Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  A graceful obituary to his life in the trenches has been written by Captain X, who said, “He came to be looked on really as a possession of our own, and one of which we were intensely proud. And much more, he became our friend. He is a man who apparently is always to have enemies. He made none in his old regiment, but left behind him men who will always be his loyal partizans and admirers, and who are proud of having served in the Great War under the leadership of one who is beyond question a great man.”

  Chapter 21

  RETURNING home to stir up Parliament, Churchill found himself in a frustrating position — without power, port-k. folio, or backing. But he was still the Member for Dundee, and he set about destroying complacency wherever he could find it, which was nearly everywhere. First he made a rackety speech urging the creation of a separate Air Ministry, and succeeded in cementing the foundation of the present Royal Air Force. More or less in return, he was informed that a Committee of Inquiry would be held on the Dardanelles campaign; not too surprisingly, Churchill was to be given prominent billing as the star witness.

  With the herculean energies that had never flagged, he went to work preparing his case and had plenty of time left over to turn out a great number of magazine articles on the war, receiving for most the praiseworthy sum of twenty-five hundred dollars. Warming up to his writing, he composed a thundering document on the Battle of the Somme, which he circulated among the Cabinet. It provoked a near-riot. Its main contention was that Sir Douglas Haig’s estimate that “the enemy’s losses in men and material have been very considerably higher than those of the Allies” was significantly wrong. Churchill’s estimate, stunning all of England, was that Germany had lost men in the proportion of 1 to 2.3 of the British. Deposed from power or not, he had been right too often in the past to ignore. A careful examination of the facts, completed after the war, showed that the true figures for the Somme were 1 German killed to 2.27 British. His document contained a good many more upsets and predictions, but it did not, for a while, restore him his crown and scepter. Nothwithstanding that it was received with scorn, the Army adopted it in after years as “a model for Staff Officers to show how the deductive process can be used in military calculations.”

  This was a provoking period for Churchill, a lull in a career bristling with action. As a self-styled “Opposition Member” in a Coalition Government, he was tilting with invisible dragons; it was all but impossible to separate foes from friends. Perhaps out of desperation, and to take up the slack, he turned to painting, at first only a pastime and today a polished facet of his creative life. Churchill made his entrance into the arena of art through the back door, so to speak. The Armored Car Division in France, a unit he had brought into being against the sagest council of the existing military minds, wished to tender him an appreciation and commissioned Sir John Lavery, an accomplished and famous artist, to do his portrait. Sir John did a splendid job, as may now be seen in the Municipal Gallery of Dublin, but he did it under stresses. Churchill became fascinated by the technical end of the project and refused to remain in the pose. He was eternally popping around to check on the artist’s progress; after a few days he began to give Lavery helpful little hints. Sir John countered with several priceless lectures on painting, and before long Churchill had swung into full stride. Characteristically, he provided himself with every known accessory of the guild — a gigantic easel, a light blue smock, and a flapping beret the size of a small tent. In the words of one of his friends, “He was a hell of sight, if you know what I mean.”

  Regardless of his visual impression, Churchill forged ahead rapidly. In almost no time the boulevardiers of war-torn Paris were treated to an exhibition by an unknown and probably struggling artist named Charles Morin, which was the succinct nom de brush that the former First Lord of the British Admiralty had chosen. It was noted that foremost among the budding Morin’s offerings was a quite recognizable portrait of Sir John Lavery, the well-known English artist.

  Some details of Churchill’s artistic bent will be considered later in this volume; now in 1916 his beginning work with brush and easel tided him over a bad time and simultaneously nurtured a strong talent that might have withered had he been otherwise fully occupied.

