O Shepherd, Speak!

by Upton Sinclair

  VIII

  All this was what Bernhardt Monck wanted to talk to Lanny about. This onetime sailor, labor leader, capitán, and OSS agent had been taken on as a personnel adviser to the AMG. He kept track of Germans, looked up their records, and helped to sort out the liberal and democratic sheep from the Nazi goats. Lanny went to his apartment and had dinner with his little family, whom he had heard much about but had never met. Those two children had lived in Germany, France, and the Argentine and knew all three languages and some English besides. The war had paid no heed to children but had scattered them like seeds over the earth; however, this pair hadn’t suffered, because their father had earned money from Lanny and his father and had used the Americans as a bank, much safer than anything in Adolf Hitler’s realm or his French satrapy.

  Monck poured out his heart to this trusted friend. He had had so many disappointments in his life—one long struggle for social justice which he had never seen. He had felt so confident that with the overthrow of Nazism there would be peace and a measure of security for this tormented old continent; but now his mind was full of doubts and tempted to despair. Were the Americans going to be equal to the job which had been thrust upon them? Did they even have any comprehension of the nature of that job? The Humpty-Dumpty of capitalism had fallen off the European wall and been smashed into a thousand pieces; and apparently all the President’s horses and the President’s men had no idea in their minds but to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

  The Big Four governments had agreed upon an elaborate program of denazification, and it read very well on paper; the trouble was with its application. It was Monck’s business to investigate the record of this individual and that, and he would do so and make a report; but then he would find that the American authorities would make excuses for not acting. Yes, the individual may have been a Nazi; but then most Germans had been Nazis, or had had to pretend to be. What was needed right now was efficiency, and this individual had had experience and was willing to do what he was told. Monck would say to his American boss, “Yes, Major Porter, but doing what you are told isn’t democracy. Doing what you are told is supposed to be the principal German vice and was what brought Hitler into power.” That would be taken as arguing, and what Monck was supposed to do was to do what he was told.

  It was one consequence of government by an Army, and it couldn’t very well be ended until there was a civil administration in Germany, so Monck thought; and Lanny answered that it was more than that, it was a difference in national point of view. To an American, democracy meant political rights and civil liberties but had nothing to do with business. “In business we have private enterprise, which is autocracy undisguised. The boss owns the plant, and if the worker doesn’t like it he can go elsewhere.”

  “Exactly,” agreed the German; “and that means that I get nothing but blank looks when I try to explain to an American Army officer that the Social Democrats are the only people in this country who really believe in democracy and can be depended upon to oppose the return of some new and more subtly disguised form of Nazism. What the American is thinking about are property rights and efficiency in administration. The result is that while they are prosecuting Dr. Schacht for crimes against humanity they are appointing thousands of little Schachts to positions of authority all over Germany. When they get through, the country will be in the hands of the very same men who financed Hitler and who will have no idea in the world but to finance some new ‘strong’ government to keep the Socialists from winning an election.”

  IX

  That was one of Monck’s troubles; the other was at the opposite end of the social scale—the Communists. They were making all the difficulties they could for Socialists, as well as for Americans; they wanted everything to fail, not merely with capitalism, but also with Social Democracy, in order that the workers might be driven to Communism. Monck was of the opinion that the Western powers had made a grave error in consenting to four separate regimes for Germany; it was the one sure way to promote dissension and conflict. “They should have argued it out at the beginning and worked out an arrangement for one government; it was either then or never. As it is, they have established perpetual argument, and if it doesn’t lead to war it will be a miracle.”

  A grave problem indeed for a German Social Democrat, for he was caught between the two firing lines, and neither side was his friend. The Americans dealt with the Socialists only because they had to, and forbade them to take any steps toward carrying out their program; as for the Russians, what they wanted was to shoot the Socialist leaders and throw their followers into concentration camps. They were doing that in their own zone of Germany; they had got up a so-called “Socialist Unity Party,” to be run by the Communists, and if the Socialist leaders joined that they were all right, but if they didn’t, they disappeared and nobody knew what had become of them. Kidnapings across the line were common, and Monck said that he would never go anywhere near the line at night. It was quite like the old Nazi days.

  Yes, the world was certainly in a mess! Americans had thought the world war was won and that the Allies were going to stand together and bring order and peace to Europe; but there they were, splitting apart—exactly as Hitler and Göring and the rest had foreseen. American boys in the Armed Forces were holding mass meetings, crying, “We wanna go home,” and this movement was spreading to India, Korea, Japan, Italy, and France. There were places where officers didn’t dare give orders to the men for fear they wouldn’t be obeyed. Naturally, it looked to the Communists like the coming of world revolution, their newer world in birth.

  “I don’t need to tell you about the Russians,” said the ex-capitán. “Your armies are going to pieces, but theirs stay put, and the same applies to the air forces. They are probing for weak spots all over the world, and wherever they find one they will move in. Their propaganda war has never been so active.”

  Yes, Lanny knew. Russia was still refusing to carry out her agreement that Dairen and Port Arthur were to be free ports. Russia was backing Yugoslavia’s demand for Trieste. Russia was demanding a trusteeship over Tripolitania in North Africa. Russia was refusing to take her troops out of Northern Iran, and when Iran appealed to the Security Council of the United Nations, Russia denied the right of the UN to consider the matter. When the UN acted, Gromyko, the Russian representative, took a walk. A sensation throughout the world, caused by this young man with the dead-pan face. Was he going to stay out? He didn’t say. Was Russia going to withdraw from the UN? Russia didn’t say.

  What was America going to do? Monck asked, and Lanny didn’t have much to tell him. Lanny didn’t know America’s new President and couldn’t guess how rapidly or slowly he was learning his job. His Secretary of State was an amiable, old-fashioned Southern gentleman, from the most old-fashioned state in the Union, South Carolina. James F. Byrnes was the only man in the country who could say that he had been representative, senator, justice of the Supreme Court, and secretary of state. He was an elderly politician, trained in the arts of compromise and reconcilement. For more than a year he had been traveling from one conference to the next, encountering for the first time in his life a force that would not compromise and would not be reconciled. Jimmie looked into the dead-pan face of Gromyko and the deader-pan face of Molotov and tried to guess what was going on behind those masks; it was something new in his experience, a trained and indoctrinated, silent and implacable, cold and deadly hatred.

  X

  Lanny explained, “We Americans are busy putting our Fleet and our Air Force up in mothballs, as we call it, and it will seem to us perfectly awful to have to start taking them out again. We hate war and everything about it. We want to bring the boys home and give them jobs making motorcars and electric refrigerators and other such useful articles. We want to use our spare money keeping the people of Europe alive and helping them to build a union of free nations. But I don’t think we’ll let ourselves be squeezed out of Germany, or even out of Berlin, and I think if we see that we ha
ve to, we’ll start rearming all over again and getting ready to defend our position. We think that Roosevelt was very generous at Yalta and Teheran; indeed, our conscience troubles us a little because we gave away things that were perhaps not ours to give. You can be certain we won’t give any more, and if we have to get tough, we will.”

  “You must understand,” said Monck, “it’s a matter of importance to me and mine, not to mention my comrades and my party. If we stick here and try to help you Americans, and then you back down and leave us, it would be certain death for me and probably for my family. You can’t imagine how the Communists hate us, or the frenzy they will be in if they see their plans being balked. They are absolutely certain that they are going to be able to take Germany and make it into a Communist satellite. They have been training a hundred thousand German prisoners in Russia—men who have been indoctrinated and have become Communists, or have pretended to. You know about General Paulus, their commander.”

  “I have read about this army,” Lanny replied. “Will the rank and file stay put?”

  “The Russians are bringing them into Eastern Germany now, and a number of them have deserted and come over to our side of the line. They have dreadful stories to tell of the millions who have died in slave camps. They themselves are well fed, better than they will be on our side, but they prefer freedom.”

  “How much do they realize about what is going on?”

  “Those I have talked to are in a state of bewilderment and don’t know whom to trust. Nobody ever loved an occupation army, but after they have been here a while they know that they prefer Americans and American ways. All Germans, you know, look upon the Russians as a barbarous people who are dirty and don’t know how to use a bathroom. What they did in the way of rape and looting in Eastern Germany would suffice to make it impossible to win us to their ideology. The Russians themselves are confused—they have a hard time making up their minds whether they are conquerors or comrades, and they try to be both, and it doesn’t work.”

  XI

  Stalin had delivered a speech in the month of February, in which he had said that the Soviet Union must have more heavy industry, to be prepared for any contingency. It was notice to the Russian people that they must face more years of deprivation, and it was notice to the outside world to do the same. This applied especially to America, the only nation which had the means to save Europe from starvation—and from Communist revolts which would follow in its wake.

  “What can we do?” Lanny asked, and his friend replied with one word, three times repeated, “Propaganda! Propaganda! Propaganda! You must set up the most powerful radio stations in the world and answer the Communists in every language. You must employ the best writers and the best speakers you have, every skill of every sort, and meet the falsehoods and smash them. You must print cheap newspapers and leaflets in every language and flood every country with them. You must smuggle them into Russia by every device you can think of. It’s a war—they have declared it, and you have to pitch in and win. If you spend one per cent of what you’ll have to spend in a fighting war, you may save the other ninety-nine per cent. I can’t imagine why your leaders don’t see that.”

  “There are several reasons,” the other explained. “Our people are afraid of government propaganda. They are afraid to give too much power to politicians—it might be turned against the people.”

  “But you did it during the war!”

  “We did it, but we hated it, and we stopped it as soon as we could. The Office of War Information was abolished almost at once. When we have won a war we think everything is settled, and we hurry home to our private affairs.”

  “Including the private publishing of newspapers and the broadcasting of radio commercials!”

  “That’s a big factor in the matter. Our publishers and radio owners are scared of the very shadow of government competition. They’d rather risk going to hell than see it get a foothold. Their congressmen agree with them, and it will be like pulling teeth to get any appropriation out of them.”

