WC02 - Never Surrender (24 page)

"But, Prime Minister, they cannot bring their weapons back, the Chiefs of Staff have made that abundantly clear. Every tank, every truck, every tanker and every artillery piece the BEF possesses will be lost. All we can save is some of our men. And even if we manage to bring back as many as fifty thousand, which we are told we cannot, that will leave nearly a quarter of a million British soldiers as prisoners. I don't feel that's much of a bargaining position."

"Nevertheless, we must try to bring them back. As many as we can."

"Of course. Perhaps we should have tried that some days ago instead of persisting in the futile policy of having them push south."

Oh, it was a cruel card to play. It was like screaming from every rooftop that Churchill's policy of unceasing advance lay in ruins, but the stakes were too high for delicacy.

"We must give our troops a chance," Churchill began, hoping to seize back the initiative, but Halifax was already there.

"Prime Minister, I suggest that we give peace that chance. Let us talk."

Halifax would not be denied. Churchill could not refuse to talk, not at this point. Halifax had the facts, while Churchill had little else but his fears and what others saw as dark fantasies. He would have to give some ground or he would lose the entire field.

"But can Hitler be trusted?" Churchill began again, casting around for allies. He turned to Neville Chamberlain, his former Prime Minister and rival a man who had wanted Halifax to succeed him. It was a measure of the desperation Churchill felt. "You have had more dealings with That Man than anyone in this room. How far, in the matter of negotiations, do you think that Hitler may be trusted?"

And now Churchill was calling in all the favours and courtesies he had showered upon this failed Man of Munich in the two weeks since he had succeeded him. The handwritten letters, the phone calls, the whispered confidences, the refusal to put to the sword those who had been close to him, the suggestion that he should remain living at Number Ten. Churchill had been assiduous in trying to reach out across the ocean between them in preparation for a moment such as this.

The former Prime Minister was a proud man. He didn't particularly care for Churchill, but it was not Churchill who had humiliated him, cast him from office and made sure that the name of Chamberlain would for ever be linked with failure and unforgivable weakness. That was Hitler's doing.

Trust him?" The dark eyebrows arched. "No, never trust him."

And it was enough for Churchill.

"Gentlemen, the hour grows late and we all have other duties. I believe a sense of this meeting is beginning to emerge. We take the point made so persuasively by the Foreign Secretary that we should not refuse to countenance talks with the Italians' he nodded at Halifax in grudging appreciation of his excellent fight 'but we should approach any such talks with the greatest of care. Might I ask the Foreign Secretary to prepare a paper setting out the detailed grounds we should consider before making any opening to the Italians?"

Ah, the devil of the detail. Halifax was a master of the bureaucratic game and it wouldn't take him long to respond to such instruction, but it had to be enough for Churchill. The men around the table were all exhausted, content to leave it for another day. It had bought him a little time, just as had those brave men in Calais. But time for what? Churchill didn't know.

Sunday 26 May. It was 18.57 when the order came through. Vice Admiral Ramsay was hovering over the teleprinter in his underground kingdom, held there by impatience but still more by frustration.

He was a quiet and most methodical man, some said lacking in emotion, even cold, yet he couldn't help snatching at the paper as it squeezed from the Admiralty machine.

Operation Dynamo is to commence.

Dynamo. It had been named by one of his junior officers after the room in which they had conducted all the planning deep within the chalk cliffs. During the last war the room had been filled with electrical plant; now it held a long polished table across which they could spread every sort of chart, and a couple of cots where some of them slept. No one would sleep tonight, nor for the nights to come.

The evacuation was to begin.

The plan was simple it had been put together so hurriedly that there had been no scope for complications. The soldiers of the BEF had formed a pocket or, more accurately, had been pushed by the advancing panzers into a pocket for several miles around Dunkirk. There were also many French troops in that pocket. Together they would try to hold the perimeter while Ramsay's boats snatched away as many as possible. As troops were taken off, the perimeter of the pocket could be slowly withdrawn, ever closer to Dunkirk, until .. .

Until they ran out of time.

They should have begun days ago, but until yesterday they'd still been arguing about breaking out to the south, not retreating. Now they had been left with no other option, and no one even knew for certain whether retreat was still an option. The burden of it all was revealed in orders Ramsay had received earlier that day. "It is imperative," the Admiralty had instructed, 'for "Dynamo" to be implemented with the greatest vigour, with a view to lifting up to 45,000 of the BEF within two days." Because after that the enemy was going to spoil the whole show.

Two days! Why, oh why, had they waited so long? A few days earlier they'd had three harbours to work from, but now Boulogne and Calais had gone, leaving Ramsay with nothing but the port of Dunkirk to work with. Dunkirk. An ancient seaport tucked up against the Belgian frontier, ringed with medieval ramparts and hemmed in by sand dunes with their coarse, tufted sea grass. The beaches that stretched either side were long and shallow, and gave little protection from the savage weather that swept up the Channel or down from the North Sea. The dunes often shifted during violent storms and so did the offshore sandbanks. These seas looked evil, and were often more evil than they looked. Over the centuries the treacherous, shifting banks had become a museum of maritime tragedy, filled with the bones of boats that hadn't made it.

For the boats that did make it, Dunkirk had been a haven of safety. But that was last week. This week, Dunkirk had become all but unrecognizable beneath the pounding of enemy bombs. Its once fine harbour had been crippled and choked by sunken shipping, its docks had been rendered unusable by the ferocious heat from the burning oil tanks and waterfront buildings, it had no water supplies, no electricity, and in places the panzers were now less than five miles away. Fire, sea, violence. Dunkirk was being squeezed to death.

Ramsay didn't have enough ships for the job and far too few destroyers. It wasn't much of an armada, but they had to try, otherwise defeat would turn to annihilation.

At 21.16 the first ship, Mono, 's Isle, an Isle of Man packet, sailed out of Dover for that smudge of smoke on the horizon that was Dunkirk.

(Sunday 26 May 1940. William L. Shirer, CBS.)

Good evening. This is Berlin.

Calais has fallen. That great French Channel port, familiar to many Americans who have crossed from London to Paris, fell into German hands today after a hard fight.. .

Dunkirk, the last of the three great French Channel ports, apparently is still in the hands of the French, though its harbour works, say the Germans, have been continually bombed from the air by Stukas in the last few days.

But Calais was the gateway from France to England, the port through which most of the supplies passed for the British Expeditionary Army in France. Its capture by the Germans practically completes the cutting off of Great Britain from its ally on the continent. Moreover, Calais is only twenty-five miles across the Channel from Dover, on the English coast. The massive, mechanized German army is that close to England tonight twenty-five miles the first time, unless I'm mistaken, that a hostile army has been that close to England's shores since the days of Napoleon more than a century ago .. .

She found him on the bridge, guided by the glow of the cigar. It was desperately late, gone three, with the dark shadows of the clock tower of Big Ben looming against the night sky. A figure she assumed to be Inspector Thompson lurked across the carriage way otherwise they were alone in the damp river air.

Thank you for coming," Churchill said. He was different. Courteous. Without a drink in his hand. She wondered if the two conditions were connected.

"Had to get out," he continued. "Couldn't stand the atmosphere inside. Needed to find some free English air."

The tide was running fast; she could hear it slapping against the granite piers of the bridge and saw tiny water sprites dancing in the moonlight. She said nothing; she'd let him reach his destination by his chosen route.

"Had a friend at Harrow school. Jack Milbanke." A pause for smoke. I didn't have many friends; seem to have had trouble with that all my life. But Jack was special. Two years my senior. Unremarkable in many respects, either at games or lessons. Much like me. Although immaculately dressed, much unlike me. You see, he had a style, a distinction, that set him above the rest, and a maturity that I found utterly exceptional. We were always getting into scrapes, that was our nature, but he was always there to restrain me from going too far, or to haul me out when I did. To save me from myself, he said, the prerequisite of any friend of mine. I used to wonder what he meant by that .. . When my father passed through Harrow, he might come to visit, and he would take both Jack and me to luncheon at the King's Head Hotel. Roast beef and rhubarb, I seem to remember. And how they would talk, Jack and my father, as if they were equals, man to man. Oh, how much I wanted to be part of it, to share what Jack shared with my father, but ... I was a mere backward schoolboy and every time I tried to enter upon their conversation I was always awkward or foolish. Yet it heartened me to know that my father could share such confidences with someone of my age, almost as much as I was saddened that it was not with me. I was able to hope that one day it might be my turn." He glanced at her. "You're shivering. Where's your coat?"

