A Peace to End all Peace (29 page)

27 Vladimir Jabotinsky

28 Chaim Weizmann (left) with Lord Balfour

I

Between autumn 1916 and autumn 1917, the Ottoman Empire held firm while the governments of its adversaries, the Allied Powers, collapsed. This was very much contrary to what European political and military leaders had expected.

The Ottoman army’s success in holding the Dardanelles played a direct role in the overthrow of Prime Minister Asquith’s government in Britain and that of Czar Nicholas in Russia. The overthrow of the British and Russian governments, and of the French government in 1917, brought to power in the three Allied capitals new leaders who held strong views about the Middle East which were totally at variance with those of their predecessors.

The Prime Minister who had brought Britain into the war was the first Allied leader to fall victim to it. Bonar Law once observed, in a letter to Asquith, that “In war it is necessary not only to be active but to seem active.”
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Asquith, with his indolent patrician ways, seemed the reverse. He had achieved a towering position in British politics, but it was an aspect of his special genius to make his triumphs appear effortless. In the transaction of political and governmental business he was unhurried: he always seemed to have time for another dinner party, another visit to the countryside, or—all too often—another cognac.

As military catastrophes multiplied in Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, and on the western front, the Prime Minister’s method of Cabinet government by consensus seemed indecisive, while his unwillingness to call upon the nation for such strong measures as compulsory military service suggested that he was less than completely dedicated to winning the war.

Lloyd George, in dramatic contrast, made the conscription issue his own. In taking the lead on this issue he showed how much his political position had changed. While Asquith, who had brought the country into the war, continued to uphold peacetime civil liberties and Liberal values, Lloyd George, the one-time Radical who until the last moment had opposed entry into the war, emerged as a leader prepared to sacrifice individual rights for the sake of victory. Traditional Liberals, who had always opposed compulsion, felt that Lloyd George was going over to the other camp.

As he lost his old political friends, Lloyd George acquired new ones, two of whom proved to be especially important. One was Sir Edward Carson, the rebel Irish Tory who led the fight for conscription in the House of Commons. The other was the champion of imperialism, Alfred Milner, who led the fight for conscription in the House of Lords and, as chairman of the National Service League, in the country. Milner, an outstanding colonial administrator, had been largely responsible for launching the Boer War, the venture in South Africa at the turn of the century that Lloyd George as a young idealist had vigorously opposed.
²
At the time Lloyd George had attacked Milner bitterly. As a Radical, the young Welshman had opposed imperial expansion, foreign involvement, and military ventures; while Lord Milner, as a Liberal Unionist who became the inspiration of right-wing Tories, made himself the center of imperialist thought. His ideal was imperial union.
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Together with the young men assembled in South Africa under his leadership—“Milner’s Kindergarten”—he had stimulated the movement for integration of the far-flung empire into one organic unit.
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Milner was a superb administrator whose skills were later to prove invaluable to Lloyd George in winning the war.

II

In 1916, Lloyd George became Secretary of State for War when Kitchener died, but found himself powerless to put an end to the sickening military disasters of that year. It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe’s domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day’s combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.
³
Coming after Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, and such gory episodes as the 142,000 British casualties suffered in just four days of fighting at Arras in France, the terrible Somme offensive of July 1916 aroused a climax of despair. On 1 July the British lost 60,000 men, the heaviest casualties ever suffered in a single day by a British army.
⁴
By the time the offensive was over, British casualties at the Somme had mounted to 420,000. Among them was Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son.

Lloyd George despaired of victory as he observed the lengthy and inefficient meetings of Asquith’s large War Cabinet, debating endlessly and deciding nothing. On 9 November he told Maurice Hankey that “We are going to lose this war.”
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At about the same time, the Gallipoli controversy was revived, reminding the political world how ineptly the Asquith government had waged war. Unwisely, the government had sanctioned an official inquiry in June into the Dardanelles campaign. Churchill, now out of office, devoted himself to documenting the case that his colleagues were to blame for the Gallipoli disaster. The alarmed Prime Minister managed to have the report restricted to the Commission of Inquiry’s conclusions, omitting the testimony and other evidence on which they were based. Nonetheless, the political damage was done and the Gallipoli inquiry contributed to the collapse of the first coalition government.

The story of Asquith’s overthrow has been told too often for it to need retelling here at any length. A principal role in his downfall was played by the British press, dominated then, as it never has been before or since, by one man. Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, controlled half the London press, at a time, before radio or television, when publications were the only media of mass communication. His ownership of
The Times
, with its prestige, and of the
Daily Mail
, with its popular appeal, gave him both “the classes and the masses.”
⁶
Northcliffe used his immense power to dramatize the case that Asquith and his civilian colleagues were preventing the generals and admirals from winning the war.

Northcliffe’s newspapers ranged themselves behind Sir Edward Carson, Britain’s leading trial lawyer, who led the revolt against the government in Parliament and in the country. Carson on the attack was the most dangerous animal in the political jungle. As he lashed out against the government, the lean, dark, and bitter Irishman seemed to be everything the Prime Minister was not. As a historian has written of him, “The notion became current that he possessed a drive, a remorseless determination, and unrelenting hostility to the Germans, which contrasted strongly with the dismal procrastination attributed to Asquith and his colleagues.”
⁷

Although he denied it, in the autumn of 1916 Lloyd George began working closely with Carson; and Sir Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) brought Bonar Law into a political combination with them. After intricate maneuverings, Asquith resigned and went into Opposition, taking half of his Liberal Party—and all of its leaders except Lloyd George—with him. Pushed by Aitken (“It was he who made B.L. decide to break up the Asquith government,” said Lloyd George),
⁸
Bonar Law threw the weight of the Unionist-Conservative Party behind Lloyd George. (A major condition imposed by the Conservatives was that Churchill should be excluded from the new government.) A substantial number of backbench Liberals joined with them, as did the tiny Labour Party. On 7 December 1916, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister of Britain as head of the second coalition government.

Lloyd George moved quickly to impose a war dictatorship. Direction of the war was entrusted to a War Cabinet, composed initially of five members. The new Prime Minister headed it himself. Bonar Law, who also became Leader of the House and Chancellor of the Exchequer, became a member, as did Labour’s Arthur Henderson. The work of the War Cabinet was done principally by its other two members, Lord Milner, on whom Lloyd George especially relied, and to a lesser extent, Lord Curzon. Maurice Hankey became Secretary to the War Cabinet, and took charge of seeing that its decisions were carried out.

It was a sweeping, revolutionary change in the way the country was governed. Arthur Balfour, the former Prime Minister who became Foreign Minister in the new government, remarked of Lloyd George at the time: “If he wants to be a dictator, let him be. If he thinks that he can win the war, I’m all for his having a try.”
⁹

A chance effect of the change in government was that it changed Britain’s objectives in the Middle East. Asquith and Grey, the only two men in the government who doubted the desirability of acquiring new territories in the East, had been driven from office. Lord Kitchener, who had imposed his own Middle Eastern views on the Cabinet, was dead; and the new Prime Minister had been an opponent of Kitchener’s views all along.

Unlike Kitchener, Lloyd George had believed, and continued to believe, that the East could be of great importance in winning the war. Typically, only a few days after Lloyd George took office as Prime Minister, Hankey recorded in his diary that “I lunched along with L1. G., who discoursed mainly on his plans for a big military coup in Syria.”
¹⁰

As for the future of the area, he was moved in large part by his hatred of the Turkish regime. From his first political leader, the nineteeth-century Liberal, William Ewart Gladstone, he had inherited an abhorrence of the Ottoman Empire for its cruelty toward its Christian subjects. He was sympathetic to Greece, which had territorial ambitions in Asia Minor, and espoused Zionist aspirations in the Holy Land. In the latter case he had made clear, however, that he expected the Jewish National Home to develop within the context of British rule. What became clear only after Lloyd George had been in office for a year or two was that he envisioned the Middle East, not just as the road to India, but as a prize worth seeking in itself. Unlike British ministers of the nineteenth century, whose aim was limited to excluding other European powers from the region, Lloyd George therefore sought British hegemony in the Middle East.

As Prime Minister, Lloyd George moved ever closer to Milner and imperialism. Hankey later wrote that Milner “was Lloyd George’s most trusted colleague; except, perhaps Bonar Law—but he was more for political advice.”
¹¹
Lloyd George was a pragmatic, intuitive opportunist who improvised; Milner, with his German background, was methodical in action and systematic in thought, supplying what the Prime Minister lacked.

Milner further strengthened his hold on the Lloyd George government by placing his own followers within Hankey’s secretariat. Hankey was able to retain Sir Mark Sykes, his personal choice, as one of his three assistants,
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but the other two were Leo Amery, one of Milner’s leading adherents, and William Ormsby-Gore, Milner’s Parliamentary Secretary.

When Lloyd George, after the fashion of an American president in the White House, set up his own informal staff, Milner had a hand in including some of his own followers, such as Lionel Curtis, a founder of the magazine
Round Table
, which espoused imperial union, and Philip Kerr, the magazine’s editor. The staff was set up in temporary buildings in the garden of 10 Downing Street and was dubbed the “Garden suburb.”

A sort of dictatorship of two emerged from the early days of the new Prime Minister’s period of office: at 11:00 each morning Lloyd George would meet with Milner, along with Hankey and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and only at noon would they meet with the other members of the War Cabinet. In 1918 Milner became War Minister in name as well as reality. He had the experience needed for the job: he had run the civilian side of the Boer War and now, under Lloyd George, ran the civilian side of the First World War.

Lloyd George’s association with the Milner circle was intellectual as well as practical and bureaucratic. The Prime Minister came to social gatherings where the Round Tablers met to exchange views. In the middle of 1917 Hankey observed that “Among the most influential at the present moment I would place the Round Table group. They dine every Monday…Milner is the real leader in this group…Lloyd George sometimes attends their gatherings.”
¹³

The influence was mutual. Shortly afterward Hankey noted that Milner had “come completely round to L1. G’s view…that it is necessary to devote our main efforts against Turkey.”
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III

In France, several governments had fallen during the course of the war, but the differences between one government and another were not dramatic. In 1917 that changed.

The mutiny of the French army in May 1917 brought about the fall of the last of France’s wartime governments with which her politicians felt comfortable. The traditional leadership was discredited. The Viviani, Briand, and Ribot governments had been allowed to resign, but the Paul Painlevé government had not been: in November of 1917 the French Parliament overthrew it. There was only one potential premier yet untried who might fight on to victory, but he was the most feared and detested man in public life. As Lloyd George remarked of him, “There was only one man left, and it is not too much to say that no one wanted him.”
¹⁵
He was the man who had exposed the corrupt practices of his political colleagues—and they had never forgiven him.

Georges Clemenceau was, like Lloyd George, a political “loner.” He, too, was a Radical, though in France the label had rather a different meaning. Like Lloyd George, he was believed to have abandoned the leftist tenets of his youth.
¹⁶
Like Lloyd George, the man of “the knock-out blow,” he had denounced proponents of a compromise peace, and indeed had brought an end to discussions along those lines initiated by the Germans through Aristide Briand in 1917. He was growing deaf and fat and was seventy-six years old, but he remained the fighter he had been all his life; and the President, who felt obliged to offer him the premiership, noted that this “devil of a man has all patriots on his side, and if I did not call on him his legendary strength would make any alternative cabinet weak.”
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