by Don Gillmor
The destroyers were World War I vintage, ancient hulks on the verge of being scuttled, though this was left unsaid. In return for this dubious gift the Americans got land on Canadian and British soil to build military bases. King realized that this agreement essentially shifted Canada’s primary alliance from Britain to America. It was logical certainly, inevitable even. If King had learned one thing, it was to seize upon historical inevitabilities. If you didn’t, someone else would and take the credit. Though how close should they get to the Americans, those bare-knuckle optimists, those uniquely sunny brutes? The polio-stricken Roosevelt was a curious choice to lead a people who saw health as a form of divinity.
King knew that the president was facing an election and that it was much on his mind. He asked him if he was confident of his chances.
“I could only be defeated by peace, Mackenzie,” he said through the haze of his cigarette. “In times of peace, the people want a manager. In times of trouble, they want a leader.”
“There is no danger of peace, Franklin, I can assure you.”
King marvelled at how alike he and Roosevelt were; both disdained pretension, sought simplicity, and trusted in God.
While King chatted amiably with FDR’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, Roosevelt drafted a joint agreement for defence between the two nations. He wrote it out in pencil on a piece of paper under the title “Permanent Joint Board of Defense.”
“I wonder about the use of the word ‘permanent,’ ” King mused.
“Who knows what the future will bring, Mackenzie,” FDR said. “What if Canada is invaded? We would like to be able to get three hundred thousand troops onto Canadian soil within three hours.”
They had wanted to get troops on Canadian soil in the past, but had been unsuccessful, thank God.
Before going to bed that night King read from Ezekiel, which seemed to be calling to him of late.
In the morning it was warm and the air heavy. King sat in the president’s car as they rolled slowly past people waving flags. FDR inspected the Pennsylvania Regiment, which was assembled in a field. Afterwards they all sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and King felt his body swelling, as if it were preparing to rise upward. You completed one stage on this earth and began another. He had had a vision that morning while lying half asleep—the most receptive state—of climbing a staircase to find a blank white wall. It was not yet his time to go, that’s what the dream was telling him. Too much to do.
When they parted, Roosevelt leaned toward King. “If anything more is needed, Mackenzie,” he said through that winning smile, “let it be done without my knowledge.”
3
QUEBEC CITY, 1944
Winston Churchill took King into the map room they had laid out in the Citadel and showed him the battle areas. “The British troops are here,” Churchill said, pointing to a spot near the Adriatic. “They will go over the mainland and up the route that Napoleon took, driving into the Balkan states during the winter. Unless, of course, the war is over by the end of the year. God willing, it will be. I suspect there will be skirmishing in the Alps for some time, however. Hitler and his gang have nothing to lose at this point—they know they’re condemned.”
Churchill looked healthy. He was drinking very little (in contrast to King’s London visit when Churchill was tight all the time). But Roosevelt looked desperate. His forehead perspired and his face was flushed, and his leg seemed to have atrophied further. All three men were facing elections, King mused. He wondered if Roosevelt would last that long.
In the dregs of his morning tea Mackenzie King saw what appeared to be a guardian angel with a banner. A sign of something. Also the number thirty seemed to be taking on unusual import. In the House a few days earlier he had stared at the opposition benches to see three occupied seats and one empty (3 and 0). When he glanced at his watch, it was exactly three o’clock.
At lunch, King scanned the newspapers for unfavourable cartoons of himself. The newspapers had made sport of his not being included in meetings between Churchill and Roosevelt despite Canada’s being the host country. They failed, as always, to see the subtler and more pertinent role, King thought. Churchill didn’t entirely trust Roosevelt, and that feeling was mutual. Both distrusted de Gaulle, and had no faith in Stalin whatsoever. And there was something comforting in King, in his neutrality, a neutrality that transcended politics. I am the facilitator, King thought, the translator.