"I don't have a coat."

Churchill fell silent for a moment, as though struggling with a problem of higher algebra, then motioned to Thompson. A moment later, she was wearing the inspector's raincoat. There was the harsh clanging of a bell near at hand; a police car sped out from the gates of New Scotland Yard on the Embankment and disappeared in the direction of St. Paul's.

"I remember them building that place," he muttered abstractedly, gazing towards the dark mass of masonry. "Used convict labour. Straight out of Dickens. Seems so very long ago."

His mind was wandering, exhausted. "You were talking about your father," she prompted.

"No, not at all, why do you say that? I was talking about Jack Milbanke. The firmest friend I ever had. Got into all sorts of scrapes together, always teetering on the edge of disaster, did I say that? Saved me from a thousand thrashings. Went into the army, the Hussars, and off to South Africa. Won a Victoria Cross for rescuing a colleague under heavy enemy fire. Brave, brave man and gallant friend."

"What happened to him?"

"I killed him."

A startled silence. "I don't understand."

"Gallipoli. He died leading an attack in that awful battle of Suvla Bay."

"Ah, your battle."

"Not mine, not in that sense, but they blamed me for it. Twenty-five years ago and still they haven't forgotten. Or forgiven."

They .. . ?"

"The Conservative Party. They have long memories. Blamed me for Jack's death and all the rest. More than forty thousand dead at Gallipoli. It's why they won't trust my judgement, always think I am unreliable." He chewed the word to pieces. "Actually, they think I'm mad. Like my father." The cigar flamed once more and then flew in a sad tumbling arc down to the dark water below, where it expired with a sigh. "That's why I wanted to see you. To find someone who would tell me that I am not going mad."

"You have many qualities, Mr. Churchill, but madness is not amongst them."

"You may yet change your mind, Frau Mueller." His tone had grown suddenly taut. "You see, two things happened this evening. First, it became clear that my War Cabinet wants to open peace talks. I may not be able to prevent it. And then we heard that Calais is abandoned. All evening we've been dropping supplies and ammunition to the garrison there, straight into the arms of the grateful Wehrmacht. You see, the British and French are gone. Nearly four thousand of our bravest young men, captured or killed. By my personal order. And for what? For nothing!" The old Churchill was back, the hunched shoulders, the clenched fists that were now beating upon the cast-iron parapet of the bridge. "Lord Halifax and his like insist that we make contact with the enemy. The enemy! Why, if that's what was required, all I would need to do is to open my window in the Admiralty and holler."

"Then you have learnt something since first we met."

"Jack Milbanke always said I was my own worst enemy. Something else I have learnt. But too late, I fear."

"Not if you stop the talks."

"I cannot."

"You are the most powerful man in the country," she protested.

"Even so, I am not that powerful. Something called the constitution."

"We had one of those, too. Hitler got himself elected and then nailed it to the forehead of the nearest Jew."

"Ours is unwritten. It cannot so easily be discarded."

"Oh, it will take Hitler less than five minutes once he gets here. But that's the difference, perhaps, between you and him."

"Ah, at last she finds some means of differentiating me from That Man," he muttered, matching her scorn.

"He cares more. Has more passion, apparently."

"No one cares more than I!"

"I don't know you very well, Mr, Churchill, but I do know Hitler. He wouldn't be standing in the middle of a misty bridge wringing his hands."

"And what, pray, would you suggest that I do?"

"Do? Whatever it takes! He would. Bend the constitution. Break it if you must. Because it will be no good to you if you don't."