Churchill: A Minority View

Abstract

WHEN THE TRUMPETER had blown the last reveille, when the gun carriage had discharged its burden on the quay and the journalists had exhausted all their treasuries of special prose; then, surely, the time had come when one might reasonably wonder what it had all been about. Yet it seemed almost blasphemous to ask such a question. For a week we had been encompassed by so vociferous a cloud of witnesses to Churchill’s greatness; obituaries had been furbished up at the last moment to ensure that no possible extravagance had been omitted from their praise; the television had luxuriated in funeral tributes, the dead man’s literary agent, his valet, his detectives, had scraped the barrel of memory for the last threadbare fragments of reminiscence. A large and lucrative industry had been founded on his death. Special supplements rolled from the presses; new editions of his works proliferated; the voice of Dimbleby* was loud in the land. And to crown it all there had been the marvelous ceremony of his funeral, the tight blue-and-white square of the naval escort drawing the gun carriage, the guardsmen bowed over their reversed rifles, the voices and the trumpets echoing in the dome of St. Paul’, the tiny launch that carried him away from it all down the river. There had never been such a wake since Valentino’s. How could one have any doubt what it all meant?