A History of Britain, Volume 3 (57 page)

The cabinet, however, was divided over when and whether the fleet would be needed. Churchill got a great deal of stick, especially from Lloyd George, for his spectacular naval estimates. Was he, Lloyd George wondered out loud, still really a Liberal at all? But though in a minority, Churchill, like the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, was convinced that, if a war should break out in the Balkans, Germany, allied with Austria and Hungary, was more likely than not to respond by sending its armies to the west to attack France, and in equal likelihood through Belgium. The best chance of deterring this scenario, he also believed, lay in a real, rather than paper, commitment to stand shoulder to shoulder with France, and in never hesitating to regard an attack on Belgium as a direct threat to Britain. Certainly he thought back to the similar stance taken by William Pitt the Younger in 1793. But lest he be accused of idle and anachronistic historicism he also believed, in his marrow, that apart from any ideological anti-republicanism Pitt and his colleague Henry Dundas had been right about the uncontrollable expansionism of revolutionary France. So, indeed, he felt about imperial Germany – without any knowledge of the Schlieffen Plan, which called for simultaneous war on two fronts, west and east, or of the still more aggressive German policy (made formal in 1916) to convert large parts of eastern Europe into slave colonies and regions of western Europe (the Netherlands, for example) into satellites of the greater Reich.

For most of the summer of 1914, war seemed more likely to break out in Ireland than in Bosnia. Ulster Unionists and nationalists were each
forming
armed camps; Churchill, who had gone to Belfast in 1912 to make an appeal for moderation, hoped against hope, and against probability, that the third attempt at a Home Rule Bill would be successful. But faced with the threat of direct Protestant revolt against the plan in Ulster, it collapsed. The First World War itself would finish off the last possibility of Home Rule.

It was at these moments that history came to Winston Churchill. In early August 1914, it was giving the first lord mixed signals. On the very brink of hostilities he went to see the fleet steam past at Portland Bill. As the great steel towers emerged from the mist, Churchill’s romantic imagination sailed all the way back to ‘that far-off line of storm-beaten ships … which in their day had stood between Napoleon and his domination of the world’. But Churchill was already a good enough historian, and had seen enough carnage, for his up-and-at-’em euphoria to be qualified by deep foreboding. He was, after all, no longer the cavalier lancer. He had a wife and young children as well as a high office. On 28 July 1914 he had written to Clementine:

My darling one & beautiful,

Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared-up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I w[oul]d do my best for peace, & nothing w[oul]d induce me wrongfully to strike the blow. I cannot feel that we in this island are in any serious degree responsible for the wave of madness w[hic]h has swept the mind of Christendom. No-one can measure the consequences. I wondered whether those stupid Kings & Emperors c[oul]d not assemble together & revivify kingship by saving the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance. As if it was someone else’s operation!

The two black swans on St James’s Park Lake have a darling cygnet – grey, fluffy, precious & unique. … Kiss those kittens [their children] & be loved for ever by me. Your own W

The war that materialized tortured Churchill’s impatience, as well as his perfectly decent wish to spare prolonged slaughter. Along with many others in command, both political and military, he greeted the beginning of fighting with a strange euphoria, but at the same time felt sheepish about his reaction (‘Is it not horrible’). And as the war developed into a hideous, man-devouring stalemate, Churchill became desperate for
something
other than the strategy of men ‘eating barbed wire’. It was this compulsion to experience action that had prompted him to go to Antwerp in October 1914, after consulting with the foreign secretary, Grey, and the war minister, Lord Kitchener. There he took command of its defences, even offering, rather amazingly, to resign from the admiralty if the government felt he would be better used in a position of military rather than political command.

Flanders made him understand the critical importance of the western front about which the generals and Kitchener kept on hammering away to the cabinet. But Churchill’s pessimism – entirely justified, as it turned out – about a breakthrough there encouraged him to push for an altogether different strategy. Why not attack the German alliance at what must be its weakest point – the Ottoman Empire of Turkey?

