CHAPTER 5
Britain’s Pseudo-Religion and the Cult of Winston Churchill

“For I will not trust in my bow; it is not my sword that shall help me.”

(THE 44TH PSALM)

Now we come to the very heart of the cult that enthralled us all, especially children. On thousands of walls hung the reproduction of our national deity—the famous Yousuf Karsh photograph of the truculent warrior glowering in a monochrome twilight. We all believed (was it true?) that Karsh had achieved this effect by unkindly snatching the Havana cigar from Sir Winston’s lips and recording the resulting expression. My Devon preparatory school displayed a different portrait—this time in color, including the famous cigar, probably a lithograph of a once-famous 1942 painting of the Great Man by Arthur Pan—adorned with a quotation that well summed up the battle we thought we had just triumphantly won. “We are all of us defending a cause…the cause of freedom and justice; of the weak against the strong; of law against violence, mercy and tolerance against brutality and iron-bound tyranny.” Alas, I now find that this reproduction was originally sold in thousands to raise money for Mrs. Churchill’s “Aid for Russia” fund, money that presumably ended up in the hands of Joseph Stalin’s lawless, merciless, intolerant, brutal, and iron-bound tyranny.

Winston Churchill

I possessed for many years a comic-book biography of our Great Leader called “The Happy Warrior,” one of thousands of more or less idolatrous

publications that concentrated rather heavily on Mr. Churchill’s good side. I knew more about his life than I knew about the life of Christ. Winston was our savior. In fact, the generally radical and irreverent historian A. J. P. Taylor famously called him “the Saviour of his Country” in an impulsive—and uncharacteristically laudatory—footnote to his history of twentieth-century England.¹

As children, echoes might have reached us of various less-than-complimentary memoirs, of suggestions that the old man’s mind was going long before he retired, but we were protected from them by our own desire to believe in his superlative greatness. We had won the war, with him at our head. We whizzed around the playgrounds with our arms outstretched, pretending to be Battle of Britain Spitfires and making machine-gun noises as we sent imaginary Germans spiraling to earth. Once again, we had no thought of what that might have been like for them, and we resisted the idea that our own side had suffered losses of its own. What, us shot down? We won the war!

On freezing evenings, in inadequately heated classrooms or workshops and our fingers dabbled with uncooperative glue, we strove to make plastic models of these aeroplanes or of equally gallant British warships—always rather less impressive and disappointingly smaller in reality than in the dramatically colored pictures on the (much too large) boxes in which these toys were misleadingly sold. The contrast between the packaging and the reality was a metaphor for the difference between what we were then taught to believe about the war and what had actually happened—but we would not find that out until much later.

I possessed a red volume called Men of Glory, a title that could not be published now, even ironically. It contained several stories of astonishing but genuine heroism, including that of a man who fought on long after he ought to have been dead (thanks to a Japanese sword-thrust) and a particularly nerve-tightening account of the struggle to remove an unexploded bomb from a claustrophobic space in a submarine. I learned later that my future wife had at the same time been studying its female equivalent, called Women of Glory. Many years later in Moscow, these titles returned to worry me when we—a group of expatriate journalists and their spouses—had been discussing the way in which the Soviets liked to use what we thought of by then as the outmoded and exaggerated word “glory” in accounts of their wartime heroes. And it came to me with a shock of memory that there had been a time when we, in prosaic, understated Britain, had done exactly the same and had not thought there was anything odd about it. The Soviet parallel would revisit me again and again to unsettle me. Here was another nation in hopeless decline, comforting itself with a long-ago battle in which it claimed to have saved the world from evil.

And then there was Sergeant Pilot Matt Braddock, the great Royal Air Force bomber ace, fervent democrat (he refused a commission), and all-around British hero. For many years—having encountered him in a book for boys called I Flew with Braddock, in which his adventures were recounted by his faithful and admiring navigator, George Bourne—I genuinely believed that this person actually lived. He now has a Wikipedia entry, almost as if he had been a real person, but I now know he never existed outside the pages of a weekly comic.

