Publishers Note: Douglas Reed was living in Vienna in 1937 and in the beginning of 1938 when he wrote this book. While the book was in the press the storm broke.
The publishers could easily have edited the chapters on Austria to recognize the changes already accomplished. But by this means much of the vividness of the author's first-hand account of the last days of Austrian independence would have been lost.
Therefore the chapter on Austria (ch 32) was allowed to stand as it is written. All but the last four paragraphs of it was written before events began to move; and this part shows how clearly the author felt the suspense that lay over the country and shared the anxiety of its inhabitants. The last four paragraphs of Chapter 32 were written after von Schuschnigg visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and these paragraphs show equally clearly that Douglas Reed then immediately recognized the end of Austria to be imminent. It came a month later, and Chapters 44, 45, 46 and 47 (which were incorporated after the second impression) describe how it happened.
In these chapters the reader sees a sound prediction, based on knowledge and experience, come true.
Authors Note: None of the characters in this book is imaginary. They all exist, believe it or not.
None of the opinions expressed in this book commits any third party. They are mine, all mine, and nobody's but mine.
None of the material in this book has been published before, but I wrote a full-length book about the Reichstag Fire, which is briefly discussed in this volume, and it was published (The Burning of the Reichstag) by Messrs. Victor Gollancz.
click on the above to select required chapter - use browser's 'back' button to return to place in text
The years between those two wars look to me, in retrospect, like a street in Westbourne Grove or some other Victorian suburb. One day like another, one house like another, a grey vista of ugliness and repression. Many Londoners who were born around 1900 must have similar memories. The Berliner has the woods and lakes waiting for him half an hour away. The Viennese carries with him through life the picture of his native hills golden in the sun or white with snow, of becandled Christmas trees in the windows, of priestly processions chanting their way to the Stefansdom with banners of red and gold. The Budapester has his Danube and does not need to be rich to know music, wine and song.
London was too big, you could not escape it. I bicycled furiously, at the week's end, in search of a green and pleasant land. Marble Arch, Maida Vale, Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Hendon, Edgware, Stanmore and other bosky names fell behind me, but when the time came to turn back the promised land still lay over the next horizon. I had found only a belt of pseudo-countryside, flowerless, dusty, with stunted trees. Wherever a green meadow or a shady wood offered a notice forbade me to approach it.
Of country pursuits little was to be seen. The countryfolk devoted their energies to stifling the tea-drinking mania of my compatriots. Every hut and hamlet bore the sign 'Teas'. Once I rode in search of the Thames, the chief river of my native land. After some hours I discovered it at Staines and spent a week's salary on the hire of a punt. This I propelled, until I tired, between a double row of notices offering me tea, forbidding me to land, and threatening me with prosecution. I came back believing that I had had a good day. The lot of a Londoner did not then seem to me insufferable. I knew nothing else. Long afterwards, when I saw other cities and countries, my gorge began to rise. Am I right now or was I right then? Anyway, when people speak longingly of their childhood and youth I feel superior to them, because my own were so dull that the present is infinitely preferable. I feel that I am living on an ascending, they on a descending scale of happiness. Those grey London years, before I sailed down Southampton Water bound for France, are like the wasteful blank pages that inexplicably begin most books.
For I am a Londoner. My father came from the West Country and my mother from Ireland, but I was born in St. John's Wood and spent nearly all my days before the war between Shoot Up Hill, a pleasant name, strangely bestowed before the Petrol Age, and St. Paul's. Only once, when I was very young, did we go to live at Southend, where the sea at stated times retires out of sight. On these vast mud flats I wandered, and saw with quaking heart a drowned man fished out of the sea. Here my infant sister fell face downward while paddling in the fringes of the sea, during one of its rare visitations, and my mother with piercing cries rushed in her heavy flounced skirts and petticoats to rescue her, and, scarlet-faced and shamed by so much commotion, I drove home with them in a brougham. Here my father told me how he had kicked his top hat all the way down Queen Victoria Street on Mafeking Day and on Mafeking Night had transplanted a 'To Let' board from the garden of an empty house to the forecourt of the little church which we attended on Sundays.
I was certainly in better circumstances then, for I went to a school which now claims to rank among the public schools of England, and in England public schools draw their scholars from a narrow moneyed class. The head master habitually dressed like a Scottish dominie caricatured by Punch. With long hair and beard, a tam o'shanter, and a cloak streaming behind him, he stalked about the windy streets, a picture of stern and wild Scottish righteousness, and deeply impressed the matrons of Southend.
One morning he assembled the whole school in the main hall for an unknown purpose and, gaunt and terrifying, to my uneasy surprise called for 'Douglas Reed' to step forward. I was about nine years old. I stepped out and stood, the focus point of invisible dotted lines running from the curious eyes of a hundred schoolfellows. In a breathless silence the dominie spoke. I had in my possession a toy cannon; where had I got it? I had indeed a small toy cannon, worked by a spring, which I had found during playtime the day before behind a tree in the playground and had shown with much glee to other boys. I told him this. 'You lie,' said he. 'No, it's true,' I answered. 'You lie.' 'No, it's true.' 'You lie,' thundered the dominie, 'you took it from another boy's desk.' A figure of righteous wrath, he pointed a long bony finger at me, and shouted, 'Tell the truth, tell the truth!' The deity that punishes bad boys seemed to have taken earthly shape. I had an awful feeling of guilt. So holy a man could not be wrong. He roared louder, 'Did you take it from another boy's desk? Say yes!' 'Yes,' I said. I was thrashed before the school. I dared not tell my parents; they would never believe me, I thought. Some distrust of myself, which I only conquered many years later, dated from this time.
We came to London. I went to another school, in Kilburn. This school was public, but not a public school. All might attend it. It was free, though for the benefit of those who strove after superiority it had a separate department where the scholars paid two shillings a week, and to this I belonged. Although we had a common playground and fell over each other's legs a great social gulf was fixed between the two-shilling boys and the free boys and we never mixed. The head master was an estimable man who habitually stood at the door through which we filed after playtime and at random picked a boy here and a boy there for a box on the ears that sounded like a pistol shot. To receive one of these unmerited buffets from the good Dr. Nairn counted on balance as a distinction. We never bore him malice and thought of him in after years with mild affection. If boys feel that a master is mean in his soul and hates them they loathe him but if their instinct tells them that he is ultimately a just man they respect him and don't give a hoot for his canings.
Stands St. Augustine's where it stood? Red brick Gothic in a grey Georgian world of Avenues and Terraces, that in their drooping lace curtains and coy aspidistras belie these fair and verdant names. Cross housewives and pinched servants toiling on their knees to give a transient whiteness to the sacred front steps, their behinds turned to the blue sky and the trees. All else could be ugly and dingy, the house could be dirty without and dark within, but the front steps had to be white and the woman who did not laboriously hearthstone them in the morning was a slattern and the butt for her neighbours' malice.
Is the 'recreation ground' with its sparse grass and tortured shrubs still there, and the bright yellow cake with gaudy pink icing, a slab even bigger than a man's hand for a penny?
One day I shall brave Edgware Road. Maida Vale and the Kilburn High Street and go and see if St. Augustine's, with other great British institutions, has survived a world war unchanged. I hardly know what I learned there. The curriculum was a simple one, meant for boys who were going to become clerks and shopkeepers and would not need to know very much. Reading I hardly needed to learn, for it is an inborn passion; arithmetic I have never yet learned; history, although I then habitually gained top marks by reciting parrotwise pages of dates which I immediately afterwards forgot, I can only retain by seeing the places where things have happened; geography only came to me years later through travel. Classical education was none; and if any undeveloped talent for music, painting, or sculpture ever lurks in the boys who go to such schools it must, save in a case of genius, be efficiently nipped in the bud.
But when I was thirteen I left St. Augustine's and began to earn my living. One day I was a schoolboy, wearing the unsuitable clothes that were my penance for my parents' belief that we belonged to a superior class: the shopkeepers called these garments Eton jackets and my derisive schoolmates called them bumfreezers. The next day, my fingers still tingling from Dr. Nairn's congratulatory parting handshake, I had begun to serve a term as office-boy to a publishing firm.
I continued to wear my only suit, the bumfreezer with the Fauntleroyan collar, for several months, until my employers made me the vehicle of a protest to my parents. Then I was bought a brown trouser suit the jacket of which, to my grief, was not slit at the back as were those of all the other men in my immediate circle whom I held to be really well dressed; why, I complained to myself, did my parents insist in making me conspicuous.
I was paid eleven shillings a week. Five years later, when I was eighteen, this had risen to eighteen shillings. When I was sixteen I obtained a post at thirty shillings a week, but my employers would not part with me without the full month's notice to which the law entitled them because they paid me my fourteen weekly shillings monthly, and my prospective new employer would not wait.
About eight in the morning I left the mass-produced street in Brondesbury, which looks like the Dionne quintuplets carried to infinity, where we lived, and by means of a circuitous railway journey with long walks at either end reached the Strand, where the publisher had his office. About seven-thirty in the evening I returned. Later I went and returned by bicycle, haring down Maida Vale and through Hyde Park, past posters that said 'Bleriot flies the Channel' or 'Sinking of the Titanic', and darting in and out of the traffic in emulation of the evening newspaper runners, those trick-cyclists of the streets in pre-war London.
My days I spent in typing letters, running messages, sticking on stamps, running up to the storerooms where the books were kept in brown paper packages on racks. The smell of those dust-covered shelves is with me now. I had an hour for lunch but ten minutes was usually enough to eat a pork pie and then I retired with three sticks of chocolate cream to a window ledge on the top story of the publishing house, a vantage point among the chimney pots with a glimpse of the Strand where I was for a moment captain of my soul. All the contents of the dusty racks were at my disposal. I followed Napoleon to Moscow, Murat to Pozzo and Bernadotte to Sweden; I went with Scott to the South Pole, shared his despair at finding that Amundsen had got there first, and I went out into the snow with Oates; I sailed in the Cutty Sark and walked with Brummel along Haymarket, jibing at his fat friend; I was besieged in Ladysmith, but never lost my faith in Bobs, whom I had seen cutting down mutineers in India; I communed with Shakespeare, St. Francis of Assisi and Borrow. Anthony Hope took me to tea with Miss Dolly and I marvelled at their gift of idle repartee. Taking books at random from the shelves, my mind consumed a prodigious literary Irish Stew.
When the clock struck two I had to leave this brave world with its spacious horizon and climb down from my crow's nest to a nether world of endless boredom. The minutes trailed by on leaden feet until six o'clock. Opening letters, typing letters, closing letters, sticking stamps on letters. I loathed it and, continually reproached, I had an ineradicable feeling of guilt about myself. The manager had the same effect on me as the dominie at Southend, although he looked quite different, with his neatly brushed grey hair, his pince-nez, his striped trousers and morning coat. One day, opening the morning mail, I threw into the wastepaper basket an envelope containing a cheque. A summons to the presence, words of stem reproach that I could be so forgetful of all that had been done for me. I was fifteen. I fetched my overcoat and walked along Essex Street, under the archway, down the steps, through the passage where the blind man stands, to the Embankment. A cold November sun glinted on the Thames. I stopped to contemplate His Majesty's Ship President, that stationary barque where city clerks of a seafaring bent do physical jerks in the evenings as Naval Volunteers. How many generations of office boys have woven their dreams about the President, wished that it would suddenly leave its moorings and take them with it, far away to a world of spacious skies and sunny strands.
Then I went on, across Blackfriars Bridge, bound for Dover. The London Docks never occurred to me, so hamstrung is the mind of a London boy; he may work for years alongside the Thames at Blackfriars and never know where are the docks or how to get to them, never see the steamers white and gold but only dull barges trailing behind puffing tugs. Dover was the place for a boy who meant to run away to sea. Running away to sea was a brave, flashing jewel that I had long kept in a private casket at the back of my mind. But now that the moment had come I found that it was not easy. How did you run away to sea? I did not know. At last the word 'Dover' suggested itself. It had a salty tang; the Dover Road was a romantic place, a good approach to so great an undertaking, with a sinister inn where strange adventures, as I remembered from a breathless evening at the Lyceum, had befallen Henry Irving. At Dover would be ships.
