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‘I know I’m a bit of a snob,’ Channon began, ‘but I can’t help feeling he’s right.’
‘Of course he’s right,’ Butler snapped irritably.
‘And what do you think, Jock?’
‘You see this suit I’m wearing?’ It was offensively blue and exceptionally bright. ‘From the fifty-shilling department of Monty Burton’s. Rather cheap and sensational, I’m afraid, but entirely suitable for this administration.’ He plucked a loose thread from his lapel. ‘I don’t expect it will prove to be much of an investment.’
The public library in Pimlico was open until seven that evening. It had a ground-in, sweet-and-sour aroma of beeswax and half-burnt coke, but it suited Ruth Mueller. She did not want to get back to her rented room before eight. By that time the family who lived below would have finished their dinner; it was bad enough having to go hungry without smelling the rest of the world at the trough.
Unlike her room, the Pimlico library was warm and quiet, but it was the books, of course, that had first drawn her here, particularly the Hitler books. Sadly, they had long since been banished from the shelves, and none of them had been very good, either Marxist tracts or hagiography. So she was left to wonder and to grapple with her half-formed impressions of the man. What about his childhood? What about his early days as a vagrant on the streets of Vienna? What about his early friendships with Jews, his devotion to his mother, his inability to form any other close relationship with a woman, his vegetarianism and his fondness for cream cakes? Who was he, why was he? He was physically brave, a man of courage. Like Churchill, so she had been told, and perhaps more so, for the young Hitler had received many wounds and war decorations. Yet he was childish. In 1918, Hitler had been invalided to a military hospital. When he heard that an armistice had been signed and that Germany had surrendered, he’d put his head beneath his pillow and sobbed. Bawled like a baby. And he’d been shouting like a petulant child ever since. Some said that was like Churchill, too …
She’d been trying to forget about Churchill but he had an irritating habit of wheedling his way back into her thoughts. She picked up a newspaper and tried to shake him away once more.
Hah! Civil servants, The Times announced, were to get a war bonus. The guilty men cosseting themselves at the very moment they were putting up the price of coal yet again. Outside the library the sun was shining brightly, but she couldn’t prevent a shiver of apprehension running through her body. She had frozen in her garret through the last winter, and dreaded what the next one might bring. On the following page there were tips for ‘cooking through the war without fear of rationing’. Dishes such as eggs with anchovy, bean and liver casserole, coconut rounds (a concoction based on bread soaked in evaporated milk) and macaroni and rabbit pie. She imagined every rabbit in the country dashing for cover.
Not that he would be eating anchovies or rabbit pie. At Chartwell it had been salmon, venison, pheasant and beef, washed down with the finest wines. The cost of a single bottle would have got her through an entire week, rent and all, yet he had the impertinence to lecture her about his sacrifices! What did he know about sacrifice?
Her mind wandered back to that summer of 1914, August, the last time she could remember being happy. There was sun, and the sound of children’s laughter. Then the summons had come. War. And the men had left with the horses, leaving behind the women with their young ones and their unspoken fears. So it had begun. The war was fought a million worlds away in France and Russia, but it had come rapping at their doors, gently at first. Strange shortages appeared. Suddenly there was no paper. She had begun to write letters not only across the page but up its length, too, in writing so minuscule her husband had required a glass to find his way through the kaleidoscope of scribbles. Worn-out shoes had to be repaired with card or resoled in wood; the children were asked to bring all their old bones and even cherry stones to school, to be turned into fertilizer. And they brought illness with them, everyone got sick, not least in their souls. Children were taught to hate, to kill even before they had become men, and were told by their teachers and priests that this was good and right. Hatred and intolerance were taught alongside geography and the Lord’s Prayer, and was so much simpler to learn. Hatred had become a great patriotic game, honed by hunger, and it had been played so long that it would never be stopped, not while Germany, this Germany, survived.
Ruth Mueller was a German. But she was also an intellectual, a free thinker with a mind of her own, for what it was worth. And above all, she was a mother with memories of a starving child whose cries still woke her in the darkest moments of the night. She had fled, but she had not escaped, and whatever she did now, in the end some part of her soul would be shredded. She was a German in a foreign land, an intellectual reduced to scraping through on scraps of translation and proofreading, a mother with no child. But doing nothing would not be an option, not in this war.
Then she remembered that Winston Churchill had said please. It was a cry of vulnerability, like a child’s plea for help. It had been a long time since anyone had said please.
She put aside the newspaper and went to the enquiries desk.
‘May I help you?’ The assistant was formal, unfriendly – she disapproved of Ruth Mueller’s strange reading habits, and of Ruth Mueller even more.
‘I would like some books. Something written by Mr Churchill, please. Perhaps something he has written about his father?’
They had expressed their collective concerns and reservations about the new Prime Minister, after which, politics being politics, they had trooped through the Division Lobby to give him a unanimous vote of confidence. Afterwards it had taken Churchill some while to leave the Chamber for, politicians being politicians, many had paused to congratulate him – but not for too long. Even Chips Channon had joined the throng.
‘Not one of us,’ Bracken had warned, whispering in Churchill’s ear.
‘Chips? Of course he is. Chips is everyone’s,’ Churchill had replied gaily. ‘Don’t worry about him. It’s the other buggers we have to watch out for.’ And Churchill had forced his way through to the side of Neville Chamberlain, taking his arm, smiling, ensuring that they were seen together and offering him an ostentatious display of gratitude and warmth.
Afterwards he had noted Bracken’s quizzical eye. ‘That’s the way it shall be, Brendan, both publicly and in private, for as long as is required. I’m haunted by enough damned ghosts, I’ve no need of more.’
They strode away, out of earshot and hidden behind a fog of cigar smoke. ‘Brendan, I have a task of some delicacy for you. I am being forced to fight on too many fronts. I have nominated the most senior Ministers in my Government, now I want your help in selecting the great mass of the remainder. I need to get on with the other war.’
‘Magnificent. I always enjoy a little vengeance.’
‘You will start this evening. You will do it with David Margesson.’
‘Margesson? Winston, you’ve gone mad …’
David Margesson was a name no one took lightly. He had been Neville Chamberlain’s Chief Whip, his immensely powerful organizer of the parliamentary party. He had known the details of every plot and piece of parliamentary wickedness during the last decade, largely because he had initiated most of them, and none of his plots had been more vicious than that against Churchill himself.
‘Winston, barely twelve months ago Margesson was on the point of getting you deselected. Thrown out of the party. He tried to destroy your whole life – he hates you! The only reason you’re here today is because the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia the night before the deselection meeting. God knows, but Adolf Hitler’s done more for your career than bloody Margesson! He’s a comprehensive bastard!’
‘Ah, but a most effective one. Which is why you will sit down with him and reshuffle the rest of my government, allowing as many as possible of the other bastards to remain.’
‘I am lost,’ Bracken gasped, his mind exhausted.
‘Come on, Brendan, it’s your own idea: Mark Antony, embracing the conspirators in order to give himself enough time.’
‘For what?’
Churchill stopped, grabbed the other man’s sleeve and spun him round until he was staring directly into his eyes.
‘To survive! If we rock this boat too violently, it will sink. It may be overloaded with men not to our hearts, but if we are to let them go, slip them over the side, it had best be done as quietly as possible and at night. So mark out the troublemakers. Give them new jobs, different jobs, impossible jobs, but always some job; never forget that their love of office – any office – is stronger than their loathing for me. Keep them busy with the war against Hitler; give them not a moment for their war against me.’ Churchill was panting with emotion, struggling to keep his breath. ‘And if we are to go down in flames, then they too shall shed tears, share the toil, be drowned in sweat. But if we are to survive, it can only be together.’
So they had gathered in the Admiralty later that evening, Bracken and Margesson in one room while Churchill buried himself with his papers and maps in the inner sanctum. Bracken and the Chief Whip had bickered and debated, weighing dubious merits against more certain sins, moving from one to the next, pricking a few names, moving others to more minor posts, getting Colville to telephone the news through to the victims while they themselves congratulated the victors. In the end two-thirds of the existing members of the Government were reappointed, only twelve senior offices went to newcomers. Chamberlain remained prominent on the poop deck while Margesson continued in service as the master-at-arms.
But even as they worked, the boat was to be rocked far more brutally than ever they imagined.
