by Simon Heffer
STARING AT GOD
Britain in the Great War
SIMON HEFFER
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Consequences
2. War
3. Coalition
4. Conscription
5. Rising
6. Slaughter
7. Coup
8. Dictatorship
9. Attrition
10. Escape
11. Armistice
12. Aftermath
Illustrations
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Picture acknowledgements
Further Information on the Cover Image
About the Author
Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
This war has caught us at our worst … and now that shrapnel is killing an entire generation, we are left staring at God.
Margot Asquith, Diary, 26 October 1914
Kitchener, in creating an army, has created love. This is a great change in a country where only marriage was known before.
Report in a Spanish newspaper, sent to Bertrand Russell by George Santayana, 5 May 1915
Someone will turn up. The war will disclose a genius.
Lord Northcliffe to Sir George Riddell, 5 June 1915
But this I would say, standing, as I do, in view of God and eternity. I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no bitterness or hatred towards anyone.
Edith Cavell to the Revd Stirling Gahan, Brussels, 11 October 1915
The direct descendant of Judas Iscariot.
Clementine Churchill, on Lloyd George, letter to her husband, 30 December 1915
There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield.
Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty to Captain Ernle Chatfield, Jutland, 31 May 1916
Believe me England is not rotten. It is a nation of lions led by asses and knaves. England is all right at heart. I have never lost faith in the people. But I have lost faith in all our leaders.
H. A. Gwynne, letter to Countess Bathurst, 15 January 1918
My Lords, is it not a terribly sad thing to think that we have practically made no progress during the last fifty years in acquiring the love and affection of the Irish people?
Reginald Brabazon, 12th Earl of Meath, addressing the House of Lords, 12 March 1918
Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, dispatch, 11 April 1918
One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.
Lady Cynthia Asquith, Diary, 7 October 1918
To Greville Howard
L’amitié, comme le vin, se bonifie avec le temps
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Extracts from the diary of His late Majesty King George V and from the papers of Lord Stamfordham are reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.
A number of people generously provided assistance with access to archives, or supplied me with research materials, introductions and other information that was invaluable in writing this book. I should like to thank William Alden; Professor Chris Andrew; Professor Ian Beckett; Frank Bowles; the Rt Hon Sir Simon Burns; Dr Matthew Butler; Julie Crocker; His Honour Judge Edmunds QC; Professor Gerard DeGroot; Will Heaven; Laura Hobbs; the Revd Mark Jones; Professor Colin Lawson; Sam Lindley; Brigadier Allan Mallinson; Leo McKinstry; Iona McLaren; Annie Pinder; Lord Rayleigh; Andrew Riley; Hon William Strutt; Oliver Urquhart-Irvine; Mr and Mrs Tom Ward; and Melissa Whitworth. I am also grateful to members of staff in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library, London; the Cambridge University Library; Churchill College, Cambridge; the National Archives, Kew; and the Parliamentary Archives in the Palace of Westminster.
I was saved from various errors by Mary Chamberlain, who copy-edited the book with a high degree of meticulousness and intelligence. The superlative design of the dust-wrapper is by Stephanie Heathcote. Sue Brealey once more undertook the proofreading with unusual skill and dedication, and I am immensely in her debt. The book was also proofread by Alison Rae, and it was indexed by Vicki Robinson.
My agent, Georgina Capel, supported me with her customary loyalty and commitment, as she has throughout the three volumes of this project, which was originally her idea. And I have been especially fortunate in having a publisher of the skill, patience and insight of Nigel Wilcockson, who once more has brought the highest standards of refinement and production to my manuscript, leaving it far more coherent than he found it. All errors that remain are mine alone.
My final and most important expression of gratitude is to my beloved wife, Diana, who has now lived for almost a decade with this attempt to retell and amplify recent British history, as have our sons, Fred and Johnnie Heffer. Some readers will assume I exaggerate in claiming that I could not have written this book, or either of its predecessors, without her unfailing and ungrudging support; other writers will know all too well that I do not.
Simon Heffer
Great Leighs
15 May 2019
INTRODUCTION
This is not a military history. It is the story of how the government and people of a great naval and mercantile power, shaped by the tenets of laissez-faire, broke with the traditions of their culture, liberties, doctrines and customs, and adapted to total war. It tells how, with speed and uncertainty, the British state suddenly mobilised in August 1914; how it created a vast army, restricted freedom of action and expression, and prevailed over a formidable enemy; and how the country emerged radically and irrevocably changed. It describes international events from the British perspective: how the government came to take Britain into a catastrophic war because a Yugoslavist nationalist murdered an Austrian archduke in distant Bosnia; the impact of the conflict on the nation and its people; and their difficult readjustment to peace after total war, in a new dispensation where women could vote, the Russian revolution had inspired the working class, and a coalition government of ‘new men’ had made promises it had little prospect of keeping.
