Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Love letters should not be taken literally. Their very language is hyperbole. Winston did not really mean that he was determined to stay at the front until either wounded or recalled to high office. Nor had Clementine forsaken her hopes for his career. Both saw future greatness for him on a far shore; the problem was to navigate the bewildering currents between here and there. Sir John French’s promise of a brigade—four thousand men—might provide a way. A brilliant stroke in the field could bring acclaim, a reversal of his political fortunes, and, conceivably, a chance to change the direction of the war. “The hour of Asquith’s punishment and K’s exposure draws nearer,” he wrote his wife. These “wretched men,” he went on, “have nearly wrecked our chances. It may fall to me to strike the blow. I shall do it without compunction.”168

  “I long for you to have a Brigade,” she wrote back. But she had misgivings. The leap from major to brigadier general was a mighty one. Lord Cavan counseled caution. Lead a battalion first, he advised Winston; get the feel of handling troops and then take on the greater responsibility. Clementine thought that wise: “I am absolutely certain that whoever is C. in C., you will rise to high commands…. But everyone who really loves you & has your interest at heart wants you to go step by step whereas I notice the Downing Street tone is ‘of course Winston will have a brigade in a fortnight.’ Thus do they hope to ease their conscience from the wrong they have done you, and then hope to hear no more of you…. Do get a battalion now & a brigade later.”169

  Upon reflection, he agreed. The field marshal, however, wouldn’t hear of it. Churchill wrote: “I proposed to French that I shd take a battalion; but he rejected it, & said ‘no a brigade at once’ & that he wd settle it quickly in case any accident shd happen to him. I have acquiesced.” One doubts he had been hard to persuade. He was dreaming of glory on the battlefield. On December 2 Edward Grigg, a grenadier officer, wrote his mother: “Winston was attached to the Company again for all the last period in the firing line. It was very cold and very wet—first a bitter frost, and then rain, sleet and thaw, which puts us up to the calf in mud and slime. That part of the line is in bad order, too, and we had nothing but a small dug-out about 2 ft 6 high with a wet mud floor to live and sleep in, and we all got kinks in our spines getting in and out of the beastly thing. But Winston accepted the situation with great cheerfulness and we had quite a good time. He has forgotten his political legacy from Lord Randolph, and thinks much more, I am sure, of the military instincts which have descended to him from the great Duke of Marlborough.”170

  Later in the month he was summoned to GHQ. French was in England, he was told, but his appointment as brigadier general was definite. He would command the Fifty-sixth Brigade in the Nineteenth Division, which, he wrote home, “is a regular Division in the second new army, & the Bde I shall command comprises 4 Lancashire Battalions…. Altogether it is a vy satisfactory arrangement.” He anticipated some “criticism & carping” at home, but no more than if he had taken a battalion for a few weeks, in which case it would have been said that he had used it “merely as a stepping stone etc.” He was “satisfied this is the right thing to do in the circumstances, & for the rest my attention will concentrate upon the Germans.” Spiers would be his brigade major; Eddie Marsh, he hoped, would be brought over in one capacity or another. He asked Clementine to order a new tunic bearing a brigadier’s insignia. She, for her part, forgot her qualms, and wrote back that she was “thrilled.”171

  Not everyone in London was thrilled. Over lunch, in the crowded grillroom of the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, Lord Esher, just back from Saint-Omer, told her: “Of course you know Winston is taking a Brigade & as a personal friend of his I am very sorry about it; as I think he is making a great mistake. Of course it’s not his fault, Sir John forced it upon him.” She put all this in a letter to her husband, adding: “He then launched forth again, saying that you had been in the greatest danger, in more than was necessary etc & that French had determined to give you this Brigade as he was convinced you wd otherwise be killed. After this I crawled home quite stunned & heart-broken.” Churchill himself was unsurprised; he had begun to appreciate the unpopularity of the appointment. At GHQ Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “Winston came up this morning to my room & had a long talk. I advised him not to take a Brigade as it would be bad for Sir John, Winston and the Brigade, but I did not convince him.”172

