Churchill's Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government

by Larry P. Arnn

Overview

No statesman shaped the twentieth century more than Winston Churchill. To know the full Churchill is to understand the combination of boldness and caution, of assertiveness and humility, that defines statesmanship at its best. With fresh perspective and insights based on decades of studying and teaching Churchill, Larry P. Arnn explores the greatest challenges faced by Churchill over the course of his extraordinary career, both in war and peace—and always in the context of Churchill’s abiding dedication to constitutionalism.

Churchill’s Trial is organized around the three great challenges to liberty that Churchill faced: Nazism, Soviet communism, and his own nation’s slide toward socialism. Churchill knew that stable free government, long enduring, is rare, and hangs upon the balance of many factors ever at risk. Combining meticulous scholarship with an engrossing narrative arc, this book holds timely lessons for today. Arnn says, “Churchill’s trial is also our trial. We have a better chance to meet it because we had in him a true statesman.”

In a scholarly, timely, and highly erudite way, Larry Arnn puts the case for Winston Churchill continuing to be seen as statesman from whom the modern world can learn important lessons. In an age when social and political morality seems all too often to be in a state of flux, Churchill’s Trial reminds us of the enduring power of the concepts of courage, duty, and honor.

--Andrew Roberts, New York Times bestselling author of Napoleon: A Life and The Storm of War

Larry Arnn has spent a lifetime studying the life and accomplishments of Winston Churchill. In his lively Churchill’s Trial, Arnn artfully reminds us that Churchill was not just the greatest statesman and war leader of the twentieth century, but also a pragmatic and circumspect thinker whose wisdom resonates on every issue of our times.

--Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

In absorbing, gracefully written historical and biographical narration, Larry Arnn shows that Churchill, often perceived as inconsistent and opportunistic, was in fact philosophically rigorous and consistent at levels of organization higher and deeper than his detractors are capable of imagining. In Churchill’s Trial Arnn has rendered great service not only to an incomparable statesman but to us, for the magnificent currents that carried Churchill through his trials are as admirable, useful, and powerful in our times as they were in his.

--Mark Helprin, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and In Sunlight and in Shadow

Churchill’s Trial, a masterpiece of political philosophy and practical statesmanship, is the one book on Winston Churchill that every undergraduate, every graduate student, every professional historian, and every member of the literate general public should read on this greatest statesman of the twentieth century. The book is beautifully written, divided into three parts–war, empire, peace–and thus covers the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill and the topics which define the era of his statesmanship. 

--Lewis E. Lehrman, cofounder of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and distinguished director of the Abraham Lincoln Association

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595555311
Publisher:	HarperCollins Christian Publishing
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	393
Sales rank:	419,168
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Larry P. Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College. He has been published widely on issues of public policy, history, and political theory, and is the author of Liberty and Learning and The Founders' Key. He lives in Hillsdale, MI.

Read an Excerpt

Churchill's Trial

Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government

---

By Larry P. Arnn

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2015 Larry P. Arnn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59555-531-1

---

CHAPTER 1

THE FIGHTER

What does it take to lead a free nation in a vast and terrible war? One thing is fierceness.

Wars, wrote Lincoln, are not prosecuted with "elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water."

It has been proved, said Churchill, "not only that our men can die for King and country — everyone knew that — but that they can kill."

"There are less than seventy million malignant Huns," Churchill said another time, "some of whom are curable and others killable."

Churchill was a fighter. As a soldier in combat he had that deadly mixture of calm and aggression one can see in George Washington at Trenton, Princeton, or Monmouth. As a warlord he brought urgency and direction to everyone around him, even to the whole nation. He meant to win, and he found a way.

All of this was prefigured at the very outset of his career, when war was his calling and before he had any experience with politics. Consider his best adventure, which began on an armored train in South Africa on November 15, 1898. The commanding officer was Captain J. A. L. Haldane, and he knew young Churchill from soldiering in India. He invited Churchill, at that moment a war correspondent, to go along for the ride.

