Gallipoli (25 page)

Churchill, however, was in favour of at least a limited advance; he wanted the minefields in the lower straits swept up so that the Fleet would be in a position to go through the Narrows once
the Army had won the peninsula. Fisher’s answer to this was that he was opposed to any action whatsoever until the Turkish Army was defeated.

The two men were in the midst of this discussion—perhaps argument is the better word, for they were now drifting steadily apart in their ideas—when news reached them that the
battleship
Goliath
had been sunk in the Dardanelles. It was a brilliant manœuvre on the part of the enemy. In the very early hours of May 12 a Turkish destroyer commanded by a German
lieutenant had emerged from the straits and had crept up upon the battleship at her anchorage about 100 yards offshore in Morto Bay. The quartermaster aboard the
Goliath
hailed the strange
vessel through the darkness, and when he got a reply in English no alarm was given. An instant later three torpedoes struck, and the battleship heeled over and sank in two minutes. Although the
French soldiers on the coast could plainly hear the cries of the crew as they struggled in the water, more than 500 men were drowned. The Turkish destroyer dashed away up the straits proclaiming
her success over her radio.

The
Goliath
was not an important ship—she was fifteen years old and her tonnage was less than 13,000—yet the very fact that she had been sunk and in such difficult
circumstances made the
presence of the U-boats seem more menacing than ever. Fisher announced that he must retire the
Queen Elizabeth
from the Mediterranean at once.
Churchill was ready to agree to this: new monitors with anti-torpedo blisters on their sides were ready to sail, and there were other replacements which could be sent to de Robeck. But it was a
very different matter with Lord Kitchener. On May 13 Churchill asked him to come to a conference at the Admiralty, and it was there that he was given the news of the withdrawal of the flagship.
‘Lord Kitchener,’ Churchill relates, ‘became extremely angry. . . . Lord Fisher flew into an even greater fury. “The
Queen Elizabeth
would come home; she would come
home at once; she would come home that night or he would walk out of the Admiralty then and there.” ’ Churchill did his best to mollify Kitchener by telling him of the new monitors and
the other replacements, and at the breaking up of the meeting Fisher had his way. Orders were sent out recalling the
Queen Elizabeth
, and at the same time de Robeck was forbidden to renew
his attack on the Narrows.

The meeting of the War Council on the following day, May 14, is described by Churchill as ‘sulphurous’. Of all the men who gathered at 10 Downing Street that day only Churchill and
Lord Hankey, who was the secretary of the Council, survive. Yet the scene has the contemporary quality which seems to characterize all the crises of the Gallipoli expedition.

Kitchener was very bitter. He had sent an army to Turkey, he said, because he had been assured that the Navy would force the Dardanelles, and because he had been led on by Churchill insisting
upon ‘the marvellous potentialities of the
Queen Elizabeth
’. The Navy had failed, and now the
Queen Elizabeth
was being taken away at the very moment when the Army was
struggling for its life on the edge of the peninsula. It so happened that
The Times
on this day had come out with its attack upon Asquith’s Government over the shortage of the supply
of shells. As he went on to deal with this matter, Kitchener became increasingly gloomy. No organization, he said, could keep pace with the expenditure of ammunition. No one could foresee what
would happen. If the
Russians cracked in the East it was quite possible that the Germans would bring back their armies to the West and set out upon the invasion of
England.

Fisher’s only comment on all this was that he had been against the Dardanelles adventure since the beginning, and this, he said, Lord Kitchener knew perfectly well. Everyone now seems to
have been in an angry and despondent mood, and they listened without much patience as Churchill argued that the success of the campaign had never depended upon the
Queen Elizabeth.
The
only thing to do now, he said, was to reinforce Hamilton, push the campaign through to a conclusion and forget their vague fears about the invasion of England. But with his First Sea Lord openly
antagonistic to him Churchill was not in a strong position, and the meeting broke up without any decision being reached.

The crisis now moved quietly, almost stealthily, to its climax. In the afternoon there was a quite amicable meeting between Fisher and Churchill on the subject of the replacements that were to
be sent to de Robeck. The list of ships was agreed, and Fisher went off to bed. Late that night Churchill went through the list again and decided to add two E-class submarines to it. His minute on
the subject was sent off in the usual way to Fisher’s office, so that the Admiral would see it on his desk when he arrived first thing on the following morning. Upon this the explosion
erupted. Fisher appears to have reached his office about 5 a.m. on May 15, and on seeing Churchill’s minute immediately decided to resign. The two submarines were, apparently, the last straw.
‘First Lord,’ he wrote, ‘After further anxious reflection I have come to the regretted conclusion I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague. It is undesirable in the
public interests to go into details—Jowett said “never explain”—but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the
Dardanelles to meet your views—as you truly said yesterday I am in the position of continually veto-ing your proposals.

‘This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me.

‘I am off to Scotland at once to avoid all questionings.

Yours truly,

Fisher.’

Churchill received this letter from his secretary as he was walking across the Horse Guards Parade later in the morning, and he did not take a serious view of the matter
since Fisher had resigned or threatened to resign so many times before. The Admiral, however, was nowhere to be found, and Churchill went across to Downing Street to discuss the matter with the
Prime Minister. Asquith’s first move was to write out an order to Fisher commanding him to return to his duty in the name of the King, and secretaries were sent out to scour the town until
they found him. Some went to the main railway stations, others hunted through the Admiralty. Several hours elapsed, however, before the Admiral was found in a room in the Charing Cross hotel, and
for a time he refused to come out. In the end he agreed that he would at least see the Prime Minister.

Lloyd George was in the entrance lobby of 10 Downing Street when Fisher arrived for this interview. ‘A combative grimness,’ Lloyd George says, ‘had taken the place of his usual
genial greeting; the lower lip of his set mouth thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously oriental features were more than ever those of a graven image
in an eastern temple, with a sinister frown. “I have resigned,” was his greeting, and on my inquiring the reason he replied, “I can stand it no longer.” He then informed me
that he was on his way to see the Prime Minister, having made up his mind to take no further part in the Dardanelles “foolishness”, and was off to Scotland that night.’

Fisher clearly was in a rage to have done with the formalities, and neither Asquith nor Churchill could move him.

In a last message to Churchill—and one can almost see the pen trembling in the Admiral’s hand—he wrote: ‘
YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND
NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING
. I know you so well . . .
You will remain
and I
SHALL GO
—it is better so.’ There followed his defiant
final ultimatum to Asquith demanding, as a condition of his return, absolute control over the Navy and the removal of Churchill and all others who, he imagined, stood in his way. It was absurd, of
course, even
crazy, and it meant that the old man had to be removed from the scene as quickly as possible. A curt note from Asquith accepting his resignation ended his
career.

In more ordinary times Churchill perhaps might have weathered Fisher’s departure, but too much was happening too quickly. The shell crisis alone was enough to bring the Government down, or
at any rate to lead to its reorganization. In some vague way it had begun to seem that the Gallipoli campaign was responsible for all their troubles, and Churchill was regarded as the original
author of it. He had urged it from the beginning. He had lost the ships. He was responsible for the disasters and delays in the Army’s landing. He was the amateur who had dared to fly in the
face of the expert opinion of the Admirals—even Fisher, the greatest of them all. All this was wildly unfair. ‘It (Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty) was a cruel and unjust
degradation,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘The Dardanelles failure was due not so much to Mr. Churchill’s precipitancy as to Lord Kitchener’s and Mr. Asquith’s
procrastination.’

Directly they had word of Fisher’s resignation Bonar Law and the Opposition leaders gave notice to Asquith that they would challenge the Government on the matter in the House of Commons,
and Asquith at once entered into negotiations for a coalition. In the confused dealings of the next few days Churchill had no part at all; for a time his friends put up a show of a fight for him,
but the Conservatives were absolutely determined to have him out. The new cabinet was finally announced on May 26. Balfour was to have the Admiralty with Sir Henry Jackson as his First Sea Lord.
Jackson was almost as much an opponent of the Dardanelles as Fisher had been, and he later declared that he thought the forcing of the straits to be ‘a mad thing to do’. Churchill
declined the Colonial Office, and there was some discussion about his taking over a command in the Army in France, but in the end he was given the minor office of Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster. It was by some way his heaviest fall in politics since he had first entered the House of Commons fifteen years before. However, he was given a seat in the newly-formed
Dardanelles Committee, and although he had no power to take decisions it was understood that he was to have a watching brief on the operations at Gallipoli. On May 26 he left the
Admiralty, and he did not return there until twenty-four years later at the outbreak of the second world war.

Ashmead-Bartlett, who returned home from the peninsula for a few days about this time, gives a vivid picture of Churchill and his state of mind. ‘I am much surprised,’ he wrote in
his diary, ‘at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty. . . . At dinner the
conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse
on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited
number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the
Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so. . . .’

Of these events little or nothing was known at Gallipoli. From day to day Hamilton waited for an answer to his message to Kitchener asking for the reinforcement of another Army
corps. But nothing came beyond a promise of one Lowland division which was to sail from England. There was, however, an echo of the hesitation and the confusion in Whitehall in a cable which
Hamilton received from Kitchener on May 19. In it Kitchener spoke of his disappointment at the progress at Gallipoli. ‘A serious situation,’ he said, ‘is created by the present
check, and the calls for large reinforcements and an additional amount of ammunition that we can ill spare from France.

‘From the standpoint of an early solution of our difficulties, your views, as stated, are not encouraging. The question whether
we can long support two fields of
operation draining on our resources requires grave consideration. I know that I can rely on you to do your utmost to bring the present unfortunate state of affairs in the Dardanelles to as early a
conclusion as possible, so that any consideration of a withdrawal, with all its dangers in the East, may be prevented from entering the field of possible solutions.

‘When all the above is taken into consideration, I am somewhat surprised to see that the 4,500 which Maxwell can send you are apparently not required by you. With the aid of these I had
hoped that you would have been in a position to press forward.’

Hamilton wrote in his diary: ‘I can only surmise that my request made to Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton units, instead of as a raw brigade, has
twisted itself going down some official corridor into a story that I don’t want the men! K. tells me Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet no sooner do I make the most modest suggestion
concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got at and I find he is the Barmecide and I Schac’abac.
¹⁶
“How do you like your lentil
soup?” says K. “Excellently well,” say I, “but devil a drop is in the plate!” I have got to enter the joke; that’s the long and short of it.”

There is a revealing quality about this grotesque little incident, for it was symptomatic of the general tug-of-war in which they were all engaged: Maxwell withholding troops from Hamilton,
Fisher withholding ships from Churchill, the Conservatives withholding political support from Asquith. The setback at Gallipoli, in short, had brought out into the open, and more bitterly than
ever, the great issue which in the end was to dominate all others before the end of the year: were they to fight in the East or the West?