Reprised below are my small contributions on Churchill and the great Irish statesman and thinker Edmund Burke (1729-1797). It was eclipsed in 2019 in a brilliant speech by Andrew Roberts which the Hillsdale College Churchill Project offers here. Dr. Roberts spoke after receiving The New Criterion 7th Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society. He also discusses Churchill on Burke in a video interview with James Panero.

2. Churchill on Burke

A reader writes:

I’d like to congratulate you on Churchill by Himself, but I could not find any Churchill comments on Edmund Burke in the index. I thought Burke deserved a mention, but it’s your book, so it’s your call (and may I add, it has been one of the best treasures that has ever landed on my lap!)  —V.T., England

Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately the index is the worst feature of the book, and completely missed Burke. The 2016 Rosetta ebook, Churchill in His Own Words, is of course searchable. Both it and the 2012 international edition also contain a useful phrase index. Click these links or see the revolving books to the right >>>>.

Despite the index’s silence, there are five Churchill quotes on Burke, and a sixth by an observer….

1897: “What shadows we are…”

Looking at these shapeless forms, confined in a regulation blanket, the pride of race, the pomp of empire, the glory of war appeared but the faint and unsubstantial fabric of a dream; and I could not help realising with Burke: “What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue.”

Churchill was writing here of British dead in the campaign in the Northwest Frontier of India. (See The Story of the Malakand Field Force.) He nonetheless admired valiant enemies, like the Dervishes in The River War: “…their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.”

1939: “Importunate chink” of grasshoppers

[Burke said:] “Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”

Churchill was quoting Burke to Colin Thornton-Kemsley, chairman of the Chigwell Conservative Association, who wanted to dismiss WSC for his anti-Chamberlain rhetoric. When Churchill became prime minister, Thornton-Kemsley sent him his apologies. “I want to say only this,” he wrote. “You warned us repeatedly about the German danger and you were right: a grasshopper under a fern is not proud now that he made the field ring with his importunate chink.”

Churchill replied: “I certainly think that Englishmen ought to start fair with one another from the outset in so grievous a struggle and so far as I am concerned the past is dead.”

1941: Anglo-American unity

The great Burke has truly said, “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors,” and I feel it most agreeable to recall to you that the Jeromes [Churchill’s maternal forebears] were rooted for many generations in American soil, and fought in Washington’s armies for the independence of the American Colonies and the foundation of the United States. I expect I was on both sides then. And I must say I feel on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean now.

The BBC had actively worked to keep Churchill off the air in the Appeasement years, but by 1941 they couldn’t get enough of him. Here he is broadcasting on 16 June 1941, six days before Hitler attacked Russia. His theme, as ever, was Collective Security, and he yearned for America to enter the war.

1951: “Reform without injustice”

A generation would no doubt come to whom their miseries were unknown but it would be sure of having more to eat and bless Stalin’s name. I did not repeat Burke’s dictum, “If I cannot have reform without injustice, I will not have reform.” With the World War going on all round us it seemed vain to moralise aloud.

Churchill is here writing in his fourth volume of Second World War memoirs, The Hinge of Fate. WSC was never given to moralizing—or, as we hear so disgustingly often today, “virtue signaling.” Morality was prominent in his make-up, but in war for him the first priority was “Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror.”

3. Collin Brooks: “Where gusto is the prime quality”

One more reference to Burke in is on page 18. It is a lovely quotation by Collin Brooks about Churchill the conversationalist in Churchill by His Contemporaries (1953). Brooks captures the quality that endeared Churchill, even to political opponents:

“Never was a talker so variously gifted, so ardently listened-to, so little of a prig; never was a man so wedded to precision and verbal nicety so little of a pedant…. Sir Winston would have been equally welcomed by Falstaff in Eastcheap, Ben Jonson at The Mermaid, or Burke and Johnson at The Mitre, that is, in any coterie where the talk is masculine, the wit and humour spontaneous, the erudition unparaded, and where gusto is the prime quality.”

