How could Conrad live with a dead father like that?
How could he live without him?
Of course, as Veronica had pointed out, Conrad was now the new Viscount Oakford. Conrad didn’t want the bloody title. It was his father’s. Or Edward’s. As far as Conrad was concerned, even bloody Reggie could have it; he’d love to be lord-of-the-bloody-manor. Conrad just wanted his family back.
He had hastily discussed with Madame de Salignac what to do with his father’s body. She had suggested burying him in the local village churchyard. Conrad had agreed, but on condition that Constance Scott-Dunton was buried somewhere else, anywhere else, just not next to his father. He imagined taking his mother there after the war. What he couldn’t imagine was what kind of country France, or Britain for that matter, would be when the war eventually ended, and whether that would be in several years’ time or just a couple of weeks.
He remembered Veronica urging him to shoot his father. He could forgive her that: she understood why he was hesitating and was urging him to do what she believed was the right thing. He wasn’t sure about her working for McCaigue, although he believed that she had been duped by the major. He wondered whether she would be successful persuading the Duke of Windsor to stay in France. A tall order, but Conrad had learned never to underestimate his wife.
He had grabbed a copy of The Times at Exeter station. Rumours that the Allies had surrendered Calais were false. The French were counter-attacking near Amiens. Back in England, pig clubs would come to the aid of small rearers in time of war and housewives were advised to move kitchen cabinets nearer to the stove to save labour.
Conrad wondered whether his battalion was still twiddling its thumbs in Suffolk, or whether it had been ordered to France as Colonel Rydal had anticipated. Perhaps they were fighting the Germans at last. If so, it sounded as if they would be lucky to get back to England in one piece. He should be with them.
And what of Anneliese? How would she be taking captivity? Conrad had hoped that McCaigue would get her out of prison. Much more likely, he was keeping her inside.
He missed her. He felt a sudden, almost overwhelming desire to hold her. To talk to her. To stroke her hair.
But now he was on a train jolting and juddering its way towards London, he couldn’t think about his mother, or Anneliese, or even returning to his unit. Somehow he had to convince the British government that it was in imminent danger. But whom could he talk to?
Not McCaigue, obviously. Van almost certainly wouldn’t listen to him and would alert McCaigue. His mother, perhaps. She knew people, but she was back in Somerset. It would take too long. Also she was German and therefore bound to raise doubts.
What of his father’s friends? Many of them were powerful people. But Conrad had no idea which, if any of them, were involved in Lord Oakford’s plotting. Or which were also friends of Sir Henry Alston.
There was his father’s old school chum Lord Halifax. Conrad had met him on a number of occasions, and he was sure Halifax would remember him. He was also as convinced as he could be of his integrity and loyalty.
But not his initiative. Halifax was an expert at doing nothing.
There was one man who might listen to him, and if he believed Conrad, who would definitely act. He had listened to Conrad once two years earlier. The trouble was, he would be hard to reach, especially in these times.
But he was Conrad’s only hope.
56
Extract from Lieutenant Dieter von Hertenberg’s Diary
28 May
Fighting near Dunkirk. We can see hundreds of British ships evacuating troops, thousands of troops. If only we hadn’t been forced to halt, we would have bagged the lot of them!
Later given the order that we are to be relieved by XIV Corps. Guderian is to be given his own Panzer Group, which of course he deserves. It will be good to stop fighting for a few days, but we can’t sleep yet. Our new Panzer Group headquarters is 200 kilometres away. Maybe once we get there we can have a few days’ rest. We all need it.
Eighteen days since the offensive started. Who would have thought that eighteen days could be so vital? We have achieved more in those eighteen days than the German army achieved in four years in the last war.
Maybe peace will come now.
