The long fuse, p.1
The Long Fuse, page 1
The Long Fuse
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue January 1940
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Also by Alan White
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Though in the trade of war I have slain men,
Yet do I hold it the very stuff o’ conscience
To do no contrived murder; I lack iniquity
Sometimes to do me service.
Othello
Prologue
January 1940
It had rained all day and the London pavements glistened, catching the light of the moon. Thin pencil rays stabbed from the fronts of the few vehicles that moved around Trafalgar Square, their beams illuminating little of the road ahead. The dark green Humber looked black as it turned right in front of the National Gallery, sped straight ahead down Whitehall, then turned left into a narrow alleyway between buildings. Halfway down the alleyway it stopped; the sergeant-driver got out and opened the back door. The general was still asleep.
‘We’ve arrived, General,’ the sergeant said.
The general stirred, woke instantly as old men do, and smiled at the sergeant. ‘Here already, Warburton?’ he asked. ‘You must have made good time.’
The general rose from his seat and climbed somewhat stiffly from the back of the Humber. Sergeant Warburton handed him his cap, his stick, and a briefcase, then cast a valet’s professional eye over the general’s clothing. The general’s empty sleeve was neatly pinned across his chest, but his top pocket was unfastened and his leather cigar-case was showing. Warburton excused himself, pushed the cigar-case into the pocket, and fastened the flap.
The general chuckled, but said nothing. Warburton had been with him a considerable time.
A sentry appeared out of the gloom surrounding the doorway. Sergeant Warburton stepped forward.
‘Major-General Lord Finedon,’ he told the sentry, who had brought his bayoneted rifle to the ‘present arms’ position when he saw the red tabs on the general’s uniform.
Inside the house, Major-General Lord Finedon was greeted by a brigadier, a colonel, and a lieutenant.
‘Would you care to come in here, General?’ the colonel asked. The general turned right into a room at the far end of the small hall. Inside the room an enormous wireless set occupied half of the wall space. A sergeant wearing the flashes of the Royal Corps of Signals was sitting at the wireless wearing headphones. When he saw the general he didn’t rise, but sat ‘to attention’, a pencil poised over the message pad before him.
The back room was connected to the front door by a folding partition, panelled, as were the walls, in old oak. The partition had been opened. In the front portion of the room were several armchairs, a table, and a trolley carrying bottles and glasses. The lieutenant beckoned for the general to go into the front room, then hovered near the drinks trolley. The general sat down.
So far, no one had said anything other than a murmured greeting.
The general looked about him, relaxed and content to wait. The brigadier looked at the colonel, then at the lieutenant.
‘Jolly nice to see you again, sir,’ the brigadier said.
‘You’re looking fit, Tony,’ the general said.
Then he turned to the colonel. ‘How’s that lad of yours, Willie? Nasty wound, that was.’
The colonel coughed, embarrassed. ‘They had to take off his arm, Lord Finedon.’
‘Ah yes, joined the club, has he, the “one-armed warriors”. Still, it was his left as I remember. He’ll still be good for tennis.’
He turned to the lieutenant. ‘I’ll have a pink gin, Freddie, and not too much pink, eh?’
The general looked at each of them as Freddie made his drink.
‘What’s it all about, eh?’ he asked finally, since he realised not one of them could open the conversation. ‘What is it you do here, eh? Something with wireless?’ He got to his feet and walked back into the next room, looked over the wireless operator’s shoulder. The sergeant stiffened.
‘Relax, man, I’m not going to eat you,’ the general said. Then he reached over the operator’s shoulder and expertly turned the switch that connected the loudspeaker and disconnected the headphones. The sound of music boomed suddenly through the room, a German cabaret song. The general hummed the music, and sang the words in company with the performer, ‘Jede Frau hat irgen deine Sehnsucht…’
‘Lovely song, eh?’ he said. ‘You can’t beat the Germans for cabaret. What station are you listening to? Berlin?’
The wireless operator had released his headphones from his ears. ‘Yes, sir. Berlin, sir.’
The general went back and sat in the chair, accepting the pink gin Freddie offered. ‘Right-o, Tony,’ he said. ‘What’s it all about? Did you bring me here just to listen to the wireless?’
‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid we did.’
‘Afraid…? It’s a long way to come, from Atherton. Just to listen to a wireless. I hope you’ve found a good programme for me…’
The brigadier looked at his watch. The general was sipping his drink. The brigadier nodded to the other officers who quickly left the room. Ten seconds to ten o’clock. The song came to an end, and there was a short pause before the station announcer blandly said, ‘Hier ist der Deutsche Rundfunk aus Berlin.’ Another silence; then a female voice. ‘Guten Abend, liebe Hoerer und Hoererinnen,’ the voice said. It was warm and rich, easy and skilled. ‘Und jetzt, “Stimme aus Berlin”. Es spricht David Hinton.’
