Warrior Historian

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 , 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.

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.

There are almost no disclosures of inside information (however much new material there is in the book) which drastically alter the contemporary picture of events. There is no spirit of now-it-can-be-told. There is a continuity of history; the war was what it was reported to have been; the official information that he now releases simply fills in the account. The zest with which he writes of the British navy, and the clarity with which he describes naval battles, despite the fact that they are the most interesting part of The Gathering Storm, make it seem possible that in the future his absorption with the navy will seem his greatest limitation; perhaps it was the one quality that distorted his rounded view of the war. His personal anecdotes are sparingly chosen and are as illuminating as the stories that have carried across the centuries in the histories of Caesar and Tacitus.

The Motives of Governing. It may be that the final value of The Gathering Storm will be in his picture of the satisfaction and motives of governing. At a time when dictators clung to office because the alternative was to be killed, or when the officials of democratic countries followed wrong policies because they feared defeat in election, Churchill's reports of the actual mechanics of governing, what chances he was willing to take and what risks he could not venture, are in themselves a handbook of political science. They are as worldly as Machiavelli without his cynicism, and as wise as Lincoln, lacking only Lincoln's tenderness, and his doomed and tragic devotion. This book is a major document of our times.

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