One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  The real danger was the Russians, the host went on; there seemed to be no limit to those hordes, they bred like the vermin they were. The Führer’s General Staff assured him that the enemy had used up his last trained divisions in taking the Orel salient, and there was no more to be feared from him this summer. Lanny had been told otherwise in the White House, but he surely wasn’t going to mention it in the Berghof. He sat with his deeply hidden thoughts—an odd thing, for he was firmly convinced of the reality of telepathy, yet here he sat, staking his life upon the idea that neither of the other two would be able to get any of the treasonable thoughts that were swarming in his mind. Thoughts of Oskar von Herzenberg getting ready to take the Führer’s life! Thoughts of going to Berlin to get the latest news of this conspiracy and carrying it to the Führer’s enemy overseas!

  Hitler was a wretched sleeper and never wanted to go to bed. Eva Braun began to doze on his shoulder, and he told her abruptly to go, and she went, without a word of good night to anybody or from anybody—she just went. Lanny knew that his host would want to sit and talk till almost dawn, and that seemed a cheap price to pay for information. What might he not tell when he got good and tired?

  So Lanny stayed awake and told more about the degradation of Italy and the pitiful state of Mussolini’s health. Hitler mentioned that the silly fellow’s pride had been wounded by having to eat rice and milk in the presence of hearty Germans, so he had made it a condition of coming to the conference that he should have his food served apart; but at the last moment he had decided that this was even more humiliating, and he had eaten with the rest and made himself ill. Lanny said, “I think it was you who made him ill by refusing him forty-nine tank divisions and three thousand planes.” That, of course, pleased Adi enormously.

  But Hitler couldn’t keep away from the subject of the Russians. How he hated them and feared them—and how hard he tried to pretend that he despised them! He called for more dispatches and showed by his comments that he knew the position of every division and indeed every regiment of his three million Germans at the front. Lanny didn’t try to remember any of this because he knew that positions changed quickly in a war of movement, and he was sure the Russians needed no reconnaissance services from him. The fighting was on Russian soil, and every last man, woman, and child behind the German lines was a spy. Hitler knew that too, and said they were being shot freely, and their numbers reduced.

  As the hours passed his mood grew melancholy. “I speak to old friends in confidence,” he began. “I have been forced to confront the possibility that this heroic effort of the German people may end in failure. These barbarian hordes may sweep over the most highly civilized land in the world. Have you thought what you will do, Kurt?”

  “Grosser Gott!” exclaimed the musician. “I have never dreamed of such a thing, mein Führer!” He said it with fierce conviction, but all the same Lanny guessed that it wasn’t true. Kurt was just trying to keep up his great master’s spirits.

  “Think of it now,” the master commanded. “It is the duty of every man to make a will, even though he may believe himself in the best of health. Will you accept a commission from me, Kurt?”

  “Natürlich, verehrter Führer. When have I ever refused one?”

  “Very well. You will not stay in Upper Silesia, to be enslaved by the barbarians. You will take your family to Switzerland and establish a home there. I will see that money is put to your account in that country. Your commission is to compose the saga of our German effort, the greatest hope of mankind, and to preserve the traditions for its rebirth and reawakening. Germany will have that, rest assured; the National Socialist spirit will never die, and in the end it will conquer. You agree to that?”

  “Gewiss, mein Führer.”

  “And Herr Budd will no doubt do what he can to help you.”

  “Anything in my power, mein Führer.” This from the reverent Ausländer.

  “Have you ever thought of composing an opera, Kurt?”

  “I have often thought of it, but I have been awed by the achievements of Richard Wagner.”

  “Ich bin sicher, you will rise to this high occasion. You will have a theme as great as any in our old Teutonic legends. Be sure that I will never give up, but will die sword in hand; it will be a new Götter-dämmerung, the greatest ever seen in the world.”

  There was a solemn silence. Kurt’s long face wore an expression of consecration, as if he were a humble priest receiving the blessing of the Holy Father. “I accept your command, mein Führer,” he said. “I will do my best.”

