WINSTON CHURCHILL—René Kraus—Lippincott($3).
In the reeling spring of 1940 an Englishman's home was a place of horror. The Nazis were coming. Englishmen, looking at their wives and children, already saw them as corpses. Looking at their leaders, they saw the discredited appeasers, who had promised first peace, then planes and guns, finally failed to deliver either. A little while longer these ghosts of political dead men still squeaked and gibbered in the ministries before Englishmen said in Cromwell's words: "Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God—go!" Then they turned to Winston Churchill.
He was 65 years old. He was fat (from good living), rubicund (from good drinking). He walked with a stoop, talked with a lisp. He was tired from a lifetime of fighting singlehanded against "the inadequacy, the apathy, the bloodlessness that ruled England"; from prophesying without effect the things that at last had happened. Britons who had denied him leadership in prosperity, offered him leadership in disaster. He offered them "toil and blood and tears." In its extremity the nation seemed to recognize for the first time that the whole life of this man, whom it had hated and defamed, was a preparation for this task. This week René Kraus* described that long preparation from Churchill's premature birth (1874) to his belated appointment as Prime Minister last May.
It was a life filled with paradox. Winston Churchill, who writes some of the finest historical prose of his time, never went to college. The future Chancellor of the Exchequer had a hard time with simple arithmetic. Son of an antimilitarist, Winston rushed enthusiastically into the Army. As a war correspondent on almost perpetual furlough from his regiment, he was in the thick of fierce fighting on three continents.
A brilliant soldier, he was sometimes detested by his officers. Kitchener would not speak to him. A fighter by second nature, he was at one time a pacifist by conviction. A Conservative by heredity, he earned the undying hatred of Conservatives for bolting to Lloyd George's Liberals. Twenty years later he bolted from the Liberals. He introduced into Parliament many of Britain's most important social measures. Labor called him "traitor." Reason: as Minister of Munitions in World War I, Churchill told striking munition workers that if they were dissatisfied with conditions on the job, they could try conditions at the front.
These twistings and turnings, suggests Biographer Kraus, result from the fact that Winston Churchill is a minor politician, but a major prophet and inspired visionary. At the best moments of his life, thinks Kraus, Churchill functioned as England's voice and conscience.
One such moment came in 1911. Prime Minister Asquith invited Churchill to a secret rendezvous in Scotland, there told him he had documentary evidence that Germany was preparing war against England. "Would you like to go to the Admiralty?" asked Asquith. Churchill went to his room, opened the Bible at random, read: "Hear, O Israel, thou art to pass over Jordan this day. ..." He took the job.