Churchill's Hour

  EIGHT

  Sunday, the twenty-second day of June. It was the shortest night of the year. Four million men stood hidden along a front that stretched from the Black Sea to Finland. They squashed mosquitoes, read the Bible, wrote to loved ones, checked their equipment, ate, drank, prayed, and prepared for death—some other man’s death, they hoped.

  Fourteen minutes past three in the morning. A lightness in the eastern sky. But still Russia slept.

  A minute later, they began to move, backed by three and a half thousand tanks, seven thousand field guns and more than two thousand aircraft. They swarmed from their hiding places in the birch groves and fir forests and began to cross the rivers, the bridges and the crude wooden barriers that marked the frontier. The German invasion of Russia had begun.

  It was to result in the greatest slaughter in the history of the human race.

  Churchill had taken to his bed the previous evening in an unsettled mood, like a salmon sensing a changing tide. He had woken in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright, waiting, and that was how they had found him when they came to give him the news.

  ‘The first act is over, now the second begins,’ he had whispered. ‘The curtain rises, the scenery has changed, the greatest story of our lifetime moves on.’

  So intense had been his excitement that morning that he had cut himself while shaving.

  ‘Here, better let me do it,’ Sawyers had remarked.

  ‘I can manage,’ the old man snapped, impatient to get on with the day.

  ‘You’re dripping blood on me floor.’

  ‘But don’t you see, I was right, Sawyers. I was right!’

  ‘About what, zur?’ the valet asked calmly, sitting him down and taking the razor that was being waved like a fly swat.

  ‘About those wretched runways in Poland. They were extending them. For bombers. And that’s why their bombers have deserted London. Flown east.’

  The words came more fitfully as Sawyers stretched his neck to scrape patiently at the lather beneath his chin.

  ‘I had an inescapable instinct, Sawyers. That it would be today. Sunday. He always invades on a Sunday.’

  ‘Catch everyone on his knees, like.’

  ‘Hah! He won’t catch that devil-worshipper Stalin on his knees. But I hope to God he doesn’t catch him asleep in bed, either.’

  But he probably would. Churchill had been sending the Russian leader warnings for weeks, but the Great Commissar had turned a deaf ear to them all. He would neither forgive nor forget that it was Churchill who had been the foremost abuser of all things Soviet, who had tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution at birth, who had on more than one occasion tried to bury Russia in arms and violent abuse. Stalin would never trust the word of Churchill, but he was about to get plenty more of them to consider.

  That evening, Churchill broadcast to the world from his desk in the Hawtrey Room. He had spent the day in a state of growing agitation, working and reworking in his mind what he would say. He called what was taking place in Russia ‘a climacteric’, and he hurled the English language into the fray.

  He described Hitler as ‘a monster of wickedness’. He said he had ‘an insatiable lust for blood and plunder’. He accused him of planning ‘slaughter, pillage and devastation’. Then he called him a ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’. And that was simply by way of introduction.

  Not content with having all Europe under his heel or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing—this machine cannot stand idle, lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men!

  After he had been shaved that morning, he had begun to burst with excitement once more. ‘Don’t you see, Sawyers? In a single night, everything has changed,’ he had said, furiously wiping steam from the mirror. ‘Yesterday, we were alone. Solitary warriors. Yet this morning we stand alongside Stalin and the multitudes of Russia.’

  ‘You—and Stalin?’ Sawyers had enquired, struggling to hide his incredulity. ‘You mean “that devilworshipping Stalin”? The same one?’

  ‘You understand nothing!’ Churchill had barked, throwing cologne around himself. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I think I could find it in myself to make a favourable reference to the Devil.’

  But his valet understood things well enough. Sawyers was right. As the day wore on Churchill had realized that to persuade anyone that there was now common cause with the birthplace of Bolshevism would require a somersault of such prodigious proportions that it would leave many breathless with mirth. It would require him to turn away from a course he had followed with monastic fervour for almost half his life. He would need cover, and the only cover he knew was words. A hurricane of them.

  No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the breadwinner, of their champion, of their protector.

  He loved the English language, loved it almost too much. There were times when he would drive it like a gun horse until it all but dropped. As he spoke he beat time with his hand, as though he were driving the horse to the limits of its endurance.

  I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.

  That, at least, was something he and Stalin might agree upon.

  We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing!

  His voice rose until it was pounding with emotion.

  We will never parley. We will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke!

  His mouth had gone dry; he sipped his whisky, ready for the climax—the Pauline conversion, the climb-down, the turn-around, or whatever others might call it. But it had to be done.

  Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it, as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly—to the end!

  The world had changed. It was spinning them all around, and by the time Churchill made his way upstairs to bed that evening, he was exhausted. It had been a gruelling rite of passage.

