Death Order

by Jan Needle

  However, the scramble to keep the peace went on. The Swedish connection, working mainly through Hermann Goering, still set up meeting after meeting, held session after session, made proposals by the score. Diplomats like Sir Nevile Henderson in Berlin – already dying of cancer – wore themselves grey and corpselike in the struggle, while in London every avenue was open. The news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which broke mid-week, confused the issue, but the conviction that the war would never come appeared to grow in Whitehall, whatever evidence emerged to the contrary. Goering, via Dahlerus, insisted that Hitler was dead set on it, and even transmitted a new invasion date, the night of August 30/31. The Reichsmarschall also showed his Swedish intermediary maps of the whole German battle line, disposed to enter Poland. But when no war came on August 31, Vansittart, who was not noted for his pacifism, told Carrington over lunch with Desmond Morton that Herr Hitler had undoubtedly lost his nerve. At an adjacent table in the Carlton Club, the skeletal Lord Halifax, a hunting man, was telling his own entourage loudly that he ‘smelled a beaten fox’.

  Optimistic or not, though, the government had taken their precautions. Outside the club, the busy streets of London would next day be awash with evacuees and their parents, and third class carriages on special trains awash with tears and urine. Similar scenes were scheduled to take place in other major cities, while country areas were bracing themselves for the influx of tragic refugees or louse-infested slave labour, depending on the children’s luck. Complete mobilization of the forces was scheduled for the same day – one of those strokes of governmental timing that real people marvel at. Quietly, too, Morton confided to Edward, the stiff and priggish Chamberlain had been pulling chestnuts from the fire. He had been in touch with Winston to sound him out. At any moment, an announcement of a job would surely be made; a Cabinet position.

  It was Saturday before the balloon really went up, despite the fact that the invasion came at last on Friday morning. The news was first disseminated by DNB – the Deutsche Nachtrichten Büro – at 5.40 a.m., when the Führer’s proclamation revealed to an incredulous world that the action had been forced on Germany by the insane campaign of terror waged against her by Poland. Reuters flashed the news to London shortly afterwards, and Sir Howard Kennard, the British Ambassador in Warsaw, sent a coded phone call at 8.30 reporting the attack. It emerged much later that the first casualties had been on Thursday night – Konserven, one at Gleiwitz, six at Hohnlinden – who had been dressed as Polish soldiers and shot. They had, these dastardly ‘Poles’, been caught committing terror acts and killed by brave SS units in the ensuing battle. Their faces had been beaten off to make sure nobody could later link them to a concentration camp, or even their homes, in Germany. Tinned meat had been served, and served its purpose.

  In London, though, life went on that Friday almost as if the invasion had not happened. True, evacuees milled and wept and choked the stations, mobilization added to the confusion, the Cabinet dithered; but all that was preordained. Food-rationing details were announced, surprising nobody, and radio censorship made no difference that anyone could discern. Sandbags appeared in Whitehall and the blackout officially started, and at six o’clock Parliament assembled to hear Mr Chamberlain speak. Balloons did go up, literally, as the first of the silver monsters climbed slowly into the sky to cripple or destroy the bombers, if they came. But when the country went to bed that night, precisely nothing different or exciting, or decisive had been said or done. Edward, weary of the chattering and intrigue at Westminster, was home in bed by midnight. His thoughts were not of Britain’s fate, nor Poland’s, but of Hannele’s. He ached for her.

  On Saturday, the edges frayed. Carrington spent most of the day in the House, in the company of Churchill’s men and, briefly, Churchill himself. They followed the saga of France’s panic and Mussolini’s attempts to backslide from dribs and snippets, and hung around the bars and tea-rooms as Chamberlain’s new statement was announced and postponed twice. By 7.45, as he crammed himself into the visitors’ gallery, Edward could see that not only Desmond Morton had been drinking. In fact, the only men in the Chamber who seemed entirely sober were the Prime Minister and Halifax, his Foreign Secretary. They looked as if they needed alcohol, or perhaps a blood transfusion: they were cadaverous.

