Books: Winnie

WINSTON CHURCHILL—René Kraus—Lippincott($3).

In the reeling spring of 1940 an Englishman’s home was a place of horror. The Nazis were coming. Englishmen, looking at their wives and children, already saw them as corpses. Looking at their leaders, they saw the discredited appeasers, who had promised first peace, then planes and guns, finally failed to deliver either. A little while longer these ghosts of political dead men still squeaked and gibbered in the ministries before Englishmen said in Cromwell’s words: “Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God—go!” Then they turned to Winston Churchill.

He was 65 years old. He was fat (from good living), rubicund (from good drinking). He walked with a stoop, talked with a lisp. He was tired from a lifetime of fighting singlehanded against “the inadequacy, the apathy, the bloodlessness that ruled England”; from prophesying without effect the things that at last had happened. Britons who had denied him leadership in prosperity, offered him leadership in disaster. He offered them “toil and blood and tears.” In its extremity the nation seemed to recognize for the first time that the whole life of this man, whom it had hated and defamed, was a preparation for this task. This week René Kraus* described that long preparation from Churchill’s premature birth (1874) to his belated appointment as Prime Minister last May.

It was a life filled with paradox. Winston Churchill, who writes some of the finest historical prose of his time, never went to college. The future Chancellor of the Exchequer had a hard time with simple arithmetic. Son of an antimilitarist, Winston rushed enthusiastically into the Army. As a war correspondent on almost perpetual furlough from his regiment, he was in the thick of fierce fighting on three continents.

A brilliant soldier, he was sometimes detested by his officers. Kitchener would not speak to him. A fighter by second nature, he was at one time a pacifist by conviction. A Conservative by heredity, he earned the undying hatred of Conservatives for bolting to Lloyd George’s Liberals. Twenty years later he bolted from the Liberals. He introduced into Parliament many of Britain’s most important social measures. Labor called him “traitor.” Reason: as Minister of Munitions in World War I, Churchill told striking munition workers that if they were dissatisfied with conditions on the job, they could try conditions at the front.

These twistings and turnings, suggests Biographer Kraus, result from the fact that Winston Churchill is a minor politician, but a major prophet and inspired visionary. At the best moments of his life, thinks Kraus, Churchill functioned as England’s voice and conscience.

One such moment came in 1911. Prime Minister Asquith invited Churchill to a secret rendezvous in Scotland, there told him he had documentary evidence that Germany was preparing war against England. “Would you like to go to the Admiralty?” asked Asquith. Churchill went to his room, opened the Bible at random, read: “Hear, O Israel, thou art to pass over Jordan this day. …” He took the job.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill laughed at seniority, advanced sea pups over sea dogs, shifted the navy from coal to oil to increase cruising range, shifted (secretly) from 13.5-inch guns to 15-inch guns to increase fire range, founded the air arm. He burst into tears when Asquith told Parliament that World War I had begun—but the fleet was ready.

In 1923 Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, his brilliant history of World War I: “Open the sea cocks and let our ships sink. In … half an hour at most, the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve . . . Europe after one mighty convulsion passing into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton. . . . There would only be left far across the Atlantic, unarmed, unready, and as yet uninstructed, America to manage singlehanded law and freedom among men.” He could not free himself from a sense of doom.

England had won World War I. The price was nervous exhaustion, loss of the will to power. The post-war generation was shot through with futility, discontent, hatred. Churchill perceived that “the decisive battles would be fought for the soul, the will, the morale of his nation.” He set about it, for he also perceived that World War I would not be the last.

The year Mein Kampf was published (1925) he began “his desperate, singlehanded, 14-year struggle for England’s soul and power of vision” by writing three little-known essays. In Shall We All Commit Suicide? he warned that in Germany “science [had gone] mad in the hands of demon-ridden masses.” In Mass Effects in Modern Life he warned that mass production found its political form in the Bolshevik state. In Fifty Years Hence Churchill forecast the rise of fascist states whose power would far exceed the intelligence of their rulers, whose intelligence would far exceed their morals. But he would not write off democracy. Democracy, he insisted, is a function of morality.

His warnings grew louder. He was met by cries of “Warmonger!”, “Cassandra!”; sometimes a supercilious “Good old Winnie!” When in 1934 he warned the country that Hitler was arming fast, that England must double its air force at once, Sir Herbert Samuel cried in the House of Commons: “This is rather the language of a Malay running amuck than of a responsible British statesman.”

After MacDonald and Baldwin came Chamberlain, who “liked to be called ‘British like beef,’ ” but was really “an eccentric figure behind a disguise of excessive normality.” The appeasers were in. “All they wanted was to lay their heads on the block and be left in peace, peace!” Von Ribbentrop came visiting and proselyting. “A wave of political perversion broke over polite society.”

Churchill fought on, and the annoyance of peace-sluggish Britons, who preferred the appeasers, turned to hatred. At first they had heckled him, howled him down, spat at him, struck at him. “Now,” says Biographer Kraus, “no dog would take a scrap from his hand.” He grew tired of his own voice, tired of his own “everlasting prophecies, and still more thoroughly tired of the awful consistency with which they were fulfilled.” But one fact obsessed him—London was defended by only seven anti-aircraft guns.

In 1939, when he had all but stopped speaking, Englishmen suddenly listened. Suddenly he was no longer “a man of parties and majorities,” he had become “almost an idea.” All England was his constituency. They could not keep him much longer from the purpose of his life.

At ii a.m., Sept. 3, 1939, Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany. At the same instant the Admiralty sent a flash to all British ships: “Winnie is back.”

* Biographer Kraus (Theodora, The Circus Empress) is said to be the only member of former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg’s press bureau who escaped the Nazis.