Churchill's Triumph (11 page)

Churchill’s own dreams had been different. That morning he had woken in a sweat, tormented by a vision of the map of Europe being turned to stepping-stones. They were dripping in blood, with Stalin’s boots marching inexorably forward, stepping upon them, one by one. If he were to be stopped, then better he be stopped as far east, as far away from England, as possible.

“Poland,” he said softly. “I am concerned about Poland. It is, after all, the reason why all of us are here. Poland led us into this war, and Poland seems destined to determine how we shall finish it.”

“That’s not quite accurate,” Harriman interjected. “Poland led Europe into war, not us. Not America.”

“Averell, my friend, it is the reason why
I
am here. If we cannot rescue Poland from the ashes of this conflict then Britain will have gone to war for nothing.”

“Winston, there are nearly eight million Polish-American voters in America,” declared the newly re-elected President. “You can rely on us to ensure that Poland won’t be forgotten.”

“Poland independent. Free. Democratic. Not a vassal—”

But Roosevelt cut across him: “Emerson once said that the only way to have a friend is to be one. Be a friend, Winston.

The Soviets are our allies—and we shall still need them once the war in Europe is won. After all, they will be the ones to liberate Poland.”

“And are you aware, Franklin, of events in liberated Bulgaria?”

But Roosevelt’s mind was already elsewhere. He was looking at his watch. “Is it so late? They’ll be piping Uncle Joe aboard before we know it. Time to clear the decks!” The other Americans stood. “You will forgive me, Winston.”

So Churchill never discovered whether his friend knew of or cared about the happenings in Bulgaria. Four days earlier, those men who had held power under the old system, and who were set to become the challengers to Russian influence in the new, had been slaughtered. Three former regents, two former prime ministers and twenty other leading politicians, every one of them wiped out. An entire level of non-Communist leadership in the country gunned down, with the print of Moscow left all too clearly on the trigger. Such was the price of liberation. Moscow had explained away the tactics as “an effective purge of Fascist elements.” To Churchill’s mind, it had seemed all too bloody effective.

❖ ❖ ❖

It was a silly, sad affair that followed immediately upon the lunch and left behind it so many regrets.

By the time Churchill rose from the President’s lunch-table, little more than an hour remained before the time when Stalin would sweep through the door and the day’s plenary session would start. Roosevelt, as always a solicitous host, knew that Churchill wouldn’t have enough time to return to the Vorontsov and claim his afternoon nap so he beckoned to Hopkins, for no better reason than that Hopkins happened to be closest.

“Harry,” Roosevelt said, “find somewhere for Winston to lay his old head. I don’t want him out of shape and all crotchety for later—it’ll only lead to more of his speeches.”

Hopkins needed his bed more than anyone—he was rarely to leave it during the conference—but he did as he was asked. Yet he was tired, ill, short of both stamina and patience. Without knocking, he opened the first bedroom door he came to. Inside he discovered another close presidential aide, General “Pa” Watson, who was in his underwear and about to take a nap. The general was as physically frail as Hopkins, suffering from advanced heart disease, while Hopkins had any number of ailments that on their own could kill him. Neither man should have made the arduous journey to Yalta, but they did so for the sake of their shared friendship with a president whom they had long served and admired, and who liked to surround himself with familiar, trusted faces. Neither Hopkins nor Watson wanted to let their man down. So they had come. And they quarreled. Horribly.

“Get out,” Hopkins instructed.

“Get out yourself. I’m using this room.”

“Winston needs it.”

“To hell with Winston. I’m sick, he’s not. Go find him another room.”

“I said, get out.”

“Then to hell with you, too.”

What followed was crude, intemperate, deeply hurtful, the sort of thing that is best forgotten between two good colleagues. It left Pa Watson clutching at an insistent pain in his chest and Hopkins trembling. It should never have happened, but it did. It finished only when Churchill, who knew nothing of the row, got his bed.

It was the last time those two old friends, Watson and Hopkins, were ever to speak to each other.

Old men, worn down by war, who couldn’t properly finish what they had begun. It summed up the story of Yalta.

❖ ❖ ❖

Before the opening of the new play comes the final act of the old. It was to be played out in the square of Piorun.

