Berlin Diary (100 page)

E
STORIL
,
December
8

Unable to sleep—a sudden toothache, the first in my life, and now I shall pay for my neglect though it was impossible to do anything in Germany, where the shortage of gold and other metals has reduced dentists to plugging teeth with a tin alloy. But there was a glorious southern sun and I spent the morning tramping through the municipal garden, delighted that so many flowers were still in bloom, and then along the
beach, where great blue rollers were coming in from the sea, breaking furiously into foam on the sun-strewn sands. The tranquillity, the peacefulness, the soft rhythm of the sea were tremendous. They were too much, they demanded an adjustment that could not be made in a morning. I fled, hailed a taxi, and went into Lisbon to wait for Ed’s plane. The suspicious Britishers at the air-line would not say when the London plane was coming in or whether it was coming, apparently for fear the information in some miraculous way would get to the Germans, who would shoot it down. I waited until dark and then returned to Estoril.

L
ATER.—
Ed finally arrived and it was grand. Since ten p.m. we have been talking a year of the war out of our systems and now at five a.m. to bed, pleasantly exhausted. Considering the bombings he has taken and the killing pace of his job, Ed looked better than I had expected—in fact, right fit.

E
STORIL
,
December
9

We lolled in the sun on the beach. Ed says the bombing of Britain has been severe, but not so bad as the Germans have boasted. Besides London—Coventry, Bristol, Southampton, and Birmingham have taken terrible poundings, but it has been the centre of these cities—the churches, the public buildings, the private dwellings—that has been hardest hit. The curtailment of war industrial output, Ed thinks, has been due not so much to physical damage of actual factory plant, but to the disorganization of the cities where the workers live and where electric power, water, and gas facilities are concentrated. The British argue, he says, that the Luftwaffe in its night attacks does not aim at
factories, but has two other main objectives: first, to strike terror in the civilian population; second, to knock out essential public services and thus paralyse the great cities. I think this is correct.

Ed has good tidings about British morale, about which we in Berlin were a little doubtful. He says it’s superb.

E
STORIL
,
December
10

Pat Kelly, the genial and able local manager of Pan American Airways, confides that I have small chance of getting home for Christmas if I wait for a Clipper. The service is stalled because of ground swells at Horta, which prevent the big ships from taking off. He advises taking the boat. Since this will be my first Christmas at home in sixteen years, if I make it, I went in this afternoon to the offices of the Export Lines to book on the
Excambion
, leaving Friday. The office was jammed with a mob of refugees—jittery, desperate, tragic victims of Hitler’s fury—begging for a place—any place—on the next ship. But as one of the company officials explained to me, there are three thousand of them in Lisbon and the boats only carry one hundred and fifty passengers and there is only one boat a week. He promised me a place on the
Excambion
, sailing Friday the 13th, though it may only be a mattress in the writing room.

Tonight Ed and I did the Casino. The gaming rooms were full of a weird assortment of human beings, German and British spies, male and female, wealthy refugees who had mysteriously managed to get a lot of money out and were throwing it about freely, other refugees who were obviously broke and were trying to
win their passage money in a few desperate gambles with the fickle roulette wheel, and the usual international sharpsters you find at such places. Neither Ed nor I had any luck at roulette and we adjourned to the ballroom, where the same kind of people were trying to drown whatever feelings they had in drink and jazz.

E
STORIL
,
December
11

A visit to a Lisbon
dentista
. He gave me some herbs to boil for my ulcerated tooth, which has made sleep impossible since I arrived.

Ed depressed at a wire from London this afternoon telling him that his new office was bombed and demolished by the Germans last night. Fortunately no one was killed. His old office was destroyed by a German bomb a couple of months ago.

E
STORIL
,
December
12

We sat up until four o’clock this morning batting out a joint broadcast scheduled for tonight. We feel rather pleased with it.

L
ATER.—
No broadcast. The talk was set for two a.m. this night and we sent the script over to the local radio at eight p.m. so the Portuguese censors would have plenty of time. At midnight the censor telephoned and said very politely that he had only been able to translate two of the ten pages, but that he found it very interesting and no doubt would be able to finish it by next week, and we could broadcast then. We argued until almost air-time, but it was obvious that the Portuguese had no intention of risking wounding the
feelings of either the British or the Germans. We got New York to postpone the show until four a.m., but by three thirty we had made no progress whatsoever, and finally, defeated, we went to bed.

A
BOARD THE
Excambion
,
December
13 (
midnight
)

All day both of us depressed at leaving, for we have worked together very closely, Ed and I, during the last three turbulent years over here and a bond grew that was very real, a kind you make only a few times in your life, and somehow, absurdly no doubt, sentimentally perhaps, we had a presentiment that the fortunes of war, maybe just a little bomb, would make this reunion the last.

We paced up and down the dock in the darkening light of dusk, waiting for the ship to go. There was a little open-air bar for the stevedores on the dock with a tough, frowzy Portuguese blonde behind it. She kept chattering and pouring the drinks. Soon it was dark and they began pulling the gangway in. I climbed aboard and Ed disappeared into the night.

A full moon was out over the Tagus, and all the million lights of Lisbon and more across the broad river on the hills sparkled brightly as the ship slid down to sea. For how long? Beyond Lisbon over almost all of Europe the lights were out. This little fringe on the southwest corner of the Continent kept them burning. Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out here by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitler’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?

Five other American correspondents going home from the war, from England, from Germany, from France,
sat in the ship’s little bar over “old-fashioneds.” It was a very good way of cushioning your farewell. I joined them. I had one. But alcohol is not always enough. I felt restless, excited. I went up on deck. For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.

¹
A right-wing organization of some eight hundred thousand members. France’s other four million war veterans were organized in the
Fédération des Anciens Combattants.

²
The text: Law for the Re-Creation of the National Defence Forces.

The Reich government has decreed the following law, which is herewith proclaimed:

1. Service in the defence forces is based on universal military service.

2. The German peace army, inclusive of police units incorporated therein, comprises twelve corps commands and thirty-six divisions.

3. Supplementary laws for regulating universal military service will be drafted and presented to the Reich Cabinet by the Reich Minister of Defence.

³
Sir Nevile Henderson in
Failure of a Mission
has told us since that during the first talk after Chamberlain had outlined his plan of complete surrender to Hitler, the Führer looked at him and said: “
Es tut mir furchtbar leid, aber das geht nicht mehr
(I’m awfully sorry, but that won’t do any more).” Chamberlain, says Henderson, expressed his “surprise and indignation.”

⁴
In the next days it furnished the only means of communication between Prague and the outside world.

⁵
Panton was arrested in Copenhagen in April 1940, when the Germans marched in, and interned on a Danish island. The French Minister in Copenhagen insisted on taking out all French and Polish correspondents caught there by the Germans. The British Minister made no effort to and the four English journalists there were all arrested and interned.