The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (49 page)

There were details, as there always are, to be cleared up before publication. Quotations had to be verified; some sentences were awkward; here and there he had repeated himself. But “I don’t want anything modified or toned down in any way. I will stand or fall by what I have written.” Revisions and proofreading, he decided, would be entrusted to his uncle Moreton, who, on the frail strength of a monograph on bimetallism, was the only member of the family with literary pretensions. Churchill told his mother that he thought he ought to get at least £300 for the first edition, with royalties, “but if the book hits the mark I might get much more.” There was one problem. Another author was writing a book on the same subject. That called for haste: “Do not I beg you lose one single day in taking the MS to some publisher. [Lord] Fincastle’s book may for all I know be ready now.” On reflection he decided to “recommend Moreton’s treating with the publishers, it is so much easier for a man.” Here he misjudged both uncle and mother. The first edition, to Winston’s horror, would contain some two hundred misprints. “A mad printer’s reader,” one reviewer would write, and Winston would add sadly, “As far as Moreton is concerned, I now understand why his life has been a failure in the city and elsewhere.” Jennie, on the other hand, had very sensibly gone to Arthur Balfour, who had referred her to A. P. Watt, the literary agent. Watt negotiated the terms with Longmans.
Malakand,
appearing in March 1898, sold eighty-five hundred copies in nine months. It was priced at six shillings; the royalty was 15 percent. Winston had earned more in a few weeks (£382) than he could in four years as a subaltern.
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But far more welcome was the book’s enthusiastic reception. Moreton’s disgraceful performance did not pass unnoticed: the
Athenaeum
observed that “one word is printed for another, words are defaced by shameful blunders, and sentence after sentence ruined by the punctuation of an idiot or of a school-boy in the lowest form.” But the same reviewer predicted that the author might become as great a soldier as the first Marlborough and “a straighter politician.” The
Pioneer
found “a wisdom and comprehension far beyond his years.” The
Spectator
agreed. It was hailed as a minor classic, the debut of an exciting new talent, and, in the
Times of India,
the
Madras Mail
, and Delhi’s
Morning Post
, a penetrating study of Raj policy. Churchill’s response to all this is curiously moving. He was “filled with pride and pleasure…. I had never been praised before. The only comments which had ever been made upon my work at school had been ‘Indifferent,’ ‘Slovenly,’ ‘Bad,’ ‘Very bad,’ etc. Now here was the great world with its leading literary newspapers and vigilant erudite critics, writing whole columns of praise!”
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The Prince of Wales read
Malakand,
sent a copy to his sister, the Empress Dowager Victoria of Germany, and wrote “My dear Winston” on April 22: “I cannot resist writing a few lines to congratulate you on the success of your book! I have read it with the greatest possible interest and I think the descriptions and the language generally excellent. Everybody is reading it, and I only hear it spoken of with praise.” HRH thought Churchill probably wanted to see more combat, and he approved: “You have plenty of time before you, and should certainly stick to the Army before adding MP to your name.” He had, of course, misread the author. Winston wanted to be where the fighting was thickest, but as a correspondent, not as a junior officer. He had vowed to “free myself from all discipline and authority, and set up in perfect independence in England with nobody to give me orders or arouse me by bell or trumpet.” Besides, the struggle on the Indian frontier was over. Everyone knew that the next excitement would be in Africa. Sir Herbert Kitchener’s campaign to reconquer the Sudan had begun two years earlier; he had been moving slowly, building a railroad as he went, but now in April 1898 his major victory over sixteen thousand dervishes on the Atbara River signaled the beginning of the end. Churchill longed to be at his side. Once more he implored his mother to yank strings. “You must work Egypt for me,” he told her. “You have so many lines of attack…. Now I beg you—have no scruples but worry right and left and take no refusal.” He wanted her to “stimulate the Prince into writing to Kitchener.” Two months later he wrote: “Oh how I wish I could work you up over Egypt! I know you could do it with all your influence—and all the people you know. It is a pushing age and we must shove with the best.”
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Unfortunately Kitchener, at that time, detested Churchill. He had been outraged by his book; it was bad for discipline, he believed, for subalterns to chide their superiors. In any event, he felt that Winston already had had a good run for his money in India; the Nile was out of bounds for him. “It was,” Churchill later said, “a case of dislike before first sight.” Jennie and her influential friend Mary, Lady Jeune, were wining and cajoling everyone in the War Office—Winston later said that they “left no wire unpulled, no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked”—but while guests were susceptible to petticoat diplomacy, Kitchener, as Egyptian commander in chief, or Sirdar, had the final say, and in Winston’s case he said it over and over. It was
no.
Lady Jeune wired him: “Hope you will take Churchill. Guarantee he wont write.” She couldn’t guarantee it, and the Sirdar knew it. Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant general and an admirer of Lady Jeune’s, was recruited to the Churchill cause. Lady Jeune and Jennie lunched with Wood and the Prince of Wales, and Wood then cabled the Sirdar: “Personage asked me personally desires you take Churchill.” Kitchener was adamant: “Do not want Churchill as no room.” Jennie knew Kitchener, of course; she knew everyone. Winston asked her to write him directly: “Strike while the iron is hot and the ink wet.” She did, and he replied with elaborate courtesy. He had too many officers as it was, he was overwhelmed with applications from men more qualified than her son, but if at some future time an opportunity arose he would be pleased, et cetera, et cetera. Really challenged now, she decided to go to Egypt herself. Winston wrote: “I hope you may be successful. I feel almost certain you will. Your wit & tact & beauty—should overcome all obstacles.” They didn’t. Setting up headquarters in Cairo’s Continental Hotel with her current lover, Major Caryl John Ramsden, she bombarded the Sirdar with letters. The best reply she got was: “I have noted your son’s name and I hope I may be able to employ him later in the Sudan.” All Jennie had to show for her pains was humiliation, from Kitchener and then, unexpectedly, from Major Ramsden, who jilted her; returning to her hotel room on an impulse after she had left it for Port Said, she found Ramsden in bed with Lady Robert Maxwell, the wife of another army officer. HRH sent her a teasing note: “You had better have stuck to your old friends than gone on your Expedition to the Nile! Old friends are the best!”
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Jennie in her prime

On June 18 Churchill sailed from Bombay, taking leave to plead his cause in person. But at the War Office he found several hundred officers on similar errands. He ran up against one blank wall after another. Kitchener’s general advance on Khartoum was scheduled for early August. Time was short, and Winston seemed beaten when, out of the blue, he received a note from the prime minister’s private secretary. Lord Salisbury had read
Malakand
with great pleasure and wanted to discuss it. An appointment was set for the following Tuesday, July 12. Salisbury received him at the Foreign Office with elaborate old-world courtesy and led him to a small sofa. He praised the book, “not only for its manner but for its style,” told him that it had provided him with greater insight into the frontier fighting than any parliamentary debate, and said, as he saw him to the door, “If there is anything at any time that I can do which would be of assistance to you, pray do not fail to let me know.”
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Back at Great Cumberland Place, Churchill seized the opportunity. He wrote Salisbury: “I am vy anxious to go to Egypt and to proceed to Khartoum with the Expedition. It is not my intention, under any circumstances to stay in the army long.” He wanted to cover the Sirdar’s battles as he had covered Sir Bindon’s. Sir Evelyn had written a letter approving his plan. Churchill enclosed it, explaining that Sir Evelyn had “tried his best—so he assures me—on my behalf. My mother has exerted what influence she can for two years. Even HRH has allowed his name to be used as a recommendation. All have failed.” One hope remained: Lord Cromer, British agent and consul general in Egypt. Winston was “convinced,” he told the prime minister, “that if you will write a letter to Lord Cromer and say that on personal grounds you wish me to go—the affair will be immediately arranged.” He was “loth to afflict you with this matter. Yet the choice lies between doing so, and abandoning a project which I have set my heart on for a long time…. The affair is after all of extreme insignificance to any but me.”
