It must have been a great satisfaction for Churchill to hear himself thus eulogized after such a rackety and unfruitful career at Harrow. Despite his flippant attitude there, he was hurt by his failures, and has alluded to them bitterly many times. “I was on the whole considerably discouraged by my school days,” he wrote in My Early Life. And again, “It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race ... I am all for the Public Schools but I do not want to go there again.”
Even so, Harrow performed a great service for Churchill and for the unregimented world. In turning him aside, in rolling on unheeding, it gave him an insatiate urge to rise up and make Harrow sorry. His hot ambition, his doggedness, his restless search for command, are perhaps in good part the result of Harrow and its slights. “Never give in,” he told the students on that visit in 1941. “Never, never, never, never!” smashing his stick against the floor; “Never yield in any way, great or small, large or petty, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force and the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Chapter 7
A PUZZLING metamorphosis took place in Churchill’s manner when he left Harrow. The old stubbornness, the resolution, the bold and unabashed spirit remained unchanged, but the mood of capricious dissent began to fade. Something purposeful was evolving from his gift for willful mischief. No doubt the imminence of the stern and spartan Sandhurst had a sobering effect, but it is likely, too, that the precocious child felt himself ready to engage the not very formidable problems of an adult world.
For some little time after his graduation, the threat of Sandhurst was only theoretically bothersome. Churchill’s first examination for the college resulted in ignoble failure. He had made a mark, of a sort, at Harrow, but he had neglected to prepare himself for life in a classical age. Battles were won with bullets, as Sandhurst freely admitted, but epithets were hurled more effectively in Latin. The long-dead but always dangerous Caesar had downed another aspiring soldier. Setbacks to Churchill have ever been nothing more than an incitement to total war; with an air of deadly determination, he took the examination again, and was not much edified to note that several of his marks were rather considerably lower than on the first round. After this, his family agreeing, he arranged to tutor for the unrelenting Sandhurst. One Captain James, a military man of academic persuasion, agreed to take the job on. He and a group of sous-officiers, also suitably learned, kept an establishment in the Cromwell Road, and had a high reputation for creating order out of mental chaos. “It was said that no one who was not a congenital idiot could avoid passing thence into the Army,” Churchill wrote of the place.
Things were looking very good — his parents were laying modest bets that, since he was not a congenital idiot, he would wind up in the military after all — when Churchill fell victim to his native inquisitiveness. On the eve of his departure for the captain’s, he and his brother Jack and a young cousin went exploring. The family were living at the Bournemouth estate of his aunt, Lady Wimborne. It was a beautiful place, wild, with a fir forest, and sloping down to the sea. Among its attractions for children was a sort of canyon, called a “chine,” that was spanned by a rustic bridge fifty yards long. The three boys had organized a lively game of chase, with the candidate for Sandhurst as the quarry. All three being descendants of the canny Marlborough, it was touch and go for hours. At length, however, the pursuers having divided forces, they trapped Churchill in the middle of the bridge. Never at a loss, he assayed his chances rapidly. What would Marlborough do? The answer came clearly; he would leap into the tops of some fir trees growing up from the chasm, slide down from limb to limb, make his getaway, and apply for several additional pensions. Churchill calculated the method and the risks as coolly as an experienced general, then gave a derisive cry, and leaped. He recovered consciousness three days later.
For three months the boy was bedfast, and for nearly a year he was ailing, suffering from a variety of injuries, including a ruptured kidney. Of his tactics, and the message from Marlborough, he said afterward, “The argument was correct; the data were absolutely wrong.” Had he lit in the fir trees, the evasion might have been completed brilliantly, but he had missed the trees and flung himself down twenty-nine feet to the earth and rocks below. The best specialists in England were summoned to save his life, and their efforts were rewarded only after a long period of indecision. Churchill reported that he had lain in bed and listened with satisfaction to accounts of the enormous fees they were charging. He had never previously realized his full importance, though he had intuitive flashes about it from time to time. The fall gave rise to an inaccurate joke, alluding to Lord Randolph’s independent spirit, that had quite a little vogue in the London clubs. “I hear Randolph’s son met with a serious accident.” “Yes, playing a game of follow-my-leader.” “Well, Randolph is not likely to come to grief in that way.”
