The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one’s neighbour and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.
– Aleister Crowley
T he modern-day craving for things is caused by an internal misery. Their use reveals the slavery of the soul. If one is really free, one can take cocaine as simply as saltwater taffy. There is no better rough test of a soul than its attitude to drugs. If a man is simple, fearless, eager, he is all right; he will not become a slave. If he is afraid, he is already a slave. Let the whole world take opium, hashish and the rest; those who are liable to abuse them were better dead.
For it is in the power of all so-called intoxicating drugs to reveal a man to himself. If this revelation declares a Star, then it shines more brightly ever after. If it declares a Christian – a thing not man nor beast, but a muddle of mind – he craves the drug, no more for its analytical but for its numbing effect. Lytton has a great story of this in Zanoni. Glyndon, an uninitiate, takes an Elixir, and beholds not Adonai the glorious, but the Dweller on the Threshold; cast out from the Sanctuary, he becomes a vulgar drunkard.
I rise and soon greet my goats. I spend many glorious minutes in their proximity and continue on to the meadow on the slope, flecked with midges and flower.
My chums are quite likely to follow me, when I leave the gate on the far side of their pasture open.
As I tickle the animals, I think back to a time at our abbey on Sicily, and ponder the rumours of the night with the goat. Herodotus once told of an Egyptian priestess copulating with one during a ceremony. Many cultures celebrate the union of man and beast, and the Egyptians are no different. The Greeks too had their Minotaur; Leda and the swan also. My darling Scarlet Woman of the time was Leah, whom we shall soon meet, and she lustily agreed to play the priestess. I recall how she knelt on all fours, only to find the goat a possessor of lofty standards, impervious and indifferent to her quite charmed offering. This was the nearest we ever got to bestiality. The beast resisted ALL coaxing, so for the sake of damage limitation, I took his place and atoned for the youngster at considerable length. I do so detest waste. I admit I was rampant; a fully unfurled and stoned pervert, innocently hell-bent on radical satiation of the groin, the execution of which provided the perpetual fuel for the next plunge into erratic bliss. The chomping kid I chat to now seems to eye me, as if he knows not only the rumoured tale of Leah and the billy goat, but also the truth. His is a begrudging respect. I chuckle, which only seems to please him more. We were all young once. He is my friend. I his.
I am healthy, though aged. I am blissfully cheered by each moment, each hour. I have an existence that almost all men should crave. But I am no ordinary man. I expect within hours that I shall be dead. As Hamlet himself sat on that high rock and pondered suicide, there is also here talk of a distant England, a girl, rumours of murder, insinuations of insanity, and yet with a textured calm, there is at the root of it all, a cold and targeted sanity. It is a sanity that aims to save the world from a dystopian horror, already in the late planning stages. They call it The Crackdown. And I have its abysmal fucking architects clearly in my crosshairs.
Six hours to go.
6 January, 1917
As the ship sailed from the harbour in New York, I consulted my tarot and read from it that my Thelemic calendar was entering a new phase. This time was known in the Kabbalah as the Chokmah. It speaks of a time of questioning wisdom and offers guidance in how to act in a crisis. My crisis had been formed on the front, enough to send any man hunting for a razor to slit his own neck.
On this January dawn, on an ocean steely and drab enough to camouflage a battleship, I pulled the required series of thirty-one cards, culminating with that of the Devil. The Devil64 is not a literal translation.
Just as our dreams are not faithful and accurate, but are simply symbolic, then so it is with The Devil card. It speaks of the seduction of the material world, immediate gratification and of physical pleasures. The card is a warning to revert to the beauty of magick and the Will; to joy and to freedom. The Devil card warns of an overabundance of luxury. This seemed appropriate as I left the security and thrum of New York City and headed for a Europe still at war, and one where Hühnerbein had recently arrived. He had been convinced by me that our work there in the United States was done, for Russia was crumbling and the States neutral. Germany’s victory, I told him, was nigh and inevitable.
I never fully relied on such devices as the Chokmah, but if I found myself in a mild crisis, Dandylyon and Prudence had convinced me that these methods might provide the minutest of flicks on the barometer to offer the correction for which I was searching. This period, I was assured by the cards, would last for three years. And the cycle would begin with a series of innocuous fires on the same day.
It was February 12th, 1917 and I had not been back in London long. I remember it well. An enemy of mine within the Golden Dawn announced to the Order in Blythe Road that I was to be the subject of continued attacks from him until I relented in my vocal dissent, fled the country or died in flames. I received note of this in the post from one of my spies. I immediately requested a cab to take me from my home in Chancery Lane to visit two allies of mine, a Mrs Simpson and a Dr Berridge in Kentish Town and Camden. I also intended to tell of my plans for an insurrection that would unfurl as had the First65 Battle of Blythe Road, that notorious scrap with Yeats’s large-footed monsters.
On the way to Berridge’s, the paraffin lights on the cab caught fire, and I had to change into a different carriage by Euston. As we passed Regent’s Park, the horses bolted as a result of a bonfire by the side of the road. When I finally arrived in Kentish Town, Mrs Simpson was struggling to light her hearth fire, something she swore she had never had an issue with ever before. As she did this, the rubber raincoat I had left in her hallway spontaneously combusted and the gaslights in her street exploded, six of them in ten-second intervals. These tales were ten-a-penny, I had just happened to witness these coincidences with my own eyes. I found this wholly unworrying, for in order to believe in such ill-lit viciousness from Satan, it stood that one would have to believe in the goodness of God. And I knew that to be an outright and despicable fucking lie. I can easily take or leave this magical flimflam, it is mild entertainment.
Really, I just wanted power, drugs and naked flesh.
Despite much hot air of this cartoonish magic, my ship had landed in a Europe of the starkest realism, and I had one immediate goal, regardless of the several factions who believed I worked for them. I would harness all of my powers and every inch of political, sexual and magickal leverage to end this war.
