Oblivion or Glory

by David Stafford

  It was almost exactly twelve months since Admiral Kolchak, leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces, had been captured and murdered by the Communists. Since then, despite continued fighting in the Crimea, Lenin had consolidated his grip on Russia. Just months before, Lloyd George had welcomed the arrival in London of a Soviet delegation to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with Britain – the first time a representative of the new Bolshevik state had been received officially by the leader of any of the Great Powers. Lloyd George had no liking for Communism. But he was convinced that the best antidote to revolution was trade and European economic recovery, and for that the Russians had to be involved. Outwardly, the head of the Russian delegation, Leonid Krassin, was a reassuring figure. A veteran Bolshevik and former financier and supplier of weapons to the party, he resembled a solid member of the bourgeoisie. After meeting him at the Savoy Hotel in Berlin, one British special correspondent described him as ‘the best-dressed Communist in the world’, with his morning coat and trousers obviously hailing from Bond Street. ‘His linen is immaculate,’ he rhapsodized, ‘and a silk tie sets off a valuable tie pin. A gold ring and wrist watch hardly suggest Moscow.’ Such powerful visual impressions helped nourish the idea that Krassin was a moderate – and that there were others like him in Lenin’s entourage who could be wooed by the West. The location of the Bolshevik office in the British capital encouraged such a hope – New Bond Street, in the very heart of Mayfair.

  But Lloyd George’s conciliatory approach to the Bolsheviks bitterly divided British opinion. Many Conservatives were strongly opposed to any dealings at all with a regime that openly espoused revolution, while the Left prayed for the survival of the new socialist state and vocally opposed any efforts to undermine it. The protests climaxed in the summer of 1920, when Soviet and Polish forces clashed outside the gates of Warsaw amidst fears of Western intervention to help the Poles. ‘Hands Off Russia’ became the watch cry on the Left.

  Churchill led the vanguard of those determined to destroy Lenin’s regime. He saw nothing good in Krassin’s presence in London. To him, a Bolshevik was always a Bolshevik and he had a more clear-eyed view than many of his contemporaries of the tyranny that Lenin and Trotsky were imposing on the Russian people. It was also obvious that Krassin’s London office was far more than a trade office – it was a significant base for Bolshevik espionage, as he knew from the dozens of secret intercepts being produced by the British codebreakers.

  Despite what they revealed, Lloyd George refused to expel Krassin, and the Cabinet voted to continue the trade talks. Churchill’s fury remained unabated, especially as he believed that the Russians would be paying for Western goods with gold and diamonds plundered from their owners – in effect, he protested, ‘the proceeds of piracy’. Across the Cabinet table, Lloyd George openly disagreed with him. ‘The Russians are prepared to pay in gold and you won’t buy,’ he scoffed, and went on to quip that after all Britain traded with cannibals in the Solomon Islands. Humiliated and close to resigning, Churchill sat out the meeting, white-faced and silent. That night he travelled to Oxford and told students at the Union that there would be no recovery in Europe while ‘these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannize over its great population’. The policy that he would always advocate, he said, would be the overthrow and destruction of that ‘criminal regime’.

  It is easy to scoff at his overblown rhetoric on the topic, and many biographers have done so. But Churchill’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ reign of terror and its suppression of freedom and basic liberties has been amply vindicated by history. Moreover, his bloodthirsty language was no worse than that emanating from the Bolsheviks themselves. Indeed, even in Britain, the rhetoric attacking him from the Left was often toxic. At a huge ‘Hands Off Russia’ rally at the Royal Albert Hall that same month to commemorate the third anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Cecil Malone, a Communist Member of Parliament and decorated former army officer, proclaimed to wild cheers that the hanging of ‘a few Churchills and Curzons from the lampposts was a price worth paying for revolution’.12

  *

  As 1921 opened, any hope that Lenin could be brought down by the organized forces of the ‘White’ (anti-Bolshevik) armies was clearly in vain. Stubbornly, Churchill continued to believe that the Bolsheviks could be crushed by other means using secret service sources. Since the creation of both MI5 (the domestic security service) and MI6 (the foreign intelligence service, otherwise known as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS) under the pre-war Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, Churchill had been amongst their strongest supporters. As Home Secretary he had given MI5 the power to use general warrants to intercept the mail, and at the Admiralty he had thrown his weight behind the creation of Room 40, its top-secret unit for the breaking of German codes and ciphers, avidly reading the raw material it produced. Only a few months before, he had strongly resisted peacetime cutbacks to the budgets of the individual intelligence services. Better, he argued, would be to create a unified service to produce more effective results. ‘With the world in its present condition of extreme unrest and changing friendships and with our greatly reduced and weakened military forces,’ he told his Cabinet colleagues, ‘it is more than ever vital to us to have good and timely information.’ He also strongly supported the creation of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the successor to Room 40 in breaking foreign codes and ciphers.13

  Now, secret service reports from a wide variety of sources were regularly landing on his desk. Delivering them was his personal military secretary, the man who that morning had placed the file of intercepts in his in-tray. This was ‘Archie’ Sinclair, his battalion second-in-command from ‘Plug Street’ days. With his fine features, black hair, and dark complexion, Sinclair resembled ‘a Spanish grandee rather than the Highland Chieftain he really was’.14 Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he had joined the 2nd Life Guards in 1910 and two years later succeeded to his grandfather’s baronetcy as Viscount Thurso, along with some 100,000 acres of land in northern Scotland. ‘There were few more glamorous young men in society than Archie,’ writes one historian. ‘His good looks, charm, and romantic highland aura were spiced with a touch of daredevilry that led him to experiment with a primitive aircraft which he flew before breakfast.’15

  Although Archie was sixteen years Churchill’s junior, they had much in common. Archie’s mother, like his, was the daughter of a wealthy New York businessman. Her death a few days after Archie’s birth, followed by that of his father when he was only five, meant that he too, although for different reasons, felt deprived of proper parental attention. Both Sinclair and Churchill were cavalry officers and relished the thrills of polo and flying. During the war Churchill shared some of his most intimate thoughts and feelings with the young officer whom he treated with close to paternal affection. In several letters addressing him variously as ‘Archie dear’ or ‘My Dear’, and signing off with ‘Best Love’, ‘Yours always’, and ‘Yours affectionately’, Churchill opened his heart to him about his despair at the fall-out from the Dardanelles disaster. In one, handwritten only two weeks after his removal from the Admiralty and marked ‘Very Private’, he confessed that the hour was ‘bitter’, that he was ‘profoundly unsettled’, and that he had no idea of what to do or which way to turn.16

  In 1921 Sinclair was Churchill’s principal channel into British intelligence, one of a network of friends working with, or for, the SIS. This was thanks largely to Archie’s personal friendship with a fellow officer and Scot in his regiment who had worked on the intelligence staff at GHQ France, Stewart Menzies – the man eventually destined to become ‘C’, or head of SIS, and who was to serve as Churchill’s ‘spymaster’ during the Second World War. It was Sinclair who first introduced the two men. Cryptically, Menzies remarked that he found Churchill ‘an entertainment’. Archie acted as ‘cut-out’ with the intelligence services, served as gatekeeper against importuning White Russi
an supplicants, and provided a discreet and reliable conduit to the major players. All this, in Churchill’s own scribbled words on a secret file he kept in his papers, he described as ‘Archie’s work’.17

  Two other vital links with British intelligence emerged at this time. The first was Major Desmond Morton, another Eton-educated young officer who was connected – like Sassoon and Sinclair – with GHQ in France. In fact, as ADC to Haig, Morton lived at its epicentre. Frequently tasked with escorting visitors to the front, he established lasting connections with a number of ministers and dignitaries. More importantly, he made significant contacts in the world of intelligence. Morton at age twenty-five was a year younger than Sinclair, and already a badly wounded holder of the Military Cross when he first met Churchill painting a canvas at Ploegsteert in 1916. Later he frequently escorted him round the front lines and they had lengthy talks about technical issues that concerned them both. ‘Together,’ Churchill recorded later, ‘we visited many parts of the line. During these sometimes dangerous excursions, and at [Haig’s] house, I formed a great regard and friendship for this gallant officer.’18 When the war ended Morton moved into SIS – and Churchill claimed to have arranged the transfer. True or not – firm evidence is lacking – by 1921 Morton was SIS’s expert on Soviet activities directed against Britain.19

