Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness

by Taylor, Robert Lewis

  “Why, bless you, sir, they haven’t harmed us,” said one of the soldiers. “They’ve only kicked up a bit of dirt.”

  “Stand back!” cried Churchill. “Leave the holes!”

  The men threw down their shovels and retired, and a few minutes later a bullet whistled through one of the openings and struck a corporal named Bisbee in the rump. He was conveyed to the rear while shouting happily at the fellows, “The colonel was sure right about that dirt! Leave it lay — no more trenches for me!”

  Of Churchill in these first days at the front, one of his officers says, “Early and late he was in the line. On an average he went round three times a day, which was no mean task in itself, as he had plenty of other work to do. At least one of these visits was after dark, usually about 1 A.M. In wet weather he would appear in a complete outfit of waterproof stuff, including trousers, or overalls, and with his French light-blue helmet he presented a remarkable and unusual figure.” It was a fetish of Churchill’s to keep his finger on each operation in progress, no matter how trivial, and this enduring nosiness was a heavy burden on his unit. He had, for example, set up as an authority on sandbagging, presumably having stolen aside to do some light reading on the subject. He would appear in the trenches when sandbags were being handled and deliver a formal lecture. “To see Winston giving a dissertation on the laying of sandbags, with practical illustrations,” says Captain X, “was to come inevitably to the conclusion that his life-study had been purely in poliorketics and the corresponding counter-measures. You felt sure from his grasp of practice that he must have served apprentice to a bricklayer and a master-mason, while his theoretical knowledge rendered you certain that Wren would have been proud to sit at his feet, or even such a master of the subject as Uncle Toby Shandy.”

  The only trouble with Churchill’s applied omniscience was that it often didn’t work. In nearly every case wherein he imposed his sandbag erudition on some ignorant sergeant, the latter turned out to be right. Also, as one of his men has said, he had an unfortunate method of egging on his troops. This consisted of comparing their efforts adversely with those of the Gordon Highlanders. And yet, an officer says, “While at times his demands were a little extravagant, his kindliness and the humor that never failed to flash out made everybody only too keen to get on with the work, whether the ideal he pointed out to them was an unattainable one or not.”

  One of Churchill’s most unattainable ideals was to provide a bodyguard for each of his officers. In a meeting one day he said that, in future, officers in the trenches would keep their batmen at their sides “at all times.” It was explained that, officers being valuable, they could be succored with more celerity in this way should catastrophe strike. The plan was given only a cursory tryout. Its great defect was that batmen were scarce, one usually being shared by three officers, and in addition they served as mess attendants. However, since the colonel’s orders were plain, a gesture or so was made. During the first day of the project, several groups of four persons — three officers and a batman — were seen moving awkwardly here and there, trying to correlate their business. At mess, the situation worsened. One triumvirate of three officers tried to eat en bloc, so as to ease their batman’s problem, and another, whose man was assigned to a different shift, stood unobtrusively in a corner until he was finished. But the system as a whole broke down over the matter of sleeping. There was clearly no way for three officers and a batman to get into one bunk, and somebody finally summoned the courage to tell Churchill so. The order was withdrawn.

  The battalion slept, of course, but not very much during Churchill’s stay. He kept everybody busy, organizing huge working parties and decreeing that the jobs must be finished in some ludicrously inadequate time. One day when he was dining at his convent headquarters, a shell plopped through the roof and, in exploding, broke a soup plate, which wounded the adjutant in the right thumb. “That little farm presented such a scene for the next few days as must have been witnessed at the erection of the Pyramids,” says Captain X. “It swarmed with activity — men coming and going and carrying (and cursing) and climbing and hammering and shoveling, while Ramsey [the adjutant] looked on and commanded and implored and directed and misdirected and a thousand times a day wished himself back in B Company.”

  Besides building, Churchill was very keen on artillery. In fact, the entire village of Ploegsteert moved out in disgust only a few days after he arrived. Helpful and good-neighborly to the end, he lent them battalion transport wagons in which to haul their household goods, and waved them down the road with many a cry of “C’est la guerre.” If the growls of the Ploegsteerters were any indication, the general feeling was that “C’est le Churchill,” since, as the village midwife said, they had never had any trouble of this kind before he came. The nuns were among the very first to leave, and it was remarked that only their religion prevented them from speaking their minds. The 6th Fusiliers owned a battery of 18-pounders, which the colonel liked to keep booming at odd hours. “We’ll scramble the Hun’s sleep,” he told his men. Aside, they pointed out to each other that what he was doing was scrambling their sleep, too, but they knuckled under and kept the ammunition handy. The gun crew would be bounced out of bed at 2 A.M. or 3 A.M. and told to “fire ten rounds — wake those fellows up.” The firing would commence, and the enemy would shortly start lobbing shells over in retaliation, and maybe knock down another church in Ploegsteert. Churchill soon tired of the 18-pounder and made friends with General Tudor, who commanded the divisional artillery. From then on the nights were a perfect hell. The colonel had his officers telephoning back for bombardments every hour or two, and the Germans apparently moved up several more big guns to keep pace. When it began to dawn on everybody that the sector threatened to become dangerous, the divisional artillery crews took to presenting arguments during the night shifts. At these times, Churchill would get on the telephone personally and explain the largely imaginary situation, drawing on technical gibberish culled from his Sandhurst days to suggest that the Hun was poised to go over the top — something that had not yet started in that area. “And after a while and after much further argument,” says Captain X, “they would give in and the night would be rendered hideous by repeated series of shocking explosions, during which the entire Division awoke from its slumbers and asked itself if this was the Great Push or only another of Winston’s tunes on a borrowed fiddle.”

