by Andrew Marr
Three Tommies sat in the trench one day,
Discussing the war in the normal way,
They talked of the mud, and they talked of the Hun
Of what was to do, and what had been done,
They talked about rum . . .
But the point which they argued from post back to pillar
Was whether Notts County could beat Aston Villa.
The Old Ways of Love
The nineteenth of April 1915 was a busy day during a perplexing time in the war. The tragic and bloody landings at Gallipoli were in the final stages of preparation and, despite passionate arguments at the heart of the government, would start six days later. In France, Britain had just lost 13,000 men in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle; in three days’ time the Germans would counter-attack at Ypres using for the first time a new weapon: gas. Failure in Flanders had led Kitchener to make one of his most chilling remarks of the war, complaining that the British commander Sir John French had wasted shells, rather than men. The men could be easily replaced, he said; the shells could not. A crisis in the supply of shells and other armaments was hanging over the whole government. This, the last Liberal government Britain has had, would soon be destroyed by it, and by a row boiling at the Admiralty between Churchill, hot for the Gallipoli adventure, and his old friend, the brilliant and unstable First Sea Lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher. Lloyd George was, of course, intriguing, and was meanwhile in vigorous debate with other ministers about whether it would be right to ban alcoholic drinks entirely. This was, to put it mildly, an important time for the British cabinet.
Yet that morning, as the cabinet talk went on, covering munitions, strategy in the Mediterranean and the possibility of prohibition, the prime minister was distracted, as he often was. He was writing to the twenty-eight-year-old woman with whom he had been deeply in love for three years. He wrote to her most days, and sometimes several times a day, letters crammed with gossip and, though from a sixty-three-year-old man, as wildly passionate as any from a brimming youth. Meanwhile, as Asquith was scribbling with only one ear on the cabinet debate, a few feet away another minister was also writing. Edwin Montagu had long been one of Asquith’s most trusted supporters and now, still in his mid-thirties, had recently been brought into the cabinet. A coming man, he was being talked of as someone to take over the munitions problem. Montagu, or ‘the Assyrian’ as Asquith jokingly referred to him in private letters, had a strong jaw and a large square face, with a vigorous black moustache. He too was only half paying attention to the cabinet debate. In fact, he too was writing a love letter: ‘My very dear one, I have never received, I need not tell you, a letter so thrilling and delicious as yours this morning. God bless you for it!’ And his letter was to the same woman as the prime minister’s letter.
Venetia Stanley came from a rich, clever, argumentative family and was regularly described as boyish and dark-eyed. She does not look extraordinarily beautiful in pictures but something of her vigour and liveliness is clear. Among those who had been much struck with her was Winston Churchill, whose wife was her cousin. Her letters to Asquith have disappeared, probably destroyed by him, but his to her are some of the most moving and detailed accounts of the politics of the time, and show Asquith as a profoundly romantic, witty and complicated man. Ecstatic confessions of adoration are followed by wicked gossip and details of military matters, such as Britain’s breaking of German codes, which even other members of the cabinet knew nothing of. As Asquith begins to contemplate the idea that Venetia will marry someone else he writes in pencil, late at night, that fate will cut him off from ‘the richest plenitude of love and happiness that has fallen to the lot of any man of my time’. But he wants to think of ‘the Promised Land’ ‘with its milk & honey & grapes & the rest, wh. I am not allowed to taste, as possessed and enjoyed by someone, more love-inspiring & heart-filling & therefore worthier than I could ever hope to be’.
