Читать книгу My Early Life: The Autobiography - Winston Churchill - Страница 8

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I must now introduce the reader to a man of striking character and presence who at this point began to play an important part in my life. Colonel Brabazon commanded the 4th Hussars. This regiment had arrived at Aldershot from Ireland in the preceding year and was now quartered in the East Cavalry Barracks. Colonel Brabazon had been a friend of my family for many years, and I had met him several times during my school days. I was complimented by receiving as a Sandhurst cadet an invitation to dine with him in the regimental Mess. This was a great treat. In those days the Mess of a cavalry regiment presented an impressive spectacle to a youthful eye. Twenty or thirty officers, all magnificently attired in blue and gold, assembled round a table upon which shone the plate and trophies gathered by the regiment in two hundred years of sport and campaigning. It was like a State banquet. In an all-pervading air of glitter, affluence, ceremony and veiled discipline, an excellent and lengthy dinner was served to the strains of the regimental string band. I received the gayest of welcomes, and having it would seem conducted myself with discretion and modesty, I was invited again on several occasions. After some months my mother told me that Colonel Brabazon was anxious that I should go into his regiment, but that my father had said 'No.' Indeed it appeared he still believed it would be possible by using his influence to secure me an infantry commission after all. The Duke of Cambridge had expressed displeasure at my diversion from the 60th Rifles and had declared that there were ways in which the difficulties might, when the time came, be surmounted. 'Meanwhile,' my father had written, 'Brabazon, who I know is one of the finest soldiers in the Army, had no business to go and turn that boy's head about going into the 4th Hussars.'

However, the head was decidedly turned. After my father's last sad home-coming he could take but little interest in my affairs. My mother explained to him how matters had arranged themselves, and he seemed quite willing, and even pleased, that I should become a Cavalry Officer. Indeed, one of the last remarks he made to me was, 'Have you got your horses?'

*****

My father died on January 24 in the early morning. Summoned from a neighbouring house where I was sleeping, I ran in the darkness across Grosvenor Square, then lapped in snow. His end was quite painless. Indeed he had long been in stupor. All my dreams of comradeship with him, of entering Parliament at his side and in his support, were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.

I was now in the main the master of my fortunes. My mother was always at hand to help and advise; but I was now in my 21st year and she never sought to exercise parental control. Indeed she soon became an ardent ally, furthering my plans and guarding my interests with all her influence and boundless energy. She was still at forty young, beautiful and fascinating. We worked together on even terms, more like brother and sister than mother and son. At least so it seemed to me. And so it continued to the end.

*****

In March 1895 I was gazetted to the 4th Hussars. I joined the Regiment six weeks earlier in anticipation, and was immediately set with several other subalterns to the stiff and arduous training of a Recruit Officer. Every day long hours were passed in the Riding-School, at Stables or on the Barrack Square. I was fairly well fitted for the riding-school by the two long courses through which I had already gone; but I must proclaim that the 4th Hussars exceeded in severity anything I had previously experienced in military equitation.

In those days the principle was that the newly-joined Officer was given a recruit's training for the first six months. He rode and drilled afoot with the troopers and received exactly the same instruction and training as they did! At the head of the file in the riding-school, or on the right of the squad on the Square, he had to try to set an example to the men. This was a task not always possible to discharge with conspicuous success. Mounting and dismounting from a bare-backed horse at the trot or canter; jumping a high bar without stirrups or even saddle, sometimes with hands clasped behind one's back; jogging at a fast trot with nothing but the horse's hide between your knees, brought their inevitable share of mishaps. Many a time did I pick myself up shaken and sore from the riding-school tan and don again my little gold braided pork-pie cap, fastened on the chin by a boot-lace strap, with what appearance of dignity I could command, while twenty recruits grinned furtively but delightedly to see their Officer suffering the same misfortunes which it was their lot so frequently to undergo. I had the ill-luck, at an early stage in these proceedings, to strain my tailor's muscle on which one's grip upon a horse depends. In consequence I suffered tortures. Galvanic treatment was then unknown; one simply had to go on tearing at a lacerated muscle with the awful penalty of being thought a booby, if one begged off even for a day.

The Regimental Riding Master, nicknamed 'Jocko', who specialized in being a terrible tyrant, happened during these weeks to be in an exceedingly touchy temper. One of the senior Subalterns had inserted in the Aldershot Times as an advertisement: 'Major ——, Professor of Equitation, East Cavalry Barracks. Hunting taught in 12 lessons and steeple-chasing in 18.' This had drawn upon him a flood of ridicule which perhaps led him to suppose that every smile that ever flitted across the face of one of his riding-school class was due to some inward satisfaction at his expense.