  One of the most heart-warming aspects of Churchill’s residence in the trenches was his paternal attitude toward his troops. It grieved him to find young boys trembling in fear on sentry-go; he would quit his other duties to mount the fire step and explain in a kind and patient manner that little likelihood existed of their being hit. He lived in mortal terror, too, of having men reported for sleeping on the job, and was forever making up excuses that might mitigate their crime if they were caught. His feeling was, perhaps, not unlike that of Lincoln, who could never take a stern and unrelenting view of this capital military mistake. When somebody was wounded, Churchill was all bustle and concern. He hopped right down to the spot and carried on a learned dialogue with the doctor, and, if feasible, with the patient. He would pad along beside the stretcher, offering medical reasons, conspicuously inexpert, why the sufferer would be up and around soon. The men were devoted to him and took enormous pride in him, but the doctor finally became exasperated. “The confounded fellow treats me like a surgeon’s orderly,” he told one lieutenant, now a high officer in the British Army. Churchill’s apprehension about the chance of his men getting into trouble, any kind of trouble, was so sharp that he always lined up new recruits at his headquarters for a personal indoctrination. And for some reason not largely understood, this invariably took the form of a lecture on drunkenness. On one occasion, twenty youngsters reported in, filled with fright at the horrendous stories about this region to which the enemy appeared to give priority, and Churchill left his dinner to attend them. He ordered a bottle of champagne to be recorked as he left, and he hurried outsi
de, where he tendered them all a fatherly tongue-lashing on the evils of drink.

  There is good reason to believe that the Germans knew Churchill was at the front near Ploegsteert. It was an unending point of speculation with the Fusiliers. Certainly more shelling went on between those lines than in any other area near by. Churchill himself felt that the Hun thought he was in the trenches but did not know exactly where. He told his officers at one mess, “I am just as well known in Germany as Tirpitz is in England and they don’t like me there: they hate me. If they knew I was in the line here they wouldn’t send over a few shells like this. They would turn on all their guns and blot the place out. They would love to do that.”

  The colonel could always find extenuating circumstances for soldiers talking back to non-commissioned officers. His leniency in this regard was so notorious that many of his officers resented it mildly. The situation actually descended to a point, say several members of the battalion, where the stock answer from a soldier to a sergeant, upon being given an order, was “Kindly go to hell.” Churchill’s staff had to work hard to maintain discipline. The colonel himself did not insist on rigor in his relationships with subordinates. He loved argument and was never so happy as when one of the most colorful and unreconstructed products of the war, Canadian Captain H. T. (“Foghorn”) MacDonald, was attached to his group as observer. MacDonald took over altogether. Without precedent in Churchill’s history, the newcomer monopolized all mess conversations, using the most frightful profanity, and bragged and blew until the whole battalion was all but paralyzed with admiration. “He was the embodiment or incarnation of that rude hustling force both in word and action which by a long tract of experience we have come to associate with persons bred in America,” said Captain X.

  Churchill loved him. One of the unit later remarked that he had never seen the colonel “take second place in conversation to anyone save Foghorn, who treated with noisy scorn such of Winston’s ideas as differed from his own, and who when he found that they were in agreement would suffer no other person than himself to expound their common views.” Churchill’s laughter at MacDonald’s Paul Bunyanesque statements rocked the nunnery; the C.O.’s contribution was to draw the observer out. Under pressure, MacDonald admitted that, once the war was over and he had become a soldier of fortune, he would probably wind up as King of Mexico. He had been turning the plan over. Churchill modestly urged him to present his ideas on the political situation there. As reported by Captain X, “His opinion of Villa was that he hadn’t a — of use for the — son of a —. His opinion of Carranza on the other hand was to the effect that —.”

  Churchill had a cavalier manner with distinguished sightseers and high military brass. Even his commanding generals trod softly around him, having the uneasy feeling that a former Cabinet minister just might get to be a minister again, and maybe even Secretary for War. The colonel’s great friend, Lord Birkenhead (F. E. [“Galloper”] Smith), who had risen to be one of England’s foremost legal minds and had a delicate job at GHQ, came to inspect Churchill’s battalion. One of the guards looked over his credentials and found them in improper legal shape. Churchill seemed mildly rueful as Smith was arrested and led away, and reportedly commented that it was “the fortunes of both war and law.”

