I raised my eyebrows. 'All I heard about Domagk was his turning down the Nobel Prize.'
'I'll give you the real story. It's all round Wuppertal.' Jeff produced a sheet of flimsy paper from his pocket with a triumphant flourish. 'I had that sewn into my overcoat. As I was travelling with a Swedish diplomatic party, I decided the Gestapo wouldn't be too nosy.'
It was the carbon of a letter from Domagk at I G Farben in Wuppertal, dated November 3, 1939, to Professor Dr Gunnar Holmgren, Rector of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It started with the appropriate academic greeting, Magnifizenz!, its twenty-odd lines of German expressing Domagk's honour at accepting the 1939 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, and his readiness to visit Stockholm on December 10 to receive it.
'Don't ask me how I got that letter,' Jeff said proudly. 'But mine weren't the first prying eyes to read it. The Gestapo intercepted it, of course. Domagk must have been overconfident, or maybe didn't see what went on under his own eyes. A lot of intelligent Germans don't want to. You remember Karl von Ossietsky, the German who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934?'
'And promptly disappeared into a concentration camp.'
Jeff nodded. 'To a mind like Hitler's, a Nobel Prize of any sort carries a political sting. The story is that Hitler ordered Domagk's arrest himself. On a Friday night in the middle of November, a couple of guys in plain clothes knocked at Domagk's house near the Zoo there and said they were Gestapo officers. They arrested him, searched his place, confiscated all his correspondence. Then they locked him up in Wuppertal Jail. In the morning they ordered him to clean out his cell and offered him a cup of coffee, to both of which our professor gave a dignified refusal. A top SS man from Dьsseldorf came across to interrogate him, but by then there was a hell of a row going on. The chief of the civil police was demanding to know why their distinguished citizen was behind bars.'
'With the Gestapo, he wouldn't get an answer.'
'That's right.' Jeff poured more champagne into Elizabeth's glass. She was sitting in an armchair with her gas-mask on her knee, listening in fascination. 'They kept him there eight days. They let his wife bring some food, and they moved in a couch instead of a plank bed. When one of the warders asked what he'd done to get arrested, Domagk replied, "I won the Nobel Prize". The warder went round the other prisoners saying, "We've got a madman in there".'
We laughed. 'Then a week later Domagk got himself arrested again,' Jeff went on. 'It was at an international medical congress in Berlin. You know how suspicious the Nazis are of foreign contacts. They wanted him to sign a declaration that he wouldn't make a speech or mix with the guests. Domagk refused. So inside he went. In the end, the SS took him to the Ministry of Education, and gave him another letter to sign addressed to the Karolinska Institute, refusing the Nobel Prize.'
'He signed that?' asked Elizabeth.
'If he hadn't, the world would have heard that Professor Domagk had suffered a fatal heart attack. But do you know what the Nazis did? They sent the letter to the police at Wuppertal, so it would be posted to Stockholm with a Wuppertal postmark. These trivial bits of thoroughness are what make me feel most frightened of the Germans.'
Three waiters wheeled in a trolley with our dinner. 'When's America coming into the war?' asked Elizabeth.
'Who can tell what's in Roosevelt's mind?' Jeff stubbed out his cigarette. 'If Joe Kennedy here at the Embassy had anything to do with it, I'd say never.'
'Archie says this Kennedy chap has written Britain off already,' Elizabeth told him. 'And I gather Kennedy is highly delighted at the prospect.'
'You can't expect the Boston Irish to stroke the British lion,' Jeff observed.
'Perhaps the Germans will get rid of Hitler themselves,' I suggested. 'After all, they nearly blew him up in that Munich beer cellar last month.'
'That bomb was a put-up job, to put public sympathy right behind Hitler.'
'But half a dozen Germans were killed by it,' exclaimed Elizabeth.
Jeff snapped his fingers. 'What's six or seven lives to the Nazis? Even German ones? Let's eat.'
It was the last good meal I had in England for fifteen years. It occurred to me that Elizabeth must have been seeing a good deal of Archie.
23
'Of course, it was Dr and Madame Trefouлl working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris who made sulphonamide therapy on any scale possible at all.' Dr Henri Lamartine, beside me on a deck chair in the afternoon sunshine early in a beautiful summer, produced another blue and gold packet of Weekend cigarettes. It opened like a book. He had been in Oxford six days, without exhausting his supply brought from Paris. He refused English cigarettes, because they gave him _la toux sиche._
'Isn't that a little sweeping?'
'No, I don't think so, _mon cher confrиre.'_ He spoke excellent English, in a dry, precise way which matched his appearance and, as far as I could tell from a week's collaboration, his character. He was of middle height but lean, his dark hair well greased and brushed back, with a small woolly moustache and many thin lines round the angles of his mouth. His complexion was yellowish, and his long-fingered hands had many moles on the back. He wore a smart chalk-striped blue suit, a dark shirt and plain silk tie. He was ten years older than me, my opposite number at the Institut Duhamel in Montparnasse, though his position in the French military and bureaucratic cat's cradle was more complicated than mine. He was ending a week's exchange of information and opinions. I was to pay a return visit to Paris in the autumn.
'Oh, well left alone, sir,' I interrupted.
Lamartine frowned deeply. 'I do not understand why you acclaim a player for missing the ball.'
That Wednesday of May 8, 1940, we were enjoying a cricket match in the Oxford Parks. 'It's simple. The bowler made the ball veer at the last moment. Had the batsman not spotted it, he would have been caught off the edge of his bat and sent back to the pavilion. You see?'
'I think you have to be an Englishman of many generations to comprehend this mysterious game.'
'It's really simple but with delightfully subtle variations, like a Mozart symphony.'
'Why could they not all have bats?' Lamartine wondered. 'It would make the game much livelier.' He resumed his argument. 'I G Farben waited two years before presenting "Prontosil" to the world, while countless millions continued to die from blood poisoning, meningitis, etcetera. They wanted their patents watertight, that's all. Well, _c'est logique._ But it was the Trefouлl, with Dr Nitti and Dr Bovet, who found the "Protosil" dye was broken down in the body, and only the sulphonamide part of it did the work of killing the bacteria. As sulphonamide was discovered by Gelmo of Vienna in 1908, I G Farben couldn't patent it. We made the Germans look fools. Farben must have known all the time that only the sulphonamide in "Prontosil" was active. They manufactured it with a red colour to mask the truth.'
'Taking pure sulphonamide instead of "Prontosil" at least saved the patients turning bright pink and passing alarming pink urine.'
'It's over?' asked Lamartine, as the players abruptly trooped from the field.
'No, the captain's declared.'
'Declared what?'
'It doesn't matter. Let's have a cup of tea.'
It was towards the end of the phoney war, the _drфle de guerre_ as Lamartine called it. A month previously, Chamberlain announced that Hitler had missed the bus. But unfortunately it was still being driven by the Fьhrer in whichever direction he cared, at an unstoppable pace. Denmark and Norway had been swiftly overcome, though Lamartine assured me emphatically that the French expected little trouble from the Germans for the rest of the year-'Hitler was forced to strike up north. He will be somewhat more prudent before letting fly at the Maginot Line.' Lamartine was returning to Paris in the morning, and I solicited Professor Florey to invite us that night to dine in Queen's College.