RT. HON. SIR WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL
ROUND TABLE OF NEBRASKA
Borders Books 7201 Dodge
Omaha Nebraska, 68114
February 21st Sunday 2:00 pm
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Book 5
Shakespeare’s King Lear
Act 5
Randolph Churchill’s Winston S. Churchill – Young Statesmen 1901-1914
Chapter ‘Board of Trade’
John Keegan's The American Civil War*A Military
History *
Chapter ‘The Home Fronts’ through
Chapter ‘The End of The War’
“I think it is greatly to be deprecated that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense.”
Swansea, South Wales 14 August 1908
Churchill's time in Lord Asquith's Liberal Government
Excerpt from Randolph S. Churchill’s Young Statesmen 1901-1914 (Pages 272-274, 1967)
When speaking to the miners of South Wales in Swansea on 14 August 1908 he discounted any conflict as possible between Great Britain and Germany: “I think it is greatly to be deprecated that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense.” He first pointed out that England’s island position “freed us from the curses of continental militarism” and went on to say: “There was no collision of primary interests—big, important interests—between Great Britain and Germany in any quarter of the globe.” In fact, he concluded, there was nothing to fight about, “although there may be snapping and snarling in the newspapers and in London Clubs.”
Churchill was not then so early alerted to the dangers of German militarism as he was to be twenty-five years later. Fortunately this was only a momentary aberration into which he stumbled along side his new colleagues. Within three years he was fully convinced of the German menace and was privileged on this occasion, as he was not on the second, to take effective steps to arm the nation against dangers which he foresaw.
He had inherited a good deal of Lord Randolph’s isolationism and had not yet perceived the profound truth contained in Eyre Crowe’s famous Foreign Office Memorandum of 1907 that it was in the interest of Britain to maintain the balance of power in Europe by being the friend or the ally of the second strongest power on the Continent. Once he had assimilated this thought he lived with it and on it; and throughout his life he would point to the fact that Britain had, albeit unconsciously and without promulgating this theory, practiced it; how under Queen Elizabeth I England had defeated Philip II of Spain; how Marlborough under good Queen Anne had defeated Louis XIV; how under George III and Pitt she had defied and defeated Napoleon; and how in his own time under George V and Lloyde George Britain had worsted the Kaiser. We may be sure that the message was strongly to rouse his countrymen against Hitler and in the 1940s when he was allowed to play a notable share in achieving the liberation of Europe from a despotic tyranny.
In the shrinking of the old European world in the growth of the giant powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, Eyre Crowe’s doctrine may no longer be applicable; but it served us very well five times over four centuries—a unique record of consistent and preserving foreign policy—always directed at the same end, no matter whence the danger came, and always triumphant in the end.
The only shortfall in this record was that of Oliver Cromwell. Harold Macmillan told the author in 1962 the following pregnant anecdote. He described how in Cairo in 1943 Churchill suddenly said to him late one night: “Cromwell was a great man wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man.” “Ah,” he said, “but he made one terrible mistake. Obsessed in his youth by fear of the power of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?” He was, of course, thinking of Germany and Russia.
“The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters, and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from hospital that spoke of wounds and which all to often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father.”
Steel engraving of Walt Whitman which was made in July of 1854
Excerpt from http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/whitman/photos.htm
July, 1854. Steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer of daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison (original daguerreotype lost). Courtesy of the Bayley Collection, Ohio Wesleyan University. Walt Whitman said, "The worst thing about this is, that I look so damned flamboyant--as if I was hurling bolts at somebody--full of mad oaths--saying defiantly, to hell with you!"
Excerpt from John Keegan’s The American Civil War (Pages 316-319, 2009)
An early visitor (visitor to hospitals in Washington) was the poet Walt Whitman, who came to Washington following the evacuation of his brother George Washington Whitman from the field of Fredericksburg. Whitman was a New Yorker who was trying to set up as a professional writer. He did not serve in the army, though another brother did; he was never present at a battle and visited the armies only twice. Nevertheless, the war was to possess Whitman. After finding his brother, he decided to devote himself to the welfare of the wounded; he took a clerical job in the army paymaster’s office and spent the small salary he earned on tobacco and other comforts for the patients, to whom he devoted his time. He wrote copiously during his four years as a self-appointed hospital visitor. By his own reckoning, he attended at the bedsides of 80,000 casualties. He believed that his visits were beneficial and recorded that “the doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are helpless to yield.” That medicine was kindness and cheerful attention, particularly in writing and sending letters to the soldiers’ families.
