Churchill looked upon the Western Front as an immense trap. The military
men, he said, "had no policy but the policy of exhaustion." He emphatically
agreed with France's Georges Clemenceau that "war is too serious a matter to be
left to the generals." (Clemenceau's vintage flavor and color have been all but
forgotten. After the war a French court asked him to suggest a sentence for a
man who tried to assassinate him. Clemenceau was first inclined to let him go
free, but then he had a second thought: "We have just won the most terrible war
in history, yet here is a Frenchman who at point-blank range misses his target
six times out of seven. I suggest that he be locked up for eight years, with
intensive training in a shooting gallery.")
Uncle to Tanks & Socialism. Early in the war, Churchill suggested
"interposing a thin plate of steel" to protect troops from machine-gun fire. He
ordered experimental tanks in 1915. The paternity of the tank is disputed;
Churchill is at least its uncle.
The other major effort to end the Western Front deadlock was the
Dardanelles campaign, later known by a tragic name--Gallipoli. He wanted to
force the Dardanelles, knock Turkey out of the war, tip the Balkan states to
the side of the Allies and open a supply line through the Black Sea to
exhausted Russia. Gallipoli was bungled by lack of coordination between the
services and a piecemeal, too-little, too-late scale of attack. Churchill got
the blame. He was fired from the Admiralty in May 1915 and six months later was
dropped from the cabinet. For the next six months he saw trench warfare at
first-hand as a lieutenant colonel in France. After Lloyd George became Prime
Minister, he called Churchill back to head the Munitions Ministry in 1917.
There Churchill presided over the amazingly successful production machinery
that Lloyd George himself had set up. This all-out industrial mobilization
(including nationalized factories) was to have consequences which neither
Churchill nor Lloyd George foresaw. In all countries the prodigies of wartime
achievement by national governments left a deep impression in which socialism
and the welfare state later flourished. In 1933 New Dealers justified
themselves, not with the tenets of orthodox socialism but with the slogan,
"Let's fight the depression as we fought the war."
Churchill as mobilizer of two great national defense efforts unwittingly
contributed more than all the Fabians to the triumph of the socialist state.
A Bacillus & a Moralist. The greatest triumph of the all- powerful
national socialist state came in 1917. Russian authority was broken less by an
upsurge from below than by a rotting away at the top. The Czar and a large part
of his court were so incompetent that the monk, Rasputin, a greasy sexual
athlete, exercised more influence between 1912 and 1916 than any man in Russia.
The confused, divided and frivolous Russian aristocracy had no idea of what was
about to hit them. The Czar's last Premier, Count Golitsyn, said that he took
the job in order "to have one more pleasant memory."
The Germans sent Lenin back to Russia ("like a plague bacillus," said
Churchill) to help the Revolution along. On Nov. 7 Lenin walked onto the
platform of the Supreme Soviet, after removing his wig, and said: "We will now
proceed to construct the proletarian socialist society."