  Sawyers helped him off with his jacket. ‘Strange old world. Who’d’ve thought it? Old Uncle Joe Stalin our ally.’

  ‘Our ally—certainly. But our friend?’ The old man shook his head. ‘They are barbarians. Not even the slenderest of threads connects Communism to any form of civilization. Which is why the battle that is about to take place upon the soil of Russia will be a
s terrible as any fought in history. Whoever wins it will dominate Europe from the steppes to the distant sea.’ His tone grew darker. ‘They will dominate these islands, too—unless, somehow, America becomes part of it.’

  He fell back on the bed as Sawyers began to untie his shoes. He reached for the whisky on his bedside table. Alongside the glass stood a framed photograph of his family, taken the previous Christmas. Sarah, Vic Oliver, Randolph, Pamela, all smiling…

  ‘Everything in my life comes back to bloody Americans,’ he sighed, as his head hit the pillow.

  The weather had changed. Everything had changed.

  The gales of the endless spring had vanished and summer had at last arrived, determined to make up for lost time. The sun seemed to drag slowly across the sky and, deep inside their blacked-out and shuttered buildings, the British stifled.

  And the Russians suffered. They were being driven back on all fronts. Within nine hours of the start of the invasion, the Luftwaffe had destroyed one thousand two hundred Soviet planes. Within five days the Wehrmacht had advanced halfway towards Leningrad. Within three weeks the Red Army had lost two million men. Rassenkampf—race war—had taken on a new meaning. The doors of village houses were opened with hand grenades, children were questioned with bayonets, young women were reduced to a level lower than beasts.

  The brutality was far from one-sided. As the Red Army fell back, they slaughtered all political prisoners, and wasted the lives of their own soldiers on a prodigious scale. Yet still the Germans kept coming.

  And in Paris, in Prague, in Poland, too, Hitler’s men were beginning to round up Jews. Thousands of them.

  Churchill summoned his military chiefs and advisers to the Map Room in the Annexe. They found him staring at the huge map of Eastern Europe. A front had been marked on it that seemed to stretch for ever.

  ‘It takes the breath away,’ Churchill said, his words tinged with awe.

  ‘The Wehrmacht don’t seem to have lost much breath,’ one of his Chiefs of Staff observed drily. ‘They haven’t stopped for days.’

  ‘They must, eventually. But where? When?’

  For a while, no one spoke as they contemplated one of the most extraordinary military adventures of all time. Then, slowly, it came.

  ‘A few weeks, Prime Minister. I can’t see how the Russians can sustain things longer than that. Losing too many men, too much territory. A few weeks, that’s all. Then they’re out of this war.’

  ‘I agree, Prime Minister. They’ll do just what they did in the last war and sue for peace. Couple of months at most.’

  ‘Stalin’s wretched purges have sliced through any chance they had of putting up effective resistance,’ a third joined in. He pointed at the front. ‘Look—Leningrad, Smolensk, Kiev, the Crimea—even Moscow’s under threat.’

  ‘Two months,’ Churchill muttered. ‘Anyone here think they can hold out for longer than two months?’

  No one did.

  ‘Then, by September, by the time the leaves begin to turn, Russia will be under their heel and they will fall once again upon us.’

  Please, God, not again. Not another winter under the hammer, waiting for the invasion barges and the bombers to come back. They couldn’t take that again…

  The atmosphere grew oppressive. Even when the room had been empty the ventilation system had struggled to cope with the sultry weather, but beneath the crush of bodies in the Map Room it failed completely. The air seemed thick enough to chew.

  Yet suddenly Churchill had snapped back to life. ‘We must act! There is no time to lose!’ he said. ‘We can take advantage of them. While their attentions are elsewhere. Let’s kick a few German rumps. Make hell while the sun shines!’

  The Chiefs of Staff began exchanging anxious glances. ‘What, precisely, do you have in mind, Prime Minister?’

  ‘A large raid across the Channel,’ Churchill began, the blood rushing once more. ‘Twenty-five—thirty thousand men. Use the commandos, some of the Canadians, too. A target in occupied France that’ll set the French spirit ablaze once more.’ He was back at the maps. ‘One of the ports. Dieppe, perhaps. And let us stay there a while,’ he insisted, stabbing his finger at the French coastline.

  ‘Too soon, I fear, Prime Minister. Too much chance that we’ll end up in the same fix as we did at Dunkirk.’

  ‘But it will split their attentions, don’t you see? The Hun won’t know whether to turn east or west. It gives us profound tactical advantages.’

  His words were met with silence.

  ‘Then Norway,’ he suggested irritably, turning to another map. ‘We know enough about the bloody territory.’

  ‘Norway again, Prime Minister?’

  ‘A bridgehead in the north that will enable us to join hands with the Russians. Show that our alliance isn’t simply one of minds but of men and of muscle. It would be a hugely symbolic gesture.’

