To make matters worse, the expected war at sea had not begun, since the Germans refused to engage the British navy and preferred to pick off British cruisers with their U-boats. When a German mine destroyed a British battleship, the commander-in-chief ordered the British fleet to retreat out of danger to the coast of Ireland. There was little progress either on the Eastern Front, where the battle was far more mobile than in the cratered killing fields of the west. The Russians quickly invaded East Prussia, while Austria-Hungary lost almost a million men in an offensive in the Carpathians. But the mood of optimism among the Allies stalled when the Germans forced the Russians back over their own borders, and Turkey decided to support the Central Powers.
English enthusiasm for war was further dampened as autumn turned to winter. Newspaper reports of deaths and casualties at first provoked pity and fear, then numb resignation. Soon so many soldiers were dying that there was no room in the papers to list all of the names. Across England, women and children dressed in mourning. Soldiers on crutches or in wheelchairs, returned from the front, became a common sight. As the optimism of the early days of the war evaporated, many intellectuals began to fear a German victory. Where was England’s legendary strength and pluck? By Christmas few believed the war would soon be over, and there was little surprise among the population when Kitchener requested further volunteers. Over the coming months, an additional million and a half men would enlist.
Kitchener had correctly predicted the difficulty and duration of the war; yet he was often wrong about military tactics. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, thought the secretary of war incompetent and sometimes ‘mad’; few now had faith in his Western Front tactics. In early 1915 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a proposal which was intended to revitalize Britain’s strategy. Waging war on an entirely new front, far from Germany’s sphere of influence, would, Churchill told the cabinet, open up the war. And if the new front were to be at sea, then the horrific casualties of trench warfare would be avoided. Churchill suggested an ‘amphibious operation’, using ships and soldiers, on a strip of water called the Dardanelles, which separated Europe from Asia and which was under Ottoman control. If the straits were secured, reinforcements could be sent by the British and French to the Russians; Allied troops could also land in the area and capture Constantinople. The defeat of the Ottomans would materially weaken the Central Powers and in addition would help to protect the British Suez Canal.
Lloyd George liked the proposal, but Asquith was sceptical; Kitchener wavered, then agreed. Many of the plan’s supporters laboured under the illusion that the Turks were constitutionally weak. Churchill initially regarded the attack as a difficult operation, requiring a large force on the ground, yet Kitchener convinced him the navy could succeed virtually alone. But when the British and French began their assault on the Dardanelles in mid-March, Churchill received one of the greatest shocks of his career. The Allied navy was scuppered by Turkish mines, and the Turks repulsed its efforts to invade their territory. Another landing of British, French and colonial troops was attempted at the end of April, with the same result. While the Allied soldiers remained on the beaches, the Turks dug trenches that were as impenetrable as those of their German allies. When the Allied ammunition ran low, the attack was called off. One hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers had died, were wounded or went missing. When Churchill heard the news, he was distraught at the failure and loss of life.
After the debacle, the English press turned on the Liberal government and the British military high command. The war was being mismanaged; the troops needed reinforcements, different tactics and better equipment. Above all, greater supplies of high-explosive heavy artillery should immediately be sent to the Western Front. The Times and the Daily Mail campaigned for more shells. Lord Northcliffe, who owned both papers, backed up Lloyd George’s call for the establishment of a munitions department with himself at its head.
Meanwhile, opposition in the Commons was unconstrained over the ‘shells scandal’. Law openly attacked the government for the first time since the declaration of war. For its part, the Irish Parliamentary Party saw little reason to sustain the Liberal administration, now that Home Rule had reached the statute book. When Redmond withdrew his support, Asquith’s government was at the point of collapse. Grey had been proved wrong about the duration of the conflict, Churchill about the navy’s strength during the Dardanelles campaign and Kitchener about strategy. The only cabinet minister to have emerged with credit was Lloyd George, who had brokered a deal between the trade unions and business leaders. The unions had agreed to the dilution of labour through the introduction of a quarter of a million women, as well as unskilled or semi-skilled men, into factories and offices. In return, the chancellor had assured the unions that this would be a temporary wartime measure; he also promised that industrial profits would be controlled, an unprecedented concession to secure union support. In other ways, too, Lloyd George had shown a willingness to intervene in the wartime economy, in contradiction of his Liberal principles. He had imposed import duties, increased taxes, shored up the City banks, allowed the national debt to grow, and taken over factories that failed to meet their munitions quotas.
As the chancellor’s reputation rose, Asquith’s fell. Lloyd George seemed to display the initiative the prime minister lacked, and the chancellor’s friends in the press emphasized the contrast. The papers criticized Asquith’s reluctance to wield the considerable powers the war had bestowed on the state and mentioned his addiction to brandy. Friends claimed the drink cleared Asquith’s mind, yet the sight of a prime minister supine and sodden in the House did not inspire confidence, in either Fleet Street or the country. To journalists ‘Squiffy’ seemed as though he had survived into an age in which his skills of conciliation and his instinctive caution were no longer relevant. A twentiethcentury world war demanded a different kind of statesman. The future belonged to men like Lloyd George who were capable of decisive, improvised action as well as striking public gestures, and who could reach a vast public through the press. With Northcliffe on his side, the chancellor appeared irresistible.
After consulting Northcliffe and his potential partners on the opposition benches, Lloyd George declared, ‘We must have a coalition.’ As a pragmatist, he saw the advantages of a government based on a loose affiliation of parties, personalities and ideas. It would give him freedom for manoeuvre, without the constraints of the Liberal party’s hierarchy or its traditional creed. He was rooted in Nonconformist Liberalism, but sensed that it was a dwindling political force. Law’s Unionists, for their part, had no desire to assume sole responsibility for the military failures abroad, or for the hardship of the population at home. It seemed likely that conscription and food rationing might soon have to be introduced, and they believed that the people were more likely to accept these measures from a coalition than a Tory-Unionist government.
Lloyd George’s timing was impeccable. The public was weary of the stories of endless, senseless slaughter and martial failures, and close to hysteria after the recent appearance of German Zeppelins in the sky over London. With the population anxious for a change of fortune and direction, and with support in the Commons and Fleet Street for a Liberal administration wearing thin, Asquith reluctantly assented to the proposal for a coalition and the Liberal government came to an end in May 1915.