Gandhi & Churchill (45 page)

Four years earlier, in February 1916, Churchill had been a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, shivering and sloshing knee deep in the muddy water that filled the thousand yards of trenches that his battalion had to defend on the Western Front. He was still in disgrace after Gallipoli. A cold, wet, and forlorn figure under his helmet and waterproof, he spent his time encouraging his men and dodging German shell and small-arms fire. Anyone meeting him in his dimly lit dugout would have assumed they were seeing a failed politician at the end of his tether, in Byron’s words “half in love with easeful death”—or oblivion.

But in less than two years Churchill was back in Parliament and one of the prime minister’s closest advisers. In March 1918, when the Allied front collapsed and all seemed lost, he was the War Cabinet’s principal liaison with the French high command. General Douglas Haig dubbed him “a real gun in a crisis.” When the armistice with Germany was signed in November, he could count himself among the architects of victory. With indomitable will and astonishing speed Winston Churchill had forged himself a second career, just as Gandhi had in India.

The first step had been the Dardanelles Commission report in May 1917, which fixed some of the blame for the Gallipoli disaster squarely on Asquith and Kitchener (who was conveniently dead). Asquith had resigned the previous December, and the new prime minister was Winston’s old friend David Lloyd George. In May 1917 Lloyd George appointed Churchill minister of munitions. It was an enormous and crucial wartime task; the ministry had become in effect the United Kingdom’s largest employer.
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Even his fiercest detractors had to admit that Churchill did well there. He used his position to inspire one of the war’s most important new technologies, the land tank.
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Even so, he remained frozen out of the center of decision-making, the War Council. Distrust of Churchill, especially among Tories, ran so deep that the other members, including Lord Curzon, threatened to resign if he was let in. Only after victory was won in November 1918 was Winston finally appointed to it as secretary of war. He complained that there was not much point to the post if the war was over. Andrew Bonar Law answered for all of them. “If we thought there was going to be a war,” he said pointedly, “we wouldn’t appoint you War Secretary.”
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Nonetheless, it had been an astonishing political rebirth. “None but a first-rate man could survive so many first-rate reverses,” wrote the journalist E. T. Raymond. “There has probably been no fall comparable with his which was not final.” Yet Churchill had managed to recover and find new outlets for “his courage, his war-like tastes…and his facility for espousing new causes and deserting old ones.” Such a Lucifer, Raymond wrote, “should not hope again.”
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Churchill’s second political career looked very different from the first one. Before the war he had enjoyed the reputation of a radical Young Turk. Now, at age forty-five, he was part of the Old Guard. In less than five years he had gone from being fearlessly ahead of his time to being steadfastly behind it. As the 1920s rolled on, he remained self-consciously out of step with the latest public trends.

For if the war had changed India, Britain had changed even more. In 1919 Britons were feeling vulnerable and gun shy. In sheer numbers, Britain’s casualties in the Great War (994,000) were actually less than Italy’s (1.2 million). But the death toll drew disproportionately from the top rungs of English society, from the generation that was supposed to provide stable leadership for a society with a slowing economy and rising social tensions. The values of the Victorian and Edwardian age seemed gone for good. As a character in a novel of the time put it, “The bottom has been knocked out of everything.” Self-confidence was replaced by cynicism, war-weariness, and impatience for change.

Books like John Maynard Keynes’s
Economic Consequences of the Peace
taught Britons that the war they had just fought had been for nothing. Pacifist authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain, and the War Poets told them that such a war must never be fought again. Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
ridiculed the world of their fathers and grandfathers. In the 1920s to be branded as “Victorian” was the equivalent of social death. The future, not the past, was what counted. The war had cleared the way for New Age ideas to enter the cultural mainstream, with a distinctly leftward drift.

