The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (3 page)

Churchill hated the Annexe’s cramped quarters. Donning his zippered blue Siren Suit, as he called it (it looked like a workman’s boiler suit; the staff called it his “Rompers”), he would mount the stairs to visit his family in their ground-floor flat, or stroll over to No. 10, or cross the street into St. James’s Park to feed the ducks and pelicans in the lake despite reports, taken seriously, that German agents lurked there. At night he was even more incautious. During raids he would dart out after close hits to see the damage. Sometimes he climbed up to the roof and squatted there on a hot-air vent, counting the Heinkel III’s as the searchlights picked them up. He wanted to be wherever the bombs were falling. It is a lie that he knew Coventry would be destroyed on November 14, 1940, and didn’t alert the city because the Germans would have known their code had been broken. Sir John Martin was with him that evening. They were driving out of the capital when a motorcyclist stopped them; word had just arrived that the Luftwaffe was headed for London. So the prime minister ordered the car turned around. It was early morning before he knew that the real target had been Coventry.

All his life he was a man of extraordinary personal courage. As a youth he sought danger in Cuba, on India’s North-West Frontier, on the Nile, and in South Africa. Each battle found him recklessly exposing himself to gunfire. In the Sudan in 1898 he was a subaltern and Herbert Kitchener was Anglo-Egyptian commander in chief (Sirdar), but he attacked Kitchener, in print, for “the inhuman slaughter of the wounded” and the desecration of the tomb of the Mahdi, the natives’ idol. Then, in Natal, the Boers captured Churchill. He escaped and later rode a bicycle in civilian clothes through the Boer stronghold of Johannesburg, risking execution as a spy had he been caught. Elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he defended the enemy in his maiden speech—and then savaged Britain’s war minister, a senior statesman of his own party. At sea in 1943 he awoke Averell Harriman to tell him that a U-boat had them in its sights. He said: “I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.” After a moment’s thought he added: “It might not be so nice if one were in the water and they tried to pick me up.” Harriman, frightened, said, “I thought you told me that the worst a torpedo could do to this ship… was to knock out one engine room.” Churchill grinned and replied, “Ah, but they might put two torpedoes in us. You must come with me… and see the fun.”
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Churchill among the ruins of the House of Commons, 1941