  VII

  Lanny waited a decent interval and then he interposed, “We must not let our imaginations run away with us, Exzellenz. The German Third Reich is a long way from defeat.”

  “Das ist wahr, Herr Budd,” responded the Führer in a changed tone. He went on to name the factors that might bring victory, and this involved a long exposition: the strategy of the war, the resources of the various countries, the morale of the populations as he conceived it. He had got most of his ideas about America from his youthful reading of Karl May, a German novelist who had written long romances about the immigrants and Indians of the Wild West. Adi had had more chance to know the German people, but to Lanny it seemed that he didn’t know them much better; they were not what they were, but what their Führer was determined to make them.

  It was a long, long session. Hitler talked and talked, asked questions without awaiting answers, and almost put the P.A. to sleep several times. He told the history of Europe as he saw it; he discussed the diplomacy of the two World Wars and explained why it had been necessary for him to conquer Russia. When Molotov had come to Berlin in November of 1940, after the conquest of France, he had demanded as the price of a deal not merely Finland, the Baltic States, half of Poland, and all of Bessarabia, but also the Dardanelles. “Of course I couldn’t give him that,” said Hitler. “That would have meant turning the whole Mediterranean over to him. How can Britain and America fail to see that, and to realize that I am fighting their war?”

  Lanny’s mind was working hard, preparing an answer to this, but it was quite unnecessary; the Führer went on to tell how he meant to remake the map of Europe: there wouldn’t be any Bolshevism and there wouldn’t be any democracy or any Jews; the Slavic race would be the serfs and do the dirty work.

  Then came the subject of philosophy, and Hitler told what a bad thing it had been for Germany to fall under the spell of materialistic monism. That led to the subject of religion, and he told God what to do in the present crisis. Again he expressed his esteem for Mohammed—another self-made prophet—and Lanny took the chance to tell Kurt how he had once been taken up the shaft through the heart of the Kehlstein, and on the top had been honored with an exposition of a great master’s views on God and human destiny. A delicate compliment, letting the master know how carefully his words had been cherished.

  Somehow the subject of art came up. Hitler’s tastes ran to the simple and obvious, the early Aryan, so to speak. He had forbidden all the modernist stuff as decadent. Lanny agreed with this judgment, though not with the banning; he thought the public had a right to be fooled if it wished. But he didn’t say that. He, a well-known art expert, bowed to the decisions of a onetime painter of greeting cards at twenty-five pfennigs apiece. And when the talk turned to music, Kurt Meissner did the same. Wagner was first, and the rest nowhere. At three o’clock the Führer saw fit to release his auditors. He did not apologize for keeping them up, but said, “I have work to do in the morning and must try to get some sleep.” Etiquette through the ages has established the fact that the safety of a whole people depends upon the ruler, and therefore his wishes and welfare must be the sole consideration. It was an ancient idea—see the Alcestis of Euripides!

  VIII

  Lanny and Kurt were being flown to Berlin, where Kurt had business with his publishers. Lanny, traveling on his French passport, genuine or forged, didn’t have to worry, because he was to be met by an SS officer in Berlin and
again in Paris. He had asked for one day in each city, explaining that he wished to talk with his old friend Denis de Bruyne, who was in close touch with the financial and political world of France and might reveal something of importance. “If he does, I will mail you a report,” said the P.A.

  The Führer replied, “Send it to Berlin. I am leaving here this morning and will be at my military headquarters in the Forest of Görlitz.” That was an important secret from the point of view of the Allied Air Forces. Lanny wondered, was it a slip, or was Adi letting his American friend know what complete confidence he had in him? Lanny wasn’t going to pass on the secret, because he knew that the forest in question was a big one, and the headquarters would be well hidden. Also, if it were bombed, there might be a flash in Adi’s memory.

