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Once the Chamberlains invited the Churchills to lunch at 10 Downing Street. The guest of honor was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi ambassador, who was returning to Germany. Midway in the meal a Foreign Office messenger arrived with a private message (Churchill only later learned its contents) saying that Austria had been invaded. Chamberlain, obviously discomfited, tried to bring the meal to an end; the Ribbentrops deliberately dallied, apparently thinking "it was a good maneuver to keep the Prime Minister away from his work and the telephone. At length Mr. Chamberlain said to the Ambassador, 'I am sorry I have to go now to attend to urgent business,'" and scurried off. Churchill's final word on the incident: "This is the last time I saw Herr von Ribbentrop before he was hanged."
". . . Of the Death of Kings." "Aren't we a very old team?" he asked Chamberlain, when he was asked to join the cabinet. When in 1940 he reviewed the fleet, 25 years after his first service as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had a weird sense of living through some experience that he had gone through before. Yet this time France was weak, Russia was no longer an ally, Italy and Japan no longer Britain's friends, and America in such a state of mind that it seemed uncertain she would enter the war. On the way home "we had a picnic lunch by a stream, sparkling in hot sunshine. I felt oddly oppressed with my memories.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings."
Through these years the record of the U.S. in foreign affairs (though Churchill talks little about it) seems to have been wasteful, extravagant, mocking, painfully inept or blunderingly efficient, active and vigorous when caution was needed, and passive and contemplative when there was a need for action. Still more dismaying is Churchill's revelation that early in the war, when U.S. public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of Great Britain and France, and when President Roosevelt stood before the country as the advocate of all aid short of war, blocked (apparently) only by the artful isolationists, the Roosevelt Administration was in fact "cooler than in any other period. I persevered in my correspondence with the President, but with little response . . ."
Churchill could remember the days when the students of the Oxford Union took their pledge not to fight for King and country, and he lived to see them prove themselves full members of "the finest generation ever bred in Britain."
Rhetoric Unnecessary. There is very little of the wonderful and moving rhetoric of the Churchill speeches of the war years, his tributes to the bravery of the soldiers, his call to blood, sweat, toil and tears. They are not necessary. His style is generally simple, almost biblical.