Warsaw concerto, p.9
Warsaw Concerto, page 9
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Inevitably, Maxim Machenaud and Jacques Duclos had fallen out almost as soon as Machenaud returned to France, forming rival rag-tag armies and staking out at first, what were purely nominal territorial claims over approximately two-thirds of Southern France. In 1964 the Brezhnev Troika in Chelyabinsk-Sverdlovsk had tried, unavailingly to do business with Machenaud’s faction in Clermont-Ferrand. At the time the FI held the towns and cities, while Duclos’s reborn Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français (FTPF), a deliberate re-incarnation of the resistance movement of the French Communist Party between 1940 and 1945, terrorised the countryside.
‘Early in 1964 the Troika suspended shipments of arms to the Front Internationale. Partly, this was because of an acute shortage of long-range transport aircraft, but primarily it was because Machenaud was making increasingly outrageous demands of the Troika. He wanted nuclear warheads, for example. Not bombs or missiles, just warheads; presumably to load onto fishing boats to sail into English ports. If you remember, that was exactly the sort of thing other fanatics tried elsewhere in the Mediterranean that year. The problem was that Red Dawn was, without the Politburo’s authorisation, trying to get the surviving units of the French Mediterranean Fleet laid up at Toulon and Villefranche, about a dozen major warships including a bloody battleship – would you believe? – to attack the British. It was chaos. There was an ongoing guerrilla war between Machenaud’s FI and Duclos’s Marquisards in the Massif Central, the Navy guys in the south were trying to stay neutral while all the time Machenaud’s agents were working on the fools in charge in Corsica, successfully in the end, to start a full-scale war with the English by attacking their ships at sea!’
Such an attack had indeed taken place only for the two vessels responsible to be torpedoed and sunk, and much of the port city of Ajaccio to be obliterated by RAF V-Bombers within days. Needless to say, the Corsican Red Dawn junta had fallen and the whole island was still in ferment, ravaged from end to end by an ongoing civil war.
Rashidov had read the report of the Andropov Mission to Clermont-Ferrand in 1964-65, absorbed its political analysis with passing interest but been struck by the accounts of the country through which Andropov’s group had travelled.
‘…the FI is clearly struggling to hold down the territory it claims to govern. We encountered unexpected ‘communes’ and possibly, well-organised armed bands all across the south and to the east, the majority of whom were clearly intent on settling the few remaining undamaged lands within the governorate established by the Front Internationale…it may already be too late to prop up Krasnaya Zarya in France…’
In the latter half of 1964 the forces loyal to Jacques Duclos – then already sixty-eight years of age – roamed the country at will but were too weak and too poorly co-ordinated to directly confront Machenaud’s forces. It was a pyrrhic stalemate.
The mission to France in the winter of 1964-65 had marked, in retrospect, the low-water mark of Soviet hopes of carrying the Revolution to the doorstep of the one remaining obstacle to its domination of war-torn Western Europe, and the British Isles.
The ‘developing strategic analysis’ of the European ‘situation’ ha greatly altered in the intervening two years. There was reason to believe that Spain, Portugal, and fragmented Italy were weak, broken reeds, and that sooner or later the badly mauled Scandinavians would have no alternative but to come to terms with the New Soviet Union; the cost of rapprochement would be the neutrality – of an armed, hostile kind towards the British - of both Portugal and Spain, and the severing of the ties of the so-called Scandinavian League, comprising Denmark, Norway and Sweden, with the United Kingdom.
Rashidov had thought that sounded highly improbable; which was hardly surprising given some of the assumptions underlying Warsaw Concerto. That said, he was prepared to concede that if the British received a ‘bloody nose’ in France or in the Eastern Mediterranean, that might cast things in a different light.
He was a man who preferred to deal in what he knew, what he could see, rather than the optimistic speculation of KGB and Foreign Ministry apparatchiks.
