"And there were a couple of R.A.F men in uniform on the platform beside me. We all know they're outnumbered, and we also know they've been fighting as hard and dying as bravely as any group of men ever could. But apparently the boys from Dunkirk don't know. They think the R.A.F has abandoned them."
"Our pilots are so few, their enemies so many ..." Churchill began in protestation, but Colville was not to be denied.
"The soldiers jeered. As the train went past, the British army leant out of the window and jeered the R.A.F. Called them bloody cowards."
A gasp squeezed from Churchill.
"So we need more flyers," Colville said, concluding his argument and shoving the last of his papers into his bag. He looked up to discover Churchill drenched in tears.
The R.A.F? The army? Is this the world I have created? Then I must be mad." He was openly sobbing.
Colville felt prodded by guilt. "You're not mad, you're .. . surrounded by confusion. Much of it of your own making."
Churchill seemed not to hear, lost in his misery. He appeared very old.
"What do you mean, Jock?" Bracken prodded gently, joining them once more.
"He turns everything to such chaos. He tries to overwhelm everyone with his energy and his ideas, but they just can't cope. Telegrams, orders, written instructions, notes of advice, demands for information: he fires them off like Nelson firing off his cannonballs. There's no priority, no structure to any of it, he just blazes away in the hope that one in ten might hit. Yesterday' - Colville threw up an arm in despair' yesterday he sent out demands for information about everything from launching a second front in Europe to reusing dinner scraps."
"What should we do?"
"Get some sort of system, some sort of order. I know I'm a civil servant and it's the sort of thing I would say, but just occasionally the wretched system works. Perhaps he should tell us not only what he wants doing but what he wants doing first. I don't know, stick a few labels on things. "Action This Day" or something. Just so the dinner scraps can be left till tomorrow."
A huge sob erupted from Churchill. "Jock, my boy, please forgive me."
It was the only apology Colville had ever heard him give.
"And stay."
The outpouring of emotion overwhelmed the young civil servant. He considered the plea but only long enough to make the point that it was his decision. Feigning reluctance, he laid his case back down on his desk.
"Please, have those labels printed up. And find Ruth Mueller."
"Why?"
"Because I have found her to be of altogether unexpected use. Rather like you."
His staff insisted that Ramsay take some rest. He had slept very little in the past week and not at all during the last two days or what passed as days in the subterranean kingdom beneath the white cliffs. The night ahead would be critical, and they would need the vice admiral at his best. Two of his staff accompanied him to his room at the end of the tunnel and stayed until they had seen him lie down on his cot. He was asleep before they had closed the door.
Ramsay and his staff were beginning to pluck some measure of understanding from the chaos of Dunkirk. The previous day's toll had been heavy: two trawlers lost to mines, two drifters and a troopship by bombs, and one minesweeper had been sunk in a collision. Safety from the Luftwaffe and the artillery came only after dark, but then the sea exacted its toll of confusion as the ships tried to find their way without light or navigation aids to the most congested and wreck-strewn port in the world. Then they shifted to the beaches, with its rising surf, which swamped the dinghies and lifeboats that came to pick up men who had been standing for hours in the water waiting for rescue. Time and time again, the small boats were turned over by surf or exhausted men who filled them to their tipping point. It was all taking so long, moving so slowly.
There was a desperate need for more small boats to speed the work and ferry men out to the larger ships waiting offshore. Orders had gone out to strip every ship on the south coast of its lifeboats and to impress every rowing boat and beach vessel that could be found and floated, but they had lost two convoys of small craft as they were towed across the Channel in line astern, cut through in the dark by ships running blind.
Larger ships came as close as they dared to the gently shelving shore, where they were forced to hover, waiting for their human cargoes, making excellent targets for the bombers. That afternoon Ramsay had counted ninety-five aeroplanes above the beaches, almost all of them German.
Too many men, too few boats, total confusion. Ramsay had sent over one of his best captains to act as Senior Naval Officer in order to give some sense to the situation. He was identified by the letters SNO on his helmet, made out of silver foil from a cigarette packet and stuck there with thick pea soup. Everything was makeshift.
Yet when Ramsay was shaken roughly awake in his quarters three hours later, he was told of two shafts of light that had begun to glimmer in the darkness. More small boats were arriving dinghies, cabin cruisers, motorboats, lifeboats, rowing boats, launches from as far away as the boatyards on the Thames, dragged from their moorings by naval press gangs with or without their owners' consent.
And just when they thought every part of the harbour at Dunkirk had been made completely impractical for their purposes, someone had suggested that they look at the mole. The mole was nothing more than a narrow wooden breakwater that projected more than three-quarters of a mile into the sea to protect the entrance to the harbour, and bearing at its end a concrete footing on which stood a small lighthouse. In fact there were two of these long structures, but the western one had already been shattered, leaving just the eastern mole which, although it was riddled with gaps, still stood. It was never intended that it should be used for berthing ships it was far too flimsy, had no means of coping with the ebb and flow of the fifteen-foot tide, and could be split in two by any careless ship or accurate shell, yet it had to be tried. So they filled the holes in the wooden planking with anything to hand doors, ladders, benches and a former cross-Channel ferry, the Queen of the Channel, was instructed to try to berth alongside. She did so in darkness, and took on 950 men.
