The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (74 page)

The soldiers continue to circle. The sounds of breathing fill the hallway. Freya’s hand squeezes in Lottie’s.

Lottie realizes she can endure this. She can deny herself to them even if they will have her body. She will not fight. She’ll surrender. But they’ll take nothing from her, no prize, no woman, no Russian triumph, they might as well pluck an empty vase from the table.

The soldiers stop their appraisal. The four pair off. Freya’s hand slips from Lottie’s. Mother and daughter separate, fixing each other’s eyes. Freya nods. Lottie nods in return.

Without instruction from the soldiers, Freya heads up the stairs. Her shoes are not heavy on the treads but a controlled, determined scrape. Two of the soldiers follow, both younger ones. One man pushes Freya in the back, for no reason, just to vent some violence on this woman. The other soldier shines his flashlight ahead to navigate the steps.

Lottie walks into the candle glow of the parlor. The dark one staggers behind while the other soldier moves down the hall. This one sweeps his flashlight first into the dining room, then towards the kitchen and basement door. Lottie goes after him. She lays a hand on his narrow shoulder to pull him back to the parlor. He should be suspicious of this, but Lottie has guessed right, he’s drunk and he wants her more than he wants to do his job. He follows.

In the parlor, the dark one wavers and sits on the sofa beside the anxious flame. His rifle lies across his lap, on guard first. The young one sits too, setting his gun far from Lottie’s reach. He cuts off the flashlight. He leans over to untie his boots. Lottie allows herself a private snort at the accommodation.

She stands in the middle of the parlor rug, looking down. The candle makes the carpet quiver. The dark man stinks.

Lottie grits her teeth. She follows the man’s hands on his boot laces. She will not look in their faces anymore.

She will keep them away from the basement. She will hold them quiet, whatever it is she has to do. She will clamp her own cries shut, no matter how much everything hurts.

Mutti and she will do these things. And more. Tonight. Tomorrow. Until it stops. Until what the first Red soldier in the shelter told them comes true: They are free.

At last, Lottie understands.

This is the only victory.

They—the Nazis, the Russians—will not have Julius.

They will not have us.

In all the war; in all Lottie’s life.

This matters.

~ * ~

April 29, 1945, 7:10
p.m.

Prime Minister’s residence at Chequers

Buckinghamshire, England

in the study there is a globe. it is antique and large, rising to
Churchill’s chest. The ball is brown, the seas are parchment colored. With a tumbler of Scotch in hand, Churchill studies the thing. He doesn’t know to whom it belongs, it’s just always been a part of the PM’s home. The public owns it, then. He traces fingertips from the Arctic down to the equator, imagining the ice, the ocean, trade winds. He takes hold and spins the cool world. The axis creaks, the earth pirouettes, nations and seas blur.

He lets it twirl. There’s something pleasing about seeing the earth like this, without its boundaries and names, just the planet in motion in his study where the lights are low and he holds a good single malt. The ball turns well on its frame. Churchill admires his power to have made this happen.

The globe revolves a long time, reluctant to quit turning; it is well balanced, which one expects from a planet. Churchill is tempted to spin it again, that was nice. Instead, he lets it come to a standstill, like a roulette wheel, he waits as though some fate will be revealed in what will finally face him.

When it is done he is presented with Africa.

Again he touches the globe. He draws one finger across the breadth of the vast continent. Africa is the battleground where England’s brave Tommies first squared off against the Axis powers, in Libya, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Egypt. The northern deserts are depicted by light shades of sienna. Churchill is not put in mind to recall those great victories of 1942 and ‘43. He harks back farther in time, to the final year of the previous century. He wets his tongue with the Scotch and lets his finger run where his heart has gone, to South Africa.

He thinks of escape.

He was twenty-five years old, a young military correspondent with the British forces opposing the Dutch-speaking Boers. In November 1899, while traveling with a company of one hundred fifty troops reconnoitering enemy positions, his armored train was shelled. Several cars were derailed. Many soldiers were killed. Under fire, Churchill led the effort to collect the wounded and put them on the engine to be taken to safety. He stayed behind with a platoon to hold off the approaching Boers. Churchill was captured with these men and tossed into a Boer prison camp.

After a month of captivity, he laid plans with two others to escape. He jumped the latrine house wall, but the other two could not follow. He waited in the garden for hours, then set out on his own. In civilian clothes, he walked straight down the road. He could not utter a word of Dutch, but no one, not even a sentry, addressed him.

Churchill made straight for the rail yard and hopped a car full of empty coal bags. He rode east until morning, then jumped off, figuring his escape had been noticed by then and the trains would be searched.

The Boers posted a bounty on his head, twenty-five pounds, dead or alive. Later, Churchill memorized the fugitive description of him circulated across the Transvaal:
Englishman 25 years old, about 5 ft 8 inches tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair, almost invisible small moustache, speaks through the nose, cannot pronounce the letter “s,” cannot speak Dutch, has last been seen in a brown suit of clothes.
They’d gotten rather personal in their portrait, what with the stoop and the speech impediment, and that gibe at his first moustache.

