Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  After a week I had not ventured the Manor, foreseeing an abandoned shell, desolate as a ghost town. After its SS captors had been shot, it became a workers’ rest home, a kolkhoz, collective, where children would have learnt that wicked people had lived there. Now, it was occasionally occupied by a new owner. Who? But it was as though I had not spoken.

  I preferred to explore deeper in Forest. Though depleted at the edges, it was otherwise the same, strewn with old friends. Mushrooms – sunshades, the estate hands called them – brown boletus, stunted second-growth acacia, runic boulders, paths criss-crossing, where I once imagined the greybeard awaiting me. ‘Young man, to win your kingdom you need the strength of a bear, the resolution of a swallow and the cunning of a wolf.’

  A particular ash survived, on which I had once cut my name. A protection from witches.

  Everywhere I was met without open friendliness but with no rebuff. Younger men had left for the towns. Freddi and Max, Iliana and Frieda had left nothing.

  Days were clearer, skies icily blue. Forest gave signs of a healthy spring. Clumps of wood anemones and wild violet, lapwings in jagged, erratic flight and melancholy cries, moles active, the ground ivy purple-blue, a faint green smudge on the trees. Buds, the sharp scuffle of hares mating, new nests, though one night snow fell, flurries of white shreds against lamplit windows. Fumes, stiffly aromatic, rank, drifted from stoves I had formerly considered of Iron Age antiquity, in an immemorial atmosphere of leather, damp, hay, linseed.

  More sights. Blueberries on a mottled green plate, grey blubber of cloud above the Sound, the blur of an island, with its games, picnics, little assignments. A branch, still bare, slender as a young leg bent at the knee.

  6

  Only after ten such days I risked the road where the girl had run, carriages, motors, riders had passed, for hunts, balls, tennis, long dinners. The sky was cloudless, the sun warm, elderberries were in tiny leaf, the willows unfolding silver.

  The Manor was at once substance and illusion, like a movie seen again after many years, encrusted with lush memories, rare poignancies, sharp disillusions from the fates, often distressing, of stars that had lost the world’s love.

  The tall, intricately embossed gates must have been commandeered for scrap metal. From isolated pillars, the weed-lumbered drive curved towards the old mansion. The Turret was cracked and scaffolded, everywhere white plaster was discoloured, blistered, fallen; some chimneys were missing. Fruit bushes, still dewy, were being throttled by dock and thistle that had already overwhelmed the lawns. Most of the orchard had gone, two donkeys motionless between haggard stumps and fallen branches. Limes glimmered. All was desultory, silent, though smoke hovered above west gables, a reminder of the kitchen and talk of golden ones who move by moonlight.

  Desisting from further search, I yet did not return to Tallinn. Days headed faster towards spring. Walking long distances, around ploughed fields, through budding groves, I must be ringed by village gossip. Tongues lived wildly, someone must soon recognize me, though perhaps pleasantly, forgivingly. Dour as pumice, skin dry and featureless as uncooked haddock, my landlady had several times released a smile, as if from a trap, and was now offering coffee, hot though brackenish, fit, she assured me, for a lord and his swans.

  Traipsing back to the Manor, I again lingered at the pillars, aged sentinels, contemplating under a red, heavy sun the dishevelled gardens, the scrawled brushwork of smoke. Elegy for a lost life. All seemed diminished, more fragile: gables, roofs, mansards, timbered arches, portico, parterre.

  I was ready to depart when, as if in a rerun movie, the long black limousine again swept towards me, halted, and, not melodramatic, but precisely timed, and, in beige overcoat open, showing well-pressed grey, blue-and-white bow-tie, the Elk Lord, Bear Victor, stepped out. The Herr General, whom I had subliminally expected.

  I had envisaged a head bald as a helmet, sunken shoulders, a deposed figure despite association with high-rise Prince Louis-Ferdinand and Hollywood, stooping from errors too shameful.

  Though less broad and commanding than I remembered, he at once made me absurdly young and, though the taller, still looking up at him. No Bismarck, he was at least a senior executive, without sag, in command. Beneath carefully set grey hair, his eyes were no longer cobalt blue but keen, fixed above folds only slightly stained by age and now glinting with polite, slightly ironic goodwill.

