Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “But we've scarcely started…”

  “He will not fight! Halifax will not fight! He will run, like the wretched foxes he pursues, until we shall all be hunted down. Nothing to stand in their way, no hiding places. Oh, if only I had the rifles…”

  “But that's why you're here,” Bracken began to object, but was waved into silence as Churchill's voice and emotions began to climb.

  “They said I wanted them to fight my own war—my own war. As though it were a war of an entirely different character to their war. Damn them, perhaps they were right. Perhaps my war might have been different—no, indeed, Brendan, I tell you that my war would most certainly have been different, fought without mercy and without respite until the victory was ours! And yet there is always that most dangerous of foes, Brendan—no, not those in front of you in the moment of battle, but those treacherous bastards who attack you from behind. They are the real enemy, the enemy within. Oh, perhaps we should have used those rifles after all!”

  Bracken began to stutter in alarm but his protests were swept aside in the onslaught.

  “Cromwell purged this kingdom with four hundred cavalry, so just think—think what a Churchill might have done with four hundred thousand Mausers?” Then his voice flooded with apprehension. “And what, now, will Hitler do with them? There's the question.” Tears began to glisten on his cheeks.

  The enemy within. Did he mean Chamberlain? Halifax? The party? Or those ghosts within himself which continually haunted him. Bracken had never seen the old man in such misery.

  “But you'd never have used the rifles, not for yourself. Would you, Winston?”

  “Marlborough would've. He would have fought.”

  “Yes, but surely…”

  “If I could raise an army of stout-hearted Englishmen, what could I not have done? Most surely I would have used them.”

  “But…against whom?” Churchill responded with nothing but an expression of exquisite pain, a man at war within himself and with a world that had brought him low.

  They were now halfway through their second bottle, but they were not to finish it. A messenger had arrived. There was to be yet another meeting of the Cabinet. The Prime Minister's apologies, but would the First Lord mind presenting himself forthwith?

  “My firing squad,” Churchill bellowed, throwing his napkin to the floor. He stumbled out without a backward glance or word of thanks.

  At almost precisely the same moment that Churchill returned once more to Downing Street, a messenger from the Secret Intelligence Service also arrived. He was carrying two additional files for the small, neat pile that was mounting on the in-tray of Wilson's desk. Both were no longer than a single paragraph and were marked with a yellow flag for the exclusive attention of the Prime Minister. The first related how, at a recent diplomatic reception in Berlin, a drunken Russian well into his cups had been overheard telling his German counterpart that Chamberlain was ill. Deeply unwell. Stomach trouble. Knew it for a fact, so he claimed. Because buried deep inside the Kremlin they had a copy of the Prime Minister's personal medical report.

  The second file was more detailed. It was headed “MR. CHURCHILL,” in capital letters and underlined. It stated that following recent investigations into the First Lord's personal finances, it had been discovered that the majority of his income during the past twelve months had derived from a single payment. Although nominally the payment had come from a British-based trust, the trust received all its monies from a single source, a privately owned trading company named Omni-Carriers. Omni's only known office was in Bucharest and its bankers were in Geneva, but almost every other detail of its activities was shrouded in deliberately manufactured mystery. Yet SIS had got there eventually (with the assistance of an embittered and impoverished former employee, although this detail was omitted from the report to the Prime Minister). For Omni had begun its life trading not in its customary raw materials but in antique works of art. Enormous quantities of them, and every one of them Russian. The sort of supply that could not have continued without official sanction. And when, like so many other companies, it had nearly gone under during the great crash of 1929, Omni had been able to survive only through an emergency injection of funds. These funds, so the former employee swore, came from the Narodny Bank. Of Moscow.

  All the strands of an extraordinary noose were now present in the files on Wilson's desk. They required nothing more than a little threading together, and one sharp tug.