When Churchill was up and around, he was sent with his brother and a tutor to take a therapeutic walking tour in Switzerland. They were provided with a moderate amount of pocket money, which they spent in riding on trains. They climbed two medium-sized mountains. When they returned home, Churchill placed himself in the hands of Captain James, who tackled the job cheerfully and with military thoroughness. He found that he had bitten off about all he could chew. James was reputed to have remarked, when he finished with Churchill, “That lad couldn’t have gone through Harrow, he must have gone under it.” In any event, the tutoring paid dividends: on the third try the boy actually passed the examination for Sandhurst, although with marks about as low as he could get and still qualify. Informing his old school of his modified success, he wrote sourly, “I would have done better from Harrow.” There was no indication then or later that Harrow was inclined to shoulder the blame, notwithstanding his note. Churchill’s examination paper was regarded as so pronouncedly feeble that he was assigned to the horse cavalry, which was somehow classed as a corps fit only for dolts.
Lord Randolph was furious, for several reasons. First, because he had set his heart on lodging Winston with an old family friend, the Duke of Cambridge, who was colonel-in-chief of the 60th Rifles, a famous infantry regiment. Randolph, whose faith in Captain James was childlike, had already been so precipitate as to write the duke making inquiries about a berth for his son. The duke’s reply had been accommodating and all was arranged, except for the examination, which snarled everything up. Churchill’s father was obliged to report to the duke that the boy had struck a clinker, Captain James or no Captain James, and that he would be seen, in a military way, in the saddle or not at all. Another irritating aspect of the situation from Lord Randolph’s standpoint was the fact that to join the cavalry one must buy a horse. He had been prepared eventually to stand his son a batman, after the fashion of upper-class British soldiering, but now he would be taxed with a batman and a horse. He viewed the extra, outsized mouth as excessive, and said so, in a strongly worded letter to his son. “Little did he foresee,” wrote Churchill gleefully later, “not only one horse, but two official chargers and one or two hunters besides — to say nothing of the indispensable string of polo ponies!”
The year was 1893, a time of quiet and prosperity for the British Empire, and the place of young Winston Churchill’s last formal education was the Sandhurst Royal Military College, an establishment to train officers for the fiercely aristocratic British Army. A cadet’s pay was three shillings a day (about seventy-five cents), and his expenses were burdensome. It was never even considered that the Queen might make up this deficit; the fathers of young gentlemen of the leisure class were expected to pay in large part for the military preparation of their sons, as a patriotic duty. Upon Churchill’s family this blow fell heavily, happening to coincide with Lord Randolph’s intermittent and unexpected tours of such beauty spots as Johannesburg, Japan, and Norway. A good deal of scraping was done to keep the boy horsed and learning. And by good fortune, he rallied to his responsibilitie
s; from the very beginning he found the school a romantic spur to an ambitious nature. He dug in and worked, and tried to make the most of his opportunities. These were not glittering. Like most military posts, Sandhurst was unfrivolous, and even chafing. It still is. The school consists of a solemn-looking group of functional buildings in a setting of typical English country splendor, thirty-three miles southwest of London. A yearbook of Churchill’s time described things as follows: “In the foreground are to be seen smooth lakes — a vast expanse of water — fringed with dark fir trees and silvery birches, and dotted with evergreen-planted islets; beyond their margins the eye rests on solemn pine forests, which extend for miles, clothing the shallow valleys and low hills; while here and there sparkling streams flow down through woods of birch and alder. Black mosses, overrun with bog-myrtle and willow scrub, form in the hollows, and beach woods or ark plantations ring the changes. Beyond these forest lands lie the open, heather-covered moors, presenting as wild a scene as can be well imagined — as bleak and silent a stretch of country as any to be found in the uttermost parts of Scotland or on the high fjelds of Norway.”
