The lives of Great Men...

... may remind us/ we can make our lives sublime/ and depaarting/leave behind us/footprints in the sands of time...

Continuing on with my quest in following the lives of great men, I picked Churchill- the book ' The Last Lion' by William Manchester, which talks about the years that Churchill spent before the war, years spent fruitlessly warning the world about Hitler. The only man who recognized the truth in Churchill's words was Hitler himself, who saw him as the enemy, even when he was descredited and out of power.

The writer is a fairly obvious Churchill partisan. He makes much of Churchill's many virtues- his incredible grasp of language, his loyalty, his perspicacity, his interest in modern warfare; and glosses over his many flaws- his lack of understanding of how the rules of warfare would be modified, his tendency to use people and forget about them, his backing of a king who was clearly too self-involved to be an effective ruler- in many ways, Churchill was an anachronism- even in his time, he was a man from an earlier time- a man who still owed the sovereign his loyalty, who in some ways still held to an older code.

Reading the book though, I realized so much that our history books left untouched - how many ways the war could have been prevented, if only people had acted sooner, acted differently- how easily Hitler could have been defeated if only he'd been taken care of earlier- before Czechoslovakia and before Poland. But the men in power saw visions of eternal peace- and were not willing to fight for it- and listened to their sycophants and not their rivals, and paid for it- in the eternal eyes of history, if not then and there.

It seems like Hitler changed the rules of both warfare and politics- before him, war was declared and then fought, he fought and then declared. I don't know if he was the first to instigate riots and enter to 'bring peace to the German people in the area', but those are tactics we see so frequently today- what was so shocking then, as to be virtually unbelievable, is now a matter taken for granted.

Churchill's solution - to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler- though the government was too slow to act on it- and as a result, in the early days of the war- it was Stalin and Hitler who were allies- makes me wonder, if in seeing Hitler as his enemy, Churchill lost sight of the fact that Stalin was no angel either- maybe if things had gone differently, and Hitler had been squashed in the early days, we would have spoken of a second world war with Russia and her allies- and Churchill would have been the fool who brought us there.

There are so many lessons for us from the events leading up to the war- the reluctance of the states to go into another war, following the horrors inflicted by the previous one- its a similar fear that keeps us from going into great wars now- I wonder if it will last forever- it didn't, after all, the first time round. I wonder also, if we're seeing something similar to the desperate compromises reached to keep Germany from going to war- if we're doing something similar, unknowingly- to reach clarity only when no other path remains- the truth is, for all we talk of learning from history, its fairly hard to learn while we're living it.