Mystified but flattered, I presented myself at a small block of offices, sandbagged to the first floor, not far from St Mary's Hospital, behind a cinema in Edgware Road. I waited in a bleak official anteroom, while a smartly-dressed blonde with a superior accent answered the telephone, typed and received callers with impartial bored condescension. Ainsley's office beyond seemed a store-room for battleship-grey filing cabinets, among which he had wedged himself at a cheap, bare desk with three telephones, each of a different colour. He was small, grey-haired, knobbly-faced, bushy-eyebrowed, middle-aged, solemn-looking. A likeness to Alexander Fleming struck me. He wore a plain blue suit and a red knitted cardigan, which I later found that, like Fleming, he abandoned only during the hottest weeks of midsummer. I had during the morning taken care to discover that he was the Wychart Professor of Biology at Cambridge. I did not know that this self-effacing, amiable, overworked, practical intellectual who was to control my life for the next six years came directly under Professor Lindemann, the Oxford physicist with enormous influence on Churchill. Lindemann had just moved into the Admiralty as the new First Lord's personal assistant.
'Should I make some joke about, "Let slip the dons of war"?' Ainsley asked affably. 'Like a lot of my colleagues at Cambridge, I suppose I'm sitting here working for the Government for the duration.' He looked round the room unenthusiastically. 'I gather you were out in Germany in 1933? And that you met Gerhard Domagk?'
Sitting on a hard chair opposite, I told him, 'I was in Wuppertal, working in a brewery.'
'Yes, we know all about that. Did you meet anyone else in the I. G. Farbenwerke?'
'Only Professor Hцrlein.'
'Phillip Heinrich Hцrlein, born June 5, 1882, at Wendelsheim,' Ainsley recited reflectively. 'And a Nazi. I heard him talk about sulphonamides to the British Association at Nottingham a couple of years ago. Very effective he was, too. Anyone else?'
'Only the lab technician. A girl.'
'Perhaps you'd care to describe Domagk's lab, and anything else you remember in the factory. Draw a plan, if you like.'
I sketched what I could remember of the factory lay-out. Had the British Government been so interested, I thought, they could have sent a man that summer to ride up and down in the Schwebebahn. Ainsley began to question me about the Dieffenbachs. I became aware that a dossier on myself lay somewhere in the battleship-grey cabinets.
The Dieffenbachs were a decent family who fell for the Nazi line, or thought it prudent to pretend as much,' I told him.
'Did you fall for it at the time?'
'Not in the least. I think I saw how dangerous the Nazis were before a lot of people in England did.'
'You've no conscientious objections to killing Germans, nothing like that?' he added airily. I shook my head. 'Nor how you killed them? I don't of course mean resorting to torture, and putting yourself on the Nazis' own level. But killing them by the deliberate spread of-shall we say-botulism or plague or anthrax?'
I hesitated. 'No. It's the same principle as dropping high explosive.'
'I'm glad to see you are a realist, Mr Elgar. Nor am I myself talking theoretical science. The Government intends to wage war with every weapon possible-we are merely returning Hitler's compliment-which includes pathogenic bacteria.' He paused, looking at me closely. 'Little or nothing is known about handling and distributing such pathogens. Or of their likely effect on the enemy population. We've a few sketchy papers on 'germ warfare', that's all. Your name was put forward by Sir Almroth Wright, no less. Sir Edward Tiplady and I both agree that your particular combination of biochemical and bacteriological skills make you the right man to direct our new unit. Of course, bacteria may never be used as a weapon in this war. Neither may poison gas. But I assure you that the enemy has for some time been investigating the possibilities of both, and we should be criminally at fault not preparing ourselves for similar action.'
I could say nothing for a moment. I was amazed, even more flattered. I felt a flush of warmth towards Wright for at last finding me a job, if a peculiar one. I had imagined Ainsley wished only to interrogate me about the I G Farben plant, not to offer me a lever of the war machine. Perhaps they could find no one else to take it. My students today might be appalled at my accepting such inhuman work without scruple. But I had no qualms later over the Americans dropping two atom bombs on the Japanese. You could not fight the Nazis or the Kamikazes with half a smile on your face. My only feeling, as I agreed, was the job being preferable to peeling potatoes in the Army.
'Where does this research take place?'
'In Oxford. At the Fungus Institute, a small and admirably unobtrusive grey stone building just south of the Parks. The strictest secrecy is of course essential-you will have to sign the Official Secrets Act, which proscribes the most alarming penalties. As far as the University and the rest of the country are concerned, you are performing research on making valuable foodstuffs from toadstools and lichens.'
Well before that snowy Christmas, I was installed on one side of South Parks Road at Oxford, secretly attempting to breed strains of germs so deadly they could wipe out the population of Europe, while in the large building opposite Professor Florey was attempting to develop penicillin and save the world from the deadly germs which already infested it. Thus science progresses.
I wore grey flannel trousers and a Harris tweed jacket and I bought a second-hand bicycle. I found lodgings in north Oxford, that area of red-brick family dwellings embraced by the Woodstock and Banbury roads, where the lofty donnish intellect struggles daily with earthy domesticity. I had David Mellors and his new wife nearby for company. I browsed in Blackwell's and drank in the Randolph. I have never enjoyed so gentle and agreeable a life as the time I was preparing unpleasant death for millions. Of my laboratories, my colleagues and my work itself I may still write nothing. The Official Secrets Act has an infinite memory, and the world is not yet peaceful enough for dust to lie undisturbed on my deadly experiments.
In that December, when the strange war became weirder, with the Russians fighting the Finns and the British about to fight the neutral Russians instead of the Germans, I had a letter forwarded from the Harley Street house with a Swedish stamp and an affixed strip of brown paper printed, _Opened By the Censor._ Inside was an unaddressed, undated sheet with a typed message.
_Dear Jim
God willing, I shall arrive in London via Stockholm first-second week December. I'm trying to fix a passage with United States Lines to be home in time for Christmas, but of course it's tricky. Call me up at the Savoy. I'm still where the railway flies in the sky.
Cordially,
Jeff_
I was astounded to find Jeff still in Wuppertal, even though the RAF was dropping on him nothing more weighty than the prose of the Ministry of Information leaflets. Perhaps he was still trying to stop the war. The Savoy knew nothing of him, but it was not the time to make bookings from one side of Europe to another. I left the Fungus Institute number, and two mornings later he telephoned in high spirits.
'I arrived in a Swedish plane with the Swedish ambassador, which I guess is safe enough,' he explained. 'Hey, what are all those blimps in the sky round London?'
'That's the balloon barrage. The Germans run their bombers into them.' Jeff pressed me to have dinner the following night. I asked if I could bring a girlfriend.
'Sure thing, old man. I'm lonely. There's no girls I know left in London, and Donna sailed home early summer.'
'What's it like, being a neutral in Germany?'
'Creepy. The Gestapo had their beady eyes on me round the clock. I guess they'd have run me out, if I hadn't jumped of my own accord.'
'How are the Dieffenbachs?'
'Are you crazy? If I'd waved to them in the street, they'd have ended in a concentration camp.'
Jeff had the same suite as in peacetime, with blackout curtains which he claimed made opening the window like undressing a nun. I knew that Elizabeth was living in her father's flat, and imagined she would be impres
sed to meet a man hot from the enemy's camp fires. But it was I who felt staggered as she appeared through the door in uniform, with a Service gasmask in a haversack. 'Motor Transport Corps,' she explained. 'Do you like it? I wish I was blonde. Khaki goes so much better with fair hair. American cigarettes, divine,' she murmured, taking one of Jeff's Chesterfields.
'Where are you serving?' asked Jeff, dazzled by her.
'I'm going to Paris on Monday. There! I should never have said so. Careless talk costs lives. I'm driving ambulances and things at the British Transit Hospital, because of the French I picked up with Mummy on the Riviera, though everyone says I have the most ghastly Midi accent. Mummy thinks that Paris will be a much nicer place to spend the war in than London. Last time, they had a few shells from Big Bertha, but the food remained delicious. Mummy regards the war as a personal insult to her from Hitler,' she added to me.
There was champagne, and caviar canapйs on a silver tray. Jeff wanted to express either admiration of the fighting British or appreciation at escape from austere Germany. There was no food rationing in England until the following month, and there seemed a shortage only of taxis and torch batteries. As the long-promised bombs stayed off, London had the gaiety of a fashionable garden-party spared a threatening summer storm.