The village of Camberley, named for some dim forebear of the Duke of Cambridge, lies outside its gates, and another ducal touch is provided by the Duke of York tavern, which looks across the highroad and into the grounds, whence the thirsty cadets can watch with envy the comings and goings of the unrestricted public. The school got its name from an unusual geological formation: “the Bagshot sands,” a hardpan of sand and gravel that lies eighteen inches under the surface of the ground thereabouts. Water never seeps through the pan, but has to drain off into one of the sparkling streams mentioned in the elderly yearbook. When farmers wish to plant trees, they must take a pickax and hack through the crust, at a cost of hard labor. In the winter, when the freezes come, all is a swamp; dammed by the ice, the waters pile up and form glassy and ungeometric lakes for as far as the eye can see.
It was a great lark in Churchill’s day for the cadets to go abroad and dig for relics. It is easy for Americans to forget that nearly anywhere one disturbs the earth in England he is apt to turn up mementos of the ancients. The spring plows are forever uncovering Roman coins, and even in London excavating workmen find valuable art objects that date back for centuries, across the consecutive spans of dead civilizations. The area of Sandhurst was a prime hunting ground. In the very gardens of the college an occasional flint instrument of the Celts was to be found, and at nearby Chobham Ridges, Easthampstead and the Hartford Bridge Flats the barrows of those dark and frightened people, who flourished around the fifth century before Christ, were on view. Churchill was frequently a leader of expeditions to these subterranean graves and dwellings, whose counterparts, after twenty-five hundred years, are now everywhere building against the Atomic Age, a similarly unraveling civilization. It was excellent training for the future Prime Minister, who, in the Second Great War, was called upon to start the long-delayed movement back to the earth. Having studied the barrows, he understood the first, and last, sanctuaries of man.
Near the Wickham Bushes faint traces of stone huts told where the Belgic invasion took over from the tiring Celts, and at Nine Mile Ride, Churchill’s old nemesis, Caesar, was once encamped with his ravening legions. The strong evidences of that notable visit — a citadel, fosses, entrenchments, numerous pieces of pottery, pavement and rusted-out weapons — presumably made an unfavorable impression on the youth, for he embarked upon a series of carping comments about the Italians, and has been at it pretty faithfully ever since, coming to a climax with his House of Commons snarl of year before last to “go talk to the Italians — that’s all you’re fit for.”
His new curriculum kept Churchill busy, but it was more sustaining than the awed preoccupation with deceased tongues, poets, and generals at Harrow. The principal subjects were now Tactics, Fortifications, Topography (mapmaking), Military Law, and Military Administration. There was also a great deal of drill. He was put under the supervision of an excellent horseman, senior cadet Prince Alexander of Teck, who watched the happy Harrovian wheel and maneuver, and promptly clapped him into the awkward squad. At Sandhurst there was always — and still is — a handful of foreign nobility, sent over to learn the systems of training that had led to the accumulation of a world empire by a tiny, frostbitten island.
Among these around Churchill’s time, besides Prince Alexander, were the future Alfonso XIII of Spain, the Egyptian Prince Ibrahim Hassan, Alamayn of Abyssinia, and the Crown Prince of Siam. For the most part, the foreigners fitted in nicely to Sandhurst life and were popular, though occasional adjustments were necessary to dovetail the widely differing cultures. It was remarked that the Egyptian, a descendant of the Pharaohs, was apathetic about digging for Roman pottery. Pressed for an explanation, he was reputed to have said that he was “not much interested in modern art.”
In addition to the academic side at Sandhurst, a day’s routine included outdoor work that was regarded as a practical application of the lessons indoors. In some cases, this was questionable. Lay experts have noted that military tuition everywhere seems to lag from a decade to three hundred years behind the actual current methods of fighting. In the last war, naval officers at American indoctrination schools were amazed at the total absence of talk about airplanes, the Bureau of Personnel still pinning its faith on ironclads, and at Sandhurst, in 1893, it was felt that the newfangled bomb was on its way out. It was incorrect that, as one graduate later stated, the instruction revolved around hot pitch and defenses against the stone catapult, but even Churchill, content with his new vocation, took exception in some measure. He wrote afterward that the hand grenade was believed to have passed its peak in the eighteenth century “and would be quite useless in modern war.”
