Winston dined at Admiralty House with his mother and brother. Heavy fighting was reported in Belgium. Berlin had ignored Grey’s note. The largest human event since the French Revolution was now imminent. The last minutes of peace were ticking away, and vanishing with them, though no one knew it, was England’s century of security and supremacy—its “intolerable hegemony” in world affairs, as the German Matthias Erzberger called it. Churchill left the table to give a council of admirals and captains their final instructions. Big Ben struck the fatal hour. The message went out:221
Admiralty to all HM ships and Naval
Establishments
Signal
4 August 1914
11 pm
Admiralty
COMMENCE HOSTILITIES AGAINST GERMANY
It was a warm night. Through open windows Churchill could hear a throng outside Buckingham Palace, cheering and singing “God Save the King.” Custom required that he now report to the prime minister. All the other ministers were already there, sitting in a glum circle around the green baize of the cabinet table. Margot Asquith had been waiting with them. She had just decided to retire, and was pausing at the foot of the stairs, when she saw Winston entering No. 10 and, “with a happy face, striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.”222
FOUR
CATARACT
1914–1918
IN that first week of the war six million European soldiers sprang to arms with medieval ardor, and a month passed before anyone knew what had happened to them. The void was quickly filled by wild rumors, especially in Britain, which was spending less of its revenues on the army, proportionately, than in 1901. Other belligerent nations had military objectives, conscription, programs for mobilizing civilian efforts. England had only the “War-Book” of 1911, prepared by the Committee of Imperial Defence at Haldane’s insistence. It was inadequate, and so the country was particularly vulnerable to sensational talebearers. The most extraordinary story, almost universally accepted at the time, described a force of between 70,000 and 100,000 Russians who were said to have landed in Scotland on their way to reinforce the Allies in France. An Edinburgh railway porter told of sweeping the snow from their boots. No one seems to have reminded him that they were in the middle of an August heat wave. Instead, otherwise responsible people chimed in; a laird swore that the czar’s soldiers had marched across his estate, and an Oxford scholar declared that one of his colleagues was acting as their interpreter.
Spy stories flourished on the Norfolk coast. “Foreign-looking” men were reported almost every day. Clementine wrote Winston about them. She said that Goonie had seen a British soldier corner a suspect and “give him a small prod with his bayonette,” which, “tho’ very exhilarating to the pursuers had the effect of making the ‘spy’ run so fast that Goonie fears he got away.” Another time “one of the cottager’s wives” saw two men walking along a cliff with odd bulges in their coats. They gave her evil glances “& spoke to each other in a foreign tongue.” Following furtively, she watched them “open their jackets & let fly 4 carrier pigeons!” Policemen, alerted, “pursued the men & caught them.” Clementine learned that a decoded message retrieved from one of the pigeons revealed details of a plan to kidnap her and fly her on a German plane to Berlin, where she would remain until her husband had paid a ransom of several dreadnoughts. She wasn’t intimidated: “If I am kidnapped I beg of you not to sacrifice the smallest or cheapest submarine or even the oldest ship…. I could not face the subsequent unpopularity whereas I should be quite a heroine & you a Spartan if I died bravely & unransomed.” Winston was alarmed, and his concern deepened when he learned that their car had broken down. “It makes me a little anxious,” he wrote her on August 9, “that you should be on the coast. It is 100 to one against a raid—but still there is the chance, and Cromer has a good landing place near. I wish you would get the motor repaired and keep it so that you can whisk away at the first sign of trouble.”1
Churchill himself caught the spy fever. Driving to the Loch Ewe anchorage of the Grand Fleet with two admirals and two commodores, he spotted a searchlight on the roof of a large private house. There were no Admiralty spotlights in the neighborhood. Conceivably, he reasoned, this one was being used to send the Germans information about fleet movements. They drove on, but when they arrived and Jellicoe told them an unidentified aircraft had been seen in the vicinity, Winston returned to the house at the head of a party armed with pistols and ammunition from H.M.S. Iron Duke. He was now convinced that he had discovered a nest of secret agents. At the door the butler told him that this was the home of Sir Arthur Bignold, a founder of the Kennel Club and former Tory MP. Sir Arthur himself appeared, was questioned, and gave an unlikely explanation for the searchlight; he used it, he said, to catch the gleaming eyes of deer on a nearby hillside so he would know where to stalk them in the morning. To his indignation, Churchill ordered the light dismantled and its vital parts taken away. Back at the Admiralty, Winston demanded that “the fullest report be made on the circumstances in which this searchlight came to be placed into position, together with all other facts about Sir Arthur Bignold, his guests, friends and servants.”2 The improbable deer-stalking story proved to be true. Apart from its revelation of England’s preoccupation with intrigue, even on the highest levels, this incident, like the Sidney Street siege, adds further testimony to Churchill’s affinity to danger. The light might have aroused the suspicions of other ministers, but they would have sent subordinates to the scene. Only the first lord of the Admiralty would have arrived in person, gun in hand.
