Dreamthief's Daughter

I was surprised by my host's response.

"Well, " he said with evident embarrassment, "I did have something like that in mind, yes."

Chapter Twenty

Traditional Values

Which was how I came to be wearing the full uniform of a Standartenfuhrer, a colonel in the SS, including near-regulation smoked glasses, sitting in the back of an open Mercedes staff car driven by a chauffeuse in the natty uniform of the NSDAP Women's Auxiliary (First Class) who, with her bow and arrows in the trunk, took the car out of its hidden garage into the dawn streets of Hensau and into some of the loveliest scenery in the whole of Germany-rolling, wooded hills and distant mountains, the pale gold of the sky, the sun a flash of scarlet on the horizon. I was filled with longing for those lost times, the years of my childhood when I had ridden alone across such scenery. The love of my land ran deep in my blood.

Somehow we had gone from that pre-1914 idyll to the present horror in a few short bloody years. And now here I was riding in a car far too large for the winding roads and wearing the uniform which stood for everything I had learned to loathe. Ravenbrand was now carried in a modified guncase and lay at my feet on the car's floor. I could not help reflecting on this irony. I found myself in a future which few could have predicted in 1917. Now, in 1940, I remembered all the warnings that had been given since 1920.

Years of antiwar films, songs, novels and plays-years of analysis and oracular pronouncements. Too many, perhaps? Had the predictions actually created the situation they hoped most to avert?

Was anarchy so terrible, compared to the deadly discipline of fascism? As much democracy and social justice had emerged from chaos as from tyra

For a while we followed the main auto route to Hamburg. We saw how busy the roads, raillines and waterways had become. We traveled for a short while on an excellent new Autobahn with several lanes of traffic moving in both directions, but Oona soon found the back roads to Bek again. We were only fifty kilometers from my home when we turned a sharp bend in a wooded lane and Oona stamped quickly on the brake to stop us crashing into another car, quite as ostentatious as our own, swathed in Nazi flags and insignia. A thoroughly vulgar vehicle, I thought. I guessed it to belong to some swaggering local dignitary.

We began to move again but then a high-ranking officer in a brown SA uniform emerged from the other side of the car and flagged us down.

We had no option. We slowed to a stop this time. We exchanged the ritual salute, borrowed, I believe, from the film Quo Vadis?, supposedly how Romans greeted a friend. Once again, Hollywood had added a vulgar gloss to politics.

Noting my uniform and its rank, the SA man was subservient, apologetic. "Forgive me, Hen Standartenfuhrer, this is, I regret, an emergency."

From out of the closed car now emerged an awkward, rather gangling figure in a typical comic-opera Nazi uniform favored by the higher ranks. To his credit, he seemed uncomfortable in it, pushing unfamiliar frogging about as he walked over to us, offering a jerky salute, which we returned. He was genuinely grateful.

"Oh, God be thanked! You see, Captain Kirch! My instincts never let me down. You suggested no suitable car could come along this . road and get us to Bek on time-and voila! This angel suddenly materializes."

His eyebrows appeared to be alive. His eyes, too, were very busy and he had an intense, crooked smile on his puffy, square face. If it had not been for his uniform, I might have taken him for a typical customer of the Bar Je

"I am Deputy Fuhrer Hess, " he told me. "You will be well-remembered for this, Colonel."

I recalled that Rudolf Hess was one of Hitler's oldest henchmen. In accordance with the papers I carried, I let him know that I was Colonel Ulric von Minct and that I was at his service. It would be a privilege to offer him my car.

"An angel, an angel, " he repeated as he climbed into the car and sat beside me.

"It is the von Mincts, Colonel, who will save Germany." He hardly noticed the case containing the sword. He was too concerned with shouting urgent orders to his driver. "The flasks! The flasks! It would be a disaster if I did not have them! "

The SA man reached into the trunk of the car and carefully took out a large wicker basket which he transferred to our car. Hess was greatly relieved. "I am a vegan, " he explained. "I have to travel everywhere with my own food. Alf-I mean our Fuhrer-" He glanced up at me, like a small boy caught in some forbidden act. Clearly he had been admonished before for making reference to the Nazi leader by his old nickname. "The Fuhrer is a vegetarian-but not strict enough, I fear, for me. He runs a very lax kitchen, from my point of view. So I have taken to carrying my own food when I travel."

The deputy Fuhrer saluted his driver. "Wait with the car, " he instructed. "We'll send help from the first town we reach. Or from Bek, if we find nothing else." He sat back in the car beside me, a signal for Oona to put the Mercedes into gear and continue the journey. He was a mass of tics and peculiar movements of his hands. "Von Minct, you say? You must be related to our great Paul von Minct, who has achieved so much for the Reich."

"His cousin, " I said. I found it very hard to be afraid of this man. Hess insisted on shaking my hand.

"A great honor, sir, " I said.

"Oh"-he removed his elaborate cap-"I'm one of the old fighters, you know. Still one of the lads." He was reassuring me. Sentimentally he continued, "I was with Hitler in Munich. In Stadelheim and everywhere-he and I are brothers. I am the only one he truly trusts and confides in. It was always so. I am his spiritual adviser, in many ways. If it were not for me, Colonel von Minct, I doubt if any of you would have heard of the Grail story- or understand what it could do for us! "

Confidingly he leaned towards me. "Hitler, they say, knows the heart of Germany. But I know her soul. That is what I have studied."

As the huge Mercedes bowled along familiar country roads, I continued to speak with the man whom many believed the most powerful man in Germany after the great dictator himself. If Hitler were killed today, Hess would assume the leadership. For the most part his conversation was as banal as that of most Nazis, but laced through with a melange of supernatural beliefs and dietary ideas which marked him for a common lunatic. Because he understood me to have an affinity for the Grail and all the mysticism surrounding it, he was more forthcoming-about how he had read the Bek legends, how he had read books saying the Grail was the lost Holy Relic of the Teutonic Order. How the Bek sword was the lost sword of Roland, Champion of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne the Frank. The Franks and the Goths founded modern Europe, he said. The Norsemen were stern lawmakers, with no respect for the Old World's superstitions. Wherever their influence was felt, people became robust, masculine, vital, productive. Latin Christianity weakened them.

The destiny of the German nation, he told me, was to lift its brothers back to glory-to rid the world of all that wretchedly bad stock and replace it with a race of superbeings-superhealthy, superintelligent, superstrong, supereducatedthe kind of breed which would populate the world with the best mankind could be, rather than the worst.

The more I listened to Hess, the more skeptical I became, the more convinced that he was a low-level lunatic with dull dreams and a psychological inability to consider any "truth" but that which he invented for himself.