The Vengeance of Rome

by Michael Moorcock

  The people are colourless. Even in the grey light they are like simplified drawings, silhouettes. No matter how close you go to them the details of their faces and costume grow no sharper. They puff a thin roll-up into an ember and cough on yellow smoke. From the corners of bloodless mouths they mumble at one another. Their faces are defined by lines of grime, sketch maps of a thousand small disappointments.

  Mrs Cornelius pauses to pick through some miscellaneous domestic objects. She gives an enamel saucepan her disdainful onceover.

  ‘After the War,’ I tell her, ‘I was still in politics. There were no blacks here then. Just Irish and Poles. Perek Rachman brought the blacks in.’ But, of course, I did not blame him. He was good to me. They picked on him during the Keeler business because they thought he was a Jew. It killed him.

  ‘Wos that when you wos wiv Colin Jordan?’ Spurning the saucepan she picks up a set of rusting knives tied together with fatty string. ‘When you lived in Portland Road?’ She squints down their length.

  ‘Of course not.’ She listens to nothing. I never lived in Portland Road. She has no interest in politics. Jordan was much later. He took over the League of British Fascists. Leese’s old HQ. They called it the Black House, but it was just a terraced shop. There was a mortician’s next door. Leese’s widow used to live over it. I had tea with her every Tuesday. She hated the BUF. Mosley and her husband had fallen out years ago. Leese thought Mosley was a liberal. I met the Empire Movement people there. G. K. Chesterton was their most famous member, and of course he died. They were pleasant, mostly middle-aged, but they could not muster more than a few hundred supporters even when we went into the Common Market. Hitler’s dream of United Europe became reality. He knew he could not coerce the British. ‘They always have to volunteer,’ he said. ‘They like to think they’re in control.’ But Leese’s Information Service for the Jew Wise, as he called his organisation, was not behind Europe.

  Later Leese turned his attentions to the blacks. That was an entirely different struggle and one which he also lost, though his ideas are not forgotten. I have not been down to Portland Road lately. It has an unnatural character with its window boxes, brass knockers and dark green paint. The street is no longer a comfort to me. London was once full of sanctuaries. Today there are fewer and fewer of them.

  She flourishes a sawtoothed German carving knife. The colour has worn off the wooden handle. ‘Ten pee! Look at that, Ivan!’ Her outrage swells her. ‘It’s just like mine. You know my bread knife. And there’s a lot more effin’ rust on this one.’ She has found her moral high ground. She replaces the knife and raises her disgusted eyes level with the stallholder’s. He murmurs some stock response and glares shiftily at the dark grey tarmac beneath his sodden boots.

  Golborne Road is our most wretched street. Its gutters abound with filth swept in from the surrounding boroughs. The locals don’t notice or care. Light has no hope of escape from the smeared shopfronts. Mephitic lumps occasionally shift behind the glass. Nothing can lift the fog of desperate nihilism infecting the unwholesome air. I raise my comforter against it. I protect my mouth. Mrs Cornelius says that it will do no good. The stuff gets in through your skin, she says. Through your eyes. It’s like a gas.

  Röhm told me he had only a passing acquaintance with Hitler in the trenches. ‘He won his Iron Cross fair and square. We used to say he’d “saddled the nightmare”. You’d give him an order and he’d go into this kind of trance. Next minute he’d just set off through the shell-storm like he was running up the street to get a loaf of bread for his mother. Flak and bullets everywhere. Screaming, our Alf would run on, faithful to the end. They said he captured a bunch of Froggies single-handed once, but that sounds too much like the Mussolini story to me. Initiative was never really Alf’s strong point. Nobody ever promoted him. He was like a lot of soldiers. He preferred taking orders to giving them.’

  Röhm runs those hard fingers over his mosaics. We sit on a marble bench beside the wall. The mosaics are still in progress. They are blatantly erotic, reminiscent of Pompeii. He has had experts design them. He knows all the best interior decorators. This is the work, he says, of Sohner, who does the Berliner Film Company’s sets and designed Dietrich’s costumes for Der blaue Engel. ‘That’s what we should keep Jews on for. I don’t mind them as entertainers either. It’s the writers you have to watch. But you won’t convince Hitler of that. Like me, he’s a simple creature. He has an On/Off switch and a Fast/Slow lever.

