“Of course. That would be nice.”
“We’ll take the path around the lake. Get some blood into your cheeks. Did you eat breakfast?”
He addressed her as though checking the duties of a subordinate. She nodded, looking cowed. When Legister offered his arm, she stepped forward and took it.
“Stay clear of the woods,” Giselle advised.
Legister patted the pockets of his overcoat before removing a pair of black leather gloves. Without looking at Owain he added, “I believe your uncle is also surfacing for air, major.”
He walked off, taking Marisa with him as if she were a captive.
Owain watched them descend the steps, two dark figures in the snow, Marisa a head shorter.
“Thank you for arranging our meeting,” Owain said stiffly to Giselle.
“I did nothing of the kind,” she replied, but archly. “A lovely young woman. I do believe she’s rather fond of you.”
My own curiosity was intense and I impelled Owain to ask: “How long has he known about us?”
She was surprised by his bluntness. “The secretary of state? Almost certainly from the start.”
There was only amusement in her voice.
“It’s perfectly innocent,” he insisted. “We’re just friends.”
Giselle’s smile was both knowing and noncommittal.
Again I made Owain ask: “Isn’t there a risk? To your own position, apart from anything else. For colluding. He could have us all arrested if he wanted to.”
“Even if it’s as innocent as you say?”
“He may not know that. If I was in his position I’d assume the worst.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter to him.”
“Marisa’s his wife.”
Giselle looked thoughtful. I had the impression she was contemplating Owain’s motivations rather than Legister’s.
“You have heard the expression ‘a trophy wife’?” she asked.
Owain nodded.
“Perhaps there is something of that in their marriage. After all, Marisa wants for nothing.”
“She’s unhappy.”
“Possibly so. But perhaps we should not fault him for that. They are a generation removed from one another. He has many responsibilities, and not all of us are animated by—what shall we say?—cris de coeur. I think perhaps the minister’s concerns are necessarily not those of most other men.”
I saw my uncle emerging from the building. With him was Colonel-General Blaskowitz.
My uncle had his walking stick but he moved laboriously, as though hindered by his bulky greatcoat. The generaloberst wore a peaked hat and an old-fashioned field-grey double-breasted overcoat. It was padded but its basic design had changed little in over sixty years. To me Blaskowitz might easily have been a Nazi officer emerging from a high-level meeting with the Führer himself.
“The generaloberst and I are going to take a little constitutional,” Sir Gruffydd said to Giselle in English. “Any recommendations?”
“The secretary of state and his wife are walking around the lake,” she said pointedly. “If you would prefer a more open view I suggest the Monument.”
She indicated a direction at right angles to the lake, where a broad treeless avenue stretched a short distance to a set of steps that led up to an obelisk.
“Excellent,” the field marshal said. “Owain, you’d better come with us in case I go weak at the knees.”
They set off, the generaloberst initially walking at a brisk pace that he swiftly had to moderate to allow Sir Gruffydd to keep up. Owain hung back, certain that they wanted to talk privately. But his uncle kept calling him forward.
“…a decade of little more than local skirmishes,” Blaskowitz was saying in German, “we’d almost slaughtered one another into peace. Now the destabilisation of our remote systems has introduced renewed uncertainties on all sides. A vacuum of information, into which seeps every sort of speculation, chief of which is this business about AEGIS—”
“No basis for it,” Sir Gruffydd interrupted. “The systems aren’t advanced enough. It’s not possible.”
“We still have no adequate explanation for the breakdown,” Blaskowitz pointed out. “Meanwhile the men at the front are growing increasingly nervous.”
The generaloberst spoke with a Prussian accent. Owain thought he caught the words “Erdbeben” and “Donnerschlag”—”earthquake” and “thunderclap”. Were they discussing impending operations? Somehow he thought not. Blaskowitz was referring to something that had already happened. Something that was worrying his men.
“Combat troops are always superstitious,” Sir Gruffydd retorted. “Especially when everything’s quiet. Breeds time for the demons of the imagination to make mischief.”
“They talk of Armageddon machines, of death rays and of course the ultimate omega weapon. Some of my senior commanders have even expressed the view that the Russians might already be testing such a device.”
“Surely you don’t believe those mouldy chestnuts?”
Owain’s uncle had spoken in English, to Blaskowitz’s incomprehension. He switched back to German: “For as long as I can remember there’s always been some new wonder weapon just waiting in the wings to win the war for whatever side devises it first. Fantasies of wish fulfilment, if you ask me. We’d be mad to give them credence.”
“Perhaps so. But we face the prospect not only of continuing guerrilla warfare within our own territories but the possibility of renewed engagements with the Russians and perhaps even the Americans. These would be no trivial affairs.”
“They have their own problems,” the field marshal countered. “Bogged down in south-east Asia and over-extended in the Pacific.”
They began to climb the steps to the monument, his uncle labouring but refusing assistance. When they reached the top, Owain sat him down on a bench underneath the monument. It was an edifice of dark marble, its base a bulky representation of a crouched Europa, lifting the obelisk to the sky. It had been raised a decade before in commemoration of all those who had fallen in half a century of war.
“Do you realise that we have less than a million men on the eastern front?” Blaskowitz was saying. “And under half a million around our southern borders? There are insufficient conscripts to replace our losses. This is a matter of demographic record. The truce is beginning to crumble, and without satellite links any future clashes will inevitably mean a return to the kind of warfare of old with heavy losses of personnel. Instead of slowly bleeding to death, we will haemorrhage.”
Sir Gruffydd peered at him over the top of his stick. “So what are you suggesting?”
“We declare an unconditional cease-fire along all our borders and invite all our enemies to do the same. It is our moral God-given duty.”
Only coming from a soldier as distinguished as the colonel-general could such a suggestion have had any credibility. Blaskowitz had commanded the armies in the east for ten years. He had reduced their reliance on the monolithic army groups of old by pioneering the use of emergency action formations comprising mobile units that could speedily be dispatched to hotspots. This had helped stabilise the front. It remained a mystery to many of his men that he had not yet received an overdue promotion to field marshal.
“It’s not so easily done,” Sir Gruffydd said. “Some might see it as tantamount to surrendering.”
“And those who advocated it guilty of treason?”
Owain’s uncle made a scornful sound.
“Only a madman would question your loyalty,” he assured Blaskowitz. “It’s more a question of what such a declaration might signify. It could lead disaffected groups within our own territories to come wriggling out like worms in a bud, demanding autonomy, independence, God knows what!”