FROM SMOKE TO SMOTHER
(1938 - 1948)
A Sequel to Insanity Fair
by
Douglas Reed
*
Then must I from the smoke into the smother;
From tyrant duke unto a tyrant brother.
A comment on the twentieth century by
William Shakespeare
*
Published 1948
Home Page of Douglas Reed Books
Part One
The Smoke: 1933 - 1939
Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
Part Two
The Fire: 1940 - 1945
Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14
Part Three
The Smother: 1945 - 1950
Part Four
The Fulminant Fifties: 1950 -
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When this book appears just ten years will have passed since the publication of the one, Insanity Fair, to which it is a sequel. The shape of events, as they have come about, may now be compared with the shape of the forebodings and warnings which filled Insanity Fair; and, when that has been done, the prospect of the next ten years, 1948-58 may be examined.
Has the enpested air of the twentieth century at last been cleared? In my opinion the answer is plainly, No. The great choice between liberty and slavery remains to be made. We have merely passed from the smoke of the Thirties, through ordeal by fire in the Forties, to the dark smother that awaits us in the Fifties. Military victory in the second war was in the event turned against the shining cause for which it was begun: Liberty. The second war brought great generalship, but no statesmanship, only politicianship, and the acts of politicians, much more even than in the first war and the years that followed it, were misguided by hidden groups hostile to liberty and nationhood everywhere.
I find certain changes in my own mind, when I look back on the man who wrote Insanity Fair in Vienna ten years ago. The memory of the first war and its huge carnage was lurid in me then and the obsessing premonition of a new slaughter did more than anything else to drive me to write that warning; horror and hatred of the tyrannies I saw rising in Europe were, I think, emotions secondary to that overwhelming anxiety. After ten years I find myself reversing the order of those fears. Though lives may be destroyed, life cannot be, for it eternally renews itself. Ruins are relatively unimportant, since human hands can always rebuild what human hands have razed. The annihilation of spiritual values now seems to me the most important thing to arrest.
The ones I chiefly mean are religion, patriotism, liberty, human dignity and honour. The process of destroying these, begun in the Thirties, was quickened and extended through the second war. Its continuance now seems to me a prospect more dreadful than even that of 'the third war' which I hear people on all hands discuss. The worst prospect of all is that such a third war, like the second one, would be begun in the name of Liberty and be stealthily turned into one for the final extinction of liberty, while it went on. The mechanism of these twentieth-century wars has clearly been brought under remote control, so that such transformations are possible. We have now seen the trick performed twice.
A few days before Insanity Fair appeared its warning was abruptly borne out by the German invasion of Austria, a thing which the public mind of the Thirties refused to imagine until it happened; I received some credit for having foreseen the blindingly obvious. The second war began then, although the fighting waited another eighteen months. We are in precisely the same state of suspended, non-fighting but undeniable warfare today, ten years later. The same possibilities of averting a fighting-war, of arresting the Gadarene process of the twentieth century, are open to us now, as were open then.
That clamorous, fear-laden night in Vienna is foremost in my memory as I write this sequel, ten years later, to Insanity Fair. Among my farewells at that time was one I paid to a humble ragman who relieved me of the piles of yellowing newspapers which encumbered my lodging. He inhabited three vast cellars beneath on old house near the cathedral, the Stefansdom; built one below the other, they were the equivalent of a tall house buried underground, and from them passages led to the catacombs of that ancient city. He lived there, in the gloom, amid great mounds of sacks, round and on which prowled or sat innumerable cats. They were his skilled assistants: without them the rats would have eaten his business; and as we talked their inscrutable green and amber eyes watched us from all sides.
Down there the noise of the howling mob overhead was muffled, a distant ominous cacophony, the theme-song of the mad twentieth century. This ragman was a civilised man; that was why I went to say goodbye to him. He nodded to the muted clamour with his head. 'Listen,' he said, 'Heut' Nazis, Morgen Kommunisten, und allezeit Idioten - Nazis today, Communists tomorrow, and idiots always.'
Were there more like him the Marats, Lenins and Hitlers could not prosper. I shook his hand and made my way homeward, through the Kaerntnerstrasse. That half mile of roadway, between the Stefansdom and the Ring, seemed to me the High Street of a civilised Europe then threatened with destruction (and now almost destroyed). Not even Rome or London, in our two thousand years, have seen as much of the process of alternating invasion, siege, battle, conquest, defeat, tyranny, liberation, recovery and Christian progress which is our common story, as the Kaerntnerstrasse in Vienna.
On that night the voice, face and noise of the mob filled High Street, Europe, which leads to London as straight as it leads to Wiener Neustadt. How easy the mob has made the work of the wreckers! That mob-face appals me. Of the Gadarene swine, I imagine that each stampeding one wore the same expression of rapt admiration for the posterior view of the one in front. Why look elsewhere, and should not one always follow the swine in front? In these ten years I have seen the mob-face nearer home than I like.
Ten years ago! Babies born that night are still children, boys then ten years old are still youths, youths of twenty are still young men: is it possible? It is fascinating to turn back the pages and in 1948 to compare the ten years, as they have been, with the ten years which that night loomed menacingly ahead. Having made that comparison, and thus having so much experience to guide the judgment, it is even more absorbing to contemplate the ten years which now lie before us all. To the writer of Insanity Fair they appear more ominous than the ten years looked which lay ahead that night in 1938.
THE SMOKE: 1933 - 1939
I studied him across the wine. Urbane, easy, humorous: that was the pleasant Austrian heritage. Tall, well-built, and good-looking save for wary eyes, magnified by thick-lensed glasses. His stiff leg, I supposed, came from a war wound. What did he want with a British newspaper correspondent? Did he seek to pump or to prime me? Was he truly just an anxious and disinterested patriot or could he be a political intriguer? He did not raise the mask. Perhaps he himself did not clearly read the future and his own part in it. He knew what I could not divine: that he was a conspirator among the powder barrels, but he certainly did not foresee, any more than I, the noose that would end his life.
Behind him was a mural of Viennese wine-gardens, the reminder of happy times departed. He talked with smiling flippancy about Hitler and the Nazis: if only all men were like you and me, Herr Reed, he implied, these matters would soon be settled. The Germans? Ach, they were heavy-handed folk, one knew their irritating ways, net wahr? But they had to be reckoned with now and Austria could not play David if even France and England were afraid to stand up to Goliath. Germany had the right and the might to demand a firm place in Europe and good-neighbourliness from adjoining countries; the great powers could not expect these small ones to play the part of sentinels posted against the Reich. But there could be no question of Germany swallowing Austria and Czechoslovakia. They must remain independent.
Thus the pleasant, reasonable voice which, a few weeks later, would say 'Agreed' to a German demand for him to usurp power and invite a German invasion. Suddenly unmasking, this unknown man would appear on the balcony of the historic Chancery and smile on the howling mob while his friend, the Chancellor, was thrown into prison. Soon after that, the second war, and like one of Napoleon's marshals he would be made ruler of a small realm, the Low Countries. Not long after that: Nuremberg and the gallows.
This man, when I look back ten years later, seems to me hugely important. In his person and career the course of the disease can plainly be traced, which is now laying Europe waste, like a plague, and may bring the Christian continent to an end as loathsome as his own. He was of the tribe of the traitors and when I met him they seemed extinct. Civilised man had come to hold treason as the crime worse than murder, and it was as rare. Ten years ago, in fact, it was not only an abominable but an almost unimaginable thing: I remember the shock of disbelief I had when I watched him posturing on that balcony.
I know now that many of the men I met in those days were traitors, and that many of them condemned this man, merely because his treason was in a different foreign cause from the one they served. 'Communism' or 'Fascism': where is the difference, for a patriot?
An all-falsifying dishonesty is the mark of our century, and particularly of the last ten years. The unquestioning public acceptance of the Communist traitor, immediately after the execution of Nazi ones, in the countries which fought the second war, is its most repugnant feature. It is the worst of the changes which the war, and these ten years, have brought. Treachery as a calling can now be seen as a disease of the twentieth century. Earlier ones of the body, like leprosy, were in time overcome. The traitor's uncleanliness has polluted public principle and civic security everywhere.
I drove my new acquaintance home that night in my unforgettable Little Rocket. He lived in a pleasant suburb, a place like Wimbledon, where good, substantial villas and well-kept gardens spoke of good times nearly gone. I watched him as he painfully climbed the steps to his door. It opened, showing a comfortable interior, and he was silhouetted against warm light as he limped in towards the scaffold.
I rather envied him as the door closed. From the glimpse of his snug house I guessed at welcoming sounds within and a happy family life. My own future was obscure. I was writing a book which I expected to cost me my post; I knew the new war would soon drive me from Europe, which I loved, and could not imagine when I would ever live in it again; I could already see the destruction and the greater dangers beyond. Perhaps this mysterious man would fare better than I.
'Seyss-Inquart,' I mused, as I drove away, 'an odd name. I wonder why he wanted to talk to me?'
Take this priest, whom I met ten years ago in a craggy old town, set bluff above the Danube. Set angularly among its winding streets and ancient houses is the typical concrete hotel of the Twenties, and in its big dining-room he sat, with respectful listeners leaning on his words, for he was locally the great man. He had a bullet head, cropped hair, thick neck, fair paunch and jowl. An instinctive antagonism to the priest-in-politics stirred in me.
'Thinking makes it so'; how wrong I was. The twentieth-century man, who can usually read and seldom discriminate, inherits from ancient feuds a mass of written prejudices which he applies to his own day. How many men's minds are formed for them by other men, long dead, who cursed others, also long mouldered? In my reading I had often met the 'turbulent priest', 'fiddling priest', 'churlish priest', 'pale-eyed priest'.
Over two hundred years ago one Jean Messelier wrote in his will: 'This will be the last and most ardent of my desires: I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.' Voltaire seized on and published these words of unwisdom, probably in mockery; for Voltaire was intelligent enough to foresee that the Common Man would be worse than the priests and kings. A Messelier of today might as ardently wish to see the last Communist strangled by the guts of the last Fascist; and such words, which might be inept fifty years from now, might still inflame immature minds long after their truth was dead. Men who attack the visible enemies of justice and liberty forget that their words may live on when new enemies have risen, and that these may turn their fiery phrases against the very things they themselves love. They identify tyranny with distinct classes or callings, when it is a disease of power and infects each successive group that comes to power; just as the waves that break on the shore, though each is separate, yet are all one and eternal.
Such prejudices, obsolete but unwittingly absorbed, may have caused my vague aversion: those and the nearness of the truculent Germans, which obsessed me. They were just across the bridge, a few hundred yards away. Would this priest-politician have truck with them, I wondered? He had fine hands. They stirred another memory: 'the dilettante, delicate-handed priest'.
I see more clearly now than I saw in the smoke then. This man, whose neck also was to wear a noose, was different from, indeed the opposite of, Seyss-Inquart. He never feigned a false allegiance. He was a professed Christian and Slovak patriot, and died in that cause.
Slovakia! The Briton is insular (though I seldom met one as insular as any Frenchman), and I do not know how he shall find his way among distant Slavs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Slavonians. Yet all have their eigenart, their distinct speech, history and way of life, and hunger to live freely in their own lands. A thousand years cannot quench this longing in even the smallest tribe. The Slovaks are a peasant-nation; no people, submerged for centuries, can produce a ruling-class. Having no knights they must needs turn for leaders to the only literate class, the priests, who are usually peasants' sons. They have no longer even the choice which Viola made (in Twelfth Night): 'I am one that had rather go with sir priest than sir knight; I care not who knows so much of my mettle.'
Hence the emergence, as the second twentieth-century war approached, of this Father Tiso as the Slovak leader. I suspected him of private parleys with Hitler, and was right; he may have had the draft treaty in his pocket that night. In the Thirties I thought that a mad and evil thing to do. In the Forties he was hanged for it, and this execution looks infinitely more evil to me when I look back; indeed, his figure takes the shape of a Christian martyr.
