The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (43 page)

He and Barnes sailed home on the
Etruria,
but the Cuban dilemma still weighed heavily upon him. He dashed off a piece for the
Saturday Review
denouncing rebel cruelty and adding, “They neither fight bravely nor do they use their weapons effectively.” Bad as the Spanish administration was, “a Cuban Government would be worse, equally corrupt, more capricious, and far less stable. Under such a Government revolutions would be periodic, property insecure, equity unknown.” The best solution, he wrote Cockran, would be an American takeover of the island: “I hope the United States will not force Spain to give up Cuba—unless you are prepared to accept responsibility.” If the rebels won, the government would be dominated by “the negro element among the insurgents,” who would “create renewed and even more bitter conflict of a racial kind.”
²⁰

Cuba had been the first test of his courage and his sagacity. He had handled himself well under fire, inviting death near the firing line when, as a nonbelligerent, he might honorably have sought safety in the rear. His reportorial skills were already remarkable. On the other hand, he had failed to grasp the essential nature of guerrilla warfare, so important to an understanding of the century ahead. He had been, and in some respects always would be, a defender of the established order.
Imperialism
would never be a pejorative for him. Of the infamous Jameson Raid, which took place a week after his return from New York, he later wrote, “I was all for Dr. Jameson and his men. I understood fairly well the causes of the dispute on both sides. I longed for the day on which we should ‘avenge Majuba.’ I was shocked to see our Conservative Government act so timidly in this crisis. I was ashamed to see them truckling to a misguided Liberal Opposition and even punishing these brave raiders, many of whom I knew so well.” His forecasts of Cuba’s immediate future would soon be discredited. But in the long run his pessimism about the island would be vindicated. He had just reached his majority. He had been growing in acumen since his father’s death, and was continually revising his judgments. Little more than a year after his return from embattled Cuba, he expressed misgivings over his first interpretation of the revolution there. “I reproach myself somewhat,” he wrote, “for having written a little uncandidly and for having perhaps done injustice to the insurgents. I rather tried to make out, and in some measure succeeded in making out, a case for Spain. It was politic and did not expose me to the charge of being ungrateful to my hosts, but I am not quite clear whether it was right…. I am aware that what I wrote did not shake thrones or upheave empires—but the importance of principles do not [sic] depend on the importance of what involves them.” One principle was clear. It was inconceivable to him that a colony could survive as a sovereign state. After the
Maine
blew up, he told a reporter that “America can give the Cubans peace, and perhaps prosperity will then return. American annexation is what we must all urge, but possibly we shall not have to urge long.” To him the very thought of Cuban independence was as absurd as, say, an independent India.
²¹

I
ndia now loomed. The Fourth Hussars marched from Aldershot to Hounslow, paraded past the retiring Brabazon for the last time, and began packing leisurely for the long voyage eastward in the autumn. Churchill later recalled: “I now passed a most agreeable six months; in fact they formed almost the only idle spell I have ever had.” It was the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; fashionable London celebrated with balls, receptions, recitals, and dinner parties. Jennie was back after nine months of dalliance on the Continent, including a marathon romp with Bourke Cockran in a Champs-Elysées apartment, and vexed only by pursuing, jealous little notes from the Prince of Wales, who typically speculated on “where your next loved victim is…?” Winston had also missed her. “My darling Mamma,” he had written her from Aldershot, “I am longing for the day when you will be able to have a little house of your own and when I can really feel that there is such a place as home.” Now she had taken, not a little house, but a seven-story Georgian mansion at 35A Great Cumberland Place, near Hyde Park and within sight of Marble Arch, and using London’s six-year-old “electric deep-level” subway, the precursor of the modern tube, he commuted between there and Waterloo, taking the train on to his barracks. Once Duchess Lily invited him to join a weekend party at Deepdene given for the prince. Colonel Brabazon would also be present. Churchill realized, he wrote, that “I must be upon my best behaviour: punctual, subdued, reserved, in short display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” Unforgivably, he missed the six o’clock train to Dorking. That delayed him by an hour and a quarter. In his railway compartment, he frantically changed to full dress—to the dismay of the man who shared it—and a servant, meeting him at the station with a brougham, lashed the horses into a gallop. Nevertheless, he was late. He hoped to slip into the dining room unnoticed and apologize afterward. Instead, he found the entire company assembled in the drawing room. Without him there were only thirteen in the party, and the royal family was superstitious about that. As Winston bowed, HRH said shirtily with his German accent: “Don’t they teach you to be punctual in your regiment, Winston?” He glared at Brabazon, who glared at Winston, who was, for once, mute.
²²

It didn’t last. Before the meal ended he was chatting amiably with the prince. Duchess Lily reproachfully called him incorrigible; he cheerfully acknowledged it. Among the other guests he had met Sir Bindon Blood, an influential veteran of colonial wars, so he counted the weekend a triumph. In his letters of those months one has the feeling that skies were always blue. He danced, he hunted, he devised clever masquerades for fancy-dress balls, and he evaded creditors. His means during this period are in fact mysterious. Messrs E. Tautz, breeches and trousers makers, were dunning him for nearly forty guineas. He now had “five quite good ponies” and owed payment for them. Wine bills, book bills, saddler’s bills—they accumulated, were stuffed away and ignored. His attitude toward them was insouciant. He left a note for his mother: “Our finance is indeed involved! If I had not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills I should have the money now.”
²³