  ‘And a highly risky one, if you don’t mind me saying so, Prime Minister. We’ll examine it, of course, but after the recent problems in Greece and Crete we’re desperately short of air cover. And we all remember what happened last time.’

  It was a cruel blow but, in the eyes of the Chiefs of Staff, entirely necessary. It was Churchill who had pushed the British Army into Norway without adequate air cover in 1940. It had been a disaster. Another of Winston’s follies.

  ‘Then what the hell do you propose to do?’ Churchill shouted, glaring around at them. ‘Or are we to do absolutely bloody nothing and wait until next week before we do it?’ His chest was heaving with frustration.

  ‘I think what we should do is examine everything you’ve proposed, Prime Minister,’ one said. ‘Test them. Come back with a reasoned proposal.’

  ‘You’ve already had a reasoned proposal,’ Churchill spat.

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’ But the look in Churchill’s eye cut him short.

  ‘Not enough commandos. Not enough air cover,’ he growled in contempt. ‘Well, we have bombers, don’t we? We can at least bomb the bastards!’ With that he stormed out.

  He left London a few hours later. The heat had become insufferable and even at Chequers it remained endlessly oppressive. He felt claustrophobic, as though the walls were closing in on him. He fled, silently and alone, towards Beacon Hill, dragging his fears behind him.

  The shimmering eye of the sun had just touched the top of the beech wood when, from behind him, he heard a peculiar squeaking noise. He turned in annoyance, and found Sawyers approaching. His cheeks were red and he was carrying a galvanized bucket, which was the cause of both the squeak and the sweat that prickled on his brow.

  ‘Do you have to make such an infernal racket?’

  ‘Only bucket to be found. Thought yer might be needing it.’

  ‘And why in God’s name would I need a bloody bucket?’

  Almost as he had finished complaining, he saw that the bucket was filled with ice, and in the middle of the ice sat a bottle of Pol Roger.

  Churchill snorted like a pricked bull; it was all he could find as an expression of gratitude. ‘You expect me to drink it out of the bottle?’

  From his jacket pocket Sawyers produced a glass, wrapped in a tea towel, which he proceeded to polish with meticulous care.

  Churchill studied the valet, who had a suspicious bulge on the other side of his jacket. ‘You brought another glass?’

  ‘Just in case you didn’t want to be drinking on yer own, zur.’

  ‘My God, but you have your moments, Sawyers.’

  Churchill settled down on the stump of an old moss-covered tree. The bucket was placed beside it, and Sawyers began administering the last rites to the champagne. As the shadows lengthened, the scent of early summer travelled easily on the air and the wings of dancing insects glistened in the last rays of sunlight. From the beech wood came the sounds of courting pigeons. It should have been idyllic. For a moment, Sawyers let him pretend.

  ‘Next weekend, zur,’ he asked eventually. ‘Who shall we expect?’

&nb
sp; ‘The entire bloody world and his uncle,’ Churchill complained into his glass. Then, more softly: ‘And the family, of course. I want to see the family.’

  ‘Mr Oliver?’

  ‘No. I don’t think he will be coming back.’

  Sawyers paused to show that he understood.

  ‘Sarah will come, I hope,’ Churchill continued. ‘Mary, too, if she’s available.’

  ‘And Miss Pamela?’ Sawyers asked, affecting nonchalance, studying his glass as though a fly had fallen in. ‘And wha’ about our Mr Harriman? I believe he’s due back in a few days from that trip o’ his to foreign parts.’

  Churchill’s eyes flashed at his valet. Just how much did the wretched man know? Everything, of course, that was his job.

  Conflicting loyalties twisted inside Churchill like old ivy. A letter had recently arrived from Randolph. ‘I have been tremendously impressed by Harriman,’ Randolph had written, ‘and can well understand the regard which you have for him. In ten very full and active days he has definitely become my favourite American.’

  Oh, Randolph, most darling and deceived of sons…

  ‘I have become very intimate with him,’ the letter concluded.

  Churchill’s head sagged. ‘What do I do?’ he whispered. And again: ‘What do I do?’

  About Randolph, about Pamela, about Harriman, Sarah and the rest. About the fact that in two months’ time the bombers and the invasion barges could be back. About his buff-coloured box, from which he had just learnt that the Japanese were on the point of marching their armies into Indo-China, moving remorselessly south, ever closer to the British Empire. Soon they would have air and sea bases in Saigon, just six hundred miles from Singapore. And about the Americans, whom he could never persuade to fight.

  He was no longer in control. He was reduced to sitting like an old man on his stool and watching as the world strutted by.

  He looked up. Sawyers was standing there, his eyebrow raised, waiting for his answer. Pamela. Harriman. Under his roof? His heart ached. Yet he needed America, needed Harriman. Slowly, bleakly, the words came.