One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny ran into the two-gun warrior once, in the corridor of the headquarters building. Georgie stopped, stared, and exclaimed, “Hello! Aren’t you Budd?”

  “Yes, General,” said Lanny.

  “What the devil are you doing here?”

  “I’m one of you now, sir.”

  “The hell you say! What are you doing?”

  “I’m interrogating prisoners.”

  “Well, go after them! If they don’t answer—” Georgie’s advice was that Lanny should apply his pedal extremity to the posterior of the illegitimate German, but of course he didn’t say it in that Latinized language.

  XIII

  Lanny spent the better part of two days and nights with his special German target. He listened to the incredible story of how the German Army was being managed. Hitler, in Berlin, was growing every day more suspicious of all his old-line generals—and with abundant reason. He would send them elaborate detailed orders, from which they were not permitted to vary by a hair’s breadth, on penalty not merely of their jobs but of their lives. He was insanely unwilling to withdraw from any foot of land he had taken, and would insist that the men must stand and die. In that way he had lost half a million at Stalingrad, and in the last three months twice that many in France.

  Worse than that, he would keep his orders secret from everybody but the officers who had to carry them out. “The man next to me would be told to attack,” said Emil, “and I wouldn’t be told of his move, so we would lose contact and leave a gap for the enemy to plunge through. I had anti-aircraft units which came from the Luftwaffe and wore its uniform; Göring insisted upon keeping command of them, so I couldn’t tell them where to go and they were never of any use to me. I was told that I was to get a new division, and when I sent it orders I learned that all that had been sent was a division commander, a medical officer, and six bakers. I got whole regiments that had had only a week’s training and had never fired a gun. I got what were called Magen battalions, men who had been set apart because they had stomach ulcers and had to have white bread and milk—but I had no way to get either.”

  And always there was that insane raving, that cursing and browbeating over the telephone; there was the threat of being ordered back to Berlin, not knowing whether you were to be shot, and your family for good measure. Field Marshal von Kluge had wanted to withdraw from Falaise and Hitler had forbidden it; when the army was pocketed, Hitler had screamed that Kluge had done it on purpose, to prove that he was right. Ordered home, the field marshal had taken poison on the plane. General Rommel, hero of North Africa, had been reported dead in an automobile accident, but Emil said that he too had taken poison. Hitler had ordered it, partly because he had failed to stop the Normandy invasion, and partly because he was believed to have known of the plot against his Führer. “I am very well content with my fate,” said Lanny’s old friend dryly.

  The P.A. did not push him, but waited until Emil himself brought up his problem of conscience. Emil did this many times, but still couldn’t make up his mind. At last Lanny gazed into the eyes of his old friend and said, “Emil, you aren’t being entirely frank with me. You have something on your mind that you haven’t told me. What is it?”

  The other looked away with a face of misery. Finally he broke down. “Yes, Lanny, there is something I haven’t the right to tell you.”

  The P.A. shrugged his shoulders. “All right, old man. If that is so, I’m wasting my time and yours.”

  “If you would only let me tell you something in confidence—I mean, as one friend to another.”

  “You know I’m not here for social reasons, Emil. I am here as an officer in the American Army. If you tell me anything that has to do with the Army and its interest, I can’t promise to keep it to myself.”

  “That is what has been worrying me. I want to put a price on my help, and I want your advice about it. I want to talk it over with you, as between friends and not between officers of enemy armies.”

  “I’d have to ask my superiors about that,” was the American’s decision. “If they give me permission, then of course I’ll pledge my word.”

  “And keep it under all circumstances?”

  “Of course I’d keep it, Emil. You wouldn’t be talking to me unless you knew that.” Lanny sat with knitted brows for a space, then said, “Let me ask you one or two questions, Emil. You may answer or not as you please. I’ve an idea that your concern has to do with someone other than yourself.”

  “That is true.”

  “Some member of your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am guessing that it can only be Kurt.”

  “I’d rather not say, Lanny.”

  “Some member of your family has done something, and you want to buy immunity for him with your information. Is that the idea?”

  “That is it.”

  “You want to ask my advice about it, and I am not to be free to mention it to anyone else without your consent. Is that it?”

  “That is it.”

  “All right, I’ll see about it.”

  XIV

  Lanny took the problem to Colonel Koch, the G-2 of Lucky, that is to say, the staff officer in charge of its Intelligence Section. A quiet scholarly man as unlike his chief as possible, he listened to the life story of a German Komponist whose reputation was known to him. Lanny said, “Kurt is a metaphysician who has drugged himself with long words and mistakes them for reality. He was teaching me Hegel’s formulas when I was thirteen and he was fifteen. He convinced himself that Adolf Hitler was the embodiment of all that lofty idealism, and now I suppose he thinks he has to die with his hero. Emil wants to try to save his life, at least that is my guess.”

  Said Colonel Koch, “The fact that Kurt Meissner has been a Nazi propagandist for the past couple of decades is known to all the world. There can hardly be anything confidential about that.”

