Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  “In a way you did. They had to stop ruling England from France, they became English, and then tried for hundreds of years to rule France from England. That is as if the Knights of Southampton and London and all the English districts remained there all their lives and later on their descendants raised an army of Nazis and Englishmen and Welsh and Scotch and Irish, and attacked Germany.”

  “That wouldn’t be such a bad scheme, just to go on with until we can tell the truth.”

  “I’m afraid more than half of you is bloody-minded,” said the Knight, shaking his head. “As to the Scots never being conquered before Germany did it, it seems likely enough. Von Hess just says that at a certain date—I’ve forgotten it, seventeen something—Scotland and England were united and the British Isles were all under one king. It sounds more like an arrangement, a marriage or something, than a war.”

  “Does he say anything about a king called Alfred?”

  “Yes. He organised the Saxon law, and prevented England from becoming Scandinavian.”

  “Ha!” said Alfred, grinning with pleasure. “There was one, you see. And there will be one. Young Alfred’s son, perhaps. The messenger.”

  “It would be a good idea if I wrote to the Knight of London, and told him to round up all the men in the province of England who are called Alfred Alfredson, and who have named their eldest son Alfred. I shall tell him he can safely shoot them all for certain disloyalty.”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t be fair, sir. Why, it’s nearly as common a name as Hermann.”

  “What, going on and on from father to eldest son? And that reminds me, you asked me how you lost your surnames. I think it is because the German Government wished the common men, the Nazis and the subject races, to have as little family feeling as possible. The Knights are allowed to have family feeling; you see how dangerously strong it can be. The von Hess men have never done anything about the book, but none of them have destroyed it, as is their duty as good Germans. But the Knights are aristocrats and must have family pride. The Nazis are only allowed to have pride in Germany; the Blood itself is to be their family, and so all their surnames were proscribed, and there is only a limited number of ordinary German first names they are allowed to call their sons. No man can cock himself up with the possession of a rare name. But all that was arranged long ago. I do not really know about it. It’s just part of the social order now. Knights have surnames, Nazis don’t.”

  “And what were we to take pride in ?”

  “Oh, nothing. Your surnames must have been proscribed to prevent the Nazis being jealous. After all, every man in the Empire has a registration number, and what more can you want than that?”

  “Oh, I don’t care. Alfred’s good enough for me, and we call the young ‘un Fred. But there’s another thing that’s been puzzling me a lot. If you wanted to Germanise us, why did you let us keep our own language and our own script? It’s bound to hold Englishmen together if they have a different language and a rather different way of forming letters. It would have been easy to enforce the speaking of German in the Boys’ Nurseries.”

  “We didn’t want to Germanise you in any way except in making you accept our philosophy and your inferiority. If our blood and our language are sacred we cannot have every little Russian and Italian and English boy acquiring our language as a birth language. It is not fit for such as you to have by right, you must learn it for our convenience, that’s all. There are two ways of running an Empire. One is to make the foreign subjects feel that they are far better off inside the Empire than out of it, to make them proud of it, to give them a really better civilisation than their own, and to allow them to attain full citizenship by good behaviour. That was the Roman way. There were thousands of men who proudly and gladly called themselves Roman who hadn’t a drop of Roman blood in them. They had the legal right to do it, and shared in the privilege of the ruling race. The other way is to make the subject races think themselves fundamentally inferior, believing that they are being ruled by a sacred race of quite a different kind of man, and to deny them all equal citizenship for ever. That is our way. We could not dream of allowing any man to call himself German unless he is German by birth. We are the Blood. All you are the not-Blood. So you must speak your own languages and write your own script, and think, in English, how holy we are, how Hitler could never possibly have been anything but German, and how there can never be any other philosophy or way of life than ours. You are not even allowed to have equality within the religion. There are several ceremonies in our churches from which foreigners are excluded. Exclusion is an excellent way of making men feel inferior. Then again, within the religion which you’re all supposed to believe in and quite a lot of you actually do, you are always laymen. You can never be priests——”

  “But what is a priest?”

  “A man who conducts the ceremonies of a religion.”

  “That’s only a Knight.”

  “We had the sense not to have priests and Knights. That always leads to trouble. Church and State really are one in the German Empire, and der Fuehrer is the Pope.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In the Christian religion the priests—that is, the men who conducted the ceremonies and might go into what corresponded to the Hitler chapels, the holy men—were usually a different set of men from those who did the administration and the governing and the fighting.”

  “What an amazing idea! But one set or other must have been paramount.”

  “Not at all times. The priests had spiritual power and the Government had temporal power. The nobles were often more afraid of the priests than the other way on.”

  “The priests were armed, then?”

  “No. But they could curse people.”

  “What of that? Knights have often cursed me.”

  “They could exclude them from the benefit and blessing of God.”

  “Could they really? I don’t believe it.”

  “Of course no man can ever exclude another man from God. The people thought they could, that’s all.”

  “Then they ought to have killed the priests.”

  “But that in itself would have excluded them from God. The priests were sacrosanct, like der Fuehrer and the Inner Ring.”

  “But you say they weren’t Knights, only priests, with no real power at all except cursing. Naturally a man’s sacrosanct if you get flogged to death for hitting him in the face. If I could hit Knights in the face and have them do nothing to me but curse me, there are one or two in England I should slap—quite gently, of course.”

  “I’m afraid you’re too irreligious to understand. The people, and even the nobles, could not approach God except through the Church, that is, the priests. Just as you can’t approach a Knight except through the Knight’s Marshal. And you couldn’t approach der Fuehrer at all, in any possible way. And if you annoy the Knight’s Marshal you won’t get through even to a Knight, will you? Then this was the same: if the people or the nobles annoyed the priests seriously they were cut off from God.”

  “What would that matter when God was not cut off from them? Why, supposing der Fuehrer has heard of me and says, ‘I want to see that interesting fellow Alfred who is going to take von Hess’s book back to England,’ none of you can keep him away from me. If you can, he’s not Fuehrer at all, you are. If the priests could keep God away from men and say, ‘You can go on blessing this chap, but you must now keep from benefiting that chap,’ then He’s not God. He’s inferior to the priests. And while der Fuehrer is only a man and doesn’t know me or a millionth of the people under his rule, God must know everybody and if they want to come to Him or not. Nobody could ever have believed such a crazy idea as that a man could keep God away from other men.”

  “God gave the priests the power to keep Him away from them.”

  “That’s crazier still, because it would mean that God deliberately resigned and gave away His freedom of judgment to a lot of priests. Why, if those people believed all that they were in a way less c
ivilised than you are. Dumber, anyway. When I was a little boy and still believed in Hitler I never thought any Knight or der Fuehrer himself could keep Hitler away from me. As far as me and Hitler went you could all have fallen into the sea. I used to pray, ‘Please, Hitler, let me get into the Technical School,’ without thinking I had to go and bother a Knight about it.”

  “Ours is not a supernatural religion, not in the same sense. There is no hell in it, and as the soldiers and priests are one, and ours is a warlike religion, you are ruled in a soldierly way, not in a priestly way.”

  “It’ll be a merry day in England when you try to rule us in a priestly way,” said Alfred, chuckling. “Knights’ heads will be sold for a shilling for the teeth.”

  “And yet the Messengers will have to go more in a priestly fashion than a soldierly, if they’re to be any good.”

  “Ah, that’s different. They’re not going to go about pretending they can get between God and any man. They’re going to tell the truth. There’s nothing priestly about that. Who are the arch-devils? I suppose they’re really no more devils than Hitler is God.”

  “Eh ?” said the Knight. “Who do you mean?”

  “The devils in the creed. Does von Hess say what they really were?”

  “Oh, them. Well, Lenin and Stalin really were a bit like devils because they were Russian leaders, and the toughest fight Germany had, by a long way, was against Russia. Lenin, however, was dead long before Hitler came to power, and he never got anywhere near Stalin personally.”

  “He never flew to Moscow in the Sacred Aeroplane at the head of the air fleet?”

  “Of course not. He was far too precious ever to be allowed to risk a finger-nail.”

  “Then he wasn’t a hero?”

  “I’ve no doubt at all that he was a brave man, because Germans would never follow a coward. But he wasn’t allowed to do anything. It’s only for purposes of divinity he’s allowed to go into action.”

