Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  ‘I felt horribly uncertain. I was now really in Germany. This was Germany, all around me. This great hall was German, this table was German, and these were Germans all around me. Ugh! What would not they say if they knew I was English?’ The train to Berlin left in less than twenty-five minutes but still he could not bring himself to summon the waiter. ‘Several times the words rose in my throat, but each time they failed to get further. I tried looking angry, I tried looking pathetic, hungry, helpless, wealthy, hurried, important, all to no purpose. The ober [waiter] went busily on.’ Perhaps he should wave his arms about, make another face, he could . . .

  ‘Suddenly I heard my own voice ringing out sharp and clear across the room: “Herr ober.” The deed was done. It was like jumping into a cold swimming bath.’ The waiter came over. Pyke ordered in what he called a ‘wisely laconic’ manner, tore through his food and caught the Bummelzug to Berlin.

  After an enervating, sleepless night he woke up to find his carriage full of commuters bound for the capital. They were silent and self-absorbed, yet dotted among them he saw members of the one section of German society he feared above all: teenagers. Pyke’s research had left him convinced that the typical German teenager’s mixture of childish curiosity and near-adult authority made him or her most likely to detect an impostor. Worse, the Kaiser had recently issued a proclamation urging the youth of Germany to challenge anyone who looked suspicious and where possible have them arrested.

  Opposite Pyke was a teenager, his schoolbooks open, whose gaze seemed to wander. Or was this Pyke’s imagination? ‘I saw by that vacant stare in his eye and the unconscious movement of his lips as he looked at me over the top of his book that he was reciting all the crimes I was to be accused of, the various nationalities I was to be damned with: there are such a lot that lead you straight to Hell in Germany at the present day. Yes, I was sure of it, he would give me no peace until I was safely under lock and key, and booked to face a firing squad – with himself present by special permission – the next morning. He would – He didn’t. He got out at the next station. In this manner, then, did I enter into the city of Berlin, a humble traveller by Bummelzug.’

  Less than a month after telling an incredulous Ernest Perris at the Chronicle that he hoped to become the paper’s undercover Berlin correspondent, an idea which even Pyke had originally laughed at, this enterprising twenty-year-old had made it to the German capital. None of his family or friends knew where he was or what he had done. To pull off the war’s most daring piece of journalism Pyke only had to find a place to stay, write a dispatch and pass it on to the American correspondent Edward Lyell Fox. He was desperately close now.

  Any visitor to Berlin in 1914 would have been struck by the city’s glorious, teeming vitality. More than any other European capital this was a modern metropolis full of contrasts. Berlin was home both to a thriving salon society and a politically emancipated proletariat. Prussian aristocrats and other vestiges of an imperial past occupied the same energetic space as the pioneering Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, then run by Albert Einstein, and as many as forty homosexual bars. Berlin was also a terminus for migrants, so there was nothing unusual about the sight of a weary-looking young traveller wandering about in search of a place to stay.

  We do not know where Pyke slept, only that it was cheap and was not the Hotel Adlon. Known as the ‘American Headquarters’, this was where the likes of Edward Lyell Fox were staying. Having found a bed Pyke now faced the problem of finding more journalistic material.

  He could write about what he had seen during his journey, about the restaurant and the train. An account of the soldier’s complaints could be worked into a longer piece on the reality of life in the German Army, and any of this would have electrified a British newspaper-reading public. But he wanted a broader range of voices. Pyke had made this journey to do more than provide a clipped summary of political developments. Instead, he wanted to gauge popular opinion and give his readers a sense of what ordinary Berliners were really thinking.

  While his ability to understand the language was improving, his spoken German remained poor. To survive in Berlin as an undercover correspondent he had to live off overheard scraps. So far as he was concerned, there was only one place to do this.

