Circles of Time
Page 35
“We’d best order some beer, Herr Rilke. We’ll be too conspicuous if we don’t.”
The beer came in heavy stone mugs, and Martin, making sure that everyone in the immediate vicinity could hear him, complained bitterly in faultless German at having to pay two billion marks for two mugs of watery brew.
“You tell him!” a man shouted, leaning across his table toward Martin. “It’s an outrage!”
There were speeches, difficult to hear. The clang of beer mugs; muted, rumbling conversation nearby; the very pall of tobacco smoke hanging in wreaths, obscured the droning words. Martin had not brought a notebook, as anyone seen jotting down things in a notebook at a political rally was more likely to be taken for a police spy than a reporter and run the risk of a well-aimed beer stein hurled at his head.
Gustav Ritter von Kahr was standing on the low stage, making a speech. The state commissioner for Bavaria spoke in such a toneless voice and rambled on for so long that his very banality brought a hush to the crowd, his phrases reducing even his most ardent supporters to a semistupor. Waiters scurried between the rows of benches and tables bringing mugs of beer; the smoke thickened below the rafters; and a river of men flowed back and forth between their seats and the urinals. After one hour, Kahr showed no sign of drawing his speech to a close. The atmosphere of boredom deepened. Martin looked at his watch: 8:35. The evening, he felt sure, was a total bust.
He sensed their presence before he saw them—a vague shuffling in the corridor behind him. At first he thought it was a scuffle in the urinal between drunken men, but the sound persisted. A steady thumping. Glancing over his shoulder he saw, through the smoke and haze, men in brown shirts and ski caps, heavy boots, swastika emblems around their left arms, hurrying into the hall in single file and spreading out around the walls.
Commissioner Kahr droned on, oblivious to the rising disturbance coming from the fringes of the huge hall. Martin stared at the storm troopers hurrying past him. A few old soldier faces, but most of them young, grim-faced, and pale. Four men, sweating heavily, carried in a machine gun and clamped it to a tripod in the passageway. A command was shouted and from all points of the Bürgerbräukeller came an ominous chanting, drowning the pathetic words of Gustav Ritter von Kahr forever …
Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil …
HIS PRIMARY OBLIGATION was to INA. To delay meant yesterday’s news. He wrote the story quickly in the spacious lobby of the Kaiserhof Hotel, overlooking the Englischer Garten. Six hundred words. The hard core of facts. When he was finished, he handed the pages to Emil who raced off with them to the telegraph office.
And that was that. He felt deathly weary after so many hours without sleep, but was too keyed up to go in search of a bed. He drank some coffee, lit a cigar, and watched the crowd moving in and out of the hotel—mostly officers in the Reichswehr in rain-blackened field gray, or high-ranking officials of the state police in green uniforms. A squad of steel-helmeted regular army troops carried dismantled machine guns from the upper floor, their jackbooted progress down the red-carpeted stairway viewed with dismay by a frock-coated desk clerk.
Images pestered the brain, whirled like snowflakes in a glass ball. Six hundred words of fact, but nothing about the young Jew dragged from his room in his underwear and booted along Brienerstrasse until the storm troopers tired of the fun. And nothing of the old man in the Königsplatz buttoning up his Prussian blue uniform jacket with the faded sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves and crying, tears running down his face, “Thank God Germany is saved!”
Nothing of that. Or the sound of the brass band or the sight of the swastika flags waving in the thin rain …
Munich. November 9, 1923
Observations and reflections.
The waiter assured me the coffee was real, but I’m sure they keep the genuine grind for the guests and not for unpaying squatters in the lobby. It is hot, but tastes faintly of dried acorns and chicory.
The images blend and it is difficult to sort them out and place them in the proper order. Not that order is that important. The event itself lacked structure and cohesiveness. Ignorant armies clashing by night. The frenzy in the beer hall when Hitler made his entrance, the chanting of the Storm Troops, the howls of derision from the beer drinkers. The howls turning to angry shouts and mocking laughter when Hitler climbed onto a chair and shouted for quiet.
