Authors: Christopher Serpell
St. Mary’s, we understood him to say, had been one of the most richly endowed colleges of the university. But where
had this wealth come from? It had been drained ruthlessly from the rich estates which the college owned. What had a place of learning to do with such wealth and such land? he asked, and answered himself firmly: Nothing. “Such gold”, he said, “was for no useful purpose. It was as you say the idle talent, and much good was left undone through the avarice of the collegers. This have I changed. This gold, this land has St. Mary to the Führer dedicated, and it shall from now for the good of all, not of a few, be utilized.” He paused for the applause which was given with enthusiasm by the German members of his audience and more tepidly by some of the others. “Now”, he continued with gusto, “it shall be the duty of the former student his Alma Mater to support. You, gentlemen, vill haf that privilege.” His spectacles flashed in the candlelight as he beamed round the hall. In a little while, we were told, the Bursar, Professor Hoffstein, would come round with blank cheque forms. On these we would write what we would gladly give towards the annual support of the foundation. “Nor let the sum be insignificant,” the Warden boomed. “Ve Germans haf the quality of free-handed gifting, and the miser is not by us beloved.”
There was an uncomfortable stir as he concluded. Everyone was calculating how much and how little he could give to avert the wrath to come. I had decided that, miser or no miser, two hundred marks was my limit. They could not expect much more from a journalist. As I sat waiting for the Bursar to reach me on his round I suddenly caught sight of a familiar and friendly face. What is more, it was smiling at me, and that, on such an evening, was an event in itself. It was the face of David Grant, a red-haired Scot from
Aberdeen
. I had not seen him since the night when, our finals over and celebrated, he had cornered me after dinner and delivered a lecture on the predestined damnation of all who turned their mother-tongue into a course for study—an offence of which I had been guilty. He had been a scientist, and was going on, I understood, to a specialized course in agriculture, “in order to teach the misguided peasantry of this degenerate land how to make a proper use of the earth they till”. I had not seen him from that ribald night to this.
When we were released from our ordeal in the hall he came over to me. “You’ll come round to my rooms?” he asked. “I have a modicum of whisky there, and we’ll just get the taste of this collation out of our mouths.” It was with difficulty that I refrained from looking over my shoulder, and he saw my movement. “Ah well,” he said, smiling, “we will rather continue the conviviality which has been so
remarkable
a feature of the evening so far. Allow me to introduce you to Professor Leitch, now of Edinburgh, and a distinguished member of this college long before you or I set foot in it.” I shook hands with a little, lame man whom I had scarcely noticed behind David’s burly shoulder. He looked up at me as I was introduced, and with that
movement
ceased to be insignificant. He had the bluest and most brilliant eyes that I have ever seen in any man, and they held mine in a steady and appraising examination. He said very little, and when we were presently seated round the fire it was David who did the talking. At least I thought it was, but I gradually realized that I was being led on to express my own opinions with more freedom than I had for months. I stopped abruptly, cursing myself for the folly of giving myself away to two strangers. There was a moment’s silence, and then the old professor, who had been gazing into the fire, spoke without looking at me. He had a low, clear and rather beautiful voice and its very sound was reassuring.
“You need have no fear, Mr. Fenton,” he said. “David here has been cross-examining you a wee bit stringently, but he’s no informer. Neither am I. This hip of mine was smashed in Dalkeith camp last July.”
I murmured some sort of disclaimer and apology, but he continued:
“You do right to be fearful. There’s no security in idle talk these days. But David’s talk was not idle. He was as anxious to find how you looked at things, as you were to know his purpose, when you realized which way the talk was leading. But I fancy there’s three honest men met together for once.” He looked round at me with a warm smile, and the last of my fears vanished.
Then the talk continued in real earnest. They were both, I learnt, agricultural specialists, and as such respected and valued by the German authorities, who saw the importance of making full use of the soil of their new possession. “We’ve got something they want, do you see?” said David with a grin, “and unfortunately for them it’s not confiscatable. They’ve found no way yet of grafting a good Scots brain into a
Prussian
headpiece.” The professor’s sojourn in a concentration camp had been due to false information laid by a German student at their research station, who planned by this means to be given the directorship. He got his wish, but he very soon found that the presence of the professor was
indispensable
to the work, and had him released to serve in a subordinate capacity. “But the new director’s not so
comfortable
as he thought to be,” remarked David. “We don’t give him any handle; boys at the station are not demonstrative, but they have a quiet way of making him feel himself
superfluous
.”
That, I learnt, was generally the position of the Germans in Scotland. Except for a few outbursts in the big cities, which were repressed by typical methods during the Terror, Scotland had met the invasion with a dour silence which was by no means acceptance. Brutality had been met with a
stubborn
power to endure injustice and injury. The fulsome
outpourings
of the German “cultural front” on the close
relationship
between the Scottish and the German cultures had been snubbed with a stony glare and a devastating silence. “There was a havering body”, commented David, “that told me the Germans had the same word for kirk as we had. I asked him what they used it for in Germany nowadays.” “That was very foolish of you, David,” said Professor Leitch mildly, and I noticed that David turned a fiery red. He had a great respect for the little man.
From Scotland, the conversation turned to Ireland, where David Grant had been sent a month before to give a course of lectures at Dublin University. “There’s trouble brewing there, all right,” he said. “They were fine and pleased when they saw their Saxon oppressor put under the yoke, and heard that the Northern counties were to be restored to them, but they are piping a different tune now that the republic has been put down and there’s a German governor in its place.” There were still no open signs of trouble, he told us, but the Germans, with a sublime failure to realize the Irish character, were adopting the very methods of control which we had used so disastrously in the past. “What’s the good of shooting a dozen Irishmen?” he asked. “You’ve only created a dozen martyrs in the sacred cause of Irish freedom, and you’ve inspired a hundred others with the ambition to be shot in similar glorious circumstances. What is more,” he added, “I did hear that a long-legged, red-headed fellow called Rosse was on the run in the hills of Connemara. I wonder, would that be the fellow who we used to hear of in the Greyshirts?”
I wondered too. The miserable fate of most of the
Greyshirt
old guard had been published during the Terror. They were shot out of hand as responsible for civil disturbance. But Rosse’s name had disappeared abruptly from the news as soon as he had refused the command of the reorganized Grey Army. Till then I had supposed he had perished in obscurity.
Gradually the conversation languished. Professor Leitch
had fallen silent again, and a mood of depression came over me as I contrasted the stubbornness of the Scots and the fiery resentment of the Irish with what seemed to me the spiritless resignation of the English. The professor seemed to divine my thoughts. He looked at me again with that strangely direct gaze of his, and said:
“We are in the shadows, Mr. Fenton, and they will get darker yet. You are a spectator of our plight, and, as a New Zealander, a member of a young and vigorous people, it may be that you judge this old country a little hardly. Soon, and sooner perhaps than you think, you will go back to your own place, and the best thing you can then do is to tell your countrymen how this horror came about. But tell them too that honesty and justice and truth die hard, and that there may yet be a dawn in our darkness. David and I are among the watchers for that dawn.”
Those were the words that inspired this book. We are still waiting for the dawn he spoke of, but I went to my bed that evening strangely comforted.
H
ITLER’S
star shot onwards and upwards. He was supreme in Europe—France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Balkans, his former partner, Italy, were all his vassals.
Without
firing a shot he drove the Russians out of their part of Poland and turned Constantinople into a “free German city”. India had dissolved into anarchy, and he thought of dispatching a force thither to establish a German
Raj
; in any case, the path to the East was open to him when he chose to take it. The logic of events was hurrying him on to the biggest conquest of all, upon which the others
depended
. Speed and audacity were still his watchword, and it was unsafe to lose momentum. Across the Atlantic lay the New World,
Unser Amerika,
the finest
Lebensraum
of all.
The day after Hitler had entered London it had been learnt with little surprise that the United States Fleet was
holding manoeuvres along the Atlantic seaboard. There is little need to recapitulate for my readers the dramatic and urgent diplomacy of the following few days. It is enough to record that by the end of the week, not only Canada but Australia and our own New Zealand, at the invitation of the Government of the United States, had freely consented to become “temporary American Protectorates”. South Africa was, of course, another matter. The long arm of American protection could not be extended so far, and the German subjugation of Britain was hailed with delight by the
Nationalist
Government of that new republic. Their triumph was
short-lived
. The German Colonial Army, so long prepared for its task, had arrived at the Cape with lightning speed. The destruction of the pitifully small naval force left in those waters by the defunct Evans Government was accomplished without much difficulty, and is still celebrated by Germany under the resounding title of the “Battle for the South Atlantic”. There was no organized land force left to oppose the German landing, and within a very few days the independent South African Republic had been replaced by a German Governor and an administration which differed only from the new régime in Britain in the fact that it was largely
composed
of Germans from Tanganyika. An abortive native rising was crushed with bloodshed which horrified even the troops who inflicted it.
So now it was the Far East and the Far West which had coalesced to prevent Nazidom from sweeping round the world. With pathetic satisfaction we in London kept reminding
ourselves
that the great British base at Singapore remained intact, its strength augmented, indeed, by large reinforcements from that Indian Army whose European personnel had no title to remain when the Paramount Power they represented had been brought low. British Malaya presented the strange spectacle of a British possession functioning without a
possessor
. The unimpaired integrity of this great military and naval bastion in the Far East had a valuable effect in
influencing
the policy of Japan, and the American Government lent it all possible support for this very reason. The war in China went on, but without affecting the Japanese determination to stop at nothing to exclude the German power from the Pacific. But the key to all was the New World, and particularly that great sentimental, mercantile, Puritan, childlike Power that looked with increasing alarm at Europe from the Capitol and the White House.
It soon became clear that all the resources of Great Britain and her colonies were to be wrung for the last and most
ghastly struggle. Standards of living were to be forced down to the limits of human endurance. France was to be dragged in, Italy also; the ships of four navies were to be used to set the foot of Colossus across the ocean.
Only gradually did the British people, in the midst of their suffering, come to realize the stupendous irony of this
situation
. It had been peace with dishonour, followed by every ounce of the misery which dishonour deserved. Now it was to be war again, and the worst war of all—a war which could only be fought to the bitter end, even if civilization was indeed destroyed in the process. And into that war Great Britain was to be flung helplessly—on the wrong side.
The voice of Hitler thundered from a mighty tribune on the Crystal Palace site. He began calmly, laying just claim to the efficiency with which Britain had been turned into a disciplined and totalitarian State. What he said about the reorganization of industry and finance on the basis of one great Reich stretching from the Vistula to the Atlantic was impressive enough, for he was careful not to express it in terms of human suffering. He did not speak vindictively; he seemed to accept Britannia in that Nordic Family of Nations. Then he had a scornful word for the Jews, and said he knew where they had gone. They had gone to spread their poison in that unhappy country to which all the scum of the democracies had drifted, the United States of America. But in America there were millions of good Germans too, who had preserved themselves from pollution, and were awaiting the day when the blessings of National Socialism would be theirs also, and the Old World would redress the balance of the New. The world could not afford the strange duality which it exhibited to-day—strength, discipline, comradeship on one side of the Atlantic; weakness, confusion, enmity on the other. Frankly, the situation was intolerable. He, the Führer, bore on his shoulders the crushing responsibility for the happiness and security of the peoples of Europe. Should his work be brought to nothing through the schemes of little cliques of politicians who had fraudulently climbed to power in Washington, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires?
“I have just this to say to you, Mr. so-called President of the United States. Set your house in order, learn the lesson of Europe, cease the harrowing of five million Germans the latchets of whose shoes you are unworthy to unloose. I ask you to tell me—where is Schuschnigg, where is Benesh, where is Beck, where is Churchill? If you dare to oppose yourself to me—me!—their fate will be yours.”
I was sitting next to the same American who had spoken
so airily of that long-ago Treaty of St. James’s. “Packing off home?” I asked. “You bet,” he said, “and you will if you are wise.”
Next day, it will be remembered, Japan began staff talks with the countries of the Pan-American Union. A cable from my paper invited me to return home the moment I thought it wise; but I knew that the Nazis were not ready for war immediately, and I did not wish to forsake prematurely my unhappy English friends. In my own mind, I gave myself another month in England.
It was late October, and an Indian summer reigned. At least Elizabeth and I must pay another visit to Ashdene Cottage before we left; and we resolved to take train for Debenford that very week-end. I say we resolved to do so, but to put our resolution into effect was another matter. By that time, travel about England, except on recognized
business
, was forbidden without a special pass, only to be obtained by submitting to a long cross-examination by a Nazi official and smuggling under the table a substantial bribe. When we reached the Bureau of Communications we found it full of Americans who had come over to Europe on a conducted tour arranged by the Nazis, and now wished to return on the first boat. Elizabeth wondered how many of them had read
It Can’t Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis.
We got our passes at last. The official made many
difficulties
when he discovered who I was, but I slipped him a ten-mark note. The journey, which we made next day, was slow and uncomfortable, for the resources of the railways were by then almost entirely devoted to military purposes. An S.S. man patrolled the corridor, his sinister silhouette moving regularly across the panorama of the Essex countryside.
Debenford seemed surprisingly unchanged; it was like any other autumn there, and our friends were glad to confirm the impression. “We have a great achievement to report,” said Gerald, with a kind of strained cheerfulness. “We have learnt the art of living our own lives. We have forgotten all about politics.”
In the white drawing-room, at tea, the scene was magically refreshing. Outside, the reddening trees, the Michaelmas daisies, the great low October sun; within, old friendliness and an English domestic dignity inherited from two centuries ago. The firelight gleamed on the cabinet of Yarmouth pottery and the silken bell-pull; on a small and exquisite Crome; on a whole interior so just and right that one felt at once that it was bound to survive even the struggle of the Titans across the wide Atlantic.
“Of course you have forgotten politics,” I said. “What meaning have they here?”
Gerald and Celia Cooke were lucky people. Their income, modest but adequate, came from land, and, as the Nazis were a long way yet from putting into the effect the
smallholding
policy they had so loudly proclaimed, I imagined that they were as secure economically as one could well be in those days. It really did seem that history had passed them by, or was preserving them to take their due places in the old, lost world which one day, incredibly, would be pieced together again.
We chattered cheerfully, in this beautiful vacuum, and we never mentioned Hitler. Then Elizabeth said that we poor harassed ones wanted to know all about country life.
“Well, of course,” said Celia, “we live very quietly now. There is to be no hunting this year—we couldn’t afford it in any case; and, well, there isn’t really much company,
everybody
seems to have gone.”
She paused, and a look of sadness came over her face. We guessed what tragedies were summed up in those words, “Everybody seems to have gone.” But she added: “We should hate to go. Who would wish to leave Debenford,
anyway
?”
“Who, indeed?” I said. “And it doesn’t seem to have altered at all. Especially your garden. What a treasure Ellis is!”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” put in Gerald. “We do all our own gardening now. It’s—it’s rather fun.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Ellis was with you a long time,” murmured Elizabeth.
“With the family, forty years,” said Gerald. “It is very sad.”
“Well, these are hard times for all of us,” I said, tritely.
“Yes, but we didn’t sack him. He’s gone away. I think he’s at Godalming.”
“Godalming? Not——”
“Yes. Godalming concentration camp, where Winston Churchill is. It’s dreadful. He was very foolish. He used to talk too much down at the ‘Rose Revived’. I warned him over and over again. Of course, he was no danger to the Nazis or anyone else. He was just a nuisance. But when our Small Paddock was commandeered for a rifle range he made some solemn protest, such as spitting at a picture of Hitler. Then they decided he needed a little ‘political education’, and took him away.”
“But couldn’t you stop them? Couldn’t you explain that
he was a silly old fool, and that you would make yourself responsible for him, or something?”
“Well, I made representations, of course. I went to Ipswich, But you know what it is. People like us don’t have much influence nowadays.”
“True. And have you heard from Ellis since?”
“No. That was six weeks ago and we have heard nothing. He was seventy-three, poor old chap. I often wonder … Of course I pay a kind of pension to his widow—to Mrs. Ellis.”
The firelight danced on—in the beautiful vacuum.
“How are those two dear old ladies in the Council cottages whom you were visiting when we were here last?” asked Elizabeth. “Have they recovered from their arthritis, or whatever it was?”
“Yes, I hear they’re nearly well again,” said Celia, “but of course we don’t visit them now.”
“You don’t visit them?”
“Why, no. Our local Commissioner is most strict on the point. No sick visiting except by the incumbent of the parish and the Authorized Sick Visitor. The Authorized Sick Visitor is Mrs. Bradshaw, whose bedside manner is atrocious. But who knows what Vile stratagem an unofficial person like me might not be hatching in the bedroom of two dear old ladies in a Council cottage?”
Celia laughed mirthlessly at this comic restriction,
A moment later I said to Gerald:
“What about that project of yours for removing the
whitewash
in the church and looking for wall-paintings? Have you started yet?”
“No,” he said.
“You don’t mean to tell me that the Germans have
forbidden
that too?”
“Oh, no. They’ve raised no objection. But I haven’t done anything about it.”
Then the dressing bell rang.
It was not, as you may gather, a very successful week-end. Captain von Krausnitz, from the camp on Sutton Walks, came to dinner that night, more or less uninvited, and he had somehow lost his early tact. Little by little the desolation that had descended upon this remote and innocent village was revealed to us. A closer investigation showed that the sullen passivity of a hard-exploited peasant community had settled behind its trim hedges and rose-arbours. The marketing
restrictions
had hit the place very hard. The farmers were bankrupt and the labourers could hardly live on their wage.
Tyranny had stalked through the lanes like Death, striking where he would—here a village Hampden, like Ellis, sent to the tortures of Godalming or Haworth, there a group of day-labourers, given fifteen minutes to pack their belongings and kiss their wives and children before leaving to help with the harvest in Poland, elsewhere a pretty girl, seduced,
without
redress, by a drunken S.S. man.
Gerald Cooke had once been public-spirited. He had once been very sensitive to others’ suffering. He had served on a dozen local committees, and had flown into a rage if the rent of an old woman’s cottage had needlessly been raised by threepence a week. Now he could speak casually of the worst cruelties, and pretend not to be interested in the politics which excluded him from any influence in his village and turned it into a vale of tears. But those who have lived in England since the Captivity will understand.