Having answered many questions, Lanny had the right to ask some. “What is this I heard over the radio about an exchange of letters between Hitler and Daladier?”
“I have seen copies of them,” replied the Baron. “They represent one more effort to persuade Hitler to listen to reason; but I fear it will be futile, for Daladier says that the government will stand by its pledges to Poland, and of course that only serves to provoke Hitler.”
They talked about this premier de la république française, who had been born the son of a baker and had begun his career as a humble lycée teacher. That he was a crude fellow who smelled of absinthe and talked with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip did not trouble the Baron so much as the fact that he was weak of will and shrank from stern action in any crisis. “He is still a Leftist at heart,” was the way the munitions king put it. “He promises firmness, but then he goes off by himself and thinks what his old-time associates will say about him, and he begins to wobble again.”
“He has to make a decision now,” opined the American. “Hitler demands it.”
The other reflected. “It occurs to me, Monsieur Budd, that it might be a good idea if you were to tell Daladier the things you have just told me. Would you be willing to do so?”
“Certainly, if you think it would be of interest to him.”
“I doubt if there is anybody else in France who has talked with Hitler within the last two or three days. And it might be that you could drop a gentle hint that the government might put more pressure upon Poland to make concessions and get us by this bad corner.”
“I am afraid I do not feel myself competent to give advice, Monsieur le Baron. I know what the Führer has said to me, and what he has told me to say to others. But when it comes to deciding policies, I find myself too humble.”
“It would be a good thing for la patrie if some of her statesmen would take the same view of themselves. In any case, I think it might be good for ‘Dala,’ as his admirers call him, to hear your report. I shouldn’t care to approach him, but I know someone who could do it with propriety, and with your permission I will make the suggestion.”
X
So it came about that Lanny spent the night in Schneider’s home, a privilege which highly placed Frenchmen do not readily extend; and in the morning he drove to the War Ministry in the rue Saint-Dominique, where the French executive insisted on living and working—to the displeasure of many who thought that the elderly and conservative generals had far too tight a hold upon him. An old, gray, sad-looking building of four stories, dark inside, also, with large rooms done in mahogany, and everywhere the inevitable thick red carpet.
Lanny arrived on the dot as was his custom, and was not kept waiting, even on this most crowded of days. He was escorted into the presence of the stocky and stoutish figure whom he had heard bellowing once or twice in the Chamber of Deputies. “The Bull of Vaucluse,” he was called, but some wit had said that he was now the “Cow of Vacillation.” He had a bull’s neck, a dull brownish complexion, and kindly, tired eyes—there were few statesmen in Europe right now who were not on the verge of exhaustion. Ordinarily his manner was said to be sullen and his expression glowering; but he chose to present a different aspect to the son of Budd-Erling, holding out two hands to welcome him, and saying that he had met the father and heard of the son.
The Premier’s breath revealed that he had started the morning with what the Americans call a “bracer” and the French an apéritif. While he listened to his caller and plied him with questions, he lighted one cigarette after another, and contrived somehow to make them stick to his lower lip when he spoke. Lanny was no snob, and didn’t object that this was a man of the people, still having traces of a Provençal accent, and not very tidy in his personal appearance. In his speeches “Dala” talked about his “democratic conscience,” but Lanny could not forget that he had condoned the murder of the Spanish people’s government, and then had come to Munich and helped to wipe the Czechoslovak republic off the map. Now it was a question of Poland, no republic, but a dictatorship of the “Colonels,” the landlords, and the priests. “Do you want to die for Danzig?” the appeasers were screaming in Gringoire—even now while millions of Frenchmen were being mobilized and sent to the border. Lanny would have liked to say: “Make no mistake, Monsieur le Premier, you will have to fight the Führer sooner or later.” But of course his role didn’t permit that.
What he had to say was: “I am a lover of art and a friend of peace. I have known Herr Hitler for many years, and this is what he tells me.” Then followed one of Adi’s discourses on his respect for western culture and his abhorrence for that of Asia—all parts of that continent, Tartar and Mongolian as well as Semitic. This could not have been very new to Daladier, who had just received two of Adi’s long communications, pouring out his grievances. “The Macedonian conditions prevailing along our eastern frontier must cease. I see no possibility of persuading Poland, who deems herself safe from attack by virtue of guarantees given to her, to agree to a peaceful solution.”
What the man of the French people wanted was to ply Lanny Budd with questions concerning the man of the German people, to whom he had appealed as one front-line soldier of the last war to another of the same. What kind of man was he, au fond; what did he really want, and where would he stop, if anywhere, and could anybody trust him—save possibly his own Party members, and the General Staff of his army? Lanny had to bear in mind that every word he spoke would go back to Berlin, and with magical speed; for Dala’s Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, was the most ardent of appeasers, and Bonnet’s wife had been the intimate friend and confidante of Otto Abetz. Lanny said: “No, Monsieur le Premier, I am certain that the Führer is not bluffing. I don’t think that he wants war, but he wants Danzig and the Corridor, and is determined to have them before the fall rains. The night when I left Berchtesgaden he was hesitating; but now he is in Berlin, and may be seeing a different set of advisers, and for all I know his army may have orders to attack Poland tonight.”
XI
As soon as he went out from this bewildered and unhappy presence, Lanny got Kurt Meissner on the telephone. Take no chances of being misquoted, or of seeming to have anything to hide! “Hello, Kurt,” he said. “I have returned from a visit with Die Nummer Eins, and have just this minute had a talk with Le Numéro Un.” Kurt’s answer was: “Excellent! Come and have lunch.”
So Lanny drove to the fashionable apartment near the Parc Monceau and made himself solid and safe by telling Kurt and his agreeable secretary all about his visit to the Berghof—but of course without mentioning either Laurel Creston or Miss Jones. That was the Führer’s secret, and if it leaked it wouldn’t be Lanny’s fault. He left it to be supposed that he had gone for the purpose of conveying to the Führer what he had learned in Washington and New York, Paris and London. He was free to say that the Reichswehr had had its marching orders for two days ago—doubtless Kurt knew that by now, and may have known it earlier. Lanny reported that the Führer was hesitating, and the Premier was hesitating—a safe report to make about the head of any government in Europe that 29th day of August 1939. In his role of friend to all the great, Lanny would chat freely, and his host, cordial but cautious, would reveal more than he realized.
This day Prime Minister Chamberlain was addressing the House. Radio microphones have never been admitted to that sacred place, but soon afterwards the BBC broadcast a summary of the speech. The Prime Minister rebuked the Hearst press for having “invented” an alleged text of his confidential reply to Hitler; he went on to reveal that the argument had been narrowed down to a question of procedure. The British government insisted that the issues between Germany and Poland must be settled by negotiations and not by force. Poland was willing; and would the Führer refuse? What the British government had in mind as a final settlement, Chamberlain did not say, and perhaps did not know. Was it to be another Munich? Or was it to be “a corridor across the Corridor,” a device much talked about? Lanny said: ??
?I am going to London soon, and if I learn anything of importance I’ll get word to you.”
He returned to the home where he was a guest, and made a report to his host. That duty done, he shut himself in his bedroom and wrote a quite different report to F.D.R. It would almost certainly arrive too late, but his duty was to send it, even so. He dropped his letter into a mailbox, and then went to keep an engagement with his Red uncle. He was curious to investigate the Party line of the French Communists, vis-à-vis Ribbentrop’s recent visit to Moscow, and the photographs which had appeared in the capitalist press of the world showing the Nazi champagne salesman and the somewhat shorter Red chieftain standing side by side and beaming.
Lanny would have enjoyed being here a week earlier, to catch his uncle with his revolutionary pants down, as the saying is. But by now the deputy had had time to think, and to consult his comrades; by now the Party line had been fixed and the arguments standardized. There was no difference, moral, political, or social, between the capitalist democracies and the Fascist states. Britain, France, and America had been doing all in their power to get the Soviet Union into a war with Germany, and the Soviet Union had shrewdly forestalled them. There were no military clauses and no secret understandings, and the pact was a contribution to the cause of world peace.
