Churchill the Young Warrior, page 22
He lunched with Kitchener, who was in London to receive an earldom. Winston was impressed by Kitchener’s understanding of the likely effects of Germany attacking France, so he asked Asquith not to let Kitchener be sent back to Egypt in case he was needed in Europe. Asquith had Kitchener’s train stopped, made him Secretary of State for War, and brought him back to London.
On July 28, the German High Command suggested that Austria-Hungary should immediately march on Serbia in case someone should change their mind, while Grey pressed Austria to turn away from war. But the British Ambassador in Vienna told Grey that the Austrian public were eager for it, that they had “gone wild with joy” at the prospect of war.1
The British First Fleet had not dispersed and looked formidable in the Channel, off of the Isle of Wight. Winston sent it back to the North Sea in the hope of discouraging the Germans from attacking Britain’s East Coast. By that time Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia.
“My darling one & beautiful,” Winston wrote to Clementine, “The preparations have a hideous fascination for me … I cannot feel that we in this island are in any serious way responsible for the wave of madness which has swept the mind of Christendom. No one can measure the consequences … The sailors are thrilled … But war is the unknown & the unexpected!”
The following day, the cabinet agreed to his request for precautionary defensive measures, like civilian craft to be removed from naval harbors, armed guards positioned at bridges and viaducts, and observers placed on the coast to report on any hostile ships.
Next day he received a message that the First Fleet was now back in the North Sea. But on July 31 there was strong opposition by Liberals to any involvement in war on behalf of France. Churchill told them he agreed that Britain should remain neutral, since there was no treaty. Nevertheless, he also authorized his naval advisers to meet with the French Naval Attaché in London and discuss what should be done if they ever became allies in war. And he asked the cabinet to authorize full mobilization of the Fleet. Ministers were divided. Lloyd George was undecided. Churchill was as impatient as usual, but reluctant to commit to going to war for France if Belgium was invaded. It would depend on British public opinion in the end.
Then there appeared to be a possibility that Austria and Russia might negotiate a formula that Germany had suggested. Soon after 9:00 p.m., F. E. Smith visited him with Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook). He told them of the possibility of war being prevented. So they sat down at a card table to play away the time while they waited for fresh news. The cards were dealt, when a messenger delivered a red dispatch box. Churchill opened it with his skeleton key. He found “it contained a single sheet of paper.” He read aloud the message on it: “War declared by Germany on Russia.”2
Edith Cavell
Although the German armies had crossed into Luxemburg, they did not cross the Belgian frontier immediately. Instead, they sent an ultimatum on the morning of August 3, which demanded the right of their troops to cross Belgium. Impatient to attack the border, their vanguard was already sweeping through Luxemburg. They crossed the Belgian frontier that afternoon. A British ultimatum to Germany to maintain Belgian neutrality was due to expire at midnight on August 4. Germany made no reply and their troops continued to advance deeper into Belgian territory.
The following day, the British Expeditionary Force reached the town of Mons in Belgium. The First German Army, under von Kluck, drove south through Mons to the French border. It consisted of 580,000 troops. The Allied troops numbered only 336,000, of whom about 36,000 were British. The majority were French. They took up positions along the Mons-Condé Canal.
Edith Cavell was a trained nurse working in Belgium. She first came to the notice of a British publication when she wrote to the Nursing Mirror on August 21, 1914, to tell them that some Belgians who spoke to German troops in German found them vague about where they were, imagining themselves to be already in Paris, which was their destination. They were evidently bewildered and could not understand what quarrel they were supposed to have with the Belgians, or why they were there.
Nurse Cavell’s father was a vicar who had brought her up to help people less fortunate than herself. Her Anglican beliefs persuaded her to help anyone who needed it, because she could not let anyone die. She worked in several hospitals as the Victorian century turned into an Edwardian one, and became the matron of a nursing school in Belgium in 1907. Professional nursing developed so much in the next three years that she published a professional nursing journal called L’infirmière. She began training nurses in three hospitals and twenty-four schools, as well as thirteen kindergartens in Belgium a year later. She moved to Brussels when the German Army occupied it. From then on, she sheltered British soldiers and helped them to escape to neutral Holland. She saved the lives of any soldiers, whether from Britain, France, or Germany. But her equal treatment of the Germans did not save her from their firing squad.
At first, Edith Cavell was offered safe conduct to Holland with other British nurses, but most refused. At the same time, a British soldier who had reconnoitered the village of St. Symphorien with his bicycle failed to return. He was the first British soldier to be killed by the enemy in the First World War.3 He was buried in the village with others who got in the way of the German war machine.
Fourteen months later, the forty-nine-year-old British nurse, Edith Cavell, was about to be executed by the Germans for helping British and French prisoners-of-war to escape to neutral Holland in order to join the Allies. After being lined up for execution, she was struck by four bullets, one of which killed her instantly by piercing her heart.
Considerable anti-German feeling was expressed by the British when her murder became known. But that was only the beginning of the German atrocities in Belgium.
