This kind of thinking, however, anticipated events that went far beyond what the Cabinet was ready to consider. If Lloyd George’s new views were correct, there would be no war, and therefore no need to think about flanks and sea power along the French and Belgian coasts. Instead of four more battleships, two would be more than enough—which is the number many in the Cabinet considered reasonable.
That word reasonable was the key. Winston’s opponents never tired of saying that he was unreasonable. He wouldn’t listen to reason, they said; he wouldn’t compromise. He was still too much of the boy, a spoiled child demanding more than he deserved. In the middle of the fight over the new battleships, Lloyd George told his friend George Riddell, “Winston has acted like an extravagant boy placed in possession of a banking account for the first time” (an interesting criticism coming from a man who had recently endangered his career over a financial scandal).10
The Liberal critics of the arms race were right to think that such a buildup defied reason. At the outset Winston had opposed it on the grounds that it did indeed seem unreasonable in the absence of a clear German threat. But all that changed once he perceived that the threat was real. After he had made reasonable overtures to Germany for a “Naval Holiday”—he repeated the offer in October 1913—and the offer was spurned, then he thought it was only reasonable to prepare for war.
There was a terrible, inescapable logic to the problem. If Germany attacked France, if Britain would not allow her to be “crushed,” if a British expeditionary army stood ready to be sent to France, and the Cabinet agreed to send it, then Winston could easily imagine the horrors that would follow in the wake of those developments. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he was left with a clear choice: resign and work for peace at any price, or stay put and prepare for total war. Faced with such options, he followed one of Jacky Fisher’s cherished—and perhaps most reasonable—slogans: “If you fight, fight.”
Lloyd George, however, wanted to fight and not fight. He wanted to defend France if necessary, but not anytime soon. He wanted Britain to have a superior navy, but not too superior. Instead of four battleships or no battleships, he was content to have two. For better or worse, it was otherwise with Winston. If he fought, he fought.
Accordingly, when Winston wrapped up his stay in France, he returned to London with his war paint on. “LG is accustomed to deal with people who can be bluffed and frightened,” he said privately, “but he will not bluff or frighten me! He says that some of the Cabinet will resign. Let them resign!”11
For the next two months he fought for his ships, and everything else of military value that he could squeeze into the Navy Estimates. The cost was enormous. The figures were always in dispute and shifting, but the final sum was over £50 million. But he did what he vowed to do. He held firm against Lloyd George, resisting the Cabinet’s calls for naval economy with the same forcefulness that he had once used against Reggie McKenna’s dreadnoughts. Now the two men had reversed their positions. Reggie was on Lloyd George’s side. “You know I am a big navy man,” Reggie told a friend, “but I am against waste.”12
When the dispute dragged on too long for Asquith’s patience, he put an end to it, handing Winston his four battleships and much else in March, and forcing Lloyd George to accept the agreement or resign. The prime minister felt sure that his chancellor wouldn’t resign, and he was right.
As soon as this battle of the battleships was won, Winston wanted to resume his old friendly relations with Lloyd George. But there was a chill in the chancellor’s attitude toward him now, and a lingering resentment that Winston had prevailed in the Cabinet debate. “Really if it wasn’t for Winston’s affectionate quality and good temper,” Lloyd George later confided to Margot, “I sometimes think I can hardly do with him! . . . He’s as you say, such a child!”13
* * *
Lloyd George’s very public expressions of a conciliatory attitude toward Germany revealed to the British public—and to the German military—the deep opposition within the Cabinet to Churchill’s ambitious plans for the navy. Asquith tried to present something of a united front, but he did so only belatedly, and not very convincingly. Inside the Cabinet, Asquith was almost alone in his support for Winston. In January 1914 an Admiralty civil servant wrote privately, “The fact is the cabinet is sick of Churchill’s perpetually undermining & exploiting its policy and are picking a quarrel with him. As a colleague he is a great trial to them. But their battleground is very ill-chosen as in consequence of their indolence he has probably got chapter & verse for every item of the Naval Programme.”14
After all the political blood spilled over budgets and vetoes, the government was weakened, and vulnerable. Before Germany had a chance to take advantage of this weakness, another well-armed force decided to test the government’s will. As the Home Rule Bill was being thrashed out in 1913–14, Edward Carson and his Ulster Unionists were preparing to show that their talk of civil war had teeth to it. They had shown a genius for organization, raising a 100,000-man militia—the Ulster Volunteer Force—and had endowed the whole movement with a cultish passion for political and religious freedom, with half a million people signing a “Solemn Covenant” to defeat Home Rule and defend Ulster.
