The Wooden Shepherdess (19 page)

Three days later, after a huge discharge of pus and bone, the patient returned to his bed now well on the road to recovery. Franz might perhaps be able at last to find himself comforting Toni in Landsberg after all.

With Hitler locked up in Landsberg the Nazi Movement had come to a sorry pass. At the moment of Hitler's arrest he had scribbled a note appointing as Caretaker-Leader—
Rosenberg
: hardly the livest of wires, and one whom most of the others disliked and despised. But “Caretaker-Leader” of what? For the Party was banned, its printing offices closed and all the people who really mattered arrested or fled abroad.

Göring was now in Vienna, and still laid low by the wound he got in the Putsch. A Jewish doctor had patched him as best he could, then his friends had smuggled him over the frontier to Innsbruck; and there he had lain in hospital, wracked with pain from the gash in his groin and heavily drugged, till his wealthy wife arrived in Vienna and moved him into a decent hotel.

Another who'd managed to make Vienna was “Putzi” Hanfstängl, Hitler's patron among the Intelligentsia. There, at first, he had filled in time with Esser and Rossbach plotting a raid under arms to rescue Hitler from Landsberg—till Hitler himself put a stop to it. Left thereafter with nothing to do, Putzi conceived the plan of seeking out Hitler's widowed sister here in Vienna. This was the sister (according to Walther) whom Adolf Hitler had bilked; but Putzi'd a hazy idea that she might have her brother's ear, and he wanted her on his side.

However, when Putzi found her at last in a rotting tenement, living in squalid poverty, quite such an abject couple as she and her teenage daughter Geli hardly seemed likely to have much influence: still, he had taken them out for a drink. Geli was brassily pretty, and afterwards Putzi carried her off to a music-hall. Pretty—but sentimental and commonplace: Putzi was soon convinced he was wasting his time, in spite of her bubs—and to think that this little piece was the Führer's only niece!

Moreover he longed to be home for Christmas, so presently took the risk. This time he crossed the frontier on foot, through a railway-tunnel, wearing dark glasses and hiding his famous jaw in mutton-chop whiskers (his height he couldn't disguise). But once he got home nobody seemed very keen to arrest him, and soon he moved about Munich openly. Thus when the Landsberg Nazis were moved to the former Infantry School on the Blutenbergstrasse for trial, Putzi was one of the first to visit his friend in prison.

Putzi had brought his little boy with him to see “Onkel Dolf” as a birthday treat; and had struggled, in spite of the noise of the tram, to impress on the child what a Great
Good
Man this was. For the nonce the Baddies had locked him up in their dungeons; but one day “Uncle” would burst his chains, and triumph....

“Dungeons, and chains....” What a sorry let-down for the child it was when instead of all that a kindly blue-coat—blessed with a wonder-mustache like bicycle-handlebars—led them along to a bright, well-furnished and almost cheerful room overlooking the Marsplatz and filled with the lovely sound of trains! For there stood Uncle Dolf—and there wasn't a chain in sight.... But the child soon forgot his first disappointment, entranced once more by his darling “Uncle's” lively affectionate eyes and the man-to-man way he spoke to you, using his hands when he spoke and rocking heel-and-toe with his head on one side when he listened. But most of all was the child enslaved by that magical voice: there were notes which set the table itself vibrating, and tingled the tiny fingers which touched the wood. Then Uncle climbed on a chair to fish about on the wardrobe-top for his secret box of sugar-cakes, afterwards setting the child on his knee to share them and talking to Putzi over the little boy's head. As for his coming trial, he simply pooh-poohed it: he'd only to tell from the dock just a few of the truths he knew about General Lossow and all
his
plots to blow the whole prosecution sky-high.

This Putzi passed over in silence but inwardly didn't believe it. Whatever he'd said in the tram his political hopes were shattered: High Treason was hardly a charge you could just laugh off! Let this optimist cut all the capers he liked in court, conviction was certain; and long before Hitler came out of jail they'd all be forgotten. This was their own fault of course for banking too much on any one man: without him, it all falls to pieces.... The future looked irredeemably black. It was nice to find his friend so cheerful, but even euphoria can't do away with facts.

*

Meanwhile the date of the trial was drawing near.

Visiting Otto in hospital, one day Franz brought with him Reinhold Steuckel (his friend the Eminent Jurist), laden with fruit and copies of
Simplicissimus
. Reinhold indeed had insisted on coming. Franz had brought him with some reluctance, for surely the ultra-intellectual Reinhold and Otto the simple soldier couldn't have much in common—but only to find them hitting it off together at once. For during the War they had served in the same part of the line; and Franz was amazed to discover how much his illustrious elder civilian acquaintance seemed to know about up-to-date Army politics, Army gossip.

Presently Reinhold spoke of the coming trial. Otto would only be fit for discharge two days before it began, and certainly couldn't endure long hours in court; but Reinhold insisted that Franz at least stopped on for the fireworks, and promised to get him a seat. Ludendorff: after Hindenburg, surely the greatest name that the War had produced, though admittedly somewhat blown-upon since.... Half the journalists in the world, said Reinhold, were coming to Munich to see the great General Ludendorff tried for High Treason. “But don't you bother your head about Generals! No, the fellow to watch is the late Lance-Corporal: how will he play
his
cards? Will he shift all the blame on to Ludendorff—shoulders broad enough surely to bear it—in which case the worst he faces is deportation? Ah, but that means taking a very back-seat—and back-seats, somehow, aren't in character. Even suppose it meant facing a firing squad he's the sort who couldn't help sticking his neck out....” “But surely, Justice-Minister Gürtner....” Franz struggled to interrupt, while Reinhold raised a hand to show him he wasn't allowed: “ ... which it couldn't of course, for he isn't that dangerous.—Yes: you were going to say, my friend: ‘An Ajax defying the lightning, but knowing that Mr. Jupiter-Gürtner won't let Ajax really get hurt.'”

“
I
wouldn't go, even if I were fit,” said the practical Otto: “For what can his antics matter? Whatever he says or does at the trial, Hitler has now no political future: he's finished—and Gott sei Dank!” Otto had scant respect for his former dispatch-rider, knowing a little too much about him (things he kept locked in his breast, since other names were involved); and little as Otto liked Ludendorff either, it didn't seem decent to witness the General's shame.

But Franz was persuaded: since everyone seemed so sure that Hitler would be deported, it seemed a bit silly to miss a German's very last chance of hearing his speak. He would stop on at least for the first few days, to see how the trial went....

Even then he might never have stayed if he hadn't run into some friends his own age who could talk about nothing else: for one of these friends was Lothar Scheidemann, Wolff's younger brother—that Wolff who had gone off his head and hanged himself in the Lorienburg attics, the Wolff who had been Franz's hero....

Not since their schooldays had Franz seen Lothar until the day when they buried Wolff; but ever since then he had tried to keep up with him. Lothar was all he had left of the glorious Wolff.

So Otto went home alone that Sunday. On Tuesday the trial began, and it lasted a whole five weeks; but Franz and his friends didn't miss a single public hearing, and even the Eminent Jurist looked in whenever he could.

Reinhold of course was among the glittering throng on that final gala occasion of Tuesday, April the First 1924, that All Fools Day when the sentences were pronounced. Men in the court were in full-dress uniform: ladies wore red-black-and-white cockades of the old Imperial Colors, and loaded the nine convicted men in the dock with flowers as if they were prima-donnas (for only nine were convicted though ten were accused: the angry Ludendorff had to endure the shameful eclipse of the only acquittal).

Hitler's performance at least had deserved the bouquets. Reinhold had hardly guessed a quarter of Hitler's audacity, not only not taking shelter behind the Old War-Lord but stealing the limelight from Ludendorff right at the start; and once he was in it, he never let anyone shoulder him out of it. Journalists come from the whole wide world to see the great Ludendorff tried stayed on to listen entranced to this unknown man who was putting the whole Prosecution itself on trial. He spoke to the Press direct with hardly a glance at his judges, and made the headlines every day all over Germany. As for the Foreign Press.... You had got to admit this was honest and forthright stuff, these days, from the hypocritical Boche; and the foreign papers duly admitted it.

Even in England Gilbert had glanced at brief reports before March was out; and even the English papers by now had learned to spell “Hitler” properly.

Hitler made no pretense that he hadn't intended to topple the Weimar Republic, and boasted he'd do it yet. But was that “Treason?” For who were these traitors of 1918 to prate about Treason? His only regret was his failure—so far.... His scathing indictment against the chief Prosecution witnesses (Kahr and Seisser and General Lossow) was first and foremost that they'd been the cause of his failure; and second, that they—with their Monarchist plots for a Wittelsbach restoration and taking Bavaria out of the Reich—were fully as guilty of treason against the Reich as he was.... On which Prosecution Counsel rose to object, and the wooden-faced judges looked even more wooden—for more than one had been present himself on Kahr's invitation that night in the Bürgerbäukeller, and knew very well what he'd come for....

“The place for all three,” said Hitler, “is here in the dock!”

But Hitler reserved his bitterest taunts for General Lossow, the turncoat whose “officer's honor” allowed him to turn his coat not once but twice in a single night: the scabrous Army Commander who'd called out the Army against the Holy Cause of raising Germany out of the mire.... One day the Army would recognize their mistake of November the Ninth: one day, the Army and he would march shoulder-to-shoulder—and Heaven help anyone then who tried to stand in their way! Thank God that the bullets which felled the Residenzstrasse Martyrs were fired by mere civilian police, and the Army's honor was clean of that infamous massacre....

Oh, the fire and the force of the man—as if all Germany spoke with his voice.... And oh, that ferocious magnificent voice! Deep and sonorous: harsh, or strong, and resonant: sometimes it sounded soft and warm, but only the better a moment later to freeze your spine. Franz was carried away by it clean off his feet, like almost everyone there.

Out of the miscreant three, it was only Lossow himself who even attempted to put in his place this jumped-up Corporal daring to criticize Generals: “When I first heard that famous tongue I was quite impressed; but then each time I heard it again it impressed me less and less.” For he soon discovered, said General Lossow, that this was merely an ignorant dreamer: someone whose golden tongue outstripped a less-than-average brain, with scarcely a single idea he could call his own and no practical judgement at all. No wonder in Army days he had never risen above Lance-Corporal's rank—it was all he was fit for. “And yet,” said General Lossow with withering scorn, “this nincompoop now has the nerve to imagine himself a Gambetta—or even as Germany's Mussolini!”

But then the tables were turned: for the General had to submit to a cross-examination by Hitler, and Hitler contrived to pierce even Lossow's patrician hide till—turning a vivid purple—the General thumped the floor with his scabbard and stumped from the court for fear a blood-vessel broke.

Last Thursday had been the day of Hitler's final peroration. So! People accused him of taking too much on himself.... Must the man whose conscience drives him to save his country modestly wait to be asked to? Or is the Worker “taking too much on himself” when he puts every ounce of his strength in his task? Does the Thinker “wait to be asked” before burning the midnight oil to achieve some discovery? Never! And neither must someone whose Destiny calls him to lead a nation. He too must wait for the call of no other will than his own: he must flog himself up the lonely peaks of power, not “wait to be asked.” “For make no mistake!” he thundered: “I want no mere ‘Mr. Minister Hitler' carved on my tomb, but ‘Here lies the Final Destroyer of Marxism'!”

Lothar was nearly turned out for applauding; and so were dozens of others.

“As for this Court,” said Hitler, turning his eyes full on to his judges for once: “I don't give a fig for its verdict! The only acquittal I care for will come from the smiling Goddess of History: come when I and the German Army finally reconciled stand side-by-side before that eternal Last Court of Judgement, the High Court of God.”

Then Hitler sat down.

*

Once you cooled off, it was all just a little absurd; and General Lossow was probably right that the man had no practical sense, no sense of proportion. But still, it did seem a pity the Government had to deport such an ace-entertainer: Politics hadn't got many his like.

Deportation of course would have spelled the end (thought Reinhold), as well the prisoner knew; but by proving his own guilt up to the hilt he had played his cards in a way which had made deporting him just what his enemies couldn't do. Or at any rate, couldn't do yet: for the mildest sentence the Code provided for proven Treason was five years' fortress-confinement.