The Wooden Shepherdess (26 page)

Those four absentees: Ludendorff, Rosenberg, Strasser and Röhm....

To begin with, Hitler decided he'd no further use for the former war-lord: Ludendorff's pagan nonsense was proving a needless provocation to all respectable Christians (including the Munich government). But in that case the corpse of his great reputation had better be finally buried, for fear his support was lent to some rival party; and President Ebert's death gave Hitler his cue. He egged silly Ludendorff on to run for President, knowing this bound to end in fiasco; and when the candidate didn't score one per cent of the votes it was “
Exit
LUDENDORFF, laughed off the stage.”

Rosenberg.... Hitler knew he would lick the hand which laid on the lash, if he laid it on good and hard; and so it proved. But Röhm and Strasser were rather more difficult nuts to crack.

Gregor Strasser, the ablest leader of those who still believed in the “Socialist” half of the National-Socialist program: a big young man who dressed in home-made breeches and black wool stockings, and looked like a block of oak in spite of the rather absurd little Tyrolese hat he perched on his head. Somebody much too important and useful to do without, yet much too honest to want around.... But his Leftist ideas might go down well in the North, where the Movement had hitherto scarcely been heard of—and Strasser was one of the few with a Reichstag seat.... So Hitler dazzled his eyes with a new and almost autonomous job, and this was not the first (or last) time Hitler managed to lull his suspicions. Thus “
Exit
STRASSER,” transferred to Berlin to preach the gospel among the benighted Prussians; and Hitler was free of his somewhat embarrassing eye.

The fourth absentee had been Captain Röhm: a dyed-in-the-wool professional soldier with battle-scarred head and broken nose, and a purely soldierly way of seeing the world. He trained his Storm Troops on Army lines, like a kind of Irregular Territorial Force: whereas all Hitler wanted were street-thugs, trained not in warfare but merely to break up his rivals' meetings and guard his own. Moreover the Army were likely to look askance at a private force that was too like themselves—and winning the Army's favor had now become Hitler's lodestar, never again must he find himself facing the Army's guns.

Röhm addressed Hitler as “Du” and could never forget he had once been Hitler's discoverer, almost treating the Party as merely a “Civil Arm” of his Storm Troops run by his protégé Hitler the mere politico.... That was the final straw: if Röhm wouldn't come to heel he would have to go. So in April “go” Röhm went—at the end of a most almighty row. He resigned his command of the Storm Troops, severed all ties with the Party and vanished abroad to serve the Bolivian Army as soldier of fortune. Thus it was “
Exit
RÖHM”—at least for the next five years.

Ludendorff, Rosenberg, Strasser and Röhm.... Hitler was left undisputed cock-of-the-dunghill.

Archdeacon Dibden was out so much at committees and visitations that Joan had plenty of time on her hands. Thus she was often over at Mellton: for Gilbert was showing signs of shortage of sleep—he had rings round his eyes and a nervous twitch in his cheek, and was only too glad of an afternoon nap while she read to Mary aloud.

Gilbert showed no signs of jealousy over Mary with Joan, the way he undoubtedly did with Mary's beloved brother. Indeed he pressed her to come there whenever she could: perhaps not least because Joan was indeed such an exquisite creature to have in one's house (“Like a rare work of art,” as he told himself, “or some virginal flower”). Moreover she made no attempt to conceal her admiration of Gilbert's heroic self-abnegation; and this too was something about her he greatly liked.

As for Augustine, apart from the time he spent at his sister's bedside he came to rely more and more upon Joan for congenial company, taking her long walks over the downs or talking tête-è-tête by the Rectory fire. But they seldom talked of themselves: for now Augustine had fallen in love—and alas, it was more with the South Wales miners than Joan. Rather as Byron adopted the Greeks, and other romantic Englishmen tend to adopt their own alternative alien group (Albanian bandits for instance, Somali tribesmen, or Esquimaux), so had Augustine discovered and fallen in love with his miners and talked about little else. The blood of Welsh Princes ran in his veins (or at least he quartered their Arms), but his blood in fact was thoroughly mixed and his education and outlook exclusively upper-class English: thus he could feel these miners as kin on the one hand who made him feel proud he was Welsh—and yet at the same time creatures remote enough from himself for the alien charm to work.

