Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Three days into Loos, Guest again asked Asquith in the Commons about conscription. Asquith said it was receiving the ‘careful and anxious consideration of His Majesty’s Government’, but asked that all MPs, whatever their views, ‘abstain from raising it here’.92 He felt it would do a ‘disservice’ to the Armed Forces and to the country if ‘any suggestion go forth to the world that there is any division of opinion amongst us.’ Guest ignored the plea, rising a few minutes later to deliver a speech in which he claimed that seventy divisions could not be put in the field by 1916 without conscription. Unless the government could guarantee 20,000 men a week being called up for the next year, it would have to concede his point. Unlike in France, where every possible man was under arms, the enemy occupied not a square inch of home soil, thereby cutting the incentive for Britons to volunteer: in that regard the war was out of sight and out of mind. As Asquith had predicted, opinion was divided. The main embarrassment came when it was recorded that much money and effort was being spent sending home underage boys whose real age had not been established until they saw an Army doctor at the front. Lansdowne reported there were an estimated 1,412,040 men available for recruitment in England and Wales.93

  By October the casualty lists, reflecting the losses at Loos, occupied pages of newsprint. What was termed ‘a monster recruiting rally’ under the banner of ‘Wake up London!’ was held in the capital on Saturday 3rd, with five columns of 1,200 men – regulars and Territorials – meeting in parks around the capital and marching 10 miles through separate areas of London, while senior officers and notables made speeches.94 Bottomley was to have been the star turn, but he had sprained his ankle in a taxi-cab accident. Similar rallies were held in Glasgow, Birmingham and other major cities. On 5 October Derby, who had presided that Saturday at a rally in Bury, and who a week earlier had in a speech at Manchester called it ‘degrading’ that men such as him ‘should have to go about the country begging and appealing for recruits to defend their wives and children’, was appointed director general of recruiting by Asquith.95 He had said the public would settle for a dictatorship to sort things out rather than the present government, and his appointment was depicted in the press as the last chance for voluntarism.

  The cabinet had not been consulted about Derby’s appointment. Lansdowne, Curzon, Chamberlain, Churchill and Smith attacked him for taking it: they were convinced they had had Asquith in a corner, and within a week he would have acquiesced to compulsion had Derby not bought him time by agreeing to serve. They urged Derby to withdraw, but he refused. Derby, who Haig would say bore the impression of the last man to have sat on him, had earlier told Kitchener he thought ‘voluntary recruiting had practically come to an end, and that we must have compulsory service.’ The Field Marshal had answered that ‘he himself felt that compulsory service would be necessary, but he wished to put it off as far as possible.’96 Kitchener’s hope was to wear the Germans down, and ‘then to have compulsory service as a final push.’ He told the cabinet he needed 30,000 new men a week, and another 5,000, not necessarily of military age, to act as labourers; he had the immediate support of all the Unionists apart from Balfour. This would give him approximately 3 million men by the end of 1916.

  Derby therefore conceived a scheme, with which Asquith had no choice but to go along, to summon every man of military age before a local committee to ascertain his willingness to serve and to attest that he would if required; and if he was unwilling, to hear his reasons why. Derby called for single men who had attested to be called up first. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee and the recruiting committee of the TUC agreed this. Asquith fretted about the impact the scheme would have on his fellow Liberals: he told Pamela McKenna, wife of his closest ally, that his memo to the cabinet about it would ‘rattle my scattered colleagues in their weekend retreats.’97 Nonetheless, he sent Derby a letter agreeing that if the Derby Scheme – as it would be known – failed there would be no alternative but to bring in conscription. Derby admitted to Gwynne he was alert to the scheme’s inadequacies, but political as much as military expediency demanded it be tried. Also, significantly, the scheme had Northcliffe’s support, and that of his newspapers.

  The process started at once and was scheduled to finish by the end of November. District recruiting officers received a government circular in early October telling them that ‘as it is evidently the duty of every man who has not been starred [placed in a reserved occupation] to at once join the Army … you are to take whatever steps considered most effectual to induce such men to join the Army. In carrying out this, you will doubtless be assisted by the local authorities.’98 The widespread complaint that men had not been ‘fetched’ – and therefore assumed the Army did not need them – was to be acted upon; recruiting officers, using the register, were to visit men in non-essential industries who had not been ‘fetched’, and seek to ‘fetch’ them. Those who refused to respond to being ‘fetched’ were to have their names taken for future reference. What remained of Liberal opinion was outraged, and the directive – though not the Derby Scheme itself – was withdrawn within days.

  By now Asquith was becoming increasingly isolated. His closest associates, Grey and Crewe, wanted him to pull out of the Dardanelles. He was estranged from Lloyd George, and deeply suspicious of him, and the Tories were unimpressed by Asquith’s leadership skills. The perception of disaster in the Dardanelles brought a point of no return in terms of Northcliffe’s view of the Asquith administration, and thereafter the Daily Mail and The Times, with differing degrees of unpleasantness, proceeded to seek to harry him out of office. Northcliffe believed he would achieve this within three months. He believed by early 1916 a ‘Committee of Safety’, probably led by Carson, would be directing the nation’s affairs with a single-mindedness that Asquith and his colleagues lacked.99 To add to the climate of disunity, Lloyd George wanted troops sent to Serbia, under attack from the Central Powers, but was opposed by cabinet colleagues who thought more should go to Gallipoli.

