Free Churchill's Triumph by Michael Dobbs

a few days in a desecrated royal palace many thousands of miles from his home.
    Churchill pushed away his plate and studied his friend. The chandelier that hung from the high ceiling was filled with lightbulbs of every haphazard shape and size, and they cast long shadows across the American’s grey face. He had recovered a little from his afternoon’s apathy and was performing once again, yet Churchill realized it was just that, a performance, something that was turned on and off and that he no longer fully controlled. The eyes still danced defiance but the hand trembled—he could see that in the meniscus of the wine— and the mind sometimes wandered, had trouble fixing on any one spot, always roaming the distant horizon in search of something that insisted on remaining elusive. They had all been worn down by the years of endless war, all three of them. The stiffness in Stalin’s left arm had grown worse and he now often kept his hand in his pocket, while Churchill himself had suffered heart attacks and pneumonia, and there had been moments when his doctor had feared for his life, yet poor Franklin had suffered most, withering not only in body but also, perhaps, in judgment.
    Suddenly, as Churchill pondered, Roosevelt was staring back at him, defying him. So what if I’m sick, so what if I might die? Perhaps it’s because I’m so near my own end that I can see more clearly, know more precisely, what I want. And I, at least, don’t glorify war, don’t rejoice in the bloodshed. Forty-nine thousand Germans? It was only a goddamned joke, Winston! Raise your eyes, lift your soul, before God lifts it from you. We can do what no men have ever done—build a world freed from the tyranny of all war, where we no longer have to endure the horrors that… well, to put no finer point on it, the horrors that you wanton Europeans have thrust upon this world twice in a single generation. Time for the New World to sort out the Old, Winston, whether Europe likes it or not.
    And, in this palace of memories, Churchill decided to take up the challenge. To try to bring down the president from his lofty mountain and make him face up to the dangers of getting stuck in the Russian mud.
    “So, apart from our concerns with Germany, Marshal Stalin, what of the other nations? The small ones. What shall we do with them?”
    “Small nations? Why, they will be what they have always been . . . small nations,” grunted Stalin, “And in their proper place,” he added.
    “And what place is that, pray?”
    “Behind us. Beneath us. Or do you imagine that nonsense nations like Albania should be treated as equals, dictating to the Great Powers?”
    “Not dictating, certainly, but . . . participating?”
    “What? How big would the bloody table be?” Stalin said roughly, spreading his arms wide.
    And already the conference was in trouble, for the deeply religious Roosevelt had made the establishment of a United Nations organization the main focus of his ambitions. Churchill smiled inwardly, delighted in the manner of a child who has jumped into a huge puddle and splashed mud over those around him.
    Stalin soon splashed back. “Don’t tell me that the British Empire has suddenly come to believe in equality,” the Russian growled.
    Churchill’s blue eyes sprang straight back at him. “It is not a matter of equality but more of dignity. There are only three Great Powers. No one doubts our preeminence. We are like eagles, soaring above the world. It is a matter of affording respect to those who cannot fly so high.”
    “Since when did natives in Nigeria get a vote?” Stalin muttered, into the bottom of his glass.
    Churchill waved a spoon in rebuke. “The eagle suffers little birds to sing and is not careful what they mean thereby.”
    But Churchill’s words lost their poetry and perhaps much of their meaning in translation. One of Stalin’s men, Vyshinsky, looked up: “Hell, the louder they chirp, the more likely they’ll end up as buzzard