“We aren’t laughing at you, Jonny,” he called out, to be answered by a tearful, muttered, “Shut up.” The door was again closed. What should one do? For Phillip understood the child so well; he was himself over again. He wanted to reassure him; but it was useless to reason with emotion.
David was practical. “It’s best to leave him alone when he gets his moods, Dad,” he announced brightly, smiling his big-toothed smile. With his blue eyes and yellow hair David was Ariel. The two brothers were great friends, and worked happily together: eight-year-old David whose mind worked so fast that he could not yet read, who lived in an enchanted world of the imagination: five-year-old Jonny who in a slower voice repeated David’s remarks, shared or rather adopted his moods, but who worked steadily and surely. They were members of a Gang, with headquarters in an old chicken house on the Home Hills, fitted with rusty spring bed, water-colours (Jonny’s) in rows, a sack of small potatoes, camouflage netting left behind by the troops, a table (sack-form from the barn) and bits of wood representing tommy-guns. Jonny was the leader: he had the ideas.
Seeing Phillip still hesitating, Lucy said, “He’s so sensitive about making a mistake, and so keen always to do things peoperly.”
“Let’s have a wrestling match. Me versus the world. I’ll hold you two down, then call for help! I’ll also be referee.”
All rolled upon the mat. “Help!” screeched David. “Jonny! Help!”
Soon all three brothers were mobbing the referee, who was soon laid out, so that prizes could be disposed of—an apple, a rare piece of chocolate, an uncommon biscuit, a lollipop from the village shop. Afterwards they had a dance, which ended in another wrestling match between Peter and his smaller brother. It became a wild party; cocoa was suggested, with a little rum in it, for everyone.
“Yippee!” cried David. The tame bat hibernating on the beam, given a couple of drops of rum, went sailing blackly about the room, finally coming to rest again upside down on the beam. They turned radio knobs to get the loudest music. German music was preferred—drums, brass, and some drive in it, as opposed to the nostalgia of most of the British dance-bands.
When the New Year’s party had ended, children with mother gone to bed, Phillip sat on before the fire, to see the Old Year out, and the New Year in.
*
Goodbye to 1941; now it was almost 1942, and midnight news from the B.B.C. imminent. He pulled himself out of the armchair, and turned down the radio. The news was bad. It looked as though Manilla was gone. Would the Japanese walk into Singapore, by isolating it and smashing it from the air—a giant caught by Lilliputians, a decaying giant, whose Midas-touch could not save it, all the gold of the opium-wars and the sweat-shops of the East?
Hungry of his self-imposed duty, details of present history, he switched on the other wave-length and listened to Goebbels’ Apologia for his Führer. He felt that Goebbels was the soul of loyalty, as he spoke of his friend in a clear and resonant voice. Stalin, cried Goebbels, was the real enemy of Europe and Hitler was Europe’s hero, as history would declare.
O, the waste and pity of the war—the tragedy of the cleavage of European man, beset by the illusions of partisanship, the illusions of a counting-house materialism which saw not the shadow of its own dissolution, as Napoleon prophesied to Las Casas in 1815, when he had finally accepted his failure to unite the races of the continent, to regularise work and production and consumption on the highest possible level for all the European people, to achieve the proportional sharing of raw materials and production under the planning of France, and so to reassure the civilisation of the West.
Last night I listened to Winston Churchill’s speech from Canada: a fine speech, realistic and logical, but (apart from the immediate necessities of the war) representative of the old financial order of things, of the old inevitable division of nations so that Money might flourish in freedom.
There is, in the newspapers at this time, much talk about the New World for after the war; but I wonder how, under the same System as before the war, work can be provided, and the care of health arranged for all our people, in Mother country and Empire. Poor Birkin—the prophet of the Idea of a Greater Britain—has been discredited long since, and for nearly two years he has been silenced in prison.
I sit in this armchair, praying for the war to end, for a miracle that will unite Europe in harmony; while realising that, in my personal life, I am not able to bring harmony even into my small scope of family and farm.
Under the old System, Britain is struggling for her life, and if we win the war, we shall only do so through completely exhausting ourselves. Will the war last until 1943? If so, Billy might have to go. He will be seventeen years old in two months’ time, when he has to register. What will happen to the farm then, short-handed as we are already? But my main feelings of anguish flow away from farm and family, to our people far across the world. Japan, having bombed Pearl Harbour, is smashing away in Malaya, Sumatra, and the Philippines, to seize territory for what she calls her Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The British newspapers, on the entry of Japan into the war, declared that her air force was out of date, clumsy, inferior. Almost immediately afterwards Repulse and Prince of Wales went down, sunk by the out of date, clumsy, inferior aircraft. Who sent the battleships there, without aircover? Some hitlerian-churchillian dictat? Hitler ‘the Bohemian corporal’ who had chanced his arm (or armour) through the Ardennes in 1940; Churchill ‘the military idiot’ (according to the ‘the Bohemian corporal’) who was never a trained soldier. But who am I to talk, a mere flibbertigibbet.
Well, this for me is history in the making. These are the facts as I see them. This is the condition of Great Britain for me at that moment of New Year’s Eve of 1942. For more than six hundred days, for more than six hundred readings of newspapers, for more than twice or thrice that number of times listening to the news bulletins of the British Broadcasting Corporation and their antithetical bulletins from the Deutsche Rundfunk, we in Britain have absorbed one disaster after another, until we are all heavy and even soggy with the dull strain of it, and the most sensitive are the most affected.
What truth is there in the opinions, declamations, diatribes, sneers, boasts, claims and counter-claims of the propagandists? The aetherial voices are at mortal war, and the rounded welkin bleeding.
As he sat alone before the fire he told himself, as he had during innumerable meditations, that he must strive to stop thinking of the rights and wrongs of the war: that he must, for his own sake and for the sake of the family, try to accept the bloody tragedy of youth and middle-aged subliminal resentment of youth as historical phenomena: that if he were not to deteriorate further and perhaps die he must think and feel impartially: and to achieve this he must calm himself by relaxation, by deep-breathing, lest schism part the two sides of his mind, and in the words of a poem his cousin Willie once read to him, twenty years before:
As a burst and blood-blown insect
Cleaves to the wall it dies on,
The smearèd sun
Doth clot upon
A heaven without horizon.
I dare not but be dreadless
Because all things to dread are;
With a trumpet blown
Through the mists alone
From a land where the lists of the dead are.
And Phillip repeated to himself the phrase attributed to Marshal Pètain as, when all but he had fled, ‘the hero of Verdun’ strove to find surety for a France in division—‘la balance, toujours la balance.’
The reading of Tolstoi’s novel had suggested that no one man or set of men or group or system of financial interests were wholly to blame, but that the causes of war were incalculable in Time; whereas Phillip believed that everyone living was but a reflection of his or her environment, which was an effect of calculable causes in Time. This was his earliest theory, or belief, which he had shared with his cousin Willie soon after the Armistice of 1918, and held until faith was worn away by loneliness
; when Birkin’s realistic view of the financial-economic causes of war replaced Willie’s poetic conception that all so-called evil arose from un-understanding.
Too tired to make the effort to go to bed, he sat in the leather armchair, listening to the grandfather clock preparing to strike with whirr of brass wheels and jerk of chains holding the weights which had bumped into the case as they descended during nearly two centuries. It was almost midnight. The kettle simmered, issuing steam rosy with the embers of the thorn logs. He was glad that Boy Billy was away, on his tractor-course. Phillip had seen his error in taking him away from school on the outbreak of war in the belief that, since the old civilisation was about to collapse, he would be better learning to farm land that one day would be his. He had hoped that, should anything happen to him, Boy Billy would be sufficiently trained to farm for Lucy and his half-brothers and sister. He had believed that he would be able to give him a better education for living than that of the classroom and compulsory games. And now he had to face the effect of having been wrong.