  The Times announced on 11 October that ‘something is seriously amiss with the conduct of the war.’100 It found the government guilty of ‘mismanagement’ and run by ‘fumblers’. It demanded a smaller cabinet, that it might work more efficiently. The Mail too wanted a small war council, dominated by the military, to replace the cabinet in decision-making. Violet Asquith noted that ‘loathing of Northcliffe is the strongest & most prevalent emotion’ in her father’s house.101 It was a loathing that would increase after her marriage to Bonham Carter, her father’s secretary, on 1 December 1915. The ostentation of the wedding, the finery of the guests and the opulence of the party afterwards (there was no ‘reception’, but many guests went to Downing Street for lavish refreshments) was seized on by some in the press as setting a bad example when the nation’s resources should be devoted to pursuing victory; even Andrew Clark, the Essex clergyman, noted in his diary how the extravagance had annoyed his parishioners.

  Discussion of compulsion dominated cabinet meetings, and imperilled the continuance of the administration. When Runciman left the meeting on 12 October he told Bonham Carter that ‘we remain a united Cabinet for another 24 hours’.102 Such was the desperation to find men for the Army that the basic educational test – of being able to read and write – had been scrapped in some recruiting centres for those trying to join up. It had also been decided that the practice of sending boys of seventeen back to their parents until they were old enough to join legally – eighteen – would be stopped, and the boys would continue to train: it was an effective drop in the recruitment age to seventeen. At the meeting on 15 October Lloyd George – who the previous day had told Scott there were now eight cabinet ministers who wanted compulsion – ‘got very excited and lost both head and temper, not quite but very nearly.’103 Unfortunately for Asquith, Kitchener had changed his mind, and agreed compulsion would be necessary: but even before the meeting Scott noted Lloyd George was speaking of Asquith ‘with great bitterness.’104

  Hankey exp
lained that Kitchener’s reluctance to have compulsion immediately was because trench warfare led to the slaughter of men who tried to take enemy trenches. Before calling more up for ‘butchery’, Kitchener wanted to see whether some means – such as the tank – could be developed to overcome the barbed wire and machine-gun posts that caused terrible carnage. By the time his fears were realised in their most horrific iteration – the 19,026 men who died on the first day of the Somme – he too would be dead, and in no position to protest. Nevertheless, the war secretary had recognised the realities, and his decision added inestimable weight to the arguments of those demanding compulsion.

  Once Asquith had learned of Kitchener’s change of mind he appealed to him to tone down his support for compulsion, not least since those with whom he had thrown in his lot – notably Curzon and Lloyd George – were plotting to force his removal as Secretary of State for War. To Riddell, Lloyd George professed that ‘The PM is a great man, but his methods are not suited to war.’105 He believed that six Unionists and Churchill were prepared, with him, to leave the government if no progress were made on conscription. Mrs Asquith was clear what was happening: having added Hankey to the list of people whom she bombarded with letters, she told him: ‘It is clear as day that LlG, Curzon & Winston are going to try to wreck the Gov.’106 However, the mass walk-out, which would have ended Asquith’s administration, did not occur. Tories who had threatened to resign if conscription were not brought in decided instead to see how the Derby Scheme progressed.

  Despite the pressures on him, Asquith – whom Gwynne described as ‘the most unpopular man in the country’ – remained on the surface resolutely opposed to compulsion. He strongly believed in the idea of a liberal society in which the state, even in a time of national emergency, could not force people either into the Armed Forces or into a certain branch of industry, even though the prospect of industrial conscription did not disturb his party in the way that military compulsion did. He believed the people were with him, and saw their rights as paramount – and would fight to preserve them. He told his wife that ‘you can’t have Conscription in this country without something very like revolution.’107 Yet the Liberal Party too was fracturing under the strain of this argument: Asquith told Bonham Carter and Hankey how ‘Ll George is out to break the Govt on conscription if he can.’108 Churchill, although diminished, was fervently in favour; other Liberals, such as Grey and Crewe, remained opposed, but their minds were open. And Asquith himself, like Kitchener, slowly came to realise during the late autumn of 1915 that he would have to give way, or risk the fall of the government. For him the Derby Scheme was a means of buying time, not a solution to his problems over military manpower.

  The prime minister’s health deteriorated; during a grim cabinet meeting on 18 October, when one minister after another predicted disaster, he passed Lansdowne a note and left the room. Lansdowne announced that Asquith ‘had been obliged to retire as he was feeling unwell’.109 That night he slept badly, and in the early hours burst into his wife’s bedroom to say he thought he should resign. She calmed him down: but a doctor was called, who ordered sleep and a reduction in his intake of food and drink. A medical bulletin was issued saying that the prime minister was suffering from ‘gastro-intestinal catarrh’ and required ‘several days complete rest’.110 After seven-and-a-half years in office – years tense and difficult even before the war – he was starting to crack. Over lunch that day Lloyd George told Repington – the two had become cronies – that ‘a large Cabinet is useless, and wants a small War Cabinet.’111 He will have understood the personal advantages of whistling a tune already popular with the Northcliffe press.

