The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  Edward Cornelian, Coats’ reader, had persuaded Coats to pay an advance for the book which, to be earned, must sell fourteen thousand copies. Chapter by chapter since the late winter had been sent off without the author reading, let alone revising, what he had written. It was being set up, not in galley, but in page proof, without the manuscript having been read in the publisher’s office in Bloomsbury. Each chapter, as received, had gone direct to the printer to be set up in page-proof to save time. This meant that no additions or alterations except literals could be made, otherwise the pagination would be upset.

  Daily he sat by the little pine tree, while the sun moved from the constellation of Leo into Virgo, and towards the end of the summer he began to feel that if the trout did not die, he would. The ending was accelerated; suddenly, it seemed, the story was finished; he sat at the green baize table, bewildered and vacant, while the cock partridge and his hen moved through the grasses near him with their growing covey, without fear as each bird moved tortoise-like through the tall and leaning grasses, plucking seeds while talking to one another.

  The sun moved into the western hemisphere. Shadows lengthened. At last it was done. He unstiffened and got up, to shut the typewriter in its case, to gather the last sheets and clip them together, address the envelope to the printers: a free man now that the blind trout was dead, and all that remained was to post the envelope. He felt like crying, but checked hysteria, and lay in the grass, tears coming to his eyes despite all.

  *

  When he wrote to Piers in Germany that he didn’t know what to do now that the job was done, Piers replied with an invitation to visit him in Berlin, and later to attend the Nürnberg Rally.

  Chapter 8

  HAKENKREUZE

  The weather was calm and sunny. He spent the first hour of the short voyage from Southampton to Bremen trying to sleep on deck. On the boat was an Englishman who declared that the Jewish-controlled financial system was ruining Britain, and that he had been invited as the guest of the Führer to Nürnberg. When this man went below to get some pamphlets he had had printed, Phillip slipped away to his cabin, for the tense manner of the propagandist had given him a qualm of sea-sickness. On his bunk, all was well.

  From Bremerhaven to Berlin by train, staring at herd after herd of pied Friesian cows on dark green marshes.

  The hotel, where he arrived 4 p.m., Berlin time, was occupied by transient English film actors and actresses. There he waited until Piers arrived from the studio at 8 p.m. They went out to drink and eat in a large restaurant called Kempinski’s, resembling the Trocadero in London. Phillip was surprised to see so many prosperous-looking Jews eating there. Piers said, “It’s owned by Jews.” This surprised Phillip, who, while knowing what he considered to be the distortional magnification of the newspapers, nevertheless had been affected by the reiteration of hostile criticism of the Nazis. He had thought vaguely of all Jews hiding in cellars, or being held in concentration camps.

  Next morning he went to buy a shirt at a department store owned by Jews and found it thronged. Occasionally it was picketed, said Piers; Germans were asked why they bought from aliens and not from German tradesmen. Many other Jewish shops were open, it appeared. There were no beggars on the streets. There was work for all who applied for it. Nine million unemployed had been found work.

  Next day, having been lent Piers’ 1½-litre Aston-Martin, Phillip drove to the studios, about ten miles from the city, in a suburb among pine trees. He was anxious about making a possible traffic mistake, but soon felt he might be in London, so mild-mannered and easy was the policeman who came up to direct him.

  “When Hitler came to power he ordered, against advice,” said Piers, “that rubber truncheons be no longer carried by the Polizei.”

  The drive to Neubabelsberg was along the Avus, a racing motor track with two steeply-banked hairpin bends at each end. Phillip went down it every afternoon. His mornings were spent wandering about Berlin. Everywhere he saw faces which looked to be breathing extra oxygen: people free from mental fear. What a difference from the strained faces in certain parts of London! Would there be another war, he asked again and again, and got the same reply, No: Germany was now strong, and would create her own destiny: no more crowd-hysteria or mass-panic. No more political parties were fighting for power—there had been forty-eight such parties between 1918 and 1933, said the young Party-member who spoke English. He had appeared one morning at the hotel to take Phillip around the city. Proudly this young man wore the small gold and red badge of the 1923 Party-member. He had been a boy during the 1914–18 war, he explained.

  “You are an ex-service man. Good! You, like our Führer, are a phoenix from the flame and steel of those days!” He spoke in clipped, sharp tones, obviously copied from Hitler in his speeches, which Phillip had heard (but not understood until he read them in translation) over his wireless set in England. “I am honoured to meet a front-line soldier, like the Führer!”

  One morning Phillip invited Martin to lunch, and took him to Kempinski’s. While the two were sitting at a table Phillip noticed that his guest was looking uneasy. Martin’s good manners as a guest had prevented him from telling his host that to be seen in a Jewish restaurant might mean expulsion from the party: a host, moreover, to whom he had had the honour of handing an Invitation from Der Führer to the Reichsparteitag at Nürnberg with accommodation in the Diplomats’ Train only that morning, this invitation having come from Dr. Goebbels himself at the Propaganda Ministerium.

  Immediately he knew of Martin’s dilemma Phillip left the restaurant and the two men went to a smaller place in one of the side streets.

  Martin, he perceived, when he came to know him better, had two distinct personalities. One was the grown-up small boy of the war period; the other animated by his built-up National Socialist will. This first appeared in the small restaurant when Martin’s sharp eye saw, on the bill of fare, that pork was ten pfennigs above the controlled price. His face became stern, almost tense; he clenched his fist; his eyes set hard; his voice, though subdued, took on a deeper, rasping quality as he said, “I shall write to the Party about this man. This is a working man’s place, a poor man’s restaurant. It is wrong!”

  Phillip said, “Why not tell the proprietor about it now? It will save trouble.”

  “We must not be personal in the Party, Phillip. It is a matter for the Party to see to.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are right, Martin.”

  He wondered if most of the persecution stories in the British press were based on isolated incidents, groups or individuals taking authority into their own hands. Did Martin think this was the reason for the discipline of reporting to the Party?

  “Certainly, my friend. Some time ago a group of the Sturm Arbeitlung, what you call Brown Shirts, put on uniforms, which by then was forbidden, for Der Führer was then Reichschancellor, and getting into a lorry they went to a Jewish café on the Kurfürstendamm near where you are staying and beat up some old men who were Jews. The police looked on while this happened, for they were not to know it was not authorised. It was not the true Nationalsozialistischen spirit, and they were expelled from the Party and punished.”

  “I remember reading about it. But our papers didn’t say it was a private and illegal raid. By the way, what happened in the nineteen thirty-four purge?”

  “Roehm had his own private concentration camps in those days, and he stole a lot of money, what you call a private fortune, from the Winterhilfe, the Winter Relief street-collection funds. They found out about this after he was shot.”

  “Why was he shot, Martin?”

  The young S.S. man spoke in a hard, tense Hitler-like voice, the change-over was startling, “Roehm was a traitor to Germany!”

  “Please, Martin, you are not addressing a public meeting.”

  “I am sorry.” The voice was quiet. “Hitler was in tears during the shooting of many who were in Roehm’s plot to embody his S.A. into the Reichswehr. Roehm was an old comrade you see, and
Hitler could not understand his treachery. The plot was to capture Hitler and take him away and gradually what you call in the cinema fade-out Hitler as mortally sick, a stroke, a breakdown of nerves. For days after the purge Hitler kept himself alone, brooding on this horrible thing that had been planned. You see, if the plot had not been stopped in time, Germany would have had civil war and would have collapsed into chaos again. But the foreign press, much of it controlled by Jewish money-power, declared that Hitler had faked the plot, to get rid of Roehm, who was a homosexual, and self-indulgent with younger members of the Party. He was found in bed with one when he was surprised late at night. Hitler gave him a pistol to shoot himself with, but Roehm did not think he could really mean it, and so was later shot as a traitor to the Third Reich.”

  “I had a cousin who had a great admiration for Hitler,” said Phillip conversationally, to keep the other relaxed. “He was here just after the war. He saw Hitler as someone who could save Germany, and the world. Hitler, he told me, had perceived the root-causes of war in the unfulfilled human ego, and was striving to alter this by creating a new, truly human world. I wrote some novels about my cousin, calling him Donkin. Donkin embodied the view of the frontline soldier, a point of view that only the rankers and junior infantry officers would understand, but not the civilians at home who had not known what it was to live and die on the Western Front. Before he saw Hitler, my cousin Willie thought there was only hope in Lenin’s philosophy. Life was based on a tangled-up frustrated human jungle before the war. I suppose Hitler, to my cousin, was one who would, as it were, replace the jungle by afforestation, with individual responsibility and rectitude.”

  “That is well put, my friend! That is our Führer, who is a phoenix from the chaos of the battlefields, a messiah! ‘In the beginning was the Word!’”

  “But Martin, and please don’t take offence, I must admit I saw, in my cousin, a nervous strain, almost a fanaticism, which alarmed me, although I understood how it had come about. For it was the attitude of antagonism at home that I dreaded, Martin. It was the attitude of the Old Men, who put Money before human living, and used their newspapers to create fear and hate in the man in the street. I felt that myself, long before I had ever heard of Adolf Hitler.”

  “My friend!” cried Martin, giving Phillip’s hand a painful clasp, “You are a true friend of Germany! There will never be another war! Hitler has said, ‘Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can hope for nothing but chaos!’ But we in Germany live in the belief, not in another war, but in the renaissance of the West for a thousand years of peace in which together the nations of Europe shall build the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen. Heil Hitler!”

  *

  Piers left the small hotel in the Soho-Oxford-Street of Berlin early every morning in the studio bus, leaving his Aston for Phillip to drive where he would. Phillip usually went down the Avus to Neubabelsberg in the late afternoon. The UFA studios worked a twelve-hour day. Of the trilingual experiment plays, Lilian Harvey was the star, making the picture first in German, then in French, and last in English. She was a small thin girl, said to be a Cockney, with a beautiful face and dark violet eyes. At first it was amusing to watch the various versions, the subtle changes of the conventional theatre-idioms of the three countries; but it was the sameness of each studio day, the waiting or rather hanging-about, at a dead-level of endurance and sameness, borne patiently by the stars, that impressed Phillip. At the same time, there was an easy, quiet, and friendly feeling in the studio which, said Piers, had replaced the tensions under former Jewish producers, who had had to think in terms of schedules wholly based on money. Under Hitler there were subsidies, which made all the difference. Even so, as in writing, the whole of one’s life had to be given to the work. The dedicated star must feel empty, despoiled in her own life, for all her vital sweetness was used up in an unnatural medium.

  *

  The three friends, two English and one German, left Berlin very early one Saturday morning to drive in the Aston-Martin to Nürnberg. Once again down the concrete track of the Avus, with its twin roads divided by a strip of grass. They rushed into the faint mists of sunrise, smoothly at eighty miles an hour by the clock. They broke their fast at Leipzig, and then were driving into the direct rays of the rising sun. It was thrilling to Phillip to pass infantrymen in feldgrau on the march—long boots and limber wheels slightly dusty, each soldier wearing a flower in helmet or tunic. The flowers of the forest … for a moment he was back in the Great War, darkly wondering about the future. He remembered poignantly the march of the newly-mobilised London Highlanders through Surrey, long ago and ‘sunk in the abysm of seas’, that sweltering August month which was the end of the old world of golden sun and everlasting peace, as it had seemed then. That war existed in a lost continent of time: the gifts of apples and flowers from cottages, women in sun-bonnets and print dresses; grit on lips, boots, puttees, sweat of burning faces, damp tunics bedewed and shoulders aching with unaccustomed pack and rifle and seventy rounds of ball ammunition in khaki-web pouches under the ancient summer sun, so unreal, and always a little beyond a horizon of shadow-fear, of battle, of life lost for ever and for ever.

