Source: New York Times
Winston Churchill’s life spanned the last decades of the British Empire, and to read Carlo D’Este’s enjoyable new biography is to recall the sequence of disasters that befell Britain between the final days of the Victorian era and its brush with extinction in World War II. American pundits these days speculate rather glibly about national decline and imagine that, if it comes, it is something that can be safely and intelligently managed. But genuine geopolitical decline is a serious and often deadly business. Churchill spent the better part of his life fending off increasingly dire threats to Britain’s place in the world, and then to its very existence as an independent nation. A biography of Churchill is in some ways a biography of the British people, with all their remarkable successes, devastating failures, occasional silliness, arrogance and insouciance, and finally their incredible bravery.
Bravery was a constant throughout Churchill’s long, eventful life. D’Este notes that “long before he became a statesman,” he “was first a soldier.” The young Churchill, with his miserable childhood and miserable personality, chose military service as a way to make his name and prove himself worthy — especially to his cold and distant father. As a young man, he fought in India and was almost killed. In 1898 he fought under Kitchener at Omdurman and barely escaped death again. Then he fought in the Boer War, where he was captured and escaped. In World War I he served as first lord of the Admiralty, but after the failure of his plan to force open the Dardanelles, which led to the death of thousands of British and Allied soldiers at Gallipoli, he had himself assigned to fight alongside such men in the bloody trenches of Flanders.
All of this was decades before he became prime minister and saved Britain, and perhaps the world, from the rule of Hitler and the Nazis. In that role, D’Este argues, Churchill was not merely a politician conducting a war in the manner of Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George or Franklin Roosevelt. He was a soldier, a “warlord,” a warrior-statesman in the mold of Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Oliver Cromwell or his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.
This is the main theme of “Warlord,” and it is perhaps a bit overstated. D’Este is a military historian, the author of fine biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, so it is not surprising that he sees Churchill as soldier first and political leader second. But Churchill’s greatness as a national leader was as a politician and statesman, which was what he always aspired to be.
He loved danger, and he was daring sometimes to the point of absurdity. But whenever the young Churchill threw himself into peril he calculated, even as the bullets flew and the swords cut the air, how the latest bit of derring-do would bring his name to attention back in England. And indeed, by 1900 his fame as a soldier, along with his best-selling books, catapulted him into Parliament. That year Mark Twain introduced him in New York as the “hero of five wars, author of six books and future prime minister of England.” Churchill was 26 years old.
At that time, Churchill did not even believe a great military career was possible any longer. Like many of his contemporaries at the turn of the century, he thought large-scale war between great powers was obsolete. As D’Este describes his thinking, “surely civilization had progressed beyond that point in a new century, when nations were more and more dependent upon one another for commerce and common sense had made such nightmares ludicrous.”
Optimism vanished as Churchill watched Germany’s naval buildup and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s determination to make Germany a great world power. Churchill later wrote: “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 splendor of her Imperial State and delving down in her profound, cold, patient, ruthless calculations.”
It was not as a soldier or a warlord that he watched threats emerge, but as a democratic leader passionately devoted to Britain and to its principles and liberal traditions. In political exile following World War I, he warned of the rise of dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Soviet Union, so much so that his critics, who did not want to think anymore about great confrontations, called him a warmonger. When he denounced the agreement reached at Munich in 1938, he warned that there could “never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power.”
Despite his military experiences, Churchill’s greatness lay not in his military skills or acumen. He was the author of several botched military operations, from Gallipoli in the First World War to the failed pre-emptive invasion of Norway in the Second. British generals constantly grumbled about the meddling politician and amateur — complaints no one would have heard from the armies of Napoleon, Frederick or Marlborough.
Rather it was Churchill’s ability to see clearly and unblinkingly what most others, including most military men of his time, could not or did not want to see. He understood, for instance, that there could be no secure peace with Hitler after the invasion of Poland, even as many around him hoped Britain could yet stay out of a Continental war. After the fall of France, “realists” like Lord Halifax urged a peace deal on the grounds that Britain could never succeed alone and that there was “nothing particularly heroic in going down fighting if it could somehow be avoided.” But Churchill understood that Hitler could never permit an independent Britain, which would always threaten Germany’s control of the Continent, and would use peace only to gather strength for a final assault.
Churchill also understood, better than his own generals and admirals, the vital importance of taking the offensive. As he told his generals in 1940, “the completely defensive habit of mind, which has ruined the French, must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative.” This aggressive approach produced the failures of Gallipoli and Norway, but Churchill believed it was better to try and to fail than not to try at all. Like Lincoln, he saw the importance of bolstering public morale, and he understood how deadly it was to talk of peace deals when the nation was losing. “We shall go on and we shall fight it out,” he declared. “And if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” No one doubted him when he promised to die with pistol in hand fighting the Nazis in the streets of London.
These were the qualities that made Britons choose him over other men, and to follow him in a desperate struggle against the greatest odds. Margot Asquith, describing why people looked to him for leadership, observed that it was not his mind or judgment they respected. “It is, of course, his courage and color — his amazing mixture of industry and enterprise. . . . He never shirks, hedges or protects himself. . . . He takes huge risks. He is at his very best just now; when others are shriveled with grief — apprehensive . . . and self-conscious morally, Winston is intrepid, valorous, passionately keen and sympathetic.” He may have longed “to be in the trenches” and was “a born soldier,” but it was not as a soldier that the world needed him.
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