Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 2: The Icon And His Critics

The first problem which the Secret Elite and their agents faced in bringing Kitchener into the Cabinet in August 1914 was that he was a serving soldier, not a politician. He did not take orders; he gave them. His appointment lent credence to the view that with his presence inside the Cabinet, Kitchener guaranteed the Liberal government ‘an aura of professional military competence which earned [them] widespread public approval.’ [1] The people in the streets and factories were delighted at his appointment. However, if any insider assumed that he would embrace the collective responsibility of cabinet membership, they were to be sorely tested. [2]

The second problem stemmed from Kitchener’s comparative lack of association with the military hierarchy which had been groomed at Camberley. [3] His world had been centred on the Empire. He was more at home as proconsul in Egypt or Commander-in-Chief in South Africa during the later stages of the Boer War, and again in India, [4] than in the confines of the War Office and the Cabinet Office. While Kitchener was hailed throughout Britain as a decisive and iconic figure, he had a more limited impact on his own staff. [5] Despite all of the careful preplanning carried out by the Committee of Imperial Defence and so clearly explained to Churchill, Lloyd George, Grey, Haldane and Asquith in 1911 [6] by Henry Wilson (at that point a General), the newly formed War Council [7] began to reconsider options. To Wilson’s horror they started to quibble over the number of divisions from the British Expeditionary Force which should be sent to France. He had assumed that the whole force would be sent immediately on mobilisation. That was what had been secretly agreed with the French army. The implications of failing to do so appalled him and he complained bitterly to senior military commanders, and prominent individuals like Leo Amery and Lord Alfred Milner, [8] both of whom were inner circle members of the Secret Elite.

If Kitchener required a quick lesson on how difficult rule by committee can be when strong-minded individuals feel the need to express contrary or optional views, this was a baptism of fire. The War Council could not decide where the BEF should be headquartered or how many division should be sent to France. Sir John French favoured switching headquarters to Antwerp rather than Maubeuge, as had been planned and agreed with the French army. Kitchener preferred Amiens, but wanted to have further intelligence from the French before settling the question. The meeting should have been held in Bedlam. Some War Council members thought that Liege was in Holland, not Belgium. In Henry Wilson’s view, they discussed strategy like idiots. It was, he rasped, ‘an historic meeting of men mostly entirely ignorant of their subject’. [9] And he included Kitchener in that wild generalisation.

Every day of indecision was a day irrevocably lost to the advancing Germans. On 5 August a further War Council meeting took place at 10 Downing Street. [10] Kitchener had decided that two divisions from the BEF should be withheld to protect the east coast of Britain from German attack and Asquith approved the action. According to Henry Wilson, when the prime minister backed Kitchener in withholding two divisions, he was more concerned about internal disorder than invasion, fearing that ‘the domestic situation might be grave’. [11] He still had one eye on Ulster and knew that there was a sizeable opposition to war amongst some members of the Labour and Trades Union movement. Whatever the reason, Kitchener approved the sending of only four divisions [12], and eventually, after bitter argument on 12 August, agreed that the BEF Headquarters be established at Maubeuge. Later, historians claimed that Kitchener’s final decision was indeed fortunate. Had all six divisions been thrown at the German army in Belgium, losses would probably have been far worse and the whole British army destroyed. [13]

The personal relationship between Lord Kitchener and Brigadier-General Henry Wilson soured markedly when the Secretary of State for War discovered that Wilson had met with the French intermediary, General Huguet, informed him of current British thinking and allowed him to return to France without meeting Kitchener on 7 August. Wilson’s diary records a most acrimonious meeting at which he spoke his mind to Kitchener, insisting that he would not be bullied ‘especially when he [Kitchener] talks such nonsense as he did today.’ We have only his word on such insubordination. In Wilson’s eyes, Kitchener had ruined the carefully designed plans which had been agreed with the French army by diluting the BEF’s strength in France. [14] Consequently, relations between Wilson and Kitchener remained toxic for the first eight months of the war.

Wilson continually undermined Kitchener’s vulnerable position, isolated as he was in the War Office, criticising his ‘colossal ignorance and conceit.’ [15] The Imperial General Staff had decamped to France with Sir John French in overall command, Sir Archibald Murray as Chief of General Staff, Sir William Robertson as Quartermaster and Wilson himself, ‘reduced’, as he saw it, to Brigadier General of Operations. [16] After a personal protest, Wilson’s position was redefined as ‘Sub-Chief.’ [17] Such vainglorious emphasis on titles rather than substance revealed the near ubiquitous pettiness and conceit among the outdated, outmoded and, soon to be very evident, incompetent military hierarchy of the Roberts Academy. Kitchener was thus left isolated in London where a substantial power vacuum developed between the war planners (the General Staff in France) and the policy makers, essentially the Cabinet advised by Kitchener.

