by Simon Heffer
He blustered that those from the four Allied nations who took part in the Versailles conference had agreed not to speak publicly about its conclusions; he accused his predecessor of seeking to discuss ‘military decisions’, which Asquith protested was not what he wanted at all. At this, Lloyd George lost his temper: ‘When you are conducting a war, there are questions which a Government must decide. The House of Commons, if it is not satisfied, has in my judgment but one way of dealing with the situation; it can change that Government.’107 There then followed the key lie. George Lambert, an Asquith loyalist, interrupted and asked: ‘Did Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson approve those decisions?’ And Lloyd George answered: ‘Certainly; they were present there, and all those representatives approved.’ More of Asquith’s friends taunted him, about how rumours concerning the disregard in which Haig and Robertson were held were being sown by Downing Street, and how the leading mischief-maker, Northcliffe, was acting with impunity. Lloyd George denounced this ‘unmitigated falsehood’ and claimed to have been ‘fighting hard against these paragraphs appearing in the press.’108 He did not convince. MacDonald proclaimed that ‘the House must have been very deeply impressed with the failure of the Prime Minister’s speech this afternoon,’ and no one gainsaid him.109
Lloyd George saw Robertson again, and the General told him he would accept reduced powers if he stayed as CIGS. Lloyd George, unwilling to be seen as Northcliffe’s poodle, still felt he could not sack him. Hankey told the prime minister of Milner’s restiveness; he asked the cabinet secretary to calm him down. Milner said he would accept Robertson’s continuation in post provided he loyally executed policies agreed at Versailles, and that it was made public that he had turned down the job there. However, on 14 February Robertson again declined either to stay in his post or to go to Versailles. He attended the War Cabinet by invitation and said that as it seemed reluctant to accept his advice, it should sack him as its Supreme Military Adviser; but if it did not, he wondered whether it would be ‘wise or fair’ to retain him to run a system ‘which he regarded as dangerous and unworkable’.110 Fearing the implosion of his administration, Lloyd George sent Balfour and Derby to talk Robertson round; though Balfour, despite Hankey’s briefing him about what he was to say, had the wrong end of the stick and never properly made the offer. Derby was so annoyed at Robertson’s treatment that he was minded to resign; Haig urged him not to, for he feared Northcliffe would succeed him if he did.
The King, always loyal to Haig and Robertson, made his feelings known. Lloyd George, who usually managed to pretend to be courteous when dealing with royalty, told Stamfordham irascibly that the Monarch ‘was encouraging mutiny by taking up the cause of those officers … whom the Government has decided to get rid of.’111 Stamfordham, shaken by this direct assault, assured Lloyd George the King had no such intention. Robertson – one of those officers – wrote to Lloyd George on 16 February to outline how his ‘conscience’ would not allow him to do as the prime minister wished.112 He warned Lloyd George that ‘the method you have decided to adopt must prove unworkable and dangerous.’ Nevertheless, the War Cabinet was then told, the same day, that a statement would be issued announcing Robertson’s resignation, and his replacement by Wilson; Lloyd George had made up his mind to act in a dictatorial fashion. The King was appalled: ‘I don’t trust him,’ he wrote of Wilson.113 Curzon, who was absent, was feared to be contemplating resignation, and Hankey was ordered to contact him by special messenger.
Robertson claimed the official statement told two falsehoods. It said he had refused to stay with reduced powers, which he had not, and that he had resigned, which he also had not. Nor did it give his reasons for refusing to go to Versailles, namely that he believed the system to be unworkable. At one point Lloyd George had asked him, a senior general of two years’ standing, to become deputy at Versailles to Wilson, whom he outranked: this slight was not mentioned.
Lloyd George bracketed Haig with Robertson, but having forced out the latter had no plan to get rid of the former, even though he had considered various generals as suitable to succeed him. The South African general and War Cabinet member Jan Smuts, who was Lloyd George’s favourite soldier and who as an outsider could keep historical ideas about personality out of his judgements, advised Lloyd George to keep Haig as, he felt, there was no one better. The prime minister’s next encounter with Haig can hardly have convinced him that this judgement was correct. On the evening of 16 February Haig arrived in London, determined to see Lloyd George, and straight from a meeting of Army commanders in France where he had learned of the greatly increased strength of the German forces and ‘that we must be prepared to meet a very severe attack at any moment now.’114 Such a contradiction of the wild view he had expressed in early January can have done nothing to enhance his credibility in Downing Street – even though this time he would be proved right. Derby met him at Victoria station and told him Wilson had replaced Robertson. Haig can have been under no illusion that Robertson had been forced out; first thing the next morning – a Sunday – Robertson saw Haig and told him he felt Derby had not been ‘quite straight’.115 Nevertheless, he seemed determined to accept the official version of events and to make no fuss about it, perhaps in case a protest led to his own dismissal by a trigger-happy prime minister.
Derby then took Haig to Lloyd George’s house at Walton Heath, which Haig thought ‘reminds me of summer lodgings at the seaside’. Lloyd George was resting when they arrived. Once he appeared, Haig stressed he had never approved any of the arrangements they were discussing, but would implement them loyally now they were cabinet policy. Lloyd George left the room temporarily, which gave Derby the opportunity to tell Haig that the Field Marshal had stated his position ‘quite clearly’, and that the war secretary at least was in no doubt about Haig’s objections to the new system. Derby then promised Haig that if the prime minister ‘made any mis-statement regarding me [Haig] in the House of Commons on this subject, he was prepared to get up in the House of Lords and deny it flatly.’ Unity of Allied command might have been established, but that was all.
Haig was asked to see Wilson and discuss who should assume Wilson’s vacated post at Versailles. It went to Sir Henry Rawlinson, with which Haig was happy. Derby felt compromised by the events of which he had just had a mainly spectating part. He saw Haig that evening and again said he was thinking of resigning, a view he had also expressed to the King, who had agreed that resignation was the best course. Derby duly prepared to carry out his threat. Haig urged him to stay for the good of the Army; Law also pressed Derby to stay, and Hankey deterred Long (angry at Robertson’s treatment) from resigning as colonial secretary. Had they gone just as Beaverbrook was entering the government, and as Northcliffe was being given an official post, the unrest caused by Robertson’s departure could have fatally undermined the government. However, by 17 February Haig’s personal narrative had become that his main concern was not Robertson but ‘only whether I was satisfied with the proposed arrangement for giving me orders.’116 Rawlinson was content that, as he was a member of the Army Council, any instructions he gave to Haig would constitute ‘lawful commands’.117 If Robertson had relied on Haig as reinforcement in the political game, he would have been disappointed; Haig, when it came to deciding whether to put his own job on the line to save Robertson’s, was found wanting. But then, apart from not being a gentleman, Robertson had committed the ultimate crime of being bested by Lloyd George.
The next morning, as Derby (having vacillated) decided not to leave the government, Robertson ‘read in the morning papers that he had resigned.’118 Asquith demanded an explanation, but Law said Lloyd George could not attend the Commons because of ‘a very severe chill’; he hoped to come the following day.119 Law took pains to see Haig that morning, to tell him what Lloyd George proposed Law should say about Haig in a statement he had asked him to read out in Parliament that afternoon: that Haig found the new arrangements ‘a workable scheme’.120 Haig was not having tha
t. ‘I said that was not my opinion because I thought it a bad scheme and unsound since it set up two authorities who would give me orders, i.e., dual control.’ He noted: ‘He must not say that I thought the scheme was workable but that I will do my best to work under it.’ Law understood Haig’s point, and did not misrepresent him. Davidson, Law’s secretary, told Hankey to phrase the statement as Haig had suggested.121
The statement also announced that Robertson had accepted command of the Eastern Division, which prompted James Hogge, one of Asquith’s partisans, to ask why he had not been offered command of the Boy Scouts. The next day Lloyd George made his promised statement. What he did not say – but what Hankey wrote in his memoirs – was that the only remarkable thing was how Robertson had lasted so long. Hankey felt he was ‘the embodiment of much which the Prime Minister had come into office to get rid of.’122 The General had survived because he enjoyed great popularity among servicemen and politicians. It was only now that Lloyd George finally felt sufficiently authoritative to dispose of a CIGS with whom he disagreed profoundly on matters of strategy. Robertson had the last laugh: ‘The Executive Committee completely broke down as soon as put to a practical test, and on March 26 it was replaced by a generalissimo, General Foch, who retained that post until the end of the war.’123 Robertson would be shabbily treated by Lloyd George after his departure: the peerage he might have expected was never forthcoming, and he was paid a war bonus small compared with that of other senior generals. So much of his assessment of strategy would be justified by the events of the last months of the war that it must have irked Lloyd George even to think about it: his own grasp of strategy, as seen from his concern with sideshows, was dismal.