Once the train was under way, the Boer enemy got between it and its way home, piled rocks on the track, and opened fire from a position that would drive the train toward the rocks. The locomotive, in the middle of the train, got up steam to run for it. Three of the cars up front hit the rocks with a terrible crash, derailed, and blocked the track. Going forward was impossible, and behind were the Boers, who opened fire from about one thousand yards with artillery and rifles. The assault was loud and the fire accurate: the Boers killed four men and wounded at least thirty others.

Churchill was fifteen days from his twenty-fifth birthday. He had been a commissioned officer for three years and ten months, and he was familiar with gunfire. He had been, with a few interruptions, a war correspondent for nearly as long as he had been a soldier. The prominence and makeup of his articles in the press had led to criticism — in one case in a letter he received from the Prince of Wales, another time in a letter published in the Army and Navy Gazette from "a General Officer." The latter charged that young Churchill was "careering over the world, elbowing out men frequently much abler and more experienced" than himself; furthermore, his articles criticized "general officers highly placed in authority" and influenced public opinion in ways that were out of proportion to Churchill's rank.

These were fair points. Churchill was a young man in a hurry. Sometimes he would go to a scene of action even though the commander had forbidden him to be there. Later he would appeal to the same commander to give him material for a book about the adventure and be offended when he did not get it. When other young men waited outside the war office headquarters seeking an appointment, Churchill went to the place where the fighting was happening. He got himself into dangerous situations by these methods. His articles were popular, written without editing or prior comment from higher military authorities, and had considerable influence on the public impressions of the war. Beyond that, they made him a lot of money. Little wonder that colleagues might be cross.

But Churchill was undaunted by this "General Officer." He replied that it was unseemly for a ranking officer to "bandy words with a subaltern in the columns of public press" and argued that, "to make personal attacks on individuals, however insignificant they may be, in the publicity of print, and from out of the darkness of anonymity, is conduct equally unworthy of a brave soldier and an honorable man." The young Churchill, like the older one, was not so easy to cow.

Churchill had resigned his commission in March 1899 in order to write his second book, The River War, and to run unsuccessfully for Parliament. He was given a lucrative contract to go to South Africa as a war correspondent to cover the Boer War. Criticism in the past notwithstanding, he applied for a commission upon his departure, just in case a good opportunity for soldiering should come up. The commission did not come through.

Never mind, however, his civilian status on the besieged armored train: Churchill volunteered in a heartbeat. "Knowing how thoroughly I could rely on him," Haldane put him to work. Amidst heavy fire, with many wounded and several killed in the train, the locomotive itself damaged and threatening to explode, Churchill began to walk about in plain sight, surveying the damage. Others, shielding themselves as they could, gaped in wonder.

Churchill formed a plan to use the engine to push the derailed cars off the track. It was delicate work, and he enlisted help. The wounded engineer of the train, a civilian, was about to abandon his post. To him Churchill said, "Buck up a bit, and I will stick to you." Anyway, he continued, "no man was hit twice on the same day." He added that the man would be decorated; later Churchill as home secretary would move the decoration personally. For more than an hour, he walked, looked, and labored, calm and calculating. The heat and smoke and noise were oppressive. Metal rained down. Men returned fire, bled, and died. Finally part of the train came free.

Brave men on a battlefield are often animated, obviously moving with and moved by the excitement of the fight. A few, George Washington for example, have a special kind of deliberateness. Young Churchill proved himself a member of that serene and lethal company on more than one occasion, but especially there beside the armored train.

The engine got away with the wounded and Churchill on it. The rest of the force was left behind to be killed, wounded, or captured. Having reached safety, Churchill abandoned the train and went back on foot to help. On his way back, horsemen with rifles rode him down; he reached for his pistol, but he had laid it down while doing the work. He surrendered and was taken prisoner.

What did the people who saw Churchill's action at the armored train think? Haldane: "indomitable perseverance." Captain Wylie: "as brave a man as could be found." Thomas Walden, a former servant of Churchill's father who accompanied Churchill to South Africa, wrote, "Every officer in Estcourt thinks Mr. [Churchill] and the engine driver will get the V.C. [Victoria Cross, the highest British military decoration for valor]." Private Walls: "He walked about in it all as coolly as if nothing was going on. ... His presence and way of going on were as good as 50 men would have been." General Joubert, the Boer commander, urging the Boer government not to release Churchill from captivity: "[H]e must be guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm." Nevertheless, Churchill would make a daring escape to much fanfare.

What was Churchill thinking during the action? The record tells us four things.

First, Churchill was thinking about danger. Courage requires a sense of danger. On several occasions Churchill exposed himself to harm to gain the notice of others, and that was apparently part of his motive in this action of the armored train. To his mother he wrote, "Bullets ... are not worth considering. Besides I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending." Earlier he had written: "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." But the ambush produced a different mood: "I think more experience of war would make me religious," he wrote his American friend Bourke Cockran, an American congressman and mentor to Churchill, from the confines of the Boer prison. "The powerlessness of the atom is terribly brought home to me, and from the highest human court of appeals we feel a great desire to apply to yet a higher authority. Philosophy cannot convince the bullet." Churchill was afraid. His fear reminded him of something outside the circumstances; something above them. He did what he did despite the fear, in mind of the thing above it.

Second, Churchill was thinking about politics. Speaking with Haldane soon after both of them were captured, Churchill thanked the officer for giving him the chance. He realized that Haldane would not get so much notoriety from the episode as would Churchill. Churchill had been able to act "in full view of the Durban Light Infantry and the railway personnel." This would open "the door for him to enter the House of Commons." He would, he committed, thank Haldane in the newspaper. He took for granted that Haldane had wanted as much as he to get out there in the open and be shot at with people watching. Churchill was fighting his way into politics, which is full of sham heroism. War is a broad avenue into politics because it presents real tests of the moral virtues. The military demands a commitment of discipline and obedience; it disrupts the career and takes one from home for poor pay and bad conditions of work. Actual battle threatens death and wounds. To commit oneself to war is to demonstrate certain excellences that cannot be faked. To do this for the explicit reason of political ambition is a kind of ambition meant seriously.

Third, Churchill's mind following his capture and while planning his escape was on time. Upon capture, he began immediately a series of urgent appeals to the Boer government for his release, based on his being merely a war correspondent. In the letters he artfully downplayed his part in the action. Sweltering "in durance vile" was not part of his plan for himself. One of his more revealing letters complained that he was almost twenty-five years old and was nearly out of time. He did not know that he would live to ninety, or that his greatest deeds would be done past age sixty-five.

Fourth, Churchill was thinking about victory. He wanted to win. This had two aspects. One was grand and, above all, aggressive: by the time he reached his prison in Pretoria, the Boer capital, he had figured out the lay of the city and where the officers and the enlisted men were kept. Upon reaching the prison, he proposed to the British POW command that the officers overcome their guards and march to the nearby stadium. There they could liberate the British enlisted men, take the capital, seize the president, and end the war. The commanders refused despite much insisting, so Churchill confined himself to the more prosaic matter of his personal escape. He effected that soon enough, became a hero and, sure enough, a member of Parliament. He still regretted missing the chance to win the whole war with a single blow.

One of the best photographs of Winston Churchill was taken three days after his capture. It does not mean so much apart from knowing the events surrounding it. Yet in the context of those events, it reveals something about the man.

Notice that most of the men in the photo look bedraggled and down — as well they might, having fought a battle, watched their friends wounded and killed, suffered capture, stood and marched in the rain, traveled by train under guard, and arrived in the capital of the enemy to be displayed before the townspeople. Gathered around them are the burghers of Pretoria, gawking at the vanquished who have committed the indignity of surrender.

Two of the party seem different. One stands with his hands on his hips, his chin out. He is defiant. He looks a fighter. Likely the guards will watch him closely.

The other is aloof, off to the right, erect yet relaxed. He looks at the camera, and though we cannot know whether he saw the camera, he did know he was being observed by a throng. He looks unconcerned, not quite contemptuous. He seems at ease and untroubled. But you cannot quite mistake that he seems not only watched but also watching.

