The Day of Battle 2nd Book in Trilogy, introducing Churchill

Great writing, great description, the scene is being set...for the second novel in the Trilogy of the 2nd World War...

"The largest  human being of our time,” as one contemporary concluded. There was the Havana cigar, of course, said to be long as a trombone and one of the eight he typically smoked in a day. The familiar moon face glowered beneath the furrowed pate he had taken to rubbing with a scented handkerchief. This morning, after leaving a £ 10 tip for the Queen’s service staff, he swapped the casual “siren suit” worn through much of the voyage for the uniform of the Royal Yacht Squadron. The effect had been likened to that of “a gangster clergyman who has gone on the stage.” The previous night Churchill had celebrated both his imminent arrival in America and the third anniversary of his premiership with the sort of feast that recalled not only the Queen’s prewar luxury but the sun-never-sets Empire itself: croûte au pot à l’ancienne, petite sole meunière, pommes Windsor, and baba au rhum, all washed down with a magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, 1926. “We are all worms,” Churchill once intoned, “but I do believe I am a glow-worm.” Who could dispute it? For three years he had fought the good fight, at first alone and then with the mighty alliance he had helped construct. He had long warned minions that he was to be awakened at night only if Britain were invaded; that alarum never sounded. His mission in this war, he asserted, was “to pester, nag and bite”— a crusade that Roosevelt, who would receive thirteen hundred telegrams from Churchill during the war, knew all too well. “Temperamental like a film star and peevish like a spoilt child,” the prime minister’s army chief wrote of him; his wife, Clementine, added, “I don’t argue with Winston. He shouts me down. So when I have anything important to say I write a note to him.” “In great things he is very great,” said the South African statesman and field marshal Jan Smuts, “in small things not great.” Certainly the small things engaged him, from decrying a shortage of playing cards for soldiers, to setting the grain ration for English poultry farmers, to reviewing all proposed code words for their martial resonance. (He sternly forbad WOEBE-TIDE, JAUNDICE, APÉRITIF, and BUNNYHUG.) Yet his greatness in great things obtained. It was perhaps best captured by an admirer’s seven-word encomium: “There is no defeat in his heart.” Sea voyages always reinvigorated Churchill, and none more than WW #21W. The prime minister’s traveling party privately dubbed him “Master,” and he had worked them hard each day, from cipher clerks to field marshals, preparing studies and the memoranda known as “prayers” for the TRIDENT meetings set to start on Wednesday. Typists worked in shifts on a specially designed silent Remington, taking down dispatches and minutes he mumbled through billowing cigar smoke. (His diction was

Atkinson, Rick (2007-10-02). The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) (Kindle Locations 173-195). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.