* The prime minister’s daughter. In November 1915 she became Violet Bonham Carter, but since she was single during the years when she knew Churchill best, her maiden name is used in this volume.
* Apocrypha has it that the two commanders did not speak during the battle. Actually, they were mounted side by side when a ball passed over the neck of Wellington’s horse and hit Paget. “By God, sir,” Paget cried, “I’ve lost my leg!” Wellington looked over and replied: “By God, sir, so you have!” (From Waterloo: Day of Battle by David Howarth [New York, 1968], page 186.)
* In his Lord Randolph Churchill (Oxford, 1981) R. F. Foster discounts Harris’s “almost completely unlikely assertion of the manner in which he [Randolph] contracted syphilis.” Foster does not say why. The account does not seem unlikely to this writer, and Harris, as Foster concedes, enjoyed a relationship with both Lord Randolph and Winston which “was both genuine and appreciably close” (page 389).
* That was close. The actual line was: “And with a crashing volley the enemy was fiercely beaten back.” Winston was five years old at the time. Actually, his version is an improvement on the original.
* Father of Neville, Winston’s great adversary. This marked the beginning of the on-and-off feud between the Chamberlains and the Churchills—a dispute which, in the tradition of British politics, was conducted with great civility.
* Writing of this in 1930, his son commented: “It is never possible for a man to recover his lost position. He may recover another position in the fifties or sixties, but not the one he lost in the thirties or forties” (Roving Commission, page 47). Perhaps Winston was thinking of himself. He had been dismissed as first lord of the Admiralty in 1915, when he was forty-one. But never is a treacherous word. In 1939 Winston was again appointed first lord.
* “Prenez garde! I am going to speak to you in French, a formidable undertaking and one which will put great demands upon your friendship for Great Britain.”
* The rank held by Chatham (the Elder Pitt). Sir Robert Walpole, his political adversary, said, “We must muzzle this terrible young Cornet of Horse,” and Chatham was expelled by the army.
* On February 27, 1881, Boer troops fighting for their independence had defeated a British force under Sir George Colley and killed Sir George at Majuba Hill.
* Originally an acronym of Worthy Oriental Gentlemen.
* Lady Sandhurst was a daughter of the fourth Earl Spencer, and thus great-great-great-great-grandmother of Lady Diana, who became Princess of Wales in 1981.
* In British politics a cave is a group of MPs who quit their party. Here Churchill was anticipating himself.
* To the end of his life Churchill would believe that men who had performed well in combat held a great political advantage. In 1945 he urged Conservative friends to campaign in uniform and persuaded holders of the Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Order to stand for office. According to his son, Randolph, those who wore uniforms and won were convinced that it had made no difference. The heroes, almost without exception, were rejected at the polls.
* This seems extraordinary today. It was less remarkable then. In the Sudan campaign Major Haig’s personal pack train had included “one camel, laden with claret.”
* In his subsequent accounts, Churchill wrote that he had heard “Wer ist da?” But that is German. The above is Afrikaans.
* Churchill was always under the impression that Burnham was “a Dutchman” named “Burgener.”
* “If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms—never—never—never!” (The Earl of Chatham in Parliament, November 20, 1777.)
* Churchill used them forty years later as the theme for his history of World War II.
* John Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage.
* Astonishingly, all this had been predicted in 1899 by a Polish financier named Jean de Bloch. He published a book, Is War Impossible?, prophesying that war, “instead of being a hand-to-hand contest… will be a kind of stalemate…. Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle…. All wars will of necessity partake of the character of siege operations…. Your soldiers may fight as they please; the ultimate decision is in the hands of famine…. That is the future of war… the bankruptcy of millions and the break-up of the whole social organization” (Wolff, page ix).
* The War Council had succeeded the Committee of Imperial Defence. In May 1915 the council was dissolved and then replaced, a month later, by the Dardanelles Committee. The committee, in turn, was supplanted by the War Cabinet, which held its first meeting on December 9, 1916. In October 1919 the War Cabinet went the way of the others, and the peacetime cabinet was restored to full authority.
* Walcheren was the scene of an attempt, conceived by the second Earl of Chatham in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, to capture Antwerp. It was a catastrophe.
* Churchill also disapproved of it. He did not believe that the main effort should be made on the western front, but the only solution acceptable to him was a German surrender. Commenting on Lansdowne’s proposal, he asked: “What is the contrary view? It is in a sentence that this war has got to be won & that it is not won yet.” He added, in a phrase which would become familiar to Americans when President Truman dismissed General MacArthur in 1951: “Let us not delude ourselves by thinking that there is any substitute for victory.”
* After the war a royal commission investigating the clams of inventors reported that it was “due to the receptivity, courage, and driving force of the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer-Churchill that the general idea of the use of such an instrument of war as the tank was converted into practical shape, but Mr Churchill has very properly taken the view that all his thought and time belonged to the State and that he was not entitled to make any claim for an award, even if he had liked to do so. But it seems proper that the above view should be recorded by way of tribute to Mr Winston Churchill.”
* Most people, including Churchill, called (and still call) this weapon “Big Bertha.” Die dicke Bertha, literally “fat Bertha”—named for a member of the Krupp family—was actually a huge howitzer which flung a projectile weighing a ton nine miles. These guns had been used in the siege of Liège and, later, at Verdun.
* To assure German compliance with the peace terms, the Allied blockade was not lifted until April 1919. Thus Germans continued to starve for five months after Armistice Day.
* Later, in The World Crisis: The Aftermath, he rephrased this: “They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.” If this rhetoric sounds extravagant, it should be remembered that the Bolshevik holocaust—five years of fighting, pestilence, and famine—cost fifteen million lives.
* After the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916, Churchill had drafted a communiqué on the action at Balfour’s request, to bolster public confidence. It had merely served to identify him with public frustration over Jutland’s inconclusive results.
* Ironically, Churchill may have been the first public figure to use appeasement in a modern political context. As a foreign policy proposal it first appeared on May 9, 1934, in a letter to The Times from Lord Lothian, who suggested “a limitation of armaments by political appeasement.”
* It remained in effect until 1932, “by which time,” Telford Taylor dryly observes, “it was a very bad forecast indeed” (in Munich: The Price of Peace [New York, 1979], page 201).
* City Lights (1931).
* In 1934 he would become Lord Halifax, and is best remembered by that title.
* Originally she was to have been christened the Queen Victoria. A Cunard executive told George V that the company wanted to name her after “the greatest of all English queens.” The King was delighted. “Oh,” he said, “my wife will be pleased.”
* The cages are for display purposes. They are there, not to lock the girls in, but to lock the customers out—until rupees have changed hands.
* During the early 1950s, when this writer was living in Delhi as a foreign correspondent, social scientists began a comprehensive poll of Indian villages to determine how many natives knew British rule had ended in 1947. The survey was aborted when it was discovered that a majority didn’t know the British had even arrived. England’s East India Company was chartered in 1600.