WC02 - Never Surrender

by Michael Dobbs

  So they had relished their opportunity to jeer, to wave their papers at him in distraction, to screw up their faces and cause so much noise that he couldn't go on. He had been forced to leave, head bowed in shame, his speech unfinished. Just like his father before him.

  Now he would be facing them as Prime Minister a Prime Minister that many, and perhaps most, did not want.

  "They will render me their bloody hands, and swear unto me their loyalty, assure me of their constancy, even as they march to the fields of Philippi .. ."

  "What?" Bracken spluttered in surprise beside him.

  "Shakespeare, you ill-educated louse. They cheered Caesar, then watched him die at the hands of Brutus. After which they cheered Brutus, before watching him die at the hands of Mark Antony."

  "Thought he committed suicide."

  "Don't quibble, man!"

  They passed the sandstone obelisk of the Cenotaph, the memorial to the fallen. Churchill raised his hat in respect then clamped it forcefully back on his head. "They want Neville back," he growled. "Even those who voted against him declare they never wanted Neville out; they intended only to shake him up a little, not to shake him right out of Downing Street. He's not even Caesar's ghost; he'll be sitting right beside me this afternoon, watching, waiting."

  "For what?"

  "For calamity, which may not be far away. For all his faults, Neville is an excellent party man and he still holds the majority in Parliament in the palm of his hands. One wink from him and the House will fall down upon me more certainly than if Goering had sent over every last one of his bombers."

  Churchill strode on, his cane flying out in front of him, revealing remarkable energy. Although Bracken was more than a quarter of a century younger, he was having trouble keeping the pace.

  "Can it be that bad, Winston?"

  "You yourself reminded me of the doleful circumstance that I have not a single friend in my own War Cabinet and precious few in the Government as a whole."

  "There have been a few mutters, of course. Some of the old sods saying that if they're forced to share power with socialists then the war's already been lost, that sort of nonsense. But'

  "I know, I've heard. But I thought you were supposed to keep me informed of such things," Churchill accused.

  "I thought you had more important matters on your mind. Where did you hear?"

  "It is not widely known and it must not become widely known that Mr. Chamberlain had a most suspicious mind. Didn't trust his colleagues, not a bit. So he had their phones tapped."

  "Bastard," Bracken exclaimed in appreciation.

  "It is, of course, illegal, unethical and entirely inappropriate. It is also unfortunate that he left office in such a hurry that he forgot to cancel the phone taps. As a result, yesterday evening I, as his successor, received a large file of transcripts."

  "Must have made entertaining reading."

  "They made most depressing reading," Churchill snapped. "Most of my Ministers appear to have the loyalty of maggots. It appears I run a Government worthy of little more than being fed to the fishes. Incidentally, I have withdrawn the tap on your own phone'

  "What?"

  "And instructed that your substantial file be condemned to the fire."

  Bracken's face grew ashen. He was perhaps the most private of politicians, an enthusiastically unmarried man who revelled in the intrigue surrounding others' private lives while using his considerable personal fortune to protect his own. But phone taps? For how long? And how much did they know? In a pace he had resolved never to trust his life to the telephone again.

  "You look as though you've seen a ghost," Churchill growled, amused at his friend's discomfort.

  "Have to say I feel a little like Brutus."

  "Ah, but it is I who must go to the marketplace and address the mob."

  "What will you say?"

  "I have never been more uncertain. I pray for inspiration .. ."

  They stood on the edge of Parliament Square waiting for the traffic to clear. The edges of the pavement were daubed with thick white paint to make them visible in the blackout, and the traffic lights stood obscured, showing nothing but faint crosses on their lenses. Three elderly women were waiting with them and they turned to wish him well; automatically he raised his hat once more.

  "We're with you, Winnie," a passing taxi driver yelled through his window.

  "Ah, the people, the people," he muttered mournfully to Bracken.

  The traffic thinned and they set off toward the Parliament building until, in the middle of the road, Churchill came to an abrupt halt, smacking the silver top of his cane into the palm of his hand.

  "But perhaps that is it, Brendan. The people. The marketplace. And ghosts .. ."

  It meant nothing to Bracken who, mystified, shuffled his companion beyond the reach of the advancing traffic.

  "They are the answer, Brendan, the people." The cane smacked down once more. "Forget Brutus, think of Mark Antony. An appeal over the heads of the conspirators. Trust the people. Just as my father always insisted. That was the rock on which stood his entire career."

  Bracken knew this was balderdash. For all the father's wild protestations about democracy, at the first opportunity Lord Randolph had cast aside his radical ideas and grabbed hungrily at Ministerial office. It was another of Winston's romantic myths and Bracken considered telling him so, but thought better of it. The old man had been in such a fragile mood.

  "But .. ." Churchill seemed somehow to deflate. "How can I expect their loyalty when I have nothing to offer them but calamity?"

  "Why not surprise them? Tell them the truth."

  "The truth is too painful."

  "Not half as painful as all the lies they've been fed and all the easy victories they've been promised."

  "I'm not sure I can offer them victory of any kind."

