Chapter 10
10
Inga’s torture being forced to work with Benedict intensified in October when Larry contracted a case of pinkeye and had to be isolated in his bedroom at Alton House to stop it from spreading to the others. It meant that for the next two weeks, Inga would handle secretarial duties for Benedict in addition to her work for Mr. Gerard.
Their first assignment was to visit the Ruhleben internment camp holding detained British civilians. The exchange of civilian prisoners was a major priority because tens of thousands of men were now trapped behind warring lines. It fell to the neutral nations like the United States to negotiate the exchanges.
The task was difficult because the Germans refused to exchange a prisoner unless a German prisoner of similar rank or skill set could be found. An aristocrat for an aristocrat, or a blacksmith for a blacksmith.
Inga rode beside Benedict in the enclosed carriage, listening to Benedict’s instructions as they neared the Ruhleben internment camp. It was housed in a converted racetrack with horse stables, viewing stands, and a large open field. It contained three thousand British men who’d been refused permission to leave the country. Those men were packed into the stables, six men per horse stall.
“So far, spirits among the men are good because they all expect to be released within a few more weeks, but never underestimate prickly German obsession for details to throw a wrench into the works.”
She smiled at him. “Maybe you’d like me more if I eased up on my prickly obsession with details. Perhaps I shouldn’t have noticed that the pharmaceutical supplies sent by the Red Cross needed to be refrigerated and arranged for proper storage. It would have been faster if I just let them go to the warehouse.”
Naturally, Benedict couldn’t spare her a compliment. “Collect your belongings, Miss Klein. We’re here.”
She hopped down from the carriage and gazed at the entrance leading into the racetrack. A few uniformed soldiers loitered near the front, and Benedict flashed his diplomatic credentials to get them inside. Both soldiers immediately complied. See? Germans weren’t so bad. One of the soldiers even smiled and held the gate for her. She returned the smile before scurrying after Benedict, eager to point out how polite both soldiers had been. But now didn’t seem the right time in the dim, narrow tunnel beneath the stadium stands.
“Oh, my word,” she whispered as she emerged into the sunlight. The racetrack grounds lay before her, crowded with men walking on the tracks, sprawled out on the lawn, and loitering in the stands. Three thousand men . She’d never seen so many people crammed into such a tight space.
“At least they are allowed plenty of sunlight,” she managed to say. “Exercise too.”
“Yes, it is a veritable amusement park,” Benedict said, his tone wry. “Come along. We’re meeting with Dr. Keel to work on getting these men home.”
Inga craned her neck to take it all in. A few dozen men played a round of cricket in the center field. One man had a sketch pad balanced on his knee as he drew the bleachers filled with men reading, reclining, and playing cards. Beside her a group of shirtless men dunked rags into a water trough to bathe. One man was completely naked!
She averted her gaze and hurried after Benedict, who was already introducing himself to a couple of gentlemen standing near the grandstand. It took a few moments to realize these men weren’t fellow diplomats but were actually prisoners. Dr. Keel was a professor of chemistry who’d been teaching in Berlin and now assumed a leadership position among the internees.
They sat at a table beneath a large sail strung between two poles to provide shade, and Inga began taking shorthand notes of the discussion.
“I need a list of everyone’s name and age,” Benedict said. “Any man older than fifty will surely be considered too old to fight and perhaps will be an easy candidate for release.”
The professor nodded. “Already done. We’ve also got a handful of boys under the age of fifteen who might qualify for the same reason. I want those boys out first. If negotiations drag on for years, those boys will eventually come into fighting age, and the Germans won’t let them go.”
Inga had to bite her tongue. This couldn’t drag on for years, could it?
“Are there any men here with an aristocratic title?” Benedict asked.
“No, sir.” It was bad news. That meant an easy exchange for Baron von Eschenbach wouldn’t be happening anytime soon.
The professor showed them crates with notecards denoting each man’s age, profession, medical concerns, and home address in England. Inga’s first job upon returning to the embassy would be to organize the cards and start typing lists of men to be considered for a prisoner exchange, starting with the young boys first.
After an hour, it was all over and they were heading back to their carriage. She paused by the man with the sketch pad. Everything about the lanky, brown-haired man was ordinary except that he had a patch covering one eye.
“Is there anything you need to be more comfortable?” she asked him.
The man looked up and smiled. “Just seeing a pretty lady is doing the trick, ma’am.”
She laughed, then repeated her question because she was serious. The man sobered and had a list of requests.
“We could use some lightbulbs,” he suggested. “There’s only one lightbulb per stable block, and ours has already burned out. Most of us don’t have any pillows, and fresh fruit would be manna from heaven. And maybe some good books or magazines, anything that can—”
“Come along, Miss Klein,” Benedict said. “Our carriage is waiting.”
