Beneath Gray Skies

by Hugh Ashton

  Davis frowned. “He was going to shoot a woman in the back?”

  “Seems like it, sir. Everyone seems to think that’s who he was aiming to shoot. Anyways, he shot once, and seemed as if he’d hit her, then the three of them went round the corner, and the Limey comes out with his rifle and shoots three times, hitting Goering three times in the leg. It’s going to be a long time before he walks straight, they tell me. There was no point in chasing after them, the guys who were there said to me. They looked round the corner the Limey and the others had run round, but there was nothing in sight. None of our boys knew their way round the city, and this Goering was the only German with them, and he was bound for the hospital, anyhow. Truth to tell, sir, I got the feeling that none of them was that interested in chasing after them. They were kind of rooting for the girl, and none of them was that keen on Major Goering after what they’d seen.”

  “I see. So that was that. And then, after the arrests, what happened?”

  “Now for this, sir, I was there and I saw it with my own eyes, and I didn’t like it at all, sir, I can tell you that.”

  “Would you like some whiskey, Colonel?”

  “In a short while, if I may, sir. Please allow me to tell you about this first. After we’d finished the arrests at about eleven o’clock, according to the plans we’d been given, we were told to go back to the warehouses where they’d billeted us. We were carrying our rifles and wearing those Nazi armbands as it seemed like the Nazis had taken control and no-one cared any more. I was told to stick with the Germans as an observer, they said. The trucks that had carried our guns and bullets earlier, or maybe it was different ones, I can’t rightly be sure about that, picked up our prisoners and took them to a field some ways outside the city. I was riding up front in one of the trucks with the driver and a couple of those Nazis.” He stopped. “Mr. President, you mentioned a drink? If I may, sir.”

  “I’ll get it for you myself,” replied Davis. He crossed to the sideboard and poured into two shot glasses. “Straight, Colonel?”

  “Thank you, sir.” He accepted the whiskey and sipped, closing his eyes. “Then sir, they forced the prisoners out of the truck into the field. There was a little ditch to one side, and they told them to line up along the ditch. Then they passed out spades and told them to dig, and when they’d dug the ditch out a bit deeper, they shot them.”

  “How, Colonel?”

  “One of the Nazis, a Captain called Röhm, I think it was, went down the line with a machine pistol, sir. Then they kicked the bodies into the ditch and filled it in. But some of the ones they’d shot were still alive, sir. I could see some of their hands opening and closing, sticking out of the ground. Just the hands. I see them in my dreams, still.” He shuddered and finished the whiskey.

  “Allow me, Colonel,” said Davis, taking the empty glass and refilling it. “How many were killed, do you reckon?”

  “I counted fifteen in our truck. Thank you, sir,” taking the glass. “And from what I was told, there were ten trucks in all doing the same job. So I would guess between one hundred and two hundred people died that day.”

  Davis pursed his lips. “From what you are telling me, Colonel, you would not want to work with these Germans again?”

  “With all due respect, sir, I would not.” Vickers sat bolt upright in his chair, looking Davis straight in the eye.

  “That sounds like a very straightforward answer, Colonel. Thank you for your candor. Now a slightly different question. Could you trust these people, even if you don’t like them or what they do?”

  “Difficult to say, sir. When we arrived at Bremen, everything was very well organized. Our billets were clean, and the food and everything was a lot better than we expected. Their plans and everything were very professional. But could I trust them? I thought I could at the start, but with what I heard of the man Goering shooting the girl, and what I saw in that field, I’d watch my back if I had to work with them again, sir. I am sorry to have been working with them and I wouldn’t want us to have any more to do with them.”

  Davis’s face changed slightly, but Vickers didn’t seem to notice. “Did you meet with Mr. Hitler at all?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “And?”

  “What do I make of him, sir? I liked him, truth to tell. We used an interpreter since my German’s a mite rusty. He seemed like a man you’d want on your side in a fight. Pretty straightforward and pleasant and a good war record—a gutsy kind of guy, you’d have to call him. We talked a bit about painting—he said he’d wanted to be an artist when he was younger, and my sister paints pictures, so we had something in common. My view is he shouldn’t have taken up with those Nazis. To be frank, I don’t see him surviving long with them—he’s too nice a guy. Röhm and Goering and that gang will soon take over as the bosses. Those are the ones we have to watch out for. And I really do not think, sir, that we should have any more to so with them or their organization.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes, Colonel, that will be all.” The voice was suddenly cold, and the President’s face changed. “Colonel Vickers, I find your attitude towards the actions and aims of our German friends to be reprehensible and not that of an officer of the Army of the Confederacy. I find it to be cowardly and unworthy of the commission you hold. Furthermore, it is not your place to dictate or even to recommend foreign policy to me or my Senate. Understood, Colonel?”

  “Yes, sir,” woodenly.

  “I am going to have leave papers written for you. You may rejoin your regiment in a month. Until then, I suggest you learn to be a soldier again. Go hunting. Get used to the sound of a gun and the sight and smell of blood.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. President, sir.” There was no expression at all in the face as the tall soldier stepped out of the office.

  -o-

  “Gaylord!” called Davis after the footsteps had retreated. “Take this to the War Department. And send in the Secretary of Commerce.”

  “Austin,” he greeted his visitor. “We have us a little task to perform.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “We need to collect our debts from Mr. Hitler, now that he’s President of Germany.”

  “Actually, he’s their Chancellor, not President, Mr. President. There is no President of Germany at the moment, which according to their constitution makes Mr. Hitler the most powerful person in Germany.”

  “Well, that’s your job, Austin, to understand these things. Me, I just call them as I see them. Anyways, you’re going over to Berlin, and you’re going to collect what’s owed to us.”

  “What exactly are we going to ask for?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly going to give you a goddamned shopping list, Austin. What we need is some German folks to come over here and help us set up some factories. Right now, they’re the only hope we have of getting any modern machines and getting our economy moving.”

  “What kind of factories?”

  “How should I know? Ask around. I know I’d like to see us making some of them airplane and airship things. It really bugs me that those Europeans are really into that kind of thing, and we’re not. If only those Wright brothers hadn’t gone over to Ireland from Ohio to build their airplane, and they’d come to make their airplanes with us. The Carolinas, say. There’s lots of good flat places near the sea with a lot of wind that they could have used.”

  “So you’d like to ask me for airplanes, then? What about textiles and steel mills and that kind of thing?”

  “Sure. Whatever we need.” This kind of detail bored Davis. He preferred to leave these things to his Cabinet officers unless it was part of a project that caught his fancy. Even though he knew that most of his government members were hopelessly corrupt and could be depended on to skim their percentage off the top of any deal, he preferred other people to do the hard thinking for him. “And the other really important thing, Austin.”

  “Yes, sir?”

&nb
sp; “Make sure that those Germans get all their cotton and tobacco from us. We all know how much we need customers buying from our store. And we need people to see about getting the oil out of the ground and selling it to them, too. I know for a fact there’s a lot of oil under Texas and Oklahoma, probably more than in California, and we could start selling it to Germany, if we knew how to get it out cheap enough. Right now, there’s not enough people who’ll buy from us to make it worth our while. But if the Germans want it, that’s another matter.”

  “How do you want them to pay, sir? The German economy’s pretty bad right now.”

  “They can pay in factories and experts or something. That’s the deal, Austin. We’ll sell them oil and cotton and tobacco. They help us make airplanes and automobiles and things. But we need some money in advance before we really get started on all of this. You know as well as I do how we need some ready cash.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. I shudder every time I look at the Treasury books. But I’d like to remind you that the Germans have been forced to pay massive reparations to France and Belgium and their currency’s worthless right now. And I heard tell that a lot of their gold reserves went to those Russian Bolsheviks to start their revolution.”

  “I’d heard that about the reparations, too. I hadn’t heard that all their gold had gone over to Russia. Your job, Austin, is to call in our debts. Mr. Hitler owes us, and I want you to make sure he understands that. I want you to screw some money out of him. Not promises, but money.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Okay, Austin. Now see what you can do as soon as possible. I want you to start over there next week. Oh, and that’s another thing. See if you can get them to start a regular passenger service between Germany and New Orleans or something, and get those German ports opened up to our ships. Come and see me before you go, and let me know what you’ve found out.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.” Sometimes the Secretary of Commerce felt like an errand boy. But then, he consoled himself, errand boys never picked up the kind of gratuities he would be able to secure for himself as a result of the deals that he hoped to make with the Germans.

  Chapter 13: Whitehall, London, United Kingdom

  “The Confederacy is a perfectly rotten little state, in all senses of the word.”

  London seemed perpetually cold to Christopher Pole. His new boss in this secret corner of the British government service, Henry Dowling, sympathized with him, and insisted that he have the desk nearest the office coal fire, but it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. His ribs still ached from time to time in the cold and damp, but his fingers were getting better, and the doctor told him he would be able to take the splints off in a week or so.

  Dowling had promised Christopher that he would take him to a “decent shop” (whatever that might mean) in the next few days and get him some “proper clothes.” As long as they were warm, thought Christopher. The Brits seemed to positively relish their horrible climate.

  “Time to go and see C, Pole,” Dowling said. Christopher had had to become accustomed to being called by his family name—the Brits seemed to do it all the time to each other, but he had to call Dowling “sir”, just as Dowling had to address his superiors as “sir”. Why “C” was just called “C”, Christopher had yet to learn. “I want you to come and take notes. It’s all about your friend Brian. C wants to talk to me about the Berlin report I handed in a week ago. Don’t know why it’s taken so long for him to read it.”

