Free The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid

and the Soviet Union and then had to make concession after concession to them. They emerged in 1945 as superpowers, while Britain, formerly Great Britain, lost its Empire, lost its independent and decisive role in world affairs, and sank to the level of a second-rate power. Of course, that, too, was Aristotelian. Alcibiades routed the Spartans, but in the end he was dismissed and fled to Asia Minor, where he was murdered by Spartan agents. Tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism. Therein lay the terrible grandeur in Churchill’s funeral, a quarter-century after Dunkirk. The nation was bidding farewell both to a great Englishman and to the greatness of England. When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all that they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again.

 
    O N February 4, 1874—the year of Winston Churchill’s birth—British troops led by General Sir Garnet Wolseley entered the small African city of Kumasi, now part of central Ghana, and put it to the torch, thereby ending the Second Ashanti War and winning the general a handsome spread on the weekly page devoted to the Empire in the
Illustrated London News
. He had worked for it. A melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes and a long drooping mustache rather like that of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, Wolseley had joined Victoria’s army—“putting on the widow’s uniform,” as they later said—while still in his teens. Convinced that the surest way to glory lay in courting death at every opportunity, he had been felled by a severe thigh wound in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a bursting shell in the Crimea, and survived hairbreadth escapes while relieving Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny, capturing the Ta-ku Forts and Peking during Britain’s 1860 dispute with the Chinese, and suppressing an insurrection in Canada. After finishing off the Ashantis he fought Zulus and dervishes, and organized campaigns against Boer guerrillas. His concern for soldiers’ welfare won him a reputation among England’s upper classes as a dangerous radical. London’s cockneys loved him, however; their expression for topnotch was “all Sir Garnet.” His great ambition was to die a heroic death in action against the French. That failing, the general, who ended up a viscount, planned to enrich his heirs by writing his memoirs after his retirement. Unfortunately, by then he had completely lost his memory. Visitors who mentioned his conquests to him were met by blank stares. He died in 1913, the last year of England’s golden age.
    Wolseley was one of the country’s imperial heroes—others included Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton, and, of course, Cecil Rhodes—whose feats were held up to the nation as examples of how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire. If their lives were metaphors of the Empire’s rise, that of Churchill, their rapt pupil, was the other way around. He entered the world in 1874, when the royal domain was approaching flood tide, and left it in 1965, as the last rays of imperial splendor were vanishing. That is one way of summing him up; it is, in fact, one of the ways he saw himself. Toward the end of his life he told Lord Boothby: “History judges a man, not by his victories or defeats, but by their results.” 1 Yet the vitiation of the Empire does not diminish his stature. Alexander was driven out of India; Genghis Khan was undone by his sons; Napoleon lost everything, including France. Indeed, it may be argued that the greater the fall, the greater was a man’s height. If that is true, then Churchill’s stature rises above that of all other statesmen, for no realm, past or present, can match the grandeur of imperial Britain at its sublime