Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  In Egypt he felt he had mounted another rung on his ladder to the House of Commons. He had even acquired a sort of vicarious wound. Having floated down the Nile with the Grenadier Guards, he had encountered a fellow officer in Cairo, a subaltern who had charged the khor with him and had emerged with a severe sword cut above his right wrist. A doctor, coming to dress the wound, said a skin graft would be necessary. Winston rolled up his sleeve. The doctor warned him that he would feel as though he were being flayed alive, and Churchill later recalled, “My sensations as he sawed the razor slowly to and fro fully justified his description of the ordeal.” At the end of it Winston was missing a piece of skin about the size of a shilling with a thin layer of flesh attached to it. “This precious fragment was then grafted on to my friend’s wound. It remains there to this day and did him lasting good in many ways. I for my part keep the scar as a souvenir.” One has the distinct impression that he believed that this, like his decorations, would win votes.97

  Ironically, he had overlooked his greatest achievement on the Nile, a propitious sign of what was to come. It lay in the sinew of his dispatches. His mastery of the language was growing. The fruits of his formal schooling had been negligible. He had entered the army an ignorant youth. Now, less than four years later, his command of English distinguished him from every other correspondent in the field and won the admiration of readers accustomed to the finest Victorian prose. He had arrived in Bangalore without knowing who Sophocles was or what ethics were, yet he could write, speculating about the Khalifa’s men meeting Kitchener’s first storm of fire: “What must the Dervishes have heard? Only those who were with the Prussian Guard on the glacis of St. Privat, or with Skobeleff in front of the Grivica Redoubt, can know.” He could capture, as few writers can, moments of utter horror. Of a sergeant trying to collect his troop after the charge, he wrote: “His face was cut to pieces, and as he called on his men to rally, the whole of his nose, cheeks, and lips flapped amid red bubbles.” He described the abandoned battlefield as looking “like a place where rubbish is thrown, or where a fair has recently been held. White objects, like dirty bits of newspaper, lay scattered here and there—the bodies of the enemy. Brown objects, almost the colour of the earth, like bundles of dead grass or heaps of manure, were also dotted about—the bodies of soldiers. Among these were goat-skin water-bottles, broken weapons, torn and draggled flags, cartridge-cases. In the foreground lay a group of dead horses and several dead or dying donkeys. It was all litter.”98

  As magnanimous to the enemy as he was rebellious toward his commander, he paid tribute to the slain Arabs:

  When the soldier of a civilised power is killed in action his limbs are composed and his body is borne by friendly arms reverently to the grave. The wail of the fifes, the roll of the drums, the triumphant words of the Funeral Service, all divest the act of its squalour, and the spectator sympathises with, perhaps almost envies, the comrade who has found this honourable exit. But there was nothing dulce et decorum about the Dervish dead. Nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood. All was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was borne in on me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was as good as that which any of our countrymen could make…. There they lie, those valiant warriors of a false faith and of a fallen domination, their only history preserved by their conquerors, their only monument their bones—and these the drifting sand of the desert will bury in a few short years. There days before I had seen them rise eager, confident, resolved. The roar of their shouting had swelled like the surf on a rocky shore. The flashing of their blades and points had displayed their numbers, their vitality, their ferocity. They were confident in their strength, in the justice of their cause, in the support of their religion. Now only the heaps of corruption in the plain and fugitives dispersed and scattered in the wilderness remained. The terrible machinery of scientific war had done its work. The Dervish host was scattered and destroyed. Their end, however, only anticipates that of the victors, for Time, which laughs at Science, as Science laughs at Valour, will in due course contemptuously brush both combatants away.99

  The Prince of Wales, though he felt his rebuke justified, added thoughtfully: “Your writing a book with an account of the campaign is quite another matter.” Such a work, HRH said, would have his blessing, and he hoped Winston would “come & see me & tell me all about the recent campaign & about your future plans.” Then, revising his earlier advice, he observed: “I cannot help feeling that Parliamentary & literary life is what would suit you best.”100 Winston agreed, of course. And he was in a hurry. He had reached the odd conclusion that he was destined to die, like his father, at forty-six, that whatever he did must be done by 1920. He had already anticipated the prince’s literary advice and was at work on a new manuscript. Its working title was The War for the Waterway. He believed it would be ready for publication in a year, and he was right. What he did not anticipate was that he would be unable to read the reviews, because by then, still racing the calendar, he would be a prisoner of war in another part of Africa.

