Midnight in Berlin (43 page)

“Welcome back, Ambassador!”

It was David Buckland who led the chorus of greetings that morning. Sir Nevile rubbed his hands and smiled. They all seemed pleased to see him, most of them anyway. Halliday was lounging at the back as usual, with his lower shirtfront buttons undone.

The meeting lasted for almost three hours, and by the time it ended just before lunch, Sir Nevile Henderson realised that Providence had overlooked the presence of Satan in Berlin.

Henderson might have discounted the news he received that morning from Halliday had it not been comprehensively endorsed by Macrae and received general nods of assent around the table.

Halliday had revealed in his usual insolent manner that he had what he called “22 carat” information that Hitler planned to march into Prague and annex the rest of Czechoslovakia on 1 March, in exactly ten days' time. The Munich agreement would be publicly torn up, to the humiliation of Great Britain and its prime minister. Further, he said, the Germans were negotiating a secret deal with Romania to gain access to all her oil fields – an essential prerequisite for war.

Finally, and most alarming of all, a senior officer in the Russian NKVD intelligence service had been in Berlin just before Christmas. Secret talks were under way for a military pact between the two countries. At a stroke, this would remove the nightmare that had always troubled the sleep of the German High Command – the prospect of a two-front war.

Sir Nevile flatly refused to believe the last piece of information. He grudgingly accepted the force of Halliday's argument that Hitler was accelerating his military plans. The idea of a disarmament conference, Halliday had said, was a very bad joke, especially since the House of Commons had at last come to its senses and had just voted £150 million for rearmament.

The two men then clashed in a manner with which their colleagues were now wearily familiar. Britain's decision to rearm was designed to pressurise all nations in Europe into accepting a disarmament conference because who, in the dying days of the Great Depression, would wish, or could afford, to enter an arms race? It was a forcing move by the government – and would everyone please note that conscription had not been introduced?

Thus the ambassador confronted the man who headed British secret intelligence operations in Germany. The logic was clear, unarguable, and was the product of the finest minds in the Foreign Office and Downing Street.

But as Halliday pointed out, such theory crafted in the calm waters of Whitehall and London's clubland hardly stood a chance in the stormy seas of Europe. Logic did not apply to Hitler. He did not operate by conventional norms of behaviour. He was a barbarous opportunist seeking an excuse to take Germany to war.

At which point, Sir Nevile had risen to his feet, the pallor and creased lines on his face more obvious than usual. He said there were enough prophets of evil in the world without the British embassy adding to their number. He stalked from the room. As someone remarked, that was how most staff meetings at the embassy seemed to end in those days.

Noel Macrae never knew what finally made his mind up. Perhaps it was the sight of Hitler triumphantly saluting his troops in Prague after his army had seized the rump of a Czechoslovakian state that had been broken up by British diplomacy at Munich. Perhaps it was the extravagant plans for Hitler's fiftieth birthday celebrations on 20 April. Since the turn of the year, Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry had been priming the press with details of the largest military parade in the history of Europe, which would mark the day in Berlin.

Forty thousand soldiers from all units would march past the reviewing stand on Charlottenburger Chaussee, now renamed the East–West Axis. Two hundred aircraft would fly overhead at a height of only four hundred feet. On the main reviewing stand, twenty thousand guests would gather, both to acknowledge the power of the Third Reich and to pay homage to the man who had lifted his nation from the wreckage of war and bankruptcy to become the foremost power on the continent. Hitler would stand alone, to take the
salute on a plinth projecting from the main stand decked with oak leaves and laurel branches.

The celebrations would be nationwide. There would be a new luxury edition of
Mein Kampf,
with blue and red boards embossed with a gold sword. There was to be a major feature film about the life of the Führer and there was even talk of an opera.

There was no end to the madness. In a private coded cable to Sir Leslie Hore-Belisha in London, Macrae wrote, “The bitter truth that has to be faced is that Hitler has risen above politics and is now deified as a god by most of his countrymen and especially the young men and women in the Hitler Youth movement.”

Looking back on it, Macrae realised that he had long known that the fiftieth-birthday festivities would provide the opportunity. What he had always lacked was the lavalike flow of anger that would turn motive into action, sweep aside reason and drive him to an act of damnation and salvation.

He would be damned whatever the outcome, no question about that. The salvation, if he succeeded, would be for a generation alive at that moment and for unborn future generations.

The moment arose one morning in March when he came across a Jewish woman in Unter den Linden. It was mid-morning and it was snowing again. She was wearing only a shawl over a threadbare, patched woollen jacket and long skirt. On her feet she wore clogs that were too big and must have belonged to a man, maybe her husband. She wore a large full-brimmed hat that looked as if it had been squashed down onto her head, because the brim was only just above her eyes. The yellow Star of David, prominently sewn onto the jacket,
was the only splash of colour on her clothes. She carried a baby no more than eighteen months old on one hip while pushing a wooden cart with another young child with her free hand.

She was being jostled and prodded by two policemen walking behind her. The woman was obviously exhausted and could hardly stand. She kept slipping in the snow and slush, and every time she did so there would be another vicious jab from a truncheon. A small crowd followed the policemen, while a stream of shoppers eddied around the spectacle, heads down, eyes averted.

Macrae had stepped in front of the policemen, waving his diplomatic pass and demanding in a voice of outraged authority to know what was going on. The policemen, robotically trained to respect authority, had stopped and barked some order at the woman. When she turned, her face was that of a ghost. Imprinted on the pallid features was the pleading look of a mother who had accepted her own fate but still clung to the faint hope that she might save her children.

Macrae had demanded to know the reason for her treatment. The police looked at Macrae's diplomatic card and whispered to each other. One spat into the snow. They said she was a thief who had been caught selling stolen butter. They were taking her to the police station on Alexanderplatz. Would the Englishman move out of the way, please? This was Berlin not London, and they had a job to do.

To his shame, that is what Macrae had done. He stepped back and watched as the woman staggered up the avenue with her children towards the main square by the Brandenburg Gate. The crowd had followed, anxious to see justice meted out to a Jewish thief. Once inside the largest police station in the city, the woman would very quickly appear before a single junior judge. Sentence would be passed after
a cursory hearing of a few minutes. She and the children would be on the train to a camp the next day. The children would die first in that camp and she would follow. Macrae had seen death in that ghost face. He knew she would stay alive to protect her children, whatever the horrors that awaited them all. But they would all die, because that is what the camps were for.

It had been early March when Macrae saw this. He had done nothing after the initial protest, because there was nothing he could do beyond get himself arrested, detained and then released in a few hours. At least, that is what he told himself. But that day he felt a sense of shame and helplessness that quickly turned to rage. Because there
was
something he could do.

He had taken his rifle out of its case that night, removed the protective oilcloths and laid it on the kitchen table. The telescopic sights had been wrapped separately in fine silk, and this too he laid on the table. Finally, he drew a small velvet pouch from the case and laid it alongside the rifle.

He oiled the mechanism of the rifle, first the bolt and breech, and then the magazine clip. He oiled the spring within the magazine and pushed it gently up and down, so that it slid smoothly back and forth within the casing of the magazine. He pulled the drawstring of the pouch open and shook out five rounds of .303 copper-headed bullets.

The infantry used a different version of the Lee–Enfield, with a ten-round magazine, but snipers preferred the five-round version. A sniper rarely got a second chance after the first couple of shots. He slipped the magazine into the gun, released the safety catch and snapped the bolt up and forward to chamber the first round. He raised the gun to his
shoulder, swung the barrel to the window and peered through open sights into the darkness outside.

He tried to remember how many boar he had shot that day on Koenig's estate. Maybe a dozen; he couldn't be exact, because his memory dragged him back years earlier, recalling every shot he had fired. He knew precisely how many men he had killed. Fifteen young Germans, front-line troops, artillery observers, runners and even a sniper like himself, had fallen to this weapon. Their lives had ended, darkening those of their families and friends for ever.

They had all met clean, sudden deaths, a blessing for trench soldiers more likely to live out their lives maimed in hospitals or as gibbering wrecks in lunatic asylums. Their names would be inscribed on a marble memorial somewhere, and flowers would be laid at the base on their birthdays by grieving mothers, fathers, wives and children.

“What on earth are you doing?”

Primrose was standing in the kitchen door, elegantly dressed as if for a cocktail party, which is exactly where he thought she was.

“I thought you were out.”

“I was, and I got bored. What are you doing with that thing?”

“Just checking, giving it a little service.”

“It's time you got rid of it.”

“Why? It's a beautiful piece.”

“A piece of your past, I know. That's why you should get rid of it. Give it to a museum or something.”

He clicked the bolt back and ejected the bullet from the chamber. It fell onto the table. Primrose shuddered and walked to the fridge, pulling the door open.

“For God's sake, put it away. I can't stand the sight of it.”

“You didn't seem to mind guns when we were shooting with Florian. I seem to remember you had quite a few shots.”

He was wrapping up the gun and putting the bullets back into the pouch. She swung round from the fridge, a glass of white wine in her hand.

“That was different. That was a country shoot. This is my kitchen, and I come back to find you waving that bloody thing around.”

“I didn't know you were coming back. I'll put it away.”

She sat down suddenly and slumped in her chair.

“I'm sorry. I just can't stand this anymore.”

“What, you mean me?”

“No, it's not you. It's everything. All anyone talks about is war. It's dark all day and it never stops snowing. I need to get away, see some sun, get some light.”

He had sat down opposite her. Her eyes were filmed with tears. She sniffed loudly, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, got up and brought him a glass of wine.

“I want to go skiing up in the Alps. There's sun up there all day long. The air is like champagne, they say. I know you can't get away. You're busy with this bloody crisis. It just goes on and on. But I need to get out.”

“Of course, I quite understand.”

He reached a hand across the table and she took it, smiling through the tears that were falling gently down her cheeks. She sniffed again and drank her wine.

“I am sure the embassy will help arrange it,” he said.

She smiled again.

“No need. I have done all that. There's a little place up in the mountains near Munich called Lenggries. You can ski all day, apparently. The snow is wonderful. Evenings are all glühwein and old folk music.”

“But who will you go with? You can't go on your own.”

“Of course not. Some friends want to come.”

Some friends, or one particular friend, he wondered. It didn't matter. He got up and slid the rifle back into its leather case.

“I am pleased for you,” he said. “You need a break, we all do, but you're right, I can't get away.”

He leant over to kiss her. She raised her mouth, pursing her lips to meet his. He felt the taste of wine on her lips. She put her arms around him and gave him a quick hug. He felt her cheek against his, wet with tears.

No one in the British embassy had ever seen Roger Halliday smile. He would return morning greetings with a nod and sombrely thank people for the occasional courtesies bestowed upon him by way of a chocolate biscuit with his morning coffee or a gift of flowers on his birthday.

In spite of his dour manner, Halliday was generally liked, especially by the secretarial and junior staff, who admired the nonconformist manner in which he dressed, his inevitably late appearances at important meetings and his ill-disguised contempt for diplomatic protocol in general.

The shabby dress and the lack of personal hygiene were dismissed as the eccentricities of an
homme sérieux
and it was generally accepted that Halliday had much to be
sérieux
about in the Berlin of March 1939.

So Macrae was surprised to see his colleague smile broadly as he paced the drawing room in his Charlottenburg house one evening in late March. A nearby church had just struck six o'clock. It was still light outside and there was a lingering warmth at the close of the day that gave a hint of the spring to come.