Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  7 February 1941.

  This morning I had to leave her house early before the maid-of-all-work arrived. It meant staggering up, getting dressed, and out into the dark rainy street, but I was happy. I could see and smell again after days of planning, of talk, of papers. I felt like a living creature not a sort of filing cabinet of resolutions and schemes.

  It was impossible to do any serious work today. I went for a walk in St. James’s Park. It was a day like early spring – one expected to see crocuses but there were ridges of dirty left-over snow. I was walking along purposefully in my black hat swinging my umbrella thinking damn the war, oh damn the bloody war. I only curse the war when I am happy. When I am miserable it suits me that the world should be sliding down into disaster. Then, realizing that I was happy, I thought that this must not be wasted, let me sit on this bench in the sun, and say to myself as I watch the ducks, “At this moment happiness is right here at my elbow.”

  I am every day hearing of some new and horrific gas which is to be used against us – soporific, made at Bayer’s works in Germany which puts you to sleep all right but from which you awake paralyzed, gas that makes you sick in your mask – you remove the mask and they send over the mustard gas. Certainly people are far more frightened of gas than of anything else, yet it is obvious to me that it can be effective only over a small area and will cause relatively few casualties. I think the worst would be physical, personal, direct bullying, the sort of intimate cruelties that go on in the concentration camps.

  I have been reading Colette’s Chéri – her style light as thistledown, without a pretentious phrase, full of wit, so effortlessly and brilliantly constructed that you never feel a bump of transition. Is it too facile? No, because when you come to think it over you find you have not been cheated anywhere along the line.

  10 February 1941.

  Weekend at Oxford – motored down with Alastair and went over to Elsfield to the christening of Billy Buchan’s child. Lady Tweedsmuir, gentle, intelligent, loyal-hearted, a few friends and relatives, champagne, little pink marzipan sweets in a white Sèvres bonbonnière – little jokes in the library afterwards. Met Elizabeth Bowen, well-dressed, intelligent handsome face, watchful eyes. I had expected someone more Irish, more silent and brooding and at the same time more irresponsible. I was slightly surprised by her being so much “on the spot.”

  Oxford.

  I walked with M. around Magdalen Park. The newer buildings looked decayed like obsolescent Palladian mansions. There are no deer left in the Park. Dined at Anderson’s, the new restaurant next to the George. The Bullingdon Club members came pouring in – children they looked – pink cheeked with long hair and the look of being hot from their baths – innocent and insolent past belief. Then the aesthetes with dangling hands and signet rings, brushing back the locks from their foreheads and swaying on their feet.

  M. was very defeatist. He is now serving in the Military Intelligence and doing a course at Oxford. He thinks the Germans will invade simultaneously at four or five different points at the same time. They will concentrate on small areas and cut off communications, and none of our officers will have any initiative to act on their own without orders from the centre. (Quite unconvincing to me, but he knows more about military possibilities than I do.) He foresees a Pétain government in England with Gauleiters for Wales and Scotland. He believes that the Germans would encourage separatist national movements in these countries and that they would find plenty of material to work on. He views the prospect with malicious satisfaction. Failing invasion he thinks a patched-up peace is the only hope of saving us all from another thirty years of war. He is convinced that only the Germans are capable of organizing Europe, that Britain would never be able to do the job and we should turn our backs on Europe. Despite all this he is very anxious to get a chance of fighting and blames the Catholics who he says run the Military Intelligence and are preparing to sell out for a compromise peace. Consistency was never his long suit.

  Dinner with my former tutor, Ronald McCallum. Long argument about his beloved “succession states,” Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Baltic Republics, and Scandinavia, that promised land of modern liberalism, the country of sound architecture, cleanliness, sexual freedom, and painless socialism. I asked him why, in all these model states, there has been no resistance to the Germans to compare to unpopular Poland.

  12 February 1941.

  On Tuesday I motored down with the Masseys to see the Canadian Neurological Hospital at Hackwood. The doctors who make up the Neurological Unit are the best Canadian surgeons from Montreal and Toronto. They specialize in brain surgery – Cohen and Penfield of Montreal are probably two of the best brain surgeons in the world. The hospital is full of both military and civilian cases. The doctors and nurses are of the highest standard technically and still seem to be human. They make most of their English opposite numbers seem old-fashioned amateurs. Also they are a great relief after the military – no fuss and flummery here, no prima donnas of generals, no bone-headed brigadiers swaggering in kilts. Quiet, sensible men with a scrupulous tradition. Their uniforms may not fit, but they understand their jobs and do not show off. What a change from politicians.

  They are housed in Hackwood Park, Lord Camrose’s house, and formerly the scene of Curzon’s grandeur.

  After our visit to this hospital we went on to the Canadian Army workshop. There again we saw technical men who knew their job. They are skilled workers from Canadian factories. Some of them earned ten dollars a day at home. Now they get seven shillings and sixpence a day. They were repairing tanks, making tunnelling equipment, medical instruments, and doing general repairing. Some were working with acetylene blowtorches or melting iron in forges. Others were mending engines. They are proud of their high standard of skill. The men are said to be tough customers and heavy drinkers. They had the absorbed look of mechanics who are captured by their work. The younger men without much training who are drafted into the unit learn quickly. They have the North American flair for machinery. I asked their officer how they compared with English mechanics. “The English,” he said, “are not too bad if they are not hurried. They cannot get a move on.”

  23 February 1941.

  It is being dinned into my mind with persistence that after all we may be going to lose this war. No one admits the possibility publicly, but you could hardly expect us to do that.

  It looks as if the Germans might defeat us within the next six months, but if we survive, we shall be embarked on a long struggle against Germany, Japan, Italy, backed by the U.S.S.R., and our success in carrying on would depend on the U.S.A. If we repel the German invasion, as I believe we shall, then we shall enter a new phase of the war – a deadlock, and after a year or so of this it is possible that both sides may come to a compromise peace. It is even just conceivable that an Anglo-German combine might result, but that would imply the disappearance of Hitler. On the other hand, if this country is invaded successfully there is the possibility of a Pétain government here whose names one can already guess plus, perhaps, an Anglo-German alliance. This is an ugly picture, but the other, the picture of Germany crushed, of England and America restoring democratic governments in Europe seems to me incredibly remote. All this gloomy speculation goes on in the back of people’s minds. They do not talk like this, they hardly allow themselves to think such things. Most are content to repeat that Britons never will be slaves and that Britain can take it. They do not think ahead of the next move, and this is doubtless very sensible. Also they are pretty well blanketed by propaganda.

  25 February 1941.

  Stayed with Mike Pearson. He has a general and a colonel living with him. The general thinks the solution after the war in Germany would be to shoot one in every four Germans. Why one in four? On that theory it would be logical to shoot the lot.

  Read Sir Robert Vansittart’s The Black Record, a compilation of his broadcasts and a violent attack on the Germans. It is the kind of propaganda that used to flow freely in the last
war – full of inaccurate generalizations and written in a “hot gospeller” style which one would hardly expect from a man of his education. Its thesis is that the Germans are an accursed race differentiated from the rest of Europe by their savagery. This in itself is dubious. We know how unpleasant they are, how cruel, and how treacherous, but are they more cruel than the Russians or the Turks, or the Spanish, more treacherous than the Japanese? It is a mistake for a member of a Foreign Office to take this line in propaganda (even if it were true in fact). This makes nonsense of our official line, i.e. the Germans are being misled by the Nazi Party. That is the line to stick to in propaganda. It is a long-term investment which may pay off in the end. When the Germans have received some knocks in battle, when – or if – their morale is softened by setbacks, then propaganda of this kind could be very useful. It is obvious that if they think we intend to make mincemeat of them and that we lump them all together as a criminal nation they will fight with desperate obstinacy.

