by Peter Day
They dug in once more, in front of High Wood near Guillemont where the German Army had a divisional headquarters. They were under constant attack by the British, led by officers on horseback and preceded by artillery assaults that reduced everything to dust and rubble. Probably the worst was on 17-18 August when the artillery barrage lasted twenty-six hours. The 2nd Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders attacked, accompanied by flamethrowers, but German machine-gun fire coupled with the British bombardment, which did not let up, even when their own troops reached the disputed ground, forced them back.17 In that bleak landscape, a smouldering slag heap where no plant life survived, the Grenadiers were invited to surrender and refused, despite having lost three-quarters of their men, fighting on with only a few machine guns and precious little ammunition. They were finally withdrawn at the end of August, highly praised for their steadfastness, but it was in vain. Guillemont fell to the Allies a fortnight later.18
Klop’s fastidious ways were hardly suited to the mud and filth of the trenches. It must have been a relief when he got a chance to train with the recently formed Luftstreitkräfte, the German army’s air force section. He and his brother Peter had not been fighting side by side. Peter had started with the 1st Württemberg Regiment, joined Klop in the 123rd Grenadiers in May 1915 and then joined the 127th in February 1917 but he was also taking part in flying training. Klop quickly found that the glamorous image of an aviator in uniform opened the way to conquests that were altogether more amenable than confronting the British Tommy in the trenches. As he later confided in his wife Nadia, ‘he was able quite effortlessly to have any and every female he fancied’. He described to her how he and Peter contrived to be billeted in chateaux where the owner invariably had at least one beautiful daughter. Unblushingly, he told her he shared girlfriends with his brother and indulged in three-in-a-bed sessions with two sisters. In the officers’ mess he was developing his skills as an entertainer, playing the piano, impersonating the singers of popular songs in English and French as well as German, making friends in high places who would serve him well in later life.
On the ground, the fighting was concentrated around Messine and Wytschaetebogen where the British began a massive seventeen-day bombardment around the middle of May. Klop was a witness.19
Aviation was still its infancy. Crashes were commonplace. Dogfights were becoming lethal with the development of cockpit-mounted machine guns that could fire through the propellers. Previously enemy airmen fired at each other with pistols or threw missiles at each other. Klop claimed to have once escaped unscathed from a cockpit riddled with bullets, some of which had passed through his cap without causing injury. He liked to maintain that it was the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, who had come to his rescue. By April 1917 Klop had qualified as an observer rather than a pilot. His duties involved spotting targets on the Western Front for the artillery, and occasionally dropping bombs.
It was then that he and Peter were reunited in flying section A250. Their comradeship was to be short-lived. On the morning of Friday, 13 July 1917, Peter Ustinov sat on the end of his brother’s bed and said farewell before taking off on a mercy mission. With white streamers attached to the wings of his plane, he was heading behind enemy lines to drop bags of mail from British prisoners of war to their loved ones back home. British anti-aircraft gunners failed to see the white streamers and Peter Ustinov, with his pilot Georg Fick, met their deaths in no-man’s land at Hollebeke, just south of Ypres. For Klop, who led the search party to recover his body, it was a shattering experience. A month later Klop was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class and in September the Ritterkreuz or Knight’s Cross, effectively a double Iron Cross. He was still flying but the logs that might record what he did to deserve the accolades were destroyed in the Second World War. Klop may not have cared much about medals after the loss of his brother. He named his only son in his memory.20
In July 1918 Klop won yet another Ritterkreuz, this time with the additional recognition of the Order of Friedrich, a nineteenth-century award created for nobility serving in the Württemberg regiments. In October, a couple of weeks before the war ended, he was transferred out of the front line to a War Office job back in Württemberg. When he enlisted he had described himself as a Protestant Evangelist. By the time he signed his discharge papers he had no religion.
