God and Churchill HB Read online

  Years later, Churchill indicated a ‘partiality for Low Church principles’ because of the impact of Elizabeth Everest.17 Though he respected Britain’s rich historic traditions, he had no need for pomp. After the Second World War had ended, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, asked her husband what memorial he would prefer. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps just a park for the children to play in.’18

  In 1945, after Churchill had saved civilization, King George VI wanted to induct him into the Order of the Garter, Britain’s oldest, most prestigious and highest honour for chivalry. Churchill became perhaps the first commoner to decline the high honour. The political editor of the Daily Mail noted that ‘Mr Churchill has always insisted that he does not wish to have a title.’19 Besides, said Churchill (who had just been surprisingly defeated in the first post-war election), he could hardly accept the ‘garter’ from the king when his people had just given him the ‘order of the boot’.

  Finally, in 1953, when Churchill was once again voted in as prime minister at the age of seventy-eight, he accepted the Order of the Garter – though still dragging his feet. Young Queen Elizabeth II, with as much fortitude as Churchill had, told him that if the prime minister would not come to her to receive the honour, then Her Royal Majesty would have to come to him, bearing the accoutrements of the Order. Churchill’s regard for the monarchy wouldn’t permit such a denigrating act by the queen, so he relented and became a member of the Most Noble Order. ‘I only accepted because I think she is so splendid,’ Churchill said, in describing his change of mind.

  During the Second World War, Churchill gained the respect of the British people and their allies by personifying British pluck. His engagement with the public provided a link between ordinary people and the aristocrats in high positions of power. This was crucial in forming the strong unity that was essential for the people to keep standing during the Battle of Britain and the years of bloody struggle after that.

  PURSUING DESTINY

  Despite the void left by his parents, Churchill’s visionary outlook was awakened at Harrow. Martin Gilbert notes that Churchill’s first essay there dealt with Palestine in the age of John the Baptist. The seed of Churchill’s concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was already present when he included in the essay the notion of ‘the advantages of Christianity’.20

  In 1940, as British cities were languishing under the Blitz, Churchill took his son, Randolph, to Harrow. The student choirs presented songs that Churchill had sung when he was there as a pupil. ‘Listening to those boys singing all those well-remembered songs I could see myself fifty years before singing those tales of great deeds and of great men and wondering with intensity how I could ever do something glorious for my country.’21

  This, then, was the milieu in which sixteen-year-old Winston Churchill made his remarkable prediction of destiny to Murland Evans. It would be easy to attribute his lofty adolescent prediction to an overwrought quest for the recognition, acceptance, affirmation and significance that his parents had not provided, except for the fact that what he predicted came curiously and remarkably true.

  The path to greatness, however, was torturous and twisted. After Harrow, Churchill had high hopes of following his father into politics, even serving in Parliament at his side. Lord Randolph, however, had other ideas. When at last he visited Harrow, he told the headmaster he wanted Winston to go into the Army Class. At one point, when Winston was a young boy, Lord Randolph had surveyed his son’s toy army of fifteen hundred soldiers and asked Winston if he would like to go into the military.

  ‘I thought it would be splendid to command an army,’ Churchill later recalled, ‘so I said “Yes” at once: and immediately I was taken at my word.’22 Churchill assumed that his father ‘with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar’ – that is, to pursue a career practising law.23

  It was determined that Winston would be sent to Sandhurst, the military institute where infantry and cavalry officers were trained. But he failed the entrance examination – twice – and it appeared he wouldn’t qualify for Sandhurst after all. On his third try, he gained admission, but with grades insufficient for the infantry. Undaunted, he let his family know he had succeeded, with his appointment to the cavalry.

  Lord Randolph was unimpressed. In fact, with his mind by then wilting under the effects of what his doctors had diagnosed as syphilis, he disparaged his son without mercy. Winston’s failure to get into the infantry, his father said, ‘demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky harum scarum style of work’.24 The elder Churchill told his son that he was second- or third-class at best. In fact, his father wrote to him, ‘if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence.’25

  Churchill’s admiration for his father, however, was undiminished. Aspirations of serving with him in Parliament lingered in his mind until Lord Randolph died in 1895. Even then, the thought never quite left him. One evening in 1946, when Churchill was once again a Member of Parliament and leader of the opposition, he sat with Members of his family in the dining room at his home, Chartwell. His daughter Sarah glanced at an empty chair and then at her father. ‘If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?’

  ‘Oh, my father, of course,’ Churchill replied immediately.

  He then told them a story that would later become the seed of his little book entitled The Dream.