  While we stood silent, appraising, I was aware that though he had lost huntsman’s vigour he retained a measure of youth, that of the lotioned, cold-bath Englishman. The brown, creased face had left its nose isolated, a citadel resisting decay, complementing the eyes. There still lurked amusement at a gullible world. The tie, with its discreet stars and diagonals, his patrician brogues, must contrast with my boots and jacket, as if I were a groom seeking employment. Examining me, he was now the champion golfer assessing a longish putt, then was first to move. He had always been first to do anything.

  He extended hands, not to shake mine, or embrace, but as though holding a package as he had done so often, the welcome family intimate, bringing a bottle of Cointreau, epicene box of chocolates, a waisted jar of sprats.

  With trained negligence, voice still deep, well oiled, he nodded. ‘They told me you had come. The revalidated mortgage gives me rights of possession.’

  They? Father borrowing unwisely? Suddenly, that long-remembered elder-brother smile was unnerving. Confused, I scarcely realized that we were walking not to the house but on the old track into Forest. The ground was frosty but damp, the narrow path manageable despite bramble and sapling. Blurred thoughts solidified into guarded curiosity while he strode ahead, speaking over his shoulder as though no war or crime had interrupted us and giving an uncanny illusion of marching towards horizons, trees dissolving before him. Expertly, intent on his fine clothes, he evaded mole-casts, thorn, branches, nettles, while, lumbering behind, I was already scratched and muddied.

  As always, his words rolled as if on castors, like a barrister’s.

  ‘I enjoy the young, perhaps in what the Viennese conjurors term sadomasochism.’ The path widened, and I was alongside him, being regarded with the hint of malice due to an old friend. He resumed more softly, as it were between parentheses.

  ‘You were always responsive; your smile must have brought you many friends, though, like myself, you probably doubted whether social converse gave authentic insights. Did not Voltaire or Talleyrand believe that man was given speech in order to conceal his thoughts? You were a handsome boy, shyly unaware of your charm, the gift from your mother. Later …’ he paused, not, as I was intended to believe, to find a way around a pool of mud but surely more carefully to select his words, ‘the vaudeville of wartime life and livelihood deposited me in the USSR, for a while enduring the barely endurable. Until certain of my abilities were commandeered. I soon realized that Marxist disdain of capitalist materialism had not influenced the officialdom. Naturally, I often wondered about you. I had provided you with some refuge from storms.’

  He was now the mountain guide, supple, omnipotent, imaginative. Unable to query, ask questions, I nevertheless told myself that his fluency could effortlessly revise his career to fit new circumstances, repel accusations. The small, dry twitch of one edge of his mouth somehow placed me at further disadvantage, the dumb schoolboy. That I was now the physically superior embarrassed me with intimations of disloyalty. Count Pahlen would not have been proud of me.

  An observer would see only two leisured greyheads under fresh buds and green hollows. Neither confessing nor boasting but astutely conversational, he answered questions I had not asked, producing a balance sheet impersonal in his exactness. I wondered whether he had read Secret Protocol, its implicit condemnation of so many like himself.

  ‘The good folk of my own youth, Erich, were unfailingly courteous, well read, seeded in tolerance and breeding, yet toying with a culture virtually extinct, wasting their strength. Pouring it into over-manured soil. Their traditions, their etiquette, ma
de them wish only to preserve. In crisis that they had unwittingly provoked, they were powerless.’

  We were stepping over fungi speckled and red, spotty fern, yellow-green points, while, almost audibly, he continued marshalling trim sentences.

  ‘Who can tell how oft he offendeth? In Soviet Russia, as in National Socialist Germany, and in certain quarters of the United States, I took lessons from the uncultured and primitive. Das russiche Gemüt. I realized the limitations of bookishness, though respecting Mr Emerson’s writ, that prayers are the disease of the will, creeds the sickness of the intellect. Evidence shows me that while human behaviour is flexible human nature, despite the adornments, is not.’

  We stopped at a grassy clearing. My images of former times were overtaken by that of Hagen, acquisitive destroyer. The setting itself was Wagnerian or of illustrations in a volume of legend. Trees, birds, sunlight fragmented by branches, many still skeletal and dark, a shrill bird, undergrowth stirrings. No more than at an old-fashioned tutorial would I interrupt. Nor, as yet, had I anything to say.

