Lanny said: “I have reason to believe that Hitler means to move on France as soon as he is secure in Norway. I have the hope of getting some definite information about it; and if so, I’ll get word to you.”
There was material for much conversation here. What was the present state of the Maginot Line, and of its promised continuation to the north, in front of Holland and Belgium? This was one of the great military secrets, but Lanny could quote what Denis fils had told him, and this young capitaine ought to know, being stationed there. He reported that the extension was inadequate, for the reason that the heads of the government and of the army hadn’t really expected war; Denis fils took part of the blame, because he and his family had done so much to encourage this attitude. “He repents, but that won’t help France,” explained Lanny.
The situation was drastically worse than in the last war. Then Belgium had been an ally, and from the moment of the war’s outbreak their army had been one with the French. But this time the young King of the Belgians was an appeaser; he was more interested in his own country than in Poland, and he dreamed of keeping safe by letting the Nazis have a free hand in the East. The declaration of Belgian neutrality had been one of Hitler’s great diplomatic successes, very-little appreciated by the outside world. It left France with the northern part of her border exposed; the French armies could enter Belgium only after the German armies had done so, and would thus have no time to prepare positions.
In short, things were terrible, from whatever angle you approached them. Whether you looked at Scandinavia or Italy, Russia or Spain, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, or even the far-off vast Pacific, you saw only black danger, and your heart was made sick by the spectacle of stupidity and incompetence, or of plain and simple treason to the cause of freedom and humanity. How could you explain it? How could it happen that all the brain power appeared to be on the side of the gangsters and the cynics, and all the dullness and futility on the side of the democracies?
“We have trusted the world too much,” ventured the son of Budd-Erling. “It isn’t nearly as intelligent or as honest as we imagined.”
“We have trusted the capitalist system too much,” responded the baronet’s son, who refused to compromise in either his ideas or his language. “We thought it would know when its time had come, and would give up gracefully. We didn’t dream that it would hire the worst knaves and murderers in all history to keep itself in power.”
“It’s partly that, of course, Rick——”
“It’s wholly and completely that, and don’t you swallow anybody’s eyewash on the subject.”
“The Germans really swallow their Blut-und-Boden eyewash, Rick.”
“They swallow it because it’s the only food they get, and it’s fed to them at the point of a machine gun. Who put up the money to provide the machine guns, the pistols and the daggers and the uniforms and the flags and all the rest of the Nazi equipment? The iron and steel men, the big industrialists—you have told me so yourself, a hundred times.”
“Yes, of course, Rick——”
“All right then; and they’re reaping the biggest profits ever in all their lifetimes. They are the real masters of Germany today, and they can kick Schicklgruber out whenever they get ready.”
“I’m not so sure of that. Some of them are worried, I can tell you.”
“What price their worry? If gangsters turn against their employers—that surely wouldn’t be the first time in history, and it wouldn’t excuse the employers.”
XIV
The showers had passed, and they got out and strolled for a while by the side of a gently flowing stream. It was the custom in this very old land for rights-of-way to be left free to the public, and there were delightful places to walk, with scenery ever changing. A land to be loved and cherished, and fought for if need be. Britons never shall be slaves! Rick quoted—and then his conscience began to trouble him, because he was enjoying a holiday while Britons were dying in Norway and in the seas about it and in the air above it. He wanted to get back home and write another article exposing those who didn’t really want to beat the Fascists, because they were Fascists themselves at heart.
Nina drove them to the neighborhood of Wickthorpe, and put Lanny off by the roadside. When he entered his cottage, there was mail on his writing desk; a letter from Robbie—long delayed, because the British were holding up airmail for censorship in Bermuda, and they hadn’t been able to get things properly organized. Ordinarily he would have pounced on such a letter, but this one waited, for there was another, in a plain envelope, with a Swiss stamp and a French censorship label. “Mr. Lanning Prescott Budd, Art Expert, Wickthorpe Castle, Bucks, England.” He tore it open and read:
“Dear Sir: After considerable search I have located what I believe is a really desirable example of Meissonier. It is a large work, and rather expensive, but within the limit that you set. According to your instructions I have secured a ten-day option on it. I hope this letter finds you safe and well. Not being sure where you are I am sending a copy in care of your mother on the Cap d’Antibes, and one in care of your father in care of the Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation in Connecticut.
