[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes

by Anthology

  Rommel snapped his fingers for the guards to take the body away. “And you, too?”

  “Before or after I give you Prime Minister Churchill’s message? I’d appreciate a safe-conduct out of here.”

  “You have my word on it. I would have been disappointed if the English had sunk to using the notorious Lawrence as an assassin or a spy.” He glanced around, as if he could see an English regiment about to attack and rescue Lawrence.

  “I’m quite alone, I promise you.”

  “You’re dead! Men don’t disappear for five years, have funeral sermons preached over them, then appear in the middle of a war—”

  Lawrence laughed softly. “Herr General, you are not the only soldier known for being unpredictable. Would you not use your death—or a lie about it—to help your country?”

  “What assurances do I have that you are not a lie?” Already, Rommel was beckoning Lawrence toward “Mammut,” as if he preferred to debrief a spy in private. A junior officer hurried up, waving a message.

  “This is war the way the ancient Teutons used to fight it. I don’t even know at this moment whether the Afrika Korps is on the attack or not!” Rommel cursed.

  His mood had shifted from the ironic whimsicality of a moment ago. Lawrence knew there was not much time. Operation Crusader was keeping Rommel on the run with its very unpredictability.

  “Well?” he snapped at Lawrence.

  Moving slowly, keeping his hands in view at all times, Lawrence took off his weapons belt. “My word of honor,” he said.

  Rommel raised an eyebrow, and part of Lawrence agreed with him.

  “The word,” he went on, hating the theatricality of his words, “of a man who rode with Allenby into Jerusalem at the head of the first Christian army to take it since the Crusades.”

  Rommel laughed, a sound resembling the bark of a fox. “Crusade! Not precisely my favorite word,” he said.

  Lawrence shrugged. “Soldiers can only do what they can. We too must follow our orders, no matter how they tie our hands or short us on supplies.”

  “The Russian front! God only knows how sick I am of the damned Russian front! They want Cairo, Alexandria … I could give them all Egypt, but not one man, not one penny for Africa, but that it’s begrudged—”

  “And sent to Russia?” Lawrence asked. “Germany has some magnificent strategic minds, but Russia? Napoleon foundered there. Do you think that your Führer can succeed where Napoleon failed?”

  “Is this what your Churchill sent you to do?” Rommel snapped. “To test my loyalty to the Führer? My oath holds.”

  “You sound like one of Charlemagne’s paladins, off to fight the Moors.”

  Rommel bowed slightly, in pleased acknowledgment.

  “I do not think that this is the same kind of war, do you?” Lawrence continued. “Or even the type of war we fought in ‘17.”

  “The war is the war. I follow orders.”

  But Rommel’s answer sounded automatic. If he lost interest now, it could cost Lawrence his life. And if Rommel chose to reveal who had visited him, it could cost Churchill—and England—even more.

  “You do more than follow orders,” Lawrence said. “You serve your country. We are two of a kind, you know. I was silenced for more than five years, until England had a use for me once more. You … you are kept short of men and equipment, praised, but not truly given the honors due you—”

  “Let me tell you, Colonel, if this is an attempt to subvert me, it is a very crude one—”

  “I didn’t cross a battlefield to try anything that stupid,” Lawrence snapped.

  “What did you come to do?”

  “To ask you questions. You say you took an oath to Hitler. Well enough. Oaths should not be broken. What about your oath to Germany?

  “Look at this war. Look at how you’ve been treated. In the name of God, look at the man you call the Führer and the people he’s surrounded himself with. These are the men who are going to build your new Empire, your thousand-year Reich. Do you think they can do it? Can you honestly say of Hitler, ‘This is the man who will rule like a Charlemagne or Barbarossa’?”

  “Clearly, you want me to say, ‘No, I can’t.’ You may proceed. But make it quick. I’m getting bored.”

