Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “Distracted.”

  “At the Admiralty, I think.”

  “Magnificent! His post from the last war.”

  “So no promotion.”

  “Duties that will keep his attention a thousand miles from Poland.”

  “So once the Polish issue is settled…”

  “A quick war—”

  “And a much-praised peace—”

  “You, Neville, once again the man of the moment.”

  “And Winston lost at sea.”

  “Britain at the heart of Europe, rather than at its throat.”

  “With an election. Maybe even before Christmas.”

  “Oh, praise God! We may yet overcome…”

  The broadcast was made in a thin, reedy voice at precisely 11:15 a.m.

  “I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street.

  “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

  “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

  “You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful…

  “Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.”

  It was the voice of a man dragged to the point of exhaustion by disappointment, the words of one who sought self-justification even at the height of the nation's peril. We are at war but, please, it's not my fault…

  When he had finished, he found further speech difficult. His mouth was dry, his eyes damp. He gathered his papers into a neat pile and screwed the top carefully back onto his fountain pen. Finally he turned to Horace Wilson, who had been standing guard at the door, and nodded as though the movement of every muscle threatened to tear him apart. The words would not come at first, and when they did, they had an edge like shattered glass.

  “Send for him.”

  PART THREE

  THE LIMITS OF LOYALTY

  An elderly statesman with gout,

  When asked what the war was about,

  In a Written Reply, Said,

  “My colleagues and I

  Are doing our best to find out.”

  (A limerick popular in the Foreign Office at the outbreak of war)

  September 1939.

  It took four weeks—twenty-nine days of extraordinary late-summer heat and crushed spirits, to be precise—before Warsaw succumbed in flames. By that time two hundred thousand people and an entire nation had bled to death. It was the start of what someone in America dubbed “the Phoney War,” a phrase that seemed as remote as hope for those trapped in the rubble of the Polish capital during that endless month of September 1939, when orphans screamed in terror and the flies feasted and grew fat.

  It was only the beginning. And not even the end of the beginning.

  During the very first hour of war for the British Empire—an empire that was doomed to extinction as surely as was Poland, but simply didn't know it—the air-raid sirens had sounded across London, only minutes after Chamberlain's thin aristocratic voice announced that the battle had begun. Churchill and his wife, Clemmie, had climbed to the top of their house by Westminster Cathedral to observe the silver-gray barrage balloons rising into the sky above the rooftops and spires of London. “Bloody punctual, the Hun,” Churchill had observed, before leading her down to the nearest air-raid shelter clutching a bottle of brandy to his chest and trailing cigar smoke. The shelter proved to be nothing more than an open basement; it had no door, no sandbags, no seating. As he looked along the deserted street, Churchill imagined the carnage that he had been warned would follow an air blitz. He knew that the Government had already made its preparations, in secret, digging huge lime pits and stockpiling 100,000 cardboard coffins for the casualties their experts had predicted would be inflicted upon them within weeks. But, on this occasion at least, it proved to be a false alarm, sparked by a solitary—and friendly—French plane. Yet the two squadrons of RAF fighters sent up to engage what they thought might be the first wave of the Luftwaffe somehow managed to engage each other in a dogfight above the Thames, and in the ensuing mayhem two fighters were shot down. It became known as the Battle of Barking Creek.

  That evening a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the outward-bound passenger liner Athenia. One hundred and twelve lives were lost, including twenty-eight Americans who were fleeing home. And two weeks later, as the sun set on the evening of September 17, the aircraft carrier Courageous turned into the wind in order to allow her aircraft to land upon her deck. In so doing, she unwittingly turned into the path of the U-boat she and other ships had been hunting. A single torpedo struck her amidships and sent her to the bottom. More than five hundred of her crew, including her captain, drowned with her.

  On that same day the fate of Poland was sealed when Soviet armies swarmed across her eastern and all but undefended frontiers and stabbed her in the back. It was what had been agreed in the secret protocols of the pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov. Poland was to be wiped from the map of Europe.

  And yet…hadn't Britain and France guaranteed Polish independence? Declared war on Germany for the crime of invading Poland? So what now of the Soviets? Didn't honor, justice, consistency, simple humanity demand that they now turn their wrath on this new locust from the east? Ah, but this is diplomacy, and diplomacy is not the art of innocence, nor does it strain to be either ethical or consistent. So, as German and Soviet armies met and embraced at the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk—in comic opera fashion, the same place where in 1917 Russia had concluded its humiliating peace with the armies of the Kaiser—the statesmen in London and Paris drew in and held their collective breath. They would wait.

  But patience is for those with full stomachs.

  The first night of the war finds Carol Bell in tears, trying to focus through salt-smeared eyes on the needle she is prodding through Peter's jacket. It has gone the way of his trousers. He and the other boys in the street have been using the top of an Anderson shelter to practice parachute jumps, and the elbows of his jacket are now ripped to buggery on the bolts. It is his only jacket. And he is leaving tomorrow. She wants so desperately for him to look smart at that moment in the morning when she will try to find a smile and wave him goodbye, perhaps for the very last time.

