Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  Churchill went to Cairo to put together the manuscript of his book on the campaign in the Sudan, to be named The River War. In the Egyptian capital he called on several British officials for help; among them was Sir Percy Girouard, one of Kitchener’s young assistants, in charge of the desert railway. Girouard was dismayed to learn that Churchill’s only reason for returning to India had been to play polo.

  “Really now, you know, you can’t be serious,” he said several times.

  Churchill, unmoved as always, equably continued to smoke a cigar, a habit he had fallen into, and asked numerous questions about the high-level policies of the war against the Dervishes. Girouard at length unbent and gave him valuable advice, of which Churchill took note in his writings and for which he rewarded Girouard more substantially some years later by appointing him governor of Northern Nigeria.

  When he finished his chapters on General Gordon’s death, the author took them to Lord Cromer, then head of the British-Egyptian Agency, to be checked for accuracy. Cromer interpreted his duties as somewhat broader and indeed marked up the manuscript as though it were a public school quiz. At one point, dealing with the General’s post as private secretary to Lord Ripon, Churchill had said, in his evolving style, “the brilliant sun had become the satellite of a farthing dip.” Lord Cromer conscientiously penciled this out and observed in the margin, “‘brilliant sun’ appears to be extravagant eulogy and ‘farthing dip’ does less than justice to Lord Ripon’s position as Viceroy.” Oddly enough, Churchill submitted meekly to criticism and made many alterations, losing some of his trickiest phrases. The final version was far from humble, however. Published in 1899, it provoked both lavish praise and widespread indignation, the latter because of Churchill’s breezy censure of his old antagonist, Kitchener.

  The tenor of his comments about Kitchener was, as a critic noted, “patronizing.” Two passages aroused special umbrage. “Before the attack on Mahmud’s zereba the Sirdar issued orders that the wounded were to be spared,” Churchill wrote, adding, “It is scarcely possible to believe that he wished otherwise at Omdurman. It is nevertheless a pity that his former order was not republished to the troops for I must personally record that there was a very general impression that the fewer the prisoners, the greater would be the satisfaction to the commander.”

  Again, Churchill referred to the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb: “By Sir H. Kitchener’s order the tomb has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head was separated from the body and ... passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo ... The limbs and trunk were flung into the Nile. Such was the chivalry of the conquerors!” If things were to continue thus in the Sudan, the author went on, “it would be better if Gordon had never given his life nor Kitchener won his victories.”

  If The Malakand Field Force should rightly have been titled A Subaltern’s Hints to Generals, then The River War could have been called A Subaltern’s Hints to Kitchener. Nevertheless, the new book won many admirers. The Outlook said that “in ‘The River War’ Mr. Winston Churchill comes, we think, very near doing for the Sudan what Kinglake did for the Crimea.” Two expensive editions were printed in quick succession and sold rapidly; Churchill felt more than ever that his decision to leave the Army had been well conceived. Besides his remuneration from the book, he had skillfully arranged for another source of income. Before he left India he had worked up a kind of reverse arrangement with the Allahabad Pioneer. Instead of keeping its readers informed about Indian turbulence, he would mail back weekly letters from the battle fronts in London, at the rate of three pounds per dispatch. The break was now complete; Churchill had become a full-fledged peace correspondent, and he took off his uniform, bought some civilian clothes, including a black, barrel-shaped hat, and tried to settle down.

  *

  The year 1899 will remain a bright one in the long, unhappy annals of politics. Winston Churchill, after nearly five weeks of relaxation from the wars, decided to toss his singular hat into his first election ring. The scene of this milestone grapple was Oldham, a northern industrial center, described by the rising young lawyer, H. H. Asquith, as “one of the most dismal places in the country, peopled by wan-faced, grimy, tired artisans who have never known life in its real sense and never will know it till their dying day.”

