Chapter 45:
Chapter 45
In the cold rain of November, a coffin was lowered into the ground.
Some people sobbed, while the others shoveled dirt over the coffin.
King George VI was the first to shovel.
Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the throne, was next.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British cabinet ministers were next.
The royal relatives were next.
“Oh… Louis!”
As his coffin was gradually covered by dirt, the widow of the deceased, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, fainted in the rain.
The royal guards carefully carried the fallen woman away.
“We will never surrender! Those evil German devils hired Indian assassins to…”
Churchill’s lion-like speech seemed somehow feeble and pitiful.
In the cold rain, some people coughed as if they had caught a cold, and some others disappeared to avoid the rain.
Those who were close to or admired Louis Mountbatten in his lifetime, or those who stayed out of respect for the journalists, were the only ones who paid attention to the old lion’s eulogy.
Churchill seemed to know that too.
As his funeral speech was coming to an end, someone shouted.
‘You killed Louis Mountbatten! All of you!’
Someone stood up among the murmuring crowd and swung a cane at Churchill and the ministers.
“Stop this senseless war! Hire our army and navy to fight dirty communists. How dare you cooperate with them. This is all your fault!”
“Shut up! Shut your mouth!”
The Duke of Windsor, who was once Edward VIII and was exiled to the Bahamas as a governor after his abdication, had returned to his homeland for the sudden funeral of his royal family member.
His pro-German and pro-Nazi tendencies were well-known, but who would have expected him to act like this at a funeral?
Some of the old royals seemed to stagger in shock.
Anthony Eden, a representative of the anti-German hardliners in the cabinet who once said that Windsor should be “shot”, stood up and hit him with a cane in anger.
“This is a crusade against the fascists! Look at their vile deeds!”
“Who is more vile than you, Churchill? Churchill, who cooperated with the communists, should step down!”
The funeral, which should have been solemn and reverent, was now divided into two factions over their opinions on the war with Germany.
Well, it was not really divided into two factions, as the pro-German appeasers were much fewer in number, but their voices were louder and higher.
Half of the supplies coming into Britain were being sunk by Kriegsmarine’s submarines into the cold Atlantic Ocean. The prices of bread and potatoes had risen so much that the government had to implement rationing.
More than half of the British people were chronically hungry, and the government tried to drag them into war by conscription, but they did not like war.
The older generation had a deep-rooted contempt for other countries and a pride in being the victors of the last war.
More importantly, they did not have to go to war themselves.
At most, they would sit in their mansions in London or their country houses where there was no chance of being bombed by Luftwaffe and listen to the radio.
They supported Churchill’s administration’s iron will to continue the war for the glory of the British Empire.
But the young people thought differently.
Before the glory of the proud British Empire, they had to fight and kill or be killed by their ‘brothers’, the same Germanic people.
For those who were suffering from panic and tired of war, Hitler’s claim of an Aryan society was quite an attractive alternative.
“Jewish-Bolshevik traitors! Collaborating with dirty Bolsheviks! Do you want to be their dogs?”
“Stop killing our young people in this war! How much more blood must be spilled before this war ends?”
“Bloodthirsty butcher, Churchill must go!”
Young people began to stand up and shout from all over the funeral hall.
The atmosphere became tense, and the royal guards drew their guns. Shoot if you dare!
Anyway, it’s just blood that will flow here as it does on the battlefield!
You can never wash away the blood on your hands!
The cabinet members did not want to be Pontius Pilate who crucified Jesus.
They did not want to spill blood in front of journalists who were waiting for a scoop.
Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth and other royal ladies quickly fled under escort.
The sky began to pour rain like a waterfall, and people started shouting at each other without hearing anything.
They did not understand what they were saying or what they meant.
As they pointed at each other with umbrellas in their hands, someone threw a stone.
“Reds! Red bastards!”
“Traitors who sold our country to Germany!”
The guards tried to calm down the fight, but they could not tell who was on which side.
The journalists flashed their cameras to capture the fight, but one of them had his camera smashed on the ground.
Seeing that, the journalists flashed their cameras again, thinking it was a scoop.
They could not suppress all these people.
The cabinet ministers began to exit in case of an emergency.
There might be assassins among them.
Seeing them, the guard captain prepared for a terrorist attack by the pro-German faction and began to push them to one side.
The pro-German ‘protesters’ who were surrounded by the guards, who were much larger and more numerous, became more violent as they were cornered like wild beasts.
“Get away! Get away! Traitors!”
“Do you know who I am!”
“Churchill to hell!”
Thud, a stone thrown by someone hit the guard’s cheekbone.
In the pouring rain, blood flowed and soaked his clothes, and his high hat fell to the ground.
His uniform was already dirty with rainwater, but blood and mud stained it completely.
A mocking laughter burst out in an instant, and the guards clenched their teeth.
Thud, thud, more stones and mud flew in.
The cornered ones spat out vicious laughter and screams and attacked the guards.
“Whiiiiik! All bayonets!”
The guard captain could not stand it any longer and ordered to attach bayonets to their ceremonial guns.
Most of the government officials had left.
The journalists also left under the guidance of the majority of the guards, seeing the situation getting worse.
In the pouring rain, two groups faced each other.
The guards with bayonets facing the unarmed pro-German ‘protesters’.
Someone was capturing it on camera.
The ‘disaster’ that occurred at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral swept the front page of every newspaper the next morning.
Prime Minister Churchill boasted that he had a perfect grip on the media and asked them to ‘be careful’ after returning to his residence in the rain, but they ignored his ‘request’.
“Daily Express, Daily Mirror, The Times, News of the World, The People, Sunday Express…”
The director of the Ministry of Information ignored Churchill’s request and read through the newspapers that reported the disaster.