Hillsdale College has announced acquisition of an important part of the Ronald Cohen collection of the writings of Sir Winston Churchill. It numbers almost 2000 individual items. They comprise six categories: forewords, prefaces, and introductions by Churchill; periodical articles; works and periodicals containing Churchill speeches; letters, memoranda, statements and letters to the editor. Some 15% of these writings have not seen print since their original, limited editions, and therefore comprise a “submerged canon,” because they open a fresh field of Churchill scholarship.

Hillsdale College also has a temporary, exclusive purchase option for the balance of the collection, books written by Winston Churchill. They number over 1200 volumes, and 640 are first editions in their country of origin. Seven books are signed by Churchill. As a whole, this is the most comprehensive Churchill library ever assembled.

This material was collected over fifty years by Ronald Cohen, author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, a three-volume definitive work listing and describing each edition, translation, and imprint of everything by Churchill ever published.

“Present at the Creation”

I had the privilege of seeing “what Cohen wrought” at Ron’s home in Ottawa last November. It brought back memories because I was “present at the creation.” In 1984, Ron and I toured scores of British bookshops in a friendly rivalry. We took turns at “first choice” in each venue. So in Lyme Regis, Ron walks through the door and says, “Do you have anything by….” He turns around, and sees a row of The World Crisis in its rare original dust jackets. “I’ll take those.” Because I was out parking the car, I was fuming!

Assembling such a collection is the work of a lifetime. It could not be reproduced today because the sources have dwindled, and many items are one-of-a-kind. It is a treasure trove for researchers, students, and scholars. I am very glad also to have been “present at the finale.”

Cohen in His Own Words

Let Ron Cohen explain the uniqueness of his achievement:

“It has virtually every edition, issue, printing, state and variant of every work (save, for obvious reasons, The Second World War), many, perhaps most (but not all) in their original jackets. Plus a very large number of translations, including one previously thought not to exist (The World Crisis in Serbian).

“There are eighteen editions of Churchill’s first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (every variant). More African Journeys are here than anywhere, including all three variants of the American issue, which is almost unknown. There is every printing of every Cassell war speech volume in jackets (plus American, Canadian and Australian editions). Included are 416 Churchill-written pamphlets and leaflets.

“No stone was left unturned, including the Korean and pirated Taiwanese English-language editions of The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. There is complete Hansard for all the years of Churchill’s service in Parliament. Hillsdale has acquired the bibliographically Churchill forewords, introductions, letters, statements, interviews virtually unknown today.

* * *

“I have seen virtually every, if not every, significant collection, private or public, of WSC’s writings, as a part of my bibliographical research. None of these notable collections carry the same bibliographical depth. I also visited all the great public libraries with focused Churchill collections, such as Trinity College and the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, the Forsch Collection at Dartmouth, Fulton, Longleat, the Schweizerische Churchill Stiftung Bibliothek in Zurich, the University of Illinois Mortlake Collection, and the Churchill Memorial Trust Library (Canberra).

“Also I visited the great public libraries with excellent Churchill holdings, such as the British Library, Library of Congress, Bodleian, House of Commons, Houghton Rare Book Library and Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), the Dundee and Guildhall Libraries. None were as complete as mine. Of course I was on a mission. I felt it was my duty as bibliographer to describe every edition, issue, state, printing and variant.

“I do not believe this collection could be duplicated today. Even back then, it was extremely difficult to assemble. To collect everything, one had to know what there was. Would a bookseller have offered a major collector the sixth printing of Into Battle—or any printing other than a first? Is there anyone who’d have looked at Churchill in Ottawa closely enough to see whether the date of WSC’s arrival in Ottawa was on the 29th or 30th of December (hence two states of that pamphlet)? Would anyone have offered, or sought to purchase, a Colonial Malakand with a raised 1 in the page number 231? Or a copy of Victory with a missing 1 in page number 177? So it went!”