  Churchill’s personal bad time was negligible compared with the dark days that had descended upon England as a result of blundering by the war government. Catastrophe followed close on the heels of calamity. Sir Douglas Haig’s campaign of the Somme had cost 600,000 casualties. Unmoved, with the English phlegm that is so admirable in some connections and has proved so tragic in others, he announced himself as still in favor of a “war of attrition,” in which British manpower would be matched against German and emerge triumphant, though possibly with only a couple of dozen men left. In accordance with this cynical view, he went ahead with his unholy action at Passchendaele, where he expended 500,000 soldiers in an unworkable effort to gain possession of a swamp that was without military significance and of whose terrain, it was later shown, neither he nor his chief of intelligence had any concrete knowledge whatever. Besides these setbacks, Asquith’s Government had abandoned Rumania and Serbia to be run over, allowed Bulgaria to join the enemy, watched Russia disintegrate, and let a British expedition in Mesopotamia expire for lack of supply and Ireland flare up in the Sinn Fein Rebellion.

  To give the holocaust flavor, Arthur Balfour, as Churchill’s successor in the Admiralty, urged a timid hide-and-seek program for his fleet, then saw it decimated at the Battle of Jutland, in which he and the tentative Admiral Jellicoe claimed a victory on the technical ground that the Germans (though with smaller losses) fled first from the scene. Balfour was not apprehensive about submarines. In consequence, the Germans were able to develop an underwater flotilla that, by 1917, had sunk almost every Allied and neutral vessel in all the sea lanes leading to Europe. For his part, Kitchener, as War Minister, had been dilatory to the point where he had managed to arrive just short of the nick of time in nearly every instance in which troops or matériel were critically wanted. In Malcolm Thompson’s Life of Churchill, the author observes that “After the Dardanelles campaign he [Kitchener] seemed to lose his nerve entirely, and the nation’s war effort floundered and halted in consequence.”

  The situation plainly indicated an infusion of new blood with a higher red corpuscle count. In December of 1916, Lloyd George brought about the resignation of Asquith and succeeded him as Prime Minister. And when a good deal of savage Tory opposition was quelled, he appointed his old friend Churchill Minister of Munitions. The appointment was opportune, since the new minister had just come out of the Dardanelles quiz with a surprisingly clean bill of health, considering the popular notion of his culpability. With typical British candor, the Committee of Inquiry, whose members had been appointed by Asquith, issued a report in which Asquith himself was rather severely criticized. It was felt that Churchill’s basic plan was sound but that Kitchener’s halfhearted troop support had botched things fatally. Asquith was condemned for not exerting the necessary pressures on his reluctant field marshal. The fact that Churchill got off lightly gave him a vast amount of badly needed prestige; and some favorable publicity in the press, which had harried him devotedly of late, provided what he interpreted as a green light for gala operations at the Ministry of Munitions.

  These took the form of a mobilization of the kingdom’s resources so all-embracing that it wrung piteous howls from several other ministries, which succeeded in hauling him up before a Priorities Committee on the old complaint that he was trying to hog the show. Churchill was advised of his limitations, after which he continued his reforms. He arranged a means of commuting to the front: he arrived at his Whitehall office early in the morning, worked hard for several hours, rushed by motorcar to Hendon Airport, and took a plane to a fancy chateau the French Government had been persuaded to supply him near Verchocq. Before each day was finished, he had usually managed to hop off in another, smaller plane from his chateau and fly recklessly over the hottest actio
ns. He dropped in on the French military leaders so frequently with ideas and gigantic plans that, according to excellent sources, they adopted the practice of hiding when they heard he was coming. On one occasion, he took the frail and aged Clemenceau on an exhausting visit to the front-line trenches, where the bombs burst all about them. “Did you enjoy it?” asked Churchill on the way back. “What a delicious moment,” replied the French Premier.

  A heartening aspect of his ministry was that, upon the first inkling of American intervention in the war, Churchill displayed that practical view of his overseas cousins for which he has always been noted. In a ringing speech, he cried, “Bring on the American millions! And, meanwhile, maintain an active defensive on the Western Front, so as to economize French and British lives and to train, increase, and perfect our armies and our methods for a decisive effort later.” When the United States entered the war, Churchill was given the job of equipping the American millions he had spoken of, and he did it so well that, afterward, General Pershing presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. He was the only Englishman to wear this decoration. His assignment to prepare American soldiers for combat brought him into contact with Bernard Baruch, who was then chairman of the War Industries Board at Washington. They developed a close friendship that has continued without interruption to the present.

