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by the Soviets in 1939 at Katyn, near Smolensk. On April 15 Churchill told General Sikorski, the Poles’ leader in Britain: “Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.” In the Commons smoking room, when Duff Cooper and Harold Nicolson mentioned Katyn to the prime minister, he answered tersely: “The less said about that the better.”726 He urged Sikorski not to make much publicly of the story, to avoid provoking Moscow. Amid Polish rage, this warning went unheeded. The “London Poles” publicly denounced the Russians, who promptly severed relations with them and announced the creation of their own Polish puppet regime. Churchill warned Stalin sharply that Britain, in its turn, would not recognise Moscow’s Poles. Lines were now drawn. Moscow was bent upon a postwar settlement that brought Poland into a Soviet-dominated buffer zone. Churchill expended immense energy and political capital throughout the next two years in efforts to prevent such an outcome. Yet nothing could alter geography: Warsaw lay much closer to the armies of Stalin than to those of Churchill and Roosevelt.

It might be supposed that, in those days, Churchill’s daily existence was eased by the facts that many of the big decisions were taken, his critics had been put to flight by battlefield success, and Britain’s survival was no longer in doubt. But there was no relaxation for a man who had chosen personally to direct the war effort, in the midst of a global struggle, and whose existence was entirely focused upon hastening Allied victory. Ian Jacob described him in bed of a morning: “Sawyers brings the breakfast727; then Kinna is sent for to take something down; meanwhile the bell is rung for the Private Secretary on duty who is asked for news, & told to summon someone, say CIGS or Pug. Then it is the candle for lighting cigars that is wanted. Then someone must get Hopkins on the phone. All this while the PM is half-sitting, half-lying in his bed, breathing rather stertorously, & surrounded by papers.”

Elizabeth Layton, one of Churchill’s typists, remarked that he hated any of his staff to speak, unless they had something of substance to say: “There is nothing in the world he hates728 more than to waste one minute of his time,” she wrote to her parents.

“He is so funny in the car729; he may dictate, or he may just think for the whole hour, mumbling and grumbling away to himself; or he may be watching the various things we pass, suddenly making little ejaculations like ‘Oh—look at the lambs,’ or ‘What kind of aeroplane is that’—to which little reply is expected. I think he knows now that I have learned not to waste his time by making any fool observations, which one might have felt obliged to break the silence by doing.”

That weekend, Churchill was at his most benign. “We had good news730 about Tunisia,” Layton wrote to her parents, “so the boss was in a good temper, and really I’ve seldom had such fun. He was very nice to us all and treated us like human beings for once! Poor man, don’t think I ever blame him for not doing so—it is so understandable.” The prime minister displayed no appetite for a respite from responsibility, and welcomed companionship only to provide himself with an audience. For all his sociability, paradoxically Churchill remained an intensely private person. Moran thought that he kept his own counsel, “sharing his secret thoughts with no one731 … There is no one to whom he opens his heart. Brooke is too cold and critical; he always seems to be doubtful of the P.M.’s facts and often throws cold water on his pet projects.” Alexander, by contrast, was a skilled flatterer. The accommodating Guardsman listened patiently to the prime minister’s monologues. When he himself responded, “he is always so reassuring,”732 in Moran’s words, “always so sure that the P.M.’s plans are right.” The companionship of courtiers and visitors sufficed to assuage Churchill’s restlessness only for short periods. He was driven by a hunger for movement, action and the company of other great men, with whom he could advance