The harder question is whether he enjoyed war too much. He denied it. He called it a “dirty, shoddy business,… disguise it as you may.” On September 4, 1898, after he had survived the dreadful battle of Omdurman on the Nile, he wrote his mother that the scenes he had witnessed “made me anxious and worried during the night and I speculated on the shoddiness of war. You cannot gild it. The raw comes through.” At Tehran in 1943 he said to his daughter Sarah: “War is a game played with a smiling face, but do you think there is laughter in my heart?” And he said: “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt.”
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But this assumes that there was something magnificent to spoil. The implication is ineluctable: he saw chivalric, Arthurian,
brioso
aspects of war; it was to him, as life was to Peter Pan, “an awfully big adventure.” As a young war correspondent he reported the death of a young peer in battle as “a sad item, for which the only consolation is that the Empire is worth the blood of the noblest of its citizens.” In 1914, the diarist Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s mistress, noted that the outbreak of war found the British cabinet sunk in gloom, whereupon “in burst Churchill, radiant, smiling, a cigar in his mouth and satisfaction upon his face. ‘Well!’ he exclaimed, ‘the deed is done!’ ” Lloyd George, who was also there, told Margot Asquith that “Winston was radiant, his face bright, his manner keen…. You could see he was a really happy man,” and Churchill himself wrote his wife: “I am interested, geared up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?” During World War II he liked to cap his day by watching captured German combat films. After the second Quebec conference in 1944 he told the press that he would visit the battlefronts soon because he did not wish to miss any of the “fun” of “the good things.” The
New Statesman
acidly commented that these were “strange words for a process whereby human beings are being disembowelled, roasted to death, drowned, blown into fragments, or are dying slowly of agonizing wounds.” But the prime minister was unchastened. Six months later he stood on Xanten hilltop, watching British regiments cross the Rhine. The spectacle, he complained, was insufficiently dramatic. He said: “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge.”
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Red coats, which the army had doffed for khaki in the late 1890s, obviously belonged to the wars of earlier times. But so did he. He liked panoply, bugles, drums, battle flags, British squares. He said: “It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunistic march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns.” At times he believed it a shame that technology had altered peace, too. “In the nineteenth century,” he observed, “Jules Verne wrote
Round the World in Eighty Days.
It seemed a prodigy. Now you can get around it in four, but you do not see much of it on the way.” He thought that “the substitution of the internal combustion machine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind” and that it was “arguable whether the human race have been the gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine.” The real point here was that steam had opened up the British Empire; air power, and then the atom, had closed it down. Lord Moran, his physician, wrote that “Winston is a proud man, and it hurts him to think how vulnerable, in the atomic age, a small, densely populated island like Britain has become.” It was to Moran that Churchill said glumly: “I wish flying had never been invented. The world has shrunk since the Wrights got into the air; it was an evil hour for poor England.” And addressing England as though it were a colleague—he was apt to do this—he said: “You came into big things as an accident of naval power when you were an island. The world had confidence in you. You became the workshop of the world. You populated the island beyond its capacity. Through an accident of airpower you will probably cease to exist.”
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In a thousand little ways he revealed his preference for the past and his reluctance to part with it. Victorian expressions salted his speech: “I venture to say,” “I am greatly distressed,” “I rejoice,” and “I pray”; so many of his memos began “Pray do,” “Pray do not,” or “Pray give me the facts on half a sheet of paper” that they became known among his staff as “Churchill’s prayers.” If it was time to leave Chartwell for London, and he wanted to know if his chauffeur was behind the wheel, he would ask: “Is the coachman on his box?” After the House of Commons snuffbox was destroyed in the Blitz, he replaced it with one from his family’s ancestral home of Blenheim, explaining, “I confess myself to be a great admirer of tradition.” He frankly preferred “the refinements of Louis XIV” to the modern “age of clatter and buzz, of gape and gloat.” He also thought that “bad luck always pursues peoples who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the customs of the past.” Accordingly, Istanbul was Constantinople to him; Ankara was Angora; Sevastopol was Sebastopol; and in a directive to his minister of information dated August 29, 1941, he wrote: “Do try to blend in without causing trouble the word Persia instead of Iran.” As for Cambodia and Guatemala, they didn’t exist for him; he had got this far without having heard of them and saw no need to change now. He spoke of Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry VIII, and James I as though they were his contemporaries. Anthony Montague Browne recalls walking into Churchill’s office after Harold Macmillan had been chosen over R. A. (“Rab”) Butler as the new Conservative leader. Churchill was muttering, “Intelligent, yes. Good looking, yes. Well-meaning, yes. But not the stuff of which Prime Ministers are made.” Montague Browne asked: “But would Rab have been any better?” Churchill looked at him blankly. He said: “I was thinking of Melbourne.”
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L
ike Melbourne and all other Victorian prime ministers, Churchill never attended Parliament, or called at Buckingham Palace, wearing anything but a frock coat. It was sometimes difficult for those around him to remember that he had fought his first election in the nineteenth century and had been, by the time of the old Queen’s death, one of the highest-paid newspaper reporters in the world. Some thought his viewpoint and attitudes reached even farther back in history; Harold Laski called him “a gallant and romantic relic of eighteenth-century imperialism.” Churchill replied: “I like to live in the past. I don’t think people are going to get much fun in the future.” The older he grew, the stronger the bond he felt between himself and others who had reached manhood before the turn of the century. When he was told that a Londoner over seventy-five years of age had been arrested in Hyde Park for making improper advances toward a young girl in subzero weather, he chortled: “Over seventy-five and below zero! Makes you
proud
to be an Englishman!”
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But to those who chided him for being preoccupied with earlier ages, he answered: “The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward. This is not a philosophical or political argument—any oculist can tell you it is true.” Certainly it was true of him. He was no mere fogy. Clement Attlee, his great Labour adversary, compared him to a layer cake: “One layer was certainly seventeenth century. The eighteenth century in him is obvious. There was the nineteenth century, and a large slice, of course, of the twentieth century; and another, curious, layer which may possibly have been the twenty-first.”
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Churchill may have lacked sympathy for inventive contributions to warfare, but he understood them and even anticipated them. In World War I he was the father of the tank. As early as 1917 he conceived of vessels which would serve as landing craft for tanks. In the late 1930s he became interested in rockets and showed friends graphs illustrating their ballistic characteristics. And in the war against Hitler his genius was responsible for “Window,” strips of tinfoil dropped by bombers to confuse enemy radar; “Pluto,” a pipeline under the ocean; “Gee,” a device for guiding pilots; and the artificial harbors used at Normandy.