  “Then was Roehm as bad as he is made out in the Hitler Bible? The arch-traitor, the deceiver, the fiend who took on the form of one of the Hero-Friends?”

  “I don’t know why he’s been picked out for Judas, because there were several men in it.”

  “Who’s Judas? Several men in what?”

  “Judas is in the Christian religion. The friend of Jesus who betrayed him. Roehm was a man who either did rebel against Hitler soon after he came to power, or did not rebel and was killed for some other reason. Several men were killed, and von Hess says the episode remains obscure. It may have been important at the time, but it certainly was not a full-dress rebellion. Roehm was a friend of Hitler’s, and a man of considerable power before he did whatever it was he did wrong, but I really don’t know why he and none of the other delinquents got into the Creed. They were most of them important Nazis. As for Karl Barth, the fourth one, I can find out nothing whatever about him. Von Hess doesn’t mention him. I think it possible that, seeing two devils are Russians and one is a German traitor, Karl Barth may represent the other enemy, Christianity. He also, I think, must have been German, and naturally to Hitlerians a German Christian would be more deadly than any other kind.”

  “Being tougher?”

  “Or more disgraceful.”

  “Karl Barth ought to be in the Hitler Bible. The other three are mentioned in the Hero-Fights.”

  “Karl Barth is a mystery,” said the Knight, sighing. “One we can never clear up. He may have been an ordinary man like Roehm, or a great leader such as Lenin and Stalin undoubtedly were, or he may have been another such man as von Hess, a man of soul. On the other hand, he may have been a really evil fellow. I never say the Creed without wondering about Karl Barth.”

  “I don’t know how you can say it at all without laughing.”

  “It is absurd, and yet it is not absurd. That Creed has held this huge Empire together for over six hundred years. Nonsense of such endurance value almost ceases to be nonsense.”

  “That’s dangerous thought. If it endured for a million years it would still be nonsense, just as if no one believes in truth ever it wouldn’t stop it being truth. How do you think I’m to get this book to England, sir?”

  “I’ve thought of that. I am going to wrap it and seal it and address it as from me, with my name written on it, to the Knight of Gloucester. He’s a friend of mine. If the Nazi officials open your sack anywhere, either this side or the other, they’ll never dare to break a Knight’s seal. And no Knight would do it. It would be a discourtesy for which I could challenge him. I shall write on the outside of the package, ‘By the bearer, Alfred, E.W. 10762,’ then no one will be officious enough to think they ought to take it away from you and send it through the post. If they ask you what’s in it, you will tell a large fat round lie and say you don’t know. If they ask you why you, an Englishman, were chosen to be Knight’s messenger, you’ll say that I took a fancy to you, which isn’t quite such a lie.”

  “And what if some Nazi official remembers it and presently writes to the Knight of Gloucester to know if he ever got his huge important-looking parcel?”

  “The Knight of Gloucester will then take it up, through your Knight’s Marshal, with you. And you will simply say you’re very sorry but it fell into the Avon, or the sea, or whatever you think best, but that anyway you’ve lost it. And that you hardly liked to write to the Knight of Gloucester to tell him so. Then the Knight of Gloucester will simply say to himself, ‘Poor old von Hess is quite batty at last, to trust anything to a half-witted Englishman,’ and he may write to ask me what was in it. I shall write back and tell him it was detailed plans on parchment for a new attack on the Japanese with things that burrow underground and come up behind them and he will say, ‘Sad, sad,’ and not bother any more. But I don’t think the Knight of Gloucester will ever know anything about it. Nazi officials are very chary of interfering even with the best intentions in any business between one Knight and another, and no one even as high up as a Knight’s Marshal is likely to look into your sack. Get some twigs as from the Holy Forest and a stone or two as from the Holy Mountain.”

  “I have some genuine ones.”

  “What for?”

  “A man asked me to bring some back. A homesick Nazi.”

  “Oh, poor lad! Well, I hope they’ll make him feel better. And what are you going to do with the book instead of taking it to the Knight of Gloucester?”

  “I’m going to put it underground until it can come up behind some Germans. Now I’ll tell you something very secret, a real English secret, and you won’t be able to say you’ve heard this in Saxony. You know Stonehenge, of course?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you by any chance notice a little chalk quarry, or what looks like a chalk quarry, about due east, a quarter of a mile, not far from those old ripples that must have been a trench system?”

  “No.”

  “A sort of raised lump with a chalky face one side?”

  “Wiltshire’s so covered with lumps. No, I don’t remember it.”

  “Well, it’s a burrow all right, but not a primitive one. It’s an old gas chamber or dug-out. A concrete room, a big one, underground.”

  “Don’t the Nazis know about it?”

  “No. Its front fell in, either in some bombardment or a chalk slide in bad weather. It was blocked up. I was poking round about Stonehenge ages ago, when I was only nineteen, and I fell through this loose bit of chalk into the entrance of the dug-out. I was half killed. But I got out all right and told no one, and then I made a tunnel through the chalk into the dug-out and concealed the end of it.”

  “And what did you find, gas?”

  “No. The air was just plain bad, but with the hole in the chalk it gradually got better. After a while I could go in safely. I found a decent big dug-out, a little room off it and eleven skeletons. Mouldering skeletons. Just slightly unskeletonish. They didn’t smell bad exactly, but very queer and musty. But I put some disinfectant on them and they soon settled down again.”

>   “Why didn’t you put them out? It’s quite likely they died of plague influenza.”

  “I couldn’t put them out. Supposing I carted them off to bury them and some Nazi sergeant saw me and said, ‘Hi, Englander-schwein, where did you get those bones?’ No, I kept them in. But I wanted a two-way run to my rabbit-hole, so I told another fellow, a young chap of my own age who worked in the Armaments in Salisbury. He stole some explosive and we blew a bit out of the corner of the big dug-out. At least we cracked it up and then we could make a small hole.”

  “Did he know anything about blasting?”

  “Not very much. But we didn’t stand and throw matches at the stuff, we fixed it with a decent long fuse and waited for a thunderstorm. A beauty came at last, at night fortunately, and I rushed up there from Bulfort and fired it. It didn’t blow up much of the top part of the dug-out, but when I was waiting for the thing to go off, lying outside in pouring rain, I got the most terrible fright we might have put far too much in, and then the whole dug-out would go up and perhaps about half a mile of country and Stonehenge too. I was very young and stupid, and we knew really nothing about explosives. And there came the most terrific bang of thunder and I thought, ‘Oh, God, there’s Stonehenge gone.’ I never thought I’d be gone myself. Well, it was all right and there was just a nice little thump, quite unnoticeable in the storm, and when we could next get there together we saw it was all right. So we tunnelled through the chalk and made a much better concealed entrance the other side of the lump where there were some little juniper bushes. Then we got all these stiffs, and wired them up.”

  “Wired the stiffs? What’s that in German?”

  “Wir haben den Draht durch die Skelleten gerannt. There were eleven of them, ten men and one little one. Must have been a child, though what it was doing there I can’t think. There was an old machine-gun, all hopelessly rusted and jammed up, and some rifles.”

  “‘Arms from thy choicest store,’” said the Knight, sardonically.

  “We had a good laugh over that,” Alfred admitted. “But we found out what liars you all were, anyway. The Germans have always told us that all the old dug-outs and concrete stuff, and the old holes under London, were made by them, hundreds of years ago, to protect us and themselves against the Japanese. And we found on the concrete, painted with everlasting paint, ‘No Smoking.’ In English. A give-away, was it not? But I didn’t believe in Hitler any longer, neither did Tom, my friend. I stole lengths and lengths of wire little by little from the shop and we wired the skeletons together, leg-bone to leg-bone, and arm-bone to arm-bone, to make them firm, you see, and dressed them up again in their bits of rags and other clothes we made out of anything we could find. We set the machine-gun up in the entrance with four men and made each skeleton be in its proper place doing what it ought. We gave the other men their rifles and leaned them up against the wall at stand easy, propping their toes with stones. They look fine by torch-light. It took us about eighteen months to fix those stiffs, because we could only go up there at night. But we got them all set at last, and those ten Englishmen will guard that place better in their death than in their life. Nazis are afraid of ghosts in England. Did you know that?”