After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The President found the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people ‘too horrible’. He did not like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’; or so he told his diary.27 Nevertheless, Fat Man was ready to go and was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. It caused less immediate damage than Little Boy, but it is reckoned that 70,000 had died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with probably 140,000 altogether over the next five years.

  On 14 August a thousand Japanese soldiers stormed the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to try to prevent their emperor from humiliating himself by announcing the surrender of the Empire to the United States. They did not realize that he had already recorded his wireless announcement. On 15 August, the Japanese radio announcer told listeners that they were about to hear something which, at the beginning of the war, would have been quite unimaginable: the ineffable voice of their Divine Emperor. Almost more than the surrender itself, there was an indignity in this preparedness of a Divinity to take the stage, alongside Vera Lynn and Lord Haw-Haw, Tommy Handley and Churchill, in the twentieth-century Vaudeville. It was in 660 BC, according to Japanese tradition, that the sun goddess Amaterasu gave birth to the first Japanese emperor, Jimmu Tenno. Hirohito was the 124th in descent, the Tenno Heika, Son of Heaven. Hirohito is the name given him by Westerners. To the Japanese he is the Showa (‘Enlightened Peace’) Emperor. The Bomb had made the very question of whether this dynasty survived a matter for the say-so of a poor boy from Missouri.

  In a high, ancient voice, as strange as the voice of the elves in The Lord of the Rings, the emperor spoke to his people:

  Despite the best that has been done by everyone … the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives … This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers …

  As the hieratic incantation called for his ‘entire nation to continue as one family from generation to generation’, the rest of the world knew that the Second World War had come to an end.28

  34

  Retributions

  The man in the cage shouted ‘Cat Piss and Porcupines!’ at his neighbour. Guards were forbidden to speak to the man who shouted out. His neighbour, in another cage, was about to be hanged, so he did not take much notice. Nevertheless, American soldiers in the Disciplinary Training Camp made detours across the parade ground to glimpse this prize exhibit. He was a fellow American, not an Italian or a German prisoner. The cage, which measured six by six and one-half feet and was ten feet high, was reinforced with the steel mats used in airport runways. It contained no bedding, only a bucket for lavatory facilities, and was open to the weather all the time. By night it was lit by relentless blue acetylene torches. All the other cages contained a murderer or rapist. This cage contained a poet, Ezra Pound, and he was about to write some of the most extraordinary lines ever penned, the so-called Pisan Cantos.1

  Pound, as long ago as 1910, had begun to fashion his poetic utterance in Cantos. In Paris, from one of the bookstalls on the quai there, he had picked up a Renaissance Latin version of Homer’s Odyssey, and he had begun his great work with a translation:

  And then went down to the ship,

  Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

  We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

  Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

  Heavy with weeping …2

  James Joyce used the story of the wanderings of Odysseus as the template by which to tell the story of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and much else besides in Ulysses. Pound’s ambition had always been much more diffuse. He had drawn on Chinese philosophy and poetry and, increasingly, as the twentieth-century tragedy unfolded, he had become preoccupied by economics, by theories of usury, by admiration for Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. These interests are all reflected in The Cantos, which provide the most extraordinary palimpsest in literature. We begin by looking at the Greek epic through a Latin translation, rendered into an English which is heavily redolent of Pound the man of the Nineties, Pound the Dandy. It is not so very different, with its ‘swart’ ship, from those late Victorian Hellenic renditions by Andrew Lang which are beloved of Le Bas, the schoolmaster in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

  Now, the Italian Fascist dictator had been overthrown, the Germans had invaded Italy, the Jews had been transported to their fates, the British and the American soldiers had fought their terrible campaign from Sicily northwards, the Allies were triumphant. The retributive killing had started. Tito, the Communist fighter, soon to be dictator of Yugoslavia, and his followers, slaughtered 15,000 Italians in northeast Italy and the Italian partisans killed another 35,000 people without trial. Four days before Pound was taken into custody by the Americans, Mussolini was killed by the Italian partisans, with his mistress Claretta Petacci, the daughter of a Rome doctor. For two hours after they had been shot in Milan, the partisans kicked, spat at and urinated on the corpses in the Piazzale Loreto. Then someone had the idea of hanging the corpses upside down from a girder over a petrol station. When Mussolini was strung up there was a great cheer. When Petacci was hung by her feet, the crowd fell silent. She had on expensive suspenders and stockings, but no knickers. It was the quality of the stockings which held the attention of the war-tired women who watched. ‘There’s not a single ladder on them,’ one of them murmured.3

  ‘Manes! Manes!’ exclaimed Pound in his cage, recalling the leader of the Zoroastrians who had been killed by the Persians.

  Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano by the heels at Milano

  That maggots shd/eat the dead bullock

  DIGONOS, Δíyoros,* but the twice crucified where in history will you find it?4

  He is talking about Dionysus, the twice-born god.

  T. S. Eliot had imagined, in The Hollow Men of 1925, that the world would end not with a bang but a whimper, but 1945 was no whimper …

  ‘With a bang not with a whimper,’ Pound replies to his old friend, Possum. ‘To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.’ The city of Dioce was an ideal city, the capital of the Medes mentioned in Herodotus.

  Any reader whose head is by now spinning can be forgiven. But Pound wants to send his readers’ heads spinning. Was he by now mad, as his defence lawyers claimed, in order to spare him charges of treason? The doctor who was closest to him, in the hospital of St Elizabeth in Washington, DC, where Pound was confined, was definitely of the view that Pound was not mad.5 However you define madness, the Pisan Cantos are unquestionably the great work of literature in the English language to come out of the Second World War. And the section begins with ‘The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders’. The war was a Pyrrhic victory for the British, who had stood firm in 1940 and could now watch Germany be partitioned, half of its ruined, scarred and pitted surface given over to slavery under a puppet of Marshal Stalin, and the other regions revivified by a combination of independent German resourcefulness and American money with Marshall Aid. The British were bankrupted by the war; they had lost their Empire and their position in the world. The war was a defeat for Hitler, and for Mussolini, and to some extent for the Japanese. But the real losers, apart from the millions of dead soldiers and civilians, were those who would continue to live under Soviet oppression in those very territories, of Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as in the Baltic states and in the Balkans, which the Allies had supposedly fought to ‘liberate’.

  ‘Over wide areas, a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, careworn and bewildered human beings gape at the ruin of their cities and their homes and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror’ – thus Churchill in Zurich on 19 September 1946. ‘That is all that Europeans … have got by tearing each other to pieces and spreadi
ng havoc far and wide.’6

  Things would have been even worse if Hitler had been triumphant, that is obvious. But much had been lost, and lost irreparably. To read the 74th Canto, the first of the Pisan Cantos, is to be stumbling around in the ruins of European culture. The central phrase could be said to be that extremely 1890s utterance near the end – ‘Beauty is difficult’. When a war is being fought, largely by young men, torn between terror of death and fear of their commanding officers, there is not much time for contemplating beauty. That is one of the unnatural things about war, which gouges out beautiful landscapes and makes them charred mud heaps, which kills and maims young, beautiful people, and which knows that the thing to do with a medieval cathedral is to smash it to smithereens. From the cage, the so-called madman saw it all.

  Old Ez folded his blankets

  Neither Eos nor Hesperus has suffered wrong at my hands.7

  Most wars in history have ended with peace, but the Second World War was unlike this. It had shaken the whole world, and no one anywhere was going to start all over again just as they had been in 1939. Something profound had happened to the world, it had altered for ever. Already, on 12 May 1945, Churchill was expressing his anxiety to President Truman that the Russians would draw down ‘an Iron Curtain upon their Soviet front’. He famously used the phrase again in Fulton, Missouri, in the spring of 1946 when he said that the Iron Curtain stretched across the continent of Europe ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’, and that as long as it existed, peace and democracy could no longer be sustained by the three great powers of the wartime alliance. He did not think that the Russians wanted outright war, but their desire was ‘for the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’.

  The postwar world, even before it was a postwar world, was perceived to be one of conflict. Men had set out, clutching their secular texts with the fervour of the most superstitious sectaries in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and they had tried to build the city whose terraces are the colour of stars. With Mein Kampf as their handbook, or Lenin’s interpretations of Das Kapital, they had justified to themselves the most deadly crimes ever perpetrated in human history; with the aid of modern technology, they had managed to destroy and ruin million of human lives.

  The victors could no longer claim total moral purity. The bombing raids on civilian cities in Europe went far beyond any strategic need; and the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was a crime against humanity. Yet it would be a perverse reading of history, either at the time or with our comfortable hindsight, not to see that the Western Allies, who made many blunders, including moral blunders, were attempting to fight for a set of principles and political ideals which included freedom and justice. They had been driven by the terrible circumstances of the time to forget their aims on many occasions and to promote brutal and destructive policies. When it was all over, however, they wanted their own people, and those within their control, to be free. Had Hitler won the war, this would not have been so.

  There was an understandable desire for revenge on the part of those who eventually succeeded in beating the Nazis. In those countries which had been occupied by the Germans, the revenges exacted, both against Germans and against those nations of any country who had collaborated with them, were often terrible. In France, the reprisals were on an extraordinary scale, with many murders going undetected which could only have had the loosest, if any, political motive. Thousands of murders took place in Paris and its environs after the liberation.

  How was it possible for the Allies to express, not only to themselves but to the country they had conquered; to convey, not only to the Germans but to the world; to state unequivocally, not only to the world but to posterity, that the Third Reich had been a colossal inversion of all the values held sacred by the human race for thousands of years? In the face of so much destruction, so much despair, so many deaths, so many displaced persons and so many ruined human lives, what gesture could be adequate? In Auschwitz, the rabbis had gone so far as to put God Himself on trial. They found Him guilty and then went to their evening prayers. The times were so extreme and the suffering and devastation so total that just such mad gestures seemed called for.

  Whereas the rabbis in Auschwitz had uttered a metaphysical howl of anguish as loud as the Book of Job, such rhetoric would not pass on the stage of international politics and diplomacy. Something needed to happen in Europe which would demonstrate unequivocally that the rule of law had once more been established; and indeed that it had never been suspended; that the guilty men of Germany must be put on trial and answer for their crimes.

  The place selected for this demonstration of justice was itself a physical and architectural embodiment of what Pound was writing about in the Pisan Cantos. Nuremberg, the medieval town which stood at the crossroads of European commerce from the times of Dante and Chaucer to the 1930s, had been flattened. The Nuremberg of Albrecht Dürer, gentlest and most meticulous of artists, his gentleness and his attention to detail so quintessentially German, was now a burnt-out, pitted, sewage-infested ruin. Modern Nuremberg, with its hideous Nazi stadium, scene of so many of Hitler’s rallies, and immortalized by the cinematic choreography of Leni Riefenstahl, survived the air raids. At the time of writing (2005) it still stands, deserted and ghostly, as empty as the appalling rhetoric which once blared through its loud speakers into the ears of spellbound multitudes.

  There will always be those who see something absurd about the Nuremberg trials. Those who favour rough justice as the appropriate end of war felt at the time, and no doubt feel now, that such figures as Keitel, Streicher, and the thugs in the Nazi high command did not deserve the platform of a courtroom in which they were given the chance to defend their disgusting actions. A wall and a firing squad was all they needed. Others, more cynical, felt that ‘great events of international politics were not really a fit subject for judicial decision’.8

  There were several reasons why the Nuremberg trials, for all the unsatisfactoriness of the procedure, were defensible, difficult as it was to distinguish between individual depravity and the overall policy of a nation caught up in crisis and war. (The defence, that the Nazis were ‘only obeying orders’, became a sick joke, and a cliché, from the beginnings of the trial, and it does, surely, beg all kinds of questions about the nature of civil obedience, and the point at which private conscience should or should not defy the higher authority of government or military command.)

  The justifications for the Nuremberg trial were these. First, the government of the Third Reich had flagrantly broken an international law agreed upon by the Charter of the League of Nations, the Hague Convention on Land Warfare of 24 September 1927, which stated that aggressive war was itself a crime. As we have already observed, the whole programme of National Socialism, from before it took power, was posited on the idea of aggressive war, and this is what appeasers at the time, and revisionist historians since, did not recognize. Second, the regime had perpetrated, both within Germany and in the lands it occupied, such terrible crimes against humanity, such abuses of freedom, such mass murder, torture, humiliation and degradation of people, on so great a scale, that the perpetrators simply had to be brought to justice.

  Some of those who opposed the trial regretted giving these human monsters the chance to defend themselves. But it was in this very act of justice, for six months in the Nuremberg courtroom, that the Third Reich really condemned itself. The only defendant who put up a good showing – indeed a brilliant one – was Goring, and he in the end eluded the hangman’s noose by taking poison hours before his execution. Goring, too, was almost the only one of the wretched crew who showed any spirit or courage, continuing to wear uniform, though stripped of its ludicrous insignia, and speaking with as much eloquence as dishonesty. He denied knowing anything about the wholesale slaughter of the Jews, which was a preposterous claim, only matched by the claim that Hitler had not known anything about it either.9 On the other hand he was probably
telling the truth when he said that he had had a flaming row with Hitler about the illegal execution of captured RAF pilots, one of the crimes for which he was indicted, and there was a crazy brio in his rhetorical self-defence. ‘In the struggle of life and death, there is no legality,’ he quoted Churchill as saying, though he did so not in defence of some act of valour in the field but in order to slither out of the fact that he was, among his other dubious accomplishments, a thief on the grand scale who had stolen vast sums, including furniture, jewels, paintings and treasures, from Jews, German aristocrats and invaded French families. ‘I did not want a war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out I did everything to assure victory … The only motive which guided me was my ardent love of my people, its fortunes, its freedoms, its life. And for this I call upon Almighty God and the German people as my witness.’ Everyone agreed that Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, a star prosecutor with some of the other Nazis, had allowed Goring to get the better of him.