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Winston Churchill was now a gentleman cadet, and so life began for him. Once again it began with a touch of bitterness. He barely qualified for a cavalry cadetship at Sandhurst. Service in the cavalry was no doubt more glamorous than in the infantry, but also immensely more expensive. Naturally the competition for infantry commissions was stiffer. But anyone who had to take his examinations three times, and then got through more by luck than good management, could be thankful to “get his horses.”

So at least his father felt. Lord Randolph looked with anxiety to the future. His own means were almost, his health was completely, exhausted. On a journey to South Africa he had just tried to repair his finances by purchasing gold shares. This was the day of colonial investments. The great gentry could not earn their living at home. They belonged to politics—an honor, not a trade—and to their clubs. Joe Chamberlain was just sending his son Neville (the younger son, too slow-witted for politics) to the island of Andros in the Bahamas. Here he was to raise hemp—it would be a gold mine. It turned out a catastrophe. Young Neville stubbornly held on for seven years of self-denial—and self-deception. The fact that the entire capital, £50,000, was already lost he simply declined to realize.

Money did not grow on trees in South Africa either. The worried Lord Randolph pointed out to his offspring, “In the infantry one has to keep a man; in the cavalry, a man and a horse.”

Papa did not even know that you have to keep two official chargers in the cavalry, and two hunters besides, to say nothing of a string of polo ponies. But let worries be worries and cares be cares; Winston Churchill was mad about horses. Into old age he has remained true to that passion. Riding is more than a sport to him; it is a part of his credo. “No one ever came to grief—except to honorable grief—through riding horses,” he once said. “No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them. Unless, of course, they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.”

In the eighteen months he spent at Sandhurst he became a celebrated horseman. Even at Harrow he had been an excellent fencer, taking the Public School championship in fencing. He was not sport-mad in the new-fangled way; he was an old-fashioned cavalier. His father, though he “galloped through life until he fell” himself, did not understand all this. He warned his son not to become a “social wastrel.”

If his father had understood him better, Winston would probably have been spared all the compulsion, the forms and conventions of Harrow, into which he fitted so badly. The system may be all right for the average sons of the English upper class. In fact Harrow, like Eton, has turned out generations of brilliant youngsters. But Winston Churchill was neither average nor a son of the English aristocratic class alone. The American heritage was deep in his being. Like a regular Yankee lad he would have liked to be apprenticed as a bricklayer’s helper, or run errands, or help his father dress the windows of a greengrocer’s shop. That was what he dreamed of while he was wearing the broad-brimmed straw hat of a Harrow boy. A practical craving for action was deep in the nature of the old-fashioned cavalier-in-the-making. Indeed he would have liked to help his father in politics, too. But when he suggested that he might at least be useful to the secretary, Lord Randolph merely gave him a long look that made the boy shiver.

It was only when Winston made good at Sandhurst that things changed a little. First Lord Randolph took the youngster to the Empire Theatre to see the acrobats and jugglers and lion-tamers, then to Lord Rothschild’s house at Tring, where the young people of the Conservative Party gathered, and finally, highest honor of all, to see his old racing friends. At last father and son would grow to be friends. If only there was a little time.

There was no time.

Winston not only made good, he made very good indeed. In Tactics and Fortifications, the most important two subjects at Sandhurst, he was soon ahead of all his classmates. In Topography, Military Law, Military Administration, the rest of the curriculum, he held his own. When he was tired by long hours of study and parades, he was still never too tired to plunge into the strategical works that his father sent him as a sign of approval. You had only to loose rein and curb, and he would go the right way of his own accord.

Of course there were escapades. At least it seemed at the time as if they were escapades. Today, almost fifty years afterward, we can see his public mission proclaiming itself even in his pieces of boyish tomfoolery.

The battle of the Empire Theatre was the noisiest of these pranks. His father had first taken him there. The Empire, accordingly, was sacred ground, despite the acrobats, jugglers and lion-tamers round about. Here a sort of promenade for young people of both sexes, who even took occasional alcoholic refreshment at the bars, developed in the large space behind the dress circle. Naturally the Sandhurst cadets were always on hand, particularly of a Saturday evening.

