Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [235]
Churchill’s closest wartime colleagues, above all the Chiefs of Staff, emerged from the Second World War asserting the prime minister’s greatness as a statesman, while deploring his shortcomings as a strategist. Yet no Allied leader displayed unbroken wisdom. Churchill’s grand vision of the war was superb. Even acknowledging his anachronistic delusions about the future of the British Empire, he articulated the hopes and ambitions of the Grand Alliance as no other man, including Roosevelt, was capable of doing. His record as a warlord should be judged by what was done rather than by what was said. He indulged many flights of fancy, but insisted upon realisation of very few. The 1943 Aegean adventure was an exception rather than a commonplace.
If, as those who worked with him believed, in 1944–45 he was no longer what he had been in 1940–41, this is not to be wondered at. Smuts told Eden after a lunch of the prime minister’s: “He may be mentally the man he was865, he may be, but he certainly is not physically. I fear he overestimates his strength and he will wear himself out if he is not careful.” The wise old South African, of whom Churchill mused that he was what he thought Socrates must have been like, took care to say this within earshot of the prime minister. Ismay was wryly amused by the sternness with which Smuts often urged on Churchill the care of his health, admonishing him for overstaying his bedtime. The prime minister responded “rather like a small boy866 being sent off by his mother.”
For all Churchill’s exhaustion and ill health, his personal fearlessness persisted. He loved to watch the Luftwaffe’s occasional night attacks from a Whitehall roof. “The raids are very fine867 to look at now,” he wrote to Randolph, who was in Yugoslavia, on April 4, “because of the brilliant red flares which hang seemingly motionless in the air, and the bright showers of incendiaries … sometimes I go to Maria’s battery [Mary Churchill’s antiaircraft position] and hear the child ordering the guns to fire.” This was a lovely line. On March 4, Jock Colville described the prime minister on a Saturday at Chequers:
Late at night868, after the inevitable film, the PM took his station in the Great Hall and began to smoke Turkish cigarettes—the first time I have ever seen him smoke one—saying that they were the only thing he got out of the Turks. He keeps on referring to the point that he has not long to live and tonight, while the gramophone played the Marseillaise and Sambre et Meuse, he told Coningham, Harold Macmillan, Pug, Tommy and me that this was his political testament for after the war: “Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves—and bears.” Then we had to listen to most of Gilbert and Sullivan on the gramophone, before retiring at [three a.m.].
A mooted Easter meeting with Roosevelt on Bermuda was aborted because the president was ill—indeed, his health never recovered from the strains of the Tehran conference. Brooke, Moran and others anyway opposed any further long flights by the prime minister. His desire to see Roosevelt was driven more by restlessness and exaggerated faith in his own persuasive powers than by any real need for a summit. On April 4, 1944, Churchill told the House of Commons that 197,005 of the United Kingdom’s people had perished since the war began in September 1939. This figure omitted many others who were posted merely as missing, but would never come home. The public, and even some of those closest to power, perceived the war as entering its final phase. Churchill himself