  “No, and so I’m guessing it must be something that Kurt is doing now. I have not forgotten that after World War I he came to Paris as a secret agent of the German Army to stir up the French Leftists against the peace terms. I was young then, and swallowed the propaganda myself, and helped him to escape into Spain. I surely wouldn’t like to have Emil put anything like that up to me now.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” responded the Colonel. “The hint you have given already is enough for G-2; we can very quickly get photographs and descriptions of Kurt Meissner, and if he is operating as a spy anywhere on this front we can find him.”

  “That’s all right,” said the P.A., “so long as you are acting on my guesses and not on what Emil may tell me. The question I should like to have answered is this: suppose that Emil reveals something of that sort and asks my advice, what am I to tell him? Would you bargain his life in exchange for the vitally important information that Emil could give you on the subject of German defenses and fortifications and troops?”

  “That is a difficult point, Captain Budd. The Army has an over-all policy to avoid all types of immunities.”

  “So I have been told, Colonel. But everything has its price in war. Emil may be the means of saving many thousands of American lives; and surely they are worth more than the life of one spy.”

  “It is a problem I would have to refer to a higher authority.”

  “Let me point out to you that Kurt Meissner was a captain in the German Army at the end of World War I. Could he not be treated on that basis when we catch him?”

  “He would be—provided that he was in uniform.”

  “Use your imagination, Colonel. Let us assume that OSS has a lot of uniforms of the enemy, taken from dead bodies. They must be using them in their business.”

  “That is a fair assumption.” Colonel Koch smiled.

  “And suppose that I went along when Kurt was to be taken, and I persuaded him to put on the uniform? I would take the responsibility, and it wouldn’t weigh very much upon my conscience. A well-known musician would be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp instead of being shot, and
we would get everything that General Meissner knows about the Metz fortifications. Don’t you think that if that were put up to Georgie, he might consent to break one of the regulations?”

  “I couldn’t say, Captain Budd; but I’d be willing to ask him. Of course it would be conditioned upon General Meissner’s coming through with the real stuff. He’d have to answer questions and his answers would have to be right.”

  “That goes without saying, Colonel. Let me urge you to get the decision as quickly as possible; the only difficulty I see is that Kurt might be captured by some other unit of the Army, and I don’t suppose they delay very long about trying and executing a spy.”

  “Indeed not!” said the G-2 man.

  XV

  The deal was made, and Lanny went back to Emil Meissner and made the proposal. He saw at once that he had lifted a ton load off the General’s shoulders. “You have guessed correctly,” Emil said without hesitation. “Kurt was operating as a secret agent in my territory, and that is within General Patton’s territory now. He didn’t come to me for permission—he went directly to the OHK.” (Oberstes Herres Kommando, the Army High Command.) “I was never sure whether they assigned him to watch me or to watch the enemy; the split in our Fatherland is that terrible. Two weeks have passed since I was captured, and I don’t know where he is now, but I can tell you the name he was using and the place where he was staying.”

  “Was he operating alone or was he part of a group?”

  “We Germans are always part of a group, Lanny. But he did not tell me the names of the others, and he will not tell them to you. He is posing as an art expert, representing a dealer in Berlin who has a way of smuggling German-captured art treasures out of the American zone. That, of course, is what he tells the Germans; what he tells Americans I do not know.”

  “He has taken a leaf out of my notebook,” said Lanny, somewhat amused.

  “Of course,” replied the other. “He has heard you talk art on a hundred occasions, and it has become a second specialty with him. He has grown a beard as further camouflage; but he cannot conceal the fact that he has a crippled left arm.”

  “I understand that Hitler has the same, and so did the last of the Kaisers.”

  “I have not failed to note the coincidence, Lanny. We old-timers look back upon the Kaiserzeit as the happiest in all German history. I suppose that is a habit of the aged and a sign of premature aging. The world is going into something new and strange to us. Perhaps you can foresee it; I can’t.”

  “I can foresee this much, Emil; either the Americans are going to get to Berlin first, or the Russians are. You have to make your choice between those two—and which will you say?”

  “You hardly need an answer to that.”

  “All right then, get busy and tell our people what they need to know in order to break through the Siegfried Line and get across Germany before our bombers have knocked every last stone off the top of the next one.”

  27

  A Friend in Deed

  I

  The deal was closed, and Emil provided the G-2 Section with a detailed description of his brother; he was five-feet-ten and weighed seventy kilos, about a hundred and sixty pounds. His face was long and thin, with deep lines at the mouth; his eyes and hair were gray. He could move his left arm, but slowly and without much power in it. He had heavy scars on the left chest. In the library at Nancy they found a good portrait of him and made a photograph of it, and Emil drew in the beard and mustache as he had last seen them; these were painted in by an artist and then another photograph made, and all the G-2 agents went out with this. Emil knew that his brother’s hiding place was in Toul, but knew only the general locality. “It won’t take us long to find him,” said Colonel Koch.

