1

Preparation: The Army and the Navy

When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, to lead the British nation in a war for its survival, he knew more about military affairs and soldiering than any other wartime British premier. Much more than William Pitt the Younger and Spencer Perceval, who led Britain at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when the country was threatened with invasion by Napoleon. More than Lord Palmerston, who was brought in to lead the government when the Crimean War broke out in 1854. More than Asquith and Lloyd George, who led Britain through the appalling sacrifices of the Great War. And certainly much more than recent British prime ministers who have taken the nation to war – Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982, John Major in the First Gulf War in 1991, Tony Blair in Iraq in 2003 and Gordon Brown, who inherited the war in Afghanistan. Churchill had trained as a soldier, had served in several regiments of the British Army, had considerable experience of coming under fire, had been captured and had escaped, had led men in battle, and had fought in the trenches in the First World War. He had studied the fighting of wars and had written famous military histories. He had been in overall command of the Royal Navy in an era when Britannia unarguably ruled the waves. He had led a life that had been imbued with military matters. And he had loved it. It should not be surprising, then, that when he came to lead the nation in war he would run his government in a different way to any other war leader in history. This is that story. But first, it is necessary to see how his previous life was, as he later wrote, ‘preparation for this hour and this trial’.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 into the fringes of one of Britain’s greatest aristocratic families. His ancestor, John Churchill, had led an army against France in the War of the Spanish Succession in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The victories he won established Britain on the European stage as a force to be reckoned with; and the riches heaped upon him by a grateful nation allowed him to build a vast estate centred on the magnificent Blenheim Palace, named after his greatest victory. Having been made the 1st Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill founded a dynasty. However, like many grandee families over the generations, the Churchills experienced ups and downs, with later dukes exhibiting profligacy, instability and particularly poor management of their lives and resources, resulting in a huge sale of art treasures to keep the family solvent.¹ Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, was the younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, and he was already pursuing a promising political career at the time of his elder son’s birth. He had followed the recent example of several scions of the English aristocracy and married an American heiress, the charming and beautiful Jennie Jerome, whose wealthy father was a stockbroker and part owner of the New York Times.

By the accident of being eight weeks premature, Winston was born at Blenheim Palace.² His parents were on a shooting party there and Jennie was riding in a pony carriage over rough ground when she went into labour. Winston’s earliest years were spent in London and Dublin. As was the custom at this time, he was brought up largely by his nanny, Mrs Everest, to whom he became devoted. His mother, whom he later described as a ‘fairy princess’, was remote but caring. He wrote, ‘She shone for me like the Evening Star.’³ His father, who was rising through the ranks of the Conservative Party and seemed to have a dazzling political career ahead of him, was even more remote and showed no signs of tenderness, despite his son’s adoration and love. Churchill later commented that he had only three or four intimate conversations with his father during his whole life. When he was seven, the young Winston was sent to a brutal primary school near Ascot where floggings with birch were common. He was almost certainly bullied there as well. He hated the school, and after two years was taken away and sent to a much gentler establishment in Brighton.

Churchill wrote about his youth in My Early Life, published in 1930 when he was in his mid-fifties. It is a wonderfully entertaining account of how a backward pupil finds a niche in life. Churchill displayed little academic ability in the narrow sense in which it was defined in the late Victorian public school system: that is, in classics and mathematics. His description of taking his entrance examination to Harrow perfectly captures the hopelessness he felt in the face of exams and conventional learning. He was unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper and remembers:

I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question ‘1’. After much reflection I put a bracket around it thus ‘(1)’. But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others.⁴

From this slender indication of scholarship the headmaster of Harrow nevertheless offered the young Churchill a place at the exclusive school. It probably helped that his father was one of the most famous Tory politicians in Britain at the time.

Churchill was no star pupil at Harrow, but while he was hopeless at the conventional subjects, he had an extraordinary ability to learn by heart, once winning a prize for reciting twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ word perfectly. And although he failed to absorb much Latin or Greek, he did learn about the English language and how to write a sentence. He showed a particular interest in history and was skilled at writing essays in the subject (a talent that was not much respected then, as perhaps now). Having been obsessed with his toy soldiers, and disappointing his father because he did not have the ability to go on to become a lawyer, it was resolved that the young Winston should head for a career in the army. Unfortunately, once again the problem of the entrance examination loomed, this time to get into Sandhurst, where the young officers-to-be of the British Empire were trained. This time there was no favouritism to help a well-heeled son of one of Britain’s finest families into the officer class. Winston had to get through the exams by himself, which included his old bug-bear of mathematics. He failed the exams twice, then attended a crammer school in west London. On his third attempt he just scraped in – 95th out of 104 candidates. This was not high enough to qualify for the infantry, but the cavalry had lower standards and accepted him for a cadetship. At the age of eighteen, Winston Churchill was in the army at last.

Once at Sandhurst, Churchill’s somewhat unpromising career took a completely new course. No longer handicapped by his lack of knowledge in Latin or mathematics, he began to enjoy courses in Tactics, Fortifications, Military Administration, Drill and Riding. He did well and soon stood out as good officer material and an excellent horseman. In December 1894 he succeeded in his final exams and passed out 20th in the list of 130. Then, with a little help from his mother and from the Marlborough family, he entered one of the most fashionable cavalry regiments, the 4th Hussars. They were smart, aristocratic and led by one of the leading officers in the British Army, a man who had close connections with the royal family. The only problem was that the salary of a young subaltern did not match the outgoings expected of an officer in this elite regiment, who had to provide his own uniform, run two horses and pay all of his mess bills. So any officer in the 4th Hussars, and indeed in most other cavalry regiments at the time, needed a private income. The bubble of Lord Randolph Churchill’s career had burst when he resigned from the government in 1886 and, to his astonishment, was never asked back. Suffering from either syphilis or more probably some form of brain tumour, he experienced erratic mood swings and needed constant medical attention. By the time he died in 1895 he had used up all of his fortune. Winston’s mother was left with barely enough to fund her own extravagant lifestyle, let alone those of her two sons. Consequently, money would be a problem for Churchill for some time to come, and the need to pay his own way partly determined his course of action over the following years.

