Читать книгу The Land God Made in Anger - John Davis Gordon - Страница 17

It was dark when McQuade got back to his house in Fifth Street, It was three days since he had been home and he was in dire need of a shower. He unlocked the peeling front door. Something scraped across the floor. It was a bulky brown envelope, which had been pushed through his letter box.

His name on it had been typed: McQuade. No initial, no Mr. He tore it open. Inside was a book.

It was The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The very same book he had been reading that afternoon, which denied that the Holocaust had taken place. He looked inside. Passages had been underlined throughout. McQuade stared across the room.

Who had sent him this, and typed his surname only? It was insulting, almost aggressive. The Stormtrooper? But if Helga had sent it she would surely have hand-written his full name. No, it was typed because the sender wished to be anonymous. But who, apart from Helga, would worry what McQuade thought about the Holocaust? People he had seen at the Schmidt ranch? But for what reason? To explain? To tell him to keep his mouth shut?

He walked pensively through to his office, carrying Roger’s books. He stood a moment, thinking; then he reached for the answering machine.

It clicked; there followed the soft hiss of the tape, and then a deep male voice said softly, ‘Mind your own business, McQuade.’

Then another click as the machine cut off.

McQuade stared across the room. Then he rewound and played it again.

He could not recognize the voice. Even the accent was hard to identify. It sounded as if the speaker had disguised it. It might have been Afrikaner, but it could also have been a German accent, or even an English-speaking South African. But what was unmistakable was the menace.

McQuade frowned. What he felt was anger that some person was trying to frighten him. And, yes, he felt a twinge of fear. The bastard had succeeded! His first reaction was to snatch up the telephone and tell the Stormtrooper to tell her bloody friends to leave him alone before he reported them to the police. Just then the telephone rang.

He jerked. It shrilled in the empty house. There was a click as the answering machine took the call. McQuade stabbed the audio button. There was a moment’s pause, then a softly sneering voice said: ‘Did you get my message, McQuade?’

McQuade’s hand reached out for the telephone, and the voice said softly: ‘I know you’re there, McQuade, because your lights are on and your Landrover’s outside.’

McQuade snatched up the telephone. ‘Who is this?’

There was a smirk. ‘Just to confirm you got the message.’

McQuade barked: ‘What are you talking about, you big oaf?’

There was a chuckle, then the voice said, ‘Just forget about everything, and stay healthy.’ The telephone went dead. McQuade slammed it down.

He was furious. And shaky.

He snatched up the telephone again. Then hesitated.

And tell the police what?

He slowly sat down.

Tell them how much? ‘Mind your own business,’ the voice had said. ‘Forget about everything.’ What business? Forget about what? What you saw on the Schmidt ranch? A bunch of Germans getting sentimental about the old days? Or the submarine-business?

He stared at the wall.

But how could the voice know he had been looking into the submarine story? It was hardly possible for anyone to know he’d been sitting on the Skeleton Coast with his sextant. Somebody saw him talking to Skellum outside Kukki’s Pub and put two and two together? Certainly nobody followed him to Jakob’s kraal. So? So the only possibility was Skellum or Jakob had opened their mouths about the strange things McQuade had been up to. But that seemed hardly likely, in the short time since he left them.

McQuade sat. Trying to think it through.

If the voice had been referring to the submarine, it could only mean that he was trying to scare McQuade off, or was trying to hush up the story. That could only mean that there was a political connection. Somebody did not want it known that forty years ago a German came struggling ashore from a sunken submarine. And if that was the case, it most likely meant that that German was still alive …

McQuade sat there, thoughts cramming his head. Then he slowly returned the telephone to its cradle.

But surely it was unlikely that the voice was referring to the submarine. And the voice had doubtless delivered The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. So it was highly likely that the call was from somebody who was at the Schmidt ranch. Highly likely. But he wasn’t going to take the chance of reporting to the police since he certainly did not want them to know what he had been doing since then.

McQuade rubbed his chin. He considered telephoning the Stormtrooper, telling her to call off her bloody bully-boys. ‘Stay healthy.’ Christ, how juvenile. No. He got up. He felt silly doing it, but he went to the front door and made sure it was locked. He switched off the living-room light, then pulled back the curtains. All he saw was the silent, empty sand-street and the railway yards.