  “I gave you my weapon,” Lawrence said. “But I did come armed with something else.” Moving slowly, praying that his hands would not tremble with the sudden, dreadful fear that chilled him, Lawrence reached into his clothing and withdrew the photos he had carried for so long. “Look at these,” he said, and laid them down near Rommel’s hand. He was glad to step back; he had not realized that his life still held such value for him.

  The general opened the oilskin-wrapped packet and glanced at the pictures, one by one. He was a cool one, Lawrence would give him that, if he could look at those pictures and betray no reaction.

  “They could be frauds, you know,” said Rommel. “Since when did you become such a Zionist?”

  Lawrence drew himself up. “It has never been said of me that I have been a good friend to the Jews,” he said carefully. Aaronsohn, he thought, would certainly testify to that. “The pictures are not important because they depict Jews,” he said. “It would be the same if they showed Hottentots or Red Indians. What those pictures show is your Germany, your country to which you swore an oath, committing acts that will make its Reich last a thousand years only in infamy. A criminal Empire! Is that what you want?”

  Rommel snatched his Luger from his holster, but Lawrence grabbed his wrist. “It’s easy enough to kill me,” he hissed at Rommel. “After all, I’m ‘dead’ already. But it won’t kill the questions I’ve raised. And you wouldn’t be ready to shoot me if they hadn’t been questions you’ve already asked yourself. Do you approve of the way this war is being fought, or what else is going on? Can you honestly say that Hitler is a man of sanity and honor who is fit to rule the world?”

  “He holds my oath!” Rommel repeated.

  “I remind you. You gave your oath to Germany first. As I did to England.”

  “And you do this for England?” Rommel asked with heavy sarcasm.

  Lawrence nodded. “So I can make peace with myself, as I have not done since the Great War ended. Then it seemed that betrayal was everywhere; and so I left service until now, when I have been offered a chance, perhaps, to even the score.”

  Abruptly, weariness replaced Lawrence’s fear. At this very moment, Haseldon was being shoveled into a grave among his enemies, and Lawrence almost envied him. But he could not rest, not when he had more barbs to place.

  “I came in here with as fine a man as ever served with me,” he said. “Dead now. Look at your Afrika Korps, General. They fight like tigers. And look at your Italian soldiers. But what about the officers who command them?”

  “Shits they are and shits they have always been,” Rommel declared.

  “And is Mussolini any better? Or the drug addict Hitler has appointed as Air Marshal, who daily kills innocent English children? But you, you are a man of honor, a patriot, serving with such people. Do you truly think that, when this is all ended, they will reward you? They are likelier by far to turn on you for the very thing that makes you different.”

  “If I were not a man of honor, I could almost be a rat,” Rommel mused. “As it is, I know I’m going to regret talking with you or telling you that you can have your life, if you get out of here now.”

  “I’ll have my life, General,” Lawrence said. “But you, you’re going to die here. Unless you do what Napoleon did, and Vespasian before him: use Egypt as your bastion, and move north!”

  “I said get out!”

  “You, though. We could talk with you. If you headed the Reich, you and the Allies might be able to come to some agreement, push Germany’s borders out to their old limits or beyond a bit. And we’d have an end to this killing, this stupidity! Remember that, Rommel. England could deal with you. But with Hitler? We’ll fight to the last man.”

  “I follow my orders,” R
ommel said once again.

  “You’ve violated orders time and time again. Commandos are to be shot; you’ve let them live. Good God, you’re going to let me live. You’ve already broken your oath to honor a greater one. Honor that oath, by all means! Think about what it means, and what, to honor it as it deserves, you may have to do. Just think; that’s all I—all the world—ask.”

  Tentatively, Lawrence reached for his weapon—and the pictures. The gesture was a risk. But he could not cross Egypt unarmed, and he would not leave the photos among Germans.

  “I’m going now,” he said.

  “What will you tell your Prime Minister?” Again, the heavy sarcasm, mixed with exhaustion like Lawrence felt and something that he recognized as indecision.

  “I? Nothing. I have obeyed my orders and spoken with you. He promised me that when I had done so, I should go free. You will not hear of me again.”

