On Lloyd George’s fifty-seventh birthday, Churchill lunched with the prime minister, and Frances Stevenson noted that he “waxed very eloquent on the old world & the new, taking up arms in defence of the former.” He was, she wrote, “simply raving” about “trading with Russia” which “absolutely & finally ruins his hopes of a possible war in the East.” When another guest chided him, she wrote, “Winston glared at him, & almost shouted ‘You are trying to make mischief!’ ” That evening Lloyd George, Frances, and Churchill dined at Ciro’s. Winston, she noted, was still “ragging D[avid] about the New World. ‘Don’t you make any mistake,’ he said to D. ‘You’re not going to get your new world. The old world is a good enough place for me, & there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s going to sit up & wag its tail.’ ” The prime minister remarked that Winston was “the only remaining specimen of a real Tory.” That, too, was prophetic.50
It is a striking fact that Churchill, the acmic warrior, left a colorless record at the Ministry of War and Air, and not only because his Russian policy was a complete failure. The postwar demobilization was his only real accomplishment at the War Office. Otherwise, his military policies were cautious and stingy. Wherever he found fat he cut it, but he cut a great deal that was lean, too. He preserved the separate identity of the Royal Air Force yet left it little but its name. On Armistice Day, Britain had been the world’s greatest air power; two years later England was reduced to three home squadrons, as against France’s forty-seven. And three months after that, when Churchill resigned from the ministry to become colonial secretary, The Times observed: “He leaves the body of British flying well nigh at that last gasp when a military funeral would be all that would be left for it.” His management of the army had been equally disappointing. Young career officers, appreciative of his role in tank development, expected that he would refashion their services along modern lines. Unaware of his sentimental yearning for his golden days with the Fourth Hussars and the Twenty-first Lancers, they were stunned when he sided with the red-tabbed diehards and shared their yearning for a return to 1914. His most shortsighted policy was his acceptance of Lloyd George’s guiding principle, endorsed by the War Cabinet in August 1919, that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years and that no Expeditionary Force will be required.” At times Winston even echoed the litany of the Little Englanders. On June 18, 1920, he told the cabinet that “the military forces at the disposal of Great Britain” were “insufficient to meet the requirements of the policies now being pursued in the various theatres.” One would have expected Churchill, the tribune of Empire, to call for an increase in those forces. Instead, he argued that a cutback in imperial commitments was “indispensable if grave risk of disaster is not to be incurred.” Otherwise, he said, “the possibility of disaster occurring in any or all of these theatres must be faced, and the likelihood of this will increase every day.”51
He was always readier to defy public opinion than most public men, but here he was trimming his sails to meet the prevailing political winds. After the survivors of the western front came home, Britons wanted nothing more to do with war; most of them hoped never again to lay their eyes on an Englishman in uniform, and they were losing their taste for Empire. Privately he worried about that. A bellicose war minister and a pacifistic electorate would not work comfortably in harness, however, and though he would later reconcile himself to such an incompatibility, in those early postwar years he did not feel the risk justifiable. As Liddell Hart wrote, Churchill “was eager to make a fresh mark in current political affairs, and the best chance lay in the postwar retrenchment of expenditure.”52 It was expedient to cut taxes and he did it ruthlessly. His objectives, however, were unchanged. He freely entered into agreements in which the eventual use of force, or threat of it, was implicit, confident that if he had to show the flag, Englishmen would support him.
By now it was clear that he was too strong and too able to be confined to a single ministry. As home secretary he had often appeared at the Treasury; at the Admiralty he had led Irish policy; as lowly minister of munitions he had managed to influence the conduct of the war. Now he freely crossed ministerial lines of authority and assumed responsibilities which rightfully belonged in the India Office, the Colonial Office, and the Foreign Office. Naturally, his colleagues resented this, but the offended minister almost always found himself a minority of one. The others recognized Churchill’s gifts. Even the prime minister, who frequently discovered himself at loggerheads with him now, tolerated what, in another man, would have been called meddling and might even have merited dismissal. Churchill had become the most powerful speaker in Parliament. No one, not even the gifted Lloyd George, could hold the House as Winston did. Indeed, on one memorable occasion he accomplished a rare feat. Eloquence, wit, and charm have not been uncommon in that body, but seldom in its six centuries has a speech actually changed the opinion of the majority, transforming imminent defeat into triumph. Churchill did it on July 8, 1920, thereby vindicating England’s honor.
