• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 779 0

by civil war, past or impending, and where clusters of petty parties have each their own set of appetites, misdeeds and revenges. If I had driven the wife of the Deputy Prime Minister out to die in the snow, if the Minister of Labour had kept the Foreign Secretary in exile for a great many years, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had shot at and wounded the Secretary of State for War … if we, who sit here together, had back-bitten and double-crossed each other while pretending to work together, and had all put our own group or party first and the country nowhere, and had all set ideologies, slogans or labels in front of comprehension, comradeship and duty, we should certainly, to put it at the mildest, have come to a General Election much sooner than is now likely. When men have wished very much to kill each other, and have feared very much that they will be killed quite soon, it is not possible for them next day to work together as friends with colleagues against whom they have nursed such intentions or from whom they have derived such fears.

Churchill said to Colville in those days, speaking of the South African prime minister, “Smuts and I are like two old love-birds1047 moulting together on a perch, but still able to peck.” He “pecked” to incomparable effect. After his difficult passages with MPs about Greece in December, he had now restored his position. Yet he told at least one considerable untruth to the Commons on January 18, denying that events in the Mediterranean were in any way influenced by rival notions about “spheres of influences.” In reality, in his gratitude for Stalin’s forbearance on Greece, he was desperate to be seen to keep his own side of the Moscow bargain. He was exasperated to hear that British diplomats in Romania had been protesting about Soviet actions there, and wrote angrily to Eden: “Why are we making a fuss1048 about the Russian deportations in Romania of Saxons and others? It is understood that the Russians were to work their will in this sphere. Anyhow, we cannot prevent them.” He told Colville on January 23: “Make no mistake, all the Balkans1049, except Greece, are going to be bolshevized; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.”

If Churchill often displayed greatness on great matters, his ministers and commanders were increasingly sensitive to “the old man’s” limitations. His rambling dissertations at Cabinet meetings, often about papers which he had not troubled to read, exasperated colleagues. So, too, did his willingness to invite and accept ill-informed opinions across the table from Brendan Bracken and Beaverbrook, in preference to the considered views of Cabinet committees. Clement Attlee wrote him a note of protest about his behaviour, which fired the prime minister’s wrath, but which his own staff and Clementine agreed to be both courageous and just. Attlee had typed the note with his own fumbling fingers, to ensure that no other eyes saw it. Yet Churchill vented his spleen by reading it aloud down the telephone to Beaverbrook. Private secretary John Martin said: “That is the part of the prime minister which I do not like.” Jock Colville agreed. The prime minister was eventually persuaded to reconsider his first thought, of an angry riposte to Attlee. He responded temperately. Then he said: “Let us think no more of Hitlee1050 or of Attler: let us go and see a film.” If he was sometimes roused to stand high upon his dignity, he seldom retained the posture for long. While he sometimes behaved unworthily, he had earned the right to be readily forgiven.

TWENTY

Yalta

ALMOST EVERY DAY of the war that he was not travelling, Churchill visited his Map Room. Capt. Richard Pim, RN, the lanky Welshman who presided there, was a key figure in the Downing Street entourage, often accompanying the prime minister on his journeys to maintain the flow of battlefield news he craved. Churchill still intervened constantly in matters of detail concerning the armed forces. Britain’s falling troop strength was a preoccupation. He deplored