This cry was to haunt Churchill for many years. In an attempt to clear his name of the stigma which was now attached to it, he pressed Asquith to publish the facts about the Dardanelles. When Asquith agreed, he began collecting the documents which showed most clearly his part in the evolution of the enterprise. It was twelve months since his departure from the Admiralty and his loss of authority and influence. 'This accursed year has now come to an end,' he wrote to Fisher on May 14, '& please God there will be better luck for you & me in the next, & some chance of helping our country to save itself & all dependent on it. Don't lose heart. I am convinced destiny has not done with you.'
Churchill's conviction was misplaced. Fisher was never to be invited back to any position of authority. Nor was Churchill offered the post he sought, as Air Minister. Speaking in the Air Board debate on May 17, Churchill described his part in the air defence of Britain immediately after the outbreak of war, and the establishment of air bases in France and Flanders, and defended the early air raids on Zeppelin sheds on the North Sea and the Rhine. Among the distortions of his record that had sprung up and stuck, it was now alleged, he said, that he had 'mismanaged and neglected' the air defence of Britain in the late autumn of 1914. He denied this, giving examples of the success of his efforts.
An Air Board had just been set up by Asquith; as it was without departmental powers, Churchill said, it would be ineffective. Britain had lost the aerial superiority which she had possessed at the outbreak of the war. 'But you can recover it. There is nothing to prevent you recovering it. Nothing stands in the way of our obtaining the aerial supremacy in the war but yourselves.'
Six days after this speech, and six weeks before the opening of the Battle of the Somme, Churchill spoke in the Army Estimates debate, pleading for an understanding of the unfair burden put upon the men in the trenches, when so many soldiers, even those already serving in France, never went anywhere near the front line. It was 'one of the grimmest class distinctions ever drawn in this world'. The House should know something of the burdens put on those who actually went to the front-line trenches. 'I say to myself every day, What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly 1,000 men-Englishmen, Britishers, men of our race-are knocked into bundles of bloody rags every twenty-four hours, and carried away to hasty graves or to field ambulances.'
Insisting that there should be no further futile offensives, Churchill told the House: 'Do not let us be drawn into any course of action not justified by purely military considerations. The argument which is used that "it is our turn now" has no place in military thought.' What was needed to defeat Germany and Austria-Hungary was 'a real, substantial preponderance of strength'. Then the attacks could be made and the advantage of their interior communications 'swamped and overweighed'. Then 'the hour of decisive victory' would be at hand. 'This hour is bound to come if patience is combined with energy, and if all the resources at the disposal of the Allies are remorselessly developed to their supreme capacity.'
Churchill wanted so desperately to be allowed to pursue these dictates of war in a position of Ministerial authority. But there was no place for him, and he remained an anguished voice in the Commons. When the War Office vote was put to the House on May 31, even Carson and his recently created pressure group, the Unionist War Committee, had no plans to force a division. Churchill alone spoke of shortcomings and lack of drive, of a failure to use the country's resources, including its manpower, in the most effective way. 'We are trying our best,' he said, 'but are we at present developing the full results of the great effort made by the nation? I cannot think so.'
As soon as the Army debate was over Churchill wrote to Fisher about the Navy, 'The dead hand lies heavy on our noble fleets & they even kiss it.'
Reading Churchill's two Army speeches, several soldiers' wives wrote to him with examples of the waste of military manpower. The speeches were even published as a penny pamphlet, The Fighting Line. But there was virtually no work for Churchill to do. Curzon invited him once to attend a meeting of the Air Board, to give his view of how to secure aerial supremacy. That same month, following widespread public depression caused by the Admiralty's communiqué after the Battle of Jutland, which laid stress on the losses, Balfour asked him to write a rousing communiqué, to revive public confidence. That was the limit of what he was asked to do.
On June 5 Kitchener left Britain by sea for northern Russia. On the following day, as part of his preparation of evidence for the Royal Commission on the Dardanelles, Churchill and Sir Ian Hamilton were poring over Kitchener's telegrams to Hamilton, to ensure that no important document would be omitted with regard to Kitchener's hesitations, changes of mind, and neglect of the Army once it was ashore. As they worked in Churchill's study at 41 Cromwell Road they heard a noise in the street below. 'We jumped up,' Hamilton later wrote, 'and Winston threw the window open.' A news-vendor was passing by. 'He had his bundle of newspapers under his arm and as we opened the window was crying out, "Kitchener drowned! No survivors!"'
