scow, the proposal to divide up the conquered territory was scripted out on a half sheet of paper. This became known as the "percentage agreement", in which the Balkan countries of Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were to be divided either fifty-fifty, seventy five- twenty five, ninety-ten or one hundred to none. As eye witnesses reported, Stalin viewed the paper offered by Churchill, ' took this blue pencil and made a large tick on it... It was all settled in no more time than it took to set down". (Lukacs 58-59). It was fatefully, one of the last agreements Churchill would be able to negotiate singularly with Stalin. The Russian leader, President Roosevelt and later President Harry Truman), would come to understand that Great Britain's were severe as a result of the war. Not only had they lost their claim to a worldwide Empire, they had also lost their will to fight as a consequence of the six years of turmoil. The impression that Great Britain was tired and weak allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate as if they were the senior partners to the agreements at Yalta and Potsdam. Churchill's senior military aide, General George Brooke had been traveling with him near the front lines along the Rhine River on March 26th, 1945 when he wrote in his diary of the Prime Minister's mood, " I feel he considers a sudden and soldierly death at the front a suitable ending to his famous life... freeing him from the never-ending worries which loom ahead with our Russian friends and others..."(Lukacs 79).
             Churchill was by far the more distrustful of Russian expansionism, primarily because it impacted Great Britain's sphere of influence on the continent. The geographical closeness of Stalin's essential annexation of Finland posed a political as well as economic threat. As historian Martin Walker states, "[t] here was as yet no clear division...