A Time of Gifts (19 page)

* * *

Those Bavarian inn conversations reflected opinions which ran from the total conviction of party-members to the total opposition of their opponents and victims; with the difference that the first were loud and voluble while the second remained either silent or non-committal until they were alone with a single interlocutor. Being English was relevant to all this, for though the Germans' attitude to England varied, it was never indifferent. A few, like the near-albino in Heidelberg, showed loathing. The War inevitably cropped up: they resented that we had been on the winning side, but didn't seem to blame us—always with the proviso that Germany would never have lost if she hadn't been stabbed in the back; and they admired England, in a certain measure, for reasons that were seldom heard in respectable English circles any more. For past conquests, that is, and the extent of the colonies, and the still apparently undiminished power of the Empire. When, with education and practice the colonies could rule themselves, I would urge at this point, they would be given their independence. Not at once, of course; it would take time...(This was the theory we had all been brought up on.) Looks of admiration, partly rueful and partly ironical, at what they considered the size of the lie and the extent of its hypocrisy, were the invariable response.

In these exchanges I was held up by ignorance and by anxiety to hide it; and my limited German, though it was often a stumbling block, sometimes helped to mask its true depths. How I longed to be better equipped! When they asked, and they always did, what the English thought of National Socialism, I would stick repetitively to three main objections: the burning of the books, of which lurid photographs had filled the newspapers; the concentration camps which had been set up a few months before; and the
persecution of the Jews. This procedure was irritating, I could see, but not wholly ineffective. Anyway, the reactions and arguments are too familiar for repetition.

In all of these conversations there was one opening I particularly dreaded: I was English? Yes. A student? Yes. At Oxford, no? No. At this point I knew what we were in for.

The summer before, the Oxford Union had voted that ‘under no circumstances would they fight for King and Country.' The stir it had made in England was nothing, I gathered, to the sensation in Germany. I didn't know much about it. In my explanation—for I was always pressed for one—I depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion—‘Fight for King and Country'—was an obsolete cliché from an old recruiting poster: no-one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” ‘Für König und Vaterland' sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably ‘pour épater les bourgeois,' I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “Um die Bürger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “Ein Scherz?” they would ask. “Ein Spass? Ein Witz?” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman's rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for. Veterans of the War showed a sort of unpartisan sorrow at this falling-off. It sprang from the ambiguous love-hate for England that many Germans felt. They recalled the trenches and the stubborn fighting qualities of ‘die Tommies'; then they compared them to the pacifist
voters in the Union, and shook their heads. There was a sorrowing, Horatian note in this. Not from such sires, these veterans seemed to say, were sprung the youths who dyed the sea red with Punic blood and struck down Pyrrhus and mighty Antiochus and grim Hannibal.

These undergraduates had landed their wandering compatriots in a fix. I cursed their vote; and it wasn't even true, as events were to prove. But I was stung still more by the tacit and unjust implication that it was prompted by lack of spirit. I urged that there had always been an anti-militarist strain among the English in peace time. But when the blast of war blew in their ears, they imitated the action of the tiger, stiffened the sinews, summoned up the blood, and disguised fair nature with hard-favoured rage, etc. It didn't cut much ice.

* * *

Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded. In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private. The rumours of the concentration camps were still no louder than a murmur; but they hinted at countless unavowable tragedies.

In one of those lost Rhineland towns, I can't remember which, I had a glimpse of how quick the change-over had been for many Germans. In a workmen's bar late at night I made friends with several factory hands in overalls who had come off a late shift. They were about my age, and one of them, an amusing, clownish character, said: why didn't I doss down on his brother's camp bed at his place? When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine of Hitleriana. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His S.A. uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger. He explained these cult objects
with fetishist zest, saving up till the last the centrepiece of his collection. It was an automatic pistol, a Luger parabellum, I think, carefully oiled and wrapped in mackintosh, accompanied by a pile of green cardboard boxes packed with bullets. He stripped and reassembled the pistol, loaded the magazine and smacked it home and ejected it again, put on a belt and crossbrace with a holster, whipped the gun in and out like a cowboy, tossed it in the air and caught it, spun it round by the trigger-guard and danced about with one eye shut, going through the motions of aiming and firing with loud clicks of the tongue... When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed, and said: “
Mensch!
You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the
Horst Wessel Lied
! It was all the
Red Flag
and the
International
then! I wasn't only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!” He gave a clenched fist salute. “You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly—
Man hat sich totgelacht
. Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” What about all his old pals, I asked. “They changed too!—all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They're all in the S.A. now.” Had a lot of people done the same, then? A
lot
? His eyes opened wide. “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!” He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. “Sakra Haxen noch amal! We've scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!” He laughed merrily. What did his parents think about it all? I had met them on the way up—rather a nice, seedy-looking old couple listening to the wireless by the kitchen stove. He shrugged and looked depressed. “
Mensch!
They
don't understand anything. My father's old-fashioned: only thinks abut the Kaiser and Bismarck and old Hindenburg—and now he's dead, too—anyway, he helped the Führer to get where he is! And my mother, she knows nothing about politics. All she cares about is going to church. She's old-fashioned too.”

* * *

On the road running east from my last Bavarian halt in Traunstein the sudden clear weather showed how close I was getting to the Alps. The clouds had vanished and the great range soared out of the plain as abruptly as a wall rises from a field. The snow-covered masses climbed and gleamed, slashed with blue shadows; dark loops of fir and the peaks of the Kitzbühel Alps and the East Tyrol overlapped in the sky above a deep mesh of shadowy valleys. A signpost pointed south and along a valley at the end of which Bad Reichenhall lay. On the ledge above, Berchtesgaden was perched, only known, as yet, for its abbey and its castle and its view over the wide Bavarian lowlands.

