Churchill's Triumph (5 page)

The other man grew more anxious. “We do not have much time.” He began banging at one of the bath pipes with a wrench.

“What d’you want?”

“Get me out of here. Please. Take me with you when you leave.”

“Why should we do that?”

“Because I can help you.”

“How?”

“I know about Katyn. I was there.”

Sawyers was now certain he was falling into a trap. For almost two years the whispers of Katyn had rushed across the conscience of the world like storm clouds across the moon. It was a crime of extraordinary proportions, a crime against the Poles—all Poles, everyone was agreed on that—but the rest was covered in accusation and smothered in doubt.

Poland. The first sacrificial lamb of the war. Once a proud and independent nation whose empire had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, yet its position and wealth had always been the envy of others. Over preceding centuries the fortunes of Poland had waxed and had waned, but mostly they had waned until, in the autumn of 1939, they had been utterly wasted. That was when Germany had pounced upon her from the west, taking her in its jaws and swallowing much of her whole, while to the east the Soviets, like jackals, had lain in wait to snatch the chunks of the carcass that remained. Within a few weeks, Poland was entirely gone, but still she wasn’t to be spared. Two years further on the Wehrmacht had pushed across the blood-drenched fields that had once been Polish soil to fall upon the Soviet Union itself, and twenty million Poles were caught once again in the crossfire. The torture continued.

It was yet another two years before the Germans announced the discovery of a mass grave in the forest of Katyn, northwest of the Russian town of Smolensk. As they dug through the dirt of the forest floor they found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers, each bound, blindfolded and shot with a bullet to the back of the head. A Soviet bullet, it was alleged.

The Soviets denounced the claim as propaganda. And when the exiled Polish government in London called for an investigation of the massacre by the International Red Cross, the Soviets denounced them, too, claimed the exiled Poles were playing into Nazi hands by echoing their black propaganda and doing their dirty work for them. Moscow as good as accused the Poles in London of complicity in the crime of Katyn, and from that moment on the Soviet government refused to talk with them, denying their claims and their status as the legitimate government of Poland.

Which caused all sorts of problems for the British and Americans. They had long recognized the legitimacy of the London Poles, but now they needed the Russians more—much more. Couldn’t win the war without them. Couldn’t afford to get tangled up with nonsense in some faraway forest. So they sat back in embarrassed silence and did nothing. Katyn would be upon the conscience of them all.

And now it had come to the Crimea, had found its way right into Churchill’s bathroom. As the steam formed a thick mist round him, Sawyers started shaking his head. He had a mole’s nose for trouble, and this reeked of it. “No thanks, Mr. Nowak,” he said. “Just fix the leak, if you will.”

“But you must listen!” the other man snapped, grabbing his sleeve.

Very carefully, Sawyers removed the other man’s hand. And now the supervisor was calling, sensing that all was not in order.

“I can help you,” Nowak persisted, pleading. “Look—at bedside lamp. Examine. It has extra flex. For listening device. You must not trust Russians. . . ”

But already it was too late. The supervisor was at the door. Moments later, Sawyers was out of it.

❖ ❖ ❖

The short winter’s day had long since come to its close by the time Churchill’s car approached the neo-Gothic outlines of the Vorontsov Palace. The meandering drive down from the mountains had physically drained him, while the sense of desolation they encountered on all sides had lowered his spirits, so by the time he walked into the suite of rooms that had been set aside for him his temper was short. He did not take it kindly when he learned that Sarah’s room was nowhere near his own.

“What the hell sort of palace is this, Sawyers, when my own daughter is treated as a second-class citizen and packed off to the maid’s quarters?” He flung his cap angrily at his servant; it missed. He slumped into a hideous overstuffed chair and lit a cigar. He sighed, and the sound seemed to drag the last reserves of energy from him. His shoulders sagged, his body wilted. “What the devil are we doing here?”

“Saving the world. Leastways, that’s what you told me at Checkers,” Sawyers responded, scurrying to find an ashtray. When eventually he located one, a fine piece made of heavy crystal, he was intrigued to discover it had the Romanov imperial crest engraved upon it.

“Save the world?” Churchill snapped. “But we can’t. Even if we could, we’ve no time. No time.” Ash tumbled down his jacket, but he took no notice. “The President has decreed he will stay here only five days, six at the most. Six days—when we have been fighting for our lives for almost six years.” The words came tinged with bitterness. “Six miserable days. Why, the Almighty himself required seven.”

“You need a bath, zur,” Sawyers replied.

“I need a bloody drink!”

