Traitor's Gate

by Michael Ridpath

  Chilton Coombe was not a grand house, but it was a beautiful one, with a long history, originally built in the sixteenth century. Honeysuckle, vines and a pink rose climbed up the faded red brickwork. A lawn sloped down to a rock garden and a small pond. The house and garden nestled in a narrow valley scored into the flank of a small range of hills overlooking the flat Somerset levels, which stretched as far as the ancient domed hills of Glastonbury and its tor to the north and Cadbury to the west. Conrad’s grandfather had bought the house and surrounding estate fifty years before and although Conrad had lived in London for most of his childhood, he had looked forward to the long holidays spent there with his brothers and sisters. His father had inherited the estate in 1931, and since then his parents had divided their time between there and their town house in Kensington Square.

  From the moment he walked into the hall he could tell from the atmosphere that his father was in a good mood. Millie, his tall, rangy, 22-year-old sister, almost skipped as she hugged him welcome. His mother’s forehead was wrinkle-free as she kissed him, and his brother Reggie’s grin was vacuous and uninhibited.

  A few moments later Lord Oakford himself appeared from his study. Tall, with a spare frame and a stoop, his hair was still sleekly black, but his moustache had flecks of grey. The left sleeve of his jacket was empty, the permanent reminder of how he had won his Victoria Cross. He grinned when he saw Conrad, and his restless eyes quickly assessed his son. ‘Wonderful to see you. How was your flight?’

  ‘A bit bumpy. Some of the other passengers were sick.’

  ‘Oh, yuck,’ said Millie. ‘Aeroplanes sound such beastly machines. Don’t they smell, with all that vomit and the engine oil and everything?’

  ‘Millie, really,’ said her mother. ‘I do wish you would take the boat train, Conrad. It’s much safer. Did you read about that plane crash last year when Prince Christopher of Hesse died with half his family? Dreadful. And he was flying from Germany to England.’

  ‘It’s perfectly safe, Mamma,’ said Conrad. ‘I couldn’t spare much time, so I thought it best to fly.’

  ‘And what are you doing that makes life so busy?’ asked his father.

  ‘Perhaps that’s something we could speak about later, Father.’

  ‘How intriguing! I look forward to it. Meanwhile, nip upstairs and get changed and we’ll have a drink before dinner.’

  Dinner was a lively affair. Conrad’s mother and sister bombarded him with questions about Germany and the Nazis. He tried to describe Berlin to them, the uniforms, the speeches, the violence, the hatred, the fear and the complacency. Lord Oakford listened carefully and Reggie not at all, occasionally trying to pull the conversation around to local affairs. Reggie was a crashing bore. In most families he would have been banished to the army, but given Lord Oakford’s strong views on war he remained in civilian life. Ostensibly he was managing the small estate, although in practice he was annoying the hell out of the three tenant farmers and the gamekeeper. He was a year younger than Conrad and distrusted him and his politics. Conrad knew that Reggie was desperately worried that as the older surviving brother, Conrad, not Reggie, would eventually inherit Chilton Coombe. It was something that Conrad didn’t think about. To him, the role of eldest son and heir was still held by Edward, even though he had been dead eight years.

  Millie and Conrad had always got on well. She was lively, amusing and really quite beautiful in a gangling kind of way. Conrad knew of at least three proposals of marriage she had turned down, and was confident that, unlike him, she would wait until the right person came along. Conrad’s other sister, Charlotte, was already married and expecting a baby.

  Conrad was in a good mood as he made his way up to bed, having extracted a promise from his father to walk with him up Yarmer Hill the following morning. The apprehension he had felt on the train down to Somerset had been replaced by optimism that he would get a good hearing.

  They set off after breakfast up through the orchard behind the house, Lord Oakford as always striding ahead, with his faithful yellow Labrador, Monty, scouting the ground to left and right. The remains of the morning mist hung low over the saturated levels, with the Tor and the other extraordinary hills emerging from it like islands. The sun was already burning strongly; the mist would be gone within an hour.

  ‘Have you seen Veronica?’ his father asked.

