WC02 - Never Surrender (13 page)

"Nevertheless, there are those who will insist that we talk with him."

"You said the other day that your purpose was nothing less than victory. At all costs, in spite of all terror, because without victory there is no survival. Were they just words, Mr. Churchill?"

"I also asked that we should go forward together with our united strength. Yet we are not united. Better a poor peace than a terrible war, perhaps."

"You are being ridiculous. You cannot have peace!"

Churchill bristled.

"Do you think you can get away with inviting Hitler over for a ride up the Mall alongside the King?" she continued. "That's not what this war is about. It's about' her arms flew wide 'all this. Your island. England. What makes you different. And if you are willing to give that up then you don't understand the privilege of being English."

"But if I try to fight on, I might end up destroying everything England, the Empire, all I have ever loved. Is that what you would have?"

"You stupid Englishman! You don't have any choice!"

That was enough too much, in fact. Churchill was fond of both women and strong argument, but he had always found their combination irritating and Frau Mueller exceptionally so. German tanks were slashing their way across Europe; somehow he simply couldn't conceive of the Germans inside them as helpless victims and frankly he didn't care to try. If that was getting to know his enemy, he might as well call a halt here and now. And he felt suddenly exhausted. Nine days into the job; it hadn't been a lot of fun being Prime Minister so far.

"I understand your passion, Frau Mueller, and your personal experience commands all my sympathies," the words echoed with disdain 'but I think it has rather coloured your conclusions. You will have to allow we Englishmen to make up our own minds."

She stood close to him, clenched her fists. Tell me, Mr. Churchill, what would your father have done?"

Churchill winced, lost in momentary confusion at this unexpected alliance between Frau Mueller and his father.

She answered her own question with contempt in her tone. "He would have fought, of course. But then they said he was mad."

They stood glaring at each other, neither willing to give ground, her slim frame lost against Churchill's awesome shadow, until the moment was broken for them by an approaching figure. Thompson was running down the slope towards them.

Telephone," they heard him cry. They want you back, sir. They say it's very urgent."

It was part of Don's duties to clear up, even the bodies. He helped bury the dead soldier, along with several others, in the field behind the farmhouse. It turned out he had been an officer, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, and some idiot had even started an argument that he should be buried apart from the other ranks. The padre had suggested that as they had died together there couldn't be too much harm in burying them together. If it was good enough for God, it should satisfy the War Office. And so it had been done.

There had also been a discussion about two dead Germans. In the end, with the agreement of the handful of other German wounded, it was agreed that they should be buried with a few prayers in their own language. So the German dead were given their own ceremony, which, with seemingly comic irony, had been interrupted by the arrival of the Luftwaffe, two Me-109s that strafed the farmhouse and began turning for a second pass. Don found himself dragging a Wehrmacht soldier with a badly lacerated leg into a ditch, landing on top of him and instinctively trying to protect him from the attack. When it was over, Don was shaking, but despite his pain the German began to laugh. Too many bullets, eh, Tommy? Yesterday English bullets, today German. War is bloody dangerous, eh?"

When he clambered out of the ditch, Don found a new body by the graveside. It was the dental surgeon.

Suddenly Don began screaming at the disappearing Messerschmitts, hurling after them all his anger and frustration at a war that was so unjust, until the German limped over and stood in front of him.

"No point, Tommy. No one listens."

Artillery shells began to fall, very close. Time to move on once more. But there were too many casualties to transport in the few ambulances that had survived the attack. There was nothing else for it the most seriously wounded would have to be left behind, along with all the Germans. And some of the medical staff.

"So, some of us are going to have to stay, lad," the sergeant explained. "Your war might be over even before it's got going."

They cut cards, everyone, right up to the lieutenant colonel. Don's was a jack, but the sergeant drew a deuce. As he turned the card over, he forced a grim smile. "It's an honour, that's what it is. A bleedin' honour. Just pray for me that it's all over by Christmas, eh?"

But if prayers got answered, this would never have started ... Don carried the German on a stretcher to lay him in the open outside one of the outhouses. It had been decided that the advancing Wehrmacht should meet the German casualties first. They could report on their good treatment. And if by chance the Luftwaffe came back and started shooting the place up once again well, it seemed only fair they should have a German target rather than a British one. The hazards of war.

Don laid his patient down in the sun and offered him a cigarette. The German nodded his thanks.

"We win this one, eh, Tommy?"

"Don't be bloody stupid," Don snapped, suddenly and surprisingly angry. "This is just the away match. You wait till the return game. We'll have home advantage then, just you see."

As the remnants of the 6th Field Ambulance Unit drove off into the gathering dusk, Don knew more clearly than ever that war was unjust and evil. The trouble was, he knew that running from it didn't work any more.

Bracken rushed in as soon as he heard raised voices or, in truth, one raised voice. There was rarely more than one raised voice in this room.

Churchill was behind his desk, surrounded by a snowdrift of papers that had been swept aside. In front of him stood Colville. The civil servant was writhing in discomfort. Bracken had an appetite for blood sports, particularly when it involved over-elevated bureaucrats and place lings but there was nothing sporting in this. Churchill had lost control. His temples were swollen and purple with rage, his knuckles showed white, and he had hurled his reading glasses into one corner. As Bracken approached, he hurled a cigar into another.

"Am I to fight this war single-handed, denied help from any quarter?" Churchill stormed.

"Winston, you're making enough noise for an entire army. Calm down. And give me a clue." Bracken was calling on almost twenty years of friendship and shared adversity, but the flash of temper in the old man's eye suggested that even Bracken had overdrawn his credit.

Churchill struggled to respond with anything less than volcanic intensity. "The French," he spat, 'have dissolved. The slightest rumble of mechanical thunder and they have disappeared into the night like bats driven from their belfry."

"Paris has fallen?"

"No!" Churchill pounded the table. "The panzers have swung north. North! North! They are no longer heading for Paris but for the Channel ports. That Bloody Man means to encircle the entire British Expeditionary Force and strangle it to death."

"Damn. That's not what we expected."

"Who knows what to expect any more? And while the French generals disappear, our own generals dicker and disobey. I have given them orders to strike south. South! So that we may join up once more with the French and cut the panzers off. But instead of doing as he's told, Gort has demanded that he be allowed to withdraw. Retreat. We've suffered fewer than five hundred casualties in the entire campaign and yet our leading commander wants us to run away with our tails between our legs. And those bloody Yankees .. . !" He slumped back into his chair and reached for another cigar. "We asked for destroyers. Only old destroyers they did not want and would've scrapped. But for us, they might be a lifeline. Yet they put us off and why? Tell him, Mr. Colville."

Colville stood silent.

"Tell him!"

"Prime Minister, I am not a squaddie. If I am to be yelled at like one, then I request permission for a transfer to armed service."

"What? You want to fight?" Churchill growled from behind a huge flame. Bracken began silently laughing.

"Yes, sir."

A hesitation; a pall of blue smoke. "Excellent!" Churchill snapped, but both the tone and volume had softened. "At last, someone who wants to fight this wretched war with me. But for the moment, Mr. Colville, carry on." Churchill spat out a fleck of tobacco. "Please."

Colville stiffened to attention. He understood that he had come as close to an apology as he was ever likely to get with this man. For the moment, it had to be enough. In his blue suit with toe caps polished to perfection, he turned smartly towards Bracken. "Mr. Kennedy has advised the President that it would be unwise to offer us any assistance at this point. He says that in his opinion either England will fall, or some new government will be installed which will conclude a peace treaty. Either way, anything that America sends is likely to end up in the hands of the Germans."

"Bastard."

"So Joe ensures we get no help and does his damnedest to make sure his own dire prediction comes true," Churchill seethed. "Meanwhile I'm left to pretend to the world that I am at one with America, that I believe in the French and that my generals are doing what I bloody well tell them. And piled upon that there's the most monstrous pretence of all, that my government is united behind me. Makes you wonder who the hell the real enemy is."

"Winston, stop being so stinkingly miserable. You're not fighting this war on your own. There's me, and Jock here."

"If only your undoubted martial enthusiasm were matched with any shred of experience."

