Three Days in London
Lukacs, John
John Lukacs THREE DAYS IN LONDON Notes from the diary of a historian who flew to London in 1965 from France, where he was then teaching, to witness Churchill' s funeral. JANUARY TWENTY-NINTH...
...But the middle class is here, too...
...And she is small...
...That embarrassment they shared...
...This row, where 50 years ago stood the townhouses and flats of a rich upper-middle class, during the short peachy-creamy period of Peter Pan Kensington, houses many consulates now, the banners of many unknown new African countries, and Tito's red star, flapping in the wind...
...Farewell British Empire...
...It . is very simple...
...And they were, at that moment, the good, the reliable, the last best hope, the shop-stewards of European civilization...
...On the surface map of the world they represent a central cluster of decency, these bourgeois monarchs of Northwestern Europe...
...Farewell, father of a foreign family...
...The crowds are lighter...
...Later the London papers describe him in terms of admiration and respect...
...No longer could a warship sail upstream with Churchill...
...They have been grateful to him...
...He admired Joan of Arc and Napoleon, two of the greatest opponents of England...
...Unlike that of some of his Edwardian contemporaries, Churchill's Francophilia was more than an acquired taste for the sweet delights of France...
...The English are, of course, very good at whisking important people out of sight...
...And everywhere what, for a writer, must be one of the most evocative things of all: the inscriptions of London...
...But instinctively, at the top of the stairs, everyone turns around for a moment...
...I came because of my convictions of respect and my sentiments of gratitude...
...May they live and reign for long...
...through the brown Sunday afternoon and the wide streets to the steel tower of the air terminal, with its inscriptions in many tongues...
...Above them towers now De Gaulle...
...Not the Americans...
...De Gaulle does...
...And my heart goes out to them...
...Olav of Norway (red-faced...
...Churchill survived them by 20 years...
...But the Underground is running, with its sultana-cake patterned seats, with its coal-and-cocoa smell...
...He understood that this price ought to be set in advance, since with the Russians no postponing of unpleasant things and no vague declarations of universal goodwill would do...
...Despite the evocative power of his English, his great summer resolutions meant something more to certain Europeans than to Americans...
...Then to midday dinner in an English home...
...Of all countries that I know England has the finest public lettering...
...The sound of the whistle is melancholy and raucous at the same time...
...Why...
...Until now everything connected with the arrangement of the funeral was stately and appropriate...
...now, for the first time, we are face to face with the emptiness of the afternoon...
...Were they not those who believed, and who still believe, that history is a process of economics, or of class-consciousness, who predicted that Hitler could not wage war because, as statistics proved, the Third Reich had not enough stocks of tin or rubber or gas, who had said earlier that Hitler would not last in the face of the opposition of the German working class...
...Even now...
...Then, in 1940, all of this flashed away...
...Nations of families, presided over by royal families, by decent and unpretentious ones...
...He was, on occasion, uneasy with Churchill...
...The fluted cylindrical second portion giving clear form to the roundness of the first...
...Its brick walls have a tinge of vermilion...
...For a moment, as they stand, some of them uneasily, on the steps of St...
...Throughout his life Churchill was a Francophile...
...A ragged group of Frenchmen...
...The Bonar Laws as well as the Lansburys, the donkey generals of 1916 and the asses of the 1935 Peace Ballot, the Chamberlains as well as the Macdonalds, the ideas of Harold Laski as well as the ideas of Lord Snow: Did they have anything in common with Churchill...
...Like all colors, this impression is inseparable from the association which goes with it, which is that of quiet, reddish small square rooms inside, with dark comfortable furniture and brass fenders...
...In reality, this theme is overdone...
...Even at the airport there are not many people...
...Two of the vans bear these inscriptions in small white paint: "London 1940-44...
...So far as their conceptions of history (and of human nature, too) went, Churchill and De Gaulle, two national leaders of the Right, had more in common than Churchill and Roosevelt...
...The shape of the name, too, like the shape of his body: compact, slightly corpulent, with the glimmer of a single jewel, jaunty...
...It being Sabbath, the President of Israel wouldn't ride in a car...
...It is a mark of the decency and common sense of the people of England that they were not, and are not now, puffed up with pride in remembering those days...
...He has to sit in the cold wind, in a big black overcoat, watched with care by a tall Guards officer...
...The crowds are very sparse now: but, still, that enormous silence, all over London...
...And now, for the first time, I am gripped by the kind of emotion which is compounded of memory and historical association...
...The pout makes it human and humorous rather than churched...
