The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (113 page)

Churchill’s own homelife was erratic that year, chiefly because of his frequent and prolonged absences, but also because they had to move again. Income from leasing the Eccleston Square house was indispensable, so they found a tenant and moved into Winston’s aunt Cornelia’s house at 3 Tenterden Street, just off Hanover Square. Here Clementine gave birth to another redheaded daughter, Marigold, who promptly became “the Duckadilly.” Except during her confinement Clementine was busy with war work, running canteens, though she made sure she was always home when Winston could be there. And wherever he was, she was always in his thoughts. Writing from the Ritz when the crown prince was advancing on Paris, he told her: “Weather permitting & the rest of it I propose to fly to Kenley Aerodrome Wed or Thursday. I will send you notice. Try to be at Lullenden so that we can be together.” The zeppelins over England worried him far more than the Krupp shells bursting near him: “This vy clear weather & the state of the moon will certainly expose you to danger,” he wrote, urging her to stay in the country. “I do not like to think of you & the kittens in London.” On June 3, the day after he had introduced a regular, scheduled air service between England and France, he wrote her of the maiden flight: “My darling, I had a touching vision of you & yr kittens growing rapidly smaller and the aerodrome & its sheds dwindling into distant perspective as I whirled away.”
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The love letters of statesmen rarely stand the test of time. They tend to be mawkish, fatuous, and distorted by the egocentricity which usually fuels great political achievement. Lloyd George was a man of intellect and vision. The war diminished him, as it attenuated the leaders of all belligerent powers, but what remained was still impressive. His mistress was a charming, cultivated Irishwoman. His missives to her ought to be moving. They aren’t. Typically he wrote her, in that summer of 1918: “When I woke up at 6 my first thought was of the loving little face engraved on my heart & I had a fierce thought to go there & then to cover it with kisses. But darling I am jealous once more. I know your thoughts are on roast mutton & partridge & chicken & potatoes & that you are longing to pass them through the lips which are mine & to bite them with luscious joy with the dazzling white teeth that I love to press. I know that today I am a little out of it & that your heart is throbbing for other thrills…. Your very jealous old Lover.” Frances had told him she was hungry, and that had inspired this.
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Churchill, who in public had far less control over his emotions than Lloyd George, sent Clementine notes that are stirring even now. This year marked their tenth wedding anniversary. “Ten years ago my beautiful white pussy cat you came to me,” he wrote her from the Château Verchocq. “They have certainly been the happiest years of my life, & never at any moment did I feel more profoundly & eternally attached to you. I do hope & pray that looking back you will not feel regrets. If you do it [is] my fault & the fault of those that made me. I am grateful beyond words to you for all you have given me. My sweet darling I love you vy dearly.” Then, in a second letter: “I reproach myself vy much for not having been more to you. But at any rate in these ten years the sun has never yet gone down on our wrath. Never once have we closed our eyes in slumber with an unappeased difference. My dearest sweet I hope & pray that future years may bring you serene & smiling days, & full & fruitful occupation. I think that you will find real scope in the new world opening out to women, & find interests wh will enrich yr life. And always at yr side in true & tender friendship as long as he breathes will be your ever devoted, if only partially satisfactory, W.”
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He was, as he acknowledged, an imperfect husband, less considerate of her than the tone of his letters to her suggests. To abide by his wishes constantly, as she did, was a sign of strength and forbearance not found in all wives. In following his star he sometimes hurt her deeply. She shared his mortification when he was in political eclipse. That could not be helped. But he could have spared her much. When he needlessly courted death she writhed in her bed, dreaming him dead. He could have commuted to France by sea. Instead, he flew at every opportunity. She shouldn’t worry, he told her: “It gives me a feeling of tremendous conquest over space, & I know you wd love it yourself.”
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If he really believed he was not taking risks, he was deceiving himself. Her anxiety was fully justified. In the aircraft of 1918 eventual mishaps were inevitable. He was defying the law of averages, flying to the front every morning and returning to work at the Metropole through the evening. Once his plane caught fire over the Channel. Another of his planes somersaulted after takeoff; the pilot made a forced landing. Later, when he was piloting himself in a dual-control aircraft over Croydon airfield, the guiding stick failed. Their speed was about sixty miles per hour and they were seventy or eighty feet above the ground. The plane nose-dived and crashed. Winston’s copilot was badly injured; he himself was bleeding and badly bruised. Nevertheless, he insisted on driving off and delivering a speech. Those who urged him to see a doctor were curtly dismissed.

