Asquith and the War - Clark PDF

# HOPE AND GLORY ## The Politics of War - There are potent literary evocations, ranging from Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) to L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), of a blissful Edwardian garden party, a golden age of peace and prosperity, suddenly brought to an end in A...

# HOPE AND GLORY ## The Politics of War - There are potent literary evocations, ranging from Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) to L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), of a blissful Edwardian garden party, a golden age of peace and prosperity, suddenly brought to an end in August 1914. - For a small elite, whose double privilege it was to enjoy unfettered amenities before Armageddon and to provide the junior officer corps for the impending slaughter, it is surely understandable that subsequent reminiscence was to carry a heavy freight of nostalgia. - Their experience, however, was not the whole story. - For most people in Britain life was hard in 1914. - The burst in emigration was one testimony. - Social reforms now alleviated some of the terrors of old age, sickness and unemployment - an incremental gain in welfare at a cost of 10 per cent of a Budget that touched £200 million in 1914. - The purchasing power of wages, which had been rising as prices fell in the late nineteenth century, faltered in its advance once prices started to rise in the mid-1890s. - Nobody supposes that average real wages fell; the older statistics show that they were exactly the same in 1914 as in 1895, and recalculations suggest that there may even have been some improvement. - This tallies with other indications that nutrition and physical welfare were now steadily improving for the population in general. - The cost of living, however, rose by 20 per cent in twenty years, sometimes outstripping the annual rise in money wages (notably in 1905-7) with unsettling effects on wage bargaining. - Indeed the sharp cost-of-living increases from 1910 to 1913 brought a rash of strikes on a scale not seen since the 1890s. - In 1912 40 million days were lost through strikes, notably a national coal dispute which was eventually settled through Government intervention - a sign of the times. - But this 'labour unrest', unlike the Ulster crisis, had subsided by 1914. ## WAIT AND SEE, 1908-16 - The pre-war years, while hardly seeing 'the strange death of Liberal England', were not trouble-free. - It was the direction from which trouble came in the summer of 1914 that was unexpected. - In H. G. Wells's Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), its hero stood representative of all those who were 'mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of the possibility of a war with Germany'. - Sarajevo suddenly became a city to find on the map, with the assassination there of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand igniting a powder trail across Europe that, by 1 August, faced Asquith's cabinet with an unpalatable decision: whether to support France (and Russia) against the Central Powers (the Habsburg and German Empires). - Alliances had pulled the continental powers into conflict; Britain was not committed. - True, there was an Entente with France, and military talks had taken place between the two general staffs; there was also an understanding between the fleets. - These were only contingency plans. - If they were not implemented, however, France would be vulnerable, creating an obligation of honour which weighed heavy on Grey as Foreign Secretary. - Grey worked hard for peace in the last days but he had become bound to France more closely than he cared to admit; though those members of the cabinet who later accused him of misleading them - the Lord Chancellor, Loreburn, spoke of a Liberal Imperialist plot - must have been wilfully myopic not to see the implications of facts which they all knew. - The fact is that the drift of opinion in the cabinet was quite inadequately conveyed by the conventional divisions between 'Liberal Imperialists', in support of a strong foreign policy, and 'Radicals' against it. - Lloyd George, though he continued trying to trim the naval estimates, had shown in the 1911 Agadir crisis - the Kaiser had sent a gunboat to Morocco - that he was quite ready to face up to German pretensions. - It was Lloyd George's Mansion House speech, agreed with Grey, which publicly declared the position of His Majesty's Government. - Churchill was no longer the 'economist' of 1908; he was now a free-spending First Lord of the Admiralty, determined that the mighty British fleet should retain its historic supremacy. - The old pro-Boers whom Lloyd George consulted in August 1914 - C. P. Scott hopped on the train from Manchester - were unable to count on their man any more for the peace party. - In the end only two cabinet ministers resigned when Britain declared war on Germany: the old Lib-Lab John Burns and the aged biographer of Gladstone, John Morley. - Whatever other factors disposed towards British intervention, what brought almost all Liberals round to supporting the war was the German invasion of Belgium. - Serbia was belatedly seized upon as a small nation rightly struggling to be free - Lloyd George was to make a speech about how much the world owed to 'the little 5-foot-5 nations' - but it was Belgium which immediately fitted this familiar paradigm. - The point was that a war on behalf of Belgium was not seen as an assertion of realpolitik in the national interest, which Conservatives would have supported anyway, but a struggle of right and wrong in the Gladstonian tradition. - Radicals, whose readiness to resist public obloquy their pro-Boer stand had testified, and who had long stood accused of being anti-British, were persuaded that this time it was, for once, their own country that was in the right. - It was to be a Liberal professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, who wrote the classic defence of Grey's foreign policy in 1915. - It may have made an anti-war protestor like Bertrand Russell angry, and left the sceptical Shaw unmoved, but it tapped a rich vein of Liberal self-righteousness, which, stage by stage, helped to invest war-making and peace-making with high moral objectives. - It is not at all odd, therefore, that the most impassioned call for patriotic sacrifice came from Lloyd George in his first public utterance of the war at the Queen's Hall in London in September 1914. - The Labour movement, too, despite much pre-war rhetoric about the international solidarity of the working class, generally supported the Government's decision to go to the aid of Belgium. - This is not surprising since the Gladstonian tradition was part of the progressive ideology that encompassed Liberals and Labour, so that they split over the war on much the same lines. - Ramsay MacDonald, who, very much the progressive in outlook, had debated whether to accept a cabinet post only a few months previously, now resigned as Labour leader in the Commons and was to work with Liberal critics of Grey's foreign policy in setting up the Union of Democratic Control, aimed at securing peace in future through international cooperation. - The trade unionist Arthur Henderson took over from MacDonald, becoming uniquely powerful in shaping his party's destiny during the war years. - Labour support for the war was obviously more readily forthcoming under a Liberal than a Conservative Government. - The prime minister kept so far as possible to the methods that had served him well in peacetime. - His only immediate concession was to find a new Secretary of State for War - he had held the post himself since the fiasco at the Curragh in the august person of Lord Kitchener. - This was the stern visage, all brass hat and mustachios, which was to stare out from the recruiting posters: pointing the finger at potential volunteers. - Since the cabinet was clearly an unsuitable body to determine strategy, this meant that Kitchener's control of the war effort went virtually unchallenged. - A War Council was set up, which took over the secretariat that had served the Committee of Imperial Defence, as established by Balfour back in 1902; indeed not only did the War Council inherit Colonel Maurice Hankey from the CID as its secretary, it also took on Balfour as a member - the only Unionist directly enlisted in the war effort. - The slogan, 'Business As Usual', was coined by Churchill, but exemplified by Asquith. - Asquith's conception of the war was traditional. - For a couple of centuries Britain's role in continental wars had been to leave most of the fighting to the mass armies of her allies while acting as paymaster; the preservation of her economic and financial resources was thus crucial. - This was a highly rational model, which, through two World Wars, greatly profited the USA as 'the arsenal of democracy". - But how far was such a strategy any longer available to the United Kingdom? - Unusually, Kitchener predicted the likelihood of a war that could last for years, with a need for millions of men. - His 'new armies' were thrust into the breach, since the sector of the western front assigned to Britain, though perhaps commensurate with the relative French and British populations, was clearly beyond the capacity of the puny British Expeditionary Force of trained soldiers, even when reinforced by the Territorial Army of part-time reservists that Haldane had created. - Volunteers came flooding in, at a rate which took the authorities aback. - The problem was training and supplying them, not finding them. - They were reinforced too by troops from the Empire. - Australia and New Zealand sent troops altogether out of proportion to their population; Canada came in to the war despite internal divisions in Quebec; and so, more remarkably, did the Boer-led Government of South Africa, where General Smuts emerged as a key figure. - The appalling losses on the western front - they were still higher