“Nothing like the Battle of Omdurman73 will ever be seen again,” Churchill wrote. “Everything was visible to the naked eye. The armies marched and maneuvered on the crisp surface of the desert plain through which the Nile wandered in broad reaches, now steel, now brass.” The British-Egyptian Army, 26,000 men, lay behind temporary fortifications in a great crescent with its back to the Nile, where eight British gunboats were anchored, their guns trained out over the desert. At sunrise on September 2, 1898, the Dervish Army, sixty thousand strong, began to move across the sandy plain. Churchill, with a patrol of lancers, looked down on the enemy: “Their front was nearly five miles long... relieved and diversified with an odd-looking shimmer of light from the spear points.... I suddenly realized that all the masses were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about and before their ranks.... Then they began to cheer.... To us, watching on the hill, a tremendous roar came up in waves of intense sound, like the tumult of the rising wind and sea before a storm. In spite of the confidence which I felt in the weapons of civilization... the formidable aspect of this great host of implacable savages, hurrying eagerly to the attack... provoked a feeling of loneliness.”
Despite the Khalifa’s superiority in numbers, it was an unequal fight. The “weapons of civilization”—Kitchener’s four batteries of howitzers, the guns on the boats on the Nile, the modern rifles held by British and Egyptian troops—cut “wide gaps and shapeless heaps” in the onrushing Dervish Army. Before even reaching the British lines, the Dervishes faltered. Twenty thousand men lay dead and wounded. For no more legitimate purpose than that which sent the Light Brigade up the Valley of Death, the 21st Lancers were then ordered to charge. Churchill rode at the head of his squadron, holding his Mauser pistol: “The collision was now very near. I saw before me, not ten yards away, the two blue men who lay in my path. I rode at the interval between them. They both fired. I passed through the smoke conscious that I was unhurt. The trooper immediately behind me was killed.”
A Dervish charged with his sword: “I had room and time enough to turn my pony out of his reach and leaning over on the off side I fired two shots into him at about three yards. As I straightened myself in the saddle, I saw before me another figure with uplifted sword. I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck him.” Another Dervish “staggered toward me raising his spear. I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand and lay there dead.” The brief battle was over. “But now from the direction of the enemy there came a succession of grisly apparitions: horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.” The 21st Lancers had lost a quarter of its men and a third of its horses, killed and wounded, in two minutes of battle.
As soon as the campaign was over, Churchill returned to England. “Come and see me74 and tell me about your future plans,” wrote the Prince of Wales, who invited Winston to dine at Marlborough House, where he urged the young man to write another book. Churchill resigned from the army, began working on The River War, about the Sudan Campaign, and ran for Parliament. He lost, but not badly. When Britain’s argument with the Boers concluded in a Boer ultimatum, Churchill sensed war and further opportunity for glory. On October 14, 1899, he sailed for South Africa to cover the story for the Morning Post. Within two weeks of arriving in Capetown, Churchill had been in action and was behind barbed wire in Pretoria, a prisoner of the Boers.
The escapade was a spirited piece of Churchillian melodrama. While waiting for the main campaign to start, he was invited to accompany a British armored train proceeding through Natal toward the besieged town of Ladysmith. The train, carrying two companies of British troops, was “cloaked from end to end75 with thick plates,” but any damage to the tracks would render it immobile. General Louis Botha, commander of the Boer forces besieging Ladysmith, was out with five hundred mounted men when he spotted the train huffing north. All he had to do was to litter the rails with large rocks once the train had passed, frighten it into retreat by firing a few shells ahead of it, then wait while it piled into the rocks at full speed reverse. Three cars were derailed; the stunned British soldiers found themselves under heavy, accurate fire from the Boer riflemen. Although technically Churchill was only an observer, he assumed responsibility for trying to save the men. For seventy minutes, fully exposed to enemy fire, he labored to clear the track of derailed cars in order to free the engine. He succeeded partially and sent the locomotive off to safety, packed with wounded men. Coming back on foot to try to lead the other soldiers out, he found himself standing in front of a man on horseback, looking down the barrel of a Boer rifle. The rifleman was none other than Louis Botha, one of the best marksmen in South Africa, later the first Prime Minister of the Transvaal and a lifelong Churchill friend. Winston remembered a quote from Napoleon. “When one is alone and unarmed,76 a surrender may be pardoned.” He raised his hands in the air. “We’re not going to let you go,77 old chappie, although you are a correspondent,” one of his captors told him cheerfully. “We don’t catch the son of a lord every day,” they said.
