Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  Wilson approached, waving pieces of paper. “Here's another two.” Chamberlain groaned. “Not more helpful hints from Winston,” he pleaded.

  “He hopes you don't mind"—Wilson started to read—"my drawing to your attention the enormous wastage of paper involved in the daily conduct of Government business. Might I suggest that you consider issuing instructions to all departments that, henceforth, all envelopes used on official business should, wherever practicable, be pasted up and re-directed again and again rather than dismissed from service? Although this seems a small thing, the savings over the months and years ahead might prove to be substantial and it will teach every official—of whom we now have millions—to think of saving…”

  “No more, no more,” Chamberlain sighed, leaning heavily on his stick. He turned to Halifax. “He bombards me with his ideas without pause for breath. I feel as though I'm part of his own personal blitzkrieg.”

  “You think you're being picked out for special treatment?” Halifax inquired. “Why, he does it with everyone.”

  “You, too?”

  “Only this morning. Comments on Foreign Office telegrams. Somehow Winston's comments sound like divine commands even while they reek of port and chewed cigar.”

  “I had my doubts. Remember discussing it with you, Horace. Would Winston cause more chaos inside the Government than out? I'm still not sure I made the right choice, bringing him back. It's like competing with a brass band.” He stabbed his stick into the turf. “So what is the subject of his second commandment?”

  Wilson waved the piece of paper. “Mr. Churchill desires to express his concerns that our Army and the Air Force are not of sufficient size to meet the current threat—”

  “What?” Chamberlain exploded, shaking his stick as though trying to thrash the offending letter from Wilson's hand. “Winston is Navy. I gave him Navy, nothing more. Got nothing to do with the others. Not a bit of it. Damn him and his insolence!” He grabbed at Halifax's sleeve with surprising energy, the fingers digging in like claws. Vivid crimson spots had erupted on Chamberlain's cheeks although the face remained as pale as parchment in spite of the sun. “Two minutes back in Government and already he seems to think he can do my job better than I can. But I won't have it, Edward, won't have it at all. That man will never become Prime Minister so long as I have breath.”

  “So long as you have breath, Neville, there won't be any need.”

  “I agree with you, Edward. But if that day ever comes when I feel I should step aside, I can tell you without hesitation that you are the only man I want as my successor…” He brushed aside Halifax's predictable mutterings of humility. “No, I know that occasionally you and I have our differences, but that's mere emphasis rather than objective. You've stood by my side faithfully over these last dangerous months, and I want you to know how much that loyalty means to me.”

  “That's very generous of you, Neville.” Halifax bowed his domed head.

  Chamberlain's voice rose, he turned as though addressing an invisible audience that lurked amongst the flower beds and stretched into the farthest corners of the large garden, his hand waving to command their attention. “And if that means cutting an ungrateful upstart like Winston back down to size—well, I'm just the man to do it!”

  Suddenly Chamberlain had grown tired. His proud back was bent like a bow, and he leant heavily on the arms of both Ball and Wilson as he climbed the short flight of steps that led back to the tiled patio outside the Cabinet Room. His feet had grown heavy, his step uncertain. Halifax followed, his head bowed, his countenance severe, like some cleric from ancient times processing behind saintly relics. All that was missing from the picture was a bell and a bishop's crook.

  Chamberlain gasped. The fire in his heart was spent; for the moment it had fled to the joint of his big toe. He began to complain, of the war and of its torments. He began insisting that the burdens should be borne equally. Equality of suffering.

  Wilson and Ball remained silent, uncertain how to deal with this sudden outpouring of high moral tone. Sometimes, at moments of extreme exhaustion, Chamberlain appeared to have left them and to be talking to some distant spirit or ancestor. At such times they found it best to leave him undisturbed and not to attempt to follow the meandering pathways of his private morality. After all, they were fixers, not philosophers.

  Chamberlain said that if Germany were to be starved into submission, then there could not be those who grew fat. He insisted they devise some arrangement—"taxation, restriction, duties, whatever is required"—to ensure that the profits of those who would do well out of the war were capped.

