So frosty a reception by fellow officers would have daunted almost any other newcomer, but Winston was too proud, and his ego too strong, to be scarred by petty slights. He was, he later wrote, “infinitely amused at the elaborate pains they took to put me in my place and to make me realize that nothing counted at the front except military rank and behaviour.” Here they were wrong. He expected special treatment and he got it. Soldiers’ mail was notoriously slow; letters to and from Cromwell Road, carried by a King’s messenger from the Admiralty, were delivered overnight. No other fighting man could speak to his wife over a telephone. Churchill did; he rode back to French’s GHQ and heard her over a special Admiralty line. After hanging up he wrote Clementine that because another officer had been in the room, “I cd not say much & even feared you might think I was abrupt.” She wrote that the conversation had been “very tantalising, as there is so much I want to say to you which cannot be shouted into an unsympathetic receiver!” But millions of husbands and wives would have given much to be so constrained, and so tantalized.156
August visitors traipsed up to the trenches to see him: Lord Curzon, General Seely, and F. E. Smith, now attorney general, who, to his fury, was arrested by a sentry for want of a proper pass. At Saint-Omer, Winston had encountered another acquaintance, Edward Louis Spiers. They had met before the war in the home of Venetia Stanley’s sister Sylvia. Spiers, now a young cavalry captain, was serving as a liaison officer between the BEF and Joffre’s staff. He invited Winston to join him in a tour of the French lines. Churchill was confident that he was immune to AWOL charges—he was right—and off they went. A French general insisted on being photographed with Winston. Churchill wrote home: “I was received with much attention, more so in fact than when I went as 1st Lord.” As a parting gift he was crowned with a poilu’s steel helmet, “wh I am going to wear,” he told Clementine, “as it looks so nice & will perhaps protect my valuable cranium.”157
The battalion adjutant could not limit him to spare socks and a razor. He was entitled to his kit; he got it, and more. If he had to live in such conditions, he intended to be properly equipped. His wife sent him a pillow. That was a start. Somehow he acquired a tin bathtub, a pocket Shakespeare, then brandy—Jeffreys kept a “dry” mess—and a stock of fine cigars. Clementine wrote: “I wake up in the night & think of you shivering in the trenches; it makes me so miserable (You know how warm the Kat has to be before she can sleep).” Like Violet Asquith, she wanted to know if she could send him anything to make his life more endurable. As a matter of fact, he replied, she could. He wanted a leather waistcoat, a pair of wading boots (“water proof canvas tops coming right up to the thigh”), a periscope (“most important”), a sheepskin sleeping bag, two pairs of khaki trousers, a pair of brown buttoned boots, and three small face towels. “Voilà tout!” he wrote at the end. “Your little pillow is a boon & a pet.”158
How did the other officers feel about this? Astonishingly, they not only tolerated him; he became genuinely popular. He invited them to share his brandy, cigars, tub, and the groaning hampers of food from Cromwell Road. “I never saw such dainties & such profusion,” he wrote Clementine of one which arrived when the battalion was in a rear area. “We shall eat them sparingly keeping the best for the trenches.” He volunteered to join Jeffreys on his daily rounds of the lines, and thereafter, as he put it, he and the colonel “slid or splashed or plodded together through snow or mud… for two or three hours at a time each day and night; and bit by bit he forgot that I was a ‘politician’ and that he ‘had not been consulted in the matter of my coming to his battalion.’ ” Presently the second in command went on leave; Winston was asked to take his place. He accepted, solemnly declaring this “one of the greatest honours I have ever received.” Then he startled Jeffreys by suggesting that he could learn more about trench warfare if he lived, not in the comparative comfort of battalion headquarters, but up with one of the line companies, on the edge of no-man’s-land.159
Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, 1916