We knew long before the actual date of the revolution, in October 1917, that the Bolsheviks would take Moscow in a coup d’état. MI-1’s intrusive politicking from years before (and without intention, of course) had ensured the Russians would soon be withdrawing from the Eastern Front. That would just leave their allies the Romanians to handle the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans. The vast redistribution of the armies of the Central Allies onto the Western Front in France and Belgium would mean an early defeat for the British and French. This fat-thumbed, bullet-headed and very English Samson, now without his Scarlet Delilah and his locks of hair, would now have to shove that stone pillar, as he had promised. We needed the Americans in the war or we would face certain defeat as the Russians withdrew. Churchill had thoroughly approved of my idea to sink another boat (in a precisely similar manner to the Lusitania) and to use Mexico, of all places, to ensure victory in France and Belgium. He had immediately conferred with Downing Street. All was agreed. And Samson’s plan was set in motion. The old lads in the English Mountaineering Club purred into their gins. I shall explain.
I had been dropped from a Sopwith Camel and by the Royal Flying Corps behind the German lines outside the French village of Sin-le-Noble near the ancient commune of Douai. The precise spot for our meeting had released an emerald-green flare at five-minute intervals after the striking of noon. I had arrived an hour early at eleven, and sat scratching my arse and reading a copy of Faust I on a deserted mud hill. It was the only thing on the English side that would fit in my pocket, and reading German was always good to get into the language and character.
I inadvertently commandeered a stray horse to get the final two miles to our rendez vous. It seemed in need of company and gladly meandered to me, nuzzling my shoulder. It was a chunky beast, and therefore, I deduced, a recent arrival. He seemed to be as confused as the rest of the poor bastards on two legs around those parts.
The first flare went up and off, just as Faust was on a stroll with Wagner and being befriended by that large poodle.
The stallion even moved down into a large-ish crater in order to allow me to mount him. I then nudged his ribs with my boots, and we moved off in the direction of the green rocket.
Soon after I got there, Hühnerbein arrived in a staff car, spread wide across the rear seats like a strumpet’s thighs.
He needed help to exit the vehicle. When he did, he moved the minimal distance to a bed frame with a mattress on it. There was a risk of landmines, even back here and, for a coward such as he, it was a minor miracle that he even left the car. It seemed his laziness and his desire to be horizontal won out over the danger of walking and the discomfort and filth of the frozen bed. It was January, and fucking vile out.
The bed was not the only household piece out there by the road and in the fields. For hundreds of yards, there was furniture, beds, kitchen tables, dog beds, budgie cages, gas lamps, commodes, potties, quite attractive folding screens and room dividers, armoires, mirrors, garden tables. These were signs of normality from the deserted village that no longer had any use in the perilous and collapsed houses and farms.
‘The poor bastards were taking them to the trenches to be reminded of home, when there was a gas attack. Look closely enough and you’ll see the bones,’ he chuckled.
I looked more closely, walking around the site, distracting myself so as not to dive on the fat bastard and throttle him. There were children’s clothes, the single unstrapped shoe of a five-year-old. He picked up a teddy bear from next to his bed, and lobbed it in the air repeatedly, as one would a cricket ball.
My toe nudged a violin case open. It was empty. I thought of a slip of a girl in long socks practising. A chessboard peeled and scorched at the rooks’ corners. A small boy’s dreams.
I flipped open a school desk to see a ruler, a fountain pen with a lilac nib and a copy of Maupassant’s short stories. I recalled the bliss of ‘Mouche’ and the horror of ‘Le Horla’ from my childhood. I opened the book at the start of ‘Idylle’. It is the one where a lactating woman rides on a train. A man cannot stop staring at her breasts. Unless they are drained thrice daily, the woman suffers great pain. They pass through a tunnel, and the man obliges, helping the lady and also satiating his hunger. I flicked through the six pages of the tale and noticed some of the English translations in the margin in the same lilac ink.
The young man, confused, stammered: ‘But … Madame … I could relieve you.’
She replied in a broken voice: ‘Yes, if you want. You will do me good service. I cannot hold out, I cannot.’
He knelt in front of her, and she leaned toward him, carrying to his mouth in the gesture of a nurse, the dark tip of her breast. In the movement she made by taking her two hands to bring it towards this man, a drop of milk appeared at the top. He began to drink it eagerly, seizing that heavy breast in his mouth like a fruit. And he began to suckle in a greedy and regular way.
It was a girl’s handwriting, florid and round with the tails and spines of the letters, extravagant and passionate. It all hinted at intelligence, and the skill level of the translation verified this.
He had passed both his arms around the waist of the woman that he was holding to approach her, and he drank with slow sips with a movement of the neck, as a child would.
Suddenly she said: ‘That’s enough for this one, take the other one now.’
And he took the other with docility.
She had placed her hands on the back of the young man, and she was breathing forcefully now, happily, enjoying the breath of flowers mixed with blasts of air movement being thrown into the cars.
What the fuck was I doing here? I dropped the desk lid down and now saw lilac-inked graffiti, where I had previously seen none.
Victor Hugo est un hérétique.
Victor Hugo is a heretic.
Cette chaleur estivale me rend folle, tenez moi à l’ecart des hommes.
Save me from men in the heat of summer, or I shall go mad with passion.
Je veux que Gilbert me branle.
I want Gilbert to finger me.
The corpulent arsehole brought me out of my reverie.
‘What shall we discuss today, my fine friend?’ he said.
‘I would not want to get ahead ourselves, but this war will be won within months. The Russians will be going home, trust me on this. The British will surrender within days of their retreat to Moscow. We must consider how best to take advantage of our victory.’
‘What are they saying in London?’ He scratched his balls.
‘They are hoping for an armistice that will be kind to them. The King will impress this upon the Kaiser. We must think of our own personal gain, my friend. We can carve out our own notability and legend. It is there for the taking. For you and me. God knows we have deserved it,’ I said.
