The succeeding events proved to Churchill and Barnes that the Spanish system of conducting a war was eccentric. To begin with, when Valdez said daybreak he apparently meant midnight, for they were on the move in the pitch-dark and they groped over some very bushy terrain for about eight miles. Then they pulled up for breakfast, which consisted in the main of something which the subalterns heard as “runcotelle.” It was bland but powerful. They made an excellent breakfast on stew and runcotelle, feeling progressively more sympathetic to the cause, and it was not until several years later that Churchill identified the mysterious word as “rum cocktail.” After breakfast, notwithstanding the frenzied early morning rush to march eight miles, it was the custom of the Army to lie down on the ground and sleep until 2 P.M.
Churchill’s letters to the Daily Graphic began to appear on December 6. The first one proved such a remarkable dispatch from a military man that the editor found it necessary to append a descriptive paragraph centering on the word “breezy.” The letter was well written and discursive, much of it being given over to explaining how difficult the writing of such letters always turns out to be. It was fortunate that General Valdez had no organized censorship. In that breezy vein which had caught the editor’s eye, Churchill stated that “While the Spanish authorities are masters of the art of suppressing the truth, the Cubans are adepts at inventing falsehoods.” The pièce de résistance of his communique had to do with a favorite form of attack by the rebels, and has been ascribed, no doubt falsely, to an overdose of runcotelle. Churchill said that the rebels fired the sugar cane by affixing wax-coated phosphorus to the tails of grass snakes. The idea was that the snakes would wriggle out into the sun, the wax would melt, the phosphorus would ignite, and the countryside would then be hotted up for the enemy. It was a very fanciful and advanced branch of armament, and it seems a pity that Churchill did not clarify it with more detail. For instance, it was asked in the London clubs, did the snakes head for the enemy by instruction? What kept them from firing the sugar cane near the rebels? It was assumed in the end that the grass snakes were organized into a special unit, on the order of commandos, and were directed by officers from among their own general species, probably rattlesnakes.
Churchill’s next letter, equally interesting, announced that he had lost the Army. He was wandering around in an area riddled by patrols from both sides. This was dangerous, he pointed out, because one had to answer a hail with the proper password. That is, if a rebel called out “Quién va?” it was imperative to reply “Cuba”; if a federal gave the challenge the answer was, or should be, “Spain.” An error committed either way resulted in a volley of gunfire. Churchill’s letter indicated, per se, that to date he had made some brilliant guesses. It was also assumed that, in his wandering, he had run across a post office.
A third letter the following week put him back among friends. It also contained a very striking remark. “I sympathize with the rebellion — not with the rebels,” Churchill said. On the physical side, he related that he had just been under fire, in a running skirmish with the enemy. After several days, or nights, of marching through painfully tangled jungle, General Valdez and his troops, including the British mission, pulled up for the habitual gorge and siesta. It was a pleasant spot — on a grassy knoll, with a fringe of woods around, and in the background tall reeds and rushes, presumed to be free of hostile grass snakes. Suddenly a shot cracked harshly on this quiet, tropical scene. Churchill happened to be sitting down at the time, chewing on a half-roasted chicken. Within ten feet of his head a horse screamed, shook violently, and slumped forward. The young subaltern was amazed. It had not occurred to him that bullets could produce this cruel and disagreeable effect. He was about to cry out, “Watch where you’re aiming,” when a whole round of rifle fire destroyed all hopes of a normal breakfast. Two men were grazed and a third, having some connection with the mule train, was reported to have spilled nearly a pint of runcotelle. Churchill indignantly tossed his chicken aside. He was still open-minded about war, but this wanton disruption of meals was going too far. “I began to take a more thoughtful view of our enterprise than I had hitherto done,” he later wrote in his memoirs.
