PROLOGUE

Fitzroy Maclean brought his vehicle to a stop and stepped onto the spacious Libyan desert. He and his small raiding party, deep behind the German and Italian lines, were making their way as quietly and discreetly as possible towards the Axis port installations at Benghazi, where they were to plant explosives, sow chaos and otherwise disrupt the enemy armies moving out there, somewhere, in the desert. By nighttime, Maclean knew, the scalding, rocky expanse of sand that surrounded him would cool down considerably and the entire landscape, from Benghazi to distant Cairo, would feel like icy glass.

Yet as he stood in the afternoon heat aside his battered, open-topped Ford, Maclean was dressed in his familiar drill shorts, sandals and an Arab headdress worn as much for the allure of the look as for protection against the desert sun. Such were the practical limits of a daytime wardrobe in North Africa; even a shirt would have been too cumbersome. Maclean, a graduate of Eton and Cambridge, the son of one of Scotland’s finest families, truly relished the freedom afforded by army life. In the desert, there was little need for decorum, no use for formalities, and he, a former diplomat accustomed to parties at Parisian embassies and the mysterious workings of Soviet government ministries, now found himself living in a vast, open space alongside fellow adventurers with whom he could share the thrill of the unknown.

Maclean had fought hard for the privilege of being a soldier, as he was not permitted to leave the diplomatic corps for any reason excluding pursuit of public office. Thus Maclean, though no lover of politics, ran for a seat in the House of Commons, and, to his astonishment and good fortune, won. His career as a parliamentary representative was short-lived, however: shortly after his election Maclean abandoned his constituents and made his way to the army, North Africa, and the Special Air Service, the elite, newly formed unit which was given some of the war’s most dangerous and daring missions.

Undertaking long-range raids in the hazy days of 1942, Maclean spent most of his waking hours driving across the desert with his comrades, stopping briefly for noontime lunches of tinned salmon, sardines, and canned fruit. In the evenings, the group’s grueling advance would be brought to a standstill as the men, trudging through ground that was at times flat and at others hilly, began, with the night’s frost already in descent, to set up camp under the starry skies. They would pour a bit of petrol into a tin filled with sand, producing an impromptu campfire. Huddling around it for warmth, the men would cook supper: a hot beef stew accompanied by tea and a drop of rum, a meal that the men ate with gusto and deliberation. They then filled their water bottles in preparation for the following day, wired whatever messages they had to far-off headquarters, threw their greatcoats over their shoulders and once again took their seats by the fire. By this time it would be nearly ten o’clock, and the men, exhausted, would sit and wait for their one true joy in the lonely desert. It was a song, relayed every night at 9:57 by Radio Belgrade, a German army station.

It began with a bugle call, the sort that signaled the day’s end to generations of soldiers. Then, gently, a sweet melody, simple to hum and impossible to forget, started to play. Over it, a woman’s voice, harsh and compelling: 

Vor der Kaserne
Vor dem grossen Tor…

Maclean and his men understood little of the German lyrics, their poetry and notes of sad longing. And yet, something about the foreign song made it irresistible, meaningful, their own. Maclean, writing later in his memoirs, noted that the singer’s voice, “Husky, sensuous, nostalgic, sugar-sweet… seemed to reach out to you, as she lingered over the catchy tune, the sickly sentimental words.”

This strange siren’s song made Maclean ponder what the war had in store for him, for Scotland and the world. He was curious about faraway Yugoslavia, where this strange tune was being broadcast to the enemy armies with whom he shared the yawning desert.

“Belgrade,” he wrote, “the continent of Europe seemed a long way away. I wondered when I would see it again and what it would be like by the time we got there.”

Maclean’s wartime experiences were filled with danger, color, and intrigue. They would eventually inspire a friend of his, the budding writer Ian Fleming, to create a character based largely on his personality and exploits. Fitzroy Maclean, then, would come to be known as the dashing James Bond, the resourceful and elegant secret agent.

But even more wondrous than Maclean’s journey from civil servant to super spy, though, was the one undertaken by the song that meant so much to him in the empty wastes of Libya, that German tune which had captured the hearts of fighting men on both sides of the trenches, defied governments, and transcended ideologies. In a war remembered mostly for its stark divides and brutal, dehumanizing crimes, this song emerged from the ashes as a tiny reminder of unity, hope, and brotherhood. Eventually, it would become one of the world’s most recorded tunes. And yet it began its life at the dawn of the First World War, in the lonely and romantic mind of a young Prussian soldier hoping for peace and thinking of love.