Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  “The book” was not to be completed for eight more years; it would run to five thick volumes, 2,517 pages, and would never be described as a potboiler. As originally conceived, it was to be a two-volume memoir of his years at the Admiralty. During the war he had carefully filed memoranda, documents, and letters, explaining, in a letter to Clementine on July 17, 1915, “Someday I shd like the truth to be known,” and in March 1920 Sir Frederick Macmillan, at his request, set these in type so they would be readily usable. He began organizing them when Lord Esher published a distorted account of the Antwerp operation in The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener, charging that Churchill had “slipped away” to Belgium on his own while Kitchener was “in bed asleep.” By October, Winston was hard at work, singling out quotations from other men’s memoirs, pasting the passages Macmillan had set on large sheets of blank paper, writing commentary in the margins, and drafting transitions. Admiral Jackson checked his facts; Eddie Marsh, his grammar, punctuation, and style. An exchange between Eddie and Winston survives:

  CHURCHILL TO MARSH: Eddie. You are very free with your commas. I always reduce them to a minimum: and use “and” or an “or” as a substitute not as an addition. Let us argue it out. W.

  MARSH TO CHURCHILL: I look on myself as a bitter enemy of superfluous commas, and I think I could make a good case for any I have put in—but I won’t do it any more! E.

  CHURCHILL TO MARSH: No do continue. I am adopting provisionally. But I want to argue with you. W.159

  Soon the news that Winston was writing about the war was all over London. It was unnerving for some and exciting for others, if only because of the money involved. Late in November, Thornton Butterworth, working through Winston’s agent, Curtis Brown, advanced him £9,000; Scribner’s paid £5,000 as an advance for American publication. The magazine Metropolitan had offered nearly £8,000 for first serial rights, but he chose The Times instead. His deadline for both volumes was December 31, 1922, which subjected him to an unremitting pressure, but he liked it that way. On January 1, 1921, he attended another Sassoon party, at Lympne, in Kent. Riddell, a fellow guest, noted in his diary: “I had a long talk with Winston about his book. He says he has written a great part of the first volume. He proposed to dictate 300,000 words, and then cut down the matter and polish it up. He added that it was very exhilarating to feel that one was writing for half a crown a word! He went upstairs to put in two or three hours’ work on the book. When he came down, I said to L.G., with whom I had been talking, ‘It is a horrible thought that while we have been frittering away our time, Winston has been piling up words at a half a crown each.’ This much amused L.G.”160

  It did not amuse Bonar Law, who said that if Churchill was quoting government documents, which he was, he was violating his privy councillor’s oath. The problem of copyright torments every writer who uses contemporary sources, and Winston was no exception. He pointed out that Fisher, Jellicoe, and one of Kitchener’s biographers had used confidential material. Hankey told Law that Churchill’s point was a good one, but the matter was raised again and again as the several volumes appeared. Later, when he himself was back in the cabinet, Churchill learned that Birkenhead was working on a book about Woodrow Wilson. Dismayed that it might come out before the appearance of Winston’s next volume and provoke an embargo on ministers publishing while still in office, he unreasonably begged F.E. to drop the idea. It was a false alarm; the issue was never raised. Most of his former colleagues had nothing to fear from an accurate account of the past, but all were immensely curious. They wondered, among other things, about the title. So did the author. In the last throes of the first volume, on January 30, 1922, he wrote Clementine, “I am so busy that I hardly ever leave the Ritz except for meals,” adding that Dawson of The Times had called “and suggested himself the title ‘The Great Amphibian,’ but I cannot get either Butterworth or Scribner… to fancy it. They want ‘The World Crisis’ or possibly ‘Sea Power and the World Crisis.’ We have to settle tomorrow for certain.”161

  They settled on The World Crisis. “Winston has written an enormous book about himself,” a colleague remarked, “and called it The World Crisis.” Balfour said he was reading Churchill’s “autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.” A volume appeared in 1927, The World Crisis: A Criticism, comprising essays quarreling with some of his statistics and minor points of strategy and tactics. They didn’t amount to much. Beaverbrook was offended by the treatment of Law, whose friend he was, and the Times reviewer observed: “Serious students will not need, and others will not heed, the warning that an apologia may be first-class material for history but cannot be history itself.”162 The reviewer was absolutely wrong. It is indeed the precise strength of the work—which covers events from the prewar “Vials of Wrath” to the aftershocks of 1922—that the historian was either in the thick of events or had special access to many who were. He was a cabinet minister before the war, during the early and latter parts of it, and after the Armistice. In this regard The World Crisis is perhaps unique. Many statesmen have published memoirs; few have attempted a comprehensive account of their times. Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili are dry and unimaginative; Frederick the Great had a first-class mind, but his Histoire de mon temps was written in a language he had not mastered; Talleyrand’s Mémoires is largely based on letters he himself did not write; Metternich is characteristically vain and obscure; Bismarck’s three-volume Gedanken und Erinnerungen is insular, confusing, and inchoate. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, and the memoirs of Grant and Henry Kissinger, though immensely valuable, lack the breadth of The World Crisis. Churchill’s perspective is amazingly broad. Even in describing the activities of Lenin and Trotsky, whom he loathed, he is scrupulous of facts and objective in examining the social matrix which made their rise possible.

