Splendid And The Vile Quotes

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

As long as there was tea, there was England.

It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.

Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.

It was the loss of the books that she grieved above all. . . One keeps remembering some odd little book that one had; one can't list them all, and it is best to forget them now that they are ashes.

That's one trouble about the raids. . . People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.

If we can't be safe, let us at least be comfortable.

One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: "Alive.

I never gave them courage,” he said. “I was able to focus theirs.

when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.

Churchill’s great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.

You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky . . . You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.

As the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow. . . Well, that's done and I'm glad it's over! If that's really all there is to it I'd rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures.

Moonlight was a particular source of dread. That Friday, August 16, Cockett wrote in her diary, “With this gorgeous moon we all expect more tonight.

lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.

Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.

In an aside to his own parliamentary secretary, Churchill said, “Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.

Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit,

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!

Then Pamela, who was spending the weekend at Cherkley with her young son, stopped by, bringing a gift of two brooches and some advice. “She looked grave,” Mary noted. Mary did not particularly want any advice, but Pamela delivered it anyway: “Don’t marry someone because they want to marry you—but because you want to marry them.” Mary dismissed it. “I didn’t pay much attention at the time,” she wrote in her diary, “—and yet it stuck & I kept on thinking of it.

A dozen or so miles out, Churchill abruptly asked, “Where is Nelson?” Meaning, of course, the cat. Nelson was not in the car; nor did he appear to be in any of the other vehicles. Churchill ordered his driver to turn around and go back to No. 10. There, a secretary cornered the terrified cat and trapped him under a wastebasket. With Nelson safely aboard, the cars resumed their journey. —

At the first of the funerals the bishop of Coventry said, “Let us vow before God to be better friends and neighbors in the future, because we have suffered this together and have stood here today.

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. While energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their reports are shorter.

Churchill believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms. “All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,” he said. Or this: “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.” Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: “One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.

Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars.

From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.

South of the Thames, the air was infused with the scent of incinerated coffee, as one hundred tons of it burned in a warehouse in Bermondsey. This was the added cruelty of air raids. In addition to killing and maiming, they destroyed the commodities that kept England alive,

On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,

His demand for fine things, especially those rendered in gold, was fed as well by a kind of institutional larceny.

gibbous,

It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

French endurance was the cornerstone of British defensive strategy. That France might fall was beyond imagining.

Facts are better than dreams.

miasma

History is full of lessons about the redemption of Lost Causes.

She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.

Churchill was in bed, “looking just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.

snogging

One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.

If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

He’s like a man who’s married a whore: he knows she’s a whore, but he loves her just the same.

All I hope is that it is not too late... I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have - whatever there may be left to us.

hour.

Love me, love my dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.

THAT AFTERNOON,

on

At West Linton, near Edinburgh, Scotland,

Mistrust must be sown of the plutocratic ruling caste, and fear must be instilled of what is about to befall. All this must be laid on as thick as possible.

this

Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill issued a directive to all ministers to put on a strong, positive front.

All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed,” he said. Or this: “One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.

I know it is difficult now you are living with so many rich people, only do try & save a bit on your messing bills, etc. Remember baby Winston & I are willing to starve for you, but we would prefer not to.

In an official statement, Germany depicted Hess as an ailing man who was under the influence of “mesmerists and astrologers.” A subsequent commentary called Hess “this everlasting idealist and sick man.” His astrologer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Göring summoned Willy Messerschmitt for a meeting and took him to task for aiding Hess. The Luftwaffe chief asked Messerschmitt how he could possibly have let an individual as obviously insane as Hess have an airplane. To which Messerschmitt offered an arch rejoinder: “How am I supposed to believe that a lunatic can hold such a high office in the Third Reich?

He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

The meeting did succeed, however, in searing into the minds of several French officers a singular image: that of Churchill, angered by the French failure to prepare his afternoon bath, bursting through a set of double doors wearing a red kimono and a white belt, exclaiming, “Uh ay ma bain?”—his French version of the question “Where is my bath?” One witness reported that in his fury he looked like “an angry Japanese genie.

In England, they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking: ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ ” Hitler said, infusing every gesture with irony. “Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!” The laughter from the audience verged on the maniacal.

than four months. She and Churchill kept separate bedrooms; sex happened only upon her explicit invitation. It was to Bonham Carter that Clementine, soon after being wed, revealed Churchill’s peculiar taste in underclothes: pale pink and made of silk.

After one raid set London’s Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen’s hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.

Churchill stayed at the White House, as did secretary Martin and several others, and got a close-up look at Roosevelt’s own secret circle. Roosevelt, in turn, got a close-up look at Churchill. The first night Churchill and members of his party spent in the White House, Inspector Thompson—also one of the houseguests—was with Churchill in his room, scouting various points of danger, when someone knocked at the door. At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered and found the president outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” The president prepared to wheel himself out. “Come on in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.” The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.

Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett also found it repellent. “It shouldn’t be allowed,” she insisted. “It makes play and sport of agonies, not to help people bear them, but to pander to the basest, crudest, most-to-be-wiped-out feelings of cruel violence.

We seek no treasure,” Churchill said, “we seek no territorial gains, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his right to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat”—here Churchill knocked loudly on the table—“of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.

I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Goebbels warned the heads of his foreign and domestic press departments to prepare for a drive by the British to use atrocity stories about the bombing deaths of old men and pregnant women to arouse the world’s conscience. His press chiefs were to be ready to counter these claims at once, using pictures of children killed in a May 10, 1940, air raid on Freiburg, Germany. What he did not tell the meeting was that this raid, which killed twenty children on a playground, was carried out in error by German bombers whose crews believed they were attacking the French city of Dijon.

I think I have felt fear & anxiety & sorrow in small doses for the first time in my life. I do so love being young & I don’t very much want to be 18. Although I often behave in a completely idiotic & ‘haywire’ fashion—yet I feel I have grown up quite a lot in the last year. I am glad of it.

Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed. She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.

Suddenly everyone began paying attention to the phases of the moon. Bombers could attack by day, of course, but it was thought that after dark they would be able to find their targets only by moonlight. The full moon and its waxing and waning gibbous phases became known as the “bomber’s moon.

At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.

Many other products, while not rationed, were nonetheless in short supply. A visiting American found that he could buy chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie at Selfridges, but cocoa was impossible to find. Shortages made some realms of hygiene more problematic. Women found tampons increasingly difficult to acquire. At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.

With the prospect of raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: "I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.

THAT DAY, AS A herald of the invasion that seemed soon to come, the Germans seized and occupied Guernsey, a British dependency in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, less than two hundred air miles from Chequers. It was a minor action—the Germans held the island with only 469 soldiers—but troubling all the same.

I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return,” he said. This was an understatement. Churchill was desperate to know how well his courtship of Hopkins was progressing, and what indeed he would tell the president. “Well,” Hopkins said, “I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up—” Hopkins dropped his voice to a near whisper and recited a passage from the Bible’s Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Then, softly, he added: “Even to the end.

What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?” To Battersby, it typified “the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill”—his ability to transform “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.

was brilliant. It is a pleasure to hear really well-informed talk, unpunctuated by foolish and ignorant remarks (except occasionally from Randolph), and it is a relief to be in the background with occasional commissions to execute, but few views to express, instead of being expected to be interesting because one is the P.M.’s Private Secretary.

It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.

The Churchills brought to 10 Downing a new family member, the Admiralty’s black cat, Nelson, named after Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the British naval victory at Trafalgar. Churchill adored the cat and often carried him about the house. Nelson’s arrival caused a certain degree of feline strife, according to Mary, for Nelson harassed the cat that already resided at 10 Downing, whose nickname was “the Munich Mouser.” There was much to arrange, of course, as in any household, but an inventory for 10 Downing hints at the complexity that awaited Clementine: wine glasses and tumblers (the whiskey had to go somewhere), grapefruit glasses, meat dishes, sieves, whisks, knives, jugs, breakfast cups and saucers, needles for

As he neared his close, he reprised the speech he had made one year earlier in his first address to the House as prime minister. “I ask you to witness, Mr. Speaker, that I have never promised anything or offered anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat, to which I will now add our fair share of mistakes, shortcomings and disappointments and also that this may go on for a very long time, at the end of which I firmly believe—though it is not a promise or a guarantee, only a profession of faith—that there will be complete, absolute and final victory.” Acknowledging that one year, “almost to a day,” had passed since his appointment as prime minister, he invited his audience to consider all that had occurred during that time. “When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.” As Churchill made his exit, the House erupted in cheers, which continued outside the chamber, in the Members’ Lobby. And then came the vote.

aerodrome” but, rather, “airfield”; not “aeroplane” but “aircraft.” Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. “It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,” he said. Such precise and demanding communication installed at all levels a new sense of responsibility for events, and dispelled the fustiness of routine ministerial work.

People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, 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

He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

The U.S. Congress had previously codified this antipathy with the passage, starting in 1935, of a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, that closely regulated the export of weapons and munitions and barred their transport on American ships to any nation at war. Americans were sympathetic toward England, but now came questions as to just how stable the British Empire was, having thrown out its government on the same day that Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Using vile means to attain worthy ends makes the ends themselves vile. Let them ride on the backs of doctors and medical assistants, but why lie to the people? Why assure the people they are right in their ignorance and that their crude prejudices are sacred truth? Can any splendid future possibly justify this basr lie? Were I a politician, I could never make up my mind to shame my present for the sake of the future, even though I might be promised tons of bliss for a pinch of foul lying.

Dinner proceeded as if no raid were occurring. After the meal, Biddle told Churchill that he would like to see for himself “the strides which London had made in air-raid precautions.” At which point Churchill invited him and Harriman to accompany him to the roof. The raid was still in progress. Along the way, they put on steel helmets and collected John Colville and Eric Seal, so that they, too, as Colville put it, could “watch the fun.” Getting to the roof took effort. “A fantastic climb it was,” Seal said in a letter to his wife, “up ladders, a long circular stairway, & a tiny manhole right at the top of a tower.” Nearby, anti-aircraft guns blasted away. The night sky filled with spears of light as searchlight crews hunted the bombers above. Now and then aircraft appeared silhouetted against the moon and the starlit sky. Engines roared high overhead in a continuous thrum. Churchill and his helmeted entourage stayed on the roof for two hours. “All the while,” Biddle wrote, in a letter to President Roosevelt, “he received reports at various intervals from the different sections of the city hit by the bombs. It was intensely interesting.” Biddle was impressed by Churchill’s evident courage and energy. In the midst of it all, as guns fired and bombs erupted in the distance, Churchill quoted Tennyson—part of an 1842 monologue called Locksley Hall, in which the poet wrote, with prescience: Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.

Where Hitler is distant, legendary, nebulous, an enigma as a human being, Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both. He has a child’s love for uniforms and medals. So have they.” Shirer detected no resentment among the public directed toward the “fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life he leads. It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance.

But in America, the tilt toward isolationism was gaining momentum and intensity. On September 4, a group of Yale Law students founded the America First Committee to oppose involvement in the war. The organization grew quickly, winning the energetic support of no less a celebrity than Charles Lindbergh, a national hero ever since his 1927 flight across the Atlantic. And Willkie, urged by Republican leaders to do whatever he could to pull ahead in the presidential election, was about to change strategy and make the war—and fear—the central issue in the campaign.

On Friday, March 28, the writer Virginia Woolf, her depression worsened by the war and the destruction of both her house in Bloomsbury and her subsequent residence, composed a note to her husband, Leonard, and left it for him at their country home in East Sussex. “Dearest,” she wrote, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” Her hat and cane were found on a bank of the nearby River Ouse.

The next morning, Tuesday, Churchill worked on it some more, but found his concentration broken by the sound of hammering coming from construction underway in the Horse Guards Parade, where workers were busy shoring up the Cabinet War Rooms (later named the Churchill War Rooms), situated in the basement of a large government office building a short walk from No. 10 Downing Street. At nine A.M. he ordered Colville to find the source and stop it. “This is an almost daily complaint,” Colville wrote, “and must cause considerable delay in the measures being taken to defend Whitehall.

