The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (10 page)

One consolation I had—my pistol. I could not be hunted down unarmed in the open as I had been before. But a disabling wound was the brightest prospect. I turned, and, for the second time in this war, ran for my life on foot from the Boer marksmen, and I thought to myself, ‘Here at last I take it.’ Suddenly, as I ran, I saw a scout. He came from the left, across my front; a tall man, with skull and crossbones badge, and on a pale horse. Death in Revelation, but life to me.

I shouted to him as he passed: ‘Give me a stirrup.’ To my surprise he stopped at once. ‘Yes,’ he said, shortly. I ran up to him, did not bungle in the business of mounting, and in a moment found myself behind him on the saddle.

Then we rode. I put my arms around him to catch a grip of the mane. My hand became soaked with blood. The horse was hard hit; but, gallant beast, he extended himself nobly. The pursuing bullets piped and whistled—for the range was growing longer—overhead.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ said my rescuer; ‘they won’t hit you.’ Then, as I did not reply, ‘My poor horse, oh, my poor horse; shot with an explosive bullet. The devils! But their hour will come. Oh, my poor horse!’

I said, ‘Never mind, you’ve saved my life.’ ‘Ah,’ he rejoined, ‘but it’s the horse I’m thinking about.’ That was the whole of our conversation.

Judging from the number of bullets I heard I did not expect to be hit after the first 500 yards were covered, for a galloping horse is a difficult target, and the Boers were breathless
and excited. But it was with a feeling of relief that I turned the corner of the further kopje and found I had thrown double sixes again.

This isn’t Gibbon. This isn’t sham-Augustanism. It is more like something from the pages of Victorian adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard: crisp, punchy, full of the kind of wham-bam short sentences that keep the reader moving down the page. Churchill could do action reporting better than many of the greatest modern exponents—and he had the inestimable advantage of being able to use the first person.

He could do the
Boy’s Own
stuff. He could sound, when he chose, like an extract from
The Wonder Book of Daring Deeds
. But Churchill had so many more shots in his journalistic locker. He could do the meditative passages as well: the evils of Islamic fundamentalism; the horrors of war. Sometimes he was angry—and angry at his own side.

His description of the aftermath of Omdurman, where he made that famous charge, is one that lives in the eye and in the nostrils: the machine-gunned corpses lying three deep, men still living but already putrefying; men dying of thirst but crawling pathetically towards the Nile; here a man with one foot who has covered a mile in three days; here a man with no legs who is making 400 yards a day.

It has long been a theme of imperial writing—since the ancient Romans—to dwell tearfully on the sufferings of the subject peoples, and thereby to intensify the triumph of the conquering race. But Churchill takes it a stage farther, actively bashing the British authorities and their bland assurances. ‘The statement that “
the wounded dervishes received every delicacy and attention” is so utterly devoid of truth that it passes into the realms of the ridiculous,’ he wrote.

He publicly abuses Kitchener for his conduct of the war. He slates him for desecrating the tomb of the Mahdi, and for keeping his head as a trophy—allegedly in a tin of kerosene. Churchill’s criticism was justified, but it was outrageous and hubristic.

Kitchener was his Commander-in-Chief, the man he had personally assisted, on the morning of the battle (though there is some doubt as to whether Kitchener knew that the officer he was talking to was the notorious Churchill). Kitchener was not some has-been; he was to go on and command British forces in the First World War.

Here he was—being rubbished by some jumped-up young officer in his own army. Churchill infuriated the generals because he seemed to be riding at once with the hare and the hounds. He was using his military status to get into the action—and then slagging them off. Mind you, Kitchener should have known better. Churchill had done it before—and everyone knew it.

This is how he repaid Sir Bindon Blood for his kindness in taking him on with the Malakand Field Force. He blasted the expedition in a letter to his mother, saying ‘
financially it is ruinous, morally it is wicked, militarily it is an open question and politically it is a blunder’, and the important thing is that he said more or less the same in public. He ended his final
Daily Telegraph
article, a dispatch from Nowshera on 16 October 1897, with this gloomy analysis: ‘
It is with regret that I do not see any sign of permanency in the settlements that have been made with the tribesmen . . . They have been punished, not subdued; rendered hostile, but not harmless. Their fanaticism remains unshaken, their barbarism unrelieved.’