“No, zur, you need a bath.”

“Damn your impertinence, Sawyers. Since when did you start issuing the orders?”

“It’s true. I may be impertinent. But you still need a bath.”

Something in the servant’s steady blue eye and stubborn lip made Churchill pause. Sawyers was already turning on the taps, sending a cascade of water into the cast-iron tub, and beckoning to his master. Churchill heaved himself from his chair.

“Funny goin’s-on around here, mind,” Sawyers whispered, when at last Churchill came close. “Seems the room is bugged.”

“What?
What?
Where?”

Sawyers raised a finger to his lips to quieten the other man. “The bedside lamp, so I’m told. And that’s not all. Place has been crawlin’ wi’ all sorts of workmen ever since I arrived, yet this mornin’ they disappeared as quick as kids at a broken window and now we got strange-looking servants dressed up in white coats. One fellow’s dusted bannisters outside the door three times since lunch. Loiterin’ wi’ intent, I reckon. He’s YMCA, or whatever you call it.”

“NKVD, you bloody fool,” Churchill muttered, drumming his fingers ostentatiously against the side of the bath to create still more extraneous noise. “So, Comrade Stalin’s up to his usual tricks. Never doubted him for a moment.” The color had come back to his cheeks, “Where d’you say this bug is?”

“Bedside light.”

Churchill stamped across to the bed. He examined the lamp carefully without touching it. At first he could see nothing, yet soon he had found the extra flex leading to a hole in the skirting-board and, after more diligent searching, he identified what he assumed to be a small microphone hidden in the intricate leaf design of the lamp’s base. He drew a deep breath, held the lamp aloft to examine its underside, then burst forth with a few bars of “Rule Britannia” in a voice so grating and tuneless that it made Sawyers wince. “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” he cried, to anyone who might be listening. Then he let the whole thing fall from his fingers. It fell to the floor and shattered into pieces.

“Bugger. Clumsy of me.” He smiled grimly, turning to the servant. “Come, Sawyers, tell me. Where the hell did you discover all this?”

“From a Polish plumber. Said he needed our help.”

“Every Pole on the face of the planet needs our help. If only it were possible. What else did he say?”

“Said if I were Russian, I’d be at least a full colonel.”

“If you were Russian, Sawyers, you’d have been shot for endless insubordination. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, how about my bloody drink?”

“Know what I was thinkin’, zur?” the servant replied, standing his ground.

“What’s that?”

“Maybe there’s somethin’ to be said for joinin’ a revolution after all.”

TW
O

is arrival was like
the coming of autumn. The first sign was a growing coldness among the blue-capped NKVD guards who were posted around the Vorontsov, followed by a gentle stirring of rough, whispered instruction. Then came anxiety, which began to blow like freshly fallen leaves into every corner. Expressions froze, shoul
ders straightened, fingers hovered nervously around triggers. Stalin was coming. Early. Trying to take them by surprise.

Churchill, alerted by the cries of the guards, rushed into the hallway to greet him. They had met only three times before, and on each occasion the Englishman’s sense of foreboding had grown. They had got drunk with each other, poured scorn upon each other, and forced endless quantities of insult and adulation on each other, yet Churchill found there was something hollow in the man, a space where the spirit should have been. There could be outpourings of every sort of emotion, but they were switched on and off like a light, on command. Perhaps it was because he had no woman in his life, there was no longer any leavening, no Clemmie to dig in the occasional claw and remind him that he was merely mortal. There had once been a wife, much younger, whom Stalin had reputedly loved in his own way, but she had died, some said by her own hand on account of his uncontrollable cruelty. That was when the purges had started. Her anguished soul had been pursued into Hell by countless others. It was the price of a husband’s broken heart, or so it was whispered. Churchill didn’t care to listen to such rumors, he had no idea what was true, but that was the problem—you rarely knew what was true about Stalin, and when you did, you desperately wanted not to believe it. Churchill both admired and hated him, and he had also grown to fear him. Yes, Winston Churchill was afraid, of this untouchable man and of the world he wanted to create, and now he was on the doorstep.

Churchill had only just set foot in the hallway when the door was wrenched open and light flooded in. At first his eyes could see nothing but a silhouette set against the afternoon light—the cap, the greatcoat, the small frame, not much over five foot even in his built-up boots. Yet as things began to fall into focus Churchill couldn’t help but smile to himself, for crowding in behind his visitor came a phalanx of men— generals, ministers, toadies, assorted security men—who bent low and bobbed in their master’s wake like a gang of medieval courtiers. Churchill would later describe them to Clemmie as spaniels and sycophants; he heard Sawyers giggle and call them fart-catchers.

