A Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

  He said he did not want any breakfast. “You know, Lulu, I feel rather shaken. What Chettwood told me about the tank columns mounted for assault in the west was true. But I tried to believe that it was the same old anti-German propaganda. And now Belgium and Holland will be over-run. Both have been scrupulously neutral. Holland’s coastal waters have not been entered by the British. There’s been no provocation. This is the old Schlieffen Plan, which von Moltke in 1914 quailed from, and so lost the war. Now Hitler is pushing through the Low Countries in order to turn the Maginot Line. He has realised that none of his peace offers will be accepted, that the British Government will never call off the war which it has declared, until either Germany or Britain, or both, are broken and bled white. Oh, why didn’t I fly to Germany last August, to beg him not to march into Poland? I was a coward not to go.”

  Lucy was moved by his sudden despair. “Don’t you worry, Pip. I’ll get you some breakfast.”

  He was saying to himself, I must be only a farmer now. These things are beyond me. The sunshine outside the latticed window seemed to be brassy. He heard the swallows singing as in another world.

  “Could you eat eggs and bacon for your breakfast?” asked Lucy, returning to the parlour. “Don’t worry,” she added, resting her hand a moment on his coat collar. “You did your best, didn’t you?”

  He went to shave, and have a cold tub; and then ate his breakfast slowly, feeling suspended in time. He walked slowly up through the wood to see how the sugar-beet plants were being hoed on the Great Bustard.

  The air was quiet. Practice of anti-aircraft guns in the camp had ceased. Larks were singing in the sky. Across the field came the slight and regular noises of 8-inch hoes striking, pushing, chopping, as the four hoers moved slowly up the parallel lines of faint green. He stood by the hedge, feeling the summer to be unreal all about him. The ryegrass on Steep field below had a silky sheen in the light breeze. He stood still, staring at it; but he was seeing in his mind only the spouting of shells, hearing the metallic stutter of machine guns. This chalky ground, this loam, the same soil as above the Somme—

  He kept away from the hoers, and went on along by the hedge and down under the wood to the gap in the line of wind-blown thorns on the crest dividing Steep and Scalt fields. From the ridge he saw the line of sea and coast for some miles. The barley on the descending slope of the Scalt was poor, dotted with innumerable charlock seedlings. He saw these things but they moved out of the mind’s focus before the rumble and crump of bombs, white inverted poppies drifting down the sky, long columns of tanks on the roads, dipping over the fields, in farmhouses and cottages Dutch and Belgian mothers cowering, their arms around little children.

  Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can hope for nothing but chaos…

  He sat down at the top of the field, just below the shadow line of the pines. Everything so quiet, the very air translucent. Pigeons crooning in the wood, softening the morning. A hare lolloped across the barley. It stopped. Raised itself as it got his scent. The wind was from behind him, from the south, drawing a lofty aerial music through the crests of the pines. He did not move.

  Now the hare was loping on. It stopped again—and fled through the pale green barley upon the grey loam of the Scalt.

  Hitler. The fear he felt at times, fear of defeat, spirit of fear fleeing hare-like through him, this was the impulse that caused him to march.

  With a thousand fears that visions’s face was grained…

  The twitch that was in Hitler’s face, the tic that jerked his body, the look in the frustrated eyes in the Hotel at Godesberg in September 1938: the awful dilemma in the world of the spirit which only genius knew, world of anguish, faith, hope, and clarity. D. H. Lawrence-like screams of frustration. Fearful rages that chilled, petrified the loving beholder.

  A man of genius truly matched in the companionship of mated love was the brightest being of creation, his genius was held in balance. Alone, he overworks, his mind runs upon its own circles, its own horrific convolutions.

  The hare ran round in a half-circle, and sat up again.

  The molecules of a man’s body died on the cross or at the stake in those times before the knowledge of radio-activity; but, howsoever through the amplifiers of the radio a man of genius might project his ideas into flesh a million-fold, many times a million into all the minds and bodies of the youth of a nation, yet of such men, or their disciples, it was written that they would be broken and burned.