  ‘The first thing to do in Berlin is to go to a beer café,’ he later wrote. ‘The second thing to do in Berlin is to go to a beer café; and the third thing to do in Berlin is to go to a beer café. Not to drink beer. No. For even though the beer is light as the fluff off a dove’s wing, and is served so cool that the hot moisture of the crowded room causes the sides to drip, nevertheless it is wiser to drink only so much that you shall not be thought an unsociable curmudgeon [. . .] Take a sip here, and listen, a sip there, and listen again; smack your lips occasionally and loudly, and you will be looked upon as a temperate drinker, who enjoys his drink to the uttermost. And also you will hear many interesting things.’

  On Fleet Street there was a belief that if the British and French could hold off the German advance until Christmas, the Royal Navy’s blockade of German ports would bring the enemy to its knees. By late September, then, Berlin should have been starting to totter. Pyke was expecting food shortages and a prevailing mood of discontent. Perhaps he was in the wrong place.

  ‘I listened to the men talking in cafés. I heard no despair.’ If anything, they were ‘somewhat boisterous in their lack of it.’ Instead the feeling in Berlin could be summed up by the recruitment posters all over the city in which General Wachs roared at passers-by: ‘Do not say “Yes – but,” say “Yes – SURE!”’ Everywhere the spirit was bullish and open and Pyke had no trouble picking up the main talking points. These included rampant Anglophobia and an atavistic fear of Cossacks galloping in from the east. But still no hint of despair. Perhaps the naval blockade was having more of an effect on the German economy?

  Having finished off another beer Pyke went to the bathroom to consult the map in his Baedeker before making his way across Berlin to the Bourse. Here the beer cafés were jammed with Prussian businessmen having lunch. They had lolling, full-cheeked faces and heads with flat backs. He sat among them like ‘Daniel in a veritable den of lions’, listening hard, sipping more beer. Yet to his disappointment the one subject these men did not discuss over lunch was work.

  Geoffrey Pyke wound his way back to his hotel that evening at the end of his first day as an undercover correspondent in Berlin. He did not yet have enough for the front-page dispatch that he had envisaged, but he was making good progress.

  On the morning of Sunday, 27 September 1914, less than a week after his arrival in Germany, Pyke encountered the might of the German Army. He had joined the weekly exodus out of the city centre to Charlottenburg Park, taking with him a packed lunch and two bottles of Pilsner. Having found a quiet spot at the edge of the wood he settled down for what turned out to be an afternoon of military trainspotting.

  Two months earlier, in a great centrifugal migration away from the centre of Germany, millions of soldiers had been moved to the Western and Eastern fronts. Now a fresh landslide of troops was being sent to stem a distant Russian advance. Camouflaged by the trees, Pyke glugged contentedly at his beer as the second great mobilisation of the German Army took place before him. Train after train rolled past at a mandatory twenty miles per hour, each carriage ‘packed with row after row of soldiers. They stood at the door, leaning out over one another’s shoulders, singing cheerfully and sturdily those wonderful German marching songs that make one’s very breathing keep time to them. Each truck sang the same, and right down the train – more than a quarter of a mile long – rose and fell the words of the “Wacht am Rhein.” God! with what fervour they shouted it, and yet it was still music.’ Little did any of them know that one of the people enjoying their songs was an amateur English spy who was having a picnic.

  It was a stirring sight, one that made it hard to imagine Berlin being captured by Russian forces. The irony was that Perris and Pyke had agreed be
forehand that the most likely major story during his time in Berlin would be the arrival of Russian troops in the German capital. They had even gone to the trouble of establishing a code for Pyke to communicate via an open channel the direction and intensity of the Russian onslaught. Pyke had allowed this scene to play out in his mind. He would hang on until the eleventh hour, with ‘the booms of Russian cannons on the east side of Berlin as I left it by the west’, having written a ‘dispatch which was to adorn, yes – I confess – I decided it was to adorn a whole page of the morning paper.’

