Nevertheless, someone’s head had to roll. It was scapegoating time again, and the choice of the victim reflects ill upon all who participated in his undoing. Since the outbreak of the war the first sea lord had been the target of a vicious witch-hunt. The press had hounded him, and every minister had been inundated with anonymous letters questioning his loyalty. Lord Charles Beresford, Fisher’s bête noire, told the House that while Prince Louis was an “exceedingly able officer,” nothing could alter the fact that he was a German, had German servants, owned property in Germany, “and as such should not be occupying his present position.” Churchill warned Beresford not to repeat those remarks: “The interests of the country do not permit the spreading of such wicked allegations by an officer of your rank, even though retired.” Violet Asquith wrote that her father’s reaction to the smear campaign was one of “disgust.” That is not the impression left by his letters to Venetia Stanley, however. He wrote her that he was not, “entre nous, very trustful of the capacity of Prince Louis.” Then: “Our poor blue-eyed German will have to go.” And then: “He must go.”11
He went. Churchill told the King that the attacks on the first sea lord’s “name and parentage” had subjected Louis to an intolerable strain: “The exacting duties and heavy responsibilities of his office have no doubt affected his general health and nerves, so that for the good of the service a change has become necessary.” Back at the Admiralty, he wrote Louis that he and Asquith agreed that “a letter from you to me indicating that you felt in some respects yr usefulness was impaired & that patriotic considerations wh at this junction must be supreme in yr mind wd be the best form of giving effect to yr decision. To this letter I wd on behalf of the Govt write an answer.” There was more of this, all of it lamentable. He closed: “No incident in my public life has caused me so much sorrow.” Their parting interview may have caused him more. The prince had just learned that his young cousin, Maurice, a grandson of Queen Victoria and an infantry lieutenant, had been killed in France. With great dignity the grieving father said that “as a loyal subject of His Majesty” he was leaving “the great service to which I have devoted my life” to ease “the burden laid on His Majesty’s Ministers.” Thus Louis Alexander of Battenberg, GCB, GCVO, KCMB, PC, was evicted from office on shabby charges of disloyalty to which a Liberal government capitulated. At the King’s request Louis changed his name to Mountbatten. One day his younger son, Dickie, then fourteen, would vindicate him.12
The question of his successor was a momentous one. Haldane had written Churchill that if Lord Fisher were returned to active duty, it would “make our country feel that our old spirit of the Navy was alive and come back.” Violet Asquith had “not a shadow of doubt that Winston would wish to appoint Lord Fisher…. There was a magnetic mutual attraction between these two and they could not keep away from one another for long.” The old salt had been bombarding Churchill with advice, sometimes on profound matters, sometimes on trivia: “Why is standard of recruits raised 3 inches to 5 feet 6?… What d——d folly to discard supreme enthusiasm because it’s under 5 feet 6. We are a wonderful nation! astounding how we muddle through! There’s only one explanation—We are the lost 10 Tribes!” He was now seventy-four. On his frequent visits to the Admiralty, Winston, in his words, “watched him narrowly to judge his physical strength and mental alertness” and had “the impression of a terrific engine of mental and physical power burning and throbbing in that aged frame.” He sounded him out “and soon saw he was fiercely eager to lay his grasp on power.” No one else would do, Winston told Asquith. When the prime minister agreed, the first lord was elated. Violet, seeing him immediately afterward, said: “No one knows his weather better than you do—and you are no doubt prepared for squalls ahead.” Winston said: “I know him—and I know that I can manage him.”13
The difficulty was that Fisher felt the same way about Churchill. And there were doubters even then. Clementine was apprehensive; she was afraid the old admiral would be “like the curate’s egg.” Beatty wrote his wife: “The situation is curious; two very strong and clever men, one old, wily, and of vast experience, one young, self-assertive… but unstable.” Aitken believed that Churchill had “co-opted Fisher to relieve the pressure against himself,” but had no “intention of letting anyone else rule the roost.” He foresaw a duel between a first lord and a first sea lord “both bent on an autocracy.” Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss predicted: “They will be thick as thieves at first until they differ on some subject, probably as to who is to be Number 1, when they will begin to intrigue against each other.” The most determined opponent of the appointment was George V. The “Sailor King” had served fifteen years before the mast, and he distrusted Jacky Fisher. He summoned Churchill to Buckingham Palace, where, according to Stamfordham’s account of their conversation, the King said that Winston’s choice was “a great surprise.” His Majesty thought that “Lord Fisher has not the confidence of the Navy; he is over 73 years of age. When First Sea Lord… he created a state of unrest and bad feeling among the officers of the service.” Churchill replied that no other admiral was fit for the job. The King ended the audience by saying that he could not approve until he had seen Asquith. Stamfordham bore the sovereign’s message to No. 10: “The proposed appointment would give a shock to the Navy which no one could wish to cause in the middle of this great War.” Lord Fisher, the royal message continued, had become aged; he talked and wrote a great deal, but his opinions changed “from day to day.” Asquith himself was troubled by Fisher’s “strangely un-English” face, with its “twisted mouth” and round eyes, “suggesting the legend (which I believe quite untrue) that he had a Cingalese mother,” but he replied that he supported Churchill’s decision. The King, having done all a constitutional monarch could do, signed the appointment but wrote the prime minister: “I do so with some reluctance and misgivings.”14
He then sent for the appointee. Churchill had coached Fisher carefully. The meeting lasted an hour, and afterward the King wrote in his diary: “He seems as young as ever.” The two agreed to meet once a week. Winston wrote Asquith and Grey that the old admiral “is already a Court Favourite.” The choice seemed inspired. It was immensely popular with the country. Since the old admiral usually awoke at 4:00 A.M., between them he and Churchill could keep an almost unsleeping watch at the Admiralty. Winston loved Fisher’s wit, his contempt for pomp, his devotion to the service. He wrote him: “Contact with you is like ozone to me.” To Clementine he wrote: “Tomorrow old Fisher comes down to the yacht with me. This always has a salutary effect.” Certainly Fisher’s energy was astounding. He wrote a friend: “Thanks for your dear letter! Isn’t it fun being back? Some d——d fools thought I was dead and buried! I am busy getting even with some of them! I did 22 hours work yesterday but 2 hours sleep not enough so I shall slow down! SECRET. The King said to Winston (I suppose dissuading) that the job would kill me. Winston was perfectly lovely in his instant reply: ‘Sir, I cannot imagine a more glorious death’! Wasn’t that delicious? But burn please!” He wrote Jellicoe: “Let everyone be optimistic, and shoot the pessimists!” To Beatty he said: “It’s not numbers that tell, but GUNNERY! Gunnery, gunnery, gunnery! All else is twaddle. Hit the target!”15
At the outset the first sea lord’s relationship with the first lord was as Wemyss had predicted: superb. In Churchill’s words, “As long as the port and starboard lights shone together all went well.” The old man proposed a daring plan to force an entry into the Baltic Sea and secure command of it, cutting Germany off from its Scandinavian supplies and freeing Russian troops for an amphibious assault on Berlin. Winston, with his love of adventure, was delighted. He authorized the building of landing craft. Then he questioned Fisher about details. Before the Baltic could be entered, the Elbe River must be blocked. How could this be done? Could British warships enter the Baltic while Tirpitz’s fleet was free to sortie from the Kiel Canal and attack the ships left behind in Scapa Flow? How could the Baltic islands be seized while barring
the Elbe? The admiral was vague; clearly he hadn’t thought it through. Slowly Churchill began to realize that the King had been right, that the aged first sea lord “was very old. In all matters where naval fighting was concerned he was more than usually cautious. He could not bear the idea of risking ships in battle.” Winston had trapped himself. Fisher was his man, confirmed despite the protests of, among others, the sovereign. If the old salt turned on him, Churchill would be alone. And they were bound to find themselves on a collision course eventually, for Winston believed in taking chances—“It is not right to condemn operations of war simply because they involve risk and uncertainty,” he told the cabinet—while his first sea lord, so audacious in conversation and letters, was transformed into an archconservative when the prospect of action loomed. “He settled,” Churchill wrote bleakly, “upon a doctrine widely inculcated among our senior naval officers, that the Navy’s task was to keep open our communications, blockade those of the enemy, and to wait for the Armies to do their proper job.”16
