June 24, 2013

Finest Hour 137, Winter 2007-08

Page 57

By John McRae, 1895

Lt. Col. John McRae MD RCAMC became immortal for his World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” another Churchill favorite {FH 121: 6). Born in Guelph, Ontario, he studied medicine on a scholarship at the University of Toronto, where he joined The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, and served in the artillery in the Second Boer War. Returning to North America, McRae was appointed professor of pathology at the University of Vermont. He taught there, and at McGill University in Montreal, until 1911, during which time he accompanied Lord Grey, the Governor General of Canada, on a canoe trip to Hudson’s Bay.

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At the opening of World War I, McRae volunteered and fought on the Western Front. He was soon ,transferred to the medical corps and assigned to a hospital in France. He died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1918. His volume of poetry, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, was published a year later.

McRae did not coin that favorite Churchill phrase, “stricken field,” in stanza 1. Macaulay and Walter Scott preceded him. But it is more likely that WSC recalled it from this poem, written after the Jameson Raid, an unsuccessful attempt to spark an uprising by British expatriates (Uitlanders) against Boer authorities in the Transvaal, which led a few years later to the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

Churchill’s most memorable use of the “stricken field” was in his bravura second speech in the House of Commons, on 13 May 1901: “I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to raise the tattered flag I found lying on a stricken field.” The “tattered flag” was his father Lord Randolph’s call in 1886 for economy: the issue over which Lord Randolph resigned. WSC’s first use, however, dates to two years earlier, when he wrote in The River War (1899) of the Dervish Emir Ahmed Fedil, receiving the news of “the stricken field” at Omdurman.¹

Churchill used the phrase again in Ian Hamilton’s March (1900), concerning the 1881 British defeat at Majuba: “…it was accepted as a stricken field….”² Then he deployed it in My African Journey (1908), recalling the Sudanese domain whose downfall he had witnessed: “The Dervish empire, stretching from Wady Haifa or Abu Hamed to Wadelai, interposed a harsh barrier which nothing but a stricken field could sweep away.”³

Years later, in 1939, Churchill’s steel trap memory brought forth the phrase twice. In April, on the 21st anniversary of Foch’s assuming command of the Allied Armies in World War I, he spoke of “a moment when the battle seemed a stricken field.”⁴ A month later he added: “…the illustrious Marshal took command of the stricken field, and after a critical and even agonizing month, restored the fortunes of the war.”⁵

Finally, in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, recalling the Battle of Worcester, which Charles II lost to Cromwell, Churchill wrote: “To Charles II it afforded the most romantic adventure of his life. He escaped with difficulty from the stricken field; a thousand pounds was set upon his head.”⁶

FH Senior Editor James Lancaster reminds us of an agreeable aside to all this in a letter from Pamela Plowden, Winston’s first love, to Lady Randolph Churchill towards the end of 1900: “Someone sent me an extract yesterday out of a Regimental Paper about Winston,” Pamela wrote. “It is rather funny.”

Churchill’s failed first attempt at Parliament, his early books chiding generals for their management of wars, and his account of escaping from Boer captivity, had made him famous, or at least notorious. {In London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, Churchill had described hiding in the wilderness: “My sole companion was a gigantic vulture, who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time.”)

The words Pamela found, by a wag whose name is lost to history, provide an amusing finale to our charting of Churchill’s famous phrase

On the stricken field
See: — With wallets
stuffed with ointments
Balm’d 1st field dressings —
ever accompanied by his
faithful Vulture — gently
chiding erring generals,
heartening disheartened
Brigade Majors — the
prematurely bent figure
of the late Candidate for
Oldham, the one lodestone
of hope to the weary
soldier.

Extract from “Tugela ^Twaddle]”⁷

1. The River War, abridged and revised edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 419.

2. Ian Hamilton’s March (London: Longmans Green, 1900), 113.

3. My African Journey (New York: Norton, 1991), 117.

4. House of Commons, 3 April 1939. Rhodes James, Robert, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 (8 vols., New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 6097.

5. Corn Exchange, Cambridge, 19 May 1939. Blood, Sweat and Tears (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1941), 166.

6. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 2, The New World (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1956), 298.

7. Pamela Plowden to Lady Randolph Churchill, 1900 (no other date). Randolph S. Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume I, Part II (London: Heinemann, 1966), 1153. The Tugela is the principal river of Natal and Pamela seems to refer to a regimental newspaper called “Tugela Twaddle,” although she was not quite sure, hence the question mark.

—RICHARD M. LANGWORTH