The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  Piers drove into the country which had been German before the war. The rule of the road was as in England, on the left. They stopped at a tavern, with a fat, jovial host. The place looked like a film-set with peasants in home-spun clothes. They drank peach brandy, then returned ta the frontier and patient Martin.

  The way, continuing south, lay over roads as good, or as bad, as many British roads, with wrong banking on corners, surface of tar or bitumen on uneven and pot-holed foundation. It was obvious that the country was still very poor. Piers drove as fast as the safety of springs allowed, overtaking all other cars, and being pursued for the last forty miles by a Mercédès-Benz flying hakenkreuz pennants on bonnet and wings. Piers’ Union Jack fluttered persistently; the German pennants were stiff. All motorists seemed to be smiling, this seemed to be the party spirit.

  They stopped at an inn in Bavaria where Hitler sometimes stopped on his journey south. They heard two stories about him—One evening when he entered he invited all within to have a drink with him. Hitler was teetotal: his usual drink was Fachinger or tonic water. One after another the drinkers asked for Fachinger water. At last an old fat beer-drinker cried out, Beer! “Ha,” said Hitler. “At last I meet an honest man.” The other story was his reply to an enquiry about his chances of being shot—“Only from a ricochet from one of your pistols”—indicating his Schutz Staffel guards in black uniforms.

  There seemed, Phillip decided, an almost universal affection and even love for Hitler, at least among those he had met so far during his short and limited visit. True, there was someone at the UFA studios who did not like der Führer. He was an arc-light man, small and wizened, who had insisted on telling him, with offensive gestures of the gutter, the difference between English and German girls. He was politically and mentally opposed to the Government; perhaps his unnatural life behind eye-destroying light helped to add to the effect of an unhappy childhood.

  They went on, and at twilight came near to their destination. Flags and banners, all red with white circles containing black Hakenkreuze stretched from roof to roof of barns, cottages, inns, houses. Phillip knew they could not be far off when the horizon began to glow and dilate as though with gunfire. The illusion of driving up the line was intensified by many shadowy figures against this glow of fireworks. At last they were stopped by S.S. men, helmet’d, booted, holster’d. Delay. Martin announced to one, “Here are guests of der Führer!” At once the invitation cards were scrutinised. The men were alert and quick to wave them on. Fireworks cracked, banged, cast shadows of radiance.

  “There will be a million extra people in Nürnberg for the Rally,” said Martin, as the Aston’s lights suddenly went low.

  “Damn and blast.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My battery’s dud, and I’ve got to be back at the studio first thing on Monday morning. Dynamo not charging.”

  He drove to a garage. Mechanics said it was impossible; it was the Reichsparteitag. Martin argued. No use. Then some Storm-troopers came in. They looked like shop-keepers, or clerks in normal life. They acted immediately. They telephoned headquarters in the Grand Hotel. Outside lines and lines of Mitropa coaches were drawn up. They were filled with military attachés, secretaries, journalists, lecturers, Oxford Groupists, industrial millionaires, and a great number of foreigners like themselves: a million human beings to be housed, fed, transported, and entertained: a place for every one and for each his allotted time: and Piers wanted a battery charged. It took about half a minute for a reply from headquarters. Thither they drove with a guide, amidst coaches, buses, trucks, cars, and innumerable men in uniform. They reported, were known immediately, and directed where to go. Yes, the battery could be recharged. Leaving the Aston in a railway siding they entered a Mitropa sleeping waggon and were shown their cubicles.

  *

  Soon after dawn Phillip was awakened in his narrow bed by the steady beating of drums and wafts of faraway band music. It was Sunday morning. The sky was red in the east, soon a spiky ray shot up. Switching on a light he read that Hitler was to speak in the Luitpoldarena and guests from the Diplomats’ Coaches must be in their places before 8 a.m. They had breakfast at 6.30 a.m. and were led to a bus. It was, said Martin with satisfaction, “Hitler weather”. Phillip wondered if, should it rain, it would be Bolschewismus weather, but stopped himself making so feeble a joke. They climbed steps to a view of a vast arena, above which miles and miles of tiers of concrete benches arose to enclose an oval. Banners stretched up behind them, each about a hundred feet high and eight wide, great red roller blinds each with the usual black swastika within a circle of white. There they sat, soon to take off jackets as the heat of the sun arose upon them. Phillip fitted a yellow filter to his Rolleiflex.