“I am writing in the Cabinet room, at the beginning of twilight,” Asquith wrote Venetia Stanley, “and thro’ the opposite window across the Parade I see the Admiralty flag flying & the lights ‘beginning to twinkle’ from the rooms where Winston and his two familiars (Eddie and Masterton) are beating out their plans.” Winston had already established the routine which would become part of the Churchill legend in World War II. Adopting the Cuban siesta, he worked until 2:00 A.M. each day, woke at 8:00 A.M., and went through correspondence without rising. To Vice Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg he presented “a most extraordinary spectacle, perched up in a huge bed, with the whole of the counterpane littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colours, and a stenographer sitting at the foot—Mr. Churchill himself with an enormous Corona in his mouth.”3
He was invigorated with immense gusto, enjoying his awesome responsibilities and volunteering to take over any that other ministers found burdensome. As many as twenty major Admiralty enterprises, all of them entirely dependent on sea power, were, he noted, “proceeding simultaneously in different parts of the globe.” Under his direction, the 70,000 men of Field Marshal Sir John French’s first British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were virtually secure from invasion because British warships were patrolling the 200,000 square miles of sea between Scotland and Norway, and both sides of the Strait of Dover had been mined. German and Austrian merchant ports were blockaded. Fast cruiser squadrons hunted down German sea raiders. The kaiser’s colonies overseas were seized or besieged with almost larcenous zest—“A month ago,” he remarked to the cabinet, “with what horror and disgust would most of those present have averted their minds from such ideas!” The body of a drowned German signalman yielded a secret cipher book; as a consequence, Winston and his staff in Room 40 at the Admiralty could track the movements of German ships. But the sea wasn’t large enough for him. Land and air warfare must also feel the Churchillian presence. He established a Royal Naval division of infantry. (“A band must be provided,” he minuted in a typical touch. “The quality is not important.”) His seaplanes hunted U-boats. The pilots who had been his flight instructors were directed, on August 27, to establish their own air base on the Continent at Dunkirk. Other naval fliers carried out, on his orders, a series of stunning raids on zeppelin sheds at Cologne, Cuxhaven, Düsseldorf, and Friedrichafen and shot down six of the German airships. When Kitchener became minister for war on August 5, he aske
d Churchill to take over the air defense of Britain, and Winston instantly agreed. He even found time for wartime diplomacy. At Asquith’s request, the first lord served on a war council whose other cabinet members were the prime minister, the foreign secretary, the chancellor, and the war minister. He secretly bargained with Italy and Japan over the terms under which they would join the Allies. “What should we do to bring the Japanese into the war?” he was asked. He replied grandly: “They can have China.” Grey said: “Winston very soon will become incapable, from sheer activity of mind, of being anything in the Cabinet but Prime Minister.” At a birthday party featuring a band and a magician, Churchill’s son, Randolph, the Chumbolly, shouted at the magician: “Man, stop! Band, play!” A relative sighed: “Just like Winston.”4
A morning ride
The new secretary of state for war was the man of the hour. He had just been raised to an earldom, and on August 7 the blazing eyes, broad guardsman’s mustache, and pointing finger of Kitchener of Khartoum—“K of K,” the people now called him—appeared everywhere on a recruiting poster above the riveting message: YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU! Some colleagues worried about the relationship between this hard, enigmatic man and the ebullient Churchill. Kitchener was twenty-five years older than the first lord and at one time had regarded him as an insubordinate pest. But Winston was another man now, and K of K, recognizing it, dropped him a note: “My dear Churchill…. Please do not address me as Lord as I am only yours, Kitchener.” Winston later wrote: “I found him much more affable than I had been led to expect…. In those early days we worked together on close and cordial terms. He consulted me constantly on political aspects of his work, and increasingly gave me his confidence in military matters. Admiralty and War Office business were so interlaced that… we were in almost daily personal consultation.” Later, after everything had gone wrong, it was Kitchener who gave Churchill the consolation he would treasure during the bleakest years of his life: “There is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The fleet was ready.”5
Churchill’s pace was exhausting. On August 9 he wrote Clementine: “I am over head & ears in work & am much behindhand.” Two days later he wrote her: “This is only a line from a vy exhausted Winston…. I wish I cd whisk down to you & dig a little on the beach. My work here is vy heavy & so interesting that I cannot leave it.” In her reply she warned of fatigue and urged him to remember: “1) Never missing your morning ride. 2) Going to bed well before midnight & sleeping well & not allowing yourself to be woken up every time a Belgian kills a German. (You must have 8 hours sleep every night to be your best self.) 3) Not smoking too much & not having indigestion. Now shall I come up for a day or two next Monday & tease you partly into doing these things?”6
The fact is that she was dying for an excuse to be in the thick of it. Understanding that, and anxious to appease her appetite for news, Churchill took what was, under the circumstances, a remarkable risk. He sent her classified information by post. “My darling one,” he wrote. “The enclosed will tell you what is known officially. It is a good summary. You must not fail to burn it at once…. Kiss the Kittens for me. Tender love to you all. Your fondest & devoted W.” She consigned it to the flames and begged for more. Over the phone—in the Speyers’ cottage—she elicited his consent to put more in the mail. After hanging up she wrote him: “I am longing to get your letter with the secret news. It shall be destroyed at once. I hope that in it, you tell me about the expeditionary force. Do I guess right that some have gone already? Be a good one and write again & feed me with tit-bits. I am being so wise & good & sitting on the Beach & playing with my kittens, & doing my little housekeeping, but how I long to dash up & be near you and the pulse of things.” Apparently the letter, when it arrived, was a letdown. “It was most interesting,” she wrote him on August 10, “but I was disappointed because I hoped you were going to tell me about the Expeditionary Force. Do send me news of it. When it is going, where it will land, which regiments are in the first batch, etc. I long for it to arrive in time to save the Liège citizens from being massacred in their houses.”7
Even Winston couldn’t tell her that. And until the BEF saw action, the public couldn’t even be told of its existence. If the Germans knew of its presence in France, they would alter their plans accordingly. It was indeed inherent in most of the Admiralty’s accomplishments that everything known about them had to be highly restricted. The transport of troops, the charting of courses for warship patrols, negotiations with the Japanese and Italians, Room 40—all these would have been compromised if revealed. Information about engagements at sea could be disclosed, but in the first phase of the war most of this news was bad. The Goeben and the Breslau entered the Dardanelles, and the sequel was worse than anything Churchill had imagined. The kaiser grandly announced that he was selling both vessels to Turkey as replacements for the two Winston had virtually buccaneered. The crews, however, remained German. They led the Turkish fleet across the Black Sea to bombard the Russian Black Sea ports of Odessa, Nikolayev, and Sevastopol. Russia, in retaliation, declared war on Turkey; England and France were then obliged to do the same. That was the price the Allies paid for Churchill’s high-handed “requisition” of July 28. If he had let the Turks have their ships their country might have remained neutral or even come in on England’s side.
