Looking back to the history, few
days just after becoming prime minister, Churchill was facing calls from some
to make peace with Hitler, as the loss of so many men in World War I was still
a recent memory. However, in front of House of Commons (UK Parliament) on 13
May 1940 he said, “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined
this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’"
His speech intended to make clear to
everyone that the only option to face Hitler was to “wage war”, not make a
peace.
Again, when
German troops had taken-down Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg while 338,000 of
British and French troops cornered at port of Dunkirk, in front of House of
Commons on 4 June 1940, Churchill delivered his explosive speech. He roared, “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!”
There is no doubt the speech will be
remembered as one of the most powerful political oratories of all time. “A
miracle of deliverance” was the popular jargon to mark the event when imminent
military defeat turned into a victory.
In this biography book, the writer,
Ashley Jackson –a professor of imperial and military history at King’s College
London and a visiting fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford- told the
story of Churchill from very beginning of Churchill’s birth at Blenheim Palace in
1874 until Churchill’s final journey in Oxfordshire where his body was buried
in the small churchyard in 1965.
Churchill,
besides his elite attributes as a soldier, politician and historian, he was
also a journalist, painter and homemaker. He had rich characters of which
people like to made Churchill caricature depicted him as bulldog, Pooh Bear or
Mr. Toad, but, on the other hand dubbed him as the Last Lion.
Anyhow
Churchill was praised as high reputable international leader, he was a human
being with a very natural behaviour such as his popular “bathing habit” which
often encounter him in a state of near or abject nakedness no matter who were
around him in the spot.
His evident
humanity, which could so frustrate and anger his peers -even his wife- only
adds to his appeal as a biographical subject apart of his remarkable life and
career.
Churchill was a
genius, a great man, a statesman who dominated British politics in an age
shaped by industrial war and totalitarianism which probably would never be
reproduced in Britain today and tomorrow.
However, the
unlikeliness of having a man like Churchill again is not only because of his
achievements, talents and attributes, but also his very humanity, his failures
as well as triumphs, his weaknesses as well as his strengths, that make him so
fascinating and no way to be duplicated.
He already
become a symbol of nation, and the British people is not wrong to make him so.
***
Serpong, July 2021
Titus J.
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