Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  18 March 1941. Garnons.

  There are about twenty Canadian officers here mostly recuperating from pneumonia or bronchitis. The place is presided over by a big-boned, big-bosomed old woman – a sort of a Hindenburg of a woman. Apparently she is proving somewhat stiff-necked and cantankerous. In perpetual attendance on her is a Canadian girl brought up here and on the continent. There does not seem to be much point about her. She is sulky and introspective but not enough to be farouche.

  The masseur employed here was talking to me about the Canadian officers today. “They are all the same, same opinions, same swearwords. They are not interesting men in themselves, but I have only met two since I have been here who I would not be quite happy to serve under in the front line. What I foresee in Canada is an aristocracy beginning to grow up there. You will have aristocrats – the grandsons of the Eatons, Masseys, Flavelles, and the other millionaires.” Of course he is dead wrong. There is no aristocratic principle alive in Canada and you will not make it by a few rich men mimicking English lords.

  In 1815 Russia was in some ways in relation to Europe what Canada is now, a new country with a deep feeling that the future belonged to her. The Russian officers quartered in France during the occupation soaked up so much of the “spirit of the age” that when they went home to Russia they kept the Secret Police busy for a generation with their dangerous new ideas. Now England is in the midst of a social revolution and the continent is in travail with new forms of political and economic organization. How much of this penetrates to our Canadian officers? So far as I can see, nothing whatsoever; they still think in terms of the last war. To them this is just another war against Germany – Hitler instead of the Kaiser.

  As for the Englishman, he looks upon the Canadians as an army of friendly barbarians who for some incomprehensible reason have come to protect him from his enemies.

  The Royal Tour in Canada was the occasion for an overpowering manifestation on the part of at any rate some Canadians of a deep yearning towards the mother country. (England never thinks of herself as a mother country nor is the phrase ever heard here.) Above all the whole Tour was an example of the English genius for making use of people – a genius so highly developed in both their political and private lives.

  28 March 1941.

  1. Plutodemocracy is finished as a form of government.

  2. The small national sovereign state is finished.

  3. American culture based on optimism and the perfectibility of man through technical progress and education has had the bottom of it knocked out.

  4. It follows from all this that we are groping for a new organization and a new expression for our faith in the dignity of our destiny. After this war there will be no let-down into materialism. There will be another Age of Faith.

  29 March 1941.

  I am sick of my present hectic life – the work, the miscellaneous loveless affairs, and the mixed drinks. I wish I lived in a small provincial town and spent the evenings reading aloud the Victorian novelists to my wife and my adoring daughters.

  1 April 1941.

  The Queen came to tea with the Masseys the other day. Acute suspense among those invited (only seven or eight). Each was to be presented, each wished to show that this was not at all weighing on his spirits, each was hagridden by the thought that through some mischance he or she would not be presented. Mrs. Massey would forget them or the Queen would get tired and want to go home before it came to their turn. I was led in with the other Secretaries – we sat down in front of a blazing fire in a circle around her. She sat very upright and talked to us in her sweetly modulated gentle voice. Yes, the charm is there all right, fabulous charm! You wonder, “Is it done with mirrors?” To see that familiar postage stamp face, those gestures of the hands known to millions, that smile that moves strong men to tears, and what is behind it all? Intelligence, enormous control. She was tired by the time she got to us, but the timing of her departure, the unhurried certainty of her going, the faint regret that tiresome things made it necessary not to go on talking forever to three Secretaries at Canada House. No, it was a perfect performance.

  16 April 1941.

  Tonight is, I think from the war point of view, a new low. There is another of these infernal, eternal blitzes going on. The sky is crimson again from another great fire, this time in the direction of Victoria – planes are overhead all the time. The Irish porter has just come in to tell me that there is light showing from my window and I have been up on the roof with him watching the flares – great clumps of them – “They’re beautiful,” he says, “though for such a bad purpose, you have to admit they are beautiful. Why, the sky is lit up like a ballroom.” He is right – they are like chandeliers suspended from heaven. All the same this raid has got me scared for the first time in months. I feel like going downstairs to the shelter, but that is a thing I have not done yet. There are guns firing next door in Grosvenor Square and bits of shrapnel crackling down into the wall of the courtyard outside my window.

  I saw in the paper the other day a letter recovered from a bombed house from a girl to her sweetheart describing a raid play-by-play and ending, “I am writing this under the table, the planes seem to be getting nearer and nearer. They seem almost in the room with us now …” There the letter stopped. It was found a few yards from the girl’s body.

  There were two explosions then which shook this building considerably – it swayed each time and the blast has made my eardrums feel as they do when one is going up fast in a lift. I do not suppose there is much point in my going downstairs – if the building collapsed it would collapse on top of us. Besides, shelter conversation is insufferable – everyone standing about nervously making jokes. It seems at moments as though the Battle of Britain were being fought just above my bedroom. Someone is whistling tranquilly in the street outside as though it were an ordinary spring evening and he was strolling back with his girl on his arm from an evening in the park or at the cinema. Will there ever be such evenings again? But when other people say that we cannot win the war I immediately begin to preach optimism and victory. Bathos – but the universal bathos of people in all countries at war.

