CHURCHILL AND WAR

Young Winston goes to war: an account of the British leader’s education by combat, and the role of war in his political thought.

Churchill, writes Best (Churchill: A Study in Greatness, not reviewed), seems fated to have entered the army; he had not earned the formal academic attainments required to attend Oxford, as his father had, and “theirs was not the sort of family that thought of sending sons into the church.” Even as an officer trainee, Churchill lacked the math to be an engineer and the overall grades to get into the infantry, which left only the cavalry—in which, still a teenager, he excelled, mastering the profession of arms and learning in the bargain how to write about war. In his early assignments in the field, Churchill managed to layer a second career as a correspondent (and a well-paid one, though he thought his mother/agent was selling him too cheaply on Fleet Street) onto his principal work as an officer of the crown. He soon produced a well-received book on the Empire’s woes in Afghanistan that may merit revisiting today: “We can’t go back and we must go on,” he wrote. “Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder.” Nuanced thinking won of experience became a Churchill trademark as he commanded the British Navy (and lobbied for broader responsibilities) in WWI, and, Best writes, his Cabinet colleagues “were thankful that there was at least one amongst them who seemed to know what to do.” And if his enthusiasm for war was perhaps too much at the start—Best quotes from a cheerful letter from Churchill exulting the outbreak of hostilities between Austria-Hungary and Serbia—it was soon tempered, and Churchill matured.

Less vigorous than David Reynolds’s In Command of History (2005), Best’s book breaks no new ground.