If Hitler Comes

by Christopher Serpell

  “And is Vienna so very brilliant?” I put in.

  “The Führer has decreed that Vienna shall become eventually the cultural capital of the German Reich,” he replied coldly. “And London——”

  “Oh, and what has the Führer decreed for London?”

  “The Führer believes that it is in London that yet new standards of pan-Nordic culture will be hammered out. It is a great task. Your fine traditionalism; our strength. Your forms; our spirit. What together cannot we do for civilization?”

  He began to ask me whether I thought duelling was likely to become fashionable at Oxford and Cambridge. I felt I had heard enough.

  “Look here,” I said, “we know that in a military sense you Germans are now in a pretty strong position in Europe and the world, but there are limits to your power. At the moment it goes little farther than the point of your bayonets. It may be that one day you will be able to assert such a moral leadership that we shall all delight in following it, in our different ways. But meanwhile don’t count too much either on the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion or on the Society people who happen to have come to your party.”

  Von Holtz’s friendliness, his naïveté, did not leave him, but a new grimness tightened the corners of his mouth. He made no reply, and I felt what an incredible fool he was, wedded to his crude idea of harnessing the whole life of England to Nazidom by the methods of the card-index. To tell the truth I was nettled, and I added with bombastic recklessness: “Those who think like you have a good deal of brute force at their disposal, but they cannot with brute force kill the soul of England.”

  Before I had finished speaking, I knew what he would reply. “The soul of England?” he said, “I don’t insult you, I try to understand you. But was not the soul of England conquered, and made Nordic again, in the Great Blockade?”

  At any rate von Holtz was right about the Season. At first it had an artificially stimulated life. Official entertaining (led by the German Ambassador himself, who leased the Superb for the purpose) was never on so lavish a scale. If the usual London hostesses were shy, their places were taken by a charming cohort of German ladies out of the Almanach de Gotha, whose parties, their guests declared, were of unexampled brilliance. The postponed opening of the Royal Academy was a disappointment, but it had been a bad year for artists, some of whose works, the circumspect ventured to say, were sadly “decadent”. All who were expected to do so attended the Nordic League sports meetings, and there was a certain public excitement about the plan for the culminating Anglo-German Tattoo at Aldershot.

  Von Holtz flitted about at such of these functions as his duties led him to attend with a joyful earnestness. He always had his multigraphed lists, and the card-index must have swollen considerably. I even met him at the Derby, which as a popular festival seemed as happy as ever, although there was but a thin show of fashion in the Paddock. But I don’t think he was ever at a cricket match, and I often wondered if he had got down on any list the names of those members of the M.C.C. who still came up from the country to watch matches at Lord’s, but went straight home again afterwards.

  In general, what with the military missions and professorial exchanges, Germans were everywhere—in messrooms, senior common rooms and clubs. They did not, I am told, behave with conspicuous tact, but their very presence solved certain difficulties. In front of a German one was excused from saying what one thought about Hitler, the Grey shirts, and the policy of the Government.

  About this time all sorts of familiar things quietly changed or disappeared. Anti-Hitler literature had long vanished from the bookshops, but now it was only with difficulty that one could buy the ordinary political writings of the pre-Nuremberg era. Churchmen ceased lecturing the politicians, and reverted to discussions on the nature of God. Most of the wealthy Jews had left just in time for America, taking their capital with them, and the British film industry collapsed in consequence. Many voluntary associations devoted to familiar causes held no meetings at all. Street oratory was forbidden, even at Hyde Park Corner. “Deutschland über Alles” followed “God Save the King” on public occasions. One or two great public schools failed to reopen after the Easter holidays, there were almost no worthy candidates for the I.C.S., and a Gilbert and Sullivan season at the Savoy was a failure.

