Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘The Supervisory Commission is supposed to take control. But even they can’t get together now. It’s physically impossible to hold a meeting. In reality, Avenol has all power. There is no controlling instrument any longer. He is virtual dictator of the League,’ Edith pointed out.

  ‘I would think though that we must keep the nucleus of the League functioning—here where we are, in the midst of it—and perhaps initiate a cease-fire. Or negotiate the peace settlement,’ Lester said.

  Having removed his family, Lester was now prepared to stay and fight.

  He had risen to the challenge.

  The Fall of Paris

  June 1940

  Edith had never seen such an agonised identification between the very being of a human and the nation state as she saw in Avenol on the day that Paris fell to the Germans.

  He wept openly in his office.

  He could not control his demeanour nor find coherence of speech before his staff.

  He was a man broken apart.

  Edith suggested to him that they both stay by the wireless in his office and suspend meetings and clerical work of any consequence and he agreed.

  Some of the French staff were permitted to use the office telephones to seek news of relatives, and anyone who wished was allowed to gather in the Library to listen to the broadcasts.

  There in the office alone with Avenol, she poured him a cognac but did not pour one for herself.

  The office was dim. He had taken to closing the curtains which she usually opened in the morning. It was as if he were hiding.

  She wondered how Jeanne was faring. She wanted to call her but felt she should not do it right then.

  He chose to sit on his settee and she sat in his comfortable Leleu armchair, a seating arrangement which normally would be reversed, but he was in that condition where he was unaware of where he sat, alternately needing to stand and walk about and then to sit.

  They listened to the news coming in over the French radio broadcast spoken by the announcer in a voice artificially raised to an urgent pitch by patriotism.

  It became clear by Avenol’s attempts to ring out that although the lines were down here and there and overloaded, they were not totally disrupted, and telephone calls came to him from his friends and relatives in Paris. Avenol spoke in short urgent sentences as if time on the ’phone line was precious.

  A friend of Avenol in the French government called in and said that the government had fled to Bordeaux.

  He called Vera a number of times, talking in a personal code to her which Edith was able to decipher as being about arrangements to flee and about money matters.

  When the telephone bell rang she would answer and announce the caller and he would come to the desk to take the message or not as he chose.

  They heard on the wireless that Churchill had offered amalgamation of Britain and France—had offered common citizenship in an effort to bolster morale. The French would be English and the English would be French.

  Avenol was on the telephone again to someone in Paris. ‘The army has almost collapsed,’ he called to her, relaying the information he was receiving.

  He continued to relay to her the news from Paris over his shoulder. ‘The roads are jammed with refugees from Belgium and the north, wounded soldiers are mingled in with them—officers’ cars are forcing their way through those fleeing, for the sake of Jesus!—cannons have been left by the roadside, motorcycles smashed and abandoned … Is the army running? Some parts? Mother of God.’

  Yet French radio was still talking of a counterattack. The solemn, patriotic voice of the announcer said, ‘The Germans have not yet stood the final test. We are the old opponent of the Marne, the old opponent of Verdun. General Weygand brings back to us the genius of Foch.’

  The famous fort at Verdun had fallen days earlier.

  The Germans had bypassed the Maginot line which was still fully manned, the troops on the line now cut off.

  Only the young cadets at the Cavalry School at Saumur still held out.

  ‘The cadets of Saumur hold out!’ he said, tears in his eyes. Edith also cried as she saw in her mind the boys fighting with their training guns, rallying to the Tricolour.

  At other times, Avenol was oblivious of her presence in his office, sometimes speaking to himself, declaiming and gesturing, and then at other times staring at her in bewilderment at the situation, as if, perhaps, he expected her to take some action, to suggest a policy.

  She worked to control her weeping and found herself coolly observant, as she sat watching him swing between crying and anger.

  The telephone calls then stopped.

  The announcer said that German units were on the outskirts of Paris and that resistance had collapsed.

  The wireless began to play sombre music. Avenol finally brought his agitation under control and seated himself at his desk, and arranged some papers which were on the desk.

  ‘The British stink in the nostrils of the world,’ he said. ‘They abandoned France at Dunkirk.’

  He requested that she bring Aghnides to his office, but not Lester.

  She went to Aghnides’ office and found him grim-faced, listening to the wireless.

  ‘Avenol wants you.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He was distraught. He’s now in a rage.’

  They said little else as they walked back to Avenol’s office.

  She poured Aghnides a cognac.

  When the two men were seated, she did not ask for permission to stay, but simply sat herself on the settee.

  ‘That’s it. It is done,’ Avenol said to Aghnides.

  ‘What is done, Joseph?’ said Aghnides.

  ‘That which England has for three hundred years prevented France from achieving—leadership on the continent of Europe—Hitler has now achieved.’

  ‘All is not over,’ Aghnides said feebly and then found his stronger, official Under Secretary’s voice. ‘The fall of Paris is not only a French disaster,’ he said, ‘the fall of Paris is a disaster for civilisation. I heard today from Athens by long-distance telephone that people there are weeping in the streets for the fall of Paris. But the war is not finished.’

