Nanowrimo Winner

7. The Destruction of Dubitania

In spite of a widespread belief that he had Nazi sympathies, King Francis attempted to keep Dubitania neutral as the second World War began. His Government studiously avoided the expression of any view, and luckily had no treaty obligations which could not be harmlessly disavowed. However, it soon became clear that neutrality would not be possible to sustain. The Germans would insist that Dubitania was an ally or an enemy, and the fate of Bessarabia showed that if we did not yield to them, we should merely become the slaves of a different master, or else the country would be torn apart. Most Dubitanians at that time, and certainly the King, thought that German domination would be more tolerable than Russian intervention, but Francis wanted if possible to avoid the opprobrium of having tamely submitted. After prolonged and agonised discussions, his counsellors suggested that he could perhaps at least spread the blame for the inevitable concession. He therefore took the extraordinary step of issuing a general amnesty to all political activists and called elections to a special Grand Assembly which would decide the nation’s fate.

My father, of course, could scarcely believe that this amnesty applied to him, or that it would be honoured, but having consulted his friends and allies, he decided to test it. He and a number of other leading Communists put forward nominations as candidates for the Assembly, and amazingly, found they were accepted as a matter of course. The pleasure my father felt in being able to come forward and campaign openly almost compensated for the fearful situation of his country.

The cause of anti-Nazism rejuvenated my father’s enthusiasm, at any rate. I think the long years of unavailing struggle must have had some erosive effect even on his unquenchable optimism, but now he threw himself into the campaign, bursting with energy and conviction.

According to Mischkoff, my father was in constant danger of being shot by Royalist soldiers, and his life was only saved by the scores of honest Dubitanians who would flock to hear him wherever he went; in fact the amnesty was fully honoured and my father was treated with unexpected respect. He says he thinks that at times of crisis, people turn to familiar figures, and that he had now been around long enough to be viewed with a degree of affection even by his enemies. It is true that his climactic speech in Colomati Square, which now bears his own name, was attended, if not heard, by a crowd which packed the space tight; but he also faced hecklers and hostility, especially at the beginning of his campaign.

500 deputies were elected to the Assembly in a national vote; Mischkoff says my father got the highest vote of any candidate, but my understanding is that in fact he was merely the leading communist candidate; moderate nationalist figures were in reality the most popular. We really do not need to pretend that even under Francis I Dubitania was already a communist country. At any rate, my father and several other Party members were duly elected and the Assembly met in the grand Hall of St George.

After some ceremonial preliminaries and a series of inconsequential debates about the national constitution, the King now explained that he had received an ultimatum from the Nazi government; he must sign a treaty of alliance committing the Dubitanian army to fight alongside the Germans, and providing full access to Dubitanian territory and resources, or be considered an enemy, with all that that implied. The Dubitanian army, whose equipment and training had barely changed since the last century, could not realistically hope to hold out against Hitler without international help, and the chances of material assistance from any other country were clearly negligible. The King therefore felt he had no alternative but to accede. He asked the deputies to endorse the signing of a treaty which would give the Germans what they wanted. He tried to present it as essentially a non-aggression pact, similar to the one signed by the Russians, but everyone knew the truth.

There was a lengthy discussion. Although they were slow to admit it, most of the deputies accepted the King’s reasoning. Indeed, a majority of my father’s comrades felt that since Hitler had signed a pact with Stalin, the communists should favour a pragmatic deal with the Nazis.

My father, however, was among the minority of deputies who regarded a deal with the Nazis as inconceivable. He told the Assembly that the question history had presented to them was not whether to resist the Nazis, but how; he said, with tears in his eyes that he had spent long miserable years underground, but that he would infinitely rather return to being a fugitive forever than hand his country to the Germans. There is no safety in such a course in any case, he insisted; you cannot deal with a rabid wolf by taking it into your bed.

All the accounts agree that my father’s rhetoric made a deep impression, and for once I think they are probably accurate; but when the final vote was taken only twenty deputies voted with him – and one of those was Lucas Stilin, who afterwards confessed that only personal loyalty had made him do so.

“It was the first time I ever thought that in purely rational terms Comrade Larvartin was mistaken, he said, “But fortunately I followed my instincts and not my brain.”

My father felt, at least, that his twenty deputies were the best of the lot, even though a number were members of the bourgeois parties, and there were even aristocrats among them, notably the famous Julio Cesare Obertin – while the other communists had voted against him. Lodovi Manumin, the former Chancellor who had almost been killed by Uncle Tibri, white-haired now, was among the twenty, and so was that notorious chauvinist reactionary, the immensely fat old judge Hercule Agrica. The Assembly went into recess and my father called the twenty together: they conferred, cautiously at first but with growing goodwill, about what could be done in this emergency. Then an extraordinary thing happened – my father was summoned to the Agraci Palace for a personal audience with King Francis and his Chief Minister. He consulted his new-found colleagues, who agreed that the summons must be answered.

My father was, of course, in fear of his life as he approached the Palace for the first time – little did he suspect that one day he would have his office there, and fill the ballroom and reception rooms with lunatics – it seemed quite likely that this was simply a crude ruse to capture or kill him; or perhaps even hand him over to the Germans. Every curtain – and there were lots of curtains –seemed to him to be harbouring an assassin or a spy.

My father had vaguely expected to be led to the throne room itself, where he had confused ideas of Francis wearing the Crown of St Hortense and the full Royal regalia, surrounded by courtiers. Instead, a footman took him along thickly-carpeted corridors to a small room with oil paintings on the walls – my father thought he recognised the Oath of the Horatii – and an elegant Hepplewhite table in the middle where the King and his Chief Minister were already sitting. My father felt a strange residual sense of unease as he approached; he says he actually found himself wondering whether he was supposed to bow. Instead he held out his hand, and after a slight pause, the King stood up and shook it.

Francis I was a thin man, with white hair and whiskers, beneath which a suggestion of a Hapsburg chin could be seen. He wore the white dress uniform of a Dubitanian Field Marshal. He began, in a soft, refined voice, by praising my father’s speech; he could tell, he said, that in my father’s breast there beat the heart of a true Dubitanian, and that was why, in spite of everything, he had thought it was worthwhile to speak to him. In the interests of their common mother country, would my father consider withdrawing his vote, and persuading the twenty deputies to do the same?

My father was puzzled. His side had only twenty votes, whereas the King had 463 (there were some abstentions, some calculated absences, and one deputy had died of a heart attack just before the vote was taken). Surely that was enough?

The King explained that he thought the Germans would be happier if the vote could be considered unanimous. Anything less might suggest to them that their new allies were half-hearted, and that could have consequences. While my father sat in astonished silence, the Chief Minister leaned forward and added that it would not, though, be necessary to vote for the treaty; simple abstention would be sufficient.

My father lowered his eyes and sat in silence for a few minutes. The strange thing, he told the King at length, is that I feel great sympathy for you. I should hate you and despise what you are trying to do, but I don’t. But of course I cannot do what you ask. Let me ask you in turn, don’t you realise that this will never work? You see how the Nazis are humiliating you before they have even arrived, making you go on your knees to some scurvy red who spent most of his life trying to have you deposed? You can’t think they will let you remain here, even as a figurehead. Please, if you won’t fight with us, go into exile while you still can. Go to Argentina, or Switzerland. Retire. Withdraw with honour. Don’t let your time end in disgrace. Don’t make your heirs ashamed that your dynasty ended so badly.

There was a long silence, and then the King’s face fell, and he lowered his eyes. The audience was over. The next day my father returned to the Assembly and made a new speech, that speech, the speech which changed the land forever.

He was, he said, a patriot. He loved Dubitania with all his heart. And there before him, in the deputies sitting in the hall, he could see Dubitania, the true image of his homeland. And yet that homeland had decided to submit to, no, to join forces with an unmeasurable evil. What is a man to do when his country joins with Satan? He must part from her. That was what he had come to do; to give up his country. Yet if this is truly Dubitania, then I feel I am an exile already, he said. Since yesterday I have been eating the bread of a strange land. My country is no longer Dubitania. He looked at the twenty deputies who had arranged themselves around him and concluded;

“From today I am no longer a subject of the King of Dubitania, but a citizen of the land of the Twenty, a free country which we founded yesterday with the best that could be recovered from the wreck of Dubitania.”

He and the Twenty went off to prepare what defence they could. They found that they had far more support in the real Dubitania than they had had in the Assembly. A great many citizens, perhaps the majority, were prepared to fight for the freedom and independence of their country. My father said that he felt the same way as he had felt in the Assembly, that the country was being passed through a sieve; all the gold remained with him in Twentyland, while the dross fell through to King Francis in the shell of Dubitania.

Francis I submitted to the Nazis and within two weeks, the streets of Sescastri were full of German tanks. His reign lasted for only a few further weeks of humiliation before he was deposed in favour of a Dubitanian fascist nonentity. This led to a group of Royalists with some members of the armed forces breaking away; but instead of joining my father, they took refuge in the northern Graupin mountains, only to be winkled out gradually by the Germans.

In the eastern provinces, the Twenty set up a provisional government, and a large part of what was left of the Dubitanian army rallied to them. It made little difference. They say that when the General Reinhardt, the Nazi commander, heard that the anti-Nazi part of Dubitania was being called ‘Twentyland’, he said it was well named: a country which would last twenty days. The German armoured divisions, with overwhelming air superiority, could not be stopped, but Reinhardt was proved wrong: there was bitter, street-by street fighting for a month before the Twentyland government became merely the underground national Resistance movement and a terrible darkness settled on Dubitania.