WC02 - Never Surrender (29 page)

"They all abandon me," he muttered.

"Not bloody surprised," Bracken responded, recognizing the corrosive self-pity in which his friend sometimes bathed, and determined to drag him out of it.

"What? What did you say?"

"I said that I am not bloody surprised," Bracken repeated, blowing a blue ring of Cuban smoke from the depths of a cracked leather armchair. "You are so damnably offensive."

In normal times Churchill would respond to the barb by fighting back; instead, he kept his silence, eyes closed, lost in some other place.

Bracken glanced across at Colville. The old man had a parliamentary statement to make in a few minutes with yet another War Cabinet to follow; it was no time for him to fall off his form. Colville understood the hint and shuffled through the pile of papers in front of him.

"A note from the Treasury, Prime Minister," he began, 'about your new salary." It was usually enough to engage his immediate attention, some snippet about his personal funds, but today was not like other days. Silence.

"Hell, Winston, snap out of it," Bracken demanded, deciding for the direct approach.

An eye, its rims red and sore, prised itself open.

"There seems so much to do, and so little time to do it," he announced wearily.

"Let us help you," Bracken insisted.

"I fear no one can help me."

That's because you refuse to allow anyone to help!"

Colville sat up in alarm. It had sounded so suspiciously like his own voice.

"You take sides with him with Bracken?" Churchill barked, rousing himself. "You think I am what were the words? damnably offensive?"

Colville hesitated, trying to judge the distance of the stones across the swamp before he jumped, but he took too long.

"There, Brendan," Churchill shouted, jabbing his own cigar in Colville's direction, 'exactly what I mean. I pay this man and all I get is sullen disloyalty."

The insult stung Colville. Why was it only Churchill who was allowed to feel exhausted and be open in his feelings? Why did the rest of the world have to dance in constant attendance on his whims and petulance? He liked to pretend that he was fighting this war on his own, yet he sat there smoking while many of Colville's friends were away in France and might never be coming back. Suddenly Colville had had enough of the old man's temper and tongue.

"You do not pay my salary."

"I am the cause of your salary being paid," Churchill corrected himself.

"Then I beg to relieve you of that responsibility and be allowed to join the armed forces."

"You want to desert. Like all the rest."

Colville sprang to his feet. "I resent that! I don't want to desert, I want to serve, but you never allow anyone to get close. You never explain, you never tell anyone around you what's going on. You issue orders and expect blind obedience."

"That is what happens in war."

"This isn't your private war! Do you know what they are saying about you, Mr. Churchill, behind your back? That you are so bent on your war that you'll fight it to the last woman and child. That you intend to go out in such a blaze of glory that all of England will be turned to ash. They're saying that you can't control yourself. That you're no better than Hitler."

Churchill looked across to Bracken for his customary reassurance, but his friend seemed engrossed in a detailed examination of the ceiling.

"How dare you!" Churchill began his defence with a bullying growl, but Colville knew the technique all too well.

"I dare, Mr. Churchill, because sometime very soon, a week, a month, I may be put up against a wall and shot for no better reason than having served you as loyally as I could. So I have the right. What I don't have is any reason to continue."

"Then you have my permission to leave."

"I don't believe I need your permission, sir." And in as determined a manner as his trembling hands could manage, Colville began to arrange the papers on his desk into a neat pile before putting them into his briefcase.

"What do you intend to do?" Churchill asked.

Colville was too wrapped up in his own unexpected emotions to notice that the old man's voice had lost its aggressive tone. "I'd like to join the R.A.F."

"Why?"

"Because .. . Because .. ." Did it matter why? Even in his calmer moments Colville had difficulty putting his preference into words. "I came back from Chequers this morning preparing it for your first visit this weekend. Do you know there's only one telephone in the entire place? In the pantry."

"We may need the pantry for more than that."

"And at the station, as I was waiting, a troop train came through. It was crowded with evacuees from Dunkirk. I can tell you, a defeated army is a terrible sight."

"A defeated British army is the worst sight in the world."

"And there were a couple of R.A.F men in uniform on the platform beside me. We all know they're outnumbered, and we also know they've been fighting as hard and dying as bravely as any group of men ever could. But apparently the boys from Dunkirk don't know. They think the R.A.F has abandoned them."

"Our pilots are so few, their enemies so many ..." Churchill began in protestation, but Colville was not to be denied.

"The soldiers jeered. As the train went past, the British army leant out of the window and jeered the R.A.F. Called them bloody cowards."

A gasp squeezed from Churchill.

"So we need more flyers," Colville said, concluding his argument and shoving the last of his papers into his bag. He looked up to discover Churchill drenched in tears.

The R.A.F? The army? Is this the world I have created? Then I must be mad." He was openly sobbing.

Colville felt prodded by guilt. "You're not mad, you're .. . surrounded by confusion. Much of it of your own making."

Churchill seemed not to hear, lost in his misery. He appeared very old.

"What do you mean, Jock?" Bracken prodded gently, joining them once more.

"He turns everything to such chaos. He tries to overwhelm everyone with his energy and his ideas, but they just can't cope. Telegrams, orders, written instructions, notes of advice, demands for information: he fires them off like Nelson firing off his cannonballs. There's no priority, no structure to any of it, he just blazes away in the hope that one in ten might hit. Yesterday' - Colville threw up an arm in despair' yesterday he sent out demands for information about everything from launching a second front in Europe to reusing dinner scraps."

"What should we do?"

"Get some sort of system, some sort of order. I know I'm a civil servant and it's the sort of thing I would say, but just occasionally the wretched system works. Perhaps he should tell us not only what he wants doing but what he wants doing first. I don't know, stick a few labels on things. "Action This Day" or something. Just so the dinner scraps can be left till tomorrow."

A huge sob erupted from Churchill. "Jock, my boy, please forgive me."

It was the only apology Colville had ever heard him give.

"And stay."

The outpouring of emotion overwhelmed the young civil servant. He considered the plea but only long enough to make the point that it was his decision. Feigning reluctance, he laid his case back down on his desk.

"Please, have those labels printed up. And find Ruth Mueller."

"Why?"

"Because I have found her to be of altogether unexpected use. Rather like you."

His staff insisted that Ramsay take some rest. He had slept very little in the past week and not at all during the last two days or what passed as days in the subterranean kingdom beneath the white cliffs. The night ahead would be critical, and they would need the vice admiral at his best. Two of his staff accompanied him to his room at the end of the tunnel and stayed until they had seen him lie down on his cot. He was asleep before they had closed the door.

Ramsay and his staff were beginning to pluck some measure of understanding from the chaos of Dunkirk. The previous day's toll had been heavy: two trawlers lost to mines, two drifters and a troopship by bombs, and one minesweeper had been sunk in a collision. Safety from the Luftwaffe and the artillery came only after dark, but then the sea exacted its toll of confusion as the ships tried to find their way without light or navigation aids to the most congested and wreck-strewn port in the world. Then they shifted to the beaches, with its rising surf, which swamped the dinghies and lifeboats that came to pick up men who had been standing for hours in the water waiting for rescue. Time and time again, the small boats were turned over by surf or exhausted men who filled them to their tipping point. It was all taking so long, moving so slowly.

There was a desperate need for more small boats to speed the work and ferry men out to the larger ships waiting offshore. Orders had gone out to strip every ship on the south coast of its lifeboats and to impress every rowing boat and beach vessel that could be found and floated, but they had lost two convoys of small craft as they were towed across the Channel in line astern, cut through in the dark by ships running blind.

Larger ships came as close as they dared to the gently shelving shore, where they were forced to hover, waiting for their human cargoes, making excellent targets for the bombers. That afternoon Ramsay had counted ninety-five aeroplanes above the beaches, almost all of them German.

Too many men, too few boats, total confusion. Ramsay had sent over one of his best captains to act as Senior Naval Officer in order to give some sense to the situation. He was identified by the letters SNO on his helmet, made out of silver foil from a cigarette packet and stuck there with thick pea soup. Everything was makeshift.

Yet when Ramsay was shaken roughly awake in his quarters three hours later, he was told of two shafts of light that had begun to glimmer in the darkness. More small boats were arriving dinghies, cabin cruisers, motorboats, lifeboats, rowing boats, launches from as far away as the boatyards on the Thames, dragged from their moorings by naval press gangs with or without their owners' consent.

And just when they thought every part of the harbour at Dunkirk had been made completely impractical for their purposes, someone had suggested that they look at the mole. The mole was nothing more than a narrow wooden breakwater that projected more than three-quarters of a mile into the sea to protect the entrance to the harbour, and bearing at its end a concrete footing on which stood a small lighthouse. In fact there were two of these long structures, but the western one had already been shattered, leaving just the eastern mole which, although it was riddled with gaps, still stood. It was never intended that it should be used for berthing ships it was far too flimsy, had no means of coping with the ebb and flow of the fifteen-foot tide, and could be split in two by any careless ship or accurate shell, yet it had to be tried. So they filled the holes in the wooden planking with anything to hand doors, ladders, benches and a former cross-Channel ferry, the Queen of the Channel, was instructed to try to berth alongside. She did so in darkness, and took on 950 men.

On her way back to Dover, a stick of bombs broke the Queen's back and she sank in minutes. And yet and yet, the mole had worked. Ships could tie up against her, so men could be taken from her. It gave the BEF another lifeline -and one so smothered in smoke from the burning buildings that it might take some time for the Germans to catch on, blinded by the destructiveness of their own bombs.

One other morsel greeted Ramsey when he woke. The storm front was receding and the surf falling. They would bring more men home today than yesterday perhaps double the number. Still a miserable trickle compared to the flood of men that was beginning to wash up along the beaches but, as he stood on his balcony in the fading light, watching his makeshift armada stretching back from that awful pillar of smoke, he felt his tiredness lifting on the evening air. Every homecoming, every ship that made it back through the entrance to the harbour with its cargo of hope, was like an injection of adrenalin straight to his heart.

More dispute. More deliberation. No decision. Yet another War Cabinet.

Halifax warned of the danger of the destruction of Christian civilization; Churchill replied that any country that bowed to Nazism would be neither Christian nor civilized for long. Halifax countered that they would get better terms now, while they still had their aircraft factories operational and unbombed. Churchill growled that anyone who thought the Germans would allow them to keep the aircraft factories open must think Hitler a fool, and That Man may be many things, but he was no fool.

And neither was Halifax. Churchill had hoped that a period of reflection or a sound night's sleep might have softened the other man's arguments, but he would be neither persuaded nor browbeaten. Yet he stuck to the gentleman's agreement. He threatened disasters of many kinds, but he didn't threaten resignation. The Government was united, but only in its determination to disagree.

They were getting nowhere and taking up too much time more time than Churchill had allowed. He had asked his senior Ministers outside the War Cabinet to meet with him in his room at the House and they were already flocking outside, so he suggested to Halifax and the other 'big beasts' that they should stand down for a short while and reconvene later.

"Time off for Children's Hour," Halifax muttered as they scooped up their papers.

It was an apt description. These men of the Outer Cabinet, some thirty in number, had responsibility but little authority. Left to their own devices they would have created the most eccentric confusion, for they were of differing parties and conflicting personal loyalties. Many were still Chamberlain's men; some belonged to Attlee's team; only a few owed their position directly to Churchill. He could not command them, he could only try to lead and persuade. He hadn't met with them as a group since he'd appointed them, and now they gathered, ushered to their places around the table by Bracken.

The faces were all anxious; some were exhausted. So was Churchill, and they could see it.

"I have asked you here today to share with you some of my thoughts and feelings as we venture upon this most critical hour. You are how might I put it? an exceptional collection of men, of many different passions and political persuasions. I tell you frankly that, in the past, some of your passions and much of your politics have scared the senses out of me. Let us hope you will have a similar effect upon Hitler!"