Subsequently de Wet appeared in all the theatres of war. First he served nine months as a pilot and Intelligence officer in the army of the Negus. Forced to leave Abyssinia on account of a duel, he offered his services to General Franco. Not being accepted, he joined the Reds and for three months served as a fighter pilot. During this time he began his work for the Deuxième Bureau, the French equivalent of the British Intelligence Service. But not yet as a paid agent, only out of friendship with the officers of the Deuxième Bureau. Is it not possible that de Wet has been for long a member of the British Intelligence Service, entrusted with a mission involving him in the rôle of foreign mercenary? De Wet denies this and says he did once offer his services, which were refused. Is he telling the truth? And if it is the truth, why was he rejected? Did the British consider him vain and stupid and, on account of his drunken bouts, unsuitable for employment? It may be so, and it may be otherwise. In any case de Wet withdraws from his rôle as a Red Spanish pilot to act as arms dealer for a certain Zacharoff. Then he writes two books concerned with his experiences, entitled Cardboard Crucifix and The Patrol is Ended. [By this point it seems obvious that it was the reporter who was having his own bout of intoxication with adventure and didn’t know how to explain this jumble of facts but had fallen under the sway of the foolish or cunning figure of the prisoner, about whom he asks too many useless or overtly ridiculous questions, among which “Is he telling the truth?” takes the prize for mindlessness. Even so, the inference that vanity could be a serious impediment to espionage work isn’t bad. At certain moments, he gives the impression that his very fascination with De Wet irritates him and sets him against the former pilot in a way that’s quite instructive, but his weakness for the accused shimmers in the air for a second when he takes care to point out that initially the spy spied only out of friendship with the greatest figures in French espionage. Still and all, the most admirable sentence in the paragraph is the one that states with cautious equanimity, “It may be so, and it may be otherwise.”]
For a short time de Wet led a quiet life exercising his gifts as a painter. [Here again we catch sight of the mask maker.] When the conflict between Germany and Czechoslovakia broke out, then in his twenty-fifth year, he put aside his palette and hastened to Prague, where he offered his services as pilot to the Benes government. Here he renewed a friendship of Paris — the friendship with a dancer of southeast Europe, a woman who has left several shattered hearts behind her and of whom little can be discovered. It is not known for certain whether she was an erotic or herself a political adventuress. In any case, when de Wet was arrested she was not only his confidante but also his collaborator. During the course of interrogation she committed suicide, and de Wet, who until the death of his accomplice had confessed to his full responsibility, began to try to defend himself. [Clearly our reporter wasn’t entirely indifferent to literary ornament, and while his training in the composition of narrative prose must have been shoddy and generally furnishes him with tired expressions and desiccated lies, the enigmatic felicity of expression he occasionally achieves with his unique euphemisms and unstable syntax must be acknowledged: “It is not known whether she was an erotic or herself a political adventuress.” That’s hard to match.]
It is firmly established that during his stay in Prague de Wet became closely associated with a certain Czech officer who, when the Protectorate was set up in Bohemia, fled to Alsace and there became a liaison officer of the Deuxième Bureau. De Wet visited this man several times from Prague, smuggling to him gold and information, and it was these and other activities for the Deuxième Bureau that finally landed him in the hands of the German authorities.
At the conclusion of the trial de Wet thanked the President of the High Treason Senate for the correctness of the proceedings, and further for the right of complete freedom to defend himself. He heard the sentence of death with indifference, and with a polite bow left the court, whose tribunal included as lay judges three officers of high military and party rank. [We can imagine that the Gestapo wasn’t taking any chances, and sent over three bigwigs to guarantee and underscore the sentence.]
Everything possible has been done to elucidate the actions and character of the accused. His crime is evident. His character, however, still remains enveloped in mystery. Brought up in two cultures (de Wet attended a French school and speaks French in preference to his own mother-tongue), this descendant of an interesting family — he is related to the Boer General de Wet — is now destined to be a wanderer into nothingness. [And here, giving rise to the frivolous and accusatory adjective “interesting,” appears the Boer grandfather who may not have been all a lie after all. I’ve also found a portrait of him and a book he wrote, but we’d best conclude first with the tale of the Berlin death sentence, the ending of which strays very far from what a journalist’s account of a trial should be, to venture unequivocally onto the terrain of meditation and lament.]
He is intelligent and gifted with several talents, he is fearless and capable of noble feelings, yet he ends his life in a chaos of uncertainty and in the society of dubious men and woman, who all, though patriotic phrases are upon their lips, are themselves without a country and live on foreign money. The ideal of this society is the legendary Colonel Lawrence, but none of them achieves his ideal. Life does not want them and spews them forth [as if they were a costly and superfluous luxury that life expels at once like a breath]: uprooted limbs of a tree that once flourished fruitfully; scattered members of a race whose way of life has become infamous.
Up to this point the speaker has been the journalist from the Vôlkischer Beobachter, who, curiously enough, mentions Lawrence of Arabia as the unattainable ideal of the disastrous De Wet and others of his ilk, though Lawrence himself had died in 1935 in an obscure motorcycle accident or suicide, at the age of 46, my present age.
The translation of the German article complete, De Wet himself begins to speak, as he prepares to embark on his tale:
Thus ran their story of “a wanderer into nothingness.” Though founded on fact, in various respects it was slightly inaccurate, and some of their deductions were wide of the mark. And, obscure though these errors may have been, they still offended the truth; they offended something else, something deeper and more enduring than that — something for which I did not then propose to find a name — could not, perhaps.
The following is my version of the story of myself — and of one other, she who bore me company “on the shores of Avernus” for a little while.…