Castles of Steel (34 page)

[King George V blocked another Churchill battleship name proposal the following year. The First Lord had suggested
Pitt,
to honor the two great prime ministers, father and son. The king rejected the name on an intuition derived from his own many years as a naval officer. Sailors, he knew, tended to find obscene or scatological nicknames for warships;
Pitt
was too easy and would have an inevitable result. Churchill bowed, not without grumbling that this thought was “unworthy of the royal mind.”]

Once the war began, however, Churchill cast advice and restraint aside. As the supreme political authority at the Admiralty, he saw himself as solely responsible to the prime minister, the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country for the war at sea; the First Sea Lord, the Admiralty War Staff, and the admirals in the fleet were there to carry out his orders. His imagination was often brilliant and his energy was phenomenal; somehow, his capacity for work actually increased under the pressures of war. Conduct of the war was centralized in a tiny ad hoc Admiralty War Group run by Churchill and including the First Sea Lord, the chief of the War Staff, and the naval secretary. Churchill himself described its working: “We met every day and sometimes twice a day, read the whole position and arrived at a united decision on every matter of consequence. . . . Besides our regular meetings, the First Sea Lord and I consulted together constantly at all hours.” Nevertheless, Churchill admitted, he often acted on his own: “It happened in a large number of cases that, seeing what ought to be done and confident of the agreement of the First Sea Lord, I myself drafted the telegrams and decisions and took them personally to the First Sea Lord for his concurrence before dispatch.” Further, Churchill said, “I accepted full responsibility . . . and exercised a close general supervision over everything that was done or proposed. Further, I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on all operative matters.”

The trouble was that Churchill’s concept of his role, added to his constant demand for haste, eliminated normal staff procedure in presenting alternative views. Often, orders were written and issued quickly, without the advantage of staff analysis, and subordinates were effectively eliminated from any role in decision making. Admiralty messages had flair, but because they were written by an amateur, their language was often ambiguous. The advent of modern wireless communications added to the complication. Now, the Admiralty could communicate directly with the admirals and ships at sea, who began receiving messages straight from the desk and hand of the First Lord. Constitutionally, Churchill was entitled to do this, but it created confusion at the Admiralty and in the fleet. Already, in the episode of the
Goeben
’s escape, the confusion of orders emanating from Churchill’s pen had befuddled Admiral Milne and confused Admiral Troubridge.

Nowhere was the effect of this erosion of professional authority greater than in the office of the First Sea Lord. Traditionally, the naval officer filling this role was responsible for the worldwide conduct of naval operations; Battenberg, however, had all but ceded this role to the First Lord. Prince Louis was responsible for keeping the fleet mobilized in the week before the war, but as time passed, and the whirlwind activity of the First Lord increased, Prince Louis’s authority and self-confidence deteriorated. During the first three months of war, the First Sea Lord wrote few minutes and memoranda. Churchill wrote the cables to Milne regarding
Goeben;
it was the First Lord who wrote on September 18, four days before the
Bacchante
s were sunk: “These cruisers ought not to continue on this beat.” Battenberg’s original response had been “Concur.” Soon, Prince Louis’s nickname around the Admiralty was “Quite Concur.”