The cadets “dug trenches, constructed breastworks, reveted parapets with sandbags, with heather, with fascines, or with ‘Jones iron band gabion.’ ” They put up chevaux-de-frise and made fougasses (a kind of primitive land mine), cut railway lines with slabs of guncotton, learned how to blow up masonry bridges, drew contour maps of the hills round Camberley, and made road reconnaissances in every direction. Churchill’s inventory of his college work represented military activities, as he said, “no doubt very elementary,” and he padded out his knowledge by wangling invitations to dinners at the Staff College, about a mile away. There he heard officers who were being trained for the high command talk of those glamorous adjuncts to human progress — logistics, interior and exterior lines of communications, supply, personnel, attrition, flanking maneuvers, and other matters so dear to the soldier’s heart. He and his fellow cadets complained bitterly that they had been born out of their time. The British Army, Churchill observed with scorn, “had not fired on white soldiers since the Crimea,” forty years before. It was felt that this was a pretty shabby record for any self-respecting army, which ought to fire on white soldiers at least once a week, if simply to keep up a decent standard of marksmanship. “If it had only been a hundred years earlier,” wrote Churchill thirty years later, “what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war with Napoleon in front of one!”
Dreams of another such situation, with its almost limitless opportunities for shooting white soldiers, kept the cadets at Sandhurst alive. And lest it might be imagined that the British Army, through some kind of bias, was organized to shoot only white soldiers, it should be pointed out that, in this period, it was equitably shooting as many black, brown, and tan soldiers as it could manage. As Churchill himself remarked, “Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples.” These laggards were being eliminated in South Africa, in Afghanistan, and in the Egyptian Sudan, in small, unrewarding skirmishes. Among the more farsighted cadets, it was hoped that the Indians might get sufficiently irritated to revolt. “At that time the natives had adopted a mysterious practice of smearing the mango trees,” wrote Churchill, “and we all fastened hopefully upon an article in the Spectator whic
h declared that perhaps in a few months we might have India to reconquer.”
As dim as was the prospect of an authentically bloody war, Churchill had a pleasant and well-behaved time at Sandhurst. People who remember him there say he did little to attract the limelight that brightened his path through Harrow. Only infrequently did the tempestuous spirit break out, and then calm was quickly restored. For some reason, these outbursts, as at public school, seemed to come on him near water. At the college swimming pool he made the mistake of heckling the rugby forward, E. M. Panter-Downes, whose daughter, Mollie, born some years later, is now the British correspondent for The New Yorker magazine. Panter-Downes, not only a fine athlete but a leading student, saw the problem as military in tone. He rapidly outflanked Churchill, established a line of communication between his foot and the enemy’s seat, supplied him with a prolonged ducking, and nearly reduced Sandhurst’s personnel by one. Churchill was, in fact, half drowned and left Panter-Downes strictly alone thenceforward.
In classrooms he was undistinguished, competent, and quiet, in astonishing contrast to his classroom manner at Harrow, which was thrustful, ignorant, and raspy. He often had the answers to questions and showed, on the whole, if not excellence, a sincere desire to learn. With various roommates, he spent his evenings at work on the next day’s lessons, though it is reported that he often launched one of the windy political roundups for which he had earlier become noted. Partly through devotion to his father, he considered himself an expert in matters of state. His quarters in the main building at Sandhurst, a columned, two-story piece of Doric architecture having a 900-foot facade, were cold and comfortless, unadorned by personal elegancies. He had two or three small family photographs on his plain oak desk and little else to remind others of his lofty descent. And besides, good blood was a commonplace at the military college; nearly all the cadets were the sons of army officers of high family.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 9
