The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (233 page)

On the last evening of 1938 Nicolson wrote: “It has been a bad year…. A foul year. Next year will be worse.” Churchill, more optimistic, told his constituents in January that while Englishmen like himself doubted that Munich had “purchased a lasting peace,” they felt that at least a “breathing space” had been won. He said: “Let us make sure that this breathing space is not improvidently cast away.” Later, after the Men of Munich had been discredited, that became the keystone of their cover-up; they had, they said, bought time to rearm. It wouldn’t wash. The day after Churchill’s speech, Chamberlain rejected Secretary for War Hore-Belisha’s request for a larger army budget, playing the same weary tune the cabinet had heard so often before, telling them that “finances cannot be ignored, since our financial strength is one of our strongest weapons in any war which is not over in a short time.” As a former chancellor, he said, he thought Britain’s financial position looked “extremely dangerous.” Other ministers argued that Hitler would be shocked by British rearmament, interpreting it as inconsistent with the spirit of Munich, asking why, if the two countries were trusted friends, England was arming to the teeth. Hore-Belisha proposed conscription. He was denied it. Kingsley Wood wanted air parity with Germany. His request was also denied, but because he invested everything he was given in new, superior fighter planes—while the bloated Luftwaffe remained content with what it had—the number of Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons jumped from five to forty-seven in a year. Antiaircraft batteries also multiplied, but “these improvements,” as Churchill later wrote, “were petty compared with the mighty advance in German armaments.”
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In every other category—artillery, tanks, and equipped divisions—Nazi gains were overwhelming. While Chamberlain was lecturing his ministers on the military value of stocks and bonds and spending £304 million on arms, German arms expenditures exceeded £1.5 billion—a fivefold gap. The number of Nazi divisions jumped from seven to fifty-one. By calling up trained reserves, the Reich could field an army of over seven million men, outnumbering the armies of France and England combined, and the Führer, unlike the democracies, did not have troops tied down in colonial possessions overseas. Vis-à-vis France, Churchill found, with every month that passed from 1938 onward the German army not only increased “in numbers and formations… but in quality and maturity.” He believed that “in morale also the Germans had the advantage,” and he attributed the ebbing of French martial resolve to Munich: “The desertion of an ally, especially from fear of war, saps the spirit of any army.”
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L
ess than two months after Munich, Churchill entered his sixty-fifth year, and some parliamentarians, including friends, thought he was beginning to show his age. On Monday, December 5, the House of Commons received its long-awaited report on the preposterous attempt to court-martial Duncan Sandys. Everyone was exonerated; “misunderstandings” were blamed. Churchill rose. He started brilliantly, and everyone, Nicolson wrote, was “expecting a great speech.” Then:

It wasn’t age, and he was capable of rebounding. The fact is that he was simply attempting to do too much. Indeed, the wonder is that he found time to appear in the House at all. His writing schedule continued to be punishing, and even as he struggled to meet it, Grace Hamblin recalls, Chartwell was being inundated by a blizzard of invitations to speak. As the taste of Munich turned to ashes, people wanted to see and hear the vindicated Ishmael. He was sensible enough to decline these, though some were tempting: the League of Nations Union, the Oxford Union (from its young president Edward Heath, a future prime minister), and a Jewish Youth Rally for National Service (“because of your courageous defence of freedom and denunciation of Nazi-ism [
sic
] you are held in the very highest esteem by all sections of Jewry”). He even turned down a dinner invitation from General Edward L. Spears, a fellow officer in Flanders twenty years earlier, explaining that “It is absolutely necessary for me to be in the country every possible night this year in order to complete the history I am writing.”
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By day, however, he entertained visitors: French politicians, men who had held high posts in Vienna and Prague, and German anti-Nazis, many of them, like Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the Führer’s finance minister, members of the old Wilhelmine aristocracy. In January a high French source sent Chartwell, in great confidence, information unknown to anyone in the British government. Deuxième Bureau agents were reporting that German munitions convoys were moving across Czechoslovakia, from the Sudetenland to the Hungarian frontier. Churchill immediately took this to the Foreign Office, where it was confirmed and then dismissed as part of a program to execute maneuvers and rearm the Austrian army on “the German scale and with German weapons.”
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Of course, Winston could not hew to a spartan regimen. No one could work harder—while writing longer and more strenuously than ever before, he was also in one of his periods of intense bricklaying—but he had no intention of abandoning his sybaritic life-style. In the House of Commons he defended it with wit. Among the unhappiest victims of his gibes was Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was one of the very few on Labour’s side of the House who shared Churchill’s contempt for appeasement; he begged the front bench to rearm before Hitler struck. But he was also ascetic, a vegetarian, a man who shunned coffee and tea and quit smoking cigars because he thought the habit vulgar. “My God,” said Churchill when told of this. “Cripps has cut his last tie with human civilization.” On another, later occasion, Churchill was airborne over the Sahara Desert when his plane had to land for an emergency repair. Winston stretched his legs and gazed in all directions. “Here we are marooned in all these miles of sand—not a blade of grass or a drop of water or a flower,” he said. “How Cripps would have loved it.”
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Churchill did not propose to slacken his pace, but experience had taught him that he could be equally productive, and more comfortable, on the Riviera. Thus, in the first week of January, 1939, after an interview with Kingsley Martin of the
New Statesman
—“War is horrible,” he told Martin, “but slavery is worse, and you may be sure the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude”—he was off for Maxine’s Château de l’Horizon. Changing trains in Paris, he read in the papers that the Germans had announced a vast plan to expand their submarine fleet. Before unpacking in Cannes he wrote and cabled home a
Daily Telegraph
column, calling the Nazi U-boat program “a heavy blow to all international cooperation in support of public law.” It meant, he said, that England was imperiled by an “avoidable danger” which could only be mastered after great “loss and suffering.” The
Telegraph
was unread in Cannes, but a local newspaper subscribed to his syndicate, and there was a stirring in the lush villas when the same paper ran an earlier piece in which Churchill pondered an Anglo-Soviet détente. Among its readers was the quondam king of England, now Duke of Windsor, and he was splenetic.
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To Churchill, Edward’s wrath, once majestic, now seemed more like petty whining. By now Winston had shed all illusions about the man he had championed, at such cost to his career and the cause he led. There was, he noted, no depth to the man; he never read a serious book, never gave the world’s affairs profound thought, and what he presented as opinion was merely narrow, ill-informed prejudice. He doted on his wife, who ordered him about, apparently to his delight. Winston was amused by Wallis’s sartorial influence on her husband. On the memorable night when the Duke crossed swords with Churchill in Maxine’s white-and-gold dining room he was wearing a Stuart tartan kilt. He was lucky Winston didn’t leave him without a fig leaf, according to the account of Vincent Sheean, who kept notes when, as he wrote,

