A History of Britain, Volume 3 (58 page)

Perenially ebullient as he was, Churchill nonetheless understood this strange mix of emotions. As the new minister of ‘war and air’ (and an eager trainee flyer, until a crash impelled Clemmie to forbid Winston the cockpit), he was responsible for handling demobilization, which, before he took office, had become a source of immense anger and distress for all
those
who had survived the inferno. They were supposed to be discharged according to industrial and economic priorities, which inevitably meant slowly. Judging this inhuman, Churchill speeded up the rate of discharge and made wounds, age and length of service the priorities instead.

It was the least that could be done. At least 700,000 British servicemen had perished in the Great War, and a million and a half had been wounded. Another 150,000 were lost to the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. Some 300,000 children had lost at least one parent. One in ten of an entire generation of young men had been wiped out. One of them was Rudyard Kipling’s only son, and the grief turned the great imperial tragedian towards deeper melancholy. In his wonderful
Mr Britling Sees It Through
, published in 1916, Wells (though his own sons were too young to serve) imagined the ‘little Brit’ similarly bereaved, along with a German father in the same torment: ‘Man has come, floundering and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darknesses of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again.’ A predictable, perfectly human response would be to ‘flounder with the rest’, to indulge again in ‘Chestertonian jolliness, the
Punch
side of things. Let mankind blunder out of the mud and blood as mankind had blundered in.’ But for Wells, as for like-minded writers such as Shaw and Arnold Bennett, this had to be the moment, perhaps the last, when the conditions that had produced the general massacre were removed. Away with preposterous empires and monarchs and the tribal fantasies of churches and territories. Instead there would be created a League of Free Nations, advocated also by Shaw, Bennett and the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. This virtual international government, informed by science and motivated by disinterested guardianship of the fate of common humanity, must inaugurate a new history – otherwise the sacrifice of millions would have been perfectly futile, the bad joke of the grinning skull. All of these ‘new Samurai’, as Wells called them in his book
The Modern Utopia
(1905), were to be bitterly disappointed by what they took to be the vindictiveness of the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the blame and the cost of the war on Germany. Wells was also frustrated by the limited authority given to the League of Nations, made even weaker by the United States Congress’s repudiation of the treaty.

At home there were misleading signs that this new era, when the fate of the common man and woman would truly be the concern of their rulers, might actually come about. The burial of the Unknown Soldier in the nave of Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 1920 seemed, at least symbolically, to herald just such a chastened democracy. The idea had been floated by the Reverend David Railton, a vicar from Margate in Kent who
had
served as an army chaplain at Armexntières and had written to the Dean of Westminster. The battlefields were, of course, strewn with unmarked, improvised graves and this would be the ordinary soldier’s counterpart of the Cenotaph, the monument to the war dead designed by Lutyens and erected in Whitehall. The king was against it and the appointment of Lord Curzon, not noted for his sympathy with or knowledge of the common man, as chairman of the committee did not bode well. But Lloyd George, presiding over the coalition government (with a huge majority), saw its propaganda value and the scheme went ahead in the deliberate glare of publicity. Six parties were sent out to six cemeteries in Flanders to exhume a body from each, and the anonymity of the soldier selected was preserved by blindfolding the officer who made the final choice. A coffin of English oak was prepared and inscribed, as would be the plaque of black Belgian marble in the abbey, with the utmost simplicity and gravity: ‘A British warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’. Six destroyers escorted the coffin across the Channel, where it received a gun salute from Dover Castle; then it was moved by train to Victoria Station in London, from where on 11 November it was carried through the streets of the capital, the king following on foot. The pall-bearers included the three chiefs-of-staff, Field Marshal Haig, Admiral Beatty and Air Marshal Trenchard. In the tomb, at the feet of statues of the famous and the mighty, were buried, along with the soldier, 100 sandbags of earth from each of the great battlefields of the war. Over 1 million people came to pay their respects in the first weeks of the interment, and 100,000 wreaths were laid at the newly built Cenotaph.