But the armies were not doing their proper job. The assumption had been that Belgium would be the battleground. That was the gist of the War Office summary Winston had sent Clementine on August 9. Three days later Punch had run its first wartime cartoon, showing a brave little Belgian boy in wooden shoes barring the way to a fat German trespasser, with the caption “No Thoroughfare!” Heavy casualties had not been expected. When Winston learned that his young cousin Norman Leslie had been killed in action he thought it bad luck. Even in South Africa death had come to relatively few. He had no way of knowing that fifteen thousand British soldiers had fallen in five days—and that their losses had been light compared to those of the French. On the morning of August 24, three weeks after Germany had declared war on France, he looked up from his desk and saw Kitchener standing in the doorway. K of K’s face was peculiar. Winston had “the subconscious feeling that it was distorted and discoloured as if it had been punched with a fist. His eyes rolled more than ever.” Wordlessly he held out a telegram from the commander of the BEF, Sir John French. The Belgian fortress of Namur had fallen to the enemy. At the time this was considered a disaster. Namur was fifty-seven miles from the German frontier and the gateway to France. Neither Kitchener nor Churchill could have envisioned what lay ahead: a further BEF retreat of 157 miles, putting the Tommies just outside the suburbs of Paris before they rallied. To cheer up the war minister, Winston took him to the Other Club and proposed, after dinner, his intention to break the club rule forbidding any toast but that to the King; with a flourish he raised his glass to “success to the British arms.” He beamed at Kitchener, who drank but still looked pummeled.17
Five days later another member of the club suffered a similar shock. That Saturday afternoon F. E. Smith, the official press censor, was handed a dispatch from Arthur Moore, the war correspondent of The Times. Moore had written that the Allied forces had virtually disintegrated under an “immediate, relentless, unresting” enemy advance. He was awed by the “irresistible vehemence” of the Germans, whose numerical superiority was so great that “they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea.” The BEF, a “retreating, broken army,” was being “forced backwards, ever backwards,” suffering “very great losses” reducing it to “bits of broken regiments” that were “grievously injured” and some divisions which had “lost nearly all their officers.” F.E. suspected that the correspondent was simply windy. Nevertheless, he passed what became known as “the Amiens dispatch” in the shrewd belief that it would make excellent recruiting propaganda. Thus it was that members of the English establishment sat down to breakfast Sunday morning and found themselves confronting a front-page headline, FIERCEST FIGHT IN HISTORY, followed by the subheads Heavy Losses of British Troops—Mons and Cambrai—Fight Against Severe Odds—Need for Reinforcements. In a box the editor explained that the story was being run to alert the country to the “extreme gravity of the task before us.” H. G. Wells thought: “It was as if David had flung his pebble—and missed!” Asquith indignantly scolded the paper, but F.E. had been right; Monday morning recruiting posts were packed with young men eager to rescue their brothers in France. “Kitchener’s Army” had begun to form.18
F. E. Smith
What had happened? Part of the explanation is Gallic stupidity. There is a theory that the last competent French general lies in Napoleon’s tomb, and nothing that happened on the fluid front that summer refutes it. Ever since Louis Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians a generation earlier, cadets at Saint-Cyr-l’École had been imbued with the belief that, as General Ferdinand Foch put it, “There is only one way to defend ourselves—to attack as soon as we are ready.” This was the doctrine of the offensive à outrance, of cran, of charging mindlessly while shouting: “Vite, vite! Allez, allez!” Field regulations stipulated that “the French Army henceforth admits no law but the offensive… the offensive alone leads to positive results.” The bible of this faith was the general staff’s Plan XVII, its blueprint for an irresistible march to the Rhine. The instant war was declared, they would invade German-occupied Lorraine with their right wing and advance through Alsace. As the Germans met the threat by transferring troops from their center, the French would hit the center with everything they had. Voilà: a quick, decisive victory.19
Plan XVII was hopelessly flawed. It assumed parity in the populations of the two countries, and there was none. Since 1871 German Fraus had been conceiving far more frequently than Frenchwomen; despite the Reich’s commitment in the east, against Russia, the kaiser had mobilized over 1.5 million men in the west, enough to guarantee superiority in the first clash. The French plan’s total commitment to massed attacks overlooked the changes in warfare wrought by modern technology—the machine gun, heavy artillery, barbed wire—all of which had been obvious to European observers of the Russo-Japanese War ten years earlier. Most grievous of all, the French generals were guilty of what Napoleon had called the cardinal sin of commanders: “forming a picture”—assuming that the enemy will act in a certain way in a given situation when in fact his behavior may be very different. It seems never to have occurred to them that the Germans, too, might have a plan. But they did. It was the Schlieffen Plan, completed in 1906 by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, then the kaiser’s chief of staff. The count had anticipated Plan XVII. He intended to draw the French right into Lorraine in a “sack maneuver” while his own right wing, a million Soldaten, swept down through Belgium like a swinging scythe, cutting a swath seventy-five miles wide and enveloping France’s extreme left flank.