Could we foresee the end of those with whom we dine there would be some grisly feasts. The reptilian dishonesty of our century creeps with slimy trail through the trial and hanging of this man. His crime was that he signed a treaty with Hitler! By that token nearly every politician in Europe is as guilty (that I did not foresee ten years ago). The President of Czechoslovakia himself submitted to Hitler, under duress from the British, French and Italian Prime Ministers, supported by all their political parties! That transaction (the Pact of Munich) opened the way to the second war, which was actually begun by a pact of alliance between Hitler and the Soviet dictator.
The Priest-President of tiny Slovakia, who under the impact of these terrific forces made a treaty with Hitler, they hanged! The death warrant was signed by the Czechoslovak President himself. How the outlines of men change, when I look back from the Forties at the Thirties. I held this President Benes for a foremost champion of liberty and justice. Working-man, artisan, petty bourgeois: here I saw the Common Man, triumphant at last, a fighter for liberation from alien rule, even before 1914, who at last had reaped the reward of his and his people's long struggle.
I have been looking at the record of things he said to me, about Germany, in the Thirties. Thus, in January 1937: 'If I knew for certain that England and France would not carry out their League obligation I should make an agreement with Germany at once....' And in December 1937: 'If you think we are of no use in maintaining this extraordinarily important geographical position in Central Europe, on which all European peace rests, that means that finally our interests will be to agree with Germany and to go with her in all German conquests.'
Thus President Benes, whose country in the event was 'forced to go with Germany'; ten years later he confirmed the sentence on President Tiso, whose dilemma was precisely the same. Today he and his country have been forced to go with Soviet Russia, and this hanging was an act of Soviet policy.[1]
Thirty years ago the world in which 'thinking makes it so' was being taught to think the Austrian Emperors tyrants. Under their rule, however, a Masaryk and a Benes were free to fight for freedom. The execution of a Slovak patriot was all the Czech patriots could offer on the altar of gratitude, thirty years later.
The corpulent Father Tiso looks different to me now. The portrait of men is often made by their background, and he has been given the background of a barbarous martyrdom for his faith and patriotism. It is darkened by the hue of black hypocrisy in the charge: that he, like his executioners, commuted with Hitler. His last message to the Slovaks, from the scaffold, was clear truth in gathering darkness: 'Be always united in serving God and the Nation, this being, by God's explicit command, the Law of Nature, which I have served all my life. I regard myself as a martyr in the defence of Christianity against Bolshevism and call on you always to remain faithful and devoted to the Church of Christ.'
That night, when I left him, I gave him little further thought, for Slovakia and he seemed but pawns in the great game. In the streets Nazi Storm Troopers, barely bothering now to disguise their allegiance, tramped noisily about. The war was near. These Germans, I thought, these Germans....
Kings stand sharply apart from all others in politics, in my experience. They are professionals in a professional calling. The professional statesman, the nobleman, cleric or scholar who gave his life to public affairs, is extinct. His successor, the twentieth-century politician, of whom I met a multitude, appears to me an amateur. He is always in origin something else: a lawyer, peasant's son, journalist, trades union official, professor, artisan; who sees in politics the road to material gain, or enters politics to improve or ruin his country. In this century of the great masquerade his true motives may only appear at the moment of unmasking, when a traitor may emerge. He is sometimes the agent or dupe of half-hidden groups. His renown is as brief as snow; where are the politicians of yesteryear? His posterity sinks again into the mass.
When I met a king I felt the respect I feel for a surgeon in an operating-theatre, or should feel if I were in a ship's engine-room with Kipling's old McAndrew, who was 'Alone wi' God an' these my engines'. These are technical specialists; their detachment from parties is real. They are what they seem. A chilly loneliness surrounded them, like that which encloses the front-line soldier in a war.
The Balkan kings are front-line kings. A hundred years ago, when the Turks after five centuries fell back to Asia Minor, Europe seemed at last secure for Christianity and the small nations. The Balkan ones all chose kings, and most chose Germanic ones. Germany somehow bred men who understood kingship and this island fared well enough after making a similar choice. But after the Turks, Austria, Germany, and today the Communist Empire fell upon the Balkan kingdoms. Russia under the Czars was their friend; the Communist Emperor made them again the dark shambles they were under the Sultans. A century ago the Christians had to build underground churches to keep their faith alight; one such faced Boris's Tootingesque palace in Sofia. The words 'resistance' and 'underground' were born there; they were Christian and patriotic words, not anti-Christian and treasonable ones. That battle, too, was all Europe's battle. The British islander will never know it, but the Balkans are his front-line. Bulgaria and Greece inexorably mean him.
Boris perfectly understood this. The chill around him was tangible, and I wondered why any man, having safety and ease within simple reach, should persist in this beleaguered outpost. I thought, and now feel sure, that the specialist's attachment to his job kept him and his brother-kings at their posts. It must have been that, for the two figures behind his chair, though shadowy, were yet plain to me. I wrote in Insanity Fair: 'He has spent twenty years fighting the twin enemies of every Balkan monarch, abdication and assassination ... The thought of assassination (not the fear of it, he is courageous) is always with him ... He looks it in the face.'
He talked much of assassination, its methods and his counter-methods. He spoke as a specialist calmly considering professional problems. He was a family man, with young children. His Bulgars liked him, he did not see danger there. Whose would the hand be, Russian, German - whose? I tried to draw him, and found the first man in a high place who spoke of other powers than these, of hidden, super-national forces. He pointed to the assassination of his neighbour, Alexander of Yugoslavia. A Macedonian gunman; Croat confederates; a murder-school in Hungary; Italian money and complicity; a murder in Marseilles and the unaccountable laxity of French police officials; British and French pressure, at the League of Nations, to shelve the inquiry....
He smiled. 'Who, then, was the culprit?' he asked me, 'incidentally, I warned Alexander. No, Mr. Reed, there are forces in the world which do not want peace and order in the Balkans, where the future of Europe will be decided, but you cannot pin them down in any one country. They are international groups, super-national ones rather....'
I wish I could discuss these things with him now, in the light of all that happened in the Forties. By amazing chance he foretold to me the way in which he would himself be killed. He was speaking of an attempt on his life which he had sidestepped, through advance information, at Varna. His English was not perfect. 'They wanted to send me with an aeroplane,' he said, with an upward movement of his hands. I missed his meaning. 'In an aeroplane?' I asked. 'They wanted to blow me up,' he explained, repeating the gesture. 'Oh, I see,' said I. In the Forties he was sent in an aeroplane, with an oxygen helmet adjusted for his suffocation. His brother Cyril told the story at his own trial. Cyril was shot or hanged, for what pretended reason, I forget. The hand which killed him was that of the Communist Emperor. Yet I think Boris, could he speak, would smilingly deny that his own death was caused in that quarter alone. 'There are super-national forces,' I believe he would say, 'which do not desire peace and order here in the Balkans where the future of Europe will be decided.'
I thought of his words when Peter of Yugoslavia, after enthronement by acclamation in the teeth of the German invader, was dethroned by Britain and America and a Communist dictator set up. When that happened I first saw that the second twentieth-century war was being lost before it was won. Again, I think Boris, discussing this event, would have pointed to the dark combination of forces in many countries at the time of Alexander's murder, and have repeated, 'There are super-national forces which do not desire peace and order here in the Balkans ...'.
He died at his post in the way he expected and he believed he knew the identity of his 'enemies. He loved his children, flowers, the study of insect life and his job. He wanted to keep his kingdom and to keep the peace, so that his motives and interests were identical with those of the Bulgars. That is why they chose a king and will recall his son Simeon if ever they are allowed.
George of Greece, quite different as a man, had the same alert aloofness and lived in the same chill loneliness. I have never seen public rejoicing equal to that at his first restoration. 'Ah, yes, but how much does it all mean?' he said to me afterwards, and his windows were shuttered by day. I do not know if he shared Boris's opinions about super-national forces, arrayed against him, but he certainly knew the dangers surrounding him and I doubt if he feared a Greek assassin. A Balkan king need seldom fear his own people.
His last years strengthen Boris's theory, for a tremendous campaign of international hatred was waged against this man who so well served the cause called 'Allied'. The hostility towards him, of those supposed to be his allies, points to the existence of forces and motives beyond and behind the ones which were publicly proclaimed to the masses. It came from Britain and America, as well as Communist Russia.
Twice-restored kings must be rare in history. This king's two restorations, one in the shadow of the looming war, and the other when it was ostensibly won, prove the real desires of a Balkan people. His life was a panorama-in-little of the whole Balkan tragedy. In his youth he heard French and British shells fall in the palace garden, saw Greek soldiers go out to press back French and British landing-parties, saw his mother telegraph impetuous complaint to her brother, the German Kaiser, and his father try to ward off a German descent on Greece. In middle age he led a victorious Greek army against Italy and was driven from Greece by Germany. When he died Greece was besieged by the hordes of the Communist Empire.
Thrice on the throne, he occupied it for barely a decade. He was schooled in England and spent much of his life here. He was in manner and bearing English and Greece was a distant kingdom to which he was periodically restored. 'In fact,' he told me, 'I am everywhere described as an English agent.' More years in England awaited him, during which he would be reviled as 'a Fascist'. I thought he was wrong in 1936, when he suspended the Constitution and abolished parties, but in the light, or darkness, of the Forties would not care to reaffirm the criticism I put in Insanity Fair. 'There is so little time,' he said, repeatedly. For what, he did not say, but we both knew. The war was near.
He must have done marvels in the little time he had, for on his first restoration he found a ruined army, yet the victory over Italy of the one he led belongs to the wonders of history. I do not suppose that he, more than Boris, could have been surprised by anything, or, more than Talleyrand, have believed that gratitude existed; he was a professional ruler. He may have been mildly perplexed when, after that fantastic victory, he reached England and heard its Prime Minister announce that the Greeks must be consulted before he reoccupied his throne. By that time the shadow of Boris's super-national forces was spreading over the war and the hidden motives were emerging. The result, as I write, is that the danger of a new war beginning in Greece is great and the heirs of President Roosevelt's ill-omened regime are trying desperately to prevent one.
However, the Greeks called him back, and the scenes of 1935 were repeated after ten years. Once more, he had 'little time'. One day he was found dead in the palace, after (it was said) asking for a glass of water. I do not think this was a natural death. The organised campaign against him, through newspapers and politicians all over the world, is too ominous; the resemblance to the case of Alexander of Yugoslavia is in that respect striking. But for the moment he had saved his kingdom; his brother succeeded him and has a son; another front-line outpost is held.
He seemed an especially lonely man, even for a Balkan king. He too stayed at his post to the end.
This key to the riddle of our times was discovered by a few of the men near to him, who recoiled in horror when they opened Bluebeard's forbidden room with it. The first was Hermann Rauschning, who fled abroad before the war and sought to enlighten mankind in two books, Germany's Revolution of Destruction and Hitler Speaks (1939). In his reports of Hitler's conversation I first found confirmation of what I suspected:
'We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out - that, roughly, is my task. If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the spilling of German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.'
'Send the flower of the German nation into hell without the smallest pity for the spilling of German blood': the train of his thought ran from blood, through blood, into blood. Depopulation[2] is an idea which, I believe, first emerged as a political programme in the French Revolution. It is discussed, as a deliberate motive behind that event, in Mrs. Nesta Webster's book, The French Revolution.
Rauschning's discovery was subsequently made by many other Germans, who tried to kill Hitler. If the devil's hand is potent on earth his power may be seen in the failure of their many attempts and the fearful deaths which befell them, from the slow strangulation of Admiral Canaris to the public exhibition of Field-Marshal von Witzleben's body on a meat-hook. If, on the other hand, there are mortal forces in league with 'the revolution of destruction', their strength may be indicated by the fact that the German who could throw most light on this secret of Hitler's work, and who tried to kill him, received twenty years imprisonment at Nuremberg!