Amazingly, he learned to like it. “It is,” he admitted, “a vy curious life to live.” But after the humble, fettered duchy of Lancaster, after being blamed for what went wrong when he lacked the power to make it right, he felt free. “I do not feel any prick of conscience at being out here,” he wrote Curzon. “I was and am sure that for the time being my usefulness was exhausted and that I could only recover it by a definite and perhaps a prolonged withdrawal…. I do not know when I have passed a more joyous three weeks:… I share the fortunes of a company of Grenadiers. It is a jolly life with nice people; and one does not mind the cold and wet and general discomfort.” The “indomitable good temper” and “inflexible discipline” of the grenadiers impressed him. He in turn charmed them by referring to himself as “the escaped scapegoat” and saying: “Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right than responsible and wrong.” Major General the Lord Cavan, the commander of the Guards Division, proposed that he wait at brigade headquarters, away from the slime of the front, until a suitable command could be found for him. He declined, writing Clementine: “I said I wouldn’t miss a day of it. Nor did I.” He wrote again: “I am vy happy here. I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed peace. How I ever cd have wasted so many months in impotent misery, wh I might have spent in war, I cannot tell.”160
He won the affection of the men by his easy manner with them. He wrote: “I keep watch during part of the night so that others may sleep. Last night I found a sentry asleep on his post. I frightened him dreadfully but did not charge him with the crime. He was only a lad, & I am not an officer of the regiment. The penalty is death or at least 2 years.” The troops also delighted in his treatment of visiting officers from Saint-Omer; he insisted they join him in an inspection of the front line, where their highly polished boots became spattered with mud and their elegant whipcord breeches torn on the barbed wire. One pompous brigadier, arriving after the battalion’s position had been damaged by a heavy barrage, told him that this really would not do, that the place must be made safe: “You know, it’s dangerous—positively dangerous.” Churchill replied: “Yes, sir. But this is a very dangerous war.” No major British offensives were launched during his six months in Flanders, but it was a wretched existence, and why he should have looked forward to his spells on the brink of no-man’s-land so eagerly is difficult to grasp. As he later wrote, “cannonade and fusillade were unceasing” and “no one was ever dry or warm.” Part of the reason lay in his remarkable gift for romanticizing squalor. In a letter to his wife he wrote: “Last night… after dinner, I had a splendid walk with Archie [Archibald Sinclair, his second in command and later a political colleague] all over the top of the ground. We left the trenches altogether and made a thorough examination of all the fields, tracks, ruins etc immediately behind our line. You cannot show yourself here by day, but in the bright moonlight it is possible to move about without danger (except from random bullets) & to gain a vy clear impression. Archie was a vy good guide. We also went in front of our parapet into the No man’s land & prowled about looking at our wire & visiting our listening posts. This is always exciting.” On November 30 the Germans celebrated his forty-first birthday by shelling him for three hours—which is how he, the ultimate egoist, regarded it. Then the battalion left the line for a rest, and he exulted in telling Clementine how they marched “while the men sang ‘Tipperary’ and the ‘Farmer’s Boy’ and the guns boomed applause. It is like getting to a jolly good tavern after a long day’s hunting, wet & cold & hungry, but not without having had sport.” He was, he confessed, dazzled by “the bright eyes of danger.”161
Undoubtedly he enjoyed isolation from the abuse and intrigues of London. But the essence of his Flanders mood—finding profound satisfaction where others saw only horror—lay deeper. It derived from a hard, medieval streak, a capacity for viewing bestiality and senseless brutality with a clear, untroubled gaze, responding in kind, even glorying in it. He was fascinated by scenes w
hich revolted others. Few men, what ever their peacetime pursuits, could bear the sight of bloated rats feeding on corpses. In one stretch of earthworks abandoned by the Germans, Edward Spiers later recalled, the rodents “were appalling things; they were huge…. Had you fallen in a trench you would never have gotten out alive. They would have devoured you. One heard them at night running about in the barbed wire.” Churchill thought them immensely interesting. “Winston,” Spiers remembered, “pointed out that they played a very useful role in eating human bodies.” In a letter to Clementine, he described a patrol of Tommies returning from no-man’s-land with a captured German: “Such men you never saw. The scene in the little dugout when the prisoner was brought in surrounded by these terrific warriors, in jerkins & steel helmets with their bloody clubs in hand—looking pictures of ruthless war—was one to stay in the memory. C’est très bon.”162
