WC02 - Never Surrender (12 page)

The first thing he noticed was that the casualties were still coming in. Hundreds of them. Soldiers, civilians, French and British, even a few German troops. They'd all found their way to this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist, and the survivors had struggled to this last and most remote place on earth.

The BBC had announced that the French forces had the situation under control, but not here they didn't. The outhouses of the farms were overflowing with casualties; newcomers were being left outside in the sun; and it seemed to Don that their injuries were growing ever more terrifying. His physical and emotional strength was almost overwhelmed, and he didn't think he could take much more. As he relit the cigarette that had remained stuck to his lips, he noticed that his hand was trembling uncontrollably. And all for two shillings a day.

Yet there could be no escape. The screams of those injured mixed with the cries of instruction from the doctors, and Don found himself running to help with another of the wounded, brought in on the shoulder of a fellow soldier, his head wrapped in a red tablecloth.

They laid him on the- kitchen floor the table was occupied and a doctor slowly unwrapped the sodden cloth. Two terrified eyes stared out, but of the rest of the face there was almost nothing. No lower jaw, no tongue, no cheek, only those two staring eyes which understood it all. Fingers clutched at Don's sleeve with the force of a man under siege from pain he was incapable of resisting.

Don's stomach heaved in revulsion, and perhaps it was only his exhaustion that prevented him from throwing up. He'd never encountered such horror. But the eyes understood it all, staring at him, pleading. Gently the doctor replaced the cloth over those parts where the lower face should have been. He paused in prayer.

"God help him," he whispered, 'for we can't." He heaved himself back to his feet it seemed to consume most of his remaining energy and returned to his patient on the table. "Give him morphine," he instructed.

As he lay there the wounded soldier began to foul himself. He was no longer in control, carried away down a path of unbearable distress and darkness. He knew what was happening, for nothing had dulled either his mind or his pain. The eyes had taken on a new sharpness, and were screaming silently at Don.

With great tenderness, Don prised himself free from the clenched fingers and did as he was instructed. He gave the soldier morphine. Unscrewed the cap, squeezed the capsule. Marked an "M' on his forehead. Then he gave him another dose. Two syringes. Too much. But still it seemed to have no effect, so ten minutes later Don gave him yet another.

And slowly the eyes began to change, to lose that edge of fear, to go gently into his night. And to smile, Don thought. Don stayed with him, holding his hand, feeling him slip away.

Don did not stir until it was done.

"You did your best," the surgeon offered, trying to console.

"I might have given him too much," Don blurted back in shock. "I didn't know how much to give him."

"Do you think I do?" the man at the table spat, bent over yet another patient. There was bitterness in his voice.

"But you're a doctor .. ."

"Me? Not now, and not ever, not after this. I'm nothing but a dental surgeon," the man replied, turning back to his work.

"I wasn't sure if you would come," the old man muttered as he clambered into the back of the Humber.

"Neither was I," she replied bluntly.

They said no more. Inspector Thompson sat up front alongside the driver as their journey unwound across the river and through the jumbled suburbs of south London until they had left behind the respectable brick fronts of Norwood and were into the open hills of Surrey. Churchill was hunched, bound inside an overcoat in spite of the sunshine, his hands resting on his silver-topped walking stick. His cheeks were grey. Ruth Mueller wore the same frayed suit, although he wouldn't have noticed.

"I have been Prime Minister for a week, and every day of that week I have woken with dread in my heart." He sounded bitter, as if it were her fault. "We are facing disaster."

She considered this outburst for a moment. "I'm puzzled, Mr. Churchill. I am, by the definition of your own Government,

an enemy alien. A security threat. Why are you telling me this?"

"Because That Bloody Man Hitler already knows," he growled. He took a large handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose fiercely. "I-was in Paris. Went to see for myself. Everyone had gathered together at the Quai d'Orsay -Reynaud, Daladier, General Gamelin their top men, dripping dejection across every thread of carpet. They were standing; no one sat. It was as if at any moment they expected to start running." He wiped his eyes, but she could sense that his sorrow was beginning to give way to anger. He sat up, more alert.

"The panzers push on, they told me, scattering the French armies in front of them. They had a large map set up on a student's easel. It had a battle front marked on it in a thick black line, but as they talked their fingers were always pointing to places behind that line. As if the line meant nothing any more. So I asked them: where is their strategic reserve? No one answered. I thought they had misunderstood, so I tried it in French. "Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?" I demanded."

He rapped his stick sharply on the floor.

"D'you know what Gamelin told me? Know what he said? Simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "Aucune." None. They haven't got a bloocjly strategic reserve! Five hundred miles of front and they haven't got a single man, goat or mattress to plug the gaps!"

The grey cheeks had grown crimson with fresh life.

"And while we were talking, outside in the garden I could see bonfires. They were trundling out papers in wheelbarrows, and all for burning. The Third Republic disappearing in cinders and ash. They say Paris may fall in days. You can see it written on the faces of the people. Last time I was there they applauded as my car passed, but now there are no cheers, no salutes, no waving arms, nothing but the ripe stench of fear. They know their country is dying."

And suddenly his whole body sagged, the anger giving way to exhaustion, as though all the sinews and strands that held his body together had been cut. It seemed that only the buttons on his overcoat kept him from collapsing completely.

"We have been fooled, duped, Frau Mueller. Hitler has shown us not only daring but also great wisdom. This has all been to his plan. He wanted us to advance into Belgium, encouraged us to move out from behind our de fences That's why he didn't bomb us during our headlong rush to adversity. We were blind, jumped to do his bidding. And now he has swept behind us and we are in danger of being cut in two. It seems barely credible, but we have been overwhelmed by a handful of tanks. Holland has gone, Brussels has been surrendered without a shot being fired, and his troops will soon be on the outskirts of Paris. Our great alliance with the French lies in ruins."

He was weeping quietly now, the handkerchief to his eyes, the dark smudges beneath them like dead ash scattered over a hearth. "It is said that the French troops are surrendering in entire companies with their officers at their head. They are throwing their weapons into the road to be crushed by the passing panzers. But the panzers don't even stop to take the surrender, they roll onwards, thirty and forty miles a day. Nothing like it has ever been seen before in the history of warfare."

Suddenly he was staring at her, eyes still flooded but waving his hand in passion. "He is beating me, Frau Mueller. Not only out there upon the field of battle, but up here' he began jabbing a finger to his massive forehead 'in the battle of the mind. Out-thinking me, outsmarting me at every turn."

He fell to brooding once more until they had rolled into Kent. A little more than twenty miles from their starting point, they drew into the driveway of an old brick-fronted house. The windows on the ground floor were shuttered and weeds were beginning- to peer through the gravel of the driveway. In front of the house a bank of rhododendron bushes was in full and violent flower, but to her mind it only served to make the old house look more forlorn.

"Welcome back to Chartwell," he announced as the car drew to a halt. In normal times his arrival would have lifted his heart. She remembered how he would leap out, scattering dogs and papers before him as he revelled in the joy of returning home. But these were not normal times. The house had been shut since the start of the war and an air of melancholy had settled around it. He made no attempt to go inside but led her around by a path that brought them to the rear of the house, and there his spirits seemed to lift, for Chartwell was set upon the side of a great Kentish hill that looked out upon endless miles of misty countryside. Nature had chosen this spot as a great stage with half of England as its audience. While Thompson and the driver disappeared inside the house, Churchill led her down towards the lakes in the valley below, and with every step his energies slowly returned. The back straightened, the gaze lifted, the walking stick became a weapon rather than a prop, slashing angrily at nettles that had begun to grow in corners, digging at young bramble shoots that would soon burst into a jungle of thorns. Yet the beauty of spring could not be turned by a few weeds; this was much as the Tudors would have seen England from this spot, and much as it might appear in another thousand years, if England still lived.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, poking with his stick amongst a scattering of feathers on the grass. "Old Reynard's taken one of the ducks. But look, my black beauties are still here, every one of them. Remember?" He waved at the small flock of black swans that cruised on the larger of the two lakes. "Survivors," he whispered in awe.

Butter-dipped primroses were still in bloom along the banks of the lakes, and a carpet of bluebells had been rolled out for inspection beneath the beeches and great oaks. Squirrels rustled, ewes grazed, moor hens and coots protested at the intrusion and scampered into the reeds. Overhead a pair of buzzards wheeled and turned like dancers in the sky.

"Oh, how I love this place! One day, one glorious day, we shall return."

"One day I would like to return home, too," she responded dryly.

"Then it is agreed. We shall help each other."

Instinctively she wanted to argue, to push against his presumption, but why else had she come if not to help?

He sat down on a stone cairn overlooking the lake, one of his favourite spots for easel and paints. Almost reluctantly, she settled beside him.

"You have a beautiful home, Mr. Churchill."

"A family home. So important, is family. You must miss yours."

"I have no family to miss any more."

He carried on; she wasn't sure whether he had heard her. "I only wish my mother might have seen this place. She died shortly before I bought it. My father, of course ... he died long before that. He was very young."

"Hitler expects to die young."

"I always thought that I would, too."

"Perhaps that's why you and he have always been in so much of a hurry."

He refused to rise to the bait she seemed constantly to dangle before him. "I sometimes wonder whether my father knew that he would die young; if that was the reason why he seemed always to be so preoccupied, so precipitate. Tilting at every windmill. I must admit it was sometimes a struggle for a young boy to keep up with him." He squinted into the sun, pretending that it caused the new moistness in his eyes.

If the young Winston hadn't been able to keep up, it was largely because he'd never been asked to. Lord Randolph had been a careless man, jealous of others, even his own sons, and Winston had spent his adult life trying to show his father how it might have been. That was what Chartwell had always been about. Family. Together. Not Christmases spent apart or summers spent adrift, and a child's letters from school left unanswered.

Family!

Suddenly he'd had enough of introspection. He sprang to his feet, setting off at a furious pace up the slope towards the house, head forward, cigar ablaze, his stick flying before him like a dueller's sword.

"The French," he shouted over his shoulder, 'will want to make peace with Hitler."

"They can't," she insisted, already breathless in pursuit.

"They will, I fear. And not just the French. There are people in this country, even in my own Cabinet .. ." He slashed with his. tick at some more rising weeds. Yes, it seemed that everyone wanted to bloody well talk.

"No, you do not understand." She grabbed his sleeve, forcing him to stop. "They cannot make peace with Hitler. Peace is not possible. You must understand .. ."

He could see desperation in her eyes, a haunted look as if a terrible tragedy that had once overtaken her was about to catch up with her again.

"Hitler is a man who is defined by war and only by war. Without war he is nothing. He failed at everything -as a son, as a schoolboy, as an art student, as a friend. He finished up as a penniless vagrant on the streets of Vienna. He had no home other than a shelter for tramps, one step above the gutter. Then came war and suddenly he was no longer half formed but a complete man, with a sense of purpose and the respect of his fellows, a war hero with the Iron Cross. He couldn't let it go. It was war that gave his life some sort of meaning. And only with war will Hitler's life retain any meaning. Don't you see? He can never stop."

"Some of my colleagues argue that he will leave us alone. That he doesn't hate the English in the way he hates others."

"That is true, he does not hate the English, but that will not save you. Look at Germany. He doesn't hate his own Volk, yet what has he done to us?"

"Given you victory after victory."

"You think we are victorious? Open your eyes, Mr. Churchill! We Germans were his first victims, long before Austria and Czechoslovakia and the rest."

Abject incomprehension crept across his face.

"In Germany today there is no hiding place from him," she continued, her words tumbling over each other in their determination to escape. "No private life, no corner that you can claim as your own. You think you can see and understand what is going on, that your eyes are wide open, but then you blink and someone has disappeared. A public figure, perhaps, a writer, an actor, yet no one knows where. You shrug, you do not know them personally, they must have done something wrong, else why would they disappear? There has to be a reason for such things. Then you blink again and someone else has disappeared, but this time someone close to you, a neighbour, a friend, even family. For why? You ask what has happened, you demand to know, but then you discover that it has become an offence even to ask, and you realize that soon it may be your turn to disappear. And that is the reason it happens. Everything is broken down, every friendship, every loyalty. You still greet your neighbours, but Wie geht's and Guten Tag has suddenly been replaced by Heil Hitler and Perish the Jews. You want to keep breathing, but there is no air left any more, you are suffocating, and the only place you can get oxygen is from the Party. So you do as you are told. You stop asking questions. You think only what you are allowed to think, you admire only what you are authorized to admire and you love only with permission." Some memory had brought her close to tears. "Mr. Churchill, you say we Germans are victorious but we have become less than slaves, for even slaves can live in hope that one day they will be given their freedom. Under Hitler, there is no hope."