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 m
ajority, 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 Am
ericans 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.
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