Lunch was Dover sole followed by a fine porterhouse steak, but the highlight was the choice of wine, the dusty bottle brought to the table to be examined, before being taken off for decanting. The cork, long and so deeply stained to be near black, was presented to show there was no rot, then the sommelier used his little silver cup to taste it before Cal was allowed some in his glass, that followed by much sniffing and swilling to aid the Burgundy to open out.
A nod saw both glasses filled, with Peter copying the tasting ritual. Rated as among the best wines in the world, a Domaine de Romanee-Conti was not something to be consumed in a rush, so the two lingered there for some time, reminiscing and planning.
Tempted as Cal was, there was no point in taking Vince Castellano for anything like a similar meal in Paris; he was not in favour of eating what he called ‘foreign muck’ and besides, there was no time, given they had airline reservations on a busy route that now provided the only convenient way into Czechoslovakia that did not involve a massive detour. It was a taxi from Gare du Nord to the airport, followed by a long wait to be processed through to a flight that only carried fourteen people.
Anxious French customs officers were behaving as if Cal and Vince were entering the country, not leaving, which perhaps only served to underline the nervous nature of everyone in Europe when it came to Czechoslovakia. Passports were scrutinised, luggage carefully examined, with both Cal and Vince staring at the man carrying out the latter task with the bland indifference of the seasoned traveller.
The country was of particular concern to France, who had had a strong hand in its creation, the same applying to Poland — building up allies on its eastern front to contain Germany, which was bound to be resurgent, had been its most serious political objective after reparations when negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.
She had also spent two decades and much treasure training the Czech armed forces and building their defences; indeed there was still a military mission in Prague under a senior French general, that to give credence to a treaty of mutual protection that included Russia — a pledge to come to their aid if they were attacked by Germany and, of course, vice versa. Easy to sign, it was a damn sight more difficult to honour in the prevailing climate.
The daily newspapers they had read on the way over the Channel showed the rhetoric was being ramped up in Berlin as the delegate members headed to Nuremberg for their Tenth Party Congress, to be called, since they had taken over Austria in their manufactured coup, the ‘Rally of Greater Germany’.
The whole of this was being faithfully reported as a wondrous event by the right-wing dailies, most notably Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail. In essence, if more measured, many of the others were not far behind, only the News Chronicle and the Daily Herald showing natural doubt, and the Manchester Guardian outright disgust.
All reported the rants from Hitler and Goebbels in the build-up to the Congress, about the supposed atrocities being committed by the Czechs against the poor beleaguered Sudetenlanders, whose only desire was, naturally, to be allowed to live their lives according to their own lights.
There was still no mention of any desire to be reunited with their brethren across the border, though Cal suspected from his briefing that was now the aim of Konrad Henlein and the Sudetendeutsche Partei, which he led, even if, as he did, he continued to deny it.
He had lived in Nazi Germany long enough to know the value to the state of the big lie: scream ‘atrocity’ loud enough and often enough on the radio and in the press and even the most sceptical observer begins to see reasons to believe it to be true, especially if there are no outlets to present an opposite point of view.
If that had been true in a country where the totalitarian reality stared one in the face, how much more effective was it in those supine democracies where the populace could barely comprehend the awful truth of National Socialism, people who would also, very likely, struggle to point out Czechoslovakia on a map.
Vince had an easy way of putting the whole thing into perspective; for him, all he saw in the Daily Mail, the paper which was most vocal in its support for Hitler, Mussolini and that ‘turd’ Oswald Mosley, was lies. This constituted a trio which, even with his Italian parentage, he hated with a passion. It was, in his pithy phrase, ‘Pure bollocks, guv.’
Eventually they got aboard the twin-engined DC2 and it took off, lumbering into the air with a full passenger load and, flying from an airport to the north of Paris, it soon took them over some of the old battlefields of the World War. For anyone who had been there the scars in the landscape, though they were green and verdant instead of mud-brown now, were unmistakable.
From on high on a clear summer day the line of the trenches, gentle depressions now, stood out starkly in the fields of grazing land and wheat, running from north-west to south-east, as did the mass of craters that littered the otherwise fertile fields surrounding them, holes that regularly threw up body parts.
There were trees again where their predecessors had been reduced to matchwood, rebuilt farmhouses, and cows grazing contentedly in well-ordered pastures. When you thought of the millions who had perished on that restored landscape it was easy to see very good reasons to not want to go through the whole thing again.
Nor was it simple to equate the trouble of the country to which they were headed with the peaceful-looking parts of France over which they then flew, those that had been occupied but untouched by trench warfare, the very fields over which Cal and Peter Lanchester had advanced to battle.
That was until, just over the broad grey River Rhine, their passenger aircraft was buzzed by a couple of German single-engined fighters, seemingly, according to the steward, a common practice, a way of telling those on board that their passage in a Czech aircraft was only possible through German tolerance.
Just over an hour later the rolling hills of Bavaria gave way to the more broken country of Southern Bohemia, part of that chain of hills and deep forested valleys in which lay the formidable Czech defence line, copied from the French Maginot Line, which Cal had described to Peter Lanchester.
Not that anything could be seen of the artillery-filled cupolas and machine gun-bearing pillboxes, but to an experienced military eye it was very possible to understand how formidable it could be to advance into a terrain in which it would be easy to inflict casualties on and hurt even a well-equipped enemy.
The next cause for exhilaration was when the banking plane showed the numerous church spires of one of the jewels of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire: Prague, the city of a hundred churches, looked peaceful at this distance and that was maintained when they landed, to be greeted by folk who seemed grateful they had troubled to travel to their country, whatever their purpose.
Cal liked the Czechs despite their airs; they tended to speak German as a second language, which meant he could communicate, drove their cars on the left, were honest, if rather strict in their morality, and proud to be citizens of an independent nation, that proved by the calm way they had mobilised in May in the face of Hitler’s bluster, getting to the colours some eight hundred thousand fighting men and forcing the Fuhrer to back down.
Most had been stood down but it was obvious the country was still feeling threatened. There was a strong military presence at the airport and Cal had noticed both sides of the runway were lined with trucks, which could be driven on to the concrete strip to block it in the event of an emergency. The Czechs had an air force, but it was nothing compared to the Luftwaffe.
There were knots of soldiers on the route into the city and, even if the roadblocks had been moved to the side, evidence of a state of emergency was more obvious still the closer they got to the city centre. All the shop and office windows were still taped to counter the effects of blast and some of the larger buildings remained as Cal had last seen them, sandbagged at their entrances; this was a country on edge.