Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  In every other category—artillery, tanks, and equipped divisions—Nazi gains were overwhelming. While Chamberlain was lecturing his ministers on the military value of stocks and bonds and spending £304 million on arms, German arms expenditures exceeded £1.5 billion—a fivefold gap. The number of Nazi divisions jumped from seven to fifty-one. By calling up trained reserves, the Reich could field an army of over seven million men, outnumbering the armies of France and England combined, and the Führer, unlike the democracies, did not have troops tied down in colonial possessions overseas. Vis-à-vis France, Churchill found, with every month that passed from 1938 onward the German army not only increased “in numbers and formations… but in quality and maturity.” He believed that “in morale also the Germans had the advantage,” and he attributed the ebbing of French martial resolve to Munich: “The desertion of an ally, especially from fear of war, saps the spirit of any army.”31

  Less than two months after Munich, Churchill entered his sixty-fifth year, and some parliamentarians, including friends, thought he was beginning to show his age. On Monday, December 5, the House of Commons received its long-awaited report on the preposterous attempt to court-martial Duncan Sandys. Everyone was exonerated; “misunderstandings” were blamed. Churchill rose. He started brilliantly, and everyone, Nicolson wrote, was “expecting a great speech.” Then:

  He accuses Hore-Belisha of being too complacent. The latter gets up and says, “When and where?” Winston replies, “I have not come unprepared,” and begins to fumble among his notes, where there are some press-cuttings. He takes time. He finds them. But they are not the best cuttings, and the ones he reads out tend to excuse rather than implicate Hore-Belisha. Winston becomes confused. He tries to rally his speech, but the wind has gone out of his sails, which flop wretchedly. “He is becoming an old man,” says Bill Mabane beside me.32

  It wasn’t age, and he was capable of rebounding. The fact is that he was simply attempting to do too much. Indeed, the wonder is that he found time to appear in the House at all. His writing schedule continued to be punishing, and even as he struggled to meet it, Grace Hamblin recalls, Chartwell was being inundated by a blizzard of invitations to speak. As the taste of Munich turned to ashes, people wanted to see and hear the vindicated Ishmael. He was sensible enough to decline these, though some were tempting: the League of Nations Union, the Oxford Union (from its young president Edward Heath, a future prime minister), and a Jewish Youth Rally for National Service (“because of your courageous defence of freedom and denunciation of Nazi-ism [sic] you are held in the very highest esteem by all sections of Jewry”). He even turned down a dinner invitation from General Edward L. Spears, a fellow officer in Flanders twenty years earlier, explaining that “It is absolutely necessary for me to be in the country every possible night this year in order to complete the history I am writing.”33

  By day, however, he entertained visitors: French politicians, men who had held high posts in Vienna and Prague, and German anti-Nazis, many of them, like Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the Führer’s finance minister, members of the old Wilhelmine aristocracy. In January a high French source sent Chartwell, in great confidence, information unknown to anyone in the British government. Deuxième Bureau agents were reporting that German munitions convoys were moving across Czechoslovakia, from the Sudetenland to the Hungarian frontier. Churchill immediately took this to the Foreign Office, where it was confirmed and then dismissed as part of a program to execute maneuvers and rearm the Austrian army on “the German scale and with German weapons.”34

  Of course, Winston could not hew to a spartan regimen. No one could work harder—while writing longer and more strenuously than ever before, he was also in one of his periods of intense bricklaying—but he had no intention of abandoning his sybaritic life-style. In the House of Commons he defended it with wit. Among the unhappiest victims of his gibes was Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was one of the very few on Labour’s side of the House who shared Churchill’s contempt for appeasement; he begged the front bench to rearm before Hitler struck. But he was also ascetic, a vegetarian, a man who shunned coffee and tea and quit smoking cigars because he thought the habit vulgar. “My God,” said Churchill when told of this. “Cripps has cut his last tie with human civilization.” On another, later occasion, Churchill was airborne over the Sahara Desert when his plane had to land for an emergency repair. Winston stretched his legs and gazed in all directions. “Here we are marooned in all these miles of sand—not a blade of grass or a drop of water or a flower,” he said. “How Cripps would have loved it.”35

  Churchill did not propose to slacken his pace, but experience had taught him that he could be equally productive, and more comfortable, on the Riviera. Thus, in the first week of January, 1939, after an interview with Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman—“War is horrible,” he told Martin, “but slavery is worse, and you may be sure the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude”—he was off for Maxine’s Château de l’Horizon. Changing trains in Paris, he read in the papers that the Germans had announced a vast plan to expand their submarine fleet. Before unpacking in Cannes he wrote and cabled home a Daily Telegraph column, calling the Nazi U-boat program “a heavy blow to all international cooperation in support of public law.” It meant, he said, that England was imperiled by an “avoidable danger” which could only be mastered after great “loss and suffering.” The Telegraph was unread in Cannes, but a local newspaper subscribed to his syndicate, and there was a stirring in the lush villas when the same paper ran an earlier piece in which Churchill pondered an Anglo-Soviet détente. Among its readers was the quondam king of England, now Duke of Windsor, and he was splenetic.36

  To Churchill, Edward’s wrath, once majestic, now seemed more like petty whining. By now Winston had shed all illusions about the man he had championed, at such cost to his career and the cause he led. There was, he noted, no depth to the man; he never read a serious book, never gave the world’s affairs profound thought, and what he presented as opinion was merely narrow, ill-informed prejudice. He doted on his wife, who ordered him about, apparently to his delight. Winston was amused by Wallis’s sartorial influence on her husband. On the memorable night when the Duke crossed swords with Churchill in Maxine’s white-and-gold dining room he was wearing a Stuart tartan kilt. He was lucky Winston didn’t leave him without a fig leaf, according to the account of Vincent Sheean, who kept notes when, as he wrote,

  the Duke of Windsor and Mr. Churchill settled down to a prolonged argument, with the rest of the party listening in silence…. We sat by the fireplace, Mr. Churchill frowning with intentness at the floor in front of him, mincing no words, reminding HRH of the British constitution on occasion—“When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings,” he said—and declaring flatly that the nation stood in the gravest danger of its long history. The kilted Duke… sat on the edge of the sofa, eagerly interrupting whenever he could, contesting every point, but receiving—in terms of the utmost politeness as far as the words went—an object lesson in political wisdom and public spirit…. There was something dramatically final, irrevocable about this dispute.37

  According to Sheean and their hostess, those who thought of Winston as doddering should have been there that evening. Afterward Maxine wrote Churchill, “Never have I seen you in such good form…. You are the most enormously gifted creature in the whole world and it is like the sunshine leaving when you go away.” England was not like sunshine to him. “People talk of how brave Winston was in 1940,” Lady Diana Cooper observed, “but his highest courage, and it was his moral courage, shone through when he saw war coming, England virtually helpless, and himself impotent—when he spoke the truth and men he had entertained in his home cut him in Parliament Square.” He took it; he had to take it, but he didn’t have to like it. Writhing in the bonds of his frustration he reminded Virginia Cowles of “a mighty torrent trying to burst its dam.”38

  That was one aspect
of him, and to all but the few close to him it was the intrinsic Churchill, his quiddity and diathesis. Most public men have one personality for the world and another in private. Winston Churchill was an exception. In his greater speeches he could hold Parliament spellbound; at Chartwell his guests were entranced as he used the same language, mannerisms, and expression. He could reminisce with old comrades, and the emotional undercurrent was always there. His eyes would fill, but like a sun shower the misty moment passed. The only people who saw the intimate Churchill—who knew the power and depth of his love, which lay within him like a vast reservoir eternally replenishing itself, available to them in boundless measure when they were parched or careworn—those few whom he cherished, were his family. His awareness of them was constant. In the middle of a letter on another topic in early 1939, he interpolated: “Mary has been… vy sweet to me and is growing into her beauty.” His son had tried him as few fathers have been tried; nevertheless, it was understood that once Randolph married and began his own family, Chartwell would be his: his parents would move into more modest quarters. Creating those quarters was the impulse behind Churchill’s renewed interest in bricklaying. Some diversion from his writing was essential, and he was aware of it. There were only so many productive working hours in a day; anything written beyond that was chaff. So he painted, fed his goldfish, savored his Pol Roger, and laid his bricks, letting his mind drift and rejuvenating his powers of thought.39

  As usual, he had a new Chartwell improvement in progress. He was, he wrote Clemmie on January 28, supervising the tiling of roofs, putting down new floors, and “the joinery of the doors, cupboards, etc.” Any other country squire at his age might have been overseeing such projects. But Churchill, as always, had grander plans. He was already building one cottage on the grounds with his own hands and planning another—for Clemmie and himself—when he retired and Randolph became Chartwell’s householder. He wrote her: “In the summer when I am sure the book will be finished, I think I will build a house.” It would stand on ten acres far from the mansion, he wrote, and would “cost about three thousand pounds.” This was reasonable. Assuming he met the terms of his continuing contract for the English-speaking Peoples and completed assignments for Collier’s, News of the World, the Daily Mirror, and his fortnightly syndicated columns, his literary earnings for 1939 would be £15,781. But knowing her dread of debt, he assured her that “we could sell it for five or six thousand pounds.” After he had met all his writing deadlines he planned to ask Sir Edwin Lutyens, the eminent architect, for appraisals and opinions, hastily adding: “He will do this for nothing, I am sure, as he has always begged to give advice.” For Winston the immediate value of the construction would be recreational: “It would amuse me all the summer and give me good health.” To further soothe her he promised that “downstairs you will have one lovely big room” and “you may be sure that nothing will be done until you have passed the plans. I have at least two months work ahead on the present cottage.” He had already christened it “Orchard Cottage.”40

  This letter reached her in Barbados. The year just passed, so disastrous for British diplomacy, had also been wobbly for her. A succession of minor ailments discouraged activity, and in July she had spent nearly three weeks alone in the French Pyrenees “taking the cure.” In Paris she had broken her toe, a minor affliction but painful and slow to heal. Then came Munich and Winston’s denunciation of it. Early in their marriage, as the wife of a politician who took unpopular stands, she had known that part of the price he paid—social opprobrium—must be shared by her. At first, when old acquaintances crossed the street to avoid greeting her, she had been shocked and hurt. She had been young and resilient then, however; tempered by her own anger, she had learned to take such shabby partisanship in her stride. It had seemed a small sacrifice; she shared her husband’s convictions and was proud to be his wife. The pride was still there, but she was older now, and slights were harder to bear. Her spirits were at their lowest when deliverance, or what looked like it, appeared in the form of an invitation from Lord Moyne, suggesting that she join him and his friends for another voyage on the Rosaura, this time in the Caribbean. She loved the yacht and loved the idyllic islands, but her hopes of recapturing the ecstasy of their South Seas cruise four years earlier were crushed. As an unreconstructed Liberal she was outraged by conditions in the British West Indies. “These islands,” she wrote Winston, “are beautiful in themselves but have been desecrated & fouled by man.” Starchy food kept the population “alive but undernourished—eighty percent of the population is illegitimate, seventy percent (in several islands) have syphilis and yaws.” There was no sanitation of any sort, not even earth latrines. “And this,” she bitterly concluded, “is a sample of the British Empire upon which the sun never sets.”41

  She felt he was neglecting her. In the past, when they were parted he had sent her long, clever holographs, decorated with drawings of pigs or pug dogs. Now, preoccupied with his manuscripts, avalanches of mail, and the recurring crises in Parliament, he dictated notes or cables. She responded tartly: “Please don’t telegraph—I hate telegrams just saying ‘all well rainy weather love Winston.’ ” The news he did send was worse than none: an obituary of Sir Sidney Peel, who had fallen in love with her when she was eighteen, just after the turn of the century. She had nearly married him; twice they had been secretly engaged. Winston commented: “Many are dying that I knew when we were young. It is quite astonishing to reach the end of life & feel just as you did fifty years before. One must always hope for a sudden end, before faculties decay.” By the time the Rosaura approached Nelson’s old dockyard on Antigua, Clemmie was plainly homesick. “I miss you & Mary & home terribly,” she wrote, “& although it is a boon to miss the English Winter & to bask in this warmth, I really think I should come home—only that I hope this prolonged voyage in warm weather will really set me up in health—I do not yet feel very strong, but I am sure I shall.”42

  She found strength when, following the news and reading Winston’s letters—now frequent, long, and penitent—she realized how lonely and embattled he must be. In the February 9 Daily Telegraph he had ruefully conceded that support for a firm stand against Nazi aggression was still weak, that “ripples of optimism” to the contrary were, “alas,” based on “insufficient justifications.” He pointed out that the press had reported long troop trains passing through Vienna and Munich and asked “What is their destination? What is their purpose?” Obviously, the British public didn’t care. Mussolini was mobilizing for an invasion of Albania, and Hitler had announced that Germany would support the Duce: “Indeed, it is clear that the German dictator could not afford to witness the downfall of his Italian colleague.”

  Nevertheless, England remained lethargic. In an attempt to rouse it, he had left his Disraeli desk for a whirlwind lecture tour, but his audiences had been small and tepid. To a friend he wrote: “Nothing but the terrible teaching of experience will affect this all-powerful, supine Government. The worst of it is that by the time they are convinced, or replaced, our own position will be frightfully weakened.” Hitler appeared determined to fight on one issue or another; it hardly seemed to matter which. And each fresh concession by Chamberlain and Halifax debilitated Britain as the inevitable showdown approached.43

  In the middle of one letter home Clementine blurted out, “O Winston, are we drifting into War?” England, it seemed, yearning for peace and all but defenseless, was nevertheless tottering toward the brink “without the wit to avoid it or the will to prepare for it.” Then she scrawled across the page: “God bless you my darling.” Thus clouds were gathering within her, and sooner or later Clementine’s overcast moods led to an outburst. One that entered Churchill family lore occurred when Moyne and his guests were listening to a BBC political broadcast. The speaker was vehemently pro-appeasement—Sir John Reith banned any arguments from the other side—and when Churchill was attacked by name, Lady Vera Broughton, another member of the party, cried: “Hear, Hear!”
Clementine awaited a conciliatory word from her host, but he compressed his lips and remained silent. That put the wind in her sails. She flew to her cabin, wrote him a note of explanation, and packed. Lady Broughton arrived, begging Clemmie to stay, in vain; Winston Churchill had been insulted, and Mrs. Winston Churchill would accept no apologies. Ashore, she booked a berth on the Cuba, which was sailing for England in the morning.44

  As she entered Chartwell’s front hall she cried their old mating call: “Wot!” And from deep within the mansion came the delighted echo: “Wot!” He embraced her, heard her story with pride and pleasure, described his progress on the manuscript, and then broke the news, as gently as possible, of a new attempt to expel him from Parliament. This second campaign, four months after the first, was again led by Thornton-Kemsley. But “Peace for our time,” which had pealed across the land then, now had a hollow ring. Winston knew he had but to hire a hall or two, give tongue to what was in his heart, and his constituents would come gamboling to him.