Churchill's Hour (22 page)

Churchill's good humour had gone. Could he not
even spend time with his daughter without being bludgeoned by idiots? ‘If the armchair aviators that I find lurking in every corner showed half as much valour as our pilots,' he said stiffly, ‘the situation might be very different.'

‘The valour of our aircrews is not in question. The competence of their commanders is. I seem to remember you saying much the same thing a few years ago when you were an armchair aviator.'

Churchill had neither time nor temper for this. He turned to move on. ‘I am flattered that you should wish to follow in my footsteps, Leslie, but don't let ambition spoil your dinner.'

‘You never run away from Hitler, Winston,' his colleague called after him. ‘So why do you run away from the House?'

Why? Because he had a bloody war to run. Because he couldn't win that war if he was forced to reveal every card in his hand. And because—because, in his heart, he was no longer certain he could win the war at all, and it might show. So in recent months he had seen them little and told them less, and many had begun to resent it. They wouldn't follow Hore-Belisha through the voting lobbies against Churchill, but neither did they shun him any more.

The barbs in his back stuck firm throughout the meal and soured every mouthful. The pleasure he showed in the celebration was little more than
pretence and by ten thirty he was back at Downing Street, seeking solace with his boxes of secrets. Yet as the car drew up he saw a figure pacing up and down outside. It was the unmistakable outline of Maisky, the diminutive Soviet Ambassador.

‘Forgive me, Prime Minister,' Maisky began, waylaying the Prime Minister, ‘but it is a message of the highest importance.'

They stood in the moonlight, puffing cigar smoke at each other from beneath the brims of their hats. Maisky was short and swarthy, but personable and exceptionally hard-working, which perhaps had as much to do with his dull and awesomely ugly wife as with the ever-present prospect of being summoned home and purged. Churchill respected and might even have grown to like him, if he hadn't been a Bolshevik.

‘I have been instructed to inform you from the highest levels of my Government'—in other words, this came straight from Uncle Joe himself—‘that the rapid deterioration of the situation within the Soviet Union has given rise to a new environment.'

Churchill sniffed. That meant new demands. He'd already sent tanks and Hurricanes to the Soviets and had promised more—weapons that the British desperately needed themselves. Yet Churchill had insisted, even in the face of outright opposition from the Chiefs of Staff. He needed Russia in this war and almost any material price was worth paying. There
had been a moral price to pay, too. Only a week earlier British forces had shot their way into neutral Iran, invading the country in order to grab a supply corridor that stretched five hundred miles from the Gulf to the borders of Russia. Churchill needed it as a lifeline that might keep Stalin going, and so he'd kicked his way in before the Germans got there first. It was an act of shameless aggression that made a mockery of the high-minded principles of the Atlantic Charter, so wasn't that enough? What more could any reasonable man expect? Yet Stalin, as Churchill had once suggested to Beaverbrook, was a man who would bite through his own mother's nipple. Reason had nothing to do with it. Now he wanted more.

‘Our country faces mortal menace,' Maisky went on.

‘As does ours. Your Excellency, forgive me but it's late, and we've known each other long enough. Tell me directly, what is it you want?'

‘Four hundred planes—'

‘We've already promised you.'

‘A month.'

‘What?'

‘And five hundred tanks. Every month for the next year.'

‘Impossible! We don't have that number ourselves.'

‘Prime Minister, the reason for the growing disaster in my country is very simple. Hitler has been
able to invade the Soviet Union solely because he has no other opposition on the mainland of Europe. He can throw everything at us because he has come to the conclusion that the British are content to sit at home. There is no danger from the west, so he attacks us in the east.'

Churchill snorted with impatience, sending cigar smoke swirling high into the night sky. ‘May I remind you, Mr Maisky, that no one, not any nation on this globe, has risked more than the British to fight that bloody man.'

‘Then it is vital that he is reminded of that.'

‘I strive ceaselessly…'

‘I make no personal criticism, I assure you.'

‘And Britain is doing her best.'

‘I'm afraid it does not seem that way in my country.'

‘What?'

‘I have been given a specific instruction, Prime Minister, to pass on to you a message from the highest levels of my Government. The message is simply this. You must establish a second front in Europe by the end of the year. To draw Hitler's men away from the east.' Maisky paused while the enormity of the demand had time to settle in. ‘Otherwise, I fear that the Soviet Union may be placed in a position where it is unable to continue with the armed struggle, and will have to look to other means to pursue its interests.'

