Martin Greenberg
WINSTON CHURCHILL, TORY DEMOCRAT
The age 'of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters,
economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and
the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
-Burke
Then the world was not only made for a few,
but a very few.-Disraeli
(in
Sybil)
I t is all the fault of Democracy and Science. . . . Instead of
a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's
cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic
manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation,
we now have entire populations, including even women and children,
pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a
set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill.
This sentiment, voiced by Winston Churchill in 1930 in the memoirs of
his youth, has been a constant one with him and he repeats it, in the
third volume of his present account of the Second World War,l in
connection with his tribute to Rommel: "In the sombre wars of modern
democracy chivalry finds no place. Dull butcheries on a gigantic scale
and mass effects overwhelm all detached sentiment." Yet the champion
of ancient weapons and archaic maneuver has played a leading role in
the two great "democratic butcheries" of the twentieth century and has
had to concern himself with tanks, airplanes, radar, and atomic bombs.
There would be a melancholy irony in this if Churchill were a weary
aristocrat dragging out his days and duties in a sordid world of "mass
effects," and a banal irony if his attachment to an earlier age-to "the
old world of culture and quality, of hierarchies and traditions, of values
and decorum," as he has put it-were merely nostalgia allowing for fine
rhetoric in books, but making no real part of the character of the man.
1.
The Second World War:
Vol. I,
The Gathering Storm;
Vol. II,
Their
Finest Hour;
Vol. III,
The Grand Alliance;
Houghton Mifflin. These three
volumes cover a period (through December 1941) in which Churchill's in–
fluence on the conduct of the war in the West was decisive and overwhelming;
they constitute a natural division of his extensive history. In Vol. IV,
The
Hinge of Fate,
which is of enormous interest but appeared too late to be con–
sidered here, Roosevelt and the American General Staff taking a vigorous part
in the direction of the war,
it
ceases to be so very much Churchill's personal
affair.
