The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and the townspeople were gathering around a huge mound of wood and dry brush. On top of the pile someone had placed effigies of Wilhelm and his eldest son. “The Kaiser wore a real German spiked helmet and a cloth mask with huge whiskers,” young Paddy noticed. The crown prince sported a monocle fashioned out of cardboard and wore a hussar’s hat. When it was dark enough, the fire was lit, and the boy watched the blaze climb toward the two dummies. At last they burst into flames and there was a drumroll of explosions as the fireworks stuffed inside detonated. A little while later one of the village boys was terribly injured by a Roman candle and Paddy was whisked away. What he saw when he looked back was etched into his memory in a dreamlike tableau. He could still make out the two scarecrow effigies, hauntingly illuminated by the leaping flames and both beginning to crumple.

  IN HIS ROOM at Nijmegen the sound of a hammer clanking against iron on the blacksmith’s anvil woke him at six the next morning. Snow was falling again as he walked along the road leading toward the border. When he reached the Dutch guard post, an official there stamped his passport and he trudged on through the drifts toward the German frontier. “Black, white and red were painted in spirals round the road barrier,” he noticed, “and soon I could make out the scarlet flag charged with its white disc and its black swastika. Similar emblems had been flying all over Germany for the last ten months. Beyond it were the snow-laden trees and the first white acres of Westphalia.”

  By nightfall Leigh Fermor had covered seventeen or eighteen miles and arrived at the town of Goch. Here Nazi flags hung wherever he looked. He stopped in at a tobacconist’s for cigarettes and on the way out paused in front of the shop next door. The window, he saw, was filled with Party regalia. The centerpiece of the display was a wax figure dressed in the uniform of an SA storm trooper. Uniforms for women and children lay stacked alongside. Arrayed around the clothing and equipment there were photographs depicting Nazi luminaries. In one shot Hermann Göring, chief of the newly formed Luftwaffe, offered a bottle of milk to a lion cub; another showed a fair-haired little girl handing Hitler a fistful of daisies. A third photo presented the Führer shaking hands with SA leader Ernst Röhm. Leigh Fermor couldn’t know at the time that Hitler, turning on his former ally in an effort to consolidate his own power, would order Röhm’s murder the next summer.

  The clacking of boots on the cobbles nearby turned his attention from the display. In the muted light of the streetlamps he watched as a formation of brown-shirted SA troopers marched into the square and assembled to hear an address by a man who appeared to be their commander. Leigh Fermor had not yet picked up enough German to make out what the man was saying. But his manner was ominous in itself.

  That night, with the SA marching song still reverberating in his thoughts, Leigh Fermor found a room at an inn where the portraits on the wall looked back to an older Germany. But even here the likenesses of Frederick the Great and Baron von Hindenburg shared wall space with Hitler. Once settled at an oak table in a timber-framed hall warmed by a wood-burning stove, he was busy recording the events of the day in his journal and drinking beer from a pewter-lidded stein when a party of men in SA uniforms traipsed into the inn and gathered around a nearby table. Watching their good-humored manner as they drank that night only muddled the emotions he had felt earlier in the evening. “They looked less fierce without their horrible caps,” he thought. “One or two, wearing spectacles, might have been clerks or students.” He overheard them singing a song about a woodsman’s beautiful daughter. It might as well have been written for the pretty girl tending the greengrocer’s shop back in Kent. “It was charming,” he felt. “And the charm made it impossible, at the moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.”

  From Goch, Leigh Fermor struck out toward the southeast, passing through Krefeld and Düsseldorf. One night he took shelter at a workhouse where the crowded sleeping room reminded him of his school days. When the route looped its way back to the Rhine—he remembered this was really the same waterway as the Waal that had been his thoroughfare across Holland—he tracked the river upstream and arrived at Cologne on December 20. His first stop, characteristically, was the celebrated Gothic cathedral. The second was a bar. At a crowded place on the quay, just a short, steep walk downhill from the cathedral, he fell in with a rough crowd of bargemen and sailors who were chasing shots of schnapps with beer. He wound up dancing with a girl who drifted into the party late in the evening. “She was very pretty,” he thought, “except for two missing teeth.” He soon learned that she had lost them in a brawl.

