But of course he had to lie like the devil; he had to say that the work was just what the occasion called for, and would be associated in the minds of all Germans with their greatest series of victories, and the establishment of a new order, for Europe if not for the world. Wagner had written a Kaisermarsch, and Meissner a Führermarsch. Kurt glowed with pleasure—for Lanny had come straight from the Führer, and brought some of the magic with him; it was possible to believe that what he said was what the Führer would say, and France and America in course of time. “Lanny, it is a sublime hour we are living in, and our art works must strive to be worthy of it.” Lanny assented; and in his traitor heart he wondered: was there, perchance, in some one of the Nazi concentration camps, a comrade who was jotting down on a scrap of paper the notes of a death march which would some day sweep the world, and might be played at the funeral of Adolf Hitler’s Drittes Reich?
These two roamed the forests and climbed the mountains and looked at old Rhine castles, just as they had looked at even older Roman castles and aqueducts and what-not on the French Riviera more than twenty-six years ago. Now, as then, Kurt talked his hifalutin German metaphysics, magnificent long words of Latin and Greek derivation which were impressive so long as you did not seek to apply them to anything in the everyday world. Then, as now, Lanny listened reverently and expressed his agreement; but in his traitor soul he was using one of Hitler’s rowdy phrases: “Das kümmert mich einen Dreck!”
Sitting on the ruins of the old Godesberg castle, lost in damp clouds, the art expert said: “Kurt, I wonder if it is considered unethical to travel during the height of this campaign.”
“It depends on where you want to go.”
“I have had word about a collection of paintings in Basel, and sooner or later I must take a look at them. This might be a good time, before the march to Paris is completed. But the road lies across the pathway of the armies.”
“We have switchmen who attend to matters like that,” said Kurt, in the patronizing tone he had always taken to an American two years younger than himself. “If the trains are running, I’m sure there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be on one of them.”
“Well then, I’ll make inquiry. You are presenting the Führer with a splendid march, and it occurs to me that if I found some painting he would like, it might be a gracious way of expressing my congratulations.”
“Famos!” exclaimed the Nazi Beethoven.
II
So Lanny enjoyed a daylight rail trip up the storied Rhine. In the wealthy and pious Swiss city with the ancient cathedral he got himself a hotel room and a typewriter, and wrote:
“The Germans expect to take Paris within one week from date. Pétain will be the head of the new French government and Otto Abetz will be Governor of Paris. The present program is to attack England by means of bombers, parachutists, barges and transports, as soon as the armies can be moved to the Channel ports and resupplied. In the meantime appeasement negotiations are going on with British agents in Madrid and Stockholm. German demands are for the Cameroons, German East Africa, and the Belgian Congo, a free hand for themselves in Eastern Europe, and for Mussolini in dealing with Spain, Yugoslavia and Greece. This comes from the highest authority and is to be accepted.”
This he double-sealed in the usual way, and addressed it, not to the American ambassador as such, but to Leland Harrison, Esq., 4 West-strasse, Bern. Lanny knew that Basel would be swarming with German agents, and that anyone coming from that country would be closely watched; so he took a long walk and turned many corners before at last he dropped the letter into an inconspicuous box. After that he went straightway to look up art dealers, and made himself as prominent as possible, inspecting what they had to offer, and inquiring as to what there was to be seen in private collections, and whether any of them could be purchased for American collectors. He spoke German, and looked at German paintings, and made quite sure that the Germans would know he was there.
He had the good fortune to come upon a Defregger, one fairly small, which could be taken out of its frame and carried under a gentleman’s arm in wartime. This Austrian painter was the Führer’s favorite; he would delight to look upon the weatherbeaten countenance of an old Bauer of the Innthal, where the greatest man in the world had been born. Adi would find in those wrinkled features the honesty, fidelity and credulity which were the virtues he wanted in his peasants, and meant to teach to all the peasants of the earth, not excluding North America. He would hang the work in his private car, and take it back to Berchtesgaden and put it in one of his guest bedrooms. The price was only fifteen hundred Swiss francs, which Lanny arranged to pay through his bank in Cannes. When he took possession of the work he did not fail to say what he was going to do with it. He knew that the story would go all over town, and certainly ought to satisfy the agents of the Gestapo!
III
Back to the Mountain of the Gods. Kurt admired the painting, and listened while Lanny explained the peculiarities of the painter’s technique, and its derivations. They played four-hand piano compositions which Lanny had purchased; and in between times they listened to the radio and marveled at the achievements of the Führer’s armies. Nothing like it in the world! They had broken through along the coast, and by the 10th of June were at Dieppe, and from there in a great bulge through Compiègne and Soissons. In two days more they were at Le Havre, and all the way along the Seine, as close to Paris as the mouth of the Oise. They had begun a giant new offensive farther west, and had broken through to the west of Paris and reached the Marne. They had taken Château-Thierry—name full of significance to Americans as well as French.
