The Generals (33 page)

Colonel Pigafetta
: This peculiar little propeller which blows air over my legs all the time, is that one of your … improvements?

Colonel Orbal
: Yes, it is. Though not especially successful, I must admit. I suggest that we move to another place. To Army Staff Headquarters, for instance.

Colonel Pigafetta
: I won’t agree to that.

Colonel Orbal
: What? Why not? It’s nothing to quibble about anyhow, is it?

Colonel Pigafetta
: And I find it highly unnecessary and impractical to change locality now when the session is nearly over.

Commander Kampenmann
: Yes, it does seem superfluous.

Major von Peters’
. How long does this wretched business have to go on, Schmidt?

Captain Schmidt
: Not many more days. It depends on the accused’s condition.

Colonel Orbal
: Here’s that carriage and pair coming back again. Come on, get a move on, now.

Captain Schmidt
: We have heard how the accused visited the enemy of the people, Joakim Ludolf, and put himself at his disposal. What is of greatest importance is to clarify Velder’s participation in four different stages in Ludolf’s criminal attempts to acquire power. The first of these was what—still according to the accused’s own testimony, almost the only evidence there is on this point—was called the ‘general method’. Let him now continue, Endicott.

Velder
: Ludolf was very taciturn. Generally speaking, he just bade me welcome. Stoloff on the other hand, talked quite a bit. He said that I knew more than almost anyone else about Oswald and his way of thinking and also that I had witnessed the collapse in the northern sector and seen practical results of the Fascists’ tactics. Then he said that in future I would be a staff officer. Ludolf asked what had happened to Janos and Aranca and when I told him what I knew, he shrugged his shoulders and didn’t say any more. What happened then?

Major von Peters
: Are you asking me, you maniac?

Velder
: Yes, Stoloff did a quick run-through of the situation. On the operations map, he showed that Army units were attacking along the old demarcation line—the western front, as he called it—and were trying to cross the river, and that at three or four places they were also attacking in the north, along the autostrad. But they were weaker units there. He judged the situation as favourable and said that the outer defence belt could not be forced with the methods the Army had used hitherto. The whole of the land border was well fortified and the mines were in three layers. He also considered it impossible that Oswald’s units from the west would be able to cross the river and the ravine because the fortifications on our side were blasted into the mountain wall and could not be destroyed by artillery.

Major von Peters
: Oh, Christ, letting him sit there talking about all that. As if I didn’t remember that bloody river. Month after
month … oh, well, it doesn’t matter.

Commander Kampenmann
: I’ve studied all that. You landed into the same situation as Cadorna once did at Isonzo. You couldn’t take the hills without crossing the river and you couldn’t cross the river without controlling the hills.

Colonel Pigafetta
: My dear Kampenmann, your officiousness is boundless. What do you know about Isonzo?

Commander Kampenmann
: That it led to Caporetto.

Colonel Pigafetta
: But do you by any chance remember who won the war?

Major von Peters
: Pigafetta’s right, but this is after all a court martial, not an academy for staff officers.

Colonel Pigafetta
: Most of all, it’s not a forum for amateur historians and café-strategists. Go on with the testimony.

Velder
: Things went just as Stoloff had said. The Army attacked for ten days without making more than a few yards headway. Then Oswald saw that he must change tactics and the attacks stopped. From then on it was mostly shelling by artillery, but that didn’t have much effect.

Captain Schmidt
: Here I should like to steer the accused over into another track. What is meant by the ‘general method’? To what extent did Velder participate in the carrying out of it and to what extent was he responsible for the consequences of it?

Captain Endicott
: Velder, the general method …

Velder
: … had two sides, an ideological one and a military one. The ideological side was based on application to Communist doctrines and thought. And giving every man and woman in the southern sector something which Ludolf called ‘definite will to defend’. He himself had this quality and he’d clearly had it for a long time. As had Stoloff. To loathe the enemy to the extent that it seemed much better to die than to flee or give up. It was a dogma that was hammered in highly systematically, for a start. Then they stopped talking about it. I gradually realised that the majority of those in the southern sector had thought like that earlier, consciously or unconsciously, and that otherwise they wouldn’t have been there. Everyone in the southern sector joined the militia, both men and women. Children and people who were so old that they were no use at anything had obviously been evacuated at a very early stage.
Quite a lot was also done to see that no more children were born. Abortions were done at first-aid stations, of course, and contraceptive pills were also dealt out to the women.

Captain Endicott
: And the military side …

Velder
: … consisted of a defence and fortification scheme which Stoloff had created. He saw to the military department and Ludolf to the psychological and ideological side, so to speak. When I saw what they’d achieved in three months, I couldn’t believe it. When it came to the crunch, Stoloff did admit that some of the installations had been done long before under various pretexts and that they also could have been used for different civilian purposes. Well, what? Well, the general method started out from the theory that the whole of the southern sector was a permanent fortress. First there was the outer defence belt, minefields, trenches and bunkers, which lay inside each other along the whole of the northern border. The river in the west and the hills behind were a natural fortress in themselves. Not much work had been needed there. Along the coasts, the outer defence belt consisted of electric and magnetic mines, which to a great extent had been there before, and they’d mined the beaches as well. But that was just the beginning, if I may say so. Inside the outer defence belt, there were three chains of fortresses. The outer one was of thirty-two forts, connected to each other by underground passages. In the second, there were twenty forts or defence-units and in the third twelve. Many of them had several storeys. In the very centre was the headquarters itself. All this was only partly finished at the time, but the first chain, thirty-two concrete forts blasted into or dug out of the ground, were already complete, and they were working busily on the inner belts. The headquarters itself had been ready long before the war broke out. Stoloff had built it on three levels under the ground, as laboratories and storage space. But the thought had clearly been from the very beginning that it could easily be converted for military use. When I first saw it all on the map, I thought it looked like three necklaces of beads lying inside each other with a star in the middle.

