by Gene Wolfe
As it happened, Lansbury and I had spent most of the winter now past in setting up the game and settling the rules for the movement of units. Both of us have had considerable experience with games of this sort, and knowing the confusion and ill feeling often bred by a rulebook treating inadequately of (what may once have appeared to be) obscure contingencies, we wrote ours with great thoroughness. On February 17 (Lansbury and I caucus weekly) we held the drawing; it allotted Germany, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, and Japan to me, Britain, France, China, and the Low Countries to Lansbury. I confess that these alignments appear improbable—the literal-minded man might well object that Japan and Italy, having sided with Britain in the Great War, would be unlikely to change their coats in a second conflict. But a close scrutiny of history will reveal even less probable reversals (as when France, during the sixteenth century, sided with Turkey in what has been called the Unholy Alliance), and Lansbury and I decided to abide by the luck of the draw. On the twenty-fourth we were to make our first moves.
On the twentieth, as it happened, I was pondering my strategy when, paging casually through the Guardian, my eye was drawn to an announcement of the opening of the Exposition; and it at once occurred to me that among the representatives of the many nations exhibiting I might find someone whose ideas would be of value to me. In any event I had nothing better to do, and so—little knowing that I was to become a witness to history—I thrust a small memorandum book in my pocket and I was off to the fair!
I suppose I need not describe the spacious grounds to the readers of this magazine. Suffice it to say that they were, as everyone has heard, surrounded by an oval hippodrome nearly seven miles in length, and dominated by the Dirigible Tower that formed a most impressive part of the German exhibit, and by the vast silver bulk of the airship Graf Spee, which, having brought the chief functionary of the German Reich to Britain, now waited, a slave of the lamp of Kultur (save the Mark!) to bear him away again. This was, in fact, the very day that Reichschancellor Hitler—for whom the Exposition itself had opened early—was to unveil the “People’s Car” exhibit. Banners stretched from poles and even across the main entry carried such legends as:
WHICH PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE A “PEOPLE’S CAR”
?????
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE!!
and
GERMAN CRAFTSMANSHIP
BRITISH LOVE OF FINE MACHINES
and even
IN SPIRIT THEY ARE AS BRITISH
AS THE ROYAL FAMILY.
Recollecting that Germany was the most powerful of the nations that had fallen to my lot in our game, I made for the German exhibit.
There the crowd grew dense; there was a holiday atmosphere, but within it a note of sober calculation—one heard workingmen discussing the mechanical merits (real and supposed) of the German machines, and their extreme cheapness and the interest-free loans available from the Reichshauptkasse. Vendors sold pretzels, Lebkuchen, and Bavarian creams in paper cups, shouting their wares in raucous Cockney voices. Around the great showroom where, within the hour, the Reichschancellor himself was to begin the “People’s Car’s” invasion of Britain by demonstrating the vehicle to a chosen circle of celebrities, the crowd was now ten deep, though the building (as I learned subsequently) had long been full, and no more spectators were being admitted.
The Germans did not have the field entirely to themselves, however. Dodging through the crowd were driverless model cars only slightly smaller (or at least so it seemed) than the German “People’s Cars.” These “toys,” if I may so style something so elaborate and yet inherently frivolous, flew the rising-sun banner of the Japanese Empire from their aerials, and recited through speakers, in ceremonious hisses, the virtues of that industrious nation’s produce, particularly the gramophones, wirelesses, and so on, employing those recently invented wonders, “transistors.”
Like others, I spent a few minutes sightseeing—or rather, as I should say, craning myself upon my toes in an attempt to sightsee. But my business was no more with the “People’s Car” and the German Reichschancellor than with the Japanese marionette motorcar, and I soon turned my attention to searching for someone who might aid me in the coming struggle with Lansbury. Here I was fortunate indeed, for I had no sooner looked around than I beheld a portly man in the uniform of an officer of the Flugzeugmeisterei buying a handful of Germanic confections from a hawker. I crossed to him at once, bowed, and after apologizing for having ventured to address him without an introduction, made bold to congratulate him upon the great airship floating above us.
“Ah!” he said. “You like dot fat sailor up there? Veil, he iss a fine ship, und no mistake.” He puffed himself up in the good-natured German way as he said this, and popped a sweet into his mouth, and I could see that he was pleased. I was about to ask him if he had ever given any consideration to the military aspects of aviation, when I noticed the decorations on his uniform jacket; seeing the direction of my gaze he asked, “You know vat dose are?”
“I certainly do,” I replied. “I was never in combat myself, but I would have given anything to have been a flyer. I was about to ask you, Herr—”
“Goering.”
“Herr Goering, how you feel the employment of aircraft would differ if—I realize this may sound absurd—the Great War were to take place now.”
I saw from a certain light in his eyes that I had found a kindred soul. “Dot iss a good question,” he said, and for a moment he stood staring at me, looking for all the world like a Dutch schoolmaster about to give his star pupil’s inquiry the deep consideration it deserved. “Und I vill tell you dis—vat ve had den vas nothing. Kites ve had, vith guns. If vor vas to come again now …” He paused.
“It is unthinkable, of course.”
“Ja. Today der Vaterland, dot could not conquer Europe vith bayonets in dot vor, conquers all der vorld vith money und our liddle cars. Vith those things our leader has brought down die enemies of der party, und all der industry of Poland, of Austria, iss ours. Der people, they say, ‘Our company, our bank.’ But die shares are in Berlin.”
I knew all this, of course, as every well-informed person does; and I was about to steer the conversation back toward new military techniques, but it was unnecessary. “But you,” he said, his mood suddenly lightening, “und I, vot do ve care? Dot iss for der financial people. Do you know vat I” (he thumped himself on the chest) “vould do ven the vor comes? I would build Stutzkampfbombers.”
“Stutzkampfbombers?”
“Each to carry vun bomb! Only vun, but a big vun. Fast planes—” He stooped and made a diving motion with his right hand, at the last moment “pulling out” and releasing a Bavarian cream in such a way that it struck my shoe. “Fast planes. I vould put my tanks—you know tanks?”
I nodded and said, “A little.”
“—in columns. The Stutzkampfbombers ahead of the tanks, the storm troops behind. Fast tanks too—not so much armor, but fast, vith big guns.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “A lightning war.”
“Listen, mine friend. I must go und vait upon our Führer, but there iss somevun here you should meet. You like tanks—this man iss their father—he vas in your Navy in der vor, und ven der army vould not do it he did it from der Navy, und they told everybody they vas building vater tanks. You use dot silly name yet, and ven you stand on der outside talk about decks because uf him. He iss in there—” He jerked a finger at the huge pavilion where the Reichschancellor was shortly to demonstrate the “People’s Car” to a delighted British public.
I told him I could not possibly get in there—the place was packed already, and the crowd twenty deep outside now.
“You vatch. Hermann vill get you in. You come vith me, und look like you might be from der newspaper.”
Docilely I followed the big, blond German as he bulled his way—as much by his bulk and loud voice as by his imposing uniform—through the crowd. At the door the guard (in Lederhosen) saluted him and made no effort to prevent my entering at all.
In a moment I found myself in an immense hall, the work of the same Germanic engineering genius that had recently stunned the world with the Autobahn. A vaulted metallic ceiling as bright as a mirror reflected with lustrous distortion every detail below. In it one saw the tiled floor, and the tiles, each nearly a foot on a side, formed an enormous image of the small car that had made German industry preeminent over half the world. By an artistry hardly less impressive than the wealth and power which had caused this great building to be erected on the exposition grounds in a matter of weeks, the face of the driver of this car could be seen through the windshield—not plainly, but dimly, as one might actually see the features of a driver about to run down the observer; it was, of course, the face of Herr Hitler.
At one side of this building, on a dais, sat the “customers,” those carefully selected social and political notables whose good fortune it would be to have the “People’s Car” demonstrated personally to them by no less a person than the German nation’s leader. To the right of this, upon a much lower dais, sat the representatives of the press, identifiable by their cameras and notepads, and their jaunty, sometimes slightly shabby, clothing. It was toward this group that Herr Goering boldly conducted me, and I soon identified (I believe I might truthfully say, “before we were halfway there”) the man he had mentioned when we were outside.
He sat in the last row, and somehow seemed to sit higher than the rest; his chin rested upon his hands, which in turn rested upon the handle of a stick. His remarkable face, broad and rubicund, seemed to suggest both the infant and the bulldog. One sensed here an innocence, an unspoiled delight in life, coupled with that courage to which surrender is not, in the ordinary conversational sense “unthinkable,” but is actually never thought. His clothes were expensive and worn, so that I would have thought him a valet save that they fit him perfectly, and that something about him forbade his ever having been anyone’s servant save, perhaps, the King’s.
“Herr Churchill,” said Goering, “I have brought you a friend.”
His head lifted from his stick and he regarded me with keen blue eyes. “Yours,” he asked, “or mine?”
“He iss big enough to share,” Goering answered easily. “But for now I leave him vith you.”
The man on Churchill’s left moved to one side and I sat down.
“You are neither a journalist nor a panderer,” Churchill rumbled. “Not a journalist because I know them all and the panderers all seem to know me—or say they do. But since I have never known that man to like anyone who wasn’t one of the second or be civil to anyone except one of the first, I am forced to ask how the devil you did it.”
I began to describe our game, but I was interrupted after five minutes or so by the man sitting in front of me, who without looking around nudged me with his elbow and said, “Here he comes.”
The Reichschancellor had entered the building, and, between rows of Sturmsachbearbeiter (as the elite sales force was known), was walking stiffly and briskly toward the center of the room; from a balcony fifty feet above our heads a band launched into “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” with enough verve to bring the place down, while an American announcer near me screamed to his compatriots on the far side of the Atlantic that Herr Hitler was here, that he was even now, with commendable German punctuality, nearing the place where he was supposed to be.
