When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (5 page)

DOROTHY LAWRENCE ADMIRES HER DISGUISE AS A FIRST WORLD WAR SOLDIER

 

10

Agatha Christie's Greatest Mystery

At shortly after 9.30 p.m. on Friday 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie got up from her armchair and climbed the stairs of her Berkshire home. She kissed her sleeping daughter, Rosalind, aged seven, goodnight and made her way back downstairs again. Then she climbed into her Morris Cowley and drove off into the night. She would not be seen again for eleven days.

Her disappearance would spark one of the largest manhunts ever mounted. Agatha Christie was already a famous writer and more than one thousand policemen were assigned to the case, along with hundreds of civilians. For the first time, aeroplanes were also involved in the search.

The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, urged the police to make faster progress in finding her. Two of Britain's most famous crime writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, were drawn into the search. Their specialist knowledge, it was hoped, would help find the missing writer.

It didn't take long for the police to locate her car. It was found abandoned on a steep slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford. But there was no sign of Agatha Christie herself and nor was there any evidence that she'd been involved in an accident.

As the first day of investigations progressed into the second and third – and there was still no sign of her – speculation began to mount. The press had a field day, inventing ever more lurid theories as to what might have happened.

It was the perfect tabloid story, with all the elements of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Close to the scene of the car accident was a natural spring known as the Silent Pool, where two young children were reputed to have died. Some journalists ventured to suggest that the novelist had deliberately drowned herself.

Yet her body was nowhere to be found and suicide seemed unlikely, for her professional life had never looked so optimistic. Her sixth novel,
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, was selling well and she was already a household name.

Some said the incident was nothing more than a publicity stunt, a clever ruse to promote her new book. Others hinted at a far more sinister turn of events. There were rumours that she'd been murdered by her husband, Archie Christie, a former First World War pilot and serial philanderer. He was known to have a mistress.

Arthur Conan Doyle, a keen occultist, tried using paranormal powers to solve the mystery. He took one of Christie's gloves to a celebrated medium in the hope that it would provide answers. It did not.

Dorothy Sayers visited the scene of the writer's disappearance to search for possible clues. This proved no less futile.

By the second week of the search, the news had spread around the world. It even made the front page of the
New York Times
.

Not until 14 December, fully eleven days after she disappeared, was Agatha Christie finally located. She was found safe and well in a hotel in Harrogate, but in circumstances so strange that they raised more questions than they solved. Christie herself was unable to provide any clues to what had happened. She remembered nothing. It was left to the police to piece together what might have taken place.

They came to the conclusion that Agatha Christie had left home and travelled to London, crashing her car en route. She had then boarded a train to Harrogate. On arriving at the spa town, she checked into the Swan Hydro – now the Old Swan Hotel – with almost no luggage. Bizarrely, she used the assumed name of Theresa Neele, her husband's mistress.

Harrogate was the height of elegance in the 1920s and filled with fashionable young things. Agatha Christie did nothing to arouse suspicions as she joined in with the balls, dances and Palm Court entertainment. She was eventually recognized by one of the hotel's banjo players, Bob Tappin, who alerted the police. They tipped off her husband, Colonel Christie, who came to collect Agatha immediately.

But his wife was in no hurry to leave. Indeed, she kept him waiting in the hotel lounge while she changed into her evening dress.

Agatha Christie never spoke about the missing eleven days of her life and over the years there has been much speculation about what really happened between 3 and 14 December 1926.

Her husband said that she'd suffered a total memory loss as a result of the car crash. But according to biographer Andrew Norman, the novelist may well have been in what's known as a ‘fugue' state or, more technically, a psychogenic trance. It's a rare condition brought on by trauma or depression.

Norman says that her adoption of a new personality, Theresa Neele, and her failure to recognize herself in newspaper photographs were signs that she had fallen into psychogenic amnesia.

‘I believe she was suicidal,' says Norman. ‘Her state of mind was very low and she writes about it later through the character of Celia in her autobiographical novel
Unfinished Portrait
.'

She soon made a full recovery and once again picked up her writer's pen. But she was no longer prepared to tolerate her husband's philandering: she divorced him in 1928 and later married the distinguished archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan.

We'll probably never know for certain what happened in those lost eleven days. Agatha Christie left a mystery that even Hercule Poirot would have been unable to solve.

 

11

Dressed to Kill

Dressed in khaki fatigues and splattered in mud, Private Denis Smith looked little different from the thousands of other war-weary comrades.

The boyish face and cropped hair provoked few comments from those at the battlefront. Indeed, no one in the 51st Division of the Royal Engineers (British Expeditionary Force) knew that Private Smith was hiding an extraordinary secret.

He was actually a woman, Dorothy Lawrence, who had come to the battlefield to see with her own eyes what was taking place. In doing so, Lawrence became the only female soldier to fight on the Western Front in the First World War.

Dorothy's story began in Paris at the outbreak of war in 1914. She was desperate to become a war correspondent, but was told that it was a man's world in which she could play no part. Determined to witness the bloody fighting in Northern France, she decided to disguise herself as a soldier and make her own way to the front.

‘I'll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money, can accomplish,' she wrote.

She befriended two English soldiers in Paris – she later referred to them as her ‘khaki accomplices' – and asked them to smuggle her a uniform. They agreed to help and within a week Dorothy was kitted out with military boots, khaki trousers, braces, jacket, a shirt and puttees.

There still remained the problem of how to disguise her feminine form. She knew that she would be arrested and sent home with immediate effect if anyone discovered that she was a woman.