  Rommel nodded. “So that is why you want the weapon. Sometimes that is the only way out … for such as we.” He started to hold out his hand, then withdrew it.

  “Wise of you, General,” Lawrence said. “Your men will simply think that you have heard your pet spy and sent him about his business. You and I will know differently, though. And, depending on how you act, so will history.”

  “You have your life,” Rommel said. “I will see you out of here. There are armed cars … short as we are, we can say that you stole one, unless your honor”—heavy irony on the word—“forbids that.”

  Rommel shouted for a signals officer and a mechanic. “Get me Berlin!” he demanded. “And you, fuel up my Heinkel!”

  “But the battle, Herr General—”

  “Am I to be obeyed, or not?” demanded Rommel. “Get moving! “This much,” Rommel murmured, “I can do. I can ask, and I can see.”

  He saw Lawrence still standing there, a small man in filthy, bloodstained robes, and started perceptibly.

  Lawrence almost smiled at him. Now that his work was finished, he felt curiously light, like a cartridge when its charge is spent. At Rommel’s gesture, Lawrence gathered the filthy folds of his native robes about him and stepped down from Mammut.

  “That way,” Rommel said. “There’s the car. Get moving.”

  Lawrence could almost feel the explosion of a bullet between his shoulderblades as he walked to the car. Behind him, he heard a shout of warning, a command to stop, then a shot—but no pain.

  As he started the car, he dared to steal a glance back at Rommel, who had knocked aside the barrel of a Walther P-38 from a soldier’s hand.

  “I told you not to fire! I gave that man my word of honor that he would have safeconduct out of here,” Rommel raged.

  The car started with a roar. If it had a full tank of petrol and luck was with him, it would be hours before he ran out of fuel. And then what? Then, somehow, he would join up with the sons of the men he had known long ago, men who would help him cross the desert, and take those damnable pictures to a place where, finally, he might lose and forget them forever. Whether or not Rommel played Faust to his Mephistopheles and turned on Hitler, whether the war had been shortened might matter to the rest of the world, but not to him. He would have begun the penance that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

  Aaronsohn’s ironic “Next year in Jerusalem” had become an obsession for him. The man had wanted Jerusalem for his people; in death, these at least would rest there. That seemed like the least he could do, if he were sentenced to go on living. Rommel had been right to stop him from being shot. Life was a more cruel sentence by far … perhaps for both of them.

  A LETTER FROM THE POPE

  Harry Harrison and Tom Shippey

  INTRODUCTION

  In the year 865, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a “great army” of the Vikings landed in England, led in legend and probably in fact by the sons of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. In the following years this army wiped out the rival dynasties of Northumbria, killed Edmund, King of East Anglia, and drove Burgred, King of Mercia, overseas, replacing him with a puppet ruler. By 878 all the kingdoms of the English had been conquered—except for Wessex. In Wessex, Alfred, the last of five brothers, continued to fight.

  But then the Vikings turned their full effort on him. At Twelfth Night 878, when all Christians were still getting over Christmas and when campaigning was normally out of the question, they made a surprise attack on Wessex, establishing a base at Chippenham, and according to the Chronicle again driving many Englishmen overseas and compelling others to submit. Alfred was forced to go into hiding and conduct a guerrilla campaign “with a small force, through the woods and the fastnesses of the fens”. It was at this time that—so the story goes—he was reduced to sheltering in a peasant’s hut where, immersed in his problems, he burned the good wife’s cakes and was violently rebuked for it.

  Yet Alfred managed somehow to stay alive, keep on fighting, and arrange for the army of Wessex to be gathered under the Vikings’ noses. He then, quite against the odds, defeated the “great army” decisively, and finally made a masterstroke of statesmanship. He treated the Viking king Guthrum with great forbearance, converted him to Christianity, and became his godfather. This set up a reasonable relationship between English and Vikings, gave Wessex security, and became the basis for the later reconquest of all England by Alfred’s son, grandson and later descendants (of whom Queen Elizabeth II is one).

