The Last Lion

At dawn’s first light on November 21, ten days after the Armistice, the light cruiser H.M.S. Cardiff steamed out of Scottish waters flying an enormous blue ensign. Twenty miles out, as prearranged, she rendezvoused with the German High Seas Fleet—the kaiser’s titanic armada, most of whose guns hadn’t even been fired since 1914: 179 battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and other vessels, now commanded by Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who was, that day, the most wretched seaman in Europe. Von Reuter had prayed for cloudy skies to mask his shame, but this was Kaiserwetter, clear, if blustery, and very bright. Cardiff led the humiliated enemy vessels back to May Island, in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, where Admiral Sir David Beatty, nineteen subordinate admirals, and 90,000 bluejackets awaited them on the decks of England’s Grand Fleet, the greatest concentration of sea power in history. Beatty presided over 370 warships, all of whose crews were at battle stations, their guns trained on their recent foe, their battle flags snapping angrily in the rising wind. The British warships formed two parallel lines, the classic Spithead formation. Thirteen squadrons of capital ships (among them the Queen Elizabeth, her role in the Dardanelles forgotten) escorted the defeated fleet into the firth and then ordered it to anchor. “The German flag,” Beatty signaled von Reuter, “will be hauled down at sunset today, Thursday, and will not be hoisted again without permission.”² By dusk swarms of English pleasure boats were festively cruising around the wretched ships of the vanquished hohe Herr, hooting and beating buckets with bilge pumps.

Of all the belligerents who had lunged at one another’s throats four years earlier, only Britain, it seemed, had emerged strengthened. France’s loveliest provinces were a wasteland of denuded earth, barbed wire, and rotting corpses. The Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy was disintegrating. Czarist Russia had ceased to exist. The fallen Second Reich, founded by Bismarck, was racked by strife and a proliferation of Femen, or political assassins—Hans Kohn called this frightening new phenomenon “the sudden brutalization of German political life”—and for the next quarter century its menace would darken all Europe.³ England’s enormous prewar wealth was gone, but its factories were intact, its armed forces had never been mightier, and although England owed the United States five billion dollars in war debts, its continental allies were indebted to it for far more than that. At the Versailles peace conference Britain could, in effect, cast six votes because Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India, all separately represented, supported the Mother Country on most issues. Woodrow Wilson’s resistance to territorial acquisitions, and his insistence upon self-determination, was ingeniously met by the creation of the League of Nations mandates. Allied flags flew over these possessions, but, diplomats told the President with straight faces, they were not really annexations because ultimately—no one knew just when—they would become independent. Thus the Empire emerged from the Hall of Mirrors swollen by 988,000 square miles of new territory, inhabited by 13,000,000 people, many of whom had not even known a war was being fought. The Union Jack now flew over German New Guinea, South-West Africa, Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and Cameroon, more than a hundred German islands wrenched from the kaiser, and the Middle Eastern lands which later became Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and Israel. Rhodes’s dream of a Cape-to-Cairo corridor had been achieved at last.

Best of all, for those who cherished old customs, the King-Emperor’s expansion could be attributed to his Royal Navy, which, as the “Senior Service,” had been England’s original instrument of imperial growth. The army had done the dying, but even before the Versailles treaty (or Diktat, as the resentful Germans called it) Britons knew that trench warfare had been futile. It was the Grand Fleet which had blockaded the enemy, starving them into surrender. So tradition had triumphed after all. Englishmen liked that. They were proud of their eccentricities, even the dowdiness of their women’s fashions and the odd customs of taking long hikes in the wet, bathing in cold water, flinging open windows in winter, deferring to bowler-hatted retired officers with bristling white mustaches, and driving on what was, for most of the world’s motorists, the wrong side of the street. As R. H. Tawney put it, “ ‘Back to 1914’ became a common cry.” Some wanted to go even farther back. On the eve of the war sophisticated Englishmen had felt uneasy about Britain’s hegemony. But as Churchill’s Harrow schoolmate Leo Amery told Lloyd George after Armistice Day, if the Empire grew mightier after the valor of its youth, “Who has the right to complain?”⁴

The Empire had flourished on certitude and myth. “It is the virtue of the Englishman,” Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had written in 1913, “that he never doubts. That is what the system does for him.” Englishmen treasured chivalric legends. In 1912 London children, and many who were no longer children, had packed the Savoy Theatre to see Where the Rainbow Ends, an improbable play about two innocents, brother and sister. They are threatened by a Dragon King. Enter Saint George. He seems inadequate: silver-haired and obscured by a billowing cloak. Then the girl says tremulously: “I am an English maiden in danger, and I ask for your aid.” Instantly, the cloak disappears and we behold a knight in dazzling armor, a great red cross on his breastplate and his hand on the hilt of a glittering Excalibur. The Dragon King boasts of degrading the British (“I flung my gold dust in the people’s eyes and lulled them into false security”), but Saint George reminds Britons of their duty to “fight aggression and foul tyranny.” As the end of the last act approaches he cries to the playgoers: “Rise, Youth of England, let your voices ring / For God, for Britain, and for Britain’s King!” They then stand and join the cast in singing “God Save the King.”⁵

The pull of such lore retained its power, on the home front at least, while the men in the trenches were fighting a very different struggle. At Mons, it was said, an angel had led lost Tommies to safety. The Evening News of September 29, 1914, had carried a poem by Arthur Machen, “The Bowmen.” In it an embattled British soldier about to be overwhelmed by waves of enemy infantry remembers and repeats Saint George’s motto: Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius, which he once saw on a plate in a London restaurant. Suddenly he hears “a great voice” calling: “St. George! St. George!… St. George for Merrie England!” Simultaneously, the attacking “grey men” begin “falling by thousands.” They have been shot by Agincourt bowmen in the sky. No sooner had Machen’s poem appeared than dispatches from France and Belgium began reporting dead Germans slain by arrows. As late as 1917, when, one would think, the truth about the war ought to have been evident to everyone, Henry Newbolt (“Play up! Play up! and play the game!”) published his Book of the Happy Warrior, full of chivalric fables about the events across the Channel, and E. B. Osborn brought out The Muse in Arms, in which he explained the gaiety of British soldiers going into action: “The Germans, and even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as sport; they do not know that sportsmanship is our new homely name, derived from a racial predilection for comparing great things with small, for the chevaleries of the Middle Ages.” Today this sounds inane, but it had some basis in fact. In at least two offensives British soldiers went over the top dribbling soccer balls across no-man’s-land. One occurred on July 11, 1916, when Captain W. P. Nevill and his company of the East Surrey Regiment booted a ball back and forth as they advanced along the Somme. Nevill and most of his men were killed in less than an hour. Ineluctably they inspired a poem:⁶

On through the heat of slaughter
Where gallant comrades fall
Where blood is poured like water
They drive the trickling ball
The fear of death before them
Is but an empty name
True to the land that bore them
The Surreys play the game.

It is outrageous, it is preposterous, and to a later generation it is completely baffling. What game, in the name of God, were the Surreys playing? Ah, but they knew, and that was enough for them. Being mythical, that knowledge was imperishable, and its vitality was still strong on that sunlit morning when Beatty received the surrender of von Reuter’s fleet. As the German warships approached the Firth of Forth, the British crew on the battleship Royal Oak heard a mysterious drumbeat coming from the lower decks. It was audible on the bridge. Twice officers dispatched bluejackets to investigate. They found nothing, but the drum continued to roll until the enemy’s anchor chains ran out. The next day’s newspapers carried Newbolt’s old poem Drake’s Drum:

Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
And drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

Seven months later, on a prearranged signal from Admiral von Reuter, German crews pulled the sea cocks of his 10 battleships, 9 armored cruisers, 8 large cruisers, 50 torpedo boats, and 102 submarines, sending them to the bottom while the horrified, helpless British officers and ratings looked on. Among those witnessing this extraordinary event was a party of schoolchildren on an excursion from Stromness in the Orkneys. Being children, they thought the show was for them. It was. It was for everybody—a defiant gesture declaring that Germany had surrendered but had not quit. In Berlin, Ludendorff, dining with Major General Sir Neill Malcolm, the chief of Britain’s military mission in Berlin, explained in his tumescent, inarticulate way that his home front had let him down. “Do you mean,” asked Malcolm, “that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff pounced. “Stabbed in the back?” he repeated. “Yes, that’s exactly it. We were stabbed in the back [Dolchstoss in den Rücken].” Hindenburg heard the phrase from him and testified before a political committee of inquiry: “As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was stabbed in the back.” Stabbed by whom? Presently an answer emerged: the hilt of the dagger had been held by the Jews.⁷

The British were very cross with von Reuter. His conduct, they felt, had been most unsportsmanlike, and doubtless there were those who expected retribution from the angel of Mons, Saint George, the Agincourt bowmen, or the footballers of the Somme. If they felt chagrined, so, for very different reasons, did His Majesty’s diplomats in Versailles, the following week, when the peace treaty was signed. They were satisfied with their spoils of war but departed feeling somehow diminished in the eyes of the civilized world. Lloyd George, they had assumed, would dominate the conference. In the words of a contemporary, he was regarded as the “one statesman in England who counted.” And Winston was almost as familiar to the British public as his chief. Robert Rhodes James has left us a vivid portrait of Churchill at this time: “Much of the early aggressiveness has been softened by age and experience. In manner he remains alert, thrusting, eager, or in sharp contrast fitting his mood, somber, portentous, and scowling with leaden responsibility…. His dedication to his career is total, even obsessive. Experience has not dimmed the originality of his mind, nor the intensity of his emotions, nor the volubility of his conversation.”⁸

Churchill saw Versailles as “grimly polished and trellised with live wires” over which the British prime minister repeatedly tripped. He tried, but failed, to dilute Clemenceau’s draconian demands upon the Germans. Lloyd George’s support of President Wilson’s proposal for a League of Nations was—to Churchill’s deep disappointment—uncharacteristically tepid. The fact is that George was jealous of Wilson. The austere President was upstaging him. A weary Europe found the American’s earnest idealism fresh and stirring. The center of Sir William Orpen’s painting of the signing ceremony features Lloyd George, surrounded by an Australian, a Canadian, an Afrikaner, a turbaned Indian, Balfour, Curzon, and Milner. “But somehow the eye strays,” wrote James Morris, to “the stiff ascetic person of President Wilson: for he is looking directly, deliberately, at the artist, with an almost accusatory expression, as though he is staring hard into the future, and willing it his way.” Lloyd George distrusted the President, and with good reason, for the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination—the right of a people to decide their own political status—was a threat to the very survival of imperialism. Indeed, the Empire delegations, led by Australia’s mercurial Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, narrowly defeated a clause in the League Covenant, proposed by Japan, which would have declared that all races were inherently equal. Hughes, a fellow Welshman, was Lloyd George’s natural ally. Besides, Australia had its eye on German archipelagoes in the Pacific. Wilson, offended, asked Hughes if he really meant to defy world opinion by a naked grab for colonies. The feisty Australian replied: “That’s about the size of it, Mr. President.” Thus the emergence of the Third World debuted on the international stage as a moral issue. It would be crowded into the wings again and again, only to reappear cast in ever larger roles, to the exasperation and dismay of, among others, Winston Churchill.⁹

Almost unnoticed among the miles of Union Jacks in the Firth of Forth on the day of von Reuter’s surrender had been a little squadron of six warships flying the Stars and Stripes. When the Admiralty signaled Beatty that morning, affirming that the enemy’s capitulation “will remain for all time the example of the wonderful silence and sureness with which sea power attains its end,” it meant British sea power.¹⁰ The Royal Navy’s treatment of its American cousins had been patronizing and at times even rude, but one of the first signs that England’s belle époque was ending appeared in a naval agreement, reached in Washington after the Versailles signing, which would have been unthinkable before the war. At the turn of the century England had been spending almost twice as much on its navy as any other country. Its policy, followed by both parties, had kept its fleet strength at a level greater than that of any other two nations combined. Now England consented to observe the ratio of 5 (Great Britain), 5 (United States), 3 (Japan), 1.75 (France), and 1.75 (Italy). Imperial warship designs were discarded; the agreement stipulated the size and type of every vessel. There would never be another Queen Elizabeth. After the pact, the Royal Navy was required to scrap 657 ships, including dreadnoughts, battleships, and cruisers—much of the Grand Fleet’s backbone. The Admiralty pledged itself never to build a naval base at Hong Kong. England’s absolute command of the seas, so vital to the Empire, was over. Britannia no longer ruled the waves, not because world opinion objected, but because, having spent £5,000,000 a day during the war, it simply couldn’t afford to.

It is impossible to pinpoint the beginning of imperial decline. In a sense eventual freedom became inevitable the moment a British possession was conquered, because Britain selectively extended its institutions into its colonies with the establishment of legislative councils, later to become parliaments. In the beginning this happened only in colonies dominated by white settlers. Canada became a self-governing federation in 1867 and imposed a tariff on British imports the following year. Gladstone’s cabinet was outraged, but the GOM pointed out that if you grant people rights, you must expect them to flex their new muscles, however disagreeable the consequences. Self-government then came to Australia in 1901, to New Zealand in 1907, and, in 1910, to South Africa.

As early as the 1880s, farsighted members of England’s ruling class, seeing where all this would lead, expressed alarm that Free Trade and self-government would end in the “dismemberment” of the Empire. To stop it, they founded the Imperial Federation League in 1884. Rhodes, Milner, Rosebery, and Joseph Chamberlain gave the league their heartiest support. Chamberlain, who had admired Bismarck’s skill in uniting the former German states for commercial and military ends without sacrificing the autonomy of the Second Reich, proposed a British imperial defense league, patterned on the Reich’s Kriegsverein, and a customs union along the lines of Bismarck’s Zollverein. However, the Empire’s self-governing colonies—now coming to be called Dominions—were not interested. They came to London for imperial conferences and loyally knelt before the throne, but when they declared war on the Central Powers in 1914, each of their prime ministers was careful to point out that his government was making its own decision, not following London’s instructions, whatever constitutional theorists might say. After the war, thoughtful men in Whitehall realized that the United States and the USSR would eventually dominate Weltpolitik. They tried to press the cause of imperial federation, in the hope that all countries flying the Union Jack might combine to form a third superpower.

Gradually, however, they realized that they were playing upon a losing wicket. The Washington treaty was but one of several omens. India having supported the war effort, India’s politicians now demanded a quid pro quo. Their leaders, some of them educated in English public schools, infuriated the British establishment by quoting Burke and Macaulay in support of the demands for immediate parliamentary self-government. They didn’t get it, but their contribution of a million men and £500,000,000 to the war effort could not go unrecognized. A resolution introduced by Lloyd George in 1917, and then passed by Parliament in 1919, proved to be the first step toward Indian independence. Before 1914 both the resolution and the Washington naval treaty would have meant the fall of the government. Now press and public seemed indifferent. H. G. Wells estimated that 95 percent of England’s population was as ignorant of the Empire as of the Italian Renaissance. Both the Colonial Office and the Indian Civil Service marked a sharp drop in the number and quality of their applicants. In large measure this was a consequence of the recent slaughter. The war had left 160,000 young English widows and 300,000 fatherless children. The flower of England’s youth, its university students and recent graduates, had joined Kitchener’s armies and crossed to France, most of them as infantry lieutenants. The number of those who fell is incalculable, but some figures are suggestive. In his mindless Passchendaele offensive, Haig lost 22,316 junior officers, compared to only 6,913 Germans of similar rank. We shall never know how many potential prime ministers, cabinet ministers, poets, scientists, physicians, lawyers, professors, and distinguished civil servants perished in the mud of France and Belgium, but the conclusion is inescapable: an entire generation had lost most of its ablest men. Those who survived, like Anthony Eden, of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, gassed on the Somme, and thrice-wounded Harold Macmillan of the Grenadier Guards, who had studied Horace by candlelight in his dugout, emerged with a weltanschauung which was incomprehensible to their fathers.

Part of the loss of brio may be attributed to the lack of heroes. Chivalric myth required heroic leaders. The reading public now had to settle for the thin fictional gruel of Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hanney. The war had produced no Marlboroughs, Wellingtons, Nelsons, or Gordons. Kitchener was a tarnished legend. Only the young archaeologist T. E. Lawrence, whose achievements as a colonel in the Middle East were genuine, had a postwar following. Victory had eluded Jellicoe at Jutland, the war’s only major naval engagement, because, out of excessive caution, he had evaded three crucial decisions. All the British generals had been discredited, with consequences which reached far beyond the British Isles. Before the war, the Empire’s overseas subjects had regarded England with affection and respect. Young Mahatma Gandhi, who had struggled up Spion Kop as a stretcher-bearer that night when Churchill was frantically rushing from colonel to colonel, trying to save the hill from the Boers—Gandhi had been decorated for his bravery afterward—later wrote of his anglophilia then: “Hardly ever have I known anyone to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution…. I vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne.” In 1914, James Morris wrote, “the white colonials had gone to war trustingly, innocently almost, satisfied for the most part to be loyal assistants to the Mother Country. They had been inexperienced still, as soldiers and as statesmen, and they were as indoctrinated as the British at home in their ingenuous respect for British traditions and achievements. Though they often made fun of the British, their toffs, their drawls and their domesticity, they still looked up to the Old Country, and believed as the British did themselves in the value of its systems and the skill of its leaders.”¹¹

At the time of the Somme, when the fate of civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Australian boys at Melbourne’s Scotch College wept when they sang the stanzas of “Bugles of England.” The legend of Saint George was as revered in Durban and Ottawa as in London. Proud of their membership in the Empire, the colonials assumed that the graduates of Sandhurst were the finest officers in the world. In the trenches they learned otherwise. The Australians learned to despise both Major General Alexander Godley, who at Gallipoli had led them ashore, not to a beach, but to the base of a cliff, and Ian Hamilton, who, when they asked to be evacuated, had replied: “You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.” In self-mockery the survivors called themselves “diggers” and made ribald jokes about British redtabs. Godley, they said, “couldn’t find the balls on a bull.” Some of the wittiest wartime scatology ever written was inspired by Louisa Godley, the general’s wife, who visited wounded New Zealanders in an Egyptian hospital and complained that they had insulted her by not lying at attention.¹²

The Canadians were also disillusioned. On Easter Sunday, 1917, on Vimy Ridge, they had won the reputation of being the finest soldiers on the western front. Haig wasted them, of course; his lethal hand struck down everything it touched. But he also slighted them. He described a delegation of visiting Canadians, including their minister of war, as a “well-meaning but second-rate sort of people.” Indeed, he let it be known that in his judgment all “colonial generals” were “ignorant and conceited.” Australians and New Zealanders, he said, were likely to desert at the first opportunity. He made it a point to keep them separated from British divisions, explaining to his staff that they would exert “a bad influence.” It was probably impossible to deepen the contempt of Irish Catholics for the British, but Kitchener had a try at it, issuing orders that under no circumstances would Catholics be permitted to fight under their own officers.¹³

By Armistice Day the image of the Mother Country in its greatest possessions had been irretrievably altered, although there was little understanding of this in London. Someone in the royal household—it is impossible to trace the source—thought it a splendid idea for the King’s four sons to reign over the four Dominions. The question was raised in Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, and Cape Town; then quietly shelved. The Empire’s five additional votes at Versailles had been misunderstood. They were a sign, not of imperial unity, but of the Dominions’ independence. As early as 1917 their four prime ministers, meeting in London, had resolved that when the fighting ended they must have an “adequate voice in [imperial] foreign policy and in foreign relations.” Jan Christiaan Smuts, South Africa’s next premier, even called them “autonomous nations.” British omniscience had been exposed as a fraud. They were less willing to accept decisions made in Whitehall and Westminster, though the tug was still strong; when the first summons came, they wavered, awed by the momentous decision to defy parental authority. The test came shortly over an incident in Turkey, and here, as so often in the making of British history during his life, Churchill, then at the Colonial Office, was right in the middle of it. He sent an “inquiry” to the Dominions, asking whether they were prepared, if the need arose, to send troops to the troubled area. The Times was offended. This, said its editorial, was a typical example of Winston’s lack of good judgment; imperial possessions weren’t asked, they were told. “Although the Dominions may speak with many voices for themselves as individuals,” its leader declared, “they speak as one when the time comes to speak for the Empire.” But they didn’t. They spoke as many. Only New Zealand and Newfoundland meekly complied. The Australians agreed under protest. The South Africans refused. “Very important questions of policy would be involved as far as the Union is concerned,” Smuts cabled, “by any decision of the Union Government to take part in military operations in Eastern Europe and it is felt by the Union Government that such a step should not be taken without calling Parliament together.” The Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, took the same stand. King fully understood the implications of his response, but in his diary he wrote: “If membership in the British Empire means participation by the Dominions in any and every war in which Great Britain becomes involved, I can see no hope for an enduring relationship.”¹⁴

As it turned out, the men weren’t needed, but the precedent had been set. The King’s statesmen brooded. Most of his British subjects, however, gave the issue neither first nor second thought. Imperialism, so thrilling a creed only a few years earlier, had lost its charisma. They simply didn’t care. The young in particular were more concerned with finding a home and a steady job. Labour, now the most exciting of the parties, was either indifferent toward the Empire or downright hostile. Newspapers found that events in England’s far-flung possessions bored their readers. “Back to 1914”? They wanted no part of it. The chairman of the Empire Day Committee acknowledged that Britons were simply incurious about the “many dark corners where the rays of our Empire sun have not been able to penetrate.” Philip Guedalla discovered that in the early 1920s the doctrine of Imperialism attracted merely “a dim interest [among] research students.”¹⁵ Intellectuals jeered at values fin de siècle Britain had held sacred. Lytton Strachey’s sardonic, sniggering Eminent Victorians was an immediate success when it appeared in 1918. His next book, Queen Victoria, which presented its subject as a trivial, quirky woman, became required reading in universities between the wars. And the generals, who had seemed mighty only yesterday, were left to the merciless pens of cartoonists.

Sometimes a social event, wholly divorced from political considerations and affairs of state, can illumine the mood of a time. In this sense, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is immensely instructive about the temper of postwar England. Assembled at the terminus of the London underground railway at a cost of £4,000,000, it dwarfed Britain’s last great fair, the Crystal Palace. Pavilions celebrated the genius of the imperial peoples, the fair managers enlisted Kipling to acclaim imperial glory, and Edward Elgar provided the music, which largely comprised various renditions of his “Land of Hope and Glory.” Tibetan trumpeters blew bugle calls. The tomb of Tutankhamen was reconstructed, he being, as W. S. Gilbert would have put it, a sort of British ancestor by purchase. Visitors traveling on the exhibition’s Never-Stop Railway passed beneath thousands of massed Union Jacks, and Lord Milner expressed the conviction that Wembley would prove a “powerful bulwark” against subversives who would undermine the Empire. The King himself went on the radio to hawk its attractions. (“This great achievement reveals to us the whole Empire in little….”) The exhibition, solemnly conceived, should have reaffirmed Britain’s confidence in its imperial destiny.¹⁶

It didn’t. It became a joke. The most popular feature had been lifted from an American carnival. “I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire,” a Noel Coward character told his children, “and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems.” P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster drawled: “I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia—but not Bertram…. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast Village and were looking towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indies section.” The intellectuals of Bloomsbury and Hampstead, solidly anti-imperialist, organized a group called the WGTW, the Won’t Go To Wembleys. Mayfair’s Bright Young Things, soon to find their minstrel in Evelyn Waugh, treated it, James Morris wrote, “as a spree.” They performed naughty acts in the Nigerian Handicrafts Exhibition—“Did you Wemble?” they slyly asked one another, and if you nodded it meant you had performed a lewd act under the eyes of the wogs—after which the bobbies usually released them, because the boys bore patrician names and so many of the naked girls turned out to be widows of the Glorious Dead. “A great empire and little minds,” Edmund Burke had said in 1775, “go ill together.” Now T. S. Eliot wrote: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”¹⁷

Churchill watched all this and grieved. In the notes for a speech to his constituents he wrote: “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been. How terrible & how melancholy is the long series of disastrous events wh have darkened its first 20 years. We have seen in ev country a dissolution, a weakening of those bonds, a challenge to those principles, a decay of faith, an abridgement of hope on wh structure & ultimate existence of civilized society depends…. Can you doubt, my faithful friends, as you survey this sombre panorama, that mankind is passing through a period marked not only by an enormous destruction & abridgement of human species, not only by a vast impoverishment & reduction in means of existence but also that destructive tendencies have not yet run their course?”¹⁸

Honor, as he understood it, seemed dead in England, and gone with it were innocence, rationalism, optimism, and the very concept of an ordered society. He asked almost pathetically: “Why should war be the only purpose capable of uniting us? All for war—nothing is too good for war. Why cannot we have some of it for peace?” An age, the age he had adored, appeared to have reached journey’s end, and journeys no longer ended in lovers meeting. The government seemed to need, not diplomats, but economists, of whom he knew almost nothing. The disposition of the British public was a backlash against everything he cherished, and he found that hard to bear. “I was,” he wrote, “a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was growing ever stronger.” Now that was threatened, and threatened from within. He reflected that the “shadow of victory is disillusion. The reaction from extreme effort is prostration. The aftermath even of successful war is long and bitter.” These, he realized, would be years of “turbulence and depression.” But he would soldier on. Surely the great imperial strengths, tradition and continuity, could not be long denied. Eventually the tide would turn. He was certain of it. It never crossed his mind that the ebb might be permanent—that he and all he cherished would, in the end, be stranded forever.¹⁹

He continued to think of the Empire as an “old lion, with her lion cubs by her side,” and while he could shrug off the Stracheys and the Wodehouses and the WGTW as temporary abhorrences—he could never have accepted the Wembley circus as a metaphor for imperial majesty anyhow—he was deeply angered by any retreat from the distant frontiers of what he regarded as Britain’s rightful realms. When Curzon supported Milner’s recommendations for Egyptian sovereignty, Winston passed him a note: “It leaves me absolutely baffled why you shd be on this side, or why you shd have insisted on keeping Egyptian affairs in yr hands”—Curzon had been an able imperial administrator as viceroy of India (1898–1905) and foreign secretary (1919–1921)—“only to lead to this melancholy conclusion. It grieves me profoundly to see what is unfolding.” In a City of London speech on November 4, 1920, he sounded paranoid, hinting at a sinister “world-wide conspiracy against our country, designed to deprive us of our place in the world and rob us of victory.” He did not see how, in the long run, such a plot could succeed: “Having beaten the most powerful military empire in the world, having emerged triumphantly from the fearful struggle of Armageddon, we should not allow ourselves to be pulled down and have our Empire disrupted by a malevolent and subversive force, the rascals and rapscallions of mankind… now on the move against us. Whether it be the Irish murder gang, or the arch-traitors we had at home, they should feel the weight of the British arm. It was strong enough to break the Hindenburg line; it will be strong enough to defend the main interests of the British people.”²⁰

Confronted by foes, he was always like this: galloping, mud-spattered, high in oath. But once a foe was down, he sprang from his saddle and extended a helping hand. Had Arthur reappeared in modern Britain, Churchill would have been his Galahad. It is not without significance that he loved round tables and always had at least one in each of his several homes. His faith in gallantry ran deep. Years later he told his physician how, at the end of an engagement on the western front, when one of his tank crews had to surrender to the enemy, the Germans saluted them and complimented them on their valiant fight. He smiled. He said: “That is how I like war to be conducted.” Even in the last weeks of 1918, when the popular slogans were “Hang the Kaiser!” and “Squeeze them till the pips squeak!” he repeated his watchwords: “In victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” He agreed with the Germans that the Versailles terms had been dictated by the victors; he would have preferred a negotiated settlement. “I was all for war,” he told Bernard Baruch when they met. “Now I’m all for peace.” In a long memorandum to himself he concluded that both sides had been guilty of atrocities unprecedented in war between civilized states. Germany had been “in the van,” but had been “followed step by step” by Britain, France, and their allies. “Every outrage against humanity or international law,” he wrote, “was repaid by reprisals—often of a greater scale and of longer duration” than Germany’s. “No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries…. Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilised scientific Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.” Nor had the Armistice ended it. Relief for the prostrate nations was wholly inadequate. All they were accomplishing, he told a friend, was the return of victims “again and again to the shambles. Nothing is wasted that can contribute to the process of waste.”²¹

It is a sign of Churchill’s stature as a politician that what he wrote in private, and said to friends, he repeated from the platform when campaigning for office. Immediately after the Armistice, Lloyd George called England’s second khaki election of the century. Winston told his constituents that the Germans must be clothed, sheltered, and fed, that the triumphant Allies ought not “to be drawn into extravagances by the fullness of their victory.” He particularly deplored staggering reparations. Immediately James K. Foggie, a leading Dundee Liberal, wrote him: “I think the great card to play & one which will give you a huge victory, is that you declare, ‘that Germany must pay this country & the other allied Nations, all expenses caused by the War.’ Germany started the War, & has been defeated, therefore it stands to reason she must pay. Had Germany beaten our Empire she certainly without doubt, would have made us pay all expenses. Dundee will stand for nothing else. Dundee has given over 30,000 soldiers. Almost 20%… have been killed.” Doubtless Foggie spoke for an overwhelming majority of the Dundee electorate, but Churchill wouldn’t budge. As it happened, it didn’t matter. Lloyd George’s timing had been precise. The coalition was swept back into office—though the Tories had outpolled the Liberals for the first time in thirteen years, and Labour strength was growing.²²

Winston had been reelected by what his bitterest adversary in the constituency, the Tory Dundee Advertiser, called the “immense majority” of 15,365. Clearly he was entitled to a more prestigious cabinet post. His stubborn courage in adversity since Gallipoli, his capacity for taxing work, his brilliance and force—all argued strongly against extending his exclusion from the government’s highest councils. He wanted to return to the Admiralty but realized that was impolitic. The War Office was available, however; Milner was moving to the Colonial Office. Winston’s critics trembled at the prospect of entrusting military decisions to him again. Leo Amery wrote the prime minister: “Don’t put Churchill in the War Office. I hear from all sorts of quarters that the Army are terrified at the idea.” The Daily Mail and Morning Post echoed Amery’s warning, but nothing could have given Lloyd George greater pleasure than dismaying the men responsible for the Somme and Passchendaele. On January 9, 1919, he relieved his minister of munitions, whose desk at the Metropole had long been cleared anyway, and invested him with twin portfolios. Churchill was now secretary of state for war and air.²³

