Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
– Aleister Crowley
I stop by a stone statue of a cherub holding a bird in each hand, and with lush, verdant ivy reaching ambitiously to the top of the scamp’s thigh on one side, and on the other, a spinach green stem in the vanguard, tickling the lower right rib. The growth appears to have been welcomed and has brought a smile to the lad’s chops.
I think of my goats in the pasture, how they will be waiting for me.
One of my early spells of low-grade tomfoolery was supposed to involve a recipe of Indian tuberose stamen, simple sea salt and young goat neck. In the spirit of the Costa Rican bullfighter who refuses to have the beast slain but instead spends a healthy two hours engaged in teasing, whispering private jokes and the odd fetlock or jowl tickle, I once used a wide and long and piped floury pasta which gave the impression to the arses in the Golden Dawn of the animal’s oesophagus and in case the Lord Hierophant wasn’t fooled, I assured him that all the ingredients were genuine.
I shall miss my goats. I shall walk to them very soon. To bid them farewell.
I am now fully resolved to return to England to lead my acolytes and spark a global revolution. I am the spark they need to rally against this most inhuman Crackdown. If we do not succeed, this planet is doomed.
Nine hours to go.
There were wars everywhere and every day. I helped to limit and then extinguish the third and fourth Central American wars, the Romanian peasant revolt of 1907, and the Korean guerrilla insurgency against Japanese occupation (1907–10). The Melillan campaign (1909) might have lasted a decade had it not been for me. The Chinese revolution of 1911 was a little-reported storm in a teacup, though I was thrilled to be returning there. It was a shame the Empress had passed three years prior; I would have gladly revisited. The Italo–Turkish war of 1911–12 was responsible for 20,000 deaths, but had it not been for our diplomacy that might have been a quarter of a million. Two Balkan conflicts (in 1912 and 1913) foreshadowed what I had seen in my visions. This was a perilous spot to watch, full of crooked bastards, willing to torch anyone for anything and at any time.
Between these operations, I always returned to Boleskine, and to Rose Edith and Lola. The intensity of time spent together should never be undermined by periods of being apart. It was a time of constant war for this double agent. Loved ones being apart from one another is the natural state of things for any soldier in these days. I loved and missed them so, and these six words might be repeated between any two sentences in this memoir. When I was with them, I missed them when I blinked.
There was often a cold reception in the villages around Boleskine in those days. The Scots were a gossiping lot, though some were respectful heathens themselves. The locals believed my darling lost Lilith was buried in the graveyard by the tiny and ancient church. Of course, she was not. She was in my own ground at Boleskine. But, like my taking of women to quell rumours of sodomy, I established a façade of a Christian internment for my daughter. Every time I returned home, I visited her fake tomb in their consecrated sod, though even the early visits, while still draped in mourning black, were marred by aggressive types looking for fist fights. Monied homosexual Satanists were apparently not welcome, even holding hands with their surviving, shin-high daughter and weeping wife. And so, I dressed as Viking lords, a pissed-up rag ‘n’ bone man, and red-headed Highlanders in tartan just to keep up the pretence. I could have damned any of them, had them screaming in flight for caves, heather and hillside, with the slightest spell of fire or mischief. Yet I always told myself I had more important tasks to complete, for one great aspect of our epoch was about to come to an end, and such kaleidoscopic periods of change required my full attention.
This was the time of the Great Binge in Europe. This time of vast and widespread consumption of substances now illegal had begun around the year of my birth. It did not discriminate by age and only minimally by social class. There are modern-ish day preconceptions that the Victorians were puritanical, sober and solemn. They were quite possibly worse than the Ancient Romans. Do not be fooled into thinking that the mirepoix of narcotics, fornication and spicy Anglo-Saxon invective is the preserve of the late twentieth century.
First of all, the colourful curse is traceable through Geoffrey Chaucer and beyond. In the thirteenth century, he wrote in ‘The Miller’s Tale’, ‘And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.’ Then Philotus (1603) spells the same thing a different, more familiar way, ‘put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt’. Cambridge had a Gropecunt Lane before the grim sods, who believe themselves to be in charge, changed the name. The language was unsterilised, as was the food, the prevailing stink in the air from arse, crotch and breath, the fucking, the horse shit, the grime from the mill. It was, if nothing else, a time for sensations.
Secondly, the hypocrisies around Victorian sex are just staggering and absurd. I applaud their energetic coitus and sodomy, but puke at their denials thereof. The Queen was the product of illegitimacy, likely her cousin-husband Albert too. The literature of the age did not shy from discussing the duplicity and the fraud in the bedrooms; Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Dracula all told of rampantly split personalities, façades and pretence, and all alluded to sex. Those Germans, whom we shall soon encounter, sum it up the best, ‘Doppelzüngigkeit’.31
In the Victorians’ defence, a fool may yell, ‘Yes, but none of them copulated with a horse like the pre-eminently deviant Emperor Caligula had done.’ I would have answered, ‘Yes, they fucking did.’ Life for some was a procession of horses, ponies, pigs, hounds and donkeys. They didn’t care what they wanked off or drained to empty with their mouths.
The Devil will find work for idle hands to do, and this is never more apt than when one rules the world. Romans, Victorians, Ottomans, Greeks, you name it. Boredom in the bedrooms might indeed bring down an Empire. It was not that long before that Catherine the Great (1729–1796) had, we believed for the longest time,32 attempted to better Caligula, for he merely fucked a horse, and this, as even any normal-minded person might suspect, is a quite different proposition to being entered, tarnished and corrupted by one. One would imagine. Anyway, we shall meet several doughty Russian squaws later. The point is they really were a sordid lot in the Victorian age, and this would have been truly admirable had they not lied about it.
The triumvirate of Victorian façade is complete with drugs. During that star-flecked Binge, cocaine, hashish, morphine, laudanum, heroin and chloroform were available at pharmacists across England and Europe. Absinthe, the real stuff with the potent hallucinogen of wormwood, was served universally until a French farmer, on a week-long spree, slaughtered his family, believing them to be roaches in their beds. Children as young as four or five years old around the cities, towns and villages of England were legally served beer and drank it with glee, because it was cleaner than the water. I should know, the fortune I had been left by my father was from Crowley’s Alton Ales. Sherlock Holmes was shovelling white powder up his beak; Dorian polluted by opium. Victoria drank booze when she had any engagements, otherwise she was chewing cocaine lozenges, injecting, snorting and puffing whatever she fancied. Jekyll’s own schizophrenia came from a concoction of chemicals, after all. Dracula stayed up all night.
And so, like any decent shindig at its peak, the Great Binge appeared as if it would last for a while yet. But then, we failed to prevent the first great horror: Sarajevo in 1914.
MI-1 and The Legion had uncovered yet another plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and we were there to help prevent it. By now, Rose Edith and our daughter were under the magnificent care of a friend of Dandylyon in what was called an asylum in private by those who ran it, but really, to the naked eye, it was a country estate in Dumfriesshire, settled in astonishing grounds and only improved upon by the warmish and snug blanket of a squadron of nurses of adoring benediction.
28 June 1914
I met Orr and a new-ish troop of his battalion of naughty rag tags and righteous scrag-ends in the city that morning. The sun shone on the River Miljacka, and the crowds, families and young scamps waving flags gathered. The soldiers appeared slovenly and bedraggled, unshaven and sloppy. From Dandylyon’s immaculate brief, we aimed to have the six assassins shadowed, watched and covered. They were all clueless young boys, café conspirateurs, and rank amateurs. Two were wrestled away from the procession by Orr’s men, two had left on their own accord, losing their nerve as large and menacing Boers stared at them. One similarly jumpy type had attempted a shot at the Archduke’s car, missed by a long way if the crack in the upstairs window was to be believed, and then necked weak and ineffective cyanide, before jumping in the river for a glorious martyr’s end, only to be fished out, puking and weeping in agony, in the least heroic manner possible. The final one lobbed his grenade too soon, clearly unnerved by Orr himself. Orr lifted him under his arm and marched off with him, as if he were carrying a fresh baguette. However, the bloodshed that we all know ensued that day was absolutely contrary to our plans, as we wished to curtail the clairvoyant horror-vision I had seen on the Ceylon jungle floor. That European alliance I had forged in the Boxer Rebellion frayed and then dissipated into the heat of that fulcrum of a day.
I meandered away from the parade route, looking for troublesome types, and was intrigued by nothing other than several caricatured sorts. They seemed to be plentiful. It was as I was observing one such fellow, a large Englishman chatting to two small boys playing chess in a park, that I heard one, two, three shots ring out. There was an odd silence, and it would not be for several weeks, months and then years that one would truly begin to grasp the pivotal nature for the century, for the planet, of those seconds. The lead Serb assassin had given up for the day. We believed we had prevented murder, but chance had him walk out of Schiller’s café still masticating his food, revolver in his pocket, when he encountered a stalled car carrying royalty in his precise path. And that was that. How can anyone legislate for such awful fortune?
