Requiem for Greatness

Typically, with his incomparable sense of history and theater, Winston Churchill years ago had issued directions for his own funeral. He insisted:

"I want lots of soldiers and bands." As the solemn leavetaking was acted out last week, a great drama and a great work of art in every ceremonial detail, Sir Winston had everything he desired--and more.

Dawn broke cold and grey. Calm in its majesty beside the Thames, the palace of Westminster emerged from the drifting mist. Across the river stood the starkly modern outline of Festival Hall, its garden windows catching the first pale light. Far downstream, the dome and finial of St. Paul's Cathedral were faintly etched against the wintry sky. Between these two points, Westminster and St. Paul's, gathered a million men and women and the children they brought with them to capture the scene in memory. Via Telstar and television, millions the world over watched the obsequies of Churchill, a man who would have been great in any century, and who was, beyond doubt or envy or animosity, one of the greatest men that Britain--and the West--had ever produced.

Honored Pageant. There was a narrower time, and it lasted well into Churchill's own youth, when a great state occasion was one of the few events that brought spectacle into most people's lives. Today, in an age of relentless distractions, when spectacle shouts from countless posters, pages and screens, pageantry must compete for attention, and in this sense it is diminished. But it is also more affecting than ever when, as in Churchill's case, it goes so plainly beyond show and becomes an expression of continuity between a nation's past and a people's heart.

The pageant honored Churchill; but Churchill also honored the pageant. For the occasion, directed in its inimitably British style by the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, consisted of a succession of crowns, swords, escutcheons, and every other encrustation of royal power--a power that is noble because it no longer rules but only inspires. In granting a royal funeral to a commoner, Britain expressed the fact that its trappings of autocracy have long ago been triumphantly absorbed by democracy--a pertinent fact in the 20th century.

Laced Jackets. At 9:45 a.m., as Big Ben struck the quarter-hour and cannon boomed, a gun carriage emerged from Westminster Hall, where Churchill's body had lain in state for three days and nights. The coffin on the gun carriage was shrouded with the Union Jack, on which rested a black velvet cushion bearing the diamond and gold regalia of the Order of the Garter. More than 100 sailors of the Royal Navy--Churchill's favorite service--drew the gun carriage and its burden forward at a measured 65 paces to the minute.* Each minute, the cannon boomed their soldierly lament.

Ahead of the gun carriage marched platoons from all the arms and services, their arms reversed. Here, also, were Lord Mountbatten, Chief of the Defense Staff, and the other service chiefs, followed by eight officers of the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars--Churchill's first regiment--bearing Sir Winston's medals. Behind the gun carriage strode the top-hatted men of the Churchill family, led by his son Randolph. In a carriage lent by the Queen were Lady Churchill and her two daughters Sarah and Mary. The march was accompanied by music of the Drum Horse and State Trumpeters in their velvet jockey caps and gold-laced jackets. Band after band--ten in all--appeared at appointed intervals in order to keep the pace steady and slow all down the long line of marchers.

Up Whitehall, past Nelson's monument in Trafalgar Square, by the National Gallery, where the flag hung at half-mast, and into the Strand moved the gun carriage, which had borne the regal corpses of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V and George VI. Along the way the pavements were thronged with silent watchers, and the white topees of Royal Marines dotted the route like snowdrops.

At Temple Bar, the boundary between Westminster and the City, the gun carriage entered the ancient section of London that had been heavily bombed by Nazi planes and was heartened on those long-ago, smoky, red-eyed mornings by the inspiring Churchill presence poking defiantly among the ruins. The cortege moved on through Fleet Street, home of London's press, and then up Ludgate Hill to the strains of Chopin's Funeral March.

Seated Kings. St. Paul's was meticulously packed with heads of state and government, with famous men and old colleagues of Churchill's. They came in powdered wigs and capes and frocks of office, in morning clothes sprayed with medals and sashes, set off by black ties and armbands. Here sat Charles de Gaulle and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands and the Kings of Norway, Greece and Denmark. One hundred and thirteen na tions had been invited to send representatives to the funeral. Only one--Red China--refused. Unwatched and unheralded, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip drove to St. Paul's by a circuitous route--leaving the panoply and glory of the day to Sir Winston. The Queen could scarcely help remembering how she first knew and admired the wartime Prime Minister when she was a girl, and how later, on her ascension to the throne, he guided her in her first steps in statecraft.

