Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [267]
Churchill was still ailing when he boarded the Queen Mary at Greenock on September 6, bound for Quebec. Brooke remarked that he seemed “old, unwell and depressed978. Evidently found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.” Conditions belowdecks for most of the crossing were oppressively hot. After the austerities of British diet, on the liner the customary sybaritic fare was provided for the prime minister’s party. Jock Colville described their meals as “gargantuan in scale979 and epicurean in quality; rather shamingly so.” There was the usual glittering table talk, faithfully recorded by the three notable diarists aboard—Colville, Brooke and Moran. The prime minister said that he would not regret980 the loss of any Labour colleague from his government save Bevin, the only one whose character and capacity he esteemed. He lamented the fact that he no longer felt that he had a message to deliver to the British people: “All he could now do was to finish the war981, to get the soldiers home and to see that they had houses to which to return. But materially and financially the prospects were black.”
He found time to read, first Trollope’s Phineas Finn, then The Duke’s Children, which describes a Victorian political grandee’s embarrassments with his offspring. The latter novel can scarcely have failed to prick Churchill, at a time when his own son’s marriage to his wife, Pamela, was breaking up. She had conducted a notable affair with Averell Harriman, a future husband, and was later unkindly described as having become “a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings.” Earlier that year, Churchill982 achieved one of his few moments of intimacy with Brooke, when the two men discussed tête-à-tête over supper their difficulties with their respective grown-up children.
But, while the prime minister struggled to recruit his strength, as usual he spent many hours on the Queen Mary preparing for the summit. He minuted the Chiefs of Staff during their passage that Britain should “not yield central and southern Europe entirely to Soviet ascendancy or domination.” This was, he said, an issue of “high political consequences, but also has serious military potentialities.”983 He expressed distress that the British and imperial armies were nowhere advancing the nation’s standard as he would have wished. One-third of their strength, in northwest Europe, was deployed under U.S. command; one-third in India was about to launch an offensive in Burma, “the most unhealthy country in the world under the worst possible conditions,” merely to appease America’s China ambitions; and the remaining one-third in Italy had been emasculated for Dragoon. Had he known, he said, that the Americans would use their monopoly of landing ships unilaterally to enforce strategy, he would have ensured that Britain built her own. He was appalled to hear that Mountbatten was demanding 370,000 men and 24,000 vehicles from Europe before launching an assault against Rangoon. He still craved an amphibious landing on the Istrian Peninsula, “in the armpit of the Adriatic.”
Churchill arrived in Quebec by overnight train on the morning of September 11, within a few minutes of the president. They drove together from the station to the Citadel. The next day, Colville heard the prime minister say that he would that evening discuss postwar occupation zones in Germany with Roosevelt. The private secretary, knowing Churchill had not studied the relevant papers, offered to read them aloud to him in his bath. This procedure proved only partially successful, because of Churchill’s tendency to submerge himself from time to time, missing key passages of the brief. The prime minister cabled to the War Cabinet in London that the conference had opened “in a blaze of friendship.” There was indeed a blaze of courtesies, but not of agreed policies. In Churchill’s opening exposition of events, he sought to flatter the Americans