Downing Street, London, 28 May
Winston Churchill listened to Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, argue the case for honesty about the latest news from the continent. It was dire. That morning the King of the Belgians had surrendered. Calais had fallen the day before, Boulogne the day before that; 11,400 men of the BEF had been evacuated from Dunkirk so far, leaving behind a quarter of a million more waiting. The French wanted to discuss peace with Germany. They were defeated and they knew it.
Over the weekend the Chiefs of Staff had circulated a dispiriting paper entitled ‘British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality’, that eventuality being the fall of France. The report concluded that if the Germans won complete air superiority, there would be little the Royal Navy could do to prevent invasion.
But Britain wasn’t defeated. Not yet. Not according to Churchill.
Churchill was presiding over the War Cabinet, the small group of five men who ran the war day-to-day: himself, Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain and the two Labour ministers Arthur Greenwood and Clement Attlee. While the discussions focused on the details of the war, the unspoken question hung in the air. At what point should Britain admit defeat?
The question had become very close to being spoken the day before, when Lord Halifax had argued that the British should open discussions with the Italians. Afterwards, in the Downing Street garden, Halifax had threatened to resign and Churchill had been forced to apologize and beg him not to. Churchill could not allow the government to be seen to be split on the issue of peace and war.
The Prime Minister studied the adversary sitting opposite him. Halifax had a long, lugubrious face of high-minded seriousness. He prided himself, with justification, on his pragmatism, on his rational mind, on his ability to weigh pros and cons dispassionately. Britain was losing the war and Halifax felt that the War Cabinet should discuss what to do about it.
The trouble was that Halifax had no imagination and no sense of history, both of which Churchill knew he had in spades. Instinct told him, history told him, that at this vital moment it would be fatal to show any sign of weakness. Britain was an island that had not been invaded for a thousand years; it had a glorious history of defending freedom; it had a parliamentary democracy that was the admiration of countries everywhere; it had the greatest empire the world had ever seen. All that was the work of centuries; Churchill would not give it up without a fight.
But he couldn’t defend it single-handedly either. He needed the support of the War Cabinet, of the Conservative Party and of the British people. And he was weak. He had only been Prime Minister for eighteen days, and in those eighteen days the Allied armies had been routed. No one blamed him directly. But Halifax’s quiet appeal to hard-headed pragmatism in a dire situation was difficult for Churchill to counter.
Conrad perused The Times as he waited in an ante-room in 10 Downing Street. He was interested to see no mention of Calais that day, apart from a tiny piece stating that French sources in Paris claimed the town was still probably in Allied hands. It was half past eleven; Conrad had been waiting since ten. His demand that he must meet the Prime Minister with urgent news from France had met with scepticism, but when he had identified himself as Lord Oakford’s son, he was at least admitted.
A Civil Servant approached him.
‘I understand you wish to see the Prime Minister, Mr de Lancey?’
‘Yes. I have some urgent news from France.’
‘As you can imagine, the Prime Minister is very busy today. Perhaps you could tell me and I can pass it on?’
‘No. I must see him myself.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’
Conrad had been expecting this. ‘Just tell Mr Churchill I’m here to
see him and he can decide if he wants to meet me. Remind him that I saw him at Chartwell two years ago with an important message from Germany.’ That had been that the German officers were planning to overthrow their Führer. ‘Tell him this message is even more vital.’
‘I will tell the Prime Minister and we will be in touch with you,’ said the Civil Servant. ‘Can you give me details of where we can reach you?’
‘I can wait here,’ said Conrad. ‘The Prime Minister really needs to hear this as soon as possible.’
‘I am sorry, Mr de Lancey, you will have to leave.’ The Civil Servant glanced at a moustachioed policeman at the door of the ante-room.
Conrad argued for a few minutes longer, but it was clear he was getting nowhere. In the end the policeman escorted him firmly but politely to the door and out into the street.
Conrad stared desperately at the door of Number 10. ‘I have to tell him. I have to tell him somehow,’ he said to the policeman, because he was the only person there. ‘The future of the war depends on it.’