It was as though Churchill's had been physically assaulted. His whole frame began to shake. He gripped the railings that ran along the front of Number Ten as he struggled to keep his incredulity and growing outrage from bursting forth. ‘You mean…' He seemed barely able to spit the words out. ‘You mean you'd do another deal with Hitler? Sign another one of your wretched pacts?'

Maisky refused to respond to the accusation. It wasn't the job of a diplomat to tell the full truth when the doubts stirred by a half-truth could be so much more effective. Anyway, he didn't know the truth himself, he only knew what he had been told to say.

‘We are at a turning point in history,' he replied. ‘But consider. If the Soviet Union does not survive, then neither will you.'

‘How dare you?' the Englishman shouted. ‘How dare you have the gall to stand on my doorstep with the rubble of our defiance lying all about us and lecture me, Winston bloody Churchill, about the fight against Hitler?'

‘More calm, please, my dear Mr Churchill,' Maisky said, surprised by the vehemence.

But Churchill was not to be appeased. ‘Two years ago you signed a pact with Hitler. It allowed him to hurl himself upon Poland and start this war. You began to supply him with every sort of raw material. Thousands of my people have died beneath bombs that you had helped him manufacture. And
only three months ago we had no idea whether you might not even come into this war on the German side.'

Maisky was trying to interrupt but Churchill would have none of it.

‘No! You will listen to this. Throughout that time, and without a breath of help from you, this country has stood alone and defiant. We have starved, we have suffered, we have sacrificed almost everything we have—except our unflinching belief in victory. So damn your diplomatic dances, Maisky. The British need no lectures from you about how to fight for our lives!'

Maisky was taken aback by the unexpected brutality of Churchill's tone, but the Soviet diplomat was nothing if not a survivor. He hadn't made it through the purges that had left thousands of his colleagues in gulags or graveyards by losing his nerve in the face of a little shouting.

‘I can tell that you are much affected, Mr Churchill,' he said in a tone that was far more conciliatory. ‘And it is also very late. Perhaps it would be sensible to put what has been said to one side and return to this subject at a more appropriate time. But I fear my masters are impatient for a response. Is there anything that I may tell them by way of a preliminary reply?'

‘Tell them to go down on their knees and pray for winter!'

Churchill turned his back on the Russian, anxious
that he had already said too much and might yet say more. He slammed the great door of Number Ten behind him with unusual vehemence, but he couldn't shut out the pain that dragged along behind him. Maisky was a duplicitous bastard whose demands were outrageous, but the Bolshevik echoed a central truth that had been screaming at Churchill through every waking moment and pursued him into his dreams.

Alone, Britain hadn't a hope.

That night he didn't call for his usual retinue of advisers. He'd had enough rows for one evening. He took his whisky and his boxes to bed and allowed Sawyers to undress him in silence. The valet sensed the mood, poured in a little less soda than usual, and departed as soon as the final cigar of the night was alight.

Churchill was exhausted. He seemed to be losing his powers. Once, and not so long ago, his words had found an energy that carried his ideas around the world, but now it seemed that no one wanted to listen—not the Americans, not his new Russian allies, not even circumcised little pricks like Hore-Belisha. He'd always known that leadership was a friendless place, yet it seemed as if he alone was able to see the terrors that lay ahead, while others closed their eyes and hid from them like children afraid of the dark.

Churchill was hovering between wakefulness and sleep, immersed in that state where conscious thought is pushed aside by half-formed dreams and images, and anxieties swirl through the mind. His anxieties were built on a predictable tangle of fears of war, of defeat, of ill-formed loyalties and unhappy alliances, and no matter how much he shouted at them they refused to return to the dark corners from where they had come. Yet, as he lay there in the early hours, from this unruly combination of dark concerns emerged something fresh and very different. Suddenly he was awake, sitting bolt upright, snatching at his eyeshades. When he switched on the light he discovered it was twenty to three. He reached for the phone.

‘See if Lord Beaverbrook is still in the land of the living,' he instructed the duty clerk. ‘If he's not, return him to it.'

It took only a couple of minutes to make the connection.

