by Simon Heffer
The press had its own reasons for sympathising with the call to ease censorship, being sure that more graphic detail would sell more newspapers. The Times did not accuse Asquith of lying, but, returning for a second day to attack his Newcastle speech, it did say that his statements about munitions supply ‘will not bear examination.’169 It believed that the government had failed to take steps to increase output early enough, and it was right. Criticism of Asquith and his colleagues went far beyond Northcliffe. Supply problems at Neuve Chapelle had filtered back into London society from officers home on leave, and the shortcomings to which The Times referred were being widely discussed. Asquith, though, appeared less and less engaged, as his paranoia about his relationship with Miss Stanley grew. Late on 22 April he wrote his second letter of the day to her, pleading: ‘I would rather know the worst – without disguise or delay … Do tell me – yes or no!’170
While Asquith fretted about this, Lloyd George used a Commons debate on the munitions industry to try to undo some of the damage of the Newcastle speech. The Army, he said, had quintupled in size since war broke out, and yet had been properly equipped with ‘adequate ammunition’ as part of ‘one of the most magnificent pieces of organisation in our history.’171 He praised Kitchener; he quoted an unnamed general who had told him the amount of heavy ammunition used had been ‘the surprise of the war’. The chancellor believed the country should be ‘proud’; and mentioned that a large proportion of German shells fired at the British had been duds, because of their inferior manufacture.172 Between 2,500 and 3,000 firms had been subcontracted the work of making these munitions; and he claimed it had become apparent the previous December that things were moving too slowly. The response had been to use labour exchanges to find more men, but by March it had become obvious that not enough were prepared to move to unfamiliar districts to do this work. The more skilled they were, the less willing they were to move. Therefore, the government had amended DORA yet again to enable it to take over engineering factories and turn them entirely to arms production. Artillery munitions production was now nearly nineteen times more than the previous September. He praised the patriotism of the workers, and the cooperation of the unions.
These reassurances were inadequate for Northcliffe, recently back from the Western Front and talks with French and Joffre – the latter instrumental in removing some of the restrictions on war correspondents. At this stage he disliked Lloyd George nearly as much as he disliked Asquith – that would change, as it came to suit Northcliffe’s ambition – not least over the chancellor’s anti-drink policies. The Times described Lloyd George’s intervention as having ‘encouraged a revival of complacency.’173 Given the mounting casualty lists in the papers – on some days there were 2,000 dead, missing and wounded – most would have regarded complacency as an unlikely state of mind. What Lloyd George had, it seemed, failed to get over – and the newspaper stated it baldly – was that ‘the Germans stand at most points in the West where they did six months ago, that driving them out will be a costly and a deadly business, and that we are as far off as ever from the imperative task of the invasion of Germany.’
The last point was of huge interest and importance to Northcliffe, but was barely considered by anyone else, since the main war aim was to get Germany out of Belgium and France rather than conquer and subjugate the German people: as the leading article admitted. But the pungent criticism of the two leading men in the government was heading in only one direction: which was bringing some of Northcliffe’s Unionist friends into government to improve the running of the war. In reply to Lloyd George’s speech, Law – who for months had gone to lengths to ensure his party did not attack the government – expressed his ‘anxious misgivings’ about the distance between Lloyd George’s version of events and what anyone who had talked to senior officers had heard since Neuve Chapelle. It exemplified an unease that Northcliffe, and other Unionists who wanted a coalition, could capitalise upon.
Asquith, however, was too preoccupied with his emotional turmoil to grasp these strategic considerations. Unknown to him, the last obstacle to a marriage between Montagu and Miss Stanley had been removed: she had agreed to convert to his faith of Judaism so he could fulfil a condition of receiving an inheritance of £10,000 a year under his father’s will. However, she was due in Boulogne in the second week of May to nurse the wounded, and Asquith was preparing himself mentally for that separation. For him, it was not a minor matter, and would not have been even at the best of times: but problems were piling upon him, problems that his fierce intellect and enormous experience alone could not always solve. War presented him with a set of difficulties outside the scope of that experience, and that required a different sort of mentality and background to tackle: Lloyd George, notably, found them less of a challenge, not least because he was prepared to dissemble and act the showman in a way Asquith would not.
He saw Miss Stanley on 4 May and, after ‘ruminating’ as he walked back to Downing Street, wrote to her: ‘I sometimes think that Northcliffe & his obscene crew may perhaps be right – that, whatever the rest of the world may say, I am, if not an imposter, at any rate a failure, & au fond a fool.’174 She did not tell him of her impending marriage, and nor did she when Asquith took her for a drive the following afternoon and again two days later – these excursions had been a habit of theirs for three years. She was due to embark for Boulogne, but her health broke down – mainly because the tensions of her double life were making her feel ‘ill and miserable’ – and her departure was postponed. In his relief Asquith wrote to her on 10 May that ‘you are everything to me’, which cannot have helped her.175
VII
Paradoxically, the constant flow of bad news from both the Western and Eastern Fronts in the spring of 1915, and the lengthening casualty lists, stiffened the national resolve. The drain of men for the Dardanelles, and a setback at Ypres, were raising new questions about recruiting, and the question of the possibility of compulsion was no longer confined to the internal debates of the Unionist Party. As The Times observed on 6 May: ‘the voluntary system has limits and we are rapidly approaching them.’176 Thus far, because of a failure of planning, there had been more men than could be equipped: but now, if war production stepped up, there was likely to be more equipment than there were men. There was anger that public money was being spent on advertising campaigns to urge men to do their duty and volunteer, which The Times called ‘a humiliating expedient for a self-respecting nation’. A system of compulsion was not yet imperative: but the government was urged to start planning for it in a way it had not planned for a huge supply of munitions until almost too late. To Asquith compulsion (which had operated in France from the moment war broke out) remained unthinkable; but not to Lloyd George, whose own brand of liberalism embraced statism in a way Asquith’s never could.