  Burgess arrived at the club only minutes after Churchill had departed, having wheedled from the old man's secretary the location of his lunch. As he leapt from the back of the taxi, he almost bowled into Bracken who was coming down the sandbagged steps into St. James's. Bracken scowled.

  “Bugger off, Burgess.”

  “I have to see Mr. Churchill.”

  “Never ceases to surprise me how often you seem to need to see Winston. And it never ceases to astonish me how, in spite of it all, he manages to struggle on without you.” Bracken didn't bother to break his stride.

  “I have to see him!” Burgess repeated breathlessly, not bothering to hide his anxiety.

  “Can't!” Bracken sang out merrily. “Gone!”

  “Where?” Burgess grabbed the other man's sleeve.

  Bracken turned, his eyes filled with loathing. “Get your filthy hands off me!”

  “Not until you tell me where Mr. Churchill is.”

  “Rot in hell,” Bracken spat, moving off again.

  “Then I'll share damnation with you. And Anna Fitzgerald.”

  Bracken pulled up sharply. “What's your stinking little game, Burgess?”

  “Did you think you could keep your affair with her secret?”

  “Never been a problem. I 'm happy to be associated with her,” Bracken responded, his words growing clumsy through surprise. “If you think I have something to hide—”

  “Sorry. I was forgetting. It's Miss Fitzgerald who's got the problem. On account of the fact that she's also having an affair with a Swedish gentleman. Name of Svensson. Bjorn Svensson.”

  Bracken prayed that his face remained inscrutable behind his bottle-thick glasses, but there was no disguising the flush of astonishment and torment that had begun rising in his cheeks. “You miserable bastard. You repeat one word of that and I'll break you. I'll make sure you never work again. And when I've finished breaking you into pieces I'm pretty sure Joe Kennedy will be standing in line to feed what's left of you back into whichever sewer you crawled from. I'll destroy you, Burgess. And it will give me the most immense pleasure.” He turned his back and was off again, striding forcefully down towards the park.

  His total destruction. Yes, there might be many people standing in line for that pleasure, but it was a risk Burgess knew he had no option but to take. To destroy himself, if that's what it took, in order to get to Churchill. Oh, God, this was it. No turning back. He began to run after the retreating figure of Bracken.

  “Then we'll go down together. She'll destroy you, too, Bracken.”

  Still the other man did not stop, striding out ever more impatiently, pushing his way along the crowded pavement and leaving looks of irritation in his wake.

  “Do you know she tells the Swede everything. Everything you tell her.”

  A slight faltering in the step, but still Bracken pressed onwards. Burgess had almost caught him, was up to his shoulder.

  “Do you know that's how the Germans found out the invasion date for Norway? Because you told her.”

  Bracken stopped but did not turn, as though he had walked into an invisible wall.

  “Thousands of British lives lost, Bracken. Because of you. And her.”

  At last he turned, his face a battlefield of rage and misery.

  “Lies,” he whispered. “Lies! Absurd lies!”

  “Face it, Bracken, why the hell d'you think she hangs around with a character like you? To get tips from your hairdresser?”

  Bracken grabbed the lapels of Burgess's crumpled suit. “Svensson's
nothing more than a friend of her uncle!”

  “A very well-connected man, is Mr. Svensson. Lots of business interests in Germany. Trades all sorts of things, he does. Currencies. Timber. Rubber. And pillow talk.”

  Their faces were only inches apart.

  “Know what she does, Bracken? Goes directly from your dining table to his bed. Takes your bloody roses with her.”

  That's when Bracken hit him, lashed out and connected with Burgess's chin so forcefully he sent him sprawling in the gutter. Bracken stood towering over the fallen figure, ready to do it again.

  Burgess felt his chin, then managed a smile through a lip he knew had split. “That's nothing to what they'll do to you, Bracken, when they find out about your little love triangle. Beat bloody hell out of you, I expect. But that'll be kids' play compared with what they'll do to your career. And that of Mr. Churchill. Everything destroyed, because you got up the wrong piece of skirt.”

  The foot went back, ready to kick the insult out of him, but something snapped in Bracken's memory. The Swede in the company of Anna and Joe Kennedy, at dinner when he'd first met Anna, then their encounter walking through the park. A man of many contacts, Kennedy had called the Swede—Christ, they'd just come from the Palace. And Anna had been so remarkably, irritatingly coy.

  “How do you know about Anna?”

  “Because I know about Svensson.”

  “He's a spy?”

  Burgess clambered gingerly to his feet, still rubbing his chin. “They'll have difficulty proving it. After all, he's done nothing you haven't done—done no more than repeat gossip. Except you knew it wasn't gossip, you knew they were state secrets. Yet still you passed them on. Anna Fitzgerald whispered sweet nothings in your ear and you—well, you whispered everything in hers. They'll have a much easier time making the case stick against you.”

  “But, but…”

  “Know what they'll do, Bracken? They'll conclude that you're either a fool or a traitor. They'll go digging about, looking for something in your background that might have made you turn against us, turn anti-English. Something you've hidden away and buried all these years.”

  Bracken's Irish cheeks, which had been burning with torment, turned to ice.

  “If they find you've been holding out on them, fabricating, hiding your tracks, then you'll go down as a traitor. If not, you're simply another infatuated fool who got led on by a much younger woman and just happened to be responsible for the military disaster in Norway. Oh, wouldn't Chamberlain just love to pin that on someone else? Someone so close to Mr. Churchill?”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “Deadly.”

  “I don't believe you,” Bracken whispered.

  “Then why are you still standing here? Or maybe you want me to tell you when Miss Fitzgerald and Svensson last met? Hyde Park Hotel less than a week ago. They spent the night there, and much of the next morning. Big 'Do Not Disturb' notice swinging from the door knob.”

  The lips moved, but no sound emerged.

  Burgess pushed home his advantage yet again, but this time there was an edge of pity in his voice. “That was the night after you last saw her, wasn't it?”

  Slowly, the words formed. “You mean to destroy me.”

  “Funnily enough, Bracken, I intend to save you. Because that's the only way I can save Mr. Churchill. You go down, he goes down for being such a monumental bloody fool as to have you as a friend. That's why I need to see him. Must see him. Immediately.”

  “But you can't. He's in Cabinet.”

  “Oh, my God,” Burgess gasped, as though he'd just been hit again. “Then it's probably too late. But we have to try.”

  They began running down the street in the direction of the park and Downing Street which lay beyond. Until Bracken came sliding to a halt.

  “Wait!” he insisted.

  “No time.”

  “Then make some.” Bracken was staring angrily at him, all signs of wretchedness gone. “How the hell do you know all this? Who are you, Burgess? What are you?”

  Burgess simply stared, still panting from the chase.

  “A traitor or a fool, you said. And you're no bloody fool, Burgess, I'll grant you that.”

  They stood eye to eye, of similar height, with hair seemingly ruled by the same laws of chaos.

  “A traitor trying to save Mr. Churchill?” Burgess demanded. “Bizarre definition of treachery.”

  “How would you know about Svensson? About Anna? About me? Unless…”

  His bluff had been called, and Burgess had run out of excuses and explanations. He was also desperately afraid he might have run out of time.

  “Christ, you're not just a queer, you're the same sort of creature as Svensson, aren't you, Burgess? But for which side?” And slowly, as memories of late-night conversations about the qualities of Russia began to tumble through his jarred brain, a smile began to form a slow path across Bracken's face, twisting as it went. “Oh, I think I can figure out which side. Can't I, Commissar?”

  “I'm English, Bracken. As English as any man on this earth.”

  “You're a Communist.”

  “I'm not the one who betrayed thousands of British troops. Let's remember that, shall we?”

  And the smile was gone. “You can prove nothing.”

  Suddenly Burgess began to laugh, mocking.

  “You can prove nothing!” Bracken repeated, trying to bluster, but Burgess's eyes were colder and more sober than Bracken had ever known.

  “Can't you see, Bracken, how ludicrous all of this is? Neither of us can prove a damned thing. We can kill each other off with accusation—but we can't prove a bloody thing. I admit I've got friends in some pretty low places—you've got that much on me and I suppose you might use it to make my life distinctly uncomfortable. But nowhere near as bloody uncomfortable as I promise I will make things for you, if I have to. Because what have you got against me? Russia? We're not at war with bloody Russia! We want Russia as an ally, on our side—Winston Churchill's been making broadcasts about it for months. No, they'll not care much about me—hell, if I'm half as good a friend of the Russians as you suppose, they might even find me useful. Whereas you…You have blood on your hands, Mr. Bracken. British blood. They might find many uses for you, too, but none which will allow you to sleep at night.” Bracken shook his head.

  “No matter how much you might loathe me, Bracken, we're in this together. Oh, yes. Sort of a team, we are, you and me. Tied to each other like the Devil to his tail. And we both might burn in Hell—but if we do, it'll be together. Because if I go down I shall have to insist on taking you with me.”

  “You threaten me like some cheap bully.”

  “Wake up, Bracken! This isn't about you and me. It's about a world that's grown insane and wants to destroy itself, a world in which you and I count for nothing more than a piss in the park. We have a choice, you and I, to make right now. We can stand here and pick over our mutual lack of merit while the world annihilates itself—or we can take the only chance we've got of doing something about it.”

  “Which is?”

  “Saving Mr. Churchill. When we've done that we can sit down over a crate of champagne and talk about our shortcomings until we are both old men. But in the meantime—unless you have some unnatural desire to form a queue for the nearest scaffold—may I suggest we get on with it?”

  And they were both running, hurling themselves across Pall Mall, into the park and towards Downing Street.

  Four-twenty p.m. Ten minutes before Cabinet.

  “You say Mr. Attlee's on a train?” Wilson was demanding into a bakelite telephone.

  At the other end, a secretary struggled to explain.

  “Telegram? But we haven't received any telegram,” Wilson insisted. “For heaven's sake, what sort of operation are you running down there?”

  The secretary was tempted to explain that she wasn't running any sort of operation and the Labour Party in conference was both constitutionally and temperamentally incapa
ble of “being run,” as he put it, no matter how hard the leadership tried, but she sensed he wasn't interested in the democratic niceties.

  “Is there anyone there I can talk to?” Wilson demanded, as if she were no one.

  They'd all gone off to the Winter Gardens where the conference was being held. She offered to run there herself and get back to him.

  “How long will that take?”

  Thirty minutes, if she hurried.

  “But we only have ten! What am I to tell the Prime Minister? Have you no idea what was in Mr. Attlee's telegram?”

  There was hesitation at the other end of the line.

  “If you know, for the sake of sanity, you have to tell me,” he insisted. “There's a war on out there, you know.”

  Silence.

  “Please…”

  Ah, the magic word. At last. Well, not the telegram, that was up to Mr. Attlee. But she had typed out a press release and stenciled a hundred copies for distribution later that evening. They were sitting in a pile beside her. She supposed it could do no harm to let Wilson have the gist of it. About the unanimous National Executive decision to be a full partner in a new Government.

  “Yes…”

  Under a new Prime Minister.

  Ah, so there it was. To the first question—no. But to the second they had responded in the affirmative. Wilson replaced the phone without thanks or formalities.

  Chamberlain was standing at his shoulder. Wilson looked up.

  “It's as we expected, Neville.”

  Chamberlain nodded slowly.

  “Would it have made any difference? If they'd had other thoughts?” Wilson pressed.

  Chamberlain seemed lost in another world. He stood tall for a moment, his shoulders braced. “We shall never know,” he replied. Then he picked up his slim folder and marched into the Cabinet Room.