This Communist-led strike was nominally for higher wages; it was a protest against the rise in the cost of living—or, viewing it from the other side, against the depreciation of the franc. But it is hard for men to fly into a rage against an abstract thing such as inflation; they have to have an enemy to blame it on, and in this case the enemy was Wall Street, the American imperialists who were trying to harness France to their charlot wheels by a cunning device called the Marshall Plan. General Marshall, in his role as American Secretary of State, was the enemy of the toiling masses of the world.
There were a million members of the Communist party of France, and that meant a million men and women to make speeches in meeting halls and on street corners; to lift their clenched left fists and scream, ‘A bas l’impérialisme américain, à bas le plan Marshall!’ In the national elections, held the previous year, the Communists had polled twenty-nine per cent of the total vote, which meant five million French men and women would gather in crowds and listen to the speakers and repeat the carefully contrived slogans. It meant parades in the streets, with banners and menacing signs. When properly worked up the mobs would get out of hand, and bricks would be thrown through plate-glass windows and the contents of the shops looted. It meant a solid mass of men and women marching across a great bridge of the River Seine and besieging the Palais Bourbon where the National Assembly met, storming the legislative chamber and demanding the repeal of agreements for the Marshall Plan bribery of la belle France.
And it meant much more than that; it meant thousands of trained saboteurs, who had learned the arts of destruction in secret war upon the Nazis, turning their efforts against the American imperialists and their dupes and hirelings; it meant the goods on the docks being dumped into the water, and railroad lines being torn up and bridges wrecked to prevent the bringing of Marshall Plan goods into France. It meant munitions being blown up and oil depots set on fire. It meant all these actions, not secretly but as an avowed public programme. It meant women pleading with the police to refuse to disperse the mobs and with soldiers not to fire. As the final goal it meant a Communist revolution in France; the seizure of strategic places, the radio stations and the newspapers, the telephone and telegraph offices, the arsenals, and ultimately the government itself. It meant Moscow in Paris.
Lanny attended one of the réunions, as they were called, on the second night of the strike. It was a somewhat dangerous thing for him to do, for he was obviously an American imperialist, one of Wall Street’s minions, perhaps one of its bosses. He had signed a cheque for eleven million francs on the previous day, and that was as much as all the people in this hall might together be able to earn in a month. Many dark looks were cast at him; but he sat quietly, and when the others applauded he clapped his hands, and when the clenched fists were raised his went up too. So they let him alone; he might, for all they could know, be one of those eccentric American members of the haute bourgeoisie who turned Communist and gave of their millions to the cause of the awakening proletariat.
He wanted to hear what was being said and wanted to observe, if not to share, the spirit of the French workers. In two hours he heard more falsehoods about America than he could have answered in as many days. The fact was that America had come and saved France from the Nazis, America had poured out her blood and treasure; she was still pouring out the treasure—and now suddenly this had become bribery, a seduction of the sacred virgin known as Marianne. America was Wall Street, and the Kremlin was the true and only friend of the workers of the world.
XI
Who was there to withstand this hurricane of hate? According to Denis de Bruyne, there was no one; but Lanny knew better, for he spent part of the day in the office of Irving Brown, together with leaders of French labour who had not gone over to Moscow. Brown was there for the express purpose of baulking this Communist coup d’état. If it were to succeed it could be repeated in Italy, where the Reds were even more numerous and more powerful; there would be nobody left in Western Europe with any power to resist, and the other countries of the Continent would go down like a row of ninepins.
Who was there to resist? Among them was a leader, six feet tall and big in proportion, with a deceptively round, jolly face and an amiable smile; an elderly blonde giant with light brown eyes and eyebrows, and a little moustache which had been a pale yellow and was now grey. His name was Léon Jouhaux; Lanny heard an American tourist, an elegant fur-clad lady, refer to him as Jewhawks; so in the cable he sent home describing this crisis he took occasion to state, ‘The name rhymes with you-oh’.
The great General Confederation of Labour, known as the C.G.T., had two secretary generals, and Jouhaux was one of them; the other was a Communist, and for years they had been fighting the battle of French labour in their office. When the strike was called Jouhaux denounced it—and this was a hard decision for an old man who had given nearly fifty years of his life to building up the organisation. But the Reds had taken over and were running it, and it was no longer a French organisation, but a Soviet one. Jouhaux issued a blast on the French radio, calling the strike anti-French and anti-working class.
And so the fury of the Communists was turned upon him. They called him ‘a lackey of the Wall Street imperialists, the Marshall Plan warmongers’—a man who for decades had been known to them as ‘the General’, who had spent the war years in a Nazi concentration camp because of his loyalty to them. Jouhaux saw this strike for what it was: a foreign invasion of the land. The executive committee had called the strike without even the formality of a ballot, and now the Red terrorists were roaming the countryside, breaking the heads of workers who would not obey them; tearing up railroad sleepers, heaping them in bonfires, then twisting the rails; wrecking trains, flooding mines, putting boards studded with nails on the highways to deflate the tyres of trucks.