It would signal the end of the Binge, for now boys and men were not to be focused on fornicating or entering an inebriated, frazzled, harmonious or tranquil state. They were going to war and to slaughter. We had failed, but we would be back. We would always be back. It was the way we were all built.
And we did not hang around in getting to work. It was later that day in Sarajevo, when Orr showed to me the fellow whose dangerous acolytes would provide my mischievous focus for a large chunk of that century. He entered into the lobby of the Hotel President in the late afternoon. He was an amorphous gargantuan, who walked in with a rolling and waddling motion, and stood beneath the tilting and grinding ceiling fans, as they struggled in the battle with the afternoon heat. Behind him was a small trail of sycophants, who perpetually mopped his neck, helped him to fix his monocle onto his pudgy cheek, and lit his broad turd of a cigar. I was struck immediately by what appeared to be feet the size of a ten-year-old girl. The elephantine was dressed in a suit of the vilest mustard shade, and sported an unsightly and patchy ginger beard. His jacket did not hide the patches of sweat around his soggy armpits that had already soaked a dress shirt beneath, the pleat of his damp arse was equally as guilty, it appeared.
They spoke German loudly and with a Bavarian twang.
‘Getraenke! Jetzt. Komm’ schnell.’33
He reclined his head to expose his circular pink and pulpy face to the fan. In doing so, his broad hat fell, a minion swift to catch it before it hit the polished tiles. Such was my friendly ogre’s height, Orr’s elbow nudge struck me in the shoulder, but I had already seen the clod, of course. The German scowled, producing unhealthily deep trenches in his beaming half-moon of a forehead. The effect was one of anger and discomfort, though whether the anger was the cause of the discomfort or the discomfort was prompting the anger was more difficult to determine. Both may have been true, and the agony on his most unpleasant mug was only extinguished temporarily by the first of many loud swigs of the schnapps awaiting the troupe at a table. The other three were all in morning suits. They said not a word unless it was in utter deference. They laughed at or nodded along with everything the fat man squawked.
It was not just this little scene that appeared to have come from some cheap melodrama. The chaos of the day’s events seemed to have seeped its way into the exaggerated movements of the befuddled burghers of Sarajevo, as they tripped, juddered, head-rolled, wept or stood silent and still. We all appeared to have been forced into some caricatured and inflated state, seemingly prescient of the looming horror. A handsome uniformed young man with a large head sat at the bar and seemed to be more agitated and frayed than the rest of us. He scribbled on paper, whimpering and sobbing, as we approached and ordered drinks. He drank vodka and was quite prolific with it. I was impressed by his intake, but felt for the poor soul in the midst of his despair. We sat by the bar, where a young Prussian was serving, concerned for his customer who also appeared to be his friend. After he had filled the wastepaper basket with screwed up leaves of paper, littered with scribbles of tear-blotted purple ink, he finished the bottle of vodka, stood and as he stumbled past me, grabbed my lapel and announced in a precise Queen’s English: ‘It is a microcosm of the apocalypse. It is a microcosm of the apocalypse. Tell them all I am sorry.’
And he left, apparently without having paid his bill.
Orr shrugged, for he was more concerned with observing the raucous and lardy Fritz. However, I was intrigued, and watched the youth leave the front of the Hotel President and narrowly avoid a passing carriage. A car’s horn sounded and men yelled. And he was gone, off into the distance. I would recognise his face the next day from a grainy photograph on the front of the newspaper, seated behind a steering wheel and a yard from a dead princess, clasping the bump in her belly, and a dying Archduke. His anguished and afflicted expression seemed to broadcast a torture to last a lifetime. I shan’t forget it. Perhaps my foreknowledge of the wider impact of that day’s slaying magnified the horror of the snapshot of the boy’s face. I knew a Great War was coming. Orr spoke to me as he looked at the dripping colossus glugging the schnapps. The unforgiving and unfortunate proportions of the monstrosity’s toad-ish neck resembled those of my own troubled youth.
‘His name is Hühnerbein. I know him from Africa.’
‘Stupid bloody name,34 that is,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is rumoured he is part-English, but hates them so.’
Orr closed his eyes and I soon knew that he was calculating the precise importance of this chance encounter. For several minutes, Orr remained silent, opening his eyes from time to time, saying naught and not even looking at me to request my silence. This was, of course, a given, for I worshipped this great lug and the ground in which he left the deepest of defined footprints.
‘Let him drink some more. I shall introduce you shortly.’