A Churchilliana Triad

The Cohen Collection forms a triad with the recently acquired Martin Gilbert Papers and Sir Martin’s meticulous Official Biography. His thirty-one volumes include twenty-three volumes of documents besides Gilbert’s “wodges” of papers, news reports, and, most importantly, interviews for each day of Churchill’s life. Hillsdale earlier acquired the Cohen audio collection: the voice of Churchill dating back to 1909. The college is digitalizing these for ease of access by scholars.

We thus acquire the Cohen collection, or most of it, and, besides, Ron himself, as a sometime curator, lecturer and speaker: an invaluable asset, as I know from experience.

Hillsdale College launched the Churchill Project to propagate a right understanding of Churchill’s record and to better understand his contributions to statecraft and leadership. The Project seeks to promote Churchill scholarship through national conferences, scholarships, and other resources. For more information on the Churchill Project, visit its website and subscribe for mailings.

==============

Churchill loved polo, which he called “The Emperor of Games.” A contemporary writer’s description of his polo tactics is remindful of much else in the statesmen’s approach to life and politics:

He rides in the game like heavy cavalry getting into position for the assault. He trots about, keenly watchful, biding his time, a matter of tactics and strategy. Abruptly he sees his chance, and he gathers his pony and charges in, neither deft nor graceful, but full of tearing physical energy—and skillful with it too. He bears down opposition by the weight of his dash, and strikes the ball. Did I say strike? He slashes the ball.

Sandhurst

Churchill first mentions polo in a letter to his father, seeking permission to ride in September 1893. He had just arrived at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In the entrance exam, his final test score was too low for him to be accepted in the infantry and qualified him only for the Cavalry. This was a disappointment to his father Lord Randolph, who was troubled by the expense: “In the infantry one has to keep a man; in the cavalry a man and a horse as well.” His son recalled later: “Little did he foresee not only one horse, but two official chargers and one or two hunters besides, to say nothing of the string of polo ponies!”

In the spring of 1894, Colonel J.P. Brabazon expressed interest in having Winston join a cavalry regiment. He wrote his mother, Lady Randolph: “How I wish I were going into the 4th [Hussars] instead of those old [60th] Rifles. It would not cost a penny more & the regiment goes to India in 3 years which is just right for me.” Following Lord Randolph’s death in January 1895, Winston duly joined the 4th Hussars. On 12 February 1895 he received his commission as a second lieutenant.

Polo at Aldershot

At Aldershot the same month, Churchill began intensive training as a cavalry officer. As his father had feared, finances were a problem. It was a stretch for their mother to maintain Jack, Winston and herself in the way they would all like. And by now young Winston had discovered polo. In April 1895 he wrote his mother,

Everyone here is beginning to play as the season is just commencing. I have practised on other people’s ponies for 10 days and am improving very fast. If therefore, as I imagine—you have some ready money do lend me a hundred pounds…. I cannot go on without any for more than a few days unless I give up the game, which would be dreadful.

Churchill played regularly during his eighteen months at Aldershot. By May 1896 he was hoping to make the regimental team. “I am making extraordinary progress at Polo,” he wrote his mother, “but I want very much to buy another pony, I wish you would lend me £200 as I could then buy a really first class animal which would always fetch his price.”

It bears mentioning, in those far off days, that £200 had the purchasing power of £20,000 today. It is like your son asking for a loan to buy a car…

For six months he lived in London and played polo at Hurlingham in Essex and Ranelagh. As summer ended the 4th Hussars gave up their cavalry chargers to a returning regiment, and sailed for India.

India

In Bombay a native regiment, the Poona Light Horse, was thought to have the best ponies. In what Churchill called an “audacious and colossal undertaking,” the 4th Hussars bought a complete polo stud of twenty-five horses. This gave them a huge advantage of well-trained ponies immediately upon arrival at their duty station, Bangalore in the south of India.