He inherited an army crisis. The vast mass of the troops were civilians who had signed up for the duration. They wanted their discharges as soon as possible. Of the 3.5 million men under arms, fewer than a third would be needed for armies of occupation in Germany and the Middle East. A majority, therefore, were eligible to return home as soon as transport could be arranged. The difficulty lay in deciding who should go first. Senior officers, whose temporary rank depended upon the size of their commands, were in no hurry to expedite the process. Milner had established a system under which priority was assigned to “key men” in industry. But these blue-collar workers, by the very fact of their indispensability, had been among the last to be called up; many had not been drafted until the manpower crisis of the previous March. Now they were being released from the service while volunteers who had fought in the trenches for four years remained there. In the week before Churchill moved into Whitehall, soldiers had rioted in Dover and Folkestone, demanding immediate demobilization. Two days later Milner had issued new regulations under which only men with job offers could be discharged. This left three million Tommies with no prospect of an early return to civilian life, and their mood was ugly. On Winston’s first day in his new office he was handed a telegram from Haig, reporting a rapid deterioration of army morale under the latest rules. Proof of it lay in London, within earshot of the War Office. A mob of insubordinate Tommies had gathered on the Horse Guards Parade, waving seditious signs. Had they but known it, that was the last way to win concessions from Churchill. He called in a group of anxious officers and asked them: “How many troops have we got to deal with them?” A battalion of guards, he was told, and three squadrons of the Household Cavalry. “Are they loyal?” he inquired. The officers replied that they hoped so. He asked: “Can you arrest the mutineers?” They were uncertain but had no other suggestions. He said: “Then arrest the mutineers.” He watched from his window while the demonstrators, deflated, permitted the guards to surround them and then lead them away.²⁴

By now reports of barracks disturbances were arriving from commanding officers in France, Flanders, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Greece, and Italy. Haig warned that unless the stampede was stopped, “the Germans will be in a position to negotiate another kind of peace.” Churchill was more worried about the impact upon the Bolsheviks, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, who were calling for uprisings by soldiers all over the world. There were Communist agitators in Britain, too, particularly around military and air bases. Sir Henry Wilson noted in his diary that the new war minister directed him to bring home “all reliable troops, i.e. Household & other Cavalry, Yeomanry, Home Country Rgts: etc.” At the same time Winston decided that no men would be mustered out who had fought less than two years in France; eligibility for discharge would be determined by age, length of service, and wounds. But young conscripts would still be needed to police the new territories being absorbed by the Empire. No one liked compulsory service—until three years earlier the country had never known any form of conscription, even in wartime—but there was no alternative. Since Lloyd George was at Versailles, the cabinet had to act in his absence. After consulting Austen Chamberlain, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill drew up plans for an army to garrison the British Zone in occupied Germany. The War Cabinet approved and advised George of its action. An announcement was prepared. By the time it was released to the press, Wilson wrote in his diary, “the great adventure of ‘compulsing’ a million men in time of peace to serve abroad will have begun.” In his view it came in the nick of time, because “all our power over the Army is slipping away.”²⁵

Britons accustomed to wartime regimentation accepted the extension of conscription, partly because the new demobilization scheme seemed fair. In the meantime, however, Milner’s old regulations had kindled a major revolt in Calais, where five thousand Tommies, newly arrived from England, demanded that they be returned home immediately. Haig reported to Winston that their attitude was “threatening, insubordinate, and mutinous.” At his direction, he said, General Henry G. Sandilands sent a brigade with fixed bayonets into their camp and arrested the three ringleaders. He wanted them executed; otherwise, he believed, “the discipline of the whole Army will suffer, both immediately & for many years to come.” Churchill disagreed. Execution, Winston wrote, “should be used only under what may be called life and death conditions, and public opinion will only support it when other men’s lives are endangered by criminal or cowardly conduct.” The field marshal spared the three men, but he was incensed by what he regarded as civilian meddling. He noted in his diary that he had the “power by Warrant” to put men before firing squads without consulting the War Office. His days of wielding such power were numbered, however. Parliament awarded him £100,000 and made him an earl, but the historians were beginning to catch up with Douglas Haig. Lesser generals were appointed to lofty civilian roles: governor-general of Canada, high commissioner for Egypt, high commissioner for Palestine, governor of Malta, offices in the Indian Empire. London never summoned Haig from his retirement in Scotland. Forgotten and ignored, he died of a heart attack in 1928.²⁶

By the end of January, 1919, some 980,000 soldiers had been repatriated, and eight months after assuming office, Churchill had reduced Britain’s military expenditures by nearly 70 percent. Britain’s army, he said, had “melted away.” The demobilization had been a triumph of organization, but it left him uneasy. England, he believed, now needed a large standing army. Postwar Europe had become dangerous. In the spring some 70,000 of Ludendorff’s former troops, marching under the banner of the Rote Soldatenbund (Red Soldiers’ League), had seized a cache of arms in Bochum, defeated a right-wing Freikorps in a pitched battle, and occupied six Ruhr cities, proclaiming workers’ republics in each. Under Versailles the Ruhr was out-of-bounds to German and Allied troops, but Berlin sent in troops of the Reichswehr, the Weimar Republic’s army, and suppressed the revolt; rebels were tried before Freikorpskämpfer military courts and shot. Britain, Italy, and the United States approved the Reichswehr action, but the French, infuriated by this invasion of the “neutral” Ruhr, countered by occupying four German towns. In Paris, Winston discussed the incident with André Lefevre, the French minister of war. He told him that French had “committed a grave error in tactics and had lost far more in prestige and authority than they had gained.” The present threat to Western civilization, he said, was not German militarism; it was bolshevism. By now the Ruhr was quiet. The Rote Soldatenbund having been shattered, both Berlin and Paris withdrew their troops. Churchill’s anxiety over the spread of communism did not fade, however. Years later Bernard Baruch wrote him recalling one day in Paris, when the Versailles talks were in progress and the two of them “were walking through the Bois de Boulogne, talking of the problems which burdened a world exhausted by war and groping for peace.” A wind had risen; the sky was darkening; Baruch expressed concern about the weather. His letter continued: “Suddenly you broke your brisk stride, paused and, lifting your walking stick, pointed to the East. Your voice rumbled ominously: ‘Russia! Russia! That’s where the weather is coming from!’ ”²⁷

In the spring of 1918, when Ludendorff was plunging his bloody fists into the Allied line in France and Belgium, the Bolsheviks in central Russia stood naked to invasion. And no regime, not even Napoleon’s, had ever been threatened by more formidable enemies. Led by the czar’s professional officers, over 300,000 “White” Russians, loyal to the Romanovs, were forming armies on the Reds’ five-thousand-mile front—over ten times the length of the western front. On December 30, 1917, Japan had become the first foreign country to intervene in Russia’s internal struggle, landing troops at Vladivostok in Siberia. Two battalions of Tommies from Hong Kong occupied Murmansk next, and, six weeks later, with Frenchmen at their side, Archangel. American doughboys joined them. Meanwhile, British soldiers from Salonika and Persia seized the Baku-Batum railroad while British warships blockaded Russia’s Black Sea and Baltic ports. National motives varied. All felt vindictive toward an ally who, as they saw it, had betrayed them by signing a separate peace, and they were determined to recover vast stores of munitions they had shipped to Russia—arms which the Germans, in that last crisis of the war, were bent on capturing. Japan also wanted to annex Russian territory. The Americans were determined to prevent that and, at the same time, to free beleaguered Czechoslovaks.

The Allies were united in their resolve to crush bolshevism, though in those months it appeared to be disintegrating without their help. The Ukraine had proclaimed its independence on January 28. In April and May similar declarations followed in the Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Lenin had agreed to the Germans’ terms at Brest-Litovsk in order to gain some “breathing space,” but every day the Bolsheviks had less space in which to breathe. By signing the treaty they had yielded Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. Now the Whites and the Allies vowed to take the rest. The Red Army was in a pitiful state. Some troops were approaching starvation. Few had coats; half of them lacked boots and underwear. Rifles were in short supply. So was ammunition. Weapons rusted because oil was unavailable. Horses died; there was no fodder. The logistical situation was appalling. Coal mines had been flooded. Factories had been demolished. The sources of fuel, steel, and iron were in White hands. Lenin had spoken grandly of riding to triumph on a wildly careening “locomotive of history,” but on Russia’s railroad tracks his trains labored forward at a speed of one mile an hour. His only two military assets were interior lines and the ingenuity of his commissar of war, Leib Davydovich Bronstein, who had taken the name of Leon Trotsky and who, over the next two years, was to prove himself a commander of genius.²⁸

Even with Trotsky the Reds would have been doomed had they been forced to fight during the first winter of their revolution. But the White counterrevolutionaries were still gathering their forces, and the Allies were pinned down by the Germans. It was typical of this confused, tumultuous war that the first shots were fired by soldiers who were neither Reds, Whites, nor Allies. Before the overthrow of the czar, his officers had organized a Czechoslovakian legion comprising seventy thousand prisoners of war eager to fight the Austrians. These were the men who concerned Woodrow Wilson. Brest-Litovsk had stipulated they be disarmed by the Bolsheviks, but it wasn’t done, and the Allies had been unable to spare the shipping to evacuate them. They were being marched and countermarched aimlessly across the Urals and Siberia when they learned that the Reds were planning to disarm them. In June 1918 they revolted and seized a section of the Trans-Siberian Railway. That feat attracted the attention of the counterrevolutionary Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. He recruited them under his banner and opened the civil war’s first great offensive, capturing Omsk, Ekaterinburg, and, against negligible opposition, most of the country between the Volga and the Pacific. In Omsk the Siberians announced that they were now an autonomous nation—another territorial loss for the Bolsheviks. Among the casualties during this drive had been the czar, his family, their doctor, and three servants. They had been imprisoned in Ekaterinburg; when Czech troops approached in July, their guards shot them. They would have been killed anyway. The Reds had read Marat: “Woe to the revolution which has not enough courage to behead the symbol of the ancien régime.” But Trotsky was disappointed. He had looked forward to prosecuting Nicholas in a public trial, and had designated himself as public prosecutor.

