by Allan Massie
‘I suppose I heard of Hitler, darling, but I don’t recall doing so,’ Polly once sighed.
Was she pulling my leg, and the legs of those assembled on her South African terrace, or could she have been speaking the truth? She may well have been, for Polly was the most apolitical of women.
Surely, Lucien was much better informed.
Well, of course he was. Nevertheless he wrote a long memorandum – I’m sending you a copy, but won’t trouble to reproduce it here, because its banality is so easy to summarise – in which he analysed the threat to Germany’s parliamentary democracy solely in terms of the Communists, and concluded that the French Government should do everything in its power to ease matters for Bruening and the Conservatives. He insisted that they must be involved in the work of the League, and even speculated on whether it might be desirable to restore German sovereignty over the Rhineland. He didn’t mention the Nazis. They were a mere temporary phenomenon of no historical significance. And Lucien wasn’t a fool.
History is written from then to now, but understood back to front.
The Berlin in which Lucien and Polly lived was a dull, correct place. They knew nobody except other diplomats and a few German aristocratic families. Some of these had lost their estates in old Prussia or the Mark of Brandenburg or Poland as a result of the frontier changes which had followed the war; they talked of themselves as exiles. Both Lucien and Polly found this appealing.
For a year or eighteen months their isolation from any lively or interesting company didn’t distress them. They were wrapped up in each other. Their conversation was full of the private jokes of happy couples, and they would cut across a dinner table with a raised eyebrow or half-smile. Polly wrote letters to her parents which were rare and scrappy because she was too happy to be able to feel homesick for England. Lucien naturally wrote far more frequently to his mother, but his letters were dull and dutiful things. For both of them family had become for the moment concentrated in their four-roomed apartment.
Two or three times in the winter they were invited by their Prussian friends to shooting-parties. Standing in a butt, his face frozen by the grey wind which cut across the marshy wastelands from the Russian steppes, Lucien sniffed the immensity of Europe, the cruelty of history, the fragility of all he valued. He watched the sullen peasants who acted as beaters, heavy, clownish and indifferent in their leather breeches; he found something ‘Slav, barbaric, utterly miserable’ in those faces with their high cheekbones and full inexpressive eyes. When in the evening his hosts talked of the lost mission of civilisation which had been Germany’s historic role in the east, he understood the sense of deprivation which they experienced. Ancestors, they assured him, had belonged to the Teutonic Order of Knights; he could picture them in black armour setting their faces against that east wind, venturing into a land of dry magic, where no values of Christian man were known. The thought made him shudder. He, who had been accustomed to think of Germany itself as something barbaric, who was conscious of everything that was Roman in Europe to which Germany had stood opposed, now felt that Rome was like a stone hurled into a deep black pond, which sent ripples, diminishing in size, from the spot where it had landed. He had believed that Germany was beyond the ripple; he now saw that he was wrong. The Germans were not only the remotest of ripples themselves, but the guardians of all that that rippling water signified. He listened in the evenings to Brahms on his wind-up gramophone; there was forest-music there, but beneath its pagan mystery throbbed the affirmative note of Rome.
Often, in the evenings, after the day’s sport had been discussed, the talk turned to these matters. Lucien was made aware of how these Germans lived as exiles in their own land, bewailing their lost estates and, perhaps even more powerfully, the lost mission of Germanitum. He found himself in sympathy with them; they echoed the tunes that Maurras piped over the marshy delta of the Rhone. When one of them said, ‘The historic antipathy of France and Germany has been worse than a blunder, it has been a crime against the fundamental integrity of Europe,’ the words conveyed to him the idea of a mission that went beyond the narrow nationalism in which he had been reared. He all at once saw that France’s old alliance with Russia had been a betrayal of her true self. ‘In order to fatten a few thousand greedy bond-holders, we were ready to squander a thousand years of Europe,’ he wrote in his diary.
Disinterested idealism was still possible then. There was no fear of a new war. Certainly the world was a mess, for the economy of the Western world had plunged out of control into a black and incomprehensible whirlpool. Yet it seemed that men of goodwill could shake the bag and reassemble the pieces coherently. Lucien believed this, though below the conscious level of his mind he still heard the barbaric drumming of Spengler threatening doom. Yet, despite the pervasive sadness of these country visits, of which the abiding image remained for him a flight of duck, necks outstretched, lost in the thin grey of evening, he experienced a new optimism and sense of purpose. It was partly because he had found a friend.
This was Rupprecht von Hülenberg. (Does that name ring a bell, Hugh? It should, you know. I shall call him Rupert because that is how Polly and Lucien came to speak of him.) He was hardly more than a boy, in his early twenties, too young of course for the war, though – in his own words – ‘not without its souvenirs’.
‘We had to fly before the Russians. In carts. Then, when we recovered our estates in ’17, it was the peasants. Filthy beasts, they raped my sister, you know, and we only just escaped with our lives.’
He told them this in a flat matter-of-fact voice, which horrified Polly. She didn’t know what to make of Rupert. She had been quite certain at first. He was beautiful, blond, of middle height, quite sturdy, with a straight nose and curving lips; she fell in love with him. But his seriousness repelled her. She didn’t understand a boy who would rather, it seemed, talk politics and philosophy with Lucien than love and gossip with her. She told Lucien she was sure he was a pansy; ‘like so many of these Germans’.
‘Not at all,’ Lucien said, ‘that’s ridiculous. He is just a serious young man. And a very intelligent one.’
For a couple of months she sulked, then discovered, when they were back in Berlin, that he had taken to calling at a time when he must know Lucien would be at the office.
‘Why do you come here?’ she said.
‘Because I feel comfortable. You have no idea how uncomfortable I feel most of the time. I live with my mother, you know. She has never recovered from our experiences during the war, and I am all she has. It is not very exhilarating.’
‘You never seem very exhilarated here. You don’t even laugh at my jokes.’
‘Well, no. You see, I am not very good at understanding jokes. I am even stupid when it is a question of jokes, I am afraid. I only see that you have made a joke when the moment for laughter has passed. Nevertheless, Polly, I really do like your jokes. They are one of the things I like most and which bring me here. There you have your answer. I come on account of your jokes which I do not understand.’
She looked at him carefully to see whether he was in fact laughing at her. But she saw a perfectly blank face, with the deep blue eyes steady and serious.
‘You like jokes which you don’t understand?’
‘Yes, you see, I like the idea of jokes.’
‘You are an ass.’
He touched his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ she asked. ‘I always have this idea that you’re laughing at me.’
‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘Do you like flowers?’
‘Everybody does.’
‘Not everybody, I think. My poor mother, flowers mean nothing to her. But next time I will bring you flowers.’
He did so, and soon after that Rupert and Polly became lovers. It was her first infidelity, and it amazed and disconcerted her; she had not been aware of anything lacking in her marriage, and now all at once she found herself in bed with this blond young German, whom she
was not even sure she liked. And Rupert himself was, I think, also taken aback by the affair. He liked Lucien, admired him and deferred to his intellect; and yet he couldn’t keep his hands off his wife. He indulged himself in outbursts of self-recrimination, which soon bored Polly. She has always been the least introspective of people, and she couldn’t understand her lover’s delight in declaring that he was ‘utterly contemptible’, or his moaning that he had ‘lost his honour’ and that the ‘only thing left to him was to blow his brains out or set off for China’. It seemed all the stranger when the next minute he was urging her back to bed. Yet for all her irritation, she couldn’t help adoring him; his photograph was to reappear on her dressing table during the war. I grew familiar with it then; he had rather high cheekbones – perhaps there was Slav blood in him as in so many Prussian aristocrats. (Didn’t Bismarck always say he himself was a Wend, not a Prussian; but what exactly is a Wend?)
In the end nothing would serve but that Rupert must confess to Lucien. This disgusted Polly, who believed that the decent thing – if you were engaged in adultery – was to keep the betrayed husband in the dark. But Rupert insisted on ‘total honesty’. He took Lucien out to dinner and Lucien talked so determinedly about Spengler and his debt to Hegel (neither of whom Rupert had then read) that Rupert couldn’t broach the matter. He therefore suggested they move on to a casino, where, over indifferent champagne, he explained that he was in love with his friend’s wife.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I must get out. Perhaps I will go to China. There are openings for German officers there.’
‘But you are not an officer,’ Lucien said. ‘You have never been a soldier.’
‘No,’ Rupert said, ‘that’s true. But the Army is in my blood. In China I could be an officer. It is a wonderful country, a mysterious one, and there is no future for me in Germany, where my own personal disgrace now mirrors that of my family. But in China I might perhaps fulfil myself.’
‘I see no reason for you to go there. You are exaggerating the gravity of things. What has happened has happened to others before us. It is unfortunate, but in another sense, well, Rupert, it binds us together. We both love Polly, and you have proved that you are honourable by confessing to me what you have done.’
Was it Lucien’s vanity that caused him to speak in this way?
‘But I don’t only love her. I have slept with her.’
‘I don’t regard my wife as my possession,’ Lucien said. ‘The time for that has passed. Of course I am sad that she does not love me exclusively, but I do not believe she loves me less because she also loves you. And in a curious way my friendship for you is strengthened by your love for Polly. I feel it is somehow symbolic.’
To a German of Rupert’s generation, the word ‘symbolic’ was decisive. At any rate he now called for another bottle of champagne and lifted his glass.
‘I shall never forget this, Lucien. This nobility of soul. And I accept the symbol. The three of us, you, Polly and myself, represent the three great powers of Europe, the three cultures of Europe. Let us drink to the idea of Europe as expressed by our love for each other, and to you, Lucien, I protest my undying friendship. Let us drink to – what is your phrase – “to the fundamental integrity of Europe”, that’s it.’
‘The fundamental integrity of Europe.’
Lucien, who normally drank little, threw back his head and quaffed his glass. One thing led to another. The fundamental integrity of Europe was subjected to full baptismal treatment, drenched in the Jordan. Soon people at other tables were drawn into the celebration. As they staggered, arm in arm, into the bald streets of the sunless dawn, Lucien assured Rupert that they were now joined in an immortal brotherhood.
‘Like the Teutonic Order of Knights,’ Rupert said.
‘Or the Knights of St John.’
‘Or the Templars.’
They woke Polly up to tell her the good news. She was not pleased.
‘When chaps go out to fight over you and come home rollicking drunk having had a jolly whale of a time, a girl begins to feel a bit on the outside looking in. Still, one thing, it ended my little romp with Rup, and do you know, I was so jealous of him that I got to work on Lucien and we started you off. So something good came of the whole nonsense.’
‘And did Rupert go to China?’
‘No, of course he didn’t, it wasn’t like the pictures.’
CHAPTER NINE
Document 6:
Memorandum note by Lucien de Balafré
I AM NOT ashamed now to write that I made many good friends in my time in Berlin. Those were years of hope when it seemed that we could build a better Europe without war. Neither I nor any of my friends foresaw that the barbaric savagery of the Nazi movement would introduce an imponderable X into the equation; though it has become an X whose riddle we have to solve, the consequences of which we must elucidate. In those days it was already clear to me that the Treaty of Versailles had been, as Talleyrand said of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, ‘worse than a crime, a mistake’. It had destroyed the stability of central Europe, or rather any chance that the stability might be restored; it had inflicted injustice on many, especially Germans, even while it aspired to eliminate injustice; and, in consequence, it had bred up a generation of fanatics whose one thought was revenge. Such were the consequences of the myopia of Clemenceau and Lloyd George; such was the bitter fruit of rational liberal statesmanship! As the decade of the 1930s appeared to be stumbling into the shadows of night, walking with the carelessness of a doomed man towards the very jaws of Hell where Mars lurked, so I grappled with the terrible dichotomy created when Versailles spawned Hitler, as, in Milton’s epic, sin gives birth to death. To be brief, this consisted in the contrast between the justice of Hitler’s demands and the injustice of Hitlerism. We were being compelled, step by step, to do the right thing for the wrong reason, the wrong cause and the wrong man.
There was such hope and ardour hidden in Germany then. My friend Rupert von Hülenberg may be taken as an example of all that seemed to warrant optimism there. A young man of rare capacity and generosity of spirit, hardly impaired by the mis-fortunes to which his family had been subjected or the interruptions which his education had suffered, he was firmly opposed to the extremities of the Right and Left, firm for the enduring traditions of Germany. That said, the purity of his spirit was displayed by his refusal to succumb to false comforts, assurances that tried to conceal the nullity of their message by the stridency with which they were uttered. He was one of those who clung, while all around him fell apart, to the central conviction that truth could be identified and maintained.
Note (scribbled by my father on the back of this manuscript sheet): I write this, and it is true, it is all true, but it is also the sort of truth which one utters in public or might publish in a formal autobiography.
Or obituary notice?
And the time, I fear, may be close when I do indeed feel the necessity to write Rupert’s obituary.
If indeed I dare then to write anything, which, certainly, I would find no means of ever publishing.
Consider too: a conversation I had with Drieu in – May ’37? – about Rupert as an example of the self-hatred manifested by so many young Germans. ‘A poisoned legacy of Romanticism,’ Drieu remarked.
Yet, when I write of self-hatred in connection with Rupert, what exactly do I mean? That he had a sense of what must be done, could see no way of achieving it, and shrank from the attempt, hating himself for his fear. And his courage, which I don’t doubt, has always nevertheless had its roots in terror.
‘When I look in the mirror at night,’ he once said to me, ‘or in my dreams, I see a stormtrooper.’
He is so nearly everything which he fears and detests.
Five years after their affair, Polly said to me: ‘You think the sun shines out of Rupert’s backside. You don’t see how ordinary he is.’
What she didn’t realise is that it was his ordinariness I loved: the fact that he wasn�
��t really clever, that he was so easily perplexed; that his stocky confidence was assumed, that he swaggered in order to disguise what he knew of himself.
Who said: ‘The relation between France and Germany is sadomasochistic. France is the woman who submits’?
But with Rupert, wasn’t I the sadist? Didn’t I insist, after he had confessed his adultery with Polly, that he remain our friend, on spaniel terms, not only because I could not then contemplate not seeing him, but, far more significantly, because I knew that he could no longer make love to Polly, even while he longed to do so? I used to watch his eyes following her round the room.
I have had mistresses. After Etienne was born, when Polly began to tromper me again and again, I had mistresses: clever girls who wanted to write poetry and some who actually wrote essays. Polly laughed at them, but it reached the point when she could not bear to see me with Rupert, whom I have never so much as touched since that evening when we staggered arm in arm back from the casino where he confessed his adultery to me. That was the only night in my life on which I have been intoxicated.