Churchill was at Lullenden, playing with his children, when Lloyd George telephoned from Riddell’s country home at Walden Heath, where he was staying, and asked him to drive there at once. Arriving, Winston was shown the shocking telegrams from Rome. The prime minister was badly shaken. An attack on Caporetto had been expected, but Haig had assured them only a few days earlier that Italy would “be able to hold her ground unaided.” Asked on October 27 if he could send two British divisions there, the field marshal now replied that the best way to help England’s embattled ally was to keep “Ludendorff busy” in Flanders. That evening Haig meticulously wrote in his diary: “If the Italian Army is demoralized we cannot spare enough troops to fight their battles for them.” But this time he stood alone. Even Robertson understood the need to reinforce Italy. Sir Henry Wilson, after a talk with Churchill, also began to see the light. “We may lose this war yet if we try,” his diary entry began that evening. He compared “the different strategies—ours and the Boches’: 1, We take Bullecourt, they take Rumania; 2, we take Messines, they take Russia; 3, we don’t take Passchendaele, they take Italy.” To Haig’s indignation, the War Cabinet ordered five BEF divisions out of the trenches and through the tunnels under the Alps to rally the Italians on the Piave. Cardona was fired. He had lost 800,000 men. Italy, unmanned, was unable to mount a counterattack.239
Nor was that the worst. Russia, cut off from its allies since the sealing of the Dardanelles, was collapsing within. On November 6, in the middle of the Caporetto rout, Bolshevik mobs, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, sailors from Kronstadt, and the workers’ Red Guards stormed the czar’s Winter Palace. Chaos followed, but all parties reached agreement on one point. Nine million Russian soldiers had been lost in the war, and every leftist politician wanted peace—at any price. Trotsky accepted the kaiser’s brutal terms at Brest-Litovsk, a railroad junction on the Bug River. The implications for Britain, France, and the United States were vast. Russia was no longer an ally. Overnight it was a new war. The Central Powers were now confident of victory, and with good reason. Brest-Litovsk freed three thousand German guns and a million men—enough to give Ludendorff the whip hand on the western front provided he struck before America’s waxing strength eclipsed his edge. The German strategist had designed a brilliant new assault technique, stressing stealth, surprise bombardment, gas, and infiltration, and encoded his coming operation in the west Kaiserschlacht (kaiser’s battle). This entailed a complex of thrusts in France. By April 1, Hindenburg promised the kaiser, they would be in Paris. The Allies dug in and waited numbly. They couldn’t tell where or when or how the enemy was coming, but they knew the storm was imminent. And there was almost nothing they could do about it. They were spent. Even Haig yearned for U.S. troops now. Robertson said, “Our only hope lies in American reserves,” and France’s Pétain said, “J’attends les américains et les tanks.” Publicly and privately Churchill had anticipated them by several months. In Paris the previous September 17, Eddie Marsh had written in his diary: “Winston very eloquent on the necessity of bringing every possible American soldier over to France as soon as possible, and training them here or in England instead of in America—so as not to waste transport during the time of training.” His tanks would not be available in significant numbers for another year, but he could, and did, stockpile other munitions. Convinced that the Germans would bag enormous quantities of equipment in their first drive, he redoubled his efforts at the Metropole, often working through the night. He expected the enemy’s great offensive to open in the third week of February. Actually, it came a month later, on March 21, 1918. And he was there when it started.240
Although he was not in the War Cabinet, Lloyd George sought his advice with increasing frequency. He respected Churchill’s judgment, valued his experience in the trenches, and wanted him to serve as his eyes and ears at the front. On Monday, March 18, at the prime minister’s request, Churchill crossed the Channel and was driven to Saint-Omer. Unlike George, he believed that Haig would be the right man in the coming crisis. He wasn’t very good at advancing, but he would be a poor retreater, too. The very stubbornness and lack of imagination which had handicapped him on the offensive would steady him when the waves of feldgrau came rolling across no-man’s-land. Haig had many complaints that Monday, mostly about the French, yet Churchill felt he anticipated the approaching struggle “with an anxious but resolute eye.” Together they studied the map. The immediate threat was not in Flanders but south of the Ypres salient, on a fifty-mile stretch of front which the War Cabinet, at the insistence of Premier Georges Clemenceau, had just taken over from the French. Here, north of the Oise River, 57 British divisions were confronted by 110 German divisions—over five times the German strength when they had attacked Verdun two years earlier. Haig, Winston reported, was “daily expecting an attack of the first magnitude.”241 He was far more vulnerable than the French and the newly arrived Americans, both of whom, at the moment, outnumbered the enemy concentrations facing them. Part of Haig’s problem was that Lloyd George, after Passchendaele, had deliberately kept him short of troops to prevent him from renewing his attack. The enemy was aware of this weakness. It was logical to anticipate the first German attack of 1918 on the British front in the sector between Arras and Fère-en-Tardenois. And Ludendorff was logical.
