The Long Hand of the I Ching

by Paul G. Chamberlain

According to Chinese tradition, coincidence is more than mere chance; life is the servant of fate and, by casting yarrow stalks, a sage can employ the I Ching to glimpse into the future. Take the strange case of the report sent to the United States intelligence service in the months leading up to Word War II. This extraordinary document fell onto the desk of A.W. Dulles like a Stuka dive bomber. It was an exact copy of a memorandum sent to British Intelligence by the Chief of the German General Staff, and it called for the assassination of Adolf Hitler if he continued his aggression in Europe. The missive was signed by Generaloberst Beck, and the date was precisely two weeks before the Führer’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Poggio Brocciolini knew nothing about Generaloberst Beck’s plan to assassinate Hitler. The Italian mountaineeer was recuperating in the foothills of the Himalayas after fate had decreed — as the I Ching often does — that he abandon his alpenstock when he twisted his ankle trying to scale Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.

It was while recuperating in the house of a tree planter in Darjeeling that Brocciolini discovered a lost library. The voices he found in this garden of dreams echoed through the foothills, and the words had such a soothing effect on him that they washed away his melancholia like the Ganges. One of the books Brocciolini found in the library was titled Medieval History by the American professor Carl Stephenson.

The Italian alpinista noticed that the professor’s weighty tome had 28 chapters, the same number as his age, and it ended with a genealogical table and a chronological chart. Brocciolini was just about to put the book back on the shelf when he hesitated. The heavy volume fell open at the index, and it was at that moment that he noticed his name. Brocciolini was astonished.

It turns out the Poggio Brocciolini in the book had lived in Florence in the fifteenth century and was famous all over Europe for unearthing the ancient writings of Quintilian, Lucretius, and Columella. Stephenson, the author of the magnum opus, couldn’t help adding an excursus: “[p]ractically all the Latin writings that are known to us,” he points out on page 324, “were soon brought before the eyes of eager Italians, who often failed to remember that for every treasure which they had brought to light they had to thank some obscure ‘barbarian’ of the previous age.”

Closing the book, Poggio Brocciolini couldn’t help but ponder what treasure he might one day bequeath upon the unsuspecting eyes of some future generation.

Back to the German General staff. According to a report by Generaloberst Halder, printed in the General Worker at the end of the Second World War, Beck had indeed formulated a plot to murder the Führer. Apparently, the planets had swung wildly into alignment shortly before Hitler’s decision to invade the Sudetenland in 1938 and, within days, a certain disillusioned officer in the Wehrmacht volunteered to carry out the assassination at an upcoming party rally in Nuremberg. His codename was ‘William Tell’. Generaloberst Beck, it turns out, was somewhat of a Medieval historian himself.

Beck was convinced that German unity under Adolf Hitler was a sham: Germany had never been properly united since the Middle Ages, and the country that emerged from the bitter religious wars of the seventeenth century was a farrago of principalities governed by an aristocracy that was hostile to unity.

Napoleon, Beck believed, had perpetuated this particularism with cunning tenacity, and after the humiliating defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, democracy never took root in Germany because the country was so heavily agricultural that it had never developed a strong middle class. Inevitably, Germany’s perpetual insecurity played into the hands of Prussia’s military elite, and Bismarck, the great architect of German Empire who presided over the country’s industrial expansion, continued to remain circumspect of the libertarian ideas sloshing about the Continent like schnapps.

After Germany’s devastating defeat in the First World War, all might have been finally put right had it not been for a messianic corporal with apocalyptic dreams of grandeur. Now Germany once more stood on the brink of war. As far as Generaloberst Beck was concerned, Czechoslovakia was a bridge too far, and Germany was not ready to throw itself into the abyss. ‘Operation Crossbow’ was to be put into action immediately, and the target was code-named ‘Gessler’.

Poggio Brocciolini remained blissfully ignorant of the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The mountaineer recovered from his injury and left the Himalayas on a warm summer evening in 1938. Mussolini, who was following with great interest Brocciolini’s heroic attempt to scale Kangchenjunga, had ordered that a chauffeur-driven limousine be sent to pick up the mountaineer at the Italian Embassy in Istanbul. From there, Brocciolini was to be driven to Munich, and then to proceed across the Brenner Pass into Italy, where he would eventually complete his long journey back to Rome. But it was while Brocciolini was crossing the Bavarian Alps on his way to Innsbruck that fate intervened.

In spite of protests from the driver, Brocciolini insisted on swapping seats and taking the wheel. Perhaps, as the I Ching tells us, it was all foretold in a smoke-filled room in Kowloon by a man casting runes; or perhaps Brocciolini was just bored. Whatever the reason, a freak storm swept down from the Zugspitze that night, and the Mercedes-Benz 770 was engulfed in snow.

The luminescent head lamps cut the swirling snowflakes like yarrow stalks, but Brocciolini was unable to see the dark spectre making its way along the side of the road. There was a loud thump. The powerful car swerved momentarily, then skidded off the narrow road and cartwheeled into a ditch. Except for the front wheel spinning wildly like a swastika, all fell silent. A man smoking an opium pipe half way round the world trembled.

Now it was Generaloberst Beck’s turn to have the news fall on his desk like a Stuka dive bomber. A communiqué informed Beck that William Tell had suddenly been killed on his way to Nuremberg to assassinate Hitler by a car driven by Poggio Brocciolini, the heroic mountaineer returning to Rome for a hero’s welcome. The occupants had both survived, but ‘Operation Crossbow’ had been seriously compromised.

If Hitler was to be assassinated, another killer had to be found, and quickly. Germany was on the brink of war, and it was a war Generaloberst Beck was convinced Germany could not win. But before Beck could concoct a new plot, there was more bad news: the British Prime Minister had agreed to meet Hitler at his Berghof in the Bavarian Alps. Rumours were flying about like a Tyrollean standoff.

In less time than it took to slap his lederhosen, Hitler had cunningly offered to sign a peace agreement with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. History records that this treaty guaranteed that Germany would pursue no further territorial claims against its neighbours in Europe provided, of course, England allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland.

Beck was horrified. Chamberlain’s capitulation enabled Hitler to pose before the world as a peacemaker just as Beck was about to shoot the apple of his discord.

Within months of Neville Chamberlain’s triumphant return to Britain — famously caricatured by waving a document promising ‘peace in our time’ — the world was once more engulfed in war—a Blitzkrieg that was to kill nearly sixty million people. There was one irony in the failure of Beck’s plot to kill Hitler, however: it was only by fighting this apocalyptic war that Germany was so completely annihilated that its militarism was destroyed forever.

Perhaps this, too, was foretold in the I Ching. But the Italian mountaineer who had seized the wheel that night in a snowstorm in the Alps had no more idea of the part he was to play in the rebirth of modern Europe than the obscure barbarian in Carl Stephenson’s book on Medieval History.