General Sir Henry Wilson had much deeper and more extensive roots within the Secret Elite than Kitchener could ever have appreciated and regularly sent private letters of complaint about the conduct of the war to his mentor and Secret Elite leader, Lord Alfred Milner. Within a week of crossing to France, Wilson condemned the ‘cowardly ignorance’ of his superiors in London – meaning Asquith and Kitchener. He blamed the retreat from Mons on the ‘initial blunder’ (that would be Kitchener’s blunder, approved by the prime minister) of depleting the BEF’s original strength by keeping two divisions in Britain. [18] Blaming others was a tactic repeatedly employed by Henry Wilson. Any military failure was always someone else’s fault.

Despite the criticism of disloyal colleagues, both in the military and the Cabinet, Kitchener had a far greater grasp of the prerequisites for warfare and the appropriate application of sound strategy than most around him. What did not help was his overbearing and dismissive manner. [19] He alone amongst the military hierarchy recognised that Britain had to be committed to a prolonged war.

Historians have glibly accepted the idea that Herbert Kitchener first began to consider the impact of war in Europe in the short days of August immediately before his appointment as Secretary of State for War. What nonsense. While in Japan on his world tour in 1909, Kitchener was joined by his old friend Henry Rawlinson who had served on his staff in Sudan and South Africa. He was informed of the secret arrangements for combined action between the British and French in the event of war with Germany. Kitchener did not like the arrangement because it meant being tacked-on to the French, which ‘might not suit’. [20] After a joint military and naval conference in Malta in 1912, he and Churchill ‘used to talk over Imperial Defence topics when from time to time we met.’ [21] Kitchener also discussed Germany’s likely strategy in Belgium with Winston Churchill on 28 July. [22] To suggest that he was ignorant of the imminence of war in August 1914 is completely at odds with the evidence.

While the German plans for defence, should they be attacked from east and west simultaneously, the Schleiffen Plan, was widely known throughout Europe, Schleiffen’s original designs had been refined over the previous decade. The advance of the whole first army through Belgium had not been envisaged by Wilson and his entourage. This concerned Kitchener. He correctly concluded that the German plan of attack was to sweep around Belgium north of the River Meuse – which was why he had deep reservations about placing the BEF headquarters at Maubeuge. For all the years of detailed preparations which Sir Henry Wilson had spent laboriously mapping and planning along the Belgian – French border, he had never considered that his small force would face the full might of Von Kluck’s 1st German army, nor spend the next three weeks in retreat, struggling to keep in touch with the disheartened French.

Indeed as a soldier experienced in several wars, Kitchener’s grasp of the immediate situation before him was far more circumspect than that of anyone at GHQ in France. [23] He was under no illusion that the Expeditionary Force was completely inadequate to the task of taking on the vast resources and overwhelming manpower of the German and Austrian forces. He saw that the small British force had little value as an independent unit and consequently it became an auxiliary wing of the retreating French army.

Kitchener’s fears proved justified. Sir John French, a commander whose enthusiasms plummeted between unbound optimism and deep despair, had to be commanded not to retire to Le Havre with the remnants of the BEF. Perturbed by his commander in the field’s intention to withdraw, Kitchener was immediately sent by a small coterie of the Cabinet, including Asquith, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George ‘to unravel the situation and if necessary, put the fear of God into them all.’ [24] With his mind already poisoned by the bitter Wilson, Sir John French took Kitchener’s presence as a personal insult. He was even more upset when Kitchener appeared in the uniform of Field Marshall. Jealous of Kitchener’s superior rank, political authority, linguistic skills (his fluency in French gave him an advantage in discussion with the French high command,) [25] Sir John French resented the Secretary of State for War with a vengeance.

All of which begs the question – why did the Secret Elite pursue his appointment as Secretary of State for War with such insistence? What did Kitchener possess which made him integral to the pursuit of a very long war?

