MICHAEL DOBBS
NEVER SURRENDER

DEDICATION

FOR RACHEL

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Ascot, 1883.

The boy was small, only eight, the youngest in the school. Red-haired, blue-eyed, round in face, and nervous. He had been at the school only a term and was not popular. One of the older pupils had written home that this new boy was ‘irksome’; the headmaster already found him intolerable. ‘A constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other,’ the headmaster wrote to his parents. ‘He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere.’

The boy didn’t fit in. And he was about to discover that failing to conform carried with it a heavy price, even for an eight-year-old.

St George’s School was a private educational establishment of four teachers and forty pupils, set in woodlands that had once been the ancient hunting forests of Windsor. It couldn’t claim much of a tradition since it was only six years old, so it sought to make up for that by charging outrageously high fees. It made the place instantly exclusive. Perhaps that was why the boy’s father, a man habitually committed to over-extending himself, had found the place so attractive. Anyway, it was time for his son to move on; up to that point he’d been educated by private tutors and seemed ill at ease amongst other boys – he’d developed both a nervous stammer and foul temper. But that, as his father had written to the headmaster, was what he had been sent to St George’s to cure.

He was almost a year younger than any of the others, but within days of his arrival, perhaps seeking the approval of the older boys, he had leapt onto a desk and begun to recite a bawdy song he’d learnt from some of his grandfather’s stable lads. Only his recent arrival saved him from a punishment harsher than being sent to bed without his supper.

Yet the boy carried with him his own sense of justice, and the following day he felt not only hungry but also poorly treated. After all, St George’s was one of the most expensive schools in the country: he felt sure his father hadn’t sent him here to starve. So, in order to balance the scales of elementary justice, he had sneaked into the basement kitchens and stolen a pocketful of sugar. Inevitably he’d left considerable evidence of his crime spilled upon the counter, so the kitchen staff had reported the loss to the headmaster, the Reverend Herbert William Sneyd-Kynnersley.

‘Mr K’, as he was known to the pupils, was tall, almost gangling, mutton-chopped and sandy-haired, a graduate of Cambridge with very distinctive ideas about education. To some he was a man of impeccable standards and something of a reformer, a schoolmaster who liked nothing more than to join in with his pupils while they swam naked in the pond or pursued him on a paper chase through woodlands they called the Wilderness. For others, however, he was nothing less than a ruthless brute, who punished pupils so savagely that he would not stop beating them until they bled. It was also remarked upon that, for some reason no one either could or wished to explain, Mr K seemed to pay particular attention to those with hair of a colour even more red than his own. His childless and overwrought wife had red hair, and pupils with similar colouring seemed to be summoned frequently to the headmaster’s study. The young boy had been dubbed ‘the red dwarf’ the day he arrived, and he seemed to spend more time in the study than most.

For Kynnersley, chivalry, posture and truthfulness were the highest virtues attributable to an English gentleman. The boy’s relationship to these virtues was, in Mr K’s opinion, ‘like a rainbow in the night’. His habits and language belonged more to the stable yard than the schoolyard, he disliked sports, was constantly late, had few friends and was rebellious with the teachers. There seemed no one in any part of the school who seemed capable of exerting a positive influence on him, with the possible exception, it was noticed, of the gardener. He was a child doomed to failure.

There was also the matter of the stolen sugar. When, at morning assembly, the miscreant was instructed to do his duty and to own up, the entire school had remained silent. But Kynnersley knew there would be tell-tale traces, and there were. In the boy’s pockets. Both of them. In such circumstances, the Reverend Kynnersley found his duty clear.

The boy stood in the entrance hall outside the headmaster’s study and considered what lay ahead. He knew of the punishments, had heard the cries of others even as he sat at his desk, had seen the welts at bedtime and knew of the desperate sobbing beneath the covers from boys much older than he. Now it was his turn.

He gazed at the clock, ticking so slowly, then up at the leering faces of the stuffed fox heads on the wall. He paced quietly in an attempt to compose himself, then fiddled with the ornate carvings of the mock Tudor fireplace, trying to find something for his fingers to do other than to tremble. On one side of the mantel stood the figure of a husband, on the other side stood his wife, separated by the fire. Just like home.

Suddenly the door to the study opened. Towering in it stood the headmaster. The boy wanted to run, every ounce of common sense screamed at him to flee. He strode forward.

The study was not large. It was dominated by two French windows that looked out onto the lawn and to the woodlands of the Wilderness beyond. Near the fireplace was a wooden block. It was upon this block that the Reverend Kynnersley had sat and toasted teacakes for Churchill’s mother when she had first brought him to this place. Neither of his parents had been back since.

On the back of the door hung a straw boater. It was a favourite item of the headmaster, one he wore throughout the summer and would raise in greeting to all visitors. Beneath the boater, hanging from the same hook, was a length of hazel cane. That, too, judging by the splayed end, had been raised with equal frequency.

The boy was ordered to take down his trousers and underwear, and to raise his shirt. He did as he was told. The Reverend Kynnersley, cane in hand, adjusted his gold-framed spectacles.

‘You’re a thief, and you will have your nasty little habits beaten out of you. Do you have anything to say?’

What was there to say? Sorry wouldn’t save him, and anyway he didn’t feel in the least sorry. Only scared. And thankful that they hadn’t noticed the apple he had stolen at the same time.

Kynnersley nodded towards the wooden block. The beating block. It was whispered about between the boys, and no one ever came back bragging. The boy shuffled forward, his trousers around his ankles, like a prisoner in chains.

Eight is such a tender age to deal with adversity, but perhaps lessons learned so young are those that endure. Certainly the Reverend Kynnersley thought so, which is why he persisted in trying to flog the qualities of an English gentleman into his pupils. Break them while they are young, the younger the better, and rebuild them in a better mould. It’s what had made an empire.

The boy’s thoughts didn’t reach so elevated a plane. He was putting all his concentration into controlling his bladder and denying the flood of tears that demanded to burst forth. He knew he would cry, and scream, as they all did, but not yet. Sunlight flooded in through the French windows and he struggled to look out at the woods beyond, trying to imagine himself romping through the Wilderness, a million miles from this block.

Suddenly, he thought he saw a shadow at the window, a silhouette that looked remarkably like his father. But it couldn’t be, his father had never come to the school, not once. He was always at a distance, somehow untouchable, elevated. The boy adored his father – no, worshipped him rather than adored, as one might worship a god. And feared him, too. Yet the greater the distance that stood between him and his father, the more eager he grew to bridge it. The less he knew about his father, the more the son invested him with almost heroic powers; the less he heard from his father, the more ferociously the young boy clung to his every word.

Never cry, never complain, his father had instructed, for they will only take advantage of your weakness.

So throughout that thrashing, he refused either to cry or to complain. The only sound to be heard was the swishing of the hazel branch, which fell with ever greater force as Kynnersley insisted that the boy submit. Again, and again. But the boy’s fear of Kynnersley was as nothing compared to the fear and adulation he felt for his own father, standing there in the doorway. And when the pain became extreme, unbearable, he cried out for his father, but only inside.

They had to get two of the older boys to help him back to his room.

‘You are a thief,’ Kynnersley shouted after him from the doorway of his study, struggling to smooth the creases in his self-control. ‘You’ll never come to any good. You hear me? Never!’

Once alone, Winston Churchill sobbed into his pillow until there were no more tears left to shed. In later years he would cry many times, but never in fear.

Some days later, Churchill slipped away from the swimming pond where Kynnersley and the other boys were cavorting. He ran quickly back to the school buildings, being careful not to leave any trace of wet footprints on the polished floor. He tried the door to the headmaster’s study, but it was locked, so he slipped out to the garden and rattled the French windows. They were also locked, but loose. A twig thrust between the doors enabled him to slip the catch.

It was the work of only moments to snatch the beloved straw boater from its place upon the door, and it became the pleasure of an endless afternoon, alone in the Wilderness, to kick it to a thousand pieces.

ONE

Flanders, 1940.

In Private Donald Chichester’s view, the war in France had been little short of sublime. Month after endless month of – well, nothing. No shelling, no air attacks, scarcely a shot fired in anger since they’d arrived the previous September. La drôle de guerre, as the locals called it. No war at all.

That suited Donald Chichester. He was not yet twenty, with dark hair and deep-set, earnest eyes that seemed to be in constant search of something he had lost. He was tall, well sculpted, but on the lean side, like a plant that had been forced to grow too quickly. There was an air of vulnerability about him that set him apart from the other men who had gone to war brimming with extravagant if superficial claims of confidence. Yet he was always bound to be set apart from the others, for he wasn’t any proper sort of soldier.

Don Chichester was a nursing orderly serving with the 6th Field Ambulance Unit. Woman’s work, as the fighting men suggested, a soldier who had taken up bucket and mop rather than arms, who made other men’s beds and who cleaned up after the sick. There were many ways to fight this war, but being a nursing orderly wasn’t any of them.

He had arrived in France eight months earlier after a crossing from Southampton to Cherbourg that had been a misery. He’d reacted badly to the typhus and typhoid vaccinations, which had made his arm swell like a bloated pig and given him a raging temperature, but there had been no point in complaining. Sympathy was as short in supply as everything else. The 6th had arrived in France with old equipment and slack-geared vehicles, only to discover that their food supplies, spares and half their officers had been sent to an entirely different destination. The confusion of disembarkation had grown worse when the only new ambulance the unit possessed was hoisted on a rope cradle from the deck of the transport ship and swivelled over the side of the dock. As Don watched helplessly, the cradle had begun to unravel like a Christmas pullover, sending the ambulance thumping to earth. It bounced almost a foot in the air, then promptly collapsed into every one of its component parts.

The fate of the ambulance had reminded Don of the last time he had seen his father. Their last row. Not too many words, they’d never gone in for words much, only periods of cold silence that seemed to say it all. His father had been standing in front of the old Victorian fireplace, beside the photograph of Don’s mother, the mother he had never known. But how he had grown into her looks, and more so with every passing year until there was no mistaking the resemblance. The only attributes he seemed to have inherited from his father were a stubborn chin and an ability to harbour silent fury.

They lived in his father’s vicarage – a house of peace and goodwill, according to the tapestry on the wall, but not on that day. Don had tried to explain himself yet again, but the father wouldn’t listen. He never had. He was a bloody vicar, for pity’s sake, he preached eternity to the entire world, yet never seemed to have any time left for his only son. Perhaps it would have been different if there had been a mother to rise between them, but instead they were like strands of badly knotted rope that twisted ever tighter. The Reverend Chichester had stood in front of the fireplace shaking with anger – the only emotion Don could ever remember him displaying – and called him Absalom.

The son who betrayed his father.

Then he had used that one final word.

Coward.

Any further exchange seemed superfluous.

So Donald Chichester had gone off to be trained for his war, watching at a distance as the others wrote letters to their loved ones or bargained feverishly for two-day passes home. When the training was over and their war was about to begin, they had hung despairingly out of the windows of their embarkation train until distance and smoke had finally smothered all sight of the families they were leaving behind. Through it all, Don sat back, gently mocking the overflowing affection, and twisting deep inside.

The 6th had left England in emotion and arrived at Cherbourg in chaos. They had then driven to their billet three hundred miles away in Flines-les-Râches on the Belgian border. It was raining. The British Expeditionary Force had arrived.

It continued to rain. In fact, the weather proved to be abominable, the autumn one of the wettest on record followed by a winter where the snow lay thick and everything froze solid, including the radiator in every ambulance. But so long as German radiators froze too, Don was happy. Even when they attempted to dig sanitation pits and discovered that the water table lay beneath their feet, turning their main dressing station into a quagmire, Don was content. The war was worthless, and every step he took in the fetid mud served only to confirm it.

