These were a Northland people, according to the Nazis’ own formula as good as any in the world; surely as “Aryan” as Adi Schicklgruber the Austrian, or Hermann Göring the Bavarian or Josef Goebbels the dark and deformed Rhinelander. But it happened that geography was against them; the Neue Ordnung needed their harbors, and so they were to feel the jackboot in their faces, they were to be turned out of their homes and made into slaves of the conquering Nazi machine. They might have yielded, and been accepted as co-conquerors and deputy-rulers; but they resisted, they stood by their faith in freedom and humanity—and so their story became one which made men sick to watch.
VIII
The invasion began against six ports. German merchant ships came in, supposedly in ballast, but really loaded with Nazi troops and weapons. They had sent their spies and secret agents ahead and had everything planned with true German Gründlichkeit. They had charts of all the channels and minefields; they knew where the arsenals were, the airports, the oil storage depots, the telephone exchanges, the radio stations. The troops, many of them, spoke Norwegian, for the reason that, during the last war, the kindly Norwegians had accepted thousands of refugee children, had taken them into their homes and treated them as members of the family. Now they paid a return visit, in the role of thieves and murderers.
Everything went precisely on schedule. The troops emerged from the ships and seized the strategic places, while at the same time German warships came into the fjords, destroying whatever vessels or fortifications attempted resistance. At Trondheim the warships surrounded themselves with a fleet of small Norwegian vessels, so that the forts hesitated to open fire. In the great Oslo fjord several German vessels were sunk, but the troops came ashore, while the populace stared in helpless incredulity. Since the Norwegian government refused to yield to the invaders, fighting began and the small Norwegian army retreated to the north and east.
These details Lanny gathered, hour by hour, day by day. It was hard to think about anything else, or to find anybody who wanted to talk about anything else. What would the British fleet do? Lanny was among people who could give him some idea. The fleet was already out in force, because mines were being laid in Norwegian waters. It would seek out the German fleet and begin action; but these waters were stormy, and fogs appeared suddenly, and who found what would be a matter of chance. The Germans would be willing to risk their fleet, and perhaps to sacrifice it, in order to seize Norway and hold it. Would the British fleet venture into the Skagerrak, and what would be its chances against German U-boats in those narrow waters?
Such were the questions debated by the family and guests at Wickthorpe during the following week-end. Somebody was always glued to the radio, and now and then would turn it higher so that others could hear. Never since World War I had there been so many incidents, piling one on top of another. For example, the fighting at Narvik—that far northern fjord into which the Bessie Budd had sailed, at the head of which you heard day and night the sound of iron ore roaring down a chute from railroad cars into ships. Here had come a German expedition, supply ships guarded by half a dozen of the latest and largest destroyers; five smaller British destroyers dashed in during a snowstorm, barely missing the black rocks of the shore, and sank the supply ships and one of the enemy destroyers and left two others in flames. One British destroyer was sunk and one had to be beached; a third, crippled, managed to get away with the other two.
A few days later came nine British destroyers with the battleship Warspite, and wiped out seven German destroyers then in the fjord. Those were feats in the old tradition of Drake and mighty Nelson; but alas, they wouldn’t loosen the enemy’s hold on the country they had seized. The Germans dug in, and fleets of airplanes brought them supplies; it would take a real war to remove them; and did Britain have the ships and the men and the guns to spare?
IX
Now and then Lanny went up to London. People there realized that the war had really begun now; you saw them carrying their gasmasks, something that had been forgotten during the winter. Lanny gave his time to luncheons, teas, and dinners in the town houses and clubs where he met Britons who knew what their country was doing and planning. He let his role of art expert slip into the background and became the son of a great airplane manufacturer, which he discovered was a social distinction in England now; the man who bore it could sit before kings, he could speak like the Pope ex cathedra, he could utter that most offensive phrase, “I told you so!” and no one would take offense.
Margy came back from the Riviera, and Lanny spent a week-end with her. A curious phenomenon, how people were getting sorted out; there had been ardent appeasers at Bluegrass, but no more; for Margy’s stepson, the new Lord Eversham-Watson, had a sister married to a Polish landowner, now a refugee, and her dreadful stories had turned the place into a rallying point for the Germanophobes. Margy herself, the dowager, hated all wars and war-makers, but she kept quiet and didn’t count any more. Lanny, coming from a place where most men defended good old Neville and considered him a greatly wronged statesman, found himself in a place where everybody sang the praises of good old Winston, First Lord of the Admiralty and ninth lineal descendant of the Duke of Marlborough. Lanny took no sides, but listened attentively, and when he came back to London mailed another report in care of the American ambassador.
