The City cloaked itself in its best fog, the bells of Big Ben fell silent, and the cranes of the Thames bowed in slow reverence to accompany the funeral of Winston Churchill. It was January 31, 1965, and that was an august occasion. London —reporters recount— had not seen anything like it since the time of Prime Minister Gladstone. Nor would it see it again: the obsequies of the great statesman were the last "in the British tradition of imperial ceremony." This is how Elizabeth II had arranged it: a slow liturgy, of contained affliction, of sober pomp, until the moment of glory of the honor salutes. A state funeral.
When facing the Battle of Britain, as Store reflects, "a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that there was no hope." Fortunately, among the florilegium of adjectives that Winston Churchill has earned, "sober" is one of the least frequented. He slept without order, always ate without adhering to a schedule. Where the Labourite Attlee scrupulously adhered to times, he entertained his General Staff until dawn, soaked in scotch and alcoholic loquacity. He smoked between nine and ten cigars a day, had a manifest weakness for "very old" brandy and —according to his own accounts— emptied in this life the hulls of forty thousand bottles of champagne. But perhaps a statesman needs some virtues in times of peace and others in times of war. Churchill never had proportion, temperance, moderation. Leadership, however, trembled in his blood, a scion as he was of the old Marlborough stock. From his father he had inherited the poise of an Englishman cradled in Victorian certainties; from his mother, the individualistic optimism of Americans of the best age.
And if he was born with the noblesse oblige of the aristocrat, he would end up acquiring the gift of opportunity of politicians, the vision of the military, and the instincts of the historian. Another character note remained upstream of his lineage: that trait between audacious and reckless that could well be due to the genetic load of a Raleigh and a Drake and that would distinguish him among the politicians of his time.
When studying the Churchillian temperament, Lord Owen, therefore, is right with his caveat: let no one think, when facing Winston Churchill, that we are dealing with a normal person. His enemies were not normal—let's think of Hitler. And a life that led him to witness the last cavalry charge and the first steps of the space race, the rise and fall of the empire, discredit and fame, and—as he himself wrote—"triumph and tragedy" was not going to be normal. From one extreme to the other, he had time to win World War II, hold a thousand and one positions of political relevance, set a standard as a historian, win the Nobel Prize in literature, and give his name to a cigar size and a pattern for bow ties. For any man, fighting on three continents or enjoying the celebrity of a journalist would have represented a vital achievement: in Churchill's biography, they appear merely as offshoots of glory.
Many have tried to find the key to Churchillian greatness. Phyllis Moir, one of the statesman's secretaries, was asked the question insistently. The good woman would take years to ponder the answer. In the end, she wrote that "it was impossible to work with Mr. Churchill for any length of time without experiencing the feeling that he was a man of destiny." It is difficult to read such things in the writings of political scientists. But when Moir portrays the always laborious, always hurried Churchill, it is inevitable to think of a man who feels the urgency to fulfill a design.
His haste soon became apparent. As soon as he entered the Sandhurst Military Academy, young Churchill wrote to his mother and informed her of his solemn intention to "do something in the world." Left behind was the shy child, the unapplied student, and the unpopular classmate from his Harrow days, one of the nurseries of the race. "To do something in the world": the same had been said, long before, by a certain Benjamin Disraeli. Like the eminent Victorian, Churchill was going to accelerate to achieve it: perhaps he did not have a great intellectual background, but he did have a magnificent hussar uniform to show off.
He also had a —again— reckless bravery, to the point that one wonders what would have become of Winston Churchill if he had not spent his excess energy, literally, looking for war. His record still amazes. Before turning twenty-five, he had already participated in fifty operations with live fire in Cuba, India, Sudan, Egypt, and South Africa. He did so, almost always, in the dual role of soldier and correspondent, partly to balance the books and partly out of an ill-considered romanticism. On occasion —as in the time of the Boers— he only served as a journalist, but even so, he managed to get into trouble. For example: in South Africa, when his train was attacked, Churchill took command and did not receive the Victoria Cross only because he was listed as civilian personnel. Later, confined in Pretoria, he would add more pages to the hero's youth: his escape from the prisoner-of-war camp and his arrival in Lourenço Marques —capital of Mozambique, three hundred miles away— were read in England as the adventures of a Byron. Today they remain, rather, as the inaugural verses of an epic.
There would have been no Churchill the statesman had there not previously been a Churchill the soldier. That is why it is hardly surprising that the great man always returned to the military: after his first frustrated adventure in Oldham, at the end of the 19th century, and also in the Great War, headlong, as a purgation of his guilt in the Gallipoli disaster. But South Africa had been his revelation to the world and, on the back of this celebrity, he was going to make the natural leap to politics: the new century was barely dawning when he was already one more in the Commons. Only shortly before, he had again turned to his mother: "I telegraphed her to send me books." With that pragmatism, the prose of a historian in the mold of Gibbon and —according to Bernard Shaw— the greatest stylist of England in his time was forged.
Winston Churchill would hold his seat for more than sixty years, but his career as a public man stands out less for its duration than —typically— for its brilliance. He occupied, always earlier than usual, ministerial posts capable of culminating a cursus honorum, from Defense to Munitions, from the Admiralty to the Air Ministry, from the Colonies to the Home Office. He even held the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, the British Treasury, despite being a spendthrift, just as he became a memorable orator despite having a problem with his s's. It is not surprising —character is destiny— that, in his six decades in the political arena, he knew success and failure and only rarely discipline.
