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CHURCHILL'S BELLIGERENCE
His Defining Characteristic
Virtues and vices - like carpets and hats - obey the law of fashion, and at different times society, with infuriating inconsistency, punishes or rewards the same trait. What characteristic, in Churchill, won him adulation and honors? The same characteristic that earned him censure: his love of war. He never changed, but the values of the world did.
On his twenty-first birthday, for the first time, Churchill heard bullets strike bodies for the first time and by 1899, he'd seen action on three continents. When he became Prime Minister in 1940, he'd served in the Army, Navy, and Air Force; been a member of Lloyd George's and Chamberlain's War Cabinets; and got a reputation as someone who couldn't resist a fight.
For good or for ill, right or wrong, Churchill's stomach for war was the defining aspect of his career. While others shrank from battle, Churchill embraced it. War allowed him to channel his belligerency into the flood of something finer, something real, historic. It gave him his greatest moments of adventure and opportunity: the first thrills of battle, his celebrated escape from the Boer camp in 1899, the rigors of the Great War, the stern days of 1940 and 1941. Churchill dismissed those who derided war. "People talked a lot of nonsense when they said wars never settled anything; nothing in history was ever settled except by wars." "Look at the Swiss! They have enjoyed peace for centuries. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!" He told Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who wrote about war's horrors, "War is the normal occupation of man" (but then corrected himself, "war - and gardening").
Certainly Churchill was always eager to fight. After leaving Sandhurst in 1896, he strove to push his way into battle, whether as a war correspondent or as a soldier. He exploited all his parents' connections in high circles - his mother left "no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked"- to find a place for him. He was frustrated by the difficulty of getting into action. "Nowadays," he complained in an 1896 letter, "every budding war is spoiled and nipped by some wily diplomatist."
War was no remote exercise for Churchill. He personally killed at close range and after one battle on horseback, wrote his mother that he "rode up to individuals firing my pistol in their faces and killing several - 3 for certain - 2 doubtful - one very doubtful." Years later he chose to serve in the trenches of the Western Front, with their terrible alternations of boredom and terror, their lice, their mud and rot. Even as Prime Minister, Churchill longed to be in action. On D-Day, only the insistence of the King himself stopped Churchill from sailing with the fleet.
To his regret, over his lifetime Churchill saw war deteriorate from a splendid clash of manly combatants to a statistical race of mass production and indiscriminate slaughter - a contest in which a methodical Speer was far more dangerous than a valiant Rommel. Later, recalling the pageantry of the old battles, Churchill wrote, "It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns."
Churchill's frank zest for war often shocked those around him. "This, this is living History!" he said during World War I. "Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling - it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why, I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me."
The public was suspicious of his enthusiasm. In 1922, Clementine campaigned for him and reported that voters seemed to object to his enthusiasm for war, but that she presented him as a "Cherub Peace Maker" with "fluffy wings round your chubby face." This peace-maker Churchill was unconvincing, and he lost the election. Then, and during the 1930s, and again after World War II, Churchill's eagerness for war cost him public support.
Beneath his happy truculence, however, Churchill recognized the cost of war. He wrote to Clementine in 1909, "Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations - I feel more deeply every year - & can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms - what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is."
Churchill's affinity for war sprang in part from his faith in the possibility of a glorious death. As Prime Minister, he inspired people with this conviction that death, if it must come, would be meaningful - life was precious, but not more precious than liberty. Of the desperate months when Britain stood alone, Churchill wrote: "This was a time when it was equally good to live or die." When he visited his former school Harrow during the war, students added to the school song a new verse, in his honor, about the "darker days" of the war. Churchill asked the word darker to be changed to sterner - because, he said, they were not dark days, they were great days.
Churchill's great wartime command suited him perfectly. "This cannot be accident, it must be design," he confided. "I was kept for this job." His faults were harnessed to his great task, and he surprised everyone with his terrific ability. His natural bellicosity had frequently gotten him into trouble, but in England's danger, Churchill's fighting nature helped, not hurt, him. He'd worked to prevent the war, but he was also glad to fight; he'd do anything, and suffer anything, before surrendering. He promised the demoralized French in 1940: "Whatever you may do, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever."
And, if the years before 1940 were a prelude, the years after the war were a long decline. In the 1945 election, even before Japan surrendered, Churchill was ejected from office. The public sensed in him the permanent relish for battle, and they wanted no more of it.
Out of office, however, Churchill continued to fight. He criticized the domestic and imperial policies of Labour, and when public sentiment changed, he returned as Prime Minister in 1951. But this time, instead of issues of war and peace, he faced economic problems - and, he admitted, he hadn't been "brought up on such things." In wartime, the country was united behind a single goal, victory, and behind a single man, Churchill; peace brought disagreements about both ends and means. Churchill observed in 1954 that during the war, "We always knew exactly where we stood, and we had the power to act as we thought best. Now everything is different. There is so much patter, patter, patter, chatter, chatter, chatter it's a wonder anything ever gets done."
Nothing was the same after 1945. Churchill once confided to his doctor: "I feel very lonely without a war. Do you feel like that?" During the war, Churchill had made famous use of his ACTION THIS DAY labels that he stuck on his most urgent orders to ensure immediate action. The staff loyally preserved the labels in case of Churchill's return, and when he again became Prime Minister in 1951, a stack was placed on his desk. But times had changed. The labels stayed there for more than three years and were never used.
Is it a virtue or a fault to thrive on war? "In great or small station, in Cabinet or in the firing line, alive or dead, my policy is, 'Fight on.'" In The World Crisis, Churchill observed: "Nations as well as individuals come to ruin through the over-exercise of those very qualities and faculties on which their dominion has been founded." All gifts are not suited to all seasons; Churchill was punished for his combativeness at other times, but it was his aptitude for war that fitted him for his greatest days.
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