Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [43]
And above all, in those days, there were his words. “Faith is given to us to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny,” he told the British people in a broadcast on July 14, Bastille Day, in which he recalled attending a magnificent military parade in Paris just a year before. “And I proclaim my faith that some of us will live to see a Fourteenth of July when a liberated France will once again rejoice in her greatness and her glory.” He continued:
Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen—we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or—what is perhaps a harder test—a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.
One of the prime minister’s listeners wrote: “Radio sets were not then very141 powerful, and there was always static. Families had to sit near the set, with someone always fiddling with the knobs. It was like sitting round a hearth, with someone poking the fire; and to that hearth came the crackling voice of Winston Churchill.” Vere Hodgson, a thirty-nine-year-old London woman, wrote: “Gradually we came under the spell142 of that wonderful voice and inspiration. His stature grew larger and larger, until it filled our sky.” Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, saying that one of Churchill’s speeches “sent shivers (not of fear)143 down my spine. I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words’ sake.” Mollie Panter-Downes told readers of the New Yorker: “Mr. Churchill is the only man144 in England today who consistently interprets the quiet but completely resolute national mood.”
Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Like a great actor145—perhaps the last of his kind—upon the stage of history, he speaks his memorable lines with a large, unhurried, and stately utterance in a blaze of light, as is appropriate to a man who knows that his work and his person will remain the objects of scrutiny and judgement to many generations.” Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote on July 16: “It is certainly his hour146—and the confidence in him is growing on all sides.” Churchill’s sublime achievement was to rouse the most ordinary people to extraordinary perceptions of their own destiny. Eleanor Silsby, an elderly psychology lecturer living in south London, wrote to a friend in America on July 23, 1940: “I won’t go on about the war147. But I just want to say that we are proud to have the honour of fighting alone for the things that matter much more than life and death. It makes me hold my chin high to think, not just of being English, but of having been chosen to come at this hour for this express purpose of saving the world … I should never have thought that I