As the clock dragged its hand towards the appointed hour, the square filled with townsfolk. They came in small groups, old men in black caps leaning on their daughters, mothers clutching their children, small gaggles of widows, with their heads low, dragging their feet behind them. The thaw that had delayed the advance of the Russians was a miserable, halfhearted affair: old snow was still piled at every corner and icy winds snatched at the hems of skirts and cheekbones, and dragged tears from the corners of rebellious eyes. Even in Poland, where death had become so plentiful, the townspeople of Piorun refused to allow it to come cheap.

The hand of the clock trembled once more. Five minutes to four. Then the coughing of cold engines. Trucks filled with Germans. A
Kubelwagen
in which sat Kluge and, beside him, the mayor’s wife. It drew up beneath the lamppost in the square. It was the only lamppost in the whole of Piorun, an overly ornate cast-iron affair. It hadn’t been lit since the first day of September, 1939.

A rope was quickly thrown over the lamppost, a noose knotted at its end. The mayor’s wife was made to stand in the back of Kluge’s vehicle while the scarf was snatched from her head and the noose placed round her neck. She was a woman in the last years of her life. Her many winters had left their scars across her face, the summers had bleached her hair to a steel grey, and the pain of a life filled with many harvests had bent her back and made claws of her hands, but her head was held high so they could see her eyes. They were dry, defiant.

At one minute to four, a young lieutenant began to read from a sheet of paper, his breath forming little clouds, but the wind carried away his worthless words. The driver gunned the engine, anxious that it shouldn’t stall when the moment came. Kluge checked his wristwatch against the town-hall clock. Old bones creaked. Children sobbed. The lieutenant read on.

Then a ripple of agitation passed through the square. Voices were raised. The lieutenant paused in confusion. The crowd began to part. And through it, muddied and exhausted by his race from the forest, stumbled the figure of Mayor Nowak. He was totally breathless.
“Stuj! Stuj!
Stop! Please stop!” he cried, and sank to his knees.

Kluge could not hide his delight. He clapped his leather-gloved hands and stamped his boot several times. Then he ordered that a second rope be thrown over the lamppost. “We shall have a double celebration!” he declared.

Yet his greed was his undoing, for they had brought only one rope with them. While the German soldiers scurried around in search of another, the Kommandant continued to stamp his boot, but this time in impatience. Then the doctor stepped forward. “Herr Kommandant Kluge, is there nothing we can do to save our friends?”

“You want to die in their place?”

“No one wants to die, Herr Kommandant.”

“Then what do you have in mind?”

“It appears, Herr Kommandant, that you may soon be leaving our town.”

Even though they had no newspapers other than German and they listened to radio only under pain of death, they all knew what was going on. Many of the
Volksdeutsche
had already left the Settlement, abandoning the white-painted farms they had stolen. They had gone to join the long, straggling columns of refugees that for weeks had been clogging the main routes near Piorun, their horses floundering on the ice, belly-deep in the thick snow, pulling sleighs, carts, even upturned tables loaded with whatever these people could save or steal. But wherever they came from, and however they traveled, the refugees were all heading west. They quickly became targets. By day the SS patrols would drag off any male of fighting age, while by night Polish bandits and German deserters would come for the women. The very old and the very young were left to freeze slowly to death. Babies died quickest of all as the milk turned to ice in their mothers’ breasts. Yes, the Germans were leaving Poland, and they would soon be leaving Piorun, everyone knew that. It was only a matter of time.

“War is a terrible thing,” the doctor continued, “and none of us is sure what we shall meet in the days ahead. But we implore you, Herr Kommandant, not to leave Piorun with innocent blood on your hands. How much better to go with your heads held high with honor—and your pockets filled with our thanks.”

“What?”

“Allow us to purchase the lives of our friends.”

“Ridiculous! There’s no more than a thousand Reichsmarks left in the entire town.”

“True enough. Money burns so easily. But gold, silver, jewelry—all these things can be so much more useful in times like these.”

“You’ve been hoarding? I’ll do for the lot of you!”

“Perhaps, Herr Kommandant, as you say, you could do for every single one of us—if you had the time. But I fear. . . ”

Kluge’s jaw was working hard, chewing over the doctor’s words. The war was lost, every German knew it, but whatever else lay ahead was buried beneath uncertainty. And, like all Germans of his age, he remembered the times when you could fill a wheelbarrow with money and still not have enough to buy breakfast for your babies. But a good watch, a gold bracelet, a brooch—even during the darkest days, they sang for themselves.

