by Leo Kessler
‘The account of how I came to join the British cause,’ the Count said with some dignity. ‘A warrior for Mr Churchill!’
‘Holy strawsack!’ Otto exclaimed. ‘You’d better get another bottle, Count!’
‘It was a strange journey, through the night from Dover.’
Otto nodded his understanding and settled back in the deep leather armchair, as the Count set about the account account of his mysterious business in England.
‘Hour after hour of journey, until finally that nice young officer who did the interrogation there at Dover – something like Captain Smith-Wanking, one of those double barrel names – helped me out of the car and I found myself in a remote country house, no sound save that of the sentries pacing the grounds. Very fine lawn they had, by the way.’
Otto sniffed. ‘Officers obviously have a different kind of war from us common blokes.’
The Count did not appear to hear. ‘But the occupants weren’t asleep, no, not one little bit,’ He wagged his finger at his handsome blond listener. ‘The English are a very alert and cunning people, perfidious Albion and all that.’
Otto thought of the sentries who fell asleep over their Bren guns at York, the drunken singing the night of his escape, but he said nothing; he was too intrigued by the story the Count was telling.
‘At first there were two of them there, obviously gentlemen out of the top drawer. One could see that immediately. The one was a dried-up fellow with thinning hair and devilishly clever eyes. Between you and me, I know now that he was the head of their Secret Service. They call him “C”. The letter stands for the English word “cunning”.’
‘How cunning?’
The Count did not react. ‘The other was clearly a military fellow in mufti. Also very smart though a little more direct than this Cunning chap. Kept getting up from his chair all the time and swinging a golf club all over the place as if the study were some tremendous links course or something. Spoke German, too. Well, at least, he said hello in German when I was escorted in by Wanking-Smith or Smith-Wanking or whatever he was called.’
(What the Count didn’t know, and Otto only found out years later was that the military man was a certain Col. Mason-MacFarland, the pre-war military attaché to Berlin, who had just been relieved of his post as head of the British Expeditionary Forces’ Intelligence Service. The other was, of course, General Stewart Menzies, head of MI6. – L.K.)
‘So all this swinging happened in the middle of the night?’ Otto asked slowly.
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right, my boy. Perhaps Mufti's German wasn’t so good after all. But one thing is for certain, he knew his Germany and he knew all about me,’ he lowered his voice dramatically. ‘Everything.’
‘Damn!’ Otto breathed, impressed.
‘Damn indeed, Otto. He knew all about my activities with the Abwehr, Old Father Christmas’s plan to – er – dispense with the Führer in May 1940 and my particular role in that unfortunate affair. The whole bloody lot.’ He nodded significantly.
‘Then the other one, this Cunning chap, said: “Count, we know that you are a good German, one with his heart in the right place, one of us in other words.” The man was obviously some well-born aristocrat, Otto, I could see that at a glance. One of us.’
‘Naturally,’ Otto said sarcastically, ‘a typical aristocrat like me – father unknown and mother earning her pennies on her back in bed.’
‘You are one of nature’s aristocrats, Otto. I have always told you that, but pray let me continue. After this Cunning had finished singing my praises, he came out with the reason for having me brought there.’
Otto leaned forward eagerly and his face was warmed by the fire. ‘Yes?’
‘He said he’d like me to meet a third party, who was waiting for me in the other room.’ The Count could hardly restrain his excitement now. There was almost a feverish glitter in his eyes. ‘A very important person indeed, he emphasized that, fixing me with a look like a cobra about to strike some petrified animal prey.’
‘Who was it, Count? Come on, spit it out! Not King George himself?’
‘No,’ the Count smiled triumphantly. ‘Someone far more important than he.’
‘Pee or get off the pot already!’
‘Don’t be so plebeian Otto,’ the Count teased.
‘Who?’
‘A certain Colonel Warden.’
‘Colonel Warden?’ Otto’s face fell. ‘And who’s Colonel Warden when he’s at home?’ he demanded, his honest young complexion reflecting his disappointment.
Instead of answering his question straight out, the Count teased his young listener a little while longer, while the logs crackled merrily and the setter continued to snore, occasionally giving out little pants, as if he were enjoying some erotic doggy dream. ‘A moment later Colonel Warden came into the room in person, exactly as I had always imagined him, though a little smaller than I had anticipated, with a lot of cigar ash on the lapels of his jacket. I had always thought he was a very tidy person somehow.’
‘Who?’
The Count feigned not to hear. ‘Of course, it was the middle of the night and he had been imbibing slightly. Not serious, of course, but I did think without the stick he might well have keeled over a couple of times.’
‘Who?… Who was it, in God's Name?’ Otto cried out in exasperation.
‘We, of course, rose and then this Cunning chap did the introductions, but naturally, as clever as he was, he couldn’t fool me. That cigar and whisky glass were sufficient. Even if they had covered his face, they would not have been able to fool me.’ He, winked knowingly. ‘I would have recognised who Colonel Warden really was anywhere and anyhow.’
‘HEAVEN, ARSE AND CLOUDBURST!’ Otto roared, springing to his feet, ‘WHO WAS THIS COLONEL WARDEN SHIT?’
Graf von der Weide looked up at his infuriated, red-faced young friend with a mild grin on his face. ‘I thought you would have guessed by now, Otto. I’m surprised at you. Colonel Warden was – of course – no less a person than their prime minister, Winston S. Churchill!’
CHAPTER 4
‘I’ll have another double, Stew,’ were the Great Man’s first words as he slumped down hard into the chair. ‘Little soda, if you please.’
C rose obligingly and mixed the scotch, while the Count and the Englishman with mufti and golf club stared down at the rosy-faced, cherub-like politician in his ‘siren suit’, a one-piece garment that made him look like a rather fat, bald-headed baby.
Churchill indicated that they should sit and for the first time turned his gaze on the German. In spite of the drink and the lateness of the hour, Graf von der Weide could see the keenness in those eyes and knew instinctively he was in the presence of greatness; it was the same feeling he had experienced the day Hitler had presented him with his Iron Cross. He realised they were both very much like one another, the Führer and Mister Winston Churchill.
‘Are you by chance a father, Count?’ he asked unexpectedly, his words slurred a little by his badly fitting false teeth and perhaps also due somewhat to the whisky.
‘I don’t think so. Perhaps. I have never married,’ he stuttered, bewildered by the question.
The confused answer seemed, however, to satisfy the Great Man. He took a reflective sip of his scotch and said, ‘It is good that you have not, my friend,’ he growled. ‘Ordinary men should have children naturally – for the sake of the nation’s future. Even less ordinary ones should, perhaps – for the sake of stock.’ He raised his finger in warning, as if he were addressing a full session of the House of Commons. ‘Great men should refrain!’
The Count flashed an enquiring look at his two other companions, but they remained silent, offering no explanation of what the Great Man meant, so he ventured a hesitant, ‘How do you mean, Herr Ch – ’ he caught himself just in time – ‘Herr Oberst Warden.’
‘Herr Oberst Warden?’ Churchill rolled the words across his tongue in an atrocious accent, but with obvious pleasure, ‘I like the sound o
f that. German is a fine language for cursing in, I always think. Herr Oberst Warden. Yes. I don’t think I have been addressed with a German military rank since ’04 when I accompanied the Kaiser on the Imperial manoeuvres of the year.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘And I doubt if your Herr Hitler will ever honour me with a German military title, what?’
There were polite titters from the ether two Englishmen. Churchill’s plump cherubic face grew grim again.
‘Children, Count,’ he declared, ‘compromise great men. They never live up to their fathers’ greatness. When I think of my own brood…’ He sighed and continued. ‘But what if the great man is indiscreet too, and if he sires a child on the wrong side of the blanket, if I may put it like that?’ Suddenly he straightened up from his slouched position in the big leather armchair and declaimed grandly:
‘There have been, or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now. And many a man there is, even at this present, now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm. That type that thinks she has been sluiced in his absence. And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour…’
‘Yes,’ the Count said, feeling more confused than ever.