This is the third of what is planned to be a four-volume account of Great Britain between 1838 and 1939, a transformative century surpassing even those after the Roman invasion, the Norman Conquest and the Reformation. The five years between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, and the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty, on 28 June 1919, saw a metaphorical revolution in Britain to compare with the literal ones in parts of Europe and in Russia: though one was effectively accomplished in Ireland by the ballot box in December 1918.
In Britain, millions of men either volunteered for or were drafted into the Army, and their lives either cut short or overturned by it. Women were bereaved, enlisted, advanced and enfranchised, yet were still expected to hold together homes and families. In early 1917 it seemed for a time that the country might be starved into submission. Bombers attacked the south and east
of England and ships bombarded towns on the east coast. Britain became hugely indebted and highly taxed; but above all the state ballooned, and exerted unprecedented control over the lives of the people. The war became an opportunity to inaugurate a welfare state, with plans hatched long before the Armistice for improved health care, housing and education. Britain also had to learn how to cope with and care for a legion of disabled ex-servicemen, and the widows and orphans of the dead. It did not always do so ideally.
Like the two preceding volumes, High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain, which examined Britain from 1838 to 1880, and The Age of Decadence: Britain from 1880 to 1914, which took the story up to the eve of the European crisis, Staring at God seeks to be a social and cultural as well as a political history. But because of the desperate predicament the war created, and the consequent awareness that every man and woman, and many children, would have to contribute if Britain were to prevail, government and politicians imposed themselves unprecedentedly on the ordinary citizen. So this volume is, inevitably, concerned much more with politics and political intrigue than its predecessors, because of the central and dominant part the state came to play in the lives of individuals, and the direction of the nation and its vast war effort.
Staring at God also portrays a second conflict with which Britain had to deal as it fought Germany: that in Ireland. Soldiers, sailors and battles inevitably pass through its pages, but only insofar as they were a part of a strategy governed, ultimately, from Westminster and Whitehall; and for the effect their fates had on the people left behind. Numerous fine historians have told the story of the fighting, and of the detailed international background to the conflict. These were five tumultuous and tragic years in Great Britain and Ireland, whose details the horrific events on the Western Front and other theatres of war have long overshadowed. This book examines them freshly, and in detail; and charts a nation’s transition from an almost arrogant certainty to a wounded insecurity.
CHAPTER 1
CONSEQUENCES
I
At 4 p.m. on Sunday, 28 June, 1914 the Foreign Office in London received a telegram announcing the murders of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria–Hungary and his morganatic wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg. The royal couple – he the nephew of eighty-three-year-old Emperor Franz Josef and heir presumptive to his throne – had been killed while visiting Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a former Ottoman territory Austria had annexed with Herzegovina in 1908. The telegram was addressed to Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, from J. Francis Jones, the vice consul in Sarajevo. ‘According to news received here heir apparent [sic] and his consort assassinated this morning by means of an explosive nature.’1 Two hours later Sir Maurice de Bunsen, Britain’s ambassador to Vienna, confirmed the news, adding: ‘From another source I hear that bomb was first thrown at their carriage on their way to town hall, several persons being injured, and later young Servian [Serbian] student shot them both with a revolver as they were returning to Konak.’2 The news was transmitted immediately to the King and Queen, taking tea in the garden of Buckingham Palace on a hot afternoon. ‘It will be a terrible shock to the dear old Emperor,’ George V noted in his diary, ‘and is most regrettable and sad.’ The King consoled himself by marking up his new stamp catalogue.3
The next morning, as Britain learned of the murders from the press, Jones updated Grey. ‘Local paper speaks of anarchist crime, but act was more likely that of Servian irredentists, preconcerted long ago.’4 Grey, who had met Franz Ferdinand on his visit to England in 1913, sent ‘sincere and respectful condolences’ to Franz Josef on behalf of the government and himself. In a Europe of monarchies, an attack on one was seen as an attack on all: there was not the slightest sense that Britain would find itself against Austria on this question. The King declared a week of court mourning, and The Times reported that the Royal Family had been ‘inexpressibly shocked’.5 Grey wrote to Count Mensdorff, Austria’s ambassador to London, that ‘every feeling political and personal makes me sympathise with you.’6 Grey and Mensdorff were close: theirs was one of several high-ranking friendships shattered in the unfolding tragedy. That afternoon the King himself went to the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Belgrave Square to express his regrets to Mensdorff.