So the facile cartoons didn’t irk. What did was his woeful knowledge of history and events. Foreign issues were bad enough, but his knowledge of Canadian history was impoverished. I have been too much of a recluse, he thought, my mind concerned with lesser things. Churchill had the world crammed into that head, a brain fuelled by champagne and cigars for weeks on end. But war was the breath of life to him. He knew the details of a hundred wars and was certainly enjoying this one.
King remembered wandering in the rubble of London, the rain-soaked, soot-stained brick lying in heaps. He had had someone from the Canadian embassy gather stones from the remains of Westminster Hall and had them shipped to Kingsmere, a glorious addition.
He had had a vision the night before of ruins, columns lying broken, but it wasn’t London. Perhaps it was Greece. In this vision, his brother, Max, appeared. When he was alive, Max had been a doctor, and his presence usually meant healing. He was always comforted by the appearance of Max, whether in dreams or at his table-rapping sessions. The other figure was disturbing, however. A woman, naked save for a pair of shoes, sitting on a fallen column (Doric, he suspected). She was clearly aggrieved, though showed no sign of any wound. Could this be Velma (or Ann or Dorothy or any of the other prostitutes he had attempted to redeem)? The fallen woman. But what could be the possible significance now? King went back to his vision, trying to recall the detail, which had evaporated so quickly. The columns were Doric, he was sure of it now. His mistake was thinking it was Greece, that it was antiquity. No, this was the Brandenburg Gate. Of course! What had been the gateway to the sanctuary lay in ruins. Berlin was in ruins! But the woman. Was she Germany? One of the few countries that eschewed feminine metaphor. Die Fatherland. They would need healing when it was all done; Max was telling him this.
He summoned Laurier in the evening, using the plodding, sometimes infuriating table rapping. He didn’t want to chance a medium here at the summit.
—Wilfrid, it seems that we are finally at the very centre of this dreadful business. I’m afraid that Roosevelt may not see the end of it.
I tally blade (?).
—History will miss him.
Histry berry occidents (accidents) vbising (?) to be shut in odder (order).
—The French question plagues me, Wilfrid.
No response was forthcoming, Laurier distracted with something in the spiritual dimension, perhaps. What distractions existed there? Three minutes lumbered by. How did time pass among the infinite? Perhaps King lacked the spiritual connection to summon these people. Sixteen discouraging minutes, then finally, King felt a response.
I pricked everton. (Picked? Plagued? Everyone?)
—Is there no answer?
All rations (nations) are unanswerable questions Mackenzie though bost (most) disguise it fore (more) cleverly that (than) we do.
—My place in history, Wilfrid …
That tactful pause.
Luddy min snoot.
Over and out.
There was a disagreeable discussion with Ralston on the issue of conscription. King was loath to send men into battle. Borden had been loath to in the last war, but now they knew the true horror of what had gone on in Europe, and King was even more reluctant. And the natural forces that pulled at the country were aligned on opposite sides of the issue, which made it even more problematic. In Quebec, which had elected him with such emphasis, 73 percent had voted against conscription; in the rest of Canada, 80 percent had voted in favour of it. King’s compromise, “Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary,” was inspi
red, but it would only hold back the waters for so long. He was free to implement conscription, but there would be both a political and a human cost. With luck the war would end before a decision had to be made.
But Ralston was agitating to send some of those who had been conscripted for home service only, the so-called Zombies. Quebec’s premier, the masterful and worrisome Duplessis (King had heard that the man had given appliances to rural Quebecers in return for votes), gave a gallant speech for the sake of Churchill and Roosevelt, extolling the patriotism that soared in the heart of every Quebecer. It was only a few hundred yards from here where Wolfe’s men had climbed L’Anse au Foulon and Montcalm had doomed himself, the battle for a continent decided.
Roosevelt was coming out of the sunroom with a cocktail in his hand, pushed by his imposing wife, who King thought looked like a painting of a defective Dutch royal from two centuries ago. A forceful woman, though, and an engaging dinner companion. Roosevelt had his cigarette with that long holder, though King noticed he rarely puffed on it.
“Mackenzie, join us for a drink, won’t you.”
“Of course.”