Major von Peters
: Nice necklaces, I must say.

Velder
: It was a fortress, the whole thing. Like an anthill. The whole of the southern sector. Stoloff reckoned on having it all ready in six months and that happened, too. In August, all three fortified
lines were ready. There were huge stores too. They reckoned that provisions, fuel, ammunition and medical stores, even under bad conditions, would last for two years. That was how the general method ran. At first I thought it was awful. There was no land; nowhere where people could live as human beings. But soon I was caught up into the general atmosphere and spirit. I suppose I’d had it in me from the start. I suppose that was what had brought me there, of course. After I’d been there a week, I was made a staff officer. We had a lot of work to do, eighteen hours a day for the first months.

Captain Schmidt
: That was what was called the ‘general method’ then?

Velder
: Terrifying millstone ideologies.

Commander Kampenmann
: What did you say, Velder?

Velder
: ‘Our island mustn’t become an experimental field for terrifying millstone ideologies which grind people to dust beneath them.’

Colonel Orbal
: What did he say? What’s that peculiar talk?

Velder
: Strategically it was like this: we were not going to do anything until the defence system was complete and intact. Only defend ourselves against attack. Keep casualties low. Then when the whole fortification system was ready, Plan A was to be set into action. We worked on it very carefully. That was when the raids began.

Major von Peters
: That’s enough for today.

Velder
: Everything was like a dream. We were quite isolated, all of us in the southern sector. Communiques were never sent out, and we had very few contacts with the outside world. It felt as if everyone had forgotten us. No one thought about it as war. Only us and Oswald of course. We hoped he’d underestimate us. We worked out three plans, Plan A, Plan B and Plan C. The last was an emergency plan and was Ludolf’s idea. Sometimes I think that deep down inside, it was that one that he liked best.

Major von Peters
: That’s enough, I said. Can’t you get the blighter to keep quiet, Endicott?

Colonel Orbal
: If it’s not one fault then it’s another. Just like Pigafetta’s air-conditioning.

Velder
: So in August, on the third, we began …

Major von Peters
: Shut up, man. Push him out.

Colonel Orbal
: The session is adjourned until tomorrow at eleven o’clock.

Lieutenant Brown
: Those present: Colonel Mateo Orbal, Army, also Chairman of the Presidium of this Extra-ordinary Court Martial. Colonel Nicola Pigafetta, Air Force, Major Carl von Peters, Army, and Commander Arnold Kampenmann, Navy. The Prosecuting Officer is Captain Wilfred Schmidt, Navy, and the accused is assisted by Captain Roger Endicott, Air Force. The officer presenting the case is Lieutenant Brown.

Colonel Pigafetta
: First name and service, Brown.

Lieutenant Brown
: The officer presenting the case is Lieutenant Arie Brown, Air Force. Justice Tadeusz Haller had reported his absence.

Colonel Orbal
: I don’t think Haller’s going to come any more.

Colonel Pigafetta
: No, I don’t think he will.

Major von Peters
: How do you know that?

Colonel Pigafetta
: As you must know, Justice Haller fills a double role in this connection. He not only acts as an observer, but he’s also chairman of what they call the Joint Commission from the Ministry of Justice and the Judicial Department of the General Staff, who are working out the formal verdicts and sentences in the case against Velder.

Commander Kampenmann
: I had understood that decisions are to be announced almost immediately after the final summing-up.

Colonel Pigafetta
: Yes, together with detailed argumentations. Bear in mind that it’s a question of verdicts which will become precedents.

Commander Kampenmann
: So the verdicts of this court martial will be settled virtually without our assistance.

Colonel Orbal
: How you do complain and grub into everything, Kampenmann.

Colonel Pigafetta
: The material collected will of course be placed before the presidium of this court martial. Then we have to state our opinion on verdicts and sentences.

Commander Kampenmann
: I can’t help thinking that the procedure seems somewhat simplified.

Major von Peters
: Don’t you see, Kampenmann, that otherwise we’d be sitting here raking about in all this muck for years.

Colonel Orbal
: Exactly. Quite right. Quite right.

Commander Kampenmann
: It worries me all the same. If the members of this Joint Commission are thinking along different lines from ours, then their work will be wasted. And Haller has only presented himself here on eight days out of the fourteen.

Colonel Pigajetta
: Presented himself is probably not quite the right expression.

Major von Peters
: Justice Haller is very close to the Chief of State.

Colonel Orbal
: Haller isn’t a man to talk out of turn with impunity, civilian though he may be. Do you remember how he ran the information services during the disturbances, Carl?

Major von Peters
: He built the reputation up outwards. Both the nation’s and the General’s. Damnably well.

Commander Kampenmann
: So he testified about …

Colonel Orbal
: That business, that’s old hat, Kampenmann. The similarity between a priest and a pair of women’s legs. Heard that in cadet school. Now let’s start.

Commander Kampenmann
: However strange it may seem, that wasn’t quite what I was going to say.

Major von Peters
: It doesn’t matter. Call in the parties, Brown.

Captain Schmidt
: I will now develop further charges numbers one hundred and five to and including one hundred and twenty-seven of the case for the prosecution, concerning murder, accessory to murder, accessory to mass-murder, preparation for genocide, subversive activities, Communism, hounding of opponents and criminal promiscuity. Request to call Corporal Erwin Velder as witness.

Major von Peters
: Yes, yes, granted.

Captain Schmidt
: I intend first to corroborate the accused’s
participation in the so-called Plan A.

Captain Endicott
: You can begin now, Velder.