Shafted

Sir William Robertson (rt) with Churchill and an unknown officer circa 1914

THIS WAS MUCH more than a bit of office politics.

But that was how Haig saw it, at the time anyway. Lloyd George, his old adversary, wanted to get rid of Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. And it all blew up at the same moment as the Germans were teetering on the very edge of a devastating new offensive on the Western Front. Indeed, he noted privately:

How petty all this squabbling in high places is compared with the great problem of beating Germany, and the present anxiety of Commanders in France.

In other words (not his own, of course): stop your blasted politics and let the people who know get on with winning the war. But therein lay the problem. Who were the people “who knew”?

British political tradition — perhaps the national psyche — liked leaving experts to do their stuff. But, by February 1918, faith in the capacity of military commanders to deliver the goods had waned. This was hardly the stuff of secrets, insofar as members of the Coalition Government were happy to expatiate — at great length — on the subject, at least in St James’ clubs, or around the dinner tables of professional London. But, before the nation at large, they dared not. The terrible investment of the past years could never be seen — not even for an instant — to have been squandered.

Lloyd George had experienced plenty of moments when he doubted victory, and he seems frankly to have disbelieved that it could ever happen along the Western Front. His intuition pointed him in the direction of opening up other fronts. Hence, he had been an erratic sponsor of a revitalised Italian campaign. Most recently, he had become a devotee of setting up a unified military command. The French and the British must coordinate their efforts, absolutely and at once. Nothing else made sense.

This put him on a collision course with Roberston, certainly: such internationalism outraged the CIGS, whose weltanschaung, or world-view, was not that of a Little Englander, but certainly baulked at allowing supranational institutions to rule the roost. And, of course, vested interests were involved. He and Haig guarded their prerogatives, and jealously watched over the independence of the institutions which they served.

The showdown between the PM and Robertson had been brewing for several months. What turned out to be the final instalment began with an article, written by Charles Repington, which appeared in the conservative Morning Post on 11th February. The piece amounted to a savage criticism of Lloyd George, citing three separate grievances: that he was planning to set up a rival staff under Sir Henry Wilson at Versailles; that he intended to concentrate on Turkey for the next major action; that he had failed to keep the British army up to strength.

Lloyd George: you loved him or loathed him

Such forensic (and well-informed) evisceration was strong meat indeed. The offence it gave was undoubtedly added to by the fact that it appeared in the uber-conservative Morning Post, which loathed Lloyd George with a passion. Repington had, until recently, been a reporter on The Times, before an epic falling out with its proprietor, Lord Northcliffe. But it was not difficult to see in the article a public challenge to the Prime Minister on account of his efforts to bypass Robertson, as well as evidence of a military man’s contempt for a politician’s interference.

Thanks to the exceptional powers given to governments in wartime, the Prime Minister did not need to suffer in silence. Repington was arrested, and appeared at Bow Street on 16th February with a large crowd in attendance, charged with contravening Regulation 18 of DORA (Defence of the Realm Act). He and his editor, Gwynne, were found guilty and fined £100 each.

Charles Repington: a penchant for troublemaking

That was not the end of the story. Support and sympathy for Repington straddled the usual faultlines of politics. In the House of Commons on 12th February, Asquith put questions about the extension of the powers of the ‘Versailles Council’ — questions which Lloyd George refused to answer in any detail, on the grounds that this would jeopardise national security and the interests of the Alliance. He also implied that strategic considerations had been transformed since the days when Asquith himself had been Premier, in particular due to the collapse of Russia, and the enormous influx of German troops now arriving in France from the East.

On 16th February, it was announced quietly that Sir Henry Wilson had succeeded Sir Wully Robertson as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). Less to save Robertson’s face than to cover its own tracks, the powers-that-be sought to play down his departure. Unsurprisingly, the newspapers were not to be fobbed off so easily. Two days later, the Daily Telegraph queried the claim, made in the official statement, that the former CIGS had resigned — their task made that much easier by Robertson’s denial that he had done so. The evidence that he had been sacked was circumstantial, but impressive. The press, quite correctly, drew a link between Robertson’s sudden exit and the Allied Supreme Council’s recent meeting in Versailles. The erstwhile CIGS had used the occasion, after all, to express his total opposition to any removal of power and responsibility away from the British Commander-in-Chief and army to be given to a council or, worse, to random military representatives.

Sir Henry Hughes Wilson: new CIGS

In ousting the CIGS, Lloyd George knew he was expending fistfuls of political capital in powerful quarters, but he was also resolute. The King’s Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, told the Prime Minister that the King “strongly deprecated the idea of Robertson being removed from the office of C.I.G.S”This was a relatively unsophisticated message to butt outbut Lloyd George’s response suggested he had had enough:

He did not share His Majesty’s extremely favourable opinion of Sir William Robertson [and if the King insisted on Robertson’s retention]… the Government could not carry on and His Majesty must find other Ministers…

Collapse of stout party (at least for now). Stamfordham swiftly replied that the King “had no idea of making any such insistence”.

The new CIGS was Sir Henry Wilson. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, compared the two men in a pithy diary entry on 11th February:

Wilson, who is a good strategist, and gets on well with foreigners, and has been a brilliant success at Versailles, but is distrusted by the Army, is to be Chief of the Imperial General Staff; while Robertson, who is a good administrator, and is popular with the Army, but cannot get on at all with foreigners, is to go to Versailles!

In other words, in this particular battle between the politicians and the military, there was no stalemate. Lloyd George had bided his time, but had won game, set and match.

Battles in real time were curiously thin on the ground, above all along the Western Front. Fighting broke out at the start of the week in the Passchendaele area where, on 13th February, the Germans captured two British outposts before being expelled before the end of the day. Significantly, the Canadians mounted a bombardment there that same day, in which they were helped by American batteries. They ended up penetrating the third German line and took 177 prisoners.

The relative dearth of action along the Western Front did not extend to the war at sea or, indeed, in the air. A coup for the Germans occurred on the night of 14th February when a flotilla of large destroyers penetrated the Dover Strait and, in a two-part assault, attacked a posse of British trawlers and drifters. Several vessels were sunk, and 76 men were killed, either in explosions or by drowning. To add to Britain’s grief and humiliation, the German ships escaped without damage. Consolation, if that was what it was, may have been drawn from a rare British success against a U-boat a day earlier, in which HMS Roxburgh had rammed and sank SM U-89 in the Atlantic off the coast of Donegal, killing all 43 crew members.

Dover during the Great War

Aerial warfare assumed ever greater intensity. Allied aeroplanes bombed Offenburg in Baden, and the railway lines around Conflans and, on 17th February, dropped nearly a full ton of bombs near Metz. German raids continued to display a lack of inhibition when it came to targeting civilians. They bombed Nancy on 12th February, before moving on to night raids on London and Dover, twice, later in the week, which killed at least 34 people and injured another 40.

Every raid, of course, deserves to be remembered as a dramatic human narrative, rather than a burst of statistics. The one on 17th February, for instance, was responsible for the destruction of a house in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Far worse, the three bombs which dropped upon it killed a whole family — Captain Ernest Ludlow, of the Grenadier Guards, his wife Jessie, and sons, Ernest, 10, and Bernard, 4.

Ludlow was that relatively rarity — a Sergeant who had been one of the first ever NCOs to receive an MC, and had gone on to be commissioned. His death had come at the hands of the only one of the six Gothas which had succeeded that night in penetrating the capital’s defences. The Grenadiers paid tribute in a memorial: “In affectionate remembrance of a brave and esteemed colleague.

Captain Ernest Ludlow, MC

As for Russia, the usual epithets it attracted — that it was submerged in chaos and given over to brutality — were as apt as ever. This week, one more may be attached: that its politics and diplomacy were now submerged in burlesque: was she at war, or wasn’t she? The future Nazi leader, Rudolf Hess, received a letter from his mother, Klara, penned in Munich on 12th February, steeped in relief at the apparent collapse of Russia:

The first I heard of the peace with Russia was at 11 this morning, when a station official announced the news. It was such a great relief. We had already resigned ourselves to the idea that the peace talks would collapse and the negotiators would go their separate ways, having failed once again to reach an agreement. But peace has come sooner than expected, thank God. Perhaps now we will be spared a dreadful bloodbath in the west.

Her anger at Britain and France was palpable.

The prisoners will be ecstatic that they are free at last. I hope we have enough vehicles to get rid of the damned POWs and bring food in for our own people.

Trotsky: being obdurate

But any euphoria was previous. The Russians had signed nothing. Press coverage in Britain revealed a sense of bewilderment at the Bolsheviks’ behaviour. The Daily Telegraph thought it amazing that Trotsky could abandon the war, but refuse to sign what he called “the peace of landlords and capitalists”They were also more than a little miffed at the claim that the proposed settlement had “the silent co-operation of the English and French bourgeoisie”.

The Germans were more than miffed. Provoked beyond endurance by endless Bolshevik prevarications, they announced on 17th February that the Russian armistice would expire the following day. The following day, a German army was sent across the Dvina towards the towns of Dvink and Lutsk. German forces also moved into Kovel in the Ukraine, at the behest of the Ukrainian government, which was desperate for any help it could get to smash Bolshevik forces.

A series of fluctuating defeats and victories unfolded in the East, but their significance was often fleeting, since compacts and alliances were built on shifting sands. Bolshevik forces defeated General Alexeiev’s forces on 13th February when the suicide of General Kaledin was also reported. Southern Finland was also now in the hands of the Bolsheviks. Then, on 18th February, the Russians hurriedly began to evacuate Armenia as Turkish forces reached Platana.

The Romanovs seem to have tried hard to interpret their circumstances in terms of a much larger catastrophe. A letter to the Tsar from his sister, Xenia, at Ai-Todor in the Crimea, on 13th February, was eloquent on the subject:

To watch and realize that our country is being destroyed, and so senselessly, is unbearable, and you simply wonder how you can go on living! You want to believe that everything is not yet lost, that people will be found to lead Russia out of this chaos and terrible impasse. What have they done with our unfortunate people? Will they come to their senses some day?

Not unreasonably, personal preoccupations surfaced as well:

They don’t allow anyone to see us, and we have not been allowed out of Ai-Todor for three months. We have not seen Irina [her daughter, married to Felix Yusupov] since the 6th January.

… I don’t know how we are going to survive, everything is so madly expensive, and there’s no money. For some days we have faced being without light, as there is no kerosene. But that isn’t the point, we’ll manage somehow, but you feel painfully sorry for poor Mama. Why should she have to suffer, and put up with such adversity, privations and insults at her age?

The Dowager Empress (“poor Mama”) and her family at Ai-Todor

Why indeed? Why her, why anyone? Suffering and bereavement were no more easily absorbed, simply on account of their ubiquity. On 12th February, Vyvyan, 23-year-old son of the Daily Mail proprietor, Lord Harmsworth, died of wounds he had received the previous November. Harmsworth had already had already lost one son, Vere, killed in action in November 1916.

Vyvyan, a holder of the MC, was the stuff of heroes. Having suffered one bout of trench fever and two serious wounds, he had indeed been ordered to take up a staff position, from which he had escaped as soon as he was fit and returned, post haste, to his beloved Irish Guards. In a letter to his wife on 17th February, Lieutenant Colonel Feilding of the Connaught Rangers, always a fair observer, reflected that:

Vyvyan was a fine fellow. With his wealth and backing he could have had his pick of Staff jobs. But he was not built that way.

His mind also turned to the young man’s father:

The father will feel it terribly. To think that two of his three sons are dead! It seems such a short time since our visit to Highcliffe, when they were boys. How times have changed.

Vyvyan Harmsworth

As usual with Feilding, there were no complaints, no railing against fate. He just got on with it.