So Dover it was. I knew that it lay vaguely somewhere south-east of London, so I tacked to port at the end of Blackfriars Bridge and set my course for Southwark and the Old Kent Road. I had but a few pence. A pawnbroker in a side street gave me three shillings for my overcoat. In brown suit, shiny starched collar and bowler hat I plodded on. Greenwich already reeked of the sea and boasted of Nelson; my spirits rose and I greeted Greenwich as one seafaring man greeting another. My feelings were mingled, of awe at what I had done, elation at finding myself bound for Dover when I should have been licking stamps, and trepidation about the future. At Crayford dusk and a drizzle began to fall together. At Dartford I found a Sailors' and Soldiers' Home and a pretty girl in charge of it, whose friendliness would have enchanted me a few years later but now embarrassed me when I only wanted to avoid notice. She gave me supper for a few pence, smoothed the sheet and thin coverlet on a plank bed that cost another sixpence, and in the morning sped me on my way with hot coffee and a quick hug with one arm. She asked no questions.
The Dover Road belied its promise. Coming through Rochester I asked a burly cheerful policeman where it was, and regretted this immediately when he asked me what I was about. My trousers were muddied half-way to the knee, the bowler hat was turning soft with the rain. The feeling of guilt that had always accompanied me since the incident of the toy cannon overwhelmed me and I went scarlet as I told him 'I'm on a walking tour'. 'In those clothes' he said ironically. Then he pointed the way, turned on his heel and without another word went on his business. I continued on mine. The Dover Road lay glistening and grey between muddy brown fields. I was cold and wet. In Maidstone I spent my last few pence on biscuits and chocolate. The daylight began to fail and I had to find somewhere to sleep. I passed through the town and on the farther side came to a row of half-built houses, the twins of those I had left behind me in Brondesbury. On the plank flooring of a doorless and windowless backroom I tried to sleep. I grew colder and colder and ached in every joint. I didn't sleep a wink. Shivering, thirsty and hungry, I got up when I thought dawn must be near and started off again for Canterbury. By the afternoon I had shot my bolt. Dover seemed far off and uncertain, night was again at hand: I had eaten hardly any thing that day and saw no prospect of finding a place to sleep. I turned back. London had beaten me. I trudged back through the night and the next day and came into London on the next evening. I came through Poplar, with its crowded Jewish streets and smelly naphtha flares, and here, one of the meanest places in London, a grand Guardee officer came striding towards and past me - scarlet and blue, tall bearskin on his head, sword and gold braid. An unusual sight anywhere in England, where officers in uniform are only seen in barracks or in processions, but stranger still in dingy Poplar.
I forgot that I was hungry and cold and miserable and tasted glory for a moment, as most boys do when they see a uniform. I knew him. He was a Jew. Somewhere in Hampstead existed at that time a thing called a cadet battalion - somehow I had come to belong to it. Its members, embryonic week-end soldiers, were boys under sixteen. They had rifles, red coats, and even -- sheer bliss -- busbies. Mine were lying at home now, as I came through Poplar. We had two Jewish officers, both bespectacled, one very tall and thin, one short and plump. I had met the tall and thin one, on his homeward way from some parade. What stirred this martial enthusiasm in them? England's need? The title of Lieutenant? The thought of a uniform almost as grand as that of a Guards officer and procurable cheaply from cousin Moss in Covent Garden? Who knows. I knew many Jews later, in the war, and they were neither better nor worse, braver nor less brave than the others.
I crept through the city, along Oxford Street and Edgware Road, came to a Brondesbury deserted by all save marauding cats, let myself in with my latchkey and was found dead asleep the next morning by my father, who had spent some harassing days. Next day the stamp-sticking began again. For a time I was regarded with the respect due to a near-runaway and reproofs became fewer. I still regret that I had not the gumption to complete that adventure.
The routine of boredom was resumed. The same trivial tasks presented themselves at the same times, like parts on a moving belt in a factory. I lived for the evenings and Saturday afternoons - less for Sundays, which I had come to connect with compulsory church going, raindrops trickling down window panes, and the most mournful sound I know - that of a barrel-organ in a London suburban street.
But the evenings were different. I courted death by my bicycle dashes from the Strand to Brondesbury. I finished work at six, and by seven I reckoned to have reached home, swallowed a cup of tea, changed into flannels, and continued my journey to Willesden, where behind a gaunt black fence was a large field where many men played cricket. In the height of the summer, and failing rain, you could count on two hours of daylight and here, as long as a man could see the ball, I stood, for the most part vainly waiting for it to come to me. I had then an unquestioning and impressionable mind and had acquired a fervent belief in the paramountcy among sports of this grim game, which sometimes remains unfinished after three days of languid combat. To be critical about cricket was then to show yourself a heretic, but no methodical effort to produce good cricketers was ever made. Athletics were a closed book at the schools I went to, and in many of the Continental cities I have since come to know I have envied the unmoneyed young men their opportunities for developing their bodies and learning to run, jump and swim.
In the winter you went to the pictures or the Kilburn Empire. The pictures offered darkness and armchairs made in pairs, so that no dead upholstered arm intervened between yourself and the girl you took with you; you watched Mary Pickford go with the jerky movements of a robot to some romantic tryst and ate chocolates at 71/2d. a quarter-pound.
At the Kilburn Empire you booked a front seat in the circle at 1s. 3d., and set out soon after supper time, freshly washed and brushed, with a pleasurable feeling of anticipation to attend the second house. In the circle you were a gentleman; Ethiopia was hardly more remote or more unknown to you than the gallery. George Robey cocked a knowing eye and sang 'Swish' while the well-bred among the audience told each other confidentially that he was an Oxford man. Harry Champion hit the bull's-eye of British humour by singing about boiled beef and carrots. Charlie Chaplin as the drunken swell fell out of his stage-box in the Mumming Birds' stage-on-a-stage sketch.
The audience applauded everything: I never remember disapproval. A Hebrew comedian, who caricatured the most marked facial and other characteristics of the Jews, was enthusiastically received; so was the gentle and magnanimous Jew in 'Only a Jew' who triumphed over his Gentile adversary in a stupendous life-and-death struggle in which the two threw lamps, chairs and practically everything else on the stage at each other. Manly or patriotic sentiments, lustily sung, were enough to gain applause that genius might often have envied. A large man in a red shirt, riding breeches and sombrero, a simple soul from the great open spaces, regularly brought down the house by singing this verse:
My father was a white manAnother, a retired colonel who in retirement could not break himself of the habit of wearing his regimental mess kit, came on the stage accompanied by two ladies who from the circle passed easily as his nieces and moved a 1912 audience, to whom King George was practically unknown, almost to tears with this refrain:
Who bore an honoured name,
My mother was a paleface
Whose life was without shame:
I never will disgrace them,
Temptation I'll defy,
I'll always be a white man,
A white man till I die-hie.
God save the King!'I liked it as much as any of them. I felt a better man afterwards. When the war came, and I took the first opportunity to show my khaki in a stall at the Kilburn Empire, I felt I had never heard nobler sentiments than these, sung by a large blonde in a pink dress:
Can't you hear them shouting,
Can't you hear them shouting
As the King goes by
'God save the King!'
That's the song they sing.
'Long live the King!'
Is the nation's loving cry.
We don't want to lose youTo which my same self ten years later would have answered gently but firmly. 'Sez you.'
But we think you ought to go,
For your King and your Country
Both need you so.
We shall want you and miss you,
But with all our might and main
We shall hug you, squeeze you, kiss you,
When you come back again.
King Edward died and the tolling of bells in the early morning, as I was dressing for the office, brought tears to my father's eyes, although I had never deemed him to be deeply patriotic. I watched the funeral. Down the Edgware Road came the music of Chopin's funeral march, then slow-stepping guardsmen and then, between the comic metal helmets of an English county regiment, I saw the coffin go past, and the kings follow it. King George, then little known, looking cold and pinched; Kaiser Wilhelm, upright and self-conscious, glancing or glaring about him; King Alfonso, with his pendulous Habsburg lower lip and slouched shoulders and his cocked hat on the back of his head.
I stayed up all night to make sure of a front place on the kerbstone in Whitehall for the Coronation and then was driven away by the police just before the procession began, so that in the end I only got glimpses of it between masses of other people's heads by straining my tiptoes to the utmost. But I saw, for the first time, Edward Prince of Wales, pink and boyish in his coronation robes, with his brothers and sister all crammed into the same lumbering gala coach.
Life was a gloomy corridor that began in Brondesbury and ended in the Strand and had no exits, only an occasional tiny window through which came a glimpse of a wider world. I did not grow much after I was thirteen; days spent in dark and stuffy storerooms and snatched meals of hamrolls and chocolate cream saw to that. At Easter and Whitsun I put metal clips round my trouser ankles and pedalled hard in search of quiet meadows, streams to bathe in, shady groves. I never found them, and innumerable boards warning me that I should be prosecuted if I trespassed made me feel guilty to look for them. Once a year I had a fortnight's holiday and sometimes went to Hove, which, like a lady who has married beneath herself, averts a shuddering face from her lusty plebeian spouse, Brighton. At Hove my grandfather, for some reason hidden from me, lived in a big house with many servants and a marvellous garden. Across the garden wall came the sharp clipped report of bat meeting ball, for here Sussex County had their home. With awe I heard that my father had once played for the Gentlemen of Sussex. A curtain was lifted, and I peeped for a moment into a finer and brighter world, as I did too when my mother, who set much store by such things, told me of a kinsman, so distant that he seemed enchanted, who had achieved a Jamaican judgeship and of another who as a Catholic Bishop had blessed the body of the Prince Imperial - that Prince who may or may not have had the blood of the Bonapartes in his veins, and was killed in the Zulu war.
I sometimes called on my grandfather, in awe and trepidation, for he was a daunting figure with his bald head and mutton chop whiskers. He was normally irritable, lived to be nearly eighty, and in his last years was furious when a doctor, telling him that these now were numbered, sought to console him with the remark 'After all, you've had a pretty good innings'. From that moment the sound of the cricket balls, coming over the garden wall, must have had a sinister ring for him. He had lived for many years in Hove, where he was long an alderman and he must have been a man of progressive mind, for I was proudly told that he was responsible for the bandstand on the front and even for the Hove lawns, a modest green carpet laid down in his time between the gaunt Georgian terraces and the knobbly beach. Some time before the war he died and my respect for him, the worthy representative of a long line of prosperous west-country lawyers, increased in death as I read in the 'Wills' column of the Daily Mail that he had left a large fortune. I showed the cutting with pride to my fellow office boys in the publishing house and my stock with them rose steeply. Such is the power of reflected glory, for not a penny of the many thousands trickled through to my family, far less to me, until twenty-five years later, when the death of an aunt brought a very modest legacy.
After five years a first modest bid for freedom was successful. In 1914 I became a junior clerk in Lloyds Bank. I earned nearly a pound a week and after a few months I was to have thirty shillings. I had begun to climb the social ladder, several rungs of which lay between office-boy and bank clerk. Vistas undreamed of opened to me. I could now aspire to play bank cricket, which meant a great field unshared by other teams, your name in obscure corners of the newspapers, a pavilion to change in and an exquisite though tormenting walk from the pavilion to the wicket, a blazer in mauve and green which had only the drawback of resembling too closely the colours vaunted by Mrs. Pankhurst and her suffragettes.
Still moving up the social ladder, I became a Saturday afternoon soldier as a private in the Artists' Rifles. This was one of those military formations, apparently peculiar to England, reserved to persons of superior social standing. I am still not sure how I came to get in, since the unwritten law was that the recruit should have a public school education, and the man without this advantage who found himself in a company of others from the public schools in pre-war England usually felt like one of Bateman's subjects, the Guardsman who dropped his rifle on parade, or something of that sort. The cult of the public school fetish was at its height and I had absorbed a real veneration for this superior class from reading this sort of statement: 'The British private soldier will follow a public school man into hell but not a ranker wallah.'
Later, in the war, I remember an officer of foreign extraction, who had acquired an English name at its outbreak, who was wont to expatiate on the merits of a public school upbringing with tears in his eyes. I do not think he liked me much, and thought he indicated the reason when one winter's day, while we were digging reserve trenches in France, he asked me pointedly before the others what school I had been to. And another time, when we were in billets in a bleak Flanders village, he called me aside and strongly reproved me for going about with a drummer. The bandsmen were hired men and proletarians.
However, my fellow Artists were good enough to me, and thankfully I went shooting and marching with them on Saturdays. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been murdered at Serajevo and the summer was full of rumours of war. So the Artists were all agog when, on the first Saturday in August, they and all England's volunteer soldiers set out for their yearly fortnight's training in camp. I was nineteen and I hoped against hope that war would come as we detrained at Salisbury Plain. I had nothing against Germany. I had only known four Germans in my life. They lived at a boarding-house near my home in Brondesbury and on summer evenings in 1913 and 1914 they used to stand at the garden gate and talk with me and my friends of the war that was coming, of the way that Germany was going to pulverize England, of the secret things that Germany had in store for that great day. We neither took this talk seriously nor amiss nor gave it a second thought.
