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Cause of Freedom. With each succeeding volume, Churchill's canny grasp of the changing world situation and Allied strategic necessities becomes more astonishing. His endless stream of memoranda to subordinates, to F.D.R., to Stalin, are magnificently informed, range from the gravest military decisions to a recommendation (to the Minister of Economic Warfare) to try a John Steinbeck novel. Reading them—and even a Churchill memo on cleaning destroyer-boilers is readable—it is possible to feel the urgency about things large & small that the man felt himself.
What is this, he asks the Minister of Agriculture, about a cut in the sugar ration for bees? "Pray let me know what was the amount previously allotted . . . what is the saving?" When, during Churchill's illness with pneumonia, his doctor prescribed a novel for light reading, he chose Defoe's gamy Moll Flanders, "about which I had heard excellent accounts, but had not found time to test them." Having finished it, he gave it to the doctor "to cheer him up. The treatment was successful."
With all his skilled eye for detail and his affectionate eye for human trivia, Churchill never lost sight of the main objective. When he speaks of that, casting up accounts as they stood in mid-1943, the Churchillian prose rolls with the old indomitable diapason: "The entry of the United States into the struggle . . . had made it certain that the cause of Freedom would not be cast away. But between survival and victory there are many stages . . . Henceforward . . . the danger was not Destruction but Stalemate [yet] the hinge had turned."