Unexpectedly a thin, hooting sound cut through the music—and as it did the music halted as abruptly as though a bell jar had been dropped over the band. The hooting sounded again, and the crowd of onlookers began to part like tall grass through which an approaching animal, still unseen, was making its way. Another hoot, and the last of the crowd, the lucky persons who stood at the very edge of the cordoned-off area in which the Reichschancellor would make his demonstrations, parted, and we could see that the “animal” was a small, canary-yellow “People’s Car”; as the Reichschancellor approached the appointed spot from one side, so did this car approach him from the other, its slow, straight course and bright color combining to give the impression of a personality at once docile and pert, a pleasing and fundamentally obedient insouciance.
Directly in front of the notables’ dais they met and halted. The “People’s Car” sounded its horn again, three measured notes, and the Reichschancellor leaned forward, smiled (almost a charming smile because it was so unexpected), and patted its hood; the door opened and a blond German girl in a pretty peasant costume emerged; she was quite tall, yet—as everyone had seen—she had been comfortably seated in the car a moment before. She blew a kiss to the notables, curtsied to Hitler, and withdrew; the show proper was about to begin.
I will not bore the readers of this magazine by rehearsing yet again those details they have already read so often, not only in the society pages of the Times and other papers but in several national magazines as well. That Lady Woolberry was cheered for her skill in backing completely around the demonstration area is a fact already, perhaps, too well known. That it was discovered that Sir Henry Braithewaite could not drive only after he had taken the wheel is a fact hardly less famous. Suffice it to say that things went well for Germany; the notables were impressed, and the press and the crowd attentive. Little did anyone present realize that only after the last of the scheduled demonstrations was History herself to wrest the pen from Tattle. It was then that Herr Hitler, in one of the unexpected and indeed utterly unforeseeable intuitive decisions for which he is famous (the order, issued from Berchtesgaden at a time when nothing of the kind was in the least expected, and, indeed, when every commentator believed that Germany would be content, at least for a time, to exploit the economic suzerainty she had already gained in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, by which every “People’s Car” sold during May, June, and July would be equipped with Nordic Sidewalls at no extra cost comes at once to mind) having exhausted the numbers, if not the interest, of the nobility, turned toward the press dais and offered a demonstration to any journalist who would step forward.
The offer, as I have said, was made to the dais at large; but there was no doubt—there could be no doubt—for whom it was actually intended; those eyes, bright with fanatic energy and the pride natural to one who commands a mighty industrial organization, were locked upon a single placid countenance. That man rose and slowly, without speaking a word until he was face to face with the most powerful man in Europe, went to accept the challenge; I shall always remember the way in which he exhaled the smoke of his cigar as he said: “I believe this is an automobile?”
Herr Hitler nodded. “And you,” he said, “I think once were of the high command of this country. You are Herr Churchill?”
Churchill nodded. “During the Great War,” he said softly, “I had the honor—for a time—of filling a post in the Admiralty.”
“During that time,” said the German leader, “I myself was a corporal in the Kaiser’s army. I would not have expected to find you working now at a newspaper.”
“I was a journalist before I ever commenced politician,” Churchill informed him calmly. “In fact, I covered the Boer War as a correspondent with a roving commission. Now I have returned to my old trade, as a politician out of office should.”
“But you do not like my car?”
“I fear,” Churchill said imperturbably, “that I am hopelessly prejudiced in favor of democratically produced products—at least, for the people of the democracies. We British manufacture a miniature car ourselves, you know—the Centurion.”
“I have heard of it. You put water in it.”
By this time the daises were empty. We were, to the last man and woman, and not only the journalists but the notables as well, clustered about the two (I say, intentionally, two, for greatness remains greatness even when stripped of power) giants. It was a nervous moment, and might have become more so had not the tension been broken by an unexpected interruption. Before Churchill could reply we heard the sibilant syllables of a Japanese voice, and one of the toy automobiles from Imperial Nipp
on came scooting across the floor, made as though to go under the yellow “People’s Car” (which it was much too large to do), then veered to the left and vanished in the crowd of onlookers again. Whether it was madness that seized me at the sight of the speeding little car, or inspiration, I do not know—but I shouted, “Why not have a race?”
And Churchill, without an instant’s delay, seconded me: “Yes, what’s this we hear about this German machine? Don’t you call it the race master?”
Hitler nodded. “Ja, it is very fast, for so small and economical a one. Yes, we will race with you, if you wish.” It was said with what seemed to be perfect poise; but I noted, as I believe many others did, that he had nearly lapsed into German.
There was an excited murmur of comment at the Reichschancellor’s reply, but Churchill silenced it by raising his cigar. “I have a thought,” he said. “Our cars, after all, were not constructed for racing.”
“You withdraw?” Hitler asked. He smiled, and at that moment I hated him.
“I was about to say,” Churchill continued, “that vehicles of this size are intended as practical urban and suburban transportation. By which I mean for parking and driving in traffic—the gallant, unheralded effort by which the average Englishman earns his bread. I propose that upon the circular track which surrounds these exposition grounds we erect a course which will duplicate the actual driving conditions the British citizen faces—and that in the race the competing drivers be required to park every hundred yards or so. Half the course might duplicate central London’s normal traffic snarl, while the other half simulated a residential neighborhood; I believe we might persuade the Japanese to supply us with the traffic using their driverless cars.”