As he toasted FDR’s health (barely able to look him in the eye), King thought that it was essentially a religious war between those who denied God’s revelation of Himself in Christ and those who accepted it.
They all sat, of course, on the bomb, that secret knowledge. It could prove to be an agent for total destruction. The Bible says we shall have forty years of peace, and then Armageddon. The Russians were working on their own, using research stolen from the Americans. The Germans hadn’t made much progress, it was being reported. God help us if they do.
He read Ezekiel 31 at breakfast, the cutting down of the lofty cedar that tried to rise so high above all the others. Perhaps this was mankind. The bomb would lay waste to all life, a modern version of the Flood … “for they are all given over to death, to the nether world among mortal men, with those who go down to the Pit.”
King wondered if War Secretary Stimson was being seduced by the imperial notion of a Pax Atomica. Of course the U.S. would need to control the world’s supply of fissionable material. The Russians wanted Libya and Tripolitania because it would give them access to the uranium deposits in the Belgian Congo. Canada was supplying the U.S. with uranium from the Eldorado Mines at Great Bear Lake. The U.S. government had first ordered 8 tons of uranium for the Manhattan Project. The next order was for 60 tons. Then 350 tons, and now 500 tons.
The alliance between Canada and America still troubled King. The Americans had built the Alaska Highway, a project that Canada couldn’t have managed on its own. Still, they had access through the Canadian north and some claim to it now. The relationship was always going to be a question of balancing friendship and imperialism. At any rate, the complicity between the two countries was cemented with this atomic project, whatever it led to.
The uranium was refined in Canada, then shipped to New Mexico, where the scientists were working around the clock to build the bomb. King had heard that Eldorado was falling behind in its orders. The project had already cost two billion dollars and caused some awkward political contortions. Just look at Oppenheimer. If he wasn’t a Communist he was the next best thing. But he was a genius, and one always forgives genius in wartime.
Oppenheimer said that no demonstration would be sufficiently spectacular to guarantee the primitive awe the weapon deserved; for that they would need a city. Yet General Eisenhower was lobbying hard not to use it. An irony: the communist scientist in favour of the bomb, the Republican general against it. Eisenhower was against dropping the bomb for two reasons: It was unnecessary, the Japanese were going to surrender anyway; and it would make a terrible mark in history, a black smudge beside America’s name. Perhaps he was right, or perhaps as a general he disliked the idea that all he had dedicated his life to was suddenly null. Five thousand years of discipline and sacrifice, armies clashing with their steel, that bloody tradition that became noble in the retelling. The military become superfluous in one nineteen-kiloton flash; war now the domain of science and politics.
Oppenheimer had been seduced by its awful promise, the pure and instant physics: a fiery centre that produced a ring of black smoke, the fireball extinguished in a flash and the smoke rising up—24,000 feet in four seconds—a miraculous growth that grew to 36,000 feet in another few seconds, a plume of white, black, yellow, and red that punched through the clouds with the greatest force the world had seen.
The bomb was to deter the Russians as much as finish the Japanese, King mused. Already they had to look to the next war.
4
NUREMBERG, 1946
Mackenzie King sat in the gallery that looked down on the dock. Ribbentrop and Goering were the last to come in and they sat beside one another. To think these men had brought such destruction upon themselves, their country, and the world. King felt something for them; they had come under the spell of the devil, who wasn’t here to answer for his evil. The German lawyer was plodding to the point of stupidity. Perhaps this was part of the plan: to arrange for them to be defended by a simpleton reading endless affidavits.
Goering seemed half his former size, diminished in every way. Ribbentrop was taking notes, weary looking, an old man suddenly, a shadow. He was planning to write his memoirs, King had heard, and there would be several volumes, everything done on the monumental Nazi scale. Surely he knew he would be executed. Did these men know of the burning flesh in the ovens, children clawing at the doors? Who can see inside their souls? Apparently a psychiatrist was trying to do just that. King doubted he would have much luck. He had met these men in the guise of gentlemen (von Neurath was educated at Oxford) and they had presided over hell on earth. Such was the devil’s power of disguise. Hitler was a false god, Germany itself a false idol, and now the Germans were like Job, destined to live “in desolate cities, in houses which no man should inhabit, which were destined to become heaps of ruins … he will not escape from darkness, his emptiness will be his recompense.”