For what he had not foreseen was that Boy Billy would exchange the ordered discipline of school for the disordered environment of a rural community where the best elements, the younger and abler men, had gone away to war, leaving others who saw in war’s opportunity only a chance to get money, and more money. And, as Charles Box said to him once, about a farmer’s son being sent as a pupil on another farm, “A boy learns nothing at home from his father.”
*
Now it was 1942. What of the farming scene? Nearly eighty airfields in the county alone were offering high wages to all available labour; it was the chief subject of talk among the boys who had left school and had some time to go before being called-up. That was their dawning world; and during the eager talk by the bridge at night, Billy often thought of how he had to remain on the unknown ‘little grey donkey’, while of the tractor drivers he knew, one and all had faster, larger machines—Oliver, Case, Massey-Harris, and even magnificent Caterpillar crawlers. Phillip knew that Billy felt ashamed that his tractor went so slowly, and was of so uncommon a design. That this ‘patent’ had a great future Phillip was sure; but what he had said, in so many aspects, having been already proved wrong, Boy Billy was by now sceptical of all his father said. He had no cause or reason to be other than ashamed of his father, judged by the standards of the world about him.
*
Phillip wanted to go to bed, but knew his mind would not rest. Sitting there in the armchair, turning over the cracking embers with a 3-foot fire-pic forged by the blacksmith to his pattern, he told himself that the only thing to do was to hold on, to wait for clarity to come to one’s fellows, to cease girding against the slow-moving glacier of negation.
Of course it was difficult for ordinary people to see themselves as the historian would see them: as some writer of genius, perhaps as yet unborn, would re-create the miseries and hopes of the times as did Tolstoi, with varying clairvoyance, of another age, in his great novel. That Russian nobleman shut himself away for over five years and with infinite care and patience, while sustaining within himself the power to endure, set his mind to bring alive within the pages of his story the peasants and the landowners, the ministers and the priests, the battles and the sufferings, the lovers and deaths and joys and tragedies of an entire Russian generation: more, of an entire European age. There was Napoleon with his new order for Europe, directing battles and regarding the dead and the wounded—all in War and Peace. Napoleon, who failed in Africa, frustrated by the British Navy; who, turning to the East to smite an opportunist and treacherous ally-enemy, King Alexander of Russia, found the grave of his Army—and of his hopes—in the snows and ice of the steppes.
No wonder the book was out of print in England in the winter of 1941/2, and being sought eagerly in secondhand shops, for the parallel with the Hitlerian war was apparent. Napoleon massed his cannon at one point and made a lightning break-through, pouring in his heavy yet mobile troops, and turned the flanks of his opponents by a pincer-movement. He was successful in battle after battle, beating the Allies who did not understand this new way of fighting. His men rode over bridges, a general or two at first, smiling and dismounting, and talking with the enemy, declaring that the war was over, a truce had been made, and peace would shortly be signed. The astonished Allied sentries then watched a French regiment marching over the bridge. They did not understand it. They watched the ‘correct’ French gunners spiking their guns. Thus Napoleon crossed the Danube, the war still on, and not a shot fired to stop him.
Was that how Hitler had crossed the Maas in May 1940, and so turned the Maginot Line? It was all done before by the Ogre of Europe, who was said to eat infant human flesh for breakfast, who won battle after battle and defeated nation after nation until in the end his armies were spread out all over the conquered Continent, and far into Russia; so far into the Steppes that his Armies’ lines of communication were extended to the point of collapse. The nouveau logistique of moving armies, originated by this military genius, the cause of his victories, was also the cause of his failure. The illimitable Russian invasion was the beginning of the end. Napoleon went too far. When he lost Africa, he lost the war; he cracked his teeth on Russia, where they learned, by retreating and and leaving partisans behind, to counter the encircling movements, the lightning assaults which an Austrian general of those times called Napoleon’s blitzen tactics.
What was the war about? Readers, said Phillip to himself, will learn nothing from War and Peace. But had Tolstoi read the memoirs of de las Casas, surely he would have been struck by Napoleon’s remark at St. Helena that the war might be summed up as a deadly quarrel over the price of a barrel of sugar?
A bankrupt France torn by internal dissension and revolution was unable to pay world prices, which meant the prices of the bankers of Lombard and Threadneedle Streets, for the raw materials that France needed. So Napoleon set about building a national organisation which would dispense with the gold of the commanding agents who had created the system of usury by which European trade was dominated. If Napoleon’s system were successful in Europe, it meant the end of the great banking houses of London. Napoleon by his system tried to dissolve in Europe the hold of the money-lenders on an economically-dominated Europe. He was blockaded. He retorted by counter-blockade. He tried to starve out England. He closed the Baltic, and stopped Russian wheat going to Britain. The price in Britain promptly rose to one hundred and eighty shillings a quarter of two sacks. (Heavens, wheat was sixteen shillings a quarter in 1939!)
Napoleon offered a prize for a substitute to replace the sugarcane from Jamaica, and out of Poland came a wild plant from which was bred the first beet-sugar. He offered another prize of one hundred thousand francs to any chemist in Europe who found a process of making bicarbonate of soda out of common salt. Somebody won it. He started silk mills at Lyons and Lille to make a substitute for cotton, which could only come to Europe from the ex-British colony of America by way of British bottoms, or ships. And in 1815, when his power was finally broken, and he was prisoner in the hands of his enemies, Napoleon made this prophecy: he said, in effect, to las Casas, ‘These British will come to rue the day that they did not co-operate with my system. In a hundred years they will be at war with a great European power, arising from the valley of the Rhine.’ Napoleon was a year out in his prophecy; for 1914 was ninety-nine years later.
*
So Phillip communed with himself as the minute hand of the clock crept to the top of the painted flower face.
The parallel was there—everywhere the same. Hitler crying, ‘The British will come to rue the day if Germany should be defeated’ … for that would mean Asia over the Elbe, and perhaps to the Channel.
If I do not survive this war, who will write a novel of our times, transcending War and Peace? Most of the writers I know dismiss me as a well-meaning but rather silly person who has strayed into a world he does not understand. Perhaps they are right: but no European writer of the future worth his
salt will fail to strive to understand the phenomenon of the conflicting views of this war. As an example: that cry in 1938, at the Parteitag at Nurnberg—‘Germany must export or die—and Germany shall not die!’
My unknown writer will surely relate this cry to the failure of the German barter system. He must know why Great Britain, though possessing a great estate of one-fifth of the world, with every raw material therein, was unable to develop that immense territory; and why the heirs of that great estate rotted on the dole. My writer will possess clarity, penetration, and above all talents, a capacity to sustain himself in aloneness. He will see the true connection between the decay of farming in Britain between the two wars, and cheap food imports coming into Britain as interest on loans to Central European countries.
He will learn from my journals, which I have added to during the nights of darkness, the connection between rusty British ships laid up in toll-free estuaries in the ’thirties, suddenly to be sold as scrap to Japan, and the fact that German coats of that period were being made from wood.
He shall connect these two details with the price-cutting of consumer-goods almost to below subsistence-level of workers in the four great exporting industrial nations of the United States, Japan, Britain, and Germany; with the dole queues in Britain and the free-soup bread-lines in the United States; with the burning of maize in the Argentine and the dumping of fresh-caught herrings in Scotland, while children in European and American slums starved.
He must deal truly, otherwise with comprehension and clarity, with the inner or psychological processes by which the ‘decadent democracies’ become totalitarian in their efficiency for destruction by war and the totalitarian states fell apart into ‘decadent democracies’. Above all, he must sustain his vision while the crystallised minds of this age are passing away.
Lucifer Before Sunrise Page 26