[1] Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol 1, p. 203.
[2] Keith Jeffery, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, A Political Soldier, p. 132.
[3] Kitchener was an imperial soldier and proconsul. Several of his staff members during the Boer War served or commanded the Military Staff Training College at Camberley, but Herbert Kitchener was never one of Lord Robert’s entourage who dominated the upper echelons of the British army. He operated independently, and had his heart set on becoming the next Viceroy of India before war broke out. Thus he was an ‘outsider’ compared to the near masonic brotherhood which Roberts dominated inside his ‘Academy’. [ See Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the first World War, Chapter 15, p. 194 – 202.]
[4]  Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, p. 203.
[5] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, 132.
[6] Winston Churchill, World Crisis, pp. 38-9.
[7] For details see previous blog.
[8] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics p. 244.
[9] C E Callwell and Marshal Foch, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson VI: His Life And Diaries. p. 159.
[10] PRO CAB 22/1/1.
[11] Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, H H Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 159.
[12] PRO CAB 22/1/2.
[13] John Terraine, Mons, p. 88.
[14]  Callwell and  Foch, Wilson Diaries:  p. 160.
[15] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, p. 133.
[16] Callwell and Foch, Wilson Diaries, p. 157.
[17] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, p. 132.
[18] Milner Papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, quoted in A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 242.
[19] George H Cassar, The Tragedy of Sir John French, p. 252.
[20] George H Cassar, Kitchener, Architect of Victory, p. 160.
[21] Churchill, World Crisis, pp. 125-6.
[22] Ibid., p. 101.
[23] Callwell and Foch, Wilson Diaries, p. 161.
[24] Brock and Brock, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 213.
[25] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 310.

Churchill – The Circus Comes To Town

The British Expeditionary Force had been successfully transported across the Channel to France without the loss of a single ship between 12 and 21 August. They were protected by destroyers and submarines which closely watched the Heligoland Bight, the entrance to the German Grand fleet base at the mouth of the river Elbe, to counter any attempt at interference from German patrols. German naval planners reckoned that it would take longer for the Royal Navy to organise a cross-channel expedition and were caught by surprise at its speed of execution. Their submarines, which might have attacked the British transport ships, were engaged in searching for the main British fleet further north. [1]

On 28 August, at the Heligoland Bight, a force of five battlecruisers, eight light cruisers, thirty-three destroyers and eight submarines ambushed six German light cruisers, nineteen torpedo boats and twelve minesweepers in the early morning mists just off the coast. Asquith considered it a heartening success, describing the three German cruisers that Churchill claimed had been sunk, as ‘a good haul’. [2] Later it transpired that only one destroyer had been sunk and the cruisers damaged. In terms of ships and men lost, victory was recorded by the Royal Navy, but more important than the statistics was the impact on Kaiser Wilhelm. Stung by the loss of his precious ships so close to home, he issued orders to restrict the initiative of the Commander of the Imperial Fleet in the use of his navy. In future, any great ‘sallies’ into the North Sea had to have his prior approval. The Imperial Fleet had effectively been muzzled by its own leader. Churchill claimed that, ‘except for furtive movements by individual submarines and minelayers, not a dog stirred from August till November.’ [3] His selective-memory syndrome was alarmingly inaccurate.

At a rally in Liverpool on 21 September 1914, Churchill’s bold predictions left him a hostage to fortune. In his blustering triumphalism, he prophesied that victory was only ‘a question of how much blood is to be shed, and the more men we can send the less slaughter there will be.’ [4] While his fine sounding words were set to inspire the 15,000 souls crammed into Liverpool’s Tournament Hall, they were empty promises, as was his assertion that, ‘if the German Navy did not come out and fight, it would have to be dug out like rats in a hole’.

The rats bit back immediately. On 22 September, three ‘good and powerful [British] cruisers of an old, but not obsolete type’ were sunk in the southern part of the North Sea. [5] More than 1,400 men and boys were lost, and his political enemies claimed that this was directly due to Churchill’s incompetence. [6] A few days later, Conservative MP George Bowles circulated a pamphlet which specifically alleged that ‘despite the warnings of the admirals, commodores and captains, Mr Churchill refused, until it was too late to recall them from patrol’ and the ships had carried on, ‘certain to fall victims to the torpedoes of an active enemy’. [7] Matters deteriorated. Half a dozen German cruisers were still at large on the high seas, and a New Zealand detachment for the British Expeditionary Force refused to sail without adequate convoy escorts. Decisions had to be postponed. There was a mini-crisis at the Admiralty for Churchill had sallied off to France and was incommunicado. Asquith remained loyal to his First Lord and meekly told Venetia that ‘unfortunately Winston was away on one of his furtive missions’, confirming for certain that Churchill’s yearning to be part of the action took him where he pleased. [8]

With his navy safely ensconced at Scapa Flow like a prize collection of favoured toys, more valued in display than in action, Churchill began to look for other avenues that would promote his self image. He had to be the centre of attention. Inactivity and patience ill suited him. He was exhilarated to agree to Lord Kitchener’s request that his naval air service be used to protect London from Zeppelin raids but a second request to send a detachment of marines to reinforce Dunkirk, and give the Germans the impression that British troops were already stationed along the channel coast, backfired. Churchill’s capacity for rash judgement began to take on a comic look when first he requisitioned fifty London buses and took them to France to make a flamboyant statement. What Kitchener had not envisaged was that Churchill would leave his office and visit his marines in France. They had great fun parading around Ypres, Lille, Tournai and Douai, towns that would become synonymous with the horrendous and merciless destruction of war, as did Winston, inspecting his air bases and ‘thinking up new escapades for his Circus.’ [9]

A week later the Churchill circus rolled into the Belgian city port of Antwerp. In the aftermath of the German defeat on the Marne in September, they switched their attack towards the channel ports, and in particular, Antwerp. Its heavy fortifications crumbled before the onslaught of enormous German howitzers and the King of the Belgians appealed for urgent and immediate aid, hinting that if reinforcements did not arrive, the Belgian army might be captured intact. It was a stunning predicament. Asquith called the Belgian government’s plans to abandon the city as ‘mad’. Someone had to steady the Belgian nerve, and who better than Winston Churchill? They had been informed that the King and the Belgian army intended to evacuate to England. Churchill was on ‘one of his jaunts with the Dunkirk circus’ [10] in a special train when he was summoned back to London for a late night emergency conference with Sir Edward Grey and Lord Kitchener. It was agreed that Winston should go immediately to Antwerp, ‘and beard the King and his Ministers and infuse into their backbones the necessary quantity of starch.’ [11] How quintessentially Eton and Oxford.

Why send Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty? Did he not have other pressing duties? Sir Edward Grey, as Foreign Secretary had only ever crossed the channel once, in the company of King George in April 1914, and did not speak French. Lord Kitchener was a fluent French-speaker, but as Minister of War could hardly act as a messenger. Churchill’s capacity to speak the language actually attracted Asquith’s later ridicule as ‘the worst French you or I have ever heard’ [12.] but in what the Prime Minister called ‘one of the many unconventional incidents of the war,’ off Winston went to stiffen the Belgian resolve.

There is a different account given by Lord Esher, one of the inner-most men in the Secret Elite. [13] According to his version of events, Churchill took it upon himself to go to Antwerp without anyone’s agreement. Esher claimed that the first that Kitchener knew about the expedition was when he received a telegram the following day from Churchill in Antwerp pleading for urgent re-enforcements. [14] Churchill went to great lengths in his own account to belittle the claim, blaming Esher’s ‘uncontrollable fondness for fiction’. [15]

Whatever the truth, Churchill left Victoria station at 2.00am on 3 October on his special train for a second time. He duly arrived at the Belgian Headquarters in Antwerp dressed like an understudy from HMS Pinafore in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity House. Whatever possessed him to don such inappropriate and frankly, comic apparel, bemused the American correspondent, E. Alexander Powell. He described Churchill’s arrival in the city as follows;

‘ It was a most spectacular entrance and reminded me for all the world of a scene in a melodrama when the hero dashes up bare-headed on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine, or the old-homestead, or the family fortune as the case may be. The Burgomaster stopped him, introduced himself, and expressed his anxiety regarding the fate of the city. Before he had finished, Churchill was part way up the stairs. ‘I think everything will be all right now, Mr. Burgomaster,’ he called in a voice which could be distinctly heard throughout the lobby. ‘You needn’t worry. We’re going to save the city.’ [16]

Of course he was. That was how he saw himself. Unquestionably Churchill’s arrival bolstered the spirits of the populace in Antwerp as did the two thousand marines who followed and the five or six thousand naval reserves who boosted their numbers over the next few days. The British force flung itself into the trench defences of Antwerp, and Churchill relished the opportunity to inspect the Belgian positions for three consecutive days, defiant of the extreme dangers from gun-fire and shrapnel. He was in his element. When the London buses arrived bedecked in their adverts for Theatre shows, teas, tobaccos and whiskies, Antwerp reacted like Mafeking. But the raw troops who were rushed into the trenches without head protection or sufficient artillery support could only hold the line for three days under murderous fire, [17]

