The Old Lion

Once he had roared like an angry lion against delay and the deluded talkers of Munich. But last week an older Winston Churchill did nothing to quell Labor's feet-dragging rebels or to give urgency to his Foreign Secretary's plea for action. True, he sturdily supported German rearmament ("It astonished me that anyone can imagine the mighty, buoyant German race being relegated to a kind of no man's land in Europe and a sort of leper status at the mercy, and remaining at the mercy, of Soviet invasion"), but he weakened the case for EDC by talking of including the Germans in "EDC, or NATO, or some variant between them." He also urged greater trade with Russia, and asked for "a substantial relaxation of the regulations affecting manufactured goods, raw materials and shipping."

Sir Winston had not absorbed the lesson of Berlin either. Few, he admitted, ask any longer (as he himself did last May) whether Soviet policy has changed since Stalin's death. But he professed to find Berlin "a very remarkable conference," which "restored the reputation of such meetings." Said he: "Further meetings between those concerned are in no way prevented. One meeting which seemed hopelessly barred has been fixed . . . the meeting in high level conference of Communist China and the U.S."

Flapping his thick arms for emphasis, the old warrior cried: "Patience and perseverance must never be grudged when the peace of the world is at stake. Even if we had to go through a decade of cold-war bickerings punctuated by vain parleys, that would be preferable to the catalogues of unspeakable and unimaginable horrors which is the alternative." As for himself, he still had hopes for "a meeting like we used to have in the war." In Triumph and Tragedy, last volume of his war memoirs, Churchill agreed that at least one such meeting -Yalta -brought triumph to the U.S.S.R., tragedy to the rest of the world, but if he remembered it in his burst of nostalgia for the old days, he made no exception of it in his speech.

Not the Tories, not the Attlee Labor leadership, but the below-the-gangway Laborite rebels cheered as the old man sat heavily down. They pounced on the phrase,"perseverance and patience," which to them opened up a vista of endless conferences, endless hopes, endless delays. Though Churchill insisted that he saw "no contradiction" between bringing Germany into EDC immediately and simultaneously "faithfully striving to reach a workaday understanding" with the Russians, others did. In France, Churchill's words gave fresh encouragement to the foes of EDC.

Sir Winston, beguiled by an old man's dream of arranging the world's affairs in time of peace as he had done in war, had done no good to his government's case, or to its allies. What his own personal case really was, whether it grew out of a senescent's dream or nostalgia or hard thinking, no one seemed to know.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.