on the eastern front - soon provided a chilling rebuff to many of the easy assumptions of August 1914. - The prospect of a quick breakthrough on either side was poor. - In this context the War Council came up with a plan to switch the attack to another theatre and to bring the Royal Navy into play. - The defensive role of the Navy was to protect British shipping routes and in this it was generally successful, at least against surface attack. - The only full-scale naval engagement was to be the inconclusive encounter at Jutland in May 1916; and the Kaiser's claims of a famous victory by his High Seas Fleet were belied by the fact that it never again put to sea. - But if the British were able to secure their essential defensive objective, the Royal Navy found more difficulty in securing an offensive advantage. - This is where the ill-fated plan for naval action to take the Dardanelles, at the mouth of the Black Sea, went badly wrong, committing Imperial forces to a futile battle at Gallipoli. - British and Australian troops bore the brunt of the carnage. - Churchill's dream of finding an alternative strategy thus became ensnared by compromise, muddle and indecision, which was hardly his sole responsibility - but more his than that of the men who perished at Gallipoli. - It was not the Admiralty crisis alone which prompted the reconstruction of the Government; allegations in the press that the British Army in France faced a shell shortage forced Asquith's hand. - As in previous crises, he showed that he was still the master and that Lloyd George was still his principal adjutant. - Together they disposed of the offices in a new administration, including the Unionists. - This was hardly an equal coalition; Law was only given the Colonial Office and Liberals continued to hold all the top jobs, including the Treasury, which went to Reginald McKenna. - Lloyd George's move to the new Ministry of Munitions was the big change. - He threw himself into the task of improvising a better supply structure by doing deals with the armaments industry and vastly extending state intervention through munitions factories under his own control. - He became the apostle of state intervention, finding allies where he could. - The new Minister of Munitions went so far as to say: 'We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is drink.' - The real drink problem at the time was not beer but spirits. - The peak year had been 1900, when 25 million gallons of proof spirits were consumed in England and Wales (well over a gallon for each adult) and over 8 million gallons in Scotland (well over three gallons per head). - Despite a slightly rising population, these totals had dropped by 1913 to under 17 million and under 6 million gallons respectively. - It was the War that gave a temporary boost, as war workers spilled their earnings. - Lloyd George's temperance supporters, thwarted by the Lords before the War, saw their chance in 1915. - Not only was beer watered in strength but the hours of licensed premises were regulated. - In London, for example, pubs were henceforth open only from 12 noon to 2.30 p.m. and from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m. - The immediate objective was achieved; in Great Britain consumption of spirits in 1918 was only 40 per cent of its pre-war level, and little more than a quarter of the levels of 1900. - The effects, moreover, were long-term. - Despite a temporary post-war boost, these levels of consumption were to remain normal until the 1960s; and the distinctive British licensing hours, with compulsory afternoon closing, were set for the next seventy years. - The coalition had been formed partly to blunt press criticism of the Government. - In getting rid of Haldane, the architect of an efficient army, in face of grotesque allegations that he was pro-German, Asquith sacrificed not only an old friend but also an old friendship. - The press attacks continued regardless, but on a more selective basis. - Lloyd George was the one Liberal who was exempt: a mark of the fact that his position was now much more sympathetic to Unionists who generally favoured belligerent measures. - It was in the summer of 1915 that the prime minister lost Lloyd George's confidence. 'Wait and see was an excellent precept for peace,' **he now said privately**. 