Churchill: The Artist Shaped the Speaker

One of the best ways to improve our own writing is simply to read great writers. Tastes vary and literary analysis is a subjective exercise, but I keep returning to Winston Churchill because his style teaches us so much. I place him among the masters of prose.

Churchill had been influenced by Gibbon, Macaulay, and Plato. By “rummaging among old books,” as he called it, we can discover elegant writing and gain insights from the writer’s reflections on the world and its unsettled questions. That was my motivation to dive into a newly issued two-volume set of Winston Churchill’s first-hand history of the Nile Campaign. The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. He wrote it in his mid-twenties after attaching himself to the punitive military expedition as an ambitious young Lieutenant.

During this forgotten war he actually rode in the British Army’s final cavalry charge. This climactic event happened when the Egyptians and British confronted the Mahdi’s vast Dervish Army near the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile at Omdurman, but we are not concerned with his exploits. Our focus rests on his observations.

Unbridled Ambition; Uncommon Deeds; Undeniable Talent?

Although I was initially looking for Churchill’s thoughts on the difficulties that great powers face?in attempting to project force into inhospitable regions, it was his tremendous powers of description rather than his geopolitical wisdom that caused me to set the book down in wonder.

I knew from his later writings that he was a keen observer of power and the human condition, but Churchill’s perceptiveness as an observer of the natural world and his gift as a stellar prose stylist were a further revelation. His powers of description did, of course, win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, but most observers would credit that recognition to his later works and his decisive leadership during his moment in history, as the Nobel Committee cited.

Up the Nile at Twenty-Three

More amazing is the fact that he took in the events of the book and recorded them while still a young man, publishing them in 1899. What can his early writing prowess suggest to us about his future potential?

Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill’s great wartime speeches do not feature evocative sketches of far away landscapes, but they do rely upon his talent for framing and illuminating the paramount questions at issue in a way that motivated The Allied Powers and left his words ringing in the ears of the world long afterwards.

Like other talented writers, Churchill has the capacity to spirit us back, in this case one hundred and twenty-five years, to stand beside him on the bank of the Nile to share a twilight moment with him. Later in life, when he needed to draft argumentative speeches to rally the world against totalitarianism, he was able to draw from his well of nascent artistic expression to illustrate the gravest challenges, just as he had earlier so memorably sketched nightfall on the Nile.?

A Searing Introduction

In July 1984, when my infantry battalion’s charter flight finally touched down at Sharm El Sheikh on Egypt’s desolate Sinai Peninsula, after our twenty-two-hour flight. When the battered DC-8’s doors finally swung open, it was as if they had opened into an oven. A searing blast of air swept down the fuselage. I was an eighteen-year-old private and it was 127 degrees fahrenheit on the tarmac. As we struggled to extricate ourselves and our gear from the cramped seating, I thought: What fresh hell is this? And there many times, as I crossed paths with Moses during overnight foot patrols into the forgotten quarters of this Biblical Wilderness, I had the same thought. ?

Awakening to Beauty

However, as alien and forbidding as I initially found the Sinai, the desert can grow on a person. In temperate climates during night, the landscape and natural beauty go largely unappreciated due to the absence of light. Desert landscapes at noon, by contrast, are not fully accessible due to their overabundance of light.

Anyone who has lived alongside the Tropic of Cancer in a desert learns a simple truism. Nature’s magic always appears on the margins of daylight. As it ascends the blazing sun rapidly sweeps away all of the color, definition, and subtlety that provide richness and texture to the spare sandy landscape. However, at the transitions, a wider palette opens as nature paints with glorious colors at dawn and dusk. The heat is gone. The air is still. Rose, pink, and orange appear at the horizon. Such ethereal moments are recompense for suffering through the harsh march of daylight.?

It is only at the hours for coffee or a drink that the desert shares her full beauty. I relate my experience to note that, if we have learned to admire the sublime moods of desolate places, we can better appreciate a writer whose extraordinary powers of description can so perfectly capture such a scene.

The Military Soudan

Churchill begins his history by establishing the centrality of the river to anyone living, working, cultivating, trading, or conducting military operations within the vast region it drains. The book centers upon a desolate thousand-mile section stretching north from the Sudanese Capital of Khartoum. “Without it,” he wrote of the Nile’s surrounding desert along this passage, “there is only suffocation.”?

He then approaches the river to describe the dense, inedible, forbidding fauna protecting the banks, singling out only the noble date palm as a life-sustaining rarity. Between the Egyptian frontier and the Dervish capital of Khartoum, the great river passed through a desolate region he termed the Military Soudan, an area without population centers or arable land “stretching with indefiniteness over the face of the continent.”?

An Extraordinarily Perceptive Pen

There are throughout this history and his other works stellar sentences that any writer would gladly claim. However, it was the below paragraph, painting the shifting mood at nightfall that prompted me to set the book down before rereading the passage again and again. ?

“The banks of the Nile, except by contrast with the desert, display an abundance of barrenness. Their characteristic is monotony. Their attraction is their sadness. Yet there is one hour when all is changed. Just before the sun sets toward the western cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the landscape. It is as though some Titanic artist in the hour of inspiration was retouching the picture, painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthening the lights on the sand, gilding and beautifying everything and making the whole scene live. The river, whose windings give the impression of a lake, turns from muddy brown to silver-grey. The sky from a dull blue deepens into violet in the west. Everything under that magic touch becomes vivid and alive. And then the sun sinks altogether behind the rocks, the colours fade out of the sky, the flush off the sands, and gradually everything darkens and grows grey, like a man’s cheek when he is bleeding to death. We are left sad and sorrowful in the dark, until the stars light up and remind us that there is always something beyond.”

– W.S.C. The River War, Chapter 1, page 5

I had watched many such sunsets during my service in Egypt along the Gulf of Aqaba and treasured these spare moments of beauty. We learn from the subsequent sentence that he was injecting this flash of tranquility into the bleak narrative for a larger purpose. He offered us something sweet to sharpen the bitterness of the point that follows. He provides the contrast to establish the solitary and melancholy aspect of fighting in a remote and forbidding region. He holds up his lens to magnify the fleeting appearance of beauty amid a harsh and desolate landscape to empathize with the forlorn hopes of a soul confronting mortality in an obscure and savage conflict. Sadly, Sudan continues to be the scene of brutal strife.

“In a land whose beauty is the beauty of the moment,” he wrote, “whose face is desolate, and whose character is strangely stern, the curse of war was hardly needed to produce a melancholy effect.”?

Following the Sudan Campaign, Churchill greatly distinguished himself through his still bolder African exploits during the Boer War. His escape from a Boer prison camp hundreds of miles behind enemy lines captivated the British public and propelled him into elective office in 1903. However, the bright sparks of creative genius that served him so ably as Prime Minister were already visible forty-one years earlier two thousand miles up the Nile River in his masterful use of language.

?