Winston’s War Read Online Free PDF Page B

now it's become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep driveling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they'll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ's sake?”
    Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.
    “I despair. What's become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would've finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.”
    Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. “Not to berepeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn't really be telling you this but…Just between the two of us, eh?”
    The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.
    Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He'd been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings, and by Bloody Chaos. He'd seen both imperialism and communism up close—too close—and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map—until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.
    This one was scarcely better than the rest. He wanted war and he'd get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That's what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier's boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where—and why—it had ever been.
    Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he'd burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn't he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?
    No, for the politician this was nothing more than a glory hunt, a game of ambitions and advancement, a game pursuedfrom the day he had been shoved out of his nursery and sent to learn the rules of the sport on the playing fields of some English public school.
    The shave and trim were finished, the moustache back in its proper place. The politician was ready to face the enemy. “Have a good day, sir,” Mac said at the door, holding out his client's freshly brushed hat.
    The soon-to-be former great person barely heard. In his mind he was already on his feet making one of the most memorable resignation speeches of the age, a speech which might yet rock the Government, even bring its house down. He tried to ignore the worm that had been wriggling deep inside all morning and telling him that he should come to his senses, be realistic, understand that the most he could hope to achieve was to sway the House enough for the door to swing open and allow him back in.
    “I'll be back,” Cooper barked.
    Mac declined to offer an opinion.
     
    Guy Francis de