...Everything resumed now its course, the theatres and the cinemas and the shops were open, the football matches were played and there was racing in the wet parks, the crowds half-filled the streets, but the sense of silence remained...
...To the younger generation it is yet another example of the selfishness and of the myopia of the governing classes...
...Roosevelt and Hitler died within the same month, in April 1945...
...thousands of people straight and somber, huddling from the wind, scuffling slowly, close against the iron railings, way down Millbank...
...Living through this phase of the Protestant episode, of the long unhappy chapter of Roman Catholicism in England, with the old mistrust fading, these English Catholics know in their bones what it means to be Christians in a post-Christian land...
...unimaginative but fair...
...His sentimental support of Tito, too, paid off in a way: it contributed to Tito's sense of independence...
...He chose to regard the twentieth century as the Century of the Common Man and the American Century...
...He is in the crowd, with his Slavic, creased face, in an angular black suit, wearing the ribbons of his medals...
...We walk out from the hotel...
...The Constable of France": thus Churchill saw him in June 1940...
...The heads of the state of Israel walking, small and solemn, in Churchill's funeral...
...And how silent they are...
...There is nothing chilly about that final syllable...
...Not the Liberals...
...The monarchs of Northwestern Europe...
...Again the tall catafalque and the candles blowing and the four guards and the flag covering the coffin, all palely gleaming in the thin light which comes through the large window, with its small and reconstituted unimpressive stained-glass panels...
...Still, we'll see...
...Conventry 1940...
...It is a large apartment building, built in the Queen Anne style, I presume around 1910...
...In a foreign airplane we rose into the winter evening sky...
...And, so, this is a sad family occasion...
...He would let the Russians have Eastern Poland in exchange for a Russian acceptance of a Russophile but essentially free Polish government...
...Noon...
...They must know that we are not English...
...Despite the high-hatted arguments in his Memoirs, he wrote there a crucial sentence: "Shipwrecked from desolation, on the shores of England, what could I have done without his help...
...To the lower classes not because he had much of the demagogue in him but because they sometimes instinctively understood him, on his own level...
...The English could have been conquered...
...The constable of Europe now...
...The shock that grips England at this moment is the sight of Macmillan, Eden, and Attlee, among the honorary pallbearers...
...And yet he is here, in this icy street, silent and stolid...
...I mean men in their thin towncoats, women with their bony cheeks and blue eyes, erect and tried...
...That peculiarly English, steady, stutterless hissing of the steam locomotive...
...There is not much traffic in the snow and driving sleet...
...He is currently writing a book about Philadelphia...
...From the house of the Holland Legation we now drive to Westminster Hall...
...This Sunday stillness...
...A young man was supposed to have said yesterday: ''Let's hope that Hitler can see this now...
...He belonged to a generation of Englishmen who, coming to maturity during the Edwardian age, were, among all British generations, the most conversant with the political history of the continent and the most deeply attuned to the pleasures and the civilities of French culture...
...The street signs and the shop fascia, the Bus Stops and the public lettering, most of it in that already traditional and very English modern sans-serif which Eric Gill created in 1928, I think, for the London transport system and which was, indeed, one of the few fine achievements of the English creative spirit between the wars...
...What remains then, for England, on this Sunday...
...Churchill was never inclined to take an insular view of Europe, not even when the continent was ruined, when the governments of the ancient states of Western Europe had been reduced to the role of tattered suppliants, when it seemed that America and Britain and Russia alone counted in the world...
...it is short, brilliant, a spring-like sound of a rill...
...On this day of Sabbath the British people mourn a great David-like figure who is buried with the pomp and reward of a great Old Testament patriarch...
...And who would have followed Churchill then...
...Then the locomotive blows twice...
...London had risen from her partial ruins, and her imperial monuments, lit by floodlights and by the eerie sideglow of her theatres, still stand...
...I thought that I could detect something of the same on the otherwise nearly vacuous, pale face of the little waitress too...
...In the white rooms of London hotels these royal persons of Europe were surrounded by gentleness and courtesy, by the fading flowers of a civilization...
...Four times in six weeks King George and his Queen had to drive in the evening to Victoria Station to greet the fleeing monarchs and presidents of Europe with dignity, sympathy, and solicitude...
...There he stands in his ill-fitting French army greatcoat, blinking occasionally, putting on his glasses, leaning down to Prince Jean of Luxembourg, with a bearing that reflects a kind of familiar solicitude...
...There is now the sense of a few small hitches in a family occasion: the Pullman waiter, standing respectfully but somewhat uneasily in his white spencer jacket...
