Churchill's Triumph (6 page)

“Are you sure it was Jerry? I sense the Russians themselves have been hacking away. Every bit of bathroom furniture is new, even the lavatory cisterns. Now, I can’t imagine a German dragging away a lavatory cistern, can you? But a Russian. . . ”

“They are the most awful brigands.”

“Strange people.”

“Still stranger allies.”

“Needs must.”

“We’re going to have our work cut over the next few days, Anthony, and not just with the Russians.”

“With Winston, you mean?”

“No, not him. You and I can always sweep up after him. Heaven knows, we’ve had enough practice. It’s the Americans I’m dicky about. Harry seems so listless. And Ed so. . . ”

“Useless,” Eden muttered, through a cloud of smoke, finishing the thought.

“But I rather like him.”

“Everyone
likes Ed. He has that charming capacity for bearing the imprint of the last bottom to sit upon him. But when it comes down to the serious stuff of
doing
something, he’s quite, quite useless.”

Edward Stettinius had only recently been appointed as Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He was graceful, easygoing, and irredeemably naïve. Harry Hopkins was none of those things. This informal but hugely influential adviser to the president was a ferret of a man who worked in the shadows and survived on a diet of nicotine and intrigue. He was gaunt, waxy-skinned, desperately frail. That he was still alive was a surprise to his friends, and that he had been able to make the trip to the Crimea a matter for astonishment. It had been almost too much for him. From the moment he had arrived he had been confined to his bed, and with him he had taken the steel wire that bound the U.S. delegation together.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Cadogan conceded. “Ed is always weathercocking. You know I’d done a deal with him? We’d agreed we wouldn’t put any other issue to bed before we’d discussed Poland. Put a bit of pressure on Uncle Joe, force his hand. Then Roosevelt arrives and it’s back to square one. Bricks without straw once more.”

Outside, the sun was beginning to settle, drawing the colors from the day. The sea became oily, the breeze brittle, mimicking Eden’s mood. Behind his elegant appearance he was a nocturnal pessimist, a man who shone for others in the daylight but who, alone in the dark corners of the night, found too few sticking places for his talents. In his own eyes he’d never truly succeeded at anything. Politics. Marriage. Money. Now he feared, at Yalta, he would find yet more failure.

“We’ll muddle along somehow, I suppose. As always.” He sighed.

“You know, Anthony, an uncle of mine once advised me never to go abroad. Said it was a horrible place. I’m beginning to think he was right. Last night I couldn’t find even a scraping of lemon peel. Had to take my gin-and-tonic
sans citron.
Bloody, I can tell you.”

“And I fear it will get bloodier still before they let us out of here,” Eden muttered, rattling in vain once more at the stubborn Russian window.

❖ ❖ ❖

Three delegations, three locations. The British with their sticky windows at the Vorontsov, the Russians some distance away at the palace of Yuspov, which had once been the home of a bisexual aristocrat who had helped murder the monk Rasputin. But the grandest of the settings was the Livadia, the place reserved for Roosevelt and the American delegation.

It was a summer palace built of sandstone and marble earlier in the century by the last Tsar, Nicholas. It contained many bedrooms. The Tsar had been said to use a different room every night for fear of assassination, sometimes changing rooms during the early hours. In the end, it had served no purpose. They had murdered him regardless. Indeed, he might have preferred to be shot in his bed rather than in that dank, dreadful cellar, but in the event the choice had never arisen.

While the arrangements were necessarily somewhat makeshift, the delegations were met with the highest standards of Russian hospitality. These included constant military patrols in the grounds that were doubled at night and armed soldiers every ten feet to guard the water supply. What it did not include, however, was privacy, a concept with which Soviet citizens were unfamiliar. There was no escaping the presence of Russian servants, imported from the Metropol to cook, to clean, to relight fires, and to lay dining-tables—and, of course, to remake beds. It seemed to matter little if the guests were still in them.

In a palace where there were often no doorknobs and where more than two hundred Americans had to share just six bathrooms, even the most fussy visitors had to compromise on their privacy. That included the president.