He looked, frankly, too absurd to be taken with any degree of seriousness. A pasty-faced man in a badly tailored cutaway coat—like a maître d’ or a Charlie Chaplin imitator. He was being howled down until he fired his pistol at the ceiling. There was silence then—shocked, incredible silence as the pathetic man on the chair holding the small pistol in a pale hand proclaimed that the national revolution had begun. A beefy man seated near me hurled his beer stein—a gesture; it hit the floor without breaking and rolled under a bench. “We’ve had a revolution, you son of a bitch! We dumped the pig Kaiser!”
That brought laughter—a release of tension. Catcalls and booing as Hitler and others pushed on toward the platform where Kahr was standing, thunderstruck.
Others. Only one I knew—Werner, a soft felt hat pulled low, the wide brim obscuring his face. But it was Werner—seen from a distance, taut-faced, walking stiffly. A thousand people separated us—but the distance between us was far greater than that.
Hitler’s speech when he climbed onto the platform difficult to hear at first, but the opening sentence must have struck a chord, because silence spread, slowly, moving back like a wave until there was nothing heard in the enormous room but the sound of Hitler’s voice—firm, impassioned, almost hypnotic. He did not denounce the commissioner for Bavaria; he told that sea of faces staring up at him only that Dr. Kahr was wrong in wanting to separate Bavaria from the rest of Germany. It was, Hitler cried out, the duty of Bavaria to lead the way to a new Germany, a greater Germany. It was Bavaria’s duty to organize a march on Berlin to save the German people.
And that is the fact reported—Adolf Hitler made a speech before three thousand Bavarian separatists at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich at 8:45 P.M., November 8. The speech was successful and he won the crowd over to his cause. There is nothing in the report of the hysterical euphoria that swept the hall, the tears and the shouting, the banging of beer mugs on the tables, the raucous singing of “Deutschland uber Alles,” the hundreds of ex-soldiers standing on their chairs whistling or humming the old marching tunes—“Heir dir im Siegerkranz” and “Die Wacht am Rhein.”
Nothing of that.
The crowds spilling out into the night, into the cold wind and the flecks of snow. Storm Troops everywhere. Fixed bayonets glistening under the streetlamps. Trucks packed with Brownshirts rumbling over the Ludwig Bridge. The fever spreading into the center of the city. Byron’s stanzas coming to mind—And there was mounting in hot haste: the steed,/The mustering squadron, and the clattering car,/Went pouring forward with impetuous speed,/And swiftly forming in the ranks of war …
Rather more mindless riot than war. Wildly singing ranks under Nazi banners serpentining through the narrow streets. A broken shop window here, a manhandled Jew there; the wanton, gleeful wrecking of a socialist newspaper’s office and shop—spilled type and smashed presses. No, hardly a war.
It burned itself out. The frenzy was missing at dawn in the cold, the wind, and the soft, wet snow. The Storm Troops looked bleary-eyed and self-conscious. They stood about in the streets under the soggy flags hanging from lampposts. They were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The fire was gone. One man kicked the side of a parked car, rhythmic, sullen, the heavy boot thudding against the metal. A man hurried past on his way to work, fearful, eyes downcast.
“Dirty Jew!”
“I am not a Jew!” the man cried out, starting to walk faster—starting to run. “I am not a Jew!”
And there were rumors. The rumors of the state police and the army setting up machine guns in the Odeonplatz and of the Storm detachment under Captain Röhm u
nder siege at the police headquarters. There was nothing to eat. Nothing hot to drink. No one had any money for cigarettes.
Nothing of that is in the report.
Hitler came. Only a glimpse of him in the Marienplatz. A glimpse of Werner walking behind him. Some of the excitement of the night before returning, but the bands were gone. There were crowds singing marching songs and there was the clomp of storm trooper boots on the paving stones, but no one knew where they were going. No one knew what they were supposed to do.
“We march on Berlin!” a Brownshirt cried, waving a banner. “We march on Berlin!”
But they were marching into the narrow Residenzstrasse toward the Feldherrnhalle, following Hitler, and General Ludendorff in his brown overcoat, and Werner and a dozen others who led the way.