  She has spent the afternoon filling sandbags and her back feels as though she's been taking care of a football club on tour, including a full set of reserves. Not that she ever did that, of course, strictly a one-punter girl. She's been hoping to spend every last minute with Peter but he said he wanted to play with his friends and she thought it best he should feel as normal as possible—no tears, they can wait for tomorrow—so she let him go with an instruction to be back by teatime. He's always been restless, could never keep still, even when she was carrying him, impatient little sod. Gets that from her. Anyway, he went to play and she couldn't just sit and wait for him, practicing her false smiles and her goodbyes, so she put the sleeping Lindy in her pram and pushed her to the park where they were filling sandbags. Wasn't much, so far as the war effort goes, filling sandbags, but there isn't much else a single mother can do—or is allowed to do. So she filled sandbags. And heard them gossiping behind her back.

  Chigwell is supposed to be a fresh start, away from all those vicious tongues that surrounded her in her last street, but even in Chigwell a deserted wife is viewed with suspicion no matter what excuse for her circumstances she invents. The gossip is lurid, as gossip always is; she might as well have put an advertisement in the church magazine anno
uncing she does tricks for a fiver a time. It's the way of the world, which sees something very wrong with any woman who isn't up to keeping a man. All men are unreliable bastards, but any decent woman finds some way of coping…So Carol keeps up appearances, helps others—when they allow her to—steers well clear of their husbands and today she fills up sandbags. Something to bridge the gap between now and the moment Peter leaves home.

  He scurries in through the back door, filthy, scratched, radiant—and in tatters. She gives him a clip around the ear—it's what he would expect, a fair exchange for the good time he's had—then she digs out her last shilling to send him round to the bakers for his favorite cherry tarts and lemonade. He goes to bed smothered in love and crumbs. And as the light fades, Carol sits alone, her world no larger than the tiny back room, hemmed in by blackout curtains as she tries to repair all the holes that have suddenly appeared in her life. She struggles desperately to forget about tomorrow, for tomorrow is when she's going to lose her son. She will send Peter to school with nothing more than his gas mask, a small bag, and a large label around his neck, at which point he will be swallowed up by the Great Plan. He will be evacuated. Lined up in the playground along with all the other children and taken away—to a place of safety, the Great Plan insists, but where that place of safety will be, the Great Plan doesn't know and can't yet say. Somewhere in the country. With new parents. No longer hers. With people who know nothing about Peter, who don't understand his sense of mischief, who won't know how much he adores cherry tarts and lemonade, who might abuse him, or use him as some form of cheap labor. Peter will be little more than a refugee, another frightened face from the pages of Picture Post.

  All this she can do nothing about—but she is determined that at least he will be a refugee with sound leather patches on the elbows of his jacket. So she sews beneath the light of a bare bulb and fights the dread rising inside her which tells her that, after tomorrow, she might never see Peter again.

  She struggles on. Got to keep herself strong, for the children. Send him off with that smile. She reminds herself that she still has Lindy, that it could all still be worse. That's when she raises her eyes and spots their rubber gas masks on the table. Peter and Lindy have been playing with them at teatime, chasing each other, screaming in muffled voices, pretending to be bugeyed monsters from another planet. Which is exactly what the war had already made them. Unrecognizable. No longer hers.

  Even before the first bomb has fallen on London, her entire world has been blown apart.

  Halifax had expected to find the Prime Minister working in the Cabinet Room, but it was deserted. The long, elegant room had grown claustrophobic, with tape masks pasted across every window-pane, cutting out the view and the light. At its far end the French windows were open and the lace curtain was shimmering, as though someone had made a hurried escape. Halifax followed the route, which led him out onto a sun-scorched patio from where he could see Chamberlain, down on his knees beside the roots of the silver birch, chatting animatedly with the gardener. Judging by the arch of his back and the earnest movement of his hands, it appeared to be a matter of considerable importance.

  “Ah, Edward!” The Prime Minister looked up, his expression full of unaccustomed enthusiasm. “Have you seen the autumn crocus? Just breaking through.”

  The Foreign Secretary gazed down from an imperial height. Poland was in flames, Warsaw being reduced to rubble, and yet…

  “Planted them myself. Last year,” Chamberlain continued. “Makes you think—doesn't it?—that things will get back to normal.”

  “Hope—and the crocuses—spring eternal.”

  “Then perhaps you might persuade your friend Dawson to take that view,” Chamberlain observed, his voice grown suddenly taut, rising awkwardly with the aid of a stick. He was beginning to suffer from the early symptoms of an attack of gout.

  Halifax couldn't escape the hint of accusation. Your friend Dawson…One editorial in The Times that was only a couple of degrees less than adulatory and the Prime Minister had taken personal offense, seeing enemies on every side. “You know Geoffrey is one of our greatest friends,” Halifax insisted, “and continues to be. He's given over his editorial columns to us these past months.”

  Chamberlain sniffed.

  “But he—like so many—feels…” Halifax searched for the word. He was going to use the expression “let down” but decided it was too ambiguous and open to misinterpretation by an overly sensitive Prime Minister. “He feels deflated.”