The conditions caused disease, of course. All drinking water had to be treated with sterilizing powder, a process which usually left the water tasting so disgusting that many Tommies decided to drink the foul French water instead, with predictable results. There were many other ailments. Training accidents. Traffic accidents. Afflictions of the feet. Bronchial troubles brought on by the fact that most of the soldiers had only one uniform, which had to be dried out while being worn. And venereal disease, as the British soldiers grew tired of their phoney war and succumbed in ever-growing numbers to boredom, drink and the local doxies. The follies of Flanders. Just like their fathers before them.

As the dismal months of phoney war stumbled on, there was an ever-increasing number of men who complained about the uselessness of it all, how it was a mindless war and not worth fighting. Wrong place, wrong time, and an awful bloody idea. Just what Don had argued.

That was, until the early hours of 10 May. Things changed. Dawn broke through a cloudless sky, and breakfast at the field dressing station where Don was posted found the officers squinting into the rising sun. They were muttering about reports of air activity. A church bell began ringing insistently in the distance. Something was up.

A sense of anticipation crept amongst those around him, a nervous excitement he was unable to share. The distance he had always known stood between him and the other soldiers once more began to assert itself.

‘There’s going to be a shooting war after all, Chichester,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Not that you bloody care.’

An hour later, the sergeant was back with new orders. They were moving out. Two hours’ time. Into Belgium. Problem was, none of their training had had anything to do with Belgium. They’d been preparing themselves for a war just like the last one, a steady, solid, stay-where-you-were war. A war fought from behind those tank trenches and pillboxes they’d spent their months in France building. They hadn’t even been allowed to recce inside Belgium, it was off limits to everyone, they’d been told, and particularly the Germans.

So it was with renewed confusion that the unit prepared to get under way. Don packed the surgical kit, checked his medical bag, counted the field dressings and knocked down the casualty tents until he thought he was ready, but then he was instructed to help load additional supplies from the officers’ quarters into one of the ambulances. A desk, several filing cabinets, a typewriter, a small library of Michelin guides, two tea chests of crockery, a fishing rod, a case of sherry, three new uniforms and a pair of highly polished dancing shoes: all were piled on board. Only then did Private 14417977 Donald Chichester, Nursing Orderly Grade 3 and noncombatant Conscientious Objector, drive off to war.

The three men gathered at the tall window to mourn, their cheeks fired by the setting sun as they sipped at glasses of champagne. The wine was warm. It always was in the Foreign Office.

‘A day for our diaries, eh?’ suggested the Minister in whose elegant office they had gathered.

‘The darkest day in English history,’ the second man suggested, practising a line for the entry he would make that night. Henry Channon was known by all as ‘Chips’. He was the Minister’s parliamentary aide, an envied and potentially influential position, but it would be for his keen-eyed diaries rather than for his notoriously blunted political wits that his reputation would endure.

‘Will any of us survive?’ the third and youngest of the companions enquired. ‘Jock’ Colville was only twenty-five yet for seven months had been a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. It had given him a ringside seat at the bonfire of hopes, conceits and monstrous complacencies that a few hours earlier had finally consumed his master. Chamberlain was no more, his resignation handed to a reluctant monarch, and now many more sacrifices would be required.

‘Has it come to that? A struggle to survive? Oh, I do so love being part of all this. I should miss it so,’ Chips muttered wistfully.

‘I was rather thinking of the war,’ Colville countered.

‘Ah, but we seem destined to fight on so many fronts,’ the Minister added, his eyes wandering northward across the gravel stretches of Horse Guards Parade to the white sandstone of the Admiralty building beyond. ‘Rab’ Butler was the second most senior Minister in the Foreign Office, a man of considerable intellectual powers whose career had embraced both ambition and Neville Chamberlain. He was talked about as a future leader. Inevitably it made him enemies, and perhaps the most significant of all his enemies was the man across the way in the Admiralty – a man who, less than an hour ago, had taken the King’s commission to become the new Prime Minister.

‘They say he cannot last. That he will soon be gone. Even that Neville may be back,’ Channon suggested.

‘To save us all from disaster,’ Butler intoned.

‘From the Luftwaffe.’

‘From Mr Churchill,’ Butler corrected.

‘Such a vulgar man,’ Channon muttered, replenishing their glasses.

Butler’s lips drooped in distaste. He had extraordinary lips, weak, as though constructed of wax that had strayed too near the flame and been melted. His eyes also drooped. It gave him an air of ingrained disapproval.

‘But Churchill’s a man with experience of war,’ Colville reminded them.

‘There is nothing to be gained either from war or from Winston Churchill,’ the Minister all but spat. ‘The fate of our country has been placed in the hands of the greatest political adventurer of modern times. A half-breed American whose entire life has been littered with failures for which other people have paid.’

‘And now poor Neville.’

A pause.

‘What will you do, Jock?’ Channon asked the younger man.

‘I think I might apply for a transfer to the armed services. The RAF, perhaps.’ He seemed unaware of his implied rebuke to Butler. If war was not an answer, what was to be the point of fighting it? But the Minister had more advice to offer.

‘No. Wait, Jock. Don’t draw stumps just yet. This game isn’t over. Let Winston have his day dabbling at war. And when he falters, and then fails, as he always has, the country will need men like us. More than ever.’

‘And after Winston?’

‘Pray that it will be an Englishman. Perhaps Neville once more. And if not him, then Halifax. But better Neville.’

The sun was almost set, its embers sprinkled wide across the spires and cupolas around them. The end of more than just another day. Chips raised his glass.

‘Then, to the King over the Water.’

‘To Neville,’ Butler agreed.

‘And may God send us victorious,’ Colville whispered, finishing the last of his warm champagne.

‘So how was he?’

Winston Churchill looked up from the letter he was writing to inspect the man who had just burst in upon him. A pall of cigar smoke hovered across the room in the Admiralty.

‘His Majesty was as ever charming. A little awkward, perhaps. Dressed in his uniform as Admiral of the Fleet.’

Unbidden, his visitor helped himself to a large whisky from the tray that sat beside the Prime Minister. The splash of soda was brief, no more than a gesture.

‘You know,’ Churchill continued, ‘I do believe His Majesty would willingly give up all the splendours and circumstances of his role in order to return to the duties of his career in the navy.’

‘He’s out of his depth.’

‘No, I think more out of his experience,’ Churchill growled. ‘Rather like us all at this moment.’ He thrust his own empty glass in the direction of his visitor, silently demanding it be refilled. As on almost every occasion in the seventeen years since they had met, Brendan Bracken complied with his older friend’s wishes. Bracken was a man often derided as an outrageous fantasist by those who knew him slightly, and no one could claim to know him well, not even Churchill. But for all his faults and legendary confrontations with the truth, he had remained loyal to Churchill when more respectable political colleagues had deserted him. All his life Churchill had been a man of few friends, and this friend he valued more than most.

‘Still, must have been awkward for you. For both of you, given the past,’ Bracken continued.

Ah, the past … Churchill wanted to believe that all his past life had been but a preparation for the trial that lay ahead, yet in truth it had been a lifetime of uneasy adventures thrown together with outright failures. During the last war, for instance, he had been hurled from office – not simply resigned as his father had done before him, but thrown out by those who thought him inadequate for the job. Many of them had still not changed their minds, the King included. No, it wasn’t success that had brought him here, only the still more monumental failures of others. Churchill looked up once more from his blotter. ‘He covered it with a little joke. Asked me if I knew why he had summoned me. I replied that I simply couldn’t imagine. So he offered me a cigar and asked me to form a government. Of which, I suppose, you expect to be a member. Along with many others.’

‘The joy of it!’ Bracken threw his arms around in excitement. ‘After all these years, the chance to even the score. To do unto others …’ He clapped his hands. ‘You know, I’ve just been over to Downing Street. Thought I’d take a look. Went by the back gate into the secretaries’ rooms. Rushing around bundling everything into sacks and waste-paper baskets, they were, even had a fire roaring in one of the grates. Several in tears. It was as though the enemy had arrived.’

‘You don’t understand, Brendan: in their eyes, he has.’

Bracken lit himself a cigar using a petrol lighter that threw an immense flame, adding to the aerial confusion. ‘So – who is to be in this government of ours?’

‘My War Cabinet,’ Churchill responded, ‘will consist of four men, apart from myself.’ He cleared his throat as if making an official proclamation. ‘There will be Mr Attlee and Mr Greenwood from the Labour Party.’

Bracken shifted uneasily in his chair.

‘Lord Halifax.’

An eyebrow arched in disapproval.

‘And Mr Neville Chamberlain.’

Bracken gasped, momentarily brought to silence. ‘You cannot be serious.’

‘In most deadly earnest. Our lives may depend upon it.’

‘But …’ Suddenly the energy was upon him once more, his body contorting in exasperation. ‘They’re the four most bloody-minded men in the country. Two socialists with whom you’ve got nothing in common, the former Prime Minister who’s devoted most of his limited talents to keeping you at the outer edge of the universe, and …’ He wondered for a moment how best to sum up Edward Halifax, Churchill’s chief rival for the post. ‘And an Old Etonian.’

‘You’re right.’ Churchill smiled. Throughout all the years of drought Bracken had had an unquenchable talent for making him smile. ‘You are absolutely right. We need more Harrovians.’

‘Seriously, Winston, how can you include Chamberlain after everything that’s happened?’

‘Can’t you see, Brendan, it’s because of everything that has happened that I must embrace him? He is still the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons, and if I am to build a truly national government I must include him as well as the socialists.’ He picked up his pen and resumed his work. ‘That is what I have had to insist to Mr Attlee, who, I’m afraid, rather shares your opinion about Mr Chamberlain.’

‘But you’ve nothing in common with any of them.’

‘I can count on the claws of a chicken’s foot the number of men you and I can trust. It’s not enough. We need more.’ He finished off the letter with a flourish. ‘Which is why I have just written to the Kaiser enquiring whether, before the Wehrmacht arrives, he would wish to exchange his exile in Holland for a suitable small establishment in this country.’

Bracken choked on his drink, spluttering, when at last he could, ‘You expect the old Kaiser, the man who started the last bloody war, to help you in this one?’

‘No, I don’t expect that. But I would like it. I know him, of course. Attended manoeuvres with him in 1909. An odious and ill-formed man. But useful. If by any chance he would agree, oh, how it would distract Hitler. Take his eye off the ball. Kaiser versus the Fuehrer, German against German.’ He sealed the envelope he had been addressing and rang a hand bell. ‘I would do a deal with the Devil if only he would part company with Hitler for a moment. We do so desperately need some distraction. We have enemies enough without creating more. Which is why we must have Neville, and Edward Halifax, too. And all the rest.’

He rang the bell again, more impatiently.

‘And for me?’

‘For you, Brendan? Minister of Information, I thought. My own private Goebbels. Waging war with words. You’re good at that. And we have so little else with which to wage war.’

‘Thank you, Winston. With all my heart. But – no. I think I should be here, by your side. At least until you have the show up and running.’

‘You would refuse your own ministry?’

‘There are so few who know you, understand your ways.’

Suddenly Churchill rose to his feet and flung open the door behind his desk. It led to a corridor, and at its end, deep in conversation, stood two male secretaries. Churchill’s shoulders heaved in irritation.

‘Have you both been deafened by the blast of some enemy bomb?’ he shouted at them. ‘Can there be any other reason why you have failed to respond to my bell?’

Bemused, they looked towards him and started to approach.

‘Fly! Fly! Or shall I call the guard to encourage you at the point of a fixed bayonet?’

The first man broke into a hurried shuffle; the second, seeking salvation, ducked into an open office door. It was Colville who arrived, his face a cauldron of embarrassment and anger.

‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister. A little confusion in responsibilities. We were rather expecting you to arrive at Downing Street this evening.’

‘Downing Street is still the home of Mr Chamberlain. I have offered it to him and Mrs Chamberlain until they can make suitable alternative arrangements. In the meantime you are to attend upon me here.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. As I said, a matter of confusion.’

‘And you are to run, do you hear me? Every time you hear that bell, you run, not walk, for so long as this war is in progress. I will not have walkers.’

Colville swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry with resentment. Never in his public service had he been spoken to like this. Still, it made his decision all the easier. He wouldn’t put up with it for a moment longer than would be necessary to get himself a transfer. Submarines, for all he cared, after this.

‘Tell me, where did you go to school?’ Churchill demanded.

What? What had his wretched school to do with it? ‘Why, Harrow, sir. But a while after you.’

‘Ah, another Harrovian. We make good runners at Harrow. You’ll do.’

And so, through the accident of his education, Colville stood conscripted.

‘Now, get me Lord Halifax on the phone. I have an urgent letter for him to deliver.’

‘It’s gone midnight. His Lordship will be asleep in bed, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘You know that for a fact?’

‘I know His Lordship, sir.’

‘Nevertheless, get him on the phone for me.’

‘It will be a most exceptional pleasure for him,’ Colville responded, tripping over his own sarcasm.

Churchill thrust his head forward. It made him look like a cannonball in flight. ‘No, it will not be a pleasure for him at this hour. And in future it will not be exceptional, either. Pray inform His Lordship of that, and anyone else that matters.’

Without another word, Churchill went back to his work and began writing a fresh letter. Colville, his face ashen, backed slowly out of the door.

Bracken hooked his leg over the arm of his chair and began to chuckle. ‘As I said, Winston, there are so few who understand your ways. I think I’d better stay.’

Churchill’s head fell towards the notepaper. ‘Thank God there’s one person in this room who knows what to do.’

It had been like a triumphal progress from ancient times. Slowly the British army moved forward across the frontier into what, until that morning, had been the green fields and gentle canals of neutral Belgium. At every village and crossroads they were greeted like heroes. Old men shuffled forward in carpet slippers to offer them bottles of beer, with womenfolk at their side bearing baskets of cheeses and oranges, and daughters who climbed up on the vehicles with their snatches of schoolgirl English to hand out an abundance of flowers and kisses. The BEF advanced upon the enemy with lilac on their helmets and dictionaries in their pockets, and soon the songs of old could be heard encouraging them on their way – ‘Tipperary’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, and a new one, a tune about how they were going to hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line.

The column was closely packed, a confusion of every sort of vehicle grinding along at the pace of the slowest, but they were all heading in the same direction. North, towards the enemy. Belgian bicycle troops meandered beside the convoy, frantically ringing their bells. It was spring, hawthorn blossom blew across their path, and the British army sweated gently in the sun.

By early evening they had passed through Brussels and were making camp in an old deserted brewery outside Mechelen. They unloaded the chairs, filing cabinets and the bottles of sherry while tea was brewed. This site was to be the Casualty Clearing Station, for the time when there were casualties. But of the enemy there was no sign. Perhaps this one was going to be easy, after all.

In the evening, the padre came round with a billycan of corned-beef stew accompanied by cigarettes and a homily about the morality of their cause. Strange, Don thought, how morality had become such a moveable feast. Why, it was less than two years ago when vicars throughout the land had climbed into their pulpits to denounce aggression and offer prayers for the triumph of appeasement and Neville Chamberlain. Yet today, from those same pulpits and plundering phrases from the same scriptures, they prayed to the Almighty that they might remember their gas masks and gain rapid victory. Whichever way you read it, kneeling down or standing on your head, it simply made you giddy.

That’s not what he had explained to the Tribunal for the Registration of Conscientious Objectors, of course. For them he had displayed a morality that was clear, principled and utterly inflexible – he’d copied that much from his father. And it was his father’s God-fearing morality that he offered them, everything taken from the Book, every argument backed up by scripture and psalm. They quoted the Book back at him, all the bits about eyes for eyes and the righteousness of vengeance, but he’d spent so much more time in church and Bible classes than they had that putting down their counter-case had proved to be, quite literally, child’s play.

It troubled him that he couldn’t be entirely honest with the Tribunal. He would have liked to tell them that reasons why the world shouldn’t set out to slaughter itself were so bloody obvious you didn’t need the Bible, but that wasn’t the way the Tribunal game was played.

Don had played, and he had won. Noncombatant service. No weapons, no killing. But it troubled him more than he cared to admit that he had won only by leaning on his father’s beliefs, and that his father knew it. There was a little of Absalom in everyone.

As he tossed in distraction upon the floor of the abandoned brewery, other thoughts began to chisel away at his sense of well-being. If God moved in mysterious ways, so, it seemed, did the generals. The men of the British Expeditionary Force had spent half a year working flat out to build a defensive line of tank traps and pillboxes. They’d been assured it would be all but impregnable.

So why, at the first sign of trouble, had the generals ordered them to come out from behind its cover and move forward into a field of fire that was totally unprepared?

And let’s not turn our back on good fortune but why, during all that long first day of advance, had there been no sign of the enemy? There hadn’t been a single air attack.

As Don struggled to find some comfort on the cold concrete, one thought kept nagging at him. It was almost as though the Germans wanted them there.

At last Churchill was alone. Letters written, appointments made, officials dismissed, Bracken on his way home. The path begun.

He felt exhausted. Keeping up the spirits of others had sapped his own, and a mood of darkness clung around him. It had been a day he had dreamed of for so long, yet the reality had proved so very distant from the dream. There had been no cheering crowds at the Palace to greet him, not even curious onlookers, no one but soldiers in war garb who had stood in front of a palace that had retreated behind sandbags and shuttered windows. Then the King’s little flash of humour to cover his unease. Faces long, brimming with concerns. No victorious arrival at Downing Street. Only Bracken to lift the gloom.

How he had longed for this day! A Churchill as His Majesty’s First Minister, his destiny achieved, his father’s memory vindicated. Yet all around he found nothing but sorrows and unspoken fear. Instead of triumph, he had found his way into a tragedy.

He sat slumped in his chair, an old man, clutching his glass of whisky in both hands as if he were afraid it might fall. No one there to see him, to help guide him through the depression that emerged like a mist from a swamp to surround him. He had such a way with words, brave and magnificent outbursts that stirred hearts, but words were for others, while he was left with nothing but his own dark thoughts.

These thoughts carried him to the oil painting that hung in a corner near the bookcase. It was a portrait of his father – not a particularly magnificent piece, one that had been painted long ago in Belfast. It showed Lord Randolph small and slim, with delicate ears and a twirling moustache, his neck surrounded with a huge moleskin collar and a polka-dot bow-tie that Winston himself had adopted. The painting followed the son everywhere, almost haunting him, for it had been completed in 1886, the year of his father’s brief triumph, which had turned so quickly to endless disaster. Lord Randolph was a rising star, one of the most powerful men in the country – some said the most powerful, and he believed it. He had quit the Government in the expectation of being recalled with ever greater honours, only to find his resignation greeted with ridicule. His reputation had crumbled. So had his mind, relentlessly. Winston had been still a schoolboy, not yet twelve. So long ago, yet the pain still so fresh.

He stared at the portrait. What had his father been thinking when it was painted? Had those bright protruding eyes been able to see any of the misery that lay so close ahead? Had he felt any symptoms – had he guessed in any way that he had already set out upon a path that would lead to a slow and wretched death?

No, he could not have known. No man ever knew what lay ahead.

Tiredness gnawed away at the old man and his head sank towards the glass, still clutched tightly in his two hands. Yet as the head fell forward he was once more jerked awake. He opened his eyes to find himself staring at his father. Lord Randolph was sitting in the chair opposite – not an oil painting, not an hallucination, but body and blood, so far as Winston could tell. It wasn’t possible, of course, but …

‘Papa?’

‘What are you doing, Winston? Where are we?’

‘In my office. At the Admiralty.’

‘So, you’ve become a clerk in the navy, have you?’

‘I followed you, Papa. Into politics.’

‘Brutal game. Surprised you had the stomach for it. You were such a weakly child, always sickening for something.’

‘Politics have been my life. I entered Parliament at the same age as you, Papa. Twenty-five.’

‘Ah, all those years, but to what end?’ The father managed to sound both envious and dismissive. He began filling his amber cigarette-holder with a little pad of cotton wool to soak up the nicotine. The process seemed to absorb him, to the annoyance of his son. Instinctively the son decided not to reveal all of his hand, to keep something in reserve.

‘I have been Home Secretary and, as you were, Chancellor of the Exchequer. For five years.’

The father, who had been Chancellor for a mere five months, seemed not to hear, his attention focused on the search for a match from deep within his pockets.

‘I used your old robes, Papa, the ones you wore.’

Randolph scowled impatiently as his search continued fruitlessly.

‘And until this morning I was First Lord of the Admiralty,’ the son added.

‘Under whose authority? Who as Prime Minister?’

‘Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s younger son.’

‘What? A Chamberlain as Prime Minister?’ The eyes of the father bulged in displeasure. ‘Praise be that I never lived to see the day. Nothing but iron-mongers. Why, in my day you could buy a dozen Chamberlains for a single Churchill and still get change.’ He stared at Winston as though he were directly responsible for the devaluation of the currency. ‘So how did this young Chamberlain do?’

‘Not well.’ The son chose the words with care, speaking them slowly. ‘We are engaged in a horrible war with Germany, Papa, for the second time in my life. With flying machines and other terrible weapons that slaughter millions of men.’

‘Millions, you say?’

‘Tens of millions.’

‘My God, is it possible? Then I’m glad not to have lived to see such terrible days. But we will prevail, of course.’

Again the words were chosen with care. ‘Not necessarily. We may not prevail. And if we don’t, we shall lose not only our armies but also our empire, even our independence.’

‘Takes my breath away to hear it. Not the place it once was, eh, our England? But something always turns up. Like fresh cavalry riding out of the afternoon sun.’

‘The British cavalry hasn’t charged in anger in more than forty years.’

The father shook his head in consternation. ‘So, who is to lead us from the jaws of such adversity?’

‘I hope it will be me, Papa.’

‘You, Winston? My God, but you only just sneaked into Sandhurst by the skin of your breeches. And at the third attempt. With your school record I couldn’t even consider you for a career in the law. You, of all people?’ He tugged at his moustache in puzzlement. ‘You are an admiral? Or a general?’

‘No, Papa. But I was once a major in the Yeomanry.’

The father wrinkled his nose. ‘You were always getting yourself into scrapes. Getting beyond yourself. Like that time you fell off the bridge in Dorset.’

‘I didn’t fall. I jumped, Papa. To evade capture by my friends. I jumped onto the higher branches of a tree, but they gave way.’

‘Seem to remember you were in bed for months. And for what? It was a childish game, nothing more. No judgement, that’s the thing.’

‘There are those who would agree with you, I fear.’

‘Always sickening in bed. Caused your mother no end of inconvenience.’ The voice trailed away, diverted down a new, more gentle path. ‘So … what of Mama?’

‘She lived a long life.’

‘There were … other men?’

(Did he truly want to hear? But he knew there would have been other men. There were always other men.) ‘She married twice more.’ The son pondered telling him that they had been young enough to be her sons, the last even younger than he. But somehow it didn’t seem to matter any longer. ‘Neither of them matched up to you, Papa.’

