The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (20 page)

In that sense, you could argue that he helped save Britain from fascism not once, but twice. It was important, that walk around the slums of Manchester in 1906. Go there today and you see chic little bars and trendy young people in cool gear who look as though they must be something to do with the city’s burgeoning tech sector. Ask them what they believe in, politically, and I expect it will be some variant of capitalism with a human face.

Churchill adopted this strategy not just because it was right for the empire or the economy or for himself as a politician, but because he was genuinely compassionate. He was never a brute, whatever Labour myth may say.

Then there is a further point we must now settle about the psyche of the man; a question that goes to the heart of the whole debate about Churchill that sputters on to this day. We need to be absolutely sure of the purity of his motives, as he prepared to steer the country in 1940.

I mean we need to know what he thought and felt about that primal act in which our species was probably born—and yet which seems so alien to most of my mollycoddled generation. There are some (perhaps many) who say that a crucial part of the Churchill Factor was his sheer willingness to make war.

CHAPTER 12

NO GLORY IN SLAUGHTER

W
ar is the father of all things, said Heracleitus. War certainly fathered Churchill the hero. But was Churchill himself the father of wars? And was he as rampantly and gleefully philoprogenitive as some have suggested?

Let us go back to the end of the war to end wars. It was 9 August 1918, and though no one could quite see it at the time, the most shameful war yet recorded was about to enter the last convulsions of slaughter. With the help of 600 tanks the British Expeditionary Force had made dazzling gains at Amiens, surging through the barbed wire and grinding over the mud and the mangled corpses for a distance of, wait for it, eight whole miles in a single day. Thousands of Germans had been killed, thousands captured.

As so often in those days, we find Churchill in France, staying at the Château Verchocq. Ostensibly this was so he could observe the distribution of munitions—his job as Minister for Munitions—at first hand. In reality, one suspects, it was because he could not bear to be far from the centre of the action. He was driving towards the
headquarters of the Fourth Army, and he passed some five thousand captured Germans: their eyes vacant with shock, their heads down, their skin still blackened with explosive. As he went by, Churchill noted that he ‘
could not help feeling sorry for them in their miserable plight and having marched all those miles through the battlefield without food or rest, and having been through the horrors of the fight before that’.

This was perhaps a bit odd. The British successes had been remarkable—but there was no reason, as far as he could tell in August 1918, to think that they would be decisive. He had been gloomy about the prospects of the war, and had predicted that it wouldn’t end before 1919 at the earliest. The Germans were capable of inflicting continued mayhem on the British. Indeed, they would do so until the final whistle.

The sight of so many defeated and captured enemy soldiers should therefore have filled him with exhilaration, a fierce pleasure that the Boche was finally on the run. Instead—he felt for their misery. It became ever clearer that this was no false dawn. Germany was really losing the war, had all but lost; and Churchill was unlike many other lesser politicians.

He was radiantly unvindictive. Where they were petty, he was great hearted; where they proposed retaliation, he was eirenic. By November 1918, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Germans had signed the armistice. The country was in chaos. The Kaiser had fled; influenza raged; communist insurrections were paralysing the cities—and partly as a result of the British blockade on German ports, there were huge numbers on the verge of starvation.

One November night Churchill found himself at dinner in London with his chums—F. E. Smith, the Attorney General, and Lloyd George, the Prime Minister. News was brought to them of the
German hunger. Lloyd George wanted to leave the former enemy to suffer; Churchill said twelve ships full of food should be sent over immediately.

Lloyd George said they should shoot the Kaiser. Churchill said no. Four months later, in 1919, the German position was worse—and we find Churchill complaining in the Commons that it was repugnant to use starvation as a weapon against women, children and the elderly. He wanted the blockade lifted as soon as possible, and a peace deal done with Germany.

Finally they agreed the terms at Versailles—with their demands for vast and unpayable reparations from Germany. Churchill was at odds with Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, the US President, in seeing the essential folly of what had been done. The terms were too harsh. ‘
The economic clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile,’ he said later. This is not only prescient; it tells us something about character and instinct.

