God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  Whatever history decides, the 1915 campaign and its heavy British casualties will always be considered among the greatest failures in military history. And rightly or wrongly, Winston Churchill’s legacy will always be coloured to some degree by those events.

  ‘I have a clear conscience which enables me to bear any responsibility for past events with composure,’ Churchill said in his letter of resignation to Prime Minister Asquith. Asquith subsequently appointed Churchill to an inconsequential post, the Chancellery of the Duchy of Lancaster. Perhaps he meant well by allowing Churchill to continue as a member of the War Cabinet, but it was pure torture for Churchill. Though in his new role he could attend the meetings and hear reports from the battlefield and discussion of plans, he could neither enter the talks nor vote. ‘He was condemned to passivity while the storm raged over England, and all hands were feverishly occupied on deck,’26 writes René Kraus. As Churchill himself described it:

  The change from the intense executive activities of each day’s work at the Admiralty to the narrowly measured duties of a councillor left me gasping… . I had great anxiety, and no means of relieving it. I had vehement convictions and small powers to give effect to them. I had to watch the unhappy casting-away of great opportunities, and the feeble execution of plans which I had launched and in which I heartily believed. I had long hours of utterly unwanted leisure in which to contemplate the frightful unfolding of the war.27

  Once the dynamo of the world’s greatest navy, Churchill now took up, among other things, oil painting. Though it would prove a delight for the rest of his life, it was not enough to assuage the frustration of being pushed aside while his nation was at war. When Asquith reduced his War Cabinet to a committee of five, excluding Churchill from the inner circle, Churchill wrote to him, ‘I am an officer, and I place myself unreservedly at the disposal of the military authorities, observing that my regiment is in France.’28

  Within days, he requested a posting to the Western Front in France, and he served there until March 1916 alongside troops who no doubt blamed him for the disaster at Gallipoli that had cost so many Allied lives.

  FACING PARLIAMENT

  Before Churchill left for the front, he went to the House of Commons to explain his resignation. The members were cordial but sceptical as he rose. What followed was one of the signature speeches of his political career, as he rallied Parliament in the face of the recent military reversals.

  There is no reason to be disheartened about the progress of the war. We are passing through a bad time now and it will probably be worse before it is better, but that it will be better, if we only endure and persevere, I have no doubt whatever… . Some of these small States are hypnotised by German military pomp and precision. They see the glitter, they see the episode; but what they do not see or realise is the capacity of the ancient and mighty nations against whom Germany is warring to endure adversity, to put up with disappointment and mismanagement, to recreate and renew their strength, to toil on with boundless obstinacy through boundless suffering to the achievement of the greatest cause for which men have fought.29

  When Churchill finished his remarks, thunderous applause erupted from members who only moments earlier had been reluctant to even welcome him to the House.

  On 18 November 1915, Churchill crossed over to France to take up a posting in the Oxfordshire Hussars. En route, he was intercepted by Sir John French, the commander-in-chief at St Omer, who offered him a brigade to command. Churchill jumped at the chance.

  Upon hearing that Churchill was to serve on the French front, his friend Violet Bonham Carter wrote to him: ‘For one who knows as you do what he has to offer the world, it is a very great thing to risk it all as you are doing. So fine a risk to take that I can’t help rejoicing proudly that you should have done it.’30

  Field Marshal French kept his promise to arrange Churchill’s command, and it was agreed that he would train with the Grenadier Guards. Churchill met with the senior divisional officers, who encouraged him greatly. ‘They highly approved of my course of action & thought it vy right & proper’, he wrote to Clementine from St Omer, adding that ‘the Army is willing to receive me back as “the prodigal son”.’31

  On 20 November, Churchill was attached to the second battalion of the Grenadier Guards, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Jeffreys. The battalion was destined for Neuve Chapelle, and Churchill later recalled that first day:

  It was a dull November afternoon, and an icy drizzle fell over the darkening plain. As we approached the line, the red flashes of the guns stabbed the sombre landscape on either side of the road, to the sound of an intermittent cannonade. We paced onwards for about half an hour without a word being spoken on either side.32

  Jeffreys was not pleased to have had Churchill foisted upon him.

  ‘I think I ought to tell you that we were not at all consulted in the matter of your coming to join us,’ he said.33

  Churchill replied respectfully, saying that he’d also had no idea which battalion he would be assigned, ‘but that I dared say it would be all right. Anyhow we must make the best of it.’34

  Upon his arrival at battalion headquarters, a ruin called Ebenezer Farm, Churchill received an icy reception from the troops. Undaunted, he pressed ahead with making the proper introductions, and soon his personality and wit won the day. Before long, he commanded the respect and good wishes of everyone under his leadership – a remarkable feat considering the untenable nature of his situation: an international disgrace, stepping down from the Admiralty under a cloud, and now serving among troops who neither liked nor trusted him. However, on reflection, the years Churchill had spent in Parliament, and the times he had been cast aside by those he once considered friends, had prepared him for this great challenge.