He rolls the Scotch glass in his hand.

Hmpf. Stooped, indeed.

Well, he thinks, it was a stooped, lisping little shit of a nasal Englishman who got away. He lucked into a small group of sympathetic English coal miners who hid him in a cave. For three days he had no one for company but rats, the little rotters even ate his candle. He got sick in the darkness. After three days of this, he was spirited aboard another train, where he lay buried for two more days in a stack of wool bales, supplied with two roast chickens, some cooked meat slices, a loaf of bread, and a revolver. The train headed for Portuguese East Africa. When he emerged, he was black as a chimney sweep from coal dust in the car. He was so elated, he crowed and sang at the top of his lungs and fired his pistol three times in the air.

Churchill has not taken his finger from the globe. South Africa is so far away on this old ball, so far too behind time and events of his life. He was unburdened in those days by any thought but survival, driven only to see his mother and homeland again. The sense of it all returns to his breast, bracing and pure. It’s akin to the feeling he had moments ago spinning the globe, of standing off the world, making it go with a shove of one hand, being so huge he is beyond the measurements of responsibility and history. That is what it was like when he was young and in danger, before this whole bloody world was put in his custody. Now his stoop is far worse.

He lifts his eyes above Africa, across the Mediterranean, to his Europe. The war here is not finished, even though the fighting will end sometime in the next few days. Berlin and Hitler will not hold out under the Russian onslaught. But what will this Europe look like once the papers have been signed and the smoke clears?

Churchill takes a swallow of Scotch. The dash of alcohol down his throat breaks him out of all reverie. There’s a starkness to the reality on this globe.

He slides his finger north, to Germany. He draws his nail through the middle of the country, down the Elbe River. On one side of the line there is Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, the United Kingdom. On the other, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Albania, Finland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia.

A curtain is falling across Europe. It splits Germany in two, and profoundly divides the free world from the Communists. Tens of millions from tens of millions, separated by ideology as surely as they are by weapons.

Churchill must watch it happen. He knows how to fight it, but Britain’s voice is not heard so loudly as it once was. He begs Truman in daily correspondence to allow the Allied troops to hold their positions everywhere on the battlefields. Do not take one step back, rush east with tanks and soldiers as fast and as far as possible.

But the Americans are tired of our war, Churchill thinks. His appeals to Truman are met with polite parries. The President agrees in principle, then orders no action. The Yanks will not keep men and arms in Europe for as long as it will take to stare Stalin down. England has the stomach for it, but alas, England is only the gut, and maybe the head; the United States is the legs and arms. Though Truman is a new sort, a bolder man than Roosevelt, even he bends under political truths. There is no support in the U.S. for another fight, especially against Russia, their ally. Americans are a friendly bunch, taken as a whole. They are reluctant to brand villains. They just finished with Hitler, they’re about to settle Hirohito’s hash, and they have no longing to identify another threat. Truman and his countrymen want to finish the war in the Pacific, then get on with the business of making America greater.

Well, good for them.

Churchill stands before the globe in checkmate. There is nowhere he can put his finger now. The days of power are gone.

There’s little left for him to do but accept defeat in the jaws of victory.

He cannot demand anything from Stalin. He can only ask.

So ask he will.

Churchill moves to his desk. He freshens his Scotch glass, takes a bolt, and writes. The telegram is long. Point by point he sets out again his arguments for Stalin to accept the dictates of Yalta. He pleads for a sovereign, free, and democratic Poland. He sounds the warning of Tito’s ambitions in Yugoslavia. He addresses Stalin’s suspicion and ill-treatment of his allies and the people subjugated on his side of the curtain.

Churchill writes like a man behind in a race, with desperation and his last, best efforts. He knows this is futile; he will lose. In a few days Stalin will have Berlin, the war will be over, and Russia will not give back anything, not one inch, not one soul. Even so, Churchill cannot stand idle beside the real world the way he can next to the dead globe in his study. He cannot be silent. That was never Winston Churchill’s calling.

Writing for two hours, he ends his message with prophecy:

there is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the communist parties in many other states, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the english-speaking nations and their associates or dominions are on the other. it is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces and that all of us leading men on either side who had anything to do with that would be shamed before history.

When he is done, he rings for his secretary to code the pages and have them sent to Stalin. He rises on unsteady legs, exhausted. He leaves the sheets on the table, does not proofread them, trusting his draft. He heads for dinner. Then, a movie, yes,
The Mikado.

Churchill walks past the globe on his way out of the study. He lays a palm flat against it, the globe is willing to spin for him one more time. He considers the earth under his hand. He’s laid it right over Moscow.

He sticks his mitt in his pocket and leaves the world alone.

April 30, 1945, 11:50
a.m.

Bandy farm

Big Laurel, Tennessee