I knew that Orr had not taken this length of time to deduce an obvious and immediate tactic. I knew shortly thereafter exactly what he had computed, and it was a beautiful and precise thing, an explicit and defined stratagem that would never make up for the misfortune of that lunchtime, but would aim to limit the slaughter. It had been a pitiful moment in history; a chance showdown between a diseased wretch with a gun and my confused, bawling pal from the bar, who was trying to find the reverse gear on the government car, with which he had been charged for the day.
War was coming. I’m so sorry, lads. We fucked up.
From Orr’s planning we would get The Legion back in the game, not just for the pending scrap with the Hun, but for the next thirty-one years until the second one. I still shudder at its astonishing accuracy. I now knew that chess with blindfolds was how all of those lads kept that muscle in the brain, that one for protracted and patient strategy, suitably taut.
Orr had computed the precise impact of all of the pacts, treaties and alliances. He told me the plan was to infiltrate the Prussians and Bavarians, this is where our enemies now presided. Our meddling in Moscow would now be replicated in Berlin and Munich; Russia was now our pal, Germany our foe. We had known this shift would happen one day, and it was largely always a case of recognising the moment and seizing it. And here in the Hotel President, he calmly informed me, it was the soggy monster in front of us, the one who waddled and yelled and sweated, who was their Achilles’ heel. Orr’s prescience was a thing of beauty.
I walked over to the bar where the Germans were. I listened to Hühnerbein for several minutes. All four of them were now on their second bottle of schnapps. My German was excellent, but a combination of their southern dialect and their inebriation did not help my translation of their ratcheting nonsense. It was ridiculous that grown-ups behaved so inelegantly. I wish I were able to report that they were funny, but they were not; they were the Marx brothers without the guile, timing or wit.
‘I was in the cab. I had no idea where we were,’ said Hühnerbein. ‘I was a little bit sloshed from lunch. I then spotted that old church we always see at the beginning of the motion pictures at the Mutoskope around the back of the Karl Hedwig III monument.’
One of his bootlickers fawned, ‘Ah, I so miss the Mutoskope in this backwater.’
Another brown nose chimed in, ‘Oh I do too.’
‘Shut up, you fools. So I said out loud, “Ah, we are here.” I did not mean we were at our destination. I only meant to express that I knew where we were.’
‘At the Mutoskope?’
‘I think you mean the Kinetoskope.’
‘Of course, at the Mutoskope. But I was going to the Regierung Strasse.’
‘But the Mutoskope is not near the Regierung Strasse, Herr Hühnerbein.’
‘I know, but the driver let me down there.’
‘You know it is run by Communists, don’t you?’
‘And perverts.’
‘No! That is the Kinetoskope. I was fondled there in broad daylight while waiting for a strudel.’
‘And you got out?’
‘But why?’
‘I was potted.’
‘And a long way from the Regierung Strasse.’
‘I do miss the Mutoskope. I saw Der Weisse Geist Von Meiner Grossmutter35 there. What a masterpiece.’
‘It is owned by Communists.’
‘And perverts.’
‘So how did you get to Regierung Strasse?’
‘Enough, you damned fools. Take me to piss. Get the trolley, my poor put-upon legs hurt.’
One backslapper jumped up from his seat and motioned to the bellboy, who promptly delivered a wheelchair to their table at the bar. Several chairs, tables and customers had to be shoved and displaced in order for Hühnerbein’s carriage to be adjacent to his table. The three subordinates grunted as they lifted the fat man into the broad seat, which was still rather snug for the backside of the humongous oaf. Two of them then took a handle each, tilted the vast load slightly backwards, taking huge care not to pass his centre of gravity, and rolled him off to urinate. The third toad slumped behind them all. I could only imagine the poor soul was to help with the act itself.
Orr walked over to where I stood.
‘What sort of state are they in?’ he said.
‘They are pie-eyed.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes, I think they are.’
‘Excellent.’
Orr waited there at the bar with me until the troop returned, almost spilling their load en route. The concierge and several other guests frowned their stunned disapproval.
When they were almost back at their spot, Orr turned to face the elephantine, and greeted him in a phlegmy Dutch German.
‘Hühnerbein! You old scoundrel. What a delight!’
‘Oh dear God. It is you!’
The three fawners lifted Hühnerbein back into his seat, unable to avoid the large puddles in his crooks, which were now accompanied by a new one on the front of his trouser. Just as the stooges had deposited the rotundity in his chair, he leapt up and moved reasonably nimbly, given his unfortunate and possibly perilous combination of fleshy girth and tiny feet.
His harsh Bavarian softened marginally in the presence of the foreigner, but also from appearing to sober up by a sliver.
‘Good God. It has been so long. What a surprise!’
‘I would like to introduce you to a dear friend of mine, Hühnerbein. Please come and meet Aleister Crowley.’
I moved in, reluctantly shook the insipid mitt, though this was masked by my enthusiastic grip, and said, ‘How do you do?’
We then continued in Bavarian. They do so appreciate that, it all points to an inferiority complex, the same fuel that sparks their faux superiority and pretentions to conquer.
Greek mythology tells us of Achilles’ mother, that sea-nymph, dunking him into the river to bless him with the gift of immortality. The legend speaks of how she held him by his heel, and so this spot remained vulnerable and therefore mortal. Well, the German spirit has one such weak spot. It is their belief in their own pre-eminence that is the nearest thing humanity has to the spirits, the gods. This factor was at the heart of Orr’s foresight. This is where The Occult and its bidder, Aleister Crowley, the acclaimed protégé, precipitously rising star in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with its own sturdy connections in Berlin and Munich, became crucial. For here in this arena that dazzled them all, I was a noted devotee, erstwhile wunderkind, burgeoning Dark Lord, practitioner of the metaphysical and paranormal activities, a Rosicrucian36 hell-bent on spiritual development, drugs and genitals of all kinds. How could they not be cowed by, intimidated by and, hence, enamoured of me?
‘Crowley? Crowley? I know of you, young man. Yours is a fearsome repute.’
‘Thank you, Herr Hühnerbein. Most gracious.’
‘You must join us.’ In hindsight, his terminology might have been purposefully ambiguous.
So we joined them, exchanging small talk and hot air about the assassination, until Orr took Hühnerbein’s appalling frame off to one side. The German’s high spirits had subsided and the three lackeys, following the example of their leader, had now lost much of their drunken bluster.
When the vast Orr and the roly-poly Hühnerbein returned, he was very precise and quite business-like in his approach to me.
‘I hear you are a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. This is of the greatest interest to me, Herr Crowley.’
‘I am indeed. It is a fine honour for this Englishman.’
I knew precisely his intent.
‘And why are you not a member of the English Mountaineering Club?’
‘Because I despise them. They are a moribund lot. A quite despicable clique, who are eternally jealous of my abilities. Had they any wit or decency about them, they would welcome me in and increase their own standing but, as is the English way, they are far too concerned with themselves, the fucking rules of the game, and playing it straight. This is not my way, sir. The Scots are a feistier lot, and would attack a mountain any way they saw fit, just to sit upon her. And they recognise unshackled talent when they see it. This makes it a pleasure.’
‘How very intriguing. We have so much to discuss. And tell me what you really think of what happened here today, and what brought you to Sarajevo, for this is quite a coincidence that we all meet here today of all days.’
‘I knew what was to happen today. I wanted to witness history. But it is more than that, sir, for I also wish to define history.’
‘You and our friend-in-common,’ he nodded at Orr, ‘must come to visit me at my castle near the Wetterhorn. The Scottish Mountaineering Club have the chalets down the road, I am sure you know.’
‘I do.’
Orr and I exchanged glances and minuscule nods to encourage the great lump.
‘Do we find you here at the Hotel President?’
‘You do, and that is most kind. I am sure we shall be delighted to accept.’
‘Marvellous. It has been a true pleasure.’
‘That pleasure, believe me Herr Hühnerbein, has been all mine.’
‘One of my men shall be in touch in the morning.’
We moved our heads marginally closer together, and we clasped hands to say ‘Farewell’ for the evening. This tiny gesture became a magnified detail of our intent.
As my dear and mischievous friend and I walked out into the thick and hot Sarajevan evening, Orr looked straight ahead with a military precision and said to me, ‘That fool has murdered hundreds with his own hands. He has ordered the slaughter of thousands. We must be careful.’
And it would be this fat fool who would allow my proximity to, truly, the most evil man of the twentieth century; not I, for heaven’s sake, though Fleet Street would have you believe otherwise. I write of that grubby and resentful little Austrian. I tell of that viciously peeved reject from the Austrian Army, at that precise moment struggling to paint like a grown-up, up the road in Munich. But my acquaintance with that over-mothered and under-fathered vulgarian is still two decades ahead.
Meanwhile, I would think of how Rasputin had hypnotised a German (the Czar’s wife) with sex, drugs and the Occult, and how I now planned to do the same.