According to Sheean and their hostess, those who thought of Winston as doddering should have been there that evening. Afterward Maxine wrote Churchill, “Never have I seen you in such good form…. You are the most enormously gifted creature in the whole world and it is like the sunshine leaving when you go away.” England was not like sunshine to him. “People talk of how brave Winston was in 1940,” Lady Diana Cooper observed, “but his highest courage, and it was his
moral
courage, shone through when he saw war coming, England virtually helpless, and himself impotent—when he spoke the truth and men he had entertained in his home cut him in Parliament Square.” He took it; he had to take it, but he didn’t have to like it. Writhing in the bonds of his frustration he reminded Virginia Cowles of “a mighty torrent trying to burst its dam.”
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That was one aspect of him, and to all but the few close to him it was the intrinsic Churchill, his quiddity and diathesis. Most public men have one personality for the world and another in private. Winston Churchill was an exception. In his greater speeches he could hold Parliament spellbound; at Chartwell his guests were entranced as he used the same language, mannerisms, and expression. He could reminisce with old comrades, and the emotional undercurrent was always there. His eyes would fill, but like a sun shower the misty moment passed. The only people who saw the intimate Churchill—who knew the power and depth of his love, which lay within him like a vast reservoir eternally replenishing itself, available to them in boundless measure when they were parched or careworn—those few whom he cherished, were his family. His awareness of them was constant. In the middle of a letter on another topic in early 1939, he interpolated: “Mary has been… vy sweet to me and is growing into her beauty.” His son had tried him as few fathers have been tried; nevertheless, it was understood that once Randolph married and began his own family, Chartwell would be his: his parents would move into more modest quarters. Creating those quarters was the impulse behind Churchill’s renewed interest in bricklaying. Some diversion from his writing was essential, and he was aware of it. There were only so many productive working hours in a day; anything written beyond that was chaff. So he painted, fed his goldfish, savored his Pol Roger, and laid his bricks, letting his mind drift and rejuvenating his powers of thought.
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As usual, he had a new Chartwell improvement in progress. He was, he wrote Clemmie on January 28, supervising the tiling of roofs, putting down new floors, and “the joinery of the doors, cupboards, etc.” Any other country squire at his age might have been overseeing such projects. But Churchill, as always, had grander plans. He was already building one cottage on the grounds with his own hands and planning another—for Clemmie and himself—when he retired and Randolph became Chartwell’s householder. He wrote her: “In the summer when I am sure the book will be finished, I think I will build a house.” It would stand on ten acres far from the mansion, he wrote, and would “cost about three thousand pounds.” This was reasonable. Assuming he met the terms of his continuing contract for the
English-speaking Peoples
and completed assignments for
Collier’s
,
News of the World
, the
Daily Mirror
, and his fortnightly syndicated columns, his literary earnings for 1939 would be £15,781. But knowing her dread of debt, he assured her that “we could sell it for five or six thousand pounds.” After he had met all his writing deadlines he planned to ask Sir Edwin Lutyens, the eminent architect, for appraisals and opinions, hastily adding: “He will do this for nothing, I am sure, as he has always begged to give advice.” For Winston the immediate value of the construction would be recreational: “It would amuse me all the summer and give me good health.” To further soothe her he promised that “downstairs you will have one lovely big room” and “you may be sure that nothing will be done until you have passed the plans. I have at least two months work ahead on the present cottage.” He had already christened it “Orchard Cottage.”
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