LITMIR.BIZ

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crossed the road to avoid the crowd milling around the gates of the Russian Embassy. Since April 1918 the Imperial Russian Embassy had been called the Soviet Embassy. At the 1918 party conference, Lenin had told the delegates that ‘…we shall go under without the German revolution.’ And in response the new staff, of no fewer than three hundred people, had been frantically circulating Bolshevik agitators, ready cash and crate-loads of revolutionary literature throughout Germany. The new ambassador – a wealthy Jewish philanthropist from the Crimea – had had hoisted across the embassy’s façade a huge red banner that urged ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ Soon afterwards he’d been deported back to Russia, but the banner remained.

      Guarding the Interior Ministry were three men with rifles slung over their shoulders. Round the corner was a truck with more armed men, their shabby, makeshift uniforms and red armbands identified them as members of an irregular band recruited by the new police chief – Emil Eichhorn – a radical of the extreme left. On the corner of Wilhelmstrasse were some women, one of them weeping uncontrollably. They were on their way back from Dorotheen Strasse, where the army’s casualty lists were still being displayed, with new names every day. The fighting had ended, but corpses were still being identified. Pauli walked past them and crossed back across the road to the Adlon Hotel.

      He checked his helmet, overcoat and pistol belt at the cloakroom. The elderly attendant showed no surprise. He placed the gun and helmet on a shelf with silk hats and gave Pauli a small yellow ticket. Pauli went into the bar. There was a crowd in here, but the heating was not working, and some customers had their overcoats on. He had arranged to meet Alex Horner here, and true to form, Alex was sitting near the door with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket at his elbow. An extra glass was in place. From the dining room next door came the high-spirited music of a gypsy band.

      ‘How goes the army command?’ said Pauli. He sat down and waited for the waiter to pour his wine.

      ‘Excellent!’ said Alex. ‘And how are things at home?’ Alex was not in uniform. He was wearing a smart new grey flannel suit, white shirt and dark tie, but no one in the bar – or in Berlin, for that matter – could possibly have mistaken him for anything but a Prussian of the Officers Corps.

      ‘Peter is still moaning. Papa won’t leave the house and says it’s on account of the influenza epidemic. Mama has become something of a tyrant but she still manages to serve meat, even for lunch: sauerbraten today. I had two helpings.’

      ‘Your mother is a woman of infinite resource,’ said Alex.

      Alex had secured an excellent job – or rather, his influential relative in the War Department had secured it for him. After the failure of the big German offensive of 1918, he was sent to Supreme Headquarters in Spa, Belgium, and appointed an aide de camp to General Schammer, the military governor of Berlin.

      The present military governor was a rather disreputable civilian but that didn’t prevent Alex from lording it over his old friend, for there was a great difference between duties on behalf of the headquarters of the Imperial German Army and being with the Freikorps, an ad hoc assembly of enthusiastic volunteers consisting almost entirely of men the army had no place for.

      Alex liked to give his friend insightful anecdotes about life among the generals. For a few minutes Alex entertained him with stories about the new commander of the German Army. ‘General Groener is a good sort,’ said Alex. ‘He’s highly intelligent and not at all stuffy.’

      ‘He’s a Schwab,’ said Pauli before sipping some wine. ‘Get rid of all these damned Prussians, I say.’ It was a Riesling from Alsace, just cold enough and it tasted delicious. Goodness knows when he’d taste its like again: under the terms of the armistice Alsace was now a part of France once more.

      Alex grinned. Although Pauli was born in Vienna to an American mother, his upbringing was hardly less Prussian than his friend’s, but there was a running joke that Alex was a Prussian of the most inflexible old-fashioned kind and Pauli was the oppressed Southerner. The friendship between the two boys was based on a long time together and mutual respect. And yet, right from the time they’d first met at Lichterfelde, Pauli was the admirer and Alex, by common consent, was granted an edge of seniority. The admiration that Pauli had always shown for his elder brother Peter was reflected in his respect for Alex. And, typically, Alex responded to this faith that Pauli showed by revealing to him his most treasured secret. Alex said, ‘Although the Chancellor is being held prisoner in his office there’s a secret telephone line from the Chancellery to the army. Chancellor Ebert has asked the army for help.’

      ‘Good God!’ said Pauli. Everyone believed that the mutinying sailors had cut all the lines from the Chancellery and that Ebert – the new socialist head of government – was being held incommunicado.

      ‘That’s just between the two of us,’ said Alex. ‘It’s a closely guarded secret, not to be passed on even to your father.’

      ‘Just as you say, Alex. But it changes things, doesn’t it?’

      ‘Yes, and the army will do what has to be done,’ said Alex enigmatically. ‘Those mutinous pigs will find out what it means tomorrow.’

      ‘Christmas Eve?’ said Pauli. ‘Why?’

      ‘Are you in a hurry?’ said Alex languidly.

      ‘I’ve got all the time you need,’ said Pauli, sipping some more wine and leaning forward to hear what Alex had to tell.

      ‘It all began on November 9,’ said Alex.

      ‘Everything did,’ said Pauli.

      That much was true: everything began on November 9, 1918. The army’s commanders – too arrogant to face the consequences of their own defeat – had sent some unfortunate civilians through the wire of no-man’s-land to seek an armistice from the Allies, as the Turks and Austrians had already done. During that Saturday, the Imperial German Army ceased to exist as a unified fighting force. Red flags were flying all over the land as soldiers’ committees took control. Alex Horner, on one of his regular visits to Supreme Headquarters from Berlin, was shown the reports. It was amazing: the army’s command structure collapsed like a deck of cards. ‘Riots in Magdeburg’; then, early in the afternoon, ‘7th Army Corps Reserve District rioting threatened’. Halle and Leipzig were declared ‘red’ by 5:00 p.m., and soon afterwards Düsseldorf, Halstein, Osnabrück and Lauenburg went, too. So did Magdeburg, Stuttgart, Oldenburg, Brunswick, and Cologne. By this time the soldiers at Supreme HQ had stopped saluting the officers, and some of the offices were deserted. At 1900 hours, news came that the general officer commanding 18th Army Corps Reserve at Frankfurt was ‘deposed’. It was all over. By early evening Kaiser Wilhelm, German Emperor and ‘All-highest Warlord’, was sitting in the dining car of his private train, waiting for it to leave the siding and start the journey that would take him to exile in Holland.

      In Berlin the socialist Cabinet, which had been created without any legal transfer of power, could not contain the disorder. They ordered the army to rip up sections of railway line and so interrupt the trainloads of mutinous soldiers and sailors that were arriving in the capital in ever-increasing numbers. When Alex arrived at the Lehrter station, in a train that had taken two and a half days to reach Berlin from Belgium, he was startled to see that army machine-gun teams commanded a field of fire along every platform and the main concourse. Troops were occupying the gas and electricity works, the government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse were all guarded, and there were even armed soldiers outside some of the town’s finest restaurants.

      By the time that Leutnant Horner reported to Berlin’s military governor, that governor was a socialist civilian named Otto Wels. The Imperial Army’s Berlin garrison having deserted – and having no more than a handful of civil policemen at his disposal – Wels had put together a force of ex-soldiers and armed civilians. Most of the rifles had been bought from the deserters who, standing alongside the flower girls, were doing a brisk trade at the Potsdamer Platz at two marks per gun. Even the ‘army’s’ trucks had been purchased in this way from the deserters. Wels had given his scratch force the grandiose title of Republikanische Soldaten

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