The first plenary had shown how tired Roosevelt was. It had been agreed that all the meetings of the Holy Trinity should take place at the Livadia to spare the chair-bound President the discomfort of traveling, yet he had already come six thousand miles. He was not at his best. He had been repetitious, dull, wayward. Even the incessant supply of cigarettes had failed to stimulate him, and he had a worrying cough. The session had been short, little more than an hour, and nothing of substance had been agreed. Stalin had doodled with a red pen, drawing wolves, Churchill had closed his eyes and contemplated, while Roosevelt simply sagged. Like an old man.

They had taken him quickly to his room for rest, and that was when Old Fenya had barged in with an armful of clean towels. No knocking—in the Soviet Union it wasn’t customary: there was supposed to be nothing to hide.

As she entered she saw, lying on the silken counterpane, an emaciated figure clad in nothing but a small towel that lay across his loins. His skin glistened from the oil that his black servant, Prettyman, had rubbed in to soothe the aches and sores of sitting so long, but it served only to emphasize the wasted muscle and wafer white skin. When he coughed she could see the pain trying to break through between the ribs. The pulse in his neck throbbed in protest. From a pad on his arms protruded wires that went to a small machine, over which hovered a man in naval uniform. This was Commander Bruenn, the President’s hard-pressed cardiologist. So intent was he that for a moment he didn’t notice Fenya—Prettyman saw her, but was uncertain what to do: he wasn’t used to giving commands. Roosevelt himself slowly raised his head and stared uncertainly.

Old Fenya didn’t need to be a physician to understand what she saw. The body was dead from the waist down, the legs little more than bleached matchsticks, and the decay was eating its way through the rest. Twenty-four years in a wheelchair would do that to a man. The eyes were sunken, purple-dark, empty pathways to the exhaustion within.

Old Fenya was used to suffering. She’d lost one husband to the purges, another to diphtheria and two sons to the war. There had been little enough pleasure in her life and an abundance of pain, but never in one spot as much helplessness as this.

She turned, weeping, and fled.

❖ ❖ ❖

There were other tears that day, but first there was laughter and excitement.

Sarah had gone with the other girls to the port of Sebastopol. The “other girls” were Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt’s married daughter, and Kathleen, the daughter of Averell Harriman. They were known as the Little Three, and they shared the ill-defined but vital duties of smoothing parental arrangements and, when necessary, their fathers’ tempers.

Today they had decided on a little sightseeing, and they had been driven west round the coast in a shiny black Packard, accompanied by a Russian naval officer with a prominent gold tooth who declared himself to be Boris and spoke excellent if stilted English. The day had thrown a blanket of grey across the countryside but the views from the coastal road were impressive and their spirits were lifted by two bottles of the sweet local champagne that, by the time they had arrived at Sebastopol more than two hours later, had been entirely demolished.

“That was for our lunch,” Boris declared, in apparent despair, when he inspected the damage. “I will try to find more.”

They giggled. They knew he had a case of the stuff in the boot.

Sebastopol nestled at the head of a sweeping bay. As they approached it along a road that fell casually down through gentle pine forests, it seemed a most tranquil setting, yet its distant beauty was deceptive. As they drew nearer they could see the outline of wrecked ships, scattered across the harbor like fallen crows. They were entering a graveyard. They kept stumbling across all sorts of mechanical skeletons—charred tanks, broken artillery pieces, derailed railway carriages, even the remnants of planes. And as they drew into Sebastopol, they were unable to find a single building that remained intact. It was as though an earthquake had erupted beneath the town, yet the ruins did nothing to diminish Boris’s pride.

“This,” he declared, “is a very beautiful church.” Indeed, it might once have been, but nothing had survived except for the gaunt outline of a tower.

On all sides, they found themselves being stared at. Everyone seemed to view them with suspicion, not just the Soviet infantrymen and sailors and blue-capped security guards, but also the civilians, the women in shawls who dragged bundles tied in rags behind them, the old men bent over the shafts of makeshift handcarts, those who stood buying, selling, haggling, arguing over scraps of clothing or meager trays of food, or old books, worn-out tires, a radio, an ancient heirloom, patched trousers, vodka. Wherever they walked they met eyes filled with envy and loathing, and accusation, for a glance was enough to show that these girls knew nothing of their suffering. Anna tried to give a child a bar of chocolate, but Boris stepped between them and with a few sharp words hustled the little girl away. “That is not necessary,” he explained, with a forced smile when he turned to Anna. “The children of the Soviet Union have everything they require.”