However, within measure, I am all for youth being made willingly to endure austerities; and for the rest it was a gay and lordly life that now opened upon me. Even before being released from the riding-school the young officers were often permitted to ride out with their troops at exercise or on route marches and even sometimes to ride serre-file1 in actual drill. There is a thrill and charm of its own in the glittering jingle of a cavalry squadron manoeuvring at the trot; and this deepens into joyous excitement when the same evolutions are performed at 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 combine to make cavalry drill a fine thing in itself.

1 The third rank of a troop which being only partially filled by supernumeraries, interlocks with the front rank of the following troop whenever the squadron is in column.

I must explain for the benefit of the ignorant reader that cavalry manoeuvre in column and fight in line, and that cavalry drill resolves itself into swift and flexible changes from one formation to the other. Thus by wheeling or moving in échelon a front can always be presented by a squadron almost at any moment in any direction. The same principles apply to the movements of larger bodies of horsemen; and regiments, brigades and even divisions of cavalry could be made to present a front in an incredibly short time as the preliminary to that greatest of all cavalry events—the Charge.

It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns. But at Aldershot in 1895 none of these horrors had broken upon mankind. The Dragoon, the Lancer and above all, as we believed, the Hussar, still claimed their time-honoured place upon the battlefield. War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science. From the moment that either of these meddlers and muddlers was allowed to take part in actual fighting, the doom of War was sealed. Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill. From the moment Democracy was admitted to, or rather forced itself upon the battlefield, War ceased to be a gentleman's game. To Hell with it! Hence the League of Nations.

All the same it was a very fine thing in the '90's to see General Luck—the Inspector-General—manoeuvre a cavalry division of thirty or forty squadrons as if it were one single unit. When this massive and splendid array assumed a preparatory formation and was then ordered to change front through an angle of perhaps 15 degrees, the outside brigade had to gallop two miles in a cloud of dust so thick that you could not see even five yards before your face, and twenty falls and half a dozen accidents were the features of a morning's drill. And when the line was finally formed and the regiment or brigade was committed to the charge, one could hardly help shouting in joyous wrath.

Afterwards when we were home in barracks, these enthusiasms in my case were corrected by remembering that the Germans had twenty cavalry divisions each as imposing as this our only darling, of which I formed a part; and secondly by wondering what would happen if half a dozen spoil-sports got themselves into a hole with a Maxim gun and kept their heads.

Then there were splendid parades when Queen Victoria sat in her carriage at the saluting point and when the whole Aldershot garrison, perhaps 25,000 strong, blue and gold, scarlet and steel, passed before her, Horse, Foot and Artillery, not forgetting the Engineers and Army Service Corps, in a broad and scintillating flood. It seemed very wrong that all these European Powers,—France, Germany, Austria and Russia—could do this same thing in their countries on the same day in twenty different places. I wondered why our Statesmen did not arrange an International Convention whereby each country should be represented in case of war, just as they are at the Olympic Games, by equal teams, and we by a single complete army corps which should embody all that was best in the race, and so settle the sovereignty of the world. However, the Victorian Ministers were very unenterprising; they missed their chance; they simply let War pass out of the hands of the experts and properly-trained persons who knew all about it, and reduced it to a mere disgusting matter of Men, Money and Machinery.

Those of us who already began to understand the sort of demoralisation that was going to come over War were irresistibly drawn to the conclusion that the British Army would never again take part in a European conflict. How could we, when we only had about one army corps with one Cavalry Division together with the Militia—God help them—and the Volunteers—Hurrah!? Certainly no Jingo Lieutenant or Fire-eating Staff Officer in the Aldershot Command in 1895, even in his most sanguine moments, would have believed that our little army would again be sent to Europe. Yet there was to come a day when a Cavalry Captain—Haig by name—who drilled with us in the Long Valley this spring was to feel himself stinted because in a most important battle, he could marshal no more than forty British Divisions together with the First American Army Corps—in all a bare six hundred thousand men—and could only support them by less than 400 brigades of Artillery. I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

*****

Colonel Brabazon was an impoverished Irish landlord whose life had been spent in the British Army. He personified the heroes of Ouida. From his entry into the Grenadier Guards in the early '60's he had been in the van of fashion. He was one of the brightest military stars in London society. A close lifelong friendship had subsisted between him and the Prince of Wales. At Court, in the Clubs, on the racecourse, in the hunting field, he was accepted as a most distinguished figure. Though he had always remained a bachelor, he was by no means a misogynist. As a young man he must have been exceptionally good-looking. He was exactly the right height for a man to be. He was not actually six feet, but he looked it. Now, in his prime, his appearance was magnificent. His clean-cut symmetrical features, his bright grey eyes and strong jaw, were shown to the best advantage by a moustache which the Kaiser might well have taken as his unattainable ideal. To all this he added the airs and manners of the dandies of the generation before his own, and an inability real or affected to pronounce the letter 'R'. Apt and experienced in conversation, his remarkable personality was never at a loss in any company, polite or otherwise.