Naval War
Churchill was convinced that Germany’s next step would shortly be to attack Russia’s ally, France. He left his friends playing cards and walked across the Horse Guards Parade to the Prime Minister’s office at Number 10. Once there, he told Asquith that, despite the cabinet’s earlier refusal, he wished to order immediate mobilization of the fleet. Then he walked back to the Admiralty and gave them the order.
“Cat dear,” he wrote to Clementine at one o’clock in the morning, “It’s all up. Germany has quenched the last hopes of peace by declaring war on Russia, & the declaration against France is momentarily expected.” She had written to him on the previous day to declare that war would be lunacy. Now he had a chance to agree with her. “But the world is gone mad—& we must look after ourselves—& our friends.” He told her he hoped she would come to London for a day or two.
At the same moment that Germany aimed to defeat France, to get her out of the war, the Russian government now requested that France should honor the Franco-Russian Treaty of 1894 by coming to her aid. So far, the expected progress through the alliances and treaties was going like clockwork. Germany’s initial drive would be through Belgium. Soon after midday on August 2, Britain informed Germany that it would not allow German ships through the English Channel or the North Sea to attack the French coastline or French shipping. A copy of the warning was sent to British naval commanders in those areas with orders to “Be prepared to meet surprise attacks.”
No German armies had yet crossed the Belgian frontier at that point, although their forces had occupied Luxemburg. On the morning of August 3, the cabinet learned that Germany had sent an ultimatum to Belgium. It meant that Britain was now committed to insisting on maintaining Belgium’s neutrality. Nevertheless, German forces crossed the Belgian border that afternoon. Grey warned the House that their act was a violation of Britain’s Treaty of 1839, which now obliged Britain to go to war on Belgium’s behalf. “Now,” Grey said privately to Winston, “we shall send them an ultimatum to stop their invasion of Belgium within twenty-four hours.”
Back at the Admiralty, Churchill requested that Asquith and Grey give him immediate authorization to undertake the combined Anglo-French dispositions to defend the Channel. Unless expressly forbidden, he would now act accordingly. On August 4, The Times complimented him as the one Minister “whose grasp of the situation and whose efforts to meet it have been above all praise.” The British ultimatum was to expire at midnight.
While the cabinet waited impatiently and anxiously for an answer all day, the German cruiser, the Goeben, bombarded a French North African port, while a German light cruiser, the Breslau, bombarded Bône. British warships followed both of them, but could take no action unless fired upon, since Britain was not at war. Anticipating another favorable reaction from Asquith, Churchill telegraphed the Admiralty, “If Goeben attacks French transports you should at once engage her.”
At noon on the same day, Asquith wrote, “Winston, who has got on all his war paint, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben.” Churchill was told by the cabinet to wait until the ultimatum had expired one hour after midnight. He telegraphed all ships accordingly.
German troops penetrated deep into Belgian territory that afternoon. As soon as the ultimatum expired, Winston authorized a signal to be sent from the Admiralty to all ships and naval establishments: “Commence hostilities against Germany.”4
In the meantime, Bonar Law had already started to plot Winston’s downfall. But when it came, Kitchener would be able to say to that brash young man of whom he had once disapproved, “There is one thing they cannot take away from you—the fleet was ready.”5
The Fall of Antwerp
The British Expeditionary Force would have to be shipped across the Channel, and Churchill had sealed off the English Channel against any German intervention. The BEF began to be transported to the Continent within two weeks. One hundred twenty thousand men arrived without any loss of vessels or lives. Meanwhile, Churchill was anxious about Clementine and their children, in case of a mischance of war, since they were still on vacation by the North Sea. She was seven months pregnant. He wrote to tell her there was little chance of a raid, but that Cromer provided a landing place for the enemy. “I wish you would get the motor repaired and keep it so that you can whisk away at the first sign of trouble.”
Meanwhile, the German attack on Belgium had been planned to run seamlessly, with nothing and nobody allowed to stand in the way of its timing. The plan, as revised by Moltke, was heavier than necessary and deadly effective. It established a detachment of troops under General von Emmich, to open out a corridor into the Belgian plain north of the Ardennes, ready for the advance of the main troops when, after a temporary check on August 5, a staff officer named Ludendorff became famous for occupying the fortress of Liége. The fort was held stubbornly, but fell because of the invention of heavy Howitzers with enormous destructive power that took everyone by surprise. The Belgian Army fell back on Antwerp.
On August 6, the British light cruiser, the Amphion, destroyed a German minelayer and captured its crew. But it was sunk almost immediately by one of the mines. A hundred and fifty British sailors drowned, and so did their captives. Churchill immediately related the tragedy to the House of Commons and the news media, and was complimented for his frankness by the Manchester Guardian.
Unable by temperament and common sense to be limited to a passive role in war, Winston recommended an assault on one of the Dutch islands, which might be fortified and used as a base from which to attack German shipping and an air base to bomb the Kiel Canal. The Naval war staff he had set up to advise him considered such an operation impractical, so he continued searching around for other opportunities to attack Germany. He obtained cabinet approval for a naval blockade of Germany’s North Sea ports, to prevent food coming out or going in. Volunteers were applying to fight with him; among them the rising patriotic poet Rupert Brooke. Churchill persuaded Kitchener to send Britain’s last military division to France, after convincing him that the Admiralty was ready and able to protect Britain against invasion on its own.
