Authors: Alan Moorehead
These then were the arguments which Churchill used among his colleagues, and up to the middle of January there appears to have been no dispute. Kitchener was satisfied because none of his
soldiers, except a few who were to be employed as landing parties, were to be engaged. Grey, the Foreign Secretary, saw great political prospects. Arthur Balfour said it was difficult to imagine a
more useful operation. The Russians on hearing of the plan spoke of the possibility of sending troops to support it, and the French offered four battleships with their auxiliaries to serve under
Carden’s command.
Towards the end of the month the enterprise was fairly under way; the ammunition was assembled, the final instructions drafted, and from as far away as the China station ships were under orders
to proceed to the Mediterranean. It was arranged that the whole armada should gather in the Ægean Sea in the neighbourhood of the island of Lemnos at the end of the first week in February.
All that was needed was the final approval of the War Council, and the action would begin.
It was at this point that a new and wholly unexpected factor came into the scene: Fisher turned against the whole design. His motives for doing this were so unusual that one can only hope to
understand them—and the famous quarrel that followed—by recalling the strange position into which they had all drifted at this
time. It is as strange in some ways
as any of the inner manœuvrings of the Russian Government at the present day.
On the outbreak of war a War Council had been formed, and it consisted of the Prime Minister (Asquith), the Lord Chancellor (Lord Haldane), the Secretary of State for War (Lord Kitchener), the
Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lloyd George), the Foreign Minister (Sir Edward Grey), the Secretary of State for India (Lord Crewe) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill). Fisher and
Sir James Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, also attended the meetings to give their technical advice, Lieut.-Colonel Hankey was the secretary, and there were others who were
called in from time to time. Ostensibly this body as a whole was responsible for the higher conduct of the war. In fact, it was dominated by three men—Asquith, Churchill and
Kitchener—and of these three Kitchener was incomparably the most powerful. Churchill himself summed up the position when he came to give evidence to the Dardanelles Commission in 1916:
‘Lord Kitchener’s personal qualities and position,’ he said, ‘played at this time a very great part in the decision of events. His prestige and authority were immense. He
was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council. Everyone had the greatest admiration for his character, and everyone felt fortified, amid the terrible and incalculable events of
the opening months of the war, by his commanding presence. When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the cabinet, in
any military matter, great or small. No single unit was ever sent or withheld contrary, not merely to his agreement, but to his advice. Scarcely anyone ever ventured to argue with him in Council.
Respect for the man, sympathy for him in his immense labours, confidence in his professional judgment, and the belief that he had plans deeper and wider than any we could see, silenced misgivings
and disputes, whether in the Council or at the War Office. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.’
Twenty-five years were to elapse before such a figure, in
Winston Churchill himself, was to reappear in England; and it is even doubtful if Churchill in the
nineteen-forties enjoyed quite the same prestige, the air of almost infallible right and might, which Kitchener possessed during these winter months in 1915 when the country had still not recovered
from the first shock of the war. Kitchener was not only thought to be as resolute as Churchill later became in the Battle of Britain; he really knew, people felt, precisely how he was going to win
the war. The famous poster of the Field Marshal with the pointing finger and the legend ‘Your country needs Y
OU
’ was, possibly, the most effective recruiting
propaganda ever devised. All over the country, on the hoardings and the railway stations, in the shops and the buses, the commanding eyes never left one’s face, and the pointing finger
followed everywhere. This was Big Brother, protective and all-wise, the face of Mars himself, but there was no evil in him, only strength and the stern sense of duty.
Inside Whitehall, at close range, the effects were just as remarkable. Asquith, the most urbane of men, came under the influence, and Churchill, an extremely youthful First Lord of forty, was in
no position to challenge the colossus, even if he had wanted to. Certainly at this stage Lloyd George had not begun to murmur that Kitchener’s handling of affairs was less than perfect.
The point was of course that while the others were civilians, and unused to taking decisions in the awful physical presence of war, Kitchener, the professional soldier, was presumably in his
very element. He knew the mysteries of war and they did not. Inside the War Office his power was absolute, for by now the ablest generals and the best of the regular soldiers had been sent to
France, and the General Staff had been virtually disbanded. Under the new system there was the Minister who decided everything, and a group of secretaries who supplied him with information and saw
to it that his orders were carried out. There was no discussion, no pooling of brains and experience to make a plan, and more often than not his subordinates did not have the vaguest idea of what
was passing through his mind until he announced his decisions. Then the scurry began to catch up with the Minister’s mind,
to arrange the details which were necessary
for his broad designs. Sir James Wolfe Murray, the general who had recently and hastily been put into the position of Chief of the General Staff, was in no different case from the others; although
he attended the meetings of the War Council he did not speak, and indeed he often heard there from Kitchener’s lips the first news of some new military plan that was to be carried out.
This system was all the more complicated by the fact that Kitchener had an oddly feminine way of thinking. Most of his big decisions appeared to be based upon a kind of flair, a queer mixture of
technical experience and instinctive divination; in other words, the calculated hunch. When all the world was saying that the war would be over in six months he would suddenly come out with the
announcement that they must prepare for three years at least. These oracles, which were often proved right, and if wrong became confused and forgotten in other events, added immensely to his
reputation.
Fisher’s position was entirely different. He was not a minister and he had no power to decide on policy. Yet to the public and even inside Whitehall he was something more than the First
Sea Lord: he was the expression of the Navy itself. With his curiously gnarled face, which gave him almost an oriental appearance, his irreverence and drive, his tremendous knowledge of the Navy,
he answered every requirement in the conception of what a great British sailor ought to be. In the past the Admiral’s pugnacity had caused serious disputes inside the Navy, but all that was
done with now. He was as solid and tried as one of his own dreadnoughts, and if his authority was not as great as Kitchener’s he had one thing the Field Marshal lacked, a shrewd, fresh,
humorous mind that enabled him to come to the heart of a problem in language that everyone could enjoy and understand. Kitchener was respected, but Fisher one really liked.
It was Churchill who brought Fisher back from his retirement to the Admiralty at the age of seventy-four, shortly before the war began, and an intimate relationship had grown up between the old
Admiral and the young Minister. Together they were a
formidable team. A new wind blew through the Navy. Fisher had but to produce a plan and Churchill promptly put it through
the cabinet and the House of Commons for him. In this way together they had got Jellicoe the command of the Grand Fleet, they had secured the Navy’s supply of oil by inducing the government
to finance the Persian wells, and they had embarked on a shipbuilding programme which made Britain the strongest maritime power in the world.
Churchill liked to work late at night, Fisher in the early morning. Thus there was a continuous control at the Admiralty; a stream of minutes, notes and letters passed between the two, and no
move of any consequence was made by one man without the other having given his agreement. Fisher, coming to work at four or five in the morning, would find the fruits of Churchill’s labour of
the previous night on his desk; and Churchill, arriving at his office later in the day, was sure to have a letter waiting for him with the famous green F scrawled on the bottom.
They quarrelled at times—as when Fisher in an outburst of rage against the Zeppelin raids wanted to take reprisals among the Germans interned in England—but these commotions were
soon over, and at the beginning of 1915 Fisher was still ending his letters to his friend, ‘Yours to a cinder’, ‘Yours till hell freezes over’.
One wonders, naturally, how far Churchill’s very forceful personality may have pushed Fisher and the other admirals beyond the point where they themselves really wanted to go. In the Navy
especially men were trained since boyhood to believe in the established system and to obey orders; one did not argue, the senior officer knew best. Discipline and loyalty—those were the two
imperative things. Fisher and his brother admirals considered it their duty never to express any open disagreement with their Minister in a cabinet or War Council meeting. No matter whether they
agreed with him or not they sat silent: and this silence was accepted as assent. Inside the Admiralty the admirals were of course free to state their views, but it may not always have been easy to
do this. Churchill was young while they were older,
he made the pace hot and the very brilliance and energy of his mind may not have encouraged his colleagues to express those
half-formed ideas, those vague inconsequential questionings which sometimes contain the beginnings of an understanding of the real truth, the truth that is not always revealed by logic.
This, at any rate, is the real core of the mistrust of Churchill over the Dardanelles—that he bamboozled the admirals—and no matter how much he proves that he was right and they were
wrong there will always be an instinctive feeling among some people that somehow or other he upset the established practices of the Navy at this time, and not in the Nelson manner, but as a
politician. It is the old story of the conflict between the experimenter and the civil servant, the man of action and the administrator, the ancient dilemma of the crisis where, for the moment, the
trained expert is dumbfounded and only the determined amateur seems to know the way ahead.
Churchill himself, in
The World Crisis
, makes it clear that he was perfectly well aware of this issue. He says, ‘The popular view inculcated in thousands of newspaper articles and
recorded in many so-called histories is simple. Mr. Churchill, having seen the German heavy howitzers smash the Antwerp forts, being ignorant of the distinction between a howitzer and a gun, and
overlooking the difference between firing ashore and afloat, thought that the naval guns would simply smash the Dardanelles forts. Although the highly competent Admiralty experts pointed out these
obvious facts, this politician so bewitched them that they were reduced to supine or servile acquiescence in a scheme which they knew was based upon a series of monstrous technical
fallacies.’
‘These broad effects,’ he adds pleasantly, ‘are however capable of refinement.’
Refine them he does, and with devastating force. Yet still, against all logic, the doubt remains: somewhere, one feels, there was a break in the flow of ideas between the young Minister and the
sailors.
Up to the middle of January the admirals certainly had nothing
to complain of. They had been consulted about the Dardanelles plan at every step of the way. They never liked
the idea of going ahead without the backing of the Army, yet they gave their consent. But now, all at once, after the January 13 meeting, Fisher is beset with the deep empirical misgivings of old
age. He cannot explain precisely what it is that causes this change of mind, but he is not Kitchener, he cannot just bluntly say, ‘No, I have decided not to go ahead with the matter’;
he must give reasons. Moreover, he must give them to Churchill whom he likes and with whom he is on terms of almost emotional intimacy and to whom he must be loyal. There can be no half-measures
between them: they must go into the thing wholeheartedly together or they must part.
And so, within the narrow room of his own conscience, caught as he is between his respect and friendship for Churchill and his loyalty to his own ideas, the old Admiral suffers a considerable
strain. He chops and changes. He tries to fix his vague forebodings about the Dardanelles adventure on some logical argument, on any convenient pretext which will establish his general sense of
danger and uneasiness. And Churchill, naturally, has no difficulty in proving him wrong.
The argument began over the strength of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea. Fisher’s point was that it was being so seriously weakened by the demands of the Dardanelles that it was losing
its superiority over the German Fleet, and might find itself exposed to an attack under disadvantageous conditions. Churchill was able to reply that, far from this being the case, the Grand Fleet
had been so strengthened since the outbreak of the war that its superiority over the Germans had been actually increased; and this would continue to be so after all the requirements of the
Dardanelles had been met.
Fisher still persisted; he suggested that a flotilla of destroyers should be brought back from the Dardanelles, a move which in Churchill’s opinion would have crippled the venture at the
outset. Then there was the question of the Zeebrugge Canal. For some time past there had been under discussion a plan for the Navy to sail in and block the canal to German shipping. Fisher
began to express his doubts about this operation as well. He was indeed, he now revealed, against aggressive action of any kind, until the German Fleet had been defeated.