Books: Symbol

MR. CHURCHILL—Philip Guedalla—Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

At Cowes, during a ball aboard a British cruiser one August night in the 1870s, the future Lord Randolph Churchill met three American girls named Jerome and promptly told a friend that he intended to marry “the dark one.” Next day he proposed and was accepted. To his ducal father’s natural question young Churchill replied: “Mr. Jerome is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look after his business. I do not know what it is.”

Thus Britain’s No. 1 biographer, Philip Guedalla, suggests the prenatal impulses which may have affected the character of Britain’s impulsive Prime Minister, of whom he has written the most important and readable biography yet published.

Early in the 1920s Philip Guedalla charged into the battle of the books, shouting: “Historians’ English is not a style; it is an industrial disease.” In its place he developed a lively and somewhat overarch Guedalla English which soon helped to make biographies almost as popular reading as novels. It also boosted the sales of his books (as one critic observed with Guedallan acidity) “within measuring distance of the giddy heights attained by Mr. Edgar Wallace and Miss Elinor Glynn.” It was a style nicely adapted to describing the molting eagles of Napoleon I (The Hundred Days) and the tacky grandeurs of Napoleon III (The Second Empire). But is it, as Mr. Guedalla himself would ask, is it the style with which to describe Britain’s great wartime leader, the human symbol in whom the terror, courage, hatreds and hopes of millions of democratic men are centered?

Some readers will think not. They can nevertheless read Mr. Churchill for its author’s sense of history as a pageant of personalities, his eye for vivid, incongruous detail, his ability to compress masses of fact into a smooth ribbon of narrative. They can also read it to tracethe development of Winston Churchill fromthe specious Victorian calm into which he was born, until, an old man, he put the will of a battered empire into four words: “We shall never surrender.”

Winston Churchill’s early life was like a series of military marches. He went to Ireland, where he remembers (age four) his grandfather, the Lord-Lieutenant, saying as he unveiled a Dublin statue: “. . . with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.” “Nor,” says Author Guedalla, “was the martial infant . . . unaware of the nature of a volley. . . .”

He went back to London, where by the age of seven he had built up an army of nearly 1 ,000 toy soldiers. He went to Harrow, where he once by mistake pushed a star athlete into the swimming pool, displayed typical Churchill tact in his apology. “I am very sorry,” he said, “I mistook you for a Fourth Form boy. You are so small. My father, who is a great man, is also small.”

He went to Sandhurst, which with some difficulty turned him into a cavalry subaltern. Then he went to Cuba, where he acquired a taste for cigars and siestas. He anticipated Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt’s visit by two years. “Imagination falters,” says Guedalla, “at the possibilities of an encounter on the same terrain.”

He went to India, played crack polo, fought on the northwest frontier. He went to the Sudan, to fight the Mahdi, was nearly killed by a dervish, but killed the dervish instead. As a war correspondent he went to South Africa, was captured and imprisoned by the Boers, escaped, became the popular hero of Britain’s least popular war.

Then he went to Parliament.

Conservative Liberal. The Britain that elected Hero Churchill to Parliament was still a healthy nation. Joseph Chamberlain, father of the umbrella man of Munich, had expressed its mood of bursting vigor: “It does not much matter which of our numerous foes we defy, but we ought to defy someone.”

Churchill began his political life as a Conservative. His first speech made his party leaders jump. “If I were a Boer fighting in the field,” said the Boers’ recently escaped prisoner, “and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field. …” A Liberal speaker congratulated him, and it was not long before Winston Churchill dramatized his break with the Conservatives by walking across the House of Commons and taking his seat beside the Liberal Leader Lloyd George. The issue was free trade. The cause was deeper: Winston Churchill, says Author Guedalla, had discovered poverty. His action in joining the Liberals was the 1906 equivalent of joining the New Deal.

As Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill readied the Fleet for World War I. Author Guedalla also credits him with saving the Channel ports from the Germans by rushing off to Antwerp to plead with the Belgians not to evacuate the city prematurely. “His intervention had prolonged the resistance of Antwerp and dislocated the German timetable, though all that the public could see for the moment was a spectacular performance by the First Lord of the Admiralty ending in the fall of Antwerp.” Later they blamed him for the Dardanelles fiasco. The Liberals dropped him from the Government. He had never really been one of them.

He dropped into the trenches with the rank of colonel. Appointed as Minister of Munitions, he still haunted the firing line, and once escorted Premier Clemenceau on a tour of the British front. “Shells whined overhead; the rifle fire was quite close; and somewhere just in front they could see a fragmentary line of British troops—the precarious front line itself.” “Quel moment délicieux,” Clemenceau murmured to his escort. “That was the school,” says Author Guedalla, “at which Mr. Churchill learned deportment for Prime Ministers in time of war.”

The war had had a strange effect upon Mr. Churchill’s politics. “His Liberal objectives—higher wages, cheaper housing—still attracted him. . . .” But his “major interest was in the defeat of Socialism.” This led him back to the Conservatives. “If the French Revolution had transformed Burke’s party affiliations without impropriety, there seemed no reason why the Russian Revolution should not do the same for Mr. Churchill’s.” By 1924 he was a Conservative again, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, towering. Lord Oxford, wrote, like “a Chimborazo or Everest among the sand-hills of the Baldwin Cabinet.”

He did not tower long. “Weak-kneed skepticism found its expression in halfhearted policies and uncertain ethics; and as the ’20s followed the ambiguous gleam of Mr. Aldous Huxley to an accompaniment by Mr. Noel Coward, great affairs were left to Mr. Stanley Baldwin in discouraging rotation with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. What place was there for Mr. Churchill’s positive beliefs in such a scene as this?”

Soon he resigned from the Baldwin Cabinet. “I have cheerfully and gladly,” he said, “put out of my mind all idea of public office.” He began to raise his voice in that series of great warnings which he was to continue unheeded or laughed at until World War II. But when, beginning with Norway, the crash of what had been European civilization began its melancholy long withdrawing roar, the half-men made way for him at last.

He might have said like Weygand in the collapse of France: “They have given me a disaster.” He said: “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us. … You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Author Guedalla explains Churchill by quoting Macaulay’s verdict on William Pitt, the great Lord Chatham: “The ardour of his soul had set the whole kingdom on fire.” “For Mr. Churchill,” says Guedalla, “is not far from Chatham.”