I had heard of something called “The Blitz,” in which German Nazis (they were always Nazis, a special kind of human being deserving of death) had killed our women and children by dropping bombs on their homes. I also had some extremely vague and confused ideas about the massacre of Jews by Germany and may actually have thought that we went to war to save those Jews. If so, I was not alone. Many British people now seem to think that this was our actual reason for fighting Germany, and they are surprised when it is pointed out that this was not so.

In any case, I had no doubt at all that Matt Braddock and his fellow pilots were heroic warriors as they unloaded their bombs upon the evil Nazis. In this I was at least partly right, as I now know. I lost what little physical courage I ever had on the day I crashed my motorbike into a lorry carrying pork pies. The collision (entirely my own fault) nearly removed my right foot. This is as close as I have ever come to the real experience of warfare, though as a journalist I have hung about at the edge of various conflicts doing my best to stay well away from the action. I simply do not know how bomber crews found the courage to climb into their aircraft, especially given the sort of deaths they had already seen so many of their comrades die. What I did not then grasp, and now do, is exactly what Matt Braddock’s bombs did when they reached their targets. This late discovery ended my worship of Matt Braddock and of his comrades, brave as they certainly were, and unraveled my entire faith in the whole pseudo-religion we once called, “We Won the War.”

The Cult of Noble Death

As pseudo-religions go, ours was attractive and elegant, and it contained many decent and godly elements. Its central ceremony was Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to 11th November. This invariably fell at the low point of the winter term, when the soccer fields were thick with mud the color of tea and the consistency of soup, and a leather football in the face could ruin your entire day. Rain hissed incessantly from misty skies, and the far horizons of summer shrank to a small, murky circle around the school buildings. Through foggy windows we could see only fog. Morning took hours to gain the upper hand over night. The afternoon light began to thicken into a cozy dusk soon after lunch. Feet squelched, puddles formed in doorways, and heavy dark blue raincoats (never fully dry) hung in sodden, musty clumps in the corridors. The normal daily smells of fatty mutton and stodgy puddings loitered in the brown-painted corridors all day. Christmas was too far off to illuminate the darkness.

In the very depth of this season of universal, drab-colored gloom we were marched in ranks and files down to the town war memorial, with absurd caps on our heads, for the crowning ritual of the year.

Everyone else, like us, was somberly clad, and the only color—a startling blood red—came from the artificial poppies we all wore to commemorate the flowers that bloomed among the corpses in First World War Flanders. Wreaths fashioned from the same poppies were heaped on the monument. As a vicar in austere black-and-white vestments intoned uncompromisingly Protestant prayers, we kept a silence. Then a quavering bugle blew, and we sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” a hymn that seemed to have been carved from granite much like that of the memorial itself. It was a deep evocation of everything we liked about ourselves, an indulgence in melancholy and proud self-restraint. No outsider could possibly have penetrated its English mystery or imagined that we were in fact enjoying ourselves. But we were.

At that point in my life I still imagined that I too might meet my noble, painless imagined fate in a gray ship on gray seas in some cold northern place, preferably dying at the moment of victory, therefore helping to preserve this unfathomable society from harm. I think I may have believed that my sons might one day process to a memorial and sing sad songs in my memory, standing stiffly upright as the rainwater found its way down the back of their necks.

To this day, I cannot attend or watch this event—for it still continues—without a great wrench of the heart. This was what I believed in most, what I was chiefly proud of, who I truly was. Great poets expressed it, usually but not always sentimentally. “Here dead we lie,” as A. E. Housman wrote in 1919,

because we did not choose

To shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,

But young men think it is, and we were young.

And in lines that still make me shiver, Edward Thomas described the shocked Easter of 1915, when a dismayed country began to understand the size of the butcher’s bill it was then only beginning to pay for entering so blithely into the First World War. He wrote:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

It is only after a minute that the phrase “now far from home” has its intended effect.