And yet…
The mind-set of the warrior is rigid, inflexible, fiercely intolerant. He cannot think kindly of the enemy; cannot, usually, regard him as human. And any suggestion that his own view of war may be even slightly flawed is both provocative and profoundly resented. Churchill did not fit that mold at all. He was, in fact, its obverse. In World War II he would shock Britain by praising the generalship of Erwin Rommel. In this war he became captivated by the poetry of England’s most eloquent pacifist, an officer spared by a court-martial solely because of his valiant combat record. One of Winston’s acquaintances wrote a friend: “By the way, who is Siegfried Sassoon?… Winston knows his last volume of poems by heart, and rolls them out on every possible occasion.” A lieutenant, recalling such a recitation, wrote: “I had never heard of Sassoon or his poems and we were soon told something of his history…. We quickly realized that the main theme of the poems was anti-war, the futility of war and the misery war brought. We heard that the Generals were seriously worried at the damage to morale these poems might inflict on the troops.” An officer said to Churchill: “I should leave that man alone if I were you. He might start writing a poem about you.” Churchill instantly replied: “I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.”163
Later in the war, when Winston was back in London, Eddie Marsh introduced the two men. Sassoon’s recollection of the meeting survives. He found Winston “leisurely, informal, and friendly. Almost at once I began to feel a liking for him…. He broached—in a good-humoured way—the subject of my attitude to the War, about which—to my surprise—he seemed interested to hear my point of view.” Churchill, Sassoon recalled, “was making me feel that I should like to have him as my company commander.” There came a point, however, when the conversation developed into a monologue: “Pacing the room, with a big cigar in the corner of his mouth, he gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual achievements…. Transfixed and submissive in my chair, I realized that what had begun as a persuasive confutation of my anti-war convictions was now addressed, in pauseful and perorating prose, to no one in particular.” As the dazed poet left, Winston offered him a civilian appointment. “Had he,” Sassoon wondered, “been entirely serious… when he said that ‘war is the normal occupation of man’? He had indeed qualified the statement by adding ‘war—and gardening.’ But it had been unmistakable that for him war was the finest activity on earth.”164
Certainly it stimulated him. On December 28, 1915, The Times carried an interview with a corporal, an Orangeman, who was quoted as saying of Churchill, “A cooler and braver officer never wore the King’s uniform…. During the Ulster business before the war there was no man more detested in Belfast, but after what we have seen of him here we are willing to let bygones be bygones—and that is a big concession for Ulstermen to make…. His coolness is the subject of much discussion among us, and everybody admires him.” Repeatedly, when he was elsewhere on the line, his frail sandbagged shelter was demolished by direct hits. Like Douglas MacArthur, who also defied enemy fire here two years later, he felt shielded by mysterious intervention, believing that “Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.” One experience, as he saw it, seemed to confirm him. At the end of his first week at the front he received word that the corps commander wanted to see him in Merville; a car would meet him at the Rouge Croix crossroads. It was a muddy, three-mile hike, under German observation most of the time; he would write afterward that “the shriek of [enemy] shells” was constant, but he and his batman “toiled and sweated on,” until, on arrival, they were dumbfounded to learn that the general had changed his mind. What, Churchill asked a staff officer, was the point of the rendezvous? “Oh, it was nothing in particular,” the staff officer replied. “He thought as he was coming up this way he would like to have a talk with you.” Winston was furious. He began “another long, sliding, slippery, splashing waddle back to the trenches…. The sedentary life of a Cabinet Minister, which I had quitted scarcely a month before, had not left me much opportunity to keep fit.” Back with the grenadiers, someone shouted to him: “You’re in luck today.” Five minutes after he had left, his dugout had been blown up. The officer with whom he shared it had been annihilated. “Suddenly,” Churchill wrote afterward, “I felt my irritation against General———pass completely from my mind. All sense of grievance departed in a flash…. How thoughtful it had been of him to wish to see me again, and to show courtesy to a subordinate…. And then upon these quaint reflections there came the strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot.”165
