The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (121 page)

Churchill’s approach was entirely unlike Montagu’s. He called for “a calm spirit, avoiding passion and avoiding attempts to excite prejudice.” Dyer, he said, had not been dismissed in disgrace; “he had simply been informed that there was no further employment for him under the Government of India.” But the incident in Jallianwallah Bagh was “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.” He quietly observed that the number of Indians killed was almost identical with the number of MPs now sitting within range of his voice. An officer in such a situation as Dyer’s, he said, should ask himself whether the crowd is either armed or about to mount an attack. “Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon…. At Amritsar the crowd was neither armed nor attacking.” Thus the general had not, as he claimed, faced a “revolutionary army.” Another useful military guide, Churchill continued, was the maxim that “no more force should be used than is necessary to secure compliance with the law.” In the Great War, he and many other members of the House had seen British soldiers “exerting themselves to show pity and to help, even at their own peril, the wounded.” Dyer had failed to follow their example; after the massacre, his troops had simply swung around and marched away. Churchill knew, and many members of Parliament knew, of many instances in which officers, in “infinitely more trying” situations than the one in the Bagh, had, unlike the general, displayed an ability to arrive “at the right decision.” Then, as if with a stiletto, Churchill knifed Dyer: “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.”
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He twisted the blade. Dyer’s most vocal champions agreed with Churchill’s stand in Russia. It was compassion and its absence, he said, which marked the difference between Englishmen and Bolsheviks. His own hatred of Lenin’s regime was “not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.” It arose from “the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise… and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.” It was intolerable in Russia; it was intolerable in Amritsar. “I do not think,” he said, “that it is in the interests of the British Empire or of the British Army for us to take a load of that sort for all time upon our backs. We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another, that this is not the British way of doing business.” He quoted Macaulay: “The most frightful of all spectacles [is] the strength of civilisation without its mercy.” England’s “reign in India, or anywhere else,” Churchill continued, “has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it. The British way of doing things… has always meant and implied close and effectual cooperation with the people. In every part of the British Empire that has been our aim.” As for Dyer, Churchill himself would have preferred to see the general disciplined. Instead, he had been allowed to resign with no plan for further punishment, “and to those moderate and considered conclusions we confidently invite the assent of the House.”
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He sat and they rose crying, “Hear, hear.” After five more hours of debate they voted for the government, 247 to 37. Carson’s motion for mild approval of Dyer was defeated 230 to 129. The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote Curzon that Churchill’s speech had been “unanswerable.”
The Times
called it “amazingly skilful” and declared that it had “turned the House (or so it seemed) completely round…. It was not only a brilliant speech, but one that persuaded and made the result certain.” Winston, the editorial concluded, had “never been heard to greater advantage.”
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L
ate in 1920 Churchill told Lloyd George that he wanted to move to another cabinet post—the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, or, preferably, the Exchequer. He was tired of wringing half crowns from frugal military budgets, presiding over troop withdrawals, and trying to suppress terrorism in southern Ireland with responsibility for order but no power to negotiate a political solution. Moreover, the prime minister shared few of his views about the army and the RAF. On January 23 of the new year Winston told Sir Henry Wilson that he could not last “much longer in the W.O. owing to differences with L.G.” He bluntly wrote George: “I am vy sorry to see how far we are drifting apart…. When one has reached the summit of power & surmounted so many obstacles, there is danger of becoming convinced that one can do anything one likes, & that any strong personal view is necessarily acceptable to the nation & can be enforced upon one’s subordinates.” He understood that. “No doubt I in my time of important affairs was led astray like this. I suddenly found a vy different world around me: though of course all my fortunes were on a petty scale compared with yours…. But is yr policy going to be successful? I fear it is going wrong.” Churchill thought it a mistake to negotiate with the new Russian leaders, thought George underestimated the returning popularity of the Conservative party, and believed that “one of the main causes of trouble throughout the Middle East is
your
quarrel with the remnants of Turkey…. All the soldiers continually say they disapprove of the policy against Turkey…. This soaks in.” On February 14, 1921, the prime minister, unwilling to lose the most talented member of his cabinet, appointed him colonial secretary. That evening Churchill received his new seals from George V. He wrote Clementine that his room at the Colonial Office “is very fine and sedate… at least twice as big as the old one—an enormous square, but well warmed. It is like working in the saloon at Blenheim.”
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His immediate concerns were Ireland and the Middle East, which was in chaos. Because Turkey had been on the losing side in the war, the old Ottoman Empire had disintegrated. In the peace settlements Turkey had been reduced to a shadow of its former self, a small Asiatic state in the Anatolian uplands around Ankara. During the fighting in the desert against the Turks, France’s and England’s most powerful ally had been the army of Husein ibn-Ali, sharif of Mecca and ruler of the ancient kingdom of Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia). In October 1918 forces led by the sharif’s son Faisal had entered Damascus in triumph. Faisal had appeared at Versailles, registered at the Hotel Metropole, and emerged dressed in immaculate Hashemite robes and attended by two enormous Nubians carrying glittering swords. But when he had appealed for Arabian self-determination, speaking as the emissary of “my father, who, by request of Britain and France, led the Arab rebellion against the Turks” and asking that “the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia… be recognized as independent sovereign peoples, under the guarantee of the League of Nations,” he was ignored.
