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Churchill's bier will first lie in state under the oaken rafters of ancient Westminster Hall, in the palace that houses Parliament. Then it will be placed on a gun carriage and escorted by slow-marching troops through the silent heart of London to St. Paul's Cathedral. Statesmen and soldiers, old comrades and old foes will come from all over the world for the obsequies, which in scale and splendor will be unsurpassed by any funeral for a commoner in British history.
His people could do no less. For Sir Winston was a kingly figure, his life a glowing Shakespearean epic. He had been his nation's savior, Britain's greatest statesman, leader and inspiration of the free world. In war and diplomacy, oratory and literature, above all in his delineation of Western values, his achievements place him honorably in the company of Pericles and the elder Pitt, of Wellington and Washington.
Forces Foreseen. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was an intensely human hero. He was easily moved to rage or tears; he delighted in mischief and rushed headlong into many an action that he was later to regret. If he was an Elizabethan in deed and spirit, he was implacably Victorian in his ideals and dedi cation to duty. When he became Prime Minister at the nadir of his nation's fortunes in 1940, he was 65—older than any other Allied or enemy leader. He had held more Cabinet posts than any other Briton in history; he had seen more of war than any of his military advisers; and from a lifetime of scholarship, authorship and parliamentary debate, he had fashioned the soul-stirring prose that was to enshrine immortal deeds in immortal words.
Churchill outlived his own great era, but he had foreseen and often named the forces that were to shape subsequent history: the cold war, the Iron Curtain, Europe's drive for unity, disorder and dictatorship in many of the lands that had once been part of Empire. At the end, few who paid him tribute remembered how bitterly the old statesman had been reviled in his time. Denounced in turn as charlatan, braggart, turncoat and warmonger, he was many times defeated at the polls, swept from high office, made the scapegoat of others' failures. But if Churchill was sometimes wrong, on the great issues of his times he was most often right. History will forgive his faults; it can never forget the indomitable, imperturbable spirit that swept a people to greatness.