Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes

by Peggie Benton

  ‘Do you remember the day when the Wirtin gave us softboiled eggs instead of hard ones and we had to wipe the children’s faces with handfuls of bracken?’ I asked Tante Hella.

  ‘Yes, and when we went to pick mushrooms in the fir plantations you were worried because there was no undergrowth, only rows of straight tree trunks and you could find nowhere to—how do you say—spend a penny.’

  ‘And we used to go for walks with Anukelchen and she made us each take a long stick and beat the grass in front of us to frighten away the snakes,’ Sam interrupted.

  ‘Quite right too,’ said the baron. ‘Every year children are bitten by snakes and we lose dogs.’

  ‘But Anukelchen was very silly,’ said Mark. ‘She told us that the storks brought babies and we knew where babies came from, but you wouldn’t let us tell her. Look Daddy, the stork’s up there now.’ He pointed to a large untidy nest on the stable roof.

  ‘Storks are monogamous,’ observed the baron, ‘and if the wife is unfaithful the stork fetches all the males in the neighbourhood and they peck her to death.’

  ‘And if he has a roving eye?’ asked Kenneth.

  ‘The other females are too busy with their nests to care, I expect. That’s how life is.’ He looked serenely at his wife.

  Five years ago I had expected Rindseln to be my home. It was a happy place, but there would have been no freedom to fly away like the storks if the cold closed in.

  We were sitting on the verandah looking across the pond towards the orchard where Jimmy and I had spent the night of the midsummer festival with guns on our knees to scare away returning revellers from the ripening apples.

  The boys and Tello scampered off in the direction of the stables.

  ‘I’ll take them for a ride,’ said Tante Hella.

  ‘Come and see what we’ve done since you left,’ the baron said.

  The spring-droshky rattled past with the baroness and the boys astride the plank and the stable-master whipping up the horses. They all waved as it turned into the linden avenue and disappeared in a cloud of white dust.

  We followed the avenue of chestnuts to the great house on the high ground above the lake. Scaffolding still surrounded the burnt-out shell, and the white columns of the portico were stark beneath the charred roof beams.

  ‘Only a few of the great houses escaped damage during the war,’ Kruedener said. ‘The best of them were italianate, copies of the work of Rastrelli, one of the architects of Catherine the Great. They were all built of wood and ready to go up like tinder. Sometimes it was the disgruntled peasants, sometimes the Russians and sometimes the Germans. One day we shall rebuild—when the orchards are bearing. We’ve planted half a hectare already. Come and see.’

  We turned towards the head of the lake. The steep banks had been clothed in forest pines, mirrored in the deep water. Now they had vanished and in their stead were naked stumps, like the seats in an outdoor theatre. I stood aghast. The mutilation was shocking.

  ‘We needed cash to plant the apples,’ said Kruedener. ‘You fell a tree and take the money and it’s finished. But the apples keep on coming.’

  ‘Who burnt Rindseln?’ Kenneth asked.

  ‘We are not sure. It happened during the German occupation when I was away fighting.’

  ‘What was the occupation like?’

  ‘Not so bad for us. Not good for the Latvians, though. But at least it kept the Russians out of this part of the country. In Livonia, where they set up a puppet republic, there were revolutionary tribunals and people suspected of capitalist sympathies were shot without trial. Life was utterly wretched. So you see, we preferred the Germans, and Ludendorff, who was in charge here, wasn’t a bad fellow.

  ‘I and most of my fellow landowners wanted to take a hand against the Bolsheviks, so we formed a militia, the Baltische Landeswehr, but even with the help of some Latvians and White Russians we were only a small force, so we joined up with the German Iron Division, who were freelances like ourselves.

  ‘In the end, our Landeswehr came under the command of a British officer, a young fellow called Alexander [Alexander of Tunis]. I believe he’s done quite well for himself since then. In spite of everything those were wonderful times.’ Kruedener’s eyes shone. ‘Riding all day and shooting game when there was nothing else to shoot; cooking it in the open or on the hearth of a great hall. Do you know, it was a strange thing, one could go into a ballroom and find the windows broken, the pictures slashed, the furniture hacked to pieces, but all the mirrors untouched. It was an old superstition that whoever broke a mirror would die. I learnt a lot of useful things during the campaign. For instance, I know where the hardest fighting took place and where the tree trunks will be full of shrapnel. Never cut timber like that. It strips the teeth of the saw.’