  Virginia Woolf’s house – Bloomsbury – has been bombed.

  Someone was describing it the other day – the frescoes by her sister Vanessa Bell, the book-lined sitting-room where Lytton Strachey and Virginia conducted conversation in the twenties. Now the house is gone, and she has committed suicide because she thought that a mental derangement she had suffered from before was coming back on her again. A fear far worse than the fear of any bombs. For she found it so insufferable that she drowned herself in the peaceful countryside while we in London cling hard to life among the bombs.

  What is meant by the collapse of civilization? It means that we are glad when we hear that Berlin is getting the same bombing we are. It means that when I said I was sorry that our bombers had hit Frederick the Great’s palace at Potsdam, someone replied, “I cannot say I share that sentiment. I should like all their beautiful and historic places to be destroyed.” It means the Italians being prepared (if that story is true) to bomb the Vatican themselves and then put the blame on us.

  The unending tale of death and destruction goes on piling up all over the world. And it is too much. General Franco (the Christian Catholic knight) makes a speech saying there is no such thing as peace – all peace is simply the period of preparation for the next war. I should say that war-weariness will soon show itself among all the peoples of the world. That is a thing which has not yet happened. Perhaps it has not yet begun to happen in Germany. I do not know. It is a feeling that takes a long time to assert itself in practical or political form.

  Perhaps we are entering a new phase in which war no longer seems a titanic struggle between rival systems and nations, no longer seems even tragic nor glorious, but just an intolerable burden, a bloody pointless waste.

  The grass is green at last in St. James’s Park, but the gates are locked and one is not allowed in
because it is full of time-bombs. I look through the railings at the deserted paths and lawns. Even the ducks seem to have been moved away.

  I think of those Australians in that hell in Greece being bombed by planes that outnumber them three to one and by tanks that outnumber them three to one and by armies that outnumber them God knows how many times. It is like the feeling we had last year over Dunkirk and again Norway – the feeling of waste and impotent rage, the feeling that one has no right and very little desire to be alive when better men are lying dead by the hundreds.

  The above gloomy entries in my diary have done me some good. It is better that I should pour all this stuff out in a private diary – than after a drink or two begin to talk like this to my friends or write it in letters. There is much self-pity here, mixed with the higher forms of gloom. My own vitality seems to have given out.

  21 April 1941.

  An Edwardian period piece is Maggie Greville whose luncheons in Charles Street have been famous for at least thirty years. She was the daughter of a Scottish millionaire and possessed by that energetic worldliness which pushes the lowland Scot so far up the English social ladder. Just as whenever in England you meet with a genuine interest in the arts you may suspect Jewish blood, so whenever you meet with respect for the human intelligence you may guess that there is a lowland Scot about. Mrs. Greville is very old, lame, halfblind, and has as she says, “everything wrong with her except leprosy,” but she still puts on a great act, and cabinet ministers still ring her up and ask if they may drop in and spend an evening with her in her room at the Mayfair Hotel. “My husband,” she told us, “was in the Grenadier Guards. We had been married two years and were very happy together, but I could not bear army society, so I said ‘If you must stay in the regiment I’ll have to go away with somebody else and begin over again. These people are intolerable.’ ” He left the army and thus began her social career in London. She talked of her interviews with Hitler, who evidently had charmed her by taking the trouble to talk to her quietly and intelligibly. Someone asked, “Didn’t you find him appallingly – well – common?” “Not at all – one doesn’t notice that with a great man – now Mussolini, yes, the only great man I have ever known who was truly pompous.” I liked her story of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt saying to her at the time when New York was talking about the dangers of communism, “If the revolution comes in America, Neely (her husband) and I will go first – like Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette.”

  How the English hate being rescued by the Americans. They know they must swallow it, but God how it sticks in their throats. The Americans are thoroughly justified in their suspicions of the English, and the English I think are justified in their belief that they are superior to the Americans. They have still the steadiness, stoicism, and self-discipline that make for a ruling race, but what will these qualities avail them if the tide of history and economics has turned against them? How will the volatile, generous, imaginative, spoiled, and impatient Americans manage city populations in the after-war world?

  24 April 1941.

  Mr. Massey has said to me that he would not like to think that the National Archives contained no account from this post of affairs in this country during the greatest war in history. I quite agree, but how is one to report anything which does not appear in the propaganda press when he exercises a censorship over everything which could be considered critical of England? He fears that anything critical might weaken the purpose of our people at home. But we are in too deep to get out, and surely our people have the right to know what is going on and read things which, if they were over here, they would hear from half the Englishmen they met in the clubs. He has an unrivalled opportunity to compile a secret history of the conduct of the war – to illustrate it with social anecdotes and personal impressions of men. But he is too patriotic ever to publish anything that could be considered critical, and what is worse he is too blinded by wishful thinking ever to face the conclusions even when he is alone with his confessional diary before him. Some day he will publish his memoirs. In fact he is looking forward to doing so – but they will be composed in the prose he loves best – that of a Times leading article. It is a pity, because he has in conversation the vivacity of phrase to produce a vivid, if superficial, account of the London scene. Alas, his reverence is too much for him.

