by David Fraser
‘I’m at home till next Thursday.’ Anthony had, he said, been remarkably fortunate. Most of his battalion had got away from Dunkirk on the second but last day of the evacuation. Anthony had preceded them, moving by hospital ship before the main body of the British Expeditionary Force had begun their enforced departure from France. After a generous fortnight of sick leave he had rejoined his battalion in early July, limping but fit, to find that he had not, as he might have expected, been omitted from the first list of short leaves they had enjoyed since Dunkirk.
‘We’re lucky. Our rôle means we’re to get some time off now. Then we relieve another division, and go without leave until God knows when. Until Hitler invades, I suppose, or rings us up to say he won’t. But I’ve been idling in and out of hospital so long I really thought they’d keep me at duty. Jolly nice of them.’
So Anthony, for a week which had just begun, was again at home. Bargate was a wonderful oasis of peace. To return to it from hospital on sick leave had been sheer delight. It stood in particular contrast to the turmoil, the fear, the uncertainty of that extraordinary May in Belgium and France. Bargate had seemed like Heaven – but familiar, thought Anthony, as I suppose Heaven could hardly be. Or could it? And now he was profoundly grateful for the chance of another week there, after what had only turned out to be a short return to his battalion at the end of his sick leave.
The war had not left Bargate undisturbed and nobody wished that it should. There were evacuees – two families of London children, one co-operative and delightful, the other surly and suspicious. Hilda was coping with them skilfully and firmly. Preston, the butler, was beyond the age of conscription to any particular duty and was ‘managing’ with loyalty and a good deal of complaint, zealous for air raid precautions, waging unremitting war against the evacuees: and Hilda’s cook, Mrs Riding, grumbling a good deal at the exigences of the rationing system (generous as yet), was producing edible meals. Otherwise there was no domestic staff and rooms were shut save dining room and inner hall. But it was quiet at Bargate. It was almost as it had always been. There was no sense of crisis, no alarm.
Most of John Marvell’s county and charitable activities continued to demand his time. It was a relief to be busy, although the trivial character of some of the business irritated him, so far was it from the great drama through which they were all condemned to live. ‘But somebody has to keep things going,’ John thought, ‘and these little concerns make up life, after all. They are worth attending to as well as fighting for. He had joined the Home Guard. The evening news was invariably listened to on the radio and John tuned in again at breakfast time: but the war had assumed its inevitable place in the background rather than the forefront of life.
When they talked of Marcia it was with pain, but pain steadily endured. As much as could be had been done, by contacts with the American Embassy. There were, not unnaturally, a great many such problems put to the Americans. No direct word of Marcia had been received. At times the Marvells’ fretting showed, though they took pains to be cheerful with Anthony.
The band in the cellar struck up a new and popular tune and people began to sing.
‘At home,’ said Anthony. ‘At home at Bargate until next Thursday. I can always get up for a day or a night. The trains have been pretty good. I stay at the Club.’ Anthony belonged to a large, many-bedroomed Club, a place of convenience rather than companionship, impersonal, useful, and so far undamaged.
‘Could you come up and have dinner on Monday night?’ asked Robert. ‘There’s a rather nice American who’s just joined their Embassy here. He’s been in touch with my mother. He’s going to dine with me.’ [Robert’s mother was American].
Anthony nodded – ‘I think so, yes –’
‘Bill O’Reilly. William Standish O’Reilly, Junior. He was at Oxford – well before us. He’s bound to be interesting. Before going back to the States last month, and now coming here, he was at their Embassy in Berlin! So he can tell us how people rate our chances – both in America and Germany.’
Their Embassy in Berlin! How extraordinary that people still have Embassies in Berlin!’
Robert considered this. ‘Well, I suppose the truth is that pretty well everyone does. Except us, of course!’
Anthony said that he’d be delighted. The ‘all clear’ was sounding and they made their way a little unsteadily up the steep cellar stairs to a Regent Street lit only by a harvest moon.