  In fact, what Dawson had told him as they had shared a compartment on the train journey down from Yorkshire was that he felt almost betrayed. “Left standing bloody naked in the park, Edward, I can tell you. I've backed this Government, you know I have. To the hilt. Let you write more of my leader columns than I have myself. And Neville promised. That appeasement would work, that there would be no war. Right up to the very last minute. Now I look a complete fool. All of a sudden my editorial meetings are chaos, everyone's arguing—I 've even got the wretched lift man telling me where I got it wrong. Not much fun being an emperor with no clothes, I can tell you.”

  Halifax sympathized. He knew precisely how Dawson felt. He'd never liked Munich, had described it as “a hideous choice of evils” even while Chamberlain was promising peace and honor and claiming his place in history. At the end of the day Halifax had gone along with it because there seemed to be no other choice. He didn't like Hitler and so he didn't trust him. He was also more than a little afraid of him. Halifax had three sons of military age and he found the thought of losing them almost unendurable, and he feared that was what Hitler might demand. And it would all be his fault—their fault, his and Chamberlain's. Somehow they'd got this thing wrong, terribly wrong, yet this morning he found Chamberlain in no mood for self-flagellation. The Prime Minister took him by the arm and began to lean on him as he set off around the garden.

  “Tell Dawson this. What is clear is that our cause is the moral cause. There has never been a clearer case in Christendom of such an unnecessary war. History will show this. What we have succeeded in doing over these last months is showing that we are the innocent party, the crusaders for peace. We have God on our side and I take great comfort from that. So should Dawson.” Halifax felt uneasy. He was a High Anglican and spent more time on his knees than any of his Cabinet colleagues, yet at this moment he felt no more capable of laying claim to being a Christian crusader than he did of pronouncing it without sounding ridiculous.

  “I think Dawson is struggling—many are, I suspect—to explain why on the one hand we go to war with Germany when they invade Poland, yet on the other barely lift a finger of protest when the Soviettes"—Halifax refused to call them Wussians—"do exactly the same thing.”

  “Our guarantee was aimed against Hitler, not Russia.”

  “There's not much of a difference, so far as Poland itself is concerned…”

  “So far as Poland is concerned, nothing will make much of a difference, since in all probability in a matter of days it will no longer exist!” Halifax came to an abrupt halt as he stumbled over the sudden appearance of Realpolitik amidst their contemplation of morality. Meanwhile Chamberlain thrust his head forward and continued alone, as though trying to leave all this sophistry behind.

  “Have to say, Neville, it's not the easiest intellectual argument we've ever put forward,” Halifax ventured.

  “Forget intellectual, think survival. We send an expeditionary force to Poland, it would never make it off the beach. Get shot to pieces, along with you, me, and the entire Government.”

  “Then…what?”

  “We wait. Bide our time. The war can't last—Hitler's overstretched himself, not got the resources. I have a fair suspicion that by the spring the German people will be calling for an end to all this nonsense.”

  “What—glutted with their victories?” Halifax couldn't hide the skepticism.

  Chamberlain shook his head as though bothered by mosquitoes. “The war is a temporary distra
ction, Edward. A diversion. Hitler has ransacked the German economy, it can only be a matter of months before it collapses. War can only lead to starvation and disaster, just like last time. But…"—he turned to his Foreign Secretary, tired eyes glinting with defiance—"if we can limit the conflict, confine it to Poland, then by the spring Germany will have grown thin and weary, and we can get out of this awful mess with our prestige and our Empire intact.”

  Halifax wanted to be convinced, yet if it came down to an economic contest between Britain and Germany, it might prove to be a damned close-run thing.

  “That's why we've got to keep the lid on it,” Chamberlain continued. “No bombing of the German mainland, no excuse for them to retaliate and for the war to spread. We must make sure they understand that we still—even at this point—have no desire for an all-out war. My conscience couldn't live with that.”

  “But it could live with Hitler?”

  “That's for the German people to decide. And by the spring, God willing, the war may be settled and the British people can make their decision, too.”

  “An election?”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, but what a bloody place Europe is.” And what a bloody art is the art of politics, Halifax thought, when a war is viewed through the lens of electoral advantage. Sometimes democracy stank.

  As if to confirm his thoughts, he spotted Wilson and Ball crossing the lawn in their direction. He had developed a growing antipathy for these men who served Chamberlain so ferociously—"the Iron Triangle at the heart of Government,” as they were sometimes called. What was it, why did his missing arm seem to ache whenever these two were near? Was it a question of class? Ball was the son of a bookstall clerk and Wilson that of a Bournemouth furniture dealer—although from the point of view of an hereditary Viscount, Chamberlain himself might be viewed as little more than a provincial metal basher. Or perhaps it was much simpler to understand than the English class system, perhaps it was no more than naked jealousy. Wilson was altogether too mighty, had accompanied Chamberlain to Munich, had been used by Chamberlain for all sorts of unorthodox dealings with ambassadors and others that should rightly have been within the fiefdom of the Foreign Office. Yes, it was a little of all of these things. But mostly it was because Halifax knew that in justice Wilson should bear the lion's share of the blame—blame for promoting appeasement so blindly, for pushing Chamberlain too far, blame which, because Wilson operated from the shadows, Halifax would have to shoulder in public.