"James P. Hogan - The Proteus Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

stable, and summer pavilion, interspersed with flagstone terraces and copious shrubbery. Running
water pumped from a reservoir at the bottom of the grounds returned via a system of fishponds,
duckponds, cascades, and rockeries to enliven the gardens and provide a soothing background of
rustling and chattering. Solid, immutable, and serene, the house and its setting epitomized the
English ideal of secure, comfortable, leisurely contentment.

The Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill, parliamentary member for the electoral
constituency of Epping, gazed out at the scene from behind his desk in the south-facing, upstairs
study. Such serenity had not arisen of itself, as part of the natural order of things, he
reflected. It had been fought for by a nation struggling for generations to win and hold a
survival niche against forces of disruption, destruction, and violence that were not of its
invention, but which had existed as part of human nature's darker side for as long as humanity had
existed. Freedom had been won only at heavy cost, and to survive, it had to be protected
jealously. As in the gardens below the window, the blooms and fruits of civilization, carefully
cultivated over long periods of time, would soon be overrun by the weeds of barbarism if the
gardeners relaxed their vigilance. Churchill made a brief note of the analogy for possible future
use, then turned to relight his cigar from a candle kept burning on a side-table for the purpose.
He blew a stream of smoke across the desk and resumed reading the speech that he had made to his
constituents five months previously, late in August 1938.

It is difficult for us...here, in the heart of peaceful, law-abiding England, to realize
the ferocious passions which are rife in Europe, he had said. During this anxious month you have
no doubt seen reports in the newspapers, one week good, another week bad; one week better, another
week worse. But I must tell you that the whole state of Europe and of the world is moving steadily
towards a climax which cannot be long delayed.

That had been before the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler at Munich and the throwing of
Czechoslovakia to the Nazi wolves. The weeds were threatening to engulf the garden, and the
gardeners were still asleep.

Churchill and a small group, predominantly of Conservatives, had tried to waken them. For
years now, although persistently excluded from cabinet office and the inner ranks of
government, he had been trying to waken them. Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations and
the Disarmament Conference in 1933, just nine months after Hitler came to power, should have given
ample warning. But the nation hadn't heeded. The Nazi blood purge of the following year, clear
evidence that a powerful, industrialized state was being taken over by criminals and subordinated
to the gutter ethics of street gangs, had failed to provoke the indignation that could have
extinguished Corporal Hitler's grotesque social and political experiment in its infancy.
And it had been the firm reaction of Mussolini, before he changed sides, not of the West,
that had foiled a premature Nazi coup in Austria shortly afterward, in which the Austrian
Chancellor, Dollfuss, had been murdered.



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In 1935, when Germany openly defied the Versailles Treaty by introducing military
conscription and announcing the existence of the Luftwaffe, the Allies had responded by sitting
down at Stresa and solemnly registering an empty protest; then the British had rushed to make