Slowly, somewhat hesitantly, the voice of David Hinton began. It was a voice both men in that room knew well. ‘There was a time,’ David Hinton said, his German articulation very precise, ‘when I was proud to have been born of a long line of Englishmen…’
A burst of aerial static obliterated the next few words; the brigadier looked at the wireless operator, who turned a dial, trimming out the interference. When the voice returned, it was loud, clear, and quite unmistakable.
‘Let me now tell you,’ the voice said, ‘when and why I became ashamed of being English…’
‘That’s David,’ the general said, uncomprehending. He looked at the brigadier. ‘That’s David. What the hell’s my boy doing, broadcasting for the Nazis?’
But then the truth hammered him; his face rapidly turned the colour of old pewter, and he slumped unconscious in his chair. The brigadier got to the chair in a fraction of a second and held the general’s head, placing his other hand inside the general’s tunic, feeling for a heartbeat.
The voice of David Hinton, the general’s son, filled the room, broadcasting from Berlin. ‘There is a growing feeling in England,’ David Hinton said, ‘that this war is being fought for the benefit of a privileged few…’
‘Turn that bloody thing off, Sergeant,’ the brigadier said.
Chapter One
David Hinton was born in 1915, the second son of Lord Finedon. His mother had been a keen horsewoman until the birth of David, premature and by caesarean section, ended her hopes of a place in the Olympic team. She became a semi-invalid; the baby saw her only by appointment and for short periods of time, being left in the care first of a nurse and later of a governess, in the family seat in Northamptonshire.
As soon as he was old enough, David was sent to Eton; holidays were spent on the Continent with a specially engaged tutor. By the time he went up to Magdalen, Oxford, he was already trilingual in English, French, and German with an extensive knowledge of the literature of those countries. He took a first in 1937, and was immediately offered junior rank in the Foreign Service.
In 1937 David Hinton was posted to the British Embassy in Berlin as a junior officer in the cultural section; routine reports on him and his work described a donnish young man. He quickly grasped the essentials of the German Kultur in those pre-war days, and often was asked to advise the political section.
When the embassy closed in 1939 and its staff dispersed, David Hinton disappeared. He was not heard of for the first two months of the war and nothing was known of his activities until his father, Major-General Lord Finedon, summoned to the War Office one evening, verified the identification of a voice broadcasting over the German National Radio Service as that of his son, David. The Honourable David Hinton was treasonably broadcasting for and to the Germans.
He broadcast once a week from Berlin during 1940 and 1941; his ‘Stimme aus Berlin’ broadcasts became as popular in Germany as J. B. Priestley’s were in England.
In 1942 the broadcasts stopped, and Hinton disappeared from the German scene. British Intelligence learned that Hinton was believed killed in a bombing raid; a report was prepared and the Hinton file was closed.
A secret file was opened, however, in December 1942 when a man purporting to be David Hinton revealed his identity to the British ambassador in Lisbon, who would never have recognised, in this thin, wasted figure, the young man he’d met at country house parties before the war. The ambassador concealed Hinton in his private residenc e while trying to decide what to do with him. ‘Hinton is one of us,’ he said to his wife, ‘we can’t just turn him in.’
His wife remembered Anthony Stope-West, who’d lodged with them when he was in Lisbon a few months previously, on some important, hush-hush job. She remembered Anthony had even placed a direct call to Winston Churchill. ‘Anthony will know what to do with him,’ she said, and the ambassador sent a coded signal.
Anthony dispatched his personal aide, a lieutenant-colonel, to collect David Hinton, and bring him back in secret to Bedfordshire. After all, David had been his fag at Eton.
* * *
‘David, you’ve been a damned fool,’ Anthony Stope-West said. ‘Now sign this blasted piece of paper and we’ll set about getting you into His Majesty’s Forces. Then you can go down to my tailor, and get yourself a decent uniform.’
‘What regiment are you putting me in, Tony?’ David asked.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ Tony said, ‘but it won’t be the Lancers. I mean, a chap can only do so much…’
* * *
Anthony Stope-West’s influence extended much further than his rank of brigadier-general would suggest. He was persona grata in all the private councils of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Allied High Command. It was known he had the ear of the War Cabinet. Many people privately asked why, but no one mentioned it. Not in the hearing of Winston Churchill, anyway.
Basically, Stope-West was a planning co-ordinator unhampered by conventional chains of command. He was a devious man of complete charm, unassailable on either moral or social grounds.
Someone once said of him that he was a perfect ‘alter ego’, a voice of conscience that could argue equally well on either side. If a general were squeamish about sending a group of men to certain death, Anthony Stope-West could point to the number of other lives that would be saved; if a general were lenient in his interpretation of a military law, Stope-West could express a moral indignation that would have done credit to an archbishop.
Anthony Stope-West was given a free hand; his brief stated in the most succinct terms, ‘do anything to help the Allies win the war’.
When he had learned that Hinton was broadcasting for the Germans, he suspended judgement. After all, David was ‘one of us’: he didn’t behave badly without a reason. Anthony Stope-West refused to take up an attitude until he had all the facts.
