The people listened to Lloyd-George. He has a way of making them listen to him. They gave him their ear even in his pro-Boer days. They listened to him when he (an ardent Baptist) cleared for action against the Welsh Church. They listened to him even when he went down to Limehouse and coined a new word, "to limehouse," meaning violent political spell-binding, second cousin to demagogism, by the nature of his impassioned appeals to the people to rise and slay the Lords. It was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and greatest rôle as organizer of victory.
Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital "mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. He is as much at home laboring with a gang of recalcitrant miners at the pit-mouth--he always goes straight to headquarters when he essays to settle a strike--as he is on the floor of the House of Commons or as moderator at a Baptist convention. He likes Americans and specializes in extending hospitality to interesting ones. Unquestionably he has a strong hold on our imaginations, as a man of his temperament, career and talent is bound to have. An eminent Chicagoan visited London last summer, with introductions which would have easily paved his way to the throne or any other exalted British quarter. "Whom would you like to meet most of all?" he was asked. "Lloyd-George," he said, with the intuitive sense of a Yankee who only has time for the things worth while.
Winston Churchill, the son of an English father and an American mother, is the Peck's Bad Boy of the British Government. His popularity has been sadly dimmed since the war began, for he was looked upon as not only the author of the grotesque naval "relief" expedition to Antwerp--now either prisoners of war in Germany or interned in Holland--but the culprit who was chiefly responsible for the far more disastrous Dardanelles adventure. Another crime is charged against him, hardly less serious than the two just named: his imperious administration of the Admiralty drove from the First Sea Lordship the man universally considered Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Fisher. All agree, friend and foe, that to "Winston" was due in a very marked degree, England's superb readiness at sea when war broke out, but it is a matter of grave doubt whether even that superlative service to the country will be looked upon as great enough to blanket his subsequent and costly incompetencies. When the upheaval in the Asquith Cabinet came about, in the spring of 1915, Churchill was nominally squelched by interment in the harmless berth of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, most of whose official time is spent in licensing Justices of the Peace and Notaries Public. That ennui hung heavily on his hands was manifested by the announcement during the summer that Churchill had taken up painting as a pastime.
I have said that "Winston" was nominally subjugated, for a petrel of his peculiarly irrepressible storminess can only be wholly curbed by annihilation. Asquith is far too sagacious a politician to risk Churchill's complete eclipse in the Government of which he has always been the most picturesque constituent. Churchill, too, aspires to the Premier's toga, though a good many people fear that the defects of his qualities will keep him, just as they kept his distinguished father, Lord Randolph Churchill, from No. 10 Downing Street. But "Winston" is far less dangerous to the Government as a friend than as a foe. His chameleon political career justifies the fear that he would turn on his old associates and party cronies the moment he conceived that advantage to self was thereby obtainable. Obviously such a man is better in the Cabinet than out of it, especially if he is of Winston Churchill's undoubted personal charm, magnetism and resistless force.
Combining the best qualities of his dual ancestry, he makes a lively appeal to the average heart. Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. He has only one serious rival, indeed, in their affections, and that is Lloyd-George. He is remembered in war thus far not only for his Antwerp and Dardanelles indiscretions, but for his equally unhappy oratorical excesses, which are doomed, apparently, always to precede some untoward naval or military event. Within thirty-six hours of proclaiming at Liverpool (in September, 1914) that "if the German navy does not come out and fight, we shall dig it out like rats from a hole," U9 sent the Cressy, Hague and Aboukir to the bottom. In the spring of 1915, discussing the Dardanelles, Churchill blustered that "we are within a very few miles of the greatest victory this war has seen," and a few weeks later Kitchener announced that twelve miles of precarious front in Gallipoli were all there was to show for a campaign which had already cost eighty-seven thousand casualties. When Churchill prognosticates nowadays, the country trembles for what the next day will bring forth. Yet he is a rash prophet who would predict that "Winston" has run his course in British politics. He took manfully the discomfiture of the Coalition reshuffle, and although his picture is no longer cheered when it is flashed on the cinematograph screen the shrewdest seers are certain that he will "come back."[1]
[1] Churchill resigned from the Cabinet in November, 1915, declaring that he was a soldier--"and my regiment is in France." To it he said he preferred to go rather than continue in a position of "well-paid inactivity" at home. In a dramatic speech in the House of Commons, he took political farewell of the country and, having pleaded "Not Guilty" to the capital charges of responsibility for Antwerp and the Dardanelles, left England unostentatiously for the trenches, as a major of cavalry.
Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. Men recalled his dominant traits--iron determination, strenuous application to duty, imperious disregard of hide-bound methods and red tape, and, above all, his genius for organization. They rejoiced to hear that he had accepted the War Office, long cob-webbed with circumlocutory traditions and petticoat influence, on the strict understanding that he was to be monarch of all he surveyed--that he would not tolerate such party interference as intrudes itself on departmental affairs in general. Immensely to the popular taste, because it confirmed the masses' conception of "K.," was the story that when he arrived at the War Office for the first time and was told there was "no bed here, Sir," he commanded the affrighted and astonished caretaker, then, "to put one in, as I am going to sleep here." Britain said to herself that she indubitably possessed a match for German Efficiency in her new Secretary for War, and all thought of "losing" with such a man as the supreme chief of the military establishment vanished from her mind.
Kitchener.
Kitchener was never one of the war-will-be-over-by-Christmas crew. His maiden speech as War Minister in the House of Lords informed the country, bluntly, that he expected a three years' struggle. During the winter an anecdote ascribed to the taciturn War Secretary's loquacious sister gained currency, and passed from mouth to mouth. "When is the war going to end?" she asked him. "I don't know when it's going to end," he was said to have replied, "but it is going to begin in May." It was in May, by the pitiless irony of Fate, that the War Office's muddle of the ammunition supply was exposed.