Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  But the step outside the house, after pausing a moment, went on down the street. Alfred went to look, thinking it might be Hermann.

  “No, it’s nothing. Just a fellow looking for a number,” he said, when he came back. “But I don’t want Thomas told, yet. It isn’t that he isn’t with us against the Germans, and a stout unbeliever, and all that, but von Hess told me not to hurry. I want you to understand thoroughly first. And don’t say a word in front of Jim. He’d be as loyal as you or me, but he’s too young and excitable. Some boast might slip out. So don’t say anything except to me and carefully, at present. And don’t talk much to Hermann. He’ll be in a queer mood, I’ve no doubt.”

  “That isn’t a safe place, Father,” Fred said after a long silence. “Not really safe.”

  “Did you ever know or guess that lump had a dug-out under it?”

  “No. I dare say no one does, and no one but us ever will. But it’s not safe, for all that. Because someone may find it. And you can’t absolutely trust to the terror Nazis have of Stonehenge and ghosts generally.”

  “But what would you do, Fred? Where in all England could you put a book where the Germans couldn’t get at it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fred. “There is no place. Only it’s terrible trusting to such a lot of chances like we shall have to.”

  “Well, it’s no manner of use worrying,” said Alfred, philosophically. “Von Hess couldn’t keep it, and so we must. God will look after it so long as we do our best.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Fred asked dubiously.

  “More and more. But not to say He’s German or this and that. And now I’m going to bed. We must sleep while we can.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE foreman up at Long Barrow was a practical man. When Alfred next evening put his proposition before him he said that if the four arch-fiends in the Creed knew anything about farm work he would employ any two of them.

  “I’m so short of labour I don’t know which way to turn,” he said. “I’ve complained to the Knight’s Marshal, and he says that labour is to be sent up from the East, where they’ve got a few more than they want, but the labour ain’t come yet. Nor will it for a few weeks. The government is sure enough, but it isn’t always as fast as a hare. So send your wicked Nazi up to me as soon as he comes, and I’ll see that he sweats some of it out. There are too many boys being let into the Technical Schools, Alfred, and they’re starving the land.”

  Alfred nodded gravely at this ages-old complaint.

  “It suits me they are,” he said. “I wouldn’t like this fellow actually to starve. He’s a great big hulk; he can’t exist on an old woman’s ration. And you might drop a hint to the other men that he’ll be in a desperate mood, not caring much whether he lives or dies, and he’s very strong. If they pick on him he’s liable to kill a few before they down him.”

  “They’ll let him alone,” said Andrew. “They’d be ashamed to fight him. Civilised men ought to stick together about Christians. If one doesn’t—well, then,” Andrew spat on the ground contemptuously. “But work! He shall have that.”

  In three days more Hermann arrived. Alfred found him in the kitchen, alone with Fred, when he came back from work to his supper. Neither man was speaking. Hermann looked up. He still did not speak. He looked huge in his red uniform—red breeches, red coat, red cap—but older, and ill. His broad shoulders sagged despondently, his eyes looked dull and lifeless.

  “He has been through it,” Alfred thought. “Worse than I thought. Oh, my poor silly Nazi, it’s I that brought you to this.”

  He laid his hand on Hermann’s shoulder.

  “I’ve got you work, Hermann.”

  Hermann’s eyes did not brighten. He mumbled something Alfred could not hear. Fred brought his father’s soup and Alfred sat down to eat it in silence. When he had finished he got up.

  “Come on, Hermann. Back to the farm.”

  “Can’t he stay here to-night, Father?” Fred asked.

  “No. Officially we can’t sleep in the same house with him.”

  Hermann got up and followed Alfred out without a word. His head nearly touched the top of the doorway. Such a large man had probably never been through it before. And yet he was no giant. He fell seven inches short of the legendary Hitler. Presently they were out of the town and walking up to Long Barrow farm, out of step, as usual. When they turned in to the lonely downs road that led to the farm, Alfred took his arm.

  “I’m sorry I brought all this on you, Hermann.”

  Hermann said nothing.

  But when they were very near the farm Hermann said, very slowly, “How shall I see you again?”

  “Go down to the end of the lane to-morrow night after your supper, when it’s dark, I mean, and we’ll come. We go up to the dug-out where the book is. Only Fred and me. The others know we’re doing something, but they don’t know what. And pull yourself together, man. You’ve done nothing you think’s wrong, and von Hess is trusting you to help us.”

  “I shall be all right,” said Hermann, still in that slow voice, “when I can work. You stay here now. I’d rather go in alone.”

  Alfred watched him go to the farmyard gate and swing it open, then shut it carefully and go round the corner of some barns.

  “Why is red their colour of disgrace?” he wondered. “Christian crosses are red, and Permanent Exiles wear red. There must be some old reason they don’t know themselves. Perhaps I shall find it out.”

  Alfred found out this and many other interesting things during the end of the summer and the autumn and the winter, in session with old von Hess, the Knight of the Inner Ten. He and Fred and Hermann went up to the dug-out roughly one night out of every three. As autumn came on they could go up earlier, but the dug-out began to get very cold and they could not stay such long hours. They all three spent every penny they could scrape together for candles, and Hermann was as single-minded in this as the others who could read the book. Alfred took up a little stool each for himself and Fred, and a tiny rough table was transported up in pieces to hold the book and the candles. Hermann usually stretched himself on the pile of sacks, which he added to whenever he could conveniently steal an old one from the farm, and went to sleep. He was tired out after his day’s manual labour, and he had no absorbing interest, as the other two had, to keep him awake. Sometimes they woke him up to ask the meaning of a German phrase or word, or to tell him a really interesting piece of news about his country.

  “I say, Hermann, wake up. Now what do you think of this? Do you know what the Teutonic Knights really were?”

  “Hitler’s Knights.”

  “They weren’t. They were much older than that. They were German Knights who went to convert the heathen Slavic Prussians to Christianity. Now what do you think of that?”

  But Hermann was too tired to think. So long as he might stretch his huge form between Alfred and the entrances whence might come an enemy to him and the book, Hermann was content. He was unhappy in the daytime because the other men on the farm, though they let him alone, despised him without concealment, and sometimes it was hard to believe that he was not really what he seemed to be, a Permanent Exile in a red uniform, or shortly, a Red. But on one night in every three he was happy, as whenever he woke from a doze he could see Alfred’s dark head and Fred’s fair one bent over the book, and hear the mumble of German and English in Alfred’s voice. They never heard a sound from outside except sometimes wind. They took endless precautions, going separately and meeting at different places. No man was allowed to wear his boots within two hundred yards of the entrance, in case a track was left. Smothered curses were constantly heard, every time someone trod on a thistle. There seemed to be more thistles than grass on that particular bit of down. Sometimes one member of the reading party did not come at the appointed time. That meant he had met a poaching Christian or someone else too near Stonehenge and had walked on in some other direction and had then gone home. But no catastrophe happened, and through coldness and we
ariness and eye-strain, because they had to be careful about candles, Alfred acquired knowledge and translated it to Fred. Fred pretty soon began go be able to read a lot of the book for himself. Then Alfred just read on in German until Fred stopped him. It was a great night when they had got once all through the book, having carefully considered every sentence to try to draw from it its deepest meaning. Alfred suggested they should have a rest from reading for a little while, and spend more time with old Joseph Black, the head Christian of the Amesbury community.

  “No, don’t do that,” Hermann pleaded. “I can’t see you then.”

