by Bodie Thoene
Clement Atlee, head of the Labour Party, and Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberals, both gave speeches criticizing the handling of the war. But in Mac’s opinion, the fireworks didn’t really get started until Labour Member of Parliament Josiah Wedgwood gave a speech in which he accused the Royal Navy of cowardice.
Just as Wedgwood was finishing, Murphy nudged Mac’s elbow and pointed. Into the chamber walked Admiral Sir Roger Keyes. Someone Mac did not recognize handed a note to the highly decorated officer.
The face of Keyes got as red as the ribbons of the medals on his chest. This naval hero of the Great War demanded and was granted the right to reply immediately to the insult. “I have repeatedly offered to lead a fleet of warships into the fjords,” Keyes said, “and just as repeatedly have been told that the army had the situation well in hand. How can our troops be expected to advance along a narrow shoreline under constant and undeterred fire from the German ships? It is not a lack of courage with the sailors! It is a failure of leadership in this government!”
Cheering from the Opposition Party was greeted with stony silence and deep frowns from the government side of the House—Sir Roger had been one of their own.
Mac wondered if Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, would get tarred with the same brush as Chamberlain.
David Lloyd George, the Opposition statesman who had led England during the 1914 war, rose to speak. Adjusting his pince-nez, he theatrically ran a hand through his mane of silver hair and attacked. “This country is in greater peril now than during the whole of the Great War. What is the good of sea power if it is unused?”
A chorus of “Hear, hear!” sounded from both sides of the aisle.
“But I do not think that the First Lord is to be blamed for the mistakes,” Lloyd George continued.
Churchill popped up from his seat beside Chamberlain. His brooding pose had made Mac think that Winston was scarcely following the debate, but this sudden spring proved that idea false. “I take my full share of the responsibility, sir,” Churchill said.
“Admirable,” Lloyd George replied, “but I hope that the First Lord will not become an air-raid shelter to keep splinters from hitting his colleagues!”
Applause followed these words.
It was unexpected support. Maybe Churchill could surface from the sinking ship after all.
Leo Amery was called on to speak next. It was Amery who had attacked Chamberlain’s conduct of the war clear back in September; his views had not moderated since then. “We must have men in government who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, resolution, and thirst for victory.”
Mac saw Amery study the faces of the Members of Parliament, obviously thinking about what he was about to say, judging its timing. “I quote certain words of Oliver Cromwell spoken to a government he judged no longer fit to rule. I do this with reluctance, because those to whom it applies are old friends of mine. But this is what he said.” Amery stopped and stared squarely at the top of Chamberlain’s bowed head. “He said, ‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’”
As the Speaker called for order to be restored, Mac thought that there was no longer any question whether Neville Chamberlain would remain prime minister. The resultant vote of confidence on the conduct of the war produced a Conservative victory, but only by a margin of eighty-one votes. Every single uniformed member of Chamberlain’s party deserted him and voted with the Opposition. Clearly, it was time for him to go.
5
The Crossing
On May 8, as instructed, Josie left the Brasseur Hotel carrying only her passport, twelve dollars’ worth of Luxembourg francs, and the precious volume of Goethe’s Faust with the travel documents of Yacov Lubetkin sealed beneath the end sheets. Nothing else.
Driving the car from Luxembourg City into the village of Wasserbillig, she parked at a Bierstube whose windows overlooked the river and the bridge into Germany. She gave the dubious barkeeper a slip of paper instructing him to turn the automobile over to Andre Chardon, who was staying in Luxembourg, if she should fail to return from her trek into the Reich.
A charge of excitement went through her as she walked onto the Wasserbillig Bridge. Below the metal girders she could see the slow-moving river that divided Luxembourg from Germany. Pontoon bridges were built halfway across from the German shore. Terminating in the center of the languid current, the pontoons punctuated the border at one-hundred-yard intervals both upstream and down. Even if the little army of Luxembourg blew up their half of the Wasserbillig Bridge, how long would it take the Nazi engineers to slip the rest of the pontoons into place for the crossing? Then how long would it be before the panzers would overflow the Luxembourg side of the riverbank?
