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 von 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.
‘To be deceived by appearance and superstition was not for me. Luigi Barzini, trustworthy witness, told me that an unknown man in a Roman crowd saw Mussolini’s motorized chariot halted. He stepped forward and told the pothouse dictator, ‘Death after victory over France. Death from strangers.’ The Duce was never the same man thereafter. Squeezing fantasies from dwindling vision, mesmerized by Hitler, his pupil, he had decided for war, which his fears and apathy made his disaster certain.’
While we stood on the Lake’s margin and, gross with fantasies and superstition, I awaited the knightly sword to descend for the white hand protruding from water. He brooded, before saying, ‘A long shot from Arabia, a trumpet call from the Rhine, return from Elba, a howl from a Bavarian beer cellar… by such disasters men live and, scarcely knowing it, die.’