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Salisbury saw nothing wrong in this brazen manipulation; it was common among “young men with suitable introductions,” to use Churchill’s delicate phrase. The prime minister wrote Cromer, suggesting that he approach Kitchener, but as he told Winston in his reply, “I cannot advise you to rely too confidently on the result of his letter.” Wheels were turning in the bureaucracy. Salisbury’s role, here as in so much else, is unclear. All we know is that nothing happened before Churchill’s visit to the Foreign Office and that something happened soon afterward. Sir Evelyn told Lady Jeune that the Sirdar was going too far in picking his officers and ignoring recommendations from London. He could do as he liked with his Egyptian troops, but British regiments remained under the control of the War Office. Lady Jeune repeated this to Winston, who asked: “Have you told him that the Prime Minister has telegraphed personally on my behalf?” She hadn’t. “Do so,” he said, “and let us see whether he will stand up for his prerogatives.” Conveniently, a young officer in the Twenty-first Lancers, a regiment of English cavalry, died in Cairo that day. The Sirdar routinely informed the War Office of the vacancy, and the War Office routinely replied that another officer would be on his way. It was left to Cromer to suggest Churchill as the replacement. Kitchener, we are told, “simply shrugged his shoulders and passed on to what were after all matters of greater concern.” Meanwhile, fresh orders had been delivered to Winston by courier at 35A Great Cumberland Place. He had been “attached as a supernumerary Lieutenant to the 21st Lancers for the Soudan Campaign” and would report to the Abbasiya barracks, Cairo. It was understood that he would pay his own expenses and that the government would not be liable if he were killed or wounded. He immediately took a hansom to his solicitors, Lumley and Lumley, and then, with their approval, borrowed £3,500 at 4½ percent interest from the Norwich Union Society, using as collateral an insurance policy bequeathed him by his grandfather. Then he called on Oliver Borthwick of the
Morning Post
. Borthwick agreed to pay him £15 apiece—his value was rising—for a series of Nile dispatches which, to avoid ruffling Kitchener further, would be disguised as letters to “Dear Oliver.” Winston told Aylmer Haldane, a friend, “If you look at the
Morning Post
it is possible that you will see that one of my friends has committed and continues to commit an unpardonable breach of confidence by publishing letters of mine. Don’t give away the pious fraud as I do not want to be recalled.”
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He was not yet in the clear. He needed official permission from the Fourth Hussars. But that didn’t trouble him; his future didn’t lie there. It lay in public life, and so, while packing, he decided to deliver a political address. He spoke at Bradford and wrote afterward: “The meeting was a complete success. The hall was not a vy large one—but it was closely packed. I was listened to with the greatest attention for 55 minutes at the end of which time there were loud & general cries of ‘Go on.’… All of which was vy gratifying…. The conclusions I form are these—with practice I shall obtain great power on a public platform. My impediment is no hindrance. My voice sufficiently powerful, and—this is vital—my ideas & modes of thought are pleasing to men.” R. B. (later Lord) Haldane, a leading Liberal MP, read the speech in the
Morning Post
the next day and wrote Jennie: “I thought it very good—broad in tone—fresh & vigorous. I hope he will soon be in the House.”
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After Bradford, Churchill vanished. Once in Cairo, he reasoned, he would be beyond reach of the Fourth Hussars. Indeed, unless the War Office proved uncharacteristically helpful, Bangalore wouldn’t even know where he was. Ignoring the swift, comfortable steamers of the P & O and Australian Lloyd, he took the train to Marseilles and boarded the freighter
Sindh,
“a filthy tramp,” he wrote in a note on July 30, manned by “detestable French sailors.” On August 2 he reached Cairo and took a carriage to the cavalry barracks. “All was hustle and bustle” there. “Two squadrons of the 21st Lancers had already started up the Nile.” He paid forty pounds for a charger and paraded that evening with “A” Squadron, to which he was attached, in the uniform of the day: khakis, topee, Sam Browne belt, field glasses, revolver—he had forgotten his regular one, with its lucky silk lanyard, and had to buy a new Mauser pistol—and Stohwasser gaiters. The band struck up “Auld Lang Syne,” and they were off. That was on a Tuesday. On Friday he was “toiling slowly up the rising river—against a 6 knot current with only a balance of speed of 4 miles an hour,” pausing briefly in Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile, where he paid “a flying visit” to the ancient temple and was reminded of Rider Haggard’s
Cleopatra
. He felt like a fugitive from the Fourth Hussars, which he was. He had “heard nothing definite about my leave being sanctioned by India—but as there has been no canceling order & a fortnight has already passed I think I may now conclude… that ‘silence has given consent.’ ” The trip was proving “delightful,” though the boat was a strange troop transport, one of Cook’s, painted alabaster white, with chintz curtains in the saloon windows and flowered toiletries in every cabin. Winston, interested in everything, noted that it was powered by steam-driven pistons which turned “a great paddle-wheel which protrudes from the stern. The appearance is peculiar.” He had found “many old friends in the regiment.” He had also learned that never, in its entire history, had the Twenty-first Lancers seen action. Indeed, other regiments gibed that its motto was “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The taunt was of long standing, but in a month it would be forgotten.