Kitchener was dead. 'The fact that he should have vanished at the very moment Winston and I were making out an unanswerable case against him,' Hamilton wrote, 'was one of those coups with which his career was crowded-he was not going to answer.' It was widely expected that Lloyd George would succeed Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Churchill thought that he might be given Lloyd George's post as Minister of Munitions. But the shadow of the Dardanelles still hung over him. 'You will readily understand my wish that the truth should be known,' he wrote to Asquith two days after Kitchener's death.
Asquith did not want full publication of documents in which he himself appeared as a leading supporter of action at the Dardanelles, and decided not to allow any War Council minutes at all to be included among the documents being prepared for publication. Churchill learned of this blow to his hopes on June 19. On the following day he learned that the Admiralty objected to the publication of many of the crucial naval telegrams. 'A considerable period must elapse,' Asquith told the Commons on June 26, 'before these papers are likely to be ready.' There was a further blow to Churchill's hopes of full disclosure four weeks later, when Asquith wrote to him to say that the Government had decided not to publish the Dardanelles documents at all.
On July 7 Lloyd George became Secretary of State for War; Churchill at once appealed to him for publication. 'The personal aspect of this matter is not very important,' he wrote, 'except in so far as it affects the behaviour of colleagues to one another. But the public aspect is serious. The nation & the Dominions whose blood has been poured out vainly have a right to know the truth. The government had decided of their own accord that the truth could be told & had given a formal promise to Parliament: & now as the time draws nearer they shrink from the task.'
The Government had no wish to rake over the embers of the past. Too many of those still in high positions had taken their part in supporting, or in hampering, the enterprise. Angered but powerless, Churchill went with his family to Blenheim. 'Is it not damnable,' he wrote to his brother Jack, then on the Western Front, in mid-July, 'that I should be denied all real scope to serve this country, in this tremendous hour?' He still hoped for 'a situation favourable to me'. Lloyd George, though he had made only a 'half-hearted fight' to have him made Minister of Munitions, was 'very friendly according to the accounts I get'. Meanwhile, 'Asquith reigns supine, sodden and supreme'.
Churchill had decided not to return to France. 'Tho' my life is full of comfort and prosperity,' he told his brother, 'I writhe hourly not to be able to get my teeth effectively into the Boche. But to plunge as a battalion commander unless ordered-into the mistaken welter-when a turn of the wheel may enable me to do 10,000 times as much would not be the path of patriotism or sense. There will be time enough for such courses. Jack my dear I am learning to hate.'
That summer Churchill sat for his portrait by Orpen. Many years later Lloyd George's secretary, Frances Stevenson, wrote in her diary: 'Orpen described to me a scene in his studio while he was painting Winston just after he had lost office. W came to Orpen for a sitting, but all he did was to sit in a chair before the fire with his head bowed in his hands, uttering no word. Orpen went out to lunch without disturbing him & found Winston in the same position when he returned. At four o'clock W got up & asked Orpen to call him a taxi, & departed without further speech.'
***
On July 1 British and Empire forces attacked the German trenches on the Somme. Churchill had long been an opponent of such frontal attacks made without any clear superiority of men or tanks. That summer he wrote four articles for the Sunday Pictorial, in the last of which he described the changing national attitude to the war as a result of the battles of attrition from Loos to the Somme. 'The faculty of wonder has been dulled,' he wrote, 'emotion and enthusiasm have given way to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar and sorrow numb. The world is in twilight; and from beyond dim flickering horizons comes tirelessly the thudding of the guns.'
On July 24, during the supplementary vote of credit for the prosecution of the war, Churchill again spoke in the Commons as the soldiers' friend, asking for a fairer system of front-line service, quicker promotion for those who were at the front, and a wider recognition of bravery. 'I do not believe that people in this country have any comprehension,' he said, 'of what the men in the trenches and those who are engaged in battle are doing or what their suffering and achievements are.' He also appealed for greater effort to improve the security of the trenches, for trench lights that would be at least as good as those used by the Germans, and for steel helmets of the sort the French used, and that he had worn throughout his time in the trenches: 'Many men might have been alive today who have perished, and many men would have had slight injuries who today are gravely wounded, had this proposal not been put aside in the early stages of the war.' The Admiralty too, he said, should press on 'night and day' with every form of new construction, 'that is, the construction which saves the lives of our men, and does not expose them to needless and hopeless peril'.
