If Hitler Comes (10 page)

I expect that by this time the mill-owners of Oldham, hot under the collar when the Nazi “labour leaders” order them about their business or whisk their plant off to Chemnitz, have long forgotten the Mallory “incident”, and have never known that he might have been their saviour. Others, like myself, are vainly trying to forget him, recalling that we had declined to join him, not out of an intellectual disbelief in his chances of success, but out of the moral paralysis which, the punishment of those who put their hand to the plough and then look back, had descended upon the whole of our generation. Himmler may have it in his secret records
somewhere
that a not very dangerous centre of resistance was, as a measure of extreme precaution, neatly liquidated during June. The failure of Stephen Mallory—Stephen the
Protomartyr
—was, you may say, complete.

Yet indeed the banner of freedom had been raised, however hopelessly. There had at least been that little demonstration on the windy market-place at Oldham. Lancashire men had shouted their belief in freedom, and Lancashire hearts had beat high, for a moment. A small group of patriots had staked everything for the salvation of England. In the general
disorderly
retreat a token challenge had been made.

I suspect that Adolf Hitler, who has a flair for these things, was about the only man who at that time accorded Mallory his full importance. I believe he watched the small affair at Oldham with considerable anxiety. He knew well how a political snowball can start to roll; he knew the illimitable possibilities of audacity and faith. Even with Mallory out of the way he must have decided to take no chances.

The inevitable next step followed swiftly. Its cue, however, was given not by any internal development, but, to the surprise of everyone, by the President of the United States.

It was known that Washington had serious misgivings over the turn of events. Then, just a week after the light of Mallory had been put out, the President chose the occasion of a meeting of the Pan-American Conference for an
important
statement of American policy. He referred bluntly to the German “domination” of Great Britain, and said that Americans’ worst fears were being fulfilled. The American Government, he said, saw with concern the effect which this domination would have on the policy of the United
Kingdom
. The danger of a penetration of German ideas and German power into the western hemisphere was imminent. He then touched on the position of the British Dominions and colonies. He reaffirmed that the existing Monroe doctrine covered Canada, and that no new influence on the policy of that great country could be permitted by the United States. The ensuing passage of his speech, so fraught with immediate and indirect consequences, is worth quoting.

“The Monroe doctrine,” said the President, “like all great political conceptions, is elastic in character and expands itself to embrace new developments in human thought and human history. It was originally evolved to preserve the stability of the American Continent, and to safeguard the life and freedom of those States which have their home and being on the soil of that continent. The basic idea inspiring it was the
preservation
of peace and the
status quo
within a wide area of the globe. With the vast development of communications and the evolution of new and long-range weapons during the past half-century, can we doubt that the area of the earth’s surface necessary for the free and unhampered growth of the
American
peoples has not also expanded? Can we doubt that if the sovereignty and integrity of such vigorous and prosperous young nations as Australia and New Zealand were threatened, this would not also be a threat to the safety and freedom of every denizen of the western hemisphere? The Monroe doctrine has ceased to have a merely American significance.”

The President’s words were received in the United States with surprisingly unanimous approval: they were received in Germany with a revealing burst of fury. The indignation which Dr. Goebbels and his men felt on behalf of the British Empire resembled the screech of a vulture which had seen someone attempting to revive what it had regarded as its own legitimate carrion. We were told, till we yawned, of this brutal and unprovoked threat to our national sovereignty. The Propaganda Ministry in Berlin had for long been deprived of a worthy target for its abuse, and it fell on “American imperialism” and the “American lust for world domination” with renewed ardour.

Gradually this clamour developed into a new expression of policy. The German people, it was declared, would not stand by and see their allies despoiled by robber Powers. The 
American menace had welded the German and the British peoples into a new and closer unity, and had given them a new mission, the protection of the “Nordic peoples” all over the world. Finally it was announced, with a bray of trumpets, that the Führer himself would set the seal of this new
brotherhood
by vouchsafing his presence on English soil. The
oppressed
British should have a chance of welcoming their new Protector in person, and it was to be a very different affair than the “State visit” mentioned at the time the Treaty was signed.

