[continued from here]
The main street through the old city is peaceful. The sun is shining. The Zytglogge, famous clock that inspired Einstein while he was at the patent office ticks off a minute.
On the street, at a kiosk, the morning newspaper is mounted on a board. At the kiosk a woman buys a pack of cigarettes. Berlin has fallen, the newspaper says in German.
The woman buys the cigarettes and walks down a side street.
She imagines the burnt out and destroyed city she has just read out.
She finds an inconspicuous door which leads to a flight of stairs. She unlocks the door, steps inside, then locks the door behind her. She presses a button and announces herself on an intercom. She then walks up the stairs and is buzzed through a door there, where she enters an office that is full of activity from many people in the room, at desks and typewriters, and in offices as well, the doors open. She greets a man through a door in an office who is wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. He is sitting at a desk looking at map.
She sits at a desk where there is a typewriter and multiple telephones.
At his desk. looks at her and smiles, and greets her, then takes another puff on his pipe and looks intently at the map. On his desk are multiple telephones as well, and a small flag of the United States. There is a photograph of Harry Truman on the wall.
It is a map of the front lines in Europe, the situation on the ground as of that morning, the boundaries between the forces of the Allies and the Axis, from Norway down to the Adriatic Sea. His eyes study the contours of the lines on it.
He looks over the area near Berlin. The lines there show that the German resistance has collapsed. The Russians have even broke across the Elbe to be met by the rapidly approaching Americans and British forces.
He shakes his head, tsk tsk, as if in pity, contemplating the fate of the city and those in it. He can imagine the bunker, the Russian soldiers going through it. He has never been there, but he has read and heard much about it.
He can imagine the fugitives, certain ones that he knows so much of, and certain ones he has met personally. He can imagine one by name, whom he can imagine is probably dressed in a disguise, perhaps even as a woman, in hiding or trying to make his way through the enemy lines, to be rescued. Things will probably not go well for him, he imagines. If only he had gotten out earlier...
His gaze then shifts south from Berlin, through the circular area of Bohemia still held by the Reich forces---sheltered in the ring of the mountains (like a lunar crater in the middle of Europe, as Galileo once said). The mountains there are not impossible for the Russians, however. They didn't hold out the Germans in 1938, of course. It is only a matter of time before theyare penetrated and the German resistance is squeezed out of Czechoslovakia. They will perhaps make a last stand in Prague in the High Tatras.
Then to Vienna, the city that was overrun by the Soviets three weeks ago.
The Russians did not advance much further than that. After Vienna fell, the remaining Panzer corps had retreated into the nearby Alps which were, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable to the Red Army, which was geared towards flat terrain, as every Russian Army had been.
The Russians did not to make much further headway up the Danube since then. They were throwing everything they had in the north, to try to put as much German ground behind them as possible before meeting up with the western Allies. It was the principal mission of the Soviet Army at that point.
Thus the Reich still held sway and existed in most of the Austrian highlands, all the way to the Swiss border. The war had not yet reached there. But everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Still, it affords precious days and weeks for those in the redoubt to make preparations for the inevitable. There is so much that needs to be handled, and stored, and moved. The man with the pipe imagines the scurry activity from people he knows are there---packing up documents, burying crates underground.
This of course had been the plan---the retreat to the Alps, where the Reich could gather its rest while it negotiated for survival in some form. How ironic that the man who so much had loved the idea of this, was now trying to make his way through the Allied lines in a house dress.
But there is more going on. The man with the map looks finally at the southern part of the map. There the contours of map are most interesting. In all the attention in the north, the two great Allied-Axis "fronts" meeting in central Germany as the Reich collapses, there is so little world attention being paid to the "Third Front," in northern Italy. There the Reich had surrendered the coastal fringe and the valley of the Po River to the Allies, but here they had done so by a quietly negotiated withdrawal. The territory still held by the Germans is extensive, and barely penetrated at all by the Russians.
Down by the Adriatic, the Germans are dug into the mountains as in Austria. But here in the south the mountains they held are not in landlocked area but close to the sea. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows very well, and can imagine in his mind, the Reich is still operating a navy in the ports in the Adriatic, even out of Trieste and Venice, where there are German u-boats docked peacefully in obscurity in the docklands, and in nearby bases.
They are waiting for passengers to arrive, and for goods to be loaded on board. There are many such boats, in more than one such location. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows, there is still a functioning German support system in the port areas. It is not only functioning but is being aided in my places by members of the Allied forces.
It is a complex operation against the clock to accomplish an extremely important goal. On it will depend so much.
The phone rings in the outer office. She looks at it. She answers the phone differently depending on which phone rings. Knowing the difference is the essence of her job.
For this phone, she simply says "Good morning, Bern office."
A male voice says "Let me speak to the station chief.'
The woman says, "Right away, sir."
She leans back in her chair so the man in the office smoking the pipe can see her through the door. She nods. He nods back.
She puts through the call. He picks it up. A big wide grin breaks across his way. He greets the caller. They make small talk, in an old Ivy League companion way. He seems to come alive even more while talking to the person on the phone. As he talks, the man picks up a paperclip off his desk and turns it over while looking at it.
Then the voice on the phone asks him, "Say, how's that old clock of yours running lately?
Allen smiles broadly. He startes at the paperclip almost hynotically, as if it is a magic icon full of great power. He imagines the submarines in the docklands, and the passengers getting on board them.
He replies, nonchalantly,
"It is running quite smoothly. Smoothly, indeed."
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