Come into my Parlour (23 page)

Anxious as Sir Pellinore had been that they should reach Russia as soon as possible, he had not dared to make a request for any special priority to be accorded to their travel permits after Cairo. The Russians having been virtually barred out of Europe for so long and then having, of their own choice, for many years restricted all but official contact with the outside world, were extremely suspicious of their new Allies. Even members of the Military Mission, sent to help them, found themselves subject to the most infuriating delays and scrutinies; and if the least indication had been given that Messrs. Sallust and “Cooper” were
en route
for the Soviet Union on matters other and more urgent than routine work under the British Press Attaché, a score of excuses would have been produced to prevent them entering Russia at all.

In consequence, from Cairo onwards, the two travellers had to make the best arrangements they could for themselves and, as civilians of no apparent importance in a military zone, their path was far from being strewn with roses. Their cover, as journalists, which they had perforce to disclose wherever they went, proved, in most cases, a hindrance rather than a help; for the majority of responsible officers live in perpetual, and not altogether unfounded, dread that any visiting pressman might later write up some “human interest” story which, while innocent enough in itself, would give away to the enemy information prejudicial to forthcoming operations. But the worst of their troubles arose from the fact that German agents, French quislings, and anti-British schemers of the Arabic world had, between them, succeeded in making the Near East a seething cauldron of unrest throughout the whole of the summer.

In May, the pro-Nazi Premier of Iraq, Raschid Ali, had staged a
coup d'état
, kidnapped his boy king and declared against the British; necessitating offensive operations which had left a certain bitterness in their wake. In June, the Vichy French in Syria had given the Germans facilities to establish air bases there, and although the bitter resistance of the Petainists had been overcome by the 12th of July, they were still doing all they could to sabotage British interests. The situation there was now further complicated by the high-handed actions of the Free French and the hatred of the Syrian Nationalists for all Frenchmen irrespective of their politics, which led to riots, shootings and every sort of trouble for the unfortunate British, who, on the one hand, did not wish to antagonise their Free French allies, and, on the other, were appallingly embarrassed by the recently published “Atlantic Charter”, under which the Syrians claimed their right to independence. On top of this the violent, avaricious and despotic Shah of Persia had sold himself to the Nazis, refused to expel the hundreds of agents they had established in his country and had declared his intention of resisting by force of arms any attempt by the British and Russians to use his territory as a military supply route in their common struggle against Germany.

During the middle and latter part of August, Gregory and Kuporovitch were tempted a score of times quietly to fade out and, ignoring the British military controls, make their own way to the Russian frontier. They would certainly have reached it more quickly, but the trouble was that they would then not have the requisite number of rubber stamps on their passports to show that they had arrived there by orthodox means, and it was absolutely essential that they should enter Russia without the least suspicion attaching to them. In consequence, they had to kick their heels in transit camps and small
hotels for days on end in Cairo, Haifa, Damascus and Baghdad while awaiting the okays of security officers.

On 25th of August, British and Russian forces entered Iran, and on the 28th, the Persian Army, having offered only a token resistance, was ordered by the new Premier, Ali Faranghi, to cease fire. By pulling a fast one, that their status as pressmen entitled them to go to the front as much in Persia as it did in Russia, the two travellers succeeded in entering Iran with the British forces operating from Khaniquin; but when they linked up with the Russians advancing south from the Caspian they were not allowed to proceed further. Luckily, however, a genuine war correspondent decided to make for Teheran and gave them a lift in his car to the Persian capital.

Here they were able to make direct contact with the Russian authorities in the Soviet Legation. Their passports and visas were all in order but they met with a sponge-like combination of politeness and procrastination which resisted all their efforts to get any satisfaction for ten days. Gregory had little doubt that, in the meantime, their suspicious allies were making enquiries about them in Moscow, but he knew that it would be futile to leave Teheran for the frontier until they had secured the special permits without which, visa or no visa, no one was now allowed to cross it.