There is reason to believe that the decision to visit Great Britain was Hitler’s own, and was taken against the advice of his lieutenants, who feared that his presence might be a stimulus to any lingering tendencies towards independence. But the Führer saw himself now as a demi-god indeed, and no longer felt the need to retire to his eyrie in the Bavarian Alps in order to experience his godhead. The old lion had been cowed into submission, and he, the tamer, would now strut into the cage in full uniform, and make it go through its newly learnt tricks, to the crack of the whip.

Göring and Ribbentrop acquiesced, but they were taking no chances. There should be loaded rifles, as well as a whip, to ensure that nothing untoward befell the lion-tamer. Hitler, it was announced, would arrive on 1st July, but the “Führer’s Bodyguard” would precede him. Owing to the censorship and the general atmosphere of secrecy which now enveloped
everything
it was never known how many men constituted Hitler’s bodyguard on this occasion, but, according to a rumour emanating from Hull, 20,000 men were landed at that port alone from troopships during the week before the coming of the Führer. They were not seen in London, however, except as small detachments of superlatively well-disciplined men, who were apparently quartered in the Guards’ Barracks in Birdcage Walk. Even so, public attention was carefully
distracted
from their presence by the loudly heralded arrival of several thousands of Hitler Youth, on a mission of
Kameradschaft
. They were to take part in the festivities, and
subsequently
were to propagate the doctrines and ideals of Nordic boyhood throughout the schools of Great Britain. These youngsters, after arriving in
Kraft durch Freude
vessels at Tilbury, paraded through Central London and were given a mayoral banquet at Guildhall, before being quartered on families in the suburbs. They seemed to have plenty of pocket-money, and were seen everywhere in the streets during the latter part of June.

Hitler’s entry into London was superbly staged, and even
the weather was subservient The
Scharnhorst
, with an escort of German and British destroyers, arrived in the Thames soon after eleven o’clock. Opposite Greenwich the Führer entered a motor-torpedo boat and proceeded up river,
accompanied
by six similar craft flying the Swastika flag from the bows and all manned with rigidly watchful S.S. men facing the banks with machine guns at the ready. Tower Bridge, with elephantine courtesy, broke its lower span and raised up the great bascules as the diminutive vessels passed underneath. On all the other bridges, ornamented with pylons and banners for the occasion, stood serried lines of steel-helmeted “
bodyguard
”, and in the centre of each was a band which broke into the strains of the German national anthem as the flotilla appeared. Squadrons of bombers in formation roared up and down the river, only a few hundred feet above the heads of the crowds on the Embankment, who were allowed to peer at the spectacle through a continuous line of British police facing inwards. At Westminster Pier, where the flotilla arrived punctually as Big Ben announced noon, Hitler was met by the Cabinet, headed by Dr. Evans, who, it was afterwards stated, greeted him with the raised arm salute. It was
impossible
, however, for the ordinary man to see this incident, since the approaches to the pier were hedged deep with troops and a phalanx of Hitler Youth who barked out a triple “Heil!” as their Führer set foot in England.

It had originally been reported that Hitler would receive the homage of Parliament at Westminster, but this item on the programme had been abandoned, apparently because it was not yet considered politic to enforce a full attendance of both Houses, or even to reconvene that neglected organ of State. Instead, a procession of bullet-proof cars with an escort of motor-cyclist troops proceeded slowly up Whitehall towards St. James’s Palace, where Hitler had elected to have his temporary residence and where a reception was to be held that afternoon. The shuttered windows of Buckingham Palace, which had witnessed so many a flashing Sovereign’s escort, gazed blankly down the Mall as the new régime, surrounded by a cloud of stuttering motor-cycles, advanced towards them and then turned to the right into St. James’s.

On that very day, when so much that was portentous was happening in London, the rest of the “bodyguard” set foot in England, to the number of 300,000 men. Within twenty-four hours every large port was occupied, in clockwork order, and Admiralty signals ordered all naval commanders to “
co-operate
” with the nearest units of the German Grand Fleet. Resistance was of the slightest, although it did leak out
afterwards
 
that some sixty British sailors and marines lost their lives at Chatham and Portsmouth.

