Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  Reconciled, Churchill wrote Sinclair: “It will be odd now on the direct opposition Bench with all the furious ex Ministers arriving. I expect they will be vy anxious to be civil to me. But I intend to sit in the corner seat in a kind of isolation.” He seemed puzzled at being passed over. Clementine’s shrewd eye saw the transformation in Lloyd George, however. “At one time he abused the Dukes to please the working-men,” she wrote. “Now he has abused the working-men to please the soldiers.” He had deposed Asquith by insisting that he would prosecute the war more vigorously, providing the generals with everything they needed. This tactic had been effective because the politicians and the press, to keep civilian morale at fever pitch, had glorified the military hierarchy, endowing it with an almost ecclesiastical aura. After the appalling Somme and Verdun casualty lists, the sensible move for the Allies would have been the pursuit of a negotiated peace. Lord Lansdowne recommended just that. A meaningful victory, he suggested in a cabinet memorandum, was clearly impossible. He asked: “Can we afford to go on paying the same sort of price for the same sort of gains?” Haig, responding, assessed the outlook for 1917 as “excellent.” Robertson wrote: “Quite frankly, and at the same time respectfully, I can only say that I am surprised that the question should be asked. The idea had not before entered my head that any member of His Majesty’s Government has a doubt on the matter.” Lloyd George called Lansdowne’s letter “a terrible paper.”*220

  What made this gifted statesman climb into bed with Douglas Haig and Wully Robertson? There is only one possible explanation. He had been twisted by his yearning for power. He profoundly disagreed with Robertson’s western strategy, but he had been unable to change it because of the ennoblement of the general staff by an adoring country. Privately he said that the War Office kept “three sets of figures, one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.” He also said: “If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t—and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. The thing is horrible, and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can’t go on any longer with the bloody business.” But of course he did go on, as men in high office always have, justifying themselves to themselves, by making little adjustments in their reasoning. Haig held him in contempt. When he heard that Lloyd George had asked Foch’s opinion of British strategy, he said tightly: “I could not have believed that a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly.” Later, when 1917 had become even madder than 1916, he wrote in his diary: “L.G. is feeling that his position as P.M. is shaky and means to try and vindicate his conduct of the war”—as though it had been Lloyd George’s, not Haig’s and Robertson’s—“in the eyes of the public and try to put the people against the soldiers.” He added a patronizing note: “Quite a nice little man when one had him alone, but I should think most unreliable.” Robertson agreed. He wrote of George: “I can’t believe that a man such as he is can remain for long head of any government. Surely some honesty and truth are required.”221

  Churchill, who could have been invaluable to his old colleague when the 1917 campaign was being planned, remained in purgatory. But the end of his personal martyrdom was in sight. In January the Royal Commission of Inquiry issued an interim report. Its only criticism of Churchill was that he had been “carried away by his sanguine temperament and his firm belief in the success of the operation which he had advocated.” The heavy losers were Asquith and Kitchener. Asquith was faulted for failing to keep his colleagues informed and for “the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seem to have characterized the proceedings of the War Council.” Kitchener’s failure to consult his general staff, the commissioners concluded, had created “confusion and want of efficiency,” and his delays in sending troops—delays Winston had protested at the time—had been ruinous. Three months later the commission’s final report disposed of all accusations against Churchill. He had always acted with the full support of his naval advisers, it found, and had been blameless of any “incorrect” behavior. In the commissioners’ view his plans had been right; others had been responsible for the flaws of execution. Asquith was again condemned, even more severely. Winston was not completely satisfied—the findings, he said, omitted “proof that when we stopped the naval operations the Turks had only three rounds of ammunition”—but he thought they were “at any rate an instalment of fair play” and he told the House that the commissioners had “swept away directly, or by implication, many serious and reckless charges which have passed… throughout the land during the long months of the last two years.” By telling their “long, tangled, complicated story,” they had relieved him of the burdens “which have been thrown on me and under which I have greatly suffered.” Now “the current of public opinion and the weight of popular displeasure” which had been “directed upon me” could recede.222

  They didn’t; not yet. He had been cleared in the House, but acquittal in the public’s view was another matter. Hatred of Churchill, like the later hatred of Franklin Roosevelt, satisfied the emotional needs of too many people. As a politician Lloyd George had to reckon with their feelings. He thought he understood one reason for their distrust of Winston. “Here is the explanation,” he later wrote. Churchill’s “mind was a powerful machine, but there lay hidden in its material or make-up some obscure defect which prevented it from always running true. They could not tell what it was. When the mechanism went wrong, its very power made the action disastrous, not only to himself but to the causes in which he was engaged and the men with whom he was co-operating…. He had in their opinion revealed some tragic flaw in the metal.” Such people ignored the commission’s report, or discounted it, or found him objectionable for other reasons. No. 10 extended no invitation to him through the remainder of April and May. It was June 18 before Lloyd George summoned him, and then it was to say that he would “try” to get him back the duchy of Lancaster. Winston felt insulted. He declined it on the spot. Frances Stevenson, a reliable guide to George’s moods, described Winston as “very sulky” when the two men met at a Guildhall function, and noted in her diary that everyone “remarked how surly he was looking.”223