But I steered east and reached the banks of the Salzach late in the afternoon. A red, white and black pole barred the road. Inside the customs-house hung the last picture of the Führer. Uniform sleeves were ringed by the last swastika armbands and in a few minutes, beside a barrier striped red and white, an Austrian official was stamping my passport:
24 January 1934
.

By nightfall I was gazing at the statues and wandering down the baroque colonnades of Salzburg in search of a café. The windows, when I found one, looked out on a fountain adorned by stampeding horses and stalactitic with icicles.

 

[1]
I never saw the rucksack again: I had hoped the diary might have been jettisoned and handed in. Rather oddly the stick, with its twenty-two plaques, had vanished as well. The loss of the journal still aches now and then like an old wound in bad weather. There was no news either of the ‘pickeliger Bua.' I repaid the fiver from Constantinople almost exactly a year later.

[2]
It was destroyed by a bomb in the war.

[3]
In
The Condemned Playground
by Cyril Connolly.

O
NLY GLIMPSES
of Salzburg remain: bell-towers, bridges, piazzas, fountains, a dome or two and an impression of cloisters which might all have been flown here by djinns and reassembled as an Italian Renaissance city the wrong side of the Alps.

But I didn't tarry, and for a depressing reason. The evocative smell of hot ski-wax drifted through many of the windows and swarms of people, little older than me and all bound for the mountains, were clumping the streets with skis over their shoulders. They filled the arcades and the cafés and shouted joyfully to each other as though they were already swooping about the high slopes; worse still, some were English. I loved ski-ing and all this made me feel lonely and out of things. So, early next morning, turning my back on the Salzkammergut and the lakes and the beckoning peaks of Styria and the Tyrol, I slipped away; and soon I was plodding north-west and ever further from temptation through the woods of Upper Austria. I slept in a barn near the village of Eigendorf—too small a hamlet for any map—and the next two nights in Frankenburg and Ried. One of them, spent in a loft where all the racks were filled with apples, was sweet-smelling almost to swooning point. Little has stuck from early Austrian days except the charm of these minor mountains.

* * *

St. Martin, one of Baron Liphart's castles, the earliest of those houses of friends to whom he had written on my behalf, is my first real landmark. To avoid arriving out of the blue, I telephoned
before setting out, and learnt that the owner was in Vienna; but he had asked his agent to look after me if I turned up. Graf Arco-Valley, a great favourite of many English people, called ‘Nando' (but not by me as we never met
[1]
) had been at Oxford or Cambridge a couple of generations earlier. The schloss was shut up, the friendly agent told me. But we wandered through its twilit rooms and walked about under the trees in the park. Finally he gave me a feast in the cheerful and pretty inn, urging me to tuck in with the assiduity of a jolly uncle taking a nephew out from school. There were a couple of musicians, a zither-player and a violinist, and everybody sang. He told me at breakfast he had telephoned to the next schloss marked down on the Liphart itinerary: I would be welcome any time, they had said. (Things were beginning to look up! I would have given anything to know what my kind sponsor in Munich had written. It was a change to have favourable reports circulating.) As a result, after a second cow-shed sojourn near Riedau, I found myself in the corner tower of another castle two evenings later, wallowing in a bath of ancient shape, enclouded by the scent of the cones and the pine-logs that roared like caged lions in the huge copper stove.

* * *

The word ‘schloss' means any degree of variation between a fortified castle and a baroque palace. This one was a fair sized manor house. I had felt shy as I ploughed through the snow of the long avenue late that afternoon; quite baselessly. To go by the solicitude of the trio at the stove-side in the drawing-room—the old Count and his wife and their daughter-in-law—I might, once again, have been a schoolboy asked out for a treat, or, better still, a polar explorer on the brink of expiring. “You must be
famished
after all that walking!” the younger Gräfin said, as a huge tea appeared: she was a beautiful dark-haired Hungarian and she spoke excellent
English. “Yes,” said the elder, with an anxious smile, “We've been told to feed you up!” Her husband radiated silent benevolence as yet another silver dish appeared. I spread a third hot croissant with butter and honey and inwardly blessed my benefactor in Munich.

The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. (Next day he wrote a chit to some private gallery in Linz on the back of a visiting card. After his name was printed:
K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R
.
[2]
‘Imperial and Royal Chamberlain,' that is, ‘and retired Captain of Horse.' All through Central Europe the initials ‘K.u.K.'—
Kaiserlich und Königlich
—were the alliterative epitome of the old Dual Monarchy. Only candidates with sixteen or thirty-two quarterings, I learnt later, were eligible for the symbolic gold key that court chamberlains wore on the back of their full-dress uniforms. But now the Empire and the Kingdom had been dismembered and their thrones were empty; no doors opened to the gold keys, the heralds were dispersed, the regiments disbanded and the horses dead long ago. The engraved words croaked loud of spent glories. Rare then, each of those symbols by now must be one with the translucent red button, the unicorn-embroidered robe and the ruby and jade clasp of a mandarin of the first class at the court of Manchus: ‘
Finis rerum
, and an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene...') I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a grey and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock's tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. It was in Salzburg that I had first admired these Austrian country clothes. They were similar in kind, but less splendid in detail, to the livery of the footmen who kept bringing in those silver dishes. There was a feeling of Lincoln green about them, woodland elegance that the Count carried off with the ease of a courtier and a cuirassier.