A Solitary War (36 page)

From
The
Times
he learned that Roumania had been lent
another
£
10,000,000, and the wheat harvest of 1940, 1941, and 1942 had been secured as interest on the loan. By 1941, declared the Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the power of Britain would be felt. Behind the impregnable Maginot Line the Third Reich would fall to bits, prophesied ‘Diogenes’ in some daily picture paper.

Phillip was out and about on the farm now. The men had started hoeing the sugar beet by contract, while he enjoyed himself alone by stripping some of the cut thorn trees of the hedges, burning the lesser branches, and piling the trunks for the circular saw in coming winters.

Arriving home from the farm to breakfast one morning he heard the B.B.C. announcement that the German fleet was out and the Norwegian ports were occupied. Anxiously he listened to more news that evening at six o’clock, while Billy and Jonny sat silent beside Lucy at the far end of the table. Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared in the House of Commons that every German ship would be bottled up in the Skaggerak and destroyed. The Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, stated, amidst cheers, that Hitler had missed the ’bus. He had, said Mr. Chamberlain, made a fatal extension of his flank comparable to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Things could hardly be better for us, he concluded.

At half past nine that evening Phillip tuned in to the German Radio. The nasal, sardonic voice of Haw-Haw commented on the news of the B.B.C., and concluded, “In the words of the late
Lord Oxford and Asquith, my British listeners will have to wait and see.”

*

At the beginning of May the barley was green, but patchy, on the Scalt. It was poor and unhappy-looking on Pewitt’s, where the dour half-iced furrows had been turned up after the sheep’s feet had compressed the soil. Phillip had sensed what would happen when he had turned the ice under too far, making the soil cold for tender barley roots. Ploughing that piece had been like planing wood against the grain. A fair soul and a fair soil were related. He had ploughed against his true feeling, under the compulsion of fear—the hare of his mind dreading a late sowing in spring.

The oats looked well on the Nightcraft, where Luke had drilled over the failed wheat. The seed had been sown after frost had gone out of the land, following the pitchpole harrow which had made the soil light and gracious: a happy tilth.

The small seeds on Steep field, drilled among the wheat of the past season, were growing thick and dark green. The layer was mainly cowgrass, red clover, and ryegrass; his first proper hay crop was coming along. Never again, on the farm, said Phillip to Luke, shall we broadcast grass and clover seeds in this country of light rainfall, but always drill them as soon as possible after the barley is sown.

Hare took tractor and rib-roll to press down the frost-lifted plants of clover and ryegrass and exposed flints on Steep field. He had gone round the field once when there was a terrific explosion from the direction of the sea. A column of black smoke hung in the sky three miles away. Was it bomb or mine? A few minutes later Matt appeared, clumping over the sky-line from the direction of the meadows, to stop abruptly when he saw Phillip, to wipe a sweaty brow with his cap, and stare reproachfully.

“My Gor!” he said when Phillip reached him. “I thought it was you, gone up on the tractor!”

“Bless you, dear Tortoise. I expect the Sappers were exploding a mine.”

A few mornings later Hare and Tortoise walked side by side across the lower slopes of the field. Each carried a stick with a thistle spud on it. Phillip wanted to have a thistle-free field after the bare fallow of two years before, when all weeds were killed. A few thistles had survived.

“Your bare fallow did good, master. Ah, it did that. B’utiful bottom this hay hev. The partridges’ll soon be settun.”

“Yes, it’s the tenth of May. They’re laying now, just about.”

Phillip returned to the farmhouse by way of the meadows and the lower bridge over the river. As he was passing the church the Rector came out of his drive on a bicycle and called out, “So it’s started at last! The Germans attacked Holland this morning with a million men. They are using great numbers of parachute troops dropped behind the lines!”

Phillip was shocked. He had told Lucy—his only listener now—that the attack on Norway had come because the Royal Navy had mined the neutral waters of the northern ports; because
Hore-Belisha
, having left the Ministry of War, had been urging in a Sunday newspaper that they should attack Germany through Norway.

“Hitler’s reply was to get there first. I don’t believe that Major Quisling, leader of the Norwegian National Samling, and the most brilliant soldier in Norway, yielded to the Germans. He knows Bolshevik Russia well, he believes in the new European
consciousness
, in the new economy, which will throw out the international financier with his concomitant Communist destroyer. Quisling is first of all a Norwegian patriot. He may be assassinated, or shot by a firing squad, but one day his name will be cleared. He’s been much in Russia, he knows Bolshevism as Norway’s, and Europe’s, real enemy.”

So Phillip told a passively listening Lucy. Once she had
believed
all he said; but during the years she had become doubtful. He was often contradictory; he changed his mind suddenly, sometimes after listening to what someone else had been telling him. Thus one day Luke would be right; the next day he would be wrong again. Some of the things he said, too, about the children, she knew to be wrong: but he could not bear to be argued with, it seemed to upset him so, and anyway, what did it matter, whatever was said would not alter things. That was now Lucy’s general attitude.

“They’ll be saying that next about Birkin—or even little me,” Phillip went on. “Birkin has made it plain to everyone in the party that, in the event of attack, we must all fight in defence of the country. But fancy Hitler attacking in the West. Oh, why wasn’t I in to hear the news over the wireless?”

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
protecto
r, 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.