Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Jack Seely, the former war secretary, now a brigadier general on leave from Flanders, spoke as a former opponent of conscription who had changed his mind; and Redmond, while stating Irish opposition, said that as far as Britain was concerned conscription was a matter not of principle, as Simon had put it, but of necessity. Simon’s argument attracted only hard-core pacifists and the Irish when the vote came: the government won by 403 to 105. Distressed by Simon’s conduct, Asquith, his patron, told Curzon: ‘I felt as if my son had struck me in the face in public.’185

  Labour had to be propitiated; there were fears Henderson and two junior ministers would be mandated to resign, after a protest led by the National Union of Railwaymen. Despite the victory of Stanton, the anti-pacifist, in the Merthyr by-election, a congress of Labour delegates on 6 January expressed opposition to the new Bill by a factor of two to one, notwithstanding Henderson pleading with them to support the government, and despite his colleague John Hodge warning that the alternative was an election in which a Labour Party opposed to conscription would do badly and lose what influence it had. Henderson and two junior colleagues said they would have to resign from the government if their party persisted in this line. Asquith persuaded them to stay their hands, and met union leaders to assure them the tribunal system would prevent the law being abused, and that there would be no industrial conscription. This was deemed acceptable.

  There were dangers even without an election, so febrile was the mood and so impatient were some – not just Unionists – becoming with Asquith’s attitude. John Dillon, a leading Irish Nationalist MP, told Scott that ‘the aim of the Tories would be, with Lloyd George’s assistance, without an election to oust Asquith [who, when Scott saw him on 10 January, ‘seemed a beaten man’] and put Bonar Law in his place.186 Carson would come back and he and Lloyd George, between whom there was a sinister alliance, would dominate the Government and Bonar Law would be wax in their hand.’187 Dillon was right: Lloyd George would tell Miss Stevenson that Carson ‘is a great man: he has courage, he has determination; he has judgment.’188

  On 27 January 1916, the Military Service Act introduced conscription for unmarried men aged between eighteen and forty-one, from 2 March. At a conference in Bristol that day Labour voted against compulsion and the Act, but also voted against an agitation to repeal it. The Liberals too were damaged. Lloyd George felt he had acted according to his conscience, believing a bigger army was essential for victory. Some Liberals labelled him a traitor, betraying core Liberal values and throwing in his lot with the Tories. His Liberal colleagues were increasingly aware of his association with Northcliffe, for whom conscription was a victory, and deeply disliked it. Riddell told Miss Stevenson that ‘if Lord N once gets a footing inside the Government, he will not rest until he is made Dictator … Lord N is unscrupulous, & a dangerous man.’189

  The Military Service Act was, as Simon had correctly predicted, only the start. Despite this almost revolutionary measure, altering the whole balance between the state and the individual, recruitment remained far short of what was necessary. The government also had to consider the Navy’s needs. The Admiralty was demanding more ships, which were being built more slowly because of the removal of much labour from the shipyards. The pressure for full conscription was unaffected by the Act, and Asquith continued to waver between two factions in the cabinet. Unattested married men would eventually have to be called up, and the arguments rehearsed all over again. Simon soon protested that the tribunals considering exemptions were conducted capriciously, and he was right. Auckland Geddes, a Lloyd George crony who became director of National Service in 1917, said that ‘with, perhaps, more knowledge than most of the working of conscription in this country, I hold the fully matured opinion that, on balance, the imposition of military conscription added little if anything to the effective sum of our war effort.’190 There were more soldiers than could be equipped, and the conscripts were less motivated than the volunteers. There were 748,587 new claims for exemptions from munitions workers and miners who hitherto could have volunteered, and who now found themselves called up.191 There were only 48,000 enlistments of unattested single men in the first six months, roughly half the number who had come forward each month under the voluntary system.192 Within weeks a poster campaign and a series of public appeals began, hoping to persuade married men who had not attested to come forward.