It is the contrast between the face and the posture and the actions he was taking throughout this time that makes one think. Churchill, the figure to the right, is embarked at that moment on planning and executing several contradictory courses of action. He will inspire an attack on the whole capital; he will argue that he is a noncombatant; he will write his friends of the valor of others while he calculates his election to Parliament as a hero; he will plan his escape; he will write for the press; and he will talk with his captors, befriend them, and find out information. All this is moving in his mind and very soon in his actions, and yet he shows neither distress nor impatience in his demeanor. As on the battlefield before exploding shells, so in the capital before his captors, he seems in the photograph we have of him indifferent.

One wonders, if a certain former German corporal had seen this photograph and known this story, would he have acted differently? The fatal decision of his life was to turn his back on this man and attack to the east. He exposed his entire nation to this calm captive, vigorous author, and proud warrior. Could he have foreseen in Churchill's letters and articles from South Africa the seed of an eloquence that could stir a nation to stand and fight? Could he have discerned in Churchill's negotiations with the Boers the portent of a skill that could finally outmaneuver the appeasers in 1940? Could he have foreseen in his capacity for self-effacement the stirrings of a capacity to stoop and to woo that would entice Franklin Roosevelt? Maybe not, for that takes study. In fact Hitler never did understand that he was fighting someone who could live amidst the fires of 1940 and sleep well every night, get up every morning ready to fight, and think it, even at the moment, the best time he ever had.

Clementine Churchill surely knew her husband when she wrote to a prime minister words worthy of a Spartan wife or mother: "[H]e has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess, the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany."

FROM WARRIOR TO WARLORD

Churchill of course would go on to occupy higher stations, stations of command, where his deeds were not performed upon the battlefield. These higher stations demanded a different kind of courage and other virtues than those of personal valor.

The distinction did not come immediately or easily for him. Sir Edward Grey — foreign minister before and during the Great War and a senior and distinguished member of Parliament — described Churchill as a "hero" during that war. "I can't tell you how much I admire his courage & gallant spirit & genius for war," he said. But Churchill realized his gallant spirit could lead him astray, as it did when, while serving as the first lord of the admiralty, he took direct and personal charge of the defense of Antwerp in 1914. The Germans were sweeping across Belgium on their way to France, and Antwerp, a fortified city, provided a chance to delay them and gain time. Churchill got to the scene of battle, and the next thing he was commanding troops. He did not save Antwerp, though his energy and judgments were much praised by those who saw them. King Albert of Belgium thought that the delay in the German advance was of "inestimable service" and that only Churchill had the "prevision of what the loss of Antwerp would entail." Churchill nonetheless learned a lesson from the episode:

I ought ... never to have gone to Antwerp. I ought to have remained in London and endeavored to force the Cabinet and Lord Kitchener to take more effective action than they did, while all the time I sat in my position of great authority with all the precautions which shield great authority from rough mischance. ... Those who are charged with the direction of supreme affairs must sit on the mountain-tops of control; they must never descend into the valleys of direct physical and personal action.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Churchill's Trial by Larry P. Arnn. Copyright © 2015 Larry P. Arnn. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

A Note on Style, xi,
Preface: Why Churchill?, xiii,
Introduction: Churchill's Trial, xvii,
PART ONE: WAR,
1. The Fighter, 3,
2. A More Terrible Kind of War, 21,
3. The Statesman's Virtue, 51,
4. The Strategist, 69,
PART TWO: EMPIRE,
5. Strategy and Empire, 97,
PART THREE: PEACE,
6. "Lo! A New England", 119,
7. "Some Form of Gestapo", 137,
8. Bureaucracy, 163,
9. The Social Reformer, 185,
10. The Constitutionalist, 207,
Conclusion: Churchill's Trial and Ours, 245,
Acknowledgments, 257,
Appendix I: Fifty Years Hence, 261,
Appendix II: What Good's a Constitution?, 275,
Appendix III: The Sinews of Peace, 287,
Notes, 303,
Bibliography, 355,
Suggested Further Reading, 363,
Index, 365,