Churchill threw himself into the life of his regiment. For an officer recruit this involved a round of activities at the Riding School, learning horsemanship; on the Barrack Square, learning cavalry manoeuvres; and in the mess, learning to be a true officer and a gentleman. At this point in the late Victorian era, the country had enjoyed many years of peace. Few officers below the rank of captain had seen any active service. It was Churchill’s fear that he would serve dutifully for many years but not enjoy the thrill of combat. ‘From very early youth I had brooded about soldiers and war,’ he later wrote, ‘and often I had imagined in dreams and day-dreams the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire. It seemed to my youthful mind that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all round.’⁵ So he now resolved to take full advantage of the perks of a young subaltern in a cavalry regiment, one of which was long holidays, and to put this matter right. In the winter of 1895, during his two-month break, instead of spending the time fox-hunting, as was usual for cavalry officers, Churchill and a fellow-officer travelled at their own expense to Cuba, where a war was raging between local rebels and the Spanish colonialists. With appropriate introductions from an old friend of Churchill’s father, the two young officers were assigned to a mobile column of the Spanish Army marching into the jungle interior in search of rebels. They soon found them and a gunfight ensued in which the twenty-one-year-old Churchill came under fire for the first time. He found the whole experience exhilarating. But the mission was not a success. The Spanish forces deployed in conventional formation to assault the Cubans, who, adopting guerrilla tactics that would become much more familiar over the following hundred years, simply melted away into the jungle mists.

After a couple of weeks the column returned to base and Churchill and his friend sailed home. Today it seems incredible that a young army officer would pay his own passage halfway across the world to engage in combat, with all the risks of death or injury that entailed. But in the last decade of the Victorian era, before the futile horrors of the Great War, before the destruction of aerial bombing, and long before the nightmare of nuclear Armageddon came to haunt us, war was still seen as glamorous and romantic. Certainly Churchill saw it that way. And he was ambitious. The officers who had experience of warfare would probably be promoted more rapidly. Doubtless they would attract the awe and attention of fellow-officers. It also seems likely that Churchill was already looking ahead to a political career and wanted to notch up some worthwhile experience as a foundation for what would follow.

Soon after Churchill’s return from Cuba, the 4th Hussars were sent to India. This was a regular posting for almost every unit in the British Army, and the Hussars were assigned to spend nine years in Bangalore in the south. For a young officer in an elite cavalry regiment, life on the India station in the heyday of the Raj could be very pleasant. Officers lived in spacious bungalows surrounded by neat gardens and were looked after by a butler and servants. There were a couple of hours of horse-riding drill from six o’clock each morning, then an hour or so in the stables, then nothing much through the heat of the day, until the officers started to play polo around 5 p.m. And each evening there were dinner and drinks in the mess. Churchill committed himself wholeheartedly to polo and soon developed into a fine player, despite sustaining a shoulder injury. But he rapidly realised that this leisurely officer’s life was not enough for him. He needed something else.

Churchill was very aware that his earlier academic failings had forced him to miss out on a university education. So he decided he needed to catch up on his learning. In the many hours of his down time at Bangalore, he threw himself into a rigorous reading programme. His mother sent him crates of books which he devoured. He started with the eight volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which someone told him had been a favourite of his father, and the twelve volumes of Macaulay’s History of England: ‘fifty pages of Macaulay and twenty-five of Gibbon every day’. He then progressed to other classics of history and philosophy, from Socrates to Malthus and from Aristotle to Darwin and Adam Smith. He even asked his mother to send dozens of volumes of the Annual Register, a compendium of parliamentary debates and an official record of British public life. He read for four or five hours every day, for five or six months of the year. A mind that had not been accustomed to learning was suddenly soaking up ideas like a sponge. He loved the way the English language was used in these classics and was absorbed by the stories they related and the ideas they contained. And he stored away everything he discovered. His scholarly reading must have made him a very unusual figure among the other young cavalry officers of his regiment. But his enthusiasm for polo kept him in with his fellow-officers as a popular and sporting colleague.

Churchill longed for one of India’s regular frontier wars in which he could seek further experience and possible fame. But in sleepy Bangalore all he had were his books, his polo and the daily round of regimental life. Then, in the spring of 1897, a dispute arose in the Swat Valley in Malakand on the North-West Frontier (now still an unruly quarter of northern Pakistan). Churchill was on leave in England but immediately raced back to India to try to be assigned to the field force that was setting out to teach the Muslim Pathan rebels a lesson. The commander cabled him: ‘No vacancies; come as a correspondent; will try to fit you in.’ Churchill rushed first to Bangalore, to get permission to join the field force, and then travelled for five days by train to the North-West Frontier. Meanwhile, back in London, his mother lobbied various editors and finally persuaded the Daily Telegraph to accept dispatches from her son at five pounds a column.

The Malakand Field Force was a unit typical of the British Raj. It consisted of regular British Army units on their tour of duty in the subcontinent, and units from the Indian Army, with British officers commanding native warrior-soldiers – Sikhs, Punjabis and others. Travelling with the force was a set of ‘political officers’ whose job it was to negotiate with the locals and enforce imperial rule. The field force’s mission was to seek out the Pathan warriors and draw them into battle. On 16 September a small group was detached to go up the Mamund Valley. Churchill was advised that he might see some action here, so he joined the 35th Sikhs, who slowly marched their way up the valley, surrounded by mountains rising steeply to four or five thousand feet. At the top of the valley they reached a village. The troops were about to destroy the villagers’ crops as a form of collective punishment when Churchill looked around and realised there were only four or five officers and about eighty Sikhs. The rest of the column was way behind them down the valley. At that moment, firing erupted and Churchill could see the glint of the swords of the Pathan tribesmen reflecting in the hot sun along the steep valley side. They had walked into a trap.

Churchill picked up a rifle and began to return fire. A British officer ordered the small force to withdraw down the valley. He was shot and killed only a few yards from Churchill. The Sikhs pulled back in some confusion and nearly broke one of the first rules of a frontier war: never leave the wounded behind at the mercy of an enemy who would probably hack them to pieces. But Churchill and a few of the Sikhs carried their wounded comrades down the valley, under constant harassment from groups of Pathan warriors. At one point a tribesman charged at Churchill, brandishing his sword. Churchill took out his revolver and fired. He missed, but the warrior withdrew hastily and hid behind a rock. Eventually, Churchill and his paltry force reached the rest of the company further down the valley, but the tribesmen were still in hot pursuit. Then came the reassuring sound of regular firing and the smart order ‘Volley firing. Ready. Present’ echoed across the valley. Another volley of rifle fire crashed out. A regular British Army unit, the East Kents, known as the Buffs, had arrived on the scene to save the day.