  The government then had to endure a high-profile resignation: Carson, the Attorney General, went on 19 October, ostensibly over the government’s failure to keep earlier promises about supporting Serbia militarily. F. E. Smith, on a meteoric rise to the Woolsack, replaced him. Carson’s resignation had been rumoured for several days; and when it happened the Daily Mail – he was close to Northcliffe – asserted he had gone because of his ‘refusal to accept any policy of drift.’112 The paper returned to the offensive. It accused the government, because of its implementation of censorship, of having ‘deceived the democracy as to the course of the war.’ It rubbished claims Britain would win a famous victory in the Dardanelles, or that the Russians had seen off the Germans on the Eastern Front; and Northcliffe had decided that if the truth were made public, there would be less trouble with recruitment. His other paper, The Times, saw Carson’s departure as of huge significance, and the harbinger of problems ahead for a government with which Northcliffe felt intense disillusion.

  Carson was indeed annoyed at how Asquith ran the war. His resignation embarrassed Law, his party leader, who should have made the running on this question; and Lloyd George, who shared these views. Both Law and Lloyd George could make the patriotic argument that it would have been wrong to desert the government at that stage, and cause a crisis; and that was their private reasoning. However, away from the public gaze, Lloyd George would bluster and threaten. On 26 October he told Scott that he would if necessary force a general election not technically on the conscription issue, but on manning the Army: the debate, he said, would be between getting the 30,000 men Kitchener wanted, and the 20,000 that anti-conscriptionists such as McKenna thought could be raised under the voluntary system. (In fact, as Asquith would stress, 30,000 men represented the maximum Kitchener felt the system could handle, not a minimum.)

  Lloyd George’s blustering made Asquith’s job more and more difficult. The question was imminent whether the 1910 Parliament, due under the 1911 Parliament Act to expire in January 1916, could be extended: and Lloyd George said he would not allow it to be lengthened – he would resign and bring the government down – unless the conscription issue were settled. The munitions minister’s own frame of mind was febrile: 90,000 workers on Clydeside, most of them in factories under his purview, were threatening to strike because three men, fined heavily for absenteeism in a trade subject to military discipline, had chosen to go to prison rather than pay.

  But if that were not enough Lloyd George, backed up by Law, then threatened on 1 November to resign unless Kitchener was dismissed. Asquith ignored this latest ultimatum, and by the time he discussed the matter with his two colleagues their anger had died down. The next day Asquith announced the new War Committee that had evolved from the Dardanelles Committee, which, in his view and that of the cabinet, ‘had outlived its usefulness’.113 He would chair it: Balfour, Lloyd George and Grey were the other members. Lansdowne declined a place but chose to remain minister without portfolio. McKenna was originally excluded but demanded to be put on the committee to shore up Asquith, and Asquith, to Lloyd George’s intense annoyance, relented. This brought about precisely the small executive body Carson had wanted, though its running alongside the cabinet would provide the conflicts Hankey had identified as so destructive to good decision-making.

  It met for the first time on 5 November with Hankey as secretary. Although Curzon was aggrieved by his exclusion the main casualty of the arrangement was Churchill, who as Chancellor of the Duchy had at least, by remaining in cabinet and on the old Dardanelles Committee, had a chance to continue to influence war policy and, more to the point, defend himself as the situation in the Dardanelles became worse and worse. His elimination from the War Committee was the key for him on 29 October, when he first heard of the proposed change, to draft a letter of resignation, which was not sent. However, he continued to rage internally about his fate.

  A far more important figure than Churchill was absent from the new committee as it began its deliberations: the Secretary of State for War. Kitchener remained distrusted by many of his colleagues, and his attempts to run the War Office as a one-man show were proving increasingly unpractical, both administratively and politically. His belated conversion to conscription did not erase memories of his culpability in the shells shortage of the previous spring. Hankey recorded
that some of his colleagues ‘hoped that he would never sit with them again in the position of War Secretary, for he had many critics’.114 Asquith, well aware of Kitchener’s faults as a statesman, decided to send him to the Dardanelles, mainly to placate Law and Balfour, and he ran the War Office during his absence. There were rumours that Kitchener might remain in the Near East as commander-in-chief of all forces outside Europe: but nothing came of that. Blanche Lloyd includes in her diary a story about Kitchener being blamed for not sending troops to Salonica to support the Serbs, as had been promised:

  Joffre came to England and … thumped the table with his fist and demanded ‘where is British honour?’ Asquith, touched [to] the quick, turned to K and said ‘This is all your fault. Why did you let us say we would do this if we couldn’t?’ Whereupon K resigned – but as his resignation was made to the Cabinet, and not to either the King or the Prime Minister (which is according to the book) our blameless premier was able to rise in his place in the House, white with passion at the accusation of being a liar, and reiterate that the War Minister neither had handed in, nor attempted to hand in, his resignation.115

  When a newspaper, the Globe, tried to print the truth, it was suppressed.