by Celia Sandys
In January 1896 Churchill returned from Cuba to rejoin his regiment, with whom it was intended he would leave later that year for an eight-year posting in India. While most young officers looked forward with keen anticipation to military life in India – polo, pigsticking and a host of servants – Churchill increasingly saw it as a political backwater he must avoid. Nine months remained before the regiment would set sail, and during this time he once more prevailed upon his mother to use her influence with those in power. He wished to be posted, as he put it, ‘to scenes of adventure and excitement – to places where I could gain experience and derive advantage’. He would have liked to join General Sir Herbert Kitchener’s expedition to reconquer the Sudan, but when that prospect dimmed he set his sights on Rhodesia, which, he explained in a letter to his mother on 4 August, would provide ‘excitement and adventure’. Meanwhile, assiduously promoted by Lady Randolph, he used his time in England to cultivate many important people.
Having failed in his attempts to obtain a more exciting posting, Churchill sailed for India on 11 September 1896. Here, in the garrison of Bangalore, he was to endure two years of peacetime soldiering, alleviated only by polo, a great deal of reading – ‘the desire for learning came upon me’ – and Miss Pamela Plowden.
Pamela, seven months older than he, was the first love of Churchill’s life. She was the daughter of the Resident of Hyderabad, and they met during a polo tournament. He wrote the next day to his mother, ‘She is the most beautiful girl I have ever known . . . We are going to try to do the city of Hyderabad together – on an elephant’ The love affair would continue for several years at a desultory pace dictated by the demands of Churchill’s main aim: to win the fame and fortune he felt he needed to launch his political career. (She would marry the Earl of Lytton in 1902, would remain friends with Churchill, and would outlive him.)
It was during his time in Bangalore that, as far as we know, Churchill first confided his ultimate political aspirations, to Captain Bingham of the Royal Artillery. Bingham was Master of the Ootacamund Hounds, and was bringing the pack home through the dusty, undulating country when a young cavalry officer out riding fell in with him. They struck up a conversation, during which the young officer, puffing on a cigar, said he would be giving up the army for politics, and would one day be prime minister.
In the summer of 1897 Churchill came home on leave. On the lawns at Goodwood, while he was enjoying the racing and improving his finances, an opportunity arose for further adventure. The news arrived of a rebellion among the Pathan tribesmen in the mountains along the North-West Frontier of India. A British expedition, the Malakand Field Force, had been formed to quell the uprising, and the General appointed to command it was none other than Sir Bindon Blood, who the year before had promised Churchill a place on his staff should he ever command an expedition again.
As I looked through the archives, I was struck once again by the alacrity with which Churchill seized this outside chance. Abandoning his leave, he took the next boat to India, cabling General Blood to remind him of his promise. Blood was unable to find an immediate vacancy, but his reply was encouraging: ‘I should advise your coming to me as a press correspondent . . . If you were here I think I could, and would if I could, do a little jobbery on your account. Yours in haste, B. Blood.’
The hint was more than enough for Churchill. Having persuaded his Colonel to grant him leave, he set off by rail for the two-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey from Bangalore to the scene of operations. He had been commissioned as a war correspondent by an Allahabad newspaper, the Pioneer, and had also arranged that the Daily Telegraph would pay him £5 a column for his letters from the front.
Within a month of arriving at General Blood’s headquarters, Churchill had been attached to the force as a replacement for an officer who had been killed, had been involved in heavy fighting, and mentioned in dispatches. He had achieved all his aims. Was he lucky, or had he simply made the most of the situation? I think the latter. He continued to write for the Daily Telegraph, and thus got the best of both worlds – as an officer on active service and a war correspondent. Thinking he had struck an insufficiently hard bargain with the paper, he sought his mother’s help in negotiating for better terms: ‘When I think of the circumstances under wh. those letters were written . . . temperature of 115 degrees or after a long days action or by a light which it was dangerous lest it drew fire . . . I think they are cheap at the price.’ (Greater financial reward would come with his book The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which he wrote in five weeks and which, on its publication in March 1898, was widely recognised as a military classic.)
His letters home spared Lady Randolph none of the details which soldiers usually conceal from their loved ones:
I rode forward with the 35th Sikhs until firing got so hot that my grey pony was unsafe. I proceeded on foot. When the retirement began I remained till the last and here I was perhaps very near my end . . . I was close to both officers when they were hit almost simultaneously and fired my revolver at a man at 30 yards who tried to cut up poor Hughes’s body . . . Later on I used a rifle which a wounded man had dropped and fired 40 rounds at close quarters. I cannot be certain but I think I hit four men. At any rate they fell . . .
In one letter to his mother, written on the eve of a battle, he expressed for the first time a sentiment he was to repeat at intervals over the next few years: ‘I have faith in my star,’ he wrote, ‘that I am intended to do something in the world.’ It was a faith that was reinforced when he emerged unscathed on the frequent occasions he recklessly exposed himself to enemy fire: ‘I rode my grey pony all along the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down . . .’ There is no doubt he actually enjoyed the danger. ‘Bullets,’ he wrote to Lady Randolph, ‘are not worth considering. Besides I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.’
The Malakand Field Force’s successful campaign ended with punitive action against the rebellious tribes. There is little of Churchill’s usual animation in his laconic description of this final action, rather a hint of disapproval: ‘We were to stay in the Mamund Valley and lay it waste . . . we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.’
Churchill managed a second attachment in early 1898 when he joined the Tirah expedition, also on the North-West Frontier. However, negotiations brought peace, and he returned disappointed to his regiment in Bangalore. He had not given up his hope to join Kitchener in the Sudan, and he now bombarded his mother with requests for her to influence those who could help. The main stumbling block was Kitchener himself, who took exception to Churchill’s attempts to manipulate the military system for his own ends, and refused to accept him.
Due for leave, Churchill returned to England in May 1898. He had sent a copy of The Malakand Field Force to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, who invited the author to come and see him. Five days later Churchill was notified of his attachment to the 21st Lancers for the Sudan campaign: it was obvious that Prime Ministerial influence had been successful where feminine allure had failed. The military were not amused, and instructed him to proceed to North Africa at his own expense, warning him that should he be killed or wounded, ‘no charge of any kind will fall on British Army Funds’. Ignoring these barbs, Churchill set off forthwith for the Sudan and the campaign which he would call ‘the River War’, after the River Nile. The War Office had forbidden him to write for the press, but he arranged to send dispatches to the Morning Post, in the guise of letters ostensibly written to a friend.
We may imagine Kitchener’s annoyance when, of all the officers who might have been sent to reconnoitre the enemy positions, it was Churchill who cantered across the shimmering desert to deliver his personal report: ‘I saw the Union Jack by the side of the Egyptian flag,’ Churchill was to write ma
ny years later. ‘Kitchener was riding alone two or three horses’ lengths in front of his Headquarters Staff. His two standard bearers marched immediately behind.’
The report given, Churchill reined in his horse to let the retinue flow past. A friendly voice invited him to lunch: ‘in our path appeared a low wall of biscuit boxes which was being rapidly constructed, and on top of this wall I perceived a long stretch of white oil-cloth on which again were being placed many bottles of inviting appearance and large dishes of bully beef and pickles.’ He was no doubt thinking of the cavalry charge promised for the following day when he summed up the meal as being ‘like a race luncheon before the Derby’.
The battle of Omdurman, on 2 September 1898, saw the last British regimental cavalry charge. In a clash with hundreds of massed Dervishes, ‘ten or twelve deep at the thickest, a great grey mass gleaming with steel’, Churchill survived unscathed, although the two minutes cost the regiment nearly a quarter of its strength. His survival probably owed much to the fact that, due to an injured shoulder, he was wielding a pistol instead of the traditional cavalry sword: ‘I saw the gleam of [a Dervish’s] sword as he drew it back . . . I fired two shots into him at about three yards . . . I saw before me another figure with uplifted sword. I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol actually struck him.’
His book of the campaign, The River War, was published a year later, and would become the standard history.
Churchill’s formidable abilities were already evident, but their impact on the world at large had so far been confined to his trenchant writing, as he combined the roles of cavalry officer and war correspondent. He now decided it was time for him to leave the army and enter politics. This was an audacious move for a young man with considerable debts, who would need an income if he were to pursue a Parliamentary career. He had been trained for no profession other than the army, and although he had demonstrated a rare ability to write, his pen remained an uncertain source of income.
He was, however, sanguine, and wrote explaining his decision to his grandmother, the Duchess of Marlborough:
Had the army been a source of income to me instead of a channel of expenditure – I might have felt compelled to stick to it. But I can live cheaper & earn more as a writer, special correspondent or journalist; and this work is moreover more congenial and more likely to assist me in pursuing the larger ends of life. It has nevertheless been a great wrench and I was vy sorry to leave all my friends & put on my uniform & medals for the last time.
Courted by the Conservative Party, Churchill stood in a by-election for the Parliamentary seat of Oldham in Lancashire on 6 July 1899, but was narrowly defeated. However, fortune was about to favour the brave.
TWO
Preparing for War
‘Britain entered the twentieth century in the grip of war. She placed nearly half a million men in the field, the biggest force she had hitherto sent overseas throughout her history. The conflict in South Africa, which began as a small colonial campaign, soon called for a large-scale national effort . . . the years of the Boer War saw a surge of patriotism among the vast majority of the British people, and a widespread enthusiasm for the cause of Empire.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL,
History of the English Speaking Peoples, VOLUME IV
As BIG BEN CHIMED IN the new century, the patriotic crowds celebrating in the streets of London seemed to echo the response of Queen Victoria to one of her ministers who had tried to raise the subject of the series of military disasters in South Africa: ‘Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’ The national feeling was that Britain would triumph, as she had always done. But there was no denying, she was in the grip of war.