On August 1, in a memorandum which F.E. Smith circulated to the Cabinet for him, Churchill argued that with each new offensive on the Western Front the pent up energies of the Army were being 'dissipated', with the result that Germany would be able to release men from the West to fight off Russia's recent advances in the East.
Recognising just how much Churchill had to give, of ideas and practical suggestions, Lloyd George invited him to the War Office to hear his views and discuss them with his advisers. After several further invitations the protests began. 'I know your feelings about him,' the Director-General of Recruiting, Lord Derby, wrote to Lloyd George that August, 'and I appreciate very much that feeling which makes you wish not to hit a man when he is down, but Winston is never down, or rather will never allow that he is down, and I assure you that his coming to the War Office as he does is-not to put it too strongly-most distasteful to everybody in that office.'
Derby was emphatic that the Conservative Party would not work with Churchill, nor would Derby support 'any Government' of which Churchill was a member. 'I like him personally,' Derby wrote. 'He has got a very attractive personality, but he is absolutely untrustworthy as was his father before him, and he has got to learn that just as his father had to disappear from politics so must he, or at all events from official life.'
Churchill refused to 'disappear early in September, when he learned that tanks, the 'caterpillars' he had pressed so hard to develop in 1915, were about to be used in battle for the first time, on the Somme, he went at once to see Asquith, to ask that none be used until they could appear in large numbers, thereby adding to their technical effectiveness the element of surprise. Asquith listened so attentively that Churchill was convinced that the tank would be held back until it could be used with maximum, perhaps decisive, effect, probably early in 1917. When, therefore, on September 16, he learned that tanks had been used on the Somme, only fifteen of them, he was deeply disappointed. 'My poor "land battleships" have been let off prematurely & on a petty scale,' he wrote that day to Fisher. 'In that idea resided one real victory.'
Throughout August and September Churchill prepared his case for the Dardanelles Commission of Enquiry. As Asquith still refused to allow him to use the War Council minutes, his presentation lacked one of its chief sources and justification. His hope that he would be able to be present when others gave evidence was dashed when the Chairman, Lord Cromer, informed him that all meetings would be held in secret, and that no one other than the day's witness would be admitted to them. On September 28 he appeared before the Commission, submitting documents and arguments to illustrate what he called five distinct truths concerning the naval attack at the Dardanelles, 'That there was full authority; that there was a reasonable prospect of success; that greater interests were not compromised; that all possible care and forethought were exercised in the preparation; and that vigour and determination were shown in the execution.'
The evidence that Churchill brought to substantiate these claims was voluminous. His desire was that when the Commission's work was over, his evidence would be published. He had also embarked upon a series of three articles in the monthly London Magazine, entitled 'The War by Land and Sea'. To Clementine's brother William, who had served at the Dardanelles and was now commanding the cruiser Edgar, he wrote two days after appearing before the Commission:
Of course I am miserable not to find any means of bringing my mind and knowledge to bear upon the war directly. I have a good deal of influence here, & in Parliament I can get things done. But I long to have power to use against the enemy. A turn of the wheel may give it me again. But meanwhile I languish in hateful ease. It is much the hardest time I have ever had in my life. If the war were not my sole thought, I would not care about political office. But to see things so little comprehended & to be impotent to guide them-at this great time is a deep & ceaseless torment to me.
I should have been able to make myself useful to the Army if French had remained: for then I could get my ideas, which are right, considered & brought into action. But his departure left me with no outlook beyond that of the regimental officer, and although the 5 months I served in the trenches was a striking and not unpleasant experience, it cut me off of course absolutely from either information or real activity. So when my battalion was broken up I came back here: & here for the present I remain. I write and make large sums of money very easily; & to judge by the way I have lifted the circulation of the Sunday Pictorial & the London Magazine I have a good following in the country.
The success of the Caterpillar has been a great joy to me: it was the last of my projects that was still moving forward. They have not been used in the right way, nor in sufficient numbers; but there is no doubt of their merits and of their relation to the true conception of this war. An official statement about their origin is I believe soon to be published.
Well I expect you have had a dull time. Still you have done your duty, & after 2½ years of Armageddon the breath is still in your body. Voilà déjà quelquechose. How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted-so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.
