Churchill: We Shall Never Surrender!

We shall never surrender!

IN his last, loneliest battle, that defiant vow seemed graven on Sir Winston Churchill’s soul. Hour after hour, day after day, the world stood vigil as the medical bulletins became ever more grave. But Churchill fought on with almost unbelievable tenacity. Finally, after days of drifting in and out of consciousness, the old warrior sank into peaceful sleep. The battle was over, the lion heart stilled forever.

His last illness began with a cold. Then, on Jan. 15, Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician for 24 years, announced that he had “developed a circulatory weakness, and there has been a cerebral thrombosis.” Though he had rallied with astonishing vitality from earlier illness, including two previous strokes, Churchill at 90 was feeble and weary; his illness, said Moran, was “very serious indeed.” In a chilling wind and rain, sorrowing Britons gathered quietly in the cul-de-sac outside Churchill’s red brick house at 28 Hyde Park Gate.

Telegrams and flowers arrived by the thousands, from the humble and the great. Relatives came and went. Moran, stooped and frail at 82, drove up two or three times daily to examine his patient, then read his simple, unemotional bulletins to the shivering newsmen outside. For 18 hours a day, bowler-hatted Detective Sergeant Edmund Murray, Sir Winston’s longtime personal bodyguard, kept order in the crowded street. When Churchill’s life appeared to be ebbing, Moran relayed Lady Churchill’s request that reporters and TV crews disperse. Within minutes, the arc lights winked out, endless coils of wire were cleared away, and the street was empty, with one small glow showing through the fanlight at No. 28.

God-Commended. As the cur tain of grief descended over Britain, the nation’s life slowed almost to a halt. “In view of the nation’s concern about Sir Winston Churchill,” Prime Minister Harold Wilson postponed a major House of Commons speech and an economic report to the nation on TV, also put off an important round of talks with West Germany’s Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. Britain was to have commemorated the 700th anniversary of the first Parliament last week, but in deference to Parliament’s greatest son. Lords and Commons agreed to put off the ceremonies until June.

At Holy Communion in St. Margaret’s, the House of Commons’ parish church, the Archbishop of Canterbury intoned, “We commend to God Winston Spencer Churchill as he approaches death.” A private message from the Pope was delivered by Monsignor Cardinale, the apostolic delegate to Britain. There were special prayers at Harrow, his old school, and at Castle Rising, near Sandringham. where the Queen and members of the royal family attended church.

Shakespearean Epic. Queen Elizabeth, who was notified of Churchill’s death before it was officially announced to the public, took the unprecedented step of requesting Parliament to accord her former Prime Minister a state fu neral, the first such tribute to a commoner since Gladstone’s death in 1898. Churchill will be buried in a tranquil Oxfordshire graveyard beside his parents: Lord Randolph Churchill and his beautiful American wife, Jennie Jerome.

Churchill’s bier will first lie in state under the oaken rafters of ancient Westminster Hall, in the palace that houses Parliament. Then it will be placed on a gun carriage and escorted by slow-marching troops through the silent heart of London to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Statesmen and soldiers, old comrades and old foes will come from all over the world for the obsequies, which in scale and splendor will be unsurpassed by any funeral for a commoner in British history.

His people could do no less. For Sir Winston was a kingly figure, his life a glowing Shakespearean epic. He had been his nation’s savior, Britain’s greatest statesman, leader and inspiration of the free world. In war and diplomacy, oratory and literature, above all in his delineation of Western values, his achievements place him honorably in the company of Pericles and the elder Pitt, of Wellington and Washington.

Forces Foreseen. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was an intensely human hero. He was easily moved to rage or tears; he delighted in mischief and rushed headlong into many an action that he was later to regret. If he was an Elizabethan in deed and spirit, he was implacably Victorian in his ideals and dedi cation to duty. When he became Prime Minister at the nadir of his nation’s fortunes in 1940, he was 65—older than any other Allied or enemy leader. He had held more Cabinet posts than any other Briton in history; he had seen more of war than any of his military advisers; and from a lifetime of scholarship, authorship and parliamentary debate, he had fashioned the soul-stirring prose that was to enshrine immortal deeds in immortal words.

Churchill outlived his own great era, but he had foreseen and often named the forces that were to shape subsequent history: the cold war, the Iron Curtain, Europe’s drive for unity, disorder and dictatorship in many of the lands that had once been part of Empire. At the end, few who paid him tribute remembered how bitterly the old statesman had been reviled in his time. Denounced in turn as charlatan, braggart, turncoat and warmonger, he was many times defeated at the polls, swept from high office, made the scapegoat of others’ failures. But if Churchill was sometimes wrong, on the great issues of his times he was most often right. History will forgive his faults; it can never forget the indomitable, imperturbable spirit that swept a people to greatness.

For the affectionate crowds that hung outside his house when he turned 90 in November, there was still an impish twinkle in his eyes, a pugnacious thrust to the jaw, a dash of the old defiance as he raised his hand in the familiar V sign. It was a valiant effort, for Churchill had grown ever weaker and more withdrawn in recent years. Denied his old pastimes of painting, bricklaying and racing a famous stable, he still found pleasure in food, drink and a meager ration of cigars, in feeding the black swans at Chartwell, his country manor, or reliving old wars and controversies with a few chosen friends. Though the world saw little of him, he remained one of the most widely beloved and honored men on earth. Among other high tributes were the congressional resolution that conferred honorary U.S. citizenship on him in 1963, and last year’s motion of “unbounded admiration and gratitude” from the House of Commons, which had not so honored an Englishman since Wellington.

A Roving Commission. For the Churchills, greatness has been a birthright. Winston was born and raised amid the splendors of Blenheim Palace, the 320-room mansion that a grateful nation bestowed on his ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. School, by contrast, bored him; he was a poor student who allowed in later life that “no one has ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees.” Fame was always his spur. As a newly commissioned subaltern in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, he searched impatiently for battlefields to prove his mettle. It was a poor time for the molding of heroes. The Industrial Revolution had raised Victoria’s England to a position of surpassing wealth; Pax Britannica in all its majesty prevailed throughout the civilized world.

Nonetheless, Churchill pushed himself into five wars in as many years. In all of them he managed to double as a war correspondent, thus launching the first of his many celebrated careers. After covering British campaigns on India’s Northwest Frontier and in the Sudan—where he figured conspicuously in one of history’s last great cavalry charges—Churchill also turned out excellent books on the fighting. He had honed his style with extensive reading: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Macaulay’s History of England, Plato’s Republic, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Aristotle’s Politics. By 1899, he had achieved such success as author and correspondent that he resigned his commission, went off to cover Britain’s war against the Boer settlers in South Africa. His exploits in and out of Boer prison camps were so dramatic that in 1900 he returned to England to find himself a national hero.

Within four months, Churchill, then 25, was elected Tory M.P. for Oldham, a sturdy working-class constituency in the industrial north. To finance his new career, he earned $50,000 in five months by lecturing to packed audiences throughout Britain, then the U.S. He knew at once how to delight Americans. When a reporter asked him what he thought of New York, Churchill said gravely: “Newspaper too thick, lavatory paper too thin.”

Across the Aisle. In February 1901, Winston Churchill rose to make his maiden speech in the House of Commons, which was to be his stage for more than half a century. At 26, he was a slim, elegant figure, with his family’s high forehead and prominent eyes, and his parliamentary style inevitably evoked memories of his father, a famed Tory leader. He had the same rolling eloquence, the lightning shafts of wit by which a Churchill could start a storm or turn a tempest back into a teapot. But he had more. In Winston’s oratory, the English language and the English spirit came together as fuel and flame.

One day in 1904, Churchill entered the House, bowed to the Speaker, and turning his back on the Conservative benches, sat down in the front row of the Liberal Opposition next to David Lloyd George, the fiery, humbly born Welshman who was to influence Churchill more profoundly than any other political figure in Britain. Free Trader Churchill broke with the Tories over their policy of high tariffs and protectionism, but he also was attracted by the Liberals’ program of social reform; in 1908, as a minister in Herbert Asquith’s gifted administration, he worked tirelessly to improve the working-class Briton’s harsh existence.

While fighting a by-election in Dundee, Churchill met Clementine Hozier, the granddaughter of a Scottish earl. Sorbonne-educated and a passionate Liberal herself, she was beautiful, intelligent, and ten years younger than Winston. Their wedding in 1908 was a highlight of the social season, and as Winston reported later, they “lived happily ever afterwards.”

Absorbed in Politics. Life could not have been altogether happy for the Churchills, for Winston in those days was probably the most hated man in the House of Commons. The “Blenheim Rat,” as his foes called him, was ostracized by most of his friends, who considered the crusading social reformer a traitor to his class. Churchill immersed himself in politics, also embarked on a shrewd, solid series of biographies, notably of his father and Marlborough. Then, in the summer of 1911, when imperial Germany gave the first unmistakable signs of belligerency, Old Soldier Churchill turned all his energies to the study of military affairs and foreign policy. From his desk in the Home Office he bombarded the Cabinet with brash, penetrating menns on European strategy. Prime Minister Asquith was impressed. That October, Asquilh asked him if he would like to take over the Admiralty. “Indeed I would,” said the 36-year-old minister.