  Wilson and Ball seemed suddenly stiff. They half-led, half-carried the Prime Minister to his chair at the Cabinet table. A trickle of sweat ran like an ant from his brow down towards his stiff collar. The acolytes fetched him liver salts and muttered about Socialist confiscation, but it had no effect. Chamberlain appeared deaf. More strongly, they urged that it was the great weapons manufacturers who had suffered cruelly during the years of appeasement, that it was only right that they should restore the balance, but still Chamberlain did not hear. Then they reminded him that the great industrialists were donors to party funds, the oceans of money which kept his Government afloat.

  “I only wish to be fair,” he insisted.

  “But how?” they demanded.

  He smiled weakly. “That is for you to tell me. You, my advisers, my loyal elves. Something from your bottom drawer. You always have something in your bottom drawer, Horace.” Ah, the bottom drawer. At last Ball and Wilson relaxed. They would take care of things.

  They left Chamberlain, whose head had dropped in the heat. Before the door had closed he had already fallen asleep in his chair.

  September 26, 1939.

  The Prime Minister gets up to make his statement. He is dressed in deep mourning relieved only by a white handkerchief and a large gold watch-chain. One feels the confidence and spirits of the House dropping inch by inch. When he sits down there is scarcely any applause. During the whole speech Winston Churchill has sat hunched beside him looking like the Chinese god of plenty suffering from acute indigestion. He just sits there, lowering, hunched and circular, and then he gets up. He is greeted by a loud cheer from all the benches and he starts to tell us about the Naval position. I notice that Hansard does not reproduce his opening phrases. He began by saying how strange an experience it was for him after a quarter of a century to find himself once more in the same room in front of the same maps, fighting the same enemy and dealing with the same problems. His face then creases into an enormous grin and he adds, glancing down at the Prime Minister, “I have no conception how this curious change in my fortunes occurred.” The whole House roared with laughter and Chamberlain had not the decency even to raise a sickly smile. He just looked sulky.

  Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1939 edited by Nigel Nicolson, Collins, 1966

  The thirtieth of September. One month since the war began. Horse Guards Parade lit only by the intermittent moon and the glow of a single cigar at a window in the Admiralty Building.

  Churchill is alone, despondent. His staff have all fled before the howl of the Black Dog that all day has been circling and that finally late at night has fallen upon them. Unfair of him, of course, to take it out on his staff, when the real problem lies out there, on the other side of Horse Guards, in Downing Street, but in the morning they will all be back, eager for more, just like old times.

  So many memories. First Lord of the Admiralty. Again. An office from which he had been dismissed nearly twenty-five years before. “Winston is back!” they had telegraphed every ship in the fleet on the day the Prime Minister had reappointed him. It had been a magnificent day. He had known exactly where he was going the moment he stepped through the entrance of the Admiralty Building, marching pell-mell down the corridors, his heels clipping along the mosaic floor, the officers and staff struggling to keep pace, until he had burst in upon his old room to find it so little changed—
his chair, desk, the same half-paneling of finest English oak, and the map box concealed behind it. When he had thrown back the shutters on the map box he had found the same charts he had left behind in 1915, with pins still showing the positions of every ship of the Imperial German Navy on the high seas of Europe. A search had been undertaken of the cellars and store rooms to unearth the lamps and other office furniture that had served him so well in his previous incarnation. All was soon as it should be—except for the war.

  One month. In which both Poland and with it, British honor, have been wiped from the map. While Poles have been fighting and dying in their tens of thousands, their bodies strewn across a landscape of despair, what have their British allies done? Nothing. Not a bomb has been dropped in earnest nor a bullet fired in anger. Instead of bombs, the RAF have been dropping leaflets. Chamberlain's little bits of paper. Propaganda—even copies of Chamberlain's speeches—assuring the Germans that the British have no wish to fight them—as if there could be any doubt of the fact! After a month of supposed hostilities there has been only one reported German casualty—an unfortunate soul who was hit by a bundle of Chamberlain's speeches that had been thrown out of a Whitley bomber and had failed to separate, striking the man dead from sixteen thousand feet. This is not war as Churchill knows it.

  Bombing—real bombing, designed to fire savagery from the air and bring the enemy to his knees—has been forbidden. “We cannot bomb their munitions factories,” the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, has informed the Cabinet, “because they are private property.” Anyway, if the British start bombing, the Luftwaffe might retaliate. The courage of mice. So the strategy appears to be to bore the Germans to death. And bludgeon them with leaflets.

