Staring at God
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It had been replaced, Dillon said, by an ‘unlimited military tyranny’.145
Asquith insisted he had never given anyone the impression that either he or Lloyd George had been ‘plenipotentiaries’ or had purported to say anything that bound their colleagues.146 Asquith spoke the truth about himself: Lloyd George, however, had unquestionably over-reached himself. He announced the appointment of Henry Duke, a Unionist barrister and stranger to the Irish controversy, as chief secretary, signalling the end of martial law: Duke quickly promised an ‘amicable settlement’ to the ‘grievances’.147 His appointment was to be counterbalanced by the reinstatement of Wimborne, a Liberal Home Ruler, as Lord Lieutenant, but Law asked Asquith to postpone the announcement, which caused uproar among the Nationalists. Lloyd George could have threatened to resign to prevent Asquith caving in to the Unionists, but again did not, perhaps because of an admission to himself that he had handled the process badly. Redmond, who claimed Duke as one of his oldest friends, having been a fellow student at Gray’s Inn, put it bluntly: ‘The proposal simply to revive Dublin Castle at all is a very serious thing. But to revive it by setting up for all practical purposes a Unionist Executive in Ireland will most undoubtedly outrage still more the feelings of the Irish people. The right hon. Gentleman … has gone out of his way to point out that the position of Lord Lieutenant is a purely honorary one, a purely ornamental one, and that he has no power. The real governors of Ireland are the Chief Secretary and the Attorney General, and they are both to be Unionist.’148
Asquith, not least because of Lloyd George’s mismanagement of his role, was at the mercy of the Unionists; and the decision to ‘revive Dublin Castle’, even though presented as a temporary measure, was another recruiting sergeant for Sinn Féin: the British press simply saw what Asquith had done as proving, in the words of a Times editorial, ‘less and less cohesion, grip and driving power’ in the administration.149 Redmond spoke of the 150,000 Irishmen fighting and dying in France, and the tens of thousands of others of Irish descent fighting for Australian, New Zealand or Canadian regiments; but the spirit that had driven those men was disappearing among those at home.
One of Duke’s first tasks was to devise a system of grants and loans to help rebuild parts of Dublin wrecked during the Rising, so businesses might reopen and staff be hired. This initiative also showed how the British Treasury could be brought to Ireland’s aid when needed. Republicans were not impressed. Ironically, even some Nationalists – such as Sir Horace Plunkett, who would be prominent in the attempt to resolve the Irish problem in 1917–18 – had concluded by late July that even if the Lloyd George plan were implemented, it would simply hand over Ireland to Sinn Féin; it was already too late.150
VIII
It is striking that Frances Stevenson, whose devotion to Lloyd George was not in question, felt he damaged himself during the negotiations, and should have resigned. The Irish took out their rage on him; those who sought an amicable solution also felt he should have resigned when Asquith capitulated. The Irish crisis showed typical aspects of both men’s characters: Asquith trying to do the right thing, but his lieutenant exceeding his remit, proving increasingly incapable of behaving straightforwardly, and leaving a trail of destruction behind him. It would not be the last time such a thing would happen. As is the wont of men in such a situation, Lloyd George blamed everyone but himself. He felt the Irish were being unreasonable. ‘I don’t think he has quite played the game,’ Miss Stevenson recorded in her diary, adding that she disagreed with him and did not know what to say to him.151 Within days she decided he was right to stay: Riddell, at that stage Lloyd George’s tamest press baron, had told him that Asquith’s closest associates, led by McKenna and Montagu, were after him; and Miss Stevenson feared that if he went he would be frozen out for good. In fact, to many who were not aware of the intimate detail, the negotiations boosted Lloyd George’s reputation, because of the impression he had given of being a man who could handle a big problem with some degree of decisiveness. They marked him as Asquith’s natural successor, even though he had conducted them so poorly: his usual negotiation weapons, of charm or bribery, were not equal to so serious a challenge. The Nationalists were breaking into factions, and would never be effective again: in August the Irish trades unions turned on them and expressed ‘abhorrence’ at the Nationalists’ endorsement of partition.152 The Asquith coalition too was undermined, though that, ironically, would benefit Lloyd George.