  Asquith, whose fiery spirit and liberal tenets were to make him one of the most important men in England, was destined to work in political partnership with Churchill for years, but in 1899 their views were divergent. More accurately, Churchill’s views were formless and shifting, pulled along as a sort of kite tail to his central motive force of ambition. He had Liberal stirrings, but he was still a technical Tory.

  His opportunity arose when one of the two Conservative members from Oldham fell ill. The other, a Mr. Robert As-croft, inexplicably chose Churchill to fill the gap. Churchill accepted the honor without astonishment, and at the party’s “adoption meeting” he caused the utmost consternation by arising to confront a veteran strategist with the precocious words, “I disagree with you.” At Tory headquarters in London it was wondered if the party had another intractable Lord Randolph on its hands. Everybody sat back to watch with interest, and apprehension, the outcome of this fledgling effort. In the matter of independent thought, Churchill disappointed nobody. It was an unusual contest in nearly every way. To start off, Robert Ascroft died in mid-campaign and was succeeded by a Tory workingman, James Mawdsley, whose cockney accent contrasted sharply with the educated drawl of his running mate from Blenheim. The fact is, the two men presented an incongruous unit on the platform. Mawdsley was attired in the stout but ungorgeous threads of the laborer, while Churchill was a sartorial blossom, in a swallow-tail coat and carrying a gold-headed cane. Neither could the two ever get together on their remarks; no matter what line Mawdsley took, Churchill was pretty apt to be yawing away on a different tack. On one occasion, Mawdsley rose to passionate heights in outlining a utopian program for labor, to be followed by Churchill in an hour and a half’s blanket denunciation of the Church of England. His complaint was based on ritualism: too much mumbling, far too many tassels, too much shaking of censers, too many cabalistic signs marked out in the air. “I introduce the subject,” he said at one point, to the relief of many, “because I am sure that it is uppermost in the minds of the voters of Oldham.” It did not appear to be uppermost in the mind of anybody at the meeting, since his explanation caused a general guffaw and not a few gibes of a basically unreligious nature.

  The people of Oldham, strapped for amusement, as Asquith had indicated, took the campaign as a kind of street carnival. The press also treated it flippantly. The Conservative candidates were commonly referred to as “The Scion and the Socialist.” It was noted by one paper that Churchill, though the grandson of a duke, was not himself titled, while Mawdsley was the bona fide secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Operative Spinners. The opposition was strong but not distinguished. The Liberal candidates were Alfred Emmott, who ran a factory, and Walter Runciman, the son of a shipping-line owner, who had the temerity in one speech to suggest that Churchill had been “a swashbuckler around the world.”

  This injudicious barb provoked the Scion to depart from the lofty generalities to which he had cleaved and introduce a personal tirade, demanding of the electors whether “this is the sort of welcome you will give the Lancashire Fusiliers when they come home from Omdurman. Mr. Runciman has not had the experience of the Lancashire Fusiliers; his contests have been more pacific. The difference between Mr. Runciman and the Lancashire Fusiliers is that, while they were fighting at Omdurman for their country, he was fighting at Gravesend for himself. And another difference between them is that, while the Fusiliers were gaining a victory, Mr. Runciman at Gravesend was being defeated.”

  There was agreement that the last part of this was vague, because the family ship business was afloat and bustling and young Runciman himself looked perfectly successful; nevertheless, the remark was digested and
enjoyed.

  A note of unfairness crept into the election when Churchill and Mawdsley were branded as representing the vested interests. Emmott and Runciman were held up as the champions of the underprivileged. Since both Runciman and Emmott were extremely rich and, as Churchill tried futilely to point out, he and Mawdsley would have had “great difficulty in finding five hundred pounds between us,” this stigma was a bitter pill. At the conclusion of a meeting, Churchill and his vested harness mate would retire to an inexpensive pub to dine on pig’s knuckles and beer, while the champions of the underprivileged held a gaudy wassail in the leading hotel.

  As the campaign matured, a feeling of confusion pervaded Tory headquarters in London. Churchill appeared to be fighting a contest along very bizarre lines, not entirely connected with the party. Mawdsley, too, was going it alone, having come out openly for something he described as “Tory Socialism,” to which only Mawdsley had the key. There was anxiety as to how Churchill would handle the pet Clerical Tithes Bill; it was felt that a few more allusions to the Church of England and to the disturbance at Omdurman might muddle the issue. Arthur Balfour, the leader of the House of Commons, was reputed to have remarked, in the interest of cheering his fellows up, “We need have no worry. The boy’s young and he’s flighty, but he’s not Randolph’s son for nothing — he’ll bat his heart out in a pinch.” The way things went, all this was worry wasted. Churchill came through in dazzling style. At the climactic meeting of the campaign, he batted the bill overboard altogether. “A tragic mistake,” he described it airily, and passed on to some additional foolishness of the Church. When news of the ditching reached Balfour, he changed his opinion slightly. “I thought he was a young man of promise,” he said, “but it appears he is a young man of promises.”

  What with Mawdsley bawling about Socialism at one of their platforms and Churchill conducting a revival from the other, the Tories put up a very poor show. When the results were all in, Emmott led the quartet with 12,976 votes, Runciman came in second with 12,773, Churchill was next with 11,477, and Mawdsley with his plans for a workers’ paradise brought up the rear with 11,449. The Conservatives had lost both of their Oldham seats, and the party heads were in a state of advanced peeve. Writing of this, Churchill observed, “Everybody threw the blame on me. I have noticed that they nearly always do.” The consensus was that his abortive reform of the Church of England had done the trick.

  Perhaps the most mystifying aspect of the whole election was Churchill’s attitude when he lost. His manner was indistinguishable from that of the victors. At the “declaration of the poll,” when each candidate makes a species of postelection statement, he far outshone his colleagues. All the Tories present concurred that he scored his best impression of the campaign; even Emmott was moved to declare publicly that Churchill’s words had been “noble and gallant.”

  One of the local newspapers reported that “Lady Randolph Churchill, who had listened to the result with a tinge of regret, bore herself proudly as she retired from the room with her talented son.”

  When they reached the door, Churchill turned sportingly to Runciman and observed, “I don’t think the world has heard the last of either of us.” In view of the fact that Runciman had won a seat and was in an excellent position to be heard, the remark was baffling in the extreme. Runciman was said to have stepped down to a nearby newspaper office and checked the returns again. The first tabulation was correct: Oldham had returned Churchill to journalism.

  Chapter 13

  THE AUTUMN of 1899 brought a welcome diversion to Churchill, whose premature retirement from politics was growing tiresome. For the first time since the Crimea, Britain was about to open fire on white soldiers. The trouble zone was South Africa, where President Paul Kruger of the fanatically religious republic of Transvaal was finding the English settlers on all sides growing in uncomfortable numbers. Kruger and his faithful were of Dutch and French extraction, a weird and headstrong band, called Boers, after the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “farmer.”

  Kruger himself was nearly enough to cause a war on sight. He was an angular man who wore a hat shaped like a coal scuttle and had eyes that flashed piety as the prehistoric dragon was said to have exhaled flame from its nose. Kruger was a Dopper and claimed to know God. Periodically he disappeared into the veldt for several days of communion, subsisting on bark and insects. His regime was conducted with an iron hand; he had decreed that the world was flat, and any statements to the contrary in his presence brought on an immediate fuss. When the New Englander, Captain Joshua Slocum, called on him while sailing a 36-foot boat around the world, Kruger declined to say more than a few gruff words, on the ground that Slocum was trying to peddle a dangerous physical theory and go against nature.

  Kruger himself had gone against the English in every way, petty and large, that he could contrive, from supplying free liquor to the natives (whom he detested), thus preventing them from working in the English industries, to cutting off trade between the Transvaal and the British Cape Colony. For their part, the British were keenly anxious to cultivate a friendship with Kruger and give him a hand with his rich diamond mines.

  In consequence of Kruger’s hostility, and the extreme amity of the British, which had lately taken the form of transporting troops to the Transvaal border, in the hope of forcing the issue and paving the way for the diamond-studded camaraderie to follow, the situation in South Africa had deteriorated. Kruger now sent London an ultimatum to withdraw the troops, and the war was on.

  The collective force of these events stirred Churchill patriotically. Muttering imprecations against Kruger, whose eccentricities he did not find intimidating, he went round to the Morning Post and made a pretty bargain. He would report this struggle, even as he had covered the one farther north in the Sudan. By now he was a veteran warrior-correspondent; only recently a newspaper had noted that, except for Napoleon, he alone was known to have waged campaigns on three continents. Publicity of this sort seemed to Churchill to weigh heavily in favor of an increase in rate. The Morning Post, after some backing and filling, agreed to pay him £250 a month and all expenses. This certainly represented progress, since his other English papers had allowed him practically no expense money and the Allahabad Pioneer refused to cough up as much as the price of a cigar.

  Once again, Churchill packed up and bade his friends good-by in a series of exhausting dinners, which reached a climax with a rousing celebration for him and one of his father’s closest friends, Sir William Gerard, who was also joining the African campaign. The Prince of Wales was among the guests. Gerard, an elderly man, was presented with several cases of choice champagne and brandy and told to share them freely with young Churchill. After the dinner, in happy but muddled spirits, Gerard and Churchill thought it expedient to label the cases “Castor Oil” for shipping purposes. Two months later in Natal, Gerard tried to check up on his supplies by telegram. He received a reply that the drugs consigned to him had already been delivered to the hospital by mistake but that the base had a full store of castor oil and was rushing him a crate marked “Emergency.” Later on, a friend of Gerard checked further at the hospital and learned that the morale there had brightened out of all bounds.

  Churchill sailed on October 11 aboard the Dunottar Castle for Capetown. Also on the ship was Sir Redvers Buller, who had been appointed to command the South African Field Force. Churchill saw very little of Buller either on the journey or in Africa, but he was to write about him with informality, as he had about so many other generals. His shipboard impression of the commander was that “He said little, and what he said was obscure.” Churchill’s military impression of him, given some years afterward, was that “he was a man of considerable scale. He plodded on from blunder to blunder and from one disaster to another, without losing either the regard of his country or the trust of his troops, to whose feeding as well as his own he paid serious attention.”

  Arrived in Capetown, the passengers learned that the Boers had invaded Natal and were put
ting up a surprising fight. This came as agreeable news, since it had been feared on the Dunottar Castle that the dispute would be settled before the ship landed. It remained now for Churchill to make his way north to the front. In company with J. B. Atkins, the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, he went by train to Stormberg and then sailed from nearby East London for Durban in a small coastal steamer. Up to this point his South African adventure had unfolded genially; three hours out on the coaster the roof caved in. Churchill took to his bunk with a case of seasickness that made his Caribbean trouble seem like a momentary giddiness. For several days, as the wind blew, he remained prostrate, arising only to perform the ancient rites of the ailment. He clung tenaciously to life, he said, by reminding himself “that Titus Oates lived in good health for many years after his prodigious floggings.”

  The sea subsided, the ship landed, and Churchill, several pounds lighter, continued with Atkins toward the fighting region, at last reaching Estcourt, which was held by a small detachment of British and was in danger of being cut off by a large force of Boers. Here Churchill ran into an old acquaintance of Harrow days, Leo Amery, the boy who had so patiently censored his dispatches to the Harrovian. He was in Africa representing the Times. The relationship between them had changed; Amery’s old contributor was now fairly well known and in a furious hurry to move onward and upward. And by good luck, a Captain Haldane he found at Estcourt, a friend from the Indian wars, was the means of providing him with an opportunity that, as it developed, made him the most famous young man of the decade.