Gandhi & Churchill (37 page)

Churchill’s prediction thirteen years earlier that “the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings” would be played out on a scale that few politicians except Churchill could have imagined. For the next four years the Western Front would be the graveyard for millions of British, French, and German soldiers, even as every country from the Urals to the Pyrenees geared up its economy and society to feed the monstrous killing machine.

Few greeted this prospect with any sense of adventure. Churchill was an exception. Apart from Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener, Churchill was the only member of the War Cabinet to have seen any military action. “Much as war attracts and fascinates my mind,” he wrote to Clementine in 1909, “I feel more deeply every year…what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.” Yet despite its horrors, the experience of mobilizing every resource in society for a single purpose aroused the happy warrior in Churchill, much as it did Gandhi during his months in London after the war began.

After a conversation with Churchill, Margot Asquith remarked, “What a strange being! He really likes war.”
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Churchill had to agree. “I think a curse should rest on me because I am so happy,” he confessed the following spring, when the British and French armies were making fruitless attacks on the Western Front and the Germans were deploying poison gas for the first time. “I know the war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second of it.”
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In September 1914, however, hopes for a decisive breakthrough were still strong. Each side was scrambling to establish a defensive line that eventually ran from the Swiss border to the Channel. But the “race to the sea” had left some important gaps, including south of the Belgian port of Antwerp, which was about to be besieged by a large German army. If Antwerp held, the British and French armies would have time to close the gap. If not, German forces would be poised on their flanks like a deadly sword of Damocles.

From the Admiralty building, Churchill immediately grasped the seriousness of the situation. He fired off a frantic telegram to Prime Minister Asquith, “
WE MUST HOLD ANTWERP
.” The French commander in chief refused to help, as did Lord Kitchener. So Churchill ordered a brigade of Royal Marines and two brigades of scratch naval volunteers across the Channel.
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Then for good measure he set off to take command himself.

The three thousand Marines arrived on September 28, 1914, to the ecstatic cheers of the Belgian citizens. “You needn’t worry,” Churchill told the astonished Antwerp mayor. “We are going to save the city.” Winston was everywhere, supervising the construction of defensive works, rounding up workmen and combat teams, scrounging for guns and ammunition, and even siting artillery pieces as the German bombardment got under way. It was the Siege of Sidney Street all over again. This time, however, the lives of thousands, and the course of the war, hung in the balance.

The London correspondent of an Italian newspaper caught sight of him during the bombardment, “enveloped in a cloak and wearing a yachting cap.” Churchill “was tranquilly smoking a large cigar and watching the progress of the battle under a rain of shrapnel which I can only call fearful.” The reporter mused, “It is not easy to find in all Europe a Minister who would be capable of smoking peacefully under that shell-fire” or coolly planning his counterattack while shells shook the roof over his head and blew out the windows.
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As the Germans approached the city, Churchill sent another cable to Asquith. He begged to be allowed to resign from the Cabinet and to be given formal command of the defense of Antwerp. Asquith was as much amused as surprised. When he read the telegram aloud to the other assembled members, the table rocked with laughter.
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They all looked at one another and shook their heads. What was Winston thinking? But others, especially at the Admiralty, were not amused. They were furious at the First Lord for deserting his official post, arguably the most important in Britain, and for leading the Royal Marines to a fore-ordained defeat. “It is a tragedy that the Navy should be in such lunatic hands at this time,” one officer complained.
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Relief for Antwerp proved impossible to provide. Churchill and his men were ordered to return to Dover, and on October 10 the city capitulated, even as the relentless German attack pounded it to ruins. “What a crime!” wrote one eyewitness, the poet Rupert Brooke.
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Nearly 2,500 British Marines and naval volunteers were either taken prisoner or interned, and more than 20,000 Belgians. “Poor Winston is very depressed,” Asquith said when Churchill came back. “He feels his mission was in vain.”
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Many agreed. Newspapers angrily denounced the Antwerp operation as reckless and unnecessary. Even the
Morning Post,
which had carried his dispatches from South Africa, turned against him, calling the First Lord of the Admiralty an “erratic amateur.” But the defense of Antwerp had accomplished more than appeared at first glance. Winston had delayed the German advance just long enough for the French to move northward to plug the gap. “Ten days were needed,” Churchill would dramatically write later, “and ten days were found.”
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Others, however, saw in the Antwerp affair a forty-year-old-man with great responsibilities acting impulsively—“like a romantic child,” as his friend Violet Asquith admitted—without a single thought about the consequences. Asquith told his wife that the rash adventure made Winston “by far the most disliked man in my Cabinet.” Even Lloyd George had to shrug his shoulders in vexation over his friend’s impulsiveness. “Winston is like a torpedo,” he confessed. “The first you hear of his doings is when you hear the swish of the torpedo dashing through the water.”
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The Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law was deeply disturbed by the Antwerp fiasco. “I think [Winston] has very unusual intellectual abilities,” he wrote to a fellow Tory MP, “but at the same time he seems to have an entirely unbalanced mind, which is a real danger at a time like this.”
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Just how dangerous, they were about to find out.

