A Peace to End all Peace (19 page)

I

Winston Churchill’s dogged determination to fight on at Gallipoli until victory was won kept him in the spotlight even after the army had taken over the Dardanelles campaign from the navy. He appeared to be both the man who had brought the Ottoman war about, and the man who had caused Britain to suffer one defeat after another in that war.

Although from April onward the battle for the straits was no longer the Admiralty’s operation, Churchill was made the scapegoat for the continuing casualties and setbacks as the Allied armies fought on hopelessly at Gallipoli. Kitchener’s prestige was so great that the press, the public, and Parliament found it inconceivable that he had been responsible for the blunders that had been committed; but Churchill was an interfering civilian and it was easy to believe the admirals who claimed that his amateurish meddling in naval matters had been the cause of British setbacks.
The Times
gave voice to a gathering consensus in 1915 when its 18 May editorial proclaimed that

Outside of the War Cabinet, it was not generally known that Lord Kitchener was the author of the plan to send the navy on its own to attack the Dardanelles. Churchill was blamed for the decision, and therefore for the several weeks of advance warning that had been given to Enver and Liman von Sanders, which enabled them to entrench their armies to repel the Allied assault on Gallipoli. The officers on the Gallipoli beaches saw the earlier naval attack as a show-off stunt by the First Lord of the Admiralty, a
coup
that had failed and threatened to lose them their lives. Aubrey Herbert, who served in the armed forces there, wrote in his diary that “Winston’s name fills everyone with rage. Roman emperors killed slaves to make themselves popular, he is killing free men to make himself famous. If he hadn’t tried that
coup
but had cooperated with the Army, we might have got to Constantinople with very little loss.”
²
Later he wrote that “As for Winston, I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here.”
³

Abuse was heaped on Churchill from all quarters, and his political position deteriorated rapidly. A final split between Churchill and Britain’s greatest sailor, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, brought matters to a head. Churchill and Fisher had conferred and had reached agreement on a program of reinforcements of the fleet supporting the Gallipoli campaign on Friday, 14 May. Early the following morning Fisher received several memoranda from Churchill summarizing the points on which they had agreed, but also adding new suggestions of his own. Infuriated, Fisher, who had announced that he was resigning on eight previous occasions, walked over from the Admiralty to nearby 11 Downing Street and told the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, that he was resigning his office. Lloyd George sent for the Prime Minister, who was next door at 10 Downing Street, and the two of them attempted to persuade Fisher that he had to remain at his post at least temporarily. Fisher refused, and then went back to his room at the Admiralty, locked the door, and drew the blinds. Later, he disappeared from view for a time.

Churchill learned of the situation from his colleagues, for Fisher refused to see him. The immediate problem was that the navy—in the middle of a war—was without its chief commanding officer, and that the intentions of the other members of the Admiralty Board were unknown. Churchill was assured on Sunday, 16 May, that the Second, Third, and Fourth Sea Lords were all willing to continue in their positions. He also secured the agreement of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson to return to his prewar position of First Sea Lord in Fisher’s place. Since the press and the political world did not yet know of Fisher’s resignation, Churchill planned to announce both Fisher’s resignation and the new dispositions at the Admiralty to the House of Commons on Monday morning—before the Opposition had time to disrupt his plans.

Fisher, however, sent a hint of what he had done to Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Opposition. Bonar Law guessed what it meant, and called on Lloyd George first thing Monday morning. He asked the Chancellor whether Fisher had resigned. When Lloyd George confirmed that he had, Bonar Law explained his own view of the grave political consequences that could be expected to ensue. The Opposition theretofore had refrained from challenging the government in wartime, but Bonar Law said that he could no longer restrain his followers: Fisher was their hero, and they would not let Churchill stay at the Admiralty if Fisher went. Nor would they stop their attacks there, for the Tory Members of Parliament, in the face of one military failure after another, no longer felt that they could give the Liberal government their unqualified support.

Bonar Law’s solution was to broaden the government. He proposed that the Liberal government should be replaced by a coalition government, representing the two major parties in Parliament, and Labour.

Lloyd George instantly saw the force of the argument. He asked Bonar Law to wait at 11 Downing Street while he went next door to consult the Prime Minister. Lloyd George then put the case for a coalition forcefully to Asquith, who abruptly agreed.

Churchill knew none of this. Early that afternoon he went to the House of Commons to announce that the Sea Lords had agreed to stay on with Admiral of the Fleet Wilson as their new head. He arrived to find that Lloyd George and Asquith would not let him make his speech. Asquith said that he did not want the scheduled debate between the parties to take place. He told Churchill that he would form a new government in which the Liberals would share office with the Conservatives and with Labour.

On 19 May 1915, the new government was announced. Churchill was removed from the Admiralty and given the minor position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster—in effect, Minister Without Portfolio—although he remained in the War Cabinet.

The political world did not know at the time that, if Churchill had been listened to, the Dardanelles campaign could have been won at a time when only a few hundred casualties had been incurred; and that it was because the admirals and generals had overruled him that Britain had embarked on a campaign that was in the process of costing her more than 200,000 casualties. Thus it failed to grasp the essential fact that Britain’s generals and admirals were losing the war for her and that the country urgently needed not less but more civilian control of the military.