‘Oh, there’s not much doubt about it, we weren’t good enough,’ said Robert Anderson somewhat sharply. He and Anthony exchanged glances. They had already discussed with each other their reactions to the fighting in France and Belgium with the sort of defensive self-mockery Englishmen adopt when confused or ashamed. Neither, however, relished the prospect of breast-beating before William Standish O’Reilly, Junior. His question had been courteous enough – what did they think primarily had gone wrong? He was, they had both decided, a nice man. But wounds were still raw.
‘I reckon,’ Bill O’Reilly said, ‘that the French hadn’t got their hearts in it, right from the word go.’ They were dining in a restaurant immediately south of Leicester Square and so far the evening had been air raid free.
‘You’re talking to two pretty junior officers,’ said Anthony lightly. ‘I only saw things at worm’s eye level. But I don’t think it can all be blamed on the French. Neither they nor we were ready for the shock.’ His mind went back to Arras. How did one convey to this agreeable American the paralysis of the will, the sheer numbness created by enemy air power and fast-moving ground forces, apparently irresistible, destroying any coherent pattern of defence, violating every preconceived notion? So that leaderless men, stunned, fearful, came to act only as if in a bad dream? There had been stories of French soldiers acting as unbidden traffic police, waving on German columns. To one such as O’Reilly this must betoken treachery or moral collapse. To Anthony – who had no idea whether or not the tales were true – such a thing was perfectly comprehensible.
‘Never mind,’ said Robert. ‘There’ll be a return match. Somehow. Some day. Now tell us about Berlin.’
O’Reilly told them.
‘Their successes have stunned the victors themselves. The generals – you don’t get any whispers these days of the sort of disenchantment in the Army which was certainly there before they went into Czechoslovakia. Hitler mocked their fears. He’s been proved right. He’s riding high.’
Did this mean, Robert and Anthony wanted to know, that the Germans were confident about an invasion of Britain? Bill O’Reilly shook his head emphatically.
‘What’s on Hitler’s mind all the time is relations with Russia. They’ve got this pact. It’s important to both sides. Germany’s getting her imports from the East, the Soviet Union’s importing stuff from the rest of the world and exporting it straight to Germany. You’d be amazed. But the Soviets are fencing with the Germans all the time about their relative position in the Balkans – in Rumania, Bulgaria and so forth. Each wants to strengthen his hand vis-à-vis the other. Same in the Baltic States. The Soviets just marched in and occupied them when the Germans were busy elsewhere, and the Germans didn’t like that one bit. They’re having one hell of an argument about it.’
‘Thieves falling out.’
‘You can say that. But it’s still covered by a lot of smooth talk.’ The question every diplomat in Berlin asked himself, Bill O’Reilly said, was whether German-Russian relations could worsen to the point of war.
‘They’re watching each other like cats. But we don’t think Russia’s ready for it yet.’
‘It must have been tedious enduring air raids in Berlin knowing that if you got knocked off it would be by friends!’
Bill grinned, ‘I don’t think any of us minded that. A British air raid was good news. But air raids aren’t disturbing people much. Not yet, anyway.’
From the whole conversation, indeed, Anthony formed the picture of a Germany less concerned, at the moment, about the war than was embattled Br
itain. Bill conveyed the impression of a Reich unthreatened, triumphant, looking forward to the fruits of victory – very different from the sense of living, invigorated, through great peril which prevailed that summer in England. Bill acknowledged it.
‘That’s right. That’s most people. But the top guys are discouraging complacency. The Party line is that the rough stuff still lies ahead. And of course there are, thank God, a number of thinking, decent folk who are appalled the Nazis have gotten such reflected glory, and who pray for a setback.’
‘Although a setback for the Nazis would involve a military defeat! Not easy, I suppose, for a patriotic German to swallow!’
Bill agreed. ‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘That’s sure their problem.’
Bill O’Reilly had been in Berlin four years, a long posting by any standards. His special subject at University had been nineteenth-century German history and he had been a fluent German speaker from his Oxford days. The assignment had been natural.
‘We’ve a small Diplomatic Service,’ he said, ‘and less of them than you’d suppose know a lot about Europe.’ He had thus been a witness of every step along the road which had led, so inevitably it seemed, to European war.
They spoke of Spain. The nationalist victory had brought satisfaction to Germany. Bill regarded it sceptically. He did not take the idealistic view of the Civil War which had brought stars to the eyes of so many of his compatriots.
‘Franco’s no German puppet. He’ll get all he can out of them but the Spanish are about the most obstinate guys in the world.’
‘Did German help to Franco amount to as much as the Republicans said?’ asked Robert. Bill spoke expertly. This had been his department. He had also known personally a number of German officers who had served in Spain and he had, where opportunity offered, discussed the war with them.
‘You had to measure what they said against what you knew, of course, but you got a feeling for it. There weren’t huge numbers of Germans there, but they sent some good ones. One of the brightest of their airforce officers, for instance, was there – killed in an accident after the fighting was over as a matter of fact. Guy I knew quite well. I’d met him and his wife often in Berlin before he went to Spain. Guy called Langenbach. And there were some other pretty sharp fellows there, I know that.’
Anthony’s attention had wandered for a little to other tables. Several acquaintances were dining at the restaurant, and contacts in wartime were fleeting and treasured. Then with the speaking of a familiar name, he felt as if a high-pressure hose of cold water had struck his left ear, leaving him shocked and breathless.
‘Did you say Langenbach?’
‘That’s right, Kurt Langenbach. One of the Luftwaffe’s ablest, they always said.’
‘I’ve met some of his family. I was in Germany in 1938.’
‘Well, Kurt was already in Spain by then –’
‘Yes, I met his father and mother. And his wife. At their home near Hanover.’
‘Is that so? Well, I used to see quite a bit of Kurt and Anna when they were in Berlin. She was a lovely girl – real lovely. She was half-English or something, you know.’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
‘When Kurt went off to Spain, some people said they’d not been getting along too well. Kurt was pretty close to the Nazis, in my opinion, even if he wasn’t a Party member. I reckon he approved of a lot they were doing, even if he looked down his long aristocratic nose at them personally. There are plenty like that. That wasn’t Anna’s line at all. Still he came on leave now and then, must have, because she had a baby, a little boy, born after Kurt was killed. Born well after the start of this war in fact.’
Anthony said, ‘I didn’t know.’
Part IV
1942
Chapter 12
‘It is extraordinary what he writes to me, perfectly extraordinary,’ said Kaspar von Arzfeld for the fourth time. ‘Our friend Rudberg,’ he added again, unnecessarily. ‘Such an interesting letter. But perfectly extraordinary.’
It was the third winter of this peculiar war and he felt a good deal older. That golden summer of 1940, when France had been beaten, when England might have seen sense – that seemed, now, a long time ago. That was before the start of this strange, limitless adventure in the east, the adventure that had started on 22nd June, 1941, the invasion of Russia. Operation Barbarossa.
‘An extraordinary, interesting letter.’
‘Are you going to read it to us, Father?’ Lise was daring.
‘Some of it is not for girls, it is soldiers’ talk,’ said her father firmly. ‘He knew I would be interested. One reads about it, of course, but there’s nothing like hearing at first hand from a young fellow at the front. Makes all the difference.’ He returned to the letter.
‘Is Toni well?’ asked Marçia gently. She had had no letters since Toni had ‘gone east’ in common with a large part of the Wehrmacht. Nor, although hoping a little, had she expected any. Now it was winter. January, 1942.
‘He sounds well. It’s hard for them just at the moment of course. The Bolsheviks were saved by that winter of theirs. I’ll read you part of the letter.
“Dear Colonel von Arzfeld,
I owe it to you –”
Well, all the first part is how happily he looks back to his visits here last year and the year before. Very polite of him, certainly. And he’s just left his job, he’s been with a Corps Headquarters until now and he’s about to return to the staff of a Panzer division.’
‘Like before?’
