Winston Churchill got a hero’s funeral. That didn’t make Alistair Walsh any happier about the politician’s demise. If anything, it only threw petrol on his suspicions.
Assorted Conservative Party dignitaries walked behind the hearse and a riderless black horse with polished black boots reversed in the stirrups. At the politicians’ head strode Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a gray heron with a black bowler and an umbrella. The day was sunny, but the umbrella seemed at least as much a part of him as, say, his small intestine.
Walsh shook his head. Everybody knew the PM always had his umbrella. Whether he had guts wasn’t nearly so obvious.
Why were the Tories laying on a memorial like this for a man most of them couldn’t stand? Come to that, how and why had Churchill walked in front of a speeding Bentley? Important people didn’t do such things… did they? Not very often-Walsh was bloody sure of that.
Guilty consciences, he thought unhappily as the slow funeral procession passed him. That’s what it smells like to me.
He wondered if there wasn’t also a touch of guilt in the way the authorities hemmed and hawed about returning him to duty. He wouldn’t have stayed in London to watch the funeral procession if they’d been sure what to do with him. Why the devil did I have to be the one who saw Rudolf Hess come down? Somebody had to, but why me?
Quite a few men in Army khaki, Royal Navy deep blue, and RAF blue-gray lined the route of the procession. Like Walsh, many of them doffed their caps in silent tribute when the hearse rolled by. They weren’t so silent when Chamberlain followed. Several hisses floated through the warm, damp summer air. So did calls of “Shame!”
Chamberlain might have been oblivious. His small head, set atop a long neck and tall, thin, angular frame, only made him seem the more birdlike. Had he suddenly thrust forward and straightened up again with a wriggling fish clenched in his jaws, Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised.
But no. The Prime Minister passed close enough to let Walsh see a small muscle under his left eye twitch. Walsh wouldn’t have believed Chamberlain had been issued a conscience at birth, but he might have been wrong.
Behind the PM walked Lord Halifax. If Chamberlain looked like a heron, Halifax resembled a walking thermometer. He was tall-even taller than the Prime Minister-and lean, with a big bald head that looked like a rugby ball standing on end. He smiled at something the man next to him said. Assuming he’d ever come equipped with a conscience, it wasn’t troubling him now.
Not all the spectators were military men-not even close. There were many ordinary civilians: housewives and greengrocers and shop-girls and chemists and secretaries and clerks. Almost all of them wore somber black to pay their respects to the dead man. Some of the women dabbed at tears behind dark veils. Churchill had always been more popular among the people than the gray men who held the reins of power. Unlike them, he was a recognizable human being. Having met him, Walsh knew how very human he was.
And, because he was a recognizable human being, he roused dislike as well as admiration. A furlong or so down the street from Walsh stood a knot of Silver Shirts, supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They were in uniform, something Walsh hadn’t seen since war was declared. He thought there was a law against it, but he wasn’t sure. If there was, the authorities were looking the other way.
The Silver Shirts bawled organized abuse as Churchill’s body rolled past them. The man standing to Walsh’s right nodded. “That’s telling the daft old bugger,” he declared.
“Think so, do you?” Walsh asked in conversational tones.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.” The man was younger and larger than Walsh. “What about it, sport?”
Walsh slugged him in the jaw. He was a veteran of the front and of years of bar fights. Nothing in his expression or the direction in which he looked warned that he was about to do anything at all. The chap who liked the Silver Shirts better than Churchill never knew what hit him. He toppled as if all his bones had turned to gravy.
A bobby rushed up. “ ‘Ere, what did you go and do that for, Staff Sergeant?” He was about Walsh’s age. No doubt he’d done a tour in the trenches the last time around, to recognize the noncom’s rank emblem so readily.
“He spoke ill of the dead,” Walsh answered quietly.
“That’s right-he did,” a woman behind Walsh said.
“Like that, was it? Spoke ill of Winnie, did ’e, with ’im on ’is way to the grave?” The bobby clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I’ll let you off with a caution, then, but take yourself somewhere else before ’e comes to, like.”
“Obliged, Officer.” Take himself elsewhere Walsh duly did. He steered clear of the band of Silver Shirts. He would only have got into another fight, and against so many he wouldn’t have come off well.
Another man of about his own age, this one wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer, came after him. “Will you let me buy you a pint, friend?” the Royal Navy man said. “Or a shot, or whatever your pleasure may be? If you hadn’t coldcocked that bastard, I’d’ve landed on him with you.”
He looked like a good man to have on your side in a fight. He was strong and stocky and plainly knew his way around. Walsh gave his name and stuck out his hand.
The CPO took it. He had a grip like a vise. “Douglas Green, at your service. The cheek of those Mosley maniacs, to heckle Churchill when he’s not even in the ground! I’d like to break all their heads, I would.”
“Save a few for me, by God,” Walsh answered. “If we are where I think we are, there ought to be a pub around this corner and half a block down.”
They were. There was. The two veterans went in together. Walsh ordered a pint of bitter, Green a whiskey. They raised their glasses together. “To Winston!” they chorused, and they both drank.
“Amen,” the bartender said. “He was a right good one, he was, not like the cabbageheads running things nowadays.” He had to be over sixty; his bushy mustache was white as fine flour. “You blokes mind if I turn up the wireless a bit? They’ve got the ceremony on, and I don’t hear so good when other folks are talking at the same time as what I’m listening to.”
“Go ahead,” Walsh said. “I know what you mean.” Age hadn’t dulled his hearing, not yet. Countless bullets going off near his ear had, though.
In hushed tones, a BBC broadcaster said, “The cortege now approaches St. Paul’s. Inside, after the customary prayers and a sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister will say a few words.”
“Oh, Winston’d love that, he would,” the barman said.
“If he wasn’t already dead, it’d kill him,” Walsh agreed.
“Bore him to death,” Douglas Green put in. The man behind the bar liked that so much, he gave them the next round on the house. Walsh drank up, though none too happily. The last funeral the BBC had broadcast was George V’s, four and a half years earlier. Like the rest of the obsequies, this worried Walsh instead of comforting him. Churchill hadn’t been in power. Why were the present rulers making such a show of these rites, if not to make the public look away from them? See how sorry we are he’s dead? they might have been saying. They might have been, but Walsh didn’t think they were.
Prayers and sermon were almost invincibly conventional. William Cosmo Gordon Lang, senior prelate of the Church of England, couldn’t have been duller if he were Neville Chamberlain. Or so Walsh thought, till Chamberlain took the microphone.
“England has lost a patriot,” the PM said, “and we shall go on to accomplish his desires.” That almost made Walsh choke on his beer. How was Chamberlain going to justify such an enormous lie? He did his best: “Early on, Winston Churchill recognized the dangers and evils of Bolshevism. After the last war, Britain attempted to nip the canker in the bud. Sadly, we failed then, despite Churchill’s best efforts. This time, with God’s help, we shall succeed.”
His claque in St. Paul’s applauded. “God’s help? What about Hitler’s?” Green said.
“Churchill knew Germany was dangerous before anybody ever heard of Bolsheviks,” Walsh added. “Will Chamberlain say anything about that?”
Neville Chamberlain said not a word.
“Hey, you! Sergeant! Yes, you! Whatever your name is.”
“Fujita, sir!” Hideki Fujita sprang to attention and saluted. “At your service, sir!” He hoped he wasn’t in