In 1914 the force began aggressively trying to arm itself with smuggled rifles. It was not lost on the German military that the outbreak of an insurrection in Ulster would divert British troops and provide a fine opening for a quick Prussian offensive against France. As Lord Haldane recalled in his memoirs, “The Germans appeared to be taking an uncomfortably vivid interest in the troubles of the British Army in Ireland.” The Austrian embassy in London sent a diplomat to Belfast to report on the situation. What he found frightened him. He had no doubt that the Unionists were preparing for an epic fight.
“I found Ulster in a state of feverish ferment,” the Austrian diplomat George Franckenstein recalled after the war. “Ulster’s grim determination to offer armed resistance was brought home to me in Belfast, where I saw Protestant clergy in full canonicals bless the colours of the volunteers to the accompaniment of prayers and hymns. Many thousands of these volunteers . . . marched by with a detachment of nurses, while Carson, his face hewn out of granite, looked the very symbol of unbending resolve, as he towered above the crowd and spoke of their determination to stop at nothing rather than be forced out of the Union.”15
Carson was so “unbending,” and so immersed in his dark dreams of an Ulster bloodbath, that he refused every effort by Asquith to create some amendment to the Home Rule Bill that would make it more acceptable. One proposal was to delay carrying out the law in Ulster for six years, but this produced a howl of indignation. It was nothing more than a “sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years,” said Carson.16
The Ulster Unionists were placing the British government in an impossible position, and if the prime minister had been a stronger, more confrontational figure, he might have chosen this moment to stand up to Carson and to find a way to isolate him. But in this crisis the Cabinet turned to Winston for help. Resented only weeks earlier for his unreasonable demands, he was suddenly the Cabinet’s favorite bulldog to put the Unionist leader in his place. Lloyd George decided that he had been too hard on Winston after all, and he was now inspired to speak warmly to his old friend. “You can make a speech which will ring down the corridors of history,” he told him.
The flattery hit its mark. Churchill gave a speech in the North, at Bradford, that dared the Unionists to back up their threats. “If all the loose, wanton and reckless chatter we have been forced to listen to these many months is in the end to disclose a sinister and revolutionary purpose, then I can only say to you: Let us go forward and put these grave matters to the proof.” He wanted to shame them into retreating, but they held firm. He made the mistake of allowing them to create what the Germans, quietly watching from afar, must have been hoping for—a domestic crisis that was an even greater distraction than before.17
Over the next f
our months the government was utterly absorbed in an effort to subdue the Ulster unrest. Misunderstandings proliferated. Thinking that they were going to be sent to fight the Unionists in Belfast, a few dozen army officers at a camp near Dublin—the Curragh—threatened to resign their commissions, which created fears of widespread mutinies. Believing that supplies of arms and other military equipment in Ulster might be at risk from a sudden attack, Churchill sent destroyers to help move army reinforcements to the area. When the opposition learned of his action, he was subjected to a rhetorical bombardment far out of proportion to what he had done. The Unionists whipped up hate against him as the leader of a secret plot to storm Ulster and institute a “pogrom.” On the basis of rumors alone, Edward Carson sought to portray Churchill as a would-be Ulster czar bent on massacre. He condemned him as “Lord Randolph’s renegade son who wanted to be handed down to posterity as the Belfast butcher.”18
To his critics throughout his career, Churchill always presented a tempting half-finished portrait that they could touch up as desired. With the right brushstrokes and shading they could turn him into a snarling demon capable of any crime. In large part it was the aristocrat in him that so many of his critics couldn’t forgive. It was convenient to ignore the fact that, surrounded by political contemporaries who eagerly accepted grand titles as their just reward, he remained plain Winston for so much of his career. But none of that mattered when one of his detractors was determined to find a mad duke, a strutting prince, or a tyrannical emperor lurking somewhere inside Churchill.
