The Antwerp affair widened the breach. It was in the month of October, after a time of rout, bad losses, and fading hopes. The Battle of the Marne had started, but the French were still in retreat all across the littered and smoking front. Protecting the Allied left flank, the Belgian Army already had capitulated at Liege and Namur but was holding out at Antwerp, which the Germans had been ordered to take at any cost. To prevent this, 8000 men of the Royal Naval Division had been rushed to bolster up the sagging lines. These and other problems vexed Churchill as he rode on a train between London and Dover, heading for Dunkirk and his exuberant Circus. In mid-flight a very emphatic telegram from Kitchener put an abrupt end to his visit. As if taking no chances, the telegram ordered train, First Lord and all back to London. Then, at a meeting in his home, Kitchener explained that Churchill was urgently needed in Belgium, to lend “moral support in a vital and deteriorating situation.” “Nobody but you can provide the necessary spark to stem the tide,” the field marshal said in effect. Churchill agreed instantly and left before morning. A number of reports exist that touch on both his departure and his arrival at the scene.
From Mr. Asquith’s memoirs comes the following notation: “I was away but Grey [the Foreign Secretary], Kitchener and Winston held a late meeting and, I fancy with Grey’s rather reluctant consent, the intrepid Winston set off at midnight and ought to have reached Antwerp at about nine o’clock this morning. He will go straightaway and see the Belgian Ministers; Sir John French is making preparation to send assistance by way of Lille. I have had a talk with K. this morning and we are both rather anxiously awaiting Winston’s report. I do not know how fluent he is in French, but if he was able to do himself justice in a foreign tongue the Beiges will have listened to a discourse the like of which they have never heard before. I cannot but think that he will stiffen them up.”
Churchill’s arrival was one of the high lights of the war. It was ably described by the American correspondent, E. Alexander Powell. “At one o’clock that afternoon,” he wrote, “a big drab-coloured touring-car, filled with British naval officers, drove down the Place de Mer, its horn sounding a hoarse warning, took the turn into the Marché-aux-Souliers on two wheels, and drew up in front of the hotel. Before the car had fairly come to a stop, the door of the tonneau was thrown violently open and out jumped a smooth-faced, sandy-haired, stoop-shouldered, youthful-looking man in undress Trinity House [a sailors’ fraternity] uniform ...
“As he charged into the packed lobby he flung his arms out, in a nervous characteristic gesture, as though pushing his way through a crowd. It was a most spectacular entrance, and reminded me for all the world of a scene in a melodrama where the hero dashes up bare-headed on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine, or the old homestead, or the family fortune, as the case may be.”
Asquith’s speculation about Churchill’s linguistic skill was not entirely idle. When the First Lord rushed in to confront the Belgian ministers, one of them, pointing to his peculiar uniform, asked what he was. In attempting to explain that he had been made an elder brother of Trinity House, he said, “Je suis le frère âiné de la Trinité.” Confused as they were, the Belgians got the impression that Churchill was announcing his divinity, and they spoke more softly. When the French group arrived, it was suggested that perhaps he had better converse in English. But he insisted on sticking to his French and sailed into a stirring and garbled summation of the crisis. When it was over, the Frenchmen quietly conferred for a moment, obviously moved, and then sent one of their subordinates across the room for a translation.
The language problem was finally ironed out, and Churchill, in his excitement, decided to withdraw from the Admiralty and plunge personally into the land fighting. He therefore got off a telegram to the Prime Minister, saying: “If it is thought by H. M. Government that I can be of service here, I am willing to resign my office and undertake command of all relieving and defensive forces assigned to Antwerp in conjunction with Belgian Army, provided that I am given necessary military rank and authority, and full powers of a commander of a detached force in the field ...”
Asquith turned down this impulsive offer, wearily noting in his memoirs that “Winston is an ex-lieutenant of Hussars and would, if his proposal had been accepted, have been in command of two distinguished major-generals not to mention brigadiers, colonels, etc., while the Navy were only contributing their little brigades.”
The refusal did not prevent Churchill from taking full command. One of his old Harrovian contemporaries, Lord Mottistone, who had been sent to the scene as an observer by Sir John French, the British commander-in-chief, afterward wrote, “From the moment I arrived, it was apparent that the whole business was in Winston’s hands. He dominated the whole place — the King, Ministers, soldiers, sailors. So great was his influence that I am convinced that with 20,000 British troops he could have held Antwerp against almost any onslaught.”
And speaking of the naval brigade, Sir Ian Hamilton, also on the spot, added, “Churchill handled them as if he were Napoleon and they were the Old Guard, [flinging] them right into the enemy’s opening jaws.”
The outcome of the Antwerp incident, and Churchill’s part in it, have been a matter of controversy for more than thirty years. He was accused of a reckless, even a wanton, expenditure of lives to no purpose. The fact that he had recently been studying Napoleon was pointed out as significant by his critics. Had the city’s defense successfully held off the Germans, he would doubtless have been feted as a savior, and welcomed in triumph back to London. But the oncoming hordes were too powerful, and at last, after five days of titanic effort, the Allies gave way. As they did so, part of one naval brigade was trapped and interned in Holland for the rest of the war. What is largely overlooked is that the Belgians, together with their main British support, were able to fight backward along the coast, opening sluices and flooding the country so thoroughly that the Germans were sealed off from the Channel ports. Also, a sizable English army had time to rush up and engage the enemy at Ypres, where a major battle was fought, in which cooks, batmen, and other supernumeraries helped hold the lines fast. Students of the war now agree that, without the five days’ delaying action at Antwerp, the Hun would quickly have swept on and been in a position to strike at England.
Notwithstanding, Churchill came in for the usual stinging censure. It is a curious truth that, all his life, something about him, his mood of truculence, an excess of vigor, his defiant scowl, have aroused antagonism in people almost automatically. They rally around happily to bait him, as the townsfolk of Pamplona appear annually in the streets to bait the season’s bulls. This has been deplored by the less thoughtful among his friends. Actually, the public’s unseemly attentions to Churchill are a compliment of very rare quality: weaklings are tormented but never baited; only championship class attracts the best opposition.
The results of his next ruckus gave Churchill a chance to exercise all of his champion’s powers. Over the vociferous protests of his side-kick, Lord Fisher, he invented an intricate scheme to force the Dardanelles, detach Turkey from the Central Powers, win over the Balkan States, and pave the way for a sweeping Russian victory in the east. It was his blueprint for smothering the war early, a “back-door” attack on the enemy. Fisher had at first been in favor of the plan; then he veered around to oppose it. He was a testy and unpredictable but effective man. All of these traits were manifest in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, when two of Germany’s best ships, the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, were destroyed along with several smaller cruisers. It was due to Fisher that the English cruisers Inflexible and Invincible were refitted and at sea in time to tackle the enemy. He had directed the dock people, at Devon-port, to have the ships out in three days. “It will take the laborers a week to finish the brickwork on the boilers,” they telegraphed him. The First Sea Lord’s unemotional reply was that, if the workmen were not finished in three days, they could put the bricks aboard the cruisers and sail with them. Without benefit of ent
ertainment units or further begging from the government, they finished in two days and a half.
Fisher’s and Churchill’s hours did not precisely coincide. In these years the First Lord was working a comparatively normal day; Fisher preferred to start at 3 A.M. and continue without interruption until 3 P.M. To preserve the peace, Churchill accommodated his hours to the Sea Lord’s eccentric ones, and he has never since shaken off his acquired habit of working at night.
Fisher’s pique over the Dardanelles can be ascribed in part to the fact that he had a similar plan of his own. In a contest of wills, the results were inevitable: Fisher found that he was, in fact and in spirit, second in command. In the beginning, Kitchener, too, was in accord with Churchill’s stratagem, but he was against using troops to support the naval action. After lengthy talks by the Cabinet, it was agreed to proceed, using the oldest ships in the Fleet, supported by the long-range guns of the new superdreadnought, Queen Elizabeth. Churchill rode over all further objections and the catastrophe got under way, on March 18, 1915.
It was not long in taking form. While entering the straits, Admiral de Robeck, commanding the assault group, ran into trouble in the form of a mine field and lost three battleships. This was a heavy blow, but there were more to follow. To the amazement of the Turks and Germans, he broke off the action. In the light of postwar reports, he chose an extraordinarily bad time to do it, for the enemy were all but out of ammunition. “The Turkish gun crews were demoralized and even the German officers present had, apparently, little hope of successful resistance if the Fleet attacked next day,” says the official British history of the war, prepared by men not necessarily friendly to Churchill. In London, the First Lord assembled his “Admiralty War Group” and showed them a telegram instructing De Robeck to renew the action. It was never sent; Fisher and the other admirals refused to overrule the man on the spot. This can now be seen only as a very great pity. After the war, the able German general at the Dardanelles, Liman von Sanders, wrote, “If the orders given at that moment had been carried out, the course of the world war would have changed after the spring of 1915, and Germany and Austria would have been constrained to continue the fight alone.”
