My Early Life

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by Winston Churchill


  To me, apart from service matters in which he was a strict disciplinarian, he was always charming. But I soon discovered that behind all his talk of war and sport, which together with questions of religion or irreligion and one or two other topics formed the staple of Mess conversation, there lay in the Colonel’s mind a very wide reading. When, for instance, on one occasion I quoted, ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’, and Brabazon asked ‘Where do you get that fwom?’ I had replied with some complacency that though it was attributed often to the Bible, it really occurred in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. ‘Have you ever wead it?’ he asked, in the most innocent manner. Luckily I was not only naturally truthful, but also on my guard. I admitted that I had not. It was, it seemed, one of the Colonel’s special favourites.

  The Colonel, however, had his own rebuffs. Shortly before I joined the regiment he came into sharp collision with no less a personage than Sir Evelyn Wood who then commanded at Aldershot. Brabazon had not only introduced a number of minor irregularities, mostly extremely sensible, into the working uniform of the regiment – as for instance chrome yellow stripes for drill instead of gold lace – but he had worn for more than thirty years a small ‘imperial’ beard under his lower lip. This was of course contrary to the Queen’s Regulations, Section VII: ‘The chin and underlip are to be shaved (except by pioneers who will wear beards).’ But in thirty years of war and peace no superior authority had ever challenged Brabazon’s imperial. He had established it as a recognised privilege and institution of which no doubt he was enormously proud. No sooner had he brought his regiment into the Aldershot Command than Sir Evelyn Wood was eager to show himself no respecter of persons. Away went the chrome yellow stripes on the pantaloons, away went the comfortable serge jumpers in which the regiment was accustomed to drill; back came the gold lace stripes and the tight-fitting cloth stablejackets of the old regime. Forced to obey, the Colonel carried his complaints unofficially to the War Office. There was no doubt he had reason on his side. In fact within a year these sensible and economical innovations were imposed compulsorily upon the whole Army. But no one at the War Office or in London dared override Sir Evelyn Wood, armed as he was with the text of the Queen’s Regulations. As soon as Sir Evelyn Wood learned that Brabazon had criticised his decisions he resolved upon a bold stroke. He sent the Colonel a written order to appear upon his next parade ‘shaved in accordance with the regulations’. This was of course a mortal insult. Brabazon had no choice but to obey. That very night he made the sacrifice, and the next morning appeared disfigured before his men, who were aghast at the spectacle, and shocked at the tale they heard. The Colonel felt this situation so deeply that he never referred to it on any occasion. Except when obliged by military duty, he never spoke to Sir Evelyn Wood again.

  Such was the man under whom I now had the honour to serve and whose friendship I enjoyed, warm and unbroken, through the remaining twenty years of his life. The Colonel was a die-hard Tory of the strictest and most robust school. His three main and fundamental tenets were: Protection, Conscription, and the revival of the Contagious Diseases Acts. He judged Governments and politicians according as they conformed or seemed likely to conform to his programme. But nothing in politics, not even the Free Trade controversy, nor the Lloyd George budget, nor the Ulster quarrel, severed our relations.

  * * * * * * *

  We were all delighted in the summer of 1895 to read that the Radical Home Rule Government had been beaten in the House of Commons and that Lord Salisbury was again forming an Administration. Everybody liked Lord Rosebery because he was thought to be patriotic. But then he had such bad companions! These bad companions dragged him down, and he was so weak, so they said, that he had to give way to them against his true convictions. Then too he was kept in office by the Irish Nationalists, who everyone knew would never be satisfied till they had broken up the British Empire. I put in a word for John Morley, but they said he was one of the worst of the lot and mixed up with Fenians and traitors of every kind. Particular pleasure was expressed that the Government should have been defeated for having let down the supply of cordite. Supposing a war came, how would you fight without cordite? Someone said that really there was plenty of cordite, but that any stick was good enough to beat such dogs! Certainly the Liberals were very unpopular at this time in Aldershot. The General Election proved that the rest of the country took our view, for Lord Salisbury was returned with a majority of 150, and the Conservatives ruled the country for ten years during which they fought a number of the wars which form a considerable part of this account. Indeed they were never turned out until they went in for Protection, and then the Liberals came in and made the greatest of wars. But all that is stopped now.

  I was invited to the party at Devonshire House after the Ministerial banquets. There I found all the new Ministers looking very smart in their blue and gold uniforms. These uniforms were not so magnificent as ours, but they had a style about them which commended them to my eye. I talked especially with Mr George Curzon, the new Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He looked very splendid and prosperous, and received my congratulations with much affability. He explained that although his post was a small one, yet it carried with it the representation in the House of Commons of the Foreign Office and all that that implied. So he hoped he would have a share in making the foreign policy instead of only defending and explaining it. There were also some of those poor young men who had been left out; but they had to smile more gaily than anyone else, and go round congratulating all the people who had got the jobs these poor ones wanted for themselves. As no one had even considered me for any of these posts, I felt free to give rein to jealousy.

