Thus was Britain ringing with righteous wrath in the middle of May, 1915, when what I venture to dignify as the turning-point of the war arrived: the exposure by Lord Northcliffe's newspapers of what was henceforth to be known as "the shells tragedy." Northcliffe himself had recently been the guest of Sir John French at the front. Still more lately the military critic of The Times, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Repington, had visited British Field Headquarters under the same auspices. There they were told the truth about Neuve Chapelle. It was a simple story. The British army had essayed to smash through the German lines, hopelessly short of the right kind of ammunition--high explosive shells. Batteries of artillery, often on the threshold of decisive victory, found themselves suddenly starved of the only sort of shell which could possibly blast a way through the concrete and barbed-wire of the enemy's entrenchments. What happened at Neuve Chapelle--a terribly heavy loss of British life with nothing like compensatory results--would inevitably happen again when the British army was called upon to attack. It would simply be sentenced to death and defeat. Sir John French had been provided with shrapnel which was good enough to smash the Boers, but he was criminally ill-equipped with the shells which alone were capable of demolishing the elaborate German defensive arrangements and enabling the British infantry to advance with a fighting chance of success. If the army was not to be condemned to inglorious impotence or annihilation, it had to be provided forthwith with high-explosive ammunition on an immense and unceasing scale. The British Commander-in-Chief declined, in effect, to assume further responsibility for the fate of the campaign in Flanders unless there was sweeping and instant remedial action by the War Office.
On May 14 Lieutenant-Colonel Repington, in a dispatch to The Times from "Northern France," which, like other news from the field, passed the Censor at Headquarters before transmission to England, declared that "the want of an unlimited supply of high explosive was a fatal bar to our success." Describing an attack which had collapsed for the same reason that the offensive at Neuve Chapelle had failed, Repington wrote:
"We found the enemy much more strongly posted than we expected. We had not sufficient high explosive to level his parapets to the ground after the French practice, and when our infantry gallantly stormed the trenches, as they did in both attacks, they found a garrison undismayed, many entanglements still intact, and maxims on all sides ready to pour in streams of bullets. We could not maintain ourselves in the trenches won, and our reserves were not thrown in because the conditions for success in an assault were not present.
"The attacks were well planned and valiantly conducted. The infantry did splendidly, but the conditions were too hard.
"On our side we have easily defeated all attacks on Ypres. The value of German troops in the attack has greatly deteriorated, and we can deal easily with them in the open. But until we are thoroughly equipped for this trench warfare, we attack under grave disadvantages. The men are in high spirits, taking their cue from the ever-confident and resolute attitude of the Commander-in-Chief.
"If we can break through this hard outer crust of the German defenses, we believe that we can scatter the German Armies, whose offensive causes us no concern at all. But to break this hard crust we need more high explosive, more heavy howitzers, and more men. This special form of warfare has no precedent in history.
"It is certain that we can smash the German crust if we have the means. So the means we must have, and as quickly as possible."
By way of illustrating what British guns could do, if sufficiently numerous and adequately fed, Repington told how the French "by dint of the expenditure of 276 rounds of high explosive per gun in one day, leveled with the ground all the German defenses, except the villages." He left no doubt that until Sir John French's artillery could attack under similar conditions, British hopes of effective cooperation with Joffre's army were futile. The Times critic's plain-spoken observations, which bore the unmistakable imprint of "inspiration" from British Headquarters, startled the nation. They could hardly have been more suggestive if the Commander-in-Chief himself had gone to the country and proclaimed the facts. Indeed, if others had not promptly done so, I have reason to believe that Sir John French would not have shrunk from that very task. No one had so direct and personal a reason for taking the bull by the horns, for if the British campaign were to degenerate from futility into fiasco, the odium would necessarily fall upon its field chieftain. History will hardly condemn him for resolving that the blame should be placed where it belonged, if, as may well have been the case, inspiration of the impending public exposure emanated from him.
On May 21 Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail--his critics are fond of calling The Times the "penny edition" of The Daily Mail--opened a ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming placards reading: "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The Shells Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only assailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War Secretaryship; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the country's greatest war asset. Whenever Britons doubted whether the course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the shells crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol; that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great Britain to its uttermost foundations, The Daily Mail went full tilt to the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it recalled) there were men who knew Roberts' private opinions of Kitchener's achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such knowledge. The Daily Mail admitted all these things and declared moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at a moment's notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding and fighting of an army which had to be manufactured at a speed unprecedented in the history of the world. Kitchener, though not essentially a good organizer, was a man of enormous driving-power. His talents in that respect had stood him in good stead so far in the war. With the aid of a gigantic advertising campaign, he had accomplished marvels in the direction of raising a volunteer army; but "the shells tragedy" was thunderous proof that the Secretary for War had bitten off more than he could chew. Unless things were to go from bad to worse, the all-important question of providing munitions must be taken from Kitchener's overburdened shoulders and transferred to those of men better equipped in respect of time, temperament and training, to deal with it. The Northcliffe revelations lost none of their sensationalism in presence of Mr. Asquith's solemn assurances at Newcastle, barely three weeks previous, that Britain's munition supply, as well as that of her Allies, was entirely adequate.
If Northcliffe had suddenly proposed the abdication of the Sovereign, or the demolition of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the proclamation of a Republic, nothing could have been more cyclonic in its effect than The Daily Mail's imperious demand for the curtailment of Kitchener's supreme authority at the War Office, because he had "blundered" with the army's ammunition. At the Stock Exchange and on the Baltic (the shipping mart) copies of all the Northcliffe papers were ceremoniously burnt. Town councils held indignation meetings, to discuss the advisability of banning them from the public reading-rooms. Super-patriots and Hide-the-Truth zealots rushed to their newsdealers and canceled their subscriptions to The Times, The Daily Mail and other Northcliffe organs. Rival publishers went so far as to suggest that Northcliffe and his editorial staff should be lined up in front of a firing-squad and shot for high treason. Wherever one went, one encountered the most violent abuse of the journalist who had dared to sling mud at the great soldier who was the incarnation of the nation's hopes and to write "Failure" next to his magic name. Punch epitomized national sentiment in a cartoon showing John Bull patting Kitchener on the shoulder, trampling a Daily Mail under foot, and saying: