To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [83]
When disaster follows disaster, someone or something has to be blamed. Since he was the commander in chief and could not blame himself, French blamed a shortage of artillery ammunition. Haig, on the other hand, using his skills as a master of backroom maneuvering, blamed French. Both streams of recrimination flowed back to London, and gradually it dawned on French that Haig was gunning for him. His subordinate was well entrenched on some strategic high ground: both Kitchener and the King had asked Haig privately to keep them informed. Lady Haig supplemented his letters by typing up extracts from his diary and sharing them with the royal family. "Precious documents," one Buckingham Palace official called them.
As for artillery shells, French was not wrong: there was indeed a shortage, and some were defective. Haig blamed this on the British worker, who, he was convinced, had too many holidays and too much to drink—a notable argument for someone whose family fortune was based on whiskey. "Take and shoot two or three of them," he wrote to his wife, "and the 'Drink habit' would cease." In reality, no country had been prepared for a war of this length, least of all Britain, with its small professional army used to fighting ill-armed colonials. In the three-day Battle of Neuve Chapelle—a mere skirmish compared to the giant clashes to come—British artillery had shot off almost as many shells as in the course of the entire Boer War.
During this frustrating spring, French received an alarming telegram from the War Office ordering him to immediately ship much of his meager stock of ammunition to the British Empire forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in western Turkey. There, a new campaign had been launched, aimed at skirting the impasse on the Western Front: an amphibious assault on the Ottoman army, which was thought to be far weaker and more vulnerable than Germany's. The attack, it was hoped, would seize Constantinople (today's Istanbul) and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. French was dismayed: not only would his supply of scarce shells be diminished further, but some other British general might get credit for turning the tide.
No more skillful at office politics than the new style of combat, French fought his campaign of blame too much in the open. His friend Repington, the Times correspondent and a veteran intriguer, weighed in with an article blazingly headlined: "Need for Shells: British Attacks Checked: Limited Supply the Cause: A Lesson from France." French then pressed his American millionaire housemate, George Moore, into service to urge newspapers to attack Kitchener for the shell shortage. Believing—quite incorrectly—that he had the confidence of Prime Minister Asquith, he claimed that everything was the fault of the secretary for war. In his erratic way, he evidently forgot that earlier in the spring he had sent Kitchener two separate messages declaring his stock of shells adequate.
Had he plenty of high-explosive shells, Sir John wrote to his latest mistress, he would be able at last to "break thro' this tremendous crust of defence ... once we have done it I think we may get the Devils on the run. How I should love to have a real good 'go' at them in the open with lots of cavalry and horse artillery and run them to earth. Well! It may come." French's correspondent, like almost every woman he was drawn to, was married to someone else. The tall, elegant Winifred "Wendy" Bennett was the wife of Percy Bennett, a diplomat whom she referred to as "Pompous Percy." Most unusually for French, this affair, begun in early 1915, would last more than half a decade. The two of them were, he told her, "shipwrecked souls who have found one another." The best she and French could do was to snatch an afternoon or evening at his lodgings on his short trips to London to consult