At 5:00 P.M. Rawlinson finally arrived. But he was alone, and his forty thousand men had not even come ashore. For the king and his ministers, that was the last straw. Already the Germans were close enough to pulverize the city with their howitzers. Because of the Belgians’ “complete exhaustion and imminent demoralisation,” Churchill wired, they were evacuating Antwerp. The eight thousand British troops would hold the inner line of defense as long as possible and then follow. Churchill toured the three brigades, one marine and two naval, for the last time. His reception was mixed. Green troops are always shocked by the primitive conditions of life in the field and usually blame those who put them there. These boys had shivered all night in thin oilskins, and one wrote his father: “We cursed a car containing Churchill who came out to see what was going on & we were glad when he departed.” After hearing from his son, Asquith wrote Venetia: “Strictly between ourselves, I can’t tell you what I feel of the wicked folly of it all. The Marines of course are splendid troops & can go anywhere & do anything: but nothing can excuse Winston (who knew all the facts) from [sic] sending in the other two Naval Brigades.”35
Churchill reached Dover Tuesday night. There he learned that all three brigades of the naval division were fighting in the front line, that Rawlinson had moved his headquarters back to Bruges, and that Clementine had given birth to a daughter. Thursday morning, when he reported to the cabinet, Asquith thought him “in great form & I think he has thoroughly enjoyed his adventure. He is certainly one of the people one would choose to go tiger-hunting with…. He was quite ready to take over in Belgium, and did so in fact for a couple of days, the army the navy & the civil government.” Grey wrote Clementine: “I cant tell you how much I admire his courage & gallant spirit & genius for war. It inspires us all.” Haldane called the journey “a great and heroic episode.” Lloyd George told him it was a “brilliant effort” and then asked: “What are the prospects?”36
The prospects were wretched. Kluck’s bombardment was shattering the center of Antwerp. The French had decided not to send reinforcements. The marine brigade commander was preparing to abandon his trenches. On Saturday the Belgians surrendered while the British troops escaped along the narrow land corridor. Some wandered over the Dutch border and were interned. For the others, Rupert Brooke wrote, the flight “was like several different kinds of Hell—the broken houses and dead horses lit by an infernal glare. The refugees were the worst sight. The German policy of frightfulness had succeeded so well that out of that city of half a million, when it was decided to surrender, not ten thousand would stay…. I’ll never forget that white-faced endless procession in the night, pressed aside to let the military—us—pass, crawling forward at some hundred yards an hour, quite hopeless, the old men crying and the women with hard drawn faces. What a crime!” Asquith wrote: “Poor Winston is very depressed, as he feels that his mission has been in vain.”37
Others put it much more strongly. The previous Sunday, when prospects seemed relatively bright, Captain Herbert Richmond, the navy’s assistant director of operations and a venomous critic of the first lord, had written in his diary at the Admiralty: “The siege of Antwerp looks ugly. The 1st Lord is sending his army there; I don’t mind his tuppenny untrained rabble going”—he meant men like Brooke and young Asquith—“but I do strongly object to 2000 invaluable marines being sent…. It is a tragedy that the Navy should be in such lunatic hands at this time.” Now, after the capitulation, the Tory press was in full cry, led by H. A. Gwynne, the editor of the Morning Post. A Post leader called the stand at Antwerp “a costly blunder, for which Mr W. Churchill must be held responsible…. We suggest to Mr Churchill’s colleagues that they should, quite firmly and definitely, tell the First Lord that on no account are the military and naval operations to be conducted or directed by him.” Gwynne wrote six members of the cabinet that Antwerp was proof “that Mr Churchill is unfitted for the office which he now holds,” excoriating him as “a man who has shown most signally his incompetence at least in time of war.” There were vehement denunciations in The Times, and the Daily Mail, reprinting the Post attack, described the operation as “a gross example of mal-organization which has cost valuable lives and sacrificed the services during the continuance of the war not only of a considerable number of gallant young Englishmen but also of a considerable section of the Belgian Army.”38
Extraordinary stories were circulated. Sir Francis Hopwood, a civil lord of the Admiralty, wrote Lord Stamfordham that Winston had been aboard a train Friday evening when “somewhere along the way he heard that the Belgian Government intended to evacuate Antwerp. He rushed back to London and saw K and E. Grey in the small hours of the morning. Then in spite of their remonstrances he left for Antwerp.” Stamfordham, believing it, replied: “Our friend must be quite off his head.” Beatty wrote his wife: “The man must have been mad to have thought he could relieve [Antwerp]… by putting 8,000 half-trained troops into it.” The next day he wrote her again, prophesying that “this flying about and putting his fingers into pies which do not concern him is bound to lead to disaster.” Bonar Law called Antwerp “an utterly stupid business”; the first lord, he believed, had “an entirely unbalanced mind, which is a real danger at a time like this.” Even Churchill’s cabinet colleagues were critical. After reflecting upon the expedition, Lloyd George told Frances he felt “rather disgusted” with Winston. “Having taken untrained men over there, he left them in the lurch. He behaved in rather a swaggering way when over there, standing for photographers and cinematographers with shells bursting near him.” Asquith, smarting over his son’s discomfort, told his wife that the first lord was “by far the most disliked man in my Cabinet by his colleagues.” Margot wondered why. “He is rather lovable I think,” she said, “and though he often bored me before the war I’ve liked him very much since. I love his spirit of adventure—it suits me—and I love his suggestiveness.” Asquith replied irritably: “Oh! He is intolerable! Noisy, longwinded and full of perorations. We don’t want suggestion—we want wisdom.”39
