'Ah,' Mackie said around his pipe. 'Germans never did like a heavy pitch.'
'Meanwhile Guderian's superiors were well aware that France was not yet conquered. The BEF was beaten; so let it go, and keep back Guderian's forces, let them rest and re-equip for the French campaign. And then Hitler was still dreaming of peace with England. He thought that sparing the BEF from slaughter might demonstrate to you Brits that he was a civilised kind of guy after all. But in the end they concluded that the destruction of the BEF was too good an opportunity to miss.'
'So how would you make the change? You remember the rules we set. You're allowed to go back and whisper in one person's ear.' This was, from Geoffrey's evidence, how the Loom seemed to operate.
'I'd reach back to Hitler's court in those hours when they were debating whether to unleash Guderian. And I'd mess about with the head of Karl Ernst Krafft.'
'Who's he?'
'An astrologer.'
'I thought Hitler didn't believe in astrology.'
'Yes, but there are those around him who do, Himmler and Goebbels to name but two. In 1939 this guy Krafft sent a prediction to Himmler's intelligence service that there would be a bomb attempt against Hitler. Well, the prediction came true.'
Mackie snorted. 'Pure coincidence!'
'Of course. But it gave him an in at court. Mess with him, and you can influence at least two Nazi barons.'
'And if the decision about Guderian was so close, that might be enough to swing it. What would you say to him, though?'
Mary shrugged. 'Some suitable gobbledygook, couched in Aryanmythos phraseology. Hitler is a Taurus, which is supposedly ruled by the element earth. Hitler is a lion on land but lost in the water – so he should spare Britain, an island nation, and concentrate on the ground he can conquer, which after all stretches all the way to Russia. Something like that.'
'Um. So what next? If the BEF had been reprieved-'
'I think everything would have been different,' Mary said. She hesitated, then plunged on, 'I think the German invasion might not have happened at all.'
Mackie raised his eyebrows.
A different Dunkirk would have altered the mood on both sides of the Channel, she argued, and so affected the chains of decision-making that led up to the invasion itself. A saved BEF might have boosted British morale. Churchill might have survived politically – and then, emboldened, he might have forced through such belligerent actions as disabling the French fleet, to prevent it being absorbed by the German navy. As for the Germans, facing a tougher, more resolute Britain, and with the balance of power less in their favour on both land and sea, the invasion might have seemed that bit more daunting.
'They were always disunited at the command level,' she said. 'Each service seeking to shuffle off responsibilities onto the others. If the invasion had seemed more difficult, the infighting might have got that much worse.'
Mackie nodded, but looked doubtful. 'You know, actually I'm not sure how much difference the invasion has made, up to now at any rate, in the bigger picture of the war. Essentially the land war in the west has been stalled since September 1940. It doesn't matter much whether Hitler's troops were held up on this side of the Channel or the other. Without an armistice, he couldn't have withdrawn too many units for the eastern front – I doubt if he could have launched Barbarossa any earlier or more violently. And in the meantime he still had the Luftwaffe. He would have been able to strike at us even without an invasion. Hammer the cities – London especially. And he could attack the Atlantic convoys. In some ways we might have suffered more.'
'That's true,' Mary insisted, 'but with an unoccupied British mainland the allied western front would have been a hell of a lot stronger. You wouldn't have to go through a W-Day counter-invasion to scrape the Germans back into the sea before you could even contemplate going into France, for instance.'
'Perhaps. And with Britain intact, the Japanese might not have been bold enough to launch their invasion of Australia, for instance…' He pulled his lip, clearly not convinced. 'The trouble is, Mary, all the military logic of the time dictated invasion. In that summer the Germans had the momentum of blitzkrieg, and we were the last pawn to be taken. One way or another they'd have had a go, I think, whether the BEF was spared or not. Nice try, Mary, but invasion was inevitable, whatever happened at Dunkirk! Tell you what, though: if I may, I'll hand this to my tame boffins back at Birdoswald. See what they make of it. All right?'
'Sure. I'll give you my notes. So how did you get on? Where would your turning point be?'
'1938,' he said without hesitation.
It was hard to think back that far, to remember what was going on in the world before the great shock of the war. 'That was the year Britain was trying for peace, right?'
'We call it appeasement now,' Mackie said, his face hard. 'Bloody great mistake. We should have declared war when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, thereby tearing up all the guarantees he'd given up to that date.'
'But Britain wasn't ready for war – was it?'
'We were in a damn sight better shape than Hitler. He couldn't have mounted a blitzkrieg. He didn't have the tanks or the trucks. Why, he only had three months' fuel! He'd placed orders for ships, for instance, that could have overwhelmed the Royal Navy a few years later. But he couldn't wait, had to move fast. His Nazi economic expansion was heading for a bust, and at court there was plotting against him, according to our spies. And that's also why he's kept on moving – it was no surprise to me when they took on Russia. Nazism is a bankrupt ideology sustained only by endless expansion and conquest. In retrospect we muffed it; we should have struck when the balance of power was at its most favourable for us. By waiting another year we gave him the chance to arm to the hilt.
'As to what would have followed if we had gone to war then, there are many uncertain factors. I can't imagine the French poking their noses much beyond the Maginot Line, for instance. But at worst it might have been a war like the close of the last show, a lot of infantry manoeuvres. And at best it could all have been over by Christmas, and that would have been that for Hitler and his crew. It certainly would not have been the catastrophic collapse in the west that we actually saw.'
But it would have been politically impossible to have gone to war then, Mary thought. She remembered the mood in Britain, and indeed America. Only twenty years since armistice, another European war was a horrible prospect, and Chamberlain had been a hero, briefly, when he produced what looked like a peace deal. But Mackie was showing a side of himself she had perceived among other Brits, especially in the military. These were a people who believed themselves destined to rule the world. Hitler had humiliated them the first time he put a tank-tread on a south coast beach. Anything to reverse that.
She asked, 'So how would you make the change?'
'Actually we haven't got that far. Not as far as you! I must sack my historians.'
But he was being cagey, and suddenly she wondered if he was lying, if he had some team of military thinkers working on this counter-history for real, just in case. Which made him as bad as the lunatics in Richborough – and as bad as herself, for she had been seduced into seriously contemplating how her Dunkirk project would work. The power implicit in the idea of the Loom was just too tempting.
He smiled. 'Well now, look – enough of the fun stuff. Tell me what you've found out about this old fossil Geoffrey, and his inventory of history-botherers.'