194
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
It
is
however a genuine sense of loss which he feels, and which he can
express at times with almost Yeatsian feeling:
In those days English Society still existed in its old form. . . . the
glittering parties at Lansdowne House, Devonshire House or Stafford
House comprised all the elements which made a gay and splendid social
circle in close relation to the business of Parliament, the hierarchies of
the Army and Navy, and the policy of the State. Now Lansdowne House
and Devonshire House have been turned into hotels, flats and restaurants;
and Stafford House has become the ugliest and stupidest museum in the
world, in whose faded saloons Socialist Governments drearily dispense
the public hospitality.
Pledged by his sentiments and sympathies to the
ancie'n regime,
yet
obliged to live and work in the modern-how is it that irony has no
hold on Churchill?
Because he will not allow it to. Irony is a nuance, and in the
strong light of Churchill's energy and hardheadedness all nuances are
instantly dispelled. He has never permitted his sympathy for the past to
blur his vision of the present. In
My Early Life,
one of the best written
of his books (before his style had grown so orotund), Churchill gives
an account of his experiences as a subaltern with the 21st Lancers in
Kitchener's campaign against the Dervishes of the Sudan. At the
Battle of Omdurman in 1898, he took part in a cavalry charge whose
couched lances and brandished swords must have stirred him over and
beyond the simple excitement of the occasion. But Churchill had a
game shoulder and in mid-career returned his sword, with great dif–
ficulty, to its flapping scabbard and drew a Mauser automatic pistol
(certainly no "ancient weapon"!), with which he had prudently pro–
vided himself. The pistol proved a success, though the charge did not.
Afterward, a few fusillades by two squadrons of dismounted Lancers
did, at a great saving of lives, what the entire regiment had been un–
able to do with horse and lance, and convinced Churchill of the
"futility of the much vaunted
Arme Blanche."
He has been sheathing that sword and drawing a pistol in its
stead all his life. Regret for the nineteenth century has never caused
Churchill to repine at the twentieth. With that reasonableness and ab–
sence of foolish intransigence which have generally characterized the Eng–
lish aristocracy, he accepts the conditions of the modern world, and has
taken not only a dutiful but an enthusiastic share in the wars and
politics of Great Britain. It is an interesting question why Churchill has
been able to function so well in a world with which he feels himself
to be so much at odds. In a general way we can say that, though the
power of the English aristocracy was gradually broken, their morale
