Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“Maybe that was the mistake,” Hess is saying, as if to himself. “Killing the Jews after our conquests. If we’d just got rid of them, driven them out of Germany, not invaded Poland, the rest, would the world have cared? Britain, America? About some Jews?” He shakes his head. “Yet those victories, that glory, the binding loyalty of war, perhaps they were all essential to carry the people with us.”

“ Enough! ” Rotheram cries, lunging across the broad back seat, and having the satisfaction of seeing Hess jerk back, his head bouncing off the window. “So help me! Say another word and I’ll wring your neck myself.”

IT TAKES THEM almost an hour from the outskirts of the city to the Cage, Baker working his way laboriously through streets blocked by joyous crowds spilling from pubs and cafés. Hess leans back in the staff car and hides his face, but the few times anyone pays them any attention, it’s to offer a cheer or applause.

At the London Cage, they part in silence. Hess is led away to another car, never looking back, and Rotheram is told to report to Hawkins.

“Sorry about that,” Rotheram tells Baker as he goes.

“Not at all, sir. Always fancied stringing him up with piano wire meself.”

Rotheram finds himself sitting across the familiar desk. Hawkins offers him a cigarette and a tumbler of Scotch while Rotheram tells him, a little stiffly and before he is asked, that Hess had nothing new to offer.

“Didn’t really expect it,” Hawkins admits.

“Where are you taking him?”

“The Tower.”

Rotheram nods.

“How’ve you been?” Hawkins asks. “Missed you around here, you know. Could have used you, preparing for all this.” He gestures around the room, and for the first time Rotheram sees the boxes piled against the walls.

“You’re moving?”

“Lock, stock, and barrel. Nuremberg, they reckon. Though they haven’t found decent digs for us yet, far as I know. Not that there’s much to be had over there right now.”

Nuremberg, Rotheram thinks. Of course.

“Look,” Hawkins says, leaning forward. “It was rotten the way things went for you. I tried, but you know how it is with orders. Still, I should have tried harder. Anyhow, the truth is I’d like you to come with us. You should be there. I mean, Lord, I saw those films. Sickening.” He reddens before Rotheram’s eyes. “What I mean to say is, you deserve to be there, if you ask me, and I’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.”

The desk suddenly seems very wide, a vast veneered plain. Rotheram reaches for the edge of it, puts his palms on it to push himself up.

“It’s not necessary,” he says. He sees a flash of hatred in Hawkins’s eyes, but doesn’t regret it. Better, he thinks, that you should hate me than feel forgiven.

OUTSIDE, HE PRESSES his way through the choked evening streets, hurrying at first, then slowing as he becomes caught up in the throng of bodies. Before a pub in the Tottenham Court Road, he pauses to watch a man in a trilby, staggering with drink, falling to one knee and being helped up by two others, who clap him on the back as if he’s just run a marathon. Behind him a crowd pours out of one of the theaters in Leicester Square and sweeps him along towards Covent Garden. Someone starts to sing, and soon they’re all at it—“Lambeth Walk,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” “Bless ’Em All.”

Rotheram would break away, but he’s hemmed in on all sides. He tries to join in, but he feels self-conscious. And then his arm is hooked, and he looks around to see a red-faced girl beaming at him. “Can’t sing for toffee myself.” And no sooner has he leaned in to catch what she’s saying than she’s spinning him in a jig or a reel, and soon the whole crowd is twirling. “What do they call you?” she shouts, and he tells her, “Joseph.” She points to her chest and yells, “Lucy! Pleased to meet you, Joe.” Her bare arm is warm in the crook of his elbow, and Rotheram finds himself entranced by it, this point of contact about which they spin, and then he bounces off someone else’s shoulder and catches her heel and she stumbles, sprawls. Seeing her open her wide mouth, he almost bolts, and then she starts to laugh, a raucous peal. “Your face!” she cries. “I’m not made of china, you know!” She holds up a hand and after a second he grasps it and hoists her back onto her feet. She gives him a sloppy theatrical kiss and swings off from arm to arm through the whirling crowd.

He works his way to the edge of the group, pulls up in a doorway, watches them go, marching now to “Lili Marlene.” It’s too late for Rotheram to join in, but the lilt of the tune stays with him as he heads north through Russell Square, Islington, along streets of celebration and streets of rubble. Finally, sometime towards nine, he finds a little hotel. Out there in the night, he knows, couples are coming together and making victory babies. Nine months from now they’ll be repopulating the Continent. As for Rotheram, he’s been awake for two days straight, and he falls swiftly into a deep and dreamless sleep, drifting off to the bursts of laughter and snatches of song from the street below, his last thought that tomorrow he should visit his mother’s grave.

IT’S THE LAST TIME he’ll see Hess in person, though two months later, in a darkened cinema, he’ll see him in a newsreel, sitting in the dock at Nuremberg. Hess will look shabbier, like a prisoner at last, and haunted, his deep-set eyes sunken, cowled in shadow. He’s expected to plead insanity. His lawyer has already made the case. Hess will be asked by the French judge to confirm his plea. He will rise and blink in the bright lights of the newsreel cameras and grip the rail before him. He’ll waver for a second, then stiffen, straightening his back. The amnesia he has claimed all these years, he will announce to the hushed court, was simulated, for tactical reasons. He renounces it. He will sit back down in the long, long dock, which looks so disconcertingly like a jury box, and Göring will lean into him, smiling, and pat him on the shoulder.

The prosecutors won’t challenge the claim — it’s a gift for them, justifying their decision to try him. And after all, Rotheram will think, watching the camera pan across the row of stark faces, how is one to know one’s mad amid the ranks of the insane? But then something about Hess will strike him. He’s the only one of the accused not to don the simultaneous-translation headsets that International Business Machines has invented and donated to the proceedings. Rotheram will have read this in the papers. The headphones pinch his head, Hess has told the court, utterly unimpressed by the incredible technology, simply pointing out the poor fit. So he sits there oblivious, dipping into a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which he rests on his knees, smiling and occasionally nodding in response to what, no one knows. And it will dawn on Rotheram that this is just another suicide attempt. These men will hang, and Hess, by asserting his sanity, is volunteering to hang with them.

He’s getting away! Rotheram will want to shout at the screen. Can’t you see?

AND YET, for all this, Hess will not swing for his crimes. He’ll be convicted on counts I and 2 of the indictment, Crimes Against Peace, Planning Wars of Aggression in Violation of Treaties, but not on counts 3 and 4, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity — the timing of his flight, before the full implementation of the Final Solution, sparing him. He’ll be sentenced to life, instead of death. He’ll grow old in Spandau jail. He’ll be a prisoner for the rest of his days. He’ll never escape. He’ll never be freed. There will be pleas for his parole, but the Russians will block them every time, perhaps out of vindictiveness, a lingering suspicion, or perhaps — it is rumored — because even in the frozen depths of the Cold War, the meetings between the old Allies go on at Spandau. Ostensibly to discuss Hess, they will provide a thin but unbreakable thread of diplomacy so that the human relic of one conflict will, in a stony irony, help in a modest way to avoid another. Hess will lose his hair. Hess will lose his teeth. Hess will lose his mind, again or for the first time, to senility. He will live to hear that man has conquered Everest, walked on the moon; that Germany has hosted another Olympics; that the American actor turned president, who likes to say he was in the war though he was only ever in movies of it, has visited Belsen on the fortieth anniversary of it’s liberation and even claimed (to the Israeli prime minister, no less) that he filmed the newsreels of it’s liberation. And Hess will shake his head in disbelief at it all. He will be ninety-three at the end. And then he will die, finally succeeding after all these years in taking his own life, hanging himself, his limp body as light and lifeless as the faded flying suit he wore to Scotland, which he will have kept hanging on a hook on his cell wall, like a shed skin, ever since.