Blood, Sweat and Tears
$3.00
By
PUTNAM
GREAT BRITAIN s leader in the present supreme struggle has been a man who could express the thoughts and feelings inspired by a supreme crisis in the rolling sonorous periods of classical British eloquence. Burke would have felt at home in the speech which gives the present collection of Mr. Churchill’s recent addresses its title, and either of the Pitts, in dark moments of British history, might have voiced the superb peroration of the message of June 18, when France had fallen and the whole outlook seemed most hopeless: ‘Let us so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say: “This was their finest hour."' The present volume includes, besides Mr. Churchill’s war addresses, a number of pre-war speeches, of which the first was significantly devoted largely to a protest against surrendering to Ireland the naval bases which have been so valuable to Great Britain in the present war. His credit as a prescient statesman grows from this basically unaltered reproduction of his public utterances, even if there are naturally a few misjudgments. The statements on the invasion of Norway are definitely too optimistic in retrospect, and it is questionable whether Mr. Churchill before or after the war found the key to the Russia which he wittily describes as ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ But in general the speeches give an accurate survey of the course of the war, and their cumulative effect is tonic and bracing.
W. H. C.