Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  Oh, but he could have made the difference. To lose the seat, to lose all they had fought for, for a thousand votes. Votes which he could undoubtedly have delivered, had he gone, and taken others with him. Had he fallen so far—was he so old, so distracted, so worn out that his entire life's work could have been pushed aside for a half-hour meeting with a bank clerk? He had saved Chartwell, for a while, but what would that be worth if what he feared and what Kitty had fought against came to pass? Nothing but ashes. At times Churchill disliked himself very much. Kitty had offered no recriminations, had died with great dignity, and alone. It only made Churchill feel worse.

  His path led him upwards, through the clinging mists to a high point above the lake where stood a small temple in the Greek style dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was here, on the bench thirty years before, that he had proposed to Clementine. She had been in a disdainful mood that day. He had lingered in bed and she had been on the point of packing her bags and leaving. Then they had walked and been caught by a shower of rain, and taken shelter in the temple. There, on the bench on which he was now sitting, he had asked her to marry him and to put up with all his impossible ways. “Most of them,” she had replied, “so long as you put up with an equal number of mine.” So it had begun, and continued. It would be a good end, whiling away their final days with each other.

  Except…

  Except that every time he looked ahead, he saw anguish walking arm-in-arm with disaster, and they would not leave him alone to die a graceful death. Hitler attacked him personally and viciously in the German press, called him a scheming warmonger and a drunkard, while Chamberlain treated him scarcely any better. It was difficult at times to know who posed the greater danger, the mad little Austrian who screamed and spat, or a British leader who sang his songs of silence. “Do not tie my hands,” the Prime Minister had pleaded to Parliament, justifying his negotiations with Hitler over Europe. Monstrous idiot. Didn't he realize that soon the rope would be knotted not for his hands but for his neck? For all their necks?

  Churchill knew he was a stubborn old man, and that was an end to it. And yet a beginning, too, perhaps. For besides being obstinate he was also eloquent—those were words that young Burgess had used about him, the day after Munich—and these troubled days were a time for eloquence rather than Chamberlain's songs of silence. He could continue to speak out, to persist. Warn of the dangers in Europe and fight for the right of Britons to be free and fickle, and not just vassals. It might mean tearing his party apart, but what did that matter when the country itself was on the brink of being torn apart? Country before party, always, there was no middle way.

  They could bury him with his conscience, at least, and maybe sooner than he cared for. He had been summoned to appear before the executive of his Epping constituency—to explain himself and his recent positions, in the words of the peremptory letter. To defend himself against charges of disloyalty, to show why he should not be put aside in the same manner they had cast aside poor Kitty, to argue that loyalty to a party and a misguided leader was not the highest duty of a politician. After all, what was loyalty? A word, an excuse, a shield behind which cowards hid their own nakedness. The party didn't need loyalty, it was suffocated in the stuff, what it needed so desperately was the fresh air of imagination and leadership.

  He had received a Christmas card from young Burgess, a hand-drawn cartoon which was crude but which displayed considerable talent. And insight—it had shown the entire Cabinet standing in a circle with their heads embedded firmly up the next man's backside, and although their heads weren't visible, most of the characters were easily recognizable. The figure at the front had a wing collar and was clutching an old umbrella. The cartoon was entitled simply: “Leadership.” A man of considerable imagination, was young Burgess.

  So…

  He didn't really have a choice. He must fight. Fight on. Then fight some more. Continue to fight until he had neither breath nor words left within him. For what else could he do? It was his nature.

  PART TWO

  AN END TO ILLUSIONS

  (Daily Express, Monday, January 2, 1939)

  THIS IS WHY YOU CAN

  SLEEP SOUNDLY IN 1939

  There will be no great war in Europe in 1939.

  There is nothing in our present situation which affords any ground to suppose that an upheaval can, or must, come.

  Nothing is here today that we have not experienced over and over again in our history—at moments when we stood on the threshold of an era of peace.

  What is it that makes the prophets of evil quake in their shoes? They see dictators in Europe. There have always been dictators in Europe. It is the natural form of government for many countries in that continent.

  They see rearmament going on at high speed.

  We have always had spells of that often before in this island. We have shied at all sorts of fears—and phantom fears…

  The peddlers of nightmare should pay a little more heed to British history and a little less to their own nerves. They might also consider the following facts in the world today.

  Britain grows more formidable. Mr. Chamberlain tells us that. She is stronger in Europe. When the Singapore base is ready this year, she will be stronger in Asia…

  There was a danger that there might be a great war over Czechoslovakia. If France had kept her word. If Britain had backed France in doing so. All the makings of a cataclysm.

  But Czechoslovakia is over and done with.

  Look forward, then, to a year in which the bulwarks against a general war will grow in strength. Remember that war, now too costly for little States, is also growing more and more impossible for great Powers. The destruction is too great. And the people know it.

  Believe in peace—and insist that Britain shall be strong in order to buttress your belief!

  Miss Susan Graham examined the newspaper that lay spread out on the floor in front of her with an expression of restrained contempt. The crusader on the masthead of the Express had a raised sword and jutting jaw, yet he seemed faintly absurd, almost comic, for his eyes were sightless and he had his back against an advertising box. He seemed to be defending a gargling solution for sore throats.