‘Two, you say. Always a little careless with her men, your mama.’ The voice now seemed strained; Winston put it down to his father’s need for a smoke. He had still not lit his cigarette.

‘But, in the end, loyal enough,’ the father continued. ‘Can’t fault her loyalty, not through the last years, at least.’

The painful years of his father’s decline came flooding back to the son, when his brain disease had got hold of him and he had died by fractions in public. Winston himself had died a little as he watched his father being led stumbling and incoherent from the Chamber. Decay of the brain, and of the character. The Churchill legacy.

‘You have sons?’

‘One. And three daughters.’

‘Is he up to carrying the Churchill name?’

‘A father should never give up hope for his son,’ Winston responded. It was both reproach to his father and injunction to himself. His son had been named after the grandfather, Randolph, and had inherited so many of his characteristics. Rudeness, inconstancy, infidelity, lack of judgement – that’s what they said about the younger Randolph, and they had said no less in the grandfather’s time.

‘And Jack? What of him?’

‘My brother is happy. Married. A stockbroker.’

‘A stock—’ Randolph bit off the thought, but there was no hiding the disappointment. ‘Went too soon, I did. Before my time. Always wanted more sons, but your mama … There was so much more still to do, to make the Churchill name stand out above the crowd. So, you have a role to play in this war.’

‘I was with the King this evening.’

‘Which King is that?’

‘George. The Sixth.’

‘What? Two more Georges?’

‘And two Edwards.’

‘Hah! I knew the first, of course, royal rogue that he was. Once challenged me to a duel, he did. Couldn’t accept, of course, not a contest with the Prince of Wales. A pickle over some damned woman. Can’t remember her name.’

The name had been Edith, Countess of Aylesford, a woman to whom passion spoke more loudly than discretion. It had caused her to become entangled not only with the Prince of Wales but also with the Churchill family in an affair that grew into one of the most sensational causes de scandale of the time. It had pushed Randolph’s legendary lack of judgement to new and intolerable extremes, and he threatened the heir to the throne with public exposure. As a result, Randolph and his young family had been condemned to exile in Ireland and many years of royal ostracism. Winston’s first memories had been not of his beloved England, but of Dublin.

‘In my life there was but one monarch, Victoria. It gave us all a sense of continuity, of stability. But four since then?’ the father muttered in astonishment.

‘In less than forty years. And scarcely any great kings left. No Habsburgs, no Romanovs, not even a Kaiser.’

The father’s jaw sagged in disbelief.

‘There has been war and revolution in every corner of Europe.’

‘And in England?’

‘We still live as a democracy.’

‘Then there is hope,’ the father concluded. ‘I always said: “Trust the people.” Built my reputation on it. It’s only a democracy that can weather the storms of political fortune, link the past with the future.’

‘Tempests have struck with remarkable ferocity since democracy took charge, Papa. We may yet be swept away.’

‘But still a kingdom, you say? And you are friendly, are you, with the King?’

‘No, not friends. In truth, I don’t think he cares for me very much. I was too close to his elder brother, the second Edward. He abdicated.’

‘Oh, misery. A realm in which kings abdicate and enemies prevail? My poor, wretched England …’

‘Papa, these times are harder than any I have known. But perhaps you can help me.’

The sharp eyes bulged in alarm. ‘What? Not money again, Winston? Always begging for money.’

If it were so, it was another trait inherited directly from the father, but there seemed little point in saying so.

‘No, Papa, not money. Advice. I fear our country faces nothing but disaster for a very long time. What would you do, in such hard times?’

The father’s head was raised again, his impatience washing away in satisfaction that the son had acknowledged the greater wisdom of the father. ‘Well, only one thing for it, Winston. Know your enemies. I didn’t, you see, underestimated them, and so … Know your enemy. In that way you will discover how to beat him. That’s it, and all of it. So if you have the ear of the government …’ He had at last discovered a match and bent his head to light it.

‘Papa, I should tell you –’

But it was too late. As the match was struck there was a flash of considerable brilliance, and Lord Randolph was gone, the chair empty. The son was once more alone.

‘Know mine enemies, Papa? But all I ever truly wanted to know was you …’

TWO

Whit Sunday. The first Sunday of the real war.

The Reverend Henry Chichester climbed into the pulpit of his ancient parish church of St Ignatius-without-the-Walls, which stood above the port of Dover, and confronted pews that were crowded with parishioners. There was no denying it: war had been good for business. The flock grew larger with every passing month. What did it matter that these people had grabbed their gas masks and ration books before they’d given a thought to embracing religion, so long as they had ended up here?

I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance …

Time, he thought, was man’s greatest enemy. Time passes, and time destroys. There was a time when he had been a young man brimming with self-belief and optimism, before the trenches of Flanders. There was, too, a later time when he had gathered the pieces of that lost happiness through his love for Jennie, yet God seemed unshakable in His plan that Henry Chichester’s days were not to be spent in a state of contentment. Jennie had died giving birth, and had taken with her the last flakes of colour in his life. He had found many other things to fill the void – duty, obligation, ritual, the son – yet still it was a void. And it felt timeless, without end, a life surrounded by so many people, yet spent so much alone.

Behind his back they called him Bishop Brimstone in recognition of the strength of his faith. Henry Chichester was a good man, a strong and awe-inspiring preacher for these hard times, which is why they crowded into his pews, placed money upon the plate, filled the churchyard with flowers and left his surplice whiter than any summer cloud. All for faith. Yet none of the eager faces now raised in front of him could comprehend how, alongside his faith, sat failure. His life had been a litany of failure. He had failed in the trenches, simply by surviving. He had failed Jennie, too, by letting her die, and then failed as a father by letting Don go. He had even failed his God. The Reverend Chichester was not a wicked man but he knew he was a dishonest man, for while he preached duty as being the way to salvation he was aware that the only thing duty had delivered unto him these past years was unhappiness and a feeling that his soul had been placed on a bed of ice, where it had somehow become frozen, unable to move.

‘Today – Whit Sunday – we celebrate a time of accomplishment,’ he began from the pulpit. ‘When men shall go forth and do great deeds.’

It wasn’t the standard Whit Sunday sermon, but present circumstances called for something a little different. Many years ago his college principal had told him that while the Word may be eternal, a congregation’s attention span never was, so Henry Chichester had developed a reputation for his vivid sermons. But how could he inspire others when his words had long ago ceased to inspire him? He raised his eyes heavenward, but all he saw was a large patch of damp above his head that was growing steadily worse in the salt-wind storms. The roof was long overdue for repair, but what was the point when the entire building might be blown away by a single bomb? Dear God, what was the point?

‘The Whit Sunday story began a little while after Our Lord’s ascension into heaven, when the Apostles had come together to celebrate the day of Pentecost. They were alone, uncertain, worried about what the future held in store for them. And as they assembled in their small room, from the sky came a noise like that of a whirlwind and they were surrounded on all sides by leaping tongues of fire. Imagine that. Imagine how those men must have felt. In just a few weeks their Lord had been crucified, then resurrected, after which he had disappeared. And now this. Fire and chaos on all sides. Those poor Apostles must have been terrified.’ He cast his arms wide to gather in all the concerns his congregation were wearing so openly. ‘O Lord, how many of our young men in France must share that fear today.’

They wouldn’t fall asleep today. Nowhere in the country was closer to the war than this place and not a family in the town could escape it. The town was the port, and the port was the highway to a battlefield that was being fought over for the third time in seventy years. Like it or not, it was Dover’s war. All the newspapers carried large maps of Flanders, and the Reverend Chichester had cut out the map from The Times and pinned it on the notice-board in the porch alongside the brass-cleaning roster. Something to help focus their prayers.

‘Before his ascension Jesus had told the Apostles, “I leave behind with you – peace. I give you my own peace, but my gift is nothing like the peace of this world.”’ The vicar stared over his reading glasses and repeated the words for emphasis. ‘Nothing like the peace of this world. Our Lord knew that peace didn’t come naturally to this world; his message was that it would have to be laboured for – yes, even fought for. He was telling us that the crusade for Christ might involve much hardship.’

Eyes gazed up at him, the majority female, anxious, all desperate for reassurance.

‘And he told us this. In his own words, Jesus said: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” That’s what he told the Apostles. And that is what he is telling us today.’

Mrs Parnell had seen him post up the map as she arrived for flower duty. There seemed to be more flowers this year than ever. Her eyes had brimmed as she saw what he was doing. ‘My youngest, Harry,’ she said, fighting her tears. ‘Just got his call-up papers this morning.’ She had made no complaint, simply grabbed her flowers and began cutting and arranging them with even more care than usual. It was only later he had found her sobbing in a rear pew. ‘I know, I know’ – she waved away his awkward attempt to comfort her – ‘he’s got to do his bit. But as a mother it’s so … well, you understand, of course. With your Donald.’

Reverend Chichester had smiled grimly and nodded. When his son had left, his parishioners assumed that he had gone off to fight like all the rest. It was an impression his father had done nothing to dispel. It wasn’t a lie, not at first, but it had taken root and grown to the point where his silence screamed of falsehood. But what was he to do? Admit the truth and lose the respect of all the Mrs Parnells in his congregation, just at the time they needed him most?

Or lose his self-respect, by admitting that every time he looked at his son he was reminded of Jennie and everything he had lost, and acknowledging that, in spite of a lifetime of faith and duty, he still couldn’t cope? He’d spent three years in a tunic constantly spattered with blood and he’d survived, yet inside he felt … a coward. Which is why the word had sprung so easily to his lips and been hurled at his only son.

‘Our young men are like the Apostles,’ he told them. ‘Sent out to follow in the footsteps of Our Lord and to cleanse the world from sin. May the Holy Spirit be with them, too.’

A chorus of ‘amens’ rippled through the congregation. The sun shone through the south windows into the nave, filling the church with warmth and comfort. He hoped it was an omen.

‘And let us take the words of Our Lord as our message today, when he said: “I am going away and I am coming back to you.” Coming back to you. Jesus passed through many trials and tribulations, but he came back to us – as we pray with all our hearts that our loved ones shall. May the Holy Spirit be with them, to bring them courage in all they do and victory in their task. May the Lord comfort them, keep them in His care and deliver them from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory …’

As he offered the sign of the cross and bade his flock to stand for the next hymn, his mind went back to the map on the board. He’d noticed there were no battle fronts or lines of trenches marked on it, not like last time, just the outline of a chunk of northern France and Belgium. But that was understandable, he decided. The Reverend Chichester, like so many others, concluded that the BEF was probably advancing too fast for the cartographers to keep up.

The morning had burst forth most gloriously, filled with birdsong and with the aroma of fresh spring grass still carried on the breeze. The clouds stood high and like gauze – an excellent day for cricket, Don thought, or some other game the Germans were no good at.

The old brewery in which the 6th had landed turned out to be rancid, full of pigeons and other pestilence. The task of transforming it into a Casualty Clearing Station was Herculean, and to be finished by the end of the day, they were instructed. They set about their labours with hoses and mops, encouraged by both the barks of their NCOs and the strengthening sun, while around them the local inhabitants carried on with their lives as they had always done: the milk was delivered, post collected, the children sent off to school as if war were no more than a distant rumour. And so it seemed. As the day drew on the men in Don’s unit began to relax; there had still been no sign of the enemy. Perhaps Hitler had thought better of the whole idea.

The news was brought to them while they paused for their first brew of the afternoon.

‘Right, then,’ the sergeant announced. ‘Pack it all up again. We’re moving.’

‘Where?’

‘Back.’

‘But, Sarge, I don’t understand, we only just got here …’

‘If you had been meant to understand, matey, God would have made you a general instead of a bleedin’ nursing orderly. So let’s just agree in this instance that the Almighty knows a half-sight more than you and jump to it. We move out. In an hour.’