He soon moved to Berlin in search of civilian employment. He abandoned the notion of becoming a diplomat. Representing a defeated and vilified country abroad may not have been the best showcase for his talents but his chosen alternative was scarcely better. He had influential friends and quickly found himself appointed to the Wolff’s Telegraphische Büro, the national news agency of Germany, as a correspondent destined to report from London, probably the most hostile posting imaginable. Wolff’s had been founded by Bernhard Wolff in 1849, shortly before his former colleague Julius Reuter set up his eponymous agency in London. They had previously worked together in Paris, for the French news agency Havas. The three agencies represented the great powers of international news reporting, often pooling reports or sharing the telegraph cables that made possible rapid worldwide communication. The strategic significance of communications technology had been recognised during the war, with Britain in particular seeking to control the means of transmission in Europe, across the Atlantic and into the Far East. Intercepting enemy diplomatic and military traffic for intelligence and propaganda purposes played an important part in her strategy. Similarly, the Wolff Bureau had been used before and during the war by the German Foreign Office to challenge Britain’s colonial supremacy and to get Germany’s message across.
So Klop’s new profession was not that far removed from diplomacy, in fact it was ideal cover. Klop was about to become a spy.
While he waited for British clearance to travel to London he was sent by the Wolff Bureau to the Netherlands, reporting from there on Dutch and English news. In 1919 the German ambassador in The Hague was Friedrich Rosen, an Orientalist who had grown up in Palestine and been German consul in Jerusalem at the turn of the century. In 1905 he led a German mission to Ethiopia and so would almost certainly have known Baron Platon Ustinov and Moritz Hall’s family. Klop reintroduced himself to Rosen and got to know the counsellor at the embassy, Baron Adolf Georg Otto ‘Ago’ von Maltzan. Rosen would briefly serve as Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic conducting lively exchanges with his opposite number in the Soviet Union, Georgy Chicherin, with a view to rapprochement.21 But it was Maltzan who was the architect of German revival by clandestinely subverting the peace treaty of Versailles from the moment when victors and vanquished finally put pen to paper in June 1919.
Germany and Russia had been on opposing sides for the first three years of the war but after the Russian Revolution hostilities had officially ceased. The Russians were therefore excluded from the Versailles treaty negotiations. In addition, some German soldiers had joined forces with the White Russian armies, which already had British and French support, seeking to depose the new Communist rulers. As these rebellions petered out, hundreds of thousands of troops from either side were left stranded in the Baltic States or held as prisoners on either side. There were estimated to be 100,000 German prisoners in Russia and 1.2 million Russians in German hands. During 1919 Maltzan became commissioner responsible for repatriating these displaced soldiers. These were ideal circumstances for infiltrating agents and Maltzan, who had been First Secretary at the German embassy in St Petersburg before the war, took full advantage.
He was convinced that Germany’s best prospect for economic and political recovery lay with Russia – Bolsheviks or no Bolsheviks. Russia needed Germany’s technical ability; Germany needed Russia’s raw materials and vast labour force. The punitive reparations imposed by the Western Allies meant there was no future in that direction. He built his own career around that concept. By 1921 he was ministerial director of the Eastern department of the German Foreign Office and by 1922 State Secretary and closest adviser to the Foreign Minister Walther Rathe
nau, who signed the Treaty of Rapallo which ultimately allowed Germany secret military development facilities inside the Soviet Union.
In 1919 and 1920 Germany did not have normal diplomatic representation in Moscow and was anxious to infiltrate any unofficial observer who could report first hand on the chaos that was enveloping the new regime. One of Maltzan’s first sources was a Communist sympathiser, Wolfgang Breithaupt, editor of a small but apparently well-regarded journal known as The Word in Three Languages, published by the Pacific-World-Union in The Hague, in fact in four languages – English, French, Dutch and German. It attracted contributions from a number of English correspondents, among them the novelist D. H. Lawrence who provided a four-part series on democracy. He had been introduced to the magazine by the pacifist novelist Douglas Goldring, who visited the magazine’s offices in 45 Van Imhoff Street and recalled that the paper was run by Germans pretending to be International Socialists. He thought they were secret service agents.22 It has since emerged that between November 1919 and March 1920 the magazine was used as a front to gather information from inside Russia, paid for by Maltzan who received the fruits of their research direct from Wolfgang Breithaupt. In January 1920 Maltzan paid an Italian journalist F. P. Giuntini the relatively modest fee of 8,000 Marks to travel through Russia, ostensibly gathering material for Italian newspaper articles. A month later, a German businessman using the cover name of Knoll was set up with 30,000 Marks to trade in confiscated or export-prohibited medicinal drugs that the authorities in Soviet Russia desperately needed, while making an objective assessment of the latest political events in Soviet Russia. The German consulate at Vyborg, just inside the Finnish border and only eighty miles north-west of St Petersburg, was weighing in with information gleaned from Bolshevik newspapers and informants prepared to make hazardous border crossings at night.23 Two German doctors, Julius Borchardt and Georg Klemperer, had been summoned to Moscow to treat Lenin’s baffling, persistent headaches and reported back to Maltzan. In 1919 a Dutch journalist by the name of Fabius went on a semi-official trip and was arrested on the Russian border but still contrived to return with copies of correspondence between Stalin, Lenin and the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky.24
Maltzan was simultaneously holding secret trade talks in Berlin with Viktor Kopp, Russia’s Red Cross representative in the city, and hatching military strategies with General Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission, to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Maltzan was also aware that, however much Britain might appear to oppose the Communist takeover in Russia, Prime Minister Lloyd George saw a potential solution to his country’s unemployment problems in opening up the Russian market to British exports. Maltzan was determined to get in ahead of him. On the face of it, Britain was trying to bring down the Bolshevik regime, while Germany was trying to establish good relations with them, in spite of their ideological differences. It was not so straightforward.25
Klop was a natural candidate for recruitment. He had strong personal reasons to go to Russia: he had lost touch with his parents and his sister. Early in the war they had corresponded through his mother’s younger sister Katia, who was in Bulgaria and managed to pass letters through Sweden and Switzerland. But after the revolution in 1917 Klop lost touch and determined to go to Russia to find out what had happened to them. It was not a journey to be taken lightly or without friends or support. Friedrich Rosen and Ago von Maltzan could help him prise open the door but thereafter he would have to live on his wits. The consequences if he was betrayed or captured didn’t bear thinking about.
It probably did not cross his mind that he would find a bride of independent mind, great strength of character and aesthetic talent who just at that moment was in need of a knight in shining armour.
CHAPTER 3: NADIA
Alexandre Benois missed the world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 15 January 1890. His friend Dima Filosofov dragged him along on the second or third night, having heard that it was not so bad after all. The composer’s earlier ballet, Swan Lake, had not been well received. For Benois this was a revelation and he attended every performance from then March. The impact on him and his friends was such that it changed their approach to art, ballet and music for years to come. Without it, he claimed, there would have been no Ballets Russes.26
Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece had awakened in Alexandre Benois the creative impulse which led to the founding of Mir iskusstva (World of Art), the magazine which dominated the aesthetics and art nouveau movements in the great city of St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. Benois and Filosopov, the supreme ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the artist Léon Bakst, were the driving cultural force and the Mariinsky was its focal point. The greatest talents of music and dance were nurtured there. Alexandre’s production of Le Pavillon d’Armide was premiered at the Mariinsky in 1907 and performed in Paris by Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova two years later. His career as a costume and set designer spanned nearly sixty years with his last production of Petrushka staged at Covent Garden in 1957, three years before his death.
For Benois and his young contemporaries, Tchaikovsky opened a gateway to the west, to Europe and progress, without relinquishing the splendour of the eighteenth century when Peter the Great made St Petersburg his model capital. For a while they called themselves the Society for Self-Education of Nevsky Pickwickians, setting out, in the style of Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, from the main thoroughfare of their capital, the Nevsky Prospekt, in their quest for the delights and curiosities of life. Alexandre adopted the slogan ‘Petersburg über alles’ as a rule to live by and Sergei Diaghilev described their new movement as a generation thirsting for beauty.27
The prosperous Benois family, among whom Alexandre was simply the most talented of many talents, had lived in Russia for several generations but they traced their roots to Germany, Italy and France. They were at the heart of the cultural life of the Tsar’s capital.