  Instinctively she smoothed out a crease across the newsprint. Hers was a neat and orderly life—as was expected of a postmistress in the sleepy seaside town of Bournemouth—a life spent on behalf of the community, helping others, not indulging her own feelings. Leave that to the French just across the Channel. So she had smiled and never wavered during the hectic weeks before Christmas as an unprecedented flood of letters and cards had poured across her counter. The whole town seemed to have been engaged in mass celebration, an outpouring of relief—no war!—so they did what the British did best. They queued. Queued to take money out of their savings accounts, queued to send telegrams, queued some more to buy postal orders for gifts and stamps with which to send them, then queued in search of string and brown paper for their parcels. The whole of Bournemouth seemed to have formed a perpetual line across her doorstep, yet she had coped, as she always did, and smiled at their expressions of joy and deliverance. Not that Sue believed a word of it. Shouldn't trust a German, not after what they did last time, particularly what they had done to her dad, a postman himself who had come back from the mud and gas of Passchendaele with half a lung and even less of a life. He hadn't complained—well, not much, just wheezed a lot. Sue didn't complain much either, just got on with things, and even as a teenager had taken charge of the post office, served the customers, and cared for her dad. Not much time for anything else, until he died, by which time it all seemed a little late. She was thirty-three, had just noticed a gray streak in the hair that she kept swept back in an unfashionable bun, and was as far back on the shelf as a bundle of last year's Christmas cards.

  Sue was not the excitable type. Perhaps that was why she knew the talk of peace was—what would her father have said?—“a load of bloody old cobblers.” Took two to make a peace, only one to make
a war, everybody knew that. Particularly Dr. Stern and his wife. They were Jews who had fled from Vienna and hadn't stopped running until they'd arrived in Eastcliffe. Pleasant couple, quiet. He tried to get on with his work as a family doctor as best he could, although truth be told a lot of people weren't too happy about taking their clothes off in front of a Jew, but he was cheap. He didn't insist on living well, he was simply grateful for the chance to live in any condition. Yet the doctor's wife had never quite completed the journey. Her heart and mind were still back home in Austria and her nerves had been lost somewhere on the journey. She rarely opened the door, even for the post, her eyes darting, filled with anxiety, and Sue hadn't seen her at all since the night the synagogues had been torched. Dr. Stern had explained that they hadn't heard from her mother or her sister who were still back in Vienna—at least, that's where they hoped they still were. They kept hearing terrible things about a place called Dachau.

  But Mr. Chamberlain and the Daily Express didn't seem to have heard about Dachau. Only a few miles outside Munich, so Dr. Stern said, and Mr. Chamberlain had been to Munich. But like Mrs. Stern, he seemed to have lost something on the journey back.

  Sue Graham was used to coping on her own, and didn't make a fuss. She'd cope with Harry Hun, too, if it came to that, and it probably would. In the meantime she would make a few preparations. Take out one of the flower beds—the roses, they were always so difficult in the salt winds—and plant more vegetables in the garden. Preserve a little more of the autumn fruits. And, just for tonight, she would light a fire to keep out the chill that was blowing from across the Channel and into her bedroom.

  She got down on her knees and rolled the pages of the Daily Express into long spills, which she folded neatly and settled in the grate beneath a few sticks of kindling and a sprinkling of coal. It took her two attempts and half the newspaper before the fire caught—the coal was damp—but at last her bedroom began to warm. That was about the only bit the Daily Express had got right. She would sleep soundly, for tonight.

  Burgess clung to the darkness, finding shadows, wrapping them around him like a cloak. He was following Mac, at a distance, and was anxious not to be seen.

  He had to find out who Mac's informant was. The last batch of contents from Sam Hoare's wastepaper bin had contained a note from Max Beaverbrook that had obviously been accompanied by a check—“a small contribution from an ample pocket”—with the suggestion that the note should not be kept. The sack of rubbish had also contained a sheet of blotting paper on which was imprinted an almost complete replica of a letter from the Home Secretary to the Prime Minister suggesting Beaverbrook should be brought back into Government—“possibly as Min. of Agriculture?” The material was so good it made him nervous. Was he being set up? Duped? He had to get nearer the source.

  So he had followed Mac for several evenings. He was scarcely a trained pursuer but Mac proved to be a creature of hopeless habit. Every evening he would walk back to his room in Kensington, using the same path across Hyde Park, the same route through the maze of streets in Notting Hill, never tarrying, never stopping to peer in a shop window, never taking time off for a quick pint, the same steady, stubborn step, as though he had established a pattern to his life that he could no more vary than a monk could rewrite the Ten Commandments. But habit was his undoing, for this evening he had emerged from Trumper's carrying a canvas bag—the bag, the one that always arrived with the rubbish—and instead of setting off across Hyde Park had turned for the Underground station. He had taken the Tube to Chigwell in Epping, where he disembarked and began walking once again with that steady, stubborn pace. Burgess followed, at a distance, shoulders hunched, feeling faintly ludicrous, until they had reached a small, poorly lit street of terraced Victorian red-bricks. Mac had knocked on one of the doors and stood for a moment bathed in a pool of light before entering with the familiarity of a man who was amongst friends.