The Hussars were out to win, and Winston’s letters home were full of the sport. “I get up here at 5 o’clock every morning…ride off to parade at 6. At 8 o’clock breakfast and bath and such papers as there are: 9.15 to 10.45 Stables—and no other engagement till Polo at 4.15.″

A polo game lasts an hour and is divided into periods or chukkas of seven minutes each. Churchill played in every chukka he could get into. His prodigious efforts soon came to the notice of the Aga Khan. “It was at Poona in the late summer of 1896 that our paths first crossed,” the Khan wrote later:

A group of officers of the 4th Hussars, then stationed at Bangalore, called on me…. none was a better judge of a horse, than a young subaltern by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill. He was a little over twenty, eager, irrepressible, and already an enthusiastic, courageous, and promising polo player.

“Give your son horses”

In November 1896 Churchill’s team won a tournament at Hyderabad, a 24-hour, 700-mile train journey. Winston told his mother that the entire population turned out to watch, not infrequently betting thousands of rupees:

This performance is a record: no English regiment ever having won a first-class tournament within a month of their arrival in India. The Indian papers express surprise and admiration. I will send you by the next mail some interesting instantaneous photographs of the match — in which you will remark me—fiercely struggling with turbaned warriors….

Churchill was fond of other horse sports; he participated in steeplechases, point-to-points and pleasure riding. In a letter to Jack in November 1896, he proudly noted that their father’s racing colors, chocolate and pink, would appear on Indian soil for the first time at a pony race meeting. In his 1930 autobiography Churchill would advise parents:

Don’t give your son money. As far as you can afford it give him horses. No one ever came to grief— except honourable grief—through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.

Expanding horizons

During leave in 1897, Churchill traveled in Europe and then went home to England. By September he was back in India, chasing fame and notoriety as a war correspondent with Sir Bindon Blood and the Malakand Field Force. From Nowshera he wrote polo team-mate Reginald Barnes, “Best luck at Poona. It is bloody hot.”

Lt. Churchill returned to Bangalore—“to polo and my friends”—in October 1897. But the success of his writing, and the realization that it could be a serious source of income, had taken the edge off his consumption with polo. “I am off to Hyderabad on Sat for a polo tournament,” he wrote his mother. “It is a nuisance having to go when I am so busy.” He referred to the writing of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Hoping for more action in the Sudan, where General Kitchener had been appointed to reconquer that territory on behalf of Britain and Egypt, was later attached to the 21st Lancers. This adventure provided material for his second book, The River War.

* * *

Before he left India he got “rid of every polo pony I possess…. I hope to get rid of them all soon. They eat.” Churchill would not return to India again, and would soon leave the army. The Malakand Field Force “earned me in a few months two years’ pay as a subaltern.” He was about to publish his novel Savrola and had offers to write biographies of his father and his ancestor the First Duke of Marlborough. Above all, however, Churchill hungered for a seat in Parliament.

Concluded in Part 2.

_____

Barbara Langworth is a bacteriologist, editor and publisher in New Hampshire. Multi-talented, she runs everything.

Malakand Field Force?

Without consulting references, I thought the “advice” line involved The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Churchill’s first book, 1898). I was influenced by its last chapter, “The Riddle of the Frontier.” Plenty of advice there, though it is as much political as it is military.

I also remember the fine biopic Young Winston (1972). Here General Kitchener picks up a copy of what looks like a first edition Malakand, scans its cover, and hurls it into a wastebasket!

Churchill was at the time lobbying for appointment as a war correspondent on Kitchener’s expedition to recapture Sudan. Dalton Newfield, the second editor of Finest Hour, wrote in his column, “75 Years Ago” FH #28 (1973):

[Churchill] gathered his forces for a tremendous effort to join Kitchener’s forces In Egypt, after which he would return to England and politics. He unashamedly pulled every string known to him or [his mother] Lady Randolph, but Kitchener remained obdurate. He had read the Malakand, often referred to in military circles as “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals.” He wanted no part of the brash young lieutenant.

Surprisingly, there are few appearances of “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals” in the Churchill canon. Ted Morgan, in Churchill: The Rise to Failure, alludes to it in passing:

Kitchener listened in absolute silence as Winston told him that the enemy was advancing in large numbers between the British position and the city of Omdurman. “You say the Dervish [Sufi Muslim] army is advancing,” Kitchener said. “How long do you think I have got?” The commander-in-chief was asking a subaltern’s advice, which Winston did not hesitate to give. “You have got at least an hour—probably an hour and a half, sir, even if they come on at their present rate.”

