Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Certainly Churchill meant to be a professional soldier, and follow in the footsteps of the gory and well-heeled Marlborough. His confidence was never firmer; his voice at graduation soared above the others as he sang “I Am a Gentleman Cadet”:

  “Oh! we’re the boys to make the noise,

  we won’t be taken down.

  And we cut such a dash when we’re out on the mash

  in Camberley or Yorktown.

  Our manners at mess are perfect,

  our morals oh so high!

  And you always hear us coming

  with our well known cheery cry.”

  Over the years Churchill has tried to keep faith with the old college song. His cry has not always been cheery, but he has signalized his approach with all the noise possible. And it has become vividly apparent, and devoutly to be wished, that he will never be taken down.

  Chapter 8

  WITH Sandhurst successfully completed, Churchill stepped out into the exhausting whirl of London society, and of Army protocol. His first duty was to get lodged with a suitably famous regiment. It made a great deal of difference which military unit a highborn Englishman first joined; it affected his whole career. Lord Randolph, despite the contretemps involving the cavalry, still had illusions that he could secure an infantry commission for his son. The Duke of Cambridge had hinted that certain wires might be pulled in inner circles. The Queen was not averse to seeing cadets of promise comfortably placed, no matter what their skill with examinations.

  By misfortune, though, this was the deepest winter of Lord Randolph’s discontent. He had just returned from an arduous trip around the world, and his health was failing fast. The end was not far away. His last conversations with Winston had to do with the latter’s horses; he wished to know if the boy were adequately mounted. His death, on January 24, 1895, cut off a rich source of influence and power for his family; in some measure Churchill was now on his own, although his mother began to pay him increased attention. He was twenty years old, a poised, well-set-up, rusty-haired young man with a bold, humorous, calculating, and rather questioning gaze. The impressions of people who remember his first season in the crazy, rigid, social confusion are of interest. One of his comrades, now Lord , was particularly struck by his offhand acceptance of the most coveted invitations. These were secured first of all by virtue of his father’s name, by his mother’s exceptional beauty and wit, and by his own reputation for being a youth out of the usual aristocratic English mold. “Winston was never self-effacing even amongst the most gorgeous company,” says the comrade of those days. “He was polite but condescending. He never interrupted the conversations of his notable elders, but he had always the air of waiting patiently until they were finished — then he would give the opinion that seemed to put that topic on the shelf for good.”

  It was a mellow time of romance and opulence in British history. The Empire was intact, a favorable balance of trade poured wealth into the small island country, the benevolent rule of Queen Victoria imparted to all her subjects that freest of all freedoms — a minimum of government — and the various orders of society were not yet lashed into class furies by neurotics, failures, and professional revolutionaries. There were many abuses of privilege, as there may ever be in an organization lifted above that of the apes, whose communal habits, it has been observed, have put them little forwarder or given them scant protection against the free-enterprise lion. In England of the 1890s it was merely the difference between privileged birth and the equally malodorous but less intelligent privilege of an ideologically experimental proletariat. The latter would come later, and England would not prosper. It must be said that Churchill’s world flaunted its favors stupidly. When the Duke of Portland was summoned for driving a pioneer motorcar four miles an hour, and without dispatching two men on foot ahead with red flags, he contemptuously sent his steward into court with the message, “I must warn you that His Grace will be much displeased.” The case was dropped. The distinctions were inflexibly drawn. When Lady Ashburton invited the celebrated writer, Thomas Carlyle, and his ill wife to go to Scotland, she put them into a second-class carriage with her maid and a second-class doctor.

  But life in the main was easy and genial. Rents were low and food was cheap, good, plentiful, unrationed, and unsubsidized. It is true that the new income tax amounted to nearly two cents in a pound, or something like one-hundredth of its present rate, and there was a certain amount of grumbling, but the secure and lazy state of affairs was such that nobody’s mind could dwell on trouble very long. Politics was a game rather than a distemper; inept officeholders were promptly kicked out, and went back to digging coal, or selling garters, or running errands for thugs, or teaching law, or whatever they were doing before the urge to rule hit them. It was before the heyday of that small, venomous blessing, the behind-the-government-scenes intellectual, usually sick and always hate-ridden, who was to be so lofty and sonorous in hauling down a world in which he lacked the courage to compete on normal terms. Writers were enjoyed for what they were: entertaining fellows, a little freakish, who were far less fit for large, unliterary problems than career statesmen were fit for writing. People read Dickens and Thackeray, deplored the social inequities pointed out, and allowed progress to roll on in its ancient, inevitable course.

  It was not the best of all possible worlds, but it was Churchill’s world, a good world, with some faults and more virtues, and it was to remain substantially the one he believed in for succeeding decades of his bright and useful career. Thanks to the fashionable circles in which he moved, the graduate at last joined a cavalry regiment which for splendor and good connections matched any in the Army. It was the 4th Hussars, commanded by a Colonel Brabazon, a friend of his father and a sidekick of the Prince of Wales. The colonel’s qualifications struck a nice balance between the social and the military. Not the least of these on both counts was the fact that he had what was universally viewed as the gaudiest mustache in the English or any Continental army. It was his identifying mark, a carefully tended growth not unlike a pair of ram’s horns. Brabazon’s mustache got him entree to all the gilded salons and was believed capable of afflicting the boldest enemy with paralysis. He was an Irishman by birth and upbringing, a man who had killed his share of foxes and gone into the Army to make a living, his estates being impoverished. From the outset, what with his natural charm, his bearing, and the mustache, he had flashed through London society like a new Brummell. Churchill speaks amusingly of his old commander’s accent, feigned or involuntary, which led him to convert r’s into w’s. Brabazon, who had changed regiments about as often as he changed his underwear, was once asked, “What do you belong to now, Brab?” He replied, “I never can wemember, but they have gween facings and you get at ’em from Waterloo.” There is no detailed record of conversations between him and Churchill, but they must have been interesting, when it is considered that the latter also had a speech peculiarity. The colonel was a man of offhand imperiousness, perhaps a typical product of his class. At Aider-shot he once inquired of the stationmaster, “Where is the London twain?” Informed that it was gone, he said, “Gone! Bwing another.”

  Into Brabazon’s regiment, after a six-month recruit period of toughening, Churchill fitted snugly. There was unusual esprit de corps, based on social conquests above and beyond the call of duty. Brabazon never let rival commanders forget that his unit had infiltrated everywhere. His manner, though civil, was often deflating. At one mess, after listening to several bragging accounts, he asked the officer in charge, “And at what chemist’s do you get your champagne?” In fairness, Brabazon’s quality was by no means entirely convivial. His military record was unimpeachable. Notably, he had distinguished himself in the Ashanti campaign, a bloody war of revenge and subjugation fought in 1874 against tribesmen of a small West African country. Like others of his comrades, he was incensed that, in a previous row, the tribesmen had decapitated the governor, Sir Charles M’Carthy, and were using his skull as a drinking cup. This
went against both Brabazon’s military and social instincts, and he tore into the natives as though the late governor’s skull were the Holy Grail.

  In the Afghan War of 1878 and in the Egyptian Sudan he had performed valorously, with the same nonchalant ease he displayed in the London clubs. He had been several times decorated. Brabazon may accurately be held up as the prototype of the English career officer of his day — wellborn, socially versed, good-humored, suicidally brave, sometimes stupid and mulish, but more often competent and tireless in the field. He was of a type now rarely seen. Away from action, it was a point of honor for a man to appear as foppish as possible; under fire, he must walk into the cannon’s mouth, if need be, but never under any circumstances accompany the act with dramatics. The whole must always be understated, as only the British can achieve this laudable technique of living. Brabazon’s men were as proud of his stylish clothes and sissy airs as of his inevitable gallantry in the face of certain death. During his association with Churchill, a disaster befell both him and the regiment. Sir Evelyn Wood, a martinet general of no doubt envious disposition, ordered the colonel to whack off the mustache. It was a crippling blow. Wood, the story went, had previously essayed a mustache of his own, but the effort had drawn a virtual blank. In a towering rage, Brabazon went to the regiment barber, who with tears running down his cheeks truncated the gorgeous shrub. Brabazon, maintaining a stiff but denuded upper lip, continued to do his duty in the time following, but a shadow had fallen over his spirit. The fire had gone out of him. And the 4th Hussars, also managing a surface equipoise, were far from the same happy group. The mustache was grievously missed.

  *

  In the days of Churchill’s subalternship, the military year was reasonably divided. There were seven months of training in the spring, summer, and fall, and an agreeable five-month leave in the winter, during which the officers could participate in the “London season,” as it was called — the continuous round of formal amusements. In the late summer of 1895, Churchill felt himself pursued by that old, nagging frustration, the flimsy prospect of war. He was not alone. All his young companions were champing at the bit. As they often remarked at mess, there was scarcely any further reason for medals, and they knew only a bare handful of lucky senior officers who had been hit by bullets. It was a happy world, but it was not a soldier’s world — that of the fading nineteenth century. Except for a slight but undeniable edge at the parties, there was scant motive for wearing a uniform.

  Unlike his fellows, Churchill saw a bad situation as something to be corrected, not merely to be deplored. He got out some newspapers and a big map and spent a profitless morning looking for wars. The only thing he could turn up, barring a few bush-league scuffles that could have been matched any evening in Limehouse, was the comic-opera revolution in Cuba. The island people, as yet unofficially aided by their powerful neighbor to the north, were bucking under the Spanish yoke. There was little evidence of mass slaughter, but it was a war, and Churchill determined to see it. At any time in history, small wars attract the adventurous and the ill at ease. In its course, the Cuban revolt was to siphon off nearly all the bored eligibles of North America. Rich and poor alike went down for the military season, for a variety of reasons. A leading statesman, Theodore Roosevelt, attended in order to see if he could ride a horse uphill while wearing bifocals, and others were spurred to arms by similar doubts. It was a strange and fashionable struggle and Churchill was among the first to recognize it as a competitive entertainment, a sort of World’s Fair with funerals.