Churchill heard it first, on the radio, from an American, a respected CBS correspondent named William Shirer who was based in Berlin. His broadcasts were inevitably filtered through the coarse gauze of the German Propaganda Ministry, but what squeezed past the censors was often useful, helping to know the enemy.
Good evening. This is Berlin …
The voice was flat, reedy, its tones stripped of emotional emphasis as it wowed and fluttered its way through the ether. Churchill tapped a dial; it made little difference. But the message did.
Liège fallen! German land forces break through and establish contact with air-force troops near Rotterdam! Those were the astounding headlines in extra editions of the Berlin papers that came out about five, our time, this afternoon.
‘Colville. Mr Colville!’ Churchill first muttered, then roared. There was a sudden scrabbling in the outer office.
Today was a holiday in the capital – Whit Monday – and there were large crowds strolling in the streets. They bought up the extras like hot cakes. The announcement by the German High Command on the fourth day of the big drive that the citadel of Liège had been captured, and that German – well, the Germans call them ‘speed troops’ – had broken through the whole southern part of Holland and made contact with the air-force troops who’ve been fighting since the first day in and around Rotterdam on the west coast, caught almost everyone by surprise. Even German military circles seemed a bit surprised. They admitted that the breakthrough to Rotterdam, as one put it, came somewhat sooner than expected …
Colville was standing aghast on the other side of the desk. None of this had been mentioned in the night’s situation briefing. To be sure, the Dutch had been talking of ‘modifications’ and ‘confusion’ in the military position, but this …
‘Get the Chiefs of Staff back here. Every man jack of ’em. And find out whether m’Lord Halifax is in the land of the living. If he’s not, drag him out of bed. Tell him there’s a war on!’
FOUR (#ulink_48a83db1-1d57-575c-bea8-0b96bcb8892d)
Tuesday 14 May. The Reverend Chichester rose before dawn, turning his back on his bed. Sleep had been elusive and, when at last it had come, a river of troubles had run through his dreams, destroying his peace and reminding him of so many unanswered prayers. It had been his birthday on the previous day, his fifty-second, a time for reflection, although it had passed unnoticed by anybody else, apart from a card from his sister. Nothing from Donald.
Everything in his mind kept moving in circles and coming back to the same point. Donald. Even Jennie stared back at him in reproach from the mantelpiece, as if to say there should have been another photograph of their son alongside her. But he hadn’t any recent photos of Don.
The vicarage seemed empty, the hallway too tidy; the kitchen had an unaccustomed echo; even the driveway taunted him. Not so long ago Don’s motorbike, an AJS, had stood there on the gravel, leaning drunkenly and leaking oil. It was an ancient machine and Don had spent many hours repairing it, not always successfully. The Reverend Chichester hated motorbikes. As a young man he’d almost killed himself on one and he was afraid that Don would do the same. So he had objected to the bike. He was trying to protect his son, but instead of a discussion about caring it had been reduced to a shouting match about filthy sinks and oily clothes. Ridiculous. Pointless. Splinters in the eye, for in spite of Don’s offensive language, he knew it was his fault. It seemed he would say anything rather than admit to his son that he loved him.
The previous evening he had returned to the vicarage to discover that his occasional gardener had cleaned up the soiled gravel. It was in pristine condition, no trace of the bike. Every fragment of Don’s memory was being leached from his life, leaving them to stumble around his dreams.
He began to prepare another solitary breakfast, his newspaper propped up above the sink. Across the Channel that lay beyond his kitchen window, a new war was raging. He could see and hear nothing of it, there was little to witness apart from the calm of the sea and the outline of Calais beginning to emerge from its morning veil, but the headlines gave him the story of a ‘Total War’ in which the ‘RAF had triumphed’. One hundred and fifty enemy machines shot down. Good news, great news, God’s work. Set out in The Times.
Yet, as seemed increasingly to be His habit, God moved in ways that left mysteries in their wake. As the vicar pushed aside his breakfast plate, the same newspaper announced that the Belgian army was falling back, the Dutch, too. Yet only yesterday it had announced that the BEF was sweeping forward. Backwards, forwards – this was unlike any war the Reverend Chichester knew.
The Times assured him that the Belgians and Dutch were withdrawing ‘without heavy casualties’.
Which puzzled the Reverend Chichester. For why, in God’s name, if they had suffered no heavy casualties, were they moving back?