Shrines—At Home and Abroad

The great cult of noble, patriotic death has its shrines everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. Some are majestic, adorned with statues of soldiers, sailors, and airmen with bowed heads standing at their corners. Some are considerable works of art. One such is the Cenotaph in Whitehall with its simple-seeming but curiously worrying inscription to “The Glorious Dead.” The most evocative—a mud-encrusted infantryman forever reading a letter from home—stands on Platform One of Paddington Station in London. This Great Western Railway Memorial is the work of the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger, who also executed the astonishing Royal Artillery Memorial in the heart of London. This is one of the very few to portray a dead soldier (his head and trunk covered by a cloak, his booted legs projecting as a real corpse’s would), an enormous and extraordinarily honest tribute to what is described in deeply incised lettering as “A Royal Fellowship of Death.” This sculpture, so strange and outlandish that almost nobody studies it, is a full-size representation in solid stone of an enormous Howitzer, trained in the general direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, no doubt unintentionally. Nearby, the much smaller memorial of the Machine Gun Corps pointedly mocks Jagger’s heavy grandeur, with the biblical but un-Christian boast, “Saul hath slain his thousands, but David hath slain his tens of thousands,” on its plinth. This curious memorial takes the form of a statue of the young shepherd boy David, naked but for a fig leaf, gripping Goliath’s abandoned sword. On either side of him are bronze machine-guns, recreated in careful detail, hung with large bronze wreaths. Once again, the structure is so eccentric, un-Christian, and odd that few ever examine it, though millions must pass by it every year.

In the disturbing and melancholy memorial in the pretty garden city of Port Sunlight in the north of England, sculpted bronze children stand among the sculpted bronze soldiers—intended, I believe, to emphasize the belief that our armies were fighting to defend their homes and families. Now, long afterward, they just call to mind the uncomprehending, or half-comprehending, childish grief that must have broken out in so many homes when fathers did not come home.

Some shrines have powerfully moving inscriptions, especially that of the Metropolitan Railway memorial at Baker Street Station:

The men from the service of the Metropolitan Railway Company whose names are inscribed below were among those who, at the call of King and country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that their names be not forgotten.

Other shrines simply list hundreds of names of the dead, or in small villages a dozen or so, all too frequently two or three from the same family. One, a small obelisk in a Devon hamlet, carries the lines from a forgotten patriotic poem of eighty years ago: “Live thou for England. These for England died.” Some are stern and minatory, especially one at the fishing port of Fleet-wood, which rather waspishly points out that “Principles do not apply themselves.”

All these temples of mourning were originally designed to commemorate one war, that of 1914. All of them were adapted later to commemorate at least one more, that of 1939. An increasing number now bear names from later conflicts. Towering cenotaphs, crowned with globes, look out to sea at the great naval ports. The British traveler abroad will generally find, from Bayeux in France to Rangoon in Burma, sad gardens containing the ordered graves of tens of thousands of soldiers who died abroad and were buried—as was then the custom—where they lay. Colossal monuments at Thiepval and Ypres will continue to mark these cemeteries for hundreds of years to come, each bearing the names of thousands upon thousands of the lost.

British religious architecture, far from dying out, continues to exist in this empire of the dead, with its monumental gates, giant shrines, and graceful colonnades and fountains. Not all the survivors approved. Siegfried Sassoon wrote furiously of the Menin Gate at Ypres:

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride

“Their name liveth for ever,” the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

A different criticism is made in a faintly sacrilegious story about the same gate, written after the Dunkirk disaster, the defeat of the British Army in Europe in 1940, and its evacuation with the loss of all its equipment, transformed by brilliant Churchillian propaganda into an apparent triumph. In a short story written by an artillery officer, John Austin, using the pseudonym “Gun Buster,” a small boy is taken by his father to the Menin Gate on a frozen evening sometime during the 1920s. His parent, a survivor of the First World War, is clearly and profoundly moved by the idea that this was a “War to End War.” They watch a Belgian bugler sound “The Last Post” (the beautifully melancholic British equivalent of “Taps”) as dusk falls. A few years later, the boy—now himself a soldier in the Second World War—uses the monument as an observation post in a 1940 battle with the Germans, who have no scruples about shooting at it and swiftly drive him to a safer vantage point.

