The Fox in the Attic (24 page)

But the whole troop was bound for the Bürgerbräu, surely (where the Revolution was), by way of the Ludwig Bridge? How was it then that the next thing he could remember he was somewhere different altogether and quite alone?

Scene Two.

It was dark. Lothar was in some enclosed place, and the darkness was only relieved by the murky trailing flames of torches held by hurrying hooded monks. It wasn't a gun Lothar was carrying now, it seemed to be a pick. No Fritz, no Willi—none of his friends were here with him; but one of those hooded faceless figures was padding along ahead of him, guiding him and hastening him on. The air was warmer than the chill night air outside but close and dank—a sort of earthy, cellar-warmth. The smoke of his guide's torch made him cough, and his cough echoed—these were vaults ... there was a damp smell of mold, a smell of bones ... this was a place of tombs, they were deep underground, these must be catacombs ... they were treading in a deep, down-soft dust that muffled sound—it must be the dust of bones.

The small Nazi working-party they came to were older men mostly—none of them ones Lothar knew. From a different troop. They worked by the light of the monks' torches in reliefs of sixes, for there was no room for more to wield picks and shovels at one time and anyhow the dust hung so heavy on this dead underground air that one soon tired.

The thickness of the masonry they were digging through seemed endless. Lothar found it hard to believe this was just some bricked-up vault: for who would have bricked up an
entrance
with masonry more than four feet thick? When at last they did break through, however, the whole thing was plain: for this they were entering was no ecclesiastical crypt any more, but the cellars under the barracks next door. Efficiently sealed off and sound-proofed from the barracks above, moreover: the reason being eight thousand rifles hidden here from the Allied Disarmament Commission—and theirs for the taking!

“
Von Kahr himself signed our orders—the old fox!
”—“Eh? Surely not!”—“
Yes indeed! Our officer had to show them to the Prior
...”—“But surely he'd have intended this backdoor for royalist uses; and no doubt that's where these simple monks think the rifles are going even now!”—“
But Kahr has joined us with Lossow and Seisser, hasn't he?
”—“Ye-es ... or so Herr Esser said: but he's such a slippery cove, Dr. Kahr ...”—“
The old fox! But he's trapped at last
...”

Eight thousand rifles, well-greased, neatly racked—what a sight for weapon-hungry eyes! Re-inforcements of friendly Oberlanders arrived, and a living chain was formed to pass the guns from hand to hand, along the tunnels, up the torch-lit steps, along the corridors and cloisters—all the long way through these dark and silent sacred places out to where Goering's plain vans were waiting in the street ...

It went on for hours.

Scene Three.

Lothar was dripping wet and had lost his boots. It was early morning. He was agued with cold so that he could hardly speak ...

Lothar must have swum the river, but he had little idea why he should have had to swim: presumably the bridges were closed—or he had thought they might be ... or else, perhaps someone had thrown him in.

But he had to reach Captain Goering, had to tell him ...

In the gardens below the Bürgerbräukeller brownshirts were bivouacked, but it was perishing cold and no one had slept. Dawn was breaking at last, still and gray with an occasional lone flake of snow, as Lothar picked his way among them. In the entrance-corridor of the Keller was huddled a civilian brass band, the kind one hires for occasions: they had just arrived, they were in topcoats still and with shrouded instruments. They were arguing: they looked hungry and obstinate: their noses dripped. They were being shepherded unwillingly into the hall where the meeting had been, now full of brownshirts camped among the wreckage; but the bandsmen were demanding breakfast before they'd play to them—and at that word Lothar's saliva-glands stabbed so violently it hurt like toothache.

Then someone took pity on the shivering Lothar and pushed him into the cloakroom, telling him to help himself. The place was still littered with many of last night's top-hats, furs, opera-cloaks, uniform-coats, dress-swords ...

“They were all in too much hurry to bother,” said a sardonic voice: “All the upper-crust of Bavaria—and when
we
said ‘Scat!' they were thankful to run like rabbits. Take your choice, comrade.”

The speaker was a portly little brownshirt with a kindly, humorous face. In private life he was an atheist and a tobacconist, without reverence for God or man; and now he was drunker than he looked. It tickled him to wrap Lothar in a fur-lined greatcoat with the insignia of a full general on it. If Lothar had noticed those badges of rank, as a good German the very thought would have burned him to a cinder—like the Shirt of Nessus; but now his new friend was pouring a hot mugful of would-be coffee into him, and he noticed nothing. Lothar
must
see Captain Goering—and at once—about those rifles ... But no one seemed to know whether Goering was even in the building. However, some of the other high-ups had just got back from a reconnaissance in the city, someone said: they were in a room upstairs ... Hitler, General Ludendorff ...

So Lothar, warmed a little at last, wandered off upstairs unhindered. The length of this vast greatcoat almost hid his stockinged feet, but he was just as wet underneath as ever and left wet footprints everywhere on all the carpets.—
He must find Captain Goering
...

In the half-darkness of an upstairs corridor Lothar met a hurrying orderly and stopped him imperiously: “Where are they? I have to report!”

“This way, Excellency,” the man said, saluting (but Lothar was too pre-occupied to notice, for those rifles might have reached God-knows-whose trusting hands by now). Then the orderly led him through a little anteroom where piano and music-stands had been shoved on one side to make room for a chin-high pile of packages, and opened a door:

“... be hanging from the lamp-posts in the Ludwigstrasse,” a cracking, nervous voice was exclaiming within.

On the threshold, Lothar checked himself in dismay. Goering wasn't there; and clearly this wasn't a Council of War at all, for there were only two people in the room and by their dress both seemed civilians. In a thick and fragrant haze of tobacco-smoke a stout old gentleman all puffy dewlaps and no neck sat stolidly sipping red wine and pulling at his cigar alternately: he was staring at Lothar—but only as if his gaze had already been fixed on the door before it opened—with dull, stony, heavy-lidded eyes. Under his scrabble of gray mustache the open, drooping mouth was almost fishlike, and he had dropped cigar-ash all down his old shooting-jacket. Beyond him Lothar glimpsed some nondescript with his back turned, gnawing his fingernails and violently twitching his shoulders as if some joker had slipped something down his neck ...

A
waiting-room!
But Lothar had no time to waste—he
must
find Captain Goering at once and tell him those monastery rifles were useless, they'd all had the firing-pins removed.

Lothar retreated, leaving the door ajar. But in the ante-room the orderly was already gone, and Lothar paused—at a loss.

“
Tonight we'll be hanging from the lamp-posts in the Ludwigstrasse!
” The interruption had been so brief that these histrionic words seemed still suspended on the stale air.

“Nevertheless we march,” the seated one replied flatly and with distaste.

In the ante-room Lothar stood rooted—he knew
that
voice (why hadn't he known the face?): it was General Ludendorff. Then of course the other ... this wasn't at all his platform voice, but it
must
be ...

Inside the room, Hitler turned: “But we'll be fired-on if we do, and then it's all up—we can't fight the
Army
! It's The End, I tell you!” Then, as if he had forgotten who he was talking to, he added, ruminating: “If we appeal to Rupprecht, perhaps he'd intercede?”

For their impromptu Revolution was already running on the rocks. Hoodwinked by the “earnest of good faith” of those useless rifles, Hitler had let Kahr go; then Kahr, Lossow and Seisser—the all-powerful triumvirate—once safely out of his hands had turned against him. Prince Rupprecht had unequivocally refused to rise to Hitler's fly—not with Ludendorff's big shadow darkening the water; and that had decided Kahr. Lossow had been virtually arrested by his own city commandant till he made clear his obedience to Berlin. Seisser too had dutifully bowed to the will of the police-force he commanded. So now the Kampfbund was to be put down by force unless it surrendered.

Government re-inforcements had been pouring into Munich all night, and the “Vikings” had already deserted to them. The Nazis held the City Hall—for what that was worth—while Roehm with his Reichskriegsflagge had seized the local War Office and now couldn't get out of it again; but all other public buildings were in the hands of the Triumvirs.
They
held the railways, the telephones, the radio station—indeed no one in the Nazi camp had even thought of securing those vital points, there can seldom have been a would-be coup-d'état so naïvely impromptu and unplanned.

Troops were reported to be massing now in the Odeonsplatz, with field-guns ...

Lothar peeped in again unseen. The general still sat his chair as heavily as a stone statue sits its horse and his eyes were still set in the same stare, though lowered now to the carpet just inside the door.

General Erich Ludendorff was only fifty-eight: not quite the “old gentleman” Lothar had taken him for, but nevertheless his mind like his muscles was becoming a little set. Nowadays pre-conceived ideas were not easily shaken and if they were tumbled they left a jagged gap: Kahr's double-crossing Ludendorff could take, for the man was a civilian and though a protestant was in the Cardinal's pocket one could only expect of him the moral standards of ... of cardinals: but a world where a Lossow—Commander-in-chief of the Bavarian Army— could break his “word as a German Officer” was a new world altogether for Ludendorff!

The old order was ended for the old war-lord, and he knew it; but his puffy features were quite without expression, as if their soft surfaces had no organic connection with nerve and muscle and bone and brain within, and he sat staring without visible surprise at those wet footmarks on the carpet—the marks of two naked feet where lately a German general in full-dress uniform had stood.

“Eh?—We march,” said Ludendorff again. His voice remained firm as a lion's, and this time it was unquestionably a command.

But when Ludendorff had said “We march” (as he presently explained) he hadn't meant it in the military sense. No soldier would try to capture Munich—or even to relieve Roehm beleaguered in the War Office—by doing as Ludendorff now proposed: by marching three thousand men through the narrow streets of the Old City in a kind of schoolgirl crocodile sixteen abreast. But a clever (and desperate) politician might.

A military operation would cross by the Max-Josef Bridge in a flanking movement through the English Garden—some tactic of that kind: but what would be the use? That fellow Hitler (thought Ludendorff) was right: they couldn't
fight
the Army. But suppose that instead, in all seeming confidence and trust like friendly little puppy-dogs, their whole companionage paraded peaceably right onto the points of the Army's bayonets ... would German soldiers ever fire on inoffensive brother-Germans? And once contact was made, once the officers saw their old war-lord Ludendorff in front of their eyes and had to choose, was it conceivable they would prefer to obey the unspeakable Lossow who had turned his coat twice in one night? Barely an hour ago the streets were still placarded with Lossow's name linked with ours ...“And once the Army obeys my orders again, the road to Berlin lies open!”

Lothar was so bewildered that he stood listening outside dumbfoundered and dripping among the bales of bank-notes which half-filled the ante-room, and scarcely noticed Captain Goering as the latter strode suddenly past him and entered the room beyond.

Goering listened to Ludendorff's plan; but then his eye met Hitler's. These two had rather less faith in the magic of the “old war-lord's” name and presence nowadays than the “old war-lord” had himself. Ludendorff had been slipping—didn't the old boy realize how much he had slipped these last few years? That flight to Sweden in '18, and all those antics since ...

Goering suggested instead a retreat on Rosenheim—to “rally our forces” there, he hastened to add. But Ludendorff fixed this bravest-of-the-brave with his stony look: Rosenheim was all too convenient for the Austrian frontier! Hitler also turned his blue stare on Goering: for reasons best kept to himself, escape into his native Austria held no attractions for Hitler.

Goering dropped his eyes and did not press it. But the suggestion all the same tipped the scales in Hitler's mind, for any alternative was preferable to “Rosenheim”; and he turned to Ludendorff's plan after all. Hitler's own “magic” at least was new; and if that called out anything comparable with last night's cheering crowds they would march behind such a screen of women and children that no one could fire on them!

A coup-d'état by popular acclamation? Maybe it was a forlorn hope. But at least it meant, for Hitler, sticking to the one technique he was yet versed in—the technique of the public meeting.

Blindly Lothar wandered away, not knowing whether he was mad or sane, awake or dreaming. Goering ... he had a message for Captain Goering, something about some guns.

One thing, the arch-plotters agreed, was essential: if this gigantic confidence-trick of Ludendorff's was to work the marching men themselves must have no inkling that Munich was in “enemy” hands, for they must positively radiate friendliness and trust. No one must know the real state of affairs outside the innermost circle. So, shortly before eleven, a briefing-parade for officers was held in the fencing-school and there the supreme leaders, beaming, put their next subordinates “in the picture,” assuring them that everything in the city was going like clockwork under the capable management of their obedient allies, Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, and all ranks should be so informed. Today the Kampfbund would parade ceremonially through the city, merely to “show the flag” and to thank the citizens for the warmth of their support: they would then take up a position for the night outside somewhere to the north, and wait there for regular troops to join them ... and after that—Berlin!