But he was determined to learn. He got the drill down, enrolled in nearby machine-gun and bomb-throwing schools, and patrolled the battalion area each night with Archie Sinclair. His batman found warm, dry quarters for him in one of the farmhouses, where, he wrote home, “the guns boom away in the distance, & at night the sky to the Northward blinks & flickers with the wicked lights of war.” It never entered his mind that he was not entitled to every available comfort; nor, in that day, before the rise of the egalitarian passion, did it occur to his men. But he was not an insensitive officer. To boost morale, he organized a concert and games. He wrote: “Poor fellows—nothing like this has been done for them before. They do not get much to brighten their lives—short though they might be.” He decided to brighten each of their days with a lecture from their CO. One day he struck a dogged pose and announced sonorously: “War is declared, gentlemen—on lice!” There followed, in Gibb’s words, “such a discourse on pulex Europaeua, its origin, growth, and nature, its habit and its importance as a factor in wars ancient and modern, as left one agape at the force of its author.” And then the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers were thoroughly deloused.182
Sometimes he was preposterous. The outline of one speech he made to his junior officers survives. He sensibly began: “Keep a special pair of boots to sleep in & only get them muddy in a real emergency. Use alcohol in moderation but don’t have a great parade of bottles in yr dugouts. Live well but do not flaunt it.” Then he said: “Laugh a little, & teach your men to laugh—gt good humour under fire—war is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile grin. If you can’t grin keep out of the way till you can.” In Churchill, G. A. Henty still lived. On the other hand, he was a source of invaluable advice on master masonry and the handling of sandbags, all of which would be immensely useful when they moved up on the line. He devised clever plans for shelters, scarps, counterscarps, half-moon dugouts, and ravelins. These might save their lives; they appreciated that. But when he announced that batmen must serve as bodyguards, sacrificing their lives, if necessary, for their officers, laughter drowned him out. Some of his schemes, said Gibb, were “too recherchés, too subtle to stand the practical test of everyday fighting.” If a parapet was hit during the day, he ordered, it must not be repaired until nightfall; that way, the Germans would not know what damage they had done. Later, under fire, bullets passed through the gaps and men were hit. The order was quietly countermanded.183
On January 24 they were ready. At eight o’clock that morning, with Churchill riding on his horse at the head of the column, they marched from Moolenacker Farm into the Belgian village of Ploegsteert, or “Plug Street,” as the Tommies called it—the jump-off point for a maze of paths and shallow communications trenches which led soldiers eastward to and from the front—taking casualties from the German shellfire along the way. Churchill lodged that night in a battered convent (the “Hospice,” he called it) belonging to the Sisters of Charity. It was the twenty-first anniversary of Lord Randolph’s death. He wrote his mother: “I thought of my father on Jan 24 & wondered what he would think of it all. I am sure I am doing right.” To his wife he wrote: “I am extremely well-lodged here—with a fine bedroom looking out across the fields to the German lines 3,000 yards away. Two nuns remain here and keep up the little chapel which is part of the building…. On the right & left the guns are booming; & behind us a British field piece barks like a spaniel at frequent intervals.” He contrasted the view from his Admiralty office, from which he had been able to see the Horse Guards Parade and the windows of the Cabinet Room at No. 10, to the prospect here: “2 bright red pigs rooting about among the shellholes.”184
In the darkness the battalion moved up to the front-line trenches. Churchill established his headquarters in a shattered building known as Lawrence Farm—he called it his “Conning Tower”—about five hundred yards behind no-man’s-land. He was responsible for a thousand yards of trenches. Following deep, winding, sandbagged gullies, he could move up to the British wire and then check the entire position. “It takes nearly 2 hours to traverse this labyrinth of mud,” he wrote. “On the average,” wrote Gibb, “he went around three times a day, which was no mean task in itself, as he had plenty of other work to do. At least one of these visits was after dark, usually about 1 A.M. In wet weather he would appear in a complete outfit of waterproof stuff, including trousers and overalls, and with his French light-blue helmet he presented a remarkable and unusual figure.” Lieutenant Jock McDavid saw him “stand on the fire step in broad daylight, to encourage the Jocks, and to prove… how little danger there was of being hit.” He was undismayed when, from time to time, his experiments demonstrated that the danger was very great indeed. Once he and his adjutant were in an advance trench when Winston suggested they peer over the parapet, to get a better look at the German fortifications. They drew small-arms fire, and then shellfire. “Do you like war?” Churchill asked dreamily. “At that moment,” Gibb wrote, “I profoundly hated war. But at that and every moment I believe Winston Churchill revelled in it.”185
