Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  “I don’t think I have,” said Alfred dubiously. “I shouldn’t be tough enough not to fight when the other Englishmen were fighting. I don’t really believe in fighting at all, but I should have to go in with them. It’s a new idea to me that a man might refuse to fight with his own people.”

  “You must remember it was a religious principle with them. It can’t be with you. Your childhood’s religion was ours, and now of course you have none.”

  “Well, it is vague. I react against bloodshed and violence and cruelty because it’s your religion, but I don’t know that I could let any man have even a chance to call me a coward. Von Hess was a better Englishman than I am.”

  “He saw that he must be called a coward for the sake of truth.”

  “Well, I could do it, of course,” Alfred said, after a pause. “Yes, if it was a question of protecting the book, I’d let my best friends think me a coward. Why couldn’t he have collected just one or two more books, the Christian Bible, for instance, and left them with Arnold just the same?”

  “He doesn’t say. But I think it may have been very dangerous for anyone in Germany in the state it was in then to buy anything but technical books. I expect he didn’t dare to risk it, not through Arnold, an agent or anyone. And his own were already sealed up. And those sort of books, just on cheap paper, wouldn’t have lasted. He says he made his book to endure for thousands of years. Before you go I’ll show you how to touch up the letters with a paint-brush if any of them show the smallest sign of fading.”

  “He might have sent Johann Leder to buy a Bible in some little quiet place in England, and then I should be able to read our claim to literary greatness.”

  “I know he would have got other books had it been possible. But if he had been found out, we shouldn’t even have had his book.”

  “And how were all the things destroyed? Were there a great many books ?”

  “Millions. And records in stone and in paint and in architecture.”

  “However was it done? It must have taken twenty years.”

  “More likely fifty or a hundred, and it must have cost as much as a small war. I don’t know how it was done.”

  “But doesn’t he say ?”

  “It wasn’t done then. Only starting to be done. He wastes no parchment talking about that.”

  “But someone must know. There must be records with der Fuehrer, or the Inner Ring.”

  “Alfred, you’re being stupid. If you murder a Knight you don’t bury him in a Holy Field with a tombstone explaining how you killed him. You hide the body and hope people will think he’s been lost or fallen down a crevasse or drowned himself. Those Germans wanted future generations, Knights, Fuehrer and all, to be ignorant, wholly ignorant of the existence of other civilisations.”

  “I see. But there must be legends. We’ve got legends about all sorts of things.”

  “There are no legends about it in Germany. None that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve collected legends since I read the book at twenty-one. The Germans were ashamed of it really. They deliberately forgot it as soon as possible.”

  “I think in England it’s got mixed up with our loss of freedom,” said Alfred. “I don’t know anything in particular about books being burned, certainly. We moonrakers say that there was once a great building in Salisbury with a pointed tower where the Holy Swastika Barracks Church stands. But the Germans tell us we didn’t know how to build with mortar before they taught us, that we could only put up primitive monuments like Stonehenge.”

  “The thing with the pointed tower was probably a great Christian church. There were thousands of them, some very beautiful, von Hess says.”

  “Why didn’t they just keep them for Hitler churches, then?”

  “Because they were built in the form of the cross and were packed with records in stone of past civilisation. But Stonehenge is much older than your Salisbury church.”

  “Does von Hess mention Stonehenge?” Alfred asked, thrilled and surprised.

  “He does, because it was famous in Europe. There is nothing so good in Germany.”

  “How old is it?”

  “He says it wasn’t absolutely certain, but that it was pre-Christian, pre-Roman, probably Druidic.”

  “And why didn’t the Germans blow that up?”

  “Because there’s nothing civilised about it, and it served to remind you of your tribal darkness.”

  “Well, it’s a queer place,” Alfred admitted. “I often go there to think over things. All those great stones lying about, and the two that are still upright with the thing across the top. I’m glad they left Stonehenge.”

  “It’s not yours,” said the Knight. “Your ancestors were running about in Jutland or some such place when men were worshipping at Stonehenge.”

  “It’s mine now. You’ve made it mine. Your people have always dinned it into me that that’s our primitive savage monument, and you can’t take it away from me now. I’m glad you’ve got nothing like it in Germany. How did von Hess get that photograph of the girl?”

  The Knight smiled.

  “It’s a curious reflection that every man who sees that photograph looks more at the girl (once they know it is a girl) than at Hitler, even though when they see it they suppose Hitler to be God.”

  “I didn’t suppose him to be. Surely you didn’t either?”

  “Of course I did, at twenty-one. You can’t teach children dangerous secret heresies, because they can’t be trusted not to talk about them. The von Hess boys are brought up like any other Knight’s sons, and at twenty-one, or when the father thinks the youth has gained some stability of character, he receives this severe shock.”

