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None of the others amounted to anything, but young Churchill had scarcely left the table when his Imperial career began. He went to Cuba during the rebellion against Spain as a war correspondent. Spain in Cuba seemed to him a model of all that Imperial rule should not be: irresponsible, wasteful, harsh, above all vindictive and vengeful. In India too he pondered (meanwhile playing polo, serving on the frontier, reading Gibbon, moral philosophy, history and military strategy) and after writing The River War, a description of the Sudan campaign, and a terrible novel, decided to take up literature and politics. Informing the voters of Oldham, he was rejected. He promptly left for the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent. Captured, while defending an armored train derailed by a Boer attack, he was arrested by big, beefy Louis Botha, later Prime Minister of South Africa, locked up at Pretoria. After weeks of reading Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, in desperation he scaled the prison wall and escaped. Back at Oldham for another election, he won, 12,931-to-12,522.
Against the Current. All this, like innumerable Churchill adventures and anecdotes made a lively career, but paradoxically bothered voters. To modern Britons up to last week Winston Churchill was less like a public figure than like some oldfashioned, battered Gladstone bag stuffed full of the relics of Empire—pieces of prejudices, bits of old patriotic songs (music hall comedians used to call him "Winnie"), mementoes of old Imperial wild oats, mistakes, idyllic weekends better forgotten. Jaunty, witty, informed, expert, positive, a sparkling talker when interested, a growling monster of rudeness when bored, he said in 1939 what he had said in 1903, and knew he said it better. An unabashed lover of the sound of his own voice, talking to himself very loudly when alone, he was never really popular. Moreover, as the years passed, a mighty collection of opponents assembled against him, though each had different reasons for dislike:
Army. Old line officers never got over their suspicion of his unorthodox methods. Contemporary experts agree that the Dardanelles campaign, the attempted relief of Antwerp that held up the German advance on Paris in 1914, were brilliantly conceived, weakly executed. Purpose of the Dardanelles campaign as Churchill saw it was more than an attempt to help Russia gain access to the Mediterranean: it was to swing fence-sitting Italy to the Allied side, win the tremulous Balkans away from Germany. Defending himself after the failure with biting eloquence, Churchill used the phrase "gamble" in connection with the Naval Plan, later got an undeserved reputation of needlessly sacrificing men.
Suffragettes. He was against them.
Labor. He attacked the General Strike (1926) as a Bolshevik conspiracy. For ten years he denounced Socialism as the source of all post-War troubles.