Churchill’s Hour. Michael Dobbs
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‘Anyone gonna join me?’ he demanded, his voice taut as a bowstring. No one stepped forward. They all knew better than to get within snapping distance of the Black Dog. So he thrust his empty weapon at his detective, Thompson, and began striding back towards the house, his hands deep in the pockets and head bent low. Only Winant seemed willing to fall in step beside him, bending his tall frame to get nearer to the old man’s words, causing his unkempt hair to fall across his face.
‘So tell me, Gil, my Intelligence people suggests the Herrenvolk are lengthening the runways on many of their airfields in Poland. You heard anything about that?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ the American said. It made Churchill feel a little happier. It seemed he was ahead in one game, at least.
‘What the hell do you think they’re up to?’
‘I’ve no idea. Not for our benefit, I guess.’
‘Our’ benefit. Churchill liked that. He was beginning to warm to this diffident, angular American. His shirts were habitually crumpled and his blue overcoat a diplomatic disgrace, but the man had heart.
‘And it’s not for the benefit of bloody Lufthansa, either,’ the old man continued. ‘It can only be for the bombers.’
‘What bombers?’
‘The bombers they will use when they fall upon Russia.’
‘But Russia and Germany have a friendship pact…’
‘So did Cain and Abel.’
‘What do you think it means?’
‘It means the Germans are looking east, in search of bigger game. Perhaps our tiny British islands have become an irrelevance in Hitler’s eyes, a sideshow —perhaps he thinks that Winston Churchill is no longer worth the bother.’
‘You make it sound personal.’
‘Of course it’s bloody personal! He’s leaving us to die from starvation, imprisoned in our own impotence. But there might be salvation in the insult, Gil. If Germany attacked Russia, they would not dare invade these islands until they were done. It gives us time—time which we both must use.’ He stopped abruptly and grabbed the ambassador’s sleeves. ‘Don’t you see? It will change the whole nature of the war. Make it stretch around the world. Surely America must realize that it could never stay out of such a conflagration.’
The blue eyes were staring up at the taller Winant, boiling with emotion, willing the ambassador and all his countrymen to draw alongside. But it was a passion that Winant knew was so often misdirected. For the best part of a year Churchill had been bombarding Roosevelt with messages that overflowed with obsession and excess. In the old man’s eyes, every hour was the moment of destiny, the hour when civilization would collapse unless Roosevelt sent more destroyers, offered more credits, built more planes, declared war. The bombardment had been conducted without respite and it had reached the point where Roosevelt often didn’t respond to Churchill’s telegrams, simply ducked them, left the moment to grow cold. Not every hour could be Churchill’s hour. The American President had his own battles to fight—against the isolationists who didn’t want to touch the war, against the leaders of organized labour who didn’t want to touch it either, not unless they got paid a whole lot more, and against Congress where good will was flowing about as slowly as treacle on a frosty day. So Roosevelt had taken to ignoring Churchill’s incessant words of doom. ‘I close my eyes,’ the President said, ‘and wake up in the morning to discover that, somehow, the world has survived.’
Winant, too, hoped for a brighter outcome. ‘If Hitler attacks Russia, so might the Japs,’ he suggested. ‘Turn north. Into Siberia. Away from your colonies to the south.’
‘No. I fear not. Siberia has no oil, no rubber, no resources. Nothing for the Japanese war machine to feast upon.’
‘You mustn’t always look on the dark side, Winston,’ Winant said in gentle warning. ‘The American people are optimists. It unsettles them if they can see no light in the gloom.’
‘And what if there is no light? Do you simply sit back and pray you will find your way through the darkness? Or do you pick up a box of matches and start a bloody good fire?’
‘And burn your house down in the process?’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ he muttered, unconvinced. ‘But the Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka is prowling through the corridors of the Kremlin even as we speak. What the hell’s he up to? Lost his way in the dark, has he?’
‘He’s just come from Berlin. Our intelligence suggests it’s possible he’s in Moscow preparing the ground.’
‘For what?’
‘For a declaration of war.’
‘Against whom?’
‘Why…Russia, I mean.’
‘Then let it be war! War! War!’ he shouted histrionically, to the alarm of the following group. Then he shook his head. ‘But once again your optimistic American intelligence has got it utterly wrong.’
‘How can you be certain?’
‘Because intelligence needs to be dipped in a bucket of common sense before it’s laid on the table. And common sense suggests the Japanese haven’t gone to Moscow with bunches of flowers in their hands in order to declare war, any more than they arrived in China with fixed bayonets for the purpose of setting up a wood-whittling business.’
‘You don’t think much of American Intelligence, then?’
‘They got it half right. There will be war. And not all the optimists in America will be able to stop it,’ the old man growled, before stomping off in the direction of the house.
Sawyers sat with Héloise at the long central table in the kitchen polishing silver, while Mrs Landemare prepared lunch.
‘But I do not understand,’ Héloise protested.
‘Yer too young to understand such things,’ Sawyers responded.
‘Oh, you don’t ’alf talk a lot of tommy-rot at times, Mr Sawyers,’ Mrs Landemare said, peering into a bubbling pot.
‘How so?’
‘The girl needs to know these things, otherwise she’s going to be dropping breakfast trays from here until the gates of Heaven.’
‘Well, she’s your relative…’
‘My hubby’s relative.’
‘Your responsibility, then,’ Sawyers said, reaching for a fresh buffing rag.
Mrs Landemare’s face came up from the pot, her ruddy cheeks and remarkably broad forehead covered in little droplets of steam. Sawyers was opting out. Typical man.
‘It’s war what does it mostly,’ Mrs Landemare began, turning to Héloise, ‘although it goes on just as much when there ain’t any war, I suppose.’ Her awkwardness was stretching almost to the point of contradiction. ‘It’s just that…Well, you haven’t got no mother and father, poor thing, so it’s not surprising this is all a bit new. So, how can I put it?’ She sipped from a ladle, then threw a little more salt in the pot. ‘Great country houses are like little worlds all of their own. The ladies and gentlemen get dropped at the door, and for the time that they’re here the rules of the outside world get put to one side. So Mr C wanders around without a towel at times. Don’t mean nothing by it, it’s just his way. So you make a bit of noise when you get near his bathroom, just so he knows you’re coming.’
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