Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

An observer would see only two leisured greyheads under fresh buds and green hollows. Neither confessing nor boasting but astutely conversational, he answered questions I had not asked, producing a balance sheet impersonal in his exactness. I wondered whether he had read Secret Protocol , its implicit condemnation of so many like himself.

‘The good folk of my own youth, Erich, were unfailingly courteous, well read, seeded in tolerance and breeding, yet toying with a culture virtually extinct, wasting their strength. Pouring it into over-manured soil. Their traditions, their etiquette, made them wish only to preserve. In crisis that they had unwittingly provoked, they were powerless.’

We were stepping over fungi speckled and red, spotty fern, yellow-green points, while, almost audibly, he continued marshalling trim sentences.

‘Who can tell how oft he offendeth? In Soviet Russia, as in National Socialist Germany, and in certain quarters of the United States, I took lessons from the uncultured and primitive. Das russiche Gemüt . I realized the limitations of bookishness, though respecting Mr Emerson’s writ, that prayers are the disease of the will, creeds the sickness of the intellect. Evidence shows me that while human behaviour is flexible human nature, despite the adornments, is not.’

We stopped at a grassy clearing. My images of former times were overtaken by that of Hagen, acquisitive destroyer. The setting itself was Wagnerian or of illustrations in a volume of legend. Trees, birds, sunlight fragmented by branches, many still skeletal and dark, a shrill bird, undergrowth stirrings. No more than at an old-fashioned tutorial would I interrupt. Nor, as yet, had I anything to say.

‘The Spartans, my boy, periodically culled their slaves as our forebears did bears and wolves. It carried danger, in trusting to a subordinate docility that had limits. In sixteenth-century Rajput wars, the men besieged in Chiter, finally, very meekly, marched out, unarmed, in peaceful saffron, to be massacred, their women flocking to indulge in mass widow-burnings. Both examples I found instructive in my military courses. Docility, resignation, meekness were inappropriate for survival beyond 1914.’

Still the man in uniform, he was solicitous, intimate, preparing justification for the unmentioned, which might prove unmentionable. Again on the path, we were reaching a band of heath, grey flecked with yellow, breathing space, before another thick shadow of Forest.

‘Never, Erich, have I been allured by the past. Romance is merely distance. Handfuls of the best forgotten. You will have read Sallust.’ Sarcasm beneath the statement was blatant. ‘I recommend him. He presents authentic, if jaundiced, insights into motives behind cruelty. In Soviet prison I noted the supercilious unconcern of doctors towards babies they judged unsuitable to live, they, themselves, haunted by fear, even terror. As for us Germans, Nietzsche considered they belonged to the day before yesterday, were avid for the day after tomorrow but lacked any today. It will be interesting to encounter the disposition of the Fourth Reich.’

He negotiated a patch of bog, adroitly sidestepping, while I floundered, distracted not by Sallust or Nietzsche but by the assumption that I was still German, I had long thought myself supranational but English in disliking extravagance, in respect for privacy and impatience with those they called busybodies.

His words were very distinct, almost visible, in the sharp air. ‘We must never overlook the compulsions towards rebirth. Wiedergeburt . I had to manoeuvre through disreputable company east and west of the Elbe. We must live, most of us, however meagre the excuses for doing so. One ruler, Marcus Aurelius, wrote that life resembles not dancing but wrestling. Just so. I myself from the start, even in your own house, recognized the importance of blat – words in the right quarter, useful connections, polite influence. Certain smiles, pledges, clothes, the nuance of handshakes.’

I remembered a moment in Eaton Square, Herbert Sulzbach feeling danger in his blood when his men refused to salute.

Oppressed by the processes of recollection habitually attributed to the drowning, I instinctively looked for a bulge in his overcoat and wondered, here in the recesses of Forest, if I would emerge alive.

He pressed my arm, in affection or guiding me, pushing me forward, foregoing that flicker of distaste and speaking with long-ago familial pleasantry, sharing his zest for the grotesque antics of others, as though only we were fully adult.

‘Before the war, I learnt something of interest from Prince Mikasa. You may remember him as brother to the quondam god Hirohito. The League of Nations had delegated the respectable Lord Lytton to report on the behaviour of Japanese troops in Manchuria, generally held unpraiseworthy. The pathology of race!’ His voice shrugged. ‘Incidentals included conscripts bayoneting Chinese civilians to develop martial skills, extend their art of living. His Lordship discovered an attempt to demolish his commission by sprinkling selected dishes at a welcoming banquet with cholera germs. This, he reported, as the ‘Material Factor in Etherealized Postulates’, which Heidegger would have envied. There is later parallel in Belgian police in Brazzaville quelling high-stepping African dissent by distributing poisoned toothpaste.’

He was inspecting a massive bramble with the well-mannered interest he might have allowed to a quondam god.

‘I apologize for digressing. His Altitude Mikasa was sufficiently gracious to introduce me to none else than General Ishii Shiro. Not a name to enchant. He was Director of Unit 731. I may have to explain that this was a pleasure dome in Harbin, manufacturing germs for scattering amongst the conquered, along with strangling, freezing, starving people, in interests of medical research, by the Children of the Sun, the Führer’s allies. MacArthur preserved Shiro and his colleagues, their researches useful in the Cold War. The Pentagon feared a Russo-Japanese Pact. And Shiro still remains, in his glory. He has established the Green Cross Company, producing medical drugs, in return for oblivion of his past. Very neat. Magnanimously, he has offered me some advantages I thought politic to reject.’

We had circumnavigated the bramble. I could almost feel his glance on my sodden feet, relating them to my inability to speak. Any objections, he would capably dismiss as trifling, to be courteously excused.

‘Ours is an era in which science explains all, technology contrives all, camp-followers claim all…’

Camp-follower, I managed a feeble, ‘But –’

‘One moment. I have won, then lost, several sizeable fortunes, and the present moves towards European unification look favourably on me. Walter Rathenau once said, in my hearing, that history records the clever resisting the strong. Did not Odysseus, shipwrecked and naked, have confidence in the cleverness that made him powerful? Philosophers too easily denigrate power as weakness. I possess no philosophical assets, though once saw myself as Gnostic, preferring élitist knowledge to generalized, aimless compassion. I enjoy existing, in comfort considerable but not excessive. I have tended to dominate, yes, but by choice only when filling gaps left by those of superior moral texture but weaker personality. I have no trace of Einsatz , I am not disgusted by notions of self-sacrifice, I merely do not possess them. If I need to discover a profound relation to life and death, I do not need a slaughterhouse in which to prove it.’

There showed the bluff contempt he used when bored or irritated, for which Mother had rebuked him, when thinking themselves unobserved. He now smiled apology, as he had to her, while we struck through to another path, towards the Lake and road.