different factions in the Cabinet to delay clear decisions on broad war
policy.
3
Asquith was not a great war leader, but he had to manage
quarrelsome colleagues, and in his defence it can be said that the major
decisions affecting the outcome of the war – the commitment of the bulk
of the British army to the Western Front, the abandonment of economic
orthodoxy, the creation of the Ministry of Munitions and the intro-
duction of conscription – were taken while he was prime minister.
4
Few ministers showed any talent for conduc ting war, and those who
did might have benefited from greater willingness to listen to their
professional advisers. Churchill’s enthusiasm for strategic ends was not
always accompanied by adequ ate reflection on the necessary means, as
the Dardanelles episode was to show. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener,
who was appointed secretary of state for war on 5 August 1914, enjoyed
a great reputati on as a soldier, but was unfamiliar with the work of the
War Office and was temperamentally an autocrat, unaccustomed either
to seeking or taking advice. He ignored the General Staff, which had in
any case been weakened by the departure of many of its members with
the BEF, with the result that plans for the Dardanelles operation were
not subject to critical appraisal.
5
In some respects Kitchener’s
appointment served to obscure rather than to clarify the direction of the
nation’s military effort as he combined ministerial responsibility and
professional authority. During the Battle of the Marne in 1914 he went,
in his field marshal’s uniform, to the headquarters of Sir John French,
the commander of the BEF, and overruled the latter’s orders to retreat
behind the Seine, thereby caus ing lasting hostility on French’s part.
Military strategy was settled by ministers in Cabinet on Kitchener’s
advice, although he frequently found it difficult to explain policy.
6
He
was the first person in authority to realise that the war could last for
several years, reasoning that Germany would resist the Allies’ superior
numbers with the same determination as the South had resisted the
North in the American Civil War.
7
The Cabinet sanctioned his call for
volunteers on 6 August without deciding what the strategic purpose of
the new army would be. By the end of October 898,635 men had
enlisted, more than the combined pre-war strength of the Regular and
Territorial armies (707,466). It is not surprising that there was a
3
John Turner, ‘Cabinets, committees and secretariats: the higher direction of war’, in
Kathleen Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–
1919 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), pp. 57–83, at p. 63.
4
George H. Cassar, Asquith as War Leader (London: Hambledon Press, 1994).
5
Gooch, Plans of War, pp. 299, 301–12, 316–17.
6
Strachan, Politics of the British Army, p. 128.
7
Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher, ed. Maurice Brett and Oliver Esher, 4 vols.
(London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934–8), vol. III, pp. 192–3.
The First World War 51