At last permission to proceed was granted; a Russian courier was attached to them and, having accompanied them to the border, saw them safely into an old-fashioned but comfortable broad-gauge train on the Soviet side, with strict injunctions that in no circumstances were they to leave it until they reached the capital. On Friday the 12th of September, six weeks after leaving London, they arrived in Moscow.

On presenting their papers at the British Embassy, a junior secretary took them to an annexe, that had recently been acquired to house the additional staff necessitated by the new alliance. Here they were introduced to a number of people, given a bedroom between them and made members of the Press Section Mess.

During their journey they had held many discussions as to how they should set about their mission once they arrived in Russia. Kuporovitch had been pessimistic from the beginning, and had declared on half a dozen occasions that, while it was just possible that they might find means of getting reliable information as to Stalin's health, any attempt to assess Russia's resources would prove far beyond their scope, and that the chances of their finding out the final line upon which the Soviet armies must stand or surrender were positively nil.

The fact that Gregory had never lived in Russia, and knew nothing of the special difficulties which would confront them there, made him
much more optimistic. He reasoned that as two unusually shrewd observers, both having considerable military knowledge, they ought, provided they were allowed reasonable freedom of movement, to be able to see enough and talk with enough people to form a pretty sound appreciation of the proportion of soldiers to men of military age who were still civilians, of the rapidity with which new classes were being called up, and of the length of time it took to convert the intakes into battle-worthy troops. To find out about Russia's future strategy would obviously be a much more difficult matter. But here, he felt, that if only he could meet enough people, particularly Soviet officers, and discuss prospects with them, in time the pieces of the jigsaw would fall into place. Then, if he could get the impression he had formed himself tacitly confirmed in casual conversation by one or two talkative senior officers, he would at least have something well worth reporting to Sir Pellinore.

In pursuance of this policy of securing a sort of “Gallop Poll” by talking to anybody and everybody whose views might be worth hearing, at dinner that night they entered into conversation with every member of the Press Section Mess, and obtained quite a useful collection of miscellaneous information as a background for their further specific investigations.

The official rate of exchange made the
rouble
incredibly expensive to foreigners. It was easy to get a far higher rate “round the corner”, but even then there was little that one could purchase with one's
roubles
when one got them. Such things as could be bought, including the personal services of the Muscovites, male and female, could however, be had for a song if the purchaser was in a position to pay for them with cigarettes, soap, perfume or lipstick.

At this point, Gregory and Stefan found it difficult not to smile, since the latter, knowing perfectly well what sort of conditions he was likely to find in his own country, had taken appropriate measures, and from Cairo onwards each of them had been lugging an additional suit-case crammed with just such priceless commodities.

Their new acquaintances went on to inform them that the Ballet was as superb as ever, the Opera excellent and the cinema shows, apart from the high quality of their technique, lousy, as they had practically no humour or story value and were, one and all, simply vehicles for Government propaganda. The public went regularly and made no complaints, because they were conditioned to this, and not one in ten thousand of them had ever seen anything different; but these endless documentaries and films with a moral were a poor form of entertainment.

Nevertheless the Bolsheviks' long experience in the art of propaganda
was now proving of enormous value, both in keying their own people up to make the maximum possible efforts for the war and as an insidious weapon against the enemy. They were absolute realists and, knowing that they were fighting a completely unscrupulous enemy, they arranged their broadcasts with no regard at all to the truth, but solely on their calculated effectiveness—a game at which they were daily making rings round Dr. Goebbels. Yet, wherever possible, they made the truth serve them too, and every programme included accounts of the spectacular heroism or high production feats of individual soldiers or war workers as well as of units, divisions and factories; a policy that filled the British pressmen, who, after two years of war, were still muzzled on such matters, with envy, and an added contempt for their own amateurishly-run Ministry of Information.

They all agreed that Russian morale was excellent and did not believe that this was due only to the skilful internal propaganda. Various factors were advanced to account for this. In the first place the Russians had certain qualities in common with the British. The two countries alone, of all those in Europe, had never been entirely overrun and subdued by an enemy in the whole of their history; therefore it was impossible for either people to envisage total defeat. Both peoples were also essentially home-dwellers, as opposed to the café-frequenting nations of the Continent; both were intensive cultivators of their own soil, the British in their millions of small gardens and the Russians on their farms; and this attachment to home and land gave them an additional incentive to fight desperately in their defence. Added to this it was clear that, whatever the shortcomings of the Soviet régime might be, it had at least caused the Russian masses to feel that they now were the real owners of their country, and that not only the land and the cities, but also the parks, palaces, theatres, stadiums, museums, and even the works of their artists, scientists and writers, were in fact the personal property of each and every one of them.

This high morale was, moreover, by no means attributable to the type of blind patriotic neurosis which had gripped and given a spurious self-confidence to many nations during the first stages of the 1914–1918 war. The Russians had now been waging a gigantic conflict on a thousand mile front for nearly three months, and if enemy claims were to be believed, their losses in dead and prisoners already ran into millions. Even on the most conservative estimate they had taken appalling punishment and, so far, with only brief local successes here and there, been thrown back on every sector.

When Gregory left London, at the end of July, they had already been driven out of the greater part of the protective belt of foreign
territory that they had secured as a screen for their own frontiers during their Machiavellian alliance with Hitler. Russian Poland, Lithuania and Bessarabia had been overrun. The Germans were pouring north into Latvia and west into the Ukraine, and were only being held with difficulty at Smolensk.

Their initial defeats had compelled them to divide their long front into three commands, under Voroshilov in the north, Timoshenko in the centre and Budenny in the south; but this had not saved them from further disaster. During August, von Leeb had driven through Latvia to Esthonia, taken Novgorod, reached Lake Ilmen and forced Voroshilov back against the Valdi hills; while von Rundstedt had proved more than a match for Budenny, hurling him back through the southern Ukraine, encircling Odessa, capturing Nikolaieff and thrusting towards the Crimea; Timoshenko alone had managed temporarily to stem the German torrent in the centre, but von Bock had smashed his southern flank, taken Gomel and almost cut him off from Budenny.

Since leaving Baghdad, Gregory and Stefan had been able to follow the news only with difficulty, but now their new friends brought them up to date as far as they could do so as, apart from the fact that the Soviet communiqués were often intentionally misleading, it was doubtful if even the Kremlin had more than a rough idea of the general situation throughout the whole length of their vast front.

In the north von Leeb had driven a wedge between Voroshilov and Timoshenko, cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway, and now claimed to have reached the shores of Lake Ladoga, to the north-east of the latter city, while the Finns, supported by several German divisions, had resumed their war against the Russians, forcing them to withdraw from the thinly-held Karelian isthmus to the north-west, gained from the Finns by the armistice of March 1940; so the Russian Marshal and his northern army were now surrounded and besieged in Leningrad.

In the south Odessa was still holding out, but von Rundstedt had inflicted further defeats on Budenny, the most serious of which had been the spectacular break-through of von Kleist's armoured columns to the Dnieper. By it the Russians had been deprived of the huge hydro-electric plant, powered by the giant dam at Dnepropetrovsk, that supplied one of their greatest manufacturing areas, and the blow was a heavy one. The penetration towards the Crimea had deepened and Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, was now semi-encircled.

In the hope of relieving the pressure on his two colleagues, Timoshenko had launched a desperate counter-offensive in the centre. Under him General Koniev had defeated the German Panzer expert Guderian, and the whole of von Bock's Army Group had been badly
mauled in the neighbourhoods of Smolensk and Gomel; but with both his flanks now in the air, it was doubtful if Timoshenko would be able to hold the ground he had recaptured for long.