Death on the Rhine

by Charles Whiting

  ‘We’d like to see a Major McIntyre,’ Smith said.

  The sergeant sniffed. The accent was English all right and it was posh. ‘All right,’ he said, slightly mollified, ‘I’ll ring his office.’

  A couple of minutes later McIntyre was hurrying out of the door personally, as tough and as unsmiling as ever, obviously pleased to see them. ‘I’ve got news,’ he said when they were out of earshot of the NCO. ‘First, I want to show you somebody. Come on.’ Without any further explanation, he bustled them round the back of the hotel to some steps which obviously led to a cellar, in which a tall, immaculate NCO of the Guards stood sentry. When he saw McIntyre he stamped his foot down and saluted.

  ‘All right, Sergeant Hurt… cut out the bullshit… I want these gents to see the prisoner. Open up.’

  ‘Yessir… exactly, sir… straight away, sir.’ Swiftly, Sergeant Hurt pulled a key from his pocket and opened the lock.

  Slightly puzzled by it all, Dickie Bird and Smith passed into a gloomy passage and followed McIntyre down a dusty corridor to another door. McIntyre rapped it three times swiftly and snapped, ‘It’s all right, Dietz. It’s me.’

  The door was opened to reveal a small man whose face bore the fading marks of what appeared to be a series of large bruises.

  Beyond, seated at a table in front of a wireless transmitter, another civilian sat with earphones set on his head.

  ‘This is Dietz, my assistant and interpreter,’ McIntyre introduced the little man with die bruised face, ‘and that fellah over there, he’s our tame Fritz.’

  Dietz bowed stiffly from the waist and said, ‘Whisky, gentlemen?’

  ‘Sure, why not,’ McIntyre said easily, although it was barely ten o’clock in the morning. ‘It’ll help to entertain you while I tell you my boring story.’

  Smith looked at Bird. His look said: ‘Nothing boring about what our Colonial is going to tell us, to judge by the situation in this place’.

  They sat on packing cases, sipping whisky from chipped enamel mugs in the yellow light cast by the single electric bulb, while McIntyre told them how he had rescued his assistant Dietz, who regarded him now with dog-like devotion, and taken four German prisoners. ‘They thought themselves pretty tough hombres, but I managed to persuade them to sing in the end.’ He looked down at the knuckles of his right hand, which they could now see were bruised, and the two young shipmates could guess just how McIntyre had made them ‘sing’.

  ‘Who were they then?’ Dickie asked, unable to restrain his curiosity any longer.

  ‘Members of von Horn’s intelligence setup. All former petty officers in the Imperial Navy during the war. That one,’ he indicated the man at the radio, who seemed oblivious of what was going on behind him, ‘was sparks on the Hun battleship the ‘Derrflinger’ at Jutland. All out of work and down on their luck. So they took up with von Horn and did his dirty work for him – this time, however, one time too often.’ He gave that hard, crooked smile of his, obviously pleased with himself.

  ‘It’s clear then,’ the Canadian continued, ‘that von Horn’s outfit is working with and for Hitler. It’s clear, too, that von Horn is providing the intelligence about the British Army of Occupation, which these nationalists need to prepare their strike.’ He nodded to the man at the radio. ‘That tame Fritz was their sparks and that’s their radio with which he keeps in touch with von Horn’s HQ in Flensburg.’

  ‘Keeps?’ Smith queried, noting the use of the present tense.

  McIntyre’s face cracked into another hard smile. ‘Yes, you heard right. But the Fritz sends only the stuff we want to be sent. He’s working for us now. When the business is over, I’ve promised him a South American passport, passage to that continent and enough money to tide him over for a while. C’s agreed to that.’

  ‘But where are the other three?’ Dickie asked in bewilderment.

  ‘Well, they weren’t so co-operative. Besides I didn’t have the men to keep them under constant guard and I couldn’t risk them escaping and blabbing everything to their boss, von Horn. So I sent them abroad – for a little holiday, kind of.’

  ‘Abroad… holiday?’ Dickie stuttered.

  ‘Yes, currently the three of them are enjoying the facilities of the Aldershot glasshouse.’