The River War?

But that reference proves nothing, really. Churchill historian Paul Courtenay thought “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals” refers to Churchill’s second book, The River War.

Mr. Courtenay based his answer on Richard Harding Davis’s Real Soldiers of Fortune (London: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1906), 108. Admittedly his Churchill chapter contains several inaccuracies, but this reference to River War looked right:

Equally disgusted [with The River War] were the younger officers of the service. They nicknamed his book, “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals,” and called Churchill himself a “Medal Snatcher”…. But Churchill never was a medal hunter. The routine of barrack life irked him…. Indeed the War Office could cover with medals the man who wrote the Malakand and River War and still be in his debt.

I appealed for adjudication to a judge, the Hon. Douglas Russell, who is not only a judge but the author of a distinguished book, Winston Churchill Soldier: The Military Life of a Gentleman at War. Judge Russell replied in detail (reprinted by kind permission)…

Douglas Russell:

If we conclude that the “subaltern’s advice” quip was the reason Kitchener did not want Churchill in the Sudan, the book has to be the Malakand. It could not be The River War, which was published after Churchill left the Sudan campaign. By that time, young Winston was trying to get into the Second Boer War, and the general making the decision was Roberts, not Kitchener.

It is not clear that Churchill’s critiques in the Malakand caused Kitchener’s resistance to him joining the Sudan campaign. I have never verified that. I do not know if Kitchener even read the book. It is clear that Kitchener did not like journalists generally. He certainly knew of Churchill. In August 1898 Winston wrote to his mother:

F[rancis Rhodes, correspondent for The Times] v[er]y kind and amiable. He talked to Sirdar [leader] about me. Kitchener said he had known I was not going to stay in the army—was only making a convenience of it; that he had disapproved of my coming in place of others whose professions were at stake….

This may be the real reason Kitchener did not want Churchill. I do not give great weight to Richard Harding Davis and his Real Soldiers of Fortune. His Churchill chapter has several basic errors on other topics. I have looked at the 1914, 1941 and 1981 editions and there are no footnotes. Davis was a popular rather than a scholarly writer. The subaltern’s advice quip is the sort of thing that would appear in a soldier’s memoir, as something that he had heard someone else say without disclosing the individual who actually said it.

Subaltern’s Advice

So which book contained Lieutenant Churchill’s Advice to his Generals? We concluded that the best reference available is Davis (his errors elsewhere notwithstanding). A war correspondent himself, Davis associated with military types. The wisecrack could have been going around, and if he heard it about The River War, so be it. Churchill in that book deplored certain of Kitchener’s actions after the victory at Omdurman, such as destroying the Mahdi’s tomb.

Still, one could use this humorous subtitle for any of his four war books, all published before he had turned twenty-six. Forever fascinated by war strategy, Churchill never hesitated to speak his mind, whether he was twenty-five or seventy.

A: Very. The late Curt Zoller was the first to write in depth about Bourke Cockran. This man played a vital but little understood role in forming young Churchill’s political philosophy. In 1895, Zoller wrote, when young Churchill traveled to New York on his way to Cuba,

…he was greeted by William Bourke Cockran, a New York lawyer, U.S. congressman, friend of his mother’s and of his American relatives. Winston’s Aunt Clara was married to Moreton Frewen. (The peripatetic “Mortal Ruin” would later badly edit Churchill’s first book, Story of the Malakand Field Force.) For many years Frewen had been a friend of Cockran, who would grow to become one of Winston Churchill’s lifelong inspirations.

Churchill later wrote of “the strong impression which this remarkable man made upon my untutored mind. I have never seen his like, or in some respects his equal. With his enormous head, gleaming eyes, flexible countenance, he looked uncommonly like a portrait of Charles James Fox. It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations but his conversations, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard.”