  28 April 1941.

  I am thinking not in military terms but in social and historical terms. The ruling class in this country has nothing to gain from victory. The loyalty of the ruling class is not open to doubt. They will die for England and will let themselves be bled white for England. They are Englishmen before they are capitalists or landlords (unlike the same class in France). But the fact remains that if the war continues for some years, as it must if we are to obtain the victory, they will be ruined financially and in the event of a British victory they face – not the return of the status quo – but the completion of a bloodless, social revolution which will deprive them of all their privileges and bring about the destruction of all the things they hold dear. The reverse is true in Germany where the leaders know that victory means not only the triumph of the Reich but their own continuance in power and ever-increasing spoils of victory. England’s ruling class are committing suicide to save England from defeat – it shows the stuff of which they are made, but all the same no one commits suicide with élan, and élan is a valuable quality in time of war.

  2 May 1941.

  We are in danger of losing the war. This is the way things might go if Hitler has his way as he has had it up to now. The “pincer movement” in Egypt may succeed. If it does, and the Germans reach the Suez Canal, Japan will move south, Spain will attack Gibraltar and French Morocco. The Germans will then be able – for who is to stop them? – once the British army in Egypt is eliminated, to drive through Africa to the Cape. South Africa has neither arms nor men to defend itself. A quisling government will be set up there, Germany can then cut our communications not only with India but with Australia and New Zealand which will be threatened by Japan.

  As for England she will be outflanked on a world scale and left like the Maginot Line, a graveyard of equipment and static armies with nothing to defend except herself. These possibilities were outlined by General Smuts in a memorandum addressed to the United Kingdom Government in July 1940. They now seem to me to represent the most likely objectives of German strategy. It is possible that when the Germans have reached Suez they will make another peace offer on the basis that we can keep our Empire (except of course that they will control it by establishing themselves on the main routes of communication) and let them run Europe. They might join this with the announcement that they propose to turn their attention to the U.S.S.R., thus appealing both to our wish to save the Empire and to our hope that they may get embroiled in a grapple with Russia. Needless to say they will not have finished with us nor with the U.S.A. but they may prefer to transfer the war temporarily back to the sphere of pressure politics and to avoid their biggest risk, a frontal invasion of the U.K.

  3 May 1941.

  Went to a concert with Anne-Marie. Bach, to which I am deaf – though Anne-Marie says, “He is a god.” As she had said a few minutes before that what she liked in music was “sex – the frisson,” I cannot think that she enjoys Bach much. Then Beethoven’s piano concerto with Moiseiwitsch at the piano. The Beethoven was what I had come for, but Anne-Marie somewhat spoiled it for me by leaning her shoulder against mine and “vibrating” during the more exciting passages, at the same time glancing at me with a “faint smile of pleasure” to make sure that I was sharing her ecstasies in the appropriate manner. This technique disturbed me, as what I like to do is to shut my eyes and concentrate like hell.

  I always enjoy it when Anne-Marie talks of her fabulous youth. “When I was a girl,” she says, “I was a very precious person. My father of a very old family in Romania going back to 1200 – pedigree perfect. My mother came from nothing, but she was very rich. She died when I was eighteen months old, and half he
r fortune went to my father and half to me – forty thousand pounds a year each – so you see I was an heiress – for those days in Romania before the war it was a lot of money.” She adds this last deprecatingly out of worldly convenance – knowing perfectly well that forty thousand pounds a year is a lot of money anywhere at any time. “My father was a charming person, but good for nothing. He went through his share of the fortune in a year – every penny of it – and nothing was left but bills. Under the Romanian inheritance laws if I died before coming of age my money went to my father – so now you see why I was so precious. I was brought up by my grandfather and grandmother – my father’s parents. They were always terrified in case anything should happen to me. I might be kidnapped by some of my father’s creditors who, if I was out of the way, could collect their money, or I might die. So if I flew into a rage they did not dare to refuse me what I wanted in case it should turn to a fever, and upset my health. My grandfather I disliked, but he was a very intelligent man – to him I owe any taste or knowledge I may have. But I got on badly with him, first because he made my grandmother, who was a saint, miserable – but that is another story – then because he was after my money all the time. But they were all after my money, like sharks – he, my father, my uncle – all of them.

  “I never went to school, but I had all kinds of governesses – Swiss, English, German, Italian, French. It was that way that I learned languages. I have never studied a language in my life. I was allowed to read almost anything I liked. I was allowed to travel where I liked – Venice, Paris, Munich – anywhere so long as it was by land. My grandparents were frightened of sea travel in case anything should happen to me. I was too precious. My grandfather used to take me to the Salon Carré at the Louvre when I was twelve years old. In those days the pictures had not been divided into the schools. In the Salon Carré was the best of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian – everything – ‘Go and look for yourself,’ he would say, ‘and come back and tell me what you liked and try to explain to me why you liked it.’