Many vital trades and professions were being denuded of men, so the first step would be to train women, or co-opt the retired, to replace them. However, numerous businesses were not even trying. It was reported on 7 May that 20,000 men had been engaged by the Post Office since August, 11,000 of whom were eligible for the Army. Even Gwynne, who had been against compulsion, was by 11 May telling Milner that ‘I am becoming more and more of opinion [sic] that conscription, so far from being distasteful to the people, at the present moment would be heartily welcomed.’177 Sir Frederick Milner – no relation to the proconsul, but a former Unionist MP – evoked another reason for ‘unpatriotic slackers’ to be called up: once everyone was doing his ‘duty’ and the ‘shilly-shallying had stopped the nation’ would emerge from its ordeal ‘purified’.178 He was not alone in believing war was some sort of penance from which a morally renewed nation would arise.
Some on the Left – such as George Lansbury, editor of the Daily Herald and a future Labour leader, who would make his presence and his principles felt consistently throughout the war – felt nothing would be gained by further fighting; but his paper’s attempt in May 1915 to rally support for peac
e among leftist intellectuals and trades unionists met resounding opposition. H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett wanted nothing short of victory, the latter demanding huge indemnities from the Germans and ‘a ceremonial passage of Belgian troops down Unter den Linden.’179 Union leaders wanted a fight to the end; the only heads above the parapet were those of MacDonald, who suggested some frontier alterations, and Sidney Webb, who suggested a League of Nations. Bottomley used his Sunday Pictorial column to attack MacDonald for pacifism, demanding he be arraigned for treason. MacDonald had earlier called Bottomley ‘a man of doubtful parentage who had lived all his life on the threshold of jail.’180 Bottomley was a dangerous enemy, however; he obtained a copy of MacDonald’s birth certificate and published it, proving that the Labour MP was illegitimate.
Then came an event that triggered a new and far more violent phase of anti-German feeling in Britain, with social consequences that Asquith’s administration had to try to control. On 7 May 1915 the Lusitania, en route from New York to Liverpool, was sunk off the south of Ireland by U-20, which had claimed several merchant ships in the preceding days. There had been 1,959 passengers and crew on board; 1,201 died, including 128 Americans.181 The German embassy in Washington had advertised in American papers warning US citizens not to travel on British ships, as they would be targeted once in British waters. The ship had carried 173 tons of ammunition, a point that was not made in the aftermath of its sinking, and of which the Germans were unaware. The Admiralty put out a statement that reports that the ship was ‘armed’ were ‘wholly false’, which was strictly true: it had no guns.182
The press perfectly articulated, and inevitably fed, the national torrent of outrage. The Times led the way, and assailed the Germans for this ‘wholesale murder’.183 The Germans had wilfully slaughtered civilians on a passenger ship: they had not targeted it because it was carrying ammunition, for they did not know. Otherwise, there would have been a different set of arguments, and quite possibly a political furore of a different dimension. Inevitably, the question was asked whether the Admiralty could have done more to protect the vessel in the light of German threats, a line of inquiry that could not have come at a worse moment for a government already accused of complacency. In the aftermath, The Times attacked Asquith’s administration for ‘a paralysing lack of prevision’.184
The matter of German ‘frightfulness’ was high in the nation’s consciousness, because the government was about to publish a report by Viscount Bryce, a former ambassador to America and distinguished academic, on German atrocities in Belgium. The use of poison gas and the bombing raids on the east coast had already put Germany beyond the moral pale in the eyes of most Britons. The King himself wanted no quarter given to Germany. Esher saw him two days after the sinking and noted: ‘I told the King that the Archbishop had spoken to me yesterday about the use of poisonous gases, and had expressed an almost violent hope that we should not retaliate. The King takes a diametrically opposite view, and rightly holds that the question is purely military, and that ethical considerations will not enter into it.’185
As news of the sinking was still being absorbed a Zeppelin dropped an estimated 100 bombs on Southend. London itself was now vulnerable to this aerial terror. But the Lusitania was the final straw. Scenes of injured and shaken crew members arriving at Liverpool from Queenstown, where survivors had been taken, sparked fury in the city. German-owned shops were wrecked, and a riot broke out in Everton that required fifty police to put it down. Further up the social ladder, it was announced that all enemy Knights of the Garter would be struck off and their banners removed from St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Those affected included Kaisers Franz Josef and Wilhelm, the King of Württemberg, the German Crown Prince, Prince Henry of Prussia, and the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Cumberland. The King had not wanted to make a fuss about this, and insisted that the brass plates of the degraded knights remain on their stalls, to reflect the historical record. No such degradation in any order of chivalry had happened since 1814; and the press enthusiastically noted that in the case before that, in 1621, there had been a ceremony in which heralds in Westminster Hall hacked off the spurs of the extortionist Sir Francis Mitchell, cut his sword belt and broke his sword over his head before pronouncing him no longer a knight but a knave.
Press cartoons depicted the German as a grotesque monster in a Pickelhaube, the spiked helmet of the Prussian army. The Daily Mail published a picture of corpses of women and children from the disaster laid out in a mortuary at Queenstown. Anti-German meetings were held in the City of London, and a deputation from there went to the Commons. They met the Attorney General and demanded all Germans and Austrians be interned for the duration. The Royal Exchange decided to exclude all such nationals, even if naturalised, from its meetings. Germans were driven out of Smithfield market, and the police ordered German restaurants in the City not to open. On 11 May a mob attacked German shops in the east end of London, and sixty to seventy police and fifty Territorials struggled to contain it. A new recruiting poster, proclaiming the ‘COLD-BLOODED MURDER!’ of the Lusitania attack, said it had been designed to make Britons ‘AFRAID OF THESE GERMAN BARBARIANS’: to which the only answer could be to attend the nearest recruiting office and ‘ENLIST TO-DAY’. Also on 11 May the cabinet discussed the implications of the sinking, worried that America would in consequence ban the export of munitions, ‘wh wd be almost fatal,’ Asquith admitted.186
However, the next morning Asquith himself was sunk. A letter arrived from Miss Stanley announcing her and Montagu’s engagement. Unlike the conversational geniality of his other letters to her, his reply was stark:
Most Loved –
As you know well, this breaks my heart.
I couldn’t bear to come and see you.
I can only pray God to bless you – and help me.
Yours.187
Her letter enraged and unhinged Asquith: enraged because he thought Montagu a preposterous choice (even though Asquith and he were socially close, and he was a cabinet colleague whose career owed everything to Asquith’s patronage), not least because of the repudiation of Christianity Miss Stanley would have to make to marry him; and unhinged because he had been entirely emotionally dependent on her in handling the pressures of office, especially since war broke out. After seven years as prime minister, almost all of them distinguished by some major crisis or another even before the war, he was on the edge of exhaustion, prone to bouts of mild paranoia about the scheming of his colleagues, and finding the (for him) unprecedented circumstances of warfare management highly challenging. For his dream (and that was all it ever had been) of intimacy with Miss Stanley to be, as he saw it, exploded must have seemed like a gigantic physical assault upon him.
He managed to write a letter of congratulation to Montagu, with whom he had to continue to work; but immediately turned to Miss Stanley’s sister, Sylvia Henley, and told her: ‘I don’t believe there are two living people who, each in their separate ways, are more devoted to me than she and Montagu: and it is the irony of fortune that they two should combine to deal a death-blow to me.’188 He added that he felt ‘sore and wounded’. Mrs Henley sent a ‘sweet and understanding letter’, and he replied saying: ‘I must see you: I cannot say a word to anyone else, and you are wise and loving and know everything.’189 She would to an extent assume her sister’s place and become the emotional prop Asquith needed, and the recipient of frequent letters and over-lavish affections.
He could not conceal the blow from his wife, who noted with an understatement that was not her forte that ‘H came into my bedroom much perturbed at his great friend’s engagement.’190 Raymond Asquith, in basic training for the Grenadier Guards in Richmond Park and cynically aware of his father’s ‘interested disapproval’ of the match, declared himself in favour of it ‘because for a woman any marriage is better than perpetual virginity, which after a certain age (not very distant in Venetia’s case) becomes insufferably absurd’.191 He thought she was ‘well-advised’ to �
�make a marriage of convenience’ because of her apparent incapability of ‘conceiving a romantic passion for someone or other.’ It was doubtless fortunate he did not share his views with his father. His sister Violet, echoing Duff Cooper, told her diary that ‘M’s physical repulsiveness to me is such that I wld lightly leap from the top story [sic] of Queen Anne’s Mansions – or the Eiffel Tower itself to avoid the lightest contact – the thought of any erotic amenities with him is enough to freeze one’s blood.’192
Events did not pause to allow Asquith to digest what fate had served him, which rendered him all the more incapable of dealing with them rationally, and made him intensely vulnerable to the political machinations of others. Bryce’s report on German atrocities in Belgium – published the same day Asquith received Miss Stanley’s letter – poured accelerant on the new surge of anti-German feeling. Bryce’s commission had included academics and lawyers, and was endorsed by the neutral local commissioner of the American Red Cross. It was the government’s first major anti-German propaganda exercise: Masterman had it translated into thirty languages, so its impact was maximised. It was based on depositions by 1,200 Belgian refugees and both British and Belgian soldiers.