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perceived the desperation of their ally. France’s generals and politicians were waiting upon defeat. As the leaders of the two nations conferred at the Quai d’Orsay, officials burned files in the garden. When Churchill asked about French reserves for a counterattack, he was told that these had already been committed piecemeal. Reynaud’s colleagues did not conceal their bitterness at Britain’s refusal to dispatch further fighters. At every turn of the debate, French shoulders shrugged. From the British embassy that evening, Churchill cabled the War Cabinet, urging the dispatch of six more squadrons. “I … emphasise the mortal gravity of the hour,” he wrote. The chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, proposed a compromise: six further squadrons should operate over France from their British airfields. At two a.m., Churchill drove to Reynaud’s flat to communicate the news. The prime minister thereafter returned to the embassy, slept soundly despite occasional distant gunfire, then flew home via Hendon, where he landed before nine a.m. on May 17.

He wore a mask of good cheer, but was no longer in doubt about the catastrophe threatening the Allies. He understood that it had become essential for the BEF to withdraw from its outflanked positions in Belgium. Back in Downing Street, after reporting to the War Cabinet, he set about filling further minor posts in his government, telephoning briskly to prospective appointees, twelve that day in all. Harold Nicolson recorded a typical conversation:

“Harold, I think it would be wise47 if you joined the Government and helped Duff [Cooper] at the Ministry of Information.”

“There is nothing I should like better.”

“Well, fall in tomorrow. The list will be out tonight. That all right?”

“Very much all right.”

“OK.”

Sir Edward Bridges and other Whitehall officials were impressed by Churchill’s “superb confidence,”48 the “unhurried calm with which he set about forming his government.” At the outset, this reflected failure to perceive the immediacy of disaster. Within days, however, there was instead a majestic determination that his own conduct should be seen to match the magnitude of the challenge he and his nation faced. From the moment Churchill gained the premiership, he displayed a self-discipline which had been conspicuously absent from most of his career. In small things as in great, he won the hearts of those who became his intimates at Downing Street. “What a beautiful handwriting,”49 he told Jock Colville when the private secretary showed him a dictated telegram, “but, my dear boy, when I say stop you must write stop and not just put a blob.” Embracing his staff as50 an extension of his family, it never occurred to him to warn them against repeating his confidences. He took it for granted that they would not do so—and was rewarded accordingly.

Churchill lunched on May 17 at the Japanese embassy. Even in such circumstances, diplomatic imperatives pressed. Japan’s militarist expansionism was manifest. Everything possible had to be done to promote its quiescence. That afternoon, he dispatched into exile former foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, most detested of the old appeasers, to become ambassador to Spain. He also established economic committees to address trade, food and transport. A series of telegrams arrived from France, reporting further German advances. Churchill asked Chamberlain, as lord president, to assess the implications of the fall of Paris—and of the BEF’s possible withdrawal from the continent through the Channel ports. His day, which had begun in Paris, ended with dinner at Admiralty House in the company of Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken.

Posterity owes little to Churchill’s wayward son, Randolph, but a debt is due for his account of a visit to Admiralty House on the morning of May 18:

I went up to my father’s bedroom51. He was standing in front of his basin and shaving with his old-fashioned Valet razor …

“Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.” I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and