  ‘The Spartans, my boy, periodically culled their slaves as our forebears did bears and wolves. It carried danger, in trusting to a subordinate docility that had limits. In sixteenth-century Rajput wars, the men besieged in Chiter, finally, very meekly, marched out, unarmed, in peaceful saffron, to be massacred, their women flocking to indulge in mass widow-burnings. Both examples I found instructive in my military courses. Docility, resignation, meekness were inappropriate for survival beyond 1914.’

  Still the man in uniform, he was solicitous, intimate, preparing justification for the unmentioned, which might prove unmentionable. Again on the path, we were reaching a band of heath, grey flecked with yellow, breathing space, before another thick shadow of Forest.

  ‘Never, Erich, have I been allured by the past. Romance is merely distance. Handfuls of the best forgotten. You will have read Sallust.’ Sarcasm beneath the statement was blatant. ‘I recommend him. He presents authentic, if jaundiced, insights into motives behind cruelty. In Soviet prison I noted the supercilious unconcern of doctors towards babies they judged unsuitable to live, they, themselves, haunted by fear, even terror. As for us Germans, Nietzsche considered they belonged to the day before yesterday, were avid for the day after tomorrow but lacked any today. It will be interesting to encounter the disposition of the Fourth Reich.’

  He negotiated a patch of bog, adroitly sidestepping, while I floundered, distracted not by Sallust or Nietzsche but by the assumption that I was still German, I had long thought myself supranational but English in disliking extravagance, in respect for privacy and impatience with those they called busybodies.

  His words were very distinct, almost visible, in the sharp air. ‘We must never overlook the compulsions towards rebirth. Wiedergeburt. I had to manoeuvre through disreputable company east and west of the Elbe. We must live, most of us, however meagre the excuses for doing so. One ruler, Marcus Aurelius, wrote that life resembles not dancing but wrestling. Just so. I myself from the start, even in your own house, recognized the importance of blat – words in the right quarter, useful connections, polite influence. Certain smiles, pledges, clothes, the nuance of handshakes.’

  I remembered a moment in Eaton Square, Herbert Sulzbach feeling danger in his blood when his men refused to salute.

  Oppressed by the processes of recollection habitually attributed to the drowning, I instinctively looked for a bulge in his overcoat and wondered, here in the recesses of Forest, if I would emerge alive.

  He pressed my arm, in affection or guiding me, pushing me forward, foregoing that flicker of distaste and speaking with long-ago familial pleasantry, sharing his zest for the grotesque antics of others, as though only we were fully adult.

  ‘Before the war, I learnt something of interest from Prince Mikasa. You may remember him as brother to the quondam god Hirohito. The League of Nations had delegated the respectable Lord Lytton to report on the behaviour of Japanese troops in Manchuria, generally held unpraiseworthy. The pathology of race!’ His voice shrugged. ‘Incidentals included conscripts bayoneting Chinese civilians to develop martial skills, extend their art of living. His Lordship discovered an attempt to demolish his commission by sprinkling selected dishes at a welcoming banquet with cholera germs. This, he reported, as the ‘Material Factor in Etherealized Postulates’, which Heidegger would have envied. There is later parallel in Belgian police in Brazzaville quelling high-stepping African dissent by distributing poisoned toothpaste.’

  He was inspecting a massive bramble with the well-mannered interest he might have allowed to a quondam god.

  ‘I apologize for digressing. His Altitude Mikasa was sufficiently gracious to introduce me to none else than General Ishii Shiro. Not a name to enchant. He was Director of Unit 731. I may have to explain that this was a pleasure dome in Harbin, manufacturing germs for scattering amongst the conquered, along with strangling, freezing, starving people, in interests of medical research, by the Children of the Sun, the Führer’s allies. MacArthur preserved Shiro and his colleagues, their researches useful in the Cold War. The Pentagon feared a Russo-Japanese Pact. And Shiro still remains, in his glory. He has established the Green Cross Company, producing medical drugs, in return for oblivion of his past. Very neat. Magnanimously, he has offered me some advantages I thought politic to reject.’

  We had circumnavigated the bramble. I could almost feel his glance on my sodden feet, relating them to my inability to speak. Any objections, he would capably dismiss as trifling, to be courteously excused.

  ‘Ours is an era in which science explains all, technology contrives all, camp-followers claim all …’

  Camp-follower, I managed a feeble, ‘But –’

  ‘One moment. I have won, then lost, several sizeable fortunes, and the present moves towards European unification look favourably on me. Walter Rathenau once said, in my hearing, that history records the clever resisting the strong. Did not Odysseus, shipwrecked and naked, have confidence in the cleverness that made him powerful? Philosophers too easily denigrate power as weakness. I possess no philosophical assets, though once saw myself as Gnostic, preferring élitist knowledge to generalized, aimless compassion. I enjoy existing, in comfort considerable but not excessive. I have tended to dominate, yes, but by choice only when filling gaps left by those of superior moral texture but weaker personality. I have no trace of Einsatz, I am not disgusted by notions of self-sacrifice, I merely do not possess them. If I need to discover a profound relation to life and death, I do not need a slaughterhouse in which to prove it.’

  There showed the bluff contempt he used when bored or irritated, for which Mother had rebuked him, when thinking themselves unobserved. He now smiled apology, as he had to her, while we struck through to another path, towards the Lake and road.

  ‘You will have heard reports of me. Rumour has many tongues. So has prejudice. I have had to fight on several fronts, an officer surrounded by danger and treachery, requiring, I risk saying, the multiplication of the impromptu. In crisis, in the English phrase, keeping my head. I read Spengler, perhaps too readily. He taught that would-be moralists and social ethics types were only predators with broken teeth. In the visible world, that made good sense. For Rousseau, righteous instruction axiomatically cures the undesirable, but I found no evidence for it. The war gave me chance for both good and ill. I can claim that my telephone call to Ernst Jünger in 1940 was not the least of the influences which saved Laon Cathedral. He told me later that superior intelligence was needed to experiment with drugs, so profitably peddled by the SS. A test too few pass.’

  He was parting branches for me, assiduous as ever. Our footsteps cracked, disturbing birds and the unseen. These reaches were colder, bleaker, the sun hidden, buds mere specks.

  ‘Some of us, with well-planted donations to generals and access to Excellency Serrano Suner, helped keep Spain neutral, thus preserving the Mediterranean for the Allies. With time shortening for the Reich, I had to refuse v
on Stulpnagel’s invitation to join the July Plot. Not from any pledged oath to Hitler, only gut conviction that it could but fail. You, more lively-minded, may consider me wrong.’ His eyes, mouth, intonation disposed of any likelihood of personal error. ‘But the idealistic consciousness, beyond good and evil, that once so excited us had long been trodden into the mud. Stauffenberg, Moltke and, at times, Adam, were better people than myself, but I was unable to envisage them controlling a stricken nation. So I sought means more subtle, more effective. I dared encourage Dietrich von Choltitz, Commandant of Outer Paris, and my young protégé, Ernst von Bressendorf, to disobey the Führer’s direct order to blow up all bridges, tunnels, public buildings. Using my blat elsewhere, I persuaded an SS colonel to permit hundreds of Danish Jews to escape to Finland. I had always to protect my back …’ For once he hesitated, looking not at me but at grass. ‘I was not, like some of those in your childhood, enamoured of hopeless causes, heartbreaks, what I called the rose of tragedy. I was not the boy dazzled by the Christmas tree or awash for Marie-Antoinette. Sexually, I was less than scrupulous, though few are not. It is more difficult to prefer the weak to the handsome. Yet I learnt from an instructor, short-sighted, spineless, spinsterish, who quelled rowdy, brutal cadets by a tongue flaying like a whip. One puny, bitter, spectacled academic against fifty slabs of muscle and brawn. He always won. Another Odysseus. He would toss cash on to the floor and, sneering, watch us grovel for it, like curs after gristle. Just possibly, he could see some Promised Land, which lack of talent barred him from entering.’

  If he had minutely faltered, he had swiftly recovered. We left Forest, the path twisting into empty fields surrounding the Lake, pewter-coloured, flat, melancholy, gulls diving, weeds floating. At clubman’s ease, he was level, reasonable, quiet. The mutability disconcerted.