Leaving Haig at three o’clock in the afternoon, Churchill decided to visit the Ninth Division, commanded by Major General Henry Tudor, who had been a fellow subaltern in India. Tudor’s headquarters were in the ruined village of Nurlu. “When do you think it will come?” Winston asked him. Tudor replied: “Perhaps tomorrow morning, perhaps the day after, perhaps the week after.” The next day they toured the trenches together, and Churchill was still in Nurlu Wednesday night. As they turned in, Tudor said: “It’s certainly coming now. Trench raids this evening have identified no less than eight enemy battalions on a single halfmile of front.” Churchill woke at four o’clock Thursday morning and lay awake for thirty minutes, listening in the quiet. The silence ended at 4:40 A.M., when he heard several explosions in the distance. They were enemy mines, sapped beneath British positions. “And then,” Churchill later wrote, “exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear.” In a matter of minutes all British communications were destroyed. Gas was spreading over artillery parks and machine-gun nests. “The flame of the bombardment,” he wrote, “lit like flickering firelight my tiny cabin.” He found Tudor on the duckboards outside. The general said: “This is it. I have ordered all our batteries to open fire. You will hear them in a minute.” Churchill didn’t: “The crash of the German shells bursting on our trench lines eight thousand yards away was so overpowering that the accession to the tumult of nearly two hundred guns firing from much nearer could not be even distinguished.” A few minutes after six o’clock over 500,000 Germans, outnumbering the defenders three or four to one, loomed out of a dense fog. Winston left “with mingled emotions” and “motored without misadventure to Peronne.” The road to Peronne was cut behind him. By dusk he was in Saint-Omer. The British were reeling backward. Ludendorff had hoped to split the weak seam between the British and the French at Amiens, but although Amiens didn’t fall on Friday, when the Germans advanced ten miles, all contact between the two allies was broken.242
Churchill reached London on Saturday. At No. 10 he reviewed the situation with Lloyd George and Sir Henry Wilson, who, having outwitted all his rivals, had succeeded Robertson as chief of the Imperial General Staff. Then the prime minister took Winston aside and asked how, with its intricate trench system destroyed and troops falling back, the BEF could remain intact. Churchill answered that “every offensive loses its force as it proceeds. It is like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushes forward, then soaks forward, and finally stops altogether until another bucket can be brought. After thirty or forty miles there will certainly come a considerable breathing s
pace, when the front can be reconstituted if every effort is made.” Lloyd George invited him to meet with the War Cabinet at 4:00 P.M. They broke up after two hours, and Hankey recorded the dismal conclusion: “Our casualties are going to be huge.” Lloyd George and Hankey dined with the Churchills at Eccleston Square on Sunday. The news was all bad; the fury of the enemy drive was unabated. Monday evening Winston was one of several ministers who gathered at Downing Street. Hankey wrote: “Balfour & Churchill whom I found in company with the PM were ridiculously optimistic.” Sir John French, now Viscount French, arrived and said bitterly that Haig had “badly let down the army in shattering it in the hopeless Flanders offensive.”243
During the next three days the reports from France grew blacker and blacker. Lloyd George, badly frightened, wondered how much the poor bloody infantry could stand. On Thursday he asked Churchill whether he could “get away for a few days to France.” The day before, Foch had become generalissimo of all forces fighting the Germans, “charged by the British and French Governments to co-ordinate the action of the Allied Armies on the Western Front.” To relieve the pressure on the faltering British, the prime minister wanted Winston to request a “vigorous” French attack on Ludendorff’s southern flank. Churchill would take with him the Duke of Westminster (“Bender”), an old foxhunting friend and the brother-in-law of Jennie’s second husband. Meanwhile, Bonar Law and Sir Henry Wilson were