The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (46 page)

“I have hardly looked at a novel,” he wrote on March 31, 1897. He was sticking to tough reading and writing letters meshed with abstruse allusions. His brother officers wondered how he did it. The climate was punishing. This was the Raj in its heroic period, without air conditioning, refrigerators, or even electric fans. One thinks of Kipling in the Punjab only a few years earlier, sweating and scribbling under the same sun through long afternoons in his darkened bungalow, struggling to immortalize the age. Churchill was writing, too, but his was a genius of a different order, and he had not found his medium. He was writing his first book, and only novel,
Savrola
, though he had not yet settled on that title. Once it had begun to take shape he wrote Jennie: “I think you will be surprised when you get the MS. It is far and away the best thing that I have ever done. I have only written 80 MS pages—but I find a fertility of ideas that surprises me…. It is called ‘Affairs of State,’ a political romance. Scene Plot a hypothetical Republic…. I am quite enthusiastic about it. All my philosophy is put into the mouth of the hero. But you must see for yourself. It is full of adventure.”
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He added a postscript: “Do try to get me up to the war if you can possibly.” He meant the imminent clashes along India’s North-West Frontier, but it is clear from his correspondence that year that the prospect of fighting anywhere would have been welcome. The first flush of his enthusiasm for Bangalore had faded. He had become restless; his temperament cried for action. India had become “an abominable country to live long in. Comfort you get—company you miss…. There is every temptation to relapse into a purely animal state of existence.” He and Baring had spent Christmas in Bengal, but he had concluded that “Calcutta is full of supremely uninteresting people endeavouring to assume an air of heartiness”; he was glad to have seen it only because “it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.” Yearning for a stimulating environment, he wrote that if he could “only get hold of the right people my stay here might be of value. If I had come to India as an MP—however young & foolish, I could have had access to all who know and can convey. As a soldier… I vegetate.” Without his books, he felt, he would stagnate. “The Indian press is despicable—being chiefly advertisements.” All sorts of complaints crowded his letters now. “My face is blistered by the sun so badly that I have had to see a doctor,” he wrote after one field exercise, and when he was appointed acting adjutant he had to write “so many memos etc that to touch a pen is an effort.”
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His first chance to break free from this oppression came in the spring of 1897. The Greeks had sent a small expeditionary force to fight rebellious Turks on Crete. The British Mediterranean fleet, joining those of five other nations, was blockading the island to prevent the landing of Greek reinforcements. Churchill was indignant: “What an atrocious crime the Government have committed in Crete! That British warships should lead the way in protecting the blood bespattered Turkish soldiery from the struggles of their victims is horrible to contemplate.” His mother disagreed: “The Concert of Europe were
obliged
to act as they did altho’ they certainly were slow in making up their minds.” He was unconvinced: “We are doing a very wicked thing in firing on the Cretan insurgents… so that she [Greece] cannot succour them.” He saw the whole thing as a devious Salisbury plot to strengthen the Turks and thereby deny Constantinople to the Russians. He was right there, but wrong in an aside which, in the light of subsequent events, has a haunting ring: Salisbury’s policy was “foolish because, as surely as night follows day—the Russians are bound to get Constantinople. We could never stop them even if we wished. Nor ought we to wish for anything that could impede the expulsion from Europe of the filthy Oriental.”
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All this laid the groundwork for his letter to Jennie of April 21. “I am afraid you will regard this letter somewhat in the aspect of a bombshell,” he began. He proposed to cover the Cretan fighting as a war correspondent, and he didn’t care which side accepted his credentials. “Of course all my sympathies are entirely with the Greeks, but on the other hand the Turks are bound to win—are in enormous strength & will be on the offensive the whole time.” It didn’t matter, really; “if you can get me good letters to the Turks—to the Turks I will go. If to the Greeks—to the Greeks.” He thought her close friend Sir Edgar Vincent “could probably do everything for me in Constantinople & could get me attached to some general’s staff etc as in Cuba. On the other hand you know the King of Greece and could of course arrange matters in that quarter.” Jennie, he was confident, could also find a newspaper which would hire him. He expected to be paid ten or fifteen pounds for each piece but would meet his own expenses, and he asked her to manage a loan—“Lord Rothschild would be the person to arrange this for me as he knows every one.” His mother, he felt certain, would “not stand in my way in this matter but will facilitate my going just as you did in the case of Cuba.” He misjudged her. In London she described his design to friends as “a wild scheme” and told Jack that the men she knew in the Foreign Office thought the war would end soon anyhow. This being true, his plan, far from being a bombshell, would end rather “like a damp firework,” which is precisely what happened.
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He had been checked. But not mated. Considering the powerful men who had been enticed by his mother’s beauty—the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Salisbury, Vincent, Sir Evelyn Wood, Kitchener, Lord Cromer, Sir Bindon Blood—Winston concluded that she could surely exploit at least one of her relationships to his advantage. He had no compunctions about twisting her arm, thereby persuading her to twist theirs. But he could not do it from six thousand miles away. Luckily he would soon be at her side. As the hot season of 1897 approached, the officers of the Fourth Hussars were offered what was called “three months’ accumulated privilege leave” in England. Most declined on the ground that they had just settled in, but “I,” Churchill would recall, “thought it was a pity that such good things should go a-begging, and I therefore volunteered to fill the gap.” On May 8 he sailed from Bombay aboard the
Ganges.
The trip was an ordeal: “sweltering heat, rough weather and fearful seasickness.” At Aden he was greeted by bitter news. The Greeks had sued for peace. His disappointment was shared by a fellow passenger, Colonel Ian Hamilton, a romantic who dreamed of Greece’s past glories and would later encounter Churchill again and yet again, but Winston, unconsoled, left the ship when it reached Naples, dawdled in Pompeii, Rome, and Paris, and reached home only just in time to attend society’s annual fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House in Piccadilly. Jennie went as Theodora. Of Winston we know only that he wore a sword. He had, he said, returned to enjoy “the gaieties of the London Season,” but he had other matters on his mind.
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War, any war, was one. Politics was another. After the ball he dropped into the St. Stephen’s Chambers office of Fitzroy Stewart, secretary of the Conservative Central Office and a distant cousin, and told him he wanted to stand for Parliament as a Conservative.

