Winston Churchill - Between Victory and Defeat: A Private Life

January 1945, Above the Atlantic

The conference that has been given a name I find insufficiently grave is four weeks away, and I know precisely what the next four months require and what they will cost and what will be lost if the argument is not made with the force it demands. There is no one else to make it. I have reviewed the available alternatives and they are not alternatives. This document exists because the argument requires a record that does not depend on the presence of a room to hold it, and because I am, at this altitude, in this darkness, the only person qualified to make it.

I am writing this at altitude, in the reinforced darkness behind the flight deck of a converted Lancaster, somewhere above the mid-Atlantic, while the aides sleep and the engines make a noise like continuous certainty. The brandy is French and the circumstance warrants it. Below me is an ocean that kills without preference. Above me is nothing of use. Ahead is what I am flying toward, and what I am flying toward is not a conference, not a summit, not a diplomatic gathering of the kind that produces handshakes and communiques and the subsequent rearrangement of spheres. What I am flying toward is the last clear opportunity to build, out of the materials of this war and the debts it has created, a structure that will keep what must be kept and lose what can be afforded to lose, and I intend to build it correctly.

Roosevelt is dying. I know this with the certainty one knows the condition of a ship from the quality of its motion in heavy weather - not from the formal report but from the accumulation of small signals that add up, past the point of denial, to a single conclusion. He will not survive to govern the peace he is spending himself to win. This means the peace is mine to shape, or it is no one's, which amounts to the same thing in the particular theatre I care about, which is not Europe in the abstract but England in the specific - England and the imperium it has not yet entirely relinquished, and the question of whether the structure I have spent sixty years maintaining will exist in a recognisable form when Randolph's children are old enough to understand what it meant.

That is the question I am flying toward. Not the one that will appear in the communiques.

I write now beyond the management of secretaries and the solicitude of doctors and the particular loving inattention of Clementine, who sees everything I do and has learned, after forty years, that seeing it and naming it are two different acts with different consequences. She names it rarely. I am grateful for that. I would be grateful for it even if I did not love her, which I do, though love is not the organising principle of this document.

The organising principle is England. England and what comes after England, and what comes after me, and whether those two questions are the same question or different ones, and whether anyone now living is capable of holding what I have held, and whether I am about to do something at this conference that will make that question irrelevant for reasons I have not yet fully worked through.

These are the thoughts of a man at the height of his powers writing in the dark. Not a man looking back. A man looking forward, with the peculiar clarity that comes from understanding, precisely, that the view from here will not be available for much longer, and that the use one makes of it is the only thing that will matter when the height is gone.

I begin.