Intermittent firing from the bush marked their progress of the next few days. Casualties were light, and there was no sign of the crawling arsonists. Exhibiting a flair for stratagem of which Marlborough might well have been proud, Churchill made a new friend. He stuck close to the side of an enormously fat Spaniard, whose screening bulk was more reassuring than the stoutest coat of English mail. When the man, during halts, strapped up his hammock, there was Churchill, comradely and voluble, strapping up a hammock right beside him. Obscured by the shrubs, the rebels retreated before them, expending endless rounds of ammunition. General Valdez’ men, shouting carrambas, sapristis, and other federal oaths, shot back industriously, and the palm trees, both rebel and government, took a terrible beating. All along the course, both Churchill and Barnes were nonplussed to note that scarcely anybody on either side got hit. Nobody was ever killed. But the trees were badly plastered.
The expedition ended in a brisk set-to within both sight and sound of the enemy. Valdez brought up his best troops, and the rebels, “to my relief,” as Churchill was to write, quit firing and vanished for good into the jungle. It had been an expensive and dubious campaign. So far as could be ascertained, the rebels had no casualties; the pursuers lost a horse. Nevertheless, Valdez and his staff celebrated victory with a noisy and uninterrupted dinner, toasted nearly everything in Cuba, including the snakes, and then pointed the column toward the coast. Churchill was much gratified; he had seen enough of bush warfare for the moment. Both he and Barnes were anxious to get back to the Carlton and re-form their lines. Before they left, for some reason never made entirely clear, the Spaniards presented them with the Order of Military Merit (first class). One of the London bloods, hearing the news, uncharitably commented that the Spanish must have slapped on the decorations on the run, so lively was the British mission in getting clear of the island.
As a parting gesture, Churchill solemnly presented his sword, which he had bought secondhand before leaving London, “to Spain,” in the person of a bewildered colonel. His last letter to the Daily Graphic was written from Florida. There had been some question of delay in getting a ship to England direct, so the subalterns had grabbed the first thing out. Churchill had intended to compose his valedictory report on the expedition “when under the influence of the sentiment aroused by seeing the shores of Cuba grow dim on the horizon,” but he had unluckily come under the influence of seasickness instead and had thrown up all the way across. From Florida they caught a ship home, and turned up back in London early in 1896.
Just after his twenty-first birthday, Churchill inscribed in his birthday book a quotation from Milton:
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
It was apparently his questionable tribute to Cuba.
Chapter 9
CHURCHILL was barely recovered from Cuba when he was ordered to the military staging center of Hounslow in preparation for duty in India. As it imposed privations upon the cadets at Sandhurst, so did the British Army of that day rise to stern heights in assigning foreign service. When the recently decorated subaltern asked how long he was likely to be in India, he was told, “Around and about fourteen years.” In consequence, he and his comrades of the 4th Hussars were given full latitude for the next six months in arranging their affairs. To Churchill this meant traveling back and forth to his mother’s home in London and tripping the light fantastic at the season’s balls.
Lady Randolph had sensibly decided not to go into permanent mourning after her husband’s death. She was a beautiful and vital woman, still young, with a need for self-expression and male companionship. In the course of the years she was to marry again twice, the first time to a man named George Cornwallis-West, a career army man, and, later, to a Montagu Phippen Porch, a civil se
rvant in Nigeria. What with her exotic childhood, Lord Randolph’s expeditions, and her succeeding husbands’ occupations, she had a wide knowledge of the world, and her counsels became invaluable to Churchill as time went on.
The Lady Randolph was currently not the only American member of the Marlborough clan. The exalted English family seemed to have a predilection for entangling foreign alliances. The eighth duke had married an American, the wealthy daughter of a commodore in the American Navy. Widowed like the Lady Randolph, she too had embarked upon further matrimonial ventures, and was, at the time of Churchill’s subaltern-ship, wedded to Lord William Beresford, with whom the young officer struck up an admiring friendship. Beresford was indeed a man who might appeal to the romantic-minded younger generation. His accomplishments were outstanding even in the rarefied circles in which he moved. For example, he was regarded as the fastest man on a badger draw in all of England. The legend of one feat performed years before when he was attached to the 12th Lancers lived on, and would have been reputation enough for a lesser athlete. On a large bet, he had arisen from the convivial dinner table of his mess at Knights-bridge, walked the ten miles to Hounslow, stolen a badger belonging to the 10th Hussars, and carried it in a bag slung over his shoulder all the way back to Knightsbridge. He made the trip in champion time, too — his record stands to this day.
As if this were not enough, Beresford was an able pigsticker, pony-racer, big-game shot, and polo player. In him were combined all the qualities that young Churchill thought desirable, and many were the reminiscences involving obstinate badgers and elusive pigs that the boy drew forth in quiet tête-à-têtes. Churchill remembers his six-month preparatory leave as “the only idle spell I have ever had.” He danced, he lounged in the clubs, he visited the badger king at his handsome estate of Deepdene, and altogether he made splendid gains in the social skills that were to be so helpful to him later. In his works Churchill has given a priceless description of his life and locale in the crowded months before India:
“In those days English Society still existed in its old form [he wrote]. It was a brilliant and powerful body, with standards of conduct and methods of enforcing them now altogether forgotten. In a very large degree everyone knew everyone else and who they were. The few hundred great families who had governed England for so many generations and had seen her rise to the pinnacle of her glory were inter-related to an enormous extent by marriage. Everywhere one met friends and kinsfolk ... The leading figures of Society were in many cases the leading statesmen in Parliament, and also the leading sportsmen on the Turf. Lord Salisbury was accustomed scrupulously to avoid calling a Cabinet when there was racing at Newmarket, and the House of Commons made a practice of adjourning for the Derby. In those days the glittering parties at Lansdowne House, Devonshire House or Stafford House comprised all the elements which made a gay and splendid social circle in close relation to the business of Parliament, the hierarchies of the Army and Navy, and the policy of the State. Now Lansdowne House and Devonshire House have been turned into hotels, flats and restaurants; and Stafford House has become the ugliest and stupidest museum in the world, in whose faded saloons Socialist Governments drearily dispense the public hospitality.”
Churchill naturally found these high-echelon delights hard to leave, but orders were orders, as he would often point out half a century later when he was in charge of running a great war. Before sailing, he had the good fortune to make one of those useful acquaintances which British society provided for ambitious youngsters. At Beresford’s house, he met a high Army officer with the unlikely but fitting name of Sir Bindon Blood, a leader of famous Indian campaigns. During a memorable week end, Blood had shed light on several of his exploits, and Churchill extracted a promise to be allowed to serve under him should any further natives require punishment.
The voyage of the 4th Hussars, a body of 1200 men, was made in a big troopship and took twenty-three days, coming to an end in Bombay Harbor. And there a minor disaster overtook Churchill, an accident destined to plague him steadily until the present day. In stepping from a small boat to grasp the ladders at Sassoon Dock, he wrenched his right shoulder out of place. He wrote afterward that he scrambled up all right but “made a few remarks of a general character, mostly beginning with the earlier letters of the alphabet.” The shoulder popped back in, but thenceforward it had the annoying habit of popping out again at unpropitious times — when its owner was swinging a polo mallet, or lifting a champagne glass, or waving derision while making political speeches. It popped out a few years ago during a debate in the House of Commons, and he was compelled to ask a nearby Member, fortunately a party colleague, to yank it back into place. Churchill still uses the shoulder cautiously, performing whatever tasks he can with his left arm.
Soon after the landing it developed that the 4th Hussars were urgently needed in India. The local polo situation had deteriorated; the natives were walking, or galloping, off with nearly every honor. Churchill’s regiment settled down at Bangalore to an intensive practice grind. As Army life went, his beginning Indian stint was not onerous. In company with two other second lieutenants, he rented a comfortable cottage and hired twelve servants, in accordance with regional usage. The Indian labor situation was then, and is now, confused. Because of the dark, diverse religions, the limits to what any one person could do were pretty sharply marked out. For example, while a man of one caste or sect might dust a bureau with impunity, he could stir up the gods terribly by dusting the dining-room table. A cook could on no account shine his employer’s shoes; the whole theological structure might come tumbling down. When Churchill first arrived, he was told that he must have separate servants for his right and left shoes, but this proved to be only a barracks-room jest.
