Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  "That night when I went to bed… my mind was dominated by the news I had received of the complete change in my station and of the task entrusted to me. I thought of the peril of Britain, peace-loving, unthinking, little prepared, of her power and virtue, and of her mission of good sense and fair play. I thought of mighty Germany, towering up in the splendour of her Imperial State and delving down in her profound, cold, patient, ruthless calculations. I thought of the army corps I had watched tramp past, wave after wave of valiant manhood, at the Breslau maneuvres in 1907; of the thousands of strong horses dragging cannon and great howitzers up the ridges and along the roads of Wurzburg in 1910. I thought of German education and thoroughness and all that their triumphs in science and philosophy implied. I thought of the sudden and successful wars by which her power had been set up."

  Filled with excitement and disquiet, Churchill opened the Bible lying on the table beside his bed. At random, he read from the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself… Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them…"

  For Winston Churchill, who in a lifetime never questioned Britain's virtues or the wickedness of her enemies, "it seemed a message full of reassurance."

  From the beginning, Winston Churchill knew he was unique. Youth and early manhood only strengthened this impression. One evening in 1906 after the Liberals had been swept into power and Churchill was holding office as Under Secretary for the Colonies, he was seated at a dinner party next to Violet Asquith, daughter of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. For a long time, Churchill did not speak. "Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence," Violet wrote. "He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. 'And I,' he said almost despairingly, 'am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though,' he added, as if to comfort himself." Churchill then launched into a savage attack on the shortness of life as opposed to "the immensity of possible human achievement:"… "Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality! How cruelly short is the alloted span for all we must cram into it." By the end, Violet was dazed, but not so much that she did not remember the words with which he concluded his outburst: "We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm."

  Winston's grandfather was the seventh Duke of Marlborough, and Winston was born in one of the 320 rooms of Blenheim Palace, which had been built by parliamentary grant to reward the military exploits of the first Duke. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a second son who had done brilliantly at Eton and Oxford and then, at twenty-five, met a nineteen-year-old American heiress, Jennie Jerome, and proposed to her on their third evening together. Jennie's father worked on Wall Street, which the Duke vaguely disdained. Randolph persisted and the Prince of Wales, always a romantic, lent a hand. The couple were married in April 1873 in the chapel of the British Embassy in Paris. Jennie became pregnant immediately.

  Seven and a half months later, she came to Blenheim to hunt, suffered a slight fall, and began to have contractions. Because she could not make it upstairs to her bedroom, Winston was born in a small ground-floor room, just off the great library. Jennie was only twenty and her own life seemed to have just begun, so, in the manner of the upper classes, the tiny baby with pinkish curls and upturned nose was immediately turned over to a nanny, Mrs. Everest. "Woom," as Winston always called her, was the maternal influence in his life. Jennie was always out-"We seemed to live in a whirl of gaiety and excitement," she remembered later. "Many were the delightful balls I went to which… lasted till five in the morning." In her absence, "Woom" cradled Winston, fed him, toilet-trained him, dried his tears, and made him feel that he was loved. "Mrs. Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants," Churchill recorded. "It was to her I poured out my many troubles."

  Troubles appeared early in his parents' marriage. Somehow, Randolph had contracted syphilis, some say from an aged prostitute while he was at Oxford, others believe from a parlormaid at Blenheim with whom he slept soon after Winston's birth. Although the symptoms were not disabling, once the disease was clearly diagnosed he no longer could sleep with his wife. Jennie had an extraordinary beauty. One who saw her described her as "a dark, lithe figure… appearing to be of another texture to those around her -radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favorite ornament-its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her look." Margot Asquith, who met Jennie Churchill at Newmarket, also used the feline simile: "She had a forehead like a panther's and great wild eyes that looked through you." Jennie took lovers; one estimate was that she had two hundred. Society did not doubt that one conquest was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Jennie did not flaunt her lovers and Randolph-who had no choice-accepted them, although on one occasion he ordered the Prince of Wales out of his house and on another, he attacked one of her companions with his fists. The couple took long, separate vacations to Switzerland, Paris, the south of France, sometimes not seeing each other for weeks. When Winston was seven, his mother spent time on the Irish estate of Colonel John Strange Jocelyn, a famous horseman. Jennie became pregnant, and when the child was born named it John Strange Churchill… Winston's only brother, Jack.

  Unfortunately for Winston, these private circumstances reinforced the natural disinclination of upper-class Victorian parents to have much to do with their children. Winston saw his parents rarely. His earliest memory of his mother is "in Ireland… in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spattered with mud… My mother always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power… She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly-but at a distance." Winston's own son Randolph, the grandson of Lord Randolph and Jennie Jerome, declared of his father's childhood: "The neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days." William Manchester offers a perceptive view of the effect of this deprivation of parental love: "Most infants are loved for themselves; they accept that love as they accept food and warmth… [But in Winston's case] that anyone should love him became a source of wonder… Affection from others had to be earned; eventually he would win it by doing great things. At the same time-and this would cripple his schooling-the deprivation of parental attachment bred resentment of authority. One might expect that his mother and father, the guilty parties, would be the targets of his hostility. Not so. The deprived child cherishes the little attention his parents do give him; he cannot risk losing it. Moreover, he blames himself for his plight. Needing outlets for his own welling adoration, he enshrines his parents instead, creating images of them as he wishes they were, and the less he sees of them, the easier that transformation becomes. By this devious process, Lord Randolph became Winston's hero, and his mother… 'a fairy princess.'… His own resentment had to be directed elsewhere. Therefore he became, in his own words, 'a troublesome boy.' "

  At seven, Winston was plucked from Mrs. Everest's care and on a dark November afternoon deposited at St. George's School in Ascot, a fashionable preparatory school. "I hated this school… [and the] life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years," Churchill recalled. "I made very little progress in my studies and none at all in games… My teachers saw me at once backwards and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of my Form. They were offended. They had large sources of compulsion at their disposal but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn." Pugnacious, resistant to discipline, Winston's behavior provoked those "sources of compulsion" which were later described by another boy at the school. Boys who did poorly in class were summoned to the Headmaster's study: "In the middle of the room was a large box draped in black cloth and in austere tones the culprit was told to take down his
trousers and kneel before the block over which I and the other Head Boy held him. The swishing was given with the master's full strength. It took only two or three strokes for drops of blood to form everywhere and it continued for fifteen or twenty strokes when the wretched boy's bottom was a mass of blood. Generally, of course, the boys endured it with fortitude but sometimes there were scenes of screaming, howling, and struggling which made me almost sick with disgust."*

  The liverish welts on Winston's buttocks, exposed at home, first to Woom, then to Jennie, were sufficient evidence. Winston was removed from St. George's and entered in a school in Brighton where "I was allowed to learn things that interested me: French, History, lots of Poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming." His dearest wish, however, was not fulfilled. "Will you come and see me… I shall be miserable if you don't… Please do come, I have been disappointed so many times"-the letters flowed to Jennie, week after week, year after year, in a hundred variations.

  * The beating of small boys in English public schools was unremarkable. Earlier in the nineteenth century the headmaster of Eton was a Dr. Keate, "who on heroic occasions was known to have flogged over eighty boys on a single summer day; and whose one mellow regret in the evening of his life was that he had not flogged far more."

  She never found the time. Once, his father came to Brighton for a political meeting and did not cross the street to visit his son. Winston waited in vain and then wrote sadly, "I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy."

  At twelve, Winston was put up for Harrow. First, there was an entrance examination. "I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew," he wrote. "They always tried to ask me what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well on examinations." The Harrow examination contained no grammar, no French, neither history nor geography, and only a few questions on arithmetic. Most of it involved translation from Latin and Greek. "I found I was unable to answer a single question on the Latin paper," Churchill recalled. "I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question 'i.' After much reflection, I put a bracket round it thus '(i)-' But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true." Harrow took him anyway-his grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough, his father Lord Randolph Churchill- and for five years he remained at the bottom of his class. "We were considered such dunces," Churchill wrote, "that we could only learn English." Day after day, he went through the drill of diagramming sentences. "I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence-which is a noble thing. And when in after years my school fellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage."

  From Harrow, Winston continued to plead for a visit. "Do try to get Papa to come. He has never been here," he wrote to his mother. Jennie replied, "I would go down to you but I have so many things to arrange about the Ascot party next week that I can't manage it." When he was seventeen, a crisis arose. Winston was refused permission to come home for Christmas, but was to be sent to stay with an unknown French family in Versailles to improve his French. He begged for a reversal. Jennie was adamant: "I have only read one page of your letter and I send it back to you-as its style does not please me." Winston wrote back: "My darling Mummy: Never would I have believed that you would have been so unkind. I am utterly miserable. That you should refuse to read my letter is most painful to me. There was nothing in it to give you grounds for rejecting it… I can't tell you how wretched you have made me feel… Oh my Mummy." No reply. Winston wrote every day, building a crescendo: "Darling Mummy:… I am so wretched. Even now I weep. Please my darling Mummy be kind to your loving son. Don't let my silly letters make you angry. Let me at least think that you love me-Darling Mummy, I despair. I am so wretched. I don't know what to do. Don't be angry I am so miserable… Please write something kind to me. I am very sorry if I have 'riled' you before. I did only want to explain things from my point of view. Good Bye my darling Mummy. With best love I remain, Ever your loving son, Winston." Jennie complained to Randolph, "He makes as much fuss as though he were going to Australia for two years." Winston remained at the bottom of his class; his only distinction at Harrow was winning the school fencing championship. During these years, he developed a stammer to complement his lisp.

