Another question was the prime minister’s role in the use of the gas. I do not have any more proof than I have already set forth. In the hours before the chemicals were released, Clay conferred over the telephone with Churchill after having waved the rest of us out of hearing range, something he had never before done. At our last Defense Committee meeting, while some were searching for the guilty, the surreptitiously smiling Churchill seemed ready to dance a jig at the Wehrmacht’s appalling fate. I also believe General Clay had been intensely loyal to the prime minister from the moment Churchill resisted pressure to dump Clay. It would have been true to General Clay’s character to gain approval from Churchill, then deny Churchill knew anything about the use of the gas to spare the prime minister the political strife.
About seven o’clock that evening, I noticed that General Clay’s packing had slowed. He was taking longer and longer to do less and less. He was being exceedingly careful, gently blowing dust off a few books, polishing a silver picture frame with his sleeve, scratching the back of Wee Wee’s neck. He was acting like a man with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
He looked up from a small album of photographs and said, “The only goddamn thing of any worth my father ever taught me was that if there’s enough blue in the sky to make a pair of sailor’s trousers, it’ll be good weather tomorrow.”
“Sir?”
“Well, he didn’t teach me enough, it looks like.” He placed the album in a trunk. “Jack, you know me better than anybody but my wife. Do you know why you and I get along so well?”
I was immensely gratified. “I have a few ideas.”
“Spare me them,” he replied. “We have the same perspective on history. You can grasp why I did what I did.”
“I can?”
“No general worth a damn is going to scratch his ass while the enemy runs over him. You didn’t see me scratching my ass, did you?”
“Not once, sir.”
He limped toward me, holding an envelope he had drawn from a back pocket. “I want you to give this to my wife.”
A bell of alarm sounded. “You are leaving tomorrow for Washington, sir. Why don’t you take it with you?”
“It’s a new draft of my will. With the Luftwaffe out in force, trans-Atlantic crossings are risky. No sense having that document and me on the same flight.”
I took it from him.
He reached for his uniform jacket. “I’m going to Mayfair to pay my respects to General Crawford’s widow.”
I rose and started for the armoir.
“No need you coming along,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly.”
He had not had a driver since being removed from command. He also had little use for my services. Still, I found his going out alone unsettling. He deserved an entourage.
I bid him goodnight and returned to packing his trunk. After a few moments it was full, so I strapped and locked it, then returned to a book I had been reading.
At 8:30, I was startled by a booming knock. I crossed to the door and opened it. Two American MPs were standing there. One said, “Colonel Royce, there’s been an accident. It’s General Clay. Will you come with us?”
The blackout hid London as we passed through the city. I do not have a clear memory of that drive to Hyde Park. I did not see the crumpled car until our jeep had stopped. A rescue truck was there, as well as an ambulance and another military police jeep. But no one was frantically rescuing the occupant of the car, no prybars or winches or the loud orders of rescue organizers, so I knew what I would find. Wilson Clay, so conscious of the past, had just entered it.
The automobile, an Austin, had smashed into the trunk of a roadside tree, thrusting the radiator back to the firewall and propelling Wilson Clay through the windshield and against the tree. His body lay on the crushed hood. Blood covered much of his head and had matted in his hair. I bent close. His eyes were open and unseeing.
I bubbled, “General Clay, please, no.”
An MP casually lit a cigarette and said, “He’s about as dead as I’ve seen anybody, Colonel.”
A memorial service was held in the remnants of Westminster Abbey three days later. Winston Churchill and General Stedman attended. The general’s body was then flown to Washington, where it was buried in the military cemetery at Arlington. I took Wee Wee home with me to California. Six years have passed since the night General Clay died, and I still grieve for the man.
He may have taken his own life. Investigators determined his car was traveling close to sixty miles an hour when it hit the tree. And the envelope he gave me did not contain a will, but a letter to his wife. Margaret Clay told me later it was a love letter. I could not ask to read it, so I do not know if it was a good-bye letter, too. I have no idea why General Clay would have me deliver the letter if he thought he was going home the next day.
On the other hand, the roads that night were slick from the downpour. Street lamps had been extinguished for the duration. Londoners will attest to the hazards of driving during the blackout. And Clay was a fighter, unlikely to let a moralizing commotion in the States send him to his end. He would have viewed it as too easy.
I believe, and I prefer to believe, that his death was a mishap on a dark and slippery road. I have no more details, so I end my conjecture.
Some have suggested Clay’s death, whether suicide or an accident, carried the scent of justice. He would heatedly reply—I can hear him dictating his response and ordering me to put it in my journal—that every great captain has learned from his predecessors. Charles XII from Alexander. Napoleon from Frederick. Foch from Napoleon. Clay learned from them all, and the lesson was that in defeat was disgrace.
His actions will be a source of controversy for years. For Wilson Clay, there was no debate, no hesitation. He was a soldier who would vanquish the enemy. He would not abide history recording him as a conquered warrior, and so it will not.
Also by James Thayer:
House of Eight Orchids