Otto's Phoney War Read online

  ‘Leaflet-dropping,’ he explained airily when Otto queried him about his latest acquisition. ‘Important means of subverting the enemy, you know.’ For some reason his gaze could not meet Otto’s, though at the time the young Sonderführer paid little attention to the fact.

  ‘I can't imagine, Meadow,’ he had started sardonically, ‘what any sensible Frog or Tommy is going to do when he gets one of those leaflets in his hands.’

  The Count had been in no way offended. ‘Perhaps you are right, Otto. They would be a little gentler on the jolly old rump than the usual issue Army latrine paper.’

  A major event in the spy school calendar was the weekly staff discussion on impossible new methods of liquidating the enemy. These brainstorming sessions aimed to bolt together the most outlandish outpourings of the Reich's most special minds with all the elegance and quiet of a steel works.

  ‘Poisoned barbed wire,’ someone would suggest in a voice incensed with excitement to the assembled crowd. They would gather in the big mess, wood crackling merrily in the ceiling-high green-tiled stoves, the snow falling in solid white sheets outside. The setting was always serene and beautiful. ‘You could scratch yourself on it and die in sheer agony within the hour!’

  ‘What’s the poison?’ someone else would ask.

  ‘Curare.’

  ‘Ah.’ There’d be a knowing murmur from the rest. ‘South American stuff, eh?’ And they would launch into an interminable discussion of the Matto Grosso and the lost treasures of Montezuma.

  In a lull, someone else would remark with apparent casualness, ‘It has occurred to me that migrating birds are the only individuals who could enter French territory without exciting suspicion.’

  ‘Tiny bombs tied around their necks!’ One of the men – usually the Commandant – would start the ball rolling eagerly.

  ‘Certain hideous disease germs would be better.’ This was a regular counter-suggestion from the non-combative staff. And so it would go on, until it was realised that there were no bird-migrations in Western Europe in the dead of winter.

  After a long winter’s afternoon discussing Brass Eggs’s ‘explosive horse-apple’, Otto decided that enough was enough. Brass Eggs's newest invention was the product of considerable forethought, he assured the assembled crowd: a simulated piece of horse shit, filled with TNT, which according to him would blow the foot off any enemy soldier foolish enough to step into it. Twice Otto protested that no one in his right mind stepped into horse shit, not even idiot Frog soldiers, and twice his protests were overruled by the others with cries that the French were intoxicated all the time, everyone knew that, and besides they were peasants for the most part and had this mythical attachment to the soil – and shit.

  Sonderführer Stahl resigned without regret from the ‘Lethal Secret Weapons Committee’, as it was called, and concentrated on his other duties. These weren't particularly onerous: training a succession of seedy, clumsy, sullen and sometimes conspicuously shady young men who were introduced as ‘volunteers’, but who, Otto suspected, were culled from the local jails of the Eifel. Invariably he wrote on their confidential reports to Gertie that they were unfit for their chosen profession, hoping to spare their necks that way. But discovering that Gertie was using them, and anything else he could lay his hands on, as fuel for the greenhouse in which he was trying to develop a new cross-strain of the South American fly-eating orchid that could attack human flesh – ‘Imagine, Sonderführer, plant one of those in General Gamelan’s conservatory and – snap – his arm is off! That would bring a rapid halt to the French war-machine.’ – he gave up.

  Once a week, weather permitting, Otto would go to Düren in the company truck to ‘fetch supplies’. In reality he used the afternoon to make swift and deadly advances upon his new mistress, a flighty blonde in her mid-thirties – only a little over ten years Otto's senior. Very beautiful in her own very unique way, she was given to easy tears and quick passions and maintained that she was the wife of a general serving in Poland. Of course Otto didn’t believe her, but one afternoon they were interrupted in the middle of a particularly acrobatic bout of love-making by a brass band playing outside her bedroom window. He first realised something was wrong when her muffled cries of ‘Scheisse’ replaced those of desperate enjoyment. He removed certain bandages and she looked up at him from the rug on the floor, crying, ‘It’s my birthday. The General’s got the local band to play me a few airs as a present, the silly sod! You’d think he’d know I’ve better things to do.’