Most galling was that his own Air Ministry appeared to be unable to account for 3,500 airplanes out of 8,500 frontline and reserve aircraft believed ready, or nearly ready, for service. “Surely there is in the Air Ministry an account kept of what happens to every machine,” Churchill complained in a subsequent minute. “These are very expensive articles. We must know the date when each one was received by the RAF and when it was finally struck off, and for what reason.” After all, he noted, even automaker Rolls-Royce kept track of each of car it sold. “A discrepancy of 3,500 in 8,500 is glaring.

department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success. It struck me that this was a pretty good representation of Churchill’s first year as prime minister

As he neared the conclusion of the speech, he fired his boilers. “We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, 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—” As the House roared its approval, Churchill muttered to a colleague, “And…we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

The bombs fell until 6:15 A.M. The blackout ended at 7:54. The moon still shone in the clear dawn sky, but the bombers were gone. The cathedral was a ruin, with melted lead still dripping from its roofs, and fragments of charred timber now and then coming loose and falling to the ground. Throughout the city, the most common sound was that of broken glass crunching under people’s shoes. One news reporter observed glass “so thick that looking up the street it was as if it was covered with ice.” Now came scenes of horror. Dr. Ashworth reported seeing a dog running along a street “with a child’s arm in its mouth.” A man named E. A. Cox saw a man’s headless body beside a bomb crater. Elsewhere, an exploded land mine left behind a collection of charred torsos. Bodies arrived at a makeshift morgue at a rate of up to sixty per hour, and here morticians had to deal with a problem they had rarely, if ever, been compelled to confront: bodies so mangled that they were unrecognizable as bodies. Between 40 and 50 percent were classified as “unidentifiable owning to mutilation.

Then came lunch back at the house, attended by the family, the godparents, and the church rector. Beaverbrook stood up to propose a toast to the child. But Churchill rose immediately and said, “As it was my birthday yesterday, I am going to ask you all to drink to my health first.” A wave of good-natured protest rose from the guests, as did shouts of “Sit down, Daddy!” Churchill resisted, then took his seat. After the toasts to the baby, Beaverbrook raised a glass to honor Churchill, calling him “the greatest man in the world.” Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day. Cowles found herself deeply moved. “I have never forgotten those simple words and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.” The next day, apparently in need of a little attention himself, Beaverbrook resigned again.

If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite. In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears. — LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial….Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.” Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill

She reported that a member of Churchill’s inner circle, whom she did not identify, “has been to me and told me there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner.” She assured her husband that the source of this complaint was “a devoted friend,” with no ax to grind. Churchill’s private secretaries, she wrote, seemed to have resolved simply to take it and shrug it off. “Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.” Hearing this shocked and hurt her, she said, “because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you.” Seeking to explain the degradation in Churchill’s behavior, the devoted friend had said, “No doubt it’s the strain.” But it was not just the friend’s observations that drove Clementine to write her letter. “My Darling Winston,” she began, “—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” She cautioned that in possessing the power to give orders and to “sack anyone & everyone,” he was obliged to maintain a high standard of behavior—to “combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.” She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.” She

A team of Mass-Observation researchers, experienced in chronicling the effects of air raids, had arrived on Friday afternoon. In their subsequent report they wrote of having found “more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis” than they had seen over the prior two months of chronicling air-raid effects. “The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness.” (The italics were theirs.) The observers noted a widespread sense of dislocation and depression. “The dislocation is so total in the town that people feel that the town itself is killed.” In order to help stem the surge of rumors arising from the raid, the BBC invited Tom Harrisson, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Mass-Observation, to do a broadcast on Saturday night, at nine o’clock, during its prime Home Service news slot, to talk about what he had seen in the city. “The strangest sight of all,” Harrisson told his vast audience, “was the Cathedral. At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets.” He spoke of the absolute silence in the city on Friday night as he drove around it in his car, threading his way past bomb craters and mounds of broken glass. He slept in the car that night. “I think this is one of the weirdest experiences of my whole life,” he said, “driving in a lonely, silent desolation and drizzling rain in that great industrial town.