Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “I meant what I said, Neville,” he began, almost before he had set foot inside the door, “about old friends and associates. I realize it will be of little comfort to you in present circumstances, but I have never been more distressed in my parliamentary life than having to speak against you.”

  Chamberlain steepled his fingers. “Old friends and associates,” he repeated softly. “Leo, I firmly hope that we are. And it's in that sense that I wanted to speak with you.”

  He looked through the window—it was a perfect spring day. A day of renewal. As it should be. “We have had our differences, genuine on both our parts, and nothing would please me more than if we could resolve them.”

  “Certainly. But how?”

  “Not with glib words, not with any sudden discarding of principle—we have both been too long at the front for that. But perhaps by working together, in the common cause, we might yet gain a better understanding of each other's point of view.”

  Amery looked sharply at Wilson. These were his words, not Chamberlain's. Wilson smiled through thin lips—he was standing by the window, his back to the daylight, in silhouette, a little bent. A dark figure from a children's fairy tale, Amery thought.

  “I hope to construct a new Government, Leo, in the common cause. A Government of all the parties and all the talents.” A pause while it sank in, waiting for a reaction. “I would like it to include your talents, too.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “What capacity would you like?”

  “Depends what's available.”

  Chamberlain looked at Wilson before replying.

  “Everything is available.”

  “Everything?”

  “Anything beyond this desk.”

  “Air Secretary. Home Secretary,” Wilson added for clarification, trying to pitch it right.

  “Chancellor? Foreign Secretary?” Amery pressed, raising the stakes.

  A long silence. Chamberlain looked once more towards Wilson.

  “Do I take it that the Foreign Secretary's post might be available?”

  “If needs be.”

  “And Halifax?”

  “He repeated to me less than two hours ago that I have his complete support.”

  “And less than two hours later you offer up his job…”

  “These are hard times, Leo.”

  “And how hard will the times have to get before in turn you offer up my job?”

  “I'm sure it would never come to that…”

  Amery remained silent for a while, until the silence began to hurt. Indecision? Calculation? Amery's face revealed nothing.

  “What are you thinking, Leo?”

  “I was wondering, Prime Minister, how you could so misjudge a man. And so misjudge a country.”

  Then he turned and left, dragging Chamberlain's dreams behind him.

  Burgess examined himself in the mirror. He looked awful. “Mac, I'm sorry.”

  “So, I suspect, is your liver.”

  “We can't all survive on half a pint of bloody mild, you know.”

  “So long as we survive, sir.”

  Survival. It had come down to that, hadn't it? All the idealism and nobility had at last been shoved aside as the world focused on only one thing. Survival. And Mac was giving him a hard time about his bloody shirt.

  “Look, I was up all night wandering around Westminster, watching history being made.”

  “Bit like a bed, is history. One minute it's made, next minute it's an awful mess.”

  “What are you going on about? Why the hell am I here?”

  So Mac told him of his morning's work on two customers. One had said he'd been offered the job of Secretary of State for Air, and promptly fallen asleep. So a reshuffle was in the offing, a last desperate throw of the dice.

  “Won't work,” Burgess concluded defiantly. “Chamberlain's got to go.”

  “Which is what made the other customer so interesting. A senior Whip, he was, hadn't slept. Like you, in desperate need of a bit of smartening up. So how is our Mr. Chamberlain? I asked him. Been up all night trying to save him, he replied. Then he said: 'A complete bloody waste of time. Party's full of incomparable cretins.'”

  “Told you so. Chamberlain's for the taxidermy department.”

  “So I told him how sorry I was to hear that, and asked if we might be seeing more of Mr. Churchill. Hold your chin up, please, Mr. Burgess.”

  Mac tilted the chin up with a finger in order to expose the neck, and started scraping.

  “So what did he say?” Burgess demanded through gritted teeth.

  “Not a lot, sir. But thought it was interesting. That's why I had to call you. For which I apologize.”

  “Don't apologize, just bloody explain.”

  “He sat just where you're sitting. Neck up in the air like a Christmas turkey. Had a bit of trouble making out what he was saying, to be honest. But I think I got it.”

  Burgess could do little more than grunt in frustration.

  “But I think he said Mr. Churchill would become Prime Minister over his dead body.”

  Churchill was taking his regular afternoon nap at the Admiralty when the phone rang. Had to be something important, his staff had strict instructions otherwise. Wanted at Downing Street, he was told. The pace was heating up. He dressed quickly and strode across the parade ground at Horse Guards, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his silver-topped stick flying out in front of him. Marching towards the sound of gunfire.

  He still felt the effects of his amusing lunch. Carlton Grill. A splendid occasion full of dark humor and outrage, entirely worthy of such a day. Kingsley Wood had been insistent that Churchill should give him a little time, and such had been his passion that Churchill found himself feeling not so much imposed upon as intrigued. Wood was normally a man of endeavor rather than outrage, the type who formed the backbone of the party, an unimaginative loyalist who as Secretary of State for Air held one of the key posts in the Government—at least, so Wood himself had thought until he had discovered that his prized Cabinet post had been offered to others on at least three separate occasions since ten o'clock that morning. Through mouthfuls of bloodied beef and horseradish he had grown incandescent, the veins on his temple matching the color of the wine. Churchill found himself in the unusual position of being reduced to the role of spectator, so he sat, ate, and watched the Prime Minister's support being carried away on a tide of injury and excellent claret. He couldn't deny that he had rather enjoyed the experience.

  And now a summons. The policeman at the door offered a crisp salute and—was it Churchill's imagination?—an extra broad smile. The staff always seemed to be the first to know. Churchill continued his march down the long corridor that led from the front hall to the Cabinet Room. He was just about to reach for the polished brass handle when, as if from nowhere, Horace Wilson appeared at his elbow. “My dear Winston, a moment of your time?” Wilson had a disagreeable habit of making his requests sound like papal edicts. Churchill was about to pull rank and excuse himself on the grounds that the Prime Minister came first and in any event Wilson was an irritating office junior, but it would have been a pointless gesture. Downing Street was a magical fortress, a castle of intrigue, and Wilson was its ferocious gatekeeper. Not even one of Goering's thousand-pounders could get to Chamberlain without first obtaining clearance from Wilson, so it was said, and today was not the day for Churchill to kick over the established order, not when so many others were doing it for him. Puffing smoke, he followed Wilson into his gatekeeper's lodge. He found Ball already there.

  “Problem, Winston,” Wilson began after Churchill had taken a seat in one of the low armchairs. Wilson leant against the mantelpiece, ensuring that he towered over the other man. Churchill, encased in the leather arms, suddenly felt stuck. He offered no more than a grunt in reply.

  “Guns,” continued Wilson.

  “Guns?”

  “Yes, you know, the things you shoot people with?”

  Churchill had neve
r cared for Wilson. He liked men of passion, of exuberance, even men of occasional folly, but Wilson was altogether much too self-contained, a civil servant to the core. Cut him and you'd find nothing but ink. “Don't bugger around with me, Horace, I'm not in the mood for it and I've got a lot to do. What bloody guns?”

  “Four hundred thousand rifles.”

  “Ah, those. Been waiting to be collected for a week or more.”

  “Mausers.”

  “When are you going to pay for them?”

  “German Mausers.”

  “Snatched from under the nose of the enemy.”

  “Did you ever pause to think, Winston?”

  “Think? About what?”

  “Why the Germans would let you have four hundred thousand of their newest rifles?” Churchill glowered from his seat. “What are you trying to say?”

  “It's not what I want to say, it's what others will say if ever they hear of this…”—he searched for the words—“extraordinary affair.” He paused to light a cigarette, chasing the smoke away with a slowly flapping hand. “Did you ever consider that the enemy might know about it—must know about it? And why they would let you continue with it? The whole of the Western Front is buzzing with agents and spies, and into that cauldron you sent—who? Boothby? Not a trained agent or negotiator, merely a—well, in all honesty, merely a parliamentary crony of yours. A notorious drunk. And, incidentally, a sworn opponent of the Prime Minister. Voted in the Opposition Lobby last night. Nothing clearer than that. And you expect people to believe he went to Europe to help Neville's cause?”

  “Some very fine men voted in that Lobby last night.”

  “So you say. So we would expect you to say. After all, it's only a matter of office that kept you out of it yourself.”

  Churchill's clenched fists pounded the arms of his chair. “How dare you! What in blazes are you trying to suggest?”

  “I dare,” said Wilson softly, “because others will dare.”

  “What—others?”

  “Berlin, for God's sake!” Ball snapped, joining in at last, reminding Churchill that he was outnumbered. “Anyone who wants to do the British cause harm. Boothby trampled around the German border like a hog through bamboo. Everybody heard him, all the way to Amsterdam. They were waiting for him.”

  “With four hundred thousand brand-new Mausers? I scarcely think so.”

  “You don't think for one moment we'll get them, do you? We might pay for them, of course, get a few crates as a first shipment. Then Goebbels will release his dogs. Announce that he's made fools of the British yet again. Duped them into a desperate bid to buy Nazi rifles—and why? Because Nazi rifles are the best—even Winston Churchill says so. And because the British are weak, haven't got enough weapons of their own. He'll play it like a fiddle in every neutral country in Europe.”

  “You can't be certain—”

  “Certain enough to give you Boothby's itinerary for every hour he spent on the continent,” Ball spat back. “Every place he visited. Every seedy little railway room and hotel corridor he prowled doing your business. Your business, Winston. Which is something else Dr. Goebbels is likely to pick up on.”

  “What has that club-footed degenerate got to do with me?”

  “Winston, Winston,” Wilson sighed, intervening again as patronizingly as he could. “Think about it. Out of Government you were Neville's fiercest critic. In Government you have been his biggest thorn. You are the country's most ambitious and, many would say, most reckless politician. The makings of a dictator—even some of your own Admiralty staff say so. You send a renowned opponent of the Prime Minister abroad to buy German arms—without discussing it with any of your colleagues first.”

  “Action! Action this day!”

  “Yes. But you can see how it might look. Wouldn't need a master of propaganda like Goebbels to make mischief with that. He'd have you walking in the Führer's footsteps before the first crate had been unwrapped.”

  “You cannot believe I could be capable of treachery…” Churchill insisted, his voice cracking with passion.

  Wilson paused. Treachery? They would know, very shortly, in a few hours, perhaps. Where he had got his money from. But until then…

  “Of course not. But others would, all over Europe. And perhaps quite a few in this country, too. The madness of the Churchills, they would say.” He'd been waiting to use those words, knowing that if ever he could talk of such things in Churchill's presence then the argument was already won. He watched his victim writhe with misery in his chair. Churchill was panting, short of breath as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. He hadn't been prepared for this. Of course he hadn't discussed it, but neither had he made a secret of it, even asked the Treasury to pay for the damned things. But they'd been stalling. Now he thought he understood why.

  Ball cut through his misery. “If a word of this gets out, you'll be ruined, Winston.”

  Churchill hadn't seen it like this before, hadn't even thought of such possibilities—yes, hadn't thought it through, had rushed ahead, borne along by the excitement and passion of war, like a cavalry charge, only to find himself entirely cut off and surrounded. As a young man in such circumstances he would have let forth a great yell and charged, content to die in the heat of battle. But he was no longer young and he didn't want to die, not yet. And not in this way, not sliced to the meanest of slivers by tongues rather than by swords.

  “Who…knows of this?” Churchill asked with difficulty, as though his jaw had been severely broken.

  “All of it? Only a handful,” Wilson replied. “And Neville has told them all, face to face, that it must go no further.”

  “No one doubts your abilities in fighting and winning this war, Winston,” Ball added, “so long as you remember who the enemy is.”

  “The Prime Minister is very mindful of your loyalty to him in recent months.”

  “Then I am…”—Churchill was about to say “his hostage,” but the words would not come—“as always, overwhelmed with gratitude.”

  Churchill found his way to the Cabinet Room through a mist of confusion and despair. Halifax was already there, the Chief Whip, too.

  “Ah, Winston,” he heard Chamberlain greet him as though from a profound distance. He heard more words. About Chamberlain's continuing hopes of reforming his Government as a coalition. But also about inevitable difficulties. Of being prepared for the worst—“the worst” appearing to mean any Government other than his.

  “There is one point of considerable relevance,” Chamberlain was saying in his clipped, prissy voice. “As we all know, there are some who have put Edward's name forward as a potential successor…”

  Even in despair, Churchill found his brain digesting the red meat that was being thrown to him. So, the idea of a Chamberlain coalition is sinking even as they try to launch it. No surprise there.

  “There are also some who suggest that his position in the House of Lords would make this difficult. Remove him from the center of the stage, as it were. It is, after all, nearly forty years since we last had a peer as Prime Minister…”

  Chamberlain was playing with his pen, turning it over and over. His fingers seemed stiff, awkward, those of an old man. Or was it simply Churchill's mind that had suddenly grown clumsy?

  “Quite irrespective of other names I might put forward, Winston,” the Prime Minister was saying, “I need your thoughts. If events dictate that I must recommend to His Majesty that he should call upon someone else to form a Government, would a seat in the House of Lords be an automatic bar?”

  So, he wants Halifax, but isn't sure he can manage it from the Lords. Wants my approval. Wants Churchill to say it's not a problem, so no one else can say it's a problem. Yet if I say it is a problem, I will be branded the most ungracious of colleagues, the most self-serving of men. A man who would say or stoop to anything to meet his ambition of becoming Prime Minister. A man who would…Suddenly he had an image of Horace Wilson. His thin face with the lizard-like eyes was laughing
at him. And as he laughed, as his mouth came open and the teeth were exposed, the face slowly transformed itself into that of Josef Goebbels. The same, soulless mask…And he was waving a brand-new Mauser rifle.

  From somewhere in the distance, Churchill could hear a voice talking about a cardinal constitutional issue. Asking to know whether he could think of any reasons why a peer's name should not be considered. Putting him to the test. With the Chief Whip as witness. But all he could think of was guns, hundreds of thousands of them. And why a man as grotesquely incompetent as Chamberlain could have presided for so long over so much folly. Why ineptitude had flourished while a Churchill was once again to be denied the role for which he had been born, for no better reason than the jealousies and intrigues of lesser men. The Churchills' fatal flaw. To be too good for the job.

  He couldn't give an answer. Then he found himself in the garden, with Halifax. Drinking tea. Being civil. So terribly English.

  Thank God it was a quiet day for war. There were endless meetings. The front door of Downing Street swung on its hinges so many times that the doorman told his wife it was like running a brothel in Marrakesh. And everything at the rush. No sooner had their tea begun to cool than Halifax and Churchill were summoned back to the Cabinet Room, where they found Attlee and another senior Labour figure, Greenwood, sitting opposite the Prime Minister. Few formalities, no small-talk. Chamberlain stiffened. “Will you serve in coalition under me?”

  “No,” came the blunt reply.

  “Why not?” Chamberlain was hurt, unaccustomed to the lack of subtlety.

  “Because we don't like you, Mr. Chamberlain. We detest your leadership, think it's been evil,” they said.

  In other circumstances, Churchill might have enjoyed this joust, but not now. There could be only one winner of this tumble. Halifax.

  The Labour Party was a beast burdened by its own overdeveloped sense of fair play. Revolution had to be pursued strictly by the rule book; after all, if you were going to ransack the pockets of the rich, it was only fair that it be carried out in a systematic and orderly fashion. So the Labour leaders informed Chamberlain that they were only giving their personal opinions, and they would have to consult their party executive for a formal decision. By chance, the executive was gathering in Bournemouth for the start of the party's annual conference. “But take it from me,” Attlee said, “Hell will freeze before they agree to serve under you.”