  Alfred thought it better not to take Hermann to Joseph Black’s house, though since the enlightenment in Germany he had let Fred know that he was acquainted with Christians and had taken him two or three times to see Joseph. But Alfred had not had much leisure in the last four months. If he were not struggling to understand von Hess he had to see his friends, visit little Robert in the Boys’ Nursery, go to see Ethel and brood unhappily for a little while over the baby Edith, and pay some fatherly attention to his adoring second son, young Jim. He had to do his work and have some time for sleep. So Joseph, who was a mine of interesting but mostly inaccurate information, had been rather neglected. Alfred’s acquaintance, or really friendship, with this Christian had been the result of an accident. He had been returning late one night from a meeting of the Brotherhood of British Heathens, the official name of the anti-Hitler secret society. There were branches all over England, and in Scotland and Ireland and Wales, and though members could not move about freely news of progress did filter through from other branches, so that the leading men had an idea as to how the society was growing. Alfred was returning from this seditious conspiracy across the downs with two other men when at least three miles from Amesbury they heard something crying, and found a very small Christian boy of not more than five years old, quite alone and half-frozen. The other two men, who included in their anti-Hitler feelings no toleration at all for any other kind of religion, and had a rigid conventional contempt for Christians, whom they considered more unclean than ordure, told Alfred to leave the brat, as it was too tough to die, and would certainly be presently found by its own people, and what did it matter, anyway? But Alfred had reacted so strongly and logically against the Hitlerian virtues of bloodshed and brutality and ruthlessness that he was already developing shoots of their opposites. He would not leave the little boy, but parted from the other men and carried him over to Amesbury. Joseph Black, the father, received the child, his youngest son, with unashamed transports of relief and joy, and told Alfred that the boy might well have been out all night in the frost, and possibly the next day too. Owing to a misunderstanding as to the direction in which he had strayed the Christians were all searching the wrong part of the downs. But Joseph, while very grateful, remained aloof and unapproachable, and Alfred, though he was immediately interested in the Christians, whom he had up to then regarded as something quite negligible and rather disgusting, could not make him talk. But he came again, ostensibly to know if the little boy had since died of pneumonia, and let Joseph understand that he was anti-German and did not believe in Hitler as God. On that Joseph opened his heart to him, and talked freely enough about everything except the deeper mysteries of his religion, though, he warned Alfred frankly, “It makes no difference in the Last Day whether you believe in the foul fiend Hitler or no. The Lord will not ask you whether you believed in this evil man or had lost your faith in that one; He will ask you whether you believed in the Lord Jesus, and it’s no good thinking you can get out of it by lying, for God can read all hearts.” But Alfred was not concerned with the last day, and was much pleased at Joseph’s change of attitude. All that was long ago now; the little boy was a sturdy lad of sixteen; Joseph was nearly old, and head of the settlement.

  Alfred said to Hermann, “We must stop reading for a bit, old lad. Fred’s eyes ache so that he can hardly do his work next day. We need a rest. You can walk down to Amesbury with us at night if we don’t go on the road.”

  “When will you go on with the reading?”

  “We’ll start it through again in about a fortnight, or perhaps sooner if our eyes are better. And, Hermann, you mustn’t come up here protecting the book by yourself.”

  “Or looking at the Nazi girl,” said Fred gravely.

  “I’ll clout your head, mein Junker,” grumbled Hermann. “I didn’t leave Germany to be preached at by a boy who can’t grow a beard at seventeen. Well, Alfred, then it must be a fortnight.”

  “You can have nice warm sleeps every night instead of getting so stiff with cold you can hardly walk home.”

  “I’d rather be cold,” said Hermann.

  So Alfred and his son put in a few secret visits to Joseph, at night, going and coming carefully, for they were most anxious not to lose their reputations as normal English people.

  Joseph always received them with pleasure in his filthy hovel, and immediately turned all the women out of the room, for they were not fit to listen to men’s conversation, even though two of the men were condemned unbelievers. Joseph’s father, a very old man and rather deaf, generally stayed there, polishing a newly made whistle or some such old man’s job. The sons were usually out of the way, setting or taking up snares, stealing vegetables from the fields, or getting a nice chicken from some outlying run. Alfred often had a better meal with Joseph Black than he could afford to buy with his wages. The Christians were allowed no rations by the government, and they could do no work. They lived on the country or starved on the small proceeds of their illicit sales, and most times of the year they lived fairly well.

  Joseph would sit on his stool and talk for hours in the most dogmatic way about everything on earth and in heaven. His expression was an extraordinary mixture of religious fanaticism and humorous slyness; his person was very dirty; his long hair was greasy, grey, never washed and rarely combed; his teeth were perfect and very white, and his small dark eye could see stars in the sky where Alfred could see none.

  Alfred would question him, “Why do you think women have their heads shaved, Joseph?”

  “I don’t know why your infidel women, whom you keep shut up in pens like bitches on heat, have their heads shaved, for a superficial following of the blessed Paul the brother of our Lord will not save any of you in the Judgment. But our women are shaved because the blessed Paul said, ‘A woman’s hair is her shame, therefore let her be shorn.’ And its truth is evident in the fact that a man’s hair is his glory and his strength lies in it, like Samson in the den of lions.”

  “What would happen if men cut their hair off or shaved their heads?”

  “They could beget no children and would come to a deserved extinction.”

  Alfred looked at Fred’s solemn young face, and caught the ghost of a twinkle in his eye. Both of them knew the truth about the shaving of women’s heads, and the consequent pride men took in their hair and beards.

  “If a woman grew her hair as long as it would grow would she be barren?” Fred asked.

  “A woman’s hair cannot grow beyond the bottoms of the ears,” Joseph stated. “But even that is a shame to her. Women are hairless. Why, if they were meant to have hair on their heads they would have it on their faces. Have you ever seen a woman with a beard like mine? Sometimes they grow a little hair, but only when they are past child-bearing. But this is a very trivial matter for talk between men, even between Christians and unbelievers, whose fate is worse than a woman’s. For she merely parts and disperses asunder, atom from atom, drop from drop, in a wholly painless fashion. Nothing she is and nothing she must become.”

  “But men must burn for ever in the fiery lake.”

  “That is so, Alfred. In that day before the eyes of the faithful remnant then alive, and all the glorious hosts of the Christian dead, Hitler the foul fiend and all other false gods shall plunge at the head of their reprobate followers into the lake of fire.”

  “Joseph, if you could, would you overthrow the Germans
by violence?”

  “By violence the Jews killed our Lord. By violence we, the disobedient, persecuted and killed the Jews, forgetting the commandment, ‘Christians, forgive them, they know not what they do.’ By violence the Germans and all other followers of Hitler have persecuted us. Shall we then add sin to sin, and calamity to calamity?”

  “But then,” said Alfred, “if you were to forgive the Jews for not knowing what they were doing, ought not you also to forgive the Germans? For just persecuting Christians can’t be such a great crime as killing the son of God.”

  “It is not for us to forgive them. We have not been told to forgive them, and disobeyed. We have not persecuted the Germans, nor offered them any violence. It is for God to forgive them, but He will not,” Joseph said very firmly. “We have sinned, and they are the instruments of our punishment, but they are willing instruments, bloody and deceitful men.”

  “They were deceitful, certainly,” Alfred murmured. “Joseph, what was there in the world before there were Germans?”

  “Jews and Christians. But first there were only Jews. The whole world of men descended from the blessed race of Jesus. Why, how could it be otherwise?”

  “But the Japanese are yellow, and Africans are dark, and we are white,” said Fred, looking at Joseph’s grey and filthy skin.

  “And why should not Jews and the descendants of Jews be of different colours? Your hair is nearly yellow, Fred. Alfred’s is brown. Are you not his son?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then there is no difficulty. There is no difficulty about anything unless the eyes and the mind are made filthy and dark by unbelief.”

  “Joseph, do you think Christians could ever read?” Alfred asked.

  “No. Reading and writing are heathen. The truth must always be passed on by the words of the mouth. Does God write to us to tell us what He wills? Do you think that in the Last Day God will send you little notes to let you know of your damnation? He will tell you, in a voice louder than the thickest thunderclap. You mock, Alfred. You think I don’t know why you come here, to mock and tease the old Christian.”