Churchill has now by act of Parliament completely dictatorial powers and can order any British citizen to perform any service or can confiscate any property, but he has yet to be criticized for ruling arbitrarily. He hates silly questions and will walk away from a bore, or cut a hypocrite down with an epigram. Whisky, he believes, is a boon to mankind, and he has never been the worse, but often the better for it. The two men he most abhors in our time are Hitler and Trotzky, both teetotalers. He is a gourmand, that is to say a man with a sensitive taste in food who likes a lot of it. Once he was in ill health and went to a noted specialist who, contrary to the fashion of the day and despite the patient’s well-upholstered body, advised him to eat more food. He follows the prescription enthusiastically.
One night, about eighteen months before the war, traveling from London to Paris, I had the good luck to be on the same train with Mr. Churchill. After he had finished his work he invited me to join him. All the way from London to Dover he had dictated to a secretary who was to return to London. This is the way he works, incessantly, never wasting a moment. Our train was run onto a massive ferryboat, a new system of crossing the Channel and this was Mr. Churchill’s first experience of it. It was bitterly cold. Mr. Churchill wore a heavy fur-lined coat. We started to explore the ferryboat. Word got about among the crew that Winston Churchill was aboard, and speedily men gathered to salute him and mention their service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, which he organized. The Captain invited us to the bridge. Steaming out of Dover harbor with an icy wind cutting our faces, we listened as the Captain pointed out the lights of two wrecks near the harbor and ventured the opinion that “You, Sir, I believe ordered those ships sunk to block the harbor entrance to submarines?” Mr. Churchill believed the skipper was right.
With unflagging energy Mr. Churchill led the way about the ship from the bridge to the hold, stopping now and then to exchange a few sentences with his admirers. Churchill had been out of the government then for many years, but he remained the best-known figure in the realm and one could measure his popularity by the reception he received on the ferryboat. Toward midnight we climbed to the smoking room where Mr. Churchill as a nightcap consumed a large platter of thick slices of rare roast beef with the appetite of John Bull. As I watched him I thought to myself that this is the way he deals with life, he devours it. When during the quiet period of the war he made an intensive inspection of the French and British positions and the Maginot line, French officers were astonished at his ability to sit up with his hosts studying and discussing the problems of war and probably a hundred other things, including certainly the dry vintage champagne he likes so well, and then appear again a few hours later at dawn for a hearty breakfast with cigar! No Frenchmen and few of any other nationality smoke cigars for breakfast, but Mr. Churchill finds them invigorating. He is seldom without one in his waking hours.
The last time I visited him he received me at about 9:30 A.M. in the upper bedroom at Number Ten Downing Street. The Prime Minister was sitting up in bed, cigar in mouth, hard at work with a kind of bed desk in front of him to hold his papers, and pinned within easy reaching distance on the wall a rack for various colored folders to hold documents of different urgencies. This man who might justly be called the most industrious human being on earth, is a believer in the maxim of Mark Twain who did most of his voluminous writing in bed: “A man’s a fool who runs when he can stand still, or stands when he can sit down, or sits when he can lie down.”
For serious writing Mr. Churchill requires the stimulus of striding up and down, but he finds that for reading and working over state papers and for dictating letters and memoranda, there is no more efficient position than sitting up in bed. To sleep Mr. Churchill does not necessarily require a bed, for such are his powers of endurance that now in his sixty-seventh year he frequently when on tours of inspection takes his night’s rest in his automobile. I remember saying good-by to him one afternoon before the Admiralty and as he was climbing into his car to drive to one of the great naval ports, his aide-de-camp asked him where he would spend the night. Mr. Churchill replied, “In the car driving back.” No Prime Minister has ever moved about his constituency so much, so tirelessly, and so dangerously as Mr. Churchill who travels day and night by blackout and under bombardment. He manages the total war effort of the Empire, but as he has repeatedly emphasized, the war will be won or lost in the British Isles, and inside this mighty fortress the Prime Minister gives the major part of his attention to his duties as Commander in Chief. He is incessantly on inspection.
Like the Captain of an old-time castle under siege, he roams from battlement to battlement, from the South of England to the North of Scotland, viewing the coast defenses, visiting naval stations, driving the newest tanks, witnessing test flights of the latest warplanes, cheering the R.A.F., the troops, the civilian population, sharing their dangers, striding through the dust of bombs, and always everywhere comprehending instantly, offering suggestions, giving the orders of the expert he is in every branch of defense. It is sometimes forgotten that if Hitler is indeed the Marshal in Chief of the German war machine, so is Churchill of the British war machine, and if Hitler has proved a military leader of intuitive genius, Churchill has incomparably more experience and scientific education in war, and certainly no less imagination than Hitler even in the narrow field of strictly military affairs. Hitler had four years of the last war as a private and corporal; has read military history; since he became Chancellor has had the counsel of the Prussian General Staff; and now has had two years’ experience of war. Churchill’s military education began with the exacting instruction of Sandhurst and for practical experience in old-fashioned combat he witnessed or took part in the Boer War, the River War in India, civil war in Cuba, and the Sudan campaign. In the first World War he helped direct the struggle from one of its most important posts, the Admiralty, conceived the tank and numerous other new devices of war, fought in France as a colonel, and all the while before and since, studied and wrote about war until he became one of its foremost historians. These experiences and studies are those of a Doctor of Philosophy compared to Hitler’s grammar school course. In the long run, granting all of Hitler’s genius, I am convinced Churchill, given the tools, will win—but not without America.
You may object that it seems absurd to compare favorably the military abilities of a commander of forces which have constantly been on the defensive with those of the chief of troops so far ever victorious. But the war is a long way from its end, and before that goal is reached, the military qualifications of Churchill may prove their superiority over Hitler’s. Churchill has not yet had the opportunity to show what he can do as a war leader pitted with equal weapons against the enemy, because the war machine he inherited from the feeble hands of Chamberlain was for a long time capable of nothing but defense. Meanwhile as the British plus American war machine is growing, it is encouraging to remember that Churchill with his background of forty years of war, study of war and leadership in war, his youthful inventive mind and eager imagination, is capable of taking everything the Germans have devised or used successfully, and improving it until with the eventually superior resources he will command, victory will be certain, provided always that the United States enters the war in time.
4. WAR AIMS
Q. What are Britain’s war aims?
A. We Americans may still find it interesting to inquire “What are they fighting for?” but if we stood in the midst of the ruins of Westminster Abbey or the House of Commons, it would not occur to us to ask the question. Mr. Churchill has joined President Roosevelt in a formal statement, the so-called Atlantic Charter, but it seems to me that he has twice expressed himself far more eloquently and accurately than he did in the Eight Points. In those dread days when despair touched nearly every soul but his, and he had just accepted the responsibility of leading his country at the moment of its greatest peril, Mr. Churchill said: “You ask what is our policy? I 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; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. 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 way may be; for without victory there is no survival.”