Winston’s War (11 page)

He is still feeling cold to his core as he drives—rather, is being driven—back from Sandringham House. The applause of the guests is ringing in his ears, the warmth of the King's handshake still upon his palm, but by God it's cold at night in these Fens. He wraps himself more tightly in the car blanket and tries to find comfort on the leather seats of the Austin. He wishes he could sleep, like his wife beside him, but sleep has learned to avoid him. It is dark outside, as it was when he flew back from Germany. He had never flown before but three times now he has made the trip, long and uncomfortable, like being thrown around in a tumbrel as it crosses uneven cobbles. But it has been worth the pain. As he flew back that last time along the Thames towards London, he realized he was following the path the bombers might take. And there below him, in all
its electric splendor, had sat London and its millions of men, women, and children—his own grandchild included, born just days before he left—waiting. Waiting for him, waiting for Hitler, waiting defenseless for whatever might be thrown against them. But now there isn't going to be a war. And he hopes never to have to go up in an airplane again.

He knows there are those who mock him, but only the types who would have mocked Jesus himself. Behind his back they call him the Undertaker, the Coroner, but not to his face, not any more. Even Hitler had shouted and stormed at him, his spittle landing on Chamberlain's cheek, and Horace Wilson had told him that during one of his private interviews in Berchtesgaden the Führer had become so agitated that he had screamed and fallen to the floor in a fit. He is the commonest little dog, the German leader, no doubt of that, but if he is half-mad then there is also the other half, and at least he is a man of business. And he, Neville Chamberlain, has done business with him—"the first man in many years who has got any concessions out of me,” as Hitler told him—and he has brought back a piece of paper bearing his signature on which the lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans depend. Herr Hitler has given his word.

The visits to Germany have had their lighter moments, of course. When he arrived in Munich and stepped down from the plane, an SS guard of honor had been waiting ready for inspection. With skulls and crossbones on their collars. What, he had wondered, did they signify? Anyway, as they came to attention he remembered that he had left his umbrella on the plane and kept the SS waiting while he retrieved it. The great German army—held up by an umbrella! And they accuse him of having no sense of humor.

He has achieved more than merely an absence of war, he has built the foundations for peace—a peace in which Britain will be at the heart of Europe, with real influence, helping
shape its future rather than simply watching in impotence as a resurgent Germany grows increasingly dominant. “'Proaching Cambridge, sir,” the driver announces—God, miles still to go. His thoughts turn to his half-brother, Austen, and the Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded for his efforts in bringing the nations of Europe together. And he wonders whether two brothers have ever separately won a Nobel Prize before. Not that he has been awarded the Peace Prize yet, of course, no point in jumping the guns (although he has, quite literally). But his brother had never had a poem dedicated to his honor by the Poet Laureate, John Masefield:

As Priam to Achilles for his son,
So you, into the night, divinely led,
To ask that young men's bodies, not yet dead,
Be given from the battle not begun.

“What was that, darling?” His wife, Anne, stirs, woken from her sleep.

“Sorry, my dear. Must've been talking out loud. Rest a while longer. Still a way to go.”

And what had Queen Mary told him? Over dinner she took his hand—yes, actually touched him—and said she had received a letter from the Kaiser himself in which he had said—oh, the words burned bright—that he had “not the slightest doubt that Mr. Chamberlain was inspired by heaven and guided by God.” It makes him feel unbearably humble. He is sixty-nine, rapidly wearing out, undeniably mortal, yet with the hand of a Queen on his sleeve and his God at his shoulder. Still some, even within his own party, deny him. What would they have him do, for pity's sake? Cast humanity aside and launch upon another bloody war? What in heaven's name would they have him fight with? A French air force without wings? A Russian army with no scruples? Those people, that rag-bag of political
mongrels around Churchill—armchair terriers who have urged him to introduce conscription, not just of men but of capital, too. Suggested he should take over the banks and much of business. Control their profits. Insanity! Doing the Bolsheviks' work for them. But what could he expect of Winston, waving around his whiskey and soda, desperately trying to obliterate the memories of his own manifold failures as a military leader. They would carve Gallipoli upon Churchill's gravestone, along with the names of the forty thousand British soldiers who were slaughtered there. Herr Hitler had called Churchill and the other warmongers “moerderen"—murderers. He had a point.