Such sympathy was not, however, universal, and nor, where it was expressed, was it especially deeply felt. The Habsburgs had had a miserable passage in their history, of which this was but the latest episode. Franz Josef’s brother, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, had been executed by the government that overthrew him in 1867; his son and heir, Rudolf, had been found dead in the imperial hunting lodge with his mistress in 1889, presumably (but not confirmed) as the result of a suicide pact, and after ructions with his father; his wife, Sisi, had been assassinated (their marriage had more or less broken down); and Franz Ferdinand, who became heir on Rudolf’s death when his father renounced his right to the throne, was disliked by his uncle and most of his court. Few mourned him. In continental Europe, not just in the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary, Franz Ferdinand was loathed. Such was the relief in Budapest at his death that Hungarian stocks rose 11 per cent.7
When the House of Commons met that Monday afternoon Herbert Henry Asquith, the prime minister, said he would move a motion in tribute to the murdered archduke; but the assassination was a low priority for him, and for the government he led. The cabinet was obsessed with trouble in Ireland over Home Rule.8 By contrast, the event in far Sarajevo seemed to have no ramifications for the United Kingdom at all. Asquith’s motion expressed ‘the indignation and deep concern with which this House had learned of the assassination of His Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduke Francis Ferdinand’ and asked the King to tell the Austrian emperor of the Commons’s ‘abhorrence of the crime and their profound sympathy’.9
Asquith praised the ‘patient assiduity and devoted self-sacrifice in the pursuit of duty’ of the aged and bereaved Franz Josef, who he said had attained ‘the highest ideal of what … Kingship can be made to be’ and was ‘the heroic head of a mighty state’. He added: ‘He and his people have always been our friends’.10 Andrew Bonar Law, the Leader of the Opposition, concurred: ‘The heart of the whole world is turned today in sorrow and in pity to the lonely and desolate figure of the aged Emperor.’11
Grey did not trouble himself by speculating on the possible consequences of the assassinations. Some of his staff, however, did. Experienced British diplomats were aware that the killings might provoke feeling in Germany, Austria’s main ally, given the closeness of the two countries bound by a common language, history and culture, and shared international aims. On 30 June the first secretary at the British embassy in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, wrote to Grey that the German Foreign Ministry had told Serbia it should ‘spontaneously … offer to do all they could to help the Bosnian authorities’ to give ‘convincing proof that they dissociated themselves from the motives that had led to the perpetration of this dreadful crime.’12 Sir Arthur Nicolson, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office and its senior permanent official, wrote the same day to Sir George Buchanan, British ambassador at St Petersburg, that ‘the tragedy which has recently occurred at Sarajevo will, I hope, not lead to any further complications; though it is already fairly evident that the Austrians are attributing the terrible events to Servian intrigues and machinations.’13 But even Sir Arthur could see more silver linings than clouds, reflecting that the new heir, the Emperor’s great-nephew Charles, would be more popular than his dead uncle ‘though it may seem a little brutal to say so’. Proving his point, the Germans were not instantly bellicose and, indeed, seemed to be striving to avoid worsening tensions in central Europe. In Britain, life continued serenely: The Times, on 1 July, published advice on ‘the servant problem’, which it stated ‘is one of the most serious problems of the present day.’14 Other issues troubling the nation that summer were the nuisance of dogs in railway carriages, and the plague of noise caused by motor-horns.
Yet by 3 July
Rumbold had sensed a shift in mood in Berlin – where the Prussian officer class that ran the army were strongly urging support of Austria, and alerted London about it. He told Grey that the murders had ‘produced an impression almost amounting to consternation in Germany.’15 Rumbold stressed that Franz Ferdinand had been an ‘intimate friend’ of the Kaiser, and that the German people felt ‘universal sympathy’ for Franz Josef. Some of the Berlin newspapers had ‘pointed out that the aspirations of those working for a greater Servia constitute a danger to the peace of Europe.’16 This, five days after the murders – but not received by Grey until three days later, as Rumbold communicated via the diplomatic bag rather than by telegraph – was the first time a British diplomat in the field had registered with London the potential for a conflict to drag in one European nation after another. He warned Grey of the ‘anxious interest’ with which Berlin was watching events, and said there was little doubt there that the plot to murder the royal couple had been hatched in Serbia.
The Serbs themselves were only too well aware of that. The British minister in Belgrade, Dayrell Crackanthorpe, said the city was in a state ‘rather of stupefaction than of regret’, but also of ‘apprehension’ lest reprisals be taken against Serbs outside Serbia and, indeed, Serbia itself.17 He reported that both the Serbian government and press had denounced the murders, in the hope of placating Austria. However, Crackanthorpe had heard that when the Austrian chargé d’affaires called on the Serb foreign minister, to return his call of condolence, ‘an interview of considerable violence’ took place. By 4 July he was reporting Serb condemnation of ‘the persecutions of the Serbs now daily taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, and how angry Belgrade was at the Viennese press’s determination to blame the Serbian government.18 According to Crackanthorpe, Serbia realised its vulnerability, and ‘sincerely desires the establishment of good relations with the Dual Monarchy.’