"Tom Purdom-The Redemption of August" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

knew it was him because I had identified him the night before at dinner. He was the only anglais in the
town, he was the correct age, and he claimed he was taking photographs for a book he was writing on
the French countryside, just as the Greenway I knew about had claimed.
It was now July 3. In a few days, according to my information, he would leave the hotel and take up
residence on the Dinar farm. In less than thirty days, mobilization would be declared in France and
Germany, and General von Kluck's hordes would begin their advance through the neutral soil of Belgium.
The masterpiece of Prussian military morality -- the "Schlieffen Plan" that they speak of with such pride --
would begin with German troops crossing a border the apostles of Kultur had sworn to respect. The
huge masses under von Kluck's command would push back the weaker French and British forces in front
of them -- forces that were smaller than they might have been because no one in Paris or London had
believed the animals on the other side of the Rhine would actually betray their oath and violate Belgian
neutrality. Von Kluck's hordes would swing across France in a great arc that would take them behind
Paris. and the French army would be surrounded less than six weeks after the commencement of
hostilities.
That had been the German vision, and von Kluck had followed the plan to the letter and turned it into
the reality that had disfigured my entire life. Every horror that had blighted my existence -- every second
of the ninety-five years of shame and tyranny that had followed the surrender of the French army in
September of 1914 -- had been the direct result of von Kiuck's relentless execution of the maneuver the
German General Staff had been planning for almost two decades.
There had been a moment, however, when Von Kluck had considered a modification in Schlieffen's
scheme. Von Kluck has even admitted it in his memoirs. His men were tired. He believed the French
army had exhausted itself with its unsuccessful attacks against the center of the German front. He did not
know there were several reserve divisions still posted in Paris.
Von Kluck had been fully prepared to shorten the arc and swing in front of Paris -- where he could
have been hit in the flank by the reserves the commander of the Paris sector still had under his command.
He had avoided this blunder (as you can see if you read his memoirs with care) only because he had
received an urgent radio message -- uncoded -- in which the German high command had warned him of
the reserves and unequivocally ordered him to proceed with the original plan.
But who had sent that message? The message on which the entire success of Schlieffen's plan had, in
the end, depended? In the late 1940s, a small group of American academics had devoted large portions
of their careers to that question. The leaders of the "Germanic Pan-European Hegemony" had never
officially admitted it, but the testimony of several German staff officers had indicated that no one in
German headquarters had ever transmitted such a message. In 1996. while I was browsing through a pile
of second-hand books in Johannesburg, I came across a volume that had been written by a writer named
Raymonde Fran├зois Martinel who lived in the American city of Philadelphia and called himself L'Exile. It
was entitled The Conspiracies of August and in its pages Martinel built a massive theory around the
findings of a much more famous writer, Madeline Lescaut, who had investigated certain puzzling events
that had taken place on a farm near the Belgian border. An Englishman named Greenway had rented a
room there in the month of July 1914. When the German advance began, he told the Dinars daughter he
was a British agent. He had a radio with him and he claimed he was supposed to transmit information on
German troop movements. The daughter and her brother hid him when the Germans searched the farm
for weapons. At one point, the brother tried to leave the house with a shotgun, so he could join some
friends who were hoping to fire a few honest volleys at the German columns. "Greenway" became afraid
the boy would attract attention to the farm. He threatened the boy with a knife and retrieved the gun in a
confrontation in which he stabbed the young man in the thigh. The wound became infected. The boy lost
his leg a few weeks later. Years after, when he heard about the controversy over the radio message, he
wrote Madame Lescaut. By the time she got around to visiting his village, he had died of alcoholism and
she had to piece the story together by interviewing his acquaintances.
To Raymonde the Exile, the story proved that Mr. Greenway was the primary reason he was scraping
out a living in a foreign city. Greenway had been a German spy, Raymonde asserted. He had somehow