Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  The Knight came out from the Hitler chapel and stood watching the women and girls being driven in by a Nazi. Already the sniffles were beginning; already some of the younger children, at the mere sight of him, before he opened his mouth, set up loud cries of terror. With perception clouded by traditional fear, they could not see that his face was benign and rather noble, with the possible cruelty of his large hooked nose offset by a large calm forehead and sane gentle eyes. They could not see that with this face and his nearly white hair and beard he looked handsome rather than martial in his sky-blue tunic with the silver swastikas on the collar, in his black full breeches, with his Knight’s cloak, black lined with blue, shaking gracefully back from his shoulders.

  All the women in, the Nazi went out, banged the big door behind him, and locked it according to the custom. The crash of the door caused more loud yells. A woman burst into deep low sobbing. The Knight remembered a saying attributed to the Lord Hitler: “Germans, harden your hearts. Harden your hearts against everything, but above all against women’s tears. A woman has no soul and therefore can have no sorrow. Her tears are a sham and a deceit.”

  The Knight pinched his lip under his moustache, looking at his congregation and thinking, “I think someone else must have said that. Poor cattle, there comes more and more for you to cry for.”

  For the Knight knew, what the women themselves did not know, that all over Germany, all over the Holy German Empire in this year of the Lord Hitler 720, more and more and more boys were being born. It had been a gradual loss of balance, of course, but now it was causing acute uneasiness. The end of all things was not accomplished. There were millions of Japanese heathens unconverted, and millions of the Japanese subject races who had not yet had much chance to see the light. And yet, if women were to stop reproducing themselves, how could Hitlerdom continue to exist? It seemed as if, after hundreds of years of the really wholehearted subjection natural under a religion which was entirely male, the worship of a man who had no mother, the Only Man, the women had finally lost heart. They wouldn’t be born now. There might be a physical reason. But no one could find out what it was. This particular old Knight, who knew a good deal, more than those of the Inner Ring, more than der Fuehrer himself—this old mild-faced German grey-beard, sunk in a depth of irreligious cynicism that since the death of his three sons was now known only to himself, looked at his women worshippers with a most unmanly un-German feeling of pity.

  “It’s all wrong,” he thought. “There are things men can’t do, not to go on for long in the same rigid way. Not for five hundred years without any change or relief. Poor cattle. Poor ugly feeble bodies. Nothing but boys. Women’s only reason for existence, to bear boys and nurse them to eighteen months. But if women cease to exist themselves? The world will be rid of an intolerable ugliness.”

  For the Knight knew, what no other man knew, and what no woman ever dreamed of in the most fantastic efforts of her small and cloudy imagination, that women had once been as beautiful and desirable as boys, and that they had once been loved. What blasphemy, he thought, curling his lips a little. To love a woman, to the German mind, would be equal to loving a worm, or a Christian. Women like these. Hairless, with naked shaven scalps, the wretched ill-balance of their feminine forms outlined by their tight bifurcated clothes—that horrible meek bowed way they had of walking and standing, head low, stomach out, buttocks bulging behind—no grace, no beauty, no uprightness, all those were male qualities. If a woman dared to stand like a man she would be beaten.

  “I wonder,” thought the old Knight, “that we didn’t make them walk on all fours all the time, and have each baby-girl’s brain extracted at the age of six months. Well, they’ve beaten us. They’ve destroyed us by doing what we told them, and now unless the Thunderer can throw the whole mass of Germans out of his head we’re coming to an inglorious end.” With this blasphemy, a crowning one, the Knight finished his private meditation.

  “Women, be quiet,” he began, frowning at them as a matter of form. “Do not disturb the sacred air of this holy male place with your feminine squeakings and wailings. What have you to cry for? Are you not blessed above all female animals in being allowed to be the mothers of men?”

  He paused. In dreary little scattered whispers came the formal response: “Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. We are blessed.” But a renewed burst of weeping followed as the women wondered where were the men they had borne. He is twelve now—he is twenty-five and Rudi twenty-one—if Hans is still alive he’s seventy this summer, with a white beard like the Knight. But this last thought was in the mind of a very old and incredibly repulsive hag, far too old to cry.

  The Knight went on with his homily. It was always of necessity much the same. There were so few things one could talk to women about. They had hardly more understanding than a really intelligent dog, and, besides, nearly everything was too sacred for them to hear. Anything that had to do with men’s lives was banned, and naturally it was impossible to read to them, out of the Hitler Bible, the stories of the heroic deeds of the Lord and His friends. Such matters, even at long distance and second-hand, were far too holy to be spoken of into unclean ears. The most important thing was to get it firmly fixed in the heads of the younger women that they must not mind being raped. Naturally the Knight did not call it this, there was no such crime as rape except in connection with children under age. And this, as the Knight knew, was less, far less for the sake of the little girls than for the sake of the race. Very young girls if just adolescent might bear puny babies as the result of rape. Over sixteen, women’s bodies were well-grown and womanly, that danger was past, and as rape implies will and choice and a spirit of rejection on the part of women, there could be no such crime.

  “It is not for you to say, ‘I shall have this man or that man,’” he told them, “or ‘I am not ready’ or ‘It is not convenient’, or to put any womanish whim in opposition to a man’s will. It is for a man to say, if he wishes, ‘This is my woman till I am tired of her.’ If then another man wants her, still she is not to oppose him ; he is a man ; for a woman to oppose any man (except a Christian) on any point is blasphemous and most supremely wicked.”

  The Knight coughed, and made a pause, an impressive one, to allow this to sink in.

  “She may tell the man who temporarily owns her about what has happened, and there her responsibility ends. The rest is Men’s Business, not on any account to be meddled with by females. And for you girls,” he rolled his mild eye towards the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, “be submissive and humble and rejoice to do man’s will, for whatever you may think in your empty brains at moments, it is always your will too, and be fruitful and bear strong daughters.”

  The women instantly stopped crying, except three or four who were not even half listening. They all gaped at him. The shock of being told to bear strong daughters was equal to a half-stunning blow on each little shaven bristly head. They couldn’t believe their ears. The Knight couldn’t believe his, either. He had been used for so many years to thinking one thing and saying another; his whole life was such a complicated pattern of secrecy and deceit, that he could not credit himself with at last making such a crashing mistake. It was true that it was vital women should bear more daughters, true that every German of the literate knightly class had nightmare dreams of the extinction of the sacred race, but it was a truth that most not be spoken freely, above all not spoken to the women themselves. All they knew was that in their particular Women’s Quarters was born a remarkable number of young males, but not that the condition was general. If they once knew that the Knights, and even der Fuehrer, wanted girl-children to be born in large quantities; that every fresh statistical paper with its terribly disproportionate male births caused groanings and anxieties and endless secret conferences —if the women once realised all this, what could stop them developing a small thin thread of self-respect? If a woman could rejoice publicly in the birth of a girl, Hitlerdom would start to crumble. Some did, he knew, rejoice secretly, for
the girls at least could not be taken away from them, but these were only the more shrinking, the more cowardly, the more animal-motherly kind of women. For, even where all were shrinking, cowardly and animal, yet some managed to shrink more than others and fail even in the little unnatural and human feeling allowed them, the leave to be so passionately proud of a male child, that not even the pain of losing him outweighed it. But whatever women might think and feel in private, in public there was no rejoicing whatever at the birth of a female. It was a disgraceful event, a calamitous accident which might of course happen to any woman but did not happen to the best women, and as for a woman who had nothing but daughters, she was only one half step higher than that lifelong hopeless useless burden on Hitler Society, the woman who bore no children at all. “Yet actually,” thought the Knight, pinching his moustache and stroking his nearly white beard, and looking mildly down at his stunned flock, “a woman who had ten daughters and wasted no time whatever on sons would be, at this juncture, a howling success.” Meanwhile he had made a howling error. “It’s age,” he thought; “I’m losing grip. One can walk on ledges at twenty, where one would fall over at seventy.” But he was in no hurry to cover up his error with words. He knew silence is alarming to women. So he was silent, looking at them, and they went on gaping. But at last they began to shuffle uncomfortably.

  “Something is troubling you?” he asked them, as politely as if they had been men, or even Knights. His courteous manner terrified them. They shrank away from him like a wind-blown field of corn.

  “No, Lord, no,” they whispered. One, a little bolder, or possibly more hysterically frightened than the rest, gasped out, “Lord, we thought you said——”

  “What did you think I said?” asked the Knight, still in that very polite way.

  All but one woman knew then that they had misheard. They had actually thought, with appalling and yet quite typical feminine stupidity, that he had told them to bear strong daughters. It was all a dreadful blasphemous mistake. He had, of course, said “Sons”. “Sohnen.” The word was like the deep tolling of an enormous bell. The Knight was thinking it hard, vigorously, like the man pulling on the bellrope. The women felt so deeply guilty that they even blushed, all but one. They recommenced crying. All was as it had been before. The Knight coughed, and resumed his discourse. But afterwards, when he had thankfully dismissed them, and signalled with a little bell for the Nazi outside to unlock the door and let them out and drive them back to their cage, there was a certain amount of astonishingly bright chatter.

  “Shut up,” said the Nazi gruffly. This waiting on the Women’s Worship was a tedious and humiliating duty. He kicked at one or two of them as if they had been tiresome puppies, not savagely, just irritably. The women scuttled out of his way and were quiet for a moment, but presently they began again: “How could we have thought—did you? I did, but of course it wasn’t—I didn’t, I don’t know what you’re talking about—but I did think he said—yes, well—oh, how could anyone think such a thing?”

