London – Wednesday morning, one day before Thursday’s carnage, my wife and I visited Winston Churchill’s country home, Chartwell. There the great man warned his countrymen of the nihilism welling up across the channel, and he urged their resolve. Here today, there is no Churchill but there is an abundance of British resolve and flinty composure. Londoners faced the World War II blitz. They faced the IRA’s random violence. They can face the Islamofascists’ barbarism.

Thursday morning, we took our breakfast in an outdoor cafe under an awning, for it drizzled steadily. The bombs began to go off a 20-minute walk from us, near the Liverpool Street Station, but here in Regent Street there was no sign of anything being amiss. For almost three hours there was no sign of trouble. We walked along congested Picadilly Street from 9:30 a.m. until 10:30 a.m. No one seemed to know of the bloodshed that was now resulting from bombs on trains near Liverpool Street Station, at Edgware Road Station, near King’s Cross Station, and on a double-decker bus near Russell Square. There were a couple of ambulances threading their way through the morning traffic, but I took little notice. And when I did see a police van struggle along the congested road, I thought to myself how vacant the cops’ gazes were. They seemed bored.

We walked for another hour through tourists, shoppers, and other pedestrians, with no hint of what by the afternoon Londoners would be calling their 9/11. Only at 11:30 a.m., when I called an acquaintance at Parliament’s offices, did I get the news. He expressed regret that I had to be in London on such a glum day. I thought he was referring to the weather. He informed me of the bombs. He also told me that his boss – a very significant member of Parliament – had been told by sources at 10 Downing Street that there were 150 dead. No figure that monstrous was reported all day long on the BBC, which I immediately turned to. For hours, the report was only of a few dead, the rest being “walking wounded,” and the more seriously injured – the odd term the Brits use, at least to this Yank’s ear, are persons suffering “illness.”

Over the next 30 minutes, the bustling street of Pall Mall quieted to a discernable stillness. The authorities ordered the buses shut down and the underground to cease, out of fear of more bombs. People were asked to stay off the street and indoors. Even taxis stopped running. Cell phones ceased to function – “a government plan,” a suspicious journalist later told me. More likely, the system was overburdened by calls. The drizzle turned into a downpour. By 1:30 p.m., I ventured out to see what was going on. We are a few blocks from the main government buildings in one direction and Buckingham Palace in the other. There was plenty of security at both places. Otherwise, life was picking up on the sidewalks. Restaurants were filling up for lunch. I stopped off at the cafe where I had had breakfast. It was operating at full tilt. Cell phones had come back to life.

My waiter from the morning recognized me. He remained cheerful. “It was just a matter of time,” he said. “There have been so many foiled plots.” Several Middle Eastern men jabbered in Arabic at a table nearby. The London sidewalks were back to normal, if not the streets, where no city buses moved nor many taxis. Police cruisers now sped about with sirens howling.

Early July is a time for grand parties here in London. Sir David Frost is having one. My friends at the London Spectator always have the most riotous. Theirs is canceled this evening. I have no idea what Sir David’s plans are. There was some dispute among the people at The Spectator. Some thought they should show the Islamofascists, who all suspect are the guilty ones, no never mind. The show must go on was their feeling. This is mine too if they asked their American cousin for his views. During the Blitz in 1940-1941, Churchill was adamant that normal life must continue despite the Nazi’s cruel bombs. As almost always, I am with Churchill.

But if the Spectator people canceled their party, they did not adjourn their wit. One quipped that the bombs were the work of the French. And then there was that other journalist who joked that Tony Blair’s government was responsible for the silencing of the cell phones – Milosoevic had done the same when in power, he insisted. The Spectator’s editor, Boris Johnson, himself a member of Parliament, offered a line that shows a properly laid-back response to the brutes who afflicted London yesterday. We are canceling the party, he told the Evening Standard. “The whole area is cordoned off and there are bombs going off.”

If the barbarians think they are going to dent the British spirit, they have it wrong. They seem unaware of how hopeless their cause is. They can only kill and get killed, and the forces of freedom have a far superior capacity to kill – ask the IRA. In fact, no terrorist group – not the IRA, not the ETA, and certainly not Al Qaeda – has ever defeated a democracy. The terrorists can cause tremendous carnage, but in the end, they are doomed. They represent no nation with which one can or will negotiate. They have no reasonable set of policies. The nihilists of Nazism offered a demented totalitarian future. Islamofascism offers regression to an imbecilic vision of the Muhammadanism of the 7th century.

We Americans are not buying this, and the Brits are equally reluctant. The proprietor of a men’s toiletries store on fashionable Jermyn Street sniffed indignantly to me in the late afternoon about the handful of shops that had closed. Their owners wanted to get home before a dreadful rush hour with no buses or subways moving. He pointed to a building across from his. “This is a famous street,” he said. In that very building, Britain’s intelligence services during the war directed a turned Nazi spy to misinform Berlin as to the Allies’ plans. “In the end, he told them our invading armies would land in Calais.” Of course, the successful landing was in Normandy, my new friend went on. “We have been too easy on these terrorists. Now we will get them. We are slow to anger, but now we are angry.”

Yes, how my hero who lived at Chartwell would have understood.

Mr. Tyrrell is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.