Continued
I will start with his courage, for he himself wrote:
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees all others.3
The facts that Churchill served with honour in no less than eight British regiments, from the Northwest Frontier of India to the mud of Flanders, and before the outbreak of war in 1914 had made nearly 140 flights while learning to fly, testify to his supreme physical courage. Flying was at that time very dangerous, but he only gave it up because his wife was so worried: he gave her the news in a most moving letter:
This is a wrench, because I was on the verge of taking my pilot’s certificate. It only needed a couple of calm mornings; & I am confident of my ability to achieve it vy respectably … But I must admit that the numerous fatalities of this year wd justify you in complaining if I continued to share the risks – as I am proud to do – of these good fellows. So I give it up decidedly for many months & perhaps for ever. This is a gift – so stupidly am I made – wh costs me more than anything wh cd be bought with money. So I am vy glad to lay it at your feet, because I know it will rejoice & relieve your heart.4
Courage shines even brighter when it marches with humour, and this, too, bubbled in abundance through Churchill’s phrases. Even, for example, when exposing to Parliament in 1936 the weakness of our air defences, he could leaven the gravity of the occasion with a telling touch of levity:
A friend of mine the other day saw a number of person engaged in peculiar evolutions, genuflexions and gestures … He wondered whether it was some novel form of gymnastics, or a new religion … or whether they were a party of lunatics out for an airing. They were a searchlight company of the London Territorials, who were doing their exercises as well as they could without having the searchlight.5
Again, when describing how he just scraped into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where budding officers are trained, at his third and final attempt, he said that his fate hung on the mathematics paper where he happily found that one question concerned:
…cosines and tangents in a highly square rooted condition which must have been decisive on the whole of my life. It was a problem. But luckily I had seen its ugly face only a few days before and recognized it at first sight … If this aged, weary-souled Civil Service Commissioner had not asked this particular question… the whole of my life would have been altered, and that I suppose would have altered a great many other lives…6
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