The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  Those splendid days would never come again, or their like, he told Brother Laurence as they went out, Phillip feeling rather proud of the Silver Eagle’s lines until a small boy standing by said to another small boy, “Cor, there’s a funny old-fashioned car, ain’t it?” On the other side of the street a newsboy, running with a bundle of London mid-day papers under his arm, was crying, “Poles mobilise! Latest crisis!”

  They reached the area left ugly by the maulings of London: speculative hire-purchase housing ‘estates’—all trees cut down—tens of thousands of cubic yards of coke-breeze blocks and pink heaps of fletton bricks piled up. Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is chromium fittings, radio, love with pessary, rubber girdles, perms, B.B.C. gentility and the sterilising of truth, cubic international-type concrete architecture. Civilisation is white sepulchral bread, gin, and homosexual jokes in the Shaftesbury Avenue theatres. Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world. Hoardings, brittle houses, flashiness posing as beauty, mongrel living and cosmopolitan modernism, no planning, all higgledy-piggledy—thus the spiritual-material approaches to London, the great wen, Cobbett called it. Was the wen about to burst and pus to run throughout the body politic for the second time in his life?

  At last the wearisome journey through dirty congested, narrow streets was over. Saying goodbye to Father Laurence—“I’ll meet you at the Barbarian Club at half-past six”—Phillip drove over London Bridge, on the way to see his father. Richard, after returning from his world cruise, had declared that he was a new man. He spent his time in the garden, and flying his box kites on the Hill. He was cutting the lawn when Phillip arrived.

  “I can’t stay long, Father.”

  “Well, sit down awhile, old man. How is the farm going?”

  “Oh, literally uphill work. I’ve just finished the corn harvest.”

  “Keep your corn in rick, take my advice. Prices will go up if there’s a war.”

  “Father, if anything happens to me, will you keep an eye on Lucy and the children?”

  “Why, are you thinking of going back into the army?”

  “I might go abroad, Father.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Anyway, you will keep an eye on Lucy if——”

  “Of course I’ll do my best, my dear Phillip.”

  From Hillside Road he went to the flat in Charlotte Road where his sister Doris was living. He drank a cup of tea hastily, after being reassured that she was all right: she was teaching again, as well as receiving a small income from the money left to her by their mother.

  *

  Returning to the Barbarian Club he left the sports-car under the plane-tree and walked up the stone steps. It was quiet and cool inside. Nearly all the members were away on holiday. The porter was not in the lodge, so he put down his bag and walked up the stairs to the reading-room, with its wide windows overlooking the Park. No life here: only an occasional form on sofa or in armchair, eyes closed. There was three-quarters of an hour before Brother Laurence was due, so he went downstairs again and out into St. James’s Park.

  It was hot and quiet; the European harvest was in. A new era of life was beginning: he must be its historian. The detached part of him wanted to empty itself of preconceived opinions in order to get the feeling of the people. He walked to the lake, and watched the wildfowl. People sat quietly on the green seats, or strolled past, scarcely speaking. They seemed to be half-resigned to what might come, unable to alter or deflect in the least way the thing they all felt they should dread. Then along the asphalt path came two young men and a young woman. All three had an air of purpose, as they gave out hand-bills. No war for Warsaw. Remember the War Dead of1914–18. Have they died in vain? and Who the heck cares for Beck?—with particulars of Birkin speaking that night near Trafalgar Square.

  He wondered how the crowd would respond to Birkin that night, whether violently or with acclaim: Birkin who had given up all that he had (and he had great possessions) to the poor. What chances had he? If the idiom of history was anything to go by, Birkin’s chances were small. He recalled the writings of his own grandfather Maddison, who had asked himself when the prophet would arise to lead the people back to the sun: poor, tipsy old grandfather, he had weakened and fallen down before he himself had been born.

  *

  After supper with Brother Laurence at the long table where sat comedians and authors, flute-players and surgeons, script-writers and gossip columnists, actors and scientists, they walked down Piccadilly with a club acquaintance through the strolling, seeming-careless crowds. Phillip felt that the people were not indifferent: but now behind the eyes of every man and woman was an evaded question, an avoided dread. What was to be, would be; meanwhile the sky is clear and bright, food and drink are pleasant things taken amidst laughter and the talk of friends, this new film is good, let us get in before the last house begins. Men still moving in the crowds with handbills: bold type on cheap paper barely glanced at before being dropped on the pavement, to be forgotten: to fall on stony ground, now trodden by the young men and their girls, the ghosts of tomorrow,

  ‘whose world is but the trembling of a flare

  and heaven but as the highway for a shell’.

  Down past the square of plane trees and gaudy lights of the cinema palaces the crowd waits, while under the wall of a tall brick building stands a black van with loudspeakers and platform on its roof, draped with the Union Jack; and beside and before it the displayed banner lines Britons Fight for Britain Only, and People’s Peace and Greater Britain upheld by men who have come here after their day’s work inspired by Birkin’s vision of a fairer country.