Where had they gone, those people who only days before had been smiling, blowing kisses and shouting their encouragement as the 6th had made its way to the front? Now, on the way back, there was no greeting, no warmth, nothing but tired eyes that spoke of concern and even contempt.
Don’s unit were withdrawing to a suburb of Brussels called Boitsfort in a tight convoy consisting of fifty ambulances, water trucks, troop-carriers and other vehicles. A few refugees had begun to appear on the road in front of them with their cars and overladen carts. Progress began to slow, and a sense of fading order crept up on them. The 6th had seen no direct combat yet, but planes had begun to appear overhead, high in the clear sky, and they came from the east. They must have seen the convoy; you couldn’t hide an entire field unit, not with all their bright red crosses painted on the roofs.
They passed a single bomb crater at the side of the road. A dead horse lay beside it, the carcass still smouldering, its stench sweet: the first casualty of Don’s war. And moments later there were others, Belgian soldiers, a group of them at the side of the road, abandoned and bleeding. Some were badly injured from shrapnel wounds. They kept gesticulating towards the sky, but otherwise there was little sense to be had from them in their strange language, and no one seemed inclined to delay in order to discover more. The wounded were loaded into the back of the ambulances and other vehicles. First blood. Belgian blood.
Yet, that evening, Boitsfort displayed the air of a prosperous suburb whose mind was fixed on moving gently into the embrace of nothing more threatening than a glorious summer. The gardens were full of flowers, the restaurants and cafés crowded, the young women gay, even while in the back of Don’s vehicle a soldier was bleeding silently upon the floor. Someone mentioned they were passing near the battlefield of Waterloo.
The 6th drew up in front of an imposing building, the Hôtel Haute Maison. Inside the hotel a dinner-dance was in progress. Most of the male dancers were Belgian officers in freshly pressed uniforms, with women on their arms and champagne at their tables. As the British marched in bearing the bloodied casualties, a woman screamed, but in a moment the surprise was overtaken by a hurried calm. A Belgian officer began issuing orders to the hotel staff, the tables were cleared, the women ushered out, the band dismissed. The maître d’ passed calmly from table to table, extinguishing candles, removing bottles, everything else being swept up in the starched linen tablecloths so that it took only moments for the tables to be laid bare. The two largest of these were then positioned beneath the chandeliers, their tops scrubbed with disinfectant and transformed into operating tables. The walking wounded slumped into the dining chairs to wait their turn, while those who were beyond helping themselves were carried in on stretchers that were already stained beyond cleansing. The maître d’ brought in armfuls of clean towels and napkins to use as bandages, tears pouring silently down his cheeks. A priest arrived.
There was little time, often not enough time for the anaesthetic to take effect. More casualties arrived throughout the night, some civilian, all Belgian. The surgeons did whatever they could; often it was not enough. The dead were laid out in the ballroom.
War had at last caught up with Don.
Then, as the sun rose, the 6th were given fresh instructions. New orders. Fall back. Again.
‘How is it possible? How can it be that three armies have fallen back because of the approach of a mere handful of Nar-zi tanks?’
Churchill hunched over the map spread before him on the Cabinet table and held it down with his clenched fists. For many long moments he stood like stone as he studied what lay before him, refusing to believe. All day long he had been pacing up and down as reports flooded in of ever-spreading disaster, his head bent forward as though he intended to butt his way towards victory, but no matter how furiously he paced he couldn’t prevent disaster from catching up with him. The Dutch had surrendered, laid down their arms, given up. The Maginot Line was broken: the French were falling back, the Belgians with them, while the Germans had pushed beyond Sedan and were now halfway to the Channel. Luftwaffe bombers were now at airfields no more than thirty minutes’ flying time from the English coast. That morning he had been shaken awake by a telephone call from the French Prime Minister Reynaud. ‘All is lost,’ he had said in English. ‘The road to Paris is open. We have been defeated.’
And all through the day the calamities had continued.
‘Impossible!’ Churchill’s fists pounded the table and he exploded back into life. He turned to his right, to where Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, was sitting. ‘How many planes? How many planes do we have in France?’
‘Prime Minister, we had four hundred and seventy-four. I regret to tell you that as of this morning we had barely two hundred left still operational.’