We were now unable to prevent the inevitable march to war. We might have controlled many things, influenced even more, but we were still just human beings. We were neither unstintingly prescient nor ever-judicious, and mistakes happened. Sometimes we were only reactive, but we still acted for Good and punched bastards in the neck with a righteous glove whenever we could. We had already prevented and shortened conflicts while spreading lust and love from that generous and weeping pustule on the spicy mountains of Ceylon. I would have spoon-fed it to the whole fucking world, but Winston and MI-1 were my masters. I would not defer for ever.
We would have to do what we could to curtail the bloody mess in Europe. This was hampered when within months of hostilities beginning that summer of 1914, the transport of the treasured resin from the East was stopped, as boat after boat was sunk in the Atlantic and the channel. Many ships carrying the raw goo from Ceylon were torpedoed by U-boat. This was the first war on drugs, I suppose. But Robbie, now dressed almost exclusively as a chap, and I still managed a modicum of rebellious chaos with our meagre rations.
We were there at the Marne in September ’14, but we carried no narcotic. I sat in tight on the German lines with special dispensation from Hühnerbein. I gave rallying speeches to the lads and to the officers on the power of the Teutonic spirit. We played Wagner and drank. The poor boys did not seem too enthused, and I knew from Robbie’s letters, neither were our boys. It was heartbreaking to know that the youth, to whom I was preaching, were the poor buggers who were next over the top and into the flying flak. Desperate souls shat their pants and spoke, in varying tones of sanity and clarity, of Mama, as they were ordered to oblivion over excellent cognac and pulverised snuff by the church-going monsters in London and Berlin.
*
My sturdy accomplice and I both slalomed across front lines all the way to the North Sea from 1914 onwards, conversant in invective-stuffed lower Prussian, snot-raking Flemish and swaggering Italian. We sent daily messages to each other by pigeon, and bellowed laughter until the poor bastards around us joined in, such was its infection and their lack of hope. They believed we knew something they did not, the intuitive and exhausted and hollow beauties. As fifth columnists, we sat in trenches with boys from Stuttgart and Mainz, and rather than send them to their deaths, when possible, we urged them to desert, and ensured their safety from their own firing squads. We shovelled away hundreds, thousands, pouring more than the authorities would ever admit onto vessels in Genoa and Dubrovnik and Hamburg bound for anonymity in Peru, the South Pacific and of course, Ceylon. From our side, the weary Tommy found passage to Marseille and Lisbon. The giddy and deranged generals had no idea for months, such was the indiscriminate piles of bones perpetually ahead of them. The cunts just frothed orders and banqueted in vast chateaux. Meanwhile, our elaborate route would have thrilled that Pimpernel Sir Percy Blakeney, for it was also his turf from a hundred years previous. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – well, apart from the fact that he had shovelled aristocrats over the channel, while, with us, it was the elevated classes who were being fooled and robbed of their human fuel for the fire that raged.
Imagine only stopping the carnage on both sides for a few hours, only so the corpses out of the trenches could be shovelled away. On the German side, I saw them discard the bodies, and we all knew they were going to the glue factories. It was called the Kadaververwertungsanstalt.37 The British naval blockade had cut off the supply of fats, so now corpses of boys were rendered down for lipids, which were then used to produce nitroglycerin for explosives, candles by which to write one’s last letter to mother, the missus or the kids, and dubbin for the boots that would carry the next sorry lot to their ends.
The most profound misery we witnessed when we saw those teenage boys and fathers and brothers climb to their annihilation, unable to divert them away for we were under the glare of a gutless officer, was matched by the absolute rapture, the euphoria and the enchantment of when we were able to veer these blessed boys, with cowering mothers, across a stretch of water, or hollow and frantic fathers out to the East, to a new land, where mornings might be greeted with delirium and elation, a beatitude to persist all day and for a lifetime. And yet, the reality would be that many of those we saved would be scorched not by shell or mortar, but by the guilt and stigma of not being taken by explosion, bullet, gangrenous trench-foot or gas attack. Dandylyon was a middle-aged man now, but spent his days sweeping through the oases and the enclaves around the world that we had established for these fellows, nursing and counselling those blighted by what they had seen in and in-between the trenches. Prudence was always at his side, of course. They were a formidable team.
Then one day, the toffee arrived. A minuscule amount came to me just inside the Belgian border. I split it with a foot-long section of wire from no man’s land. I requisitioned one of the company’s malleable and brave carrier pigeons that I had recruited for mischief, and sent her to Robbie, whom I knew was within a mile on the other side, that late December day. We only had enough resin to make the weakest of brews, and to spike the shots of grog that had been sent to the front by the King as a Christmas gift. Robbie and I not only synchronised across no man’s land in front of us, but then zipped with gusto along the frontline towards the sea, leaving sabotage and monkey business in our determined slipstream.
