed this letter along to the King. Winston continued to be unpopular among Liberal back-benchers, who now, according to The Times’s parliamentary correspondent, considered him to be “the author of all their ills.” Even in the cabinet and the War Council he had become a controversial figure. That Saturday evening when Fisher resigned, Lloyd George told his mistress that if the resignation were accepted, Winston would have to surrender his office. After George had left her, Frances rose from bed and committed his hard words to her diary. Political ruin, Lloyd George had said, would be “the Nemesis of the man who has fought for this war for years. When the war came he saw in it the chance of glory for himself, & has accordingly entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands, in the hope that he would prove to be the outstanding man in this war.”¹¹⁹

Lloyd George did not speak for the prime minister. But Asquith’s emotional stability, unknown to his colleagues or even his family, had just been dealt a cruel blow. All these months he had been sustained by his love for Venetia Stanley. It was a sign of his dependence upon this sophisticated but shallow young woman that he had disclosed every state secret to her; indeed, it is arguable that she had become England’s greatest security risk. And Venetia, unlike Lloyd George’s Frances, was not constant. She had finally decided that the disparity between her age and Asquith’s—thirty-five years—was too great. That Friday, May 14, she had told him that their relationship was over. She intended to marry Edwin Montagu, a future cabinet minister. Only the week before he had written her, “You give me the life blood of all that I do, or can ever hope to do,” and that if anyone wanted to destroy him, he could do it “effectively, & without a moment’s delay, when any veil is dropped between me & you—soul of my life.” Now, after reading her crushing letter, he wrote her brokenly: “This is too terrible; no hell could be so bad.” When Bonar Law confirmed Fisher’s elopement and threatened a major debate in the House, Asquith refused to pick up the gauntlet. He lacked the strength. Afterward he wrote the young woman he still adored: “You alone of all the world—to whom I have always gone in every moment of trial & trouble, & from whom I have always come back solaced and healed & inspired—were the one person who could do nothing, & from whom I could ask nothing. To my dying day, that will be the most bitter memory of my life…. I am on the eve of the most astounding and world-shaking decisions—such as I wd never have taken without your counsel & consent. It seems so strange & empty & unnatural: yet there is nowhere else that I can go, nor would I, if I could.”¹²⁰ Bonar Law proposed a coalition, and Asquith listlessly agreed. Ironically, Churchill had been advocating this new step for several weeks. It never occurred to him that he might not be a part of a new cabinet. But the Tories had eyed his scalp too long. The exclusion of Churchill was Bonar Law’s price for Conservative participation in the government; Balfour must become first lord.

Winston, who knew none of this, had realized that Fisher’s departure would precipitate an uproar in the House. He had prepared a stout defense of his Dardanelles record; he meant to deliver it from the front bench, presenting, at the same time, his nominees for a new Admiralty Board. “I had,” he later recalled, “prepared for a Parliamentary inquiry of the most searching character.” He meant to summarize the navy’s record of achievement, of which “I shall always be proud to have had a share,” declaring: “The terrible dangers of the beginning of the war are over, the seas have been swept clear; the submarine menace has been fixed within definite limits; the personal ascendancy of our men, the superior quality of our ships on the high seas, have been established beyond doubt or question; our strength has greatly increased, actually and relatively from what it was in the beginning of the war, and it grows continually every day by leaps and bounds…. On the whole surface of the seas of the world no hostile flag is flown.”¹²¹

Although exhausted by the Italian negotiations—Sir Henry Wilson had noted in his diary on May 7 that he “looked ill and unhealthy”—Churchill polished this speech all day Sunday, May 16. Monday morning, as a matter of form, he went to the prime minister for clearance. It was then that he learned he would not be permitted to speak. There would be no debate. Asquith, reading it, slowly shook his head. “No,” he said, “this will not do. I have decided to form a National Government, and a very much larger construction will be required.” He looked up and asked: “What are we to do for you?” This was Churchill’s first inkling that his reign as first lord of the Admiralty was over. He was thunderstruck. He had assumed that the prime minister, who had shared all his decisions, would stand by him. Asquith asked him whether he wanted another post in the cabinet or would “prefer a command in France.” Before Winston could answer, Lloyd George entered the room. George, who had been deeply involved in the negotiations with Law—“LG,” Sunny wrote Winston, “has done you in”—asked the prime minister: “Why do you not send him to the Colonial Office? There is great work to be done there.” Winston said numbly that he would refuse any office which cut him off from the conduct of the war. That evening he put it in writing, sending a note to No. 10: “So far as I am concerned if you find it necessary to make a change here, I shd be glad—assuming it was thought fitting—to be offered a position in the new Government. But I will not take any office except a military department, & if that is not convenient I hope I may be found employment in the field.”¹²²

By Tuesday morning, however, the prospect of leaving the Admiralty had become unbearable to him. That evening F. E. Smith and Max Aitken called, and Aitken wrote later that Winston “was clinging to the desire of retaining the Admiralty as if the salvation of England depended upon it,” that he would “even have made it up with Lord Fisher” if he could have remained as first lord. He talked wildly of soliciting support among the Tories. Aitken bluntly told him he had no hope there. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Churchill sent Bonar Law documents to justify his pride in his record as first lord. “Now that there is I rejoice to think good prospect of our becoming colleagues,” he wrote his most implacable political enemy, “I feel entitled to send you the enclosed papers.” In a postscript he added that “this great event of a National Government must be made lasting.”¹²³

If only the facts were known, he believed, he would be kept on. He prepared a long statement for the press, defending his Dardanelles role, and showed it to Lloyd George. George, minister of munitions in the new government, was appalled. This material was classified, he said; if it appeared, the troops on Gallipoli would be compromised. Both he and Grey, Churchill suddenly realized, were treating him as though he had already left the government. He lost his temper. Turning on Lloyd George, he snapped: “You don’t care. You don’t care if I am trampled underfoot by my enemies. You don’t care for my personal reputation.” His old ally broke in: “No, I don’t. I don’t care for my own at the present time. The only thing I care about now is that we win in this war.” That was cant. He, too, was a political animal. Had he been in Winston’s plight he would have been at his wits’ end. George is a key figure in the history of that time, but his position during that turbulent week is murky. He cynically told his mistress, “The situation for Churchill has no meaning but his own prospects,” and she, who always reflected his views, wrote in her diary of Winston’s fall: “I am rather sorry for him, as it must be a terrible experience for one who has had so much power in his hands. But all the same I think he deserves it.” It was the chancellor who, upon learning of Fisher’s departure for Scotland, had told Asquith: “Of course, we must have a coalition, for the alternative is impossible.” Clementine regarded that as a piece of “Welsh trickiness.” She told Winston she thought Lloyd George a Judas. Yet afterward George called Churchill’s dismissal “a cruel and unjust degradation. The Dardanelles failure,” he said later, “was due not so much to Mr. Churchill’s precipitancy as to Lord Kitchener’s and Mr. Asquith’s procrastination.”¹²⁴

Churchill set his jaw. He wouldn’t quit. He was ready to pay almost any price rather than surrender the Admiralty. “In the evening,” Hankey wrote in his diary that Wednesday, “Churchill offered Fisher any terms he liked including a seat in the Cabinet, if he would stay with him at the Admiralty.” An intermediary carried the message, as before, and Fisher again played the informer, sending the letter to Bonar Law and scribbling across it: “I rejected the 30 pieces of silver to betray my country.” It seems never to have occurred to him that he was betraying the friend who had brought him back from retirement. Sir Arthur Wilson, who had succeeded Fisher as first sea lord, said he would refuse to serve under any first lord except Churchill. “This,” Winston wrote Asquith, “is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid.” Heartened, he wrote Law again. “The rule to follow,” he began, “is what is best calculated to beat the enemy, and not what is most likely to please the newspapers.” The conduct of the Dardanelles operation “should be reviewed by the new Cabinet. Every fact should be laid before them.” He himself bore “a tremendous responsibility” for the campaign against the Turks. “With Sir Arthur Wilson’s professional aid I am sure I can discharge that responsibility fully. In view of his statement to the Prime Minister and to the naval Lords that he will serve as First Sea Lord under me, and under no one else, I feel entitled to say that no other personal combination will give so good a chance.” At stake was “the safety of an Army now battling its way forward under many difficulties.” For nearly four years Churchill had been, “according to my patent, ‘solely responsible to Crown and Parliament’ and have borne the blame for any failure: and now I present to you an absolutely secure naval position…. Therefore I ask to be judged fairly…. I do not ask for anything else.”¹²⁵

He wrote that “if the Admiralty were in uninstructed or unfriendly hands” it might “lead to the abandonment of the Dardanelles operation” which “otherwise is a certainty,” and asked Asquith to “fancy my feelings if, at this critical moment—on mere uninformed newspaper hostility—the whole intricate affair is to be taken out of my hands & put in the hands of a stranger without the knowledge, or worst of all in the hands of a deadly foe of the plan.” He was “clinging to my task & to my duty.” He could not defend himself without putting England’s security at hazard. The Conservatives knew only what they had read in the press. “But you know. You alone know the whole situation and that it is my duty to carry this burden safely: and that I can do it. Let me stand or fall by the Dardanelles—but do not take it from my hands.” Clementine also took the remarkable step of writing the prime minister. Her husband, she told him, had mastered “every detail of naval science. There is no man in this country who possesses equal knowledge capacity & vigour. If he goes, the injury to Admiralty business will not be reparable for many months—if indeed it is ever made good during the war. Why do you part with Winston? unless indeed you have lost confidence in his work and ability? But I know that cannot be the reason. Is not the reason expediency—‘to restore public confidence.’ I suggest to you that public confidence will be restored in Germany by Winston’s downfall…. If you send him to another place he will no longer be fighting. If you waste this valuable war material you will be doing an injury to this country.”¹²⁶

To swallow pride and crawl thus must have been excruciating for both Winston and Clementine. And it was all for nothing. Asquith wrote Venetia that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine. Bonar Law—who said privately that Winston “seems to have an entirely unbalanced mind”—replied to Churchill that his removal as first lord was “inevitable.” Asquith wrote Winston: “You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” There could be no appeal from that. Winston, who like other critics of Asquith had taken to calling him “The Block” in private, replied: “All right, I accept your decision. I shall not look back…. I must wait for the march of events at the Dlles.” On the next Saturday, May 22, Winston saw the prime minister briefly. Asquith called it “a most painful interview to me: but he was good & in his best mood. And it ended all right.” Yet there was still no place for him in the new cabinet. Two days later Margot wrote in her diary: “What a satire if the coming Coalition Government of which Winston has gassed so much should not contain him! I know Henry [Asquith] too well to suppose this but there is no doubt if Henry wanted to make himself supremely popular with every party ours and the others he would exclude Winston. I would not wish this, there is something lovable in Winston and he is a real pal but I should not be surprised if he wrecked the new Government.”¹²⁷

How unpopular was Churchill in the spring of 1915? He was controversial, of course; he always had been. But he himself believed he was now friendless. Asquith’s daughter, who loved him as her father loved Venetia, came to him in tears. They “slipped away” together, she wrote, and he “took me into his room,” whereupon he collapsed in a chair, “silent, despairing—as I had never seen him. He seemed to have no rebellion or even anger left. He did not even abuse Fisher, but simply said, ‘I’m finished.’ ” She protested; he said, “No—I’m done.” Yet the day after his final dismissal Italy had entered the war, and he more than anyone else had been responsible for England’s new ally. His most loyal supporters remained steadfast. Virtually all the younger flag officers went on record as supporting him. At Gallipoli, Hamilton discovered “in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get in touch with Winston Churchill, all would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense, touching.”¹²⁸

But Englishmen demanded a whipping boy. If they couldn’t beat the Germans, they could turn on one of their own, and Churchill, the ostentatious poseur, was the obvious choice. Sir Henry Wilson wrote Bonar Law: “A man who can plot the Ulster Pogrom, plan Antwerp, & carry out the Dardanelles fiasco is worth watching.” In some vague way Winston was held accountable for everything that had gone wrong, from the shell crisis to the hopeless seesaw in the trenches. He had lost ships. He had frequently been away from his desk—on urgent missions, though they didn’t know that. He had ignored expert advice—even the counsel of Fisher, England’s greatest admiral. He was a reckless adventurer, a man loyal only to his own ambition. The Dundee Advertiser reported that many of his Liberal constituents believed that he “should be excluded altogether from the Cabinet on the ground, as they contend, that he is in a large measure responsible for precipitating the present state of affairs.” Admiralty diehards, impotent during his early naval reforms, now struck out savagely. Captain Richmond called him “ignorant.” Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, who was appointed first sea lord when Balfour replaced Churchill, described the attempt to force the Dardanelles as “a mad thing to do.” The naval correspondent of The Times reported: “The news that Mr Churchill is leaving the Admiralty has been received with a feeling of relief in the Service, both afloat and ashore,” and commented that while he had brought a “breezy atmosphere” with him, he had also created “a sense of uneasiness lest those very qualities of his which might be of advantage to the State in other circumstances, should lead him into making some false step, which, in the case of the Fleet, upon which our all depends, would be irretrievable.” On May 24 Frances Stevenson wrote in her diary: “There is no section of the country, so far as I can see, that wishes him to stay at the Admiralty.” According to her, Winston’s private naval secretary had advised the prime minister “that on no account ought Churchill to be allowed to remain at the Admiralty—he was most dangerous there.” Even Asquith, whose punishment Winston was taking, joined the posse. Churchill, he complained, “is impulsive & borne along on the flood of his all too copious tongue,” and, further, “it is a pity that Winston has not got a better sense of proportion. I am really fond of him, but I regard his future with many misgivings. I do not think he will ever get to the top in English politics with all his wonderful gifts.” In war, losers, even more than winners, need to create martyrs. Churchill was England’s Armenian.¹²⁹

He suffered. His Black Dog had never been so bad; he was in the pit of the worst depression of his life. After he had said his goodbyes at the Admiralty on Saturday and sent a farewell telegram to the Royal Naval Division, Eddie Marsh wrote Violet Asquith: “I am miserably sorry for Winston. You can imagine what a horrible wound and mutilation it is for him to be torn away from his work there… it’s like Beethoven deaf.” Sir George Riddell called on him and wrote in his War Diary: “He looked very worn out and harassed. He greeted me… and said, ‘I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!’ ” Lloyd George later said that it was “the brutality of the fall” that “stunned” Winston, and Churchill himself wrote afterward: “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure…. At a moment when every fibre of my being was inflamed to action, I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.” Clementine later told Martin Gilbert: “The Dardanelles haunted him for the rest of his life. He always believed in it. When he left the Admiralty he thought he was finished…. I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.”¹³⁰

At the time she, too, was distraught. After calling at Admiralty House, Edwin Montagu wrote Venetia, now his fiancée: “I went by request to see poor Mrs Winston. She was so sweet but so miserable and crying all the time. I was very inarticulate, but how I feel for her and him.” Back in his Treasury office he wrote Clementine that “Winston is far too great to be more than pulled up for a period…. Have no misgivings as to the future; I have none, I’m sure he has none.” But Winston had many, and what cut deepest were the lost chances which had gone up in the smoke rising from British ineptitude in Turkey. One of his dinner guests at this time was Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a war correspondent who had just returned from Gallipoli. Unlike young Churchill in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, journalists covering this campaign had been heavily censored—a full month had passed before the Illustrated London News had been permitted to publish photographs of the fighting—and an uninformed public, susceptible to rumor, had contributed to Churchill’s ruin. Ashmead-Bartlett wanted to talk to him about that. But his host wouldn’t listen to anyone. Ashmead-Bartlett noted in his diary: “I am much surprised at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty…. At dinner the conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so.” Jennie wrote Leonie: “If they had made the Dardanelles policy a certainty, Constantinople would have been in our hands ages ago. In confidence, it is astounding how Winston foresaw it all.”¹³¹

His obsession with what might have been kept him in civilian clothes for six months. Asquith promised him a seat on the War Council, now renamed the Dardanelles Committee, if he would accept the lowest of cabinet posts, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. “Where is Lancaster?” jeered the Bystander. “And what is a Duchy?” The position was a sinecure, which, as Lloyd George put it, was “generally reserved either for beginners in the Cabinet or for distinguished politicians who had reached the final stages of unmistakable decrepitude.” The chancellor’s only duty was to appoint county magistrates. In false cheeriness Winston wrote Jack Seely: “The Duchy of Lancaster has been mobilized. A strong flotilla of magistrates for the 1915 programme will shortly be laid down.” His salary was immediately cut from £4,500 to £2,000 a year. Asquith offered to let the Churchills stay on in Admiralty House, but Clementine refused to accept charity from the man who, as she saw it, had sacrificed her husband to save his own office. Ivor Guest gave his cousin the temporary use of his house at 21 Arlington Street, behind the Ritz; then they would move in with Goonie in Jack Churchill’s South Kensington house at 41 Cromwell Road, opposite the Natural History Museum. On May 23, eight days after the crisis over Fisher’s resignation had erupted, Winston turned the Admiralty over to Balfour. One of the new first lord’s first decisions was to scrap the tank project. According to Captain D’Eyncourt’s memoirs, A Shipbuilder’s Yarn, the new first lord called him in and asked: “Have not you and your department enough to do looking after the design and construction of ships without concerning yourself about material for the Army?” Appropriations already in the pipeline produced a small number of tanks in 1916. To Churchill’s dismay, Lloyd George told him that the army planned to use them immediately. Winston went to Asquith, pleading against untimely use of the trench weapon which, he believed, could be decisive. He was ignored. On September 15 a handful of tanks went into action on the Somme. The British infantry was unprepared to consolidate their quick gains, and the element of surprise was squandered. “My poor ‘land battleships,’ ” Churchill wrote, “have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale. In that idea resided one real victory.” Here he, too, was premature. The tank’s time would come again, and yet again.¹³²

In the weeks after he cleared out his Admiralty desk his depression deepened. “It is odious to me,” he wrote Seely, “to remain here watching sloth and folly with full knowledge & no occupation.” To Jack on Gallipoli he wrote: “The war is terrible: the carnage grows apace, & the certainty that no result will be reached this year fills my mind with melancholy thoughts. The youth of Europe—almost a whole generation—will be shorn away. I find it vy painful to be deprived of any direct means of action.” Beginning in late May, he took his and his brother’s families to a rental property in Surrey each weekend. “I am off to Hoe Farm,” he wrote Jack on June 19. “How I wish you cd be there. It really is a delightful valley and the garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.” Yet even here he drew apart from the others and paced endlessly between the garden and a small wooden summerhouse. He tried golf again and again and hated it; it was, he said, “like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.” Then, in a flash of inspiration, his sister-in-law introduced him to painting. Goonie painted herself; she set up her easel in the garden one Sunday, and when she noticed Winston watching her with interest, she suggested he try it, using some of the children’s watercolors. There was plenty to paint, she pointed out: the garden, the woods, the house, a nearby pond. He tried, liked it, and did it well. He had a natural visual eye, and knew it; during the Boer War he had supplemented his dispatches with sketches drawn in the field; touched up by newspaper illustrators, they had been published. Obviously, he could be good if he applied himself. It struck him that in this dark hour of life the “Muse of Painting” might have come to his rescue—“out of charity and out of chivalry, because after all she had nothing to do with me—and said, ‘Are these toys any good to you? They amuse some people.’ ”¹³³

But watercolors would not do. Being Churchill, whatever he did had to be done for the ages. He told Clementine: “La peinture à l’huile est bien difficile, mais c’est beaucoup plus beau que la peinture à l’eau.” She needed only that hint; she was off and running, and when she returned she brought a palette, canvases, an easel, a smock, and tubes. Unfortunately she had neglected to bring turpentine, and that aborted his first venture. Finally he was ready. Later he described his sensations on the threshold of that first attempt. With everything assembled, “the next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto. But after all the sky on this occasion was unquestionably blue, and a pale blue at that. There could be no doubt that blue paint mixed with white should be put on the top of the canvas. One really does not need to have had an artist’s training to see that. It is a starting-point open to all. So very gingerly I mixed a little blue paint on the palette with a very small brush, and then with infinite precaution made a mark about as big as a pea upon the affronted snow-white shield. It was a challenge, a deliberate challenge; but so subdued, so halting, indeed so cataleptic, that it deserved no response.”¹³⁴

At that most appropriate moment an automobile was heard in the drive, and out stepped Hazel Lavery, a neighbor, the wife of an artist, and a gifted painter herself. Her appearance was not a coincidence. Clementine was making up for the turpentine. Hazel strode up and said: “What are you hesitating about? Let me have a brush—the big one.” She splashed it into turpentine, socked it into the blue and white, thrashed it about on the palette, and delivered several huge, savage strokes on what Winston called “the absolutely cowering canvas.” Anyone could see, he wrote, “that it could not hit back. No evil fate avenged the jaunty violence. The canvas grinned in helplessness before me. The spell was broken.” He was delighted. This was his style; this was how he lived. It was inevitable that he should become an audacious painter, and a gaudy one; nothing that he ever touched was done by halves. “I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours,” he wrote. “I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.” When he reached heaven he would “require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”¹³⁵

Eddie Marsh, who watched his first efforts, thought that “the new enthusiasm… was a distraction and a sedative that brought a measure of ease to his frustrated spirit.” In fact, it would be a solace to him for the next fifty years. He had, he believed, discovered the solution to anxiety and tension. Exercise, travel, retreat, solitude, forced gaiety—he had tried these and none had worked. “Change,” he now wrote, “is the master key. A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it… the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened, not merely by rest, but by using other parts…. It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”¹³⁶

He painted landscapes and still lifes; never people. For one of his studies of bottles he coined a word: bottlescape. The dazzling hues were always there, a kind of signature. He knew desperation, but never a gray day. Once, painting in a drab, monochrome countryside, he introduced a dramatic range of mountains which were not there. A puzzled companion asked if he had seen a mirage. No, said Churchill; he just “couldn’t leave it quite as dull as that.” In time he became very good. An art critic scrutinized his work at a Royal Academy exhibition and wrote: “I was bound to recognize that their creator is a real artist. His canvases bear the mark of the spontaneity of a sincere and exuberant, but undisciplined vocation. His landscapes are vigorous and sometimes sensitive. His use of colour is often happy…. I think his fame as a statesman has prejudiced his reputation as an artist.”¹³⁷

At Hoe Farm he also rejoiced in the company of small children. Sarah was still an infant, but Diana was six and Randolph four, and his two nephews, Johnny and Peregrine, were also there. Long afterward Johnny would recall how, when he and his brother were given a box of Meccano—a kind of Erector Set—they started building a cantilever crane in the farmhouse dining room. Their uncle appeared, puffing on a cigar. He watched thoughtfully for a while, and then murmured: “Hm. A bascule bridge would be better, you know.” Johnny explained that they hadn’t enough pieces. Churchill waved his hand impatiently, summoned a servant, and sent her out to buy several Meccano boxes. Then, Johnny remembers, he “took off his coat and began preparing the largest model bascule bridge ever…. The final construction was a gigantic piece of engineering some fifteen feet long and eight feet high, with a roadway which could be lifted by means of wheels, pulleys and yards of string.” It was so big that the dining room became unusable. The family had to eat elsewhere.¹³⁸

He also played “gorilla” with the children. Donning his oldest clothes, he would lurk behind shrubbery, waiting for one of them to appear. When one did, he would leap out roaring “Grr! Grr!” and advance menacingly, his arms swinging limply at his sides. “The realism was alarming,” Johnny recalls, “but we squealed with delight and enjoyed this exclusive performance hugely. Few people can say that they have seen an ex–First Lord of the Admiralty crouching in the branches of an oak, baring his teeth and pounding his chest with his fists.” Winston’s son remembered that when his father dropped from a limb, “we would all scatter in various directions. He would pursue us and the one he caught would be the loser.”¹³⁹

In the Dardanelles Committee the ex–first lord was less effective, but he had lost none of his persuasive powers, and in the beginning most of his recommendations were adopted. On June 1 he circulated a paper among the other members, arguing that while a decision in France had proved impossible, a relatively small expansion of Hamilton’s army could bring victory. “It seems most urgent,” he wrote, “to try to obtain a decision here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.” Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson, another old Churchill adversary, disagreed, but the committee voted to send five more divisions to Gallipoli. In France, Sir Henry Wilson raged: “That makes 9 there and 22 here, and not a single Boche facing the 9. How they will laugh in Berlin.” In any event there was no doubt that Britain was betting heavily on Gallipoli. Hamilton’s army now numbered 120,000 troops. Surely he could break through.¹⁴⁰

He didn’t. An old military maxim runs: “Never reinforce failure.” That is how Hamilton used his fresh troops. Churchill telegraphed him, urging a landing on the Bulair Isthmus. Hamilton, obsessed with logistics and matériel, replied that he doubted his troops were capable of the effort, or that it could succeed under the best of conditions. His troops, bogged down, fought, not only Turks, but also summer flies. Discipline grew lax; the men grumbled that they were victims of “the politicians.” Hamilton wired the War Office that he needed ninety-five thousand more men to provide “the necessary superiority.”¹⁴¹ Kitchener told him that Gallipoli had had its chance, and the Dardanelles Committee, to Winston’s alarm, began to consider evacuating the peninsula. Whatever the problems in the east, Churchill said, the west was not the answer. In September the first troops of Kitchener’s army went over the top in France to capture the village of Loos and the high ground a mile beyond. After two days fifteen thousand English and Scottish soldiers had been killed and the German wire was intact. Churchill searched the map again, and, the following month, when Bulgaria entered the war as a German ally, drew up a four-point plan of attack to open a broad Balkan front from the Aegean, offering opportunities for movement and thrusts.

It was rejected. Churchill’s theories of war, Aitken concluded, were “so hare-brained that it would be humorous if the lives of men were things to joke about, or, I might add, to trifle with.” Even Violet Asquith, who defended him passionately, rated him “a guided gambler.” In fact, his military thought was on a plane so extraordinary that others simply could not grasp it. In his multivolume history of the Great War he dwelt upon the significance of maneuver, which, he wrote, may assume many forms, “in time, in diplomacy, in mechanics, in psychology.” Only when military and political thought were joined could leaders discover “easier ways, other than sheer slaughter, of achieving the main purpose.” As he conceived of it, the “distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised. At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”¹⁴² Thus the internal political complexes of the Balkan states, in his mind, were linked to events on all European battlefields. Because these states were politically weak, the opportunities were there and should be seized. Others, lacking his imaginative grasp, dismissed him as superficial. Actually, he was plumbing depths whose very existence was unsuspected by them.

And so the achievements his genius might have wrought were irrevocably lost. His credibility had shrunk as Hamilton’s prospects for victory faded. Once more he was being blamed for a plan that had not been his. Accustomed to respect and even deference, he now had to endure slights which, less than a year ago, would have been unthinkable. Balfour recalled Fisher from Scotland and appointed him chairman of the Admiralty’s Committee on Inventions and Research. Churchill angrily wrote Asquith: “Fisher resigned his office without warning or parley…. You ordered Fisher to return to his post in the name of the King. He paid no attention to yr order. You declared that he had deserted his post in time of war; & the facts are not open to any other construction. For ten days or more the country was without a First Sea Lord as Fisher did not even do his duty till his successor was appointed.” To Balfour he added: “All this must be viewed in relation to a very old man.” He decided not to send the letter, but made his views known to the prime minister through a mutual friend. It didn’t matter. His protest was ignored. The next week Kitchener suggested that he make an official trip to the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. Winston was delighted. Since all British positions on the peninsula were within range of Turkish artillery, he took out a new insurance policy, giving him £10,300 coverage. In addition he held £1,000 in Witbank Collieries stock. He explained all this in a letter to Clementine, to be delivered in the event of his death, and told her where she could find the “complete” Admiralty papers documenting his record. “There is no hurry,” he wrote, “but some day I shd like the truth to be known. Randolph will carry on the lamp. Do not grieve for me too much. I am a spirit confident of my rights. Death is only an incident, & not the most important wh happens to us in this state of being. On the whole, especially since I met you my darling one I have been happy, & you have taught me how noble a woman’s heart can be. If there is anywhere else I shall be on the look out for you. Meanwhile, look forward, feel free, rejoice in life, cherish the children, guard my memory. God bless you. Good bye. W.”¹⁴³

Kitchener suggested that Hankey accompany him, and it was agreed. The King sent word to him that he was “glad to hear” of his mission. A warm note arrived from Grey. Winston spent a final Sunday with the family at Hoe Farm. Then, after the cabinet meeting had broken up Monday morning, Asquith, Kitchener, and Grey gathered around to wish him a fond farewell. At that point a Tory minister unexpectedly returned and asked where Churchill was going. Told, he made a beeline for Bonar Law. The upshot was that the Conservatives opposed the trip. Asquith again caved in rather than, as he told Churchill, face “any serious division of opinion.” Lord Curzon, one of the Tories who had protested, wrote Winston that “we shared a doubt as to the reception that public opinion might give to such an act, for which the Govt would be held collectively responsible.” The unkindest cut came from Kitchener. The reason he had asked Hankey to go along, he said, was that he thought someone should watch Churchill. After discussing the Tory veto with K of K, Lord Esher wrote in his diary: “He laughed over it a good deal and admitted that he would not have been sorry to get rid of Winston for a while.” News of this reached Churchill. The message to him was clear. He wasn’t wanted. He wasn’t even trusted.¹⁴⁴

If others had doubts about forcing the Narrows, British submarine commanders didn’t. They slipped in and out, roaming the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea and sinking Turkish ships within sight of Constantinople. Because of them, enemy troops were chronically short of ammunition. Nevertheless, the British learned from prisoners, aerial reconnaissance, and agents in Constantinople that Turkish reinforcements were pouring into Gallipoli. Hamilton wrung his hands. On October 16 he was sacked and General Sir Charles Monro, who had been fighting in France, replaced him. One of Monro’s first duties, the War Office told him, would be to determine whether or not the peninsula should be abandoned. Since he was an ardent Westerner, scornful of this theater, there could be little doubt about his decision. Churchill later called him “an officer of quick decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” Before he could take over, however, Roger Keyes made a last plea for a naval assault on the Narrows. He arrived in London on October 28 and converted Balfour and the sea lords. Churchill saw a sparkle of hope. “I believe,” he wrote, “we have been all these months in the position of the Spanish prisoner who languished for twenty years in a dungeon until one morning the idea struck him to push the door which had been open all the time.”¹⁴⁵

When Kitchener joined his proselytes, Keyes seemed to have won. Asquith, Balfour, and Kitchener gathered to plan “an abrupt naval coup de main upon the Straits.” But Balfour, hedging his bet, said the navy would act only if the army also attacked—which would require Monro’s approval—and Law threatened to resign unless the whole Turkish theater was shut down. After a communications breakdown between London and the Aegean, Kitchener personally visited the peninsula. He met Keyes aboard the Dartmouth. “Well, I have seen the place,” he said. “It is an awful place, and you will never get through.” Keyes asked what had changed his mind. K of K was vague, but it is a fair guess that Monro had decided him. Hamilton’s successor was on the scene now, spreading defeatism. Kitchener wired London that the Suvla and Anzac beachheads should be evacuated. Cape Helles would be held “for the time being.”¹⁴⁶

On November 6 the Dardanelles Committee was renamed the War Cabinet and Winston was excluded from it. It was time for him to go; past time. He had known it for weeks. Early in September he had asked Asquith for a field command, suggesting that a major general’s commission and the command of an army corps would be appropriate for someone with his knowledge and experience. The prime minister approached Kitchener, who said that he “would like to get rid of Churchill, but could not offend the Army.” Winston then proposed that he be appointed “Governor-General and Military Commander-in-Chief of British East Africa.” He felt sure he could raise an army of Africans. Balfour told Hankey and James Masterton-Smith, a veteran civil servant at the Admiralty, a version of this. Hankey entered it in his diary. Churchill, according to Balfour, had given Asquith “a scheme for attacking the Germans” in their African colonies “with armoured cars.” He added that perhaps if he succeeded in this, the “military objections to his [assuming] a high post of command would disappear. All this tickled Mr. Balfour so much that he positively pirouetted on one foot, looking very odd in his long frock coat, so that Masterton-Smith and I fairly roared with laughter.”¹⁴⁷

The laughingstock of the cabinet submitted his resignation on November 11. Asquith accepted it the next day. Not many mourned his departure. The Manchester Guardian was one; an editorial described it as “a great national loss, for in our opinion—though we dare say there are few who now share it—he had the best strategic sense in the Government…. There have been two opportunities of winning the war. One was last October before the fall of Antwerp, the other was this spring when a great effort by land and sea would have won through to Constantinople and saved us all of our troubles in the East now. Mr Churchill saw them both at the time and though his ideas were adopted, neither in Flanders nor in the East did they have anything like a fair chance.”¹⁴⁸

Churchill was without political office for the first time in ten years, and as was customary when ministers stepped down, he made a personal statement in the House of Commons—a privilege which had been withheld from him when he left the Admiralty. Later he expanded his remarks before the commission investigating the Turkish campaign. He denied that he had “foisted” a civilian plan upon “reluctant officers and experts.” He said: “You may condemn the men who tried to force the Dardanelles, but your children will keep their condemnation for those who did not rally to their aid.” In his peroration he cried: “Undertake no operation in the West which is more costly to us in life than to the enemy. In the East, take Constantinople. Take it by ships if you can. Take it by soldiers if you must. Take it by whichever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts. But take it; take it soon; take it while time remains.” Asquith rose from the Treasury Bench to acknowledge his departure briefly. He praised him as “a wise counsellor, a brilliant colleague, and a faithful friend,” but did not mention his own role in the Dardanelles decisions. His daughter, who had watched from the gallery, wrote Winston “one line to say I thought your speech quite flawless—I have seldom been more moved…. Is there anything you haven’t got for the Front? Compass? Luminous wristwatch? Muffler & Tinderlighter? If there is any lacuna in your equipment let me fill it.”¹⁴⁹

There was one, but she could do nothing about it. He needed a command. At the very least, he thought, he should be given a brigade, preferably in a division fighting Turks. He didn’t get one. It was fashionable that fall, in Parliament and the War Office, to deride him as an attitudinarian who had been a “mere subaltern.” In fact, his military qualifications were more substantial than that. He was a reserve major who had commanded the defense of Antwerp. As a young officer he had seen fighting in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa. Twice he had witnessed German war maneuvers, an advantage no one on the general staff shared. He had made a thorough study of the arts of war and had published five books on military subjects. His years as first lord ought to have counted for a great deal. “Instead,” as Max Aitken wrote afterward, “he was extruded from the centre of action by men of lesser ability and initiative, and his knowledge and his inventiveness of mind—all were wasted.”¹⁵⁰ Asquith and Kitchener ignored his every appeal. In the end he had only his commission in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars—that and his acquaintances among the redtabs in France, which, because of his genteel birth and public career, were several. He decided to join his regiment in France. There, at least, he would be among friends. He would see what else he could manage along the way.

On Tuesday, November 16, he held a farewell luncheon at 41 Cromwell Road, inviting Goonie, Nellie Hozier, Eddie Marsh, and Margot and Violet Asquith. Violet would later remember that “Clemmie was admirably calm and brave, the rest of us trying to ‘play up’ and hide our leaden hearts. Winston alone was at his gayest and his best and he and Margot held the table between them. They had always been an uneasy combination, as neither of them really enjoyed the other’s society and she could not forbear from rubbing in the evils which had followed in the wake of the coalition and reminding him that he had always wanted one. He made his stock reply, that we should have sought one, not in our hour of weakness but at a time of strength.” For the rest of the group, Violet thought, the lunch “was a kind of wake.”¹⁵¹

Wednesday, Aitken arrived, bursting with energy, as always, and found “the whole household was upside down while the soldier-statesman was buckling on his sword.” He was also supervising the packing of cigars, port, vermouth, whiskey, camping equipment, and assorted creature comforts. “Downstairs,” Aitken saw, “Mr ‘Eddie’ Marsh, his faithful secretary, was in tears…. Upstairs, Lady Randolph was in a state of despair at the idea of her brilliant son being relegated to the trenches. Mrs Churchill seemed to be the only person who remained calm, collected and efficient.” On Thursday, Major Churchill crossed the Channel aboard a regular steamer to Boulogne, where, to his surprise, a car had been sent by Sir John French to meet him. After reporting to his regiment, he joined the BEF’s commander in chief for dinner at Saint-Omer “in a fine château,” he wrote home, “with hot baths, beds, champagne & all the conveniences.” French received him warmly; his own position had become highly precarious, and he could empathize with the fallen Churchill. More generous than Asquith or the War Office, he offered him a choice between serving here as an ADC or commanding a brigade. “The brigade,” Winston instantly replied. It was settled that he would first spend a training period with the Grenadier Guards. He wrote home: “Midnight. My dearest soul—(this is what the gt d of Marlborough used to write from the low countries to his cat) All is vy well arranged… but as I do not know to wh battalion I am to be sent, I cannot tell the rota in wh we shall go into the trenches.”¹⁵²

Approaching the front in that war was a shocking experience. Winston hadn’t been in the field in fifteen years, and he had never seen anything like this. He was a middle-aged man, accustomed to indulgence, whose skin felt unchafed only when caressed by silk. There would be none of that here. On Saturday he lunched at La Gorgue and learned that he had been attached to the grenadiers’ Second Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George “Ma” Jeffreys, the only surviving officer of the original battalion which had gone into action here in 1914. They would be reentering the line that night in front of Merville, near Neuve Chappelle, one of the many villages, like Ypres, Bullecourt, and Messines, whose very names had become symbols for the suffering here. He was driven part of the way toward the thundering artillery and then proceeded on foot with Jeffreys’s sweating, heavy-laden, sleepy-eyed headquarters staff. “It was a dull November afternoon,” he would write in the March 1924 issue of Nash’s Pall Mall. “An icy drizzle fell over the darkening plain. As we approached the line, the red flashes of the guns stabbed the sombre landscape on either side of the road, to the sound of an intermittent cannonade.” After nearly four hours they reached battalion headquarters, “a pulverized ruin called Ebenezer Farm,” where they were provided with rations and “strong tea with condensed milk”—not his idea of liquid refreshment.¹⁵³

Jeffreys greeted him coldly: “I think I ought to tell you that we were not at all consulted in the matter of your coming to us.” Winston respectfully replied that the decision had not been his; he ventured to say it would work; in any case they must make the best of it. After a long, hostile silence, the adjutant said: “I am afraid we have had to cut down your kit rather, Major. There are no communication trenches here. We are doing all our reliefs over the top. The men have little more than what they stand up in. We have found a servant for you, who is carrying a spare pair of socks and your shaving gear. We have had to leave the rest behind.” Churchill said that was “quite all right”; he was sure he would be “very comfortable.”¹⁵⁴

No one spoke to him again as they moved up. He felt, he said afterward, “like a new boy at school in charge of the Headmaster, the monitors, and the senior scholars.” He knew why; every British soldier in France was bitter about the reinforcements which had been sent to Gallipoli, and he, of course, was to blame for that. At length they leapt over a parapet and rushed into the front-line trenches. There he was given his choice of sleeping quarters for the night, a signal office eight feet square, stiflingly hot, and occupied by four busy Morse signalers, and a dugout two hundred yards away. Having “surveyed” the signal room, he asked for directions to the dugout and was led there. It turned out, he later recalled, to be “a sort of pit four feet deep containing about one foot of water.” It was there, in the mud of Flanders, trapped in a deadlock he had tried so hard to break, that he learned the outcome of his hopes in the east. It came in a scrawled postscript to a letter from Clementine: “Large posters just out:—TROOPS WITHDRAWN FROM DARDANELLES—OFFICIAL.” After 213,980 British casualties, the evacuation of Gallipoli had begun. It would continue through December into January. Not a man fell in winding down the operation. Virtually all future losses would be here on the western front, where no end was in sight.¹⁵⁵

So frosty a reception by fellow officers would have daunted almost any other newcomer, but Winston was too proud, and his ego too strong, to be scarred by petty slights. He was, he later wrote, “infinitely amused at the elaborate pains they took to put me in my place and to make me realize that nothing counted at the front except military rank and behaviour.” Here they were wrong. He expected special treatment and he got it. Soldiers’ mail was notoriously slow; letters to and from Cromwell Road, carried by a King’s messenger from the Admiralty, were delivered overnight. No other fighting man could speak to his wife over a telephone. Churchill did; he rode back to French’s GHQ and heard her over a special Admiralty line. After hanging up he wrote Clementine that because another officer had been in the room, “I cd not say much & even feared you might think I was abrupt.” She wrote that the conversation had been “very tantalising, as there is so much I want to say to you which cannot be shouted into an unsympathetic receiver!” But millions of husbands and wives would have given much to be so constrained, and so tantalized.¹⁵⁶

August visitors traipsed up to the trenches to see him: Lord Curzon, General Seely, and F. E. Smith, now attorney general, who, to his fury, was arrested by a sentry for want of a proper pass. At Saint-Omer, Winston had encountered another acquaintance, Edward Louis Spiers. They had met before the war in the home of Venetia Stanley’s sister Sylvia. Spiers, now a young cavalry captain, was serving as a liaison officer between the BEF and Joffre’s staff. He invited Winston to join him in a tour of the French lines. Churchill was confident that he was immune to AWOL charges—he was right—and off they went. A French general insisted on being photographed with Winston. Churchill wrote home: “I was received with much attention, more so in fact than when I went as 1st Lord.” As a parting gift he was crowned with a poilu’s steel helmet, “wh I am going to wear,” he told Clementine, “as it looks so nice & will perhaps protect my valuable cranium.”¹⁵⁷

The battalion adjutant could not limit him to spare socks and a razor. He was entitled to his kit; he got it, and more. If he had to live in such conditions, he intended to be properly equipped. His wife sent him a pillow. That was a start. Somehow he acquired a tin bathtub, a pocket Shakespeare, then brandy—Jeffreys kept a “dry” mess—and a stock of fine cigars. Clementine wrote: “I wake up in the night & think of you shivering in the trenches; it makes me so miserable (You know how warm the Kat has to be before she can sleep).” Like Violet Asquith, she wanted to know if she could send him anything to make his life more endurable. As a matter of fact, he replied, she could. He wanted a leather waistcoat, a pair of wading boots (“water proof canvas tops coming right up to the thigh”), a periscope (“most important”), a sheepskin sleeping bag, two pairs of khaki trousers, a pair of brown buttoned boots, and three small face towels. “Voilà tout!” he wrote at the end. “Your little pillow is a boon & a pet.”¹⁵⁸

