Fall of Giants

“Joey Ponti!” she screamed, and then they dragged her out through the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – January and February 1917

Walter Ulrich dreamed he was in a horse-drawn carriage on his way to meet Maud. The carriage was going downhill, and began to travel dangerously fast, bouncing on the uneven road surface. He shouted, “Slow down! Slow down!” but the driver could not hear him over the drumming of hooves, which sounded oddly like the running of a motorcar engine. Despite this anomaly, Walter was terrified that the runaway carriage would crash and he would never reach Maud. He tried again to order the driver to slow down, and the effort of shouting woke him.

In reality he was in an automobile, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes 37/95 Double Phaeton, traveling at moderate speed along a bumpy road in Silesia. His father sat beside him, smoking a cigar. They had left Berlin in the early hours of the morning, both wrapped in fur coats-it was an open car-and they were on their way to the eastern headquarters of the high command.

The dream was easy to interpret. The Allies had scornfully rejected the peace offer that Walter had worked so hard to promote. The rejection had strengthened the hand of the German military, who wanted to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking every ship in the war zone, military or civilian, passenger or freight, combatant or neutral, in order to starve Britain and France into submission. The politicians, notably the chancellor, feared that was the way to defeat, for it was likely to bring the United States into the war, but the submariners were winning the argument. The kaiser had shown which way he leaned by promoting the aggressive Arthur Zimmermann to foreign minister. And Walter dreamed of charging downhill to disaster.

Walter believed that the greatest danger to Germany was the United States. The aim of German policy should be to keep America out of the war. True, Germany was being starved by the Allied naval blockade. But the Russians could not last much longer, and when they capitulated, Germany would overrun the rich western and southern regions of the Russian empire, with their vast cornfields and bottomless oil wells. And the entire German army would then be able to concentrate on the western front. That was the only hope.

But would the kaiser see that?

The final decision would be made today.

A bleak winter daylight was breaking over countryside patchworked with snow. Walter felt like a shirker, being so far from the fighting. “I should have returned to the front line weeks ago,” he said.

“Clearly the army wants you in Germany,” said Otto. “You are valued as an intelligence analyst.”

“Germany is full of older men who could do the job at least as well as I. Have you pulled strings?”

Otto shrugged. “I think if you were to marry and have a son, you could then be transferred anywhere you like.”

Walter said incredulously: “You’re keeping me in Berlin to make me marry Monika von der Helbard?”

“I don’t have the power to do that. But it may be that there are men in the high command who understand the need to maintain noble bloodlines.”

That was disingenuous, and a protest came to Walter’s lips, but then the car turned off the road, passed through an ornamental gateway, and started up a long drive flanked by leafless trees and snow-covered lawn. At the end of the drive was a huge house, the largest Walter had ever seen in Germany. “Castle Pless?” he said.

“Correct.”

“It’s vast.”

“Three hundred rooms.”

They got out of the car and entered a hall like a railway station. The walls were decorated with boars’ heads framed with red silk, and a massive marble staircase led up to the state rooms on the first floor. Walter had spent half his life in splendid buildings, but this was exceptional.

A general approached them, and Walter recognized von Henscher, a crony of his father’s. “You’ve got time to wash and brush up, if you’re quick,” he said with amiable urgency. “You’re expected in the state dining room in forty minutes.” He looked at Walter. “This must be your son.”

Otto said: “He’s in the intelligence department.”

Walter gave a brisk salute.

“I know. I put his name on the list.” The general addressed Walter. “I believe you know America.”

“I spent three years in our embassy in Washington, sir.”

“Good. I have never been to the United States. Nor has your father. Nor, indeed, have most of the men here-with the notable exception of our new foreign minister.”

Twenty years ago, Arthur Zimmermann had returned to Germany from China via the States, crossing from San Francisco to New York by train, and on the basis of this experience was considered an expert on America. Walter said nothing.