Castles of Steel (97 page)

Over the next few days, as the crisis played out, both Fisher and Churchill displayed their worst qualities. Fisher’s antipathy toward Churchill reached a peak in a letter to Bonar Law on the seventeenth: “W.C. MUST go at all costs! AT ONCE . . .
because a very great disaster is very near us in the Dardanelles.
. . . W.C. is a bigger danger than the Germans by a long way.” At some point, this frantic assault gave birth in Fisher to a larger, extraordinarily grandiose project. He decided that he did not actually want to retreat to Scotland. His country needed him and he would serve by returning to the Admiralty as an entirely new kind of First Sea Lord, an admiralissimo, who would assume absolute control of the navy.

Unfortunately for Fisher, events were working against him. On Monday, May 17, even as Asquith was asking Churchill, “What are we to do for you?” Room 40 was decoding an intercepted German wireless message indicating that the High Seas Fleet was coming out. The First Lord hurried from the House of Commons back to the Admiralty to send the Grand Fleet to sea. At 8:00 that evening, he telegraphed Jellicoe, “It is not impossible that tomorrow may be The Day.” By dawn, however, hope for a battle was fading, and by 10:00 a.m. it was clear that the German fleet was returning to its harbors. Through these alarms, the all-night vigil, and the subsequent disappointment, the First Sea Lord—still formally in office, because Asquith had not yet accepted his resignation—was absent from the Admiralty. The other Sea Lords were shocked; Churchill told the prime minister that they took “a serious view of Lord Fisher’s desertion of his post in time of war for what has now amounted to six days during which serious operations have been in progress.” The king, a former naval officer who did not share his mother’s warm admiration of Fisher, grew red in the face when this incident was mentioned. “He should have been hanged at the yardarm for desertion of his post in the face of the enemy,” George V declared. “It really was a most scandalous thing which ought to be punished with dismissal from the service and degradation.”

Fisher, still rampaging around London, but never setting foot in the Admiralty, did not realize that the wind had changed. Knowing by May 19 that Churchill was doomed, he persuaded himself that this was his moment of triumph; that he was the man the government must turn to. Thus deluded, he sent Asquith a set of conditions under which he would agree to return to the Admiralty and “guarantee the successful termination of the war.” Churchill must be completely excluded from the Cabinet. Balfour (who had angered him by supporting the naval attack on the Dardanelles) must not replace Churchill as First Lord. Whoever became First Lord must be restricted solely to political policy and parliamentary procedure. Sir Arthur Wilson must quit the Admiralty and a new set of Sea Lords be installed. Turning to the role he himself proposed to play, Fisher slid into megalomania: “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 untrammeled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever. . . . I should have the sole absolute authority for all new construction and all dockyard work of whatever sort, and complete control of the whole of the Civil Establishment of the navy. These six conditions,” Fisher concluded, “must be published verbatim so that the fleet may know my position.” The only excuse for the breadth and tone of Fisher’s demands can be that he was attempting to elevate himself to the same level of untrammeled authority already occupied by Kitchener at the War Office. But no one else saw it that way. “I am afraid that Jacky is really a little mad,” said Arthur Balfour. Asquith’s reaction was that the memorandum indicated “a fit of megalomania.” He informed the king that “Fisher’s mind is somewhat unhinged, otherwise his conduct is almost traitorous!” Privately, to Hankey, the prime minister wrote “that Fisher, strictly speaking, ought to be shot for leaving his post.”

Fisher’s role in the drama was over. On the afternoon of May 22, one week after he had read Churchill’s proposal to send two more submarines to the Dardanelles, he boarded an afternoon train for Scotland to hide himself away at the estate of his close friend the Duchess of Hamilton. During the train’s stopover at Crewe, a messenger approached and handed him an envelope. He opened it and read:

Dear Lord Fisher,

I am commanded by the king to accept your tendered resignation of the Office of First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.

Yours faithfully,

H. H. Asquith

The sixty-one-year career of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, the man who created the modern Royal Navy, had come to an end.

