Channels, Spring 2019

Channels • 2019 • Volume 3 • Number 2 Page 27 knew that the Dutch were nearly defeated, the Belgians were losing ground, and the French were under the heavy thrust of Germany’s advance. Nevertheless, destiny had proffered glimpses of final victory all along. A leader driven to do his duty, a nation united in courage for freedom against barbarity, a people standing up for decency, and an Island protected by the sea just as its army would soon be delivered from it. The Battle of France would be the culmination of a much more extensive defeat for the Allies—the product of years of myopic post-WWI policy. But having known failure, Churchill knew by experience that it was not fatal. The years of the locust were at an end, and the time which history had appointed for Churchill to “save London and England from disaster” had finally come.47 For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright!48 While it was famously and rightly said of Churchill that “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle”—at a time when arms and munitions were in scarce supply—the heart of his oratory demonstrates that Churchill’s aim was much more than that of victory.49 As glimpsed through this poem Churchill quotes, his battle-ready words reveal a greater longing for ultimate victory and a time when world peace is made possible by the brighter lights of human nature passing through the divine. Likewise, Tolkien’s writings and convincing legends do as much as they point us toward this real world’s final victory when, at long last, “a light from the shadows shall spring . . . [and] the crownless again shall be king.”50 47 Sandys and Henley, God and Churchill, 4. 48 Churchill’s War Time Speeches: “A Difficult Time,” April 27, 1941, accessed March 31, 2018, http://churchill-society-london.org.uk/LngHrdWr.html . In a BBC Radio Address Churchill made only a year after the perilous events of May 1940, he concludes with this quote from the profound poem “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough. 49 Tom Vitale, “Winston Churchill's Way With Words,” NPR , July 14, 2012, accessed March 12, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2012/07/14/156720829/winston-churchills-way-with-words . Quote from a speech President John F. Kennedy made on April 9, 1963. 50 Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 241.