“I fear this will be out-of-date before it reaches you. The appeasers are making a last appeal through the King of the Belgians, who is afraid of losing his throne if real war breaks out. All the monarchs of the small countries have the same fear, but they dare not stand together. Now King Leopold is awaiting Hitler’s reply, and it is a question whether this will be delivered by Ribbentrop or by the Wehrmacht.”
IV
Lanny telegraphed his mother that he was in Paris, and presently he received some mail forwarded from Bienvenu. There was no further word from Monck, but a note signed “Bruges,” which meant Raoul Palma. On Lanny’s last visit he had learned that the workers’ school in Cannes had been closed; some of the pupils had gone into the army, while others, the Communists, had gone “underground.” He hadn’t known where Raoul and his wife were, and had been afraid to make inquiry. Now came a note, written in that code which Lanny had taught his friend: “I have come upon what purport to be some of the preliminary sketches by Doré for his illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, and I thought you might be interested to examine them and pass upon their genuineness.” That meant, apparently, that Raoul was in serious trouble of some sort, and needed Lanny’s help. He gave an address in one of the factory districts which form a dark and dingy ring about la ville lumère.
Lanny was pleased to hear from this Spanish Socialist, who in times past had served in France as Rick had served in England, to make public important news. Lanny wrote, appointing a place of meeting on a street in Montmartre, where all sorts of people went, Bohemian artists and the well-to-do who patronized them. Lanny strolled on the other side of the street and saw his friend approach, with nobody following. Raoul knew all about taking precautions, and they joined each other, walking in obscure streets and lunching in an obscure café. The “Inferno,” it appeared, was one of the concentration camps in the southwest of France, where a heartless government kept tens of thousands of refugees who had fled from Franco’s hangmen and torturers. More than a year had passed since the collapse of the Spanish Republican government, but still the French politicians refused to turn any foreign “Reds” loose in France. They were not to be moved by the fact that these internees were the most determined foes of Nazism on the Continent, thousands of them soldiers with battle experience who craved nothing in the world but to go to the front and fight the Hitlerites. But no, they were “politically untrustworthy,” and even Frenchmen who had fought for the liberties of Spain were denied posts of responsibility in the fight for the life of la patrie. Class was more than country!
Raoul had done his usual impetuous thing. Overlooking the fact that he was not a French citizen, he had tried to investigate the conditions under which these unfortunates were living. The result was that he had got himself arrested as a political suspect. During the period that Lanny had not heard from him he had been in jail in Toulouse, and only the tireless efforts of his wife, a Frenchwoman, had got him free. Neither of the pair had attempted to inform Lanny, because they knew they must never write anything which would do him harm if it fell into the wrong hands. Now here was Raoul, pale from confinement and bitter with resentment, not for one person but for a hundred thousand, asking Lanny what could be done to get the facts before the public. Another skirmish of the civil war in France!
Ordinarily, Lanny would have said: “I will take the story to Rick.” But not now. He explained: “I have pretty good information, Raoul, that Hitler will attack through Belgium and Holland the day after tomorrow.”
So, the Spanish refugees would have to be left inside their stockades for the present. Raoul wanted to know what he could do, and his friend said: “Go to Le Populaire and get them to publish a warning, a bugle call. Aux armes, citoyens! Tell them to cover the front page with it.”
“But how can I tell them that I know it?”
“Say that you have a connection with the German Socialist movement. Make it positive and explicit, but nothing that could point to me. Do your best, for it is the most important thing you will ever have a chance to do. And try to keep out of jail, because you and Julie are the only persons in France who know my secret and can make use of my information.”
“I don’t know where I’ll be,” said Rapul. “The police have me marked, of course.”
“Keep me informed wherever you go. But don’t write anything except about paintings. Doré is good. Next time I hope it may be Il Paradiso!”
“A fine chance of that,” was the reply, “if the Nazis enter Belgium the day after tomorrow!”
V
Lanny went back to his deux cent families, and to the Comité des Forges, whose heads were striving desperately for an arrangement to have both sides spare the steel mills and coal mines. Lanny reported to Hélène de Portes, and became aware that he had made a hit with that ambitious lady. She entrusted him with the fact that there had occurred that day a violent quarrel between her Premier and the hated Minister of National Defense. Paul had wanted to replace the elderly General Gamelin, and put in someone who believed in attacking; but “Dala,” timid and vacillating himself, insisted upon retaining the old gentleman who could be counted upon to stay behind his concrete. The situation was embarrassing for the Comtesse, for the thing she wanted was not what her lover wanted, but what the odious Edouard wanted, and she had been obliged to compel Paul to drop the unfortunate project. Such was the fleur-du-lit de la belle France!
The political lady went on to put her career in Monsieur Budd’s hands—so she declared. She and her friends had under negotiation a matter of supreme importance, concerning which her beloved Paul had not yet been informed. The matter now hung in the balance, and they needed someone to travel to Brussels. Would Monsieur Budd possibly be willing to perform this great service? Lanny replied that he had no purpose and no thought at the present moment but to avert the calamity of war—real war, as opposed to “phony”—from the old continent which he had made his home.
Très bien! He was to be entrusted with a note of introduction to an important gentleman connected with the Belgian court, and he might even be invited to meet His Majesty. There was a certain set of proposals under consideration, and the answer might be too secret to be entrusted to paper—he might be asked to memorize it and bring it back in his head. The Comtesse apologized for putting such a burden upon him; she might have sent a Frenchman, but Frenchmen were known, and here had come an American, as it were une merveille, one who possessed the confidence of the British government, and his father was an airplane manufacturer, so that he might well be traveling on some such errand.
Lanny replied that he frequently attended to small matters for his father, and he had met through Baron Schneider an important steel man of Brussels, and might call upon him and enlist his co-operation in influencing the German industrialists. Madame la Comtesse was delighted, and wrote the note of introduction to His Majesty’s man, and added: “I hope we are not imposing upon your kindness too greatly; also that you are not afraid of danger.”
“Danger, madame?” said the messenger, missing no crumb of information that might fall from the table of a Premier’s mistress. “You mean that hostilities may start so soon?”
“How can one tell, monsieur? One hears so many rumors, and meets so many persons who claim to know what is in the minds of statesmen and generals.”
Lanny had given no hint of what he knew, or thought he knew. Now he smiled amiably and replied: “I can understand that your home must be a whispering gallery. As for danger, let me explain that I began visiting in Germany when I was a small boy. One of my oldest friends is General Emil Meissner, and when I was in Berchtesgaden last August I learned that he was commanding an army corps on the Belgian front; so you see, if I were captured it would be a social occasion, and I might be able to bring you even more important communications than the one I am scheduled to receive in Brussels.”
“Vraiment, monsieur!” exclaimed the grande dame. “Vous êtes un messager des dieux!” Lanny kissed her hand, which was thin and wrin
kled, with enameled purple nails, and knuckles stained yellow and smelling strongly of nicotine. Her dark eyes were set in deep hollows, and her skin was gray where it was not rouged. Lanny thought: “This woman is living on the last quiver of her nerves.”
VI
This interview took place on the evening of the 9th of May, and his plane was to fly from Le Bourget field at ten the next morning, and put him down in Brussels in time for lunch with His Majesty’s man. When he returned to the Crillon, Der Tag was less than two hours away—that is, if Monck’s information was correct, and if Professor Pröfenik, or the little old lady on the Nymphenburgerstrasse with the much-worn deck of black cards, had not caused Adi Schicklgruber to change his mind. Rudi Hess was the one who would be collecting omens and bringing them to his master, and Lanny could picture the pair in the magnificent study of the New Chancellery, poring over the reports and worrying—the Führer rushing about and slapping his thighs and breaking out in scoldings at somebody who had given him advice contrary to the course which he wished to follow. It would still be Göring versus Ribbentrop, Hess versus Goebbels; they would come and present their arguments, each seeking some new extreme of flattery, some way to persuade Die Nummer Eins that the project they advocated was his, not theirs. One or the other would strike the right key, and the Führer of the Germans would have an inspiration, an intuition; he would know what his destiny called him to do, and he would give his thigh a still harder slap and shout: “Ich hub’s!”
Lanny wondered, should he have gone to Berlin and tried to get the news at first hand, and perhaps to influence it? But what influence could he expect to have, a fellow-countryman and subject of the hated Rosenfeld, the pluto-democratic-Jewish-Bolshevik intriguer and enemy of the Herrenvolk; he, the son of a man who was making weapons for the British and the French, no longer for the Germans! No, there just couldn’t be any more friendship, any more art-experting or piano-playing or philosophizing on the top of the Kehlstein; there couldn’t be any more running back and forth, with messages from British statesmen and French cartel-masters. The son of Budd-Erling would have to sit, like any common man, getting his news about Germany via the radio or the newspaper page; and certainly he could no longer indulge in the luxury of imagining that he was changing events, even by the weight of an eyelash, the force of a midge’s wing.
He wasn’t going to sleep very much that night; he was going to sit up in bed, after the fashion of F.D.R., and search the London and Paris press for hints of what might be coming. He found several, for there had been alarms, one after another, for months. Now the Dutch army had canceled all leaves; and Lanny wondered, had his warnings had anything to do with that?
He turned the dials of his portable radio, keeping it low so as not to disturb his neighbors in the hotel. He imagined the Wehrmacht, most elaborate killing machine ever devised by mankind, massing its forces along the line, all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss border. They had been bringing up troops continuously over a period of years, and especially for the past eight months. There would be mass arrivals tonight, everything in darkness and silence. The attack, if it was coming, would be at dawn, which comes early at this season in the high altitudes of Europe. First would come bombing planes, and then an artillery barrage, the greatest in all history; for that, every gun would be in position, carefully camouflaged; the acres of hidden shells would be uncovered in the darkness and brought to the front. Every gun would be already laid on the target—that would be the work of spies who had obtained photographs, and of mathematicians who had calculated range and trajectory. Whole cities had been transplanted to the front lines, a thousand factories of death; and there they lay silent—except for the ticking of carefully synchronized watches.