Churchill’s plan, seconded by Fisher, was to ‘force the Dardanelles’, the narrow strait separating the Mediterranean from the Black Sea, and take Constantinople. This would have the double advantage of securing Egypt, not to mention the oilfields in Persia and Mesopotamia, from German attack, and of persuading Balkan countries such as Romania, which was still sitting on the fence, to commit firmly to the side of the Allies.

It did not work according to plan. The optimal strategy was for a combined naval–military operation, with warships softening up Turkish forts before the army landed a large expeditionary force. But Kitchener balked at the commitment of troops, so on 19 February 1915 Churchill went ahead independently with a naval assault. None of its objectives was realized. Minesweepers failed to sweep adequately; battleship guns failed to take out the Turkish fort artillery. Three ships, including a French battleship, were sunk by mines. When Kitchener finally gave his authorization, an attempt was made to land a combined Australian–New Zealand–Franco–British force (including Winston’s younger brother, Jack) of 70,000 on a rocky peninsula called Gallipoli, but thousands were mown down from entrenched Turkish artillery positions. A beach-head and a hilltop were taken, which afforded a good view of the bodies lying in the sand and shallows.

The butchery at Gallipoli in early 1915 came close to destroying Churchill’s career. It didn’t help that Jacky Fisher now resigned and denied ever having supported an assault on the Dardanelles in the first place. Someone was going to have to take the blame and, without a strong party base, that someone was inevitably going to be Churchill. When Asquith formed a coalition government with the Conservatives in May 1915, one of the items on their shopping list was the eviction of the man
who
had betrayed them in 1904 and who had taken so much pleasure in savaging them through the campaign for the People’s Budget. Churchill was duly demoted to chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, an all but meaningless job in wartime. This was bad enough for someone desperate to perform some active wartime service; but after another attempt to land troops in Turkey failed in August that year, the campaign was abandoned and the inner-circle military-operations committee wound up.

Out of favour, out of power, out of sorts, Churchill crashed into one of his ‘black dog’ depressions. For a while Clementine, with some reason, feared for his sanity. Wandering around his brother’s garden, in a state of incoherent misery, he came across his sister-in-law ‘Goonie’ (Gwendeline) painting watercolours. She put a brush in his hand. It saved his mind, lifted him out of self-annihilating gloom and, more important, gave him a campaign he knew he could win: ‘The sickly inhibitions rolled away. I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury.’ But he seemed not to be able to paint his way out of a guilty conscience, nor to get rid of the consuming frustration that he had been denied a chance to harness his tireless energy to the all-important end of hastening victory.

This left only one route to redemption, active service, and Winston took it. He was now in his early 40s but continued to insist that he was, after all, a soldier. Not any old soldier, of course, but one who rather fancied he might, as a brigadier, lead a regiment. This was aiming a bit high – even, or especially, for an ex-cabinet minister. So Churchill, growling, had to make do (eventually) with the rank of colonel and the command of a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers. The service was not very long – six months in all – and punctuated by leaves home and periods at staff HQ. When he did get to Ploegsteert, the Fusiliers’ assigned position, in January 1916, the orders were to hold it rather than embark on some frontal assault of the German lines. It was real service all the same. Winston made a point of experiencing the trenches, and he got a proper dose of them over the winter of 1915–16. He stomped around the rat-run duckboards and half-frozen mud; ducked with the rest when the ‘whizz bombs’ came over; looked mournfully at the half-buried bodies; even – by mistake – went walkabout in No Man’s Land, to find when he returned that his usual post in the trench had taken a direct hit. Amidst all these discomforts and terrors, Churchill kept up his usual ebullience and slightly uncoordinated surges of zeal, together with frequent exhibitions of disregard for his own physical safety. It helped, of course, that he used Clemmie like Fortnum & Mason. In November 1915, at Bout-de-Ville, he wrote to his wife:

My darling,

We have finished our first 48 hours in the trenches. … I have spent the morning on my toilet & a hot bath – engineered with some difficulty. … The line of trenches … built along the ruins of other older lines taken from the Germans. Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet & clothing breaking through the soil, water & muck on all sides; and about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle & machine guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets w[hich] pass over head. … Will you send now regularly once a week, a small box of food to supplement the rations. Sardines, chocolate, potted meats. … Begin as soon as possible. … Do you realize what a v[er]y important person a Major is? 99 people out of any every hundred in this g[reat] army have to touch their hats to me. With this inspiring reflection let me sign myself. … Kiss Randolph, Diana & that golden Sarah for me.