How did the other officers feel about this? Astonishingly, they not only tolerated him; he became genuinely popular. He invited them to share his brandy, cigars, tub, and the groaning hampers of food from Cromwell Road. “I never saw such dainties & such profusion,” he wrote Clementine of one which arrived when the battalion was in a rear area. “We shall eat them sparingly keeping the best for the trenches.” He volunteered to join Jeffreys on his daily rounds of the lines, and thereafter, as he put it, he and the colonel “slid or splashed or plodded together through snow or mud… for two or three hours at a time each day and night; and bit by bit he forgot that I was a ‘politician’ and that he ‘had not been consulted in the matter of my coming to his battalion.’ ” Presently the second in command went on leave; Winston was asked to take his place. He accepted, solemnly declaring this “one of the greatest honours I have ever received.” Then he startled Jeffreys by suggesting that he could learn more about trench warfare if he lived, not in the comparative comfort of battalion headquarters, but up with one of the line companies, on the edge of no-man’s-land.¹⁵⁹

Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, 1916

Amazingly, he learned to like it. “It is,” he admitted, “a vy curious life to live.” But after the humble, fettered duchy of Lancaster, after being blamed for what went wrong when he lacked the power to make it right, he felt free. “I do not feel any prick of conscience at being out here,” he wrote Curzon. “I was and am sure that for the time being my usefulness was exhausted and that I could only recover it by a definite and perhaps a prolonged withdrawal…. I do not know when I have passed a more joyous three weeks:… I share the fortunes of a company of Grenadiers. It is a jolly life with nice people; and one does not mind the cold and wet and general discomfort.” The “indomitable good temper” and “inflexible discipline” of the grenadiers impressed him. He in turn charmed them by referring to himself as “the escaped scapegoat” and saying: “Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right than responsible and wrong.” Major General the Lord Cavan, the commander of the Guards Division, proposed that he wait at brigade headquarters, away from the slime of the front, until a suitable command could be found for him. He declined, writing Clementine: “I said I wouldn’t miss a day of it. Nor did I.” He wrote again: “I am vy happy here. I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed peace. How I ever cd have wasted so many months in impotent misery, wh I might have spent in war, I cannot tell.”¹⁶⁰

He won the affection of the men by his easy manner with them. He wrote: “I keep watch during part of the night so that others may sleep. Last night I found a sentry asleep on his post. I frightened him dreadfully but did not charge him with the crime. He was only a lad, & I am not an officer of the regiment. The penalty is death or at least 2 years.” The troops also delighted in his treatment of visiting officers from Saint-Omer; he insisted they join him in an inspection of the front line, where their highly polished boots became spattered with mud and their elegant whipcord breeches torn on the barbed wire. One pompous brigadier, arriving after the battalion’s position had been damaged by a heavy barrage, told him that this really would not do, that the place must be made safe: “You know, it’s dangerous—positively dangerous.” Churchill replied: “Yes, sir. But this is a very dangerous war.” No major British offensives were launched during his six months in Flanders, but it was a wretched existence, and why he should have looked forward to his spells on the brink of no-man’s-land so eagerly is difficult to grasp. As he later wrote, “cannonade and fusillade were unceasing” and “no one was ever dry or warm.” Part of the reason lay in his remarkable gift for romanticizing squalor. In a letter to his wife he wrote: “Last night… after dinner, I had a splendid walk with Archie [Archibald Sinclair, his second in command and later a political colleague] all over the top of the ground. We left the trenches altogether and made a thorough examination of all the fields, tracks, ruins etc immediately behind our line. You cannot show yourself here by day, but in the bright moonlight it is possible to move about without danger (except from random bullets) & to gain a vy clear impression. Archie was a vy good guide. We also went in front of our parapet into the No man’s land & prowled about looking at our wire & visiting our listening posts. This is always exciting.” On November 30 the Germans celebrated his forty-first birthday by shelling him for three hours—which is how he, the ultimate egoist, regarded it. Then the battalion left the line for a rest, and he exulted in telling Clementine how they marched “while the men sang ‘Tipperary’ and the ‘Farmer’s Boy’ and the guns boomed applause. It is like getting to a jolly good tavern after a long day’s hunting, wet & cold & hungry, but not without having had sport.” He was, he confessed, dazzled by “the bright eyes of danger.”¹⁶¹

Undoubtedly he enjoyed isolation from the abuse and intrigues of London. But the essence of his Flanders mood—finding profound satisfaction where others saw only horror—lay deeper. It derived from a hard, medieval streak, a capacity for viewing bestiality and senseless brutality with a clear, untroubled gaze, responding in kind, even glorying in it. He was fascinated by scenes which revolted others. Few men, what ever their peacetime pursuits, could bear the sight of bloated rats feeding on corpses. In one stretch of earthworks abandoned by the Germans, Edward Spiers later recalled, the rodents “were appalling things; they were huge…. Had you fallen in a trench you would never have gotten out alive. They would have devoured you. One heard them at night running about in the barbed wire.” Churchill thought them immensely interesting. “Winston,” Spiers remembered, “pointed out that they played a very useful role in eating human bodies.” In a letter to Clementine, he described a patrol of Tommies returning from no-man’s-land with a captured German: “Such men you never saw. The scene in the little dugout when the prisoner was brought in surrounded by these terrific warriors, in jerkins & steel helmets with their bloody clubs in hand—looking pictures of ruthless war—was one to stay in the memory. C’est très bon.”¹⁶²

And yet…

The mind-set of the warrior is rigid, inflexible, fiercely intolerant. He cannot think kindly of the enemy; cannot, usually, regard him as human. And any suggestion that his own view of war may be even slightly flawed is both provocative and profoundly resented. Churchill did not fit that mold at all. He was, in fact, its obverse. In World War II he would shock Britain by praising the generalship of Erwin Rommel. In this war he became captivated by the poetry of England’s most eloquent pacifist, an officer spared by a court-martial solely because of his valiant combat record. One of Winston’s acquaintances wrote a friend: “By the way, who is Siegfried Sassoon?… Winston knows his last volume of poems by heart, and rolls them out on every possible occasion.” A lieutenant, recalling such a recitation, wrote: “I had never heard of Sassoon or his poems and we were soon told something of his history…. We quickly realized that the main theme of the poems was anti-war, the futility of war and the misery war brought. We heard that the Generals were seriously worried at the damage to morale these poems might inflict on the troops.” An officer said to Churchill: “I should leave that man alone if I were you. He might start writing a poem about you.” Churchill instantly replied: “I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.”¹⁶³

Later in the war, when Winston was back in London, Eddie Marsh introduced the two men. Sassoon’s recollection of the meeting survives. He found Winston “leisurely, informal, and friendly. Almost at once I began to feel a liking for him…. He broached—in a good-humoured way—the subject of my attitude to the War, about which—to my surprise—he seemed interested to hear my point of view.” Churchill, Sassoon recalled, “was making me feel that I should like to have him as my company commander.” There came a point, however, when the conversation developed into a monologue: “Pacing the room, with a big cigar in the corner of his mouth, he gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual achievements…. Transfixed and submissive in my chair, I realized that what had begun as a persuasive confutation of my anti-war convictions was now addressed, in pauseful and perorating prose, to no one in particular.” As the dazed poet left, Winston offered him a civilian appointment. “Had he,” Sassoon wondered, “been entirely serious… when he said that ‘war is the normal occupation of man’? He had indeed qualified the statement by adding ‘war—and gardening.’ But it had been unmistakable that for him war was the finest activity on earth.”¹⁶⁴

Certainly it stimulated him. On December 28, 1915, The Times carried an interview with a corporal, an Orangeman, who was quoted as saying of Churchill, “A cooler and braver officer never wore the King’s uniform…. During the Ulster business before the war there was no man more detested in Belfast, but after what we have seen of him here we are willing to let bygones be bygones—and that is a big concession for Ulstermen to make…. His coolness is the subject of much discussion among us, and everybody admires him.” Repeatedly, when he was elsewhere on the line, his frail sandbagged shelter was demolished by direct hits. Like Douglas MacArthur, who also defied enemy fire here two years later, he felt shielded by mysterious intervention, believing that “Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.” One experience, as he saw it, seemed to confirm him. At the end of his first week at the front he received word that the corps commander wanted to see him in Merville; a car would meet him at the Rouge Croix crossroads. It was a muddy, three-mile hike, under German observation most of the time; he would write afterward that “the shriek of [enemy] shells” was constant, but he and his batman “toiled and sweated on,” until, on arrival, they were dumbfounded to learn that the general had changed his mind. What, Churchill asked a staff officer, was the point of the rendezvous? “Oh, it was nothing in particular,” the staff officer replied. “He thought as he was coming up this way he would like to have a talk with you.” Winston was furious. He began “another long, sliding, slippery, splashing waddle back to the trenches…. The sedentary life of a Cabinet Minister, which I had quitted scarcely a month before, had not left me much opportunity to keep fit.” Back with the grenadiers, someone shouted to him: “You’re in luck today.” Five minutes after he had left, his dugout had been blown up. The officer with whom he shared it had been annihilated. “Suddenly,” Churchill wrote afterward, “I felt my irritation against General———pass completely from my mind. All sense of grievance departed in a flash…. How thoughtful it had been of him to wish to see me again, and to show courtesy to a subordinate…. And then upon these quaint reflections there came the strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot.”¹⁶⁵

His mother begged him to “be sensible” and “take the trenches in small doses”—as though he could manage that. Jennie felt close to him now; like his father at about the same age, he had quit the cabinet in disgrace. But Winston was unresponsive to her; his daily missives went to Clementine. In a typical letter from a rear area he began: “I sit in a battered wicker chair within this shell scarred dwelling by the glowing coals of a brazier in the light of an acetyline lamp.” The grenadiers had been “hunted by shells during these last two days in ‘rest billets.’ ” His bedroom had been pierced by shells three times; a nearby church steeple, which had withstood sixteen months of fighting, had been obliterated. “One lives calmly on the brink of the abyss,” he wrote. He had come to understand how the unremitting strain transformed men, their first ebullience fading and leaving only “dull resentment.” The infantrymen he had spoken to during his trench tours sensed the “utter inability to take a decision on the part of the Government…. Some urge me to return and try to break them up. I reply no—I will not go back unless I am wounded; or unless I have effective control.” Clementine was the one constant, indispensable figure in his squalid trench life. He endorsed virtually all of her political judgments; she was his “vy wise & sagacious pussy cat.” Once several days passed with no mail from Cromwell Road; he signed himself “your vilely neglected pig.” His letters to her often read like those of a child writing home from camp, and like a camper he made many small demands: “I want 2 more pairs of thick Jaeger draws [sic] vests & socks (soft), 2 more pairs of brown leather gloves (warm) 1 more pair of field boots (like those I had from Fortnum & Mason) only from the fourth hole from the bottom instead of holes there shd be good strong tags for lacing quicker. One size larger than the last. Also one more pair of Fortnum & M’s ankle boots…. With these continual wettings and no means of drying one must have plenty of spares…. Also send me a big bath towel. I now have to wipe myself all over with things that resemble pocket handkerchiefs.”¹⁶⁶

She eagerly complied. Her need was as great as his, her worry greater. When he wrote her of his aborted rendezvous with the corps commander, she replied in anguish: “It is horrible to sit here in warmth & luxury while danger & suffering are so close to you. That dreadful walk across the fields there & back among falling shells was on Nov. 24th & now it is 10 days later & Heaven knows what narrow escapes you may have had since.” One of Winston’s cousins—his aunt Clara’s daughter Clare, who, like Venetia Stanley, had been a bridesmaid at their wedding—had just learned that her husband had been killed in France. Clementine wrote: “My darling, I don’t know how one bears such things. I feel I could not weather such a blow. She has a beautiful little son 8 weeks old, but now her poor ‘black puss’ sleeps in Flanders. You must come back to me my dear one.” She prayed that he wore “a steel helmet always & not the Glengarry.” She had “ceased to have ambitions for you. Just come back to me alive that’s all.” She loved him “very much more even than I thought I did—for Seven years you have filled my whole life & now I feel more than half my life has vanished across the channel.” She wondered: “If I came to Dieppe could you get 2 days’ leave? I’m very very lonely.” Dieppe proved impossible, but later he slipped home from time to time. Like all wartime couples they desperately sought privacy during their brief hours together, once in Dover Pier’s dreary Lord Walden Hotel and once in Cromwell Road, after which they had to cut it rather fine at Victoria Station. In her note to him that evening one recognizes the powerful tug between the shadow of death and the light of desire: “I could not tell you how much I wanted you at the station. I was so out of breath with running for the train.”¹⁶⁷

Love letters should not be taken literally. Their very language is hyperbole. Winston did not really mean that he was determined to stay at the front until either wounded or recalled to high office. Nor had Clementine forsaken her hopes for his career. Both saw future greatness for him on a far shore; the problem was to navigate the bewildering currents between here and there. Sir John French’s promise of a brigade—four thousand men—might provide a way. A brilliant stroke in the field could bring acclaim, a reversal of his political fortunes, and, conceivably, a chance to change the direction of the war. “The hour of Asquith’s punishment and K’s exposure draws nearer,” he wrote his wife. These “wretched men,” he went on, “have nearly wrecked our chances. It may fall to me to strike the blow. I shall do it without compunction.”¹⁶⁸

“I long for you to have a Brigade,” she wrote back. But she had misgivings. The leap from major to brigadier general was a mighty one. Lord Cavan counseled caution. Lead a battalion first, he advised Winston; get the feel of handling troops and then take on the greater responsibility. Clementine thought that wise: “I am absolutely certain that whoever is C. in C., you will rise to high commands…. But everyone who really loves you & has your interest at heart wants you to go step by step whereas I notice the Downing Street tone is ‘of course Winston will have a brigade in a fortnight.’ Thus do they hope to ease their conscience from the wrong they have done you, and then hope to hear no more of you…. Do get a battalion now & a brigade later.”¹⁶⁹

Upon reflection, he agreed. The field marshal, however, wouldn’t hear of it. Churchill wrote: “I proposed to French that I shd take a battalion; but he rejected it, & said ‘no a brigade at once’ & that he wd settle it quickly in case any accident shd happen to him. I have acquiesced.” One doubts he had been hard to persuade. He was dreaming of glory on the battlefield. On December 2 Edward Grigg, a grenadier officer, wrote his mother: “Winston was attached to the Company again for all the last period in the firing line. It was very cold and very wet—first a bitter frost, and then rain, sleet and thaw, which puts us up to the calf in mud and slime. That part of the line is in bad order, too, and we had nothing but a small dug-out about 2 ft 6 high with a wet mud floor to live and sleep in, and we all got kinks in our spines getting in and out of the beastly thing. But Winston accepted the situation with great cheerfulness and we had quite a good time. He has forgotten his political legacy from Lord Randolph, and thinks much more, I am sure, of the military instincts which have descended to him from the great Duke of Marlborough.”¹⁷⁰

Later in the month he was summoned to GHQ. French was in England, he was told, but his appointment as brigadier general was definite. He would command the Fifty-sixth Brigade in the Nineteenth Division, which, he wrote home, “is a regular Division in the second new army, & the Bde I shall command comprises 4 Lancashire Battalions…. Altogether it is a vy satisfactory arrangement.” He anticipated some “criticism & carping” at home, but no more than if he had taken a battalion for a few weeks, in which case it would have been said that he had used it “merely as a stepping stone etc.” He was “satisfied this is the right thing to do in the circumstances, & for the rest my attention will concentrate upon the Germans.” Spiers would be his brigade major; Eddie Marsh, he hoped, would be brought over in one capacity or another. He asked Clementine to order a new tunic bearing a brigadier’s insignia. She, for her part, forgot her qualms, and wrote back that she was “thrilled.”¹⁷¹

Not everyone in London was thrilled. Over lunch, in the crowded grillroom of the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, Lord Esher, just back from Saint-Omer, told her: “Of course you know Winston is taking a Brigade & as a personal friend of his I am very sorry about it; as I think he is making a great mistake. Of course it’s not his fault, Sir John forced it upon him.” She put all this in a letter to her husband, adding: “He then launched forth again, saying that you had been in the greatest danger, in more than was necessary etc & that French had determined to give you this Brigade as he was convinced you wd otherwise be killed. After this I crawled home quite stunned & heart-broken.” Churchill himself was unsurprised; he had begun to appreciate the unpopularity of the appointment. At GHQ Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “Winston came up this morning to my room & had a long talk. I advised him not to take a Brigade as it would be bad for Sir John, Winston and the Brigade, but I did not convince him.”¹⁷²

Sir Henry was dissembling—a complex man, he couldn’t even be candid in his diary—for by then he surely knew that Sir John was beyond help or harm. At that moment the commander in chief was facing the music in Downing Street, the victim of bad strategy, worse tactics, an impossible war, and, to some extent, the disloyal intrigues of his senior subordinate, Sir Douglas Haig. Asquith wrote that he “had for some time felt past fears and growing doubts as to Sir John French’s capacity to stand the strain of his task with its ever-increasing and unforseeable responsibilities.” So he dismissed him. Before they parted, French mentioned that he had given Churchill a brigade, and, according to him, “Asquith said he was delighted.” But the prime minister was also a political weather vane, and he shortly learned that rumors of Churchill’s promotion had already aroused hostility in Parliament. Sir Charles Hunter, a Tory MP with a military background, rose at Question Time to ask “if Major Winston Churchill has been promised the command of an Infantry brigade; if this officer has ever commanded a battalion of Infantry; and for how many weeks he has served at the front as an Infantry Officer.” After an interval the under secretary of state for war deftly replied: “I have no knowledge myself, and have not been able to obtain any, of a promise of command of an Infantry brigade having been made to my right hon[orable] and gallant Friend referred to in the question.” Having “consulted books of reference and other authentic sources of information,” he had found that his gallant Friend had never commanded a battalion. As to the time he had been in combat, “the answer to the last part of the question would be about four weeks.” The House laughed. Hunter then demanded to know if Churchill had been assured of a battalion command. Several of Winston’s friends cried, “Why not?” Sir Charles Robertson, a former India army officer and an admirer of Churchill’s, inquired sarcastically: “Is not the question absurd on the face of it, Major Winston Churchill being under sixty years of age?” But another Tory MP, Evelyn Cecil, ended the exchange on a venomous note, asking: “Is the right hon[orable] Gentleman aware that if this appointment were made it would be thought by very many persons both inside and outside this House a grave scandal?”¹⁷³

Aitken had the impression that this “apparently frightened The Block.” He also heard that Bonar Law had expressed “unswerving antagonism to Churchill,” arguing that “to give Churchill an influence on the conduct of affairs in France would be a disaster,” and that Lloyd George “would not give any countenance to projects for Churchill’s preferment.” If true—Aitken was a prodigious gossip—this is puzzling, for when Law and George visited Haig at GHQ a month later, they told the new commander in chief that if he saw fit to give Winston a brigade there would be “no difficulty at home.” Whatever the pressures, Asquith swiftly buckled. He sent a note to French, who had not yet been formally relieved, saying that on reflection, far from being delighted, he feared that “with regard to our conversation about our friend—the appointment might cause some criticism” and was therefore inadvisable. “Perhaps,” he added, “you might give him a battalion.” Dismayed and embarrassed, French phoned Churchill at GHQ. “I have something extremely unpleasant to say,” he began, and then he read the prime minister’s veto. Winston was astonished. If he had wanted a battalion, he could have had it long ago; six months earlier, when the Dardanelles was winding down, he had been offered one in the QOOH. Churchill had just finished a letter to Clementine when the field marshal’s call had been put through. He unsealed the envelope and added on a slip marked “later”: “I reopen my letter to say that French has telephoned from London that the P.M. has written to him that I am not to have a Brigade but a Battalion. I hope however to secure one that is going into the line. You will cancel the order for the tunic! Do not allow the P.M. to discuss my affairs with you. Be vy cool & detached and avoid any sign of acquiescence in anything he may say.” She instantly replied: “My Dear—your letter has just come telling me that your hopes of a Brigade have vanished. I do trust that Haig will give you one later. If he does it may be all for the best—but if not it is cruel that the change at G.H.Q. came before all was fixed…. My own Darling I feel such absolute confidence in your future—it is your present which causes me agony—I feel as if I had a tight band of pain round my heart.”¹⁷⁴

Winston’s resentment deepened. “I am awfully bitter and so is French,” he wrote F. E. Smith; “what ill-fortune.” Brooding, he wrote Clementine: “To measure Asquith’s performance one has to remember that on my leaving the Admiralty he offered me a Brigade: & that when I told him three months ago of the offers French had made to me if I came out to the front, he advised me to go and assured me that any advancement wh was thought fitting by the C in C would have his hearty concurrence. One has to remember all the rest too of a long story of my work & connexion with him. Altogether I am inclined to think that his conduct reaches the limit of meanness & ungenerousness. Sentiments of friendship expressed in extravagant terms; coupled with a resolve not to incur the slightest criticism or encounter the smallest opposition—even from the most unworthy quarter. Personally I feel that every link is severed: & while I do not wish to decide in a hurry—my feeling is that all relationship should cease.” Clementine loved and honored her husband, but she did not always obey him. “You know I’m not good at pretending,” she wrote him, “but I am going to put my pride in my pocket and reconnoitre Downing Street.” Nothing came of it. Winston was unsurprised. The prime minister was a “weak and disloyal chief,” he said; “Asquith will throw anyone to the wolves to keep himself in office.” During a winter thaw, she accepted an invitation to join the Asquiths at Walmer Castle and wrote Winston of how they could “distinctly hear the rumble of heavy guns” across the Channel. She played golf with “the Prime who was feeling very pleasant & mellow… at one moment [I] thought I was going to give the boy a good beating (which I shd have relished) but Alas! I fell off towards the end & he won by a short length.” Winston reproached her mildly for going and asked what Asquith had said. She replied: “You know what the P.M. is—He loathes talking about the War or work of any sort—He asked anxiously if you were happy.”¹⁷⁵

The Block could be left to the mercies of Lloyd George, who now began his intricate campaign to dethrone the prime minister and then replace him. Churchill, meanwhile, had to deal with a new commander in chief. His wife wrote him: “Do you know Sir Douglas Haig? Did he agree to your appointment or was it finally settled before he supervened? He looks a superior man, but his expression is cold and prejudiced, & I fear he is narrow.” Actually, he and Winston had been acquainted in the early Edwardian years, when he was a major and Winston a young MP, but that had been long ago, and Haig, a dour Scot, was elusive even to those who were close to him. At Oxford he had been regarded as “head-strong, bad-tempered, and intractable.” In the army he had learned to control his temper, and he brought valuable qualities to Saint-Omer: a remarkable grasp of detail, tranquillity under pressure, and absolute self-confidence. He was blindly loyal to military tradition, however. “The role of the Cavalry on the battlefield,” he wrote, “will always go on increasing”; bullets, he believed, had “little stopping power against a horse.” One has the distinct feeling that to him, machine guns, tanks, and aircraft were, if not contemptible, at least bad form. His greatest assets in his rise had been his powerful social connections. His wife had been a member of the royal household, and he knew the King well enough to write him that French, his immediate superior, “is quite unfit for his command at a time of crisis in our nation’s history.”¹⁷⁶

The way to break through the German trench line, Haig thought, was to use horses in “mass tactics”—a theory which, as Leon Wolff points out, had been abandoned by even the most ardent cavalry officers. The official British history of the war would tactfully conclude that he was “not swift of thought.” Bernard Shaw, who visited GHQ shortly after Haig took over, wrote: “He was, I should say, a man of chivalrous and scrupulous character. He made me feel that the war would last thirty years, and that he would carry on irreproachably until he was superannuated.” Haig and Sir William (“Wully”) Robertson, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, were exponents of attrition. Churchill, attrition’s heretic, could expect little from them. No compromise was possible between his concept of war and theirs. After reading a Churchill memorandum on the use of tanks and mortars, Leo Amery wrote in his diary: “Whatever his defects may be, there is all the difference in the world between the tackling of a big problem like this by a man of real brain and imagination, and its handling by good second-rate men like Robertson and Haig, who still live in the intellectual trench in which they have been fighting.” On arriving in France, Winston had headed straight for the front to see for himself what it was like. In the whole course of the war, Haig never visited the trenches. Scenes of carnage, he said, might influence his judgement. Afterward Churchill etched him in acid. Haig, he wrote, reminded him of “a great surgeon before the days of anesthetic, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.”¹⁷⁷

This judgment lay in the future on December 18, 1915, Sir John French’s last day as commander in chief, when, after picnicking in the countryside with Winston, French returned to GHQ and approached Haig on what he called “a delicate personal matter.” He explained the broken promise to Churchill—broken by Asquith—and then, according to Haig’s diary, said he was “anxious that Winston should have a Battalion. I replied that I had no objection because Winston had done good work in the trenches, and we were short of Battalion CO’s.” The new commander in chief then sent for Churchill, who wrote Clementine that evening: “He treated me with the utmost kindness & consideration, assured me that nothing wd give him greater pleasure than to give me a Brigade, that his only wish was that able men shd come to the front, & that I might count on his sympathy in every way.” Beaming, Winston asked whether Haig would like to read “Variants of the Offensive,” a memorandum on trench warfare he had written while the grenadiers were in the rear area. He wrote home that Haig replied that “he wd be ‘honoured’—! So I am back on my perch again with my feathers stroked down.” Spiers wrote: “WC has Douglas Haig to heel. DH is ready to do anything for him.”¹⁷⁸

He was ready to do nothing of the sort. It is doubtful that Haig read “Variants of the Offensive.” If he had, he probably wouldn’t have understood it. And had he understood it, he would certainly have felt affronted. Churchill proposed flamethrowers, improvised infantry shields, wire-cutting torches fueled by gas cylinders, and massive tunneling operations. And he looked beyond the siege warfare in France and Belgium to fluid movements in other theaters of action. “He was probably the only member of Asquith’s Cabinet,” Clement Attlee would later write, “who had a grasp of strategy.” Certainly he seemed to be the only British officer in Flanders who grasped the desperate need for innovations. Civilization was bleeding to death. “The chaos of the first explosions,” he wrote, “has given place to the slow fire of trench warfare: the wild turbulence of the incalculable, the terrible sense of adventure have passed…. A sombre mood prevails in Britain. The faculty of wonder has been dulled; emotion and enthusiasm have been given place to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar, and sorrow numbs. The world is in twilight; and from beyond the dim flickering horizons comes tirelessly the thudding of the guns.”¹⁷⁹

On New Year’s Day, 1916, Haig appointed Churchill a lieutenant colonel and gave him an infantry battalion, the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers, consisting largely of Lowland Scots, many of them miners from the Ayrshire coalfields. Winston wrote home that he would be glad to see the last of Saint-Omer, “a desert” since French had left. He was now responsible for thirty officers and seven hundred men, and that evening he dined with the divisional commander at his headquarters in Merris. The grenadier colonel’s welcome had been cold, but here, he wrote, “they evidently will like vy much to have me. The general—Furse—is extremely well thought of here and is a thoroughly frank & broadminded man…. Most of the staff had met me soldiering somewhere or other, & we had a pleasant evening.”¹⁸⁰

His assurance was premature. Cheery greetings from the general and his staff were one thing; the battalion was another. The Sixth Royal Scots had been badly mauled at Loos and were deeply attached to their commanding officer, whom Churchill was replacing. The switch was therefore unpopular with them. Hakewill Smith, the battalion’s only regular officer, later recalled that he heard of it with “horror.” “When the news spread,” wrote Andrew Gibb, the young adjutant, “a mutinous spirit grew…. Why could not Churchill have gone to the Argylls if he must have a Scottish regiment! We should all have been greatly interested to see him in a kilt…. Indeed, any position at all in the Expeditionary Force seemed not too exalted for Winston if only he had left us our own CO and refrained from disturbing the peace of the pastures of Moolenacker.” Winston arrived there mounted, at the head of a cavalcade bearing his luggage, bathtub, and a boiler for heating the bath water. Moolenacker Farm, the battalion’s reserve billet, consisted, in his words, of “squalid little French farms rising from a sea of soppy field and muddy lanes.” The farm wives were awed. They whispered: “Monsieur le Ministre! Monsieur le Colonel!” “Ah, c’est lui?” “C’est votre Ministre?” The soldiers were less impressed. His first parade, after lunch, was a farce. The men were standing at slope arms when their new CO rode up on a black charger and cried: “Royal Scots Fusiliers! Fix bayonets!” As a cavalryman he did not know that this order could not be carried out from the slope. A few men put their rifles on the ground and yanked their bayonets from their scabbards; the rest stood immobile, baffled. Gibb whispered to him that “Order arms” must intervene, and Churchill growled the command. He inspected his troops and then barked another cavalry order: “Sections right!” This meant nothing to the Jocks. They didn’t budge. Gibb had to rescue him again.¹⁸¹

But he was determined to learn. He got the drill down, enrolled in nearby machine-gun and bomb-throwing schools, and patrolled the battalion area each night with Archie Sinclair. His batman found warm, dry quarters for him in one of the farmhouses, where, he wrote home, “the guns boom away in the distance, & at night the sky to the Northward blinks & flickers with the wicked lights of war.” It never entered his mind that he was not entitled to every available comfort; nor, in that day, before the rise of the egalitarian passion, did it occur to his men. But he was not an insensitive officer. To boost morale, he organized a concert and games. He wrote: “Poor fellows—nothing like this has been done for them before. They do not get much to brighten their lives—short though they might be.” He decided to brighten each of their days with a lecture from their CO. One day he struck a dogged pose and announced sonorously: “War is declared, gentlemen—on lice!” There followed, in Gibb’s words, “such a discourse on pulex Europaeua, its origin, growth, and nature, its habit and its importance as a factor in wars ancient and modern, as left one agape at the force of its author.” And then the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers were thoroughly deloused.¹⁸²

Sometimes he was preposterous. The outline of one speech he made to his junior officers survives. He sensibly began: “Keep a special pair of boots to sleep in & only get them muddy in a real emergency. Use alcohol in moderation but don’t have a great parade of bottles in yr dugouts. Live well but do not flaunt it.” Then he said: “Laugh a little, & teach your men to laugh—gt good humour under fire—war is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile grin. If you can’t grin keep out of the way till you can.” In Churchill, G. A. Henty still lived. On the other hand, he was a source of invaluable advice on master masonry and the handling of sandbags, all of which would be immensely useful when they moved up on the line. He devised clever plans for shelters, scarps, counterscarps, half-moon dugouts, and ravelins. These might save their lives; they appreciated that. But when he announced that batmen must serve as bodyguards, sacrificing their lives, if necessary, for their officers, laughter drowned him out. Some of his schemes, said Gibb, were “too recherchés, too subtle to stand the practical test of everyday fighting.” If a parapet was hit during the day, he ordered, it must not be repaired until nightfall; that way, the Germans would not know what damage they had done. Later, under fire, bullets passed through the gaps and men were hit. The order was quietly countermanded.¹⁸³

On January 24 they were ready. At eight o’clock that morning, with Churchill riding on his horse at the head of the column, they marched from Moolenacker Farm into the Belgian village of Ploegsteert, or “Plug Street,” as the Tommies called it—the jump-off point for a maze of paths and shallow communications trenches which led soldiers eastward to and from the front—taking casualties from the German shellfire along the way. Churchill lodged that night in a battered convent (the “Hospice,” he called it) belonging to the Sisters of Charity. It was the twenty-first anniversary of Lord Randolph’s death. He wrote his mother: “I thought of my father on Jan 24 & wondered what he would think of it all. I am sure I am doing right.” To his wife he wrote: “I am extremely well-lodged here—with a fine bedroom looking out across the fields to the German lines 3,000 yards away. Two nuns remain here and keep up the little chapel which is part of the building…. On the right & left the guns are booming; & behind us a British field piece barks like a spaniel at frequent intervals.” He contrasted the view from his Admiralty office, from which he had been able to see the Horse Guards Parade and the windows of the Cabinet Room at No. 10, to the prospect here: “2 bright red pigs rooting about among the shellholes.”¹⁸⁴

In the darkness the battalion moved up to the front-line trenches. Churchill established his headquarters in a shattered building known as Lawrence Farm—he called it his “Conning Tower”—about five hundred yards behind no-man’s-land. He was responsible for a thousand yards of trenches. Following deep, winding, sandbagged gullies, he could move up to the British wire and then check the entire position. “It takes nearly 2 hours to traverse this labyrinth of mud,” he wrote. “On the average,” wrote Gibb, “he went around three times a day, which was no mean task in itself, as he had plenty of other work to do. At least one of these visits was after dark, usually about 1 A.M. In wet weather he would appear in a complete outfit of waterproof stuff, including trousers and overalls, and with his French light-blue helmet he presented a remarkable and unusual figure.” Lieutenant Jock McDavid saw him “stand on the fire step in broad daylight, to encourage the Jocks, and to prove… how little danger there was of being hit.” He was undismayed when, from time to time, his experiments demonstrated that the danger was very great indeed. Once he and his adjutant were in an advance trench when Winston suggested they peer over the parapet, to get a better look at the German fortifications. They drew small-arms fire, and then shellfire. “Do you like war?” Churchill asked dreamily. “At that moment,” Gibb wrote, “I profoundly hated war. But at that and every moment I believe Winston Churchill revelled in it.”¹⁸⁵

On February 3, he and Archie were lunching with several other officers at Lawrence Farm when, he wrote Clementine, “there was a tremendous crash, dust & splinters came flying through the room, plates were smashed, chairs broken. Everyone was covered with debris and the Adjutant (he is only 18) hit on the finger. A shell had struck the roof and burst in the next room—mine & Archie’s…. The wonderful good luck is that the shell (a 4.2) did not—& cd not have—burst properly. Otherwise we shd have had the wall thrown in on us—& some wd surely have been hurt.” Probably it disturbed her more than him. “I slept peacefully in my tiny war-scarred room last night,” he added, “after a prolonged tour of the trenches.” He even found time to acquire an easel and oils and paint shell holes. She wrote frantically: “Please leave that wretched farm and find a safer place.” She wanted to join him: “It wd be so easy & I cd live with the poor French women in a ruined cottage & hoe turnips.” The sensible course for him would have been to omit such alarming accounts from his letters, but Churchill was never sensible about taking risks, or thoughtful about the impact his vivid details would have on those who loved him. Since peril never upset him, it may never have occurred to him that it might distress others. “It is one long holiday for me,” he wrote her, “… like my African journey.”¹⁸⁶

By now all distrust of the new CO had vanished. “I am firmly convinced,” wrote Gibb, “that no more popular officer ever commanded troops. As a soldier he was hard-working, persevering and tough…. He lived soldiering: it lay near his heart and I think he could have been a very great soldier.” Winston was touched and pleased to find that the battalion’s junior officers “put up my photograph in the trenches, & I am sure they would make an effort if I asked them and some big test came upon us.” He was asking a lot of them as it was. McDavid later remembered Winston’s first venture into no-man’s-land: “Clad in his long trench waterproof, shining knee-high trench boots and blue steel helmet, with his revolver and powerful flash-lamp attached to his web-belt, he preceded me on the journey through the wire. All went well until we were within a few yards of the first post. Then enemy machine-gun fire swept the sphere of operations.” They dove into a shell crater. Abruptly a blinding ray of light appeared in the hole. Churchill roared: “Put out that bloody light!” It was his own flashlight. As he crouched he had pressed the switch. “Corrective action,” McDavid recalled, “swiftly followed.” Thereafter, according to Hakewill Smith, he “would often go into no-man’s-land. It was a nerve-racking experience to go with him. He would call out in his loud, gruff voice—far too loud it seemed to us—’You go that way, I will go this…. Come here, I have found a gap in the German wire. Come over here at once!’ ” By now he “never fell when a shell went off; he never ducked when a bullet went past with its loud crack.” Lieutenant Francis Napier Clavering was with him when Winston decided that they should climb over the top of the parapet and walk along the entire thousand-yard length of the Royal Scots’ line. “Up went a Verey [sic] light,” he recalled. “Churchill was on his knees at the time, measuring the depth of the earth” with a yardstick. Under the flare they were clearly visible to the enemy. “The Hun machine guns opened up, belly high. Why the hell we weren’t killed I just don’t understand. I didn’t want to die…. ‘For God’s sake keep still, Sir,’ I hissed. But he didn’t take the slightest notice. He was a man who had no physical fear of dying.”¹⁸⁷

He abandoned Lawrence Farm, as Clementine had asked, only to establish himself in what he called his “Advance Headquarters,” a hundred yards closer to the wire. Here, as in India nearly twenty years earlier, he hoped to win recognition, mention in dispatches, possibly a medal or two—some distinction which would attract attention in London. Back in reserve at the convent for two days he wrote Clementine: “If I come through all right my strength will be greater than it ever was. I wd much rather go back to the trenches tonight, than go home in any position of mediocre authority. But I shd like to see my beloved pussy cat.” Actually, the time was approaching when he would prefer even mediocre authority to Flanders, not because of the discomfort and jeopardy at the front, but because in Parliament he could at least hope to exert greater influence on the conduct of the war. His disclaimer to his mother—“All I hear confirms me in my satisfaction to be freed from my share in the present [parliamentary] proceedings”—cannot be taken seriously. In the same letter he urged her to “keep in good touch with all my friends.” But here again, it was his wife who was his real eyes and ears—and tongue. There was talk of creating a minister for air. She invited Curzon to lunch and suggested that Winston would be ideal for the job. “Oh my darling I long so for it to happen, & feel that it would except for the competition for the post inside the Cabinet,” she wrote. Nothing came of it. In early February she and Goonie lunched with Curzon at his mansion, and he raised the possibility that Churchill would “be made a Brigadier almost at once”—he even gave Clementine three bottles of brandy as a token of congratulation—yet this, too, was vain.¹⁸⁸

Lloyd George lunched in Cromwell Road, but this was a great strain on his hostess. He said all the right things, expressing “great distress at you not being in the Government,” she wrote, and saying repeatedly, “We must get Winston back.” She didn’t believe him. In her view he, not Asquith, was her husband’s nemesis. “I don’t trust him one bit,” she wrote, characterizing him as “fair of speech, shifty of eye, treacherous of heart.” Again: “I get on so well with him & I know he likes me, but he is a sneak…. He is a barometer, but not a really useful one as he is always measuring his own temperature [sic] not yours!” And again: “Before taking LlG’s [hand] I would have to safeguard myself with charms, touch-woods, exorcisms & by crossing myself. I can always get along with him & yesterday I had a good talk, but you can’t hold his eyes, they shift away.” She thought her husband had been too hard on the prime minister: “I think my Darling you will have to be very patient—Do not burn any boats—The P.M. has not treated you worse than Ll. G has done…. I feel sure that if the choice were equal you would prefer to work with the P.M. than with Ll. G.” She lunched with Asquith in Downing Street. “He talked a great deal about you and asked a great many questions. I was perfectly natural (except perhaps that I was a little too buoyant) & he tried to be natural too, but it was an effort.” She said she would take his hand, “tho’ I would give it a nasty twist.” Winston replied that while Lloyd George was “no doubt all you say,” he had been opposed to the Dardanelles and not, like the prime minister, a “coadventurer” who had destroyed the plan by his own incompetence. Still, Churchill wanted to know more about her hour with Asquith: “I shd like a verbatim report of the Kat’s conversation with the old ruffian.” Unfortunately, there was little to tell. Most of the talk at No. 10 had been trivial. “The chief topic of social gossip,” she told him, “is who is going to India as Viceroy…. It seems incredible.”¹⁸⁹

All this was very hard on her. Clementine did not carry her husband’s weight. She was admired and respected, but there could be no substitute for Churchill’s presence. And she found it disagreeable to pass along his messages to political allies and confidants, particularly those she distrusted. She wrote: “Oh Winston I do not like all these letters I have to forward—I prefer Charlotte Corday—Shall I do it for you?” The unavoidable fact was that he could not be an effective parliamentary force while prowling near the enemy wire in Flanders. Nor was the army always considerate toward officers who were also MPs, particularly when they lacked political muscle. Learning of a secret session of the House of Commons, Churchill applied for leave to attend it. Permission was granted with the understanding that he would return the moment debate ended. When an open session followed, and he asked for an extension of his leave, the appeal was denied in a War Office telegram informing him that no exception could be made “while you are commanding R Scots Fus and your battalion is in trenches.” Clementine was furious. He could have altered policy during the session, she wrote him afterward when he was back on the front, “if only you had been here and spoken.” She could not blame this on Lloyd George. Asquith was responsible, and she acknowledged it. “The Government,” she wrote, “are in a shameful position.”¹⁹⁰

Actually, he would have been wise to have stayed in Flanders that spring. It was while in Parliament on another leave that he delivered one of the most unfortunate speeches of his life. Late in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 7, 1916, he rose from the front Opposition bench to offer a closely reasoned critique of governmental blunders in the prosecution of the war. “I shall have to strike a jarring note,” he began. He indicted Balfour’s tenure at the Admiralty in the strongest language the House had heard since the outbreak of the war, charging “slackness, indifference, want of push and drive.” The U-boat challenge was not being met, he said; there was strong evidence that German shipyards were out-building Britain’s. The zeppelins were getting through; mismanagement of the navy could lead to defeat. It was an exceptionally impressive speech. He had the complete attention of every man there. And then, at the very end, he destroyed his message, and dealt a savage blow to his credibility, in a single sentence: “I urge the First Lord of the Admiralty without delay to fortify himself, to vitalise and animate his Board of Admiralty by recalling Lord Fisher to his post as First Sea Lord.”¹⁹¹

