The Generals (25 page)

Lieutenant Bratianu
: As today’s proceedings end with this committal of the case to the court, I cannot see any objection to a brief interrogation of Velder.

Colonel Orbal
: No, just go ahead. But don’t go on for too long.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Velder! So you admit to desertion and high treason.

Velder
: Yes.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Answer in the regulation manner.

Velder
: Yes, sir.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Do you also admit that your treachery and cowardice cost the lives of hundreds of your friends?

Velder
: No, sir. What happened that night in Ludolfsport happened
before we got there. It would have happened whether we’d gone there or not.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Don’t argue with you superior.

Velder
: No, sir.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Keep quiet until you are spoken to.

Colonel Orbal
: Why does he swing his head about like that? Is he in pain?

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Keep your head still, man. Do you regret your betrayal?

Velder
: Yes.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: It’s still ‘Yes, sir.’

Colonel Orbal
: Heavens, how he yells!

Lieutenant Bratianu
: You say yes, but I don’t believe you. Turn towards the presidium of the court and say that you regret it.

Velder
: I beg your pardon …

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Beg your pardon! How can you use such words? Your crimes are unpardonable. They cannot even be expiated with death. Say: I am a swine.

Colonel Orbal
: What a row!

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Answer, man!

Captain Endicott
: The accused is unconscious.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Really? You’re not being taken in, now?

Captain Endicott
: No.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: In that case I shall commit the case to court. Colonel Orbal! Major von Peters! Colonel Pigafetta! Commander Kampenmann! Justice Haller!

Major von Peters
: Smart demeanour.

Colonel Orbal
: That’s good, Bratianu. The parties may leave. Push that creature away, Brown. And Endicott, if you must fiddle about with those hypodermic syringes, for God’s sake do it somewhere else.

Major von Peters
: Bit of luck Bratianu came in on it. Schmidt would have gone on nagging about this for three more days.

Commander Pigafetta
: Interesting young man, that Bratianu.

Colonel Orbal
: This session of this extra-ordinary court martial is adjourned until tomorrow at eleven o’clock.

Lieutenant Brown
: Permanent members of the presidium present: Colonel Mateo Orbal, Army, also President of the Court Martial; Major Carl von Peters, Army, and Commander Arnold Kampenmann, Navy. Colonel Nicola Pigafetta and Justice Tadeusz Haller both report absence. Colonel Pigafetta is replaced by his personal substitute, Major Tetz Niblack, who consequently represents the Air Force. Officer presenting the case, Lieutenant Arie Brown. The prosecution is presented by the Prosecuting Officer, Captain Wilfred Schmidt, Navy, and the accused is assisted by Captain Roger Endicott, Air Force.

Colonel Orbal
: What’s wrong with Pigafetta?

Major Niblack
: They say he’s ill.

Colonel Orbal
: Seriously?

Major Niblack
: Not as far as I know. He was reckoning on taking his place in the presidium again by tomorrow.

Colonel Orbal
: Oh, I see. Nothing serious.

Major von Peters
: And Schmidt’s back again. We’ve that pleasure yet again.

Commander Kampenmann
: I’m afraid that you’re rather alone in your penchant for Lieutenant Bratianu. I for one don’t share it personally, anyhow.

Colonel Orbal
: Nonsense. Bratianu’s a first-rate young man. He’ll go far.

Commander Kampenmann
: I don’t doubt that at all.

Colonel Orbal
: Is there anything really wrong with Pigafetta? I mean, he’s not seriously ill?

Major Niblack
: No, not really.

Colonel Orbal
: Perhaps he couldn’t stand that windows business.
The draught, perhaps. Yes, I expect he couldn’t stand that.

Major Niblack
: Windows?

Colonel Orbal
: We’ve got ventilation problems, you see.

Major Niblack
: Oh, I heard something about it in the mess.

Colonel Orbal
: I’m not really satisfied myself, either. It’s a bit better, and the air does circulate, but there’s such a bloody noise from outside. From your aeroplanes. That noise, we must get rid of it.

Major Niblack
: It would seem a trifle difficult to eliminate that on an airfield.

Colonel Orbal
: I’ve just had a couple of conversations on the matter, one with the Commanding Officer of the Engineers and the other with Major Carr of Stores. They’ve agreed on a compromise solution. We have a type of small portable fan, fan model eighteen for office tables, it says in the stores inventory. Major Carr promised to send over a dozen. Have they come, Brown?

Lieutenant Brown
: Yes, sir.

Colonel Orbal
: And have you got them fixed up?

Lieutenant Brown
: Yes, sir.

Colonel Orbal
: Well, let’s have them on, then.

Lieutenant Brown
: They’re already working sir.

Colonel Orbal
: Oh, are they? Carr said in a note he sent me this morning that these fans model eighteen don’t solve the central problem, i.e. the circulation of the air. They are only able, as he so rightly pointed out, to circulate the air that’s already in the room. But he had considerable expectations that they would make conditions more endurable, anyhow, giving an illusion of circulation of air, he wrote. We’ll have to see. We must observe how they work.

Major von Peters
: Call in the parties, now, Mateo.

Colonel Orbal
: Time enough. What’s the point, for that matter, of Schmidt and Endicott standing here babbling on, if the presidium is paralysed by lack of oxygen? I’ve also noticed that Velder smells bloody awful. Put him further to the left, Brown, not right in front of me.

Lieutenant Brown
: Yes, sir.

Colonel Orbal
: That’s right. Well, now we can let the parties in.

Captain Schmidt
: As the charges appertaining to Velder’s desertion and high treason were clearly dealt with yesterday afternoon and have been handed over to the court for consideration, I request
to be allowed to continue with the prosecution.

Major von Peters
: What else could you do? Begin again from the beginning?

Captain Schmidt
: I shall, therefore, go on to charges numbers eighty-three to and including one hundred and one, concerning rebel activities, terror, murder and accessory to murder, on nineteen different occasions. This complex includes the criminal activities committed by Velder during the time he collaborated with Janos Edner and Aranca Peterson. As the evidence mainly consists of the accused’s own confession and statement, I request that Corporal Erwin Velder be called as witness.

Major von Peters
: Yes, if that’s necessary. Granted.

Captain Schmidt
: Is Velder capable of continuing his story?

Captain Endicott
: Yes. He’s had several injections.

Captain Schmidt
: Velder, describe you activities with the traitors Janos Edner and Aranca Peterson.