  And then a roar of cheering and (strangely, Phillip feels) no booing, no opposition, no counter-demonstration, as the tall figure in the grey double-breasted suit climbs to the platform and stands gravely still, with set face, and then lifts his arm in salute and acknowledgment of the greeting. It takes some minutes for their devotion to release itself, and the words to come from the tense figure now crouching as though to attack an invisible giant, the Minotaur about to devour another generation of European youth.

  Holding the stalk of the microphone with one hand the crouching figure cries—“Tonight the British people are here—to tell Parliament, to tell the old Parties, and their financial masters—the truth: that if any foreign power attacks Britain, every member of our Party will fight in defence of Britain—but just as straightly we tell them this—we will not permit a million British youths to die in their moneylenders’ quarrel!”

  A roar goes up from the faithful; a forest of salutes; cheers. Holding up his hand, Birkin continues—

  *

  Wandering away from his two companions, both soldiers of 1914–18, on the outskirts of the crowd kept by the police maintaining the traffic-flows from enlarging beyond the space allotted for the reception of free speech, Phillip again sought to find what the casual sightseers were thinking. They were not hostile to Birkin. Were they, with the exception of the followers massed under the high wall of the brick building, indifferent? Or were they those who accepted things as they were, as they were coming in the future, with no question—people who did not believe in miracles? Who felt the events of the world too much for them, who since early consciousness had been frustrated in nearly all, if not all, of the secret inner hopes and tenderness of the interior heart? Was their attitude that of people who could not help themselves? Were they, each one, crouching within the little ego, void of the still small voice, the glimmer of each soul dulled-out under the bushel of circumstance—the circumstance of one business against another business, of each for himself, of unemployment, poor housing conditions, malnutrition, the wheat berry permanently stripped of its goodness, people fed on the destroying white bread of ordinary life, with its eternal wars and mutilation, its diseases and frustrations, until the final peace of de
ath?

  Among these seemingly aimless ones there was no excitement, no resentment, no enthusiasm: there was passivity: and save from the figure now raving on the raised platform, there were no words. The gesture had been made; the gesture was suspended in time. At least this man had given hope and a vision of nobility to a few thousand men and women, said Phillip, returning to Brother Laurence and the gunner officer who had come with them from the Barbarian Club.

  “I agree entirely about the Jews and their hidden power—I come from South Africa where I have been campaigning against the Jews’ stranglehold for some years—but I object equally strongly to Hitler and his ways,’’ said the old gunner, who had been decorated in 1917.

  Birkin was crying,

  “Let us put our own house in order before we interfere with others outside the great estate of the British Empire. Let us develop that estate, let us devote our lives in service to all within the Empire. We shall build a civilisation which will far surpass anything Germany or Italy or any other nation can build, for we hold one-fifth of the world in trust, while Germany has not one square metre of land beyond her boundaries. And if Germany has done so much with so little, how much more can we Britons build, with the resources of Empire? I beg you to believe in the possibility of this before it is too late, before Germans and Englishmen, the white giants of Europe who should be brothers, bring one another, and Europe, to the dust.”

  *

  “Well, goodbye, and good luck,” said the old gunner officer, as he went back to the club.

  At least those who followed Birkin felt a light shining within themselves, thought Phillip, seeing the happy faces and hearing shouts of confidence as they marched in procession through the streets, believing that they were heralds of a great destiny, pioneers of a Greater Britain.

  In this richer part of London, on that late August night, he heard amused laughter among the bystanders, saw sceptical tolerance on the faces of those looking from the windows of various buildings in which were clubs, for it was a warm night and many of the windows were open to the summer air of London. Phillip, walking alone on the pavement, accompanied the procession. He passed an old woman selling flowers, an old cockney in shawl, bonnet, and old-fashioned skirts who cried out to Birkin in a shrill voice, “Gawd bless you, Sir, you’ve always tried to save our boys!” On through the lighted streets and lines of cars to the Embankment of the Thames. There Phillip turned back to his club and went up to the bar. While waiting to be served with a pint of beer he heard someone saying, “Same old speech. What rubbish he talks.”

  Yes, the same old speech; the same stony pathway; must the heart always die before resurrection. Leaving his drink untasted, he walked out of the club.

  *

  Omnibuses and motor-coaches moving to their assembly places. Evacuation of London children. Hitler would not start the bombing. Hitler wanted to go East only. Wandering down to the Embankment again he came upon Brother Laurence and told him what he had made up his mind to do.

  “Of what use is it to fly to the moon, Phillip, if a man cannot bridge the abyss which divides him from himself.”

  “The world is too far gone for theosophy, mon père.”

  “You may never come back, Phillip.”

  “My life is nothing to me.”

  “Are you prepared to sacrifice the love, which is their security, of your little children?”

  “They will be happier without me, mon père.”

  “You must not believe that, Phillip. But do not despair—hold on—the secret of a man’s success lies in the mystical element which is in all of us. Bless you, my son.”

  I am a ghost among men, he thought, as he wandered through the warm summer night, I am in my right mind at last.

  On a seat along the Embankment by Cheyne Walk he wrote Apologia pro vita mea upon a sheet of paper; and waited for words to come.

  The massed misery of existence in one battlefield after another, of life sapped by sleeplessness and exposure beyond the lost horizon of life is known by the enduring soldier of the infantry; and even then, only an exceptional integrity can resolve its Truth, maintain its inner clarity among normal human beings who do not think, who do not care to think, beyond the immediacy of their self-ful living. And what is the small and obscure life of one such man, its happiness or even its continuation, against such a threatening misery of un-understanding? Is there no formula, no idiom of understanding? Men talk of mysteries such as the mind of Shakespeare, or of Goethe, which are not mysteries to me.

  They were plain and simple men, as I see them; for I know the processes of elimination by which they came to their clarity, and so built their worlds of deed and word. There is no mystery in a flower or a bird; there is infinite care and infinite work—the same things—and the essence of all things is the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of Life. All things are made by work. To the true artist, the self-cleared man or woman, comes the Holy Ghost, to which he trusts himself, and can do no wrong. By study and by thought, by meditation and by observation, by knowing himself or by striving to know himself, in trust of the Holy Ghost or the spirit of life, a man comes to see plain, to see with truth; and thus he knows other men, the rare great workers called men of genius and the slower craftsmen and simple men who would live their lives in the sun, and ask no more than that they might work for their bread, and for a continuation of their useful work. Is all knowledge to be turned against itself, is all the self-hate of a repressive financial civilisation to destroy a generation, perhaps two generations, of European youth; and even what is called Europe? Is Russia waiting for the two giants of Europe to bleed themselves white, and then to step over the prostrate bodies and bolshevise the earth, as Birkin has said, has written, has shouted for years?

  He tore up the letter and stuffed the pieces into his pocket. He walked up and down under the plane trees whose leaves were rustling with the congealed vapours of the night and the lights of the river. A lost moth was beating its wings against the glass, the lamp casting its pattern of shadows upon the seat.

  What will it avail my life, or what is left of that life if after twenty years of striving for that plain-seeing called truth I turn away from my knowledge and hide myself in the little fearful ego, a farmer not thinking beyond his family on a farm? Have I no wider responsibility? In the growing fear and apprehension coming over the world, is it better to remain silent, or is it better to risk losing all by speaking out, however ineffectually? I do not want fame, or my name to be known among men; I know the vanity of such illusions; but the poor man working in the fields, the man in the thin coat in the dole-queue, the artisan soon to be taken from his home to wear a uniform and carry a rifle and bayonet, or to be told to fly through the air and sooner or later to be broken by iron or charred by fire, who else is there to speak for him? Have I not when trusting myself to the Holy Ghost, the gift of clarity? Will not this immediately be recognised if I go, my unafraid self, in the name and spirit of the camaraderie, with all the hopes of the dead and the living of the Western Front on Christmas Day, 1914?

  Might not such a gesture, for once in history, be taken at its just and truthful value, and with the aid of that modern miracle, the radio, and served by the hope of all men of good-will, so promulgate the beginning of the new world, the brave new world?

  Speak for us, brother; the snows of death are on our brows.

  When the sun arose upon the Thames east of the bridge he walked to a coffee house in Covent Garden. As the day grew, and movement of men and vehicles impinged upon his eyes and ears, he felt an extreme coldness growing upon him, and when just after noon he went before the man in whose ability and realistic vision he believed, he could not speak more than a few words. With his invariable courtesy Birkin rose to greet him, but the calm and aloof strength of Birkin’s usual self was withdrawn, as though for the moment his life, too, was suspended. He held Phillip’s letter half-crumpled in his hand, as though it had been pushed hastily into a pocket.

  “I have been thinking a
bout your letter,” he said.

  Phillip waited. He knew the answer. Birkin looked before him a moment before saying, “I am afraid it is too late to try to see Hitler. The curtain is down.”

  As he prepared to leave, Phillip said, “What will you do?”

  Birkin shifted his weight from the leg ruined in the war, and with eyes averted he said, “They might shoot me, as Jaurès was shot in Paris in August nineteen fourteen, for opposing the war.”

  Phillip waited another few moments.

  “I shall keep on, Maddison, while I can, to give a platform for peace, should our people want it.”

  Phillip paused with his hand on the door-knob.

  “I cannot see my country sink, without trying to do something to save it.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  Outside in the street the newsbills read:

  NAZIS SEIZE DANZIG CUSTOMS

  Chapter 20

  FLITTER-MOUSE

  On the Saturday morning as Phillip was leaving his club the hall porter, who was sorting letters, said casually, “Well, it’s begun. They’ve bombed Warsaw this morning. Will you be wanting your bedroom tonight? I could do with it. Members are returning to Town.”

  “No, thank you. Who told you?”

  “Mr. Olson just came in and told me. I’ll cross your name off No. 10 then. Going home to the farm?”

  “Yes, I’m a farmer this war. How queer.”

  “Yes, it’s a queer business altogether,” the porter replied grimly. He was an old soldier from Belfast, with a wound from the Schwaben Redoubt at Thiepval on July the First, 1916, still unhealed. “Bloody queer, if you ask my opinion,” he iterated, and as his grim stare was maintained upon him, Phillip began to wonder if Irish Jack thought he might be responsible.