It may seem strange that Augustine had only discovered the miners so lately. The Valleys had always been close in the topographical sense: yet Augustine had barely seen even a pit-top before, since his usual route to-and-fro was the beautiful rural one by Llandilo and Brecon which by-passed the whole Industrial South—you wouldn't have known it was there. But that Swansea lawyer of his was leading a double life, conveyancing only by day and by night conducting a male-voice choir which won prize after prize; and on one of his visits to Swansea, Augustine got taken with him to one of these singing marathons up in the anthracite country. After the concert he spent the night in a miner's cottage, watching a ninety-year-old with a miner's blue tattoos on his face who danced on his hearthstone half through the night after everyone else was in bed. This little old man liked his pint but he never went into a pub nowadays, he said—not since the dancing in pubs had been stopped by the bloody police....

Next morning Augustine promised a prize for their next Cymanfa Ganu. That, and his likeable manner, earned him a trip down a pit; and to him this whole way of life was a revelation. It bowled him over, and ever since then he took every chance he could get of exploring the Valleys—even so far afield as the Rhondda. As for the miners, strange as he was they seemed to adopt him much as that teenage American pack had done.

The miners' talk, and the way they sang, and the plays they acted—oh no, it wasn't by any means only their physical prowess which singled them out as the Chosen People if ever there was one! They certainly didn't lack brains, and many who'd worked underground all their lives had somehow acquired an education as good as his own—or perhaps even better than his was. Their pride.... It made him feel proud in his turn that he too could claim to be Welsh (even though he belonged to that much-despised Class, the “Uchelwyr”). Indeed he admired them so much that even their little weaknesses only endeared them the more to him.... Wasn't it strange (so Augustine told Joan) how useless the skillfullest miner was with his hands at anything else? An out-of-work miner could lie on his face and burrow into the hillside a couple of hundred yards like a mole till he reached the seam, then inch himself back feet-first dragging his bag of coal to the open air with his teeth (thus leaving the hillside a dangerous honeycomb): yet if the same man tried to nail together two pieces of wood, the result would disgrace a child....

In this way week was added to week till Augustine and Joan knew every Dorset ramble for ten miles round, and Augustine and Joan between them (no single voice could have possibly lasted out) had read to Mary the whole of Proust.

So Strasser had moved to the North, and was hard at work for the Cause....

That Presidential Election which ridded Hitler of Ludendorff proved quite a close-run thing between the more serious candidates. Finally, seventy-seven-year-old Field Marshal Hindenburg just scraped in; and Reinhold used the excuse of a legal case in Berlin to sniff the changed political air of the capital now we'd a Junker instead of a working-class President.

One of his oldest and ablest political friends in the North was that veteran “Patriot,” Arno Lepowski. The previous year, while Hitler was still in jail and his Party proscribed, this Count Lepowski had worked with Ludendorff, Strasser and Rosenberg rigging a “Völkisch Coalition”—the one which had netted the Nazi anonymous remnant a handful of Reichstag seats, including a seat for Strasser; and then the Count had formed a high opinion of Strasser—the only Nazi with any future, according to him. For the Count brushed Hitler aside as a featherweight, lacking the stuff of a leader: “A febrile weathercock, useful perhaps down South; but the solider Protestant North distrusts his sort. If the Nazis want to cut any ice up here they had better forget about Hitler and hitch their wagon to Strasser.”

“I beg to differ,” said Reinhold.

“I happened to run into Captain Röhm just before he sailed, and he made my hair stand on end with his tales of what Hitler is like to work with. Poor old Röhm, he got so excited his scars lit up like the comb of a cock! Each twopenny problem has to be solved by Hitler himself—though half the time it has only become one because of his own vacillation. Again: if you offer advice he throws it back in your face, then three days later announces that very decision as if it was his idea from the first. Indeed Röhm doubts if Hitler has ever produced one single idea of his own: he filches the lot, he's a peacock naked apart from borrowed plumes—an ideological scarecrow.”

“With great respect,” said Reinhold mildly, “isn't that always the stuff that leaders are made of? Of course I mean the Caesars who get to the very top, not the high-minded Strassers who merely win our esteem.”

The aged and deeply furrowed face of the Count took on an ironical look, with cool gray eyes more ready to be amused than convinced: “Then what becomes of the typical charismatic leader's obsessional Grand Idea that he's ready to die for? His superhuman will, which forces unwilling disciples to follow his Great Ideal like sheep?”

“Thus Spake Zarathustra—not the revered Lepowski, who knows no leader has ever forced men to do things against their will. We only imagine he has.”

“Proceed,” said the Count, no longer smiling.

“The world-shaking ‘Leader' is just what Röhm described: a tabula rasa without any will or ideas of his own at all, but a superhumanly sensitive nose for what potential followers think and want. He must find that out before the bulk of them know it themselves, then announce it as
his
unchangeable will—when of course they will follow his lead like sheep, because that's the way they're already unconsciously wanting to go.”

“So that's your idea of the famous ‘Führerprinzip'?” mused the Count: “No need for Democracy's ballot-boxes because the Leader himself is a walking box, with sensitive ears where everyone posts his vote? But come! That's merely a human weathercock, not what we mean by a ‘Leader.'”

“Aren't you forgetting your Leader's implacable will?”

“But you've just denied him a will of his own at all!” cried the Count, amazed.

“I only denied him the choice of his will's direction: I never denied him its strength. It's the strength of will they so signally lack themselves which makes the herd so dependent on him. Themselves they pursue their ends so feebly; but he lets no obstacle stand in the way of their faintest unspoken and even unrealized wishes....”

But now Lepowski had had quite enough. “What a pair of old wind-bags we are!” he grumbled. “We've lost ourselves in the clouds.... Let me see, where did all this start?”

“You thought the Nazis ought to ditch Hitler for Strasser. But if you ask me, Hitler won't give them the chance.”

“These Nazis—a so-called ‘national' party almost unknown in the North, with only a few thousand members and those at each other's throats.... If
you ask me
, it is Strasser who ought to ditch the Nazis and join some party which counts. They can only thrive on despair, and will disappear altogether now our Seven Lean Years seem over.”

“Yes, I agree that by all the rules they should now fade away—and doubtless they would, if it wasn't for Hitler.”

The old man made an impatient gesture: “Your
Hitler, Hitler
—I'm sick to death of the name!”

“Very likely—but don't think you've heard the last of it!” Reinholds' Cassandra-like tones confronted the frank disbelief in Lepowski's face. “He is powerless now; but can't I get you to see he's the very archetype of a Leader—the pure Platonic Idea of ‘Leader' with everything normally human left out?” Lepowski tried to break in, but Reinhold was not to be stopped: “Consider how far he has come already, though starting from nothing—an ignorant workhouse tramp. And remember I've watched the diabolical skill of his every move: his technique leaves Machiavelli's ‘
Prince
' at the post, for he sees at least five moves ahead of everyone else. But the nub of the matter is this: he is bound in the long run to come to the top because—in the long run—no one will try to stop this uncanny clairvoyant who
knows what Germany wants
. That's more than she knows herself—but all the same it's what she is doomed to receive at his hands some day, however little she likes what she gets when she gets it.”

“If what you mean is the German rabble....”

But Reinhold brushed this aside. “The rabble's a bogy we make too much of: they only want bread. But think of Germany's middle classes, the class from which Hitler himself once sank to the gutter—and therefore knows what it's like, that fate which all of them fear like hell. Imagine the secret desires and hates of our solid Bürgerlich little shopmen and civil servants, our teachers and Lutheran pastors, our skilled artisans and our farmers—imagine that Freudian nightmare released into waking life! Imagine the coming to power of everyone terrified out of his Spiessbürger wits by inflation, and everything else which has hit him these Seven Lean Years: who longs for a chance to hit back at something or someone, he doesn't care who or what!”

The Count curled his lip in derision: “So that's what you think your Hitler can bring to fruition! But how on earth, with so tiny a following?”