His military career had been long and varied. He had had to leave the Grenadier Guards after six years through straitened finances, and passed through a period of serious difficulty. He served as a gentleman volunteer—a great privilege—in the Ashanti Campaign of 1874. Here he so distinguished himself that there was a strong movement in high circles to restore to him his commission. This almost unprecedented favour was in fact accorded him. The Prince of Wales was most anxious that he should be appointed to his own regiment—the 10th Hussars—in those days probably the most exclusive regiment in the Army. However, as no vacancy was immediately available he was in the interval posted to an infantry regiment of the Line. To the question, 'What do you belong to now, Brab?' he replied, 'I never can wemember, but they have gween facings and you get at 'em from Waterloo.'

Of the stationmaster at Aldershot he inquired on one occasion in later years: 'Where is the London twain?' 'It has gone, Colonel.' 'Gone! Bwing another'.

Translated at length into the 10th Hussars he served with increasing reputation through the Afghan War in 1878 and 1879 and through the fierce fighting round Suakim in 1884. As he had gained two successive brevets upon active service he was in army rank actually senior to the Colonel of his own regiment. This produced at least one embarrassing situation conceivable only in the British Army of those days. The Colonel of the 10th had occasion to find fault with Brabazon's squadron and went so far in his displeasure as to order it home to barracks. Brabazon was deeply mortified. However, a few weeks later the 10th Hussars were brigaded for some manoeuvres with another cavalry regiment. Regimental seniority no longer ruled, and Brabazon's army rank gave him automatically the command of the brigade. Face to face with his own commanding officer, now for the moment his subordinate, Brabazon had repeated the same remarks and cutting sentences so recently addressed to him, and finished by the harsh order, 'Take your wegiment home, Sir!' The fashionable part of the army had been agog with this episode. That Brabazon had the law on his side could not be gainsaid. In those days men were accustomed to assert their rights in a rigid manner which would now be thought unsuitable. There were, however, two opinions upon the matter.

As it was clear that his regimental seniority would never enable him to command the 10th, the War Office had offered him in 1893 the command of the 4th Hussars. This was in itself an inevitable reflection upon the senior officers of that regiment. No regiment relishes the arrival of a stranger with the idea of 'smartening them up'; and there must have been a great deal of tension when this terrific Colonel, blazing with medals and clasps, and clad in all his social and military prestige, first assumed command of a regiment which had even longer traditions than the 10th Hussars. Brabazon made little attempt to conciliate. On the contrary he displayed a masterful confidence which won not only unquestioning obedience from all, but intense admiration, at any rate from the Captains and subalterns. Some of the seniors, however, were made to feel their position. 'And what chemist do you get this champagne fwom?' he inquired one evening of an irascible Mess president.

To me, apart from service matters in which he was a strict disciplinarian, he was always charming. But I soon discovered that behind all his talk of war and sport, which together with questions of religion or irreligion and one or two other topics formed the staple of Mess conversation, there lay in the Colonel's mind a very wide reading. When, for instance, on one occasion I quoted, 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb', and Brabazon asked 'Where do you get that fwom?' I had replied with some complacency that, though it was attributed often to the Bible, it really occurred in Sterne's Sentimental Journey. 'Have you ever wead it?' he asked, in the most innocent manner. Luckily I was not only naturally truthful, but also on my guard. I admitted that I had not. It was, it seemed, one of the Colonel's special favourites.