When our droplets were empty and once again with the collusion of a pigeon, Robbie and I marched from opposing trenches, and shook hands in front of the startled thousands in Flanders Field, sparking a moment in Mankind which is still to receive its full and proper recognition, for its disclosure undermines the evil bastards who kill hundreds of thousands of boys for profit and represent to them far, far less than a stolen pawn on the queen’s rook flank. The Germans then allowed this moment’s hope to spread. They all began to sing Christmas carols, the echo funnelling down the trenches in the eeriest way, undulating and reverberating for miles and from miles in the oddest manner. It was quite impossible to know if the effects of the resin were totally responsible for this trick of the ear or whether mother science herself was sticking her oar in through the radio transmitters and stirring up the rebellion. Music, music, music. The British sang along with them, and their own bizarre echo of tens of miles of trenches spilled over the top and danced over the wires, shells, the potholes, the mud, and the bones and the bodies. The blessed Germans even sang in English.
Silent Night, Holy Night
The Hun then began to light cigarettes while standing in full sight of the enemy. There was no sniper fire to take off the head of the smoker.
The British stood up and did the same.
‘Oi Fritz!’
‘Hey Tommy, Merry Christmas.’
That Christmas Day in 1914, we played football on the mined land between armies, and we almost ended the whole war by the twenty-eighth, such was its mass stretching from southern Belgium to the umbra of Montparnasse. Lads from Bristol and Leeds and the Lakes lit cigarettes for men from Heidelberg, Halle and the Schwarzwald. Candles were burnt and carried in small pine trees. The candles may well have been made from the processed fats of someone’s son, splattered across still tough and patchy green earth in the first days of the war.
The men compared weaponry, armour, and helmets and gave minute stores of rations wrapped in muslin to each other as Christmas gifts.
I saw a German trimming the hair and the beard of an Englishman, for he had recognised his barber from Jermyn Street in ’09.
Those small moments might have torched a crooked and sparkling line of turquoise, lilac and death-white, visible from space. My pal and I kicked that first ball, and shouted, ‘Heute und Morgen. Kein Krieg.’38
Our rebellion seemed strong, as it extended beyond the points where we had administered the droplets. The stone-cold sober joined in from both sides. Some officers relented with them, others were simply ignored. Several were gagged and bound to bunk beds, left to be sniffed and nibbled on by rats. I stood on a hillock of mud, and for hours preached to a revolving crowd of a hundred or more, imploring them to spread the word to demand a campaign to unionise and to raise the pay of soldiers that would make war too expensive. They seemed so responsive.
Christmas Day passed and rifles remained down, Germans and British explored each other’s trenches for diaries and letters, for they had once been their own. The songs abated and then piped up again, filling the line with a renewed vigour for peace. The immediate future of the planet was in the hands of these belligerent boys and hard men, just as it had been decided upon an unfortunate street corner in Sarajevo, a scorching day just months previously. I had read much about the Will of a people, the German hierarchy revelled in it, but, by God, this was so very different. This was a visceral desire to live, to survive, and to see one’s children and one’s home again. They were, after all, just over that twenty-one-mile stretch of sea. So close from decency. Yet it felt like they were a lifetime away, but perhaps if we were all to spit together, we could drown the bastards who’d sent these fine and worthy runts here. It was no longer a scrap of nations for me, for those German lads were a magnificent lot. It was political and unashamedly revolutionary. Of course, I despised the monsters that sanctioned this murder. How fucking dare they?
I spent months crossing from one side to another, in the vein of the little boy with no friends who plays chess against himself or the tennis player who sprints and leaps from one side of the net to the other to return his own lofty lobs. This was achieved with the help of the Imperial German Flying Corps and the Royal Flying Corps. I was dropped by biplane well behind lines, each time with the best wishes of a pilot who was convinced I was on his side. Only the British lads were correct, of course. I knew Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, met him several times and he even dropped me into Belgium at midnight after a hefty schnapps session. He was an entertaining and large-hearted bloke with incredible skin, a mad gaze and lips like figs.
High above the Western Front, he asked me at full volume and in a comically Germanic accent over his shoulder, spittle jisming over his goggles and flying cap, ‘So, Crowley, you are a double agent in more ways than one. How is it when you are taken by a large man?’
I put my finger to my lips, smiled and yelled, ‘Please watch where you are going!’ as we entered a thick cloud. ‘And do you really wish to know the enemy’s secrets?’