He went to the kitchen, got a beer, then walked through to the bathroom. He turned on the taps.

He went back to his office and got the topmost book off the pile. German Rule in Africa, by Evans Lewin. He took it back to the bathroom.

He hesitated; and then locked the bathroom door. He had never done that before in this house.

Here again coincidence came into play. If he hadn’t received that threatening telephone call he wouldn’t have read Roger Wentland’s books all night; and, had he not done so, it is doubtful whether he would have persevered in the long chance of trying to trace the man who landed on this coast forty years ago from a sunken German submarine. In the books he learnt about political battles of not so long ago, history of which he was sure most educated people of his generation had little idea; recent history with a relevance to the present to make his blood run cold.

That night was unreal. A fog came rolling in off the Atlantic, so dense that a man would have been invisible five paces away, and the town was completely silent: it would have been a perfect night for villainy. McQuade sat in a yellow-grey pool of light, the mist rolling in his open window, jerking every time he imagined a sound, growing hourly more appalled by Germany’s colonial history. He read speeches by parliamentarians in the Reichstag denouncing their own government for maintaining German rule by the terror of the whip, calling their African territories ‘The Colonies of the Twenty-five’, referring to the twenty-five vicious lashes that were meted out for the most trivial offences – for failing to salute a white man, for failing to raise a hat, for collapsing when carrying heavy loads, for not being punctual with the master’s dinner. ‘The insensibility to the feelings of others, the disregard of native rights and the elementary principles of justice, the brutal callousness … and the total inability to conceive any system of administration that is not upheld by cruelty and by designed intimidation … stamps German administrators as on a par with the most brutal of the old Arab slave hunters’. He read a report about District Judge Rotberg in Togoland, who ‘was making a journey when one of the porters, overcome by his burden, fell to the ground. The representative of German justice knelt upon him, pummelled him in the face, and then had him flogged. The poor fellow fell again. He was again thrashed – this time with fatal effects.’ He read the verbatim report of a German judge, protesting in the Reichstag in 1906 in these words:

The native, after being completely stripped, is strapped across a block of wood or barrel, so that he cannot move, and then … the strongest amongst the black soldiers has to wield a plaited rope, or a correspondingly thick stick, with both hands and with all his strength, and with such violence that each blow must whistle in the air. It has happened that if the blow does not whistle it has to be repeated, and, moreover, if it does not do so the soldier gets it himself.

And he read about forced labour as a substitute for taxes, about blacks being caught ‘like so much game’ and being driven by soldiers in chained gangs to work on the road-making and railway-building and on the colonists’ farms, about women being taken as hostages if the men ran away when the soldiers came to seize them. He read:

Removal from their primitive homes to new conditions, where the food has frequently been different from what they were accustomed to, kept at strenuous labour from early morning till late at night; herded together in insanitary surroundings; goaded by the brutalities of their taskmasters; flogged for the slightest offence: the unfortunate natives frequently have died after a few months …

On certain plantations in the Cameroons and Tanganyika the death rate was admitted to being between fifty and seventy per cent within six months. There was an eye-witness account by a South African, describing the harbour-building at Lüderitz:

I have seen women and children … at Lüderitz dying of starvation and overwork, nothing but skin and bone, getting flogged every time they fell under their heavy loads. I have seen them picking up bits of bread and refuse thrown away outside our tents and being flogged when caught.

Another witness, writing in the Cape Argus newspaper in 1905, described seeing a woman, carrying an infant on her back, and a sack of grain on her head, when ‘she fell … The corporal sjamboked her certainly for five minutes and the baby as well.’ And the result of all this was depopulation, the harvests could not be reaped, or even sown, because the men had been dragooned away for forced labour and there was famine in many places. And the overall consequence of all this brutality was rebellion and thirty years of bloody warfare, punitive expedition after punitive expedition, warfare moreover that seemed to be regarded as a kind of sport. He read a verbatim report by a German soldier writing in a Strasbourg newspaper describing a battle in Tanganyika:

… we surprised the rebels as they were attempting to cross the river. There was a long narrow bridge, which they had to cross, so that we could pop them off comfortably. There were seventy-six dead, besides those torn to pieces by crocodiles … In the middle of the river was a sandbank where they wanted to rest, but here too our shots caught them. That was a sight! I stood by the river behind a felled tree and shot 120 rounds. The prisoners were always hanged!

