The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (120 page)

Certainly the cabinet was deaf to his proposals that he confer with the Second Reich’s discredited warlord, and after reflection he dropped the idea. Thus the Russian epic was played out without further British intrusions. The Bolsheviks still faced obstacles. Japanese troops remained in Vladivostok after all the other Allies had left, drove off a Soviet attack, inflicting heavy losses, and did not leave Russian soil until the autumn of 1922. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania retained their freedom until 1940. Extending Red control over the Caucasus was a slow, exasperating business. Long after Wrangel had left, Georgia continued to be ruled by Mensheviks. Trotsky had agreed to leave the Georgians alone, but in 1921, while he was absent on an inspection tour of the Urals, the Red Army invaded the republic and, after severe fighting, seized Tiflis, its capital. The man who had done this, sabotaging Trotsky’s promise to Georgia, was himself a native Georgian. He hated Trotsky even more than he hated Churchill for intervening, and he was Joseph Stalin.

Winston had one arrow left in his anti-Bolshevik quiver. Lloyd George had been a radical young parliamentarian, but now, like all British prime ministers, he was dedicated to expansion of British trade, and when a Soviet trade mission arrived in London after the counterrevolutionaries had been overwhelmed, the prime minister saw to it that they were provided with every comfort. There was no alternative to peaceful coexistence with them, George told the House; it had become “perfectly clear now to every unprejudiced observer that you cannot crush Bolshevism by force of arms.” But Churchill was not an unprejudiced observer. He refused to “grasp the hairy paw of the baboon.” Commercial ties with England would strengthen Lenin’s regime, he said, and “as long as any portion of this nest of vipers is left intact, it will continue to breed and swarm.” Besides, he asked Lloyd George, how would the Reds pay for British goods? The answer outraged him. The Russians planned to barter with gold and precious stones taken from the czarist nobility. “This treasure does not belong to the Russian Bolshevik Government,” he said at a cabinet meeting. “It has been forcibly seized by these usurpers…. The jewels have been stolen from their owners in Russia and in many cases from their corpses.” The gold was similarly “bloodstained.” England would be giving the Reds “a special title to this plundered gold in order that with it they may make purchases in the British market. It seems to me that this is a very serious step to take.”
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Nevertheless, the government took it a few minutes later. Winston almost resigned on the spot. He was “so upset by the decision,” Hankey noted in his diary, “that he declared himself unequal to discussing other items on the Agenda affecting the army. He was quite pale and did not speak again during the meeting.” As it broke up he glowered at the prime minister and inquired heavily whether any minister would now be “fettered” if he wished to deliver anti-Communist speeches. Assured that he was free to say what he pleased, he drove to Oxford that evening and addressed the Oxford Union. Flaying the Lenin government, he said he believed “that all the harm and misery in Russia has arisen out of the wickedness and folly of the Bolshevists and that there will be no recovery of any kind in Russia or in Eastern Europe while these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannize over its great population…. The policy I will always advocate is the overthrow and destruction of that criminal regime.”
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He had been candid, he had been prophetic, and he paid a price. Men who had forgotten the Dardanelles remembered it now and felt their earlier assessment of him confirmed. A new rift had opened between him and Lloyd George. The growing delegation of Labour MPs marked him as their chief enemy. In some instances their enmity did him honor; it was later found, for example, that the
Daily Herald,
a Labour newspaper, was subsidized by Russian money. But his bitterness and his isolation from old friends were curiously at variance with his usual generosity of spirit. H. G. Wells, returning from Russia, declared that Red excesses had been necessary to “establish a new social order” and that the British naval blockade had been partly responsible for Russian starvation. Churchill, replying in the
Sunday Express,
wrote: “We see the Bolshevik cancer eating into the flesh of the wretched being; we see the monstrous growth swelling and thriving upon the emaciated body of his victim. And now Mr Wells, that philosophical romancer, comes forward with the proposition that the cancer is the only thing that can pull the body round; that we must feed and cultivate that. After all, it is another form of life. It is ‘a new social order.’ Why be so narrow-minded as to draw the line between health and disease, still less between right and wrong? Adopt an impartial attitude. Put your money on the disease if you think it is going to win.” Wells struck back with asperity. He had known Churchill for years, he wrote in the next week’s
Sunday Express.
