It was to be a formal ceremony, and Lanny was asked to stand beside one of the windows, out of the way. Göring pressed a button and gave a command, and presently came the sound of marching in the hall. There entered the room, first, a man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe general, a man young for that high rank, with a round, rather boyish face, pink checks, and dark hair close cut. This was General Milch, Göring’s assistant and right bower; he had been suddenly promoted from lieutenant-colonel, something deeply resented by old-line Wehrmacht officers. Milch had a Jewish father, and was one of those military men who saved their careers by having their mothers make affidavit that they had committed adultery and that the Jew was not the actual father. One look at Milch and you would know the mother’s offense was perjury, not adultery; but the Nazis didn’t go by looks, they went by instructions. Göring had said: “It is I who decide who is a Jew!”
Two subordinate officers followed, and behind them marched half a dozen night officers of various ranks, all very young, all solemn and exalted. They stood in a line before their fat commander, and saw nothing grotesque about him, but on the contrary worshiped him as the second-greatest man in the world, the author of their victories, the maker of their careers. Göring, grave as a priest celebrating high mass, stood in front of the first in line, saluted and said: “Leutnant Sieghammer, the records shows that you have shot down fourteen enemy planes, that you have been twice wounded, and that when obliged to parachute to the ground you gave first aid to a wounded comrade in spite of your own wounds. I honor your heroism, and that of your comrades who are here before me. In the name of the Führer, and as a symbol of the gratitude of the German people, I present you with this Iron Cross, first class, which you will wear with pride for the rest of your days and pass on to your descendants.”
The cross was about two inches each way, and without a ribbon. It was pinned onto the coat, on the left side below the chest. The young flyer’s thin face was flushed with excitement; he had fair hair and sensitive features, and bore a startling resemblance to Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, the baronet’s grandson. To Lanny it was a confirmation of what the Reichsmarschall had just said, that this was a fratricidal war, that these boys who were machine-gunning one another in the air were in very truth blood brothers. Hard indeed not to want that fighting stopped!
Göring repeated the procedure in front of each of the group, refreshing his memory from little cards. When the ceremony was over he ordered everybody at ease and chatted with his heroes. He brought Lanny forward and introduced him as “ein amerikanischer Freund des National Socialismus.” Each man bowed sharply from the waist and expressed his sense of honor. They were as much like automatons as twenty years’ discipline could make them; but one was a little different, a rolypoly, somewhat the shape of his Kommandant, but with dark hair and lively dark eyes. He bore the name of Bummelhausen, which was to say the least unusual, like a burlesque name on the vaudeville stage. “Es ist ein besonderer Vorzug, Herr Budd”—an unusual privilege—exclaimed this youngster, and Lanny asked: “Have I not met you before, Herr Bummelhausen?”
“It is my younger brother whom you met, Herr Budd. He was one of a group of the Jugendschaft who were camping in the Teutoburger Wald, and you were motoring and stopped at their campfire.”
“Oh, surely! I recall it very well.”
“You gave them a little talk about the Führer, and then you were introduced to them, one by one. My brother was so excited over shaking a hand that had shaken the Führer’s hand that he has never stopped talking about it. I suppose he has told it in my hearing two dozen times.”
“Well, now,” smiled Lanny, “you will be able to tell him that you have shaken the same hand—and much more important, you have shaken the hand of the Reichsmarschall, the Father of the Luftwaffe.”
Little shivers were running up and down a P.A.’s spine. What a small Germany it was! In August, less than two years ago, when he had been helping Laurel Creston to set away from the Gestapo, they hadn’t dared to stop at any hotel; they had come upon this youth encampment, and Lanny had had the bright thought that here was a place where they might spend the night without having to sign their names in a register. They had been introduced to a line of eager, excited boys, and one had borne the name of Bummelhausen, which had amused Lanny. He had commented on it later to Laurel, and it had become in their conversation a symbol for the robots turned out by the Hitler machine; the faithful and adoring children who would grow up to become crusading warriors, dying gladly on a hundred battlefields for the glory of their heaven-sent Leader.
