(See Cover)
Four years and six months have passed since King George VI told his people: "We are at war. . . . We can only do the right as we see the right." Three years and nine months have passed since the King's First Minister, Winston Churchill, arose from Dunkirk's depths and immortally said: "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. ..."
Britain and her Empire, her people and her King have changed. Her dangers, as Winston Churchill said last week, are no longer mortal. The great impending event of 1944 is not invasion of Britain, but the invasion of Hitler's Europe. The looming question for Britons and their king is not whether they can avert disaster, but how they will fare in victory—and with whom they are going to share it. The question of Empire is not which Dominions shall receive and sustain the British Fleet (it never was a question in Britain), but just how closely the Dominions shall group around Britain in the postwar world.
Britain's mood is not the lonely desperation of 1940. The emerald isle is a khakied isle, jammed with American men, planes, weapons; jammed, too (as Americans forget), with Britons who never left their bombed and war-worn home, with many others who left, fought far afield, and are briefly home again to fight on the climactic field of Europe.
Nor is Britain's mood, on the eve of the blow to end the war in Europe, the excited anticipation which only lately began to abate in the U.S. The mood of Britain is more in keeping with the effort to come. The men of Britain who (as A. E. Housman sang) make it possible for God to save the king have lost too many battles in this and other wars not to know that they and their allies may lose battles on the beaches before they win the battle for Europe.
Britain is tired. Britain, for that good and human reason, is as determined as the Russians to end the war as soon as the generals think it possible. For that effort, Britons summon all the energy, all the bravery, all the power left to them in their fifth year of war. They know that when Hitler falls the task will not be done. They are in the Pacific war, too. But, regrettably, it can never be so real and near to the people of Britain. For them, the great task left will be the task of peace. In that task, they know, is wrapped the fate of Britain, her Empire and—to the extent that Britain shapes her world—of all men.
One of the Britons girded for the climactic year of Europe's war, and for the peace, is King George VI. His highest duty is to be one of Britain's 46,000,000. In a fashion which no other people can wholly understand, and which no Briton needs to understand, he is Britain, or he is nothing.
How to Make a King. George VI is, first of all, the product of time. Britons have spent some 1,100 recorded years in the making of their monarchy (see p. 27). The result—a king who does not rule, a monarchy which nevertheless still holds and preserves the intangible but final