  Burgess stood for a while in the shadows at the end of the street, his hand cupped around a burning cigarette, while he examined the house. Poor neighborhood, peeling paint, entirely unexceptional, apart from a children's tricycle that lay abandoned in the rug-sized front garden. So there were children. And he had the address. The electoral register should provide the name of the occupant. The mystery was beginning to unravel. Perhaps next week he would follow Mac's friend to ensure that she was, indeed, a cleaner at Sam Hoare's home. Three times a week, Mac had said. Shouldn't be too difficult. He took a swig from a quarter-bottle of Irish he carried in his raincoat pocket. He had difficulty replacing the top. His left and right hands seemed to be having a difference of opinion, arguing amongst themselves until they began trembling in frustration. At this rate he'd never get the top back on the bottle, so he decided to empty it. Easier that way.

  Then Burgess began laughing, mocking himself quietly amongst the shadows, until tears began to roll. What a ridiculous life he led. That morning he'd had breakfast at the Ritz with a senior member of the Labour Party, which had been arranged to discuss whether appeasement was a moral imperative or a doormat for dictators. Instead they'd ended up agreeing to discuss their own personal morality later that week at the Mandrake Club. Lunch had been taken at the home of Rozsika Rothschild—Burgess had been to university with her son, Victor, and she had become so impressed with Burgess's grasp of international affairs that she paid him a retainer to act as her informal investment consultant. “Put your money into war,” he had advised over the smoked salmon. “Take everything out of Europe and invest it in Rolls-Royce and General Motors.” She had thought the analysis penetrating and the advice shrewd, but she would not follow it. “I have half my family in Europe, Guy,” she had explained. “It would be like turning my back on them and abandoning them to the terror.” He had left her polishing silver photo frames with a handkerchief damp with tears.

  And now this. Scurrying around the back streets of London with his hat pulled low over his head, trying to lead a ridiculous double life when it was apparent to everyone that he couldn't even organize a single life properly. Hunting others—they said he was good at it, one of the best, but if that were so, why did he so often feel that he was the one being hunted? It was absurd. That's why he had to laugh at himself, otherwise he might start taking it all too seriously and end his days as messed-up as old Mac. That's why he had to drink, too. Go down with the whiskey rather than all the worries and woe. As for the other…Well, no one could accuse him of waving his dick in the dark. He was an outrageous, insatiable, out-and-out queer, the sort of person others expected to skulk around on street corners, and with the kind of habits few cared to investigate too closely. That's only Guy, they would say, you know what he's like. Then they would move on quickly to something else. No one wanted to get too close. It suited him down to the ground.

  A brilliant Suffolk morning. Cold, with a sun that sparkled off the flat, frosty landscape. The noises of beaters in the woods carried on the air and filled it with expectation. The killing time had come.

  Suddenly the wood erupted in an explosion of indignation and feathers. They flew low and in great numbers, wave after wave of them, mostly pheasant but also French partridge, English partridge, too, although it had been a bad year for the English bird. The damp autumn and cold winter had reduced their number dramatically. After breakfast the head keeper, Turner, had ridden up and down in front of the shooters on his pony, like a general issuing his final orders before the battle. “Me Lords—and those wanting to be—we ain't be shooting no English partridge today. On account of the fact that there ain't be enough of 'em. Plenty of the foreign type, and pheasant, if you be quick and have woked yoursel's up after last night's fodder. But you leave my English birds alone, and my beaters too, or you answer to me.” He was an original, was Turner, a life form considerably rarer than any partridge and one in far greater danger of extinction. The game birds might struggle through what was waiting for them, but not his kind. When the great estates had been bankrupted and broken up, as they would be
, the Turners of this world would be gone forever.

  Chamberlain stood on his peg, a small, gangling figure, narrow shoulders, long arms, his moustache as ever at the droop, his three-piece Harris tweed suit firmly buttoned. His gun was up, his shoulders swiveling. A crack of gunfire, the wooden stock digging into his shoulder. A high angled blast of shot, right and left. It brought down two hen pheasants. They hit the ground with considerable force only yards from his feet. First blood.

  And still they kept coming. Reload. Another savage blast of the shotgun. When the smoke had cleared, he looked down at the misshapen and brilliantly colored remains of a cock pheasant.

  So it went on. Feet steady, gun up, swing the shoulders. Kill. Reload. Again! Both barrels. One bird missed, another dying in a graceful arc that ended in a ball of feathers bouncing off the frozen soil. New gun, fresh prey, more bloody feathers.

  “All in all it's what I'd call a splendid start to the new year. Don't you think so, Neville?” Sam Hoare, the Home Secretary, had the peg next to his Prime Minister. Now he approached, holding out a hip flask which they shared as they walked, guns broken, to the next beat.

  “A year of achievement, Sam, which will deliver unto us all those things the people need. New homes, new hospitals. A Government committed to the highest moral standards.” Chamberlain's mood was crisp, like the air.