Heil Harris!

on destiny, history, grammar, and the insignificance of man. Even Hitler had spoken in clichés. Would any serious novelist have got away with ‘Never... has so much been owed by so many to so few’? Style! It was like the wit of the Prime Minister. The thing is not done well, as somebody once said, but you are surprised to find it done at all.
    Steed decided to write another paragraph tomorrow.
    It was half past nine, he had run out of brandy, and if man was as insignificant as all that he might as well take a healthy walk down to the village pub and listen to the local farmers talking about their crops and the recurring seasons. They talked in genuine Mummerset accents down at the George & Dragon, all except Snowy Black-Hawkins who owned the place.
    He walked slowly along the narrow lane (Karsten’s Lane they called it locally, after the famous accident), smelling the fresh rain on the birch trees and relishing the absolute darkness of the countryside. There was none of that glow that you get in London; no street lamps, no office blocks or cars. He decided that statesmen must love not their country but history.
    “Hello, here comes Rousseau. Evening, Steed. How are the scandalous confessions today?” Snowy had a sense of humour; his other joke was that Steed was recording how he won the war single-handed. “Did you tell them how we went down into Hitler’s bunker?”
    “Yes.” Steed raised his glass to the good old days.
    “Creepy place,” Black-Hawkins explained to the yokels. “Like a bloody underground hotel, all concrete and damp. No wonder Adolf was going senile I”
    The George & Dragon was an authentic country pub, with none of the brass and oak beam comfort that the advertisements insist on. It had seven tiny bare rooms arranged round the bar, and the bar was a huge stone kitchen. Snowy Black-Hawkins had bought the place when he retired from Military Intelligence eight years ago, and he had done his best to attract the Jaguar trade; he had put a fireplace in the saloon bar, persuaded the Wiltshire captain to use it for a ‘pop into your local’ advert on television. But to Steed’s relief the pub was not a magnet for the surrounding county. The only time it made a profit was when the hunt met outside on the green. The profit would be larger if Snowy could keep silent about bloody-stockbrokers-reverting-to-savagery. Five farmers were in tonight, complaining about the lack of rain, and an old lady in the corner was drinking cider.
    “I reckon we wasted our time,” said Snowy. He thrust back his shoulders and barked like an old soldier. “Eight years of my life I spent fighting Jerry, two of them behind the lines and two of them in Berlin before the party started. So did you, Steed. (Ay, so I did.) And what happens? The devils are at it again.”
    “Ay, so they are.” They had had this conversation several times before, but there was nothing much else to talk about. They were old friends. It was better than the argument over British youth being soft today. “Did you read what von Thadden said last week? He said Germany has no aggressive intentions towards the rest of Europe; he only wants back the territories stolen from it during the last war.”
    “By God, it’s all so damned familiar!” Snowy thumped the bar in disgust. “Is he the fellow who married an English debutante?”
    “No. That was Baron von Thalmann.”
    “They always harp on about the territories they used to possess, and communism and Africa and the Jews. Emotional blah! That’s what was wrong with Hitler-behind all his emotion and his bogeymen he had no positive ideology.” Which was a pretty deep observation for Snowy, so he nodded impressively for the next few minutes and joined Steed in a brandy. “Frivolous, that’s what Jerry is. I mean, who’d want to marry an English debutante?”
    “That was Baron von Thalmann.”
    “They’re all the bloody same. I didn’t like the country; the beer was bad and they were sexually repressed.”
    “Down with the N.P.D.,” said Steed.
    “Gesundheit!”
    They drank solemnly to the laying of ghosts.
    Sixty minutes later Steed was strolling cheerfully back along the dark lane. He felt more optimistic now about Germany. They were on our side anyway. And a lot can change in twenty years. Steed, he said to himself, it’s that first quarter century of anti-kraut propaganda still lurking in the old bosom. Hitler was dead. It didn’t matter whether he was a genius or a