Cockran’s Influence

The New York congressman, therefore, was crucially important. Churchill based much of his domestic political philosophy, particularly his lifelong belief in Free Trade, on Cockran’s thinking. Thanks to Churchill’s his capacious memory, he was still quoting Cockran’s famous line, “the earth is a generous mother,” forty years later. In the 1950s, Churchill told Adlai Stevenson, Democrat nominee for President  in 1952 and 1956, that his model was a Democrat congressman. Stevenson had to be reminded of who Cockran was.

 

In 2007 Curt Zoller teamed with Michael McMenamin to write Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and his American Mentor. This excellent book is well worth a read, thorough and accurate. 

We can never know for certain how a person would have developed if one or another aspect of his life had been different. But what is clear with regard to Churchill—as his letters at the time and his writings in later years attest—is that a life which before 1895 seemed destined to yield a narrow range of skimpy achievements became from 1895 onwards a life of glorious epitomes and stunning vindications.

Credit Bourke Cockran, New York’s overflowing hospitality, the railroad journey to Tampa and back, or the rampant vitality of a nation outgrowing itself day by day. Credit whatever you will, but do not doubt that Winston’s exposure to his mother’s homeland struck a spark in his spirit. And it was this spark that illuminated the long and arduous road that would take him through triumphs and tragedies to his rendezvous with greatness.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Andrew J. Bacevich considered the war in Afghanistan against Churchill’s experience in World War I. Churchill, he says, looked for alternatives to “sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders.” Just so. And we should be looking for alternatives to chewing dust in Afghanistan.

Bacevich describes Churchill’s alternative as “an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles.” (That is a physical impossibility.) Churchill championed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, followed by an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula). Bacevich adds that Churchill wished to “support the infantry with tanks.” (I presume he means supporting the infantry on the Western Front with tanks, since they were not a factor on Gallipoli.)

But the Dardanelles/Gallipoli strategy, Bacevich continues

only prolonged the war and drove up its cost. Churchill and his Cabinet colleagues had spent four years dodging fundamental questions. Fixated with tactical and operational concerns, they ignored matters of strategy and politics. Britain’s true interest lay in ending the war, not in blindly seeing it through to the bitter end. This, few British leaders possessed the imagination to see. A comparable failure of imagination besets present-day Washington.

Why comparisons are inapt

Professor Bacevich writes thoughtfully. At minimum, a people that opt for war should pay the bills. They should not foist the debt onto their grandchildren. But the Churchill examples are not entirely appropriate.

1. To compare the butchery of World War I trench warfare with the casualties of Iraq/Afghanistan is silly. Every village in Britain, Alistair Cooke once reminded us, has its memorial to the fallen in the Great War. To say soldiers were decimated is perhaps an understatement. At many times, tragically, the losses were greater than one in ten.

2. Churchill’s Dardanelles adventure was an attempt to end the stalemate and slaughter on the Western Front. A success would have powerfully contributed to the Allied war effort. The premise was that the Fleet would sail through the Dardanelles and appear off Constantinople (Istanbul). This would force Turkey’s surrender and relieve the bottled-up Russians. That meant redoubling the forces deployed against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Churchill’s fault (as he later admitted) was trying to drive a cardinal operation without authority to direct every aspect of it. It was something he avoided in World War II.

3. The tank (which Bacevich rightly identifies as a Churchill concept) was never a factor early in World War I. Tanks were not used significantly until 1917, and then only briefly. They did ease the horrific carnage of “over the top” charges against entrenched artillery. That was salient feature that made World War I much worse in terms of human losses than World War II.

A better source of Churchill comparisons

Churchill drew many appropriate lessons applicable to the present war in Afghanistan much earlier. He wrote about the features of the terrain and the determination of the enemy in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He also wrote presciently about the nature of Islam. No people, he concluded, were braver in battle, nor more easily misled by religious fanatics. The Middle East, he remarked in 1921, was

unduly stocked with peppery, pugnacious, proud politicians and theologians, who happen to be at the same time extremely well armed and extremely hard up.