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Page 28
It is time, high time, he hitched his waggon to a star.
Ever since I first met him, when he was still in the twenties, Mr.
Churchill has seemed to me one of the most pathetic and misunderstood
figures in public life. People have got it into their heads that he is a
noisy, shameless, truculent, and pushing person, a sort of intellectual
Horatio Bottomley of the upper classes. Nothing could be further from
the truth.
Mr. Churchill is one of the most sensitive of prominent politicians, and
it is only by the exercise of his remarkable courage that he has
mastered this element of nervousness. Ambition has driven him onward,
and courage has carried him through, but more often than the public
thinks he has suffered sharply in his progress. The impediment of
speech, which in his very nervous moments would almost make one think
his mouth was roofless, would have prevented many men from even
attempting to enter public life; it has always been a handicap to Mr.
Churchill, but he has never allowed it to stop his way, and I think it
is significant both of his courage and the nervousness of his
temperament that while at the beginning of a speech this thickness of
utterance is most noticeable, the speaker's pale face showing two
patches of fiery pink in his cheeks, the utterance becomes almost clear,
the face shows no sign of self-consciousness, directly he has
established sympathy with his audience. It is interesting to notice an
accent of brutality in his speaking, so different from the suave and
charming tones of Mr. Balfour; this accent of brutality, however, is
not the note of a brutal character, but of a highly strung temperament
fighting its own sensibilities for mastery of its own mind. Mr.
Churchill is more often fighting himself than his enemies.
His health has been against him: his heart and his lungs have not given
him the support he needs for his adventurous and stormy career. At
times, when every man's hand has seemed to be against him, he has had to
fight desperately with both body and mind to keep his place in the
firing line. Some of his friends have seen him in a state of real
weakness, particularly of physical weakness, and for myself I have never
once found him in a truculent or self-satisfied frame of mind. I believe
he is at heart a modest man, and I am quite certain he is a delicate and
a suffering man. But for the devotion of his wife I think he could not
have held his place so long.
Fate, too, has opposed him. His enemies are never tired of shouting the
two names of Antwerp and Gallipoli. They are convenient terms of abuse:
I suppose they would have destroyed most politicians; certainly they are
more deadly than such a phrase as "spiritual home," for although the
world may be ignorant of the fact, every honest, educated man must
acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the thinkers of ancient Germany,
while to be associated with operations which involve the suffering, the
death, and the defeat of British troops is in every way more fatal to
reputation.
But, in truth, both these strokes of military strategy were sound in
conception. I doubt indeed if the military historian of the future, with
all the documents before him, will not chiefly condemn the Allies for
their initial failure to make Antwerp a sea-fed menace to the back of
the German Armies; while even in our own day no one doubts that if Lord
Kitchener, in one of his obstinate moods, had not refused to send more
divisions to Gallipoli we should have taken Constantinople. The fault of
those operations lay not in attempting them but in not adequately
supporting them.
Mr. Churchill has had bad luck in these matters, but even here it is the
lack of character which has served him most ill. He never impressed Lord
Kitchener as a man of power, although that sullen temperament grew in
the end to feel an amused affection for him. He did excellent work at
the Admiralty, work of the highest kind both before and at the outbreak
of war, but his colleagues in the Cabinet never realized the importance
of this work, judging it merely as "one of Winston's new crazes,"
Ministers speak of him in their confidences with a certain amount of
affection, but never with real respect. Many of them, of course, fear
him, for he is a merciless critic, and has an element of something very
like cruelty in his nature; but even those who do not fear him, or on
the whole rather like him, will never tell you that he is a man to whom
they turn in their difficulties, or a man to whom the whole Cabinet
looks for inspiration.
General William Booth of the Salvation Army once told Mr. Churchill
that he stood in need of "conversion," That old man was a notable judge
of character.
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