If Hitler Comes (6 page)

The disorder occurred in two main areas—Tyneside and London. In the north the League of Britons had apparently lost much prestige as a result of the Leeds riot. Middle-class citizens who had been inclined to sympathize with its
flamboyantly
expressed ideals fought shy of their violent
expression
. But, although the movement thus lost much of its respectable fringe of adherents, it had also gained enormously in momentum. The cards were on the table, and, in the words of the Leaguers, “war had been declared on the alliance between Jewry and bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy to the Leaguers meant the police.

The leaders of the movement did not lose sight of the confusion caused in high places by the German move, and seized their opportunity to stage another demonstration. This was to be a “battle march”—I detect Patrick Rosse's phraseology—through Newcastle, Jarrow and South Shields, three places which had for long before the war suffered from the worst kind of depression and unemployment, and after the brief armaments boom felt themselves slipping back into their former misery.

Like so many of Rosse's slogans the phrase “battle march” was vague but suggestive. The demonstration, which began in Newcastle as the usual affair of banners and brass bands, developed rapidly into a savage and semi-organized fight with the police. The authorities had their hands tied; already shaken by the questions which were being asked over the suppression of the Leeds affair, they now received a circular from the new Home Secretary warning them that on no account was popular feeling to be excited by the presence of large bodies of police or military. Nothing must be done which suggested persecution. Local forces were to deal with local disturbances.

The result was that the demonstrators found themselves from the first opposed by small bodies of police who,
themselves
affected by the indecision of their superiors, hesitated to take effective action and were quickly routed. As the mob saw the forces which represented discipline melt before it, its
taste for triumph was whetted, and the next phase of the disorder was a series of deliberate attacks on police stations and assaults on isolated police units.

The marchers got no farther than Jarrow; here motor lorries and vans were commandeered, and the rioters
circulated
over a wide area of the poorer parts of Durham. In many places they were joined by parties of the younger unemployed, though it was noticed that the older, married men stood aloof. Everywhere small local police stations were attacked and looted, and in small villages the local constable's house was searched out and broken up. The police, wherever they could, resisted furiously, and would by now have acted without thought of future reprimands and inquiries, but the attack was so sudden and so widely dispersed that they had no time to form any effective concentration. Ten police officers were murdered by the rioters, and many others were man-handled and more or less seriously injured.

I have described the Durham disturbances from reports collected after the event, but I was myself a witness of part of the London trouble, and even I shudder as I remember what was for me the first spectacle of street anarchy, of open and destructive fury in men's faces, and the ugly snarl of a fighting crowd. I was working in my office in Fleet Street when O'Flynn, of the Irish United Press, which had premises across the passage, ran into my room. “Get your hat on if you want to see some fun,” he said. “They say the boys are marching on Downing Street.”

We chartered a taxi and reached Trafalgar Square, where we were stopped by a police cordon and got out. It appeared at first that O'Flynn was wrong. From inquiries in the crowd and from a large and friendly police constable I learnt that the square was the objective of the march, that Sir John Naker, apparently with the object of convincing the world and Germany that the Constitution had room for all sorts of politics, had authorized a mass meeting of the League in the Square, and that a procession was even then approaching down Haymarket.

The procession appeared in due course at the north-west corner of the square. It was led like so many London
processions
by a small detachment of mounted police, behind which marched a large and efficient brass band. As they came into the open the mounted police drew off to let the marchers defile into the area round Nelson's Column, but instead the brass band and the leading Leaguers advanced steadily down towards Cockspur Street and Whitehall. The police
appeared
momentarily nonplussed, and then, as the danger of 
the situation dawned on them, crossed the centre of the square at the trot and formed a weak cordon across
Whitehall
just below King Charles's statue.

Still the band came on, lustily playing “Hearts of Oak”, and then the officer in charge of the mounted police made a grave mistake. Instead of falling back behind the strong reserve of foot police, which was now emerging from the region of the Admiralty Arch, he gave a sharp order, and drawing his long truncheon cantered forward with his men. They fell on the unfortunate bandsmen, who, hampered with their instruments, could put up no resistance and fell beneath the truncheon strokes as if pole-axed. Then the mass of the marchers behind lost their temper. They surged forward, grabbing at the truncheons and the feet of the mounted men, who became isolated and surrounded by the dense crowd. Two men disappeared from their horses, and at those points a hoarse and furious clamour arose above the general confusion, as the mob stamped and struck at something on the ground. The riderless horses reared and broke a way out through the crowd. One of them galloped round the square, skating and slipping on the smooth surface, and
disappeared
up St. Martin's Lane, where the crowd was relatively thin and fell back quickly as the frightened animal came towards it. The rest of the mounted police gradually fought their way out through the furious crowd down into
Whitehall
, where they were received into the ranks of a large body of police on foot which had now assembled to bar the way.

The crowd had tasted blood and was not to be held back. The numbers of the marchers were swollen by onlookers who found themselves infected by the mob-spirit. I saw a man near me forcing his way through the spectators, his face suffused with fury. He was cursing incoherently at the “blue bastards”; “Let me through: I'll get 'em!” he kept shouting. The bottleneck at the top of Whitehall became a confused mass of fighting men, but the police were in sufficient numbers this time, and had the advantage of organization. Their truncheons rose and fell mercilessly: one could hear from the steps of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields the sickening sound of the impact. But there was neither time nor room for quarter. At last the crowd began to give way, and those who had been bold to shout in the rear suddenly broke into hurried retreat as they saw the fighting zone approaching them. Similarly, as the leaders, engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, noticed the pressure yield behind them, they felt that they were being abandoned and fell back in their turn to find supporters. The immediate battle was over, and I, who
had been so far infected with the deadly spirit of the affair as to watch fascinated with my heart beating violently, now felt the chill of panic in the atmosphere and turned with those who stood beside me in hasty retreat. I had enough sense to leave the main streets for the by-ways running up to Covent Garden, and so escaped the headlong rout which swept up the Strand, with the mounted police, furious at the fate of their comrades, doing savage execution on the
rearmost
.

What I had seen was bad enough, but there was worse happening elsewhere in London. There was careful
generalship
behind the apparently disorderly outbreaks of the League, and the fight in Whitehall with its threat to the seat of Government was only a feint to distract the attention of the authorities. Simultaneously there were two savage outbursts against Jewry, one in Whitechapel and the other in Golders Green. In the East End armed gangs of roughs attacked the Jewish traders. Shop after shop was broken up and looted while their wretched owners were beaten, stripped naked and maltreated in various hideous ways. In Golders Green there was an organized assault on a social centre which had been started by Jewish philanthropists for the benefit of refugees during the war. After the place had been set on fire the affair developed into a manhunt, with scared old men and women as the quarry. My wife, who was out shopping in Hampstead, saw with bewilderment and horror a
pasty-faced
middle-aged Jew running full tilt down the main street with a hue and cry of Greyshirts tearing after him.

That same day Berlin, the hidden hand behind all this disorder, sent its first direct orders to Naker, and he obeyed. At midnight I was sitting by my wireless trying to collect European reactions to the doings of the day, when I suddenly heard Hamburg announcing an “important bulletin”. It was addressed to “the people of Greater Germany” and it was as follows:

“The British Government is meeting with certain difficulties in controlling Jewish-organized anarchy which has occurred in every part of the country, and it has appealed for help to the Führer and Chancellor, in accordance with the obligations assumed under Article VI of the Treaty of St. James's. Adolf Hitler, whose mission, now as ever, is the maintenance of peace and good order, has decided therefore to dispatch a limited number of picked units of the Special Police to
England
to help in the work of restoring order to that country.”

I sat motionless as the unctuous voice of the German announcer repeated his tidings, and during those seconds there
flooded in upon me a full realization of the fate that had come upon us. The Treaty had been a shock and a portent, but the imagination had shrunk from envisaging its
consequences
. The rioting and the Government crisis had strained our nerves and demanded our attention, but it had been a day-to-day anxiety and had left little time to look ahead. Now I saw that these things were but as the chill wind that blows before the tempest, which at last had burst upon us. I will not say that at that time I foresaw all the horror and humiliation which was to come, but for one moment of vision I felt like a man standing on a hilltop and watching the shadow of a cloud sweeping across the land towards him. The last light of liberty was blotted out, and before me I could see nothing but darkness and terror. So I sat, and then the firelight and the familiar room came back to me, and I went to tell my wife the news.

It is said that the first Germans arrived at dawn, by air. How many there were of them has never been disclosed. They were not unduly conspicuous; one never saw them cantering on horseback along the principal streets, or
standing
, hand on holster, in the neighbourhood of the great
railway
stations. Yet anyone who had business with the C.I.D. or was concerned with the organizing of public assemblies would be sure to observe them standing in the background, taking notes; and public figures, in politics or industry, were apt to be politely questioned by them. But the surprising thing was that, beginning almost with the day of their arrival, the rioting lost its force, became sporadic, and at last gave way to an unnatural calm. It would not be right to say that the Greyshirt movement collapsed, but it became respectable. It marched now, but did not fight. When it beat up Jews and Socialists it did so with nice selectiveness, and calculated method. The Lord Mayor of London reviewed it. It formed a guard of honour for Professor Döppelganger, the great German authority on
Henry VI, Part I
, when he visited Stratford on the Birthday. It became almost as respectable as the British Legion.

Where, then, was Patrick Rosse? Was his passionate struggle over? A few parades, a little organized and
cold-blooded
cruelty—were these the marks of a Britain reborn? It is sad to admit it, but Rosse's doubts on these points were, for the time being, swiftly set at rest. Herr Meyer, joined now by a number of equally insistent
Parteigenossen
, firmly but gently took Rosse in hand. They waved cheque-books, and at the same time made suggestions. They took him to the Savoy, where many long dreams for the future might
quiver in a golden haze of champagne—and many concessions might be granted for the immediate present. Rosse regained his self-respect in these surroundings, among the uniforms and pretty women; it was possible there to believe of
Germany
everything that Herr Meyer said; and political ideals, if they lost in precision, glowed splendidly in the distance. But the day of reckoning was coming, in his own heart, and Patrick Rosse knew it.

There were many other Meyers at work. On the day the German police arrived the B.B.C. lost its familiar voice, and gained a new one. The first news bulletin of the day
consisted
of a fulsome and rhetorical document extolling the new measure as an act of German friendship. There was no direct criticism of the British police—only a suggestion that they were at the moment overworked, and that the Germans were to act as temporary reinforcements—but citizens were urged to extend the hand of friendship towards the newcomers and to obey them implicitly. Thus, it was added, they would display the true spirit of order and discipline which was inherent in the British people but had been obscured by the “recent and unfortunate occurrences”. The whole
document
, which was read in a non-committal monotone by an obviously unregenerate announcer, resembled a “pi-jaw”
delivered
to an unruly set of children by a schoolmaster who knew his own weakness. I do not know who had compiled it, but it was the voice of all that was left of the British Government.

The newspapers also had come under an iron hand.
Comment
on the measure was conspicuously absent. My message of the previous evening to New Zealand had just escaped the news censorship, but when I arrived at the office of the cable company that afternoon I found it was in full force. There was no ineffectual Foreign Office clerk to deal with this time. I was ushered straight into the presence of a genial and competent-looking Dr. Schultz, late, I was told, of the German passport control. He spoke a fluent if Teutonic English and firmly took charge of my copy, regretting the necessity with the appropriate and entirely
ersatz
charm. Would I be so kind as to wait while he read it?