“So now you are a pacifist!” exclaimed Lanny.
“The Communists have always been pacifists as to capitalist wars,” declared the baldheaded old warrior. “But if capitalist states want to fight one another, we surely have to let them.”
“The deal is for ten years,” said the skeptical nephew. “Do you think it will actually last two?”
“You can be sure that whatever the time, we shall be using it to make our Soviet land secure.”
“God help you, Uncle Jesse, if Hitler finishes off Poland and has a common frontier with the Soviet Union! He will start marching some midnight, and won’t stop till he has reached the Urals.”
“It may be you are right,” was the reply. “If that happens, we shall retreat to the Urals, and start to beat him from there.”
XII
Several millions of the young men of France were being put into uniforms and shipped away to the eastern border; it would cost several billions of francs, and that was a terrible thing for the taxpayers; they cursed the Nazi fanatics who were making it necessary, and cursed still more heartily the politicians who had failed to settle these matters in a sensible and orderly way. Lanny Budd, who remembered from boyhood the scenes in Paris at the outbreak of the First World War—the marching, the singing, the mad cheering—now saw the men crowding to the railway stations, dull and listless, just as they entered the factories for tasks in which they had no interest. Spectators paid little attention to them, and authorities who had the duty of conducting propaganda and working up enthusiasm had apparently realized the hopelessness of their task. Marianne had been asked the question: “Do you want to die for Danzig?” and she wasn’t interested enough even to reply.
The life of the rich went on, just as if no danger had ever been in the world. Smart ladies descended from their limousines in front of the jewelry shops on the rue de la Paix, and toddled in on heels four inches high. Instead of thinking about war or peace they thought about blue fox furs and hair-dyes to match, green rouge, purple lipstick, and a choice of fantastically named perfumes. A night of pleasure was more important than their country’s honor, and an invitation to a chic affair of more concern than the peace of the world.
Marceline Detaze, daughter of a famous painter and a professional beauty, never had to worry about her social position in Paris. She was dancing at one of the expensive night spots and acclaimed with unfailing ardor. But when Lanny called her on the phone he heard distress in her voice. “Oh, tell me! Is there going to be war?”
“Nobody can say,” he answered. “It’s touch and go.” He thought: for the first time that he could recall in his half-sister’s twenty-two years on earth, she was showing interest in a question of general concern.
But no, it wasn’t that. “Oh, Lanny, if Oskar goes, I have to go, too. I’m just not going to lose him.”
“But, dear,” he objected, “if there’s war, he will be called to the front, and you won’t see him in any case.”
“He can get furloughs; and it surely can’t be much of a war with Poland!”
Lanny thought this was serious enough to go and see her. In her elegant but somewhat over-furnished apartment he explained: “If there is war, it will be Britain and France against Germany, and it may last a long time. If you go to Berlin, you will make it impossible to come back to France—perhaps for years.”
“Oskar assures me I can get engagements to dance in Berlin.”
“That I don’t doubt; but it will be taken as a political stand, and you will be hated in Paris, and will not be allowed to return. You will have branded yourself as a Nazi.”
She stared with astonishment in her lovely brown eyes. “What nonsense, Lanny! Nobody hates the Nazis—at least, nobody who counts.”
“That may be true today; but it will change instantly if there is war. Believe me, I watched it the last time, and I know that when people get to fighting they hate one another—how else can they fight? Atrocities are committed, or at any rate they are told about and believed.” He had to be careful, for he could be sure that what he said would be reported to Oskar von Herzenberg, perhaps before the day was over. She was dressed in a lovely peach-colored peignoir, her hair dressed and her face made up, so he guessed that she might be expecting a visit.