  Meantime Emil was provided with an American uniform, for reasons of security, and installed in a villa with a G-2 staff. They brought him their wonderful photo-reconnaissance maps, and he sat at a big table poring over them with a reading glass; he put little numbers on certain spots, and then wrote out a list of emplacements, giving a detailed description of each, its depth, amount and kind of armament, and the forces it contained. He told its strong points and its weak, and how it could best be taken. He did this for all the fortifications of Metz, from Forts Kellerman and Gambetta on the north to L’Aisne on the south, from Bordes on the east to the row of defenses on the west: Guise, Jeanne d’Arc, De Vaux, Driant, de Verdun—a territory of some thirty or forty square miles. The American officers could check many details by their spies, and they said that Meissner’s memory was beyond belief.

  Emil, for his part, said that American coffee, candy, and cigarettes were himmlisch. He was particularly pleased with apple pie, and when the officers of the friendly enemy came to a party in the evening he served it to them proudly. When the time came for the jump-off, they had his German uniform newly cleaned and pressed; and took him into a large drawing-room with an immense map on the wall. The commanders of all corps and divisions of Third came in, and Emil stood, pointer in hand, and gave them a briefing, showing them where to attack and how. He spoke in excellent English for two or three hours without a break. Lanny wasn’t there at the time, but he was told about it later, and how freely the American generals had expressed their admiration. They said that only one thing would have improved the occasion, and that was to have Adolf Hitler among the auditors.

  II

  During the P.A.’s sojourn with the Third Army it still had the Moselle River before it and was permitted to fight only for “limited objectives.” But with Patton that meant a lot of activity, especially as the enemy seemed to be in the same mood. The front was “fluid”; each side kept stabbing at the other, and units found themselves now and then behind the enemy lines. The sound of gunfire was incessant; and as Lanny wasn’t supposed to get into danger, they would pick him up and with other G-2’s move them away. The rain was incessant, the mud was horrible, and men were in misery from head to foot—head colds and trench feet. The airstrips were so soggy that planes couldn’t get off, which gave the enemy a great advantage.

  But G-2 went on working, and after a couple of weeks they reported, that they had located Kurt Meissner. They wouldn’t take him right away. That, they told Lanny, was the weakness of the Gestapo: they were so full of hate that they couldn’t restrain themselves and would grab one man; but the Americans were calm and calculating and would watch their man for a long time and get all his associates. Lanny wasn’t allowed near the place for fear of being recognized; he spent his time interviewing prisoners who were brought in every night from the raids. The officers had promised that they would let him be present when Kurt was taken; they wanted his help in handling this prize catch, soothing him down, and possibly getting information out of him.

  The day came, and they put the P.A. in a staff car with two other Intelligence men. Lanny had his comforting Budd automatic in a holster, and by his side on the seat a large bundle, carefully wrapped and tied; it contained a complete outfit for a Wehrmacht Kapitän, five-feet-ten and weighing about seventy kilos. It had been taken from a dead man and was newly cleaned and pressed, and included everything except the arms and the insignia. The wardrobe department of OSS thought nothing of equipping a score of men every day with different outfits, each exactly what it ought to be. Some of the outfitters had come from Hollywood and had been doing that sort of thing for thirty years.

  The party was preceded by two other cars and followed by two more, under supervision, with men specially trained to take particular prisoners and not let them get away or commit suicide. The amount of brain power and hard work which had gone into this war would have solved most of the secrets of the universe. Or so, at any rate, thought the pacifist son of Budd-Erling, as he sat looking out upon a rain-soaked landscape, shivering slightly, and wiping his nose now and then—for he had an undignified cold, like so many others of those who would never get rich in this man’s army. The car skidded now and then on a slippery highway, and twice they had to get out
and wait while the GI’s lifted it out of the mud and set it onto the pavement.

  But they were coming to the town of Toul, and Kurt was there, and Lanny had been waiting for this D-day a long time; so he perked up, and by the time that darkness fell and they were coming into the town, he found his heart thumping with excitement. However, the way things happened wasn’t at all picturesque or dramatic; the caravan stopped by a sidewalk, and Lanny was told to sit there and wait, and he did so. He knew that the men were surrounding a certain house, but he didn’t see that house, except later as a dark form looming. He had been told that the telephone wires would be cut, and that what was called a “surreptitious entry” would be gained; that is, they wouldn’t ring the bell or batter in the door, but would pick a lock or cut a pane of glass out of a window, while having on one hand a sticky glove that would keep the pane from falling when it was pushed in. So many tricks there were—and so many unsolved secrets of the universe!

  III

  Lanny was prepared to hear shooting, but there wasn’t any. A sergeant came and reported, “Everything is ready, sir.” Lanny asked, “You have them all?” And the answer was, “All that were in this place.” Lanny got out, took the bundle of clothing under his arm, and followed the man to the house, which was one of a block, only dimly to be made out. They went in by a doorway where two soldiers stood guard; they went up a flight of stairs by the light of an electric torch. There was an open door at the top and light pouring from a room. Lanny stopped in the doorway, and there, in the middle of the room, sitting stiff in a straight chair, was Kurt Meissner, and perhaps ten feet away a GI with a tommy gun at ready.

  Lanny took in the scene at a glance. The room was somebody’s study, and had bookcases against the wall, and a flat-top desk at which Kurt had probably been sitting, for there were papers scattered over it. He was wearing a dark gray business suit, and his beard and mustache were as the artist had drawn them. Lanny thought, he is thinner and paler. Poor fellow!