The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (41 page)

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Victoria’s army, which would leave a lasting impression upon Churchill, was an eccentric, insular institution that had changed little since Waterloo, a battle some men still alive could remember clearly. The troops were led by patricians: Wellington had decreed that English gentlemen made “the best officers in the world, and to compose the officers from a lower class would cause the Army to deteriorate.” Military leaders, it was held, should be men with “a stake in the country.” Only WASPs need apply; there were few Disraelis or Rothschilds wearing epaulets. Apart from that, public-school boys were accepted if they were “sound,” were “of the right sort,” and came from “good families.” (You could quickly identify those with classical educations; they swore “By Jove,” an oath never heard in Other Ranks.) In endorsing an application, one colonel scrawled across it, “The son of a good soldier, his mother is a lady.” It was common to note on reports as a recommendation: “A good man to hounds.” Lord Roberts always checked the bloodlines of a man applying for an appointment, and according to the career officer Ian Hamilton, if Roberts thought the candidate “owned a good grandmother he would give him a trial.”
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Gentlemen were expected to guard zealously their regiment’s “tone,” a Victorian word freighted with class consciousness. The army counted on them to live by the gentleman’s code, and if they didn’t know what that was, they weren’t commissioned in the first place. In some ways the code was peculiar. Gambling debts were always settled promptly, but those to tradesmen weren’t. Six years after joining the Fourth Hussars, Churchill still hadn’t paid the tailor who made his first uniforms. But once you were in, you could stay in forever. Some officers who had reached their eighties retained their commands. Nor were crippling wounds disqualifying. Two generals, Roberts and Wolseley, were one-eyed. Hamilton’s wrist had been shattered at Majuba.
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Lord Raglan had been one-armed. So was Samuel Browne, who invented the Sam Browne belt so he could draw his sword swiftly with his remaining hand.

By continental standards, the number of men in uniform was tiny. Asked what he would do if the British army landed in Prussia, Bismarck replied: “Send a policeman and have it arrested.” There were no corps, no divisions, nor even brigades. Everything was built around the regiment. An infantry regiment might have a single battalion of seven hundred men divided into five or six companies. An entire cavalry regiment like Winston’s—hussars, dragoons, or lancers—numbered from three hundred to five hundred men, led by its colonel, four majors, eight captains, and fourteen or fifteen subalterns. There were just thirty-one cavalry regiments in the whole of the British Empire. Seniority—which determined which outfit was stationed on the right in an attack—was jealously guarded in both the cavalry and the infantry. The Coldstream Guards went back to 1661, the Grenadier Guards to 1656, the Scots Guards to 1633, the Buffs to 1572, and the Honourable Artillery Company, which was neither a company nor confined to ordnance, to 1537. Each of them cherished drums and flags captured in battles, some long forgotten, and each dressed officers and ranks in absurd uniforms.
The Times
had reported on the regalia of the Eleventh Hussars: “The brevity of their jackets, the irrationality of their headgear, the incredible tightness of their cherry-colored pants altogether defy description.” The man responsible was George IV, who had never been near a battlefield but who, as Prince Regent, had designed uniforms so tight that men could hardly get into them. In his opinion, “A wrinkle is unpardonable.”
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These zany costumes had become preposterous with the invention of smokeless gunpowder in 1886, but the British didn’t like smokeless powder, and wouldn’t accept it until their enemies had shown them how effective it could be. It was new; therefore, it was suspect. So were the breech-loading fieldpieces Krupp had introduced; Britain was the last European power to abandon muzzle-loading cannon. So were carbines; those issued to one cavalry regiment were dumped on the stable manure pile. The Duke of Cambridge protested that he wasn’t against change. He favored it, he said, when there was no alternative. But encroachments on tradition, if avoidable, were fiercely resisted. Enlisted men were called Tommy Atkins because that was the name of the private Wellington had picked for a specimen signature on an army identity card. Officers drank wine, brandy, and whiskey, and Other Ranks drank gin and beer, because it had always been that way. Regulation bugle calls, though difficult for some buglers, were defended on the ground that they were quintessentially British, though in fact they had been composed by Franz Joseph Haydn.

The citadel of custom, charmingly described in Byron Farwell’s
Mr. Kipling’s Army,
was the regimental mess. This, thought Captain R. W. Campbell, was “the school for courage, honour, and truth”; there, Hamilton wrote, one understood the “Chivalry of Arms”; there, in the opinion of Major General George Younghusband, “The prig ceases to be priggish: it isn’t good enough. The real ‘bad hat,’ or ‘untamable bounder’ quietly disappears.”
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Meals were rituals. You wore a proper mess jacket, which varied from one regiment to another. New subalterns did not speak until spoken to, never expressed opinions, and, in at least one regiment, did not stand on the hearthrug in front of the fire until they had completed three years’ service. The first toast of the evening was to the Queen. Thereafter the port was passed from right to left, and no one smoked until the decanter had circulated twice, or, as they put it, “when the cloth was removed.” Those who broke the rules were fined, and the rules were so numerous, and so divorced from reality, that one wonders when they had time to ponder the profession of arms. Not at mess; shoptalk was forbidden there. So were discussions of politics, religion, and women. Therefore, they rambled on about sport and horses, particularly hunting, where they shot hares, plover, quail, stags, grouse, partridges, ducks, snipes, woodcocks, pigeons, and, occasionally, through error, one another.

What did their countrymen think of them? It is difficult to say. “Victorian England,” Brian Bond writes, “was simultaneously jingoistic and anti-militarist.” A visiting foreigner observed: “How this blind glorification and worship of the Army continues to co-exist with the contemptuous dislike felt towards the members of it, must remain a problem of the national psychology.” They were paid almost nothing. Regimental rates, established in 1806, varied from £95 for a subaltern to £365 for a lieutenant colonel—less than half the wages of War Office clerks—and they would remain unchanged until 1914. No man could afford a commission unless he possessed a private income of at least £150 a year for an infantry office and as much as £700 in the cavalry. Enlisted men received eleven shillings and fourpence per week, twopence less than the most exploited rural laborer in England. Edward Spiers quotes a recruiting sergeant: “It was only in the haunts of dissipation or inebriation, and among the very lowest dregs of society, that I met with anything like success.”
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Yet these men had conquered an Empire. Under Victoria one regiment or another had been in action every year, somewhere on five continents, fighting from Aden and Afghanistan to Zululand and the Zhor Valley. They were almost always victorious. One reason was their sublime, unfathomable courage. Braver officers never led men into battle. They marched at the head of their columns, disdaining weapons for themselves, brandishing only cigars or swagger sticks. At the battle of Isandhlwana every officer had a horse and could have escaped with his life. Not one did; all remained and died with their men. Under fire, they refused to “bob”—to duck bullets and shells. An astonishing number actually enjoyed courting death. Of his first wound Wolseley wrote: “What a supremely delightful moment that was!” A captain in the First Royal Dragoons wrote his mother: “I
adore
war. It is like a big picnic. I have never been so well or happy.” Chinese Gordon, seeing combat for the first time in the Crimea, found it “indescribably exciting.”
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If officers found themselves in peaceful billets, they looked for war elsewhere, took leave to get there, and paid their own expenses. The colonel commanding the Fourth Dragoon Guards enlisted as a private in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers so he could join the storming of the Malakand Pass. The commander of the Tenth Hussars fought under the Turkish and Egyptian flags. Younghusband, having vanished from his post, was next seen standing rapturously in the middle of a Philippine bloodletting. And in November 1895 Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill went to embattled Cuba via the United States.

