Master's Chronicle

A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES (Vol. IV): THE GREAT DEMOCRACIES (403 pp.)--Winston S. Churchill --Dodd, Mead ($6).

The past, it has been said, is the only thing man can change. Winston Churchill, the incredible ex-Hussar officer, has taken full reign over the terrible past. As he tells it, history becomes a matter not of blind forces but of men and the principles that animated them; schoolbook events take on the Shakespearean splendor of character and fate.

No one, certainly not a professional historian, would dare to box the compass of Churchill's subject matter. His great grasp of the essential fact made him, in power, a master of decision and, in the hindsight of history, a master of the precis. Never has so much been contained in so few words. He begins the last volume of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples in 1815, leaving Waterloo (reluctantly, it would seem) behind him to take on the task of shaping the whole course of the British Empire and the American Republic in the last century into one sonorous and coherent story. He succeeds magnificently. More cautious historians--the economic-theory men, the specialists in constitutional law, the nationalists--will cavil at Churchill's large-minded judgments. Yet this same generosity of spirit enables him to write of the American Civil War as the noblest war--one fought on sheer principle. Even Civil War buffs who know the last cock plume in the "shapos" at Bull Run will be moved by Churchill's brief epilogue to Gettysburg: "When that morning came, Lee, after a cruel night march, was safe on the other side of the river. He carried with him his wounded and his prisoners. He had lost only five guns, and the war."

As historian, as well as statesman, Churchill refuses to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire; he leaves his story just before the beginning of the end, with the death of Queen Victoria and the Boer War. It is astonishing to recall that Historian Churchill himself was once a prisoner of that war, almost 60 years ago. It helps to explain the confidence with which Churchill cuffs the past about into its proper Churchillian posture. When schools are better, his books will be required texts.

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