But now, as I sang 'Who were you with last night?' lustily with Artists, London Scots and others in a great marquee at Salisbury, I longed for war. It would mean that I should not have to go back to the bank, that this glorious fortnight would be indefinitely prolonged, that I should see foreign countries. Brought up on pictures of dying soldiers pressing the folds of a Union jack to their lips and exclaiming 'England, my England', I had no idea what war meant. To me it spelt freedom.
The sun went down in a blaze of red that I shall never forget and as I lay trying to sleep on the unaccustomed ground the noise of a motor car broke the stillness of the night. It grew louder and louder, chugged into the camp, and stopped.
'War', I thought. It was. Next day we trained back to town, went home for a few hours to pay farewells and then set out again for mobilization and an unknown future. A soldier on active service, I turned out of the garden gate of the little house in Brondesbury, one of the thousands that stretch in endless facsimile in those streets. I never saw it again. I had packed my pack as foursquare as I could get it, and from one end of it hung and clattered an enamel mug which would not go in but was essential, as my instructions told me, to a campaigning soldier. My sister, a child of fifteen with her hair in two stiff plaits, came bareheaded with me as far as the corner. When I next saw her she was a married woman. At the hardware store there we parted and I turned down the Kilburn High Road for the last time.
The corridor had opened. I lay for a week on the hard boards of a schoolroom floor in St. Pancras and drilled in the asphalt playground; I toiled over Hampstead Heath and slept in alcoves at Lord's Cricket Ground built originally for the hungry relatives of Etonians and Harrovians; I stood guard at the Tower of London, and I rushed about fields at Bricket Wood at intervals falling on my stomach and dispatching with unerring aim hordes of imaginary Germans who offered themselves as targets at a distance not too near to be unpleasant nor too far to make marksmanship difficult. In the war no attacks of this kind were made; and I only once saw a German who gave me a chance of a potshot.
One October afternoon, as we were drilling in the fields, a motor cycle came up the lane at speed and stopped alongside. 'France', I thought. A few hours later I was handing a postcard for my parents to a man on a London suburban railway station in the few moments that our train stopped there.
That night I stood for the first time on a ship - my imagination afire. It was a cattleboat and I stood in the prow as it moved down Southampton Water. The night was dark, no lights were shown, the shore was a shapeless mass a little darker than the night itself. Suddenly a searchlight struck across the water, like a magician's wand, and turned the little steamer, with its dungy smell, into a dazzling white barque, filled with statuesque knightly figures that looked silently at the land they were leaving, some for the first, many for the last time. Then the white ship slipped through the beam and was lost in the darkness beyond.
The Artists marched to an open place and there, self-conscious under the measuring gaze of the townsfolk, piled arms, a trying operation for inexpert spare-time soldiers; seldom are the tripods of rifles assembled without some of them suddenly crashing to pieces. Then we stood about and stood about. The officers walked up and down. Nothing happened. We had not breakfasted and were hungry. A fellow Londoner and myself sidled off to a grocer's shop a few yards away. We found that we had learnt French perfectly at school. 'Des sardines. Des biscuits. Du chocolat.' It was easy. Our pockets full we left the shop and found that the Artists had gone to the war. They had vanished. Our rifles and packs had vanished with them.
Now our French failed us. The townsfolk met the panic-stricken inquiries of two youths in khaki with tranquil incomprehension. We rushed through the streets at random. By the grace of God we came on the battalion tramping to the station. We fell into the ranks, struggled frenziedly like Laocoon with the serpentine coils of our webbing equipment, seized our rifles from cursing comrades. At the station, the crushing obloquy of the company commander fell upon us, already scarlet with heat and guilt. We were on active service now, he thundered. Did we know what crime we had committed? Desertion on active service! Did we know the penalty for that?
Good God, we thought, is he going to have us shot before we have been half an hour in France? The horrors of war rose vividly before our eyes. Chastened we filed with the others into the cattletrucks that are made to carry forty men or ten horses, and these rumbled off slowly towards Flanders.
We marched and drilled in Flanders fields, the towers of Bailleul dominating our daily life, while a pom-pom spat futile puffs of white smoke at the first frail German aeroplanes, and these dropped their first futile jampot bombs that made little holes in ploughed fields. Twenty-two years later hundreds of Abyssinians and Spaniards and Chinese were being killed by a single bomb.
We slept in lofts and granaries and greenhouses, while east-ward shell-fire grumbled intermittently through the night. We turned out sleepily for a rush to the front when it swelled to a continuous roar and went back to bed again when it dwindled.
We went up over the frozen Lys to Armentières and into the trenches, whose inhabitants, the survivors of the first British army that went to France, looked like bears in their shaggy goatskin coats. I slept soundly in a little dugout built mainly of ten-pound tins of corned beef. Hardly a shot disturbed the quiet. We came out, and in a chilly December dawn Pigeon Rust, the company sergeant-major, stripped to the skin in a Flanders courtyard and took a bath in a bucket of cold water.
One by one the Artists disappeared, to officer depleted front line battalions. Men who had marched beside us one day vanished and we saw them the next with the star on their shoulders, or read their names under 'Officers killed' in the casualty lists. Drafts from home replenished the battalion strength, and we were withdrawn to St. Omer, British headquarters. Here we spat and polished, paraded in the Grand' Place each morning, and marched off in separate guards to give the approaches to the town that protection which its dignity as the seat of British headquarters demanded. I was a lance-corporal with one stripe, and no colonel ever led his battalion more proudly than I marched behind my three good men and true.
For many months we watched the roads, railways and canals entering the town. If a German regiment or a car full of German officers had tried to enter St. Omer we should have been ready for them, but none ever did, and if any German agents came to St. Omer they presumably used the great open spaces between the carefully guarded means of obvious approach. So diversions were rare in these long watches.
Once an elderly officer with a muffler concealing his tabs came out of the town for a stroll along the poplar-lined canal path, asked me what I did in civil life, and other things, and went his way without showing the requisite pass. I demanded it again, and his companion, a tall and handsome staff officer, turned back and said, 'Don't you know who that is? It's Sir John French'. This was Major Fitzgerald, who went down with Kitchener in the Hampshire.
Well, I thought, the Commander-in-Chief ought to be the first man to comply with orders. Yet I did not feel equal to arresting the Commander-in-Chief. So they went down the path under the poplars and a moment later another man, in a quasi-military uniform, came through the guard. This was the detective whose duty was to follow Sir John French, but whom Sir John French could not bear to see. He pursued his charge like a deer-stalker, stealing from poplar to poplar in his efforts to remain unseen. Soon afterwards this curious procession returned, saluted with presented arms by the entire guard.
Another figure came down the path under the poplars, running. A slight boyish figure with a pink face, thin putteed legs beneath guardee knickerbockers, jog, jog, jogging along the bridle path. For the second time I saw the Prince of Wales. With that excess of zeal which Talleyrand rightly deprecated, I turned out the guard and presented arms. The runner changed his trot to a walk and saluted, but an unfriendly look from the Royal eye, as I thought, travelled across the moss-covered sluice gates.
The elderly French reservists who shared the watch with us looked after him, shrugged incomprehending shoulders, and when their relief arrived related what they had seen with fluent gestures, caricaturing the action of the runner's legs and arms with movements that the baggy red trousers and shapeless blue coats made doubly grotesque.
Kitchener came, and Millerand, and I lay on a hillock under a blazing sun and watched as they inspected the Brigade of Guards, drawn up on a plateau above St. Omer. In the immobile phalanx of rigid men some detail jarred, like a missing rail in a fence, and my eye roved about until I found what it was: a Guards officer saluting with his left hand because his right arm was missing.
The eastward wind brought the grumble of the guns, and troops continuously passed through to the front; but I sunned myself on the terrace of the café in the Grand' Place, held Georgette's hand in the estaminet, and when I drew my occasional ten francs hired one of the boats in which the peasants brought the vegetables to markets, and propelled it with a spade-headed pole along rush-lined canals and waterways. With Baby Allen and Frank Reynolds I found an idyllic retreat, a patch of lush grass, rush screened, at a place where the water widened and was clear, and we bathed naked, scandalizing some peasant women who came by in a boat. They did not see another full summer, Allen, lively as a cricket, and Reynolds, a dreamer.
My turn came. I found myself, as the walnuts ripened, in a restful chateau, learning to be an officer. I learned to read the stars, to find my way by compass at night, to make a sketch-plan of the countryside, and other things that I was glad to know but found no use for in that war. As a promising pupil, I commanded my fellow cadets on a Cook's tour to the trenches, at Hooge. We came at an unhealthy moment. I shared a trench bay with a private of the Worcestershires, an old soldier, steady, grizzled, resigned. Wrapped in a blanket, I lay on the fire-step while heavy shelling rocked the trench, splashed dirt in my face, grazed my nose with a tiny fragment of metal.
The old soldier told me not to be afraid. I was not, very much. I was still master of my nerves, and ready to lie there without flinching until a howitzer shell fell on me, although this would not have helped the British Empire. If you are young, in good health and have not been much bombarded, steadiness under fire is not difficult; but I admire those men, like my old soldier companion, who know what a bombardment is and does and still remain master of themselves.
In the next bay was a machine-gunner. He was at the end of his nerves and shivered as if with ague. He survived that night, at all events. And next evening I led my first command back to the quiet chateau. I was still dead asleep when the Commandant, who feared we had had heavy casualties in the liveliness at the front, cantered round for information; and again I suffered heavy rebuke. I always had an unfortunate talent for antagonizing senior officers.
At last I pinned the gold stars on my shoulders, buckled a leather belt around my rough private soldier's jacket, and, with Allen and Reynolds, found myself travelling by Pullman Car to London, surrounded by fellow officers whom my arm still itched to salute. We were second lieutenants in the Sherwood Foresters. What memories of Robin Hood led me to pick that name from the list of regiments? Anyway, I chose it, and the others followed suit. We belonged to that between-decks class which England had devised in her hour of need, and for which she simultaneously found the name of temporary gentlemen. 'Gentleman' and 'of independent means,' as Karl Silex remarked in his study of England through German eyes, are in England interchangeable terms. I had £50 to buy myself a uniform, more money than I had ever had, and I revelled in spending it. I lolled in a stall at the Hippodrome, the chorus girls tripped along a gangway built over the stalls, and I recognized in one a demure neighbour from Brondesbury. I became acquainted with a stage-door and she saw me off when the train for the front left Victoria.
At the head of our Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire miners Allen, Reynolds and I trudged along the muddy road from Poperinghe to Ypres, where the gaunt ruin of the Cloth Hall reared itself against grey Flanders skies. We went to the trenches; we stayed four days; we returned to billets. Trenches, billets, trenches, billets, all through the winter and spring of 1915 and 1916, and we never saw a German. Our men were undersized, bow-legged, dour, cynical, the underfed heirs of England's era of greatest prosperity, the slaves of Old King Coal; they had the hearts of lions, never showed emotion and would stand any hardship, but bitterness was deep within them, and why not?
I took them out into No Man's Land to repair barbed wire and as heavy shelling blew neighbouring trenches into the air they only remarked nonchalantly, 'Thank God we've got a navy'.
I took them on carrying parties and from the wings of the salient machine-gun bullets came hissing between us like flying snakes, one of them hitting the man before me in the thigh, so that he staggered off on one stiff leg exclaiming, 'Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!' collapsed and was carried away. 'Worth a quid!' said Private Redfern calmly, looking after him. 'Worth ten', tranquilly answered Private Cooke.
I led them on a pitch dark night back from the trenches across shell-riddled ground calf-deep in mud and water, came to a ditch, felt gingerly with my foot and discovered a plank over which I safely passed, calling over my shoulder, 'Plank here, Sergeant Grundy'. Followed a loud splash in the darkness, floundering sounds, and the sergeant's voice urbanely remarking, 'It must have been a very thin 'un, sir'.
Tenderly, but without emotion, they watched round Private Redfern as he lay from dawn to dusk in a snowbound trench with a bullet hole between the eyes, moaning faintly.
