Who responds to this as more than just a song?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_zp4fsDrNA
Who understands how clearly it expresses the black dog which burdened Churchill all his life and most of all during the war?
Which makes his performance all the greater by a man burdened with just living.
If you want just the song in an original performance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbuRN63sG04&feature=related
Brilliant!
I think that without his Blackdog, CHurchill, as we know him, would never have existed.
Our Blackdog can be our driving force and ultimately, be the recipe of our success or our failure - the trick is not to allow it to devour us!
But a fine balancing act, with a fine line between performance and collapse.
Mnay, perhaps most, great men have been beset by the black dog.
As have many lesser men, and women.
Perhaps, even the lessermen are really great men when they control their own Blackdog.
After all, not all have the advantages which come with being high born.
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and all that.
You’re right, balance is everything.
Too often we ignore courage in little things, often by people who are unfairly written off as weak.
An agoraphobic walking to their letter box to collect their mail or someone terrified by public speaking giving a speech can involve more courage than someone engaged in a more spectacular physical activity, in or out of war, which doesn’t require them to confront and overcome great fear.
Similarly, some soldiers undoubtedly exercised great courage just staying with their unit in or approaching action while others in the unit exercised equal courage doing rather more spectacular things in action.
Unfortunately ‘courage’ is usually measured by the impressiveness of the action rather than the unknowable internal fortitude it took the actor to perform it.
Doing something you’re not scared of doesn’t involve courage, no matter how impressive the action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9i2fqxSjTI
Some peoples’ “Black Dog” represents an angst of a different kind! 
Only because big legged women ain’t got no soul.
Yes, I guess that brings us back to the reasons for character building.
Doing something you’re not scared of doesn’t involve courage, no matter how impressive the action.
Would you say resignation, i.e. the conscious acceptance of the consequences of ones actions, even if unafraid, is courage?
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing, but if one resigns oneself to death as the likely or even just a possible result of being engaged in a war even though one doesn’t want to die but is prepared to, then I’d say that is courage.
It’s a more generalised courage than storming a pillbox or whatever, but a more dangerous courage to the enemy as it doesn’t rely on spontaneous action with the blood up but permits the relentless assaults intended to wear the enemy down, as Allied bomber crew did in WWII or the PBI did in WWI.
I would suppose that courage is a multi-faceted phenomena which works on different levels.
It brings to mind Queen Victoria’s comments when discussing the inscription for the VC:
She said words to the effect that to inscribe it with ‘for bravery’ would be akin to saying that those soldiers that didn’t win it were not brave. Hence, ‘For Valour’.