Nicholas Benois, son of a farm labourer, was born in 1702 and brought up by his widowed mother, a laundress, in the village of Saint Ouen-en-Brie about fifty kilometres south-east of Paris. She instilled enough of an education for Nicholas to become the village school master, a profession his son also followed. But his grandson had grander social ambitions, more suited to a man christened Julius Louis Caesar Benois. He became pastry cook to the Duc de Montmorency. Together they fled the revolution of 1789 and made their way to St Petersburg where the cook found himself more in demand than the duc and was very soon appointed food taster to Tsar Paul I. This prestigious appointment had its drawbacks, since the emperor rightly suspected his courtiers of plotting assassination and became convinced that he was being fed ground glass in his meals.
But the Frenchman survived, adopted the name Jules-Césard and married the royal midwife, Concordia Groppe from Germany. They produced between them seventeen children. Among them was yet another Nicholas, who qualified as an architect and married Camilla Cavos. Her grandfather, the composer Catterino Cavos, had been brought up in a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice and was director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Her father was an architect.
Thus there came into being a great theatrical and architectural dynasty. Nicholas Benois, the architect, had as his patrons the Empress Maria Federovna and Tsar Nicholas I. He worked on the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and collaborated with his father-in-law, Alberto Cavos, on the design of the Mariinsky Theatre. Three of his nine children were closely connected with the arts. Albert, the oldest boy, was a thrice-married philanderer and an artist whose water colours were popular in the Royal household. He was eclipsed by his younger brother Alexandre.
Leontij Benois was the least flamboyant of the three, an architect whose best works were civic and business buildings in a Renaissance style. He enjoyed a reputation as a consummate teacher, holding first a professorship and then becoming Rector at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. He had married Maria Sapojhikov
a, daughter of a wealthy merchant who ran fisheries on the Volga River.
Leontij’s most famous artistic moment came in 1909 when he put on show a ‘lost’ Leonardo da Vinci painting of the Madonna and Child which he had inherited from his grandfather Alberto Cavos. Family legend maintained that Alberto had acquired it from a band of itinerant actors. It caused a sensation and Tsar Nicholas II eventually offered $1.5 million to acquire it for The Hermitage museum. Comparing exchange rates over time can lead to wildly differing results but even on the basis, using a reputable academic calculator, that it was the equivalent of £310,000 at the time, it represents £26 million at twenty-first century prices. But the payment was to be made in instalments and after the Bolshevik revolution the new regime reneged on the deal while keeping the painting.
At the time of the painting’s first appearance, Leontij’s youngest daughter Nadia was thirteen years old and growing up in luxurious surroundings on Vasilievsky Island, the most fashionable quarter of St Petersburg. She could have had little expectation of the terrible events which were to shatter her comfortable existence, nor of the strange ‘Dutchman’ who would eventually come to her rescue.
Vasilievsky Island was laid out on a grid system. Leontij, who had designed some of the buildings, had a house at Number 20 in the Third Line. As Nadia got older and followed the family tradition by enrolling at the Academy of Arts, she became a frequent visitor at the home of her uncle Alexandre at Number 38 in the First Line, overlooking the Bolshoi Theatre. There she would be likely to meet the composers Sergei Prokofiev and Alexander Tcherepnin, playing the grand piano, or her cousin Nicholas, to whom she was briefly engaged to be married. He later became design director of La Scala in Milan. Prokofiev was in his early twenties, closer to Nadia’s age than Alexandre’s, but the two men collaborated on ballet productions and became good friends. The composer was a regular guest at the Benois’s Thursday night ‘At Home’ parties and had attended a boisterous New Year celebration.28