Churchill returned to his duties at the Admiralty and the War Cabinet, but he found little room for the kind of action he craved and few important decisions to make. Nothing decisive was stirring at sea;
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not much more on land. As the fighting bogged down in the trenches that winter and British casualties approached the 100,000 mark, Churchill and others wondered if this war was going to be won in France after all.

Winston, back to his usual manic self, fired off ideas and opinions with dizzying speed. For example, the prime minister wrote on December 30, 1914, that Churchill had approached him with an idea for equipping soldiers for the next offensive with “armed rollers to crush down barbed wire, bullet proofed shields, and armor,” a notion that seemed to Asquith quaintly but pointlessly medieval. Later Winston would take up the idea again with his armored motorized “tank.” But for now both he and Maurice Hankey made it clear to the prime minister that something different was needed to break the stalemate in the West. Winston wanted the move to be made “primarily, of course, by means of his Navy,” but the Allies needed a way to bypass the dead end in France.
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Churchill and Kitchener took turns pondering the map. Perhaps Eastern Europe, they thought, offered a way to get around the German flank. In January 1915 the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas, who was hard-pressed on his front, appealed to them for help. Where could Britain deliver a decisive stroke and possibly join up with her Russian allies? Then one day as he and Kitchener talked and plotted, Churchill’s finger slowly traveled down the map—until it stopped at the Dardanelles.

The Dardanelles Straits were the western gateway to Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire. They form a narrow passage between the Mediterranean and the landlocked Sea of Marmara, which opens through the Bosporus onto the Black Sea. Since the time of Xerxes and Alexander, these waters had drawn empire-builders from East and West: no less than fifteen decisive battles had been fought nearby.
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Now there would be another.

For the Dardanelles were hostile territory. Before general hostilities broke out, the Turkish sultan had struck a secret deal with the Germans; the German cruisers
Goeben
and
Breslau
had found shelter from the British navy in Constantinople’s harbor. Over the autumn the Turks’ ramshackle empire, stretching from the European shore of the Dardanelles through Turkey and Syria and across Mesopotamia to Baghdad, had slowly and painfully mobilized for war. The sultan’s armies had launched a disastrous offensive against the British in Egypt through Sinai and another, more successful one against the Russians in the Caucasus. It was that attack that had prompted the plea for help from the Russian commander in chief.

Yet, in the early autumn of 1914 the war in the Middle East had seemed a sideshow, compared to the vital stakes on the Western Front. And Britain had other reasons for not stirring up the hornets’ nest of Turkish politics. Sultan Mehmet V was also caliph or defender of the shrines sacred to Muslims around the world, including Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Millions of Muslims in India considered the sultan caliph (in Urdu,
khalifa
) and nothing less than their spiritual leader. Officials in the India Office worried about where the loyalty of India’s Muslims might lie, should the Allies attack the Turks.

