If Hitler Comes

by Christopher Serpell

  I returned once or twice to Smithers’s church, the Congregational one at Tanner’s End. There was my old friend, the Rev. Mr. Brownlow, whose flock, apart from being swollen, binder the “rationalization scheme”, by a few Peculiar Baptists of the neighbourhood, was nearly twice as big as it was before. There, too, was the Nazi spy, in his special pew; people were quite kind to him, and often asked him home to Sunday dinner. The service was purely devotional, with not the obliquest reference to politics that I could detect, except the general implication of Christian teaching that the State is not exempt from the laws and punishments of God. Though an outsider, and uninitiate, I soon became conscious of the impelling attraction of that simple, unwontedly formal, service. The people there, so tragic in their worldly circumstances, seemed to come to stand silently round a deep and healing well. In the old days, when they could debate their pacifism freely and quote the Bible in support of political shibboleths, such a simile would never have occurred to me.

  After the service was over, and one had shaken hands with the parson at the door, one walked out again into the desert. And what a desert it was! The congregation broke up rapidly—not to have done so might have provoked a truncheon charge by the police—and each little family group hurried back to its shabby home, an Englishman’s castle no longer. The shuttered streets were soon deserted, and to me they presented the most dismal and hopeless prospect that I have ever been able to conceive. It was a London suburb and it was Sunday, but, beyond all the suspension of healthy human activity which that statement implies, there was a deeper and more terrible stillness. It was not sleep but death.

  And yet the Germans went on with that Cultural Congress at which London was solemnly named “Vienna of the West”. Vienna, we knew, was the “cultural capital of the Reich”, but not, so far as we had heard, a particularly effective one. Hodges told me that it had never been duller since the period of hunger which followed the Four Years’ War, and that all that was happening was that a group of Nazi scholars imported from North Germany were editing a great Encyclopaedia Germanica there. However, dictators can’t do without culture, so we resigned ourselves to becoming a second Vienna, and were not surprised to learn that the central manifestation was to be a concrete building called the Valhalla of Nordic Virtues, which was to be set up where the Crystal Palace used to be. Hitler himself was said to have designed it, and this may have been so, for, from the drawings, it was to be an immense structure, domed and pyramided, ten times uglier than the Crystal Palace. As to what was to go on there, arrangements were still somewhat vague, but as time went on an odd assortment of intellectuals emerged who were willing, it seemed, for security and a competence, to carve the right statues, paint the right “murals”, and compose the right odes for forging the new culture of Germany’s western fringe. Their only problem was to know in what proportions they should mix Anglo-Saxon motives, the baroque picturesqueness of southern Germany, and the vulgar grandiosity associated with all modern dictatorships. Otherwise they went their silly way in peace, ministering duly to the Führer’s megalomania. They were our intellectual Quislings, and it would have been easy to be satirical at their expense. But it would not have been amusing, because no-one took them seriously, and most of the German high officials forgot all about them. After conquest, cultural propaganda takes a back place, with practical people.

  One day a party of the foreign Press were taken to see the site being prepared on Sydenham Hill. The man who showed us round turned out to be von Holtz himself. I had met him several times since 19th July, and, as was everyone’s way in a time when principles were being shed one by one, I had allowed the general treachery of his countrymen towards my Motherland to remain unremarked. Tacitly excluding this subject from conversation, I found I could talk to him without embarrassment; he, on his part, affected at first a somewhat deprecatory tone, as though to suggest that his Führer and he regretted that the character of the vanquished had proved such that the victors were compelled to proceed to rather extreme measures. But as time went on I thought I detected, on his not unfrank countenance, a growing trace of disillusion, perhaps even of frustration. Certainly, I recalled, the picture he had drawn as we talked together on the roof of Bush House in May had not come to life. On a soil so heavily trampled, so stained with blood, it never could; the fine flower of Anglo-German culture, that von Holtz had thought to stick proudly in his buttonhole, would never bloom at all.

  I kept pondering about this man as he led us somewhat despondently over the squelchy ground, pointing out where the giant statue of Odin was to rise, and where that of Adolf. I wondered if he had been really sincere last May, and had indeed expected a golden millennium, Teutonic maybe, but none the less idealistic and principled, pseudo-Kiplingesque. If so, he might be representative of a growing conservative influence in Germany that was reacting against the diseased inhumanity of the gang now in control. I fancied I had met other highly placed Nazis to whom similar views might, by the observant, be ascribed. Was it possible that decency and restraint would one day emerge again among the Germans, that horror and disgust would grow at what had been committed, and that some clumsy, materialistic, but yet tolerable mode of civilization would return?

  I sounded von Holtz discreetly, looking anxiously for any signs of a conflict within him. I thought I descried them, and rejoiced.

  We had reached the site of the Triumphal Way, a great vista to be closed with a group of statuary showing “Britannia being Received into the Nordic Family of Nations”. A plaster model of the group was already in position, and from the bottom of the avenue it looked extraordinarily like the Laocoön.

