Channels, Spring 2019

Page 20 Lanning • The Long Defeat these were the defining elements of the interwar period. Yet, glimpses of light, small but piercing through the shadowy darkness, foretold of a greater plan still to come. This plan would tell of a great defeat but a “fool’s hope” amidst the desolation.8 It would also tell of an even greater victory at the end of that defeat, one in which the victors would find courage and inspiration not from their level of strength or any likelihood of success but from their knowledge of the eternal and unassailable truths that man is born free and that good, in the end, must triumph, whether or not evil has already laid waste to all that is fair and true. Though many things in this world that bring hope do not come with full, palpable assurances here on earth, some things are so clearly the hand of the Divine that it would be foolish to claim otherwise. One particular officer in World War I knew this well – very well in fact. On November 26, 1915, six days after joining the second battalion of the Grenadier Guards as a Major under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Jeffreys, this forty-year-old veteran of the British Army found himself soldiering on once again. This time he was not atop a horse, galloping across the British Empire as a cavalry officer, taking in the morning mist of India or fighting to reconquer the Sudan in the hot desert climate of Omdurman. Now he was in the miry trenches of a French winter, only three miles behind the front lines. The story goes that a message from Lieutenant General Richard Haking summoned the Major to meet him at Merville. But when he reached the rendezvous point at which he was to find a car and driver, no one appeared. Due to heavy shelling, the escort had to abandon his vehicle and did not make it until hours later by foot. In the end, there was no meeting with the corps commander after all. It had actually been canceled, and the Major was annoyed that the whole ordeal “had resulted in ‘dragging [him] about in rain & wind for nothing.’”9 However, the Major returned to the trenches “only to discover that, a mere fifteen minutes after he had left, a German shell had exploded just a few feet from where he had been sitting.”10 This particular Major was none other than Winston Churchill himself. One of his comrades had died from the blast, and the small bunker in which they had been sitting was destroyed. Churchill would later say that he “was not so angry with the general after all” once he found the place in ruins.11 Indeed, it was not for nothing. Destiny (or Providence) had once again preserved Churchill’s life. For what reason, Churchill could only wait and see. Nonetheless, at a young age he seemed to have possessed the surest sense of destiny. When he was sixteen, he had told his friend and fellow student Murland de Grasse Evans what he believed the future would hold for him. Though unsure about how he would begin – whether it would be the army or politics like his father – the young Churchill said that he had dreams about his future and had ‘a wonderful idea of where [he] shall be eventually.’12 The remainder of the conversation was nothing short of remarkable. Churchill predicted he would play a very important role in defending London amid the calamities of war, a very odd and high-minded thing to say – at least, so it seemed, from Murland Evans’ point of view. London was in the middle of peace and great progress – not having experienced invasion since the days of Napoleon – so Murland thought. But years later, once Churchill’s predictions turned out to be essentially true, Evans would write a letter to Randolph Churchill telling him that he “was so 8 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 797. 9 Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley, God and Churchill (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015), 56. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 57. 12 Sandys and Henley, God and Churchill, 4.