It was incredible. Kurt was like a man walking on air, or flying on one of the steeds of his Valkyries. He hummed new music, and started to write a march that would be better than his first. Lanny had to act the part; and it is a fact to which the psychologist William James has called attention, that if you enact certain emotions, you presently begin to feel them; the reflexes work both ways, and an anti-Nazi spy cannot help becoming a Nazi, at least for the nonce. After all, it is impossible not to pay tribute to a professional job well done—even if the job is the wholesale slaughter of your fellow-men. If you go to a football game, and the home team is being overwhelmed beyond hope, you might as well get your money’s worth by admiring the way the victors are doing the job, the new formations they have devised, and the amazing accuracy of their forward passes.
Mussolini summoned his Fascist mob to the plaza in front of the Palazzo Venezia. The band struck up and he made his dramatic appearance on the balcony, thrust out his pouter-pigeon chest, and roared one of those pompous pronouncements which had caused Rick to call him the world’s most odious man. “Fighters of land, sea and air, Black-shirts of the revolution and of the legions, men and women of Italy, and of the empire, and of the Kingdom of Albania, listen! The hour destined by fate is sounding for us. The hour of irrevocable decision has come. A declaration of war has already been handed to the ambassadors of Great Britain and France. We take the field against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies which always have blocked the march and frequently plotted against the existence of the Italian people.…”
And so on, through a long tirade, which the Nazi press featured on their front pages. Lanny was concerned, because one of the Duce’s demands was for Nice, and that might include Cannes and the Cap d’Antibes, Bienvenu and Beauty Budd. But Kurt said: “Do not worry. The jackal only takes what the lion allows him.” Such was a Nazi agent’s opinion of his ally. He went on to predict that Mussolini would do no invading or fighting in France; he was afraid of the French army, even crippled as it was, and still more afraid of the British Mediterranean fleet. It was understood that he was to be in on the armistice, and to have French North Africa if he could take it.
Very convenient, to be close to the seat of authority, and to know what was coming next! They talked about Paris, and the future which the Neue Ordnung was preparing for it. Since the Führer had honored Lanny wit
h his confidence, there could be no reason why Kurt should not speak frankly. La ville lumière had been his stamping ground for years, and he knew everybody and everybody’s wife and everybody’s amie. Lanny knew many of them, and it was useful to review the parts these persons had played in the debacle. Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, of which each furnished parts. Kurt said he was planning to take up his residence in Paris, and do what he could to assist Abetz in making real friendship between the two nations. “What do you plan, Lanny?”
The American replied: “I can’t think of any better work than that. I’ll be somewhere around, to run errands for you when you call.”
“Herrlich!” exclaimed Kurt. “Perhaps we can devise a way for you to get to England now and then. We must set to work immediately to try to keep that war from going to extremes. Your connection with Irma and Ceddy may be most fortunate for us.”
IV
A telephone call for the Komponist. The Führer had promised that he should hear his march played when the Germans entered Paris; and the Führer never forgot a promise. A limousine would call for him the next morning. “Would you like to come along?” asked Kurt; and Lanny replied: “What would I like better?”
So he was driven once more through the fields of battle, and breathed once more the air polluted with the effluvia of dead horses and cattle. You got an overwhelming impression of destruction, because, in this new Panzer war, most of the fighting was along the roads, and the ditches were filled with wrecks of every sort. The dead humans had been buried where they lay, but the living still sat among the ruins. They had piled their belongings into carts or baby carriages, fleeing from bombs and shells; they had cumbered the highways, and had been one of the reasons why the French had been unable to move their armies. The Germans had cleared the roads ruthlessly; and now, after weeks of wandering, many of the people had given up in despair, and settled down to die of starvation where they lay. It was nobody’s business to feed them.
When the car traveled westward things were better, for there had been less fighting. The poilus had given up and taken the road home; if some Germans came along in an armored car and told them they were prisoners, eh, bien, they shrugged their shoulders and gave up. Altogether, Kurt reported, the Germans had taken close to a couple of million prisoners, with German casualties of all kinds less than a hundred thousand. Six nations conquered in nine weeks! There had been nothing like it in history.
Lanny said: “It was your work, Kurt; I mean, yours personally. You cut the motor nerves between the French head and the French body.” That is the way to make friends and influence people!
The highway passed within a couple of miles of Les Forêts, familiar to them both. Lanny suggested: “Let’s stop and see if Emily is here.” They did so, and found the place turned into the headquarters of a Reichswehr corps. Emily had fled to the Riviera, as Lanny had advised some time ago, and heel-clicking officers were in possession of her splendid château, which Lanny had visited from childhood, and in which Kurt had first met the élite of French society. It was a lot better than having the furniture smashed, as in the previous war, and several thousand dead men in the great beech forest. Lanny said: “It will be a pleasure to tell her.”
“You can say,” replied the Komponist, “that if any damage is done, it will be paid for fully.”
When the car neared Paris, Lanny said: “I want to retain my ability to help you and the Führer, and for that reason I ought not be seen riding in a German staff car. It might give the idea that I am in the pay of your government, and that would hurt my standing with some of the French.”
“No doubt you are right, Lanny. What will you do?”
“I’ll get out when we come to a Metro station. I’m not sure if it’s running, but if not I can walk.”
