A Peace to End all Peace (15 page)

I

The British government, too, encountered unexpected problems with which it had no idea how to deal. At the outset of war nobody in Britain had foreseen that the warring armies would dig trenches across western Europe. Now that they had done so, nobody in Britain had any idea of how to break through enemy lines.

As 1914 turned into 1915, the British Cabinet became increasingly unhappy about the direction of the war. Lord Kitchener’s strategy of concentrating all forces in western Europe seemed to offer no hope of victory in the foreseeable future. The wiliest politician in the Cabinet—David Lloyd George—was conspicuous among those who looked for a way out.

Lloyd George, after Asquith the most powerful politician in the Liberal Party and in the Cabinet, was not one who willingly goes down with a sinking ship. He was, above all, a survivor: years later it could be seen that he was the only British minister who succeeded in staying in the Cabinet from the outbreak of the First World War until its end.

The glowing, dynamic political wizard from Wales was the supreme strategist—or, some would say, opportunist—of his time. “To Lloyd George no policy was permanent, no pledge final,” wrote one of his contemporaries; the zig-zags in his policy forced him to seek support first from one group then from another, so that “He became like a trick rider at the circus, as he was compelled to leap from one back to another…”
¹
His deviousness was a byword, so that even an admirer said that his truth was not a straight line but “more of a curve.”
²
The way he himself put it was that, “I never believed in costly frontal attacks either in war or politics, if there were a way round.”
³

No minister felt more greatly frustrated than he did by the way Allied commanders were fighting the war in France and Flanders: hopeless direct assaults on entrenched enemy positions. Every time that he sought a way out or a way around, he found the route blocked either by the War Office on behalf of Britain’s generals, or by the Foreign Office on behalf of Britain’s allies.

From the beginning, Lloyd George looked for a solution in the East. He was among those who favored entering into Balkan alliances, notably with Greece, in order to defeat the Ottoman Empire and to turn the German flank. Other Cabinet ministers agreed. So did Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Cabinet and most influential of the civil servants. Hankey’s memorandum of 28 December 1914, proposing an assault on the Dardanelles in collaboration with Balkan allies, cogently outlined the arguments underlining the Cabinet’s belief that “Germany can perhaps be struck most effectively, and with the most lasting results on the peace of the world through her allies, and particularly through Turkey.”
⁴

The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, blocked this approach. It was Grey, according to Lloyd George’s associates in the left wing of the Liberal Party, who had closed off Britain’s alternative of remaining neutral in the war; he had done this, they claimed, by his secret prewar arrangements with France.
^*
(The philosopher Bertrand Russell later wrote: “I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war.”)
⁶
Now again it was Grey, who had entered into secret prewar arrangements with Russia regarding the Dardanelles, who argued that Allied claims to postwar territorial gains precluded bringing the Balkan states into the war. It was the Foreign Office’s view not only that Bulgaria’s rivalry with Rumania and Greece rendered an alliance that included all three states unfeasible, but that Greek help in capturing Constantinople was unacceptable because it would offend the Russians.

Yet it was agreed by the Admiralty, the War Office, and the Cabinet alike that Constantinople could not be captured by the Royal Navy alone. An army, they argued, was needed as well. If the Greek army or another Balkan army were not to be allowed to help, then the British army would be needed; but Lord Kitchener supported those Allied field commanders who decreed that no troops should be diverted from the trenches of the western front until the war in Europe was won.

Yet, notwithstanding the hopeful views of Allied commanders in the field, nothing in the first months and years of the war suggested to the leading members of the Cabinet that on the western front the war was being won or even could be won. As early as 7 October 1914, Asquith noted that Kitchener “thinks it is not improbable that…the big opposing armies may in some months’ time come to something like stalemate.”
⁷
By the end of December, Winston Churchill (as he informed the Prime Minister) thought it “quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines in the Western theatre” while, at the same time, Lloyd George, in a memorandum to Cabinet colleagues, dismissed the prospects of a breakthrough on the western front as an “impossibility.”
⁸

History had seen nothing like the trench warfare that spontaneously emerged in the autumn of 1914; and Kitchener, though he quickly divined the problem, admitted that he saw no solution. The Entente Powers and the Central Powers manned parallel lines of fortifications that soon stretched all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Alps. Each side thus decisively barred the way to the other.

