Sundays With Winston

So for a project I’m working on I’m spending a lot of time this weekend re-reading some parts of Churchill’s World Crisis (the book I think Arthur Balfour dismissed as “an autobiography disguised as a history of the universe”), and it struck me that it might make a neat Power Line feature to have a regular Sunday helping of Sir Winston just because it is good for us.

So the first helping comes from the opening chapter of The World Crisis, where Churchill describes how the scale and horror of World War I caught everyone by surprise, but that human beings proved themselves adaptable to the unimaginable:

But nothing daunted the valiant heart of man.  Son of the Stone Age, vanquisher of nature with all her trials and monsters, he met the awful and self-inflicted agony with new reserves of fortitude.  Freed in the main by his intelligence from medieval fears, he marched to death with solemn dignity.  His nervous system was found in the twentieth century capable of enduring physical and moral stresses before which the simpler natures of primeval times would have collapsed.  Again and again to the hideous bombardment, again and again from the hospital to the front, again and again to the hungry submarines, he strode unflinching.  And withal, as an individual preserved through these torments the glories of a reasonable and compassionate mind.

Look for future installments starting next Sunday.

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