Almost all of these memorials are more or less explicitly religious, but some very pointedly so. In the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield the monument (upon which a light burns at night) is adorned with a carving of Christ crucified. Some compared the sacrifice of 1914 – 18 with the sacrifice of Calvary, an understandable if theologically dubious parallel. A memorial panel in my own parish church bears the words “The Great Sacrifice.” This idea, of a repeated Golgotha in the Flanders slime, is expressed in the rather unsettling hymn, “Oh Valiant Hearts,” which was in widespread use throughout what used to be the British Empire until relatively recently—though it is now rarely sung:

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war As who had heard God’s message from afar; All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave, To save mankind—yourselves you scorned to save.

Splendid you passed, the great surrender made; Into the light that nevermore shall fade; Deep your contentment in that blest abode, Who wait the last clear trumpet call of God.

Long years ago, as earth lay dark and still, Rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill,

While in the frailty of our human clay, Christ, our Redeemer, passed the self same way.

Still stands His Cross from that dread hour to this, Like some bright star above the dark abyss; Still, through the veil, the Victor’s pitying eyes Look down to bless our lesser Calvaries.

These were His servants, in His steps they trod, Following through death the martyred Son of God: Victor, He rose; victorious too shall rise They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice.

There is an almost equally disturbing blurring of the boundaries between the eternal and the temporal in the patriotic poem written by Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat whose own brother was to die in the Great War. Set to plangent music by Gustav Holst, it has become one of Britain’s most frequently sung national hymns, though the middle verse (originally the first verse of an earlier draft) has been largely forgotten and is not, for understandable reasons, included in the church version. I believe it is not widely known in North America, yet the hymn is sometimes sung at an Episcopalian church in Washington, D.C., attended by both British and American military officers on a mid-November Sunday close to the British Remembrance Day:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea, Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me. Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head, And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead. I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns, I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it seems to me that those who love their countries should have asked many more questions than they did, I have not sung the words “the love that asks no questions” when I have met with this hymn.

Most other countries do not have quite the same deep confusion of patriotism and faith. It is true that Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” comes rather close. This is one of those songs that are so familiar that people pay little attention to the often startling words. Some of its verses are no longer sung, and its exhortation to “die to make men free” is usually changed to “live to make men free.” There are, of course, many war memorials in the United States, but there are far fewer of them than in Britain, they are more equivocal, they do not tend to stand in such prominent places, and they are not so universal. The Vietnam monument breathes controversy about the aim and anger about the loss. The Korean War memorial seems resentful that the event has been so easily forgotten. The only American memorials comparable in emotional force to the British ones are those in Southern small towns, recalling the lost cause of the Confederacy. The sole sizeable monument to the dead of the 1917 – 18 war that I have seen in the USA stands opposite Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. Americans who wish to begin to understand the extent of the British commemoration of war should imagine a Vietnam memorial in every town and city in the country, the center of an annual ceremony and parade and for much of the year adorned with fresh wreaths.

There are war memorials in France, dedicated heartbreakingly to “Children of France, dead for the Fatherland,” but they have lost much of their power because of the national defeat in 1940. Some British war memorials in France—notably one at Boulogne—became the focus of anti-German demonstrations after 1940 and were blown up by the occupiers. There are war memorials in Germany, but they have even more embarrassments to conceal or evade, and they are neglected or hard to find.

The only country with a comparable cult of heroic death is Russia, or to be strictly accurate, the former Soviet Union. Compared to the Soviets’ colossal statuary, Charles Sargeant Jagger’s great artillery monument in London seems modest and restrained. The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow Park in Berlin—built on the site of a mass grave—is plainly a mystical site, with its enormous image of a soldier, sword at rest and cradling a rescued child, that is approached through a ceremonial gate and along a funerary avenue lined with great blocks of stone-like sarcophagi, several of them featuring harrowing reliefs of civilians weeping over the loss of homes and breadwinners and adorned with stern quotations from Stalin. Equally numinous is the eternal flame in the Alexander Gardens under the Kremlin walls in Moscow, with its giant fallen flags and helmets of the dead. Even more so is the vast graven image of the motherland at Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and particularly this supposed dialogue between a German and Russian soldier about the battle, inscribed on the battle memorial. The German asks in astonishment, “They are attacking again. Can they be mortal?” And the Soviet soldier replies, in letters picked out in gold leaf, “Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before Holy Mother Russia.”