“Please wait a moment. This man has been telling me—”
“Now, Miss Klein.”
This time Benedict’s voice wasn’t as polite, and she closed her notepad. Benedict was many annoying things, but he wasn’t cruel. Something must be wrong, and she nodded a quick farewell to the artist before following Benedict out of the stadium.
Benedict didn’t say a single word until they were safely behind the closed door of the carriage. “Don’t ever initiate a conversation with a British prisoner,” he said. “It could be misconstrued as an attempt to spy.”
“All I wanted was to see if I could—”
“I know what you wanted, and it doesn’t matter. You are a representative of the American Embassy. If a German officer saw you consorting with a prisoner, it could be misconstrued.”
“All right, fine,” she conceded. She was ignorant of the rules for this terrible game, and she would follow Benedict’s lead, even as she planned to somehow get that man the supplies he’d requested.
The next two days were a flurry of messages between Benedict and his counterparts in London and Berlin. All of them wanted the prisoner exchanges to go through, and yet with the exception of a few elderly or critically ill men, nothing happened.
As Inga prepared lists of the men for the Ruhleben prisoner exchange, she figured out the artist she’d spoken to was named Percy Dutton. He was the only one-eyed man in the camp, and his profession was listed as a Presbyterian minister. Benedict allowed her to start corresponding with Percy so that he could compile requests from the prisoners for relief supplies. She sent the lists on to London, where British citizens began sending relief packages.
“Miss Klein!” Benedict rapped out one morning when she was running off more copies of blank forms on the mimeograph machine. “I need you to find lodging for twenty-five volunteers from the American Red Cross. They will arrive this weekend.”
It was a typical request. Hundreds of American volunteers from the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and medical volunteers were flooding into Europe. Inga helped find them lodging and taught them how to distribute emergency services to hospitals and families who’d lost their breadwinners.
October turned into November, and there was still no exchange of prisoners. The men at Ruhleben had set up a printing press and were producing their own camp newspaper. The Red Cross supplied them with sporting equipment, and leagues took shape. Many of the interned men were professional athletes who’d been stranded in Germany when the war was declared, and they went into high gear getting the sporting leagues established.
Yet despite the stiff upper lip displayed in Percy’s letters to her, she sensed a growing fear and frustration as the days stretched into months without any hope of release. His letters showed the corroding effects of helplessness on a man’s soul.
One morning she brought the issue up at the breakfast table. “Thanksgiving is coming up,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange a Thanksgiving meal for the prisoners at Ruhleben.”
Benedict looked up from his bowl of cold oats. “They’re British, Miss Klein. They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.”
Embarrassment clobbered her, but at least Colonel Reyes complimented her for being thoughtful. Mrs. Barnes said they never celebrated Thanksgiving at Alton House because it was on a Thursday, which was a normal working day in Germany.
“But we’re Americans, and we should be able to celebrate,” she said as another platter of breakfast rolls circulated around the table. “The Gerards are going to Keil for the holiday. I think we ought to at least have a Thanksgiving meal to relax and give thanks for our good fortune.”
Benedict remained inflexible. “Thursday is a normal working day throughout Europe, so we shall not be caught lollygagging. Besides, you’ll find that turkeys are scarce in Europe. Turkeys are native to America and are hard to come by here.”
Hard, but not impossible. Turkeys had been imported to Europe because they made for such fine hunting, and many of the aristocratic hunting reserves had them. Mr. Gerard went hunting almost every weekend, and when she mentioned Benedict’s comment about the scarcity of turkey, he promised to solve their problem. The Monday before Thanksgiving, Ambassador Gerard arrived at Alton House with a dead turkey in each hand.
“Compliments of the weekend hunt with the Grand Duke of Hesse,” he said. “The duke has a fabulous hunting lodge just south of here. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!”
Inga was delighted they would have a real Thanksgiving dinner, but not thrilled when she learned she would be the one to pluck the turkeys. Mrs. Barnes had sprained her wrist, and Nellie flat-out refused to pluck.
It was left to Inga, then, who was huddling in the Alton House garden, apologizing to the two dead turkeys lying on the cold slate patio. Why hadn’t she realized how difficult it was to actually yank each of these tough quills off the bird? She never once set foot inside the kitchen back home at the Martha Washington, so plucking a turkey was a new and horrible experience.
Mrs. Barnes instructed that Inga must not yank too many feathers at once or the skin would tear, so it had to be done one by one, and each pluck made a disturbing noise. Maybe it wouldn’t be so awful if she didn’t have to hear that popping sound with each pluck, but after ten minutes she’d only cleared a few square inches of the first bird.
