Churchill's Triumph

by Michael Dobbs

  Stalin looked at the American. He seemed so helpless, leaning weakly in his wheelchair, and his plea was so pathetic that it had to be genuine. This was the man who had done more than anyone to ensure the creation of a world organization: it was his child and would be his legacy. Yet here he was, down on his metaphorical knees, begging for a little extra help. Up to this point, Stalin had perceived the United Nations as being little more than an Anglo-American brothel in which everyone would set about screwing each other while they whispered sweet words in their ears and made all kinds of pretence, yet Stalin hadn’t cared. Let them talk, words were free, an old man’s sedative. But for the first time, Stalin was coming to understand that Roosevelt was entirely sincere in his belief that they were ushering in a new world system dedicated to reconciliation, rhubarb pie and choir practice every Christmas. The man was a fool, a doddering old fool, and it was Stalin’s firm view that fools should always be encouraged.

  Stalin took out a handkerchief, blew his nose, appeared almost close to tears. “I will lend my weight to your appeal, Mr. President, and wish God’s blessing upon it.”

  And you, Winston? Sometimes I wonder if you are capable of understanding how much this means to me. You have in your veins the blood of so many generations who are accustomed to conquest. But we are here at Yalta to build a new world, one that will know neither prejudice nor violence, a world of justice and equity. Will you help me in this. . . this little matter of a couple of extra votes?”

  Churchill wondered if he were dreaming. Here was a man extolling the virtues of equity and equality while at the same time demanding that the United States be given three votes. Three—why three, for pity’s sake? Why not forty-eight, one for every state? Rise up, Rhode Island, and be counted! Awake, Alabama! Onward, Oregon! And while they were about it, perhaps the Ku Klux Klan should provide the doormen and lift operators. “My dear Franklin, I am sure my feelings on the matter precisely match those of the Marshal.”

  “Then, gentlemen, I’m a happy man.” And with that, he seemed to deflate into his chair.

  “One day the entire world might be one huge and happy family,” Stalin offered, smirking slightly.

  “One day,” Roosevelt whispered, “even Germany might be a member of the United Nations.”

  “Germany,” Stalin returned, “will do as she is told. As Germans have always done.” He forked a huge pile of roast beef on to his plate. “They are a queer people. Like sheep, but led by rams. I remember before the October Revolution that we all thought the main uprising wouldn’t come in Russia but in Germany. We were wrong. There can be no revolution in Germany—do you know why? Because they would have to step on the lawns.” He was piling spoonfuls of sturgeon on to his plate alongside the beef. “But maybe we Russians are no different. I remember a tale about how, after the battle for Stalingrad, one of our men was leading back a large number of German prisoners and on the way he killed all but one. When he arrived at his barracks with the prisoner, they asked him what had happened to the others. “I was just carrying out Stalin’s orders,” he said, “to kill every German to the last man. And here he is!” The generalissimo exploded in mirth and thumped the table, full of self-congratulation.

  Roosevelt felt it was time to change the course of the conversation, yet his mind kept being pulled back to the same point. “Will you come to the opening ceremony of the United Nations, Winston?”

  “If I can. It depends upon so many things,” the Englishman replied, gazing in wonder at the confection of food on Stalin’s plate. “First, I may have to endure the rigors of an election. It is possible that this may be the last time we three shall ever sit together.”

  “What?” Stalin demanded, with creamed potato lurking in his moustache. “They’d never get rid of you. Who better than the man who led them to victory?”

  “Regrettably, it seems that the ordinary Englishman is no match for the German or Russian when it comes to taking guidance on these matters. We have two parties—three, even—who will contest the election.”

  “One party. One party!” Stalin insisted. “So much better.”

  “Electorates have no memory,” Churchill continued, sounding morose. “Every day dawns fresh for them, with all its promise of novelty and new fashion, and they remain ever hopeful of imminent seduction. To be tried and tested is taken as a grievous fault, to be old even more so. It may be that I am thrown out of office.” He sulked for a moment. “Tell me, Marshal, what happens when a politician is thrown out of office in Russia?” Yes, tell me, you black-hearted bastard, tell me that. Men like Trotsky and Kirov and Rykov and Kamenev and Zinoviev and Bukharin and Lakoba and Ordzhonikidze and a hundred others, many of them women. Those who were your colleagues and friends and became rivals, and are now nothing but bones.

  “Why, they disappear,” Stalin mumbled between mouthfuls of fish, “from public life. But you seriously think you might lose the election, Prime Minister?”

  “I like my politics like my beef. Well done. Yet the taste in my country seems to be for their political fare to be a little pinker. But never bloody red.”

  “But what will you do—if you lose?” Stalin asked, his tone still incredulous.

  “Why, I shall do what each one of us is doing. Seek to secure my place in history.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “By writing it.”

  And they all burst into laughter, perhaps the first genuinely shared expression of warmth they had shared throughout the conference. So they sat, and talked, and exchanged stories, the Dreamer, the Dictator, and the Democrat, until it was time for them to go.