By the summer of 1918 it seemed likely that Trotsky himself would stand in the dock, with Kolchak as his hanging judge. On August 6 the Red Army broke and fled from Kazan on the east bank of the upper Volga, over four hundred miles west of Ekaterinburg and the last important strongpoint between the Whites and central Russia. If Kolchak and his Czechs crossed the river there, they could pour across the open plain—that muddy okra-sown countryside grazed by brown, low-slung cows—and take undefended Moscow, which had become the seat of the new government in March. Nothing could stop them; the villages were completely indefensible. The Central Executive of the Soviets declared the regime to be in danger. Trotsky ordered conscription and left for the front aboard a train which would serve as his mobile headquarters for the better part of three years. Arriving in Svyazhsk, a village on the west bank of the Volga, opposite Kazan, he rallied his panicked soldiers with fiery eloquence and led them back to the front. There he boarded a rusty boat and summoned the sailors of Kronstadt to swell his ranks. Leaders who had joined their men in the rout were brought before him and sentenced to death. He issued a proclamation: “If any detachment retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, the next the commander…. Cowards, scoundrels, and traitors will not escape the bullet—for this I vouch before the whole Red Army.”²⁹ Heavy fighting continued throughout that month and into the next, until, on September 10, the Bolsheviks recaptured Kazan. By the end of the month the entire Volga basin was back in their hands. Moscow had been saved. Trotsky celebrated the victory by executing hostages and launching his first Red Terror against civilians who had not actively supported his troops.

Meanwhile, the White general Anton Denikin was planning an attack with thirty thousand counterrevolutionaries from his base on the Don while a third counterrevolutionary army, under General Nickolay Yudenich, was bearing down on Petrograd, whose Red defenders were led by the Ossetian Joseph Stalin. It was at this point, in mid-1918, that Churchill’s participation in the Russian struggle began to be felt. He was still a junior minister then, and his role was severely limited, but he was the revolution’s most vehement British foe. He had been the first to grasp the strategic significance of the Czechs. At his urging, the cabinet voted to remain in Murmansk and Archangel, recognize the Omsk regime, send munitions to Denikin and the rebels in the Baltic states, occupy the Baku-Batum railway in the Caucasus, and establish a strong British expeditionary force in Siberia.

Winston then set out to warn the British public against what he called the “poison peril” in the East. In Dundee, he said: “Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism…. The Bolsheviks maintain themselves by bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders…. Civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.” In a memorandum he wrote: “Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a vy large country, a vy old country, a vy disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons & in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.” He understood England’s yearning for peace. “Unhappily,” he continued, “events are driving in a different direction, and nowadays events are vy powerful things. There never was a time when events were so much stronger than human beings. We may abandon Russia: but Russia will not abandon us. We shall retire & she will follow. The bear is padding on bloody paws across the snows to the Peace Conference.”³⁰

He conferred with the War Cabinet again on December 31 to discuss the government’s Russian policy, but Lloyd George was becoming critical of his hawkish stand. George told Riddell: “Winston… wants to conduct a war against the Bolsheviks. That would cause a revolution!” The prime minister toyed with the idea of opening talks with the Reds. Churchill, hearing of it, rushed to Downing Street and, according to the diary of Mary Borden, Edward Spiers’s wife, “Winston told LG one might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.” Nevertheless, on the eve of Churchill’s appointment to the War Office, the cabinet, supporting the prime minister, voted against any attempt to topple the Reds by force; British troops already in Russia would be eventually withdrawn. When the Daily Express reported “ominous signs” of a “gigantic campaign” against Russia—and commented that the “frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single British grenadier”—it misread the government’s mood. Backing the counterrevolutionaries in other ways was still possible, however, and the new war minister meant to do it, ignoring, if necessary, the views of his colleagues.³¹

The immensity of Russia determined the strategy of the civil war. As a theater of military operations it was the antipode of the western front: deep White thrusts into the interior would be followed by Red thrusts, equally deep, toward the country’s outer fringes. Where Haig had measured gains and losses in yards, Trotsky and his enemies thought in terms of hundreds of miles. The conflict was fought out in three theaters bearing the names of their counterrevolutionary commanders, Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich, and was followed by a Polish invasion, which must be considered separately. As of New Year’s Day, 1919, the Whites were being supported by over 180,000 troops from Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Japan, the United States, and the Czechoslovaks. Germany’s capitulation had left them with no excuse for intervention, but bolshevism was not a Russian movement; Lenin said again and again that his objective was a world revolution. Moreover, the Reds were committing acts which, even after the horrors of the war just ended, were regarded as unprecedented atrocities. Photographs had been smuggled out; the victims were of both sexes and all ages, and the evidence of extraordinary torture and obscene mutilation was unmistakable. The Red Cross wanted to bring food to the afflicted. Lenin approved. Trotsky refused. “Fools and charlatans” would misunderstand his tactics, he said; he wanted no outsiders to witness what they described as “the burning and scorching” of the “bourgeois.”³² Churchill had acquired copies of the pictures and was trying, without success, to get them published in England.

The defeat of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians also meant the withdrawal of their armies westward. That left a vast vacuum in central Europe. Trotsky wanted to fill it with the Red Army, but the defense of the homeland came first. His troops were tied down by Kolchak in the Urals and Denikin in the south. Petrograd was Stalin’s problem; Trotsky was in no hurry to solve it for him. Lenin could not be ignored, however. Now that Kolchak had been stopped in his tracks, Lenin wanted to clear the Don and the northern Caucasus of the enemy. Trotsky thought the Ukraine more tempting; he believed new foreign expeditions would soon land on the Black Sea beaches. The debate became academic when Kolchak, reinforced by peasant farmers who revered the czar’s memory, broke through the Red defenses and captured Ufa and Perm. This was a crisis; a linkup of Kolchak and Denikin on the Volga seemed imminent. Red counterattacks flung Kolchak back. Then twelve thousand French poilus—Clemenceau’s antibolshevism was far more ardent than Lloyd George’s or President Wilson’s—arrived from the Black Sea, as Trotsky had feared, and took Odessa and Nikolayev. Unfortunately Clemenceau had forgotten the Nivelle disaster and its impact on the morale of French soldiers. The poilus resented their mission. Bolshevik agitators infiltrated their ranks and found them receptive. They rebelled, and the entire French expeditionary force had to be evacuated. Simultaneously, Bolshevik guerrillas and the Red Guards in the Ukraine, who had been scorned by Lenin and Trotsky, surprised them by seizing Kharkov, in the eastern Ukraine, on February 3. Everything had happened and nothing had happened. Neither side was strong enough to subdue the other. But leaders on both sides were discouraged. Clemenceau and Foch began assembling a new force of French infantry. And in Whitehall, Winston Churchill had moved into the War Office with the authority and determination to deal the Bolsheviks savage blows.

Churchill did not rejoin the inner cabinet until November 1919, but as secretary of state for war and air he frequently appeared before it, and there, six weeks after the Armistice, he first raised the Bolshevik issue with the government’s highest council. England had two options, he said; it could either permit Russians “to murder each other without let or hindrance” or intervene “thoroughly with large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical appliances.” He proposed to reinforce the troops already there with as many as thirty divisions. The prime minister wanted no part of it. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “Winston all against Bolshevism and therefore, in this, against Lloyd George.” A week later the two clashed again. Churchill urged the dispatch of an Allied army “to restore the situation and set up a democratic government”; the Reds, he believed, “represent a mere fraction of the population, and would be exposed and swept away by a General Election held under Allied auspices.” George vehemently disagreed; he was “definitely opposed to military intervention.” Yet he was equally reluctant to abandon Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich. He said he thought it best that the Russians settle their differences among themselves, but he agreed to keep the British battalions in Murmansk and Archangel until the dust had settled. The fact is that the old champion of social reform had never felt comfortable with foreign affairs. He was vacillating, always an alarming symptom in a national leader and one which, in this case, threatened the very survival of the Liberal party. The coalition still ruled, but Tories dominated it. They were siding with Churchill. Balfour told Winston: “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.” When Churchill attacked Lenin and Trotsky in the House, the loudest cheers came from the Conservative benches.³³

Squaring off against his party’s prime minister was not, however, good politics. Neither was it wise. He was repeating his mistakes of 1914 and 1915. He had been right about Antwerp and the Dardanelles, but wrong in trying to direct the campaigns from the Admiralty. Only the man at No. 10 Downing Street could make policy. Churchill had lacked the power to override doubters then, and he lacked it now. And now, as then, his high profile guaranteed that, should the attempt to destroy the new masters of the Kremlin fail, he would be blamed. Nevertheless, he persevered. The emergence of Communists as leaders of a great nation aroused his powerful aggressive instincts. Not until Hitler showed his fist would Winston again be so vehement. As a monarchist he had been shocked by the brutal murder of the Romanovs; Lloyd George said that “his ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes.” Yet he never advocated a restoration of the Russian monarchy. Instead, he proposed a social democratic regime in Moscow. It was the Red dictatorship which outraged him. Its atrocities and pogroms were, he believed, the inevitable consequence of Marxism in action. To him they represented a new barbarism. As a conservative in the purest sense—a defender of freedom, justice, and the great achievements of the past—he saw civilization gravely endangered. Bolshevism, he said, was “a ghoul descending from a pile of skulls.” He told the House: “It is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence.” The Red Executive Committee was “subhuman.” Lenin “was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”^*³⁴

When President Wilson proposed a Russian armistice and the withdrawal of all Allied forces, Churchill replied that this would mean “the destruction of all non-Bolshevik armies in Russia” and “an interminable vista of violence and misery.” He said: “The theories of Lenin and Trotsky… have driven man from the civilization of the twentieth century into a condition of barbarism worse than the Stone Age and left him the most awful and pitiable spectacle in human experience, devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence, and deprived of hope.” Allied intervention was only temporary, he said: “There are now good reasons for believing that the tyranny will soon be overthrown by the Russian nation. We have steadfastly adhered to our principles that Russia must be saved by Russian manhood.” No conscripts would be sent to Murmansk and Archangel, he assured the House, and the families of British soldiers killed there would be told “what purpose these men are serving,” but the effort must be made. If Lloyd George recognized the Soviet regime, he hinted, he would resign. The repatriation of Russian prisoners of war from German camps angered him; instead of being returned to Moscow, he said, they should have been recruited by the counterrevolutionary armies. “Of all tyrannies in history,” he declared in April 1919, “the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.” In his view it was far viler than the kaiser’s Second Reich. His nightmare was a military alliance between a hostile Russia and a vengeful Germany. Instead, he suggested the Germans be encouraged to invade Russia—or, as he put it to Violet Asquith, to “Kill the Bolshie and Kiss the Hun.” Exceeding his authority, he sent howitzers to Kolchak and Denikin and appealed to British volunteers who would join a “Slavo-British Legion,” serving as a rear guard when Murmansk and Archangel were evacuated. A whole generation of Englishmen knew nothing but fighting, and over eight thousand actually enlisted.³⁵

“Churchill’s eloquence, enthusiasm, and personality,” Hankey noted, produced “an electrical effect.” They also triggered a reaction. Even in the War Cabinet his supporters were a minority. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary that “neither LG nor the Cabinet would throw their hearts into beating the Bolsheviks…. I am all in favour of declaring war on the Bolsheviks, but the others, except Winston, won’t.” Curzon, the foreign secretary, described the White Russian situation as one of “complete failure.” Austen Chamberlain at the Exchequer was doubtful of “any good results” because the Whites were “completely untrustworthy,” the British forces were “very tired,” and even the Czechs were “less willing to fight.” All in all, he concluded, the intervention was “hopeless.” Lloyd George came down on one side, then the other. He observed enigmatically that although England was “at war” with the Bolsheviks, the country had decided “not to make war.” Then he strengthened the naval blockade of Petrograd. Swinging back again, he complained that the first six months of intervention had cost the government £73,000,000 “for our military forces alone, including transport,” and if naval expenditures were included the figure would be twice that—for what, he said, “were after all very insignificant operations.” Next he raised the figure to £100,000,000 but wrote Churchill: “If Russia were anxious to overthrow Bolshevik rule, the help we have given her would have provided her with a full opportunity. We have discharged faithfully our honourable obligations to Denikin and to Kolchak. We have never entered into any with Yudenitch and I hope we shall not do so. The British public will not tolerate the throwing away of more millions on foolish military enterprises…. Let us therefore attend to our own business and leave Russia to look after hers.” The prime minister’s thinking, Winston observed, stopped “short of a definite character on which a policy, or even a provisional policy,” could be based.³⁶

Readers of British newspapers had the impression that Churchill was acting alone. The press headlined the fighting in Russia as “Mr Churchill’s Private War.” The Daily Express declared: “The country is absolutely unwilling to make a great war in Russia…. Let us have done with the megalomania of Mr Winston Churchill, the military gamester. Let us bring our men back—if we can.” The strongest opposition, however, came from the Labour party, which in these months was quietly making converts of thousands of Liberals disillusioned with Lloyd George’s postwar drifting, and thereby reshaping Britain’s political future. Lenin and Trotsky had assumed that the Russian revolution would be followed by a “German October,” a “French October,” and an “English October.” Although they were to be disappointed, the war had thickened socialist ranks everywhere, and the new left did not share Churchill’s hatred of the Soviet Union. Sir David Shackleton, a civil servant, warned the government that British socialists deeply resented the intervention in Siberia. In June 1919 a Labour party conference at Southport unanimously passed a resolution condemning “the war in the interests of financial capitalism” and calling for “the unreserved use… of political and industrial power” to end all British opposition to the Communists “whether by force of arms, by supply of munitions, by financial subsidies, or by commercial blockade.” At the London docks longshoremen refused to load munitions on the Jolly George when they learned that the cargo was destined for White enemies of the Bolsheviks. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour party leader, wrote in the Socialist Review: “Churchill pursues his mad adventure as though he were Emperor of these Isles… delighting his militarists and capitalists.” MacDonald predicted “new offensives, new bogus governments, new military captains as allies.” In the Albert Hall one Colonel C. J. L’Estrange Malone, a disillusioned officer, spoke glowingly of the Red achievements and urged his audience to overthrow Parliament. “What are a few Churchills and Curzons on lamp posts,” he asked, “compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings?”³⁷

Malone was sentenced to six months in prison for inciting revolt. The British left regarded him as a martyr. Churchill, speaking to his Dundee constituents, said of the Bolsheviks, “I know they have got a few friends here, but it is very lucky for those people that the great mass of the British nation is sensible, solid, and sound, because when it comes to revolutions the revolutionaries are the first to suffer, and when the revolution has come to an end all the most excitable people have been put out of the way, and you have got a great period of reaction, with probably a military dictator at the head of the state.” Replying to MacDonald in the Weekly Review of June 22 he wrote: “Bolshevism means in every country a civil war of the most merciless kind between the discontented, criminal, and mutinous classes on one hand and the contented or law-abiding on the other…. Bolshevism, wherever it manifests itself openly and in concrete form, means war of the most ruthless character, the slaughter of men, women, and children, the burning of homes, and the inviting in of tyranny, pestilence, and famine.” He then wrote a provocative piece for the London Evening News urging Germany and Poland to build a dike against bolshevism. A Labour spokesman called him “sinister and dangerous,” and added: “We repudiate him and his works.” The leftist Robert Smillie sardonically thanked “our comrade Winston Churchill for uniting the British democracy. We could not do it: the people would not believe us. But Winston and his friends have done it.” Ernest Bevin declared that Winston had damaged himself by “appealing to the old enemy—with whom we were never going to speak or trade—to rise to the occasion and defeat Soviet Russia.” Churchill replied that Labour was “quite unfitted for the responsibility of Government.” The spread of bolshevism, he solemnly warned the House, might threaten Britain’s imperial possessions, including India. This was greeted with laughter, but it wasn’t as farfetched as it seemed; Trotsky, according to Isaac Deutscher, had suggested that “the Red Army might find the road to India much shorter and easier than the road to Soviet Hungary…. The revolution’s road to Paris and London might lead through Kabal, Calcutta, and Bombay.”³⁸

Nothing came of it, because Lenin recognized Trotsky’s proposal for what it was: a cry of anguish, an attempt to sound a note of hope at a time when Communist fortunes were at one of their low points. On the battlefronts the seesaw continued. In the spring of 1919 Kolchak renewed his broad advance toward the Volga, and Moscow once more held its breath. Trotsky now had 500,000 men under arms, but his most reliable troops were fighting elsewhere. Then, in late April, one of his officers, a former colonel on the czar’s general staff, outflanked Kolchak, cut his supply lines, and sent him reeling back toward the Urals. Before the Red Army could celebrate its victory, however, Denikin lunged back into the Ukraine. He met negligible resistance. The peasants greeted his troops as heroes; bolshevism was unpopular here, and it grew more so when bands of defeated Reds crisscrossed the countryside looting, raping, and pillaging. On May 29 Churchill told the House that Denikin “has advanced his whole front, in some places, to a distance of eighty miles, and in this he has been aided by rebellions which have broken out among the people.”³⁹ In Siberia, Kolchak dug in after a 180-mile retreat and threw back Red Army attacks. Meanwhile, the French had evacuated Odessa, the American and Italian expeditionary forces sailed away, and soviets were proclaimed in Hungary and Bavaria. The spring campaigns, in short, were indecisive.

So was Lloyd George. On this issue he had lost control of his ministers. British warships, he suggested, should be withdrawn from Petrograd waters, and Curzon, supporting him, urged his colleagues to “proceed with caution” because there was “a strong element in the House of Commons that is opposed to intervention.” Nevertheless, the War Cabinet, after hearing Churchill, resolved that “a state of war” existed “between Great Britain and the Bolshevik Government of Russia” and, therefore, that “our Naval forces in Russian waters should be authorized to engage enemy forces by land and sea, when necessary.” Winston wanted supplies and munitions rushed to Denikin. He even proposed building a railroad for him. Yet his support was far from blind. He demanded that the White general adopt a land-reform program, establish “a constituent assembly on a democratic franchise to decide the future form of Russian Government,” and recognize the independence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. Later he also asked for a written promise to suppress anti-Semitism. Six million Jews lived in Russia. Reports of Ukrainian pogroms had reached London, and British Jews were furious. But Denikin, confident of imminent triumph, ignored all of Churchill’s conditions.⁴⁰

Events in the early fall of 1919 seemed to confirm Denikin. Kiev, the capital city of the Ukraine, had fallen to him on the last day of August. He swiftly retook Kharkov, took Odessa and Rostov-on-Don, and was pressing the Reds’ weak center, toward Kursk and Voronezh, along the shortest line to Moscow. Simultaneously, Yudenich, armed by Churchill and supported by the Royal Navy, fought his way into the outskirts of Petrograd. Lenin, telegraphing that “the fate of the entire Revolution is in question,” ordered that positions be defended “to the last drop of blood.” Trotsky retorted that weapons and ammunition which he had been promised had not arrived, and attempts to suppress White marauders roaming behind Red Army lines had “up to now yielded almost no result.” Lenin proposed abandonment of the city and withdrawal of all Red Army units from all fronts for a circle-the-wagons defense of Moscow. If that were lost, he said, they would retreat to the Urals. Trotsky protested. Petrograd, he told the Politburo, was “the cradle of the Revolution.”⁴¹ Stalin agreed; the loss of Russia’s two great cities, he said, could not be borne. Boarding a train to take personal command of Petrograd’s defenses, Trotsky was handed a copy of a Churchill statement claiming that troops from fourteen nations would soon join in an anti-Soviet crusade. He dismissed it with a scornful laugh and said he would defend the beleaguered city house by house and, if necessary, room by room. Bad news awaited him on arrival. Yudenich had seized Krasnoe Selo, the last strongpoint between him and the center of the city. His drive was spearheaded by British tanks, newly arrived from Churchill. Their appearance had panicked the defenders.

This was Trotsky’s hour. Improvising armored cars in Petrograd factories, he inspired the Red troops, and, in a week, threw the Whites back. Lenin wired him: “It is damnably important to us to finish off Yudenich…. If the offensive is to be launched, cannot a further 20 thousand or so Petrograd workers be mobilized, plus 10 thousand or so of the bourgeoisie, machine guns to be posted to the rear of them, a few hundred shot and a real mass assault on Yudenich assured?” His commissar of war had anticipated him; it had been done. Trotsky then turned to the southern theater. Believing the Whites there were overextended, he ordered a counterattack, and Denikin fell back in confusion on Kiev, Poltava, and Kharkov. Then Kolchak’s army was crushed in Siberia. The three great counterrevolutionary armies had been defeated in just three weeks—this time for good. By December the Red Army was back in Petropavlovsk and Omsk. Denikin had been beaten back to Kursk, eighty miles south of Orel. Yudenich was retreating toward the Estonian border. Kolchak’s headquarters were in remote Irkutsk, fifteen hundred miles east of Omsk. The British expedition had been evacuated. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “So ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s military attempts. Antwerp, Dardanelles, Denikin. His judgment is always at fault, & he is hopeless when in power.” Churchill himself wrote: “There seems to be very little doubt of the complete victory of the Bolsheviks in the near future. The Japanese will no doubt hold up to Lake Baikal…. Everywhere else we must look for a complete smash up.” Lloyd George’s vacillation was over. On the day Kharkov fell, he and Clemenceau met at No. 10 and agreed not to “enter into any further commitments as to furnishing assistance to the anti-Bolshevik elements in Russia, whether in the form of troops, war material or financial aid.” They added that “a strong Poland” was “in the interests of the Entente powers.”⁴²

The blunt truth is that a strong Poland was in the interests of Poland and no one else. Since the split of its ancient kingdom in 1138 the country had been partitioned and repartitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary, and between 1795 and the proclamation of a Polish republic by General Józef Pilsudski in 1918, it could be found on no map. Pilsudski was the archetypal Polish patriot. He had been exiled to Siberia by the czar and jailed by the Germans, and he had fought with the Austrians between 1914 and 1916, when he had left the field to nurse his dream of an independent nation. Now that dream had been realized, but, like most of his countrymen, he was less interested in peace than in acquiring adjacent territories occupied by Russians. In September 1919 Ignace Paderewski, the republic’s premier, asked the Allies to finance a drive toward the Soviet capital by 500,000 Poles. Churchill disapproved, as did Wilson, and for the same reason: “I quite agree with you that it would be madness for us to advise Paderewski, and to support him in any attempt to occupy Moscow. If anything could combine all Russia into a whole, it would be a march of the Poles on Moscow. I can almost conceive Denikin and Lenin joining hands to defeat such an object.”⁴³

Pilsudski struck in the first week of March, seized Kiev and Vilna, and occupied most of the Ukraine. But his triumph was a brief, doomed flicker. As Churchill and Wilson had foretold, the invasion of Mother Russia deeply stirred her masses. To followers of the Greek Orthodox faith this was a struggle with Roman Catholic heretics, and to men who still cherished loyalty to the Romanovs, a fight with a hereditary enemy—“a truly Russian war,” as Deutscher put it, “even though waged by Bolshevik internationalists.” Aleksei Brusilov, the late czar’s commander in chief, put his sword at Trotsky’s disposal. Ukrainians found the Poles even more lawless than the Reds and Whites and expelled them. On June 12 Kiev was retaken. By August 14 the Red Army, now five million strong, had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. “Nothing can save Poland now,” Churchill wrote gloomily and left London to play polo at Rugby.⁴⁴ Curzon offered to mediate the dispute; Lloyd George gave both sides ultimata, but the days were past when British statesmen could settle foreign quarrels by fiat. Salvation reached Warsaw in the form of General Maxime Weygand and a French military mission. The Poles and the poilus rallied on the Vistula. The Reds retreated; Pilsudski, unchastened by his rout, marched on the Caucasus. A provisional peace was signed on October 12 at Riga, though fighting between Russians and Poles, supported by Rumanian allies, continued until late in the 1920s.

Disaster having been averted, Winston, relieved, wrote: “Poland has saved herself by her exertions & will I trust save Europe by her example.” Yet in some obscure way the Polish adventure had damaged him. The British press depicted the Bolsheviks as victims of aggression—worse, aggression that failed—and Churchill was England’s most vigorous anti-Bolshevik. Every Red victory was a blow to his prestige, and, now that the tide had turned, the pins representing counterrevolutionary forces on the War Office’s map of Russia were being plucked out one by one. By February 7 Kolchak had been captured and executed by Bolsheviks in Irkutsk. Yudenich had fled to England. On March 27 Denikin, abandoning hope, turned his command over to Baron Pëtr von Wrangel and sailed for France. Because the Red Army was busy fighting Poles, Wrangel, driving north from his base on the Sea of Azov, overran much of southern Russia, but after Riga the Reds wheeled and hurled him back into the Crimea. Churchill begged the inner cabinet to support Wrangel. Their response was icy. One minister wrote in his diary: “At the Cabinet this morning the PM gave Winston a dressing down about Russia. Winston had been complaining that we have no policy. This the PM described as ridiculous. Our policy was to try to escape the results of the evil policy which Winston had persuaded the Cabinet to adopt.” Another diarist wrote: “Churchill bumbles on about Russia.” On November 1 Wrangel evacuated his army to Constantinople. Two weeks later the Bolsheviks were in Constantinople, and tens of thousands of White refugees boarded French ships and vanished into permanent exile.⁴⁵

Churchill wouldn’t quit. His defiance in defeat, which would thrill England twenty years later, embarrassed his colleagues now. British officers in Berlin informed London that Ludendorff wanted to confer with Churchill about the Bolshevik menace. To the astonishment of his fellow cabinet members, Winston expressed interest. H. A. L. Fisher, minister for education, wrote Lloyd George that he was “alarmed.” He was convinced that Ludendorff’s goals were sinister. Churchill didn’t see it that way. “In my view,” he wrote in a minute, “the objective wh we shd pursue at the present time is the building up of a strong but peaceful Germany wh will not attack our French allies, but will at the same time act as a moral bulwark against the Bolshevism of Russia.” He added that “the advice of the WO throughout the last 15 months has constantly tended to that recovery, stability, & tranquilisation of Europe, wh wd enable Britain to enjoy the fruits of victory. It is a pity it has fallen on deaf ears.”⁴⁶

Certainly the cabinet was deaf to his proposals that he confer with the Second Reich’s discredited warlord, and after reflection he dropped the idea. Thus the Russian epic was played out without further British intrusions. The Bolsheviks still faced obstacles. Japanese troops remained in Vladivostok after all the other Allies had left, drove off a Soviet attack, inflicting heavy losses, and did not leave Russian soil until the autumn of 1922. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania retained their freedom until 1940. Extending Red control over the Caucasus was a slow, exasperating business. Long after Wrangel had left, Georgia continued to be ruled by Mensheviks. Trotsky had agreed to leave the Georgians alone, but in 1921, while he was absent on an inspection tour of the Urals, the Red Army invaded the republic and, after severe fighting, seized Tiflis, its capital. The man who had done this, sabotaging Trotsky’s promise to Georgia, was himself a native Georgian. He hated Trotsky even more than he hated Churchill for intervening, and he was Joseph Stalin.

Winston had one arrow left in his anti-Bolshevik quiver. Lloyd George had been a radical young parliamentarian, but now, like all British prime ministers, he was dedicated to expansion of British trade, and when a Soviet trade mission arrived in London after the counterrevolutionaries had been overwhelmed, the prime minister saw to it that they were provided with every comfort. There was no alternative to peaceful coexistence with them, George told the House; it had become “perfectly clear now to every unprejudiced observer that you cannot crush Bolshevism by force of arms.” But Churchill was not an unprejudiced observer. He refused to “grasp the hairy paw of the baboon.” Commercial ties with England would strengthen Lenin’s regime, he said, and “as long as any portion of this nest of vipers is left intact, it will continue to breed and swarm.” Besides, he asked Lloyd George, how would the Reds pay for British goods? The answer outraged him. The Russians planned to barter with gold and precious stones taken from the czarist nobility. “This treasure does not belong to the Russian Bolshevik Government,” he said at a cabinet meeting. “It has been forcibly seized by these usurpers…. The jewels have been stolen from their owners in Russia and in many cases from their corpses.” The gold was similarly “bloodstained.” England would be giving the Reds “a special title to this plundered gold in order that with it they may make purchases in the British market. It seems to me that this is a very serious step to take.”⁴⁷

Nevertheless, the government took it a few minutes later. Winston almost resigned on the spot. He was “so upset by the decision,” Hankey noted in his diary, “that he declared himself unequal to discussing other items on the Agenda affecting the army. He was quite pale and did not speak again during the meeting.” As it broke up he glowered at the prime minister and inquired heavily whether any minister would now be “fettered” if he wished to deliver anti-Communist speeches. Assured that he was free to say what he pleased, he drove to Oxford that evening and addressed the Oxford Union. Flaying the Lenin government, he said he believed “that all the harm and misery in Russia has arisen out of the wickedness and folly of the Bolshevists and that there will be no recovery of any kind in Russia or in Eastern Europe while these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannize over its great population…. The policy I will always advocate is the overthrow and destruction of that criminal regime.”⁴⁸

He had been candid, he had been prophetic, and he paid a price. Men who had forgotten the Dardanelles remembered it now and felt their earlier assessment of him confirmed. A new rift had opened between him and Lloyd George. The growing delegation of Labour MPs marked him as their chief enemy. In some instances their enmity did him honor; it was later found, for example, that the Daily Herald, a Labour newspaper, was subsidized by Russian money. But his bitterness and his isolation from old friends were curiously at variance with his usual generosity of spirit. H. G. Wells, returning from Russia, declared that Red excesses had been necessary to “establish a new social order” and that the British naval blockade had been partly responsible for Russian starvation. Churchill, replying in the Sunday Express, wrote: “We see the Bolshevik cancer eating into the flesh of the wretched being; we see the monstrous growth swelling and thriving upon the emaciated body of his victim. And now Mr Wells, that philosophical romancer, comes forward with the proposition that the cancer is the only thing that can pull the body round; that we must feed and cultivate that. After all, it is another form of life. It is ‘a new social order.’ Why be so narrow-minded as to draw the line between health and disease, still less between right and wrong? Adopt an impartial attitude. Put your money on the disease if you think it is going to win.” Wells struck back with asperity. He had known Churchill for years, he wrote in the next week’s Sunday Express. He liked him and admired him. “But,” he said, “I will confess that it distresses me that he should hold any public office at this time…. I want to see him out of any position of public responsibility whatever.” Winston’s retirement and his return to private life, he suggested, would not “be a tragic fall…. Mr Churchill has many resources. He would, for instance, be a brilliant painter.”⁴⁹

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 dixit 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, the 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

Nevertheless, by the time he entered the Colonial Office he was committed to it. The more he pondered the issue, the more his enthusiasm for a Jewish homeland grew, and he reaffirmed the declaration at a time when a majority of the British officials in the Middle East were urging that it be repudiated. Lieutenant General Sir Walter Congreve, commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in the Middle East, typically predicted that the Arabs would not return to tranquillity until their “aspirations are attended to,” which “means Zionist aspirations being greatly curbed.” He continued: “As long as we persist in our Zionist policy we have got to maintain our present forces in Palestine to enforce a policy hateful to the great majority—a majority which means to fight & to continue to fight and has right on its side.” Walter Smart, a senior civil servant in Egypt, wrote bitterly of “Anglo-French bargaining about other peoples’ property, the deliberate bribing of international Jewry at the expense of the Arabs who were already our allies in the field, the immature political juggleries of amateur Oriental experts, the stultification of Arab independence and unity… all the immorality and incompetence inevitable in the stress of a great war.”⁶²

Churchill decided to sail out to the eastern Mediterranean on the French steamship Sphinx and see for himself, taking with him Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, and Archie Sinclair, now Winston’s private secretary. The Arabs could not have chosen a more passionate spokesman than Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” who spoke fluent Arabic, had led them against the Turks, had suffered several grave wounds, and, after surviving capture and torture, had emerged as a shining figure. His shyness was legendary. Privately Winston wondered about that. Lawrence, he said wryly, “has a way of backing into the limelight.” But including him in the delegation was a brilliant political stroke. Outraged by the betrayal at San Remo, he had begun writing his great Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the leitmotiv of which would be British shame. When George V had received him at a royal audience and attempted to award him the DSO and a Companionship in the Order of the Bath, Lawrence had politely refused the decorations, leaving the shocked monarch, in the King’s own words, “holding the box in my hand.” If this man of honor supported a Middle Eastern settlement, the shiekhs of Araby would hesitate to reject it.⁶³

The Sphinx would stop at Marseilles to pick up Clementine, who had been visiting friends in France. From the Hotel Bristol in Beaulieu she wrote Winston: “I am thrilled by the idea & so so longing to see you.” Replying, he told her to pack the proper clothing for sight-seeing trips and tennis—“Do not forget your racquet.” In a second letter he wrote: “We shall have a beautiful cabin together. If only it is not rough—then I shall hide in any old dog hole far from yr sight…. If it is fine, it will be lovely & I shall write & paint & we will talk over all our affairs.” His mother, now living in Berkeley Square, dropped him “a line to wish you bon voyage—& a speedy return—Give my love to Clemmie…. I will look after the children & give you news of them. They are great darlings & do you both great credit!”⁶⁴

Meanwhile, Weizmann had told the Political Committee of the Zionist Organization that he was worried about Churchill’s mission. The new colonial secretary was “of a highly impressionable temperament,” he said, and he expected the Arabs to “organize an agitation to greet him on his arrival in the East.” On March 1, Winston’s last day in London before the six-day voyage, Weizmann sent him a long letter, demanding that the Jewish state’s eastern boundary be extended east of the Jordan River to include all of Transjordan (now Jordan). Transjordan, he wrote, “has from the earliest time been an integral and vital part of Palestine.” Here the tribes of Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben “first pitched their tents and pastured their flocks.” The climate was “invigorating,” the soil “rich,” irrigation would be “easy,” and the hills were “covered with forests.” There “Jewish settlement could proceed on a large scale without friction with the local population.” How friction with the Arab inhabitants could be avoided he did not say. Nor was that all. Weizmann also wanted Palestine’s southern frontier pushed southward. Churchill was noncommittal. He favored including the triangular wedge of the Negev Desert in the Palestine Mandate, but not the east bank of the Jordan. Two days later, when the ship paused at Marseilles, a newspaperman came aboard and asked him the purpose of his trip. He replied disingenuously: “I am endeavouring to realise French and British unity in the East. My journey to Egypt and Asia Minor is proof of this. We must at any price coordinate our actions to the extent of uniting them. It is by those means only that we shall be able to arrive at lasting quiet, and diminish the enormous expenditure we are both making.” Privately he was more entertaining. He told his party: “What the horn is to the rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohammedan faith is to the Arabs—a faculty of offense or defense.”⁶⁵

As Weizmann had predicted, Churchill’s arrival in Cairo was a tumultuous event. A few weeks earlier he had publicly described Egypt as part of the British Empire, and newspapers here had carried the story. El Azhar University students were staging a one-day protest strike. Thousands of spectators, many carrying rocks, awaited his appearance in Station Square. The bridge leading into Shubra Road was packed to capacity. “Various notables,” the Palestine Weekly reported, “waited patiently in the station, which had been cleared of all unauthorised persons, and Bristol Fighters and huge Handley Pages circled overhead. The train steamed in to the station half an hour late and amid intense excitement disgorged five boxes and other baggage.” But where was Churchill, the great Satan? Prudently, he and his party had detrained at the suburban terminal of Shubra, whence they had motored unseen and undisturbed to their destination. The newspaper noted that “a disorderly rabble gathered outside Shepheard’s crying ‘Down with Churchill!’ but they were dispersed speedily and without casualty.” Being students, they had picked the wrong hotel. He was staying at the Semiramis.⁶⁶

The Semiramis, another newspaper reported, was “a scene of feverish bustle,” as high commissioners, generals, governors, and civil servants checked in from the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Palestine, and British Somaliland. His Marseilles interview to the contrary, Winston’s real purpose in Cairo was, not the knitting together of Allied unity, frayed though it had become, but the choosing of two kings, protégés of the British, to rule over Iraq and Transjordan. As Lawrence later wrote frankly, he and Winston had already reviewed the aspirants “over dinner at the Ship Restaurant in Whitehall.” The two likeliest candidates were Husein’s sons, emir Faisal and emir Abdullah. On March 12, 1921, the Cairo conference opened at the Mena House. “Practically all the experts and authorities on the Middle East were summoned,” Churchill wrote afterward, a singular description of a meeting at which, of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British. Lawrence suggested that Faisal be crowned head of Iraq, “not only,” the minutes read, “because of his personal knowledge and friendship for the individual, but also on the ground that in order to counteract the claims of rival candidates and to pull together the scattered elements of a backward and half-civilized country, it was essential that the first ruler should be an active and inspiring personality.” His motion, with Churchill’s approval, carried without dissent. Abdullah, in Lawrence’s opinion, was “lazy and by no means dominating,” but though unfit to rule Iraq he would be permitted to reign over Transjordan under the watchful eye of a British high commissioner. Churchill announced his intention to appoint Abdullah in Palestine, and in later years he would say: “The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordania, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.” Zionism’s hopes were honored; Sir Herbert Samuel, the Empire’s high commissioner in Palestine, was instructed to foster a Jewish homeland. It was all very insular—Faisal and Abdullah would send their sons to public schools in England—and it was also rather medieval. Churchill enjoyed this feudal role immensely. And Lawrence was delighted. He continued to hold other politicians in contempt, but in the Seven Pillars he would write enthusiastically of Winston’s accomplishments, concluding that, as a result of them, “I must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.” When at long last the book was published he sent an inscribed copy to “Winston Churchill, who made a happy ending to this show…. And eleven years after we set our hands to making an honest settlement, all our work still stands; the countries have gone forward, our interests having been saved, and nobody having been killed, either on one side or the other. To have planned for eleven years is statesmanship. I ought to have given you two copies of this work!” James Morris wrote: “The routes to India were safe as never before, the oil wells of Iran and the Persian Gulf, the Abadan refinery, all were securely in British possession.”⁶⁷

Other matters lay before the conference, notably the occupation of Iraq by British troops. Churchill decided to withdraw them, and, in a grand if absurd gesture, declared that the entire country—116,600 square miles—would be defended by the emaciated RAF, thereby saving the Exchequer £25,000,000 a year. Then he left the details to subordinates in Mena House and departed to enjoy leisure outside. The Egyptian climate is at its most pleasant in March, and he sprawled happily beneath its sun. He knew he was unpopular with the Egyptians—many vehicles carried stickers reading “à bas Churchill”—“but,” as Jessie Crosland, the wife of a civil servant, recalled a half-century later, “he didn’t care. He took his easel out and sat in the road painting—he also talked so loudly in the street that the generals got quite nervous.” Cordons of police held back furious mobs who had come to stone him. Carried to and fro in an armored car, he painted the Sphinx and the Pyramids while Clementine admired them, and he even held a one-man show of his canvases. On an expedition in the desert he was careening forward on a loping camel when his saddle slipped, dashing him off. Several colorfully dressed bedouins galloped up and offered one of their horses, but he rose, dusted himself off, and growled: “I started on a camel and I shall finish on a camel.” An Englishwoman who attended the conference remembers: “When things were boring in the hotel everyone would cheer up when Winston came in, followed by an Arab carrying a pail and a bottle of wine.” On their last day in Egypt, Winston and Clementine were driven to a Nile dam, which he painted. Returning, they crashed into another car. Churchill, a journalist observed, was “far more concerned about the safety of his painting than about himself.” According to the Egyptian Gazette, no one was hurt. Indeed, at a farewell ball given by Lord Allenby, the country’s high commissioner, Clemmie was reported to have danced until “close on midnight.”⁶⁸

FIVE

OXBOW

1918–1932