Midnight in Berlin (37 page)

“So you see, my dear, there is an element of sport in the hunt.”

He was speaking to Gertrude, who tossed her head and shrugged. She was wearing headscarf, gumboots, corduroy trousers and a waterproof jacket. She had slung her .22 rifle over her shoulder like a marching soldier. Macrae realised the gun was less a threat to a boar than a rebuke to her husband.

They heard shouts and ringing bells coming from the far end of the wood. They tramped off to their positions and climbed into the hides. Macrae laid his Lee–Enfield on a narrow wooden plank and eased the barrel through a screen of bushes. He peered through the sight.

The edge of the wood was about a thousand yards away. The boar would come along the valley and swerve up the
sloping sides when they realised that there were hunters concealed ahead of them.

A boar travelling at thirty miles an hour showing only his snout and tusks would not be an easy shot. The hide was tough and only a direct hit would kill the animal. Once it had swerved sideways, the boar would be showing its flank and shooting would be easier, but there would be more chance of wounding the beast. Macrae did not want to leave a wounded animal to die a lingering death. He would take the boar head on at the outside range of his rifle, about eight hundred yards. He should be able to get off three or four shots before the animals realised the danger ahead and changed course.

He loaded the gun, slipping the magazine with five bullets into the chamber. Solid .303 rounds, three inches of pointed brass of the kind that had carried death across the trenches. The sniper heard only a crack as he fired. The target would hear a fizzing hum if the bullet missed. Macrae had missed many times, but he had also killed many men with this gun. And that is why he had never used it since. It had accompanied him on his travels in its leather case stamped with his initials “NM”, and he had taken it out and cleaned it, but never once had he fired it – until he had taken Koenig's stag. It was a fine British rifle, with superb optical sights that had helped him become a sniper with one of the highest kill records in the British army.

He looked across at Koenig's hide across the valley. The sides were not camouflaged and in the distance he could just make out two figures blurred into one on the platform. He swung his rifle up, looking through the sights. Koenig was showing Primrose how to hold his rifle. He was standing behind her, leaning into her, one arm with hers under the barrel and the other under her right arm around the trigger guard. Koenig's head was on her shoulder and he was talking
to her, guiding her through the manly art of aiming and firing a Mauser sporting rifle.

What was he saying to her?
Aim for the forehead just above the eyes, hold the butt tight into your shoulder and squeeze?
Or was it
I've missed you, I want you come to my room tonight when he's asleep, Gertrude never sleeps with me these days?

“See anything interesting?” said a voice at Macrae's shoulder.

He put the rifle down. Gertrude was holding out her hip flask.

“No, just aligning the sights.”

Gertrude smiled. “She isn't the first and she won't be the last. Here, have a bull shot,” she said.

She lifted the head of the flask, created a cup, poured a measure and handed it to him. Macrae drank, grateful for a pause in the conversation. He struggled for a response to a statement that invited no reply and decided to give none. He felt the vodka and beef broth burning the back of his throat. He winced and she smiled, taking the flask and drinking straight from the neck. Sounds of shouting and bells grew louder from the wood. They turned to take up their positions.

“You don't like shooting, do you?” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Female intuition.”

“I haven't used a gun in twenty years – except for that stag,” he said.

“So why now?” she asked.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, buried far from rational thought, lay the awkward answer to that question. He pushed it aside. There was an easier response.

“I don't like to disappoint my host,” he said.

Macrae looked through his sights again. The hunting horn sounded three times, long wailing notes like the trumpets that
had sent men into battle for centuries. He slid his rifle into his shoulder and took up his position. There was a shot beside him. Gertrude stepped back, reaching for the binoculars.

“Too soon,” said Macrae, squinting through his sights.