Yet less than six months earlier, as Winston Churchill canvassed the voters of Oldham, South Africa had not even remotely been an issue at the hustings. This was hardly surprising. The Empire had largely been at peace for a long time. The humiliation of Majuba had been almost forgotten by the public, if not by the regiments involved; there had been no rush to arms in April 1899, when Queen Victoria had received the Uitlanders’ petition; and the Jameson Raid had been disingenuously disowned by the government. The tussle between British imperialism and Afrikaner nationalism had been going on for half a century, and there was still the hope in London that war could be avoided.
Meanwhile, the Boers’ economic power, and thus their influence in the region, was increasing daily, and their wealth enabled them to fill their armouries from ready suppliers in Germany and France. Churchill, still a young officer watching events from his garrison in India, had grasped this at the time of the Jameson Raid. He produced a memorandum – presumably for his own amusement, as it was never published – on the main issues involved. Entitled ‘Our Account with the Boers’, it is a pity it did not see the light of day, for it would have struck a chord among the public, and might well have had some influence:
Imperial aid must redress the wrongs of the Outlanders; Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers . . . There must be no half measures. The forces employed must be strong enough to bear down all opposition from the Transvaal and Free State; and at the same time overawe all sympathisers in Cape Colony. There will not be wanting those who will call such a policy unscrupulous. If it be unscrupulous for the people of Great Britain to defend their most vital interests, to extend their protection to their fellow countrymen in distress and to maintain the integrity of their Empire, ‘unscrupulous’ is a word we shall have to face. Sooner or later, in righteous cause or a picked quarrel, with the approval of Europe, or in the teeth of Germany, for the sake of our Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of the race, we must fight the Boers.
Two years after forecasting the need for a shift in Britain’s Southern Africa policy, and shortly after his first, unsuccessful attempt to enter Parliament, Churchill found himself cruising in leisurely fashion along the Thames with Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. The two men were weekend house guests of a mutual friend, Lady Jeune. They had met before, but this was the first real opportunity for Churchill to make the acquaintance of his father’s old friend, whose conversation, he found, was ‘a practical political education in itself’.
The discussion which began on the river continued over dinner. Uninhibited by his inexperience in politics, and not in the least awed by Chamberlain’s formidable presence, Churchill pressed for a strong line against President Kruger. Churchill’s strategic instincts, which the world would one day come to know so well, were already well developed. He felt that the policy of intervention had failed at Majuba and Doornkop not because it was wrong, but because it had been irresolute or bungled. He did not believe, like the British government, that in time the Transvaal would fall of its own accord, leaving Britain to pick up the pieces. His instincts were not dissimilar to those of Cecil Rhodes, who within two years would say of him, ‘He is a young man who will go far if he doesn’t overbalance.’
Churchill’s experience in India, to say nothing of his aristocratic background and a political philosophy inherited from his father, inclined him to the view that the British exerted a benevolent and beneficial influence wherever they imposed their rule. He remained at heart a Victorian all his life, and to him British interests and the well-being of whoever might be under British rule were virtually synonymous. Magnanimity towards the conquered was also an essential part of his philosophy. This was a concept which he had developed while campaigning on the North-West Frontier, but it required the opponent to be subdued before generosity could be extended. Kruger, he believed, should be brought to heel.
Chamberlain listened patiently to the young man’s arguments. ‘It is no use blowing the trumpet for the charge and then looking around to find nobody following,’ he replied. His own political career having been threatened by the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, he was hesitant to follow any policy other than that of ‘no war’. Neither man
realised that even then Chamberlain’s own appointed High Commissioner to South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, was doing exactly what Churchill had recommended in his unpublished memorandum two years earlier: picking a quarrel.
Meanwhile, Churchill was absorbed with the proofs of his book The River War, which ran to two volumes and almost a thousand pages. It was dedicated to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, whose influence had smoothed Churchill’s way to the Sudan. To ensure that Salisbury would accept the dedication, Churchill submitted to him in advance the more critical passages in the book, offering to delete anything of which he disapproved. Salisbury’s reply, only three days later, was that no alterations were needed.
The constraints of military discipline had never caused Churchill to flinch from trenchant comment, although he had been well aware that his future advancement might well be determined by the very generals he was offending by his articles in the London press. (It was in fact these which gave rise in 1898 to the edict which since then has forbidden serving officers from writing in newspapers.) Now, no longer a soldier, he found himself ‘able to write what I thought about Lord Kitchener without fear, favour or affection, and I certainly did’.
On the whole The River War contained a balanced account of Kitchener’s actions and an honest appreciation of his great military abilities. However, Churchill strongly disapproved of Kitchener’s punitive actions after the battle of Omdurman, and while he had muted his criticism of these in his articles, he gave full vent to his feelings when writing The River War. In particular he objected to the ‘inhuman slaughter of the wounded’, for which he held Kitchener responsible, and to the desecration of the tomb of the Sudanese leader the Mahdi, whose head was lopped from the corpse on Kitchener’s orders, to be ‘passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo . . . an interesting trophy’.