  “And of course the father is always an unbeliever?”

  “Yes. It makes a difficulty, a gap between father and son, but the son comes to understand at last, and then they can make friends. There were few happier times in my life than the years I spent making friends with my father first, and later with my sons.”

  “Please,” said Alfred, a little uncomfortably, as the Knight did not go on. “How did he get the photograph, sir?”

  “Oh, he’d always had it. It was a much-cherished possession of his family, one of the few unofficial pictures of Hitler that were left. They took great care of it and when von Hess left Germany he took it with him. He knew that all photographs and pictures of Hitler would be gathered in, and all the statues destroyed, if he was going to be God. Even greatly idealised, as he was in the statues, he was still not impressive enough and not German enough to be God. The Thunderer would naturally have exploded him with a much larger, blonder, nobler type of physique. Von Hess when he’s writing about Hitler states that he has no doubt whatever that it is an authentic photograph of him, and he describes it exactly, so that there shall be no doubt he means that photograph. The placing of the figures, their clothes, the somewhat peculiar position of Hitler’s hands, and a detailed description of all the faces. He says the girl is a member of the Hitler Mädchen, probably a sort of leader among them, and that the men behind are two of Hitler’s bodyguard. Of course Arnold had it when he got the book, and they’ve been together ever since. Now it is yours.”

  “Ah,” said Alfred, “that’ll be grand.”

  “I wish you were an older man—no, I don’t. But that girl is not important except to show what a shaky basis our religion has. How many lies there are that can be shown in just one picture.”

  “And as showing how von Wied changed the pattern for women. Didn’t von Hess think that important?”

  “Yes, he did. He found von Wied’s ideas so disgusting and unmanly that he writes quite a long piece (he apologises for the length of it) about the history of women. Oh, I suppose she is important. But you’ll only make yourself unhappy looking at her.”

  “I’d rather be unhappy. Are all the composers you say are German really German?”

  “Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Wagner, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Handel, Haydn, Bruckner, Strauss—o
h, scores; I couldn’t give you offhand the whole list von Hess gives. All German or Austrian. When they wrote their music the Austrians did not call themselves Germans, but of course they always were. But there are some big things we play that I can’t believe are German, and I believe it’s Russian music. Von Hess mentions one great Russian composer called Tchaikowski, and several lesser ones. Then doubtless there is a good deal of French and Italian and Spanish music attributed to minor German composers. You often hear things that don’t go at all with the other work of some particular man you’re supposed to be studying.”

  “And no English music?”

  “There might be,” said the Knight doubtfully. “But I doubt if much of it was good enough to last. There’s a most interesting thing about the music, Alfred,” he said, his eyes brightening with enthusiasm for the subject: “those enormous works we play of Wagner aren’t supposed to be only played; they’re operas. They’re supposed to be acted and sung as well as played.”

  “You mean like a Hitler miracle play with heroes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t they do them?”

  “Because the operas are jammed up with beautiful and heroic and sexually attractive women. Von Hess says he knows the operas will have to vanish as themselves.”

  “I think that’s rather silly. They could have put lovely heroic boys in the places of all the women and let the men love the boys. Men do love boys, nearly all of them, at one time or another, in one way or another.”

  “The only unfortunate thing is that boys can’t possibly sing the music.”

  “Ah, that is rather a facer. Could women really sing in those days ?”

  “Judging by Wagner’s music, in which you can trace all the songs once you have the clue, the women had voices of enormous range and power. I never can imagine what it sounded like, however hard I try. No boy could sing more than little bits of the songs, even in the soprano parts. I do not particularly care for Wagner’s music, but I often wished I could slip back in time and hear one of those operas performed. They must have been in their way magnificent.”

  “Why doesn’t someone write an opera for men and boys, with not such difficult soprano songs? .”

  The Knight sighed, and the light went out of his eyes.

  “No one can write anything now, not even a new march. No one has written anything for hundreds of years, except the most flagrant hash-ups and plagiarisms. You can’t cut all culture off at the root and expect it to go on flowering at the top. Lots of us, most of us, love music. Many of us are excellent instrumentalists and quite a number of us can sing in tune and with feeling. But we can’t make music. We have nothing to make it out of. No one knows or ever did know, so says von Hess, quite what will cause a vigorous culture, or how the creative spirit in men works. But he says, one culture seems to grow out of another, one will go rotten, and another spring up on its grave, with a bit of the old one in it, like manure you see, and those wretched mangolds that won’t grow, but they’d have grown even less if I hadn’t put something into the ground first. Now we have nothing in the ground. We didn’t let the old cultures die, we killed them. Now we have nothing, except the memory, in our music, of our own. But we killed even part of our own, our literature—that is all gone; we have nothing but the Hitler Bible and the legends, and what we call the history of Germany. We are stagnant. We’re not exactly barbarians, we have technical skill and knowledge, we are not afraid of Nature, we do not starve. But in the rich mental and emotional life men live when they are going somewhere, aiming at something beyond them, however foolish, we have no part. We can create nothing, we can invent nothing—we have no use for creation, we do not need to invent. We are Germans. We are holy. We are perfect, and we are dead.”

