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REVIEWING CHURCHILL EDITED BY JOHN G. PLUMPTON The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948 and London, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1948. {The Saturday Review Of Literature, 31:7, 19 June 1948, reviewed by Rebecca West.) Mr. Churchill's account of the events leading up to the Second World War and its first awful year, which subjected us to ordeal by stagnancy, is a puzzling book. It is clear as crystal about everything except the man who wrote it. That clarity, so far as it goes, is beyond price, and we must thank heaven that when it decided to complicate earthly affairs it provided a chronicler with the vitality to cope with that complication. This is not to say that Mr. Churchill's writing always pleases. He is not nearly so good at the style which Sir Walter Scott called "the big bow-wow" as he thinks he is. His rhetorical passages seem, like the first English automobiles, to be preceded by the man carrying a red flag. But in his less flamboyant moods he is a master. He is without match in his generation for his exquisitely feline portraits of his enemies. But Churchill is the leader of the Tory Party, and he is not going to make it lose face altogether, so though he gives Baldwin away entirely, and frankly reveals Neville Chamberlain's incompetence at certain periods, he preserves certain reticences. This leads him at times into slight falisfications of history. But apart from partisan tenderness, Mr. Churchill has served history well. This book can be recommended to everybody who wants to keep by them a handy record of what happened between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. His literary gift enables him to describe a certain manifestation so odd, so out of the run of reasonable life, that it would defy a less accomplished pen: the intrusion of the barbarians cherished and chosen as emissaries by the Fascist powers, into the familiar world of ordinary manners and. morals. Then, having shown how the ponderables and imponderables made a war, Mr. Churchill takes on the task of teaching the general reader something of tactics and strategy. But the whole book is puzzling. When it tells the story of the world's progress to its second total war, it has to tell the story of Mr. Churchill's own life; and that propounds a mystery. He is the most able statesman of his time, and he foresaw the most dangerous threat to his time. Yet his political life has been a matter of shouting from one to the other of the older political parties until he was thrown into the desert by the Tories for the best part of a decade. He was made Prime Minister only when Great Britain was in the extremest peril of death, and once he had averted that peril he was ejected from office. It is a tragedy; for humanity produces so little genius that it needs to avail itself of all there is. This volume indicates that some of Mr. Churchill's difficulties with his colleagues may have been due to his phenomenal egotism. He was inconsiderate of others and surrounded himself with smallsized men, except for "Prof." Baldwin and Chamberlain excluded him from the Cabinet because they thought he was displeasing to the electorate. They were, in an immediate and personal sense, quite wrong. When the electorate sees Mr. Churchill walking down the street or hears him over the radio, it likes him very much indeed. It likes his infantile contours, his several optimistic and epicurean chins; the gusto with which he munches his juicier phrases, particularly if they cock a snook at his enemies; his easy and beaming possession of the first requisite of manhood, courage; his rich solemnity, which shows him aware but not afraid of pain and death; his preposterous clothes, which are obviously the cast-offs of a hippopotamus. The very sight of him sends a crowd into sudden, tender, familiar laughter. Yet, as the polls show, the crowd is ambivalent. It loves him, it distrusts him, it fears him. England has always kept Winston Churchill because behind him they see the towers and parks of the great houses which were the nerve centres of the old order,- in him they fear the insolence which was the occupational disease of those who lived in the great houses. They suspect that, given his head, he will ride down the common man. It is interesting to read The Gathering Storm with an eye on the evidence it offers for and against this charge. There is some support for it in his views on certain international matters. In his estimate of the factors operating at the end of the First World War which caused the Second World War he names the complete breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He remarks, quite inaccurately, that "there is not one of the peoples or provinces that constituted the Empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence has not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians have reserved for the damned." But he has a fine record as a maker of democratic England in his various periods of office. He consulted socialist Beatrice Webb on staffing the Labour Exchanges he set up. He wanted to abolish poverty; and other inequalities too were his enemies. We sigh in astonishment at the fools who year in, year out, kept out of power the man to whom we British owe our lives. But that is the story told in the first volume. There are more volumes to come. Did the stopped clock tell the right time then, too Did the fools, with the clairvoyance which is sometimes given to compensate for foolishness, foresee Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, indeed all the terrible matter that will have to be explained in subsequent volumes FINEST HOUR 75, PAGE 6
WSC: A Remembrance \ HURCHILL is dead, gone from V> the world he saved. And the world he saved, distracted still by the flow and eddy of the aftermath, has not yet reckoned its debt to him. Perhaps that sum cannot be reckoned up, so great it is. Our very troubles of this time derive from that more nearly mortal evil that Churchill fought and ended. Are the emerging nations irritated and frustrated at what they take to be survivals of the British Raj Had it not been for Churchill, they would have been spared their hurt feelings, for they would never have emerged at all. Does Charles de Gaulle grow restive at the failure of the nations to see his glory The question would not have arisen without Churchill to fight for a France that had been captured. Are Americans troubled with the problems of the alliance We'd have been spared our troubles had not Churchill stood when all else fell. It is hard and endless to achieve the unity of Europe There was a European unity of slavery and depravity designed to last a thousand years. Because of Churchill it is no more. The Russians themselves may count their debt to that great man. Had England made its peace with evil, the Russian state would have dropped into the dark of history or have become, in the extension of the Stalin-Hitler pact, the complete political expression of the worst shadows in Stalin's mind. But Churchill did not fail. He lived and spoke and fought, and so all of us live as we do. In an age of progressive thought, he seemed an odd man to become a hero. He liked cigars and brandy and high cuisine. He believed deeply in the virtue of royalty. He believed in the British Empire, in gallantry, in chivalry. He believed in language and in the golden deeds of the English past. In an age that wrote history in terms of social movements and philosophical evolution, Churchill read history as a glorious record of brave men and the things they did for their country. He was old-fashioned and out of date. But when the hour struck it was his alone. For the evil that rose in Germany was a timeless evil. To meet it required a cast of mind that Churchill had, a dedicated innocence, a belief in battles and in courage. The monstrous German war-gods came up from under mountains and brandished again their hammers and axes. Their shadow of death spread through the heart of Europe, north to the polar ice, south to the Sahara, over all of France and paused for a moment at the little strip of water before England. In that moment Churchill spoke and his voice was like Roland's horn at Roncesvalles. He broke the spell of the evil magician and roused the world to fight for its freedom. Against the Wehrmacht's mechanical might, he had, for a while, only the gallantry, the courage, the spirit of his people. These old-fashioned virtues held the battle. He saved the world and his world at home replied by turning him out of office, for a new time had come. He said that he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, but it is dissolved and it had to be dissolved. Yet whatever hope of freedom and dignity all men have today, they owe in part to the last glorious fight of that Empire, and to its ability to bring forth, as its last gift, the man, Winston Churchill. May angels attend him. THE EVENING STAR WASHINGTON DC, 25 JANUARY 1965 SUBMITTED BY DR. HERBERT GOLDBERG FELLOW OF ICS UNITED STATES FINEST HOUR 75, PAGE 7
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