Trench warfare began as an endurance contest and ended as a survival contest. Beneath the ground, in the perhaps 35,000 miles of trenches that they eventually dug, the opposing armies lived in bloody squalor and subjected one another to punishing and almost ceaseless artillery barrages, punctuated by suicidally futile charges against the other side’s barbed wire and machine guns. Alternately executioners and executed, one side played the role of the firing squad whenever the other side launched one of its frequent attacks. No ground was gained. It was a deadlock.

The civilian ministers turned for guidance to the military oracle in their midst, but the oracle sometimes was awkwardly silent and at other times spoke a gibberish that undermined belief in his powers of divination. In the Cabinet, unfortunately, FitzGerald was not available to speak and listen for him. Field Marshal Kitchener always had found it immensely difficult to
explain
his military views, even to close colleagues; in the company of those whom he feared—strangers, civilians, politicians—he was struck dumb. To break the silence, he sometimes launched into long discourses on nonmilitary subjects of which he knew little or nothing. He spoke of Ireland to the Irish leader, Carson, and of Wales to Lloyd George; both men were surprised to find him ignorant and foolish.

There was genius within him, but it manifested itself only on occasion. Years after the war, having remarked that Kitchener “talked twaddle,” Lloyd George took it back by adding:

Kitchener’s failure to show them a way out of the deadlock on the western front led the country’s civilian leaders to devise plans of their own. The plans resembled one another in proposing to swing around the fortified western front in order to attack from the north, the south, or the east. The doctrine of the generals was to attack the enemy at his strongest point; that of the politicians was to attack at his weakest.

Lloyd George’s mind inclined toward collaboration with Greece in the vulnerable southeast of Europe. Churchill, inspired by Admiral Lord Fisher (whom he had brought back from retirement to serve as First Sea Lord), proposed a landing in the northwest of Europe, on an island off Germany’s Baltic Sea coast. Maurice Hankey, however, carried all before him with his persuasive memorandum of 28 December 1914.

Hankey proposed that Britain should move three army corps to participate with Greece, Bulgaria, and Rumania in an attack on Turkey at the Dardanelles that would lead to the occupation of Constantinople and the subsequent defeat of Germany’s two allies, the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The political problem of reconciling Bulgaria with Greece and Rumania, he pointed out, would have to be overcome; but he believed that this could be done as a result of Allied military participation in the campaign and Allied guarantees that all three states would receive a fair share of the spoils of victory.

When shown the memorandum, Churchill commented that he himself had advocated an attack at the Dardanelles two months earlier, but that Kitchener had refused to supply the needed manpower; and that such an action would be much more difficult to mount in January than it would have been in November. Churchill continued to believe that the Baltic Sea project was a more promising move, but recognized that he and Hankey thought alike in espousing some sort of flanking attack.

Hankey’s plan, however, was never put to the test. It foundered on the usual shoals: Kitchener’s unwillingness to divert troops from the west, and Sir Edward Grey’s worry that a Greek march on Constantinople might be troubling to Russia. Grey was not hopeful of reconciling Bulgarian claims with those of the other Balkan states but, above all, what led him to oppose a Greek attack at the Dardanelles was the fear that it might succeed; for if the Greeks were to conquer their old imperial capital, Constantinople, the Byzantium of their great days, they would be unlikely to give it up; while Russia, rather than let any other country seize it, might well (in Grey’s view) change sides in the war.

The situation in Athens was that the Prime Minister, Venizelos, who at the outset of the world war had offered to enter into a war with Turkey, was still inclined to join the Allies, while his political adversary, the Kaiser’s brother-in-law, pro-German King Constantine, acted to prevent him from doing so. Instead of throwing its weight behind Venizelos, the British Foreign Office, like King Constantine, opposed Greek entry into the war.