As Churchill's coffin was carried up the nave, the choir intoned I Am the Resurrection and the Life. There were no flowers, but many flags and banners from old campaigns. Between the bier and the altar rested Churchill's tokens of office: his black-draped sword, the great carved lion that is the Churchill family crest, sashes bearing the medals and honors of a lifetime of great achievement. The pallbearers--Churchill's old wartime colleagues and chiefs of staff--moved quietly to their seats.

As the regular, short Anglican funeral service proceeded, the first hymn to be sung was John Bunyan's

Who would true valour see,

Let him come hither;

One here will constant be,

Come wind, come weather . . .

After a special prayer read by the dean of St. Paul's, organ and choir burst into Churchill's favorite American anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was sung at his express command and in homage to the honorary U.S. citizenship granted him in 1963. It was also symbolic of his lifetime dream of a closer union between the two nations whose blood flowed in his veins. The martial thunder of the old abolitionist hymn, with its stern New England pieties, may at first have sounded startling in Christopher Wren's graceful English Renaissance church, but it was one with the Churchillian spirit--militant, sonorous, confident of being in the right. The church that symbolized the survival of the British nation and the hymn that symbolized the endurance of the American Union--the suddenly mingled echoes of Agincourt and Antietam--served to remind the world of a kinship that goes deeper than shifting alliances and new patterns of power. It was an Anglo-Saxon moment that could not have been lost on Charles de Gaulle, among others, and its impact was lessened only by the absence of the President of the United States.

Empty Seat. The funeral had really begun days earlier in the House of Commons. Preeminently, Churchill was a child of the House, in which he spent full 53 years of his long life. In fact, he was the last man to have served in Parliament under Queen Victoria.

In speaking of Churchill to the House, after a slight nod to the empty seat of the Member for Woodford, Prime Minister Harold Wilson suddenly seemed touched with the Churchillian magic. "Where the fighting was hottest, he was in it," Wilson recalled, "sparing none, nor asking for quarter. The creature and possession of no one party, he has probably been the target of more concentrated parliamentary invective from, in turn, each of the major parties than any other member of any parliamentary age, and against each in turn he turned the full force of his own parliamentary oratory." Churchill, said Wilson, "was a warrior, and party debate was war. It mattered, and he brought to that war the conquering weapon of words fashioned for their purpose: to wound, never to kill; to influence, never to destroy."

As Churchill lay in state in Westminster Hall, the three party leaders, Labor's Wilson, the Conservatives' Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and the Liberals' Jo Grimond, stood together in reverent silence before the catafalque. They must have recognized the Tightness of the scene, for in this very hall and on the very spot where Churchill lay Simon de Montfort had called together Britain's first Parliament 700 years before almost to the day. In its long history the hall had seen prodigies, from the Court of William Rufus in 1099 to the trials of Guy Fawkes and his companions in the Gunpowder Plot, and to the condemnation of luckless Charles I.

It had also in its time been a hall of fairs and festivities, a hall of the people--and never more so than last week. For 23 hours a day, a two-mile-long queue stretched from Westminster Hall along Millbank, past Horseferry Road and across Lambeth Bridge, then along the South Bank as far as County Hall. In the queue people chatted and swapped war stories of Winston, or told the younger ones what those days had been like. The atmosphere was not so much of sadness as of gratitude for what Churchill had done to save England. There were all sorts: working-class parents carrying their children, housewives and commuter husbands, young fellows and their girl friends, men in dinner jackets and women in evening wraps. Some took nips from hip flasks against the intense cold; others poured hot tea from thermos bottles. It was almost like the old days of the Blitz, when stranger talked to stranger as if they were neighbors.

Oaken Canopy. But on entering the great, drafty hall with its canopy of ancient oak, a great silence enfolded them. Footsteps were muffled by brown carpet, and the crowd divided into two lines, which passed on both sides of the catafalque. At the four corners stood tall candles and, nearly as rigid as the candlesticks, the honor guard, which solemnly changed every 20 minutes. As the people of Britain passed the casket, they dropped flowers--snowdrops, white carnations, daffodils. Before going out into Palace Yard, each one paused and looked back. Often dignitaries would enter the hall through another door. But though the queue shared the hall with Queen Elizabeth, with De Gaulle and Germany's Chancellor Erhard, there was never a stare or a flicker of recognition. Before the casket of Winston Churchill, all mourners were equal.

So it was also in St. Paul's, as the funeral service drew to a close with God Save the Queen. There was a long pause, and then from high in the Whispering Gallery a Royal Horse Guards trumpeter sounded the Last Post, its plaintive notes ascending and echoing round the dome itself. In answer, from across the cathedral, came the bugle call of Reveille played by a Royal Irish Hussar, a hearty and heartening last trump that would have stirred the old warrior's blood.

The great bells of St. Paul's pealed out as the coffin was returned to the gun carriage. Cannon again reverberated. Sixty salutes had already been fired; now came 30 more--one for every year of Churchill's life. Sixty Highland bagpipers from different Scottish regiments piped the coffin down to the wharf at the foot of Tower Hill where Beefeaters in full uniform stood guard. Against the backdrop of Tower Bridge the vast Pool of London lay as still as an inland lake. Across the river great cranes bowed low in touching, mechanical precision. To the piping of a bo'sun's whistle, the coffin went aboard the Havengore, a Royal Navy launch.

No Drums. With this action, the state funeral closed and the private one began. Churchill's body crossed the Thames, once London's great avenue of trade and triumph, under a massed flypast of fighter planes, which dipped to 500 feet in tribute. At Festival pier, the coffin was placed in a private hearse and driven slowly to Waterloo station. There were no more parades or bands or flags or muffled drums. Accompanied by his family, Churchill's body was carried by special train some 60 miles into the heart of Oxfordshire, to rest beside the graves of his English father and his American mother in the small parish churchyard at Bladon. A few hundred yards away is Winston Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, the grandiose home of his martial ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.

Silenced Pessimists. Winston Churchill's countrymen quickly turned back to present realities and future problems. Yet everywhere people paused to wonder what Churchill might teach the world he left behind. The mere fact that he happened, said Historian Will Durant, "silences the grumbling of a thousand pessimists." Said Adlai Stevenson: "Like the grandeur and power of masterpieces of art and music, Churchill's life uplifts our hearts and fills us with fresh revelation of the scale and reach of human achievement." Yet, he concluded, "our world is thus the poorer, our political dialogue diminished and the sources of public inspiration run more thinly for all of us. There is a lonesome place against the sky."

Many were mourning not only an exceptional figure but an era and a society that was able to produce exceptional figures. Except possibly for De Gaulle, who was of Churchill's own generation, today's rulers seem, in comparison, faceless and mediocre. Churchill was an aristocrat, a brilliant dilettante, a creator in a dozen roles and garbs. He was a specialist in nothing--except courage, imagination, intelligence. He was never afraid to lead, and he knew that a leader must sometimes risk failure and disapproval rather than seek universal acclaim. He had been, as Denis Brogan put it, "everything but the Archbishop of Canterbury"--and he often seemed more confident than any archbishop that he had the ear of God and was watched over with solicitude by angels.

Radiated Force. There is a feeling that, as Harvard Historian Henry S. Hughes puts it, today's world has "little tolerance of greatness," and that in an era of computers, expert teams and government by consensus, the Churchillian kind of leadership may never again assert itself. But one of Churchill's greatest contemporaries, Konrad Adenauer, 89, does not share that fear. "What makes a statesman great?" he asks. "He needs first of all a clear conception of what is possible. Then he needs a clear conception of what he wants. Finally, a great leader must have the power of his convictions, a moral driving force. Churchill radiated it. He had fire and daring from the days of his adventurous youth." In Adenauer's view, times of trouble generate leaders to deal with trouble.

Churchill surely would have agreed, for it is the paradox of the unique man that he does not insist on his own uniqueness--only on the uniqueness of the continuing and self-renewing human spirit. In that mood Lady Asquith, a longtime Liberal and friend of Churchill's, spoke in the House of Lords last week. "There can be no leave-taking between Churchill and the people that he served and saved," she said. "Many of us today may be feeling that by his going the scale of things has dwindled, our stature is diminished, that glory has departed from us ... Then I remember the words of his victory broadcast--when he urged us not to fall back into the rut of inertia, confusion and 'the craven fear of being great.' And I knew that the resolve to keep unbroken the pattern of greatness which he had impressed upon the spirit of the nation is the tribute he would ask from us today."

* Naval ratings were substituted for horses at state funerals after the 1901 cortege of Queen Victoria, when a faulty ringbolt made the horses nervous and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm suggested that sailors take over.

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