He did not like to be told what to do. He was climbing into a cockpit, puffing on a cigar, when his flier reminded him that when they became airborne the cigar would be extremely dangerous. He scrambled down, flung the butt on the airstrip, and stamped on it. One evening in France he and Eddie Marsh were driving to his château in a Rolls-Royce. It was a trying journey, as Marsh described it in his diary: “First a tyre burst with one of those loud bursts which make one think one has been assassinated—and then… Winston gave a wrong direction, left instead of right, at a crossroad.” The chauffeur protested, Churchill abruptly put him in his place, “and on we went in the dark, on and on literally for kilometres between the close hedges of the roadside, it must be the original ‘long lane that has no turning.’ It’s impossible to imagine anything more comical and provoking.” Eventually they turned around and got on the right road. Churchill accepted none of the blame. Eddie wrote: “The climax of Winston’s cursing was, ‘Well, it’s the most absolutely f——ing thing in the whole of my bloody life.”
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He expected to live as he pleased, doing exactly what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, assuming that others would alter their plans to suit his. He couldn’t get away with it when dealing with, say, Lloyd George or Clemenceau, but that was only because their authority exceeded his. When he was top man, which was most of the time, he exercised his prerogatives. On another automobile trip, this time near the front, Marsh wrote: “Winston was attracted by the sight of shells bursting in the distance—irresistible! Out we got, put on our steel helmets, hung our gas-masks round our necks, and walked for half-an-hour towards the firing. There was a great deal of noise, shells whistling over our heads, and some fine bursts in the distance—but we seemed to get no nearer, and the firing died down, so we went back after another hour’s delay. Winston’s disregard of time, when there’s anything he wants to do, is sublime—he firmly believes that it waits for him.”
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Visiting him after the uproar over his return to the cabinet, Hankey had noted in his diary: “On the whole he was in a chastened mood. He admitted to me that he had been ‘a bit above himself’ at the Admiralty, and surprised me by saying that he had no idea of the depth of public opinion against his return to public life, until the appointment was made.” But humility was foreign to him, and it didn’t last. In the spring of 1918 he made a naked attempt to widen his domain. At present, he wrote Lloyd George, “the War Cabinet alone have the power of decision & the right of regular & continuous consultation.” Moreover, most of the great offices “are filled by Tories.” He proposed that the prime minister “fortify” himself by appointing “a proper Cabinet of responsible Ministers,” independent of the War Cabinet, to determine policy. He wrote: “I do not seek this power.” But that is precisely what he
was
seeking. He declared: “Certainly I will never accept political responsibility without recognized regular power.” He was not only accepting it, but seizing it, at every opportunity. He sent Lloyd George several memoranda appealing for responsibilities and prerogatives which would have increased his authority. The prime minister didn’t even reply.
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Despite his small significance and slight influence at the Ministry of Munitions, at least one of his fellow ministers regarded him as “a dangerously ambitious man.” Everyone recognized his enormous potential. Like Krakatau, he was capable of erupting at any moment. But he was also curiously inconsistent. More than any other man he had recognized the folly of the trench deadlock on the western front. His proposed solutions, the Dardanelles and then the tank, had revealed an imaginative genius unique among the belligerent parties on both sides. He sensed that the terrible slaughter of the rising generation could destroy Europe’s world hegemony and undo the bonds of the British Empire. Yet he still believed in military glory, still thrilled to the sound of bugles and drums. In the summer of 1918 he could tell a meeting of the Anglo-Saxon Fellowship in London: “I am persuaded that the finest and worthiest moment in the history of Britain was reached on that August night, now nearly four years ago, when we declared war on Germany.”
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John Squire of the
New Statesman,
a friend of Marsh’s, wanted to meet him, and Eddie introduced them in the lounge of the Savoy. Later Squire set down his impressions of Churchill: “He has enormous qualities, especially the primary quality of courage; one defect—the defect of romanticism—or rather, since romanticism may be good, of
sentimentalism.