  “It’s extraordinary it should all absolutely stop, like that,” Alfred said.

  “No more extraordinary than that my nose should bleed when I hit it hard on a rigid steel-bar. One thing follows from another. It’s the same with all the other arts. There are men who can draw, men who can paint, men who can carve in wood and stone. And all they can do is to copy. They have technique, they know about perspective and so forth, but they can make nothing. Statues and pictures of Hitler and the heroes, all exactly alike, all weak and dull. If they draw a picture of a cat, well it is a cat. If the man is clever it is like a photograph of a cat, if he is not it’s like a bad photograph of a cat. None of it is art, none of it is worth doing. I don’t know what a real picture is like, but I do know it must be very different. No, there is no civilised culture in the world now, only remnants of the old. Our music, the traditional tunes of the subject races, and all the legends. The real legends, not the Hitler ones.”

  “Tunes like this,” Alfred said. He whistled the Highland air, the Skye tune.

  “That’s a Celtic lament,” said the Knight. “It has the true Celtic melancholy. The Scandinavian tunes are rather similar. I think it comes from long dark winters, lack of sun. It would sound better if you whistled it in tune, and in the right key. It’s a lovely melody.”

  “I may whistle out of tune, but that is the key. Why, I can hear Angus at it now.”

  “It’s the wrong key,” said the Knight. He went to a corner of the room and took a violin out of its case. He tuned it and played some runs and arpeggios and chords with such power and grace that Alfred sat open-mouthed with admiration. Then he played the Skye tune as Alfred had whistled it.

  “You hear that?”

  “Yes, that’s right. It starts on that note.”

  “Then listen to this.”

  The Knight played it in a different key, lower down on the violin.

  “That is the key. Are you so deaf, you unmusical English dog, that you can’t hear the difference? And are you so half-witted that you think that any music from the simplest to the greatest can ever be played except in its own key, the key that suits the form and thought of the composition? Would you transpose the symphonies of Beethoven, and then think they would sound just the same? Yes, you probably would.”

  “The first key was the one Angus always played it in,” said Alfred obstinately.

  “And what did he play it on?”

  “A whistle.”

  “Of course. And the key of the whistle was D flat. You can make accidentals on those primitive home-made wooden whistles by not wholly stopping up the holes, but owing to their small range you cannot conveniently play anything except in the key of the whistle itself. Had Angus sung it or been able to play it on a violin he would, of course, have put it in the right key. Now here is another Celtic tune, either Irish or Scottish in origin. I heard it first from a Japanese.”

  The Knight played a simple, sweet and very melancholy tune on the violin. First he played it in single notes and then with a rich deep double stopping. Alfred was entranced.

  “Ach, you like that, do you ?” asked the Knight sarcastically. “Ach, how English you are, Alfred! No one should play double stopping with Celtic melodies. They were not made for that, they are too sweet themselves. The harmony overloads them, and makes them sickly. It is just what you would like. Shall I play it again?”

  “Yes, please,” said Alfred, unabashed. “It’s lovely.”

  The Knight played it again, with tremendous feeling, his cloak shaking gracefully back from the shoulder of his bow arm, his great nose bent down towards the violin, and his eyes rolling towards his appreciative audience. Afterwards he played an aria of Bach, a severe cold piece of music.

  “Just to get the taste out of my ear,” he explained, when he had finished.

  “You play beautifully, sir,” Alfred said. “Even an English dog can hear that.”

  “I used to play a little,” said the Knight, with a sigh, putting the violin back in its case. “Not well, really. Now my fingers are getting stiff. If I really wanted to play something I should have to practise three hours a day for three months and at the end of that time they still would not be supple enough.”

  “Did you say yo
u had that lovely tune from a Japanese?”

  “Yes. But he didn’t make it. The Japanese have no more real music in them than a tom-cat, and their singing sounds very much like cats. It is an American traditional tune, an old tune. He knew its name, but no words. It is called ‘Shenandoah’, and the Shenandoah is a river in North America. That Samurai was one of the very few who had a tiny spark of intelligence and taste.”

  “But if it is an American tune why should it be a Celtic tune?”