  Sir Henry was dissembling—a complex man, he couldn’t even be candid in his diary—for by then he surely knew that Sir John was beyond help or harm. At that moment the commander in chief was facing the music in Downing Street, the victim of bad strategy, worse tactics, an impossible war, and, to some extent, the disloyal intrigues of his senior subordinate, Sir Douglas Haig. Asquith wrote that he “had for some time felt past fears and growing doubts as to Sir John French’s capacity to stand the strain of his task with its ever-increasing and unforseeable responsibilities.” So he dismissed him. Before they parted, French mentioned that he had given Churchill a brigade, and, according to him, “Asquith said he was delighted.” But the prime minister was also a political weather vane, and he shortly learned that rumors of Churchill’s promotion had already aroused hostility in Parliament. Sir Charles Hunter, a Tory MP with a military background, rose at Question Time to ask “if Major Winston Churchill has been promised the command of an Infantry brigade; if this officer has ever commanded a battalion of Infantry; and for how many weeks he has served at the front as an Infantry Officer.” After an interval the under secretary of state for war deftly replied: “I have no knowledge myself, and have not been able to obtain any, of a promise of command of an Infantry brigade having been made to my right hon[orable] and gallant Friend referred to in the question.” Having “consulted books of reference and other authentic sources of information,” he had found that his gallant Friend had never commanded a battalion. As to the time he had been in combat, “the answer to the last part of the question would be about four weeks.” The House laughed. Hunter then demanded to know if Churchill had been assured of a battalion command. Several of Winston’s friends cried, “Why not?” Sir Charles Robertson, a former India army officer and an admirer of Churchill’s, inquired sarcastically: “Is not the question absurd on the face of it, Major Winston Churchill being under sixty years of age?” But another Tory MP, Evelyn Cecil, ended the exchange on a venomous note, asking: “Is the right hon[orable] Gentleman aware that if this appointment were made it would be thought by very many persons both inside and outside this House a grave scandal?”173

  Aitken had the impression that this “apparently frightened The Block.” He also heard that Bonar Law had expressed “unswerving antagonism to Churchill,” arguing that “to give Churchill an influence on the conduct of affairs in France would be a disaster,” and that Lloyd George “would not give any countenance to projects for Churchill’s preferment.” If true—Aitken was a prodigious gossip—this is puzzling, for when Law and George visited Haig at GHQ a month later, they told the new commander in chief that if he saw fit to give Winston a brigade there would be “no difficulty at home.” Whatever the pressures, Asquith swiftly buckled. He sent a note to French, who had not yet been formally relieved, saying that on reflection, far from being delighted, he feared that “with regard to our conversation about our friend—the appointment might cause some criticism” and was therefore inadvisable. “Perhaps,” he added, “you might give him a battalion.” Dismayed and embarrassed, French phoned Churchill at GHQ. “I have something extremely unpleasant to say,” he began, and then he read the prime minister’s veto. Winston was astonished. If he had wanted a battalion, he could have had it long ago; six months earlier, when the Dardanelles was winding down, he had been offered one in the QOOH. Churchill had just finished a letter to Clementine when the field marshal’s call had been put through. He unsealed the envelope and added on a slip marked “later”: “I reopen my letter to say that French has telephoned from London that the P.M. has written to him that I am not to
have a Brigade but a Battalion. I hope however to secure one that is going into the line. You will cancel the order for the tunic! Do not allow the P.M. to discuss my affairs with you. Be vy cool & detached and avoid any sign of acquiescence in anything he may say.” She instantly replied: “My Dear—your letter has just come telling me that your hopes of a Brigade have vanished. I do trust that Haig will give you one later. If he does it may be all for the best—but if not it is cruel that the change at G.H.Q. came before all was fixed…. My own Darling I feel such absolute confidence in your future—it is your present which causes me agony—I feel as if I had a tight band of pain round my heart.”174