  On the Western Front even less has been happening. Eighty-five French divisions face no more than thirty-four divisions of the Wehrmacht. The French march and counter-march, and peer out from behind the Maginot Line, but will not go to war. Perhaps they are waiting for their British allies, who have sent only four divisions to France. All along the front the Germans have placed loudspeakers through which they constantly taunt the French—“Ou est l'armée anglaise?” Where are the British? No, this is not war as Churchill knows it.

  And while he tries to fight and to encourage others to do so, Churchill meets with nothing but resistance. Just today he has received a letter from the Prime Minister—in belated response to several of his own—which tartly points out that his responsibilities stretch so far as the Royal Navy and no further. It rebukes him for interfering in other domains and draws to his attention “the remarkable similarities between what is contained in your confidential memoranda to Cabinet colleagues and what subsequently appears in the newspapers.” Of course, that much is true, Churchill leaks like a rusting Thames dredger, but only from frustration and in an attempt to focus the minds of others on winning this war—a task which, in his less-than-humble opinion, can be achieved only by fighting it.

  The war. One month old. Already soaked in blood. And another anniversary, twelve months ago to the day, when Chamberlain was being saluted by an SS honor guard, young Bavarian women were weeping with joy outside his hotel and he was concluding his pact with Hitler. Twelve months of failure, of deceit, of frenzied death as Hitler's war machine marches on all but unopposed while in London the Government covers its face in shame. It is like his map box, as though time in this place has stood still, as if the lights have gone out and all the clocks have been stopped.

  Well, bugger that. He swears softly beneath his breath, throwing the stub of his cigar through the open window. There will be no stopped clocks on his watch. He resolves to give Time a little nudge.

  “Oi! Can't you bleedin' read? It says reserved. This shelter is reserved.” The ARP warden in his tin helmet and dark uniform grabbed at Mac's arms as he was trying to squeeze between the sandbags that formed the entrance to the air-raid shelter off Mayfair's exclusive Berkeley Square, a couple of hundred yards from Trumper's. The sirens had just sounded—perhaps another false alarm, but who was to know? It was hot, his leg hurt, and Mac was running short of patience.

  “Reserved? For who? Got a list?”

  “Reserved for officials and the like. So's they can carry on working even while there's a raid on. That's why only the list get allowed in—you follow?”

  “How do you know I'm not on your little list? Show it to me,” Mac demanded, but the warden ignored him, shoving him out of the way as a woman carrying a fur coat and wearing a hat full of fruit approached the sandbag battlements. It was a scorcher, eighty in the shade, but the woman clung to the fox as if it were about to come back to life. The ARP warden saluted: “Afternoon, Mrs. Studely-Grimes.” In exchange he received a curt nod that threatened to spill the entire contents of her hat into the gutter.

  “Officials, eh? So who's she, then, the head of MI5?” Mac asked, his voice the echo of innocence.

  The warden's eyes narrowed. The headquarters of the security service were only around the corner but that fact was strictly need-to-know. This little oik clearly didn't have a need and wasn't supposed to know. “Don't get smart with me, matey. You just run along to the next shelter up the road,” he instructed, ignoring the fact that, quite evidently, Mac was incapable of running.

  “And tell me, Mr. Warden, do the Luftwaffe bombs have little reserved notices on them, too, or can we all share them?”

  “Take a word of advice from me, sunshine—and bugger off!”

  “Two. That's two words.”

  The warden's face drew close to Mac's, threatening. Then he sniffed. “Oi, you reek of drink. Right, that's it. I'm having you. Drunk and disorderly. You bloody wait…” The warden began gesticulating to a policeman patrolling on the other side of the street, but his shouts were drowned by the sirens as they started wailing once more to sound the all-clear. Another false alarm. The constable passed by.

  Disappointed and denied, the warden pulled himself up to his full height, bounced in his boots, and glowered at Mac. “Next time, matey…” His finger wagged ferociously as if it had suddenly caught fire. “Next time…well, you just better bleedin' watch it!”

  “Put them in uniform and they all become Nazis,” Mac sighed as he hobbled off, loud enough to make sure the warden heard him.

  But it was true. He did reek of drink. Bloody Burgess again.