But Mrs. Ormiston Chant was against it. She was a puritan crusader, and she started a fierce campaign against the promenade at the Empire Theatre and the bars on both sides. In those happy days all London could get excited over such a problem. A long series of letters to the newspapers supported the clean-up. On the other side an “Entertainment Protection League” formed, determined to defend the rights of man and civic self-determination even at the bar.

The puritans succeeded in getting a sort of barricade put up between the promenade at the Empire and the row of bars. But they reckoned without the Sandhurst cadets. One evening a large group of the young gentlemen appeared, the barricade was torn down amid general enthusiasm, and naturally Winston Churchill celebrated the deed of liberation in a resounding address. It was his maiden speech. The occasion was a mere excuse for him to rise to the higher regions of politics. “You have seen us tear down these barricades tonight; see that you pull down those who are responsible for them at the coming election!” he blared, altogether Lord Randolph’s son. He had, incidentally, prepared his speech with great care, taking pains to have as few words as possible beginning with S.

Next day most of the papers printed leaders about the storming of the barricades at the Empire Theatre. For the first time Winston Churchill was the hero of London.

He finished his studies at Sandhurst, with honors, eighth in a group of a hundred and fifty.

“Did you get your horses?” his father, already a dying man, asked him.

Certainly, he had got his horses all right. He was commissioned to the Fourth—the Queen’s Own—Hussars, who had recently come back to Aldershot from Ireland. The regimental commander was Colonel Brabazon, an old friend of the family. Lord Randolph did grumble a bit at his old friend. “He had no business to turn the boy’s head about going into the Hussars.” He had still not quite given up hope of getting the boy into the Goth Rifles, whose commander, the Duke of Cambridge, had promised to open a back door to his own regiment, and thus to the infantry.

It was one last disappointment. On January 24, 1895, Lord Randolph Churchill died of paralysis at his mother’s home. It was a gentle, painless death, really a dropping off to sleep. Winston stood by his father’s deathbed. “The dunce of the family will take revenge on the whole pack of curs and traitors!” he vowed. He saw his life’s work clearly before him: the name of Lord Randolph Churchill must be cleansed in the sight of his enemies and persecutors, his reputation rehabilitated, the country made to realize that it had not understood one of its greatest and most gifted sons.

In the end, Fate had other intentions. Lord Randolph Churchill sank into oblivion. A greater task awaited Winston Churchill.

From now on the regimental commander stood in loco parentis to Winston. The two were mysteriously linked, for Colonel Brabazon too had a lisp. In his case, indeed, it was not an impediment, but sheer grandeur. “The gwass is veddy gween!” was more or less how he talked. The Colonel showed special kindness to his youngest sub-lieutenant, although in general he was considered a strict disciplinarian. The two remained friends for twenty years, until Brabazon’s death.

Outwardly Colonel Brabazon was nothing but a brilliant soldier and a man of the world. At court, in the clubs and drawing-rooms of Mayfair all doors opened before him, and all hands reached out to greet him. He was an intimate of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward. As he was also an officer famous throughout the army, who had won his spurs and medals in every conceivable colonial war, the earth bowed down to him. He took this quite for granted. “Wheah is the London twain?” he once asked the stationmaster at Aldershot. “Unfortunately gone, Colonel.” “Gone? Bwing anotha one!”

Inwardly these perfectly polished super-gentlemen have a way of being less serene. Colonel Brabazon was a passionate bookworm, able to recite by heart pretty nearly all the famous poetry in the English language—something that he would of course never have admitted. Even less would he have admitted that he, the disciplinarian, was guilty of a long-continued mortal sin against discipline. For more than thirty years he wore a little imperial under his lower lip, whereas the Queen’s Regulations, Section VII, expressly state, “The chin and the under lip are to be shaved.” Of course the army made an exception of Colonel Brabazon, the darling of gods and men—until his regiment was transferred from Ireland to Aldershot. There Sir Evelyn Wood was in command, and he made no exceptions. Hearing one day that the irresistible Brabazon has publicly criticized some measure of his, he sent orders for the Colonel “to appear at his next parade shaved in accordance with the regulations.”

The imperial fell. But Brabazon did not commit suicide; he bore his cross with a smile. Only thereafter nobody was allowed to mention the name of the commandant of Aldershot in his presence.

Such was the man who introduced Winston Churchill into the army of the Queen.

