The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (36 page)

W
inston had entered Sandhurst ninety-second in a class of 102. Immediately he had trouble with parade-ground drill—his officers were dumbfounded to find that he wanted to argue about commands—and was put in the awkward squad. But within a fortnight he had grown to love the life. He felt himself “growing up every week.” Gone, he later wrote, were Harrow’s “unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony…. At Sandhurst I had a new start. I was no longer handicapped by past neglect of Latin, French or Mathematics.” Instead, there were just five subjects to master: fortification, tactics, topography, military law, and military administration. In retrospect it seems inadequate preparation for England’s greatest war leader. “We were never taught anything about bombs or hand-grenades,” he would recall, “because of course these weapons were known to be long obsolete. They had gone out of use in the eighteenth century, and would be quite useless in modern war.” And though Winston would be disdainful of the U.S. Military Academy when he visited there two years later, West Point without math would have been unthinkable even then.
¹³²

But Sandhurst was
fun
. He particularly liked the exercises in field fortification. They dug trenches, built breastworks, and revetted parapets with sandbags, heather, fascines, and “Jones’ iron-band gabions”—cylinders filled with earth. Chevaux-de-frise were constructed, and
fougasses,
a kind of primitive land mine in which the charge was overlaid with stones. Using slabs of guncotton, they blew up simulated railroad tracks and masonry bridges; then they erected pontoon or timber substitutes. All the hills around Camberley were mapped. Roads were reconnoitered. Picket lines were established and advance and rear guards posted. It was like being back at Banstead with Jack and their cousins, building the castle with its moat and drawbridge and using the homemade elastic catapult to hurl green apples at the cow. In a revealing comment on his cadet days, Winston later said he thought it “a pity that it all had to be make-believe, and that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end for ever. If only it had been 100 years earlier what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war against Napoleon in front of one!”
¹³³

Sandhurst, like West Point, divided cadets into companies. There were six, each commanded by a commissioned officer, regular army NCOs, and cadet corporals; each with its own quarters, mess, and billiard room; each fielding athletic teams against the others. The year after he was commissioned, Winston wrote an article about the academy for the
Pall Mall Magazine
. He used the pseudonym “Cornet of Horse,”
^*
and he described a typical day at Sandhurst. Reveille sounded at 6:00
A.M
. and forty-five minutes later the study halls were filled with cadets in immaculate blue uniforms, “deep in the wiles of tactics or the eccentricities of fortification.”
¹³⁴
Breakfast was served at 8:00
A.M
. Morning parade came an hour later, followed by gymnastics, the formation of skirmishers beyond the cricket pavilion, bayonet practice, lectures on outposts and attacking enemy positions, and lunch. Riding school was held in the early afternoon and was mandatory, even for infantry cadets; those who lacked mounts, like Winston, hired “screws” at the local livery stables. Sports began at 4:00
P.M
. Tea and study preceded mess, the school’s only formal meal. Evenings were devoted to reading, talking, playing whist and billiards, and, sometimes, watching a boxing match between cadets. The bugler played “lights out” at 11:00
P.M
.

Winston became a passionate horseman. He was the liveryman’s steadiest customer. Gradually, he wrote, he developed “a tolerably firm seat,” learning to saddle his mount, to ride without stirrups or reins, to ride bareback, to leap fences, and to mount and dismount while his horse was trotting, a “feat very easily performed.” He became Sandhurst’s second-best rider. “I enjoyed the riding-school thoroughly,” he wrote, “and got on—and off—as well as most…. Horses were the greatest of my pleasures…. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, if taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.” In idle hours he organized races and point-to-points. His sole complaint about Sandhurst was that “polo for the last two years has been relegated to the limbo of prohibited pleasures,” despite the fact that “if there is a game which could prepare a youth for a soldier’s life, that game is polo.” The argument against it was that some officers would be unable to afford it. “This levelling-down doctrine,” he concluded, “is pure Socialism.” Thus, in the first piece he sold to a newspaper, he identified his parliamentary enemies of the coming century.
¹³⁵

He was now an eager student of war. Lord Randolph had instructed his bookseller to send Winston any books he needed for his studies, and presently the young cadet was devouring Maine’s
Infantry Fire Tactics,
Prince Kraft’s
Letters on Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery,
and Sir Edward Bruce Hamley’s 1866 classic,
Operations of War.
Days passed pleasantly. He was surrounded by his peers. As Byron Farwell observes in
Mr. Kipling’s Army,
a youth arriving at Sandhurst or Woolwich “found himself surrounded by others with backgrounds similar to his own…. Officer-instructors and cadets spoke the same language in the same accents, possessed similar vocabularies, had the same set of attitudes and beliefs.” Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, looking back, wrote: “We regular army officers of those days might all have come out of the same mould. We had been to identical public schools…. We… were, I’m afraid, terribly dull.” Winston, though his social position was loftier than most, didn’t think them at all dull. After the long dreadful years of being bullied and taunted, he was accepted here as a comrade, and he rejoiced.
¹³⁶

In his early cadet days his father had written him: “Mind you if you do well at Sandhurst & get good reports good positions in your classes & even the good conduct medal you would go to your regiment so much higher in credit & more thought of. So if you feel at times like giving way or falling off ‘Don’t.’ ” Winston had been getting these goads for twelve years. They hadn’t worked then, and now they were unnecessary. In the examinations at the end of his first term, he scored near the top of his class, his strongest subjects being tactics and military law. Under “Conduct” the official verdict was “Good but unpunctual.” He would always be unpunctual, always missing trains, ships, and, later, planes, until he reached a station so exalted that they all waited for him. But he excelled so in every other Sandhurst course that his tardiness was overlooked. His earlier status of public-school dolt was forgotten now that he was an admirable young soldier with a brilliant career ahead of him. This showed, he wrote, “that I could learn quickly enough the things that mattered.” He was growing stronger physically. Furthermore, he was popular with his fellow cadets. Randolph, astounded by all this, lifted the restrictions on his leave, and Winston began entraining for Waterloo Station in London with his new friends.
¹³⁷