The origins of that day’s controversy lay in a shocking episode. A few months after the war an Englishwoman, a missionary, had reported that she had been molested on a street in the Punjab city of Amritsar. The Raj’s local commander, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, had issued an order requiring all Indians using that street to crawl its length on their hands and knees. He had also authorized the indiscriminate, public whipping of natives who came within lathi length of British policemen. On April 13, 1919, a multitude of Punjabis had gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwallah Bagh to protest these extraordinary measures. The throng, penned in a narrow space smaller than Trafalgar Square, had been peacefully listening to the testimony of victims when Dyer appeared at the head of a contingent of British troops. Without warning, he ordered his machine gunners to open fire. The Indians, in Churchill’s words, were “packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies”; the people “ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed upon the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for eight or ten minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion.” Dyer then marched away, leaving 379 dead and over 1,500 wounded. Back in his headquarters, he reported to his superiors that he had been “confronted by a revolutionary army,” and had been obliged “to teach a moral lesson to the Punjab.” In the storm of outrage which followed, the brigadier was promoted to major general, retired, and placed on the inactive list. This, incredibly, made him a martyr to millions of Englishmen. Senior British officers applauded his suppression of “another Indian Mutiny.” The Guardians of the Golden Temple enrolled him in the Brotherhood of Sikhs. The House of Lords passed a measure commending him. Readers of the Tory Morning Post, Churchill’s old scourge, subscribed £2,500 for a testimonial. Leading Conservative MPs took up his cause, and Lloyd George reluctantly agreed to a full-dress debate. Venetia Montagu’s husband, Edwin, now the secretary of state for India, would open for the government, with Churchill scheduled at the end.53
Montagu’s speech was a calamity. He was a Jew and there were anti-Semites in the House. He had been warned to be quiet and judicial. Instead, he was sarcastic; he called Dyer a terrorist; he worried about foreign opinion; he “thoroughly roused most of the latent passions of the stodgy Tories,” as one MP noted, and “got excited… and became more racial and more Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture,” with the consequence that “a strong anti-Jewish sentiment was shown by shouts…. Altogether it was a very astonishing exhibition of anti-Jewish feeling.” The Ulster MPs had decided to vote against Dyer. After Montagu’s speech they conferred and reversed themselves. Sir Edward Carson rose to praise the general—who was watching from the Strangers’ Gallery—as “a gallant officer of thirty-four years service… without a blemish on his record” who had “no right to be broken on the ipse d
ixit of any Commission or Committee, however great, unless he has been fairly tried—and he has not been tried.” Carson ended: “I say, to break a man under the circumstances of this case is un-English.” “Un-English,” in the context of the time, was anti-Semitic—roughly the equivalent of “kike.” MPs roared their approval. The government was in trouble. Lloyd George being absent, Bonar Law, the leader of the House, asked Churchill to speak immediately.54
Churchill’s approach was entirely unlike Montagu’s. He called for “a calm spirit, avoiding passion and avoiding attempts to excite prejudice.” Dyer, he said, had not been dismissed in disgrace; “he had simply been informed that there was no further employment for him under the Government of India.” But the incident in Jallianwallah Bagh was “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.” He quietly observed that the number of Indians killed was almost identical with the number of MPs now sitting within range of his voice. An officer in such a situation as Dyer’s, he said, should ask himself whether the crowd is either armed or about to mount an attack. “Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon…. At Amritsar the crowd was neither armed nor attacking.” Thus the general had not, as he claimed, faced a “revolutionary army.” Another useful military guide, Churchill continued, was the maxim that “no more force should be used than is necessary to secure compliance with the law.” In the Great War, he and many other members of the House had seen British soldiers “exerting themselves to show pity and to help, even at their own peril, the wounded.” Dyer had failed to follow their example; after the massacre, his troops had simply swung around and marched away. Churchill knew, and many members of Parliament knew, of many instances in which officers, in “infinitely more trying” situations than the one in the Bagh, had, unlike the general, displayed an ability to arrive “at the right decision.” Then, as if with a stiletto, Churchill knifed Dyer: “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.”55
He twisted the blade. Dyer’s most vocal champions agreed with Churchill’s stand in Russia. It was compassion and its absence, he said, which marked the difference between Englishmen and Bolsheviks. His own hatred of Lenin’s regime was “not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.” It arose from “the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise… and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.” It was intolerable in Russia; it was intolerable in Amritsar. “I do not think,” he said, “that it is in the interests of the British Empire or of the British Army for us to take a load of that sort for all time upon our backs. We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another, that this is not the British way of doing business.” He quoted Macaulay: “The most frightful of all spectacles [is] the strength of civilisation without its mercy.” England’s “reign in India, or anywhere else,” Churchill continued, “has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it. The British way of doing things… has always meant and implied close and effectual cooperation with the people. In every part of the British Empire that has been our aim.” As for Dyer, Churchill himself would have preferred to see the general disciplined. Instead, he had been allowed to resign with no plan for further punishment, “and to those moderate and considered conclusions we confidently invite the assent of the House.”56