The Andropov Mission had reported that the south was a patchwork of philosophically and ideologically incompatible tribes and fiefdoms; the locals, bandits mainly, had explained away the checkpoints on every major road as necessary ‘security measures’; but actually, each clan and gang had marked out its borders, arming themselves against their neighbours. Within the Auvergne the Front Internationale had had its headquarters and its illusory fortresses, it brutally enforced its writ within the dead shell of its city citadel but the farther one strayed from Clermont-Ferrand, the weaker its ‘control’ became. Marseilles, the Côte d'Azur, and the coast all the way east to the Italian border, was already a different country. The people down there who had initially followed the ‘party line’ had recoiled in horror after the ‘Corsican disaster’; they had had their fingers badly burned two years ago and they were still ‘playing dead’ hoping against hope not to bring down the ‘wrath of the English upon their heads’ again.
‘Presently, there is no contiguous Front Internationale country in the south but there are two allied, more or less self-sufficient powers which broadly speaking, pursue common objectives even if their shared ideologies are only approximately aligned most of the time,’ Zorin had explained. “The oddest aspect of the French situation is that this accommodation has been achieved largely by Maxim Machenaud. The man has re-created himself and the Front Internationale, re-modelling his own persona and that of the FI to conform to the realities on the ground. Two years ago he cultivated a cult of personality which was positively Stalinistic: his staff followed him around like sheep writing down every word he said in little notebooks and lived in terror of la Commission Vérité, the universally loathed and feared ‘Truth Commission’, the FI’s secret police; these days la Commission Vérité is no more than a department of the Revolutionary Guard, which most people in the Auvergne now regard as their ‘brave defenders’. Two years ago, the old Navy types who still run the ports, the Mediterranean coastal strip and nominally control the big ships, refused to leave their southern enclaves and lived in constant fear of Red Dawn assassination squads, now they have offices in Clermont-Ferrand and they sit on the Politburo of the FI!’
Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov had mulled what he had learned with immense care and diligence, not least because his mission to the semi-reformed Red Dawn children of the New USSR was a priceless opportunity to prove to his masters in Sverdlovsk that he was more than just a ‘candidate’ to sit at the top table.
However, notwithstanding he was no zoologist, it struck him that Leopards tended not to shed their spots and that therefore, Comrade Maxim Machenaud’s apparent transformation into Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘man of reason’ against Josef Stalin’s ‘monster of the Gulags’, was probably only skin-deep.
This had been gratuitously demonstrated within minutes of his arrival in France as he had been forced to watch that poor woman choking, pissing and shitting herself at the end of a piano wire noose.
Oddly, that was the sort of thing he had half-expected. Even Maxim Machenaud’s handlers had thought he was a psychopath back in the day…
It was what had happened next which had so totally...disconcerted him in ways he was unlikely to come to terms with any time soon.
It had been so obscene that it had briefly shocked him into a near catatonic daze disturbed only by the retching and the muttered curses of several members of his entourage.
The old man and the teenage girl had been chained to each other, back to back either side of the vertical girder that supported the hanging gibbet from which the dead woman’s lifeless body still swung.
The girl screamed and struggled unavailingly, her chains clanking against the frigid metal.
The old man had simply shut his eyes and begun to collapse down onto his knees, dragging her with him.
A Revolutionary Guard had emptied a can of what stank like Kerosene over the man and the child, and then another, soaking them from head to foot before stepping back, leaving George Duclos and the teenage girl kneeling in a spreading pool of fuel.
Then a second man; an officer had stepped forward and standing some five metres distant pointed a flare gun at the base of the gibbet.
That was when Rashidov first became aware of the gaggle of photographers surrounding a man and a woman in FI grey dungarees, filming the atrocity for posterity.
The flare exploded with a dazzling, momentarily blinding green bloom of light.
WHOOSH!
For a second or so the man and the woman were strangely unmoving, frozen inside the balls of flame which instantly enveloped them.
Then they writhed in unimaginable agonies as the inferno consumed them, unable even to scream as the fire hungrily sucked the air from their scorched lungs.
The fiery tableau seemed to go on forever; actually, it was all over in a minute or so, long before the dreadful stench of seared, charred flesh wafted into the witnesses faces.
