Churchill liked war
I'm slowly making my way through "Speaking for Themselves," a book of letters between Winston S. Churchill and his wife Clementine.
I was struck by letters he wrote to her after he arrived at the front in World War I. Churchill was fired from Cabinet over the Gallipoli campaign, which went very badly for the British. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, and the campaign was primarily a naval one, but he has always had his defenders who say there was not enough support from the Army. It's probably also true that he had attracted a lot of envy and resentment, so many people were happy to see him fall. So he was fired from Cabinet in a situation where someone else may not have been.
What did he do? He practically insisted on getting back into an Army uniform, and going to the trenches in Belgium. This is the famous nightmare battlefield, where young men by the thousands were pointlessly killed, while the front line hardly budged. Indeed it was to stop or avoid some of this horror that Churchill had tried to open an entirely new front through Turkey. But to say the least, his letters do not show him sharing in the doom and gloom, "why are those bastards sending us to get our asses shot off?," kind of attitude.
In November 1915 it was around his 41st birthday. He is (for the time being) a Major.
"I am very happy here. I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed peace. How I ever could have wasted so many months in impotent misery, which might have been spent in war, I cannot tell."
His unit takes over a trench that had been occupied by others. Here Churchill shows that he is not exactly unaware of the horrors of war.
"The neglect and idleness of the former tenants is apparent at every step. Filth and rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences and scattered about promiscuously, feet and clothing breaking through the soil, water and muck on all sides; & about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous rats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle & machine guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead. Amid these surroundings, aided by wet & cold, & every minor discomfort, I have found happiness & content such as I have not known for many months."
Now admittedly, there is something funny going on here. He is reminding his wife how miserable it was back in London, where he was blamed for a military defeat, the Prime Minister had abandoned him, and many enemies were laughing at him. The bloody trenches are absorbing enough, you might say, that he can finally forget all that. Nevertheless, I think it comes through that he really did enjoy himself at the front.
Some would say this is a type of mental illness. George Will wrote years ago that it is hard to forgive Churchill for a photo, taken during World War I, in which he leaves a war planning meeting in London, a huge grin on his face. It is probably true that we wouldn't want a lot of people to be like this. But I believe there is a nobility in it which shines through. Churchill wasn't a mere thrill-seeker (although he did enjoy flying before World War I, when the likehilood of crashing and being killed was very high); he sought out the theatres where noble, lasting, historic actions are possible. It had to be politics, at the highest level, and/or war.
Leo Strauss is supposed to have said Churchill proved that Aristotle's great-souled man could exist in the modern world. Maybe Churchill was too willing to seek virtually any political office, no matter how small. Because of that he was probably too much inclined to suck up to lesser prime ministers. (Aristotle says the great-souled man seeks only the greatest honours; he is disdainful with "high society," to remind them they are not truly his equal, but he is (ironically, in the original sense of that word) much less harsh with people who are clearly his inferiors).
Still, reading Churchill is like getting a dose of something fine and true. The left likes to say Churchill was only right once, and it was probably a fluke that this once happened to be his opposition to Hitler in the 30s. Of course, the left still has a lot to answer for in their flattering of communism over many decades. In the 30s, Churchill must have been amazed that the sophisticated intellectuals roughly divided up (probably more on the left) between the radical left and the radical right. Who was going to defend liberal democracy?
|
