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No Drums. With this action, the state funeral closed and the private one began. Churchill's body crossed the Thames, once London's great avenue of trade and triumph, under a massed flypast of fighter planes, which dipped to 500 feet in tribute. At Festival pier, the coffin was placed in a private hearse and driven slowly to Waterloo station. There were no more parades or bands or flags or muffled drums. Accompanied by his family, Churchill's body was carried by special train some 60 miles into the heart of Oxfordshire, to rest beside the graves of his English father and his American mother in the small parish churchyard at Bladon. A few hundred yards away is Winston Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, the grandiose home of his martial ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
Silenced Pessimists. Winston Churchill's countrymen quickly turned back to present realities and future problems. Yet everywhere people paused to wonder what Churchill might teach the world he left behind. The mere fact that he happened, said Historian Will Durant, "silences the grumbling of a thousand pessimists." Said Adlai Stevenson: "Like the grandeur and power of masterpieces of art and music, Churchill's life uplifts our hearts and fills us with fresh revelation of the scale and reach of human achievement." Yet, he concluded, "our world is thus the poorer, our political dialogue diminished and the sources of public inspiration run more thinly for all of us. There is a lonesome place against the sky."
Many were mourning not only an exceptional figure but an era and a society that was able to produce exceptional figures. Except possibly for De Gaulle, who was of Churchill's own generation, today's rulers seem, in comparison, faceless and mediocre. Churchill was an aristocrat, a brilliant dilettante, a creator in a dozen roles and garbs. He was a specialist in nothing—except courage, imagination, intelligence. He was never afraid to lead, and he knew that a leader must sometimes risk failure and disapproval rather than seek universal acclaim. He had been, as Denis Brogan put it, "everything but the Archbishop of Canterbury"—and he often seemed more confident than any archbishop that he had the ear of God and was watched over with solicitude by angels.
Radiated Force. There is a feeling that, as Harvard Historian Henry S. Hughes puts it, today's world has "little tolerance of greatness," and that in an era of computers, expert teams and government by consensus, the Churchillian kind of leadership may never again assert itself. But one of Churchill's greatest contemporaries, Konrad Adenauer, 89, does not share that fear. "What makes a statesman great?" he asks. "He needs first of all a clear conception of what is possible. Then he needs a clear conception of what he wants. Finally, a great leader must have the power of his convictions, a moral driving force. Churchill radiated it. He had fire and daring from the days of his adventurous youth." In Adenauer's view, times of trouble generate leaders to deal with trouble.