It was a kindly, a joyful introduction. Some happy, carefree months followed. From March to November of 1895 the young officer had the time of his life. Daily he enjoyed the thrill and the charm in the glittering jingle of a cavalry squadron maneuvering at the trot. Every day he was excited anew when the squadron was put to a gallop. The stir of the horses, the clank of their equipment, the thrill of motion, the tossing plumes, the sense of incorporation in a living machine, the suave dignity of the uniform—all these his own words—intoxicated him. The cavalier in him was swept off his feet. That he knew. What he did not know was that the artist in him was also stirring. The picture of the redcoats on white horses in the green countryside stamped itself deep on his consciousness. Years later he was to try to express those glowing colors in oil.

He himself was now as handsome as a picture. The little red-head had grown up into a sandy-haired youth with his hair parted on the left, according to regulations. From his mother he had inherited the high forehead, the prominent brow, the eyes full of inquiry, though usually brightened by a sly twinkle. The slim, aristocratic face with the mobile, blood-filled lips came from Father. There was nothing to hint that in the course of decades that face would grow disturbingly round. The youngest lieutenant of Her Majesty had his picture taken in a gold-laced tunic lavishly decorated with epaulettes, clasps and tassels. In his right hand he held his helmet. His left rested on the sword-pommel, not forgetting the kid glove between hand and pommel.

He was the favorite of the officers’ mess. They were all a crowd of good companions, gay, well-bred, proud. They were the officers—this was what made them so proud—of the only cavalry division in the Kingdom. The Germans at that time had twenty cavalry divisions. But no one in Aldershot bothered his head about that. After all, there would never be another European war. Too bad. People ought to have gone back to the system of mediaeval combat. In those days the lords stepped out in front of their ranks, and disposed of the matter among themselves in knightly fashion. The world belonged to the better rider and swordsman.

Now, with the nineteenth century coming to an end, the world had become considerably more sordid. Even to extract a commission in some Indian punitive expedition you had to use all the craft and guile at your command. You needed pull, connections. There was no other road to heroism, a medal, and a spot of glory in the officers’ mess. That path was jammed. Everyone wanted to slip through. None succeeded so brilliantly as the youngest sub-lieutenant of the Queen’s Own Hussars.

There were three subjects of conversation: war, sport, and the questions of religion and irreligion. Of course these were purely theoretical questions. They could never be immediate and burning ones until the bullets were whistling around your head. What a shame that they would never hear such music!

Among Winston Churchill’s companions of youth some fell in the Boer War, and the great majority in the first World War. Only two or three battered veterans are still alive. These, gouty, but indestructible, are now hunting through the townships where they are pensioned, in search of Hitler’s parachute raiders.

The young English officers, unlike their German colleagues, did not live a narrow, secluded, barrack-yard existence. Nor were they, like them, regarded as beings of a higher order. No British Prime Minister would confess, as the Imperial Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg did, that the greatest pride of his life was his position as a reserve major in the Landwehr, the National Guard. But in England promising subalterns were welcome guests in political society. It was not at all unusual for a man to move from the barracks to the House of Commons.

Young Churchill’s celebrity soon spread beyond Aldershot. He was invited to a party at Devonshire House after the Ministerial banquet. Here he met Mr. George Curzon, the newly appointed Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Mr. Curzon was later to be a great British statesman, Viceroy of India, Chief of the Foreign Office. In 1895 he was still a rather bashful young man who nevertheless explained to Second Lieutenant Churchill on the evening of their first meeting that although his position was a small one, he hoped, as the representative of the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, to have a share in making the foreign policy.

Winston Churchill was much agitated on hearing this. Was some other youth to make a swift career ahead of him under his very nose? A few days later he himself gave his companions a small dinner, and the toast he proposed was to “Those yet under twenty-one years of age who in twenty years will control the destinies of the British Empire.”

It was a farewell party. For in Cuba a rebellion had broken out against Spanish rule. It was such a chance as could no longer be found in the Empire at all. The seven seas were sunning themselves in deceptive peace. But after seven months’ peaceful soldiering Winston Churchill was tired of peace. A friend of his father’s, Sir Henry Wolff, was serving as British Ambassador at Madrid. Through Wolff’s mediation Churchill was invited by the Captain-General of Spain, the famous Marshal Martinez Campos, to join in his expedition to suppress the rebellion.

