always get a carving knife from the kitchen and take one with you,
can’t you?”
The British Empire had been responsible for despicable human
rights violations, but Churchill knew irredeemable evil when he saw
it, and its name was Nazism. Concentration camps and genocidal
extermination still lay off in the future, but Churchill saw that no
self-respecting leader, no country of virtue could make a deal with
Hitler. Even if that was easier. Even if it might have protected Britain
from invasion. At the same time, he was careful to manage the
passions that war stirs up. “I hate nobody except Hitler,” he said
“and that is professional.”
Churchill was an indefatigable workhorse from the day Britain
declared war on Germany in 1939 until the end of the war in mid-
- During the war, Clementine designed a special suit her
husband could wear and sleep in. They were called his “siren suits”—
though the British public endearingly referred to them as his
“rompers”—and they saved him precious minutes getting dressed,
allowing him to grab much-needed naps.
So, yes, he was out of balance in those years, working 110-hour
weeks, and hardly ever still. It has been estimated that he traveled
110,000 miles by air and sea and car between 1940 and 1943 alone.
During the war, it was said that Churchill kept “less schedule than a
forest fire and had less peace than a hurricane.” But then again, he’d
rested up for precisely this moment—and when it was an option, he
did maintain his routine, even when he was living like a gopher in the
underground bunker that was the Cabinet War Rooms. He didn’t
have much time for painting during the war—nor many chances to be
out in nature—but when he could he did. (One is a beautiful painting
of a North African sunset, which he drove an extra five hours to
capture after the major war powers met at Casablanca.)
It is unlikely that any single individual has ever done more to save
or advance the notions sacred to Eastern or Western civilization. And
how was Churchill rewarded for these labors, for all that he had
done?
In 1945, he was pushed out of office. Upon hearing the news,
Clementine attempted to console him by saying, “Perhaps this is a