‘A different one. And he’s promoted! He’s a major! He’ll be pretty well in charge of the operations staff, I imagine. He’s doing very well.’
‘You said his letter is extraordinary, father.’
‘Yes, his descriptions are vivid, amazing. He’s given me a wonderful picture of the advance last summer. Of course he has to obey the censorship rules, no saying where events took place although he’s writing of nearly six months ago. My guess is that he was with the Central Army Group. On the Moscow front with von Bock.’
‘But we didn’t get to Moscow.’
‘No, of course not, the strategic Une of pressure was shifted,’ said Kaspar rapidly and a little uneasily. ‘That’s not the point. And of course, their damned winter slowed things down. All the same von Bock got within sight of the place, drove a mighty wedge into the Russian front. I’ll read you some excerpts, you girls. Toni Rudberg was writing about the events of last August, you see –’
Corps Headquarters always moved in a number of groups. Each group consisted of a small column of vehicles, a few officers, a number of drivers, clerks, orderlies and signallers. Each group had a certain inner cohesion, played a particular and indispensable part in the corporate professional life of the Corps Headquarters. The Headquarters was only fully functioning, only its entire self, when all these groups were again brought together at the end of a day – or a series of days. On the line of march Corps Headquarters was largely useless, its role temporarily assumed by a small advance party, its commander ranging the battlefield as he generally did, far from the advice, the support, of his staff. Corps Headquarters lived only for the moment when its various parts could be re-assembled, arranged in harmony with each other, each playing its appointed part in the control, the management, the intellectual inspiration of the Corps – a Corps of three Panzer divisions, totalling no less than 450 tanks when at full strength.
Meanwhile, and on the move, the groups of Corps Headquarters were often widely separated from each other, sometimes by design to reduce the threat of Russian aircraft knocking out more than one group, sometimes – and now more often – because of the difficulties of movement upon the appalling roads which made near impossible any systematic march discipline. Each group drove toward the distant horizon, sometimes with inadequate knowledge of how its companion groups were faring. The Corps Commander was somewhere miles ahead with a small command group of three vehicles, and a tiny handful of privileged Staff officer
s, who gave the impression when they returned to base in the evening of running the Corps advance unaided, more than a touch of patronage in their attitude. The main staff, the brain of the body, was lumbering along far to the rear, able, it seemed, to contribute little. Yet all appeared to be going extraordinarily well, although the speed of the first days of the advance seemed to have slackened. The only operational decisions necessary tended to be how far to advance the following day – how much further, during the next twenty-four hours, to penetrate into this limitless country. And their commander’s guideline for that was usually simple – ‘as far as possible’. The groups of Corps Headquarters moved unevenly forward under the infinite skies.
The drivers of vehicles got tired. Everyone sickened of the eternal dust, and the heat was taxing. But there were compensations. The country, with its low, rolling hills, its great forests and enormous rivers was beautiful. It conveyed an incongruous serenity. The villages of wooden houses had a certain primitive charm. Great fields of sunflowers lit the landscape with a periodic blaze of gold. Everywhere the horizon seemed a hundred miles away. For much of the time there was a huge silence. It was mercifully different from everybody’s idea of war. There had been, of course, some mighty bombardments in the first days, considerable expenditure of tank and artillery ammunition on both sides as the Soviet forces near the frontier had been encircled by a sequence of giant pincer movements. But thereafter the forward march, hectic, heat-ridden, had seemed for the most part extraordinarily free from the sights and sounds of battle. When one of the groups of Corps Headquarters halted for a fuelling break, a stretch of the legs, one could often hear, far to the east, the grumble of guns. Somewhere out there Russian rearguards must be forcing the German spearheads to deploy, to bring artillery into action, even to manoeuvre. Then there would be quiet. A few shouted commands would get vehicles started, men mounted. Staff officers would climb stiffly into cars or the front of trucks. The group would resume the advance. And behind the Corps, as every soldier knew with some inner relief, was a mass of marching divisions, men and horses often covering thirty miles a day. It was August, 1941.