...To be hounded by heaven was one way to put it-but it was not only the Francis Thompsons who sensed this...
...Yet he infused a sense of purpose into their declining lives, from Kensington to Kensington...
...And it is because of the royal procession melting away somewhere in the City that somehow the funeral becomes sadder and more poignant...
...Their self-respect would have been gone for good...
...the kings and the prime ministers are driven away quickly, silently...
...It is appropriate because 1940 has no great meaning for Americans...
...It stands but a few hundred feet from Hyde Park Gate, from another red brick house, where Winston Churchill died...
...To most people, in England as well as abroad, the thirties are, in retrospect, an almost incredible episode, an era of Lord North stupidity...
...We had risen early, in the black dawn, dressed and walked down to the Gloucester Road...
...A German Christian-Democrat newspaper in Bonn, paying homage to Churchill, wrote that he was nevertheless responsible for the division of Europe, having let Stalin come far into the heart of the continent...
...The nervous tic on the face of the man when he ordered a Wimpy...
...I saw less pride than a kind of disciplined resignation, and a respectful sadness: a sadness full of the remembrance of the past for those who had memories of 1940, and for the young full of a strange, vague, in certain ways medieval, respect for a distant and legendary figure, someone removed even from their parents' generation, someone with true authority...
...the people who were once the backbone of England...
...on the bridges, closed to traffic, they are not more than three deep, and some of the people scurry across the width of the bridge to follow the watery wake of the launches...
...an English name whose bearer is now buried in English earth...
...There are very few signs of the funeral now, less than 24 hours before it will begin...
...They came, in this cold, which is no ceremony and no coronation, a hundred thousand of the working people of England, with their good nature and their knobby faces, to the bier of a man who led them to no great victory but who saved them from the worst of possible defeats, from the collapse- of English self-respect...
...The working people...
...The sources of their distrust were much the same...
...In the hot droning airplane the Sunday papers again...
...1940 is close now...
...the end of the last coach vanishes...
...Farewell Churchill...
...We sat in friendliness for awhile...
...They had come to be thus received in its then last island house...
...In a fatherless world these monarchs are sources of a certain strength and of a certain inspiration...
...Not the Trade Unions...
...They distrusted him because he was uncategorizable...
...And why...
...We are told that this is the end of the state funeral, and that from now on the private progress of mourning belongs to the Churchill family...
...the once rich shipping of the port of London is sparse and far downstream...
...I mean the middle class, and not the more elegant members of the upper-middle class...
...It is right that they should be here...
...The older generation is not prone to analyze it in any detail, partly because of the fortunate English mental habit of letting bygones be bygones, partly because of the less fortunate British unwillingness to face certain unpleasant truths...
...What must be the thoughts and the memories burning in that war-worn skull...
...Holland the first England...
...Paul wants to tell them that we have flown over from Toulouse for the funeral but I dissuade him...
...Better: well, in a way...
...This was more than a political choice for him...
...Was it really true that Hitler could have been stopped easily in '38 or in '36, at the time of Munich or at the time of the Rhine-land...
...Surrounded by Wimpies and the cheap metallic filth, the plastic dishes and the sex magazines, in the midst of this vast procedure of thin liquefaction, that flicker of embarrassment was a faint sign of the atavistic resistance of the race: a faint sign but a sign nonetheless: a weak glow but still a glow, of some kind of a fire below the ashes...
...The Polish officer...
...I love you still...
...there is no dramatic huffing and puffing as the train gathers speed and glides out of the iron station into the pale sunlight of the Saturday afternoon...
...it made Tito less dependent on Stalin...
...he could not understand the romantic springs of English sentiment...
...John Lukacs, professor of history at Chestnut Hill College, is the author of The Last European War and, most recently, 1945: Year Zero...
...And Poland remained a nation, far from being independent, but still a nation and a state at a time when Stalin could have done anything he wanted...
...Churchill saved them from this fate...
...It was because of Churchill that Mac-aulay's awful prediction had not yet come true, that tourists from New Zealand standing on London Bridge may contemplate a large living metropolis and not merely a few broken buildings...
...instead, the inner silence was almost oppressive...
...It was Churchill who immediately understood that Hitler was a new incarnation of a very old evil...
...Now it is a grey and narrowing flow, with but faint memories of the ocean sea whose scummy tides race inland in the evenings...
...also, he knew the Russians better than Roosevelt...
...This is not what I saw...
...My grief is different from theirs -I am not an Englishman-but at this moment we are all one...
...There is the wail of the bagpipes, keening across the cold river...
...But how different is the Thames now from Nelson's, or even Wellington's, time...
...How bitter it must have been for the brave Polish exiles in the ruined 1945 landscape of London...
...I loved you once...
...It is perhaps appropriate that the American delegation to this Churchill funeral, because of complexity and confusion in Washington, is unimpressive and second-rate...
...We have now made the first turn in the queue and people are talking...
...They had reason to be...
...I felt nothing of that quiet glow of relief that so often follows funerals and other ceremonial occasions...
...The consequence of such beliefs is, then, that Churchill came forth at a time of great danger and distress, to attune the spirit of England to its standard condition...
...Fair...
...In a superficially post-Christian land, that is...
...Unfortunately, not many of them recognize this...
...The lights burn yellow through the mist now, at eleven in the morning...
...Queen Juliana of the Netherlands (impressive and heavy...
...Why did they-an enormous, a heterogeneous they-distrust him so much...
...In this he failed: in the end Stalin got both the frontier and the government he wanted, a big Soviet Ukraine and a subservient Communist regime in Warsaw...
...It is not the scene that is unforgettable: it is the occasion...
...Lawrence once noted, that the Rhine was a frontier of the Western European spirit...
...It brings to life the Edwardian memories, the comfortable English patrician tastes of Churchill's times: those cream and maroon British Pullman cars, the portly engine, the van in which the Irish Guards will place the coffin, the dining car for the family, its tables laid with white napery with their little yellow fringed lamps...
...to ask for appreciation would compromise the conviction and the sentiment...
...Three old blue vans of a volunteer service are parked on the grass, and elderly women address us with paper cups, offering blackish tea and Bovril...
...So there we go, rather quickly now, and as we come closer I sense that the catafalque is perhaps purposely higher than usual, the flag larger than usual, which is how they should be., There lies an old man whose flesh had begun to dissolve some time ago...
...after that the wind whipping the torn papers in the doorway...
...Past the huge dumb-impassive square aluminum buildings, indistinguishable from American ones...
...it is mingled with the sense of relief that the long cold progress is over...
...Churchill knew that a price had to be paid in Eastern Europe for the Russian contribution to Germany's defeat...
...that peculiar compound of resolution and nonchalance was one of the few things that remained beyond the reach of that wild and powerful mind...
...Not Chamberlain...
...But it was a purposeless crowd who swirled among them on this silent evening...
...The long accounts of the funeral and the excellent photographs are there but the articles are not very good-one of the editorial writers saying, for example, that when the launch moved off Tower Bridge Pier, "a band crashed out with the tune that was a last Churchillian brag: 'Rule Britannia!' "; how wrong it is, "Crash" instead of the muffled keening, and the "Last Churchillian Brag," as if it had not been something very different and infinitely melancholy...
...It is a strange thing, but they, the upholders of the Conservative Party and the Imperial Spirit and the Country Right Or Wrong were not those to whom Churchill meant the most...
...Meanwhile I had a sandwich in a place called a Wimpy...
...Then one notices the many flecks of different national flags, at half-mast, flying from the buildings...
...Two hundred years ago Canaletto painted it and wondered at it, when it was a great green river, ample and rich like the empire, with gardens and terraces along its shores...
...Then he rose like a hero, highest in those . months in 1940 when the future of human decency was at stake, and when Jewry and Christianity were on the same side, which was the side incarnated by him, which was his side...
...The queue I see is like a long quilted afghan made out of patches of humanity: schoolgirls, working people, businessmen, and the cheap-furred, straight-backed women of the conservative middle class, a few foreigners here and there, including a few dark faces, smiling Pakistani or Malaysians...
...That, too, is fitting for the occasion...
...There came in a man, a fortyish man, with glasses and a mouse-colored mustache and a thin mouth above a woolen scarf and a grey tired face...
...One day, when the last portions of the green fairness of England will be gone or meticulously fenced in by planners, that old green fairness will still exist, I think: it is the green copper bottom of the hearts of the working people of England...
...Like the grand seigneurs, Churchill was closer to the aristocracy and also to the lower classes of people...
...He saw the evil incarnated in Hitler instantly...
...How very old they look...
...Hyde Park stretches out, green, wet, and empty...
...He made certain that the Russians would leave Greece alone, which he then saved from Communist tyranny...
...I am sure that there were few gatherings in great houses this day...
...He was more concerned with the destinies of Poland than were Roosevelt, with his Polish-American voters, and Hull, who pleaded moral indignation in refusing to contemplate territorial arrangements...
...Churchill saved their countries'and their thrones 25 years ago...
...For a moment I feel a slight irritation: What are they doing here...
...Not Baldwin...
...The Yugoslav exiles fared even worse: Churchill had put his chips on the bandit Tito in the middle of the war...
...The train...
...The papers wrote later that in the crowd lived the Spirit of '40, that there was a great democratic upsurge of England, with men in derbies and elegant women mingling with cockneys and stevedores...
...They were the ones who depended most on that spirit of defiance and British self-confidence which Churchill gave...
...The cab rolls by an endless queue...
...empty cabs lumber past, and red buses resembling English spinsters who had grown to maturity in the King Edward age, with a Queen Alexandra bearing, and now often their conductors are young Negro women and men...
...Not the Dominions...
...We are far away now from the Churchillian Days, from the time of the cartoon in May 1940: "We're all behind you, Winston...
...He had found it necessary to compromise with Stalin...
...Roosevelt, in turn, was the lesser of the two...
...The wind is awfully cold, blowing from the grey sheet of the Thames, but I am surprised how far we have progressed in 15 minutes, how long already the queue is behind us...
...So this man came to pay his respects, too...
...They were not the lot of hard-faced men who had made out well of the first war: they were stiff and unimaginative, with a tight kind of patriotism that was no longer enough...
...This was odd, the papers remembered it too, the large number of young people in the crowds, long-haired, sad-faced young barbarians, in search of something, with their watery eyes...
...Who were-and who are-the peddlers of anachronisms, the real reactionaries...
...and the soft rumble of the long queue seems to have dropped...
...The grey airport bus, through the western suburbs of the great city...
...That evil genius, capable at times of great instinctive flashes of comprehension when dealing with the forces of various national characteristics, never really understood the English, and least of all did he understand Churchill...
...This is even true of Churchill's great speeches of that year...
...it is a winter arrival day...
...Waterloo Station...
...There is something very sad in the aspect of this river, and in the small launch that will carry Churchill's coffin upstream...
...the nervousness of the station-master who looks at his watch too often, because, for the first time, this perfectly managed timetable is a minute or two late...
...His presence is regal: naturally, without the slightest pomp...
...Churchill tried to save what he could...
...Dawn thoughts...
...he mistook Churchill's bravery for mere panache...
...Paul's...
...A few polite posters tell motorists that some of the Thames bridges will be closed during the funeral...
...He did not understand that behind This Far And No Further there was something more than an obstinate dumb racial pragmatism...
...The sky was blue, the German air attacks had not yet begun, in great contrast to the black clouds rising from, the fires of Bergen, Rotterdam, Antwerp...
...Above the doorway, with its crest of the Royal Netherlands, flies the bourgeois red-white-blue horizontal flag of Holland, half-mast in mourning...
...How the very sound and the shape of his name fitted him...
...Why do they want to be present at the ceremonies of the Great Imperial Guru...
...Westminster Hall...
...This will take hours...
...Having lost, he put up a good front and defended Yalta in the House of Commons...
...This is what most intellectuals fail to understand: that in 1940 the truest opponents of Hitlerism were men of the Right, not of the Left...
...Without Churchill he and Free France would have been nothing...
...In October 1944 Churchill, exasperated with American procrastination, sat down with Stalin and divided up much of Eastern Europe on a sheet of paper...
...Churchill and De Gaulle: each represented a certain superb kind of patriotism, not internationalism...
...It might have been that way, in the cold evenings and at nights, in the pubs and the teashops behind Westminster where half-frozen men and women went to restore themselves with a warm cup of something...
...With a cold empty feeling in my stomach I pay off the cab on the Lambeth Bridge and there we are, in the queue...
...Now the city was full, fuller than a century ago, and yet there was a sense of emptiness or, rather, an emptiness of sense: something had gone out of the spirit of these imperial buildings: Trafalgar Square was brilliantly lit but it was not Nelson's Column and the lions that were strange, it was Admiralty Arch: that well-proportioned Edwardian building with its proud Latin inscription chiselled large and deep over the seething roadways seemed old and purposeless now...
...and he . made life possible for many people because he had a very old, and very strong, belief in the possibilities of decency and greatness...
...Churchill and Hitler were, in any event, the two protagonists of the dramatic phase of the last world war, even though Roosevelt and Stalin played the decisive roles during its epic phase, at the end...
...He was not "steady," said Conservative Respectability...
...It is therefore that no Jewish intellectual should ever call Churchill "a splendid anachronism...
...He was a "reactionary," said Progressive Intellectuality...
...1940 is close now...
...Holland and England...
...It was at that time that Harold Laski wrote that Hitler was not much more than a tool of German capitalism, and Alger Hiss was the chief legal advisor of the Nye Committee, investigating the misdeeds of British militarism from the First World War...
...Nineteen-forty is a high year, a historical figuration, a sharp and poignant association for Britain and for Europe, but not for America...
...But I dismiss the thought in a moment, because it is ungenerous and unreasonable: in this cold wind, through this frozen garden, for such hours, it is absolutely wrong to question motives...
...The meaning of their island life would have come to its end...
...They represent lands where there still lives an older kind of humaneness...
...The sound of the full name is serious and humorous: it has a male charm about it: it is like the baroque fountains of Blenheim...
...Perhaps...
...The steady hissing of the steam valves remains the same...
...Paul's in 1940...
...ten years later the same Hiss was to sit on Roosevelt's right at the Yalta table, with his long ambitious Philadelphia Quaker face, that intellectual mug, self-satisfied, suspicious and smug...
...Pouting, aristocratic, flecked by sunlight...
...He was the kind of person whom mediocrities instinctively fear...
...Still, it is very different from the June atmosphere of coronations, and even of royal funerals...
...Paul's, they are a family unto themselves...
...The coffin, covered and now protected by that large and lovely flag, is visible to all...
...Now their houses are warm and they have televisions and they live better than ever before...
...And yet that is all wrong...
...And when I read in the paper, the next day, that Communist Poland was the only East European nation that had sent a cabinet minister, and that he sat in St...
...and he represented that short-lived Anglo-French civilization which glistened at times, elegant and uniquely luminous, through the clouded years when this century was young...
...This London house, and the Holland Legation, and Churchill-they are monuments of decency, commingled now in my mind and before my eyes: large, tolerant, and solid...
...The Havengore is a launch used for hydrographic tasks by the Port of London Authority...
...But how bitter and lonely must have been the exile years for men and women like this angular, hardwood Pole, alone for more than two decades now in this grey London...
...Churchill and he were fighting comrades in a great European war, after all...
...In their greenish old tweed coats and brown wool scarves, their little glasses resting on the bumps of their pale faces, their bad teeth, their thin mouths...
...We are already moving to the left...
...They had fought and bled across three continents, for six years, and they were abandoned in the end, with the acquiescence of Churchill...
...it is therefore that every conscientious Catholic should pay respects to this Anglican who, in a supreme moment, saw Evil even clearer than had the Pope...
...now it has become appropriate in a familiar way...
...In reality there is no division between the two parts of the procession...
...In a black automobile, simply, the coffin is now driven to the train...
...its white curved roof gables have a Dutch impression, though this is surely coincidental...
...My eight-year-old son is wearing cotton socks...
...Hounded by Satan or by God in a new-old, post-modern way, preoccupied, unlike many other people in the Western civilization, with the question of whence we have come and where we are to go...
...Attlee is bent over twice...
...It is a long and humdrum approach through what were not so long ago solidly respectable rows of houses but which now bear some of the outward marks of social decay...
...and later understood that Hitler came close to winning his war...
...Their colors, together with the red-and-white crossed Danish flags, lighten for a moment the somber tint of the procession, beneath the cold blackened imperial buildings of Whitehall...
...Many people in the royal assembly look at him often...
...He did not have the kind of mind that has a natural appeal to Overseers of Harvard University...
...I say "certain Europeans" because at that time many of them were small minorities, those who knew they were living in the dark, who had lived to see the Third Reich victorious, who had experienced the swift sinking of an iron night on their once civilized evenings...
...He believed in the necessary alliance of St...
...but in the way he fought for the cause of France before, during, and after the two world wars...
...Yes: and no...
...Bristol 1941...
...Jean of Luxembourg (looking surprisingly like Otto of Habs-burg...
...The pout merges, in a genial way, into the second syllable...
...No crowds, no excitement, no feeling of something big and ceremonial...
...But was this really so...
...As he said that there passed a shadow of embarrassment, a flicker of resigned disturbance, over his face...
...He looked at the plastic menu for a while...
...Here, for the first time, the gestures of the policemen are quick...
...Churchill knew that, for he was a monarchist not merely out of sentiment but because of his deep historical reason...
...That afternoon and evening I walked in the streets and across the squares of this great city...
