THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  I felt somehow personally responsible for these misfortunes, and for some reason quoted H G Wells, 'It was the war that will end war.' But Domagk only smiled again and diverted the unpleasant subject by asking, 'Have you done any research yourself?'

  I nodded. 'I held a six months scholarship at Cambridge after taking Tripos. I studied the affinity of bacteria for dyes.'

  I was startled at the effect of this scientifically inconsequential information. Domagk stiffened in his chair, staring at me for several seconds frowning and half-smiling, like a man suspecting you are pulling his leg. Embarrassed and puzzled, I explained, 'Just the usual bacteriologist's dyes, gentian violet, methylene blue, carbol fuchsin and so on.' They were used to stain bacteria to make them visible under the microscope, a notion which had come from the German Karl Weigert in the previous century. 'I was investigating the chemical reaction behind the colouring effect.'

  'I see.' After another moment Domagk said, 'As you can imagine, we're always investigating the properties of dyestuffs in the labs here. I G Farben manufactures drugs, fabrics, a hundred things, but we're essentially a dye-making concern. The company is inclined to see itself as God, creating the colourful dawn and rainbows to please His fancy. You're familiar with that passage in Goethe's _West-Цstlicher Divan?'_ I shook my head. 'At present I'm investigating a series of dyes, to discover if they've any therapeutic effect against various bacteria.'

  It struck me as curious that I G Farben should dissipate its scientists' time seeking remedies in the colours of curtains and girls' dresses. The only dyestuffs I recalled being used as medicaments were the bright yellow proflavine and the brilliant green which had disfigured my adolescent face worse than the impetigo spots they were applied to cure. While speaking, Domagk had taken from a desk drawer a reprint of his own, on which he scribbled and handed to me with a dismissive, 'Please pass that on to Sir Frederick, with my regards and respects.'

  I saw the paper was entitled in German, _The Destruction of Infectious Agents._ The date was 1926. It must have been among the first scientific papers Domagk wrote. He seemed an early recruit in man's battle against infection, which progressed with the gloomy indecision of any which had lurched upon the Western Front.

  We rose. I nodded towards the photograph of Paul Ehrlich, remarking, _'Geld, Geduld, Geschick, Gluck'-_money, patience, skill and luck, his four ingredients for successful research.

  'Who taught you that?' Domagk asked as we reached the door.

  'When I was seventeen, I worked in the Inoculation Department of St Mary's Hospital in London-'

  'So young! You will soon be a professor,' he exclaimed humorously.

  'I was only a technician.' I had been the lab boy, the equivalent of an office boy, who washed the glassware, prepared the flat, round Petri dishes for growing bacteria, and of course made the tea. 'Before Professor Ehrlich died during the war, he had been on very friendly terms with one of the bacteriologists at St Mary's-Professor Alexander Fleming. Perhaps you've heard of him?'

  Domagk shook his head. 'I only know the chief of the Inoculation Department, Sir Almroth Wright. He came to visit us here at Elberfeld, you know.' That must have been after my time. Knowing Wright's disdain for chemistry, and particularly the systematized German variety, his reflections on Domagk's lavishly-equipped labs would have reverberated throughout St Mary's. 'By the way-' Domagk nodded towards Ehrlich's photograph. 'It's a myth that he had to investigate 605 arsenicals before discovering "Salvarsan". But he examined a good number, and slaughtered whole armies of mice.

  In the corridor outside we found Professor Hцrlein emerging from the lab where we had met. From the way Domagk stepped back I sensed Hцrlein was an important person in the factory. But he said to me pleasantly enough, 'You've come a long way to our city of Wuppertal, Herr Elgar. I hope you'll find it an interesting place.' Everyone seemed to damn Wuppertal with the faint, non-committal praise of _eine interessante Stadt._ 'The Elberfeld Rathaus has an excellent museum, and there is a remarkable old church in the Kolk. You have already visited our splendid Lauretuiskirke, doubtless.'

  Domagk smiled. 'Wuppertal cannot offer a great deal of amusement for a young man. It's hardly Paris, _nicht water?_ There's the cinema. And I expect you enjoy the company of Frдulein Dieffenbach.'

  Professor Hцrlein shook hands. 'I expect we shall see each other again.'

  But we did not, until he was on trial for his life at Nьrnberg.

  3

  'Well, what do you expect?' Frдulein Dieffenbach used an unnaturally sharp voice for arguments, or when she was embarrassed or chiding me about the puddles I left on the bathroom floor. 'We supposed everything would be settled in accordance with the famous Fourteen Points, because after all, President Wilson was a lawyer, so he could produce a just agreement in an intelligent way, without emotion or malice.'

  'Whoever heard of a lawyer stopping a battle?' I asked-in German, because she spoke hardly any English.

  'The Americans, obviously,' she replied primly.

  'The Americans think you can fix anything if you hire a smart enough attorney.'

  'That's exactly the remark I should have expected from you, Herr Elgar.' She was a schoolmistress, and she reproved me in her best schoolmistress manner, which sat on her as grotesquely as the broad-brimmed flat black hat she was in the act of unpinning. Her hair was so blonde it suggested an albino, and she wore it coiled in plaits over her ears, resembling a telephone girl's headphones. 'Like any educated young man who can't take things seriously, you imagine that you are a…a Rochefoucauld,' she said flatteringly, not being able to think of anyone else. 'President Wilson was a great idealist.'

  'On the contrary, he was only a great optimist.'

  'Well, what's wrong with that? Relying on the best in people?'

  'But it's disastrous! Every leader who's tried has been painfully disappointed. Ever since Jesus Christ.'

  'Now you've gone too far.' Gerda Dieffenbach was a Catholic, unlike most inhabitants of Wuppertal, renowned in Germany as a nest of stinging Protestant sects. She was a year or so older than me, tall and grey-eyed, always in appalling long serge skirts and a plain white blouse freshly laundered every day. She never used cosmetics or scent or even bath salts. She smelt wholesomely of household soap. She argued with me because I was the first Englishman she had met in her life, and because argument is flirtation with intelligent young women who are not sure of themselves. I did not really argue at all. I teased, enjoying the delicious spectacle of her pink with indignation, her soft mouth open breathlessly.

  It was early evening that same Saturday, and we were in the shabby room where everyone ate and sat at the front of Dr Dieffenbach's house near the Zoo. It was not a large house, and her father had to have his surgery, the waiting room and his small library, aromatic with cigars. The Gesellschaftszimmer across the narrow, tile-paved hall was filled with massive dark furniture and curtained with crimson plush, even the subjects of its solidly-framed family portraits looking uncomfortable. It was kept shuttered and unheated, mercifully reserved for important visitors, who by German custom always occupied in solitude the ugly horsehair sofa. Gerda had just come in from shopping. Her father was attending a patient, her mother gone visiting and her twelve-year-old brother Gunter somewhere out of the way. I could smell our evening meal cooking behind the double doors leading towards the kitchen, and faintly hear the wireless and the two maids calling to one another.

  'Germany accepted the Fourteen Points on October 23, 1918 so that the bloodshed might be ended,' Gerda continued relentlessly. 'Then you dictated whatever terms you felt like at Versailles and tried to ruin us in the name of "Reparations". Well! How could you expect Herr Hitler to like that?'

  'Why shouldn't you pay reparations? The Kaiser had planned the war for twenty years.'

  'Oh, the Kaiser,' she dismissed him impatiently. 'I can't understand why you English never saw through him. He was a braggart, who simply faded out during the War. We looked to Hindenburg and Ludendorf
f, who ran everything.'

  'It was the Kaiser's U-boat campaign-'

  'It was England who first made war by starving little children, with the blockade. Admit it, now-go on! I can remember perfectly well not getting enough to eat, Mama standing for hours on end just to buy a cup of watery milk or a spoonful of jam made from beetroot. We had to take down all our net curtains and cut them into bandages for the wounded. You've been reading too many English papers, Mister.'_

  She shut her lips firmly, sitting at the large circular table covered by a pink chenille cloth. Taking a pile of exercise books from the black leather bag she had brought home that Saturday lunchtime, she put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and started to correct the children's answers. Gerda was unusual in earning her living, in a land which preached the doctrine of _Kinder, Kirche, Kьche-_children, church and kitchen-to its womenfolk as sternly as ever. Only one German woman in five worked, and they mostly toiled on the farm or in the homes of others. And to be a teacher of history in a girls' elementary school was a position of high importance and respect. I sat and opened the _Wuppertaler Zeitung_ in deferential silence.

