Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  “Yes, but they have more important matters to work on than to bring birthday greetings to a prisoner of war.”

  “It is worse than I imagined. Would you not like to send a message to the Führer?”

  “I would indeed.”

  “I was able to have Switzerland included in my passport. As you know, my mother lives in Unoccupied France, so that I have a good pretext for a trip. If I were to get word to the Führer that I had a message from you, he would surely send somebody to get it.”

  “He would do more than that; he would make it possible for you to come to him, if you were willing to take the risk of having the fact leak out.”

  “I cannot think of anything that would please me more. It might be that I could bring out some message to his friends abroad which would help to terminate this blind and cruel fratricide.”

  “I am afraid he has few friends in the so-called democracies now, Lanny.”

  “Many more than you think, take my word for that. But tell me, what message do you wish to send?”

  “Tell him first of all of my undying love and devotion. Tell him that I have never wavered for one moment in that, and never shall.”

  “And what else?”

  “I should have to think, Lanny. I am quite overwhelmed by the idea of being able to send word to him. I think of so many things that ought to be done, and that I might suggest to him if we could speak, but none that is important enough to send as a message. Quote him the English saying that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Remind him of the glorious example of Frederick the Great, who was beaten more than once but refused to recognize it. Tell him that I lie here in the solitude and darkness and try to send him courage and hope by the secret” channels of the subconscious.”

  “He will be deeply touched, Rudi, as I am. You have no concrete news of any sort for him?”

  “What can a poor wretch in what is practically solitary confinement have to tell? Not a word! Describe how I exist, and how I wait for him to bring me deliverance. And of course if he can send me help without too great risk of loss to the Fatherland, I will do what I can to fight my way out.”

  XI

  Lanny kept on giving leads and hints until he satisfied himself that he wasn’t going to get any information of importance from this Number Three Nazi; either the Nazi didn’t have it, or he was no longer trusting his American friend. Lanny had had no part in the scheme of B4 to lure Hess to Britain, but Hess, brooding over the matter in his too abundant leisure, was likely to have hit upon the possibility that Lanny might have been in on the plot. Or he might have decided that all Americans were enemies now. Anyhow, what he wanted was to get information, not to give. He wanted to ask about Lord Wickthorpe and others who were supposed to sympathize with his cause, and after that he wanted to tell his troubles, to repeat the complaints he had put before his jailers and before the Swiss commissioner who had visited him not long ago.

  Lanny decided that the once vigorous master of the N.S.D.A.P.—National Socialist German Workers’ Party—had become a querulous neurotic and a bore. He said: “Rudi, I am allowed only one hour here, and I promised not to overstay. Tell me frankly, do you want me to see the Führer for you?”

  “Of course, Lanny.”

  “Well then, give me something to prove to the Führer that I was here. I hardly need to point out that he will not trust anyone from my part of the world.” Lanny took from his coat pocket a small writing pad and pencil. “Will you write me a few words for him?” When Hess said “Surely,” Lanny went on: “Write it as small as you can, in one corner of the paper, so that I can cut it off and conceal it in my clothing. If it were found, I should be turned over to the American Army and pretty certainly shot.”

  Hess wrote a few words in one corner of the paper. “This won’t look much like my handwriting, written so small,” he commented.

  “Is there some talisman you could give me? Something the Führer would know?”

  “I will give you my wedding ring.” Hess took from his finger a plain gold band. “The Führer gave me this, and he will remember the inscription. To make it more sure, repeat to him what he told me when he put it into my hand: ‘Dies wird das Lästermaul zum Schweigen bringen!’”

  Lanny knew what that referred to. In the old days of political strife the enemies of the Party had accused Adolf Hitler of improper intimacy with his devoted secretary, and they had had a nickname for the secretary, Das Fräulein. The story had it that Hitler therefore had ordered Hess to marry his Klara. “This will shut the mouths of the scandalmongers!”