  In the last year of the war Churchill committed himself to an “anti-liberal” action that gave him his envied start toward becoming the premier target of the left-wingers, or plotters against society. Despite his history of fifty years of humanitarian endeavors, he stands today as a sort of free-enterprise lightning rod, drawing off the furies of ideological conspiracy. His first such unpopularity was gained in the strikes of 1918, which were similar to the Communist-planned stoppages that swept America in the recent war. Like President Truman in the later crisis, Churchill threatened to end the strikers’ immunity from military service unless they returned to work. Though the mass lamentations and wails of the radical press were heart-rending, he held fast to his convictions. It was pointed out that men fighting with guns were not permitted to strike for higher pay, or for a four-hour day, and that industrialists were discouraged by law from war profiteering; the question was then raised why workers should be treated with special deference. Faced with the prospect of a low-paid and even dangerous life in the trenches, the men went back to their jobs, and the war was allowed to continue to its successful conclusion.

  When peace came, it returned to Churchill much of his lost favor. The ghost of the Dardanelles had been laid, or at least forgotten for the moment, and traces of the victorious youth who had escaped from the Boers were again seen by a forgiving public. On the night of the Armistice, he and his wife entered their automobile in front of their house in Northumberland Avenue and started for the Prime Minister’s. People in the street saw them and started a cheering stampede that swarmed upon the car from every direction. The couple were driven slowly through Trafalgar Square and into Whitehall, while what seemed to be half of London waved and applauded and sought to shake the minister’s hand. In the Government he soon consolidated his gains with such speed that, as the Tories blinked, he found himself in the unprecedented position of holding two offices — Secretary for War and Secretary for Air. The protests that arose over this artistic coup shook the Cabinet. The old epithet of “medal snatcher” was changed to “portfolio collector.” A Captain Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal M.P., arose in Parliament and complained so testily that General Seely, the Under-Secretary for Air, was suddenly convinced of Churchill’s villainy and resigned. The Minister for Air and War placidly continued with the business at hand. His sang-froid had been so firmly re-established that he had not even bothered to campaign in the “Khaki election” of 1918. At Dundee the inexhaustible Scrymgeour made enough racket for both of them. The teetotaler had settled into a career of being defeated at the polls by Winston Churchill. Before this last setback, he had learned — the news had somehow leaked out in Scotland through relatives of the 6th Fusiliers — that Churchill was in the habit of taking an occasional nip. Screaming imprecations on strong drink and all of its acolytes, Scrymgeour implored Dundee to turn the tippler out. Instead, the city stamped its approval on Churchill’s manners by voting him an immense majority. Biding his time for the next opportunity, Scrymgeour sought solace in his water jug.

  As Minister for Air, Churchill established a reputation for being the worst pilot yet developed by aviation. He appeared to have an uncanny instinct for making the wrong move. The fact is, he crashed with regularity. To carry out the business of demobilization, he found it convenient to fly often into France, and the peasants in outlying areas came to know him well. In the last days of the war he had enjoyed the distinction of crashing twice in the same day, a record still admired in aeronautics circles. Along with a “co-pilot,” he had taken off for London from the French General Headquarters in a plane that nobody else would touch (he had a patriotic bias against pre-empting aircraft that might be put to better work elsewhere). Five miles out in the Channel, the engine quit and they headed toward the sea. Churchill was trying to get out of his heavy clothing when a few strangled pops hauled them back up briefly. They made it to Gris Nez and flapped down near the aerodrome. The plane was patched up, serviced, and assisted into the air again. This time Churchill and his pilot were more than halfway across when the engine sighed feebly and diminished to one or two cylinders. With fifty feet of altitude left at the English shore, they crash-landed safely in a grove of elms.

