WC02 - Never Surrender (37 page)

"Ah, Edward Rab! My warriors from the Foreign Office. Thank you for answering my summons. I trust you don't object to the informal setting in fact, it's probably essential. A quiet word with you both, without note-takers and eavesdroppers." He linked arms with them both, guiding them around the garden as though they were his oldest friends. "It's about our dear friend Joe. I thought I had better warn you. He won't be with us for much longer."

"I'd heard nothing," Halifax said, sounding a trifle affronted that he hadn't been the first to learn of any change.

"No, neither has Joe. Neither has President Roosevelt, for that matter." Churchill was toying with them, and enjoying it. "But I have a strong suspicion that the President will come round to my way of thinking as soon as he hears."

Halifax couldn't resist the bait. "Hears what?"

"Seems Joe's begun hunting with a new pack of hounds. Got himself involved with a woman, a Clare Booth Luce. I suspect he's going to discover there's a heavy price to pay for his infidelity."

"Husband on the warpath?"

"No, completely oblivious, poor chap. Or perhaps he is fortunate in his blindness I find it difficult to take a strong stand on such questions. It has the advantage of enabling me to keep rather more of my Ministers in office than might otherwise be the case. But the lady in the middle of this matter is an extremely wealthy and influential woman, who is also a prime supporter of Mr. Roosevelt's most powerful opponent in his re-election campaign later this year."

"Ah."

"Joe is apparently planning to come out against Roosevelt at a time most damaging to the President. I think we should stop him, don't you? Inform the President."

"Interfere in American politics?"

"I look upon it more as saving the alliance."

"They are not our allies."

"Not yet, Edward, but I'm allowed to dream. So I thought I should warn you both, since you are Joe's main points of contact with this Government, that you should not confide in him too strongly. He is a man of not only loose morals but also loose lips. The seepage of information from his embassy has not ceased simply because we have apprehended Mr. Tyler Kent. Joe is a man who has, I believe, limited prospects as his country's ambassador. To put no finer point on it, he is on his way out. Don't tie yourselves too tightly to him."

Both Halifax and Butler knew this was more than an exchange of diplomatic guidance, it was personal. They were being warned off.

"How do we know all this?" Halifax enquired, anxious to learn of the source. Both he and Butler were desperately ransacking their memories for details of their own manifold indiscretions with Kennedy. Oh, the muttered disloyalties. The haggling over those bloody ships. Was all that known to Churchill, too?

"Let us simply say," Churchill responded, 'that Joe is outspoken even at the best of moments, and even more so when drunk or climbing into someone else's bed." He would give them no more. He wasn't going to let them know that Kennedy's phone was tapped and his cables read; he much preferred that they should be left to sweat in uncertainty.

"On another matter," he said, deflecting them along a different path. This press nonsense about Guilty Men."

It has been tedious," Halifax acknowledged, his understatement unable to disguise the hurt. The letters had been so cruel and so many of them.

"I share your pain. It is nothing less than outrageous. Guilty Men, indeed! Heavens, if I were left surrounded only by those with whom I had agreed over the years, I should be the most lonely Prime Minister in all the annals of England's history. So I want you both to know that I have taken every step in my power to make it clear that I will not bow to their pressure to force you from government. You are most trusted colleagues. I have told everyone so. I hope that meets with your approval."

"Thank you, Winston."

And with that the trap was sprung. For Halifax was caught between shame and silence. If he resigned now, as he had threatened, it would look as if he'd been forced out by the press campaign. It would be an acknowledgement of his guilt and, perhaps, his inappropriate relationship with the discredited Kennedy. Yet if he were to remain in government, as a gentleman he would have to do so on terms acceptable to Churchill. Which meant his silence.

"I hope I can ensure that it will stop," Churchill continued. "There is so much for us still to do together!"

Of course he would ensure that it would stop. He'd started the whole bloody thing, through Bracken and Max Beaverbrook. One word, a snap of his fingers, and it would vanish like a morning mist.

The two visitors began to leave. He held them back. "A moment's guidance from you both," he requested. He consulted his script. "Would you use a phrase like "we shall fight them on the beaches"? Is that appropriate? Fighting them on the beaches? If it came to that?"

"Why, yes, of course," Halifax concurred. What else could he say? He knew Churchill had won their private battle. Butler knew it, too. They would fight, not talk.

And Churchill thought to himself what an aching pity it was, and would always be, that these two guilty men had not fought at Munich, while peace still had a chance.

"Thank you. But now I must prepare. This morning the soldiers of the BEF asked me for a speech. So I intend to bloody well give 'em one!"

Sometimes there is nothing left but words.

Churchill sat on the leather bench beside the Despatch Box, trying to judge the moment like a lover bringing a difficult message. The House of Commons was filled to its capacity, the benches crowded and galleries overflowing. Churchill closed his eyes. He could smell the mixture of fear and expectation that surged around him, could feel it inside himself. This place this beast had both borne him high and turned on him with extraordinary savagery; after nearly forty years it still had the capacity to twist his nerves in anticipation.

He opened one eye. Above him he could see journalists with their pencils poised, many peers from the other place Halifax himself was squeezing into a seat. And Kennedy was in the Diplomatic Gallery, stretching forward for a better view. Damn him as they all would be damned. But Joe would get there long before the rest.

And Ruth was watching, too. He'd asked her to come, had something he wanted her to hear.

The eye closed again. Time for a last thought, a final flickering of fear. Then he rose.

He cleared his throat. They fell silent.

He had a simple structure. Place deliverance before defeat. Pour honour on those who had given great sacrifice. And leave victims along the way.

He began by talking about disaster, about the German attack that had swept like a sharp scythe through all their plans and sliced almost unopposed through France. Ah, but that was before Calais .. .

"The British Brigadier was given an hour to surrender. He spurned the offer, and four days of intense street fighting passed before silence reigned over Calais," he reminded them. He looked around; the House was silent, too. "Only thirty unwounded survivors were brought off by the navy, and we do not know the fate of their comrades." His hands gripped the sides of the wooden Despatch Box, his voice muffled with emotion. "Their sacrifice was not in vain."

Slowly, he bowed towards Anthony Eden, sitting to his left, in honour of his regiment's sacrifice.

But it wasn't sufficient simply to honour the dead. Someone had to be held responsible for the dreams the dead had taken with them. Churchill needed a scapegoat, someone to blame. A Guilty Man. So all the better that he was foreign. Leopold of Belgium was, he told them, a man who before the war had turned his back on the Allies and who had refused them any assistance. He had hidden away in what proved to be a fatal neutrality. If only Leopold had been wiser, and braver -why, not only might Belgium have been saved but Poland, too! The entire disaster of the last few months might have been avoided! Of all the Guilty Men, he bore the most blame.

"At the last moment, when Belgium was already invaded, King Leopold called upon us to come to his aid' ah, the sinner come to repentance 'and even at the last moment we came. He and his brave, efficient army guarded our left flank and thus kept open our only line of retreat to the sea." But they all knew that was not the end of the story. Churchill filled his lungs like a judge about to pronounce the most terrible sentence.

"Suddenly, without prior consultation, with the least possible notice," Churchill thundered, 'he surrendered his army and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat!"

It was a devastating indictment. It was also utterly dishonest. Leopold had been telling them for days that his position was hopeless had even written to the King, who had discussed it with Churchill himself. But leaders sometimes have a need to distract the eye and deflect the truth, to have a target that is set well away from themselves for others to fire at. There are many casualties in war, and Leopold would be one of the earliest and most eminent. He was condemned, and by the time historians had come upon the scene, the body would be rotten beyond resurrection.

Churchill did not enjoy it, yet he felt it had to be done. A victim left at the side of the road as a warning to others. Then he marched on to Dunkirk.

"The enemy attacked on all sides with great strength and fierceness," he told them. "They sowed magnetic mines in the channels and seas; they sent repeated waves of hostile aircraft sometimes more than a hundred strong in one formation to cast their bombs upon the single pier that remained, and upon the sand dunes upon which the troops had their eyes for shelter. Their U-boats and their motor launches took their toll of the vast traffic which now began."

A wife in the Diplomatic Gallery was quietly crying into her handkerchief while her husband sat stiff and resolute, as did every man in the Chamber.

"For four or five days an intense struggle reigned. All their armoured divisions, together with great masses of infantry and artillery, hurled themselves in vain upon the ever-narrowing, ever-contracting appendix within which the British and French armies fought."

He looked up from his notes. They all knew the story; what mattered was how they would perceive it in the days and months to come. He had to raise their sights. It had been a disaster, certainly, a defeat in some measure, but it was also: "A miracle of deliverance. Achieved by valour. By perseverance. By perfect discipline. By faultless service, by resource, by skill by unconquerable fidelity."

The words came pounding out like a barrage of artillery fire. A tremor began to run along the green leather benches. Many sitting there had found the old man's rhetoric too gaudy, almost glutinous, when he had used it in times of peace, but these were different times. They began to stir in new courage.

"We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations," he warned them. "But there was a victory inside this deliverance. It was gained by the air force." He turned, thumb in waistcoat pocket, towards the small civil servants' gallery behind the Speaker's Chair where Colville sat. Churchill had been tormented by his young assistant's story of how the soldiers returning from Dunkirk had jeered and called the airmen cowards. Englishman set against Englishman. He had to finish that, otherwise they could never win.

"Many of our soldiers coming back have not seen the air force at work. They saw only the German bombers which escaped its protective attack. They underrate its achievements.

I have heard much talk of this; that is why I go out of my way to say this. I will tell you about it." He recounted for them a battle against overwhelming odds, of desperate Luftwaffe attacks, of British heroism, of astounding achievements in the air over France, fighting on even when they had run out of bullets, forcing enemy aircraft into the sea. And the rhetorical flourishes grew ever more extravagant as he paid tribute to the pilots of the R.A.F.

"The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the distant past as these young men go forth every morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power. It might be said of them that: "Every morn brought forth a noble chance, and every chance brought forth a noble knight." They deserve our gratitude."

Growls of agreement began to swirl through the benches and along the galleries above. The tearful woman had put away her handkerchief.

"Nevertheless, our thankfulness at the escape of our army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonizing week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster." He had inspired them with tales of valour, but they couldn't run away from the truth and he would not let them, for otherwise they could never resist what he feared lay ahead.

"We must expect another blow to be struck almost immediately at us. We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles." They all knew it; there was no point in denying it. "This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone: "There are bitter weeds in England." Churchill gazed around the Chamber, tying every one of them in. There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned."

How they embraced these words. The old man was taunting Hitler, defying him with humour. The lady in the gallery clapped her hands in gentle, silent applause.

Churchill's eye ran along the galleries, searching for Ruth. Oh, if only he had a thousand Ruths then victory would be theirs! Yet, with a thousand Ruths, how impossibly peace-less a man's life would become.

"We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency against enemy aliens," he declared, staring at her; Ruth stared back.

"I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them. But we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do." But trust me, I'm trying, he was saying. "If parachute landings were attempted and fierce fighting followed, these unfortunate people would be far better out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for ours."