The political world in Britain also failed to grasp another essential fact: the war in the East was not merely being lost by the Allies, it was being won by the other side. The results of the campaign were a reflection of the fact that the courage and tenacity of the Australian, New Zealand, British, and French soldiery was being matched by the courage and tenacity of their Ottoman opponents.

II

Lloyd George had brought about the creation of this first coalition government, which excluded Churchill from a major Cabinet position. He claimed that “he had fought to get Winston high office…His colleagues would not, however, agree to Winston’s having anything but a minor position.”
⁴
Lloyd George was aware, however, that a hurt and angry Churchill placed the blame on him.
⁵
Churchill’s wife, even years later, spoke bitterly of the Chancellor as a Judas whose “Welsh trickiness” had shattered the First Lord’s career; and the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill’s cousin, sent a note on 24 May saying “Pro tem LG has done you in.”
⁶
Churchill himself exclaimed: “I am the victim of a political intrigue. I am finished!”
⁷

Lloyd George had always regarded the Ottoman war as Churchill’s fault. In the spring of 1915 the Chancellor took an even wider view of his former protégé’s failings. When it became clear that Churchill would have to leave the Admiralty, Lloyd George commented: “It is the Nemesis of the man who has fought for this war for years. When the war came he saw in it the chance for 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.”
⁸

I

The Unionist-Conservative members of the new British government took office in the belief that their task would be to protect the country’s military leadership from civilian interference. Having succeeded in removing Churchill from the Admiralty, they took it that the next item on the agenda should be the defense of Lord Kitchener against his principal adversary, the Liberal politician Lloyd George.

David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, held the distinction of having been the first member of the Cabinet to question a decision of Field Marshal Kitchener’s after the latter became Secretary of State for War. Once started on questioning Kitchener’s judgments, Lloyd George never stopped. Avoiding the pitfall that was Churchill’s undoing at the Admiralty, the Liberal politician did not at first dare to challenge the field marshal on issues that were strictly military. Instead the Chancellor of the Exchequer waged his campaign on grounds of his own choosing. The issue that he raised was the shortage of munitions and other supplies. Involving questions of labor, production, and finance, it was an issue regarding which his qualifications to speak were greater than Kitchener’s.

On 19 May 1915, the day on which formation of the new government was announced, Lloyd George inaugurated the final phases of a campaign that succeeded in detaching the munitions and supply functions from Kitchener’s War Office and placing them under himself as Minister of Munitions. In his new ministry he succeeded in starting to do what Kitchener had not been able to do: expanding civilian production of war material and finding new sources of supply.

The Unionist-Conservative M.P.s who entered the new coalition government began to take another look at Lloyd George and Lord Kitchener, whose quarrel they had prejudged. As Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George became a tornado twisting with elemental force to destroy the enemy. The Tories came to admire and applaud his efforts. Bonar Law and his colleagues had come into the Cabinet to protect Kitchener and the military from interference by amateurish Liberal civilians, but to their surprise found themselves ranged alongside Lloyd George in questioning Kitchener’s competence.

The immediate military decision facing the new government was what to do about the Gallipoli expedition. The War Council of the Cabinet reconstituted itself as the Dardanelles Committee, and held its first meeting in Asquith’s rooms at the House of Commons on 7 June 1915, to deliberate the matter. Thereafter it met often. The Tories discovered that the Secretary of State for War did not supply them with the information they required in order to form a judgment. Kitchener was secretive and reluctant to disclose military information to civilians. At times he avoided answering questions because he was not fully and accurately informed. At times he espoused positions that were contradictory.

Bonar Law and his principal Tory colleague, the new Attorney-General, Sir Edward Carson, were inclined either to abandon the venture or else to send enough reinforcements to Gallipoli to ensure success. The question was what level of reinforcements would ensure success, but Kitchener would not say how many troops the Turks had at Gallipoli or how many British troops were needed in order to win. Instead he continued to talk in terms of how many troops could be spared from the western front. In exasperation, by early September Carson was writing that “What I feel so acutely about is that all our calculations (if we can dignify them by that name) are absolutely haphazard—we are always told what we can send & not how many are necessary…”
¹

By questioning the War Office on one occasion, ministers found that an important piece of cabled information had been received there although the War Minister denied all knowledge of it. Either Kitchener had forgotten the cable or had misunderstood it. On 10 Downing Street stationery, Carson penned a note and passed it along the Cabinet table to Lloyd George: “K doesn’t read the telegrams—& we don’t see them—it is intolerable.”
²

Carson began cross-examining Kitchener in Cabinet meetings as though he were an accused criminal in the dock. The field marshal’s evasiveness, combined with hopeful predictions from Sir Ian Hamilton that never seemed to be fulfilled, brought the Tory leaders to frustration and despair. Typical comments during sessions of the Dardanelles Committee were “S
IR
E. C
ARSON
said that the slaughter which had gone on was no success, and inquired if it were to be continued” and “M
R
. B
ONAR
L
AW
asked if Sir Ian Hamilton was to continue attacking when such action was obviously hopeless.”
³