  When his head cleared the next day, he sought out a bookshop, in order to buy a paperback copy of Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark. Maybe he could pick up some German by reading Shakespeare in translation, he thought. As he explained what he wanted to the bookseller, the word “student” once again worked its magic. Before he left the shop, Leigh Fermor had been invited to spend the night with the owner’s friend, a student at Cologne University. Over dinner that evening the two young men discussed literature. Later, while they drank tea laced with brandy, the talk turned to recent events in Germany. The student and his landlady—she was the widow of a university professor—both despised Hitler. But when they spoke of the Nazis their conversation grew morose, as if they felt helpless to resist the changes Hitler was bringing to their country. It was more pleasing to dwell on books.

  Before bed Leigh Fermor had his first bath since leaving England. When he drifted off to sleep, it was under a clean down quilt in a study lined with volumes of Greek and Latin literature.

  On top of the evening’s hospitality, the university student also wangled a lift for his new friend on one of the barges that plied the Rhine between Basel and the North Sea. When Leigh Fermor had said his good-byes the next morning, he lit out upstream on a diesel-slicked tub crewed, he was surprised to see, by a gang from the bar where he had spent his first night in Cologne. It carried him as far as Koblenz, where the river Moselle, cascading off the Ballon d’Alsace through a vineyard-flanked valley, rushed into the Rhine. The clear new stream presented an enticing fork in his route, but he pressed on along the Rhine. Christmas morning found him at an inn in Bingen. He was the only guest, and the innkeeper’s daughter gave him a tangerine and a tinsel-wrapped packet of cigarettes.

  In Heidelberg he was adopted by the elderly proprietors of an inn known as the Red Ox, Herr and Frau Spengel, who treated him to clean laundry for the first time since he left home. He found himself wondering whether a German vagabond would be cared for as well in England. The Spengels’ son Fritz took him into the hills above the town the next day to see the ruins of Heidelberg Castle. Pooling their memories from long-lost history lessons, they pieced together its story and remembered that this was one place—the palace of the “Winter Queen” Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who married Frederick V—where the stories of Germany and England intertwined. But the happy spell was soon broken. Returning to the inn just after sunset, they passed by a gang of boys who were whistling the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” which had become a favorite marching song of the Nazis. Later that night, while the two new friends drank to the coming year, Leigh Fermor found himself berated by a pale, rime-eyed young man seated at a nearby table. He demanded to know why Germany should be made to suffer as she had since the end of the last war. His angry voice rang out a dismal envoi to 1933. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” the stranger barked. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?”

  THE WEEKS PASSED in a whirlwind, but the whirlwind had a rhythm to it. A night in a baroque palace in Bruchsal was followed by another in a barn outside Pforzheim, where Leigh Fermor slept under his greatcoat on a makeshift bed of cut hay. At each town he visited he nailed a small metal plaque bearing its name to his walking stick. The ash-wood Wanderstab, as the Germans called it, soon bristled with commemorative medallions.

  One evening in Stuttgart, a windblown shower of sl
eet and hail chased him into a café across the street from the city’s best hotel. He could not spare the price of a room, he knew, but a better option turned up. Two girls settling their account at the counter caught his eye. They were about his age. Both were pretty. One had dark tousled hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses; the other had blond braids twisted into buns over her ears like a heroine out of Wagner. “They were amusingly dressed in Eskimo hoods, furry boots and gauntlets like grizzly bears which they clapped together to dispel the cold.” Before Paddy could concoct a way to meet them, the girl in glasses edged toward his table and asked, “How do you do, do, Mister Brown?”

  He recognized the line from a silly foxtrot that had been last year’s novelty sensation. The girl must have noticed the German-English dictionary splayed out on the table in front of him. Although the song’s catchphrase used up more or less all of her English, Leigh Fermor had by now learned enough German to strike up an acquaintance. It turned out the two girls, Lise and Annie, were music students. Just as important, Annie’s parents were away in Switzerland. The three of them hit it off, and the next morning the girls added a new word to his growing German vocabulary: Katzenjammer. It meant hangover. Fortunately the weather remained unsuitable for travel; Leigh Fermor was forced to linger with the girls in Stuttgart another evening.

  When he finally tore himself away, he picked up a road veering away from the Neckar River outside of town and took it as far as Ulm, where he crossed the Danube. The route then angled toward the east. In Munich he ditched his rucksack at an empty youth hostel and sought out the famous Hofbräuhaus—the city’s cathedral to beer. Winding his way through darkening streets in search of the place, he was alarmed by the growing numbers of SA and SS uniforms in evidence. At the beer hall the menace felt suddenly more visceral. “Halfway up the vaulted stairs,” he saw, “a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours.”

  Dodging the foul-smelling mess on the stairs, Leigh Fermor slipped inside. The drunk storm trooper’s companions were crowded into one of the hall’s numerous rooms, and black-clad SS officers occupied another. It was no surprise to find them here; Hitler, after all, had convened the first meeting of the Nazi Party in a room on the third floor. Leigh Fermor settled at a table downstairs, surrounded by more affable farmers and laborers. As the tall mugs of beer arrived and were drained, it seemed to him that the boisterous scene grew more and more to resemble a mead hall out of The Ring or Beowulf. At some point he quietly crumpled across the table. He woke up the next morning on the couch of a couple who lived nearby. His Katzenjammer, he was sorry to find, was as heroic as the drinking had been. To make matters worse, when he returned to the youth hostel he discovered that his rucksack had been stolen during the night. Lost along with it were his passport, what money he had, the medallion-encrusted Wanderstab, his journal, and—except for the German Hamlet, still safe in his pocket—his books.

  At the British consulate a sympathetic official issued a new passport and spotted him a five-pound note. Leigh Fermor spent the next five days with a family outside of town who had been expecting him, thanks to a friend’s letter of introduction. Their household delivered a welcome antidote to the Hofbräuhaus. The patriarch was a baron whose family had fled to Munich when the state seized their castle in Estonia after the war. He was a font of literary knowledge. When Leigh Fermor asked him whether he thought the German translation of Hamlet deserved its lofty reputation, he conceded that the original was best, then read aloud from Russian, Italian, and French versions to illustrate their inferiority to the German. He may have exaggerated the national styles as he went along, Leigh Fermor thought, but the rich, unhurried music of the German startled him; “in those minutes, as the lamplight caught the reader’s white hair and eyebrows and sweeping moustache and twinkled in the signet ring of the hand that held the volume, I understood for the first time how magnificent a language it could be.”

  The baron and his son rummaged through the house and attic to find a rucksack and other gear to replace the equipment he had lost. The baron also wrote letters of introduction that gave the young traveler aristocratic contacts stretching across eastern Europe. On the day Leigh Fermor left, the baron, apologizing that his library was inadequate to replace all of the books that had been stolen, handed him a priceless duodecimo edition of Horace. He looked at this pocket-sized heirloom with wonder. “It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket.” It was a gift that would prove strangely providential before the impending war was over.

  PUSHING ON TO the southeast led Leigh Fermor deeper into Bavaria. Beyond the village of Rosenheim he followed telegraph lines and resorted to footpaths when the country roads gave out. At the inns where he sheltered here in the countryside, the obligatory photograph of Hitler sometimes got lost among religious pictures and the intricate wood carving that seemed to be worked into every corner of the rooms. He attributed the carving to a geographical accident—“long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives”—that ran around the world at this elevation.

  At a bar in one small town he fell in with a factory worker who offered to put him up for the night. When they clambered up to the young man’s attic room, Leigh Fermor saw that the walls were covered with Nazi flags and posters. He noticed an SA uniform and an automatic pistol. The man explained that he had been a Communist just a year earlier. The walls of his room then had been papered with red stars and portraits of Lenin. “I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied,’ ” he said. “Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me.” The alarming thing was that all his friends had fallen into step with the Nazis too—“Millions!”

