They were thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them as rational people.
It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevasse.

They wanted to get back, were struggling, panting even--as a nation pants--to get back by their own way that they understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the weighted rope that was dragging them forward.

Churchill stood up there and repeated: "Mine is the only way--the saner policy," and his words would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of trifling even, in the face of danger, who suspected the calmness as one suspects the thing one has not.

At the end of it I received his summons to a small door at the back of the building.

The speech seemed to have passed out of his mind far more than out of mine.
"So you have come," he said; "that's good, and so....