The Churchill Series - Nov. 3, 2005

(One of a series of daily posts about Winston S. Churchill.)

Below is the opening paragraph of John Lukacs’ masterful, The Duel, 10 May – 31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler. For ease and comprehension, I’ve segmented the paragraph into four shorter ones. Otherwise, it's unaltered.

If you're new to theThe Duel, it’s a study of Churchill and Hitler’s leadership during the time Britain was first driven from the European continent, and then stood alone on its home islands and fought the Nazi horde.
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In June 1940, a few days before Paris fell, Premier Reynaud broadcast to the French people: if Hitler wins the war, “it would be the Middle Ages again, but not illuminated by the mercy of Christ.”

A few days later, on 18 June, in his “finest hour” speech Churchill evoked the prospect, not of a return to the Middle Ages, but of a lurch into a New Dark Age.

If Hitler wins and we fall, he said, “then the whole world, including the Untied States, including all that we have known and cared for , will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

That was a more precise statement than Reynaud’s - and perhaps more apposite now, fifty years later, when within and without the great conurbations of the Western world many of the signs and symptoms of a New Dark Age are rising. (p. 222)