  In the hallway, as they departed, many of the British staff were lined up to say goodbye and Churchill called for three cheers for his departing guests. Roosevelt waved his thanks, and Stalin gave a stiff little bow. Sawyers helped him on with his greatcoat but appeared to be in a somber mood. The Russian said something to his interpreter, Pavlov.

  “The Marshal wishes to know if you have enjoyed your time in Russia,” Pavlov said.

  Sawyers summoned up a servant’s smile. “Up the Revolution, I say.”

  “He wishes success to the Revolution,” Pavlov whispered to his leader.

  “And up yours,” Sawyers added.

  “Success also to you personally, Comrade Stalin,” the interpreter continued, hoping he had managed to capture the meaning of this servant with the few words and strange accent.

  ***

  Hour upon hour, mile upon mile, the train rattled over the sleepers, heading south. Not to Yalta, but its route would at least take it through Simferopol. Near enough. Nowak tried to make himself invisible, feigning sleep, his cap pulled low over his face. All the while he kept an eye open for landmarks he might recognize, things he might have seen only the day before, but it was pitch dark.

  He sat in the corner of his carriage, waiting for the moment when someone would come and denounce him as an impostor, but no one did. The head count was in order. It was enough.

  He had no plan, but once more he felt a flicker of hope. So he sat on the hard wooden bench and waited for Fate to play its hand.

  SUNDAY, 11th OF FEBRUARY, 1945

  THE LAST DAY

  NINE

  First light. The faint silver threads of dawn. Most of the men on the train still slept, even the guards, anaesthetized by drink and the rhythmical chant of the wheels. Mile after mile, the train rattled and swayed its slow way south.

  Nowak had no plan, no information as to where he was and no idea how long the journey would take. All he had was the hope that the train would take him somewhere near Yalta, where he knew his fate would be decided, for that was where Winston Churchill had taken his hand and given him his word. His strange servant, Sawyers, too. Now, for Marian Nowak, there could be no going back.

  He knew he was a man who counted for little in this world, whose life or death mattered to no one,
except perhaps a little girl lost somewhere a lifetime ago in Poland. This had become a world in which men were no longer individuals but had become nothing but statistics, to be nodded on and off trains or work details and on to casualty lists. But Marian Nowak wasn’t yet ready to die.

  The elderly guard at the end of the carriage stirred, scratched himself. Nowak caught his eye. “When do we next stop for food, comrade?”

  The guard shrugged and spat through the latrine hole. “Maybe we don’t.”

  “But we must eat.”

  The guard stood by the hole and, with unsteady fingers, fumbled with his belt. “When we get to Sebastopol. Perhaps midday.”

  “So soon?” he asked, struggling to quell the mixture of excitement and terror that was rising within him.

  “What’s so soon about it? Look,” he nodded out through the window, “we’ll be pissing in the station at Simferopol any moment now.”

  The train was slowing, swaying as it passed across the points.

  “Will we be stopping here?”

  The guard ignored him as he set about his business.

  Nowak stood. “My turn next,” he suggested, as he passed by and moved through to the end of the carriage. He stretched, trying to force life back into sleeping limbs. Slowly, he pulled down the carriage window and took in the blast of fresh, cool air. The brakes were squealing, beginning to bite. As Nowak leaned through the window, he looked back into the compartment to where the old guard was squatting and struggling, his rifle leaning against the wall several feet away. That was when Nowak reached for the handle and threw himself off the train.

  ***

  Churchill stood in his shirtsleeves at the open window, looking out to sea where gulls were twisting and turning through the warm air in their relentless pursuit of the shoals of fish.

  All morning he had been distracted, rising unusually early, yet with no apparent purpose. A message had arrived from the President inviting him to share a drive through the grounds of the Livadia while the advisers finished preparing the final drafts, but Churchill had sent his regrets. All week long he had sought a private audience, to the point of humiliation, but now his pride wouldn’t allow him to accept. “Too late. Much too late.”

  Now the dolphins had also found the sardines and were joining in the attack. The water was being churned silver as the fish crowded ever closer together in their futile bid to escape. More carnage.

  Sawyers was at his elbow, collar and bowtie in hand.

  “What about our Pole?” he asked quietly.

  Churchill continued to gaze at the attack that was pouring in upon the defenseless fish. “And what about Poland?” he whispered hoarsely. “Never has so much suffering settled upon the world as it does at this moment, Sawyers.”

  “I don’t understand your job, zur. You’re about to sign a peace agreement, yet you’re misery itself.”

  “Oh, but I shall smile as I sign, Sawyers, with a face that will crack with delight. For if I am sad, they will know they have won.”

  “They?”

  “The forces of chaos. And that’s half the secret, not letting the other bastard know when he’s won. Giving yourself a chance, another day to fight.”

  “Never surrender.”

  “Something like that.”

  “There were a time when you didn’t have to pretend.”

  “Was there? Was there really?”

  He went back to studying the sardines.

  ***

  The fall sucked the breath from his body. He screamed at his limbs to move, but they wouldn’t respond, didn’t hear his calls, and for a while he wondered if he’d broken something. But slowly, as though in a dream, he found that he was running, dragging his leaden limbs behind him. He didn’t look back. Behind him he could hear menacing noises—the slowing train, angry steam, tortured brakes, reluctant windows being forced open, shouts, a whistle being blown. More shouts.

  He stumbled as he ran, his body still protesting from the fall, his feet catching in the long grass. At one point he tumbled, and when he picked himself up, he couldn’t remember where he was—Warsaw? Katyn? He had done so much running. Then he heard a familiar sound, one that seemed like the crack of a breaking branch, followed by the hiss-zip of an angry hornet as a bullet forced apart the air somewhere above his head. Soon there would be a swarm of them. Thank the Virgin that the guards were mostly old, not front-line troops, as slow with their trigger fingers at this time of the morning as they were with the buckles of their belts.

  He had faced gunfire many times, but this had none of the exhilaration of attack, staring at the enemy, knowing that one of you was about to die. Instead he was running like a rabbit, his arse bobbing in the air, knowing that his was the only body that might be dragged off the scene. As he ran, he felt his veins turning to ice, his muscles binding up in anticipation as he waited for a bullet to tear its way through his back. Would he feel it? Would he be aware of the flesh being torn from his body and his life oozing out through the gaping hole? His throat was parched. He very much wanted to be sick.

  Ahead of him and to the right, a few hundred yards away, stood a small farming cottage on the outskirts of Simferopol, and beyond that other buildings and outhouses. In the open fields he was nothing but a free target and he desperately needed to make it to the clutter and chaos of the town. The train had now halted, its brakes howling in protest, and behind him he could hear the sounds of the gathering pursuit.

  He focused all his energies on a window in the old mud wall of the cottage. It kept his head up, his legs pounding, even though his heart wanted to burst. More hornets. As he drew near, a small cloud of dust erupted from the wall, leaving behind it a dark, unpleasant hole. Soon there were more. He stumbled again, concentration broken, and for an instant he thought he might have been hit, but his lungs were still screaming and his feet smashing into the ground. Every part of him hurt. Then he was behind the wall of the cottage and found himself on a track that led to the shelter of more buildings.

  Only then did he stop for a few precious seconds to suck in lungfuls of air that proved to him he was still alive.

  ***

  Churchill picked up his pen for the second time in as many minutes and dismembered it, checking that it had sufficient ink in its reservoir. Wouldn’t do to run out of ink, not when you were signing a warrant of execution.

  They were gathered for the last time in the ballroom of the Livadia Palace, indulging in the small talk they all abhorred, waiting. There was much scurrying in the wings. Fevered last-minute whisperings. Everything smothered in tobacco smoke and nervous smiles.

  Churchill gazed around “this bloody place” and checked his watch. Twelve. Too early, by half. Throughout the night their advisers had been testing their endurance and the meaning of words, redrafting, retyping, giving what they hoped was final form to the document—although, in fact, there would be two documents. The first was the Protocol. It would reflect what they had agreed, yet its paragraphs would be piled high with caveats and conditions because the President of the United States was forbidden by his own constitution to enter into formal treaties: that was the exclusive prerogative of the U.S. Senate. So for the sake of such formalities the Protocol was larded with words that were deliberately soft and supple, recording their “conclusions” rather than talking of them as commitments. And to offer themselves a further layer of protection, the Protocol was to be signed by the foreign secretaries, Eden, Molotov and Stettinius. It was almost as though the leaders wanted to keep their fingerprints off the knife.

  The leaders would sign the second document. It was a communiqué or report—the press release of the proceedings, if you like—which was more polemical and overflowed with ambition and exhortation. It talked of their “inflexible purpose,” of the “restoration of rights” and of “a world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom and the general well-bei
ng of all mankind.” Mighty stuff. Yet this, too, would not be binding.

  Ah, but there was also to be a third piece of paper, one that would be written in words of steel and would bind them like shackles: “The Agreement on Terms for Entry of the Soviet Union into the War against Japan.” In a single page it gave Russia everything she wanted, the islands, the ports, the railways. Everything. It also ordered the American president to obtain the concurrence of the Chinese on every one of these matters. And so as to leave no shred of doubt it went on to state: “The Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.” So, Stalin was to get the language he wanted, too.

  These documents were warrants of execution, not just for Germany and Japan but for innocent countries like China, Poland, and many others in the further reaches of Europe. Churchill thought it might even involve his own execution, too, when it came to the election. Yet still he would sign, and smile.

  Then the advisers, like Oriental minions, were shuffling forward with their gifts. The final drafts. The small talk evaporated as slowly, painfully, silently, they began to read.

  They all saw different things. Roosevelt lingered on the first paragraph of the protocol summoning the conference that would create the United Nations: 25 April. He read it twice, three times, with a feeling of excitement inside that he hadn’t experienced since he was a young and predatory man. He noticed his hand was trembling as it hovered above the paper. In less than three months the dream would be flesh and even as his own flesh fell apart he knew now that he was on the verge of the sort of immortality that is bestowed only once in a hundred years or more. George Washington had created a new nation, yet Franklin Roosevelt was creating a new world. Not bad for a man who couldn’t even get himself out of bed.