The Pope's Last Crusade by Peter Eisner Read Free Book Online Page B

familiar with the men, George Hoffman Fonsau and Nicholas Boehm Oberlohna, pro-Nazi provocateurs who had previous run-ins with authorities and had served time in prison. Fonsau and Oberlohna died at the local police barracks.
    News of the incident spread quickly, and the German army marched to within miles of the border. Czech president Edvard BeneÅ¡ swiftly deployed four hundred thousand army reservists to the Sudetenland border zone. BeneÅ¡ broadcast an appeal for calm, but the fact he had gone on national radio to do that produced the opposite effect; his words intensified the fear of an impending war. “We are living through the gravest moment since the end of [World War I],” he said. “This calls for calmness [and] cool nerves . . . It means that we must know no fear in the days that are coming. That we must in fact banish fear and stand for everything.”
    When Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador to Germany, asked German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop about the troop movements, he was told “to mind his own business . . . that Germany did not want to make trouble, but could not stand by while German blood was shed in Czechoslovakia.”
    All this was going on during LaFarge’s long train ride. Since there was no radio on the train and the train conductors said nothing, he had no idea of what was happening. All he could do was sense the strained, tense atmosphere all the way to the Czech border. Worse still, the border post was Eger, exactly where the two men had been killed hours earlier. The train reached the border midevening; customs inspection on both sides was unusually quick and perfunctory, silent and tense. On the Czech side, people finally told him about what was happening. There was “general fear of an immediate German invasion,” and Czechoslovakia was preparing to defend itself against an anticipated Nazi attack.
    The train traveled on into Czech territory for another three hours eastward to Prague. The train lights didn’t come on until after they had arrived at Prague’s main station. On the platform, people shouted for porters in a cacophony of German and Czech and French among other languages. A porter half dragged and carried LaFarge’s cases outside to search for a taxi in the driving rain; the weather added to the gloom and desperation.
    But the porter abruptly abandoned LaFarge when an imposing German military officer demanded service first. “Half paralyzed with fear, the porter dropped my things on the sidewalk and lugged the big valises inside under an ever-pointing finger,” LaFarge remembered. It felt like an allegory for what was happening between the two countries. “Behind that threatening voice was the voice of Hitler, and that voice spoke not Czech but imperious German.”
    LaFarge found a taxi but by then was soaked by the rain. He tried to make his way swiftly to the Jesuit seminary house where he was staying for the night. The roads and highways were clogged with military vehicles and soldiers heading west toward Sudetenland. Saturday had been a workday, and President Beneš’s call to battle was so pressing that men were reporting to their military posts without even going home first. The atmosphere was turbulent.
    The Jesuit center was overcrowded and chaotic like everywhere else in Prague that night. LaFarge’s host, Father Jaroslav Ovecka, set up a makeshift bed for him in the seminary’s geography museum. LaFarge “slept amid maps, globes and charts. Czechoslovakia was still upon the map that night.”
    The rain stopped on Sunday, and though news reports said there was less danger of an attack, the constant drone of military traffic suggested otherwise. Appeals came in from Britain, from France, and from around the world for calm and restraint. But the Nazi newspaper Angriff kept the propaganda machine running by proclaiming that the Czechs would be held responsible