A Kiss for the Enemy (25 page)

‘Thieves falling out.'

‘You can say that. But it's still covered by a lot of smooth talk.' The question every diplomat in Berlin asked himself, Bill O'Reilly said, was whether German-Russian relations could worsen to the point of war.

‘They're watching each other like cats. But we don't think Russia's ready for it yet.'

‘It must have been tedious enduring air raids in Berlin knowing that if you got knocked off it would be by friends!'

Bill grinned, ‘I don't think any of us minded that. A British air raid was good news. But air raids aren't disturbing people much. Not yet, anyway.'

From the whole conversation, indeed, Anthony formed the picture of a Germany less concerned, at the moment, about the war than was embattled Britain. Bill conveyed the impression of a Reich unthreatened, triumphant, looking forward to the fruits of victory – very different from the sense of living, invigorated, through great peril which prevailed that summer in England. Bill acknowledged it.

‘That's right. That's most people. But the top guys are discouraging complacency. The Party line is that the rough stuff still lies ahead. And of course there are, thank God, a number of thinking, decent folk who are appalled the Nazis have gotten such reflected glory, and who pray for a setback.'

‘Although a setback for the Nazis would involve a military defeat! Not easy, I suppose, for a patriotic German to swallow!'

Bill agreed. ‘That's the problem,' he said. ‘That's sure their problem.'

Bill O'Reilly had been in Berlin four years, a long posting by any standards. His special subject at University had been nineteenth-century German history and he had been a fluent German speaker from his Oxford days. The assignment had been natural.

‘We've a small Diplomatic Service,' he said, ‘and less of them than you'd suppose know a lot about Europe.' He had thus been a witness of every step along the road which had led, so inevitably it seemed, to European war.

They spoke of Spain. The nationalist victory had brought satisfaction to Germany. Bill regarded it sceptically. He did not take the idealistic view of the Civil War which had brought stars to the eyes of so many of his compatriots.

‘Franco's no German puppet. He'll get all he can out of them but the Spanish are about the most obstinate guys in the world.'

‘Did German help to Franco amount to as much as the Republicans said?' asked Robert. Bill spoke expertly. This had been his department. He had also known personally a number of German officers who had served in Spain and he had, where opportunity offered, discussed the war with them.

‘You had to measure what they said against what you knew, of course, but you got a feeling for it. There weren't huge numbers of Germans there, but they sent some good ones. One of the brightest of their airforce officers, for instance, was there – killed in an accident after the fighting was over as a matter of fact. Guy I knew quite well. I'd met him and his wife often in Berlin before he went to Spain. Guy called Langenbach. And there were some other pretty sharp fellows there, I know that.'

Anthony's attention had wandered for a little to other tables. Several acquaintances were dining at the restaurant, and contacts in wartime were fleeting and treasured. Then with the speaking of a familiar name, he felt as if a high-pressure hose of cold water had struck his left ear, leaving him shocked and breathless.

‘Did you say Langenbach?'

‘That's right, Kurt Langenbach. One of the Luftwaffe's ablest, they always said.'

‘I've met some of his family. I was in Germany in 1938.'

‘Well, Kurt was already in Spain by then –'

‘Yes, I met his father and mother. And his wife. At their home near Hanover.'

‘Is that so? Well, I used to see quite a bit of Kurt and Anna when they were in Berlin. She was a lovely girl – real lovely. She was half-English or something, you know.'

‘Yes, I remember that.'

‘When Kurt went off to Spain, some people said they'd not been getting along too well. Kurt was pretty close to the Nazis, in my opinion, even if he wasn't a Party member. I reckon he approved of a lot they were doing, even if he looked down his long aristocratic nose at them personally. There are plenty like that. That wasn't Anna's line at all. Still he came on leave now and then, must have, because she had a baby, a little boy, born after Kurt was killed. Born well after the start of this war in fact.'

Anthony said, ‘I didn't know.'

‘It is extraordinary what he writes to me, perfectly extraordinary,' said Kaspar von Arzfeld for the fourth time. ‘Our friend Rudberg,' he added again, unnecessarily. ‘Such an interesting letter. But perfectly extraordinary.'

It was the third winter of this peculiar war and he felt a good deal older. That golden summer of 1940, when France had been beaten, when England might have seen sense – that seemed, now, a long time ago. That was before the start of this strange, limitless adventure in the east, the adventure that had started on 22nd June, 1941, the invasion of Russia. Operation
Barbarossa.

‘An extraordinary, interesting letter.'

‘Are you going to read it to us, Father?' Lise was daring.

‘Some of it is not for girls, it is soldiers' talk,' said her father firmly. ‘He knew I would be interested. One reads about it, of course, but there's nothing like hearing at first hand from a young fellow at the front. Makes all the difference.' He returned to the letter.

‘Is Toni well?' asked Marçia gently. She had had no letters since Toni had ‘gone east' in common with a large part of the Wehrmacht. Nor, although hoping a little, had she expected any. Now it was winter. January, 1942.

‘He sounds well. It's hard for them just at the moment of course. The Bolsheviks were saved by that winter of theirs. I'll read you part of the letter.

“Dear Colonel von Arzfeld,

I owe it to you –”

Well, all the first part is how happily he looks back to his visits here last year and the year before. Very polite of him, certainly. And he's just left his job, he's been with a Corps Headquarters
until now and he's about to return to the staff of a Panzer division.'

‘Like before?'

‘A different one. And he's promoted! He's a major! He'll be pretty well in charge of the operations staff, I imagine. He's doing very well.'

‘You said his letter is extraordinary, father.'

‘Yes, his descriptions are vivid, amazing. He's given me a wonderful picture of the advance last summer. Of course he has to obey the censorship rules, no saying where events took place although he's writing of nearly six months ago. My guess is that he was with the Central Army Group. On the Moscow front with von Bock.'

‘But we didn't get to Moscow.'

‘No, of course not, the strategic Une of pressure was shifted,' said Kaspar rapidly and a little uneasily. ‘That's not the point. And of course, their damned winter slowed things down. All the same von Bock got within sight of the place, drove a mighty wedge into the Russian front. I'll read you some excerpts, you girls. Toni Rudberg was writing about the events of last August, you see –'

Corps Headquarters always moved in a number of groups. Each group consisted of a small column of vehicles, a few officers, a number of drivers, clerks, orderlies and signallers. Each group had a certain inner cohesion, played a particular and indispensable part in the corporate professional life of the Corps Headquarters. The Headquarters was only fully functioning, only its entire self, when all these groups were again brought together at the end of a day – or a series of days. On the line of march Corps Headquarters was largely useless, its role temporarily assumed by a small advance party, its commander ranging the battlefield as he generally did, far from the advice, the support, of his staff. Corps Headquarters lived only for the moment when its various parts could be re-assembled, arranged in harmony with each other, each playing its appointed part in the control, the management, the intellectual inspiration of the Corps – a Corps of three Panzer divisions, totalling no less than 450 tanks when at full strength.

Meanwhile, and on the move, the groups of Corps Headquarters were often widely separated from each other, sometimes by design to reduce the threat of Russian aircraft knocking out more than one group, sometimes – and now more often – because of the difficulties of movement upon the appalling roads which made near impossible any systematic march discipline. Each group drove toward the distant horizon, sometimes with inadequate knowledge of how its companion groups were faring. The Corps Commander was somewhere miles ahead with a small command group of three vehicles, and a tiny handful of privileged Staff officers, who gave the impression when they returned to base in the evening of running the Corps advance unaided, more than a touch of patronage in their attitude. The main staff, the brain of the body, was lumbering along far to the rear, able, it seemed, to contribute little. Yet all appeared to be going extraordinarily well, although the speed of the first days of the advance seemed to have slackened. The only operational decisions necessary tended to be how far to advance the following day – how much further, during the next twenty-four hours, to penetrate into this limitless country. And their commander's guideline for that was usually simple – ‘as far as possible'. The groups of Corps Headquarters moved unevenly forward under the infinite skies.

The drivers of vehicles got tired. Everyone sickened of the eternal dust, and the heat was taxing. But there were compensations. The country, with its low, rolling hills, its great forests and enormous rivers was beautiful. It conveyed an incongruous serenity. The villages of wooden houses had a certain primitive charm. Great fields of sunflowers lit the landscape with a periodic blaze of gold. Everywhere the horizon seemed a hundred miles away. For much of the time there was a huge silence. It was mercifully different from everybody's idea of war. There had been, of course, some mighty bombardments in the first days, considerable expenditure of tank and artillery ammunition on both sides as the Soviet forces near the frontier had been encircled by a sequence of giant pincer movements. But thereafter the forward march, hectic, heat-ridden, had seemed for the most part extraordinarily free from
the sights and sounds of battle. When one of the groups of Corps Headquarters halted for a fuelling break, a stretch of the legs, one could often hear, far to the east, the grumble of guns. Somewhere out there Russian rearguards must be forcing the German spearheads to deploy, to bring artillery into action, even to manoeuvre. Then there would be quiet. A few shouted commands would get vehicles started, men mounted. Staff officers would climb stiffly into cars or the front of trucks. The group would resume the advance. And behind the Corps, as every soldier knew with some inner relief, was a mass of marching divisions, men and horses often covering thirty miles a day. It was August, 1941.

Toni Rudberg looked lazily at the country as his car bumped uncomfortably along. The road, the main Corps axis of advance, ran along a broad, shallow valley. Astride it woods crowned low hills, extending back as far as the eye could see, and connecting with each other to make a great forest on either side. If one had to go to war it was good to see new lands, savour fresh experiences. Toni had been pleased to be attached to this Panzer Corps Headquarters – and in the operations branch, too. If all went well he might next go in a more senior position to another headquarters, possibly again to one of the Panzer divisions, whether in this Corps or further south. Just at present, however, there wasn't much chance to show zeal and efficiency. The General was doing it all from the front, and Corps Headquarters was trundling along a dusty road all day, from one lice-ridden village to another. The driver braked and switched off the engine.

The operations group appeared to have halted. A military policeman was reporting to the vehicle in front, a car in which rode Toni's section chief. Along this stretch the road wasn't too bad. The forest, dark and seemingly infinite, started about a kilometre away on either side. Green meadows sloped gently upwards from road to treeline. A cluster of the usual wooden houses meant that this place probably had a name, but Russians didn't appear to go in for maps and those issued by the General Staff before the campaign had proved remarkably inaccurate. There was a shout.

‘We're likely to be half-an-hour here.'

‘It could be worse,' thought Toni. An orchard and cherry
trees stood behind the row of houses. He watched an old Russian woman feeding geese. She called out something which he didn't catch, although his Russian was improving – soldiers' Russian, perhaps, but serviceable. The old woman was joined by a fair, pale-skinned girl. Both wore peasant clothes and headscarves.

‘Really she's rather sweet,' Toni said to himself. ‘A delightful little thing. These people with their grave faces, their sad eyes, their wooden shacks, this extraordinary, limitless land – it transports one from 1941 to the middle ages. It's all so – so disorganized, so untidy, so primitive!' He went to the largest of the village houses. An old man stood humbly in a corner and bowed as Toni nodded to him. Toni noted with approval that somebody was brewing tea. He took off his cap and belt, yawned, and looked at his watch. Just four o'clock. Two other staff officers were in the room. They exchanged comments about the day's march so far. The August sun had made them sleepy.

The spring of 1941 had not been without complications for Toni. He reckoned that he had survived them with a good deal of adroitness. He had paid discreet but assiduous court to Anna Langenbach. This was to some extent by letter and he fancied himself as a skilled and sensitive letter writer. He had also, however, driven to Langenbach to see Anna while visiting Arzfeld on two further occasions early in 1941, while enjoying a delightful time with Marcia Marvell. This had demanded finesse. Toni knew that Marcia and Anna were fond of each other. His method had been to take, or appear to take Anna into his confidence. This, anyway, produced a certain delicious intimacy. He explained how Marcia and he had fallen light-heartedly in love, in Vienna.