The question of what to do dragged on into the late autumn. Cabinet opinion began to harden in favor of withdrawal from Gallipoli; for Kitchener failed to offer an alternative that promised success. Kitchener dissented, arguing that Britain should soldier on. He claimed that “abandonment would be the most disastrous event in the history of the Empire,” though he admitted that he “would like to liquidate the situation.”
⁴

The Cabinet was unwilling to order a withdrawal from Gallipoli without Lord Kitchener’s sanction, the more so as the commander on the spot, Sir Ian Hamilton, remained hopeful. On the Gallipoli beaches the situation was desperate, and Wyndham Deedes, the officer who had warned Kitchener against the Dardanelles adventure but who was serving there, joined together with two other officers, George Lloyd and Guy Dawnay, to do something about it. They schemed to get one of their number sent back to London to tell the Cabinet the truth about their situation. Dawnay had the chance, and seized it.

Back in London, Dawnay saw Kitchener and other British leaders, even including the recently demoted Churchill. He tried to get his message through to them, but they were reluctant to accept the unpalatable truth. Deedes had also guessed what Dawnay would discover, and told him so: “And I bet the best you found was Winston after all!”
⁵

In the end, Ian Hamilton was replaced; and the new British commander saw at once that the situation was hopeless and called for an immediate evacuation. But the Cabinet continued to hesitate; the problem, as always, was Lord Kitchener.

II

In Lloyd George’s vivid image, Kitchener’s mind was pictured as the moving, turning turret of a lighthouse; but somewhere in the raging storm of the Gallipoli campaign the light had suddenly gone out. The field marshal’s colleagues waited with growing anger and impatience in the darkness for the powerful beam of light that never again swung around to dispel the night.

Even the Tory Bonar Law had come around so far as to propose that Lloyd George should replace Kitchener at the War Office, but the Prime Minister resisted the proposal. Only the inner group in the government was aware of the field marshal’s failings; he retained his following in the country, and Asquith felt that to replace him would be politically impossible. The Prime Minister’s typical solution was to send Kitchener out to the Dardanelles on a fact-finding expedition in the hope that he would be detained there indefinitely.

In the event, once he went out and saw the battlefield himself, Kitchener felt compelled to agree that Gallipoli should be abandoned. Armed with Kitchener’s approval, the Cabinet finally issued the necessary authorization; and, at the beginning of 1916, the evacuation—which was far and away the most brilliant operation of the campaign—was completed. Deedes called the evacuation “one of the most remarkable things in history.”
⁶

III

On 25 April 1915, the Allies could have won an easy, bloodless victory by their surprise attack; but 259 days later, when they withdrew in defeat from their last positions on the blood-soaked beaches of the Dardanelles, it emerged that they had lost one of the costliest military engagements in history. Half a million soldiers had been engaged in battle on each side, and each had suffered a quarter of a million casualties.

It was a decisive battle, in that the Allies could have won it, and, with it, the Middle Eastern war—but did not. It foreshadowed, too, things to come; a supposedly backward Asian army had defeated a modern European one.

It had the effect of drawing Europe into Middle Eastern affairs on a long-term basis. The military involvement which Kitchener had feared but failed to prevent was suspended temporarily by the Allied evacuation, but would resume a year later. More important, the setback to Allied fortunes drove Britain both in a specific and a general sense to involve herself more deeply in Middle Eastern affairs. In a specific sense, as will be seen presently, it drove Kitchener’s lieutenants to ally themselves with a Middle Eastern ruler they believed could help to save Sir Ian Hamilton’s armies at Gallipoli from perishing. And in a general sense, the sheer magnitude of Britain’s commitment and loss at Gallipoli made it seem vital years later that she should play a major role in the postwar Middle East to give some sort of meaning to so great a sacrifice.

IV

On 18 November 1915, having resigned as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Winston Churchill crossed over to France to serve, at his own request, as an army officer on the western front. The political world continued to place the blame for Gallipoli on him. In the Cabinet, however, Kitchener was blamed too; and Kitchener knew it.

Lord Kitchener was aware that his Cabinet colleagues hoped he would not return from his trip to the Dardanelles, but deliberately disappointed them. On returning to London at the end of 1915, he spoke frankly with the Prime Minister about his loss of support within the Cabinet, and offered to resign. When an acceptable replacement could not be found for him, he adopted a different approach. With the Prime Minister’s approval, he arranged for a basic change in the nature of the position he held as War Minister, reducing the powers and responsibilities of the job. A fighting soldier from the western front, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, was then brought into office as Chief of the Imperial General Staff with widely expanded powers that until then had fallen within Kitchener’s domain as War Minister.

Yet Kitchener retained authority in formulating political policy for the Middle East. When he returned to London at the end of 1915, his aide Sir Mark Sykes also returned to London from a long fact-finding trip, bringing with him exciting news of a Middle Eastern ruler who might ally himself with Britain, and a revolutionary program on the basis of that alliance for turning the tide in the Ottoman war—a program that Kitchener was to push through the Cabinet.