The Greatest Traitor Read Online Free

But, on leaving his wife and infant son that afternoon to walk to the town hall in Rotterdam to declare the birth, Albert William Behar had time to think, free of family constraints.
    It was Armistice Day, just four years after the end of The Great War in which he had fought. Despite his own rather mysterious origins, Albert was then a patriotic Briton: he decided there could be no more appropriate name on that auspicious day than George, in honour of king (George V) and country. The registrar was duly informed.
    It was an uncommon name for a Dutch boy, and Albert quickly discovered that his impulsive act was scorned by little George’sconservative and parodial relatives: instead, they would always prefer to call him by his Dutch nickname, Poek.
    A few years later as little George started to read, the first book with which he was presented was the illustrated Children’s Bible. Heroes like Abraham and Isaac, David and Saul, and Samson stirred his imagination. But above all, the character he enjoyed most, and with whom he most closely identified, was Jacob – the biblical source of his intended name.
    The Behar family home was at 104, Gedempte Botersloot, in Rotterdam, one of the city’s oldest and wealthiest streets. By the time Albert and his family took up residence there it had undergone major development, but without losing its air of affluence. The year after George’s birth the Behars moved into the vacant house next door, No. 102, where there was more space. Their second child, Adele Gertrud, was born there in June 1924, and the family moved soon afterwards to an even bigger residence at 40c Spengensekade, an equally respectable address. There, Catherine gave birth to their second daughter, Elizabeth, in August 1925.
    It seemed an entirely conventional middle-class life, but their road to this destination had been a rocky one, and their union was anything but commonplace.
    Both sets of parents had frowned upon the relationship. The Beijderwellens were very reluctant to see their daughter marrying a somewhat exotic man whose past seemed cloaked in mystery, however charming he might have been: a Dutchman with solid bourgeois credentials would have been their preference. And the wealthy Behar family, for reasons that would only become clear many years later, warned Albert, quite straightforwardly, that if he married this Dutch girl he would be cut off without a penny.
    Catherine Beijderwellen was 26 at the time of her marriage – tall, fair-haired, and vivacious. She came from a conventional, well-established Rotterdam family with deep Protestant roots, although they were actually members of the minority Remonstrant Church. She knewlittle about her fiancée. She thought Behar was an English surname and understood that Albert was British, though she knew he had been born in Cairo, and that his family still lived there. His origins did not matter: she was under the spell of this dark, handsome man whose romantic image was only enhanced by shrapnel wounds on his face sustained in the First World War. An unreliable outsider in one light, he was undoubtedly a heroic figure in another.
    Albert had constructed a stirring narrative of the life he had lived before meeting Catherine. He claimed to have studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, to have served in the French Foreign Legion, and then, in the First World War, to have won the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Other accounts of his life have even had him serving on Field Marshal Haig’s Intelligence Staff.
    Although a good deal of this story had the ring of truth, certain parts were undoubtedly embroidered, and one or two others would later fail to stand up to examination. It only becomes possible to clearly separate fact from fiction in Albert’s life when looking at what he did in the First World War, where his full service record reveals the less glamorous, though no less heroic, experience of an ‘ordinary’ soldier.
    Enlisting in France in 1915, he