Thus, the British tried to avoid any provocation of Indian Muslim feeling. Winston Churchill was told to put off any attack on the
Goeben
and
Breslau
in Constantinople’s harbor, for fear that it might trigger trouble.
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Then in November 1914 the sultan supplemented his declaration of war against the Allies with a declaration of jihad, calling for all Muslims in the British, Russian, and French empires to rise up against their colonial masters.

To the Allied officials’ relief, the response across India was minimal. Even in the heavily Muslim Northwest Frontier, the most volatile region of all, where rumors flew over the mountain tops that the German Kaiser had cemented his alliance with the sultan by converting to Islam, things remained quiet. However, there were some flare-ups among Muslim troops in the Indian Army, and soldiers in the Fifth Indian Light Infantry in Singapore besieged their officers in their bungalows and released German internees from prison (who immediately turned around to help suppress the revolt). For several days Singapore lay defenseless. When the mutiny was over, more than forty whites were dead and thirty-six mutineers had been executed. To many at the time, it had looked like Cawnpore all over again.
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So fears of provoking another Great Mutiny, a remote possibility but still a vivid one,
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stayed the British hand when it came to dealing with the Turks.

But as the Western Front bogged down in stalemate, those considerations paled as the British considered using the Dardanelles to stage an end run around the Germans and Austrians, thereby protecting the British Empire’s eastern flank. The original idea was certainly not Churchill’s—it probably was Kitchener’s. It was not even Churchill’s first choice as a diversion. His, and First Sea Lord Admiral Jack Fisher’s, preference was always for using the navy to cross the Baltic and then land troops in Pomerania, within striking distance of Berlin. The French, however, had earlier proposed a Dardanelles attack. The Admiralty had planned for something like it for years.
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On November 3, after the Turks declared war, Churchill even ordered the navy to bombard the forts guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles, leaving open the option of future operations there. The attack only induced the Turks to reinforce the forts, thus ensuring that any future Allied attack would be more difficult, not less.

But the other members of the British Cabinet’s War Council did not know that. At their very first meeting on November 25, the idea of an attack on the Dardanelles began to take shape.
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By the New Year, it had become Churchill’s new obsession. On January 3, 1915, he telegraphed Vice Admiral Sackville Carden, who commanded the fleet in the eastern Mediterranean: “Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation?”

He was somewhat surprised and perplexed when Carden said no. Carden thought it would require a much larger naval force than he had, as well as a considerable number of troops. On January 21 First Sea Lord Fisher weighed in, saying, “I just abominate the Dardanelles operation, unless a great change is made.” The change would be the addition of 200,000 troops in order to conduct landings in support of the fleet.
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But Churchill believed the Dardanelles could still be “rushed” by a handful of ships, in the kind of bold strike typical of the Royal Navy. Besides, his growing eagerness for an attack was contagious. On January 13 the War Council set up a subcommittee to study the problem. On the twenty-eighth, Winston reported that the Admiralty, the French, and the Russians had signed on “with enthusiasm.”
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In the end the War Council gave its go-ahead, but with two stipulations. The first was that the expedition had to include an army large enough to land on the narrow Gallipoli peninsula that jutted into the Dardanelles and defeat the Turkish garrison there. The second was that Churchill had to send a force of battleships to start the proceedings with a large naval bombardment.

Thus it was the War Council, including Kitchener, that put together the Dardanelles operation in all its detail and complexity, and hardly Churchill alone.
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The others had come to see it as he did, as more than just a diversion or an effort to join up with the Russians. They convinced themselves that success in the Dardanelles would bring Greece, Bulgaria, and even Romania into the Allied camp. Kitchener said “the Turkish Army would evacuate Europe altogether.” Churchill went further. “A soon as the Dardanelles are open,” he enthusiastically predicted on February 23, British forces would be able to occupy Constantinople and “compel the surrender of any Turkish forces in Europe.” Its effect on the whole of the Balkans, even perhaps on the war itself, would be “decisive.”
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