Winston’s War (62 page)

Such side-stepping of responsibility causes uproar. Outrage sweeps along the benches of Opposition members in front of him. Catcalls ring in his ears, while from behind he can sense only a dull silence. They are being slow, his own men, perhaps languid after too good a lunch, but languid's no bloody good to him. His eyes fasten on to the Chief Whip seated at the end of the Front Bench, whose hand begins to beat on the back of the bench, like a galley master beating time for the slaves. Tumult erupts and the Speaker is at last dragged from his torpor. “Don't you want to listen to him?” the Speaker demands in rebuke. “We've heard all the excuses before,” a shout comes back.

It's time to pursue them. At moments like this Chamberlain sometimes wonders who the real enemy is. Don't exaggerate our difficulties, don't you dare exaggerate our difficulties, he scolds them, don't do the Wehrmacht's work for them. Heavens, it's nowhere near as bad as Gallipoli!

Ah, that eternal, irresistible comparison. Gallipoli. All eyes on the Opposition benches float towards Churchill, seated beside his Prime Minister, brooding.

No, this time, Chamberlain continues, our losses have been really quite light. Very well, so we've suffered a certain loss of prestige, and perhaps a certain color has been given to the legend of German invincibility. And I grant you that our enemies are for the moment crowing. The Prime Minister spreads his hands, nothing to hide, indicating how reasonable he can be. But reason never won the day in the House, and he's beginning to lose control. Press on quickly.

So, you ask, why did we set our sights on Trondheim, knowing how difficult and how hazardous the task would be? Well, how many reasons do you want? But the most important reason is that we were asked to do so by the Norwegians themselves. Brave Norwegians, extraordinary courage, resisting the German bully—who would deny them? Anyone here? Stand up and identify yourselves if you would have dared refuse!

So why did you run away, then? a voice demands.

We went to their assistance because we are decent men who respect the freedom and right to neutrality of small nations (very well, so we invaded their neutrality and laid a few mine-fields ourselves, but that was nothing compared with what the Germans have done…).

So why
did
you withdraw…?

He ignores the repeated jibe. If we hadn't gone to their help, he insists, what would that have looked like? They would have said we were only interested in the iron ore! Which, of course, is so far from being the case!

Out of his sightline Churchill's large head, resting on his chest, remains motionless, except for one eyebrow which suddenly arches in—in what? Disagreement? Mockery? Gentle surprise? To the Opposition it looks as though the truth is struggling to get out.

Understand our strategy, Chamberlain insists. Germany has vast and well-equipped armies. She could attack us at any time and at any place. We must be ready to meet that threat!

Pardon me, they shout, but isn't that what Winston has been saying all these years? Isn't that precisely why you let him starve in the wilderness?

Churchill's head, eyebrow, jaw, every muscle of him, remain like stone beside his leader.

Chamberlain waves his arms in contempt. Some of you are always full of cheap jibes. Accusing every Minister of being either complacent or defeatist. Me, I've always tried to steer a middle course.

You couldn't steer a bloody bus, they cry.

Look, unlike some, I've never sought to raise undue expectations… Tell that to Joey Ball!

…or to make the people's flesh creep by painting pictures of unmitigated gloom.

Missed the bus, they cry again.

That's it. He's had enough. Time to deal with these vermin… Don't twist my words. I used those words in totally different circumstances.
Before
the invasion of Norway.
Three days before!

Oh, bugger, he knows he's lost. Got too bloody sensitive for his own good, let them get under his skin. And what's worse, he's allowed it to show. Get back—get back to where you need to be, Neville. Mountain top, lofty visions, not down in the sewer with the rats.

He forges on, piling clichés around him for protection. No time for bickering, for division amongst ourselves. Time for
closing ranks, for setting our teeth. For unity. For party loyalty. For friendship!

He even appeals to the Labour Party for help. No, no! they cry—as he knew they would. What? You won't help with the war effort? he sneers.

They erupt in frustration. He grips the Dispatch Box. The eyes of the Whips travel like cattle prods around the House, goading, inciting, compelling. Mixed amongst the chaos there are cries of shame. Some of them are coming not from in front of him but from behind, from his own benches.

He has almost finished. Run out of clichés. I don't claim to be infallible, he tells them. I'm not above receiving help and advice from others. For I recognize an overriding national objective—as every true Englishman does—to prepare for the trials that lie ahead. We must put all our strength into preparing for these great trials, and so steadily to increase our strength until we ourselves will be able to deliver our blows, wherever and whenever we will!

It's not great, so far as perorations go, scarcely the stuff of Shakespeare, but he's never had Winston's skills. Yet he has confronted the whirlwind and not been swept off his feet. At last he can sit down, to the applause of his own men and to shouts of consternation from the rest. He is satisfied. He is also utterly exhausted.

Of all the many perils that lie in wait for the statesman, the greatest are his friends. As Chamberlain sat down matters were still, perhaps, in the balance. The first to offer a response was Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, who in his clipped public-school tones taunted Chamberlain with being the man who had an almost uninterrupted career of failure and who had missed every bus of the last ten years. Then it was the turn of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader, who described at length the failings of the Norwegian
campaign—Territorials, ill-trained boys sent to do men's jobs, and dying for the privilege.

Yet such taunts were of little account. It is difficult for Opposition leaders to shine in such an arena, for grand words of denunciation are no more than is expected of them. So Chamberlain was still free and in control when the next speaker rose to his feet. A Government stalwart, a senior backbencher, a knight of the shires and a brigadier-general all rolled into one. Sir Henry Page Croft was a veteran of the Somme campaign who had witnessed the spilling of much blood. He was about to inflict praise upon his leader from which Chamberlain would never recover.

The brigadier drew himself up to his full height. From where he was looking, the rows of the Opposition benches stretched out before him like enemy trenches shorn of their barbed wire—my God, but he was used to this, had seen it all before in France and the fields of Flanders. In his mind he carried the orders of the day, delivered by the Chief Whip himself, and in his hand he held a few notes which like a bayonet he would soon be plunging repeatedly into the breast of the enemy. A few short breaths to fill the lungs, a licking of dry lips, and he was over the top…

First he thrust at Attlee, followed by a lunge at Sinclair, but these were minor skirmishes. His sights were trained upon a target he described contemptuously as “our own Quislings"—the treacherous and treasonous scribblers of the press who “have enrolled themselves under Dr. Goebbels.” These creatures, he accused, have turned “a minor technical mishap into a great disaster for British arms.”

A minor technical mishap. Well, there it was. The difficulties in Norway were really nothing worse than a broken fan-belt. From two rows behind him, Dickie could be heard offering voluble support.

Yes, the brigadier continued, the Quislings in our press were defeatists—but where was the defeat? There had been no defeat, nothing but glorious victory! (Even Dickie had to pause in order to get hold of this one.) Hitler had been lured into one of the great strategic blunders of all time, Croft insisted. “He has done the very thing which the whole of the German staff have preached against for the past one hundred years. He has extended his right flank by over one thousand miles. He must keep at least one hundred thousand men in Norway until the end of the war…” The statistics were thrown around the Chamber like grenades, the noise was deafening. “Who can doubt,” he thundered, “that Hitler, with his right flank stretched out one thousand miles, subject always to possible attack by sea power, has entered upon a road which is a departure from all military reason and strategy?”

Why, it was clear. Hitler would collapse under the weight of his own success. Give him Belgium, give him France, give him anything he wanted, and soon he would be utterly vanquished…The brigadier's colleagues sat stunned, but the smell of blood was in his nostrils and he knew from his experience in the trenches that once you'd started you never dared stop or you'd end up with your balls hanging on the wire. No chance of that. On to Berlin! “And I shall say to all my friends, whatever may be their different shades of opinion,” he exclaimed, pointing to his Prime Minister, “that if you are convinced you can find a better man, then put him there!” It was only the first half of the thought, of course, merely setting up what he intended to be the coup de grace, but the savior of the Somme had unwisely paused for breath in the middle of his onward charge. Suddenly he was caught in the middle of no-man's land. Stuck in the mud. Bugger. He struggled onward, ever more recklessly, trying to dodge the enemy fire that was bursting forth on all sides, determined to bury his blade to the hilt. “But if you believe that this kind of attack in the Press,
this sabotage, is wrong, if you still believe in democracy, then do not let those of us who are fighting for democracy take our orders from the biggest dictator of all—the Press!”

What—bigger than Hitler? Bigger even than Joe Stalin? Well, it was a point of view, and one that was to prove extraordinarily effective in having the brigadier's name removed from the
Telegraph's
Christmas card list. He resumed his seat, breathless. Below and in front of him, Chamberlain did not stir, dare not move. His mind froze. Was this the best they could do? Was he to find himself defended not by valiant knights but by court jesters and fools?

The House of Commons was being turned into a stage for the playing-out of an historic masterpiece, and from the wings entered Sir Roger Keyes, dressed for the part in the full uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, six rows of medals gleaming at his chest. The Admiral's military record was long, impeccable, indeed heroic; this was a man who knew war. He was also a parliamentarian who had considered carefully the part he must play in this drama. “I have come to the House of Commons today in uniform, for the first time, because I wish to speak for some officers and men of the fighting, sea-going Navy who are very unhappy.”

Friends, Britons, countrymen, lend me your ears, for I come to talk of honorable men, whom we shall then devour. And with forensic ability Keyes proceeded to rip the heart out of Chamberlain. He talked of damned insults. Of a shocking story of ineptitude. Of things that ought not to have been allowed to happen. Of a battle which should have been a triumph but a battle which had become, instead, a historic tragedy—yes, he used that word. Tragedy. No duplicitous nonsense about the balance of advantage still lying with this country and how it was no worse than a broken fan-belt. The House reeled. Not in living memory had a Prime Minister's arguments been so ably dissected to expose the cancer within.

Then he spoke of Churchill.

“I have great admiration and affection for my Right Honorable Friend the First Lord of the Admiralty.”

What was this? Another honorable man to be thrown to the mob? But no, Keyes had an entirely different purpose. He talked of Churchill's brilliant conceptions, of the unfairness with which in the past he had been treated, and he also spoke of the future. “I am longing to see proper use made of his great abilities. But I cannot believe it will be done under the existing system.” The existing system? But the existing system was…

Chamberlain. Who sat as though iron had entered his soul. Then, presently, when he had found the strength to move, he left the Chamber to faltering cheers from some on his own side. He would listen to no more of the debate that evening. And so it was that he was not present to witness the final drama of the day played out by a fellow Member from Birmingham. Leo Amery was one of those nearly-nearly men, a politician who had enjoyed high office but never the highest. He was diminutive, almost Napoleonic, and always had a little too much to say for his colleagues' comfort. But this was a day of discomforts, so when later that evening he caught the Speaker's eye and gained the floor of a sparsely attended Chamber, other Members began to drift back from the dining rooms and bars. The House was still only half full by the time he declared that “there are no loyalties today except to the common cause,” but the benches filled steadily as, for nearly forty minutes, he shredded his own Government for its failures in Norway. “It is a bad story, a story of lack of provision and of preparation, a story of indecision, slowness, and fear of taking risks.” Damning criticism by any measure, but…“If only it stood alone. Unfortunately, it does not.” Then he mocked his own Prime Minister's words about Hitler having missed the bus. He said such claims were very far from the truth—which was about as close as a Member could come to calling Chamberlain a fool and a liar.

“We cannot go on as we are,” he declared. “There must be change. Believe me, as long as our present methods prevail, all our valor and all our resources are not going to see us through…”

What? We might lose this war? Yet as he flung his unpalatable truths at them, not a single voice was raised in contradiction.

Parliament itself is on trial, he told them. And recalling another occasion when Parliament had been put to the test, he reminded them of the words of Oliver Cromwell in denouncing the failures of his own companions when it seemed that all might be lost. “
Your troops are most of them old, decayed, serving men and tapsters and such kind…You must get men of spirit that are likely to go as far as they will go, or you will be beaten still.
”