The biblical reference shows perhaps that Asquith subconsciously knew, though he was not then sure, that his rival was Montagu. For Montagu was Jewish and it was essential to him that Venetia convert before they married, which she agreed to do. To make things more complicated, Montagu and Asquith were in one another’s company continually, across the table at meetings, walking together through London, sitting side by side on train journeys, and Montagu adored the older man. In that same cabinet meeting he continued his letter to Venetia: ‘I do not know what to do. I simply can’t face, and that’s an end of it, hurting the PM . . . I owe it all to the PM. I love him. I can’t be guilty for my own happiness of hurting him.’ Self-hating, he berates himself as ‘a coward and a Jew’ unfitted for politics but concludes: ‘I do not see how we can invent a new triangle. I cannot share you, nor can he,’ before ending on a note of bathos, which confirms much about cabinet meetings of the period: ‘Yours very disjointedly and disturbedly (Winston is gassing all the time) . . .’ Yet eventually Edwin and Venetia agreed they must marry, dropping the bombshell on Asquith – though perhaps in the circumstances of 1915 that is not the best metaphor. After hundreds of pages of garrulous, self-analytical, literary and loving letters, his final one to her is bleak and tiny. It reads, in full: ‘Most Loved – As you know well, this breaks my heart. I couldn’t bear to come and see you. I can only pray God to bless you – and help me.’
What, one might ask, of Margot, Asquith’s tough and brilliant wife? She had always taken a tolerant attitude towards Asquith’s weakness for younger women, what she once called his harem. But a few days before that cabinet she had confronted him about Venetia. She wrote, explaining how she felt, to Montagu: ‘I have as you know often wondered if Venetia hadn’t ousted me faintly – not very much – but enough to wound, bewilder & humiliate me.’ She always invited Venetia to dinners and meetings and her jealousy was not small or wounded vanity but out of love for Asquith and the knowledge, ‘alas! That I am no longer young’. But she went on to describe her ‘absolutely unique’ relationship with Asquith: ‘Every night however late I go & sit on his knee in my nightgown & we tell each other everything – he shows me all his letters & all Venetia’s & tells me every secret.’ This does not seem likely; or if true makes Margot a most unusual person. But to demonstrate her point she sent Montagu a letter from her husband after their row in which he insists that he is not transferring his confidence to the younger woman: ‘My fondness for Venetia has never interfered & never could with our relationship.’69
It is as hard, looking backwards, to fully understand Edwardian attitudes to love and sex, as it is to understand much else about that age. For one thing, men regularly speak of their love for one another without there being any evidence of erotic or homosexual instinct. For another, as we shall see, there seems to have been much cuddling and even nights spent in bed without intercourse because of the dangers. The lava-flow of Asquith’s heated prose would say to us instantly today that his relationship with Venetia must have been sexual. The young diplomat Duff Cooper, who knew the family, thought so, recording in his diary that his lover, Lady Diana Manners, had had a letter from Asquith in July 1915 when the Venetia–Edwin marriage was taking place: ‘Diana is quite certain that Venetia was his mistress which rather surprises me. This letter, which was rather obscurely expressed, seemed practically to be an offer to Diana to fill the vacated position.’ Diana, like Venetia, wanted to stay close to the prime minister but without ‘physical duties that she couldn’t or wouldn’t fulfil. I advised her to concoct an answer which should be as obscure as his proposal and leave him puzzled – the old lecher.’70 Yet it is wholly possible that Cooper and Diana, both of them wild enough, were wrong about Asquith and that this is another example of that now-outlawed perversion, the passionate friendship.
Apart from casting a unique shaft of light on the world of high politics through its trail of undestroyed letters, does the love triangle at the heart of the 1915 cabinet matter at all? While it was peripheral to the political crisis that was beginning to engulf Asquith, it badly winded him at a c
ritical time. It would not lead to a newly moral 10 Downing Street when Asquith finally went since Lloyd George also had a mistress, Frances Stevenson, who lived with him most of the time, later becoming his wife. If Asquith was an elderly romantic and possibly a lecher, Lloyd George was a famous goat. Kitchener once said that he objected to discussing sensitive military issues in cabinet because they all went home and told their wives – except for Lloyd George who went home and told somebody else’s wife. The Asquith revealed in the Venetia Stanley letters was without doubt a man from another era. Though he might confess to moments of anger and even self-hatred, he was the frock-coated intellectual, romantic and political cynic he had always been, too easily distracted from the grim and grinding business of trying to win a world war. For nine years he had been the most important Briton. But by 1915 he was starting to look as dated as the Edwardian age itself. Coarser times had come and coarser men were needed.
The First Crisis
The war can be divided into several phases, each changing the politics of Britain. In the first, there was still popular optimism about a short, easy victory. Asquith’s Liberal government was not much remodelled. His was still a free-trade ministry which was highly sceptical about government taking too many powers and had absolutely no concept of the state revolution that would be needed to fight war on the coming scale. The land war, it was hoped, would be mainly fought between the French and Russians on one side and the Austrians and Germans on the other: Britain would control the seas and finance her allies, contributing only a modest land army. Yet Britain’s chief enemy was a thoroughly militarized, centrally directed and war-directed power, with a vast land army and a sophisticated general staff almost outside civilian control. This, of course, was part of the point – a ‘Prussianized’ imperial power against a sort-of democracy. Anyone who had taken a close interest in Germany’s rise, which meant anyone vaguely interested in public affairs, must have realized that laissez-faire was hardly going to be enough to beat the Prussians, but the old lot carried on in the old way. There was no talk of bringing in the Tory-Unionists or Labour to a government of national unity, as happened in the next war.
Some hard decisions were made. The Defence of the Realm Act, known as DORA, which would allow almost dictatorial powers over the press and many aspects of civilian life, was passed almost immediately. The most vigorous and warlike speeches by far came from Lloyd George, who had been so slow and cautious about supporting the conflict in the first place. From the beginning, by instinct rather than as political manoeuvring, he was speaking like the war leader Asquith plainly was not. He urged generosity to the German people while having no illusions about the scale of the struggle ahead. He told a recruiting meeting in London, in a speech described at the time as the finest in the history of England: ‘They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job; it will be a terrible war; but in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.’ The purpose of the war was to free Europe from a military caste determined to plunge the world ‘into a welter of bloodshed and death’. And already he was looking forward in exalted terms to higher war aims:
There is something infinitely greater and more enduring which is emerging already out of this great conflict – a new patriotism, richer, nobler . . . I see among all classes, high and low, shedding themselves of selfishness, a new recognition that the honour of the country does not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but also in protecting its homes from distress. It is bringing a new outlook for all classes. The great flood of luxury and sloth which had submerged the land is receding and a new Britain is appearing.
This was 1945 optimism thirty years early and it was Lloyd George’s Treasury, in sharply raising taxes and authorizing the first paper one-pound notes in case of gold hoarding, which was most active on the home front.
Asquith’s most dramatic political response to declaration of war was to accede to a public and press campaign for the imperial war hero Lord Kitchener, bringing him into the cabinet as war minister. Kitchener had been home on a visit from Egypt, which he was ruling, and was summoned from the deck of a cross-Channel ferry back to Whitehall. Like Lloyd George, Kitchener thought it would be a long and bloody war and was immediately clear that the small professional British army would be nothing like big enough to win it. The field marshal knew the French army well and was rather more interesting than his waxy, glazed-eyed image, but he would prove a disastrous cabinet member, who tried to act almost alone and regarded the views of elected leaders as impertinent piffle. In the insolent words of one of Asquith’s children, however, he made ‘a great poster’ and proved the inspirational creator of the mass volunteer armies of the first part of the war. ‘Your Country needs YOU’ and his accusing finger had a dramatic effect. He had reckoned on 100,000 volunteers responding. In the first week alone, 175,000 did and by the end of that month, September 1914, three-quarters of a million men had signed up. By the time conscription arrived in spring 1916, 2.5 million people had enlisted. Yet Kitchener himself would end up fighting with generals in the field and with politicians in London, and would become a prime scapegoat for failures in supplying ammunition, and the military disaster of Gallipoli. This was partly because he had fallen out with the other great force in wartime Britain, the popular press; but when he was drowned on his way to Russia in June 1916, he was mourned as a great national hero.
In this early period, the full cabinet continued to meet in the old relaxed way, as in peacetime, and even when a ‘war council’ was formed in November 1914, chaired by the prime minister, it met irregularly and was within a few months too big to be effective as a quick-acting executive body. This first period was brought to an end by a succession of military failures and a growing realization that the war would be long and hard. At sea, German warships managed to evade the Royal Navy and shell towns on the east coast. There were other naval failures too, with ships lost to U-boats and mines, and a German naval victory off Chile. None of this was disastrous, but after Churchill’s hyperactive work preparing for a showdown at sea it was very disappointing. He responded by bringing back a man who would nearly destroy him, Lord, or Jack, Fisher, to be First Sea Lord.
More important was the fate of the BEF. This was not the army of keen public-schoolboy lieutenants and scrawny workers of later years, but a highly trained, mobile and wholly professional force. Its shooting was outstanding – when the Germans first met them they thought they were facing machine guns, so fast and accurate was the rifle firing – and it had been thoroughly reorganized after the defeats of the Boer War. It had a large quantity of cavalry but less in proportion than the Germans or French, and British cavalry were trained to dismount and fight as infantry; they were less archaic than the Prussian Uhlans or the French Cuirassiers, with their horsehair-plumed helmets, gleaming breastplates and sabres. On the other hand, they lacked any trench mortars and enough machine guns, usable grenades and high-explosive shells for their scanty artillery.
Above all, the BEF was tiny. It comprised five infantry divisions, against a hundred raised by Germany and sixty-two French divisions. It had one division of cavalry. The German army had twenty-two of them and the French ten. The BEF was slightly smaller than the Belgian army, which had made a brave stand earlier but had collapsed and was now clinging on to a tiny remaining strip of land. As one military historian has pointed out, ‘In August 1914 the BEF held twenty-five miles of the Western Front, the French 300 miles.’71 Criticism of British strategy has to take account of the fact that for most of the war, really until its final stages, the British army was very much the junior partner and had to respond to what the French suffered, hoped for and at times demanded. So although the first encounter, and indeed the second at Le Cateau, shocked and halted General von Kluck’s First Army and demonstrated British skill, when the French fell back, so did the BEF. This became one of the British army’s great retreating successes. Unlike the fallback to Dunkirk, the French and British line he
ld and soon it was the Germans retreating. Much has been made of the failure of the British army to realize that there was a gap in the German line, available for an old-style war-of-manoeuvre push – the last time this happened until after the main slaughter. But communications were terrible and commanders sensibly cautious. With both sides trying desperately to outflank each other, the front quickly extended to the coast. Churchill, absurdly if bravely, had personally seized control of the defence of Antwerp with some sailors but that port fell and the two sides ended up facing one another from just outside Ostend to the Swiss border. The digging began, though the first trenches were paltry scratches in the mud compared with what came later. The machine-gun posts and wire went up. The rain came down, for months. So did the German shells, proving that the enemy was far better equipped with artillery. The world of war had suddenly changed. The consequences would change Britain, as well as continental Europe, for ever.
It is not true that Britain’s war leaders were slow to realize what had happened, and the likely consequences in loss of life. The first attempts at headlong attack had been bloody enough and just before New Year 1915 Churchill wrote to Asquith saying, ‘I think it quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines . . . my impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change – although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on that point . . . Are there not other alternatives to sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’72 Churchill had been converted by his admirer Lord Fisher to the idea of attacking the German sea coast, seizing the Kiel Canal and/or then taking the Russian armies through the Baltic to within a hundred miles of Berlin. Fisher had long dreamed of such a coup, ever since a German general had told him how vulnerable the coast was. He had even talked to the Kaiser about it before the war, who dismissively joked that he would send the Prussian police to arrest the British navy. Undeterred, Fisher had devised, and had built, special shallow-bottomed warships to attack Germany. They were called Courageous, Furious and Glorious, and were so odd that the navy rechristened them Outrageous, Spurious and Uproarious. But Fisher was in deadly earnest and had prepared bombardment plans and had landing craft for the Czar’s soldiers built as well. Churchill, sharing his daring, was profoundly excited by the Baltic plan.