Churchill, light and dark

It was fun watching the film The Darkest Hour again recently. 

In case you don’t know it, it’s about Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain, when the country was facing its worst moment in World War Two: Hitler’s German Army had moved at speed through Holland and Belgium, both of which were about to surrender, and pinned the British Expeditionary Force – the bulk of Britain’s professional army – and a French Army against the Channel at Dunkirk. 

The prospects were the surrender of France, which was soon to follow, and the loss of the bulk of British land forces, leaving it terribly exposed to German invasion.

All the ingredients, as you’ll imagine, for an exciting story of the triumph of the spirit over adversity. Which is exactly what the film is. Indeed, at times it even drifts somewhat into the realm of fairy tale rather than strict history. It belittles the role of Admiral Ramsay, who played a key role in rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches at Dunkirk (and quite a few of the French too), though he’s shown in the film as slow to act, with Churchill having to berating him: “the request for civilian boats was not a request, Bertie. It was an order!”.

Equally, it’s unfair to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, who proved himself ultimately far more competent than Churchill in managing government affairs. That does allow a moment of comedy, however. Churchill appointed Attlee Lord Privy Seal in his first coalition government. In the film, Churchill is sitting in the toilet when the message is brought to him that the Lord Privy Seal wants to talk to him. He replies:

Tell him I’m sealed in the privy and I can only deal with one shit at a time

Still, the most fairy-tale-like of all the scenes is, in many ways, one of the most powerful of the film. Churchill, having mentioned that he’d never taken a trip on a bus or the London Underground, takes a tube train, not just for the experience, but as an opportunity to gauge the views of ordinary people. The conversation teaches him that, whatever leading politicians, even in his own party, may think, there’s no stomach for surrender among the British people generally. 

That’s a view he gets, incidentally, from an only relatively random sample of about a dozen people, which actually feels a bit like modern politics, where so much is decided by focus groups. 

At the end of the discussion, Churchill recites from Macaulay’s Horatius. The verse he chooses tells how Horatius steps forward to defend the city bridge against the entire might of the Etruscan host. The decision will cost him his life. 

It’s not a bad passage for Churchill to recite, since his most brilliant insight was to see in Hitler a man whose word could never be trusted in any peace negotiations his colleagues might want to open, and a thug so brutal that the only option was to overthrow him. Churchill, in reality and not merely in a fairy tale, made his greatest contribution to British history by refusing to bow to the Nazis and by standing firm even when things were as bad as they ever got. In Britain’s darkest hour, indeed. 

Macaulay writes and Churchill quotes:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds…”

At that point, as he’s starting the seventh line, he’s interrupted by a young black man, who completes the verse, as Churchill listens appreciatively:

“For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his Gods.”

Churchill reaches out and pats the young man on the shoulder.

A moment of human contact for Churchill
A fine scene. But sadly more fairy tale than reality

It’s a touching image. But one that’s hard to reconcile with the Churchill whose post-war government ran a systematic campaign of imprisonment, torture and murder against the Mau May in Kenya, against people Churchill thought of as “blackamoors” and “brutish children”. One of them, who never recovered from his treatment, was Hussein Onyango Obama. He was the grandfather of a later President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

The film’s kind touch of anti-racism feels more than a little overstretched. Just a tad too kind on Churchill. However admirable his courage and firmness in other contexts.

Equally, I also feel uncomfortable about the poem itself, beautifully constructed though it is. Certainly, Macaulay captures the Roman attitude towards death in war. They had the saying, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”, “it is sweet and fitting to die for your country”. 

The best answer to that was provided by the giant of English war poets, Wilfred Owen. He describes a First World War gas attack in which one man isn’t quite quick enough getting his gas mask on. He’s poisoned and spends a time dying in agony with his eyes blinded and his lungs eaten away from the inside.

Owen tells us:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

It’s a lot less pretty than the lines about Horatius from the film. It’s chilling. But, though I’ve been fortunate enough never to have been to war myself, I find Owen’s message more convincing and closer to the emotional truth than Macaulay’s.

Still, Owen’s bleak words wouldn’t lend themselves to much of a fairy tale. And the fairy tale makes for a much more pleasing film.