Germany’s enemies should have been aware of this. In 1912 Henry Wilson, cycling through the Low Countries, saw that all new German railroad construction in the area converged on Aachen and the Belgian frontier. But Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, constable of France and the French commander in chief, was blind to it. Immediately after the declaration of war he marched triumphantly into Lorraine, not suspecting that the slowly retreating enemy was luring him into a trap. Meanwhile, Alexander von Kluck, commanding the German right, wheeled down through Belgium, overwhelming the fortresses of Liège and Namur. His men, their feldgrau uniforms coated with white dust from shattered buildings, advanced across Belgium almost unopposed, burning villages and shooting hostages as they went. General Charles Lanrezac commanded the French left wing, lying in Kluck’s path. As early as August 8 Lanrezac warned Joffre’s headquarters, Grand Quartier Général (GQG), that he might be flanked. His concern, he was told, was “premature.” GQG informed him that a flanking maneuver was “out of proportion to the means at the enemy’s disposal,” that the enemy columns his scouts had sighted must be on some “special mission,” probably serving as a screen. As evidence of their strength accumulated, Joffre actually rejoiced. It meant, he said, that they were thinning their ranks in the center, where he was about to strike.20
He struck on August 21 in the wilderness of the Ardennes. As American GIs discovered thirty years later, the Ardennes is ill-suited to fighting. T
hickly forested, slashed with deep ravines, and fogged with mists rising from peat bogs, it resembles a scene in a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Caesar, who took ten days to cross it, called it a “place of terrors.” Moreover, its slopes were such that the French would be charging uphill. They found the Germans dug in and ready. Bayonets fixed, Joffre’s men lunged upward in an attaque brusque. Machine gunners slaughtered them. During the four-day battle of the Frontiers, of which this was a part, 140,000 Frenchmen fell. Yet even this massacre failed to discourage Joffre. The British, who had lost only 1,600 at Mons, were defeatist, but the word from GQG was that although Joffre’s drive in the center had been “momentarily checked,” he would “make every effort to renew the offensive.”21 That was fantasy. The German right, outnumbering the defenders two to one, was about to roll up Joffre’s left, and if he didn’t know it, Lanrezac did. Learning that the French attackers in the Ardennes not only had failed but were actually retreating, Lanrezac saw himself facing encirclement. On the evening of August 23 he ordered a general retreat. It spread along the entire Allied line. Plan XVII had crumbled. The last chance for a short, victorious war had vanished. Urgency, even panic, was in the air. The French fell back and back. The German advance was relentless. The Allies would be lucky to save Paris. Actually, they didn’t; it was Kluck who saved it for them. He blundered, swinging east of the capital on September 3 and thereby offering his flank to Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the retired officer charged with the city’s defense. After the first skirmishes there the exhausted German infantrymen gave ground. The French rallied on the Marne, and after a seven-day battle involving more than 2,000,000 men, Kluck recoiled and dug in. Then the sidestepping began, the lines of the opposing armies extending westward and then northward as each tried to outflank the other in a “race to the sea.” The possibility that eventually they might run out of land seems never to have occurred to them. The sacrifices in the opening battles had been so great on both sides—in August the French alone had lost 206,515 men—that the thought of stalemate was unbearable.