It was unbelievable. He was actually advocating a return to power of the old man who had ruined his Dardanelles strategy and evicted him from the Admiralty. The House sat stunned. Asquith confessed that he was “speechless at the time”; afterward, he called Winston’s bombshell “suicidal” and “a piece of the grossest effrontery.” In the Strangers’ Gallery, Eddie Marsh wept. Clementine, aghast, concluded that her husband had demolished his last parliamentary support. Lloyd George simply gasped: “A great error!” The only congratulatory note came from a predictable source, the last man with any right to expect praise from Churchill. Fisher wrote him: “SPLENDID!!! You’ll have your Reward! All I entreat you now is to entrench yourself as Leader of the Opposition! and wait for the Big thing to come to you!… Your attitude so excellent—a helpful (not a hostile) critic. Anyhow my heart is very full! I feel the good old times are back!”¹⁹²

Churchill left Parliament unaware of the ridicule about to envelop him. Violet Asquith, finding him in his mother’s house, asked: “What possessed you? Why did you do it?” All London was asking the same question, but she was the first to be answered. He said he had conceived his proposal, she wrote, “as a great gesture of magnanimity—the forgiveness of the wrongs Fisher had done to him, for the sake of a greater aim, our naval supremacy.” Gently she dissolved his illusion. It would not be so interpreted, she said; rather, others would see it “as a clumsy gambler’s throw for his own ends.” By noon Wednesday he, too, saw this. The question now was whether to stay in London and carry on the debate, or take the next boat back to Flanders. Wednesday morning Fisher appeared gaily in Cromwell Road, insisting that Churchill speak again, pressing on; other MPs, the old admiral was confident, would rally around him. Clementine vehemently disagreed. After some hesitation Winston went to the House that afternoon, thereby exposing himself to the full force of Balfour’s withering reply.¹⁹³

Balfour ignored Churchill’s closely reasoned arguments, even though he knew them to be unimpeachable—knew, for example, that the German submarine campaign would soon threaten England with starvation. Instead, he humiliated him. He did not imagine “that there was a single person who heard my right hon[orable] Friend’s speech who did not listen to the latter part of it with profound stupefaction.” Churchill had “never made the smallest concealment, either in public or in private, of what he thought of Lord Fisher.” What, AJB asked, had Winston said in delivering his “farewell speech” the previous autumn, “when he exchanged a political for a military career? He told us that the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, did not give him, when he was serving in the same Admiralty with him, either the clear guidance before the event or the firm support after it which he was entitled to expect.” The essence of the matter was “that the right hon[orable] Gentleman, who could not get along with Lord Fisher—I will not say that, but with whom Lord Fisher could not get on—says that Lord Fisher, who according to my right hon[orable] Friend neither supported him nor guided him, is nevertheless the man who ought to be given as a supporter and a guide to anybody who happens to hold at this moment the responsible position of First Lord of the Admiralty. It is a paradox of the wildest and most extravagant kind.” It was more—“the most amazing proposition that has ever been laid before the House of Commons.” In a final turn of the knife, Balfour said slowly: “I should regard myself as contemptible beyond the power of expression if I were to yield an inch to a demand of such a kind, made in such a way.”¹⁹⁴

Stung, Churchill replied that Balfour, “a master of parliamentary sword play and every dialectical art,” had mocked a member “who is so much younger than himself”—this was absurd, and unworthy of Winston—to evade “a note of warning” which “should be sounded, and sounded in time.” As to Fisher: “The real fact is that if we could associate in some way or another the driving power and energy of Lord Fisher, with the carrying out of Lord Fisher’s programme at the highest possible speed, there is no reason to believe that great public advantage would not result from that.” It was a weak defense of what would have been a strong case, had he left the old admiral out of it the day before. No one’s mind was changed. All those who had been bruised by his invective in the past, who had distrusted his interlocking brilliance and instability, the inevitable handmaidens of genius, were now after him in full cry. Once more the growing frustration over the insatiable war left a residue of bitterness. Considering who they were, their breeding and their gentility, the backlashes of some were startling. Margot Asquith wrote Balfour: “I hope & believe that Winston will never be forgiven for his yesterday’s speech. Henry & I were thunderstruck at the meanness & the gigantic folly of it. I’ve never varied in my opinion of Winston I am glad to say.” (This was flagrantly untrue.) “He is a hound of the lowest sense of political honour, a fool of the lowest judgement & contemptible…. Henry & I thought you admirable and if H had not had a deputation he said he wd have given Winston 10 of the nastiest minutes of his life he was so disgusted.”¹⁹⁵

Violet Asquith, who took the other side, nevertheless wrote that “whatever his motive, he realized that he had hopelessly failed to accomplish what he had set out to do.” Back in Cromwell Road he pondered his next move. Fisher wanted him to quit the army and lead a full-fledged attack on the government: “Write at once and resign! I beg you to do this!… I assure you that I am not so much thinking of your personal interests (immense as they are! because you have the Prime Ministership in your grasp!) but of saving the country! Now now now is the time to save the country NOT 3 months ahead!” Had Winston’s stock stood at its prewar level, this might have been sensible. With each passing day it became clearer that Asquith’s war policy was a failure. He could not remain at No. 10 much longer. Tempted, Churchill secured a written promise from Asquith on Saturday that “if hereafter you should find your sense of public duty called upon you to return to political life here, no obstacle will be put in your way, and your relief will be arranged for, as soon as it can be effected without detriment to the Service.” Monday, on the train to Dover, Winston argued the point with his wife. At the port he wrote Asquith holding him to his word, scribbled a press release announcing his return to civilian life, and left it in Clementine’s hands.¹⁹⁶

Late that afternoon, back in Belgium, he changed his mind and dispatched telegrams from Ploegsteert withdrawing the letter and the release. But then he switched back, and for good. He was preoccupied now, not with the Germans on the other side of no-man’s-land, but with his former colleagues who had taunted him from the Treasury Bench. Ten days after his return to his battalion he wrote Clementine that he had resolved to leave the army at the first opportunity. He had served in the trenches since November, “almost always in the front line, certainly without discredit.” Over the past fifteen years he had built a strong political reputation, “enabling me to command the attention… of my fellow countrymen in a manner not exceeded by 3 or 4 living men.” England’s fate was at stake, “and almost every question both affecting war & peace conditions, with wh I have always been formostly [sic] connected, is now raised.” To remain in Flanders would be irresponsible. “Surely,” he wrote, “these facts may stand by themselves in answer to sneers & cavillings. At any rate I feel I can rest upon them with a sure & easy conscience. Do not my darling one underrate the contribution I have made to the public cause, or the solidarity of a political position acquired by so many years of work & power.”¹⁹⁷

Clementine was unconvinced. The misjudgment, she knew, was his; he simply did not understand the transformation of his reputation wrought by the Dardanelles, or the depth of his self-inflicted wound in the exchange with Balfour. His reasons were “weighty & well expressed,” she tactfully replied, “but it would be better if they were stated by others than yourself.” Actually, he had put her in a ghastly position. In Flanders he risked death. In London he would risk political ruin. She wrote him: “My Darling own Dear Winston I am so torn and lacerated over you. If I say ‘stay where you are’ a wicked bullet may find you which you might but for me escape,” but if he left his troops the consequences might be “a lifelong rankling regret which you might never admit even to yourself & on which you would brood & spend much time in arguing to yourself that it was the right thing to do—And you would rehearse all the past events over & over again & gradually live in the past instead of in the present and in the great future.” Six days later she wrote: “The present Government may not be strong enough to beat the Germans, but I think they are powerful enough to do you in & I pray to God you do not give the heartless brutes the chance—.”¹⁹⁸

Nevertheless, the yeast of revolt continued to work in him. He knew he was not needed here, nor even particularly wanted. Haig had summoned him to Saint-Omer. Back at Lawrence Farm, Winston told Hakewill Smith that the BEF commander in chief had offered him a brigade but suggested that he could be more useful by returning to London and guiding a conscription bill through the House. At the same time, GHQ informed him that his battalion would be merged with another, the Seventh Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the CO of the Seventh, being senior to Churchill, would assume command of the hybrid. Thus, as he happily put it, “I am not leaving my battalion; my battalion is leaving me.” Ignoring Asquith this time, he sent his resignation to Kitchener, who accepted it with the proviso that he not reapply for active service for the duration of the war. The London Gazette reported that he was relinquishing his lieutenant colonelcy. On April 28 he led his troops into the front line for the last time. Clementine, reconciled, wrote him from Blenheim: “Let me hear that you are coming home for good to take up your real work.” He sent her his last letter from Lawrence Farm on May 2. He intended to relax before plunging into politics again: “Wd it not be vy nice to go to Blenheim for the Sunday. If you arrange this, please get me 3 large tubes of thin White (not stiff) from Robersons: also 3 more canvasses: and a bottle of that poisonous solution wh cleans the paint off old canvasses…. The Germans have just fired 30 shells at our farm hitting it 4 times: but no one has been hurt. This is I trust a parting salute.”¹⁹⁹

The next morning he and his troops left Ploegsteert for reassignment, and three days later, in Armentières, he entertained his officers at a farewell luncheon. In toasting them he said he had learned that the young Scot “is a formidable fighting animal.” Gibb remembered afterward: “I believe every man in the room felt Winston Churchill’s leaving us a real personal loss.” The following day Winston received a highly political note from General W. T. Furse: “It seems to me peculiarly up to you and to Lloyd George to concentrate all your efforts on breaking such a futile Govt—and that, immediately. How can anyone suppose that the same men in the same flat bottomed tub can do any better in the future than they have done in the past?” Churchill optimistically wrote his wife: “The Government is moribund. I only trust they will not die too soon.” It was characteristic of him that he regarded himself as the obvious alternative to Asquith. Clementine had warned him that such optimism was unrealistic, but he had not believed her. Now he would learn the lesson from other, harsher critics.²⁰⁰

Churchill was never a complete outcast. During each of the several political exiles in his life his solitude was tempered by friends willing to compromise their own futures for his sake, or allies who found common cause with him. Three MPs now invited him to join them in a patriotic Opposition: Arthur Markham, George Lambert, and—Ireland forgotten—Sir Edward Carson. The Manchester Guardian rejoiced that Winston was back; the Observer wanted to see him in a ministry. F. E. Smith was a source (though his only source) of goings-on in the cabinet. Lloyd George, though bland, was at least willing to be seen with him. The unfilial Violet reported events in the Asquith household. And although Winston’s popularity with the people was greatly diminished, he retained a national constituency. Max Aitken later recalled accompanying him into a railway station and passing a train crowded with British tars returning from leave. As Winston “walked up the platform,” Aitken wrote, “the bluejackets gave him an immense reception, cheering him with enthusiasm. Churchill was deeply moved and declared that he was encouraged to believe that he was not after all the Forgotten Man.”²⁰¹

He would never be forgotten; he was unforgettable. But he could be ignored, mortified, and taunted, and all these would be his miserable lot throughout the year ahead. In Parliament, Bonar Law, now colonial secretary, baited him mercilessly. He was told that resignation of his command proved that he was a cheap opportunist. He learned that the Conservative Lord Derby, writing to Lloyd George, had vowed that, whatever the truce between the parties, “Winston could not possibly be in it. Our party will not work with him and as far as I am concerned personally nothing would induce me to support any Government of which he is a member…. He is absolutely untrustworthy as was his father before him, and he has got to learn that just as his father had to disappear from politics so must he, or at all events from official life.”²⁰² The patriotic Opposition grew shaky when Lord Milner, a prospective member of it, refused to be reconciled with Churchill. It then collapsed after Asquith deprived it of its chief issue, conscription, by accepting compulsory military service. Inductions began on May 25, 1916. During the previous twenty-two months two and one-half million Britons had voluntarily joined the colors—a testament to the extraordinary patriotism of their generation.

Winston tried to reopen parliamentary discussion of diversionary attacks in the Baltic and the Middle East. His speeches were followed by studied silence. The U-boat threat, he said, could be met by convoys. The Admiralty said, and did, nothing. (When at his insistence convoys were introduced the following year, the monthly loss of merchant ship tonnage dropped from 874,576 to 351,105.) Kitchener’s appeal for men, he pointed out, had attracted volunteers from key jobs in shipyards, mines, and munitions factories. They should be discharged from the army and put back to work: “We hear a great deal… about ‘comb this industry,’ or ‘comb that,’ but I say to the War Office, ‘Physician, comb thyself.’ ” Nothing was done. His experience in the trenches led him to make practical suggestions about the front. A network of light railways behind the lines would improve logistics. British trench lights, inferior to the enemy’s, should be improved immediately. The supply of steel helmets was inadequate. Staff officers safely beyond the range of the German artillery were pinning medals on one another, and that was outrageous: “It is the privates, the non-commissioned officers, and the regimental officers whose case requires the sympathetic attention of the House and of the Secretary of State. Honour should go where death and danger go.” Logistics, trench lights, the helmet shortage, and the pernicious decorations policy went unchanged.²⁰³

He felt that the troops comfortably stationed in England and the safe ports of the Empire should be rotated in combat. At the front, he told inattentive MPs, he had witnessed “one of the clearest and grimmest class distinctions in the world—the distinction between the trench and the non-trench population.” Under the present system, “the trench population lives almost continuously under the fire of the enemy. It returns again and again, after being wounded twice and sometimes three times, and it is continually subject, without respite, to the hardest tests that men have ever been called upon to bear, while all the time the non-trench population scarcely suffers at all…. I wish to point out to the House this afternoon that the part of the army that really counts for ending the war is this killing, fighting, suffering part.” He described red-tabbed officers in warm, safe châteaux confidently moving pins on maps, forgetting that each pin represented a multitude of human beings whose outlook was very different from their own. “The hopes of decisive victory” grew “with every step away from the front line,” reaching “absolute conviction in the Intelligence Department.” The result—doomed offensives—troubled him more than any other aspect of the government’s war policy. Victory would not be gained, he wrote in the Sunday Pictorial, “simply by throwing in masses of men on the western front.” In the days after his return from Flanders he was particularly worried about Haig’s attack, now imminent, north of the Somme River. He begged for restraint. But the cabinet agreed that as an “amateur” he could hardly match the army’s expertise. Indeed, no minister deigned to reply to him. Instead, Harold Tennant, an under secretary at the War Office, rose and followed Balfour’s example by saying contemptuously: “There is one thing which I envy my right hon[orable] and gallant Friend, and that is the time he had in order to prepare his carefully thought-out speeches. I wish I had the same opportunity.”²⁰⁴