  They had chosen a good place at the end of a row by a gangway. People were now arriving fast. He sat at the edge, sleeves rolled to just below the elbows. They had been sitting there about half-an-hour when a tall young man with vaguely good-natured face came up and stood in the gangway beside Phillip while anxiously watching towards the entrance. Phillip wondered why he did not find himself a seat; but soon a grey-faced man sharp-nosed and bespectacled approached, and the young man deferentially moved aside without hesitation. A bulky rump was pushed against Phillip’s lean one, and thus the stranger sat down at the seat-end. Phillip turned and looked at this fleshy cuckoo.

  The cuckoo looked straight ahead. Phillip had a feeling that he could see with his entire left-side through his grey flannel suit, with its hand-stitched lapels. He sat still, until the cuckoo consolidated his weight on the seat, thus squeezing his neighbour beyond the limit of his original place. Turning slowly to regard the thruster with controlled fury, Phillip saw that he was now holding in his pale podgy hands a large envelope, ostensibly displayed so that the name and address were visible. The words OXFORD UNIVERSITY had been cancelled by a squiggle of blue pencil, as though done with irritability. As Phillip looked sideways the hand uncovered the first part of the name: the words The Rev. Frank were visible. And as Phillip’s ironic glance changed to one of curiosity the hand, as though sensitive to the change of mood, uncovered the surname and Phillip read The Rev. Frank Buchman.

  Two tall blue-eyed young women wearing identical cotton dresses with a design of blue flowers walked down the gangway and seated themselves in one of the lower tiers. They had blonde hair. Piers recognised them as friends of his, two English girls often photographed in newspapers as ‘the two Mitford sisters’. One, less slim than the elder girl, wore the gold badge of the Party.

  Soon a stir moved round the miles of tiered seats. Faces near Phillip lit up. The grey-clad cuckoo on his right did not appear to share the mass animation. The feeling persisted that the originator of the Oxford Group Movement was aware of, but entirely indifferent to, what he was thinking.

  A flutter of cries and a stir moving, like a tide, round the oval. Down below a minute black car gliding, followed by another, another, another, a string of Mercédès-Benz open touring cars. People were now on their feet, a roar of HEIL HITLER!—no, not a roar, an eager gladness, everyone happy and welcoming that tiny figure on the dais below with outstretched arms and open palms. The self-styled Rev. Frank Buchman, of the self-styled Oxford Movement, standing beside me, held out a left arm somewhat limply.

  People were sitting down, like hundreds of thousands of friends knowing one another and equal with the same trust. I can only describe it this way (he wrote to Melissa) picking each word objectively. For myself, I hoped to regain a few inches of my lost territory in the adjustment of sitting down again; but no, God had provided otherwise. The Rev. Cuckoo spread his knees and leaned comfortably forward. I thought I would take a photograph, so flicking open my camera top with its screened glass focusing plate I stood up and moved back the shutter. Immediately an index finger was pushed into my ribs, and a voice said with a nasal intonation, spoken as to the air before unmoving gold-rimmed spectacles, “Can’t see through you.” With an ironic apology I s
at down quietly and slowly, furious yet amused, for now it was plain how this commercial adventure had been built up.

  Piers told me (he speaks German) that Hitler was imitating his earlier self in his speech in so far as the white-heat of declamation was concerned. The fanatical prophet was now the cool and calculating head of the nation; in his speech (only in the manner of it) he was assuming, momentarily, his old mantle, or worn-out trench-coat. He paused to look at notes held in the palm of one hand. Sometimes his voice was ragged, as though a vocal cord had worn slack. I wondered what would have happened to him had he been born an Englishman: perhaps he would have become a Jimmy Maxton, with greater fire (perhaps not in England: for there was no urgent oxygen in England after the war to make a smouldering will for reformation into a white flame to fuse men’s minds). Perhaps a poet, or an artist living in a vacuum of negation, painting surrealistic pictures in a loneliness of his own spirit, or composing a jangle of discordant sounds to echo the discordance of the times.

  Or would he have rejected the town, with its pavement-ideas, this poor English wander-bird without mission yet entirely severing himself from a money-based civilisation which repressed all the best in children while creating an economic factory-jungle and pavement existence.

  Three figures, Hitler in middle, walking in slow march up the white approach to the urns of remembrance, while softly the band below played I had a Comrade, that lament equivalent to our Flowers of the Forest. The tiny trio went past the masses paraded there below: helmets of the new Reichswehr, small and dark-grey, like poppy-seeds: clay-brown squares of the S.A.; blacker S.S. rectangles. These clerks, farm labourers, waiters, tram-conductors, newspaperboys, sons of generals and princes, poets, writers, labouring men, comedians and wounded soldiers—all who heard him in those early days and were shocked, rightly or wrongly, truly or neurotically, into a new way of thought, and gave up all for the Idea, and bound themselves together for their beliefs, fighting the forces of gold and disintegration and rival Ideas, meeting terror with terror and death with death, and driving the Communists off the streets until more than 30,000 Nazis (according to Martin) were slashed, cut, shot, blinded and finally killed in the struggle which has shocked the mind of the old Europe. I do not forget the opponents, tens, hundreds of men in a rival cause, millions of communist youths believing that the only way to a new world was by total destruction of the old civilisation, while Hitler wanted to base the new on the century-old virtues which were maintained in what was Old Europe. Yet many Communists heard the fanatic, and were disturbed anew, put into self-conflict, and went over to what they finally decided was the clear light.

  As for the opponents, what did they think, the older generations? More set in their ideas, stronger in their egotisms (or beliefs, or humanitarian concepts) obstructed and fought with words during the fifteen years—and lost. Hitler wanted to restore the old German fabric, to redesign it from its ancient foundations: the Communists said it must be razed to the ground, a new building must replace it in geometrical, concrete design.

  The flames of remembrance are now breaking out of the far-off urns. In grave, as though meditative, step, the three are returning, while we all sit still, and the air of I had a Comrade makes our mood.

  Later, towards noon, Phillip watched the reviewing of the Regional Banners from a stand in the Adolf-Hitler Platz. Before Hitler arrived individuals in the crowd hailed their favourites. A Falstaff-like figure appeared on the cobbled square fifty yards away, and all stood up, holding out arms in greeting, leaning forward like children eager to answer a teacher’s question. Reichsmarschal Hermann Göring laughed and smiled, they laughed with him. He seemed to be popular, to be regarded as a jester; but they respected him, holder of the German V.C., the Ordre pour le Mérite. Goebbels was seen next, and also hailed, but with lesser enthusiasm. Then an old man walked slowly towards a lamp-standard in the square while a young S.S. man ran with a chair for him. They hailed him, too. Martin told Phillip that he was a veteran General of 1870.

  Another S.S. man stepped forward and took Göring’s photograph. Another came out with his camera. Göring turned, obligingly. Others left the ranks. He posed, or rather stood, for them like a film-star until someone with a hand-motion stopped it. Phillip had seen uniformed men taking snap-shots of Hitler in the Luitpoldfeld: all was informal and friendly, so different from the pre-war conception of German discipline.

  Phillip grew more weary during the continual march-past of red banners, while Hitler stood in his car, arm out hour after hour, and leaving his seat wandered away to prowl about below. He noticed that many of the S.A. men had rows of ribbons: there were ex-colonels, majors, even generals of the 1914–18 army as volunteers in the ranks. They seemed to have the spirit of English gentlemen who had transcended class-consciousness. There was no arrogance, but a tranquillity about them.

