THE GATHERING STORM (784 pp.)—Winston Churchill—Houghton Mifflin ($6).
From the fall of France on through World War II, Winston Churchill was a symbol of the reserve strength of the democratic world. He was the living proof of its power to rise above defeat, of its courage, its humor and its ability to produce better and more intelligent citizens than the fanatics who were trained under other systems. For all his great public reputation, he was the embodiment of the unknown quantity in world politics, the something that exists in addition to all the figures on aircraft, combat divisions, tanks, factories and naval vessels.
The first volume of his history of the war is already partially familiar to everyone, just as his career and his abilities were partially familiar to Englishmen at the time he became Prime Minister. Much of this book has been serialized in LIFE and in the New York Times, and it moreover follows incidents in a career already exhaustively reported. It may seem inconceivable that there is more to learn about Churchill.
Hiding in the Limelight. Yet that was the error made by much of the British public in the years before Churchill became a member of the war cabinet. The paradox was that he remained in part unknown despite all his own writing, all his years of public service and all that had been written about him. He hid in the limelight. His secret weapon was that everyone thought he knew all about him.
His book begins in one of the awful periods in history when "the noble British nation seems to fall from its high estate, loses all trace of sense or purpose, and appears to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forge their arms." It ends with his appointment as Prime Minister.
The penultimate paragraph of the book is a model of restrained bitterness:
Thus, then, on the night of the tenth of May [1940], at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.
The Folly of the Victors. One theme dominates the first half of The Gathering Storm: the insensate folly of the victors of World War I in allowing the wicked to rearm. Churchill himself steadfastly warned the world against Hitler's progress from conquest to conquest, to crimes without equal "in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record." That he was personally happy during these bitter years—painting, writing and lecturing—does not seem to lessen their pain in his memory.