The constable, who was a large, comfortable man in his fifties, examined Conrad. ‘I shouldn’t say this, sir, but the Prime Minister often lunches at the Admiralty. You might catch him there later on.’
Halifax bided his time. The War Cabinet broke up with Churchill promising to make a statement in the House of Commons preparing them for bad news from France. They agreed to meet again at four that afternoon, when Churchill was sure Halifax would make his move.
Churchill pulled Neville Chamberlain to one side and asked him if he would agree to inviting Lloyd George into the cabinet. The ostensible reason was to strengthen government unity. Lloyd George was known to be defeatist; he had spoken of Hitler in admiring terms in the past, had been opposed to the war and had argued for peace intermittently since its outbreak. But if the worst came to the worst, Churchill preferred the idea of his old political partner Lloyd George taking over from him than someone like Oswald Mosley.
The success of Vidkun Quisling in usurping the Norwegian government in April had shaken Churchill and was one of the reasons why he had sanctioned locking up Mosley and Maule Ramsay. But they could always be let out of prison again once Churchill had gone.
Neville agreed to Lloyd George. Churchill then went off to lunch at the Admiralty to work on his speech to the House. He was still lodging there, having allowed Neville and his family to stay on at 10 Downing Street.
The food, and especially the wine, fortified him and, clutching a newly lit cigar, he left the Admiralty for Parliament in slightly better spirits.
‘Prime Minister! Prime Minister! May I have a word?’
Churchill glanced at the young man trying to attract his attention. He recognized him. ‘Mr de Lancey?’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said Conrad. ‘I must speak to you.’
Churchill grinned. ‘If I stopped and talked to everyone who wanted to speak to me, I’d never get anywhere.’
‘What I have to say is more important than the message I gave you at Chartwell two years ago.’
Churchill frowned. He was intrigued. He had liked de Lancey. They had talked then not only about his German friends’ plans to remove Hitler, but about history and about bricklaying. Those days, which had seemed so dark at the time, now seemed a period of tranquil unemployment. How he would love to be working on his kitchen-garden wall at Chartwell and chatting to this young man!
‘What is it, de Lancey?’
‘We need to talk privately, sir.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ said Churchill. ‘I’m on my way to speak in the House.’
‘I have become aware of a plan to replace you as prime minister,’ Conrad said. ‘My father was involved, I am ashamed to say.’
‘Your father!’ Churchill was surprised. Although Lord Oakford’s pacifism, even defeatism, was well known, Churchill had always held him in high regard. ‘Who else?’
He noticed de Lancey glance to see who was within earshot. Just Churchill’s detective and a uniformed policeman. ‘Henry Alston. And the Duke of Windsor.’
Churchill considered the young man in front of him. Could he be speaking the truth? He had done so at Chartwell in the summer of 1938. Churchill’s instinct was that he was doing so now. The duke was a worry, and Churchill had never trusted Alston.
‘See me in the House of Commons this afternoon.’
Churchill made his speech and then met the War Cabinet at four o’clock in a room in the Commons. Halifax went on the offensive immediately. He opened proceedings by stating that Vansittart had learned that the Italian government was prepared to act as mediator between Britain and Germany. The question was now firmly on the table. Should Britain discuss peace with Germany?
Halifax’s logic was persuasive. There could be no harm in seeing what terms would be acceptable to the Germans. And Britain would achieve much better terms before France was knocked out of the war and Britain’s aircraft factories had been bombed than after.
Persuasive, but wrong. Churchill made the point that once negotiations had been opened with Germany it would be impossible to back away from them and still maintain the defiance necessary to win the war. Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those that surrender are merely finished. Besides, Churchill believed the chances of Germany offering decent terms were a thousand to one against.
The War Cabinet wasn’t swayed one way or the other. Churchill adjourned the meeting to speak to the wider Cabinet, saying that the War Cabinet would reconvene at seven.
The Outer Cabinet met in Churchill’s rooms in the Commons, without the presence of the other War Cabinet members, including Halifax. It had become common practice for one or other of the members of the War Cabinet to brief the rest of the government on what was going on, but Churchill insisted on doing this particular briefing himself. The Outer Cabinet consisted of twenty-nine ministers, half Conservatives from Chamberlain’s government, half new men.
Churchill gave it his all. He said that it would be foolish not to consider discussing peace with Hitler, but that the peace terms would probably be harsh, involving giving up the fleet and naval bases. Britain would become a slave state and a puppet government would be set up by Hitler under Mosley or some such person. He concluded by saying that of course, whatever happened at Dunkirk, the British would fight on.
He had thrown in the last remark as a casual observation, but it was the key question. Would the British government fight on?
They would. Quite a few rushed up and patted him on the back. There wasn’t a voice of dissent.
Churchill was buoyed by their support, but he knew it would count for nothing if Halifax succeeded in pushing for peace in the War Cabinet. Everyone respected the towering figure of the Foreign Secretary, even Churchill himself. Unless he could win Halifax round, the war was lost.
So Churchill would find a way of winning him round.
Conrad watched Churchill’s speech to the Commons from the Strangers’ Gallery. It was grave. Belgium had surrendered. Things were clearly going badly in France, although the Prime Minister wasn’t specific about exactly what, promising instead to speak to the House at the beginning of the following week. He warned of ‘hard and heavy tidings’.
The House listened intently, and there were brief speeches of support from a Labour and a Liberal MP, but none from any Conservatives. Conrad wondered if that was a bad sign. The Conservatives were in a majority and it was they who would dump Churchill if he was going to be dumped.
Conrad picked out Sir Henry Alston’s disfigured face on the benches behind the Prime Minister. The scarring made it difficult to read the MP’s expression at distance, but Conrad was confident that it would show nothing more than outward loyalty and sincerity. Conrad was half hoping he would see either Lloyd George or Alston speak, but of course that was not part of the plan. They were waiting for their moment.
Churchill hurried from the chamber and Conrad left also. He made his way to the Prime Minister’s room in the Co
mmons and told a clerk there that Mr Churchill had asked to see him. Then he waited in the corridor. At one point he saw the Civil Servant striding rapidly towards him. Conrad bent and tied his shoelace. Fortunately, the Civil Servant was too preoccupied to recognize him.
A string of Cabinet ministers filed past him in glum silence. A short time later they emerged from Churchill’s room chatting to each other. There was a buzz of barely suppressed excitement. Whatever the Prime Minister had said to them, he had said it well.
‘Mr de Lancey. The Prime Minister will see you now.’
Conrad entered the Prime Minister’s spacious room where he was shown to a sofa. Churchill occupied an armchair next to him and lit a cigar. He looked worried. He jabbed his cigar at Conrad.
‘You have ten minutes, Mr de Lancey. Tell me more about this threat.’
So Conrad told him. About Sir Henry Alston and his plan to subvert the British government to concede its country’s independence to Hitler, without the British people even realizing what was happening. About how Lloyd George would become Prime Minister and the Duke of Windsor would become king. About powerful figures in the press, the army, the civil service and Parliament who would support this new government. About a Major McCaigue in the secret service who was in Alston’s pocket. About how Conrad’s own father had been sent to France to fetch the Duke of Windsor and had died on the way in murky circumstances.
Churchill puffed at his cigar thoughtfully. ‘It’s exactly what I fear most,’ he said. ‘A coup by stealth rather than by fascist mobs on the street.’ The cigar glowed. ‘What proof do you have that Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor are involved?’
‘No direct proof. Just what I have told you.’
‘Do you know whether they are knowing accomplices? Or are they compliant dupes?’
‘I have no idea, sir,’ said Conrad. ‘My impression is that Alston keeps his plans very close to his chest. He likes to manipulate people if he can, rather than tell them openly what he is about.’
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