by Ken Follett
Then he died.
(viii)
Daisy cried when she heard. Boy had been a rotter, and treated her badly, but she had loved him once, and he had taught her a lot about sex; and she felt sad that he had been killed.
His brother, Andy, was now a viscount and heir to the earldom; Andy’s wife, May, was a viscountess; and Daisy’s name, according to the elaborate rules of the aristocracy, was the Dowager Viscountess Aberowen – until she married Lloyd, when she would be relieved to become plain Mrs Williams.
However, that might be a long time coming, even now. Over the summer, hopes of a quick end to the war came to nothing. A plot by German army officers to kill Hitler on 20 July failed. The Germany army was in full retreat on the Eastern Front, and the Allies took Paris in August, but Hitler was determined to fight on to the terrible end. Daisy had no idea when she would see Lloyd, let alone marry him.
One Wednesday in September, when she went to spend the evening in Aldgate, she was greeted by a jubilant Eth Leckwith. ‘Great news!’ Ethel said when Daisy walked into the kitchen. ‘Lloyd has been selected as Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Hoxton!’
Lloyd’s sister Millie was there with her two children, Lennie and Pammie. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said. ‘He’ll be Prime Minister, I bet.’
‘Yes,’ said Daisy, and she sat down heavily.
‘Well, I can see you’re not happy about that,’ said Ethel. ‘As my friend Mildred would say, it went down like a cup of cold sick. What’s the matter?’
‘It’s just that having me as a wife isn’t going to help him get elected.’ It was because she loved him so much that she felt so bad. How could she blight his prospects? But how could she give him up? When she thought like this her heart felt heavy and life seemed desolate.
‘Because you’re an heiress?’ said Ethel.
‘Not just that. Before Boy died he told me Lloyd would never get elected with an ex-Fascist as his wife.’ She looked at Ethel, who always told the truth, even when it hurt. ‘He was right, wasn’t he?’
‘Not entirely,’ Ethel said. She put the kettle on for tea, then sat opposite Daisy at the kitchen table. ‘I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter. But I don’t think you should despair.’
You’re just like me, Daisy thought. You say what you think. No wonder he loves me: I’m a younger version of his mother!
Millie said: ‘Love conquers all, doesn’t it?’ She noticed that four-year-old Lennie was hitting two-year-old Pammie with a wooden soldier. ‘Don’t bash your sister!’ she said. Turning back to Daisy, she went on: ‘And my brother loves you to bits. I don’t think he’s ever loved anyone else, to tell you the truth.’
‘I know,’ said Daisy. She wanted to cry. ‘But he’s determined to change the world, and I can’t bear the thought that I’m standing in his way.’
Ethel took the crying two-year-old on to her knee, and the toddler calmed down immediately. ‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ she said to Daisy. ‘Be prepared for questions, and expect hostility, but don’t dodge the issue and don’t hide your past.’
‘What should I say?’
‘You might say you were fooled by Fascism, as millions of others were; but you drove an ambulance in the Blitz, and you hope you’ve paid your dues. Work out the exact words with Lloyd. Be confident, be your irresistibly charming self, and don’t let it get you down.’
‘Will it work?’
Ethel hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said after a pause. ‘I really don’t. But you have to try.’
‘It would be awful if he had to give up what he loves most for my sake. Something like that could destroy a marriage.’
Daisy was half hoping Ethel would deny this, but she did not. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
19
1945 (I)
Woody Dewar got used to the crutches quickly.
He was wounded at the end of 1944, in Belgium, in the Battle of the Bulge. The Allies pushing towards the German border had been surprised by a powerful counter-attack. Woody and others of the 101st Airborne Division had held out at a vital crossroads town called Bastogne. When the Germans sent a formal letter demanding surrender, General McAuliffe sent back a one-word message that became famous: ‘Nuts!’
Woody’s right leg was smashed up by machine-gun bullets on Christmas Day. It hurt like hell. Even worse, it was a month before he got out of the besieged town and into a real hospital.
His bones would mend, and he might even lose the limp, but his leg would never again be strong enough for parachuting.
The Battle of the Bulge was the last offensive of Hitler’s army in the West. After that they would never counter-attack again.
Woody returned to civilian life, which meant he could live at his parents’ apartment in Washington and enjoy being fussed over by his mother. When the plaster cast came off he went back to work at his father’s office.
On Thursday 12 April 1945, he was in the Capitol building, the home of the Senate and the House of Representatives, hobbling slowly through the basement, talking to his father about refugees. ‘We think about twenty-one million people in Europe have been driven from their homes,’ said Gus. ‘The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration is ready to help them.’
‘I guess that will start any day now,’ said Woody. ‘The Red Army is almost in Berlin.’
‘And the US Army is only fifty miles away.’
‘How much longer can Hitler hold out?’
‘A sane man would have surrendered by now.’
Woody lowered his voice. ‘Somebody told me the Russians found what seems to have been an extermination camp. The Nazis killed hundreds of people a day there. A place called Auschwitz, in Poland.’
Gus nodded grimly. ‘It’s true. The public don’t know yet, but they’ll find out sooner or later.’
‘Someone should be put on trial for that.’
‘The UN War Crimes Commission has been at work for a couple of years now, making lists of war criminals and collecting evidence. Someone will be put on trial, provided we can keep the United Nations going after the war.’
‘Of course we can,’ Woody said indignantly. ‘Roosevelt campaigned on that basis last year, and he won the election. The United Nations conference opens in San Francisco in a couple of weeks.’ San Francisco had a special significance for Woody, because Bella Hernandez lived there, but he had not yet told his father about her. ‘The American people want to see international co-operation, so that we never have another war like this one. Who could be against that?’
‘You’d be surprised. Look, most Republicans are decent men who simply have a view of the world that is different from ours. But there is a hard core of fucking nutcases.’
Woody was startled. His father rarely swore.
‘The types who planned an insurrection against Roosevelt in the thirties,’ Gus went on. ‘Businessmen like Henry Ford, who thought Hitler was a good strong anti-Communist leader. They sign up for right-wing groups such as America First.’
Woody could not remember him speaking this angrily before.
‘If these fools have their way, there will be a third world war even worse than the first two,’ Gus said. ‘I’ve lost a son to war, and if I ever have a grandson I don’t want to lose him too.’
Woody suffered a stab of grief: Joanne would have given Gus grandchildren, if she had lived.
Right now Woody was not even dating, so grandchildren were a distant prospect – unless he could track down Bella in San Francisco . . .
‘We can’t do anything about complete idiots,’ Gus went on. ‘But perhaps we can deal with Senator Vandenberg.’
Arthur Vandenberg was a Republican from Michigan, a conservative and an opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Gus.
‘He’s our greatest danger,’ Gus said. ‘He may be self-important and vain, but he commands respect. The President has been wooing him, and he’s come around to our point of view,
but he could backslide.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘He’s strongly anti-Communist.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. We are too.’
‘Yes, but Arthur is kind of rigid about it. He’ll get riled if we do anything he thinks is kowtowing to Moscow.’
‘Such as?’
‘God knows what kind of compromises we might have to make in San Francisco. We’ve already agreed to admit Belorussia and the Ukraine as separate states, which is just a way of giving Moscow three votes in the General Assembly. We have to keep the Soviets on board – but if we go too far, Arthur could turn against the whole United Nations project. Then the Senate may refuse to ratify it, exactly the way they rejected the League of Nations in 1919.’
‘So our job in San Francisco is to keep the Soviets happy without offending Senator Vandenberg.’
‘Exactly.’
They heard running footsteps, an unusual sound in the dignified hallways of the Capitol. They both looked around. Woody was surprised to see the vice-president, Harry Truman, running through the hallway. He was dressed normally, in a grey double-breasted suit and a polka-dot tie, though he had no hat. He seemed to have lost his normal escort of aides and Secret Service guards. He was running steadily, breathing hard, not looking at anyone, going somewhere in a terrific hurry.
Woody and Gus watched in astonishment. So did everyone else.
When Truman disappeared around a corner, Woody said: ‘What the heck . . . ?’
Gus said: ‘I think the President must have died.’
(ii)
Volodya Peshkov entered Germany in a ten-wheeler Studebaker US6 army truck. Made in South Bend, Indiana, the truck had been carried by rail to Baltimore, shipped across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Persian Gulf, then sent by train from Persia to central Russia. Volodya knew it was one of two hundred thousand Studebaker trucks given to the Red Army by the American government. The Russians liked them: they were tough and reliable. The men said the letters ‘USA’ stencilled on the side stood for Ubit Sukina syna Adolf, which meant ‘Kill that son of a bitch Adolf.’
They also liked the food the Americans were sending, especially the cans of compressed meat called Spam, strangely bright pink in colour but gloriously fatty.
Volodya had been posted to Germany because the intelligence he was getting from spies in Berlin was now not as up-to-date as information that could be gained by interviewing German prisoners of war. His fluent German made him a first-class front-line interrogator.
When he crossed the border he had seen a Soviet government poster that said: ‘Red Army soldier: You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!’ It was among the milder pieces of propaganda. The Kremlin had been whipping up hatred of Germans for some time, believing it would make soldiers fight harder. Political commissars had calculated – or said they had – the number of men killed in battle, the number of houses torched, the number of civilians murdered for being Communists or Slavs or Jews, in every village and town overrun by the German army. Many front-line soldiers could quote the figures for their own neighbourhoods, and were eager to do the same kind of damage in Germany.
The Red Army had reached the river Oder, which snaked north– south across Prussia, the last barrier before Berlin. A million Soviet soldiers were within fifty miles of the capital, poised to strike. Volodya was with the Fifth Shock Army. Waiting for the fighting to begin, he was studying the army newspaper, Red Star.
What he read horrified him.
The hate propaganda went further than anything he had read before. ‘If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day,’ he read. ‘If you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German before combat. If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Kill the German – this is your old mother’s prayer. Kill the German – this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German – this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.’
It was a bit sickening, Volodya thought. But worse was implied. The writer made light of looting: ‘German women are only losing fur coats and silver spoons that were stolen in the first place.’ And there was a sidelong joke about rape: ‘Soviet soldiers do not refuse the compliments of German women.’
Soldiers were not the most civilized of men in the first place. The way the invading Germans had behaved in 1941 had enraged all Russians. The government was fuelling their wrath with talk of revenge. And now the army newspaper was making it clear they could do anything they liked to the defeated Germans.
It was a recipe for Armageddon.
(iii)
Erik von Ulrich was consumed by a yearning that the war should be over.
With his friend Hermann Braun and their boss Dr Weiss, Erik set up a field hospital in a small Protestant church; then they sat in the nave with nothing to do but wait for the horse-drawn ambulances to arrive loaded with horribly torn and burned men.
The German army had reinforced Seelow Heights, overlooking the Oder river where it passed closest to Berlin. Erik’s aid station was in a village a mile back from the line.
Dr Weiss, who had a friend in army intelligence, said there were 110,000 Germans defending Berlin against a million Soviets. With his usual sarcasm he said: ‘But our morale is high, and Adolf Hitler is the greatest genius in military history, so we are certain to win.’
There was no hope, but German soldiers were still fighting fiercely. Erik believed this was because of the stories filtering back about how the Red Army behaved. Prisoners were killed, homes were looted and wrecked, women were raped and nailed to barn doors. The Germans believed they were defending their own families from Communist brutality. The Kremlin’s hate propaganda was backfiring.
Erik was looking forward to defeat. He longed for the killing to stop. He just wanted to go home.
He would have his wish soon – or he would be dead.
Sleeping on a wooden pew, Erik was awakened at three o’clock in the morning on Monday 16 April by the Russian guns. He had heard artillery bombardments before, but this was ten times as loud as anything in his experience. For the men on the front line it must have been literally deafening.
The wounded started to arrive at dawn, and the team went wearily to work, amputating limbs, setting broken bones, extracting bullets, and cleaning and bandaging wounds. They were short of everything from drugs to clean water, and they gave morphine only to those who were screaming in agony.
Men who could still walk and hold a gun were sent back to the line.
The German defenders held out longer than Dr Weiss expected. At the end of the first day they were still in position, and as darkness fell the rush of wounded slowed. The medical unit got some sleep that night.
Early on the next day Werner Franck was brought in, his right wrist horribly crushed.
He was a captain now. He had been in charge of a section of the line with thirty 88mm Flak guns. ‘We only had eight shells for each gun,’ he said while Dr Weiss’s clever fingers worked slowly and meticulously to set his smashed bones. ‘Our orders were to fire seven at the Russian tanks, then use the eighth to destroy our own gun so that it could not be used by the Reds.’ He had been standing by an 88 when it suffered a direct hit from the Soviet artillery and turned over on him. ‘I was lucky it was only my hand,’ he said ‘It might have been my damn head.’
When his wrist had been taped up, he said to Erik: ‘Have you heard from Carla?’
Erik knew that his sister and Werner were now a couple. ‘I haven’t had any letters for weeks.’
‘Nor me. I hear things are pretty grim in Berlin. I hope she’s all right.’
‘I worry, too,’ said Erik.
Surprisingly, the Germans held the Seelow Heights for another day and night.
The dressing station got no warning that the line had collapsed. They were triaging a fresh cartload of wounded when seven or eight Soviet soldiers
crashed into the church. One fired a machine-gun burst at the vaulted ceiling and Erik threw himself to the ground, as did everyone else capable of moving.
Seeing that no one was armed, the Russians relaxed. They went around the room taking watches and rings from those who had them. Then they left.
Erik wondered what would happen next. This was the first time he had been trapped behind enemy lines. Should they abandon the field hospital and try to catch up with their retreating army? Or were their patients safer here?
Dr Weiss was decisive. ‘Carry on with your work, everyone,’ he said.
A few minutes later a Soviet soldier came in with a comrade over his shoulder. Pointing his gun at Weiss, he spoke a rapid stream of Russian. He was in a panic, and his friend was covered in blood.
Weiss replied calmly. In halting Russian he said: ‘No need for the gun. Put your friend on this table.’
The soldier did so, and the team went to work. The soldier kept his rifle pointed at the doctor.
Later in the day, the German patients were marched or carried out and put into the back of a truck which drove away east. Erik watched Werner Franck disappear, a prisoner of war. As a boy, Erik had often been told the story of his Uncle Robert, who had been imprisoned by the Russians during the First World War, and had walked home from Siberia, a journey of four thousand miles. Erik wondered now where Werner would end up.
More wounded Russians were brought in, and the Germans took care of them as they would have of their own men.
Later, as Erik fell into an exhausted sleep, he realized that now he, too, was a prisoner of war.
(iv)
As the Allied armies closed in on Berlin, the victorious countries began squabbling among themselves at the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Woody would have found it depressing, except that he was more interested in trying to reconnect with Bella Hernandez.
She had been on his mind all through the D-Day invasion and the fighting in France, his time in hospital and his convalescence. A year ago she had been at the end of her period at Oxford University and planning to do a doctorate at Berkeley, right here in San Francisco. She would probably be living at her parents’ home in Pacific Heights, unless she had an apartment near the campus.