How was that supposed to cheer up the
Telegraph
reader? At other points he is more gung-ho about the whole business; but no wonder his superior officers never recommended him for a Victoria Cross—in spite of all his ostentatious and sometimes lunatic bravery. No
wonder Kitchener was so leery of having him along to the Sudan—only giving way, it seems, in 1898, when a friend of Jennie’s wrote to him, saying: ‘
Hope you will take Churchill: guarantee he won’t write.’ Ha! That was a good one, eh?

Who knows what shameless undertakings Jennie gave to this woman, or to her friends in the British military—but her son passed the first and most important test of a journalist. He put the reader first.

He told the story as he saw it. He opened his heart. Of course, he wasn’t some anti-imperialist and anti-Western campaigner—some precursor of the famously anguished reporters of the Vietnam War. He was a passionate believer in empire. But that did not mean he could ignore what he saw: the superior fighting spirit and marksmanship of the Boers; the evil of the Maxim gun.

No one has ever unpicked the essential honesty of his accounts. Harold Nicolson was later to say of him, in another context, that it was among his many virtues that he ‘
cannot really tell lies’. That verdict needs some qualification: he certainly sometimes stretched things in wartime. But in his journalism there was a genuine determination to get to the heart of things.

I say: stuff his snobbish detractors. When did Evelyn Waugh write a dispatch that was half as good as Churchill’s reports from Malakand or the Sudan? The reason Churchill has lasted, and the reason his phrases are still on people’s lips, is that he could deploy so many styles: not just the pseudo-Gibbonian periods, but Anglo-Saxon pith.

Some chicken, some neck. Fight them on the beaches. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

Often he is orotund and Augustan, but the phrases for which he is remembered are masterpieces of compression. He loved new words
as much as he loved new machines. He was entranced, for instance, on first hearing the word ‘stunt’, imported from America. ‘Stunt. Stunt,’ he kept saying, rolling it around his mouth and announcing that he would use it at the earliest opportunity.

He was one of the great linguistic innovators of recent times. When world leaders meet to discuss a crisis they might have a SUMMIT at which they discuss the MIDDLE EAST or possibly the risk that Russia will create a new IRON CURTAIN. All three are neologisms either invented or championed by Churchill. Sometimes he could be Gibbonian; sometimes he was more of a funky Gibbon; but he was always fertile, and he was fast.

It began very early. Indeed, it is one of the myths about Churchill that he was always backward at school. Even at his prep school in Brighton, in 1884, he came top in classics. Take
his first ever essay at Harrow, on the subject of Palestine in the time of John the Baptist. Here he is on the Pharisees. ‘Their faults were many. Whose faults are few? For let him with all the advantages of Christianity avouch that they are more wicked than himself, he commits the same crime of which he is just denouncing them.’

That is pure Churchill. The Pharisees were famously savage in their judgements of others; but if we judge them harshly we are ourselves pharisaical! Paradox! Even at the age of twelve or thirteen he is groping for epigrams. Long before he went to India and spent his long afternoons reading Gibbon and Macaulay, he had memorised 1,200 lines of the
Lays of Ancient Rome
.

He had all the rhythms of English imprinted on his silicon chip, and together with a vocabulary that has been estimated at 65,000 words—most people have a half or a third of that number—he had an unbeatable tool to serve all his interconnected purposes and ambitions.

It was a way of dramatising and publicising himself; he could
operate his own spotlight. Unlike any other young hussar, he could ensure that there was a long and gripping account of his bravery, because he would supply it. And like his father, he could use his facility with words to deal with a financial position that was almost always precarious.

