Gandhi & Churchill (18 page)

From Macaulay and history he turned to Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations,
Henry Hallam’s
Constitutional History,
William Lecky’s
Rise and Influence of Rationalism,
and Schopenhauer, Plato, Darwin, and Pascal. (“I read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium,” he told his astonished family, who had never seen him read even a single book.) Then he picked up a volume that had been recommended by his commanding officer: Winwood Reade’s
The Martyrdom of Man
. Its impact, as he remembered later, was intense. Reade’s theme reinforced the lessons from Macaulay: history as the story of the triumph of modern progress and science over primitive cruelty and superstition.

Born in 1838, Winwood Reade traveled widely in Africa and had been a correspondent of Charles Darwin as well as a keen proponent of evolution. Indeed,
The Martyrdom of Man
was an early manifesto of what would later be called Social Darwinism. It presented history as a single process of the rise and survival of the fittest, showing how, in Reade’s words, “our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past.”
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The book made an indelible impression on the young Churchill. (Another fan was the young H. G. Wells.) He was also struck by
Martyrdom of Man
’s devastating critique of Christianity and of religious faith as reflections of man’s most backward tendencies. Reade’s unabashed atheism left Winston, by his own admission, with “a predominantly secular view” of life and human nature that lasted until his death. More than half a century later he would querulously ask his doctor how any trained physician could possibly believe in an afterlife.
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Reade’s bleak picture of the individual as helpless and alone in the universe, an “infant crying in the night,” however, was balanced by his optimistic image of man’s progress and civilization thanks to the power of science. Civilization would outlast barbarism, Reade explained, because its virtues were of a “higher,” less brutishly material type. “We cannot say that a good man will always overcome a knave; but the evolutionist will not hesitate to affirm that the nation with the highest ideals would succeed.”
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That last quotation comes not from Reade but from Churchill himself. It is found in the novel he started writing while in Bangalore, entitled
Affairs of State
. (Later he renamed it after the novel’s hero,
Savrola.
) “All of my philosophy is put into the mouth of the hero,” Winston told his mother, including his new secularist view of man and nature, which was bleakly confirmed by his reading of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
and Malthus’s
Essay on Population
. Life is “the struggle between vitality and decay,” Savrola says at one point, “between energy and indolence; a struggle that always ends in silence.”
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Later, Churchill’s view of life would become softer and more nuanced; the old man would be more forgiving of the world than his twentysomething predecessor. But the rejection of a religious framework remained fundamental to his philosophy of life, and it drew the crucial battle line between himself and Gandhi.

For Gandhi, God is everywhere and the starting point for all things. For Churchill, He is nowhere. In a universe without God, or at least without the immanent presence of divinity, Churchill found redemption in the unfolding of history itself, as the story of man’s biological and cultural ascent. If, as Savrola says, “nature never considers the individual; she only looks at the average fitness of the species,” then Churchill believed nature had invested the species’s best hope in those nations that pushed progress forward, as opposed to those that fought to hold it back—even though it must all end in extinction and oblivion.

Reade’s Social Darwinism would also underline Churchill’s belief in England’s civilizing mission and reinforced Gibbon’s verdict that Rome’s weakness allowed barbarism and superstition to defeat civilization. Four decades later Churchill would see the new barbarism in figures like Hitler and Stalin, who seemed to him to be, in historian John Lukacs’s words, the “reincarnation of an ancient evil” but also something “terribly modern”: the face of modern man’s slide back into brutish violence and the worship of power.
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To Churchill, the figure who most embodied the second threat to civilization, that of superstition and fanaticism, would be Gandhi. By rejecting Western standards of science, law, and civilization, Gandhi rejected what Churchill saw as man’s one hope for salvation, just as Gandhi’s constant appeal to his religious faith seemed gross hypocrisy. Eventually Churchill would come to see Gandhi as the embodiment of a benighted and hieratic Hinduism, with its “shrines and burning ghats…priests and ascetics,” a religion with “mysterious practices and multiform ritual…unchanged through the centuries, untouched by the West.”
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The barefoot Gandhi, with his
dhoti
and shawl, seemed the modern version of the fanatical Egyptian monks whom Gibbon had described, coming out of the desert to “overspread and darken the Christian world” on the eve of Rome’s collapse and destroy the pagan classical tradition. In this way the monks had rendered the Roman Empire demoralized and culturally helpless in facing the marauding German tribes. Gandhi and his supporters must have seemed determined to do the same to the British Empire.

No wonder that Churchill’s favorite epithet for Gandhi would be “fakir” and “fanatic.” Gandhi was more than just a threat to British rule in India. He became a threat to everything Churchill believed in, and in the end Churchill would fight him with everything he had.

After seven months of reading, on April 6, 1897, the twenty-two-year-old subaltern jotted down his new political credo, which summed up his experiences in Bangalore. Britain’s future, he believed, rested on its detachment from world affairs. “Isolated if you like,” he blithely wrote, adding, “A mighty navy must keep the seas. The army may be reduced to a training depot for India with one army corps for petty expeditions.” Having thus solved the problem of imperial defense, he turned to the empire itself. He saw it dividing into two halves. On one side would be the white colonies like Canada and Australia, with whom Britain must form an imperial federation for joint security.