'But in war it is leading us straight to destruction.' - The great divisive issue was conscription. - Many Unionists had favoured it anyway, as a means of state-building which marched alongside a policy of national economy and tariffs. - The needs of the new armies converted many more, who wondered aloud why the flower of British manhood should perish while men at home failed to do their patriotic duty. - In fact there was no absolute shortage of volunteer recruits. - The real case for conscription was a matter of logistics - to implement manpower priorities which would prevent essential civilian workers from joining up and keep them on the job in factories and mines. - This was not, however, the emotional level on which the issue was approached in the winter of 1915-16. - Instead Asquith exhausted every tactic of dissimulation to appease Tory demands while simultaneously appeasing Liberal consciences. - He encouraged Lord Derby, 'the King of Lancashire', to come up with a scheme that ostensibly preserved the voluntary principle, by getting men to attest their willingness to serve, while assuring the married men that none who attested would be taken until the single men had gone, and then telling single men who had not attested that they were 'deemed' to have attested. - The Derby scheme was laughable or despicable, according to taste. - Conscription was finally introduced in Great Britain (not Ireland) at the beginning of 1916. - It was Asquith's final essay in consensus. - In 1914 the parties had called an electoral truce; they agreed to give an unopposed return to the party in possession at by-elections. - But politics did not stop just because some peacetime quarrels were shelved. - Labour issues, for example, were as crucial as ever, once a war of production gave a wholly new leverage to the trade unions. - **The key issue was whether the unions would permit the 'dilution' of their position by allowing less skilled workers to do some of the jobs without the traditional union ticket.** - These working practices, called 'protective' by the unions and 'restrictive' by the employers, maintained a 'closed shop' under union control. - This was the problem which Lloyd George addressed in the Treasury Agreements, early in 1915, securing concessions from the trade unions on 'dilution' but strictly on the understanding that the restrictive practices would be restored at the end of the war. - This was a considerable victory for the trade unions, whose leaders patriotically responded to the nation's needs - but on their own terms. - In all these ways the conduct of the war became the stuff of politics. - It was on this protean issue, not on pre-existing rivalries or ideological divergence, that the working alliance between Asquith and Lloyd George came unstuck. - By the end of 1916 Lloyd George was ready to make a bid for control of the war effort - not initially for the premiership, but stating terms for the establishment of a small war committee, excluding Asquith, which would have made a mockery of his position. - The crisis of December 1916 found Asquith less steady on his feet - allegations about his drinking now dogged 'Old Squiffy' - and one sign of the toll of a long premiership was that he overestimated his own following. - When he backtracked on a compromise with Lloyd George, Asquith found himself displaced. - Their partnership had been the axis of the Government for the past eight years and the mainspring of Liberal success; their vendetta over the next six years was to push the Liberal Party to the edge of the grave. # The Man Who Won the War ## 1916-22 ### THE WESTERN FRONT - We often speak of the First World War to distinguish it from the Second. - Yet it was as early as 1920, in a book by Colonel Charles à Court Repington, The Times war correspondent, that this term was first given currency. - Repington was stressing the unprecedented worldwide dimensions of a war that spread to Africa, where the German colonies were taken; to the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire was the enemy; and to Asia, where Japan had been Britain's ally since 1902. - Yet not only the origin but the main theatre of the war lay in Europe. - It was here that most of the troops from the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand fought, initially as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), leaving the Indian Army to play a crucial role in the Middle East. - The western front, running from the Belgian coast, between Ostend and Dunkirk, winding across Flanders and France to the Swiss border, was settled by the end of 1914 and was to change little until 1918. - So stable was the line that London stationers found it worth while to stock maps showing it. - The trenches symbolized this war: a stage in the development of military technology in which defence had temporarily triumphed over offence, stacking the odds against attack. - To gain even a few hundred metres of ground produced casualties on a scale never before seen in Europe (though the American Civil War had given a glimpse of the future). - The term contemporaries generally used was the Great War. - From an early point the recruiting propaganda projected the stance into the future, asking women: 'When the War is over and someone asks your husband or your son what he did in the great War, is he to hang his head because you would not let him go?' - A classic poster shows a pensive father dandling his embarrassingly interlocutive offspring: 'Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?' This projection into the future, attempting to represent the potential projected stance of the future, is what, for most people, it is.