Shadows of War

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘That’s right, sir. But with young officers like Lieutenant Dodds, this battalion will be able to fight and fight well.’

  The colonel paused briefly, but only briefly. He was a decisive man.

  ‘I can’t risk Lieutenant Dodds and Captain Burkett being in the same company, can I?’

  ‘No, sir. But perhaps Mr Dodds could be transferred to another company?’

  The colonel reached into his in tray and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘I have a request here for the secondment of regular army officers to training camps for new recruits.’

  ‘Lieutenant Dodds isn’t experienced enough for that, though, is he, sir?’

  ‘No. But Captain Burkett is.’

  Conrad tried to repress a smile. ‘I think Captain Burkett would be an excellent choice, sir.’ Conrad considered his next words carefully. ‘While I am sure that Captain Burkett would miss the opportunity for active duty, he would relish the chance to lick new recruits into shape.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’ The colonel tossed the sheet of paper on to his desk. ‘You know I was fifteen when the last war started, nineteen when it finished? I served six months in the trenches.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Rydal examined Conrad. He saw a tall, fit officer in his late twenties, with fair hair and athletic build; the sort of man who could take care of himself and his men. ‘You and I are the only two officers in the battalion with experience of real war.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The first two regiments Conrad had attempted to join had turned him down, almost certainly because of his time in the International Brigade. He had wondered why Colonel Rydal had been different.

  ‘Once the last war got going, promotions accelerated, and I am sure it will be the same with this one. You haven’t been with us long, Mr de Lancey, but I like what I have seen of you so far. I need men like you as my company commanders.’

  Conrad gave up repressing his smile. ‘I won’t let you down, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure you won’t. Now, there’s something else.’ The colonel pulled out another sheet of paper and examined it. ‘You have been ordered to report to Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office immediately.’

  ‘Immediately?’

  ‘Today,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ve no idea what it is about. Have you?’

  ‘No idea at all, sir. Although I did come in contact with Sir Robert last year.’

  The colonel frowned. ‘Really? You have a shadowy past, Mr de Lancey.’

  Whitehall, London

  Conrad decided to walk from Waterloo Station to Whitehall. London was entering its third month of war, and Conrad did not feel at all out of place in his uniform. For over a year the city had been preparing, but now that war had actually arrived, there were some changes. Motor cars’ bumps and prangs in the all-encompassing blackout had demonstrated a need for white stripes on lamp-posts, kerbs and crossings. Tops of pillar boxes were daubed with yellow paint which would supposedly detect poison gas. Brown paper strips criss-crossed shop windows to minimize blast damage. And up in the sky, over the Thames, barrage balloons dipped and bobbed, now daubed a murky green rather than the silver they had sported when they were first hoisted.

  Conrad was pleased with his conversation with the CO. He knew that in most other regiments, Dodds would be up for a court martial. He was convinced that he was right: Dodds would make a better officer under fire than Burkett, and he was impressed that the colonel had agreed. But he was worried that Dodds had lost his head. Conrad’s instinct was that the young lieutenant would come into his own when under the pressure of battle, but what if he was wrong?

  Still, he was damned sure they would all be better off without Captain Burkett. And from what the colonel had said, Conrad might be commanding his own company in a year or two. If the war lasted that long, which Conrad feared it would.

  He passed through Parliament Square and strode up Whitehall, glancing at the Cenotaph with its reminder of all those hundreds of thousands of young men, like Conrad, who had perished in the last diplomatic balls-up twenty years before. He turned left into Downing Street and, opposite Number 10, entered the grand palace that was the Foreign Office.

  Conrad had met Sir Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser, several times before, mostly over dinner at his parents’ house. ‘Van’, as he was known, was a friend of Conrad’s father from their school days at Eton. He was tall, almost as tall as Conrad, with square shoulders and a square jaw. He was known for his forthright opinions, especially on the subject of appeasement of Germany, and for that reason he had been shuffled out of his former position of Permanent Under-Secretary a couple of years before, although he still maintained the impressive office with its view over St James’s Park.

  ‘Ah, de Lancey, take a seat.’ Van indicated one of the ornate chairs in front of his desk. ‘Good to see you in uniform. How is soldiering?’

  ‘I’m enjoying it, Sir Robert,’ said Conrad. ‘I seem to have a facility for it.’

  ‘Well, let us hope you will not be called upon to fire a shot in anger.’

  ‘Actually, I rather hoped I would. That was the point of joining up, after all.’

  Van smiled. ‘I trust your father hasn’t heard you say that?’

  Conrad admired his father both for his courage and for the strength of his convictions. Viscount Oakford’s pacifism was well known. During the Great War, as Captain the Hon. Arthur de Lancey, he had won a Victoria Cross, lost an arm, and honed a determination to prevent his country’s return to such wholesale slaughter ever again. Conrad’s mother was from Hamburg. So the declaration of war two months before had been a personal disaster for Conrad’s family.

  But for Conrad it was a grim necessity. He smiled. ‘Father and I differ on the subject of war and peace.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Van. ‘He never ceases to harangue me and Lord Halifax to bring this war to an early conclusion.’

  ‘Which is impossible to do without giving in to tyranny,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Perhaps. But there might be a way.’

  Conrad’s pulse quickened. His suspicion as to why he had been summoned to Whitehall looked as if it was going to be confirmed. ‘Are the German generals finally going to do something?’

  ‘It’s an eventuality that we cannot discount. It is for that reason I summoned you here. Have you had any communication recently with your German...’ Van paused to reach for the correct word. ‘...friends?’

  ‘Not since this time last year.’ Conrad had received no reply to his letter to Theo on the first day of the war.

  ‘And who were those friends, exactly?’

  ‘You want names?’

  Van nodded.

  Conrad hesitated. When he had returned from Berlin the previous autumn, he had been determined not to betray Theo, who had warned him of leaks in the British secret service. But now Britain and Germany were at war, and Sir Robert Vansittart was at the centre of the government directing that war.

  ‘My friend Lieutenant Theo von Hertenberg of the Abwehr.’ The Abwehr was the German secret service. ‘His boss, Colonel Oster. Captain Heinz, another Abwehr officer. Ewald von Kleist, a well-connected Prussian aristocrat. General Beck, the former Chief of the General Staff.’

  ‘And who else was part of the conspiracy?’

  Theo had known most of the conspirators, but had not passed their names on to Conrad. Some, though, had been obvious.

  ‘Well, there’s Admiral Canaris, the Chief of the Abwehr. Theo Kordt in the German Foreign Office. Count Helldorf, the Chief of the Berlin Police. General von Witzleben. General Halder, the current Chief of the General Staff. Hjalmar Schacht, the former President of the Reichsbank. Many others I don’t know.’ As he reeled off the names, Conrad was reminded how extraordinary it was that so many senior members of the German government had been willing to overthrow their leader. And had come so close.

  ‘Have you come across a Captain Schämmel of the OKW Transport Division?’

  Conrad frown
ed. ‘No, I don’t think so. There were a lot of people involved. Hertenberg may know him.’

  Van was listening intently as he jotted the names Conrad mentioned on a pad of paper on his desk.

  ‘Over the last few months we have been bombarded by peace initiatives from every quarter. Most are a waste of time.’ Van grimaced. ‘An enormous waste of time. But our people in Holland have come across one which seems promising. They have been approached by a certain Captain Schämmel to discuss possible peace terms following a successful attempt by unspecified generals to remove Hitler.’

  Conrad grinned. ‘I’m very glad to hear that.’ They had come so close twelve months before; only the offer by Neville Chamberlain of peace talks at Munich had derailed their plans at the last minute, to Conrad’s intense frustration. He had assumed that now war had been declared, all thoughts of removing Hitler would have been shelved. But apparently not.

  ‘Schämmel seems genuine and the Cabinet have been discussing how to respond. But we need to be sure. Which is why I thought of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. You are the only Briton who has had direct contact with a number of the conspirators. I want you to go to Holland at once and meet this Schämmel, with our people. I would also like you to make contact with your friend Hertenberg. We believe that he has been operating in Holland recently; as a neutral country directly between Germany and Britain, it has seen a good deal of intelligence activity. Ask him whether the generals really are planning to remove Hitler and whether this man Schämmel represents them.’

  ‘Hertenberg might be unwilling to tell me,’ Conrad said. ‘He always made clear to me he was a patriot first and foremost, and his country is now at war with ours.’

  ‘If indeed there is coup planned, and the potential new government wishes to open discussions with us, he’ll tell you.’

  Conrad considered Van’s point. It made sense.

  ‘Can you get in touch with him yourself?’ Van said. ‘Our people could no doubt help you, but it would probably be better all round if you could contact him independently.’

  Conrad could hardly telephone him or send him a wire. But Denmark might work after all. ‘I can’t guarantee it, but I can have a go,’ he said. ‘When do I go to Holland?’

  ‘You are booked on a flight to Amsterdam early tomorrow morning.’

  Conrad felt a rush of excitement. After the tedium of all that training, finally a chance to do something that might make a difference. ‘I’m due back at Tidworth this evening. Have you cleared it with my CO?’

  ‘That will be done,’ said Van.

  Conrad smiled. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘If the German generals are finally going to dump Hitler, I’m grateful for the chance to be a part of it.’

  ‘Good. Mrs Dougherty outside will furnish you with the details.’ Van stood up to usher Conrad out of his office. ‘You will no doubt have contact with our people in Holland, but I would like you to report directly to me when you get back to London.’ He smiled. ‘I prefer to have direct access to sources of information. It gives me a much clearer picture.

  ‘Certainly, Sir Robert,’ Conrad said as he shook the mandarin’s proffered hand. ‘One question?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you discussed this with my father?’

  Van smiled. ‘In very general terms. He helped me track you down.’ The smile disappeared. ‘You raise a good point. I think it would be inadvisable to discuss the details of this with him. He may well press you on the issue, but you should be firm.’

  ‘I will be,’ said Conrad.

  Conrad was damned sure his father would press him on the issue, and he wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

  Conrad didn’t have much time. He arranged with Mrs Dougherty for his aeroplane ticket to be forwarded to his club, and went there himself to compose the telegram.

  When he had last seen Theo, in Berlin over a year before, Theo had suggested a means of communication in emergencies. It involved an address in Copenhagen, and the use of certain codewords. These involved people and places from the Second Schleswig War of the 1860s, which was the subject of Conrad’s unfinished thesis at Oxford. The idea was that these could credibly be buried in a letter to a Dane on the subject of his academic work.

  It was the address Conrad had used for his letter in plain English in September. He didn’t know why he hadn’t received a reply. Perhaps Theo disapproved of the sentimentality, or the lack of professionalism, or, more worryingly, he had simply never received the message.

  Anyway, there was no time for a letter now. Scarcely time for a telegram. It took Conrad several attempts before he was happy.

  ‘PLEASE INFORM PROFESSOR MADVIG THAT I WISH TO MEET HIM IN LEIDEN 10 NOV STOP NEED TO DISCUSS DYBBOL STOP LEAVE MESSAGE AT HOTEL LEVEDAG STOP DE LANCEY’.

  Johan Madvig had been a Danish liberal politician in the 1860s: the use of his name in the message meant ‘meet me’. Dybbøl was the major battle of the war, and that meant ‘emergency’. Three was subtracted from any dates and times, so ‘10 Nov’ meant 7 November. And there was no way that Conrad could think of to hide the name of a rendezvous near The Hague. Leiden was a nearby university town, and the Hotel Levedag was one mentioned in the guidebook to Holland in the club library. He translated the draft telegram into Danish, addressed it to Anders Elkjaer at a house in a suburb of Copenhagen, and took it along to the Post Office to be sent right away.

  It was the best he could do.

  Fortunately, Conrad’s passport was at his parents’ house in Kensington Square, rather than the family home in Somerset. He would also need some civilian clothes: he could hardly travel in his uniform. Unfortunately it was likely that his father would be up in town. The most natural thing would be for Conrad to stay there that night and dine with his father, but Conrad thought Van had been absolutely correct in anticipating that Lord Oakford would want to interrogate him about his mission. Much better to sneak in, grab his things, sneak out, and stay at a hotel somewhere.

  The plan worked. His father was out at the House of Lords, and Conrad left a message with his valet, Williamson, apologizing that he had missed him.

  Telegram sent, travel documents in order, dressed in mufti and suitcase in hand, Conrad checked into a hotel in Bloomsbury.

  5

  Paris

  Major Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe skipped up the steps of the imposing house on the boulevard Suchet out by the bois de Boulogne, and rang the doorbell. The gendarme on duty outside nodded to him in recognition. Lights peeped out beneath the curtains which barely covered the tall windows of the four-storey property. There would be no German bombers that night, and the inhabitants of Paris knew it.

  The door was promptly opened by a footman, and inside a butler as tall as Fruity stepped forward.

  ‘Good evening, Hale,’ said Fruity, handing the man his coat and hat.

  ‘Good evening, Major Metcalfe.’

  ‘You know we are dining with your former employer this evening?’

  ‘Please be sure to send my regards to Mr Bedaux, sir.’

  ‘If you like, Hale. But I don’t want to taunt him, what?’

  Hale was the best butler in France. Everyone knew it, including both his former employer – Charles Bedaux, and his present employer – the Duke of Windsor.

  ‘Tell His Royal Highness I’m here, would you? I’ll wait.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ Hale disappeared up the stairs, and Fruity settled in his favourite Louis the somethingth chair, crossed his long legs and lit up a cigarette. He stared at the absurdly ornate clock opposite him, its dial surrounded by an exploding sun of gold leaf, and listened to its familiar restful tick. One way or the other he had spent a lot of time over the last month waiting for the duke in this hallway. The duke would either be late or very late. Fruity didn’t mind: it was all part of the job.

  Fruity was HRH the Duke of Windsor’s aide-de-camp, or equerry or something. He wasn’t quite sure what his official title was, which was
fine, but he was becoming increasingly unsure whether he would even be paid for it, which wasn’t. The duke had found himself in a pickle when war had broken out, and Fruity had been willing to step into the breach. The British government had tied itself in knots trying to work out how the king-in-exile should be treated in the new war. The duke and his wife had returned to England from their house in Antibes to be met with official indifference. Fruity had done his duty, inviting the duke to stay at his own modest house in Sussex, and then joining him when the powers that be had finally found a job for him in France. That’s what friends were for. And whatever else he was, Fruity was the duke’s friend. Sometimes he wondered whether he was his only friend.

  He heard the scrabble of paws on the stairway and stood up. Pookie, Detto and Prisie tumbled down. Fruity bent down to scratch the ears of the largest of the cairn terriers, Detto, his favourite. Detto wagged his tail, as did the other two. The younger one, the puppy, started yapping. They were all pleased to see Fruity; animals usually were.

  ‘Oh, Prisie, do be quiet!’

  Fruity straightened up. ‘Hello, Wallis.’ He tried his best friendly smile, but it wasn’t returned. The duchess was smartly dressed for a night in alone, in an elegant black dress with a giant diamond brooch in the shape of a star sparkling from her forbiddingly flat chest. On anyone else, Fruity would have assumed it was fake, but Wallis never wore costume jewellery. She was, after all, the woman for whom a king had given up his throne.

  ‘Be sure to bring him back right away, Fruity.’

  ‘Of course, Wallis.’

  ‘No going on anywhere else?’

  ‘Straight home for us,’ Fruity said. Wallis’s strictures were completely unnecessary, more was the pity. In the old days in London, when the duke was the Prince of Wales, he and Fruity would have gone on to the Embassy Club after dinner, and stayed up all night drinking and dancing. And of course there were plenty of tempting places to visit in Paris. But the duke was even more scared of Wallis than Fruity was; there was absolutely no chance of him going on anywhere afterwards.