Respectfully, Brun.”
So there it was. Lanny lost not an hour, but packed a couple of bags and took the first train to London. On the way he thought over his plan of campaign. He had paper and envelopes, purchased in advance. Since it was after business hours, he couldn’t stop in a typewriter shop as he had done in Paris; but the hotel porter would manage to find him a machine. In writing to strangers he dared not use his own, which he left in hotel rooms, where anyone might take a sample of its writing. He imagined the Gestapo being on his trail and having such a sample in its files. If one of his letters of warning fell into their hands, they could make a comparison under the microscope and establish his responsibility.
First he wrote his report to F.D.R.: “The German army will invade France by way of Belgium and Holland, starting about the 10th of May. This information comes from the same source as that previously sent, which proved correct. I have every reason to trust it.” That was all; it wasn’t his part to make appeals, or even suggestions. The President of the United States would know what use he wished to make of such information.
Then Lanny wrote three letters, much the same as he had written to the Norwegian ambassador in Paris; these to the Belgian, Dutch, and French ambassadors in London. Also a note to Rick, saying: “The date of the appointment is May 10th. Positive.” Rick had agreed that when he got this word, he would put his father to work a second time. It hadn’t done much good in the former case, but it might do more now, because the baronet could say: “Didn’t I tell you about Norway?”
Lanny groped his way through the blackout, and dropped the letters into different postboxes on the street—all but the one for the Honorable Joseph P. Kennedy. For all Lanny could tell, there might be a diplomatic pouch leaving that night, and no chance must be missed. He stepped into a taxi and said: “American Embassy.” By some paranormal sense which the taximen had developed in the past eight months, this one managed to draw up in front of the stately building. Lanny gave him the letter, saying: “Be so good as to hand this in, and say: ‘Personal for Mr. Kennedy.’” With the request went a half-crown, and the driver replied: “Righto, guv’ner.”
Lanny followed him part way to the door, near enough to see but not to be seen. Afterwards he let the man deliver him to a point near the hotel, but not at it. All this seemed to him to constitute the perfect crime, and he settled himself comfortably in bed to read the latest painful details from the fishing villages of Namsos and Andalsnes. “Too little and too late”—once more!
BOOK EIGHT
The Flinty and Steel Couch of War
29
Secret Dread and Inward Horror
I
Lanny had decided to stay in London and see if the movies and the theater could divert his mind. It was hard for him to read a book or to play the piano while waiting to see i
f his world was coming to an end. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it; and what was the use of gathering facts and opinions which were going to be knocked into a chaos in exactly one week? His mind was haunted by visions of those crowded old towns of the Lowlands, with their fine churches and public buildings, and—more important to the Pinkish mind—their long rows of one- or two-story workers’ homes built of brick or gray stone to last for centuries; each house with its white doorstep polished twice a day, and in the rear its tiny plot with tulips or other bright flowers now at their gaudiest. He saw with his mind’s eye the Nazi steamroller passing over all these and reducing them to dust and rubble.
More dreadful yet, he saw the Nazi lie machine at work, forcing these free peoples to think and speak according to the Nazi formulas. The Jews would be robbed and driven into exile; the labor unions and the co-operatives would be destroyed and the newspapers suppressed, or made over in the Nazi mold; the children would be turned over to Nazi teachers and made into hateful little robots; the government would be put into the hands of those semi-lunatics in each country who espoused the Nazi cause, and who put on colored shirts with swastikas on them and went about heiling one another and denouncing the pluto-democratic-Jewish-Bolshevik institutions of their own land. Already you saw the whole thing in operation in Norway, where there was a creature by the name of Quisling who had the whole works and had been suddenly boosted into the seat of authority. There was something about his name which exercised a fascination upon the English mind, and it was becoming a symbol for everything horrid: a name, as the Times put it, “Suggestive of the questionable, the querulous, the quavering of quaking quagmires and quivering quicksands, of quibbles and quarrels, of queasiness, quackery, qualms and quilp.”
