* * *
It was snowing. A signpost pointed over the bridge to Arnhem, but I stuck to the south bank and followed the road for the German border. In a little while it veered away from the river and after a few miles I espied two figures in the distance: short of the frontier, they were the last people I saw in Holland. They turned out to be two nuns of St. Vincent de Paul waiting for a country bus. They were shod in clogs, they had black woollen shawls over their shoulders and their blue stuff habits, caught in the middle, billowed in many pleats. Their boxwood rosaries hung in loops and crucifixes were tucked in their belts like daggers. But their two umbrellas were of no avail—the slanting snow invaded their coifs and piled up in the wide triangular wings.
The officials at the Dutch frontier handed back my passport, duly stamped, and soon I was crossing the last furlongs of No Man’s Land, with the German frontier post growing nearer through the turning snow. Black, white and red were painted in spirals round the road barrier and soon I could make out the scarlet flag charged with its white disc and its black swastika. Similar emblems had been flying over the whole of Germany for the last ten months. Beyond it were the snow-laden trees and the first white acres of Westphalia.
2. UP THE RHINE
NOTHING REMAINS from that first day in Germany but a confused memory of woods and snow and sparse villages in the dim Westphalian landscape and pale sunbeams dulled by clouds. The first landmark is the town of Goch, which I reached by nightfall; and here, in a little tobacconist’s shop, the mist begins to clear. Buying cigarettes went without a hitch, but when the shopkeeper said: “Wollen Sie einen Stocknagel?,” I was at sea. From a neat row of them in a drawer, he picked a little curved aluminium plaque about an inch long with a view of the town and its name stamped in relief. It cost a pfennig, he said. Taking my stick, he inserted a tack in the hole at each end of the little medallion and nailed it on. Every town in Germany has its own and when I lost the stick a month later, already barnacled with twenty-seven of these plaques, it flashed like a silver wand.
The town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter’s shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a Sturmabteilungsmann. I could identify the faces in some of the photographs on show; the talk of fellow-gazers revealed the names of the others. “Look, there’s Roehm,” someone said, pointing to the leader of the S.A. clasping the hand which was to purge him next June, “shaking hands with the Führer!” Baldur von Schirach was taking the salute from a parade of Hitlerjugend; Goebbels sat at his desk; and Goering appeared in S.A. costume; in a white uniform; in voluminous leather shorts; nursing a lion cub; in tails and a white tie; and in a fur collar and plumed hunting hat, aiming a sporting gun. But those of Hitler as a bare-headed Brownshirt, or in a belted mackintosh or a double-breasted uniform and peaked cap or patting the head of a flaxen-plaited and gap-toothed little girl offering him a bunch of daisies, outnumbered the others. “Ein sehr schöner Mann!,” a woman said. Her companion agreed with a sigh and added that he had wonderful eyes.
The crunch of measured footfalls and the rhythm of a marching song sounded in a side street. Led by a standard bearer, a column of the S.A. marched into the square. The song that kept time to their tread, “Volk, ans Gewehr!”[1]—often within earshot during the following weeks was succeeded by the truculent beat of the Horst Wessel Lied: once heard, never forgotten; and when it finished, the singers were halted in a three-sided square, and stood at ease. It was dark now and thick snow flakes began falling across the lamplight. The S.A. men wore breeches and boots and stiff brown ski-caps with the chin-straps lowered like those of motor-bicyclists, and belts with a holster and a cross-brace. Their shirts, with a red arm-band on the left sleeve, looked like brown paper; but as they listened to an address by their commander they had a menacing and purposeful look. He stood in the middle of the empty fourth side of the square, and the rasp of his utterance, even robbed of its meaning, struck a chill. Ironic crescendoes were spaced out with due pauses for laughter and each clap of laughter preceded a serious and admonitory drop in key. When his peroration had died away the speaker clapped his left hand to his belt buckle, his right arm shot out, and a forest of arms answered him in concert with a three-fold “Heil!” to his clipped introductory “Sieg!” They fell out and streamed across the square, beating the snow off their caps and readjusting their chin-straps, while the standard-bearer rolled up his scarlet emblem and loped away with the flagpole over his shoulder.
* * *
I think the inn where I found refuge was called Zum Schwarzen Adler. It was the prototype of so many I fetched up in after the day’s march that I must try to reconstruct it.
The opaque spiralling of the leaded panes hid the snowfall and the cars that churned through the slush outside, and a leather curtain on a semi-circular rod over the doorway kept the room snug from cold blasts. The heavy oak tables were set about with benches, hearts and lozenges pierced the chair-backs, a massive china stove soared to the beams overhead, logs were stacked high and sawdust was scattered on the russet tiles. Pewter-lidded beer-mugs paraded along the shelves in ascending height. A framed colour-print on the wall showed Frederick the Great, with cocked hat askew, on a restless charger. Bismarck, white-clad in a breastplate under an eagle-topped helmet, beetled baggy-eyed next door; Hindenburg, with hands crossed on sword-hilt, had the torpid solidity of a hippopotamus; and from a fourth frame, Hitler himself fixed us with a scowl of great malignity. Posters with scarlet hearts advertised Kaffee Hag. Clamped in stiff rods, a dozen newspapers hung in a row; and right across the walls were painted jaunty rhymes in bold Gothic black-letter script:
Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang![2]
Beer, carraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.
