ST HOUR - Winston Churchill

Notes on theMemoirsofU. S. GrantandW. S. ChurchillSeparated by several wars and decades, shared experiences producedremarkable similarities in the writings of two men. Did Churchill,an aficionado of the American Civil War, read Grant's Personal Memoirs?AREADER of the Personal Memoirs of PresidentUlysses S. Grant periodically is haunted by asense of deja vu. Certain sentences and ideasare all too familiar. It soon becomes apparent that theechoes one hears are of the utterances of more recenttimes, those of Winston S. Churchill.Both men, holding prominent positions duringmajor wars, were tempted to give an overview of thewar, even while scruples forced them to confess that,as mere mortals, they would only be giving one facet ofthe tale. Hence Grant says, "I am not pretending to givefull details of all the battles fought but the portion that Isaw)," 1 and Churchill hangs the chronicle of great,events "upon the thread of the personal experience ofan individual ... I am telling my own tale." Again: "Ishall only summarize the course of the battle so far asmay be necessary to explain my own experiences ... Ipropose to describe exactly what happened to me: whatI saw and what I felt." 2As participants at high levels, they mainly did thefighting not from trenches or behind the barrels of gunsbut via letters and memoranda. These can be dramaticand revealing. Churchill's technique is to reprint lavishlythose letters and memoranda which give a senseof the stresses of the period being described. Grant doesso only occasionally (and, like Churchill, reprintsmainly his own, rarely anyone else's), but he gives aDr. Weidhorn is Guterman Professor of English Literatureat Yeshiva University, New York, and an academic advisor toThe Churchill Center.BY MANFRED WEIDHORNFINEST HOUR 96 / 26Churchillian justification: "I quote this letter because itgives the reader a full knowledge of the events of thatperiod." Or again: "I cannot tell the provision I hadalready made to cooperate with Sherman ... better thanby giving my reply to this letter." 3 Churchill's versionis that his memoranda "composed ... under the stressof events and with the knowledge available at themoment will... give a current account of those tremendousevents as they were viewed at the time" and"constitute a more authentic record and give ... a betterimpression of what happened and how it seemed atthe time than any account which I could write now." 4Both men's varied experience of war gave them a curiousGod's eye view of things. In A Roving Commission,Churchill in effect speaks for both men when he commentson the change of perspective wrought by thepassage of time. Battles and troop movements thatseemed impressive and challenging at the time of occurrenceturn, with the advent years later of a vastlylarger war, insignificant. For Grant, the Mexican-AmericanWar came to seem child's play after the experienceof the "most stupendous war ever known" 5 — the CivilWar — even as for Churchill, the Frontier Wars, especiallythe Boer War, underwent the same shrinkagenext to World War I. So we hear Grant say, "In view ofthe immense bodies of men moved on the same dayover narrow roads, through dense forests and acrosslarge streams, in our late war, it seems strange now thata body of less than three thousand men should havebeen broken into four columns, separated by a day's