The historian John Lukacs, who has worked extensively on the figure of Churchill, analyzes his trajectory before the Second World War: in contrast to his wartime performance, his previous history had been marked by not a few errors. He was always criticized for his stance against the abdication of Edward VIII, just as he was censured for his determination to preserve India. Be that as it may, the great error—covered in blood—was Gallipoli, all the more serious insofar as it had no small amount of personal stubbornness. A quarter of a million soldiers fell there and, consequently, he himself fell from the Admiralty. In vain could he claim his profile as a visionary: his prophetic demand for rearmament against the German enemy before the Great War, his promotion of oil over coal, his pioneering use of tanks, and even his early opposition—"it must be strangled in its cradle"—to Bolshevism. Gallipoli was going to condemn him to prostration and silence, though without diminishing his lucidity: according to his wife, Clementine, the weight of the deaths and the defeat almost killed him with grief.
That was Winston Churchill's first penitential station. The most bitter would be that of the 1930s, ostracized, isolated, with few complicities, a prophet in the desert before the incubation of Nazi power. There he rose as an early warning of the danger posed by Hitler, when even the Duke of Windsor—the transitory Edward VIII—openly admired the German dictator, the English upper class showed no few sympathies, and Neville Chamberlain received the applause of the masses as a man of peace. Within Churchill's character, historian Michael Burleigh comments that perhaps one needed to have something diabolical inside to so promptly recognize the diabolical National Socialist regime outside. At least, the man who had overcome "the darkest despair," as Dr. Moran well knew, was able to make others believe that despair could be overcome. In May 1940, Churchill was to know his "finest hour": in the face of vague pact-making, he imposed on the cabinet his thesis of fighting Hitler, and history sided with him.
That story was yet to be written. In his inaugural speech, Churchill, in a soon-to-be-famous manner, could offer the English people nothing but "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." As always in his political career, his appearance on the scene was a providence of the best opportunity: his speeches, which still resonate today as a vital reason, served to clear away skepticism, to galvanize a country that was also going to know "its finest hour" in the face of the nocturnal incursions of the Blitz. These are patrimonial words of human memory: "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender." Even from the right, Churchill has had his critics—freemason, reckless, Americanoid, surrendered to communism—but in fighting against Nazi totalitarianism, he knew he was fighting against the intoxication of a chaos that wanted to blow up the foundations of civilization.
Churchill was, precisely, "Hitler's antagonist," the embodiment—says Lukacs—of the resistance of an ancient world, ancient freedoms, and ancient laws against a man who materialized a terribly efficient, brutal, and modern force. The Englishman was aware that there was an end at stake: not only that of his nation's role among world powers, but also that of an era in the world that had begun centuries before he was born. For this reason, he acted as "defender of civilization" at an agonizing moment: Churchill knew that Great Britain could resist, but not defeat Hitler. And, above all, he knew that the Nazis could win the war. This is something that tends to be forgotten today. The struggle was—according to Lukacs—between a revolutionary Hitler and a conservative Churchill.
Churchill's merit in the conflict —states Burleigh— is summarized in having initially provided visible leadership to his people and, later, in having guaranteed the participation of the American ally in the war effort. In the background, a moral dilemma burned: the entire continent under the Nazis or half the continent under Soviet control. Ultimately, that man who, under the steel tempest of the bombings, dared to climb onto the rooftops of Downing Street, was able to raise his hand with the V for victory. But there is something of the melancholy of history in remembering that, by 1945, Churchill had given orders to draw up a plan of attack against Stalin. The country was already exhausted. And "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," an "iron curtain" fell over Europe.
Upon losing the general elections, barely two months after Victory Day, Winston Churchill had occasion to conclude that "all great nations are ungrateful." A retreat of the magnitude of a sunset began. On his downhill slope, he would still experience an encore —from '51 to '55— to repeat as premier. Afterwards, he had time for his books, for his watercolor painting, for his fondness for masonry, for cruising on Onassis's yacht, already fatigued and almost given up for lost, never letting that light whisky, like a rinse, out of his hand, with the ultimate sadness of seeing how the British Empire dissolved into shadow. In the end, he broke his femur, was named an honorary citizen of the United States —the first since Lafayette— and sat for the last time in the Commons in the summer of 1964. He was already months from dying. Correspondent Augusto Assía, who knew him so well, had written in the midst of the Blitz that, even without war, Churchill "would have gone down in the pages of History as one of the most powerful, dazzling, and versatile figures in the British arena." His was "the nerve of the great Elizabethan types."
It was one more of his heterodoxies —so much a smoker and drinker— to live past ninety, but Churchill's character gave scope and coherence to any contradiction. The boy who struggled with Latin at Harrow would become a great writer in the English language. The hero lauded on three continents would end up in the grave pose of great statesmen. The temperament perpetually pursued by the "black dog" of melancholy would also be that of the Churchill capable of drowning in Pol Roger champagne. It is ironic to think, finally, that the person responsible for the failure of Gallipoli would one day appear, herald of victory, on the balconies of Whitehall. As his contradance between liberals and conservatives showed —ultimately, a praise for the conciliation of both positions—, all his oppositions would resolve themselves well. For example, Churchill has been described as the jealous guardian of atavistic English liberties, but what would have become of old Europe if he had not also been a staunch Francophile? On January 31, 1965, the people of London had a complete answer when they saw the profile of General Charles de Gaulle appear at the funeral in St. Paul's. They were the architects of a reconciled Europe, like a cordial entente. Churchill, de Gaulle, both had been together in the hour "of triumph and tragedy." Both would know, with full justice, of power and glory.