conspiring to thwart him. His task, they felt, was an affront to Lord Milner, the new war minister. They were actually planning to prevent Churchill from reaching the French leaders when Lloyd George got wind of their intrigue and broke it up. He wired that after calling on Haig, Churchill should “go straight to Clemenceau” in Paris. Reaching the new BEF headquarters in Montreuil, Winston and Bender were astonished to learn that the British field marshal was off taking his afternoon horseback ride. Certainly this was no weather for riding; the rain, Churchill later recalled, “streamed down in torrents in the silent, empty streets of this peaceful little old-world town.” Nor did this seem a propitious time for Haig to be unavailable. Telephones were ringing constantly with news of troop movements. His new chief of staff told his visitors that the fighting was “devouring” their reserves, that the enemy was still “pouring through the gap,” and that during the past week the BEF had lost 1,000 guns and 100,000 men. The need for a French diversion was desperate.244
Driving through Amiens, which was already being shelled by the Germans, Churchill and the duke arrived in Paris and headed for what Winston called “the luxuries of an almost empty Ritz.” Leo Amery found him there and wrote: “We had a good talk while he wallowed in a hot bath and then went to bed. (Winston is in extraordinary shape and wears a long nightgown!)…. His only preoccupation was whether the French were only counter-attacking piecemeal or were getting everything together for a really big stroke.” He sent word of his mission to the premier through the head of the British military mission at 37, rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Clemenceau grandly replied: “Not only shall Mr Winston Churchill see everything, but I will myself take him tomorrow to the battle and we will visit all the Commanders of Corps and Armies engaged.” The seventy-six-year-old “Tiger”—he really looked like a tiger—was quite serious. Churchill thought the premier ought to stay away from the battlefield. Clemenceau said: “C’est mon grand plaisir.” He pointed out that danger was everywhere now; even the capital wasn’t safe. It was quite true. Shells had been landing in Paris since Saturday, fired from Krupp’s remarkable Pariskanone, whose range was eighty-one miles. In a striking example of Teutonic Schrecklichkeit, one shell had crashed through the roof of Saint-Gervais-l’Eglise on Good Friday and exploded in the transept during Mass, killing ninety-one worshipers. London newspapers had carried accounts of this, and Clementine wrote Winston: “I do hope that when the long range guns start firing you take cover.”*245
Their motorcade set out at ten o’clock in the morning. At Beauvais they mounted a stone staircase, passed through double doors which were opened at their approach, and were welcomed by the diminutive, mustachioed Foch. He led them into a huge, elegant conference room. Pinned to a wall before him was an enormous map of the front. “General Foch seized a pencil,” Churchill recalled in the Strand Magazine of December 1930, “as if it were a weapon, and without the slightest preliminary advanced upon the map and proceeded to describe the situation.” Everything about his method of delivery impressed Winston: “his animation, his gestures, his habit of using his whole body to emphasize and illustrate as far as possible the action which he was describing or the argument which he was evolving, his vivid descriptiveness, his violence and vehemence of utterance.” Most of the time he spoke in French, and his tongue was so quick that Churchill missed phrases and sometimes whole sentences, but the generalissimo’s meaning was quite clear. He pointed to the German gains on the offensive’s first day and cried: “Oh! Oh! Oh! How big!” Then his pencil sketched the second stage of the drive, also huge: “Deuxième journée d’invasion. Ah! Ah!” The third lunge, again enormous: “Troisième journée. Aie! Aie!” But as he progressed it became clear that each day’s conquests grew steadily smaller. It was Churchill’s water-bucket metaphor translated into geography. Finally he said: “Hier, dernière journée d’invasion,” and “his whole attitude and manner,” wrote Winston, “flowed out in pity for this poor, weak, miserable little zone of invasion which was all that had been achieved by the enemy on the last day…. The hostile effort was exhausted. The mighty onset was coming to a standstill. The impulse which had sustained it was dying away. The worst was over.” Abruptly Foch cried: “Stabilization. Sure, certain, soon. And afterwards. Ah, afterwards. That is my affair.” There was a silence. Then the premier moved toward him, murmuring: “Alors, Général, il faut que je vous embrasse.”246
It was spectacular, but it did not, of course, answer the question Churchill had brought from London. When were the French going to lance the German canker? Leaving Foch, the motorcade proceeded to the closest British headquarters, in Drury, twelve miles south of Amiens. It was rough driving. The road was rutted with new shell holes. Obviously Ludendorff was close. At their destination, as in Montreuil, telephones never stopped ringing. Haig was there. One by one his officers described their emergency. The BEF had been stumbling backward for ten days. Churchill asked one British general if his men could regroup and form a new line. “No one can tell,” the general said. “We have hardly anything between us and the enemy except utterly exhausted, disorganized troops… dead from want of sleep and rest.” The presentation ended. It was, all agreed, the worst show any of them had seen—perhaps the worst in history. Finally Clemenceau, who had been feasting on chicken and sandwiches as he heard them out, sat back contented and raised his voice above the phones. He said in English: “Very well, then, it is all right…. Never mind what has been arranged before. If your men are tired, and we have fresh men, our men shall come up at once and help you.” But instead of attacking the German flank, poilus would be fed into the line where the British were weakest.247
Churchill relayed Clemenceau’s decision to Lloyd George over one of the telephones. The French premier then rose from his lunch and said: “I claim my reward. I wish to pass the river and see the battle.” The British remonstrated, but the Tiger waved them off. He pointed to his military aide and said: “A few shells will do [him] good.” Back at the cars he said: “Mr. Winston Churchill, we are in the British lines. Will you take charge of us? We will do what you say.” Winston, delighted, asked: “Where do you want to go?” The premier replied: “As far as is possible. But you shall judge.” Winston sat beside the driver in the lead car, map in hand, and off they went, across the bridge and toward the battlefield. He saw streams of Tommies, many of whom “walked as if they were in a dream, and gave no notice of our file of brightly flagged cars. Others again, recognizing me, gave me a wave or a grin, as they would no doubt have done to George Robey or Harry Lauder”—music hall stars—“or any other well known figure which car
ried their minds back to vanished England and the dear days of peace and party politics.” Presently they heard shells moaning and rumbling overhead. Some burst in the fields on either side of the road. Next small-arms fire became audible. A heavy rain was falling, and mists of evening began to gather. If they followed the map much farther, they would encounter Germans. “On our left towards the enemy,” Churchill wrote, “was a low ridge crowned with trees about three hundred yards away. Among these trees a few dark figures moved about…. I thought on the whole that we had gone about far enough.”248
The Western Front 1918
Another guide would have turned back, but if the Tiger found danger beguiling, so did Winston. The two of them left the motorcade and proceeded on foot among stragglers and bursts of shrapnel. They stood together on a small rise, surveying the disorderly scene. Several weary British officers recognized them, saluted them, and came over. Clemenceau and Churchill gave them the contents of their cigar cases. As they were leaving, a shell burst among a group of horses. One, wounded and riderless, “came in a staggering trot towards us. The poor animal was streaming with blood.” The old premier advanced toward it and quickly seized its bridle, bringing it to a halt. His aide hurried up and said they really must leave tout de suite. “Clemenceau,” Churchill wrote, “turned reluctantly towards his car. As he did so, he gave me a sidelong glance and observed in an undertone, ‘Quel moment délicieux!’”249