Winston Churchill: A Penguin Life - Rilegato

Keegan, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670030791 ISBN 13: 9780670030798

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2002

Riassunto

A stirring account of the life of Britain's greatest twentieth-century prime minister focuses on Churchill's career during World War II, telling his story from a military history point of view. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

John Keegan is one of the most distinguished contemporary military historians and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of twenty books, including his bestselling The First World War.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Chapter One

Churchill and History

CHURCHILL, to those who were young in the wartime years, could seem a figure of exaggerated stature. The young seek heroes, and-to this schoolboy citizen of a Britain besieged-the prime minister seemed anything but heroic. Heroes strode the streets in khaki or navy or air force blue, lean, fit, laughing, recently returned from battle or ready to depart. Churchill, in his shapeless siren suit and comic stovepipe hat, signatory cigar wedged between flabby fingers, looked wholly unsoldierly. The adulation of adults irritated: "Winston, good old Winston." A schoolboy in wartime Britain did not want an old Winston but a young Winston, someone as dashing as the pilots who flew from the local airfields, the commandos who sprinted in training down the local lanes, the torpedo-boat captains who sailed from the local ports to do battle in the narrow seas. Portly Winston, with his jowls and grating voice, appeared a poor fellow beside such paragons.

The Winston of the postwar years was worse. There was ungraciousness in his response to the people's will, which turned him out of office in 1945, an aura about him of the bad loser. Whatever their parents' political opinions, whatever their own, the young could not help but be touched by the excitement of the social revolution the winning Labour party promised. Churchill the opposition politician put the worst possible face on the socialism it preached. The young took the offers of socialism at face value. A free health service for all sounded self-evidently a good thing, as did school and university scholarships for the clever and hardworking, irrespective of parental ability to pay; better state pensions for the old and the poor; new housing for slum dwellers; and secure employment for the survivors of the prewar slump. The Labour party said that it stood for a better Britain, and the young believed. Churchill's warning that a socialist Britain would be worse aroused disbelief, at least among the generation of the future.

I was a member of that generation and remained quite immune to the Churchillian legend throughout my school and university years. Churchill was returned to office in 1951 and, despite several setbacks to his health-one almost disabling-remained prime minister until 1955. His was an extraordinary display of recovery and resilience. He was succeeded by his political son and heir, Anthony Eden, who brought with him into ministerial appointments many of the younger men who had learned their political trade in junior appointments during Churchill's wartime premiership. Despite that rejuvenation, Eden's continuation of Churchillian postwar government failed to appeal to the new electorate. He and his colleagues seemed to them heavily Conservative in the old-fashioned sense: traditionally imperialist abroad, selfishly capitalist at home. "Suez," as the British still call the attempt in 1956 to reimpose semicolonial control over the Suez Canal and the state of Egypt, through which it runs, seemed the touchstone of last-gasp Churchillianism. The Suez crisis divided the country. To the older, the military attack may have seemed a proper reassertion of the imperial power that Britain was entitled to exercise by virtue of its history; to the young, it appeared a crass attempt at exerting an imperial authority that belonged to its historical past. One way or another, the failure at Suez marked the termination of the overseas epic of which Churchill, throughout his long life, had been standard-bearer. Suez spoke finis to all for which Churchill had stood.

Such, certainly, was my outlook as I came to the end of my education. Then, in a hot summer in New York City in 1957, a chance episode transformed my appreciation of the statesman under whom I had grown up. I had begun a journey through the United States, funded by a philanthropic American graduate of my Oxford college. I was waiting to join another beneficiary of the traveling scholarship he had established. It was the first time I had been by myself in a foreign country, previous expeditions to France having been spent with schoolmasters or family friends. The apartment I had been lent overlooked Union Square, then the center of a drab commercial district. The owners were away, and I knew no one in the city. I was, for a few days, at loose ends, lonely, and-in a postadolescent way-depressed and disoriented. America was unsettling, materially so much smarter and more modern than backward, war-worn Britain; spiritually so much more energetic and self-confident. The Britain I had left a few weeks before was undeniably in decline, the America I had entered so evidently booming, in wealth and in enjoyment of world power. My absent hosts belonged, moreover, to the American elite: the Ivy League, the Social Register, the chic world of New York intellectual life. The class of which they were members was about to inherit the earth, while mine, after a century of global dominance, was taking its farewell.

