The Bloody Red Baron: 1918

Junior officers clutched document bundles, desperate to be relieved of the bad news they brought. Colonels, generals, a field marshal were levelled in rank by an age of waiting.

A clerk, his hair a peculiarly shocked bird's nest, sometimes emerged, like a figure from a cuckoo clock, from a tiny door to call a name.

'Von Bayern,' he barked. 'Hauptmann Gregory von Bayern.'

An elder, neatly uniformed without the trimmings, stood at the sound of his name and was ushered out of the room. Ewers's envious eyes bored into von Bayern's uniformed back as it disappeared smartly through doors marked with a gilded bas- relief of the imperial German eagle.

'They always get preference,' Ewers stage-whispered bitterly, meaning elders. 'The centuried fools don't know what year it is, but are sure of a commission and the opportunity to eclipse the work of an able new-born.'

Obviously, Ewers was eaten inside by resentment. Poe was learning more of his doppelganger.

In the first-class railway carriage, numbed by Ewers's reminiscences, Poe found his travelling companion tolerable only because his position guaranteed patronage, advancement or degradation. Ewers's stories of life in the service of the Kaiser were laced with the ironic, justified falls of those who had crossed or disappointed him. Each gem of truth in his autobiographical monologue was polished until it shone, then set in a tracery of arrant fiction.

It was an uncomfortable journey, with the etched faces of soldiers returning from leave always outside the compartment or in the darks between the carriages. The grey of their uniforms spread to their faces, showing colour only in the red around their eyes.

Apparitions haunted Poe still. On a nearby couch, squeezed between a puffy diplomat and a mightily whiskered general, was a man from the front, a wild-eyed walking skeleton wrapped in a uniform. Jittery at every heel-click on marble, a muddied despatch clamped under his arm, he was one of the living dead, a warm man who seemed more dead than the vampires either side of him. His dented helmet was smeared with French dirt.

The stomach of his coat was pink-tinged with his own blood. Any rank insignia he might once have worn were obscured or ripped away. The man's stretched face was a mask of pain.

The general, fussily eating live mice from a brown paper bag, pretended not to notice the state of his comrade. He shrank to one side to avoid actual physical contact with such a disgusting remnant. The diplomat too, concentrated on a mid-air spot in a direction that did not require him to look at the soldier. The worthies, new-born vampires of the most distinguished station, conversed over and around the mud man, discussing the course of the war. Both were confident of imminent victory because the German fighting man was the best in the world. With the Russkies out of it, there was no excuse not to take Paris before the thaw.

The soldier held his stomach as if digesting a caltrop and looked at Poe with a terrible gaze. For a moment, he was certain he had been recognised as the author of The Battle of St Petersburg, and that he had been tricked into answering for his failure as a prophet of modern warfare. The thought passed but he seethed at the likes of the general and the diplomat. They were far more responsible than Edgar Poe for the divergence of the course of the war from his vision.

'Poelzig,' announced the clerk. 'Herr Oberst Hjalmar Poelzig.'

A sallow-faced officer arose and sauntered through the doors. Poe assumed he had shares in munitions. Only someone making money could look so arrogantly satisfied.

Ewers still paced, fuming. In the motor-car that conveyed them from the railway station to the Chancellory, Ewers had impressed the driver with the urgency of their mission. The name of Mabuse was well enough known to spur the man to an over-enthusiastic burst of speed. A ferocious honk on the horn startled a horse into rearing. Ewers chuckled while two soldiers tried to calm the beast and the car sped by, eagle pennants fluttering. Now, in this huge room, he was diminished. His true position emerged as each of his humble solicitations was pointedly ignored or waved away by hawk-eyed clerks. If he had not been so tired and thirsty, and conscious of his own bad clothes, Poe might have enjoyed the braggart's slow shrinkage.

A young veteran, a burned arm twisted into a batwing against his side, face snouted and angry with scars, entered with a trolley of newspapers which he hawked around the room. A colonel learned from the front page that secret information he was to hand over to his High Command was now common knowledge. Poe thought to buy a paper, but realised he had absolutely no money about him.

Ewers did his best to impress upon a clerk that his career would suffer dreadfully when it was found by Dr Mabuse that he, Hanns Heinz Ewers, had been kept waiting. He suggested darkly that a word from him ensured transfer to active service on the Western Front. The clerk humoured him but action was not forthcoming.

Strangely, Ewers was the only person in the room inclined to complain. The field marshal sat meekly, waiting. It was very German. Everyone knew their rank and place and stuck to it. All very reassuring, providing one had a seat on the pyramid. Anyone whose station could not immediately be determined from a glance at an epaulette was the equivalent of an Indian 'untouchable', excluded entirely from the caste system.

The soldier suppressed a groan and hugged his stomach as if a shrapnel fragment were working its way through. Poe thought a trickle of blood was seeping through the soldier's coat. His red thirst was excited but the battered and filthy soldier was revolting to his sensibilities. Poe would have to be starved indeed to feed on such poor meat.

The mood of the room suddenly changed, as if smoke had been scented in the air. The supplicants were like a herd of grazing deer, alert to the tread of a hunter. A susurrus of whispering swept past like a wind and Poe heard a name, repeated.

'Dracula ...'

The main doors were held open by attendants. A noisome party was coming into the room. Even Ewers stopped pacing to come to attention.

'Dracula ...'

The Graf von Dracula was the Elder Vampire of Europe, Master Strategist and Great Visionary, Architect of Victory and Defender of the Kind. It was due solely to his colossal schemes that the vampire condition was spread throughout the world. Uncle-by-marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was rumoured to have a greater say in the conduct of the war than Hindenburg or Ludendorff.

'Dracula.'

Soldiers marched in, boots and breastplates clattering. Elders of the Graf's Carpathian Guard, they had fought at his side through the centuries. With them, they brought an icy stink, of old spilled blood and discharged guns.

'Dracula.'

Poe had written to the Graf many times early in the war, encouraged by the elder's endorsement, never retracted but also not mentioned much these days, of The Battle of St Petersburg. He had never been granted a reply.

'Dracula ...'

The repetition of the name was almost a cry, almost a prayer. An adjutant was dragged in behind a pair of wolves which snapped and snarled on leashes. Ewers jumped at the approach of the beasts. Poe had heard these were Dracula's lieutenants from his warm days, transformed by his powers into faithful familiars.

A tall vampire came through the doors at a striding pace. He wore a grey cloak over a simple uniform. Poe noted the leather holster at his belt, the shiny-peaked black cap, the pointed ends of his moustache. While other elders clung to their own times, Dracula changed eternally with each war. While his generals advised the tactics of Waterloo and Borodino, the Graf deployed machine-guns against cavalry charges and ordered the digging of trenches across the whole of Europe. He was the great adapter, the supreme pragmatist.

A dowager knelt before the Graf and kissed his hand, pressing lips to spade-like nails. He tolerated her attentions but was eager to move on.

Though not given to fawning on the great, Poe stood to present himself. A word from Dracula would free him from the abominable Ewers and find him a suitable position. General David Poe, his grandfather, had been a warlord also, in the Revolutionary war. There were too many in the way. The Graf could not venture among the generality without being surrounded by the grateful, the solicitous, the opportunist.

Poe dashed forwards, running through his accomplishments in his mind. The conversation of Poe and Dracula.