WC02 - Never Surrender (36 page)

They never saw the armed patrol boat in the sea-lane ahead of them. Unfortunate, of course, nobody's fault, the sort of thing that happens when you play blind man's bluff. They hit it amidships, holing the engine room, and it heeled over and began to sink immediately. The boat was on submarine patrol, hopefully with a relatively small crew, and the skipper of the tug circled the spot in the hope of picking up survivors.

What the skipper could not know was that the patrol boat was laden with depth charges. They were not switched to 'safe' but set for use. The result was that, when the drowning vessel reached the appointed depth, it exploded with terrible effect.

The circling tug was lifted clean out of the water, thrown up on a mushroom of raging angry water, its screws thrashing helplessly in the air. It came down in a position from which there was no chance of recovering.

Don had time only for a glance, an arm outstretched in concern, and in farewell.

Other ships gathered to sift through the pieces, searching for those who had survived. They found a spaniel, barking for attention in the choppy water. When they hauled him in they discovered a rope leading from his collar, and the end of the rope was bound round Claude's wrist. He was still breathing.

Not everybody died that night.

FIFTEEN

The sharp rapping at the front door drew Channon from his breakfast. He was still in his dressing gown, and irritated. Breakfast was almost the only part of his day that offered him any sort of rest even sleep was a struggle nowadays and eggs tasted terrible cold.

It was the American ambassador. He was working his mouth around a wad of gum. Channon mumbled in insincere greeting. When all was said and done, he didn't much care for the uncouth Kennedy, and an Englishman even of the adoptive variety like Channon had the right to decide with whom he was going to share his breakfast. He was debating with himself whether he would have to invite the man in when Kennedy's impatience got the better of him.

"I don't understand it, Chips. Nobody returns my calls, my meetings get cancelled. Churchill runs away like a rabbit. Halifax hides. Even Rab cancels our breakfast this morning at the last minute. What the hell's wrong with this goddamned country?"

"Times are a little difficult, Joe," Channon replied edgily, brushing a crumb of toast from his silk lapel.

"It's more than that. I feel everyone drawing back, like I'm carrying a big bad smell around with me. You smell anything,

Chips?"

He could detect nothing but his dying breakfast. "We have just unearthed a spy in the middle of your code room, Joe," he suggested wearily. "I suspect it's simply that people are being a little .. . cautious."

"Over breakfast?"

"Rab has had a difficult couple of days. You've seen the editorials."

"It's been a long weekend," the ambassador muttered. He'd been to Beaverbrook's. "I'm a bit behind."

"There's a campaign going on in the press. Like rabid foxes. Attacking all the appeasers: Rab, Neville Chamberlain, Halifax. They're calling them the Guilty Men. Saying they are responsible for every sin in Christendom, from the surrender of Belgium to the shortage of good claret. Everything's their fault, apparently. And the ordinary people are so dull, so easily led. They've begun bombarding them with letters. Nasty, brutal outpourings of malice, bundles of the stuff. Arriving every morning. That's probably why Rab had to cry off, he has to open them all himself, poor fellow."

"Sticks and stones," Kennedy muttered dismissively, poking at his gum.

"Some people are even trying to pretend that Dunkirk has been an achievement. And in some ways I suppose it has. We hoped to bring thirty, maybe forty thousand back. If you count all the French, we got off nearly three hundred and fifty thousand."

"Christ, you ought to be getting good at it; you've had enough practice. Norway, Belgium, France. Evacuation's turning into a major British industry."

Kennedy had a point. He also had a condescending tone that was making Channon begin to feel intensely English.

"Chips, Dunkirk was a disaster, you know that."

"Could have been worse."

"Worse? How? You lost everything. Half a fleet, more than nine hundred planes, two and a half thousand guns and every single one of your vehicles. Right now the BEF couldn't rustle up much more than a pedal cycle. And for what? All in exchange for bringing home an army that's been beaten to crap."

"Yes, Joe," Channon responded tartly, 'but you do insist on telling people so."

"A turkey can't pretend it's a parrot just because it's Christmas," Kennedy protested, extracting his gum and fixing it to the back of Channon's railings.

"Nevertheless, we still demand a say in deciding at which end we're going to be stuffed!"

"Chips, face it. The jig's up."

"You may be right. But the jig as you put it isn't up until someone finds a way of persuading our Mr. Churchill."

Churchill was preparing a speech when he looked up to find her standing by the door. Inspector Thompson was at her shoulder, dwarfing Ruth Mueller, for she seemed to have shrunk. The eyes were set in dark saucers, her skin stretched across the high cheekbones. One of her lips had been recently split and he could see a horrible bruise on her cheek. Her whole body seemed to be vibrating, like a mirage on a heat-soaked day.

But she was no mirage. She began talking in a low voice that hissed like an adder, words of German that Churchill could not understand but which burnt with acid.

He rose from his chair. "Your words are wasted, Frau Mueller. I do not understand German, neither do I propose to learn it. Ever."

Her eyes flared in defiance.

As Churchill came from behind his desk, he realized it hadn't been his imagination; she was trembling. "What has happened to you?"

"I have been enjoying your hospitality. In one of your concentration camps."

"Frau Mueller, we don't have such things."

"Really? Then what would you call a camp surrounded by barbed wire, which you then fill with people who have been arrested without charge and with no trial?"

"I don't -'

"If they were in Germany you would call them concentration camps. So why do you shrink from calling them that simply because they are here in England?"

"There must have been some mistake."

"That's what I kept telling your Gestapo -I beg your pardon your brave British policemen."

Her quiet malice was far more cutting than the wild temper he remembered.

"Perhaps you would like to explain what has happened," he offered, showing her to a chair. She perched on the edge of the seat, as if she were uncomfortable in his presence.

"In Germany, Mr. Churchill, they are called the Nuremberg Laws. You call them Emergency Powers. It amounts to the same thing. Except it took Hitler years to introduce them and you did it inside two weeks."

Churchill was taken aback. "But that is for enemy aliens, to be put where they can pose no threat."

"And I am an enemy alien. You said you wanted to know your enemy, Mr. Churchill. And here I am. You have conquered me. Congratulations."

He looked at her uniform the same threadbare suit, except more crumpled than ever. One of the seams on the shoulder had begun to unravel. "What has happened to you?"

They took me, like the Gestapo tried to do. While I was eating. No explanation. Threw me into the back of a car and straight into a prison cell. Then it was a prison train and a prison boat to the Isle of Man. Hundreds of us; all the children, too. Put out of the way, where we won't disturb your fine English wives while they sip tea and pass around the sandwiches."

"But there are exemptions why didn't you telephone? Tell them that you knew me? I don't understand."

"I told them I knew you. And what did they do? They laughed, said I was insane. Or a spy."

"And they .. . did that to you?" he asked, staring in embarrassment at the bruise on her face. "I give you my word I shall find them and'

"Oh, no." She waved down his bluster. "I was given this inside the camp. You have no imagination, you English. One camp for the men, one for the women you hadn't even thought about what you would do with the children. Everyone locked up together, a boiling pot of Nazis, Jews, Communists, musicians, artists and animals. Perhaps the English think it is not possible for women to behave like beasts, let alone to be Nazis, but I assure you, it is. The Nazis run the place, of course, when the guards' backs are turned. They assumed I was one of them. When they found out I wasn't .. ."

She shrugged; it made her wince. Suddenly he suspected that beneath the crumpled suit lay other wounds.

"Mr. Churchill, I gave up everything I had in life because I refused to become a Nazi. I turned my back on everyone I have ever loved, even my family. And to be told that, in spite of it all, I am as worthless as a Nazi, fills me with a bitterness that you cannot begin to comprehend."

"But I have been searching for you for days, I had no idea .. ."

Her split lip stretched in an awkward, mocking smile. "In Germany, too, they say the same thing. What has happened to all those who have disappeared? No one has any idea."

"I am filled with remorse. This is not what I intended."

"Locked up in camps, not because of anything we have done but because of what we were born. That should sound familiar to you. It's what you claim to be fighting."

"There is a difference. I am not like Hitler."

"You can look very much the same from behind barbed wire."

"We did not want this war, yet we have to fight it. We must show ourselves as determined as any tyrant, but that does not make us tyrants. Yes, we fight fire with fire, Frau Mueller, but afterwards we shall douse the flames with our tears, if necessary. You may not see so much difference in what we do, but search for it and you will find the difference in our hearts, and in what we hope for."

She glared back in defiance, but this time in silence.

"In the past, Frau Mueller, you have always brought me inspiration. I have come to regard you as a friend. I am filled with pain at the humiliation I have caused and I beg you to believe that it was unwitting. I, too, was once a prisoner, during the war in South Africa. I know the sense of degradation it brings. Sadly I am no wizard Merlin. I cannot promise you that I can wave my hand and put right all the wrongs that have been done. But given time, I will try." He sighed with great passion. "Given time .. . You have heard of the disaster at Dunkirk?"

"They told us nothing in prison."

"We have come close to suffering the greatest military defeat in our long history. Our losses in materiel have been enormous. We gave the best we had to our army, the first fruits of every factory in the land, and all that is now gone. How long we shall be able to continue the fight, I do not know."

"You must carry on. You must!"

"We shall try. But the panzers may roll upon our beaches at any time, and we have nothing to fight them with but stones and our bare hands. There is a tightrope that stretches between survival and extinction, and at Dunkirk we slipped and almost fell. Our army has struggled back, leaving their dead on the other side. I do not know whether I shall ever be able to convince them to hold their heads up high once more and stare the enemy in the eye."

"While a soldier lives, he can fight."

"A soldier fights not just with weapons but with his heart. I fear the heart of the British army lies broken on a foreign beach."

She stared at him intently for a moment before replying. They said you were mad. I think they were right."

"What?"

She rose from her chair. "Come with me. I shall show you where the heart of your army lies. Call Gruppenfuehrer Thompson outside," she instructed. "Tell him we need your car."

"But where are we going?"

"To the place I have just come from."

"The Isle of Man?" he spluttered, incredulous.

"No. Victoria Station. It will take only ten minutes. And I think you owe me ten minutes."

He could not deny her. So, a little later, he found himself being ushered towards a wall of steam and the signs of commotion that were spilling across several crowded platforms.

At the windows of every train Churchill could see the men of the BEF. They were in transit, on their way from Dover to their many different destinations. Their hollowed cheeks told of exhaustion, their stubbled faces of days of despair, and all about their uniforms they carried the marks of their terrible failure. They had limped back home with bowed heads and broken muskets, expecting to receive nothing but condemnation. They had failed. Yet as the trains drew in to their platforms, they found themselves surrounded not by a fog of disapproval but by men waving their hats and women their handkerchiefs. As they leant from the windows it seemed that half of England wanted to shake their hands. The tea bars and sweet stands that stood beside the platforms were swamped by people trying to buy whatever they could to thrust at the men on the trains tea, coffee, chocolate, oranges until the stalls were stripped bare and there was nothing left to buy. Young girls reached up to kiss hollow cheeks and stubbled chins, and in their eyes Churchill could see nothing but pride.

Then they saw him. "It's Churchill. It's Winston bloody Churchill!" he heard one of the soldiers cry, waving so frantically that it seemed he might fall from his train. Others began to rush towards Churchill, the soldiers cheered from their windows, and on all sides a cry went up "Speech! Speech!" but he couldn't. He was choking with emotion. Soon he was lost from sight in the middle of the crowd. All most of them could see was his hat, placed upon his cane and held high above their heads, waving in salute.

Eventually Thompson succeeded in dragging him away. Churchill made no attempt to hide his tears.

"So, Frau Mueller, what do you think now, eh?" he mumbled between profound sobs.

Her lips were sore but her eyes said it all. They smiled. "I think all you English are mad."

They found Churchill in the garden of Downing Street, rehearsing a speech. His head was down in concentration as he walked, script in hand, his arms waving like a conductor bringing in the full passion of the strings. He did not notice their intrusion for some time and they dared not disturb him. Eventually he looked up.