  ‘I bumped into her in Berlin,’ Conrad admitted.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘You mean is she still with Linaro?’

  ‘I suppose I do, yes.’

  ‘She is. You were right about her, Father. I know that’s obvious now, but it wasn’t to me then. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.’

  ‘It was your mother who was right about her,’ his father said. ‘I was just the messenger. You were in love; you couldn’t tell. Has she asked you for a divorce yet?’

  ‘Yes. She expects me to be the guilty party.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity.’

  This last remark struck Conrad as a little odd. He had always assumed his parents disapproved of divorce.

  ‘You should give her what she wants,’ his father said. ‘There’s a lot of righteous tosh spoken about divorce. But you both made a mistake; you may as well start again with a clean slate. Unless you want her back. Do you want her back?’

  ‘Six months ago I would have said yes like a shot,’ said Conrad. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Met someone else?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Conrad. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Jolly good. Very glad to hear it.’

  Conrad was surprised but rather gratified by his father’s intrusion into his private life. It made a pleasant change to feel that they were both on the same side, rather than his father attacking Veronica and him defending her. He wondered what his father would think of Anneliese, if he ever met her. He suspected that he would rather like her.

  They were walking uphill through a birch wood along the edge of a small stream. They emerged into open pasture at the top of Yarmer Hill. Here were the mounds and ditches of some ancient fort, a favourite place for Conrad and Edward to play when they were young. Lord Oakford sat down at the spot where he had sat with his sons and indeed with his own father many times before. From the hill there was a magnificent view down to the house below and across the flat grassland criss-crossed by dykes and hedges. The mist had lifted to be replaced by a higher haze, through which Glastonbury Tor was barely visible.

  Conrad was reminded of that other ancient place, deep in the Prussian forest behind Theo’s home a thousand miles to the east. The place Theo called Traitor’s Gate.

  ‘So, if it isn’t Veronica, what have you come here to talk to me about?’ asked his father.

  ‘I met someone in Berlin,’ Conrad said. ‘He asked me to arrange a trip for him to London. And I need your help.’

  Conrad told his father all about Theo and von Kleist and the latter’s proposed mission to London. His father listened closely.

  ‘I suppose you want me to arrange some meetings for him?’ he said when Conrad had finished.

  ‘Yes. It should be done directly and not through official channels. Apparently our secret service is leaky.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Lord Oakford asked sharply.

  ‘Von Kleist.’

  ‘And how the hell would he know about our secret service?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Conrad. ‘But he was confident that if the secret service found out about it, so would the Gestapo, eventually.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘He should see Lord Halifax, and possibly the Prime Minister. I know you could arrange something with Halifax.’

  ‘I could, but should I?’ said Lord Oakford.

  Conrad had feared that question. ‘Yes, I think you should. I think it’s in our country’s best interests. In everyone’s best interests.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Lord Oakford.

  Conrad’s h
eart sank. ‘Why?’

  ‘Two things. Firstly I don’t think we should start a world war over the Czechs, however poorly they are treated. We should only fight if we have tried every last avenue of peace, and if our own country is threatened directly if we don’t. Secondly, this von Kleist fellow sounds to me like a traitor. You are asking me to help a traitor. And not just me, the British government.’

  ‘When you meet him, you’ll see that whatever Ewald von Kleist might be, he certainly isn’t a traitor. He’s a brave and honourable man. He wants what he believes to be the best for his country.’

  ‘You said this man is a monarchist?’

  ‘I believe he is.’

  ‘So he wants to carry out a revolution. Remove an elected leader and replace him with the Kaiser, the man who started the last war.’

  ‘Hitler might have been elected originally, but he is an absolute dictator now. No one is going to get the chance to vote him out of office.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Lord Oakford. ‘But you’ve spent the last few months in Germany. He’s popular, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he is. But it’s a popularity based on propaganda. And he won’t be so popular when he leads the German people into a war they believe they will lose.’

  ‘So say your friends.’

  ‘So say my friends,’ admitted Conrad. ‘But he’s an evil man, you know that, Father. The world would be much better off without him.’

  ‘You may think that, I may think that, but what right have we to intervene in another country’s affairs to decide what leader they have?’

  ‘But, Father, we are on the brink of a disaster as bad as 1914! Possibly worse.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Lord Oakford. ‘But once we start threatening Germany with war, there will be one. We have to offer them peace and give them every opportunity to take it.’

  ‘But Hitler will take whatever he wants until we say “no”,’ Conrad said. ‘If it’s not Czechoslovakia, it will be Poland, or Russia, or France. The only way to avoid war is to get rid of the man.’

  Conrad had successfully managed to avoid raising his voice to his father until that moment. Lord Oakford seemed to realize that the tension was rising, and to tacitly agree with his son that the issue was too important for the differences between them to be allowed to have an effect. He sat on the grass, his chin resting on his one good hand, looking out over the levels. Conrad sat in silence next to him, waiting. He knew his father wanted to say something.

  ‘I’ve never told you how I lost my arm, have I?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Conrad. His heart quickened. When he was a boy, he had been obsessed with finding out as much as possible about his father’s most heroic moment, and bitterly frustrated at his father’s reluctance to discuss it. Now, finally, he was to find out.

  ‘I should tell you. I’ve always known there would be a time to tell you, and this is it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Conrad.

  ‘You know how reluctant your grandmother was to see me join the army?’ he began.

  ‘I do,’ said Conrad. Conrad’s grandfather had astutely married the boss’s daughter, from the Quaker family that had founded the bank. While Conrad’s grandfather’s Anglicanism had prevailed in the upbringing of Conrad’s father, his grandmother’s Quaker ethics had quietly permeated the family.

  ‘Well, I was quite determined, and although the army told me I was too old at the time war broke out, after they had wiped out a generation of young officers they turned to me. What you probably don’t know is how excited I was to be a soldier. I felt younger, invigorated, alive. Even in battle, which at that stage of the war was pretty beastly, I enjoyed myself. I was scared, certainly, but I was thrilled also. I was a good soldier, a good leader.

  ‘Then my friends started dying, chaps I knew who had joined other regiments, my brother officers. Replacements would come up, and then they would die, sometimes after only a few days at the front. For a while, quite a while, I thought I could cheat death, but then I realized that it would catch up with me, that my death was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.

  ‘Even then, I still took each day as it came. I saw men around me crack, but I kept on fighting. If anything I became braver. I was going to die for my country: I knew it and I accepted it. I thought a lot about your mother, and about you and Edward and the others. But all around me better men than me were dying: why should I escape?

  ‘Then one day at Passchendaele we were pinned down by the Hun. They had counter-attacked and were in danger of pinching off a salient held by a battalion of the Gloucesters. Directly in front of us, on a slight rise in the ground, lay a German machine-gun post. It was in a commanding position, pinning us down and cutting off any chance the Gloucesters had to retreat. We sent a company in to try to overrun the position, but they were all wiped out.

  ‘I volunteered to try to take the post by stealth. I set off with only six men, in the hope that the fewer of us there were, the less chance there was that we would be spotted. Battalion HQ ordered up a small artillery barrage, enough to give us cover, not enough to warn the Hun that something was up. We crawled our way closer and closer. We were about twenty yards away, when one of the Germans shouted out a challenge. I yelled back to him in my best Hamburg accent that we were wounded, and that we needed stretchers, quickly. There was a lot of shouting, and as a half-dozen stretcher-bearers scrambled down towards us, we charged the post. They were taken by surprise. We were lucky: a couple of well-placed grenades, some lucky shots, and we took the emplacement. But they killed four of us.

  ‘So there was just me and Lance Corporal Roberts, a tough little dairyman from Frome. Anyway, we manned the machine gun and turned it towards the German lines. By that time my arm was shot to pieces.

  ‘They came at us, wave after wave of them, and we mowed them down. I don’t know how many men we killed. Dozens, maybe a hundred. It was a horrible sight, seeing all those bodies falling through the sights of the machine gun. I remember feeling more like a manic murderer than a soldier. But however many we killed, more came on. Roberts bought it, a shot in the throat. It was a devilish job firing the machine gun myself with one arm, but I managed somehow.

  ‘There was a lull, while they regrouped. They must have thought there was more than one person facing them. My own company hadn’t realized what had happened, I learned later that despite urging from some of the other officers, the company commander got himself in a blue funk and refused to order an attack to relieve me.

  ‘I knew the Germans would come and I knew they would get me. It was a question of how many of them I would kill before they did. I was surrounded by bodies, British and German. Some were still alive, groaning. There was one boy who had died only about five yards in front of the position. He looked about sixteen, but he must have been a little older. He had buck teeth and surprised blue eyes. He reminded me very much of little Willi Müller in the post room at the bank in Hamburg. Because of the way he had fallen those eyes were staring straight at me. He was quite dead, but he was accusing me.

  ‘Time stood very still. I was no longer scared. In my mind I was already dead. But suddenly I knew I wasn’t going to take anyone else with me. The scores of broken bodies that littered the field of fire in front of me were no longer enemy soldiers, but young men I had killed: sons, husbands, perhaps some fathers, post-room boys. If I close my eyes now, I can still see them, the grotesque shapes they formed as they fell. I knew I wasn’t a murderer, that I wasn’t evil, but I also knew that if I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be while I was in the act of killing other human beings.

  ‘So I stood up and I walked towards the German lines. Not with my hands up, not carrying a gun, just walking. I kept expecting a bullet to hit me, but there was nothing, no firing, nothing. I kept going until I got to the German trenches. They were empty; the Germans must have scarpered. Then I sat down. I don’t remember anything else. Apparently D Company found me sitting on the parapet, staring back towards our own lines.
It didn’t take the medics long to chop off my arm. But it took months for them to repair my mind.’ He snorted. ‘Well, they never did. You know that.’

  Conrad sat in silence next to his father.

  ‘I never killed anyone after that,’ he said. ‘I was hoping none of my sons would. And now you want to start another war.’

  ‘We both want the same thing, Father,’ Conrad said. ‘It’s just that I am convinced that the best way of preventing war is to help von Kleist. You must trust me, Father. You must help him.’

  Silence.

  Conrad could feel as much as see his father’s body tense. His jaw muscles tightened, his fingers rubbed at his moustache in an unnaturally fast rhythm. Conrad knew what would happen next. He had known from the moment his father had started talking about the trenches, but he had been too transfixed to stop him.

  ‘Father?’

  Lord Oakford muttered something through clenched teeth.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that.’

  ‘I said: You little shit!’

  ‘Father, I—’

  ‘All those good men who died in Flanders, you couldn’t give a fuck about them, could you?’ Lord Oakford’s eyes were suddenly blazing. ‘You’ve forgotten what they suffered – you never knew what they suffered, you took it all for granted. You just want to start another little fight, Bolshies against the Nazis, Britons against the Germans. Well, I won’t let you, do you hear? I won’t let you.’ He was shaking with anger, his eyes glittering with an unnatural excitement.

  ‘Father, that’s not quite fair—’

  ‘I would have thought if there was one thing I have taught you it is that we must never ever fight another war. Why can’t you and your friends understand that? It must never happen again. It may be that evil men like Hitler get away with more than they deserve but at least millions of young soldiers won’t die.’

  Conrad felt the anger rise within him. His father’s words stung. They were so unfair! He knew that he should ignore them, that they were a result of the damage his father had suffered that day in 1917, which was as real if not as visibly obvious as his empty sleeve. But this was a time when he needed his father’s support. The stakes were so much higher than just the relationship between them. Without his father’s support Conrad did not know how he would persuade the likes of Lord Halifax to listen to von Kleist. Lord Oakford’s sudden emotional occupation of the moral high ground had become a ritual in their arguments, as if his wounds and his Victoria Cross gave him a right to it. This right had never been challenged before, but Conrad realized that he had to challenge it now, before it was too late.