CHURCHILL

 The New Criterion
“One Hundred Fifty Years of Churchill” (excerpt)
by Larry P. Arnn

 There has been no better eulogy for Churchill than that given by Leo Strauss, a German Jew who left Germany in time to escape the death camps. One of his teachers was Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of note and a Nazi, who provided some of the impulse for Strauss to return to the classics and begin the recovery of political philosophy as a quest for the truth. Churchill died on January 24, 1965. When Strauss came into class and was informed of Churchill’s death, he said:

“The death of Churchill is a healthy reminder to students of political science of their limitations, the limitations of their craft.

“The tyrant stood at the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant—this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.

“No less enlightening is the lesson conveyed by Churchill’s failure, which is too great to be called tragedy. I mean the fact that Churchill’s heroic action on behalf of human freedom against Hitler only contributed, through no fault of Churchill’s, to increase the threat to freedom which is posed by Stalin or his successors. Churchill did the utmost that a man could do to counter that threat—publicly and most visibly in Greece and in Fulton, Missouri.

“Not a whit less important than his deeds and speeches are his writings, above all his Marlborough—the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.

“The death of Churchill reminds us of the limitations of our craft, and therewith of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.”

Franklin to Washington, 1787

“I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig'd, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

“When you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected?”

“It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are confounded, like those of the Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet hereafter for the Purpose of cutting one another’s Throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

“The Opinions I have had of its Errors, I sacrifice to the Public Good. I have never whisper’d a Syllable of them abroad. Within these Walls they were born, & here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the Objections he has had to it, and endeavour to gain Partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received. . .

“Much of the Strength and Efficiency of any Government, in procuring & securing Happiness to the People depends on Opinion, on the general Opinion of the Goodness of that Government as well as of the Wisdom & Integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own Sakes, as a Part of the People, and for the Sake of our Posterity, we shall act heartily & unanimously in recommending this Constitution, wherever our Influence may extend, and turn our future Thoughts and Endeavours to the Means of having it well administered.

“On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a Wish, that every Member of the Convention, who may still have Objections to it, would with me on this Occasion doubt a little of his own Infallibility, and to make manifest our Unanimity, put his Name to this Instrument.”

COOLIDGE

During most of my course George Sherman was the principal and Miss M. Belle Chellis was the first assistant. I owe much to the inspiration and scholarly direction which they gave to my undergraduate days. They both lived to see me President and sent me letters at the time, though they left the school long ago. It was under their teaching that I first learned of the glory and grandeur of the ancient civilization that grew up around the Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia.

Under their guidance I beheld the marvels of old Babylon, I marched with the Ten Thousand of Xenophon, I witnessed the conflict around beleaguered Troy which doomed that proud city to pillage and to flames, I heard the tramp of the invincible legions of Rome, I saw the victorious galleys of the Eternal City carrying destruction to the Carthaginian shore, and I listened to the lofty eloquence of Cicero and the matchless imagery of Homer.

They gave me a vision of the world when it was young and showed me how it grew. It seems to me that it is almost impossible for those who have not traveled that road to reach a very clear conception of what the world now means. It was in this period that I learned something of the thread of events that ran from the Euphrates and the Nile through Athens to the Tiber and thence stretched on to the Seine and the Thames to be carried overseas to the James, the Charles and the Hudson. I found that the English language was generously compounded with Greek and Latin, which it was necessary to know if I was to understand my native tongue. I discovered that our ideas of democracy came from the agora of Greece, and our ideas of liberty came from the forum of Rome. Something of the sequence of history was revealed to me, so that I began to understand the significance of our own times and our own country.

Calvin Coolidge, [1929] The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge: Authorized, Expanded, and Annotated Edition (51-52). Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.

NEW GI

But the greatest lesson was one learned from the enemy: to hate. Word of the Malmédy Massacre, of the massacres of civilians at Stavelot, Trois Points, and Bande, passed from man to man, and from unit to unit. Until the Ardennes the GI had fought a civilian’s war. Now he was learning to kill without remorse or pity.

 

John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
New York: Random House, 1959, 329-331


    Reports from men drifting back from the front were alarming. Entire units, claimed many wild-eyed refugees, had been cut off and were being wiped out. Back at Division, General Grow had no clear idea of how great his casualties were. But he did know that it was the worst day in the history of his 6th Armored Division.

    The retreat of the 6th Armored wasn’t the only reverse on George Patton’s front. For the savage meeting engagement was at its climax. Violent German attacks had struck all along the Bastogne front. In particular the 17th Airborne Division, in their first real day of action a few miles west of town, had been dealt shocking casualties, some battalions losing 40 per cent of their men.

    Ordinarily the most optimistic of American generals, Patton was now in a despondent mood. Each man lost that day weighed heavily on him. He sat at a desk and wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war.”

    But at the front, later that night, a strange thing began to take place where the day’s disaster had been greatest. Men stopped running, and were digging in. Terror was being replaced by anger.
 
    Not far behind the 6th Armored Division breakthrough area, Colonel John Hines was in a stone house where refugees from the front were thawing out their frozen rifles and frozen bodies.

    One man, his face covered with blood and dirt, his eyes two bitter holes, was saying, “I used to wonder what I was doing in the army. I didn’t have anything personal against the Krauts, even if they were making me live in a freezing, frigging foxhole. But I learned something today. Now I want to kill every goddam Kraut in the world. You know why? To save my own ass.”

    There was a new GI in the Ardennes.

    The good-natured, rather careless, supremely confident GI who had known one victory after another since landing in Normandy; who had assumed he would be well clothed, well fed, and well led; who accepted it as his heritage to outgun and outmachine the enemy, was gone. Since December 16 he’d had few days of the overpowering air support and air cover he’d taken for granted; his clothing didn’t keep out the cold; his boots were traps for trench foot, his tanks were outnumbered; often his machines were immobilized by cold, snow, and terrain.

    He was cold and hungry. He had just fought a humiliating series of retreats where terror roamed far behind the lines. He had tasted defeat.

    But he had learned bitter lessons that were beginning to pay off. In this first major winter battle ever fought by Americans he had learned that the wounded die fast in the zero cold. He had learned in a few weeks that cold is a living enemy and must be fought.

FLOGGING

 John Prebble, Culloden [1746]
New York: Atheneum, 1962, pp. 20-21

The Age of Reason may have wished its armies would behave like Hectors, and every man may indeed, as Johnson claimed, have thought meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, but the reality of life was not that imagined by the Patriot Muses of The Gentleman’s Magazine. It was dirty, depraved and despised. All men preyed on the soldier, and in his turn he robbed and bullied them. To his colonel he was frequently a toy, to be dressed in bizarre and fanciful uniforms that must have given battle an added horror. He stood on a no-man’s-land outside the law, its victim and its guardian. When called to support it during civil riots he risked death by shooting if he refused, and trial for murder by the civil authority if he obeyed. The whip, the nine-tail cat with knots of precise size, kept him in order, and his wife or his woman could be disciplined by the whirligig. In this chair she was strapped and spun through the air until she suffered the vomiting sensations of sea-sickness. A solder who asked permission to marry a doxy who had loyally followed him through a campaign, risked a hundred lashes for impertinence. 

Flogging was notoriously commonplace. Almost every day’s entry in the Order Books contains the names of one, two, or three men sentenced to the lash, receiving anything from the minimum of twenty-five strokes to the maximum of three thousand. Men boasted their endurance of the cat. A drummer bragged that he had received twenty-six thousand lashes in fourteen years, and his officers agreed, with admiration, that four thousand of them had been given between the February of one year and the February of the next. Life for the foot-soldier was punctuated by the lash and the pox. Battle came almost as a relief. It was often his only discharge in a war.

For his sixpence a day he was expected to march from a town where innkeepers had either refused to serve him, or had robbed him when drunk, to eat a breakfast of dry bread and water, to watch his officers indulge in chivalrous courtesies with enemy officers while the lines closed, and then to endure a murderous exchange of musketry or grape at one hundred paces. “We ought to returne thanks to God,” wrote a sergeant of Foot from Flanders, “for preserving us in ye many dangers we haue from time to time been exposed unto...” But thanking God was not always easy when His mercy was hard to find...

JEFFERSON

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. 

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? 

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

from Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

KATYN FOREST

With only three Polish divisions covering the 800-mile-long eastern border, it came as a complete surprise when at dawn on 17 September [1939] the USSR invaded Poland, in accordance with secret clauses of the Nazi–Soviet Pact that had been agreed on 24 August. The Russians wanted revenge for their defeats at Poland’s hands in 1920, access to the Baltic States and a buffer zone against Germany, and they opportunistically grasped all three, without any significant resistance. Their total losses amounted to only 734 killed. Stalin used Polish ‘colonialism’ in the Ukraine and Belorussia as his (gossamer-thin) casus belli, arguing that the Red Army had invaded Poland ‘in order to restore peace and order.’ The Poles were thus doubly martyred, smashed between the Nazi hammer and the Soviet anvil, and were not to regain their independence and freedom until November 1989, half a century later.

In one of the most despicable acts of naked viciousness of the war, in the spring of 1940 the Red Army transported 4,100 Polish officers, who had surrendered to them under the terms of the Geneva Convention, to a forest near Smolensk called Katyń, where they were each shot in the back of the head. Vasily Blokhin, chief executioner of the Russian secret service, the NKVD, led the squad responsible, wearing leather overalls and an apron and long leather gloves to protect his uniform from the blood and brains, and using a German Walther pistol because it did not jam when it got hot from repeated use. (Nonetheless he complained he got blisters on his trigger finger by the end of the third day of continuous executions.) 

In all, 21,857 Polish soldiers were executed by the Soviets at Katyń and elsewhere—an operation which, after the Germans had invaded Russia, Stalin’s police chief Lavrenti Beria admitted had been ‘a mistake’. When the Germans uncovered the mass graves on 17 April 1943, Goebbels broadcast the Katyń Massacre to the world, but Soviet propaganda made out that it had been undertaken by the Nazis themselves, a lie that was knowingly colluded in by the British Foreign Office until as late as 1972, even though charges against the Germans over Katyń were dropped at the Nuremberg Trials.

Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.