Would post-war Britain, then, as Lloyd George had promised, be a ‘country fit for heroes’? It would at any rate be a democracy of 27 million, even if the vote at last given to women in 1918 began at the age of 30 whilst 21-year-old men were deemed adult enough to exercise it; there would be no flapper franchise. A short, strong, post-war economic boom funded some, at least, of the government’s promises. Christopher Addison, the minister of reconstruction, oversaw the building of 200,000 homes – effectively the beginning of council-house construction in Britain. The liberal historian and president of the Board of Education, H. A. L. Fisher raised the school-leaving age to 14, a small act with immense significance, and standardized wages and salaries throughout the country. Old-age pensions were doubled, and unemployment insurance extended to cover virtually the entire working population of Britain.

It is not quite the case, then, that ‘reconstruction’ was the fraud that some historians have claimed. But where it was most visible, in the economics of heavy industry, ‘war socialism’ did indeed disappear as Lloyd
George
always meant it to; and with it went the sense, in the labour movement at least, that an activist government would do something to moderate the inequities of the old industrial system. The men who ran the government were, after all, born Victorians, and they did not hesitate in their determination to dismantle as quickly and completely as possible the state control of raw material, manufactures, communications, wages and rents. And even though Lloyd George was the prime minister, the political complexion of the government was a strong shade of blue since his majority was completely dependent on the alliance with the dominant Tories and Ulster Unionists.

So any talk, strong amongst the unions, of nationalizing the coal industry, the docks or the railways was discouraged. And when the boom turned to slump in 1920–1, there was nothing to prevent the people whom Stanley Baldwin called ‘the hard-faced men who looked as though they had done well out of the war’ from resuming the tough tactics they had adopted in the first decades of the century: wage cuts and lock-outs.

In any event Lloyd George did not need persuading by the likes of Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative party, or the other hard-right figures in his government such as F. E. Smith and Lord Curzon that the termination of ‘war socialism’ was an important goal and the restoration of monetary orthodoxy was the
sine qua non
of British ‘reconstruction’. If anyone pointed out that he had ensured there would be two contradictory interpretations of what reconstruction meant – that of a social democracy and that of Tory traditionalism – the prime minister would merely beam disconcertingly back until the ingenuous dimly understood that divide-and-rule was the point. Either you got it or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you were outside Lloyd George’s charmed circle. Now, more than ever, he was convinced that he could govern through sheer charisma reinforced by tough political muscle. Up on a pedestal of his own making as ‘the man who won the war’, in his own mind (and in many others’ too) he was no longer a mere politician leading a party so much as the indispensable ‘statesman’. With the evaporation of the authority of the US president, Woodrow Wilson, and the short-lived office of the French wartime prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, his fellow post-war peacemakers, it was Lloyd George who filled the vacuum as the arbiter of Europe, which was to say the world. The more this became apparent, the better he liked it – strutting, flashing his cherubically wicked smile and treating the obliging press like the complaisant mistresses he so unapologetically enjoyed. The coalition faced virtually no threats in parliament, where the 59 Labour members provided the main opposition along with the withered rump of ‘pure’ Liberals ostensibly led by the frequently
drunk,
wispy-haired figure of H. H. Asquith, who had never got over his dethronement by Lloyd George in 1916. With not much to challenge him, the prime minister rarely deigned to put in an appearance in the Commons, presiding instead from Downing Street over a regime of flashy cronies. It was rule by dinner party; its weapons the artfully targeted rumour, the discreet business sweetener, the playfully or not so playfully threatening poke in the ribs. Honours were up for sale; insider commercial favours expected. And the more gangsterishly presidential Lloyd George became, the less love was lost between him and his only obvious rival – Winston Churchill.