Photo from European

EARLY MILITARY CAREER

Winston Churchill at the age of twenty-one in the uniform of the Fourth Hussars

And so Churchill could make comfortable—well, not exactly comfortable, but cheap—use of the ten weeks of leave that he had coming to him from his regiment. Having spent all his money on polo ponies he could not afford a hunting trip to Africa in any case.

All of his money meant, aside from the ridiculously small pay of a lieutenant, a yearly allowance of five hundred pounds from his mother. He knew that Lady Randolph, now a widow, could not easily save this sum from out of her dowry, the only capital she had left after the death of her husband. Lady Randolph at forty was as fascinating as on the day of her debut; but if it costs money to be a beautiful woman, it costs even more to remain a beautiful woman. Winston’s relationship with his mother was now like that between brother and sister, and he was resolved not to be an expense to her much longer. Had he not been a first-class writer at school? He offered himself to a penny paper as Cuban war correspondent. He sent home five travel articles, at five pounds each. It was to be a few years yet before he got $2500 per article, making him the highest-paid journalist in the world next to Lloyd George, even $500 ahead of the Duce, who has never forgiven Churchill his advantage.

Early in November, 1895, Churchill left for Havana. He had to change boats at New York. And so for the first time he saw his mother’s home city. A friend of the Jerome family, Mr. Bourke Cockran, was waiting for him at the pier, and looked after the young visitor with good old-fashioned American hospitality.

Bourke Cockran was a remarkable man. His huge skull, gleaming eyes and mobile countenance physically reminded young Churchill of the portraits of Charles James Fox. Mr. Cockran’s physical appearance was impressive enough; the impression was strengthened the moment he opened his mouth. It was the first time that Winston Churchill had ever heard the dynamic American language from the mouth of one of its best speakers in that age. Even during his early days he had a fine ear for the power of language, which later was to be his own special weapon. He had never heard such conversation as Mr. Cockran’s “either in point, in rotundity, in antithesis, or in comprehension.” Even decades later he still felt that he had never met another speaker with the acuteness and individuality of this American politician.

Originally Bourke Cockran was a Democrat and a great man in Tammany. Mr. Bryan’s Free Silver campaign drove him into the Republican camp, where he soon stood out as a leader. Still, when the currency issue was out of the way, he returned to his old party. Of course both sides reproached him with inconsistency. But Mr. Cockran always hotly denied this accusation. “Frequently recurring to the first principles of the American Constitution,” he declared, his complete scheme of political thought permitted him to present a sincere and effective front in every direction according to changing circumstances. He was individualist, democrat, capitalist—but above all a Free-Trader, adhering to the one doctrine that united all the others. Throughout his life he fought against socialists, inflationists, and protectionists; and indeed Bourke Cockran’s life was one endless fight.

This New York politician, more than any other one man, served as Winston Churchill’s model. He too left his traditional party, and later returned to it. He too was individualist, democrat, capitalist—though without capital—and Free-Trader above all. He too has battled throughout his career against socialists, inflationists and protectionists. And he too has maintained with all his might the lifelong opinion that “first principles” are what count, and not the changing needs of parties.

But years were still to pass before this realization matured in his mind. Meanwhile the two young Englishmen took a look at New York by day and night. For in the company of our knight errant there was another adventurous officer, Reginald Barnes, who was to be a Divisional Commander in France during the first World War.

Arrived in Havana, the two young subalterns were treated as members of an important mission, sent at a time of stress by a mighty power and old ally. The harder they tried to clear up the apparent misunderstanding, the more profound was the respect surrounding them. They had no objections when this respect took the form of delivering immense shipments of oranges and boxes of pitch-black cigars to their hotel. But they felt out of place when they were honored as the secret emissaries of Great Britain. After all, their expedition was a mere private matter.

Here Winston Churchill was mistaken. To the Spaniards there was no such thing as a private matter when the fate of their crown colony, the Pearl of the Antilles, was in question. With an astonishment that gradually grew into a sort of admiration, the English officer learned that the idea of colonies was not, as he had supposed, a British monopoly. Other nations felt their colonial missions equally strongly, even though they might not accomplish that mission with the same imperialist genius. He made note of this Cuban lesson, and at the outbreak of the second World War Churchill was among the champions of the thesis that the natural wealth of the earth should be accessible to all nations and peoples.

Otherwise he did not find much that was admirable about the Spanish expedition. In his first travel letter he wrote: “While the Spanish authorities are masters of the art of suppressing the truth, the Cubans are adepts in inventing falsehoods.” Nor was he much charmed with the secret devices that were used in this war. He referred to the rebels’ intention to fire the sugar-cane crop by means of phosphorus, thus starting a conflagration without exposing the culprits to detection. Such fighting methods were not taught at Aldershot; he thought them unworthy of a gentleman. He was not to have a much higher opinion of the dive bombers, parachute-flyers and Fifth Columnists when the time came. He would even have some apology to make to the half-naked and half-starved Cuban rebels when he found himself confronted with Mr. Hitler’s methods.

His second story as a war correspondent dealt with the difficulty of finding his own army. Only after infinite complications and confusion did he succeed in joining the mobile column under the command of General Valdez, which had just left Santa Clara for Sanctus Spiritus. Between the two towns were forty miles of road flanked on both sides by the rebels. “They are everywhere and nowhere,” declared a friendly Spanish lieutenant who answered to the surprising name of Juan O’Donell, and was a son of the Duke of Tetuan. “Fifty of our horsemen can go where they please—two can’t go anywhere.”

It was really a bandit war—petty criminal fighting for a great cause. This led Churchill in his second report to make a remark whose spirit he has remained true to all his life: “I sympathize with the revolution—not with the revolutionaries!”

The Daily Graphic published his five reports simply with his initials, with no signature.

Sitting down to a very simple dinner, which however was served in polished grandeur, the English war tourist explained to the Spanish Dukes’ sons and other Señores why he sympathized with the revolution. After all, it was the Cubans’ own country, and they wanted to be free men, and—

—and ping, ping, enemy bullets whizzed from ambush about the officers’ table. The Señores jumped up in panic. Only Winston Churchill did not stir. On the contrary he bit heartily into his cold drumstick. He bent down to do so. A bullet flew over his head, missing him by a hair. Had he really a charmed life?

Or was he thus imperturbable and wise even in youth? “I feel ridiculously old,” he wrote to his mother the following day. It was his twenty-first birthday.

He took home another lesson from the expedition. It struck him that the Spanish infantry was able to march eighteen or nineteen hours a day in that murderous climate without looking in the least weary by evening. What was the reason? The siesta, of course! The day was carefully divided up: eight miles’ march in the early hours of the morning, ending by nine o’clock. Then breakfast, an important meal with coffee and stew for the troops, and the greenest of grass for the horses. Then the siesta—sleep until two o’clock. Then marching until darkness. Winston Churchill acquired the siesta habit. He has found it most useful in the crises he has been through. As First Lord of the Admiralty in the first World War he discovered he could add two hours to his working day by taking a short nap after lunch. It is only in the present war that he has surrendered the habit of a lifetime. The old man in a hurry has not another second to lose.

As if in belated celebration of his twenty-first birthday, the following day brought the first skirmish of any consequence. Of course Churchill and his English companion marched immediately beside the general who led the infantry attack. The rebels let the Spanish troops come up to within three hundred yards; then white puffs of smoke began to go up all along the edge of the woods, and the first casualties fell around Churchill.

The infantry replied with rapid fire. They slunk up to the deadly forest at the double, Churchill still in the first rank, as cool as if he were quite uninvolved, admired the fighting spirit of the Spanish soldiers. Excellent troops, he said, but still they were not likely to bring the Cuban adventure to a speedy end. He stood in the midst of the fire-spouting jungle, as casual as if it were the parade ground of Aldershot. Hearing the rattle of Mauser pistols around him, he realized that the rebels had fled, and that there were merely a few of those left behind being liquidated. Of course methodical pursuit of the enemy was not possible in the impenetrable primeval forest.

General Valdez’ column reached its goal at La Jicotea. The two English subalterns’ leave had expired. When Churchill bade good-bye to General Martinez Campos the latter hung the Order of Military Merit, First Class, around his neck.

Twenty years later Don Alfonso, King of Spain, bestowed on him still another order for services in Cuba to the army of the kingdom. As he did so, the monarch whispered: “Allow me the pleasure. I am delighted to honor an Englishman. You know, the common people and I are the only ones in Spain who love England.”

For Winston Churchill the Cuban adventure always had meaning. Not because of the rain of bullets in whose midst he stood. Since that time more things than bullets have rained around his head. No, it was because this was his first irruption into print.