It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils.
The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible.
Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made onceβonce for all. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had taken it upon himself to order the fleet to its stations as war loomed between France and Germany. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, a notorious acerbic wit. The argument was rendered moot when Fred Shapiro, in The Yale Book of Quotations , tracked the origins of the phrase to a joke line from a edition of The Chicago Tribune. The rest of that unhappy country was swallowed by Hitler six months later.
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many long months of toil and struggle. I will say, it is to wage war with all our might, with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. I can answer in one word: Victory.
Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be. For without victory there is no survival. As the will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be. Churchill adopted the quotation from 1 Maccabees But Churchill somewhat edited the text. For the original wording click here. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
