Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Bulgaria had surrendered on September 28 and Turkey on October 21. Austria was next. “A drizzle of empires,” Churchill said, was “falling through the air.” On October 28 he had been invited to review British soldiers parading in Lille’s Grande Place—among the party in the reviewing stand was one Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Law Montgomery, the Forty-second London Division’s chief of staff—and he was at his desk in the Metropole on November 10, when Hindenburg advised Berlin that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of the army and the kaiser fled into Holland. The Eiffel Tower in Paris beamed directions to the enemy’s peace envoys, telling them which trenches to approach and where to pick up their guides. That evening Lloyd George invited Churchill to join a special cabinet which would study the implications of the peace. At five o’clock the next morning the German envoys signed Foch’s dictated terms in his railroad car at Compiègne. All firing was to cease six hours later. Churchill would recall that full moment: “It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I stood at the window of my room looking up Northumberland Avenue towards Trafalgar Square, waiting for Big Ben to tell that the War was over.” It struck, and he could hear the baying of the crowds outside, but he felt no jubilation. “Scarcely anything which I was taught to believe had lasted,” he wrote. “And everything I was taught to believe impossible had happened.” Since 1914 Britain had lost 908,371 dead, 2,090,212 wounded, and 191,652 missing. Victory had indeed been “bought so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” Then Clementine arrived and proposed that they go to Downing Street and congratulate Lloyd George. Twenty excited revelers, cheering wildly, jumped on their car as it moved slowly through the rejoicing mass. F. E. Smith and Sir Henry Wilson were already with the prime minister. Others joined them. They discussed the advantage of calling an election now, whether or not to intervene in the civil war raging between Red and White Russians, and what peace terms should be presented to Germany. The “fallen foe,” Churchill pointed out, was close to starvation. He proposed rushing “a dozen great ships crammed with provisions” to Hamburg. His colleagues eyed him coldly. (That evening Wilson would write in his diary: “LG wants to shoot the Kaiser. Winston does not.”)* Outside, the rapturous demonstrations continued through the afternoon, frolickers romping over the Mall, throwing firecrackers and confetti. Suddenly the weather took an ominous turn. The sky darkened. Rain began to fall, hard. Some Londoners sought refuge in the lap of Queen Victoria’s statue, but after huddling there a few minutes they climbed down. They had found little shelter there, and less comfort. The arms were stone cold.277

  In a Pomeranian military hospital a twice-decorated German noncommissioned dispatch runner, who had been temporarily blinded during a heavy gas attack on the night of October 13, learned of the capitulation from a sobbing pastor. The invalided noncom was still ready to fight, still throbbing with patriotic fervor, but now there would be no more fighting. Six years later the future Führer of the Third Reich set down a description of his reaction in November 1918. Night after night he lay awake, blazing with hatred for those whom he believed responsible for what he considered a betrayal:

  Ich wusste, dass alles verloren war. Auf die Gnade des Feindes zu hoffen, konnten höchstens Narren fertigbringen—oder Lügner und Verbrecher. In diesen Nächten wuchs mir der Hass, der Hass gegen die Urheber dieser Tat…. Elende und verkommene Verbrecher! Je mehr ich mir in dieser Stunde über das ungeheuer Ereignis klarzuwerden versuchte, um so mehr brannte mir die Scham der Empörung und der Schande in der Stirn. Was war der ganze Schmerz [meiner] Augen gegen diesen Jammer? Was in den Tagen darauf wurde mir auch mein Schicksal bewusst…. Ich aber beschloss, Politiker zu werden.

  [I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope for mercy from the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed…. Miserable and degenerate criminals! The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to this misery? In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me…. I resolved to go into politics.]278

  FIVE

  OXBOW

  1918–1932

  IT was with feelings which do not lend themselves to words,” Churchill recalled afterward, “that I heard the cheers of the brave people who had borne so much and given all, who had never wavered, who had never lost faith in their country or its destiny, and who could be indulgent to the faults of their servants when the hour of deliverance had come.” One simple cheer, a curious eight-word antiphon now locked in the memory of history, was heard that Monday night and throughout the following day wherever London crowds gathered, in Mayfair and Whitechapel, Leicester Square and Regent’s Park, Streatham and Harrow-on-the-Hill. It echoed and reechoed, repeated by beaming, tearful, proud, grieving, exultant Britons who rejoiced in the irrefutable evidence that their sacrifices had been redeemed and the Glorious Dead had not, after all, died in vain. Someone in a throng would chant, “Who won the war?” and the rest would roar back, “We won the war!” Then once more: “Who won the war?” Again a thundering: “WE won the war!” And so it went. Eventually they grew hoarse, and the tedium of it drove them away one by one, until at last all had fallen silent. Nevertheless, every one of them believed it. They actually thought that Britain had won the war.1

