The Wooden Shepherdess (39 page)

January last year had seen the Nazis coming to power: so what of the future? Foreign Office reports and forecasts were many and various—far too various, contradictory even; and Diplomats anyway only come in contact with high-ups (which means with
successful
liars or else they wouldn't have got where they are); and nations in any case change their high-ups rather more often than changing their minds. Germany's dangerous new batch of high-ups could only last as long as Germany wished them to last—they might be out on their ears again in six months.... So some bright lad in Naval Intelligence thought it a possibly useful idea for the Naval Planners to have their own unofficial private assessment anent the “basic mood” of the German man-in-the-street.

Journalists help, but all have their axes to grind. This junior Commander was rather in awe of Jeremy's brains, and Jeremy knew the language.... If Jeremy chose—mind you, entirely off his own bat—to go take a look-see and put it on paper.... Well, he could rest assured that (naming no names) his screed would be read.

Jeremy planned his leave to start in the first week of June. Travel by train wouldn't do: so having no car himself he suggested Augustine coming. Augustine hated the place too much and refused; but asked him at least to lunch, to meet a girl just back from Berlin.

They lunched in Soho: a party of four, for Polly came too (she was now sixteen).

As for the girl herself.... According to Mary, Augustine had got a new girl but she wasn't at all his class and Mary was not very happy about it: so
this
couldn't be the one, for this was a “Lady Jane—Something,” he couldn't quite catch the rest of her name. No, this was probably merely some friend of Polly's.... Indeed it soon transpired that Polly and Janey had known each other as children and met again at their Finishing School in Geneva. This also accounted for Polly's presence: for Janey had grown up a shy and excessively diffident girl, deferring to Polly in everything—even the food she chose—though Polly was two years younger. At just eighteen she seemed to be finding the burden of adult life already too much.... “If they don't look out” thought Jeremy “sooner or later she'll swallow a bottle of aspirin.”

Janey indeed had hardly spoken at first; but when she did speak at last it all came out with a rush. Yes, she had been to Berlin and had stood for hours outside the Chancellor's Residence hoping that Hitler would come to the window, till somebody told her he hadn't got back from Munich yet. Still, she had kicked off her shoes and stood in her stockings....

“Why?” asked Jeremy.

“This was the pavement his feet had trod,” said Janey reprovingly.

Next day Janey had stood there again—and the next, till at last she had had her reward. As the Führer's car drove slowly past his eyes had sought out hers in the crowd for a long penetrating look which had pierced to the depths of her soul: she had felt transported.

“I don't quite get it,” said Jeremy: “What makes you feel like that about him? You aren't a German yourself.”

Helplessly Janey turned an imploring look on Polly. “You can't be in Germany twenty minutes without,” said Polly abruptly: “You'll see for yourself.”

“Your ‘Chameleon Law' again!” said Jeremy
sotto voce
.

“You ought to see Polly's room,” said Augustine accusingly: “Portraits of Hitler all over the walls.”

But Polly was quite unabashed. “One photo is signed!” she exclaimed in triumph.

A pause: then Jeremy asked: “Do you mean to go there again?”

Janey glanced quickly at Polly, and Polly at Janey. “Promise you won't tell Mother?” They promised. “We thought, on our way back to Mme. Leblanc's next term, we might give the Dragon the slip and arrive in Munich quite by mistake.... You know—wrong part of the train or something.”

“We want to see some of the Holy Places.”

“The street where the Martyrs died.”

“The inn where Hitler was born.”

After they'd seen the two girls into their taxi, “
Christ!
” said Augustine (who seldom swore).

“Exactly,” said Jeremy, adding: “I wonder they don't come out with miraculous Stigmata—swastika marks on their hands and feet.”

*

Jeremy next thought of Ludo. Ludo had cars to choose from; and Jeremy wanted to see how the Nazis behaved to a visiting foreign Jew, if Ludo was willing to face the music.

Luckily, Ludo was willing. His father had business interests there, and Ludo was anxious to wind them up.

Then Joan and Anthony turned up out of the blue to visit the old Archdeacon, so Ludo and Jeremy carried them off as well. It was quite a party that finally set off through France in Ludo's voluptuous Rolls.

They got their first sight of the Nazi flag in the Saar. The Saar had been under Geneva control for the profit of France ever since the War. In six months time they could choose to return to the Reich or belong to France or remain more-or-less as they were; but the swastika banners festooning the village streets left little doubt which way the voting would go.

“They won't be half as well off,” said Jeremy.

“That, they know; but it won't affect the issue,” said Ludo. “Germans are not ‘Economic Main,' in the which-side-your-bread-is-buttered sense: nor are they a ‘nation'—or not in the sense you mongrel British are one. They're more like a wandering horde who have settled down here and there in Europe almost by chance: their ties are still not so much with any particular patch of soil (or State) as tribal ‘kinship' ties. Rosenberg's right that far....”

“A bit like you Jews,” interrupted Joan.

“Except that the German Tribes have focused their kinship ties in a single, godlike Paramount Chief.”

“But you do too—except that you keep
your
Führer up in the sky, which is very much safer for all of us.”

Jeremy nudged his aunt, glancing at Ludo in some alarm.

“Where do we eat?” asked the practical Anthony: “Some of these Gasthauses look pretty good to me.”

It was hard to believe these smiling meadows and woods housed one of the major coalfields of Europe, Jeremy mused, when you thought of the needless degradation and ugliness Coal had inflicted on Wales. For “wandering tribes” the Germans were pleasingly tidy people.... But then a Poilu lifted a pole which barred the road: a German policeman saluted with outstretched arm, looked at their passports and smilingly waved them on into Germany proper. He hadn't batted an eyelid at Ludo's name or at Ludo's nose.

They crossed the Rhine on a bridge of boats where the anxious Rolls seemed to walk like an overweight cat on a slender twig, and passed through peaceful country where pine forests skirted the fields. Peasants were carting their hay in ox-drawn wagons, or spraying their fruit; and the gentle breezes of June barely ruffled the growing wheat. Young men stripped to the waist and burned a mahogany-brown were laying pipes. There weren't many cars on the dusty road, or even lorries: only occasional motor-cycles ridden two-or-three-up, and a single trio of holiday cyclists sweating over their pedals—including a fat white woman in shorts. There wasn't much sign of political ferment here—only an overweening friendliness, everyone making these foreigners welcome and going out of their way to be helpful; and a pleasant but all-pervading scent of anti-sunburn cream.

True, in the village streets there were Nazi flags and bunting inscribed with slogans: GERMANS—A NATION OF AIRMEN (without one single airplane in the sky), or YOUNG MEN! VOLUNTEER FOR THE LABOR SERVICE; but no one seemed ever to lift his eyes to look at them.

Stuttgart was Ludo's first port of call. There he disappeared for a while; and after they'd toured the partly burnt-out castle the rest of them sat in the Railway Hotel, watching an S.A. Parade in front of the brand-new station. The Troopers drilled with a Guards-like precision, but looked rather jolly young men with peeling cream-daubed noses and hardly the sort to go beating-up Germany's Ludos.... They presently drove away in lorries, singing their heads off.

Jeremy talked in the bar to a young man wearing a Nazi badge, and smelling of sunburn-cream like everyone else. Why all this soldierly drilling and marching by two or three million men still called civilians? The French were bound to think it a threat....

The young man smiled, turning such candid and almost affectionate eyes on this total stranger that Jeremy felt embarrassed. “It's just that they don't understand us, poor dears.... Yet it's perfectly simple: why do you English play football? Because you enjoy it—and nobody looks on a match between Chelsea and 'Spurs as threatening civil war! We long to make friends with the French: hasn't Hitler said so again and again? No German wants a new war: our fathers have told us too much about the last one....” But then his brow clouded. “No, but the French might start one.... They've evil men at the top; and when they do overrun us what have these ‘two or three million men' got to fight with?—This!” (and he brandished a table-fork). “That's why we want the whole world disarmed like ourselves.”

The man was transparently truthful and honest. “It isn't me he is trying to kid so much as himself; and I wonder why?” thought Jeremy.

Just then two Hitler Youths came round, shaking collecting-boxes “For Aircraft”; and everyone put in a coin in exchange for an aircraft badge, like a charity flag-day. “That's only for building
civil
aircraft of course” said their Nazi friend; but he added “The French could blast us out of the skies!”—a mental connection more likely than logical, Jeremy thought. He remembered the red-and-white model bomb in the square outside with a slit for similar contributions. A placard on it had read: A SINGLEFOLK A SINGLE DANGER A SINGLE DEFENSE.

But then came an awkward moment, when Joan unthinkingly lit a cigarette: whereupon a somewhat pimply creature in S.S. uniform smugly remarked to the world at large: “No
German
woman of decent breeding smokes.” Hurriedly Joan stubbed out her fag. But a bystander loosed on the man the cutting edge of a whiplash tongue: “No German
man
of decent breeding insults his country's guests”—and a lot more besides, in which other bystanders joined till the S.S. man scuttled away with his tail between his legs amid claps and guffaws.

“He knows no better,” their friend said to Joan: “He's only an ignorant pig of a Prussian. There's far too many of these down here lately, riding the band-wagon.”

*

Meanwhile the loudspeaker-set on the bar was blaring forth panegyrics extolling Hitler's historic first meeting with Mussolini at Venice, from which the Führer had just returned.

No one at Stuttgart knew how unlikely it was that this meeting would ever take place at all.

When first it was mooted, Hitler had been most unwilling. He spoke no language but German, knew nothing of foreign life and wished to know less: once his Austrian-immigrant roots had struck in the Reich he could see no reason for further crossing of frontiers except as an armed invader. For him and the Duce to meet, however, Mahomed must go to the Mountain; and Hitler found the whole idea of “abroad” so repugnant he kept on putting it off.

But that wasn't all: for Hitler had troubles enough at home, this June. He was reaping the harvest of having come to power by legal (if not entirely legitimate) means: whereas from earliest days the cauliflower ears of Röhm's thick-headed S.A. had rung with the summons to violent revolution, and these were a couple of million men whose forte was none of your hair-splitting logic—licentious and arrogant bullies who weren't to be balked of their revolution merely because he had come to power without one.

Once Hindenburg died and Hitler was Head of State.... But to let them kick over the traces just now could be fatal, it meant provoking too many opponents at once—the Army, the whole establishment, even the President. The one man they all adored and followed was Röhm: only Röhm could jolly them out of it, everything therefore turned on persuading Röhm to keep his men on the leash at least for the few weeks ailing President Hindenburg had to live.... But a marathon tête-à-tête had failed to make Röhm understand his point of view—oh why was Röhm such a fool?

At first he had thought he could bargain with Röhm by taking into his Cabinet radical Strasser to counterpoise right-wing Göring; but Strasser refused to serve not only with Göbbels his personal Judas but Göring too, he preferred to remain in private life. And time was short, for Hitler had promised to meet the whole S.A. High Command on the last day of June at Wiessee (where Röhm was at present on sick-leave) and answer their case.... In such abysses of indecision a couple of days in Venice seemed suddenly less of a hateful chore than a welcome respite: so finally Hitler went.

The only remaining hope of persuading Röhm to hold in his men for these vital few weeks till the Head of State died and Hitler stepped into his shoes seemed to be Göbbels's silver tongue. Two fellow-radicals—Göbbels too had lately been blowing his top against the Establishment.... Therefore, the last thing before he left, Hitler had authorized secret talks between them. These talks took place in a private room at a Munich tavern; and secrecy suited the faithful Göbbels fine, since that way Hitler need never know that instead of dissuading Röhm he was egging him on. For to Göbbels this seemed the obvious course because, should the Radical cause succeed, he would thus be well in with the winning side: while if it was doomed, then Röhm's broad shoulders alone would take the rap and Göbbels himself would be free, as soon as he saw which way the cat intended to jump, to jump just ahead of the cat....

But now the cat was away in Venice; and Göbbels and Röhm not the only Nazi mice at play. On the opposite side, Göring and Himmler were playing a deadlier game. Göring had always hated Röhm for filching his storm-troops from him. “Hatred” perhaps was too warm and human a feeling ever to motivate Himmler; but that made his enmity, rooted in cold self-interest, none the less implacable. Röhm's S.A. were blocking the path of his own S.S.: it was not Röhm alone who stood in his way, but these couple of million men.