With exclamations of shocked propriety, but otherwise unmoved, they regarded Private Hopkins of the Duke of Cornwall's, whose friends had forgotten to bury him. All that remained was head and shoulders, with outflung arms, and his feet, in their boots, near by. He was a good-looking lad, his eyes were open and calm, and the wind played with his hair as if he were alive. That he should be left like that scandalized the Foresters, and they quickly put him in a sandbag.
They made ribald jokes about Private Connolly, who having taken a large piece of shell in his behind plunged for cover into a flimsy makeshift shelter of corrugated iron, leaving only the scat of the trouble to protrude into the trench for attention by the stretcher-bearers.
I loved it. I loved the men and admired the officers. I loved the star on my shoulder, my revolver, my orderly, the officers' mess. No Germans bore down on me with bayonets, no heavy bombardment came my way in these nine months in the trenches. Bullets hit the man on my right and him on my left. Shrapnel burst almost in my ear, but not a drop of the rain of pellets touched me. A shell dropped beside me but politely did not explode.
These things are the small change of warfare. Charging into a curtain of machine-gun fire, standing still under a barrage: these are the real tests of a man's nerve, and I was spared them.
Still immature and romantic, the moments of fright were not yet enough to outweigh my delight in my commission, in the stupendous drama all about me. I gave little thought to the outcome of the war. It seemed likely to last a long while, and that suited me, as I pottered about the trenches in front of Ypres.
Once, peeping over the parapet, I actually saw a German. Perhaps his trench was fallen in or flooded. He calmly climbed out of it, walked a few yards silhouetted giant-like against the sky, and disappeared, just as I squeezed the trigger.
At night I went out into No Man's Land to inspect a two-man patrol and found them crouching behind a tree stump. They had just seen a German patrol stroll calmly past, they said. 'Why didn't you shoot them?' I asked. They were at a loss for an answer. Live and let live seemed to be their motto. Soldiers on both sides at that time, knowing that local exploits in that interminable muddy line of deadlocked armies could only be as the fleabite to the elephant, did not gratuitously annoy each other. This was remarked far, far back at Headquarters, and though it did not lead to any brilliant strategic scheme for a smashing break through, it possibly produced the multigraphed list of questions which junior officers in the front line were recommended to ask themselves, beginning with 'Am I offensive enough?'
Colonel Hobbs came plodding across the shell-pitted ground in the dusk to inspect the front line, an almost biblical figure with shepherdlike staff, long waterproof cape and steel helmet. His underlip was long and pendulous, his mouth open, his eyes were as empty of emotion under fire as at the head of the mess table, with the port at his left hand. He was a little deaf, and could only be startled when a shell, arriving unheard, burst close to him; that rippled the surface even of his self-mastery and made him jump.
He led us once up the Ypres road, through Flamertinghe, into which gigantic shells were falling from the great Austrian siege howitzers. It was like a walk to the electric chair. The concentrated gaze of six hundred Sherwood Foresters was fixed on Flamertinghe, visible from afar off, as the centipede that was the battalion drew near on leaden feet. The regular timing of the explosions showed that a 15-inch shell would fall while the battalion was passing through Flamertinghe. If it fell plumb on the battalion practically nothing would remain over. We could well have been halted until a shell fell and then passed through.
The colonel, erect and imperturbable, rode on as if going to the meet. Dotted lines from six hundred pairs of eyes led to the village ahead. The leading platoon, headed by myself, reached the village, entered, had nearly traversed it when an express train took wings and flew towards us. Nearly a ton of explosive-laden metal came rushing through the air. We marched on, outwardly unmoved. A loud earthquake happened near at hand, followed by a dead silence and then the patter-smack-crash of shell fragments, bricks, tiles and other debris deluging the battalion. Brickbats knocked off the colonel's helmet, sent his charger rearing and prancing, but he only cocked an eye over his shoulder and coldly surveyed a ragged battalion, most of which had in the last shattering moment ducked for cover. The cold, compelling glance was effective; quickly the broken ranks closed and resumed the march. The shell had fallen behind some houses. Only a few men had been killed, at the rear, where the stretcher-bearers were busy. We went on.
I sat with Crosbie in a dugout and secretly revered him. He had a dark, handsome, sensitive face, like a Gascon; young in years, but a veteran of the war. Outside in the trench our mess cook and our orderlies squatted and cooked the midday hash. One of those sudden shells arrived that explode simultaneously with the noise of their approach; whiz-bang. The dugout rocked. We ran out. One orderly had got a blighty -- a wound not serious, but enough to take him to England -- and he was going to England as fast as he could. We saw only his head, travelling rapidly along the zigzag trench leading to the rear. The cook, bleeding from several wounds, lay on his back, Crosbie gently telling him to lie still. Whiz-bang, whiz-bang, whiz-bang. In such a moment you are convinced that the next shell will explode in the same place as the last, but Crosbie was cool and detached. Whiz-bang, whiz-bang, whiz-bang. Three more, all around us, and then another three, and debris deluging down on us. At last the stretcher-bearers came and got the cook away, Crosbie went calmly back to the ramshackle dug-out, I strolled to another part of the trench.
Spring came, and early summer, and we went back to Calais for a rest. After the quiet months the summer storm on the Somme was brewing, and we were to be fattened for the sacrifice. I lived for the day. I rode horseback along the sands and bathed in the sea. Seeking safety in numbers, we made the inevitable sight-seeing tour of the houses of pleasure. Rows of chemised ladies paraded before us for our inspection and postured before us in attitudes enticing or coy. We bought them drinks, they sat on our knees, we gave them twenty francs and went in search of more exclusive company.
A fortnight, gloriously begun, less gloriously ended. Turning a reluctant back on the pleasures of Calais, I marched with the battalion through a ripening June-time countryside to Picardy. Golden fields and shady orchards called to us, but we tramped on and on, left-right, left-right, fifty minutes at a time and ten minutes' halt, while the gunfire grew louder in the distance and the fertile countryside gave way to a land trodden and ridden brown by swarming English armies assembling for the great offensive.
The Somme lay before us. The Somme. None of us then knew what that one word contained in blood and suffering. Many of us were sceptical; others itched to be at the enemy after long months of inactivity. The flower of British manhood remained there, mown down by an enemy still unreached, unseen. For weeks on end British divisions were flung head-on against prepared defensive positions of enormous strength. Snug in deep concrete dugouts the Germans waited till the barrage lifted, then came up and knocked the khaki skittles down with their machine-guns. After the slaughter the British armies had nibbled a small dent in the impregnable German line.
The 2nd Sherwoods went the way that all flesh went on the Somme. One morning they stood with thumping hearts, the Colonel, Baby Allen, Frank Reynolds and the others, looking at their synchronized wrist watches, and the men with their bayoneted rifles looking at them, and then they were up and away over the trench ladders, and the next moment they were no more.
But I was not with them. I was up above. Just before that day I was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. I packed my valise, hiked backwards from the trenches, and while the drum-fire pulverized the tortured fields around the Somme I rode above the smoke and din in an aeroplane, map-marked the fall of shells and the position of troops, tapped messages on a wire less transmitter, and anxiously scanned the sky for the swooping Immelmann or Boelcke. I was an observer, and proudly wore the feathered 0.
I had a grand life. Number Nine Squadron lay against a wood that sloped down to the Somme. We bathed in it, and in the great mess marquee ate abundantly of apricots and greengages. We paid flying visits to Amiens. I gazed in respectful awe at my new companions; Leman who had been schooled by the self-same dominie who thrashed me about the toy cannon, the lion-hearted South African Scaife and his Suffolk pilot Coller, the dour Macdonald in his neat tartan riding breeches, Hollinghurst who had left a thumb in Gallipoli, the wealthy Australian Bell and others, many soon to be killed. Only three years before I had stopped kicking a football about somewhere at Golders Green and gazed spellbound at the first aeroplane I had ever seen. I had longed to fly. Now I sat among flying men and was one of them. It was sheer bliss.
We flew BE2C's. The observer sat between the pilot and the engine, surrounded by struts and stays and cross-bracing wires. He had around him several metal pegs and was supposed in the heat of combat, while the machine dived and banked, to fight off the enemy by transferring his machine-gun from the one to the other and then firing through the small apertures left by the struts and wires. It was like fighting from an animated parrot's cage. I was never attacked by a German aeroplane in a BE2C. I was not meant to be killed in that war.
July passed, and August, and September came and brought rumours of mysterious new machines that were to be let loose against the enemy on September 15th. Tanks! I travelled daily overhead and watched British infantry wrest a few yards of trench here, a few yards there, round Ginchy, Guillemont and Falfemont Farm. Sometimes on summer evenings we cruised high up in a peaceful blue vault and looked down on fifty miles of front from Arras to Soissons. The guns would bark and counterbark angrily at each other, their innumerable flashes answering each other like heliographs and growing more brilliant as the dusk neared, the noise of the bombardment making our aeroplane vibrate and the passage of shells through the air, which we sometimes saw, causing it violently to oscillate. Or we would fly in a morning mist, so thick that we could only see what lay straight beneath us, and we had to fly so low that we could almost see the features of the men in the trenches.
Such a morning was that of September 11th. We flew lower and lower, Hollinghurst with his thumbless hand on the joystick, I staring at the trenches until my eyes nearly started out of my head to see whether the troops at Guillemont had gained another yard or two of trench during the night. I think they were Guards. They had advanced a little and were trying to secure themselves in their newly won ground. Here an officer waved a white paper to me, and I made a dot on my trench map, there a green flare was lit, there a signal given with a pocket-torch, but from there came machine-gun fire. So we circled round and round, lower and lower, trying to plot the line to the last remnant of trench and shell-hole.
Afterwards I remembered hearing the shot that hit me. Not one of a thousand machine-gun bullets sprayed at random into the blue, but a lucky potshot. That German could not have done it again in a hundred years.
I was hit where you would expect to be hit if you were sitting down and being fired at from below. Nothing I had ever read or imagined about being wounded had prepared me for that terrific blow. I seemed to shoot out of the aeroplane and fall back again. Who did that, I thought, looking round vaguely for my assailant. Then I remembered that I was in an aeroplane, felt the blood streaming over my leg, and slumped into my seat. I heard Hollinghurst shouting 'Are you hit?' and nodded drowsily. 'Are you bad' he howled, above the noise of the engine, 'or can you wait until we get back to the aerodrome?' But I was not equal to more than a plain nod or shake. I wanted to go home immediately, without any argument. So I stayed still and he, like a sportsman, brought the machine down behind the trenches among barbed wire and shell-holes, at the risk of his own life, and at the cost of the aeroplane. I tumbled out somehow, and somebody gave me a cigarette that tasted like brown paper. Somebody else cut my leather coat off me. Twenty years later to a day I opened an old tin trunk in Vienna, found that coat with the bullet hole and the dried blood, had it patched and used it for driving about, and very useful it was, being lined with fleece, and in the depth of a Vienna winter an ordinary English overcoat leaves you cold. One morning when Brenda Mary was cold, going skating, I wrapped her in it, and she was beautifully warm.
Then I was bumped along in an ambulance, I lay on 'a stretcher in some clearing station, where a man shouted repeatedly, 'Oh my God, Oh my God!' and people with bullets in the guts and in the head and no arms and no legs were carried in and out without pause, and a cheery nurse, a grand girl, brought me a glass of milk and said breezily, 'Don't look so sorry for yourself'. If there were any justice in this world, I thought, she would be shot in the behind immediately. Then a train, where the major suddenly materialized and said 'Goodbye' to me; a long, long journey, and a big hospital with a fat surgeon, of whom I asked, 'Is it bad?' and he said, 'Well, it's not very nice'.
They cut me open, beginning where the bullet went in and going on, apparently, until hope failed, so that I must have looked like a large rumpsteak. Later, X-rays showed the bullet in my back, the tip just not touching the junction of the lowest rib and the spine. I woke up as they were pulling the packing out of the wound and shrieked like a banshee. I lay in bed, unable either to lie still or to move, and read the Pickwick Papers in fitful glimpses. What a book! I seemed to see the pages as through dark smoked glasses. I was at Rouen, and out of the mist around me my father suddenly materialized, thoughtfully sent over by the War Office to see me before I expired.
A hospital ship, and an elderly uniformed medico at Southampton who, without knowing what ailed me, looked at me rancorously and told his superior that I was fit to travel, apparently wishing me to John O'Groats or further. Even lying helpless and half-conscious on my back I seem to inspire antagonism in some people. But his superior overruled him, I went to London, an ambulance took me to Regent's Park, where I was removed while two servant girls watched and one remarked, 'Doesn't he look sweet', and I entered the hospital, run by Colonel and Mrs. Hall-Walker, who later became Lord and Lady Wavertree, and most lavishly cared for hundreds of wounded officers during the war.