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W
hat were the British doing on the Nile? To the public at home, and to Churchill, who wrote ardently of Queen, Empire, and Flag, the answer was obvious. They were there, he wrote, to assure the destruction of an autocracy, “a state of society which had long become an anachronism—an insult as well as a danger to civilisation; the liberation of the great waterway; perhaps the foundation of an African India; certainly the settlement of a long account.” That long account was the martyrdom of Chinese Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi’s howling dervishes. After Khartoum had been retaken, Churchill thought, it would be rather a good thing to “tell some stonemason to bring his hammer and chisel and cut on the pedestal of Gordon’s statue in Trafalgar Square the significant, the sinister, yet the somehow satisfactory word, ‘Avenged.’ ”
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But over thirteen years had passed since Gordon had been butchered. The Mahdi, as inscrutable as his victim, had died suddenly (and mysteriously) five months later. Before his death he had chosen Abdullah Ibn Mohammed as Khalifa—literally “successor”—to lead the forces in Mahdism. Under the Khalifa the Sudanese situation had been transformed. After suppressing a conspiracy by the Mahdi’s relatives and disarming the forces of other leading emirs, he had sought to accomplish the Mahdi’s dream of a universal jihad, or holy war, reforming Islam throughout the Moslem world. Although the Sudanese people were of mixed Arab, Hamitic, and Negro ancestry, all of them were, and are, commonly called Arabs, and their devotion to the Prophet Mohammed approached the absolute. The Khalifa’s hordes attacked north, south, east, and west. They were checked everywhere, notably by the Belgians in the Congo and the British in Egypt. Then the Mahdist Sudan entered a three-year period of great suffering. Almost no rain fell. Crops shriveled, herds grew emaciated, dervishes starved, epidemics broke out, thousands died. Eventually the rains returned; improved harvests brought prosperity. The Khalifa became a popular leader. He was an autocrat, but his people had never known democracy, and in any event the charge of autocracy was hardly one to be flung about carelessly by a twenty-three-year-old youth who was deftly exploiting his own membership in a privileged class to build popular support among his fellow countrymen.

England’s real enemy on the Nile was France. Now that the British held Egypt, they wanted to insulate the length of the river, without which Egypt could not survive. “The Nile is Egypt,” said Roberts, “and Egypt is the Nile.” The Italians, the Belgians, and the Germans agreed to stay out of the river’s valley. The French declined. Instead, they sent an expedition to Africa under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, whose orders were to land on the continent’s west coast, march inland, and seize Fashoda (now Kodok) on the upper Nile, where, it was believed, a dam could be built to shut off Egypt’s water. Fashoda, not the ruins of Gordon’s Khartoum, would be Kitchener’s ultimate destination. The Khalifa’s tribesmen merely lay between him and his objective. Since all this was beyond Churchill, it was probably beyond the Khalifa, too. All he knew was that an army of British and Egyptian troops, led by the Sirdar, was coming after him. He sat in the Mahdist capital of Omdurman, built opposite Khartoum after Gordon’s death, and plotted the movements of his sixty-thousand-man army. His confidence was sky-high. Kitchener, after all, had only twenty thousand men, counting his Egyptian Camel Corps and the disaffected Sudanese he had enlisted. What the Khalifa did not realize was that the new technological superiority of European armies—resulting from such innovations as shrapnel, magazine rifles, and Maxim guns—had rendered his passionate masses, clad in their patched blue-and-white jibbas, or smocks, waving their obsolete weapons and their banners inscribed with passages from the Koran, almost meaningless. And logistics, another technological development, solved the Sirdar’s supply problems, permitting him to plan the orderly arrival of reinforcing troops like the Twenty-first Lancers, setting out from Cairo, fourteen hundred miles away.

The journey took two weeks: by steamer to Aswân, where they led their horses around the cascading water at Philae and reembarked; on to Wadi Halfa, a four-day trip by boat; then four hundred miles by military railroad to Kitchener’s main camp, where the waters of the Atbara flow into the vast, brown, muddy, fifteen-hundred-foot-wide Nile. Many of the place-names in Churchill’s dispatches are meaningless today: Shellal, Metemmeh, Wad Habeshi, Wad Bishara, and, nine miles above the main camp, the Shabluka gorge and cataract, beyond which long, low heights overlooked Omdurman and the ruins of Khartoum. But Winston’s reportorial skills were growing. A
khor,
he carefully explained to his readers, “is a watercourse, usually dry. In India it would be called a
nullah;
in South Africa a
donga;
in Australia a
gully.
” A
zareba
was a hedgehog. He described the lovely gazelles running along the riverbanks, and the Sirdar’s telegraph wires, strung above them; how, where the Nile narrowed to two hundred yards, “great swirls and eddies disturb its surface”; the disembarkation of an entire division—with fifteen hundred horses, mules, camels, and donkeys—and how, when ashore, “our line of march lay partly in the desert and partly along the strip of vegetation by the Nile, to which we returned every evening to water, and by which we camped at night.”
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