‘Winston?' the gruff Canadian voice growled, heavy with sleep. ‘What the hell's up? You still on Placentia time or something?'

‘Max, before you fly off to see Joe Stalin, I want you to go and have a talk with our German guest, Herr Hess.'

‘What the hell for?'

‘Oh, to see whether he has anything new to tell us.'

‘Like what?'

‘We won't know unless someone goes and talks with him, will we?'

‘Christ, Winston, this is a strange bloody game to play in the middle of the night.'

‘When I appointed you, Max, you said you would never rest. I took you at your word.'

‘First goddamned time.'

‘It would please me if you were able to help in this matter.'

‘You want me to take him roses or something?'

‘No, Max. Just take yourself. Goodnight.'

But where Max Beaverbrook went, gossip was sure to follow. Max insisted on it. Soon speculation and exaggeration about the meeting would be halfway around London, and it would take only a few days more before it reached Berlin.

The essence of leadership, Churchill had always found, wasn't in coping with success but in the ability to hop around the pitfalls of failure. To KBO. He was surrounded by a chaos of uncertainty, and if he couldn't find his way out of it in a hurry, he could at least share it a little, with Adolf Hitler.

Churchill put down the phone. He had just thrown a little raw meat to the dogs of confusion that lurked around every campfire. It made him feel very much better. Within moments, he was sound asleep.

The destroyer USS
Greer
was an ugly scourer of the seas that had been built during the last war and brought out of retirement at the start of the new one. Her role escorting convoys and running nautical errands was scarcely a glamorous one, but it should have been safe enough. After all, it wasn't as if the United States was at war.

On 4 September 1941 she was carrying passengers and mail to Iceland. She had reached a point south-east of Greenland when she was signalled by a British bomber that a German submarine had crash-dived some ten miles ahead. The
Greer
went to investigate and soon picked up the trail of the U-boat on her sound equipment. The British bomber stayed in the vicinity for about an hour until, running short of fuel, she made one final pass and dropped four depth charges at the submarine, the U-652. Then the bomber returned to its base.

The American ship continued to track the German U-boat for another two hours. In the belief that the
Greer
had dropped the depth charges and was pursuing her with the intent of dropping more, the U-652 fired a torpedo. It missed by a hundred yards, but in retaliation the
Greer
dropped eight of her own depth charges. A second torpedo was fired, and another eleven depth charges were thrown at the German boat. By the time the engagement was finally discontinued, the USS
Greer
had been in contact with the German for the best part of four hours.

It was a somewhat academic confrontation, for there had been no hits and no casualties on either side. Yet it was what Churchill had been praying for, what his life depended upon and what he had been willing to trade his soul for.

The Germans had attacked the United States Navy.

Amidst the sounding of alarums and the beating of many drums, President Roosevelt recalled Congress. He also announced he would make a major pronouncement about the German attack. The world held its breath.

Churchill, of course, did not. He was ecstatic. ‘At last! It means war. By God, if I'd known that was all it would take, I'd have torpedoed the bloody ship myself!' he declared. Roosevelt had told him that everything would be done to force an incident. Now the Germans had tumbled into the net.

It was also reported that the first snows had begun to fall in Russia. It wouldn't bring the German advance grinding to a halt, not yet; in fact, as Churchill told everyone within earshot, if the campaign was anything like that of Napoleon's, the freezing conditions would at first help the Germans. ‘The
Herrenvolk
have found themselves getting bogged down in the muds and sloughs of autumn. Yet as the soil of Mother Russia begins to freeze, so the invader will find firmer footing, for a while. But then—then!' he roared. ‘They will wake one grey and miserable morn to find they have thrust themselves firmly into the jaws of merciless winter!'

But for all his confidence, the castle of dreams that Churchill had constructed proved to be built of straw. He sat listening to the presidential broadcast in Downing Street; Sawyers had set up a radio on the Cabinet table and brought in a tray of refreshments, but as he prepared to leave Churchill motioned him to remain. ‘We do not walk out on the President when he is about to declare the depths of his devotion.' He smiled in anticipation.

Roosevelt made his broadcast from the basement of the White House. He was wearing a black armband for the occasion—his mother had died a few days beforehand. His words were blunt.

The attack on the USS
Greer
was, the President said, ‘piracy, legally and morally'. He said the German submarine had fired first. With no trace of
ambivalence, he declared that the Nazis planned to create ‘a permanent world system based on force, terror and murder.' This would be resisted, ‘no matter what it takes, no matter what it costs.'