The ‘General’ stuck to his office in the C.G.T., resisting the efforts of the Communists to expel him. His lieutenants came, young fellows whom he had trained and who now were even more determined than he was—pushing the old man on, after the bold way of youth. From his office they directed the civil war, in spite of the Communist threats upon their lives. All over France the C.G.T. workers proceeded to organise a new group of resistance. They called it the Force Ouvrière, the working-class force, and during the two weeks it took to break the strike they acquired eight hundred thousand members. The loyal workers organised armed committees to defend the mines from sabotage; they organised groups to patrol the railroads; they guarded the barges on the canals which spread from France all over the lowlands of Europe and had been used by the Reds as a means of conveying spies and saboteurs.
Lanny watched the battle from the vantage ground of Irving Brown’s office. Neither he nor Brown took an active part—for they were Wall Street imperialists. But they could give advice and could help to persuade key labour leaders that President Truman had no designs upon the liberties of the French workers. Lanny had been in Poland and East Germany and had talked with refugees from the Baltic provinces and from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Everywhere it was the same thing: dictatorship called democracy and forced labour called liberty. France was the birthplace of liberty in the modern world, and French workers above all others knew the real meaning of the word.
15 IF THIS BE TREASON
I
Lanny didn’t stay through the whole two weeks of the strike. He made sure what the end would be; then he saw to the packing and shipping of his precious Rembrandt and took a plane to Cannes, to visit his family and tell them the news. Poor Beauty! How she longed for peace in the world, and how little of it she had seen!
Then Lanny flew to Lisbon and New York. He didn’t go to Washington, because he had nothing special to report. He went to Edgemere, and over the radio he told the audience of the Peace Programme what the French general strike meant to America and the rest of the free world. If you wanted peace inside your country you had to convince the workers that they could get a steady improvement of their condition
s by the method of education, organisation, and political action. If you wanted peace in the outside world you had to build up the strength of the United Nations and convince the Soviet fanatics that they could not get what they wanted without war—nor could they get it by war.
Ideas like this went out over the air, and a stream of discussion and controversy came back, mostly by mail, sometimes by telegraph and by visitation. There was bitter criticism, but there was also agreement and generous praise. The Peace Group would be satisfied if the bulk of their public understood what they were trying to say. The process of changing the mind of a nation, to say nothing of a world, was slow and tedious; it might take many years, and the trouble was, no one could say how many years would be available.
Laurel had much to tell her husband about the things that had happened in his absence: the speakers and the impression they had made, the plans that had been formed for new programmes; a stack of letters had been set aside for him to read, and also business accounts and reports. The group had figured on continuing their work for five years, a schedule that would permit them to lose about four thousand dollars a week; but they weren’t losing that much, so they had to decide whether the world might need their advice for a longer period or whether they should spend more money to advertise what they were doing. The experts could not agree in their advice: Rick said he expected the cold war to last ten or twenty years; Bernhardt Monck was afraid it was going to burst into flame in the year 1948, soon to begin.
Lanny got Monck on the telephone and learned that there was no news about Fritz Meissner. Monck said, ‘There’s not a thing we can do. Stop brooding about it. It has happened to millions and will happen to millions more’.
There was no one in Edgemere with whom Lanny was free to discuss the subject, so he locked the secret in his heart. But he couldn’t help brooding. He had read and heard so much about the torturing of prisoners, first by the Nazis and now by the Reds. He pictured that tall fair-haired German youth being questioned day and night by relays of tormentors; having bright lights shining continuously in his eyes, being hung up by his thumbs, have splinters driven under his fingernails, having his testicles crushed, or his food drugged, or being shut up in a space so constructed with sharp projecting points that he couldn’t stand erect or sit down or lie down. All the time he would be told that there were worse things to come, and that they would be continued until he told what he was ordered to tell and signed what was put before him.
What would they try to get from him? The names of his friends and fellow students in the school who were Nazis or Nazi sympathisers? And would he be unwilling to tell about such? Or would it be about his father and the Völkischerbund? Or would they want to know about his mysterious visits to the American sector, and to a mysterious personage who had talked over R.I.A.S. under the name of Herr Fröhlich? Would Fritz assume that Lanny was back in America and beyond reach of the M.G.B. and its torturers in Berlin?
II
This brooding led to a strange incident and brought back to Lanny’s mind a set of questions to which he had long sought an answer. Staying in his father’s home in Connecticut during World War I, he had opened his eyes one early dawn and had seen standing at the foot of his bed the figure of Rick, who then was a flier in the Royal Air Force. The figure had not spoken, but it had looked so mournful that Lanny had been terrified, taking it to mean that his best-loved friend was dead. Later he had learned that this was the time of Rick’s crash and serious injury. Some twelve years later Lanny had come into touch with an old Polish woman in New York who had the strange gift of mediumship, and he and Irma Barnes, then his wife, had taken her to Bienvenu and made her a part of their establishment. Another ten years, and he had divorced Irma and met Laurel Creston, and they had discovered by accident that she too possessed this ‘psychic’ gift.
She had not been using it of late, being wrapped up in the affairs of the outside world. Her thoughts had to do with the morning’s mail and what had come in it, and what she was going to answer to this letter and that; with the problem of who was to be the next speaker and how he was to be approached; with visitors and employees, and a household to run, and two children to care for. As the poet Wordsworth had written, ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’.
Laurel was lying on her daybed one evening with some letters and manuscripts beside her; Lanny was in his own room reading, and he heard her voice. It was a murmuring tone, and he assumed that she was dictating; but he hadn’t heard the secretary enter, and there was something about the voice that caught his attention. He got up and went softly to the door and saw that her eyes were closed. He might have assumed that she had dozed off and was talking in her sleep, but he had never known her to do that. He took it that she was in one of her trances, and he went to her side and stood listening.
‘… this place’, she was saying. ‘There are many people here. I do not like it. They seem to be unhappy. They are sick people. They lie about. It is a bad place. I cannot see very well, I think it is the darkness; it is not my fault. I do not know what they want or why I am here’.
There came a pause, and Lanny said very gently, ‘Is that you, Madame?’ That was how the old Polish woman had been addressed in the household of Beauty Budd.
‘Oh, Lanny, I am glad you are here’, said the voice. It was Laurel’s, and yet it seemed different, though he could never be sure whether the difference was in his own imagination. ‘I have not heard from you for a long time, Lanny’.
‘I have been away and very busy’.
‘Your old friends need you. They come to me and ask about you’.
Lanny hastily took a pencil from his pocket and a writing pad from the table by Laurel’s bedside. There was no time to bring up a chair, so he sat on the floor, making notes according to his long-time custom. ‘Where are you now, Madame?’
‘I do not know. It is a strange thing. There are people here from Germany, but they do not tell me why they are here. There is a young man—wait a minute, he wants to speak. He has yellow hair and blue eyes. He is tall. He wants to speak to you, but it is not easy for him. He is unconscious’.
‘How can he want to speak if he is unconscious?’
‘It is his human part that is unconscious. His spirit wishes to speak. He says his name is Ferdinand; he says you will know’.
‘Yes, I know. What is the matter with him?’
‘He has suffered terribly. I don’t think he will stay here’.
‘You mean he has not passed away, Madame?’
‘I mean he is unconscious, but his consciousness will return. He wants me to tell you—wait, he is speaking English, but he has a foreign accent. I think he is German’.
‘Yes, Madame, he is German’.
‘He is trying hard to tell you. He wants me to tell you that he has told nothing that he should not tell. He wants you to give him courage, Lanny. He is in terrible trouble’.
‘Tell him I love him, Madame. Tell him I trust him. Tell him he has the power. No one can take it from him’.
‘He hears you. He is trying to tell you something. It is a poem, he says. Something in English. It begins, “Hush” and it is—what is that?—yes, a lullaby. Do you know such a poem?’
‘I know it: “Hush—’tis the lullaby time is singing—/ Hush, and heed not, for all things pass.”’
‘He thinks it is a beautiful poem’.
‘Tell him there is a limit to what any man can suffer, and then he will come to join you, in a place where there is peace. Tell him to stand firm’.
‘He will go now. I think he has gone back to his world—to his enemies. Lanny, talk to me a little, I miss you’.
Surely that seemed to be the utterance of the old woman who had been alone in the world and who had adopted Lanny as a son in her heart.
‘I have been working very hard’, he told her. ‘There is another war threatened, and Laurel and I are doing what we can to prevent it’.
‘Do not forget me, Lanny. I need to be remembered. All of us do’.
III
The voice died away, and that was the end. Lanny sat waiting; presently Laurel sighed once or twice, gave a couple of feeble groans, and at last opened her eyes. She looked at him with a touch of wonder. ‘I fell asleep’, she said.
‘No’, he told her, ‘you were in a trance. Madame came’.
She sat up at once, wide awake, always curious about this fascinating experience. ‘Tell me what happened?’
‘The strangest thing you could imagine’, he answered. ‘I can’t tell you all because it has to do with things I must not talk about. It is a man who is in the hands of the Reds. He gave his name and made it plain that he is suffering. It’s mixed up in a curious way. He said I had quoted a poem to him’.
This was the problem that had been haunting Lanny’s mind for just about thirty years. He didn’t know the answer and feared that he was never going to know it. He found in his mind a strong resistance to the idea of ‘spirits’; he didn’t want to believe that it was the voice of Madame Zyszynski to which he had been listening. He didn’t want to believe that any of the details had come from her mind. In this particular case it was obvious that there was nothing in the communication which had not been in Lanny’s mind. There were his memories of Madame herself; there was the substance of his brooding over the fate of Fritz Meissner, and, of course, the boy’s code name; finally, there was the poem called ‘Scythe Song’ by Andrew Lang, which Lanny had come upon reprinted in an English magazine and had cut out because he liked it.
Hush—’tis the lullaby time is singing—
Hush, and heed not, for all things pass;
Hush, ah hush! and the scythes are swinging
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 34