  So they had to wait impatiently from the first floor window while the local volunteer fire-brigade band ground its way through a selection of Lehar, Strauss, and naturally Wagner, idly tossing burning cigarette-ends into the mouth of the sousaphone.

  Then when the band had shuffled off, fumbling their way through the inevitable Muss i denn zum staedele hinaus? she had turned to him urgently and cried in dismay at the effect the music had had upon him, ‘Oh, look, my present’s vanished!’

  But as February 1940 began to give way to March, Otto noticed a worrying change in the air. Returning from his pleasant afternoons in Düren, he could see that the Eifel forests and villages were rapidly filling up with new troops.

  There were tanks, trucks, cannon and soldiers everywhere, packed into the white-painted cottages, grouped round the slate-roofed, onion-towered baroque churches, crowded into the half-timbered farmhouses. In these, both humans and animals slept under the same dark thatched roof and the whole place stank of boiled white cabbage and animal droppings.

  Once he had to stop while a column of 75mm cannon were manhandled into position at the side of the road by sweating angry soldiers, with others bringing up the rear with branches and farm brooms to sweep away the tell-tale tracks in the snow. At night, too, low-flying fighters flew from dusk to dawn to mask the rattle of tanks moving up ever closer to what would soon be the new front, making the darkness hideous with their snarling, roaring engines.

  The school started to fill up too with a new type of trainee; men from the Brandenburg Regiment stationed in Düren, ‘come here,’ as Gertie announced in his welcoming address, ‘to receive the final polish from teachers who themselves have learnt their trade in the field.’

  They were a strange bunch of individuals of all trades and professions, many of whom spoke German with a strong accent. They were recruited from the many ranks of overseas citizens caught in the Reich by the outbreak of war and conscripted into Father Christmas’s special commandos on account of their knowledge of foreign tongues and foreign places. A surprising number of them, Otto discovered, came from South Africa and spoke Afrikaans to each other, including a dusky-skinned young man from Windhoek. The lad was always complaining about the cold and broke up all the furniture in his room to make a fire on the floor over which he grilled worms, and once even a hedgehog he had found dead on the road outside.

  Jokingly Otto had suggested that the presence of so many South Africans, as the recruits were called by the staff, indicated that the Führer intended to launch a blitzkrieg against the Dark Continent next. His suggestion was taken seriously by Gertie and for a couple of weeks the Lethal Secret Weapons Committee met in the stifling heat of the Commandant’s greenhouse, brushing off the importuning of the fly-eating orchids and sweating heavily in their winter uniforms as a kind of acclimatisation for the inevitable Sub-Saharan Africa Campaign.

  Now on his weekly visits to the school, the ‘Flying Fool’, as the Brandenburgers called the Count, who had somehow managed to obtain a pilot’s licence and invariably scared the pants off them as he came winging down at tree-top height to make his terrible, bumpy landings on the lawn, looked increasingly worried as March gave way to April and the warlike preparations at the frontier continued at high speed.

  Otto assumed that the Count’s worried appearance had something to do with the coming offensive in the West; but that spring the Count was playing his mysterious game with his cards held closely to his chest. Otto got little out of the
flamboyant aristocrat, save enigmatic remarks such as, ‘The longer I study men, Otto, the more I like dogs. Frederick the Great, you know?’ followed by heavy sighs, as if the cares of the world weighed down on his shoulders.

  In April's second week, the Count bounded out of his new plane before it had even come to a standstill. Otto was taking a bunch of frozen Brandenburgers for a bout of unarmed combat, and turned round to see the Count stalking towards him as the the plane came to rest against the greenhouse to the sound of groaning wood and cracking glass.

  ‘Ah, Otto! Where is this new weapon we've been hearing so much about?’

  Otto wasn't so sure who the we referred to. ‘Hello Meadow,’ he smiled. But then his attention shifted back to the plane, which, in a rending crash was overpowering the aged greenhouse in a spectacular show of popping panes. Flames from the greenhouse fire were now licking up towards the wing's framework. Otto's Brandenburgers were standing and staring open-mouthed. Suddenly Gertie, as pink in the face as his suspenders, was leaping about in the foreground, screaming at the recruits to ‘stop that bloody plane!’

  The Count carried on stalking towards the house, seemingly oblivious to the chaos behind him.

  Later that afternoon, Otto sought out the Count to inform him of the damages. He found him lying full length on the range, firing a silenced carbine at the butts, though Otto was amused to see that he had attached the school’s portable electric generator to the electric blanket upon which he lay.

  ‘I doubt if the Greater German Army will provide you with an electric blanket in the field, Meadow, eh?’ he quipped. But his sally brought no answering smile from the Count. Indeed his face had assumed that tragic ‘man-of-destiny’ look that Otto had noted on it before.

  The reply was sombre. ‘I must take the greatest care of myself, Otto,’ and after a pause he added, ‘especially now.’

  On the morning of the 10th April 1940, the school was startled by the announcement over the ‘People’s Receiver’, lodged in the mess, that the Führer had gone to the aid of little Denmark, which had been attacked by the perfidious English in their usual treacherous fashion. An hour later the radio broadcast the same statement about Norway, though this time the speaker announced threateningly that if the Norwegians rejected the hand of friendship offered to them so nobly by the Führer, he would be forced to employ the ‘severest and most relentless means to crush the ingrates’.

  ‘It is unbelievable, isn’t it, that people could be so ungrateful?’ Gertie had commented and smoothed down his skirt, which he had immediately donned after the first announcement (‘in case we have to go into action at once. One can’t be too prepared’).

  Now things began to move swiftly. The Sitzkrieg, the German equivalent of ‘phoney war,’ was over at last and now the air-waves and the newspapers were full of battles in strange places with tongue-twisting names in the far north of Norway.

  In spite of himself, Otto became an addict, glued to the radio, listening to accounts of bitter fighting in Narvik and Bergen and the sea-battles off the Arctic coast, in which it was clear that the Tommies had given the Kriegsmarine a bloody nose; even Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry could not quite conceal that fact. Otto even neglected his weekly visits to the blonde in Düren in favour of waiting at the radio. When he did visit her, she complained bitterly that he was letting the ‘shitting war’ get in the way ‘of life's really important things’.

  It was in the third week of that April that Father Christmas, the white-haired, little Admiral who headed the Abwehr, made a surprise appearance at the spy-school. An hour later the Count’s plane came roaring in at roof-top height too, taking with it several tiles and so shocking the dusky South African that he swallowed one of his half-grilled worms in a sudden frightened gulp. That afternoon the surprise visit of Father Christmas and his chief subordinate seemed to be a pure coincidence. Later Otto was to realise that it had all been planned.

  Thus it was that he could not make much sense out of the fragments of conversation he chanced to overhear through the window of the room in which the two spy-masters met, which was open on account of its being an unusually warm day for April.

  ‘The pretext,’ the Admiral was saying, ‘is that he is off to visit Field Marshal von Mackensen up in Hamburg … It’s his ninetieth birthday … Half-way there, somewhere around Celle perhaps, the special train will be switched on to the line heading south. They’ll reach Munster … ’

  At that moment one of the low-flying fighters had zoomed in low over the house, the snarl of its engine drowning the little Admiral’s words so that Otto had not been able to make out which of the several towns named ‘Munster’ in Germany the Admiral meant.

  ‘There will be a motor cavalcade waiting for him there at the station to escort him to the Mountain Nest.’ The Admiral laughed scornfully, ‘What a hopeless romantic he is! In my time,’ he exclaimed, ‘a serious commander would never have picked a name like that for his HQ.’

  ‘And Wolf for his own code-name,’ Count von der Weide said equally contemptuously. ‘Typical petit-bourgeois!’