  Drawing on the family name, he had no trouble arranging a sight-seeing tour of the Antilles. And, as at Harrow, he roped in a compliant comrade, one Reginald Barnes. “I say, Barnes,” Churchill brought up the subject the afternoon after he’d studied the maps, “would you care to go to Cuba and get shot at?”

  “Oh, rather!” cried Barnes, according to another subaltern in the 4th Hussars. “It would be a lark, what? Just hold on till I get my kit and whangee.”

  With the connivance of his mother, who had become as ambitious for her elder son as she had formerly been for Lord Randolph and for herself, Churchill wrote to Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, once a political aide of his father and now Ambassador to Spain. Then he dropped into the office of the Daily Graphic, to which Lord Randolph had once mailed letters from an African journey of several years ago.

  “I’m off to Cuba to join the war,” Churchill told the editor, “and I’d be willing to be appointed a special correspondent, for a fee, of course.”

  The editor looked interested and said something in a muffled tone that sounded like “three quid.”

  “My offer would involve five pounds per letter,” said Churchill, with true journalistic fervor. Both editors and publishers have noted that native business genius reaches its zenith in writers. The heads of corporations and international bankers strive for years to attain their financial acumen; nearly all writers are born with an acquisitive and automatic grasp of everything pertaining to money. Alfred Knopf, the American book publisher, once said, “When a writer tells me he doesn’t know anything about business, I take a firmer grip on my back teeth.” The editor of the Graphic knuckled under, and Churchill left with a lucrative commission, his first of many. At home he found an affectionate and understanding reply from Drummond Wolff, saying that he and Barnes must go to Cuba by all means, only thing to do, enclosing permissions from the authorities, and adding a tacit hint that the Spanish commandant would knock off fighting and meet them in Havana with all ceremony.

  Things had gone so swimmingly up to now that Churchill and Barnes decided to throw a big dinner. It was held in a London restaurant and was a success, though it thinned down the spending money of both hosts for about three months. Churchill in his book My Early Life makes no mention of this function, but one or two others recall it with pleasure. Everything was done to a nicety, including the serving of first-rate wines with all the courses and two whopping slugs of brandy afterward. Churchill made a fervent but somewhat long-winded speech, just after the brandy, in which he paid tribute to his guests “who are yet under twenty-one years of age, but who in twenty years will control the destinies of the British Empire.” The prediction was certainly accurate for himself; it fell short for the others, more than three quarters of whom would be killed in the soon-to-come wars which they all desired so earnestly.

  It was not difficult for the two subalterns to obtain leave. They boarded a steamer on November 3, 1895, and had an uneventful trip. The Spanish commandant failed to turn up at the dock, but they were vastly enraptured by the Cuban capital. They registered at the best hotel in town and bought a box of cigars. For two days they did little but smoke cigars and eat oranges, both of which commodities were cheap and superior to anything in those lines seen in England. Then, suffering from a painful surfeit of citrus and nicotine, they presented their credentials to the authorities. Because of the language difference, the Spanish presumably got the notion that their arrival presaged the entrance of England into the war as an ally, and Churchill and Barnes were treated royally. They were presented with several boxes of cigars and a large crate of oranges, which they threw into the harbor. The next day they were assigned to a mission headed by train for the interior.

  “Is there anything we ought to know?” asked Barnes.

  “Sí — if firing commences lie down on the floor,” replied the Spanish representative in Havana.

  Both subalterns felt that this struck an unnecessarily chilling note in what was intended to be a lighthearted outing. It was the first of a series of very realistic impressions they were to get about war.

  The mission proceeded without incident from Havana to Santa Clara, all the passengers riding in the seats from start to finish. At the interior post, Marshal Martinez de Campos received the visiting warriors with great respect. There can be little doubt that he saw their presence as having some profound diplomatic significance. He assigned his best man, a charming young lieutenant with the curious na
me of Juan O’Donnell, to show the subalterns around. Further confusing his nomenclature, O’Donnell was the son of the Duke of Tetuán, the latter word being, irrelevantly, a Polynesian noun meaning “pigsty.”

  “Well, what can we do for you?” inquired the duke’s son affably.

  “Where’s the war?” said Churchill.

  O’Donnell’s reply was that they must find a mobile column, since the fighting around them consisted of invisible guerrilla sniping, vexing but unglamorous. He escorted the Englishmen 150 miles through exceedingly uncomfortable jungle to the town of Sancti-Spíritus, considered by many to be the world capital of mosquitoes and smallpox, and they repaired to a tavern. By this time both Churchill and Barnes were beginning to find the romance of Caribbean revolution slightly dimmed. It was impossible not to recall the good times and military stalemate around the Carlton Club.

  One General Valdez, on loan from an O. Henry short story, soon turned up with his mobile column, consisting of 3000 infantry, some cavalry squadrons, and a mule train. An audience was arranged immediately, O’Donnell acting as interpreter. Batting energetically at the mosquitoes, Valdez declared that it was heartening to have the moral support of Great Britain, and he hoped that the main body of her troops was not far behind. Churchill, severely bitten about the face and neck, muttered that it was nothing, and Valdez then paid tribute to Sancti-Spíritus, saying that the men would march at daybreak, since if they stayed in town as long as twenty-four hours they would probably be too sick to leave at all.