  But old Marta, hobbling very slowly on two sticks, said, “He told you you were to bear strong daughters.”

  Perhaps she was so old she was no longer a woman at all, and therefore out of reach of all womanly feelings of shame and humility. She was not free, but perhaps by mere age had passed out of reach of psychic subjection. She was not a man, no, but not a woman either, something more like an old incredibly ugly tree. Not human, but not female. At any rate the Knight’s hypnotism had rebounded from her. But all the other women despised her. Ugly as they were they could see she was uglier. A revolting dirty old woman, speaking an awful toothless German—she said she had had sons—a hundred years ago—but no one knew.

  “He never said that—never. We only thought it. He said we were to have sons. Of course. Sons. Sons. Marta, do you hear?”

  “I’m not deaf,” said Marta. It was a fact, she had every unpleasant attribute of old age except deafness—and senility. “He said you were to bear daughters—strong daughters.”

  “It’s a lie. Why should he say such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. That was what he said.”

  They jeered at her and left her to hobble along by herself, quite convinced and completely uninterested: as convinced of the Knight’s words as she was that the hard thing that occasionally poked her in the back was the herding Nazi’s thick cane, and as uninterested as she was in his stick or in him or in anything in the world except food (of which she got very little) and the faint memory of Hans, her first child. The Knight would have found himself in a certain amount of sympathy with her, had he been in psychic contact. Marta’s cynicism was as deep, no, far deeper than his own, though arrived at in an entirely different way.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HERMANN got out of the church at last, but the golden-haired singing-boy was gone. Plenty of men were loitering; the women were being formed up at the Women’s Gate of the enclosure which surrounded the church; there were numerous lads and youths hanging about, but that particular one was nowhere to be seen. Hermann started to walk very quickly down the path which led to the Men’s Gate, for already groups of men and youths were crossing the big village parade-ground outside the church enclosure, when he saw something that made him wholly forget his purpose. A man, with his hands in his breeches pockets, was standing on (right on with both feet) the beautiful level clipped lawn which filled the church enclosure. The man was idly gazing at the huddle of women being pushed into some sort of order by their shepherd. He was brown-haired and not very large. Hermann’s heart bounded with a shock of joy. Brown curly hair, brown beard, grey eyes, standing on the grass, hands in pockets, quiet, aloof—it must be he!

  “Alfred !” he cried.

  The Englishman, for such was this nonchalant person who stood so firmly where he was not supposed to set his boots, turned round. He smiled in a very pleased way, and yet his greeting was undemonstrative. He did not even withdraw his hands from his pockets.

  “Hullo, Hermann !” he said. “Is this your village, then? What luck!”

  “Ja, ja!” said Hermann, longing to throw his arms round the older man’s shoulders, but restrained, as he always had been, by something reserved in Alfred’s manner, or in his character. Hermann never knew which it was.

  “Well, well,” said Alfred, at last holding out his hand. “Heil Hitler, Hermann.”

  Hermann hastily saluted and grasped the hand. He did not notice that Alfred had failed to salute. It would not have upset him if he had noticed. Englishmen were funny, informal, queer people altogether. And yet Hermann’s two years in England when he had done his military training with the permanent army of occupation had been the happiest of his short life. At least, after he had met Alfred, a man of thirty then, a ground mechanic in one of the huge aerodromes on Salisbury Plain. Alfred was an interesting person to have for a friend. He was a technician and therefore had been allowed to learn to read. Hermann could not read, as when his military training should be finished he was going back to the land-work in Germany that had been his boyhood’s labour. He never thought this extraordinary, that an Englishman should be able to read and that he, a Nazi, should be illiterate. It was part of the general plan, the Holy Plan of life in the German Empire. There were not enough Germans of suitable abilities to supply technicians for the whole Empire; some of the subject races must be taught to read. And they had nothing much to read but their technical books and the Hitler Bible. News was always broadcast. One didn’t miss anything by not being able to read. But it was Alfred’s type of mind that made him interesting to Hermann, the contented rustic. Alfred was urban, quick-witted, a machine-man skilled and rejoicing in his skill; Hermann was slow-brained and bucolic, half-skilled, strong and rejoicing in his strength. In the army he had often pined for the land, and it was the more surprising that for Alfred’s sake he had so often pined for the army in Germany.

  “How’s the farm-work going?” Alfred asked, when Hermann had done shaking his hand. “Y
ou look bigger than ever, mein Junker.”

  “Get off the grass there !” roared a harsh voice.

  Hermann leaped, and Alfred walked.

  “Bigger than ever,” repeated Alfred, looking up at his young friend. “A fine German. You like the land as well as you did as a lad?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Hermann slowly in English. “I like that. Do come on. Let’s get away from all these people.”

  “You there!” said the bull’s bellower, now on top of them. “What’s your name? No, not you, Hermann. What’s your name?”