His mother begged him to “be sensible” and “take the trenches in small doses”—as though he could manage that. Jennie felt close to him now; like his father at about the same age, he had quit the cabinet in disgrace. But Winston was unresponsive to her; his daily missives went to Clementine. In a typical letter from a rear area he began: “I sit in a battered wicker chair within this shell scarred dwelling by the glowing coals of a brazier in the light of an acetyline lamp.” The grenadiers had been “hunted by shells during these last two days in ‘rest billets.’ ” His bedroom had been pierced by shells three times; a nearby church steeple, which had withstood sixteen months of fighting, had been obliterated. “One lives calmly on the brink of the abyss,” he wrote. He had come to understand how the unremitting strain transformed men, their first ebullience fading and leaving only “dull resentment.” The infantrymen he had spoken to during his trench tours sensed the “utter inability to take a decision on the part of the Government…. Some urge me to return and try to break them up. I reply no—I will not go back unless I am wounded; or unless I have effective control.” Clementine was the one constant, indispensable figure in his squalid trench life. He endorsed virtually all of her political judgments; she was his “vy wise & sagacious pussy cat.” Once several days passed with no mail from Cromwell Road; he signed himself “your vilely neglected pig.” His letters to her often read like those of a child writing home from camp, and like a camper he made many small demands: “I want 2 more pairs of thick Jaeger draws [sic] vests & socks (soft), 2 more pairs of brown leather gloves (warm) 1 more pair of field boots (like those I had from Fortnum & Mason) only from the fourth hole from the bottom instead of holes there shd be good strong tags for lacing quicker. One size larger than the last. Also one more pair of Fortnum & M’s ankle boots…. With these continual wettings and no means of drying one must have plenty of spares…. Also send me a big bath towel. I now have to wipe myself all over with things that resemble pocket handkerchiefs.”166
She eagerly complied. Her need was as great as his, her worry greater. When he wrote her of his aborted rendezvous with the corps commander, she replied in anguish: “It is horrible to sit here in warmth & luxury while danger & suffering are so close to you. That dreadful walk across the fields
there & back among falling shells was on Nov. 24th & now it is 10 days later & Heaven knows what narrow escapes you may have had since.” One of Winston’s cousins—his aunt Clara’s daughter Clare, who, like Venetia Stanley, had been a bridesmaid at their wedding—had just learned that her husband had been killed in France. Clementine wrote: “My darling, I don’t know how one bears such things. I feel I could not weather such a blow. She has a beautiful little son 8 weeks old, but now her poor ‘black puss’ sleeps in Flanders. You must come back to me my dear one.” She prayed that he wore “a steel helmet always & not the Glengarry.” She had “ceased to have ambitions for you. Just come back to me alive that’s all.” She loved him “very much more even than I thought I did—for Seven years you have filled my whole life & now I feel more than half my life has vanished across the channel.” She wondered: “If I came to Dieppe could you get 2 days’ leave? I’m very very lonely.” Dieppe proved impossible, but later he slipped home from time to time. Like all wartime couples they desperately sought privacy during their brief hours together, once in Dover Pier’s dreary Lord Walden Hotel and once in Cromwell Road, after which they had to cut it rather fine at Victoria Station. In her note to him that evening one recognizes the powerful tug between the shadow of death and the light of desire: “I could not tell you how much I wanted you at the station. I was so out of breath with running for the train.”167
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