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Afterward diplomats from Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay met quietly in San Remo, Italy, and divided up the Middle East in a muffled version of their nineteenth-century scramble for African possessions. Husein remained as sovereign of Hejaz, but France got Syria and Lebanon; Persia (Iran) was under British protection; and Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine came within Britain’s sphere of influence, providing the Empire with a direct overland route between imperial troops in Egypt and the Persian Gulf.

But Arabs were not docile Punjabis. Back in Damascus, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria. Neither France nor England would recognize him; indeed, French troops arrived, dethroned him, and forced him to flee. Then his brother Abdullah recruited a private army in Mecca, capital of Hejaz, and announced that he would march on Damascus and drive the poilus into the sea. Next the Iraqis rose and besieged several British garrisons. Arabs rioted in Jerusalem, and, most ominous of all, Bolshevik forces were reported crossing into Iran. A British infantry division, transferred from India to Baghdad by Churchill, pacified Iraq. Persian cossacks drove the Bolsheviks across the border. Then as now, however, the knottiest problem of all lay in Palestine. The Balfour declaration, promulgated in 1917 when Arthur Balfour was the coalition’s foreign secretary and Jewish political power was at its zenith in London, had proclaimed that the British government favored “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
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When Churchill took over at the Colonial Office, this declaration was part of his legacy. His feelings about Balfour’s largess appear to have been mixed. Of Zionism he had written in 1908: “Jerusalem must be the only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy; but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.” But after the declaration he peevishly wrote that the Jews “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit [their] convenience.” Later, in the
Illustrated Sunday Herald,
he hailed Chaim Weizmann’s “inspiring movement” to build a new nation “by the banks of the Jordan” as a “simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal” than the “absolutely destructive” Bolshevik conspiracy to establish “a world wide communistic state under Jewish domination.” This backhanded endorsement carried a sour tang of anti-Semitism, and it surfaced again in 1920, when, opposing economic aid to Russia, he said he saw “the gravest objections to giving all this help to the tyrannic Government of these Jew commissars.” That same year he expressed fresh reservations about the creation of a Zionist state, writing Lloyd George on June 13, 1920, that “Palestine is costing us 6 millions a year to hold. The Zionist movement will cause continued friction with the Arabs. The French ensconced in Syria with 4 divisions (paid for by not paying us what they owe us) are opposed to the Zionist movement & will try to cushion the Arabs off on us as the real enemy. The Palestine venture is the most difficult to withdraw from & one wh certainly will never yield any profit of a material kind.”
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Nevertheless, by the time he entered the Colonial Office he was committed to it. The more he pondered the issue, the more his enthusiasm for a Jewish homeland grew, and he reaffirmed the declaration at a time when a majority of the British officials in the Middle East were urging that it be repudiated. Lieutenant General Sir Walter Congreve, commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in the Middle East, typically predicted that the Arabs would not return to tranquillity until their “aspirations are attended to,” which “means Zionist aspirations being greatly curbed.” He continued: “As long as we persist in our Zionist policy we have got to maintain our present forces in Palestine to enforce a policy hateful to the great majority—a majority which means to fight & to continue to fight and has right on its side.” Walter Smart, a senior civil servant in Egypt, wrote bitterly of “Anglo-French bargaining about other peoples’ property, the deliberate bribing of international Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity… all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war.”
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Churchill decided to sail out to the eastern Mediterranean on the French steamship
Sphinx
and see for himself, taking with him Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, and Archie Sinclair, now Winston’s private secretary. The Arabs could not have chosen a more passionate spokesman than Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” who spoke fluent Arabic, had led them against the Turks, had suffered several grave wounds, and, after surviving capture and torture, had emerged as a shining figure. His shyness was legendary. Privately Winston wondered about that. Lawrence, he said wryly, “has a way of backing into the limelight.” But including him in the delegation was a brilliant political stroke. Outraged by the betrayal at San Remo, he had begun writing his great
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, the leitmotiv of which would be British shame. When George V had received him at a royal audience and attempted to award him the DSO and a Companionship in the Order of the Bath, Lawrence had politely refused the decorations, leaving the shocked monarch, in the King’s own words, “holding the box in my hand.” If this man of honor supported a Middle Eastern settlement, the shiekhs of Araby would hesitate to reject it.
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The
Sphinx
would stop at Marseilles to pick up Clementine, who had been visiting friends in France. From the Hotel Bristol in Beaulieu she wrote Winston: “I am thrilled by the idea & so so longing to see you.” Replying, he told her to pack the proper clothing for sight-seeing trips and tennis—“Do not forget your racquet.” In a second letter he wrote: “We shall have a beautiful cabin together. If only it is not rough—then I shall hide in any old dog hole far from yr sight…. If it is fine, it will be lovely & I shall write & paint & we will talk over all our affairs.” His mother, now living in Berkeley Square, dropped him “a line to wish you bon voyage—& a speedy return—Give my love to Clemmie…. I will look after the children & give you news of them. They are great darlings & do you both great credit!”
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