General Pienaar nodded several times. “I have given Sir Nigel my word that you will have our complete cooperation here. And I will abide by my word.”
“Thank you, General.”
“I am going to attach to you one of my two personal staff officers. He will help you in anything you need: obtain files that you may wish to examine, interpret if necessary. You speak any Afrikaans?”
“No, General, not a word.”
“Then there will be some translating to be done. Perhaps some interpreting.”
He pressed a buzzer on the table and in seconds the door opened to admit a man of the same physical size as the general but much younger. Preston put him in his early thirties. He had ginger hair and sandy eyebrows.
“Let me introduce Captain Andries Viljoen. Andy, this is Mr. John Preston from London, the man you will be working with.”
Preston rose to shake hands. He sensed a thinly veiled hostility in the young Afrikaner, perhaps a mirror of his superior’s better-masked feelings.
“I have put at your disposal a room down the corridor,” said General Pienaar. “Well, let’s waste no more time, gentlemen. Please get on with it.”
When they were alone in the office set aside for them, Viljoen asked, “What would you like to start with, Mr. Preston?”
Preston sighed inwardly. The casual first-name informality back at Charles and Gordon was a lot easier to get along with. “The file on Jan Marais, if you please, Captain Viljoen.”
The captain’s triumph was evident as he produced it from a desk drawer. “We have, of course, been through it already,” he said. “I took it out of Foreign Ministry Personnel Registry myself some days ago.” He placed a fat file in a buff cover in front of Preston. “Let me summarize what we have been able to glean from it, if this will help you. Marais entered the South African foreign service in Cape Town in the spring of 1946. He has been in the service for forty years—a bit more—and is due to retire in December. He comes from a perfect Afrikaner background and has never come under the slightest suspicion. That is why his behavior in London appears such a mystery.”
Preston nodded. He did not need it spelled out any more clearly. The view here was that London had made a mistake. He opened the file. Among the top documents was a sheaf of papers handwritten in English.
“That,” said Viljoen, “is his autobiography, a requirement of candidates for the foreign service. In those days, when the United Party under Jan Smuts was in power, there was a much greater use of English than today. Now such a document would be written in Afrikaans. Of course, candidates must be fluent in both languages.”
“Then I suppose we had better start with it,” said Preston. “While I read it, could you please make a synopsis of his career while in the service? Especially foreign postings—where, when, and for how long.”
“All right”—Viljoen nodded—“if he did go rotten, if he was turned, it probably happened somewhere abroad.” Viljoen’s stress on the word if was j
ust enough to imply his doubt, and the corrosive effect of foreigners upon good Afrikaners came out in the word abroad. Preston began to read.
I was born in August 1925 in the small farming town of Duiwelskloof in the northern Transvaal, the only son of a farmer in the Mootseki Valley just outside the town. My father, Laurens Marais, was a pure Afrikaner, but my mother, Mary, was an Anglo. It was an unusual marriage in those days, but because of it I was brought up fluent in both English and Afrikaans.
My father was considerably older than my mother, who was of frail disposition and died when I was ten in one of the typhoid epidemics that in those days swept that region from time to time. My father was forty-six when I was born, and my mother only twenty-five. He farmed potatoes and tobacco mainly, and also some chickens, geese, turkeys, cattle, sheep, and wheat. All his life he was a strong supporter of the United Party, and I was named after Marshal Jan Smuts.
Preston broke off. “I suppose all this would not have done his candidature any harm,” he suggested.
“No harm at all,” said Viljoen, looking over the passages. “The United Party was still in power then. The National Party won the country only in 1948.” Preston read on.
When I was seven I went to the local farm school in Duiwelskloof, and at the age of twelve went on to Merensky High, which had been founded five years earlier. After the outbreak of war in 1939, my father, who was a keen admirer of Britain and the empire, followed every item of news about the war in Europe on his wireless set, sitting on the stoep in the evenings after work. After my mother died we had become even closer, and I, too, soon began to yearn to take part in the war.
Two days after my eighteenth birthday, in August 1943, I said good-bye to my father and took the train to Pietersburg and then changed for the line south to Pretoria. My father came as far as Pietersburg, and my last sight of him was standing on the platform there, waving me off to the war. The next day I walked into Defense Headquarters in Pretoria, signed on, and was sent to Roberts Heights camp for basic training, kitting out, drilling, and small-arms instruction. There I also volunteered to be red-tabbed.
“What does ‘red-tabbed’ mean?” asked Preston.
Viljoen looked up from his writing. “In those days only volunteers could be sent to fight outside the borders of South Africa,” he said. “They could not be compelled. Those volunteering for combat overseas were given a red tab to wear.”
From Roberts Heights I was posted to the Witwatersrand Rifles/De La Rey Regiment, which had been amalgamated after the losses at Tobruk to form the Wits/De La Rey. We were sent by train to a transit camp at Hay Paddock, near Pietermaritzburg, and attached to reinforcements for the South African Sixth Division, awaiting transport to Italy. Finally, at Durban, we were all shipped out on the Duchess of Richmond, up through the Suez Canal, and disembarked in late January at Taranto.
Most of that Italian spring we were moving up toward Rome, arid it was with the Sixth Division, then composed of the Twelfth Motorized Brigade and the Eleventh Armored Brigade, that we in the Wits/De La Rey went through Rome and began the move on Florence. On July 13 I was forward of Monte Benichi in the Chianti Mountains with a scouting patrol from C Company. In thickly wooded country I became separated from the rest of the patrol after dark and minutes later found myself surrounded by German troops of the Hermann Goering Division. I was, as they say, “put in the bag.”
I was lucky to stay alive, but they put me in a truck with some other Allied prisoners and took us to a “cage” or temporary camp, at a place called La Tarina, north of Florence. The senior South African NCO, I recall, was Warrant Officer Snyman. It was not to be for long. As the Allies advanced through Florence we were suddenly subjected to a brutal night evacuation. It was chaos. Some prisoners tried to escape and were shot. They were left lying in the road as the trucks rolled over them. From the trucks we were put into railcars built for cattle and went north for days through the Alps and finally to a POW camp at Moosberg, twenty-five miles north of Munich.
Even this was not for long. After only fourteen days about half of us were marched out of Moosberg and back to the railhead, where we were entrained in cattle cars again. With hardly any food or drink we rolled across Germany for six days and nights, and in late August 1944 we were finally disembarked again and marched to another and much bigger camp. It was, we discovered, called Stalag 344, and was at Lamsdorf, near Breslau, in what was then German Silesia. I think Stalag 344 must have been the worst stalag of them all. There were 11,000 Allied POWs there, on virtual starvation rations, kept alive mainly by Red Cross parcels.
As I was then a corporal I was required to join working parties, and was sent every day with many others by truck to work at a synthetic-petrol factory twelve miles away. That winter in the Silesian plain was bitter. One day, just before Christmas, our truck broke down. Two POWs tried to fix it while the German guards kept them covered. Some of us were allowed to jump down near the tailboard. A young South African soldier near me stared at the pine forest only thirty yards away, looked at me, and raised an eyebrow. I will never know why I did it, but the next moment we were both running through the thigh-deep snow while our comrades jostled the German guards to upset their aim. We made the forest line alive and ran on into the heart of the woods.