These then were the arguments which Churchill used among his colleagues, and up to the middle of January there appears to have been no dispute. Kitchener was satisfied because none of his soldiers, except a few who were to be employed as landing parties, were to be engaged. Grey, the Foreign Secretary, saw great political prospects. Arthur Balfour said it was difficult to imagine a more useful operation. The Russians on hearing of the plan spoke of the possibility of sending troops to support it, and the French offered four battleships with their auxiliaries to serve under Carden’s command.
Towards the end of the month the enterprise was fairly under way; the ammunition was assembled, the final instructions drafted, and from as far away as the China station ships were under orders to proceed to the Mediterranean. It was arranged that the whole armada should gather in the Ægean Sea in the neighbourhood of the island of Lemnos at the end of the first week in February. All that was needed was the final approval of the War Council, and the action would begin.
It was at this point that a new and wholly unexpected factor came into the scene: Fisher turned against the whole design. His motives for doing this were so unusual that one can only hope to understand them — and the famous quarrel that followed — by recalling the strange position into which they had all drifted at this time. It is as strange in some ways as any of the inner manœuvrings of the Russian Government at the present day.
On the outbreak of war a War Council had been formed, and it consisted of the Prime Minister (Asquith), the Lord Chancellor (Lord Haldane), the Secretary of State for War (Lord Kitchener), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lloyd George), the Foreign Minister (Sir Edward Grey), the Secretary of State for India (Lord Crewe) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Winston Churchill). Fisher and Sir James Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, also attended the meetings to give their technical advice, Lieut.-Colonel Hankey was the secretary, and there were others who were called in from time to time. Ostensibly this body as a whole was responsible for the higher conduct of the war. In fact, it was dominated by three men — Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener — and of these three Kitchener was incomparably the most powerful. Churchill himself summed up the position when he came to give evidence to the Dardanelles Commission in 1916:
‘Lord Kitchener’s personal qualities and position,’ he said, ‘played at this time a very great part in the decision of events. His prestige and authority were immense. He was the sole mouthpiece of War Office opinion in the War Council. Everyone had the greatest admiration for his character, and everyone felt fortified, amid the terrible and incalculable events of the opening months of the war, by his commanding presence. When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the cabinet, in any military matter, great or small. No single unit was ever sent or withheld contrary, not merely to his agreement, but to his advice. Scarcely anyone ever ventured to argue with him in Council. Respect for the man, sympathy for him in his immense labours, confidence in his professional judgment, and the belief that he had plans deeper and wider than any we could see, silenced misgivings and disputes, whether in the Council or at the War Office. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.’
Twenty-five years were to elapse before such a figure, in Winston Churchill himself, was to reappear in England; and it is even doubtful if Churchill in the nineteen-forties enjoyed quite the same prestige, the air of almost infallible right and might, which Kitchener possessed during these winter months in 1915 when the country had still not recovered from the first shock of the war. Kitchener was not only thought to be as resolute as Churchill later became in the Battle of Britain; he really knew, people felt, precisely how he was going to win the war. The famous poster of the Field Marshal with the pointing finger and the legend ‘Your country needs YOU’ was, possibly, the most effective recruiting propaganda ever devised. All over the country, on the hoardings and the railway stations, in the shops and the buses, the commanding eyes never left one’s face, and the pointing finger followed everywhere. This was Big Brother, protective and all-wise, the face of Mars himself, but there was no evil in him, only strength and the stern sense of duty.
Inside Whitehall, at close range, the effects were just as remarkable. Asquith, the most urbane of men, came under the influence, and Churchill, an extremely youthful First Lord of forty, was in no position to challenge the colossus, even if he had wanted to. Certainly at this stage Lloyd George had not begun to murmur that Kitchener’s handling of affairs was less than perfect.
The point was of course that while the others were civilians, and unused to taking decisions in the awful physical presence of war, Kitchener, the professional soldier, was presumably in his very element. He knew the mysteries of war and they did not. Inside the War Office his power was absolute, for by now the ablest generals and the best of the regular soldiers had been sent to France, and the General Staff had been virtually disbanded. Under the new system there was the Minister who decided everything, and a group of secretaries who supplied him with information and saw to it that his orders were carried out. There was no discussion, no pooling of brains and experience to make a plan, and more often than not his subordinates did not have the vaguest idea of what was passing through his mind until he announced his decisions. Then the scurry began to catch up with the Minister’s mind, to arrange the details which were necessary for his broad designs. Sir James Wolfe Murray, the general who had recently and hastily been put into the position of Chief of the General Staff, was in no different case from the others; although he attended the meetings of the War Council he did not speak, and indeed he often heard there from Kitchener’s lips the first news of some new military plan that was to be carried out.
This system was all the more complicated by the fact that Kitchener had an oddly feminine way of thinking. Most of his big decisions appeared to be based upon a kind of flair, a queer mixture of technical experience and instinctive divination; in other words, the calculated hunch. When all the world was saying that the war would be over in six months he would suddenly come out with the announcement that they must prepare for three years at least. These oracles, which were often proved right, and if wrong became confused and forgotten in other events, added immensely to his reputation.
Fisher’s position was entirely different. He was not a minister and he had no power to decide on policy. Yet to the public and even inside Whitehall he was something more than the First Sea Lord: he was the expression of the Navy itself. With his curiously gnarled face, which gave him almost an oriental appearance, his irreverence and drive, his tremendous knowledge of the Navy, he answered every requirement in the conception of what a great British sailor ought to be. In the past the Admiral’s pugnacity had caused serious disputes inside the Navy, but all that was done with now. He was as solid and tried as one of his own dreadnoughts, and if his authority was not as great as Kitchener’s he had one thing the Field Marshal lacked, a shrewd, fresh, humorous mind that enabled him to come to the heart of a problem in language that everyone could enjoy and understand. Kitchener was respected, but Fisher one really liked.
It was Churchill who brought Fisher back from his retirement to the Admiralty at the age of seventy-four, shortly before the war began, and an intimate relationship had grown up between the old Admiral and the young Minister. Together they were a formidable team. A new wind blew through the Navy. Fisher had but to produce a plan and Churchill promptly put it through the cabinet and the House of Commons for him. In this way together they had got Jellicoe the command of the Grand Fleet, they had secured the Navy’s supply of oil by inducing the government to finance the Persian wells, and they had embarked on a shipbuilding programme which made Britain the strongest maritime power in the world.