  But when he came upon a smallish dapper man in greenish-grey uniform, obviously regular army, eyeglass cutting a red rim in the socket of one eye, four rows of ribbons and a service cap upthrust in front, he wondered who he was, for he looked out of place. The face was somehow familiar: yes, it was General von Fritsch. What was he doing, as he stood before a row of private soldiers and speaking to one? Phillip moved closer. The General was rating, in cold-passionate tones, a private soldier standing to attention with eight others in front of a row of black Mercédès-Benz cars. Von Fritsch’s tone was not furious, but a sort of cold-ash fury was in a voice almost deadly quiet. Was this homosexual reaction to inhibited passion or lust? Piers had said that homosexual practices were rife in certain sections of the S.S.; but these were men of the new army. They were tall, like guardsmen, red-faced, but not de-humanised. When von Fritsch turned away they exchanged quiet, amused glances. He was the old, they were the new, Hitler-Army, with most of its officers from the middle and lower-middle classes given a new and earnest self-respect.

  It seemed that the spirit of the elderly Junker, or squire, was entirely apart from the majority: an isolation of the old world within the new. After watching that perhaps not insignificant episode Phillip wandered away, while the incessant beat of the drums seemed more insistent, wearisome, de-human.

  They passed: group after group, banner after banner, (he continued the letter to Melissa) Hitler standing in his car a few yards from where I had insinuated myself among his Schutz Staffel, his S.S. Black Guards, personal to the Führer: they let me through when I smiled at them. March, march, march, pom, pom, pom. It was one o’clock, we had been out nearly seven hours. The other two were wandering about. The sun was very hot. I knew from experience that impressions made when I was tired were biased, weighted by fatigue. People talk about thinking: when they mean cogitation, which perhaps is an attempt to ratify the feeling-records of the past in one’s brain. Just as most writers get their ideas and feelings from literature, so the minority of writers get them direct from life—their own lives. Their feelings and reactions are to them the truth. But when a writer is tired, or fearful, or surcharged with the moods and idées fixes of others, he may easily lose divination. How easy to write of soulless militarism and mechanisation of the individual German here today, robots of a totalitarian state based on regulated welfare. These were disciplined—self-disciplined—individuals of a resurgent nation. I did not see one piece of paper thrown down anywhere. The streets, as well as the Luitpoldfeld were clean, when the hundreds of thousands had departed.

  I have thought that Hitler might never have come to power had the radio not been invented. The Idea of renaissance brought a living personality to every man and girl and youth of this nation. The radio is sensitive to personality. Any pretentiousness, nervousness, insincerity, or fear is immediately magnified for the listener. Without radio Hitler would be dead by now, exhausted, burnt out, beating in vain against what Arnold Bennett called le bloc. In the same way the wireless has done more than anything to bring to the British public the simple, sincere, and duty-exhausted King George V.

  The dilemma of any
resurgent industrial nation is that a high standard of living for all must be paid for by exports, to get currency to buy the necessary raw materials and food which the country cannot grow for all its people; or wither again to a lower condition than that from which it arose. But in Great Britain we have every raw material in the Empire, and hundreds of millions of many races all requiring our industrial products. Yet we are gummed up by a financial idea out of date since the beginning of the war in 1914. British influence, otherwise rule, extends to nearly a fifth of the surface of the earth. The new way has been shown by Birkin; but the old way clings to power.

  Wandering about worried by his thoughts in spite of knowing that idealistic unselfishness often has its base in frustration, Phillip said to an S.S. man, one of thousands lining the street, not to prevent assassination but to keep free movement of both masses and vehicles,

  “Aren’t you tired, standing here hour after hour?”

  He replied, “We’ve been here since five this morning, but if our Leader who is older than us can stand there hour after hour for us, we can do the same for him.”

  Phillip went back to the Diplomat’s train. There he found Piers asleep. He was returning to Berlin after dinner. The battery had not held its charge. Even averaging forty miles an hour for the journey it would take eight hours. When the two had gone—for Martin had his job in a bank—Phillip felt lonely. The masses and movements had exhausted his eye-nerves, he thought, accustomed to grass, trees, and the sameness of valley life. That afternoon he had bought a book with about two dozen caricatures of the Jew as financier, politician, rag-and-bone man, critic, etc. Phillip demurred when he was about to buy it, and when he did, Martin said with a subdued look of reproach, “Don’t look at that, it is not very worthy.” Phillip, however, had kept it as a souvenir: the type of thing one could buy, but never think of buying, in the shops off the Leicester Square district of London.