  Churchill’s pilot after the war was Captain Jack Scott, an ace who had been decorated several times and had a crooked leg from an aviation injury. The procedure was for the two to fly in a dual-control plane with Churchill doing the actual piloting and Scott keeping an eye open for mishaps. They left a small airport in southeast England one morning headed for London. A light drizzle set in and Churchill quickly deduced that they needed altitude. He took the plane up to 15,000 feet, an unusual height in those days, and made his reckoning for the London field. He came down three hours later at an aerodrome in France. Several hours later, the weather clearing, he got them back to London, as originally planned. They could have made the return trip more speedily had not the plane burst into flames over the English Channel, presumably as a result of some maneuvers Churchill was attempting. Scott put the craft into a power dive and the fire went out.

  Not long afterward, Churchill was in a hurry to keep an appointment in Paris and he and Scott made a fast take-off in an antiquated biplane, which rose a foot or so into the air, turned over, and collapsed. As usual, Churchill and Scott climbed out of the wreckage unhurt. Churchill seemed to have been born under some benign celestial influence. His rashest acts — errors that caused him immense immediate concern — commonly turned out to have a long-term silver lining. In the summer of 1919 he and Scott flew neatly into a vicious sideslip and hit the turf with vigor. Churchill gathered himself together, intact in his essentials, but Scott had said farewell to aviation for some time to come. He lay senseless and bleeding on the ground. As rapidly as possible, he was carried off to a hospital, from which the news at first was bad: the famous ace was not apt to fly again. A later bulletin rolled away the pall: Scott would recover. A third report carried on Churchill’s tradition for winning the war no matter how the battles went. Owing to the peculiarity of his fall, Scott’s crippled leg was twisted in such a way that an operation was necessitated which set it absolutely straight again. He walked out of the hospital a whole man, though in a somewhat different direction from where he was likely to find Churchill.

  As it developed, Scott could have gone in any direction with an easy mind, for the Secretary for War and Air had decided to give up flying. The truth is that the accident which injured Scott so beneficially had soured Churchill on piloting. The first faint hint that there were flaws in his technique had begun to enter his mind. According to one of his friends, he even was persuaded, with his wife’s help, and further aided by the cou
nsel of unbiased experts, that unless he laid off the controls he could not expect to live over a few months more at the outside.

  His attention was focused on sterner matters, notably the business of demobilization and with it the connected state of affairs in Russia. The charge had arisen that Churchill was impeding demobilization in order to assist the White Russians, Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin. As Kipling had put it, this was “the time of peril — the time of the Truce of the Bear.” The ugly mooncalf of Bolshevism was climbing out of its cradle. The revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky had ended Russia’s participation in the war and had provided the sprawling and benighted country with civil strife instead. Now the Bolshevists wished to come to terms with the civilized world, and especially with England, where Red Russian agents were diligently at work propagandizing their cause. Two top agents, Comrades Litvinoff and Rothstein, had found useful employment in London, the former as confidential adviser to the Russian section of the British Foreign Office, and the latter in the Foreign Press section of the War Office. They had been doing a masterly job of distortion, and a certain few among the ignorant, the gullible, and the conniving were favorably affected.

  Churchill came into his dual ministerhood with a heritage of commitments to the White Russians. Despite current Communist statements to the contrary, he inclined at first to the Bolshevist upheaval over the rotting regime of czarism. However, being a man of at least normal perception, he was quickly able to see Bolshevism, or Communism, in its true and sickly light of suppression and mass murder. And being Churchill, he did not hesitate to say so. “A man is called reactionary in Russia,” he observed in Commons, “if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children slaughtered.” Touching on his new resolve to assist the Whites with all the power of his offices, he said, “Britain is not unmindful of our obligations to the gallant men in Russia who helped us to fight the Germans when the Bolshevist leaders were betraying the Allies on that Front.” Before long he unburdened himself of a sort of definitive statement on Communism that stands up remarkably well today: