Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [59]
His energy seemed inexhaustible. That same evening at Chequers on which he likened himself to a swineherd, he conferred with two generals about Home Guard tasks in the event of invasion. He then studied aircraft production charts, which prompted him to marvel aloud that Beaverbrook had genius, “and also brutal ruthlessness.” He led his guests for a moonlit walk in the garden, then settled down to quiz an officer newly returned from Egypt about tactics in the Western Desert. In both London and Buckinghamshire, he received an endless stream of visitors. There was always time for Americans. Whitelaw Reid, the twenty-eight-year-old London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, was awed to find himself invited to lunch with the prime minister at Downing Street. Rear Adm. Robert Ghormley of the U.S. Navy, on a mission to London, was presented with inscribed copies of the four volumes of Churchill’s biography of Marlborough.
The death of Neville Chamberlain on November 9 roused Churchill to one of his most notable displays of magnanimity. His private view of the former prime minister was contemptuous: “the narrowest, most ignorant202, most ungenerous of men.” He felt gratitude for Chamberlain’s loyal service as his subordinate since May 10, and admiration for the courage with which he faced his mortal illness, but none for his record as prime minister. Now, however, he summoned his utmost powers of statesmanship to draft a tribute. On November 12, he delivered to the House of Commons a eulogy which forfeited nothing of its power and dignity by the fact that it memorialised a man so uncongenial to him:
In paying a tribute of respect and regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgements under a searching review. It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these high hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.
It was a supreme political act, to exhibit such grace towards the memory of a man who had failed the British people, and whom Churchill himself