  Lanny took the ring. “You are doing me an honor, Rudi, and I appreciate it. I will put it into the Führer’s hands, and when the victory has been won, he will return it to you. And now, Lebewohl! Take care of yourself, and keep up your courage. Every moment you give to doubt and worry is a moment wasted. Remember what Goethe said: ‘Alles in der Welt lässt sich ertragen.’”

  They exchanged a firm handclasp, and Lanny picked up the Major’s little bag and went to the door of the room and tapped gently upon it. Almost at once it opened, and Lanny stepped out and a guard stepped in, Lanny left the bungalow and walked to the Major’s residence, in front of which Fordyce was waiting with the car; the B4 man offered to take the bag inside, which Lanny understood to mean that he wasn’t expected to make any report there. “Tell him that everything went off well,” said the P.A., and that was enough.

  XII

  They decided to drive home that night. On the way Lanny gave an account of the conversation, complete except that he said nothing about the scrap of writing and the ring. If B4 had had a recording device installed in the room there would be no harm done, but otherwise Lanny would keep that secret. He said he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to get anything more important out of the prisoner. His guess was that Rudi had been telling the truth, that he didn’t have any contacts with the outside world. The agent professed himself well pleased, but in his heart he must have been disappointed, for if he had helped to uncover a conspiracy it would have been a bright feather in his cap.

  Churchill had suggested to Lanny that he would be interested to hear the outcome of the talk with Hess. But now Lanny told the agent: “I am guessing that I didn’t get enough to make it worth the Prime Minister’s while. Will you tell him, or shall I?”

  “My senior will report to him,” replied Fordyce. “His time is especially taken up at the moment.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” said the other. “I understand that important decisions are being taken.” That was as near as either of them would come to mentioning the fact that the top-flight American staff officers, the commanders of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Forces, had been flown to Britain a week or so previously.

  When they got to London, Lanny bade good-by to his escort and went to his hotel room. There he took out the pad of paper. He read the fine script: “Mein Führer: Ich bin es. Rudi.” Literally translated the sentence means “I am it,” but in English the words are reversed, and people say “It is I,” or more commonly, “It’s me,” against which the grammarians fight in vain. Lanny took his nail scissors and cut off the bit of paper, about two square inches; he folded it once, and carefully sewed it into the lining of his coat—on the other side from Roosevelt’s card. He put the ring on his finger—he, too, being a married man. It was his idea to go back to America soon and use these magical objects—the Ring and the Tarnhelm!—to persuade F.D.R. to let him go into Germany again.

  XIII

  The news of the military conference then going on was a closely guarded secret; but the newspapermen knew it, even though they could not give the least hint of it in print. Rick had told Lanny that the party included General Marshall, Chief of Staff, and Admiral King. Already in London was the newly appointed Commanding General of the American forces in the European Theater, whose name was Eisenhower. Lanny had never heard this name until the appointment was announced; he had to take it for granted that F.D.R. and his advisers knew their man.


  “General Ike” had set up headquarters in some “flats” in Grosvenor Square, one of the fashionable districts of London, and the playful Americans had taken to calling it “Eisenhowerplatz.” It seemed to them a charming stroke of fate that the new “C.G.” should be of German ancestry and carry a German name. The words mean “iron hewer,” and the word “iron” has been through the centuries a favorite of all military-minded German poets and orators. Now a hewer from the prairie state of Kansas had come to hew the German iron, beginning with the “blood and iron” of Bismarck and including the “iron soul” of Adolf Hitler.

  Among the arrivals from Washington was Mr. Harry Hopkins, with the Army physician who labored to keep him alive through the strain of eighteen-hour-a-day conferring. The party had put up at the Dorchester, which was why Lanny hadn’t been able to obtain a room there and had gone to the Savoy. After the trip to Abergavenny Lanny got some sleep, and then he called the Dorchester and asked for Mr. Hopkins’s secretary. To that functionary he pronounced the magic word “Traveler,” which had been given to Hopkins. It had the same effect as at the White House; Hopkins came to the phone.

  “Are you going to be in town for the next three or four days?” he inquired, and Lanny answered that he had meant to spend the time with his little daughter at Wickthorpe Castle, but would come to town in response to either a telegram or telephone call. “Fine!” said Hopkins. “You’ll hear from me.”

  Lanny called Rick, and they took a bus out to Hampstead Heath, and strolled by the ponds near the Vale of Health, where John Keats had lived; and then on to the ancient Spaniard’s Inn, haunt of many poets. They had dinner in a place where no one knew them, and then sat out on the heath, discussing the future of the world, now being decided in town. Rick had attended a press conference given by the “C.G.,” and reported him a straightforward and democratic fellow, a beneficent example to the brass hats of Britain. “The only thing is, I’m afraid he may be a little too kindhearted for a general.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lanny assured him. “Our fellows are really going to fight. I am told that our maneuvers in the Louisiana marshes were quite terrific.”

  “I know,” agreed Rick. “They are drilling like all-possessed in North Ireland and practicing landings all round our coast. The Germans send in a tip-and-run plane now and then and get photographs. They can’t find them very reassuring.”

  Lanny couldn’t say “Roosevelt told me,” but he could say: “I am told that Roosevelt is determined that American forces shall go into action somewhere this year. If it’s not to be across the Channel, then it must be the Mediterranean, or we’ll change our plans and concentrate first upon the Japanese. I don’t suppose your people want that.”

  “Hardly,” said the baronet’s son. “But from all I hear Winnie is dead set against any more Channel crossings until we have overwhelming forces. So I suppose it will be the Mediterranean, and the farther east it is the better it will suit our Tory leader. If he could invade through the Balkans he would consider that he was killing two birds with one stone, winning two wars with one expedition.”

  “The Second World War and the Third,” replied Lanny with a smile. They didn’t need to say more, for they had both been in Paris early in the year 1919 when the descendant of the Duke of Marlborough had come there and labored mightily to persuade the Allies to undertake a holy crusade to crush the cockatrice of Bolshevism, just emerged from its egg and not yet having had time to develop its poison fangs.

  “Winnie hasn’t had a new idea in a quarter of a century,” said the “Pink” journalist. “He wouldn’t get another in the next quarter of a millennium.”

  Lanny thought that was extreme, and replied, “He was a consistent supporter of the League of Nations, and of collective security.”

  XIV

  Lanny took an evening train to Wickthorpe and enjoyed a peaceful sleep, guarded by the elderly dragon lady who had once been his mother-in-law and now was his co-parent, so to speak—he an ordinary parent and she a grand one. She was a grand lady in her own estimation, also in physical aspect. Lanny had no doubt that in her secret heart she disliked him; how could she have any other attitude to a man who had failed to appreciate the magnificent Irma and the equally magnificent Barnes fortune? But he had over her a terrible power; at any time he might choose to take the little Frances away for a holiday, even to America, and if he chose to keep her there, who could guess what the law might say about it?

  The result was that Fanny Barnes the haughty was polite to the point of obsequiousness. Lanny’s room in her cottage was kept inviolate, and the place was silent while he slept or read or pecked on his typewriter. Poor old Uncle Horace, ex-manipulator of Wall Street securities, was rudely forbidden to bore him, and Fanny herself didn’t even invite him to make a bridge four, but left it for him to confer that favor if he chose.

  So Lanny lived a life of ease, roamed the estate, played tennis and bowls with the little one, played the piano for her, and danced with her to the music of radio or phonograph. They lunched with the grandmother, and dined at the Castle with mother and stepfather and whatever guests might be on hand. The child was old enough for that now; she was perfectly behaved; her mother was a strict disciplinarian, and Lanny could find no fault with the upbringing of a future heiress and bride of some British nobleman. He would have liked to teach her some of his ideas, but his role forbade that. He could only hope that events might do it for him.

  He lived this elegant and expensive life, in which even the play was formalized, and all the time he was thinking: “The future of the world is being decided!” Not a line about it in the newspapers, not a word over the radio—you couldn’t have dreamed that the directing brains of the American Armed Forces were in London. But the Earl of Wickthorpe and his countess knew it, and imparted it to Lanny as a state secret, and he was duly grateful for the favor. The guests speculated as to the probable decisions, and of course they expected to hear what a much-traveled art expert thought. Lanny could make a good guess, and did so, for it was important to him to keep the respect of the “Wickthorpe set.” He might have need of it again!

  Early on the morning of the twenty-fifth of July there came a telegram reading: “Can see you this afternoon. Urgent. Harry.” So Lanny bade farewell to this life of a country gentleman, and to his dear little daughter, who could not be told why her father had to leave so soon and never knew when he would return. Always a new heartache, wherever he was, in Connecticut or New York, in Buckinghamshire or Provence! He was sure that he’d be leaving Britain in a few days, but all he could say was: “I’ll write you, darling; and I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  XV

  The President’s right-hand man, clad in a pair of shorts on a hot summer afternoon, looked like a very sick man indeed; but apparently he had learned to live with his diseases, and they did not inhibit his cheerful manner. He offered his visitor a drink, and when it was declined, remarked: “I am on a schedule, too.” Then: “Excuse me if I stretch out,” and let himself down on the bed. He signed Lanny to a chair alongside.

  “You won’t mind if I come right to the point, Lanny. These have been strenuous days for all of us.”

  “Indeed, I am surprised that you remembered me.”

  “The Boss told me to remember you. This is the result of the conference. The British refused positively to go in with us on a cross-Channel invasion this year. They say we couldn’t force the Germans to divert anything from Russia, because the Germans have enough forces in France to withstand anything we could put ashore this year. And another defeat would be a catastrophe.”

  “That’s about what you expected, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but we had hopes. Now we have to change all our plans. It’s to be the Mediterranean. Churchill, of course, wants it to be the Balkans; he fought like a tiger for that. You should have been there—it was quite a drama. The first time he saw me he gave me the devil because I had talked to some of the generals before I talked to him.
That’s not protocol, it seems. He gave me to understand that he was the master of the British Empire, and that he, not any of the generals, is running the British part of this war. He grabbed the law book in which this is written and read me the passages in the same tone as if he were making a speech in Parliament; when he finished each passage he ripped the page out of the book and threw it on the floor. A good show, as they say.”

  “I hope you stood up to him, Harry,” ventured the P.A.

  The harnessmaker’s son looked intently at his visitor. “Listen, brother,” he said. “You are a plutocrat, I take it, and Churchill is an aristocrat; I’m only a democrat, and with a small ‘d.’ But I had to learn to stand up to our business tycoons in the old W.P.A. days, and even before that, in Albany. They want the earth with a blue ribbon tied round it, and when they can’t have it they roar you down. The Boss told me to talk back to Churchill from the beginning, and I did, and he took it like a good sport.”

  “There is a thing that he calls ‘lease-lend,’” remarked Lanny. “Who pays the piper calls the tune.”

  “Not in this case. We can’t go it alone, or even threaten to. We agreed to compromise. We gave up the Channel and the P.M. gave up the Balkans. We’re going to invade through French North Africa and put Rommel into a sack.”

  “Oh, good! That’s been my hope from the beginning.”

  “You understand, this is top secret, and for your own use only.”

  “The Governor seemed to mean that I would be free to share it with one or two persons who are working on the spot.”

  “If he said that, it goes, of course. But be sure they are persons you can trust to the death. You know what it means to be caught spying on the Nazis.”

  “Indeed I know. I have visited their dungeons; and Göring once put me in one. It was his idea of a joke, but I got all the feelings.”