Having dealt with Robertson but feeling unable to be rid of Haig, Lloyd George decided instead to starve him of troops, so he could not launch another offensive; but this also meant that Lloyd George had to take responsibility for starving the Western Front of sufficient men to defend it, a point that seems barely to have occurred to him any more than the real reason for the shortage of troops occurred to Haig. Wilson, as the new CIGS, shared (wilfully or otherwise) Lloyd George’s blindness to the dangers now facing the Allies on the Western Front. When on 4 March Maurice told Wilson he expected an attack by the Germans around Cambrai, Wilson disagreed. Whether this was because he genuinely believed it, or knew of Lloyd George’s views and wished to avoid a confrontation with him, one can only conjecture – though Lloyd George had a month earlier sent Smuts and Hankey to the Western Front to inspect the state of readiness against such an attack. The new command system was not perfect, partly because Haig was determined to be his own man: in March Lloyd George learned that he and Pétain had been engaging in freelance policy-making about the deployment of troops between the Western Front and Italy.
Throughout late February more intelligence reached the War Office about German divisions moving to the line. Yet as Maurice recorded on the 28th, ‘ministers still disinclined to believe in attack on Western front.’124 By the middle of March questions were being asked in the Commons about the shift in the war caused by German armies ‘massing’ in the west: yet the government affected to ignore the problem.125 Maurice told them an offensive would be ready by 15 March and would probably take place around Cambrai. The weather was exceptionally dry for the spring, which only added to the chance of an attack. Four days later Maurice told Wilson he was ‘certain’ the attack would come; Wilson told him that there was no point the Germans trying to attack through the devastated area of the Somme.126 On 12 March Wilson amplified this advice to the War Cabinet, saying there was no certainty of an attack. ‘The Germans are not piling up divisions in the West for fun,’ Maurice noted.127 Yet Haig, summoned to London on 14 March, noted with the zeal of a convert how Lloyd George and Law ‘did their best to get me to say that the Germans would not attack.’128 Haig then had another example of Lloyd George’s pathological dishonesty. ‘The PM remarked that I had “given my opinion that the Germans would only attack against small portions of our front.” I said that I had never said that.’
Haig emphasised that if he were a German general, drunk on the success of closing down the Eastern Front, he would attack. He told the coalition leaders that ‘we must be prepared to meet a very strong attack indeed on a 50 mile front, and for this drafts are urgently required.’ Even without such an assault, he feared he would be 100,000 men short by June.129 Lloyd George ignored him, agreeing only not to ask for any of Haig’s divisions to be withdrawn to form a general reserve, a suggestion from Versailles. Not every minister was complacent: Churchill realised the Western Front was dangerously under-defended and started to urge Lloyd George to send Haig more troops from those being massed in England. The prime minister’s continued refusal, coupled with a War Office decision to keep a reserve of 120,000 at home – a decision assisted by Haig’s often-expressed belief that his Army could resist easily for eighteen days any attack thrown at it – would bring Britain within inches of losing the war.
