The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [18]
Churchill’s plea was ignored. Within a few months the Third Battle of Ypres was launched, culminating in the bloodbath of Passchendaele.
As the First World War came to an end, Churchill, whom Lloyd George had made Minister of Munitions in 1917, wrote and spoke powerfully about the need to harness the same energies that war had generated to build a better peacetime Britain. He had earlier expressed this sentiment in 1900, as the war in South Africa was coming to an end. He was convinced that Parliament had the responsibility, as well as the means, to translate the energies of wartime into the impulses for peacetime reform.
A General Election was called for 14 December 1918. To his constituents at Dundee, Churchill set out the social policy he would like to see adopted by the postwar Parliament: the nationalization of the railways, the control of monopolies “in the general interest,” and taxation levied “in proportion to the ability to pay.” To Lloyd George, whose election at the head of a Liberal-Conservative coalition was certain, he wrote: “I do hope you will endeavour to gather together all forces of strength & influence in the country & lead them along the paths of science & organisation to the rescue of the weak & poor.”
The Lloyd George coalition was victorious. Churchill was made Secretary of State for War and charged with the complex and urgent task of demobilization. Mutiny broke out three days after his appointment, due to the existing system. Churchill devised an equitable scheme based on the principle of “first in, first out.”
The four years after the Armistice of 1918 saw some of Churchill’s finest parliamentary expositions and achievements. As Secretary of State for War (1919–21), he upheld the Army Council’s censure of General Dyer for the massacre of four hundred unarmed Indians at Amritsar, in the Punjab. Many Conservatives—the dominant group in Lloyd George’s peacetime coalition—resented Churchill’s attack on a British general. But Churchill, in one of his most impressive parliamentary performances, and to a largely hostile House, insisted that British rule in India must not be based on force. The shooting had been “a monstrous event.” There was “one general prohibition” with regard to riots and civil strife that was essential: “a prohibition against what is called ‘frightfulness.’”
“What I mean by frightfulness,” Churchill explained, “is the inflicting of great slaughter upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country. We cannot admit this doctrine in any form. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.” In Ireland, for which he had ministerial responsibility, his advice to the terrorists of Sinn Fein was succinct: “Quit murdering and start arguing.”
From the War Office, Churchill went to the Colonial Office, where he worked for two years with intense energy to resolve the Irish conflict, dominated for the previous two years by civil war, terrorism, reprisal and counter-reprisal. In supporting a truce between Sinn Fein and the British government, Churchill prevailed on Lloyd George to offer it without prior conditions. When the six counties of Ulster rejected any all-Irish settlement in which Sinn Fein would predominate, Churchill suggested the solution that was adopted and has lasted to this day: giving the South “the status