‘Go on.’
‘I have a friend in Mexico. A good friend. They are willing to form an alliance with Berlin. If the Americans join with the British, they will, under the terms of our armistice, be forced to hand back all the lands she has taken in the last seventy years from Mexico. Think of our riches. This means California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona will all be given back to them. Another possibility is that if the Mexicans go one step further and declare war on America with us, there is no way we can lose in Europe, for there will be no American troops sent across the Atlantic if they are at war on their southern border.’
‘This is most intriguing. Continue, please.’
‘It is a done deal, if you wish it. All Berlin needs to do is send a cable to Mexico to confirm this. I will facilitate everything.’
‘I will speak to them about it. This is remarkable work, Aleister. And we split all profit from this down the line.’
‘As always, my friend.’
I pocketed the Maupassant book, and the lilac fountain pen. I would give both a better home. My horse pal was looking at me, seemingly with an adult acceptance that we would soon part and also with a pride and an understanding of my having just fooled this over-fed moron.
Two weeks later, the British Navy intercepted the following cable in code.
We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavour in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.
Signed, ZIMMERMANN
They did not need to crack any code, for I had already told them the precise contents and the timing, the origination and the destination of the message. They instead reverse-engineered the message, to reveal the intent of a thousand other missives they were holding and which had confounded them for a year. It was sent by a high-level clerk called Arthur Zimmermann in the German embassy in New York to their ambassador, Heinrich von Eckardt, in Mexico City. The British heralded the cracking of the cypher, and this appeared in many British and American newspapers, so that the Prussians would never suspect me. Even then, the Germans might have got away with it all in the eyes of the public had Zimmermann not simply confessed to an American journalist. ‘I cannot deny it. It is all true.’ He backed this up with a similar admission in the Reichstag of all places.
Samson was shoving and shoving. Wilson was close to declaring war, I knew this much from MI-1. The final straw appeared close when we repeated the illusion of the Lusitania with the sinking of the Housatonic on January 31st, 1917. But still Wilson prevaricated to Samson’s dismay and near exhaustion.
In late March, four more cargo ships were emptied and sent to the depths. The sailors aboard were all redirected to Ceylon, Costa Rica or West Africa to join thousands of other lads we had saved from the trenches while the officers and generals scratched their groins or crossed their eyes towards the bottom of a brandy tumbler. On April the sixth, 1917, Wilson finally relented under huge pressure from coast to coast, from left wing and right, and we finally had ourselves the greatest ally of them all. The United States of America. And Samson could rest.
Hühnerbein was furious (but not at me), and I truly believe that that was largely because I expressed my anger and absolute disappointment at him. His fury was apparently unspeakable when he saw Churchill shaking hands with President Carranza of Mexico in a copy of The Times. Winston was claiming that victory was now close. Christ, how Hühnerbein despised my pal, and as much as he now adored me, thus making for a supremely malleable contact. The Prussians never even figured that the preponderance of ghost ships in those years were early attempts at bait for them to sink. They were certainly tied in knots by Winston and me, befuddled and thoroughly compliant and supple, and magnified by the blind spot created by Hühnerbein’s vicious hatred of the future prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
‘But exactly what did Winston do to deserve such anger from Hühnerbein?’ I asked Dandylyon, as we strolled in Hyde Park on a cloudless mid-May day in 1917 to the sound of songbird and an odd whistle I could not place as precisely as I would have wished.
Dandylyon squawked with laughter, covering the flutey whine I was hearing and allowing me to re-focus upon my chum.
‘Sit down, old boy. You will enjoy this one.’
And we slumped onto a soft gradient of billiard baize.
‘Well, some might point to their run-ins in South Africa, the North-West Frontier, India and Cuba, and they would have been warm. You see Hühnerbein’s mischief was generally concentrated over the years in the same spot as was of prime importance to England. They met like touring golf champions or moneyed ladies on their trots of perpetual summer from Nice to Florence.’
He shouted for Prudence to join us from the path by the Serpentine, as she smiled and waved at rowboats. She was blowing kisses in the direction of two young children who watched their young mother paddle, bumping into other boats and scattering swans, seemingly unable to take her gaze from her giggling little ones. Prudence swivelled, saw us and began to stroll over. She was there within three minutes.
‘I am just explaining about Winston and Hühnerbein.’
She chuckled as she sat gracefully upon my suit jacket, and then admired the perfection of the azure blue above.
Dandylyon continued, ‘Well, each time their paths crossed, Churchill stole the Prussian’s glory. Even more annoyingly for Hühnerbein was the crediting of Churchill for some act of his own heroism or decency, for I don’t know if you have noticed it, but they might have once borne an uncanny resemblance to each other. This likeness has, I admit, waned over the years as Hühnerbein has widened and now wears a filthy beard on his face. But if one looks hard enough, one might notice a kernel of similarity that several years ago would have them mistaken for each other.’
He paused. I considered it. It was true. He pulled out two photographs from the school years of the two young lads. I did not know which was Prussian and which one was English. An aroused swan piped down from its shrieking to reveal again that odd whistle that had now upped its pitch by a whisker.
‘In Plettenberg Bay, Hühnerbein saved a four-year-old on a beach from an errant wave. Society proclaimed Winston a hero. At a Madras garden party, a twelve-foot python had cornered three ladies, when Hühnerbein played a pungi with great skill to distract the snake, hypnotised it until the lasses were safe. Later that same afternoon, an escaped and famished white tiger blocked the route of his tuk-tuk by a crowded market and did so with menace, until the Prussian pulled out a catapult and hit the beast in the left eye with a pebble. It slunk away in ignominy, and bothered no one else that day or thereafter it seemed.