  * * * * * * *

  At this time Mrs Everest died. As soon as I heard she was seriously ill I travelled up to London to see her. She lived with her sister’s family in North London. She knew she was in danger, but her only anxiety was for me. There had been a heavy shower of rain. My jacket was wet. When she felt it with her hands she was greatly alarmed for fear I should catch cold. The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again. Her only desire was to see my brother Jack, and this unhappily could not be arranged. I set out for London to get a good specialist, and the two doctors consulted together upon the case, which was one of peritonitis. I had to return to Aldershot by the midnight train for a very early morning parade. As soon as it was over, I returned to her bedside. She still knew me, but she gradually became unconscious. Death came very easily to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived. I now telegraphed to the clergyman with whom she had served nearly a quarter of a century before. He lived in Cumberland. He had a long memory for faithful service. We met at the graveside. He had become an Archdeacon. He did not bring little Ella with him.

  When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives, I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a help to them.

  3 The third rank of a troop which being only partially filled by supernumeraries, interlocks with the front rank of the following troop whenever the squadron is in column.

  Chapter VI

  Cuba

  IN the closing decade of the Victorian era the Empire had enjoyed so long a spell of almost unbroken peace, that medals and all they represented in experience and adventure were becoming extremely scarce in the British Army. The veterans of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny were gone from the active list. The Afghan and Egyptian warriors of the early eighties had reached the senior ranks. Scarcely a shot had been fired in anger since then, and when I joined the 4th Hussars in January 1895 scarcely a captain, hardly ever a subaltern, could be found throughout Her Majesty’s
forces who had seen even the smallest kind of war. Rarity in a desirable commodity is usually the cause of enhanced value; and there has never been a time when war service was held in so much esteem by the military authorities or more ardently sought by officers of every rank. It was the swift road to promotion and advancement in every arm. It was the glittering gateway to distinction. It cast a glamour upon the fortunate possessor alike in the eyes of elderly gentlemen and young ladies. How we young officers envied the senior Major for his adventures at Abu Klea! How we admired the Colonel with his long row of decorations! We listened with almost insatiable interest to the accounts which they were good enough to give us on more than one occasion of stirring deeds and episodes already melting into the mist of time. How we longed to have a similar store of memories to unpack and display, if necessary repeatedly, to a sympathetic audience! How we wondered whether our chance would ever come – whether we too in our turn would have battles to fight over again and again in the agreeable atmosphere of the after-dinner Mess table? Prowess at polo, in the hunting-field, or between the flags, might count for something. But the young soldier who had been ‘on active service’ and ‘under fire’ had an aura about him to which the Generals he served under, the troopers he led, and the girls he courted, accorded a unanimous, sincere, and spontaneous recognition.

  The want of a sufficient supply of active service was therefore acutely felt by my contemporaries in the circles in which I was now called upon to live my life. This complaint was destined to be cured, and all our requirements were to be met to the fullest extent. The danger – as the subaltern regarded it – which in those days seemed so real of Liberal and democratic governments making war impossible was soon to be proved illusory. The age of Peace had ended. There was to be no lack of war. There was to be enough for all. Aye, enough and to spare. Few indeed of the keen, aspiring generations of Sandhurst cadets and youthful officers who entered the Royal Service so light-heartedly in these and later years were to survive the ghastly surfeit which Fate had in store. The little titbits of fighting which the Indian frontier and the Soudan were soon to offer, distributed by luck or favour, were fiercely scrambled for throughout the British Army. But the South African War was to attain dimensions which fully satisfied the needs of our small army. And after that the deluge was still to come!

  The military year was divided into a seven months’ summer season of training and a five months’ winter season of leave, and each officer received a solid block of two and a half months’ uninterrupted repose. All my money had been spent on polo ponies, and as I could not afford to hunt, I searched the world for some scene of adventure or excitement. The general peace in which mankind had for so many years languished was broken only in one quarter of the globe. The long-drawn guerrilla between the Spaniards and the Cuban rebels was said to be entering upon its most serious phase. The Captain-General of Spain, the famous Marshal Martinez Campos, renowned alike for victories over the Moors and pronunciamientos to the Spaniards, had been sent to the recalcitrant island; and 80,000 Spanish reinforcements were being rapidly shipped across the ocean in a supreme attempt to quell the revolt. Here then was fighting actually going on. From very early youth I had brooded about soldiers and war, and often I had imagined in dreams and daydreams the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire. It seemed to my youthful mind that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all round and to play at hazard from moment to moment with death and wounds. Moreover, now that I had assumed professional obligations in the matter, I thought that it might be as well to have a private rehearsal, a secluded trial trip, in order to make sure that the ordeal was one not unsuited to my temperament. Accordingly it was to Cuba that I turned my eyes.

