The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  He went out again and made friends with an S.A. man who spoke English. Like all others he had spoken to, this man was most friendly towards the English.

  “Not because England is rich do we want to be friends. But because we are the same sort of people. That last war was a terrible mistake, but we feel we have learnt from it.”

  “Will it happen again—for the same causes, fundamentally?”

  “It cannot happen again. Every German knows war is hell, useless, destroying the best, leaving the worst to ferment destruction of the state.”

  “Are you afraid of France attacking you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Will you ever be friends with Russia?”

  Immediately the S.A. man assumed his Hitler-built persona. His eyes set, he clenched his hands, his voice was harsh. “Never again will Russia march into our Fatherland as in 1914, killing women and children and destroying our farms and our homes. One day Japan will strike with them in the East, and then, we shall strike the Jewish snake of Bolschewismus!”

  This was depressing. He was a keen, dark young German from Franconia. He was reproducing gestures and speech which had entered into and made his thought in the past. He relaxed.

  “Our Führer will never make war,” he said in his normal voice. “Would you ever make war? You, a front-line soldier?”

  “I am afraid of the idealists and pacifists, both the older and the present generation who were children during the war. The older generation of pacifists would support a war against Germany, to compensate for their withdrawn attitude when they were of military age. The younger intellectuals in England now wear the clothes many of my generation discarded during the war and certainly afterwards. They would cause trouble and enmity but if they succeeded in helping a war-psychosis they would go to America or into some Ministry of Propaganda and kill Hitler at the microphone. True idealists are rare, they are the dedicated workers, who would if need be, die at the stake. You know, if I must be truthful, many true Communists are like that. And Jews are often very brave men. The best General on our side in the war was a civilian when war broke out and became a Lieutenant-General, Sir John Monash, commanding the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. He was a military genius immediately recognised by Haig, who used his ideas to break your Siegfried Stellung.”

  “Haig was a soldier! Our historians call him, ‘the Master of the Field’. Your Pacifists call him, what? The Butcher?”

  “More or less that. But, you know, the war was bloody awful …”

  “My friend! To Eternal Friendship between our Brother Countries! To the New Europe, which cannot endure without Germany and England and the Empire! Peace and the arts of constructive peace for a Millennium!”

  “In the West Country, where I live, there is a saying, ‘If you want good neighbours, you must first be a good neighbour yourself.’”

  “My friend, you have perceived the problem. Our foundation is built on rock, not sand. The Germans are very friendly to Englishmen, yes? Our newspapers do not distort news of England, and so the young Germany thinks happiness of his neighbour!”

  I heard it gladly, hopefully, Melissa. I wish I had been able to believe it with, say, the idealism of cousin Willie, who did indeed lose his life for peace, even if few, if any except myself, saw it like that. His pathway led to death: keeping his word to Mrs. Ogilvie, and she failing to keep hers, was the direct cause of his body being taken from the sea, like Shelley’s upon the sands of Lerici.

  Germany is boycotted. Germany will not break the idiom of money invested for the greatest profit, irrespective of human life. The free for all is dereliction and death for millions. Oh Christ if this boycott leads to war! There will not be a Jew left in Central Europe, there will not be a Germany, there will not be an Empire, England will no longer be Shakespeare’s “precious gem set in a silver sea, this realm, this England!” Yet Hitler is now within an economic trap, isolated in the centre of Europe, dying not from individual Shylocks, for the Jews are splendid family folks, and created one of the first corporate states in the known history of the world, but from an obsolescent system which no longer serves modern world-needs. War is war. I have seen German prisoners, surrendered during battle, bombed in communication trenches when led to the rear, and this by a Battalion of Foot Guards. ‘Truth is the first casualty in war.’ As for Birkin able to rouse our people in time, he is making no real headway. The sad truth is that the great masses of people never feel keenly about anything outside their home and jobs, and that is good. They’re usually too tired after the day’s work to want anything but food, social life and necessary beer in their clubs (i.e. pubs). And the intellectual minority which formulates, indirectly, their destiny, is not prepared to struggle for peace. They are isolated souls, seldom prepared to be good neighbours first.

  The next day I was invited to the Party headquarters hotel. I sat not far from Hitler in the drawing-room. He was talking to several people. Very quick head movements. His face, in happiness, has a luminous quality, his eyes particularly, being pale blue with a kind of inner shining. A Shelley self-driven by an inner tyranny to strike evil? Or a saint who will never draw the sword?

  Among the guests were the two young Mitford sisters, no longer wearing blue print dresses, but tweed coats and skirts, with no hats. Hitler in their presence seemed light and gay. He spoke rapidly, but was also a courteous listener. I could see that his natural pace was much faster than the normal. He glanced at me several times, I could feel sympathy between us. He had the look of a falcon, but without the full liquid dark eyes: an eyeless hawk whose sockets had burned out in battle and later filled with sky. A man of spiritual grace who has gone down into the market place and taken on the materialists at their own selfish game. Has such direct action ever succeeded in history? Is it not the beginning of another corruption? I recall a line of Francis Thompson’s—about a girl, but it applies to us all. ‘Her own self-will made void her own self’s will.’ I am tremulous. Darling Melissa, reassure me.

  May angels and ministers of light attend you.

  During the review of the Reichswehr next day Phillip was down in the arena of the Luitpoldfeld, sitting on grass most of the time, peering between S.S. guards. During Hitler’s speech to the Reichswehr, about fifteen minutes, he saw not a helmet move down the massed files of the soldiers. They were standing to attention, too, and not ‘At Ease’. The helmets were immobile: grey masses with rounded blunt heads disappearing to the size and colour of poppy seeds. He thought there must have been at least an Army Corps on parade, well over a hundred thousand men. When the battalions went past for the salute, at paradeschritt—the goose step—the boots came down so hard on the tarmac that the flesh in the taut cheeks of the sword-carrying officers shook with each impact.

  But it was the Luftwaffe which seemed to get most enthusiasm from the onlookers. The dais or box where Hitler and his entourage stood was behind Phillip, to one side, so that he was able to see the faces clearly. Göring beamed as the bombers flew past; Hitler looked mighty pleased. Well, thought Phillip, the standard of flying was just about up to that of the R.A.F. at Hendon which I had watched seven years before. The Luftwaffe was new, amateurish. Was this the vaunted, the dreaded German Air Force? The ‘fearful power’ was surely exaggerated in the London papers; the R.A.F. could give them points on everything. Part of the dummy factory collapsed before the bombers were overhead, to the amusement of the crowd. There was formation flying in the pattern of a swastika; the star-turn was Udet’s lone power dive beginning from above the clouds. The onlookers were happy; Phillip got their feeling that the Army, Navy and Air Force were their protectors, so that they gave Germany equality and security. The tanks also looked to be 1928 standard.

  In the evening of the day after my glimpse of Hitler, my honorary equerry in the S.A. escorted me to the station, where we parted as friends. Trains were packed with men going home after their annual beano. I promised him copies of my snapshots, but alas, I’d already-lost the ad
dress by the time the train to Munchen moved out. Perfidious Albion once again. At Munchen (how do names become anglicised, this one to Munich?) I took a cab to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, whither I had been invited to join a Presseabteilung tour conducted by an official of the Propaganda Ministerium. Found them at dinner, half a dozen British newspapermen. (There I learned that München and Monachorum both meant ‘belonging to the monks’.)

  One of the party was a star Liberal political writer. He greeted our host with these words, “I don’t like Hitler, or your form of government, but all the same I trust this won’t make any difference to our personal relationship while on this tour.” To this greeting our host bowed, saying nothing. A charmingly old-fashioned hotel, luxurious to me, with a large bathroom to myself. I pinched a china ash-tray, advertising tobacco, as a souvenir next morning. An official souvenir was presented to each of us on departure, a small flask of a potent colourless liqueur called Himbeergeist, the spirit of raspberries. Our star Liberal journalist was given a full bottle. He seemed surprised, and did not know what to do with it, but looked at us, saying diffidently that he didn’t drink much and murmured about customs duty on arrival in England. I suggested it was worth the duty, that it was rare and expensive at home. He hesitated; but under managerial bowing his manner changed, he accepted it with a little return bow saying, “Thank you very much, most kind of you, I’m sure.” Then with a glance at us, “We’ll drink it on the journey, shall we?” “No, you keep it”, we advised. He began to look pleased, like an inhibited child with an unexpected Christmas present. He was born in a West Country town, the son of a reporter on a local paper; he turned out to be kind and friendly, and no doubt he was efficient in his own idiom of journalism.

  We got into two Mercédès-Benz cars and went on to a new autobahn, once touching 50 m.p.h. I sat in the rear car, about five years’ old and slower than the leading car. Our host, a curious German-American fellow who had served as an officer in the German Navy during the war, stopped about five times on the journey to give us wine and bread and sausage, and we finally went to bed a couple of hours after midnight at Friedrichshafen in an hotel by a great lake. I was relieved to get out of the car. The driving was mediocre; the driver braked on corners downhill; the hood was closed over us.

  The next morning we walked over the aluminium frame of a new Zeppelin. Everything about it suggested lightness; e.g. the bed foundation was a single thin silk sheet stretched tight. I wondered what would happen if a razor were accidently drawn over one in flight. No photography was allowed here.

  At Stuttgart we visited the German Institute, where every German living abroad was registered, after being contacted. The idea, declared an official in a surprisingly loud and rasping voice—he had been talking with us gently before rising to his feet in a small room—was that the Fatherland wanted to know everything done by Germans everywhere. How they lived: what their houses looked like. Every German was Germany. There were masses of snapshots.

  “In the old days we wanted our undesirables to emigrate. Now we say, Every emigrant must be an Ambassador, and show by his work, whether plumbing, art, farming, or science that he is heart and soul in his work!”

  Speech-making seemed to be catching. The star Liberal journalist, who apparently had appointed himself (the bottle still unopened) British Representative, got up as soon as the stentorian but good speech was over and said suitable words back, often mentioning Peace. Even he had partly succumbed like the Rev. Frank Buchman on the first day, who was soon heiling Hitler and shooting out his right hand.

  At 2 a.m. the next morning I stood the camera on the window-sill of my bedroom and clicked the shutter open, having first switched off the light in my room. I left it there while I undressed, washed, and got into my pyjamas. Then I leaned out of the window beside my little black metal box. After a further 2 or 3 minutes I closed the shutter, hoping all would be well.

  Everywhere we went we seemed to collect new people. Hospitality was unlimited. Hock flowed down our throats from straight swan-necked bottles. An American girl appeared at Garmisch-Partenkirchen where I spoke to a Herr Baron who in a low voice, when asked what he thought of the new Germany replied with a shrug and the words, “Is it wise to say?”

  When the baron had left with his dancer friend, together with the husband of the dancer, a Dutchman standing at the bar said to Phillip, “Belle amie, ja? Der husband is what you call complacent, ja?” He made the motion of flicking banknotes with his fingers. “Money talks, do you Englische not know so? The Herr Baron still haf fife horses,” as he winked heavily. “Dat is somethin’ nowadays.”

  “Does he hunt, or are they race-horses, as in England?”

  “The Herr Baron he used to hav’ fifty race-horses, now it is only fife.” The Dutchman then whispered wetly in Phillip’s ear, “No good, eh? He make war, eh? No no, not de Baron. You do not understand. You know who will make annoder war? Not the Baron, he make water, yes, we all make water, ja, but not de war. It is come soon, yes? Money talks, and he has no money, it is true, ja?”

  “Money does more than talking. It can send men to death. Hitler is only Napoleon over again.”

  “That is so. No money, no gold.”

  The Liberal star journalist had joined the two and was listening.

  “Napoleon tried to divert the use of money as usury, you see, and so tried to create a self-sufficient and united states of Europe,” Phillip went on hopefully. “That, of course, was not the British bankers’ idea at all. They wished for trade, in order to lend, and so make more money. You know that, you and old Van Tromp with his broom to sweep the British ships off the seas.”

  “Ja ja, Van Tromp, he did some sweeping, too, my friend!”

  “The bankers, or banksters, of Lombard and Threadneedle Street wanted a gold-based Europe, since they had the gold in their vaults.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked the pipe-puffing Liberal journalist.

  “Bad for trade, sir. Very bad.” Phillip drank his tenth glass of champagne and said, “Zum Wohl!”, before continuing with what he had read in Birkin’s weekly paper. “You see, France after the revolution was bankrupt. So she could not afford to buy sugar and other commodities brought from the British colonies in British ‘bottoms’. So he started a new system.”

  “And ten million died in Europe as a consequence.”

  “Yes, when England started to blockade Europe. If Napoleon’s system had prevailed, Europe would have become self-sufficient, with a share in the trade from the East.”

  “Then why did not Napoleon try peaceful overtures? Shall I tell you? Because he had a lust for power. ‘And all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Lord Acton said that, if you know your history.”

  “My history, sir, is not of the law, such as Judge Jefferies and those judges who said, or one of them, that Englishmen would not be able to sleep safely in their beds if children were no longer hanged for stealing anything to the value of half-a-crown and upwards. But the point is this, Lombard Street bellies would have to shrink if Napoleon and his system prevailed. He offered a prize for anyone who discovered a substitute for cane sugar. It was won by someone in Poland who cultivated a weed which became what today we call sugar-beet. He offered a prize often thousand francs for a substitute for bicarbonate of soda from sea-water. Someone made it. Cotton from America was substituted by silk from Lille and elsewhere. Europe was blockaded, Nelson burned Danish ships which traded with Napoleon——”

  “But Napoleon used force. And found his grave in Russia——”

  “Russia, under Alexander the King, double-crossed Napoleon, don’t forget. Napoleon was promised Russian wheat, then Alexander bilked and accepted a bribe of four million pounds in gold from Lombard Street not to deliver in bulk. So Napoleon went to give Alexander a punch on the nose and was defeated by General Winter. And—no, don’t interrupt me—I know your point of view, in a way it is mine too—cheerio.” He swallowed another glass of wine. “In eighteen fift
een Napoleon said, ‘These English will rue the day they refused to work with my system. In a hundred years there will arise a nation across the Rhine which will break the strangle-hold of gold in Europe. And he was one year out; for ninety-nine years later there was nineteen fourteen!”

  “Who are you? Why are you talking like this in Germany, when very soon we are likely to be at war all over again?”

  “My name is Phillip Maddison, and I write books.”

  “Phillip Maddison? You wrote the Donkin Tetralogy? That was a fine work, an idealistic work. What has happened to you since you wrote those novels, and that even better book, The Water Wanderer? Stick to your last, my lad, and don’t try and play Hamlet.”

  *

  Phillip was relieved when the entourage got back to Berlin and put up at the Adlon Hotel. Too much wine and food and late nights had brought on a kind of sciatica in his left leg, which bore the purple scars of two wounds on the Somme. He limped. The American girl telephoned him one afternoon as he lay on his bed and asked him if he wanted a nurse. Alarmed that she might want to offer personal consolation, he hastily replied that he felt much better, thank you. That night a casual flier from Athens joined the party round the table. Later they went to a tavern and sat drinking in the cellar where, it was said, Tales of Hoffman had originated.

  Their host told Phillip that the night-life of Berlin had been cleaned up since the Third Reich had taken office. Beer stalls where rouged youths dressed in girls’ clothes awaiting nightly custom were no more, together with halls where pornographic films had been shown. Now the vice was no longer open. In the same café rows of girls were sitting behind the bar, each one with a seat opposite her. What did one talk about, the weather? They went to dance halls, but the Britishers kept together, occasionally dancing with the American girl from Stuttgart. In one bar Phillip saw a blond youth with the most extraordinary weary face. There were deep wrinkles round puffy eyes. He looked as though he had not slept for six months, but was kept going by being filled up with pale pink wax half-dissolved in alcohol. He was a waxen effigy, dead but giving the appearance of mechanical life. At first Phillip saw him as a hangover from the inflation, corruption, and consequent disintegration from defeat in the war, and the influx of the worst elements from the ghettos of Central Europe and Poland; but then he reflected, This man is German, and has corrupted himself.