...There was now, in London, some of that yellow fog that reminds one of what one knows of the nineteenth century: of Imperial London with its large Roman paving-blocks, and the black processions of thousands of cabs, and the great throngs of people in the cold shadows of the stony classical buildings built by an imperial race...
...He loved life very much...
...There is something to this...
...And then, rather suddenly, near the end of the new highroad, a sea of brown houses with sooty windows rises around us, a Victorian English ocean after the grey wintry continental cloudiness of the expressway...
...Not the Laborites...
...I heard a famous American reporter say on the plane back to France that what had impressed him was the pride of the crowd, that this was a day of great inner pride, that the people of England had pulled themselves up this week and showed a proud face to the world in their mourning...
...They, as well as groups from Denmark and from elsewhere, flew over here to represent their Resistance, marching disordered, as in any French civic parade, many of them paunchy, with their rimless glasses: small fonctionnaires and proprietaires (one old Frenchman with an angelic white beard shuffles on, pink-faced, waving an enormous flag...
...He understood something of what D.H...
...The traffic on the great street has dropped down to a Sunday-afternoon level...
...Baudouin of Belgium (still like a student...
...But, of course, all their quarrels and the phrase of the heavy burden of the Cross of Lorraine notwithstanding, Churchill understood and respected De Gaulle...
...Worse, there are such things as the article by the Fellow and Director of English Studies-a New York intellectual-at Churchill College, Cambridge, ending with a Madison Avenue phrase: "Given the tools, Churchill College can do its part of the exciting job...
...This shines not only through his great generous gestures in 1940 (that inimitable broadcast to the French in October: Dieu protege la France...
...JANUARY THIRTIETH SATURDAY The thirtieth of January...
...Paul's among the official guests, and so did the old spare leaders of the Polish national army, Anders and Bor-Komorow-ski, I knew that this was but fitting and just, and that in issuing the invitations to the latter the British had, instinctively, done the right (and not merely the proper) thing again...
...he had to walk to St...
...Now, in his death, he belongs to them perhaps even more than to anyone else in England...
...In the long and slow and sad music of humanity he once sounded an English and noble note which some of us were blessed to receive and remember...
...They know what they owe to this great commoner now dead...
...It goes all the way to the Lambeth Bridge...
...May their presidency over the Sunday afternoons of Western Europe be prolonged...
...JANUARY TWENTY-NINTH FRIDAY It is a very quiet London, a humdrum day...
...We come upon it suddenly, on Millbank, as it stretches out from the New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall...
...JANUARY THIRTY-FIRST SUNDAY The Sunday papers...
...We are standing and walking and standing and walking, surrounded by all kinds of people, most of them working-class...
...It was the peak of the European War, before America, Russia, and Japan entered it...
...At Yalta, too, Churchill fought for Poland and lost (he won for France instead...
...At midday we went to Mass in a Catholic church on High Street in Kensington...
...And they sense, too, the transitoriness of this comfort, the old working people of old England, the tired members of the island race even in this airplane age: selfish but self-respecting...
...Five deep at the most...
...Far on the other side of the station other trains are standing and people are moving, the regular Saturday traffic of the British Railways...
...But the crowds are not big...
...It is a good queue because it is movingart English queue, disciplined and good-natured, without jostling...
...It was not only a clique of narrow Germanophlle politicians who distrusted Churchill in the thirties, it was a large portion of the middle class: his pugnacity, his rhetoric, his brilliance, his Francophilia, and his Americanisms, these were things they shunned, uneasily, stiffly, shyly...
...English rather than British...
...English earth with its Roman and Saxon and Norman layers...
...Yet only a simple-minded person or some kind of a special pleader could see in that the evidence of traditional and perfidious diplomacy: for at that time, too, Churchill tried to save what was still possible, and he did...
...He may have been a teacher in a poor school in the Midlands...
...England the second Holland...
...All of this touched the United States but indirectly...
...Still, in 1940 at least, Roosevelt's heart was in the right place...
...Not the Pacifists...
...Now up the stairs and before us we see the open door through which the crowds file, immediately absorbed in the stream of everyday London...
...The crowd surges forward for a moment, many abreast, on the steps-and there we are, formed into two lines, in a hall...
...We walk hesitantly eastward, into the wind...
...Set back from the pavement behind a low wall and a small gravel courtyard this house stands like a large solid ship, anchored for a long time...
...Not the Fabianists...
...Marl-borough and Churchill...
...This dark-bright evening of London was closer to, say, 1875 than to 1935...
...Wearing his black 1940 hat, he looked like the dome of St...
...On this day Franklin Roosevelt was born in 1882, and Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany 32 years ago...
...His relationship to Roosevelt was a complex one: a mixture of genuine affection, a sense of loyalty, and what was a very Churchillian unwillingness to fight for certain things...
...Hence Churchill's enduring gratitude to him...
...His basic idea was right, as it was in 1915, in the Dardanelles business, even though he could not carry it through-in 1915 because of the British government, in 1942-45 because of the American government...
...The procession has reached the Thames...
...In that enormous hall, under its English Gothic beams, a very tall catafalque, like a great memorial stone cut in dull black, and his coffin under a large generous British flag...
...His name...
...First there is the sense of relief from the cold, the sleet and the wind dropping behind in an instant...
...That there is this great array of royalty paying their respects at the bier of a statesman is not the important matter...
...Much has been written about Hitler's love-hate relationship to England...
...Houses like this have buttressed the now ramshackle edifice of a thousand years of European civilization during its last great Protestant and Northwestern and bourgeois phase...
...In a minute its rumble dies away...
...The train...
...I am not so sure about that...
...the gripping great crisis of Europe rather than that of the "West" (a word hurriedly resuscitated and put into currency only after 1945...
...It was good to know that summer that the struggle-and not only for the British-was ineluctable, that even in this century, when everything is blurred by the wash of public relations, there were two camps as close to Good versus Evil as ever in the terrestrial struggles of nations...
...At Westminster Station we rise to the surface, into the crowd-and great, great quiet, an hour before the procession is to move out of the New Palace Yard...
...George and St...
...Are they charwomen...
...It was full of people, serious English men and women with their children...
...We come upon the building which now houses the Dutch consulate...
...Enormous are the debts that the people of Israel owed, and still owe, Churchill...
...It is said that he himself, in the instructions he left for his funeral, wanted his coffin to be carried up the Thames, like Nelson's...
...The waitress in a wimpy maroon uniform was very English, with her bun-like face and shyness and adolescent incompetence, I thought of the round-faced advertising managers and the horde of public-relations men who decide on such names as Wimpy, who spread the cheeseburger all over Britain, the end-result of their Americanized publicity bang being a weak British wimpy...
...Not the Socialists...
...And yet is it "Christian morality," this substance which is dissolving in the pallid flow of a vague universal humanitarianism...
...When Churchill began to crackle and sputter against the Hitler German danger, the Baldwins and Chamberlains were not the only ones whose ears and eyes were closed to him...
...The streets had a quiet Sunday feeling...
...But the procession is thinning out...
...The round and juicy sound of the first syllable, formed by lips curling to speak just as his, the air filling up the cheeks of a 17th-century boy with a young and churchy sound...
...The charwomen...
...The lines were clear in 1940...
...The important matter, again, is the memory of 1940: the dazzling, fever-laden evenings of May and June of that year...
...For a long time the exiled Poles were bitter about Churchill...
...The better commentators write that this funeral was indeed a proud and ceremonial occasion but the last occasion for something that is irrevocably past, the time when London was the capital city of the world: for after this last solemn homage to the glories of an imperial past the worn weekdays of a compressed, modest England begin anew...
...Not Roosevelt...
...In England the existence of something like Christian morality may have survived the decay of religion...
...it read, with Attlee, Bevin, Greenwood, Morrison, Eden, all rolling up their sleeves and marching in a broad file behind Churchill, like English shop-stewards in their Sunday best...
...Their silken tricolors wave smartly as the coffin moves by...
...Frederick of Denmark (genial...
...It is-also part of their Catholicism which, in the twentieth century, has been one of the subterranean streams of Englishness...
...Denis...
...The rest is what one would expect: four Royal Marines standing like statues, and tall candles burning...
...As one contemplates the devolution of Britain during the last half-century it appears that lassitude was the standard condition, during the twenties and thirties as well as during the fifties and sixties...
...They are respectable men and women, these constitutional monarchs of the small democratic nations of Northwestern Europe...
...It was not a very attractive church, set back between the brown brick houses...
...Then, for a moment, Eden-how old, and how weary, too-bends over Attlee with kindly solicitude...
...and Stalin did not incorporate Poland into Russia, after all...
...Then he said to the waitress: "A Wimpy, please...
...It is still sleeting and grey...
...Swiftly she comes up the narrowing river, bordered by warehouses, barges, cranes...
...The French owe much to Churchill...
...In this people who ushered in the modern age there is still a mystical, a near-medieval, strain, a strain that has been part and parcel of their Protestantism, of their Puritanism, of their Industrial Revolution, of their English socialism...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