  The new law created the conscientious objection movement, whose adherents would occupy much of the time of tribunals, which had the power to order non-combatant war work (such as on farms or in industry) or to imprison those who refused to fight. The tribunals were run largely by unsympathetic men, and many claims were rejected. Forty-one from the initial call-up who refused altogether were sent to France, where they could be shot for disobeying orders: but Asquith had them brought back after a month. By the end of the war 3,300 had agreed to join the Non-Combatant Corps, 2,400 did ambulance work at the front, and 3,964 joined working parties in Britain, engaging in tasks such as road-building. The 6,261 who refused to do any war work at all – ‘absolutists’ – were sent to prison, and despite Asquith’s earlier intervention some were sent to France.193

  Wells, commenting on the intellectual leap the country had had to make to accept conscription, called it ‘a real turning about of the British mind, the close of a period of chaotic freedom almost unprecedented in the history of communities.’194 But, setting a theme for the twentieth century with which he was intellectually at ease, he called it ‘the rediscovery of the State as the necessary form into which the individual life must fit.’

  VII

  Kitchener had returned from the Near East on 30 November, despite Asquith’s having given the impression that he would stay there. On 22 November, on advice from him telegraphed home, the War Committee agreed to recommend that the Gallipoli peninsula be evacuated. The final decision was left to the cabinet, which discussed it two days later. It postponed a ruling because of protests by Curzon, who circulated two memoranda, on 25 and 30 November, arguing against it. He was at odds with his leader, Law. Asquith asked Hankey, upon whose judgement he had come to rely, to set out his view. Hankey took Curzon’s side, arguing that by relieving pressure on Constantinople Britain would make it easier for Turkey to attack Egypt or Mesopotamia, or even move against Russia in the Caucasus. This divided the cabinet still further. It was not until 7 December that it agreed on a partial evacuation, which happened on 20 December; a week later it was decided to remove all forces, which took place on 8 January 1916, both operations being conducted with relatively little loss of life. Although the aim of taking Constantinople had failed, Turkish losses were twice those of the British Empire troops. The consequent weakening of their army would eventually assist British progress in Palestine and Mesopotamia during the rest of the war. When it came to lowering morale in Turkey, destabilising and bringing about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and contributing to the capitulations of the autumn of 1918, the campaign paid some sort of dividend: but that should not detract from the reckless incompetence with which it was planned, and which rightly remained a blot on Churchill’s reputation for the rest of his life.

  Kitchener’s relationship with Lloyd George had irretrievably broken down. They had argued over whether to evacuate Salonica – where troops had, on Lloyd George’s suggestion, gone earlier in the year, opening a front against Austria and guaranteeing Bulgarian neutrality. The argument had ended with Lloyd George telling Kitchener that ‘it seems you and the Germans want the same thing’.195 Lloyd George told Miss Stevenson – who faithfully recorded every word in her diary – that he believed the War Office was systematically seeking to undermine the Ministry of Munitions. Whether or not this was true hardly matters: that Lloyd George, in the grip of his egotism and ambition, believed it to be true was all that did. On 12 December 1915 he asked Scott down to Walton Heath for lunch, and told him he did not just want Kitchener out of the War Office, but in the event of his defenestration would refuse to succeed hi
m unless Kitchener had no other post from which he could disrupt what Lloyd George would want to do. His discontent went well beyond the Kitchener question: he also complained about the now institutional habit at cabinet meetings of failing to take decisions about how to deploy forces and prosecute the war more effectively: the main theme of his politics for the coming year. Lloyd George had convinced himself that he alone had the vision and the drive to put things right, but needed a free hand.

  By now the munitions minister was umbilically close to the Northcliffe press. Perhaps awareness of this provoked Simon, on 30 November, having been attacked by those newspapers for the censorship policy he operated as home secretary, to make a marathon speech in the Commons attacking Northcliffe and his works. Mrs Churchill, writing to her husband, said the speech would ‘have been very damaging had it not been made by a prig and a bore.’196 However, Stamfordham congratulated Simon on the King’s orders for having attacked ‘the dangerous influence of the Northcliffe press’.197 Inevitably, The Times went for Simon. ‘If Ministers themselves would attack the Germans with half the energy they devote to The Times they would be a good deal nearer winning the war.’198 In Simon’s case, The Times and the Mail were just warming up.

  Lloyd George’s desire to aggrandise himself – and, by implication, belittle Kitchener as the minister previously responsible for munitions – was fed when he made a long-awaited statement about the supply of arms to the Commons on 20 December.199 He told MPs that ‘the German successes, such as they are, are entirely, or almost entirely, due to the mechanical preponderance which they achieved at the beginning of the War,’ but that a level of mechanisation had been achieved by his ministry that had undone that advantage.200 He admitted the shell shortage the previous spring; that the Germans had been turning out 250,000 shells a day, almost all of them high explosive, whereas Britain had made 2,500 high explosives a day and another 13,000 shrapnel shells. He was proud to have shipped in businessmen who had made huge sacrifices in salary to improve the manufacturing process, notably in securing raw materials such as metal and by forming an inspectorate to drive factories to higher productivity.

  He added that the government had recognised the importance of the machine gun, and his ministry’s first priority had been to increase enormously their output. Far larger numbers of rifles and trench mortars had also been produced; and he hoped better mechanisation would increase output and save taxpayers’ money. He said Britain had more of the raw materials needed for the prosecution of the war and, so long as it retained command of the seas, would win it: ‘The overwhelming superiority is still with us.’201 The main difficulty, with the Army desperate for men, was that the munitions industry required ‘80,000 skilled men, and from 200,000 to 300,000 unskilled men and women’ for the new factories Lloyd George was setting up.202 He also, quite rightly, stamped upon one growing myth: ‘I have heard rumours that we are over-doing it, over-ordering, over-building, over-producing. Nothing could be more malevolent or more mischievous.’ To prove his point, he said: ‘Take the last great battle – that of Loos. You had a prodigious accumulation of ammunition. There is not a general who was in the battle who in giving his report does not tell you that with three times the quantity of ammunition, especially in the heavier natures, they would have achieved twenty times the result.’203 He emphasised that it was better to take risks with taxpayers’ money than with soldiers’ lives. If costs were too high, then the best way to reduce them was to have improved productivity.

  The one caveat he expressed was the attitude of the unions, which raised hackles on the Labour benches, where it was maintained (inaccurately) that the unions had always since war broke out responded well to demands the government had made upon them. It provoked from Lloyd George perhaps the most memorable passage of any of his wartime speeches, in which he complained about the failure to enforce the law on dilution, under which men and women without experience in certain trades were taught the skills essential to practise them, for the purpose of war production. His speech was also read as a criticism of the way the government of which he was so prominent a member was conducting the war:

  Unless the employer begins by putting on the lathes unskilled men and women we cannot enforce that Act of Parliament. The first step, therefore, is that the employer must challenge a decision upon the matter. He is not doing so because of the trouble which a few other firms have had. Let us do it. Victory depends upon it! Hundreds of thousands of precious lives depend upon it. It is a question of whether you are going to bring this War victoriously to an end in a year or whether it is going to linger on in bloodstained paths for years. Labour has got the answer. The contract was entered into with labour. We are carrying it out. It can be done. I wonder whether it will not be too late? Ah! two fatal words of this War! Too late in moving here. Too late in arriving there. Too late in coming to this decision. Too late in starting with enterprises. Too late in preparing. In this War the footsteps of the Allied forces have been dogged by the mocking spectre of ‘Too Late’; and unless we quicken our movements damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed. I beg employers and workmen not to have ‘Too Late’ inscribed upon the portals of their workshops: that is my appeal.204

  The Times’s largely laudatory comment on the speech, reflecting Northcliffe’s closeness to Lloyd George at that time, concluded with the observation that ‘the way to be in time for the future is to recognise that you have always been too late in the past.’205

  More trappings of normal life disappeared that winter. The government announced the closure of the British Museum, and most museums in the country, as an economy measure: the saving was estimated at £250,000 a year.206 Although the government was highly reluctant to contemplate rationing, people were urged to eat less meat. Manchester became subject to the same restrictions on drinking hours and ‘treating’ – the buying of rounds – as London, Liverpool and other cities, despite local people having strongly campaigned to avoid them; not just to help factory output, but because of evidence that women were drinking heavily and neglecting their children. The government restricted the hops, malt and sugar available to brewers, forcing them to brew less, or lighter, beer. Private motorists were warned of serious petrol shortages, and told to restrict their driving. That at least would help lessen the numbers being mown down in the blackout, sometimes by hit-and-run drivers.

  There were increasing demands for compulsory thrift, to channel some of Britons’ higher earnings back to the government in the form of war loans. The Revd Andrew Clark described the outrage of his parishioners in Great Leighs ‘where no-one has ever done anything else’ than practise economy ‘and where there is no increase of money received, since no-one has war-work … and no-one has any reserve either to give or invest.’207 The public was warned to expect smaller newspapers, as shipping brought in food rather than pulp from Canada. More positively, resistance to women in the workforce seemed at last to have disappeared; the demand for them in munitions work became so high that a national appeal was launched to raise funds for the YWCA to provide hostels, canteens and social facilities for them. Technological developments created jobs for women in which there was little or no exclusive history of male dominance: notably in strategically important work in wireless telegraphy.

  Early in 1916 the government’s strategic planning was shown to be defective in another crucial respect. On the night of 31 January Zeppelins bombed Suffolk and the East and West Midlands: fourteen were killed in Tipton alone out of a total of seventy dead. The raids triggered a spasm of public outrage over why the country’s air defences remained so poor that bombers could get so far into England. They arrived at 4.30 p.m., just before nightfall, and carried on more or less unmolested until disappearing back over the North Sea at 5 a.m. The government had issued the Royal Flying Corps with no orders of what to do in an air raid, partly because of confusion between the War Office and the Admiralty over who was responsible for directing the RFC. Just twenty-four
aircraft were allocated to defend London, and only two for the rest of England, hence the Zeppelins’ free run. Lloyd George was concerned about the ease with which Woolwich Arsenal might be bombed, and implored his colleagues to improve the capital’s air defences for that reason if for no other. It was decided to put French in charge of ensuring London was defended, and the blackout was greatly extended.

  Unfortunately, the same chronic indecisiveness that scarred the general conduct of government hampered resolution of this issue. The cabinet argued for days about whether to set up a separate Air Ministry – a suggestion of Curzon, who hoped to lead it – and, if so, whether it would have an autonomy in military aviation comparable to the War Office’s for the Army. Northcliffe had the Daily Mail begin a campaign to improve Britain’s air defences, because of his belief – justified, as it happened – that the Germans would soon be able to send squadrons of aircraft to bomb England. He had also turned The Times on Asquith over the War Committee’s inadequacies, with too many decisions referred to the cabinet – where Asquith’s lack of direction helped ensure they were not made.

  The air defences question became so toxic that Asquith appointed a cabinet committee under Derby to settle it: but after a month Derby resigned, unable to secure cooperation between the Army and Navy air services. Derby had sought Northcliffe’s advice, and the press baron suggested he talk to businessmen and put a dynamic one in charge of developing air defences: he may have had in mind his brother Lord Rothermere, who before the war was over would assume some related responsibilities. In his resignation letter Derby suggested Asquith create a combined air service. Asquith’s response was to form an Air Board, under Curzon. This immediately caused the Daily Mail to run an editorial entitled: ‘The Wrong Man. What Does Lord Curzon Know About Aircraft?’208