Velder
: We got to Ludolfsport soon after five o’clock on the morning of December the thirteenth. There was a lot going on there, people with white armbands everywhere in the streets. They were both men and women. Only a few were in uniform and most of them weren’t armed, either. We first stopped at a hotel in the middle of the town where the nurse and the children were accommodated. Then I went on with Janos Edner, Aranca Peterson and Danica Rodriguez to a building in the harbour area where Stoloff had set up his headquarters. Everything was humming there, people coming and going, and cars full of people, all sorts of people, leaving the harbour area at regular intervals. Stoloff was sitting in his shirtsleeves at a table on which there were three telephones and a radio-transmitter. On the wall in front of him hung two large maps, one of the whole island and one of the town of Ludolfsport. He gave us a short summary. Said that there seemed to be no doubt that the Army had acquired full control over the first and third military areas, i.e. the Central and South-Western Provinces with Oswaldsburg and Marbella. On the other hand, the coup had failed completely in Ludolfsport, where the fighting was now over. The situation was more or less the same in the rest of the Eastern Province, with two exceptions. One was the lighthouse and pilot-boat quay on the point fifteen kilometres north of the town, which had been taken by a
heavily armed Army unit, now ensconced on the point. And the other was the barracks and buildings of the military area’s headquarters ten kilometres south of Ludolfsport. The latter worried him less, he said, because by questioning prisoners he had found out that there were only a few soldiers left in the barracks and also that these troops were mostly units of the old militia, whom Colonel Fox had judged as less useful and reliable. He also told us that the majority of the regular units had been broken up in the street fighting and that about ten per cent of the soldiers had voluntarily gone over to our side. In that particular case, it was almost exclusively a matter of men who had been in the militia for a long time. What worried him most, he said, was the shortage of arms and means of transport. As people were armed, they were divided into groups and dispatched west along one of the three roads, that is, the big motorway, the old road to Oswaldsburg—the one we’d come along—and the northern coastal road, which was however still cut off by the lighthouse and the pilot-boat station. The area south of the motorway—the autostrad divided the Eastern Province into a northern and southern part—consisted of flat land with scattered farms and a sparse network of small roads. Shortly before six, a message came through that the groups of armed citizens who had been sent forward along the motorway had met strong resistance from regular troops about five kilometres beyond the boundary of the Central Province. Those who tried to get along the old road were stopped at about the same line. A moment later the radio in Oswaldsburg broke silence with a message saying that Oswald had proclaimed himself Chief of State and head of the government with Haller as Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Justice and War, and that everyone was exhorted to obey the Army’s orders. Stoloff really had done a lot. He’d also been in touch with Ludolf, who was expected on a special plane at Ludolfsport at about seven that morning. At about eight, a message came through that military area headquarters had fallen into our hands. At first, disturbances had broken out between different groups of soldiers in the barracks and then some of the troops had come over to us. The others capitulated. On the other hand, the point by the lighthouse was still held and the soldiers there could cover the northern coastal road. The Army units at the
lighthouse kept up resistance for four days, until their ammunition and supplies ran out.

Major Niblack
: This Stoloff, was he a Bolshevik?

Velder
: Excuse me, what? Don’t know. I mean I don’t know what he was then. He was a building technologist. A powerful man with curly hair, not very tall. Aranca, Edner and Stoloff looked at the map together and calculated that Oswald had control over about sixty per cent of the island, while we still held thirty-five per cent of the area. Then, when the demarcation line was drawn, it turned out that those figures were a little more advantageous. We had in fact thirty-eight per cent against their sixty-two. There was a brief discussion on the prospects and then everyone agreed that the most important thing was to get people and barbed wire and other things that could be used as barricade material quickly to the line about five kilometres beyond the border of the province where the troops seemed to have set up their most eastern support-posts, their chain of outposts, as Stoloff called them. We also agreed that we had too few people and arms to risk an attack at once. Stoloff said that he had questioned Colonel Fox—he lived on for three or four days, although he was severely wounded—and other officers and thus had got a clear picture of the real strength of the Army in both military areas. He said he was convinced that Oswald would never dare make a serious advance towards Ludolfsport until he had reinforcements. Aranca Peterson asked where those reinforcements were to come from. It was Janos Edner who answered her: ‘There are bound to be far too many people who’d like to send regular troops as so-called volunteers to Oswald’s assistance.’ Then Stoloff said: ‘We can get that kind of help, too. And we’re going to need it.’ That was the first discussion on that subject. In the morning, the Army’s emergency depôts were found and opened. They turned out to contain ten times as many weapons and ammunition as had been thought. So now at least two-thirds of the people who wanted arms could have them. And Stoloff told us that stores of building materials were considerable. At about ten, Joakim Ludolf came, and then there was a council of war.

Captain Schmidt
: We’ll stop there for a moment, Velder.

Major Niblack
: Why didn’t the General put the Air Force in at once? When I was in Africa and South-East Asia, we nearly always
used almost solely planes, both against guerillas and the civilian population. Not high explosives or atomic weapons. Gas and napalm. And rapid-firing weapons, of course, against built-up areas and crowds of civilians. It had a devastating effect on morale. If you can talk about morale in such circumstances, of course. Ha ha.