All these, of course, were weapons. Martial strains reverberated throughout his career as a kind of background score. In the House his rhetorical metaphors were those of the battlefield—events marched, political flanks were turned, legislative skirmishes fought, ultimata delivered, and opponents told to surrender, to strike their colors, to lay down their arms. More than half of the fifty-six books he published were about war and warriors; the two he most regretted not having found time to write were biographies of Caesar and Napoleon. Partly this was because he knew that peace hath not her heroes, and he meant to be heroic. In part it was because of his combative spirit. He agreed with George Meredith: “It is a terrific decree in life that they must act who would prevail.” There is no doubt that he enjoyed peril and delighted in battle. In his last days he said that 1940 and 1941 had been the best years of his life, despite the fact that for other Englishmen they had been incomparably the worst.

It is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy’s glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife—top hats, Stetsons, seamen’s caps, his hussar helmet, a privy councillor’s cocked hat, homburgs, an astrakhan, an Irish “paddy hat,” a white pith helmet, an Australian bush hat, a fez, the huge beplumed hat he wore as a Knight of the Garter, even the full headdress of a North American Indian chieftain. He had closets full of costumes. When his grandchildren visited him, he appeared as an ape, snarling. Dressing for dinner when he traveled abroad, he wore the decorations awarded him by whatever country he was visiting—his favorite was the Danish Order of the Elephant—together with his sash. If nothing else was suitable, he would don his uniforms as RAF air commodore, as colonel of the Queen’s Own Fourth Hussars, as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, or as Elder Brother of Trinity House, England’s first lighthouse and pilotage authority, chartered by Henry VIII in 1514. His fame had eclipsed the medals; his figure had outgrown the uniforms; it didn’t matter. Once in Strasbourg Lord Boothby entered wearing a Légion d’Honneur rosette. Churchill glared, pointed at it, and demanded: “What’s that in your buttonhole?” Told, he scowled, then brightened. “I’ve got something better than that,” he said. He disappeared and reappeared, proudly wearing the
médaille militaire.
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In the House he expressed this side of himself by thumbing his nose at the Opposition, or sticking out his tongue, or, when he had enraged them and they looked apoplectic, by blowing them a kiss. He once wrote of his childhood that he had been “so happy in my nursery with all my toys.” He still was; the imp lurked within. As home secretary before World War I he refused to prohibit roller-skating on sidewalks; pedestrians might be bowled over, but boys must not be deprived of their fun. Once during World War II, vacationing in Florida, he disguised himself as “a Mr. Lobb, an invalid requiring quiet.” His principal private secretary, Sir John Martin, was registered as the invalid’s butler. Security officers, after thinking it over, encouraged the prime minister to use pseudonyms when phoning. So he used Martin’s name, with the consequence, Sir John wryly recalls, that “I received a rocket from Censorship.” Despairing, the security men begged Churchill at least to keep his movements secret. He then telephoned Franklin Roosevelt before a Washington summit meeting: “They won’t let me tell you how I’m going to travel. You know security measures. So all I can say is that I’m coming by puff-puff. Got it?
Puff-puff.
” Once during the height of the Blitz, Mrs. Kathleen Hill, one of the prime minister’s secretaries, was visited by her son Richard, an army private on leave. She sent him out on a personal errand for the prime minister—buying an electric train for his first grandson. Hill had just finished assembling it on the rug of a first-floor room at No. 10 when he became aware of an august presence hovering over him. “You’ve got two locomotives,” Churchill rumbled. “Have you got two transformers?” Private Hill nodded dumbly. “Good!” boomed Churchill, clapping his hands together. “Let’s have a crash!”
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