In late August the sky briefly brightened. Beatty entered German home waters and won the war’s first naval battle, sinking three of Tirpitz’s cruisers, damaging three more, and killing or capturing a thousand men at a cost of one damaged ship and thirty-five British bluejackets. Clementine, back in Admiralty House with the children, sent Kitchener the news while Churchill dressed for dinner. “Winston,” she wrote, “thinks this is rather a ‘Coup.’ ” Then the Germans went underwater. Churchill, addressing an all-party recruiting rally in Liverpool, said he hoped “the navy will have a chance of settling the question of the German Fleet,” then added, “if they do not come out and fight in time of war they will be dug out like rats in a hole.” That was tempting fate. The British cruisers Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy were patrolling the Dutch coast. Feeling “constant, gnawing anxieties about the safety of the Fleet from submarine attack,” he had ordered them withdrawn, but they were still there when, the morning after his Liverpool speech, a U-boat sank all three in less than an hour, taking 1,459 tars with them.8 And that was only the beginning. Another U-boat entered Loch Ewe and torpedoed the cruiser Hawke. Next the dreadnought Audacious went down, followed by the Formidable. Clearly Scapa Flow was insecure; Churchill ordered the Grand Fleet to sea while the Orkney defenses were strengthened. During their absence, three battle cruisers of the German High Seas Fleet under the command of Franz von Hipper emerged from their Baltic Sea sanctuary, bombarded the British ports of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough, and sailed away without a scratch. Overseas, a squadron of fast cruisers under Maximilian von Spee roamed the Pacific Ocean, sinking British freighters almost at will. The cruiser Emden steamed into the Bay of Bengal, shelled Madras, prowled around the approaches to Ceylon, and destroyed fifteen Allied merchantmen. When a British force under Sir Christopher Cradock attacked von Spee off the Chilean coast, the Germans wiped out the British in a sensational battle and drowned Cradock.
In time all these would be avenged. Von Hipper would be intercepted on his next sortie and so badly mauled that he would never reappear on the high seas. Von Spee and his entire squadron would be sunk in the waters off the Falkland Islands. An Australian cruiser would annihilate the Emden. Only the U-boats would venture to take the offensive after that, and while their toll was spectacular, their torpedoing of American merchantmen trading with England would eventually bring the United States into the war. But in late 1914 all that lay in the future. The Admiralty’s initial defeats shocked Britons. They had thought their navy invincible. The shelling of their coast, the threat to transports bringing Indian troops back to fight in France, the sinking of their proud warships, evoked cries of pain and anger. Inevitably the
Admiralty’s first lord, the most visible member of the government, paid a price for his flamboyance.
The lord mayors of Hartlepool, Whitby, and Scarborough demanded coastal artillery and dreadnoughts anchored off their beaches. The Indian government telegraphed that Madras must be protected. The Morning Post found that “grave doubt is expressed on every hand” about Churchill’s competence: “In the War Office we have a soldier in whom the Army and the nation have confidence. In the Admiralty, upon the other hand, there is a First Lord who is a civilian, and cannot be expected to have any grasp of the principles and practice of naval warfare.” Thomas Bowles, a former Tory MP, published a pamphlet charging that the three cruisers had been lost off the Netherlands “because, despite the warnings of admirals, commodores and captains, Mr Churchill refused, until it was too late, to recall them from a patrol so carried on as to make them certain to fall victims to the torpedoes of an active enemy.” The House was hostile; when he triumphantly announced the naval fliers’ air raids on Germany, he was castigated for violating Swiss airspace. “What’s the Navy doing?” hecklers cried, and he could not reply without jeopardizing missions and men. “In spite of being accustomed to years of abuse,” he later wrote, “I could not but feel the adverse and hostile currents that flowed about me.”9
Some flowed very close. Lloyd George told his secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson, who kept a diary, “Churchill is too busy trying to get a flashy success to attend to the real business of the Admiralty. Churchill blames Admiral Cradock for the defeat in South America—the Admiral presumably having gone down with his ship & so unable to clear himself. This is characteristic of Churchill.” Asquith wrote the King that the Cabinet felt the naval losses were “not creditable.” The King, who already regarded Churchill as unreliable and irresponsible, was disgusted with his Liverpool speech. After the loss of the three cruisers, His Majesty’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, wrote: “Indeed seeing what alas! happened today when the rats came out of their own accord and to our cost, the threat was unfortunate and the King feels it was hardly dignified for a Cabinet Minister.” Even Kitchener, usually steadfast, despaired during one cabinet meeting, saying that a German invasion was not only possible, but that England would not be able to stop it. Churchill challenged him to have the brightest experts in the War Office pick any British beach, any day, and work out the logistics of landing 150,000 men. The Admiralty would then show how they could hurl those men back into the sea.10