Heil Harris!

Here comes Rousseau
     
    “I first met Adolf Hitler when I was a young captain in 1945. He was dead. M.I.5 had wanted a man in Berlin when the Russian army battered its way into the mined city. Himmler and Goering had already sued for peace, but the Allies were set on destroying Germany once and for all.” Steed looked at the phrase once and for all, then crossed it out. “I arrived in Berlin on the morning of April 30th in time to witness Hitler’s final act of vengeance carried out by the S.S.- the flooding of the Bundesbahn. It was an act of vengeance against his own people and I watched in dismay.” Horror? Aghast? “I watched in indescribable amazement. If a man could do this to his own people then the barbarity of the Russian soldiers was humane and the concentration camp I had seen a week earlier at Belsen was just. War was manly and the world was insane. Hitler was only a statesman doing his job.”
    Steed lit a panatella and sighed. He went into the kitchen to put on some more coffee. Then he strolled back into the study, paused by the latticed windows and stared through the evening mist at the willows in bloom by the river. He didn’t see the point in writing all this down. It had taken him three weeks to reach the end of the war, and when it was all finished he’d have to go through and put in some graphs and footnotes to make it a scholarly work. Think up phrases like ‘as Stalin was to Hitler so Churchill was to Peter Kavanagh’. The midnight clatter of jackboots in the empty streets still reverberates through the corridors of history. And there would have to be an academic joke; ‘Hider’s indecision exists only in the mind of A. J. P. Taylor’; that would make two professors chuckle and it would surprise the other seventeen readers. Oh yes, there was an art in writing history!
    “The first Russian troops entered Hitler’s bunker three days later and they found the bodies of not one Hitler but three. Hence the continuing mystery concerning — no, about — the actual remains. The Germans claimed that he died fighting at the head of his troops and the Russians claimed that his body was burned to ashes with that of his wife. What we really have is a triple certainty that he did die...
    There was something too remote about Berlin at the end of the war. This Elizabethan cottage in Wiltshire twenty-one years later was real, this convalescence was necessary. But the past was past. He had reached the moral bit now: Hitler was the responsibility of us all, a symptom of the malaise at the heart of Europe. Or the cautionary bit: we must remember that democracy is our only safeguard against a mad tyrant again seizing the helm. Perhaps a personal touch: I myself could never take to the fellow, he lacked refinement.
    When Steed had been knocked about and brainwashed a month ago the doctors had ordered a rest. He had been given treatment that took him back mentally to the condition of a child, which had been easily cured. They stopped the treatment. But His Nibs had developed another of his theories. “What you need, Steed m’boy, is to work your way intellectually through to the present. Put your life into a semblance of order by writing down the facts and sorting out the patterns.”
    “I think the boom for war memoirs is over, sir—”
    “It’s a spy boom now, Steed. Dammit, you must have done something during those years with M.I.5.”
    Steed had smiled. ‘I did meet a very nice girl during the liberation of Paris. But she turned out to be a spy.”
    “Well, there you are. Best seller. Did she sing in a night club? Just bear in mind that when the film comes out she’ll be played by Marlene Dietrich.”
    The old man had meant well. He knew that Steed enjoyed being idle and so he had tried to suggest something that would keep him occupied. Trouble was that Steed found himself emerging from the page as such an intrepidly heroic figure that no male actor would have the panache to play him. Which was immodest. With reference to the Germans, he wrote deliberately, as far as the British were concerned, John Steed... and he paused to work in the phrase ‘theatre of operations’. Or as it’s known in hospitals, operating theatre.
    To hell with it!
    One of the reasons Steed hadn’t written two volumes by now and reached the year 1970 was that he needed a couple of double brandies to make such an effort, and after a couple of double brandies he found himself sitting back in his chair reflecting