  At dawn’s first light on November 21, ten days after the Armistice, the light cruiser H.M.S. Cardiff steamed out of Scottish waters flying an enormous blue ensign. Twenty miles out, as prearranged, she rendezvoused with the German High Seas Fleet—the kaiser’s titanic armada, most of whose guns hadn’t even been fired since 1914: 179 battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and other vessels, now commanded by Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who was, that day, the most wretched seaman in Europe. Von Reuter had prayed for cloudy skies to mask his shame, but this was Kaiserwetter, clear, if blustery, and very bright. Cardiff led the humiliated enemy vessels back to May Island, in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, where Admiral Sir David Beatty, nineteen subordinate admirals, and 90,000 bluejackets awaited them on the decks of England’s Grand Fleet, the greatest concentration of sea power in history. Beatty presided over 370 warships, all of whose crews were at battle stations, their guns trained on their recent foe, their battle flags snapping angrily in the rising wind. The British warships formed two parallel lines, the classic Spithead formation. Thirteen squadrons of capital ships (among them the Queen Elizabeth, her role in the Dardanelles forgotten) escorted the defeated fleet into the firth and then ordered it to anchor. “The German flag,” Beatty signaled von Reuter, “will be hauled down at sunset today, Thursday, and will not be hoisted again without permission.”2 By dusk swarms of English pleasure boats were festively cruising around the wretched ships of the vanquished hohe Herr, hooting and beating buckets with bilge pumps.

  Of all the belligerents who had lunged at one another’s throats four years earlier, only Britain, it seemed, had emerged strengthened. France’s loveliest provinces were a wasteland of denuded earth, barbed wire, and rotting corpses. The Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy was disintegrating. Czarist Russia had ceased to exist. The fallen Second Reich, founded by Bismarck, was racked by strife and a proliferation of Femen, or political assassins—Hans Kohn called this frightening new phenomenon “the sudden brutalization of German political life”—and for the next quarter century its menace would darken all Europe.3 England’s enormous prewar wealth was gone, but its factories were intact, its armed forces had never been mightier, and although England owed the United States five billion dollars in war debts, its continental allies were indebted to it for far more than that. At the Versailles peace conference Britain could, in effect, cast six votes because Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India, all separately represented, supported the Mother Country on most issues. Woodrow Wilson’s resistance to territorial acquisitions, and his insistence upon self-determination, was ingeniou
sly met by the creation of the League of Nations mandates. Allied flags flew over these possessions, but, diplomats told the President with straight faces, they were not really annexations because ultimately—no one knew just when—they would become independent. Thus the Empire emerged from the Hall of Mirrors swollen by 988,000 square miles of new territory, inhabited by 13,000,000 people, many of whom had not even known a war was being fought. The Union Jack now flew over German New Guinea, South-West Africa, Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and Cameroon, more than a hundred German islands wrenched from the kaiser, and the Middle Eastern lands which later became Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and Israel. Rhodes’s dream of a Cape-to-Cairo corridor had been achieved at last.

  Best of all, for those who cherished old customs, the King-Emperor’s expansion could be attributed to his Royal Navy, which, as the “Senior Service,” had been England’s original instrument of imperial growth. The army had done the dying, but even before the Versailles treaty (or Diktat, as the resentful Germans called it) Britons knew that trench warfare had been futile. It was the Grand Fleet which had blockaded the enemy, starving them into surrender. So tradition had triumphed after all. Englishmen liked that. They were proud of their eccentricities, even the dowdiness of their women’s fashions and the odd customs of taking long hikes in the wet, bathing in cold water, flinging open windows in winter, deferring to bowler-hatted retired officers with bristling white mustaches, and driving on what was, for most of the world’s motorists, the wrong side of the street. As R. H. Tawney put it, “ ‘Back to 1914’ became a common cry.” Some wanted to go even farther back. On the eve of the war sophisticated Englishmen had felt uneasy about Britain’s hegemony. But as Churchill’s Harrow schoolmate Leo Amery told Lloyd George after Armistice Day, if the Empire grew mightier after the valor of its youth, “Who has the right to complain?”4

  The Empire had flourished on certitude and myth. “It is the virtue of the Englishman,” Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had written in 1913, “that he never doubts. That is what the system does for him.” Englishmen treasured chivalric legends. In 1912 London children, and many who were no longer children, had packed the Savoy Theatre to see Where the Rainbow Ends, an improbable play about two innocents, brother and sister. They are threatened by a Dragon King. Enter Saint George. He seems inadequate: silver-haired and obscured by a billowing cloak. Then the girl says tremulously: “I am an English maiden in danger, and I ask for your aid.” Instantly, the cloak disappears and we behold a knight in dazzling armor, a great red cross on his breastplate and his hand on the hilt of a glittering Excalibur. The Dragon King boasts of degrading the British (“I flung my gold dust in the people’s eyes and lulled them into false security”), but Saint George reminds Britons of their duty to “fight aggression and foul tyranny.” As the end of the last act approaches he cries to the playgoers: “Rise, Youth of England, let your voices ring / For God, for Britain, and for Britain’s King!” They then stand and join the cast in singing “God Save the King.”5

