We shall fight on the beaches

There are wars that are lost before they are fought, in rooms quieter than any battlefield, by men who imagine themselves prudent. The decision to fight on is rarely taken in front of an army. It is taken at a polished table, between five tired men, in the interval between one cup of tea and the next, when a Foreign Secretary with impeccable manners suggests, reasonably, that one might at least enquire. The whole shape of the next century turns on whether the question is permitted to be asked.

THE INHERITANCE

Winston Spencer Churchill was sixty-five years old in May 1940 and had been in public life for forty of them. He had been a subaltern at Omdurman, a correspondent in the veldt, a Home Secretary, the First Lord who lost the Dardanelles, a Chancellor who returned the country to gold and regretted it, and through the whole of the 1930s a backbencher shouting at an empty House about a Germany rearming under a man whose nature he had read earlier than any of his colleagues. The wilderness years had cost him office, friendships, and the polite confidence of his party. They had given him, in return, the one thing the hour required: he had been right when the men now sitting opposite him at the Cabinet table had been wrong, and they knew it, and he knew it, and the country knew it. On the tenth of May the King sent for him because there was no one else.

THE THREE DAYS

On the twenty-sixth, the twenty-seventh, and the twenty-eighth of May, the War Cabinet of five met in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street and argued, three times, the same question. Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, Anglican, Viceregal, a head taller than Churchill and a generation cooler in manner, had been the King's preferred candidate three weeks before and had declined the seal because no peer could lead the Commons in a war. Halifax had been approached, through the Italian embassy, by Signor Bastianini, who wondered, with the elaborate indirection of his trade, whether His Majesty's Government might find it useful to know what the Duce might convey to Berlin. Halifax thought it would be folly not to listen. Reynaud was on his way from Paris asking, in effect, the same. The Belgian army had laid down its arms at four that morning. The British Expeditionary Force, four hundred thousand men, was being pressed against a strip of beach at Dunkirk from which the Admiralty did not believe more than forty-five thousand could be lifted. On the third afternoon, the twenty-eighth, at twenty past four, Halifax put it to the table for the third time, and threatened, if refused, to resign.

THE CABINET ROOM, TWENTY PAST FOUR

The room is long and narrow, the table coffin-shaped, the windows giving on to the Horse Guards. Outside, the plane trees are in new leaf; the light is the cold even light of an English late spring. Chamberlain, grey, six months from his death and not yet knowing it, sits to his right; he has the Conservative party in his pocket and has not declared which way he will go. Attlee and Greenwood, Labour, are with the Prime Minister. Halifax, very tall, very still, is opposite. The argument has been made; the arithmetic is finely poised; the Foreign Secretary has set down his pen. Mention of Mussolini, mention of the French, mention of the terms which might be obtained while there is still an army in being. The Prime Minister listens with his head down, doodling. He is being asked, in the polite language of the service, to find out the price.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

He considers, in that minute, what he knows that the others do not quite admit they know. The terms will not be terms. They will be the disarmament of the fleet, the neutralisation of the air force, a government at Westminster acceptable to Berlin, perhaps a Mosley, perhaps a respectable Halifax himself, perhaps nothing so vulgar, only an understanding. The act of asking is the act of conceding. Once the Italian ambassador carries the question across the Channel, the country is in the market for a settlement, and a country in the market for a settlement does not fight in August. He considers also the immediate arithmetic of the room. Three to two against Halifax, but Chamberlain undeclared; if Halifax walks out into King Charles Street tonight, Chamberlain goes with him by the weekend, and the Prime Minister of eighteen days falls, and the man who comes in is at Bastianini's door on Monday. He must keep Halifax in the room. He must also refuse him. He proposes a pause; he proposes to put the matter, this evening, to the wider Cabinet of twenty-five, the outer ring of ministers who have not been let into the secret. Halifax leaves the table at half past four and walks out into the garden among the rose-bushes. Churchill follows. They speak, the two of them, for ten minutes by the wall. No clerk attended; no note survives. Halifax returns to the house and does not resign. What passed between them is one of the small irrecoverable hinges of the century.

THE OUTER CABINET, SIX O'CLOCK

At six the twenty-five come up the back stair from the Treasury side and find themselves, without warning, in the presence of the war. He has not rehearsed; he speaks for seven minutes. He sets out the position in the plainest words he has used in his life, the French collapsing, the Belgians gone, the army on the beach, the Italian feeler, the question whether to ask. He tells them what he believes the answer must be. I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man, he says, by Hugh Dalton's note written within the hour, and the room is very quiet. He tells them that nations which have gone down fighting have risen again, and those which have surrendered tamely have been finished. He says, and Dalton wrote it down: 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. The twenty-five make a noise he has not heard in that house before. Several stand. They go round the table; every man in his turn says no terms. Halifax at the end of the round, very quietly, says no terms. The meeting breaks up at twenty-five past seven. The Italian ambassador will not receive his answer.

THE COMMONS, THE FOURTH OF JUNE

A week later, on the fourth of June, at twenty to four in the afternoon, he rises in the chamber to report on the evacuation. Three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men have been taken off the beach by destroyers and trawlers and the pleasure-launches of the Thames, in nine days, under fire. He speaks for thirty-six minutes; most of it is operational, the sober accounting of a deliverance which, he reminds the House, wars are not won by evacuations. The closing six sentences he has been turning in his head since the night of the twenty-eighth. He delivers them flat, almost rough, the consonants bitten off: 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. The cheering lasts a long time. In the lobby afterwards, to Sir Edward Grigg, he says, half under his breath, if the worst comes to the worst, we'll fight 'em with the broken end of bottles. The speech is not broadcast; the country reads it the next morning in The Times and the Manchester Guardian. The recording the world knows is from a Decca gramophone disc he cut nine years later in 1949. The voice that carried the moment in 1940 was carried by print.

AFTER

Halifax went to Washington as ambassador before the year was out, where he served the policy he had argued against, ably and without rancour. Chamberlain died in November of cancer, having lived long enough to vote with the man who had replaced him. The Cabinet papers of those three days were closed for fifty years; they opened in 1990, and the minutes are bare, as minutes are, because the argument that mattered was made in the garden among the rose-bushes and in the corridor on the way back into the room. What is attested is what Halifax wrote in his diary that night, which is that the Prime Minister had carried the day because he had refused to permit the question to be asked. The country fought on because, in three afternoons at the end of May 1940, its government declined to find out what the enemy would have offered.

The great hours of history are not always the ones in which men act. Sometimes they are the ones in which men refuse to act, refuse to enquire, refuse to be reasonable in the way that the hour invites them to be reasonable. The Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street is still there, the coffin-shaped table still in it, the chairs still set around it. The rose-bushes by the garden wall have been replanted more than once. What was decided between them, on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of May 1940, is the reason there is still a Cabinet Room to walk into.