And in the Cameroons there was a Captain Dominck who permitted his soldiers to drown fifty-two children who were survivors of a massacre of a village. The children were put into baskets and hurled into the river for sport. But the most ruthless of all was the war of extermination against the Hereros of South West Africa, when General von Trotha issued this infamous proclamation in 1904:

I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero nation … The Herero nation must now leave the country. If the people do not do it, I will compel them with the big tube. Within the German frontier, every Herero, with or without a rifle … will be shot. I will not take any more women or children, but I will either drive them back to your people or have them fired on. These are my words to the nation of the Hereros.

There was no mercy: the wounded were killed, women and children were shot and hanged. There was a quotation from a book written by a German pastor who witnessed the dreadful campaign:

We found some old water holes and near them hundreds of new ones dug by the enemy the day before … It was now reported that there was still a last water place about five hours further on and that great numbers of the enemy were there. It was decided that we must drive them away; and we wanted to, for if we hunted them out of that place nothing remained to them but the wilderness. From a hill we saw two mighty clouds of dust moving towards the north and north-east, towards death from thirst … (Later) I saw people sitting in crowds, shoulder against shoulder, quite motionless. The heads of some drooped on their breasts and their arms hung down, as if they were asleep. Others sat leaning against a bush or neighbour, breathing fast and hard, their mouths open; they regarded us with stupid eyes …

Punitive expedition after punitive expedition, rule by the whip and the gun and the noose, to the point where a parliamentarian called Bebel cried out in the Reichstag:

‘Gentlemen, you do not come as deliverers and educators but as conquerors, as oppressors, as exploiters … to rob the natives with brute power of their properties! You make helots of them, force them into strange service, into villainage for strange purposes! That is your colonial policy!’

McQuade read through the unreal night. He was appalled – and this was part of his own family history: the van Niekerk part of his name was his mother’s maiden name, which ostensibly made him half-Afrikaner (though not half-Hairy-back), but her mother was born Kessel, of pure German immigrant stock before she married grandfather van Niekerk, making McQuade in fact one-quarter German. Yet he’d had no idea of this awful recent history, and bet that most people of his generation had equally little idea. Yet, shocking though it all was, he would have put it down to the unenlightenment of the times, had it not been for what he had seen on the Schmidt ranch – after all, had not the British, at the same time, conducted a scorched earth policy in the Boer War to starve the Afrikaners into submission, burning homesteads and crops and driving Afrikaner women and children into concentration camps where twenty-six thousand of them died of disease and malnutrition? Did not the Australians drive the Aborigines out of their traditional homelands? Were there not verified reports of hunting them down for sport? Had not the New Zealanders waged bloody war against the Maoris? Had not the Americans butchered Red Indian resistance? Was it not the American settlers who had introduced the barbaric practice of scalping so that they could claim a bounty for every Indian they killed? There was, however, that threatening telephone call echoing in his mind during that unreal fogbound night, the vivid image of the swastikas at the Schmidt ranch, and there were the photographs of the Third Reich he had seen in the library that afternoon, and it was not so easy to relegate the brutality of German colonial policy to history: there was a pattern of behaviour, a national susceptibility towards aggression and domination. It was because of the coincidence of all these circumstances that he read on, despite his tiredness, and learned things that changed the course of this story; about Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, which Roger Wentland had mentioned.

It was spelled out in the book published by the Daily Telegraph, Germany’s African Claims, in Britain and Germany in Africa, published by Yale University, and in Hitler Over Africa, by Benjamin Bennett. Nor was Hitler’s grand blueprint for Africa a new one: it was as old as the original Scramble for Africa, as old as the Boer War when German agents were planted in South Africa to stir up the Afrikaners against Great Britain. The extermination campaign that General von Trotha waged against the Herero in 1904 was part of it, for the troops that were brought out from Germany for that war were to be used against South Africa after the Herero were crushed. And after Germany lost the First World War, Hitler resurrected the grand plan for Africa: one of the first things he demanded in his sabre-rattling speeches was the return to Germany of her former colonies to provide Lebensraum.

But Hitler’s grand plan embraced much more than that: not only would his warships based in South West Africa and Tanganyika have dominated the Indian Ocean, Suez and the Cape sea route, thus strangling the British Empire; by controlling Suez, the Persian Gulf and its oil would have come under German control and then the whole Far East would have fallen under German domination, even Japan, for they were all dependent on Persian Gulf oil – and the whole of Europe would have been held to ransom for oil; Europe would have ground to a shattered halt under one blitzkrieg. But not only that: German bombers from Tanganyika and South West Africa would be in easy reach of the South African goldfields, and South Africa would fall to Germany, and then the Rhodesias and the Congo with their copper mines would fall, until finally the whole of Africa would be one vast German colony, with a massive army of black soldiers, and the whole vast treasure-house would be Germany’s, with its vast reservoir of black slave labour, with autobahns and railways connecting it all. Truly it would have become the Reich To Last A Thousand Years.

That was Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, and for the world; and it all depended on his getting back South West Africa, now called Namibia, this desert land where McQuade sat reading. And there was open talk here about the ‘Aryanization of South Africa’, racial purification, the confiscation of Afrikaner farms and Jewish property; and all the time the talk about Der Tag, which would be soon because ‘what our Führer demands our Führer gets.’ But the Führer did not get his colonies given back. War broke out and the South African government rounded up almost every German male in Namibia and shipped them off to concentration camps to prevent them fighting for the Führer. Then Hitler launched a gun-powder plot in South Africa. It was called Operation Weissdorn and the key man was a South African called Robey Leibbrandt.

McQuade knew of Robey Leibbrandt as a legendary character, once South Africa’s boxing champion, who became a Nazi spy during the war. To McQuade he was some kind of nutcase, almost as distant as Guy Fawkes: he had no idea how important Operation Weissdorn had been, or how close it came to changing the outcome of the war.

The extraordinary true story was told in a book called For Volk and Führer, by Hans Strydom, formerly President of the Southern African Society of Journalists. So, a big wheel. An authority. McQuade read the book through the eerie, unreal small hours, his tired mind racing, the possible significance of it in terms of today dawning on him, pieces of a jigsaw materializing out of the foggy night into his yellow pool of lamplight; as a plan Operation Weissdorn could be as valid today.

Robey Leibbrandt represented South Africa in the Olympic Games held in Germany in 1936. His family had suffered during the Boer War and he was fanatically anti-British, a detail known to the Nazis. Even before he set foot in Germany it had been decided to recruit him as the key man for the grand plan. In Germany he was fêted by the Nazi press, and became a cult-hero with his dazzling boxing in the preliminary fights. He was introduced to Hitler, who flattered him. He broke his hand but nonetheless courageously insisted on fighting in the finals, and only missed the gold medal because of his hand. Invited to return to Germany for ‘further education’, he became a fanatical Nazi. When war broke out he remained in Germany and was trained in sabotage and espionage. He was now invited to spearhead Operation Weissdorn, asked to return to South Africa and gain control of the Ossewa Brandwag, the faction of Afrikaners bitterly opposed to the British and to South Africa’s involvement in the war, and to set up a large guerrilla infrastructure. Then he was to assassinate General Smuts, the pro-British prime minister of South Africa, seize control of the country, and order the South African troops fighting in North Africa to return home. Rommel would then have vanquished the British under Montgomery, and Germany would have dominated the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. With the Cape sea route in Nazi hands, the British empire would have been strangled. If Operation Weissdorn had succeeded, Hitler would have won the war, and achieved the grand plan of establishing the Third Reich in Africa. From there the Persian gulf was his, and from there the world …

The rising sun did not penetrate the dense fog; the morning was opaque and chilly and cars drove with their headlights on. McQuade stared out his window at the hanging mist, astonished that he did not know how close his country had come to changing the world: Operation Weissdorn failed only because of the expert, hair-raising work of one dedicated Afrikaner policeman, called Jan Taljaart, who infiltrated the organization.

McQuade sat there, wide-awake tired, trying to see whether all this could reasonably have anything to do with that submarine.

Then he picked up the telephone and dialled the son of Dr Wessels, the man who, in 1945, was the only dentist for many miles around.