  ‘You mean the British Army’s military prison?’ Dickie gasped. ‘But how did you get away with that? They’re not soldiers and they haven’t committed a military crime.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s completely illegal. But you know, Bird, if you’ve got C behind you you can get away with stealing the crown jewels.’ His tough grin broadened. ‘I guess they’re going to be three very unhappy Fritzes if any of their fellow prisoners happen to have been in the trenches in the last show. There’ll be powdered glass in their porridge every morning, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  Smith and Bird nodded their heads in agreement, while Dietz beamed at the thought, telling himself the swine deserved everything that was coming to them after what they had done to him in Koeln-Kalk.

  ‘So let me sum up,’ the Canadian said, very businesslike now. ‘One, we know this Hitler chap is going to attempt to start a revolution and hopes to overthrow the socialist government in Berlin. Two,’ he ticked off the second point on his nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Von Horn, representing the traditionalist and right wing, is going to help this Hitler by providing him with the intelligence he needs for his attack on our people here. Three, there is no definite date yet set for this attack. It will come from the north over that radio,’ he indicated the German operator in the corner. ‘Four, but if we don’t know the date, we do know the target.’

  ‘And what is it?’ the two of them asked in unison.

  ‘Not what, but who!’ the Canadian corrected them.

  ‘All right then, who?’ Smith snorted a little impatiently.

  ‘General Sir Alexander Godley.’

  ‘And who’s he when he’s at home?’ Dickie asked cheekily.

  ‘Well, for one thing he’s a damned fool,’ McIntyre said contemptuously. ‘Won’t listen to anything I have to say, or his own staff officers for that matter.’

  ‘But who is he?’

  ‘The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army of the Rhine, that’s who,’ McIntyre snapped and there was no mistaking theanger in his voice…

  * * *

  McIntyre had waited, fuming, for nearly a whole day before the great man had finally deigned to see him in the large, requisitioned villa on the banks of the Rhine which was his official home. He had been ushered into the Commanding General’s office by a full brigadier and found Sir Alexander in full gear, including spurs and polished riding boots, seated on a saddle instead of a chair behind his desk, which was devoid of one single paper.

  He was a tall skinny man, his hair and trim cavalryman’s moustache both very white. But he had that peppery look about him of the old-school British officer who always aroused McIntyre’s ire. Instinctively, he felt his hackles rise as the GOC snapped in a no-nonsense voice, ‘Now what’s all this rubbish about? My brigadier there,’ he indicated the staff officer who was standing rigidly to attention, as if he were still a gentleman-cadet back at Sandhurst, ‘tells me the Huns are going to shoot me.’ He chortled and his skinny Adam’s apple shot up and down his withered throat like an express lift. ‘What!’

  ‘That’s my information, sir. Can’t tell you where I got it. But our own intelligence authorities back in London will confirm it.’

  Sir Alexander shot him a hard glance. ‘Secret Service, eh?’ he barked. ‘Lot of nervous nellies. Never trusted them in the last show, what!’

  McIntyre ignored the remark. He could see the GOC was a typical hidebound officer of the old school. Instead of arguing, he said, ‘Your personal security is not very good, sir, and we’ve had plenty of cases of attacks on our people when we never caught the Germans involved.’

  ‘My security is all right, Major,’ the General snorted. ‘Got a platoon of infantry on duty here twenty-four hours a day.
Smart lot of chaps from the West Yorks, what!’

  ‘Yessir. But you do go out riding, for instance, each morning along the Rhine, accompanied only by your groom.’

  ‘I have my riding crop and the groom has his. Hopkins is an old soldier – Fourth Hussar – he knows how to handle himself, what.’

  McIntyre felt his temper rising. ‘If this old bastard says “what” again, I’ll explode,’ he told himself.