At the height of the Ulster crisis the Fortnightly Review gave this portrait: “Mr. Churchill reminds one more and more of other aristocratic demagogues in history . . . their immense ability, the Claudian insolence of manner, recklessness of speech, and colossal swagger. Courage, eloquence, unbounded self-confidence, limitless ambition, but not an ounce of scruple.”19
As it happened, the threatened civil war over Ulster was merely a long series of uncivil verbal duels. The feud was still raging on June 28, 1914, when that bland London tourist of the autumn was shot down, the victim of another conflict over nationalist aspirations. Just as Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not attracted much attention on his London visit, so now his death was slow to sink into the consciousness of the British public. The reaction of the Tory MP who owned Chequers, Arthur Lee, was typical: “The news that an Austrian archduke (one of so many, and none of them known to us) had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo (which was equally unfamiliar) made little impression upon our minds, apart from the fact that the Court Ball to which we had been looking forward had to be cancelled on account of Court mourning.”20
What did it matter to an empire struggling to avoid civil war if an obscure assassin gunned down an archduke in a Balkan backwater? But, as would soon become clear, this was the opening scene of a long tragedy that would quickly overshadow the Ulster question and leave it to drift back, as Churchill said, “into the mists and squalls of Ireland.” As soon as war was declared, Ulster did indeed fight, but against Germany, along with the rest of the empire.21
XXVI
LAST STAND
It didn’t take long for war to spread. Austria threatened the Serbs, Russia prepared to fight the Austrians, and Germany seemed hostile to almost everyone except the Austrians. The ultimatums flew, the elder statesmen huddled and spoke in hushed tones, armies mobilized, the battleships of the Royal Navy steamed out to sea, and anxious vigils were held as deadlines loomed. Lusting for conquest and nursing obscure grievances, Germany had been looking for an excuse to fight and now had found it, supporting Austria against the Russian czar and his ally in the West, the French.
As Winston had predicted, the British couldn’t abide the possibility of a French defeat, and the German decision to attack France through the neutral territory of Belgium made it easy to join the fight. In London, on the warm evening of August 4, 1914, Churchill waited in the Admiralty, his eye fixed on the clock. Germany had until eleven that night to answer the British demand that Belgium’s neutrality be respected.
The minutes ticked away, no answer came, and at eleven he heard through an open window the chimes of Big Ben striking. “As the first stroke of the hour boomed out,” he recalled, “a rustle of movement swept across the room. The war telegram, which meant ‘Commence hostilities against Germany,’ was flashed to the ships.”1
Still only thirty-nine, Winston was now at the center of a world war, with a heavy responsibility for the largest navy in the world, and a duty to protect the shores of his island nation. It had taken him only thirteen years to rise from a parliamentary backbencher to one of the top posts in an empire at war. After all the struggles, after all the political fights and name-calling, he now had the chance to change the course of world history, and to prove the worth of his heroic view of life.
At this dramatic moment a figure out of his past wrote him an encouraging note. It was someone who knew all too well how much his success meant to him, and how long he had waited for it. On August 10, Pamela Lytton wrote him, “I think you must feel your dreams and capabilities are all fulfilled today by your position as head of England’s Navy, and of England’s naval battles in this greatest war.”2
In the early days of the war many in Britain assumed that it would end in a few months, and that the best commanders would come home covered in glory. How could it be otherwise for a powerful empire with a long tradition of military greatness? The idea that the war would resemble a kind of sporting event was so pervasive that the brutality of it was easily overshadowed at the start by thrilling fantasies of rivers crossed, towns overrun, and soldiers captured after relatively bloodless charges and stealthy maneuvers. Like gentlemen prizefighters, some British strategists seemed to think they would win on points, forcing the Kaiser’s surrender by completely outsmarting the much larger German army. While superior British troops drove the invaders from the battlefield, the Royal Navy would make quick work of the German fleet and set up a punishing blockade. Or so many in Britain hoped as they watched the “summer war” begin.
