The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Box Set Box Set by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads Of State, History / Military - World War Ii, History / Europe - Great Britain
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2012-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

“That night,” Churchill wrote in his memorandum of events, “I slept at Chartwell.” He did not sleep unguarded. In The Gathering Storm he later wrote: “There were known to be twenty thousand organised German Nazis in England at this time, and it would only have been in accord with their procedure in other friendly countries that the outbreak of war should be preceded by a sharp prelude of sabotage and murder.” In February he had spent six pounds, fifteen shillings, on his two guns, having them stripped, cleaned and oiled, fitted with new trigger blades and cross pins, and the two pairs of barrels rejointed. He had hired Inspector W. H. Thompson, the retired Scotland Yard detective who had served as his bodyguard in the 1920s, to resume his old duties. Thompson recalled that in the car on his way home from Croydon Airport, “Mr. Churchill grew graver and graver as he sat wrapped in thought, and then said slowly and thoughtfully: ‘Before the harvest is gathered in—we shall be at war.’ ”131

Winston had not asked for official protection, as he wrote afterward, but “I had enough information to convince me that Hitler recognised me as a foe.” At Chartwell he and Thompson planned vigils. “While one slept,” Churchill wrote, “the other watched. Thus nobody would have had a walkover.” He knew “a major burden” would fall upon him if war came—“and who could doubt its coming?” His wife and daughter had no doubts. They followed him to England a few days later, passing through Paris. “On that golden summer evening,” Mary recalls, “the Gare du Nord teemed with soldiers: the French army was mobilizing.”132

In the morning Churchill felt refreshed, and was off to London. Nicolson noted that he “has just returned from Paris and is in high fettle. The French are not at all perturbed by the Russo-German Pact and are prepared to support Poland nonetheless.” Winston had “just rung up Paul Reynaud who asserts that all is going well: by which he means war, I suppose.” He did, but only because there was no honorable alternative. A year ago the pied piper at No. 10 had thought there was. This new crisis was the bitter price they must pay for that error. Their exigency had worsened. There were no Czech divisions to march with them now, and the Russians—who had been ready to fight for Czechoslovakia—had shifted sides. Churchill believed that if the Allies had taken a firm stand at Munich, it “would have prevented war,” and “if worse had come to worst, we should have been far better off than we may be at some future date.”133

This was that future date. He devoted the night of his return to writing an article for the Daily Mirror—“At the Eleventh Hour”—which appeared on August 24. In the light of the “intrigue” between the Nazis and the Communists, he wrote, it was becoming “increasingly difficult to see how war can be averted.” Events, he stated, were “moving forward from every quarter and along all roads to catastrophe.

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