Inga yelped when the chilly November wind scattered a handful of feathers across the garden. With a moan she ran after them. Benedict would have a fit if she made a mess of his precious garden.
“Need some help?”
The friendly voice came from the other side of the fence. A young man with neatly groomed blond hair and an impish grin peered over the garden wall.
“I’ve never plucked a turkey, and I’m making a mess of it,” she said as she raced after another cluster of feathers tumbling toward the barren rose garden.
The man behind the fence rattled the hardware of the gate. “Let me in and I’ll help,” he said. “I used to pluck chickens all the time when I was stationed in Canada.”
Inga flung open the gate in gratitude. The man introduced himself as Magnus Haugen, junior secretary at the Norwegian Embassy. He lived two houses down at a place called Little Bergen, along with most of the staff from the Norwegian Embassy. Inga wasn’t allowed to socialize with the Bulgarians right next door, but Norway was a neutral nation and so befriending Magnus wasn’t a problem. He joined her on the bench and showed her the right way to quickly pluck and dispose of the feathers.
Inga, not knowing the first thing about Norway, asked, “Do you eat turkey in Norway?”
Magnus shook his head. “Mostly fish. Sometimes we have lutefisk, which is cod soaked in lye. Or sometimes we have pinnekj?tt , which is dried sheep.”
Inga tried to keep a pleasant expression as Magnus explained the foods that seemed simply awful, but good heavens, he was a pleasant man! He finished plucking the first turkey in short order and seamlessly took the second bird from her and continued working.
“Will you join us for dinner on Thursday?” she impulsively asked. It didn’t seem fair to send him home to a meal of lutefisk when he did all the work preparing the turkeys. Magnus accepted the invitation with a grin, and suddenly Inga’s dormant interest in a handsome man came roaring back to life for the first time since leaving New York.
Normally, Benedict would have been at the embassy until seven o’clock, but Inga’s resolve to host a Thanksgiving meal required him to be home three hours earlier. Inga wanted to use the formal dining room, which annoyed Mrs. Barnes, and yet Andrew and Larry both asked for it too. Eating in the dining room required ironing a tablecloth, getting out the good china, and lots of extra trips to the kitchen to carry food to the table.
Mrs. Barnes did heroic work preparing this feast with a bad wrist, and Benedict ordered the cook to take a seat while he carried the platters of roasted turkey, sweet potatoes, and green beans almondine. There were bowls of gravy, butter dishes, and a basket of rolls, all because Inga was homesick and wanted a real Thanksgiving meal.
Although she wasn’t so homesick she couldn’t make a new friend from the Norwegian Embassy. The junior diplomat had fine manners and an oversupply of charm. Most annoying, he shared Inga’s groundless good cheer for just about everything.
“Thank heavens, you Americans aren’t stingy with the heat,” Magnus said as he polished off another roll. “Our commanding officer is tightfisted with the coal, so we are only allowed to heat the house when the temperature drops below twenty degrees. Inga, will you pass the rolls?”
“Don’t get used to it,” Benedict said. “Coal is likely to be rationed soon. War shortages haven’t reached Berlin yet, but the western part of Germany is suffering. We should all become accustomed to doing without.”
“Didn’t I warn you?” Inga said with a teasing glance at Magnus. “We’re all grateful that Benedict is here to remind us that the world is a very serious place.”
The jollity continued until Benedict stood to begin clearing the table. He didn’t want Mrs. Barnes doing it, and the others seemed determined to polish off another bottle of wine. If he moved quickly, he could complete another batch of letters to London.
He closed the door on the study to blot out singing from the dining room, then got to work. It had been almost four months and there’d been no real progress on getting the British prisoners trapped at Ruhleben traded or released. Their ranks had grown to four thousand men, and it took almost an hour to draft letters to the appropriate officials in London. He would have Larry type them up tomorrow.
A movement outside of the window caught his eye. It was Inga, escorting the young Norwegian to the back garden gate. Why weren’t they leaving through the front? It wasn’t any of his business, but he stood off to the side of the window so they wouldn’t spot him and watched.
Inga leaned against the gate as Magnus stood far too close to her. She tilted her face up, and even from here, Benedict could see their joyous faces shining in the moonlight.
Magnus leaned down and kissed her. Inga made no move to stop him or step away.
Benedict clenched his pencil, and the kiss went on for several heartbeats before Magnus gave her a little salute, then crossed through the gate and headed for home.
Inga watched him leave. She wasn’t wearing a coat and would catch her death from the cold if she kept loitering much longer. Benedict lowered his head to glower. It wasn’t any of his business who Inga kissed or if she wanted to catch pneumonia.
He wasn’t jealous. He wasn’t . There were no rules against fraternization between employees of a fellow neutral embassy ... but he still didn’t like it.