Churchill remained in captivity for less than a month. One night he leaped onto the wall behind the camp latrine, dropped to the other side, and was free. He walked boldly through the streets of Pretoria, jumped aboard a moving coal train, and left the city. Still, he was three hundred miles from friendly or neutral territory, did not know the language, and had only a little chocolate and a few biscuits. The first house he tried belonged to an English mine operator, who hid him at the bottom of a coal mine for three days while the Boers posted notices all over the Transvaal describing the fugitive: “Englishman 25 years old,78 about 5 ft. 8 in. tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair... cannot pronounce the letter ‘S’...” Churchill lay with rats running across his face until his benefactor could smuggle him away, hidden behind bales of wool, on a train bound for Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa. When Churchill arrived in the first town across the border and went to the British Consulate, a minor official took one look at his ragged clothes and told him to go away. Churchill stepped back into the street, looked up at the upper story where the Consul’s office was located, and roared: “I am Winston Bloody Churchill.79 Come down here at once.”
Back in South Africa, Churchill was a hero. He reapplied for an army commission, joined a South African cavalry regiment, and fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross, which Kitchener vetoed, and rode in the first columns to liberate Ladysmith and capture Pretoria and Johannesburg. He returned to England to find his mother about to marry George Cornwallis-West, “the handsomest man in England,”80 who was only sixteen days older than Winston and twenty years younger than the bride. Her friends were appalled, but Jennie didn’t care. “I suppose you think81 I’m very foolish,” she said to a friend, “but I’m having such fun.” Winston loyally stood by her. He wrote a new book, London to Ladysmith, via Pretoria, made a lecture tour of the United States, and collected £15,000 in book royalties, journalist’s pay, and lecture fees. Then, the most famous young man in England, now properly financed, ran again for Parliament. In September 1900, he was elected to the House of Commons, where he was to remain for sixty-five years.
At first, the appearance of this pink-faced young man with bright blue eyes and reddish hair provoked memories of his father. The Daily Mail correspondent noted “the square forehead82 and the full bold eye... the hurried stride through the lobby.” The observer from Punch reported that “When the young member for Oldham83 addresses the House, with hands on hips, head bent forward, right foot stretched forth, memories of days that are no more flood the brain.” It was not long, however, before Winston was known for himself: “restless, egotistical, bumptious,84 shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magne
tism, great pluck and some originality,” thought Beatrice Webb. When Churchill spoke, the Press Gallery stirred. How many horses and mules had been sent to South Africa, Winston asked the War Secretary, whom he disliked. When the answer was given, Churchill had another question: “Can my Right Honorable Friend85 say how many asses have been sent to South Africa?” By 1904, Churchill could no longer tolerate the Balfour-Chamberlain split on free trade and crossed the aisle to join the Liberal Party. Campbell-Bannerman gave the new recruit an important sub-Cabinet position as Under Secretary for the Colonies in the Liberal Cabinet of 1905; Asquith promoted him into the Cabinet, first as President of the Board of Trade, then as Home Secretary.
By 1911, Churchill was the only man in England instantly identifiable by his first name. “If it had not been for me,86 that young man would not have been in existence,” Edward VII told Lord Esher. “How is that, sir?” asked the startled Esher. “The Duke and Duchess both objected to Randolph’s marriage,” the King explained. “It was owing to Us that they gave way.” At thirty-six, Winston had almost everything he wanted: celebrity, a podium, a place at the table of the mighty. On a Scottish golf course one autumn afternoon, Asquith gave him a responsibility and an opportunity suited to his talents: he handed Winston the Royal Navy.
fn1 Sir Arthur Wilson also argued that the British Army could not fight in France because British soldiers did not speak French.
fn2 The beating of small boys in English public schools was unremarkable. Earlier in the nineteenth century the headmaster of Eton was a Dr. Keate, “who on heroic occasions24 was known to have flogged over eighty boys on a single summer day; and whose one mellow regret in the evening of his life was that he had not flogged far more.”