Sebastopol was a city of fallen walls and empty doorways, rusting gates that swung drunkenly on broken hinges and balconies that had lost whatever room they had once adorned. There was a bitter taste to the air that reminded Sarah of over-smoked herring. Whenever the breeze got up, small flakes of ash settled on her clothing.

By the time they stopped in an open space amid the rubble, which Boris tried to persuade them was “a very beautiful square,” they were glad of the third bottle of champagne.

After lunch they clambered back into the car, yet the day of discovery was not yet done. On the outskirts of the town they stopped beside a field. It was smothered in weeds. Nearby a cow was grazing, and in a distant corner they could see a copse of hurriedly nailed wooden crosses. An old woman was digging beside one, a handkerchief tied round her nose and mouth. And in the middle of the weed-strewn field was a rusting tank. Boris waved a hand to summon up its joys. “This,” he announced with a flourish, “is our main sports field. It is very beautiful. . . in the summer.”

Even for Boris it was an altar too high. He pulled a penitential face and Kathleen began to giggle. The other girls joined in. Boris was deeply offended, so they tried to make it up to him by feigning interest and asking questions, yet when it got to asking about the breed of the grazing cow they knew they were running out of steam. They decided to inspect the rusting tank.

“It is German,” Boris told them, “not at all beautiful.”

As they came close they could see the scorchmarks of the shell that had killed it, still smeared dark amid the rust. It had been blown on to its side and the turret was open like a gaping mouth. They scrambled up to it, excited, curious, until inside they found things—foul, putrid things—that they could barely tell had once been human. Sarah pointed in horror. A collection of bones clung to the lip of the turret. One still wore a wedding ring.

Then it was Boris’s turn to laugh.

“Why. . . why. . . ?” Sarah began, drawing back. “Why have they not been buried?”

“What?” Boris exclaimed, flashing his tooth. “But there are so many of them. It will take us years to get rid of them all.”

For him it was a statement of pride. And when they realized this, they asked to be taken home.

❖ ❖ ❖

The men dined together at the American residence in Livadia that evening: the three aging leaders, the unimpressive Stettinius, the overdressed Eden, the inscrutable Molotov. Averell Harriman, Churchill’s old family friend who was now the American ambassador in Moscow, also joined them and, with a couple of other Russians and the interpreters, they made thirteen in all. In hindsight, it seemed an unfortunate number.

Roosevelt played host, and the dinner lacked the abundance that, in their turn, Churchill and Stalin would later serve. The fare was straightforward, caviar, sturgeon, beef, washed down with vodka and several kinds of wine. The President was so impressed with the local Crimean champagne that he joked he would like to go into business with Stalin after the war as an importer. “We split everything fifty-fifty, eh, Marshal?” he enquired.

Stalin merely chuckled, while Churchill wondered why he’d been left out of this little deal. It was, of course, an oversensitive reaction on his part, but it had been one of those evenings when he felt as if he’d been rubbed all over with sandpaper. Now, already tender, he was about to get a damned good kicking.

Stalin raised his glass. “To the German officers we shall liquidate.”

“To the forty-nine thousand,” Roosevelt responded, and drank.

It was a schoolboy cruelty, a taunt, that made Churchill blanch in anger.

Fifteen months earlier, in Tehran, the three leaders had engaged in a monumental row. It had been an evening during which Stalin had drunk his fill and constantly needled Churchill, finishing by declaring that at the end of the war fifty thousand German officers should be put in front of a firing squad and shot. “That’ll be fifty thousand less the next time.”

The suggestion had horrified Churchill, who had also drunk his fill. He shot to his feet. “We British will never tolerate mass executions,” he had thundered. “We shall have justice, not butchery!”

Through clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke, Stalin’s eyes had twinkled in merriment. “What do you think, Mr. President?” he asked, drawing the other man in.