As he drank his coffee he unlocked his briefcase and flicked through the documents it held, to refresh his memory of things outstanding, things to be done when he returned to his unit. They were for the most part unclassified field-orders and annotated map references: with things moving so fast there was hardly time for signals to linger about on the secret list. Operation White, der Fall Weiss, had already been formulated and allowed to mature in the mind of the General Staff for some time – the Nazis were nothing if not thorough.
Then came the plastic folder which imitated a superior pigskin, but in a flashy and debased fashion which gave the show away. This contained the two pamphlets which Dr. Goebbels had issued to them after the latest staff briefing by the Führer. They lay side by side in the pouch, one red and one blue. What was it the little crippled doctor had called them? “A cultural and intellectual justification apparatus”: Ein Kultur – und Intelligenz-Rechtfertigungsapparat! There was a phrase to gobble on, and gobble he had had to with his slight impediment of speech. But what a momentous experience it had been to sit there among some two hundred or more of his fellows, his colleagues, in the new study which the Führer had built for himself in the newborn Chancellery.
They had cooled their heels for a good hour before he came, der Kleinmann, sidling almost shyly through the great doors with an air of preoccupation, almost of vagueness. With a fine synchronisation they rose together, stamped once and heel-clicked – echo-smack of boot-leather was like a giant licking its lips. In unison they greeted him with a hoarse, carlish roar of “Heil!’ and an outflung right arm. To this he responded with a vague gesture of reply and an even vaguer glance, an almost embarrassed glance. Then he released the spring with the words, “Be seated, gentlemen.”
They settled once more like a flock of pigeons and leaned attentively forward to catch, in its most intimate and exact sense, the purport of the words which flowed now from his lips. They began slowly at first, and then gradually gathered speed as his ideas fired them, the obsessional ideas so long harboured and polished in silence and exile. But he looked tired, as well he might, with so much upon his shoulders, so many wrongs to right, so many scores to settle with the world. He was pale also and there were times of near aphasia, as if he were still coming out of an epileptic “aura”. They listened with a kind of fearful emotion to the long trailing diatribe.
And while they listened they looked around them at the immense room, memorising as well as they could the details of this pregnant encounter with the man-god of the future who was delineating for them the spiritual frontiers of the new estate. The prospects of the freedom these ideas offered made them feel buoyant and shriven; for all that they were going to do now the Führer offered them an absolution in advance. Belief – that was all that was necessary for them; the rest followed automatically. One could become drunk on such rhetoric. Many of them felt moved, their faces flushed, their breathing quickened. So it went on until suddenly, abruptly, like a motor running out of fuel, it ended and the silence flowed in upon them all.
It had taken only nine months to bring to birth this huge edifice of a Chancellery with its nine hundred rooms, plus the great operations-room and study – the cavern in which the Führer was going to live and work; to guide this huge battleship towards the new millennium. He had worked long and lovingly on the plans with the architect Speer. It was massive, subdued, theatrical, but of a classical theatre suitable to the age. As for the lion’s den, it had all the middle-class allure of a classicism such as would satisfy the criteria of an architect used to building caféterias. But it was impressive, because its owner, the slight man with the moustache-tuft and the side-saddle hair, was impressive. One asked oneself how he had arrived at this point. Then one noticed his eyes.…
Von Esslin, normally no sycophant, leaned forward and pretended to take notes; the eyes distressed him, and he disguised his anxiety in this fashion. From time to time he looked about him, taking stock of the place. The acoustics were really excellent.
The monumental room was twenty-seven metres in length, fifteen in breadth, and ten metres high. The air moved tepidly and sluggishly about it despite the well-studied ventilation of the place. The windows were six metres in height and framed in heavy curtains of grey velvet. And then everywhere there was Greek marble, specially ordered; the workmen had been generously rewarded for working overtime at Pentelikos to cut the slabs for their future monarch. Marble grey, rose and coral. Then, to offset the delicacy of these tones, there were tapestries – admirable Gobelins. The ceiling was carved into two hundred and twelve equal caissons, each one offset by mouldings of a rigid geometric style. A sculptured frieze repeated unto infinity, as it were, while upon every column flowered six double torch-holders of unctuous bronze above the initials A.H. cut in a style which hinted at a Doric order. On the cool floors glowed oriental carpets of impeccable pedigree. Three tall standard lamps of bronze presided over the massive, gleaming, walnut-wood desk and four high-backed chairs before the work-desk. It was more than convincing, it was overwhelming.
There was a sense of anti-climax when all of a sudden the discourse stopped and the Leader rose to leave them. Once more they repeated the ritual heel-clicking and the hoarse cry. Then he was gone, and the cripple came into the room and took his place, while uniformed orderlies distributed the little plastic pouch with its two pamphlets. Goebbels waited until the distribution was complete, and until the tall doors had closed behind the orderlies. Then he cleared his throat and in a quiet, unemphatic voice began his exposition; it was pitched in a low key as if to form a contrast to the harangue which had preceded it. Here they were on more familiar ground, for most of what he had to say was orthodox and free of surprises; it was what one read every day in the newspapers: the wrongs of Germany which would soon be righted, the intolerable provocations they had suffered from inferior breeds. The tone, however, was reasonable and expository. Germany had now found her true path and was going to go forward with the building of a new world, a new order of things which would be more in keeping with the order of nature. Ordnung – he almost sang the word; it clamped together the whole edifice of his thought. It was a rivet in the flanks of this huge steel battleship which would soon be rolling across the land and the sea, promoting the new Golden Age. But here the speaker reined and with uplifted finger warned them to keep always in mind the two basic foes of all they stood for – the two forces of darkness which they must overthrow in order to achieve their objectives. They would find the documents of the case in the little plastic pouch. They must be studied with care for they contained the whole truth of the German mission; every field commander should study them. These and only these two forces stood between them and the new Aryan order. That was the germ of the matter.
One might perhaps have expected an anthology of Nietzsche quotations, expressing all his vehement anti-semitism (sentiments which, forty years later, would prove to have been forged and inserted by the philosopher’s sister and her husband); but no, the two documents which nestled in the little plastic pouch were, respectively, the text of the celebrated Protocols of Zion, which outlined the Jewish plot to conquer the world, and the extraordinary Will of Peter the Great,* equally a plot to redeem it through Pan-Slavism.
The terrible thing was that there was nobody with whom one could discuss such matters, except hypocritically, for to express reservations about such apparent trash would at this stage have been taken as a treasonable act. Each was locked in the private cell of his doubts and fears – with no hope of an exit this side of the war. The position was an intolerable one for men who could still regard themselves as men of honour. Von Esslin sat in the corner of the staff office with these documents on his knee, staring at the sunshine upon the trees and pondering. Army folk were so innocent of all political instinct. It was best to think nothing, to say nothing – to throw oneself into the marvellous liberation of blind action; to become part of this vast steel juggernaut aimed at Poland, and leave the thinking to others who k
new more than he did. These were the thoughts which filled him with elation – the promise of glory and the fulfilment of his professional curiosity in the matter of tanks. Could they be directed from division, or would the general staff have to ride on their backs, so to speak, in order to control the pulse-beat of the battle as it unrolled? He would soon find all this out, unless by some last-minute chance the wind turned and the French and English changed their orientation. Yes, but even then …
He was impatient to get back to his command post, to his staff unit, to his professional friends who were all as keyed up as he was; he was keen to sanction the last signal before battle, the “Last Letters Home” which would tell the troops, if they did not already know, that the die was cast, the attack ordered. When these thoughts passed through his mind he was seized by a sort of vertigo – a desire on the rampage. It was at such moments that he longed for a piano with which to assuage all the confusion of his thoughts and impulses.
How slowly history evolves! Each drop from the icicle takes an age to form and to fall – or so it seemed to those who, like himself, waited for the definitive signal. He motored up by night, through a country of forests and marches where now the chief vegetation seemed to be of steel. At a turn in the main road, by a bridge, he came upon some sort of accident, to judge by the flare of headlights and the silhouettes of figures busily occupied around a couple of lorries which had turned turtle and lay in the ditch with their wheels in the air, like insects turned over on their backs. “An accident,” said the driver. With so much traffic, in so many complicated formations moving about by night, it was hardly to be wondered at. But there seemed to be nobody of rank about to direct whatever operation might be necessary to free the road and Von Esslin jumped out and made his way to the scene. Then he saw that the lorries had contained crosses, thousands of wooden crosses which filled the ditch and the field beyond, gleaming white in the sterile lights of the halted cars. Crosses! For some reason the sight threw him into a towering rage; he began to give orders with a hysterical violence which surprised even himself. The soldiers on the scene, aghast alike at his eminence and the febrile fury of his rage, began to buzz like an overturned hornets’ nest themselves. Von Esslin all but screamed. He ordered the drivers to present themselves and berated them. All three were put upon a charge at his behest. Then, still fuming and feeling almost faint with the force of his emotion, he returned to his car and resumed his journey.
He soon forgot, for the mighty rhythm engendered by the Grand Army in movement is irresistible, is all-engulfing. They were all diminished as individuals, shorn of their personal responsibility by the power of its motion. Its coils and meshes held them fast while its gathering momentum rolled them irrevocably down, as if on the breast of some great river, towards the fulfilling ocean. But a river of chain-mail, a river of meshed steel. Von Esslin, once he had regained his place in all the warmth and tension of friendship with his fellow adventurers, found himself as if upon the bridge of some great raft, rolling with ever-gathering speed down towards the deeps which beckoned them; towards the new human order which they had been set to build and to inspire with their presence. He looked around the map caravan at the brown, intense, beefy faces and the big red hands; his heart swelled with emotion, with affection for them all. From the depths of the night they were setting out towards a new dawn – by the time the sun was up the whole face of history would have been changed!
The edges of the darkness trembled and here and there the horizon flickered with light, as if from a distant storm’s sheet lightning. But they knew it was the first rumour of engagement, the armoured units in their delving had already locked horns with the enemy scouts. The whole symphony had been set in motion within two hours of dawn; the great animal was uncoiling itself, at first gingerly and then with increasing confidence and speed, unfurling the darkness with its few points of necessary light as it got into gear, with only the suffused roaring of an ocean grinding upon shingle to herald its advance across the plains.
At first light the air bombardment was to begin – an innovation in tactics which blasted vast ragged holes in the front. They might have been forgiven for imagining themselves to be taking part in some great historic saga, were it not for the distasteful bearing of the special units which were attached to them. The prisons had been scoured to brim their ranks. They would follow the fighting men and start the task of pillage, rape and extermination which was so carefully embodied in their official directives, issued on the field-grey signal paper which the para-military Schutzaffeln affected. “Fear of the Reich must be instilled at whatever cost. No effort must be spared.” They were a special breed, these men, furtive and monosyllabic and withdrawn. The officers smiled without unclenching their teeth; they exuded guilt and unease as do all people who enjoy inflicting pain – jailors, inquisitors, shop stewards, executioners. The concentration camps had allowed their choicest disciplinarians to gain prestige in the hated and feared death’s-head uniform of these modern centurions. The regular knew them to be lackeys on whom the authority to murder had been conferred; their shame ignited his own, for he knew that their task was to turn the whole of Europe into one smoking knacker’s yard.
They moved forward now from darkness into light and soon came to the edge of those endless plains of yellow harvest wheat, still under a cerulean sky which would soon be full of small black specks swerving and chattering like distant magpies. Then sound came, volumes of it, varieties of it all mingled into one earth-trembling concave weight upon the flinching ear-drums; they could not hear themselves speak. Their mouths worked. And slowly, from two ends of the horizon, the world began to burn, the wheat began to burn, racing as if to meet them.
Seventh and Tenth Panzers had been unkennelled like hounds and directed deliberately across this flaming prairie, racing to make contact with the invisible foe. They had supposed that their speed would carry them through, but a sudden ambush supervened, the fires elongated, unrolling before them as they raced, and they found themselves encircled by the flames. Von Esslin saw his cherished tanks going off like chestnuts, their petrol tanks exploding in the heat. The command car turned back, hesitated. He swore at his driver and urged him to continue, to follow the armour, but by now they were at the edge of the flame area and more vulnerable than the exploding tanks. It was only a minor incident in an uninterrupted chain of successful actions – they were almost bored with the reiterated signals which told of objectives attained, objectives over-run, enemy units bypassed or completely encircled. A small set-back, yet it played upon his amour-propre and he felt culpable as well as cheated of something – what he did not know. He was relieved to discover that he was sitting in a puddle of blood; a nasty cut in his forearm had soaked him. In his excitement he had experienced no pain; now the wound began to smart. He called for an orderly and stripped off his coat, the better to present his wound for bandaging. Dense smoke had succeeded the panorama of flame. Units were poking about in the black charred stubble for his exploded chestnuts of tanks. There was a bit of shrapnel in his sleeve; the orderly picked it out and handed it to him saying, “A souvenir, sir.” Von Esslin’s humour was restored by this trifling expiation. At this rate they would soon be in Warsaw.
* See Appendix.
THREE
Into Egypt
THE EMBARKATION WENT OFF WITHOUT A HITCH AT DEAD of night and by morning the royal yacht was well out to sea en route for Egypt.
In his notebook Blanford wrote:
Immortality must feel something like this for a poet. Suppose I were to tell you that here, in perfect peace, we sail eastward under cloudless skies upon a windless cerulean sea with not one Homeric curl in it.… The Khedive is the royal yacht which is carrying us into Egypt and safety. No, it is totally unreal to find myself here under an awning of brightly striped duck, lounging beside the calm Prince, drinking a whisky and soda with grave reflective delight. Contemplating the abyss which has opened at our feet – the war. The Prince himself has been transform
ed into an imposing maritime figure, for he has put on yachting tenue complete with white trousers of some magnolia-soft tissue, set off by a blazer and an old heraldic yachting cap bearing the insignia of both the royal house and the Alexandria Yacht Club. The blazer is all Balliol, Oxford.
From time to time, so pure and so encouraging is the air, we doze off for a few moments; then we awake and continue the Arabic lesson which is going to transform me into a linguist If there is world enough and time.
(My darling, these lines, somewhat to my surprise, are written to you and not to Livia. I write them because I feel freed by the probability, nay certainty, of never seeing you and Sam again in this lifetime! I write them from the part of myself which has slowly and secretly turned to you. Typically enough I did not recognise the situation at first. But Livvie did. I noticed her jealousy but not its cause. I did not realise the truth until I was on the very brink of kissing you goodbye. But Livvie did and hated you accordingly – as much as one permits hate for a sister. I simply did not know or did not realise until the train bore you away.)
And so here I am, like a younger version of Tibullus without the sea-sickness. My poetry is crowding on sail. My mother is dead, my friends dispersed, my future uncertain, my solitude a delicious weight. One feels in all this a sort of affirmation for some early promise made by the good fairy. She must have said: “This one will be introspective, cut off from ordinary life, proficient in solitude but subject to enchantments because of his insight.”