When this all turned bad – strikes and riots in Scotland, a brutal war in Ireland, boycotts, walk-outs and massacres in India – the imperial nation, which Curzon boasted in 1918 had never been so omnipotent, threatened to fall apart. The seams tore open most raggedly at the periphery, where there were outright rebellions. In Ireland, Volunteers – called for not just by Unionists but by John Redmond’s Home Rulers – self-destructed precisely by virtue of their loyal service in Flanders. As they turned into the ghosts of Passchendaele and the Menin road, their deadly rivals, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who in 1914 had been an insignificant group of militants, swelled to the level of a real army. The abrasive – or expedient – gesture of bringing the most unscrupulous and belligerent of the Unionists, Sir Edward Carson, into the coalition government, triggered not just the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, but, even more damagingly, the sense that the British government would never deliver Irish independence unless forced to do so. In the 1918 elections the remains of the Home Rulers were politically annihilated by Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA), committed to an immediate, free republic.

There was also, for the first time, a serious Scottish Home Rule movement, fuelled in part by astonishingly disproportionate Scots casualties in the war: 26.4 per cent of the 557,000 Scots who served lost their lives, against a rate of 11.8 per cent for the rest of the British army. Ironically, it was the long Scottish tradition of being the backbone of the imperial army – from the American Revolution to the Indian Mutiny – that resulted in them being put in particularly perilous positions, or made the vanguard of some insanely suicidal lurch ‘over the top’ ordained by the likes of Haig or Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. But in Glasgow an eighth of the population was still living in single-room accommodation and the region’s economy was especially vulnerable to retrenchment in the shipyards. As men were demobilized, unemployment rose. The unions responded with demands for a shorter working week, to spread the money available as broadly as possible, and for the retention of wage and
rent
controls. When they got no joy a 40-hour general strike was called, culminating in a demonstration of 100,000 in George’s Square. A red flag was waved and the baited bull of the police lines charged. The demonstration was declared first a riot and then a ‘Bolshevist’ uprising. Mindful of having been caught by surprise in Dublin at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, the government sent 12,000 troops and six tanks to occupy Red Glasgow.

Elsewhere in the empire, despite Curzon’s complacency, all was not especially well. Or, rather, there were two empires, just as there were coming to be two regionally disparate Britains, affected in very different ways and degrees by the ageing pains of the classical industrial economy. Nearly 150,000 white troops from the empire lost their lives in the war. The extraordinary sacrifices made by the white Anglo-dominions – Canadians at Vimy Ridge, ANZAC troops at Gallipoli, South Africans at Delville Wood – may have made the families who suffered personal losses proud of the sacrifice of their sons, but also perhaps not unmixed in their feelings towards the empire that had taken them. After the Gallipoli debacle in 1915 it was understandable that enthusiasm for volunteering in Australia petered out dramatically, and there was intense opposition to conscription. And if it is undeniably true that, collectively, those nations saw their service as a spurs-winning moment on the road to recognition as imperial equals with the mother country, it is equally true that the non-British populations of Canada, and especially of Boer South Africa, were much less ardent in their support. There were recruiting riots in Quebec. In 1915 elections in South Africa demonstrated that, despite General Jan Smuts’s loyalist efforts, more than half the Boers were unreconciled to a war against Germany – a country that they associated with support for Afrikaner nationalism.

Macaulay’s vision of a confederation of the educated and the self-governing had come true – but for white, English-speaking farmers, bankers and plantation owners. In the off-white empire, this reciprocity of gratitude and shared self-interest was a lot less apparent. Nearly 1 million Indian troops were in service, both in the ‘barracks in the east’ in Asia itself on the Western Front and, during the war, in the ultimately disastrous campaign in Mesopotamia, where General Sir Charles Townsend’s besieged army had ended up surrendering to the Turks at Kut el Amara in 1916. Official estimates of Indian losses were put at 54,000 dead and another 60,000 wounded. At least 40,000 black Africans had served as bearers and labourers with the British armies in France, as well as a larger force fighting in the colonial African theatre; needless to say, their casualty rates are impossible to ascertain, though likely to have been very high.