  In the Harrow years, Winston's persistent dullness in his studies convinced Lord Randolph that his son could not qualify for Oxford or Cambridge and that an attempt to enter the Royal Military College at Sandhurst was the proper goal for this obtuse boy. When Winston was fourteen, his father asked whether he would like to enter the army. Winston said yes at once. "For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar." Winston's first two efforts to pass the Sandhurst entrance exam seemed to justify his father's gloom. He failed, and in the interim before the third attempt, he almost accidentally killed himself. At his aunt's estate near Bournemouth, he was being chased in a game with a cousin and his brother, Jack. He found himself on a bridge over a deep ravine with one of his pursuers standing at each end of the bridge: "Capture seemed certain. But in a flash there came across me a great project. The ravine which the bridge spanned was full of young fir trees. Their slender tops reached to the level of the footway. 'Would it not,' I asked myself, 'be possible to leap onto one of them and slip down…? I looked at it. I computed it. I meditated. Meanwhile I climbed over the balustrade. My young pursuers stood wonderstruck at either end of the bridge… In a second I had plunged, throwing out my arms to embrace the summit of the fir tree. The argument was correct; the data were absolutely wrong. It was three days before I regained consciousness and more than three months before I crawled from my bed. The measured fall was 29 feet onto hard ground." Winston's plunge, which ruptured a kidney, at last brought his parents rushing to his side. And during his recovery period a celebrated "crammer" for the Sandhurst exams was enlisted on Winston's behalf. On his third attempt, he passed with a score not high enough to admit him to the infantry, but sufficient to allow him to enter the cavalry. His own delight at his achievement was destroyed by a letter from his father:

  My dear Winston:

  I am rather surprised at your tone of exultation over your inclusion on the Sandhurst list… The first extremely discreditable feature of your performance was your missing the infantry, for in that failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly, happy-go-lucky, harum-scarum style of work for which you have always been distinguished at your different schools. Never have I received a really good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor… Always behind-hand, never advancing in class, incessant complaints of total want of application… thus you have failed to get into the '6oth Rifles' one of the finest regiments in the Army… By… getting into the cavalry you have imposed on me an extra charge of some £200 a year.

  … Now is a good time to put this business plainly before you. Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing to you long letters after every folly and failure you commit and undergo. I shall not write again on these matters and you need not trouble to write… because I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own acquirements and exploits… If your conduct and action at Sandhurst is similar to what it has been in the other establishments… then my responsibility for you is over.

  I shall leave you to depend on yourself, giving you merely such assistance as may be necessary to permit of a respectable life… If you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays and later months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hund
reds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence… Your mother sends her love…

  The letter wounded; Winston's replies were frantically apologetic. A few months later, in his second term at Sandhurst, an accident again stirred Lord Randolph's wrath. He had given Winston an expensive gold watch and Winston had allowed it to slip out of his pocket into a stream. His father happened to see it under repair at the watchmaker's and asked Winston what had happened. "While walking along Wish Stream I stooped down to pick up a stick and it fell out of my pocket into the only deep place for miles," Winston explained.

  The stream was only about five inches deep-but the watch fell into a pool nearly six feet deep.

  I at once took off my clothes and I dived for it but the bottom was so uneven and the water so cold that I could not stay longer than 10 minutes and had to give it up.

  The next day I had the pool dredged-but without result… I then borrowed 23 men from the Infantry Regiment-dug a new course for the stream-obtained the fire engine and pumped the pool dry and so recovered the watch. I tell you all this to show you that I fully appreciated the value of the watch, and that I did not treat the accident in a casual way. The labor of the men cost me over £3.

  I am very, very sorry that it should have happened. But it is not the case with all my things. Everything else you have ever given me is in as good repair as when you gave it first.

  Please don't judge me entirely on the strength of the watch. I am very very sorry about it.

  I am sorry to have written you such a long and stupid letter…

  Winston was a success at Sandhurst; he entered near the bottom of his class of 102 and graduated near the top. "At Sandhurst I had a new start," he explained. "We had now to learn fresh things and we all started equal." True, when he first arrived, his amazed officers found that he wanted to argue about the commands on parade-ground drill. But he persevered, became again a champion fencer and a passionate horseman. At Aldershot, where he joined a cavalry regiment after receiving his commission, he was in the saddle, either at drill or at polo, eight or nine hours every day.