Channels, Spring 2019

Channels • 2019 • Volume 3 • Number 2 Page 21 ‘stunned’ by the conversation that he ‘recorded it with utmost clarity.’”13 The letter’s contents reveal just how prescient Churchill really was. At sixteen he had said, “This country will be subjected somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London, and I shall save London and England from disaster.”14 When Murland Evans had asked young Churchill if he would be a general commanding troops, he said he did not know: “Dreams of the future are blurred, but the main objective is clear. . . . I repeat—London will be in danger and in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the Capital and save the Empire.”15 After experiencing many setbacks and failures, most recently with the overseeing of the Battle of Gallipoli, Major Churchill perhaps received a new surety and humility with which to aspire once again. The near-death experience must have reminded him that something – or Someone – was overseeing his very life. Here, near the front lines of danger, after the humiliation of Gallipoli, those words of his youth may have come back to inspire and comfort him as he soon undertook the next steps of public life with growing confidence and with the same sense of duty that brought him ever closer to discovering his life’s significance, a significance that was mandated, protected, and secured by destiny and, on several occasions, quite clearly by the works of Divine intervention. The hour had arrived. After years of warning his compatriots of the rise of fascism and Nazism, Winston Churchill was finally recognized as the voice of reason on this one point. Though he had been wrong about many things throughout his long career as a Member of Parliament and minister, he was right about Hitler and, consequently, about the necessity of rearming. On May 10, as Hitler and his army of “malignant Huns” struck all at once against Western Europe, invading the Low Countries (Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Belgium), Churchill entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister and began forming a government at the request of King George VI.16 While Germany defiantly moved across neutral Netherlands and Belgium towards France, the French and British armies made a desperate attempt to rush to the aid of distant Belgian and Dutch armies. The ominous silence, as the armies were finally allowed to enter the Neutral countries in their defense, revealed a German trap was underway. Though the hour was grim and bespoke of dark days ahead, with the appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister, it seemed as if “the uncanny symmetry of history [had] supplied the antidote in the very instant of administering the poison.”17 But was it too late? The policies of his predecessors, Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, had not set Churchill and the new Government on the surest of footing when it came to war policy. Indeed, it seemed Chamberlain was still in denial about having to make war policy, or at least reluctant to do so considering the fact he had promised “peace for our time.”18 Later, Churchill would have to deal with the formidable pressure and influence of Chamberlain, who, along with Lord Halifax, continued to believe diplomacy with Hitler was an option. Fortunately, the British were beginning to align their outlooks with Churchill, someone who treated war against Germany 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Sandys and Henley, God and Churchill, 4. 16 Larry P. Arnn, Churchill’s Trial (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015), 3. 17 Philip Guedalla, Mr. Churchill (Cornwall, NY: Cornwall Press, 1942), 289. 18 British Historical Documents: “Peace for Our Time,” 1938, accessed March 21, 2018, http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/peacetime.html .