She wrote him tautly: “I assure you unless something extraordinary turns up I see ruin staring me in the face.” Jennie was as improvident as Winston—she would spend £200 on a ball dress—but after he left she would be in London to face the consequences of his extravagance, and her alarm mounted. She borrowed from friends. She borrowed £17,000 from a bank, using her life insurance as collateral. She raised money on her jewels and juggled balances. Still the drain continued. She wrote: “My darling boy, you can’t think how all this worries me. I have so many money problems of my own I feel I cannot take on any others”; and, “What an extraordinary boy you are as regards yr business affairs.” Her annual income had fallen to £900, out of which she had to provide allowances for both her sons. She explained this to Winston, and he replied: “The situation as described by your letter is appalling. As you say it is of course impossible for you to live in London on such a pittance.” Then he hinted unscrupulously: “I hate the idea of your marrying—but that of course would be a solution.” It was indeed the eventual solution. Meanwhile, she made ends meet by taking over houses, redecorating them, and selling them for a profit. Winston remained indifferent to her struggle. Once one of his checks actually bounced. She told him: “I marvel at their allowing you to overdraw as you do. Neither the Westminster or the National Bank will let me overdraw £5 without telling me at once.” She sounded envious.
²⁴

He remitted thirty pounds of the forty-five she had paid on his account and vaguely assured her he would send the rest “when my ship comes home.” He did not mean the ship to India. He had decided that he wanted to miss that one. The Fourth Hussars would be there nine years, and the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. The fact was that he wasn’t really cut out to be a professional officer. His father’s impression that he was, fragilely based on a boyhood infatuation with toy soldiers, had been whimsical. Winston was brave, and would distinguish himself in battle, but the long droughts of peacetime service could only frustrate him. He wanted to get on. Barracks life in the East would be dull, confining, dispiriting—Harrow all over again. England was the place to be; here he could find a constituency and run for office. Money would be necessary, of course, but he was an experienced journalist now; surely some newspaper would pay for his by-line. Crete was going through one of its periodic upheavals. He approached the
Daily Chronicle
with the suggestion that the paper send him there as its correspondent. The editor replied that they would pay him “at the rate of ten guineas a letter” if he got there on his own. He couldn’t afford it. In Fleet Street he floated other proposals. He offered to cover the Nile expedition Kitchener was organizing, or Sir Frederick Carrington’s expedition in Matabeleland, or the Ninth Lancers’ adventures in Rhodesia. There were no takers. He urged relatives and powerful friends to intercede on his behalf. They failed, and Lord Lansdowne, the secretary of state for war, wrote Jennie that Winston’s importuning was causing talk. His duty, Lansdowne said, lay with his regiment. There were rumors that he was trying to dodge it. “There are plenty of ill natured people about,” Lansdowne wrote, “and it is just conceivable that an attempt might be made to misrepresent his action.”
²⁵

Churchill was unchastened. By now it was August, and they would be sailing for Bombay in a month. He leaned on his mother. He leaned hard. Perhaps he sensed that she, ashamed of her early neglect of him, was vulnerable to pressure. Surely, he felt, one of her many contacts could solve his problem. Writing from Hounslow he begged her to find “places where I could gain experience and derive advantage—rather than to [sic] the tedious land of India.” If he went he would be losing a “golden opportunity” and “guilty of an indolent folly that I shall regret all my life. A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the company’s star. Thence hot foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box.” He turned the screw: “I cannot believe that with all the influential friends you possess and all those who would do something for me for my father’s sake” something could not be done. It was “useless to preach the gospel of patience to me. Others as young are making the running now and what chance have I of ever catching up. I put it down here—definitely on paper—that you really ought to leave no stone unturned to help me at such a period.” He begged her: “Three months leave is what I want & you could get it for me.”
²⁶

She couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t; no reply from her survives. The army had been lenient with him, and what he was asking of her was probably impossible. Later she would move mountains for him, but he could not avoid India now. On September 11, 1896, he and a hundred other officers sailed from Southampton aboard the S.S.
Britannia
. Twelve days later, at Balmoral, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign. Churchill, who would do more to preserve and protect the Victorian legacy than any of her other subjects, was on the Red Sea, at midpoint in the twenty-three-day voyage. He played chess with a fellow officer that afternoon and listened to a string band that evening. His spirits were low. He wrote home: “The weather is beginning to get hot and the troop decks are awful.” His only good news was that he had reached the semifinal of a shipboard chess tournament: “I have improved greatly since the voyage began, and I think I shall try to get really good while I am in India.” But that was the limit of his expectations there. He had no inkling that India, far from dooming his future, would be the first crucial experience of his youth.
²⁷

I
n 1896 the British Raj had reached flood tide. It lay halfway between the Mutiny forty years earlier, which had seen the transfer of power from the Honourable East India Company to the Crown, and the great days of that improbable, bespectacled nationalist who wore only a homespun dhoti and was known as Mahatma Gandhi. In the interval English dominance over the subcontinent flourished. The Indian Empire was a jigsaw of 602 states, ranging in size from Kashmir and Hyderabad to tiny holdings of a few acres. All were ruled from London under the principle of “paramountcy.” This was paternalism at best, and at worst, dictatorship, but the British argued, not unreasonably, that India had never been democratic, had never even been a country, and had always been governed by rajas, whose rights were respected by the Queen’s viceroy. As Englishmen saw it, they had rescued the people from pagans and savagery and introduced them to a better way of life. This was not entirely hypocritical. At the time of the Mutiny they had founded three Indian universities. Qualified natives, though few in number, had been admitted to the Indian Civil Service since 1864. Irrigation, railroads, newspapers, and the concept of Western justice and its quaint trimmings had been introduced and accepted. Solicitors wore white collar-tabs, like lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn; barristers wore wigs; judges wore imperial ermine. Hospitals, physicians, and public-health officials treated black and white patients alike.