  It will always be a source of pride to me that I succeeded in making myself perfectly at home with these men and formed friendships which I enjoy to-day. It took about forty-eight hours to wear through their natural prejudice against ‘politicians’ of all kinds, but particularly of the non-Conservative brands.35

  On 26 November 1915, Churchill’s career and life once again nearly came to an abrupt end. While serving three miles behind the front lines, he received an unusual but urgent summons from Lieutenant General Richard Haking to meet at Merville. Churchill set off on a dangerous walk ‘across sopping fields on which stray bullets are always falling, along tracks periodically shelled’.36

  A driver was supposed to meet him at the Rouge Croix crossroads, but when Churchill arrived, he found no car and no driver. Finally, hours later, the escort arrived, but without a motor car. Heavy shelling had forced the vehicle off the road, making it late to fetch Churchill. As it turned out, the meeting with the corps commander had been cancelled.

  Annoyed that his time had been wasted, Churchill returned to his previous location behind the lines. He was frustrated that the officer’s order and subsequent cancellation had resulted in ‘dragging me about in rain & wind for nothing’.37 He ‘reached the trenches without mishap’, only to discover that, a mere fifteen minutes after he had left, a German shell had exploded just a few feet from where he had been sitting. The shack-like structure built into the trench was demolished, and one of the three men inside had been killed. ‘When I saw the ruin I was not so angry with the general after all,’ he wrote.38

  THE UNSEEN HAND

  In contemplating his brush with death in the trenches of the First World War, Churchill wrote to Clementine:

  Now see from this how vain it is to worry about things. It is all chance or destiny and our wayward footsteps are best planted without too much calculation. One must yield oneself simply and naturally to the mood of the game and trust in God which is another way of saying the same thing.39

  Churchill could not have known at the time how all of these events, high adventures, miraculous unscathings and even the most dire setbacks and failures were preparing him for the day when his number would be called to step up and lead the free world
against the incursions of tyranny. Yet without his even realizing it, it seems he had adopted a very biblical perspective: ‘Don’t worry about anything’ (Philippians 4.6).

  PART II

  DESTINY

  4

  Hitler’s Vision

  More than a million German soldiers … are drawn up ready to attack … ; and the decision rests in the hands of a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German peoples in their bewilderment have worshipped as a god.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, 30 MARCH 1940

  WHILE LIEUTENANT COLONEL WINSTON CHURCHILL was bonding with his countrymen in the trenches of the Western Front, Corporal Adolf Hitler, on the other side of the conflict, began to pulsate with his own life vision in the muddy, vermin-infested ditches of that same war.

  Though surrounded by death and destruction, the twenty-five-year-old Hitler narrowly escaped harm on several occasions. When his regiment sustained an 83 per cent casualty rate (2,500 men killed, wounded or missing) in its first engagement of the war at Ypres, Hitler walked away ‘without a scratch’.1 As he watched his comrades being blown to bits or dying horribly by breathing poison gas, he noted that none of it touched him. Though eventually he sustained a leg wound from a shell fragment in the Battle of the Somme,2 he began to believe he was ‘predestined for greatness … [and] his sense of invincibility was later reinforced by his survival of several assassination attempts’.3

  Like Churchill before him, Hitler was sixteen years old when he predicted a grandiose role for himself in the future.

  ‘IN THAT HOUR IT BEGAN’

  Hitler’s friend August Kubizek was with him on the night in 1905 when he claimed that his destiny was set and the spirit that would drive it entered into him. ‘It was the most impressive hour I ever lived through with my friend,’ Kubizek noted. ‘It was not a voluntary act but rather a visionary recognition of the road that had to be followed and which lay beyond his own will.’4

  August and Adolf had just come from a performance of Rienzi, Richard Wagner’s five-act opera based on the rise and fall of a fourteenth-century Italian populist politician. Unable to secure seats, they had stood near the pillars in the opera house promenade, ‘burning with enthusiasm, and living breathlessly through Rienzi’s rise to be tribune of the people of Rome, and his subsequent downfall’.5

  It was past midnight before August and the future Nazi leader left the theatre. ‘My friend, his hands thrust into his coat pockets, silent and withdrawn, strode through the streets and towards the outskirts,’ writes Kubizek in his memoir, The Young Hitler I Knew. ‘He looked almost sinister, and paler than ever.’

  Suddenly, Hitler turned and gripped his friend’s hands tightly. ‘His eyes were feverish with excitement,’ Kubizek recalled. ‘The words did not come smoothly from his mouth as they usually did, but rather erupted, hoarse and raucous. From his voice I could tell even more how much this experience had shaken him.’

  When Hitler began to speak, Kubizek was ‘struck by something strange… . It was as if a second ego spoke from within him.’ Even Hitler showed ‘astonishment’ at ‘what burst forth from him with elementary force’. With ‘complete ecstasy and rapture’, he seemed to transfer Rienzi’s character ‘with visionary power, to the plane of his own ambitions’.6

  He conjured up, in grandiose, inspiring pictures, his own future and that of his people… . He was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.

  It was a young man whose name then meant nothing who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him and I, his only listener, could hardly understand what he meant. Many years had to pass before I realised the significance of this enraptured hour for my friend.7

  Decades later, after Hitler had come to power in Germany, Kubizek visited him and they talked about the night they had attended the opera. ‘In that hour it began,’ said Hitler. In fact, Hitler asked for Wagner’s original manuscript of the Rienzi opera, and it was given to him on his fiftieth birthday.