  The office sat in silence, Avenol staring at the wireless which was calling for calm and continuing to play sombre music.

  To relieve the silence, Aghnides went on to say that people were crying in the corridors of the Palais—all nationalities were weeping. They were weeping in the streets and stores of Geneva. ‘For all people, Paris is the capital of the civilised world.’

  ‘The crying matters for nothing. The war is finished, Thanassis,’ Avenol said, banging the table.

  He kept banging the table with his hand but without much force.

  Edith’s heart went out to him and she felt she should go over and calm him. She had a flash of Sir Eric and his despair at the time of his first great defeat as Secretary-General when, on the first try, the Assembly had failed to admit Germany back in ’26.

  She had shaved Sir Eric in the office as a way of calming him and giving him back his self-control. She wouldn’t be shaving Avenol.

  ‘England will last fifteen days and then the war will be finished. Italy will simply pick up the spoils. She will destroy us from the south.’

  She wondered how he’d arrived at the figure fifteen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Aghnides, ‘but then there is the United States.’

  ‘The United States stays clear of danger. Roosevelt has declared that the United States will never enter the war. Their Congress will never enter the war.’

  ‘And there is Russia,’ Aghnides said, desperation slipping back into his voice.

  Avenol looked at him with disgust. ‘The Russo-German Non-aggression Pact took care of Russia. You know that. The war is finished. Accept it.’

  She could only watch the force of what Avenol said crash against the feeble counter-arguments put up by Aghnides. And against her own speechless spirit. Her heart was beating and the voice in her head
kept saying, ‘Remain calm, be calm.’

  She realised that with France gone and with Italy in the war on Germany’s side, neutral Switzerland was now isolated and surrounded.

  ‘The Russians may break the Pact,’ Aghnides said.

  Even she didn’t believe that.

  Avenol didn’t bother to reply.

  ‘The Americans will be in for the spoils,’ Avenol said. ‘And the Russians. Or perhaps the Americans will join with the Germans against Russia? Who knows? That is what will happen, you’ll see—the Americans will now come in with the Germans and attack Russia.’

  She and Aghnides stared at him, the ooze of his defeat seeping over them. It seemed there in that dim office that Avenol was perhaps tragically right.

  Now and then there would be a government announcement on the wireless. Sometimes a message to mayors, sometimes to army units, sometimes to the people at large. At the sound of an official announcement, they would cease talking and listen; the music and the announcements were the sounds of a collapsing army and behind that, a collapsing nation.

  A cable was brought in to the office by messenger. It was from Arthur Sweetser in Washington.

  He looked at the cable. ‘Sweetser …’ Avenol made a dismissive noise. ‘The Americans …’

  He held it out to Edith and asked her to read it out.

  She tried to stop her voice breaking as she read the message from dear old Arthur, which she knew was in part addressed to her, or at least to the true blue League group. ‘I cannot let this day pass without just this briefest word about the tragedy facing Paris. American opinion is more deeply stirred than I have ever known it, for America is also frightened. People are living by the radio, praying for time. Armed we now certainly shall be …’

  She tried to hide her emotion by saying, ‘At least the Trans-Atlantic cable line to America is still open.’

  Avenol left his desk and paced about the room. ‘Sweetser always sees hope,’ Avenol said, although he too was trying to hide his emotions. ‘He is the travelling salesman of hope. Safe and sound in the States. I think I will also go to the United States. I think I have a role there.’

  She and Aghnides glanced at each other with puzzlement.

  Did Avenol see himself fleeing to America?

  Avenol railed on, his mathematical mind now organising the news. ‘The Germans have destroyed two great European armies. Gobbled up four smaller armies, and inflicted an immense loss on the English army. Four empires have dissolved overnight—the Belgian, the French, the Dutch and the British. The French and British together controlled over half the landmass of the world. All lost. We wouldn’t let Germany have back one colony after the last war. Not one colony. Now they have every reason to punish us.’

  The British Empire is not lost, Edith said silently. They were still there and they would fight.

  Or would the collapse of Britain mean that the Empire too was out of the war?

  She had never contemplated such a thing.

  She felt that she might now be witnessing the character of Avenol which had, in part, been concealed, but which her fellow conspirators had suspected. She thought he would now show his true colours.

  Or maybe he would rally?

  ‘Hitler did it in twelve weeks. Twelve weeks. And it is over. Germany has won,’ Avenol said, looking to her as if again remembering her presence, as if anticipating opposition, or looking to her for something else … feminine solace? Her affirmation?

  She offered no reaction.

  Aghnides said in a desperate, tired and discouraged voice, ‘We have a word in Greek—that word is hubris.’

  Avenol did not look at him, but shrugged to show he knew the word.

  ‘It means that those who grow mighty with pride and power the gods will strike down. One day Hitler will be struck down.’

  ‘How?!’ Avenol shouted. ‘How?!’ The tone of his question said that he would not believe any reply which challenged this.

  ‘I do not know how. I know it’s in the nature of things that he must eventually fall.’

  ‘In two hundred years?!’ said Avenol. ‘A moment in history has occurred. The democracies have failed. Their role in history is finished. Even if the English hold out they will still have lost the war.’

  She found no comfort in Aghnides’ hopeless words.

  Avenol’s pacing seemed to change. He was almost marching about the office. ‘A new order of things is appearing. I feel it. I sense it. History as we knew it is finished. Something very serious has changed in the nature of things.’

  She felt that she was watching a man crossing a line in his mind, finding his way to a massive leap.

  He paused, staring out the window as if staring across Europe. ‘It is, perhaps, time that we began to think in a new way. To see how it is that we should now bring ourselves to the service of a new world. A world reorganised on new foundations.’

  She listened with cold clarity to Avenol’s words.

  She was strangely relieved to hear them. They freed her, at last, from any bond she had formed with him. At last, she could be a true enemy. At last, the point of the watchdog group was confirmed. Avenol had in half an hour gone from a state of collapse to an obsessive surrender, and then to seeing himself allied with the victor.

  He was finding himself a role in Hitler’s New Order.

  ‘Hitler will fail,’ Aghnides said again, and again it lacked conviction.

  Avenol paid no heed to this reply but went over to Aghnides and put a hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘My dear Thanassis, it is all over. Our duty now is to work to achieve unity in Europe. The people will want order now. We must help bring order. England is finished on the Continent. The British officials must now leave the Secretariat. I believe in following the direction of history’s arrow.’

  Again, Edith felt a surge of release from anything to do with Avenol.

  She only needed the word and she would join any rebellion against him. She herself would strike him down.

  ‘Surely you will keep McKinnon-Wood on as legal counsellor?’ she said, unable to remain silent, freed from any sense of her proper place. McKinnon-Wood was the legal conscience of the League.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t just single the British out and send them away,’ Aghnides said.

  Avenol smiled, a smile without pleasure or humanity. ‘I won’t have to send them away. They will go, you watch—they will run like rabbits.’

  Aghnides shook his head.

  ‘Charron would make a good treasurer,’ Avenol said, his mind now reshuffling the staff to meet the new situation. ‘You know, Hitler is not really against the League. He admired our work in the Saar.’

  This was why she was there in her conspiratorial role—she was there to hear this.

  She was there to bear witness.

  If Aghnides had come to them with this story she might not have believed it. And perhaps not one of them would have believed each other’s version. They would’ve suspected Lester’s version. She was the key witness to what was happening there in the office.

  Aghnides stared at him for a few seconds, looked at her to perhaps confirm to himself that there had been a witness, and then left the office without saying a word.

  It was not wholly a gesture of disgust, it was also a gesture of frustration.

  Aghnides was a man who desperately needed to have answers, to always be armed with arguments, but in this moment of crisis he had failed to convince even himself—had found himself with no arguments against the enemy.

  She sat there staring at Avenol who was now making notes to himself.

  She too then left.

  He appeared not to notice.

  At the door, she heard him go back on to the telephone, this time to the head of the League couriers ordering him to retrieve his personal trunks from his secret safe residence in France. ‘Immédiatement!’

  He had become another sort of man, a man taking firm command of a detailed vagueness, a man ordering the details f
or want of a larger strategy.

  In the outer office she made a quick shorthand note of what Avenol had said and then collected her personal things from her desk drawer. There was no work to be done today.

  Or ever again in that office.

  The conspiracy was over. They would now all declare themselves as Avenol had declared himself.

  She nodded at the bored bodyguard from Securitas sitting on a chair outside the office. He had an automatic pistol in a hip holster.

  On her way out of the building, she looked into Lester’s office. ‘You were all correct about Avenol.’

  ‘I’ve just heard from Aghnides.’

  ‘Something has to be done fairly quickly.’

  He said, ‘A meeting tonight, usual time, usual place.’

  ‘I think I’ll go now.’

  ‘Go home.’

  ‘I’ll go first to Ambrose’s office and then home.’

  ‘Fine.’

  As she went down the corridor people stopped her and asked what she knew. She told Giraud and one or two others whom she could trust and hurried on.

  She looked in on Jeanne who was weeping.

  ‘The Americans will come into the war,’ she said to Jeanne, for want of anything to say. ‘And the British Empire is still fighting.’

  ‘Are you going to leave Geneva?’ Jeanne asked.

  ‘No. Are you?’

  She said she didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Many are leaving. Perhaps you should go to your family?’

  ‘I hear everyone is fleeing Paris.’

  ‘Go to the South.’

  ‘I think I’ll just stay here.’

  ‘Good, stay.’

  They hugged. She wanted to give more comfort to Jeanne than she knew how to give. She held to the hug but even that had to finish.

  They let go and wiped their tears. ‘I’m going to see Ambrose. We’ll all have dinner tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  She left Jeanne.

  She couldn’t find a car with a driver—probably the drivers were in the Library listening to the wireless—so she decided to walk to Ambrose’s office at the old Palais Woodrow Wilson.

  Some people were gathering around the gates of the Palais des Nations, as if expecting an announcement to be made from the League.