It was in this context of losses at sea and restlessness in the fleet that public discussion over Louis’s German birth began. The accusation that he was something less than a full-fledged Englishman, like the charge that he was a “court favorite,” had been heard throughout his career. Most officers in the navy respected and admired Battenberg, but not all. Some were jealous of his court connections. Others knew that he was a Fisher man and they, being Fisher’s enemies, became Battenberg’s, too. At the time Prince Louis was promoted to rear admiral, several senior officers mounted a campaign against him. Prince Louis was aware of their sentiments; on July 24, 1906, he wrote to Fisher, “I heard by chance what the reasons were which [Admirals] Beresford and Lambton and all that tribe gave out
urbi et orbi
against my becoming Second [Sea] Lord or any other Lord and fleet command; that I was a damned German who had no business in the British Navy and that the Service for that reason did not trust me. I know the latter to be a foul lie. . . . It was however such a blow to me that I seriously contemplated resigning my command there and then.” Complaints were heard again when it became known that he was to be made an acting vice admiral and second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet. King Edward heard about the complaints and asked Fisher about them. Fisher replied, “I have never known more malignant rancour and jealousy as manifested by Lord Charles Beresford and Hedworth Lambton as against Prince Louis and I regret to say Lord Tweedmouth [then First Lord] is frightened of what these two can do in exciting the Service against the avowed intention of making Prince Louis an acting Vice Admiral.” This resentful antagonism never died out; indeed, it spread to the press. In 1911, when Louis was appointed Second Sea Lord, Horatio Bottomley, editor of the weekly
John Bull,
protested, “Should a German boss our navy? Bulldog breed or Dachshund? It would be a crime against our empire to trust our secrets of national defence to any alien-born official. It is a heavy strain to put upon any German to make him a ruler of our navy and give him the key to our defences.” The
Daily Mail
wrote: “It is a curious stroke of fortune by which one brother-in-law directs the operations of the British navy . . . and the other in person commands the German fleets at sea.” (Prince Henry of Prussia then commanded the High Seas Fleet.)

Unfortunately and unwittingly, the Battenbergs contributed to popular misperceptions. In an era of a naval armaments race with Germany, they kept their home in Germany and made frequent and widely reported visits to their relatives in Darmstadt. There was an advantage—which Churchill recognized—in having a First Sea Lord who knew the German navy and many of its senior officers and who was related by marriage to Prince Henry of Prussia and the kaiser. But these connections aroused suspicions. No one understood this better than Queen Victoria, who had counseled the Battenbergs “to live more in England” and “embrace English life.” Even in the active navy, officers who admired Battenberg saw an irritating German side to his personality. Prince Louis, said his biographer Richard Hough,

never understood, through all his long service life . . . why his peculiarly German manner of being right, and always right, of not being ashamed of showing he had brains, rubbed his fellow officers the wrong way. “These are the kind of administrative blunders which are never made in Germany,” he once wrote . . . [to a friend]. Louis could no more cure this tendency than he could completely refine and Anglicize his faint German accent which ruffled feelings further when declaiming about the efficiency of German ways.

In fact, there was little affection between the Hohenzollerns, who were disdainful of the impoverished, morganatic Battenbergs, and the Rhineland Hessian Battenbergs, who shuddered at the behavior of the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Prince Louis once tartly rebuffed a German admiral who had reproached him as a man born in Germany for serving in the British navy. “Sir,” said Prince Louis, “when I joined the Royal Navy in the year 1868, the German empire did not exist.” By 1914, he had been a British subject for forty-six years and most of his male relatives had served or were serving the British crown. Louis’s brother Henry had married Queen Victoria’s daughter, then gone to Africa with the British army for the Ashanti campaign, where he caught fever and died. Henry’s son, and Louis’s nephew, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, was an infantry lieutenant with the King’s Royal Rifles in France. Prince Louis’s two sons, George and Louis, were in the Royal Navy. That he might have to fight against Germany was a source of anguish for Prince Louis, but he had seen the possibility for years and had no doubts about his own loyalty to Great Britain and the Royal Navy. The problem was that once the Royal Navy began to suffer unexpected wartime reverses, the First Sea Lord became an easy target for blame.

Jingoistic nationalism in Britain in the early weeks of the Great War resulted in the smashing of windows of shops owned by German immigrants, the stoning of dachshunds, and public insulting of people with foreign names. Hysteria fanned by the popular press left no one immune. Violet Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, was asked “whether it was true that my father drank the kaiser’s health after dinner.” In this predjudiced context, the holding of the navy’s highest post by a German-born prince at the beginning of a war with Germany became a focus of grievance. Louis was called a Germhun, a term coined by Horatio Bottomley. There were rumors that the First Sea Lord was secretly dealing with the Germans, that he had deliberately engineered the loss of the three armored cruisers, and that he had been imprisoned in the Tower on the orders of the king. Stories about Prince Louis reached the Naval School at Osborne, where his thirteen-year-old son, Louis (known as Dickie), was a cadet. “The latest rumor . . . here,” he wrote to his mother, Princess Victoria, is “that Papa has turned out to be a German spy and has been discreetly marched off to the Tower where he is guarded by Beefeaters. Apparently the rumor started . . . by the fact that an admiral has been recalled from the Mediterranean to find out about the
Goeben
and
Breslau
escaping. People apparently think he let the German cruiser escape as he was a spy or an agent. . . . I got rather a rotten time of it for about three days as little fools . . . insisted on calling me a German spy and kept on heckling me.”

