'He's going great guns in Wuppertal. He's a member of the Nazi party, he's mixed up with the Reich Labour Front and the Reich Health Council, as well as being on the I G Farben board of directors. A big bug in the present order of things.'
'Do you think there'll be a war?' People were asking that as they used to speculate politely about the weather.
Jeff looked hard under his bar of eyebrow. 'Hitler wants his war, and Hitler's going to win it.' I could say nothing in face of this chilling opinion. Jeff flicked up a Chesterfield. 'There's only one man in the world who can stop him.'
'Roosevelt?'
'Me.'
I stared in silence through the large window at the Thames, chocolate coloured with its spectrum of oil, a string of barges heading downstream behind a tug billowing black smoke. Jeff seemed wholly serious. I wondered whether his mind had become unhinged under the pressure of business in two continents.
'Let's take a short walk,' he added, almost equally surprisingly. 'I've got my secretary Donna over here, she's out shopping at Harrods but she'll be back, and I don't want her to know a word about this. The slightest whisper to a woman, you might as well say it on the radio.'
We took the lift down in silence. Leaving by the river entrance of the hotel, we strolled in the small, delightful triangular public gardens. It was a fine evening, the red double-decker trams clanking along the Embankment, bearing the office workers home to Camberwell and Brixton. 'You know Gцring's been in London?' Jeff asked abruptly.
'I heard a rumour, but I didn't believe it.'
'He was here less than twenty-four hours. It was on May II, 1937, the day before your King George's Coronation. He just showed up at Croydon with a few other Nazis. Wanted to get into the Royal act, I guess, maybe wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Ribbentrop was mad. Hitler already had an official representative for the ceremony, General Blomberg. Gцring spent the night at the embassy in Carlton House Terrace, then they smuggled the Reichmarschall out. The crowds in the streets would have had him for dog meat.'
'What's this got to do with you stopping the war?'
'I told you about Gцring so you'd know a lot of things go on across the frontiers which never see newsprint. Have you heard of General Franz Halder?'
'There're too many German generals to keep count.'
'He's Hitler's Chief of Staff, and I guess busy this moment with his pencil and a map of the county of Kent, planning the best way up from Dover. Say, who's this?'
He had paused at a bust among the shrubs. 'Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan.'
'Oh, sure-' Jeff whistled a phrase from _The Mikado._ 'Do you remember what I told you during that crazy show in Cologne? How the generals hated Hitler as a Johnnie-come-lately? They reckon he's more likely to lead Germany to ruin than to glory. Halder would be very, very pleased to see the end of the Fьhrer. So would Count von Moltke, great-grandnephew of the famous one. Also von Trott, von Schlabrendorff and Carl Gцrdeler, who was over here last year with his wife, ostensibly giving lectures but making contact with Horace Wilson at the Foreign Office. Do you know what's happening in London on July 18?'
'I haven't the faintest.'
'It's the International Whaling Conference.'
Jeff stopped to inspect the memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps. I had no idea where this strange conversation was leading. But he seemed to be handling important German names with assurance. I wondered how the International Whaling Conference came into it.
'The German delegation will be headed by a guy called Wohltat. He's a civil servant, from the Economics Ministry. He's close to Gцring. And he's interested in bigger fish than whales. He's coming to do a deal with Wilson. Colonies, cash for Germany-a thousand million pounds. A free hand to act as they like in eastern Europe. In return, Hitler will guarantee the British Empire. Halder could tear up his map of Kent.'
'Those are terms which Britain would never accept.'
'They are terms which Britain herself suggested. Through Horace Wilson.'
'I simply don't believe you,' I said forcefully.
'Have it your own way,' Jeff told me airily. 'But those terms could be a starting point. This is my plan. If your Foreign Office told Halder they'd stick to that sort of agreement once the generals had kicked out Hitler…that they'd support the generals against the Nazi machine right up to the hilt…that they'd support Gцrdeler as the new Chancellor, which seems the fashionable idea…then we'd be getting somewhere.'
'The Germans would murder the rebellious generals.'
'Not for one moment. Listen-the German people have been living for the glorious tomorrow since Hitler first walked into the Chancellery. Maybe the tomorrow's getting nearer, they feel they can almost touch it. But they absolutely hate the idea of another war. And so do the generals. For the same good reason. They're afraid they might lose again. I'm going on to Germany in two-three days. I've got a contact with Halder right there in Wuppertal. It's essential I meet someone from your Foreign Office. Maybe you can arrange it through Sir Edward Tiplady? In six months, we could have Hitler in Heaven or St Helena.'
Jeff paused, lighting another cigarette. I did not know what to make of it all. Jeff was not a vain man, he did not seek importance, he did not exaggerate. He was practical, a man who would set about making a million dollars or restoring peace in the world without fuss or self-delusions. And in the six years I had known him, everything he had foreseen in Germany had come sickeningly true.
'I suppose I could try Sir Edward, or Lord Meddish, who I share a flat with. But in the present temper of the country nobody wants to smell even faintly of appeasement.'
'It wouldn't be appeasement, if the end result was Hitler's head on a spike.'
'I'll see what I can do,' I promised.
'But hurry, old man. Time's short.'
Going up in the lift, Jeff talked about Wuppertal. 'Living's tough in Germany today. Everything ersatz, coffee from acorns, margarine for butter, a stick of rhubarb pretending to be a lemon. Their clothes are made from Zellwolle substitute, their rubber from God knows what. The Germans are worse off than during the War.'
'Don't they object?'
'Under the Nazis? You must be crazy. There's some sickening things happening behind barbed wire which even the Nazis are ashamed of; because they keep quiet about it.' We reached his floor. 'You know Hitler has to wear reading glasses?' Jeff added. 'He's never allowed to be seen or photographed in them. It would spoil the superman image. He has his speeches typed in special extra-large Fьhrerschrift.'_
Jeff was a useful repository of information which, casually uttered, could silence a London dinner-table.
His secretary Donna was already in the suite. She was short, blonde and bubbling, twenty-two or three, with big eyes and big bosom. As she ordered Jeff to telephone about some theatre tickets, I politely asked about her volume of work. But it seemed she did not know how to type.
21
Within the hour, I was telling Archie of Jeff's scheme in the flat. To my surprise, he did not dismiss it as fantastic. 'There's quite a traffic in unofficial diplomatic activity behind the scenes. Swedes and Swiss and those sort of people. They remind me of the mice busy under the floorboards at some tremendous diplomatic reception. Well, sometimes the unexpected appearance of a mouse can make even an ambassador jump. There's somebody I know from Eton doing rather well in the FO. I'll give him a ring. Anything is worth trying in the country's present straits.'
But the Foreign Office seemed in no hurry to accept the services of the only man in Europe who could prevent the outbreak of war. The following evening, Jeff telephoned me at the flat. 'Can't you pep them up?' he complained.
'I don't think one can pep up the British Foreign Office. Anyway, on Friday nights it disperses to its country houses. That is why Hitler always makes his most violent moves on Saturday mornings.'
'I'd try calling the Embassy, but I guess Joe Kennedy's never heard of me.'
'He's probably away with the Astor
s, anyway. I hear his sons and daughters are well in with the Cliveden Set. It's at Cliveden and not in the Cabinet, of course, where British policies are formulated.' This was not entirely a newspaper columnist's joke. Jeff put down the telephone. He was not in the mood for kidding.
That Friday, Neville Chamberlain traversed the muzzle of British foreign policy so that it no longer aimed harmlessly at the sky, or perhaps at the British people themselves, but at Hitler's head. He had gone to Birmingham, where his family name shone like burnished brass. Instead of plaintively protesting again at Hitler's perfidy, he changed his mind and said Britain would resist Hitler's domination of the world to the uttermost of its power. Everyone cheered. The last time they cheered him he was waving his piece of paper on Heston Aerodrome. The following week, President Lebrun of France paid a State visit. The weather stayed cold and showery. On the Wednesday, Hitler subdued Lithuania by sailing in the pocket battleship Deutschland from Swinemьnde to Memel. His latest aggression at least had the singular variation of being committed by water.
Jeff fumed expensively all that week in the Savoy. Archie finally told me that his friend from the Foreign Office would see 'my man' on the Friday afternoon. But not within official walls. We were invited to take tea at the Travellers' Club in Pall Mall at four o'clock.
To Jeff's visibly diminishing self-confidence, we were led by a porter in bottle-green livery and brass buttons to a large oblong morning-room full of dark leather furniture, on which a pair of elderly gentlemen sat asleep. The windows looked across St James's Park to the Foreign Office, for which the club was something of a canteen. Jeff's bounce expired more with our young diplomat, who had chestnut hair, a pink plump face, an old Etonian tie and a name not double-barrelled but triple-barrelled. 'Would you prefer toast or tea-cake?' he asked politely. 'The tea-cakes are rather good.'
'Tea-cakes,' I replied for us both.
'You've some contacts among our German friends?' suggested the Foreign Office man, when he was leaning back in his deep armchair and lazily stirring his tea.
'That's right.' The casual English grandeur of the club was too much for Jeff's natural brashness. His demoralization was completed by being presented for the first time in his life with a tea-cake. He could explain only stumblingly the scheme which had appeared so exciting and straightforward in the Embankment gardens.
The diplomat spread his tea-cake thickly with strawberry jam. 'Could you give me the name of this person in Wuppertal, who's the link between you and the Reich General Staff?'
'No, sir.'
'Well, don't worry. Male or female?'
'I'm not prepared to say.'
'German?'
Jeff nodded. I wondered for the first time if it was Gerda.
'More tea?' The diplomat invited us. 'And what precisely would you wish His Majesty's Government to do, Mr Beckerman?'
'Promise the support of the British Empire for the German generals when they murder Hitler.'
'And it is you who will bring them the British Empire's message?'
'That's right,' Jeff agreed.
'Oh, Charles-' A tall, bald man caught our host's eye. 'You are on the committee, aren't you? The cottage pie at lunch was really rather dreadful. I wouldn't have given it to my housemaid to eat.'
The two members discussed the cottage pie. Then all four of us discussed the architecture of the club. Then Jeff and I found ourselves out in Pall Mall.
'I try to prevent a war,' Jeff said bitterly. 'And what do I get? Tea-cakes!'
Last week-last week as I write this, and can lunch in professorial dignity at the Athenaeum Club next door to the Travellers'-I invited the same diplomat with the triple-barrelled name. 'Yes, we'd looked up that young American fellow's background,' he remembered. 'Which wasn't very savoury. His family were the biggest bootleggers in New York during Prohibition, hardly more than gangsters. We were suspicious of him. We were even suspicious of Carl Gцrdeler, and he was a former Lord Mayor of Leipzig. Both might have been catspaws, giving Hitler an excuse to shoot powerful but inconvenient generals as British agents, without incurring the resentment of his Army.'
'Weren't you wrong about Gцrdeler? He finished at the end of a length of piano-wire after the 1944 bomb plot.'
'Perhaps we were. There was a half-hearted sort of plot in 1939, I suppose. Halder fussed about a bit during the final days of that August. General von Witzleben was supposed to collect some troops and chuck Hitler out by marching them to his front door. The other generals all posted themselves away from Berlin. You can't say the plotters lost heart. Their heart wasn't in it from the first place. I heard about it all from a Cambridge don, who interrogated Halder after the war. The Generaloberst told of an earlier plot for September 1938, but unfortunately that was the day Chamberlain flew to Munich. When Hitler called off the impending war, his popularity went up in Germany as much as Chamberlain's did here.'
'So my American friend did know what he was talking about?' Jeff had a contact, a surprising one in Wuppertal, whom he told me about in Munich after the War.
'Possibly,' he admitted, sipping his port.
'What happened to Herr Wohltat and the Whaling Conference?'
'Oh! An utterly disgraceful episode. Sir Horace Wilson tried to buy Hitler off. A miserable failure! He should have offered more.'
'Do you still like tea-cakes?'
My guest looked surprised. 'Yes, I often have them at the Travellers'. They're not nearly so good as they were.'
The following Friday of March 31, 1939, Chamberlain offered Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, a guarantee of Britain's unqualified support should Hitler attack Poland. Colonel Beck accepted, between two flicks of ash from his cigarette. That evening I was taking David Mellors and his pretty red-headed fiancйe to dinner at Kettner's in Soho, to talk over the wedding arrangements for the following week. As we sat down, David asked, 'Have you heard of a chap called Florey?'
'Yes, he was a don at Caius when I was up. An Australian.'
'That's right. You knew he'd been Prof of Pathology in Oxford since 1935?'
'No, I didn't. The last I'd heard of him, he'd gone to Sheffield.'
'What do you do, boy, when you move into a department as a new broom of a professor?'
'Send your staff to the library to look out other people's unfinished lines of research,' I told him promptly.
'You're right. Get them busy picking brains, which is quicker than scratching their own. From all accounts, the Path Department at Oxford was in a pretty ropy state when Florey blew in. About the first item he gingered up his boys and girls to investigate anew was lysozyme.'
'Old Flem's tear antiseptic!' I exclaimed. 'That's as out of date as the Charleston, surely?'
'Oh, God!' exclaimed Margaret in anguish. We both stared at her. 'I forgot to tell Daphne the other bridesmaids have decided on pink hats.'
'She can buy some dye at Woolworth's, dear,' said David helpfully. 'Next on Florey's list was another of Flem's babies which never got past the toddling stage-penicillin. You had something to do with it, hadn't you? Apparently they've now managed to isolate a grain or two of the stuff.'
'Professor Raistrick tried to isolate some at the School of Tropical Medicine,' I said sceptically. 'But I heard the penicillin kept vanishing under his nose.'
'Florey's got a pretty bright chemist working for him there. Chap called Ernst Chain, half-Russian and half-German. Apparently he used to work at the Charitй Hospital in Berlin.'
I had heard of Dr Chain. 'Yes, he escaped from Hitler and went to work with Hoppy at Cambridge.'
David grinned. 'Florey got him transferred to Oxford, like Joe Payne from Luton Town to Chelsea. I don't know what the transfer fee would be.'
'No, I'll tell the others they can all wear white hats, like Daphne,' said Margaret thoughtfully.
'Where did Florey get the mould from?' I asked. 'As far as I knew, the specimen at Mary's was the only one which actually produced any penicillin.'
'They had a cultur
e of it already in the lab. Flem sent a bit to Oxford years ago. Chain is able to grow it faster than Flem did, by lacing the broth underneath with yeast.'
'Have they brought Flem himself into the research?'
'No. Chain thought he was dead.'
I laughed. 'That would be taking Flem's habitual self-effacement to an uncomfortable extreme.'
We talked about the imminent wedding, but more about the imminent war. As two men, we had a particularly keen interest in the possibility of conscription. It arrived within a month. One hundred and forty-three MPs voted against it. 'It is very dangerous to give generals all they want,' objected Major Clement Attlee-but he was thinking of the Somme, when the generals had more men than ideas. The conscripts were afforded exceptional treatment. Unlike any previous soldiers in the British Army, they were issued with pyjamas.
22
Neville Chamberlain was a man of peace. He even went to war peacefully. He was followed by a nation of inoffensive shepherds, cheerfully shouldering their crooks. There was no nastiness. There was no undue enthusiasm. The war was very genteel. We had the blackout and the evacuees. Everyone carried a gasmask in a little cardboard box the size of a Brownie camera. Air-raid trenches were cut among the flower-beds of Hyde Park. Strips of sticky brown paper criss-crossed shop windows, to prevent their breaking when a bomb dropped outside. The only bloodshed was a doubling of road casualties by unlit motor-cars. Meanwhile, Poland was smashed between two flicks of ash from Colonel Beck's cigarette.
Our lives were not endangered, only changed. Archie was outraged to discover that volunteering for the Army was officially discouraged. He saw the chance of his duodenal ulcer returning, and spending yet another war on his back in Swanage. I waited submissively to be gathered tidily by the harvester of conscription.
I had little work nor income, because London was empty of patients and Sir Edward was busy evacuating his hospital from Blackfriars by the Thames to a vast red-brick Victorian asylum sprawling across the South Downs. Its London wards were left empty for the half-million air-raid casualties the Government secretly but confidently expected in the first week of the War. Towards the end of October, when people were still saying it would all be over by Christmas, Sir Edward telephoned me one breakfast time at Archie's flat. Could I call that afternoon on a Professor Ainsley? The address was near Marble Arch. It was important.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 17