On her way back to Dover, a stick of bombs broke the Queen's back and she sank in minutes. And yet and yet, the mole had worked. Ships could tie up against her, so men could be taken from her. It gave the BEF another lifeline -and one so smothered in smoke from the burning buildings that it might take some time for the Germans to catch on, blinded by the destructiveness of their own bombs.
One other morsel greeted Ramsey when he woke. The storm front was receding and the surf falling. They would bring more men home today than yesterday perhaps double the number. Still a miserable trickle compared to the flood of men that was beginning to wash up along the beaches but, as he stood on his balcony in the fading light, watching his makeshift armada stretching back from that awful pillar of smoke, he felt his tiredness lifting on the evening air. Every homecoming, every ship that made it back through the entrance to the harbour with its cargo of hope, was like an injection of adrenalin straight to his heart.
More dispute. More deliberation. No decision. Yet another War Cabinet.
Halifax warned of the danger of the destruction of Christian civilization; Churchill replied that any country that bowed to Nazism would be neither Christian nor civilized for long. Halifax countered that they would get better terms now, while they still had their aircraft factories operational and unbombed. Churchill growled that anyone who thought the Germans would allow them to keep the aircraft factories open must think Hitler a fool, and That Man may be many things, but he was no fool.
And neither was Halifax. Churchill had hoped that a period of reflection or a sound night's sleep might have softened the other man's arguments, but he would be neither persuaded nor browbeaten. Yet he stuck to the gentleman's agreement. He threatened disasters of many kinds, but he didn't threaten resignation. The Government was united, but only in its determination to disagree.
They were getting
nowhere and taking up too much time more time than Churchill had allowed. He had asked his senior Ministers outside the War Cabinet to meet with him in his room at the House and they were already flocking outside, so he suggested to Halifax and the other 'big beasts' that they should stand down for a short while and reconvene later.
"Time off for Children's Hour," Halifax muttered as they scooped up their papers.
It was an apt description. These men of the Outer Cabinet, some thirty in number, had responsibility but little authority. Left to their own devices they would have created the most eccentric confusion, for they were of differing parties and conflicting personal loyalties. Many were still Chamberlain's men; some belonged to Attlee's team; only a few owed their position directly to Churchill. He could not command them, he could only try to lead and persuade. He hadn't met with them as a group since he'd appointed them, and now they gathered, ushered to their places around the table by Bracken.
The faces were all anxious; some were exhausted. So was Churchill, and they could see it.
"I have asked you here today to share with you some of my thoughts and feelings as we venture upon this most critical hour. You are how might I put it? an exceptional collection of men, of many different passions and political persuasions. I tell you frankly that, in the past, some of your passions and much of your politics have scared the senses out of me. Let us hope you will have a similar effect upon Hitler!"
Around the table, the faces of anxiety were softened by wry amusement. The old man may be facing disaster, but he hadn't lost his humour. They would remember that when they got home. But it would need more than one old man's wit if they were going to win.
He could sense their doubt, almost smell it in the heavy male atmosphere as they crowded round the table. He knew these men well, some for fifty years or more. Much of that time had been spent pushing against each other's ideas and conflicting ambitions and sometimes, he reflected, simply pushing against each other. Like Leo Amery, whose round, expectant face was a picture of concentration as he listened to Churchill's review of the war. They'd first met at Harrow. Churchill had been at the school barely a month, the lowest form of educational life, when he had hurled the diminutive but most eminent Amery into the swimming pool, thinking him to be a much more junior boy. Amery had emerged, irate and intent on retribution. The young Churchill had apologized, I'm sorry," he explained, 'but I mistook you for a Fourth Former. You are so small." His words seemed to do little to stem the older boy's wrath, so Churchill had added: "My father, who is a great man, is also small."
It had cemented a life-long relationship.
Amery understood ambition, and its price. Three weeks ago Chamberlain had offered him any post in the Cabinet in return for his support, yet despite all his dreams and desires, it had been a price too heavy for Amery. There were older memories, too. Amery could recall Churchill's father, and the day of his resignation. Most of the other boys had taunted Churchill, but Amery had come up to him at lunch and shaken his hand, very publicly, not with approval but simply from understanding. He knew the two Churchills always travelled together, even though they were so rarely seen together.
Even now, as Churchill continued with his review, his father was with him once more, sitting amongst the expectant faces around the table. It had happened so often during Winston's political career; he would imagine his father nearby, watching, never quite approving. It had always spurred him onwards, ensured he never relaxed or took anything for granted, but, just this once, he ached for someone to tell him he was right.
"I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man," he was saying. One or two heads were slowly nodding. Perhaps they'd been talking with Halifax. And, as weariness seemed to seep from every bone in his body, he could no longer deny the possibility that they were right. If neither Hitler nor Halifax were the fool, then perhaps it was Churchill himself.