‘On both occasions, it was Churchill who was heralded as the gallant saviour, and while these events were happening, he was, first, copulating with two twin sisters in the billiard room and, secondly, sitting on the roof at the party, meditating and smoking hashish with the governor and his missus. This was all more easily explained by the facts that Hühnerbein could almost seamlessly drift into Harrow English and, similarly, Churchill was able to bark quite excellent German.
‘The more Hühnerbein tried to correct these tales and these apparent injustices, the less people believed him, and lauded, extolled and revered Churchill. He was able to stomach them, until the day at the King’s Cup at the Oriental Park racetrack in Havana when Winston’s future wife, Clementine, mistook them, and, after having gone there with the German, left with the grinning other. By this time, Churchill was quite aware of his good fortune and had Hühnerbein followed, and his bets noted by large-eared gents with stubby pencils and folded newspapers. Yes, he empurpled at losing the beauty with the legs and the bosom, seeing her get in a car with the Englishman, but when his winnings had already been collected by a grinning doppelgänger, he now vowed revenge. This was simply too much.’
I chuckled. ‘Yes, Clementine is a bit of a sort! I’ll give him that.’
‘Wait, there is more,’ said Prudence.
‘You tell him,’ said Dandylyon.
I saw many people had stopped and were staring towards the sky. There was no panic, mild intrigue at most. I then looked up, because the sun was blocked for a brief moment, odd for a tranquil day with no cloud.
And then it came towards us from the direction of Park Lane, zeroing in on the rowing boats.
The Zeppelin was called the Baby Killer for a reason. That bastard Hühnerbein would pay for this. I would focus the filth of my anger on him, as I told myself that he should ponder how fucking dangerous I can be.
His countrymen were the first to suffer the ignominy of defeat. MI-1 estimated that ten thousand American troops arrived every third day from the spring of 1917 for the rest of the year.
In early 1918, the Germans were now being crippled by vast losses, instigated from their own ill-considered Spring Offensive, a last gambit perhaps. Three decisive American victories in rapid succession at Cantigny, Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood turned the tide inexorably in the other direction as the Hundred Days Offensive of the Allies buckled Berlin’s resources, and the end was almost near. By the early winter, the horror was over, but only after I told them that the Americans had 6 million more troops ready to embark. Whitehall’s conditions of the armistice that I laid out to Hühnerbein were now a summation to surrender, and they dutifully surrendered. I wept with him, but I was instead crying for my Spanish friends at the Little Madrid Café and that decimated boat on the Serpentine that left severed legs floating and the prettiest of pigtails soaked, wiry and choking the ducks that survived fleetingly. And many millions of others.
London, Berlin and Paris had privately conceded the stalemated horror would go on until 1925 at least. ‘Thank you, Aleister,’ I may have even heard late one night in Duke Street. But then again, I might not have. My glory was in the act, not in some clod’s approval and fawning.
Again, boys could go home, but the nervously delivered news of my greatest sadness and my ultimate loss was just hours away.
They found my letters in the breast pocket. The corpse was cold. It could have been any one of thousands, but some marvellously romantic crackpot66 had had the notion to honour the war dead with one honest Tommy whose identity would remain shrouded and hidden. A symbol, they called it. A shrine to all the blessed lads. They took three cadavers from Flanders that day; unsure which would be interred in Westminster. It was only upon arrival back in England that a colonel randomly touched the tilted boot of the soldier on the left in the back of the odorous ambulance that the choice was made.
I was summoned to Whitehall. What did I know? Could I identify the body?
I wept, as I saw the marbly purple of Robbie’s face.
I read the final letter written to me. It carries dark maroon fingerprints and Whitechapelian splatters. They suggest an urgency that hollows me to this day. The event to which Roberta refers took place in March 1918. Winston had insisted that she and I spend four days of luxury in Paris. We were dropped, in battle clobber, by a pair of Sopwith Camels in the Bois de Boulogne. We landed near each other and then marched with malice aforethought the five miles to the centre of the city. We walked into the Hotel Royal Monceau by the Arc de Triomphe, where they were expecting us. They saw us once pass through the lobby, when we went to stroll through the Parc Monceau at midnight. We left by Sopwith Camel and from the Bois de Boulogne. I would have no idea of the consequences of our sojourn. How could I have?
Cambrai, Hauts-de-France
France
November 9th, 1918
My darling Aleister,
You must know that I have always loved you, and wanted you as my own.
It might have been a forbidden love. It would have been a scary one.
We were too close, I felt. Perhaps our destinies to save England and run from no one clouded what we always knew, I sense. And I must pay homage to your kindliness for being gentle and understanding with a novice such as I. The one time we were intimate shall remain the summit of my life; but I must also tell you the baby you planted inside me is a troublesome one, as I lay here on a scarlet-soaked bunk in a trench, German-built, it seems. We must have gained a few yards, my love. There is just one chaplain here, a gypsy fellow of great skill he assures me, but I sense he shall not be able to help us.
I might have let you all down in the hour of all of our greatest needs. You, our child, England. And myself. I saw more in seconds with you than most women and men shall see in a lifetime, my whirring, thrumming Master. And that part within me that the romantic foolishly might call the soul shall very soon walk into the wilderness. But with each step, there will be just one Great Man, of whom this stirred mare shall think. Without the Gentle and Great Beast, I am naught; but I hope He shall be forever boosted by my thoughts, wishes and rampant Love.
Always remember me.
Your adoring Roberta, forever in True Worship xxx
Robbie, with her flat arse cheeks, raspy voice and moundless sternum, had shape-shifted quite astonishingly and most effectively from soldier to nurse, woman to male youth; all most pleasing for this Pimpernel for her to fake such disguise, while staying both safe(ish) and meddlesome. The second war was rich in tales of girls’ courage and boldness, but that just made Robbie’s pioneering in the first scrap all the more impressive and audacious. This remained so, despite the relative ease of convincing clods (Generals drunk twenty miles behind the lines) or brave and scared soldiers clinging on to life itself and minute-by-minute, with her gift for seamless androgyny. Robbie showed her talent for applying stage make-up to fake a day’s stubble and a sleepless milkman’s fertile vocabulary, while growling intermittently her/his desires for cunt of any kind and news of the cricket. There was also the latitude and cover offered by the British Army’s gently twisted and pleasingly perverse tradition of the hard-bastards-in-a-frock variety shows and cabarets of six-foot-six Welsh miners rouged like desperate, unfucked aunts in panto. Just how the baggy bloomers and snug bras would make it to Japanese POW camps, one could only marvel.