  Burgess had called, badgered, pleaded with Mac to meet with him once more, even gone to the lengths of booking another hairdressing appointment to deliver the summons in person. He had seemed so genuinely contrite that finally Mac had succumbed and agreed to meet.

  It was clear that Burgess had been in the pub—a dark, untidy place in a back-street mews not far from Victoria Station—some time before Mac arrived. The blue eyes were like melting ice, the hair seemed to have been put on back to front, the sensuous and almost feminine mouth that on other occasions broke so easily into a smile seemed cemented to his glass. Strange, thought Mac, it was almost as if Burgess had a double personality, for while the hand that held the cigarette trembled like a leaf in a Siberian storm, the hand that clung to the glass was as steady as stone. His mind seemed to reflect the hands, at one moment faltering, uncertain, the next a model of insight and conviction—but always unpredictable. Mac sat with his pint of mild, and had little option but to listen while Burgess led him on a tour around a tormented heart.

  “Thanks, Mac. And sorry. About tracking you home. Should've asked. Not sneaked. Sorry. Apologies. Castrate myself in the morning.” Suddenly his eyes were dragged from his glass to confront Mac. “Anyway, what you so pissed off for? Got the love of a woman, beautiful family, yet still you're pissed off. What the hell you pissed off about?” But before Mac had the chance even to consider the question let alone his reply, Burgess was off again. “Don't know how lucky you are, Mac. To have someone special. Be in love. I'll never be able to have someone special. To trust. Least of all a woman.” He gulped in a huge lungful of air as though he'd forgotten to keep breathing, then c
ontinued, gazing into his glass. “Was eight, I was. Asleep in my bedroom. Heard these screams coming from my parents' room. Rushed in. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Mother's screams, an' all. Found her underneath my old man. Been poking her, giving her one, he had—know what I mean?—then had a heart attack. On the job. On top of my bloody mother.” His voice sounded bitter and he gulped down more Jameson's to placate it. “She couldn't get him off. My old man, on my mother…” A silence, then: “Know what? Ever since then I can't look at a woman without thinking of my mother. And my old man. Dead. Fucking her. Doesn't seem—well, somehow doesn't seem natural. Can't do it. Don't know how bloody lucky you are, Mac. Can't love a woman. I can't love anything, really. No ties, you see. Sent away. Boarding school. Like a trunk, not wanted on voyage. Not belonging anywhere. Try to love my country, of course, but…” Another silence for an enormous pull of nicotine. “Russia. Terrible place. Dark, bleak, god-awful. But they share the misery, you know. Equal shares. Of misery. Misery all round. Pity they had to share it with Poland. You ever been to Russia, Mac? 'Course you bloody have. Solovetsky Academy of Higher Learning. One of Stalin's students, you are. And survived. More than I'm likely to. They'll take me out 'n shoot me one day. Or hang me. A traitor, like you, in the eyes of the System. Love my country, I do, Mac, seriously I do. Cricket. Crown. Christmas pudding—what more could a man want? Home his castle. Except scratch away and behind every bush you find a bunch of little Francos. Bothers me, it does, this love and hate business. Done all right out of it, personally. Eton and the Cambridge all-comers. Top shelf. Born to rule. Me. Guy Burgess.” He shoved a grotesquely bitten fingernail into his chest, raising his voice in what seemed to Mac an almost contemptuous tone. “Guy Bloody Burgess!” he shouted, to the curiosity of those seated at nearby tables. Then the moment had passed. “But somehow…I hate it all. At times—most times—hate myself. So stupidly superficial. Whistle 'Rule Britannia' out your arse and they all applaud. Kick hell out of the Establishment and no one complains, so long as you kick it from the inside. And I'm an insider. But you—damn it, people like you—this country'll freeze you out like it's Solovetsky every damned day. So you know what I do? I get stupid. I care. I ask my conscience and it says—sod 'em. Sod 'em all. And the System. Smash it, no matter what it costs. 'My conscience will bring me to my dying place, 'tis only cowardice that has kept me away so long.' Auden, I think. Friend of mine. Led me astray in every corner of Cambridge, he has. And—that's just it—comes a time when you have to decide. Country. Conscience. Or a stiff cock.” He broke into liquid laughter that dissolved into tears and began to pour down his face. “You know, Mac,” he sobbed, “in the end you can only betray one thing. That's yourself. And I do it all the time.”