Because the strategic consequences of Antwerp were being worked out in high secrecy, Churchill could not defend himself in public or in the House. In private letters he pointed out that he had acted with the fullest authority and could hardly be held responsible for the French failure to reinforce the garrison. Welcoming home the brigades on October 18, he pointed out that untrained troops had been used because the need “was urgent and bitter” and they “could be embarked the quickest”—an explanation that Asquith, in a letter to the King, had endorsed at the time. The real justification for Antwerp, however, was that, far from being an exercise in futility, it had provided an invaluable contribution to the Allied cause. Asquith knew it, and once his private grievance had healed, he wrote that Churchill, by delaying the fall of the city by at least a week, had “prevented the Germans from linking up their forces.” On October 29 he added: “The week at Antwerp was well spent, & had a real effect on the general campaign.” Afterward the British Official History of the War found that while “the British effort to save Antwerp had failed” it had “a lasting influence on operations. Until Antwerp had fallen the troops of the investing force were not available to move forward on Ypres and the coast… they were too late to secure Nieuport and Dunkirk and turn the northern flank of the Allies as was intended.” And in March 1918 King Albert told a British officer: “You are wrong in considering the RND [Royal Naval Division] Expedition as a forlorn hope. In my opinion it rendered great service to us and those who deprecate it simply do not understand the history of the War in its early days. Only one man of all your people had the prevision of what the loss of Antwerp would entail and that was Mr Churchill.” The delay, the king continued, “allowed the French and British Armies to move northwest. Otherwise our whole army might have been captured and the Northern French Ports secured by the enemy.”40
In the autumn of 1914 this was unknown. The British public wasn’t even aware that Rawlinson had brought the Belgian
army out intact, covering their escape along the Flanders coast, to fight beside the Allies for the next four years. They only knew that the first lord was acquiring a reputation for designing madcap schemes and interfering with the duties of other ministers. Winston himself later concluded that he had erred in taking the field: “Those who are charged with the direction of supreme affairs must sit on the mountain-tops of control; they must never descend into the valleys of direct physical and personal action.” But at the time the fight for the city had merely whetted his appetite. Believing that the enemy was most vulnerable on his northern flank, he drew up plans for assaults on Borkum and Amesland in the North Sea and a proposal to “attack with explosives the locks of the Kiel canal or vessels in the canal.” His imagination ranged elsewhere, however; he envisioned campaigns on the Danube or amphibious landings at the Austrian seaport of Kotor on the Adriatic. He even contemplated violations of Dutch neutrality.41
Asquith described a long session with Winston, “who, after dilating in great detail on the actual situation, became suddenly very confidential, and implored me not to take a ‘conventional’ view of his future. Having, as he says, ‘tasted blood’ these last few days, he is beginning like a tiger to raven for more, and begs that sooner or later, & the sooner the better, he may be relieved of his present office & put in some kind of military command. I told him he could not be spared from the Admiralty, but… his mouth waters at the sight & thought of K’s new armies. Are these ‘glittering commands’ to be entrusted to ‘dugout trash,’ bred on obsolete tactics of 25 years ago—‘mediocrities, who have led a sheltered life mouldering in military routine’ &c &c. For about ¼ of an hour he poured forth a ceaseless cataract of invective and appeal, & I much regretted that there was no short-hand writer within hearing…. He is a wonderful creature, with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity (quite unlike Edward Grey’s), and what someone said of genius—‘a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.’ ”42
In assuming that statesmen could conduct the war, Winston was dwelling in a world of illusion. The politicians having lost control of events and precipitated a general war, the professional militarists of every belligerent nation were in the saddle. The officer classes were declaring that no one should have a voice in the war unless he had spent forty years in uniform—which, as B. H. Liddell Hart acidly observed, would have disqualified Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Cromwell, Marlborough, and Napoleon. Antwerp, they said smugly, was an example of what you might expect if civilians were in command. The British public believed them. It was generally assumed in England that Churchill had been responsible for a pointless bloodletting in Belgium. The casualty lists told another story: 57 Englishmen had died at Antwerp; 158 had been wounded. In France, by the end of 1914, the cost was 95,654 British soldiers killed in action.
