He went back into hiding. At 10:00 P.M. a mutual friend brought him a letter from Winston, who was trying to find out what this was all about. The answer, in Fisher’s reply through their intermediary, was the two submarines. He wrote that “the series of fresh naval arrangements you sent me yesterday morning convinced me that the time had arrived for me to make a final decision—there being much more in those proposals than had occurred to me the previous evening when you suggested some of them.” This was absurd, of course; the vessels were insignificant, and Churchill had offered to talk it over. But Fisher had been looking for an excuse, and his hand shook as he scrawled on: “YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING—I know you so well!… You will remain and I SHALL GO—It is better so…. You say with much feeling that ‘it will be a very great grief to you to part from me.’ I am certain you know in your heart no one has ever been more faithful to you than I have since I joined you last October. I have worked my very hardest.” He moved to the Ritz and wrote Reginald McKenna, Winston’s predecessor at the Admiralty, that while he wouldn’t quote Churchill’s letter, “it absolutely CONVINCES me that I am right in my UNALTERABLE DECISION to resign! In fact I have resigned!… At every turn he will be thinking of the military and not the naval side—he never has done otherwise. His heart is ashore, not afloat! The joy of his life is to be 50 yards from a German trench!… I am no longer First Sea Lord. There is no compromise possible!”116
Well, there was, and he was angling for it. He very much wanted to be back at the Admiralty, but with dictatorial powers. This surfaced in his subsequent attempts to negotiate with Asquith. He would serve under McKenna or Grey, he said, but not Churchill or Balfour. Admiral Wilson must leave the Admiralty, Fisher must be empowered to appoint his own Admiralty Board, the first lord would “be absolutely restricted to policy and parliamentary procedure,” and “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 untrammelled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever.” In a postscript he added that these conditions “must be published verbatim so that the Fleet may know my position.” Hankey, to whom he delivered these terms, told him they were impossible. Asquith said the old man was either “traitorous” or “unhinged.” Fisher then sent word of his resignation to Bonar Law. That was malicious. His sole motive now was to ruin Churchill.117
After nine years in power the Liberal government was shaky, and frustration over the bloody, interminable war was at the root of it. Fisher wasn’t the only officer playing politics. Sir John French needed an excuse for the failure, the previous Sunday, of his offensive against Aubers Ridge, where 11,000 men fell without gaining a single yard. The newly knighted Henry Wilson had noted in his diary: “Sir J told me he thought it quite likely that K’s second army would go to Gallipoli. This must be stopped.” Churchill’s strongest argument for strengthening the drive against Turkey was that of the 644,000 Englishmen in uniform, 560,000, or 87 percent, were fighting in France, and, as he had told the War Council, he could not see “the smallest reason for believing” that there would be any change in “either the British or French lines.” To keep its flow of reinforcements coming from home, the BEF badly needed an alibi. Therefore French told Colonel Charles à Court Repington, the haughty military correspondent for the Northcliffe newspapers, that the politicians in London were mismanaging their end of the war. It was a lack of high-explosive shells, he said, which had prevented him from breaking through. On Friday The Times carried scare headlines: NEED FOR SHELLS. BRITISH ATTACK CHECKED. LIMITED SUPPLIES THE CAUSE. A LESSON FROM FRANCE. The problem, according to this line of reasoning, was that inadequate munitions were being sent to the western front. “British soldiers,” said The Times, “died in vain on Aubers Ridge on Sunday because more shells were needed. The Government, who have so seriously failed to organize our national resources, must bear their share of the grave responsibility.” Their error, it was argued, had been compounded by the creation of a second, pointless front. Of Gallipoli The Times declared: “The novel interests of that enterprise cannot be allowed to distract us from what is, and will remain, the decisive theatre of operations. Our first thoughts must be for the bent but unbroken line of battle in the West.” The Liberal editor of the Westminster Gazette agreed that “the war will be ended by killing Germans and in no other way.”118
Churchill was slow to grasp the threat to him. Gallipoli, after all, was Kitchener’s responsibility. But he was being held responsible for the entire campaign, land as well as sea. “Mr Churchill’s characteristics,” said the Morning Post, “make him in his present position a danger and an anxiety to the nation,” and, in another editorial, “Mr Churchill’s instincts for the melodramatic have blossomed into megalomania.” The Times charged that “the First Lord of the Admiralty has been assuming responsibilities and overriding his expert advisers to a degree which might at any time endanger the national safety…. When a civilian Minister in charge of a fighting service persistently seeks to grasp the power which should not pass into his unguided hands, and attempts to use that power in perilous ways, it is time for his colleagues in the Cabinet to take some definite action.” His absences from the Admiralty were noted and criticized. The government could not reveal that he was negotiating Italy’s entrance into the war, and when Tories in the House asked why he wasn’t at his desk, and Asquith evaded the question, they shouted: “Joy ride!” Rumors spread that he was intriguing against Kitchener. Lord Esher’s son wrote his father from Paris: “Why can’t he stick to his own job? He is becoming an object of amusement and some scorn here. The French are beginning