  The pull of such lore retained its power, on the home front at least, while the men in the trenches were fighting a very different struggle. At Mons, it was said, an angel had led lost Tommies to safety. The Evening News of September 29, 1914, had carried a poem by Arthur Machen, “The Bowmen.” In it an embattled British soldier about to be overwhelmed by waves of enemy infantry remembers and repeats Saint George’s motto: Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius, which he once saw on a plate in a London restaurant. Suddenly he hears “a great voice” calling: “St. George! St. George!… St. George for Merrie England!” Simultaneously, the attacking “grey men” begin “falling by thousands.” They have been shot by Agincourt bowmen in the sky. No sooner had Machen’s poem appeared than dispatches from France and Belgium began reporting dead Germans slain by arrows. As late as 1917, when, one would think, the truth about the war ought to have been evident to everyone, Henry Newbolt (“Play up! Play up! and play the game!”) published his Book of the Happy Warrior, full of chivalric fables about the events across the Channel, and E. B. Osborn brought out The Muse in Arms, in which he explained the gaiety of British soldiers going into action: “The Germans, and even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as sport; they do not know that sportsmanship is our new homely name, derived from a racial predilection for comparing great things with small, for the chevaleries of the Middle Ages.” Today this sounds inane, but it had some basis in fact. In at least two offensives British soldiers went over the top dribbling soccer balls across no-man’s-land. One occurred on July 11, 1916, when Captain W. P. Nevill and his company of the East Surrey Regiment booted a ball back and forth as they advanced along the Somme. Nevill and most of his men were killed in less than an hour. Ineluctably they inspired a poem:6

  On through the heat of slaughter

  Where gallant comrades fall

  Where blood is poured like water

  They drive the trickling ball

  The fear of death before them

  Is but an empty name

  True to the land that bore them

  The Surreys play the game.

  It is outrageous, it is preposterous, and to a later generation it is completely baffling. What game, in the name of God, were the Surreys playing? Ah, but they knew, and that was enough for them. Being mythical, that knowledge was imperishable, and its vitality was still strong on that sunlit morning when Beatty received the surrender of von Reuter’s fleet. As the German warships approached the Firth of Forth, the British crew on the battleship Royal Oak heard a mysterious drumbeat coming from the lower decks. It was audible on the bridge. Twice officers dispatched bluejackets to investigate. They found nothing, but the drum continued to roll until the enemy’s anchor chains ran out. The next day’s newspapers carried Newbolt’s old poem Drake’s Drum:

  Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

  Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;

  If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,

  And drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

  Seven months later, on a prearranged signal from Admiral von Reuter, German crews pulled the sea cocks of his 10 battleships, 9 armored cruisers, 8 large cruisers, 50 torpedo boats, and 102 submarines, sending them to the bottom while the horrified, helpless British officers and ratings looked on. Among those witnessing this extraordinary event was a party of schoolchildren on an excursion from Stromness in the Orkneys. Being children, they thought the show was for them. It was. It was for everybody—a defiant gesture declaring that Germany had surrendered but had not quit. In Berlin, Ludendorff, dining with Major General Sir Neill Malcolm, the chief of Britain’s military mission in Berlin, explained in his tumescent, inarticulate way that his home front had let him down. “Do you mean,” asked Malcolm, “that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff pounced. “Stabbed in the back?” he repeated. “Yes, that’s exactly it. We were stabbed in the back [Dolchstoss in den Rücken].” Hindenburg heard the phrase from him and testified before a political committee of inquiry: “As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was stabbed in the back.” Stabbed by whom? Presently an answer emerged: the hilt of the dagger had been held by the Jews.7

  The British were very cross with von Reuter. His conduct, they felt, had been most unsportsmanlike, and doubtless there were those who expected retribution from the angel of Mons, Saint George, the Agincourt bowmen, or the footballers of the Somme. If they felt chagrined, so, for very different reasons, did His Majesty’s diplomats in Versailles, the following week, when the peace treaty was signed. They were satisfied with their spoils of war but departed feeling somehow diminished in the eyes of the civilized world. Lloyd George, they had assumed, would dominate the conference. In the words of a contemporary, he was regarded as the “one statesman in England who counted.” And Winston was almost as familiar to the British public as his chief. Robert Rhodes James has left us a vivid portrait of Churchill at this time: �
��Much of the early aggressiveness has been softened by age and experience. In manner he remains alert, thrusting, eager, or in sharp contrast fitting his mood, somber, portentous, and scowling with leaden responsibility…. His dedication to his career is total, even obsessive. Experience has not dimmed the originality of his mind, nor the intensity of his emotions, nor the volubility of his conversation.”8