“I know they’re afraid of Stonehenge. Yes, it’s a good place, where your dug-out is. What did you do with the child?”
“We buried him. He was a very little skeleton; we dragged him out of the back hole and buried him a little way off. At least we buried him thinking he was an English boy, but I’m a bit doubtful now. There was some long hair—about, not exactly on his head. I think he must have been a little girl. Well then, I made a great wooden shield or door for the little room in the dug-out and took it up there in bits and painted it muddy colour. It looks exactly like the rest of the dug-out by torch-light. So that’s where I shall keep the book. The Nazis will never find the place itself, because they don’t like fossicking about near Stonehenge, and there is nothing to look for there. If they find the place they won’t like those grim soldiers all set up near the entrance. They’ll just say, ‘Ach, Hitler!’, and leave them there, doing no harm to Heilige Deutschland. And even if they should get past the soldiers they won’t find the inner room.”
“And what about your friend, Tom? Is he absolutely trustworthy? Does anyone else know?”
“No one. I thought, there may be a time when this’ll come in handy. But not while we’re all just not believing in Hitler and singing ‘God send our King’ on the downs at night. We must be doing more than that. So I didn’t tell anyone.”
“And what about Tom?”
“Tom’s very trustworthy. He’s dead. He got in a fuss with some Nazis at the Armament, and they kicked him to death.”
“Ach!” said the Knight.
“You ought to be quite pleased. Tom was very disloyal.”
“Well, I am not pleased. He was a brave lad, and brave boys should not be kicked to death.”
“Oh, well, it was a long time ago,” said Alfred, comfortingly. “Tom wouldn’t bear any malice. He was very bloody-minded, and would have liked to kick the Knight’s Marshal of Salisbury to death five times, to start from perfect health every time. But he was a pleasant lad. The fun we had over those poor stiffs! They all had names, and we laughed at them, but we thought about them when they’d been alive too. Until it made us too savage and gloomy.”
“How do you think they died? How did you find them?”
“Just lying about. The child had died with her head on a dead man’s shoulder. At least he hadn’t moved afterwards. They weren’t broken, except King Nosmo, who had the top of his head bashed in.”
“King Nosmo?”
“No-Smo-King. Nosmo our King. King Nosmo. Like King Alfred.”
“Is that a typical English joke? I don’t think it’s very funny.”
“It was funny to us. We nearly choked ourselves, because we didn’t dare to laugh very loud, just in case someone was going over the top and could hear us. King Nosmo was our pet skeleton, and he looks the ghastliest of all because of his head. The others I think must have been gassed or died of disease.”
“Well, it really does sound a fairly safe place, though not a quarter as safe as if you were a Knight and left the book unlocked in a drawer in your writing-table. But how about the Christians in the district? Are there many? They’re always about at night setting snares and taking them up.”
“There are some Christians at Amesbury.”
“That’s very close. They’ll be out after hares and rabbits on the downs.”
“Well, I know, but I don’t think they’ve ever found the place. You see, no one can find it accidentally, so to speak, any more. When I fell through, all the chalk settled down firm and no one can fall in again. The hole that end doesn’t look as if it went anywhere. The other hole is always blocked up unless someone is actually inside. It’s blocked with a stone too big for a boy to move. I’ve got awful work to move it myself. It’s a piece of that big solitary stone outside the main part of Stonehenge that’s all smashed up.”
“I know it,” said the Knight. “That stone must have got a direct hit with a bomb or shell.”
“So it doesn’t look really very odd for a comparatively small piece to be a bit farther away than the other lumps and fragments. We lugged it over one night. And I hope it’ll guard the book as well as it did whatever it was supposed to do when it was joined on to the big one and standing up.”
“Are the Christians afraid of Stonehenge?”
“No. But they’re superstitious about other things. If one of them does find the front entrance he won’t like those old soldiers. And besides, even if Christians did find it and found the book and everything they wouldn’t do anything about it. They can’t any of them read. They’d know it was either an Englishman’s burrow or a very queer Nazi’s hide-out, and they’d never interfere or even say much about it. Christians attend strictly to their own business—praying to Jesus, mourning the Sin, poaching, carving wood, making whistles and baskets, brewing herbal remedies and engaging in illicit buying and selling with the future denizens of the fiery lake.”
“Yes,” said the Knight, “I am so thankful that it has always proved impossible to prevent all trading with Christians.” He rose and opened the door of a little cupboard in the wall. “I have here the best collection of Christian whistles of any Knight in the Fatherland. When I am dead and my property reverts to the State, some zealot will probably feel himself impelled to burn them all. It will be a great crime. I have them in every key, and there is not a German one among them. The Christians must have a secret method of treating the wood before they make the holes that gives the whistles that peculiar sweet bird-like tone. It is a fascinating little primitive musical instrument. There is a kind of music you really cannot play satisfactorily on anything else. Listen to this.”
The Knight selected one of his whistles and played a delicious cool little air on it.
“You hear, Alfred? That is not primitive music, but it is the thought of a man with his head full of bird-song. So the Christian whistle is the suitable instrument. No nightingale—no blackbird—could sing more sweetly and purely. You know that bird-music in what we erroneously call the Siegfried Symphony of Wagner? It is not a symphony at all, but an opera, of course.”
“Yes, I know it.”
“That bird-music should always be played on Christian whistles. It can be done perfectly well. It would not fit with the more sophisticated instruments, any more than a bird’s voice fits with anything else in the world. It just would be birds, unfitting, startling and delicious. But unfortunately I have never dared to suggest that it should be even tried. There are so many things a sensible man would like to do but which cannot be suggested. Many things.” The Knight sadly put his whistle back and closed the cupboard.
“How did you get all the whistles, sir? You can’t go to the Nazi go-between and say, ‘Get me a Christian whistle in C major.’”
“No, no. My people bring me the whistles. Every now and then at long intervals a man will let me know he has a whistle. I send for him, and I say to him, ‘You are sure this is a German whistle?’ He says, yes he is sure, he knows the man who made it. Then I hear him play, and if, as occasionally happens with the tone-deaf, it is a German whistle I give it him back. It is not the key I want. It is very childish and stupid, for they all know I won’t buy anything but a Christian whistle, and a good one at that, but formalities must be preserved. And, of course, it is very wrong and irreligious of me to collect Christian whistles. I ought not to allow such unclean things inside my house. And I am ihdirectly encouraging trade with Christians which it is my duty as a Knight to put down. But they forgive me all that part. For one reason, they are mainly musical men themselves, and for another, I am von Hess. When I was away from home on foreign duty in England and Persia and France and Egypt I had to be more careful, but here, even though it is within a walk of the Holy City, I do what I like. Feudal aristocracy, for ours is in feeling feudal, has great advantages.”
“Yes, for the Knight,” said Alfred, with a grin.
“And even for the Nazis too.”
“In keeping them boys and not allowing them to be men.”
>
“They cannot be men while they are still under discipline of any kind. I cannot be a man myself if I swear blind obedience to der Fuehrer and really mean it. But my not-men, my Bavarian Nazi boys, are better off under me than under the Army Knights and sergeants. That is a cold, uninterested discipline, mine is a paternal rule. Until men can rule themselves, a father is a better thing to obey blindly than a government.”
“It depends on the fathers. All Knights, I suspect, are not like you, even in their own home districts.”
“No. There may be bad fathers. Cold, unaffectionate, unjust, more cruel than even our religion permits. But a government must be cold.”
“But not necessarily unjust. The Nazis should be the government themselves.”
“What, all of them?”
“No. Selected ones.”
“Who is to select them?”
“The Nazis.”
“And who is to be der Fuehrer?”
“The selected ones would choose der Fuehrer.”
“Now think of them all as English and not German, and if England was free, would you promise blind obedience to any man, always, even if he had been selected by Englishmen?”
“No. I should have to be the Leader myself.”
“Without knowing anything about democracy you have found the flaw in it. In a democracy no man of character is willing to give up his right of private judgment, and as he cannot blindly trust his leader, knowing him to be of the same clay as himself, he must be the leader. So government becomes exceedingly difficult. Because while there are many men of character, and democracy encourages them, there is also the large mass of weaker men, who must be told always what to do and what not to do, and cannot be trusted to live rightly without laws. So the end of democracy, von Hess says, is always the same: it breaks up into chaos, and out of chaos comes some kind of authoritarian government, a Fuehrer, an oligarchy, government by the army, or something of the kind. Now I am not so contemptuous of democracy as he is, because I have seen the ultimate natural decay of authoritarian government, which is complete stagnation. But I still do not see how democracy can be made to last long enough to develop character in a sufficient number of people. That will be the problem of your great-grandsons, Alfred, for once truth has come back to the world the authoritarian form of government must collapse.”
Alfred was deeply interested, frowning with concentration.
“I don’t think people ought to chuck—what did you call it? democracy, just because it’s difficult,” he said. “They ought to be so certain it’s right that they can face any difficulties. If they persevered with it, it would get easier and easier, after a time. Did they ever try it for very long?”
“Well, no, because of the menace of war. Soldiers cannot be democrats, and armies, even the armies of democratic countries, were always authoritarian.”
“Soldiers cannot be men of character, of course,” said Alfred. “They can’t be men. They must always be boys. I’ve always seen that.”
“And again an authoritarian government behind the authoritarian army gives a nation enormous advantage in time of war. The democratic countries, when war was threatening, were panicked by their severe handicap, and loss of faith in the form of government was inevitable.”
“Then what it really means is that democracy is too difficult to be persevered with when war is likely to happen, not that it is actually too difficult for human beings to cope with.”
“I expect that is it.”
“And there is another thing. Has a democracy ever started in a community, a nation, where the men all really considered themselves equal, no one fundamentally and unalterably superior to any other?”
“I should think it most unlikely. Democracies rose on decayed aristocracies.”
“But you see we’ll start fair from the bottom. In Germany there’ll be numbers of discontented Knights, disgusted at the loss or sharing of their privileges. But not among us once the Empire has broken up. All Englishmen are so low in your eyes that they’re equal, and we feel equal in our own estimation too. There is no class, as there is in Germany. There are only men who can read and men who can’t. That doesn’t really matter.”
“No. When there is nothing to read but the Hitler Bible and absurd legends about the heroes and technical books, literacy has an entirely different significance from that which it had in old time. A boy who is to be a technician learns to readjust as part of his job, it causes no jealousy among those who do not want to be, or are not fitted to be, technicians. Hermann has the Bible read to him in church, and saves his eyes. And there are advantages in not reading. Hermann sees far more than you do. He notices things about weather, about nature, about animals, and all movements and changing aspects of the world he lives in that you would never see. The illiterate eye and brain are different from the literate, but unless the man is half-witted, they are in their way just as good. It’s not only that Hermann is a farm-worker. I’ve noticed the same thing in illiterate factory workers who tend the simple machines. They see things differently. But you will have to teach your young men to read, Alfred. They must read von Hess for themselves.”
“Fred can read, and speak baby-German, but he doesn’t know much grammar yet.”
“You must teach them to read German. Von Hess is not difficult. But don’t try to do things too fast. Neither Jesus nor Hitler nor their best disciples could convert Europe in their lifetime. If you can make twenty men really understand before you die you will have done well.”
“I don’t understand about Jesus. Where did the Jews come from?”
“They were an Eastern Mediterranean people, not black, but dark, and I gather a little like Arabs to look at.”
“But where are they now?”
“They don’t exist. They were either absorbed into other nations or wiped out. There were a few left in von Hess’s time. The Palestine Jews were killed, massacred to the last man and the last child, when the Imperial German Army took Jerusalem. The German Jews were killed in various pogroms both during and after the Twenty Years’ War. The Jews in other countries were harassed first by the anti-Semitic authoritarian war governments of those countries, before Germany conquered them, and were much reduced in numbers, and then were harassed over again by the German armies of occupation. But how the last remnants disappeared I don’t know. It happened after von Hess’s time, as did the segregation of the few faithful followers of Jesus. The end of the Jewish tragedy is in the gulf of our darkness. There must be plenty of men of Jewish descent, particularly in Russia and America and England where they had mixed more with the indigenous people, but there are no Jews as such. They were an unlucky people.”
“After they killed Jesus?”
“No, always. Enslaved by the Egyptians, then by the Babylonians, then by the Romans. Then the massacre of Jerusalem and the dispersion (like a whole nation going into Permanent Exile), then the Christian persecution. And hardly had the Christian persecution, which had a religious motive, stopped, than the racial persecution started. And hardly had a little portion of the Jews made a new home in their old home in Palestine, than the Germans pushed the Empire down there and killed them all.”
“Why did everybody hate them so much?”
“I cannot make out,” said the Knight. “Von Hess does not know. In his time there were too few of them for anyone to wish to do more than despise them and leave them alone. There were none in Germany then. Von Hess had read a great deal about the Jews, but said that even in his day it was not possible really to understand anti-Semitism. They had the unpleasant characteristics of all people who are persecuted persistently and made to feel aliens in the country where they live, but they had brilliant qualities. And they were fanatically brave if once they started fighting. They resisted Titus heroically, and they resisted the German Imperial Army. Titus rewarded them with crucifixion, and we more mercifully shot them and clubbed them. I think that the whole world, not only the Germans, must somehow have been afraid of the Jews. But vo
n Hess could not feel the fear, and so he cannot understand the hatred. Now no one is ever afraid of Christians. We look on them rather as we look on wild animals. If they got savage they would be shot, but as they’re harmless they can be left alone.”
“But there are so few of them. When there were a lot and they were preaching Jesus against Hitler, weren’t men afraid of them?”
“I don’t think so. Not in the same way. Von Hess says that the Christians in his time had most of them no heart for their religion. Germany was not Christian, it was without religion except devotion to Germany, and the subject races were for the main part only Christian because to be so was to be anti-German. There were tough ones among them; Christians are everywhere in Europe, even in Germany, but the majority had no heart for it. Now Jews always seem to have had a good will to be Jews, and to contain in their Jewishness something very menacing. But then they were a race, not only a religion, and perhaps Blood will tell. Sometimes. And perhaps Christianity came too soon. Perhaps it was too difficult, like democracy. Von Hess, writing with his martial side uppermost, despises it. He says it is an effeminate religion.”
Swastika Night Page 18