The Marlborough touch

Geoffrey Best has written a formidably good book about Churchill’s military core. He begins with the hussar sub- altern, as well as the great Duke of Marlborough his ancestor, before he goes near politics. He reconstructs the standards of conduct that were common form among the aristocracy and the officer class with whom the young Winston Churchill grew up, and explains how they continued to guide him all through his military and political life. There were things one did not do; no gentleman would do them. There were accepted laws and customs of war, universally respected by civilised states, even if they were not yet enshrined in print. Churchill went on record himself that he would never wish to do anything that was dishonourable.

How, then, does he come to be described nowadays, in careless talk, as a war criminal? Dr Best admits that in 1914 his hero wrote to his wife about how glad he was that war had broken out: a shocking view today, but what was to be expected of him then. Best shows what posts and what responsibilities Church- ill held during the Kaiser’s war (they included a few weeks under fire in the trenches of the Western Front) and what his still more important roles were in the war against Hitler and Hirohito. As prime minister and minister of defence, he was answerable for the bombing campaign against Germany, and he bore a share in the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. His weakest link, from a legal point of view, turns out to have been his insistence on the preparation of mustard gas as a beach defence when England was threatened with invasion in the winter of 1940-41: plenty of mustard gas was secured (from the USA) and safely stored, but never used.