In the preface to his history of the Second World War, Churchill gives us his famous maxim that a nation should show ‘in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill’. This is not just cant. It is really how he was. One of the biggest calumnies that has been directed at Churchill is that he was too warlike, bellicose,
va t’en guerre
, that he almost literally snorted and snuffed and stamped the ground and rolled his eyes like a mettlesome steed at the very thought that there might be the chance of a dust-up.

It is quite easy to see why people make this charge. Scrunch up your eyes and look back at the really big events of the first half of the twentieth century—what might be called the Churchillian epoch. It is dominated by the First and Second World Wars, the two most disgraceful and destructive conflicts humanity has ever engaged in. The First World War left a total of 37 million people dead across the
world, including about a million British. A generation of talented young men was liquidated in the fields of Flanders—many of them pulverised or left in gigantic anonymous ossuaries like the one at Verdun.

The Second World War killed even more—60 million dead, and half a million British. Britain had been physically and emotionally pounded. The nation had lost a quarter of its wealth. When you look at the scale of those catastrophes, you have to ask yourself who was at the wheel at the time. To an extent that we have half forgotten these days, Churchill was integral not just to the management of one conflict, but both of them. Indeed, as they recede from us in time, they look more and more like a single event; fought over the same ground, with the same patterns, the same sorts of causes, and at least in one giant case the same personality at the top. Throughout those eleven years of butchery he was the shaping political and military intellect of the nation that began the century as the greatest military power on earth; and which ended the Second War with just about everything cruelly reduced except the reputation of the Prime Minister. He was the man who got the fleet ready for the First World War, and who conceived and promoted Britain’s only original strategic contribution (which ended in further catastrophe). He personally directed the action in the Second World War, in a way that seems bonkers to us today.

He was a warlord, and the suggestion is that he was also therefore a warmonger—someone who so relished war that he actually helped to provoke the conflict that made him famous. That was the suspicion of that Tory wife, who wrote that he was another Goering, pumped up with bloodlust. That was the fear of a Conservative MP who wrote in 1934 that he was an extraordinary personality—‘
a man with such power that he constitutes a definite menace to the peaceful solutions of the many problems with which this country is confronted’.

Today we think of him as the incarnation of moral rectitude—a man who had the courage to stand up to tyranny and yet to remain good natured, humane, democratic, rubicund, fundamentally benign and English in his moderation. That is broadly right; but in the run-up to the war he exuded for many people a dark charisma, a satanic optimism about the possibilities of violence; and even today there are those who believe that beneath the jovial image is more than a touch of Darth Vader—or possibly even the Emperor Palpatine.

It is not so long ago that the
New York Times
best-seller list featured a curious diatribe by Pat Buchanan, in which he accused Churchill of a ‘lust for war’ in 1914, and argued—if argued is the word—that Britain should simply have stood by in 1939 and watched the Nazis enslave the rest of Europe. Buchanan said that Churchill was far more militaristic than the Kaiser or any of his heel-clicking
Junkers
, adding (perhaps correctly) that by 1914 ‘
Churchill had seen more war than any soldier in the German army’.

Or take the views of another palaeo-conservative, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a former editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, who recently wrote: ‘
seldom has there been a statesman as good at glorifying war, and as indecently eager to wage war, as Winston Churchill. All his works demonstrate his love of war, glamorise its glories and minimise its horrors.’ Sir Peregrine is entitled to respect; he actually fought in the Second World War. But I am afraid his views just do not square with reality, or with the complexity of Churchill’s nature.

Agreed: he was excited by war. He had a naturally emotional and romantic reaction to the drama, the scale of the event. When Sir Edward Grey made his speech to the Commons on 3 August 1914—on the eve of the First World War, when the lamps went out across Europe—Churchill wept. Asquith the Prime Minister noted his
mood, and with some disapproval. ‘
Winston has got all his war paint on and is longing for a sea fight . . . the whole thing fills me with sadness.’ Slightly more indulgently, Asquith’s wife Margot said, ‘Winston is longing to be in the trenches—dreaming of war, big, buoyant, happy even. He is a born soldier.’ Churchill even blurted to Margot that he found war ‘delicious’—instantly pleading with her not to repeat the remark—and was heard to say that peace was the last thing we should pray for. Many others noted his energy, his bounce, and the gleam of purpose in his eye.