The car is rolling down the A10 now, his thoughts rolling with it, past the acres of glasshouses that carpet the Lea Valley, approaching the outskirts of Cheshunt. The anger has warmed him inside but he remains exhausted almost to the point of despair. The driver slows to take a bend and through the darkness the Prime Minister can see the outline of a church, and a notice that announces it to be St. Clement's. Oranges and lemons, said the bells of St. Clement's…And St. Martin's, the Old Bailey, Shoreditch, Stepney, Old Bow. The candle is here to light him to bed. And here comes the chopper to chop off his head—chip, chop, chip, chop—the last man's dead! In his tormented mind, Chamberlain has a vision. The heart of London has been ripped out by bombers, the church spires are burning like funeral pyres, and in their light he can see Winston Churchill, astride it all, holding the axe! Chip—chop—chip—chop. Oh, but this is no children's game, there is no need for him to run away. Chip—chop—chip. He thinks he can hear the methodical rhythm of the axe as it falls, but it is only the beating of the car engine. His body aches, his mind is swimming with fatigue and a small tear begins to trace an uncertain path down his cheek. He wonders vaguely why he is crying, but arrives at no clear answer. He doesn't make a habit of
crying, can't remember the last time he did so. Oh, yes, it was as a young child, when he refused to get out of the bath and his father had punished him…

He dwells on memories of yesterday, perhaps because he dare not dwell on tomorrow. Sometimes, at that vanishing point as wakefulness dips into sleep, Chamberlain has a vision that London is burning after all and he has got the whole thing wrong. The crowds are no longer cheering and both God and the Queen have turned their backs. But it is only a dream. As they pass Queen Eleanor's memorial at Waltham Cross, finally he falls into a fitful sleep.

Late nights were spreading like a disease in Downing Street. They disrupted the process of calm thought and careful digestion. They were not to be encouraged.

“I'll follow you in a minute, my dear,” Chamberlain promised as his wife set foot on the stairs. They both knew she would be asleep in her own room long before he made it up to the second floor. There came a point where the body was too exhausted to relax, and he had long since passed that point. He would need a drink and to pace a little before he could think of retiring, perhaps refresh himself from a few of the thousands of letters and telegrams waiting for him.

As he wandered in search of distraction through the darkened corridors, he discovered a chink of light shining from beneath the door of the anteroom next to the Cabinet Room. The elfin grove. Muffled laughter. He was drawn to it like a moth.

The merriment ceased as Horace Wilson and Joseph Ball looked up in concern. “Everything in order, Neville?” Ball inquired. They were used to the tides of exhaustion that had swept across their master in recent weeks, but the face at the door was more lugubrious, the moustache more determinedly drooped, than ever.

“Things in order? Perhaps you should tell me. You two always
seem to know so much more about what's going on than do I.”

The Prime Minister sank into a chair and held out his hand. It was immediately filled with a glass of white wine. Tired eyes lifted in silent thanks. So often he found there was no need to use words with these elves, they had an uncanny ability to understand his needs—and particularly Wilson, whom he had inherited from the previous administration of Baldwin. At times it seemed to be the finest part of his inheritance. Softly spoken, pale eyes, fastidious by habit, understated but extraordinarily determined. From the start Wilson and the new Prime Minister had been natural colleagues, one the Government's Chief Industrial Adviser, the other a former Birmingham businessman, both seeing virtue in compromise and believing pragmatism to be a guiding principle. Politics were, after all, simply about business, a matter of making deals.