After further intense fighting, the numerically superior British and Indian troops finally took control of the valley. Over the next two weeks Churchill witnessed the systematic destruction of the Pathans’ villages, the filling in of their wells, the burning of their crops and the smashing of their reservoirs in punishment. Such was the revenge of the British Empire. But for Churchill this combined Anglo-Indian expedition confirmed his belief in the Empire and his conviction that Britain had a mission to rule India. It was a belief he never gave up.

Churchill’s dispatches in the Daily Telegraph were well received for their graphic and dramatic accounts. Encouraged by this, he wrote a book of the campaign which he sent back to London and his mother arranged for its publication. The Malakand Field Force was a great success, well reviewed and widely read. Even the Prince of Wales wrote to congratulate Churchill: ‘Everyone is reading it, and I only hear it spoken of with praise.’⁶ Churchill reflected that for a few months’ hard work writing the book he had earned the equivalent of two years’ pay as a cavalry officer. He was delighted with the praise and took on board the pecuniary lesson.

A year later another imperial sortie attracted Churchill’s attention. Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government had decided to send an army to the Sudan to teach the Khalifa and his Muslim Dervish army a lesson for the assault by his predecessor on Khartoum a decade earlier, which had cost the life of the British commander there, General Gordon. Sir Herbert Kitchener assembled an expedition to march down the Nile into the Sudan and on to the Dervish capital. Churchill again tried to pull strings with influential people to get himself assigned to an expedition that offered even more dramatic imperial adventure than the North-West Frontier. However, despite much support for his placement, Kitchener refused to have Churchill in his expedition. There was clearly some hostility felt towards the young cavalry officer who always seemed to up sticks and leave his own regiment to be at the centre of the action. And many people did not like the idea of such a junior officer going into print and criticising his superiors. Even a telegram from the Prime Minister’s office did not change Kitchener’s mind. But Churchill was nothing if not persistent, and at the last minute the War Office assigned him to the 21st Lancers, who were to accompany the expedition south. Churchill embarked immediately for Cairo, where he joined the Lancers just as they were leaving. The border with the Sudan lay some fourteen hundred miles to the south. This time Churchill was contracted to supply letters to the Morning Post at fifteen pounds a column. His value was rising.

As we saw in the Introduction, Churchill marched with Kitchener’s army down the left bank of the Nile, then acquitted himself bravely in the Battle of Omdurman. Just as on the North-West Frontier, he looked death in the face from frenzied tribesmen opposed to British rule and once again emerged without a scratch. Once this short engagement was over, ‘the most dangerous 2 minutes I shall live to see’, as he wrote to a fellow-officer, Churchill played no further role in the campaign.⁷ Three hundred British troops died at Omdurman. But about ten thousand Dervishes were killed and another fifteen thousand were wounded. The wounded were left to die in the hot desert, and were offered no medical aid. Some were even murdered where they lay. Later, when British and Egyptian soldiers entered Khartoum, they desecrated the tomb of the Mahdi who had destroyed Gordon’s army ten years before. His corpse was exhumed, decapitated and eventually taken to Cairo. Churchill was deeply shocked by this.

He returned home within days of the victory at Omdurman. The adventure was over. He briefly rejoined his regiment in Bangalore and helped them to win the Indian Polo Championship, despite a worsening of his shoulder injury. Then, having achieved his objectives of seeing action and commanding men under fire, he resigned his commission. The pace of regular army life was too slow for him and he wanted to move on. He returned to London to devote himself to writing and politics. Free to write without the limitations of being an army officer, he quickly finished another military book which told the story of the Sudan campaign, The River War. Published in two volumes and at 950 pages, this was as successful as his earlier work and helped to enhance his reputation. In The River War Churchill was outspoken in his criticism of Kitchener for failing to prevent the brutality of the army once the victory had been won. He was already beginning to work out his own philosophy of war, which involved being defiant in the face of defeat, resolute in the pursuit of battle, but magnanimous in victory. Kitchener’s army had shown only barbarity after its triumph, and Churchill argued that this was not right. Unsurprisingly, the book won him few friends in military circles.

Back in London, Churchill decided it was time to launch his political career, and sounded out the Conservative Party.⁸ The mixed reputation of his father preceded him and he was made a candidate for the tough working-class constituency of Oldham. The Lancashire cotton town faced a by-election in the summer of 1899. Churchill fought his first election campaign and lost. He felt disconsolate at his defeat. But, as ever in his remarkable life, unexpected events came to the rescue.

In October 1899, just as The River War was about to be published, war broke out with the Boers in South Africa. The quarrel between the ever-expanding British Empire and the Boer republics went back a long way. The Dutch settlers who had lived in southern Africa since the seventeenth century had been slowly migrating north from their old colony at the Cape. They were fiercely independent, strongly Calvinistic and had fought a succession of minor wars with their neighbours, the Zulus, as well as the British. What transformed a series of relatively petty arguments into something far more significant was the discovery of huge reserves of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal in the 1890s. Now that there were abundant natural resources to be exploited and fortunes to be made, the warlike Boers attacked British territory. For the first time in nearly half a century, Britain found itself at war with other white men. It was soon clear that this could escalate into a major imperial conflict.

Churchill once again felt the magnetic pull of war, and he negotiated a deal with the Morning Post to report from South Africa as a war correspondent. This time he commanded the princely fee of £250 per month plus all expenses, making him one of the highest-paid war reporters in South Africa. He sailed on the first available boat for Cape Town, travelling with the British commander-in-chief, General Redvers Buller, and his staff. Churchill’s dispatches from South Africa would soon turn him into an international celebrity.

As with so many wars fought by Britain, the early stages of the Boer War went badly. The Boers showed themselves as skilled fighters, good horsemen and ingenious tacticians, and they had bought the latest weaponry, including magazine-loading rifles and modern artillery pieces. They laid siege to the British garrisons at Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley, and in almost every head-on engagement they proved superior to the British forces. Churchill had to report one setback after another. In an attempt to be first with his story, he negotiated a trip on an armoured train from Durban to Estcourt. Then, on 15 November, the train ventured forth from Estcourt with two companies of infantrymen under the command of Captain Haldane, who asked Churchill to go along with them. The train moved cautiously into territory that had recently been raided by the Boers. On its way back it came under fire from a Boer raiding force and then ran into an ambush. The Boers had placed a heavy stone on the track and three coaches were derailed.