The tour of the prisons had been dismal. That nauseating odour. And there was Hess in his cell, eyes burning like coal, possibly mad. King had spoken with him several years ago, but it was impossible to tell if he remembered him. He stared like a zoo animal, like those bison that had been sent to Berlin. The exhibits were ghastly beyond belief; using human skin to make shoes. If there was anything to be gained from all this, King thought, it was that there would be a newfound embrace of divinity in the world. What was in doubt will become accepted belief. The scriptures will become literal truth, the world will evolve to a higher plane, and there will be a Second Coming. King had been told of a medium that did materialization, which seemed somehow dreadful: to behold your dead mother (in the dress she was buried in? In a gossamer gown?). But it was said to be beautiful; it must be where the conception of angels came from.
It was a moral universe; if you let Christ out of your life, Satan rushed in. This was clear.
In King’s vision that morning, a Mother Superior stood beside him. He was holding a roll of paper under his arm. Perhaps new commandments—King picked to be Moses, a manifesto to keep mankind from destroying itself in the twentieth century.
Goering looked up from the dock and met his gaze briefly, and King was relieved when he turned away.
Goering sat in his cell toying with the copper cartridge, which gleamed dully in the prison light. He had enjoyed sparring with the prosecutors. Ribbentrop hadn’t had the will to respond to them with any vigour. He hadn’t the will for much. As foreign minister he had been weak and indecisive, and in the witness box he gave the impression that he would fall apart at any minute. Goering recalled his first meeting in Dortmund when he declared that in the future he would be the only man in Prussia to bear responsibility, that every bullet fired from a police pistol was his bullet, and if that was murder, then it was his murder. A convenient moral loophole, and so many ran to embrace it. This, he mused, was the beginning of empire.
Hitler was gone, dead in the bunker. The people loved him, no one would doubt that. They fought with loyalty, selfsacrifice, and courage even though they didn’t want war. The Volk never want war, this is understood. They hunger for leadership and complain when they have it.
Blood will tell.
Had it been Himmler who dreamed up the medical experiments? Such a tedious mind. A buffoon whose suicide was welcomed by all. Yet another shirking of his responsibility. And Ley too, hanging himself in his cell. So he wouldn’t be hanged by England! Ley had tied the curtain to the toilet handle and then around his neck and stuffed his own stockings in his mouth to die choking over the toilet. He couldn’t have contrived a more ignominious end. Another weakminded fool in the dock, facing the smugness of the English. Ley was no doubt dying for a drink. Perhaps he died for a drink. A squalid drunk (and possibly a Jew—his last name, Goering had heard, was actually Lev). And who are the English? They should be German, their kings are German. Isolated on that soggy island, they lost their German soul, a race of pale shopkeepers counting change for the world. Where is their empire? Its remnants in that damp food turned to shit and used to fertilize the precious gardens.
If the Nazis committed atrocities (and of this, he had no knowledge, and what did it matter if he did—Hitler was his conscience), the Communists were inhuman, following a barbaric ideology. The delusion that all men are equal. What Russian peasant living in his thirteenth-century filth was his equal? Barbaric Asiatics communing with goats. Their kings, too, were German, or at least educated here. Communism is a disease, not an ideology, he thought, and I am proud, yes, this is true, proud that I created the first concentration camps—they were for the Communists. Let them be equal there!
Of course you needed a sensible wife for this work. Hitler lacked one, perhaps a critical failing. There were two Hitlers. The Hitler of the French campaign was charming and genial. The Hitler of the Russian campaign was suspicious, tense, and violent. Perhaps he possessed the madness he was accused of. Who can be sure? When there is nothing left to connect us to this world, what are we?