The Dardanelles Committee occupies a good deal of my time, & I am hopeful of a favourable result. Later on I may find an opening in France, if political affairs allow. Nellie has presented us with a son to replace casualties. I often think of you my dear Billie. You know you can always count upon me as your affectionate friend.
Esmond, the baby son of Clementine's sister Nellie, was to be killed in action in 1942, when a Pilot Officer in the Canadian Air Force.
***
Conservative newspapers clung tenaciously to the old charges; when, that October, the Daily Mail referred to 'the contemptible fiasco of Antwerp and the ghastly blunder of Gallipoli', Churchill wrote at once to the Dardanelles Commission to protest that the article 'shows very clearly the kind of attack to which I am exposed and from which I have every right to defend myself before the Commission'. Throughout October he submitted further evidence in answer to what others had told the Commission, which he had been allowed to read as a special concession. He also gave evidence a second time.
Churchill knew that any hope of his return to Government depended on the publication of his evidence. But when the Commission's work was done the Government agreed to publish only a general report. The documents, the submissions and the cross-examinations were not made public. Churchill had been cheated once again. On November 20 he told C.P. Scott he was 'the best abused man in the country'. Almost the only weapon left to him was his pen; on November 26 he published a full account of the Antwerp expedition in the Sunday Pictorial.
On November 30 Churchill was forty-two. At that very moment Lloyd George and Bonar Law were challenging Asquith's power. Churchill had no place in their struggle. Meeting him on December 2 as the crisis was at its height, Aitken later recalled that he was 'almost wistfully eager for news'. Three days later Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Curzon resigned from the Government. That same evening Asquith tendered his resignation.
The King asked Bonar Law to form a Government. That night Lloyd George and Aitken were to dine with F.E. Smith. Churchill had not been invited. Before dinner he was with 'FE' at the Turkish Baths of the Royal Automobile Club. While still at the Club, Smith telephoned Lloyd George to remind him about the dinner, and mentioned that Churchill was with him. Lloyd George at once proposed that Churchill join them. 'This suggestion,' Aitken later reflected, 'probably quite carelessly made, produced on Churchill's mind the natural impression that he was regarded as one of the new set of war administrators who were about to grasp the helm. Surely Lloyd George would not ask him to be included in a dinner party on that night of all others if he did not mean to offer him a real post-and a real post to Churchill meant nothing but war-service.'
During the dinner much of the talk was about the new administration. All those present including Churchill took part in it, in Aitken's words, 'on terms of equality'. During dinner Lloyd George had to leave, to see Bonar Law. He asked Aitken to drive with him. On the drive he explained that enormous pressures were being brought on him and Bonar Law to exclude Churchill from any new Government. He himself, if he emerged as Prime Minister, would not be able to offer Churchill a Cabinet position. Lloyd George then asked Aitken to return to the dinner party and 'convey a hint of this kind' to Churchill.
Aitken himself expected office in the new Government. Returning to the dinner party, 'I smiled on Churchill,' he later wrote, 'as a senior colleague might on an aspiring junior. I still, so to speak, walked warily, but I walked. Churchill also had every reason to suppose that he was sure of high office. We discussed as allies and equals the personnel of the new Government. Churchill suggested that I might be made Postmaster-General-a task suitable to my abilities. Then I conveyed to him the hint Lloyd George had given me.'
The words Aitken used were these: 'The new Government will be very well disposed towards you. All your friends will be there. You will have a great field of common action with them.' Aitken's account continued: 'Something in the very restraint of my language carried conviction to Churchill's mind. He suddenly felt he had been duped by his invitation to the dinner, and he blazed into righteous anger.' Aitken had never known Churchill to address F.E. Smith in any other way than 'Fred' or 'FE', or refer to him as anything but 'Max'. Now he turned on him with the words, 'Smith, this man knows that I am not to be included in the new Government.' Then he walked out into the street.
That evening, Bonar Law asked Asquith if he would serve under him. When Asquith refused, Bonar Law realised that he would not be able to call upon full Liberal support, and advised the King to send for Lloyd George, who became Prime Minister.