The Colonel, however, had his own rebuffs. Shortly before I joined the regiment he came into sharp collision with no less a personage than Sir Evelyn Wood who then commanded at Aldershot. Brabazon had not only introduced a number of minor irregularities, mostly extremely sensible, into the working uniform of the regiment—as for instance chrome yellow stripes for drill instead of gold lace—but he had worn for more than thirty years a small 'imperial' beard under his lower lip. This was of course contrary to the Queen's Regulations, Section VII: 'The chin and underlip are to be shaved (except by pioneers, who will wear beards).' But in thirty years of war and peace no superior authority had ever challenged Brabazon's imperial. He had established it as a recognized privilege and institution of which no doubt he was enormously proud. No sooner had he brought his regiment into the Aldershot command than Sir Evelyn Wood was eager to show himself no respecter of persons. Away went the chrome yellow stripes on the pantaloons, away went the comfortable serge jumpers in which the regiment was accustomed to drill; back came the gold lace stripes and the tight-fitting cloth stable-jackets of the old regime. Forced to obey, the Colonel carried his complaints unofficially to the War Office. There was no doubt he had reason on his side. In fact within a year these sensible and economical innovations were imposed compulsorily upon the whole army. But no one at the War Office or in London dared override Sir Evelyn Wood, armed as he was with the text of the Queen's Regulations. As soon as Sir Evelyn Wood learned that Brabazon had criticized his decisions, he resolved upon a bold stroke. He sent the Colonel a written order to appear upon his next parade 'shaved in accordance with the regulations.' This was of course a mortal insult. Brabazon had no choice but to obey. That very night he made the sacrifice, and the next morning appeared disfigured before his men, who were aghast at the spectacle, and shocked at the tale they heard. The Colonel felt this situation so deeply that he never referred to it on any occasion. Except when obliged by military duty, he never spoke to Sir Evelyn Wood again.

Such was the man under whom I now had the honour to serve and whose friendship I enjoyed, warm and unbroken, through the remaining twenty years of his life. The Colonel was a die-hard Tory of the strictest and most robust school. His three main and fundamental tenets were: Protection, Conscription, and the revival of the Contagious Diseases Acts. He judged Governments and politicians according as they conformed or seemed likely to conform to his programme. But nothing in politics, not even the Free Trade controversy, nor the Lloyd George budget, nor the Ulster quarrel, severed our relations.

*****

We were all delighted in the summer of 1895 to read that the Radical Home Rule Government had been beaten in the House of Commons and that Lord Salisbury was again forming an Administration. Everybody liked Lord Rosebery because he was thought to be patriotic. But then he had such bad companions! These bad companions dragged him down, and he was so weak, so they said, that he had to give way to them against his true convictions. Then too he was kept in office by the Irish Nationalists, who everyone knew would never be satisfied till they had broken up the British Empire. I put in a word for John Morley, but they said he was one of the worst of the lot and mixed up with Fenians and traitors of every kind. Particular pleasure was expressed that the Government should have been defeated for having let down the supply of cordite. Supposing a war came, how would you fight without cordite? Someone said that really there was plenty of cordite, but that any stick was good enough to beat such dogs! Certainly the Liberals were very unpopular at this time in Aldershot. The General Election proved that the rest of the country took our view, for Lord Salisbury was returned with a majority of 150, and the Conservatives ruled the country for ten years during which they fought a number of the wars which form a considerable part of this account. Indeed they were never turned out until they went in for Protection, and then the Liberals came in and made the greatest of wars. But all that is stopped now.

I was invited to the party at Devonshire House after the Ministerial banquets. There I found all the new Ministers looking very smart in their blue and gold uniforms. These uniforms were not so magnificent as ours, but they had a style about them which commended them to my eye. I talked especially with Mr. George Curzon, the new Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He looked very splendid and prosperous, and received my congratulations with much affability. He explained that although his post was a small one, yet it carried with it the representation in the House of Commons of the Foreign Office and all that that implied. So he hoped he would have a share in making the foreign policy instead of only defending and explaining it. There were also some of those poor young men who had been left out; but they had to smile more gaily than anyone else, and go round congratulating all the people who had got the jobs these poor ones wanted for themselves. As no one had even considered me for any of these posts, I felt free to give rein to jealousy.

*****

At this time Mrs. Everest died. As soon as I heard she was seriously ill I travelled up to London to see her. She lived with her sister's family in North London. She knew she was in danger, but her only anxiety was for me. There had been a heavy shower of rain. My jacket was wet. When she felt it with her hands she was greatly alarmed for fear I should catch cold. The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again. Her only desire was to see my brother Jack, and this unhappily could not be arranged. I set out for London to get a good specialist, and the two doctors consulted together upon the case, which was one of peritonitis. I had to return to Aldershot by the midnight train for a very early morning parade. As soon as it was over, I returned to her bedside. She still knew me, but she gradually became unconscious. Death came very easily to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith, that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived. I now telegraphed to the clergyman with whom she had served nearly a quarter of a century before. He lived in Cumberland. He had a long memory for faithful service. We met at the graveside. He had become an Archdeacon. He did not bring little Ella with him.

When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives, I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a help to them.