  Chamberlain’s speech was worse than his appearance.The House, prepared to sympathize, listened in growing anger as he doddered on. It sounded, to that excited, tired throng, as if no one had invaded anyone, no one had been bombed or slaughtered, no treaty obligations were being fudged. He talked of an Italian plan to stop the war and have a conference instead, he said he was in touch with France to agree a time limit for Germany to withdraw and be forgiven; it came across as craven. Morton, crushed in next to Edward, spluttered ‘Winston must speak! Winston! Winston!’

  It was Arthur Greenwood who did speak, however, the Labour leader. When Chamberlain subsided, Greenwood rose.

  ‘Speaking for the Labour Party—’

  ‘Speak for England!’ someone roared, and the House erupted. Later that evening, as the Churchill faction talked and drank and lived it out again, Bob Boothby claimed the honour, although Edward thought he had seen Leo Amery mouth the words. No matter; it was said. And when the noise died down, Greenwood continued.

  ‘I am greatly disturbed.’ His features were working, he clearly showed it. ‘An act of aggression took place thirty-eight hours ago. The moment that act of aggression took place, one of the most important treaties of modern times automatically came into operation.’ The roars and shouts grew louder. ‘I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when Britain, and all that Britain stands for, and human civilization, are in peril?’

  Poor Chamberlain tried to save himself, but his reply was yet more pathetic than his first attempt. The Tory Chief Whip, David Margesson, ended his agony by moving the adjournment, and the corridors were filled with yelling, scurrying, frantic men, taking up their cliques and groupings, pooling their opinions, consolidating. Edward allowed himself to be swept by his particular tide, and spent the next few hours in a blur of short motor trips, a meal, many drinks, shouted insults, conversations. Half the Cabinet or more, the rumour went, had rebelled and demanded Chamberlain give an ultimatum to the Germans, whether or not the French joined in. The seriousness of the revolt was evidenced by the fact that Soapy Simon, an arch-appeaser who wanted above everything to be liked, had become their spokesman and had let them cram into his room and sit it out (with a break for dinner at the Savoy) until the PM gave his answer.

  All evening, great men came and went at Downing Street and at the Palace of Westminster. Phone lines buzzed between Rome and Paris, Paris and Warsaw, Berlin and London, London and Rome. The Poles reported Warsaw under bomb attack and wanted help, immediately, from whoever would honour their commitments. The French Cabinet, split and demoralized, wriggled and trimmed, while their Embassy in London was besieged by people and by telephone. The assembled friends were told by Brendan Bracken, in tones of wonderment, that the great Francophile Churchill himself had rung to bellow that he would watch them die without a qualm if they ‘ratted on Poland as they had ratted on Czechoslovakia,’ while Bob Boothby told them repeatedly how he had exhorted Winston to ‘break Chamberlain and take his place’. Churchill, while being ‘too much a man’ to kick the PM on the ground, had agreed to send a letter to Downing Street demanding to know by midday on Sunday the exact position he could expect to hold in the government.

  There was an emergency Cabinet meeting shortly after 11 p.m., and as it progressed the storm clouds that had been gathering all Saturday evening came to a head. Like characters in a Thomas Hardy novel, the Cabinet left Number Ten to wild lightning and torrential rain – nor were they unaware of the almost vulgar symbolism. An ultimatum had at last been agreed, which gave Hitler until eleven o’clock next morning to withdraw from Poland lock, stock and barrel. No one believed for a moment that he would, but it was backed unanimously. The largest thunderclap of the stor
m had followed the Prime Minister’s words ‘Right, gentlemen, this means war’, and the subsequent flash of lightning, it was remembered later, had lit up the entire room, despite the blackout curtains. Edward believed it when he heard the tale. By midnight, he and everybody else would have believed almost anything. Without a miracle happening, Hitler had achieved his war, and Chamberlain had lost his peace.