His motives were mixed. He wanted to see a real war. He was curious about New York, his mother’s home. And he was bored. Anticipating its move to India, the Fourth Hussars had been giving its officers ten weeks’ leave. They were expected to spend it yachting, racing, steeplechasing, and riding to hounds. The War Office assumed that, as gentlemen, they all had independent incomes and could afford such diversions. Being broke was bad form. The Manchester Regiment had the lowest status in the army because it was said that its officers could live on their pay. But a young cavalry subaltern needed a charger, two hunters, and three polo ponies. Buying them had exhausted Churchill’s funds and his mother’s patience. Therefore, as he put it, he “searched the world for some scene of adventure or excitement.”
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Spain was making its last attempt to quell the insurrection led by José Martí and Máximo Gómez, and 200,000 Spanish troops were tied down in Cuba. Both sides were murdering civilians and putting towns to the torch. That, and its proximity to America, appealed to Churchill. Moreover, he could manage some of the expenses. The
Daily Graphic,
which had published Randolph’s letters from Africa in 1891, agreed to pay Winston five guineas for every dispatch from the front. He persuaded one of his regiment’s senior subalterns, Reginald Barnes, to accompany him.

At that time there were no restrictions on officers’ writing for the press. Brabazon had no objections to the trip. Neither had Jennie. She sent ninety pounds and wrote: “I understand all right—& of course darling it is natural that you shd want to travel & I won’t throw cold water on yr little plans.” Next Winston wrote Lord Randolph’s old friend Sir Henry Wolff, now the British ambassador in Madrid, applying for permission from the Spanish military authorities to visit the war zone. It was granted instantly, almost eagerly. The fighting in Cuba had given Spain a terrible image. The press in both England and the United States ardently supported the rebels. This briefly became an issue. Churchill needed one more endorsement, from the War Office. He called on the commander in chief, Wolseley, who seemed embarrassed by the request and hinted that it would be better if Winston went without asking him; newspapermen might misinterpret his sanction of two British officers marching with the Spanish troops. But he couldn’t deny a Churchill. He sighed, nodded, and, Winston wrote, added that “if I worked at the military profession he would help me in every way he could & that I was always to come and ask when I wanted anything.” Then Wolseley sent Winston to his director of military intelligence. This officer, unlike his commander, saw no need for discretion. He provided Churchill with maps and a full briefing. In addition, Winston wrote, he and Barnes were “requested to collect information and statistics on various points and particularly as to the effect of the new bullet—its penetration and striking power. This invests our mission with almost an official character & cannot fail to help one in the future.”
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On November 2 they sailed aboard the Cunard Royal Mail Steamship
Etruria
. The voyage was “tedious and uncomfortable… & I shall always look upon journeys by sea as necessary evils.” But in New York they forgot their grievances. Originally they had scheduled three days in the city, and, aboard ship, had considered cutting this in half. Actually, they were there a week. The man responsible for this revision in plans was Bourke Cockran, a wealthy Irish-American lawyer, congressman, and power in the Tammany wigwam. Cockran was one of Jennie’s men—at one time he had been her favorite—and like the rest he cut a remarkable figure, towering, leonine, with deep-set eyes and a massive forehead. His mobile features gave a contemporary the impression of “something Spanish, Celtiberian as well as Celtic.”
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His oratory was remarkable. Twice, in 1884 and 1892, his deep, resonant brogue had held Democratic national conventions spellbound. Churchill was to be one of his early conquests. Among the last was Adlai Stevenson, who modeled his rhetoric on Cockran’s. In the early 1950s Churchill would astound Stevenson by quoting long passages from Cockran speeches.

Jennie and two of her lovers (Count Kinsky on left)

Churchill and Barnes were Cockran’s guests in his sprawling apartment at 763 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifty-eighth Street. Jennie had written him that they would be calling, and he made wonderful things happen. Her son wrote her that he had “engagements for the next few days about three deep. It is very pleasant staying here as the rooms are beautifully furnished and fitted with every convenience & also as Mr Cockran is one of the most charming hosts and interesting men I have met.” Twelve judges, including a Supreme Court justice, came to dine with them the first evening. The two young English officers dined out at the Waldorf, were entertained at Koster and Bial’s, toured the harbor in a tugboat, attended the annual horse show, were shown around the ironclad cruiser
New York,
attended five fires with the fire commissioner, were received by the Cornelius Vanderbilts—whose niece would be the next Duchess of Marlborough—and visited West Point. Winston wrote: “We are members of all the Clubs and one person seems to vie with another in trying to make our time pleasant.”
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