“Where is your brother now, Herr Leutnant?” inquired the American friend of National Socialism.
“He is training at Kladow, Herr Budd, and hopes to get his wings next month.”
Lanny said no more, for the subject was one full of danger. What if the youngster had heard of “die Miss,” and were to ask after her? Lanny moved on to chat with the other men.
Later he discovered that he had made as deep an impression upon the elder as upon the younger Bummelhausen; for when he had bade farewell to the Reichsmarschall, and was blindfolded and driven back to the airfield and seated in the plane, he heard the familiar young voice saying: “Gut Rutsch, Herr Budd! Gut Rutsch!” That was the airmen’s phrase for “pleasant journey.” Like the British and Americans, they relieved the tedium of war by making a language of their own. Oddly enough, Lanny discovered that the civilians of Berlin were doing the same. Back in his hotel, he happened upon one of his father’s business friends; they had a chat, and when they parted, this elderly steel magnate remarked: “Bolona!” Lanny wasn’t sure that he had heard aright, and ventured to ask about the word. The other laughed and explained: “That has taken the place of ‘Adieu’ with us Berliners. It is made of the syllables of ‘Bombenlose Nacht.’” Bombless night—of which Lanny saw few while he was in Berlin.
VII
In the headquarters of the Hitler Youth organization sat a patient and faithful bureaucrat who was one of Lanny’s oldest friends in Germany. Heinrich Jung was only three years younger than the American, but had always looked up to him, because Lanny had been a guest at the castle of Stubendorf, where Heinrich’s father had been Oberförster, head forester of the estate. Such class feelings were in the very bones of an honest German lad, and not even a Nazi revolution could get them out.
Always hitherto Lanny would telephone and invite his friend to have lunch at the Adlon, and Heinrich would be proud and excited to be in this fashionable expensive place, among visiting headliners and high-up SS officers. Always he would invite Lanny to his office and show him off to the rest of the staff. Once he had had Lanny for an Abend at his home, to meet Heinrich’s Party friends, and eat Leberwurst sandwiches and drink beer—the dullest imaginable occasion.
But this time it was different. Heinrich said: “Let me come to see you privately. There is a matter to be explained.” Lanny said: “Ja, gewiss,” and smiled to himself, knowing perfectly well what it was. Americans had come to be the most hated people in Berlin at this hour; not even the Jews stood so low. Heinrich Jung, in spite of his knowing the Führer personally, stood only medium high in the Party hierarchy, and he had a wife and half a dozen blue-eyed and fair-haired little Jungs to think about.
Lanny spared him the embarrassment of having to explain. “Ich versteh’, alter Kerl,” he said, and added: “I am the one to be embarrassed, because of the way my country is behaving. I only hope it isn’t going to make any difference in our friendship.”
“Ach, Lanny, niemals!” The Youth officer bubbled over with cordiality, to make up for his cowardice; and Lanny, who despised the Nazi soul, was a bit sick at heart but careful not to show, it. Heinrich had been caught young, and would never grow up mentally, because he was a prisoner of the forces inside himself, the Prussian spirit which made it necessary for him to have someone to obey, even someone to tell him what to believe. Adi Schicklgruber had told him, and for the rest of his life Heinrich would be a smooth and effic
ient cog in the machine which the Austrian painter of picture postcards had constructed.
Heinrich hadn’t seen the face of his divinity for a year or more, being afraid to trouble him in a time of stress. Lanny revealed how Hess and Göring were trying to arrange a meeting for Lanny, and promised that if it took place he would tell Heinrich, if permitted. Meantime, he recounted his visit to the Air Marshal’s Gefechtsstand, and sang the praises of those noble boys who had deserved so much from the Fatherland, and had received it in the form of an Iron Cross measuring two inches horizontally and the same vertically. If anything was needed to re-establish-the social position of an American visitor, this was it, and Heinrich began to wonder if he hadn’t made a bad mistake.
VIII
The Youth official began to talk about his own work, and this was what Lanny wanted. Several times the P.A. had been able to find out what progress the underground was making in Germany by means of the documents on Heinrich’s desk. Bernhardt Monck had been in despair over the situation, but would have been encouraged if he had been able to hear the report of his enemy. The Fatherland was under great strain, Heinrich explained, because the war had lasted so much longer than anyone had expected. There were many signs of discontent among the workers, signs which Heinrich blamed upon what he called die verfluchten Kommunisten. It was the older men, who had belonged to the Red trade unions in the old days. Never the youth-no, no, the youth were magnificent, they were the Führer’s own children, those young heroes whom Lanny had seen in the Gefechtsstand.
But some older men resented the food rationing, and the long queues for everything they and their women tried to buy. They it was who went out at night in the Wedding area, where they lived, and in the Hasenheide section to the east, and painted Communist signs on sidewalks and the walls of buildings. “Rotfront siegt!”—the Red Front conquers! They it was who met in the back rooms of saloons and gave the Communist salute of the upraised fist instead of the Hitler salute of the arm and hand extended straight. Such a little thing it might seem, but what a world of difference it meant as to what was going on inside the saluter’s head!
This was a terrible thing, for it was treason in the very heart of the Neue Ordnung, and the traitors had the cunning of Satan himself. When the Soviet Foreign Minister had come to Berlin to negotiate a trade treaty, they had bought up every red carnation which could be found in the city and had worn them openly on the streets. As you passed them you would hear humming of “The Red Flag,” and there was nothing that even the Gestapo could do about it, because, as it happened, the dissidents had stolen for that revolutionary hymn the tune of an old German Volkslied which the National Socialists taught to all children. “You know, Lanny—‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum’” Lanny replied: “Yes, I know. We in America stole the same tune. At the outbreak of the Civil War the Southerners made up some verses called ‘Maryland, My Maryland.’ But that was eighty years ago, and it no longer does any harm.”
“Ja, freilich,” assented the Youth leader. “But it’s a different matter when working people hum a tune as they pass you on the street, and you know they are telling you: ‘We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here!’”
In the midst of these revelations, the telephone rang: the Führer’s secretary calling; Herr Budd was invited to call upon the Führer at eleven o’clock the next morning in the New Chancellery building. It was a command, and Lanny said: “I will be on hand.” To the awestricken Heinrich he remarked: “Mein Alter, it was you who took me to the Führer the first time, and I wish I could take you now.” “Um Himmel’s Willen, nein!” exclaimed the reverent disciple. “He must have great matters of state in mind, and for me it would be a preposterous intrusion.”
Lanny consoled him by becoming confidential. “What the Führer wants is to tell me what I am to say to friends of our cause in Britain and America as to the terms on which he would be willing to make peace.”
To this the bureaucrat replied: “Isn’t it marvelous, the progress our armies are making? Just count the countries: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and now Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria. Soon we shall finish Yugoslavia and Greece! There has never been anything like it in the whole of history!”
IX
Promptly at the appointed hour the P.A. presented himself at the main entrance to the immense long building which Adi Schicklgruber, the greatest architect in the world, had designed and constructed: four stories high, rectangular and stern like a barracks, and built of gray granite, as somber as the soul of its designer. To the SS men on guard—the Führer’s own Leibstandarte, in green uniforms—all Lanny had to do was to present his visiting card and say: “I have a personal appointment with the Führer.” They had a list, and when they had checked it, one of them escorted him in.
There was a corridor half a block long, floored with red marble. The door to the Führer’s offices had a great monogram in brass: AH. A secretary who knew Lanny greeted him politely, took his hat and coat, and ushered him into the huge high-ceilinged room which Adi had designed, presumably to have something bigger and more impressive than Il Duce in Rome. Once Adi had been a waif, sleeping in the shelter for bums in Vienna, and being put out of it because he wouldn’t stop spouting. Now the whole world was hardly big enough for him, and when he spouted, radios carried his words from Argentina to Zanzibar.
The great man was wearing that simple soldier’s uniform which he had put on at the outbreak of the war and had promised never to take off until victory was won. Of course he didn’t mean that literally; he must have had at least two suits, for this one was neatly pressed and showed no traces of blood or sweat. He was always cordial to Lanny, shook hands with him and indicated a seat in front of the big fireplace with one of the Lenbach Bismarcks above it. “See what I am doing, alter Herr,” you could imagine Adi saying, standing there and solemnly saluting the Iron Chancellor. “So much more than you were ever able to accomplish. Berlin to Bagdad!” There was a marble statue of Frederick the Great in the room; and it was no phantasy to imagine Adi communing with him. No, indeed. Adi was that theatrical kind of person, and certainly needed encouragement and counsel from some master strategist in the present days of perilous venture.
Hitler’s complexion had always been pasty and his features pudgy, especially the nose. Now it appeared that he had gained in weight, and it was not healthy flesh. His expression showed heavy strain; he had always been a bad sleeper, sometimes keeping his friends and advisers up until daylight to save him from being alone with his own thoughts. Lanny wondered: was he, also, taking to the use of drugs? At any rate, he had no time for the smiles and gracious gestures with which he usually played the host. He began abruptly: “Rudi tells me you have news for me, Herr Budd. What is it?”
First it had been Number Three to hear that story, and then Number Two, and now it was Number One. This time Lanny went into even greater detail, for he knew that Adi was feminine in his attitude toward people; if he was hearing about someone, he wanted to see that person with his mind’s eye and hear the tones of his voice. So Lanny took him to Admiral Darlan’s office, and then to Laval’s château, and then to the old Maréchal’s combination home and office in the Hotel du Parc. He explained why the hero of Verdun was so generally trusted by the French, and why the butcher’s son was less trusted. He described life in a fashionable springs resort where the hotels had all been turned into government offices, and wealthy and elegant people were sleeping in any corner they could find. All bread was gray and tasteless, unless you could find a breadlegger.
And then to London. The Führer went in his imagination to visit the gray smoke-stained building of the Foreign Office, and the still older residence of the Prime Minister in Downing Street, which was both short and narrow, a deadend way in which the Germans would have been ashamed to house any official. He described Churchill as he had watched him at Maxine Elliott’s swimming-pool on the Riviera and in her great hall where every now and then all conversation had to stop while
a train of the Mediterranean line roared by a few feet from the outside wall. He told about Lord Wickthorpe’s resignation and what it meant; he took the Führer for a week-end visit to the Castle, where all the friends of his cause discussed what they were going to do about “Winnie.” The Countess of Wickthorpe had once spent an evening at Berchtesgaden and listened to the Führer expound his program, and had said to him: “I wish you to know that I agree with every word you have said.” That night had been the end of the marriage of Irma Barnes and Lanny Budd, but of course the ex-husband didn’t mention that detail in his narrative.
The Führer held in his hands the fate of both these countries, France and Britain—or at any rate so he believed. He plied his visitor with a stream of questions: what did this mean, and that, and what would happen if he, the master of Europe, took this course or that? Lanny’s purpose in giving information was to get the master to talk in return, and therefore his answers were directed to the pleasing of this genius-madman risen from the slums of Vienna. Like all conquerors through the ages, he had fallen victim to his own surroundings, and had come to the state where he could absorb an unlimited amount of flattery and could not stand any trace of opposition. So Lanny told him that the French were rapidly adjusting themselves to l’ordre nouveau, and that the sane conservative elements in British public life were rapidly realizing what a blunder they had made in letting themselves be persuaded to “die for Danzig.” Lanny called the roll of the leading “appeasers” with whom he had talked; some of them had had to bow to the storm but now were straightening their backs and lifting their heads again.