Winston’s War (41 page)

“Understanding what?”

“How you could trust the word of a man like Chamberlain. And how you could remain so ridiculously serene while the bloody Luftwaffe is slaughtering their wives and children!”

Then he was gone.

A blanket of embarrassment fell over Churchill and Bracken as they heard Boothby pounding out of the front door.

“Over-excitement,” Bracken apologized. “There's a lot of it about this evening. Two Members were physically sick in the Chamber.”

“Not simply from excitement, I suspect.”

“Well, there's a lot of that, too.” Bracken put his glass down; this was a night to keep his wits about him and he'd never been able to match Churchill's capacity for alcohol.

“Go after Bob,” Churchill instructed. “Calm him. This is not a night to fall foul of our friends.”

Bracken picked up his own jacket, relieved at the excuse to leave. “All he needs is a little fresh air. We'll go and join the protesters. Wave a few of your banners,” he joked, heading for the stairs. “You don't mind, do you? The banners, I mean.”

“Why should I?”

“That's a relief. I couldn't ask beforehand—you were away in France—so I…”

“That is your work?”

“Yes,” Bracken lied. “Had a word with a chum in the advertising industry.”

“You are always full of wonders, Brendan.”

“It was nothing.”

Churchill knew it was precisely that—nothing, at least, so far as Bracken was concerned. The posters had been placed by an admirer. Not Bracken's work—but Bracken always wanted so desperately to be included. He was an outrageous chancer who lied—no, that was the wrong word, for he had never engaged in harmful deceit so far as Churchill was concerned—who invented things almost without knowing he was doing so. Churchill had always known he could rely on Bracken's loyalty, and that counted for far more than any occasional “evidential economy and frugality with the facts,” as he'd described it to Clemmie. Anyway, such inexactitudes were nothing compared to those that had been poured down upon them in such abundance from on high.

“Bob didn't mean it,” Bracken offered, trying to reassure, but Churchill waved him on into the night with a sweep of his cigar.

Boothby was right, of course—indisputably, ineluctably right. There was no reason to believe Chamberlain's promise. But the Prime Minister was faced with circumstances which overshadowed all personal considerations and previous slights. Churchill had watched him that afternoon in the House, borne down and made gray by the weight of his cares. War was at hand, surely this was a time when a Prime Minister could be trusted to deal straight. So Churchill would wait.

“Ah, my Praetorian guard.” Chamberlain offered a thin smile as Wilson and Ball entered the Cabinet Room. His face, always finely drawn, looked spectral beneath its tight covering of pale, drawn parchment. On the table in front of him stood a glass of effervescent liver salts.

“Pains?”

“Are you surprised—on the diet of disloyalty I am fed?”

“Leslie?”

“He says he cannot support a policy of—I quote—pusillanimity
and indecision.”

“Upstart and intriguer, like all his kind.”

“That may be, Joe, but he is not alone. He came with others.”

“There's Winston, too.” Ball waved a folder. “He won't stay quiet much longer. Been telephoning everyone to say we must be at war by midday tomorrow, or else.”

“Or else what?” Chamberlain snapped at his acolytes, grimacing as though in physical pain.

“Else you'll find him right outside the bloody door. And he'll have company.” Ball waved the file again. “They're organizing, Neville.”

“How many?”

“Too many.”

“Horace?”

“I think, Neville”—a breath, a final pause for thought, a moment of history—“that if you don't declare war tomorrow, then someone else will.”

“Ah, so it's come to that…” For a moment Chamberlain seemed to have forgotten the business in hand. He took a long draught of his liver salts and used it to wash down a couple of pink pills he took from a circular box. “Thank you for your honesty. Both of you. I swim in a sea of deceit, and you are my rocks. I don't express my gratitude enough.”

“Not necessary.”

A pause, his mind wandering.

“They'll know it's not my fault, won't they—the people? I've done everything I could to avoid this outcome—they'll say we've taken the ethical course?”

“Without doubt they will.”

“We must be up there with the angels, but…” A lengthy pause, hanging on to a half-hope which withered even as he grabbed at it. “If there is to be war”—another silence, more painful—“then I will have to include him. Won't I?”

“War requires sacrifice.”

“He bombards me with letters—two since this morning. As if I have time to read them, on a day such as this.”

“Perhaps better inside the tent…”

“Keep him busy.”

“Distracted.”

“At the Admiralty, I think.”

“Magnificent! His post from the last war.”

“So no promotion.”

“Duties that will keep his attention a thousand miles from Poland.”

“So once the Polish issue is settled…”

“A quick war—”

“And a much-praised peace—”

“You, Neville, once again the man of the moment.”

“And Winston lost at sea.”

“Britain at the heart of Europe, rather than at its throat.”

“With an election. Maybe even before Christmas.”

“Oh, praise God! We may yet overcome…”

The broadcast was made in a thin, reedy voice at precisely 11:15 a.m.

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street.

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

“I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

“You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that
there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful…

“Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.”

It was the voice of a man dragged to the point of exhaustion by disappointment, the words of one who sought self-justification even at the height of the nation's peril. We are at war but, please, it's not my fault…

When he had finished, he found further speech difficult. His mouth was dry, his eyes damp. He gathered his papers into a neat pile and screwed the top carefully back onto his fountain pen. Finally he turned to Horace Wilson, who had been standing guard at the door, and nodded as though the movement of every muscle threatened to tear him apart. The words would not come at first, and when they did, they had an edge like shattered glass.

“Send for him.”

An elderly statesman with gout,
When asked what the war was about,
In a Written Reply, Said,
“My colleagues and I
Are doing our best to find out.”

(A limerick popular in the Foreign Office at the outbreak of war)

September 1939.

I
t took four weeks—twenty-nine days of extraordinary late-summer heat and crushed spirits, to be precise—before Warsaw succumbed in flames. By that time two hundred
thousand people and an entire nation had bled to death. It was the start of what someone in America dubbed “the Phoney War,” a phrase that seemed as remote as hope for those trapped in the rubble of the Polish capital during that endless month of September 1939, when orphans screamed in terror and the flies feasted and grew fat.

It was only the beginning. And not even the end of the beginning.

During the very first hour of war for the British Empire—an empire that was doomed to extinction as surely as was Poland, but simply didn't know it—the air-raid sirens had sounded across London, only minutes after Chamberlain's thin aristocratic voice announced that the battle had begun. Churchill and his wife, Clemmie, had climbed to the top of their house by Westminster Cathedral to observe the silver-gray barrage balloons rising into the sky above the rooftops and spires of London. “Bloody punctual, the Hun,” Churchill had observed,
before leading her down to the nearest air-raid shelter clutching a bottle of brandy to his chest and trailing cigar smoke. The shelter proved to be nothing more than an open basement; it had no door, no sandbags, no seating. As he looked along the deserted street, Churchill imagined the carnage that he had been warned would follow an air blitz. He knew that the Government had already made its preparations, in secret, digging huge lime pits and stockpiling 100,000 cardboard coffins for the casualties their experts had predicted would be inflicted upon them within weeks. But, on this occasion at least, it proved to be a false alarm, sparked by a solitary—and friendly—French plane. Yet the two squadrons of RAF fighters sent up to engage what they thought might be the first wave of the Luftwaffe somehow managed to engage each other in a dogfight above the Thames, and in the ensuing mayhem two fighters were shot down. It became known as the Battle of Barking Creek.

That evening a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the outward-bound passenger liner
Athenia
. One hundred and twelve lives were lost, including twenty-eight Americans who were fleeing home. And two weeks later, as the sun set on the evening of September 17, the aircraft carrier
Courageous
turned into the wind in order to allow her aircraft to land upon her deck. In so doing, she unwittingly turned into the path of the U-boat she and other ships had been hunting. A single torpedo struck her amidships and sent her to the bottom. More than five hundred of her crew, including her captain, drowned with her.

On that same day the fate of Poland was sealed when Soviet armies swarmed across her eastern and all but undefended frontiers and stabbed her in the back. It was what had been agreed in the secret protocols of the pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov. Poland was to be wiped from the map of Europe.

And yet…hadn't Britain and France guaranteed Polish independence? Declared war on Germany for the crime of invading
Poland? So what now of the Soviets? Didn't honor, justice, consistency, simple humanity
demand
that they now turn their wrath on this new locust from the east? Ah, but this is diplomacy, and diplomacy is not the art of innocence, nor does it strain to be either ethical or consistent. So, as German and Soviet armies met and embraced at the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk—in comic opera fashion, the same place where in 1917 Russia had concluded its humiliating peace with the armies of the Kaiser—the statesmen in London and Paris drew in and held their collective breath. They would wait.

But patience is for those with full stomachs.

The first night of the war finds Carol Bell in tears, trying to focus through salt-smeared eyes on the needle she is prodding through Peter's jacket. It has gone the way of his trousers. He and the other boys in the street have been using the top of an Anderson shelter to practice parachute jumps, and the elbows of his jacket are now ripped to buggery on the bolts. It is his only jacket. And he is leaving tomorrow. She wants so desperately for him to look smart at that moment in the morning when she will try to find a smile and wave him goodbye, perhaps for the very last time.

She has spent the afternoon filling sandbags and her back feels as though she's been taking care of a football club on tour, including a full set of reserves. Not that she ever did that, of course, strictly a one-punter girl. She's been hoping to spend every last minute with Peter but he said he wanted to play with his friends and she thought it best he should feel as normal as possible—no tears, they can wait for tomorrow—so she let him go with an instruction to be back by teatime. He's always been restless, could never keep still, even when she was carrying him, impatient little sod. Gets that from her. Anyway, he went to play and she couldn't just sit and wait for him, practicing her false smiles and her goodbyes, so she put the sleeping Lindy in her pram and pushed her to the park where they were
filling sandbags. Wasn't much, so far as the war effort goes, filling sandbags, but there isn't much else a single mother can do—or is allowed to do. So she filled sandbags. And heard them gossiping behind her back.

Chigwell is supposed to be a fresh start, away from all those vicious tongues that surrounded her in her last street, but even in Chigwell a deserted wife is viewed with suspicion no matter what excuse for her circumstances she invents. The gossip is lurid, as gossip always is; she might as well have put an advertisement in the church magazine announcing she does tricks for a fiver a time. It's the way of the world, which sees something very wrong with any woman who isn't up to keeping a man. All men are unreliable bastards, but any decent woman finds some way of coping…So Carol keeps up appearances, helps others—when they allow her to—steers well clear of their husbands and today she fills up sandbags. Something to bridge the gap between now and the moment Peter leaves home.