A clever Jewish surgeon deftly hanked the bullet out of my back, I hobbled about the West End and the front at Brighton for many months, spent the £250 which my wound cost England, and in July was back in France. Eighteen years afterwards that wound suddenly opened up one day in Vienna and a splinter of pelvis emerged.
'It's a darned reliable war, always there to go back to when you're broke,' remarked Hoppy Cleaver, a new acquaintance, three times wounded, decorated, who refused to take the war seriously at any time. Number Sixteen Squadron lay on an aerodrome in sight of the ruined pitheads of Lens. The major was Portal who by now must be a big noise in the Royal Air Force; his officers then deeply respected his coolness and gift of leadership. Men from all parts of the Empire and beyond gathered round the mess table.
We flew RE8's and the observer had a clear field of fire and a rotating machine-gun mount. They were slow machines. We pottered around the trenches observing the fall of shells or we ambled gingerly across and took photographs of the enemy lines. Our casualties during the autumn and winter were few.
The opposing armies stood like wrestlers locked in an iron stranglehold, swaying no more than a few feet this way or that. Northward, at Ypres, the history of the Somme was being repeated. In the mud of Passchendaele British divisions were flung prodigally, head on, against enormously strong positions. Plodding doggedly through a quagmire, they were mown down from the concrete machine-gun posts. 'At Passchendaele you've got the choice of standing on a duckboard and being killed by a shell or getting off and being drowned,' said the British infantryman. Of what avail was gallantry without strategic inspiration? The two great British offensives on the Western front are dreary to recall. The strategic principle was that of battering your head against a wall. If Germany was to be starved out anyway, what was the purpose of this squandering of life? That offensives could be successful, even on the dead-locked Western front, the Germans proved.
In our quiet retreat west of Lens we had as little understanding for the greater picture of the war as village-folk in peace time have for great issues of international politics. Our vision was bounded by the few yards of trench and shell-hole that we patrolled. We were vaguely perturbed by the collapse of Russia, vaguely reassured by the intervention of America; operations in Italy, Salonika, Mesopotamia and elsewhere were Double Dutch.
Between flights we stood on our aerodrome and watched the war. On a lovely September evening a fast German chaser hopped unnoticed across our lines and bagged a British observation balloon tethered near by. It fell in a dissolving mass of crimson flame and black smoke. The German turned on the little white speck beneath him that was the parachute of the balloon pilot. Machine-gunning hard he dived on the helpless swinging figure, rose-coloured in the sun's last rays. If he had not paused for this he would have got away, but now, when he turned to go, two British chasers were on him. Three shining white machines, soaring, leaping, falling, charging, their tracer machine-gun bullets blazing a yellow trail, they rode about the darkening sky like silver knights jousting at each other with golden lances. They got the German down, landed near him, took him, only slightly hurt, to the nearest officers' mess and drank with him.
And once, in the full heat of the day, another German chaser sped across and destroyed five observation balloons tethered at intervals between our aerodrome and the line. The pilot of the first balloon jumped when he saw the German coming, the pilot of the second jumped when he saw the first go up in flames, the pilot of the third jumped when he saw the German machine-gunning the second, and so on. It was a valiant exploit, but it was like a Charlie Chaplin film to watch and, as nobody was going to be actually hurt, the audience on our aerodrome hooted with uncontrollable laughter. Chinese coolies working near at hand looked from us to the burning balloons with incomprehension written on their faces. Oriental passivity was not equal to this test; they were deeply perplexed men. One came running over to us and, pointing to the five holocausts, said with childish concern, 'Engliss ballon, Engliss ballon'. 'Yes', we said, still laughing, 'Engliss ballon, Engliss ballon'.
The winter came, and Christmas Day, and Eric Read, my Canadian near-namesake, and I toasted each other riotously in the mess. On Boxing Day we went up in pairs taking photographs, Douglas flying me in the first machine, Read flying his observer Donovan in the second. Slowly, fighting the wind, we drew over the lines until the pulverized pitheads of Lens lay beneath us, and the heavens seemed to crack asunder as a shell burst plumb between us. Not sure if I were still alive, I looked round and saw Read's machine fall over sideways in a slow, graceful curve. It looked like the practised art of a figure-skater; but it meant that Read was dead in his cockpit. He stiffened as he died and locked the rudder against the direction of his spin, so that his machine spiralled down slowly and crashed with a relatively light impact. Donovan, after falling 6000 feet with a dead pilot, stepped out of the wreck physically unscathed.
And Crompton and I went night-bombing, a first initiation in that art, on a dank and misty night. A hair on the head is little, a hair in the soup is much; the hairsbreadth by which our starboard wing-tip missed the dimly-seen squadron offices as we left the ground with engine all out was a great deal. Peering down the narrow funnel of relative visibility directly beneath us which was all that the mist-banks allowed us to see, we dumped our bombs when we thought we recognized an enemy landmark and turned with quaking hearts for home and a dreaded landing. Fumbling through the fog, we at last hit on the flares and Crompton throttled down to land. By this time I was the lucky survivor of several crashes due to misjudged landings. I thought we were going to overshoot the aerodrome, which we could scarcely see, and hit that squadron office. Inexcusably yielding to back-seat nerves I shouted to Crompton, 'You're going to overshoot', and so wrong was I that just then we hit the ground and overturned. The instinct of self-preservation was so strong that, though I was not belted in, I found myself, upside down, but still seated firmly on my seat, clinging on like grim death to everything I could lay hands on. Crompton lay tangled up in his belt, uttering North Country imprecations, and to get the pin out and release him was not easy with his weight bearing on it.
The Germans, skilful campaigners, quietly followed us home one night and dropped their needle-pointed, shrapnel bombs all round us, the landing flares making it easy for them. In the mess we precipitately abandoned hard-won whiskies and took a prostrate position on the floor, and the major's dog, Yace, left us at speed with a piece of bomb in the neck, to return a day or two later looking glum and embittered.
The Allies gradually won the mastery of the air. At home the Zeppelin and Gotha raids became fewer and in France our fighters brought the big German bombers down in increasing numbers of nights: one met its end over our aerodrome one starlit night, exploding like a box of fireworks. But on land the Germans were full of fight. The Russian collapse had freed masses of men and in March came the great offensive, when the Fifth British Army was rolled up and the German wave began once more to roll menacingly towards Paris.
Sixteen Squadron was sent into the air to a man and a machine. For the first time I saw something like war as the picture books show it. Instead of the lifeless lunar landscape of the trenches, masses of Germans moving forward in the open. The air was so packed with aeroplanes that sardines in comparison seemed to be lolling in luxury. The cloud ceiling was low, about 2000 feet, and in that narrow space hundreds of machines swooped and zoomed, spitting fire at each other and at the troops below.
Nickel, my Toronto pilot, dived on German troops marching along a road, machine-gunning them furiously through the airscrew, and as he turned to regain height I continued with my gun. Black anti-aircraft shells burst on all sides; and the flaming onions, green incendiary projectiles that rose as if tied together on a string, came groping towards us. Aeroplanes flashed by on all sides, friend and foe almost impossible to distinguish.
We dropped our bombs on a German battery, zoomed cloud-ward, and my heart missed a beat, for immediately above us a German fighter dropped out of the clouds. He flew the same course, his landing wheels almost touching our top plane, the black crosses almost near enough for me to touch. Here at last was the enemy, after three and a half years of war. Frantically, in the rear cockpit of the swaying, bumping, racing aeroplane, I swung my machine-gun on its rotary mount and blazed away into the brown fabric above me. It fell over, just as Read's machine had fallen over, and dropped past us, showing its stomach like a dying fish, down and down, and crashed near the railway embankment at Achiet le Grand. For the first time, in my definite knowledge, I had inflicted some damage on the enemy. We went home, inspected the bullet holes in our aeroplane, and I had a little cross, with a date against it, painted on the barrel of my machine-gun.
St. George's Day, and the British Navy, with a flicker of Nelson, dashed across the Channel and sank a couple of cruisers in the mouth of Zeebrugge Harbour to bottle up the German submarines lying in the Bruges Canal. On that same morning Nickel and I went up on patrol and were climbing from the aerodrome, about 300 feet up, when I heard a crash. I saw nothing, but knew what had happened. We had collided with another aeroplane. I felt Nickel wrenching at broken controls. I saw the sky and then the earth, and then the sky again, and the wing of the machine describing great arcs. I clung to my machine-gun mount like a drowning man. The crash seemed never to come, though the fall probably lasted no longer than a second.
Then it came, a terrific impact, and a bounce and rending wood and snapping wires and myself saying to myself, 'I'm still alive'.
Suddenly blazing petrol was everywhere and 800 rounds of machine-gun ammunition, stacked in drums around my head, exploded in staccato chorus. Bullets exploded like this do not travel, but I did not believe this as I fought to free myself from the coiling wires and wreckage; they were going off in my ear. The wires would not let me go, the rubber band that held my goggles fell away, burned through. Then suddenly I was rolling on the ground to put out my burning leather coat. I stood up and looked back at the holocaust. No sign of Nickel. I could not get within ten yards of it for the heat. I ran round, met Nickel running round to look for me. The machine-gun ammunition was still exploding. We beat a hasty retreat. A hundred yards away lay the other aeroplane.
A sergeant came running over the field, gave me a surprised look, and said, 'Oo sir, what 'ave you done to your face?' I put up my hand and fingered it. It felt funny.
It was. A few hours later it looked like a dog's dinner. The doctor put picric acid on it, and for weeks I was as yellow as a daffodil. It swelled like a football. It blistered, and the blisters peeled. Boils appeared between the blisters. My beard grew through both. Nickel and I travelled together to the base hospital. An imperturbable Australian was there, chatting about this and that while a doctor deeply probed a nasty wound in his shoulder. He happened to glance at us as our bandages were taken off. His treasured imperturbability failed him. Surprise came over his face and his mouth opened. Then he recovered himself, asked, 'What is it, boys, a touch of gas?' and resumed being a stoic.
My head swathed in bandages, with a single eye-slit, I wandered about London, from theatre to dance-club, and squandered the £200 which this damage to my face was worth to England. I expected to be disfigured for life, but the quick touch of picric acid possibly saved this. Such as it is, my face healed beautifully, I spent a June week in a Hampshire cottage lent me by a compassionate lady with a weakness for wounded officers, I sailed her dinghy up and down the Itchen, and in July I was back on the aerodrome with Sixteen Squadron.
I was weary of the war and dreaded the peace. I did not know what I should do when it came. But for the grace of God I should have become one of those men, captains all, who subsist for the rest of their lives on their war service: I saw many of them afterwards in Germany, where they actually succeeded in making themselves masters of the State. I had no qualifications, no talents, no influence. My parents lived almost in poverty. I had no public school education, and without it you feel like Little Tich among a crowd of Carneras, when you seek to muscle-in and make a place for yourself in England. The League of the Old School Tie, a solid phalanx, stands guard over the approaches to advancement and shoots strangers at sight. Few are those who get through, though the garrison usually suffers you once you are in. I had seen this bottle-neck system at work in the war itself. As Raymond Asquith wrote from the front: 'If you look at any list of honours it's always the same story. The Dukes are proved to be the bravest men of all, and after them the Marquesses.' Twenty years afterwards the same story was told in other words by Professor John Hilton of Cambridge University, when he said that the odds against a non-public schoolboy getting into one of the reserved stalls of life were one thousand to one; to get there, he said, you must have been to the right school and be entitled through life to wear the right school tie. In 1937 a distinguished churchman put the thing in a nutshell when he said, 'The first public school man was born in Nazareth, and his name was Jesus Christ; the second was his disciple, St. Paul.'