He sat and they rose crying, “Hear, hear.” After five more hours of debate they voted for the government, 247 to 37. Carson’s motion for mild approval of Dyer was defeated 230 to 129. The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote Curzon that Churchill’s speech had been “unanswerable.” The Times called it “amazingly skilful” and declared that it had “turned the House (or so it seemed) completely round…. It was not only a brilliant speech, but one that persuaded and made the result certain.” Winston, the editorial concluded, had “never been heard to greater advantage.”57
Late in 1920 Churchill told Lloyd George that he wanted to move to another cabinet post—the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, or, preferably, the Exchequer. He was tired of wringing half crowns from frugal military budgets, presiding over troop withdrawals, and trying to suppress terrorism in southern Ireland with responsibility for order but no power to negotiate a political solution. Moreover, the prime minister shared few of his views about the army and the RAF. On January 23 of the new year Winston told Sir Henry Wilson that he could not last “much longer in the W.O. owing to differences with L.G.” He bluntly wrote George: “I am vy sorry to see how far we are drifting apart…. When one has reached the summit of power & surmounted so many obstacles, there is danger of becoming convinced that one can do anything one likes, & that any strong personal view is necessarily acceptable to the nation & can be enforced upon one’s subordinates.” He understood that. “No doubt I in my time of important affairs was led astray like this. I suddenly found a vy different world around me: though of course all my fortunes were on a petty scale compared with yours…. But is yr policy going to be successful? I fear it is going wrong.” Churchill thought it a mistake to negotiate with the new Russian leaders, thought George underestimated the returning popularity of the Conservative party, and believed that “one of the main causes of trouble throughout the Middle East is your quarrel with the remnants of Turkey…. All the soldiers continually say they disapprove of the policy against Turkey…. This soaks in.” On February 14, 1921, the prime minister, unwilling to lose the most talented member of his cabinet, appointed him colonial secretary. That evening Churchill received his new seals from George V. He wrote Clementine that his room at the Colonial Office “is very fine and sedate… at least twice as big as the old one—an enormous square, but well warmed. It is like working in the saloon at Blenheim.”58
His immediate concerns were Ireland and the Middle East, which was in chaos. Because Turkey had been on the losing side in the war, the old Ottoman Empire had disintegrated. In the peace settlements Turkey had been reduced to a shadow of its former self, a small Asiatic state in the Anatolian uplands around Ankara. During the fighting in the desert against the Turks, France’s and England’s most powerful ally had been the army of Husein ibn-Ali, sharif of Mecca and ruler of the ancient kingdom of Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia). In October 1918 forces led by the sharif’s son Faisal had entered Damascus in triumph. Faisal had appeared at Versailles, registered at the Hotel Metropole, and emerged dressed in immaculate Hashemite robes and attended by two enormous Nubians carrying glittering swords. But when he had appealed for Arabian self-determination, speaking as the emissary of “my father, who, by request of Britain and France, led the Arab rebellion against the Turks” and asking that “the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia… be recognized as independent sovereign peoples, under the guarantee of the League of Nations,” he was ignored.59 Afterward diplomats from Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay met quietly in San Remo, Italy, and divided up the Middle East in a muffled version of their nineteenth-century scramble for African possessions. Husein remained as sovereign of Hejaz, but France got Syria and Lebanon; Persia (Iran) was under British protection; and Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine came within Britain’s sphere of influence, providing the Empire with a direct overland route between imperial troops in Egypt and the Persian Gulf.
But Arabs were not docile Punjabis. Back in Damascus, Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria. Neither France nor England would recognize him; indeed, French troops arrived, dethroned him, and forced him to flee. Then his brother Abdullah recruited a private army in Mecca, capital of Hejaz, and announced that he would march on Damascus and drive the poilus into the sea. Next the Iraqis rose and besieged several British garrisons. Arabs rioted in Jerusalem, and, most ominous of all, Bolshevik forces were reported crossing into Iran. A British infantry division, transferred from India to Baghdad by Churchill, pacified Iraq. Persian cossacks drove the Bolsheviks across the border. Then as now, however, t
he knottiest problem of all lay in Palestine. The Balfour declaration, promulgated in 1917 when Arthur Balfour was the coalition’s foreign secretary and Jewish political power was at its zenith in London, had proclaimed that the British government favored “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”60
When Churchill took over at the Colonial Office, this declaration was part of his legacy. His feelings about Balfour’s largess appear to have been mixed. Of Zionism he had written in 1908: “Jerusalem must be the only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy; but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.” But after the declaration he peevishly wrote that the Jews “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit [their] convenience.” Later, in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, he hailed Chaim Weizmann’s “inspiring movement” to build a new nation “by the banks of the Jordan” as a “simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal” than the “absolutely destructive” Bolshevik conspiracy to establish “a world wide communistic state under Jewish domination.” This backhanded endorsement carried a sour tang of anti-Semitism, and it surfaced again in 1920, when, opposing economic aid to Russia, he said he saw “the gravest objections to giving all this help to the tyrannic Government of these Jew commissars.” That same year he expressed fresh reservations about the creation of a Zionist state, writing Lloyd George on June 13, 1920, that “Palestine is costing us 6 millions a year to hold. The Zionist movement will cause continued friction with the Arabs. The French ensconced in Syria with 4 divisions (paid for by not paying us what they owe us) are opposed to the Zionist movement & will try to cushion the Arabs off on us as the real enemy. The Palestine venture is the most difficult to withdraw from & one wh certainly will never yield any profit of a material kind.”61