  Thus slowly the scene began to change, but against it the lives of ordinary people were, on the surface, very little altered. Troubles of work and wages, high prices and in-security of employment, had been common since the war; they were not lessened, but neither were they yet much increased, by alliance with the enemy. The future was uncertain, indeed, bound up with all kinds of decisions that might be taken, not in London or Manchester, but in Berlin and Leipzig; but it was not the habit of Englishmen to peer far into the future. There were still moments of leisure and fun, and these could be enjoyed to the full. There was the romance of the lengthening spring evenings, a time for lovers, when the dullest suburb quivered with enchantment; there were the Sunday papers, sensational about non-essentials, to be read deliciously in bed; there were the pub, and the Oval, and dog-racing and fish-and-chips. All these could be enjoyed even if several of one’s friends were joining the Greyshirts, and twice as many officials were busy at the town hall, and Sergeant O’Malley next door, of the local police, was scratching his head about the kind of report he must send in to the German inspector who had come to “co-operate”. True, the picture-house was less attractive since there had been so many dull films that had to be fitted with “English sub-titles”, and the music hall seemed to have lost all spontaneity, and the wireless, between the extremes of Beethoven and brass bands, was simply not worth listening to. But on the whole, if one was lucky and in work, life jogged on as before, and, Hitler or no Hitler, one could expect births, marriages and deaths, breakfast, dinner and tea.

  So it seemed; but a little below the surface there were unmistakable signs that the common people were not spared the humiliation and the fears that haunted their leaders. The bar parlour of the “Sawyer’s Arms”, round the corner from where I lived, had once been a great place for discussing foreign politics. Everyone had had his views on what Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Churchill were likely, or ought, to do next; and on most nights a friendly argument would develop, illustrated by head-shakings, scraps of private information, and expletives. Mr. Alf Stevens, a facile but dignified lawyer’s clerk, would sum it all up towards closing time, and, by sheer force of personality, have his reading accepted as final. But after the Treaty he drank his beer in silence, there being no debate calling for his analysis. Soon not even the home news was discussed—it was merely explained, illustrated, and accepted. During Registration Week, for instance, there was a lot of talk about how various people fared at the town hall, but when a young stranger ventured to draw dark pictures of the uses to which the registration particulars might be put in the future no-one else did more than grunt, or throw darts with greater intensity. It was not to be long before a cell of the Greyshirts adopted the “Sawyer’s Arms” as their headquarters, and Mr. Stevens and his boon companions were dispossessed of their red-plush cosiness. Perhaps they went to the “White Lion” farther down the street, but it was not their kind of place, and it is more likely that they drank bottled beer beside cheerless hearths at home. In either case, they must have preserved their latter-day silence, which was eloquent not so much of fear or foreboding as of a conviction that freedom of speech had suddenly become an empty privilege in England.

  This queer silence, or, what was worse, a babble about indifferent things, descended in time on every honoured and popular institution. People went on doing the same things, but, it almost seemed, from new and depressing motives. My secretary, Smithers, was a pillar of North Street Congregational Church, Tanner’s End, and once, before the war, he had persuaded me to give a talk on New Zealand to the debating society that was run in the schoolroom hard by. I spent a stimulating evening in the company of people who took life seriously, thought deeply within narro
w limits, and had a strongly ethical approach to public affairs. Of the quality of their piety I was no judge, but it seemed to me that democracy at least was in no danger of senile decay while enough such earnest people were at hand to take humble parts in working it. The minister, over a farewell cup of cocoa, confessed that, with the introduction of conscription, pacifism was likely to become a big issue among his congregation. It was an admitted dilemma, when war and Fascism were regarded as equally abhorrent manifestations of evil; but to him the remedy in the human sphere was to go on working for conditions in which neither war nor Fascism could flourish.

  It turned out, when war came, that there were only three determined conscientious objectors in the whole congregation. Smithers, who went off cheerfully with his class late in 1940, spoke of them without bitterness; but even at that stage I fancied he was a little less certain about his religious bearings. Back after Nuremberg, he resumed family life at Tanner’s End, and it never occurred to me to ask him how his church was getting along. But one day some event of New Zealand interest took me to the neighbourhood, and I recognized the ugly group of buildings I had visited so long before. The notice board showed that my acquaintance, the Rev. M. Brownlow, was still pastor, and that Divine Service was still held at eleven and six-thirty on Sundays. But a great banner was flapping against the grimy Gothic windows, bearing an announcement quite out of keeping with my recollection of the practical Christianity of Mr. Brownlow and his flock. It said that the subject of the sermon next Sunday evening was “Will the Second Coming be next year?”