  ‘It was not plain whether he was recalling a dream or elaborating on some fanciful idea that had struck him earlier,’ Churchill’s son, Randolph, would later say.26 Churchill wrote the story in 1947, when he was again feeling the disdain of the political party in power and of a sizable portion of the British public. Yet, suggests the historian Richard Langworth, perhaps it was the disdain from his own father that Churchill, now at the age of seventy-three, had not overcome.27

  In The Dream, Churchill said he was in his art studio at Chartwell. He had been given a portrait of his father from 1886. The canvas was badly torn, and he was attempting to make a copy. As he concentrated intensely on his father’s image, his mind ‘freed from all other thoughts except the impressions of that loved and honoured face now on the canvas, now on the picture, now in the mirror’, he felt an ‘odd sensation’.28 He turned to find his father sitting in the red leather armchair across the studio.

  ‘Papa!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What are you doing, Winston?’

  After Churchill explained his project, the conversation continued.

  ‘Tell me, what year is it?’ Lord Randolph asked.

  ‘Nineteen forty-seven.’

  Lord Randolph asked his son to tell him what had happened in the years since his death. Churchill gave him a broad outline and then spoke of the Second World War. ‘Seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin …’

  ‘Winston,’ replied Lord Randolph, ‘you have told me a terrible tale… . As I listened to you unfolding these fearful facts you seemed to know a great deal about them… . When I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.’29

  In the ‘dream’, Lord Randolph did not know, and his son would not tell him, that Winston had indeed gone into politics. Military service, as we will see, was part of the path that got him there.

  At age twenty-one, with that storied encounter with his father still decades into the future, Churchill was only a few months from being commissioned into the Fourth Hussars cavalry regiment. It was in this moment that his life’s purpose changed, and though a tinge of youthful arrogance re
mained, everything he did until the day he entered Parliament was with the singular purpose he expressed in his book My Early Life: to pursue Lord Randolph’s aims and vindicate his memory.

  Despite his father’s gloom at his being a mere cavalryman, Churchill looked forward with exuberance to graduating from Sandhurst and ‘becoming a real live cavalry officer’.30

  At Sandhurst I had a new start. No longer handicapped by past neglect of Latin, French or Mathematics. We now had to learn fresh things and we all started equal… . I was deeply interested in my work, especially Tactics and Fortification.31

  Suitably engaged, Churchill soon discovered that he ‘could learn quickly enough the things that mattered’.32 He graduated with honours from Sandhurst, finishing eighth in his class of 150, and thus was launched ‘into the world’.33

  He plunged into living and working with excitement and anticipation: ‘Ups and downs, risks and journeys, but always the sense of motion, and the illusion of hope,’ he said.34

  Yet there was a disappointment: the world was at peace. A cavalry officer needed to stay in the saddle, so it seemed the best thing to do was play polo. Lord Randolph had died two months before Winston was commissioned as an officer in the Fourth Hussars, and Churchill’s income was reduced to a relatively small allowance, which he exhausted on polo ponies.

  Then he heard there was war in Cuba. Rebels there were battling the Spaniards. If he could not go as a soldier, he determined to travel to the battlefield as a correspondent. He soon found that the Graphic would pay him five pounds for each report. After a lengthy voyage, which he greatly disliked, Churchill peered out at Cuba from his ship as it approached the island:

  I felt as if I sailed with Captain Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island. Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen… . Here I might leave my bones.35

  In fact, he almost did. In Cuba came the first of those seemingly miraculous survivals that would occur several times in Churchill’s life. A bullet passed a foot from his head, and another pierced the thatched hut where he slept but left him unscathed.

  In the winter of 1896, when his assignment to Cuba was completed, Churchill sailed to India with the Fourth Hussars, and they were based in Bangalore. He and two of his comrades lived in what he described as ‘a palatial bungalow, all pink and white’, set on two acres and ‘wreathed in purple bougainvillea’.36 There they were tended to by three butlers. There was still no war in which to exercise his military craft, so he resumed playing polo. It occurred to him that there might be other, perhaps better, pursuits – namely, that of learning.

  Back in England, someone had told Churchill that ‘Christ’s Gospel was the last word in Ethics.’37 This was a theme he often spoke about in later years, but in his young adulthood he scarcely understood the meaning. ‘This sounded good,’ he wrote, ‘but what were Ethics? They had never been mentioned to me at Harrow or Sandhurst… . Then someone told me that Ethics were concerned not merely with the things you ought to do, but with why you ought to do them.’38 With no one in Bangalore to instruct him, Churchill ordered a wide array of books.