"Not to mention millions of ordinary Englishmen."

It was offered, and taken, as justified rebuke. The old man's tempers were thunderous, yet could disappear as quickly as a flash of lightning. He began to collect himself. It wasn't Colville's fault that he was so young, or Bracken's fault that the only military experience in his family was traceable to his father, an ardent Irish republican who had been in the habit of blowing up buildings owned by Englishmen.

"And, come to think of it, there's a peculiarly irritating German woman, too," Churchill mused, sucking at the cigar. "She wants me to fight. In fact, insists upon it, says I've got no option."

"But what shall we fight with if Roosevelt won't give us the destroyers?" Colville enquired.

The passion was back, but this time channelled and sustained. "Why, we shall fight them from rowing boats and paddle steamers if necessary. We can't give in, never, never! At least, I shan't. So this is what we'll do. We shall confirm our order to General Gort to advance south towards the French. We shall offer the French more aircraft and encourage them to advance north. And we shall telegram to President Roosevelt yet again. If he cannot give us old destroyers, then let us ask for some new fighters. I won't let him sleep with an easy conscience. So summon them all, Mr. Colville, the Chiefs of Staff and my War Cabinet. Instruct them to bring their fighting boots, and inform them that if any of those boots arrive without the mud of Flanders clinging to their welts, there will be hell to pay!"

As Colville bent to retrieve the old man's reading glasses, Bracken smiled, content that the master was restored.

"Tell me, Winston, how the hell did you find out about what Kennedy was telling the President?"

"Ah!" Churchill looked up, a gleam of mischief in his eye. "For that I must thank Providence. And Mr. Chamberlain. Do you remember me telling you about the phone taps he had forgotten to cancel? Well, by some extraordinary oversight, I appear to have forgotten to cancel his tap on Mr. Kennedy's phone."

"We are bugging the American ambassador?"

"I shall do more than bug him! You know, if ever I had any doubts about this war, Brendan, the fact that he's such an unquenchable defeatist makes me sweep aside all hesitation. I have no idea how our cause will progress, but I vow on my father's grave that if I am to be dragged down to the gates of hell, I shall take Joe Kennedy with me. Then I can die a happy man."

Churchill was to live. Yet he was still to be pushed to the gates of hell, with Joe Kennedy lighting fires all the way.

SIX

At around ten o'clock on the morning of Monday 20 May, four men gathered outside the door of a bed sit at 47 Gloucester Place in London's Marylebone. It was the home of a young American, Tyler Kent.

Kent was twenty-nine, a clean-cut American with excellent academic credentials. He spoke several languages, had been born in Manchuria, had spent several years in Moscow and claimed to be related to Davy Crockett. He was also a cipher clerk at the US embassy.

Two of the men who stood outside his door were detectives from Scotland Yard, another was from MI5, and the fourth a senior official from the embassy. When they knocked, they heard scuffling, and were told by a male voice that they couldn't come in. They broke down the door and found Kent in a state of undress with a young woman, his mistress.

They also found the most extraordinary hoard of diplomatic papers. Stuffed inside a cupboard and a large leather suitcase they found 1500 embassy cables, two photographic plates and a pair of duplicate keys to the embassy's code room. The cables contained some of the most sensitive messages to have passed through the embassy in recent months, including what was known as "Naval Person' correspondence the private messages Churchill had sent to Roosevelt. It was believed that within days of being sent they had all found their way into German hands.

Kent's arrest was the most extraordinary affair. It was the first (and only) time in American history that an embassy official's diplomatic immunity from arrest had been waived. Permission for this had been granted two days beforehand by the ambassador himself.

When Kennedy had first been told about the spy in his embassy, it had placed him in a quandary. Any scandal would reflect badly on him, particularly since he himself was often accused of reckless chatter. He was always being quoted by the Nazi-controlled German News Agency. Then there was the added complication of the mistress, which would inevitably draw further unhelpful comparisons. And although Kennedy couldn't recall ever meeting Kent, there were only two hundred employees at the embassy and nobody would believe there wasn't a close personal connection. Kent and Kennedy would be wrapped up in it together.