You don’t sum up Russia by calling Lenin a traitor, or by calling munitions workers well-fed malcontents. That is melodrama.” Yet, he added, “I have met many politicians; this is the first one who was alive.” Squire, a poet and literary critic, had missed the one source of Churchill’s political strength which, one feels, he should have identified immediately. It wasn’t courage; bravery is common. What distinguished Winston was his remarkable mastery of the language. As he used it, the English tongue was a weapon and a benediction. It fascinated him; he adored it, and could spend hours musing over its charms and the ways to employ it with maximum effect. Gilbert Hall, one of Winston’s young pilots, later recalled a dinner at his château: “One could never predict what Mr Churchill would come up with next. During a lull he suddenly, without any warning, uttered the word ‘stunt.’ ‘Stunt,’ ” he repeated. “ ‘That’s a remarkable word, and it has come to stay.’ ” He asked each of his guests to define it while he rolled his cigar across the top of his coffee cup. “The cigar,” Hall remembered, “was held between the first finger and thumb of each hand and he practiced this untiringly and I think unconsciously for long periods, meanwhile commenting on our efforts to define this wonderful new word ‘stunt’ that had come over to us from America.”
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L
udendorff had not abandoned his Flanders dream. He was maneuvering for position, hoping for a
Siegessturm,
a stroke of victory, while Foch, on the other side of no-man’s-land, was planning a general offensive. Haig, resentful of being subordinate to a French generalissimo, schemed alone. His relationship with Churchill had improved. Winston’s conduct during Ludendorff’s March offensive had, in Haig’s opinion, proved that he was “a real gun in a crisis.” The general intended to use 456 of Churchill’s newly arrived tanks east of Amiens on Thursday, August 8, and Winston decided to go over and watch. “We had a very pleasant fly over,” he wrote Clementine, “and passed fairly close to Lullenden. I could follow the road through Croyden and Caterham quite easily.”
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Thick morning mist veiled the tanks, and the British advanced six miles, a spectacular achievement. But the infantry and cavalry—Haig had insisted on sending in horsemen—couldn’t keep up with the machines. Here, as on the Somme in 1916 and at Cambrai in 1917, German resistance to the clanking new weapon stiffened and the line re-formed. Churchill, however, was elated. He wrote Lloyd George that the assault had been “a very great success which may well be the precursor of further extremely important events…. It seems to me that this is the greatest British victory that has been won in the whole war, and the worst defeat that the German army has yet sustained.” He thought Haig should be congratulated. The prime minister disagreed. George believed that the general had lost a golden opportunity: “Had Haig flung his army into the gap created and pursued the broken and demoralised Germans without respite, an even greater victory was within his grasp. When the enemy was scattered and unnerved, and their reserves were not yet up, Haig did not press forward with relentless drive and the Germans were given time to recover and reform their lines.”
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Both Lloyd George and Churchill were right. Haig had bungled; he wasn’t prepared for a breakthrough. Nevertheless, the significance of the tanks’ brief breakthrough was profound. “It is a commonplace in military history,” writes Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, “that there exists a continuity between the closing phase of one war and the opening phase of the next: the weapons and the ideas invented or formed toward the end of one armed conflict dominate the first stage of the next conflict.” And the tank attack of August 8, 1918, we now know, was the turning point in the war’s last convulsion. Ludendorff later called it “the black day of the German army.” It meant that the sacred Hindenburg line had been breached—only briefly, to be sure, but what had happened once could happen again. When the news was brought to Ludendorff’s headquarters (situated, ironically, in the Hôtel Britannique), he leapt to his feet and began cursing, not the Allies, but the kaiser, the Reichstag, the German navy, and the civilians on the home front. A. J. P. Taylor notes that the tank assault that Thursday deprived the German strategist of nothing “vital from a strategical point of view.” His position was intact, some useless salients had been abandoned, the new trench complex was stronger, and Allied casualties had, as usual, been heavier than those of the defenders. “The real effect,” Taylor writes, “was psychological. It shattered the faith in victory which, until that moment, carried the Germans forward. The German soldiers had been told that they were fighting the decisive battle. Now they realized that the decision had gone against them. They no longer wanted to win. They wanted only to end the war.” In their great 1918 offensives the Germans had lost 688,000 men. “They were worn down,” Churchill said later, “not by Joffre, Nivelle and Haig, but by Ludendorff.”
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