On February 3, he and Archie were lunching with several other officers at Lawrence Farm when, he wrote Clementine, “there was a tremendous crash, dust & splinters came flying through the room, plates were smashed, chairs broken. Everyone was covered with debris and the Adjutant (he is only 18) hit on the finger. A shell had struck the roof and burst in the next room—mine & Archie’s…. The wonderful good luck is that the shell (a 4.2) did not—& cd not have—burst properly. Otherwise we shd have had the wall thrown in on us—& some wd surely have been hurt.” Probably it disturbed her more than him. “I slept peacefully in my tiny war-scarred room last night,” he added, “after a prolonged tour of the trenches.” He even found time to acquire an easel and oils and paint shell holes. She wrote frantically: “Please leave that wretched farm and find a safer place.” She wanted to join him: “It wd be so easy & I cd live with the poor French women in a ruined cottage & hoe turnips.” The sensible course for him would have been to omit such alarming accounts from his letters, but Churchill was never sensible about taking risks, or thoughtful about the impact his vivid details would have on those who loved him. Since peril never upset him, it may never have occurred to him that it might distress others. “It is one long holiday for me,” he wrote her, “… like my African journey.”186
By now all distrust of the new CO had vanished. “I am firmly convinced,” wrote Gibb, “that no more popular officer ever commanded troops. As a soldier he was hard-working, persevering and tough…. He lived soldiering: it lay near his heart and I think he could have been a very great soldier.” Winston was touched and pleased to find that the battalion’s junior officers “put up my photograph in the trenches, & I am sure they would make an effort if I asked them and some big test came upon us.” He was asking a lot of them as it was. McDavid later remembered Winston’s first venture into no-man’s-land: “Clad in his long trench waterproof, shining knee-high trench boots and blue steel helmet, with his revolver and powerful flash-lamp attached to his web-belt, he preceded me on the journey through the wire. All went well until we were within a few yards of the first post. Then enemy machine-gun fire swept the sphere of operations.” They dove into a shell crater. Abruptly a blinding ray of light appeared in the hole. Churchill roared: “Put out that bloody light!” It was his own flashlight. As he crouched he had pressed the switch. “Corrective action,” McDavid recalled, “swiftly followed.” Thereafter, according to Hakewill Smith, he “would often go into no-man’s-land. It was a nerve-racking experience to go with him. He would call out in his loud, gruff voice—far too loud it seemed to us—’You go that way, I will go this…. Come here, I have found a gap in the German wire. Come over here at once!’ ” By now he “never fell when a shell went off; he never ducked when a bullet went past with its loud crack.” Lieutenant Francis Napier Clavering was with him when Winston decided that they should climb over the top of the parapet and walk along the entire thousand-yard length of th
e Royal Scots’ line. “Up went a Verey [sic] light,” he recalled. “Churchill was on his knees at the time, measuring the depth of the earth” with a yardstick. Under the flare they were clearly visible to the enemy. “The Hun machine guns opened up, belly high. Why the hell we weren’t killed I just don’t understand. I didn’t want to die…. ‘For God’s sake keep still, Sir,’ I hissed. But he didn’t take the slightest notice. He was a man who had no physical fear of dying.”187
He abandoned Lawrence Farm, as Clementine had asked, only to establish himself in what he called his “Advance Headquarters,” a hundred yards closer to the wire. Here, as in India nearly twenty years earlier, he hoped to win recognition, mention in dispatches, possibly a medal or two—some distinction which would attract attention in London. Back in reserve at the convent for two days he wrote Clementine: “If I come through all right my strength will be greater than it ever was. I wd much rather go back to the trenches tonight, than go home in any position of mediocre authority. But I shd like to see my beloved pussy cat.” Actually, the time was approaching when he would prefer even mediocre authority to Flanders, not because of the discomfort and jeopardy at the front, but because in Parliament he could at least hope to exert greater influence on the conduct of the war. His disclaimer to his mother—“All I hear confirms me in my satisfaction to be freed from my share in the present [parliamentary] proceedings”—cannot be taken seriously. In the same letter he urged her to “keep in good touch with all my friends.” But here again, it was his wife who was his real eyes and ears—and tongue. There was talk of creating a minister for air. She invited Curzon to lunch and suggested that Winston would be ideal for the job. “Oh my darling I long so for it to happen, & feel that it would except for the competition for the post inside the Cabinet,” she wrote. Nothing came of it. In early February she and Goonie lunched with Curzon at his mansion, and he raised the possibility that Churchill would “be made a Brigadier almost at once”—he even gave Clementine three bottles of brandy as a token of congratulation—yet this, too, was vain.188
Lloyd George lunched in Cromwell Road, but this was a great strain on his hostess. He said all the right things, expressing “great distress at you not being in the Government,” she wrote, and saying repeatedly, “We must get Winston back.” She didn’t believe him. In her view he, not Asquith, was her husband’s nemesis. “I don’t trust him one bit,” she wrote, characterizing him as “fair of speech, shifty of eye, treacherous of heart.” Again: “I get on so well with him & I know he likes me, but he is a sneak…. He is a barometer, but not a really useful one as he is always measuring his own temperature [sic] not yours!” And again: “Before taking LlG’s [hand] I would have to safeguard myself with charms, touch-woods, exorcisms & by crossing myself. I can always get along with him & yesterday I had a good talk, but you can’t hold his eyes, they shift away.” She thought her husband had been too hard on the prime minister: “I think my Darling you will have to be very patient—Do not burn any boats—The P.M. has not treated you worse than Ll. G has done…. I feel sure that if the choice were equal you would prefer to work with the P.M. than with Ll. G.” She lunched with Asquith in Downing Street. “He talked a great deal about you and asked a great many questions. I was perfectly natural (except perhaps that I was a little too buoyant) & he tried to be natural too, but it was an effort.” She said she would take his hand, “tho’ I would give it a nasty twist.” Winston replied that while Lloyd George was “no doubt all you say,” he had been opposed to the Dardanelles and not, like the prime minister, a “coadventurer” who had destroyed the plan by his own incompetence. Still, Churchill wanted to know more about her hour with Asquith: “I shd like a verbatim report of the Kat’s conversation with the old ruffian.” Unfortunately, there was little to tell. Most of the talk at No. 10 had been trivial. “The chief topic of social gossip,” she told him, “is who is going to India as Viceroy…. It seems incredible.”189
All this was very hard on her. Clementine did not carry her husband’s weight. She was admired and respected, but there could be no substitute for Churchill’s presence. And she found it disagreeable to pass along his messages to political allies and confidants, particularly those she distrusted. She wrote: “Oh Winston I do not like all these letters I have to forward—I prefer Charlotte Corday—Shall I do it for you?” The unavoidable fact was that he could not be an effective parliamentary force while prowling near the enemy wire in Flanders. Nor was the army always considerate toward officers who were also MPs, particularly when they lacked political muscle. Learning of a secret session of the House of Commons, Churchill applied for leave to attend it. Permission was granted with the understanding that he would return the moment debate ended. When an open session followed, and he asked for an extension of his leave, the appeal was denied in a War Office telegram informing him that no exception could be made “while you are commanding R Scots Fus and your battalion is in trenches.” Clementine was furious. He could have altered policy during the session, she wrote him afterward when he was back on the front, “if only you had been here and spoken.” She could not blame this on Lloyd George. Asquith was responsible, and she acknowledged it. “The Government,” she wrote, “are in a shameful position.”190
