The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (102 page)

His mother begged him to “be sensible” and “take the trenches in small doses”—as though he could manage that. Jennie felt close to him now; like his father at about the same age, he had quit the cabinet in disgrace. But Winston was unresponsive to her; his daily missives went to Clementine. In a typical letter from a rear area he began: “I sit in a battered wicker chair within this shell scarred dwelling by the glowing coals of a brazier in the light of an acetyline lamp.” The grenadiers had been “hunted by shells during these last two days in ‘rest billets.’ ” His bedroom had been pierced by shells three times; a nearby church steeple, which had withstood sixteen months of fighting, had been obliterated. “One lives calmly on the brink of the abyss,” he wrote. He had come to understand how the unremitting strain transformed men, their first ebullience fading and leaving only “dull resentment.” The infantrymen he had spoken to during his trench tours sensed the “utter inability to take a decision on the part of the Government…. Some urge me to return and try to break them up. I reply no—I will not go back unless I am wounded; or unless I have effective control.” Clementine was the one constant, indispensable figure in his squalid trench life. He endorsed virtually all of her political judgments; she was his “vy wise & sagacious pussy cat.” Once several days passed with no mail from Cromwell Road; he signed himself “your vilely neglected pig.” His letters to her often read like those of a child writing home from camp, and like a camper he made many small demands: “I want 2 more pairs of thick Jaeger draws [sic] vests & socks (soft), 2 more pairs of brown leather gloves (warm) 1 more pair of field boots (like those I had from Fortnum & Mason) only from the fourth hole from the bottom instead of holes there shd be good strong tags for lacing quicker. One size larger than the last. Also one more pair of Fortnum & M’s ankle boots…. With these continual wettings and no means of drying one must have plenty of spares…. Also send me a big bath towel. I now have to wipe myself all over with things that resemble pocket handkerchiefs.”
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She eagerly complied. Her need was as great as his, her worry greater. When he wrote her of his aborted rendezvous with the corps commander, she replied in anguish: “It is horrible to sit here in warmth & luxury while danger & suffering are so close to you. That dreadful walk across the fields there & back among falling shells was on Nov. 24th & now it is 10 days later & Heaven knows what narrow escapes you may have had since.” One of Winston’s cousins—his aunt Clara’s daughter Clare, who, like Venetia Stanley, had been a bridesmaid at their wedding—had just learned that her husband had been killed in France. Clementine wrote: “My darling, I don’t know how one bears such things. I feel I could not weather such a blow. She has a beautiful little son 8 weeks old, but now her poor ‘black puss’ sleeps in Flanders. You
must
come back to me my dear one.” She prayed that he wore “a steel helmet always & not the Glengarry.” She had “ceased to have ambitions for you. Just come back to me alive that’s all.” She loved him “very much more even than I thought I did—for Seven years you have filled my whole life & now I feel more than half my life has vanished across the channel.” She wondered: “If I came to Dieppe could you get 2 days’ leave? I’m very very lonely.” Dieppe proved impossible, but later he slipped home from time to time. Like all wartime couples they desperately sought privacy during their brief hours together, once in Dover Pier’s dreary Lord Walden Hotel and once in Cromwell Road, after which they had to cut it rather fine at Victoria Station. In her note to him that evening one recognizes the powerful tug between the shadow of death and the light of desire: “I could not tell you how much I wanted you at the station. I was so out of breath with running for the train.”
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L
ove letters should not be taken literally. Their very language is hyperbole. Winston did not really mean that he was determined to stay at the front until either wounded or recalled to high office. Nor had Clementine forsaken her hopes for his career. Both saw future greatness for him on a far shore; the problem was to navigate the bewildering currents between here and there. Sir John French’s promise of a brigade—four thousand men—might provide a way. A brilliant stroke in the field could bring acclaim, a reversal of his political fortunes, and, conceivably, a chance to change the direction of the war. “The hour of Asquith’s punishment and K’s exposure draws nearer,” he wrote his wife. These “wretched men,” he went on, “have nearly wrecked our chances. It may fall to me to strike the blow. I shall do it without compunction.”
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“I long for you to have a Brigade,” she wrote back. But she had misgivings. The leap from major to brigadier general was a mighty one. Lord Cavan counseled caution. Lead a battalion first, he advised Winston; get the feel of handling troops and then take on the greater responsibility. Clementine thought that wise: “I am absolutely certain that whoever is C. in C., you will rise to high commands…. But everyone who
really
loves you & has your interest at heart wants you to go step by step whereas I notice the Downing Street tone is ‘of course Winston will have a brigade in a fortnight.’ Thus do they hope to ease their conscience from the wrong they have done you, and then hope to hear no more of you…. Do get a battalion
now
& a brigade later.”
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Upon reflection, he agreed. The field marshal, however, wouldn’t hear of it. Churchill wrote: “I proposed to French that I shd take a battalion; but he rejected it, & said ‘no a brigade at once’ & that he wd settle it quickly in case any accident shd happen to him. I have acquiesced.” One doubts he had been hard to persuade. He was dreaming of glory on the battlefield. On December 2 Edward Grigg, a grenadier officer, wrote his mother: “Winston was attached to the Company again for all the last period in the firing line. It was very cold and very wet—first a bitter frost, and then rain, sleet and thaw, which puts us up to the calf in mud and slime. That part of the line is in bad order, too, and we had nothing but a small dug-out about 2 ft 6 high with a wet mud floor to live and sleep in, and we all got kinks in our spines getting in and out of the beastly thing. But Winston accepted the situation with great cheerfulness and we had quite a good time. He has forgotten his political legacy from Lord Randolph, and thinks much more, I am sure, of the military instincts which have descended to him from the great Duke of Marlborough.”
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Later in the month he was summoned to GHQ. French was in England, he was told, but his appointment as brigadier general was definite. He would command the Fifty-sixth Brigade in the Nineteenth Division, which, he wrote home, “is a regular Division in the second new army, & the Bde I shall command comprises 4 Lancashire Battalions…. Altogether it is a vy satisfactory arrangement.” He anticipated some “criticism & carping” at home, but no more than if he had taken a battalion for a few weeks, in which case it would have been said that he had used it “merely as a stepping stone etc.” He was “satisfied this is the right thing to do in the circumstances, & for the rest my attention will concentrate upon the Germans.” Spiers would be his brigade major; Eddie Marsh, he hoped, would be brought over in one capacity or another. He asked Clementine to order a new tunic bearing a brigadier’s insignia. She, for her part, forgot her qualms, and wrote back that she was “thrilled.”
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Not everyone in London was thrilled. Over lunch, in the crowded grillroom of the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, Lord Esher, just back from Saint-Omer, told her: “Of course you know Winston is taking a Brigade & as a personal friend of his I am very sorry about it; as I think he is making a great mistake. Of course it’s not his fault, Sir John forced it upon him.” She put all this in a letter to her husband, adding: “He then launched forth again, saying that you had been in the greatest danger, in more than was necessary etc & that French had determined to give you this Brigade as he was convinced you wd otherwise be killed. After this I crawled home quite stunned & heart-broken.” Churchill himself was unsurprised; he had begun to appreciate the unpopularity of the appointment. At GHQ Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “Winston came up this morning to my room & had a long talk. I advised him
not
to take a Brigade as it would be bad for Sir John, Winston and the Brigade, but I did not convince him.”
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Sir Henry was dissembling—a complex man, he couldn’t even be candid in his diary—for by then he surely knew that Sir John was beyond help or harm. At that moment the commander in chief was facing the music in Downing Street, the victim of bad strategy, worse tactics, an impossible war, and, to some extent, the disloyal intrigues of his senior subordinate, Sir Douglas Haig. Asquith wrote that he “had for some time felt past fears and growing doubts as to Sir John French’s capacity to stand the strain of his task with its ever-increasing and unforseeable responsibilities.” So he dismissed him. Before they parted, French mentioned that he had given Churchill a brigade, and, according to him, “Asquith said he was delighted.” But the prime minister was also a political weather vane, and he shortly learned that rumors of Churchill’s promotion had already aroused hostility in Parliament. Sir Charles Hunter, a Tory MP with a military background, rose at Question Time to ask “if Major Winston Churchill has been promised the command of an Infantry brigade; if this officer has ever commanded a battalion of Infantry; and for how many weeks he has served at the front as an Infantry Officer.” After an interval the under secretary of state for war deftly replied: “I have no knowledge myself, and have not been able to obtain any, of a promise of command of an Infantry brigade having been made to my right hon[orable] and gallant Friend referred to in the question.” Having “consulted books of reference and other authentic sources of information,” he had found that his gallant Friend had never commanded a battalion. As to the time he had been in combat, “the answer to the last part of the question would be about four weeks.” The House laughed. Hunter then demanded to know if Churchill had been assured of a battalion command. Several of Winston’s friends cried, “Why not?” Sir Charles Robertson, a former India army officer and an admirer of Churchill’s, inquired sarcastically: “Is not the question absurd on the face of it, Major Winston Churchill being under sixty years of age?” But another Tory MP, Evelyn Cecil, ended the exchange on a venomous note, asking: “Is the right hon[orable] Gentleman aware that if this appointment were made it would be thought by very many persons both inside and outside this House a grave scandal?”
