Admiral Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, talked of burning Berlin to the ground, dividing Germany into small principalities, and imposing a fifty-year occupation. Oliver Stanley, the secretary of war, and Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, favored a hundred-year occupation. The German people should have no illusions “as to where the mastery in Europe lay.”

Of all the personalities that Welles met on his trip, none made as deep an impression as Churchill.

Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the fire smoking a 24 inch cigar and drinking a whiskey and soda. It was quite evident that he had consumed a good many whiskeys before I arrived. As soon as the preliminary courtesies had been concluded, Mr. Churchill commenced an address which lasted exactly one hour and fifty minutes, during which I was never given an opportunity to say a word. It constituted a cascade of oratory, brilliant and always effective and always interlarded with considerable wit. It would have impressed me more had I not already read his book . . . [of] which his address to me constituted a rehash.

By March 16, when Welles returned to Rome for a second visit with Mussolini, rumors of war were everywhere. From Norway to Spain, people sensed a real shooting war was coming, maybe in Scandinavia, maybe in France, maybe somewhere else, but it was coming, and with spring, the traditional campaign season almost upon Europe, it was coming very soon. “The minute hand is pointing at one minute before midnight,” Mussolini said, then told Welles about his recent conversation with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister. According to von Ribbentrop Germany “would consider no solution other than a military victory.” Hitler expected to conquer France within three or four months and for Great Britain to crumble shortly thereafter. The prospect of war seemed to energize Mussolini. Welles noticed that “the nervous oppression” that the Duce had evidenced at their first meeting was gone. Mussolini’s eyes closed less frequently, his fleshy face was more animated, and his manner more relaxed and casual. Two days later, at a conference on the Brenner Pass, the Duce pledged to Hitler that Italy would march with Germany.

Welles returned to Washington convinced that the principal obstacle to peace was not the statuses of Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. As serious and difficult as those issues were, the principal obstacle was insecurity. Each side was preparing for total war because each side believed its enemies were bent on its annihilation. Hitler was responsible for fomenting the atmosphere of distrust, but the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent humiliations imposed on Germany had given him a lot to work with. In Welles’s view, the only solution to what was essentially an existential crisis was a security guarantee imposed by an outside force strong enough to enforce the guarantee. In his final report, he suggested that the force might take the form of an American-led coalition of neutral states. But even supposing an isolationist Congress would agree to sanction such a measure, by the time Welles filed his report it was spring, and spring was the campaign season in Europe.

CHAPTER FOUR

SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING SPECTACULAR

To her admirers, the Comtesse Hélène de Portes was a great beauty. It was true that the comtesse had a large nose and a chin that was not all a chin should be, and in certain quarters of Paris her taste in hats was regarded as almost tragic. “Perfectly silly,” Edward Spears said, of “the ridiculous saucer shaped contraptions” the comtesse favored. To admirers, however, these minor flaws were more than offset by a head of wonderfully thick, dark, curly hair, sparkling eyes, “very good feet and ankles,” and a figure so perfect it constituted a French national treasure. “She had a way of walking,” wrote Elie Bois, a columnist for Le Petite Parisian, “that disclosed the suppleness of her limbs and the agility of [a] whole body maintained by physical exercise.” Clare Boothe, who was spending the spring in Paris, thought Bois was being ridiculous. Describing Hélène de Portes as the “du Barry of France” is like “describing Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt as the Cleopatra of the New Deal,” she said.

The journalist René Benjamin once described the Marquise de Crussol, the comtesse’s great rival, as “a pretty little gilded goat,” but Benjamin’s was a minority opinion. Small, with “peculiar features,” the Marquise de Crussol possessed none of the comtesse’s physical glamour and bore the additional burden of a humiliating nickname—“La Sardine qui estee Cure Sole”—the sardine who took itself for a sole: a reference to the advertising slogan of her family’s sardine-canning business.