Q. What is the secret of Churchill’s success?
A. His appetite for creation. He is as eager to create as Hitler is to destroy life. He cannot live without creating. Hitler cannot live without destroying. Churchill’s courage, wit, and eloquence are matched by his industry. He does an incredible amount of work. Before he came back into the government he never let a day go by without writing at least 2,000 or 3,000 words. His powers of concentration are phenomenal. His memory is prodigious. He dictates everything he writes. I have visited him in his workroom on the top floor of his country home at Chartwell in Kent. A shelf about breast-high runs the length of the room, and on it he has arranged his books of reference, notes, and documents. I was there when he was finishing his monumental life of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. There were twenty or thirty volumes lying open on the shelf, with paper slips marking other passages to be consulted. His practice is to walk up and down the room, glancing here and there at his various works of reference, dictating all the time to a secretary. As in the composition of his speeches, he has a first draft typed with plenty of space for corrections and interlining. This is returned for recopying and sometimes half a dozen drafts are necessary before the final form is completed. The result of this striving after perfection is something as near approaching perfection as one can find in the works of any writer of, what I might call, inspired history. I remember once a conversation about Churchill’s writing ability with Alexander Woollcott. I thought I had been as appreciative as one could be, but Aleck broke in: “No, Knick, you haven’t said enough. Churchill is the greatest master of the English language since the men who wrote the King James version of the Bible.” There is a nobility and grandeur about Churchill’s oratory which no literature I know outside the Bible can approach. On July 14, 1940 when Hitler’s army had swept all before it save the British Isles, Churchill said: “And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen—we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting sudden violent shock, or what is perhaps a harder test, a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.”
Can this language be matched except by the adjurations of the prophets of old? And what could surpass the fiery blast of his invective turned upon Hitler? “This wicked man,” he said, “the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man’s honor, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.”
It is interesting to catalogue the various words Churchill has used to describe Hitler, and to note that he prefers the simplest descriptives, “wicked,” “evil,” and “bad.” What other speaker could use the childish adjective “bad” and make it so effective as did Churchill on April 27, 1941 when he said: “In February, as you may remember, that bad man in one of his raving outbursts threatened us with a terrifying increase in numbers and activities of his U-boats....” And again on February 9: “We must all of us have been asking ourselves what is that wicked man whose crime-stained regime and system are at bay and in the toils, what has he been preparing during these winter months?” And earlier on October 1, 1939: “How soon victory will be gained depends upon how long Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption, can keep their grip upon the docile, unhappy German people.” Once he calls him a “cornered maniac,” and in the same speech of November 12, 1939 says: “I have the sensation and also the conviction that that evil man over there and his cluster of confederates are not sure of themselves as we are sure of ourselves; that they are harassed in their guilty souls by the thought and by the fear of an ever approaching retribution for their crimes, and for the orgy of destruction into which they have plunged us all....” On March 30, 1940 he refers to “Hitler’s murderous rage,” and says, “In his frenzy, this wicked man and the criminal regime which he has conceived and erected, increasingly turn their malice upon the weak.”
Constantly recurs the simile of bloodstained, foul hands, perhaps best in Churchill’s speech of June 12, 1941 when he said: “We can not yet see how deliverance will come or when it will come, but nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler’s footsteps, every stain of his infected and corroding fingers will be sponged and purged and if need be, blasted from the surface of the earth.”
The most famous of Churchill’s epigrams is the one now known by the entire English-speaking world, about the Royal Air Force, delivered in his speech of August 20, 1940 on “The War Situation” in the House of Commons. I heard that speech and particularly noted the epigram, but I cannot now certify which of the two current versions he actually delivered. As I remember, he said, “Never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.” But in the collected volume of his speeches edited by his son, Randolph, the sentence runs, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” I have seen both of these versions on placards in British stores and offices. Hansard must have the original version and it is possible Churchill or his son may have made an amendment in the volume of speeches.
Q. What are Churchill’s principal interests?
A. I am going to make an omnibus answer to this and include replies to a score of questions usually asked about Mr. Churchill. Roughly, in order of importance Mr. Churchill’s principal interests are England; the war, the Royal Navy; his family, past, present, and future; power; politics; the English language; public speaking; writing history and making it; writing journalism; reading history, biography, literature; the English-speaking people; Scotch whisky; good food, good wines, cigars; the French people; all other people; conversation; favorable publicity; unfavorable publicity; ceremony; painting; bricklaying; swimming (in younger days polo); six-pack bezique; his hats; his shoes; his clothes; and of course “that bloodthirsty guttersnipe.”
Compare this with Hitler’s interests: power; Hitler-Germany; the war; the German Army; barbarism; haranguing crowds in public; haranguing friends in private; propaganda; rewriting history; reading military history (and making it); suppressing journalism; the Jews; colossal architecture; the movies; vegetarian food; and of course “the warmonger Churchill.”
By this comparison I do not put the two men on the same level, for morally they cannot be considered as belonging to the same species, but it is interesting to note the contrasts that come out in such a list. It is not merely the contrast between the aristocrat who is striving to preserve free life for common men and the “guttersnipe” who is bent upon enslaving them all; it is a contrast of two worlds.