THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'I arrived in a Swedish plane with the Swedish ambassador, which I guess is safe enough,' he explained. 'Hey, what are all those blimps in the sky round London?'

'That's the balloon barrage. The Germans run their bombers into them.' Jeff pressed me to have dinner the following night. I asked if I could bring a girlfriend.

'Sure thing, old man. I'm lonely. There's no girls I know left in London, and Donna sailed home early summer.'

'What's it like, being a neutral in Germany?'

'Creepy. The Gestapo had their beady eyes on me round the clock. I guess they'd have run me out, if I hadn't jumped of my own accord.'

'How are the Dieffenbachs?'

'Are you crazy? If I'd waved to them in the street, they'd have ended in a concentration camp.'

Jeff had the same suite as in peacetime, with blackout curtains which he claimed made opening the window like undressing a nun. I knew that Elizabeth was living in her father's flat, and imagined she would be impressed to meet a man hot from the enemy's camp fires. But it was I who felt staggered as she appeared through the door in uniform, with a Service gasmask in a haversack. 'Motor Transport Corps,' she explained. 'Do you like it? I wish I was blonde. Khaki goes so much better with fair hair. American cigarettes, divine,' she murmured, taking one of Jeff's Chesterfields.

'Where are you serving?' asked Jeff, dazzled by her.

'I'm going to Paris on Monday. There! I should never have said so. Careless talk costs lives. I'm driving ambulances and things at the British Transit Hospital, because of the French I picked up with Mummy on the Riviera, though everyone says I have the most ghastly Midi accent. Mummy thinks that Paris will be a much nicer place to spend the war in than London. Last time, they had a few shells from Big Bertha, but the food remained delicious. Mummy regards the war as a personal insult to her from Hitler,' she added to me.

There was champagne, and caviar canapйs on a silver tray. Jeff wanted to express either admiration of the fighting British or appreciation at escape from austere Germany. There was no food rationing in England until the following month, and there seemed a shortage only of taxis and torch batteries. As the long-promised bombs stayed off, London had the gaiety of a fashionable garden-party spared a threatening summer storm.

'Have you seen anything of Archie?' I asked Elizabeth while Jeff was telephoning the head waiter.

'Yes, he's dreadfully confused, poor dear. Now that Hitler's in bed with Stalin, he doesn't know if the war is an anti-Fascist crusade or an anti-Communist one. He says the British working classes went to war quite ignobly, only because they were fed up with Hitler. But fed-upness is an incredibly powerful force, isn't it, with the British? So in the end he's gone to join up as a Guardsman.' This was news to me. 'At least it will give him some peace from continually redefining his attitudes. What are you doing at Oxford?'

'I'm on war work at the Fungus Institute.'

Elizabeth looked nonplussed. 'I've got it. You're developing a mushroom like the Caterpillar's in Alice. Eating one side will make our soldiers so small they can creep on the Germans unseen, and the other will make them so tall they'll frighten the enemy to death.'

'That's right,' I told her.

Jeff explained to us how the Germans were cock-a-hoop after the Polish campaign. 'The Wehrmacht and the dive bombers made mincemeat of the Poles. They've a new tactic. If the tanks run into trouble, they radio the Stukas to bomb them out of it. I guess Poland hadn't a combat plane in the sky after the first day. And now they've sunk your carrier, the Courageous. And the _Royal Oak,_ right inside Scapa Flow. You've got to take your hat off to the U-boat captains, I guess.'

'You forgot the Athenia,' said Elizabeth. 'Sunk without warning nine hours after the war started. Drowning a hundred and twelve people, including children.'

'And including twenty-eight Americans.'

She coloured. 'I'm sorry.'

'Anyway, the Germans believe that Churchill sank the Athenia, to do another Lusitania. It's a crazy idea, but nobody dare deny it. Say, you remember your Professor Domagk? He was arrested by the Gestapo.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'All I heard about Domagk was his turning down the Nobel Prize.'

'I'll give you the real story. It's all round Wuppertal.' Jeff produced a sheet of flimsy paper from his pocket with a triumphant flourish. 'I had that sewn into my overcoat. As I was travelling with a Swedish diplomatic party, I decided the Gestapo wouldn't be too nosy.'

It was the carbon of a letter from Domagk at I G Farben in Wuppertal, dated November 3, 1939, to Professor Dr Gunnar Holmgren, Rector of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It started with the appropriate academic greeting, Magnifizenz!, its twenty-odd lines of German expressing Domagk's honour at accepting the 1939 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, and his readiness to visit Stockholm on December 10 to receive it.

'Don't ask me how I got that letter,' Jeff said proudly. 'But mine weren't the first prying eyes to read it. The Gestapo intercepted it, of course. Domagk must have been overconfident, or maybe didn't see what went on under his own eyes. A lot of intelligent Germans don't want to. You remember Karl von Ossietsky, the German who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934?'

'And promptly disappeared into a concentration camp.'

Jeff nodded. 'To a mind like Hitler's, a Nobel Prize of any sort carries a political sting. The story is that Hitler ordered Domagk's arrest himself. On a Friday night in the middle of November, a couple of guys in plain clothes knocked at Domagk's house near the Zoo there and said they were Gestapo officers. They arrested him, searched his place, confiscated all his correspondence. Then they locked him up in Wuppertal Jail. In the morning they ordered him to clean out his cell and offered him a cup of coffee, to both of which our professor gave a dignified refusal. A top SS man from Dьsseldorf came across to interrogate him, but by then there was a hell of a row going on. The chief of the civil police was demanding to know why their distinguished citizen was behind bars.'

'With the Gestapo, he wouldn't get an answer.'

'That's right.' Jeff poured more champagne into Elizabeth's glass. She was sitting in an armchair with her gas-mask on her knee, listening in fascination. 'They kept him there eight days. They let his wife bring some food, and they moved in a couch instead of a plank bed. When one of the warders asked what he'd done to get arrested, Domagk replied, 'I won the Nobel Prize'. The warder went round the other prisoners saying, 'We've got a madman in there'.'

We laughed. 'Then a week later Domagk got himself arrested again,' Jeff went on. 'It was at an international medical congress in Berlin. You know how suspicious the Nazis are of foreign contacts. They wanted him to sign a declaration that he wouldn't make a speech or mix with the guests. Domagk refused. So inside he went. In the end, the SS took him to the Ministry of Education, and gave him another letter to sign addressed to the Karolinska Institute, refusing the Nobel Prize.'

'He signed that?' asked Elizabeth.

'If he hadn't, the world would have heard that Professor Domagk had suffered a fatal heart attack. But do you know what the Nazis did? They sent the letter to the police at Wuppertal, so it would be posted to Stockholm with a Wuppertal postmark. These trivial bits of thoroughness are what make me feel most frightened of the Germans.'

Three waiters wheeled in a trolley with our dinner. 'When's America coming into the war?' asked Elizabeth.

'Who can tell what's in Roosevelt's mind?' Jeff stubbed out his cigarette. 'If Joe Kennedy here at the Embassy had anything to do with it, I'd say never.'

'Archie says this Kennedy chap has written Britain off already,' Elizabeth told him. 'And I gather Kennedy is highly delighted at the prospect.'

'You can't expect the Boston Irish to stroke the British lion,' Jeff observed.

'Perhaps the Germans will get rid of Hitler themselves,' I suggested. 'After all, they nearly blew him up in that Munich beer cellar last month.'

'That bomb was a put-up job, to put public sympathy right behind Hitler.'

'But half a dozen Germans were killed by it,' exclaimed Elizabeth.

Jeff snapped his fingers. 'What's six or seven lives to the Nazis? Even German ones? Let's eat.'