The race to the sea was over and no one had won it. A week after the Germans seized Antwerp, they reached the Channel coast and overran Ostend. There they pivoted, to turn the Allied flank. Joffre, however, asked the British to thwart them, and Churchill, in response, ordered heavy shelling from English warships offshore. It worked. Now the Allies attempted to turn the Germans, but by the end of the month it was obvious that the enemy could not be dislodged either. The front was deadlocked. A wavering seam of trenches, within which troops huddled, began on the Swiss border and ended 466 miles away on the shore at Nieuport, just below Ostend. Because the armies on both sides were enormous, the density of human concentration was unprecedented: there was one soldier for every four inches of front. Mobility, and the opportunity for maneuver, were gone. The deadlock was as obvious as it was intolerable. Surely, people thought, with the expensive and ingenious arsenals available to general staffs, an early breakthrough was inevitable. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even possible, because offensive weapons were no match for the weapons available to defenders. And whenever a position was in peril it could be swiftly reinforced; troop trains could rocket to the tottering sector, while the attacking infantrymen could plod no faster than soldiers in the Napoleonic wars.* The British Tommies, bewildered and increasingly fatalistic, turned a gay song into a dirge:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go
They were the first men to be exposed to poison gas, massed machine-gun fire, and strafing airplanes, and they lived with rats and lice, amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, staring up at the sky by day and venturing out only by night. Separated by the junk of no-man’s-land, the great, impotent armies squatted month after month, living troglodytic lives in candle-lit dugouts and trenches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Bassée clay, or ladled from the porridge of swampy Flanders. In the north the efficient Germans tacked up propaganda signs (Gott strafe England; Frankreich, du bist betrügen) and settled down to teach their language to French and Belgian children while the Allies counterattacked furiously. These titanic struggles were called battles, but although they were fought on fantastic scales, strategically they were only siege assaults. Every Allied wave found the kaiser’s defenses stronger. The poilus and Tommies crawled over their parapets, lay down in front of the jump-off tapes, and waited while their officers studied the new gadgets called wristwatches before blowing their zero-hour whistles. Then the men arose and hurtled toward as many as ten aprons of ropy wire, with barbs thick as a man’s thumb, backed by the pullulating Boche. Morituri te salutamus. A few trenches would be taken at shocking cost—the price of seven hundred mutilated yards in one attack was twenty-six thousand men—and then the beleaguerment would start again. In London, newspapers spoke of “hammer blows” and “the big push,” but the men knew better; a soldiers’ mot had it that the war would last a hundred years, five years of fighting and ninety-five of winding up the barbed wire.
Keep the home fires burning
Though the hearts are yearning
It was a weird, grimy life, unlike anything in their Victorian upbringing except, perhaps, the stories of Jules Verne. There were a few poignant reminders of prewar days—the birds that caroled over the lunar landscape each gray dawn; the big yellow poplar forests behind the lines—but most sounds and colors were unearthly. Bullets cracked and ricochets sang with an iron ring; overhead, shells warbled endlessly. There were spectacular red Very flares, saffron shrapnel puffs, and snaky yellowish mists of mustard gas souring the ground. Little foliage survived here. Trees splintered to matchwood stood in silhouette against the sky. Newcomers arriving from Blighty (“The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs,” said Carson) were shipped up in box-cars built for hommes 40 or chevaux 8 and marched over duckboards to their new homes in the earth, where everything revolved around the trench—you had a trench knife, a trench cane, a rod-shaped trench periscope, a trench coat if you were an officer, and, if you were unlucky, trench foot, trench mouth, or trench fever.43 In the course of an average day on the western front, there were 2,533 men on both sides killed in action, 9,121 wounded, and 1,164 missing.
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris:
qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Even in quiet sectors there was a steady toll of shellfire casualties—the methodical War Office called it “normal wastage.” The survivors were those who developed quick reactions to danger. An alert youth learned to sort out the whines that threatened him, though after a few close ones, when his ears buzzed and everything turned scarlet, he also realized that the time might come when ducking would do no good. If he was a machine gunner he knew that his life expectancy in combat had been reckoned at about thirty minutes, and in time he became detached toward death and casual with its appliances: enemy lines would be sprayed with belt after belt from water-cooled machine guns to heat the water for soup. Hopes for victory diminished and then vanished. After one savage attempt at a breakthrough Edmund Blunden wrote that “by the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win
, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.”44
There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams
A month after Antwerp, Churchill received a letter from Valentine Fleming, an MP and fellow officer in the QOOH, now serving in France: “First and most impressive,” Fleming wrote, were “the absolutely indescribable ravages of modern artillery fire, not only upon all men, animals and buildings within its zone, but upon the very face of nature itself. Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves…. Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men…. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1,000 yards apart…. In these trenches crouch lines of men, in brown or grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven, hollow-eyed with the continual strain and unable to reply to the everlasting run of shells hurled at them from 3, 4, 5 or more miles away and positively welcoming an infantry attack from one side or the other as a chance of meeting and matching themselves against human assailants and not against invisible, irresistible machines….” Winston sent this to Clementine with a note: “What wd happen I wonder if the armies suddenly & simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute! Meanwhile however new avalanches of men are preparing to mingle in the conflict and it widens and deepens every hour.”45
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