It was odd to find oneself in prison in this loosest, least confined of capitals. Lakes and waterways run through it, and there is much wet and sandy ground on which it is not safe to build, so there are heaths and pine woods and birch woods and good alluvial fields well within the city limits. But now it was a prison, the largest prison ever known, with walls that rose to the sky and were as thick as the whole encircling Soviet Zone. Everybody in Berlin was a prisoner. None was free, not even those who claimed to be warders. The Berliners were prisoners because they were conquered. The Allies were prisoners because they were conquerors. The Americans could not leave lest the Soviet Union take their withdrawal as an admission that they were willing to surrender the whole world to it and stay at home in peace; and a Third World War might well have followed such a misunderstanding. The British could not leave Berlin lest the United States and the Soviet Union take their withdrawal as an admission that they were a bankrupt people destitute of power: a misunderstanding which also might have hastened the outbreak of a Third World War. The French could not leave Berlin lest the world draw its conclusions from the state of serfdom into which they had fallen in 1940 and think them destitute of power.
The Russians also were prisoners; theirs was the deepest degree of captivity. They could not leave Berlin without abandoning what was then the sole Russian idea: that they could occupy any country into which they could send the Red Army to cooperate with the local Communist party, no matter how greatly the population loathed them, and that by imposing a police state they could then induce in such countries an appearance of satisfaction which would make it difficult for the Western democracies to gain moral support if it tried to drive them out. The Russians had therefore to stay in Berlin and pretend that they found it easy to administer their Sector, at the same time doing their best to drive out the Allies. For the inhabitants of their Sector obstinately voted against communism in their free elections, and this evidence of discontent could be suppressed if the Allies abandoned the quadripartite control of the city, and there need be no more free elections.
In the summer of 1949 they were working at the task of ousting the Allies with all that peculiar bitchery which was Stalin’s stamp and seal. A year before the Russians had refused to cooperate with the British and the Americans and the French in the currency reform, though this was obviously necessary, since the official currency was still Hitler’s Reichsmark, which for long before the defeat had been the parthenogenetic child of printing presses unmated with any gold reserve. They picked a series of petty quarrels over the new Deutschmark and proceeded to use the power which the Potsdam Conference had given them when it embedded Berlin in the heart of the Soviet Zone. In June 1948 they had closed all land communications between Western Germany and Berlin. Their hope was that this would inflict such privations on the Sectors controlled by the Western Allies, which relied for their important export trade on Western Germany, that the Berliners would not want them to stay. This threat was met by that great act of genius, the airlift, which supplied the city’s essential needs at a cost of a hundred thousand pounds a day, and by a ban on the export of all goods from Western Germany to the Soviet Zone in East Germany. In May 1949 this ban had reduced Eastern Germany to the verge of economic collapse, and the Russians, with a great fanfare on the radio and in the news-reels, let the trains and the automobiles and the canal barges go through their Zone to Berlin.
But as soon as the Russians got the goods they needed and were saved from administrative disaster they began to cheat. It happened that a large number of railway workers in the Soviet Zone went on strike, an event which genuinely amazed the Red Army and the commissars, since strikes are not permitted in the Soviet Union. But they turned it to their own purpose and refused to settle it, for so long as it went on no goods could be carried to or from Berlin, and the Soviet authorities could plead that they were not imposing a blockade, it was the German Railway Workers’ Union that was responsible for the hold-up. This ruse was peculiarly Stalinist. It explained why Lenin, and the party as a whole, had never thought much of Stalin in the early days, for it was incomplete. It left the automobiles and the canal boats unaccounted for, and they had to be turned back by Soviet guards who demanded documents of which nobody had previously heard, and this revealed to the simplest minds that there was a disingenuous element at work.
So, in the summer of 1949, the little blockade was on. In the sky over Berlin the airlift hummed perpetually, though on the ground it was very easy to find parts of the city which seemed remote from strife, and even from life. The bogus classical villas round the lakes of Dahlem were now truly classical, and as graceful and elegiac as the willows which drooped silver over the waters. In the past their pompous colonnades had shut out light much needed in a northern climate, and they had been dumpy with darkness. Now these colonnades were doubly irradiated, by the light that shone on them from without, and the light that poured down into their rooms through the shattered roofs. The gardens were now more tame and more wild: the lawns and parterres were covered with neat rows of vegetables, the un-pruned rambler roses hung in great curtains, billowing in the wind, from porches and balconies. Bullet-pocked shutters made easy a burglar’s entrance to a house that was intact. Built into a colossal mantelpiece, a huge marble female head, crowned with faintly green laurels on its faintly gilded hair, looked over the dusty parquet floors of the empty salon and was reflected in the cracked and sallowed mirrors, set in nouveau art frames representing twined water lilies. It seemed a good house to explore, but the handle of the door had been taken off and put on again at an odd angle. To open that door might be very unhealthy, and, indeed, if an intact house in this district lacked inhabitants it usually meant that it had been mined by German troops in their last stand against the Russians and had not yet been cleaned. That door handle had been noticed so nearly at the last moment that it seemed good to go outside and sit on a bench in the garden and breathe the air with a proper appreciation.
On the other side of the lake was a great white mansion, flying the Union Jack; and on its lawn, between two taller visitors, walked a trim man with a white moustache. This was Sir Cecil Weir, the president of the Economic Sub-Commission of the Allied Control Commission for Western Germany, a Glasgow manufacturer who had been one of the chief planners of British industry during the war and had reorganized French industry after the liberation. He was the perfect bourgeois whom Marx had denounced in the Communist Manifesto one hundred and one years before, with double inconsistency, since he was a determinist, and the bourgeois was a natural product of the capitalism which he had certified as an inevitable and temporarily beneficial historic phase: the perfect boorjoo, whom the Russians were still denouncing with the same inconsistency. But me imperturbe, Sir Cecil might have said with Whitman, for within himself he was adventurous and serene. He and Harry Collins, who had brought the coal out of the ground in the Ruhr, belonged to the same type of thinkers who dealt with concrete things in an abstract way. Harry Collins believed in bringing coal out of the ground, no matter whether the ground was British or American or French or German, because coal is a good thing for human beings to have about the place. Sir Cecil believed in trade as the foundation of civilization. Wherever raw materials flowed into a factory and manufactured goods flowed out and the product was satisfactory and the accounting honest, houses and schools and hospitals were built, and men became cleaner and wiser and kinder. Hence he was as profoundly shocked by the blockade of Berlin as he would have been at a blockade of Glasgow.
This impersonal effort was often to be recognized among Allied officials. It had its bearing on the moral issue raised by the people, mostly English, who arrived in Germany with the avowed intention of loving the Germans and claimed to be inspired by Christ’s injunction that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves. But they had surely mistaken a difficult injunction for an easy one. Christ did not tell us to love our neighbours as we love our lovers or our kin, which is not a hard task for people
with a certain vacancy of nature; every woman tried for murder receives a number of proposals from total strangers. He did tell us to love our neighbours as ourselves, and that is a cool and intellectual love. Few of us take joy in ourselves. Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn. But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills. It is our duty to fight as eagerly for the rights of others, to admit the unique and sacred character of their souls and their wills, and here in Germany that duty was often faithfully observed. No parachutist dropped on the Ruhr could have guessed that Harry Collins was not wrestling for his own people; and Sir Cecil Weir might have been managing factories that belonged not only to his own nation but to his own firm. It is true that even in those days some objected because the ultimate result of such services to Germany must be her reappearance as Great Britain’s most formidable competitor in world markets; but that is a dilemma which the cited injunction disregards.
But it was rarely a civilian official caught the eye in Berlin. The city belonged to the armed forces. The blockade was a state of war without the horror of death and wounds, and so the air was brilliant, for war is in fact an exhilarating sport, and it was sweetened by the comradeship which springs up among those living under a threat. For of course there was an overhanging threat, the worst of threats. There was also a great demonstration of panache, particularly among the Air Forces. They were superb and they knew it; there had in cold fact never been any feat like the airlift since the world began. On these preservers the Berliners fondly directed a gaze which often seemed so fond as to be frivolous. They talked of the generals as if they were film stars, praising their handsomeness, their look of health, their disciplined bearing, their good manners, the neatness of their uniforms. But that showed only that people in dread of extinction recognize the qualities which make for survival. It is written in the Book of Judges that the Lord bade Gideon send his ten thousand men down to the fountain of Harad, and dismiss to their homes all those that knelt down on the shore and bent their mouths to the water, and to keep with him all those who lapped the water from their hands, for with such men he could conquer the hosts of Midian; and though he found but three hundred of such men among ten thousand, they brought him victory. The Berliners were seeking for like evidence of deliberation and delicacy.
The lot of the generals was often such that it was hard for them to present the imperturbability proper to idols. The American commandant of the city was one General Howley, an advertising man from Philadelphia, a robust character given to horseback-riding, with a fine record in show jumping. His quality can be deduced from a passage in the reports of the Kommandatura proceedings for July 1, 1948. Colonel Kalinin, the Soviet Chief of Staff, told the representatives of the Allies that the Soviet Union would take no further part in the meetings, at any level, of the Kommandatura. He gave two reasons, one of which was the Western Allies’ introduction into Berlin of the new Western currency, and the other was the behaviour of General Howley at the previous meeting. This was really startling. The British authorities coldly stated that they could not accept a verbal announcement by a Soviet staff officer as terminating the quadripartite government of Berlin. Search in the Minutes shows what it was that Colonel Howley had done to cause a Soviet staff officer to blaspheme against the name of Potsdam. It appeared that after the Russians had dragged out a discussion on administrative details for some hours, as was their wont, General Howley had risen and stated that his deputy would take over, as he was leaving because he was tired. At that the whole Soviet delegation had rushed out of the hall in a rage, and that was natural enough. One had only to look at General Howley to see that he had never felt tired in his life. The Russians had every reason to resent an attempt to make them believe any statement so palpably false.
One morning this hearty soul sat in his office and described to some visitors how, a few days before, he had settled the railway strike. This was indeed a feather in his cap. It could have been no easy triumph. Once the strike was ended the Russians would have no excuse for stopping the trains on the line between Western Germany and Berlin, so the blockade would be broken; and the settlement had involved negotiations on the delicate matter of currency. The Soviet Union had refused to cooperate with the Allies in the new currency reform, because they liked having a depreciated mark in their own Zone and in their Berlin Sector, as it meant a cheap market where they could buy for Russia. They were also aggrieved because the currency reform had dismantled a financial structure from which they derived extraordinary benefits, owing to certain fantastic arrangements made by the United States Treasury at the end of the war. They were now paying all the Berliners who worked in their sector in their depreciated mark, which was worth something like a quarter of the new reformed mark. But many of these workers lived in the Allies’ Sector and had to pay out Western marks for their rent and all goods except those they could carry home from the Soviet Sector. This cut down their real wages to something between a quarter and three-quarters of their nominal wages. This was the real reason why the railway workers struck, though rebellion was manifestly dangerous, since over three thousand Berliners were known to have been kidnapped by the Russians. They had even surged into the Tempelhof Station and attacked General Kvashnin, the transport chief, which made the Soviet authorities very angry indeed.
But General Howley, who was the kind of man who greets the seen with a cheer, whatever it may be, had advanced on this tangled situation and set it to rights. After hours of negotiation with General Kvashnin he had got him to accept the compromise plan which gave the railway workers sixty per cent of their wages in Western currency and promised them freedom from victimization. The Allies had put these terms to the strikers, making no secret of their eagerness that they should accept the terms and go back to work and end the blockade, and there was to be a ballot the next day. General Howley told us comfortably that he knew how the railway workers would be voting, and yawned. He had risen early for a ride and was now pleasantly relaxed, and he began to talk of horses, and how he had competed against the Russians in jumping events, and what decent fellows they were when they got a chance to be themselves and were not jerking about at the end of a string that stretched to Moscow. The telephone buzzed, and he put the receiver to his ear, and it was proved that when people are astonished they really do open their mouths and forget to shut them. “Why, no,” he presently told the man on the line, “I don’t have any confirmation in writing. I guess I just accepted his word as an officer.” The Soviet-licensed news agency had issued a denial that there had been any negotiations of an official character and that the Soviet Military Government had made any specific promises of the sort on which General Howley had based his appeal to the railway strikers to return to work. Already the railway union was sending out a whip to instruct their members to vote for a continuance of the strike.
A man who has been the victim of such a trick feels that he looks a fool, and General Howley obviously felt just that. But he need have nourished no such fear. All his visitors thought he took the blow stoutly, and the two Britons among them were enthralled at seeing a moment of historic drama, which they had seen performed once before, now re-enacted by a different player. On March 17, 1938, they had turned on the radio and heard Neville Chamberlain shrilling and choking with anger because he had had news that Hitler had broken faith with him and sent his troops into Czechoslovakia. The Chamberlains were typical of the industrial bourgeoisie that had risen to political power during the nineteenth century, and he had brought to the office of Prime Minister the outlook of a respectable businessman accustomed to deal with businessmen of the same order. When a managing director finds that his firm is being inconvenienced by the operations of another firm, he and his colleagues will think it natural for him to meet his opposite number in the other firm and work out a compro
mise with him, giving way on some points and claiming concessions of at least equal value. If both firms are of good standing there is no reason to fear that the bargain will not be kept, for both have every reason to wish that their reputations should shine unblemished before their customers, their suppliers, and their banks, and indeed the whole community, since the credit system makes it advisable to leave a favourable impression on as many people as possible. So there was not a thing to worry about after such a meeting, except that one would not like to forget to send a box of cigars or a case of sherry as a Christmas gift. The Nazi rape of Czechoslovakia horrified Neville Chamberlain, not because he felt any tenderness towards the Czechs, whose representatives he continued to treat with the same coldness and discourtesy he had always shown them, but because he found that the world had changed around him, and he had been doing business with people who did not keep their word, because they did not mind whether they were thought honourable or not, and could not be made to suffer for it, since they were living outside the credit system. He raged at the destruction of his world.
So too did this younger man in his Berlin office. It must be granted that he was an advertising man, and copywriting is often metaphysical; it celebrates not the imperfect article that actually exists and is being vended, but the universalium ante rem, the article as it was in the mind of God before it existed. But an advertising firm of repute must keep faith with its clients, its staff, its stockholders, its bank. The general looked like a bewildered boy as it dawned on him that there were men he knew, men against whom he competed in the show ring, men who were his opposite numbers in the highest ranks of an imposing military hierarchy organized to meet a vital historic moment, who did not keep faith. It also was breaking on him, as it had broken on Neville Chamberlain, that the ground was not solid beneath his feet, that it is impossible for society to survive if the mass of men cannot be trusted to abide by their word. He must have known this with his mind for quite some time, but as he sat there, grasping the telephone and taking in its odious message, he was realizing it with his veins and his pulse and his sweat glands.
A Train of Powder Page 17