  Winston’s resentment deepened. “I am awfully bitter and so is French,” he wrote F. E. Smith; “what ill-fortune.” Brooding, he wrote Clementine: “To measure Asquith’s performance one has to remember that on my leaving the Admiralty he offered me a Brigade: & that when I told him three months ago of the offers French had made to me if I came out to the front, he advised me to go and assured me that any advancement wh was thought fitting by the C in C would have his hearty concurrence. One has to remember all the rest too of a long story of my work & connexion with him. Altogether I am inclined to think that his conduct reaches the limit of meanness & ungenerousness. Sentiments of friendship expressed in extravagant terms; coupled with a resolve not to incur the slightest criticism or encounter the smallest opposition—even from the most unworthy quarter. Personally I feel that every link is severed: & while I do not wish to decide in a hurry—my feeling is that all relationship should cease.” Clementine loved and honored her husband, but she did not always obey him. “You know I’m not good at pretending,” she wrote him, “but I am going to put my pride in my pocket and reconnoitre Downing Street.” Nothing came of it. Winston was unsurprised. The prime minister was a “weak and disloyal chief,” he said; “Asquith will throw anyone to the wolves to keep himself in office.” During a winter thaw, she accepted an invitation to join the Asquiths at Walmer Castle and wrote Winston of how they could “distinctly hear the rumble of heavy guns” across the Channel. She played golf with “the Prime who was feeling very pleasant & mellow… at one moment [I] thought I was going to give the boy a good beating (which I shd have relished) but Alas! I fell off towards the end & he won by a short length.” Winston reproached her mildly for going and asked what Asquith had said. She replied: “You know what the P.M. is—He loathes talking about the War or work of any sort—He asked anxiously if you were happy.”175

  The Block could be left to the mercies of Lloyd George, who now began his intricate campaign to dethrone the prime minister and then replace him. Churchill, meanwhile, had to deal with a new commander in chief. His wife wrote him: “Do you know Sir Douglas Haig? Did he agree to your appointment or was it finally settled before he supervened? He looks a superior man, but his expression is cold and prejudiced, & I fear he is narrow.” Actually, he and Winston had been acquainted in the early Edwardian years, when he was a major and Winston a young MP, but that had been long ago, and Haig, a dour Scot, was elusive even to those who were close to him. At Oxford he had been regarded as “head-strong, bad-tempered, and intractable.” In the army he had learned to control his temper, and he brought valuable qualities to Saint-Omer: a remarkable grasp of detail, tranquillity under pressure, and absolute self-confidence. He was blindly loyal to military tradition, however. “The role of the Cavalry on the battlefield,” he wrote, “will always go on increasing”; bullets, he believed, had “little stopping power against a horse.” One has the distinct feeling that to him, machine guns, tanks, and aircraft were, if not contemptible, at least bad form. His greatest assets in his rise had been his powerful social connections. His wife had been a member of the royal household, and he knew the King well enough to write him that French, his immediate superior, “is quite unfit for his command at a time of crisis in our nation’s history.”176

  The way to break through the German trench line, Haig thought, was to use horses in “mass tactics”—a theory which, as Leon Wolff points out, had been abandoned by even the most ardent cavalry officers. The official British history of the war would tactfully conclude that he was “not swift of thought.” Bernard Shaw, who visited GHQ shortly after Haig took over, wrote: “He was, I should say, a man of chivalrous and scrupulous character. He made me feel that the war would last thirty years, and that he would carry on irreproachably until he was superannuated.” Haig and Sir William (“Wully”) Robertson, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, were exponents of attrition. Churchill, attrition’s heretic, could expect little from them. No compromise was possible between his concept of war and theirs. After reading a Churchill memorandum on the use of tanks and mortars, Leo Amery wrote in his diary: “Whatever his defects may be, there is all the difference in the world between the tackling of a big problem like this by a man of real brain and imagination, and its handling by good second-rate men like Robertson and Haig, who still live in the intellectual trench in which they have been fighting.” On arriving in France, Winston had headed straight for the front to see for himself what it was like. In the whole course of the war, Haig never visited the trenches. Scenes of carnage, he said, might influence his judgement. Afterward Churchill etched him in acid. Haig, he wrote, reminded him of “a great surgeon before the days of anesthetic, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.”177