Now followed a disastrous lull in the campaign, during which it was decided to bolster the naval thrust with a troop attack on nearby Gallipoli. By the time the soldiers arrived, the Turks had dug trenches, thrown up barbed wire, and made other preparations. And at the critical moment, Fisher ordered the Queen Elizabeth home. This drew a frenzied protest from Kitchener, who charged that the Navy was “deserting” the Army. The whole effort became tangled up in a many-sided quarrel, which was not helped by a secret note that Fisher disloyally sent to Asquith, saying, “I desire to convey to you that I honestly feel that I cannot remain where I am much longer, as there is an inevitable drain daily (almost hourly) on the resources in the decisive theatre of the war.
“But that is not the worst. Instead of the whole time of the whole of the Admiralty being concentrated on the daily increasing submarine menace in home waters, we are all diverted to the Dardanelles, and the unceasing activities of the First Lord, both day and night, are engaged in ceaseless prodding of everyone in every department afloat and ashore in the interest of the Dardanelles Fleet, with the result of the huge Armada now there, whose size is sufficiently indicated by their having as many battleships out there as in the German High Seas Fleet! Therefore this purely private and personal letter, intended for your eye alone and not to be quoted, as there is no use threatening without acting, is to mention to the one person who I feel ought to know that I feel that my time is short.”
Whatever his grievances, Fisher’s methods were those of a schoolboy tattling on a companion. In any case, his companion went ahead with the eastern campaign. After being bullied and badgered, Kitchener dispatched the 29th Division to reinforce the Gallipolian army, but the paper work was so faulty that the unit was obliged to go first to Egypt in order to sort out its stores. On June 7, Churchill had made a speech in Dundee that was injudicious from a security standpoint; he said of the Dardanelles campaign, “There never was a great subsidiary operation of war which a more complete harmony of strategic, political and economic advantages has combined, or which stood in truer relation to the main decision which is in the central theatre. Through the narrows of the Dardanelles, and across the ridges of the Gallipoli Peninsula, lie some of the shortest paths to triumphant peace.”
Before this address, which was widely printed, the Turks had not judged that the British Army in their area would be reinforced and the fight continued. General Liman von Sanders said afterward that the speech helped him “to realize that the British attacks would surely be resumed with increasing violence.” He and the Turks accordingly hastened to increase their defenses, and the ensuing actions provide one of the goriest chapters in the ugly and unending history of war. The total British casualties reached 205,000; those of the French were 47,000. The British dead, English, Australian, and New Zealand officers and men, amounted to 43,000. One of these young unfortunates, a splendid veteran of Churchill’s naval force at Antwerp, the poet Rupert Brooke, spent the last few weeks of his life in the alien land to which the Admiralty had dispatched him recording his metric impressions for posterity:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Churchill countered with a well-composed obituary: “He expected to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.”
The sad and straggling remnants of the Army and the Navy were evacuated from Gallipoli and the Dardanelles; Fisher resigned his post with angry words; and the public’s wrath rose up in a terrible storm, whose epicenter was Churchill. New Zealand and Australia, with a frightful loss of their best youths, were especially bitter. In the official Australian history of the war, an account of the campaign ends, “So through a Churchill’s excess of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.”
Politically, the aftermath was swift and destructive. The Tories, thirsting for Churchill’s blood, were able to force a Coalition Government, and the tempestuous First Lord was removed from his post. A visitor calling at the Admiralty has said that he found Churchill slumped over at his desk, broken-hearted. “This,” the fallen idol was quoted as saying, “is what I live for,” waving toward the charts on the walls. “Yes, I am finished in respect of all I care for — the waging of the war, the defeat of the Germans.”
In company with Rupert Brooke, Churchill himself was among the early casualties.
Chapter 20
ONE MORNING in December 1915 I fell in with the I Transport Officer in the unsavory courtyard of the farm which housed the Battalion H.Q. of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, and in exchanging rumors he told me as a fact that almost immediately Winston Churchill was coming to take over the Battalion.”
The writer of those words — a “Captain X” — went on to say that, hearing the rumor, he agreed and then added that Lord Curzon would probably be made transport officer. He was about to offer a few mo
re predictions of a similar nature — Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George, and the Duke of Norfolk had been named mess attendants, and so on — when he began to suspect from his informant’s “unquenchable solemnity that he might after all be making an essay in the truth.”
It was the truth all right. Churchill was at last taking the field as the logical successor to, the lineal descendant of, the mighty Marlborough. Stepping from the debris of his shattered career, he had asked for a command at the front. After being deposed at the Admiralty, he had been given a token ministry, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but he was excluded from the War Council, the influential group of policy-makers. So he declared in favor of active service.
A friend of Churchill’s has described his leave-taking, as reported by British biographer Lewis Broad: “The household was upside down as he completed his preparations. Downstairs his faithful secretary, Eddie (later Sir Edward) Marsh, was in tears, upstairs Lady Randolph was in despair at the thought of her brilliant son leaving for the trenches, their discomforts and their danger. Mrs. Churchill alone remained calm.”
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 27