Chapter 8
Wednesday 7th December 1966
Penshurst Place, Kent
The Prime Minister had written to fifty-seven-year-old William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L'Isle, VC, that summer while he was in the throes of preparing to hand over the reins at Yarralumla as his extended stint as the fifteenth Governor-General of Australia had been drawing to its conclusion.
Margaret Thatcher’s first overture had simply been to congratulate him on the ‘marvellous work’ he had done since his appointment in 1961, and to note that Admiral Sir Julian Christopher had more than once confided to her that it would have been ‘impossible to mount Operation Manna,’ or to ‘so intimately conduct relations with our Australasian friends’ without his ‘constant, wise counsel’, and to tentatively sound him out about the possibilities of his ‘joining my administration in Oxford, in some capacity’. After, that was, he had had an opportunity to ‘catch his breath’ upon his return to England and to enjoy a ‘hugely well-deserved rest’.
He had responded – no De L’Isle could do otherwise – that he would be honoured to be considered for a role in ‘your administration’ and thought no more of it, until shortly before his successor, Captain Sir Peter Christopher, RN, VC, arrived in the Antipodes.
The Prime Minister had asked him to take over at the Ministry of Defence; a post he had assumed the morning after his return to England on the first Tuesday of November. Lord Carington, his predecessor, had been labouring manfully combining the burdens of ‘Defence’ and that of First Secretary of State – essentially, the role of Deputy Prime Minister – and although Carington’s two extremely able junior ministers, the remarkable Fitzroy MacLean and Ian Gilmore had kept the nation’s war machine on an even keel of late, De L’Isle had concluded his accession to the Secretary of State’s chair was not a moment too soon.
This was a thing Peter Carington made no bones about; his frankness reflecting that he knew De L’Isle was a man after his own heart, utterly wedded to duty and service above all other ‘personal’ considerations.
De L’Isle’s wife, Jacqueline, had died shortly after the October War but he and his four eldest children had remained in Australia to see out his full, and as it turned out, extended by the best part of a year, term in Government House. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, had gone missing like so many millions of others in the Cuban Missiles disaster, most likely in London on the night of that war but he tried not to dwell on this, or upon any of the vicissitudes that immediately became apparent to any Englishman returning home these days.
He had left one country in 1961 and returned to a land completely different, changed forever, five years later. The England of 1962 no longer existed.
Having agonised over leaving his four surviving children ‘down under’; however, travelling through his sorely-tried homeland in recent weeks had to his chagrin, swiftly alleviated his pangs of conscience.
Twenty-four-year-old Catherine had met and married a third secretary at the United Kingdom High Commission in Canberra, a sound fellow some seven or eight years her senior, well-regarded by his friend, and his daughter’s new husband’s superior, the High Commissioner, Lieutenant General Sir William Oliver.
Meanwhile, his son, twenty-one-year-old Philip, had been commissioned ‘in absentia’ into the Grenadier Guards was attending the Staff College in Melbourne.
While Catherine and Philip were already making their own ways in life, he was confident that his younger daughters, Anne and Lucy, respectively nineteen and thirteen years old, would be safe – and happy - under the tutelage, guardianship and indubitably, in the convivial company of the Christophers at Yarralumla while they continued their education.
Given that Anne and her elder sister Catherine had assumed many of his late wife’s duties as a hostess, they already ‘knew the ropes’ at Yarralumla as well as anybody.
Notwithstanding their celebrity, De L’Isle had not really known what to expect until he had actually met Sir Peter and Lady Marija Christopher; needless to say, his last lingering doubts about their suitability to take on Government House, had dissolved within minutes of encountering them. This despite the fact that the putative Governor-General’s wife was heavily pregnant and Peter Christopher looked ridiculously young. However, it was soon apparent that Peter was the sort of chap who was the ‘captain of his ship’ whenever, or wherever he went and that his wife – goodness, what an extraordinary force of nature she was! – was surely going to charm the socks off even the most resolute of diehard Australian republicans.