Robbie had been a day away from returning to a care home near Worthing when the fatal shell hit the earth where her final inter-trench mischief was being executed. She was busy switching messages, and therefore cancelling plans for wave after wave of German offensives. They had been pointless for four years, this was beyond the absurd. The foetus was just twenty-five weeks; Robbie barely showed a bump, they say. She had planned, I now suspect, that when she did show signs of motherhood, she would have retreated to the role of a nurse to continue her own Pimpernelling. We were less than two days from the armistice that I, in particular, knew was coming. The first, second and third vicious wounds had been made by flying metal, as she was exposed outside of the bunker, exchanging nodes of a radio transmitter in order to broadcast those four final communiqués to prevent thousands more casualties. She wrote on a piece of paper, as she bled. On another scrap, a name and address in Dulwich Common, London SE and one by Loch Ness. Our child was taken from her womb by an army chaplain of Romany extraction called only Zealand, doing his befuddled and frowning best.
The sliver of a minuscule youth was lobbed onto a bunk that held diseased rags that were masquerading as bandages, and with the presumptuous prioritising that saw the mother’s survival chances infinitely greater than the determined little sod, barely able to breathe, never mind scream. Zealand felt the minutest of pulses and heard the softest of yells. Within thirty minutes, Robbie had lost consciousness and within the hour, she had passed. Paperwork and bureaucracy had been abandoned four and a quarter years previous, and there were no procedures there for a man, let alone a woman, never mind a pregnant one and her foetus-cum-child.
The famished rats and the Prussians appeared to move in at a similar rate, one polite-ish rodent of a liberal mind sniffed, nibbled and then tucked in to the placenta, as the first boots landed in the mud, and they were seen by the chaplain at the tiny passageway to the bunks.
The godly man was now sitting next to the cold corpse of Roberta, as the young boys from the 2. Landwehr came in. He did not know whether their silence and dismay was at the presence of a still foetus or a naked woman, for it was clear to him that they had seen neither before. They then all slumped like dominoes onto the earth, unable to speak from what appeared to be a combination of exhaustion and relief to have made it across the battlefield. After a pause of barely more than a minute, one addressed the chaplain.
‘Darf ich Dir helfen, mein Freund?’67
11 November 1918
It was all over. It was time to traipse home.
Zealand was the kind to follow the path of least resistance. It was in his gypsy blood to wander. There was a route to the east; he took it. This was not the second war when a nation was toxic. It is so easily forgotten that in 1918 (as in 1914), Germany was pretty similar to England, to Britain. There were no Nazis, no concentration camps, no sterilisations, no Final Solutions. But innocent civilians had died at sea bringing food to friends. And yes, gas had been used in the trenches, but by both sides and away from the populace. Bombing of cities was limited. This was a daft brawl between lands with Asia and Africa in mind, fuelled by gourmands with infinite wealth and a hunger for puissance. They were countries lorded over by inbred cousins. For sure, Hitler needed a thumping, but, for the first one, the Kaiser and the King were of the same family. And so, it was no big deal for Zealand to join the young boys, with whom he had become pals when the sirens were sounded on the 11th, and to go with them to their home town of Halle, where their mothers would, they were sure, welcome him.
It seemed to be a slow and endless journey on viciously retarded rolling stock, but by Christ, it felt remarkable to be above ground.
Zealand read an English–German dictionary. And spoke the odd word from time to time.
The boys smiled, and slumped across the floors and seats, seemed to be speaking of German cuisine, interspersed with the name of a school sweetheart. Their joy was in abrupt contrast to the stern countenances and unrelenting miens of the officers down the carriage, castrated of their honour and elitist pride.
Zealand carried only his small medical bag and chaplain’s Bible with him. They all reacted as one and with a fatherly silence, when after an hour of talking of Mutti’s Apfelstrudel and girls with names like Katrina Goetz, Beatte von Schorlemer and Heidi Schaller, there came a small pulsating purr from the satchel. It was the weak cry of a small boy, whom the gypsy chaplain and the boys had named Edward at the dying Roberta’s request. This orphan, while never knowing his mother, might at least have a small brigade of fathers, and an impassioned squadron of doting and relieved grandmothers. Some wallowing cretins would see misfortune from day one, but not this lad. He would grow to know of rich gratitude for his own miracle, despite the youthful curse of fat ankles, a toad’s neck and by the age of nine a burgeoning pertness to his chest.
I had lost Papa, Rose Edith, Robbie, two daughters, several pals from The Legion, and possibly La Gitana, but there were very few left unscorched by the horror. I knew I would never pity myself either, what a vile state. As much as I told the world I hated the English, I held the stiff upper lip, as any god should. I was still a triple agent of crimson subterfuge, and I had to maintain the confidence of my acquaintances: Hühnerbein, above all. I would destroy him in good time, and when he was no longer of any use to me.
The war had also ended the liberalism of the Great Binge, and we all felt the hangover, and with such withdrawals, I nursed the guilt and pondered how to channel the arousal. The answer was with more drugs, more rituals, more scandal, more mischief, more yoga, more female arse and more Pimpernelling. However, I feared a period of pending creative and spiritual block. I wrote in my diary:
I am tempted, for example, to crucify a toad or copulate with a duck or sheep or goat or to set a house on fire or murder someone with the idea – a perfectly good magical idea to some, of course – that some supreme violation of all the laws of my being would break my Karma or dissolve the spell which seems to bind me. These actions were abominable to me, and I would never have done them. It just seemed that I would need such extreme behaviour to spark me from an inertia that filled me with dread like no ghost or policeman or German or venereal affliction ever could.
In February 1919, I retreated to Loch Ness, to Boleskine House. There I would walk the mountains and sniff the lake, I planned to find inspiration amid the elegant cliché of nature and from liberating rustication.
The Frog maid, who I had imagined quite unaware of my arrival, greeted me with a vast pot of mushroom soup, a peck on my cheek and a punctuality, as if I were arriving back from the office on the usual rush-hour train from Waterloo. I still chuckled at how she had arrived the day after I had, to my eternal shame, sacrificed the frog, and, given her prescience with the soup and my otherwise unexpected arrival, now firmly suspected even more her connection with some spirit or other. This further confirmed to my fried brain that some strange force or other approved of my withdrawal to the countryside.
The more I watched Frog eat, burp, curse like a steelworker, fart and shit, the more attractive I found her. This is usually the domain of the true beauty, but Frog was not that. She was quite the bewitching marvel, in fact. Minute tics that might send another man to anger, despair and distraction only cemented my worship of her. Whether she was picking her teeth with a chewed-off finger- or toenail, or whether she was plucking black hairs that resembled fat spider legs from her nostrils, I only wanted to stare at her more. She wore my socks without asking, cooked only what she wanted to eat and her arse was as wide as a barrel, but, like her behaviour, it would not have been right in any other proportion. I do miss her.
When Frog walked me to my desk and a new typewriter with a stack of fine vellum sheets, with a view from the bay windows that looked out onto the waters, I knew that she and some perverse force was goading me to write. I was intrigued enough by the oddness of it all. So we smoked vast piles of marijuana and snorted molehills of white powder. The sole condition was that after taking on board an ounce of both between us, we had to maintain an absolute silence, and then to write and write and write. We were disallowed from talking or fondling or fucking. We were allowed to look at each other, to smile, to nod, to smoke and then tap away at the keys. This channelled grand energies and thought patterns and revelations into two hundred pages of The Gospel According to St Bernard Shaw. I knew the Scriptures of course, and had just read Shaw’s disposition on Jesus, Androcles and the Lion. I had to tell the world that Shaw knew less than bugger all about Christ, the East and mysticism. This thesis of mine, despite its excited spelling errors, established the outline of an entirely final theory on the construction of Christianity. Well, it did to me.
The fine and tasteful British novelist, Francis King CBE reviewed it thus:
A treasury of Crowley’s wit, wisdom and criticism which, even if it was the only book its author had written, would suffice to rebut the slander that Crowley was a pleasure-seeking fraud whose occultism was no more than ‘making a religion out of his weakness’.
The next time Frog and I did this neat experiment together, we were only allowed to paint and this is when I created Four Red Monks Carrying a Black Goat across the Snows to Nowhere.
I can thoroughly recommend this highly disciplined (and ill-disciplined) method to anyone wishing to re-spark their creative Will, as this piece uncovered my ability to daub oils with aplomb. Frog was so adorable as we began the second sitting. I recall her desire to taste the powder again and to experience once more the animal froth that she contributed quite beautifully to our times of pleasure, but before we began, her last words were the innocent and concerned enquiry, ‘Is there a good doctor nearby, Beast?’
‘I do not know about a doctor, but there is a first-class undertaker in the village.’
She laughed for a full five minutes, before we both shut up for four days of ritual drug-taking, silence and artistic intensity on several dozen canvasses, each the size of the main wall in the vast hall. Her crowning glory was a quite magnificent self-portrait that was part-human and part-amphibian, and which she signed Frog, and scrawled a line from Blake beneath her signature.
‘If a fool were to persist with his follies, he would become wise.’
I was back.
I returned to London. Orr met me at King’s Cross, and took me to see Dandylyon and another old pal from Whitehall. Spiritual and creative vigour were renewed (and a damned good sleep had) and when such positivity is sourced, fine things happen. And in this case it was Winston Churchill.
We met at Winston’s Hyde Park Corner mansion. It was a place full of secrets that seemed to echo from evenings of fun. It was darkened hallways, stunningly lit at dusk through the stained glass of the door arches, as dust danced in preparation for a large dinner and a night of mirth, plot and laughter. The exterior style was Italianate and clad in Royal Doulton Carrara and green, blue and turquoise Burmantofts bricks. The lavish and extravagant inside was of the Arts and Crafts school, glazed surfaces, teal domes, marble and hardened tiles to lessen quite purposefully the effects, even internally, of city pollution. The trellis wallpaper in the Japanese mingei style was a spectacular addition by his regardful missus, Clementine. Winston described the house as ‘an alderman dressed as a discerning street strumpet’. They were both most proud of her.
Orr and I were let in by Rex, the butler. We were led into the library, where I soon gravitated towards an abundant corner dedicated to the dark arts. The scarlet drapes were almost closed and let in minimal light. More light came in from the hallway. Orr played with the large globe that stood by the mahogany desk central in the room. Next to it, Dandylyon reclined in the large armchair. We may have whistled or hummed tunes; no one spoke, I remember that. After a minute or two, Winston stood forward from the shadows, wearing the gingerest beard and made his eyes bulge. He waddled viciously, barking harsh Bavarian invective and looking uncomfortably energetic. It was a scarily brilliant impersonation, but I knew we had not been brought here for a cheap dramatic stunt.
When our chuckles had subsided, Winston opened the curtains. He paused before turning on his heel, to look at us all one by one, ‘Gentlemen. Peacetime calls for a very different kind of naughtiness.’
I knew what he wanted, as he continued, ‘It is time to really mess around with Hühnerbein.’
‘Oh! Let’s have a newspaper scandal with scarlet strumpets in a cheap hotel. Or boys. Or animals,’ Dandylyon said.
‘I have a better idea,’ I whispered.
Dandylyon was adept at allowing me to believe things were my idea. I spoke.
‘Gentlemen! The fear and hollow horror that one’s enemies feel when they realise that one will never let an issue rest is a real and persistent one. If they are convinced that the dull and sickening thud of revenge is to come a year or five years or ten years later, they must then believe that the threat will be there until one of you dies. If I were your enemy, then you should make arrangements for a perpetual and infinite menace beyond the day you are boxed up in a coffin and dropped into the soil. And this shall be the precise intention of the Second Battle of Blythe Road. We can scare Hühnerbein but impress him at the same time. And by attacking Yeats, we can make him fearful for the rest of his pitiful days and beyond. The goal of piercing the Golden Dawn’s temple and headquarters shall not be to steal relics or ancient manuscripts. It shall be an old-fashioned roguishness and a bullying waggery. I want to defecate, literally and therefore fiercely symbolically, on their altar. And quite crucially, I have a perfect plan …’
Winston was to wear his ginger beard and we would dine in the Schwarzwald, a Stammtisch, next to the German embassy in South Kensington and within easy reach of 36 Blythe Road. We would take a quiet and ill-lit corner, I would do all the ordering, the unhealthiest fatty wurst for him with schnapps, of course. Our presence would be noted, and that would be all that was required, for Hühnerbein was egotistical enough to take great joy in a mere rumour of being seen out with me, even if, in this case, the rumour would be founded in more than idle tittle-tattle.
Winston was already widening around the girth, but still was infinitely thinner than the German. We started taking vast breakfasts, lunches and dinners at his house. Chef was ordered to use extra butter, lard and cream in all of Winston’s dishes. We had both developed a taste for hot curry in India, so the kitchen stuffed him with the highest-caloric fare, while I took it hotter than anyone could handle. To truly slow his metabolism, Winston did not walk anywhere, and had a hansom cab on a twenty-four-hour station. Every other day, we were driven down to a fleapit cinema called the Gaumont Rialto in the cut-throat backstreets of Waterloo. Next door we ate the greasiest fish and chips, and then rammed our gobs with milk chocolate as we watched afternoon matinées of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with Mary Pickford, Chaplin’s double bill of The Immigrant and Easy Street, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in Coney Island, John Ford’s Straight Shooting and my favourite, El Apóstol. We chuckled and were often told to be quiet by old ladies. Given his diet, Winston was just as likely to pass wind and nod off, leaving me awake to deal with the ire and disgust of the horn-rimmed aunts in our immediate vicinity. Not one of them looked like their emissions would have been any less sickening than Mr Churchill’s.
He expanded at a marvellous rate and soon was, with red beard in place, a doppelgänger for his nemesis. Having one’s greatest foe resemble one’s greatest ally is an intriguing combination that offers thrilling prospects for wickedness.
Our first mission of mischief one night in June 1919 was an unprovoked and unsuspected attack on those arses at the Golden Dawn. We chose the evening of the summer solstice, for, like the Epiphany, it brought them all out to Blythe Road like cockroaches.
Both Winston and I were sturdy types, who could hold our ale. We had consumed enough at the restaurant to add to the myth. ‘Ja, Herr Chef. They were both here that night and sank two large Flasches of peach schnapps.’
We smoked spicy marijuana at the table and snorted spoonfuls of cocaine. I made sure our waiter took his gratuity in pounds sterling and in face-numbing powder. It was the only kind, polite and decent thing to do, but also anything that added to the mystique, allure and standing of Hühnerbein would please him. The Dummkopf!
‘Why does he hate you so much? I heard some of the reasons,’ I said.
‘Ha ha ha! I shall tell you one day, chum. I promise.’
It was just after 7 p.m. when we walked out into the drizzle and to our waiting vehicle. We got into character and costume on the short ride to W14. It was an easy process that really just involved swinging our metaphorical scrotums in the style of an inebriated ogre, convinced that Satan and Lucifer were over our shoulders, egging on their chums and ready to come wind-milling into our scrap. This would be our role once inside, but first we had to slump on the seats of the vehicle and wait for our driver to oblige with his rather simple task, which was to pierce the guard of the two gargantuan trolls on the front door of the Edwardian mansion. He pulled the brand-new Packard onto the gravelled driveway, with the slow steady intent of the consummate chauffeur he was. He stepped out of the car, nodded at the large-footed fellows and casually engaged with them.
‘I am here for Lord Albury.’
‘Very well.’
There was no Lord Albury, of course.
He smoked a cigarette, and then pulled out a small bag of toffees, which he offered to the guards.
‘Fank you ’squire. Don’t mind if I do.’
‘Fank you very mach, gav’nah.’
And that was that. Who, after all, doesn’t like a damned good toffee?
A forty-five-minute wait was a fair estimate, and my anticipation seemed to be matched by Winston’s. We approached the elephantine thugs once we were sure the effects were close. We wanted them to remember us. In fact, I was convinced one of them had been there at the previous raid. Joy! I wanted them to remember too, who had done this to them. I sensed that Winston was quite shocked by the ferocity of the passion sparked by the jungle goo, as the bearded Cockney monsters shuffled into an understood embrace that did not even fake an interest outside of the intense clinch. Their giant cocks twitched against each other, we could both see this much. Winston and I walked straight past them smoking a very large reefer, as they chomped noisily at each other like famished peasants presented with a warm meal.
*
We both wore horned helmets, our faces bore the tattooed ink of the pentagram and inverted crucifixes that the crowd at the Waldorf Hotel had once seen me produce on dear Randle Dibdin’s face. We had steel breastplates, adorned with five-sided insignia and rams. We carried a large tankard that resembled a holy-ish grail. It contained human blood from the Shepherd’s Bush mortuary. We both wore Japanese warrior Oni masks, but Winston’s fake beard stuck out below his. I yelled spells as we burst in through the double doors on the raised ground floor. There were perhaps forty of them in there, in crimson gowns and facing an altar. They too wore masks. I recognised the limp and awful gait of Yeats at the chantry. I drew a pistol on him and ordered him, and everyone else, to remain still and silent.