  It was less than a month since I had left a nation of three million unemployed for one of five million. It had been an act of dizzy sophistication to take the boat train at Charing Cross and plunge across the Channel in a wretched little steamer with its midwinter handful of nauseated passengers. I had never been abroad before, nor even lived away from my parents, except in the narcissistic air of Cambridge. I had travelled overnight and through Ostend, as a few shillings cheaper. The Belgian train had smelt excitingly of coffee and strange tobacco, and even the direction _Do Not Lean Out Of The Window_ written in French had a worldly ring I encountered before only in the library novels of Somerset Maugham and Dornford Yates.

  I had sat on a wooden bench in a cramped third-class compartment like a prisoner in a black maria, face pressed against a dark window running with sleet, imagination making do for the passing countryside. I knew nothing of Belgium, except that Nurse Cavell was shot there. At Aachen I crossed the frontier of Germany, the land to whom Nature gave no frontiers, displaying my brand new passport signed by Sir John Simon, observing, 'That faintly sinister air of leisure which invests the movements of officials at frontier stations,' which struck Christopher Isherwood. But Isherwood went to wicked, delicious Berlin-or invented it. Wuppertal was as staid as a dishful of dumplings.

  I reached the Rhineland on the last afternoon of 1932, the cafйs glowing yellow and people starting to toast _Prosit Neujahr!_ I knew I should need strenuous and painful mental gymnastics, seeing war and peace from the opposite side of the North Sea. The Great War had stamped British thought with a black edge, like the writing paper then fashionable for proclaiming bereavement. Massive monuments had been built above the gently rolling graveyards of the Somme and the Menin Gate in Ypres, both encrusted with thousands of names, all that was left of men lost in the battlefield for ever. At home, the village war memorial shared the green with the oaks, and men doffed their hats passing the Cenotaph in Whitehall, or had them knocked off from behind. Everyone shared an experience lost with the Middle Ages, of knowing a countryman who had died untimely. My uncle Jim had been fragmented at Hazebrouck in the last German push of 1918. A regular soldier, he had survived four years so promising of promotion without even rising to the rank of Adolf Hitler.

  We British wanted to hang the Kaiser for it all. But this war aim was unachieved, like all the others. Kaiser Bill was securely in exile in Doom, peacefully reading P G Wodehouse aloud to his family and repeating all the passages which struck him as particularly funny. I knew the Germans had suffered as badly, or worse. But they did not want to hang anyone, because they did not know who to hang. They went into 1933 confused and helpless, as bitter with old leaders as old enemies.

  'What were you doing, going to see Professor Dr Domagk this morning?' asked Gerda, unable to suppress her curiosity any longer.

  'Don't be nosy.'

  'Oh! I'm sorry.' She looked so crushed that I felt ashamed. I was learning how tender she was. She was aggressive only in her defencelessness, she feared to slacken the tight rein on her emotions lest they drove her headlong.

  'I was bringing him a present from another professor,' I told her, relenting.

  Her face brightened, all women being interested in presents, even for other people. 'Something nice?'

  'A long lecture, reprinted as a pamphlet on best quality paper and signed by the author.'

  'That doesn't sound very exciting.'

  'Academic personages often exchange their lectures, with a great flourish of politeness. It's like gentlemen with their visiting cards.'

  She returned her eyes to her work. 'I thought you might be seeing Professor Dr Domagk to find a better job.'

  'Why? I'm perfectly happy where I am.'

  'I can't understand how an intelligent chemist like you can bring himself to work in a brewery,' she said with contempt.

  'Louis Pasteur worked with fermenting wine, and now there's statues of him all over France.'

  'The American pays you a good salary, particularly with the rate of exchange,' Gerda said thoughtfully. She had quickly ferreted the figure out of me. I could not decide whether her serious-minded concern for my welfare was flattering or irritating. 'But why come to Germany? You could have sailed to India, like all the other English. Or Australia or Africa. There's no future in Germany, not if things go on as they are.'

  'I don't fancy myself as a pukka sahib with a topi and a fly whisk.'

  The Empire provided the British nation with easygoing if warmish jobs, cheap food and a sense of purpose. Though it was a cardboard palace, glittering and showy in the sunshine, artfully realistic with its plumed hats and gorgeous uniforms and battleships firing ceremonial salvos of blank ammunition, doomed since it saw defeat down the rifles of a few Boer farmers. Hitler never realized this before the day he shot himself.

  'I don't know that I should like to meet your friend Herr Beckerman,' she went on. 'He sounds like a gangster.'

  'You'd find him charming. He's more like an All-America footballer. I'm lucky to work for him.' Jeff Beckerman had been looking for a reliable chemist in London on his way from New York, and Sir Edward Tiplady had mentioned my name while treating him for some small ailment at the Savoy. Young Jeff always selected the best hotels as well as the best doctors.

  'I hope none of the beer reaches America. Then you would be participating in something illegal.'

  'Prohibition's on its way out,' I reassured her. 'It was futile of President Wilson, trying to save the American people from the horrors of drink by passing a lot of laws in 1917. Just as futile as trying to save the whole world from the horrors of war by passing a lot more in 1918. Don't tell me I'm a cynic.' I wagged my finger. 'I'm a chemist, so I look at life practically. Talking about Americans, there's a super musical film on next week called _Blondie of the Follies._ It's got Marion Davies in it. How about coming along?'

  This invitation caused her schoolmistress's red-ink fountain pen to pause in mid-air and her cheeks to turn the colour of the table-cloth.

  'Whatever made you think of such a thing?' she reprimanded me.

  'Professor Dr Domagk. He said the only items I could find amusing in Wuppertal were the cinema and your company.'

  'The professor would never make a remark like that.'

  'Ask your father to telephone and find out.'

  'You mustn't mention a word of this to Papa,' she exclaimed, delightfully flustered.

  Gerda saw my invitation as a serious matter with serious implications. She seemed not to have-or she did not dare to have-any casual men friends. She was thought in the tail of childhood, in an age when marriage was an excitement preserved until the third decade, when contraception was unreliable, unobtainable and unmentionable, when abortion carried a prison sentence and the maidenhead had not yet suffered the fate of much else and become disposable. Relations between men and women were wary and cer
emonious, sex a delicate dish rather than a staple diet. Such attitudes were particularly strong in the middle-classes, in Catholics, in Germany and in girls like Gerda.

  She added, 'Of course, Herr Elgar, I enjoy discussing international politics with you, because you are intelligent and have been to Cambridge University. But I thought you regarded me as a sensible woman, whom you could talk to in a dispassionate way.'

  'That's precisely why I want to ask you to the pictures.'

  'But I almost never go the cinema,' she said, by way of another objection.

  'In one so seriously-minded as yourself, Frдulein Dieffenbach,' I countered, 'self-denial is but another pleasure.'

  'As you insist, I shall ask Mama if it would be all right,' she said more cheerfully, shifting responsibility.

  I was calmly confident. I had noticed how she generally contrived to take the same Schwebebahn to work every morning as myself.

  4

  This is a story of drugs, not politics. I am a biochemist, not a historian. But it is also the story of a coincidence, which occurred in Germany over thirty-seven days astride Silversterabend, New Year's Eve, 1933.

  The second of these dates was Monday, January 30, 1933. The better schooled of my present biochemistry students in London can identify it as the day which ushered Adolf Hitler to power, and so comparable with St Peter's Day 1338, when the buboes of the Black Death first festered upon Englishmen among the sailors of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. The earlier date was December 24, 1932. Even my fellow-professors can remember nothing in particular about that Christmas Eve. Which suggests that the evil of the 1930s lives after them, the good was interred with the hurried riddance of their bones.