  This judgment lay in the future on December 18, 1915, Sir John French’s last day as commander in chief, when, after picnicking in the countryside with Winston, French returned to GHQ and approached Haig on what he called “a delicate personal matter.” He explained the broken promise to Churchill—broken by Asquith—and then, according to Haig’s diary, said he was “anxious that Winston should have a Battalion. I replied that I had no objection because Winston had done good work in the trenches, and we were short of Battalion CO’s.” The new commander in chief then sent for Churchill, who wrote Clementine that evening: “He treated me with the utmost kindness & consideration, assured me that nothing wd give him greater pleasure than to give me a Brigade, that his only wish was that able men shd come to the front, & that I might count on his sympathy in every way.” Beaming, Winston asked whether Haig would like to read “Variants of the Offensive,” a memorandum on trench warfare he had written while the grenadiers were in the rear area. He wrote home that Haig replied that “he wd be ‘honoured’—! So I am back on my perch again with my feathers stroked down.” Spiers wrote: “WC has Douglas Haig to heel. DH is ready to do anything for him.”178

  He was ready to do nothing of the sort. It is doubtful that Haig read “Variants of the Offensive.” If he had, he probably wouldn’t have understood it. And had he understood it, he would certainly have felt affronted. Churchill proposed flamethrowers, improvised infantry shields, wire-cutting torches fueled by gas cylinders, and massive tunneling operations. And he looked beyond the siege warfare in France and Belgium to fluid movements in other theaters of action. “He was probably the only member of Asquith’s Cabinet,” Clement Attlee would later write, “who had a grasp of strategy.” Certainly he seemed to be the only British officer in Flanders who grasped the desperate need for innovations. Civilization was bleeding to death. “The chaos of the first explosions,” he wrote, “has given place to the slow fire of trench warfare: the wild turbulence of the incalculable, the terrible sense of adventure have passed…. A sombre mood prevails in Britain. The faculty of wonder has been dulled; emotion and enthusiasm have been given place to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar, and sorrow numbs. The world is in twilight; and from beyond the dim fli
ckering horizons comes tirelessly the thudding of the guns.”179

  On New Year’s Day, 1916, Haig appointed Churchill a lieutenant colonel and gave him an infantry battalion, the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers, consisting largely of Lowland Scots, many of them miners from the Ayrshire coalfields. Winston wrote home that he would be glad to see the last of Saint-Omer, “a desert” since French had left. He was now responsible for thirty officers and seven hundred men, and that evening he dined with the divisional commander at his headquarters in Merris. The grenadier colonel’s welcome had been cold, but here, he wrote, “they evidently will like vy much to have me. The general—Furse—is extremely well thought of here and is a thoroughly frank & broadminded man…. Most of the staff had met me soldiering somewhere or other, & we had a pleasant evening.”180

  His assurance was premature. Cheery greetings from the general and his staff were one thing; the battalion was another. The Sixth Royal Scots had been badly mauled at Loos and were deeply attached to their commanding officer, whom Churchill was replacing. The switch was therefore unpopular with them. Hakewill Smith, the battalion’s only regular officer, later recalled that he heard of it with “horror.” “When the news spread,” wrote Andrew Gibb, the young adjutant, “a mutinous spirit grew…. Why could not Churchill have gone to the Argylls if he must have a Scottish regiment! We should all have been greatly interested to see him in a kilt…. Indeed, any position at all in the Expeditionary Force seemed not too exalted for Winston if only he had left us our own CO and refrained from disturbing the peace of the pastures of Moolenacker.” Winston arrived there mounted, at the head of a cavalcade bearing his luggage, bathtub, and a boiler for heating the bath water. Moolenacker Farm, the battalion’s reserve billet, consisted, in his words, of “squalid little French farms rising from a sea of soppy field and muddy lanes.” The farm wives were awed. They whispered: “Monsieur le Ministre! Monsieur le Colonel!” “Ah, c’est lui?” “C’est votre Ministre?” The soldiers were less impressed. His first parade, after lunch, was a farce. The men were standing at slope arms when their new CO rode up on a black charger and cried: “Royal Scots Fusiliers! Fix bayonets!” As a cavalryman he did not know that this order could not be carried out from the slope. A few men put their rifles on the ground and yanked their bayonets from their scabbards; the rest stood immobile, baffled. Gibb whispered to him that “Order arms” must intervene, and Churchill growled the command. He inspected his troops and then barked another cavalry order: “Sections right!” This meant nothing to the Jocks. They didn’t budge. Gibb had to rescue him again.181