  Christopher had been surprised to learn that Brian had been a British spy planted in the Army of the Confederacy, and even more surprised to learn that he, Christopher, was now technically a British Intelligence agent. He had signed a piece of paper called the “Official Secrets Act”, and Dowling had laughed. “Tell anyone what you do for a living, and we’ll stick you in the Tower of London and cut off your head,” he’d grinned. Noticing Christopher’s look of alarm, he quickly added, “Just joking. Sorry. We don’t cut people’s heads off any more. But we don’t want you talking about what goes on in this building, what?”

  British humor took some getting used to, too, thought Christopher. You could never tell when they were joking or not. There were other ways that they did things which just seemed plain wrong. Like the business of what side of the street you went on, for example. The Brits drove all their traffic on the left, when everyone knew you should stay on the right.

  -o-

  Henry Dowling had set him straight on that business one day in the office, though. “Look, Pole,” he explained. “Imagine you’re wearing a sword. You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So which side does your sword live? Think about it.”

  Christopher thought about it a bit. “Left, I guess, sir, so I can pull it out easy with my right hand.”

  “Good. Now tuck this umbrella into your belt, pretend it’s a sword. Good man. Now let’s say this chair is a horse. The back of the chair is the horse’s head. Which leg are you going to put over the horse first when you mount?”

  “Right leg, of course. Otherwise the sword gets in my way.”

  “Well said. So which side of the horse are you getting on, if you’re going to face the front?”

  “Left, sir.”

  “Excellent. Now, if you’re on the right side of the road, you’re going to be in the middle of the road while you get on your horse, eh? And if you’re on the left side of the road, you can have a mounting block on the pavement,” (Christopher had just learned the hard way that this meant “sidewalk” in British English, having been shouted at by a bus driver in the street to “stay on the bloody pavement”) “out of the traffic? So you carry on riding on the same side of the road that you got on the horse, which is the left. Clear?”

  “Suppose you’re right, sir. But sir?”

  “Yes, Pole?”

  “You don’t wear swords any more, and not that many folks ride horses nowadays. So why still do it?”

  “Habit, Pole, habit. Like so many things. Like you still drink cold tea, when us civilized chappies drink it the proper way.” Christopher shuddered inwardly. He still hadn’t got used to the notion of putting milk and sugar into hot tea, and had trained the office canteen to let him have his tea cold, with a slice of lemon.

  Another thing he hadn’t got used to was the money. Twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. Crazy. Quarter-pounds were called “crowns.” And then you had things called “half-crowns”, which were worth two shillings and sixpence. And then, just to make matters even more complicated, there were things called “guineas.” There wasn’t a coin called a “guinea”, but the prices of some things seemed to be marked in guineas, worth one pound and one shilling each.

  “How do you learn all this, sir?” he had asked Dowling one day, after trying to work out three times seven shillings and ninepence in his head.

  “It’s not as easy as your system, is it, Pole?” Dowling had said. “One day, probably in the next ten years or so, we’ll have a logical system for counting our money. But in the meantime, look at how easy it is to split our pound into two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten or twelve or sixteen or twenty equal parts. You can’t do that with dollars and cents, now, can you?”

  -o-

  Dowling’s voice snapped him back to the present. “Do come on, Pole, old chap. C will have us for breakfast if we’re not there pretty sharpish.”

  Christopher collected his official notebook and pen, and a file of papers, following Dowling down the corridor to C’s office.

  He’d only met the legendary head of the British Secret Service once, when he was first brought to London, and had been too shy and embarrassed to look him in the eye. The door to C’s reception office was open, and Dowling and Pole signed the appropriate form, and passed it to C’s effete male secretary.

  “You’re one minute early,” announced the latter, making a great show of pulling out his fob watch and consulting it. “Wait here,” pointin
g to two hard-backed chairs.

  “Berk,” muttered Dowling to Christopher, unintelligibly. After what Christopher assumed to be a minute, the secretary picked up the telephone on his desk. After a few words on the telephone, he turned to Christopher and Dowling. “C will see you now,” making a theatrical production out of the simple statement.

  “Bloody twit,” said Dowling to Christopher, out of the secretary’s earshot. Christopher had a reasonable idea what he was talking about this time.

  C was seated at his desk at the far side of the room. A view of London roofs was visible through the window behind him. In the distance, Christopher thought he could see the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, to which he’d been taken on his first Sunday in London, and been impressed by the size and the majesty of the place, as well as by its graceful beauty.

  “Dowling. Pole. Good morning,” said C without looking up. He continued reading the papers he had been studying when they walked in. They waited in silence for a few moments. Suddenly C looked up, turned to Christopher and smiled.