T
he imperial capital was then approaching its prime, and for privileged youths who knew they would inherit it one day, the city was a source of endless wonder and ebullience. The metropolis of the 1870s, when Winston had played in Mayfair and Hyde Park, had been transformed. London was gay; it was, by earlier Victorian standards, permissive. These were the 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, the Mauve Decade, the best time, Churchill would later write, in his entire life: “Twenty to twenty-five—those are the years!”
¹³⁸
It was almost as though the capital was preparing for the momentous events which lay ahead. Popular institutions which would flourish in the next century, and which later generations of Englishmen would come to regard as the very essence of the British way of life, were just then arriving on the national stage. The first white-fronted J. Lyon’s Teashop had just opened at 213 Piccadilly. Harrods had newly installed display windows. Marks and Spencer had opened their Penny Bazar (“Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny”) at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, and were building a branch in London. Londoners of the upper and middle classes had plenty to spend; that year the capital of England’s limited liability companies exceeded £1,000,000,000—one and a third times that of France and Germany combined. At the five-year-old Savoy, Auguste Escoffier had created the Peach Melba, honoring Madame Nellie Melba, who was singing Wagner’s
Lohengrin
at Covent Garden. Piccadilly Circus was acquiring its fountain. In Langham Place, Queen’s Hall had replaced old St. James’s Hall as the home of the capital’s orchestral music; it would be famous for its Promenade Concerts until Nazi bombers leveled it in 1941. The Tower Bridge had just been completed. Strolling along the Embankment from Westminster Bridge, the cadets from Sandhurst could see New Scotland Yard rising, a creation of the architect Norman Shaw, who contrived to give the police station the appearance of a French Renaissance château transplanted from the Seine to the Thames.

If they were in the mood for a play, the Sandhurst cadets could see Oscar Wilde’s
Woman of No Importance
at the Haymarket Theatre, George Bernard Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
at the Avenue,
Charley’s Aunt
at the Royalty, and, at the St. James’s, Arthur Wing Pinero’s
Second Mrs. Tanqueray,
starring that acrobat of the chaise longue, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The hit songs likeliest to be hummed by passersby in the street were Dvořak’s “Humoresque”; or “Happy Birthday to You,” a curious tune composed by a Kentucky kindergarten teacher; or, if the pedestrian had just returned from Paris, the theme of Debussy’s
Après-midi d’un faune
. Lounge suits, worn with bowlers in winter and boaters in summer, were frequently seen here in the center of town, but in the West End the cadets’ fathers were loyal to their frock coats and toppers. Women’s fashions were another matter. The bustle had disappeared four years earlier. Leg-of-mutton sleeves had arrived, and so had separate blouses and skirts, a by-product of lawn tennis’s popularity, though the blouses were worn with stiff collars. Hems were higher, always a source of pleasure for the coarser sex, and boys who could divert chaperons and make exceptional progress with a cooperative girl were delighted to find that knickers had replaced thick petticoats. This was a tribute, not to sexual emancipation, but to the bicycle craze, which dated from J. K. Starley’s invention of the Rover “Safety” bike and J. B. Dunlop’s patenting of the pneumatic tire. The most startling switch in women’s appearance, which did nothing for anyone, was in hair and hats. During Jennie’s youth, hair had been plaited and coiled in a knob at the back of the neck; bonnets were then arched over the knob and tied under the chin. Now hair was brushed forward from the back of the neck and massed on top. Hatpins became indispensable. Hatpin hats, floating on top of the coiffures, might be toques, miniature straw hats, or wide-brimmed picture hats. Many pins were required to anchor them. Keeping them in place discouraged motion, a handicap to a youth intent upon exploring his date’s knickers, and the pins themselves were long and deadly, which, if push came to shove on a park bench, could be lethal.

Had Winston but known it, the change with the greatest significance for his future was the appearance on London streets of W. H. Smith’s newsstands. Once Richard Hoe’s steam-powered rotary “lightning” press had replaced flatbed presses, vast supplies of fodder were needed to feed it. The answer, a German discovered, was cheap groundwood pulp. Readers were ready. W. E. Forster’s Compulsory Education Act of 1870, followed by compulsory schooling ten years later, had raised the entire nation’s level of literacy. In 1858 only 5 percent of the army’s recruits had been able to read and write. But by Churchill’s time the figure was 85.4 percent. Civilians had made similar progress. Reading materials began to be available to them. The 1880s had brought free libraries; Parliament had then abolished the newspaper tax and the excise duty on paper. That cleared the way for what can only be called an explosion in journalism. W. T. Stead’s
Pall Mall Gazette,
which was founded in 1892 and cost a penny, was one of the first eruptions. Others were the
Daily Chronicle,
the
Daily Mail,
George Newnes’s
Tid-bits,
and, from the Harmsworth Brothers,
Answers to Correspondents, Comic Cuts
(for children), the
Evening News,
and, the year after Winston left Sandhurst, the
Daily News,
which, at a halfpenny, would reach a circulation of a half-million, twice as high as that of any other paper. Five years later Alfred Harmsworth would become Lord Northcliffe, and three years after that he would acquire
The Times
and begin trumpeting the danger of war with Germany.