The good news was brought to Adolf Hitler in strange surroundings. During the night he had driven westwards, through the sleeping suburbs, to fulfil a curious little ambition. At dawn, when his secretaries rushed up with the latest cables, he was the illustrious tenant of Hampton Court Palace, walking moodily among the roses wet with dew.

A
ND
now there were German troops stationed in London and Exeter, in York and Edinburgh and Carlisle. German words of command rang out on Salisbury Plain and in the green recesses of Ashdown Forest; steel helmets moved across the skyline of Dartmoor and the Grampian Hills. The grey
Reichswehr
paraded down Whitehall, deployed across Newmarket Heath, billeted itself in the stone cottages of the Cotswolds. And everywhere there went with it, like hostages, a few sullen men in khaki, who were the rightful heirs of these places, and had meant to devote their lives to defending them.

The Germans came swinging along the Mall with flowers round their bayonets, and the flowers did not wither straight away. Unprovoked, the officers remained polite, the men stonily respectful. But they smiled grimly to themselves as they proceeded to their stations, mounting their machine guns according to prearranged plan. Within three days the whole of Great Britain was effectively occupied, and the invasion was complete.

There was something apparitional about the invaders. Hitler's men—they had been so long the distant bogies whom our armed might was holding at bay, that it was unbelievable that one fine day they should arrive, as it were, by bus. You might, for instance, on Wednesday be walking down a sandy lane, to buy some cigarettes in the village, reflecting on the way how changeless was the countryside, whatever the B.B.C. might say at nine o'clock; then on Thursday,
repeating
the errand, you might find a company of Hessian
Jäger
resting on a route march beneath the beeches, looking more or less at home in your inviolable pastures. “Ah, the Germans,” you would say to yourself, rather as though they were a circus that was passing through the village. But the circus had come to stay.

Outside London, the fact that England had been seized by the enemy was brought home to many people only in flashes. Twelve months earlier most inhabitants of Debenford would have said, quite truthfully, that they would rather be dead than see German soldiers encamped on Sutton Walks. Now, by some odd conjuring trick of fortune, they were there—and Gerald Cooke wrote to us that the one complaint of the villagers was that, a well-worn short cut being now denied to them by a smiling Westphalian sentry, it was two furlongs more to Woodbridge. The parish meeting wrote to the
commanding
officer about this short cut, and young Captain von Krausnitz, being a clever man, at once threw it open again. Thenceforth the villagers walked through the camp with their shopping baskets, beaming with gratitude and friendliness, and fraternized to some extent with the soldiers. After all, they were hardly stranger than the actors and actresses who had turned an old sailing barge on the Deben into a
weekend
haunt, or worse-behaved than Londoners in their little red bungalows over the hill. Also they had money to spend. The landlord of the “Rose Revived” adapted his cellar to the keeping of lager, both
dunkles
and
helles
, on draught; the village baker learnt how to make
Milchbrödchen
. The girls began to dream of dances at Ipswich, and a few old ladies, their minds full of all the crime reports in the
Daily Mail
, were genuinely relieved that “the military”, albeit grey-clad, had arrived to preserve law and order.

So wrote Gerald Cooke, from Ashdene Cottage, and to us in teeming London, now cowering under what was virtually martial law, it was a queer picture. We had indeed wanted to think of Debenford as our private refuge in this nightmare world, even if there the seasons and the crops mattered more than patriotism; but it was a shock to learn that, while we shuddered in London, the country folk were taking the enemy to their hearts.

“But”, Gerald added, “there are moments when even we hang our heads. There was a bit of excitement when a picture of Hitler standing with the Chief Regent took the place of the Death of Nelson over the parlour mantelpiece at the Rose. We
almost
began to talk politics. Then you may remember that we lost five young men in the last war, two of them in the crew of a lightship. People tend to avoid their relatives.
I suggested to the Vicar that we might add the five names to the 1914 memorial, but he coughed and changed the
subject
. Another unhappy reminder of the wider catastrophe is the presence in the village of young Paul Ebbotson. You may remember him, son of the blacksmith, who did so well at school and got a job in the Nigerian police. Now that's all over, and he's back as a farm labourer.