  ‘It is not difficult to see how Hitler might have been mesmerized by Rienzi’s theatrical embodiment of a charismatic Führerprinzip [leadership principle],’ writes the Wagner scholar Thomas Grey. ‘In every step of Rienzi’s career – from [his] acclamation as leader and saviour of the Volk [the German people], through military struggle, violent suppression of mutinous factions, betrayal, and the final immolation at the hands of a world that has failed to follow his vision – Hitler would doubtless have found sustenance for his fantasies.’8

  Hitler and his compatriots, in their hubris, thought they were the heralds of a new order that would cleanse the world of its impurity. With stunning brutality, they pursued their fantastical vision right up until the moment when they were defeated by ‘the world’, led by Winston Churchill. Still, before the full truth of Hitler’s vision came to light, there were sympathizers in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, who watched with interest how the Nazis would implement this new order.

  THE ROOTS OF HITLER’S NAZISM

  During and after the Second World War, specialists tried to construct psychological profiles and histories of Adolf Hitler, hoping to predict, while the war raged, where and how he might strike; or hoping to understand, in the war’s aftermath, how to recognize and prevent the rise of another of his type. But few have delved deeply into Hitler’s spiritual roots. Spirituality gives rise to personal psychology and is the bulb from which the psychological roots spread.

  ‘Hitler’s actions have been given a variety of psychological explanations,’ writes the Tufts University professor and childhood development expert George Scarlett. But ‘they do not add up to explaining how it was possible for this odd man first to seduce a highly educated nation and then to nearly destroy it along with millions of non-Germans’.9

  Both Churchill and Hitler suffered from dysfunctional fathers. Churchill felt the pain of rejection from Lord Randolph’s emotional abandonment, whereas Hitler experienced physical and emotional pain from his father’s violent temperament.

  Anyone who has experienced parental rejection knows that mental and emotional distress can be as severe as physical abuse. Nevertheless, Churchill developed admiration for his father’s public career at least, and aspired to follow in his footsteps. Hitler’s infliction of violence on entire nations may indicate that he never rose above the hatred he felt for his father.

  George Scarlett cautions against taking too narrow a view of Hitler’s formative character. Quoting the psychiatrist Fritz Redlich, Scarlett writes, ‘“To study the psychosocial transactions between Hitler and his followers is a crucial task, perhaps also more feasible than solving the riddle of the inner man.”’10 Scarlett then adds: ‘Hitler does not fit neatly into a psychiatric category, and his problems cannot be derived simply from his childhood early experience… . [His] problems are combinations of psychological and spiritual problems.’11

  Whatever else might be said about Hitler, he was not a crazed religious nut. Labelling Hitler as crazy is tantamount to acquitting him and his legacy by reason of insanity. Hitler was not insane; he was evil. There was a cold calculation behind his actions. Though there is no question that he burned with demonic hatred for the Jews and was driven to exterminate them, there was also the practical matter of needing huge sums of money for the war he was planning, which he would either have to borrow or steal. Persecuting the Jews enabled him also to confiscate their wealth. Hitler’s paintings – which, like any piece of art, is an expression of the artist’s personality – have been criticized for their tedious rigidity. Hitler’s art shows that he was starkly logical, and that is what made him so evil.

  History’s definitive events – both good and bad – are often noted in the Bible and other literature as occurring ‘on that day’, ‘on a certain day’, or at a momentous time that is weightier than others in a given period.12 And so there was ‘a certain day’ w
hen Adolf Hitler became obsessed with the glories of war and unification of the German people. He describes the experience in his autobiographical Mein Kampf :

  Rummaging through my father’s library, I stumbled upon various books on military subjects, and among them I found a popular edition dealing with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. These were two volumes of an illustrated journal of the period which now became my favorite reading matter. Before long that great heroic campaign had become my greatest spiritual experience. From then on I raved more and more about everything connected with war or with militarism.13

  Though Hitler grew up at a time when Western culture was becoming fascinated with industrialization and the emerging concepts of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, there was still a strong mythic influence, primarily from the romanticists and their tales of knights, wizards and grand crusades. This strange syncretism between mechanical and mystical elements is similar to what we find in our own postmodern age, except now the mix is between spirituality and cybernetics.

  For Hitler, the mystical aspect was found in his engagement with occultism. Whereas Churchill’s spiritual foundation was established in large part by his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, Hitler was influenced by occultists such as the founders of the Thule Society, whose major goal was to ‘create a new race of Nordic Aryan Atlanteans’;14 mystics like Guido von List (who linked racial ideology with occultism), Lanz von Liebenfels (who fostered the pro-Aryan views known as Ariosophy) and Rudolf von Sebottendorf (who had studied spiritualist and occult systems in Turkey); and other believers in the occult, including Karl Haushofer, Dietrich Eckart and Helena Blavatsky.

  Hitler’s views were also shaped by the writings of the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche had filled the German mind with the idea of the Superman, the concept that God was dead, and the principle that the primal force in human society was ‘the will to power’.