In retrospect it seems clear that if the Greek army had marched on Constantinople in early 1915, alongside the British navy, the Ottoman capital would have been defenseless. The anguish of Winston Churchill when this was not allowed to happen is evident in the phrases of a letter that he wrote to Grey in the winter of 1915 but never sent:

II

When 1915 began, Lord Kitchener suddenly changed his mind and proposed that Britain should attack the Dardanelles. The Russian high command had urgently asked him to stage a diversionary attack there, and he was fearful that if he did not comply Russia might be driven out of the war—which at that point would have been fatal for Britain and France, for it would have allowed the Germans to concentrate all their forces in the west. Kitchener insisted, however, that the attack had to be mounted by the Royal Navy on its own: he would make no troops available. No matter; civilian members of the Cabinet leaped at the chance to escape from the western front strategy which they (unlike the Allied generals) regarded as hopeless.

Enver’s attack on the Caucasus was responsible for the Russian plea and hence for Kitchener’s change of mind. Russia’s cry for help came before her quick, easy, and decisive victory over Enver’s Turks in January 1915. Logically, after crushing the Ottoman invaders that month, the Russians should have told Lord Kitchener that it was no longer necessary for him to launch a diversionary attack on Constantinople—or Kitchener should have drawn that conclusion for himself. Instead, throughout January and February, Britain’s leaders considered how best to attack Constantinople in order to relieve Russia from a Turkish threat that no longer existed.

Thus began the Dardanelles campaign, which was to so alter the fortunes of Churchill and Kitchener, Asquith and Lloyd George, Britain and the Middle East.

I

When Lord Kitchener proposed that an expedition to the Dardanelles should be mounted by the Royal Navy alone, Churchill’s reply from the Admiralty echoed what every informed person in the military and in government said: that the Dardanelles could be forced only by a combined operation in which the navy was joined by the army. A glance at the map would show why. The 38-mile-long straits are at no point more than 4 miles wide. Warships attempting to force their passage against the strong current would face lines of mines in front of them and a crossfire of cannon barrages from the European and Asian shores. Thirteen miles after entering the waterway, ships reach the Narrows, a mere 1,600 yards across, which can be dominated by the guns of the forts on shore. Only if an attacking army took possession of the coastline could it silence the artillery on shore and give its fleet a chance to sweep the mines ahead of it; the forts, in other words, had to be stormed or destroyed to allow the navy to get through.

Kitchener met with his advisers at the War Office to ask them to reconsider their position about the opening of the new front, but they were adamant in reiterating that no troops could be made available. In turn, Churchill, on the morning of 3 January 1915, met with his War Group at the Admiralty to reconsider whether, given the importance of keeping Russia in the war, it really would be out of the question to mount a wholly naval operation. The idea of employing only warships that were old and expendable was raised; and the War Group decided to ask the commander on the spot for his views.

Soon after the meeting adjourned, Churchill sent an inquiry to the commander of the British naval squadron off the Dardanelles, Admiral Sackville Carden. In his cable Churchill asked: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation?”—adding that older ships would be used, and that the importance of the operation would justify severe losses.
¹

To everybody’s surprise, Admiral Carden replied to Churchill that, while the Dardanelles could not be “rushed”—in other words, could not be seized in a single attack—“They might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships.”
²
Carden had been in command at the Dardanelles for months, and his views carried the day.

The Cabinet overruled Churchill—who argued in favor of a naval strike in the Baltic instead—and authorized him to put Carden’s Dardanelles plan into operation. Churchill was not opposed to the Dardanelles plan; it was simply that he preferred his Baltic plan. Once the Dardanelles decision had been taken, he moved to carry it out with all of his energy and enthusiasm.

II

Though gifted in many other ways, Churchill was insensitive to the moods and reactions of his colleagues, and oblivious to the effect he produced upon others. When he gave orders that naval officers felt ought properly to have been issued by one of themselves, he inspired a collegial and institutional hostility of which he was unaware; he did not know that they viewed him as an interfering amateur, and that his imprecision in the use of their technical language fueled their resentment.

He also did not know (for they did not tell him) how much his colleagues in the Cabinet were alienated by his other traits. He bubbled over with ideas for their departments, which they regarded as meddling. He talked at such length that they could not endure it. Neither subordinates nor colleagues dared to tell him to his face that he was often impossible to work with. Even Fisher, his naval idol and mentor, whom he had chosen as First Sea Lord, found it difficult to communicate with him; though, it should be said, the problem was mutual.

Lord Fisher, whose intuitive genius and extreme eccentricity were rather like Kitchener’s, had a sudden hunch, on or before 19 January, that sending a naval expedition to the Dardanelles was a mistake. But he was never able to articulate the basis for his foreboding, so he could not persuade Churchill to change course.

Support for the Dardanelles expedition initially had been unanimous, but from that rising high tide of enthusiasm there had been a turn, an ebbing, so that within days the tide had reversed direction and was flowing swiftly the other way.

Maurice Hankey, to whom Fisher had complained of Churchill in January, began establishing a record that he, too, was opposed to the expedition unless the army participated in it. As the most skillful bureaucrat of his time, Hankey was more sensitive to the currents of opinion that prevailed in Churchill’s Admiralty than was Churchill himself. He was aware that by the middle of February, Admiralty opinion had turned against the idea of a purely naval venture, although the attack was scheduled to begin in a matter of days.
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On 15 February, Sir Henry Jackson, who a month earlier had urged Churchill to implement Carden’s plans immediately, circulated a memorandum in which he said that the purely naval plan “is not recommended as a sound military operation.”
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Captain Herbert William Richmond, Assistant Director of Operations, was also associated with this criticism, having written a memorandum of his own along similar lines the day before, a copy of which he had forwarded to Hankey.

Early in the morning of 16 February Fisher sent a similar warning to Churchill, who was thunderstruck: he was driven to seek an immediate emergency session with whatever members of the War Council of the Cabinet were available. The dire situation was this: the British naval armada off the Turkish coast was due to commence its attack within forty-eight to seventy-two hours; the armada could not postpone its attack while remaining in the area, for enemy submarines might soon be sent to sink it;
⁷
but if the armada proceeded to attack, it would fail, according to this suddenly revised opinion of the naval leadership of the Admiralty, unless a substantial body of troops was sent to support it—troops that Kitchener had repeatedly refused to send and which, in any event, could hardly be expected to arrive in time even if dispatched immediately.

Before attending the War Council, Kitchener spoke with Wyndham Deedes, the officer who had served in the Ottoman Gendarmerie before the war, now a captain in intelligence serving in London, and asked his opinion of a naval attack on the Dardanelles. Deedes replied that in his view such a plan would be fundamentally unsound. As he began to explain why that would be so, an enraged Kitchener cut him short, told him he did not know what he was talking about, and abruptly dismissed him.

Yet the interview with Deedes changed Kitchener’s mind. A few hours later, Kitchener told members of the War Council that he would agree to send the 29th Division—the only regular army division that remained in Britain—to the Aegean to support the navy’s attack. In addition, the new Australian and New Zealand troops who had arrived in Egypt could be dispatched if necessary. The plan, which now met the requirements of Fisher, Jackson, Richmond, and the others, was that once the navy’s ships had won the battle for the straits, the troops would come in behind them to occupy the adjacent shore and, thereafter, Constantinople. According to a diary entry, “Lord K’s words to Winston were: ‘You get through! I will find the men.’”
⁸

The plan was flawed. If the Turkish defenders had competent leadership and adequate ammunition, a combined assault was called for. Instead of waiting for the navy to win the battle, the army ought to have helped by attacking the Dardanelles forts. The civilian Maurice Hankey saw this clearly; the admirals and generals did not.

On 22 February, the Admiralty issued a public communiqué announcing that the Dardanelles attack had begun and describing it in detail. The newspapers took up the story, focusing attention on the attack and arousing public expectations.
The Times
noted that “bombardment from the sea will not carry such a project very far unless it is combined with troops” and warned that “The one thing the Allies dare not risk in a persistent attack on the Dardanelles is failure.”
⁹

Kitchener issued a similar warning of his own to Cabinet colleagues. Although he had originally proposed to “leave off the bombardment if it were ineffective,”
¹⁰
when Lloyd George argued in favor of adhering to that plan (“If we failed at the Dardanelles we ought to be immediately ready to try something else”), Kitchener changed his mind. At a meeting of the War Council on 24 February, the War Minister cited the Admiralty’s public communiqué as his reason for the change. “The effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious. There could be no going back. The publicity of the announcement had committed us.” If the fleet failed, he said, “the army ought to see the business through.”
¹¹

First he had suggested sending in the navy. Now he had decided to send in the army. Step by step, without meaning to, Kitchener was allowing Britain to be drawn into a major engagement in the Middle East.