to shrug their shoulders when he is mentioned—a bad sign.” Esher passed this letter along to the King. Winston continued to be unpopular among Liberal back-benchers, who now, according to The Times’s parliamentary correspondent, considered him to be “the author of all their ills.” Even in the cabinet and the War Council he had become a controversial figure. That Saturday evening when Fisher resigned, Lloyd George told his mistress that if the resignation were accepted, Winston would have to surrender his office. After George had left her, Frances rose from bed and committed his hard words to her diary. Political ruin, Lloyd George had said, would be “the Nemesis of the man who has fought for this war for years. When the war came he saw in it the chance of glory for himself, & has accordingly entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands, in the hope that he would prove to be the outstanding man in this war.”119
Lloyd George did not speak for the prime minister. But Asquith’s emotional stability, unknown to his colleagues or even his family, had just been dealt a cruel blow. All these months he had been sustained by his love for Venetia Stanley. It was a sign of his dependence upon this sophisticated but shallow young woman that he had disclosed every state secret to her; indeed, it is arguable that she had become England’s greatest security risk. And Venetia, unlike Lloyd George’s Frances, was not constant. She had finally decided that the disparity between her age and Asquith’s—thirty-five years—was too great. That Friday, May 14, she had told him that their relationship was over. She intended to marry Edwin Montagu, a future cabinet minister. Only the week before he had written her, “You give me the life blood of all that I do, or can ever hope to do,” and that if anyone wanted to destroy him, he could do it “effectively, & without a moment’s delay, when any veil is dropped between me & you—soul of my life.” Now, after reading her crushing letter, he wrote her brokenly: “This is too terrible; no hell could be so bad.” When Bonar Law confirmed Fisher’s elopement and threatened a major debate in the House, Asquith refused to pick up the gauntlet. He lacked the strength. Afterward he wrote the young woman he still adored: “You alone of all the world—to whom I have always gone in every moment of trial & trouble, & from whom I have always come back solaced and healed & inspired—were t
he one person who could do nothing, & from whom I could ask nothing. To my dying day, that will be the most bitter memory of my life…. I am on the eve of the most astounding and world-shaking decisions—such as I wd never have taken without your counsel & consent. It seems so strange & empty & unnatural: yet there is nowhere else that I can go, nor would I, if I could.”120 Bonar Law proposed a coalition, and Asquith listlessly agreed. Ironically, Churchill had been advocating this new step for several weeks. It never occurred to him that he might not be a part of a new cabinet. But the Tories had eyed his scalp too long. The exclusion of Churchill was Bonar Law’s price for Conservative participation in the government; Balfour must become first lord.
Winston, who knew none of this, had realized that Fisher’s departure would precipitate an uproar in the House. He had prepared a stout defense of his Dardanelles record; he meant to deliver it from the front bench, presenting, at the same time, his nominees for a new Admiralty Board. “I had,” he later recalled, “prepared for a Parliamentary inquiry of the most searching character.” He meant to summarize the navy’s record of achievement, of which “I shall always be proud to have had a share,” declaring: “The terrible dangers of the beginning of the war are over, the seas have been swept clear; the submarine menace has been fixed within definite limits; the personal ascendancy of our men, the superior quality of our ships on the high seas, have been established beyond doubt or question; our strength has greatly increased, actually and relatively from what it was in the beginning of the war, and it grows continually every day by leaps and bounds…. On the whole surface of the seas of the world no hostile flag is flown.”121
Although exhausted by the Italian negotiations—Sir Henry Wilson had noted in his diary on May 7 that he “looked ill and unhealthy”—Churchill polished this speech all day Sunday, May 16. Monday morning, as a matter of form, he went to the prime minister for clearance. It was then that he learned he would not be permitted to speak. There would be no debate. Asquith, reading it, slowly shook his head. “No,” he said, “this will not do. I have decided to form a National Government, and a very much larger construction will be required.” He looked up and asked: “What are we to do for you?” This was Churchill’s first inkling that his reign as first lord of the Admiralty was over. He was thunderstruck. He had assumed that the prime minister, who had shared all his decisions, would stand by him. Asquith asked him whether he wanted another post in the cabinet or would “prefer a command in France.” Before Winston could answer, Lloyd George entered the room. George, who had been deeply involved in the negotiations with Law—“LG,” Sunny wrote Winston, “has done you in”—asked the prime minister: “Why do you not send him to the Colonial Office? There is great work to be done there.” Winston said numbly that he would refuse any office which cut him off from the conduct of the war. That evening he put it in writing, sending a note to No. 10: “So far as I am concerned if you find it necessary to make a change here, I shd be glad—assuming it was thought fitting—to be offered a position in the new Government. But I will not take any office except a military department, & if that is not convenient I hope I may be found employment in the field.”122
