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By Root 948 0

and to indulge his passion for witnessing great events. Foreign Office official Oliver Harvey muttered scornfully about the prime minister “fooling about in Italy.”972 Amid the miseries and slaughter inflicted on London by the flying-bomb offensive, Churchill faced greater personal risk at home than in Normandy or the Mediterranean. Though his government had much to do, most of the tasks were uncongenial to him. More and more of his ministers’ time was occupied with preparing for peace. At worst, victory could not be more than a year or two away. The British people looked with eagerness mingled with uncertainty towards a future without war. Yet the prime minister’s interest in domestic matters was spasmodic and perfunctory. David Reynolds notes973 that in Churchill’s memoirs, he makes no mention of the 1944 Butler Education Act, the most important piece of domestic legislation passed during his wartime premiership. Ismay once observed, “The PM can be counted on to score974 a hundred in a Test Match, but is no good at village cricket.” The issues of postwar reconstruction, the mundane concerns of the careworn British people, required ministers to take the field in many village cricket matches.

Winning the war, and securing the place of the British Empire in the new world, were Churchill’s unaltering preoccupations. Because the Americans perceived the prime minister as the embodiment of his country, they failed to recognise that many younger British people, some of them in government, saw as surely as did Roosevelt and his compatriots that the day of empire was done. For those obliged to work with Churchill, difficulties mounted. His flagging health, rambling monologues and refusal to address business which did not stimulate his interest posed great difficulties. Leo Amery complained: “Our Cabinet meetings certainly get more975 and more incoherent, though I notice that there is much more talking by everybody, often simultaneously, than there used to be when Winston held the field entirely by himself … What makes me so tired at Cabinets is the same feeling that one has in a taxi wishing to catch a train with a driver who dawdles and misses every green light.”

The philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Churchill is preoccupied by his own976 vivid world, and it is doubtful how far he has ever been aware of what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of others. He does not react, he acts; he does not mirror, he affects others and alters them to his own powerful measure … His conduct stems from great depth and constancy of feeling—in particular, feeling for and fidelity to the great tradition for which he assumes a personal responsibility, a tradition which he bears upon his shoulders and must deliver, not only sound and undamaged but strengthened and embellished, to successors worthy of accepting the sacred burden.” This seems profoundly true of Churchill’s behaviour in the last months of the war. Two or three years earlier, he had power to shape events as well as popular perceptions of them. Now, the world was going on its way with ever less heed for his grandiose antique vision, though it could still be moved by his words.

Through the autumn, the miseries of Poland provided a running theme, as the Nazis suppressed the Warsaw Rising with familiar savagery. Not only Stalin, but also Roosevelt, resisted Churchill’s impassioned pleas to press Moscow about the Warsaw Home Army. The Americans wanted Siberian bases for their B-29 bomber operations against Japan, and were unwilling to provoke the Russians about what they perceived as lesser matters. On August 26, the president rejected an appeal from Churchill that the United States and Britain should dispatch a strongly worded joint protest to Moscow about Poland. Roosevelt wrote: “I do not consider it advantageous977 to the long-range general war prospects for me to join with you in the proposed message to Uncle J.” On September 4 the prime minister, still unwell, felt obliged to rise from his sickbed to calm a Cabinet whose members were sincerely angered by events in