  Tante Hella was coming up the drive with the boys. Each was carrying a couple of eggs tied up in his handkerchief. ‘We found them in the stable,’ they shouted. ‘One of the hens had laid astray. Can we have them for supper?’

  ‘You will stay for supper, won’t you?’ Tante Hella asked.

  ‘But the boys ...’

  ‘They can go to their old room after the meal and sleep for an hour or two. It’s summer and easy driving at night. What is lighting-up time, Edgar? Eleven o’clock? You see, there’s plenty of time.’

  The table with its heavy linen cloth looked just as it used to, except that Jimmy’s chair was empty. The Wirtin had roasted a hare, which she served with cranberry sauce and sliced cucumbers in sour cream, but the boys preferred a bowl of Griitze, barley baked with milk and butter, crisp and golden on top.

  We sat on the verandah with glasses of home-made apple wine. Bats were flickering across the pale sky and the cool evening air carried a faint aromatic scent of resin from the clustered pine stumps at the head of the lake. Occasionally the silence around us was broken by the harsh cry of a night bird or a gentle plop from the pond.

  ‘It is hard to believe that less than twenty years ago this country was devastated,’ I said, thinking of the neat houses and well-kept parks.

  ‘By the time the fighting ended,’ said Kruedener, ‘there was hardly a bridge or a building, or come to that a virgin, left intact. One must hand it to the Latvians. They did a wonderful job in clearing up the mess and getting the country on its feet again. ‘The war in these parts must have been chaotic,’ said Kenneth. ‘People with entirely different ideas linking up, and then changing sides again, saying one thing and meaning another.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m afraid that goes for your people too.’ Kruedener smiled apologetically. ‘You may not know that while the Latvians were confidently awaiting the Allies’ de jure recognition of their independence, the British were negotiating with the White Russian Admiral Kolchak about returning the Baltic States to a future White Russian monarch.’

  ‘But your people were quite happy to work in with the Germans, though you had no intention of allowing them to take over the country,’ Kenneth objected.

  ‘As far as the Balts are concerned,’ Kruedener said quietly, ‘you must understand that we have been here for seven hundred years—centuries longer than the existence of the American nation. Like the Americans and the British, we and the Germans share the same language, but we value our independence, just as the Americans do. In order to try and preserve it we’ve had to use whatever means came to hand. At least we didn’t set out to interfere in the affairs of wholly unrelated nations.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Kenneth.

  It was long after midnight when we reached home and lifted the boys, fast asleep, from the dusty old car. ‘We’ve missed them,’ said Kruedener, ‘and we miss you too.’

  Chapter 9

  On August 23rd, 1939, the Germans and the Russians signed a non-aggression pact, while German troops massed on the Polish frontier. News trickled through from Poland that the population was calm. Two days later Britain and Poland signed a mutual assistance pact—gilding the lily it might seem, s
ince offers of mutual assistance had already been made and accepted, and with the rapidly growing might of the Third Reich lying between the two countries it was not easy to imagine what form the assistance might take.

  ‘Black caviar has disappeared from the shops,’ Kenneth reported. In the climate of rumour and apprehension this seemed sinister, though the Russians might only be holding back exports of caviar to distract their visitors’ attention from the Soviet standard of cooking, which by all accounts was very poor.

  On September 1st, at 5.30 in the morning, the Germans invaded Poland with three forces, striking in from East Prussia, Bohemia and Slovakia. By midday Warsaw and the principal cities had already been bombed. There was no ultimatum, no declaration of war. The world was simply told that Poland had ‘refused the peaceful settlement desired by Hitler and had appealed to arms.’

  Britain and France demanded the withdrawal of German troops from Poland and gave a final warning to the Germans. ‘Go into Riga, gnädige Frau,’ Lotte begged, ‘and buy some salt and sugar and tea. There is no salt in Latvia. You’ve no idea what it’s like to eat food without salt. When I was in Petrograd in the last war ...’

  In Riga there were queues in all the food shops and at the diplomatic bonded stores most of the shelves were empty. Pounds could no longer be accepted. Everything must be paid in dollars. The exchange rate would be twenty per cent higher than before. In the eyes of the storekeeper, Britain was already at war. Out at the Strand the sun shone with a tranquil brilliance, all the pines red-gold and lofty, with the spiders’ webs unbroken in the shimmering air. But in Poland there was death and desolation.

  Sunday September 3rd was a still golden day. We sailed down the Lielupe to the sand bar where the river flows into the bay. The boat was very shaky now. Perhaps she would not last the holidays. As we tied up at the jetty we sat in a row on the warm silvery planks and dangled our toes in the water. There was a fortnight of mellow autumn days before the boys need go back to school.

  When we reached home we turned on our small wireless set. As Lotte put the bowl of soup on the table the voice of the King came very clear. With our arms round the boys’ shoulders we listened to his speech. Great Britain was at war with Germany. Although we had realised that war was inevitable, its outbreak was a shock. All the summer we had longed for the month of September when families return to Riga, the sea is warm and the beach empty, the dachas shuttered once more and the small shops closed; when there is a country stillness in the air and the evenings are long and sharp with frost.

  Instead, we were packing up the dacha and Zasulauks was once more piling our furniture onto his lorry; the furniture which had never stood more than six months in one place. Lotte, running in sudden zigzags, turned all her energy into an inconsistent devastation of carefully laid plans.

  When the last room was empty I gathered all the zinnias into a glowing bunch and we got into the hired car which was waiting, its tyres deep in the sand. At our corner, Ukermarks was measuring a piece of ground with an official of the Forestry Commission. I gave him the keys and he shook hands with us and shouted ‘Sveike’ .

  On the way back, we stopped the car at the Addisons’ and Una and the old lady came out to say goodbye. The road to Riga was empty, so different from the week before when the families were moving back in time for the school term. On either hand the countryside lay placid and glowing with autumn, untouched as yet by trouble.

  Sam and Mark were wearing their grey flannel suits once more after weeks of old shirts and bathing drawers. They sat on each side of me holding very carefully the sailing boats they had rigged. Both were excited at driving in a motor car.

  We stopped at the toll house and then the car raced across the pontoon bridge over the Daugava, each section clanking as we passed. By evening the flat would be in order. There remained the problem of the boys’ journey home.

  For the first few days in Riga we thought we should suffocate. Opening windows only let in dead air from the street. The stars and trees of the dacha had been replaced by the grey mass of the Vorburg flats. Shoes irked one’s feet and the pavements were hard and merciless.

  In the shops, people were still anxiously buying up stocks. Foreign goods were already restricted. Only one reel of cotton, one pair of silk stockings and three pennyworth of cotton wool could be bought at a time. Foreign cosmetics were vanishing regardless of their colours and scents. Medicines, films, buttons and pins were all snatched up in a panic. Petrol was already rationed, and coffee mixed with twenty-five per cent of roasted barley, but there was still an abundance of dairy products.

  By order of the Admiralty the Baltic had been closed to British shipping since the end of August, and the way home now lay through Sweden and Norway. The Orde children had already left, and were held up in Bergen. There were rumours that the town was so crowded that the cheapest rooms cost one pound a day.

  The day after the Ordes left came news of the torpedoing of a neutral cargo ship in the North Sea, but people continued to flock back to England like migrating birds.

  Terrible accounts were coming from Poland of wanton attacks on the civilian population, of the desperate bravery of the Polish cavalry charging against German tanks, and of the merciless pincer movement closing in on Warsaw. The Polish Corridor, which was formed to give Poland an outlet to the sea, was now occupied by the Germans, who had taken over Danzig. Thornton, one of the British engineers expelled from Russia after the 1933 Metropolitan Vickers espionage trials in Moscow, walked into the Consulate one morning haggard and dusty. He had bicycled the two hundred miles from Warsaw, where he had been working since his expulsion from the USSR.

  German attacks on shipping in the North Sea were intensifying. At this moment Miggs wrote that if we could send the boys to Stockholm, the Montagu-Pollocks would put them on the train to Oslo. After that, we would see.

  So Sam and Mark flew off to Stockholm waving happily and I went straight to the Passport Control Office to start work. In the entrance hall the staff of the Danzig Consulate were standing disconsolately by their suitcases after their flight from the battered city. On the morning of September 1st they had woken to hear the guns of the SCHLESWIG HOLSTEIN bombarding the port at point blank range. No warning had been given, though the officers from the German battleship had called on the Polish authorities only two days before.

  Following the usual crisis routine, the Danzig staff had kept suitcases ready packed in their office, so they piled into the car left behind by the penultimate Consul-General—trains had been requisitioned by the Germans—and set out for Riga under Gestapo escort as far as Konigsberg. The journey went well, in spite of two breakdowns on the Lithuanian roads. They slept in the car and ate only the food they had brought with them. When they finally reached the Hotel St Petersburg they found Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, who had also fled to Riga.

  News came from Miggs that Sam and Mark had arrived safely in Oslo and that the wife of the Legation radio operator had offered to put them up. There was at present no prospect of passages across the North Sea, so perhaps we would like the boys to go to a Norwegian school meanwhile. This seemed a good idea, although school in England was about to begin and the term’s fees were already paid.

  Riga, meanwhile, had had its first Air Raid Precaution practice blackout and the dvornik, our house-porter, had covered our windows meticulously with black paper. People were sending their valuables to Stockholm and we, too, packed a trunk of treasures and shipped them off for storage in the Legation cellars.

  On September 17th the Red Army invaded Poland and surged across the country to Brest Litovsk, where the Germans had accepted the surrender of the Tsarist armies in 1917. The roads into Latvia and Lithuania were choked with refugees.

  Miggs wrote that the boys had decided against going to a Norwegian school as they felt sure they would get back to England soon. ‘Sam has found his stamp collection is getting out of hand, so we have divided the wo
rld between the three of us,’ wrote Miggs, ‘and formed a stamp triumvirate, just in time to stop Mark merely switching from brown stamps to blue. The school has moved to Eardisley in the Wye Valley. I wonder how the boys will find it. Mark is taking things very calmly. He told Sam he had better go on speaking German as Germany will probably be part of the British Empire by next year!’

  News constantly reached us of German attacks on North Sea shipping and the boys’ onward journey was a nagging anxiety, but on September 25th a telegram arrived from Miggs saying that they had been put on the night train to Bergen where they could take the STELLA POLARIS for Newcastle. She explained in a letter that the Ponsonbys, who were travelling home, had agreed to take them under their wing. However, the North Sea was rough and the boys wrote that after leaving Bergen they had not seen their escort again. The rest of the postcard described the glories of the Smörgåsbord, so evidently they had not been worried by the weather.

  From this point, my mother took up the story. The boys had apparently made friends with a man on the train and invited him to breakfast at her club. He, in turn, had tracked down the address to which the school had been evacuated and put them on the train for the Wye Valley at Paddington.

  Chapter 10

  On September 28th news came that after four weeks of continual bombing, on the twenty-third day of siege Warsaw had fallen and the Polish Government had fled to Romania. Once again in her troubled history Poland was to be partitioned. This time, the Germans were annexing the west and the Russians the eastern part of the country.

  The war was now in its fifth week and our lives had settled into a steadier rhythm. Papers arrived calling Kenneth for service with the Honourable Artillery Company, of which he was still a member, but the Foreign Office refused to release him and it seemed that for the present we should remain in Riga.

  Every morning we walked the length of the Ausekla iela, turned into the gardens and followed the winding path along the Canal, crossing the footbridge to the Consulate in the Raina Boulevard, which opened at ten o’clock.