The Invisible Victory

21

Within the hour, I was telling Archie of Jeff's scheme in the flat. To my surprise, he did not dismiss it as fantastic. 'There's quite a traffic in unofficial diplomatic activity behind the scenes. Swedes and Swiss and those sort of people. They remind me of the mice busy under the floorboards at some tremendous diplomatic reception. Well, sometimes the unexpected appearance of a mouse can make even an ambassador jump. There's somebody I know from Eton doing rather well in the FO. I'll give him a ring. Anything is worth trying in the country's present straits.'

But the Foreign Office seemed in no hurry to accept the services of the only man in Europe who could prevent the outbreak of war. The following evening, Jeff telephoned me at the flat. 'Can't you pep them up?' he complained.

'I don't think one can pep up the British Foreign Office. Anyway, on Friday nights it disperses to its country houses. That is why Hitler always makes his most violent moves on Saturday mornings.'

'I'd try calling the Embassy, but I guess Joe Kennedy's never heard of me.'

'He's probably away with the Astors, anyway. I hear his sons and daughters are well in with the Cliveden Set. It's at Cliveden and not in the Cabinet, of course, where British policies are formulated.' This was not entirely a newspaper columnist's joke. Jeff put down the telephone. He was not in the mood for kidding.

That Friday, Neville Chamberlain traversed the muzzle of British foreign policy so that it no longer aimed harmlessly at the sky, or perhaps at the British people themselves, but at Hitler's head. He had gone to Birmingham, where his family name shone like burnished brass. Instead of plaintively protesting again at Hitler's perfidy, he changed his mind and said Britain would resist Hitler's domination of the world to the uttermost of its power. Everyone cheered. The last time they cheered him he was waving his piece of paper on Heston Aerodrome. The following week, President Lebrun of France paid a State visit. The weather stayed cold and showery. On the Wednesday, Hitler subdued Lithuania by sailing in the pocket battleship Deutschland from Swinemьnde to Memel. His latest aggression at least had the singular variation of being committed by water.

Jeff fumed expensively all that week in the Savoy. Archie finally told me that his friend from the Foreign Office would see 'my man' on the Friday afternoon. But not within official walls. We were invited to take tea at the Travellers' Club in Pall Mall at four o'clock.

To Jeff's visibly diminishing self-confidence, we were led by a porter in bottle-green livery and brass buttons to a large oblong morning-room full of dark leather furniture, on which a pair of elderly gentlemen sat asleep. The windows looked across St James's Park to the Foreign Office, for which the club was something of a canteen. Jeff's bounce expired more with our young diplomat, who had chestnut hair, a pink plump face, an old Etonian tie and a name not double-barrelled but triple-barrelled. 'Would you prefer toast or tea-cake?' he asked politely. 'The tea-cakes are rather good.'

'Tea-cakes,' I replied for us both.

'You've some contacts among our German friends?' suggested the Foreign Office man, when he was leaning back in his deep armchair and lazily stirring his tea.

'That's right.' The casual English grandeur of the club was too much for Jeff's natural brashness. His demoralization was completed by being presented for the first time in his life with a tea-cake. He could explain only stumblingly the scheme which had appeared so exciting and straightforward in the Embankment gardens.

The diplomat spread his tea-cake thickly with strawberry jam. 'Could you give me the name of this person in Wuppertal, who's the link between you and the Reich General Staff?'

'No, sir.'

'Well, don't worry. Male or female?'

'I'm not prepared to say.'

'German?'

Jeff nodded. I wondered for the first time if it was Gerda.

'More tea?' The diplomat invited us. 'And what precisely would you wish His Majesty's Government to do, Mr Beckerman?'

'Promise the support of the British Empire for the German generals when they murder Hitler.'

'And it is you who will bring them the British Empire's message?'

'That's right,' Jeff agreed.

'Oh, Charles-' A tall, bald man caught our host's eye. 'You are on the committee, aren't you? The cottage pie at lunch was really rather dreadful. I wouldn't have given it to my housemaid to eat.'

The two members discussed the cottage pie. Then all four of us discussed the architecture of the club. Then Jeff and I found ourselves out in Pall Mall.

'I try to prevent a war,' Jeff said bitterly. 'And what do I get? Tea-cakes!'

Last week-last week as I write this, and can lunch in professorial dignity at the Athenaeum Club next door to the Travellers'-I invited the same diplomat with the triple-barrelled name. 'Yes, we'd looked up that young American fellow's background,' he remembered. 'Which wasn't very savoury. His family were the biggest bootleggers in New York during Prohibition, hardly more than gangsters. We were suspicious of him. We were even suspicious of Carl Gцrdeler, and he was a former Lord Mayor of Leipzig. Both might have been catspaws, giving Hitler an excuse to shoot powerful but inconvenient generals as British agents, without incurring the resentment of his Army.'