Churchill had only the status of a reporter, but so recently out of uniform and now finding himself and his companions under fire, he soon reverted to military mode. With Haldane’s agreement, he spent about an hour trying to get the steam engine to push the derailed coaches out of the way. Throughout this time they were under continuous rifle and artillery fire. Four men were killed and about thirty wounded. Haldane wrote in his official report that Churchill ‘with indomitable perseverance continued his difficult task’.⁹ Eventually, Churchill managed to get the engine past the derailed coaches and it carried off the wounded men to the nearest town and safety. Churchill himself went just a few hundred yards and then left the locomotive to walk back to the scene of the ambush, where Haldane and the remaining soldiers were still exchanging fire with the Boers. He had not gone far when two Boer riflemen surrounded him and opened fire. Churchill ran back down the railway cutting with the riflemen shooting after him. ‘Their bullets,’ he later wrote, ‘sucking to right and left, seemed to miss only by inches.’¹⁰ He emerged from the cutting and headed for the cover of a river gorge, but was chased by a Boer horseman. With the Boer just forty yards behind, Churchill reached for his Mauser pistol. Later he said that, with his blood up, he would have killed the horseman. But his revolver was not there. He had taken it off earlier. The Boer aimed his rifle at Churchill who now had no alternative. He put his hands in the air and surrendered. Churchill was a prisoner.

All the men who had surrendered were rounded up like cattle and taken away. This action was typical of the many humiliations which the Boers inflicted on British forces at this stage of the war. The technically superior firepower of the armoured train had counted for nothing against a cleverly planned ambush by able fighters who had chosen their ground well and could soon overpower the British troops.

Churchill and the officers were taken to a school that had been requisitioned as a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria. When captured, Churchill had been unarmed and he had all his journalistic credentials on him. But the Boers realised they had a big catch in Winston Churchill and were unwilling to release him, despite his protests that he was an unarmed civilian. Churchill wrote formally to the Boer commander, demanding to be released. He claimed that he had at no time fired on Boer forces and had only been trying to evacuate the wounded. His appeals were ignored.

Churchill passed his twenty-fifth birthday in the POW camp. Thirty years later he wrote, ‘I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period of my whole life.’¹¹ There is a photo of him at the camp in which he looks dejected and thoroughly peeved. When it seemed that his appeals to the Boers would fail, he began to plan an escape. He, Haldane and another prisoner who spoke some Dutch intended to climb over the hastily built prison fence and head east out of Boer territory into neutral Mozambique, travelling by night and resting up during the day. After several delays, on the night of 12 December Churchill made a dash for it while the guard was not looking. He clambered over the fence and into a neighbouring garden, where he waited in the shrubs for the others. But no one came. The guard was too watchful and the others could not make their escape. Churchill was on his own. He had some money in his pocket and some chocolate, but no map.

Unknown to Churchill, when his absence was discovered a huge hue and cry went up. Search parties were sent out to look for him. Posters were put up offering a reward of twenty-five pounds, ‘dead or alive’. But he managed to hide on a train heading east through the night and the next morning he sheltered near a tiny station. He was safe for the moment, but knew that without food or help he would never be able to find his way the three hundred miles to Mozambique. There were guards on every bridge and at every station. He could not decide what was best. ‘I stopped and sat down,’ he later wrote, ‘completely baffled, destitute of any idea what to do and where to turn.’¹² Finally, he took a huge risk and went up to the door of a house in a nearby kraal, or settlement, to ask for help. With extraordinary luck, he had picked the house of a British engineer who managed the local coal mine. The engineer knew that Churchill was a wanted man, but still he decided to help. He fed him and hid him in the mine for several days while he made a plan. With the support of three others (one of whom was from Oldham and so knew of Churchill’s recent by-election campaign), the engineer then smuggled Churchill into the truck of a coal train heading east. Churchill eventually reached Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), where, covered in coal dust, he walked into the British Consulate and freedom.¹³

Churchill’s escape brought him instant fame. It provided a brief moment of relief and celebration at a point when the war was going badly for the British. When Churchill arrived back in Durban on 23 December he was met by cheering crowds, who took over an hour to disperse. Three days later he met General Buller, the commander of the British forces in Natal, who congratulated him wholeheartedly. Churchill had become a hero. And now he asked to enlist again in the fighting forces.

This posed a quandary for Buller, because the War Office had recently made it clear that serving officers could no longer write for the press and no journalists could fight in the regular army. But Buller was so keen to enlist Churchill with his fighting spirit that an exception was made and he was offered an unpaid commission in a local regiment, the South African Light Horse. He spent the rest of his time in South Africa with the unusual dual role of being both a fighting cavalry lieutenant and a war correspondent.

In the early months of 1900, Churchill witnessed some of the worst moments of the Boer War, including the aftermath of the fighting at the Tugela River and the battle at Spion Kop. For many days at a time he lived under constant shellfire and regular rifle fire. At one point, the feather in his hat was cut through by a bullet. At another, eight men around him were wounded by a shrapnel burst while Churchill was, yet again, unscathed. In April, he found himself alone, facing a group of Boer commandos, cut off and without a horse. At the last minute, a British scout rode up and Churchill leaped on his horse. They rode off together, but the horse was shot and died of its wounds. ‘I don’t think I have ever been so near destruction,’ he wrote to his mother.¹⁴

These months of fighting and writing reports for the Morning Post helped to shape Churchill’s view of war. He was fascinated by the commando tactics of the Boers, who attacked in small numbers, struck hard and then melted away into the countryside. This left Churchill with a lifelong respect for the use of small, well-trained forces that could hit the enemy with an impact out of all proportion to their numbers. This appealed to his romantic view of war and how it should be fought. He also later became firm friends with some of the Boer commanders, men like Louis Botha and Jan Christiaan Smuts.

On the other hand, although he continued to find the thrill of battle exhilarating, he was terribly moved by the death and mayhem he witnessed in South Africa. After the fighting on the Tugela River, he came across the dead bodies of two Boers: a man in his sixties who had been wounded in the leg and had bled to death; and alongside him a young boy of about seventeen, shot through the heart. A few hundred yards away were the corpses of two British soldiers, their heads smashed ‘like egg shells’. Churchill wrote in the Morning Post: ‘I have often seen dead men killed in war – thousands at Omdurman, scores elsewhere, black and white, but the Boer dead aroused the most painful emotions … Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and squalid, the pitiful and the sublime.’¹⁵

Churchill also refined his views about the senior officers in the British Army. He felt they were not facing up to reality and were not using their troops effectively. He was amazed at how officers still ordered men into frontal attacks against troops who were able to employ the devastating firepower of their powerful modern rifles. There was no glory, only sacrifice, in this. He wrote in the Morning Post: ‘We must face the facts. The individual Boer, mounted in suitable country, is worth from three to five regular soldiers. The power of modern rifles is so tremendous that frontal attacks must often be repulsed.’¹⁶ He also felt that senior officers rarely showed enough aggressive spirit and too easily became depressed and almost fatalistic about the fact that the enemy would outperform them. This sense that British commanders needed to be more offensiveminded would return to worry Churchill again, forty years later.

In January 1900, Lord Roberts took command of the British Army in South Africa and Kitchener was sent from Khartoum as his chief of staff. With reinforcements of men and supplies arriving from Britain, the tide of war slowly turned against the Boers. Churchill wrote that the British now needed to show mercy to the Boers so as not to provoke a further phase of bitter warfare. His views were unpopular, going against the grain of jingoistic fervour that had been stirred up back home. Nevertheless, this was an important aspect of his concept of the morality of war – to be magnanimous in victory and to show goodwill in peace.

In May, the siege of Mafeking was relieved, prompting huge celebrations in Britain, and the creation of another new hero, Major Robert Baden-Powell, who had led the town’s garrison through the dreadful hardships of the siege. In June, Churchill was present at the recapture of Pretoria, leading the troops that freed the remaining prisoners-of-war. Amid cheers, he tore down the Boer flag, replaced it with the Union Jack, and was reunited with many of those who had been captured with him six months before.

With the recapture of Pretoria and the relief of Mafeking, it seemed that the war had been won, and many people assumed it would soon be over. In fact, it dragged on for a further two years, with the Boers mounting a highly effective guerrilla war against the British right across southern Africa. Exasperated, the British, by now under Kitchener’s command, did everything they could to destroy ground support for their guerrilla enemy. Farmsteads were destroyed, crops were burned and Boer citizens were rounded up and interned in what the British called ‘concentration camps’. Tens of thousands of Boer women and children died in the overcrowded and unhealthy camps, leaving a lasting legacy of hatred towards British rule among the Afrikaner community.

Churchill returned to Britain in the summer of 1900 and immediately resumed his political career. The Conservative government of Lord Salisbury wanted to exploit the patriotism generated by the war and called a general election in the autumn. It became known as the ‘Khaki Election’. Churchill once again stood in Oldham, where he was welcomed as a returning war hero by a crowd of ten thousand people. During the campaign, he was cheered wildly in speech after speech. In those days, general elections were not held on a single day, with the result announced the following morning. Instead, the election process could last anything up to five weeks. However, Oldham was one of the first constituencies to declare its result, and it returned two members. This time Churchill was elected as the second candidate by a narrow margin. This early victory in a working-class town gave a huge boost to the Conservative campaign, and Churchill was in great demand during the remaining weeks of voting. He addressed political rallies up and down the country, every night for four weeks, sharing the platform with many of the leading Conservatives of the day.

The triumphant Churchill, basking in the glory of his personal political success, then went on a whistle-stop lecture tour, using a magic lantern to tell the story of his experiences in the Boer War. Today, a young celebrity like the twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill would probably go on a reality TV show. Then, public speaking was the way to become famous and to earn money. Churchill visited most of the big cities of Britain, captivating crowds of many thousands at a time, and often earning a hundred pounds or more for an evening lecture. The House of Commons, in which the Conservatives and Unionists enjoyed an increased majority, was due to meet in December, but the newly elected MP for Oldham chose to miss the opening of his first Parliament and instead continued his lecture tour in the United States and Canada. Here, even more money was on offer. After three lucrative months, Churchill had amassed about ten thousand pounds (roughly a million in today’s money). He invested his earnings and had plenty to live on for years to come. The financial worries that had plagued him since he had joined the army were over and he was free to dedicate himself to his new political career. His military exploits had led to fame and fortune.

The young MP gradually began to build a new reputation for himself at Westminster. Fast-forwarding through his political career, which is not the subject of this study, Churchill never felt entirely comfortable within the Conservative Party. In particular, as a convinced free-trader, he disagreed with the Tory policy of tariff protection. In October 1903, he drafted a letter to a friend. It was never sent, but in it Churchill stated, ‘I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory Party, their men, their words and their methods.’¹⁷ In May 1904, he took the highly unusual step of ‘crossing the floor’ of the House of Commons; that is, he left the Conservative benches and joined the Liberals. Many Tories never forgave him for this act of betrayal. And as the Conservative government was becoming unpopular, many others saw it as a purely opportunistic act, an attempt to seek office within a future Liberal government.

Sure enough, two years later, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals won the general election. Churchill was elected as the Liberal MP for Manchester North West. With his fame and celebrity status, he was an obvious candidate for office and he duly became Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office. For two years he threw himself into his new role as a junior minister and oversaw the creation of self-governing states in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, bringing the Boers into the British Empire and resolving the disputes in southern Africa. At one point he wrote six lengthy notes for the Colonial Office, outlining his plans for various other parts of the world. This prompted Sir Frances Hopwood, the senior civil servant at the Colonial Office, to write, ‘He is most tiresome to deal with & will I fear give trouble – as his father did – in any position to which he may be called. The restless energy, uncontrollable desire for notoriety & the lack of moral perception make him an anxiety indeed.’¹⁸ So Churchill was already displaying the energy and drive that would characterise his wartime leadership, but was still dismissed as an awkward troublemaker by many in the establishment.