  Equalling Morton in importance as an intelligence source for now and in the future was Brigadier Edward Louis Spears, who had performed brilliantly during the war as British Liaison Officer with the French Deuxième Bureau (Secret Service) and War Office. He was now head of the British Military Mission in Paris, with the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre to his name. A fluent French speaker born in Paris, the twenty-nine-year-old Spears had conducted Churchill around the French front lines in 1915. In the younger man Churchill instantly spotted a similar spirit to his own: a man of courage, high intelligence, nonconformist views, and something of an outsider. Soon they were in regular correspondence. The next year, after Spears was seriously wounded for the fourth time, he sent him a passionate letter. ‘You are indeed a Paladin worthy to rank with the truest knights of the great days of romance,’ he wrote. ‘Thank God you are alive. Some good angel has guarded you amid such innumerable perils, & brought you safely thus far along this terrible and never-ending road.’20 It was no wonder that Spears was Churchill’s first (but rejected) choice as his battalion second-in-command on the Western Front, and that more than two years after the war Spears was still supplying him with intelligence about French affairs. So much so, indeed, that their personal link created a crisis with the British ambassador to France, Lord Derby. ‘Spiers [the original spelling of his surname] is a sort of political spy for [Churchill],’ he complained bitterly to Curzon.21 This forced Spears to leave Paris, but he remained a key link for Churchill with his anti-Bolshevik contacts.

  The documents Sinclair placed in his tray this January morning confirmed all Churchill’s darkest fears about the Bolsheviks. Even as he was preparing to join Lloyd George for the New Year’s celebrations, he now learned, Krassin had sent a message to Moscow advising Lenin that signing the trade agreement would cut the feet from under hostile elements such as Churchill and thus free Moscow from ‘the English political and economic cabal’. Once an agreement was signed, argued Krassin, threats to break it by Moscow would provide the Bolsheviks with a powerful weapon. ‘We must boldly conclude an agreement and naturally be prepared for further struggle,’ he told Lenin, ‘since no treaties will save us from a struggle until communism is victorious in the West.’ On reading the file, Churchill’s response was short and blunt. ‘All these telegrams,’ he responded, ‘illustrate the perfidy and malice of these ruffians.’22

  THREE

  ‘HE USES IT AS AN OPIATE’

  With Parliament recessed until mid-February, on the morning of Monday 10 January Churchill left with Clementine by train for the French Riviera for a long-needed break. It was the first real holiday for the couple since the war. As a younger man he had considered holidays mostly a waste of time. Once, he had even confessed that he would not mind at all being condemned to live the rest of his life within the square mile that embraced Westminster. Even worse, during their pre-war honeymoon in Venice, he had disappeared into a newspaper shop and emerged with a bundle of copies of The Times under his arm, sat down on a stone, and buried himself in the headlines, oblivious to the beauties surrounding him, including his new bride.1

  But now, having discovered the delights of painting, he had plenty to occupy him. Clementine also needed a rest. She was physically and emotionally exhausted after the stresses of coping with their new baby and managing a household with young children, nannies, and governesses. The recent domestic moves and disruptions had not helped either. Then, just five days before their departure, her maternal grandmother Blanche, the Countess of Airlie, died aged ninety at her home in London. Although they were not especially close, the death brought back family memories tinged with grief about Clementine’s older sister Katharine (‘Kitty’), who had tragically died aged sixteen of typhoid fever, leaving her a lonely and isolated figure in her family.

