There were incidents of cruelty, enforced homosexuality, even occasional murder. Yet perhaps because Gray was foreign, and thus largely an enigma, he was generally left to himself. His only real acquaintance was a Polish Jew, said to be half mad and violent. He and Gray generally met in one of the tooling sheds, and chatted quietly about art.

There were varying opinions about the war within the compound at Doberitz. There were those pessimists (realists) who tended to see the war as a violent conclusion to modern civilization. The few survivors would be scarred for life, the fortunate would die early. Then there were the optimists, mostly Russians and Poles, who saw salvation in terms of a German defeat. And there were the ones like Gray, who hardly knew what to think . . . except that in the face of great misery there were the small things to cling to: hope, memories, impossible schemes.

Initially Gray, too, found himself thinking of escape—either buying his way into one of the rumored tunnels or slipping out beneath the dung wagon. He also thought of killing a guard: not to escape, but to reclaim a little of what they had taken from him—a residue of self-respect.

What he did, to his surprise, was to survive, to merge with the routine, and as rumors of imminent war were confirmed by newspapers stolen from the guard's quarters, to try to manage the vision of the future: three years, five years, even another decade of his life consumed on account of, in pursuit of, Zelle.

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

THERE are conflicting stories concerning Margaretha's movements on the eve of the Great War. One account has her spending the night with a legendary German spymistress (homosexual overtones implied). Another has her sleeping with a mysterious Prussian baron, then slipping across the border to France. Most popularly, however, she is said to have dined with a certain Traugitt von Jagow from the secret metropolitan police. Supposedly she met the man at about eight o'clock in the Romanische Cafe, and by midnight she had sold another dozen British agents down the river.

In all probability the misunderstanding concerning von Jagow stems from Zelle's own admission: "Towards the end of July [actually July 31] I was dining with a chief of police." The French, no doubt assuming that she meant the chief of police, took the man for von Jagow—chief in Berlin since 1909 and largely remembered for the dictum: "Streets are for traffic, others keep off." In fact, Zelle actually dined with one Herr Griebel, a metropolitan section chief and casual friend from her first days in Berlin.

Nor was the evening in any way compromising to the British intelligence effort. After weeks of despair and frustration she had come to the man in the hopes of securing Gray's release. Griebel, however, told her that he was powerless to intercede in matters of state security, and sent her back to Spangler.