  He thought of the photograph he had of Hitler’s mother: one glance at the face, and it was immediately apparent from where that strange, off-set, imagination-living being who was her son had derived his sensibility. But the face of Hitler’s father was entirely the opposite: a heavy male face, with beetling brows and fearsome moustache—it was D. H. Lawrence and the mother-father division over again; but while Lawrence’s father was a simple, free, self-contained creature, Hitler’s had looked to be a hectoring male, probably at sexual odds with his wife—like his own father, feeling himself shut off from the spiritual being of his wife, deriding his young son as ‘your best boy’ in his presence.

  Father had not meant to be over-bearing, but he had been; and the life of Mother and her children had been lived in the shadow of fear, anxiety, and escape by deception. The only defence of the ‘donkey boy’ that had been himself—tears scorned by Father as cowardice—had been subterfuge and lies, lest strokes of the dreaded cane sear the flesh. Father had taunted him for cowardice, called him creeply-crawly, a namby-pamby clinging to his mother’s skirt, ever since he could remember. Poor Father, sexually inhibited, shut-in by his conception of honour, Victorian respectability: Father for ever complaining, complaining, complaining to Mother, to whom his son had gone as the only protector, the ‘donkey boy’ who had loved his mother to excess; even as Father, overset and derided by his father, had loved his mother to excess. He had turned to a young woman in due course, even as he himself had turned to Lucy—for gentle, motherly qualities, which had, naturally, been given to children in the course of nature. So the anodyne was lost and in the wilderness the doppelgänger drove to tasks—such as restoring the family upon its own land again: Uncle Hilary at Fawley trying to prove to his father, or father-pattern-in-the-mind, that he could, and would, restore the past.

  Was that the imaginative basis of the Third Reich? The hare declaring—as Hitler had more than once confessed—that he had never wanted to undertake such a task as the reclaiming of an entire nation: he had wanted to be only an architect in a traditional German town such as Nürnberg, or München—but who else was there to bring a decadent German nation to health again, except himself. Goodbye to water-colours and drawing board, goodbye to bird-watching and nature-loving, both pleasures of idleness, mein lieber Vater: Hare must become a Werewolf until the pastures for future Dürers and Wagners were secured for a thousand years of peace.

  Was it always fatal for a man of genius to become a man of action? Should genius work only in words, colour, sound, stone: never directly upon the souls of men?

  If, through that psyche-distributor, the radio, a prophet of clairvoyance and the gift of tongues spoke with the authentic hopes of his being, of those of his fellow beings, each one of the millions must follow, for each man would then be following the voice of his own soul. There was no strength like that of the soul’s compulsion. The soul knew neither ease, nor apathy, nor the life of the flesh. The flesh was afraid of the soul, which was a light that the flesh would hide under a bushel measure, and so stifle its flame. But self-will was not soul. Self-will of genius self-frustrated would blast first the bushel measure, then the hands and body that placed it over the light.

  The hare was now coming towards him, lolloping up the slope of the Scalt. It ran with the south wind from the ridge drawing across its nostrils. It stopped. Phillip now sat in half shadow. The hare sat in sunlight. It would not see him unless he moved. Fifty yards away it stopped, and sat up again, ears erect, nose twitching. Hare listening, smel
ling. Then it squatted low, and began to nibble green shoots of barley. Phillip felt he ought to go quietly away, not to alarm it, and return later with his .22 Winchester and shoot it from the cover of the wood. If he did not, the hare and perhaps its leverets would destroy many of the plants of sugar-beet on the Bustard.

  Yet watching the hare, he knew how it felt, how it was happy in that sunny, wind-stroked place, feeling the intense joy of living, saddened by no sense of continuity, without regrets, without memory.

  There was no purpose in thinking further of the division in the mind of European man. Like a hunted hare his own mind ran round in circles, often ending where it began. He moved slowly backwards into the wood, and went away, leaving the hare to its peace.

  Chapter 23

  TORTOISE-HEADED FEAR

  Every night Phillip wrote in his diary,

  Saturday, May 11

  Grave news. Holland appears to be scuppered. Making up the accounts, I find that, when all bills are paid, I shall owe the Bank £400.

  Sunday, May 12

  Horatio Bugg went to Steve my young labourer today, seeking information of ‘evidence’ that I am a fifth-columnist. Stories about these probably mythical objects in Belgium and Holland fill the newspapers. Steve said he told Horatio to clear out. I wonder who put Horatio up to it? I heard that last winter patrols went out from the camp to detect possible signalling by myself across the marshes. The order actually came through to one of the Fusilier officers who were my guests at shooting (that very rainy day).

  Monday, May 13

  Liège fell yesterday. German wireless says with the loss of about a dozen men. ‘A new method of attack’. Parachute troops on the forts, dropping explosives down the ventilator shafts and gelignite necklaces around the guns? The German army is through the Albert Line. Feeling very unsettled: that England will be invaded and a battle fought in Surrey, with a result I dare not contemplate. Among my books is a copy of Hindenburg’s March on London, translation of a German bestseller novel published here in England in 1916. It forecast the Russian collapse in 1917, the battle for the Channel Ports in 1918, the crossing, the breakthrough, and the final battle for London on the Hogsback near Guildford. All happened in 1918 as written, except the taking of the Channel Ports and invasion.

  Tuesday, May 14

  Billy and I sowed small seeds on the Hanger today. Owing to my error only 15 lb. per acre were sown instead of 21. Seed-bed dry but good. Barley looks well there, even and regular. The bare-fallow last year has benefited the soil. Barley on Steep bottom looks bad. Against orders, Luke sowed it on the furrow. No seed-bed even. I was sick about it. A ferocious talk in English from Bremen. They are going to shatter us if they can. I have looked out my old uniform.

  The Dutch commander-in-chief has capitulated.

  Wednesday, May 15

  I bought 20 lb. rape, 60 lb. mustard, to sow again on northern four acres of the Steep—the Cold Old Land. We sowed Juliana wheat there last November, after mustard fed to sheep. It is said locally that nothing will ever grow there. Certainly the wheat has failed.

  I enrolled at night in Crabbe anti-parachute corps, mainly old 1914—18 soldiers from the British Legion.

  Thursday, May 16

  Germans say they have broken the Maginot Line. Here at night armed troops are watching all flat fields. Some are in the Great Bustard Wood, I hear.

  Friday, May 17

  Billy and I sowed 20 lb. mixed mustard and rape on the Cold Old Land. I think it is too much. 10 lb. would be enough.

  Grave news. Maginot Line is turned. The French and B.E.F. have been lured into the Low Countries. German radio says four panzer divisionen are through at Sedan. They came through the Ardennes! (Will Hitler use rockets based on the Channel coast?) Looks as though our army in France, and the French Army, will be surrounded a là Poland. I feel numbed and heavy-hearted.

  Two men are pulling weeds and mud from the dykes on Teal Meadow. The Govt. grant will pay half the approved cost.

  Tonight it was still and warm. A full moon rose over the marshes upon a strangely silent village. Dark old pantiles of the cottage roofs glowed with a warm mysterious red. I have noticed this phenomenon once before. A nightingale sang by the well, in the lilac bushes, to the left of my lighthouse window. I remembered these birds on the Somme, and before the Hindenburg Line in 1917.

  Saturday, May 18

  The mangolds on the north end of Pewitts, below the searchlight camp are in a very cobbly seed-bed. Luke neglects to carry out my instructions about making the seed-bed when the land is fit, and NOT leaving it cobbly, to dry out hard and sullen, and then hoping for ‘a little dag o’ rain’ to work it down. No rain came in time and the seed was sown in the poorest of seed-beds.

  Monday, May 20

  France is beaten. It is only a question of a few days now. Looks as though our Expeditionary Force will be decimated.

  Tuesday, May 21

  The rout continues. The French are finished before they started. Was ever a victory so swift and overwhelming?

  Wednesday, May 22

  Germans in Boulogne. Much stuff in papers about fifth column activities. Most of it the old Fleet Street-fake-merchant’s stuff: spies in priest’s clothes or parachuting in Dutch and Belgian uniforms; lights signalled from windows at night—all the old third-rate fiction mentality, with new props. Talk in papers of banning Birkin’s Imperial Socialist Party. I must do something: the war should be stopped. Hitler does not want to destroy Britain, only the international financial interests in Europe. Will Chettwood publish an article in the Crusader?

  May 24

  Dear Chettwood,

  I foresee the possibility of military defeat in France, and then an offer from Hitler to call off the war. Our people will be stunned and in that moment it may be possible to crystallise an idea which may reach them and so save both country and Empire for a future on entirely new lines.

  Will you allow me to write an article and show it to Otterburn, who in the event of our military collapse in France may be able to show a flash of light or clarity to the public (which includes the Government), a way of salvation. If the defeat in France comes with a colossal Tannenberg (and only IF) we shall be leaderless, and only a dominant and clear call may hold the situation. If there is a Tannenburg, then I assume that to fight in England is only prolonging, momentarily, a few days or weeks maybe, our subjugation. If we fight on, it will mean terrible suffering and material destruction of the whole of Europe.

  Lord Otterburn’s long appeal—Empire isolation—WAS the only way to peace. It is a war fundamentally of economic necessity for the Germans. If they invade and shatter this island, it will mean a Twenty Years’ war; but if we realise in time that the haves versus the have-nots war is over when the military situation in France is lost (if it be lost) then we shall have a chance of deciding, swiftly, if we shall survive economically on Otterburn’s vision of Empire isolation.

  Please consider this; look ahead; anticipate its possibility. Do not think I am just a misguided crank; I beg you, if you have ever thought I had once any power to use the gifts in me truly, to trust to this feeling in me. I have never been pro-Hitler in the sense of being anti-British; nor was it mere sentimentalism or pacifism; it was a feeling of urgency, with the power of imagination fortified by Birkin’s clear-thinking.

  Once I wrote in your paper an article which people heeded, called THE VOICES OF THE DEAD; and if you let me write one now, ready for the possible hiatus, I think you could drive it home. You have such a vast public, a great power; let Otterburn trust to his evangelical side, and act with the swiftness of his genius, before it is too late.

  I KNOW there will be a chance to save Britain and the Empire intact, even if the BEF is captured. Hitler does not want to destroy the British Empire.

  The theme of the article will be: Save our people, Save our Empire, Save the German People further losses. The war with Germany should never have been, it was an economic war, and Britain’s destiny is i
n its Empire and not in Europe or European investment to secure export markets …

  It was a long letter. As soon as it was corrected and revised in red ink, with further additions in brown ink—Phillip felt empty. The impulse did not extend to sending the letter. He threw it in a drawer, where lay scores of other unposted letters. Some of these letters, on the occasion of their writing, had been repeated in variation perhaps half a dozen times before the impulse had been abandoned in hopeless vacuity. Some of these multiple letters had been addressed to Lucy, but not shown to her.

  *

  What to do now? Ah, I must go and see Wallington Christie. I must go now. At once. It is a matter of life and death for Europe—the world. And for me, but I do not care for myself, he thought inconsequentially.

  Christie was the editor of The New Horizon, a quarterly with a literary-pacifist policy. Since the outbreak of war Christie had started a community farm near Chelmsford. What was the name of the village? Where are my maps? Oh, these piles of forms, letters, catalogues. No time to find maps. Or wait for Lucy’s sandwiches.

  “I must leave at once. Flag me out, stop any traffic. Arm high, hand firm! Let them know a car is coming out blind, but for you!”

  Away south, speeding over empty roads; signposts torn up, place-names on war memorials daubed thick with paint, or struck off by cold chisels. Windscreen flat. Flying-helmet, goggles, black leather coat. South wind stroking waves on barley behind hedges. Air roaring in empty head-phone flaps. Ha ha, life is stranger than fiction, The Man in Black, German spy-film, Conrad Veight the hero. German eagle on bonnet. Village. Slow down. Constable by elm at cross-ways. Better stop and ask the time. Not the way. War medals on tunic.