The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (116 page)

As it turned out, the men weren’t needed, but the precedent had been set. The King’s statesmen brooded. Most of his British subjects, however, gave the issue neither first nor second thought. Imperialism, so thrilling a creed only a few years earlier, had lost its charisma. They simply didn’t care. The young in particular were more concerned with finding a home and a steady job. Labour, now the most exciting of the parties, was either indifferent toward the Empire or downright hostile. Newspapers found that events in England’s far-flung possessions bored their readers. “Back to 1914”? They wanted no part of it. The chairman of the Empire Day Committee acknowledged that Britons were simply incurious about the “many dark corners where the rays of our Empire sun have not been able to penetrate.” Philip Guedalla discovered that in the early 1920s the doctrine of Imperialism attracted merely “a dim interest [among] research students.”
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Intellectuals jeered at values
fin de siècle
Britain had held sacred. Lytton Strachey’s sardonic, sniggering
Eminent Victorians
was an immediate success when it appeared in 1918. His next book,
Queen Victoria,
which presented its subject as a trivial, quirky woman, became required reading in universities between the wars. And the generals, who had seemed mighty only yesterday, were left to the merciless pens of cartoonists.

Sometimes a social event, wholly divorced from political considerations and affairs of state, can illumine the mood of a time. In this sense, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is immensely instructive about the temper of postwar England. Assembled at the terminus of the London underground railway at a cost of £4,000,000, it dwarfed Britain’s last great fair, the Crystal Palace. Pavilions celebrated the genius of the imperial peoples, the fair managers enlisted Kipling to acclaim imperial glory, and Edward Elgar provided the music, which largely comprised various renditions of his “Land of Hope and Glory.” Tibetan trumpeters blew bugle calls. The tomb of Tutankhamen was reconstructed, he being, as W. S. Gilbert would have put it, a sort of British ancestor by purchase. Visitors traveling on the exhibition’s Never-Stop Railway passed beneath thousands of massed Union Jacks, and Lord Milner expressed the conviction that Wembley would prove a “powerful bulwark” against subversives who would undermine the Empire. The King himself went on the radio to hawk its attractions. (“This great achievement reveals to us the whole Empire in little….”) The exhibition, solemnly conceived, should have reaffirmed Britain’s confidence in its imperial destiny.
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It didn’t. It became a joke. The most popular feature had been lifted from an American carnival. “I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire,” a Noel Coward character told his children, “and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems.” P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster drawled: “I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia—but not Bertram…. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast Village and were looking towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indies section.” The intellectuals of Bloomsbury and Hampstead, solidly anti-imperialist, organized a group called the WGTW, the Won’t Go To Wembleys. Mayfair’s Bright Young Things, soon to find their minstrel in Evelyn Waugh, treated it, James Morris wrote, “as a spree.” They performed naughty acts in the Nigerian Handicrafts Exhibition—“Did you Wemble?” they slyly asked one another, and if you nodded it meant you had performed a lewd act under the eyes of the wogs—after which the bobbies usually released them, because the boys bore patrician names and so many of the naked girls turned out to be widows of the Glorious Dead. “A great empire and little minds,” Edmund Burke had said in 1775, “go ill together.” Now T. S. Eliot wrote: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
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C
hurchill watched all this and grieved. In the notes for a speech to his constituents he wrote: “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been. How terrible & how melancholy is the long series of disastrous events wh have darkened its first 20 years. We have seen in ev country a dissolution, a weakening of those bonds, a challenge to those principles, a decay of faith, an abridgement of hope on wh structure & ultimate existence of civilized society depends…. Can you doubt, my faithful friends, as you survey this sombre panorama, that mankind is passing through a period marked not only by an enormous destruction & abridgement of human species, not only by a vast impoverishment & reduction in means of existence but also that destructive tendencies have not yet run their course?”