This man, Albert Speer, the Minister for Armaments, was in Hitler's innermost group, and eventually made Rauschning's horrifying discovery: that Hitler's aim was the destruction of Germany and universal destruction. When he heard Hitler and Goebbels (these two, and Martin Bormann, were, significantly, the only leaders who did not fall into British or American hands) order the Germans to ruin and ravage their country themselves, he tried to gas the arch-wreckers in their dugout. The last broadcasts from that dugout were nihilist paeans of triumph:
'The bomb-terror spares the dwellings of neither rich nor poor ... the last class barriers have had to go down ... under the debris of our shattered cities the last so-called achievements of the middle-class century have been finally buried ... there is no end to revolution; a revolution is only doomed to failure if those who make it cease to be revolutionaries ... together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the fulfilment of our revolutionary task.. Now that everything is ruined, we are forced to rebuild Europe ... The bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only smashed the prison walls which held them captive ... In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has only succeeded in smashing his past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone.'
Nihilism, anarchism, communism, fascism: the ape's or the infant's joy in destruction, of friend or foe, by no matter whom. That was the meaning of it all.
The long interval between the French and Russian revolutions blinded the public mind to this meaning; the skilful trick of presenting the Hitlerist revolution to the world as something different from those, and as their opposite, concealed the continuing process from the perception of the masses.
The word 'wrecker' is in the dictionary and means a man who by showing false lights on shore brings about shipwreck. The mass-wrecker in politics works by the same method, but seeks something greater than monetary gain: power. I like to think that I saw three of the wreckers of this decisive century in the flesh (Lenin dead, Hitler and Mussolini alive) and moved among the peoples they ruined. Mussolini may have been an unwitting agent of destruction, a man corrupted by the disease of power itself, after he gained it. Lenin and Hitler, I believe, were both fully enlightened destroyers and depopulators. The mass-mind, however, seems only able to comprehend the multi-murderer in private life, for instance, those respectable Parisians Landru and Dr. Petiot who, like minor vermin on a huge field of carnage, prowled about during the first and second wars; the great mass-murderers of public affairs, from Robespierre and Marat to Lenin and Trotsky, Hitler and Goebbels, remain outside its understanding.
Hitler I met, and watched, on a hundred occasions. He was shadowy, and as distinct from the millions he ruled as if he were of another species. I think this separateness came from the secret he carried, the secret which only an odd German in a million ever learned, then recoiling from or trying to kill the monster. He played a part, and the mob never knew that; it saw in him the heroic image of itself and was infatuated.
I felt the need to laugh when I talked with him; or rather, when I listened to his rasping rodomontade, while the uneasy, worshipping Hess sat beside us. In Hyde Park, I thought, the balloon of this verbosity would quickly be pricked by some sharp Cockney interjection. Today, I am less sure about an English crowd, and know I was wrong about him. He skilfully suited his acting to his audience. 'The furious German comes, with his clarions and his drums': Macaulay was right, the German can be stirred by this appeal, and Hitler mastered it. Moreover, his rages, which were so transparently artificial, like those of a barn-stormer tearing Lear to rags, became real and lethal paroxysms when power to shed blood was his.
That great student of the French Revolution, Lord Acton (were he alive now, I think he would trace the unbroken thread from it, through Soviet Communism and German National Socialism, to the World Nihilist State which threatens us today) said two things which seem to me to explain Hitler and the process of our times:
First, the famous verdict: 'All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' It has been repeatedly proved true in our century and means that even a man who does not consciously set out as a wrecker of nations, becomes one when he reaches out for power beyond public and parliamentary control.
Second: 'The appalling thing in the French revolution is not the tumult, but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organisation. The managers remain studiously concealed; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.' This, also, seems to me to have been proved true, much more by the events of the twentieth century than it was when he wrote it, towards the end of the nineteenth, about the great upheaval of the eighteenth. It means, to my mind, that men who seize power find 'a design' and 'managers' waiting and become the instruments of these; they are only allowed to rise so far because their usefulness in 'the design' is foreseen. Some of them, however, are privy to the design from the start, and among these I would include the man Hitler, alongside those he pretended to hate, like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
There Lord Acton's reading of the times comes near to King Boris's and to my own today. When I look back on the smoky Thirties, and around me at the smouldering Forties, the appalling thing is, not the smoke, but the design. It is that of destroying liberty and justice and the plant from which these grew, Christianity, in all countries. Contemplated in the light of such a design, Hitler's war was a triumph. After he went the shape of the 'design' spread over a larger field than he ever conquered, and now enshadows this island.
In the Forties no doubt remains about that effect of his work. The only question unanswered is, was he the witting or unwitting agent? Did he consciously desire the destruction of all Christian Europe, which has been almost completed since he went?
I think he did, because of the mystery which surrounds his early life, his appearance on and disappearance from the scene. There appears to me to be design, and the presence of managers, in this.
The formative years of his life were spent in Vienna before 1914. Hardly anything is known of them. Since I last wrote Berlin, Munich and Vienna have been captured and every archive ransacked. Nothing has been heard of his Viennese police dossier. In my opinion it should show what manner of man he was, and with whom he consorted, in those years when the great Eurasian migration to the West was beginning; when the nihilists and anarchists from Russia were gathering in the mean streets of Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London; when Peter the Painter and his dark band vanished in the flames of Sidney Street.
In 1919, again, he was a German soldier, still serving, under the Bolshevist Government, in Munich. He did not fight against it and yet, after its overthrow, suddenly became leader of an anti-Bolshevist 'National Socialist Party'! In our century such sudden appearances in politics have otherwise only been made by Communists, long secretly trained in the schools that bred the anarchists and nhilists of 1900-14. In age, origins and suddenness of appearance Hitler much resembles the mysterious, pseudonymous and previously unknown 'Tito', who in the second war descended on Yugoslavia from Russia and was soon enabled by means of British and American gold, arms and supplies to set up a Communist dictatorship there.[3] The manner of Tito's apparition and the support he thus received from super-national sources, again, recall the arrival of Lenin and Trotsky in Russia during the first war, with German and American help. If there is no 'design' and 'management' in all this, then the arm of coincidence in our century is endless.
Hitler, then, appeared in German politics as if released from a spring-trap, like the demon king in pantomime. Ten years ago, when I was forming these theories about his real allegiance and motives (one can only theorise about conspiracy until Guy Fawkes is found among the powder-barrels, and in our time any proposal to search the cellars would be dismissed as Fascist, or 'a witch-hunt', or anti-something) I looked forward with interest to his end. If there were managers and a design, I thought, he might disappear as he had come.
Ten years later he passed from the visible scene. A British intelligence officer in Berlin Mr. H.R. Trevor-Roper, was charged with the investigation and had all available evidence. He published a book, The Last Days of Hitler. The title is conclusive, but the facts do not seem to me final or to establish more than the end of some black trousers. Several points occur to me:
In the week before Hitler committed suicide (if he did) on April 30th, 1945, thirty-two persons lived in his dugout or in others near. Only eleven of these fell into British or American hands, and these included none of the ten or eleven men who claim to have waited in the passage outside Hitler's suite while he and Eva Braun killed themselves. The solitary man interrogated by the British or Americans who claims to have seen Hitler dead on a sofa is Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth. He also asserts that he saw, later, the corpse of Martin Bormann, Hitler's second-in-command of the Nazi Party.
Bormann was included in absentia among the accused men of Nuremberg and thus was apparently presumed alive. Hitler, 'that wicked man', was not included among the accused.
The only other witnesses in British or American hands who claimed indirect knowledge of Hitler's end were obscure persons, policemen or guards. One policeman 'saw the body being carried out with a blanket concealing the bloodstained and shattered head ... and easily recognised it by the familiar black trousers'. Another by chance came upon the two bodies burning; they were 'easily recognisable, though Hitler's head was smashed'.
Certainty might exist had the British or Americans reached the scene first. By some high order, the reason for which was never published, the Americans appear to have been halted to ensure that the Soviet troops should be first on the spot. That is where uncertainty begins.
Hitler drew up two wills, one of which announced the intention of suicide and desired that his body and Eva Braun's be burnt on the spot. This, if it was genuine, was a public message to the German people and the world. Yet 'careful precautions' were taken to conceal the cremation, and only by accident did 'two unauthorised persons' witness it. One, a policeman, 'was shouted at by Hitler's SS adjutant, Guensche, to get out of the way quickly'. Later the senior police officer, Brigadier Rattenhuber, 'gathered his men and made them promise to keep the events of the day a holy secret; anyone talking about them would be shot'.
Why? This Rattenhuber would be a useful witness, but his testimony is not available. The Soviet commander announced that Rattenhuber was in Soviet hands, together with the man who is supposed to have carried Hitler's body out of the dugout (his personal attendant, Heinz Linge). British and American requests for the identification of these two men, however, were refused. Hitler's body was never found.
Another strange thing happened on 'the last day'. If Hitler died, he was buried just before midnight on April 30th, 1945. At that very moment Goebbels, Bormann, General Burgdorf, Artur Axmann and one other were 'working out the project of a treaty with the Russians'!
The one other was General Hans Krebs, 'who had served for a long time in Moscow before the war'. This General Krebs, then, who knew all about the Hitler-Stalin Pact which began the second war, at midnight on April 30th was on his way from the dugout with a letter from Goebbels (who had already announced his own impending suicide) for Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet commander, informing him of Hitler's death and inviting him to sign an armistice! Twelve hours later he returned and said the answer was 'not satisfactory'. At least, we are told so. General Krebs has never been seen again; Bormann is missing; Burgdorf has vanished; Goebbels was said (by the Soviet authorities) not only to have committed suicide, but even to have left his body behind, though in his case no photographs were published to my knowledge.
Truly, if Hitler had not died his death would have had to be invented, for those negotiations on his 'last day' with the approaching ally of 1939 would otherwise have needed much explaining.
Are they dead, he and his companions of the last days? If he is dead, it is an irrelevant accident. 'Satan with a small moustache', one tin-pan troubadour sang of him in New York, during the war. Perhaps; but his satanism was directed more against Christian Europe than against the Jews. With his disappearance the revolution of nihilism was not annihilated, but made its greatest advance.
I think the missing Viennese dossier might supply the missing link in our knowledge of his early associations, and that it might lead to Russia. My theory is that Hitler, between 1908 and 1914, received his political training in the Russian schools of anarchism and nihilism; and that these have now bred the ostensibly opposed factions of 'Communism' and 'Fascism', in order the better to work, behind this screen of pretended mutual hatred, for the aim of continental destruction. I think these forces have been clearly shown, by the events of the Forties, to be internationally organised, and to have friends in the 'capitalist West' as in the 'communist East'. I think he was their agent and had as many protectors as enemies in the eastern armies which were given priority to capture Berlin. I think he sprang from those secret, nationless, conspiratorial ranks and, with his chosen initiates, may have been spirited away by them. If he still lives, I would look for him first behind the dark curtain; if he is dead, I think his secret might yet be found there. If there is 'a design', he furthered it; and if there are 'managers', they may claim him as their man.
I shudder to think of it now. Our century is all a masquerade and how can you compile a truthful Who's What when all men wear a mask? How his features changed, when he unmasked! He only wanted power to do to others what he denounced when it was done to him; he did not wish to cleanse Europe of the Gauleiters, but merely to rename them Commissars.
Chance was kind, to send me past the Reichstag as it took fire. A man who saw those flames, and what followed, has the key to the riddle of this century. A Major Breen, who on that fateful night was at the British Embassy in Berlin, fifteen years later wrote to The Times, 'The Reichstag hoax was the atomic bomb which blew our continent to pieces', and the words are exactly true. Those flames lick at the lives and liberties of every man, woman and child in the British island today.
The chain of events is plain. The fire was attributed to 'Bolshevists' and in that pretext parliamentary government was abolished and 'emergency powers' over men seized in Germany. Thus the area of ruined parliaments and rule-by-terror was extended, at a single move, from Soviet Asia to the largest country in Europe. Later the war was begun in agreement and alliance with 'the Bolshevists'; this spread the regime of savagery over all the land between the two, so that the Asiatic despotism reached to the Rhine. When the alliance was broken this area did not shrink, nor did it diminish when victory was won. As a result of the victorious war against Germany, 'emergency powers' (which mean that parliament rests on half-ruined foundations) were perpetuated in England. In the British island, therefore, this twilight of insecurity derives directly from the Reichstag fire.