  There was no miracle, although across Western Europe, Sunday morning saw the last throws of the diplomats and the last prayers of the people who believed. When the moment of the ultimatum came and went, Neville Chamberlain sat before a microphone at 10 Downing Street and read the speech that was to become his monument. Before the National Anthem had finished playing, the first air-raid siren of World War II had sounded, a false alarm that sent the British nervously into the shelters, some – like Winston Churchill – defiantly clutching bottles of strong drink. That afternoon a U-boat sank SS Athenia, carrying eleven hundred passengers and three hundred crew from Liverpool to America. Of the three hundred Americans on board, anxious to get back across the Atlantic to safety, twenty-eight were among more than a hundred people drowned. A Swedish yacht helped pick up the survivors.

  Edward Carrington returned to his flat in Bedford Square at just after seven o’clock that evening. It had been a melancholic day, although Winston Churchill had at last been called into the War Cabinet, gracing its inaugural meeting as First Lord of the Admiralty. Not only his men were cockahoop, either. Even the worst dummies, according to Bracken and Bob Boothby, were quietly confident that Britain would win a brief, efficient war. Carrington, however, was drained, and worried, and prematurely hung over.

  Then his own small miracle took place. The phone rang, and the operator connected him to Stockholm. It was Hannele.

  The call was brief, the line appalling. She said Suzanne had telephoned her from Germany. Berlin was stunned, the population cowed, rebellious, sullen. Dahlerus had spent the morning in one last effort to save the situation, and Goering had, in fact, ordered a plane to be prepared and standing by to fly him to London if the British would accept. They had turned him down. Goering’s second flight had also not come off.

  Carrington said: ‘But Hannele—’

  ‘No. I’ll talk. Carruthers, I don’t know what will happen now, but I have changed my mind. I do not know why, or whether it will work. If this war goes on, there will be networks. People will organize, and I will be among them. Tell your people who I am, that I will be in touch, I will be waiting. Carruthers?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Carruthers, fourth time lucky!’

  She put the phone down. Through his window, Carrington could see a silver barrage balloon, rising slowly on its cable into the clear blue sky.

  It was very beautiful.

  Nine

  The beauty of that late summer came to seem, finally, quite bizarre. Although most people were relieved that the waiting game was over, the first days and nights were nerve-racking. All the preparations, all the propaganda, had led them to expect Herr Hitler to start it with a bang, an airborne cataclysm, probably with fire and with deadly gas. Although few people still retained the Great War view that German soldiers wore dead babies on their helmet spikes and lived on human flesh, there was little doubt in many minds that the Führer was related to the devil. It was a schizophrenic view, as he was depicted by cartoonists as a buffoon, a cringing halfwit with cap constantly in hand, but the balloons, the sandbags, the innumerable air-raid shelters attested to the underlying fear. And nothing came. The war in Poland raged tragically, but even the French had pulled themselves together sufficiently to coin triumphalist slogans about their might and will. It continued warm and pleasant, no bombers terrified or destroyed, and euphoria returned and grew. Not until October 14, when a U-boat penetrated the defences of Britain’s ‘safest harbour’ at Scapa Flow and killed the Royal Oak and more than eight hundred of her sailors, did the chill of autumn begin to bite. Churchill, the First Sea Lord and England’s hero, could only describe it in the House on October 17 as ‘a remarkable exploit of skill and daring’. There were many more to follow.

  For Edward, the early weeks brought little but frustration and disappointment. He had learned from Desmond Morton that there was a plan afoot involving iron ore and the Swedish port of Oxelösund, which – had he not ‘joined the wrong eleven’ – he might have had a hand in. Edward knew Oxelösund, and guessed that the idea might be to cripple it, to cut down ore shipments to German industry, although Morton would not confirm his hunch. The major, grander now but no less approachable, had been promoted to a joint directorship of the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  ‘Try for a transfer, my lad,’ he said. ‘It might sound damned stuffy but it’s not. Winston calls it the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, you know, although we have no riffraff, naturally. We get up to all sorts, I can tell you, and we’re not fully in our stride yet. God knows what’ll happen now that poor old Quex is going home. Perhaps I’ll put in a word for you sometime.’

  Quex was dying, fast, of cancer. By October his days in the saddle were over, and his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Menzies, was preparing to clear his desk for one last time and transfer to Sir Hugh’s enormous office overlooking Whitehall, an office so secret that it had a private door and staircase that could not be overlooked. There were some who hoped and half expected that he would never get there, and indeed, fought viciously to prevent it. Not because of his background – among Menzies’ credentials was the widely held belief that he was the illegitimate offspring of Edward VII – but because, as Carrington was to slowly learn, the secret services, like most other scions of government and the Establishment, were run by envy, fear and favouritism. One of the most heinous of Menzies’ sins was the fact that he was not a Navy man in the tradition of the one-legged Smith-Cumming, who had coined the title ‘C’ for holders of the post, or Admiral Sinclair. He also spent too much time a’hunting (which endeared him to Lord Halifax) and too much time drinking fine brandy at White’s (which had the same effect with Churchill). Many members of the Admiralty were furious with their First Lord when the temporary appointment was ratified on November 28, but Churchill did not give a fig. He knew, as they did not, of Enigma and of Ultra. Stewart Menzies was master of the key that might one day win the war.

  Long before Quex died, however, Edward had discovered better reasons than inter-service rivalry and backstabbing to make him doubt the quality of the organization he had been so proud to join. He was interviewed by Menzies in the second week of September, and taken out of a class in pistol shooting for the occasion. He found the lieutenant colonel, although only touching fifty, almost impossibly grand. He had been educated during Eton’s greatest days, been President of Pop, then had straightway graced the Grenadiers, transferring later to the Life Guards. The only human thing that anybody whispered of him was that his wife, the daughter of the Eighth Earl de la Warr, had had to be divorced for granting bedroom favours to another. Given his carriage, his square face with downturned mouth, his iron self-regard, Carrington could see her point.

  The interview was short and devastating. Edward, invited to give an account of himself and be frank about it, emphasized his knowledge of parts of Europe, in particular the North, and his grasp of Nordic languages. He could pass for a native of Sweden certainly, and probably of Norway and of Denmark. He already had a contact in a Swedish woman who had expressed a desire to work with the British, who was studying at Dresden. His greatest use, he felt, would be in forging this connection, with the help of the agents he imagined were already in place in these countries, and developing it. Fröken Malling, his contact, had very high and useful connections of her own. He named Suzanne Simonis, her cousins the Kordt brothers, Erich von Weizsäcker, Birger Dahlerus. And added, tentatively, that members of the German High Command might be linked.

  Colonel Menzies listened with apparent interest. He raised his eyebrows at the list of names. He consulted a dun-coloured file in front o
f him. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Well.’ His voice was deep, cultured, sonorous. ‘Self-confidence is of the greatest importance in an agent. Self-knowledge comes with time. We have assessed your capabilities, and we find your potential interesting. There is a proposal to send you – when you have completed basic training, naturally – to the Netherlands. We have great need of people like you there. You’ll fit in perfectly.’

  Edward Carrington gasped.

  ‘I don’t speak Dutch.’

  It was all he could get out. The face across the table hardened.

  ‘Then learn. You will be groomed as a Dutch businessman, based in Rotterdam, who has returned from the East Indies. You are in rubber, which the Germans desperately lack. We note your father is a Burma expert, that is good. You will be able to cross into Germany, with a view to doing deals. It is a most important posting. Any questions?’

  Plenty sprang to Edward’s mind, but he prevented any of them from passing his lips, which he momentarily pursed. He thanked the colonel for the interview and returned doggedly to his pistol lessons in the basement range two doors away. After that he went back to the offices to receive details of his next step. He neither complained nor commented to anyone.