  That the News Editor of a major British newspaper was predicting the Russian capture of Berlin for September 1914 is a reminder of the resolute and at times blinding optimism on Fleet Street. The image of Pyke delivering a dispatch in the teeth of a Russian advance hints at something else: his own giddy ambition and a yearning for the kind of affirmation that would come with front-page heroics. It was a sense of recognition he never received at home. Yet this raw ambition was dovetailed increasingly with a growing self-awareness, as suggested by the words ‘yes – I confess –’.

  When Pyke left Charlottenburg Park later that day the troop trains were still in transit, and the following morning he returned to watch yet more of them pass by, soldiers stuffed in like socks in a drawer, until at last the convoy had rolled past. After making several back-of-an-envelope calculations about how many troops were on the move he took a train back into Berlin. In his hotel room he settled down to write.

  It was about six o’clock in the evening. Outside, in the gloaming, lamps were being lit. His first dispatch would take the form of a letter to Perris. He had completed the first paragraph of this note when he heard the door open behind him.

  Pyke spun round. Two men were standing in the doorway. They were about six feet away from him. One had bewitching eyes and a long black beard. The other had a fat face with jowls that looked like mutton chops.

  ‘Bitte, kommen Sie mit,’ said the better-looking one. ‘Come with me, please.’

  Pyke stood up, positioning his body between the two men and the half-written letter on the desk.

  ‘Aber wollen Sie nicht Platz nehmen?’ he replied. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ Yet this was far too accommodating, he told himself. He needed a retort worthy of an indignant Raymund Eggleton. ‘Wer sind?’ Pyke corrected himself. ‘Who are you?’

  No response.

  Instead the taller one repeated his instruction, adding an unequivocal ‘Jetzt.’ ‘Now.’

  Pyke could only think of the wretched letter behind him. Had they seen it? It was hard to say.

  They could not see through the chair’s back. If he could get a hand to the note on the desk he might be able to dispose of it. Trying to keep his shoulders still, he extended an arm backwards.

  ‘Where is your authority?’ Pyke asked in German, straining now towards the letter.

  The senior detective produced a circular metallic emblem. By now Pyke had got a finger to the paper. But he could not get any purchase on it.

  Time was running out. The first detective had repeated his instruction for the third time, adding ‘Unmittelbar’ – ‘immediately.’ He had also taken a step towards Pyke. ‘It would not be long before he had done another. In four steps he would be touching me. [. . .] He would be on me like a flash. His hands would seize my arm – would twist it back. Ju-jitsu. They teach the police that sort of thing in continental countries.’ Pyke had to do something to move the focus of suspicion away from the desk.

  With a lurch he strode past the two detectives and out into the corridor, switching off the lights as he went.

  Surprised, thinking that Pyke was about to make a run for it – this was his hope – the detectives followed him out into the corridor. Yet as he watched them leave he saw one lock the door and drop the key in his pocket. He must be planning to go back – in which case he would find the letter.

  With lurid finality, Pyke’s mind raced ahead to his execution. He had read countless adventure stories in which the hero was captured, put before a firing squad and offered a blindfold. Usually he refused – before pulling off a daring escape. How would Pyke respond when asked the same question?

  As he pictured his final moments the senior detective led him away, before asking him where he had been earlier that day.

  He had not been to Charlottenburg to watch troop trains.

  ‘To Potsdam,’ Pyke replied. ‘To see the pictures. There is a remarkably fine Velazquez there.’

  The detective knew the one. In fact, he ‘knew everything there was to know about Velazquez. When not arresting criminals he absorbed himself in Velazquez. There was fervour in his voice as he mentioned the name. It was his hobby, so he told me, and it was a pleasure to him to meet somebody who took an interest in the great master.’

  Pyke coaxed more out of him and as they continued down the street he felt the detective’s grip loosen, until he was no longer being restrained. Was this his chance to escape? Both detectives were armed. It was not worth the risk and, besides, he might yet be able to talk his way out of this situation.

  At the police station the wide-eyed Cambridge undergraduate was led into an office reeking of cigarette smoke and sausage meat. Around him was a phalanx of overweight policemen whose bellies seemed to vary according to rank – the fatter, the more senior.

  ‘You’ll be shot, you know,’ said one.

  The room buckled up with laughter.

  Pyke rearranged himself mentally, laughed and asked why anyone would think that. Again the room roared.

  ‘This sort of infantile sparring went on for twenty minutes. It was late now, and yet these portly tubs seemed to have nothing to do, except drink beer, eat sausage, turn a roaring gas still higher so that the very sausage began to sweat, and to spit contemplatively and repeatedly.’

  The detective with the dark eyes reappeared.

  ‘Herr Pyke,’ he began.

  The world seemed to stop.

  How could he have known Pyke’s name? There was nothing on Pyke’s person to suggest that he had gone through life with this moniker, in which case the detective must have been tipped off. But by whom?

  Experiencing jolts of betrayal amid a rising tide of fear, Pyke was then led outside by the plumper of the two detectives, the one he had come to think of as ‘Mutton Chop’, and together they took a cab across town. This gave his captor a chance to prattle on about the iniquities of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, until at last they pulled up inside the glass-covered courtyard of the Alexanderplatz Polizeigefängnis, a prison for common criminals. The scene now descended into farce. ‘Mutton Chop’ did not have enough money for the fare and asked Pyke to pay the cab driver.

  He did so and, seeing that he would have no need for money where he was going, tipped the driver extravagantly. Enjoying the look on his face, he then did the same to Mutton Chop, thanking him as you might a porter. Once he had entered the prison his mood became more sober.

  His pockets were emptied, he was given a chit for their contents and in the early hours of Tuesday, 29 September 1914, Geoffrey Pyke was shown into an empty cell without any lights. It had slick walls that were cold to the touch. When the door closed behind him he was consumed by a universe of darkness. There was nobody to speak to, only the distant moan of an inmate who had lost his mind. The next day Pyke was left to confront his mortality. His account of that morning remains an extraordinary passage:

  Outside I could hear Berlin throbbing with the noise of motors and trams. I thought of all those people, free, and with lives to lead. I thought of them anxious about relatives at the front, anxious about the next meal, anxious about their own fate in the far-off future, uncertain whether they should marry somebody, cheat somebody, benefit somebody, wondering what would happen to them if they were married, cheated, or what they would do with money if left them, and if it would be necessary to return a kindness if done them by the living. I envied them their doubt. I solved their problems for them. I lived their lives for
them, directing their energies. I married them; I divorced them; I was mother and father to their children; son and daughter to their parents. I gave them fortunes; I helped them spend it. I gave them poverty; I helped them bear it. I gave them politics; I made them socialists. I gave them philosophies, and made them supermen. I gave them a hundred religions, and but one commandment – Thou shalt not kill. I gave them everything they could want and took it away again immediately, that they should know its value. I gave them knowledge of good, and twice as much of evil. I created worlds, in which men lived with intensity, and any tendency towards becoming a moral and mental jelly-fish was followed with death by inanition. I moulded a universe and put in it worlds other than ours, and beings unlike us, and superior to us; I destroyed it. I . . . I awoke with a sob, as my head slipped off my hands, and I fell against the opposite wall.

  Which was how Geoffrey Pyke came to be awaiting execution in a German prison cell just two weeks before he was due back at Cambridge to start his final year. Perris at the Chronicle would assume that Pyke had been unable to get into Germany and had returned to England. His mother, meanwhile, imagined him to be in Stockholm.

  He was imprisoned and alone, and it seemed that nobody who cared about him knew where he was. Before leaving London he had realised that something like this might happen. Pyke understood that to pull off a scheme of this kind he must be prepared to fail, and that given the stakes involved his failure would be spectacular. In setting out for Berlin he had taken an enormous risk. His plan to pull off the great journalistic scoop of the war had met with stunning initial success, and as a twenty-year-old amateur spy he had got further than any professional British intelligence agent would during the entire war. But he had been betrayed. Though he did not know who was responsible, all that mattered just then was that his plan had failed and now he was set to pay with his life.