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Aitken had the impression that this “apparently frightened The Block.” He also heard that Bonar Law had expressed “unswerving antagonism to Churchill,” arguing that “to give Churchill an influence on the conduct of affairs in France would be a disaster,” and that Lloyd George “would not give any countenance to projects for Churchill’s preferment.” If true—Aitken was a prodigious gossip—this is puzzling, for when Law and George visited Haig at GHQ a month later, they told the new commander in chief that if he saw fit to give Winston a brigade there would be “no difficulty at home.” Whatever the pressures, Asquith swiftly buckled. He sent a note to French, who had not yet been formally relieved, saying that on reflection, far from being delighted, he feared that “with regard to our conversation about our friend—the appointment might cause some criticism” and was therefore inadvisable. “Perhaps,” he added, “you might give him a battalion.” Dismayed and embarrassed, French phoned Churchill at GHQ. “I have something extremely unpleasant to say,” he began, and then he read the prime minister’s veto. Winston was astonished. If he had wanted a battalion, he could have had it long ago; six months earlier, when the Dardanelles was winding down, he had been offered one in the QOOH. Churchill had just finished a letter to Clementine when the field marshal’s call had been put through. He unsealed the envelope and added on a slip marked “later”: “I reopen my letter to say that French has telephoned from London that the P.M. has written to him that I am not to have a Brigade but a Battalion. I hope however to secure one that is going into the line. You will cancel the order for the tunic! Do not allow the P.M. to discuss my affairs with you. Be vy cool & detached and avoid any sign of acquiescence in anything he may say.” She instantly replied: “My Dear—your letter has just come telling me that your hopes of a Brigade have vanished. I do trust that Haig will give you one later. If he does it may be all for the best—but if not it is cruel that the change at G.H.Q. came before all was fixed…. My own Darling I feel such absolute confidence in your future—it is your present which causes me agony—I feel as if I had a tight band of pain round my heart.”
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Winston’s resentment deepened. “I am awfully bitter and so is French,” he wrote F. E. Smith; “what ill-fortune.” Brooding, he wrote Clementine: “To measure Asquith’s performance one has to remember that on my leaving the Admiralty he offered me a Brigade: & that when I told him three months ago of the offers French had made to me if I came out to the front, he advised me to go and assured me that any advancement wh was thought fitting by the C in C would have his hearty concurrence. One has to remember all the rest too of a long story of my work & connexion with him. Altogether I am inclined to think that his conduct reaches the limit of meanness & ungenerousness. Sentiments of friendship expressed in extravagant terms; coupled with a resolve not to incur the slightest criticism or encounter the smallest opposition—even from the most unworthy quarter. Personally I feel that every link is severed: & while I do not wish to decide in a hurry—my feeling is that all relationship should cease.” Clementine loved and honored her husband, but she did not always obey him. “You know I’m not good at pretending,” she wrote him, “but I am going to put my pride in my pocket and reconnoitre Downing Street.” Nothing came of it. Winston was unsurprised. The prime minister was a “weak and disloyal chief,” he said; “Asquith will throw anyone to the wolves to keep himself in office.” During a winter thaw, she accepted an invitation to join the Asquiths at Walmer Castle and wrote Winston of how they could “distinctly hear the rumble of heavy guns” across the Channel. She played golf with “the Prime who was feeling very pleasant & mellow… at one moment [I] thought I was going to give the boy a good beating (which I shd have relished) but Alas! I fell off towards the end & he won by a short length.” Winston reproached her mildly for going and asked what Asquith had said. She replied: “You know what the P.M. is—He loathes talking about the War or work of any sort—He asked anxiously if you were happy.”
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