We flew about the pock-marked map that was the front, gnats biting vainly at an elephantine war. I flew with Solomon, painter, good pilot, courageous officer, Jew, and we had to delay to remedy a camera defect, so that when we crossed the line our companions had already taken their pictures and gone home, and we went over alone. On we crawled, a long way over enemy land, a lonely feeling when you are all alone, the air feels quite different on that side of the trenches, and I looked over the side and saw a pair of black crosses below us, climbing like lightning. Desperately I swung my machine-gun round and gave him a burst to starboard and another to port, as he passed beneath us. Then my gun jammed, and in another instant he was fast on our tail and stinging hard, swaying from side to side and giving us a burst each time he got us dead on his sights. The noise of a machine-gun fired point-blank is the loudest noise I know. I struggled frantically with my useless gun but the parts slipped about all over the cockpit. I curled myself up into a ball as he poured bullets into us and then quickly uncoiled myself at the thought that this might mean that one bullet would go through several things, whereas it might otherwise only make one hole. Cumbersomely Solomon heaved our heavy old RE8 from side to side, trying vainly to elude a foe as swift and sure as a swallow. I thought this martyrdom would never end, and felt sick; I had a mental vision of an observer I had seen lifted out of his cockpit on the aerodrome a little while before, his flying suit spangled with little stars of blood, so that he looked like St. Sebastian. How that German missed us I can't imagine; afterwards we found that he had shot all round us, like a knife thrower. At last, scarcely daring to believe my eyes, I saw him turn away, and looking round I saw the reason: we had reached the lines, and many of our own machines were about. Hampered by smashed controls, Solomon gingerly felt his way back to the aerodrome and managed to flop the machine down on it.
Gradually the German front weakened. American troops and munitions were pouring into France; Ludendorff, at German Imperial Headquarters, was a broken man. October came, and with new heart we flew low over the Lens coalfields and saw British soldiers waving to us from German trenches.
We got up in the dawn and machine-gunned the rearguards of the retiring German army, as they struggled over muddy fields; they were full of fight.
I was due for leave, and on a lovely autumn morning came over a hilltop to see Paris shining below me. Paris! The very word was a silver bugle call. I spent enchanted days, drank champagne, ate raspberries and cream, went to the Folies Bergères. Paris was gay, full of uniforms and pretty girls. I had never seen anything like it, and reluctantly I took the dusty road back to Camblain L'Abbé. When I got there the squadron had gone, hard on the heels of the enemy, who was now far behind Valenciennes. I chased after it and on November 10th was peering curiously down from an aeroplane cockpit on Mons, that legendary town where the war had begun for the British Army. Now Belgian civilians jubilantly waved to us black-gold-red tricolours that they had kept hidden for four years. A German aeroplane took me unawares -- I thought he was English -- and put some holes in the fabric near me before I got my gun to bear on him.
Next day the war was over. We sat in a tiny Belgian schoolroom and drank whisky immoderately. Afterwards I leaned against a farmhouse wall in the dusk, to cool my head, and watched horse-gunners going by, rain streaming from their helmets. Silence, save for the jingle-jangle, clip-clop of harness and hooves. Set jaws in the fitful light of a street lamp.
I thought of the future. The causes and effects of the war were then unclear to me, but afterwards I read and thought it over and saw that the Russians had saved us in 1914 by pressing the Germans so hard in the east that they had had to halt their drive towards Paris and the Channel ports in the west, and that the Americans in 1918 had saved us again from a German drive that otherwise we could not have withstood. I have to this day a feeling for Americans and Russians that no talk of Yanks or Reds will ever diminish.
One thing seemed clear to me on that dark and drizzling night when the war ended. For four years the Germans had ridden roughshod over Europe, laid waste other countries. Now for the first time, save for the brief East Prussian episode in 1914, the war was approaching their own country. At this very moment we had called it off and granted an armistice. An instinct told me that to leave any doubt in the German mind about a military defeat was a fatal mistake. Years afterwards, in Germany, I became sure of it.
I went to Lille and shared the unforgettable joy of a freed people. I went to Brussels, and saw the Allies march in, the Americans then surpassing all others in bearing and looks. I walked in awful boredom along the single slushy street of a tiny Belgian village and thought dismally of my future. I was consumed with impatience to be out of the army. I could have clung to my commission, and its pay, for some weeks or months, but when an icy plunge has to be taken I like to get it over. I agitated to be demobilized, was sent home and dispatched to a dreary frostbound camp near Grantham, where my fellow-officers passed demoralizing days playing billiards, while I, mutinous, took my bags down to the good George Inn, ate and drank well, took no thought for the morrow, dashed up to London to see girl friends and only looked in at the camp once a week to see if I were still a soldier. One day in March I came down the hill holding a paper which made me a civilian. The brave days were over. The world lay before me, and a grim place it looked.
I came to London, drew my officer's gratuity of several hundred pounds, had my first evening clothes made, and began an expensive round of theatres, restaurants and dance-clubs. I still had one or two friends from the army who did not know my private plight and thought that I, like they, could now look forward to piping years of peace. Invitations came. I found myself in unaccustomed country houses, privily bothered about tips and manners. With a few pounds left I lazed in June in a rose-contained garden overlooking the Needles and played tennis with a boy who was England's premier Duke.
One day in July the silver and copper coins in my pocket amounted to less than ten shillings. The future had to be faced at last.
I cannot understand now why I was so unenterprising. I could have got on a ship and gone to Malta or Capetown or Ceylon, or one of a hundred other places where an Englishman could find some work. I could have exploited my evening clothes and become a dancing partner. I could have done dozens of things. But instead, when I had no money left, I looked desperately for a clerk's job. I had a one-way mind then.
The bank was ready to take me in, but at a price that was not my price, and when I said so it made crushing remarks about young officers who would have to modify their ideas. So I walked out. Afterwards I longed to walk in again, but pride forbade. After lean and despondent weeks I found myself hired to type letters, in the French I had learned in the war, for a wine merchant, an ebullient foreigner known to all pedestrians in Piccadilly, for he would stand at his door and beam on the passing throng, and a part of his technique was to lunch and dine at some expensive restaurant that sold his wares.
London had got me again. From my Piccadilly window, as I tapped on my typewriter, I saw war-time acquaintances strolling to their clubs. Eggs were at first sixpence each, and butter five shillings a pound. London's streets were full of armless and legless ex-soldiers trudging round with barrel-organs. My two suits wore threadbare and I saw no hope of going to a good tailor again. My days were spent communing with dozens of port and sherry, with clarets that boasted of having been bottled at some château, with fussy burgundies that were self-important about their rank - premier crû, or première cuvée.
It was hell. It lasted eighteen months. Then I was ushered out with a cheque for four weeks' salary. I forget why I was dismissed, I think I had asked for a higher salary, and this was the answer. The manager, who had spent a lifetime among vats and was wont to apply irrelevant adjectives like 'robust' and 'vivid' to the wines he tasted, told me as he handed me my cheque that many a career had been spoilt by a thoughtless act, a baffling remark that irritated me like an itch, and then I found myself strolling aimlessly along Piccadilly, thinking 'How now?'
This time the luck failed. The eighteen pounds dwindled rapidly to nothing. Something had to be done. I answered an attractive advertisement offering a large income, easily earned, to ex-officers, and found myself being interviewed, with many others in like plight, by a map-maker in Fleet Street. We had only to go out into the English countryside, hire a bicycle, call on rich men and sell them motoring maps of England, handsomely bound in imitation leather, and the commission was so munificent that we should live, as the Germans say, like God in France. It was a grim prospect but it was baited with an advance of four pounds, and I had no money. The next day I breakfasted in a cheap lodging in Salisbury with Captain Eustace Mountebankes, the mapmaker's star salesman, a merry fellow who sang a good song and accompanied himself on the jingling piano in our lodging.
Eustace was marvellous. His manner overbore the most pompous butlers and daunted dukes. A man conferring a favour, he played his order-book into the hands of baronets and squires like a conjurer forcing a card and he took their signatures for several pounds worth of maps practically by sleight of hand. He had to show me how it was done. He certainly showed me that it could be done. He earned some £600 a year at it. One Sunday long afterwards I saw him in the Row. He escorted a fashionably dressed woman, wore a silk hat and a morning coat, and in his right hand he carried, with complete assurance, a lady's umbrella, one of those slender, almost shoulder-high things with a long, straight handle.
After three days he left me alone. I bicycled miserably along the roads about Salisbury. I could have steeled myself to walk to the gallows with not much more difficulty than to pedal along those rhododendron-lined drives, to ring at those grimly forbidding doors, to start talking about my ridiculous maps and watch the look of apprehension come into rich men's eyes.
But I did it, and made some strange acquaintances; a jovial landowner who would have none of my maps but sat for hours smoking cigars and drinking port with me who had hardly enough money for my next meal; a solitary lady who had no interest in maps but extended a flattering invitation to a tête à tête lunch, from which I stupidly fled; well-to-do farmers who unexpectedly ordered eight guineas' worth of maps, gave me cider and took me to see the pigs.
Sometimes I could not bring myself to go on and bicycled aimlessly along the lanes or lay on a river bank watching the swallows. I had always longed to see primroses growing and here they were abundant. I picked quantities, and squandered shillings posting them to my mother and girls in town. I dallied in the cathedral close, watched the pigeons circling round the mellow roof and wished I need never leave the peaceful place again. Now, I shun that cloistered tranquillity; I am happier in a Bierstube in Moabit, in a wine-garden in Sievering, in a gipsy restaurant in Belgrade, or almost anywhere away from that remote, repressed life of the English countryside, all cluttered up with golf courses and fox hunting.
When I had exhausted Salisbury's appetite for maps I went to Tunbridge Wells, a town of mean cottages and mansions, and from the common looked resentfully down on the rows of great houses, with their parks and gardens. I alone was to blame if I had squandered the money my wounds and service in the war had earned me, if I had recklessly forfeited my clerk's desk. But I had no money, a sharp appetite, no prospects, and a detestable occupation. I hated wealthy Tunbridge Wells.
Somehow, I earned thirty shillings one week, fifty shillings the next, in one unforgettable week eight guineas. On Saturdays I bicycled furiously round the countryside, racing time to get one more order and justify a trip to town, and at three o'clock in the afternoon I set my face Londonwards, rode hard for four hours, arrived dripping with sweat just in time to take a girl to the Military and Naval Tournament at Olympia. Though the stars on my shoulder had waned I was under the spell of the army and had buoyed myself up through an exhausting week with the thought of that Saturday dash to town and Olympia. It was glorious. I loved the regimental marches and the bravely stepping companies. Since then I have watched military parades all over Europe, and like them less.
Soon after dawn on Monday morning I was on my way to Tunbridge Wells again. I pedalled and peddled through the summer. I rode up an endless drive to a great castle, rang at a ponderous door which was opened by one footman for another footman and a moment later was bowed politely out. I remounted and rode with dignity down the drive, but found afterwards that I had worn a large hole in the seat of my army breeches, through which my shirt was waving like a banner.
I had shot my bolt. I was as thin as a rake, my energy spent, and I knew I could not go on with this revolting struggle.
London had won again. I came back, answered advertisements, dragged about the streets, ate a poached egg and drank a cup of coffee occasionally, and after some time I sat in a cellar in Fleet Street, now typing letters for a travel agent about Hotel accommodation in Switzerland, conducted parties, train-fares and time-tables. I seemed to be inescapably back in my London corridor.
I was wrong. I was in the street of adventure. I had never been able to understand why Fleet Street was called that. I had spent years in and about Fleet Street and had vainly explored it for adventure. It seemed dull, dirty, noisy and narrow. But it was the doorway to the world for me.
Shorthand is commonly regarded as a petty accomplishment, unworthy, of a gentleman. But if you have no old school tie you have to look around for some side entrance to betterment, and this insignificant key opened the doors for me to a wider life, to travel, to the profession of writing. I bless it now as I detested it in the days of my office-boyhood, when the publisher demanded that I should know it and a young clerk came to my home two evenings a week to teach it to me and a couple of fellow-sufferers, while my mother made cocoa for us all.
In my cellar I racked my brains to find a means of escape. I wrote to an anonymous advertiser who wanted a good shorthand writer to take down long messages over the international telephone. Within a week I had a new desk, in Printing House Square.
It was a grand life. For the first time since my early days as an officer I had something to do that interested me. I loved working at night, I loved being a small link in the long chain of news, hearing great tidings from Berlin and Paris and Vienna flowing into my mind through the earpieces and seeing them flow out again at my pencil's tip. I loved the hum of the printing presses towards midnight, I loved the moist copies of the paper that the fetch-and-carry boys casually flipped into my basket about midnight.
News transmission by telephone was then in its infancy. You waited interminably for calls; when they came cracklings and buzzings kept you in a white beat of profanity. Now you can casually ring up New York or Melbourne or Baghdad, and count on quick connection and clear understanding.
The Times was then founding its telephone news service -- it now covers all Europe -- and after a few weeks I found myself on a cross-Channel steamer, bound for Paris, where I was to be part of the network of telephonic communication between correspondents abroad and Printing House Square.
I found a very different Paris. Paris on a lovely autumn morning, with the war going well and all the girls smiling at a British officer, was one thing. Paris on a dank autumn evening, for a humble clerk without acquaintances, was another. I had a tiny stone-floored room with an iron stove au sixième, on the sixth floor, with the moon and chimneypots for my neighbours, and thither I retired at two o'clock in the morning, after the telephone from Madrid or Milan had rung for the last time.
My neighbours were a young man and a girl, a pair of quarrelsome lovers, who were wont to fight like cats, until one day one of them threw a burning lamp, and the girl was so badly burned that she died. Across the courtyard was a table full of laughing midinettes, to whom I would heliograph with my shaving mirror, and in one corner a little seamstress, who would entertain me with aniseed liqueur when I had a free evening, discourse with the simple fluency of a river flowing to the sea on this and that, and inevitably tell me I was gentil.
And near by lived Mademoiselle Sautier, who personified the brave and thrifty and hard-working France that I loved. She was over seventy, and went out at 5 o'clock every morning to char a bank. It was hard, she said once, to crawl round scrubbing and shifting heavy furniture when you were over seventy. In her little room she had a big French bed, where her brother Jean had slept when, he came to Paris on leave during the war, and a stove, and lots of shining copperpots and pans, and she was eternally cleaning.
She had her economies, beyond a doubt, and I was happy to add a little to them then and later, when I was in other lands. You could tell she had them from the respect shown by her legions of relatives who came to visit her, all dressed in unalleviated black, on Toussaint, the day of the dead, when they all set out together for the resting places of other relatives who had gone before and left their economies in the right direction. She must have been a grand girl once, and I wondered that she was only Mademoiselle Sautier. She tolerated Madame from me, poor foreigner, but would snap 'Je n' ai pas de Monsieur' at cronies who, hearing me say it, tried to ingratiate themselves by calling her that.
In the evenings, I began to see how the news is made. Sweating lavishly in an upholstered cabin, insulated against noise, I strained my ear muscles to catch between the noises what little exasperated voices were saying in Madrid and Rome and Berlin. Strange things happened. A voice from Morocco whispered to me of a gallant and successful attack on a Rifi position 'by two Italians'. I did not notice anything strange. It ought to have been 'by two battalions'. A correspondent in Geneva spoke of 'the famous Ali Baba arbitration case', and that was all right with me, who had never heard of the good ship Alabama. And once when the multi-murderer Landru was being tried my colleague in London dropped the word 'beard' from an allusion to his 'long black beard', and the sub-editor in London put 'hair' into the gap. Landru was as bald as a coot.
I went out to Versailles to see him, and sat among the avid Parisiennes scoffing their sweet cakes and sandwiches and scoffing audibly at his protestations of innocence. He had killed and burned a dozen women for their economies and the police had evidence that about two hundred and fifty women in all had been his dupes. I watched the fiery Corsican de Moro-Giafferi, simulating intense moral indignation at the suggestion that his client was a murderer, the public prosecutor sitting in his pen and gazing unblinkingly at Landru, whom he reminded from time to time that his head was at stake, and Landru himself, turning in quiet dignity to reprove the jeers of the spectators with the words, 'There is nothing to laugh about'. He was the most dignified figure in court, this pale, thin-faced, bearded, bald, unsmiling man with the dark eyes, and he could have sat well as model for one of the apostles.
I began to pick up the tricks of the journalist's trade - the advantage of stating the news in the first sentence, the value of a neat phrase, the importance of brevity, the feeling of satisfied craftsmanship that a soundly constructed message leaves. Sometimes things happened in Paris late at night, after the correspondents had passed beyond the ken of the office. I was able to fill one or two small gaps and achieved print.
Then the spring came and I was ordered back to London once more, to take charge of the telephone system.
The ship listed hard over as the passengers gathered on the port side and craned their necks. Among the wreckage floating by, unrecognizable, I could see two bundles. I knew they were men; not long before the thought of ending like this had been constantly in my own mind. A boat put out from the ship, a Harley Street doctor among the passengers accompanying the crew, and rowed over to the wreckage. First they pulled out the pilot, a Frenchman, and then the passenger, and as they turned up his face the doctor recognized one of his patients.
I often have to restrain myself from remarking that the world is a small place; this particular coincidence impressed me as deeply as that other strange marine encounter, when a man called Aloysius Pendlebury Plum, or something equally rare, plunged into the Thames at Blackfriars and rescued a man called Aloysius Pendlebury Plum.
The ship continued on her course. Once more, though England had seemed to loom indefinitely ahead of me, I was leaving it behind. Lord Northcliffe had just returned to France from an anonymous tour in Germany and had cabled urgently to London for a secretary. I had been chosen.
A strange adventure lay before me. I had been dispatched at a moment's notice, primed with instructions that I was going to meet a most remarkable man and that I must strain my wits and energy to the utmost to satisfy him. A picture of a journalistic god had been given me - The Chief, ruler of Fleet Street, all-seeing and all-wise, quick to reward devotion, ruthless in punishing infidelity. Immoderate devotion inspired this picture, which misled me so that I was prepared to see in every action, however strange by normal standards, only the incalculability of genius, the eccentricity of the great.
We met in a little hotel in Boulogne, whither Mr. Leonard Brown, as he chose to be known, had come from Cologne. He lay in bed, a very sick man, as I should have known if that priming had not fogged my judgment, a man disappointed, disillusioned, distrusting everyone, with rare moments of gentleness, knowing himself to be mortally ill and hating the knowledge that neither his brain nor his energy nor his wealth could overcome this enemy. The shadows were already closing relentlessly in on him and he had ordered a little back bedroom, to match his mood. The hotel manager, a young man who was anxious to make this distinguished guest as comfortable as possible, had thought to know better and given him the best bedroom, in front. The first summons was to this young man and the brief interview ended with, 'Get out!'
'Get out!' was his cure for many evils.
Then he turned to me. A disproportionately massive head lay on the pillow, a greying forelock hung dankly down, greenish eyes contemplated the world in general and myself in particular with malevolence. A series of strange exchanges began. What public school had I attended? I answered that I had had no schooling after the age of thirteen, and had had the bulk of my schooling at free schools before it. This seemed to flabbergast him. At intervals during the short time we were together he remarked that not everyone would have dared to confess to being a council schoolboy, or complained that I should not have been sent to him.
We began to send daily telegrams to the great newspapers he owned - Old One, Young One, Nightingale. Guess for yourselves which was which. We criticized, with the telegraphic terseness of the great, their contents or make-up, we rebuked their staffs with the brevity that is telegraphese. To one eminent journalist we telegraphed, 'You are fired', to another, 'Hear you have been seen walking down Fleet Street in top hat. Don't do it'. We wrote long letters, which mercifully never appeared, in which we discussed in satirical vein all manner of things, from the skinny shanks of a famous society lady to the Jewish influence in English life. We began to write that series of articles, 'Incognito in Germany', in which he described his German journey -- Northcliffe, the German-hater, alone in Germany -- in the manner of a bold, adventurous undertaking. The first two were published; a third was written but did not appear; and the series came to a sudden end.
He discoursed of many things, of his early struggles and later successes, of his friends and enemies, of his Government mission to America, of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. and Mrs. Asquith.
He felt himself surrounded by treachery. He put his hand under the pillow and brought out a little black silk bag. 'Look at this', he said, 'it was left here for me, for Mr. Leonard Brown, by a man who wouldn't give the porter his name. How do they know that I am here? You see the colour? It is the colour of death!'
For the first time I saw something of the system of spies with which great men sometimes surround themselves. Sleek young men with sinecure posts in his London undertakings arrived to report on the doings of their chiefs.
So these were the ways of the great! My mind was in a whirl, but so deeply had I been impressed with the necessity to humour his every mood that I never thought anything was amiss and when the valet, a really good and devoted man, stopped me in the ante-room to ask me what I thought about his master's condition I put the suggestion from me like a poisonous snake. Unquestioning devotion, I had been told, and that was going to be my rule.
In later years I came to know the signs of mortal illness. I have seen them in men who had the destinies of nations in their hands, and have speculated about the consequences that this might have for a country or a continent. They thought they were still masters of their souls and minds, and they were making plans accordingly. This twilight period is the greatest argument against dictatorship. No man who had been present at Napoleon's autopsy would be likely ever to vote for the absolute rule of a single man.
My salary was rocketed up to £500 a year, a figure that had always seemed to me to mark the Becher's Brook of the Betterment Stakes. And after a few days of this whirlwind atmosphere I was dispatched hot-foot to London, with £150 to buy myself a silver-fitted crocodile leather suitcase. I don't know why. He had asked if I had one, and of course I had not.
I could not bring myself to buy a silver-fitted crocodile leather suitcase. I did not need it. I needed other things. My two suits were on their last threads. I bought a wardrobe trunk and ordered some clothes and paid some bills and still had some money left.
This was a fatal mistake. I had to admit that I had come back without a silver-fitted crocodile leather suitcase. I had failed in unquestioning compliance, and suspicions were aroused. He began to find in me too much or too little zeal. I was approaching the moment of dismissal, which a long line of my predecessors had experienced. The words 'Get out!' or 'You're fired!' trembled on those close-clamped lips.
In between we worked, went for drives to Wimereux or Paris Plage, and at night we took some book of biography or politics and I read to him. 'As the poet Cowper wrote ...' I read. 'Stop a minute', he said. 'How do you spell that?' 'C-o-w-p-e-r', I answered. 'But you pronounced it Cooper,' he rejoined. 'How did you know that?' 'I thought it must be so,' I said. 'Good, I like that.' Then silence. Then, drowsily, 'It's extraordinary how well you read for a board school boy.' A few seconds later he slept like a child, and I stole out.
The end, but for the background of a most unhappy man, would have made a comic film. Continually complaining of pain and poison, he became more and more irritable. One morning we went for a long drive, and on returning he went to bed, while I went to the hotel dining-room to snatch a quick lunch. He sent a servant for me to my room and was violently angry to find that I was not there. Summoned from the dining- room, I was bitterly reproached and a servant, with the wooden face of those trained to conceal their feelings and opinions, was called into the room, and asked if he had carried out some order or other. The little scene had been rehearsed and he answered, for my benefit, 'Not yet, sir, I haven't had my dinner yet. Food first is my motto'.
'You're fired' was the next step, accompanied by the intimation that I could keep the £150. I had not asked for it and said I would repay it, whereon he answered with the contempt of the moneyed man, 'You'll never earn enough'. He was wrong. Traps were being packed and before he drove off to Boulogne Station and Paris he said to me, 'Good-bye. You will never see me again in this world'.
Few people saw him again in this world. Cryptic daily bulletins told the public that he was ill and finally that he was dead. I watched the funeral service in Westminster Abbey. Many thousands of people had part in it. The funeral procession was miles long, the wreaths were innumerable. He had felt himself a man without friends.
Nothing much else happened to me in 1922, save that I married.
Years of struggle followed. I needed money, to buy furniture, to rent some habitation fit for man. Post-war England was the paradise of the profiteering houseowner. The men back from the war were getting married and wanted houses. Outer London was throwing off new slums in eccentric circles, like the rings of a tree trunk, to add to those of the Victorian era, jerrybuilt settlements of mass-produced houses with niggardly little coal grates, up-and-down windows, primitive bathrooms without any adequate means of heating water. Speculative builders could buy land and dump what they liked on it. Co-ordinated control of building in the general interest, co-ordinated effort to beautify London, there were none. Even these suburban outcrops lagged far behind the demand.
In inner London, in the gloomy squares around Bayswater and Paddington, gaunt Victorian mansions were being converted into small dwellings. You took a nursery floor, two or three small bedrooms and the children's playroom, put a gas stove into one room, a bath tub and a geyser into another, threw in a couple of thin partitions for luck, called it a maisonette, and as a favour accepted tenants at £3 a week.
The Londoner had the choice of paying a high price for discomfort in one of these claustrophobic dwellings or trekking out to a distant suburban house three walls of which he might call his own, for semi-detachment was still the jerrybuilder's golden rule. There he had neither the benefits of the town nor the delights of the country, and he used up his income and energy in long journeys to and from his daily occupation. Privacy in his home, beauty in his surroundings, were things beyond the hopes of the bulk of workaday Londoners.
For some time we counted ourselves lucky to find two unfurnished rooms in Praed Street, which is just a slice of the hundred miles of dreary streets that you find between the inner and outer circles of London, and we fetched water from an outside tap. Then we moved into a maisonette in a Paddington square; it was like a prison cell, but you could see trees from the window, great plane trees in the railing-guarded square, where a lugubrious gardener and a few geraniums fought a losing battle against the dingy soil. The tenants of Norfolk Oblong -- London squares are seldom square -- had keys to the garden, but a square-watcher appointed jointly by all the houseowners kept a stern eye on it, and if a child threw a ball or a tenant took a puppy for a walk there the watcher at the window sallied forth and forbade these goings-on. So the square, imprisoned behind its soot-blackened railings, remained always empty, and remains empty, I dare swear, to this day, save for the disgruntled gardener.
Later I discovered that in Germany, where all things are supposed to be forbidden, such a private tyranny as this would be unthinkable; there pieces of open ground between houses are the joint property of all men, they are made pleasant with flowers and fountains and sandpits for the children, and railings would be an intolerable affront to the common public conscience.
What did Mr. Gladstone say in 1886 - about London squares? From the window of Margot Asquith's boudoir, he 'admired the trees in the square and deplored their uselessness'. And when Margot asked him 'if he would approve of the square railings being taken away and the grass and trees made into a place with seats, such as you see in foreign towns, not merely for the convenience of sitting down, but for the happiness of invalids and idlers who court the shade or the sun', he said, 'Yes, but the only people who could do this or prevent it were the resident aristocracy'.
Forty years later in 1926, when I lived in such a square, the residents, though their blue blood had thinned, were still preventing it, and in 1966, as things go in England, they are likely to be still entrenched there, resolved to sell their railings dearly.
However, in 1937, when I was in London for a few days and walked through St. James's Square, I suddenly realized that these railings have their uses after all. They keep you from approaching nearer than a hundred yards to the equestrian statue of William III, dressed as Nero.
I worked like a mole to find an outlet from this existence. My night work began at seven and ended at two a.m. and I took up private work to augment my means, so that for months I worked from nine in the morning until two at night, drawing heavily on reserves of health.
I met Sir Roland Bourne, who had gone to South Africa as a young officer to fight the Boers -- I listened enthralled to his tale of the blue-bearded Boer who came at him with a bayonet shouting 'Burgher Offizier', but Bourne got him with his revolver in the nick of time -- and stayed there afterwards to build the Union with them. A disappointed man, he was trying late in life to carve a new career for himself by directing from a little flat in St. John's Wood, where I typed his letters and sub-edited his appeals and card-indexed his correspondence for him, a scheme for settling retired officers and pensioned civil servants in communities in South Africa and the other Dominions. A great gentleman, he loved to go shopping with a string-bag in the Edgware Road and to chat with the shopkeepers. His energy was amazing and, though his scheme was impracticable, he did by irresistible force succeed in getting together a committee and extracting a Government grant. But the burden of his disappointments and of this hopeless venture was too much and he afterwards shot himself, in his bathtub. I seldom had warmer respect for anyone.
I fought hard to find a bridge across the great gulf fixed between the men who wrote and the clerks. It was a great battle. A university, or at least a public school education was normally essential. The gulf seemed unbridgeable. The Northcliffe episode, which at first promised to open all doors, had ended ill. I had a few slender hopes. Far back in the Paris days the correspondents, Wentworth Lewis, Ralph Deakin and W. F. Casey, had found me worth backing. My French was fairly good. But the years were passing.
At last a chance came. Long-distance telephony bridged the Atlantic. Men in New York and in London could converse as easily as men in Putney and Pimlico. The opening of the London-New York telephone was a nine days' wonder in 1927. The first public conversation was between my paper and its American opposite number - the New York Times. A quite ordinary tinkling of the telephone bell heralded the great moment for me. At the other end was Adolf Ochs, proprietor of the New York Times. I wrote the account, and it was a distinct success. For the first time I experienced the warm touch of that friendly helping hand which journalists are quick to give when they can. The London Correspondent of the New York Times came up to say that, for once, he had read a turnover article through 'to the bitter end'. Members of the editorial staff caused congratulations to come to me by devious ways.
I had gained a slight foothold. After some time I modestly suggested that I had the makings of a good journalist. The suggestion fell flat. I went downstairs prepared to struggle on. Suddenly, a note on managerial paper told me briefly that I had been promoted to the writing staff.
All those stubborn doors were open. A great moment. This tiny achievement, measured by the things that men accomplish every day, was to me an inexhaustible source of satisfaction. At last I had found confidence in myself, and I thought thankfully of the men who, with never a word to me, had backed my cause. Presumably they thought first and foremost that they were serving the paper, but they helped me too and I never forgot it.
For three years I learned to write. We found a house, restful and perfect, within sight of Harrow spire. Even during our few months' tenancy it was submerged by the tidal wave of jerrybuilt settlements, but it was so secluded that within the hedges of its garden complete peace reigned, save for one or two serpents. I loved it, I loved the almond tree, the apple blossom outside the kitchen window, the view of Harrow-on-the-Hill from the bedroom windows, the intervening group of elms with the rooks cawing around them, the market gardens through which we used on summer evenings to stroll, accompanied not only by our dog, but also by our cat, a strange animal.
At Christmastide 1927 the moving men came and took our few pieces of furniture, which I had so sweated to procure, and carried them away to storage. We packed our modest wardrobe in our cheap trunks and sent them to the station. The rooms we had loved so well were empty. As we went down the lane we took a last look at the house. The snow lay heavy on it and on the trees; at that rare Christmastide snow fell abundantly. I was 32. The house was my first real home in England. I had had it a few months. I left a piece of my heart in it, for now I was leaving England again and, as I instinctively felt, for good.
We were bound for Germany. I was torn between exhilaration in a new career, and regret at losing England, which I loved but of which I had never been able to feel myself a part. That pain lasted for three years. Then changes began to occur in me.
I began to look for the crushed and starving and desperate and bled-white Germany. I never found it. I found a country that had never known war on its own land save for the brief Russian drive in East Prussia in 1914; that had called the war off when inevitable defeat impended and had retired in ostensible submission into its own unravaged land; that by this apparent surrender had warded off decisive military defeat; a country that, scarcely daring yet to believe this, was beginning to hope that it had outwitted its foes. Germany had been spared a knockout. An international heavyweight, proclaimed to be defeated on points, but feeling himself to be the better man and dreaming of a come-back, feeling his biceps.
The next seven years were the fullest and most stimulating of my life. I should hate to have lived without knowing Germany. At the end of them the fears I had felt on Armistice Day in France, as I watched the gunners clip-clopping by, were confirmed and branded in my soul. It seemed likely that the Great War had been fought in vain, all that human energy and idealism and life and treasure squandered fruitlessly. Seventeen years after the Armistice all Europe, bordering on Germany, was in a fever of fear again. She was mightier in arms than ever. Seventy years after the first Prussian year of expansion -- against Denmark -- the threat to Europe was greater than ever.
I went to Germany without knowledge, but with prejudices, born of the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell, the shooting of Belgian civilians at Louvain, the bombardment of Paris, the bombing of London. Seven years later, though an enormous admiration for Germany had taken shape in me, these prejudices had become convictions founded on knowledge.
There is in Germany a class of ruthless man, and this class has now again mastered the State, that acknowledges only the law of Germany's right to prevail by force of arms. These very men have harnessed the nation to a mighty fighting machine. You will find the type drawn to the life a hundred times in non-Jewish German literature - in Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan, in Remarque's All Quiet, in Peter Martin Lampel's Outlaws, in Wolfgang Langhoff's Rubber Truncheon, and many more.
After six years in Germany I stood Unter den Linden with a famous American journalist. We had been together to see a woman who had been beaten senseless by Nazi Storm Troopers. He had come to Europe, full of anti-German prejudices born of war-time propaganda, with the American Army, and after the war had come to Germany of the pre-Hitler period and had come to love Germany, deciding that the war-time propaganda had been lies. 'After what I've seen lately,' he said, 'I believe all I was ever told about them,'
Germany in 1928 was still seemingly in the throes of this struggle for the soul of the nation, though actually, as I think, it had been decided on November 11th, 1918, when the German militarists had been left the possibility to tell the nation that it had never been defeated in the field, but had only retired within its frontiers because it had been betrayed, 'stabbed in the back', by the Jews and Marxists - the dejected German sailors, the war-weary population.
Germany had lived to fight another day. The outward signs of defeat were there. Allied armies stood in the Rhineland - until reparations were paid; and in Berlin Parker Gilberts and Andrew McFadyean, with large staffs of highly paid men and women still floating on the cushions of war-time soft jobs, collected these reparations. The outer world saw Germany as a prostrate figure, with a mailed Allied foot on her neck and an Allied hand in her pocket.
It was an illusion. This was no despairing, starving country. There were no devastated areas to make good, but streams of British and American gold, flowing into the country, went to build and equip vast new factories and industries, sports grounds, suburban Lidos, stations - in short, to improve and adorn German real estate.
The Germany I found had been deprived after the war of her entire merchant fleet. Now, ten years later, she had one of the biggest in the world, all new. She was forbidden to build military aircraft and severely circumscribed in her production of civilian aircraft; but through factories in Russia, Denmark and Switzerland, and by ingenious design, she overcame all obstacles and one day I saw the lovely flying-ship DO.X. go up from Lake Constance with 173 people on board - a feat never yet equalled, as far as I know.
I travelled on their maiden voyages in two lithe and graceful German ships, the Bremen and Europa, that effortlessly stole the Blue Riband first trip across the Atlantic and set wealthy victor powers hurriedly trying to recover lost prestige by building Normandies and Rexes and Queen Marys.
In France, England, Italy, America, airships came crashing down and these countries abandoned the search for the secret of their construction. In 1929 I saw a German zeppelin take the air. It crossed the Atlantic, circumnavigated the world, began regularly to ply to and fro across the Pacific to admiring South America.
German exports rose until she was among the first trading powers of the world. Leipzig and Stuttgart displayed splendid new stations, like proud, municipal smiles. Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover and the great Rhineland cities built vast settlements for workers.
The Germany I discovered in 1928 was a well-found land, going ahead fast, overhauling the world by its prowess in peaceful pursuits. But the political itch left it no rest. The outcasts -- the men who had lost rank and privilege through the war, the men who had achieved unexpected importance in the war and found themselves nobodies in peace, the big business men who disliked the power of the trade unions, the small shopkeeper who hated to see a Socialist as mayor, all those classes which traditionally oppose and resent any betterment of the working classes -- played incessantly on the nation's nerves with the refrain 'You didn't lose the war, you were stabbed in the back by Jews and Marxists, they are bleeding you white to pay the foreigner'.
Germany had one all-consuming desire - to get the Allied armies out of the Rhineland. That was the essential condition for all further policy. Foreign troops in the Rhineland! That was the shackle on the German wrist. No use stopping reparations while they were there, because they would never go. The Rhineland, occupied, was a pledge for payment. Get them out!
Stresemann was Foreign Minister, Stresemann, who looked like one of the Allied wartime cartoons of a German. I often saw him at the Foreign Office. He sat in the centre of a long table, between Baligand, who afterwards became German Minister in Lisbon and was shot by a German caller, and a Socialist official. They sat among a hundred foreign journalists of all nationalities, a motley gathering, with one woman journalist, the then Mrs. Knickerbocker, as pretty as a picture, in the middle of them. They were forbidding-looking men, and I wondered how far you are justified in taking physiognomy as a springboard for jumping to conclusions.
Stresemann, when the war was going well, was hot for the annexation of Belgium, and he was now the figure head of 'the policy of understanding'. I don't know how he himself conceived the policy of understanding, but I know that the German people in bulk understood by it, not reconciliation with former enemies, but concessions to get the foreign troops out of the Rhineland. Then you would have your hands free; then you could stop reparations; then you could rearm; after that, well, Germany had never been defeated in the field.
Austen Chamberlain was Stresemann's opposite number in London, Briand in Paris. Chamberlain, rare among Foreign Ministers, really knew his subject. He had lunched with Bismarck, and, still more important, he had sat among Treitschke's students at Berlin University and heard him impart hatred of England and the thirst for conquest. Fifty years later, in 1937, the son of a British diplomat whom I know heard just the same lesson being taught at German universities.
'I fear my generation of Germans,' Chamberlain wrote from Berlin in 1887. 'There is a school growing up here as bad as the French military school, and if they come to the front, why, gare aux autres. They are likely to find a friend in Prince William, who is said to be thirsting for warlike distinction and is the idol of the military party.'
His father, Joseph Chamberlain, in spite of his son'