  Many historians have noted that if Alfred had not held on in the winter of early 878, England would have become a Viking state, and the international language of the world would presumably now be a form of Danish. Yet another possibility.

  By 878 Alfred and Wessex stood for Christianity, and the Vikings for paganism. The later reconquest of England was for Christ as well as for the Wessex kings, and monastic chroniclers were liable to see Alfred as an early crusader. But we know, from his own words, that by 878 Alfred was already deeply dissatisfied with the ineptitude of his churchmen. We also know that about the same time Ethelred, Archbishop of Canterbury, had written to the pope to protest about Alfred’s extortions—which were very likely only a demand for further contributions to resist the pagan assaults. Pope John responded by sending Alfred a letter of severe reproof—at exactly the moment when Alfred was “journeying in difficulties through the woods and fens”. This letter never arrived. No doubt the letter carrier could not find the king, or thought the whole situation far too dangerous even to try.

  But what would have happened if the letter had been received? Would it have been the last straw for a king already isolated, almost without support from his own subjects and his own Church? A king also with clear precedent for simply retiring to safety? Or would Alfred (as he so often did in reality) have thought of another bold, imaginative and unprecedented step to take?

  This story explores that last possibility.

  Alfred, Guthrum, Ethelnoth, Odda, Ubbi, Bishop Ceolred, the archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the pope, are all historical characters. The pope’s letter is based on examples of his known correspondence.

  A dark figure moved under the trees ahead, barely visible through the heavy mist, and King Alfred raised his sword. Behind him the last army of England—all eighteen of them—stirred with unease, weapons ready as well.

  “Easy,” Alfred said, lowering his sword and leaning on it wearily. “It is one of the peasants from the village.” He looked down at the man who was now kneeling before him, gaping up at the gold torque and bracelets that marked the king.

  “How many are there?”

  “Tw-twelve, lord King,” the peasant stammered.

  “In the church?”

  “Yes, lord King.”

  The Vikings were conquerors, not raiders. Guthrum’s men always quartered themselves in the timber churches, leaving the peasant huts and the larger thanes’ dwellings undamaged—as long as there was no resistance. They meant to take the country over, not destroy it. The mist was rising and the lightless village was visible below.

  “What are
they doing now?”

  As if in reply the church door swung open, a square of red light against the blackness, and struggling figures passed across it before it slammed shut again. A female shriek hung in the air, then was drowned out by a roar of welcome.

  Edbert, the king’s chaplain, stirred with anger. He was lean, just string and bones, all the fat squeezed out by the passion of his faith. His voice, loud and resonant, had been formed by that same faith. “They are devils, heathen devils! Even in God’s own house they practise their beastly lusts. Surely He shall strike them in the middle of their sin, and they shall be carried to the houses of lamentation where the worm—”

  “Enough, Edbert.”

  Alfred knew that his chaplain was vehement against the heathens, striking out strongly enough with his heavy mace, for all his leanness and apparent reluctance to shed blood against the canons of the Church. But talk of miracles could only anger men who had wished for divine assistance many times—so far without reward. He turned back to the peasant. “You’re sure there are twelve?”

  “Yes, lord King.”

  The odds were not good. He needed a two-to-one advantage to guarantee victory. And Godrich was still coughing, near dead with cold. He was one of the eleven king’s companions who had right of precedence in every battle. But not this time. A sound reason must be concocted for leaving him behind.

  “I have a most important duty for you, Godrich. If the attack should fail we will need the horses. Take them all down the track. Guard them with your life. Take Edi to help you. All others follow me.”

  Alfred put his hand on the kneeling peasant’s shoulder.

  “How will we know the door is unbarred?”

  “My wife, lord King…”

  “She is in there with the Vikings?”

  “Aye, lord King.”

  “You have a knife in your belt? Follow, then. I grant you the throats of the wounded, to cut.”

  The men surged forward across the meadow, grimly eager now to end the waiting, to strike at least one nest of their enemies from the board.