Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Your own brother!' I was horrified.

'He passed the story to his schoolmaster. You know how Gunter thinks absolutely everything about the Nazis is wonderful, just because they organize camps and give him a uniform and they all sing songs round a fire. They tell him it's his duty to inform on anything at home which goes in the slightest against the thinking of National Socialism. You can't blame him. All kids are instructed to put their country first, even before their parents. He doesn't know any better.' She ended charitably, 'I expect he'll grow out of it.'

I decided to guard my tongue carefully within earshot of the young man. I noticed that Gerda took every chance afterwards to slap the cheeks of Hitler's little enthusiast.

These two incidents decided me to quit Germany. I had no knowing who might be itching to report me to the SD, and put me in serious trouble. Or perhaps my mind was already made up, they were the clicks of a shutter admitting light to a sensitized film. Jeff was nettled. He had bought a cosmetics firm in Berlin, and had planned my concocting voluptuously-smelling perfumes and powders from chemicals.

'What's the matter? Homesick?'

'You know I haven't a home to pine for.'

'I guess Germany's getting too noisy a jungle for the explorers to sleep soundly,' he agreed, after trying to dissuade me. 'These Nazis are nuts, when you come down to it. A government's job is to declare war and raise taxes and keep the railroads running, not to tell a girl who she can go out with and who she can't. Sure you've made your mind up? I guess England's just like the States right now, full of college graduates selling apples.'

I was to leave just before Christmas 1933, through Ostend again, and by night. On my last day in Wuppertal I met Professor Domagk for the second time.

Dr Dieffenbach gave a small evening party to speed me on my way. There was French champagne and spiced biscuits and _pets de nonne_-nun's farts, the name given to delicately flavoured pastries by Voltaire. Gerda wore her blue and white dress with diagonal stripes. I invited Jeff. She seemed to have accepted renouncing him as she accepted having to raise her arm when the Storm Troopers marched past. Dr Dieffenbach invited the Domagks. But the Professor arrived alone, late and agitated.

'Gertrude can't come,' Domagk anxiously explained the absence of his wife. 'It's our four-year-old girl. You heard she was ill?'

'No, I hadn't.' Dr Dieffenbach looked concerned. 'What's up with the child?'

'She pricked herself with a needle, and it went septic. It may have been contaminated with some virulent organisms which I'd brought back from the laboratory. On my clothing perhaps, one can never be sure of these things.'

'My dear Gerhard, I'm so sorry.' He grasped the professor's hand. 'What's the pathogen? Have you identified it?'

'Yes, it's a streptococcus. She's developed a suppurative Phlegmon on her arm.' Domagk's face, drawn with worry, passed unseeingly round the rest of us in the room. 'The poor little girl's got a positive blood culture. Septicaemia, there you are,' he said resignedly.

'But she's receiving the best treatment?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently.

'She's in hospital. The surgeons are trying to arrest the infection, they've already made fourteen incisions in the arm. The only hope left is amputation.'

_'Du lieber Gott!_ But has the decision been made?'

'It's being made at this moment. I'm on my way to see them.'

'You should never have delayed by coming here.'

'I came intentionally. Listen-' Domagk dropped his voice, but I was near enough to hear. 'Do you suppose I should give her "Streptozon"?'

'Why not? It's been proved safe.'

Domagk frowned. 'Has it? Who can say? It's still in the experimental stage.'

'You've no alternative,' Dr Dieffenbach told him sternly.

'It's never been used on a child before, never.'

'You simply reduce the dosage, exactly as you would for any other drug in your armamentarium.'

Domagk stood shaking his head. 'Amputation might save her life. The sulphonamide might equally well kill her.'

'Give her the drug,' Dr Dieffenbach repeated firmly. 'You know perfectly well that you cannot make a proper clinical judgement within your own family. When your brain's clouded with emotion, you're like a sea-captain trying to navigate in fog.'

Domagk still demurred. I stood listening, while my host read him a lecture lit by the candid light of true friendship. 'Gerhard, you're a fool. Or rather, you're a bacteriologist, which in clinical matters is much the same thing. You sit all day in your laboratory pottering with your Petri dishes and squinting down your microscope, and you forget those beastly germs of yours infect real people, not just the mice which you use as biological litmus paper. Real men and women, who like eating and drinking and making love to one another and going to the pictures. Listen to me-I'm a clinician. You've always got to be taking chances in clinical medicine. An unadventurous doctor leaves nothing but a trail of carefully-treated corpses.' He ended revealingly, 'I didn't hesitate, when I saw that sulphonamide was the only way to prevent our young English friend from cutting the figure of Admiral Nelson.'

'Very well.' Domagk nodded several times. 'I shall exhibit sulphonamide.' He paused. 'I had already made up my mind, Otto, but I wanted to share responsibility with someone outside the family.'

'Have you the "Streptozon"?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently. 'I've none of the pills left.'

'I was intending to collect some from my laboratory, then go on to the hospital.'

'Why waste time? Herr Elgar here knows the way, and his American friend drives the fastest car in Germany. They'll get to the hospital with the pills before you do. Go along and see your child, and tell the surgeons what you've decided. Those gentlemen might take some persuading, they haven't got wind of sulphonamide yet.'

I was instructed to revisit Domagk's room, the one with the painting by Otto Dix. I was told that Professor Hцrlein had left a phial containing twenty tablets of 'Streptozon' on the roll-topped desk. Domagk departed for the hospital. Dr Dieffenbach telephoned the I G Farben works for the night-watchman to admit me.

The expedition appealed hugely to Jeff. In 1933, motorists in neither Germany nor England were incommoded with speed limits, and we roared through the misty night with headlights ablaze and horn blaring. The only necessity for our breakneck rush was Jeff's sense of the dramatic. I left him provoking the car to angry, impatient roars in the triangular cobbled yard with the railway tracks, while I hurried across the footbridge over the stinking river, above me the brightly-lit cars of the passing Schwebebahn. A window or two was alight in the research block, indicating some engrossed scientist-or perhaps just the cleaners. I reached Domagk's study door on the third floor and switched on the light.

I saw the sulphonamide at once. Two phials, not one. Each with twenty tablets. I hesitated. I should be leaving Germany within hours. I took one phial in my hand. The other I slipped into my tweed jacket pocket.

I turned to go. There was a gap among the framed photographs on the wall. I missed the amiable, bearded features of Professor Paul Ehrlich from Frankfurt-on-Main. The man who cured the infection which took the lives of Schubert, Nietzsche, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec had the misfortune to be born a Jew, and therefore worthy of nothing but odium.

We lived in the basement. Everything we had was second-hand. Our furniture was the discards of upstairs, the carpet old and bald, the once expensive chintz sofa grown pale, split and extruding flock, propped up by _Who's Who _and Bradshaw's Railway Time Table, both out of date. Our newspapers were always yesterday's, our magazines last month's. A radiogram upstairs had given us our portable gramophone, a black musical suitcase which my father would charge with a shiny needle and play _Blue Skies _on a scratched record. Our wireless set was almost new, in a wooden cabinet as ornamental as a Victorian bracket clock. It was a gift rather than a throw-out, that we might enjoy the uplifting diversion of Sir John Reith's BBC, which every Sunday had three religious services and five religious talks. Even our food had been used upstairs, cold joints, hashed vegetables, broached pies, milk which left sour little flecks in our tea. But we enjoyed the hottest water and the best nuts of coal, because we lived beside the boiler and the cellar. Sometimes during the London summer I imagined that the air we breathed had already been exhaled by the people upstairs and generously passed down for our consumption via the drains.