At 9 a.m. on 3 August Casement was hanged at Pentonville. He had been received into the Roman Catholic Church before his execution. Shortly afterwards, the government published a statement explaining why his sentence had not been commuted, notably that he had made an agreement with the Germans to raise an Irish regiment that would fight against the British in Egypt. There had been many petitions to reprieve him, not least from Scott, who on 5 July had asked Lloyd George whether such a move might be ‘politically possible’.153 Scott argued that Casement had suffered from poor mental and physical health – ‘I think he is at least as much off his head as the religious fanatic who murdered Sheehy Skeffington and two other men and who – rightly I think – is not going to be hung [sic].’ However, Sheehy-Skeffington’s arbitrary killing and martyrdom did nothing to help Casement, who unlike Colthurst had been convicted of treason in the midst of the most brutal war in British history.
There remained a controversy over Smith, to whose own flirtation with treason Casement had alluded at his trial, prompting Smith, in an undignified gesture, to get up and walk out of court. He later refused permission, as Attorney General, for an appeal to the Lords. It was also a matter for concern that a diary had allegedly been discovered in Casement’s papers proving not just his promiscuous homosexual activities, but also his unnatural interest in the genitals of underage boys; and that this fetish had been considered when deciding not to reprieve him. Asquith, in response to a plea for a reprieve from Lady Ottoline Morrell, told her Casement was ‘a depraved and perverted man’.154 Further evidence had also been found, however, of Casement’s collusion with the Germans, far more damning than any lubricious sexual aberrations.
The law took its course despite worries about the effect on American opinion. The Times, while agreeing with verdict and sentence, accused the government of foul play in its management of the propaganda surrounding the case, and its crude attempts to have the press mention Casement’s sexual practices: ‘These issues should either have been raised in public and in a straightforward manner, or they should have been left severely alone.’155 The government refused to allow the release of Casement’s body for burial outside the prison. When it was eventually exhumed and handed over to the Irish in 1965, Casement received a state funeral in Dublin, attended by de Valera.
Many Volunteers sympathised with Sinn Féin for its Irish independent and republican ideals, but Sinn Féin had not intended the Rising. Effectively, the Volunteers took the movement over and turned a non-violent organisation into a military one. Count Plunkett, Joseph Plunkett’s father and a former deportee who had been sacked from his job as a museum director, won a by-election in North Roscommon on 3 February 1917 as a Sinn Féin candidate. This was its first victory and a trigger for its relaunch. With some reluctance on Plunkett’s part the movement decided not to take any seat it won in the Imperial Parliament. On 19 April 1917 the republican movement was reconstituted after a meeting called by Plunkett, the change formalised at an Ard Fheis, or party conference, on 25 October, when Sinn Féin became the formal umbrella organisation of the republican movement. It would, if necessary, pursue its objectives by violence. Plunkett’s was the first of many by-election victories, and the next and most crucial stage in the disappearance of a constitutional alternative to Unionism.
CHAPTER 6
SLAUGHTER
I
During February and March 1916 Edward ‘Colonel’ House, confidant of Woodrow Wilson, the United States president, visited London and Berlin to seek common ground for a peace
initiative. He was greeted with cynicism, it being believed that Wilson, who faced re-election that November, was hoping to acquire the reputation of a great peacemaker to boost his standing. House, possibly taking German propaganda too literally, was convinced the Allies faced an uphill battle. According to Hankey, he told senior ministers that the German army and navy were ‘stronger than we calculate’, that a new submarine was launched every three days and there were plenty of German troops for another year’s hard fighting.1 This was depressing news: the men directing Britain’s war sensed that if the next offensive, planned for the summer, failed, Britain would lack the men and the money to fight at anything like that pitch again.
House’s view was that it would serve Allied interests best to pursue a diplomatic course. He told Grey that if the Allies told Wilson their peace terms, he would ask Germany to a conference to discuss them. If Germany’s terms were unreasonable, House said America would ‘probably’ join the Allies.2 The War Committee discussed the matter on 21 March, and decided not to take a decision. Preparations for the summer offensive on the Western Front were already advanced, and it made no sense to Asquith to dismiss the chance of triumph if it was there for the taking. To make such a judgement the War Committee relied on Robertson’s advice about the prospects of victory. House returned to America in late March to tell Wilson there was no likelihood of his good offices being sought after just yet. A German overture three months later was rejected. Esher wrote to Asquith on 23 June, a week before the start of the Battle of the Somme, that ‘an emissary has been employed by the Germans to sound the French, and to try and discover the terms upon which an armistice might be granted, with a view of subsequently discussing terms of peace. The answer that was given was that no proposition for an armistice would be considered unless it was accompanied by an offer to restore all French, British and Russian prisoners before hostilities were suspended. Nothing more was said.’3 The French also wanted the German army withdrawn from French and Belgian soil before any discussion. Peace remained an illusion.
Asquith’s confidence received a profound shock two months after the attempted House initiative. On 31 May, the day after the first drafts of conscripted married men went off to training, the German fleet came out and sought to engage the Royal Navy. The Battle of Jutland began that afternoon. It started badly for the Navy, with one ship after another going down, prompting Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty to remark to Ernle Chatfield, his flag captain, in one of the great bons mots of the war, ‘there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield.’4 Asquith was kept informed, though Hankey noted that late that night he ‘was playing bridge as though nothing had happened’.5 More news trickled in throughout 1 June. By the morning of the 2nd it was becoming ‘worse and worse’, not least because the first official news made no mention of German losses at all.6 At 4 p.m., when Jellicoe’s report reached Downing Street, it said that three British battle cruisers, three armoured cruisers and ten or twelve destroyers had gone down, heavier losses than it was believed the Germans had taken. Hankey called it ‘the most bitter disappointment of this terribly disappointing war’; for if British sea power was that inadequate, Britain was nothing. Yet he did not believe the losses altered the effectiveness of the Navy’s blockade of Germany, and he was right.
The next day’s definitive reports brought better news. The Germans had lost one battleship against none for the Navy, one battle cruiser to the Navy’s three, no cruisers against the Navy’s three, but four light cruisers against none for the Navy, and five destroyers to a final Royal Navy total of eight losses. ‘I do not think that they [the German High Seas Fleet] will venture out again,’ Hankey noted, nor did they. It had also become clear, he added, what had gone wrong with ‘our bloody ships’: ‘defective arrangements for preventing the effect of a shell bursting in the turret from reaching the magazine.’ For his part, Fisher felt Beatty had blundered by allowing the more lightly armed ships to engage the Germans long before the more heavily armed ones arrived. Even so, and despite the greater British losses and the U-boat menace, Jellicoe had retained command of the North Sea.
When the Admiralty had received the news Balfour, as First Lord, had ‘implored’ Asquith to tell nobody, including the War Committee: so, remarkably, it was not summoned.7 Admiralty House was in such a panic that Balfour enlisted Churchill, one of its sternest critics, to write an officially briefed account of the battle to be issued to the press, in which a more uplifting version of events was prepared. It was not until the evening of Friday 2 June, two days after the battle had started, that Lloyd George picked up a rumour about it. It gave him further ammunition against Asquith about how the government and the war were being run. Once the news reached Northcliffe – with whom Riddell believed Lloyd George was ‘in daily contact’ – his newspapers were merciless.8 The Times condemned Churchill’s deployment as an act of ‘weakness’ by the government.9 However, the Germans had steamed back to safe harbours and the Royal Navy sailed the North Sea unimpeded. For Mrs Asquith, such criticism confirmed her obsession about Northcliffe’s toxic influence, and her belief that he was orchestrating a coup against her husband. St Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, who had become a close confidant, told her the real difficulty with Northcliffe ‘is the fact that so many members of the Cabinet not only are unwilling to stand up to him, but actually court him and ask him for his support.’ Accusations that Northcliffe was a ‘public danger’ were met with the question: ‘Why are Cabinet Ministers hand in glove with him?’10
With morale still shaken after the loss of so many ships at Jutland – and with the adverse effect on the German navy still not entirely understood – an even greater blow was struck against the morale of the country. Late on 5 June the Admiralty learned that Kitchener and his staff had died when HMS Hampshire, an armoured cruiser taking them from Scapa Flow on a mission to Russia to discuss British financial and logistical support, hit a German mine east of the Orkneys. Hampshire sank in a force 9 gale; Kitchener had refused to wait for better weather so he could have the destroyer escort Jellicoe offered him. Lloyd George should have been aboard but had been detained in London dealing with Ireland. The government realised this news required delicate management: partly because, as Beaverbrook put it years later, the mission was a ‘disguised banishment’ for the Field Marshal before his removal from Whitehall, but also because the public’s love for him was undimmed.11
The effect on the national spirit was thus almost uniformly depressing: though Northcliffe, whose newspapers respected the public mood, supposedly said that ‘Providence is on the side of the British Empire after all.’12 Parliament was on its Whitsun recess, so it was not until 21 June that official tributes were paid; minsters poured cataracts of praise on a man they would have been glad to be rid of by any less terrible means. Esher, who had liked Kitchener, postponed his return from France. ‘Another reason for not going to England,’ he told Haig, ‘is that I could not stand the whining over K from those who hated and depreciated him.’13 ‘His career has been cut short,’ Asquith said, in the tones of the worst sort of canting clergyman, ‘while still in the full tide of unexhausted powers and possibilities.’14 The Army was ordered to observe seven days’ mourning, with officers wearing crêpe armbands.
The public had no doubts about Kitchener’s heroic qualities; the soldiery viewed his death as a serious blow; but the political class had come to see him as an obstacle. His death brought the silver lining of the chance to overhaul the running of the war. Hankey, who admired Kitchener because of his foresight and energy in August 1914, noted that as an ‘autocrat’ he had sat uncomfortably in cabinet.15 He had trusted few of his colleagues to keep secrets on which lives depended, so did not share them. He had felt undermined since Robertson’s appointment as CIGS, even though they had a good personal relationship. Kitchener told Derby just before he sailed that he knew his mission to Russia was about ‘getting him out of the way’ but ‘he did not mean to leave without a struggle.�
��16 He was under no illusions.
At breakfast on 6 June, before he had heard about Kitchener, Lloyd George – whom the Field Marshal disliked vigorously – told Scott that ‘we are losing the war if indeed we have not already lost it.’17 He attacked the Russians, who he said were now producing fewer shells each week than Britain did in a day: it had been confirmed that the army of British women munitions operatives were working an average of sixty-one and a half hours a week on the day shift or sixty hours on the night shift.18 He dismissed the idea of a further offensive on the Western Front, claiming it was ‘folly’ to suppose, after Verdun – where the French had sustained 185,000 casualties thus far in heroically resisting a series of punishing German attacks since 21 February – that the BEF could break through German lines. He believed that ‘our generals were largely incompetent.’ Instead, he (like the French) wanted an assault on the Central Powers from Salonica, but in this was alone in the cabinet. Scott detected that Lloyd George’s criticisms were more rhetorical than practical; Churchill, also at the breakfast, told him after their host had left that Lloyd George was ‘still flapping about’.19
Later that day Scott saw Lloyd George again, and told him he should succeed Kitchener. Lloyd George was too conscious, however, of how little more than a figurehead Kitchener had been. He himself had siphoned off many of his powers as minister of munitions, and Robertson had taken many of the rest. Lloyd George would consider the job only were those powers restored. He distrusted Robertson, because he suspected him of lacking respect for the views of politicians and of conspiring with other generals, notably Haig, to get his own way; and he coveted his power to appoint officers to higher commands. He knew Asquith regarded him as ‘indispensable’, so was unlikely to strip him of this power in order to placate Lloyd George.20 Robertson, however, was willing to work with the munitions minister: Churchill recounted that the CIGS had, speaking of the cabinet, described Lloyd George as ‘the only live man in that set of bloody fools’.21 Esher, who spent much of his life talking to generals, told Haig: ‘I hope that Asquith will retain the WO himself, with a strong Under-Secretary. That would be the best scheme, and leave Robertson the freest hand, but I fear it is an unlikely solution.’22