In the year 1908, two life-changing events took place. In March, Churchill met Clementine Hozier at a dinner party. She was ten years younger than him, and radiant. Churchill particularly liked her striking, mysterious eyes. He asked her if she had read his recent biography of his father. She had not. Despite this, Churchill became infatuated with Clementine and they wrote and met regularly over the next few months. This was not Churchill’s first infatuation, there had been a small number of society women who had previously attracted his attention. But he was the first to admit that he was not a great romancer, and found it difficult talking to young ladies. Clementine, though, was different: she was serious-minded as well as beautiful; and, rarely for a girl of her class at the time, she had good academic qualifications.¹⁹ She liked his style, his wit and no doubt his ambition, and when he proposed to her at Blenheim Palace in August, she accepted. Churchill was delighted and the two were married the following month.

Churchill loved ‘Clemmie’ intensely for the rest of his life and he never strayed. She provided the support, homeliness and large doses of good sense that he desperately needed. The domestic life they began to build together was something new for Churchill, who had endured a lonely childhood and since Sandhurst had found most of his camaraderie in the male worlds of the army and the House of Commons. Clemmie was the ideal political wife. Despite long separations when Churchill was away on business, they wrote lovingly to each other almost daily, and Churchill found Clemmie’s support, always imbued with a great deal of common sense, a vital prop to both his emotional and his political life.²⁰

While Churchill was courting Clemmie, Herbert Asquith replaced Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister. In the reshuffle that followed, Churchill was appointed President of the Board of Trade. So, aged just thirty-three, he became a member of the Cabinet. His star was rising quickly, along with that of another passionate and visionary politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. Asquith’s government would become one of the greatest social-reforming administrations of the twentieth century, laying the foundations for the welfare state. Churchill was soon hard at work drafting legislation to create a minimum wage, to establish workers’ rights to breaks for meals and refreshment (the much-loved British tea break became law in one of his reforms), and to create more than two hundred labour exchanges across the country to help the unemployed find work. Always keen to get into print, Churchill’s next book was a compendium of his speeches on reform entitled The People’s Rights.

In February 1910, Churchill was promoted again, this time to Home Secretary. He was now even more centrally placed to carry forward the Liberal agenda of improving conditions for working people. He also threw himself into prison reform and reduced the high numbers of young offenders in prison. But the tensions of Edwardian Britain were never far below the surface. There was the long-running and still unresolved issue of Home Rule for Ireland. Churchill was lukewarm in his support for Home Rule, even though it was official Liberal policy. British society was similarly divided over the issue of whether women should get the vote (there was still not universal suffrage for men, either). The suffragette movement eventually split, with one group resorting to violent protest in a bid to make its voice heard. The chant ‘Votes for Women’ echoed around Westminster. Churchill was not in favour. Clementine was, but was opposed to the violent tactics of the militants. As Home Secretary, Churchill approved the forced feeding of suffragettes who had gone on hunger strike in prison.

Along with this, Britain was hit by a series of increasingly damaging labour disputes, as working men and women began to exercise their political muscle. On Churchill’s watch there was a series of strikes in the South Wales coal mines which led to local rioting and disturbances. Shops in the town of Tonypandy were looted and a local colliery attacked. In principle, Churchill was opposed to the use of the army to resolve domestic disputes, declaring in the House of Commons: ‘It must be an object of public policy, to avoid collisions between troops and people engaged in industrial disputes.’ However, he sent a squadron of cavalry to the Valleys and placed them on stand-by. The soldiers were never used, but Churchill was still widely condemned from all sides. The Conservatives accused him of being too soft on the rioters. The Labour Party, although still only small as a party at Westminster, was outraged that he had sent soldiers into an industrial problem. ‘Remember Tonypandy!’ was a cry heard against Churchill from the Left for many years to come.

These were all serious issues, but Asquith’s administration faced its greatest crisis yet when the House of Lords rejected Lloyd George’s reforming budget, known as the ‘People’s Budget’. In this, he proposed unemployment benefits and, most radically, Britain’s first state pension. In order to pay for these, Lloyd George planned to increase taxation of the rich, including a new super-tax of six pence in the pound for those earning over five thousand pounds per year, along with rises in death duties and property taxes. The Conservatives were deeply opposed to this attempt to redistribute wealth, and used their substantial majority in the House of Lords to reject the budget. Asquith was outraged that the Lords could reject a money bill proposed by a democratically elected House of Commons, and a major constitutional crisis unfolded. Two general elections followed in 1910, the House of Lords finally gave in, and the budget was passed. But Asquith had not finished: he wanted to permanently restrict the power of the House of Lords and he persuaded King George V to agree in principle to the creation of 250 new Liberal peers if the Lords did not accept another piece of legislation, the Parliament Bill. In August, to avoid being swamped by the new peers, the Lords finally passed the bill by a tiny majority. The constitutional crisis was over. The People had won. Churchill, firmly committed to the side of the People, was viewed by the Conservatives as no less than a class traitor. They were now more hostile towards him than ever.

A totally different crisis also erupted in the summer of 1911 when the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir in Morocco during a revolt against the Sultan. The French regarded Morocco as part of their sphere of influence in North Africa and were appalled at what they saw as aggressive German action. The British interpreted this piece of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ as an attempt to turn Agadir into a German port, a clear threat to the British naval base at Gibraltar, as well as a sign of Germany’s ambition to rival the Royal Navy. The crisis was soon defused, but the Prime Minister decided that the Admiralty needed someone more assertive in charge. In October 1911, Asquith invited Churchill to visit him in Scotland. After a round of golf, the Prime Minister asked his Home Secretary quite abruptly if he would like to become First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill later wrote that, after the crisis that summer, ‘All my mind was full of the dangers of war. I accepted with alacrity.’²¹ It was a few weeks before his thirty-seventh birthday. His new role would shape Churchill’s career and his military thinking for years to come.

The Royal Navy, over which Churchill took civilian and political command in October 1911, was a mighty force that still ruled the waves. However, like many aspects of pre-Great War Britain, its supremacy was severely challenged by a series of weaknesses and fissures, some evident to contemporary observers, others less visible. A naval race had begun when Germany, traditionally a friend of Britain (the Kaiser was the nephew of King Edward VII), started to expand its fleet. British policy for almost a century was to possess a small, professional army but a vast navy that could defend British imperial and trading links around the world. The Royal Navy was intended to be as large as the next two most powerful navies combined. So when Germany started to build up her fleet this was taken as a major affront, an attempt to diminish Britain’s authority in world affairs. Along with this rivalry came the development of an entirely new generation of fast-moving, turbine-powered, heavy steel-clad battleships called Dreadnoughts. This new class of super battleship left most of its predecessors obsolete. So, as the Germans began to build Dreadnoughts, the British government needed to do the same, at enormous expense, to maintain its supremacy. Earlier, in Cabinet, Churchill himself had opposed the cost of this in order to keep funds for his social reforms.

Once again, Churchill threw himself into a new challenge. Although he had served in the army and had written extensively about military campaigns, he knew relatively little about the navy. But he was eager to learn, and through long discussions with his chief naval advisers, the Sea Lords, along with extensive visits to naval bases and meetings with junior personnel, Churchill began to pick up knowledge of the intricacies of naval gunnery, the relative merits of different vessels, and the key elements in the complex organisation of the Royal Navy. The Admiralty at this time put at the disposal of the First Lord a 320-foot yacht, the Enchantress, with a crew of 196. Over the next two and half years, Churchill spent more than two hundred nights on board the yacht, witnessing reviews and generally trying to understand naval matters. In other words, he spent nearly one night of every four at sea.

One of Churchill’s first tasks was to push through a major naval reform by creating a Naval War Staff. Indeed, he prepared a paper for the Cabinet on this subject within four days of his appointment. The Naval War Staff would be a central team of officers to look across the board at the threats facing Britain’s sea power, and then establish ways of dealing with them. Its creation was based on reforms that had taken place five years earlier in the army at the War Office. The growing threat from German naval expansion made this reform a necessity, but it involved a level of strategic thinking that the Royal Navy was not used to. For the navy, promotion had always come after service at sea, and experience in the various ships of the line was the most favoured knowledge in Admiralty thinking. The First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson, the most senior naval officer, was deeply opposed to this change in naval tradition. He feared the creation of a new cadre of staff officers who might get to the top without devoting their lives to service at sea. Churchill soon removed Wilson and the Naval War Staff was created. Then, typically, Churchill himself wanted to be at the centre of this strategic review of naval threats and opportunities.

Fresh from his days as a social reformer, Churchill also wanted to improve the lot of the general sailor. He improved pay as well as facilities below decks and at shore establishments. And his ‘Mates’ Scheme’ enabled ratings to be promoted to officer rank. Churchill wrote and communicated directly with officers below the rank it was regarded as appropriate for a First Lord to deal directly with. The Sea Lords deeply disapproved, but Churchill used it as a way to find out what junior officers were thinking and what they were concerned with, all of which he regarded as part of his remit.

He soon forgot his earlier opposition to the increased spending requirements of the navy. Alarmed by the growth of Germany’s fleet, he speeded up the building programme of the mighty Dreadnoughts. In early 1912, he received Germany’s new plan for naval construction. It projected huge growth, from the biggest new battleships to much smaller vessels, and a vast increase in naval personnel. Churchill calculated that at present growth rates the German Navy would one day deploy twenty-five battleships in the North Sea, whereas the Royal Navy would be able to put only twenty-two to sea. This would result in a substantial shift in the balance of power. It could not be allowed to happen. Churchill committed his energies to persuading his colleagues in Cabinet and throughout the nation of the urgent need to speed up the building of new Dreadnoughts. As he later put it: ‘The Conservatives wanted six, the Liberals wanted four; we compromised on eight.’²²

Churchill found many of his senior naval advisers rather stuffy, plodding and distinctly poor in analysis. The qualities that made a great naval captain were combative arrogance, the confidence to take risks and to be highly individualistic in the assessment of a situation and the leadership of men. But these were not the characteristics that made for good managers. Churchill later wrote of the senior admirals: ‘They are so cock-sure, insouciant and apathetic.’²³ Moreover, few senior naval men had the capacity to sit down and argue a case with an experienced debater like Churchill. They could not pull an argument to pieces and put it back together again. They often wilted under a concerted argumentative assault from Churchill, who thought them all the poorer for this. To be fair, of course, these were not the qualities that were judged to be admirable in naval circles.

One man who did delight Churchill was the retired admiral Sir John Fisher, who had been a controversial First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910. He was ebullient, energetic and constantly looking for improvements, to find faster ships, deadlier weapons and better ways of doing things. It was Fisher who had overseen the introduction of the Dreadnoughts. He was a genuine eccentric even in the unusual circle of senior admirals, and Churchill took to him immediately. In many ways, the two men were alike. They both had an instinct to spot what was new and different. And each identified in the other a keen supporter of his own passionate beliefs. Fisher was soon encouraging Churchill in his reforms, and the two men enjoyed a close friendship. Inevitably, they argued, but this only strengthened their relationship. Churchill was keen for people to stand up to him and it was this that he missed in most of the senior admirals around him.

Another senior figure whom Churchill admired was Prince Louis of Battenberg, a cousin of the King. The royal family was close to the senior service. The recently crowned King George V had served in the navy and both of his sons, the future Edward VIII and George VI, were educated at the Royal Naval College. Churchill had a lively correspondence with the King about naval matters, especially the naming of new ships. For instance, the King vetoed the name Oliver Cromwell for a battleship, but Churchill got approval for his suggestion of Iron Duke. Churchill appointed Prince Louis as First Sea Lord in December 1912. He served Churchill and the navy well.

Churchill initiated several reforms in the years before the First World War. First, he gave great encouragement to the development of the Royal Naval Air Service. The Wright brothers had ushered in the era of powered flight only a few years earlier, in 1903. And the first flight did not take place in Britain until 1908, only three years before Churchill went to the Admiralty. But he was fascinated by this new activity, and although it is unrealistic to claim he spotted its full military potential at this stage, he certainly encouraged the navy to take up flying and to build a series of air stations. At this point, air power was seen simply as a form of reconnaissance, a potential extension of the ‘eyes’ of the navy to spot its enemy at sea. So keen did Churchill become that he asked some young naval pilots at their base at Eastchurch if they would teach him to fly. The pioneer aviators must have been astonished at the First Lord’s enthusiasm, because flying was so dangerous that one flight in every five thousand resulted in a death. Nevertheless, Churchill persevered with his flying lessons throughout 1913, despite fierce opposition from his friends, his family and from his wife Clemmie. In December, after one of his instructors was killed in an accident, F.E. Smith, the politician and close friend of Churchill, wrote to him: ‘Why do you do such a thing as fly repeatedly? Surely it is unfair to your family, your career and your friends.’²⁴ But Churchill’s obstinate streak came through and he persisted with his flying lessons for another six months. Then, one of the planes he had flown crashed into the sea, killing the pilot who had been teaching Churchill only days earlier. Clemmie, who was five months pregnant with their third child, pleaded again with him to give up the deadly sport. This time he agreed and, despite nearly gaining his pilot’s licence, reluctantly abandoned his flying lessons.

However, Churchill’s commitment to naval flying only intensified. He made plans to draw civilian fliers into the navy. He named the type of aircraft that could land on water a ‘seaplane’ and ordered a hundred of them. He planned and budgeted for the building of five new air stations and for the provision of new flying facilities. And he was impressed by a flight he took in an airship over Chatham dockyard. Churchill’s recurring fascination with the new attracted him to flying and drove him to push through these measures against an inherently conservative Admiralty establishment that just didn’t get it.

The other major area of reform ushered in by Churchill at the Admiralty was the launch of another new class of battleship, the Queen Elizabeth. At twenty-five knots they were faster than anything that had gone before. They were armed with giant fifteen-inch guns, the largest in the navy. And, in a revolutionary step, they were powered by oil rather than coal. To support them, Churchill began a process of converting the whole navy to oil power, a massive transition that would take decades to complete and involved building oil storage depots around the world. Coal had been at the heart of Britain’s industrial revolution and its supply was guaranteed for years to come, but oil was more efficient and lighter. As part of the transition, Churchill recognised the need to ensure that oil supplies would be secure well into the future. Consequently, in June 1914, in one of his most far-sighted acts, he persuaded the government and the House of Commons to take a 51 per cent stake in the Anglo Persian Oil Company (which later became British Petroleum). This marked several major shifts in long-term government thinking. First, it guaranteed the Royal Navy a plentiful supply of oil for the foreseeable future, enabling the transfer from coal to oil to proceed smoothly. Second, it marked a break from governmental laissez-faire policy towards business by creating a partly nationalised company dedicated to the provision of an essential raw material. For decades, the interests and investments of BP would be closely aligned to the interests of the British government, in marked contrast to the American oil giants that became huge private concerns. Third, the stake in Anglo Persian focused British attention on a region that had not been paramount in imperial thinking before: Persia (now Iran) and the Middle East. This would have major consequences over the next half century. It was one of the most radical steps taken by the pre-war government, and it is a sign of Churchill’s achievement that, despite being so revolutionary, it was carried in the Commons overwhelmingly by 254 votes to 18.

Eleven days after the Commons voted to take the stake in Anglo Persian, a shot rang out in Sarajevo. This started the sequence of events that would lead Europe inexorably to war. But at the time few realised the importance of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian gunman, so great were the issues facing the British government. The Home Rule Act threatened to provoke civil war in Ireland. The Unionists in the North rallied behind their leader Sir Edward Carson. The Nationalists mobilised too, and groups of armed men marched openly in Belfast and Dublin. The suffragettes brought more violence to the streets of London. Labour disputes were causing real anxiety throughout the country. And the Cabinet was still arguing over the heavy expenditure demanded by the navy. When the Naval Estimates were finally agreed for the years 1914–15, Lloyd George passed a note to Churchill which read, ‘Had there been any other Chancellor of the Exchequer your Naval Bill would have been cut by millions.’ Churchill scribbled a reply: ‘There would also have been another First Lord of the Admiralty! And who can say … that there would not have been another government?’²⁵

By the end of July 1914, however, these issues were suddenly overshadowed by the extraordinary prospect of war between the nations of Europe. The Cabinet met on a hot, sultry Friday afternoon, 24 July, and spent several hours discussing the deadlock over Ulster. Then the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was handed a note which he immediately read out to his colleagues. It was the text of an ultimatum sent by Austria-Hungary to Serbia, and it was clearly phrased so that no self-respecting state could accept it. War suddenly looked likely. But it took a while for the enormity of this document to sink in. Churchill later described how the border dispute in Ulster ‘faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe’. He went straight to the Admiralty and immediately wrote down seventeen points which had to be attended to if war came. This piece of paper acted as a checklist for Admiralty officials over the next ten days.²⁶

As the situation in the Balkans came to a head, the network of alliances that linked the nations of Europe divided the continent into two camps. If Austria declared war on Serbia, then Russia would come to Serbia’s aid while Germany would support Austria. And if Germany went to war with Russia, France would come to Russia’s aid. Knowing this, the German Army Command had devised a strategy known as the ‘Schlieffen Plan’. This involved attacking France first and knocking it quickly out of the war, then turning to face Russia, which would be slower to mobilise. But the Schlieffen Plan necessitated passing across Belgian territory, which would draw Britain into the conflict because it had pledged to come to Belgium’s aid in the event that it was invaded. As a result, within days, the whole of Europe slid helter-skelter into war.

Churchill was in his element. The Royal Navy’s Home Fleet had gathered for its annual test mobilisation. The First Lord suggested that it should not disperse. Then he ordered the First Fleet to deploy from Portland on the south coast to the North Sea. This was tantamount to the fleet taking up its battle stations against Germany. Armed guards were put on naval supply depots and oil tanks.

At this moment, Clemmie was on holiday on the north Norfolk coast with their young family. Churchill, writing to her on 28 July, could not hide his excitement:

Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me … We are putting the whole Navy into fighting trim … Everything is ready as it has never been before. And we are awake to the tip of our fingers. But war is the Unknown and the Unexpected … I feel sure however that if war comes we shall give them a good drubbing.²⁷

On the evening of the following day, Germany declared war on Russia. Railways across Europe now started to move millions of men and thousands of tons of matériel in preparation for military activity. Churchill put the fleet on full mobilisation. Germany, as planned, prepared to launch its offensive against France and demanded right of passage through Belgium. Britain issued an ultimatum. On 4 August, as the German Army disregarded the ultimatum and crossed into Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany. At midnight, Churchill sent the order to all ships: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany.’ He rushed to 10 Downing Street where Lloyd George, who was already with Prime Minister Asquith, remembered his entrance thus: ‘Winston dashed into the room, radiant, his face bright, his manner keen, one word pouring out on another how he was going to send telegrams to the Mediterranean, the North Sea and God knows where. You could see he was a really happy man.’²⁸

Churchill was nearly forty. He had command of Britain’s mighty navy at a time of major European war. And he was loving every minute of it.