Midway across the Wasserbillig Bridge was a gatehouse and customs office festooned with warning signs and capped with the swastika flag. A handsome young Wehrmacht sentry stared through Josie without curiosity as she approached the barrier. He stopped her with stiff formality and demanded her passport.
He seemed unimpressed by the American document but not at all surprised that an American journalist was walking on his bridge and entering Germany. “Your destination, Fräulein?”
“Treves.”
“Purpose?”
“Sightseeing.” This she said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the Siegfried Line were not between her and Treves . . . as if she were a tourist out for a day trip, and there was not a war on.
Without comment, the youth directed her to an anteroom in the customs office, where the Nazi officials took on a much more sinister tone and appearance. The manner of the questioning was far from friendly.
A poster bearing the likeness of the Führer glared down on a small assembly of civilians: two men and three women who had crossed the bridge ahead of Josie. They were returning to Germany by order of the Reich. They all seemed unhappy about it. One portly, middle-aged woman wept continuously without any attempt to hide the reason for her tears.
“She is sad because we have to leave our little grandchildren,” her pale, frightened husband kept explaining over and over to the interrogators. “She will feel better when we get back home. We have not been there in ten years.”
The resident Gestapo agent was unimpressed. In his eyes something was definitely wrong with a German citizen who had stayed away from the Fatherland so long and who wept so copiously at the prospect of returning. As Josie waited in line behind the woman, she watched the official tear through the couple’s luggage. He ferreted out a bar of chocolate, held it up in triumph, stripped it of paper, and broke it into tiny pieces as the woman’s weeping became louder.
“Do you not know it is illegal to smuggle contraband chocolate into the Reich?” He roared his displeasure as if her crime was a personal offense. With a wave of his hand he summoned a white-uniformed Nazi matron, who forcibly hauled the unhappy woman into an examination room while her meek husband was escorted to a second room.
The woman screamed as the door was closed. Then it was Josie’s turn at the declaration counter. Oblivious to the howls of the captive, the officer snapped open Josie’s passport and examined it without comment.
Cold eyes pivoted to study her press uniform. Then back to the passport photograph. Then to her face and the press badge on the shoulder of her jacket.
“Fräulein Marlow, is it? An American journalist, are you? Anything to declare today, have you?” He smiled, but his eyes were dull and hard, like the eyes of a copperhead snake Josie had nearly stepped on as a child in Arkansas. The impression given was that he could kill her without a twinge of emotion simply because she put her foot down wrong.
“What is the purpose of your visit to the Reich, Fräulein Marlow?”
“Sightseeing.” She tried not to look at the conspicuously posted sign that listed the names and photographs of foreign travelers who had been convicted and executed as spies in the last twelve months.
He c
losed the passport. “Have you anything to declare?”
“Thirty Luxembourg francs. Nothing else.”
“Empty your pockets.”
She did so. The copy of Faust was placed on the counter. Heaping coins and cash onto the cover of her book, she slid it across to him.
He picked up the bills one by one, as if checking for counterfeit currency. Stacking the cash neatly to one side, he retrieved the volume of Goethe.
The rush of Josie’s blood pumped in her ears. She focused her eyes on the small rectangle of Hitler’s mustache as the agent examined each page with the same intensity with which he had checked the bills. What was he looking for? A code? Some message pricked into the paper with the point of a pin?
“What is this, Fräulein?”
“A copy of Faust.”
Suspicion hardened the line of his mouth. Josie resisted the urge to turn and run out the door—to escape back into the safety of Luxembourg.
“Why do you carry Goethe’s work into the Reich?”
She shrugged. “Something to read on the ride into Treves. Faust is not among the banned books. Germany is quite fond of Goethe, I understand.”