'Have you seen anything of Archie?' I asked Elizabeth while Jeff was telephoning the head waiter.
'Yes, he's dreadfully confused, poor dear. Now that Hitler's in bed with Stalin, he doesn't know if the war is an anti-Fascist crusade or an anti-Communist one. He says the British working classes went to war quite ignobly, only because they were fed up with Hitler. But fed-upness is an incredibly powerful force, isn't it, with the British? So in the end he's gone to join up as a Guardsman.' This was news to me. 'At least it will give him some peace from continually redefining his attitudes. What are you doing at Oxford?'
'I'm on war work at the Fungus Institute.'
Elizabeth looked nonplussed. 'I've got it. You're developing a mushroom like the Caterpillar's in Alice. Eating one side will make our soldiers so small they can creep on the Germans unseen, and the other will make them so tall they'll frighten the enemy to death.'
'That's right,' I told her.
Jeff explained to us how the Germans were cock-a-hoop after the Polish campaign. 'The Wehrmacht and the dive bombers made mincemeat of the Poles. They've a new tactic. If the tanks run into trouble, they radio the Stukas to bomb them out of it. I guess Poland hadn't a combat plane in the sky after the first day. And now they've sunk your carrier, the Courageous. And the _Royal Oak,_ right inside Scapa Flow. You've got to take your hat off to the U-boat captains, I guess.'
'You forgot the Athenia,' said Elizabeth. 'Sunk without warning nine hours after the war started. Drowning a hundred and twelve people, including children.'
'And including twenty-eight Americans.'
She coloured. 'I'm sorry.'
'Anyway, the Germans believe that Churchill sank the Athenia, to do another Lusitania. It's a crazy idea, but nobody dare deny it. Say, you remember your Professor Domagk? He was arrested by the Gestapo.'
I raised my eyebrows. 'All I heard about Domagk was his turning down the Nobel Prize.'
'I'll give you the real story. It's all round Wuppertal.' Jeff produced a sheet of flimsy paper from his pocket with a triumphant flourish. 'I had that sewn into my overcoat. As I was travelling with a Swedish diplomatic party, I decided the Gestapo wouldn't be too nosy.'
It was the carbon of a letter from Domagk at I G Farben in Wuppertal, dated November 3, 1939, to Professor Dr Gunnar Holmgren, Rector of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It started with the appropriate academic greeting, Magnifizenz!, its twenty-odd lines of German expressing Domagk's honour at accepting the 1939 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, and his readiness to visit Stockholm on December 10 to receive it.
'Don't ask me how I got that letter,' Jeff said proudly. 'But mine weren't the first prying eyes to read it. The Gestapo intercepted it, of course. Domagk must have been overconfident, or maybe didn't see what went on under his own eyes. A lot of intelligent Germans don't want to. You remember Karl von Ossietsky, the German who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934?'
'And promptly disappeared into a concentration camp.'
Jeff nodded. 'To a mind like Hitler's, a Nobel Prize of any sort carries a political sting. The story is that Hitler ordered Domagk's arrest himself. On a Friday night in the middle of November, a couple of guys in plain clothes knocked at Domagk's house near the Zoo there and said they were Gestapo officers. They arrested him, searched his place, confiscated all his correspondence. Then they locked him up in Wuppertal Jail. In the morning they ordered him to clean out his cell and offered him a cup of coffee, to both of which our professor gave a dignified refusal. A top SS man from Dьsseldorf came across to interrogate him, but by then there was a hell of a row going on. The chief of the civil police was demanding to know why their distinguished citizen was behind bars.'
'With the Gestapo, he wouldn't get an answer.'
'That's right.' Jeff poured more champagne into Elizabeth's glass. She was sitting in an armchair with her gas-mask on her knee, listening in fascination. 'They kept him there eight days. They let his wife bring some food, and they moved in a couch instead of a plank bed. When one of the warders asked what he'd done to get arrested, Domagk replied, "I won the Nobel Prize". The warder went round the other prisoners saying, "We've got a madman in there".'
We laughed. 'Then a week later Domagk got himself arrested again,' Jeff went on. 'It was at an international medical congress in Berlin. You know how suspicious the Nazis are of foreign contacts. They wanted him to sign a declaration that he wouldn't make a speech or mix with the guests. Domagk refused. So inside he went. In the end, the SS took him to the Ministry of Education, and gave him another letter to sign addressed to the Karolinska Institute, refusing the Nobel Prize.'
'He signed that?' asked Elizabeth.
'If he hadn't, the world would have heard that Professor Domagk had suffered a fatal heart attack. But do you know what the Nazis did? They sent the letter to the police at Wuppertal, so it would be posted to Stockholm with a Wuppertal postmark. These trivial bits of thoroughness are what make me feel most frightened of the Germans.'
Three waiters wheeled in a trolley with our dinner. 'When's America coming into the war?' asked Elizabeth.
'Who can tell what's in Roosevelt's mind?' Jeff stubbed out his cigarette. 'If Joe Kennedy here at the Embassy had anything to do with it, I'd say never.'
'Archie says this Kennedy chap has written Britain off already,' Elizabeth told him. 'And I gather Kennedy is highly delighted at the prospect.'
'You can't expect the Boston Irish to stroke the British lion,' Jeff observed.
'Perhaps the Germans will get rid of Hitler themselves,' I suggested. 'After all, they nearly blew him up in that Munich beer cellar last month.'
'That bomb was a put-up job, to put public sympathy right behind Hitler.'
'But half a dozen Germans were killed by it,' exclaimed Elizabeth.
Jeff snapped his fingers. 'What's six or seven lives to the Nazis? Even German ones? Let's eat.'
It was the last good meal I had in England for fifteen years. It occurred to me that Elizabeth must have been seeing a good deal of Archie.
23
'Of course, it was Dr and Madame Trefouлl working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris who made sulphonamide therapy on any scale possible at all.' Dr Henri Lamartine, beside me on a deck chair in the afternoon sunshine early in a beautiful summer, produced another blue and gold packet of Weekend cigarettes. It opened like a book. He had been in Oxford six days, without exhausting his supply brought from Paris. He refused English cigarettes, because they gave him _la toux sиche._
'Isn't that a little sweeping?'
'No, I don't think so, _mon cher confrиre.'_ He spoke excellent English, in a dry, precise way which matched his appearance and, as far as I could tell from a week's coll
aboration, his character. He was of middle height but lean, his dark hair well greased and brushed back, with a small woolly moustache and many thin lines round the angles of his mouth. His complexion was yellowish, and his long-fingered hands had many moles on the back. He wore a smart chalk-striped blue suit, a dark shirt and plain silk tie. He was ten years older than me, my opposite number at the Institut Duhamel in Montparnasse, though his position in the French military and bureaucratic cat's cradle was more complicated than mine. He was ending a week's exchange of information and opinions. I was to pay a return visit to Paris in the autumn.
'Oh, well left alone, sir,' I interrupted.
Lamartine frowned deeply. 'I do not understand why you acclaim a player for missing the ball.'
That Wednesday of May 8, 1940, we were enjoying a cricket match in the Oxford Parks. 'It's simple. The bowler made the ball veer at the last moment. Had the batsman not spotted it, he would have been caught off the edge of his bat and sent back to the pavilion. You see?'
'I think you have to be an Englishman of many generations to comprehend this mysterious game.'
'It's really simple but with delightfully subtle variations, like a Mozart symphony.'
'Why could they not all have bats?' Lamartine wondered. 'It would make the game much livelier.' He resumed his argument. 'I G Farben waited two years before presenting "Prontosil" to the world, while countless millions continued to die from blood poisoning, meningitis, etcetera. They wanted their patents watertight, that's all. Well, _c'est logique._ But it was the Trefouлl, with Dr Nitti and Dr Bovet, who found the "Protosil" dye was broken down in the body, and only the sulphonamide part of it did the work of killing the bacteria. As sulphonamide was discovered by Gelmo of Vienna in 1908, I G Farben couldn't patent it. We made the Germans look fools. Farben must have known all the time that only the sulphonamide in "Prontosil" was active. They manufactured it with a red colour to mask the truth.'
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 18