Ball was different. He was a man of fleshy indulgence, which showed beneath the waistcoats of his broad chalk-stripe suits. His fingers were thick, like sausages, and his face was round, an appearance exaggerated by the manner in which his dark hair was slicked close to his skull. His demeanor was often deliberately intimidating—he would take up his position behind his desk, staring inquisitorially through porthole spectacles like the barrister and spy master he once was, stirring only occasionally to wave away the cigarette smoke in which he was half-obscured. Unlike Wilson he was not in the least fastidious, being entirely open about his prejudices, which he promoted through his role as the mastermind of propaganda at Conservative Central Office, and also through a newspaper he published entitled
Truth
. Truth, for Ball, consisted of destroying the reputations of all opponents—among whom he numbered most Americans and all Jews—and he was liberal only in the means he employed to achieve his ends. He was extremely wealthy and had access to many sources of funds, using them not only to support his own publications but also to place
spies inside the headquarters of the Labour Party and amongst opposition newspapers. He was widely loathed and almost universally feared.

Yet he was even closer to the Prime Minister than was Wilson. Ball and Chamberlain shared a passion for country pursuits and particularly fly-fishing that swept them off in each other's company to the salmon rivers of Scotland at the slightest opportunity, sometimes with unseemly haste. It was widely rumored that the dates of many parliamentary recesses were set around the fishing calendar. Somehow there always seemed to be time for a little fishing.

“So, how is our ungrateful world?” Chamberlain pressed as he sipped the wine. It surprised him. An excellent hock.

The elves looked at each other with an air of conspiratorial mischief. It was Ball who spoke.

“This will pain you, Neville, I'm sure. But I fear Winston's got himself into a spot of bother.”

“Truly?” A thick eyebrow arched in anticipation.

“More than a spot. An entire bloody bog.”

“Drink?”

“Money.”

“Will he never learn?” A pause. The hock was tasting better by the mouthful. “How much?”

“More than forty thousand.”

“My God!”

“Forty-three thousand, seven hundred and forty, to be precise. Due by Christmas.”

It was a fortune. More than four times the Prime Minister's own generous salary.

“But how?”

“Been gambling on the New York stock exchange. Losing. Now the banks are calling in his loans.”

“We have him,” Wilson added softly, as though announcing the arrival of a tray of tea.

“Bracken's been trying to help, find an angel to save him. But the angels don't seem keen on saving the soul of a man who wants a war that would ruin them.”

“So what will he do?”

“Sell what's left of his shares. Put Chartwell on the market. Pay off his debts with the proceeds.”

“Chartwell's been a nest of vipers for too long,” Wilson added. “Time it was cleared out.”

“No, no…” Chamberlain was shaking his head, his brow furrowed in concentration. “That would be wrong.”

“Wrong? What's wrong?” Ball muttered, as though grappling with a new philosophical concept.

“He loathes you, Neville,” Wilson objected. “Leads the opposition on all fronts.”

“And he'll do so again, given half a chance,” Ball emphasized.

“Precisely,” Chamberlain agreed, steepling his fingers as though in prayer, urging them on.

“But these debts will crucify him.”

“What is to be gained by seeing him crucified now?”

“For the pleasure of it!” Ball cried.

“To clean up Westminster,” Wilson suggested.

“But he can do us no harm,” Chamberlain persisted. “It would be like stepping on an ant.”

The two elves fell into silence. They hadn't caught on, not yet, but they knew the Prime Minister tied a mean fly.

“Winston doesn't matter, not now, at least. He has lost, we have won. That's the truth of the matter. And if at this moment he were to fall over the edge, no one would even hear the splash. And how should we gain any benefit from that? Those who stand against us would only regroup, find a new leader and we would have to start all over again. No, there's a better way. Not today, perhaps, not this month but sometime soon, there will be another crisis. How much better it would be, when that time comes, that their leader is a man who is on the
brink. Vulnerable. Unstable as always. Whom we control and with one small nudge can send spinning into the abyss—if that were to prove necessary.” There was color in his face again, a spirit that had revived. The tips of his fingers were beating time, pacing his thoughts.

“By God,” Wilson breathed. “But how?”

“Bail him out. Extend just sufficient credit for him to survive, for now. Play him on the line. Until he's exhausted and we can net him whenever we choose.”

“But he must not realize…”

“Of course not. Do we know his bankers?”

“Most certainly.”

“Are they…friends?”

Ball snorted, struggling with the concept that bankers might be blessed with feelings more complex than those of black widow spiders. “Much better than friends. They're the party's bankers.”