Unless, of course, Adi Schicklgruber had changed his mind again, and decided to wait for another set of omens, or perhaps for a message from the mistress of the Premier of France, sent by way of the King of the Belgians. Lanny couldn’t know; he could only await the ticking of his own watch, and ask himself, was there any word he could have spoken, any person he could have interviewed, any information he could have sent to the Great Father in the White House, that would have averted this continent-wide calamity? He wavered in his own mind, arguing perpetually with himself. Just what was he trying to do? To make another Munich? To postpone the decision, with Hitler getting ready twice as fast as any of his foes? War was such a ghastly thing, yet his reason told him that it had to be fought, and that it had better begin this very morning.
VII
The watcher dropped off to sleep with his bedside light still burning; and when he opened his eyes again he did not know how long he had slept. A glance at the window, and he realized that it was dawn. He reached for the radio and turned to one of the Paris stations. An excited voice was shouting, and it took Lanny a few moments to realize what he was hearing: bombings all over Holland, Belgium, and Northern France; German planes attacking one airfield after another, and rumors of parachute troops landing here and there. Suddenly the sirens of Paris began screaming, and at once the radio went dead.
Lanny realized that this must be it; this was the news for which the world had been waiting eight months and ten days. He slipped into his clothes and hurried down to the air-raid shelter, where guests and employees mingled in an irritated promiscuity. Apparently it was a false alarm; and when the “All clear” sounded he hurried back to his room. The radio had come to life, and he didn’t want to do anything but stick by it, turning from one station to another, piecing together the details of the most frightful of man-made catastrophes. He forgot to order breakfast, and when the newspapers were brought he hardly glanced at them, for this put them out of date, it put everything else in the world out of date.
He listened as one who had traveled back and forth between France and Germany most of his life, and knew all these roads, these rivers, these bridges; when he heard the name of Venlo, or Arnhem, or Maastricht, it was not just a combination of syllables, it was a set of sights and memories—a town hall, a hotel, perhaps a meal eaten or a painting purchased. Even the shells and the bombs were personal, for he had seen the explosions before his eyes, felt them in his eardrums, and examined the ruin they had wrought in Madrid and Barcelona and Valencia and points between.
The Germans had repeated all the tricks they had used in Poland and Norway, and perfected in the interim. The first attack was upon the airfields of the three nations, in order to destroy their planes on the ground, or make it impossible for them to get into the air. Freight vessels had arrived in Rotterdam and Antwerp, supposedly loaded with merchandise, but really with troops which came out at the appointed hour to seize the arsenals and other strategic places. Paratroopers descended from the skies, and traveling salesmen and tourists emerged from the hotels to show them the way. The great Moerdijk bridge, which crosses the estuary of the Waal and the Rhine rivers, was seized before it could be destroyed; and so on for one place after another. Reports came in fragmentary form, but one who knew how to put them together discovered a pattern—it was like those wasps which prey upon grubs, and which have learned where each separate ganglion lies, and put their stingers in at the precise spot.
At eight o’clock in the morning Lanny took the liberty of calling the private telephone number which the Comtesse de Portes had entrusted to him. He listened for a while to her agonized exclamations and said polite words of sympathy; then he added: “I suppose, madame, there will be no use in my taking the proposed trip under the circumstances.”
“No,” she replied slowly, as if reluctantly. “I suppose not. What is going to happen, Monsieur Budd?”
“Sooner or later the enemy will be stopped, and there will develop a stalemate, the same as last time. Both sides will dig trenches and sit in them. They will have time to think, and then, perhaps, we can venture to have hopes again.”
“You are a wise man,” she exclaimed. “Come to see me again, and give me the benefit of your knowledge.”
“Indeed, madame
, you honor me,” he replied. Assuredly no P.A. would say less to the first lady of a great nation—even if she was a left-handed lady!
VIII
A man cannot sit by the radio all day, even to listen to the end of the world. A civilized man has to bathe and dress and order orange juice, or coffee, and soft-boiled eggs and petits pains, “little breads,” which strikes an American as an amusing phrase. There was mail to be read, and a cablegram from Robbie, a couple of days delayed, asking his son to see Schneider and de Bruyne and request them to use their influence to get a final decision as to whether the French government meant to put up its share for the building of a new Budd-Erling plant. The brass hats were still tied up in their red tape!
Lanny called up de Bruyne and made an appointment to lunch with him, and they talked over the dreadful news. Incidentally the younger man got an item of information which interested him greatly; the United States army and navy were turning back airplanes to Budd-Erling, and Johannes Robin was selling them to the French and British purchasing commissions in New York! A neat little device for helping your friends in trouble, and at the same time preserving the formalities of “neutrality”! The army and navy were getting the promise of much better planes than they turned in, so no ardent patriot could find fault with the arrangement; meantime the existing planes were being loaded onto French and British vessels in American ports, taking the chances of a race through submarine-infested waters. The arrangement was being kept secret, so much so that Robbie had written his son nothing about it; Denis had got the news from the French authorities. The new Minister of National Defense was Daladier, and Lanny and Denis would call on him in the course of the afternoon, and impress upon him the superiority of the Budd-Erling product and the importance of getting it quickly. Merchants of death!