He liked him and admired him. “But,” he said, “I will confess that it distresses me that he should hold any public office at this time…. I want to see him out of any position of public responsibility whatever.” Winston’s retirement and his return to private life, he suggested, would not “be a tragic fall…. Mr Churchill has many resources. He would, for instance, be a brilliant painter.”
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On Lloyd George’s fifty-seventh birthday, Churchill lunched with the prime minister, and Frances Stevenson noted that he “waxed very eloquent on the old world & the new, taking up arms in defence of the former.” He was, she wrote, “simply
raving
” about “trading with Russia” which “absolutely & finally ruins his hopes of a possible war in the East.” When another guest chided him, she wrote, “Winston glared at him, & almost shouted ‘You are trying to make mischief!’ ” That evening Lloyd George, Frances, and Churchill dined at Ciro’s. Winston, she noted, was still “ragging D[avid] about the New World. ‘Don’t you make any mistake,’ he said to D. ‘You’re not going to get your new world. The old world is a good enough place for me, & there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s going to sit up & wag its tail.’ ” The prime minister remarked that Winston was “the only remaining specimen of a real Tory.” That, too, was prophetic.
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I
t is a striking fact that Churchill, the acmic warrior, left a colorless record at the Ministry of War and Air, and not only because his Russian policy was a complete failure. The postwar demobilization was his only real accomplishment at the War Office. Otherwise, his military policies were cautious and stingy. Wherever he found fat he cut it, but he cut a great deal that was lean, too. He preserved the separate identity of the Royal Air Force yet left it little but its name. On Armistice Day, Britain had been the world’s greatest air power; two years later England was reduced to three home squadrons, as against France’s forty-seven. And three months after that, when Churchill resigned from the ministry to become colonial secretary,
The Times
observed: “He leaves the body of British flying well nigh at that last gasp when a military funeral would be all that would be left for it.” His management of the army had been equally disappointing. Young career officers, appreciative of his role in tank development, expected that he would refashion their services along modern lines. Unaware of his sentimental yearning for his golden days with the Fourth Hussars and the Twenty-first Lancers, they were stunned when he sided with the red-tabbed diehards and shared their yearning for a return to 1914. His most shortsighted policy was his acceptance of Lloyd George’s guiding principle, endorsed by the War Cabinet in August 1919, that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years and that no Expeditionary Force will be required.” At times Winston even echoed the litany of the Little Englanders. On June 18, 1920, he told the cabinet that “the military forces at the disposal of Great Britain” were “insufficient to meet the requirements of the policies now being pursued in the various theatres.” One would have expected Churchill, the tribune of Empire, to call for an increase in those forces. Instead, he argued that a cutback in imperial commitments was “indispensable if grave risk of disaster is not to be incurred.” Otherwise, he said, “the possibility of disaster occurring in any or all of these theatres must be faced, and the likelihood of this will increase every day.”
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He was always readier to defy public opinion than most public men, but here he was trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds. After the survivors of the western front came home, Britons wanted nothing more to do with war; most of them hoped never again to lay their eyes on an Englishman in uniform, and they were losing their taste for Empire. Privately he worried about that. A bellicose war minister and a pacifistic electorate would not work comfortably in harness, however, and though he would later reconcile himself to such an incompatibility, in those early postwar years he did not feel the risk justifiable. As Liddell Hart wrote, Churchill “was eager to make a fresh mark in current political affairs, and the best chance lay in the postwar retrenchment of expenditure.”
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It was expedient to cut taxes and he did it ruthlessly. His objectives, however, were unchanged. He freely entered into agreements in which the eventual use of force, or threat of it, was implicit, confident that if he had to show the flag, Englishmen would support him.