At the Admiralty, Winston enjoyed an enormous advantage, for this was his hour—the arrival of the war he had seen coming, and had prepared himself to fight, whether by land, sea, or air. He couldn’t suppress his excitement, and this unsettled some of those around him, who thought he shouldn’t be so pleased to wage war.
Others rejoiced that Winston had worked so hard to make sure that a strong navy could command the seas. One of his unexpected admirers was the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, who gave no hint of irony when he said in September 1914, “God has put us on an island, and Winston has given us a navy, and it would be absurd to neglect those advantages.”3
At the outset Churchill found the challenge exhilarating, though he knew it meant death and destruction for so many. “Everything tends towards catastrophe & collapse,” he wrote Clemmie. “I am interested, geared-up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me.”4
A telling moment came during the Cabinet debates over whether to go to war. On August 1, Lewis Harcourt—who had been arguing in earlier months that Britain was unlikely to fight on the Continent—noted with amazement and disgust in his journal, “Churchill wants to mobilise the whole navy: very violent.” Faced with German armies preparing to invade Belgium, Churchill was indeed “violent,” and Harcourt was so removed from the realities of the crisis that he couldn’t understand why.5
For the British, what would help to turn the war into such a long and bitter slog was the halfhearted way in which Harcourt, Lloyd George, Asquith, and other Liberals threw the nation into the fight and then failed for so long to pursue it vigorously. In the beginning they seemed to regard the war as a subcontracted affair—nice work for the military but not much of a business to occupy them. Ten days after the war began, Churchill’s Cabinet rival Reggie McKenna was spending his Saturday playing golf and complaining sourly to a friend that Winston was getting to
o much attention at the Admiralty. “He talks well,” Reggie said of Churchill, “but has never done anything big.” He continued in this vein for some time, completely blind to the irony that he was golfing while Churchill was hard at work as First Lord.
One of the few Cabinet members who had the good sense to resign after admitting that he had no desire to prosecute a war was old John Morley. He had long outstayed his welcome in politics and was ready to retire, and he wasn’t afraid to oppose the decision to go to war. To Winston, he gave a forthright explanation of his position: “I should be no use in a War Cabinet. I should only hamper you. If we have to fight, we must fight with single-hearted conviction. There is no place for me in such affairs.”6
The prime minister was more like Morley than he would have wanted to admit. His decision to vote for war served only to illustrate how wise his colleague was to resign, and how wrong he was to stay. For, once the fighting started, Asquith began to grow increasingly disengaged from it, and he would spend hours each day writing to young Venetia Stanley for comfort and diversion. Though she was thirty-five years his junior, he had developed a passion for her that grew ever stronger in the early months of the war. A typical letter to her in this period ended with the words “Most dear—never more dear—I love you with heart & soul.”
He knew little of war, and what he knew came mostly from books. He was never going to embarrass himself by appearing happy or violent at a Cabinet meeting, but he was also not going to fight the war with conviction and purpose—not to mention daring. In the hectic and crucial first weeks of the fighting, the prime minister was often absorbed in his old routine of attending dinner parties, giving speeches, and taking naps after drinking too much. One day in September, while Lord Kitchener—the new head of the War Office—and Churchill were immersed in battle plans, Asquith was in a deep sleep, lost in a dream about Venetia and the pleasures of other worlds. “After I had slept a little,” he wrote her, “or rather dreamt over your dear letter in a kind of Kubla Khan mood, I again confronted stern realities in the shape of Kitchener & Winston—the latter just returned from his flying & secret visit to [Admiral] Jellicoe somewhere in the North of Scotland.”7
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