But “East of Suez Democratic reins are impossible,” he wrote. “India must be governed on old principles,” meaning the principles of his father and men like General Roberts. In capsule form, it was the credo he would hold for the rest of his life.
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“Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority,” he would say during the Second World War. “We
are
superior.” Fixed ideas, Prince Metternich once said, are like fixed guns: “They are dangerous for those who stand or move along its line of trajectory.” This would be also true of Churchill’s view of India. Over the next decades Churchill would deal with, even befriend, men and women of many different political persuasions. He would show remarkable flexibility on key issues of national policy and imperial strategy, including during two world wars.

But on India he would be prepared to wreck friendships and his own career. In the dark days of 1942 he would even consider resigning as prime minister. Almost every other policymaker on India—Sir Edwin Montagu, Stanley Baldwin, Leo Amery, Lord Irwin, Lord Wavell—all would feel the furious fire from Churchill when they dared to cross his line of sight on the subject. “India,” wrote Leo Amery, who held the India secretaryship during the Second World War, when the conflict with Indian nationalism and Gandhi reached a climax, “or any form of self-government for coloured peoples, raises in him a wholly uncontrollable complex.” Churchill’s outbursts were sometimes so intemperate that Amery wondered in his diary if “on the subject of India, he is really quite sane.” Certainly there seemed to be “no relation between his manner, physical and intellectual,” on India and on the other issues affecting the war, even the gravest and most urgent.
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Indeed there was not. Because with India it was not only his own vision of the British Empire and civilization that he had to uphold. Over his shoulder loomed another shadowy figure, a man in a top hat with an exquisite mustache, bulging eyes, and a ferocious contempt for his son’s shortcomings. On India, at least, Winston would never let down the father he had barely known, and whose approval he otherwise never hoped to hear.

A month after formulating his credo, Churchill left Bombay for London, “in sweltering heat, rough weather, and fearful seasickness.”
²⁴
British officers in India had three months’ leave every year, so Churchill decided to spend his at home. He stopped first in Italy and was able to visit Rome for the first time, seeing it through Gibbon’s eyes as the seat of vanished imperial power and magnificence. He then arrived in the new seat of imperial power, London, just as it was gearing up to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

Eighteen hundred and ninety-seven was a watershed date for Great Britain. In her sixtieth year as queen, Victoria presided over an empire that was more populous and more extensive than any in world history; it was now more than a third larger than it had been when Winston was born. One in five people on the planet now owed some form of allegiance to her. The parades, pageants, and celebrations that year, including a massive display of the Royal Navy at Spithead on June 26, were emblems of a great historical accomplishment and global responsibility—as well as global risk. Other Western powers, including France, Belgium, Germany, and soon the United States, were busy carving out colonial empires of their own. Britain still occupied the imperial summit. But the winds there were turning colder, and the view was becoming less clear.

On July 26, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, a patriotic association called the Primrose League held a public outdoor meeting in Bath. Their speaker was the freckled and sunburned young officer just returned from India. It was Winston’s very first political speech. Already his mind was turning to possibly standing for Parliament, as a Tory like his father. His remarks to the picnickers and onlookers in Bath sounded the first notes of what was to come.

He started with the obvious: “In this Jubilee year, our Empire has reached the height of its glory and power.” Some were saying that “now we should begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage, and Rome had declined.” Winston asked his audience not to believe these “croakers,” as he called them. It was time for true Britons to show the world that “the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen.” He assured them that he and his generation would continue to “carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilization, and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
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The crowd cheered and the band played. Winston grinned and waved back. Those reassuring words in the warm summer sunshine had conjured up a familiar sense of serene self-satisfaction. But not very far away another man recently back from India was watching the parades and pomp of the Jubilee celebration. The poet Rudyard Kipling had a very different take on what it all meant. Indeed, the words he wrote were almost a warning to the smiling and confident young officer:

If drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

At the same time, India was suddenly back in Winston’s thoughts, thanks to the newspapers. Pathan tribesmen on the frontier between India and Afghanistan were on the warpath, and three brigades from the Indian Army were being sent up into the Malakand Valley under veteran General Bindon Blood to confront them.

Here was a chance to get into some real fighting, Winston thought, the one military experience that still eluded him. Churchill had actually met General Blood the previous summer. As it happened, Blood had been one of Jennie Churchill’s ardent suitors, and Winston had extracted from the general the promise that if he ever led troops against the Pathans again, he would bring Winston along with him.

At once Winston fired off a cable to Blood reminding him of his promise. He scrambled to catch the next boat back to India, leaving behind a new stack of books, his polo sticks, and his pet dog Peas.
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It was August, the worst time of the year for traveling on the Red Sea, and the steamer’s crowded and stifling dining saloon reeked of stale food. “But these physical discomforts were nothing beside my mental anxieties,” Winston remembered later, certainly nothing beside his fear that the fighting might already be over and that he would arrive too late.
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When he reached Bombay, he found a brief reply from General Blood. “Very difficult; no vacancies,” it read. “Come up as a correspondent, will try to fit you in. B.B.” At Bangalore Churchill browbeat his commanding officer into extending his leave (his second in five months!), while back in England his mother arranged for any dispatches he wrote to be carried by the
Daily Telegraph
at £5 a column. Winston was ready to go to war. Soon he would be bundled on a sweltering train, “deeply-shuttered and blinded from the blistering sun,” for the five-day journey to Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier province and jumping-off point for the Khyber Pass and the Malakand Valley.
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