Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

‘You will have heard reports of me. Rumour has many tongues. So has prejudice. I have had to fight on several fronts, an officer surrounded by danger and treachery, requiring, I risk saying, the multiplication of the impromptu. In crisis, in the English phrase, keeping my head. I read Spengler, perhaps too readily. He taught that would-be moralists and social ethics types were only predators with broken teeth. In the visible world, that made good sense. For Rousseau, righteous instruction axiomatically cures the undesirable, but I found no evidence for it. The war gave me chance for both good and ill. I can claim that my telephone call to Ernst Jünger in 1940 was not the least of the influences which saved Laon Cathedral. He told me later that superior intelligence was needed to experiment with drugs, so profitably peddled by the SS. A test too few pass.’

He was parting branches for me, assiduous as ever. Our footsteps cracked, disturbing birds and the unseen. These reaches were colder, bleaker, the sun hidden, buds mere specks.

‘Some of us, with well-planted donations to generals and access to Excellency Serrano Suner, helped keep Spain neutral, thus preserving the Mediterranean for the Allies. With time shortening for the Reich, I had to refuse von Stulpnagel’s invitation to join the July Plot. Not from any pledged oath to Hitler, only gut conviction that it could but fail. You, more lively-minded, may consider me wrong.’ His eyes, mouth, intonation disposed of any likelihood of personal error. ‘But the idealistic consciousness, beyond good and evil, that once so excited us had long been trodden into the mud. Stauffenberg, Moltke and, at times, Adam, were better people than myself, but I was unable to envisage them controlling a stricken nation. So I sought means more subtle, more effective. I dared encourage Dietrich von Choltitz, Commandant of Outer Paris, and my young protégé, Ernst von Bressendorf, to disobey the Führer’s direct order to blow up all bridges, tunnels, public buildings. Using my blat elsewhere, I persuaded an SS colonel to permit hundreds of Danish Jews to escape to Finland. I had always to protect my back…’ For once he hesitated, looking not at me but at grass. ‘I was not, like some of those in your childhood, enamoured of hopeless causes, heartbreaks, what I called the rose of tragedy. I was not the boy dazzled by the Christmas tree or awash for Marie-Antoinette. Sexually, I was less than scrupulous, though few are not. It is more difficult to prefer the weak to the handsome. Yet I learnt from an instructor, short-sighted, spineless, spinsterish, who quelled rowdy, brutal cadets by a tongue flaying like a whip. One puny, bitter, spectacled academic against fifty slabs of muscle and brawn. He always won. Another Odysseus. He would toss cash on to the floor and, sneering, watch us grovel for it, like curs after gristle. Just possibly, he could see some Promised Land, which lack of talent barred him from entering.’

If he had minutely faltered, he had swiftly recovered. We left Forest, the path twisting into empty fields surrounding the Lake, pewter-coloured, flat, melancholy, gulls diving, weeds floating. At clubman’s ease, he was level, reasonable, quiet. The mutability disconcerted.

‘To be deceived by appearance and superstition was not for me. Luigi Barzini, trustworthy witness, told me that an unknown man in a Roman crowd saw Mussolini’s motorized chariot halted. He stepped forward and told the pothouse dictator, ‘Death after victory over France. Death from strangers.’ The Duce was never the same man thereafter. Squeezing fantasies from dwindling vision, mesmerized by Hitler, his pupil, he had decided for war, which his fears and apathy made his disaster certain.’

While we stood on the Lake’s margin and, gross with fantasies and superstition, I awaited the knightly sword to descend for the white hand protruding from water. He brooded, before saying, ‘A long shot from Arabia, a trumpet call from the Rhine, return from Elba, a howl from a Bavarian beer cellar… by such disasters men live and, scarcely knowing it, die.’

Contemplating the nebulous banks opposite, he must have been sure of my admiration and loyalty.

He said, as if remembering a tune, ‘ Magna est Veritas et Praevilabit. A sacred text faulty in its premises and would not have rescued me from consequences of the Plot.’

A small breeze cobbled the water, gulls criss-crossed above their shadows. Again in nonsensical qualms, I thought of death by drowning, untraced murders, then, even more ludicrously, of the English Princes in the Tower. I moved more apart. Could he hold some clue to the hushed Rose Room. My own submissiveness unnerved me, like a stammer. My very face, usually obstinate under untidy hair, must have weakened, with the sham power of a pugilist in decline.

At last turning away, indicating the road, the Herr General sighed. ‘You may not realize my relish for teasing. My concession to… I really do not know.’ His laugh, youthful, was itself a tease. ‘I once had a grudge against the Japanese consul at Riga. He had commended me as a Jew-baiter, while unaware that I knew sufficient of his private life that would have dismayed his family and entertained his masters. At my hint of this, he tripped over his tongue, to accede to my proposal to pass me five thousand visas, which I then distributed to anti-Nazi Jews and gentiles. By special arrangement, they crossed Russia to the Shanghai International Settlement.’

It did not occur to me to doubt these assertions, delivered like commonplaces. But a worry touched the strongly moulded face, frayed less by age but by impatience or spirit. Still calm, his next words lost some ring.

‘My motive? Merely, I fear, to make an Asiatic menial look foolish. Yet you will surely agree that if an action, a book, a painting has any value an analytical précis does not suffice.’

This dissatisfied him and he moved ahead, perhaps seeking the more convincing. Catching up, I made some remark, empty, stupidly deferential, but was inwardly cautious, as if fearing a false step on to an escalator. Quickening pace, he said no more until reaching his car. Beside it, under the pillars, he looked smaller, older, leaning on the black, opulent machine as if for support. Its glitter matched not him but his clothes. In no haste to drive either to the Manor or to some further destination, he reverted to defensiveness, against criticism I was incapable of inflicting.

‘Life cannot be passed in remorse and laments. Nostalgia cannot reclaim Eden or tie up in Ithaca. More often, it creates the Gorgon, lets Medusa speak. We must nail down the years and stride forward. Few of us can bear much scrutiny. Not only Spengler but Tolstoy taught that, with rare exceptions, martyrs and the tormented are tyrants. Tolstoy, at least, spoke with some authority, being one himself. Today, I am apt to hear that in both world wars the real victor was Germany, by fortitude and resilience extracting assets from defeat. You and I, Erich, are both…’

What we were, he did not explain. The afternoon had chilled, thickening over the sun. I had stood thus with Alex, both reluctant to relinquish a cheerful day.

The Herr General’s affability appeared more than ever calculated, that of a capable scientist during an experiment interesting but not crucial.

‘I myself, Erich, am no genuine moral victor. I once authorized the torture of a Polish sniper. And why? To wring out information that saved several thousand lives. Legally, it entitled me to a hanging. Morally… Well! You may think I agonized over my decision. But I did not. The matter was ice clear.’ His wryness was perfunctory. ‘There was no alternative. I felt very little. German officers, Polish partisans, they create souls, then spoil them. Distillation of bravado, often worse. I leave souls to others and content myself with the job in hand. Signing in so as not to be signed off. Genius, seeking a break-out, die Aufbruch , understands that judge and victim can be the same. Actually, I have found few unwilling to be victims. Prey to fashions, Herr Omnes yet enjoys regulations, respectable desires, cosiness. So you and I must treat him like a favourite dog – you remember poor dear Caspar – tenderly but not forgetting the muzzle. I should add that I much respect the Jewish gentleman who betrayed to the world the Israeli nuclear reactor and weaponry at Dimona and Israel’s industrial espionage and deals with Pretoria and Washington. I also refused a substantial bribe from the ill-bred bullies in Baghdad. Some Russian, French and UN lordlings were less scrupulous. Friendship with your mother made me reflect that, while English and Americans trusted to luck, Germans were Macbeths, over-respectful to Fate, which often wears one face too many. Like a whore.’