March 28, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 45

CHURCHILL’S LEGACY, 1915 AND 1965: From Ploegsteert Wood to his state funeral many perspectives had changed.

“The Famous and the Forgotten of Plugstreet Wood,” by Lloyd Clark, Battlefields Review 18: 2002.

To walk the peaceful Belgian wood which the Tommies called “Plugstreet,” eight miles south of Ypres, is to tread in the footsteps of volunteers and conscripts of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) who occupied the one and one-half square mile area for all but six months of the war.

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Most of their names meant as little during the war as they do today, but a remarkable number were either famous or to become so: Churchill, Eden, Montgomery, Archibald Sinclair, the cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather and the poet Aubery Leighton are among the notable. A few miles away in Messines, Adolf Hitler served as a corporal during the winter of 1914-15.

During the extraordinary “Christmas Truce” of 1914, German and British troops fraternized and exchanged presents, and even played a football match. Poet Bairnsfather wrote of “clambering up and over our parapet [to] join the throng about half-way across the German trenches. It felt most curious: here were these sausage-eating wretches, who had elected to start this infernal European fracas, and in so doing had brought us all into the same muddy pickle as themselves….there was not an atom of hate on either side….suddenly, one of the Boches ran back to his trench and presently reappeared with a large camera. I posed in a mixed group for several photographs, and have ever since wished I had fixed up some arrangement for getting a copy.”

Churchill commanded a battalion, 6/ Royal Scots Fusiliers, at Ploegsteert, and established a reserve HQ on the road south to Armentiéres. It was here whilst writing ideas about a new weapon to help infantry attacks that Churchill was forced to flee from an bombardment that destroyed his office. On his return he could find no sign of the documents but after three nervous days he happened to reach into a little-used pocket where his hand fell upon the papers—the secrecy of the “tank” had been preserved.

After the unpredictability of politics, Churchill found the routine of the trenches initially satisfying, though he was soon itching to return to Parliament. His troops were impressed by his industry, bravery, and concern for their welfare. One officer, Lt. Jock McDavid, said he “accelerated the morale of the officers and men to an almost unbelievable degree. It was sheer personality.” Wearing his trademark French blue “Adrian” helmet, Churchill did not shy away from danger. McDavid was impressed: “I have seen him on the fire step in broad daylight to encourage the Jocks, and to prove to the man on the fire step how little danger there was of being hit.”

By early May Churchill had left the front. 6/ Royal Scots Fusiliers left the sector later that year.

Plugstreet Wood does not seem to have attracted as much interest as other areas of the Western Front. However, it reflects the truth of what so much of the fighting was actually like, and reveals that, although difficult to measure, wartime service was likely to have been a character-defining experience in the lives of those who survived.
—ABSTRACT BY THE EDITOR

“40 Years On” by Greg Neale, BBC History Magazine, January 2005.

Forty years on from Winston Churchill’s funeral forms an ideal point at which to reassess how his reputation has been affected by different historians, and to reconsider how the event itself reflected Churchill’s place in history. David Cannadine’s thesis is that the funeral was “a requiem for Britain as a great power.” It was watched by about 350 million around the world, and in the words of the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, giving what proved his own last broadcast, there had not been an event “which has touched the hearts of people quite as much as this one is doing today.”

Geoffrey Best recalled how he was “deeply moved as by no televised event, before or since.” Simon Schama remembered that “the cutting-edge glamour of the new Britain was utterly engulfed by the immense epic of the national past,” and that it was the impact of the funeral which prompted him to re-read Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which “first kindled [his] passion for history.”

David Reynolds holds that the funeral’s sense of a chapter closing made it possible for books like Moran’s Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, and Rhodes James’s Churchill: A Study in Failure, to be published. The process has continued down to recent books such as Paul Addison’s Churchill —The Unexpected Hero, where it is argued that Churchill is “the kind of hero our disenchanted culture can accept and admire: a hero with feet of clay.” The interest in Churchill studies is likely to continue: his recent nomination as “Greatest Briton” in a BBC poll in 2002 shows his continuing impact on the popular imagination.

For some, there is an argument that Churchill outlived his era, while other writers argue that the continuities in British life were symbolised in Churchill. Whatever view one takes, it is surely a measure of the man that the debates continue.—ABSTRACT BY ROBERT COURTS