‘When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike,' the President continued, adopting the fireside manner for which he was so renowned, ‘you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic. They are a menace to the free pathways of the high seas. They are a challenge to our sovereignty.'

In Roosevelt's eyes, the Germans had been not only indicted but already convicted. The palm of Churchill's hand smacked down upon the Cabinet table in approval.

‘The time for active defence is now,' the President continued.

Churchill sniffed.
Active defence?
Somehow the words seemed to imply an ambiguity, a softening in the President's tone and intensity. He was introducing shade where before he had been painting only in black and white.

He declared that US forces would shoot first upon any German rattlesnake found in American defensive waters. They would not wait to be bitten. They would defend not only American ships but all friendly ships in these waters. And those waters, he decreed, would be stretched to cover three-quarters of the Atlantic.

Fine words. A clear commitment. But he did not declare war. Indeed, he insisted that there would be no war: ‘There will be no shooting unless Germany continues to seek it.'

After the President had finished speaking, Sawyers switched off the radio. Churchill remained still in his chair.

‘Do we break out a bottle to celebrate, like?' the servant enquired.

‘To celebrate what, precisely?'

‘Active defence.'

‘I think not.'

‘Better than nowt, I suppose.'

Churchill's jowls had sunk. He looked intently at the brown tablecloth. It was some time before he replied. ‘Sawyers, my son informs me that there is a house of ill-repute in Cairo—one of many such establishments, I believe—where the proprietor has daubed upon his wall the message: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job”. You may remember the phrase.'

‘'Deed I do.'

‘It sums up perhaps what a large part of the world thinks of me. History has cast me in the role of the common tart. I smile at de Gaulle. I am nice to any number of Arabs. I am even forced to embrace the bloody Russians. I am reduced to plying my trade on every street corner. But the President is of altogether finer quality. He is like a beautiful woman
who knows she is desired, who is warm, suggestive, promises to lead you to paradise, even hitches her skirts halfway up her leg in anticipation…'—Churchill ground out his cigar with considerable violence—‘then leaves you to finish the job by yourself. The President is halfway to war, and three-quarters of the way across the Atlantic, but no further. It may all be, as you so charmingly put it, “better than nowt”, but at this moment I feel a rather desperate sense of disappointment.'

‘Can't you twist his arm a bit?'

‘You cannot woo with a whip, Sawyers,' Churchill replied quietly. ‘So we shall continue to protest our love to the President and hope that next time his skirts will be hitched a little higher, until, before he realizes it, he has reached the point beyond which all further protestations of virtue are useless.'

At around this time, when the focus of so much of the world centred on events in the Atlantic, the Prime Minister of Japan sought an audience with His Most Imperial Majesty, Hirohito. When he had first become Prime Minister four years earlier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye had been counted as a moderate, but experience had dealt with him harshly. His mood was sombre as he led his frock-coated cabinet and military commanders into the council chamber of the Kokyo imperial palace.

While their god-king sat and everyone else stood, Konoye outlined his plans. The bullying and blockading of the Western powers had cast long shadows across their land, he argued, and their dreams were in danger of falling about them like the leaves of an angry autumn. To do nothing would be to submit to both personal dishonour and imperial disaster. So he proposed to the Emperor that Japan should launch a simultaneous attack against all the Western colonial powers—America, Britain and the Dutch—‘to expel the influence of these three countries from east Asia, to establish a sphere of self-defence and self-preservation of the Japanese Empire, and to build a new order in greater east Asia.'

But in the obtuse and formalized manners that govern such audiences, it became clear that the occupant of the Chrysanthemum Throne might not be content. His tone implied anxiety; his ministers could not promise immediate victory in such an enterprise. He would therefore understand his ministers if in their wisdom they thought it necessary to seek more time in pursuing a diplomatic solution by initiating talks with the Americans. He mentioned only the Americans. The British, it seemed, were of far less interest to the imperial mind, the Dutch of no interest at all.

Confused by the unexpected chill in the mists that clung to the imperial mountaintop, the ministers
withdrew, promising that nothing would be done to pursue their plans for at least another month.