Winston was enjoying himself. He was ‘exhilarated by the experience’ When his old friend Jack Seely arrived in Antwerp he found him at the centre of attention ; ‘He dominated the whole place – the King, ministers, soldiers, sailors.’ [18]

Churchill was unstoppable. He telegraphed Asquith on 5 October saying that he ought to resign as First Lord and take military command of the expedition to Antwerp with an ‘appropriate military rank and a full staff.’ Charles Hobhouse, the Postmaster-General, noted that ‘he appears to have promoted during his stay in Antwerp, several officers to be Generals.’ [19] Asquith tried valiantly to avoid answering questions in Cabinet about the missing First Lord of the Admiralty, but forced by repeated questioning into reading Churchill’s telegram aloud, his colleagues burst out laughing at his stupidity. [20] All bar Kitchener.

Antwerp fell only five days after his arrival but there is a general consensus amongst establishment historians that his intervention bought time for Sir John French and the remnants of the B E F further along the coast. It may have, but that had not been Churchill’s primary aim. He was there to stiffen the King’s resolve, to save Antwerp, to save Belgium, to win the war for the nation. Little wonder some thought it ‘the mere madcap exploit of a passion for adventure’, a view rejected by his friend and apologist, Sir Edward Grey. [21] The decision to withdraw the Belgian army was taken on the evening of 6 October and the bold Churchill, in the company of General Rawlinson, immediately retired from Belgium before the German bombardment of the city’s inner defences started.

The inner-line of the Antwerp forts were pummelled from midnight on 7 October and having no means to reply, the British naval brigades had no other recourse but to withdraw towards Ghent and Ostend on 8 October. Next day German patrols entered Antwerp and on 10 October 1914, the ‘stout-hearted Governor’ surrendered the city. [22] The retreat from Antwerp was described by the Belgian journalist Charles D’Ydewalle as a terrifying business. [23] So it is always for those left with the consequences of rash decisions. The original telegramme sent by the British minister in Antwerp, Sir Francis Villiers on 2 October, warned that resistance would likely last for only five or six days, and that is precisely what happened. Churchill’s presence had made no tangible difference.

[1] Robert Massie , Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the winning of the Great War at sea. P. 80.
[2] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.203.
[3] Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, p171.
[4] Times, 22 September 1914, p.3.
[5] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.252.
[6] Leo Manxse to J S Saunders, 8 October 1914
[7] Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill, p.178.
[8] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.253.
[9] Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill, p.177.
[10] Earl of Birkenhead, Churchill, 1874-1922, p. 313.
[11] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.260.
[12] Ibid., p.418.
[13] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 311.
[14] Reginald Viscount Esher, The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener, p. 67.
[15] Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 322.
[16] E Alexander Powell, Fighting in Flanders, pp.176-7.
[17] Ibid., p. 183.
[18] Earl of Birkenhead, Churchill, 1874-1922, p. 315.
[19] Edward David, Inside Asquith’s Cabinet, p.195.
[20] George H Cassar, Kitchener, Architect of Victory, p.245.
[21] Grey of Fallodon, Twenty Five Years, vol. 2.p. 302.
[22] Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, p. 323.
[23] Charles D’Ydewalle, Albert, King of the Belgians, p. 126.

Selling The Big Lie (2) Press Censorship In 1914

Censorship of news was reluctantly accepted by the British press. Initially, they surrendered their right to freedom of information and expression with barely a noticeable whimper. Again it was left to Churchill, who gloried in being the front-man, to make the announcement in Parliament on 7 August. He praised the editors and proprietors who had deliberately  turned a blind eye to the discreet preparations for mobilisation by the Admiralty and the War Office barely ten days earlier and announced the formation of an all-powerful Press Bureau under the command of the Secret Elite’s legal colossus, F E Smith. [1] It’s purpose, he claimed was to provide,

‘a steady stream of trustworthy information supplied both by the War Office and the Admiralty … which, without endangering military or naval interests, will serve to keep the country properly and truthfully informed from day to day of what can be told, and what is fair and reasonable; and thus, by providing as much truth as possible, exclude the growth of irresponsible rumours.’ [2]

Perhaps the clue lay in the words ‘as much truth as possible’. Out of nowhere, a Press bureau was created under the all-pervading arm of the Defence of the Realm Act which allowed the government to impose very powerful social controls on the population. Freedom to access news about the war that had just begun was removed. Journalists were not allowed to travel to and report from the front line in August 1914, but newspapers were promised absolute accuracy from the War Office and Admiralty liaison officers.