  But his achievement is greater than that. T. E. Lawrence described the second volume as “far and away the best war-book I’ve yet read in any language.” John Maynard Keynes, finishing the fourth, wrote in the Nation: “With what feelings does one lay down Mr Churchill’s two-thousandth page? Gratitude to one who can write with so much eloquence and feeling of things which are part of the lives of all of us of the war generation, but which he saw and knew much closer and clearer. Admiration for his energies of mind and his intense absorption of intellectual interest and elemental emotion on what is for the moment the matter in hand—which is his best quality. A little envy, perhaps, for his undoubting conviction that frontiers, races, patriotisms, even wars if need be, are ultimate verities for mankind, which lends for him a kind of dignity and even nobility to events, which for others are only a nightmare interlude, something to be permanently avoided.” Keynes had touched on the work’s deepest theme: its recreation of the past, the illusion of immediacy created by the author’s powerful presence. Keynes had also identified the reasons for Bloomsbury’s reservations about it: the author’s certitude and his lack of curiosity about subconscious motivation. Malcolm Muggeridge points out that Churchill, as a historian and biographer, “remained obstinately Victorian and pre–Lytton Strachey”—interested in public events, that is, not in private lives. Writers like Strachey, literary beneficiaries of a decade in which irony and understatement were fashionable, dismissed Churchill’s style as outmoded. In reality its essence is timeless; it found its greatest audience in 1940, when it moved an entire nation, but it lives today in allusion and everyday speech.163

  Here he writes about the eve of Britain’s 1916 offensive:

  A sense of the inevitable broods over the battlefields of the Somme. The British armies were so ardent, their leaders so confident, the need and appeals of our Allies so clamant, and decisive results seemingly so near, that no human power could have prevented the attempt. All the spring the French had been battling and dying at Verdun, immolating their manhood upon that anvil-altar; and every chivalrous instinct in the new British armies called them to the succ
our of France, and inspired them with sacrifice and daring…. The British Generals… were quite sure they were going to break their enemy and rupture his invading lines in France. They trusted to the devotion of their troops, which they knew was boundless; they trusted to masses of artillery and shells never before accumulated in war; and they launched their attack in the highest sense of duty and the strongest conviction of success.

  And after the Somme:

  A young army, but the finest we have ever marshalled; improvised at the sound of the cannonade, every man a volunteer, inspired not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny, they grudged no sacrifice however unfruitful and shrank from no ordeal however destructive. Struggling forward through the mire and filth of the trenches, across the corpse-strewn crater fields, amid the flaring, crashing, blasting barrages and murderous machine-gun fire, conscious of their race, proud of their cause, they seized the most formidable soldiery in Europe by the throat, slew them and hurled them unceasingly backward. If two lives or ten lives were required by their commanders to kill one German, no word of complaint ever rose from the fighting troops. No attack however forlorn, however fatal, found them without ardour. No slaughter however desolating prevented them from returning to the charge. No physical conditions however severe deprived their commanders of their obedience and loyalty. Martyrs not less than soldiers, they fulfilled the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener’s Army. The flower of that generous manhood which quitted peaceful civilian life in every kind of workaday occupation, which came at the call of Britain, and as we may still hope, at the call of humanity, and came from the most remote parts of her Empire, was shorn away for ever in 1916. Unconquerable except by death, which they had conquered, they have set up a monument of native virtue which will command the wonder, the reverence and the gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among men.164

  Churchill had received the first payment of his American advance, a check for £3,000, in July 1921, and on August 19 he paid £2,550 for a new Rolls-Royce. It was a token of his faith in the work’s popularity, and it was more than justified. The British editions alone sold 80,551 copies. Since his British royalties ranged between 30 and 33 percent, this brought him £58,846, or $285,996. Moreover, The Times serialized four of the five volumes. Further excerpts appeared in the Sunday Chronicle. An indefatigable worker, he produced the last three volumes of The World Crisis when serving as the cabinet’s busiest minister. Considered in their entirety, his achievements as an author in that decade were prodigious, though he was not the most successful political author of those years. Five days before Christmas, 1924, when he was writing his version of the Somme, a former German soldier who had been wounded in that battle left Landsberg Prison in southern Bavaria, where he had been serving time for attempting to overthrow the government, with the rough draft of a very different account under his arm. Like Churchill, Adolf Hitler had a problem with his title. He wanted to call it Viereinhalb Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (“Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”), but his publisher persuaded him to settle for Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). Within a few years, when its writer came to power, Mein Kampf’s presence would be almost obligatory in the homes of respectable burghers, and it led the list of his country’s most popular graduation and wedding gifts through the 1930s. How many actually read it—plowing through those desperate Teutonic sentences to find the verb at the end—is unknown, but its sales eventually exceeded six million copies, making it Germany’s number-one best-seller and bringing Hitler $1.8 million in royalties. Unlike Churchill, he paid no taxes on this income after 1933, having declared himself exempt from them. His prose, however, has not borne the test of time.

  Late in 1919, pressed for cash and not yet a wealthy writer, Churchill had sold his Lullenden estate to Ian Hamilton and moved his family in with the Freddie Guests, sharing expenses with his cousin while Clementine hunted for a new London home. A tall, handsome house at 2 Sussex Square, a block from Hyde Park’s Victoria Gate and adjoined by a mews which would serve as Winston’s studio, proved highly suitable, but he still yearned for a country home. Early in 1922 this became possible. On January 26 his first cousin once removed, Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest, died in a train accident. Lord Herbert had been a bachelor; Winston, as his heir, came into several thousand pounds. Clementine felt “like a cork bobbing on a sunny sea,” while her husband sought out real-estate agents. He looked at several properties and found the one he wanted near Westerham, in Kent, some twenty-five miles from London and just a mile north of Lullenden. The house itself was ugly. Built of pleasant red brick during the reign of Henry VII, the original structure had been charming, but during the nineteenth century its owners had added ponderous bays and oriels, two ungainly wings, stifling clots of ivy, and heavy flora: rhododendrons, laurels, and conifers. Its view, however, was magnificent. Sited on eighty acres above a combe, it overlooked the great Kentish Weald, with its smooth meadows, suave green slopes, and sheltering woods of oak, beech, and chestnut, watered here by a clear spring, the Chart Well, which gave the manor its name. Years later, looking down on it, Churchill said: “I bought Chartwell for that view.” At the time, however, he wondered if he could afford it. Clementine was in Scotland then, so he drove Diana, Randolph, and Sarah there, telling them he wanted to show them an estate he might buy. They adored it. Sarah recalled: “We did a complete tour of the house and grounds, my father asking anxiously—it is still clear in my mind—‘Do you like it?’ Did we like it? We were delirious. ‘Oh, do buy it! Do buy it!’ we exclaimed.” The asking price was £5,500. On September 15 Winston offered £4,800, explaining: “The house will have to be very largely rebuilt, and the presence of dry rot in the northern wing is I am advised a very serious adverse factor.” Norman Harding, the agent, told him his offer was unacceptable. “He strode up and down,” Harding recalled afterward, “using every argument he could think of…. Eventually, with very bad grace, he gave way.” They compromised on £5,000.165

  Chartwell

  Chartwell

  Churchill had been right; the rot was advanced, and the mansion had to be reconstructed from the ground up. An architect was engaged, a friend of his aunt Leonie’s who had just finished a country place at Churt for Lloyd George. The ivy and Victorian trimmings were stripped away, high crowstepped gables were added, and also a new wing for a drawing room, dining room, and Clementine’s bedroom. The job took more than two years. Winston grew impatient. Clementine didn’t. Her husband had committed a grave error. He had made the purchase without consulting her. And when she saw it, she disliked it. “At first,” she told Martin Gilbert, “I did not want to go to Chartwell at all. But Winston had his heart set on it.” Mary remembers that her mother “tried very hard to love the place which so enthralled Winston. She worked like a Trojan to make it the home and haven for us all that he dreamed of. But it never acquired for her the nature of a venture shared; rather, it was an extra duty, gallantly undertaken, and doggedly carried through.” Among other things, she was concerned about the expense. The cost of rebuilding the house rose to £13,000, then £15,000, and finally £18,000. Winston wrote her: “My beloved, I do beg you not to worry about money, or to feel insecure. On the contrary the policy we are pursuing aims above all at stability (like Bonar Law!). Chartwell is to be our home. It will have cost us £20,000 and will be worth at least £15,000 apart from a fancy price. We must endeavour to live there for many years & hand it on to Randolph afterwards. We must make it in every way possible economically self contained. It will be cheaper than London.” He contemplated selling the house in Sussex Square: “Then with the motor we shall be well equipped for business or pleasure. If we go into office we will live in Downing Street!”166