And that is in the report. And the quick rattle of gunfire and the wild stampede away from the cracking rifles. The ranks of the Storm Troops tearing apart like wet paper as the men bolted and ran. Steel helmets and rifles being thrown away. Swastika armbands torn off and shoved into pockets or dropped in the street. It was over. The putsch had died in an alley along with sixteen men.
And that is in the report. But not what the blood looked like on the stones; the dirty scarlet puddles; a clot of spilled brains on the pavement. The pale, sweaty face of a young policeman vomiting next to a machine gun. None of that is in the report because it is irrelevant. Only pertinent information goes over the wires.
Fact. Hitler was injured in a dive to the pavement when the guns went off. A reliable observer saw him get into a car, in obvious pain, and be driven away. The police are searching for him.
Fact. General Ludendorff marched straight into the fire and was not touched. He is under arrest for treason.
Fact. Goering was shot in the leg. The police have told me that Werner von Rilke helped him away. They were seen getting into a Mercedes parked in Maximilianstrasse. Warrants have been issued for both of them.
“Hitler is finished,” a Munich city official told me. “All the National Socialist scum are finished. You can tell that to the world.”
But it is not fact and is not in the report. On a wall in the Löwenbräukeller where two thousand storm troopers spent the night waiting for Hitler to cross the river, there is a painted prophecy. White paint against a brown wall—SOON BURN THE RED JEWS AND LIBERAL FILTH.
And that is not in the report either. It is not, as Scott Kingsford would say, significantly germane to the story.
Book Four
GOD REST YE MERRY, GENTLEMEN
Christmas 1923
XVI
IT BEGAN TO snow a week before Christmas, a gentle fall that merely dusted the hills and villages and turned the landscape phosphorescent under the pale sun.
“I do hope we get more of it by Christmas Day,” the vicar remarked. “The children do love it so.”
His wish was granted. There was a heavy fall the day before Christmas Eve, deep enough in some places to block the less traveled roads. But there was no wind and little bite to the cold. Snowmen appeared with lump coal eyes and children sledded on Burgate Hill.
Martin came down from London by train and Charles met him at the station, Banes being laid up with bronchitis.
“Quite a fake cough, I believe,” Charles said as he walked with Martin to the car. “Poor old fellow, he lives in dread of icy roads.”
“You’re certainly looking well, Charles.”
“I feel splendid—although somewhat depressed. I understand from Mother you’re going back to Chicago.”
“Wrong by a few miles. New York.”
“And for how long?”
Martin shrugged. “I’m not sure. Scott Kingsford wants me to organize and run a news division for his CBC radio group. Easier said than done, I expect, but I’ll give it a try—and the salary is princely.”
“Sounds rather challenging, old boy.”
“I’ll find out soon enough if an old dog can learn new tricks.”
“I’m glad for you, Martin, but I’ll miss your long weekends at the Pryory.”
“So will I.”
And that was certainly true, Martin was thinking as Charles put the Rolls into gear. He had accepted Kingsford’s cabled offer without really giving it much thought. He had been soul-weary after returning from Germany and any change had seemed welcome. Now he had misgivings. Europe had been home for nearly ten years, and this spot, Abingdon, was where the heart lay.
LORD STANMORE SMILED slightly to himself as he came down the stairs into the great hall. Coatsworth was standing at the bottom, a picture of martyrdom.
“If you would be so kind as to speak to the children, m’lord. They’re quite possessed, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll try, Coatsworth, I’ll try. But you know, they are children and it is Christmas.”
“I’m aware of both those facts, m’lord, but I hardly find it reason for destruction.”
“Destruction” turned out to be a small pane of glass in one of the ballroom’s French doors—cracked in a game of blindman’s buff. The house was filled with children of all ages. There were twelve boys and girls from the school, children who for one reason or another could not go home for the holidays. And then there were the Wood-Lacy twins, six-year-old Jennifer and Victoria, who had so much energy they always appeared to be in two places at the same time. And there was Winifred’s new child, Kate, but she was only a baby and no bother at all—even to Coatsworth.
A broken window was a small price to pay for children’s laughter. The earl’s only regret was that Colin was not part of the happy noise and that Alexandra did not have her baby, John Anthony, upstairs in the nursery. Hanna shared his regret. It was the only thing that marred an otherwise perfect Christmas. But next year would be different, if James could manage to get away. Or perhaps they could go to California. That would be a novel experience, Christmas under palm trees.
“MIND IF I pop in for a minute?”
Martin glanced over his open suitcase. “Of course not, Willie.”
William strolled into the bedroom and plopped down in a chair. “Lord, Christmas! Soppy sort of holiday. I should be in Derbyshire looking after the horses.”
Martin smiled as he unpacked his evening clothes. “Just a cowboy at heart, aren’t you?”
“Something on that order. I say, that’s a dreadfully wrinkled suit. I’ll send Eagles up to press it.”
Martin dabbed at it. “It’ll hang out.”
“By the way, a word of warning. Christmas being what it is, a time of cheer and all that sort of thing—not to mention roast goose, mulled wine, and mistletoe. In other words, the type of atmosphere Mother finds heaven-sent. She invited a youngish sort of woman she hopes you’ll find attractive.”
“Good God!”
“My words exactly. But you know how Mother is. Bachelors bring out her sporting instincts.”
“I’ll have to tell her that there happen to be women in New York. I don’t need to export one from Abingdon.”
“New York! What a marvelous life you lead, Martin. Will you be back in England next June? For Ascot? I’ll be entering Baconian in the Prince of Wales—mile and a quarter. He’ll win hands down.”
Martin hung his suit on a hanger and eyed it dubiously. “Maybe you’d better get Eagles up here after all. June? Sorry. The Republican party convention is in June. I’m sure I’ll be covering it, but put five pounds on the nose for me.”
“Righto, and you bet the dark horse for me.”
THE WOMAN THAT Hanna had invited turned out to be sweet, quite pretty, and dull. So as not to insult his aunt in any way, Martin devoted most of the evening to her—even kissing her under the mistletoe. The woman was flustered and Martin unmoved by the experience. Fortunately, she complained of a splitting headache and went up to bed early. Her headache coincided with William’s playing the latest jazz tunes on the phonograph.
“May I have the honor of this dance?” Winifred asked. “Or is the man supposed to ask that question?�
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“It hardly matters,” Martin said. “These are modern times.”
They moved briskly across the ballroom floor to the syncopated rhythms of Dusty Swan and his State Street Five.
“I never realized how tall you are, Winnie.”
“Junoesque is the correct word. By the way, if you’re wondering why Fenton has said so few words to you this evening, it’s because I warned him, under pain of disfigurement, not to take you aside for an interminable chat on the condition of the world. You can do that tomorrow. Boxing Day is ideal for that sort of thing. Christmas is for unsullied happiness and joy.”
“I couldn’t agree more. Do you think he’d shoot me if I led you under the mistletoe?”
“He’s more liable to shoot you if you don’t.”
He kissed her beneath an arch, under a dangling sprig of green. She drew her head back and smiled at him, her hand pressing his.
“You’ve been a wonderful friend, Martin.”
“I’ve been blessed with people to have as friends.”
Her smile was tender. “You know so much and keep such silent counsel. Jacob’s getting married. Did he tell you?”
“Not yet—but he’ll get around to it one day.”
“He called yesterday. I wished him and his Amelia well.”
“And meant it.”
“Yes, of course.”
He kissed her again, lightly on the cheek. “You’ll see him before I will. Tell him that I knew all along it wasn’t brotherly concern.”
IT WAS COLD on the terrace. The clean, crisp cold of snow, a star-filled sky. There was no moon, but the stars sent down their own pale light. Turning up his coat collar, he walked slowly along the terrace, the sound of the phonograph fading behind him—Dance time … dance time …
He hummed the Charleston tune and strolled on, hands in his pockets, past the yellow rectangles of light cast through the ballroom’s tall windows. Christmas night. And all is still—all is bright.