  Skirting eastward to the north of the Chiemsee—the great freshwater lake that was sometimes called the Bavarian Sea—Leigh Fermor reached the village of Traunstein on January 23. When he left the next morning, the weather had cleared and he could see the Alps rising in front of him. Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof, lay hidden away near Berchtesgaden, just above. He continued east and reached the Austrian frontier at the river Salzach late in the day. At the border station the official who stamped his passport wore a red armband emblazoned with a black swastika. Leigh Fermor hoped it would be the last one he ever saw.

  IN AUSTRIA LIFE fell back into the pattern he was growing accustomed to. At St. Martin, another castle; a cowshed near Riedau. Fading photographs of Emperor Franz Joseph, dead now for nearly two decades, replaced the portraits of Hitler. By the end of the month Leigh Fermor was nearing the Danube once again, and the alteration in the landscape made it feel like walking into a different world. A bracing glass of Himbeergeist he drank at an inn near Linz seemed to reflect the change. It tasted to him like “a thimble full of the cold north.”

  On the afternoon of February 11, after trudging all day through a gusting snowfall, he marked his nineteenth birthday in a count’s lamp-lit Schloss, “lapping whiskey and soda from a cut-glass tumbler.” The next morning he hurried on toward Vienna, holing up in a barn for an hour when the snow gave way to a thunderstorm. For once he was glad to hitch a ride when a truck pulled alongside later in the day. He rode into Vienna nestled under a tarpaulin in the back, sharing the makeshift shelter with a bright-eyed fifteen-year-old girl named Trudi who was transporting a basket of eggs and a large duck to her grandmother’s house.

  Leigh Fermor spent a fanciful few weeks in Vienna. At the workhouse where he lodged first, he met the itinerate son of a Frisian pastor, with whom he cooked up a plan to sell sketch portraits to the locals. Later he was taken up by a creative circle of students and expatriates. “Wildish nights and late mornings set in, an
d after a last climactic fancy dress party, I woke in an armchair with an exploding head still decked with a pirate’s eyepatch and a cut-out skull and crossbones.”

  One of his new friends was Einer von der Heydte. He was twenty-seven, a baron, and a devout Catholic. His father was a retired Bavarian army officer whose family fortune had declined along with the falling value of German war bonds. The studious son was expected to follow his father into the army. But the world had changed since the older Heydte’s heyday. The war had ended when the boy was eleven, and Germany had been transformed into a socialist republic. When he was twelve, Einer had helped a gang of boys tear the red flag down from a building in Traunstein—the same Alpine village where Leigh Fermor had stopped earlier in the year. Although he later entered the army as a cavalry officer, he had been granted leave to study at the university—first at Innsbruck, then at Berlin. Now in Vienna, he was enrolled at the Consular Academy, which trained students for diplomatic service. Just about the time Leigh Fermor met him, he got himself tangled up with the Gestapo by beating up a Nazi who was badmouthing the Church. Returning to his old cavalry regiment was the only way he could think of to evade the secret police.

  The two young men talked endlessly about literature and history. They also shared a fascination with the ancient Greek world. Even as an adult Heydte recalled how, as a schoolboy, he had been moved by Greek mythology, in particular the story of the Minotaur, the monstrous bull-man who was imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath the palace of King Minos at Knossos and fed on the blood of Athenian youths. Heydte remembered how Theseus, a brave young Athenian, had traveled to Crete and overcome the monster, escaping from the labyrinth with the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who gave him a thread by which he could find his way through the maze’s twists and turns. And how Daedalus, who engineered the labyrinth, had flown from Crete on wings made of feathers and wax. Heydte could still recall hearing the story for the first time. When he talked about the myth, it all came back: the dimly illuminated schoolroom, the schoolmaster’s pinched voice as he spoke, even the graffiti scratched into the desks in front of him. According to Heydte’s teacher, the myth was a tale of human triumph—“how the progress of the human mind in technical science had mastered the animal in mankind!” This was an idea he had trouble accepting. Even as a boy Heydte had sensed that the story held something darker at its core. Many years later he would come to believe the Minotaur’s real name was “War.” But the mysterious world the schoolmaster had described nevertheless drew him in. He imagined himself traveling to Crete one day—“perhaps as a scholar,” he thought, “or a treasure-seeker, or an investigator to try and fathom its secrets.”