The writings of authors of the lieutenant and captain class contain powerful criticisms of the war, as well as vivid evocations of life on the Western Front. In Wilfred Owen’s verse innocent soldiers die, ‘guttering’ and ‘choking’, for empty patriotic slogans such as Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country’). In the pages of Robert Graves’s autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929), the voices of the privates rise up again from no man’s land: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But we’re all f—ing dead.’
Lloyd George was appalled by the lack of military progress and determined to take a more prominent role in deciding strategy. His opportunity came in the summer of 1916, when HMS Hampshire was sunk by a German mine and Kitchener was among the drowned soldiers. On taking over as war secretary he fired off countless directives to the generals, in defiance of their objection to ‘civilian interference’; he also dismissed his Liberal colleagues’ proposal for a negotiated peace. Despite his new responsibilities, Lloyd George had energy left over to plot behind the scenes, frequently briefing the press about Asquith’s lack of vision, energy and flair.
In the autumn of 1916 the war secretary informed his political allies that reorganization was essential. He proposed a small war council ‘free from the “dead hand” of Asquith’s inertia’, which he would lead himself. The prime minister was dismayed, and rejected the plan. Before making his next move, Lloyd George consulted Law and Carson, who appeared inclined to support him rather than Asquith; their reaction emboldened him to resign. Over the coming weeks, there was much discussion between Lloyd George, Asquith and the Unionists, but when no compromise could be found, Asquith saw no alternative but to resign. Law was asked to form a government but declined to do so since the Liberals would not serve in it. The king then turned to Lloyd George.
The king accused Lloyd George of behaving like a blackmailer during the controversy, while Churchill said he effectively seized power. While these are exaggerations, Lloyd George undoubtedly displayed ruthlessness and certainly bears the main responsibility for forcing out Asquith. On leaving Downing Street, Asquith compared himself to Job, the Old Testament patriarch who endures appalling suffering through no fault of his own. The English public’s reaction was sympathetic to a departing prime minister who had recently lost his eldest son in the war. Yet most people probably shared the view of Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces: ‘I am personally very sorry for poor old Squiff. However, I expect more action and less talk is needed now.’
Most Liberal MPs tried to comfort Asquith in his distress, as did the party’s rank and file in London and the south of England. The Liberals now became the official opposition to Lloyd George’s coalition, though they were reluctant to oppose the conduct of a war which they themselves had begun. They were united only by a devotion to laissez-faire economics and a dislike, in Asquith’s phrase, of the new prime minister’s ‘incurable defects of character’. The Nonconformist and provincial sections of the Liberal membership, however, supported Lloyd George, as did a handful of Liberal MPs, including Churchill. More Liberal MPs would join the coalition in time.
The Liberal party thus split, just as it had done thirty years previously over Irish Home Rule. On this occasion, however, the schism would be fatal. Unlike Gladstone’s party of the 1880s, Asquith’s Liberals lacked a coherent political credo and a secure social base. Nonconformism no longer provided a popular political ideology, and the causes of free trade, laissez-faire economics and Irish Home Rule were now immaterial. The key economic and social struggle of the first half of the twentieth century was between capital and labour, and neither side looked to the Liberal party as its champion. For the workers, Labour was the new lodestar, while the representatives of capital and industrial wealth increasingly looked to the Tories. But the party of old England was also changing in response to the changing times, absorbing and promoting new men with new ideas, such as Law and Baldwin. They had far greater financial resources than the Liberals, too, and better links with the social elite and the press. Moreover, the British electoral system encouraged division between two main parties with contrasting creeds. A third, smaller party, with a more fluid identity, would always be under-represented in parliament.
With the exception of Lloyd George himself, Liberals did not appear in the new coalition’s war cabinet. The Unionists also dominated the wider administration, with Balfour at the Foreign Office and Carson at the Admiralty. Law now led the Commons, and the veteran Tory Lord Curzon the Lords. Lloyd George aside, the only indication the government was a ‘national coalition’, rather than a Unionist administration, was the presence of Labour’s Henderson in the war cabinet. Lloyd George was now, in effect, a president without a party. He deftly presided over the cabinet and oversaw the various ministries of government, to which he appointed his friends from the business world.
This system gave Lloyd George absolute control over home affairs, and considerable influence over the conduct of the war. ‘He pulled the levers,’ one government official wrote, ‘and the traffic moved in Westminster, in Fleet Street, in party offices, in town and village halls, in polling booths.’ Churchill, who joined the government as minister of munitions, was enthusiastic about Lloyd George’s despotism, while leading Unionists accepted the situation because it gave them influence without responsibility. ‘If the remarkable, unscrupulous little man wants to be a dictator,’ commented Balfour, ‘let him be.’ Over the ensuing months, Law and Lloyd George would form a successful working partnership, despite the striking contrast in their characters.
The king was among the many people who accused Lloyd George of mendacity, and nor was that the monarch’s only complaint about his new prime minister. Lloyd George regularly neglected to reply to his letters and often failed to appear when summoned to Buckingham Palace. The man who had risen in politics through his own merits had nothing but contempt for hereditary monarchy; he took pleasure in treating the king ‘abominably’, to use George V’s own term. Here was another wartime revolution – a middle-class politician intimidating the king. Lloyd George’s reputation as a ‘man of the people’ was also enhanced when he recruited three ministers from the Labour party to the coalition.
Lloyd George described his government as a ‘win the war’ coalition. He used the terrors on the battlefields of France as an argument for continuing the conflict, declaring that the ‘perpetrators’ must be ‘punished’. His message was faithfully broadcast by his old ally Lord Northcliffe and by Max Aitken, the owner of the Daily Express. Aitken, who had been instrumental in the removal of Asquith from office, would soon be elevated to the peerage as Lord Beaverbrook and appointed the coalition’s minister of information. Lloyd George’s propaganda efforts largely ensured that the country, however uneasily, still supported the war.
The prime minister, however, was eager to increase the war’s popularity by delivering a ‘knock-out blow’. He believed no mission was impossible – British troops could capture Jerusalem, help the Italians defeat Austria-Hungary or even gain the elusive breakthrough in France. In order to achieve that last aim, Lloyd George removed Britain’s largely incompetent military high command and placed the army under the authority of Robert Nivelle, a French general. Yet the next major engagement, at Arras in April 1917, was no more decisive and no less bloody than the battles preceding it.