The humiliating announcement came that the British were re-embarking at the Norwegian ports they had taken; and shortly afterwards Lanny Budd was a visitor in the House of Commons, listening to Chamberlain’s defense of his course through the past four years. A lame defense indeed, and everyone sensed that his nerve was breaking. A member of his own party, attacking him as bitterly as any of his foes, called on him with the words of Oliver Cromwell to the Long Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say. Let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” The majority still supported the P.M. in his plea for “unity,” but the margin was small and the end was near. Rick, at the picnic, had said: “The day he is out I am going to stand on my head!”
II
Lanny went about counting the days and hugging his direful secret. His credit as a P.A. was at stake, but he wouldn’t hope for vindication; he would just wait, and leave it on the lap of Adolf Hitler. Lanny’s mind went back to Berchtesgaden at the end of the previous August, when Adi had been agonizing and consulting the spirits, while a roomful of generals and adjutants downstairs champed and pranced like so many thoroughbreds lined up for a race. Would he have got some other medium this time—Professor Pröfenik of Berlin, or the little old lady of the Nymphenburgerstrasse in Munich? Was he getting a horoscope or a spirit communication and changing his mind this night? Or would he let the meteorologists and the militarists have their way?
The same burden of anxiety rested upon the minds of all Lanny’s appeaser friends. The zero hour was approaching, and they hadn’t done anything, at least not anything that counted. There was something going on, a negotiation so ultra-secret that Lanny was allowed only a hint of it; but there was a hitch, somebody had raised his demands, and, as usual, each side blamed the other, each suspected that the other had been playing for time, pretending good faith while having only guile. Europe was drifting to destruction, and there wasn’t anywhere enough statesmanship, enough patience and wisdom to avert it.
On the evening after Chamberlain’s speech, Lord Wickthorpe called from the apartment which he and Irma kept in town. “Could you come over, Lanny? It’s something rather urgent.” And when Lanny came: “Would it be possible for you to run over to Paris tomorrow?” When Lanny answered in the affirmative, his friend inquired: “Do you know the Comtesse de Portes?”
Lanny had met her, but they had had only casual conversation. Now Ceddy said: “I will give you a letter. The French have got to act, if the situation is to be saved. We are helpless, because of the pressure which the opposition puts upon us.”
“There’s a war party in Paris, too, Ceddy.”
“I know—but nothing compared to what we have here. If the Quai d’Orsay would make even the smallest public move toward peace, we could say that we were forced to join them. Even our madmen wouldn’t want to fight Hitler alone.”
So there was the P.A., in the very heart and center of the intrigue about which he had been hearing whispers for the past few weeks. It was too late from the point of view of a P.A., but he didn’t say so; he listened patiently to the outline of an elaborate set of proposals for the reconstruction of Europe: a nominally independent Poland, under an administration satisfactory to the Nazis, and with the right of trade through a Corridor to be acknowledged as German; the independence of Norway and Denmark to be restored, but with German control of the waters leading to the Baltic; an agreement as to submarine and air-power ratios: in short, another Munich, but very much worse from the British point of view.
Said his lordship: “Our only hope is for Reynaud to accept it, and force his Cabinet to do the same. If the announcement is made public it will be like an Armistice Day in France; there will be such a wave of popular enthusiasm that the warmongers here will be cowed. It’s either that, Lanny, or our own government will fall, and we can see no chance of anything but a Churchill Cabinet.”