'Weren't you wrong about Gцrdeler? He finished at the end of a length of piano-wire after the 1944 bomb plot.'

'Perhaps we were. There was a half-hearted sort of plot in 1939, I suppose. Halder fussed about a bit during the final days of that August. General von Witzleben was supposed to collect some troops and chuck Hitler out by marching them to his front door. The other generals all posted themselves away from Berlin. You can't say the plotters lost heart. Their heart wasn't in it from the first place. I heard about it all from a Cambridge don, who interrogated Halder after the war. The Generaloberst told of an earlier plot for September 1938, but unfortunately that was the day Chamberlain flew to Munich. When Hitler called off the impending war, his popularity went up in Germany as much as Chamberlain's did here.'

'So my American friend did know what he was talking about?' Jeff had a contact, a surprising one in Wuppertal, whom he told me about in Munich after the War.

'Possibly,' he admitted, sipping his port.

'What happened to Herr Wohltat and the Whaling Conference?'

'Oh! An utterly disgraceful episode. Sir Horace Wilson tried to buy Hitler off. A miserable failure! He should have offered more.'

'Do you still like tea-cakes?'

My guest looked surprised. 'Yes, I often have them at the Travellers'. They're not nearly so good as they were.'

The following Friday of March 31, 1939, Chamberlain offered Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, a guarantee of Britain's unqualified support should Hitler attack Poland. Colonel Beck accepted, between two flicks of ash from his cigarette. That evening I was taking David Mellors and his pretty red-headed fiancйe to dinner at Kettner's in Soho, to talk over the wedding arrangements for the following week. As we sat down, David asked, 'Have you heard of a chap called Florey?'

'Yes, he was a don at Caius when I was up. An Australian.'

'That's right. You knew he'd been Prof of Pathology in Oxford since 1935?'

'No, I didn't. The last I'd heard of him, he'd gone to Sheffield.'

'What do you do, boy, when you move into a department as a new broom of a professor?'

'Send your staff to the library to look out other people's unfinished lines of research,' I told him promptly.

'You're right. Get them busy picking brains, which is quicker than scratching their own. From all accounts, the Path Department at Oxford was in a pretty ropy state when Florey blew in. About the first item he gingered up his boys and girls to investigate anew was lysozyme.'

'Old Flem's tear antiseptic!' I exclaimed. 'That's as out of date as the Charleston, surely?'

'Oh, God!' exclaimed Margaret in anguish. We both stared at her. 'I forgot to tell Daphne the other bridesmaids have decided on pink hats.'

'She can buy some dye at Woolworth's, dear,' said David helpfully. 'Next on Florey's list was another of Flem's babies which never got past the toddling stage-penicillin. You had something to do with it, hadn't you? Apparently they've now managed to isolate a grain or two of the stuff.'

'Professor Raistrick tried to isolate some at the School of Tropical Medicine,' I said sceptically. 'But I heard the penicillin kept vanishing under his nose.'

'Florey's got a pretty bright chemist working for him there. Chap called Ernst Chain, half-Russian and half-German. Apparently he used to work at the Charitй Hospital in Berlin.'

I had heard of Dr Chain. 'Yes, he escaped from Hitler and went to work with Hoppy at Cambridge.'

David grinned. 'Florey got him transferred to Oxford, like Joe Payne from Luton Town to Chelsea. I don't know what the transfer fee would be.'

'No, I'll tell the others they can all wear white hats, like Daphne,' said Margaret thoughtfully.

'Where did Florey get the mould from?' I asked. 'As far as I knew, the specimen at Mary's was the only one which actually produced any penicillin.'

'They had a culture of it already in the lab. Flem sent a bit to Oxford years ago. Chain is able to grow it faster than Flem did, by lacing the broth underneath with yeast.'

'Have they brought Flem himself into the research?'

'No. Chain thought he was dead.'

I laughed. 'That would be taking Flem's habitual self-effacement to an uncomfortable extreme.'

We talked about the imminent wedding, but more about the imminent war. As two men, we had a particularly keen interest in the possibility of conscription. It arrived within a month. One hundred and forty-three MPs voted against it. 'It is very dangerous to give generals all they want,' objected Major Clement Attlee-but he was thinking of the Somme, when the generals had more men than ideas. The conscripts were afforded exceptional treatment. Unlike any previous soldiers in the British Army, they were issued with pyjamas.