around her. For the moment, she felt secure and content. She had a goal. Canada.
“Jack, when was the last time you kissed a girl?”
He grinned. “Ages. I’ve forgotten how.”
“Liar,” she said, laughing, and promptly proved that neither he nor she had forgotten a thing.
CHAPTER 13
As the prime minister entered the Oval Office, Harry Truman’s first impression of Winston Churchill was one of mild surprise that the man whose force of will had helped sustain Britain was so darned short. The second impression, and a very negative one, was that Churchill looked so very old. With a jolt, he realized that the bulldog of Britain was seventy-one, an age when most men should have retired and be writing their memoirs. Worse, Churchill showed every year. His wartime service as Britain’s leader had taken a serious physical toll. At sixty-one, Truman knew he not only looked much younger but acted much sprier.
Truman shuddered. How would he look in a few years as president? Would the combined weight of the office and continuing aging drag him down too? Well, he thought wryly, nothing like starting a new war to set the tone of a new administration to help him find out.
Churchill broke the brief silence. “Mr. President, it is indeed an honor to meet you. The late president has spoken well of you.”
Like hell, Truman thought. He sincerely doubted that FDR had ever mentioned him. “I am honored to meet you too, sir. He spoke of you often when we discussed world matters.”
Churchill laughed at the polite lies. They shook hands and took seats along a wall where they were separated by a small table. No one else was present for this brief meeting.
Truman began. “First I should inform you that Mr. Speer has been taken to the Executive Office Building across the street. When we are finished speaking, we can go and hear what he has to say.”
“Very good.”
“Now, Prime Minister, let me be most frank. Obviously, I am not in the least bit happy with what has transpired with Stalin, and I am concerned by rumors that you are not displeased that we are in this new war.”
“I did not want this war either, Mr. President,” Churchill said sadly. “I merely urged firmness when dealing with Stalin. I did not for one minute expect such an irrational onslaught. Kindly recall that my British soldiers are bleeding and dying as well as yours.”
Churchill smiled bleakly. “I merely wanted the Russian bear caged. I wished Stalin to know that the democracies had strength and a willingness to let him go no further. There was nothing we could do about the countries he’d already seized, but we could not let him impose his will on Germany or the rest of Europe.
“Mr. President, despite the fact that the British empire is far-flung, England itself is a small island that could be vulnerable to aggressor nations should we let it. Unlike the United States, whose moats are oceans, England’s moat is only twenty or thirty miles wide, not thousands. In these days of bombers and missiles, safety is virtually nonexistent. I might add, sir, that your moat is shrinking as well, and that your traditional emphasis on isolation may no longer be appropriate. Ergo, we allied ourselves with others, sometimes distastefully, to maintain our security.”
“Did it matter,” Truman asked, “what the policies were of the nations you were allied with and against?”
“Not at all,” he replied candidly. “My predecessors at Downing Street and I have always had one goal in common, and that was the preservation of the empire as a sovereign, powerful, and prosperous nation. I once implied that I would seek an alliance with the devil if I thought it would help England and I meant it.”
Truman grinned. “Are you comparing the United States with Satan?”
Churchill chuckled and continued. “France and Italy are hopeless and impoverished both militarily and morally, while Spain and Portugal are inconsequential. Therefore, a resurgent Germany is our only hope for stability in Europe in the face of Communist Russia. If the Russian bear is allowed to swallow Eastern Europe and now Germany, it will be strong enough to reach out with a mighty paw and smash the British empire.”
“I see your point,” Truman said grimly.
Churchill rose awkwardly. His joints were stiff and he was still fatigued from his trip. “The war with Russia is indeed a tragedy. However, it may have been inevitable. It is at least occurring at a time when our nations are strong, not weak.” He dramatically checked a pocket watch. “Do we not have a German waiting to see us?”
“We do.”
“Then, Mr. President, shall we not hear what he has to say?”
Billy Tolliver took a moment to take stock of his situation. He and his platoon were settled in an unnamed village about ten miles west of the Elbe, and a narrow road ran through it that ultimately went to the very old city of Brunswick. The village was of fairly new construction and bland, with no front lawns. The road ran almost right up to the sterile houses and buildings.
They had fallen back from a village much like it yesterday and would doubtless find a village just like this one a few hundred yards up the road when the Russian pressure became too much to bear. Bear, he thought and smiled, bear the Russian bear. Or should they shave it and bare the bear?
“Something funny, Lieutenant?” Holmes looked confused. Was his platoon leader losing it?
“A private thought, Corporal. Nothing important.”
The recently promoted Holmes shrugged but did not look impressed. Tolliver sometimes thought that Holmes did not have the respect for an officer that an enlisted man really ought to, and seemed to be sneering at him in his New England accent.
Worse, Holmes was a Jew, and Tolliver hadn’t had much experience with Jews. There were very few of them in and around Opelika and none that he knew of at the Citadel, where he’d gotten his degree, and the only ones he could think of ran stores or pawnshops in Montgomery or Mobile. Like many people, he hadn’t given much thought to what the Nazis were doing and still wasn’t certain he believed all that stuff about mass murders. Still, he’d seen a couple of camps and was beginning to change his mind.
Tolliver did some quick calculating just to make sure he hadn’t forgotten something important in his troop’s dispositions. He had three squads, which, including himself and Holmes, totaled only twenty-four men. With that he was to stop, or at least delay, whatever the Russians were going to send down the damn road and through the damn village. The rest of the company had similar assignments, as did the battalion, the regiment, and the division. So did the whole damn army, for that matter, he realized. Slow or stop the Russians was their only goal.
At least this particular village wasn’t in ruins like so many of them. Germany, he decided, was a study in contrasts. While so much of the land had been reduced to rubble only a few feet high, there were other areas that, inexplicably, had been untouched by the physical presence of war. Of course, with the Russians due at any time, there was little likelihood of that continuing for this particular neat and tidy collection of brick and concrete houses and stores.
They were in a gasthaus, a tavern, whose location gave his platoon good fields of fire down the main road from the east, as well as a secondary road that he would consider a tempting way to enter the village if he were the Russian commander. He also had men with machine guns, BARs, and bazookas in homes flanking the gasthaus.
The gasthaus had also given his platoon something they hadn’t had in a very long time, a couple of steins of beer apiece. To their astonishment, they had found a perfectly good cask of suds in the cellar that Tolliver had carefully portioned out to his crew. The local krauts, he decided, would never miss it, and if someone complained, fuck ’em. His men deserved it. Even Holmes had seemed appreciative of the gesture.
“Second squad hears tanks.” It was Holmes on his radio.
“Can they see anything?”
“No, sir, and it only sounds like a couple.”
Yeah, Tolliver thought, only a couple. When this war with Russia first started, he had thirty-five men in his platoon. He had seen how much damage just a couple of Russian tanks could do.