Meanwhile, Churchill was struggling to save himself. He bombarded Asquith, Bonar Law, Lloyd George, and Grey, asking, eventually begging, to be kept at the Admiralty. To Lloyd George, his closest Cabinet ally before the war, he shouted, “You don’t care what becomes of me. You don’t care whether I am trampled under foot by my enemies. You don’t care for my personal reputation.” “No,” Lloyd George replied, “I don’t care for my own at the pres-ent moment. The only thing I care about is that we win this war.” Clementine Churchill, incensed by what was happening to her husband, wrote the prime minister an angry letter: “Why do you part with Winston? . . . If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a war machine as your present government.” Asquith did not reply, but he told Venetia Stanley that he had received “the letter of a maniac” from her cousin Clementine Churchill. To Churchill himself—who had sent him six letters in five days—Asquith finally wrote on May 21, “My dear Winston: You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty.” The “horrible wound and mutilation”—in Churchill’s private secretary’s words—was confirmed. The following day, Churchill was offered and accepted a minor, essentially meaningless Cabinet post, the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. “I gather that you have been flung a bone on which there is very little meat,” wrote his cousin the Duke of Marlborough. The duchy, Lloyd George wrote of this post, was an office normally given “to beginners in the Cabinet or to distinguished politicians who had reached the first stages of unmistakable decrepitude. It was a cruel and unjust degradation.” May 25 was Churchill’s last day at the Admiralty, and that afternoon he received a surprise visit from Lord Kitchener. “He asked what I was going to do,” Churchill wrote. “I said I had no idea; nothing was settled. . . . As he got up to go, he turned and said, in the impressive and almost majestic manner which was natural to him, ‘Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.’ ”

Kitchener was right: the ships built by Fisher and Churchill were at sea and the men whom Fisher and Churchill had chosen were in command. It reflects poorly on Beatty, whom Churchill had saved from early retirement and promoted over a dozen admirals to command the battle cruisers, that he wrote after Churchill’s fall, “The navy breathes freer now it is rid of the succubus Winston.” Nor was it generous of Jellicoe, to whom Churchill gave command of the Grand Fleet on the eve of war, to write to Fisher, “We owe you a debt of gratitude for having saved the navy from a continuance in office of Mr Churchill.” In the stream of newspaper articles and editorials about Churchill’s departure, most were derogatory.

[Only J. L. Garvin, writing in
The Observer,
looked to the future: “He is young. He has lion-hearted courage. No number of enemies can fight down his ability and force. His hour of triumph will come.”]

At that moment, the former First Lord did not know or care what any of these men were saying. Later, Clementine Churchill would say of her husband, “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.”

CHAPTER 27
“Some Corner of a Foreign Field”

Ultimately, Fisher’s concern about the safety of the warships at the Dardanelles had led to the reconstruction of the Admiralty and then of the government. Curiously, on May 25, just as this immense political drama was playing out and Winston Churchill was in his last hours in office, another British battleship was sunk at Gallipoli. And thirty-six hours later, when Arthur Balfour was just sitting down in Churchill’s chair at the Admiralty, still another British battleship went to the bottom. Neither loss had any political impact in London, but to the navy off Gallipoli and the thousands of soldiers on the peninsula, their significance was grim.

On May 17, Admiral de Robeck had been informed that a German submarine had been sighted on the surface passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. This was
U-21,
voyaging from the Ems around the coast of Europe to the Aegean. No one at the Admiralty or in the fleet doubted that the submarine’s destination was Gallipoli. On May 25, in full view of both armies on shore, the old battleship
Triumph
was torpedoed by
U-21
off Anzac Beach. As the ship began to list, a destroyer came alongside and hundreds of men stepped from the battleship’s stern onto the deck of the smaller ship. Then
Triumph
turned over, floated with her keel in the air for twenty minutes, and sank, taking fifty-three men down with her. The cheers of exultant Turks, dancing in their trenches, echoed down from the hills while men in the Allied trenches watched with shock and fear. De Robeck, his fleet suddenly vulnerable, immediately ordered all large warships back to the island harbors. “I saw them in full flight, transports and battleships, the
Agamemnon
seeming to lead the van,” said the British writer turned officer Compton Mackenzie. “Next morning,” recorded a German officer watching from the heights, “all the ships had disappeared as if God had taken a broom and swept the sea clear.”

The following day, May 26, the twenty-one-year-old
Majestic,
the oldest battleship in the Royal Navy, returned, anchored off Sedd el Bahr, spread her torpedo nets, and awaited bombardment assignments. At 6:40 on the morning of the twenty-seventh, a seaman on watch called an officer’s attention to the periscope and conning tower of a submarine not far away. The officer looked and said, “Yes, and here comes the torpedo.” “There was a great, muffled roar and the old ship quivered and shook in a terrible way. The masts and yards swayed as if they were coming down on top of us. . . . A huge volume of water shot up two hundred feet in the air on the port side. . . . There was only one thing to do and that was to swim for it. . . . The water was gloriously warm.” The battleship rolled over and sank in shallow water, leaving her green keel protruding from the surface. There she remained for months, in full view of both armies.

Fisher and Churchill were gone, and three more old battleships had been sunk, but Kitchener and the new coalition War Council were not ready to give up on Gallipoli. In July, three divisions of Kitchener’s New Army arrived from England on board the huge, transatlantic liners
Aquitania, Mauretania,
and
Olympic,
swelling Hamilton’s force to 120,000 men. It was midsummer and the newcomers entered a landscape of Saharan desolation. Under an intense blue sky, the land and sea were covered by a suffocating haze of heat; the trenches were ovens; hot wind blew sand and white dust into eyes and mouths. For sixteen hours a day, the sun beat down so mercilessly that tinned rations of corned beef cooked in their containers. The sea, Hamilton wrote, was “like melted glass, blue-green with a dull red glow in it; the air seemed to have been boiled.” To cool off, men bathed naked off the beaches, hundreds at a time, oblivious to artillery and sniper fire. (Once, a shell exploding in the water near a swimmer tore off his arm; retrieving the floating limb, the victim carried it ashore.) The flies became a plague; the ground and the walls of tents were dark with them; they swarmed in the latrines; three or four flies accompanied every forkful of food into the mouth. No one at Gallipoli escaped the torture of lice. Dysentery now affected half the army, and every day a thousand men with the disease were being evacuated from the peninsula as unfit for duty. Rank gave no immunity; both Hamilton and Wemyss were afflicted. The disease, Hamilton wrote in his diary, “fills me with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest. . . . This, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years taking Troy.” Over the peninsula hung the sickening smell of death. Men who died between the two lines of trenches lay where they fell, the flies settled to feast, and the stench from corpses putrefying in the heat reached for miles out to sea.

As the months went by, both British and German officers developed great respect for the hardiness of the average Turkish soldier. Accustomed to sleeping on the ground, untroubled at being clothed in rags, happy to receive a piece of bread, some olives, and in the evening a thin soup, these peasant soldiers adapted to war and made a formidable enemy. After the war, the German influence at Gallipoli was overstated. There were never more than 500 Germans on the peninsula and although Sanders’s generalship played a critical role, most German officers acted merely as advisers to Turkish commanders. Here, their usefulness was limited. “That evening, Kemal Bey assembled all his regimental commanders around him in an empty tent,” wrote Hans Kannengiesser, a German colonel at Gallipoli. “They all sat in rings on the ground . . . with their legs crossed under them. . . . I at first tried to sit
a la turca,
but could not do so, so lay on the hard ground on my side. There were no chairs or tables—the Turks wrote with the paper flat on the palms of their hands. . . . Maps were not used during the discussion, of which I naturally understood no word.” The strength of the army was the average soldier’s willingness to accept death as unexceptional. “I do not order you to make war,” Mustafa Kemal told his men. “I order you to die.” Kannengiesser once saw two Turkish soldiers sitting on two corpses while eating their bread and olives. On several occasions, Allied soldiers capturing a Turkish trench confronted nightmarish horror: bodies had been embedded in the trench wall to make up part of the parapet; the trench floors were covered with the remains of separate arms, legs, and heads, all decomposing and slippery underfoot.