  There was no ceremony of parting, for the Führer was locked up in the maproom with several of his generals; the dispatches continued to be bad. Nor could Lanny have much talk with Kurt, because the plane was noisy. He devoted himself to remembering the important things Hitler had said, and the important things that Lanny himself was planning to say to Reichsmarschall Göring, if by good fortune Der Dicke was in Berlin.

  Arriving at the Tempelhoferfeld, they found that it had been thoroughly pasted with bombs during the night, so they had to fly to another field in a distant suburb. That disarranged matters, because Lanny’s escort was not on hand; but meantime he got the official Residenz of his fat friend on the phone. He asked for General-Major Furtwängler, but was told that he was “at the front.” The secretary, who knew Herr Budd of old, said Seine Exzellenz was sleeping after a bad night, but would surely want to see Herr Budd, and would Herr Budd promise to call again the moment he arrived in Berlin? Herr Budd promised.

  An SS Leutnant arrived in a car with a uniformed chauffeur, and the Komponist and the Kunstsachverständiger were driven to the city, by a route which gave them opportunity to observe much bomb damage. Kurt was delivered to his music publishers, and Lanny to one of the smaller hotels, where he was not known. He telephoned from there and heard the booming voice of the old-time Teutonic robber baron: “Um Himmels Willen, wie kommen Sie hier-her?” When Lanny said he had spent a night at the Berghof, Der Dicke wanted in the worst way to see him. “Kommen Sie so schnell wie möglich!”

  Lanny replied, “I wouldn’t let anybody see me till I have a chance to clean up.” He agreed to come to lunch.

  He got a room, and had a bath and a shave, and his one suit was sponged and pressed. He got a copy of the Völkischer, and had time to read that the German troops were victoriously retreating from both sides of what had been the Belgorod salient; also that the German and Italian troops were victoriously retreating into the northeastern corner of Sicily, inflicting terrific losses upon the Americans and British. Then Lanny went for a stroll and observed the results of the bombing which he had witnessed during the previous winter and many other raids since then. At thirteen hundred he approached the Residenz, by the plebeian method of shanks’s mare, which he hoped would be considered patriotic because of war shortages.

  IX

  There were no shortages inside the Air Commander’s office, of that you could be sure; no shortage of breath for a welcome and no shortage of comfort for the inner man. Lanny was received in the sumptuous private office, an enormous ebony table in the center and gleaming gold curtains at all the windows; everything as it was when he had first come here, nine years ago—except that there was no lion cub, all the animals in the zoo having been killed and eaten. Hermann der Dicke had taken a fancy to an American art expert and had amused himself by displaying his glories to this visitor. What was the use of having glories if no one saw them? And who better to impress than the son of Göring’s former business associate, used to all kinds of luxury and really knowing the difference between true elegance and the crude imitations which Hermann the aristocrat saw about him in parvenu Naziland?

  On a hot day at the beginning of August the way you displayed elegance was to hang the coat of your latest sky-blue uniform over the back of a chair, so that all the decorations and medals could be seen; then you could be comfortable in a white polo shirt and enjoy a silver pitcher of beer resting in a bowl of ice. You could press a button and have a table wheeled in with pheasant in aspic and endive salad and iced peaches with cream, and you could gobble this with much smacking of the lips, and enjoy it more because three million of your fellow countrymen were floundering in the mud of Central Russia. There had happened to be a long spell of rain before the Orel salient, and Der Dicke explained that this favored the defense, which was falling back upon its own supplies while the enemy had to drag his forward through the swamps.

  Lanny had a story to tell: the Führer had ordered him to Rome and he had been able to meet the top people and have confidential talks. Hermann had been to Rome the previous winter, so he knew the scenery and the personalities. He had laid down the law to that decadent people, and they had hated him but had to obey; where they had failed, they were now paying the penalty, and Der Dicke made no secret of the fact that he hoped the bombing had done them good. He fully shared Hitler’s opinion of Ciano and took delight in the scandalous tales. “Galeazzo’s widows—famos!” The old pirate leaned back in his chair and laughed until he half choked himself. He slapped his fat knees, covered by soft shiny black leather boots.