  I asked Smithers about this, at the first opportunity. “Yes,” he said, “things are different now at North Street. Our congregations are no smaller, and we sing the same hymns and hear much the same prayers. But you could hardly call us Radicals to-day. Some of us are still great admirers of Dr. Evans, but Mr. Brownlow says that in the past we have tended to identify the Gospel too much with some particular programme of social reform. He says that it is time to lay more emphasis on personal holiness. Some of us don’t care much for the Apocalyptic teaching he goes in for nowadays, but others do. I believe the Church means more to us to-day than it ever did.”

  “And the debating society?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “we use the schoolroom on Wednesday nights for a prayer-meeting.”

  So much for the democratic spirit, as nurtured by faith. Just as the fiery Socialists had become Greyshirts, or were simply disillusioned, so the more bourgeois Radicals were taking refuge in a purely personal religion. Henceforth, from bus tops I looked with special interest at the blank façades of Nonconformist chapels. I took them to be the monasteries in which frustrated democrats found, I hoped, a true consolation.

  But what of the worldlings in positions of greater influence, who bore a much heavier responsibility for the tragedy of the age? Some of them, as I have said, gyrated, gaily or desperately, in the inner circle of Herr von Holtz’s London Season. They were the simple turncoats, into the workings of whose minds it would be unprofitable to enter. But there were several thousand others who had supported the elaborate superstructure of English life, who had been tricked or not, as it might be, into approval of the Peace of Nuremberg, and who remained loyal at heart to the old standards and the old ideals. These were the Army men, the original Civil Servants, the dons, the leaders of local industry up and down the provinces, the country gentlemen—in short, that great body of Englishmen who, more truly than most of their fellows, had what I might call a moral stake in the old order. These were the greatest sufferers in mind and spirit. It was not only that many of them had the intelligence to see that their own future, and that of their children, was barren and perhaps painful; it was that they knew they had been doorkeepers in the Temple while the Ark, by stratagem, had been defiled.

  Their human consolations were a mockery.

  Where the land is dim from Tyranny

  There tiny pleasures occupy the place

  Of glories and of duties.

  They had the opportunity to approach that brittle, unreal world that represented “modern thought” in London. They could listen every day to the hypocrisy of the Nurembergers in high places, to the twittering exponents of “neo-Fascism” and “neo-Teutonism”. It was only to them to follow the neurotics of Mayfair and “go Viennese”, as a self-deceptive preliminary to “going Prussian”. But mostly they preferred to do what remained of their business quietly, and then to go home or to the club to talk absently of unimportant things, or play bridge. Every turn of the day brought them against some fact, some symbol, some situation that put them in mind too poignantly either of the world that was passing away or of the world that was being born.

  Humour saved many immediate situations, but Mr. Punch was already a peace casualty. Reminiscence satisfied the very old, and dissipation attracted the young. In some circles there was a short phase of fin de siècle nastiness which was heaven-sent material for Dr. Goebbels. Much worse, there was a loosening of the moral fibre in almost all places where the example should have been set. There were, of course, countless splendid people who maintained their own integrity, but even they learnt to be suspicious of others. Peculation reared its head where it was undreamt of before—in local government, in Whitehall itself. Crimes of violence increased. “We have cut ourselves off from nearly all our traditions,” a penetrating friend of mine remarked, “and so we have to start again from the moral level of the Balkans.” In fact we had become familiar with the spiritual atrophy of Nazism before we had submitted to its discipline.

  Such was the England awaiting Herr Hitler. He might well have come as arranged in the last week of May. He might well have been satisfied to look down on distracted London from the roof of Bush House, while the plane-trees were in young leaf, and murmur: “I had no idea it was so beautiful.” But bigger changes were on the way, and he was patiently awaiting them. One by one, as spring melted into a golden summer, his policemen stepped confidently ashore at Harwich and Gravesend.

  Chapter Five

  A LIGHT THAT FAILED

  HITLER paused, and by his own standards he was right. The fruit even now was trembling on its rotting stalk; let God, or some other agency, blow, and it would inevitably fall into his lap. Time, he must have thought, was his almost fanatical ally.

  Yet can it be that Hitler’s was not the ultimate wisdom? Is it “wishful thinking” that makes one hark back already to those lines of Tennyson’s that people used to quote complacently about the Finns, about the “banked-up fire” which even a hopeless fight for freedom will leave glowing for future deliverance? For in those brief despairing months there was at least one spark of determined heroism in England, which even grew into a tiny flame. Hitler came and quenched it—how easily! … but not, perhaps, for ever.

  It is with diffidence, almost with shame, that I write of my acquaintance with Stephen Mallory in those days. He never openly summoned me; but I know in my heart that he represented a challenge which I had not the courage to accept. I had a thousand excuses, of course, as we all did, including the bravest of us. I was a New Zealander; I was a mere journalist, not supposed to mix in politics; I had my wife and child to consider; I had few gifts to place at his disposal; and in any case, since it was impossible to resist the trend of history, one must try to adapt oneself to it. I knew that these were only excuses, and he knew that I knew it. But he said nothing; because he was finding just the same moral cowardice among men who had gaily gone off to France three years before, quite ready to lay down their lives for freedom.

  Mallory has not yet emerged as a figure in history. He had no chance to lead an active revolt behind the barricades. To the Nazis he was an obscure agitator, soon put out of the way. To newspaper readers only his death was remarkable, and even that, alas, would not have seemed so a couple of months later. But to those Englishmen who, silently, came under his ever-widening influence he stands as an inspiration as well as a reproach, and one of the last things I recall before I was expelled the country is his name c
halked boldly, under cover of night, on the railway arches of Limehouse.

  Stephen Mallory. Wild hope suggests that the name may one day be a war-cry, and a triumphant one. It is whispered to-day in gaols and concentration camps, and wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of freedom. It is sometimes shouted by those about to die.

  No doubt a legend has already grown up round it. Deeds, I expect, are attributed to Mallory which he never did, or could have done. Yet the legend does but express his significance to British patriots, which is profound. A country has no claim to resurrection if, with its political forms, its spirit too has entirely perished; but the memory of Mallory, and of the little band of heroes he inspired, may be enough to ensure the spiritual survival of England.

  It was a spiritual battle he fought. The joy of grasping material weapons and making a last heroic stand against the oppressor was not his. He had not the rude task of a Hereward the Wake; indeed, I doubt if he was fitted for it. The foes he fought were moral evils, in and around him, and, as we have seen, they advanced with a rapidity and insidiousness which paralysed most of his countrymen. But he did not give in, and it was the smallest of his fears that his struggle would be ended, like that of fighters on a humbler plane, by a German bullet.

  Mallory, it must be confessed, was no democrat. Rather, he was fascigeant, believing that Britain, suddenly finding herself plunged into such a state of shame and self-pity as marked the Weimar Republic, needed the counterpart of the National Socialist movement to restore her self-respect. But it was a Christian Fascism that he envisaged, a movement that would redeem the pagan brutality of Hitler’s régime, and set forth as its first principle a respect for the rights of others. He saw the very shame of Britain as a likely foundation for this purified nationalism. There was to be no talk of stabs in the back, of international Jewish machinations, or of a gallant war lost on the home front. To the moral surrender the whole country had been party, the people as well as the leaders. No-one was to blame but ourselves; and the rearmament we needed was “moral rearmament”, though that phrase had been emasculated by a pseudo-religious revival much advertised before the war began. To this end Mallory would have adapted some of the methods of the Nazis and the Greyshirts, as General Booth captured from the devil the good tunes. He had thoughts of red shirts, like Garibaldi’s, and he believed in his heart in the Party-State. But no-one troubled to assess him as a candidate for the job of Dictator of Britain, and no-one paid the least attention to his theories, which were based on some half-forgotten reading in political science at Cambridge. It was simply his burning patriotism which made those who came in contact with him uncomfortable, ashamed, or, in a few cases, resolved to fight and die for freedom. Nor did his theories matter. The immediate and belated task was to “stop the rot”, and persuade people that all was not yet lost.