As she stared at him he went on, speaking out of an unshakable conviction that radiated from him. 'I do not seek to belittle the gallantry of your people when I remind you that great areas of France have been conquered many times by the English and the Spaniards as well as by the Germans, and this would not be the first time if France is now compelled to accept the humiliation of a complete surrender; but in all their long history my people have never been conquered and have never surrendered, We broke the might of Spain; we fought your own King, Louis XIV, to a standstill. A Dutch fleet once entered the Thames, but we threw the Dutch out of the New World and broke their Sea Power for ever. Even when Britain stood alone against Napoleon she did not despair; she fought on until a British frigate took the former master of Europe into lonely exile.'
For the first time he saw a shadow of doubt enter the Baroness's dark eyes even as she protested. 'But this time it will be different. The English are effete; they've been pampered too long. They ran at Dunkirk.
They'll give in—they'll give in.'
He smiled then, and he did not mean his smile to be patronising, but there was something in it which drives all foreigners into a frenzy.
'Oh, no, they won't,' he said quietly. 'As a race we haven't altered. You mustn't allow yourself to be misled by what happened in Norway and Belgium. We're born muddlers, and in every war it takes us a little time to find our feet. You see, we're not like Continental countries; we're not organised for war, so our peace-time leaders are never any good when it comes to a scrap. But sooner or later we sift out the people at the top and things begin to happen. Last time we had Asquith, but he was replaced by Lloyd George, who, whatever may be said against him, was a great war leader. This time we had Chamberlain, but now Churchill has taken his place, and later on among the younger men we'll find some real live Generals.'
'Churchill!' she cried bitterly. 'Yes; he would still wish to fight if London were in ruins. But the people are not of the same metal; they'll revolt, throw Churchill overboard and sue for peace.'
'Don't you believe it!' His smile became a pitying grin. 'Churchill is England. He typifies the spirit of the Empire more than any other living man. He is what all of us would like to be, and ninety-nine per cent of us are ready to fight with him to the last ditch. Yet even if a bomb or a bullet robbed us of him it would make no difference to the final outcome of the war, because other leaders would arise and we should fight on just the same. It was your own Napoleon who said that the British don't know when they're beaten; and that's the truth. It will be a long, hard road, but in the end the triumph of Britain is as certain as the rising of tomorrow's sun.'
'I don't believe it.' She nervously clasped and unclasped her hands, now openly doubting, but striving to resist any acceptance of the belief that he was forcing home on her.
'Oh, yes, you do,' he contradicted her. 'We've won the last battle in every war. That may be a cliche, but it's a fact; and it's going to be just the same this time. That is where you have made a terrible miscalculation, and, if you think for a moment, you will see how by Britain's refusal to accept a patched-up peace all your dreams must fall to pieces. Hitler may make himself lord of Europe; Goering may send his bombers to destroy our homes; Goebbels may lie and rage and threaten; but all the time the Blockade will go on, and sooner or later the Nazis will not know which way to turn for war materials and food. Then those who have aided Hitler, and millions of innocent people as well, must pay the price of his damnable ambitions,, And as long as France is Hitler's vassal she, too, must pay.'
'Stop!' cried the Baroness. 'Stop! I will not listen.' But he went on to point the moral with inexorable, relentless logic.
'Even if the Nazis destroyed our air-ports and our factories we should still fight on from Canada; and the United States are behind us now. All the vast resources of that great Democracy will be placed at our disposal to help us smash the Nazis. Our Navy and Air Force will render your ports useless for years to come; the shipping in them must lie idle because you will be cut off from your colonies and your world markets. Every industry in France will be ruined through lack of fuel and raw materials, and the machinery in your factories will rust. Your great Army will have to be disbanded, but there will be no work for the men to do. By next winter you will have ten million unemployed. Your herds and your livestock will die because there will not be enough cattle-food to feed them. To keep their own people from revolt the Germans will be forced to seize the bulk of your agricultural produce. The spectre of famine will enter every home from Calais to Marseilles, and disease will take its terrible toll from Strasbourg to Biarritz. There will be riots and street-fighting in the towns and cities; the starving crowds will wreck the food trains which are taking your crops into Germany and they will murder the Nazi officials who are set over them. Then there will be ghastly reprisals—huge fines—and your most spirited young men—those who should be your leaders of tomorrow—will be shot in batches against the wall of your German-occupied barracks. Whole towns may be given over to destruction in a ruthless attempt to keep you under, and the country will fall into the same state of lawlessness that made life so terrible in the Middle Ages. Bands of desperate, hungry men will roam the country, breaking into houses, killing people who oppose them and torturing others in the hope that they will give away the hiding-places of secret stores of food. The very children upon whom you are counting to grow up as the citizens of the new France that you have planned will die in their cradles, or only reach maturity warped in mind from the horrors that they have witnessed and crippled in body from malnutrition. That, Madame la Baronne, is what you will have done to France.'
She cowered away from him, her scarlet mouth a little open, her black eyes wide, then she whispered:
'This is a ghastly picture that you paint, Monsieur.'
'Yet it is true,' Gregory insisted. 'All that I have said is absolutely inevitable if Britain fights on—and Britain will fight on.'
Suddenly her red mouth twitched and she cried: 'I hate you —I hate you! Never before have I been shaken in my belief, but you have made me doubt, and if I am wrong I deserve to die.'
Gregory put up his pistol and shook his head. 'No. I'm not going to shoot you now. Whatever you may have done in the past, you have convinced me today that you did it believing that it was for the good of your country. I only wish, though, that we had talked together months ago, because I believe that I could have shown you that you were wrong and persuaded you to use your great powers for good instead of ill; but it's too late now.'
'Too late,' she repeated. Then a new expression suddenly lit her dark eyes. 'I wonder. The military situation in France is now beyond repair, but if France could be kept in the war the Fleet could be saved—and the colonies.'
In a flash Gregory saw that he had achieved the seemingly impossible. The swift, cold brain of this extraordinary woman had not only analysed and accepted his arguments but had gone on to estimate future possibilities in the light of a new conviction. Without any telling she had grasped the fact that, although France was lost, if Britain fought on the only hope of saving her country from the horrors he had pictured lay in aiding Britain to smash Hitler as rapidly as possible so that France might be freed again before she fell into a state of anarchy.