  From Darwin to Macaulay, from Gibbon to Malthus to Plato and Aristotle, Churchill read voraciously during the long, hot subcontinental afternoons as his comrades napped.39 The religious ideas sown into him by Elizabeth Everest and others were greatly challenged by what he read. When he read History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe and History of European Morals by William Lecky, an Irish historian and political theorist, Lecky’s arguments induced him to briefly settle his mind on a predominantly secular view. Reflecting in later years, he said:

  If I had been at a University my difficulties might have been resolved by the eminent professors and divines who are gathered there. At any rate, they would have shown me equally convincing books putting the opposite point of view. As it was I passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase which, had it lasted, might easily have made me a nuisance. My poise was restored during the next few years by frequent contact with danger. I found that whatever I might think and argue, I did not hesitate to ask for special protection when about to come under the fire of the enemy: nor to feel sincerely grateful when I got home safe to tea.40

  That ‘poise’ would be tested sooner perhaps than Churchill had imagined. During a trip home to England in 1897, he learned there was action on the North-West Frontier of India, and he managed to get there as a war correspondent. Out of that experience, he wrote his first book, The Malakand Field Force.

  As the Indian conflict was winding down, Churchill heard that war had broken out in the Sudan in North Africa. He tried to get into the battle there, but his efforts were met with resistance from none other than Sir Herbert Kitchener, the commander of the Egyptian Army fighting in the Sudan. Churchill managed to get the backing of Prime Minister Salisbury, but even that was rebuffed. Kitchener had all the officers he needed, and any vacancies would be filled by ‘others whom he would be bound to prefer before the young officer in question’.41

  Churchill later happened to hear through a friend that Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant general of the British Army, had expressed resentment of Kitchener’s approach to selecting officers. Sir Evelyn felt strongly that the War Office ought to be able to choose the makeup of the British Expeditionary Force. Churchill got word to Sir Evelyn that his attempts to join Kitchener’s army had been refused. ‘This move was instantly successful,’ writes Violet Bonham Carter. ‘Sir Evelyn Wood became his deus ex machina.’42

  Within days, Churchill was en route to North Africa and another giant leap towards his destiny.

  2

  Surviving Destiny’s Perilous Paths

  I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck him. Man and sword disappeared below and behind me.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, MY EARLY LIFE

  THE VULTURES GATHERED that September morning in 1898 as twenty thousand British troops marched across the battle-battered landscape to scout a thrice-larger force of zealous Sudanese warriors (three thousand of whom were on horseback) led by Abdullah al-Taashi. The Arab ruler was driven by his sense of destiny as the successor to Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi, a messianic leader and Allah’s servant in bringing Koranic order to the world in its end times.

  Winston Churchill, then a twenty-four-year-old cavalryman itching for action, estimated the number of ravenous birds that day at about a hundred. The vultures had no appreciation for history or religious fervour, but they grasped the significance of carnage.

  History remembers the bloody clash that followed as the Battle of Omdurman.

  A BLESSED DISLOCATED SHOULDER

  Two years before Omdurman, Churchill had landed at Bombay, after a long, wearying voyage from Britain. Eager for dry land, he scampered to get off the small tender that had ferried him and others from the SS Britannia to a rocky quay. Iron hand rings were embedded in the stone so that passengers could steady themselves as they jumped onto steps made slippery by the surf.

  On the day of Churchill’s arrival, the tiny tender was heaving on four- to five-foot swells. Just as the young soldier gripped one of the rings, the boat was caught in a surge and jerked away. The sudden yaw of the vessel wrenched Churchill’s right shoulder – dislocating it, though he was unaware of the severity of the injury at the time. Wincing in pain, he made his way ashore, but in true Churchill style, he soon tried to put the matter from his mind.

  Without proper treatment, Churchill’s damaged shoulder never quite healed properly, and it would forever plague him. Through the years, he never knew when the stabbing pain would again bring him up short – reaching for a book, sleeping on his side, swimming or even laying hold of a banister. The injury kept him from participating in some sports, and most likely from dying at Omdurman.

  On 2 September 1898, at a quarter to six on a hazy North African morning, Churchill and his c
omrades-in-arms rode into the face of an overwhelmingly strong enemy. But rather than fearing the human tsunami hurtling towards him, Churchill felt exhilarated. Later, in a letter to his mother, he described how the ‘Dervishes’ were fearless in the face of the pounding hooves, refused to jump out of the way, and were struck down by the galloping horses of the British. The enemy slashed at the animals’ hamstrings, tried to cut bridles and reins, brandished swords in frenetic swinging arcs and fired rifles at close range. Yet Churchill pressed forward, unscathed and undaunted.1

  As Churchill explained in his letter, the key to his success and survival that day was his ten-shot Mauser pistol.

  A British cavalryman traditionally engaged the enemy with a sword, not a handgun. The blade’s length enabled the rider to lean down and reach the ground with the tip, and then recoil to continue the fight. But if Churchill had been using a sword and not a pistol on this occasion, it’s unlikely he would have left the battlefield alive.

  As Churchill rode into the fray, an enemy warrior hurled himself to the ground in front of him. A glint of light flashed from the blade of a scimitar as the warrior got ready to hamstring Churchill’s horse. Firm in his saddle, Churchill quickly spun his mount away from the sweeping sword and shot the enemy infantryman from a distance of three yards.