  I unfolded the project to a brother subaltern – Reginald Barnes – who afterwards long commanded Divisions in France, and found him keen. The Colonel and the Mess generally looked with favour upon a plan to seek professional experience at a seat of war. It was considered as good or almost as good as a season’s serious hunting, without which no subaltern or captain was considered to be living a respectable life. Thus fortified, I wrote to my father’s old friend and Fourth Party colleague, Sir Henry Wolff, then our Ambassador at Madrid, asking whether he could procure us the necessary permissions from the Spanish military authorities. The dear old gentleman, whose long-acquired influence at the Spanish Court was unrivalled in the Diplomatic Corps, of which he was the doyen, took the greatest trouble on my behalf. Excellent introductions, formal and personal, soon arrived in a packet, together with the Ambassador’s assurance that we had only to reach Havana to be warmly welcomed by the Captain-General and shown all there was to see. Accordingly at the beginning of November, 1895, we sailed for New York, and journeyed thence to Havana.

  The minds of this generation, exhausted, brutalized, mutilated and bored by War, may not understand the delicious yet tremulous sensations with which a young British Officer bred in the long peace approached for the first time an actual theatre of operations. When first in the dim light of early morning I saw the shores of Cuba rise and define themselves from dark-blue horizons, I felt as if I sailed with Long John Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island. Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen. Here I might leave my bones. These musings were dispersed by the advance of breakfast, and lost in the hurry of disembarkation.

  Cuba is a lovely island. Well have the Spaniards named it ‘The Pearl of the Antilles’. The temperate yet ardent climate, the abundant rainfall, the luxuriant vegetation, the unrivalled fertility of the soil, the beautiful scenery – all combined to make me accuse that absentminded morning when our ancestors let so delectable a possession slip through their fingers. However our modern Democracy has inherited enough – to keep or to cast away.

  The city and harbour of Havana thirty-five years ago presented a spectacle which, though no doubt surpassed by its present progress, was in every respect magnificent. We took up our quarters in a fairly good hotel, ate a great quantity of oranges, smoked a number of cigars, and presented our credentials to Authority. Everything worked perfectly. Our letters had no sooner been read than we were treated as an unofficial, but none the less important, mission sent at a time of stress by a mighty Power and old ally. The more we endeavoured to reduce the character of our visit, the more its underlying significance was appraised. The Captain-General was on tour inspecting various posts and garrisons; but all would be arranged exactly as we wished. We should find the Marshal at Santa Clara; the journey was quite practicable; the trains were armoured; escorts travelled in special wagons at either end; the sides of the carriages were protected by strong plating; when firing broke out, as was usual, you had only to lie down on the floor of the carriage to arrive safely. We started next morning.

  Marshal Martinez Campos received us affably and handed us over to one of his Staff Officers, a young Lieutenant, son of the Duke of Tetuan, by name Juan O’Donnell, who spoke English extremely well. I was surprised at the name, but was told it had become Spanish since the days of the Irish Brigade. O’Donnell explained that if we wished to see the fighting we ought to join a mobile column. Such a column it appeared had started from Santa Clara only that morning under General Valdez for Sancti Spiritūs, a town about 40 miles away beset by rebels. It was a pity we had missed it. We suggested that as it would only have made one march we could easily overtake it. Our young Spaniard shook his head: ‘You would not get 5 miles.’ ‘Where, then, are the enemy?’ we asked. ‘They are everywhere and nowhere,’ he replied. ‘Fifty horsemen can go where they please – two cannot go anywhere.’ However, it would be possible to intercept General Valdez. We must go by train to Cienfuegos, and then by sea to Tuna. The railway line from Tuna to Sancti Spiritūs was, he said, strongly guarded by block-houses, and military trains had hitherto passed regularly. Thus by a journey of
150 miles we should reach Sancti Spiritūs in three days, and General Valdez would not arrive there with his troops until the evening of the fourth day. There we could join his column and follow his further operations. Horses and orderlies would be provided and the General would welcome us upon his staff as guests.

  We accomplished our journey with some risk, but no accident. Sancti Spiritūs, its name notwithstanding, was a very second-rate place and in the most unhealthy state. Smallpox and yellow fever were rife. We spent the night in a filthy, noisy, crowded tavern, and the next evening General Valdez and his column marched in. It was a considerable force: four battalions comprising about 3,000 infantry, two squadrons of cavalry and a mule battery. The troops looked fit and sturdy and none the worse for their marches. They were dressed in cotton uniforms which may originally have been white, but now with dirt and dust had toned down to something very like khaki. They carried heavy packs and double bandoliers, and wore large straw Panama hats. They were warmly greeted by their comrades in the town and also, it seemed, by the inhabitants.

  After a respectful interval we presented ourselves at the General’s headquarters. He had already read the telegrams which commended us to him, and he welcomed us most cordially. Suarez Valdez was a General of Division. He was making a fortnight’s march through the insurgent districts with the double purpose of visiting the townships and posts garrisoned by the Spaniards, and also of fighting the rebels wherever and whenever they could be found. He explained, through an interpreter, what an honour it was for him to have two distinguished representatives of a great and friendly Power attached to his column, and how highly he valued the moral support which this gesture of Great Britain implied. We said, back through the interpreter, that it was awfully kind of him, and that we were sure it would be awfully jolly. The interpreter worked this up into something quite good, and the General looked much pleased. He then announced that he would march at daybreak. The town was too full of disease for him to stay for one unnecessary hour. Our horses would be ready before daylight. In the meanwhile he invited us to dinner.

 

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