‘In five days? We have lost more than half our strength in five days?’ Churchill gasped.
‘The Germans have lost a great many more machines,’ the Air Marshal responded sharply. ‘But we are outnumbered. I’ve heard of three Hurricanes taking on flights of thirty or forty enemy planes. They fight magnificently, but the French fuel is poor, their landing fields a disgrace and their radio communications nonexistent. This morning we attacked the pontoon bridges around Sedan. We sent in nearly eighty planes. Thirty-seven of them failed to return.’ He glared defiantly at Churchill through exhausted eyes. ‘If the RAF is in peril it is not through want of courage. Or of sacrifice, Prime Minister.’
‘The French want more. They want us to send over more squadrons.’
‘To what purpose, Prime Minister?’ Newall countered. ‘If the French are already beaten it would be like cutting out the heart of the RAF and offering it on a plate to Goering. There’s no point in sacrificing our aircraft simply to help the French improve their terms of surrender.’
‘We must keep them in the fight! No surrender. If France were to fall …’
The thought was so terrible as to be inexpressible. He left it hanging half-formed before them. A military aide came in, offered a smart salute and with lowered eyes placed another map before the Prime Minister. An update from the front. It showed an arrow through the place where the heart of the French Ninth Army should have been.
‘Dear God,’ Halifax whispered from his seat opposite Churchill. ‘I despair.’
‘Despair does not appear on the agenda of this Cabinet, my lord,’ Churchill growled. ‘Why, there is opportunity in such chaos!’
‘Then it eludes me, Prime Minister,’ Halifax responded calmly. ‘Opportunity for what?’
‘For counterattack! To mobilize our forces and take advantage of their tired and overstretched panzers before they can recover. I remember the twenty-first of March 1918. All experience shows that after five or six days they must halt for supplies – I learnt this from the lips of Marshal Foch himself. Look, look!’ His finger stabbed at the enemy salient protruding into France. ‘Once more they have exposed their neck like a wretch stretched out on a guillotine. So let us grab the moment to cut it off!’
‘This time, I fear, the French are fighting with a decidedly blunt axe.’
‘Then what do you propose as an alternative?’ Churchill all but spat, his frustration bubbling over.
‘Prime Minister, I have neither your abilities nor experience in the military field. I leave the art of fighting to you and the late marshal.’ His artificial hand moved awkwardly across the papers set out before him on the table. ‘But I am a diplomat. That is a different game and perhaps we might play it with rather better fortune.’ He looked around the room, bringing the other Ministers and military men into the discussion. ‘At this point the impetus appears to be with Herr Hitler, but he is isolated, alone. If we can prevent other nations from siding with him we can perhaps help stem his progress. We all know that Italy is threatening to come into the war on his side. That would be a disaster which would threaten our Mediterranean possessions and make the situation of the French impossible. I suggest, with all the powers of persuasion I command’ – they all noted the implicit words of warning – ‘that the Prime Minister write immediately to Signor Mussolini and make it clear to him that we bear Italy no ill will, that the dialogue between us remains open, and that if the Italians have any cause for grievance with us it can be settled without turning the Mediterranean red with each other’s blood.’
‘Ah, play the Roman card,’ Attlee muttered.
‘You think it a sensible suggestion, Lord Privy Seal?’ Churchill enquired.
‘I do,’ Attlee replied. ‘Nothing to be lost from it.’
‘But what if he says he wants Gibraltar, or Malta, as prizes for his co-operation?’ Which he would, damn him, like any jackal.
‘Better that such issues be resolved across the table than across a battlefield,’ Halifax insisted.
Churchill stared at him; Halifax stared straight back. He had given his advice ‘with all the powers of persuasion I command’. In the muted language of Halifax’s world, the Foreign Secretary was announcing that he would not tolerate rejection. And Churchill could not withstand rebellion. He had no choice. Anyway, it was only a bloody letter.
‘An excellent idea,’ Churchill announced. ‘You have a draft for my consideration, Foreign Secretary?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then it shall be done.’