“Listen, dear,” he said, tenderly—for she was his “little sister,” and he had taught her to dance at the same time that she was learning to walk. “I am an American, and regardless of my feelings I intend to be neutral in the war if it comes. You are half-American, and it will be wise if you keep that half to the fore in this unhappy time. If you go to Germany it will be taken as a repudiation of France, and you will not be able to get an engagement in this country for ten years at the least. You will not be happy in Germany—they are a different kind of people, and they aren’t going to have as easy a time as they expect.”
That was as far as he could go; and he saw that it wasn’t going to do any good. Marceline had always had her own way—she had been brought up to it, and since her unhappy marriage she had become hard-boiled. She didn’t really love this son of a Prussian nobleman; she was thrilled by him because of his high position, his elegant manners to her and arrogance to others, and the sense of power that radiated from him. He was a Nazi, and the Nazis were on the way up, they were going to rule the world. Lovely, gay, self-willed daughter of pleasure, Marceline was going to be one of the court favorites, a Pompadour or a du Barry.
“Has he asked you to marry him?” inquired the proper half-brother.
“Mon dieu, no! I wouldn’t if he did. I mean to be free, and nobody is going to tie me down.”
XIII
The lovely and intelligent daughter of Baron Schneider was married to a man who was active in his father-in-law’s vast affairs, and whom Lanny had met in the days of “Mister Irma Barnes,” who had leased the palace of the Duc de Belleaumont and dived over his head into the social swim. Now the daughter wanted Lanny to join them at a dinner party they were giving at the ultra-fashionable Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles. “Tout le monde will be there,” she declared; whereupon Lanny told her the favorite story of his friend, Sophie de la Tourette. The president of her Cincinnati hardware company had brought his new wife to the Cap on a honeymoon tour, and this lady had social aspirations and wished to know people of importance. Very earnestly she inquired: “Who is Toola Maud?”
This party took place while Poland was decreeing mobilization, and while Sir Nevile Henderson, having flown to Berlin with Chamberlain’s reply to Hitler, was summoned to the Chancellery to receive Hitler’s reply to Chamberlain. That day the Nazi press had reported five more Germans killed in Poland, and Adi, having created a press to fool the rest of the world
, was now permitting it to fool him. He shouted his grievances at the British ambassador—but the sounds didn’t reach to an ornate luxurious restaurant, where the wealthy and famous crowded together in promiscuity which would have shocked a Grand Monarque who had built Versailles as the most exclusive of royal residences. This famous old hotel stood on the edge of the park, so that really the park was its garden. Honeymoon parties came here by tradition, as in America they went to Niagara Falls.
Tonight Lanny encountered the American ambassador, Bill Bullitt, rich Philadelphian, who had agreed with him in disapproval of the treaty of Versailles, and after it had been signed had joined him at Juan, “to lie on the sand and get sunburned and watch the world come to an end.” Here were editors, writers, motion-picture stars—and also the statesmen who held the destinies of France in their keeping. Here, surveying fastidiously a tray full of hors d’oeuvres, Lanny observed the Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, lean, long-nosed, his complexion sallow, almost green; he was the ardent advocate of le couple France-Allemagne, ready to give the Führer anything he chose to ask for; his wife, Odette, who sat by his side, was the friend of all the Nazi agents.
At the next table, toying with a large half langouste, sat dapper little Paul Reynaud, Minister of Finance. He plotted incessantly to replace Daladier, and was egged on by his amie of twenty years, the Comtesse de Portes, one of those political ladies who pulled the strings and made French public figures dance. There wasn’t much secret about Hélène, for she had a shrill voice and a violent temper, and when she became excited she shouted so that all the restaurant could listen, and did. A lean, neurotic woman, with few of the charms which are supposed to aid in seduction, she had ambition and a driving will, and had never wearied in the determination to drag her lover from his Leftist associations into the paths which led to prosperity and power in France. In this crowded place she scolded at “Jewish warmongers,” in tones which these gentlemen were meant to hear. She loathed Bill Bullitt, and expressed her feelings in tones which he could hardly ignore. Sitting at the next table Lanny observed a man diligently making notes, and the lady at Lanny’s side whispered that this was the correspondent of DNB, the official German news agency. It was that easy to obtain secrets of French politics!