The ministry staff had collected all the daily papers that covered the incident on the front page and brought them to the conference room.
“Ha, one of them even made it a headline?”
Attlee exclaimed. At the same time, he was worried.
“Two royal guards were slightly injured in yesterday’s… ‘standoff’, and four of the troublemakers were seriously wounded, and thirteen were slightly wounded. They are currently in the special ward of the Royal Victoria Hospital. The British Union of Fascists demands a statement from the government…”
“A statement for those damned bastards!”
Churchill slammed the table.
The fascists were openly marching on the streets with their flags, as darkness fell.
<Raise your flags! Keep your ranks tight!
The stormtroopers march, proud and brave!>
They sang Horst Wessel’s song and held torches, demanding to honor their ‘martyred’ comrades and to release their former leader Oswald Mosley.
Their slogans could be faintly heard inside the conference room where the cabinet ministers were discussing.
They recruited homeless people and delinquent youths with money from an unknown source and mobilized them for the protest.
Where did the Nazis get that money?
Germany? Indian dissidents? America or even Soviet Union? The intelligence agency had not even grasped their situation yet.
“Deploy the 1st Cavalry Division in London. I won’t let those things stand in front of my eyes! If those damned protesters show up again, just trample them down!”
“Prime Minister!”
The ministers screamed.
A crackdown?
Lord Mountbatten had already been killed by a bomb.
They did not know what they would do next in this chaos and repression.
Most citizens disliked the independence of Indians, but they disliked Churchill’s regime even more.
A crackdown would… cause something unpredictable.
“The protests are not just happening in London. They are most intense in places like Birmingham and Liverpool, where the bombings were concentrated, and also in Portsmouth, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, etc. Thousands of protesters are gathering there. The Labour Party is… some trade unions are joining them by declaring a strike, but it seems difficult to stop them.”
Attlee bowed his head.
The workers who were ordered to produce war materials in the midst of unpredictable bombings had declared a strike.
The Labour Party wanted to cooperate with the Conservative Party in the national coalition government, but the trade unions, which were the base of the Labour Party, did not like it.
They hated Churchill’s stubbornness and hated sending their sons to war even more.
Many young workers had died.
Of course, proportionally, the casualty rate of junior officers was much higher.
And junior officers were mostly young people from middle or upper classes, so technically, the Conservatives should have been more opposed to war.
But these numbers were not very important.
The young people of the upper class would have no worries about food for life even if they returned with their arms and legs cut off or lost their eyes, but it meant ruin for their families if young workers did that.
Two generations of misery: father killed by bombing, son returned as a cripple from war with Germany!
The media spread these sensational cases, and people were angry.
As a Labour member, he understood their anger.
Even today, fat Churchill would eat pork chops or roast beef for dinner made by his chef at his residence.
But most workers would fry some American spam or eat one or two eggs if they had more money.
They had to endure another night of anxiety while eating turnips, potatoes, carrots, those miserable things that reminded them of the last war.
Those who could eat well would never empathize with their feelings.
“A break with Soviet Union is…”
“What are you talking about breaking with Soviet Union now? Without a truce with Germany? What’s the point of breaking with Soviet Union alone?”
One of the Conservative ministers cautiously brought up an option that seemed most feasible from his position, but quickly backed down when he saw Attlee growling.
Churchill’s loyalists shared his anti-communist ideology.
But they did not have his courage and stubbornness.
“I can’t suppress them with force, I can’t accept their demands. What do you expect me to do?”
“Isn’t there another way? The lack of distribution is the main cause of the protests. If we could increase the distribution to a reasonable level…”
Ha! Snorts of derision erupted from all around.
The distribution was carried out as long as it did not touch the supplies for the real war, or as long as they could nibble on them secretly.
If they increased the distribution in this state, they would soon face a more serious situation.
“Lord Atlee, if we follow our previous plan for distribution… we could run out of supplies in about 90 days. That’s assuming that the sea transport does not get worse. If America gives us another 50 destroyers, it might get better, but…”
He knew what was behind that fading voice.
There was nothing left to give.
North Africa was lost.
The naval bases in the Caribbean were handed over at first.
The colonies in South Asia, from Iraq to Burma, were increasingly out of control.
And if it came to India…
There was not a single battleship in that sea at the moment.
They had reached the point where they had to beg America for battleships for homeland defense, so there were no battleships to spare.
The Soviet Union hinted that Japan was trying to invade Southeast Asia, but even if they knew, they had no power to stop it.
At best, they could squeeze out a medium-sized battleship?
“I will tell President Roosevelt myself. I can’t increase the supply without a drastic strategy, and there is no other way to calm them down, is there?”
Churchill chose to rely on America in the end. He seemed to think it was a gamble.
The bigger the debt of a debtor, the more the creditor would try to keep giving him more in order to get it back.
Of course, there was a fundamental problem with this.
From the perspective of a rich man like America, he could either cut off his hand and lose a little bit, or lose interest and ignore him altogether.
Or Germany could say, I’ll pay you back instead! And pounce on Britain and eat it up alone.
“Prime Minister! Prime Minister!”
An officer kicked open the door of the conference room and entered.
He looked like he had run all the way from somewhere far away, with his face flushed red and his breath panting.
His uniform tie was loosely untied as he gasped for air, and he seemed to want to deliver the news as soon as possible, but he felt like he would choke on his breath in that moment.
“Invasion! Invasion!”
“What? What are you talking about? Who! Where?”
Ha! Ha! Ha!
The officer continued to gasp for air.
The officials murmured among themselves, and Atlee approached him and patted his back and handed him a glass of water.
He gulped down the water and thanked him lightly and informed the officials of the emergency.
“German troops have appeared on the coast! The southern coast is swarming with German ships! It’s an emergency!”
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