  After one dinner party (an occasion mentioned with awe and laughter for years by the 6th Fusiliers) Churchill asked a scintillant collection of guests, including some of the most famous generals then at the front, if they would like “a little entertainment.” They responded eagerly, with visions of French dancing girls, and he led them on a relaxing stroll to the trenches. He did not go by way of the communications trench, but on top of the ground, as he made all his own inspection trips. In the darkness there were muffled giggles from the unseen troops as these dignitaries stumbled over sandbags, tore holes in their gorgeous uniforms at the wire, and wallowed in mudholes. “What a lovely night,” remarked their host. “But isn’t there considerable danger of being hit up here?” asked a well-known paper-work general who had never been near the lines before. “This is a very dangerous war,” replied the former Cabinet minister.

  The chances are that there will never be another Mess like Churchill’s. He had his couriers scouring the countryside for tasty viands, and he once sent a man to bespeak Hazebrouck’s entire seasonal production of peach and apricot brandy. He also bought all the lobster and tinned fruit in Armentieres, paying good prices. Sometimes the money came out of the Mess Treasury, usually presided over by the doctor, and sometimes the officers suspected that the colonel supplied the funds himself. The main reason for the Lucullan flavor to their dining was that Churchill enjoyed good living; moreover, they were obliged to entertain a steady queue of guests, of high and low degree. Churchill was a celebrity, one of the best-known in the world, and it was hard for many people to believe that he actually was in Ploegsteert with a bunch of wild Scotsmen. The skeptics, if they could wangle a pass, came over to see. Churchill treated the bright spirits with punctilio, and with the aid of Foghorn MacDonald pulled the legs of the bores.

  His officers were surprised at the candor with which their colonel spoke of the most delicate aspects of his career. He characterized Fisher, Kitchener, and Asquith, calling the first a greathearted fighter (and a “ferocious brute”), the second a “very nice old cup of tea,” and the last a number of things not altogether complimentary. However, the epithets were used without bitterness and were the seemingly dispassionate views of an observer of tested ability. Churchill talked freely about his experiences in connection with Antwerp and the Dardanelles, and, says one officer, “I for my part was quite won over and believed, as I believe to this hour, in the justness of the decision he then took.”

  To a man, the 6th Fusiliers backed Churchill solidly. They were enthusiastic about both his faults and his virtues. If he overrode them about sandbags, they listened with respect, then made things right later. If his methods seemed eccentric, they thought up excuses, generally saying that it was high time the Army provided such-and-such for everybody. This had particular application to his tin bathtub. One morning Churchill hailed an itinerant tinker and put him to work; the upshot was a bathtub of a type never seen before or since. It was shaped like a giant soap dish, and, perhaps as a result of some latent humor in the workman, had a suggestion of fluted sides, in the manner of Venus’ shell. It was the colonel’s custom to board this outrageous vehicle around ten o’clock each morning, at a spot beneath some trees in the farmyard. And, generously, he lent it to others. Perhaps the only man not sold on the tub was Watt, Churchill’s batman, who had to fill it with hot water. Churchill liked to set up a phonograph on a beer barrel alongside, whereupon Watt was instructed to keep the records moving. As the melodies soared up into the smoke-filled air, contending with the divisional artillery, Churchill sat reading a pocket edition of Shakespeare. If the shelling was severe, he bathed with his blue tin hat on.

  The commanding officer was probably the solitary member of the battalion who considered the recordings melodious. Thoroughly unmusical, Churchill was autocratic in his choice of numbers. His favorites were “Dear Old Dublin,” not especially popular with the Royal Scots, and something called “Chalk Farm to Camberwell Green,” a jerky piece of nostalgia about a place the Scots had never seen. “What an excellent composition — that gets to you, does it not?” Churchill would say to his officers, and they would wander off on trumped-up errands. Even so, it was a melancholy day when he left. In May of 1916 orders came for the battalion to be dispersed and amalgamated with other units of the regiment. At the same time, a political crisis had arisen back home. The question of conscription, which Churchill had fiercely supported, was hanging in the balance, and pressures were being applied to have him resume his parliamentary duties. During his stay, his tactical genius had never been tried, but he had left a soldierly mark. The 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers held a final orderly-room session near the town of Béthune. There were refreshments. Churchill looked tired; he had spen
t days beating paths to all the high rank he knew, seeking good billets for his officers. The adjutant, a noted teetotaler, showed up drunk. He made no apology but said, rather, “I have never made a speech before, but in the last hour I have prepared myself to do so now.” He then went on to tell an embarrassed Churchill that the assembly would never again have a commanding officer they liked half so well. He made a good many heartfelt remarks, and the officers all cried, “Hear! Hear!” Churchill then delivered himself of what must be regarded as a singular farewell. “Whatever else they may say of me as a soldier,” he told his charges with obvious affection, “at least nobody can say I have ever failed to display a meet and proper appreciation of the virtues of alcohol.”

  As he walked across the yard to the bus that was to take him away, both officers and men cheered. Then they struck up a tune — one of the dismal substitutes for the lively painting song — and the piper marched out and tootled the best of his feeble repertory. Churchill turned abruptly, with a curt, victorious sign similar to one that would become famous in another war a quarter of a century later, and without more ado went on his way, missed by all.