The Bedbug (3 page)

He scarcely had time to immerse himself in his studies when a family crisis summoned him home to Jaffa. Platon, too often the benefactor of good causes and needy relatives, was facing financial ruin. The solution, it was decided, was to sell his collection of antiquities to some wealthy western institution. It included more than 1,500 items, dating from the end of the Iron Age onwards: sculptures, pottery, clay vessels, terracotta figurines, gems, scarabs, glass objects, coins and bronzes. Among its more significant finds was Palestinian pottery from the ancient port of Ashkelon. He had begun by collecting Phoenician inscriptions but then become motivated by a desire to protect Jewish and Christian art and
antiques from being destroyed or defaced by the area’s Muslim inhabitants. He had no scientific or archaeological training and shunned dealers, preferring to buy direct from poor peasants, believing that he was helping them financially.

The family left Palestine in 1913, pausing briefly to confirm Platon’s German citizenship ‘on account of his Protestant leanings’ before settling in Shepherd’s Bush in west London. Klop was appointed as salesman, attempting to arouse interest in the collection not only in London but in Paris and Berlin. A family friend, the Norwegian shipping magnate Sir Karl Knudsen, who had taken British nationality and settled in London, represented the family’s interests with the British Museum. He had met Platon for the first time a year earlier, during a visit to Palestine, and considered the collection unique. It had attracted favourable attention from Middle East scholars and there was interest from the Louvre in Paris but Platon wanted to keep the collection together and was advised that London was the best place to exhibit it and, if necessary, auction it. Knudsen arranged for it to be put on display at 59 Holland Park Avenue, the home of Julian D. Myers, a wealthy City of London clothes wholesaler.

Knudsen assured Arthur Hamilton Smith, keeper of the department of Greek and Roman antiquities at the museum, that he had no personal financial interest in the transaction and that Platon would not sell until all the interested parties had a chance to view it.

One of the British Museum’s scholars, Wordsworth E. Jones, seems to have been quite bowled over by what he saw. He regarded it as unique, and a great pleasure, to find such material, including pristine Greek and Roman marbles, in Palestine which previously had been barren ground for artefacts of this type. The Greek art included a torso of Alexander the Great, by the sculptor Lysippus, discovered at Tyre and thought to represent Alexander leading a seven-month siege of the city. Among other gems was an Egyptian scarab in green jade thought to have belonged to a Pharaoh’s
daughter who married King Solomon. Jones had a word of praise, too, for the Baroness, who had packed the hundreds of specimens herself so that when they arrived in London not one was broken. They amounted to ‘almost a small museum and such as is rarely brought to London by one man’.
¹²

He recommended it for acquisition but it seems Platon’s asking price was too high. The collection was eventually bought by a consortium of wealthy and influential Norwegians. Most of it was put in storage but some of the more select items eventually found their way to the Norwegian National Gallery in Oslo.
¹³

At this point, after about fifty years in exile, Platon decided it was time to regain his Russian nationality and wrote directly to Tsar Nicholas II for permission to return to the land of his birth. His application was supported by the Russian ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, one of the architects of the Triple Entente that bound together Britain, France and Russia against the imperial designs of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

The sequel to that treaty, precipitated by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, was the Great War that tore Europe asunder. It rent the Ustinov family in three conflicting directions. Their days in London before war was declared were the last they would spend together.

CHAPTER 2: GRENADIERS

K
lop was the first to depart the Ustinov family home in London, accompanied by his brother Peter: like many young men they were caught up in the patriotic fervour of the moment, rushing to volunteer with little thought of the slaughter that awaited. But Klop and Peter were German; their duty lay with the Kaiser on the continent, not with Lord Kitchener and King George V.

Platon, meanwhile, got his wish and returned to Russia where, despite being seventy-three years old, he was still technically an officer of the Chevalier Guards. His wife Magdalena and daughter Tabitha, then aged fourteenth, joined him soon after, heading for a country that they barely knew and where they would soon find themselves destitute. The two youngest children, Platon junior, aged eleven, and Gregory, seven, were left behind, at boarding school in London. They were in the care of wealthy and influential friends, the shipping magnate Sir Karl Knudsen and his wife, and relatives of the banker Johannes Frutiger. Norwegian-born Sir Karl had taken British nationality and married a Scot, Anne Macarthur. He played a vital role during the war in liaising with Norwegian ship owners whose fleets helped keep Britain supplied.

Peter who had been born in Tölz, in Bavaria in 1895 and had been planning to study medicine, was first to enlist, on 7 August. Klop signed up three days later in the 123
^rd
Grenadiers of the 5
^th
King Karl of Württemberg infantry regiment. He gave his next of kin, rather grandly, as the Gräfin von dem Bussche. She at least had
impressive German credentials compared with his relatives, who were scattered through lands which were now enemy territory. He began his career as a
gefreite
, or lance corporal, but seems to have been marked out for rapid promotion and by March 1915 held the junior officer rank of
leutnant
. The regiment had marched out from its headquarters at Ulm, anthems playing and flags fluttering in the breeze, advancing into Belgium. They followed the old Roman road down which Attila had led the Hunnish hordes in his assault on the empire of Valentinian III nearly 1,500 years earlier. Attila got to Orleans, west of Paris, before being driven back at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The Kaiser’s army never got that far. By the winter on 1914 they were trapped in the primeval landscape of the forest of the Argonne east of Reims in northern France where even the place names were redolent of death. It was hard, attritional warfare. There was impenetrable undergrowth, gorse bushes and head high bracken growing between ancient oaks and beeches. The troops made shelters in the foliage and dug foxholes. Now they had to fight their way forward step by step through the forest and the trenches. A contemporary photograph shows Klop, with close-cropped hair and a steely gaze, in his ankle-length greatcoat on a snow-covered hillside. In January 1915 he had taken part in the storming of the Valley of Dieusson in the Bois de Grurie. Recognition that he had been acting above his rank was signified by the promotion to
leutnant
and the award of an Iron Cross, Second Class. The Dieusson attack cost the French about 3,000 men, roughly three times the German casualties. In the first three months of 1915, fighting mostly in the Argonne the French Third Army lost nearly 30,000 men. The Germans, under General Bruno von Mudra, were gaining the upper hand. By summer they were able to muster concentrated artillery attacks; for the first time shells were delivering poison gas and a new design of hand grenade was available.
¹⁴
The Grenadiers were temporarily trapped under heavy artillery bombardment from the French and when it relented the Kaiser visited them to present bravery awards. During the autumn
Klop continued to attract attention in regimental records for his noteworthy actions. Hans Speidel was a platoon commander and singled out Klop as one of his fellow junior officers who forged an unbreakable comradeship with their men which helped to maintain their morale as they experienced the terror of mechanised warfare for the first time. They finally escaped the ‘accursed forest’ for the even greater hell-holes of the trenches of the Somme towards the end of the year. Behind them, in a grove of mighty oaks, they had buried their dead comrades, with a regimental memorial carved into one of the trees. To have fought in the battle of the Argonne Forest became a badge of honour.
¹⁵

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited the opposing French troops there in 1916, in his capacity as war correspondent of the
Daily
Chronicle
, and wrote:

The great forest consists of sturdy oaks and beeches and firs, with a thick tangle of undergrowth, mountain, valley, and plateau alternating. The soil is soft clay, admirably suited for entrenching, tunnelling, and mine warfare – when it is dry. As an outside observer, I do not see why the war in this area should not go on for a hundred years, without any decisive result. What is happening now is precisely what happened last year. The only difference is that the trenches are deeper, dug-outs better made, tunnels are longer, and the charges of explosives heavier.
¹⁶

Klop had established an important and lifelong friendship with Speidel, who became a career soldier, later a general and chief of staff in France and on the Russian Front in the Second World War. Speidel was ashamed of Nazi racial policies and took part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. In the late 1950s he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of NATO forces in Central Europe.

For them the year 1916 began in Flanders, where their job was to cling on to the hard-won positions that they called
Der Bastion
and
Doppelhöhe 60
, known to the Allies as the notorious Hill 60.
From there they could look out over the unattainable goals of St Martins Cathedral and the medieval Cloth Hall of Ypres, a town they occupied briefly at the start of the war but never recaptured. All around it both sides suffered terrible losses.

Hill 60 was not much more than an embankment, rising only a little over sixty metres above sea level, created artificially from the spoil of a nearby railway cutting. It had been captured by the Germans in 10 December 1914 and became the first scene of the underground warfare in which British engineers and miners tunnelled under the German lines in April 1915 to plant around 4,500kg of explosives. The blast that followed caused an enormous crater and flung debris 300ft in the air.

The British then suffered heavy casualties trying to defend the position – the Victoria Cross was awarded on four occasions in a single night’s fighting – but in May 1915 the Germans recaptured the barely recognisable landmark with a lethal assault of poison gas.

The 123
^rd
Grenadiers held on grimly to what was left of Hill 60 during the early months of 1916 but were beaten back from the nearby stronghold known as The Bastion at the beginning of March. They had sustained heavy losses in a night-time artillery barrage followed by an infantry advance at 4:30 a.m. on 2 March. British troops reported that many of the Germans they took prisoner had no weapons. The Grenadiers were withdrawn from the frontline after that reverse and given a couple of months leave in the peaceful surroundings of Bruges, Ghent and Ostend. Hill 60 was only recaptured by the Allies in June 1917 after they detonated 450,000kg of explosives under enemy lines at the start of the Battle of Messines, reputedly killing 10,000 German soldiers with a blast so loud that it was claimed it had been heard in London and Dublin.

The Grenadiers had by then long moved on to other scenes of slaughter. As the Battle of the Somme raged on throughout 1916 they were rushed in July to the defence of the villages
of Guillemont and Combles. Once more they came under relentless bombardment. They were forced to exist in the ancient underground catacombs at Combles and when they were finally obliged to retreat during August they left many dead and dying comrades behind them in the caves.

They dug in once more, in front of High Wood near Guillemont where the German Army had a divisional headquarters. They were under constant attack by the British, led by officers on horseback and preceded by artillery assaults that reduced everything to dust and rubble. Probably the worst was on 17-18 August when the artillery barrage lasted twenty-six hours. The 2
^nd
Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders attacked, accompanied by flamethrowers, but German machine-gun fire coupled with the British bombardment, which did not let up, even when their own troops reached the disputed ground, forced them back.
¹⁷
In that bleak landscape, a smouldering slag heap where no plant life survived, the Grenadiers were invited to surrender and refused, despite having lost three-quarters of their men, fighting on with only a few machine guns and precious little ammunition. They were finally withdrawn at the end of August, highly praised for their steadfastness, but it was in vain. Guillemont fell to the Allies a fortnight later.
¹⁸

Klop’s fastidious ways were hardly suited to the mud and filth of the trenches. It must have been a relief when he got a chance to train with the recently formed Luftstreitkräfte, the German army’s air force section. He and his brother Peter had not been fighting side by side. Peter had started with the 1
^st
Württemberg Regiment, joined Klop in the 123
^rd
Grenadiers in May 1915 and then joined the 127
^th
in February 1917 but he was also taking part in flying training. Klop quickly found that the glamorous image of an aviator in uniform opened the way to conquests that were altogether more amenable than confronting the British Tommy in the trenches. As he later confided in his wife Nadia, ‘he was able quite effortlessly to have any and every female he fancied’.
He described to her how he and Peter contrived to be billeted in chateaux where the owner invariably had at least one beautiful daughter. Unblushingly, he told her he shared girlfriends with his brother and indulged in three-in-a-bed sessions with two sisters. In the officers’ mess he was developing his skills as an entertainer, playing the piano, impersonating the singers of popular songs in English and French as well as German, making friends in high places who would serve him well in later life.