III

The Turks expected Churchill’s attack on the Dardanelles; but for the moment they had no means to defend against it. Not even Wyndham Deedes—usually so well informed on Ottoman affairs—knew this secret, although the Germans were well aware of it. At the outset of the war, the Ottoman forces and their German advisers had begun to strengthen the forts on both sides of the straits of the Dardanelles, but saw their efforts nullified by the lack of ammunition. At the end of 1914 and at the beginning of 1915, Berlin learned that the supply of ammunition at the straits was enough to fight only about one engagement, and that some of the Ottoman gunboats had enough shells to fire for about one minute each.

During the next six weeks, the Ottoman high command received a number of intelligence reports indicating that an Allied naval attack on the straits was imminent. On 15 February 1915, detailed information was received on a concentration of British and French war vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.

On the morning of 19 February, Admiral Carden’s British warships fired the opening shots in the Dardanelles campaign. The U.S. ambassador to Turkey noted that the success of the Allied forces seemed inevitable, and the inhabitants of Constantinople thought that their city would fall within days.”
¹²

It was a measure of the Porte’s despair that it even considered seeking help from Russia, its age-old enemy. The day after the British attack began, the Turkish ambassador to Germany suggested the creation of a Russian-Turkish-German alliance: Russia, he proposed, should be offered free passage through the Dardanelles in return for switching sides in the war.
¹³
As the Grand Vizier explained to the German ambassador in Constantinople, “One ought to make peace with Russia so that one could then hit England all the harder.”
¹⁴
The Germans relayed the proposal to Russia, but nothing came of it. For the Turks there seemed to be no way out of a losing battle for the straits.

The roar of the British naval guns at the mouth of the Dardanelles echoed politically through the capital cities of the strategically crucial Balkan countries. In Athens, in Bucharest, and in Sofia politicians started moving toward the Allied camp. It was evident that all of them, even Bulgaria, would enter the war alongside the Entente Powers if the Dardanelles campaign were won.
¹⁵
As Lloyd George had repeatedly argued, with the Balkan countries as allies, Britain could bring the war to an end by moving through the disaffected Austro-Hungarian Empire to invade Germany from the relatively undefended south.

When the armada of British warships, supported by a French squadron, opened fire at long range on the morning of 19 February, the Turkish shore batteries at the mouth of the Dardanelles lacked the range even to reply. In order to inflict greater damage on the Turkish shore fortifications, Carden moved his warships closer to shore. That night the weather turned, and the navy was obliged to discontinue operations for five days because of poor visibility and icy gales. On 25 February the attack resumed. British marines who were put on shore at the tip of the peninsula found the forts at the entrance of the straits deserted; the Turks and Germans had withdrawn to the Narrows, where the artillery defenses of the Dardanelles were concentrated.

The British mission in Sofia reported that the Bulgarian army might join in the attack on Turkey. The Prime Minister of Rumania indicated to the British representative in Bucharest that not only was his own country a friend to the Allies but that “Italy would move soon.”
¹⁶
In early March a joyful and excited Churchill received a secret cable from Venizelos—still serving as Prime Minister—promising Greek support, including three army divisions for Gallipoli; and, according to Venizelos, even the pro-German King Constantine was prepared to join the Allies.”
¹⁷

Victory was in the air. Though suffering from influenza, Churchill was elated. He confessed to Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister’s daughter, that “I think a curse should rest on me because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second I live.”
¹⁸

According to a cable from Admiral Carden to Churchill dated 4 March, the fleet could expect to arrive at Constantinople, weather permitting, in about fourteen days.
¹⁹
The postwar fate of the Ottoman Empire leaped to the top of the international agenda; even the Italians, who had not yet entered the war, began to claim their “share in the eventual partition of Turkey.”
²⁰
Churchill seems to have sensed that such claims were premature: in a confidential letter to the Foreign Secretary, he proposed that European Turkey should be captured but that the Allies should dictate an armistice that would leave Ottoman Asia in Ottoman hands at least temporarily.
²¹