Whitman, who was to become America’s leading poet of the nineteenth century, was of humble origins and simple nature. He was temperamentally egalitarian and might, had his bent taken him that way, have become a leader in the socialist movement. He was also deeply humanitarian with a heartfelt belief in the greatness of his country and its people. Besides his openhearted goodness, he also had a deep love for the beauties of the American landscape and skies, about which he wrote memorably in his first and best-known collection of verse, Leaves of Grass. The war moved him greatly, at first by its drama and display, then by its tragedy, which he was to express in deeply moving lyrical terms. One of his war poems, published in the collection Drum-Taps, is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of literature the war was to inspire and one of the finest war poems ever written. It came from his experiences as an army hospital visitor.
Come Up From the Fields, Father
Come up from the fields, father, here's a letter from
our Pete,
And come to the front door, mother, here's
a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, 'tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages with leaves
fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and
grapes on the trellis'd vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent
after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful,
and the farm prospers well.
Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come, father, come
at the daughter's call,
And come to the entry, mother, to the front door come right away.
Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous,
her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor
adjust her cap.
Open the envelope quickly,
0 this is not our son's writing, yet his name
is sign'd,
0 a strange hand writes for our dear son,
0 stricken mother's soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black,
she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast,
cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Ah, now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all
its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head,
very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.
Grieve not so, dear mother (the just-grown
daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and
dismay'd),
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will
soon be better.
Alas, poor boy, he will never be better (nor maybe
needs to be better, that brave and simple soul),
While they stand at home at the door he is
dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch'd, then at night
fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with
one deep longing,
0 that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent
from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead
son.
What makes the poem of Whitman’s so heartrending is that everything in it is entirely genuine. Whitman knew what happened to boys shot in the chest; he knew how such news affected families, since he often met them on their visits to the hospitals; he knew what terrible truths the consoling letters sent to families concealed, since he had often written such letters himself. Even though he was not a witness of battle, he knew what results battles caused, since he saw them on the hospital wards. Whitman was a great poet of the Civil War, because he understood the purpose and nature of the war, which was to inflict suffering on the American imagination. The suffering was equally distributed between the two sides, and was felt particularly by those not present. The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters, and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from hospital that spoke of wounds and which all to often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father. It was a particular cruelty of the Civil War that because neither side had targets of strategic value to be attacked—not at least, targets that could be reached by the armies in the field (until Sherman took the war to the Southern people by marching into their homeland)—its effect had to be directed principally, indeed for years exclusively, at the man in the field and at the emotions who waited at home. Torturing the apprehensions of the non-combatants was a new development in warfare, produced by the rise of an efficient postal service. Before the days of rapid and reasonably certain postal communication, soldiers could be banished to the mind’s recesses after they marched away, because the nearest and dearest knew that they would receive no news of a soldier on campaign by default, when he did not return. Whitman caught at the truth in an entry in one of his notebooks. “The expression of American personality through the war is not to be looked for in the great campaign and the battle-fights. It is to be looked for… in the hospitals, among the wounded.”
To both these sisters have I sworn my love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither?
Edwin Austin Abbey painting 1902 “Goneril and Regan from King Lear”
King Lear, Act 5, Scene 1
To both these sisters have I sworn my
love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd,
If both remain alive: to take the widow
Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril;
And hardly shall I carry out my side,
Her husband being alive. Now then we'll use
His countenance for the battle; which being done,
Let her who would be rid of him devise
His speedy taking off. As for the mercy
Which he intends to Lear and to Cordelia,
The battle done, and they within our power,
Shall never see his pardon; for my state
Stands on me to defend, not to debate.
“Marriage 2500 Years Ago”
Excerpts from Herodotus The Histories-Book 4
Sarmatian cataphracts during Dacian Wars as depicted on Trajan's Column
The Sauromatai customarily speak the Scythian language, though their usage of it has been incorrect from the beginning because the Amazons never did master it properly. Their marriage customs demand that no virgin ever gets married until she has slain a male enemy, and some of them actually grow old and die before they can marry because they are unable to fulfill this requirement.
Awjila today resembles what the oasis must have looked like in Antiquity.
Nasamones: nomadic tribe from ancient Libya, migrating between the Syrtis Major and the Awjila oasis.
Excerpt from http://www.livius.org/na-nd/nasamones/nasamones.html
When a Nasamonian man marries his first wife, the custom is for the bride on the first night to go through the whole number of the guests having intercourse with them, and each man when he has lain with her gives a gift, whatsoever he has brought with him from his house.
March 21st Sunday 2:00 pm
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Book 6
Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Acts 1 and 2
Randolph Churchill’s Winston S. Churchill – Young Statesmen 1901-1914
Chapter ‘The Parliament Act’
William Tecumseh Sherman’s Memoirs
Chapter I ‘Early Recollections of California—1846-1848’ through
Chapter IV ‘Missouri, Louisiana, and California—1850-1858’