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Honor, as he understood it, seemed dead in England, and gone with it were innocence, rationalism, optimism, and the very concept of an ordered society. He asked almost pathetically: “Why should war be the only purpose capable of uniting us? All for war—nothing is too good for war. Why cannot we have some of it for peace?” An age, the age he had adored, appeared to have reached journey’s end, and journeys no longer ended in lovers meeting. The government seemed to need, not diplomats, but economists, of whom he knew almost nothing. The disposition of the British public was a backlash against everything he cherished, and he found that hard to bear. “I was,” he wrote, “a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was growing ever stronger.” Now that was threatened, and threatened from within. He reflected that the “shadow of victory is disillusion. The reaction from extreme effort is prostration. The aftermath even of successful war is long and bitter.” These, he realized, would be years of “turbulence and depression.” But he would soldier on. Surely the great imperial strengths, tradition and continuity, could not be long denied. Eventually the tide would turn. He was certain of it. It never crossed his mind that the ebb might be permanent—that he and all he cherished would, in the end, be stranded forever.
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He continued to think of the Empire as an “old lion, with her lion cubs by her side,” and while he could shrug off the Stracheys and the Wodehouses and the WGTW as temporary abhorrences—he could never have accepted the Wembley circus as a metaphor for imperial majesty anyhow—he was deeply angered by any retreat from the distant frontiers of what he regarded as Britain’s rightful realms. When Curzon supported Milner’s recommendations for Egyptian sovereignty, Winston passed him a note: “It leaves me absolutely baffled why you shd be on this side, or why you shd have insisted on keeping Egyptian affairs in yr hands”—Curzon had been an able imperial administrator as viceroy of India (1898–1905) and foreign secretary (1919–1921)—“only to lead to this melancholy conclusion. It grieves me profoundly to see what is unfolding.” In a City of London speech on November 4, 1920, he sounded paranoid, hinting at a sinister “world-wide conspiracy against our country, designed to deprive us of our place in the world and rob us of victory.” He did not see how, in the long run, such a plot could succeed: “Having beaten the most powerful military empire in the world, having emerged triumphantly from the fearful struggle of Armageddon, we should not allow ourselves to be pulled down and have our Empire disrupted by a malevolent and subversive force, the rascals and rapscallions of mankind… now on the move against us. Whether it be the Irish murder gang, or the arch-traitors we had at home, they should feel the weight of the British arm. It was strong enough to break the Hindenburg line; it will be strong enough to defend the main interests of the British people.”
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Confronted by foes, he was always like this: galloping, mud-spattered, high in oath. But once a foe was down, he sprang from his saddle and extended a helping hand. Had Arthur reappeared in modern Britain, Churchill would have been his Galahad. It is not without significance that he loved round tables and always had at least one in each of his several homes. His faith in gallantry ran deep. Years later he told his physician how, at the end of an engagement on the western front, when one of his tank crews had to surrender to the enemy, the Germans saluted them and complimented them on their valiant fight. He smiled. He said: “That is how I like war to be conducted.” Even in the last weeks of 1918, when the popular slogans were “Hang the Kaiser!” and “Squeeze them till the pips squeak!” he repeated his watchwords: “In victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” He agreed with the Germans that the Versailles terms had been dictated by the victors; he would have preferred a negotiated settlement. “I was all for war,” he told Bernard Baruch when they met. “Now I’m all for peace.” In a long memorandum to himself he concluded that both sides had been guilty of atrocities unprecedented in war between civilized states. Germany had been “in the van,” but had been “followed step by step” by Britain, France, and their allies. “Every outrage against humanity or international law,” he wrote, “was repaid by reprisals—often of a greater scale and of longer duration” than Germany’s. “No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries…. Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilised scientific Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.” Nor had the Armistice ended it. Relief for the prostrate nations was wholly inadequate. All they were accomplishing, he told a friend, was the return of victims “again and again to the shambles. Nothing is wasted that can contribute to the process of waste.”
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It is a sign of Churchill’s stature as a politician that what he wrote in private, and said to friends, he repeated from the platform when campaigning for office. Immediately after the Armistice, Lloyd George called England’s second khaki election of the century. Winston told his constituents that the Germans must be clothed, sheltered, and fed, that the triumphant Allies ought not “to be drawn into extravagances by the fullness of their victory.” He particularly deplored staggering reparations. Immediately James K. Foggie, a leading Dundee Liberal, wrote him: “I think the great card to play & one which will give you a huge victory, is that you declare, ‘that Germany must pay this country & the other allied Nations, all expenses caused by the War.’ Germany started the War, & has been defeated, therefore it stands to reason she must pay. Had Germany beaten our Empire she certainly without doubt, would have made us pay all expenses. Dundee will stand for nothing else. Dundee has given over 30,000 soldiers. Almost 20%… have been killed.” Doubtless Foggie spoke for an overwhelming majority of the Dundee electorate, but Churchill wouldn’t budge. As it happened, it didn’t matter. Lloyd George’s timing had been precise. The coalition was swept back into office—though the Tories had outpolled the Liberals for the first time in thirteen years, and Labour strength was growing.
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Winston had been reelected by what his bitterest adversary in the constituency, the Tory Dundee
Advertiser,
called the “immense majority” of 15,365. Clearly he was entitled to a more prestigious cabinet post. His stubborn courage in adversity since Gallipoli, his capacity for taxing work, his brilliance and force—all argued strongly against extending his exclusion from the government’s highest councils. He wanted to return to the Admiralty but realized that was impolitic. The War Office was available, however; Milner was moving to the Colonial Office. Winston’s critics trembled at the prospect of entrusting military decisions to him again. Leo Amery wrote the prime minister: “Don’t put Churchill in the War Office. I hear from all sorts of quarters that the Army are terrified at the idea.” The
Daily Mail
and
Morning Post
echoed Amery’s warning, but nothing could have given Lloyd George greater pleasure than dismaying the men responsible for the Somme and Passchendaele. On January 9, 1919, he relieved his minister of munitions, whose desk at the Metropole had long been cleared anyway, and invested him with twin portfolios. Churchill was now secretary of state for war and air.
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He inherited an army crisis. The vast mass of the troops were civilians who had signed up for the duration. They wanted their discharges as soon as possible. Of the 3.5 million men under arms, fewer than a third would be needed for armies of occupation in Germany and the Middle East. A majority, therefore, were eligible to return home as soon as transport could be arranged. The difficulty lay in deciding who should go first. Senior officers, whose temporary rank depended upon the size of their commands, were in no hurry to expedite the process. Milner had established a system under which priority was assigned to “key men” in industry. But these blue-collar workers, by the very fact of their indispensability, had been among the last to be called up; many had not been drafted until the manpower crisis of the previous March. Now they were being released from the service while volunteers who had fought in the trenches for four years remained there. In the week before Churchill moved into Whitehall, soldiers had rioted in Dover and Folkestone, demanding immediate demobilization. Two days later Milner had issued new regulations under which only men with job offers could be discharged. This left three million Tommies with no prospect of an early return to civilian life, and their mood was ugly. On Winston’s first day in his new office he was handed a telegram from Haig, reporting a rapid deterioration of army morale under the latest rules. Proof of it lay in London, within earshot of the War Office. A mob of insubordinate Tommies had gathered on the Horse Guards Parade, waving seditious signs. Had they but known it, that was the last way to win concessions from Churchill. He called in a group of anxious officers and asked them: “How many troops have we got to deal with them?” A battalion of guards, he was told, and three squadrons of the Household Cavalry. “Are they loyal?” he inquired. The officers replied that they hoped so. He asked: “Can you arrest the mutineers?” They were uncertain but had no other suggestions. He said: “Then arrest the mutineers.” He watched from his window while the demonstrators, deflated, permitted the guards to surround them and then lead them away.
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