A fierce British bulldog with a cigar clenched between his teeth. Winston Churchill's visage, his glare, has become an icon -- the very emblem of Allied defiance and determination during World War II. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!"
But Sir Winston was not always a scowly old man with a wicked sense of humor. He once was a dashing young man -- with a wicked sense of humor. I'm reading the memoirs of his childhood and early years, "My Early Life," published in 1930, at the age of 56. He wrote this book, which many consider his best work, shortly after his Conservative party had suffered defeat at the polls, an electoral defeat that had cost him his cabinet position as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his book, he looks back fondly on the happy and adventurous days of his youth. My Early Life is a book of excitement and humor, with its high point no doubt being the story of his famous escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa.
Churchill's fame today comes, of course, from his leadership in time of war. Even in youth, he sought fame, calculatingly, as an officer in a cavalry regiment, the Fourth Hussars. Sir Winston was a thoughtful and reflective writer, but decidedly was not a pacifist. He loved the cavalry. He loved dressing up in spiffy cavalry uniforms; he loved the romance of horsemanship; he loved the swooning admiration of the young ladies. In the following selection, he contrasts modern war to his romanticized memories of war on horseback.
Before condemning his glorification of warfare in the nineteenth century, let's not forget: He wrote his book many years later, after World War I had undermined the military and economic foundations of the British Empire, had destroyed the Victorian and Edwardian societies in which he'd come of age; and had cost the lives of many of his best friends. He writes not as a starry-eyed kid just out of Sandhurst, but as a senior politician well aware of the horrors that war in general had visited upon his generation. Sir Winston was not a stranger to irony.
It is a shame that war should have flung all this [i.e., the beauty and subtlety of horsemanship in battle] 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. But at Aldershot in 1895 none of these horrors had broken upon mankind. The dragoon, the lancer and above all, as we believed, the hussar, still claimed their time-honoured place upon the battlefield. War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of democracy and science. From the moment that either of these meddlers and muddlers was allowed to take part in actual fighting, the doom of war was sealed. Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill. From the moment democracy was admitted to, or rather forced itself upon the battlefield, war ceased to be a gentleman's game.
A sad lament for the supposed joys of old-time warfare. Whatever we think of Sir Winston's politics, or his jingoistic imperialism, or his military tactics, we must concede that when he wrote an English sentence, he had few peers.
Winston Churchill is a joy to read.
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