Sawyers, the wretched man! There he was, at the door, nodding renewed acquaintance with the Marshal, as though he were meeting some fellow at a football match, and getting the first handshake as he helped the Generalissimo off with his plain military coat. Stalin was an unostentatious man for one with such rapacious appetites. One of the pockets of the greatcoat had been clearly and rather clumsily darned, and beneath it his trousers were tucked into the tops of soft boots. He wore no decorations apart from a small gold star upon the left breast of his tunic that identified him as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you again, Marshal,” Churchill began. Stalin said nothing; he simply smiled and held out his hand. The handshake was surprisingly limp, unimpressive, little more than a passing brush of flesh. The complexion, too, was unimposing, roughened and sallow from the effects of smallpox and too many years spent locked away in the Kremlin. The hair was thinning and, when he did begin to speak, the voice that crept out from beneath the thick moustache was quiet and often difficult to hear, but his eyes made all his meanings clear. They were Oriental, penetrating, sharp, yellow. They carried no flicker of warmth. As cold as the road from Saki.

“You are looking well, Marshal.”

“Let us not start with a lie, Mr. Churchill. We are all older.”

“But with age comes experience. And with experience, wisdom. Let us hope that together we can use our long lifetimes to make this a wiser world.”

“Let’s first make sure we crush the Fascists, shall we?”

He was not a man for poetry but, by God, he knew what he wanted. And that was one of the many reasons for the admiration and fear that Churchill felt whenever he met the man.

“You happy here? Everything to your satisfaction?”

“I seem to have broken a bedside lamp. But apart from that things seem splendid.”

“Lamps? We can get lamps, as many as you want.”

“That I don’t doubt.”

“There is an old Russian saying—
chem bogaty tem i rady—
you are welcome to what we have.”

“Then perhaps I may be allowed to offer you something in return, Marshal. It would give me great pleasure to show you my Map Room. We can see how things in the west are proceeding. May I?”

Ah, the offensive in the west. Stalin offered a smile, yet there was no humor in it. He had spent two barren years demanding an offensive to relieve the German pressure on the Russian front, and for two years all he’d been given was excuses—“Like kids caught with their hands up their sisters’ skirts,” he had once sneered. And when it had finally arrived it seemed less like a general offensive than a gentle overture: they hadn’t yet crossed the Rhine, and a few weeks ago they’d even been going backwards. The German counter-offensive through the Ardennes had caught the Americans and British with their heads stuck in their Christmas hampers. They were forced to regroup and rearm, and to offer up yet more pathetic excuses while they watched the Red Army in the east grind its inexorable way forward. So—Churchill wanted to show him how “things in the west” were going, did he? Seemed like a good opportunity to get the proceedings off to a suitably humiliating start.

“Da!”
the Russian declared, and the Prime Minister led the way.

Churchill took his Map Room with him everywhere. In the Vorontsov it was located in a small room beside his bedroom, where it was commanded by the admirable Captain Pim. Maps were pinned upon every wall and marked with the positions of the opposing armies in every quarter of the world. It was all there. The American slog through the Pacific. The lumbering British progress in Italy. The stalled advance upon the Rhine. Only in the east had the land been swept clean of the Wehrmacht. From Russia, of course. And the Ukraine. From Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and, now, almost all of Poland. And while all of this was going on, Churchill couldn’t even yet claim the Channel Islands.

As they studied the maps together, the Englishman was overcome with a sudden sense of inadequacy. He felt the need to defend his position. His hand wandered to Paris.
“La belle France,”
he muttered, in his execrable French,
“est encore libre.”

“And de Gaulle sniffing along behind like a dog on the trail of a free dinner.”

Stalin didn’t like de Gaulle. Truth was, it was difficult to find anyone who did. The general had an extraordinary capacity for looking down his long Gallic nose and stirring disquiet. But Stalin’s insult wasn’t merely gratuitous: as usual, there was a point to it. “He thinks he is Joan of Arc. But unlike Joan, he has inherited his earth.”

De Gaulle led the provisional government in liberated France, installed by the British and American armies as reward for being so consistently bloody-minded with the Germans— although in truth he was almost as consistently bloody-minded with the British and Americans themselves. He spread his disdain with a remarkable lack of discrimination.

“You object?” Churchill asked.

“It is a matter of no consequence. You can impose de Gaulle or Donald Duck, for all I care. If the French will not liberate themselves, they must take what is given.” He sniffed. “It is the same for Poland.”

Ah, Poland, of course. Stalin was claiming the same rights over Poland as the Americans and British had exercised in France. Tit for tat.

“Something we might discuss,” muttered Churchill, but already Stalin had moved on.

“Your maps interest me. They show the British Empire in red.”

“It is our tradition.”

“With us, too. On our maps the Soviet Union is always in red.” Stalin’s hands wiped their way across what seemed like half the globe, from Europe to the farthest stretches of Asia, then swept slowly back to take in many new territories: the Balkans, the Baltic—and Poland. “Our maps will be bigger when this war is over.” It was a statement of fact, but it was also a challenge—or, at least, Churchill took it so. While the Soviet empire would undoubtedly expand, the British empire would not. Its day was done, its map would shrink: that was the thought behind Stalin’s remark. The spoils of war were likely to be spread thinly among those who had been there from the start.

And once more Stalin’s fingers were racing across the map, like a composer at his score.

“The Germans throw against us children and old men. They are armed with nothing but pop-guns and home-made mortars. Their only hope”—he stabbed his thick finger at the map—“is to concentrate their defense. Move their best divisions to the great rivers in the east, hold them as long as possible.” His finger was tracing the line of the Danube, the Elbe, the Oder-Neisse, the mighty waterways that lay before the Russian advance. “We must stop them before they can do that. Destroy their communications centers. Berlin. Leipzig. And here.” The finger stabbed forcefully down once more, coming to rest upon the city of Dresden. “Their troops will all go through here. This city is their great crossroads.” He turned to Churchill. “I request that you destroy it. Stop the Wehrmacht. Make sure they cannot reinforce the Russian front.”

Over the years, Stalin had made so many requests, not all of them unreasonable, and the British had done their damnedest to meet them. They’d sent off desperate Arctic convoys, given up tanks they needed themselves, even ripped apart their own operational Hurricanes to make sure Stalin got the spares he demanded, but he always wanted more, more and more. Yet now the Luftwaffe was spent, almost smashed, and the skies belonged to the Allies. They could bomb almost anywhere they wanted, with impunity, so there seemed little reason to deny him. Churchill turned to his air-force chief, Portal, who was standing in the background. The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow, the airman nodded, and it was done.

A few days later the beautiful baroque city of Dresden would be gone, burned to the ground by the overwhelming force of the bombers, and with it would die fifty thousand, perhaps one hundred thousand people, although the devastation was so great that no one would ever know for sure. All on an eyebrow and a nod. Churchill would be troubled by that decision for the rest of his life. It isn’t known if Stalin ever gave it a second thought.

But now the decision had been taken and Stalin clapped his hands with impatience. “Prime Minister, our time is short. We meet again. In an hour. With Mr. Roosevelt.” Already he was heading for the door. “And I shall send you someone to update your map,” he called, over his shoulder. “You are behind the times. Zhukov is another thirty miles further forward. And Chuikov already has a bridgehead across the Oder.”

He was making a point, a boast about Soviet superiority, and they both knew it.

“May God shower many blessings on your British advance. And may you always fight on level ground.”

Damn his eyes! He could even twist a prayer into a taunt. But still he wasn’t finished. He looked back from the doorway. “You will forgive me rushing. The President has asked to see me before we begin. A personal meeting.”

Only the flutter of the eyelids betrayed Churchill, but Stalin noticed. And he probably knew; Churchill had asked not once but repeatedly for a meeting in private with the President, and as many times as he had asked he had been refused. There had been any number of excuses. Yet the Russian asks to see Roosevelt and suddenly he has all the time in the world.

The conference hadn’t yet formally started, and already Stalin was two rounds ahead.

❖ ❖ ❖

“Splendid view, Alec. But they’ve painted over the window-frame. Can’t get the wretched thing open.”

For a moment Eden banged away at it, but it was a futile gesture. “Life,” he added dispiritedly. “Always filled with sticky windows.”

He lit a cigarette, trying to fight off his dark mood and concentrate on the panorama. For all its architectural misjudgments, the Vorontsov enjoyed a captivating position. From his first-floor window the view tumbled down across newly manicured gardens to the shore far below, where a dark, smooth sea danced gently round outcrops of stubborn rock.

“Strange to think some Jerry was standing here, on this very spot, less than a year ago.”

Cadogan came to join him at the window. “I keep discovering pale marks on the wallpaper where paintings used to hang. The Germans must’ve taken them when they left. I ask myself why? Surely it was clear they were losing the war, that they’d never be able to enjoy their plunder. What was the point?”