The years that followed tested to the full those Churchillian qualities—daring, prescience, determination—that were to prove his nation’s deliverance in two world wars. Churchill built a massive new fleet, converted the navy from coal to oil, pressed development of Britain’s first naval aircraft. He also promoted a cumbersome, comic-looking vehicle that was labeled “Winston’s Folly”; it later became known as the tank.

A Million Words a Year. The years of peace were never Churchill’s happiest. He went back to the Tory Party. ”Anybody can rat,” he explained with a grin, “but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” In 1924 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post for whose decimal definitives (“those damn little dots”) he was not well suited. His first budget was the first link in the deflationary chain that led to a general strike, a nationwide depression, and the fall of the second Baldwin government.

Out of the Cabinet, denied even a seat in the Commons, he painted and laid bricks, traveled widely, and wrote an average of a million words a year. Later, during the dismal era when Hitler and Mussolini were rising and Britain shuttered its windows to the world, Churchill returned to the House to rum ble bitter warnings from his seat below the Tory gangway. He was unheeded, but never unheard.

When Britain finally declared war in 1939, the government turned once again to Churchill. He occupied his old desk at the Admiralty, and the message flashed to Royal Navy ships around the world: WINSTON is BACK. As the Nazi tide rolled toward Britain’s shores, Parliament finally turned Chamberlain out. In May 1940, King George VI asked Churchill to form the new government. In his first address as Prime Minister, Churchill told the House of Commons:

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

“Let us therefore,” he said later, in words as noble as were ever spoken under stress, “brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.’ ”

Churchill wielded greater personal power during the five wartime years than any other Prime Minister in British history. No detail was too small to escape his attention as strategist or statesman. Clad in the siren suit that he invented, a cigar clamped grotesquely in the midst of his cherubic countenance, he never tired of inspecting troops or chatting with victims of the blitz, often had to be dragged protesting from a rooftop as London shuddered under a Luftwaffe attack.

Hitler & Hell. His bones knew the historic necessity of U.S. intervention. “If we are together, nothing is impossible,” he said. “If we are divided, all will fail.” The quintessential Briton was, after all, half American. He had often damned Communism’s “foul baboonery,” but the Nazi invasion of Russia brought Churchill’s immediate pledge of unstinting support. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he reasoned, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

In the hour of victory after World War II, a grateful people was ready to give Churchill any honor he might choose. He chose instead the one reward the nation was not prepared to give—further service. Above all, war-weary Britons craved a better life. They voted for Labor and the social revolution glowingly outlined by Labor’s Clement Attlee. Wounded by defeat, Churchill settled into a new job as leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Tirelessly castigating welfare-statism as “strength through misery,” he demanded: “What is the use of being a famous race and nation if at the end of the week you cannot pay your housekeeping bill?” He was a devastating critic of the Socialist ministers who were busily dismantling Empire and clamping grey austerity on the land: “Attlee (“A modest man, and I know no one with more to be modest about”), Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps (“There, but for the grace of God, goes God”), and of course Health Minister Aneurin Bevan (“Minister of Disease”).

Pax Americana. Though out of office, Churchill was seldom out of the limelight. And in 1946, speaking as a private citizen in a foreign country, he returned to his old role of Cassandra to issue a challenge that ranks as one of his greatest feats. At Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., Churchill warned the Western world in his “Sinews of Peace” speech that the time had come to close ranks once more against a threat as sinister as any the century had seen: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Americans, summoned by Churchill to discharge their “awe-inspiring accountability to the future,” heeded and acted. Perhaps no other man on earth could have commanded such a response. In years to come, the U.S. unquestioningly supported NATO, the Marshall Plan, and a succession of international responsibilities that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Though often and unfairly characterized as a warmonger, Churchill on his return to power in 1951 saw that his warning had taken effect, and was convinced that the West could now bargain from strength with the Communist world. His hope of a realistic détente, like his vision of British membership in an integrated Europe, was left to others to pursue. Nonetheless, when he surrendered office in 1955. the world was as tranquil as it had been at any time in the 40 years since Churchill’s Grand Fleet steamed into action against imperial Germany.

In a lifetime spanning the Industrial Revolution and the Space Age, the Empire he set out to defend had evaporated. Pax Britannica had become a Pax Americana, sustained by a weight of resolve and physical might that Churchill had fruitlessly implored his own countrymen to accept as the price of peace. His words, his example, his courage were indelibly engraved on the minds of free men. With his passing. the world was diminished and felt it. Amid all the public outpourings of tribute and grief, no words struck a nobler note than the heartsick message that Winston Churchill broadcast to the people of defeated France in 1940:

Good night, then; sleep to gather strength for the morning, for the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, the kindly, on all who suffer for the cause, and gloriously upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn.