This book doesn’t rise much above the level of an airport thriller. Once that’s established, though, it is fair to say it delivers everything an airport thriller promises — and more.
The setting is the inter-war years in Europe when the espionage business reached a high point as Hitler’s Germany re-armed and started eyeing the continent for leibensraum (living space).
World War II and the Nazis have provided plenty of grist for the thriller-writer’s mill. Still, a commonplace plot becomes a page turner because the writer has deftly recreated the bizarre fin de siècle atmosphere of the inter-war years and woven the story into authentic pre-war history.
The period is the late thirties when the scars of World War I had barely healed, Franco’s Nationalists were winning the “dress rehearsal war” in Spain, and Hitler had made his intentions clear by occupying part of Czechoslovakia and signing a “friendship” pact with Austria.
The elements of the plot are pro-forma spy thriller, but they aren’t out of context. There are honey-traps, phony royalty, loutish Nazi officers, double agents, fast cars, seductions, abductions and champagne luxury.
Set in Poland, the country over which Europe went to war for a second time in a century, the novel centres on efforts by France to gain information on Hitler’s plans for a war that was gaining an inevitable momentum.
The responsibility for this rested with the dashing Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, military attaché in the French embassy in Warsaw, and a Western Front veteran.
As appropriate to the hero of a spy thriller, Mercier was something of a maverick. A minor aristocrat who disliked, but tolerated, the opulence and observances of embassy life, he had a healthy respect for the German general staff, which was, as the first years of World War II were to prove, far superior to anything the Allies possessed. The novel accurately shows how only a handful of senior people in the Allied military establishment had the perspicacity to recognise this.
The rising star at the time was Heinz Guderian, then colonel on the German general staff and architect of the devastatingly successful invasion of France in 1940. Mercier closely read contemporary German military literature in the public domain, including Guderian’s Achtung Panzer!, which discussed the efficacy of tank warfare in the next European war.
As Germany’s former enemies knew, the army was also refining and developing its Panzer tanks, first tested in the Spanish civil war (where they had limited success against the Russian T26s). The Panzers were, with German aircraft, to provide the offensive thrust of the blitzkrieg technique that rapidly brought half of Europe under Hitler’s sway by 1940.
Just how good were these tanks? To find out, Mercier recruited Everard Uhl, a senior engineer in a large metal foundry in Germany who eagerly handed over blueprints of Panzer body-work in return for money and favours from a Hungarian “countess”.
Uhl is eventually busted by German security forces (all appropriately wicked) and is hustled away to safety after a dramatic showdown. But not before Mercier’s own cover is blown in the process, subjecting him to sundry car chases and muggings by ambitious Nazi officials and assorted thugs.
Before Uhl’s rescue, he reveals that the Panzers are about to be tested in the Black Forest, a ruse that makes little sense then, since received wisdom suggested that tank warfare could only be conducted on open terrain. Mercer, disguised as a salesman, checks this out and draws his conclusions.
It’s a busy schedule, but Mercier still finds the time to conduct an energetic romance with Anna, a United Nations lawyer. Despite her suitably high-minded profession, Anna is a bit player in this story, introduced more to sustain reader empathy for the brave and noble Mercier.
Mercier’s reading, sundry hazardous clandestine visits to the German-Polish border plus the intelligence he gathers from Uhl increasingly convince him that the Germans will attack France via a Panzer thrust through the seemingly impenetrable Ardennes forest on the Franco-Belgian border.
This was, in fact, the view of Charles De Gaulle, who was considered too non-conformist by the French military establishment steeped in military strategy of the late nineteenth century. Its doyen and World War I commander Field Marshal Petain strongly believed fortifications along the borders with Germany and Italy (called the Maginot Line) would be enough to deter the Germans.
Anxious to corroborate the Ardennes invasion theory, Mercier sets out to acquire documents directly from a mole in the German general staff — a process that is naturally accompanied by grave peril to himself.
Post-war documents showed that France had ample proof of German war strategy long before Hitler’s 1940 invasion — just as Stalin did of his Russian invasion a year later — but remained steeped in dated thinking. If Furst’s racy novel has a message, it lies in the dangers of underestimating the enemy.
THE SPIES OF WARSAW
Alan Furst
Phoenix Fiction
328 pages; Rs 350