By now it was clear that he was too strong and too able to be confined to a single ministry. As home secretary he had often appeared at the Treasury; at the Admiralty he had led Irish policy; as lowly minister of munitions he had managed to influence the conduct of the war. Now he freely crossed ministerial lines of authority and assumed responsibilities which rightfully belonged in the India Office, the Colonial Office, and the Foreign Office. Naturally, his colleagues resented this, but the offended minister almost always found himself a minority of one. The others recognized Churchill’s gifts. Even the prime minister, who frequently discovered himself at loggerheads with him now, tolerated what, in another man, would have been called meddling and might even have merited dismissal. Churchill had become the most powerful speaker in Parliament. No one, not even the gifted Lloyd George, could hold the House as Winston did. Indeed, on one memorable occasion he accomplished a rare feat. Eloquence, wit, and charm have not been uncommon in that body, but seldom in its six centuries has a speech actually changed the opinion of the majority, transforming imminent defeat into triumph. Churchill did it on July 8, 1920, thereby vindicating England’s honor.

The origins of that day’s controversy lay in a shocking episode. A few months after the war an Englishwoman, a missionary, had reported that she had been molested on a street in the Punjab city of Amritsar. The Raj’s local commander, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, had issued an order requiring all Indians using that street to crawl its length on their hands and knees. He had also authorized the indiscriminate, public whipping of natives who came within lathi length of British policemen. On April 13, 1919, a multitude of Punjabis had gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwallah Bagh to protest these extraordinary measures. The throng, penned in a narrow space smaller than Trafalgar Square, had been peacefully listening to the testimony of victims when Dyer appeared at the head of a contingent of British troops. Without warning, he ordered his machine gunners to open fire. The Indians, in Churchill’s words, were “packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies”; the people “ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed upon the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for eight or ten minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion.” Dyer then marched away, leaving 379 dead and over 1,500 wounded. Back in his headquarters, he reported to his superiors that he had been “confronted by a revolutionary army,” and had been obliged “to teach a moral lesson to the Punjab.” In the storm of outrage which followed, the brigadier was promoted to major general, retired, and placed on the inactive list. This, incredibly, made him a martyr to millions of Englishmen. Senior British officers applauded his suppression of “another Indian Mutiny.” The Guardians of the Golden Temple enrolled him in the Brotherhood of Sikhs. The House of Lords passed a measure commending him. Readers of the Tory
Morning Post,
Churchill’s old scourge, subscribed £2,500 for a testimonial. Leading Conservative MPs took up his cause, and Lloyd George reluctantly agreed to a full-dress debate. Venetia Montagu’s husband, Edwin, now the secretary of state for India, would open for the government, with Churchill scheduled at the end.
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Montagu’s speech was a calamity. He was a Jew and there were anti-Semites in the House. He had been warned to be quiet and judicial. Instead, he was sarcastic; he called Dyer a terrorist; he worried about foreign opinion; he “thoroughly roused most of the latent passions of the stodgy Tories,” as one MP noted, and “got excited… and became more racial and more Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture,” with the consequence that “a strong anti-Jewish sentiment was shown by shouts…. Altogether it was a very astonishing exhibition of anti-Jewish feeling.” The Ulster MPs had decided to vote against Dyer. After Montagu’s speech they conferred and reversed themselves. Sir Edward Carson rose to praise the general—who was watching from the Strangers’ Gallery—as “a gallant officer of thirty-four years service… without a blemish on his record” who had “no right to be broken on the
ipse dixit
of any Commission or Committee, however great, unless he has been fairly tried—and he has not been tried.” Carson ended: “I say, to break a man under the circumstances of this case is un-English.” “Un-English,” in the context of the time, was anti-Semitic—roughly the equivalent of “kike.” MPs roared their approval. The government was in trouble. Lloyd George being absent, Bonar Law, the leader of the House, asked Churchill to speak immediately.
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