  “You’ll feel quite at home, von Holtz,” I said, “when all this is finished. Isn’t it modelled on the Führer’s new layout of the Tiergarten?” He agreed that there would be a resemblance. “In fact,” I went on, “London ought soon to be indistinguishable from Berlin, or, at least, from any fairly important German provincial town. It doesn’t look as though Britannia is to be allowed to make any very remarkable contribution of her own to the Nordic Family of Nations.”

  He took me by the arm, apart from the others. For a moment I thought he was about to make a confession, the kind of confession that one likes to dream of disillusioned Nazis making. He looked stern and anxious. I prepared to assume the part of father confessor, and thought out in advance my little speech of absolution.

  “You are thinking of what we said on the roof of the former Embassy,” he began, stiffly. “I said then that there was nothing our two nations could not do together. I said they needed each other to face the tasks of the modern world. I believed there would be a great cultural revival in England. I had a great and noble vision, and I thought the Führer shared it too. But now I see I was wrong.”

  He paused. “Splendid, foolish, misguided man!” I thought. “If there are enough like you in Germany there is still hope for the future happiness of the world.”

  “Yes,” he went on, “I was wrong. As you see, I was wrong. Britannia contributes nothing to the common stock. And why? Because she is undisciplined, irresolute, unprepared for the blessings the Führer is ready to shower upon her. Dazzling opportunities are presented to her, and she turns the other way. Instead of being quickened into life, she swoons and faints. Germany has allied herself to a corpse.”

  So much for my own daydream. I swallowed hard.

  “Forgive me,” he continued, as fiercely as ever, “forgive me for talking to you like this. But you are a New Zealander, and I think you cannot appreciate how tragic all this seems to a European. I tell you the Führer is going ahead with this project with a sob in his heart. He knew from the very beginning what some of us did not know—that a disciplined nation cannot effectively co-operate with an undisciplined one. He knew that he would first have to fight over again in England the fight he won in Germany. But he will not fail in his respect for a daughter Nordic nation, however debased. The Valhalla will be inaugurated even in an unregenerated Britain, and then it
can stand as an inspiration in the struggle to come.”

  A little Japanese journalist had approached us, and overheard some of this strange outburst. When I walked away to conceal my mortification, he stepped beside me. “Poor old von Holtz,” he said. “He has been getting worse lately. His trouble is that he had hoped to marry an earl’s daughter, and finds now that nobody would be the least bit interested if he did.”

  I had not realized before what a dull place England must seem to its German conquerors, now that it had collapsed.

  After this it seemed a relief to get an invitation from the Warden and Fellows of St. Mary’s College to attend that odd form of students’ reunion dinner which is known in Oxford as a Gaudy. I had lost touch with St. Mary’s when I returned to New Zealand after my Rhodes Scholarship had expired, and I accepted the invitation with some interest. Elizabeth and the child went to stay with friends—a necessary precaution in those days—and, after I had notified the Press Bureau of my temporary absence, I made the familiar journey from Paddington, and entered my old rooms over the archway in good time to dress for dinner. They looked unchanged: the afternoon sunlight fell across the same old cushions in the window-seat; the bulky and battered Victorian furniture abode in its place, and the arm-chair with a loose spring still kept watch beside the fireplace. There were fewer books on the pseudo-Gothic dresser, however, and they had taken on a new and sickly complexion. German primers and elementary textbooks were to be expected, but a frothy and rhetorical work on the Duties of Nordic Manhood was new to me, and so was the ponderous and three-volumed History of the Germanic Family of Nations, although I had heard of its publication by that repository of crank racial theory, Colonel Gregory-Smith. Books indicating the actual studies of the present occupant of these rooms were remarkably few; as far as I could judge, his main course was some form of civil engineering, an odd line for a St. Mary’s man to take.

  My explorations were interrupted by the entry of my old scout, Blackett, who, after the manner of his kind, made me respectfully welcome and succeeded in conveying to me not only that he remembered me perfectly but that I belonged to a select and favoured generation of undergraduates. “Well, how’s the College these days?” I inquired, fatuously but inevitably. “Very quiet, sir,” said Blackett. “There’s a lot of German gentlemen here now, sir, and they are a very serious lot, even in their drink. Hard-working too in a way.”

  “What way is that?” I asked. “Are they all learning English?” “No, sir,” said Blackett shortly. “Soldiering is their line of study. Proper drill’all the College is these days.” “But this gentleman,” I said, pointing to the books. “Ah, he’s a real gentleman, he is,” said Blackett hastily. “He’s learning plumbing. You see he’s a … well, he’s not a German gentleman, if you’ll excuse me.” He looked at me a little anxiously. I understood and changed the subject. I had thought of calling on my old tutor before dinner, and asked if he was still in his old rooms. A wooden look came over Blackett’s face. “No, sir,” he said distantly. “Mr. Martens was taken very ill after some German gentleman in uniform had called on him. Some trouble over a lecture I did hear it was. But he’s had what they call a nervous breakdown since then, and they’ve taken him away.” I thought of the austere, almost contemptuous front which Martens had presented to the world, and I felt a little sick at the thought of that nervous breakdown.

  Blackett had disappeared into the bedroom and was laying out my clothes. “Well, I hope I see some familiar faces,” I said, following him in.

  “There’s been a lot of changes lately, sir,” he muttered. “Mind you, I’m not complaining. Of course with the new Warden it’s natural that there should be a lot of German gentlemen in the Senior Common Room.” “What’s the new Warden’s name?” I asked, a little faintly. “Dr. Perchoven, sir,” said Blackett, disappearing.

  After these preliminaries, I was not surprised by the scene in the hall. At the high table the conversation was in German, and there were two officers present in full uniform. Dr. Perchoven proved to be a square-headed, close-cropped man of middle-age who peered occasionally down the room through thick-lensed steel spectacles. Half of the dons of my time had disappeared, and the remainder, except for a hurried, almost furtive greeting to old students, were remarkably taciturn. They were ignored by their new German colleagues, and seemed thankful for this mercy.

  At my table English was spoken, but it was a very silent company. Two places away from me was one of the new German Fellows, an enthusiastic ex-leader of German Youth, who embarked in perfect English on a discourse on the anomalies and futilities of the English system of education before it had been “leavened with our vital German culture”. His remarks were ostensibly addressed to his vis-à-vis, but since everybody was so silent they took on much of the character of a lecture, and continued, interrupted only by hasty mouthfuls, until the end of dinner. I knew neither of my neighbours, and neither of them appeared at all anxious to talk. It was one of the most uncomfortable meals I have ever eaten, and I could not imagine why the authorities had found it necessary to convene such an assembly. This, however, was explained when the Warden rose to make his speech with the dessert. Whatever may have been his branch of learning, it was certainly not linguistics, and his remarks, although delivered in the “dead language” of English out of courtesy—or pity—for his hearers, were not distinguished for their fluency.

  St. Mary’s, we understood him to say, had been one of the most richly endowed colleges of the university. But where had this wealth come from? It had been drained ruthlessly from the rich estates which the college owned. What had a place of learning to do with such wealth and such land? he asked, and answered himself firmly: Nothing. “Such gold”, he said, “was for no useful purpose. It was as you say the idle talent, and much good was left undone through the avarice of the collegers. This have I changed. This gold, this land has St. Mary to the Führer dedicated, and it shall from now for the good of all, not of a few, be utilized.” He paused for the applause which was given with enthusiasm by the German members of his audience and more tepidly by some of the others. “Now”, he continued with gusto, “it shall be the duty of the former student his Alma Mater to support. You, gentlemen, vill haf that privilege.” His spectacles flashed in the candlelight as he beamed round the hall. In a little while, we were told, the Bursar, Professor Hoffstein, would come round with blank cheque forms. On these we would write what we would gladly give towards the annual support of the foundation. “Nor let the sum be insignificant,” the Warden boomed. “Ve Germans haf the quality of free-handed gifting, and the miser is not by us beloved.”

  There was an uncomfortable stir as he concluded. Everyone was calculating how much and how little he could give to avert the wrath to come. I had decided that, miser or no miser, two hundred marks was my limit. They could not expect much more from a journalist. As I sat waiting for the Bursar to reach me on his round I suddenly caught sight of a familiar and friendly face. What is more, it was smiling at me, and that, on such an evening, was an event in itself. It was the face of David Grant, a red-haired Scot from Aberdeen. I had not seen him since the night when, our finals over and celebrated, he had cornered me after dinner and delivered a lecture on the predestined damnation of all who turned their mother-tongue into a course for study—an offence of which I had been guilty. He had been a scientist, and was going on, I understood, to a specialized course in agriculture, “in order to teach the misguided peasantry of this degenerate land how to make a proper use of the earth they till”. I had not seen him from that ribald night to this.

  When we were released from our ordeal in the hall he came over to me. “You’ll come round to my rooms?” he asked. “I have a modicum of whisky there, and we’ll just get the taste of this collation out of our mouths.” It was with difficulty that I refrained from looking over my shoulder, and he saw my movement. “Ah well,” he said, smiling, “we will rather continue the conviviality which has been so remarkable a feature of the eveni
ng so far. Allow me to introduce you to Professor Leitch, now of Edinburgh, and a distinguished member of this college long before you or I set foot in it.” I shook hands with a little, lame man whom I had scarcely noticed behind David’s burly shoulder. He looked up at me as I was introduced, and with that movement ceased to be insignificant. He had the bluest and most brilliant eyes that I have ever seen in any man, and they held mine in a steady and appraising examination. He said very little, and when we were presently seated round the fire it was David who did the talking. At least I thought it was, but I gradually realized that I was being led on to express my own opinions with more freedom than I had for months. I stopped abruptly, cursing myself for the folly of giving myself away to two strangers. There was a moment’s silence, and then the old professor, who had been gazing into the fire, spoke without looking at me. He had a low, clear and rather beautiful voice and its very sound was reassuring.

  “You need have no fear, Mr. Fenton,” he said. “David here has been cross-examining you a wee bit stringently, but he’s no informer. Neither am I. This hip of mine was smashed in Dalkeith camp last July.”

  I murmured some sort of disclaimer and apology, but he continued: