He met with Chadinoff for Monday night chess. “He is technically a traitor, right?”
“Yes. He was eighteen, should have stayed in Kiev, should have been captured by the invading Nazis, and if he had survived the Nazis, should have gone into the Soviet army to be killed for Stalin. Instead, he got to Odessa, which was blockaded, and then weaved westward, was thrown into a camp by Romanian Nazis, escaped, worked his way through Poland and now was dodging the Red army, and finally he lands in Stuttgart, where the Nazis use him as an interpreter. He escapes from them and: ends up in the warm embrace of the Allies here at Plattling. All we intend to do, after I cure him from pneumonia, is send him back to Russia so he can be shot or sent to one of those glacial camps—why do I save him from pneumonia now when he will someday soon, thanks to Western diplomacy, die of the cold in Siberia?”
Harry visited with his prisoner-patient on Tuesday, as promised, and again on Saturday before Usalov’s dismissal from the hospital. Dmitri was three years older than Harry, but his voice was from another world, the world of Europe, the cradle of political death plots against human beings on a truly massive scale. Harry had known now for the first time, really, someone who had experienced both the great demonic worlds of the century. And was now to be packaged and shipped back to the eastern division.
Late that night in February, Chadinoff was less than decisive in his movements. Reporting to the lounge as had been arranged that morning, Harry sat down at the usual table in the long room with a bar at the corner, a half dozen card tables, and service-model couches and chairs, mostly lit by one thoughtlessly unfocused incandescent light in the middle of the room. Chadinoff walked in, passed by the other card tables and through the thick cigarette smoke. He leaned over to Harry. “I must speak with you. In private. Can you follow me to my quarters?”
Chadinoff led Harry out through the cold, down the roadway to the hospital ward, and into the warmth of his office. He opened his cigarette pack and without thinking extended it to Harry.
“No thanks, Erik.”
“Yes, of course. I remember—you don’t smoke.” He lit his own cigarette and began to talk in high agitation.
“I have seen the orders. They are for two days from now. For February twenty-fifth. We are ordered to round up our Russians, take them to the Bavarian forest beyond Zwiesel, in trucks, and put them in train cars that will be there waiting to take them to Moscow.”
“But what about the ‘apparatus of delay’?”
“Diplomatic efforts to save the refugees—I insist that is what they are, refugees, not deserters—have failed. Have ended. They are refugees just as my father was—a preemptive refugee, you could call it. The orders call for us to stuff them into trains as if they were German Jews being handled by the Nazis.
“Now, Harry—”Erik’s voice was hoarse, and he punctuated his talk with deep inhalations from his cigarette—“this is a moment of great moral weight. There are two alternative roles I have considered for myself—just hear me out: I am not enlisting you, conscripting you, but I want you to know how I am thinking of it.
“The first alternative—one way of doing it: Major Erik Chadinoff, on Thursday morning, reports to HQ—regimental headquarters—that he is ill. His illness is of a kind he knows how to treat himself, and therefore he will not be reporting to the sickroom or here to the hospital.
“But that would mean I would be out of action until my health improved. Until Operation Keelhaul is completed.”
“They call that malingering, right?”
“That is the word for it. A court-martial offense. Then there is Alternative Two, the other way of doing it: Major Erik Chadinoff, on Thursday morning, reports that he declines to be a part of Operation Keelhaul, that he considers the forcible repatriation of Russian refugees to be a war crime. He will remain in his quarters and await whatever consequences of his insubordination his superiors or the military court consider appropriate.”
Harry bit his lip. “Oh, my God, Erik. You can’t do that—”
“Hang on, Harry. I have looked at the Military Code of Justice. It is of course very stern on what I propose to do. But there is a graver offense than individual insubordination. It is the stimulation of mutiny by others. What I have not yet decided is whether to post a copy of my communication on the bulletin board, with an invitation to other officers to cosign it with me.”
Harry leaned back and closed his eyes. He waited, and then, “What is it you want from me, Erik?”
Chadinoff ground out his cigarette. There was a hint of a resolute smile on his face. “I explicitly decline to urge you to join me in this action. But I want you to know what I will do, either the first step I mentioned, which would be cowardly, or the second. Is there another way to protest this surrender to Stalin?”
Major Chadinoff stood. His hand began a forward motion, as if to shake Harry’s hand. He thought better of it. Instead there was a little wave of his hand. “Good-bye, Harry.”
Harry went to his own quarters. He slept fitfully. The following morning the orders were given. The next day, Operation Keelhaul would go forward.
“My hands are stained,” Harry wrote to his mother on Saturday night, sixty-four hours (he counted) since the 0330 beginning after midnight on Thursday. He did not disguise his feelings and, at age nineteen, he didn’t flinch from the theatrical metaphor.
Harry Bontecou had been given a jeep. A sergeant was seated alongside, two enlisted men behind, operating the recording device that fed into the loudspeaker. “It’s Russian you’re listening to,” Major Simcock had explained. “It’s just to tell them they will be moved to another camp.”
“Another camp where?” Harry asked.
“Oh. West Germany.”
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cooper was in charge of the operation. He convened the company commanders and the platoon leaders at five on Wednesday afternoon. They got their orders and assembled at 0300 on Thursday. A tank battalion was in formation at the other end of the hill on the east end of Plattling. At 0515 it was still dark. Harry ordered his four squad leaders toward the refugee barracks he had been assigned to. Someone in the squad directly ahead of Harry made a noise. He could hear now, at some remove, the purr of tanks on the move. A second later, the sound of the tanks and the brilliance of their searchlights roused the entire camp.
Companies A, B, and C sent 180 armed soldiers through the camp gate to their preset stations, encircling the barracks individually and comprehensively. Slipping out of his hut, one Russian saw the column of American tanks approaching with their searchlights. Harry spotted him and detached a soldier to approach him and give him instructions. The GIs were wearing heavy-duty rubber-soled shoes; at the gateway there was a whispered pause while they took up the long riot clubs issued to them. They had been warned to expect violent resistance. The soldiers divided into separate companies and moved stealthily through the shadows to the dormitory huts. Harry banged open the door of Barracks CIO. Inside there was darkness and confusion. Light came in through the windows from perimeter searchlights. The crouching silhouettes dodged and wove about. Harry shone the beam of his light, scanning the room. The soldiers from his platoon filed in. Two GIs were assigned to every bed.
Suddenly, at Harry’s nod to the communications corporal, who relayed the signal, the stillness was broken. There was a shrieking blast of a whistle. Those who were still asleep woke. “They looked all around, as if it was a nightmare,” Harry wrote to his mother.
But then they sized it all up, and there were yells, yells from everywhere. Some of the Russians refused to get out of bed, so we had to prod them with our clubs. I lifted my right hand and stretched out my fingers, five—five minutes to pack, I pointed to the bags in front of their beds. We prodded them to the camp gates. The trucks were there, a long row of them, engines humming. They were loaded into them, and the trucks drove off.
The convoy clattered and swayed down the darkened roads. Harry was silent. He declined to order the Russians in the t
ruck he commanded to be quiet. At the end of the road, twenty miles distant, there was a hasty transfer to a train.
Under way, the train rattled on toward the east, a pale, cold light appearing now in the sky. Near the Czech frontier, beyond Zwiesel, the train halted in the stillness of the Bavarian forest. The Russian troops waiting for their cargo were wearing blue caps.
We shook hands. There was an interpreter. We didn’t say much, didn’t want to say anything. I signed the human invoice and got a Russian invoice in return. The Russians were shepherded down by the railway track. I could see them down at the end of the platform. Mostly they were trying to keep themselves warm. We got back into our train, to go back to Plattling. I looked back, Mom. I saw Russians there waiting to be pulled to Russia, to go to the prison camps and the execution squads.
The tumult of Thursday and Friday left him no time, but on Sunday morning Harry rang the hospital telephone extension. “Major Chadinoff, please.”
“Major Chadinoff is not here.”
“Where is he? This is Lieutenant Bontecou calling.”
“I don’t know,” the attendant said. “I mean I don’t know where he’s gone, but he’s no longer at Camp Plattling.” Harry went to the door and opened it into the cold. I have known a real hero, he said to himself. If Chadinoff was gone, that meant he had elected Alternative Two: formal, public resistance. Harry asked himself, Why wasn’t he there, alongside him, saying—doing—the same thing?
He went listlessly to the mail room to dispatch his letter to his mother. There was a letter waiting for him. It was from the registrar, admitting him to the Class of 1950 at Columbia University.
8
HANBERRY, 1991
Alex, Lord Herrendon, reminisces
Alex, Lord Herrendon, was proud of his mastery of the computer. “I suppose it’s obvious you know and use it, Harry?”
Yes, Harry said. He had in fact brought his own laptop from America and had it in the office provided for him. The two men met for lunch and, four or five times a week, for dinner. First in the “garden room,” which was English boarding-room cold year round; the evening meal in the small formal dining room that eased away from the very large dining room, whose table—for twelve? twenty?—was covered by tablecloths. On top of it were photographs and, as their work progressed, more and more piles of file material.
“Lovely quarters you have for me, Alex.”
“It’s a nice place,” Lord Herrendon said. Most—lordly manors—are, Harry thought. Not that he knew the insides of many such, though he had had a professional look at several in Germany when he did the research on the Victorian cousins.
Herrendon walked Harry about in his impressive library, with volumes of material in varied folders. There were books, manuscripts, transcripts of hearings, congressional records, Hasards. Harry had asked the first day, “Do you have a record of the Senate hearings, the McCarthy hearings?”
Herrendon led him to a corner shielded from the sun by the heavy window curtain. He pointed to a dozen bound volumes. “I have here the Tydings hearings on McCarthy, the Gillette-Monroney hearings on McCarthy, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and over there the McCarran Committee hearings—he pointed to eight volumes. “And here,” there was a touch of pride in his voice, “are transcripts of the two trials of Alger Hiss. In those three volumes there—” these were large volumes, suitable for filing newspaper clippings—“are reports on the work of the Communist underground, beginning in Los Alamos and going through preliminary revelations of the Venona files, the archive recording Soviet radio activity in and about America during the Second World War. Did you have a chance last night to look over the outline of my proposed book?” It was the book Alex Herrendon dreamed of writing. An account of Communist activity and public opinion in the West. How much was Western indifference traceable to manipulation? How much to ignorance? How much to moral fatigue? How much to—insouciance?
Harry nodded, drawing up a chair from the long table with books scattered over it to the side of his computer desk. “In the two pages with chapter headings having to do with McCarthy, I notice the ‘George Marshall Episode.’ I know a lot about that.”
“I supposed that you did. Let’s talk procedure here. At our next meeting, we can hope to get down to work. … If you don’t object, I will bring the recording device—it is very good, very sensitive, you don’t need to hold a microphone to your lips, nothing like that. But I will sit by your side and question you, rattle your memory, which I suppose is very keen—like mine.” He gave a sly smile. “Depending on the volume of material, the transcriptions will require one or two days. We can be on to other matters while they are being done. But shouldn’t we take first things first?”
Harry smiled too. “I was going to say. I’d like to hear what it was that drew you—Alex—to the Communist Party and what it was that drew you away from it.”
Alex Herrendon was the only son of Lord Herrendon, who had been made a hereditary peer in the last days of Queen Victoria. The first Lord Herrendon had been active on several civic fronts, stressing the education of poor children in major British cities. As a young man he went to South Africa and, together with a partner, prospected, with marked success, for diamonds. In young middle age he withdrew completely from business, selling his holdings and joining the Socialist Party. He became a trusted friend and benefactor of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the two leading Fabianists, who devoted their long lives to bringing socialism to Great Britain without revolution. He contributed substantially to the Labour Party and was rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords by Ramsay MacDonald.
Herrendon’s opening speech was widely noticed, causing amusement in some quarters, curiosity in others, sheer rage in some. He said he would devote his career in the House of Lords to abolishing it. Every year he submitted a fresh bill. They got nowhere but marked him as a regicidal character, in one sense the godfather of Willie Hamilton, who won a seat to Parliament a generation later. But Hamilton had raised Herrendon’s ante, calling for the abolition not only of the House of Lords, but also of the monarchy.
“My father informed me—he never consulted me, he always informed me—when I was in my last year at St. Paul’s here in London that I was to go to America for my higher education. He had just acquired this castle. There wasn’t that much home life to be sorry about, on the matter of going to the United States for college work. My mother had died, and Father did not remarry. He crossed the Atlantic frequently, and on one visit to New York befriended Fulton Chapin—you know the name?—”
Harry nodded. “The American millionaire socialist.”
“Chapin had attended Columbia and easily persuaded my father to send me there. One month after I arrived in Morningside Heights I was delirious with joy over my circumstances. I had a comfortable two-room apartment—Father didn’t practice socialism, he preached it. I had total liberty of movement for the first time in my life. I was aflame with my father’s socialist cause. I made several friends. I was worldlier than the average freshman. By the time I graduated, I had had two experiences that greatly influenced my life. One was with a woman, the other with a student four years older than I. His name was Whittaker Chambers, and when I was twenty, he took me—a dramatic journey involving your subway and then a long walk—to a little office, the business and the dwelling place of one Ben Mandel. He was a party functionary. He wrote out a Communist Party card for me and told me that, pending the decision of my superiors, I was not to divulge to anyone—even my own father—the step I had taken.”
Harry looked up. “You knew Whittaker Chambers!”
“I must suppose that you did too.”
“I saw him just once, traveled out to his farm with Joe McCarthy. But we had a warm correspondence after that. I can’t imagine at that age—he was, I guess, fifty—he died at fifty-seven—what he was like when you knew him.”
“Whittaker Chambers was twenty-four, muscular, good looking, quick to laugh, teeming with excitement over the last book he had r
ead, which would have been the one he picked up two hours before. I learned—mostly from him, in fact—of endless troubles at home, eccentric father, alcoholic brother, the whole thing. He had decided to quit Columbia—he got into some kind of trouble, carried off a bunch of books to his house in Long Island. The last time I saw him was, I think … 1925. He just disappeared.
“But I got a postcard a year or so later, just as I was nearing commencement. It was sent, I remember, to ‘Alex Herrendon, Class of 1926, Columbia University, New York.’ But it reached me. A couple of sentences. Hoped-I-was-okay. He-was-keeping-busy. ‘Upholding the cause.’ There was no return address. I stayed in New York. My father got me a posting as assistant to the British consul on Third Avenue, on the Upper East Side. I was there four years, then back to London four years, then to Washington, with my—American wife and daughter—”
“Yes,” Harry interrupted. “I know about that. You will of course be writing about what you did in the underground for the party. And I’m here to answer your questions. You wanted to know about Joe’s—I still think of him as Joe—about McCarthy’s attack on Marshall. The background is curious.”
“May I turn on the recorder?”
“Of course.”
9
Harry Bontecou goes to Columbia
A week before the Christmas holidays at Columbia, the Spectator, the student daily, held elections. The eight-week competitive ordeal had been stiff and time consuming. The student contenders for posts on the paper, by tradition, reported to the managing editor at John Jay Hall on Monday through Friday at one P.M. to receive their assignments. They had also to go out and sell advertising, the Spectator’s principal source of revenue. Harry Bontecou and his roommate, Tracy Allshott, were eager competitors. This proved convenient, both because of the camaraderie of joint exposure to the rigors of the contest and because there were no complaints from one roommate to another about lights being kept on late. Both needed to work extra hours on their studies after completing the Spectator assignments.
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