Rumors of this kind reverberated not just among the boys at Osborne but in Belgravia drawing rooms and the clubs of St. James, where Louis’s old enemies, a group of elderly retired admirals, gathered. This “syndicate of discontent,” as Fisher called it, had always been envious of Battenberg’s relations with the court and hostile to his advancement to the navy’s highest post. The most bigoted was Beresford, enraged that Fisher, a middle-class nobody, and now Louis, a German prince, had both become First Sea Lord, an office he never had reached. At one point in his vendetta, Beresford wrote an article belittling Louis’s record as a naval officer and demanding that he be expelled from the navy because of his German birth. He sent this to the editor of every London newspaper, asking that it be published anonymously. No one agreed.

Before the war, this cabal had limited itself to spasmodic attacks, expecting that Batttenberg would resign from the Admiralty if war were declared. When Prince Louis did not do so, his enemies became choleric. On the evening of August 28, a group of members of the Carlton Club, among them Beresford and Arthur Lee, a onetime Civil Lord of the Admiralty and a future First Lord, was standing in a hallway. According to Lee, “the conversation having turned upon German spies, Lord Charles Beresford expressed the opinion that all Germans, including highly placed ones, ought to leave the country as they were in touch with Germans abroad. Louis’ name was not mentioned, but soon after . . . Beresford said that ‘good taste’ should lead Louis to voluntarily resign his position. However good an officer he might be, ‘nothing could alter the fact that he is a German, and as such should not be occupying his present position. He keeps German servants and has property in Germany.’ ”

Lee protested and praised Louis. “I admit all that,” said Beresford, “but none the less he is a German and he entered the Navy for his own advantage, not ours. Feeling is very strong in the service about his being First Sea Lord—it is strongly resented.” When Lee expressed surprise at this statement, Beresford continued, “I am entitled to speak for the service. I know the opinion of my brother officers on the subject. It is very strong.” Lee referred the matter to Churchill, who immediately took it up with Beresford: “In time of war, spreading of reports likely to cause mistrust or despondency is certainly a military offence.” Beresford at first denied Lee’s story and then told Churchill that what went on in London clubs was private and that Lee had no right to draw attention to the conversation. Whereupon Churchill replied:

Dear Lord Charles Beresford:

I am clearly of the opinion that the safety of the state overrides all questions of club etiquette and that personal ties must give way to public requirements at a time like this. Free expressions of opinion which are legitimate in time of peace, cannot be permitted now. Everyone has to uphold confidence or be silent. . . . We have an absolute right to your aid and influence in this and I hope it is on this footing that I may continue to address you. Yours sincerely.

This closed the incident but did not end the malevolent gossip. Horatio Bottomley, scenting the kill, stepped up his campaign. Scurrilous letters to Louis began to appear in the Admiralty mail. Others came to newspaper offices. The First Sea Lord was pinioned and increasingly helpless. He knew about the calumnies uttered at the Carlton Club and about the vicious letters arriving at the Admiralty; he saw the constant erosion of his role at the Admiralty; he knew that he was losing the confidence of the First Lord, the Cabinet, and his fellow officers. Gout, from which he had suffered for years, chose this moment to strike him down.

[“Prince Louis was a big man and had a big appetite,” said his colleague the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Henry Oliver. “At breakfast, he had porridge, fish, eggs, bacon, a large plate of cold ham, hot muffins or crumpets, then a lot of toast and butter and jam, and finished on fruit. His meal was enough to have fed an officer’s mess.”]