During the second World War, Winston Churchill visited Montgomery in North Africa. He offered Monty a cigar. Monty scolded him, "I neither drink nor smoke and I am 100% fit!" Churchill retorted, "I both smoke and drink and I'm 200% fit!"
I love that reminder in this day of the worship of fitness and the demonizing of weight in general, that the free world was saved from destruction by a man in a wheelchair with a weak heart and an obese drinker and smoker! What they had was courage and intelligence and will. January 24 is the anniversary of Winston Churchill's day of death. By he way, he went on to live 20 years past the end of the war despite a heart attack during his visit to America to speak with Roosevelt. He died in 1965.
Have any of you seen Mercy Street, the pbs production set in the Civil War in a Virginia hotel turned into a hospital? I watched the first episode last night. I'm withholding judgement until I give it a chance to get going. However, it did make me think that if Hollywood is running out of Superhero and Soldier ideas, they have a gold mine in finally searching the lost archives of Women's History. Speaking of indomitable wills (as in the above on Winston Churchill), Dorothy Dix was a force to contend with and exactly the person you would hope was watching over things if you were a soldier and wounded in those dreadful times of medical butchery.
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