On July 1, 1916, after a prolonged bombardment, the British infantry went over the top, and by nightfall eighty thousand Englishmen had fallen, twenty thousand of them dead. The Ulster Volunteer Force, brave beyond belief, had been cut to pieces in the swampy valley of the Ancre. It was the bloodiest day in the history of combat. Yet Haig refused to break off the Somme action. Churchill prepared a memorandum marshaling the arguments for disengagement. “So long as an army possesses a strong offensive power,” he wrote, “it rivets its adversary’s attention. But when the kick is out of it, when the long-saved-up effort has been expended, the enemy’s anxiety is relieved, and he recovers his freedom of movement. This is the danger into which we are now drifting. We are using up division after division—not only those originally concentrated for the attack, but many taken from all parts of the line.” It would take months, he pointed out, for “these shattered divisions” to recover. In the interval the Germans could withdraw troops from this front and send them against Russia.²⁰⁵

The Western Front June 1916

F. E. Smith wrote an introduction to this analysis and had it printed for the cabinet. Everyone else discounted it. Even before it had gone to press Hankey wrote in his diary that Sir William Robertson had “told me that F. E. Smith was writing a paper to show that the big offensive in France had failed. I suspect that Ll George & Winston Churchill are at the back of it. Personally I think it is true but it is a mistake to admit it yet.” A copy of the memo reached Saint-Omer. To Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting him there, Haig insisted that the drive must continue, and Northcliffe, convinced, wrote the editor of The Times: “Let me once more say and urge that what is taking place on the Somme must not be measured in metres. It is the first time we have had a proper scientific attack. There are no complaints of bad Staff work…. If we wrote communiqués as well as the Germans, we would lay much more stress on the German losses, which are known to be immense.” In fact, the campaign, when it finally petered out, had cost the British 481,842 men to the enemy’s 236,194—and the only gain was a few square miles of worthless mud. The Times, however, never mentioned Churchill’s warning.²⁰⁶

The Daily Mail accused him of conspiring against Haig and Robertson, and therefore against England. “The country,” it reported when the Somme bloodletting was at its height, had “seen a Cabinet minister who had just enough intelligence to know that Antwerp and Constantinople were places of importance and yet was mad enough to embark on adventures in both places…. In the Dardanelles affair in particular a megalomaniac politician risked the fate of our Army in France and sacrificed thousands of lives to no purpose.” He had dragged “too pliant officers” with him “into these reckless and hopeless ‘gambles’ ” at a time when his sole duty “was simply to supply the Navy with men and material.” Tragedy would have been averted if the admirals had been “men of the stamp of Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson.” The lesson was: “Ministerial meddling means military muddling.” Churchill was put on notice: “No politician who remembers the contemptible fiasco of Antwerp and the ghastly blunder of Gallipoli need expect either patience or forgiveness from the British public if he interferes with the soldiers in charge of our operations.” H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post wrote Asquith of “a sort of plot whose ramifications I am not altogether able to trace”; its purpose was “to get rid of DH,” and its ringleader, he believed, was the former first lord. The Spectator accused Churchill of playing “the part of a political adventurer… with a want of scruple and want of consideration for public interests, and with a reckless selfishness, to which our political history affords no parallel.”²⁰⁷

After reading this Lloyd George told Sir George Riddell that it was “on the whole part true.” He and Asquith had become convinced, in the words of Martin Gilbert, that “the imaginative, constructive, hard-working colleague of prewar years was being eaten up by personal ambition, and that his judgment had been impaired.” Winston learned of this and thought it incomprehensible. It was one thing to be slandered by Balfour, Bonar Law, and Lord Derby. That was politics. The Tories were only giving as good as they had got from him. But to be distrusted, suspected, and even condemned by men who had long been friends as well as colleagues was beyond his understanding. It was not, however, beyond Clementine’s. Others fawned on him and then cut him behind his back. She told him, and wrote him, that he was sometimes curt, insensitive, and inconsiderate; that he was too given to extravagant overstatement; that his manner was dictatorial and often insulting. It was not enough to be right. His assumption that he alone should stand at the center of events, she said, offended men whose own achievements entitled them to share the stage and disagree. He lacked patience and tolerance. He was often strident and scornful, and because this had alienated first-rate men, he was driven to seek the company of others, who, as she saw it, could do him no good and might bring harm. When they had left Admiralty House, Clementine thought she had seen the last of Lord Fisher. To her horror, Winston continued to correspond with him, sent him birthday greetings, and even invited him to Cromwell Road as an honored guest. There she could not contain herself. F. E. Smith heard her tell the old admiral: “Keep your hands off my husband. You have all but ruined him once. Leave him alone now.” Sometimes Churchill himself realized that he had fallen among companions who were, if not evil, at least unworthy. At one function he approached a fellow guest and said shakily: “Get me a stiff whisky and soda, and get it quick. I have just done something I hoped I would never have to do. I have shaken hands with de Robeck.”²⁰⁸

Max Aitken, who remained constant, later wrote of Churchill in this dark time: “he cared for the Empire profoundly, and he was honestly convinced that only by his advice and methods could it be saved. His ambition was in essence disinterested. He suffered tortures when he thought that lesser men were mismanaging the business.” Another friend described him as “a character depressed beyond the limits of description…. When the Government was deprived of his guidance he could see no hope anywhere.” He told Riddell: “I am finished. I am banished from the scene of action.” On July 5 he wrote Archie Sinclair: “I do not want office, but only war direction…. I am profoundly unsettled: & cannot use my gift. Of that last I have no doubts. I do not feel that my judgments have been falsified, or that the determined pursuance of my policy through all the necessary risks was wrong. I wd do it all again if the circumstances were repeated. But I am faced with the problem of living through days of 24 hours each: & averting my mind from the intricate business I had in hand—wh was my life.” In his anguish he sent his brother a long, tormented letter on July 15. “Is it not damnable,” he asked, “that I should be denied all real scope to serve this country, in this tremendous hour?” Asquith, he wrote, “reigns supine, sodden and supreme.” Then: “Tho’ my life is full of comfort, pleasure and prosperity I writhe hourly not to be able to get my teeth effectively into the Boche. But to plunge as a battalion commander unless ordered—into this mistaken welter—when a turn of the wheel may enable me to do 10,000 times as much would not be the path of patriotism or of sense…. Jack my dear I am learning to hate.”²⁰⁹

The western front haunted him—both its futility and the thought that there, at least, he might be contributing something, if only a mite, to the war effort. “I look back a gt deal to our Plugstreet days,” he wrote Sinclair later in the year, “& wish I cd have cut myself more adrift from London & its whirlpools and been more content with the simple animal life (& death) wh the trenches offered.” Forgetting his pledge to Kitchener, he declared: “When I am absolutely sure there is no prospect of regaining control or part of it here, I shall return again to that resort & refuge.” He was struck by a bitter irony. Volunteering to fight had been “a costly excursion” for him; in doing so he had sacrificed the power he now craved. “If I had stayed Chancellor of the Duchy and shut my mouth & drawn my salary, I shd today be one of the principal personages in direction of affairs…. Under a fair pretence of fine words, there is a gt déconsideration of all who wear uniform. Not one of these gallant MPs who has fought through the Somme at the head of their battalions, stands a chance agst less clever men who have stopped & chattered at home. This to me is the most curious phenomenon of all. It is quite inexplicable to me.”²¹⁰

He seldom addressed the House now. C. P. Scott of the Guardian, calling on him in South Kensington, urged him to keep his flag flying in Parliament. Eventually, he predicted, recruits would rally to him. Winston shook his head. Except in Scott’s paper, his remarks were unreported. Indeed, they were largely unheard; few members came in to hear him—“what a contrast with the old days, when my rising was the signal for the House to fill!”²¹¹ He preferred to reach his public through the Sunday Pictorial. Writing an article took no longer than preparing a speech; every word was printed, and he was paid £250, about five shillings a word, for each piece. That was important. He needed every penny he could make. His brother, now fighting under Haig, had only his officer’s salary. Jennie, who had let her own house and moved into 41 Cromwell Road while Winston was in the trenches, contributed £40 a month, but with three adults, and five children in the nursery under a nanny, they had to run a tight ship. The Christmas holidays were another matter. Sunny invited them all to Blenheim—his political quarrels with Winston and Clementine had been long forgotten—and they welcomed the new year with an enormous bonfire. Winston tossed an effigy of the kaiser on the flames. Across the Channel, at the stroke of midnight, the Germans filled the sky with brilliant green flares. A British battery fired ten shells, paused, and fired seven more. It was 1917.

Clementine had seen the way to sever his knot of agony nearly a year earlier, while he was still in Flanders. Once the facts about the Dardanelles were made public, she believed, her husband would be absolved of all blame, for both the failure to force the strait and the subsequent tragedy on the peninsula. On January 11 she had written Winston: “If you ask the P.M. to publish the Dardanelles papers let me know what happens. If he refuses or delays I beg you not to do anything without telling me first & giving me time to give you my valuable (!) opinion on it…. If he dissents I fear you will have to wait. If you insisted on publication against his wish you would have against you all the forces of cohesion & stability including every member of the Cabinet. On the other hand when the papers are eventually published his refusal to do so earlier will have a very bad effect for him…. I am very anxious that you should not blunt this precious weapon prematurely.”²¹²

That same day, Churchill had read in The Times, Carson had said in the House that the expedition against Turkey had been “admirably conceived.” From Lawrence Farm, Winston had written his wife: “Gradually people will see what I saw so vividly this time last year, but alas too late forever.” It was never too late to correct the record, she replied, and when he returned to Parliament as a civilian he found that in this case it was imperative. During a debate over conscription Asquith had proposed that Ireland be exempt. The Easter rebellion in Dublin the previous April had been followed by executions; feeling ran high there. Winston, disagreeing with the exclusion, said: “This is a time for trying to overcome difficulties and not for being discouraged or too readily deterred by them.” An Irish Nationalist shouted: “What about the Dardanelles?” It was a cry he was to hear again and again, in the House, in meeting halls, and on the streets. Clementine had been right. He had to clear his name. And only the truth—in the documents—would do it.²¹³

On June 1, 1916, in what was surely one of the most ill-advised political decisions of his life, the prime minister agreed. The decision was reported in the next day’s Times. Bonar Law, speaking for Asquith, told the House that all papers relevant to the campaign would be assembled and laid before the country. Churchill wrote the prime minister the next morning, offering to help sort them out. Ian Hamilton’s reputation was also at stake, and although his hopes for exoneration were less realistic than Winston’s, he nonetheless cherished them. Three days later he and Churchill dined at the general’s home in Hyde Park Gardens. Afterward they reviewed Hamilton’s copies of twenty telegrams he had sent to the War Office from Gallipoli. Not one of them, Churchill realized, had been laid before the cabinet. This was powerful evidence of negligence on Kitchener’s part. There seemed to be no way he could explain it away. While they talked, a voice became audible on the street outside. Someone was shouting K of K’s name. As Hamilton told it in his memoirs: “We jumped up and Winston threw the window open. As he did so an apparition passed beneath us. I can use no other word to describe the strange looks of this newsvendor of wild and uncouth aspect. He had his bundle of newspaper under his arm and as we opened the window was crying out ‘Kitchener drowned! No survivors!’ ” The war minister, on a mission to Saint Petersburg, had been aboard H.M.S. Hampshire when she hit a mine. Hamilton wrote: “The fact that he should have vanished at the very moment Winston and I were making out an unanswerable case against him was one of those coups with which his career was crowded—he was not going to answer!”²¹⁴

Kitchener having joined the Glorious Dead, the K of K myth was strengthened tenfold. Blaming him was impolitic now; the number of those who shared the Dardanelles guilt had been diminished by one. Asquith then had second thoughts about a full disclosure of the documents. Two weeks later Hankey wrote Churchill that the prime minister had resolved not to open the minutes of the War Council on the ground that ministers, fearing that their remarks might be “liable to publication,” would be hesitant to speak out in future meetings, and that “it would be very difficult to resist a pressure to publish proceedings in regard to other aspects of the war which might not be in the public interest.” Winston protested to Asquith that only the council’s archive could show, among other things, “the strong support of the naval project given by you, Grey, Kitchener & A. Balfour” and his own “disclaimer of responsibility if a military disaster occurred through inadequate troops not being sent in time,” which “was not an ordinary incident of discussion, but that I asked formally & at that time that my dissent shd be placed on record.” It was inconceivable to him that the prime minister could not appreciate “that this fact is vy important for a true judgement on the event.” Asquith, replying, repeated the argument that “the public interest” might suffer. To Lloyd George, who had succeeded Kitchener at the War Office, Winston bitterly remonstrated that the promise to release the minutes had been given to the House “after prolonged consideration & with full knowledge both of the facts and of the suitability of the documents for publication at this juncture.” Surely the country had a right to know the role played by the prime minister, “who alone cd have co-ordinated the naval and military action & given to the war-policy of the country the necessary guidance & leadership.” That, of course, was precisely what the prime minister did not want the country to know. His ruling stood. Winston wrote his brother: “The Govt have decided to repudiate their pledge to publish the D’lles papers. My dossier was more than they could face. There will be a row, but there are many good arguments in the public interest against publishing: and many more good arguments in the Government interest!”²¹⁵

But Parliament was not so easily gulled. There was a tremendous row in the middle of July, when Asquith informed the House that “the presentation of these papers must be postponed,” that his commitment to release them “cannot for the moment… be fulfilled” because it would entail “omissions so numerous and so important that the papers actually presented would be incomplete and misleading.” Carson led the attack on this position, and he had great support; Bonar Law’s assurance had been given, not to Churchill, but to the entire House, and the MPs’ curiosity was immense. Lloyd George proposed that a secret committee of MPs investigate the Turkish campaign. Asquith accepted the compromise. He announced the appointment of a select commission, comprising eight distinguished Englishmen headed by Lord Cromer, “to inquire into the conduct of the Dardanelles operations.” This Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Dardanelles did not satisfy Churchill. He told the House that it was a poor substitute for opening the books, “as was originally intended and promised by the Prime Minister, in the name of the Government.” But at least it would not be a whitewash. Cromer couldn’t be bought. And Winston would be allowed to testify and submit evidence.²¹⁶