Halifax nodded his gratitude. For a moment he tried to convince himself that perhaps it would work after all, this ill-conceived administration led by the charging bull that was Churchill, with himself to guard the gate of the corral. And suddenly Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, was speaking. A fragile man, in Halifax’s view, and his predecessor as Foreign Secretary until he had fallen out with Chamberlain over appeasement and flounced out of the Cabinet. Now they were all back together around the Cabinet table, as uneasy as ever. Halifax sat back as Eden reported on his attempts to raise an army of local volunteers to defend the homeland.
‘From all corners they have come forward,’ he said in his precise, over-trimmed voice. ‘In every town and every village, bands of determined men are gathering together for duties on the home front, arming themselves with shotguns, sporting rifles, clubs and spears …’
Dear God, thought Halifax, is this what it has come to? The greatest empire in the world defended with clubs and spears? And by fools?
He looked around the table, from man to man, from failed politicians to failing military commanders, and knew he had been wrong. This ill-conceived and misconstructed machine could not be made to work. It was written on all their brows. Britain had already lost the war.
Don was confused. The BBC announcer had told them that Allied forces were counterattacking all along the front. Germans were being repelled at the Sedan salient, he claimed defiantly. So why were the 6th moving back once more?
A few hours earlier there had been a trickle of refugees on the road in front of them, but now it had swelled to a stream that meandered as far as his eye could see, like a tangle of fishing net caught at the edge of the surf. It slowed the 6th’s progress to a crawl. The radiators that had frozen throughout winter began to overheat, and just after noon the convoy pulled into a farmyard for water and a little rest. Don hadn’t slept in thirty hours.
They were only miles from the border, almost back where they had started. Bizarrely, as they drew into the farmyard, they found a huge tent festooned with coloured banners in the neighbouring field. The circus was in town. Around the tent, the people of the circus were practising their arts, balancing on tightropes, juggling, tumbling, even washing down an elephant.
‘What am I to do?’ the circus owner explained. He was short, like a Toby jug, sad, with a huge moustache. ‘I have three elephants, several lions, my wife’s mother and eighteen other relatives. Where could we possibly go?’
No one else had an answer, either. As they rested, Don noticed a young girl, the owner’s daughter, riding around a makeshift ring balancing on the backs of two white horses. She waved. He waved back. The show must go on.
And so did the 6th, more slowly than ever as they approached the border. A mile beyond the farmhouse they had to manoeuvre around two British Matilda tanks that had broken down. Don had heard there was a lot of that. He’d heard many things about the BEF – that equipment was in short supply, badly packed and often sent to the wrong units; that the tanks had no wireless sets, that they were no match for the German panzers; that the twenty-five-pounders had arrived in France untested and unfired; that … well, there came a point when you didn’t want to hear any more.
He didn’t hear the Luftwaffe, either. He was aching from lack of sleep and the constant grinding of low gears had left his ears ringing. Up ahead he could see that the column had come to a complete halt. Civilians were looking up into the sky and pointing; a few soldiers began firing their rifles. Then, from behind, came the dull crump of explosions, and suddenly the refugees were on the move again, scattering to the sides of the road and throwing themselves behind every available tree and piece of cover. When he saw tracer fire ripping the trees to shreds, Don decided to join them, head down in a ditch.
And so the 6th survived their first encounter with hostile fire. Little damage was done on that occasion; most of the attention of the Luftwaffe appeared to be back down the road, from where Don could see a column of smoke rising, the only mark upon a cloudless sky. The circus tent must have seemed like a military bivouac from the air.
As Don and the others began to emerge from their hiding places, they became aware of the sounds of a commotion. Screams. Shouts of dismay. Hooves clattering on the metalled road. Drawing ever nearer. Suddenly two white horses, their eyes red with fear, flew past. They were dragging something behind them, tangled in the reins, bouncing off the tarmac.
Don ducked behind a tree and was sick.
In Joe Kennedy’s view, it had been a splendid evening. Dinner at the Italian embassy, theatre, a new flirtation, then back to Beaverbrook’s for a drink. Beaverbrook’s door just along from the Ritz Hotel was always open and awash with good company and gossip. The two men were excellent companions and Kennedy was a frequent house guest at Beaverbrook’s country home at Cherkley, where he had fallen into the most pleasurable habit of sleeping with one of Beaverbrook’s research assistants. All in the line of business, of course; she would whisper in his ear all through the night, then write him a weekly letter full of her own endearments and the press man’s private news. Keeping abreast, as the ambassador put it.