It is unquestionably true that Churchill loved war in this obvious sense, that without war he knew there could be no glory—no real chance to emulate Napoleon, Nelson or his ancestor Marlborough himself. He knew how war and its risks had lifted men and painted everyday deeds with fame. That was why, as a young man, he had plunged himself so headlong into battle—while watching the newspaper accounts out of the corner of his eye. War sent the adrenalin spurting from his glands, and of course when he was fighting—when his blood was up—he wanted to hit the enemy as hard as he possibly could. At Harrow the fencing judges had noted his lunging attacks. Churchill believed, correctly, that if you get into a fight, you have got to let your enemy know that they are losing, and you have got to make the point with whatever tools you have available. He was ruthless in the application of violence.

We have just had a high-minded international debate about modern Syria’s use of chemical weapons, a practice that everyone has rightly abominated. During the course of this debate hardly anyone sought to mention the role of our national hero in encouraging the use of gas in the First World War. He wanted to gas the Turks at Gallipoli, and one of his biggest contributions as Minister for Munitions was to ensure—within the space of a month in 1918—that a third of
the shells fired by British guns contained mustard gas. He was so keen on mustard gas, in fact, that his generals positively had to restrain him from using it in the Second World War as well.

Churchill not only sent thousands to die at Gallipoli (‘
your father killed mine at the Dardanelles’, as one Eton boy said to his son Randolph when he arrived at the school). He ordered the destruction of the French fleet in 1940, he unleashed area bombing on Germany—he took decisions that a modern politician would find unthinkable, and he did it all with brio and self-confidence. And yet it is surely obvious that there is still an overwhelming difference between a person fighting hard when he comes under attack, and a person being so belligerent that he is himself the cause of conflict. There is a difference between aggression and resistance; or at least, between attack and counter-attack.

Of course he wanted personal kudos in the late Victorian imperial wars. That doesn’t mean he approved of the causes in which he enlisted. Remember his disgust at Kitchener’s treatment of the Mahdi’s tomb, or his attack on the ‘
criminal and cowardly’ war on the North-West Frontier. He detested unprovoked imperialist aggression and jingo. He didn’t believe in war for the sake of mere colonial expansion. He took these liberal views from the Victorian battlefield into Edwardian government.

One morning in February 1906 he was at work as a junior minister in the Colonial Office when he was interrupted. A visitor was outside. Eddie Marsh had tried to give her the brush-off, but she was having none of it. She was a tall, rather handsome woman called Flora Lugard, and she was a kind of Boadicea of the British Empire. A former Colonial Editor of
The Times
, she had actually coined the name ‘Nigeria’, so baptising that vast country, and was known to be as hard as nails. She was lately married to a noted slaughterer of the natives by the name of Sir Frederick Lugard, and her mission was to tell the
young ‘
boy’ (as she described Churchill) how he should damn well run West Africa. Her answer was that he should give it as a satrapy to her husband and herself, so that they could run it the way they wanted: sometimes from London, sometimes on the spot, and always with lavish use of the best and most well-oiled modern weapons.

She found that the ‘boy’ knew exactly who she was, and he knew all about her husband. He had already noted the way the walrus-moustached Sir Frederick conducted himself—the grass huts torched, the thousands of defenceless tribespeople he had killed with shells and bullets. Churchill had written that the ‘chronic bloodshed’ was ‘ridiculous and disquieting’. ‘The whole enterprise is likely to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and the stealing of their land,’ he said. He told Flora Lugard—fairly politely—that he did not approve of her approach. So began an ideological feud. He quashed the Lugards’ plan to be the tsar and tsarina of a ‘sultry Russia’ in West Africa. Lugard was sent packing to Hong Kong. Flora Lugard protested, to anyone who would listen, that Churchill was wrong; that power flowed from the barrel of a gun, and that hers was the only way you could run a place like Africa.