Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

R E V I E W S
STUDENTS’ CHOICE...
the war by two unexpectedly critical
books: Elliot Roosevelt’s As He Saw It
and Harry Butcher’s My Three Years
With Eisenhower. In the process of
refuting them, he negotiated lucrative
literary contracts, making him financially
comfortable for the first time in
his life while acquiring a first-class
pulpit to describe the war as he saw it.
Reynolds delves into Churchill’s
book-writing “Syndicate,” including the
distinguished and brilliant Oxford historian
Bill Deakin and the wartime
Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook.
Churchill would take their research and
weave it into his own unique style: half
Macaulay, half Gibbon. And, as he’d
written in his autobiography, “I stuck in
a bit of my own from time to time.”
Of the six volumes, Reynolds is
most impressed by the first two: The
Gathering Storm and Their Finest Hour.
The Gathering Storm treats the 1930s as
a decade of lost opportunities, insisting
that there was a real chance to avert
war, but the opportunity was squandered
through the fecklessness of
western leaders. What makes Their
Finest Hour important, Reynolds says, is
that it is Churchill’s personal version of
events of that key year between May
1940 and June 1941.
Reynolds holds the next three
volumes of The Second World War
uneven in quality. Many passages are
pedestrian, he writes, because either
Churchill relied too much on documents
or because Britain (i.e.,
Churchill), didn’t play a crucial role in
those events. But Reynolds thinks the
final volume, Triumph and Tragedy, rises
to a higher level: It has about it another
sense of a lost opportunity, this time to
use the Allied victory to check Soviet
expansionism or at least to avoid an
east-west confrontation.
The Second World War sold over
two million copies and is still in print
today. Despite rampant revisionism of
varying quality, it still influences our
impressions of World War II. As the
late historian J.H. Plumb wrote,
Churchill’s memoir “lies at the very
heart of all historiography of the
Second World War and will always
remain there.” Not a bad epitaph. ,
From the Canon: The “Prussians of the Balkans” in
A chance question from a Yugoslavian reader leads us to one of
our author’s most moving and evocative historical dramas.
MICHAEL RICHARDS
The first American Edition, 1931
Mr. Vukašin Stojkov in Yugoslavia
wrote us asking if Churchill, as he
had heard, ever compared Serbia and its
role in the forming of Yugoslavia to
Prussia’s role in the unification of
Germany. A strong contender is
Chapter 1 of The Unknown War / The
Eastern Front, volume 5 of The World
Crisis (London: Thornton Butterworth,
New York: Scribners, 1931), where
Churchill refers to the Serbs as “the
Prussians of the Balkans.” Churchill
puts these words in quotes, indicating
that they did not originate with him—
but as it happens, they did.
Searching Google for the
origins of the term, we found sixteen
references, most of which indicate that
the phrase was applied to the
Bulgarians. An 11 August 1903 letter
to The New York Times, by Vladimir
Andreef Tsanoff, Secretary of the
Macedonian Committee of America,
protesting an article on Bulgaria’s dismissal
of pro-Russian cabinet members,
stated: “In a moment of exasperation at
Bulgaria’s obdurate spirit of independence,
the Russian Chancellor, Prince
Lobanoff, called these Bulgars “the
Prussians of the Balkans.”
Churchill had nearly a photographic
memory and often dredged up
phrases that he had read many years
before. In the case of The Eastern Front,
however, he certainly goes against all
preceding use of the term. It is likely
that he was either misquoting what he
had read, or liked the phrase so much
that he applied it to the Serbs!
His beginning paragraphs from
The Unknown War are reprinted by
kind permission of the Churchill
Literary Estate and Randolph
Churchill. The text, slightly shortened
for space, conveys I hope a view “from
a great height”—the magnificent prose
of which Churchill was a master.
The Dusk of Hapsburg
Winston S. Churchill
If for a space we obliterate from our
minds the fighting in France and
Flanders, the struggle upon the Eastern
Front is incomparably the greatest war
in history. In its scale, in its slaughter,
in the exertions of the combatants, in
its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses
by magnitude and intensity all similar
human episodes.
All three empires, both sides,
victors and vanquished, were ruined. All
the Emperors or their successors were
slain or deposed. The Houses of
Romanov, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern,
woven over centuries of renown into the
texture of Europe were shattered and
extirpated. The structure of three
mighty organisms built up by generations
of patience and valour and
representing the traditional groupings of
noble branches of the European family,
was changed beyond all semblance.
These pages recount dazzling victories
and defeats stoutly made good. They
record the toils, perils, sufferings and
passions of millions of men. Their
sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed
FINEST HOUR 148 / 42