204
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
won after all! ... England would live; Britain would live; the Com–
monwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.... Once again
in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or
mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not
be
wiped out. Our history
would not come to an end.
This indifference of Churchill's to identifying the particular cause
of his country with "any other more general or prior right," though
it makes for an absence of cant, is insularity.
If
we find this insular at–
titude to be deficient morally, it had the advantage of being more
realistic politically. Churchill regarded the Grand Alliance of the
Second World War, not as a union for the defense of certain general
principles, but as a temporary coalition of otherwise divergent and
even hostile interests against a common enemy. This, it is now needless
to say, was a juster appreciation of the real state of affairs, and had
his view prevailed this country might have been spared many of its
present troubles.
But in calling Churchill insular I do not mean to imply that he
is any way the narrow and provincial Tnry of caricature. Here again he
wears his Toryism with a difference and, though no cosmopolitan and
internationalist, rises superior to the ordinary British benightedness; as
when, writing in
The World Crisis
of the French General Nivelle's
meeting with the London War Cabinet in 1917, he wittily comments:
His success was immediate. The British Ministers had never before
met in Council a general who could express himself in forceful and
continuous argument, and they had never before met a French general
whom they could understand. Nivelle not only spoke lucidly, he spoke
English. He had not only captured Fort Douaumont, but had an English
mother.
The much-maligned Dardanelles campaign of which he was so enthus–
iastic an advocate in the First World War, without having the authority
to insure its proper execution, was an attempt to transcend that
parochial strategy which regarded the Western Front as the sole and
exclusive area of decision, with its vain offensives, prodigious slaughter,
and military stalemate, and to wage the world war with a worldwide
strategy. And today we can see how the unenlightened imperialist is a
better champion of European federation than the pettifogging and
provincial trade-union officials and social workers of the Labor Party,
in whom the insular spirit has completely triumphed over the interna–
tionalist tradition of socialism.
On the last page of the first volume, at the point in his narrative
