The Invisible Victory

'I mentioned the possibility to Florey. He said that you simply can't patent medical discoveries in Britain, even in wartime. It would be unethical. He would be struck off the Medical Register, as though he had committed adultery with a patient.'

Archie frowned towards his cottage cheese omelette made with dried egg. I was enjoying a Spam fritter. 'That's something the Government's got to change. Those profits shouldn't be pouring into the pockets of American capitalists. They should be used for the good of the entire British people.'

'You're still a Socialist?'

'More fiercely than ever. Did you know there's going to be a general election quite soon? I was on the telephone this morning to Blackpool.' The Labour Party conference was convening to replan the world in the Empress Ballroom. 'Clem Attlee's going to break up the Coalition. I know that for sure.'

'Then Churchill will have a walkover.'

'I'm resigned to that. But Labour will at least make some sort of impact on the country as a separate party, instead as part of the administration running the war. I intend to do some vigorous electioneering, though it's difficult for a peer. The wretched public do seem to think that you live in a castle and spend every day fox-hunting. Could I rope you in to help?'

'I've abandoned Socialism. In this country, you are born either to work for other people, or have others work for you. No political doctrine can absolve you of either original sin.'

Archie seemed shocked. 'When did you first think that?'

'The day you got married.'

'I shall of course return to publishing once the election's out of the way,' he went on hastily. 'It was hardly my fault that my firm went bust. A lot of London publishers were rather sharper than me, getting their hands on a wartime quota of paper which they didn't deserve.'

'I'm off to Germany on intelligence work.'

Archie looked puzzled. 'I didn't think that was your sort of line. Don't you just mess about with fungi?'

'My job was singular in Oxford, to create disease not to cure it. I have just invented a method of wiping out Germany with bubonic plague. Now my five years' work is completely wasted. It's very disappointing.'

He stared at me, half-disbelieving. 'You never gave the slightest inkling you were engaged in that sort of horrible war work.'

'Elizabeth knew,' I told him airily. 'Didn't she mention it?'

'If Labour should win the election,' Archie resumed, scraping up the last morsel of his leathery omelette, 'at least we've men with experience of Government. Attlee, Morrison, Bevin, Cripps, Greenwood, all members of the War Cabinet. No one can lay the old charge of Labour being short of ministerial talent.'

'If Labour did win, it would be a national disaster. They would use their energy to institute Heaven run on bureaucratic principles.'

'Perhaps you're right,' he conceded, looking gloomier than ever.

I could hardly blame myself for failing to see that in a couple of months Archie would be a Minister of the Crown.

32

'The problem of the Nazi is essentially that of Caliban,' said Dr Harold Greenparish in his quarrelsome little voice. 'To all intents and purposes, your Nazi has been raised in complete isolation from the rest of the world. His standards are those of his dam Sycorax, his worship directed to her god Setebos-the Nazi state and the late Adolf Hitler,' he explained to me. 'He has simply no yardstick of conventional morality to measure his behaviour, none whatsoever.'

'I think that's rather an oversimplification.'

He looked pained, annoyed, a little shocked. It was the first time I had contradicted him since we had left London. 'No, I don't think so. I've talked to some of these SS chappies in the prisoner of war camps. They're puzzled-to say the least-suddenly to find the world regards them as absolute monsters. By their own lights, they were simply doing their duty. In war, one is required to kill one's fellow man, whether he is the enemy without or the traitor within. The more of either category one disposes of, the more patriotic one is esteemed to be. Surely you take my point? That's how the SS people see it, I assure you.'

'Traitors? Jews, Slavs and Czechs? And a lot of other defenceless men, women and children who did nothing wrong except to be themselves?'

Greenparish's expression indicated forbearance of my tediousness. 'Essentially, yes. In the framework of Nazi doctrines. One must be clear-headed about this, Elgar. The Nazis in their private dealings could be as clean-living, as honest, as decent, as religious as the rest of us. Your Nazi mind was terribly shuttered. They performed what we regard as utterly ghastly deeds, because they saw them as perfectly natural, and even essential, under the Nazi Darwinism of survival of the strongest. The fact that it was an insane doctrine is surely beside the point? It was the only one they knew. And of course, the lurid light of war does rather tend to encourage human excesses.'

'What about the still small voice of conscience?'

'Conscience? Does it exist, in the popular sense? I am strongly inclined to the Freudian view of conscience.' Pudgy finger-tips together, he leant back on the comfortable if worn upholstery of our first-class _wagon lit_ dining car in the immense self-satisfaction of specialized knowledge. 'Freud explains conscience in terms of the super-ego, equating it with the judgements passed down to the child from the parents. But the all-pervading Nazis were of course the parents. The German people were their docile children. Particularly, of course, the younger ones, who did most of the damage. I'm sure you must agree? Human morals are not bestowed by God-about whom Freud is equally interesting. And human behaviour is by and large instilled by the methods of conditioning.'

'You mean, we learn to distinguish right from wrong as Pavlov's dog learned to salivate at the sound of its dinner-bell?'

'Fundamentally, yes,' he said with crushing assurance.

I was beginning to dislike Greenparish. We had first met less than twelve hours previously, on the departure platform of Liverpool Street Station. He had stuck out his hand and said, 'I'm Greenparish.' He was about my age, short, stout and balding, standing amid a cluster of suitcases, bags and boxes. We both wore battledress, without badges of rank. I had a red FIAT flash on my shoulders, which seemed to set me above the Red Cross but below War Correspondents. Greenparish's job was denazification. ('Dreadful word,' he would say with a shudder.) He was a psychologist who had written books and articles about the Nazi mentality from the snugness of a Cambridge college. The only Nazis he had met in his life had been sitting safely behind British barbed wire.

I made my second arrival in Germany on the Monday of August 6 in the summer of 1945. Everyone was wondering how to clean up the abattoir of Europe, while the sun warmed our delusions of permanent peace and promptly returning prosperity. The war had ended in Germany with a whimper, in Japan with a bang. A tribunal was to sit in Nьrnberg to try the important Nazis, whose photographs as shabby and sagging men I could still hardly believe in the newspapers. Only Hitler's joke, Franz von Papen, achieved any style, with a Tyrolean hat and a wry smile under the eyes of a steel-helmeted American military policeman.

Holland was flooded. Germany was flat. Large towns had vast open spaces with no wall higher than a man, small ones had disappeared altogether. People lived in the rubble like maggots in a corpse. Fraternization with Germans, just speaking to them, was strictly forbidden us. Even the objective Nazi Albert Speer thought this inhuman conduct in any victor. But the concentration camps had been overrun, and if Hans Frank, Hitler's Governor-General of Poland, was to write before _he _was hanged, 'A thousand years shall pass and this guilt of Germany will not have been erased,' there would have been nobody that summer to disagree with him.

We reached Cologne after nightfall. I had heard that the Cathedral survived, and saw excitedly the twin spires soaring against the sky. Greenparish fussed over his luggage. 'Surely there's somewhere one can get a meal?' he kept complaining, searching the ruined Hauptbahnhof. We had been given bully beef sandwiches and tea on the train. 'After all, the Army is responsible for us, and I don't see why I should be subjected to the inconvenience of hunger.'