“Big changes are coming, no doubt. The signs are there for those who care to read them. For some weeks now
Woodbridge
police court has been attended by a German officer, sitting very erect beside the mild-mannered Gestapo fellow who haunts the neighbourhood; and yesterday he was actually given a place on the bench! Stonehaven nearly had a fit, but, as the chairman seemed to take it as a matter of course, he thought it best to say nothing. The news from Ipswich is more ominous still, for it is said that the City Council is entirely under the control (lightly exercised hitherto) of the military commandant. I wonder if this is typical of England as a whole? One never reads anything of these things in the papers.

“The judge came to Ipswich last week on circuit. He had an escort of Uhlans, which wasn't very nice; in fact, there was something unpleasantly farcical about the whole business. General von So-and-So, who sat among the notabilities, must have twirled his moustaches most impatiently when all that business about
oyer
and
terminer
and our Sovereign Lord the King was being read. Very different from the People's Courts! The biggest case in the calendar, according to the
Eastern Daily News
, was a complicated civil action about an
unimportant
right of way. How unreal it seems to be expensively arguing a matter like this, from ancient statutes and leading cases, when the very bases of our law are crumbling!

“Never mind. No-one can chase the swallows away before their time, and I don't suppose the Germans will be pulling up the water-blobs above the mill-race. Come soon, as you both must be desperately in need of a change.”

“Well,” I said to Elizabeth, “shall we pay another visit to Debenford soon?”

“No,” she said. “Let's wait till we know the worst. We might find it horribly changed—more than Gerald realizes, who lives there all the time. Or we might find it horribly the same, like a death mask. Let's go to some place that doesn't matter.”

She pinned the enormous yellow Press badge to her dress, and went off to submit an article to the Bureau of Censorship. That week-end we went to Brighton. We didn't enjoy it at all;
and we found that even the monstrous Pavilion must have been among the things we had loved, for we were very sorry to see that it had been turned into a German barracks.

On Saturday morning we saw Jack Dorman, of the
Brisbane Star
, sitting on the beach throwing pebbles at a bottle. “Who does that stand for?” I asked. “Mr. H. or Sir J.N.?” He said, neither. It stood for the Unholy Optimists, who succeeded only in making the world seem a blacker place than ever. Asked to explain, he drew out a little
notebook
. “Look,” he said, “I am making a collection of Unholy Optimisms—prominent people who by their statements
publicly
made since the arrival of German troops show that they are coldly and deliberately deceiving themselves. If the
New Statesman
hadn't been suppressed it might have published them with the title ‘This Earth, this Gau, this
England
'.”

It was indeed an extraordinary collection. Most of the people quoted are now dead—some “shot while attempting to escape”—they were none of them time-servers, and all of them, surely, must have repented of what they said. It would not be fair, therefore, to name them, but I think it should be put on record that a bishop, for instance, in Westminster Abbey described Hitler as “the Reformation ideal of a
Christian
prince”, and that the proprietor of a great newspaper remarked “How fortunate and right it is that the Führer admires the English character!” It was a progressive member of the New English Art Club who said, “National Socialism is the disciplined renascence of wonder,” and a famous
headmaster
who assured parents that Hitler's
Ordenburgen
were but a flattering translation into a German idiom of the English public school. There was
Nordic Iron
, the fatuous poem done in the manner, but not with the intent, of
The Waste Land
, and there was the elder statesman's advice to “show the Germans something worth imitating”. A song sung by a top-of-the-bill comedian had a chorus which went “Belinda is now quite the Belle of Berlin, and Lotte's the Lily of London”; and the public orator at a university which was admitting Goebbels to an honorary degree addressed him with the words “
Egregie doctor, mores instrue, et nostra tecum pectora in Valhallam trahe
”.

All this was perpetrated while German troops, at vantage points throughout the three kingdoms, were quietly but
relentlessly
preparing to press down the heel. It was perpetrated by men who were trapped, but were too vain to know it—who would never believe that the values they had made their own could be entirely falsified by brute force, and preferred to
persuade themselves that God and the snail were still
somehow
where they ought to be. They were not cowards but fools.

All three of us picked up the largest stone we could find, and hurled it at the bottle. It splintered into fragments. A Prussian bugle call sounded from the Royal Pavilion. Though no-one in Brighton knew it, it was ushering in
Der Tag
, the twenty-four hours in which the heel was actually to be pressed down, in good earnest.

… Far away in Whitechapel there was one, Isaac Cohen, who was no Unholy Optimist. He made no attempt to deceive himself, and he foresaw, as clearly as though it had already begun to happen, what was in store for his race, his class, and, ultimately, his adopted country. Millions of others
foresaw
all this too, and many of his race, following the
despairing
example of their brethren in all the desecrated capitals, from Paris to Vienna, put an end to themselves and their families. Others shut their eyes and ears and tried to forget. Isaac Cohen did neither of these things. He dwelt on the future, by night as well as by day, until his ears rang with the cries of future martyrs and he saw the desolation of a yet uncreated ghetto. As with a drunkard, his mental vision contracted as it sharpened; he saw the Terror with frightful clarity, but round it there was mist and vagueness. Only out of this darkness loomed the shadowy figure of a man, with little pig's eyes, and a small moustache, and a lock of lank hair plastered to his forehead. This figure, vague as it was, was yet essential to terrible sharp vision in the centre. Every night Isaac Cohen became more certain that one had to remove the figure for the vision to soften, lose definition, and, at last, break down and disappear. Only destroy the figure …

One day, in a Lyons shop on the Mile End Road, Isaac Cohen fell into conversation with a Gentile, a German who confessed to being a Social Democrat. He was a sympathetic fellow, this German, and it was not long before Isaac Cohen was staggering out his nightmare into friendly ears. There was much earnest conversation between the two, the one man whispering wildly, the other calming him, directing his thoughts, narrowing his vision once again. A shiny black object changed hands before the interview was over.

There was no sleep for Isaac Cohen the next three nights. His brain was racing; no longer was the evil figure haunting the periphery of his mind, it was gaining definition, moving into the centre, marching boldly up to a dais in the midst of an applauding multitude. And it became thinner and thinner
until it was like a thread—the thread upon which alone that other fearful vision depended.…

When the bugle sounded we stopped the silly game of throwing stones, and climbed back on to the promenade. I bought an evening paper. “Hell!” I said. “Mr. H. has
decided
to attend that youth parade in London to-morrow morning, and he may make a speech. Dorman, you and I will have to go back. Another week-end ruined!”

One could not ignore Hitler's speeches. He made them seldom, and when he did we hung on his words and lost no opportunity, within the strict limits of the censorship, of “interpreting” them. Sometimes we might add: “The Prime Minister also spoke”.

But at the seaside, even in the vulgar pullulation of Brighton, the Führer seemed somehow remote. Politics never had much to do with groins and pebbles and seaweed, and the sun glared too fiercely on the
Evening Standard
for it to be read with comfort. We picked our way along an inert line of deck-chairs, and wondered at those comfortable people whose lives were still sufficiently shored up by
gilt-edged
securities or sheltered jobs that they could gaze placidly into the blue. They were Canutes who did not even notice the sea.

But for the chance that Hitler would speak at it I should have been glad to give the Young Englander parade a miss. It takes time to get inured to the rites of Moloch, and I preferred the disbanded Boy Scouts. Moreover, I had no desire to be present at the desecration of Lord's cricket ground. I felt deeply for the head groundsman, who a week before had walked away and had never been heard of since.

Next morning was fresh and sunlit—just the morning, had it been a Saturday, for the opening day of Middlesex
v
. Surrey. But the scene was cruelly different. The sacred pavilion was full of strange uniforms, and the ring of spectators was glum and silent. A brass band played discordantly. Only the turf remained inviolate; but round it were ranged, ready for marching, the grim imported Hitler Youth, and our own poor lads, in their new jackboots and white peaked caps. Their horrible banners, red and black, moved in the gentle breeze.