He thumbed through it as the wailing of the woman prisoner in the examining room diminished to a whimper. Beads of sweat formed on Josie’s brow. The prickle of fear crept up the back of her neck. Her mouth tasted like iron.
Would he notice the thickness of the baby’s forged papers sealed beneath the end sheets?
“Why exactly did you choose this volume, Fräulein?”
“Because I was certain I would not be inconvenienced if I carried approved reading materials into the Reich. If I was wrong, then keep it for yourself.” She glanced accusingly at the splintered slab of chocolate. “You can see I have come here empty-handed to avoid any waste of time at the crossing. One volume is not worth it. I can buy myself a dozen more just like it.”
He furrowed his brow and silently read through a passage. “It is not to my liking.” Snapping it shut, he passed it back to her, along with the neatly stacked bills. “Heil Hitler.” He thumped the stamp down on her passport and dismissed her, turning his reptilian gaze onto a sallow old woman who brooded in line behind Josie.
As Josie emerged into the spring warmth, the old woman was arguing with the official without fear of Hitler or his splendor or his might. The words were bitter and loud. Josie could hear the curses as she walked unsteadily toward the German end of the Wasserbillig Bridge.
A taxi driver was waiting for her on the German side of the Wasserbillig Bridge. A squat, muscular little man with swarthy skin and big ears protruding from beneath a Jäger’s hat, he smiled broadly with gapped teeth and waved at her approach. He leaned against the bent fender of an ancient taxi. Tires were worn down to the fabric. Windows were cracked, but they had been polished. Yet the taxi was clean. The metal of the fenders shone through what had been black paint.
“You are the American. Ja! It is plain to see. Guten Morgen, Fräulein Marlow. I am Hermann Goltz,” the driver said joyfully as he opened the back door for Josie and bowed slightly like a chauffeur as she entered. He waved happily at the sentries, who stared at the scene from their posts on the bridge. “You see; I promised I would be here. Although I had to wait. I thought perhaps you would not come, but I waited here all the same. Where do you want to go?”
“To Treves. Porta Nigra Hotel.” Josie gestured broadly eastward where the forward blockhouses of the Siegfried Line were in plain view.
“Very good, Fräulein. As we travel I shall point out all objects of interest along the way. Americans like to see the sights. I have always enjoyed guiding Americans. They do not come here often enough these days.” He closed the door and hurried around the car to slip in behind the wheel.
Josie believed that she was quite possibly the first American that he had seen in many months.
The taxi lurched into motion. The engine had a knock that made the vehicle shudder like a dog shaking water from its fur as they turned off the main highway to Treves. Instead, their route followed a secondary road that skirted a high bluff and led away from the river. This road was clogged with military traffic. Motorcycles roared past. Armored cars and troop lorries rumbled off along snaking side roads to isolated blockhouses and rows of mobile artillery set to face France as well as little Luxembourg.
It was clear to Josie within minutes that she was seeing what she was not meant to see. She pictured the poster commemorating the execution of foreign spies by the Reich. She imagined her own face smiling serenely out at future travelers. She felt the sick chill of apprehension.
“How is it you are able to get a pass to move so freely through this zone?” she dared to ask.
“A pass?” He chortled. “I have no pass, Fräulein!”
“Then how . . . ?”
“They do not ask me. Who would be here unless they were allowed?” Another laugh ended in a contented sigh. Then he continued pointing out items of interest while Josie sat grim and pale in the rear seat. “Americans enjoy the back roads. Unusual sights. I know this well. How else will you see unless I guide you? This first line is six miles deep,” instructed the taxi driver over the clacking engine. “The second line behind Treves is much deeper. Many more troops. Much more going on. But you can see. They are all moving forward!”
This information was expressed with the same enthusiasm Josie had once heard in the voice of a Beefeater conducting tours of the Tower of London. But this military zone was no tourist trap, no point of interest to be found in a guidebook. Josie knew she was witnessing some terrible and momentous force being set in place, like the pieces of a chess game. And yet the taxi moved with absolute freedom through the forbidden region of the German West Wall!
Hermann Goltz greeted military sentries cheerfully. He expressed to them his delight in the beauty of the day. They smiled back. Perhaps it was his audacity that kept him from being stopped and challenged. No one driving such a contraption could be a spy.
He pulled to the side of the road as a convoy of troop lorries blocked the way in front of them. Through the spiderweb pattern of the cracked glass, Josie looked out on an erratic field of green concrete barriers that traced the folds of the hills and valleys on and on into the lovely spring haze. A sentry beside a roadblock fixed his gaze on the taxi. But he did not move forward to question Hermann.
“This,” the driver exclaimed loudly and within hearing of the sentry, “is a tank trap. The French call them asparagus beds. The French are very amusing.” Hermann laughed.
The sentry laughed, too.
Only Josie remained unamused. Her mind was racing with the dreadful implications of what she was seeing. Enormous artillery pieces on carriages with rubber wheels were being hauled toward the Meuse River, toward Belgium, toward Luxembourg. Not toward France.
She had observed enough to be shot as a spy a dozen times over. She would tell Andre everything she had witnessed, but she did not want to see any more. Her only desire was to get the baby and then to get out of the way of the Nazi steamroller poised to flatten everything on the other side of the river.
“Is there a quicker way to Treves?” she asked.
“Ja. But very uninteresting. Americans like to see the sights.”
With that they were waved on through the chicane by the sentry. The highway ran parallel to an obviously occupied trench punctuated by a series of large gun emplacements.
“Fräulein Marlow! Look there,” shouted Hermann as he pointed to a cliff wall that rose from the side of the road. A half-dozen sentries observed him with fascinated curiosity but made no move to stop him. “It is a fort. You see there where the colors change from green to brown? Very good, is it not?”
And then Josie saw that the rock was no rock at all but a heap of concrete piled up and painted to match the cliff face. No reconnaissance plane could pick it out. It was nearly invisible, even close up. The Nazis had intended that this place be kept a secret; otherwise they would not have gone to all the
trouble of making it a secret.
Josie averted her eyes. “Please, Herr Goltz. Take me to Treves now. The shortest route.”
He was disappointed. The tour had only just begun in his eyes. Still, he agreed and pointed the taxi toward the city. There were still plenty of sights if one knew where to look, he explained. There were antiaircraft guns in haystacks—88 mm artillery pieces concealed inside steep-gabled little farmhouses and barns.
“Just think,” the fool said brightly as they passed a house that resembled something out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, “what the French air force would not give to know that there is an 88 mm long rifle hidden under that roof! When it begins to send its shells into the French troops, the French generals will not even know where to look for it. They will not know where to drop the bomb to stop it, will they? The French will be very sorry they did not drop their bombs first.” He turned and winked at Josie. “I think it will begin very soon now, Fräulein. Perhaps within days. The ‘Sitzkrieg’ is about to become the Blitzkrieg.”
***
“Monsieur Snow is not at home, I tell you!” the elderly butler insisted.
But Andre Chardon had come too far and was on too serious a mission to be stopped now. He hadn’t been able to do anything about Elaine Snow’s death. He was determined not to let the same thing happen to her child—their child.
He pushed past the butler into the spacious foyer of the steel magnate’s Luxembourg mansion. “Then I will wait for him.”
“You must ring for an appointment, Monsieur Colonel,” the man pleaded. He glanced nervously over his shoulder at a pair of heavy mahogany double doors.
“His office?” Andre asked.
“No, Colonel.” The man stepped between Andre and the doors. “If you do not leave at once, I shall regretfully be forced to telephone the—”
The panels slid back, interrupting the threat. Abraham Snow, a dignified presence with white hair and a drooping mustache, wearing a suit and waistcoat from another era, stood framed in the arched doorway of the study. He viewed Andre for a long moment and then glanced up at the landing of the grand staircase.