These words were actually written by a Russian Jewish journalist, Vasily Grossman, author of the long-suppressed novel of the war, Life and Fate. But he is not credited with them on the monument, and I am told that official guides still claim that the writer of the words is unknown. It appears that a Jew cannot be acknowledged as the origin of part of Russia’s patriotic-religious legend—something to ponder when we consider that it was at Stalingrad that the blow was struck which would eventually bring down the Third Reich and incidentally save what remained of Europe’s Jews.

What is the thing that is being worshiped in these places? It may counterfeit the majesty of great churches and imitate their mystery and grandeur. But it is not God. It is an attempt to replace God, an attempt that failed.

Confusing Patriotism with Christianity

It was the constant presence of the Soviet war cult, while I was living in Moscow in the final months of the USSR, that pushed me into the full realization that I too had been a devotee of a similar thing. The films of my childhood—The Cruel Sea, In Which We Serve, Reach for the Sky, Sink the Bismark!, The Dambusters—were breathless celebrations of the belief that also ran through my schooling. “The War,” as we always referred to it, had been a heroic period during which our great and brave country fought more or less alone, and with all classes united, against a powerful and wicked enemy—and defeated it, to the benefit of the whole world.

I also suppressed the fact that, from time to time anyway, we had to have allies. I felt, as did Dorothy Sayers in her poem “The English War,” that

This is the war we always knew… When no allies are left, no help,

To count upon from alien hands, No waverers remain to woo, No more advice to listen to,

And only England stands.

History does not support this glorious, inwardly glowing idea of a solitary, embattled island kept warm by bully beef sandwiches, strong sweet tea, and its own valor. There were always allies, even if we had to pay them for their trouble. We counted all too much on the help of alien hands even in 1940. But it was an essential part of the state religion that sustained us for so long.

I do not mean to be disrespectful. In fact, I am not disrespectful. I love Remembrance Day still. It is a noble remembrance of fine soldiers who did their duty with chivalry and courage, and only a dolt could fail to honor them for their unselfishness and devotion. I will be moved till I die by the sacrifices commemorated. I fight back tears—not always successfully—when the bugles call for the dead, the great guns fire, and the silence falls over England. My father, my grandfather, and my mother all wore the King’s uniform in the wars of the twentieth century, and many of their schoolfellows did not survive those wars. The more I know about the nature of war, the more I admire the individual courage of those who did indeed leave all that was dear to them, in the belief that principles did not apply themselves and that human hands and lives—theirs—were needed for the task. I suspect that for many of those involved it was a time of heightened and intensified life, during which they lived at a level of consciousness and endeavor that we now barely understand. The poetry they produced was born in the gap between what they hoped for and what they found. Those who came afterward, illusions torn and hacked away, cannot really write poetry at all.

But the wars in which they were asked to die do not, once examined, seem as noble and pure as they did when I first learned about them. And the proper remembering of dead warriors, though right and fitting, is a very different thing from the Christian religion. The Christian church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars. Wars—which can only ever be won by ruthless violence—are seldom fought for good reasons, even if such reasons are invented for them afterward. Civilized countries become less civilized when they go to war. And they hardly ever have good outcomes. In fact, I think it safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to Christianity in my own country than any other single force. The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three-quarters empty after 1945.

I would add that, by all but destroying British Christianity, these wars may come to destroy the spirit of the country. Those who fought so hard to defend Britain against its material enemies did so at a terrible spiritual cost. The memory of the great slaughter of 1914-18 was carried back into their daily lives by millions who had set out from quiet homes as gentle, innocent, and kind and returned cynical, brutalized, and used to cruelty. Then it happened again, except that the second time, the mass-murder was inflicted on—and directed against—women and children in their houses. Perhaps worse than the deliberate, scientific killing of civilians was the sad, desperate attempt to pretend to ourselves later that it was right and justified. In this way, the pain and damage were passed on to new generations who had no hand in the killing. War does terrible harm to civilization, to morals, to families, and to innocence. It tramples on patience, gentleness, charity, constancy, and honesty. How strange that we should make it the heart of a national cult. But there are even worse things than war, as so much of the world also knows.

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1English History: 1914-1945, Vol. 15 of Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).