Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [58]
Clementine strongly advised him against embracing the inescapably partisan role of Tory leader. He would have enhanced his stature as national warlord by declining. But acceptance fulfilled a lifelong ambition. More important, he knew how fickle was the support of public and Parliament. He was determined to indulge no possible alternative focus of influence, far less power, such as the election of another man as Tory leader—most plausibly Anthony Eden—might create. There remained a small risk, and an intolerable one, that if Churchill refused, the Tories’ choice might fall upon Halifax. It seemed to the prime minister essential to ensure control of the largest voting bloc in the Commons. Subsequent experience suggested that he was probably right. Had he placed himself beyond party, in the dog days of 1942 he might have become dangerously vulnerable to a party revolt.
As autumn 1940 turned to winter, the toll of destruction imposed by the Luftwaffe mounted. But so too did government confidence in the spirit of the nation. Some British people seemed to derive an almost masochistic relish from their predicament. Londoner Mrs. Yolande Green wrote to her mother: “I think it’s a good thing that we’ve suffered196 all the reverses we have this last year for it has shaken us all out of our smug complacency better than any pep talk by our politicians … last weekend we had a nice quiet time in spite of six [air-raid] alarms—one gets so used to them they hardly disturb one nowadays.” By October Churchill, drawing on a great cigar as he sat at the Chequers dining table in his coverall, was able to observe with equanimity that he thought “this was the sort of war which would suit197 the English people once they got used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line taking part in the battle of London than to look on hopelessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.”
Bombing created mountains of rubble, obliterated Wren churches, killed thousands of people, damaged factories and slowed production. But it became progressively apparent to Churchill and his colleagues that the industrial fabric of Britain stretched too wide to be vulnerable to destruction from the air. The blitz never came close to threatening Britain’s ability to continue the war. The aerial bombardment of cities, which a few years earlier had been perceived by many strategists as a potential war-winning weapon, now proved to have been much exaggerated in its effects, unless conducted with a weight of bombs undeliverable by the Luftwaffe—or, for years to come, by the Royal Air Force.
Millions of British people maintained existences compounded in equal parts of normality, inside their own homes, and perils that might at any moment destroy everything around them which they held dear. Almost eighty years earlier, the novelist Anthony Trollope visited the United States during its civil war. He noted the banalities of domestic life amid the struggle, and suggested with droll prescience: “We … soon adapt ourselves198 to the circumstances around us. Though three parts of London were in flames, I should no doubt expect to have my dinner served to me, if I lived in the quarter which was free from fire.” In 1940 Lady Cynthia Colville echoed Trollope, observing at breakfast one morning that “if one looked on all this199 as ordinary civilian life it was indeed hellish, but if one thought of it as a siege then it was certainly one of the most comfortable in history.”
Churchill himself was sometimes very weary, especially after striving to arbitrate on a dozen intractable strategic issues and enduring