  Back in England he was all business. In Rotherhithe, Dover, and Southsea he addressed cheering Tories. “To keep the Empire you must have the imperial spark,” he said. And: “To keep our Empire we must have a free people, an educated and well fed people.” And: “The great game will go on until we are come through all the peril and trial, and rule in majesty and tranquillity by merit as well as by strength over the fairest and happiest regions of the world in which we live.” Turning a room at 35A Great Cumberland Place into a study, he started the new book; then, taking a break, he finished his novel, Savrola, and sent the completed manuscript to his grandmother for comment. Duchess Fanny thought it had “much merit and originality,” but she noted shrewdly that the character based on Jennie “is a weak and uninteresting personality. It is clear you have not yet attained a knowledge of Women—and it is evident you have (I am thankful to see) no experience of Love!”101

  Pamela Plowden could have told her that. As the daughter of Sir Trevor John Chichele-Plowden and granddaughter of a general, Pamela was eminently suitable for Winston, and he had written his mother that he thought her “the most beautiful girl” he had “ever seen,” but although they had been meeting and corresponding for two years now, their relationship was going nowhere. One has the feeling that Miss Plowden, like Eliza Doolittle, was ready for action and was becoming exasperated as she got only words, words, words. She as much as told him so. He admitted it and promised to “try and take your advice,” telling her that he had met a girl “nearly as clever & wise as you,” which meant “I rank her one above Plato.” Pamela, who plainly did not relish a comparison with Plato, at least not in this situation, accused him of lacking ardor, thus offering him a classic opening. But Winston was merely wounded: “Why do you say I am incapable of affection? Perish the thought. I love one above all others. And I shall be constant. I am no fickle gallant capriciously following the fancy of the hour. My love is deep and strong. Nothing will ever change it.”102

  In a sense this was true, but the object of his designs was not the marriage bed but political office. Pamela can scarcely be blamed if she found this unflattering. In retrospect Winston appears to have been a very eligible bachelor. Yet vaunting ambition can be unattractive in a young man. It can even be unpleasant for him. In a revealing note, Churchill wrote that though tempted, “I have no right to dally in the pleasant valleys of amusement.” Then, in gnawing terror: “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off. It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.” So he turned from arms which would have welcomed him and sought hands that could help him up. He lunched at the Carlton Club with rising Tories of his generation: Ian Malcolm, Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Percy, and Lord Balcarres. The discussion was sharper and far more clever than anything he had heard in his regimental mess; he felt like an “earthen pot among the brass” and considered attending Oxford or Cambr
idge—until he learned he must first pass examinations in Latin and Greek. Then he discovered that companions at the Tory club possessed another political asset he lacked. They were rich. At Conservative party headquarters Fitzroy Stewart introduced him to Richard Middleton, “the Skipper,” or party manager. Middleton greeted him warmly. He said the party would certainly find him a seat, and soon. Then he delicately raised the question of money. How much could Churchill pay for a constituency? Winston, taken aback, replied that he could meet his campaign expenses and no more. The Skipper grew distant. Safe seats, he said, cost MPs as much as £1,000 a year; “forlorn hopes” were cheap, but few were free. Churchill had already decided that he could not afford to serve HRH’s mother as an army officer—“Her Majesty was so stinted by Parliament,” he later said, “that she was not able to pay even a living wage”—and this strengthened his resolve. His pen had already brought him five times as much as his soldier’s salary. His Sudan dispatches alone had produced £300. Now the Pioneer was offering him £3 a week for letters from London. That in itself would be more than the income of a subaltern. As he wrote Duchess Fanny: “I can live cheaper & earn more as a writer, special correspondent or journalist: and this work is moreover more congenial and more likely to assist me in pursuing the larger ends of life.”103

  He would have quit the army then, while his Morning Post pieces were still the talk of Fleet Street, had it not been for India’s annual Inter-Regimental Tournament, now imminent. It may seem strange that a young man afire with ambition should journey halfway around the world to play a game, but to Churchill polo was “the emperor of games,” almost a religion. So he sailed the first week in December aboard the S.S. Osiris and rejoined the Fourth Hussars just before Christmas. The trip north from Bangalore to the tournament ground at Meerut was another fourteen hundred miles by special train, with a two-week pause spent as guests of Sir Pertab Singh, regent of Jodhpur. They practiced there with local players, though it was eerie; the field was constantly enveloped in clouds of red dust, through which turbaned figures galloped at full speed, following the ball by the sound of its whistle. Then, the night before they were to leave for Meerut, calamity befell them. Churchill slipped on a stone staircase, and out went his shoulder. The team was dismayed. He was their No. 1. They had brought along an extra player, and he suggested a substitution, but they voted to keep him in, his elbow bound to his side. The weather was fine, the crowd huge, and their opponents, in the final, the formidable Fourth Dragoon Guards. In a close, furious match, the Fourth Hussars won the cup, 4–3. And Churchill, despite his disability, was the star. He wrote his mother from Calcutta on March 3: “I hit three goals out of four in the winning match so that my journey to India was not futile as far as the regiment was concerned.”104

  Pamela Plowden, 1892

  After a week in Calcutta as the guest of the new viceroy (the vicereine, Lady Curzon, wrote Jennie, “People in India have an immense opinion of Winston & his book”), he returned to Bangalore, forwarded his resignation papers to London, and sat misty-eyed while his fellow officers drank his health for the last time. “Discipline and comradeship” were the lessons he had learned in the regiment, he wrote, and “perhaps after all they are just as valuable as the lore of the universities. Still,” he added, “one would like to have both.” His university continued to be his books—he could now read at great speed—and his writing had become his livelihood. Macmillan’s Magazine was paying a hundred pounds for serial rights to Savrola. For The River War, as he now called his new manuscript, he had even greater expectations. He had worked on it during the voyage over, in Jodhpur, in Meerut, and Calcutta; he continued writing it in Bangalore and on the trip home. To his mother he wrote that he was at it “all day & every day…. My hand gets so cramped. I am writing every word twice & some parts three times. It ought to be good since it is the best I can do.”105