When he did get his colonel’s rank and his Scots Fusiliers, Churchill saw at once that they were badly mauled and demoralized from the traumatic experience of the battle of Loos. He had just two weeks to get them combat-ready again for their assigned place on the line at Ploegsteert in Flanders. Junior officers and especially NCOs not unnaturally resented having this middle-aged, paunchy, noisy VIP foisted on them and were aghast at his unorthodox approach to parade and drill, generally the kind of enthusiastic shambles that did not go down well with the regulars. But it soon became obvious that Winston was genuinely prepared to share the perils and hardships (though not the sardines); that he had real loyalty to his men and determination that they should not suffer needless casualties. And even though their orders were only to hold their position, so that they never had to face going over the top in one of Field Marshal Haig’s lethal Big Pushes, the dead and wounded rate in Churchill’s battalion was far lower than the norm. This did not, however, prevent Clementine from worrying herself sick over her husband’s fate; an anxiety not helped, perhaps, by the fact that he had already made his will.

But if Clementine was anxious about his departure, she was even more aghast to see him back so soon, in March 1916. Try as he might to be a good, steadfast soldier, it was not in Churchill’s blood to abandon politics altogether. Parading his service as though he had been in uniform since 1914, he made a sudden, exceptionally ill-advised appearance in the Commons, where he attacked the naval conduct of the war since his
departure
from office and – to general consternation and disbelief – called for the return of the ancient, extremely unstable Jacky Fisher. The speech went down like a lead balloon. It did not, however, prevent Churchill from fighting an election (pursued by cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’), nor – in the teeth of Tory hatred – prevent the new prime minister Lloyd George from listening whole-heartedly to his advice, and eventually naming him in July 1917 the new minister of munitions. As it turned out, this was a brilliant choice. Much of what Churchill was to do in the Second World War was anticipated by his work in 1916–18: the ferocious push to solve the perennial ‘shell shortage’; the frank acceptance of conscription before anyone else in the government was brave enough or realistic enough to see it as inevitable; and the advocacy of a radically new weapon that might break the stalemate – the Land Ironclad or tank, an idea taken, as Churchill admitted, from one of his friend H. G. Wells’s prophetic visions. Kitchener, predictably, dismissed the tank as a ‘mechanical toy’ and, to Wells’s and Churchill’s disgust, made sure the new fighting machines were initially used only as a defensive novelty rather than as a reconceptualized cavalry. But when unleashed as assault vehicles, they proved their worth at the battle of Cambrai in November 1917, advancing the British lines 5 miles in some places.

Some 8 million dead combatants and 25 million additional deaths later, the war ground to an end. On 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, Wells described military trucks riding around London picking up anyone who wanted a ride to anywhere, and ‘vast vacant crowds’, consisting mostly of students, schoolchildren, the middle-aged and the old, and home-front soldiers, choking the streets: ‘Everyone felt aimless, with a kind of strained and aching relief.’ A captured German gun carriage was thrown on to a bonfire of ‘Hun’ trophies in Trafalgar Square. But Wells, at least, thought exhaustion and sorrow overwhelmed the rejoicing: ‘People wanted to laugh, and weep – and could do neither.’ Vera Brittain, who had left Oxford University to be a nurse, noticed that ‘the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: “We’ve won the War!” They only said: “The War is over.”’ Even this relief gave way to a stunned, chilly gloom, for almost all her best male friends were dead: ‘The War was over; a new age was beginning, but the dead were dead and would never return.’