That seems to me to prove the continuing truth of Lord Acton's dictum about 'design behind the tumult' and the 'calculating organisation' of unseen managers. Who fired the Reichstag, shot the Archduke at Serajevo, murdered Alexander at Marseilles or killed Boris? We shall not know, but now can clearly see that all these and other pieces fit into the pattern of destroying nationhood, parliamentary government, justice, liberty and the rights of man (which were most nobly defined by the prophets of the French Revolution) everywhere.
Having seen the gibbering, slavering van der Lubbe I know the petty minion in these affairs. But Dimitroff was different. He was a leading and enlightened conspirator; that is now clear. I admired his courage, and today think the writer should be wary in extolling this quality. Like Mark Twain (who began a book by saying that if his readers wanted weather they could turn to the end, where in an appendix he included samples of the more lurid weather reports from contemporary writing) the political writer should keep courage out of his portraits, which this trait may falsify. Göring, who seemed the image of a cowardly bully when he threatened Dimitroff with a private hanging, died calmly enough when Dimitroff himself was erecting gallows in Sofia.
I even wonder now about Dimitroff's courage. May the managerial hand have been even in the Reichstag trial? It puzzled me then that the Nazis allowed him to give so effective a public performance, when they tried their own people secretly in 'People's Courts' or put them away without any trial. I now recall an episode which may mean more than I then thought.
Before the trial began an acquaintance in Berlin casually told me I might be visited in my hotel at Leipzig by a friend of hers, whom she merely called 'Heinrich'. (I was not then familiar with the Communist method of using aliases.) This man duly appeared. He was a Jewish Communist from Russia, yet seemed at ease in that Gestapo-ridden town. He wanted me, after each day's hearing, to give him a brief résumé of events in court, and for several days he awaited me, sitting in the lounge, to collect it. Since I was reporting the trial anyway I saw no harm in telling him what went on. What interests me now, in the light of all that has happened since, is that before the trial began he told me 'Dimitroff will make a big show in this trial' (Dimitroff wird in diesem Prozess sehr gross auftreten). How did he know that Dimitroff would be allowed a grosses Auftreten?
Dimitroff was but a name to me then and Communism an unanswered question. I knew he was a member of the ruling coterie of International Communism, but in 1933 did not know what that meant; in 1947 I do. I knew then that Communist and National Socialist methods were the same, but thought Communism might remain in Russia; my objection to National Socialism was the certain knowledge that it did not mean to stay in Germany. Communism could only spread through war and the condition of Russia, after fifteen years of Communism, was so miserable that I thought Communism must dread war. I foresaw, and said in Insanity Fair, that Hitler, when he was ready for war, would seek alliance with Stalin. I did not foresee the second murderer's alacrity to agree. Had I seen so far, I would not have imagined Dimitroff to be the pitiful victim of Hitler (his subsequent release and restoration to Russia, at a time when innocence meant nothing in Germany, should have foretold me of Stalin's complicity in 1939).
I thought his plight heartrendingly forlorn in the Thirties. Exactly ten years before he had led an unsuccessful rising in Bulgaria; exactly ten years before Hitler had led an unsuccessful rising in Bavaria. What changes the ten years had wrought! The one man a friendless prisoner before the German Supreme Court, the other (by his own declaration) the Supreme Magistrate of Germany!
Let another ten years pass, and Dimitroff was to behave in Bulgaria exactly as Hitler behaved in Germany. 'Communism is not cruel and brutal', I heard him cry from the dock. Another decade,'and he would set up in Bulgaria the selfsame 'People's Courts' which Hitler established after the Reichstag fire! I attended the first German People's Court and feel the creeping horror of it now, when I go to a British court of law and watch judges, who cannot be coerced, still doing justice. There is something godly about these courts, and everything devilish about those where The Party deals out death to The People under the ironic device, The People's Court. Hundreds of heads rolled at the order of Dimitroff's People's Courts.
He mocked the charge that the Reichstag fire was the result of 'a Communist conspiracy to seize power', he cried that it was an act of 'political provocation', he taunted his accusers with the suppression of the Communist Party and the expulsion of its deputies from the Reichstag - in the Thirties. But in the Forties he (like Hitler) held 'elections', and then arrested the Opposition leader, Petkoff, had him put to death ('To a dog, a dog's death!' he cried), expelled the twenty-three Opposition deputies from Parliament. Why? 'They have been conspiring' (he gravely told the British Minister) 'to seize power by force of arms.'
One thing I divined when I wrote about him in the Thirties: 'Those who take a long view of history may ponder the fact that the Communist Party, as an organisation, alone survives in Germany of all the parties that National Socialism has destroyed. Conservatives, Socialists, Catholics, Democrats, Liberals have all been swept away. The Communist Party, which it was the primary purpose' (today I should write 'professed purpose') 'of National Socialism to destroy, remains - a skeleton force, working underground, its members still apparently in organised relationship with each other, its activities pursued in spite of obstacles - waiting for its opportunity, waiting for National Socialism to collapse in the stress of a new war....'
How valorous he seemed, in the Thirties, and what a fraud he was. Where, in that smoky masquerade, was a man who really fought for what he claimed to fight for; who sincerely wished to free his fellow men, and not himself to enslave them? I see few in the smoke of the Thirties and fewer now. Today, when I watch a 'Fascist' and a 'Communist' haranguing the idlers in Hyde Park, I think, of the first, 'You are Dimitroff', and of the second 'You are Hitler', and of the twain, 'You are robbers both. You both work to the same end and behind you stand the same managers.'
It was exciting to reach Moscow, this dream metropolis of 'the great Soviet experiment' (for some) and nightmare capital of Red ruination (for others). The shape I had seen from afar was the real one: ruination was right. Today, ten years later, the shape has not changed.
I can check that by an all-revealing detail. In my Moscow hotel bedroom in the Thirties the telephone rang and a woman's voice said, 'Wouldn't you like me to come up and see you?' (see Insanity Fair). In March 1947, when another British correspondent (Mr. Herbert Ashley of the Daily Telegraph) accompanied another Foreign Minister (Mr. Bevin) to Moscow his bedside telephone rang and a woman's voice spoke the same words. I do not know if it was the same woman, but in ten years the Soviet secret police has not learned to vary the words, let alone the method. This incident is the key to all else; the picture Mr. Ashley otherwise gave was the one I saw, in every detail.
I can add, from the Thirties, a trifle to that tale. I knew the nice Russian girl could not enter the hotel without her secret police card and declined her offer (she appears in Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom, too). However, later the door opened and a girl came in. This was a different one and had hardly a word of English, French or German. Perhaps, to earn food or clothing, or gain freedom for a lover, she had told the secret police she spoke English; I do not know. She was anything but a femme fatale, she was a poor drab and pitiful in this part. I was just leaving to catch my train and recall that an American correspondent looked in to say goodbye and quickly retired, thinking no doubt that I was a willing captive. I gave her some oddments not worth packing; a piece of chocolate, some soap, two handkerchiefs and some revolting paper roubles. She burst into tears, stammered, 'You ... good', and, miming the need for haste, I went to catch my train.
Ah, mother Russia, mother of sorrows. The sufferings of the Germans and of their victims are but a drop from the cup the Russian people have had to drink in these three decades. 'This will last out a night in Russia when nights are longest there,' said Angelo, impatiently quitting a tedious debate.[4] The simile has a meaning today which Shakespeare could not foresee; a modern Angelo, having seen the endless night that has followed the red sunset of October 1917, might use the words if he heard the British or American politician, cleric and professor of 1947 belauding 'the great Soviet experiment'. The humane man seems nearly extinct in the twentieth century.
The shape of Moscow was what I expected, not because I took hostility with me, but because I had seen in Germany the replica of the terrorist state, of which the Soviet one was the prototype and the Nazi one the facsimile, touched-up in different colours. To me the secret police headquarters, whether in Moscow or Berlin, and the concentration camps, whether in Russia or Germany, were not merely brick walls and barbed wire fences. I had heard the cries, seen the wounds, talked with the weeping womenfolk, knew the all-pervading and all-degrading fear.
That was why, when I left the civilisation of Poland behind and entered Russia, I felt I passed from life to death and wrote, in Insanity Fair: 'Once across, that battened-down feeling fell upon you that the discerning traveller experiences in a State based on terror and the secret police. You have the same feeling in Germany, Italy or any other dictatorship State, if you live there. It comes from the knowledge that you must keep your mouth shut, that you have no real liberty and are liable to arrest and imprisonment without trial if you do not keep your thoughts to yourself ... I saw the universal sign of the terrorist State, whether its name be Germany, Russia, or what not. Barbed wire palisades, corner towers with machine-guns and sentries. Within, nameless men lost to the world, imprisoned without trial by the secret police. The concentration camp, the political prisoners. In Germany the camps held tens of thousands, in this country hundreds of thousands' (today 'hundreds of thousands' should read 'millions'). 'I felt I would have loved Russia, but I could see that you would never be allowed to love Russia. I knew the signs of a police State, from Germany, and saw that here, too, a foreigner, though entirely surrounded by Russians, might stay for years and never enter the life of the people. They would be too scared to know him. He would remain perpetually alone, his circle confined to other foreigners, his life limited to Legation teas, an unfelt flea on the hide of the colossus Russia.'
The words are as true now as then; W.H. Chamberlin's Russia's Iron Age confirmed them in the Thirties, and Victor Kravchenko paints the same picture, still blacker, in the Forties. This one thing has not changed in Europe, save that it has changed for the worse by spreading outward, submerging half the continent and threatening England.
'The great Soviet experiment': there is not, in the history of thirty Soviet years, one new thing. Everything in it bears the features of reaction towards the pitiless savagery of times long before the Czars. If there is one thing in it new to modern times, it is only the abolition of all rights of property. Done in the original pretence of crushing great landowners, this has been the most ruthless attack in history on the common man and, in a huge peasant country, has made every peasant a landless serf.
Ten years ago I fell into a fault of which I was critical in others, when I gave dogmatic views, in Insanity Fair, about something I had neither seen nor sufficiently studied: the beginning of the endless Soviet night. 'The Bolshevist revolution was born in the agony of Russia, an agony endured in a common cause. It was a revolt against intolerable tyranny ... It was the convulsive upheaval of a nation tortured and exploited beyond endurance, a desperate effort to throw off an age-old tyranny and achieve better things.'
No. In the Forties we have seen too much to believe any longer that power-over-people passes from one group to another through uprisings of The People; were it so, the Russian people would have convulsively upheaved long before now. The next sentence was correct: 'In the event power passed from one gang to another gang and none can yet say what will ultimately come out of the Bolshevist revolution for Russia.'
In the Forties, however, we know what is coming of it for others than Russians. In no other country has Communism gained power through a majority vote. It never will. Nevertheless, Communism now rules over many other lands, through the presence there of the Red Army. (The only two countries which, after a look at Communism, had a chance to express an opinion at a free election registered loathing and repugnance; these were Hungary and Greece).
In the Thirties, when I was in Moscow, the good Litvinoff was blandly defining 'an act of aggression' as that of the first country to set foot or aeroplane over a neighbour's frontier. Stalin was telling Mr. Eden that 'two expansionist countries, Germany and Japan, threaten the peace of the world' (but did not add that he would join Germany in breaking that peace). In those days it seemed that the rulers of Russia might desire peace and the enslaved Russians find happiness.
That was not so. The ruined area has merely been enlarged, and no doubt about the future intention remains. The question-mark over the Kremlin in the Thirties has been answered, in the Forties, and we are back where we came in ten years ago. Europe cannot remain bisected any more than a man can walk through life with a broken spine.[5] It must either be mended or he must die. That Communism might repeat the Hitlerist and Napoleonic bid for world domination was clear enough, in the Thirties; what was not clear was that it would be helped by Britain and America.
Unhappy Russia, unhappy Moscow. How incongruously the Moscow-made Union Jacks fluttered, as a British Foreign Minister for the first time arrived there, in the Thirties. How drab and silent were the distant crowds, herded behind the watchful secret-police troops. They had nothing to lose but their chains (they had once been told). Now they bore crueller chains than ever. Nothing was left them but the misery of thought.