Similarly resolute was the great aviator, Manfred von Richtofen, who had just paid what would be his last visit to his beloved mother and home at Schweidnitz. Aware that he would be needed in the forthcoming German offensive, partly to boost morale, Manfred von Richthofen wrote apologetically to her on 11th February:

It is too bad that my duties in Berlin dragged on so long that I could not come back to Schweidnitz once more. It would have been so nice and I would have enjoyed it very much. Now I think will not be able to come back to Germany for a long time.

He was not wrong there. But the absence of self-pity is striking. Duty first — always.

If one could somehow have bottled all the virtues exhibited by all the great exemplars in this war — irrespective of their national allegiance — what a force for good would have been harnessed! Two of the very greatest, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm, the so-called “Madonnas of Pervyse”, were back in London on 15th February, receiving yet another award for their humanitarian work, The Honorary Associate’s Cross of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Two days later, they were fund-raising at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, appearing in their medal-strewn khaki coats, headscarves and big boots, as a film of their work was screened. The extra money was urgently needed to open more dressing stations on the front line. Given the imminent offensive, this was prescient.

To coax open purses, macabre relics from Flanders were auctioned: the hands of the church clock at Pervyse went for £60; a silver medal taken from a dead German officer gleaned £125. The women returned to Belgium a few days later with an extra £1,500 pledged to the cause.

Madonnas of Pervyse

It would be the height of naivete to suppose that virtue came easily, even to the greatest of men and women. Did a loving home count most? Education? Religious faith? So far as the latter was concerned, the longer the war went on, the more strident the sceptics. The Army Chaplain, Julian Bickersteth, knew that well enough, but he was in no doubt also that many soldiers longed passionately to believe in God, and to be able to trust in eternal reward. On 13th February, he wrote home, describing a Confirmation service at the front:

Nothing could be more impressive than the Service of Confirmation itself. A finer lot of young Englishmen you could never want to see. Among them was a Sergeant-Major with a bar to his Military Medal, two of my candidates who had won their decorations at Ypres and Cambrai — when the British Army did not run away in its pyjamas, as seems to be the universal belief in home circles and which is a gross calumny and wants refuting every time it is uttered…

A chaplain who had just joined us from a home parish said what an amazing contrast a Confirmation at the Front presented to a home service of similar nature. Certainly we almost felt the sound of the rushing mighty wind, and our hearts were aflame with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Please God, some at least of those splendid lads may be spared to go back to England to help in her regeneration.

This may sound a bit muscular to many listeners today, but Bickersteth carries the credibility of one who risked death as readily as any trooper. For many soldiers, it took that example — someone who walked the walk as readily as talked the talk — to rekindle faith. Lieutenant Colonel Feilding seems to have recognised as much when he wrote to his wife on 17th February:

In church this morning — to my astonishment — I recognised the priest who officiated as one of the French Captains whom I meet daily. That is how it is in France. There are thousands of priests serving as soldiers and officers in the army. The priest of this morning… is a smart-looking fellow with a well brushed-up moustache…

The textures of life which could support, on the one hand, a burning Christian love while, on the other, simultaneously aching to bump off the enemy, are not easily recaptured.

But they were real: the diary of future priest (and Cardinal), Yves Congar, railing against the German occupation in Sedan, gives us a flavour of it:

13 February …Someone rang the doorbell today and I went to open the door… Tere [his mother] was in the kitchen and, thinking it was a refugee looking for lodgings, she shouted, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s a Boche,’ I replied, at which Weinberg (I have since learnt his name and jump when I hear it) looked at me angrily, asked my name, and age and said, ‘I will teach you to respect the Germans!’ He is as prickly as a hedgehog.

The bastard took over our entire first floor, including the dining room…

He sounds like a properly stroppy teenager and, indeed, he was then just a few days shy of his fourteenth birthday. But there was no absence of compassion. Two days later, having wandered through the town, he recorded seeing:

a group of prisoners, Russians, Romanians and Italians, dying of hunger, exhausted, indescribable. It is so sad to be there, powerless before such misery, unable to give any help to these unfortunate souls!

 

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