  He was still learning. Macaulay was the real architect of The River War, and the balanced and ironical apothegms which appeared from time to time were borrowed from Gibbon. But his own style was nearly formed now. It was evident, not only on paper, but also in conversation, a fact noted during his trip homeward by a fellow passenger, the gifted G. W. Steevens of the Daily Mail. When they docked, Steevens filed a story about him, prophesying that he might become “a great popular leader, a great journalist, or the founder of a great advertising business.” He said Churchill was “born a demagogue, and he happens to know it. The master strain in his character is the rhetorician. Platform speeches and leading articles flow from him almost against his will. At dinner he talks and talks, and you can hardly tell when he leaves off quoting his one idol, Macaulay, and begins his other, Winston Churchill…. We shall hear more about this in the course of ten years…. At the rate he goes there will hardly be room for him in Parliament at thirty or in England at forty.”106

  Kitchener tried to see to it that there was hardly room for him in Cairo, where he broke his journey to deepen his research on the Nile. The Sirdar had forbidden Major James Watson, his aide-de-camp in the Sudan, to furnish Churchill with any documents. Winston solved the problem, as many another writer has, by simply interviewing Watson. He also lunched with Lord Cromer, who “afterwards did me the honour of talking to me about the Soudan, its past and its future with reference to my book for more than two hours and a half.” Cromer saw him twice more, provided him with letters of introduction to everyone of importance in Egypt, and introduced him to the khedive. Winston’s letter to Jennie written at Cairo’s Savoy Hotel immediately afterward serves as a vintage example of the British contempt which outraged the Empire’s darker subjects. “I was much amused,” he told her, “by observing the relations between the British Agent and the de jure Ruler of Egypt. The Khedive’s attitude reminded me of a school-boy who is brought to see another school-boy in the presence of the head-master. But he seemed to me to be an amiable young man who tries to take an intelligent interest in the affairs of his kingdom, which, since they have passed entirely beyond his control is, to say the least, very praiseworthy.”107

  He finished the manuscript—now destined to be two fat volumes, running, with maps, to nearly a thousand pages—in Great Cumberland Place. On May 3, 1899, he noted: “Miss P. has been vy much impressed with the Proofs of the first two chapters of The River War.” Pamela was still trying. Jennie, on the other hand, was busy pursuing literary ambitions of her own, launching a competitor to Yellow Book called the Anglo-Saxon Review, which, at a price of five dollars in the United States and a guinea in England, was destined to last eleven issues before she ran out of money. Winston’s own finances were unchanged. He had high and, as it turned out, justifiable hopes for his new work, but nothing in hand except the Macmillan’s check. Nevertheless, he was determined to stand for office now. He would, of course, run as a Conservative. It didn’t matter that Gibbon had been a protégé of a renegade Tory and Macaulay a Whig, a precursor of the Liberals, or that all the indignation over Kitchener’s profanation of the Mahdi’s remains lay on the Liberal side of the House of Commons, while the Conservatives, as he noted from the Strangers’ Gallery, seemed to think it “rather a lark.” The explanation, of course, is that to desert the Tories would have been to betray his father’s memory. He couldn’t do that, at least not in 1899.108

  The constituency chosen for him was Oldham, a working-class district in Lancashire, and the chooser, at the outset, was Robert Ascroft, one of the two Tory MPs who represented it. Ascroft wanted Churchill to run with him. Suddenly he died. Oldham’s other MP resigned. That called for a double by-election. The Skipper expected to lose both seats, hoping he would win them back on the rebound in the next general election, and he picked Winston and a radical Conservative for the sacrifice. Winston knew how small his chances were, but reasoned that any fight was better than none. On June 20 he wrote Miss Plowden: “I have just returned from Oldham overnight. The whole thing is in my hands as far as the Tory Party there go.” He wanted her to campaign with him. She re
fused; reading proofs was one thing, sweaty politics quite another. She sent him encouragement, a charm, and word that she would remain in London. In his reply he said he understood; “it would perhaps have been a mistake—but I shall be sorry nevertheless.” He was still drawn to her, and kept her posted with bulletins on his progress. His left tonsil became inflamed; Dr. Roose, ever reliable, put a throat spray in the mail. On June 28 Winston wrote that “the big meeting was a great success and although I spoke for fifty minutes my throat is no worse—but rather better. We are now in the middle of the fight.” Four days later he reported, “A vy busy week has closed. I now make speeches involuntarily. Yesterday I delivered no fewer than eight.” He felt he was improving: “At each meeting I am conscious of growing powers and facilities of speech, and it is in this that I shall find my consolation should the result be, as is probable, unfortunate. But I still wear your charm—so who can tell. Write to me Pamela—I have had you in my mind more perhaps this week than ever.” The London papers had predicted his defeat. He didn’t doubt it, or resent it; “after all,” he told her, “the battle in the end must be to the strong.”109