Churchill's Triumph by Michael Dobbs

own bloody drink,” he growled, as she picked up his whisky, but Sawyers was already a step ahead of him. A fresh glass was thrust into his hand.
    He sighed. “So, Mule, what news? What despatches from your front?”
    “I went with the other girls to Sebastopol.” She came and nestled at his feet, as she used to when she was a child in front of the hearth at Chartwell, and told her tale, whispering into her glass. She told of the church with no walls, the square with no sides, the houses with no roofs and no windows, the graves and the faces filled with fear, and what she had found inside the burned-out tank. Her voice faltered. She placed her head on his knee and he stroked her hair gently, trying to brush away her sorrows. “Are there no limits to the suffering of the peoples of Russia?” he whispered. “My poor kitten.”
    “But there was something very strange, Papa. What I couldn’t understand was the fact that so many of the ruined houses, particularly the bigger ones, seemed to have trees and bushes growing from them—from right inside them. Through the walls, even sometimes through the empty windows. How could that be? I asked the guide, but he wouldn’t say, simply shrugged.”
    “And let his silence damn him.”
    “Papa?”
    “The town wasn’t ruined just by this war, Mule. Much of that damage you saw was inflicted by the Russians themselves, during their revolutions, civil wars and bloody, bloody purges. So much violence has visited this place in the last thirty years. It was settled by Tartars—it was they who might have built the church you saw, set out the square. This was their land, until Comrade Stalin decreed otherwise. He had the Tartars moved, torn from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of them, a whole human tribe, condemned to exile and extermination. And now only weeds grow in their hearths.”
    Sawyers threw another log on the fire; the flames glinted in Sarah’s hair. “Will you be all right, kitten?” Churchill asked. She nodded.
    “That’s what he said, the Pole,” Sawyers joined in. “Can’t go trustin’ Russians.”
    “And he was right,” Churchill growled. “What else did he say, this Pole of yours?”
    “What, apart from—” Sawyers jerked his head towards the bedside table where the lamp should have been “—and the fact that I should be an officer?”
    “Get on with it.”
    “Well, he said we had to save his life. He was afraid. Said he could help us if we helped him.”
    “We could do with a little help.”
    “And he said somethin’ about Katyn.”
    “What?”
    “That was it. Katyn. Was there, so he says.”
    It might have been a cause for outrage, that a foolish servant could have forgotten such a matter, but Sawyers was far from foolish and he wasn’t the one to blame. After all, hadn’t the British and American governments themselves done their best to forget about the whole matter? Churchill had wriggled in discomfort at its mention, while Roosevelt, without discomfort of any kind, had dismissed it as Nazi propaganda. At that time the goodwill of their Russian allies had seemed so much more important, but time has a way of playing tricks and turning on a man.
    Churchill gazed deep into his glass, swirling the whisky, agitating his mind.
    “There was a point when I wanted nothing more than the friendship of Marshal Stalin,” he muttered. “I hoped that matters might change, as he got to know us, but his pattern has always been consistent, and cruel. Whenever we meet, at Tehran, in Moscow, now Yalta, it’s always the same. He starts by feigning anger, threatening to walk out, bullying, so that tomorrow or the next day when he makes some small accommodation, we feel he is being most reasonable and give him what he wants. We have been so eager to make him part of our game, but instead we have been drawn into his. And we go on repeating the folly.”
    “Can’t you stand up to him, Papa?”
    Slowly, sadly, Churchill shook his head. “This