‘We haven’t had a single casualty,’ Don complained, bemused.

‘And you’ll be the first, Private, if you don’t get off your backside …’

A wasted day. Grand Old Duke of York stuff. Yet Don found consolation. The fresh orders suggested there was an alternative plan. They were moving back towards the defensive positions they’d spent so long constructing. That had to make sense, so Don told the others. Only problem was, it seemed to involve so many filing cabinets once again.

The two men met in the middle of the huge walled garden. One bowed, they shook hands.

‘I must confess that I have been lying in wait for you, Edward.’

‘Then it is my turn to confess, sir, and tell you that I fear I’ve been avoiding you.’

They walked on, casting long evening shadows on the lawn, taking in the false sweetness of that spring. They were the two most respected men in the country, yet both victims of their birth. One was King, the other the most influential of aristocrats, and between them they represented all the powers and privileges that had kept the kingdom undiminished for a thousand years. Now it might not see out the summer.

‘Why have you been avoiding me, Edward?’

‘Because I fear I have let you down.’

‘Perhaps you have let yourself down.’

‘I fear that, too.’

King George VI walked on in silence with Edward, the Third Viscount Halifax, at his side. The two men were far more than monarch and Foreign Minister. There was an intimacy between them, a deep friendship that extended far beyond their formal roles. They and their families dined together, went to the theatre together, sometimes prayed together, down on their knees, side by side, and Halifax had been given a key to the gardens of Buckingham Palace for his own private recreation. Two days earlier he’d also been given the opportunity of becoming Prime Minister, and only because of his own overwhelming reluctance had the office been handed to Winston Churchill. Now, as they walked, Halifax’s tall, angular frame was bent low, like a penitent. A flight of ducks flew noisily above their heads, wheeling sharply in formation before crashing into the lake, where they began a noisy confrontation with the birds they had disturbed.

‘The ducks rather remind me,’ Halifax began tentatively, anxious to avoid the King’s questions, ‘of those poor Dutch ministers.’

‘The Dutch? Tell me, I’ve heard nothing,’ the King insisted anxiously. He was always concerned about keeping up with information; he found his job wretched enough without having to do it in the dark.

‘They were flying from Holland yesterday when they were intercepted by German fighters. They made it through, but badly damaged. Forced to ditch in the sea off Brighton. And that’s where the most dangerous part of their enterprise began. They managed to swim and stumble ashore and had just fallen exhausted upon the sand, when they were surrounded by a suspicious mob and arrested by the constabulary on suspicion of being enemy spies.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Desperately so. By the time they arrived in my office they were in a terrible state. I told them they had set a splendid example, and were clearly invincible.’

‘What did they want?’

‘Oh, an army.’

‘Pity. Brave souls.’

‘I’ve just seen their ambassador – you know him I think, van Verduynen. Assured me that the Dutch will resist with the same stubbornness and perseverance they have always shown.’

‘Without an army,’ the King added softly.

‘The Belgian ambassador assures me of victory. Says they are ten times stronger than in 1914.’

‘And they have our prayers.’

‘Not forgetting our own Expeditionary Force,’ Halifax added a trifle too quickly, missing the irony.

The conversation was proving difficult, and at first Halifax was relieved when they were diverted by the arrival of the Queen, Elizabeth. Halifax responded to her warm smile by kissing her hand and enquiring after the children, but he was to find no relaxation on this occasion.

‘Edward,’ the Queen began, ‘we are so disappointed.’

The Minister stooped once more. ‘I’m a little mystified myself. It’s not easy to explain but … I thought – I think – that Winston’s temperament, however unreliable and impetuous, may be better suited for this particular moment than perhaps is mine.’

‘You don’t sound terribly certain of it,’ the King commented.

‘I’m not. Certainty is a luxury at times like these. But think of it this way, if I were Prime Minister I would have Winston prowling up and down outside Downing Street. You know how much damage he can cause when things go to his head. So better the tiger inside the cage.’

‘With you holding the key.’

‘Yes, something like that.’

‘Until he has been either tamed or trampled by events,’ the Queen added. ‘Nothing lasts for ever in this chaotic world, Edward. Your turn will come.’

Halifax nodded diffidently in the manner of all Englishmen confronted by their own ambition.

‘Oh, Winston!’ Elizabeth uttered the name in exasperation, and without affection. ‘He will cause problems, you know he will. Always has.’

‘And already is,’ Halifax responded. ‘Wants Beaverbrook back.’

‘What?’ Elizabeth exclaimed. She neither liked nor trusted Max Beaverbrook, a Canadian émigré who had spent a long life charting a career through some exceptionally murky waters. He had been a Cabinet Minister during the last war, was now a peer and the immensely powerful owner of the Daily Express, and would for ever be an incorrigible conspirator. In his time he had schemed against both Churchill and the present Royal Family; it appeared that Churchill was far more ready to forgive him than was the Queen.

‘Wants to put him in charge of aircraft production,’ Halifax added for detail.

‘He must be stopped,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘Beaverbrook is incapable of responsibility. Remember …’ She waved her hand in exasperation. There was so much to remember from Beaverbrook’s long career, not least his unflagging public support for her despicable brother-in-law, the abdicated Edward.

The King, less voluble, was nevertheless shaking his head. ‘No, no, it won’t do. I must write to Winston immediately.’

‘Yes, hobble his horse,’ the Queen insisted.

Halifax swallowed deep, calculating. Should he mention the other matter? But he was exhausted by the events of the last few days and no longer trusted his own judgement. Instead he allowed base instinct to rule and to stir the Prime Minister’s pot.

‘He also wants Bracken as a Privy Councillor.’

‘No!’ Elizabeth once more led the objections, more vehement than ever. ‘Bracken as part of the King’s own private council? That we cannot have.’ Membership of the Council was an exceptional honour reserved for the most senior in the land, not a jumped-up Irish adventurer. She hooked her arm through her husband’s and clasped him tightly, as if they both required an extra measure of support. ‘Those men around Mr Churchill,’ she exclaimed, ‘are not gentlemen.’

‘I fear the government is being given over to gangsters,’ Halifax muttered miserably. He knew that both the King and Queen believed it to be largely his fault.

They wandered on in silence, skirting the lake, passing beyond rhododendrons that were raising flower-drenched branches in seasonal triumph, until Elizabeth turned to her husband, as always wishing to share his burden when he appeared distressed. ‘A penny for those thoughts of yours, my dear.’

The King seemed startled for a moment, dragged back from distant troubles. ‘I was thinking, well … like you, how very much I had wanted Edward for the job. And then worrying – just a little – how can I put it? About us and the Germans. That our gangsters may not be as good as theirs.’

It was beyond midnight when Churchill’s private detective, Inspector Thompson, ushered the woman into Churchill’s study. Churchill was busy writing a letter and didn’t look up. Without being asked, Thompson refilled his master’s glass, then offered a drink to the woman. With a curt shake of the head, she declined. Thompson left, closing the door behind him quietly.

Only then did Churchill raise his eyes.

‘Didn’t know if you would come.’

‘Didn’t want to. But your private policeman waved his warrant card. You know we Germans are helpless in the face of authority.’

Ruth Mueller was around fifty with a thin, elegant face that had worn well and fading blonde hair trimmed severely at the neck. She had probably cut it herself. There were other signs of self-reliance about her, apart from defiant eyes – her tweed suit was frayed at the cuffs and clearly designed for someone several pounds heavier, her shoes were old, her fingers unadorned by any jewellery. She held an ancient handbag protectively in her lap.

‘You look well,’ he offered clumsily.

‘No thanks to you.’ Her vocabulary was precise, her accent stiff.

He cleared his throat in irritation. He could still remember his surprise at their first encounter. He had received a letter from an R. Mueller explaining that the writer was a refugee from Germany, had an academic background as an historian, and wondering whether Churchill might be in need of any researchers for his forthcoming writings. The letter had added in impassioned terms that the threat of events in Europe were so imminent and the lack of understanding about them so immense in everyone but Churchill that he was the only man in Europe the writer wished to work for.

It had been a timely letter, arriving at Chartwell at the moment when Churchill, under severe pressure from both his publishers and his multiple creditors, had turned once more to his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a book commissioned many years previously and repeatedly pushed aside for the distractions of politics. Yet as interested as Churchill was in politics, for the past decade politics had displayed precious little interest in him. He had been a political outcast, lost in the wilderness, out of office and largely ignored. So he had picked up his pen once more, believing that his History would in all likelihood be his last endeavour on this earth, and in a typically impetuous moment had written offering R. Mueller a position on his team of research assistants.

He was shaken when, on the appointed day, a woman had turned up. Churchill was not good with women, not in a professional sense. For him they were creatures of romance, to be admired when the moment was right, then left in their drawing rooms while the menfolk got on with business. He’d had severe doubts about giving them the vote and was aggravated beyond endurance by most of those who had found their way into Parliament. When, with some awkwardness, he had sat R. Mueller down and suggested there had been some confusion but he might have a vacancy on his staff for an additional typist, she had not taken it well. She was a qualified historian, she told him, one who had spent several years researching an authoritative biography of the Fuehrer. Her abilities had been recognized even by the Gestapo. They had visited her several times and suggested several other professional avenues for her to pursue, ranging from a teaching position in almost any other subject than Hitler studies, which she had declined, to a librarianship in Dachau, which she had avoided only by fleeing. But even the Gestapo hadn’t suggested she be a typist. She had waved Churchill’s letter of appointment and insisted that she be given the proper job on his staff.

The engagement had lasted three weeks. She was brilliant, incisive, immensely hard-working, and impossible. When she had discovered that he was spending most of his time working on a history of the English-speaking world, she had asked why he wasn’t writing about the contemporary threat in Europe. He had offered many reasons: he was under considerable contractual obligation to his publishers, he had told her, and people were fed up with him going on about impending war. Anyway, it was necessary for him to think about his financial survival. She had looked him in the eye and told him that survival was about much more than his silk underwear and champagne. It had been the last time they had spoken. Until tonight.

‘Many circumstances have changed since we last met, Frau Mueller,’ he began, smiling.

If he was expecting congratulation, there was no sign of it.

‘I have a war to fight. Against your Herr Hitler. I was wondering if you would like to help.’

‘Help you?’ she enquired, startled.

‘Help Britain. I know it is a lot to ask.’

‘Help? How?’ She stared at him fiercely, across a desk that was cluttered with piles of papers weighed down by gold medals and surrounded by bottles of pills, potions, a magnifying glass, two spectacle cases and a small pot of toothpicks. There were also two cuffs made of card to prevent his sleeves getting dirty.

He was examining her, weighing her up. ‘I take a risk even in having you here. But it is a time when risk arrives with my breakfast and lingers on to tuck me in at night. We face a formidable opponent in Germany and its formidable armies. We also face Hitler.’ He began jabbing his chest with his finger. ‘I face Hitler. I, Winston Churchill. And yet I don’t know him. One of the few significant men in Europe I have never met.’ The room was dark except for the light of his desk lamp, yet she could see the exhaustion that hovered behind his eyes. ‘He refused to meet me, you know. In 1932 when I was motoring in Europe, inspecting the old battlefields. All the rest, Chamberlain, Halifax, Lloyd George, they met him. But not me. He simply refused. Mistook me for a man with no future, apparently.’

‘He may yet be right.’

‘Indeed he may,’ Churchill muttered, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘My father was a great English statesman, Frau Mueller. It’s partly due to him that you are here.’

‘But he’s … ?’

‘He gave me an excellent piece of advice. My father instructed me, never underestimate your enemy. Know your enemy if you want to beat him. Words of wisdom. So I was wondering … if you would be willing to help me thrash Hitler.’

‘Help? You?’

‘I am sure if an apology is owed for any misunderstandings we may have had in the past, it is freely offered on my part.’ For a man who had such an easy way with words, the apology sounded contrived to the point of insincerity.

‘You also owe me a week’s wages. You never paid.’

‘I … I …’ The old man began to splutter helplessly. This was leading nowhere. ‘Frau Mueller, you know Hitler better than any man in Britain. I need to understand him in order to crush him. I thought you might want to help in that enterprise, but if I am mistaken then I –’

‘You make it sound terribly personal.’

‘In some respects, it is.’

‘Hurt pride? Because he refused to meet you?’

‘It has nothing to do with pride!’

‘Then what are you fighting for? The British are fighting for no better reason than that you are too proud to admit that at almost every step of the way you got it wrong. Versailles. The Rhineland. Austria. Czechoslovakia –’

‘We are fighting for principle, not pride!’ he snapped, with an undertone of anger.

‘Poland? Poland’s not a principle, it’s a miserable afterthought from the last war that’s been pulled to pieces while you sat back and watched.’

He was beginning to breathe heavily, his teeth clamped fiercely around the butt of his cigar. ‘Well, now we are fighting because Hitler insists upon it, whether we like it or not. You said this was personal. It is. Both he and I have been recalled from obscurity to guide our nations through this hour. I am a Churchill, for all the strengths and faults which that has bred in me. Now I need to know what a Hitler is. And you can help me, if you will.’

‘You are a lot like him.’

‘Like That Man?’ He spat the words out, as though his face had been slapped.

‘Unruly, bad-tempered rabble-rousers, propagandists, nationalists, outsiders.’ She began ticking characteristics off on her fingers. ‘Why, you are both even painters – although in my view you show rather more talent than Hitler. And you both love war.’

‘I do not love war, as you put it.’ They both knew he was lying. ‘And perhaps I have made a mistake in thinking you could help –’

‘There is one difference which I think is very important, Mr Churchill.’

‘And what, pray, is that?’

‘I do not know you well, Mr Churchill, but I have my instincts. As a woman. And I believe you are capable of compassion – love, even. I see it in your eyes, in your words. But Hitler knows only one thing. Hatred. From his earliest days he was conditioned to hate – even to hate his father. Perhaps he hated his father most of all. He was an Austrian, a customs official on the Austro-German frontier, you see, and there is part of me which thinks that the Fuehrer’s first great coup, when he marched his army into Austria, was driven as much as anything by a desire to sweep away his father’s entire life work, to smash down his border posts and erase all traces of him. You think that ridiculous, of course, to suggest that the political ambitions of a man like Hitler could be driven by the memory of a long-dead father.’

Churchill paused before replying. ‘No, I do not think it ridiculous.’

‘Hitler has always needed someone to hate. When he was young it was his father, and now it is the Jews. Never forget how much he hates. But also never forget – never dare forget – Hitler’s extraordinary achievements. He took a nation as broken and decayed as Weimar Germany, where old women and babies starved to death in the streets, and he rebuilt it.’ Her mood had changed; it was no longer a lecture, her words carried growing passion. ‘While you English were clinging to your old ways, he built something new – not just the autobahns and barracks but a new people. He ripped out their sadness and restored their hope. He has raised them high and made them feel all but invincible. Germany is a land where no one starves any more. And what does it matter if a few Jews or Social Democrats don’t join in the general joy? What do a few cracked heads matter when an entire people who had been denied any sort of future have been lifted up and made proud once more? For the happiness of the whole, aren’t a few whispered sacrifices acceptable?’

He suspected she was goading him, but that was what he required, for his mind to be bent into focus.

‘So why did you not accept his bold new world?’

‘To my shame I did. For several years. I was one of those young mothers of Weimar who had starved like all the rest. Do you know how we survived in those years after the war, Mr Churchill, do you have any conception of what it was like? Once a month, every pay day, we hired a taxi to take us to the market – a taxi, not because we were rich but because every moment that passed could be measured in gold. With every breath we took, the money in our pockets grew more worthless, like butter on a hot stove. If we were lucky what had been worth a king’s ransom the previous week would now buy a few essentials, and if we weren’t lucky, if we were delayed, if the taxi was late, perhaps not even that. We stood in line, and prayed that by the time we reached the head of the queue there would still be something left, and that the price wouldn’t have shot out of sight even while we looked on. So in the end you stopped queuing and started pushing, and those that couldn’t push got trampled. We would spend everything we had, everything! Every last pfennig in our pockets. Then we would climb back into the taxi with whatever we had been able to buy and go home. Sometimes we might have meat, sometimes it would be off a cheese stall, other times just vegetables. But whatever it was would have to last us an entire month, until the next pay day, because we had nothing left. Nothing. All my jewellery gone, all our best clothes pawned. Can you understand that? I’m not talking about money for champagne but money for a little sugar and milk and bread.’ Her voice suddenly softened and began to break. ‘Nothing left for school. For medical bills. For heating in winter. And eventually, Mr Churchill, it wasn’t enough even for bread. One day I woke up and discovered I had no more milk for my baby. A week later she was dead.’

‘My heart breaks for you,’ he whispered.

‘No one starves under Hitler. And as long as we ate we gave thanks. We gave money when the Brown Shirts came round with their begging buckets, we gave salutes as their parades passed in the streets and we closed our ears to those noises in the night. When we woke up we might hear whispers that one neighbour or another had disappeared. It seemed a small price to pay for the food on our plates.’

‘So why did you eventually … ?’

She looked into her lap, her fingers running distractedly along the frayed edges of her cuffs.

‘If only I had a simple answer. There was a madness about our lives that infected us all. How mad can you get, driving into starvation in the back of a taxi? You know, Mr Churchill, in the whole of the last war when I was a young woman, I never heard a single shot fired. But under Weimar, shots were being fired all the time – at each other. Our leaders, our opponents, eventually even at the bread queues. Our streets became a battleground, our schools the headquarters. Children grew more used to the sound of gunfire than they were to their teachers’ voices. Instead of carrying around schoolbooks they began carrying around knives and hammers; their sports teams became nothing more than gangs of thugs. Can you imagine how much I and every other mother in the land begged for it to end? Then Hitler came along and made it all seem so simple. It was the fault of the Jews and the democrats. And we asked ourselves, what good was democracy if the water didn’t run and the lamps went dark? Better that we see by the light of burning torches. Our political leaders had been so weak, so false, but Hitler seemed above all that. Different. Exciting. Almost – what is the word? – spiritual.’

‘And we had Stanley Baldwin,’ Churchill muttered in contempt. ‘So tell me, pray, why you put it all behind you. Why did you choose to resist when so many went along with it?’

‘It crept up on you so slowly, what was really happening. Made it so easy to accept. Of course, there were those that had to be punished, the guilty men. The Marxists, the Social Democrats, the Jews. They almost seemed to prove their guilt when so many of them were shot trying to escape. But slowly it crept closer to us all. Everyone became a suspect. We had to give up our friends, our lovers, our beliefs – even renounce Belief itself. You could trust no one. And suddenly there was no private life at all, no space even to think.’ Her head fell to hide the pain. ‘After my baby died I went back to work – as a teacher in the Grundschule, the primary school, where my other child, my son, was a pupil. One day I was supervising in the library when the Brown Shirts came in. Very polite, apologized for the disturbance. But they had come for the Jews, they announced, and started leading the Jewish children out, one by one. I asked what the children had done, and the Brown Shirt leader just looked at me curiously. “Done? They are Jews.” But they were my pupils, my son’s classmates, my Jews, and I demanded to know why they were being taken. The Brown Shirt’s attitude changed; a rage came over his face. “Are you a Jew?” he asked. And I almost fell over in my rush to deny the charge – of course I wasn’t a Jew. I was furious with him, how dare he accuse … ?’

She was silent for a moment, needing to recover herself. When her head came up once more the eyes were filled with tears. ‘After he had gone I realized what had already become of me. I watched as they dragged them all away. I looked at the empty spaces in the library, the schoolbooks still open on the tables, the satchels on the backs of the chairs, and wondered when the Brown Shirts would be coming back for more.’ She leant forward, bent with feeling. ‘No, I can’t pretend I saw it all at that moment, that I became an opponent. I am not a hero, Mr Churchill, and I had no idea where they were taking them. But I knew the Brown Shirts would be back, and eventually they would come for my son, and either he would join them, or be taken by them. This was the new Germany, my son’s Germany, and I wanted to find out more about the man who had made it. That is when I started reading about Hitler, talking about him, studying him. In the end I decided to write about him. A biography.’

‘You were seeking to know your enemy …’

‘My enemy?’ She shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t my enemy, not at first. The book wasn’t intended to be an attack upon him, I was doing no more than trying to understand. So I started asking questions about him, but that meant that very soon they began asking questions about me. I had become their enemy without my realizing it.’

‘I am so sorry.’

But she had no desire for his pity. Already she had shared with him far more than she had intended. Once again her life was being invaded. It was time to push him back. ‘Did your father know his enemies?’

‘No, I think not,’ Churchill replied, startled at the sudden change of subject. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’ve noticed that when you talk about him you seem … stiff. Formal. Almost anxious.’

‘I loved my father.’

‘No. You were afraid of him, I think.’

Churchill bridled. ‘My whole life has been dedicated to his memory.’

‘Dominated by his memory, perhaps. A bit like Hitler.’

His hand slapped down on the desktop to demand her silence. It landed with such force that the toothpicks jumped in their pot. ‘I asked you here to talk about the Fuehrer, not to offer crass remarks about my father, a man whom you never met.’

‘I’ve never met Hitler.’

And they were back where they had always been.

‘I have no time for cheap comparisons, Frau Mueller. I thought you might help. Will you?’

Her cheeks flushed. ‘Help you? Why should I? I don’t like you, Mr Churchill. I don’t like any politicians. They’ve done nothing but ruin my life.’ She sprang from her chair, not wishing to be near him any longer. ‘What reason could I have for wanting to help you?’

‘Not me personally. Our crusade.’

‘In which millions will die. To save your old man’s pride.’

‘To save both our countries.’

‘I have no country any more.’

‘Then do it for the simple pleasure of proving yourself right – and for the satisfaction of proving That Man wrong!’ He was shouting, although he hadn’t intended to.

‘You and your ridiculous male vanity. You two men will destroy the world with your war. You are so much alike.’

She was already at the door.

‘You will come again,’ he barked, the intonation halfway between question and command.

She had opened the door and was almost out.

‘Please!’ he called after her. ‘I need you.’

She turned, startled. Then she was gone.

THREE

Monday 13 May. Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister for just three days. And on that third day it all began to unravel.

Churchill was striding down Parliament Street, Bracken at his side, distractedly acknowledging the waves and shouted greetings of passers-by as he walked to the House of Commons. His mind was ablaze with doubt. So many thoughts crowded in upon him, so many concerns; in less than an hour he had to address the House of Commons like Brutus in the marketplace with Caesar’s blood still fresh upon the floor. Yet less than four years earlier those same men, in that same place, had inflicted upon him the most profound humiliation any Member could imagine. They had jeered him into silence. It had not been a good speech by any standard; it had been an inappropriate and, if truth be admitted, a slightly inebriated intervention on the delicate matter of the abdication. A foolish speech, but not exceptional for that. Yet it wasn’t the speech so much as the speaker they couldn’t stomach. They didn’t care for Winston Churchill, didn’t trust him, thought that even in the egotistical world of Westminster he rose above all others in being outrageous, unprincipled, unreliable and supremely bloody ungrateful. 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 limestone sculpture 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 Il 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 books. 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.

Not that he would be eating anchovies or rabbit pie. At Chartwell it had been salmon, venison, pheasant and beef, washed down with the finest wines. The cost of a single bottle would have got her through an entire week, rent and all, yet he had the impertinence to lecture her about his sacrifices! What did he know about sacrifice?

Her mind wandered back to that summer of 1914, August, the last time she could remember being happy. There was sun, and the sound of children’s laughter. Then the summons had come. War. And the men had left with the horses, leaving behind the women with their young ones and their unspoken fears. So it had begun. The war was fought a million worlds away in France and Russia, but it had come rapping at their doors, gently at first. Strange shortages appeared. Suddenly there was no paper. She had begun to write letters not only across the page but up its length, too, in writing so minuscule her husband had required a glass to find his way through the kaleidoscope of scribbles. Worn-out shoes had to be repaired with card or resoled in wood; the children were asked to bring all their old bones and even cherry stones to school, to be turned into fertilizer. And they brought illness with them, everyone got sick, not least in their souls. Children were taught to hate, to kill even before they had become men, and were told by their teachers and priests that this was good and right. Hatred and intolerance were taught alongside geography and the Lord’s Prayer, and was so much simpler to learn. Hatred had become a great patriotic game, honed by hunger, and it had been played so long that it would never be stopped, not while Germany, this Germany, survived.

Ruth Mueller was a German. But she was also an intellectual, a free thinker with a mind of her own, for what it was worth. And above all, she was a mother with memories of a starving child whose cries still woke her in the darkest moments of the night. She had fled, but she had not escaped, and whatever she did now, in the end some part of her soul would be shredded. She was a German in a foreign land, an intellectual reduced to scraping through on scraps of translation and proofreading, a mother with no child. But doing nothing would not be an option, not in this war.

Then she remembered that Winston Churchill had said please. It was a cry of vulnerability, like a child’s plea for help. It had been a long time since anyone had said please.

She put aside the newspaper and went to the enquiries desk.

‘May I help you?’ The assistant was formal, unfriendly – she disapproved of Ruth Mueller’s strange reading habits, and of Ruth Mueller even more.

‘I would like some books. Something written by Mr Churchill, please. Perhaps something he has written about his father?’

They had expressed their collective concerns and reservations about the new Prime Minister, after which, politics being politics, they had trooped through the Division Lobby to give him a unanimous vote of confidence. Afterwards it had taken Churchill some while to leave the Chamber for, politicians being politicians, many had paused to congratulate him – but not for too long. Even Chips Channon had joined the throng.

‘Not one of us,’ Bracken had warned, whispering in Churchill’s ear.

‘Chips? Of course he is. Chips is everyone’s,’ Churchill had replied gaily. ‘Don’t worry about him. It’s the other buggers we have to watch out for.’ And Churchill had forced his way through to the side of Neville Chamberlain, taking his arm, smiling, ensuring that they were seen together and offering him an ostentatious display of gratitude and warmth.

Afterwards he had noted Bracken’s quizzical eye. ‘That’s the way it shall be, Brendan, both publicly and in private, for as long as is required. I’m haunted by enough damned ghosts, I’ve no need of more.’

They strode away, out of earshot and hidden behind a fog of cigar smoke. ‘Brendan, I have a task of some delicacy for you. I am being forced to fight on too many fronts. I have nominated the most senior Ministers in my Government, now I want your help in selecting the great mass of the remainder. I need to get on with the other war.’

‘Magnificent. I always enjoy a little vengeance.’

‘You will start this evening. You will do it with David Margesson.’

‘Margesson? Winston, you’ve gone mad …’

David Margesson was a name no one took lightly. He had been Neville Chamberlain’s Chief Whip, his immensely powerful organizer of the parliamentary party. He had known the details of every plot and piece of parliamentary wickedness during the last decade, largely because he had initiated most of them, and none of his plots had been more vicious than that against Churchill himself.

‘Winston, barely twelve months ago Margesson was on the point of getting you deselected. Thrown out of the party. He tried to destroy your whole life – he hates you! The only reason you’re here today is because the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia the night before the deselection meeting. God knows, but Adolf Hitler’s done more for your career than bloody Margesson! He’s a comprehensive bastard!’

‘Ah, but a most effective one. Which is why you will sit down with him and reshuffle the rest of my government, allowing as many as possible of the other bastards to remain.’

‘I am lost,’ Bracken gasped, his mind exhausted.

‘Come on, Brendan, it’s your own idea: Mark Antony, embracing the conspirators in order to give himself enough time.’

‘For what?’

Churchill stopped, grabbed the other man’s sleeve and spun him round until he was staring directly into his eyes.

‘To survive! If we rock this boat too violently, it will sink. It may be overloaded with men not to our hearts, but if we are to let them go, slip them over the side, it had best be done as quietly as possible and at night. So mark out the troublemakers. Give them new jobs, different jobs, impossible jobs, but always some job; never forget that their love of office – any office – is stronger than their loathing for me. Keep them busy with the war against Hitler; give them not a moment for their war against me.’ Churchill was panting with emotion, struggling to keep his breath. ‘And if we are to go down in flames, then they too shall shed tears, share the toil, be drowned in sweat. But if we are to survive, it can only be together.’

So they had gathered in the Admiralty later that evening, Bracken and Margesson in one room while Churchill buried himself with his papers and maps in the inner sanctum. Bracken and the Chief Whip had bickered and debated, weighing dubious merits against more certain sins, moving from one to the next, pricking a few names, moving others to more minor posts, getting Colville to telephone the news through to the victims while they themselves congratulated the victors. In the end two-thirds of the existing members of the Government were reappointed, only twelve senior offices went to newcomers. Chamberlain remained prominent on the poop deck while Margesson continued in service as the master-at-arms.

But even as they worked, the boat was to be rocked far more brutally than ever they imagined.

Churchill heard it first, on the radio, from an American, a respected CBS correspondent named William Shirer who was based in Berlin. His broadcasts were inevitably filtered through the coarse gauze of the German Propaganda Ministry, but what squeezed past the censors was often useful, helping to know the enemy.

Good evening. This is Berlin …

The voice was flat, reedy, its tones stripped of emotional emphasis as it wowed and fluttered its way through the ether. Churchill tapped a dial; it made little difference. But the message did.

Liège fallen! German land forces break through and establish contact with air-force troops near Rotterdam! Those were the astounding headlines in extra editions of the Berlin papers that came out about five, our time, this afternoon.

‘Colville. Mr Colville!’ Churchill first muttered, then roared. There was a sudden scrabbling in the outer office.

Today was a holiday in the capital – Whit Monday – and there were large crowds strolling in the streets. They bought up the extras like hot cakes. The announcement by the German High Command on the fourth day of the big drive that the citadel of Liège had been captured, and that German – well, the Germans call them ‘speed troops’ – had broken through the whole southern part of Holland and made contact with the air-force troops who’ve been fighting since the first day in and around Rotterdam on the west coast, caught almost everyone by surprise. Even German military circles seemed a bit surprised. They admitted that the breakthrough to Rotterdam, as one put it, came somewhat sooner than expected …

Colville was standing aghast on the other side of the desk. None of this had been mentioned in the night’s situation briefing. To be sure, the Dutch had been talking of ‘modifications’ and ‘confusion’ in the military position, but this …

‘Get the Chiefs of Staff back here. Every man jack of ’em. And find out whether m’Lord Halifax is in the land of the living. If he’s not, drag him out of bed. Tell him there’s a war on!’

FOUR

Tuesday 14 May. The Reverend Chichester rose before dawn, turning his back on his bed. Sleep had been elusive and, when at last it had come, a river of troubles had run through his dreams, destroying his peace and reminding him of so many unanswered prayers. It had been his birthday on the previous day, his fifty-second, a time for reflection, although it had passed unnoticed by anybody else, apart from a card from his sister. Nothing from Donald.

Everything in his mind kept moving in circles and coming back to the same point. Donald. Even Jennie stared back at him in reproach from the mantelpiece, as if to say there should have been another photograph of their son alongside her. But he hadn’t any recent photos of Don.

The vicarage seemed empty, the hallway too tidy; the kitchen had an unaccustomed echo; even the driveway taunted him. Not so long ago Don’s motorbike, an AJS, had stood there on the gravel, leaning drunkenly and leaking oil. It was an ancient machine and Don had spent many hours repairing it, not always successfully. The Reverend Chichester hated motorbikes. As a young man he’d almost killed himself on one and he was afraid that Don would do the same. So he had objected to the bike. He was trying to protect his son, but instead of a discussion about caring it had been reduced to a shouting match about filthy sinks and oily clothes. Ridiculous. Pointless. Splinters in the eye, for in spite of Don’s offensive language, he knew it was his fault. It seemed he would say anything rather than admit to his son that he loved him.

The previous evening he had returned to the vicarage to discover that his occasional gardener had cleaned up the soiled gravel. It was in pristine condition, no trace of the bike. Every fragment of Don’s memory was being leached from his life, leaving them to stumble around his dreams.

He began to prepare another solitary breakfast, his newspaper propped up above the sink. Across the Channel that lay beyond his kitchen window, a new war was raging. He could see and hear nothing of it, there was little to witness apart from the calm of the sea and the outline of Calais beginning to emerge from its morning veil, but the headlines gave him the story of a ‘Total War’ in which the ‘RAF had triumphed’. One hundred and fifty enemy machines shot down. Good news, great news, God’s work. Set out in The Times.

Yet, as seemed increasingly to be His habit, God moved in ways that left mysteries in their wake. As the vicar pushed aside his breakfast plate, the same newspaper announced that the Belgian army was falling back, the Dutch, too. Yet only yesterday it had announced that the BEF was sweeping forward. Backwards, forwards – this was unlike any war the Reverend Chichester knew.

The Times assured him that the Belgians and Dutch were withdrawing ‘without heavy casualties’.

Which puzzled the Reverend Chichester. For why, in God’s name, if they had suffered no heavy casualties, were they moving back?

Where had they gone, those people who only days before had been smiling, blowing kisses and shouting their encouragement as the 6th had made its way to the front? Now, on the way back, there was no greeting, no warmth, nothing but tired eyes that spoke of concern and even contempt.

Don’s unit were withdrawing to a suburb of Brussels called Boitsfort in a tight convoy consisting of fifty ambulances, water trucks, troop-carriers and other vehicles. A few refugees had begun to appear on the road in front of them with their cars and overladen carts. Progress began to slow, and a sense of fading order crept up on them. The 6th had seen no direct combat yet, but planes had begun to appear overhead, high in the clear sky, and they came from the east. They must have seen the convoy; you couldn’t hide an entire field unit, not with all their bright red crosses painted on the roofs.

They passed a single bomb crater at the side of the road. A dead horse lay beside it, the carcass still smouldering, its stench sweet: the first casualty of Don’s war. And moments later there were others, Belgian soldiers, a group of them at the side of the road, abandoned and bleeding. Some were badly injured from shrapnel wounds. They kept gesticulating towards the sky, but otherwise there was little sense to be had from them in their strange language, and no one seemed inclined to delay in order to discover more. The wounded were loaded into the back of the ambulances and other vehicles. First blood. Belgian blood.

Yet, that evening, Boitsfort displayed the air of a prosperous suburb whose mind was fixed on moving gently into the embrace of nothing more threatening than a glorious summer. The gardens were full of flowers, the restaurants and cafés crowded, the young women gay, even while in the back of Don’s vehicle a soldier was bleeding silently upon the floor. Someone mentioned they were passing near the battlefield of Waterloo.

The 6th drew up in front of an imposing building, the Hôtel Haute Maison. Inside the hotel a dinner-dance was in progress. Most of the male dancers were Belgian officers in freshly pressed uniforms, with women on their arms and champagne at their tables. As the British marched in bearing the bloodied casualties, a woman screamed, but in a moment the surprise was overtaken by a hurried calm. A Belgian officer began issuing orders to the hotel staff, the tables were cleared, the women ushered out, the band dismissed. The maître d’ passed calmly from table to table, extinguishing candles, removing bottles, everything else being swept up in the starched linen tablecloths so that it took only moments for the tables to be laid bare. The two largest of these were then positioned beneath the chandeliers, their tops scrubbed with disinfectant and transformed into operating tables. The walking wounded slumped into the dining chairs to wait their turn, while those who were beyond helping themselves were carried in on stretchers that were already stained beyond cleansing. The maître d’ brought in armfuls of clean towels and napkins to use as bandages, tears pouring silently down his cheeks. A priest arrived.

There was little time, often not enough time for the anaesthetic to take effect. More casualties arrived throughout the night, some civilian, all Belgian. The surgeons did whatever they could; often it was not enough. The dead were laid out in the ballroom.

War had at last caught up with Don.

Then, as the sun rose, the 6th were given fresh instructions. New orders. Fall back. Again.

‘How is it possible? How can it be that three armies have fallen back because of the approach of a mere handful of Nar-zi tanks?’

Churchill hunched over the map spread before him on the Cabinet table and held it down with his clenched fists. For many long moments he stood like stone as he studied what lay before him, refusing to believe. All day long he had been pacing up and down as reports flooded in of ever-spreading disaster, his head bent forward as though he intended to butt his way towards victory, but no matter how furiously he paced he couldn’t prevent disaster from catching up with him. The Dutch had surrendered, laid down their arms, given up. The Maginot Line was broken: the French were falling back, the Belgians with them, while the Germans had pushed beyond Sedan and were now halfway to the Channel. Luftwaffe bombers were now at airfields no more than thirty minutes’ flying time from the English coast. That morning he had been shaken awake by a telephone call from the French Prime Minister Reynaud. ‘All is lost,’ he had said in English. ‘The road to Paris is open. We have been defeated.’

And all through the day the calamities had continued.

‘Impossible!’ Churchill’s fists pounded the table and he exploded back into life. He turned to his right, to where Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, was sitting. ‘How many planes? How many planes do we have in France?’

‘Prime Minister, we had four hundred and seventy-four. I regret to tell you that as of this morning we had barely two hundred left still operational.’

‘In five days? We have lost more than half our strength in five days?’ Churchill gasped.

‘The Germans have lost a great many more machines,’ the Air Marshal responded sharply. ‘But we are outnumbered. I’ve heard of three Hurricanes taking on flights of thirty or forty enemy planes. They fight magnificently, but the French fuel is poor, their landing fields a disgrace and their radio communications nonexistent. This morning we attacked the pontoon bridges around Sedan. We sent in nearly eighty planes. Thirty-seven of them failed to return.’ He glared defiantly at Churchill through exhausted eyes. ‘If the RAF is in peril it is not through want of courage. Or of sacrifice, Prime Minister.’

‘The French want more. They want us to send over more squadrons.’

‘To what purpose, Prime Minister?’ Newall countered. ‘If the French are already beaten it would be like cutting out the heart of the RAF and offering it on a plate to Goering. There’s no point in sacrificing our aircraft simply to help the French improve their terms of surrender.’

‘We must keep them in the fight! No surrender. If France were to fall …’

The thought was so terrible as to be inexpressible. He left it hanging half-formed before them. A military aide came in, offered a smart salute and with lowered eyes placed another map before the Prime Minister. An update from the front. It showed an arrow through the place where the heart of the French Ninth Army should have been.

‘Dear God,’ Halifax whispered from his seat opposite Churchill. ‘I despair.’

‘Despair does not appear on the agenda of this Cabinet, my lord,’ Churchill growled. ‘Why, there is opportunity in such chaos!’

‘Then it eludes me, Prime Minister,’ Halifax responded calmly. ‘Opportunity for what?’

‘For counterattack! To mobilize our forces and take advantage of their tired and overstretched panzers before they can recover. I remember the twenty-first of March 1918. All experience shows that after five or six days they must halt for supplies – I learnt this from the lips of Marshal Foch himself. Look, look!’ His finger stabbed at the enemy salient protruding into France. ‘Once more they have exposed their neck like a wretch stretched out on a guillotine. So let us grab the moment to cut it off!’

‘This time, I fear, the French are fighting with a decidedly blunt axe.’

‘Then what do you propose as an alternative?’ Churchill all but spat, his frustration bubbling over.

‘Prime Minister, I have neither your abilities nor experience in the military field. I leave the art of fighting to you and the late marshal.’ His artificial hand moved awkwardly across the papers set out before him on the table. ‘But I am a diplomat. That is a different game and perhaps we might play it with rather better fortune.’ He looked around the room, bringing the other Ministers and military men into the discussion. ‘At this point the impetus appears to be with Herr Hitler, but he is isolated, alone. If we can prevent other nations from siding with him we can perhaps help stem his progress. We all know that Italy is threatening to come into the war on his side. That would be a disaster which would threaten our Mediterranean possessions and make the situation of the French impossible. I suggest, with all the powers of persuasion I command’ – they all noted the implicit words of warning – ‘that the Prime Minister write immediately to Signor Mussolini and make it clear to him that we bear Italy no ill will, that the dialogue between us remains open, and that if the Italians have any cause for grievance with us it can be settled without turning the Mediterranean red with each other’s blood.’

‘Ah, play the Roman card,’ Attlee muttered.

‘You think it a sensible suggestion, Lord Privy Seal?’ Churchill enquired.

‘I do,’ Attlee replied. ‘Nothing to be lost from it.’

‘But what if he says he wants Gibraltar, or Malta, as prizes for his co-operation?’ Which he would, damn him, like any jackal.

‘Better that such issues be resolved across the table than across a battlefield,’ Halifax insisted.

Churchill stared at him; Halifax stared straight back. He had given his advice ‘with all the powers of persuasion I command’. In the muted language of Halifax’s world, the Foreign Secretary was announcing that he would not tolerate rejection. And Churchill could not withstand rebellion. He had no choice. Anyway, it was only a bloody letter.

‘An excellent idea,’ Churchill announced. ‘You have a draft for my consideration, Foreign Secretary?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then it shall be done.’

Halifax nodded his gratitude. For a moment he tried to convince himself that perhaps it would work after all, this ill-conceived administration led by the charging bull that was Churchill, with himself to guard the gate of the corral. And suddenly Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, was speaking. A fragile man, in Halifax’s view, and his predecessor as Foreign Secretary until he had fallen out with Chamberlain over appeasement and flounced out of the Cabinet. Now they were all back together around the Cabinet table, as uneasy as ever. Halifax sat back as Eden reported on his attempts to raise an army of local volunteers to defend the homeland.

‘From all corners they have come forward,’ he said in his precise, over-trimmed voice. ‘In every town and every village, bands of determined men are gathering together for duties on the home front, arming themselves with shotguns, sporting rifles, clubs and spears …’

Dear God, thought Halifax, is this what it has come to? The greatest empire in the world defended with clubs and spears? And by fools?

He looked around the table, from man to man, from failed politicians to failing military commanders, and knew he had been wrong. This ill-conceived and misconstructed machine could not be made to work. It was written on all their brows. Britain had already lost the war.

Don was confused. The BBC announcer had told them that Allied forces were counterattacking all along the front. Germans were being repelled at the Sedan salient, he claimed defiantly. So why were the 6th moving back once more?

A few hours earlier there had been a trickle of refugees on the road in front of them, but now it had swelled to a stream that meandered as far as his eye could see, like a tangle of fishing net caught at the edge of the surf. It slowed the 6th’s progress to a crawl. The radiators that had frozen throughout winter began to overheat, and just after noon the convoy pulled into a farmyard for water and a little rest. Don hadn’t slept in thirty hours.

They were only miles from the border, almost back where they had started. Bizarrely, as they drew into the farmyard, they found a huge tent festooned with coloured banners in the neighbouring field. The circus was in town. Around the tent, the people of the circus were practising their arts, balancing on tightropes, juggling, tumbling, even washing down an elephant.

‘What am I to do?’ the circus owner explained. He was short, like a Toby jug, sad, with a huge moustache. ‘I have three elephants, several lions, my wife’s mother and eighteen other relatives. Where could we possibly go?’

No one else had an answer, either. As they rested, Don noticed a young girl, the owner’s daughter, riding around a makeshift ring balancing on the backs of two white horses. She waved. He waved back. The show must go on.

And so did the 6th, more slowly than ever as they approached the border. A mile beyond the farmhouse they had to manoeuvre around two British Matilda tanks that had broken down. Don had heard there was a lot of that. He’d heard many things about the BEF – that equipment was in short supply, badly packed and often sent to the wrong units; that the tanks had no wireless sets, that they were no match for the German panzers; that the twenty-five-pounders had arrived in France untested and unfired; that … well, there came a point when you didn’t want to hear any more.

He didn’t hear the Luftwaffe, either. He was aching from lack of sleep and the constant grinding of low gears had left his ears ringing. Up ahead he could see that the column had come to a complete halt. Civilians were looking up into the sky and pointing; a few soldiers began firing their rifles. Then, from behind, came the dull crump of explosions, and suddenly the refugees were on the move again, scattering to the sides of the road and throwing themselves behind every available tree and piece of cover. When he saw tracer fire ripping the trees to shreds, Don decided to join them, head down in a ditch.

And so the 6th survived their first encounter with hostile fire. Little damage was done on that occasion; most of the attention of the Luftwaffe appeared to be back down the road, from where Don could see a column of smoke rising, the only mark upon a cloudless sky. The circus tent must have seemed like a military bivouac from the air.

As Don and the others began to emerge from their hiding places, they became aware of the sounds of a commotion. Screams. Shouts of dismay. Hooves clattering on the metalled road. Drawing ever nearer. Suddenly two white horses, their eyes red with fear, flew past. They were dragging something behind them, tangled in the reins, bouncing off the tarmac.

Don ducked behind a tree and was sick.

In Joe Kennedy’s view, it had been a splendid evening. Dinner at the Italian embassy, theatre, a new flirtation, then back to Beaverbrook’s for a drink. Beaverbrook’s door just along from the Ritz Hotel was always open and awash with good company and gossip. The two men were excellent companions and Kennedy was a frequent house guest at Beaverbrook’s country home at Cherkley, where he had fallen into the most pleasurable habit of sleeping with one of Beaverbrook’s research assistants. All in the line of business, of course; she would whisper in his ear all through the night, then write him a weekly letter full of her own endearments and the press man’s private news. Keeping abreast, as the ambassador put it.

What he couldn’t know was that the research assistant sent her letters through the Express office, where the manager would steam them open and copy the contents before posting them on. So everything got back to Beaverbrook – keeping the American ambassador on his back, where he belonged, as His Lordship put it. No hard feelings. They were both businessmen, and information was a commodity from which they both made a handsome profit.

It was around midnight. Kennedy was just tucking into a fresh bottle of the Beaverbrook bourbon when the telephone rang. A summons. The Prime Minister wanted to see him. He made a point of asking for another drink before he left.

He found Churchill in his Admiralty workrooms. He had transformed the ground-floor dining room into an office, where he was pacing up and down, waving a glass, dictating to a female typist who was tapping out the words on a special silent machine. Churchill seemed not to notice his visitor, lost in concentration, and Colville scurried forward to guide the ambassador into the next room.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.