How to be a man

The river of death has brimmed his banks And England’s far and Honour’s a name But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

Even as long ago as the first world war, men bitterly mocked the tritely jingo-istic sentiment of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. So it wouldn’t remotely surprise me if it turned out that I was the last chap on earth who still finds it an inspiration.

Yes, I know all that G.A. Henty stuff is discredited Victorian imperialistic tosh, but I still think our bewhiskered forebears grasped a point lost in our spavined, milksop era of kimchi, sourdough bread and ‘plant-based’ diets: a man really isn’t a man until he has been tested in the crucible of battle.

Winston Churchill certainly thought so. What’s striking about his early years, I’m reminded by Andrew Roberts’s stirring, thorough and impish biography, is just how frantically desperate he was to get himself almost killed on any number of occasions. Before entering a career of public service, he’d clearly decided, a man needs to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that he is in possession of a pair of cast-iron testicles.

Gosh he must have been a bumptious, annoying little tick — the way, exploiting all his aristocratic and political connections, he continually insinuated himself on to military expeditions. Lord Kitchener didn’t want him on the belated punitive expedition to the Sudan to thrash the Mahdi for his temerity in having decapitated Chinese Gordon at Khartoum. But Young Winston wormed his way aboard nonetheless and, of course, got rewarded with a place in the last significant cavalry charge in British history.

Roberts makes clear that Churchill put himself seriously in the way of danger. Sure, Kitchener’s forces had machine guns against the natives’ rifles and spears, but they were outnumbered two to one, and nearly a quarter of those who took part in the cavalry charge were either killed or wounded.