During this exposition, Irma sat by her husband’s side, not putting in a word, but watching her ex-husband’s face for signs of sympathy and hope. A curious situation for Lanny; it was his role to be gravely concerned, realizing that not merely the political career of Lord Wickthorpe was at stake, and the prestige of the Barnes fortune, but the future of the present ruling class of Britain, and the safety of big money and big business everywhere. Fascism was law and order in Italy and Spain, Nazism was law and order in Germany, and the war on them would inevitably turn into a revolutionary struggle; whichever side won, the holders of privilege would lose.
The son of Budd-Erling was supposed to understand this the more clearly, because in earlier years he had associated with the Leftists and had a chance to observe how treacherous and irresponsible they were. Ceddy knew about Lanny’s past, but it did not alarm him, because it conformed to a familiar pattern in the public life of Europe. One former Socialist, Ramsay MacDonald, had risen to become Prime Minister of Britain, and half a dozen such had become Premier of France in the course of the past generation.
III
Lanny wrote a report to Washington, and next morning flew to Paris, and in the afternoon presented his letter to Hélène de Portes, in her spacious and elegant apartment on the Place du Palais Bourbon just across the way from the meeting place of the Chambre des Députés. Here she lived quite openly with her Premier-lover, and the wits of Paris exercised themselves upon the situation, saying that the fleur-de-lis, the national flower of France, had become the fleur-du-lit, flower of the bed. Hélène had won out over her rival, Jeanne de Crussol, but wasn’t happy in this triumph, because her lover had won by taking a course exactly opposite to what she desired. Hélène was an ardent munichoise, whereas Reynaud had an “anti-Munich” Cabinet, including Daladier, his hated rival, as Minister of National Defense, the most powerful post in time of war.
So that bed about which the jokes were made was far from being one of roses—or at any rate, the roses had plenty of thorns. The countess, a woman in her forties, domineering and shrill, wore her lover out with protests and arguments; she wore Lanny out in the course of a long conversation in which she discussed the members of the newly formed Cabinet and recited their crimes and failings. She was nervous and overwrought, a chain-smoker of cigarettes, and so blinded by hatred for her polit
ical opponents that she had apparently lost sight of any faults that might exist in Nazi Germany. That was the way of things in Paris; the clamor of the civil war drowned out the sound of the guns on the Maginot Line.
This busy political lady blamed the British, too; they did not appreciate the position of Paul Reynaud, who was practically a prisoner of the bellicistes, the war party. It was Wickthorpe and his friends who ought to be making the first move, because they still had a Cabinet and a Prime Minister. Instead, they were trying to put it off on their French friends, who were so much more exposed to the attacks of enemies both domestic and foreign. She asked Lanny to explain to her the circumstances which made it impossible for Chamberlain to act, but she didn’t really want to listen—she broke in before he had said three sentences, and began scolding at Georges Mandel, the Jew, and other anti-Nazis in the Cabinet, and then at the pro-Nazis who were not in the Cabinet—Laval, Bonnet, Flandin—men who were intriguing against Paul, without having any appreciation of his difficulties. Poor little man, he was fairly worn out with the burdens heaped upon him, he was having to take sleeping powders, and public life was an accursed thing, incompatible with friendship, with love, with happiness, even with self-respect. Nothing but devotion to France and deep concern for her welfare had caused the Comtesse de Portes to have anything to do with politics, and now it was the dream of her life to return to the beautiful estate near Marseilles which her father had built.
But Monsieur Budd had come from London to see her, and she appreciated this, and hinted to him about one last effort that was being made, this time by way of Brussels. Hélène would appeal to Paul’s wiser and better self; and meantime Lanny would interview Schneider and de Bruyne and de Wendel, and see what influences they could bring to bear and what chance there might be for an appeasement cabinet if Paul would consent to listen to reason. So Lanny went the rounds once more, and penetrated still more deeply into the ulcer that was eating out the heart of la belle Marianne. He went back to his hotel and dutifully wrote another report, saying: