Authors: Rebecca West
But it was rarely a civilian official caught the eye in Berlin. The city belonged to the armed forces. The blockade was a state of war without the horror of death and wounds, and so the air was brilliant, for war is in fact an exhilarating sport, and it was sweetened by the comradeship which springs up among those living under a threat. For of course there was an overhanging threat, the worst of threats. There was also a great demonstration of panache, particularly among the Air Forces. They were superb and they knew it; there had in cold fact never been any feat like the airlift since the world began. On these preservers the Berliners fondly directed a gaze which often seemed so fond as to be frivolous. They talked of the generals as if they were film stars, praising their handsomeness, their look of health, their disciplined bearing, their good manners, the neatness of their uniforms. But that showed only that people in dread of extinction recognize the qualities which make for survival. It is written in the Book of Judges that the Lord bade Gideon send his ten thousand men down to the fountain of Harad, and dismiss to their homes all those that knelt down on the shore and bent their mouths to the water, and to keep with him all those who lapped the water from their hands, for with such men he could conquer the hosts of Midian; and though he found but three hundred of such men among ten thousand, they brought him victory. The Berliners were seeking for like evidence of deliberation and delicacy.
The lot of the generals was often such that it was hard for them to present the imperturbability proper to idols. The American commandant of the city was one General Howley, an advertising man from Philadelphia, a robust character given to horseback-riding, with a fine record in show jumping. His quality can be deduced from a passage in the reports of the Kommandatura proceedings for July 1, 1948. Colonel Kalinin, the Soviet Chief of Staff, told the representatives of the Allies that the Soviet Union would take no further part in the meetings, at any level, of the Kommandatura. He gave two reasons, one of which was the Western Allies’ introduction into Berlin of the new Western currency, and the other was the behaviour of General Howley at the previous meeting. This was really startling. The British authorities coldly stated that they could not accept a verbal announcement by a Soviet staff officer as terminating the quadripartite government of Berlin. Search in the Minutes shows what it was that Colonel Howley had done to cause a Soviet staff officer to blaspheme against the name of Potsdam. It appeared that after the Russians had dragged out a discussion on administrative details for some hours, as was their wont, General Howley had risen and stated that his deputy would take over, as he was leaving because he was tired. At that the whole Soviet delegation had rushed out of the hall in a rage, and that was natural enough. One had only to look at General Howley to see that he had never felt tired in his life. The Russians had every reason to resent an attempt to make them believe any statement so palpably false.
One morning this hearty soul sat in his office and described to some visitors how, a few days before, he had settled the railway strike. This was indeed a feather in his cap. It could have been no easy triumph. Once the strike was ended the Russians would have no excuse for stopping the trains on the line between Western Germany and Berlin, so the blockade would be broken; and the settlement had involved negotiations on the delicate matter of currency. The Soviet Union had refused to cooperate with the Allies in the new currency reform, because they liked having a depreciated mark in their own Zone and in their Berlin Sector, as it meant a cheap market where they could buy for Russia. They were also aggrieved because the currency reform had dismantled a financial structure from which they derived extraordinary benefits, owing to certain fantastic arrangements made by the United States Treasury at the end of the war. They were now paying all the Berliners who worked in their sector in their depreciated mark, which was worth something like a quarter of the new reformed mark. But many of these workers lived in the Allies’ Sector and had to pay out Western marks for their rent and all goods except those they could carry home from the Soviet Sector. This cut down their real wages to something between a quarter and three-quarters of their nominal wages. This was the real reason why the railway workers struck, though rebellion was manifestly dangerous, since over three thousand Berliners were known to have been kidnapped by the Russians. They had even surged into the Tempelhof Station and attacked General Kvashnin, the transport chief, which made the Soviet authorities very angry indeed.
But General Howley, who was the kind of man who greets the seen with a cheer, whatever it may be, had advanced on this tangled situation and set it to rights. After hours of negotiation with General Kvashnin he had got him to accept the compromise plan which gave the railway workers sixty per cent of their wages in Western currency and promised them freedom from victimization. The Allies had put these terms to the strikers, making no secret of their eagerness that they should accept the terms and go back to work and end the blockade, and there was to be a ballot the next day. General Howley told us comfortably that he knew how the railway workers would be voting, and yawned. He had risen early for a ride and was now pleasantly relaxed, and he began to talk of horses, and how he had competed against the Russians in jumping events, and what decent fellows they were when they got a chance to be themselves and were not jerking about at the end of a string that stretched to Moscow. The telephone buzzed, and he put the receiver to his ear, and it was proved that when people are astonished they really do open their mouths and forget to shut them. “Why, no,” he presently told the man on the line, “I don’t have any confirmation in writing. I guess I just accepted his word as an officer.” The Soviet-licensed news agency had issued a denial that there had been any negotiations of an official character and that the Soviet Military Government had made any specific promises of the sort on which General Howley had based his appeal to the railway strikers to return to work. Already the railway union was sending out a whip to instruct their members to vote for a continuance of the strike.
A man who has been the victim of such a trick feels that he looks a fool, and General Howley obviously felt just that. But he need have nourished no such fear. All his visitors thought he took the blow stoutly, and the two Britons among them were enthralled at seeing a moment of historic drama, which they had seen performed once before, now re-enacted by a different player. On March 17, 1938, they had turned on the radio and heard Neville Chamberlain shrilling and choking with anger because he had had news that Hitler had broken faith with him and sent his troops into Czechoslovakia. The Chamberlains were typical of the industrial bourgeoisie that had risen to political power during the nineteenth century, and he had brought to the office of Prime Minister the outlook of a respectable businessman accustomed to deal with businessmen of the same order. When a managing director finds that his firm is being inconvenienced by the operations of another firm, he and his colleagues will think it natural for him to meet his opposite number in the other firm and work out a compromise with him, giving way on some points and claiming concessions of at least equal value. If both firms are of good standing there is no reason to fear that the bargain will not be kept, for both have every reason to wish that their reputations should shine unblemished before their customers, their suppliers, and their banks, and indeed the whole community, since the credit system makes it advisable to leave a favourable impression on as many people as possible. So there was not a thing to worry about after such a meeting, except that one would not like to forget to send a box of cigars or a case of sherry as a Christmas gift. The Nazi rape of Czechoslovakia horrified Neville Chamberlain, not because he felt any tenderness towards the Czechs, whose representatives he continued to treat with the same coldness and discourtesy he had always shown them, but because he found that the world had changed around him, and he had been doing business with people who did not keep their word, because they did not mind whether they were thought honourable or not, and could not be made to suffer for it, since they were living outside the credit system. He raged at the destruction of his world.
So too did this younger man in his Berlin office. It must be granted that he was an advertising man, and copywriting is often metaphysical; it celebrates not the imperfect article that actually exists and is being vended, but the
universalium ante rem,
the article as it was in the mind of God before it existed. But an advertising firm of repute must keep faith with its clients, its staff, its stockholders, its bank. The general looked like a bewildered boy as it dawned on him that there were men he knew, men against whom he competed in the show ring, men who were his opposite numbers in the highest ranks of an imposing military hierarchy organized to meet a vital historic moment, who did not keep faith. It also was breaking on him, as it had broken on Neville Chamberlain, that the ground was not solid beneath his feet, that it is impossible for society to survive if the mass of men cannot be trusted to abide by their word. He must have known this with his mind for quite some time, but as he sat there, grasping the telephone and taking in its odious message, he was realizing it with his veins and his pulse and his sweat glands.
But he turned back to his work, and the Western commandants were soon hurrying about Berlin, trying to get the Soviet authorities to withdraw their repudiation of the settlement terms and issuing appeals to the German railway workers to vote for a return to work under a guarantee that the Western Allies would get them some form of satisfactory settlement. General Howley made a statement in which there was manifested both handsomeness of spirit and shrewdness: he gave it as his opinion that had matters been left to his brother-officer General Kvashnin, the settlement he had arranged with him would have stood, and implied that it was Moscow that had upset it.
And, indeed, it had been upset. The result of the ballot was as had been foreseen. Two thousand of the railwaymen voted for a return to work, twelve thousand were against it. The British commandant, General Bourne, had then to take over the negotiations, and these dragged on for weeks, because even after the Russians agreed to a settlement they kept on failing to implement it. But terms of that settlement were very much the same as those proposed by General Howley. Moscow gained nothing by cheating him of his triumph except a delay, which forced the City of Berlin to go on and on paying out unemployment benefit till it could see the bottom of the treasury till. But this financial victimization could not greatly impress the Berliners, who knew from the airlift that the Western Allies were willing to spend unlimited money on them. What was needed to further Soviet interests in the city at that moment was an act of generosity, not an irritating infliction of an unjust fine; for a common resentment against such ill-natured futilities drew together the representatives of the Western Allies in Berlin. But it is doubtful if it drew together their countries. A large majority of the British high command in the city were professional soldiers, who were to stay in the army for years to come; but the proportion was much lower among their American comrades, who were therefore likely to go home and become civilians at any moment. Hence it was soon true that there were a number of civilians in the United States, all free to engage in political activity, who on a basis of personal experience disliked and distrusted the Soviet government, while Englishmen who had suffered the same experience formed a small and detached group, who were expressly forbidden to take part in politics, and who probably continued to serve abroad. This is one among the elements which, from time to time, have produced divergencies in American and British public opinion.
Never has an occupying force had a higher regard for the people of the territory it occupied. The Western Allies realized quite well that it was not for them to perform the feat which Napoleon described as the one thing an army could not do; they were not sitting on their bayonets. They were sitting on the ballot boxes, which, at the last election, Berliners had stuffed with votes against communism and for social democracy. They admired this action as all human beings admire the actions of others which promote their interests; but they felt another form of admiration which was less facile and more idealistic than this. They were soldiers in an age of war, and, as they had had to run the risk of being killed much more often than they liked, they were aware how attractive life seems when there is a risk of losing it. They therefore deeply respected their former enemies for making this declaration of independence when they were wholly encircled by Soviet territory. They knew quite well that the prime motive of Berlin’s resistance was self-interest: that the Berliners knew that the first results of surrender to the Soviet Union would be an apocalyptic purge, the imprisonment and disappearance of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, and then a long descent into the depreciated existence, compact of lower feeding and underclothing and drabness and fear of arrest and deportation, which the Eastern Zone and the satellite states had all suffered and were still suffering. But this self-interest was taking such risks that it was hardly possible to call it by that name any more. Had Berlin fallen into the hands of the Russians, every day of its resistance would have been counted a reason for the infliction of further punishment. Every Berliner was staking his personal fate on the safety of the city, and was day by day, if he were an active and conspicuous person, sending his sentence up from three years to seven years, to ten years, to life, to capital punishment; and were he obscure he was sending down his bread ration. And the Berliners were not gambling on a certainty. To them the victory of the Western Allies seemed far less assured than was believed in London or New York.