Actually, he would have been wise to have stayed in Flanders that spring. It was while in Parliament on another leave that he delivered one of the most unfortunate speeches of his life. Late in the afternoon on Tuesday, March 7, 1916, he rose from the front Opposition bench to offer a closely reasoned critique of governmental blunders in the prosecution of the war. “I shall have to strike a jarring note,” he began. He indicted Balfour’s tenure at the Admiralty in the strongest language the House had heard since the outbreak of the war, charging “slackness, indifference, want of push and drive.” The U-boat challenge was not being met, he said; there was strong evidence that German shipyards were out-building Britain’s. The zeppelins were getting through; mismanagement of the navy could lead to defeat. It was an exceptionally impressive speech. He had the complete attention of every man there. And then, at the very end, he destroyed his message, and dealt a savage blow to his credibility, in a single sentence: “I urge the First Lord of the Admiralty without delay to fortify himself, to vitalise and animate his Board of Admiralty by recalling Lord Fisher to his post as First Sea Lord.”191
It was unbelievable. He was actually advocating a return to power of the old man who had ruined his Dardanelles strategy and evicted him from the Admiralty. The House sat stunned. Asquith confessed that he was “speechless at the time”; afterward, he called Winston’s bombshell “suicidal” and “a piece of the grossest effrontery.” In the Strangers’ Gallery, Eddie Marsh wept. Clementine, aghast, concluded that her husband had demolished his last parliamentary support. Lloyd George simply gasped: “A great error!” The only congratulatory note came from a predictable source, the last man with any right to expect praise from Churchill. Fisher wrote him: “SPLENDID!!! You’ll have your Reward! All I entreat you now is to entrench yourself as Leader of the Opposition! and wait for the Big thing to come to you!… Your attitude so excellent—a helpful (not a hostile) critic. Anyhow my heart is very full! I feel the good old times are back!”192
Churchill left Parliament unaware of the ridicule about to envelop him. Violet Asquith, finding him in his mother’s house, asked: “What possessed you? Why did you do it?” All London was asking the same question, but she was the first to be answered. He said he had conceived his proposal, she wrote, “as a great gesture of magnanimity—the forgiveness of the wrongs Fisher had done to him, for the sake of a greater aim, our naval supremacy.” Gently she dissolved his illusion. It would not be so interpreted, she said; rather, others would see it “as a clumsy gambler’s throw for his own ends.” By noon Wednesday he, too, saw this. The question now was whether to stay in London and carry on the debate, or take the next boat back to Flanders. Wednesday morning Fisher appeared gaily in Cromwell Road, insisting that Churchill speak a
gain, pressing on; other MPs, the old admiral was confident, would rally around him. Clementine vehemently disagreed. After some hesitation Winston went to the House that afternoon, thereby exposing himself to the full force of Balfour’s withering reply.193
Balfour ignored Churchill’s closely reasoned arguments, even though he knew them to be unimpeachable—knew, for example, that the German submarine campaign would soon threaten England with starvation. Instead, he humiliated him. He did not imagine “that there was a single person who heard my right hon[orable] Friend’s speech who did not listen to the latter part of it with profound stupefaction.” Churchill had “never made the smallest concealment, either in public or in private, of what he thought of Lord Fisher.” What, AJB asked, had Winston said in delivering his “farewell speech” the previous autumn, “when he exchanged a political for a military career? He told us that the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, did not give him, when he was serving in the same Admiralty with him, either the clear guidance before the event or the firm support after it which he was entitled to expect.” The essence of the matter was “that the right hon[orable] Gentleman, who could not get along with Lord Fisher—I will not say that, but with whom Lord Fisher could not get on—says that Lord Fisher, who according to my right hon[orable] Friend neither supported him nor guided him, is nevertheless the man who ought to be given as a supporter and a guide to anybody who happens to hold at this moment the responsible position of First Lord of the Admiralty. It is a paradox of the wildest and most extravagant kind.” It was more—“the most amazing proposition that has ever been laid before the House of Commons.” In a final turn of the knife, Balfour said slowly: “I should regard myself as contemptible beyond the power of expression if I were to yield an inch to a demand of such a kind, made in such a way.”194
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