Two days later, Kitchener appeared in his doorway at the Admiralty looking like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. He brought tragic news that the Belgian forces at Namur were in German hands. It meant that the road from Belgium to the Channel ports was open. Churchill spoke to Lloyd George at the Treasury. It was their first confidential meeting since the war had erupted, and he needed a reaction and some advice from someone he trusted and respected. Their talk gave him confidence. He immediately signaled to the new naval Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Jellicoe, to instill confidence in him too, in order to prepare him for the seriousness of the situation as French and British armies fell back from the German onslaught on August 26. He had obtained cabinet approval to send the marine brigade to Ostend in order to pressure the enemy to divert their forces from the main German thrust.
Far on the other flank of the Belgian plain, the French offensive had opened on August 7, but was soon halted. The main thrust into Lorraine by the French First and Second Armies began on August 14, but was stopped in a battle at Morrhange-Sarrebourg on August 20 when the French armies were appalled and demoralized by the extent of the war material bombarding them. Although led by offensive tactics, they were stopped in their tracks by the deadly defensive killing power of machine-guns and Howitzers.
It was the German attack on Liége that opened General Joffre’s eyes to the reality of the German advance, since French Intelligence had greatly underestimated the number of German troops that the French forces now faced. The French armies everywhere were taken by surprise. As for the British troops, after resisting six German divisions, they fell back on August 24 with their French Allies. Then they began to retreat in earnest, largely because of Sir John French’s “sudden revulsion of mind and emotion,” as military strategist Liddell Hart phrased it.6
Clementine was with Winston in London when news arrived of Britain’s first naval victory. The British fleet had sunk three German cruisers in the Heligoland Bight without losses. As a show of united confidence, Asquith and Opposition Leader Bonar Law spoke at the Guildhall. When Churchill was asked to speak, to rousing cheers, he told the public that he was absolutely sure that they had only to endure to conquer, and victory would be found at the end of the road.
But the British and French forces were in retreat after only thirty days of war, and a cloud of depression hovered over England. Winston attempted to raise morale by using encouraging words, and managed to do so with his colleagues. One wrote to him that “You inspire us all by your courage and resolution.”7 Kitchener asked him to take over the entire responsibility for the aerial defenses of Britain from the War Office. He agreed, and set up communications between Hendon Aerodrome and the coast, to attack any enemy aircraft that might attempt to strike London. A historic event took place on the same day, when a Royal Naval Air Service pilot dropped a bomb on a German army unit close to the frontline. Twenty-four airplanes were sent to newly established bases fifty miles inland. They were commanded by some of the airmen who had taught Churchill to fly.8
Now the newspapers headlined all sorts of stories about a continuing retreat. The Times wrote describing a bitter retreat from Mons, “of the broken bits of many regiments,” of British soldiers being battered by marching. Asquith asked Winston to respond with a more uplifting report of successes, and he did so. His article was published on September 5, after which the Prime Minister requested more of “his best journalistic condiment.” His articles benefited by his not knowing all the unexpected complications that had emerged in the fog of war in every army in the front lines. Had he known at the time, he would have been stunned. Even a century later it is difficult to make sense of what still looks like total chaos everywhere.
Churchill travelled to France on September 10. Only Asquith knew of his trip. He investigated the Dunkirk fortifications and studied the air bases and the first armored cars, which were armor-plated Rolls Royce motor cars. He discussed the defense of the port with the French Governor and encouraged him. On his return, he sent the Marine Brigade over at Kitchener’s request, to distract German forces which were moving cavalry units towards the Channel. Then he electrified an audience at the Guildhall with his public speech. According to the Manchester Guardian it was full of determination and belligerent phrases that stuck in the minds of the audience and hardened their own determination—about how the bulldog breed hangs on to its enemy and never lets go until it finishes them off. He didn’t deny the dangers, and caught the imagination of the public, who liked to think of their own stubbornness being compared with the British bulldog breed.
The Lust for Battle
There was no doubt that Winston possessed a lust for battle and longed to be in the thick of it again. It was the attraction of all the challenges and the willingness to take on an army that had been preparing for war for years and was fully equipped for it. It even seemed to be an added stimulus to his overdeveloped sense of responsibility that Britain was losing to the Germans: it got his adrenaline flowing. On September 14, Asquith wrote, “When I hear Winston say that the last thing he would pray for is peace, I’m inclined almost to shiver.” Winston returned to France at Kitchener’s request to explain to Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief, why the British Expeditionary Force should be in position along the coast to protect the Channel ports together with the Navy.
He observed French artillery in action while there, with German shells bursting over a nearby village. Most of their technology was new or modernized. It was a first view of a war that would soon become a normal way of life. A week later, the enemy sank three British cruisers with 1,459 officers and men losing their lives. He was blamed for the catastrophe, although he had warned them to take precautions against the risks. He made a third visit to France to encourage the marines and airmen to attack the German lines. Five days later he was back there again and as dissatisfied as ever.