No seats were vacant, Stewart explained, but he wrote Henry Skrine, the party’s agent in Bath, asking: “Will you allow the late Lord Randolph Churchill’s son, Mr Winston S. Churchill… to speak at your gathering on the 26th? He is very keen about politics and about the Primrose League and has told us he would like to address a few political meetings before rejoining his regiment…. He is a clever young man and his presence would no doubt be of some interest to the Bath Conservatives.” Thus it was that Churchill delivered his first political address at Claverton Manor, now England’s American Museum, in a park near Bath, in the high summer of 1897. Newspapers then devoted roughly the same space to politics that they give to sports today, and both the
Bath Daily Chronicle
and London’s
Morning Post
ran full accounts of his performance. The speech was enthusiastically received—he was interrupted by cheers forty-one times—but that may have arisen in part from sympathy for his inexperience; he began by telling his audience that the timeworn “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” should be pardoned in this instance, because this was, in fact, his maiden effort.
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Not much was happening in politics just now, he said, which was dull for the politicians but probably a relief to the people. Then he launched into a spirited defense of the Conservative party and an attack on its critics. Liberals were “always liberal with other people’s money.” Radicals—“the dried-up drain-pipe of Radicalism”—reminded him of “the man who, on being told that ventilation was an excellent thing, went and smashed every window in his house, and died of rheumatic fever.” Conservative policy, on the other hand, was “a look-before-you-leap policy… a policy of don’t leap at all if there is a ladder.” He praised the Tories’ bill to compensate workers injured in industrial accidents, regretted a recent strike, and took the position, always popular with politicians courting the average voter, of damning both labor and capital. Ultimately, he believed, “the labourer will become, as it were, a shareholder in the business in which he works,” though he hastily added that this solution would become practical only “in the distant future.” The greatest achievement of the Conservatives, he said, had been teaching “the people of Great Britain the splendour of their Empire, the nature of their Constitution, and the importance of their fleet.” This was the heart of his message, a paean to imperialism, and his peroration, throbbing with the rhythms of Gibbon, is both a tribute to his imperial faith and a demonstration of his beginning struggle toward eloquence:

O
n the day that Churchill spoke in Bath, news reached England of a Pathan uprising in the Swat Valley, on India’s North-West Frontier. This had been smoldering for some time, and was a direct consequence of Whitehall’s policy in that harsh, craggy corner of Asia. The British, having conquered the plains of India, had paused at the foothills of the Himalayas and turned back to develop the lands they had taken. The mountains formed a natural barrier as definite, and as unbridgeable, as the English Channel. But in the northwest the peaks trailed off. There, in 1893, an Anglo-Afghan frontier had been demarcated; Britain intended to build Afghanistan up as a buffer between the Raj and the Russians, Asia’s other great power. Meanwhile, they went about enrolling the tribesmen on their side of the frontier as subjects of the Queen. And there lay the rub. These clansmen—Pathans, Swatis, Waziris, Mahsuds, Afridis, Bunerwalis, Chitralis, and Gilgitis—had lived in remote independence since the dawn of time. Now bands of pale aliens were moving among them, building roads, putting up signs, establishing outposts and blockhouses. They were bewildered, then angry. They knew almost nothing of what was happening in the rest of the world, but now they were being informed, and misinformed, by a Moslem rabble-rouser whom the British called the Mad Fakir and Churchill later described as “a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness.”
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This mullah told the tribesmen of victories by their fellow Moslems—the Turks on Crete and the Mahdi in the Sudan—and spread wild tales. Turks had captured the Suez Canal, he said, explaining what it was, and he assured them that the British bullets could not harm men faithful to Mohammed, displaying as proof a small bruise on his leg which, he said, was the only consequence of a direct hit by an English cannonball. The viceregal staff in Calcutta was not unaware of this agitation. Word of it came to them through networks of—readers of
Kim
will have guessed—informers. Punitive expeditions were organized; reinforcements of Tommies were on their way from other parts of the Empire. London was particularly worried by the isolation of the Raj’s key frontier fort, Chitral, far to the north, a miniature Gibraltar situated on an eminence commanding the great passes into Afghanistan. A Swati revolt threatened the British garrison holding the Malakand Pass and, specifically, a long wire-rope
jhula,
or swinging bridge, needed to provision Chitral. Whitehall reacted by announcing that a field force of three brigades would put down the uprising. It would be led by General Sir Bindon Blood.