His wholesale employment of religious Indians often left Churchill in straitened financial condition. His second lieutenant’s pay was nominal, barely sufficient to provide food, drink, and tobacco, and his outside income amounted to only five hundred pounds, an allowance from his mother. It was Churchill’s practice, upon receiving his salary (a sackful of silver rupees), to go directly home and toss the whole to his butler, who then made out as best he could, shopping in the local equivalent of supermarkets and cooking leftovers. To hike their living standard to what they considered a decent level, Churchill and his fellow officers relied on moneylenders. These mysterious and cosmopolitan brethren were as thick as fleas in the streets, all fairly rich, having as they did the only trade in those parts that offered real security, barring pocket-picking and the clergy. They never made a bad loan; if one of the subalterns neglected to fish up on reckoning day, it was the work of a moment to step around to his commandant and tattle. Churchill and his bungalow mates — Hugo Baring and the former Cuban observer, Barnes — were deep in the toils of the moneylenders nearly all the time they were in India. The immediate cause of their involvement was polo. Every week or so they felt a compulsion to buy a new pony. Next thing was to hop out and find a lender, as a rule easily located on the doorstep. The conversation would then go about as follows;
“Good morning, Rajputo. What’s the rate today?”
“Very low, Sahib — two per cent a month.”
“Outrageous. I need a new pony.”
“Service, Bwana. To be procured within the hour.”
“A live one.”
“I count the teeth personally.”
“What’s the total rap?”
“A mere nothing, Tuan — three hundred rupees, plus a slight carrying charge.”
When the horse was bought, a man would be engaged to untie it, another to give it a shove, a third to curse it, another to lead it down the street, and so on until the gods were appeased and the chain of command rather expensively set up to deliver the animal to its terminal owner.
It became plain that Churchill had natural genius as a polo player. Much of his success was attributed to his frenzied style of attack, which was later described by an officer as looking “like a man thrashing at a cobr
a with a riding crop.” Churchill and the other members of the regimental squad made a long trip to Hyderabad to join in a tournament for the Golconda Cup, a sporting event of national interest comparable to that of the Kentucky Derby here. It was considered by all that two native teams, the Golcondas and the Vicar Al Umra, were far and away the best ones entered. By thrashing cobras in especially vicious style, Churchill led his mates to a thundering triumph over the Golcondas, and they went on to take the tournament itself, the first time it had ever been won by a newly arrived regiment; neither was it to happen again. Photographs which exist of Churchill in this summertime of his polo career are those of a youth with a serious purpose. Wearing a sun helmet, he is seen mounted on a milk-white stallion; again, he stands slouched but ready beside a satiny black mare, with four dark-skinned functionaries in the background holding additional testimonials to the moneylenders’ skill. None of the early photographs shows him smiling. He is clearly a young man with a mission; perhaps a young man in a hurry, as some journalists were soon to say, with uncomplimentary intent.
In India he got his first real dose of culture, taken voluntarily, without being force-fed. The genesis of this departure was not altogether a lust for learning, or even curiosity. The three hours around noon in southern India are so ominously hot and humid that scarcely any living thing, in the village or in the bush, walks or crawls abroad. Everywhere there is quiet, even in the deepest jungle. Despite a saying of the tropics that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, Churchill and his colleagues turned in for a snooze. Repose of this sort was appetizing to most subalterns, but it chafed Churchill sorely. He was too highly charged. There was nothing else to do except read. To his surprise, once he had got the first few volumes down, he found the exercise non-toxic. His taste expanded rapidly. In the past he had cheerfully swallowed such confections as Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines, but these were wholly for pleasure; there was no notion of self-improvement. As he got into his Indian reading it occurred to him that there were vast fields of knowledge with which he was not even on speaking terms. To anyone with Churchill’s sense of personal destiny this was a rude shock, and a challenge. By his account he quickly absorbed, and stored away in perpetuity, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (an old standby of his father’s), Macaulay’s various histories and essays, Plato’s Republic, the Politics of Aristotle (edited by Dr. Welldon of Harrow), Southey’s Colloquies on Society, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Schopenhauer on Pessimism, and the poems of Robert Montgomery (not to be confused with the movie actor).
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 12
