Stung, Churchill replied that Balfour, “a master of parliamentary sword play and every dialectical art,” had mocked a member “who is so much younger than himself”—this was absurd, and unworthy of Winston—to evade “a note of warning” which “should be sounded, and sounded in time.” As to Fisher: “The real fact is that if we could associate in some way or another the driving power and energy of Lord Fisher, with the carrying out of Lord Fisher’s programme at the highest possible speed, there is no reason to believe that great public advantage would not result from that.” It was a weak defense of what would have been a strong case, had he left the old admiral out of it the day before. No one’s mind was changed. All those who had been bruised by his invective in the past, who had distrusted his interlocking brilliance and instability, the inevitable handmaidens of genius, were now after him in full cry. Once more the growing frustration over the insatiable war left a residue of bitterness. Considering who they were, their breeding and their gentility, the backlashes of some were startling. Margot Asquith wrote Balfour: “I hope & believe that Winston will never be forgiven for his yesterday’s speech. Henry & I were thunderstruck at the meanness & the gigantic folly of it. I’ve never varied in my opinion of Winston I am glad to say.” (This was flagrantly untrue.) “He is a hound of the lowest sense of political honour, a fool of the lowest judgement & contemptible…. Henry & I thought you admirable and if H had not had a deputation he said he wd have given Winston 10 of the nastiest minutes of his life he was so disgusted.”195
Violet Asquith, who took the other side, nevertheless wrote that “whatever his motive, he realized that he had hopelessly failed to accomplish what he had set out to do.” Back in Cromwell Road he pondered his next move. Fisher wanted him to quit the army and lead a full-fledged attack on the government: “Write at once and resign! I beg you to do this!… I assure you that I am not so much thinking of your personal interests (immense as they are! because you have the Prime Ministership in your grasp!) but of saving the country! Now now now is the time to save the country NOT 3 months ahead!” Had Winston’s stock stood at its prewar level, this might have been sensible. With each passing day it became clearer that Asquith’s war policy was a failure. He could not remain at No. 10 much longer. Tempted, Churchill secured a written promise from Asquith on Saturday that “if hereafter you should find your sense of public duty called upon you to return to political life here, no obstacle will be put in your way, and your relief will be arranged for, as soon as it can be effected without detriment to the Service.” Monday, on the train to Dover, Winston argued the point with his wife. At the port he wrote Asquith holding him to his word, scribbled a press release announcing his return to civilian life, and left it in Clementine’s hands.196
Late that afternoon, back in Belgium, he changed his mind and dispatched telegrams from Ploegsteert withdrawing the letter and the release. But then he switched back, and for good. He was preoccupied now, not with the Germans on the other side of no-man’s-land, but with his former colleagues who had taunted him from the Treasury Bench. Ten days after his return to his battalion he wrote Clementine that he had resolved to leave the army at the first opportunity. He had served in the trenches since November, “almost always in the front line, certainly without discredit.” Over the past fifteen years he had built a strong political reputation, “enabling me to command the attention… of my fellow countrymen in a manner not exceeded by 3 or 4 living men.” England’s fate was at stake, “and almost every question both affecting war & peace conditions, with wh I have always been formostly [sic] connected, is now raised.” To remain in Flanders would be irresponsible. “Surely,” he wrote, “these facts may stand by themselves in answer to sneers & cavillings. At any rate I feel I can rest upon them with a sure & easy conscience. Do not my darling one underrate the contribution I have made to the public cause, or the solidarity of a political position acquired by so many years of work & power.”197
Clementine was unconvinced. The misjudgment, she knew, was his; he simply did not understand the transformation of his reputation wrought by the Dardanelles, or the depth of his self-inflicted wound in the exchange with Balfour. His reasons were “weighty & well expressed,” she tactfully replied, “but it would be better if they were stated by others than yourself.” Actually, he had put her in a ghastly position. In Flanders he risked death. In London he would risk political ruin. She wrote him: “My Darling own Dear Winston I am so torn and lacerated over you. If I say ‘stay where you are’ a wicked bullet may find you which you might but for me escape,” but if he left his troops the consequences might be “a lifelong rankling regret which you might never admit even to yourself & on which you would brood & spend much time in arguing to yourself that it was the right thing to do—And you would rehearse all the past events over & over again & gradually live in the past instead of in the present and in the great future.” Six days later she wrote: “The present Government may not be strong enough to beat the Germans, but I think they are powerful enough to do you in & I pray to God you do not give the heartless brutes the chance—.”198