—

T
HE
C
HURCHILLS WERE
not poor. That description would be absurd. But as ducal families go, they hadn’t much ready income—the fortune being more or less tied up in Blenheim. In spite of her long list of male admirers (her conquests have been reckoned to number 200, though Roy Jenkins thinks this number ‘
suspiciously round’), Jennie was not especially good at converting their attentions into cash; and at one stage Churchill was forced to take legal action against his mother to stop her squandering his—and his brother Jack’s—inheritance.

Sure,
his income from writing was vast by the standards of the day. His early success was continued, with average earnings of £12,883 between the years 1929 and 1937—about ten or twelve times what a prosperous professional could hope to make. But his outgoings were epic.

The bill from his wine merchant alone was three times the earnings of a male manual worker of the time. He had to pay for the upkeep of Chartwell, whose comforts included a Neronian circular outdoor pool that he kept heated, all year round, to a temperature of 75 degrees—a feat that necessitated a coke-fuelled boiler on the same scale as that of the House of Commons.

There is something gloriously unstingey about his approach to life: he once boasted that there had never been a time when he had not been able to order a bottle of champagne for himself and one for a friend. Sometimes, though, he was driven to all kinds of hack work,
just to pay the bills. At one stage the
News of the World
commissioned him to condense and rehash a series of classic novels, under the title
Great Stories of the World Retold
.

It was not, as he himself confessed, an ‘artistic’ success. But what the hell: he was paid £333 per piece; or rather, he was paid £333, while his long-suffering secretary Eddie Marsh, who really did them, was paid £25. And then there were the awful depredations of the taxman—and here the scholarship of Peter Clarke has unearthed some spectacular manoeuvres.

As he was perfectly entitled to do, Churchill believed in keeping up the writing even when he was a minister of the Crown. He kept working on
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, for instance, even when he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924. But he nonetheless decided (or some brilliant accountant decided) that for tax purposes he had ceased, at the moment of putting on his father’s Chancellor’s robes, to be an ‘author’, and that the huge payments he was receiving—totalling £20,000—should be classified not as income but as ‘capital gains’.

Which had the preposterous result that he didn’t pay a penny of tax! Pol Roger all round.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, he would often say, quoting Dr Johnson; but of course in his case that was far from true. He also wrote because his temperament demanded it.

His creative-depressive personality meant that writing (or painting, or bricklaying) was a way of keeping the ‘black dog’ of depression at bay. He wrote for that sensation of release that comes with laying 200 bricks and writing 2,000 words a day.

Above all, he wrote his journalism and history and biography because for Winston Churchill writing was—to adapt Clausewitz on war—the continuation of politics by other means. These torrential literary efforts were his most potent weapons in his various
campaigns, whether against Indian independence or against complacency about Hitler.

He could dramatise events and personalities in a way that was given to few other politicians, adding the emotion and colour that suited his cause. Neville Chamberlain fatefully said that Czechoslovakia was a faraway country of which we know little. Churchill had the literary and imaginative skill to bring the tragedy home—even to people who had never thought much about Czechoslovakia at all.

By the time he came into Downing Street in May 1940 he had written and read so much history as to have a unique understanding of events, to see them in context, and to see what England must do. J. H. Plumb mocked what he saw as Churchill’s simplistic understanding and complacent belief in British greatness.

‘
The old Whig claptrap echoes in chapter after chapter,’ he said—and by that he means to attack the central idea that guided Churchill all his life: that there was something special about the rise of England, and of liberty in England: the process by which freedoms were won from the Crown, the growth of a sovereign and democratic Parliament.

Huh, said J. H. Plumb: ‘
The past is a pasteboard pageant that indicates nothing and does not signpost the future.’ Well, I look at the world today, and I think Plumb is wrong about that. Look at the fringes of the former Soviet Union, look at what is happening in the countries of the Arab Spring—I think most people would say that those ideals are still being fought for and are still worth fighting for.

It was greatly to the advantage of this country and the world that Churchill was able to articulate that vision with such confidence. He knew what England, for all her faults, had given the world—and that gave him his certainty of eventual victory.