  Their departure from London also promised to put behind them another grief – the collective sorrow of a nation mourning the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men killed on battlefields around the world. Both had friends who now lay buried in foreign fields. Black armbands of mourning were still being worn, and until recently The Times had included ‘Death by Wounds’ in its announcements column. Only a few weeks before, Churchill had stood solemnly alongside Lloyd George and other Cabinet colleagues in Whitehall as King George V unveiled the newly built Cenotaph, Sir Edwin Lutyens’s severe granite memorial to ‘The Glorious Dead’ of the British Empire. Only yards in front of them, resting on a gun carriage, lay the coffin of an anonymous British soldier disinterred from the battlefields of France – ‘the Unknown Soldier’. Draping it was the faded and bloodstained Union Flag that a British padre on the Western Front had used both as an altar cloth and to cover shattered bodies. Carefully placed on top of it was a dented helmet and a soldier’s webbing belt. Such basic military equipment was intimately familiar to Churchill from his Ploegsteert days. Of those standing beside him, he was the only one to have served in the trenches, where he had witnessed the real face of war. ‘Filth and rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously, feet and clothing breaking through the soil, water and muck on all sides,’ he told Clementine.2

  The very simplicity of the burial of the Unknown Soldier was overwhelming in its emotive power. To millions, the coffin and the man within it represented a son, a father, a brother, a friend they had lost. Or, as The Times observed, ‘All could mourn for him the better because he was unknown.’ As Big Ben began to chime eleven o’clock, the King pressed a button and released the flags that had been veiling the Cenotaph. After ten more strokes – at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, two years from the moment when the Armistice finally muzzled the guns of war – silence fell – the ‘Great Silence’ of two minutes’ duration that had been inaugurated the year before. People bowed their heads, lost in thoughts and memories of the dead. For some, the silence was too much and they broke out sobbing. Others appeared simply numb. No one moved for what seemed like an eternity. Then bugles broke the silence with the clear notes of the ‘Last Post’. When they finished, the frozen tableau began to move again. Slowly it made its way towards Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey and here, after a short funeral service, the coffin was lowered into its carefully prepared resting home in the floor of the central nave.

  The whole ceremony was a brilliantly conceived idea and a nationally cathartic moment. If any single event marked the psychological transition from war to peace, it was this. Now it was time to move on, to look forward not back, to start living again and enjoy what life had to offer.3 This is what the Churchills were now trying to do.

  *

  They broke their journey in Paris
, where Winston was the guest of honour at a dinner party given by Louis Loucheur, his opposite number as Minister of Munitions during the war. He also spent an hour with the French President Alexandre Millerand discussing the future of Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Aligning their interests was testing Anglo-French relations to the limit, especially over the issues of German reparations and the future of Syria and Mesopotamia.

  Churchill’s main contact in the city was an old contemporary from Harrow and Sandhurst days, Major Gerald Geiger, who was head of the British Military Mission in the French capital. During his twenty-four hours there he took time out with Geiger to visit one of the city’s most prestigious commercial art galleries. Accompanying them was a Swiss art critic whom he had first met in Paris during the war. Charles Montag had once been a painter himself, specializing in impressionistic landscapes, and he was friendly with several of the leading Impressionists and Post-Impressionists including Monet, Degas, Pissarro, and Renoir. He was also a professional arts organizer and not long before had held a one-man show of his own paintings at the gallery they were now visiting. The Galerie Druet was situated in the heart of the city on the rue Royale linking the Place de la Concorde to the Place de la Madeleine, and had been founded by Eugène Druet, who made his name photographing the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. Just four years before, it had exhibited several dozen drawings and paintings illustrating the campaign in the Dardanelles, a break with its normal peacetime practice of showing the works of contemporary French artists.

  But the reason for visiting the Galerie Druet was not to view any of the rich crop of local artists flourishing in post-war Paris. Instead, it was to inspect a small collection of works by an unknown painter identified as ‘Charles Morin’. The three of them spent some forty minutes discussing and criticizing the canvases and Geiger reported back to Archie Sinclair in London that Churchill was ‘very interested’. This was hardly surprising. The exhibition had actually been organized by Montag, and Charles Morin was none other than Churchill himself. It was not the first time he had used a pseudonym when visiting France. During the war as Minister of Munitions he had sometimes travelled as ‘Mr Spencer’, the name which had been his first suggestion for the exhibition.4