The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

  Rudolf Hess cadaverous, craggy-brow’d, ashen face, deep sunk eyes like two black holes, pouring out spate of words, often incoherent, spoken at such speed he often had to pause for breath. Nudged by Göring and Ribbentrop to shut up. “It was my pleasure that many years of my life were spent working under the brightest sun which the history of my people had known for a thousand years. I regret nothing. If I was now at the beginning, I would act as I did, even if at the end I knew I would meet death on a funeral pyre.”

  The old waiter, flat-footed and exhausted, who sometimes wore the ribands of the Boer War and the 1914 Star, was waiting.

  “Mutton hotpot is off, sir. There’s whale-meat casserole.”

  “No thanks. I’ll have the sausages and mash.”

  “Sausages all gone, sir. There’s the main dish available. Hotpot à la Carlton.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mainly offals, sir.”

  “I’ll have Carlton hotpot, please.”

  Albert Speer, former Armaments Minister, did not defend himself but devoted his statement to the horrors of the next war. “The war ended with radio-controlled rockets and aircraft developing the speed of sound, submarine torpedoes which could find their own targets, atom bombs, and chemical warfare. Through the smashing of the atom the world will be in a position to destroy one million people in New York in a matter of seconds.” For the rest, a few were unrepentant. Funk and Saukel broke down while protesting innocence. Frank and Fritsche admitted guilt. “I did not know of Hitler’s crimes,” sobbed Funk, former Reichsbank President. “Had I known of them I would not be here.”

  Ribbentrop put the blame for the war on Hitler. “Foreign policy was determined by another before I knew of it” he averred, while some of his fellow-prisoners removed their head-phones. “I devoted twenty years trying to prevent a war by removing the evils of Versailles. Never did this policy embrace plans for world domination.”

  A member coming into the room sat beside Phillip. He was a professor, appropriately dressed in short vicuna jacket and striped trousers. His head was large and partly bald, he had eyes that stared as though he had meditated much. Half-Spanish, half-Italian, he had been naturalised British for many years, and fought as a young man in a county regiment during the Great War. Since then he had become a physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the leading ‘back room boys’ of Professor Lindemann, the ‘grey eminence’ of Churchill during the war.

  Phillip’s upheld paper had been casting a partial shadow on an unused space of tablecloth. An electric light in another direction overlaid the shadow with a second shadow from a silver flower-bowl in the centre of the table. The double shadow was darker, he vaguely wondered why before lowering the paper out of consideration for the professor next to him.

  Frank, former Governor-General of Poland. “Hitler is the chief accused here. We turned from God, and were doomed. It was not technical hitches and shortages which lost us the war; God pronounced judgment on Hitler and his system, which we, our minds turned from God, served. More and more it degenerated into a political adventure, without truth or conscience.”

  “But the terrible deeds committed by our enemies, which are still going on, particularly in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and the Sudetenland—all these atrocious crimes against humanity, which have been carefully kept out of this trial—have long ago expunged any guilt our people may have incurred.”

  The flat-footed waiter, sensitive, delicate, aware of life’s end—everything was beyond him—put a plate before Phillip, having first polished it with a napkin; then he brought a small casserole dish of offal stewed with grey potato slices.

  “I don’t think I’m very hungry. Would you mind?”

  “I can take it back, sir.”

  “I’ll have it,” said the professor. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

  “No, really, thank you. May I have some sandwiches please?”

  When the waiter had served him, the professor said, “I suppose you farmers live on the fat of the land, and regard the townsman’s food as uneatable? You were wise to foresee what was coming, and buy land before the war, Maddison.”

  Phillip raised his paper. “I was wondering why a shadow can darken a shadow. See, on the tablecloth. It looks blue, while the shadows all around look grey.”

  “Two sources of light are deprived simultaneously,” replied the professor, munching vehemently.

  “Like this trial, according to Frank. Atrocities induce atrocities —all those civilians burned by our phosphorus bombs on German towns—all those Jews burned in revenge.”

  There was no reply, so Phillip returned to the paper.