  ‘When he was working for me, he was like a tin man, an automaton. I broke the ice eventually. During that trouble in Munich after the War when the Bolshies took over and we had to deal with them, he was working for me as an informant. We soon discovered he was a first-class agitator. He’d go into these camps full of commies and just start talking to them. Not much of a regular soldier but a brilliant orator. We valued him. The Bolshies caught him and were going to shoot him. There was a mix-up. My lads got hold of him and were also going to shoot him. If I hadn’t spotted him in time, old Gregor Strasser wouldn’t be having the problems he’s having now. Running the party would be plain sailing for him without Hitler. But Alfy always dithered if there wasn’t someone directing him. And then, if forced, he’d make absolutely terrible decisions! He lost his nerve in the putsch and ran like a rabbit. Too many choices. He can’t stand it. First whiff of an alternative and he falls apart. Left a lot of comrades for dead, and people were resentful, said he was powder-shy. But I came to understand his virtues. Alf’s special.’

  Röhm stands naked in front of his huge mirror. His round, scarred face belies his fitness. Stripped he is a Roman gladiator, his feet slightly apart, his arthritic hands in fists. He suffers badly, he says, with his bones. Too many breaks, too many wet trenches. He continues in his mood of reminiscence.

  ‘I had to remain independent of Alf. That’s why I resigned the first time in ‘24. But I came back. Alf’s like a wonderful instrument - useless unless regularly played. He gets into a pathetic state before he speaks. He’s got no self-confidence. He sulks. You have to push him on. Then he goes out there and just stands for a bit, as if absorbing the crowd’s vitality. Apparently Jolson’s the same. Works an audience better than he can manage his own life. On top of that Alf knows he’s been singled out by Destiny because he didn’t die in the War when everyone else was going down like ninepins. They used to call him Lucky Alf even then. I’m convinced that what will get us through all this will be Alf’s devilish good fortune. We’ll need it when we finally do take things into our own hands.’

  I was reminded of my Negro friend, the massive Mr Mix. He had also thought of me as his mascot, his rabbit’s foot. But what others saw as luck, I saw as judgement. Röhm might be underestimating Hitler. An excellent military strategist who understood the streets, Röhm left the internal politics to others. He always admitted he was more of a visionary than a day-to-day politician. That idealism would be his downfall.

  He and Strasser were the first Nazis to be contacted by Kurt von Schleicher, the army’s main political man, who had Hindenburg’s ear. Röhm thought von Schleicher too tricky, too Byzantine, but von Schleicher had not been completely deaf to his proposals for a reformation of the army.

  ‘Von Schleicher wants Hindenburg to appoint him Chancellor,’ Röhm told me. ‘But Hitler has to be Chancellor. We’ve held out for that all along. We’ve all told Hitler to stick with it.’ The elections for President were due the following year. Hindenburg would run again but was already too old. Hitler would stand and probably wouldn’t beat him. However, it would increase his public status enormously. The Nazis had no one else of Alf’s potential. They were all working to get him up there. Meanwhile, there was no harm in letting von Schleicher think the Nazis could be persuaded to serve his purposes in the Reichstag.

  For all his frankness and understanding, Röhm’s loyalty to Hitler was absolute. By force of arms the Stabschef had the power either to make himself Führer or put his friend Strasser on the throne. Röhm wa
s the hand, he told me. Strasser was the brain. But Hitler was the perceptible soul of the movement. An unstable, youthful soul, perhaps, but what the German people responded to.

  Röhm thought of Strasser as a more manly equal. They had the same left leanings. But Röhm understood how the common folk responded with religious ecstasy to Hitler. ‘That’s what the likes of General von Schleicher refuse to think about,’ he said. ‘They all see Hitler as an instrument they can play their own tunes on. Alf is so pliable he always lets us think that. He even believes it himself. He hates to say “no”. But he bides his time, and suddenly you discover to your surprise that you are his instrument! It is a kind of psychic ju-jitsu. Uriah Heep, eh?’

  Röhm had read Dickens in Bolivia. He shared with Gregor Strasser an intense love of classical literature. One room in his house was utterly different to the others — a soldier’s cell, containing only the SA blood-flag, a shelf of books and some military paraphernalia. This was where he often chose to sleep alone. Of a trusting disposition, he was not a complete fool and was unhappy about Goebbels’s and Göring’s influence on the leader.

  Röhm had better things to do with his time than indulge in petty jealousies and refused to get involved in palace intrigue. The Stabschef had his own constituency. He could afford to stand apart. At his chosen moment millions of iron-hard Storm Troopers would spring to his standard. ‘Goebbels in particular hates me,’ he said, ‘because of the old relationship I had with Hitler. He can’t poison that. He can’t make it not have happened. When all’s said and done he knows it’s me Hitler will call on if anything goes wrong. The little doctor’s scared of me and my ideas. His talk of a “new morality” means getting the chance to fulfil all the grubby little conventional wet dreams he’s ever suppressed. And watch that Göring, too. I know you like him but our valiant captain’s a sadist at root. The sweeter the outside, the harder the inside, as we say in Bavaria.’

  Mrs Cornelius disagrees. She remains derisive. She defends the Reichsmarschall and attacks the Stabschef. “E was a nasty little boy-buggerer, that Röhm.’

  ‘He was an idealistic boy-buggerer,’ I tell her, ‘and that’s the crucial difference.’

  Röhm confided his dreams to me as we wandered through the half-completed rooms.

  ‘I intend to build an army of men who are everything to one another, who have no other loyalties, who are softened neither by the company of women nor the responsibilities of fatherhood. A vast Spartan army ready to defend the nation to the death. It frightens them because we would be what they only talk of being. If Hitler refuses to condemn me, what right have they to do it?’

  On reflection he also admitted that Hitler had another good reason for not sounding off about ‘degeneracy’ in the SA.

  Röhm was proud that scarcely a senior SA commander was not of his persuasion. In turn they promoted their own. Few realise how close Röhm’s dream was to realisation. The SA must soon take over the training and moral education of the Hitler Youth. Meanwhile, I became an honorary captain in the Foreign Intelligence wing of the SA.

  What, I asked, was the Foreign Intelligence wing supposed to do? Who did it consist of? My friend was boisterously amused. ‘You, my dear Max! It’s your department.’

  As a sworn follower of my Duce, thus unable to tell Röhm all the details, I pointed out that my job as designer for the Italian aircraft industry might conflict with my new rank. He reassured me. The SA position was an honorary one. I need swear no special oath which would compromise my allegiance to Mussolini. Indeed, the rank was conferred very casually by Röhm. He sent a note to an adjutant one July evening. We were still in that bizarre, half-built classical villa. The smell of the Bavarian pine forest and heavy, damp mountain soil blended with rosewater and Havana cigars. It was up to me, he said, to find my own uniform if I wanted one. He gave me a spare cap.

  Röhm had drawn up the plans for his villa long before he left Bolivia. ’I had little else to do with my spare time. The entire country is repressed by the bloody Roman Church. Apart from the gorgeous Felipe. And his father soon put a stop to that. Hitler’s telegram came in the nick of time. I was ready to join the priesthood; I suspected it was the only place I’d find a friend.’ He spoke rather tenderly of the Bolivian boy he had known and of another ‘chum’ with whom he had travelled back to Europe.

  Röhm used the roughest of soldier’s language in parliament while reserving his cultivated eloquence for his private moments. Probably the best-read of all the Nazis, he shared my enthusiasm for Karl May and Simplicissimus. He and Hitler had both once been passionate fans of Jules Verne, but not of Wells, whom they thought too pessimistic and philo-Semitic. The Stabschef could quote from Dante, Machiavelli and many Latin authors, as well as Goethe and Schiller, but he admitted to having no ear for poetry. ’And no nose for wine!’ He could not, he said, tell one vintage from another. Which is why he nowadays only drank champagne. ‘To be on the safe side.’ He was thinking of equipping Röhmannsvilla with a vomitorium.

  ‘I went off champagne,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘It makes me sick.’ At one time or another she has identified almost every kind of food and drink as the source of her problem. She will not accept the obvious explanation.

  ‘You have a weak stomach,’ I tell her, ‘and a hard head, as we used to say in Odessa. The worst combination. My cousin Wanda was the same, although that might have been pregnancy, after all.’

  ‘It’s the stuff they put in the food,’ she insists. ’We’re bein’ poisoned.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ I ask her. Tesco’s, Safeway, Marks and Spencer’s, Lyons - all our food comes to us from Jews now! Even the Jolly Green Giant is Jewish. I read it only the other day in the grocery press. Our clothing, our medicines, our finances! The United Nations. Is there nothing the modern Jew does not control?

  As in Germany.

  The English are content to complain. They never want anything to come to a head. As a consequence they are sliding into historical oblivion. Churchill warned them of it. So did Hitler. They have no Catholics worth worrying about. Cromwell stamped out that particular canker then, as if to compensate for it, he invited the Jews to return to England! There were no Jews for hundreds of years. Cromwell was very much at odds with Martin Luther, who knew his Jew through and through. Consequently the English had no defences against what happened. Within a few generations the aliens had infiltrated everywhere until by the last quarter of the nineteenth century they even controlled Parliament! People turned them into heroes. If that is not a lesson, what must it take? Not that I have any prejudice, especially against Catholics.

  Mrs Cornelius comes across a plastic crucifix smothered with some mysterious dirt. ‘People don’t give nothin’ respect, these days,’ she says. ‘I mean, ‘oo they got to look up ta? The Archbishop of Canterbury?’

  They say the Pope helped all the ‘war criminals’ get away Yet it was impossible at that time to know who were good and who were bad Nazis. Vatican passports got Stangl and Eichmann and the others to South America, but they did not give them automatic absolution!

  When in 1930 Röhm returned to Germany in some style, he decided to make up for lost time. He did not know how long he would live or if the revolution would be successful. If it failed, he was sure to be shot. He knew from his reading of history how freebooters, like himself, could become an embarrassment should the war be won. He spoke of himself as Jean Lafitte or Sir Francis Drake, but I think he hoped Fate would make him a Napoleon.

  All his experience of life, Röhm asserted, told him that life was a wild hunt. You were lucky if the best you could do was to hang on to your horse. Anything might knock you off at any moment. Luck alone kept you seated when better riders and nobler men fell. ‘That’s why I live to the full. Knowing any hour could be my last!’

  A soldier first and everything else second, Röhm enjoyed his leisure as he enjoyed his work, bringing the same self-punishing intensity to both. Finding love for the first time after the War, he had been h
appy for a while. He had quarrelled with Hitler over a small political matter and had left the movement. Hitler condemned him as a traitor. ‘Alf went into a sulk. Wouldn’t talk to me. Well, I failed to earn a living by any other means. Soldiering’s all I know. So I accepted a commission as a regular officer in the Bolivian Army, training their troops.’ He had learned from them, too. He had picked up much of his understanding of revolutionary warfare from his South American days.

  ‘But most of my time was spent reading and playing the gramophone,’ he told me. He wrote long, sensitive letters home to close friends. The newspapers got hold of some and published them in hope of damaging Hitler’s standing with the electorate.

  Röhm had laughed when telling me the story. ‘The electorate preferred to believe Hitler’s support of me.’ Even when exclusive hotels were turned into public spectacles of unchecked homosexuality, Hitler continued to stand by Röhm. Putzi Hanfstaengl told me that. ‘Hitler couldn’t afford not to. If Alf condemned Röhm, then Röhm might easily break his own silence, eh? They’ve all had to stick together over the years. A few words from the Stabschef and that’ll be the end of Hitler’s career in national politics.’ Hanfstaengl knew how vulnerable Hitler was to blackmail. The party had already paid a vast amount of money for some letters and pictures which had fallen into greedy hands. Nobody at that time knew what else was loose. Hitler’s letter writing was a lot less discreet than Röhm’s, and he tended to embellish his points with detailed anatomical drawings. And photographs. Hitler could deny rumours, but whatever his oldest friend said would have a special authority. They would sink together. And so the alliance held.