#97 Winston Churchill – We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End

Everyone loves a good Churchill quote. One of my favourites has always been “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” I was reflecting on this as I read through this collection of some of his most famous wartime speeches.

“You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

I was reading this on a trip home, and my mum dug out an article she’d been reading about Churchill’s oratory. It claimed that Churchill’s reputation for oratory was something people had largely invented after the fact, and that many of his contemporaries had found his Augustinian rhetoric embarrassingly outdated.

I’m naturally suspicious with anyone who tries to overturn the historical consensus (it’s a damned sight easier to sell an article saying ‘Churchill was a lousy speaker’ than it is to get people interested in one saying he was as good as everyone says he was). In this case, I happened to have a useful source with which to check – Mass Observation, the pioneering social research organisation, carried out regular assessments of public opinion through much of the war. Take the following, from the time of legendary ‘never was so much owed by so many to so few’ speech.

“Morale continues high. The Prime Minister’s speech was received extremely well, according to all reports. From Northern Ireland comes the comment that it is the most forceful and heartening he has yet made. Newcastle reports it has created a strong feeling of confidence. Two Bristol verbatim reports as follows: ‘Everyone feels now that, come what will, we are top dogs; the past week has shown we shall win, no matter what slight doubts there were before.’”

That seems fairly conclusive. Mass Observation was perfectly happy to say when other radio broadcasts (including some by Churchill) went down badly.

But as I checked my sources, I found myself reflecting on just how much Churchill spoke as if it was for the benefit of history. When we hear his words now, they serve as a perfect accompaniment to black and white footage of men and women standing stalwart in defence of their native isle. Never, in the field of human conflict, have words been so perfectly chosen to show the historic moment.

“Two or three years are not a long time, even in our short, precarious lives. They are nothing in the history of the nation, and when we are doing the finest thing in the world, and have the honour to be the sole champion of the liberties of all Europe, we must not grudge these years or weary as we toil and struggle through them.”

Today, Churchill’s words are evocative because we know what he and his people did was vital to victory – a victory that was as much a moral triumph over Nazism as it was a military one. We don’t need to be told where it fits in the historic narrative.

Yet the people who were listening to these words live had no such certainty. It’s not just that they wouldn’t have had any idea how the war would end. There’s also a much deeper question about what something enormous and terrifying like a war is actually like to live through.

When we tell the history of the war, it is a nice clear narrative. Every moment of suffering is set in the context of an ultimate end, each moment of fear is a chance for bravery. But human experience does not have that kind of magic or order to it. Life, as it is lived, is a medley of chaos, built of the random moments where one person brushes up against a whole host of things, most of them far bigger and more powerful than they the person experiencing it can be. Actually living through a moment of great peril, or in a time of seemingly unlimited uncertainty, it is easy to disaggregate all of a person’s experience into its individual, meaningless, terrified components.

Rhetoric is our answer to this, and Churchill’s words are a masterful example. Churchill is fiercely asserting that everything that is going on forms part of a larger, uncomplicated story with one inevitable outcome.  In addition to be being a great piece of storytelling, it is an aggressive act of ordering.

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

In the UK, we hear these words so often that you don’t stop to ask who is the ‘we’ in this sentence. This is not the promise of one person; this is a promise made for an entire people. If you were to think of it in terms of pure-blooded philosophy, it’s a meaningless statement.

But in practice, with human blood pumping through our veins, words like this change the way we think and behave. When making the right appeal and changing our hearts at the crucial moment, they actually do change the course of events. What starts as something between an unsubstantiated assertion and a hopeful lie an end up as a glorious truth. That fact has no place in the cold abstracts of thought, but clearly does have a place in how the world is actually shaped.