If you want proof of the power of myth, Winston Churchill provides it. Last week another three books about him appeared, to join the scores already published. A recent television poll voted him the greatest Briton of all time, even ahead of Shakespeare.
This is simple preposterous, and tells us really that people prefer warrior icons. A poll taken in Ireland in 1966 would probably have chosen Patrick Pearse as the greatest Irishman ever, though no poll today would come to such a conclusion.
Pearse and Churchill actually had a great deal in common. Born within five years of one another, both were addicted to violence, the former to inflict it, and then perish; the latter to inflict it as often as possible. At Omdurman in 1898, against lightly armed Sudanese peasants, and using a pistol, he killed, in his own words, "several - three for certain - two doubtful". Only cads keep public score of such things. Indeed, in that sense, Pearse was far more of a gentleman than Churchill; but then he was also a barking lunatic.
Place in history
Both men were obsessed with their place in history, Pearse achieving his by an entirely voluntary death. Churchill's determination to achieve immortality was infinitely more Machiavellian, and his ceaseless misrepresentations of particular events, and his magnification of his role in them, were always to that end.
His conduct during the Boer War was quite despicable. When it suited, he was a war correspondent; and when it suited, a soldier. He was captured after an armoured train, whose driver he had bullied into straying too deep into Boer territory, was waylaid by the enemy. He then was enlisted in an escape plan for three army officers, hatched by a fellow prisoner called Haldane, and involving a young Dublin Fusilier, Thomas Frankland.
But Churchill then secretly made the break alone, using Haldane's plan, thereby scuppering everyone else's chances. Worse, when he got back to British lines, he became a world hero, and even worse still, after returning to London, wrote a best-selling chronicle which went began the still-enduring myth of Winston Churchill.
Can you imagine the rage that Haldane felt not merely at this betrayal, but at the rewards it brought his betrayer? For within a decade, Churchill was Home Secretary - perhaps the worst and the most irresponsible and certainly the most self-promoting of the 20th century.
The upward sweep of his career took him next to be First Lord of the the Admiralty, where few could compete with his fluent arguments, his ceaseless manipulation of fact, his endlessly coercive rhetoric. Debate with him was impossible: whenever he was shown to be wrong, he simply altered the grounds of the discussion.
Gallipoli campaign
Certainly, without him, there would have been no Gallipoli campaign. Churchill apologists point to the assent of others in this monumental folly; but it was an assent wrung, extorted, manipulated, and created by Churchill.
And how gratified Thomas Frankland's family must have been at Churchill's national eminence. Thomas, you may remember, was one of the would-be escapers whose plans to escape in South Africa were scuppered by Churchill's pre-emption of them: and on April 24th, 1915, Major Thomas Frankland, 1st Royal Dublin Fusilers, was one of the very first soldiers killed in action during the Gallipoli landings.
The disaster at Gallipoli, however, did bring a temporary halt to Churchill's canter. But having already crossed the floor of the Commons once, he was to do so again; and having been the worst Home Secretary and the worst First Lord of the Admiralty, he completed the hat-trick and became the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer. Some boy.
By the 1930s, he was deservedly washed up. Yet his appetite for violence, for bombastic rhetoric, for fabulous misrepresentation remained undiminished; and it is hard to disentangle this appetite from his opposition to appeasement. Historically, he was right; but was he right for the right reasons? And that appetite unquestionably suited him as a war leader: but that doesn't mean that he invented the resolve of the British people to oppose tyranny. The truth is that a nation which sought appeasement would never have tolerated Churchill as prime minister. He led the willing.
Admittedly, he was blessed in the shape of his foe - that blunderer of purest genius, Adolf Hitler, who could have squeezed the life out of Britain in 1941. Instead, he charged off towards the Russian steppes; the r. is h.
War leader
Rhetoric and resolve aside, Churchill was a dreadful war leader. Not content with the Mediterranean fiasco of Gallipoli, Churchill repeated it, this time in Italy, a perfect example case of planning from afar: big finger, small map. Indeed, without Lord Alanbrooke's steadying genius beside him, he could so easily have lost the war.
And of course Churchill, being a bully, could not face down a bigger bully - in his case, Bomber Harris. And though there was a military need from 1941 to bomb Germany, Harris's immolation of German cities well into 1945 was a profound and unnecessary evil which Churchill did nothing to oppose, though he distanced himself from it later, with a graceless though typical expediency.
Had he had his way after 1945, Britain would have been trying to retain India by force of arms - a calamity too monumental to contemplate. So his popularity in Britain today merely tells of us the popular need to mythologise warriors. Who today would be chosen as the great Irishman of all time? With Edmund Burke, Daniel O'Connell or W.B. Yeats as possible candidates, we would probably vote for some killer instead. That's the nature of myth.