In London, Churchill could know nothing of this directly, but he did not need to. He saw the signs, even though he didn't immediately comprehend the significance of them all; the increase in Japanese military signal activity; their renewed diplomatic activity in Washington; their ominous silence in London, where Shigemitsu, their ambassador, had long since been recalled and not replaced.

Churchill was an old campaigner, with the scars of one who had fought in many wars and the instincts of a survivor. As the sun of summer cooled and another long winter beckoned, Churchill could hear the sounds of infamy on the march from halfway round the world.

Harriman walked with hunched shoulders down the steps that led from the rear of Downing Street towards the park. He was dressed in a raincoat even though the night was neither cold nor damp. He was worn out. He had only just stepped off the plane at Heston when he'd been summoned to The Presence; he hadn't even had a chance to wash. He was sore from the buffeting of the flight, his eyes ached from the weeks of close work, yet Churchill demanded still more. Everyone, it seemed, demanded more of him right now.

He was also bruised from the time he'd spent with his wife. Both of them realized they had wanted to be elsewhere. She had new interests, he was sure of it, just as he had grown distracted by Pamela, but they hadn't spoken about any of it. There were still the formalities of marriage to observe, and they were both formal people.

As he reached the bottom of the steps at the back of Downing Street, he stumbled. After six weeks in the bright lights of Washington and New York, he'd fallen out of the practice of walking almost blind in the blackout, and there had been so much of Winston's bloody brandy.

Suddenly he was aware of someone nearby, trying to catch up with him. A woman, judging by the rustle and the click of her heels.

‘You all right, love?' a raucous voice enquired. ‘Fancy a good time, do yer?'

He groaned. He wasn't in the frame of mind to enjoy being hassled, particularly by a Piccadilly warrior. He put his head down, strode forward, but she was plucking at his sleeve, slipping her arm through his.

‘You don't know how lucky you are, Mr Averell Harriman. One smile at any other woman on your first evening back and I'd have left much of your anatomy dangling from the hands of Big Ben.'

‘Pamela!'

And they were locked together in the darkness, panting out their greetings.

‘I was expecting you…back at the Dorchester.'

‘Couldn't wait.'

‘Wonderful surprise.'

‘Missed, missed, missed you!'

Then they were silent for a long time, holding each other, listening to the sounds of the night in the park. Owls, coots, the whisper of drying leaves. When at last they parted, they began walking towards the lake.

‘You must be tired,' she said.

‘Better now I'm with you.'

‘Even so.' She could sense a weariness that had burrowed through to his bones. ‘How was it back home?'

He wasn't sure if she meant his homeland or his wife. He chose the diplomatic path.

‘Chaotic. Confused. Washington crawling with quiet men who are determined on war and appeasers who would die to prevent it. The President sitting in the middle, bearing the imprint of the last opinion poll.'

‘You sound bitter.'

‘Not really. More frustrated. Roosevelt's heart's in the right place, but I guess in a wheelchair you learn to take things cautiously.'

An autumn moon shimmered off the lake. Ducks chattered to each other. One of the park's pelicans, ghost-like in the distance, stretched its wings.

‘Washington's floating on a lake of poison right
now. Lies, rumours, distortions. Everything we do gets twisted. The Germans are behind it, must be. There's an organized campaign—German money—to undercut everyone who gets involved in the war.'

‘You, too?'

‘Right in the damned middle.' He sighed, sounding old. ‘They've been peddling stories that I'm spending huge amounts of the Lend-Lease money on champagne and luxury hotels.'

‘That's so unfair.'

‘And off the mark. Who the hell have I bought champagne for? Apart from you, and that was with my own money.'

‘I suspect I'm not the safest alibi for you to offer, either,' she whispered, clinging to his arm.

‘So then they tweak the story, and claim it's the British officials who are spending the Lend-Lease money on high living. Oh, it makes great headlines. It's one bunch of cynical bastards we have back home.' His tiredness was causing him to lose his normal restraint. ‘Right now I feel as if I've spent the last month with every rat in the business taking free shots at me. Like St Sebastian. You know—the one who died with all those arrows sticking out of him?'

‘Now, would that be the Sebastian who was a member of the Imperial Roman guard? The one who was persecuted for his faith?' she enquired sweetly, mocking him gently, but he was too tired to notice.

‘I guess so.'

‘But he didn't die from the arrows.'