I found, among their stock of long-playing records-another novelty to this British visitor-music to indulge self-induced melancholy, such as Beethoven's Eroica and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. The heavy chords reinforced the lethargy that came with unfamiliar semitropical heat. Then I turned up something else: a record called The War Speeches of Winston Churchill. What on earth, I asked myself, was anything so unchic, ponderous, and pompous doing among the possessions of smart New Yorkers? What could the ex-prime minister's long, punctuated periods have to say to them? Out of pure curiosity-for I was too young to remember Mr. Churchill in 1940-I put the disc on the turntable and began to listen.

The effect was electrifying. The needle chose the track of Churchill's speech of May 19, 1940, broadcast to the nation by the BBC. The voice was instantly recognizable. The power, the inspiration of his words was not. "I speak to you for the first time as prime minister," he began. Today I can recite the passage by heart; then it came to me with the same force as it must have done to his anxious listeners in the disastrous days of the Battle of France, when the Third Republic was about to give up the ghost and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was already in full retreat to Dunkirk. "I speak to you for the first time as prime minister [pause] at a solemn hour in the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies, and above all of the cause of freedom." Three heavy beats-"country," "Empire," "Allies"-and the dramatic rallentando: "cause of freedom."

I felt my spine stiffen. Then the voice changed tempo, from rallentando to recitative:

A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans [Churchill had a way of pronouncing the word German that combined menace with contempt] by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks ["remarkable" was a Churchillian adjective that often conveyed contempt also-"a remarkable example of modern art" was his verdict on the Graham Sutherland portrait of himself presented by Parliament in 1954] have broken through the French defences north of the Maginot Line, and strong columns of their armoured vehicles are ravaging the open country, which for the first day or two was without defenders. They have penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their track.

Behind them there are now appearing infantry in lorries, and behind them, again, the large masses are moving forward.

Even as the crisis pressed upon Churchill the prime minister, Churchill the soldier could not resist recounting the sweep and drama of military maneuver, with brilliant if chilling effect.

Then the mood changed again, to a call for national unity: "We have differed and quarrelled in the past; but now one bond unites us all-to wage war until victory is won, and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and agony may be." Finally, there was a promise: "Conquer we must; conquer we shall."

The record ran on, as I leaned on the windowsill in the heavy heat of a New York June evening. There followed the speech of June 18, 1940, delivered on the same day that the exiled de Gaulle made an appeal to his own people to fight for a free France and to believe in final victory. Churchill was in bulldog mood: Hitler [there was a spluttery, glottal pronunciation of that name, which was to become familiar] knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him [echoes of Vitai Lampada, the Victorian poet Henry John Newbolt's epic of schoolboy sportsmanship, which had inspired more of the British than might care to admit to it] all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States...will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

I was suffused with an unaccustomed sense of pride in country, and then with pride in common citizenship with a man who, at a time when ordinary mortals might have looked for accommodation with an overpowering enemy, could feel such courage and call for equal courage from those he led. That he represented the spirit of true leadership I thereafter had no doubt. The themes were constant. Those thrown down as a challenge in the darkest days, when Hitler's army loomed across the Channel, were repeated at every stage through the war's five years, recounted in the words the record repeated: hardship and agony, but also sunshine and hope and the promise eventually of conquest and victory. In his first speech as prime minister to the House of Commons he had offered only "blood, toil, tears and sweat," but he had proclaimed almost in the same breath a policy and an aim of breathtaking scope. "You ask: What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war by sea, land and air with all our might.... You ask: What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory! Vict...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670030791
• ISBN 13: 9780670030798
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 208