Having worried that Lucy, his little princess, would be alone, what with Anne being away at college in Sydney most weeks during term-time, and already possibly feeling left out, forgotten, in the weeks during which he had travelled widely and said goodbye to old friends, and generally done everything he could to ease the hand-over to his successor, it had become abundantly clear to him that his daughter had been well and truly taken under the wing of, and was being most attentively ‘mothered’ – perhaps ‘sistered’ was a better word - by Lady Marija and her immensely sensible, calm-headed American Appointments Secretary, Mary Griffin.
“The Griffins’ wedding was quite a thing,” De L’Isle chuckled, rolling his tumbler and its finger of Malt Whisky in his hands as he and his guest chewed the fat about the state of the world before the hearth, awaiting the arrival of the other members of the War Cabinet later that evening.
“I can imagine,” his friend smiled.
Although he was ten years his host’s junior forty-seven-year-old Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carington, MC, had the look of a man a decade his senior. Carrington had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the October War, escaping the bombing in the country but not the vagaries of the subsequent fall out clouds which had, sadly, claimed the lives of his wife and two eldest children. A minor but rising ‘grandee’ in the pre-October War Conservative and Unionist Party, Margaret Thatcher had initially brought him back into the fold as Navy Minister, whereupon he had been informed that he was to be his then Secretary of State’s, the wisely avuncular, much missed and lamented, William Whitelaw’s ‘number two’.
Subsequently, when Whitelaw had been assassinated in 1965, he had stepped into the hot seat. A modest, quietly capable man both under fire and in private life, nobody had been more surprised than Peter Carington to be elevated to First Secretary of State following Margaret Thatcher’s National Conservatives’ landslide election victory in March 1965.
“One wonders,” De L’Isle went on, shaking his head and barely suppressing his rueful mirth, “when a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy has ever had a Governor-General of Australia as his best man; and his bride, the Governor-General’s wife as her maid of honour?”
“The Christophers have an uncanny knack of creating unlikely precedents wherever they go!” Peter Carington agreed. “Much to Tom Harding-Grayson’s chagrin, I might add!”
The two men laughed reflectively.
In fairness, to maintain that Lord Thomas Carlisle Harding-Grayson was a modern day Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was probably - but only by degree – over-stating the case. That was not to say that many of his counterparts around the globe did not regard him as exactly that, the dark prince of international affairs. But and it was a big ‘but’, even his closest colleagues in government in Oxford never, ever made the mistake of taking Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary’s latest ‘wheeze’, whatever it was, entirely at face value. The fact was that nobody could really make up their minds if Tom was a latter-day Castlereagh or Metternich. The man himself denied his inspiration was Machiavelli: ‘Come on,’ he would protest with a mischievous twinkle in his rheumy eyes, ‘I don’t even speak Italian! Well, not very well…’
Actually, the man spoke half-a-dozen languages, including at least two Bedouin dialects, more than tolerably well. A self-confessed lifelong ‘leftie’ with a circle of friends chosen singularly blindly to political affiliation, prior to the Cuban Missiles disaster Tom Harding-Grayson’s persistent siren calls about the folly of trusting everything to some kind of ‘mythical special relationship’ with the United States, had once seen him relegated to an office located so distantly from the Secretary of State’s rooms that he joked: ‘the only way I could communicate with the incumbent was by bush telegraph and short-wave radio!’
Now, of course, Tom – a man whose brilliant career had been stuck fast on the rocks when the World went mad in October 1962 – was the first man they all looked to for guidance as they attempted to navigate their country through the perilous, shark-infested waters of the new global order.
Today, the Foreign Secretary was travelling down to Penshurst with the Prime Minister, her husband, and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Henry Tomlinson. Airey Neave, in his post as Secretary of State for National Security, the nation’s chief spymaster, had been delayed and would not be arriving until tomorrow morning; likewise, the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Michael Carver, the master tactician who had ‘Cannaed’ two whole Soviet tank armies in the rocky sands of Iraq and Iran, had been delayed returning from a visit to Northern France and Belgium. Otherwise, ‘the gang’ would be assembled in time for dinner that evening.
