by Barrie Pitt
‘His mind opened and shut smoothly and exactly, like the breech of a gun,’ wrote one who knew him well – and herein lay both his strength and his weakness. His sure convictions gave him immense firmness and stature in the swirl and doubts of political life, but they made him extremely vulnerable when the truth of his convictions came into doubt. One of his convictions was that the business of politicians was to govern at home and that of generals and admirals to fight and win the war abroad – and if the generals had been able to show even moderate local successes at anything less than Pyrrhic cost, Mr. Asquith would have remained in office and his policy of non-intervention in military affairs would have been vindicated.
But the Battle of the Somme, despite its inconclusive results on the field, did produce two subsidiary effects at home which combined – with far-reaching consequences. It hardened into a firm conviction Lloyd George’s belief that direction of the war must be taken from the generals, and it brought tragedy into Asquith’s personal life by causing the death of his brilliant elder son, thus weakening him at a crucial moment. In December 1916 Asquith resigned, and the following day, with a few rather winsome gestures of protest, Lloyd George accepted the task of forming a Government – but as rumours of the intrigue and manœuvre by which he was credited with having attained his object filtered through the corridors of the House of Commons, the Liberal Party split. Some eighty members only supported Lloyd George; for the rest, he had to rely upon the support of the Conservatives, and to his inexpressible fury and frustration, four of the most influential only agreed to follow his leadership upon the condition that he retained his two bêtes noires, Generals Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig, in their offices as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France respectively.
They also insisted that under no circumstances might he bring that astute politician Mr. Winston Churchill back into a position of power from which that young man might again try to launch one of his attractive-sounding but impractical schemes to out-manœuvre the enemy, instead of crushing him in head-on assault. Gallipoli had proved the fantasy of such schemes – as the generals pointed out to the statesmen upon every possible opportunity, until by 1917 constant repetition had caused all but the most independent-minded of them to accept the philosophy of the High Command.
And this was to kill the enemy soldiers by massed attacks: nothing more, nothing less. Brute force was to battle it out with brute force and the stronger and heavier of the antagonists would win in the end.
In Lloyd George, all the instincts of an agile Celt with a rapier-like mind revolted against such a policy, but there was little he could do about it except plan and wait, watch for his opportunity and cut down the individual soldiers who opposed him upon any occasion when circumstances robbed them of the protection of the command organization. But this Fabian policy would take time to operate – if indeed it operated at all. Perhaps in the end, it would be simply a matter of brute force, when the vast American armies arrived in France and submerged the enemy in a welter of blood and misery.
If they arrived in time.
To the average Briton, either in the trenches or at home in field, office or factory, the news of America’s forthcoming help to his own side was received with cool scepticism. ‘Forthcoming’ was obviously the critical word, and when it became evident that massive armies were not to arrive in Europe by the first boat after President Wilson’s epoch-making declaration of war on Germany, any enthusiasm felt by the jaded British public quickly faded. They had come to the conclusion some time before that they had only themselves to depend upon: from what ‘the boys’ said when they came home on leave it seemed that the French were slippery – if not downright unreliable – and Russia was already on the way out.
There was widespread ignorance and indeed considerable misapprehension of things American – only equalled by the average American’s mistaken view of European affairs – and most people’s idea of their new transatlantic ally was a compound of Ford cars, the Keystone Cops, and soldiers wearing Boy Scout hats. And envy of the health, wealth and carefree spirits of those representatives of their newest ally who had already made an appearance upon the European scene did little, alas, to endear them to the natives.
For by the end of 1917 the drab burdens which war had imposed upon the British at home, had to a great extent damped their natural amiability. They did not doubt that in the end they would win the war – they seemed in fact incapable of envisaging defeat, possibly because a totally irrational atavism told them, obscurely and inaccurately, that they had never lost a war in the past and there would be no necessity to develop the habit now. But they were becoming increasingly bitter at the cost which victory was exacting from them, especially as despite their sacrifices to date, there appeared little sign of fulfilment of the contract.
Because their attention is not so riveted by immediate violence, the morale of those left at home during wartime is always more volatile than that of the men on the fighting fronts, so it is to them that newspaper editors direct their banner headlines and politicians address their oratory. As 1917 faded, the Solicitor-General, Sir Gordon Hewart, K.C., sent to his constituency a motto with which to face the coming year, and it is indicative of the low spirits of his countrymen that they could not devise some means of wrapping it around his neck and hanging him with it. It was ‘Let us get on with the war!’
They were well aware of the fact that they had no choice but to ‘get on with the war’ – but they were doing so in a mood of bitter apathy. They hated it, hated the colourless existence it had brought, hated the hunger, the cold, the loneliness.
The heartbreak and tragedy which it had caused was a factor apart. By now hardly a family in Britain still numbered all its sons among the living, and such is the pressure of popular thought that those who did felt vaguely ashamed of their good fortune. In the first quarter of the war, before the glory died, consolation to those who mourned could be offered (and accepted) in the name of patriotism and sacrifice, but later – during the Somme battle, for instance – when the casualty lists lengthened to include entire divisions virtually destroyed, the system of complete battalions recruited from one locality had plunged whole districts into grief as the result of a single hour’s fighting. Fellow-feeling and sympathy might assuage immediate sorrow, but when every other house in a Street had received its sombre news, and every street in a town or district, then a shadow settled over it which would not lift while the war lasted. And as the months had passed, the shadows had grown in number, dropping into place like pieces of a tragic jig-saw puzzle.
Time did little to lift this shadow, for it brought increasing hardship. Meat had become more and more difficult to buy, butter almost impossible except for favoured customers, and sugar was already controlled by a rudimentary and not very successful rationing system. Day-long queues stood outside the shops throughout the dank and dreary weeks at the end of 1917, children taking the place of mothers and aged grandparents the place of the children – and only too often the joint vigils would be in vain and the shutters go up on empty shelves. In London and other centres within range of German bombers, the daylight Gotha raids would scatter the queues momentarily – to re-form when the danger was passed with tears and quarrelling over lost places.
Inflation had climbed its dreary spiral ever since the beginning of the war, and as always the economic burden was not shared equally. Business had made huge profits (it had rescued America from a slump to such an extent that there were by now 7,925 more millionaires than in 1914, making 22,696 in all) and protected labour had used the situation to its own advantage so that miners’ wages were 91 per cent, above the pre-war level, and munition-workers brought home inflated pay-packets. Any form of entertainment or luxury trade which could remain in business was paying enormous dividends, especially when the leave-trains came in.
With so large a proportion of the nation’s manpower dead or in the trenches and so many of the
women away in factories or offices doing the men’s work, home life was reduced and the children ran riot – undisciplined, uncared for, unhappy. Morality suffered its usual war-time decline, and relief from the long hours, the tensions of separation or the actual desolation of loss was sought in promiscuous love affairs or alcohol. One well-placed Staff officer in London boasted that he had no difficulty in changing his paramour weekly, and that he always insisted that they brought their own champagne. The pattern was doubtless repeated at lower social levels.
To balance this, Evangelism flourished as in the days of the Industrial Revolution – and for much the same reasons – and great was the activity of the Temperance Societies. In The Times of January 1st, 1918, the ‘Strength of Britain Movement’ campaigned assiduously against the beer trade. It was not the war, the movement claimed, which had necessitated the recent introduction of sugar rationing, it was wicked, wanton waste!
‘A Thousand Tons a Week are being used in Brewing now’ its sub-line trumpeted,
Catch Cold waiting your turn in the queue if you like,
But DON’T blame it on the WAR.
IT IS THE BREWER’S FAULT.
There was also an organization devoted to protection of the health and morals of soldiers and sailors on leave, from the activities of pimps and harpies operating in the centres of the big cities; but its efforts were not of much avail against the determination of men intent on enjoying what little life remained to them, before their return to duty.
There was little enjoyment and no luxury available for the solid mass of the middle and lower-middle classes – upon whose stability and fortitude much of Britain’s power had been built and still rested. People with small fixed incomes – particularly the elderly – suffered actual hardship and every especially inclement spell drew its death-roll from them. While they lived, they saw their world of security and probity swept away, and perhaps some were not sorry to go with it.
It is indicative of the grinding hardship of the times that the national characteristics of good-humour and rather feckless generosity had gone. Hard up themselves, the British devoured with avidity all reports of peoples worse off than themselves, and newspaper editors with stories of hunger and pestilence abroad sold out their editions: especially, of course, when they retailed such details of the enemy countries. When censorship stripped the columns of hard news, the feature writers fell back upon their own imaginations for gruesome details of desperation within the enemy camp: but they rarely came close to the truth, for they could not picture it. Reality beggared imagination.
The blockade had been strangling Germany ever since the outbreak of war, and the populations of Berlin and Vienna would have welcomed the conditions in which Londoners were living as 1918 began. To them such luxuries as bread, heating and lighting were but nostalgic memories of the halcyon days of 1915. Since then hunger had been a constant condition, and a state of shivering palsy during all but the hottest time of the year was quite normal for almost everybody.
Children and old people suffered terribly. There was just not enough food for growing children, and those of all but the wealthiest and most influential grew up with hardly enough flesh to cover their bones. Vitamin deficiency had already played havoc with their teeth, for which, God knows, there was little enough exercise: a pound of bones for soup was a godsend, meat itself but a distant memory. The boys were in slightly better case than the girls, for they had the hope that if the war lasted long enough they would be drafted into the army – where at least they would be fed before they were butchered.
