CHAPTER 2

WARNINGS FROM A YOUNG MP

DEMOCRATIC WARFARE WILL BE ALL-ENCOMPASSING

 

 

 

Churchill’s youthful essay predicting an epic military clash on the continent was only the first instance of his foreseeing the First World War. The second occurred at the beginning of his long political career.

Taking his place in 1901 as the youngest member of Parliament and a member of his father’s Conservative Party, Churchill immediately made his mark with several notable—some critics said impertinent—speeches about the Boer War and other colonial affairs.

As did his service in the Sudan, his service in the Boer War awakened his imagination to the possibilities of modern warfare, and he was not sanguine about them. His experience in the battle of Spion Kop in January 1900 was notably different from that in the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan less than two years before because of one simple factor: the Boers, unlike the Dervishes, had modern armaments, which exacted a terrible toll on the attacking British forces, despite Britain’s superior numbers. In fact, Churchill thought the Boers had superior battlefield rifles, and as for artillery Churchill observed that “one Boer gun usually managed to do to our men as much harm as six British guns do harm to the Boers.”¹ It was the first glimmer of a central principle that Churchill stressed in World War I—the superiority of defensive positions. It was a principle he could not get the British generals to absorb sufficiently.

After Britain’s initial success storming the heights of Spion Kop, the ferocious Boer counterattack forced a costly retreat. The dead piled up three deep on the slope. Lieutenant Winston Churchill was in the middle of the fight, trying to rally the troops. “The scenes on Spion Kop were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed,” Churchill wrote to a friend. “Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shell had torn and mutilated in the most ghastly manner.”² It was yet another small-scale preview of the dreadful character of the Great War that would come in the following decade—right down to the all-important detail of the lack of battlefield leadership by the junior officer corps on the spot.

Churchill’s experience in these previews of the mass slaughter of modern warfare was complemented by what he had learned of the American Civil War from his mother’s side of the family. While the British had not yet suffered the trauma of the young manhood of whole towns being decimated by war, Churchill had seen first hand, in his North American visits, the hundreds of stone markers bearing the names of the Civil War dead in upstate New York towns, some with populations of only a thousand.

From his own experience in the British army in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, Churchill gained two insights that would become important in his long political career: a recognition of the increasing horrors of modern warfare and a disdain for what he saw as the shortsightedness of much of the military establishment. It is often said of Churchill in World War II that “he interfered with the generals.” Quite true! In his third major speech to the House of Commons in 1901, Churchill said “I had always been led to believe that the generals existed for the Army, and not the Army for the generals.” He had acquired some of his instincts from his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who had warned with extraordinary prescience in 1886, “A wise foreign policy will extricate England from Continental struggles and keep her outside of German, Russian, French, or Austrian disputes.”

It should not have been a surprise that the young MP would openly oppose his own party’s proposal for an expansion of the army. In the spring of 1901, the secretary of state for war, St. John Brodrick, proposed a scheme of army “reform” that amounted to a significant increase in expenditures in order to equip six additional army corps. If adopted, the additional expense would represent a near doubling of the army’s budget over the previous eight years.

Churchill thought the proposal was unsound on multiple grounds. First, the Conservative Party, if it were worthy of its name, ought to stand for frugality. The proposal seemed to open the way to profligate spending by every department of the government. On May 13, 1901, Churchill took to the floor of the House to deliver a stinging attack on what he called “the costly, trumpery, dangerous military playthings on which the Secretary of State for War has set his heart.”

Churchill asked: “Has the wealth of the country doubled? Has the population of the Empire doubled? Have the armies of Europe doubled? Is there no poverty at home? Has the English Channel dried up and we are no longer an island?” At this point in his political career, Churchill was more concerned with social reform and the establishment of social insurance programs, as we shall see. Separately Churchill had complained, “I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.” This puts in relief his argument against increasing spending on a secondary component of national security.

I hold it is unwise to have no regard to the fact that in this reform we are diverting national resources from their proper channel of development. It may be argued that if other nations increase their armed forces so must we. If you look into the tangled mass of figures on the subject you will find that while other nations during the last fifteen years have been increasing their navies we have been increasing our expenditure on our Army, which is not after all our most important weapon.... My contention is that we are spending too much money on armaments, and so may impair our industries; but that if the money has to be spent, then it would be better to spend it on the Fleet than on the Army.

This last comment was based on Churchill’s view that England and its Empire depended first and foremost on the navy for its defense. This was another minor prophesy of Churchill’s that would soon find vindication. In just a few years, Churchill was running the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty, and his most pressing challenge was Germany’s sudden and aggressive buildup of its navy.

“This is not an Army reform,” Churchill continued, “but an Army increase.” The needs of defending “the minor emergencies” that occur on “the varied frontiers of the Empire” could easily be accomplished with one more army corps, but the expansion Brodrick wanted would be wholly inadequate for a general European war. “But we must not expect to meet the great civilized Powers in this easy fashion. We must not regard war with a modern Power as a kind of game in which we may take a hand, and with good luck and good management may play adroitly for an evening and come safe home with our winnings. It is not that, and I rejoice that it cannot be that. A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heartrending struggle....” Brodrick’s additional army corps, Churchill added, would not protect Britain in the event of a European war, because they were too small: “If we are in danger, they will not make us safe. They are enough to irritate; they are not enough to overawe.”

It was not merely that European war would be larger in scale than the frontier wars of the Empire that Churchill had witnessed in India and Africa. England had successfully prosecuted such European conflicts against Napoleon just a century before. The wars of the twentieth century would be different for two reasons—science and democracy. These would make for a century of Total War. As Churchill noted, “if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, [a European war] must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentrating to one end of every vital energy in the community.” Churchill professed himself “astonished... to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war.”

Gone were “the former days” when the causes of war were the ambitions, passions, or petty political intrigues of kings or ministers, whose wars “were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers,” whose style and smaller scale of warfare made it “possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants.” Continuing with his theme of science and scale, Churchill came to his climax:

But now, when mighty populations are impelled against each other, each individual severally embittered and enflamed—when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerers.

Churchill then uttered one of the most incisive prophecies of his long career: “Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.”

Churchill’s speech thrilled the Liberal Party opposition (which he joined a few years later in his first party switch), and annoyed much of his own party’s leadership, who thought he was merely pursuing a posthumous vindication of his father. But he succeeded in his object: Brodrick’s army scheme was shelved. Brodrick resigned and was sent to the India Office. Churchill had signaled to Conservative Party leadership that the independent young man wielded an influence with which they would have to reckon. More than one observer thought he was likely to become prime minister some day. He was only twenty-six years old.

While this was a minor early triumph for Churchill, very few took to heart his warning about the character of war in the twentieth century. The conventional wisdom was that, for economic reasons, a protracted continental war was impossible. Churchill proved himself a much better prophet than Karl Marx and his followers, who thought the coming of war would hasten the revolution of the working classes in capitalist democracies and weaken nationalist sentiments. Just the opposite occurred; the coming of war saw a swelling of patriotic fervor among all classes. As Churchill later observed in The World Crisis, “For a year after the war had begun hardly anyone understood how terrific, and almost inexhaustible were the resources in force, in substance, in virtue, behind every one of the combatants. The vials of wrath were full: but so were the reservoirs of power.... When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”³

Churchill’s prophetic insights into the coming conflagration were not exhausted. As the dread year of 1914 approached, his predictions grew more precise.