“An hour, then! Everything you have here within an hour. Or more will die.”

But the insolent dog of a doctor was shaking his head. “In an hour, Herr Kommandant, it will be dark. These things cannot be gathered in the dark. Give us until the morning. Please.”

The Kommandant hesitated, but only for a second. His garrison was desperately weak, depleted by the demands of glory on the Russian front. And these
scheisskerl
Poles scuttled around like cockroaches. He had neither sufficient men nor enough time to do for the lot of them, no matter how much he blustered. So he took what he thought was the easy way out.

“Everything the town has by ten tomorrow morning,” he snapped at the doctor. “And if it’s not enough, not only will the mayor and his wife die, holding each other’s hands, but you and your own wife will be given the honor of showing them how.”

❖ ❖ ❖

This was a time of trial for Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest trial of his life. He wasn’t a stranger to challenge, of course, he was a man who thrived on being kicked, yet somehow the circumstances in which he found himself now were different, more difficult, and not simply because he had grown old. Even at the start of ’39 they’d said he was too old. Too old, too unreliable, too unprincipled, too drunk: that was what they’d whispered about him. But, by God, he’d shown the buggers! Whatever they said about him now—and much of it was still robust and unforgiving—they’d never again wrap up his name in a whisper. They would never be able to forget Winston Churchill, no matter how much they might try.

His entire life had been a trial. He wasn’t much of a Christian and he didn’t pray, yet every night before he went to bed he would spend a few moments in reflection, placing himself in the dock. After Sawyers had left him and before he turned out the light, he would retrace the events of the day, trying to decide how much he had achieved and whether history would judge it to be enough. He never went to sleep without shaking hands with history. He put others to the test, too. Today he had tested Roosevelt and Stalin at the afternoon plenary. And they had both failed. Miserably.

Afterwards he had returned to the Vorontsov in a black mood. He had stamped. He had cursed. He had thrown things.

He had been impossible. So Sawyers had sent for Sarah, and she did what all the Churchill daughters did in such circumstances. She listened.

“Franklin is such a. . . ridiculous romantic!” He waved his glass of wine. It wasn’t the first. It circled round the dinner-table like a radar beam searching for its target. “He comes to Yalta hoping to change the world, like Moses descending from his mountain and bringing his tablets of stone on which are carved but three words.
The United bloody Nations.”
He spat them out in frustration. “It is the only thing he truly cares about. Peace on earth and unity among all the tribes, he proclaims! Then he spends his day sucking up to the Bolshevist brotherhood in the hope that those heathens will swallow it.” He threw back the last of his wine. Sawyers hovered, waiting to repair the damage.

“And you know what, Mule?”

“Papa?”

“Stalin hadn’t even read the papers. The president sent him a draft proposal on the United Nations last December and the bloody man says he hasn’t had a chance to read it. Too busy with the war.”

“He must have been embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? He’s no nearer embarrassment than Sawyers is to a double first in theology. Instead he demanded to know what the Benighted Nations would do if Egypt said it wanted the Suez Canal back. I told him it was simple. The Empire would say no. So then he asks what would happen if China wanted Hong Kong back—would the Empire keep on saying no, and if it did, what was the point of the United Nations? It was a wretched set-up, Mule, with Franklin and Stalin like footpads out to waylay the empire—just as the Pole said they would. But even that wasn’t the worst of it. . . ” His voice trailed away as he remembered.

For a while that afternoon, sunlight had swamped their meeting-place in the old ballroom at Livadia. A great fire of birch logs burned in the hearth and Corinthian columns of white marble stood guard along its walls. They sat at the circular table: Churchill in the uniform of the Colonel-in-Chief of his old regiment, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, Stalin in the simple khaki tunic of a Soviet marshal. Roosevelt was dressed in a civilian suit, pale grey, like his face. Roosevelt, as always, was chairman, since he was the only one of the three who was head of state. It was only minutes after he had opened the session that the nature of the game became apparent. Stalin, who had arrived with only the most cursory of greetings, had quickly turned intransigent. He became blunt and boorish— largely at Churchill’s expense. He had cut across the Englishman, interrupted, ignored, mocked, sneered at him and his empire. Accused him of mounting a crusade against Russia. And the rougher the Russian grew, the more emollient Roosevelt had become. It seemed he would do anything to save his beloved United Nations.