  27 February 1941.

  Obviously the biggest influence on all our lives at present is Hitler – as he is in a position to change or terminate our lives. Also his phrases have got under our skins, affected our language, made it impossible to think without his shadow falling across our thoughts. Never has so much hung upon the life of one man, never has one man so dominated the imagination of the world. Even if the Nazis went on, his death would be release from an evil spell. He is the incarnation of our own sense of guilt. When he attacks our civilization we find him saying things that we have thought or said. In the “burrows of the nightmare” such a figure is born, for as in a nightmare the thing that pursues us seems to have an uncanny and terrifying knowledge of our weakness. We spawned this horror; he is the byproduct of our civilization; he is all the hatred, the envy, the guile which is in us – a surrealist figure sprung out of the depths of our own subconscious.

  2 March 1941.

  Lunched with the Dashwoods at West Wycombe Park – Helen Dashwood looking pretty and being amusing. The house is in a state of slight disrepair, peeling statues with their noses knocked off, holes on the drive. In the big saloon the furniture is under dust-covers, the tapestry room is full of bundles for the troops – there are packing cases in unexpected places. It is the home of the Dashwoods, and down the road at Medmenham Abbey the Hell-Fire Club celebrated their boring black masses. Staying there was one of these aesthetic intellectuals or intellectual aesthetes who leave their London flats, their left-wing politics, and their rather common “boyfriends” at the weekends for the more decorative and well-heated English country houses. When one asks what becomes of the Oxford aesthetes in later life, this is the answer. They are peering at old family letters in pillared libraries or adjudicating the origin of rugs or china – or else they are simply sitting on the sofa before the fire with their legs curled up having a good gossip with the wife of their host.

  Field-Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode was there too, and his wife, a solid hull of an old woman of intelligence who likes old houses and to know of skeletons in aristocratic cupboards. After lunch the men talked about the war. Those who might be susceptible to defeatist influences were mentioned. “I do not trust the press,” said Johnnie Dashwood. Sir Philip says Archie Wavell1 came to see him the other day. “When I saw him come in I said to him, ‘What are you doing here – have you been given a bowler hat?’ (I thought they must have sacked him), but he said he was home to report. The Prime Minister has no use for him – says, ‘There is one of your dumb generals.’ But it is because he does not know how to talk to politicians. Soldiers are not stupider than other men. They say what they mean and politicians think they must be damn fools for doing that.”

  6 March 1941.

  I walked to the office a new way across Berkeley Square. The rain was dripping from the trees. They have taken away the railings and laid bare the mystery of the garden. It is so sensible that people should be allowed to walk and sit in these gardens. The railings will never be put back again. It is impossible to argue that they should be, but I loved those shut-in secret gardens. These oases of privilege and mystery seem disappointingly commonplace now that they are exposed to view – just a little grass and a few trees. West-End London had been a place of railed gardens and non-committal Georgian façades – behind these defences in clubs and drawing-rooms shut away from the vulgar, the ladies and gentlemen of England have disposed of their affairs – and the affairs of the nation. Now bomber and builder have conspired to attack these well-bred squares. What looked so solid and seemed so eternal has vanished.

  I was talking to the Masseys’ chauffeur today about the bombings. “What astonishes me,” he said, “is the way those old houses fall down so easy. You take that big house on the corner of Berkeley Square – used to belong to Lord T. My mother used to work there when I was a lad. It always seemed such a fine well-built old house and now it’s just a pile of rubble. I would have thought that they would have stood up better – some of these big houses.” Although his tone was practical I thought I could catch an undernote of dismay queerly mixed with relief. That great gloomy house may have hung on his memory since childhood. It must have seemed as permanent as a natural feature of the landscape and clothed in dim prestige. Now brutally it vanishes. This sudden destruction of the accustomed must shake people out of the grooves of their lives. This overnight disappearance of the brick and mortar framework of existence must send a shock deep into the imagination. These high explosions and incendiaries are like the falling stars and blazing comets – noted of old as foretelling great changes in the affairs of man.

  10 March 1941.

  I have just been losing my temper with Laurie Audrain, our Press Officer, in an argument over what the Americans are or are not doing to help us in the war. He was saying that if he were an American he would turn his back on the whole thing and say, “to hell with England and her war!” I suddenly found myself shouting that, “My God, I hoped we would lose this war first to see the spot it would put the American isolationists in.” I felt ashamed of myself afterwards because I remembered a resolution I had made to myself when I was in the United States that whatever happened I would never be one of those who cursed the Americans for staying out of the war just because I was in England and it was getting too hot for me.

  All the same I feel that I never shall forgive the Americans for not being in this war. It is a purely emotional state but we are all rather emotional at the moment. That bloody blitz on Saturday night partly accounts for it. They hit the Café de Paris and killed forty-seven people including most of the band. I was opposite at the 400 Club. Just afterwards I turned around when I heard a young girl say to her guardsman escort, “Darling, it was rather awful when they brought out all those black men.” This couple had come on from the Café de Paris where they had been in the lounge waiting for a table when the bomb fell and had seen them bringing out the bodies of “Snake-Hips” Johnson and his coloured band, who were all killed but two. Many young officers on leave and their girls were killed. It was a bad blitz because they got so much that I had been hoping would escape. Worst of all Garland’s Hotel, which was the great meeting place for myself and all my friends. Miss Clayton, the barmaid whom we all loved, was buried under the débris for six hours and was rescued because she managed to make herself heard and give directions to the men who were digging her out. Laurie and I were walking along Suffolk Street on Sunday afternoon; when we saw what had happened to Garland’s we stopped on the street and said to each other, “Bugger them, bugger them.” But that is about all there is to do – just curse and go home and wait to wake up the next morning to see what else is gone. There goes the siren. It is just like September all over again, and this will go on all spring and all summer and, as far as we can see, forever and ever. Amen. Having this interval of normality has spoiled us for raids. This diary tonight is whimpering – and war does make one callous too. We were making jokes yesterday about “Snake-Hips” Johnson, the band leader, and his death. Jokes th
at none of us would have thought anything but pointless and disgusting a year ago, but then I never used to think that soldiers’ jokes in the last war (“Ha! Ha! George got his blooming ’ead knocked off!”) were very funny.

  Meanwhile the Americans are getting their toes dug in in Newfoundland and Bermuda preparatory to inheriting what is left of the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

  13 March 1941.

  An American newspaper correspondent called Lake appeared. He was suffering from what he solemnly called acidosis and he spent the evening railing at the inefficiency of the British censorship and the superiority and maddening “slowness” of British officialdom. Slowness! Why don’t the Americans hurry up and convoy over to us the war materials we need to defend them and us, or at least get their industry keyed up to producing them in sufficient quantities. The truth is that we are living on a different planet from the Americans. Their observations from the world of commonsense seem irrelevant and irritating. For the neutral to talk to the belligerent is like a sober man talking to a drunk. The sober man’s fear is that the drunk will knock over his best furniture, break his glasses, assault his wife – “Go easy, be reasonable” is his cry. “Don’t seize Brazilian shipping for fear of the effect on South American shipping in general. Don’t hold up wheat for France in case the children perish,” say the Americans. But this is mixed up with a contradictory cry which is, “Why don’t you do more – be more ruthless. We will scream while you are doing it but admire you for it afterwards.” Let us never forget our friends among the Americans – Roosevelt, Bullitt, Dorothy Thompson, Lippmann, or our enemies – La Follette, Lindbergh, Nye, Wheeler.

  Dupuy1 back from France – still optimistic. He says Pétain is as pro-British as ever, full of vigour and master of the situation. Pétain does not entirely trust Admiral Darlan, and he is making use of him for just as long as he may wish to. Then he will put someone else in his place and send out a new younger man to North Africa. Pétain is pleased with himself, “N’est-ce-pas que je me suis bien débarrassé de Laval?” Dupuy says that what Pétain aims for now is an agreement – wheat for France under United States control against a promise for Vichy to guarantee no German infiltration into North Africa.