WC02 - Never Surrender (39 page)

Others paid a far heavier price. Andre Gershell, the brave but forlorn Mayor of Calais, died in a concentration camp, and Brigadier Nicholson, the gallant defender of that town, died in a prisoner-of-war camp, some said of a broken heart.

No one knew precisely how many of the 3800 Allied soldiers involved in the defence of Calais were killed. Many bodies were buried in the rubble and never recovered. There were no casualty returns, no figures for the number of wounded. Those who survived went into captivity for five hopeless years, and came back to find their sacrifice largely forgotten alongside the miracle of Dunkirk.

Blame for the wretched fate of the BEF should have been shared almost universally, yet one man was selected to shoulder the responsibility almost alone its commander, Viscount Gort. His decision to abandon the thrust south and his insistence that the BEF should fall back on Dunkirk saved not only the British army, it also saved Churchill. But neither the army nor Churchill displayed much gratitude. Gort was never again given a fighting command.

Churchill was not always fair. He was also frequently and abominably rude. A few days after the evacuation of Dunkirk had been completed, his beloved wife Clementine wrote him an extraordinary letter. "My Darling, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something I feel you ought to know," it began. "There is a danger of you being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & over-bearing manner .. . My Darling Winston I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be." It was ferocious criticism from one who loved him so much.

Bad manners and appalling memory. In his history of the war, Churchill gave his own version of the events of this period. "Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda," he wrote. "It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues."

Churchill, like so many other statesmen, preferred to be remembered in noble words; their actions were rarely as straightforward or so pure.

And Ruth Mueller? She disappeared once more, and this time her whereabouts were not discovered. Pimlico library, where she loved to spend her time, was bombed in the Blitz that began a few weeks later, and there were reports that an unidentified body was found beneath the rubble. It seems probable that it was Ruth.

But the portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill did survive. You can see it for yourself, still with its ripped canvas, in Churchill's studio at his home in Chartwell.