In winter, the Berlin streets were deep in thawed mud, with queues four deep of exhausted women and children waiting for hours before the shops opened, pressed against each other in order to keep warm; colourless, spiritless, numb with hunger and cold. The pitiful rations of sugar and flour were eked out over the endless days between issues, and even to dream of milk was ridiculous. Ersatz coffee, ersatz soup, ersatz sauce, ersatz soap – there was little for the Berliner to buy not prefaced by the loathed word, and in the minds of all it conjured up the same picture – pebbles, ground to grit. ‘It scours the stomach clean, anyway,’ was a wry gibe which had lost its savour by 1918. Grandparents and infants scrambled for the indigestible ruins of frozen potatoes.
Almost worse than lack of food was lack of fuel, for the stomach would adapt itself to meagre nourishment, but minds needed distraction from the dreadful reality. In winter after half-past three in the afternoon, there was nothing to do as there was no light to see by: no coal, no gas, no electricity, not even fat for candles. Even children could not sleep for seventeen hours a day, every day, but there was nothing else for them to do except perhaps to listen to stories told by parents or grandparents, too tired and too weak to carry on such genuinely exhausting work for long. So they went to bed in order to keep warm, all the children together irrespective of age or sex, and as parental apathy by now embraced all life, the practice bred a social problem which plagued central Europe for two generations.
Bad conditions breed extremes. In England the mass of the people lived in extreme discomfort while a minority made modest fortunes; in Germany the mass lived perilously near starvation, and the profiteers lived lives of gluttonous luxury. Fantastic fortunes were being made by those who could secure the sub-contracts to main Governmental suppliers or those who could satisfy the demands of soldiers on leave; and Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Austria were plundered to satisfy, in turn, the appetites of the new sybarites.
Early in the New Year there were bread riots in Vienna, and at the end of January a strike in Berlin of startling dimensions. The notices calling the strike were issued in the name of the Executive Committee of the Workers’ Councils – a sinister nomenclature now heard for the first time. So certain of firm support were the leaders that they did not issue the strike notices until January 27th, and on January 28th a million workers came out, six hundred thousand of them in Berlin itself. Rioting, pillaging and looting went on for a week during which many people were killed, and then the movement was crushed by the summary arrest of some forty thousand strikers and their families. Among them was Kurt Eisner, who subsequently became President of the short-lived Bavarian Republic.
But the strike was crushed – by the Army, which in effect controlled the Government. For the military leaders in Germany had a power vastly exceeding that of any other faction in the country or among the Central Powers – or for that matter in the whole of Europe. It was, for instance, a scheme bearing the name of the Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army – the Hindenburg Industrial Scheme – under which decisions were taken as to labour allocations to German industry, and indeed what industries were to be allowed to continue functioning. Not that Hindenburg himself took many of the decisions, for the power was wielded by his staff, of whom undoubtedly the most important figure was that of the First Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff.
This large, rather stout, typically Teutonic man was fortunate in being born to serve in the German Army, which had solved the problems posed by elderly and incompetent officers of royal blood who insisted on pressing their claims to high rank. The German General Staff were perfectly willing to allow the titular heads of Army units of corps status and above to hold their positions solely by right of seniority or connection – in fact, they preferred it so. The arrangement gave the formation a figurehead with ample time to spare for the ceremony and external duties to which the public and rank and file had grown accustomed from its important military leaders, without wasting the time of proficient soldiers.
While the scions of royal houses were thus displaying the panoply of war, its business would be directed by their Chiefs-of-Staff – these were the important men, chosen and appointed by the General Staff for their cool heads and professional ability. The antecedents of these officers were not of prime importance, although it is true to say that two-thirds of them prefixed their names with the aristocratic ‘von’. But this was no essential qualification, and an o
fficer who combined brains with diligence would earn promotion, be his origins aristocratic, bourgeois or humble. Ludendorff was almost the archetype. In the early days of the war when disaster for the Germans had loomed unexpectedly on the eastern front, he had been hurriedly dispatched thither, collecting en route at Hanover – like excess baggage – the elderly von Hindenburg.
Since then the partnership of Hindenburg and Ludendorff had gained immense prestige, although oddly enough there is good reason to believe that on the eastern front where they won their reputation, the Staff practice had been carried another step further and that behind Ludendorff there had been yet another éminence grise – a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Max Hoffman.
Be that as it may, when in August 1916 the Hindenburg–Ludendorff combination had been recalled from the eastern front to take command of the entire complex of Kaiserlich and Königlich Armies – in effect, to assume direction of the war effort of the Central Powers – there was no doubt as to whose was to be the guiding brain. Not that of von Hindenburg, dominant, steadfast, oaken personality though he might be.
Ludendorff had realized for some time that between the end of the British 1917 offensive and summer of 1918, Germany must win the war: otherwise the arrival of the American armies would tip the balance against the Central Powers and all their hopes and ambitions be tumbled in the dust. By early November it had become obvious that there was little now to fear in the east, and that a steady drainage away from that front of all first-class fighting material could be commenced.