He wrote that the British would send an expedition, composed mainly of the troops which had been intended to aid the Finns. His guess was that they would try to take the port of Trondheim; later he revised this, and said that the port was too heavily mined; the expedition would land at fishing villages and try to take Trondheim from the land. “It is a race against time,” he wrote; “the Germans have reopened the Skagerrak and are sending in tanks and heavy guns, and soon will be able to repeat in Norway what they did in Poland. Their claims that they have bombed and sunk British capital ships are probably false, but these falsehoods may be partly unintentional—Göring’s airmen tend to see ships bigger than they are.”
What happened after that must have brought quiet satisfaction to the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation, who had been foretelling it to the brass hats of Britain, France and his own country for several years. The Germans did not have much success against the British capital fleet, but they showed the helplessness of troops ashore, or trying to get ashore, in the face of land-based aviation. The Nazis had the Norwegian airports, and were flying their planes to these ports and supplying them by air transports. Their flyers dived upon the fishing villages and knocked their wooden docks to flinders; they bombed the landing vessels and the supplies on the shore; they machine-gunned the troops wherever they tried to hide. The Luftwaffe had had seven years in which to practice all this, and they had told Lanny Budd exactly what they meant to do.
Alfy came back from an encounter with them, having flown from a British carrier to raid an enemy supply dump. His plane had been shot full of holes by German flyers and he had barely managed to reach an airfield that was still in Norwegian hands. He had had to make his way to the coast by land, and had boarded a British transport which was bombed three times on its way back to Scotland. That sounded like a long adventure, but the whole thing had taken less than ten days. It had cost this slender young aviator some twenty pounds in weight, and his hands trembled like an aged person’s. It wasn’t fear, he said; it was grief and rage—to see these dreadful events and be powerless to prevent them, to know that his native land had been outwitted and outguessed, and might be in jeopardy of her very existence, to say nothing of her imperial pride.
X
What made matters worse was the fact that these difficulties had been in great part concealed from the public. Day after day reports were given out that troops were going ashore, that they were advancing, that the Norwegians were holding the enemy, and so on. Even Lanny believed some of it, and the disillusionment was all the greater when at last people realized the truth—that the Nazi-Fascists were scoring another triumph at very small cost. The list of these
was getting to be a tax on the memory: Abyssinia and Albania and Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland, and now Denmark and Norway. The end of it was beyond any man’s guessing, and certainly a long way off. Lanny sent a cablegram to his father, saying: “You may safely enlarge plant events make certain demand for product many years.”
England began to boil, after the fashion of a democratic nation. Englishmen demand that their government shall succeed, and when they see it failing they accept no excuses. There were huge meetings of protest in Trafalgar Square, and those licentious, irresponsible newspapers which had so greatly displeased Adolf Hitler began to please him even less. A bundle of them came to the castle every morning and another in the evening, and really, it made you embarrassed to spread them out, or to let anybody see you reading them—they were so impolite to august personalities and to principles revered in these renovated ancestral halls.
Outwardly, everything at Wickthorpe was peaceful and safe. The sheep grazed on the lovely wide lawns and the deer browsed on the tender young buds of the shrubbery; little Frances rode her pony, and watched her father play at bowls with the palish and undersized curate. But politically speaking, and intellectually, and spiritually, the castle was under siege. It was named in all the Leftist press, along with Cliveden, as a center and source of the appeasement, the cowardice, the downright treason which had plagued Britain’s public life and brought her to this shameful pass. Other persons might have a tendency to forget the list of humiliations, but a Liberal or Labor newspaper editor must keep it in large type on the wall in front of his desk, and never let an edition go to press without featuring it in news and editorials and cartoons.
The American guest, playing his role conscientiously, felt this pressure, and realized that it took a stout heart to withstand it. Did Cedric, fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe, have that heart? In the gallery hung portraits of his ancestors, and assuredly they must have had it, to be able to walk around in the armor they wore. But Ceddy was a modern, who had lived a soft life; a game of rugger was the nearest he had ever come to a fight, and he had been brought up in the firm conviction that things were always going to be as they had always been. Now came these frightful shocks, one after another: battleships sunk by torpedoes, cruisers blasted by bombs, British soldiers forced to run like rabbits and hide in holes to escape streams of bullets from overhead. Even worse were the political shocks: the astonishing competence of the dictatorships, their speed and power, the paralyzing miasma which they poured out in the form of propaganda—brazen falsehood, cunning sophistication, which almost broke the heart of a lover of truth! How could anyone stand up against it, how believe in the possibility of righteousness, of its chances of survival in a world suddenly thrown back into barbarism?
XI
Lanny was especially interested in the reaction of the woman who had been his wife for six years, and whom he knew better than any other woman with the possible exception of his mother. Irma Barnes, Countess of Wickthorpe, had a stout heart, and was not plagued with a too-vivid imagination; but she, like his lordship, had had an easy life, and was accustomed to the idea that whatever she wanted would be handed to her on a silver platter. Now very certainly this wasn’t happening, and appeared as if it might never happen again. Hosts of enemies rose up against her, screaming at her—in print, if not by voice. Indeed, she had been advised not to let herself be driven through any working-class district, for her picture had been widely published and she might be recognized, and have the unpleasant experience of having a rotten egg or a dead cat thrown into her limousine.
England wasn’t just that green and pleasant land which had so attracted her that she wanted to own one of its picturesque old castles. England was a land of coal and iron, of heavy industry, and toiling masses who did not love their masters, but had their own ideas, their own press, their own leaders, wholly beyond the scope of Irma’s mind. Now they were rising up against the betrayers of democracy, and it was a most unpleasant, even terrifying experience. Irma had not been entirely unprepared for it, of course; there had been Munich, and before that Spain, and she had played hostess to statesmen who had discussed these events in her presence, explaining them and providing her with arguments. What she had not been prepared for was the failure of these eminent persons; she had assumed that they knew England and the outside world, and would take the necessary measures to control events.
But they had not done this; on the contrary, they had let the world slip out of their grasp, they had let things happen the opposite to the way they wished. They hadn’t made friends with Germany and got her into a war with Russia; they had let Germany divide Poland with Russia and then turn upon the West! The British Empire was being defied; actually, at this moment, Ceddy was reporting that they couldn’t save Norway because that treacherous rotter, Mussolini, was mobilizing his fleet and threatening the Suez Canal, which was Britain’s lifeline to India. So Britain’s battleships and carriers had to go to Alexandria instead of to Trondheim! And suppose Mussolini should attack them with his fleet of submarines—it might mean the end of the British Empire in a single night!
So here was this titled pair, rich and fashionable, sitting on the apex of the social pyramid, and inside them they were two frightened and bewildered human souls who saw their world beginning to crumble and had no idea what to do to prop it up. Things got so bad that Ceddy didn’t dare leave his office over the week-end, and Irma went to town so as to be near him and keep up his courage. Before she left she called her ex-husband over to the castle to ask him, would it do any good if she were to cable Robbie Budd, offering to sell some of her blue-chip stocks and put up the cash to pay for the immediate enlarging of the Budd-Erling plant!
XII
Lanny, too, was in need of encouragement, and he knew only one place where he could get it. The Reaches was only a short drive from Wickthorpe, and Lanny telephoned and made an appointment; he went for a walk on the road, and Nina and Rick picked him up. Petrol was hard to get, so they wouldn’t have a holiday in the far-off Lake District, but content themselves with a picnic lunch in a sunny spot alongside one of the streams which run into the Thames. At least, it was sunny while they ate; later, when a shower came up, they carried everything to the car and continued their conversation inside.
They could find no cheerful subject; but old friendship and mutual trust are precious things in themselves, and Lanny and Rick were in their second quarter-century of shared experience. They had worried through one World War, and hoped never to see another; but here it was, and they had to live with it. Rick had come out of the first one with a crippled knee and the nuisance of a steel brace. Some seven or eight thousand nights he had unstrapped the brace, sitting on the side of his bed, and seven or eight thousand mornings he had strapped it on before getting up. Even so, he had managed to beget a family and to earn a living for it, and to make some contribution to his country’s democratic thought. Now he was burning with the desire to be something more than a free-lance writer in this crisis; he would have liked a job on the BBC, but the fuzzyheads would never take him, because he was too Pink.
They talked about Alfy, who had gone back to his squadron. His superior officers had told him to go home and sleep; but how could a man sleep when his country was in such peril? They had put him to training some of the younger chaps, and that made it possible to think of him with a bit more hope. Poor Nina!—she had been through the same thing for more than a year with her husband, and here it was with her oldest son. She couldn’t keep the tears from stealing into her eyes, and was embarrassed to wipe them away. Lanny asked about the younger children, whom he had not seen for a long time; he had had to drop out of the family’s life, for it was too many people to trust with his secret.
Lanny imparted the news he had been collecting here and there, an important service to a journalist whose specialty was the predicting of world events. It had been a long time since he had predicted anything good; alas, he was a Cassandra going about in trousers, and he s
hared her sad fate, in that nobody believed him and nobody thanked him for being right while they were wrong. Now he was sure that the man with the black umbrella would soon be returned to his private business in Birmingham, and that the First Lord of the Admiralty would take the helm of the ship of state. Lanny told about the talks at Maxine Elliott’s, and Rick said: “Why don’t you go to see him now?”
The answer was: “I don’t dare. I can’t be known to associate with any real anti-Nazi.”
“You could see him privately. I think that could be arranged without difficulty.”
“There is nothing private in a time like this, Rick. You surely don’t imagine that you’ve caught all the spies in England; and I am Cæsar’s wife—I have to be above suspicion.”
XIII
They discussed the war, and what was to be expected. They agreed that the British were in a hopeless plight in Norway, and that the expedition was probably being withdrawn at the present time. Rick told a curious story about that expedition; a friend of his had had a chance to observe what the British officers were taking with them, and besides the prescribed equipment, it had consisted mainly of salmon-fishing gear.
Dragon Harvest Page 79