How good it was to pass back through the iron curtain[6] into civilised Poland. Poor Poland!
In mid-1933: 'War in about five years, unless the danger be realised and prevented....'Austria was invaded in March 1938, Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and the second war began in September 1939.In 1935: 'We are moving to a war which, unless it be prevented, will either be a short one ending in German victory or a long one leaving Europe in a state of deteriorating, Chinese confusion....'
In April 1936: 'The Austrian Chancellor agreed with me that Austria and the world must be prepared for anything at any time from now on ... My own opinion is that from now on one should be ready at any moment for events which will place Britain before the immediate necessity to take a decision for peace or war ... The possibility of a German descent on Austria must be always borne in mind ... At present the depressing likelihood seems to be that nobody will take this situation seriously until it is too late and that the muddle-into-war history of 1914 will be repeated for the want of consideration in advance of the situation with which the world is likely to be confronted before all too long....'
In April 1937: 'The Chancellor said the worst thing that could happen for Austria, and the thing they had most to fear, was the outbreak of war in Europe. "And who can prevent war? Only England"....'
In June 1937: 'Austria is now at the mercy of Germany and it is almost a matter for surprise that she has not walked in long since. She could do it at any moment. If Germany should march in there seem only two possible results: the rapid submission of Austria and disintegration of Czechoslovakia or a European war....'
In June 1937: 'The Minister for Home Affairs said Austria could not resist an invasion by the Reichswehr; it would be hopeless. This was my estimate of the possibilities in a memorandum sent two years ago ... Did the seizure of Austria inevitably mean, in his view, the immediate disintegration of Czechoslovakia, provided there were no general war? Yes, he said, inevitably .... At the end he said, "Well, let's hope that some way out can yet be found without the great blood bath", but I did not have the impression that this hope was very strong in him....'
In September 1937: 'Italy has agreed to let Germany have her way in Austria ... in return for support in the Mediterranean or in a major European conflict ... Mussolini is "contemplating early hostilities in Europe" ... British foreign policy seems to be moving drearily to the inevitable disaster, so long foreseen and easily predictable....'
In December 1937: 'The Chancellor told me, "Any territorial expansion by Germany in this area must lead inevitably to war" ... A new war would bring Communism. He thought it a mistake to think you could avoid war by seeking to propitiate Germany with concessions in the Danubian area. He did not think England would be spared the social upheavals which would follow a new war ... I said I heard Germany was reckoning with war in about two years (this was an allusion to a report, which I have on good authority, that Papen between November 9th and 11th was told by Hitler that Germany was calculating on war "in two years at the least" and by Göring, "in two years at the latest"). The Chancellor said, without my specifically referring to this report, that he believed Germany was working for "two years at the least". His use of the identical phrase I had in mind, but had not used, seemed to show that he also had heard of this Hitler-Papen conversation....'
The reader may see that the diligent journalist of the Thirties was a clamorous, but truthful, harbinger of blood and death. Not he alone, however: the files of nearly every British Embassy or Legation in Europe must contain warnings similarly exact about Hitler's Germany in the Thirties (and, in the Forties, about Stalin's Russia).
The pattern has not changed in the new decade. I am surer now than I was in the Thirties that the second war could have been stopped by an unyielding stand over Czechoslovakia. We know now (from evidence at Nuremberg, from von Hassell's The Other Germany and Gisevius's To The Bitter End) that Germans were then ready to remove or kill Hitler. The Pact of Munich foiled them; what could they do if the outer world made encouraging gifts of territory, man-power, food-power and munition-power to Hitler? Today the scene is the same, with Soviet Russia in Hitlerist Germany's place. If 'the men of Munich' were guilty then, the men of Moscow are so now. Still the wall of misinformation stands between the peoples and the truth.
The political leaders of our century remain a riddle. If Ramsay MacDonald, even before Hitler's triumph, foresaw the danger, why did he and his successors allow it to approach? Do politicians-in-power come under pressures, which they cannot resist, from those forces 'behind the scenes' of which Disraeli spoke? Do they only look to the next election, as Baldwin implied? Or do they express an inarticulate desire of masses, to be told 'Now go home and sleep safely in your beds'? 'And you all know, security is mortals' chiefest enemy,' said Lady Macbeth.
In the Thirties, if there were 'guilty men', they were in all parties. Not only some Tories cried, 'The King is clothed' when naked dictatorship stripped for war. Snowden and Lansbury thought Hitler 'a friend of peace'; Lloyd George scoffed at German rearmament; Attlee and Morrison thought British disarmament the sure road to peace. Alone of them all the Communists, who raised this last cry most loudly, saw clearly what they wanted: a British collapse and universal destruction.
I find interest in looking back into the mind of a man (myself) who was in his own thirties during the fantastic Thirties. The background to all my thoughts was the first war. It hung there, a great grey backcloth, and when the monstrous new war took shape ahead it was like being between two huge, closing walls; one's puny arms tried to keep them asunder.
The first war, in my belief, was not just one of the innumerable wars of history. Now that the second war may be seen appended to it, like wagon to locomotive, it appears unique. The two together are one war, and this has been used, for the first time in history, to promote super-national aims, quite distinct from those of the peoples which were thrown into the melting-pot. Before the first one began (this is now clear) the seeds of those overriding schemes had been planted, and these alone throve and blossomed through both.
Therefore the first war began something new in our planet's history. For the first time that huge mechanism was set moving which brought men from the ends of the earth to fight 'for freedom', as they were told, but in the event to destroy it. I still see Chinese labourers and perplexed Portuguese toiling in Flanders fields; they, like the Brazilians in the second war, might have asked what they were doing in that galley. The omnipotent ruthlessness of that enormous machine, which clutched up men from remote corners of every continent, was then first revealed. It seemed, in 1914-18, a natural phenomenon, produced by spontaneous combustion, which could never recur. But we have now seen it twice!
Then there was its insensate immobility and gigantic destructiveness. When I look back I am astounded that the millions could be brought to lie down in mud for four years, merely waiting until a shell burst near enough. The most lethal war in history was in a sense a non-fighting war. Were the generals hamstrung by politicians (like the journalists between the wars) or was it a sterile period in the military mind? The 'war of attrition' in the great quagmire seems to me a freak among wars.
Nevertheless it was justified by its apparent results. It left Europe as near perfection as a human community in an earthy continent will ever be. While it went on it was like a dinosaur weltering in mud and blood, but when the monster at last lay still there was clean air and sweet hope. It was militarily a fiasco and politically a brilliant success. In the Thirties the monster stirred again, and the most evil of the dervish-like figures that danced through that smoky time, to me, were those who cried, 'This is all the fault of the Treaty of Versailles'. In the Forties men may yearn for the Treaty of Versailles as drowning seafarers for a raft.
For the second war was militarily a brilliant success and politically a fiasco. The falsification of causes and motives, which began in the Thirties, ran all through it like some war-born plague. The pattern of the Thirties became plainer. A tyrant duke had only been removed in favour of a more tyrannous brother. The great machine was set in motion, the second time, for ends quite different from those which were proclaimed when the button was pressed.
As the Thirties ended, and the long-denied second war began, all this was hidden behind the wavecrest of the onrushing Forties. I listened impatiently to a loudspeaker in Devon, which told me that The War had begun. It had been going on for nearly seven years (and continues as I write).
Having nothing better to do at that instant, I sorted my papers and put aside the carbon-copies of those reports of the years 1933-39.
Once the cross was in all the flags of Europe, of France, Prussia, Russia, Austria and the others. Now it remains only in that of this country, the Scandinavian ones, Switzerland and Greece. Above the darkness that spread over Europe in the Forties waves the anti-Christian symbol of the destroyers. That is the exact measurement, in its simplest form, of the result of the two wars and of three decades. They have almost undone the work of nineteen centuries; the passing of the crosses is not meaningless. Through them the vainest warlord bowed to the limits of mortal pretensions. The new ones acknowledge no authority higher than their own; theirs the vainglory of the baboon.[7]
Pitiful were the mobs I saw, shouting 'Stalin, Stalin' in the Red Square, or 'Heil Hitler' in the Wilhelmstrasse, or 'Duce, Duce, Duce' in Rome (they also shout 'Tito, Tito, Tito' now). Always they have roared themselves from bad to worse since the first mob cried 'Give us Barabbas'.
Forty years ago politics was a fairly safe occupation and the average expectation of an honourable, peaceful end was high. Now it is a dangerous calling. Stalin killed nearly all the Bolshevist leaders; Hitler killed hundreds of his confederates; dead Mussolini was hanged upside-down by his own mob. All that will not deter a new generation of wreckers. The intoxicant, power, is too potent, the unseen managers are too mighty.
They may die in thousands, these upstarts who are the curse of our century, and the mob in millions. The pitiful ones are the others, those who try to keep hold of the Christian values and let the mob rush by, but are caught in the maelstrom and swept away. What can they do against the secret police, bread-tickets, forced labour, the informer and the all-powerful Party? These victims of the devil's machine are the ones I chiefly see when I look back at the Thirties. The survivors today live in a Europe suspended between hammer and anvil; it cannot stay as it is, neither civilised nor savage, neither wholly enslaved nor wholly free. In the darkness of the Forties those millions wait, almost hopelessly now, for the final blow.
Where are my friends of the smoky Thirties in Insanity Fair? Most of them have vanished. Where is Nadya the dancing-girl, who rode with me in the Little Rocket, who learned the crawl with me in Budapest, who in exuberant mother-nakedness grilled a steak among the rushes of a lake, in Mecklenburg, who sacrificed her waist-line to the pastries of Brussels and her good-humour to regaining it among the cream-cakes of Vienna? Once I had news of her, a signed letter that came out of Antwerp just before the Germans marched in. I still see the last words: 'Es geht mir schlecht. Dein Nadya.' Good Nadya, I fear you fared still worse, but your laughter and the gay moments, in a darkling time, remain eternal.
Strange faces and figures pop up in that crowded, confused, composite street which to me is mad Europe of the lowering Thirties. There is Charles Chaplin, who lampooned the Germans in Shoulder Arms during the first war and would again lampoon them in The Dictator, during the second; there he stands before the Adlon Hotel, Berlin, and beams on a cheering German mob. The time? For him, between two films; for the mob, between two wars; in other words, the Thirties. How much he resembles Hitler, soon to beam on the same mob at the same spot. Not only in feature: in the sad hearts of these two clowns is the same self-mistrust, the same aversion from mortal mankind. The one man, who has a political itch, shows it in his pictures; the other, who itched to paint pictures, shows it in his politics.
There were new noises in Nineteen Thirty Street. In every dwelling little boxes began to speak; little did the millions who listened guess how much poison was to be injected into their minds through them. The films began to talk. I see The Blue Angel now, and Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich together in the Kurfuerstendamm. In the Forties Marlene, would still be Marlene, a little finer-drawn, but still vom Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt, still a little guttural as she sang American soldiers on to victory over the Germans (perhaps the German soldiers thought of her when they mournfully serenaded the vision of one 'Lili Marlen'.) Had Jannings stayed in Hollywood he might, who knows, also have entertained American soldiers Germany-bound, but he did not and, when they arrived, was arrested, 'grilled', charged with 'collaboration'. Had he not acted in German films? Why had he not remained in California and stayed an honest man?
Unaccountable tricks of destiny, cruel to some, kind to others. There sits lovely Lilian Harvey, smiling at me through her film make-up. She danced through the smoky Thirties and through The Congress Dances. She looked English, spoke English; I supposed her parentage was English. She was loved by all, as she drove out of the Reichskanzlerplatz in her long tourer with the musical horn and probably never suspected, when its name was changed to Adolf Hitler Platz, that this spelt ruin. But I surmise that it did, for she was rich then, and yet was swept away by the whirlwind and in the Forties suddenly reappeared, frail and ailing, in a Paris music-hall. She was 'glad to be at work again', she said; the newspapers made 'a story' of her for a day.
Capriciously the Thirties sported with the public idols, around whom the mob cavorted. There goes Bunny Austin, to play for England on the Rot-Weiss tennis courts in the Grünewald, and thereafter to a queer, unforseeable assignation with 'moral rearmament' somewhere in America. The mob loved to admire itself and forget itself in such champions. It gathered there to cheer two other heroes of the day, the American Tilden and the German von Cramm. (In the Forties both these manly figures passed out of the sunshine of public adulation into a reproachful oblivion.) There through the Tauentizenstrasse, as yet unknown, goes the rising young novelist Christopher Isherwood (the Forties will find him, too, in America) and beside him are the people of his books: the scented and bewigged Mr. Norris, the self-squandering English wanton, Sally.
And there, in the Ringstrasse, is the King of England. His story seemed then to add the one piece still missing to the pattern of Greek tragedy that was Europe in the Thirties. How ominous, I thought: when the storm broke the British people would need, on their throne, a man who so firmly united the devotion of that great family scattered over the world. It was difficult to see God's hand anywhere then; in the Forties, however, the British people might say again, there's a divinity that shapes our ends. The new king, starting with none of the huge advantages of his brother, by quiet example strengthened the feeling of union within the British family everywhere.
The idols were caught up, tossed round, cast down; not for them the tranquil, continuing renown of earlier favourites. There, through the Rue de la Paix, goes a boy, Lindbergh. He little knew the storms he flew towards when he flew towards Atlantic storms. The mob, with the smoke thickening round it, clutched at the dream-picture of itself: a golden youth, with gale-tossed hair, conquering all hazards and safely reaching that Paris where good Americans go when they fly. Mass-adulation swirled about him.
The hero became the mob's captive; never again might he own his own soul; if he wished to ride this storm he must follow the mob. He flew here, there, everywhere. Everything he said was important - if it was what the mob wanted; mobs will not brook heresy since one cried, 'Give us Barabbas'. The sudden journeyings precipitated his mind into world affairs, and he formed his own opinions. That was enough, or rather, too much: he was 'A Fascist'. That a German murdered his baby son brought him no mob-sympathy when he cried, 'Keep out of the war against Germany'.
Men who form opinions about Europe without sufficient knowledge are usually wrong, and he was wrong if he thought 'Fascism' and 'Communism' left alone, would destroy each other. That was not in the plan. He may now, in the Forties, be half way towards the truth, when he is telling his countrymen, 'Get into Europe and stop Communism'. The whole truth, however, of these thirty years is that a President Roosevelt is more dangerous to America than Fascism, Communism or any New Weapon.
Here is a strange picture from the smoky Thirties: Ramsay MacDonald, with his fellow-socialist, Sir Oswald Mosley, beside him, warning the Germans, in the Reichstag, against attacking Poland! That was even before Hitler came to power! Looking back, I feel proud of that episode. Did he 'betray Socialism'? We know much more about the Communist Empire today and might wish to see another such betrayal, rather than the hidden Communist domination of 'British Labour' which wreaked such havoc in England in the Forties; that is a much worse betrayal of England than anything this Socialist ever did. In the Forties those who most loudly reviled 'the renegade leader' have come to compare poorly with him.
And the wealthy baronet at his side? His figure, that day, seemed clearcut enough; the rich man among our Socialists is as familiar as the American millionaire among the Communists. The smoke of the Thirties must have got in his eyes, for him to have coupled the words 'British' and 'Fascist'. You cannot have a British Ogpu, a British Gestapo, a British Nazi or a British Communist, if there is always to be an England, any more than you can have a pastor with horns.
I met many other men who to my eyes had no definite shape, in the smoky Thirties, but now are gaining one. I seldom knew or cared what their politics were; they echoed my loathing of 'the Nazis' and I assumed, as I then thought, logically, that they would loathe Communism equally. I hated the things that both did, not their names.
I was often wrong, as I now see, in this assumption. I sat with a Mr. John Strachey in a Viennese café and with him denounced 'the Nazis'. To me he was but a name. I did not know he was (then) a champion of Communism; or that he had written of the Invergordon naval mutiny of the Thirties as revealing 'the true spirit of the British sailor', of 'one Union of Soviet Republics reaching to the Rhine' and of 'the centre of gravity of world Communism shifting westwards from Moscow to Berlin'. Had I then read these words of his, I would have suggested to him that such a prospect was just as evil as that of a Nazi Empire reaching to the Urals, with the centre of gravity of world National Socialism shifting eastward from Berlin to Moscow, and that it was humbug to advocate the one and denounce the other. I did not guess, that night in Vienna, that this shadowy acquaintance would in the next decade become Food Minister in Britain and under 'Defence Regulations' of a bygone war bring bread-tickets to this island. Had I been so clairvoyant, I would have argued that despotic power over a people's food is the unmistakable mark of dictatorship by any name, and have asked just what he objected to in National Socialism.
Then there was a Mr. Richard Grossman, who moved about Germany in the Thirties and similarly scarified 'the Nazis'. He seemed a slightly lisping young professor, pleasant but nebulous. When the war came I was puzzled to hear his voice each night, calling the German Arbeiter to rid himself of Hitler. He, and the professorettes who broadcast similar fiery messages in Girtonesque German, were not Arbeiter or Arbeiterinnen, I reflected; why this laboured stress on 'the working classes'. When the war was over this voice was to urge 'understanding' for the Soviet Power as loudly as others had recommended it for the well-meaning Hitler, and again I could not reconcile this respect for the devil in red with hatred of the devil in brown, or his support of 'emergency powers' in England with his loathing of dictatorship in Germany.
Truly, men were seldom what I thought them, in the Thirties, and they often emerged, in the Forties, in shapes far different from anything I foresaw when I talked with them. In Geneva, for instance, was a rather vague figure, a Mr. Konrad Zilliacus. I used to surmise casually about his unusual name and the origins it might indicate. The League of Nations needed men of languages, I supposed, and there he was. Had my life depended on it I would not have guessed that, ten years later, he would be elected by a majority of 19,000 votes to represent the Geordies of grey Gateshead, or that this enemy of things 'Fascist' would become famous as an apologist of things Communist. I never could see the sense of that and never will.
I knew some men in the Thirties whose faith was clear. They hated both devils, and usually died. Here are two: Grada Kozomaritch, a Serb, and Sima Franzen, a Croat, both Yugoslav journalists. Kozomaritch, who escaped to England in the first war and studied at Oxford, was long correspondent of The Times in Belgrade. The Balkan man often sees further than the westerner; possibly those five Turkish centuries sharpened his wits. Kozomaritch in his youth fought the Germans in his native Serbia and hated the Nazis, their heirs. But he saw clearly that 'Fascism' was only a stalking-horse for Communism. I did not, at that time, and we had many arguments. Because he hated Communism Kozomaritch was defamed as 'a Fascist'; when the Nazis reached Belgrade they killed him. (He was convinced that the murder of King Alexander at Marseilles was Communist in its origins; now that the plan of a Communist Empire stretching to the Adriatic and beyond has been revealed, and the then unknown men who were in training for it in Russia have emerged, his farsightedness is evident.)
His colleague Franzen was with me in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and joined me in trying to help refugees, most of them Jewish, from the advancing Germans. Consequently he was 'smeared' as a Communist, though he recognised the oneness and indivisibility of Fascism and Communism and hated both. When the Soviet armies reached Belgrade he was shot.
The Thirties were the hey-day of the charlatan and the bully; the Forties, which were to prove even more profitable to fraud and brutality, were yet to come (and the Fifties, which may yield an even greater harvest, are still unborn). Masses of human beings showed that civilisation in Europe was not even skin deep; it was a wafer-thin veneer laid over animal instincts and dictatorship found the way to peel off the veneer. The mob turned blindly towards reaction in its foulest form when it bore the features of Marx, Lenin or Hitler and put on the mask of The Common Man or The Working Class. The great civilising minds, from the Nazarene to Shakespeare, from da Vinci to Goethe, in two thousand years barely touched the mob-mind. Mankind was still a toad with the humane jewel dulling in its forehead; the toad had not become a lovely prince.
Let me take a man to point my theme, a man who set up a 'booth in Insanity Fair in the Thirties. Through him we may look into the soul of a man who might have become a dictator. He was a most sordid murderer, yet almost reached the seats of the mighty and had he done so he would have seemed respectable, upright, religious almost to bigotry. If it is still possible to persuade any of the danger of allowing a politician, who has climbed the party-rungs to a top place, to seize 'emergency powers', the study of this man should convince.
Thomas John Ley appeared in Danzig in the smoky Thirties; he organised the then popular sweepstakes. He had great strength of feature, muscle and will. The lust for power over men was in him and by ambition he was a politician. A butler's son from our West Country, he was taken in infancy to Australia and there became a successful politician. Electors do not choose their representatives today; in the twentieth century they are picked beforehand in the secret party conclaves, and Ley learned the trick of these. It was the time of Prohibition in America and the cry was likely to catch votes. He became 'Lemonade Ley', a temperance-crusader (had he been twenty years younger, and come to politics in the Forties, he would probably have called himself a Socialist and secretly curried Communist favour). He became (in New South Wales) Minister for Public Instruction, Minister for Labour, and from 1922-95 Minister for Justice! (In that post he refused reprieve to a man whose wife was certified insane and who, dreading the taint for his three children, killed them; this man's plea of insanity for himself was rejected and Ley, denying reprieve, said, 'Murder is murder and justice must be done'.)
This period, 1925, is the fascinating point in his career to the student of twentieth-century affairs. The next obvious step towards power was the Australian national parliament. Ley took it; he was elected to Canberra. A post in the Australian Government seemed sure. He might have become Prime Minister. The second war was not far ahead and in wartime Ministers rule through 'emergency powers'. What might he not have become in the sequel? Take one possibility: he might have become Commander-in-Chief of the World Police Force, with authority to send armies against any he was prompted to name a transgressor.
But at that decisive moment things happened. His opponent at the election, who had said hard things about him, disappeared and was never seen again. Lawsuits were begun against him in respect of certain company-promoting transactions. The Australian Prime Minister would have none of him. Suddenly he left Australia. The Thirties saw him, out of politics but rich, busy in Danzig and Andorra. The war came and he returned to the island of his birth.
But for his opponent's disappearance and those lawsuits he might have become powerful in world affairs, a governor of the 'United Nations' or what not. In 1946 he was arrested in London, for murder. The corrupting power of such a man is gruesome to study: with small trouble he picked from London streets several persons who were ready for a little money to kidnap and deliver to him a man unknown to them. I would not have thought this possible in London. The body was found, and the trail uncovered, by merest chance; but for it the victim would have disappeared like the man in Australia twenty years before.
Unlike the man whose plea of insanity was rejected, whose reprieve Ley refused, Ley was found insane after conviction and reprieved (he died soon after in Broadmoor Asylum). Was he insane, and for how long had he been? In my surmise his insanity was only that of the lust for power over men, which is the worst form of insanity. How near he came to wielding it in great public affairs. His case is illuminating for the study of Lenin, Hitler, and those men of the Forties who today seek power-over-masses. The task of The Common Man is not to follow them, but at all costs to curb them, for they seek to destroy him.[8]
A pandemonium of men and machines was Insanity Fair in the smoky Thirties. I see the first rocket-car on the Avus track near Berlin, watched by impassive German general staff officers with the forbidden red stripe on their trousers. My more sober British colleagues smiled at my deep interest in this toy. I followed every scrap of rocket news with avidity. There was a man who claimed to make a package-carrying rocket deposit its load within a prescribed area. There was talk of an experimental 'postal rocket' to America and when I reported it a friend (who in the later war was to be a senior intelligence officer in our air force) twitted me with wasting the space of The Times on 'a stunt'.
But in the Forties I thought of the rocket-car with its flaming tail when I leaned from a cottage-window in Sussex and watched the first flying-bombs, with their flaming tails, come over the shoulder of the Downs, London-bound. A newspaper-correspondent abroad, if he is allowed, can do his country good service.
The Nineteen-Thirties seem to me to have been the ten most evil and fateful years in our twenty centuries of rising civilisation. Whatever the temporary setbacks, the main tendency was always clear before, and it was an upward one. In those ten years huge backward strides were made; very few people yet realise how much was lost in that decade. When the Thirties began the Christian principles of liberty and justice, in greater or lesser degree, prevailed almost everywhere in Europe outside the small slice of Asiatic Russia which the map puts in Europe. When they ended unlawful imprisonment, torture and death, mass deportation and mass depopulation were the methods of government in three-parts of the continent; the rulers of imprisoned Russia and imprisoned Germany joined hands to extend this plague-area until it infected nearly all of Europe.
The Thirties! How the herd, released into the pleasant prairie of a free life by the nineteenth century, rushed to find the slopes of Gadarea again! Puny were the great men, many of them crying ''Ware wolf!' only because they wanted to play a wolfish part themselves. Rare was (and still is) the man who stood steadfastly by the principles of the New Testament, of British justice, of the American Constitution, no matter which side seemed uppermost in the medley of the day.
As the smoke of the Thirties burst into the flame of the Forties, and the puppets danced faster and more furiously still, the Sage of the Century gave it all a final benediction. When the two leaders of anti-Christendom joined hands to destroy Europe, in the few moments before they jointly fell on Poland, Mr. Shaw cried, 'Hitler has put himself under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming'. It was a fitting end to the mad Thirties.
THE FIRE: 1940 - 1945
Some days stand bright in memory like illuminations in an old manuscript. I began that one in Bedford, thinking on John Bunyan's long imprisonment by the bridge. In prisons he wrote Pilgrim's Progress (through Vanity Fair) and Grace Abounding; in the prison of the soul, which the Thirties were for me, I wrote books called Insanity Fair and Disgrace Abounding. I looked at his jail and tried to count the English writers, from his time till now, whose lot has been persecution. I felt a morbid loathing of my times. Then I thought of his words: 'A castle, called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair.' Saluting him, and throwing off an evil humour, I got into my car. God bless old John, I thought, as I drove towards London. I counted my blessings. I was not in prison, though some would have liked me there. My companion was the most charming I ever knew. My car was unique in slender grace and power (I fear I shall not see its like again). I bought it, perversely, after Dunkirk, thinking, at least I'll ride this beautiful creature a few leagues before nightfall. It was long, low, and of a blue which matched the scarf round my companion's hair, her eyes and the sky above. She had never read Bunyan, yet in her own words echoed him, for she chided 'the man that can look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hands'. It was hard not to do that then.
So I had barely left Bedford behind when I felt the happiest man alive. I came, indeed, at a delicate plain called Ease, and went with much content - but that plain was but narrow. Suddenly we came on a scene that stays sharp-etched in my mind.
Beside the road was a great airfield, with aeroplanes about and big buildings black against the green turf. Some alarm had been given and in groups of three or four, scattered over the sunny field, stood soldiers, tautly alert, looking upward and southward. Of what they had been warned I do not know, perhaps of a bombing-raid or parachute-attack. In these early days of airfield-defence I think sergeants and corporals alone had bullets for their rifles. I never knew so infectious a feeling of peril, or saw so many men so rigidly poised. No limb stirred or head turned as our blue car flashed by and soon we ran again between placid, empty fields. But the glimpse told me what lay ahead: battle over London.
London! It is all things to all men, or to the same man in different moods. A great wen, Cobbett thought, as he rode from it, looking back, but he saw, not London, rather the gathering evil of the century to come. 'Hell is a city much like London', cursed Shelley. 'A man who is tired of London is tired of life', pontificated Johnson. 'London is a modern Babylon', suavely averred Disraeli, his easterner's mind full of false oriental images. 'London is the Rome of today', decided Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Rome: that is nearer, but not exact, for there is nothing like London. Paul was Rome's captive, but St. Paul's Cathedral crowns London city, and more proudly since the flames fell away from its dome. To me even Rome offers a picture no lovelier than that which a man sees who today looks from Waterloo Bridge across the Thames towards St. Paul's. Providence is the master town-planner and deftly uses calamity and ugliness in composing such a city scene. For centuries men toiled to build London, and yet it took a plague, two great fires, a giant's handful of bombs, and unnumbered other man-made or natural disasters to complete that perfect symphony of outline and gap, dome and spire, roof and river, sky, tree, bridge and barge. May Turner and Canaletto bequeath to some prentice painter, now mixing his colours, the eye to capture the beauty of this moment in London's story.
A native Londoner, who came into London on such a night as that, does best to borrow the words of another Londoner who wrote four centuries ago: 'At length they all to merry London came, to merry London, my most kindly nurse, that to me gave this life's first native source.' If merriness is quiet courage under deadly odds, London was as merry that evening as when Edmund Spenser wrote.
I knew a few of the young men who tilted at the dragon over London Town that night. One I asked, just before the war began, what he thought of his chances when the Germans came. Pausing with a tankard half way to his lips, he said easily, 'Oh, we'll take the pants off them,' and drank. I winced, for I knew how few he and his companions were. I met another in Prague in the Thirties, a young man fresh from Oxford who dabbled in journalism; penitently I recall that I felt the prickly superiority of the professional. I later found his name, John Dundas, beneath a review of Insanity Fair. I wish I had then known that he was the hero of that immortal jest at Oxford, when a greased pig was unloosed among the grave seigneurs of the Senior Common Room of an Oxford college (in 1947 a young peer, Lord Mancroft, casually mentioned in the House of Lords that he shared in that exploit, whereon the Master of Balliol said sternly, 'Oh, it was you, was it?'; after that I recant all former jibes at The English Sense of Humour). John Dundas was killed in this fighting, and possibly the other youngster.
It is a pity that such golden moments as that of September 1940 cannot be nailed to the immovable wall of time, but are borne away by the flight of life. Their colours remain always bright to me, and not because I see the sun glint on the Cloth of Gold, or on Spanish hulls, or Nelson's signal flutter, or Ney's brilliant cavalry break, or Spitfires flash over London, but for a different reason. I see, at each of those instants, the eyes and hearts of men far away turn towards England. Each time we win such a fight hope is reborn in them.
I know these men, to whom the word England means that there is, somewhere, a small country that has contrived to win, widen and strengthen its liberties from century to century. Hope finally dies in them only with our capitulation. Pitt grasped this root of truth when he said after Trafalgar: 'England has saved herself by her exertions and will save Europe by her example.' I know a man who was in a Balkan town, Novi Sad, just before the Germans invaded it. He saw peasants, who did not know an Englishman was present, drink to 'England' and then again to 'Churchill'. Later these men were cruelly disappointed in their hopes and could blame us for it, yet I wager they look to England now, as ever. They know that statesmen make mistakes, but that we never yet made the mistake of surrender, and that while we survive hope survives, if only for their grandsons' grandsons.
I saw all that behind the battle over London. Today we know the words Churchill used when he first gathered his Tory, Socialist and Liberal ministers round him (to our credit, a Socialist adversary revealed them after his overthrow): 'We must fight on, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, then, I say, let it only end when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.' A Socialist cleric recorded the words he spoke aside after his 'fight on the beaches' broadcast to the nation: 'We'll hit them over the head with beer bottles, which is all we have really got.' This rare and unportrayable man, seven years after that summer, would be writing his story of the second war in classic English, and under a nom de pinceau paint pictures worthy of the Royal Academy's walls. Astounding life, that richens in colour, like a stained-glass window, as the years pass.
That evening, cigar in mouth, he watched the map of the battle overhead. It was not a decisive one, for there are none such, but it was among the greatest ever. It was not, like Waterloo, to give Europe a century of assured, foreseeable improvement. I think mistakes he later made helped to cause that, but we must await his account of the whole affair. Not even the dark sequel can dull the hues of that brilliant moment, of which his was the heroic genius. The Forties were well begun by it, and if all's well that begins well, and we can yet make good the subsequent failures, it may dominate the pattern of our world a century from now.
Whatever the future, a man who came into London at that instant could never wish to live in another place or time. There are many big cities; few great ones. London then was both the largest and greatest. It stood quite alone under the perfect sky, unafraid and, I think, not much alarmed. Its millions went quietly about their business. Disraeli miscalled London 'A nation, not a city'; that night, however, it was the only true nation in the world: that of free men everywhere.
There was an invigorating spiritual calm and pride below the noise. My heart rose for the first time in many years as we stopped by Regent's Park to watch. 'London Pride has been handed down to us'; another Londoner, Noel Coward, found apt words for the moment.
When the sky darkened and the fighting waned we moved on, along Portland Place, excited and happy. 'I believe they are taking the pants off them,' I said. 'Of course they are,' said she. At my hotel an imperturbable porter opened the door of the car. 'Good evening, sir,' he merely said, as on any other evening. He is still there, in the same uniform with the first war medals, though he now lacks an eye of which a bomb later deprived him, at that post. Seven years later he might have asked, 'Was the battle for freedom?' and have answered, 'It was all my eye.'
But the return of the dark clouds lay far ahead that night. The twentieth century seemed clear at last. 'Good evening indeed,' said I, handing my companion out. We were winning the battle; she was lovely; it was September; it was a cloudless evening; it was warm.
Vacantly we looked until a young woman with a parrot's gift for remembering and repeating absurdities answered, 'Boil them for three hours.'
'Well, that's half right,' he said grudgingly, 'but you've forgotten something.' He waited expectantly, but even she was dumb. 'You steep 'em in cold water for two hours first!'
'Oh yes,' said the star pupil breathlessly. 'If you don't steep 'em in cold water first they'll shrivel to nothing when you boil 'em.' We shuddered. 'Steep 'em cold first, then boil 'em, see? Er, what's this?' From a mound of leaflets on the table he took the top one, read it, and coughed. 'Oh, that's cancelled,' he said, 'it's just come through from the Ministry of Public Security. You don't steep 'em cold, you just boil 'em.'
A man who in one war has been at the apex of the pyramid, the front, feels out of place, in another war, among the teeming throng at its mighty base. What, he thinks, have these self-important little folk to do with war? 'We're all in this together!' Are they? Many profitably pursue their own lives and ambitions. They taste power-over-people and like its flavour.
I saw much of this process. It began with the ominous words 'emergency powers'. Once they have been spoken, from Hitler to Churchill, from the Reichstag fire to Dunkirk, no man can foresee the end. In their name the scaffolding of State-control was set up. I saw that (and said it in earlier books), but few others did. 'This is different' (they said), 'this is England, this is war, this is not the same.' But it was and is the same. At every level, from Prime Minister to parish pump, men girded on those emergency powers and said 'I am the State'. Below the Minister in Whitehall was the Regional Commissioner, beneath him were smaller despots, down to the 'Emergency Committee' in the hamlet. Through this system of pipes, stealthily laid down under cover of the war and behind the back of the fighting men, the poison of power began to circulate through the body of England.
I knew a man in a small town, a barber and a poor one; his business was worth no man's purchase. But he had a friend who became a member of the 'Emergency Committee'. The Town Hall became a benevolent local Kremlin, the barber hung round it, read all the forms, and soon mastered (on paper) air-raid defence, gas-warfare and the like. No imaginable prank of war could bring gas or fighting to that remote place, but he knew all the forms by heart and soon joined the emergency potentates. When 'powers' arrived to compel men and women to do this or that he exclaimed gleefully, 'Now we've got 'em.' When he lectured about gas he began to display his authority; 'Now, I don't like using the word compulsion,' he could say loftily, 'but ...'
I saw that the Fussy Folk (who so easily yield to the Commissar and Gauleiter) were unhappily plentiful, and that they were often men of the inferior type I had seen rise by this means to importance in other lands. 'O that we now had here but one ten thousand of those men in England, that do no work today'; thus Shakespeare's Westmoreland, before Agincourt, swore the age-old oath of the fighting soldier. These men would have been amazed had any fitted this cap on their heads. Once inside the Town Hall you were doing 'work of national importance'.
The size of the machine I saw built, however, disquietened me less than the fact that it was obviously being set up for a permanent political purpose, that of transferring power-over-people in England to new hands. Would it be dismantled when the war was over, and if not, what was the real motive behind the war? Froglike they swelled, these emergency potentates who clambered on to the war's back (and barnacle-like they clung when 'the emergency' was over). Food controllers, light-and-warmth controllers, travel controllers and dozens more: when will England be rid of these parasites again?
I watched the fantastic rise of the 'National Fire Service'. Formerly we just had local 'fire-brigades' and firemen, in great brazen helmets, who put out fires. When great cities burned and munition-plants were threatened, expansion was clearly needed; an increase in the areas obviously endangered would have been reasonable. But under 'emergency powers' such things become uncontrollable. Not only did every remote township receive its permanent contingent of bored firemen, but staff colleges, training-schools, headquarters and sub-headquarters sprang up, as if the whole island were likely to take fire by spontaneous combustion at any instant. I knew one headquarters in a large country-house where an idyllic time was had by all. Motor cars and girl motor cyclists sped constantly to the nearest village, where were the nearest shops. There were plays, concert-parties, good food (for this was Work of National Importance); for some years a charming house-party lived there as in another planet. Gold braid appeared on peaked caps, epaulettes and badges of rank on uniforms, there was saluting, and in time a special flag fluttered to the masthead (these bodies loved flags; I think even the 'National War Savings Movement' produced one, with a Soviet-like star on it). The retinue and trappings reminded me of an SS headquarters. It was a far cry from this to London burning.
Heavens, I thought, watching, how these growths sprout. This particular service shrank when the war was over, because even The Planned State cannot use many more fire-fighting officials than there are fires. But the others, which had taken powers over the people's food, clothing, firing and houses, went on; these were the things that mattered. Multitudes of men came to love employment under 'emergency powers'. Nothing but a battle in Britain would displace them again. The great army of form-filling officials was bred which after the war would lie like lead on England's energies and exchequer. 'We won the war by planning,' they then cried, 'let's go on planning.'
That was what they meant by planning and observe, gentle reader, they won the war. Not 'The Few' won it, but these many; that was why the clouds gathered again after 1940. The armies that came and went might have come from and gone to another world. This other war was for self-aggrandisement, privileges, power-over-people. Each man's interest was to multiply the number of his subordinates, increase the mass of paper, rise higher in the hierarchy. A 'Tanks for Attack Week' in the village, when all the parish-pump potentates might gather on a dais round some demigod from 'Regional', came to seem more important than a tank victory in Africa. The War was but a backcloth.
Frantic efforts were made to keep up the great anti-gas organisation, despite this vapour's refusal to be used. The higher anti-gas potentates must have fought hard to prevent the paper-machine from slipping out of their hands. To the last the villagers of Mudbury-on-the-Marsh paraded to put on the gargoyle-like garb and then to 'decontaminate' themselves. Everything was worth a memorandum, a leaflet, a form.
Long after The Battle of Britain there was the paper-battle for trousers for women wardens. I remember, when this Battle of the Beam-end was won, seeing a well-upholstered lady warden fall half way into a tub of water during a fire-fighting display, and struggle to get back. For an awful instant of suspense, while taut convulsions went on, Time, which otherwise stands still, seemed to shudder and shrink away from that stricken field. Then there was an infinitely tragic sound: it might have been the heavens rending with compassion, but was not. Unable to avert my eyes I stood transfixed. Reverently I murmured to myself, 'This seat of Mars....'
This paper-chase behind the lion-hunt, this Battle of the Town Halls, became more remote from the fighting-war as the years passed (I mean in those large areas where, it was clear, 'enemy action' would never penetrate). The Emergency Committees' happiest days were those when powers arrived which they could foresee would continue after 'the emergency' was over. The only emergency they feared was an end of the Emergency; an emergency of war would have thrown most of the emergency-potentates into frightful confusion.
In such conditions little men find easy foothold and quickly rise. The boot-boiler and the barber soon ascended to higher things, and now, I surmise, are sternly 'rationing' men's food, firing or liberty somewhere. The regime of permanent-rule-by-emergency-powers was established. Outside in the darkness the tanks and trucks rumbled, bearing dim forms towards that far-off, half-forgotten thing, The War. The great mass of people quietly did their duty; put on their steel helmets when they came from work and went out; and if danger or death came to them, in the places reached by the enemy, accepted these as uncomplainingly as all else. They were ready to hold on for ever - to win the war. They did not see the enemy who crept upon them behind its back.
It was winter, cold, dark, dank. I lived quite alone (solitude is sometimes the friendliest companion) in a small, isolated, tree-screened house. Late one night I returned by train, among soldiers and girls whispering in a dim compartment, to the station three miles away. There I collected my bicycle and rode home through sable lanes between invisible hedges, in a drizzling rain. I groped to the door, went in, read a while and then to bed.
It was a deadly still night without bombers. I was nearly asleep when, in the kitchen beneath, all the crockery crashed in pieces. I think I rose horizontally from my bed and remained suspended an instant, while my hair stood. Then I switched on the bedside light and listened. There was no sound. I went downstairs.
Twice before I knew the startling chill of abrupt fear. Once in Paris, going to an attic bedroom, I stepped from a dark hallway into a dark lift and trod on human flesh which moved. It was (a match showed) a child. I think now that little boy was to have been Oliver Twist in a Bill Sykes burglary; when I fetched light a friendly citizen, with open clasp-knife in hand, suddenly appeared from somewhere, and I fancy he was Bill Sykes. He kindly offered to take care of the boy and I agreed; they departed.
Once in London, mounting dark stairs to another mean bedroom, my hair rose and an unaccountable foreboding chilled me at the last turn in the stairway. I went on and to bed, wondering. Next morning another lodger, who came up later with a light, told me he found a man pressed into the corner by the last turn in the stairs. This man, who made no reply when asked what he wanted, was from the next house and had entered by a flat roof and the french window: my fellow-lodger knew him. Two days later I heard shouts in the street and, looking from my window, saw our neighbour being removed by burly men to an asylum. I was left pondering the sudden fear that gripped me in the dark on the stairs. There were, then, vibrations beyond our knowledge.
Now I stepped with curling toes over the kitchen threshold, reaching before me to switch on a light. Not a plate was out of place, or anything smashed. As I gazed round heavy, bludgeon-like blows sounded on the door behind me; I judge that I jumped a foot and came down facing it. After a pregnant pause, as They say, I opened it. The dim kitchen light reached into the black night and caught the glint of rain, wet grass-blades, a wet treetrunk; otherwise nothing. By nature improvident, I had no torch, so I slipped on gumboots and mackintosh and went round the garden, striking matches which the rain put out. There was neither sound nor soul.
I went to bed and to sleep. Though I think it foolish to scoff at supernatural things, when so little in life is within mortal understanding and so much outside, I am a sceptic about the spooks and spirits of popular superstition, and no other than a natural explanation ever occurred to me. I thought there must be some simple reason and did not trouble further; all my subsequent nights there were undisturbed.
Long after I saw on a friend's bookshelf a book, Unknown Brighton. There cannot be anything unknown in Brighton, I said; let me look. Turning the pages idly I found a tale of a 'haunted house'. It described happenings identical with those I have related: noises of smashing china and blows on doors. That made me think and led me to the encyclopaedias, where I found that the playful or pitiful pranks of the Poltergeist, which I had never studied, are always alike, and have been reported too often, from too many places, to be moonshine.
Yet where does that lead? The very fact that the happenings are everywhere alike suggests to me that they must after all have a natural explanation, not a supernatural one. If spirit beings frenziedly or frantically strive towards us from across the great divide, why are they always tormented ones and why do they always use these mischievous ways of expressing their eternal frustration? Why can they not imprint soft kisses on our cheeks, or squeeze our hands, tickle us under the arms or dig us in the ribs? Is there nothing but misery even beyond the beyond? Can there be Planning there too?
It was a startling, breathtaking experience, and somehow the all-pervading, unending war of our century belonged to it, for the war put me in the lonely house at that moment and for all I know may have brought that unhappy knocking on its door. When I later heard of the Poltergeister, I wondered if this endless twentieth-century war itself might be the work of some super-Poltergeist, graduated beyond china-smashing and gone into business on a big scale.
But no, I decided after much investigation: I feel certain the spirits behind it are on this earth.
The train was rumbling through the Forties when I was awakened by a voice saying, 'Pardon me, have you a match?'
'So you want to talk?' I said. 'Well, all right, if you stop trying to talk American.'
'I cann't help it,' she said, puffing. 'My mother was American.'
'You lie,' I said amicably. 'Your mother came from somewhere near Cardiff and you think it impresses Urrl, and your handbag is full of Camels and Lifesavers and we won't talk about those stockings, and your name would have been Joan, Peggy or Betty if you were twenty years older, but as you aren't it's Valerie, Jennifer or Marlene.'
'Are you trying to insult me?' she asked. 'Yes,' I said.
'Anyway, it's not,' she said. 'It's Purrl.'
'Oh no!' I said, 'Urrl and Purrl! It sounds like a knitter's nightmare.'
'But you were right about Wales,' she said. 'How did you know?'
'Second sight,' I said. 'But if you want that poor wight, stop pretending to talk American. You'll only make him despise you. Imagine the misery you are storing up for yourself if by some mischance you should marry him. At the first quarrel he'd taunt you with it; it would be a scorpion in his hand.'
'He likes it,' she said defiantly, 'and I am going to marry him.'
'He doesn't,' I said, 'and I knew you would be; they all are. Where did you meet him?'
'At Rainbow Corner,' she said.
'Ah, where the rainbow begins,' I said. 'What a shocking future awaits you: either to share a hot-dog stand in Brooklyn or be left behind, A Remnant of Rainbow Corner.'
The careless phrase stung her. 'What a horrible thing to say,' she said angrily. 'A Remnant of Rainbow Corner! Where did you hear that?'
'I didn't,' I said. 'It just came. You girls ask for it.'
'Why?' she said. 'We must have some fun.'
'Of course you must,' I said, 'and Rainbow Corner supplies it in all hues.' I studied her, the girl of a hundred dark cinemas happily rushing towards the golden youth, at last emerged from the flat screen. So many dreams so suddenly come true! 'Do you dance there?' I asked. 'Do you get turned upside down and wave your silly little legs in the air in their silly little pants?'
'Oh, I don't let him do that,' she said primly. 'And he hasn't got a hot-dog stand in Brooklyn. He's got a garage in Chicago and he needs a wife like me to help him run it.'
'It sounds like paradise,' I said.
'Why are you so sarcastic,' she said. 'Why shouldn't I make him a good wife?'
'There's no reason why you shouldn't, or he a good husband,' I said. 'It depends what you are and what he is. You might be very happy. Do you like him?'
'Yes,' she said dreamily. 'He's so ... different.'
'Oh help,' I thought but did not say; then, 'The trouble with you girls is that you're all ill.'
'Ill?' she said, in affront.
'Yes, you're suffering from the oldest woman's ailment in the world: Husarenfieber.'
'What on earth's that?'
'It befalls women when the soldiers ride into town, with their eyes laughing beneath their busbies and their chests stretching their braided coats and their thighs stretching their breeches. Soldier-fever. It doesn't matter who the soldiers are, friend or foe. They can be Germans or Italians behind barbed wire. I think even a talking gorilla behind bars might do. It's a biological thing....'
'Bio ... what?' she said, in the idiom of the moment. 'Well, I've never seen a hussar and there aren't any horses in this war, so I can't have it.'
'You have,' I said. 'It took you to Rainbow Corner. The symptoms are dilated pupils, quickened breathing, unease and a loud giggling . It can't be pernicious, since nature made it, and it's incurable. When are you going to marry Urrl?'
'Don't keep calling him Urrl,' she said impatiently. 'His name's Earl.'
'You began it,' I said. 'When is it to be?'
'As soon as the war's over,' she said happily. 'I don't think of anything else even when I'm asleep. All day long I think of marrying him and going on that ship. When I fall asleep I'm thinking of it and when I wake I'm still thinking of it, so it must be there all the t