The Queen Mother (94 page)

The news from the continent grew daily worse. The German army attacked through the narrow lanes of the Ardennes and crossed the River Meuse, which the French had thought impassable. By 15 May the French army was retreating helter-skelter and the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, telephoned Churchill to tell him that the battle was lost and the road to Paris was open to the Germans.

On 16 May German troops broke through the Maginot Line, the supposedly impregnable fortifications along France’s eastern border. The British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and northern France was under real threat of being cut off from the sea by the German advance. Churchill broadcast a warning that ‘the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall’.
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The position of the British troops in France became even more perilous when on 25 May King Leopold of the Belgians surrendered and made the fateful choice to stay with his people rather than follow his government into exile. This decision aroused horror in London, where a united European front against the Nazis was considered essential, and the King wrote to Leopold, whom he liked, expressing his great concern. King Leopold would not change his mind.

On 26 May the King and Queen, together with Queen Wilhelmina, attended a service at Westminster Abbey as part of a National Day of Prayer. Across the country millions gathered; the Archbishop of Canterbury called the war ‘a mighty conflict against the powers of evil’.

The country was praying first of all for a miracle to rescue the British troops encircled near Dunkirk. That prayer was granted. Hitler delayed his Panzer attack on the BEF and the remnants of French and Belgian units. And the Channel was like a merciful mill pond. Between 26 May and 5 June an extraordinary flotilla of British vessels, including many yachts and other ‘small ships’, managed to rescue more than 300,000 British and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. Day by day the King wrote in his diary the numbers of men brought off the beaches so far – 80,000 by 30 May, 133,000 British soldiers and 11,000 Frenchmen by 31 May, 224,000 British and 111,000 French by Wednesday 5 June. The Queen went to visit some of the first wounded soldiers to return at a Ministry of Health emergency hospital.
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The Queen was relieved that Arthur Penn’s nephew Eric got off the beaches. ‘I can only say with all my heart –
Thank God.
’
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But among the troops who did not reach Dunkirk was the 1st Battalion The Black Watch, in which her nephew John Elphinstone was serving. They were forced to surrender near Abbeville, after fierce fighting with the Germans. Only nine men and one officer got away. The Queen was deeply concerned; eventually the news came that John
Elphinstone had been captured. He spent almost five years in prisoner-of-war camps, including Colditz.
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Deliverance aside, Dunkirk was a shocking defeat, and while the evacuation was taking place the War Cabinet even discussed whether Britain should take up a suggestion that Mussolini might negotiate an overall peace. On 28 May Halifax and Chamberlain argued that all options should be considered. This was a critical moment in British history. Churchill listened to the proposals for a negotiated settlement, but said he thought that the chances of Hitler offering ‘decent terms’ were a thousand to one against. He declared that ‘nations which went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.’ To a meeting of other ministers he expressed the same feelings – ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
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‘In response to this Macbethian challenge,’ wrote the war historian John Keegan, ‘Cabinet ministers, Conservative, Liberal and Labour alike, jumped from their seats to pummel him on the back.’
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Churchill himself later wrote that if he had faltered at that moment ‘I should have been hurled out of office.’
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Churchill’s furious determination was crucial. On 4 June, warning the House of Commons that Britain faced imminent invasion, he declared, ‘We shall go on to the end … we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.’ From now on, the flame of British patriotism, lit by Churchill and tended assiduously by the King and Queen, burned through years of setbacks and tragedy with astonishing resilience.

Meanwhile, under German onslaught, the French had withdrawn most of their troops and were re-forming to await an attack on the Somme. Churchill made four flights to France to encourage resistance, and the King sent President Lebrun a telegram sympathizing with French losses and exhorting France to continue the struggle. Over the next week the French army launched an attack on a broad front in northern France, and appealed for more help; the British prepared to
send out two more divisions, including the 1st Canadian Division. On 8 June the King and Queen went to see the Canadians at Aldershot; the King recorded that Canada was fielding the only division with all its equipment and artillery. Then, as the German armies poured across France and bombed Paris for the first time, French resistance faltered.

Everywhere the news was terrible. On 10 June Italy declared war on the Allies and immediately bombed the British island of Malta. On 12 June Churchill reported to the King that the French were outnumbered three to one and might have to surrender very soon. However, as the King noted, ‘A young General de Gaulle is ready to carry on a “war of columns”, mobile units against German tanks. Marshal Pétain is a defeatist, & says all is lost. Aged 84.’
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On Friday 14 June, the day on which the Germans entered an undefended and almost deserted Paris, the Queen broadcast – in French – a message of encouragement to the women of France. ‘Je voudrais ce soir dire aux femmes de France, de cette France héroïque et glorieuse qui défend, en ce moment, non seulement son propre sol, mais les libertés du monde entier, les sentiments d’affection, et d’admiration, que leurs souffrances et leur courage éveillent en nos coeurs,’ she began. She praised the ardour with which the French army was fighting, but her thoughts were primarily with the women who were watching in anguish the immense struggle in which their sons, husbands and brothers were engaged. ‘Pour moi qui ai toujours tant aimé la France, je souffre aujourd’hui comme vous.’ She recalled the enthusiasm and generosity with which she and the King had been received in Paris in 1938 and she saluted the sacrifices Frenchwomen were now prepared to make to save their country. ‘Une nation qui a, pour la défendre, de tels hommes, et pour l’aimer, de telles femmes, doit, tôt ou tard, forcer la victoire’ – a nation defended by such men and loved by such women must sooner or later attain victory.

Finally, she spoke of her recent conversations with wounded French soldiers who had come over from Dunkirk, and whom she had visited at the Wellhouse Emergency Hospital on 6 June. She had talked to each in French, and asked how they were feeling. All, even the most severely wounded, she said, had replied almost gaily with one short phrase: ‘Ça va.’ She was sure that the time would come when the two peoples, British and French, would be able to exchange the same words: ‘Maintenant, ça va.’
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The Queen had been helped to draft the speech by the anglophile
French writer André Maurois, who had been Churchill’s interpreter on the Western Front in 1916, and was in unhappy exile in London.
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After the broadcast Maurois wrote to her praising the way she had delivered it.
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He acknowledged that the broadcast probably came too late to help stiffen French resolve not to surrender. But he felt that it would give his countrymen hope for the future. The British government was sufficiently impressed for Anthony Eden, who was foreign secretary once again, to write to the Queen in January 1941 asking her to make another, similar broadcast (although in the event the idea was shelved), as her message had ‘created a profound impression in France’.
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The day after the Queen’s broadcast, General Charles de Gaulle arrived in Britain and set himself at the head of a campaign to rally French forces outside France, shortly to become the Free French movement. On 22 June the French government surrendered. Britain was now on her own and the prospects were terrible – Churchill warned Roosevelt that if Britain were defeated, ‘you may have a United States of Europe under Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.’
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In response to a sympathetic letter from Eleanor Roosevelt,
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the Queen wrote,

Despair would have been understandable. But the country’s solitary stand gave rise to a single-minded determination and, almost, elation. The King wrote to Queen Mary, ‘Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & pamper.’
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Many British people appeared to agree with this sentiment. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Air Officer Commanding Fighter Command, remarked ‘Thank God we’re alone now’ – he would no longer have to deploy his limited number of fighters over the continent.

Churchill, knowing how vital the battle in the air would be, had appointed his friend Max Beaverbrook, the newspaper proprietor, to be minister for aircraft production. By the middle of June Beaverbrook had managed to raise the number of aircraft being manufactured every week from 245 to 363.
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In the Commons on 19 June Churchill made two more of his historic declarations, announcing that the Battle of France was over and he now expected the Battle of Britain to begin. ‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation,’ he insisted. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.” ’
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Such rhetoric induced optimism which seemed astonishing if not downright foolish to onlookers abroad. As the
New Yorker
’s London correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, ‘It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world.’
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Brave or stupid, in these circumstances it was entirely proper that the bond between King and Prime Minister grew ever stronger. One impediment had long since gone. ‘I am getting to know Winston better, & I feel that we are beginning to understand each other,’ the King wrote to Queen Mary. ‘His silly attitude over D. in 1936 is quite over … Winston is definitely the right man at the helm at the moment.’
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Churchill had indeed reconsidered his initial support of King Edward VIII. Malcolm MacDonald later recalled a conversation during the Battle of Britain when Churchill told him that ‘King George and Queen Elizabeth are a far finer, more popular and more inspiringly helpful pair than the other would have been. We could not have a better King and Queen in Britain’s most perilous hour.’
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The King began to look forward keenly to their weekly meetings, and by the autumn of 1940 these had changed from formal audiences into private Tuesday lunches. The Queen was generally present.
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Churchill commented that the intimacy which developed between him and the King was unprecedented since the days of Queen Anne and his own ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.
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Just as unprecedented, however, was the presence of the Queen at these private
conversations between the King and his Prime Minister. The King’s diary does not record any interventions by the Queen. Nevertheless she said, many years later, that she felt very much a part of a team with the King, and he ‘got on terribly well, like a house on fire’, with Churchill.
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By now the King and Queen symbolized resistance to Hitler not only in Britain but also in all the occupied nations of Europe.

Britons were now organizing to resist invasion. In the south-east, there was widespread fear of Germans parachuting or gliding down from the skies, perhaps even disguised as nuns. Locals sabotaged possible landing sites: golf courses, sports fields, downland and fields were scattered with junk – old cars, old cookers, ploughs, tree trunks – anything to prevent an aircraft from touching down. Road signs were removed, so as not to assist any enemy who did arrive. The names of villages and even railway stations were taken down.
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The government had called for all able-bodied men between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five who were not already engaged in the war effort to step forward and become Local Defence Volunteers. (Thus was born the Home Guard, eventually to be portrayed as ‘Dad’s Army’, in the affectionate television series which became one of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite programmes in later years.) Immediately, over a quarter of a million people offered their services and began to gather in pubs and meeting rooms across the country to discuss how they could serve. By the end of June the ‘force’ had grown to a million and a half. Men and boys began to drill with broomsticks instead of rifles, pitchforks instead of anti-aircraft guns.

In Windsor Castle Owen Morshead became the head of the Castle’s Home Guard. He wrote to Queen Mary to tell her how the King and Queen were coping and said that they had talked to the night patrols in the Castle, which was a great encouragement to them. He thought the King ‘seemed rather oppressed and tired – sick of reading & reading the endless stream of Cabinet papers and war reports sent daily to him, and waiting & waiting. It is a misfortune for him in these days that he has to know so much of what is going on – where ignorance is bliss. Happily the Queen is a perpetual tonic, with her sunny and buoyant nature.’
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