  But the prime minister could no longer dismiss him from his thoughts. Churchill cut a different figure in the House now. Vindicated in the eyes of Parliament, he was once again heard with respect, and, Bonar Law’s views to the contrary, Churchill against you was formidable. The Nation, which refused to join in the press choir deifying the military hierarchy, had prepared a series of articles demonstrating how the British had been outmaneuvered by an enemy tactical withdrawal. The first piece had already appeared in London and was being widely reprinted in Germany. The general staff demanded that the rest of the series be suppressed. Lloyd George did it, defended the action in a highly emotional speech, and then left the floor as Winston rose to reply—an exit Winston noted with biting wit. The Nation’s disclosures were “absolutely immaterial and innocent,” Churchill said; they made “mild reading compared with the Dardanelles Report from the point of view of public confidence.” Gagging editors would only bring “a universal harmonious chorus of adulation from morning to night about whatever was done, until some frightful disaster took place.” The prime minister’s move demonstrated “an undue love of the assertion of arbitrary power.” In George’s absence, Winston asked Bonar Law to consider the uneasiness of the House. Law interrupted to say that that would be reflected in parliamentary votes—the weakest of replies. Churchill sprang: “Do not look for quarrels, do not make them; make it easy for every party, every force in this country, to give you its aid and support, and remove barriers and obstructions and misunderstandings that tend to be superficial and apparent divergence among men whose aim is all directed to our common object of victory, on which all our futures depend.” It was the government’s duty to treat Opposition concern “fairly and justly”—not to answer with “the kind of rhetoric or argument which might do v
ery well on public platforms but is entirely unsuitable to the cool discussion in the House of Commons.”224

  This was the kind of appeal which could rally Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist MPs behind him, and if they united, Lloyd George could be unseated. But Churchill saw a looming issue far greater than the silencing of the press. The United States had just declared war on Germany. Churchill suspected that Haig wanted to win the war before U.S. soldiers could reach France in strength. (He was right; on June 10 Haig wrote in his diary: “There must be no thought of staying our hand until America puts an Army in the field next year.”) Winston asked his cousin Freddie, the government’s chief whip, to propose a secret session of the House. Lloyd George scheduled it for May 10. Asquith’s seniority permitted him to speak first, but he was unprepared; so was everyone else in the Opposition except Churchill, who began by asking: “Is it not obvious that we ought not to squander the remaining armies of France and Britain in precipitate offensives before the American power begins to be felt on the battlefields?” The logic, to him, was inescapable: “We have not got the numerical superiority necessary for a successful offensive. We have no marked artillery preponderance over the enemy. We have not got the numbers of tanks which we need. We have not established superiority in the air. We have discovered neither the mechanical nor the tactical methods of piercing an indefinite succession of fortified lines defended by German troops.” The exigent question, therefore, was: “Shall we then in such circumstances cast away our remaining manpower in desperate efforts on the Western Front before large American forces are marshalled in France? Let the House implore the Prime Minister to use the authority which he wields, and all his personal weight, to prevent the French and British High Commands from dragging each other into fresh bloody and disastrous adventures. Master the U-boat attack. Bring over the American millions, so as to economize French and British lives, and so as to train, increase and perfect our armies and our methods for a decisive effort in a later year.” George’s reply, when he appeared, was evasive—he was already committed to a new attack in Flanders—but Churchill had preyed on doubts already in the prime minister’s mind. As the session ended, the two met fortuitously behind the Speaker’s chair. Churchill later recalled: “In his satisfaction at the course the Debate had taken, he assured me of his determination to have me at his side. From that day, although holding no office, I became to a large extent his colleague. He repeatedly discussed with me every aspect of the war and many of his secret hopes and fears.”225

  How deep, Lloyd George asked Beaverbrook in June, did the Tory animosity toward Winston really go? It was still there, Beaverbrook replied, but he thought it could be defied. Office therefore came to Churchill once more on July 17, 1917, when the prime minister appointed him minister of munitions. “Not allowed to make the plans,” he later wrote wryly, “I was set to make the weapons.” The prime minister had confided in no one; everyone, including his closest colleagues, learned of his decision from the newspapers. The reaction was sharp. The secretary for war threatened to resign. The colonial secretary wrote No. 10 that the prospect of facing Winston across the cabinet table made it “extremely difficult for many of my friends to continue their support.” Leo Amery wrote in his diary that bringing Churchill “into the Government has shaken its prestige and reputation seriously,” and Lloyd George agreed; the antagonism, he said in his memoirs, “swelled to the dimensions of a grave ministerial crisis which threatened the life of the Government.” It peaked when forty Tory MPs sailed into Bonar Law’s office to protest. Law, though angry himself, told them that the issue was not strong enough to topple the coalition. Thereafter the danger receded, though resentment remained. Nothing in recent memory had created “such widespread bitterness,” said the Morning Post, which, as usual, led the Fleet Street pack, commenting that the appointment “proves that although we have not yet invented the unsinkable ship, we have discovered the unsinkable politician.” The Dardanelles was exhumed, as though the commission had never existed. That debacle, said the Post, was “managed more or less personally by Mr Churchill, whose overwhelming conceit led him to imagine he was a Nelson at sea and a Napoleon on land.” More calamities would ensue, the paper predicted: “We confidently anticipate that he will continue to make colossal blunders at the cost of the nation.” The Tory minister Walter Long wrote on July 29, 1917: “The real effect has been to destroy all confidence in Ll. G. It is widely held that for purposes of his own quite apart from the war he has deceived and jockeyed us. The complaints come from our very best supporters, quiet, steady staunch men, and W. C. has made matters worse by stating at Dundee that the opposition comes from his political opponents.”226

  It is hard to conceive of where else it could have come from; Churchill, as a new minister, was fighting a by-election in Dundee. But if the uproar in London startled him, as it must have, he showed no scars. C. à C. Repington, the military writer, described him as “looking a different man… I never saw anyone so changed, and to such an advantage, in so short a time.” The return to office was largely responsible for this, but since the spring he had also presided over a happier family. The lease on 33 Eccleston Square having expired, they moved back there. They had also acquired a second home. Clementine had always dreamed of living in “a little country basket,” and Winston had bought a gray-stone cottage in Lullenden, near East Grinstead in Kent, for £6,000, cashing in £5,000 of Pennsylvania Railroad stock and a £1,000 Exchequer war bond. The property had many attractions: a large barn nearby where the children could play, a pony and light carriage for transportation when Churchill had the car in London, landscapes he could paint, and a large high room downstairs where Clementine, pregnant for the fourth time, could nap on lazy summer afternoons and still be within earshot of the nanny. At first they only went down for weekends, but after German air raids on the capital increased, they were there all the time. Winston loved Kent—the coastal country from which the sea retreats in southeastern England—and during his first summer as proprietor he was often in Lullenden, leaving it to campaign fitfully in Dundee. On July 29 he was reelected with a majority 5,266 votes. Two days later he took his seat on the front bench and was greeted, according to The Times, “with some cheers.” It was twenty months since he had held office. During the interval 340,973 British soldiers had been killed in action and 804,457 wounded. The missing, mutilated beyond recognition, would be remembered in annual memorial ceremonies as the “unknown.”227

  The Ministry of Munitions, a small empire employing over twelve thousand civil servants divided into fifty departments, was directed from the fashionable Hotel Metropole in Northumberland Avenue, abutting on Trafalgar Square. Churchill had convened its staff before the votes had been counted in Dundee, and one member, Harold Bellman, later described the meeting in his memoirs. Like everyone else in England, Bellman’s colleagues had decided views about Churchill. They were nervous, they were worried, and many were hostile. “Those who attended from the secretariat,” Bellman wrote, “fully expected a stormy scene.” Winston, he said, “was received rather coldly, and opened by saying that he had perceived that ‘he started at scratch in the popularity stakes.’ He went on boldly to indicate his policy and to outline his proposals for an even swifter production of munitions. As he elaborated his plans the atmosphere changed perceptibly. This was not an apology. It was a challenge. Those who came to curse remained to cheer. The courage and eloquence of the new minister dispelled disaffection and the minister took up his task with a willing staff. It was a personal triumph at a critical juncture.”228

  His responsibilities were not limited to guns and ammunition. They included the railroads, airplanes, and tanks. Nor was the mandate confined to British needs. The Americans were building a “bridge of ships” across the Atlantic to transport six U.S. armies—forty-eight divisions—to France. They would need, among other weapons, 12,000 artillery pieces. Churchill quickly established contact with his American counterpart, Bernard Baruch, the chairman of t
he U.S. War Industries Board, who, when they met later at the peace conference, would become his lifelong friend. Winston signed a £100,000,000 contract and entered into a gentleman’s agreement with Baruch under which Britain agreed to make no profit and the United States promised to make good any loss. In the ministry itself, Winston undertook a massive reorganization. The fifty departments were reduced to twelve, and in conversation and correspondence he referred to each by a letter: finance became “F,” design “D,” projectiles “P,” explosives “X,” and so on. British businessmen were recruited and then governed by what he called a “ ’Clamping’ committee.” He surveyed his new realm with pride. “Instead of struggling through the jungle on foot,” he later wrote, “I rode comfortably on an elephant, whose trunk could pick up a pin or uproot a tree with equal ease, and from whose back a wide scene lay open.”229