Personally, Stope-West thought that military activity was old-fashioned; the chief weapons of the future, he was convinced, would be psychological. Perhaps there was a way in which British Intelligence could make use of the ‘fact’ of Hinton’s broadcasts for the purposes of psychological warfare.
When he heard that Hinton had gone off the air, he was appalled. So long as David Hinton was in Germany, making his regular broadcasts, a possibility existed that Stope-West might be able to make use of him. It had been no more than an idea. But that idea appeared to be lost when Hinton disappeared. Now Hinton had turned up again. Stope-West, a prudent man at all times, arranged Hinton’s posting to his own headquarters.
One day two weeks after David Hinton had been smuggled back into England, Anthony Stope-West was sitting at his desk, reading the reports of the monitoring services at Caversham. These covered the German and Italian radio stations looking for coded messages intended for the many agents the War Office had uncovered and now secretly controlled. These reports were coupled with others from the network of ‘correspondents’ British Intelligence maintained in Germany. Shuffling the reports together, Stope-West became aware of what at first seemed an insignificant fact: a woman called Heidi Lotl was doing a daily broadcast from Strasbourg that seemed to have achieved immense popularity. The programme was simply called ‘Tagesschau’ – a look at the day – but since it had started six months before the tiny broadcasting station at Strasbourg had achieved its best-ever listening figures. Heidi Lotl had become a popular heroine throughout Germany, with the same sort of reputation, Stope-West thought, that Hinton had once enjoyed.
That was when Stope-West saw how he could still make use of Hinton.
* * *
David Hinton watched Anthony Stope-West shuffling his papers. He got up and walked across to the window, looked out over the grounds. It all seemed so long ago, yet so close. How could he accept the rank that Anthony Stope-West had achieved; how could he take him seriously? They’d been boys together, had shared the same wild impulses. They’d been invited together, on exeats, to this sort of house, the homes of their contemporaries. This had been the dower house of Sir Bartholomew Wallace’s home. He and Tony had come here with young Clarence Wallace, had ridden these fields, cubbing, later hunting. Tony had gone to Cambridge, David to Oxford, but they’d met frequently, in this sort of setting. It seemed natural to be here, but not with someone who called himself ‘Brigadier’.
He turned and sat on the sofa near the fireplace. ‘Tony,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking about the old days. That time the groom brought up that horse in a lather and you questioned him and got the truth out of him and then gave him hell. I was awfully impressed with you in those days.’
‘I hope you still are…’
‘Of course I am. You’ve been damned fortunate, but you’ve deserved it. You always knew exactly what you wanted, didn’t you? That was always my trouble, I never knew what I wanted. Nobody seemed interested, nobody seemed to give a twopenny damn. I was determined I’d beat them all.’
‘You did, in the academic way—’
‘That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be superior in other respects. I wanted to be admired, I suppose, for what I was, not for what I could do. You always had a purpose. I remember that quite clearly. Whenever I said, ‘Oh, bother this, let’s cut it’, and we’d escape from a tedious prep, I’d be left with nothing to do; but you’d always have an alternative plan. You wanted to escape because you had something better to do. I wanted to escape from purely negative feelings. I suppose it was the same thing with this German business. I saw them as a Herrenvolk. I didn’t realise you can’t drive a tank through a graveyard without knocking down a few headstones.’
‘And you came to your senses again, that night the bomb dropped on the house in the Kurfürstendamm…?’
‘I suppose so, though I didn’t know it at the time… I’d finished my broadcast that evening and a car took me to the house in the Kurfürstendamm. I was early, but there wasn’t time for me to drive out to my place, so they put a suite at my disposal where I could bathe and freshen up. They were giving a reception in my honour and I was to meet a man from the Kraft Durch Freude campaign. Also the press were going to be there in force. In fact, a press car was parked outside the building when the bomb fell. My car and driver were still there, and he was the one, so I read, who told the press I was inside. After all, he’d seen me go in, hadn’t he, and I’d no reason to go out of the back door.’
‘So the press were told you’d gone into a building which they watched destroyed, and naturally assumed you were dead.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Exactly where were you and what were you doing when the bomb fell?’
‘I’d bathed and had dressed. I was alone in this suite they’d given me.’
‘Then the bomb fell?’
‘That’s right. The building was destroyed.’
‘Why weren’t you killed?’
‘How do I know, Tony? All I know is that – well, the first thing I knew was that the wall started to crumble. I hadn’t heard a bomb, of course. I just saw the wall start to crumble outwards as if it were made of cheese. And then the air started, sort of rushing about, if you know what I mean, and the curtains came whipping in, and I suppose the air must have sucked me out through the window, which, by the way, I’d opened previously, and the next thing I knew I was outside the building in a garden, about twenty or thirty yards from the building. I was tight-wrapped in an enormous velvet curtain. I got out of the curtain as best I could and then I just wandered away.’
‘But surely, someone must have recognised you? Someone must have known you from your pictures in the papers…?’
‘Well, I suppose not. After all, I was covered in muck and dust, wasn’t I…?’