  Rosenberg, the Nazi Philosopher, and Streicher, the Jew-baiter, both protested personal innocence while blaming Hitler for mass-murders and atrocities. Kaltenbrunner, ex-chief of the Security Police, denounced anti-Semitism as barbarism in which he had no part. Von Schirach, Nazi youth leader, appealed to the tribunal to declare German youth guiltless of the excesses and degeneracies of the Hitler regime.

  Only Seyss-Inquart, Hitler’s aide in the rape of Austria, remained faithful to his idol, declaring: “I served him and remained loyal to him. I cannot today cry ‘Crucify him’ when yesterday I cried ‘Hosannah’.”

  Finally, Lord Justice Lawrence expressed the appreciation of the Tribunal to both prosecution and defence counsel. Revealing that some of the German defence lawyers had received threatening letters from Germans, he said they would have the protection of the Tribunal and of the Allied Control Council.

  The waiter brought sandwiches which seemed to be made of flavoured wood-paste of the kind the Germans were living on. Phillip felt suddenly exhausted. The voice of Osgood Nilsson across the table saying the whole trial was a farce, everyone knew the Boches were bloody-minded sadists and butchers, thieves and gangsters.

  “I wonder,” said Phillip, looking across to Nilsson, “I wonder if, when the history of this war ever comes to be written impartially, it will be learned, for example, that the art treasures found in German salt-mines were put there to be out of the way of the Allied bombing?”

  At this the professor sitting beside him jumped up, exclaiming, “I refuse to sit at the same table with you! I shall complain immediately to the Committee! I come here to eat my dinner in peace!” and explosively left the room.

  Phillip followed him downstairs, ready to explain that he was sorry he had spoiled the other man’s dinner. In the hall the professor was making for the library and silence room. The door closed behind him. Phillip hesitated to follow him there. Leaving the club he hurried across Pall Mall and walked rapidly through St. James’ Square and so to Piccadilly and the Swallow Dive.

  “No message for you, sir.”

  Up the stairs again and out of the cellar, back to the half-light of Regent Street, feeling himself to be hurrying from nowhere to nowhere down the subway steps to the Underground.

  “South Kensington, please.”

  A Le Mans Bentley parked outside the Medicean Club. He went up the stairs, remembering his visit there during the phoney war—Melissa and her painting of the night of phosphoric waves and fish and seals on the East Coast, the last bathe before the war. Still a painter’s studio, thank God, same two bars, pianist and drummer, candlelight, quietude, laughter. O’Callogan declaring he had turned his studio into a refuge from the war in which art would lose its heart, so at least let it remain a refuge from formlessness and the tyranny of what was coming. Here Apollo would rule, and give the boot to Mars if any of his myrmidons tried to get in!

  Good intentions. Irish lyricism had wilted, the painter had not painted, the Great Vacuum had arrived with riff-raff splurging on canvas imitations of Picasso and selling their daubs to rich and foolish Yanks. One phoney went about London in a Rolls with buffalo horns across the front of the roof, a Cockney with a fudge-up dialect supposedly from Greenwich Village —he having helped Al Capone (he declared) to blast New York’s bootleggers from their headquarters in the Bow
ery.

  Overcome by so much fake, so much untruth, O’Callogan, the London-Irish painter, hadn’t painted. Who could paint in this bloody war, he had repeated amidst raised glasses and the thud of bombs, until he believed it and was finished.

  Phillip looked around the curtain at the top of the stairs, but could not see Piers. At the far end of the room O’Callogan stood talking to an officer in uniform standing upright, reading a book. He was, apart from this detail, the picture of military rectitude. And vaguely familiar—where had he seen him before? No, it must have been someone else.

  In fact it was someone Phillip had seen in hospital during the war; but without the parade ground stiffness which was due to the spine being held rigid, under the uniform, within a steel corset. The facial complexion was pink, the waxen effect emphasised by a wide ginger moustache below a very straight nose grafted on a face which had partly perished in the heat and flare of a flamethrower in the Reichwald, after the body had received the disruption of a mortar shell.

  Sitting beside this living effigy, on a stool, was a girl with short black hair, rose-pink complexion, and when she turned his way, large and dark-blue eyes. She was smiling—at him? Had he met her somewhere? He felt weak. Was this the beginning of mental disease—a split mind? When she turned her head to speak to her Madame Tussaud companion, Phillip crossed the floor to a table at the other end of the room, near the piano where sat the same blind pianist with apparently the same fag hanging from his lower lip, as during the last visit there, in the middle of the war, with Piers on overseas leave before embarking for the Far East, and the ‘forgotten’ Fourteenth Army. Less substantial than shadows, weak saline in the sea.

  The drummer, aged and white-haired like himself, bowed his head. He at least was real. “Glad to see you back, sir!” Carnation in button-hole of frayed but clean dinner jacket with no breast-pocket, relic of the ‘twenties, when one put a handkerchief in one’s cuff, later a middle-class solecism. That jacket was a relic of pre-war upper-middle class grandeurs of S.W.1, before the black-market boys came out of the East End, when young ladies still ignored, at least in public, the commonplace four-letter words. The disintegration had come after the bombings, following a we’re-all-in-this-together-boys camaraderie in the Medicean Club: the blitz pulled people together when it didn’t bury or tear them to bits. Thereafter the wide boys, the spivs, had taken over.

  The drummer caught Phillip’s eye again, gave another little salute and smile. He remembered Phillip as one of the original founder-members with Sir Piers Tofield, Mr. Archibald Plugge. and other gentlemen of what he called the ancient régime of the pre-war. He watched Phillip sit down at a table, unfold the evening paper, glance again at the front page; put the paper aside. The drummer thereupon leaned over and said to the pianist, “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.”

  Hearing the music, Phillip re-entered the present. So the drummer remembered! He ordered a pint of bitter and a bottle of brown ale; put down the glasses on the top of the piano, and stood there, smiling.

  “Good to see you again, sir!” said the drummer, taking the brown ale. “One of our stalwarts, if I may say so.”

  “Thank you for remembering my favourite tune!”

  The pianist drank from his pot, and then came Rachmaninov’s marvellous white music. Gone black thoughts of the ebb-tide swirling down under Chelsea Bridge to deep oblivion of Thames estuary. No, never yield to grief. Never hurt Lucy and the children. The divorce was to be heard in two days’ time. Empty formality, dead words, no contesting the charges of desertion and cruelty. The ghost of old times, when I lost my heart. I must see Lucy when it’s all over—if it will ever be all over—

  O’Callogan came across the floor. “You’re wanted on the telephone, my boyo.”

  The hall porter of the Barbarian. “Sir Piers Tofield has just called in. He says will you meet him at the Swallow Dive, sir.”

  “How was he, George?”

  “Seemed all right to me, sir. Shivering a bit, coming from the Far East, so I took him up to the bar where he had one drink and then left, sir.”

  Phillip got on the wrong train. Charing Gross. Take taxi. Quick, quick! Down the stairs. German dugouts on the Somme had forty steps. Intelligence reports of thirty yards depth never reached Army staff. “The preliminary bombardments will destroy all enemy field-works.” They didn’t. Hence sixty thousand casualties on July the First. History hadn’t yet caught up with that. I must write my war novels—

  “Sorry, sir, but your friend is barred after last night. Told me he was going down to your club, sir, the Barbarian, is it?”

  When Phillip returned, the professor was handing an envelope, addressed to the Chairman of Committee, to the night porter who had just come on duty. Phillip said, “May I speak to you a moment, privately? I want to apologise for spoiling your supper.”

  Whereupon the professor asked for the envelope to be returned, tore it to pieces, and turning to the younger man, said, “Say no more, my dear fellow! I must tell you that the war hit hard many of my friends who died in the concentration camps. Their genius lies in ashes.”

  “I do assure you, Professor, that had I been in Germany during the war and seen little children being thrown into crematoria flames, I’d have gone in after them.”

  The professor thought this to be of the lunatic fringe of the fascist attitude compounded of 1914–18 war-exhaustion, whence death-wish, megalomania and exhibitionism; but offered his hand warmly, having seen tears in the younger man’s eyes. Then he went to the lift, to play poker.

  Jubilantly Phillip leapt up the wide main stairway, two and three red-carpet’d treads at a time, to the bar. He entered quietly, and so heard what a labour M.P. was saying.

  “We’ve got Maddison! I’ve two witnesses who heard him saying that the horrors of Belsen were caused by Allied bombing, which destroyed all public utility systems including sewerage, transport, and food haulage which led to typhus! As peace isn’t yet signed, this is giving comfort to the King’s enemies, so he’s virtually in the same category as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’!”

  Phillip returned down the stairs, quietly, to spend the next hour and a half—with several interruptions—composing a letter.

  *

  My Dear Professor,

  I was much moved by your magnanimity towards me in the Club tonight. I thought your words had a Churchillian quality. Did he not say, after the Boer War, when speaking up for our (then) late enemies, Botha, Smuts, and others, “The grass grows green again upon the battlefield; but on the scaffold, never.”

  Churchill has written some of the splendid prose of the century, which means that he has received some of its finest thoughts.

  In the days before the nominal rule of the commonplace, uncommon men were able to be uncommonly chivalrous; and thus the rancours of the South African war were transmuted into respect and amity—and loyalty. How proud I am as an old soldier that Smuts is now a Field-Marshal of the British Army!

  He was preparing to continue when the door into the Silence Room opened and a tenor voice was heard singing softly,

  “Your tiny hand is frozen

  Let me warm it into life”

  and the tall figure of the night porter, who had just come on duty, entered. Phillip ignored him. That night bird, who called himself Globe-Mornington, could be a nuisance. He was an oddment of the times, which were in polluted flux. Before the war a minor operetta star, the night porter now cleaned the club premises, and some of the members’ boots outside bedroom doors, in an erratic manner. Thus sometimes he was to be seen, by some late reveller, wearing a grey-blue Ruritanian hussar’s jacket and dolman, together with trousers of the same shade, with broad red stripes down the outside seams. While he did not treat those members of the club who had been elected under Drama (which included all sorts from Shakespearean actors to panto comics) with incivility or in an over-bearing manner, Globe-Mornington was wont to assume the air of a superior artiste, with added advice to members to enjoy themselves on al
l nocturnal occasions. (He sold miniature bottles of black-market spirits). Sometimes snatches of Italian opera were to be heard about the corridors of the upper bedrooms, once attics occupied by the servants of a most noble marquess.

  “Bless your heart, you’re working late, aren’t you? What is it this time, seagulls behind your plough, or your defence as a club criminal? Though it’s none of my business, of course. I suppose I’m paging you, one of your friends has just rung you up, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, seemed a little incoherent. Sears or Cheers I think he said his name was, anyway he’s on his way to some club or other, what was it now? You know more about these places than I do, the Medical Club I think it was. He says if you’ve nothing better to do will you meet him at Piccadilly station at half-past eleven. He doesn’t want to miss you this time.”

  “Thank you”, said Phillip, and went on writing; while the porter picked up a copy of The New Horizon, saying, “May I look at this, sir? I heard from Mr. Osgood Nilsson that Wallington Christie, the editor and pacifist, wrote in here that the atom bomb should be dropped on Moscow and the sooner the better.”

  “I’m going to edit it now.”

  “My word, sir, aren’t you taking on another load of mischief?”

  “Of course I don’t agree with that! May I read what I’ve just written? ‘O, if the war could have been stopped when Hitler went into Russia! Hereward Birkin, then in prison, wrote to me to ask Churchill to consider withdrawing from the war, arming with the might of the British Empire, and then await the victor of the Russo-German clash—if any. For myself, I did not want any nation to lose the war; I wanted all the peoples of Europe to be friends, to be purged of their intolerances. And yet it seems that I, in my own small orbit, have not only failed in harmony as the head of a small family, but I have despoiled what I set myself to create on a few hundred acres of a farm in East Anglia’.”