And then he saw Ruth. He ransacked his last store of energy in order to force her image into his mind. She was sitting at the other end of the table, her hair drawn back around her face, with that determined and Germanic jib of hers. She was frowning, scolding him, warning him. Don't bend, don't you dare bend! You are alone because you understand better than any man here. So take them with you. Do it your way. But trust them, and do it together!
"I will not hide from you, gentlemen, that what is happening now in northern France may turn out to be the greatest British military disaster for many centuries. We are straining every nerve and moving every muscle to get back as many of our men as providence will allow. It may be no more than fifty thousand. But I will not negotiate. It is idle to think that we would get better terms from Germany at this moment than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet they would call it "disarmament" and our naval bases and our aircraft factories and much else besides. We should become a slave state, run by some puppet or other who owed allegiance only to Hitler."
Growls of support were coming from the far corner of the table; was that where Bracken was sitting? Ruth was slapping the table with her palms.
"No! I will not go naked to the negotiating table. Instead, it is my intention that we should fight on, with all our reserves and all our advantages." His head was up, his jaw set. "I cannot tell you what the outcome of that great struggle will be. But if, at last, the long story of these islands is to come to an end, it were better it should end not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground."
There is sometimes a moment within meetings of men when an idea catches fire and takes hold of those present. Such a moment is rarely planned and almost never scripted but comes about through a fusion of great passion and opportunity. It is often inexplicable, even to those who are there and who become part of it. These men around the table were, all of them, afraid and infected by that English talent for compromise, yet there was not a man in the room who at that moment would have hesitated to give his life for his country.
"Whatever happens at Dunkirk," Churchill told them, 'we shall fight on!"
Then Amery was on his feet, applauding, at his Prime Minister's side, wringing his hand; and others were following, crowding round, slapping his shoulder and swearing solidarity. Churchill had never known a group of politicians to respond so emphatically, yet he seemed oblivious, his face carved from stone, staring down the table to where Ruth was sitting.
For the first time since he had known her, she was smiling.
Halifax accepted his temporary defeat. The meeting of the Ministers was nothing more than a skirmish in a longer struggle, but news of their reaction was enough to persuade him that this day would not be his. When the War Cabinet reconvened later that evening for the ninth time in three days, he chose not to press his position on the negotiations. Winston, in Halifax's view, talked the most frightful rot. His mind was a jumble of disorder and naive sentimentality, and he was petulant to the point of puerility. His nonsense tumbled out in front of them, as if from an upturned dust cart but this time Halifax ignored it. After all, he had made his case and he didn't have to overwhelm Churchill with logic: events would do that.
Tonight would mark the second night of the evacuation, after which they had been told the operation would probably have to be closed down. No more than twenty-five thousand had been brought back fewer than expected, and not enough. Halifax had only to wait. It was merely a matter of time.
"Bring me the moon!"
Churchill was standing at the entrance to his Admiralty study, face flushed the colour of claret, waving his arms and shouting, so far as Colville could determine, utter gibberish. It had been less than ten minutes since he'd taken in a huge pile of intelligence reports, enough to keep the old fellow quiet for most of the night, or so he'd thought.
"Prime Minister?"
"Don't you see, Jock?" Churchill exclaimed, waving one of the intelligence folders excitedly, "The panzers are turning away from Dunkirk."
Colville was lost, and admitted so.
"They have changed their plans. Heading south. It can mean only one thing. Paris! Guderian and his panzer troops are glory boys, they want the most glittering trophy and they must have come to the conclusion that it has to be Paris."
"How, precisely, does that help us?" Colville asked tentatively.
"Because they don't understand the importance of Dunkirk. They think it's all over, no more than fragments to be swept up by the dumb foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht."
"And the Luftwaffe."
"Ah, but there's the wonder of it. They have pushed us onto the beaches and do you know what effects bombs have upon beaches?"
Colville shook his head in confusion.
"Bugger all! They bury themselves in the sand and go pop! Casualties: almost none at all. It gives us a chance, Jock. And the mole Ramsay's using only a few feet wide. Covered most of the time in a huge cloud of smoke. A desperate target for the bombers. With luck it may survive a little longer. And so might our army."
The Germans had changed their strategy. Since the first day of the offensive they had based their plan of attack on a concentrated fist of panzers punching huge holes through the Allied armies. It was a strategy that had brought them monumental success and made them masters of most of Europe. They had swept along, sometimes more than forty miles a day; now they were turning back when they were little more than four miles from the docks of Dunkirk. Their minds were already turning to Paris and the huge victory parade they wanted to claim for their Fuehrer.
As for the British, what threat did they pose? They'd already been seen destroying their tanks, spiking their guns, smashing every piece of equipment in their desperate flight to the sea. They had nothing to fight with and nowhere to go. What was left wouldn't amount to much of a battle at all, little more fun than wringing a rabbit's neck. Ah, but to be first in Paris, to march down the Champs-Elysees, to have the capital of the old enemy cowering at their feet that was a prize to warm old men on a winter's night. No, Dunkirk could be left to the plodding infantry. It was only a matter of time.