  But there was no need to. Sir Alexander announced with an air of finality, ‘Well, I’m an extremely busy man. That will be all.’ Before he had realised it, he was being ushered out. As the door closed behind him he heard the GOC chortle, ‘Some sort of Colonial, wasn’t he? Always a bit jumpy under stress. Were in the last show. Now about that chukka…’

  * * *

  ‘And that was that,’ McIntyre concluded as he ended his description of this encounter with the GOC. ‘Just couldn’t get through to him. C declined to intervene. He said the British Army will have no truck with what Sir Alexander calls the “Secret Service”. Dates back to the last show. So,’ he looked hard at Dickie Bird and Smith, ‘until we know for certain what the Fritzes are up to, Sir Alexander’s safety depends upon you two heroes. And remember,’ he held up a finger in warning, ‘if you slip up and the Fritzes do manage to bump off the old fool, it’ll be a signal to all the hothead Fritz nationalists on this side of the Rhine. The British Army of the Rhine could have a wholescale, full-blooded revolution on its hands…’

  Eight

  Germany was in absolute turmoil. All over the Ruhr, the workers roused by right- and left-wing agitators were in open revolt against their French and Belgian occupiers. Daily there were pitched battles being fought in the streets of the grimy, red-bricked industrial towns. Allied soldiers were permanently confined to barracks. Otherwise, they stood a chance of being murdered on the outside. French colonial soldiers refused to obey the order. There were numerous cases of rape, or so the right-wing German newspapers maintained. Daily, new banner headlines proclaimed: ‘Black French Beast Takes the Honour of German Maiden’. In Essen, a Black Senegalese was found stripped naked and hanging from his neck. His penis had been sliced off and thrust into his gaping mouth.

  Inflation went through the roof. Now, those workers who still had a job were paid in billion mark notes. Each week these notes were re-stamped in red by the harassed banks, taking their face-value up even higher. The price of one egg that terrible summer of discontent would have bought 30,000,000 ten years previously! Workers pulled wooden carts to work to receive their pay, piling them up high with billions of brand-new, but virtually worthless notes. Those earning two billion marks a week could afford only to buy potatoes to feed their families. A story going the rounds was that a woman forgot her shopping basket containing billions of marks. When she returned to claim it again, she found the money stacked neatly on the pavement, but the basket stolen!

  Profiteers and foreign speculators flourished. These vultures bought up huge estates, priceless heirlooms, great paintings, for a few hundred pounds or dollars. It was said that a private in the American Army of Occupation in Wiesbaden was living with the beautiful daughter of one of the greatest families in the land because he gave her a dollar a week in order to pay for food for her starving family.

  Now farmers profited too. Daily, desperate people from the starving cities trekked onto the land, carrying the last of their family treasures in rucksacks. Pale and wan, they bartered away silver, fine porcelain and the like for a couple of eggs or a handful of potatoes. If they were women, the farmers wanted more – their bodies. It was rumoured that farm animals bedded down now on fine carpets and that rough- and-ready farmhands dined off Dresden china. Nightly, farmers went on patrol round their potato fields armed with rifles and shotguns to ward off potato thieves.

  Law and order broke down, even in traditionalist Prussia. Thieves broke into the Prussian hero Frederick the Great’s tomb and stole his orders and medals. Churches were regularly looted of their altar silver and baroque angels for sale abroad to collectors. People were routinely murdered on the streets for their possessions. There were cases of cannibalism. In Dusseldorf, a man was convicted of murdering young boys and girls, dismembering their bodies and turning them into meat pies which were eagerly snapped up by the starving population.

  Naturally, the Government and the Jews were blamed for the country’s ills. But the foreigners, in particular, the men of the Allied occupation armies, came in for the most blame. They had sucked Germany dry with their demands for reparations; they had seduced German womanhood and made whores of them; and, above all, they had destroyed Germany’s dignity and pride in itself.

  The Berlin Deutsche Zeitung, under a flame-red headline which demanded KILL THE LOT! stated, ‘Workmen of Germany! It is time you realised the shame the Armistice and quasi-peace has brought on you and your country. Do you still not carry in your hearts that pride which you cast in the mud when you surrendered on the Ninth of November 1918? It will be difficult to abstain from rising under the influence of National Pride. The day will come soon when all your comrades will think: “We ought to thrash those fellows.” KILL THEM! THE LAST GREAT JUDGEMENT WILL HOLD YOU BLAMELESS!’