While Cabinet-making on December 6, Lloyd George noted in the margin of one list of possible Ministers, '?Air Winston.' In fact, no Air Ministry was established. Nor, as Aitken had intimated on the previous evening, was Churchill offered any place in the new Cabinet. This, he told Sinclair, was 'the downfall of all my hopes and desires. These have not been unworthy, for I had an impulse & gift to give to the war energies of the country. But my treasure is rejected.' He was unlucky, too, that the publication of the Dardanelles Commission report had been delayed because of the political crisis, 'for I am still hopeful', he told Sinclair, 'that it will give a turn to public opinion. But everything has turned out ill for me since the war began. Perhaps we are now at the nadir.'
On December 11, as a gesture of friendship, Lloyd George sent a mutual friend to see Churchill, to tell him that he had no intention of keeping him out of office, and would try to appoint him Chairman of the Air Board. But the Dardanelles Commission report would have to be published first. Churchill replied that although the position was not in the War Cabinet, and had no Department of State behind it, he had no reproaches to make: 'I will take any position which will enable me to serve my country. My only purpose is to help defeat the Hun, and I will subordinate my own feelings so that I may be able to render some assistance.'
Unknown to Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Edward Carson, wrote to Bonar Law on December 20, 'I should greatly fear friction if the appointment is made.' Churchill's long battle with the Conservative Party was far from ended. 'When I am absolutely sure there is no prospect of regaining control or part of it here,' he wrote to Sinclair, who had asked if he would come out to the trenches, 'I shall turn again to that resort & refuge.' Had he stayed at the Duchy of Lancaster 'and shut my mouth & drawn my salary, I should today be one of the principal personages in direction of affairs'. Ploegsteert had been a 'costly excursion'. There was no respect in Parliament for those who wore uniform. 'Not one of those gallant MPs who has fought through the Somme at the heads of their battalions stands a chance against less clever men who have stopped & chattered at home. This is to me the most curious phenomenon of all. It is quite inexplicable to me.'
Churchill spent Christmas and New Year at Blenheim with Clementine, Diana, Randolph and Sarah. A month later, shortly after Fisher's seventy-sixth birthday, Churchill wrote to him, 'Our common enemies are all-powerful today & friendship counts for nothing. I am simply existing.'
Speaking on the Army Estimates on 5 March 1917 Churchill made a forceful plea for greater energy and inventiveness in the creation of life-saving and victory-enhancing mechanical devices. 'Machines save life,' he said. 'Machine-power is a substitute for man-power. Brains will save blood, manoeuvre is a great diluting agent to slaughter.' Unless new devices were developed, 'I do not see how we are to avoid being thrown back on those dismal processes of waste and slaughter which are called attrition,' and he begged the Government not to launch in 1917 an offensive similar to that of the Somme in 1916 'unless they are certain that the fair weather months at their disposal, and the reserves they command relatively to the enemy, are such as to give an indisputable result'. Preparations should be made now for the campaign of 1918. It was then that the Allies would be strong enough in manpower and weaponry to ensure a military victory.
By mid-March the Dardanelles Commission was at last ready to publish its report. As a gesture of friendship Lloyd George lent Churchill a draft copy of its Admiralty section. No blame was put on Churchill; indeed the report showed that when the naval attack was called off by de Robeck on March 18, the Turks had only three rounds of ammunition left in their fortress guns. But although the report made clear that Asquith had been as keen to attack Turkey as any of his colleagues, and that it was Kitchener who had failed to give the War Council sufficient details of his military plans, it did not, to Churchill's mind, answer many of the specific charges that had been made against him personally. Nor did it include any of the documents he had wanted published. Worse still, he told Lloyd George, 'quotations from the evidence included in the body of the report do not in numerous cases represent the evidence given before the Commission'.
In his final submission Churchill told the Commissioners that their report failed to set the Dardanelles in the context of the wider war, and especially of the trench stalemate on the Western Front. 'A fifth of the resources, the effort, the loyalty, the resolution, the perseverance vainly employed in the battle of the Somme to gain a few shattered villages and a few square miles of devastated ground, would,' he wrote, 'in the Gallipoli Peninsula, used in time, have united the Balkans on our side, joined hands with Russia, and cut Turkey out of the war.'
A 'good Press sedulously manipulated', Churchill wrote, had represented the battle of the Somme as a series of victories. In a few years' time, however, it would be seen 'that in the ill-supported armies struggling on the Gallipoli Peninsula, whose efforts are now viewed with so much prejudice and repugnance, were in fact within an ace of succeeding in an enterprise which would have abridged the miseries of the World and proved the salvation of our cause. It will then seem incredible that a dozen old ships, half a dozen divisions, or a few hundred thousand shells were allowed to stand between them and success. Contemporaries have condemned the men who tried to force the Dardanelles. History will condemn those who did not aid them.'
Lunching with Churchill on March 20, C.P. Scott asked him if he would be willing to join Lloyd George's Government.
'Not in any subordinate capacity-only in one of the chief posts,' Churchill replied.
Would he be willing to be Secretary of State for War, Scott asked.
'Yes, that would do very well,' said Churchill.
But the post was not on offer. Later that day, two years and two days after the naval attack on the Narrows, the Commons debated the Royal Commission's report on the Dardanelles. Churchill defended his own part with vigour, and was pleased with the reception of his speech and with the debate that followed, telling Sinclair that it had been 'very successful to me personally'. The report having shown that both Asquith and Kitchener had approved the operation, all those who cared for Kitchener's memory, 'and they are many', and all who adhered to 'orthodox Liberalism' had joined to defend the operation. 'I thus have strong bodies of public opinion between me & the malevolence of the Tory Press. This is likely to govern my affairs.'
In an article in the Sunday Pictorial on April 8, Churchill reiterated his Parliamentary opposition to a renewed offensive in 1917. But on the following day the British Army launched its spring offensive east of Arras. After three days the Germans had been driven back four miles but their line had held, ending Haig's hope of a breakthrough which could be exploited by the cavalry riding forward deep into German-held territory. 'Cavalry has no role on the Western Front,' Churchill wrote to Sinclair on April 11. 'There will be no galloping through.'
Six days after Churchill's letter, Lloyd George spoke in the Commons in defence of the suppression of a series of articles in the Nation which asserted that British troops on a sector of the Western Front had been outwitted by a German tactical withdrawal. After Lloyd George defended the suppression, Churchill rose to speak. At that very moment, Lloyd George left the Chamber, a fact on which Churchill commented with much sarcasm. The suppression itself, he said, betrayed 'an undue love of the assertion of arbitrary power'.
When Churchill went on to say that the House was deeply concerned, Bonar Law interjected, 'We will judge that by the Division.' Churchill was stung to anger: 'Do not look for quarrels,' he said; 'do not make them; make it easy for every Party, every force in this country, to give you its aid and support, and remove barriers and obstructions and misunderstandings that tend to cause superficial and apparent divergences among men whose aim is all directed to our common object of victory, on which all our futures depend.'
***
That spring, in search of somewhere in the country where he could relax with his family, Churchill bought Lullenden, a Tudor farmhouse in Sussex. Hidden in its hundred acres of woodland was a small lake on the steep bank of which he loved to paint. His son Randolph was not quite five when his father bought Lullenden; a favourite game, he later recalled, was to chase his father through the dense wood. 'Once he disturbed a nest of bees, or perhaps wasps, and passed through unscathed. All of us children, however, in hot pursuit, were badly stung.'
***
That April, at Lloyd George's suggestion, Churchill twice met the Minister of Munitions, Dr Christopher Addison, to discuss some part for him in munitions production. On April 27 Addison suggested to Lloyd George that Churchill be made chairman of a Committee within his Ministry, to examine the development of the tank and other mechanical aids to war. Lloyd George declined Addison's suggestion, but he did take up a suggestion by Churchill early in May for a Secret Session of the House, in order to avoid a combined public and Parliamentary assault on his war policy by disaffected Liberals led by Asquith, and Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs.
The secret session took place on May 10. Asquith had made no plans for a full-scale attack nor did he put up anyone to open the debate. That task fell to Churchill, who once more argued against premature offensives in France. The United States had entered the war at the beginning of April. Her troops would not be ready for action until 1918. 'Is it not obvious,' he asked, 'that we ought not to squander the remaining armies of France and Britain in precipitate offensives before the American power begins to be felt on the battlefield?'
Numerical superiority and artillery preponderance were both necessary for a successful offensive. Britain had neither. Nor had she yet established superiority in the air. 'We have discovered neither the mechanical nor the tactical methods of piercing an indefinite succession of fortified lines defended by German troops.' Further offensives in 1917 would be nothing but 'fresh, bloody and disastrous adventures'. The Allied armies should be trained and increased, and their methods perfected, 'for a decisive effort in a later year'.
Lloyd George refused to commit himself to such a delay, nor did he reveal the extent to which he was already committed to a major offensive later in 1917. But when, after his speech, he and Churchill met by chance behind the Speaker's chair, 'he assured me,' Churchill later recalled, 'of his determination to have me at his side. From that day, although holding no office, I became to a large extent his colleague. He repeatedly discussed with me every aspect of the war and many of his secret hopes and fears.' After Churchill had lunched with Lloyd George on May 19, Frances Stevenson asked the Prime Minister why he was drawing closer to Churchill. 'He says he wants someone in who will cheer him up and help & encourage him, & who will not be continually coming to him with a long face and telling him that everything is going wrong,' she wrote in her diary. 'At present he has to carry the whole of his colleagues on his back.'
The first fruits of the new co-operation came on May 26, when, with Lloyd George's blessing, Churchill crossed over to France with a letter from the Prime Minister to the French Minister of War, asking him to give Churchill 'every facility' for visiting the French sector of the front. This was Churchill's first official, or semi-official, mission to France for more than two years; he was entertained by the French High Command, taken to see the battlefields of 1916, and lunched in Paris with the French Minister of War. 'It has all been very pleasant,' he wrote to Clementine on May 29, 'but never for the moment does the thought of this carnage and ruin escape my mind.'
On all those whom he met in France he urged the wisdom of postponing the Allied offensive for almost a year, until at least May 1918 and even August 1918, when the vast American reinforcements would have arrived. Sir Henry Wilson, then commanding the Fourth Corps, who lunched with him in Paris, noted in his diary that Churchill was also 'very keen (& rightly so) that the Navy should fight instead of doing nothing, & he has great plans for bringing on fights by laying minefields close up against enemy ports'. Churchill's spirits were reviving: 'I am much stimulated by the change and movement, & new discussions with new people, & I am very full of ideas,' he told Clementine.
From Paris, Churchill went to the British front, where he spent the whole of June 1. Then, on June 2, he lunched with Haig at St Omer, again expressing his conviction that the 1917 offensive should be postponed. Haig noted in his diary that during their discussion Churchill had been 'most humble'. But even as Churchill felt a new strength and purpose, his enemies were at work trying to prevent his return to public office. The Sunday Times of June 3, after reporting a rumour that Churchill was to become Chairman of the Air Board, declared that his appointment to any Cabinet post would be 'a grave danger to the Administration and to the Empire as a whole'. His record proved he did not possess 'those qualities of balanced judgement and shrewd far-sightedness which are essential to the sound administrator'.
It was not only the Conservative newspapers that raised their voice against Churchill. In the first week of June, Lord Curzon wrote to Bonar Law to remind him that he had entered Lloyd George's Government only on condition that Churchill was excluded. Lord Derby went to see Lloyd George on June 8 to make the same point in person. That evening Curzon wrote direct to Lloyd George, about Churchill, 'He is a potential danger in opposition. In the opinion of us all he will as a member of the Government be an active danger in our midst.'
Lloyd George had wanted to give Churchill the Air Board, but the ferocity of the response was too great. On June 30, however, as a sign of confidence in Churchill, he went to Dundee to receive the freedom of the city. Two weeks later, on July 16, Lloyd George invited Churchill to join his Government, and asked him what post he would like. Churchill answered at once, Munitions. The existing Minister, Dr Addison, long an admirer of Churchill's qualities, had already told Lloyd George he would step down for Churchill; indeed it was Addison's idea that Churchill should succeed him. The appointment was made public on July 18. For several days there was a storm of Conservative and newspaper protest. The Morning Post pointed to Antwerp and the Dardanelles as proof of an 'overwhelming conceit', which had led Churchill to imagine 'he was a Nelson at sea and a Napoleon on land'.
Lord Derby was incensed because the first he knew of Churchill's inclusion in the Cabinet was when he read about it in the newspapers; he went at once to protest to Lloyd George. Anticipating Derby's threat of resignation, Lloyd George stated that if he were to be denied the assistance of those 'whom he thought likely to help him' he himself would resign at once. Among those who congratulated Churchill was his Aunt Cornelia, Lord Randolph's sister. She also had words of caution, 'My advice is to stick to Munitions, and don't try to run the Government.'
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