The “nonconformist conscience” finally shed its remaining religious clothes and embraced a series of radical causes. Churchill’s erstwhile mentors, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, became cheering acolytes of the “worker’s paradise” of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s Soviet Union. Issues of pacifism, vegetarianism, socialism, anti–blood sports, radical ideas about women and sex—all the stuff of Gandhi’s counterculture London—were suddenly debated in the mainstream. Bloomsbury intellectuals like Strachey and Virginia Woolf; pacifist activists like Vera Brittain and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson; radical churchmen like Hewlett Johnson; writers like D. H. Lawrence; and even Labour politicians like Stafford Cripps and Lord Snowden—all were probably closer in their cultural views and attitudes to Gandhi than to a proud standard-bearer of the past like Winston Churchill.

Politics had changed, too. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 tripled the size of the electorate by giving the vote to men over twenty-one and women over thirty.
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This meant not only an expanded role for women, whom the war had turned into a workforce and a political presence that could no longer be ignored; it hugely increased the influence of Britain’s trade unions, especially in the Labour Party. The Labour Party’s share of the vote exploded. Its returns in the 1922 general election were double its tally in 1918–and ten times its returns before the war.
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Labour’s leaders were poised to replace the Liberals as the second party of politics, at a time when they and their trade union supporters were anxious to match the strident militancy of the new self-declared spokesman for the working class, the Communist Party. Indeed, by 1920 Communism too had a presence on British soil and in the political landscape.

Britons felt insecure and uncertain as never before. To a war-weary public, the key to security and peace seemed to be no longer the Royal Navy or the British Army but institutions like the League of Nations. The British Empire itself, it was believed, must eventually give way to something more voluntary and inclusive, the British Commonwealth.
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The old idea of British sovereignty was dead, killed in the trenches of the Somme and on the beaches of Gallipoli. Enlightened minds like the Imperial Institute’s Lionel Curtis assumed that humanity’s future would be multilateral, epitomized by the League of Nations, and that eventually even that body and the British Commonwealth would have to give ground to a single world government. Some took an even longer view, arguing that Western civilization’s days as the dominant force on the planet were numbered. In the cynical words of Curtis’s protégé Arnold Toynbee, “We will all be Dagos when the world is ruled from China.”
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Churchill would have none of this historical relativism and self-doubt. “You’re not going to get your new world,” he told David Lloyd George (who was something of a New Ager himself)
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in January 1920. “The old world is a good enough place for me, and there’s life in the old dog yet.”
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Churchill had filled his mind with the solid Victorian furniture of his father’s generation—the values of the father he had worshipped but never known. He was determined to uphold the very things that Bloomsbury and the New Agers despised. He was determined to uphold the empire that the Victorians had built, the greatest the world had ever seen, as well as the ideals, like the superiority of the British race, that underpinned it. “He cared for the Empire profoundly,” his friend Max Aitken remembered, “and he was honestly convinced that only by his advice and methods could it be saved.”

“I am an Imperialist,” he confessed to his friend Wilfred Blunt.
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The rejection of “the white man’s burden” in books like E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
and George Orwell’s
Burmese Days
seemed to Churchill a profound failure of nerve. As war secretary, Churchill set a defiant, even reactionary tone, launching a one-man battle against the prevailing pessimism of his day.

Even with the war over, his job was daunting. He had to demobilize nearly three million men, while finding money to pay for an army of occupation in Germany and another in Persia, plus 100,000 troops in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Turkey, not to mention 70,000 British troops in India.
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The army budget shrank by more than 70 percent. Mutinies had broken out in several barracks—in one of them nearly five thousand Tommies had demanded their immediate release from military service.
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For the first time Britain faced a sharp disconnect between its imperial commitments and its means. After World War II British politicians would solve the problem by shedding commitments. In 1919 Churchill’s impulse was to keep or increase commitments, while cutting expenditures to the bone.

This policy forced him to continue conscription, while insisting that army and air force planners assume that Britain would not fight a major war in the next ten years. That approach seemed reasonable in 1919, but the so-called Ten Year Rule (which applied to the Admiralty as well) slowed the modernization of Britain’s armed forces to a crawl (with disastrous consequences later).
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Elsewhere Churchill’s instinct was to hold the line—and to use force whenever possible. When the cabinet debated cutting back on troops in Persia, he vigorously opposed any rollback, agreeing with Lord Milner that “if we lost Persia we should lose Mesopotamia and then India.”
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As Ireland slid into insurrection and sectarian violence, Churchill ordered hiring ex-veterans on the cheap to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary. These paramilitary squads, the so-called Black and Tans, conducted savage reprisals against the Irish insurgency. It was one of Britain’s gravest missteps in that centuries-old conflict. But Churchill preferred deploying the Black and Tans to having to pay for more regular troops, or negotiating a settlement with the IRA.
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He was even more belligerent on the issue of Soviet Russia. He pushed hard for Britain to intervene in the Russian Civil War and to back anti-Bolshevik White forces against the Reds, “the armed enemies of the existing civilization of the world.” Left to themselves, Churchill insisted, Lenin and Trotsky would unleash their fanatical hordes across Europe and the East, even rampaging to the gates of India. A permanent Soviet Union would be a global disaster, in addition to a threat to the empire. Communism, he warned, was “a ghoul descending from a pile of skulls…It is not a creed; it is a pestilence.”
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In later years, in the shadow of Stalin, these words would seem prescient. But to Lloyd George and others in the cabinet in 1919, Churchill’s view smacked of the Russophobia of Randolph Churchill and the Victorian Raj. They worried their war secretary had “Bolshevism on the brain,” while his incessant push for military intervention stood to risk a second Gallipoli. So against Churchill’s advice, the cabinet voted to withdraw British troops from the Allied expeditionary force in Archangel and Murmansk. In February 1920 the Reds had largely won the civil war and their armies threatened Warsaw and Constantinople.

It was in the midst of this international turmoil and tension that the Amritsar incident suddenly dropped into Churchill’s lap.

As war secretary, it was his duty, not New Delhi’s, to decide General Rex Dyer’s ultimate fate. For complicated reasons, a formal court-martial was out of the question.
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The instinct among the uniformed members of Churchill’s Army Council, including Commander in Chief Sir Henry Wilson, was to leave things as they were. They believed the morale of the Indian Army, not to mention the security of India, would suffer if the army took any punitive action against the general, especially at the behest of a band of interfering “baboos.”

But Churchill’s reaction to the Hunter report was the exact opposite. Ordinarily he was a stickler on law and order in the empire even at the price of blood. His record on Ireland made that clear. But as he read the details of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, of unarmed civilians mowed down without warning or mercy, his sense of justice was shaken. In private, he said what Dyer had done was nothing less than murder.
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In public, he adopted the word used by one of the judges on the Hunter Commission: that Dyer had committed an act of “frightfulness.” Translated: the shootings had been a deliberate act of terror, not a defense of empire. In effect, he agreed with Gandhi that Amritsar violated everything British civilization stood for. As he told an audience earlier that year, the British Empire could not and would not survive “if the British name was not held in high repute as being a name associated with fair dealing and…the general peace and well-being of mankind”—words Gandhi himself might have used ten years earlier.
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So Churchill was determined to see Dyer punished or at least removed from the army. But as secretary of war he could take no action without the support of his Army Council, whose sympathies ran quite the other way. In addition, Conservatives and pro-imperialists across the country lauded Dyer’s actions. The Punjab’s Sikhs, fearful that the mob might have attacked their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, had even voted to make Dyer an honorary Sikh. Many Britons believed that Dyer had prevented another Cawnpore. “Englishmen decline, and rightly so, to take any chances so far as their wives and daughters are concerned,” wrote the
Daily Mail
. “We do not wonder that the name of General Dyer is universally held in honor at the present moment by Englishwomen in Northern India.”
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