At 4.43 a.m. on 21 March 1918 the German offensive began, just in front of Cambrai as Maurice had predicted, at the junction of French and British armies where the German high command had deemed the front was weakest, and in fog. The enemy deployed seventy-six divisions against twenty-six divisions of British infantry and three of cavalry: eight more were in reserve. The Americans had not yet reached the front in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and were not deployed. There were enormous British casualties on the first day, when the Germans advanced four and a half miles, taking almost as much ground as the Allies had in the entire Battle of the Somme: over 7,000 killed and 10,000 wounded, but also 21,000 taken prisoner. The Germans suffered heavy losses too, with nearly 11,000 killed and 29,000 wounded, but only 300 taken prisoner.130 Repington noted that ‘only the valour of the British soldier can atone for the follies of the War Cabinet.’131 Wilson, having been proved wrong to rubbish the idea of such an attack, told the War Cabinet on the morning it began that it was possibly ‘nothing more than a big raid’.132 When Maurice had told him it was under way he simply could not believe it. His biographer, Major General Sir Charles Callwell, tactfully observes that it must have taken some time for the ‘extreme gravity’ of events in France to permeate through to London.133
On the contrary, bad news having travelled fast, Law was asked in the Commons that afternoon what the government thought was happening. His reply entirely misrepresented events in Whitehall in the preceding weeks. While admitting that details, at that stage, were few, he added: ‘I do feel justified in saying that, as it has not come as a surprise, and as those responsible for our Forces have foreseen and have throughout believed that, if such an attack came, we should be well able to meet it, nothing that has happened gives us in this country any cause whatever for additional anxiety.’134
Within days the Germans had gone 40 miles, albeit into an empty space on the desolate Somme battlefield: they occupied little of strategic value. British soldiers trained only for trenches were hopeless in open country, but the ensuing retreat saved many lives. It was not only Maurice who had correctly identified where the attack would come. According to Hankey, many senior Allied officers had expected it there: he had travelled to the front with Smuts in early February, and had talked to plenty of them. ‘It is one of the decisive moments of the world’s history,’ he noted in his diary, ‘but I think our fellows will hold them up.’135 It became clear quickly that ‘our fellows’ would do nothing of the sort. Such was the scale of the retreat that by 23 March Hankey was talking of a ‘debacle’; and that afternoon Colonel Walter Kirke of the General Staff, flown in specially from the Western Front, told the War Cabinet there had been perhaps 40,000 British casualties, and the loss of 600 guns including 100 heavy ones.136 Perhaps most depressing was his remark that the trenches abandoned at the start of the Battle of the Somme were now being made ready for the Army to retreat into.
The War Cabinet discussed removing men from Italy and Palestine, and sending in an
Indian division, to bolster the front. It decided, as ‘the emergency had arisen’, to send the 50,000 eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds committed to home defence to France to reinforce the Army, even though it left the British Isles vulnerable. Astonishingly, given what Intelligence had said for weeks about the build-up of enemy forces, there were also 88,000 men home on leave who would be sent back as fast as they could be moved – about 8,000 men a day. For Wilson, disbelief that the debacle was happening gave way to disbelief at its extent.
In an astonishing spasm of hypocrisy – for he was more to blame than his arrogant and often blinkered commander-in-chief – Lloyd George was furious with Haig, who ‘had made no preparation for the attack, notwithstanding that he was warned that it would probably take place exactly as it did.’137 He believed, however, that Wilson had foreseen it, something entirely contradicted by the evidence. Lloyd George felt his Versailles plan had not been acted upon, with the French bringing up reserves too late. Wilson continued to dupe him, and the War Cabinet, saying on 23 March that he thought the opposing forces ‘might be reckoned as approximately equal’, even though Maurice reported that there were in fact 191 German divisions against 165 Allied ones, a German superiority of 117,600 in effective rifle strength.138 No wonder it was Lloyd George of whom Clemenceau said, after the war, that he was ‘the greatest liar he had ever met.’139 Wells, completing his novel Joan and Peter, observed in this moment of national despair that ‘no Nelson had arisen to save the country, no Wellington; no Nelson or Wellington could have arisen; the country had not even found an alternative to Mr Lloyd George.’140