Authors: Winston Churchill
Never Give In! (26 page)
3 October 1936
Memorial unveiling, Oxford High School
Lawrence of Arabia had been a personal friend of Churchill’s over many years. Frequently, and often unannounced, he would arrive at Chartwell on his motor cycle for Sunday lunch with Churchill and his family. It had been Lawrence who, dressed in Arab garb, had masterminded and inspired the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War.
Although more than a year has passed since Lawrence was taken from us, the impression of his personality remains living and vivid upon the minds of his friends, and the sense of his loss is in no way dimmed among his countrymen. All feel the poorer that he has gone from us. In these days dangers and difficulties gather upon Britain and her Empire, and we are also conscious of a lack of outstanding figures with which to overcome them. Here was a man in whom there existed not only an immense capacity for service, but that touch of genius which every one recognises and no one can define. Whether in his great period of adventure and command or in these later years of self-suppression and self-imposed eclipse, he always reigned over those with whom he came in contact. They felt themselves in the presence of an extraordinary being. They felt that his latent reserves of force and will power were beyond measurement. If he roused himself to action, who should say what crisis he could not surmount or quell? If things were going very badly, how glad one would be to see him come round the corner.
Part of the secret of this stimulating ascendancy lay of course in his disdain for most of the prizes, the pleasures and comforts of life. The world naturally looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independently of the ordinary currents of human action; a being readily capable of violent revolt or supreme sacrifice; a man, solitary, austere, to whom existence is no more than a duty, yet a duty to be faithfully discharged. He was indeed a dweller upon the mountain tops where the air is cold, crisp, and rarefied, and where the view on clear days commands all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.
Lawrence was one of those beings whose pace of life was faster and more intense than what is normal. Just as an aeroplane only flies by its speed and pressure against the air, so he flew best and easiest in the hurricane. He was not in complete harmony with the normal. The fury of the Great War raised the pitch of life to the Lawrence standard. The multitudes were swept forward till their pace was the same as his. In this heroic period he found himself in perfect relation both to men and events.
I have often wondered what would have happened to Lawrence if the Great War had continued for several more years. His fame was spreading fast and with the momentum of the fabulous throughout Asia. The earth trembled with the wrath of the warring nations. All the metals were molten. Everything was in motion. No one could say what was impossible. Lawrence might have realised Napoleon’s young dream of conquering the East; he might have arrived at Constantinople in 1919 or 1920 with most of the tribes and races of Asia Minor and Arabia at his back. But the storm wind ceased as suddenly as it had arisen. The skies were clear; the bells of Armistice rang out. Mankind returned with indescribable relief to its long interrupted, fondly-cherished ordinary life, and Lawrence was left once more moving alone on a different plane and at a different speed.
In this we find an explanation of the last phase of his all too brief life. It is not the only explanation. The sufferings and stresses he had undergone, both physical and psychic, during the war had left their scars and injuries upon him. These were aggravated by the distress which he felt at which he deemed the ill-usage of his Arab friends and allies to whom he had pledged the word of Britain, and the word of Lawrence. He was capable of suffering mental pain in an exceptional degree. I am sure that the ordeal of watching the helplessness of his Arab friends in the grand confusions of the Peace Conference was the main cause which decided his renunciation of all power, and so far as possible of alt interest in great public affairs.
In this premature retirement he had to lay hold of detailed tasks wherewith to fill the days and the hours. The writing of his book
The Seven Pillars
was a powerful solace to him. To all of us it is one of the treasures of English literature.
The Seven Pillars
as a narrative of war and adventure, as a portrayal of all that the Arabs mean in the world, is unsurpassed. It ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language. It is not, I think, excessive to class it in interest and charm with
Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe,
and
Gulliver’s Travels.
If Lawrence had never done anything except write this book as a mere work of the imagination his fame would last, in Macaulay’s familiar phrase, ‘as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.’ But this was a book of fact, not fiction, and the author was also the commander. When most of the vast literature of the Great War has been sifted and superseded by the epitomes, commentaries, and histories of future generations, when the complicated and infinitely costly operations of ponderous armies are the concern only of the military student, when our struggles are viewed in a fading perspective and in truer proportion, Lawrence’s tale of the revolt in the desert will gleam with immortal fire.
When this literary masterpiece was written, lost, and written again; when every illustration had been profoundly considered and every incident of typography and paragraphing settled with meticulous care; when Lawrence on his bicycle had carried the precious volumes to the few – the very few – he deemed worthy to read them, happily he found another task to his hands which cheered and comforted his soul. He saw as clearly as anyone the vision of air power and all that it would mean in traffic and war. He found in the life of an aircraftman that balm of peace and equipoise which no great station or command could have bestowed upon him. He felt that in living the life of a private in the Royal Air Force he would dignify that honourable calling and help to attract all that is keenest in our youthful manhood to the sphere where it is most urgently needed. For this service and example, to which he devoted the last 12 years of his life, we owe him a separate debt. It was in itself a princely gift.
If on this occasion I have seemed to dwell upon Lawrence’s sorrows and heart-searchings rather than upon his achievements and prowess, it is because the latter are so justly famous. He had a full measure of the versatility of genius. He held one of those master keys which unlock the doors of many kinds of treasure-houses. He was a savant as well as a soldier. He was an archaeologist as well as a man of action. He was an accomplished scholar as well as an Arab partisan. He was a mechanic as well as a philosopher. His background of sombre experience and reflection only seemed to set forth more brightly the charm and gaiety of his companionship, and the generous majesty of his nature. Those who knew him best miss him most; but our country misses him most of all; and misses him most of all now. For this is a time when the great problems upon which his thought and work had so long centred, problems of aerial defence, problems of our relations with the Arab people, fill an ever larger space in our affairs. For all his reiterated renunciations I always felt that he was a man who held himself ready for a Call. While Lawrence lived one always felt – I certainly felt it strongly – that some overpowering need would draw him from the modest path he chose to tread, and set him once again in full action at the centre of memorable events. It was not to be. The summons which reached him, and for which he was equally prepared, was of a different order. It came as he would have wished it, swift and sudden on the wings of Speed. He had reached the last leap in his gallant course through life.
All is over! Fleet career.
Dash of greyhound slipping thongs,
Flight of falcon, bound of deer,
Mad hoof-thunder in our rear,
Cold air rushing up our lungs,
Din of many tongues.
King George the Fifth wrote to Lawrence’s brother ‘His name will live in history.’ Can we doubt that that is true? It will live in English letters; it will live in the traditions of the Royal Air Force; it will live in the annals of war and in the legend of Arabia. It will also live here in his old school, forever proclaimed and honoured by the monument we have today unveiled.
12 November 1936
House of Commons
This must be counted one of the most powerful and devastating of Churchill’s attacks on the Baldwin Government, that was dithering with Britain’s defences.
I have, with some friends, put an Amendment on the Paper. . . . It is the same as the Amendment which I submitted two years ago, and I have put it in exactly the same terms because I thought it would be a good thing to remind the House of what has happened in these two years. Our Amendment in November 1934 was the culmination of a long series of efforts by private Members and by the Conservative party in the country to warn His Majesty’s Government of the dangers to Europe and to this country which were coming upon us through the vast process of German rearmament then already in full swing. The speech which I made on that occasion was much censured as being alarmist by leading Conservative newspapers, and I remember that Mr Lloyd George congratulated the Prime Minister, who was then Lord President, on having so satisfactorily demolished my extravagant fears.
What would have been said, I wonder, if I could two years ago have forecast to the House the actual course of events? Suppose we had then been told that Germany would spend for two years £800,000,000 a year upon warlike preparations; that her industries would be organised for war, as the industries of no country have ever been; that by breaking all Treaty engagements she would create a gigantic air force and an army based on universal compulsory service, which by the present time, in 1936, amounts to upwards of thirty-nine divisions of highly equipped troops, including mechanised divisions of almost unmeasured strength, and that behind all this there lay millions of armed and trained men, for whom the formations and equipment are rapidly being prepared to form another eighty divisions in addition to those already perfected. Suppose we had then known that by now two years of compulsory military service would be the rule, with a preliminary year of training in labour camps; that the Rhineland would be occupied by powerful forces and fortified with great skill, and that Germany would he building with our approval, signified by treaty, a large submarine fleet.
Suppose we had also been able to foresee the degeneration of the foreign situation, our quarrel with Italy, the Italo-German association, the Belgian declaration about neutrality – which, if the worst interpretation of it proves to be true, so greatly affects the security of this country – and the disarray of the smaller Powers of Central Europe. Suppose all that had been forecast – why, no one would have believed in the truth of such a nightmare tale. Yet just two years have gone by and we see it all in broad daylight. Where shall we be this time in two years? I hesitate now to predict.
Let me say, however, that I will not accept the mood of panic or of despair. There is another side – a side which deserves our study, and can be studied without derogating in any way from the urgency which ought to animate our military preparations. The British Navy is, and will continue to be, for a good many months to come, at least equal in numbers and superior in maturity to the German Army. The British and French air forces together are a very different proposition from either of those forces considered separately. While no one can prophesy, it seems to me that the Western democracies, provided they are knit closely together, would be tolerably safe for a considerable number of months ahead. No one can say to a month or two, or even a quarter or two, how long this period of comparative equipoise will last. But it seems certain that during the year 1937 the German Army will become more numerous than the French Army, and very much more efficient than it is now. It seems certain that the German air force will continue to improve upon the long lead which it already has over us, particularly in respect of long-distance bombing machines. The year 1937 will certainly be marked by a great increase in the adverse factors which only intense efforts on our part can, to any effective extent, countervail.
The efforts of rearmament which France and Britain are making will not by themselves be sufficient. It will be necessary for the Western democracies, even at some extension of their risks, to gather round them all the elements of collective security or of combined defensive strength against aggression – if you prefer, as I do myself, to call it so – which can be assembled on the basis of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Thus I hope we may succeed in again achieving a position of superior force, and then will be the time, not to repeat the folly which we committed when we were all-powerful and supreme, but to invite Germany to make common cause with us in assuaging the griefs of Europe and opening a new door to peace and disarmament.