  Otto frowned. ‘Wolf!’ Hadn’t the Count once said that was the Führer’s code-name? Of course, he had. The two spy-masters were talking about Hitler.

  ‘At all events, you can be sure that he’ll be there by five that afternoon. At this time of the year,’ the Admiral said, ‘that should give you two good hours of light still.’

  ‘Yes, that would be about it,’ Otto heard the Count say and there was no mistaking the note of fear in his voice.

  Then the window was shut with a bang and Otto was left, lying in the grass, with the flies buzzing lazily all around him, the sunrays playing on his pleasantly flushed face, his brow creased in a worried frown. ‘What does Meadow still need two good hours of light for?’ he asked himself thoughtfully. And why had he sounded so scared? What was going on?

  The answer to those very puzzling questions, Otto was able to reconstruct only much later, long after the war had been lost and all of the principal actors had died a violent death.

  All he knew of the event at the time was that on the evening of 8 May 1940 Count von der Weide smashed his bright-white plane into the side of the spy-school and staggered out of the smoking wreckage, crying, ‘Everyone to the front … everyone to the front!’ like a crazy man before passing out in Gertie’s arms.

  Much later, Otto was able to be fairly satisfied that the strange events of that May must have taken place something like this…

  CHAPTER 9

  It had not been a good day for Adolf Hitler.

  The deception with the train had gone well enough and, during a small stop-over near Hanover, his Chief Meteorologist Diesing predicted good weather for the 10th of May, the day the Wehrmacht would march westwards. Pleased, Hitler had awarded the weatherman a gold watch. But when his train, code-named ‘Amerika’ for a reason no one in his entourage could fathom, reached Aachen, the border city was shrouded in thick fog. From thence to Euskirchen, where the car entourage had been waiting, it had been fog all the way.

  Now that he was at last in his HQ, a bunker installation blasted out of a wooded mountaintop especially for the great offensive, the fog had lifted. But the damage had already been done. His nerves and his unruly stomach had combined to give him one of his usual attacks.

  As always he had taken his strong laxative because he had a horror of getting fat. ‘A leader must be lean and tough as a wolf,’ he always proclaimed. Half an hour later, the laxative had been followed by opium pills to quell the rumbles and pains in his abdomen, and thereafter a series of other medicines prescribed by his owl-faced personal doctor, Dr Theo Morel. But nothing seemed able to stop his meteorism this evening; and Linge, Hitler’s tall solemn body-servant, was getting the full benefit of it, crowded together as the two men were in that little bunker room. On the radio, which Linge had switched on to drown the painful, embarrassing noises the Führer made at regular intervals, a child was reciting the new grace being introduced
into the city of Cologne in a Rhenish sing-song:

  ‘Führer, my Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord … Protect and preserve me as long as I live … Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress … Abide this long with me, forsake me not … Führer, my Führer, my faith and my light. Heil my Führer.’

  Unknown to the little girl, her Führer punctuated each line of her plaintive invocation with a ripe fart, raising his booted right leg to facilitate the process, while behind him Linge grew progressively paler as the room filled up with noxious gas. Hitler’s attack of meteorism was reaching its crescendo.

  In the end the Führer decided that the odour of rotten eggs was too much even for him, although he had lived with it these forty-odd years.

  ‘I think I’ll just go outside on the terrace, Linge,’ he announced airily, ‘and get a breath of … er … fresh air.’

  ‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ Linge said in his funereal voice. Linge breathed a gasp of relief as the Führer limped outside, still farting strongly, and grabbed for the flask of strong eau-de-cologne which he kept concealed in his sleeve for this particular eventuality. With shaking fingers he unscrewed the cap and thrust the neck into each nostril in turn, knowing that this was the only way to drown the awful stench and cure his dizziness. His high rank of colonel in the SS did not justify the torture the Führer submitted him to, he told himself. Sometimes he felt he would be happier at the front. At least there, they wouldn’t employ poison gas…