Kurt was going to the Crillon—an odd reversal; for thirty or forty years this had been Robbie Budd’s hotel, and Lanny’s when he wanted to be fashionable; Kurt had come as Lanny’s guest, or had hovered around in the shadow while Lanny went inside to meet American officialdom. Now the wheel of fortune had turned; the Germans had taken over the hotel, and it would be Kurt’s address, and Lanny would find himself a less elegant abode. Kurt would ride in state, and Lanny would walk, or ride a bicycle, if he could find one. That was to be the new custom of Paris, he guessed, a custom good for the health, except, perhaps, when it rained. The son of Budd-Erling stepped from a well-padded limousine, with his newly purchased suitcase in one hand and his carefully wrapped Defregger in the other, and mounted shanks’ mare along the Grand Boulevard.
V
You could just about have your choice of accommodations in the city. Many hotels were closed, others empty of both guests and staff. More than half the population of Paris had fled to the south—they had been told that the Germans would plunder everything, shoot the men and rape the women. The result had been a frightful calamity; the roads had been blocked, and the Germans had bombed and machine-gunned them indiscriminately, killing tens of thousands of women and children. They still lay where they had fallen, and hundreds of thousands of refugees were sitting by the roadside, exhausted and despairing, with no place to go and no power to go there. This and other news you could get from radio stations in the south, if you could get access to a set; there was, as yet, no one to prevent your using it.
Lanny settled himself comfortably in the hotel where his mother had stayed at the time of the Peace Conference, and where she had hidden Kurt and helped him to escape into Spain. That had been a long time ago, and nobody remembered this elegant American gentleman who strolled in and engaged a suite. There was still food, if you had the price. To Lanny’s surprise he found that it was possible to get Bienvenu on the phone. He had a good chat with his mother; he didn’t say where he had been, but said Kurt was here, and thought she had nothing to worry about. Beauty answered that she was not the worrying kind. They were all well, and Parsifal still loved everybody, French, German, Italian. She had had a letter from Laurel Creston, safe in New York. There were letters for Lanny, but he didn’t believe that mail would reach him now. “What are you going to do?” she asked, and he said: “There will always be old masters!”
He hunted up some of his friends. Denis de Bruyne was not running away; he was staying and looking after his investments. His elder son had fled to the south, with the mad idea that the war should be continued from there. Charlot had not been heard from; presumably he was a prisoner, as there had been no heavy fighting in or near the Swiss border. Lanny said: “I was in Basel a few days ago. Many thousands of French troops were crossing the border and giving themselves up for internment.”
He accepted an invitation to spend the week-end at the château. Denis still had his car and chauffeur, everything which a member of the deux cent families claimed as his right and meant to keep, regardless of victory or defeat. He would bring Lanny up to date as to what had gone on behind the scenes; and from the radio they could learn what was going on now, or at least a part of it. Churchill had flown to Tours, whither the French government had fled; he was seeking to persuade Reynaud to continue the fight. The French Premier had made a public appeal to President Roosevelt, to send “clouds of planes” to the rescue of France. The President had answered with a promise of every sort of material, but ended with the warning that he could not promise military aid, since only Congress had the power to declare war.
“Les imbéciles!” exclaimed Denis, meaning the whole lot of them who wanted to wage war on Hitler. Why should anybody quarrel with that splendid system he had set up, and which had proved itself so marvelously in the past weeks. Denis had received the assurance that the Germans were going to behave with the utmost correctness in Paris, and certainly their advance guards had done so. Very soon there would be nobody to challenge the New Order, and France would settle down to life without labor unions, riots, strikes, and all the other appurtenances of democracy.
VI
This was Sunday, the 16th of June, and the German army was m
aking its formal entry into Paris, with a grand parade down the Champs Élysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. The bands would be playing Kurt’s new Führermarsch, but Lanny didn’t go, for already he knew it by heart, and he knew every foot of that great double avenue, lined with trees on each side; he knew the gray-green soldiers, who held their guns with their left hands and swung their right arms, and threw out their legs straight before them and brought their heels down hard upon the pavement—the goosestep, it was called by their enemies. Their big tanks and mounted guns and half-tracks would roll, and their planes would roar overhead. The bands would blare, and all German hearts would swell with glory, seeing immense swastika flags floating over the Arc de Triomphe, the Chambre des Députés, the Eiffel Tower, and the golden dome of the Invalides. Not to mention the Hotel Crillon, hitherto a sort of clubhouse for Americans who had money!
Lanny preferred to spend this lovely day in the garden where he had had so many happy hours with Marie de Bruyne. Apricot trees carefully trained against the south wall were loaded with half-grown fruit; roses were in bloom, and bees were busy, and Marie’s grandchildren knew nothing about old sorrows—it was the blessed renewal of nature. When Lanny tired of play, he could go in to the radio and hear about Winston Churchill’s proposal of a complete union of the British and the French peoples and governments. It had come rather late, and to an elderly French capitalist it seemed the apex of lunacy. “If we have to merge with some nation, why not the German? They are already here, and we don’t have to fight a bloody war and have our cities and homes destroyed in order to consummate the union.”