  Things were going badly, he was too good a military man not to know it, and too free-spoken to try to fool his guest. The Number Two could take satisfaction in the fact that he had no share of the responsibility; it had been a long time since his advice had been asked, and still longer since it had been taken. Lanny could bear witness to the fact that he, Göring, had tried hard to prevent the fantastic attack upon Russia; and Lanny said yes, surely he could. He knew better than to blame it upon the Number One, and chose instead an unnumbered person whom he knew that Göring regarded with abhorrence. “Too bad the negotiations had to be left to Ribbentrop,” he said, and this warmed the fat man’s heart. He told of the desperate efforts he had made to persuade Hitler that the one time champagne salesman was as incompetent to deal with Russian statesmen as he had proved himself to be with British. Said Göring, “The Führer pointed out that Ribbentrop knew Lord This and Minister That, and I answered, ‘Yes, but unfortunately Lord This and Minister That know Ribbentrop.’”

  They condoled together for a while, and then, to cheer his host up, Lanny brought up the subject of paintings. If Hermann Göring had been in Palestine in the year thirty-three or thereabouts he would have had a Jewish agitator crucified without bothering to have a trial, and with him would have hanged all his disciples, save only Judas. But a “Descent from the Cross,” gorgeously painted several hundred years ago, possibly by Giorgione but more probably by Titian, that was something else again, and as Der Dicke listened his mouth watered. He collected paintings by the acre of gallery space, and that anybody else should have a good one was intolerable to him—and especially in Italy.

  On the subject of Giorgione the American visitor was really a delight to hear, for ever since he had reached his majority he had been practicing smooth and elegant statements about old masters. “In my opinion,” he said, “there is only one certain work by that master, and that is the ‘Madonna’ at Castelfranco, his birthplace. Others are ‘attributed’ to him by one or more experts, but I personally have my doubts regarding even the famous ‘Tempesta,’ which is in the public museum of Venice and for which the late Lord Duveen offered a million dollars.” Lanny went on to tell the story of how Prince Giovannelli of Venice was fleeced of this painting by the Italian government, and Hermann listened with interest, because he had done a lot of fleecing himself and might get some pointers.

  Lanny went on, “I believe that this ‘Descent from the Cross’ was painted by Titian when he was still under the influence of Giorgione—he worked with the master, you know. I am offered the painting for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I think that is a reasonable price under the circumstances. I wil
l make you a free gift of the information, because I am not here to collect a commission from you.”

  “Unsinn!” responded the host promptly. “If I buy it, you shall have your share. I have plenty of money in New York, you know, and some in other cities.”

  “It might be that I would get into trouble if I took it, Hermann. Anyhow, we can decide about that later.”

  X

  Like his Führer, the Number Two got dispatches from the various fronts. He read them to his guest, even though they were bad. “I have no secrets from you, Lanny. You know that I want peace, and I know that you do. My Luftwaffe is being wiped out. Because they cannot supply me with planes they are taking my paratroopers and other highly trained men and putting them in as ground troops, and there is nothing I can do about it. I am supposed to be satisfied with the fact that they continue to wear my blue-gray uniform instead of the Army’s field-gray!”

  Lanny could guess that this Air Commander was following Lanny’s own technique of telling some secrets in order to get more; and Lanny was willing for that to happen, for he knew that F.D.R.’s policy was to frighten the enemy and break his nerve by telling him the worst. When Der Dicke hinted to know how many pursuit planes the Budd-Erling outfit was turning out now, and whether it was true that they had a new model about to go into production, Lanny told exactly what he knew. He told about the armada of ships that was serving the Sicilian campaign, and about the estimated number of submarines that were being sunk—about one a day all summer. Hermann would know the real figures, but it would interest him to know what the Allies believed.