The woman was obviously trying to ruin the shoot. Boar were breaking in numbers from the wood, fast-moving dark creatures, mostly males with tusks. But they were too far off for a clean shot. The boar came up the valley, powerful heads bobbing up and down with each stride. Their speed was surprising. Macrae trained his sights on the lead animal, bringing the cross hairs to bear on a large tusked head. He aimed and fired, feeling the familiar kick against his shoulder. The animal somersaulted and slid along the ground. Boar began breaking right and left across the valley. Macrae could hear shots from Koenig's hide. He looked back through the sights at the boar that had now scattered over the valley floor and up the hillsides. He fired four more shots in quick succession, snapping the bolt back each time to inject a new cartridge into the breech. The boar fell cleanly, shot not through the flank but each time through the head, close to the eye. He pulled out the magazine, slotted in a new one and swept his telescopic sights up the hill.

There they were, fleeing boar heading for the safety of the summit and the far side beyond. He had once shot a German soldier running from a camouflaged forward observation post. The man was an artillery spotter. When he realised he had been seen, he ran madly back to the safety of his lines, ducking and weaving. He had been hindered by a heavy uniform, which was probably why Macrae had missed with his first shot. The man had tried to strip his jacket off while running, which made his movements improbably erratic. He had thrown his jacket and rifle away and was almost at the trench when a bullet struck his head, toppling him forward.

Now he fired five more shots, taking a boar with each one. The range was about five hundred yards, he guessed. He could hear shots from Koenig's hide but had seen no sign of his kills.

He stood up, straightened his back and put his rifle down. His hands were trembling. He felt faint.

“Did you say you had not used a gun for twenty years?” Gertrude was looking at him, frowning and smiling at the same time, the note of incredulity clear in her voice.

“Bit longer, actually,” he said. “Anything left in that flask?”

Like every other member of the British embassy, Macrae had walked to work on the morning of 10 November. Most of the pavements were covered in broken glass from smashed shop-fronts and apartment windows. The streets were littered with broken furniture and household goods. There were no taxis, buses or cars moving in the city. Only the fire service seemed willing to risk their heavy engines on the rubble of glass in order to hose down smouldering houses close to the scores of synagogues throughout the city.

When dawn broke, there was little left of such places of Jewish worship. As elsewhere in Germany, the larger synagogues had been burnt down completely in the night and left in smoking ruins. Hundreds of smaller synagogues had been torched but not wholly destroyed. Houses and apartments belonging to Jews had been broken into and their contents vandalised or tipped into the street. Crowds had gathered to stare at the piles of broken mirrors, paintings, ornaments and furniture that lay heaped up on pavements. No one dared touch such goods and no one asked what had happened to their owners.

The staff meeting at the embassy had been put back that morning owing to late arrivals and also the need to get as much information as possible about the violent events of the night before. It was noon when Sir Nevile Henderson took his seat in the conference room. He noted that his colleagues looked visibly shocked. That was understandable. He himself felt pained and aggrieved at the reported events of the night. It was a diplomat's job to accept that in certain postings there would be dangers. But this was Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, a proud and powerful nation that lay at the heart of Europe. Mob rule here was unthinkable.

He had been woken at midnight by a call from David Buckland with the news that organised Nazi paramilitaries in all major cities had begun attacking Jewish properties. He had dismissed the reports as exaggerated and reminded himself that Buckland was young and inexperienced. He had gone back to sleep. There had been no news on the German radio that morning, but when he found the locally employed cook crying in the kitchen, he realised something had gone badly wrong. She was a good German girl, since the embassy did not employ Jewish staff if it could help it. The woman said she feared for her Jewish neighbours, who had simply vanished in the night.

That was when Sir Nevile had gone out and walked the streets of the city centre. What he saw disturbed him deeply. The National Socialist Party had evidently lost control of the thuggish elements of its own organisation. On his return, he placed a call to the office of Field Marshal Göring. A message was taken by his secretary, who declined to give any information about the field marshal's whereabouts.

The meeting began with a report by the political attaché, David Buckland. He had been up most of the night and looked ashen-faced. He took a deep breath and read from a
typewritten document. Reports of destruction of Jewish property and violence towards Jews all over the country were pouring in all the time, he said. So far, one hundred major synagogues had been destroyed, eight thousand Jewish homes burnt out and Jewish businesses attacked throughout the country, especially those in the centre of cities. More sinister were the beatings and the bestial treatment of elderly Jewish women and children. They had been driven into the streets and attacked by organised gangs. Many had been murdered in their homes.

“Did the police not do anything?” snapped the ambassador.

“No. The mob was made up of Nazi Party members and many were part-time police. They all wore their swastika armbands quite openly. They used official vehicles and carried military weaponry.”

“What was the cause of this – who ordered it?”

Sir Nevile looked around the room. Heads were bowed towards their coffee or their notebooks. One or two people sat back and stared at the ceiling. No one seemed to want to answer the question. Halliday at the back was preoccupied with extracting congealed mucus from his left nostril.

“I can hardly believe this was sanctioned at any senior level,” said the ambassador. “I have placed a call to Field Marshal Göring and I hope to speak to him very soon. I am sure he will enlighten us.”

Halliday drew an old handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose loudly and raised his hand. The ambassador nodded. At least the man had stopped picking his nose.

“A word of caution, Ambassador. I think you will find that Göring and all those gangsters at the top of the party were well aware of what was to happen to the Jews and their property.”

The reference to the government of a major European country with whom the United Kingdom had diplomatic
relations as “all those gangsters” was typically provocative. Sir Nevile Henderson had put up with Halliday dressing like a tramp, reeking of alcohol and picking his nose in his meetings. He was not going to accept such a casual insult to a host government to which he was the accredited diplomatic representative.

“I would ask you to justify such a remark,” he said. “And I would like to see you afterwards to discuss your use of language in these meetings.”

“They were aware of it because they ordered it – all of them. And the Führer himself was made fully aware. I think the excuse was the shooting of a junior German attaché in Paris a couple of days ago, but I am not fully informed on that. The point is that this pogrom has long been planned. With Hitler, timing is everything. We gave him Czechoslovakia at Munich, which saved him going to war for it. Now he can turn on the Jews, because he knows we will do nothing.”

“That is the kind of malevolent analysis I would expect to find in the
Manchester Guardian
,” said the ambassador. He looked around the room, seeking eye contact with his staff as he spoke. “I understand all of you are deeply shocked by what we have heard of the events last night. But I must ask you to remember that our mission in the Foreign Service is to act dispassionately and to provide London with an analysis of events without exaggeration or emotion. It is particularly important not to place weight on rumour and gossip. It is on those principles that our diplomacy has always been based.”

The ambassador sat down. Halliday tilted back on his chair, placing his arms behind his head in a gesture that pulled a length of crumpled shirt from his waistband, revealing an expanse of hairy stomach.

“My source is Goebbels himself. He made a speech on Munich radio immediately after meeting with Hitler, saying
that retaliatory action against the Jews had been agreed by the highest authority. That was the signal for the pogrom.”

Halliday tipped his chair forward with a thump, rose and moved towards the door, the flapping of his unlaced shoes the only sound to break the silence of the room. He turned at the door, as Macrae knew he would, and faced the table.

“We should remember that we are not dealing with a head of state, nor indeed with the supreme commander of the German army, nor the leader of the National Socialist Party. We are dealing with the author of
Mein Kampf,
and if any of you are surprised by what happened last night, and what will continue to happen to Jews in this country, I suggest you reread that very enlightening book.”

He closed the door behind him. The meeting had effectively ended.

They called it Kristallnacht, and even in the Salon the next night Sara caught whispered conversations expressing shock at the savagery and degradation inflicted on the Jewish community. She heard the word again and again – Kristallnacht, the night of crystal – as if the orgy of violence could be covered up with a pretty name. It wasn't just the foreigners who appeared troubled by the violence.