Churchill's Wizards (2 page)

When Winston Churchill read the newspapers in Portsmouth he had a sudden, vivid feeling that something ‘sinister and measureless' had occurred. On 28 June 1914, the Emperor Franz Joseph I's nephew and heir-presumptive, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his pregnant wife Sophie, had taken the wrong turning in Sarajevo. A faraway cloud no bigger than a man's hand was about to become a great storm, embroiling millions of people from scores of nations.

The Archduke Ferdinand was the hated symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 1908, tearing it away from Greater Serbia. The Black Hand, a Serb nationalist terrorist cell, intended to kill the archduke as he drove in his motorcade through Sarajevo. One of the conspirators threw a bomb from the crowd, but the chauffeur floored the accelerator and the black car shot over the device, which exploded behind, injuring dignitaries in the following vehicle as well as some bystanders. Hours later, driving back from a hospital visit to the injured, the chauffeur took his fateful wrong turn.

As the car reversed slowly back up Gebet Street, it passed a tubercular and weedy-looking youth called Gavrilo Princip, consoling himself with a sandwich in Moritz Schiller's cafe. The 19-year-old Bosnian Serb could hardly believe his luck, for he was one of the seven-strong gang disappointed by the failure of the earlier bomb. In one pocket Princip had a cyanide capsule and in the other a Belgian-made Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The open-topped Austrian car offered him a second opportunity for his cause to make its mark on history, and he shot the Archduke and his wife at close range.

Throughout July 1914, the widening reverberations of this incident in the Balkans tipped other nations towards war. In London's Fleet Street, where all Britain's national newspapers were edited and
printed, Philip Gibbs's sensitive, well-bred face was a familiar sight. At 37, he had fingers yellow from chain-smoking, but he was a star journalist of many scoops who had written the first best-selling novel about newspaper reporters,
The Street of Adventure
. As events unfolded, Gibbs reported ‘dazed incredibility' in middle England, uncertainty in Whitehall's corridors of power, and ‘profound ignorance' behind all the feverish activity of Fleet Street newspaper offices. In Paris, too, where Gibbs arrived on assignment for the last days of July, the word was ‘
Incroyable!
'

In England,
Much Ado About Nothing
was opening the summer festival at Stratford-upon-Avon; Wimbledon was under way; there was racing at Goodwood and eights training for Henley. War seemed as stunningly unlikely as the heat on that August Bank Holiday weekend. The Scottish writer John Buchan was moving among the leading lights of the Liberal government, and breakfasted with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on Saturday, 1 August, finding him ‘pale and a little haggard but steadfast as a rock'. Buchan also recalled ‘Mr Churchill's high spirits, which sobered now and then when he remembered the desperate issues'.

Winston Churchill, approaching his fortieth birthday, had been the First Lord of the Admiralty since 1911. Britain would not be unprepared for war on his watch: ammunition dumps and oil depots were guarded, coastal patrols instituted, the First Fleet quietly sent from Portland to the North Sea in case of a sudden German attack. Churchill was playing bridge with F. E. Smith and Max Aitken at the Admiralty around 10 p.m. that Saturday, when a large red Foreign Office despatch box arrived with a small sheet of paper inside bearing a single line of news: Imperial Germany has declared war on Imperial Russia. Churchill rang a bell for a servant, changed out of his dinner jacket and left the room to go and see the Prime Minister. Aitken (the Canadian adventurer who later became Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the
Daily
and
Sunday Express
) remembered him as oddly calm and businesslike. Churchill entered 10 Downing Street ‘by the garden gate' and found Asquith with Grey and Haldane and Lord Crewe. He told them he was going to decree full mobilisation of the Grand Fleet of the Royal Navy. From the Admiralty, Churchill wrote to his wife at one in the morning:

Lord Haldane, deputising at the War Office for the Prime Minister, was described by John Buchan as displaying ‘uncanny placidity'; this was exactly what he had been preparing for. As Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912, Haldane had created the General Staff, the Territorial Force, the Special Reserve, the Officers' Training Corps in schools and universities, and, in 1907, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Britain was the only country in Europe that did not have conscription. Its small yet professional army had already been on ‘Precautionary Measures' for a few days, with all regular soldiers recalled from leave.

The first shots were fired between French and Germans at Petit-Croix, near Belfort, on Sunday, 2 August. Imperial Germany declared war on France on the following day. This meant the Germans had campaigns on two fronts: east against Russia, west against France. Because the Germans knew that backward Russia would mobilise more slowly, seven of the eight German armies were dedicated to attacking France first. General von Moltke followed the plan of Count von Schlieffen for his main attack, which was to strike at the heart of France by encircling and seizing Paris. The best way to do this was to drive through the neutral kingdom of Belgium and then wheel most of his armed forces left, to the west of Paris. On 3 August, the Germans demanded free passage through Belgium's territory. King Albert I and his government refused ‘to sacrifice the honour of their nation and betray their duty towards Europe'. Germany then declared war on Belgium.

Gunfire in Brussels acted as the starting pistol for the UK. The British government now requested an assurance from the German government that Belgium's wishes be respected. Britain was a signatory to the 1839 Treaty of London that had guaranteed the independence and neutrality of Belgium, and a hostile power just over the Channel in Belgium directly threatened British interests and British shipping. To Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Imperial Chancellor, a treaty about Belgium was just ‘a scrap of paper'; but the British said that their word was binding.

‘The die is cast,' pronounced
The Times
first leader on Monday, 3 August: ‘Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war that she has witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire.' John Buchan thought that Bank Holiday Monday was ‘the strangest in the memory of man':

Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, put the case in Parliament and only five MPs voted against war in defence of Belgium. Among them was the dissenting aristocrat and peace campaigner Arthur Ponsonby. The opening chapter of his 1928 bestseller,
Falsehood in
War-Time
, concerns what was not talked about in the parliamentary debate: the secret military arrangements that Britain had made with France in 1911 for seven divisions of the BEF to support the French left and for the Royal Navy to protect the French north coast in the event of a German attack. ‘This commitment was not known to the people; it was not known to Parliament; it was not even known to all the members of the Cabinet.' Ponsonby argued that Sir Edward Grey's statement was disingenuous. If these contingency plans had been made public, Imperial Germany might have hesitated instead of precipitately declaring war. For Ponsonby, it was ‘a deplorable subterfuge' for Grey to insist that Parliament was free to decide.

‘What happens now?' Churchill asked the Foreign Secretary as they left the chamber. ‘Now,' replied Grey, ‘we shall send them an ultimatum.' Grey and Asquith hand-wrote the demand to Imperial Germany between them on the Cabinet table in No. 10 Downing Street. Unless German troops withdrew from Belgium by midnight German time (11 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday, 4 August, Britain would declare war.

Five German armies violated Belgian neutrality around dawn on that day. Although the invasion force of a million men was one of the largest ever seen, Belgian soldiers and the Garde Civique started shooting back. It took eight German divisions finally to reduce Liège by 16 August. Panicky and sometimes drunk German soldiers were so angered by the brave Belgian resistance, so afraid of irregulars or
guerrillas without uniforms known as
francs-tireurs
or free-shooters, and so upset by rumours that captured Germans were being mutilated, that they began burning buildings, using Belgian civilians as ‘human shields', and bayoneting or shooting them out of hand.

In London, Lord Haldane gave the order to go to war at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, 4 August. The ‘War Book' was opened. From the chaotic hive of the War Office buzzed out many terse telegrams: MOBILISE, signed Troopers. As this message cascaded from army to corps to division to battalion, all British army reservists were sent further individual telegrams ordering them to report back to their old regimental depots early the following day. Every soldier and staff-officer worth his salt wanted to be in the BEF and see some action before it was all over.

Many remembered the oddly festive mood at the outbreak of war, with patriotic mafficking and crowds singing ‘God Save the King' outside Buckingham Palace. The society portrait painter Solomon J. Solomon, who had recently been in the Palace doing studies of the royal family for a huge painting for the Guildhall, was in a dull committee meeting of the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly, late on the evening of 4 August. A dozen silver candelabra with lighted candles shone on the few council members round the table, under portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. They discussed gallery closures and what to do now that the porters were being mobilised. ‘Towards the end of our meeting,' Solomon recalled, ‘an eerie distant shouting was heard from a howling mass of presumably young people swaying up St James's Street. It had been announced from Buckingham Palace that we were also to take up arms against Germany.'

In France, Philip Gibbs was chafing at the bit. The
Daily Chronicle
had sent him abroad as a war correspondent, but the French military authorities stopped him getting to the front. He went west to Nancy and saw French lancers trotting through dust and the horse teams pulling batteries of guns along tree-lined avenues. He watched the French infantry marching off towards the Alsace frontier, wearing kepis and bright horizon-blue coats and baggy red trousers, led by their officers with swords and white gloves. Foch's staff ordered him back to Paris. Gibbs was not allowed to see the French army being blown away by German howitzers, nor their conspicuous uniforms riddled by machine-gun bullets.

The previous Monday, a grim Lord Kitchener had been on the return journey to Egypt when he was called back to London. ‘Lord Kitchener was more than a national hero,' wrote Violet Bonham Carter, Asquith's daughter. ‘He was a national institution.' Herbert Horatio Kitchener was the general who industrialised British imperial warfare. He was summoned to No. 10 for a Council of War on the Wednesday. His view was that the war would not be won by sea-power alone, but by great battles on the Continent. It would last three years, and take manpower in the millions. Prime Minister Asquith asked him to take on the job of Secretary of State for War. Three days later Kitchener made his first appeal for men to join his ‘New Armies'. Up went vast posters in places like Trafalgar Square, emblazoned with his moustached face and pointing finger: ‘Your Country Needs YOU.'

On Thursday, 6 August 1914, the British Cabinet agreed to send the 100,000 men of the BEF, with Field Marshal Sir John French as commander-in-chief, to the Franco–Belgian border to support the left of the eight French armies, and to face the advancing German right. Protected by the Royal Navy's warships and wireless-fitted aircraft, packed troopships sailed from Southampton to Rouen and Boulogne over the weekend of 8–9 August. Most of the BEF was safely in position in northern France and southern Belgium by the 20th.

They went with no publicity and no press coverage, because, under Kitchener, British censorship became total. The Committee of Imperial Defence drafted the first Defence of the Realm Act (DoRA) giving the government extra coercive and censorship powers (‘to prevent persons communicating with the enemy or obtaining information for that purpose'). It became law on 8 August 1914 and was extended or ‘consolidated', as the term was, several times during the war. New standing orders forbade servicemen ‘to give any military information to press correspondents, military attachés or civilians'.

This news blackout enabled the BEF to move in secrecy without German intelligence also reading about it in the newspapers, but Philip Gibbs recalled how the draconian censorship ‘throttled' journalism at a stroke: he was actually on the telephone from Paris to the London office when the line was cut off in mid-sentence. Staff journalists now lived the lives of desperate harried freelances, without accreditation or support, ingeniously improvising ways to get their dispatches through, while trying to evade arrest by both French and British military authorities.

Out in the field, Gibbs palled up with two other correspondents, W. T. Massey, whom he called ‘the Strategist', and H. M. Tomlinson, nicknamed ‘the Philosopher'. In the first two months of the war, these three covered thousands of miles in France and Belgium by train, bus, taxi, and on foot, grasping at straws, or contemplating defeat: