In October 1941, with World War II raging and Britain having stood alone against Nazi Germany for over a year, Churchill returned to Harrow School where he had studied as a boy. The school had endured air attacks, and the students had lived through the Blitz. Churchill acknowledged that a year earlier, they had been desperately alone and poorly armed, with the unmeasured menace of the enemy beating upon them. Yet they never flinched. His famous 'never give in' line was not blind stubbornness — he carefully added the caveat 'except to convictions of honour and good sense' — but a declaration that yielding to force or apparently overwhelming might was simply not an option.