  The small green sports-car stopped to let the soldiers pass, with their open faces and clear eyes, the ease of their long loping stride. Then on again, Martin in white helmet and black goggles leaning forward to tap Phillip on the shoulder and say, again and again, “We are to Nürnberg, yes?” his face ecstatic like a child’s.

  They passed over a level-crossing with its long barrier pole upright and its skull and cross-bones of warning below the picture of a child’s puffer-train. They stopped again to look at a landscape of new peasant-cottages, white and pink, spaced regularly and built a quarter of a mile away from the main road. Each, said Martin proudly, had its four hundred square metres of land.

  “They are for workmen, from the cities. There is an adviser for garden cultivation. Each man is encouraged to make and cultivate his garden to his own ideas. Our Führer does not want us to be like bees or ants, you see. Each man must be a leader to himself. The Party will always remain, but when all our natural ideas are learned, the direct control will wither away.”

  They passed a troop of boys in shorts, marching along under a taller boy. “Hitler Youth, see for yourself how open are their faces, my friends!” They certainly looked happy, and smiled to see the little Union Jack pennant above the radiator cap.

  Southwards under the risen sun of the afternoon, the small low car cornering fast. And then, abruptly, they passed an inn with two low white racing cars drawn up, mechanics knocking on wheels as at a race-pit. They stopped, examined, admired. They were Auto-Unions, just back from the Dolomite races. With a wave of hands they went on, and were cruising along a straight bit of road about seventy-five m.p.h. a minute later, when Phillip thought the Anzani engine had blown up, or the chassis had fractured: such a clattering, iron-vibrating noise. He had his Rolleiflex camera open and held by the strap round his neck at the time, with 1/300 sec. speed, ready to take a photograph of the rushing road. At the noise he looked up: a white flash past, the clattering of an open exhaust with it. Then von Stuck in his Auto-Union was a quarter of a mile in front. Phillip had clicked the shutter involuntarily, and now cranked up another square of film: too late, the racing shell was gone, showing the Englanders where their Aston-Martin got off.

  “Those Autos can do two hundred m.p.h.,” remarked Piers.

  Somewhere along the way they turned down a lane and arrived at the house of Martin’s mother. It was a ‘very German’ house and lunch, said Piers later to Phillip. Martin’s mother seemed to Phillip to be hospitable like the Americans, but somehow with deeper feelings: roots in the soil. The Rhine wine certainly added to the feeling of pleasure within the house. Martin was proud of his English friends; Phillip felt proud of being English, and also of having had a German grandmother.

  Martin told Phillip that many young men had been disowned by their parents f
or joining Hitler’s party during the ten years’ fight for power. Hitler had been a comic paper joke, a monster, madman, degenerate to the middle class (it was, Piers had told Phillip, a lower-middle-class revolution). Everything to discredit Hitler had been tried by the press, such as checking up on every known lodging since 1919, to find out if he were a pederast. When nothing was discovered, Hitler became a sexless pervert, who got his orgiastic effects on crowds. Women at the climax of his speeches sometimes murmured as though in the transports of love.

  Leaving behind the villa they drove on southwards, turning off the route to cross into Bohemia, for Piers technically to renew his permit. At the frontier the car was examined. Martin had to stay behind, having no passport into what was now Czecho-Slovakia, so he took charge of their German money. No cash or securities were allowed out of impoverished Germany, with its extremely small gold-reserve in the Reichsbank, the English equivalent of between two and three million pounds. The customs house had a coloured picture of Germany, with her 2,000-mile frontier, with Army and Air Force strengths of her neighbours massed all around her borders. The Czecho-Slovakian aircraft were within 40-minutes bombing of Berlin. German efficiency was revealed in the key to the lavatory: it was firmly secured to a wooden board fourteen inches long and nine inches wide.