  XII

  This situation was made worse by the fact that a congressional election was due in November, and by all the signs there would be a Republican Congress to confront President Truman during his second two years. It had been that way after World War I, and the pattern appeared to be repeating itself; the people were tired, they were disillusioned, and wanted a change. The effect would be to make every decision harder; every measure would be judged by its political results, in keeping patronage and power away from the administration. A cheerless prospect indeed, and the best Lanny could do to relieve his friend’s depression was to tell him about the Peace Program and promise to use its power to persuade the American people to prepare for ideological war.

  Monck laid down the law. “America won’t get anywhere unless it makes plain to the people of Europe that it is not trying to block progress along Socialist lines. The future of Europe rests between the Communists and the Socialists, and if you try to stop Socialism you will drive the workers straight into the Communist camp. Socialization of basic industry and free co-operatives in small manufacturing and retail trade—that is the only program that has any chance of winning Western Europe and keeping it.”

  Lanny answered, “That is our group’s program, and we are doing our best to explain it.” But somehow he couldn’t work up much hope of making it go with Senator Taft of Ohio or Senator Wherry of Nebraska, not to mention the stone-age Democrats from the South such as Senator McKellar of Tennessee or Senator George of Georgia.

  The two friends discussed the problem until so late that Monck wasn’t willing for Lanny to go home; many crimes were committed on dark, rainy nights, in spite of the military patrols. Lanny slept on the sofa in the little living-room, and guessed that one of the children was sleeping on the floor. The family had a food allowance, and the visitor had not failed to bring them a package from the PX. Wonderful people, the Americans! They had cigarettes and chocolates and canned foods and razor blades and matches and soap without limit and could play Santa Claus wherever they went.

  For the most part these superior beings lived lives quite separate from the Germans. The Americans rode in cars, while the Germans rode bicycles, and generally took them inside wherever they arrived, for fear of thieves. You couldn’t buy a bicycle for any amount of German money; the standard price was six hundred cigarettes, or three cartons. When a German boy saw an American smoking, he would follow right at his heels, ready to pounce upon the butt. A butt is a Stummel, and the Americans called the pursuit of them “stummeling.” Porters and others who cleaned offices made a good thing of it; they took the butts home and took out the tobacco and made new cigarettes. You could get a pound of potatoes for a single one.

  Also, you might get a girl! The GIs called the girls “furlines,” that being easier to say than Fräuleins, even when you mispronounced it, as most Americans did. Also they were called “fraternazis,” and when a GI was going out with one of them he told his buddies he was going “fratting.” As a result of this “buyers’ market,” the Army had a problem expressed by the letters VD. As a result of the food scarcity, the Germans had one expressed by the letters TB. War may be ever so glorious and ennobling at a distance, but it loses some of its glamour when you get too close.

  XIII

  Lanny had a debt to pay in Berlin, and next morning he and Monck walked to the Moabit district. This is one of the working-class quarters; having small factories scattered throughout, it had been well pasted with bombs. Whole blocks were smashed, and now women sat, even on this Sunday morning, digging out the bricks, scraping them clean, and piling them in neat rows; for this they got ten cents an hour, American money.

  The tenement home of Johann Seidl, elderly watchmaker, had been hit, but not hard enough to wreck it entirely; the three upper stories were broken beams and plaster, but the two lower stories were intact, and the surviving families had moved down to the lower floors, presumably dividing the rent. Lanny found three famili
es, eleven persons in all, occupying an apartment consisting of a medium-size kitchen and two small bedrooms. How they made out he didn’t ask. When it rained hard the unplastered ceiling leaked badly, but they caught the water in pans, and fortunately the drain was in order.

  Genosse Seidl was the Social-Democratic old-timer who had hidden Lanny from the human bloodhounds of Heinrich Himmler and had got him started by way of the underground to Italy. Monck had told him that the fugitive had got out safely but hadn’t told him that he was now in town; the arrival created a sensation, especially when the American produced a package of goods such as Germans had not seen in several years—goods much too valuable for them to consume but which could be exchanged for quantities of potatoes and lard.

  The visitor was introduced and shook hands all round; he found that he had become a legend, for the newspaper Socialdemokrat had published his testimony at Nürnberg, and Monck had told Johann that this Herr Budd was the “Comrade Thirty” he had saved two and a half years ago. Wundervoll, unerhört, a man who had fooled Hitler and Göring, and whose picture had been in the paper, and now here he was right in our kitchen!

  Johann produced a treasure which he had managed to keep hidden through the bombing and other dangers—Lanny’s watch. All the rest of his possessions had been burned, but you can’t burn a watch, and if the Nazis had caught Johann with it they would have put him to the torture. Lanny had a new watch, so he told Monck to sell the old one and divide the proceeds between Johann and the family of Genossin Anna Pfister. That was the woman who had hidden Lanny for ten days in the cellar of her leather-working shop; the Nazis had seized her, nobody knew why or how, and had sent her to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which, of course, had been the end of her.