  In Munich, the new leader of the National Socialist Party read the newspapers with an ever-increasing appetite and excitement. In the evenings, in his favourite lokal, the Burgerbraukeller, he would tell his admiring, fawning followers, ‘The time has almost come, party comrades. Those contemptuous reds and Yids in Berlin are on the run. These damned Catholics here in Munich have lost the support of the people, save for the old cronies who fill their churches, and the populace, left and right, has turned massively against our occupiers, those damned leeches who are living off the backs of honest German working men!’ His dark eyes blazed fanatically and his followers, Captain Goering, Lieutenant Hess and all the rest, nodded their heads in eager agreement. ‘Our people,’ Hitler continued in that throaty growl of his, ‘are under such enormous pressure that we must either act soon, or they will go over to the communists who are promising them the things they want most – bread and work.’

  Night after night he hammered home the same simple lesson, as his listeners sat around the bare, scrubbed wooden table, heavy with great litre mugs of Bavarian beer. ‘That one single blow must be struck. It will be the signal which will rouse Germany… Soon!’ And he would look round the circle of their faces with that masterful, man-of-destiny look on his own face and hiss: ‘The hour of revolution has almost come…’

  * * *

  Far away at the other end of the country in Cologne, Smith, Bird and the crew of the Swordfish knew nothing of Hitler’s plans and intentions. But even in Occupied Cologne, under the strict control of the British Army, they could feel the hatred that prevailed everywhere. The children threw stones, civilians attempted to brush soldiers off the pavement, others spat at their feet as they passed, women muttered angry names under their breath. As Dickie commented, ‘The jolly old kettle’s on the boil, Smithie. ’Spect it won’t be long before it boils over altogether, eh.’

  But Sir Alexander Godley, the GOC, seemed to sense nothing of this terrible hatred all around. At eight precisely each morning, his charger would be brought round to the front of the big riverside villa by his groom, the bandy-legged Hopkins. The smart sentries, all polished boots and gleaming equipment, would present arms. The General would say, ‘Morning, Hopkins, nice morning,’ even when it was raining, and then the two of them, armed only with riding crops, would canter down the towpath in full view of potentially hundreds of assassins.

  ‘It’s maddening,’ McIntyre confessed in frustration to the two young shipmates. ‘He sees absolutely no danger whatsoever. He’s either the bravest man I know or the most foolish. I tend to think the latter, between you, me and the gatepost.’

  All the same, McIntyre did what he could. ‘We’ve got to protect the silly old fogey against himself, dammit.’ He had a quiet word with the sergeant in charge of the
West Yorks guard platoon, a big Yorkshireman from the West Riding called Machen. Sovereigns changed hands and Machen agreed to put up ‘voluntary patrols’, he emphasised the word with a wink, at night. They would wear plimsolls and carry coshes and instead of walking the beat like the normal sentries, they would hide in dark corners around the big villa and keep their eyes open for intruders. ‘Like we did in the trenches in the last show when we expected a Jerry raid,’ Machen explained. ‘Why give away yer positions in advance – frigging daft.’

  McIntyre agreed it was ‘frigging daft’ and sent him on his way, knowing those ten sovereigns would seem a small fortune to the big NCO.

  ‘But you’re going to be the mainstay of the protection plan,’ he told Smith and Dickie as the three of them hunched in the tiny wardroom, drinking the usual pink gins. ‘You’ve been on these kinds of shows for years. You know the drill better than anyone.’

  ‘But if we only knew when, where and how,’ Smith protested, ‘it’d make the job a damn sight more easy.’

  ‘Well, you don’t,’ McIntyre snapped, obviously just as nervous as they were.

  ‘But surely,’ Smith objected, ‘you can figure something out by the kind of questions that von Horn poses to that tame Hun wireless operator of yours.’

  McIntyre looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ he conceded after a moment’s thought. ‘Yes, von Horn has asked for info about the General’s daily routine. And we’ve given him it straight. When the Old Man gets up, when he comes back from the office – that sort of a thing. He even asked if the Old Boy has a “lady friend”, as he expressed it.’

  Dickie grinned cheekily. ‘Would have thought the General was a bit long in the tooth for that sort of thing.’

  Now it was McIntyre’s turn to give him that crooked grin of his. ‘Well, you’re wrong, Bird. Regular as clockwork, every Saturday night, when the staff have all gone, Hopkins, that batman of his, takes the car and brings a certain lady of the town to spend an intimate hour with the Old Boy. Regular as clockwork – Saturday night between nine and ten.’