phial. 'These would make a horse retch, my dear chappie,' he continued with amusement. 'You must get a couple of them down you three times a day. You have quite a nasty
'What are they?' I inspected the two pills in my hand as he filled a glass with water.
'Curiosity is a superfluous quality in the patient. It's stuff called 'Streptozon', which to you can mean no more than another brand of schnapps. Now back to bed, dear chappie. You're feverish enough to boil a kettle.'
Illness abroad is doubly wretched. 'The purple wallpaper which we will grow to hate as we lie in bed with grippe,' Cyril Connolly wrote perceptively about his cheap Paris hotel. I was oppressed by
About eight that evening I descended the narrow attic stairs, grey woollen dressing-gown over my shoulders, to the lavatory on the landing below. A minute later I was hurriedly out again. I leant over the banisters shouting in panic for Dr Dieffenbach. He appeared from the living-room, napkin under chin, half alarmed and half angry.
'Doctor, I'm bleeding to death,' I cried in German. Frau Dieffenbach and Gerda appeared behind him, wondering if I were dying or delirious.
'Bleeding? Where from?' the doctor asked brusquely.
This was awkward, in front of the ladies. 'Internally.'
'Fore or aft?' he demanded impatiently.
'Fore.'
He mounted the stairs, snatching off his napkin and mumbling bad-temperedly. He followed me into _die Toilette,_ where I indicated dramatically with my good hand the bright red water in the pan of solid china, made in Staffordshire and named amid a spray of flowers in English, _The Little Thunderer._ Dr Dieffenbach's professional balance seemed shaken. 'Have you any left?' he demanded, pulling his beard. 'I need a drop more, if you can find it.'
He brought a conical flask from his surgery, into which I passed an inch of this alarmingly coloured fluid. He packed me back to bed. After a few minutes he appeared in smiling reassurance. 'No nephritis,' he announced in English. 'No septicaemic abscess, no pyelitis. I've tested your offering, my dear chappie, by the tincture of guiac method, and find it free from all blood. The colour is a harmless dye, which should have occurred to me. But a doctor never thinks at his clearest when snatched away from his dinner. I've seen the same effect in children who've gorged themselves with sweets which the manufacturers have turned pretty red colours with aniline dyes. They pass straight through to the urine, and you can imagine how the mothers get hysterics. How's the hand? Why, a great improvement already.'
I noticed that the red lines were fading. 'The streptococcus is in full retreat,' Dr Dieffenbach said with satisfaction. 'We shan't send you home looking like Admiral Nelson after all.'
He left me lying feebly on my pillow. 'Streptozon' was transparently a fancy name for sulphonamide, as 'Atebrin' was for the mepacrine hydrochloride used against malaria. I was an involuntary colleague of Professor Domagk's mice.
11
In summer, everybody thinks less. With leaves and flowers to distract the eye, skin and air making friends again, fresh fruit to eat-delicious proof of Nature's kindly abundance-people stop brooding and grow lazy and lecherous. Life looks different, a golden thread to be spun out as long as possible, not a coin to be risked for a cause. A country becomes docile towards its native politicians and completely indifferent towards foreign ones. From his first year of office, Hitler grasped this as instinctively as any other item of mass psychology.
Hitler busied himself in the sunshine to annihilate his antagonists. The Storm Troopers had for years been able to murder whoever they liked with the tolerance of the Law. It would have taken a braver witness to testify, a braver juryman to convict and a braver judge to sentence than in Ireland during the Troubles. Now they had the force of Law itself. There were rumoured to be 100,000 Germans in concentration camps, each prisoner playing the grisly double role of terrorizing those still left outside. All opponents of Hitler not behind barbed wire were under the earth, and even the wraiths of resistance vanished.
The Geleichstellung, the co-ordination of Germany, was accomplished that summer at breakneck speed. Hitler's safeguards of March were forgotten, his four-year limit not worth remembering. The Reichstag enjoyed the vestigial function of Hitler's sounding board, which it fulfilled to hear his resolve of spreading peace and light across Europe, a message accepted particularly enthusiastically by the London
The German Social Democratic Party vanished. Hitler's signature dissolved it. He also dissolved the German National Party, his partner in the coalition appointed by President Hindenburg with the idea of keeping him under control. The Catholic Centre Party lasted until July 4, when Storm Troopers appeared in its offices to close it down for ever. And on July 20, representatives of His Holiness in Rome signed a concordat with representatives of Herr Hitler in Berlin.
Hitler's success in these early vulnerable months came from his genius for the deadly game of political chess, from an eye which saw deeply into the dark, timorous, mean recesses of the human heart, and from his transforming the roughhouse which passed for German society into a disciplined country where everyone knew where he stood. Hitler restored order. And the Germans loved him for it, as Gerda loved her father.
'My dear chappie, you must realize how things are for us in Germany,' explained Dr Dieffenbach, clipping his after-dinner cigar a month after saving an English arm with a German drug. 'The Jews are vastly over-represented in medicine, as in the law. I sometimes wonder if we can truly call these two learned professions German at all. But I would agree that Herr Hitler is being rather hasty. He will have second thoughts, assuredly. You must expect him to be a little headstrong in the first flush of success. Besides, he has to pander a little to his most fervent supporters, who are not exactly the type of person I would invite to dinner.'
Dr Dieffenbach always evaded my questions about the nature of the pills. He did not know that I had seen a letter which Gerda inadvertently left on the pink chenille cloth when filing her father's professional papers. It was a short handwritten note from Domagk, saying they were receiving encouraging reports from 'Streptozon' all over Germany, particularly from Professor Dr Schreus at the medical academy in Dьsseldorf and from physicians in Mьnster and Kiel. In Wuppertal, Professor Dr Klee was using it successfully at the Municipal Hospital for erysipelas and angina of the throat. I supposed I G Farben had good reasons for keeping the drug up its sleeve, though I did not think much about it. Once cured by his doctor, the patient forgets the drug and begrudges the fee
I was already planning to spend Christmas with my parents. I certainly did not see my days in Germany as numbered. In the years ahead, there were plenty of Englishmen to visit Germany curiously and leave it enthusiastically, including Lloyd George. Nazism had a glitteringly superficial appeal, a nation as one folk, all sharing alike-even such privations as the weekly 'one pot' meal-all setting their country above themselves, all healthy, straightforward and comradely, the apotheosis of togetherness, a youth movement for all ages. I missed the full significance of the moral infection round me, as I had missed the full significance of the cured physical one in my hand.
Once a month I had to report to the Polizeiprдsidium on Druckerstrasse, between river and railway, crammed together as they traversed the narrow valley. It was a painless and even an amicable episode. A citizen of the British Empire was a curiosity to break the monotony of Hungarians or Roumanians, Dutch or Danes. A scholarly- looking policeman with pince-nez made a neat copperplate entry in violet ink on the yellowish, lined paper of my file, and that was that.
I was due to appear at the end of October. Hitler had just abruptly withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, and the League of Nations for good measure, which particularly disconcerted the London _Times, _the British Labour Party and President Roosevelt. I was on this occasion shown immediately into a small office containing two men my own age, both in Nazi brown shirts with Sam Browne belts, swastika armbands above