‘We only wish to join your ritual. Do precisely as I say.’
I poured the blood from the grail all over myself from my helmet down, and screamed, ‘Man, unable to solve the Riddle of Existence, takes counsel of Saturn, extreme old age. Such answers as he can get is the one word “Despair”.
‘Is there more hope in the dignity and wisdom of Jupiter? No; for the noble senior lacks the vigour of Mars the warrior. Counsel is in vain without determination to carry it out.
‘Mars, thus invoked, is indeed capable of victory: but he has already lost the controlled wisdom of age; in a moment of conquest he wastes the fruits of it, in the arms of luxury.
‘It is through this weakness that the perfected man, the Sun, is of dual nature, and his evil twin slays him in his glory, and who shall mourn him but his Mother Nature, Venus, the lady of love and sorrow?
‘But even Venus owes all her charm to the swift messenger of the gods, Mercury, the joyous and ambiguous boy, whose tricks first scandalise, and then delight, Olympus.
‘But Mercury, too, is found wanting. Now in him alone is the secret cure for all the woe of the human race. Swift as ever, he passes, and gives place to the youngest of the gods, to the Virginal Moon.’
Several seemed to recognise my voice and shape, Yeats for sure.
For the more finely tuned noses, there might well have been a stench of pheromone and adrenalin from the arousal and the fear.
‘I wish only to take ritual with my beloved brethren one last time. This has haunted me for years.’
I moved to the altar with my pistol cocked, and the crowd stepped back from me. Winston drew a sword, and waved it with B-movie theatrics. I almost laughed. It was a mob of cowards who offered zero menace. I ordered them to take sacrament from my partner, as I stood on the altar and screamed some more hyperbole that they all seemed to think impressive.
O virgin in armour
Thine arrows unsling
In the brilliant resilient
First rays of the spring!
No Godhead could charm her,
But manhood awoke—
O fiery Valkyrie,
They stepped forward as obedient toddlers, and sipped from Winston’s cup a concentrated version of the jungle resin brew that took effect within five minutes. For that period, I forced them to sit on their arses and meditate, while telling them all silently, with a thudding and concentrated whisper of the power of the mind, and the vast potent of yoga. The last part of my diatribe informed them that their leader was an Irish fraud and an enemy of decency. When this festivity was over, they would note him as a pederast and a liar. Aleister Crowley and the murderous Bavarian, Hühnerbein, in spite of their dreadful costumes and histrionics, would be the True Masters.
I yelled vile Lower Danish invective that even made a drunken Winston blush, he told me later. The toffee was back. We gave them a huge dose and watched them get filthy in their own mess. Yeats’s treat was an altogether different ignominy. The smug poet was made to flick two fingers for several hours in the style of the English soldier, something that would hurt the Irishman until the day he perished.
Meanwhile, our driver, a friend of Orr’s with similar dimensions, went to the boozer on the corner where a crew of cameramen and lighting technicians, pals of Dibdin, waited. They soon lumped into 36 Blythe Road heavy cameras and audio recording equipment, courtesy of a pal of the great oaf in the Lumière Pictures offices in London.
We barricaded the doors and filmed until Monday morning. Masks were removed to reveal lords, ladies, royalty, members of parliament, surgeons, actors and brigadiers. The well-known duchess present outperformed all others in vileness and earned everyone’s respect, but that can be seen around the fifteen-hour mark on the fifty-seventh reel. It was a monochrome masterpiece with the subtlest hint of the toffee’s trademark aura of turquoise, lilac and death-white, as I now added accomplished and menacing film-maker to my curriculum vitae.
Several copies were made, and Hühnerbein was installed as the Chief Hermetic of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It was the least I could do. I told him I had made him a god in London society, and he, dizzied by it all, went along with it like a dutiful little wretch. I was in his finest graces, which was helpful given that I would need one vast favour from him before too long.
The film of that glorious summer solstice was called The Word of Sin; my debut, if you will. The title came from a suitable passage of mine in The Book of the Law.
The word of sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart!
There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse.
Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell.
The First Lord of the Admiralty was as aghast as he was thoroughly impressed. We left and discussed my travel to Italy. He would arrange suitable passage. I would miss him, for he was a fine companion in mischief. Our alliance, however, had barely begun. But together, we had won The Second Battle of Blythe Road.
The Chokmah cycle was over. The creative block I had temporarily beaten by Loch Ness with Frog was now considered by me to be a blip in the larger picture of the equinox of my spirit. According to my Thelemic calendar and more importantly MI-1, my Chokmah days now required the commencement of a new cycle and a new challenge, and the obligatory storm would soon hit us in the Atlantic shortly after having left for Italy.
England was now a changed and marginally more emetic land. She was about to pass the Dangerous Drug Act.68 What scandal. For heaven’s sake.
It was a new decade, and the Italian Fascist Party had been formed by some friend of Hühnerbein, a horrid cretin called Mussolini. It was time for mischief, sabotage and monkey business in the sun. Sicily was calling. Sicily.
Excerpt of a letter to Dibdin, 1920
I am just off to D___ to give those lectures – Labour, Religion, and Death – and thence by the Beard of the Prophet to a Free Country, I am trying to find an Abbey of Thelema for free men, a love cult with high ideals. I shall reorganise freemasonry and religion to replace the pomposities and banalities of their ragbag of rituals by a simple, lucid and coherent system.
64 How could it be? The fucker doesn’t exist.
65 Yes, more are to come.
66 David Railton’s well-measured concept in 1916 of The Unknown Warrior.
67 ‘May I help you, my friend?’
68 of 1920