Nevertheless, the yeast of revolt continued to work in him. He knew he was not needed here, nor even particularly wanted. Haig had summoned him to Saint-Omer. Back at Lawrence Farm, Winston told Hakewill Smith that the BEF commander in chief had offered him a brigade but suggested that he could be more useful by returning to London and guiding a conscription bill through the House. At the same time, GHQ informed him that his battalion would be merged with another, the Seventh Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the CO of the Seventh, being senior to Churchill, would assume command of the hybrid. Thus, as he happily put it, “I am not leaving my battalion; my battalion is leaving me.” Ignoring Asquith this time, he sent his resignation to Kitchener, who accepted it with the proviso that he not reapply for active service for the duration of the war. The London Gazette reported that he was relinquishing his lieutenant colonelcy. On April 28 he led his troops into the front line for the last time. Clementine, reconciled, wrote him from Blenheim: “Let me hear that you are coming home for good to take up your real work.” He sent her his last letter from Lawrence Farm on May 2. He intended to relax before plunging into politics again: “Wd it not be vy nice to go to Blenheim for the Sunday. If you arrange this, please get me 3 large tubes of thin White (not stiff) from Robersons: also 3 more canvasses: and a bottle of that poisonous solution wh cleans the paint off old canvasses…. The Germans have just fired 30 shells at our farm hitting it 4 times: but no one has been hurt. This is I trust a parting salute.”199
The next morning he and his troops left Ploegsteert for reassignment, and three days later, in Armentières, he entertained his officers at a farewell luncheon. In toasting them he said he had learned that the young Scot “is a formidable fighting animal.” Gibb remembered afterward: “I believe every man in the room felt Winston Churchill’s leaving us a real personal loss.” The following day Winston received a highly political note from General W. T. Furse: “It seems to me peculiarly up to you and to Lloyd George to concentrate all your efforts on breaking such a futile Govt—and that, immediately. How can anyone suppose that the same men in the same flat bottomed tub can do any better in the future than they have done in the past?” Churchill optimistically wrote his wife: “The Government is moribund. I only trust they will not die too soon.” It was characteristic of him that he regarded himself as the obvious alternative to Asquith. Clementine had warned him that such optimism was unrealistic, but he had not believed her. Now he would learn the lesson from other, harsher critics.200
Churchill was never a complete outcast. During each of the several political exiles in his life his solitude was tempered by friends willing to compromise their own futures for his sake, or allies who found common cause with him. Three MPs now invited him to join them in a patriotic Opposition: Arthur Markham, George Lambert, and—Ireland forgotten—Sir Edward Carson. The Manchester Guardian rejoiced that Winston was back; the Observer wanted to se
e him in a ministry. F. E. Smith was a source (though his only source) of goings-on in the cabinet. Lloyd George, though bland, was at least willing to be seen with him. The unfilial Violet reported events in the Asquith household. And although Winston’s popularity with the people was greatly diminished, he retained a national constituency. Max Aitken later recalled accompanying him into a railway station and passing a train crowded with British tars returning from leave. As Winston “walked up the platform,” Aitken wrote, “the bluejackets gave him an immense reception, cheering him with enthusiasm. Churchill was deeply moved and declared that he was encouraged to believe that he was not after all the Forgotten Man.”201
He would never be forgotten; he was unforgettable. But he could be ignored, mortified, and taunted, and all these would be his miserable lot throughout the year ahead. In Parliament, Bonar Law, now colonial secretary, baited him mercilessly. He was told that resignation of his command proved that he was a cheap opportunist. He learned that the Conservative Lord Derby, writing to Lloyd George, had vowed that, whatever the truce between the parties, “Winston could not possibly be in it. Our party will not work with him and as far as I am concerned personally nothing would induce me to support any Government of which he is a member…. He is absolutely untrustworthy as was his father before him, and he has got to learn that just as his father had to disappear from politics so must he, or at all events from official life.”202 The patriotic Opposition grew shaky when Lord Milner, a prospective member of it, refused to be reconciled with Churchill. It then collapsed after Asquith deprived it of its chief issue, conscription, by accepting compulsory military service. Inductions began on May 25, 1916. During the previous twenty-two months two and one-half million Britons had voluntarily joined the colors—a testament to the extraordinary patriotism of their generation.
Winston tried to reopen parliamentary discussion of diversionary attacks in the Baltic and the Middle East. His speeches were followed by studied silence. The U-boat threat, he said, could be met by convoys. The Admiralty said, and did, nothing. (When at his insistence convoys were introduced the following year, the monthly loss of merchant ship tonnage dropped from 874,576 to 351,105.) Kitchener’s appeal for men, he pointed out, had attracted volunteers from key jobs in shipyards, mines, and munitions factories. They should be discharged from the army and put back to work: “We hear a great deal… about ‘comb this industry,’ or ‘comb that,’ but I say to the War Office, ‘Physician, comb thyself.’ ” Nothing was done. His experience in the trenches led him to make practical suggestions about the front. A network of light railways behind the lines would improve logistics. British trench lights, inferior to the enemy’s, should be improved immediately. The supply of steel helmets was inadequate. Staff officers safely beyond the range of the German artillery were pinning medals on one another, and that was outrageous: “It is the privates, the non-commissioned officers, and the regimental officers whose case requires the sympathetic attention of the House and of the Secretary of State. Honour should go where death and danger go.” Logistics, trench lights, the helmet shortage, and the pernicious decorations policy went unchanged.203
He felt that the troops comfortably stationed in England and the safe ports of the Empire should be rotated in combat. At the front, he told inattentive MPs, he had witnessed “one of the clearest and grimmest class distinctions in the world—the distinction between the trench and the non-trench population.” Under the present system, “the trench population lives almost continuously under the fire of the enemy. It returns again and again, after being wounded twice and sometimes three times, and it is continually subject, without respite, to the hardest tests that men have ever been called upon to bear, while all the time the non-trench population scarcely suffers at all…. I wish to point out to the House this afternoon that the part of the army that really counts for ending the war is this killing, fighting, suffering part.” He described red-tabbed officers in warm, safe châteaux confidently moving pins on maps, forgetting that each pin represented a multitude of human beings whose outlook was very different from their own. “The hopes of decisive victory” grew “with every step away from the front line,” reaching “absolute conviction in the Intelligence Department.” The result—doomed offensives—troubled him more than any other aspect of the government’s war policy. Victory would not be gained, he wrote in the Sunday Pictorial, “simply by throwing in masses of men on the western front.” In the days after his return from Flanders he was particularly worried about Haig’s attack, now imminent, north of the Somme River. He begged for restraint. But the cabinet agreed that as an “amateur” he could hardly match the army’s expertise. Indeed, no minister deigned to reply to him. Instead, Harold Tennant, an under secretary at the War Office, rose and followed Balfour’s example by saying contemptuously: “There is one thing which I envy my right hon[orable] and gallant Friend, and that is the time he had in order to prepare his carefully thought-out speeches. I wish I had the same opportunity.”204
On July 1, 1916, after a prolonged bombardment, the British infantry went over the top, and by nightfall eighty thousand Englishmen had fallen, twenty thousand of them dead. The Ulster Volunteer Force, brave beyond belief, had been cut to pieces in the swampy valley of the Ancre. It was the bloodiest day in the history of combat. Yet Haig refused to break off the Somme action. Churchill prepared a memorandum marshaling the arguments for disengagement. “So long as an army possesses a strong offensive power,” he wrote, “it rivets its adversary’s attention. But when the kick is out of it, when the long-saved-up effort has been expended, the enemy’s anxiety is relieved, and he recovers his freedom of movement. This is the danger into which we are now drifting. We are using up division after division—not only those originally concentrated for the attack, but many taken from all parts of the line.” It would take months, he pointed out, for “these shattered divisions” to recover. In the interval the Germans could withdraw troops from this front and send them against Russia.205
The Western Front June 1916
F. E. Smith wrote an introduction to this analysis and had it printed for the cabinet. Everyone else discounted it. Even before it had gone to press Hankey wrote in his diary that Sir William Robertson had “told me that F. E. Smith was writing a paper to show that the big offensive in France had failed. I suspect that Ll George & Winston Churchill are at the back of it. Personally I think it is true but it is a mistake to admit it yet.” A copy of the memo reached Saint-Omer. To Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting him there, Haig insisted that the drive must continue, and Northcliffe, convinced, wrote the editor of The Times: “Let me once more say and urge that what is taking place on the Somme must not be measured in metres. It is the first time we have had a proper scientific attack. There are no complaints of bad Staff work…. If we wrote communiqués as well as the Germans, we would lay much more stress on the German losses, which are known to be immense.” In fact, the campaign, when it finally petered out, had cost the British 481,842 men to the enemy’s 236,194—and the only gain was a few square miles of worthless mud. The Times, however, never mentioned Churchill’s warning.206
The Daily Mail accused him of conspiring against Haig and Robertson, and therefore against England. “The country,” it reported when the Somme bloodletting was at its height, had “seen a Cabinet minister who had just enough intelligence to know that Antwerp and Constantinople were places of importance and yet was mad enough to embark on adventures in both places…. In the Dardanelles affair in particular a megalomaniac politician risked the fate of our Army in France and sacrificed thousands of lives to no purpose.” He had dragged “too pliant officers” with him “into these reckless and hopeless ‘gambles’ ” at a time when his sole duty “was simply to supply the Navy with men and material.” Tragedy would have been averted if the admirals had been “men of the stamp of Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson.” The lesson was: “Ministerial meddling means military muddling.” Churchill was put on notice: “No po
litician who remembers the contemptible fiasco of Antwerp and the ghastly blunder of Gallipoli need expect either patience or forgiveness from the British public if he interferes with the soldiers in charge of our operations.” H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post wrote Asquith of “a sort of plot whose ramifications I am not altogether able to trace”; its purpose was “to get rid of DH,” and its ringleader, he believed, was the former first lord. The Spectator accused Churchill of playing “the part of a political adventurer… with a want of scruple and want of consideration for public interests, and with a reckless selfishness, to which our political history affords no parallel.”207