‘Enveloping myself in swathes of bandages, like a mummy, I pulled these swathes taut around my body.' But her womanly curves remained visible, ‘so I padded my back with layers of cotton wool … my outfit revealed a thick-set and plump figure, finished by a somewhat small head and a boyish face'.

The men also helped her obtain an all-important travel pass that would enable her to reach the town of Béthune, which was right on the front line.

Concerned that she still looked too feminine, Dorothy had one of her accomplices crop her hair and shave her face. ‘Vainly I hoped that boyish bristles would sprout,' she wrote. A born tomboy, she was disappointed when this failed to happen.

To complete her disguise before setting off for the front line, Dorothy coated her face in diluted Condy's fluid. Bronzed, and looking decidedly shabby, she now headed for the battlefront.

It was not easy to reach the fighting. On several occasions she was stopped by officers who demanded to know what she was doing so far from her supposed regiment. Yet none of them ever imagined she was a woman.

Dorothy eventually secured the services of a tunnel expert named Sapper Tom Dunn who was serving with a Lancashire unit of the Royal Engineers. She admitted her secret to him and asked for his help.

Sapper Tom was amused by her daring and touched by her courage. He and a few comrades agreed to help get her into active service. They found her a secret hiding place where she could rest up during the day. Only when it became dark did she venture out with the other sappers, digging tunnels underneath the German lines and filling them with high explosive. The charges would then be set, blowing the German trenches and control centres high into the sky.

Hygiene was impossible and Dorothy was soon crawling with fleas and lice. ‘Every inch of my body tickled and irritated,' she wrote. ‘Fleas jumped in all directions.'

Although she faced terrible discomfort, she was soon actively involved in tunnelling underneath enemy lines. Shells and mortars rained down on her yet she never once flinched. Her closest male comrade, Sapper Tom, was extraordinarily impressed by her bravery. He later described how she spent ten continuous days and nights ‘400 yards from the Boche front line, under rifle fire and trench mortars'.

The incessant fire, poor food and contaminated water rapidly took its toll. Dorothy fell ill and suffered a series of fainting fits. Fearing that her ruse would be discovered, she presented herself to her commanding sergeant and admitted her deception. He immediately arrested her on suspicion of being a spy.

Intense interrogation followed. Six generals and twenty officers were involved in cross-questioning Dorothy, but failed to prove anything other than the fact that she was a woman who wanted to join the dangerous world of men.

They forced her to sign an affidavit to the effect that she would never write about her story. And then she was despatched back to London.

Dorothy did eventually write about her adventures and Sapper Dunn even signed an affidavit to vouch for the fact that it was true. Yet few believed her story and she died in obscurity in 1964.

 

12

Mission into Danger

Irena Sendler aroused no suspicion as she left the Warsaw ghetto with a parcel under her arm. As her dog barked noisily, she gripped the parcel more tightly and gave a friendly wave to the Gestapo guards. What they did not know – and they would have killed her if they had – was that she was smuggling Jewish babies to safety.

Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker living in occupied Poland. She was permitted by the Nazi authorities to enter the Jewish ghetto in order to check for signs of typhus, for the Nazis were terrified of the disease spreading across the city.

Gestapo officials had no idea that they were being duped and that Irena Sendler was actually involved in one of the greatest rescue missions of all time. In the guise of an employee of the Social Services Department, she managed to smuggle some 2,500 Jewish children to safety.

Her work was extremely dangerous. Warsaw, in 1942, was full of Gestapo officers constantly searching for Jews who had managed to escape from the ghetto.

‘Transporting weapons … planning sabotage against the Germans, none of it was as dangerous as hiding a Jew,' said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski of the Polish Resistance. ‘You have a ticking time bomb in your home. If they find out, they will kill you, your family and the person you are hiding.'

Under the pretext of inspecting conditions in the ghetto, Sendler smuggled out babies and small children in packages, suitcases, boxes and trolleys. Older children were taken out through the city's sewers.

Irena always went into the ghetto with a dog, which she had trained to bark whenever German soldiers were about. This enabled her to cover any noises that the babies might make while they were wrapped up in her parcels. Once the children were safely out of the ghetto, they were given Catholic birth certificates and forged identity papers. These were signed by priests or officials who worked for the Social Services Department.

The children were then taken to orphanages and convents in the countryside around Warsaw.

By mid-1942, the SS were rounding up large numbers of Jews and transporting them to Treblinka extermination camp. Sendler begged Jewish parents to release their children, knowing it was their only hope of survival. In an interview recorded before her death in 2008, she spoke vividly of her conversations with the parents of these children.

‘Those scenes over whether to give a child away were heart-rending … Their first question was: “What guarantee is there that the child will live?” I said, “None. I don't even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today.”'

Sendler kept a list of all those she had rescued and she secretly buried their names in jars. It was hoped that they would be reunited with their parents when the war was over.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. They'd grown suspicious of her activities and realized she was working on behalf of Warsaw's Jews. She was beaten, severely tortured by her guards (they broke her legs and arms) and then sentenced to death for refusing to give them any information.

News of her impending execution reached Żegota, the secret Council to Aid Jews, which managed to save her by bribing a German guard as she was being led away to be killed. She was listed on the bulletin boards as among those who'd been executed; this enabled her to live in hiding for the rest of the war.

At the war's end, Irena dug up jars containing the 2,500 children's identities in the hope of reuniting the youngsters with their parents. But almost all of the adults had been executed in Treblinka.

Irena found herself persecuted by Poland's post-war Communist authorities because of her relations with the Polish government-in-exile. Not until 1965 did she receive recognition for her extraordinary bravery. She was honoured as a ‘righteous gentile' by the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Centre, Yad Vashem.