The truth is that the press sold its prestige and degraded its conscience by surrendering to government propaganda, in abandoning its critical faculty throughout the war and in willingly taking part in the deliberate deception of the public. Northcliffe and his Secret Elite acolytes dominated the British press to an extent that no national newspaper stood against them. They have much to answer for, even a century later. They carried the slogans, their editors and leader-writers provided the invective, and they gloried in the malice they concocted against Germany. That those who survived the war were misled about its purpose and meanings is, on its own, deplorable, but that millions of fighting men died under the misconception that their cause would have some long term impact on the future of civilisation is surely one of the most poignant of all historic tragedies.  [3]

To the upper echelons of the Secret Elite, control over the population, how and what it thought, and what it was allowed to know, was central to their philosophy. Freedom of thought was not acceptable. Dissent was deemed unpatriotic.  Their disdain for democracy was raised to a new level. The masses would be told only what the masters allowed. But implementing these draconian measures proved difficult. F E Smith was thrust into a new role in charge of the Press Bureau for which there was no precedent and for which there was no experienced staff. [4] He had no previous Cabinet experience, and belonged to the more right-wing school of the Secret Elite. He was closely associated with the Milner/Roberts/Northcliffe group which favoured conscription to the armed services rather than a volunteer force.

Denied first hand accounts of what was happening in northern France and Belgium, from experienced and reliable journalists, the information vacuum had been filled with patriotic nonsense. For approximately three weeks the public were force-fed a series of preposterous stories in which half of the German army had been killed and the others had taken flight. Every day reports boasted that the German soldiers were cowards, and that they ran away at the sight of the bayonet, or surrendered ignominiously. What made matters worse was that the public had been solemnly promised that they would be given the absolute truth through the Press Bureau. The accounts they read about German soldiers virtually inferred that fighting was mere child’s play. [5] No-one anticipated a military disaster. The public had been fed a diet of cheerful nonsense that raised high expectation of imminent victory. The Daily News produced chatty reports from correspondents ‘at the front’, with stories of ‘Kippers for Tea’, ‘Toothache in the Trenches’, and ‘The Lieutenant’s Morning Tub’, [6] reassuringly encouraging  and anodyne in nature, but completely at odds with what was happening in northern France and Belgium. Little wonder many of the earliest recruits harboured a fear that the war might be over before they got to France Suddenly the brutal nature of modern warfare slapped middle-class Britain in the face over Sunday breakfast on 30 August.

The truth was devastating. The first shots fired by the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) in Belgium on 23 August near the city of Mons, [7] gave the B.E.F. a brief sense of superiority, but wave after incessant wave of German infantry bore down on the greatly outnumbered British who were forced to retreat in the face of an onslaught. On 26 August the BEF fought the famous delaying action of Le Cateau with wonderful courage against an enemy ‘double their numbers and double their artillery’, but lost 8,000 men before continuing the retreat.  [8] Though they battled with consummate distinction, the B.E.F. was confronted by a well disciplined and armed host which in places was three times its size. The retreat which lasted for thirteen days of unparalleled anxiety covered one hundred and sixty miles, over which the British regulars sustained huge losses. General Sir John French became convinced that the B.E.F. which he described as ‘shattered’ would have to be withdrawn behind the River Seine [9] He was overruled.

Details of this serious reverse were not given to the press until the Times received a dispatch from one of its most reliable correspondents in the early evening of Saturday 29 August. It came as a bolt from the blue, and they instantly sought permission to print the story. Surprisingly, the Press Bureau replied within three hours, removed some minor details and gave permission to print. Confident of their source, and with F E Smith’s approval, the Times carried the news of ‘a retreating and broken army…a terrible fight…broken bits of many regiments’. [10]  It was a disaster. The British people were aghast. Had the B.E.F. been destroyed?  The effect was stunning. The moment was later caught perfectly by H G Wells in his novel Mr Britling Sees It Through (published in 1916) ‘it was as if David had flung his pebble – and missed!’

And it was a Northcliffe exclusive.

The following day The Times and the Daily Mail ‘suppressed the articles from their Monday editions.’ [11] The Times revised its position with a damage-limitation editorial to prevent widespread panic and defuse accusations of disloyalty made against it in Parliament. [Instead of focussing on the retreat of a ‘broken army’ they turned truth on its head by writing:

‘The British Army has surpassed all the glories of its long history, and has won fresh and imperishable renown. It has inflicted terrible losses on the German army and has repeatedly held its own against tremendous odds. Though forced to retire by the overwhelming strength and persistence of the foe, it preserves an unbroken if battered line…’ [12]

It was an indefensible lie. The B.E.F. was by 30 August retreating south towards the River Marne leaving behind it a trail of broken wagons, tattered, abandoned equipment and rations and piles of supplies dumped by the roadside. Anything else that could ease the marchers’ burden apart from their arms and ammunition was left behind. [13]

What the Times initially revealed had blown a gaping hole in effective censorship and forced Kitchener to claim that ‘for every man lost, two more have reached the front’. The Times ‘rejoiced to receive the assurance that British troops are still facing North with “undiminished strength and undaunted spirits.” Another lie.

Had the Censor got it so badly wrong in allowing the truth to surface or was there another motive? Outrage at Northcliffe and his flag-ship newspaper was short lived when it became apparent that F E Smith, the censor himself, had not only cleared the article, but included a comment which Northcliffe duly printed. Convinced that the serious losses sustained by the B.E.F had to be used to rally support for Kitchener’s drive for volunteers, Smith approved the article and admitted in Parliament next day that following discussions with Kitchener, he had been asked by him to ‘obtain recruits for his army.’ The words he had added to the original dispatch were, ‘we want reinforcements, reinforcements and still more reinforcements’. [14] Smith had briefly breeched his own draconian censorship and for the first time the fear of defeat was used to bolster recruitment.

Meanwhile, the first person to fall foul of the censorship law was a newsboy who was thrown into jail for ‘calling out false news’ on the streets of the Scottish Capital on 30 August 1914. [15]

[1] F E Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, was a close friend of Alfred Milner and Sir Edward Carson of the Secret Elite.
[2] Hansard, HC Deb 07 August 1914 vol. 65 cc2153-6.
[3] J. S. Ewart, Roots and Causes of the Wars,  p.30.
[4] HC Deb 10 September 1914 vol. 66 cc726-752.
[5] Dillon, The Times and the Press Censor, House of Commons Debate 31 August 1914, vol. 66, cc454-511.
[6] Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War, p. 179.
[7] John F Lucy, There’s a Devil in the Drum, p.74.
[8] C R Cruttwell, A History of the Great War 1914-1918, p. 23.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Special edition of the Times, 30 August 1914.
[11] Hansard, HC Debate 31 August 1914, vol. 66 cc497-8.
[12] The Times 31 August 1914, p.9.
[13] Paul Greenwood, The British Expeditionary Force August-September 1914. http://1914ancien.free.fr/bef_1914.htm
[14] Hansard, HC Debate 31 August 1914, vol. 66 cc498-9.
[15] Hansard, HC Debate 31 August 1914, vol. 66 cc372-4.

The Horror Begins

4 August 1914 was no ordinary day. In the early morning, the German cavalry, their 12 foot lances aloft, crossed into Belgium and began an assault on the frontier villages which presage the invasion on a much grander scale, exactly as expected. The British military leaders, the War Office, the insiders in the Foreign Office, Churchill, Haldane, Grey, the inner core of the Secret Elite and the commanders of the French army were fully aware that the invasion of Belgium was an integral part of the old Schlieffen Plan. They were counting on it. The very declaration of war against Germany had been predicated upon the German invasion of ‘neutral’ Belgium. In his memoires, General Huguet confessed that the French Commanders had been warned in advance by Lord Esher that they must not be the first to cross the Belgian border, no-matter the pretext. Whereas, when Germany took such a step, ‘that act alone will lead us into declaring war against them’. [1] The myth of Belgian ‘neutrality’ is so deeply ingrained into British history, that one hundred years on, it is still held to be the reason why Britain declared war on Germany. [2]

The Schlieffen Plan, devised in 1905 by the German general Count Alfred von Schlieffen, was a bold defensive strategy against war on two fronts. In anticipating that the day might come when she would have to defend herself on two opposite frontiers against France and Russia, the plan revolved around a quick and decisive strike against France before turning back eastwards to confront Russia. Timing was everything [3] and success depended on Germany’s capacity to move colossal armies by rail within a complex logistical timetable that required five hundred trains, each with fifty wagons, to transport four army corps of around 180,000 troops to Belgium and then France [4] in conjunction with the major offensive against the French through Alsace and Lorraine. The main thrust of the plan in the north was aimed at outflanking the French defences by sweeping through Belgium, around the northern reaches of France and thence south to Paris. Schlieffen had estimated that his plan would neutralise France within six weeks, giving the German army sufficient time to regroup and drive eastward on the same railway system to meet the Russian invaders head-on. Outright victory depended on Germany’s modern transport systems, precision-planning and speed.