‘That was from “The Winter’s Tale”,’ Churchill said as much to himself as the assembled gentlemen.
What was all this about, the Count wondered. Where was Churchill leading him with all the talk of children and lechery? He felt himself growing red: he had never been comfortable with such talk very much.
Churchill dipped the end of his cigar in the whisky and sucked on it thoughtfully for a moment, while in the background the old grandfather clock ticked away life in heavy metallic solemnity. He surveyed the Count’s fleshly face, as if he were considering whether he should continue or not. Apparently he came to the conclusion that he should do so, for as the sentry’s boots started to crunch by on the gravel outside this remote country house.
He leaned forward and said, ‘Great men – and this might come as a surprise to you – also have their vices.’
‘Not really a surprise, Herr Oberst. I know from personal contact that the Führer likes cream cakes, though to the outside world he represents himself as one who disdains such things.’
Churchill laughed. ‘I do not mean the pleasures of the stomach, but of the bed, my dear man. Your Frederick the Great and his young men, Kemal Ataturk with his child mistresses of both sexes. Napoleon, who I believe thought the tongue was more important than the other thing.’
The Count flushed even deeper and the one called Cunning looked at his highly polished shoes. MacFarland got up and started swinging his golf club at imaginary balls, watching them sail away through the sash window into the night.
Churchill was amused by their reactions.
‘When I was a young man,’ he continued, ‘starting my political career at Bath – a surprising place to do so, come to think of it – I attracted the interest of a comely young woman, who was already married. She had some vague interest in politics in the fashion of better-educated women at that time, though thank God, she never fought for female suffrage. When I think of all that chaining themselves to the railings and throwing themselves under the King’s horse and then elect as their first MP Nancy Astor… Ah well, but that’s another story.
‘Now then, Count. To make the business as short as possible. A delightful little encounter between the sheets and once in the rather cramped back-seat of my campaign car; there was an unfortunate mistake – The Honourable Reggie Gore-Browne!’ Churchill sighed, as if he were a sorely tried man.
‘Kicked out of Harrow, my own school. Buggery! Sent down from Balliol. Indecent exposure! Sacked from the Foreign Office. Importuning in Hyde Park! Quietly banished to Switzerland to learn languages. It was thought there would be nothing in that dull little country to tempt him. But we didn’t know our Honourable Reggie Gore-Browne well enough yet, it seemed. Deported two days after he arrived. Gross indecency! Something to do with another like-minded soul in a public place on a Sunday afternoon. I think the fact that it was Sunday afternoon upset those staid Calvinists more than anything else.
‘Thus my blow-by-blow arrives in la belle France, where blessed with ample money by his doting mama and unsuspecting pa, he spends his time between Paris's springtime debauchery and Cannes with its winter vice. For ten whole years that was the kind of life this young rogue pursued. He devoted himself completely to his unnatural vice, never once lifting a finger to do a stroke of honest work. Indeed, my dear Count, the only decent thing he has ever done in his whole worthless life is not to make public that I am his father. That secret is known to a very limited, select group of people. Up to now!’
There was a sudden note of bitterness in the Great Man’s voice. He took a timid sip of his drink before saying, ‘You tell him, Stew, I am a little overcome.’
The Count’s heart went out to the stricken figure slumped in the armchair opposite him, deep lines abruptly etched in his plump face.
‘Yes sir,’ the man they called Cunning answered promptly. ‘Well, you see, Count… Oberst Warden’s son was in Paris when the German Army marched on in this last summer and he was immediately apprehended as an enemy civilian.’ He frowned. ‘Needless to say he had not volunteered for the colours in’39 as any decent young Englishman would have. In spite of his little – hm – peculiarities, the Guards would have granted him a commission, especially the Coldstream.’
‘Among his other defects,’ Churchill said without looking up, ‘Gore-Browne is first and foremost a devout coward.’
‘In the camp just outside Paris where the Germans placed him, he came into contact with a group of renegade Englishmen who, I regret to say, were preparing to actively collaborate with the enemy.’
The Count tut-tutted, then realised abruptly that he was that ‘enemy’ in question. He stopped immediately.
‘There was no fight, I trust?’ he asked.
Cunning smiled, though those cold eyes of his did not light up. ‘That would not be Gore-Browne’s style, Herr Graf, nor those who were with him in Paris. Too dangerous. People get killed fighting, you see. No, these chappies wanted to fight with pen and paper – and their tongues.’
For a moment the Great Man’s strange remark about Napoleon flashed through the Count’s mind and he reddened again, until Cunning explained what he had meant.
‘They offered themselves to the Germans as volunteers for their propaganda machine.’
‘Goebbels’ Ministry?’
‘Exactly, Count. To write his lies in his English for him and broadcast his untruths over the wireless.’
‘A sorry bunch,’ Churchill raised his head and took up the explanation once more. ‘Fools, dupes and more than a few rogues like Gore-Browne. A bunch of our local breed of fascist – thank God we bagged Mosley in time – and of course, my scion! Now, I have long given up caring a fig about what he does, though it does hurt me to find my son among such rabble. But what, my dear Count, if he knows he can gain further advantage with the Germans by disclosing one really great secret to Goebbels’s propaganda minions?’
‘That you are his father, I presume.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You realise, Count,’ the one with the golf club said urgently, as if he were afraid that the Great Man might reveal his true identity, ‘Oberst Warden is a very important man in this country. A scandal of that kind could have serious political consequences. God knows what the Americans would say. They are a very moral people and their Ambassador Kennedy thinks we’re finished already, at least that’s what he tells President Roosevelt.’
‘It would shake the conservative back-benchers at the very least,’ the Great Man said with a bitter laugh.
‘Now, we know,’ MacFarland continued, ‘that these wretches are being led or trained or what have you, by a certain William Joyce, known locally as Lord Haw-Haw. He was one of Mosley’s pre-war fascists, a renegade who went to Germany just before the war broke out.
‘He is brilliant in his way, a real rabb
le-rouser, and there are unfortunately a lot of nice Nellies in this country who believe him rather than the good old BBC. Naturally, like all such people he is an empire-builder. He wants to shine in the German eyes with the number of people, especially important ones, he can convert to the German cause. He is training them, so we understand, to become a serious thorn in our side. We have received intelligence, too, that Joyce has decided to take our little rabble to Germany, either to the Berlin or Hamburg region, where they have their transmitters for broadcasts to England.’ He broke off suddenly and looked at the Prime Minister and then at the man called Cunning, as if he were afraid to say any more.
For a few moments there was a heavy silence, broken only by the metallic ticking and the faint hush of the wind in the skeletal oaks outside.
Finally Churchill spoke. ‘Herr Graf, we would like to make you an offer.’
‘An offer?’ The Count's mouth was dry with excitement. After all those laborious weeks spent at the helm of a travelling circus, he was now being thrust right back into the thick of it. Finally, he thought to himself, excitement and adventure!
‘Yes. We want to offer you your freedom, unlimited funds supplied through a friendly agency operating out of the US Embassy in Berlin, and, erm... Oh, blast it...’
‘The holiday house,’ C murmured to his shoes, prompting the Great Man.
‘Yes, yes, I've remembered it now,’ he retorted. ‘And when everything is over, Count, a rather nice villa on the Greek coast. If you wish, of course. Otherwise I'm happy to keep it,’ he added in a hurry.
The Count, overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of adventure, stuttered, ‘But what would I have to do, sir?’
‘Find Gore-Browne. Take him from the place where he is presently located, to Athens where our people will ensure that he becomes a permanent remittance man in some South American banana republic. And he can stay there for good, indulging in as much buggery as the local authorities will allow, but where he will worry us no more, sir.’