fn3 During his illness and after his death, Jennie sternly refused to permit anyone to name the disease which killed her husband. Winston never did and even in 1966 Winston’s son Randolph referred to his grandfather as suffering from a “severe mental disease.”48
Chapter 41
Churchill at the Admiralty
On Monday, October 25, 1911, Churchill and McKenna exchanged offices. In the morning McKenna came to the Home Office and Churchill introduced him to the leading officials; after lunch Churchill went to the Admiralty, where McKenna presented the Sea Lords and heads of department. McKenna’s attitude throughout was gloomy but correct. He was not happy to be shunted out of the Admiralty, and his friends and supporters in the navy and around the country shared his view. Telegrams and letters poured in, expressing gratitude for his struggle against the economizers during his three and half years as First Lord. The blow was heightened by the fact that McKenna’s replacement was one of the two arch-economizers in the Cabinet, Winston Churchill.
Some in Parliament and elsewhere did not understand McKenna’s chagrin at switching from the Admiralty to the Home Office. In the informal ranking of Cabinet posts, the Home Secretary was Number Three, just behind the Prime Minister and the Chancellor; the First Lord stood further back. Indeed, this had been Churchill’s own opinion in 1902, when he had scorned Austen Chamberlain’s desire to become First Lord as “a poor ambition.”1
Apprehension about the new figure moving into the Admiralty was widespread. Observers saw a brilliant, self-confident young man of great physical courage and inexhaustible energies, with eloquent powers of expression. His rise had been meteoric. A Cabinet Minister at thirty-three, two years at the Board of Trade, twenty months at the Home Office; now, at thirty-six, he was still half a generation younger than his colleagues (Lloyd George was forty-eight, Grey forty-nine, Haldane forty-five, and Asquith fifty-nine). Yet despite his talent, he bore a heavy weight of disapproval. The stigma of having changed parties never left him. “Turncoat,” “opportunist,” “wind bag,” “self-advertising mountebank” were some of the names flung at him. The Conservative Spectator greeted his appointment by saying, “We cannot detect2 in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue....”
Churchill did not care what anyone said about him. Once past the two carved stone dolphins which guarded the entrance to the Admiralty building, ensconced in the furniture, carved with dolphins, that dated from Nelson’s day, Churchill was in rapture. “That is because3 I can now lay eggs instead of scratching around in the dust and clucking,” he explained. “It is a far more satisfactory occupation. I am at present in the process of laying a great number of eggs—good eggs.” He moved swiftly. His first act was to hang on the wall behind his desk a large chart of the North Sea. Every day the duty officer marked with small flags the position of the principal ships of the German Navy. Each morning, on entering the room, Churchill stood before the chart and studied the whereabouts of the High Seas Fleet. His purpose, he said, “was to inculcate in myself4 and those working with me a sense of ever-present danger.” He made quick decisions on a number of matters. Orders had not been placed for twenty new destroyers authorized in the 1911 Estimates; the new First Lord placed the orders immediately. The unguarded naval magazines which had kept him awake as Home Secretary the previous summer were transferred to the Admiralty and put under permanent guard by Royal Marines. Before his arrival, only a clerk stood guard at the Admiralty nights, weekends, and holidays to respond to reports and alarms arriving from around the globe. Churchill initiated a watch system of naval officers to stand duty around the clock. He ordered the Sea Lords to stand watch; one of the four was always to be near the Admiralty building.
He made a controversial appointment to the key role of Private Naval Secretary to the First Lord. Rear Admiral David Beatty, at forty the youngest flag officer in the navy, was not a conventional officer. His career had been splendid and celebrated: he had commanded a Nile gunboat at the Battle of Omdurman; he had been with the Naval Landing Party during the Boxer Rebellion; he had been promoted rapidly, some thought too rapidly. Handsome and dashing, he had married a daughter of Marshall Field, the Chicago Department-store mogul, and his wife had brought him a dowry of £8 million; this sat poorly with admirals and captains struggling to make ends meet on regular navy pay. Others complained that he was too fond of life ashore; Beatty and his beautiful wife were often seen in society; he rode superbly and followed the hounds with relish—good stuff for a cavalry officer, but odd for an admiral. Worst, he was arrogant: offered the post of second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, a billet for which many officers would have been grateful, he had turned it down as not sufficiently interesting. Not surprisingly, the Admiralty turned its back. Beatty had been left to languish ashore on half pay for eighteen months. The prospect was that before long he would be retired.
When Churchill became First Lord, Beatty asked for an appointment. Everything that Churchill had heard was favorable: youth, enterprise, courage. Beatty’s father had been in the 4th Hussars, Churchill’s regiment. Beatty’s gunboat on the Nile had used its guns to support the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman. Churchill was not influenced by Admiralty complaints that his visitor “had got on too fast”5 and “had too many interests ashore.” When Beatty walked in, Churchill looked him over and said, “You seem very young6 to be an admiral.” Unfazed, Beatty replied, “And you seem very young to be First Lord.” Churchill took him on immediately. Beatty set to work in a room adjoining the First Lord’s, accompanied him on all his inspection tours, and provided a sounding board across every field of strategy and technology. In April 1913, when one of the most sought-after commands in the navy, the Battle Cruiser Squadron, fell vacant, Churchill appointed Beatty. Beatty led the battle cruisers into the most violent actions of the North Sea war. After Jutland, as Admiral, he took command of that huge agglomeration of dreadnoughts on which Britain’s security rested: the Grand Fleet.
Seeking guidance, Churchill turned to Jacky Fisher, now retired. They knew each other well, having spent two weeks together in Biarritz in 1907 at the house of a mutual friend. Fisher, then First Sea Lord, had talked through the days and nights
while Churchill listened. Fisher “fell desperately in love7 with Winston Churchill. I think he’s quite the nicest fellow I ever met and such a quick brain that it’s a delight to talk to him.” The King, also in Biarritz, noticed the new relationship and told Lady Londonderry that he found them “most amusing together.8 I call them ‘the chatterers.’” Churchill’s opposition to the 1909 Naval Estimates cast a shadow over the relationship, although the younger man wrote to assure the Admiral of his “unaltered feelings.”
After leaving the Admiralty, Fisher left England to live in retirement in Lucerne. He had been fond of McKenna and his wife (writing to them as “My Beloved First Lord” and “My Beloved Pamela”), but as soon as he learned that Churchill was to become First Lord, he began sending recommendations: Battenberg to succeed Wilson as First Sea Lord, Jellicoe to go as Second in Command of the Home Fleet, and so on. Churchill anticipated Fisher’s letters. On the morning of October 25, before leaving the Home Office to go over to the Admiralty, he wrote:
My dear Lord Fisher,9
I want to see you very much. When am I to have that pleasure? You have but to indicate your convenience and I will await you at the Admiralty.
Yours vy sincerely,
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
Fisher came like a shot. Three days later, Churchill and both McKennas met the boat train at Charing Cross. Fisher spent three hours with the McKennas, both of them “fearfully cut up10 at leaving the Admiralty,” then motored with Churchill to Reigate, a small town south of London, where Asquith and Lloyd George were waiting for them. The dialogue was primarily between the First Lord and the Admiral. “I had certain main ideas11 of what I was going to do and what, indeed, I was sent to the Admiralty to do,” Churchill said. “I intended to prepare for an attack by Germany as if it might come the next day. I intended to raise the Fleet to the highest possible strength.... I was pledged to create a War staff. I was resolved... to provide for the transportation of a British Army to France should war come.... I had the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer at my back.” In Fisher, Churchill found “a veritable volcano12 of knowledge and inspiration; and as soon as he learned what my main purpose was, he passed into a state of vehement eruption.... Once he began, he could hardly stop. I plied him with questions and he poured out ideas.” When the Reigate conversations began, Churchill had no thought of recalling Fisher to the Admiralty. “But by the Sunday night13 the power of the man was deeply borne in upon me and I had almost made up my mind to do what I did three years later and place him again at the head of the Naval Service.... All the way up to London the next morning I was on the brink of saying ‘Come and help me’ and had he by a word seemed to wish to return, I would surely have spoken. But he maintained a proper dignity, and in an hour we were in London.” Fisher returned to Lucerne.
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