at War
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Herbert Henry Asquith by Andre Cluysenaar, 1919.
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ASQUITH
Haldane, who, as War Secretary, created both the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the Territorial Army.
During the Moroccan Crisis of 1911 Asquith sanctioned Lloyd George’s Guildhall speech, which warned Germany not to risk British enmity. The premier responded to the crisis by putting two ex-Tories with military experience in charge of the armed services. He made Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty to ensure that the Royal Navy was ready for war with Germany and able to transport the BEF to the Continent. He also put J.E.B. Seeley in charge of the War Office, though he resigned in April 1914 after the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland. Asquith then made himself secretary of state for war, gaining direct experience of army matters several months before the start of the conflict.
A
S PREMIER, Asquith was ex officio chairman of the recently established Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), composed of politicians and military men, and he played an active role in its various committees. By 1914 it had examined most aspects of a possible war with Germany: the naval position, the threat of invasion, the possibility of a blockade, trade, transport and imperial defence. In particular, the War Book, which set out the procedures required in the event of hostilities, had recently been revised. After the outbreak of war Asquith told MPs that everything had been foreseen and provided for in advance, exceptthe necessity for a major increase in the regular forces.
The emergence of a pan-European crisis in the summer of 1914 did not entirely surprise Asquith, who had a
‘fixed belief that the Expected rarely happens’. Although the government was preoccupied with the Irish crisis, he was quick to appreciate the gravity of the situation on the Continent.
After the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in late July he wrote: ‘We are within measurable or imaginable distance of a real Armageddon, which would dwarf the Ulster & Nationalist Volunteers to their true proportion.’ A few days later he observed: ‘Of course we want to keep out of it but the worst thing we could do would be to announce to the world at the present moment that in no circumstances would we intervene.’
During the diplomatic phase of the European crisis Asquith was careful to keep in step with Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, but when it appeared that Britain could not avoid the conflict, the premier steered the nation, step by step, towards military engagement. On August 2nd he approved the mobilisation of the fleet and the following day, as secretary for war, he ordered the mobilisation of the army. On August 4th the British ultimatum to Germany, not to violate the neutrality of Belgium, was delivered and expired that evening. On August 6th the Cabinet agreed to despatch the BEF to the Continent in response to the Belgian appeal for assistance. Asquith stepped down from the War Office, which he transferred to Lord Kitchener.
Asquith was under no illusion that the war would soon be over. He told Venetia Stanley that the conflict was ‘the
biggest thing we are ever likely to see’. At no stage did he succumb to war hysteria or seek to turn the situation to his own political advantage. After being followed to his front door by a cheering crowd he commented: ‘I have never been a popular character with the “man in the street” and in all this dark and dangerous business it gives me scant pleasure.’
Asquith’s decision to go to war was an affirmation, not a betrayal, of his lifelong liberalism. Britain was fighting to fulfil its obligation to protect Belgium and ‘to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed … by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power’.
In both those respects Asquith consciously followed in the footsteps of Gladstone, who in 1870 had warned France and Prussia not to violate Belgian neutrality. At Midlothian in 1879 Gladstone had declared: ‘The same sacredness defends the narrow limits of Belgium, as attaches to the extended Right: Venetia
Stanley in 1915, from the Tatler.
Crowds gather around Asquith’s car in Whitehall soon after war is declared, August 4th, 1914.
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frontiers of Russia, or Germany, or France’. By focusing on Belgium, rather than on any obligation to France, Asquith limited dissension within the government; only two minor Cabinet members, John Burns and John Morley, resigned.
The focus on Belgium, a Roman Catholic country, appealed to the Irish Nationalists, on whom the govern-ment depended for its majority. Asquith further pleased the Nationalists by insisting that the Home Rule Bill should be placed on the statute book, despite Tory opposition. He pac-ified the Unionist Tories by suspending its implementation until the end of the war.
Max Hastings has condemned Asquith for committing an absurdly small army to the Continent. Certainly the BEF as first despatched was tiny by comparison with the conti-nental conscript armies. It was, however, the best-equipped army Britain had ever sent abroad, designed not to be a stand-alone force but to act on the wing of the much larger French army. In any case the BEF was only the advance guard of a much larger force. Within a month 200,000
Irish recruiting numbers exceeded those in Britain during the early months.
Asquith described Kitchener’s appointment to the War Office as ‘a hazardous experiment but the best in the times’.
Certainly Kitchener’s popularity with the public facilitated the raising of a huge volunteer army. In the early part of the war, Asquith saw Kitchener every day, which helped to ensure that there was no serious division between the military and the government, as had recently occurred over Ireland. But Kitchener’s appointment blurred the relationship between the military and the government and his relations with General Sir John French, the command-er-in-chief of the BEF, were difficult.
Christopher Clark has claimed that Asquith didn’t sufficiently feel the pain that the conflict would generate.
Asquith was not one to make a public display of his emo-tions but he made his horror of war evident both in private and in public. In September 1914 he declared:
War is at all times a hideous thing; at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils and at the worst little better than letting loose a hell upon earth … but in the modern days, with the gigantic scale of the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than it ever was before.
By the end of 1914 his four adult sons by his first wife, Helen, who died of typhoid in 1891, had all enlisted and they chose to stay with their regiments in the field rather than take safe staff posts. In 1915 and 1916 Asquith made a number of visits to the Western Front, where his accurate command of the language enabled him to converse with the monoglot French generals. The British soldiers that he met on the front told him that they believed in the justice of the cause and were determined to win.
Asquith generally left military strategy and tactics to the professionals, with whom he did not always agree. He dis-missed the idea that a German invasion of Britain was possi-ble but the generals kept many troops at home to deter such
an attack in the first year of the war. Asquith, moreover, believed that ‘one must take a lot of risks in war’ and he shared Churchill’s enthusiasm for bold, imaginative action against the enemy: early in the war he favoured an attack by seaplanes on Cuxhaven and the Zeppelin sheds at the mouth of the Kiel Canal. He initially opposed an assault on the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli peninsula, but Churchill persuaded him that the chance of cutting Turkey in half and winning over the Balkan peninsula was worthwhile. He de-scribed the operation as ‘far the most interesting moment up to now in the war’. Even so, he continued to regard the Western Front as the main theatre of conflict.
Asquith’s involvement with the war went beyond prime ministerial supervision. In 1914 he briefly took charge at the Admiralty while Churchill was in Antwerp and in 1915 he ran the War Office again when Kitchener visited Gallipo-li and Italy. He also managed the Foreign Office while Grey was ill and in 1915 he even offered to combine the premier-ship with the chancellorpremier-ship. Despite his workload Asquith still found time to relax, spending weekends in the reservists had been called up and 439,000 men had joined
the army as volunteers. By the end of the year a million men had enlisted. In addition, two regular divisions from India and volunteers from the Dominions, notably the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, were prepared for service in the European theatre. Asquith accurately predicted that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the contribution of the Empire to securing victory.
Asquith took what he called ‘a special and direct interest’ in recruiting, making speeches throughout the United Kingdom. At Edinburgh he reminded his audience of Gladstone’s stance in 1870. At Cardiff he appealed to the Welsh by promising that the new military forces would retain distinctive local identities. At Dublin his defence of the rights of small nations went down well with the Nationalist audience, who even sang ‘God Save the King’.