I made room between the bretzel-stand, the Maggi sauce-bottle and my lidded mug on its round eagle-stamped mat and set to work. I was finishing the day’s impressions with a dramatic description of the parade when a dozen S.A. men trooped in and settled at a long table. They looked less fierce without their horrible caps. One or two, wearing spectacles, might have been clerks or students. After a while they were singing:
Im Wald, im grünen Walde
Da steht ein Försterhaus...
The words, describing a pretty forester’s daughter in the greenwood, bounced along cheerfully and ended in a crashing and sharply syncopated chorus. Lore, Lore, Lore, as the song was called, was the rage of Germany that year. It was followed hotfoot by another that was to become equally familiar and obsessive. Like many German songs it described love under the linden trees:
Darum wink, mein Mädel, wink! wink! wink![3]
The line that rhymed with it was ‘Sitzt ein kleiner Fink, Fink, Fink.’ (It took me weeks to learn that Fink was a finch; it was perched on one of those linden boughs.) Thumps accentuated the rhythm; the sound would have resembled a rugger club after a match if the singing had been less good. Later on, the volume dwindled and the thumping died away as the singing became softer and harmonies and descants began to weave more complex patterns. Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, long sighs of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.
* * *
The green and intermittently wooded plains of Westphalia unfolded next day with hints of frozen marsh and a hovering threat of more snow. A troop of workmen in R
obin Hood caps marched singing down a side lane with their spades martially at the slope: a similar troop, deployed in a row, was digging a turnip field at high speed and almost by numbers. They belonged to the Arbeitsdienst, or Labour Corps, a peasant told me. He was shod in those clogs I have always connected with the Dutch; but they were the universal footgear in the German country-side until much further south. (I still remembered a few German phrases I had picked up on winter holidays in Switzerland, so I was never as completely tongue-tied in Germany as I had been in Holland. As I spoke nothing but German during the coming months, these remnants blossomed, quite fast, into an ungrammatical fluency, and it is almost impossible to strike, at any given moment in these pages, the exact degree of my dwindling inarticulacy.)
I halted that evening in the little town of Kevelaer. It is lodged in my memory as a Gothic side-chapel overgrown with ex-votos. A seventeenth-century image of Our Lady of Kevelaer twinkled in her shrine, splendidly dressed for Advent in purple velvet, stiff with gold lace, heavily crowned and with a many-spiked halo behind a face like a little painted Infanta’s. Westphalian pilgrims flocked to her chapel at other seasons and minor miracles abounded. Her likeness stamped my second Stocknagel next morning.
One signpost pointed to Kleve, where Anne of Cleves came from, and another to Aachen: if I had realized this was Aix-la-Chapelle, and merely the name of Charlemagne’s capital in German, I would have headed there at full speed. As it was, I followed the Cologne road across the plain. Unmemorable and featureless, it flowed away until the fringes of the Ruhr hoisted a distant palisade of industrial chimneys along the horizon and barred the sky with a single massed streamer of smoke.
* * *
Germany!...I could hardly believe I was there.
For someone born in the second year of World War I, those three syllables were heavily charged. Even as I trudged across it, early subconscious notions, when one first confused Germans with germs and knew that both were bad, still sent up fumes; fumes, moreover, which the ensuing years had expanded into clouds as dark and baleful as the Ruhr smoke along the horizon and still potent enough to un-loose over the landscape a mood of—what? Something too evasive to be captured and broken down in a hurry.
I must go back fourteen years, to the first complete event I can remember. I was being led by Margaret, the daughter of the family who were looking after me,[4] across the fields in Northamptonshire in the late afternoon of June 18th 1919. It was Peace Day, and she was twelve, I think, and I was four. In one of the water-meadows, a throng of villagers had assembled round an enormous bonfire all ready for kindling, and on top of it, ready for burning, were dummies of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. The Kaiser wore a real German spiked-helmet and a cloth mask with huge whiskers; Little Willy was equipped with a cardboard monocle and a busby made of a hearthrug, and both had real German boots. Everyone lay on the grass, singing It’s a long, long trail a-winding, The only girl in the world and Keep the home fires burning; then, Good-byee, don’t cryee, and K-K-K-Katie. We were waiting till it was dark enough to light the bonfire. (An irrelevant remembered detail: when it was almost dark, a man called Thatcher Brown said “Half a mo!” and, putting a ladder against the stack, he climbed up and pulled off the boots, leaving tufts of straw bursting out below the knees. There were protestations: “Too good to waste,” he said.) At last someone set fire to the dry furze at the bottom and up went the flames in a great blaze. Everyone joined hands and danced round it, singing Mademoiselle from Armentières and Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag. The whole field was lit up and when the flames reached the two dummies, irregular volleys of bangs and cracks broke out; they must have been stuffed with fireworks. Squibs and stars showered into the night. Everyone clapped and cheered, shouting: “There goes Kaiser Bill!” For the children there, hoisted on shoulders like me, it was a moment of ecstasy and terror. Lit by the flames, the figures of the halted dancers threw concentric spokes of shadow across the grass. The two dummies above were beginning to collapse like ghostly scarecrows of red ash. Shouting, waving sparklers and throwing fire-crackers, boys were running in and out of the ring of gazers when the delighted shrieks changed to a new key. Screams broke out, then cries for help. Everyone swarmed to a single spot, and looked down. Margaret joined them, then rushed back. She put her hands over my eyes, and we started running. When we were a little way off, she hoisted me piggy-back, saying “Don’t look back!” She raced on across the dark fields and between the ricks and over the stiles as fast as she could run. But I did look back for a moment, all the same; the abandoned bonfire lit up the crowd which had assembled under the willows. Everything, somehow, spelt disaster and mishap. When we got home, she rushed upstairs, undressed me and put me into her bed and slipped in, hugging me to her flannel nightdress, sobbing and shuddering and refusing to answer questions. It was only after an endless siege that she told me, days later, what had happened. One of the village boys had been dancing about on the grass with his head back and a Roman candle in his mouth. The firework had slipped through his teeth and down his throat. They rushed him in agony,—“spitting stars,” they said—down to the brook. But it was too late...
It was a lurid start. A bit later, Margaret took me to watch trucks full of departing German prisoners go by; then to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which left a confused impression of exploding shells, bodies on barbed wire, and a Prussian officers’ orgy in a chateau. Much later on, old copies of Punch and Queen Mary’s Gift Book and albums of war-time cartoons abetted the sinister mystique with a new set of stage properties: atrocity stories, farmhouses on fire, French cathedrals in ruins, Zeppelins and the goose-step; uhlans galloping through the autumn woods, Death’s Head Hussars, corsetted officers with Iron Crosses and fencing slashes, monocles and staccato laughs...(How different from our own carefree subalterns in similar illustrations! Fox-terriers and Fox’s puttees and Anzora hair-cream and Abdullah cigarettes; and Old Bill lighting his pipe under the starshells!) The German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour, but not the civilians. The bristling paterfamilias, his tightly-buttoned wife, the priggish spectacled children and the odious dachshund reciting the Hymn of Hate among the sausages and the beer-mugs—nothing relieved the alien strangeness of these visions. Later still the villains of books (when they were not Chinese) were always Germans—spymasters or megalomaniac scientists bent on world domination. (When did these visions replace the early nineteenth-century stereotype of picturesque principalities exclusively populated—except for Prussia—by philosophers and composers and bandsmen and peasants and students drinking and singing in harmony? After the Franco-Prussian War, perhaps.) More recently, All Quiet on the Western Front had appeared; tales of night life in Berlin came soon after... There was not much else until the Nazis came into power.
How did the Germans seem, now I was in the thick of them?
No nation could live up to so melodramatic an image. Anticlimactically but predictably, I very soon found myself liking them. There is an old tradition in Germany of benevolence to the wandering young: the very humility of my status acted as an Open Sesame to kindness and hospitality. Rather surprisingly to me, being English seemed to help; one was a rare bird and an object of curiosity. But, even if there had been less to like, I would have felt warmly towards them: I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by the sea from the tangles of the past; and all this, combined with the wild and growing exhilaration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.
Even the leaden sky and the dull landscape round Krefeld became a region of mystery and enchantment, though this great industrial city itself only survives as a landmark for a night’s shelter. But, at the end of the next day, the evening flush of Düsseldorf meant that I was back on the Rhine! There, once again, flowed the great river flanked by embankments, active with barges and spanned by an enormous modern bridge (called, slightly vexingly, the Skagerrakbrücke, after the Battle of Jutland) and looking no narrower than when we had parted.
Great boulevards diminished in perspective on the other shore. There were gardens and a castle and an ornamental lake where a nearly static and enforcedly narcissistic game of swans were reflected in holes that had been chopped for them in the ice; but no black one that I can remember, like Thomas Mann’s in the same piece of water.
I asked a policeman where the workhouse was. An hour’s walk led to a sparsely lit quarter. Warehouses and the factories and silent yards lay deep under the untrodden snow. I rang a bell and a bearded Franciscan in clogs unbarred a door and led the way to a dormitory lined with palliasses on plank beds and filled with an overpowering fug and a scattering of whispers. A street-lamp showed that all the beds round the stove were taken. I pulled off my boots and lay down, smoking in self-defence. I hadn’t slept in a room with so many people since leaving school. Some of my contemporaries would still be there, at the end of their last term, snug, at this very moment, (I thought as I fell asleep) in their green curtained cubicles,[5] long after their house-master’s rounds and lights out with Bell Harry tolling the hours and the night-watchman’s voice in the precincts announcing a quiet night.
A long stertorous note and a guttural change of pitch from the next bed woke me with a start. The stove had gone out. Snores and groans and sighs were joining in chorus. Though everyone was fast asleep, there were broken sentences and occasional laughs; random explosions broke out. Someone sang a few bars of song and suddenly broke off. Lying in wait in the rafters all the nightmares of the Rhineland had descended on the sleepers.
A Time of Gifts Page 5