The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [17]
Even while the battle was being fought at Gallipoli, and long before its outcome was certain, the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was forced by the Conservatives, largely as a result of a severe shell shortage on the Western Front, to form a coalition government. The Conservatives had one condition for joining: that Churchill leave the Admiralty. His attacks on them in Parliament during the previous decade, particularly over their hostility to Irish Home Rule, was more than they would tolerate. He left the Admiralty in May 1915 and was given a sinecure position as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, still a member of the inner cabinet but with no ministerial responsibilities. In November, frustrated at having no influence over war policy, he left the Government altogether.
Calling himself the “escaped scapegoat,” Churchill went to the Western Front, where he commanded an infantry battalion for six months and faced the uncertainty and perils of front-line service under enemy fire. He returned only once to Britain, in March 1916, to raise in Parliament what he regarded as the Admiralty’s failures in the war at sea. (Balfour had replaced him as First Lord of the Admiralty.)
In May 1916 Churchill’s battalion was amalgamated with another. He returned to his parliamentary duties, pleading in the House of Commons for an understanding of the unfair burdens put on the men in the trenches. In one speech he pointed out that the majority of soldiers serving in France—working in the lines of communication—never went near the front. It was, he said, “one of the grimmest class distinctions ever drawn in this world”: the separation of soldiers into the fighting men and those who provided services for them in the security of the ports and approach roads.
Churchill wanted the House to realize the harshness of front-line service: “I say to myself every day, what is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly a thousand men—Englishmen, Britishers, men of our race—are knocked into bundles of bloody rags every twenty-four hours, and carried away to hasty graves or to field ambulances.” It was six weeks before the opening of the Somme offensive. Churchill spoke in Parliament against the “futile offensives,” but his voice was drowned in the general patriotic call for more and more attacks against the virtually impregnable German line.
On a personal note, Churchill begged Asquith to allow Parliament to see all the documents he had assembled to give the true story of the naval attack on the Dardanelles. Asquith refused. When Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916, the ban remained in force. Churchill had faith in the fairness of Parliament but was not allowed to put that faith to the test. He was never allowed to put to Parliament the documents and arguments with regard to the Dardanelles, which he was convinced would vindicate his actions. He was, however, able to avail himself, with regard to war policy, of a hitherto almost untested feature of parliamentary democracy in wartime—the Secret Session.
A Secret Session came into being by the device of the Speaker announcing, “I spy strangers.” When he did so, all members of the public, distinguished strangers and journalists in the press galleries had to leave the Chamber. The Members of Parliament then debated and questioned Ministers, with no report of the session being made public, even in the official pages of Hansard.
At the Secret Session on 10 May 1917, called to debate