He laughed so hard, until we entered a tailspin. He coughed, and I was unsure whether it was from laughter or whether he had inhaled toxins from below. We dug ourselves out of the dive with inches to spare, flicking a poor, startled and skinny horse’s arse with the tip of the wing as we did so well behind the lines. These Germans really do have the most remarkable and misunderstood sense of humour. I suspect they might be so evolved in this regard that the English simply do not hear the pitch of their nuanced dog whistle.
But maybe not.
Just as there are the perks of double agency, mainly being believed by both sides, then there is always the equal and opposite disadvantage. That is, one might be disbelieved by both (or even one) side. I might well have been shot were I not to be withdrawn from my mischief on the front, for who knew if Winston could protect me here in the theatre of war. The generals crushed the Christmas Truce rebellion, and in doing so, I was given new orders. I was removed from the front, and was told I was to be shipped to the United States. I was given a new mission, to collude with the German political meddlers in New York, but I would be back to liberate more of those lads. I swore it as I arrived back in England. And I knew Robbie would continue in my absence. Robbie, dressed as either lass or lad, did not so much answer to Whitehall, as she did to me. She was my own personal insurgent.
January, 1915
From London, I sent letters to Robbie thrice weekly. And soon our mischief was an interlocking charm, as her movements stitched a neat thread over the wound of the trenches of the Western Front, and I prepared first with Winston’s pals in SW1 and then alone in Manhattan to engage the military and political chiefs of a new Germany in the Occult. I frolicked in a Blackness that they simply cannot resist. This was a singular and a lonely pursuit, and one into which only I wished to delve. I feared naught. Perhaps I should have for I was a) amid the enemy during wartime and b) I was prodding the darker edges of the human mind, and this is perilous ground too.
The arcane and demonic tendencies of the Nazis twenty years later were not a new whim. They were deeply rooted. There was an old German sect called the Ahnenerbe,39 who researched the cultural and archaeological history of the Aryan race. National obsessions like this don’t just crop up. They are cultivated with malintent.
The Germans’ expeditions – geographical and spiritual – into magic were camp and melodramatic farce. Their research was largely shoddy, boyishly cart before the horse, and always in the vast shadow cast by the keenness to find a proof for their theory of their own superiority. Usually so adept in technology, this was reverse engineering of the worst kind. Such is hubris. I encouraged this, for they saw me as the very essence of knowledge, reason and wickedness. (No one is totally stupid, after all.) But let us not pretend that they were not dangerous, for viciousness straddles the undulating borders of intelligence with a light and eager thigh.
MI-1’s plan was for me to become a triple agent, for our threesome was now inclusive of Satan; or so those juvenile and gullible Prussians were concerned. There is no fucking Satan, of course. If one speaks for Him, or, more pertinently, if the Germans believe that one speaks for Him, one does not even need to speak sense to have them do as one wishes. Any instruction marginally north of gibberish would be executed by enthusiastic jackboots within the hour.
And so, it would all be such a lark with them. Or it would have been had I been able to forget about the horrors at the front. I could at least leave with the knowledge that the reasonably roomy channels we had set up to allow for desertion from the trenches, would work for the next three and a half years when no one was watching. It was scant comfort, as I prepared to leave for New York in early 1915 when I completed two important missions. I secretly arranged the air-dropping of anti-war propaganda and opium across the front line in France and Belgium. I also went to Moscow to see an old friend, and as I walked out of my front door in my beloved Cambridge, my heart broke upon receipt of a letter from a Sussex hospital. I had lost another daughter, this time to consumption, and then as a direct result within ten days, my certified wife followed into the ground, her cause of death, a broken heart and lunacy. This Pimpernel wanted to die with them.
Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness.
Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.
– Sun Tzu
31 Double-tongued-ness.
32 Even if it turned out to be conjecture and gossip, the fact that everyone, historians included, were convinced she had, still spoke volumes. And anyway, it is tough to prove a negative.
33 ‘Drinks! Now! Come quickly!’
34 In German, it translates as Chickenleg, but also Drumstick, for this chap’s spirit, since childhood, had marched to a military beat.
35 My Grandmother’s White Ghost.
36 Rosicrucian (def): The mysterious seventeenth-century doctrine of the order is allegedly founded upon esoteric truths, which ‘concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe and the spiritual realm’. Their manifestos do not elaborate extensively on the matter, but clearly combine references to the Kabbalah, Hermeticism and Christianity.
37 Carcass-Utilisation Factory.
38 ‘Today and tomorrow. No war.’
39 Inherited from Forefathers.