By Tuesday morning, however, the prospect of leaving the Admiralty had become unbearable to him. That evening F. E. Smith and Max Aitken called, and Aitken wrote later that Winston “was clinging to the desire of retaining the Admiralty as if the salvation of England depended upon it,” that he would “even have made it up with Lord Fisher” if he could have remained as first lord. He talked wildly of soliciting support among the Tories. Aitken bluntly told him he had no hope there. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Churchill sent Bonar Law documents to justify his pride in his record as first lord. “Now that there is I rejoice to think good prospect of our becoming colleagues,” he wrote his most implacable political enemy, “I feel entitled to send you the enclosed papers.” In a postscript he added that “this great event of a National Government must be made lasting.”123
If only the facts were known, he believed, he would be kept on. He prepared a long statement for the press, defending his Dardanelles role, and showed it to Lloyd George. George, minister of munitions in the new government, was appalled. This material was classified, he said; if it appeared, the troops on Gallipoli would be compromised. Both he and Grey, Churchill suddenly realized, were treating him as though he had already left the government. He lost his temper. Turning on Lloyd George, he snapped: “You don’t care. You don’t care if I am trampled underfoot by my enemies. You don’t care for my personal reputation.” His old ally broke in: “No, I don’t. I don’t care for my own at the present time. The only thing I care about now is that we win in this war.” That was cant. He, too, was a political animal. Had he been in Winston’s plight he would have been at his wits’ end. George is a key figure in the history of that time, but his position during that turbulent week is murky. He cynically told his mistress, “The situation for Churchill has no meaning but his own prospects,” and she, who always reflected his views, wrote in her diary of Winston’s fall: “I am rather sorry for him, as it must be a terrible experience for one who has had so much power in his hands. But all the same I think he deserves it.” It was the chancellor who, upon learning of Fisher’s departure for Scotland, had told Asquith: “Of course, we must have a coalition, for the alternative is impossible.” Clementine regarded that as a piece of “Welsh trickiness.” She told Winston she thought Lloyd George a Judas. Yet afterward George called Churchill’s dismissal “a cruel and unjust degradation. The Dardanelles failure,” he said later, “was due not so much to Mr. Churchill’s precipitancy as to Lord Kitchener’s and Mr. Asquith’s procrastination.”124
Churchill set his jaw. He wouldn’t quit. He was ready to pay almost any price rather than surrender the Admiralty. “In the evening,” Hankey wrote in his diary that Wednesday, “Churchill offered Fisher any terms he liked including a seat in the Cabinet, if he would stay with him at the Admiralty.” An intermediary carried the message, as before, and Fisher again played the informer, sending the letter to Bonar Law and scribbling across it: “I rejected the 30 pieces of silver to betray my country.” It seems never to have occurred to him that he was betraying the friend who had brought him back from retirement. Sir Arthur Wilson, who had succeeded Fisher as first sea lord, said he would refuse to serve under any first lord except Churchill. “This,” Winston wrote Asquith, “is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid.” Heartened, he wrote Law again. “The rule to follow,” he began, “is what is best calculated to beat the enemy, and not what is most likely to please the newspapers.” The conduct of the Dardanelles operation “should be reviewed by the new Cabinet. Every fact should be laid before them.” He himself bore “a tremendous responsibility” for the campaign against the Turks. “With Sir Arthur Wilson’s professional aid I am sure I can discharge that responsibility fully. In view of his statement to the Prime Minister and to the naval Lords that he will serve as First Sea Lord under me, and under no one else, I feel entitled to say that no other personal combination will give so good a chance.” At stake was “the safety of an Army now battling its way forward under many difficulties.” For nearly four years Churchill had been, “according to my patent, ‘solely responsible to Crown and Parliament’ and have borne the blame for any failure: and now I present to you an absolutely secure naval position…. Therefore I ask to be judged fairly…. I do not ask for anything else.”125
He wrote that “if the Admiralty were in uninstructed or unfriendly hands” it might “lead to the abandonment of the Dardanelles operation” which “otherwise is a certainty,” and asked Asquith to “fancy my feelings if, at this critical moment—on mere uninformed newspaper hostility—the whole intricate affair is to be taken out of my hands & put in the hands of a stranger without the knowledge, or worst of all in the hands of a deadly foe of the plan.” He was “clinging to my task & to my duty.” He could not defend himself without putting England’s security at hazard. The Con
servatives knew only what they had read in the press. “But you know. You alone know the whole situation and that it is my duty to carry this burden safely: and that I can do it. Let me stand or fall by the Dardanelles—but do not take it from my hands.” Clementine also took the remarkable step of writing the prime minister. Her husband, she told him, had mastered “every detail of naval science. There is no man in this country who possesses equal knowledge capacity & vigour. If he goes, the injury to Admiralty business will not be reparable for many months—if indeed it is ever made good during the war. Why do you part with Winston? unless indeed you have lost confidence in his work and ability? But I know that cannot be the reason. Is not the reason expediency—‘to restore public confidence.’ I suggest to you that public confidence will be restored in Germany by Winston’s downfall…. If you send him to another place he will no longer be fighting. If you waste this valuable war material you will be doing an injury to this country.”126