  "You must. Otherwise they won't follow and they won't fight. But offer them the scent of hope and they will give you everything."

  They were at the gateway to the Palace of Westminster; a duty policeman saluted. Bracken's mind raced. He was no intellectual but he had an unfailing capacity for borrowing arguments and detecting what others and particularly Winston Churchill needed to hear. Frequently the old man wanted to argue, to engage in a shouting match that would see them through dinner and well into a bottle of brandy. But this was a different Churchill, a hurt, mistrustful Churchill, a man who needed bolstering, not beating.

  "Winston, I've never fought in a war, while you've fought in several. Always thought you were a mad bugger, to be honest, risking your neck like that. But this I do know. War has changed. It's no longer a matter of a few officers and a handful of men charging thousands of fuzzy-wuzzies. It involves every man in the country, women and children, too. Modern war is people's war, and the people are as likely to die in their own homes as they are on the front line. They have a right to be told the truth. You've got to trust them."

  They had reached the threshold of the Parliament building.

  "Anyway," Bracken added, 'you've got no other bloody choice but to trust the people. Nobody else trusts you."

  Churchill forged ahead once more, the cane beating time, his eyes fixed upon an idea that was beginning to rotate in his mind and spin aside so many of the doubts that had been plaguing him. His concentration was total and he offered his friend no word of thanks or farewell. His colleague was left staring at his disappearing back.

  "Remember like Mark Antony," Bracken called after him.

  "Like my father," he thought he heard the old man reply.

  When, later that day, Churchill entered the Chamber of the House of Commons from behind the Speaker's Chair, it was packed. For two days and nights of the previous week this same place had heard protestations and denunciations of Neville Chamberlain so terrible it had caused his Government to fall. Now, like a wicked child caught in the act, it protested its innocence.

  As they spotted Churchill making his way towards his place, there were those on
the opposite side of the House who cheered and waved their papers in the traditional form of greeting. It scratched at their socialist hearts to show goodwill towards a man such as this, but there were the common courtesies to be observed. Yet from his own party, which was more than two-thirds of the House, there came nothing but embarrassment. No one stood to cheer, few hailed him, most had suddenly found something of captivating interest amongst their papers or in the conversation of their neighbours.

  Moments later, it was Neville Chamberlain's turn to enter and walk the same path, squeezing past the outstretched legs of others until he had found his place on the green leather bench beside Churchill. And as they saw him, his colleagues offered an outpouring of sympathy so vehement that they hoped it might wash away any mark of their guilt. He had last left this Chamber as a condemned man, and already he was a saint.

  The House was like an excitable and over-bred greyhound; at every mention of Chamberlain they leapt up and barked their loyalty, while as Churchill spoke they crouched in anxiety, their tails between their legs, as he treated them to one of the most brutal and honest expositions ever offered by a Prime Minister at a time of great crisis. Many, it seemed, simply did not understand.

  "Can you believe it?" Channon was still protesting some hours later as he stood on the lawn at the rear of the Travellers' Club. It was early evening; the weather was still glorious. "What on earth did all that mean? "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat"," he growled in mock imitation.

  "Not the sort of stuff to get the common man jumping for joy, that's for sure," Butler agreed across a glass of sherry.

  "Extraordinary performance," Colville added.

  "D'you think he was drunk?"

  "Always so difficult to tell."

  "Not something you drafted then, Jock?" Channon enquired. The stare he received in response was so stony he felt forced to leave in search of the bar steward.

  "Truly, Jock, I fear for us all," Butler muttered. "Winston will say anything if the words take his fancy. We shall be swept away on a flood of oral incontinence."

  The words still rang in his ears. He was a diplomat by trade and an intellectual by training, a man who took pleasure in toying with every side of an argument in the manner that a cat plays with a ball of wool. Yet Churchill was a man stripped of any trace of either sophistication or the values Butler held so dear in public life; his speech had been nothing short of vulgar.

  "You ask, What is our policy?" Churchill had declared. "I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy," he had told them. "You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival .. ."

  Butler was far from certain that he would want to survive in a world of crude simplicities of the sort embraced by Churchill. "I feel violated," he muttered, his lips wobbling.

  His misery was interrupted as Channon returned in the company of the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy. They were followed by a club steward carrying a tray with three small sherries and an enormous glass of bourbon.

  "So, what are you Three Musketeers up to?" the American demanded.

  If diplomacy was seen by many as a carefully orchestrated minuet, Joe Kennedy could always be relied upon to arrive wearing hobnail boots. He had worn them throughout a career that had carried him through the boardrooms of major banks and into the bedrooms of Hollywood starlets, and he had kept them ever more tightly laced as he had kicked his way into the smoke-filled back rooms of the US Democratic Party where he showed as little loyalty to his President as he did to his wife. He was a man with a roving eye and a slipping tie, and in the two years since his arrival at the Court of St. James's he had come to hate Winston Churchill.

  "Not drinking to Winston and his war, I hope," Kennedy continued, waving his bourbon. "On the other hand, if all you've got is Winston, then I'm not surprised you drink." He smiled from behind round tortoiseshell glasses. "I'm sure I'm not telling tales out of school with you three when I tell you that even Halifax is complaining," he added. "Ridiculous working hours, sometimes up till two or three in the morning. This toil and sweat nonsense may sound fine, but what the hell can you achieve in the middle of the night with a man who's been drinking whisky since breakfast?"

  "Joe, how did you get to be a diplomat?" Butler enquired provocatively.

  "Funny thing, heard that Winston's been asking how the hell you got to be a Minister."

  The response brought a flush to Butler's cheek. He expected to be sacked his views about Winston and his policies were far from a private indulgence but he still hadn't heard, and he found the uncertainty offensive.

  "We live to play another day, Joe."

  "Not if Winston gets going, you won't."

  "You may well be right. But the game isn't over yet."

  "So I hear. Fact is, one of the Whips told me that two-thirds of the party would have Neville back like a shot, given half an excuse."

  "And most of them think that Winston is just the sort of person to provide it," Colville added.

  "Not won over by his charms, then, Jock?" Kennedy enquired.

  "May I put it this way, Mr Ambassador? I've never known a Prime Minister to come into office with so many people expecting him to fail even wanting him to fail."

  "They don't want this war. It's what I've been saying all along!" Kennedy exclaimed. "Gentlemen, you go ahead with this fight and you're gonna get beat. Look what happened in Poland. Look what's happening in the Low Countries. Just heard from our embassy in Holland that the Luftwaffe is turning Rotterdam into the back side of hell. It's chaos over there."

  "Do we have a choice but to go ahead, Joe? I fear Herr Hitler might insist," Butler prodded.

  "What are you fighting for, Rab?" Kennedy barked back. "Hitler doesn't want to touch England, he doesn't want your empire. Leave him alone in Europe and by Christmas he'll be sipping tea and chomping through cream cakes with your King, all friends together. Why you ever got involved in this damned war I'll never understand."

  It was a view that was also close to Butler's heart. "But we are involved, whether we like it or not. What can we do?"

  "Play the Italian card. Hitler listens to Mussolini. Wrap up a couple of your Mediterranean islands as a gift for II Duce and he'll whisper whatever you want into Uncle Adolf's ear. Otherwise you're gonna end up at war with them both."

  The three Englishmen stood mournfully.

  Kennedy finished off his drink in one huge swallow. "Still, can't stand around here all evening. Got other diplomatic duties to perform, strengthening the Entente Cordiale with the assistance of a little French lady I know." He smiled and tried to straighten his tie. "Musketeers, it's been a pleasure." He waved and was gone.

  "I know I'm a bit of a snob," Channon began, 'but I can't help feeling he's right."

  "Of course he's right," Butler snapped irritably.

  "And what do you think, Jock?"

  "You see this suit I'm wearing?" It was offensively blue and exceptionally bright. "From the fifty-shilling department of Monty Burton's. Rather cheap and sensational, I'm afraid, but entirely suitable for this administration." He plucked a loose thread from his lapel. "I don't expect it will prove to be much of an investment."

  The public library in Pimlico was open until seven that evening. It had a ground-in, sweet-and-sour aroma of beeswax and half-burnt coke, but it suited Ruth Mueller. She did not want to get back to her rented room before eight. By that time the family who lived below would have finished their dinner; it was bad enough having to go hungry without smelling the rest of the world at the trough.

  Unlike her room, the Pimlico library was warm and quiet, but it was the books, of course, that had first drawn her here, particularly the Hitler book
s. Sadly, they had long since been banished from the shelves, and none of them had been very good, either Marxist tracts or hagiography. So she was left to wonder and to grapple with her half-formed impressions of the man. What about his childhood? What about his early days as a vagrant on the streets of Vienna? What about his early friendships with Jews, his devotion to his mother, his inability to form any other close relationship with a woman, his vegetarianism and his fondness for cream cakes? Who was he, why was he? He was physically brave, a man of courage. Like Churchill, so she had been told, and perhaps more so, for the young Hitler had received many wounds and war decorations. Yet he was childish. In 1918, Hitler had been invalided to a military hospital. When he heard that an armistice had been signed and that Germany had surrendered, he'd put his head beneath his pillow and sobbed. Bawled like a baby. And he'd been shouting like a petulant child ever since. Some said that was like Churchill, too .. .

  She'd been trying to forget about Churchill but he had an irritating habit of wheedling his way back into her thoughts. She picked up a newspaper and tried to shake him away once more.

  Hah! Civil servants, The Times announced, were to get a war bonus. The guilty men cosseting themselves at the very moment they were putting up the price of coal yet again. Outside the library the sun was shining brightly, but she couldn't prevent a shiver of apprehension running through her body. She had frozen in her garret through the last winter, and dreaded what the next one might bring. On the following page there were tips for 'cooking through the war without fear of rationing'. Dishes such as eggs with anchovy, bean and liver casserole, coconut rounds (a concoction based on bread soaked in evaporated milk) and macaroni and rabbit pie. She imagined every rabbit in the country dashing for cover.