It also hinged on Belgium. On the one hand, the German timetable had not included a lengthy stop in Belgium. Schlieffen had assumed that the Belgians would either allow free passage to the German army or offer a token resistance. Whichever, Paris had to fall by the 39th day of the war. On the other, he could not have imagined that successive British governments would have secretly given a commitment to France that placed a small but well prepared British Expeditionary Force in northern France, directly in front of the advancing German army. Nor could he have known that far from the declared position of neutrality, Belgium would be an active participant in these plans which had been officially endorsed by the secretive Committee of Imperial Defence in London. [5] Belgium became the cause celebre in August 1914. Portrayed as a neutral innocent by Sir Edward Grey in Parliament and the Northcliffe press in the country, the German invasion of Belgium was the given cause for Britain’s declaration of war. And Belgium was brave.

Though their army was vastly outnumbered, the Belgians had built a series of twelve forts and underground defensive systems around the city of Liege, where from 5-16 August, the first land battle of the war slowed down the German onslaught. Over-confident in their ability to brush aside the Belgian defenders, a series of direct infantry assaults cost the German Second Army severe losses. Advancing line by line, shoulder to shoulder, the Germans were cut down ‘in an awful barricade of dead and wounded’. [6] Faced with this unexpectedly effective resistance, the Germans employed massive artillery to destroy the Belgian defences. Even after Liege had fallen, many of the forts held out until 16 August.

What the Germans feared most was the type of guerrilla warfare that had caused so much damage in the Franco-German war of 1870, including snipers, sabotage and civil obstruction. Such resistance had to be ruthlessly stamped out so that they could keep to their time-table. [7] The German commander Helmut von Moltke knew that Germany was literally fighting for its life and that those who stood in his way ‘must take the consequences’ [8] The invading forces were ruthless. Villages were burned to the ground, civilians suspected of resistance were summarily shot and the historic medieval town of Louvain was bombarded mercilessly and its priceless university library with its ancient manuscripts was destroyed by fire. Moltke lost valuable time hampered by Belgian resistance, but Germany surrendered a greater hostage to fortune through the graphic images of the gallant little Belgium that would fuel British propaganda

On 4 August 1914, at 11 pm, King George V in Privy Counsel, signed the declaration of war against Germany on behalf of Great Britain and the Empire. The world was at war.

But from the 4th August onwards, that first weeks of that war brought darker preparations to the fore which prioritised the basic prerequisites that the Secret Elite had determined in order to successfully cushion their personal liability from loss, and maximise their profits. Such actions, including immediate control over the nation, the abandonment of basic freedoms, special protection for the banks, finance houses and key industries, and secret international arrangements that had to be kept outwith the public domain, provided a template for future wars. Asquith’s government was as well prepared for war as it could have been, thanks in great part to the meticulous departmental preparations organised by the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) through its prodigiously capable administrator, Maurice Hankey. [9] But immensely far-reaching legislation was agreed and rushed through a partly bewildered, partly jingoistic parliament, punch drunk by the elation of war, a war declared by Britain, for which their approval had never been sought. Given that the Cabinet Papers for that period are missing, presumed destroyed, we must look to the occasional Committee of Imperial Defence Report that slipped the censor’s notice, [10] autobiographies, memoirs and the official records of Parliament to piece together what transpired inside the corridors of Westminster during those brief, extended-Bank-holiday days in 1914.

[1] General Huguet, Britain and the War, p. 18.
[2] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 348.
[3] Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett, 1914-1918, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, p. 59.
[4] Martin van Creveld, Supplying War, pp 112- 24.
[5] Minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence, CAB 38/9/1905, no. 65.
[6] Barbara Tuchman, Guns of August, p. 200.
[7] Winter and Baggett, 1914-1918, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, p. 64.
[8] Ibid., p.65.
[9] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, 1877-1918, p. 137.
[10] see the special Sub-committee set up in 1911 to consider the implications of Trading with the Enemy, PRO CAB 16/18A.