IN HIS LITTLE office in Lorienburg, the castle Mary had visited in her girlhood before the war, sat the magnificent Otto von Kessen she had so lately dreamed of. He was rubbing his chin, which felt pleasingly rough to the touch after the papers he had been fingering all afternoon.
“Thursday November the Eighth” said the calendar on the wall. The cold had come early to Bavaria this autumn, with ten degrees of frost outside. But this office was in the thickness of the castle’s most ancient part: it was a tiny twilight room with a sealed double window, and it was like an oven. There were beads of sweat on Baron Otto’s forehead, and the hot air over the huge blue porcelain stove quivered visibly: it kept a loose strip of wallpaper on the wall in constant agitation like a pennon.
This monumental stove was too big: with its stack of wood it more than half filled the room and the space left only just housed the safe and the little kneehole desk Otto was sitting at. On the desk stood a huge ancient typewriter of British make, built like an ironclad and with two complete banks of keys (being pre-shiftlock), and that incubus also took up far too much space: the files and ledgers piled high beside it leaned, like Pisa. In such a cubbyhole there was no possible place to put the big wire wastepaper basket other than under the desk, yet that left a man nowhere to stretch his artificial leg in comfort and now the socket was chafing: a nerve in the mutilated hip had begun to throb neuralgically against the metal of the heavy revolver in Otto’s pocket.
Otto tried hard to concentrate on the sheets of accounts in front of him (he acted as factotum for his half-brother Walther these crippled days). These were the last and craziest weeks of the Great Inflation when a retired colonel’s whole year’s pension wouldn’t cobble him one pair of shoes: Walther’s checks however vast were still honored, but only because he was able to keep his bank account nowadays in terms of the corn he grew and a check drawn for trillions of marks would be debited as so many bushels according to the price that actual hour. This galloping calculus of the currency, this hourly acceleration in the rise of all prices and the fall of all real values, made endless difficulties for Otto; and now the shooting pains in the leg which wasn’t there were getting worse ...
“November the Eighth” said the calendar: almost five years to the day since the old world ended.
*
The sound of wind ... the bitter Munich wind which had swept down the wide spaces of the Ludwigstrasse that scudding winter day nearly five years ago, alternating with moments of unearthly calm: whipping the muffling rags of the uncertain crowd, wildly flapping the revolutionary red banners on the public buildings and then leaving them pendulous and despondent.
The sound of marching feet ... it was in one of the lulls of the wind that Otto had first heard that dead thudding sound, and a sudden stirring and a murmur had passed through the crowd for this could be none of Eisner’s “Red Guard” rabble, only trained Imperial troops marched with such absolute precision. But to Otto’s professional ear, keen as a musician’s, from the first there was something wrong in the sound of that marching. A hollowness and a deadness. No spring in the step—it sounded ... wrong: like the knocking of an engine, which is also a precise and regular sound yet presages a breakdown.
Then, through the front ranks of the crowd, a blur of field-gray and steel helmets as the first men began to pass. Many were without packs: some even without rifles: their uniforms were still caked with French mud. Someone in the crowd tried to cheer—for this was their menfolk’s homecoming, home from the war, home to be demobilized; but the solitary cheer ended in a fit of coughing and nobody took it up.
The men marched in close formation, in small parties that were token platoons, detachment after detachment, with wide spaces between, so that the dead sound of marching came in waves, rising and falling regularly, like sea-waves on shingle—only varied by the sullen rumbling of a baggage-wagon like boulders rolling.
A small child, pushed forward a little in front of the crowd, stood motionless, a bunch of wilting flowers held out in front of her in a chubby fist; but no soldier accepted it, no one even looked at her, not one smiled: they did not even seem to see the crowd. They marched like machines dreaming.
Even the officers—the first these five chaotic weeks to appear on the Munich streets in uniform—wore that empty basilisk look, marching with men they hardly seemed to see; but at this sight of officers there rose from the onlookers here and there a faint and almost disembodied growl ... someone behind Otto on his new crutches jostled him aside and pressed right forward out of the crowd, right past the child too: a big elderly woman with a massive bosom and a huge protruding stomach, upright as a ramrod from carrying all that weight in front: a flaunting hag with a lupus-ridden face and hanging dewlaps, wisps of gray hair under a railwayman’s peaked cap. Deliberately she spat on the ground just where a young major was about to tread. But he seemed to see nothing, not even that. For a moment it looked as if she was going to attack him; but then, as if appalled, she didn’t.
If there was any expression at all on any of these wooden military faces it was a potential hatred: a hatred that had found no real object yet to fasten on, but only because nothing in the somersaulted world around seemed real.
God! That German soldiers should ever have to look like that, marching through a German crowd!
*
Why had God chosen to do this thing to His German Army—the very salt of His else-unsavory earth?
Otto bundled his papers into the safe and locked it, for that obsessive dead sound of marching made work impossible: then hoisted himself to his feet, facing the window.
In England the ending of the war had come like waking from a bad dream: in defeated Germany, as the signal for deeper levels of nightmare. The symbols and the occasion had changed but in Germany it was still that same kind of compulsive dreaming. The ex-soldier, expelled from the crumbled Gemeinschaft of army life, had stepped out into a void. The old order had shattered: even money was rapidly ebbing away from between men, leaving them desperately incommunicado like men rendered voiceless by an intervening vacuum: millions, still heaped on top of each other in human cities yet forced to live separate, each like some solitary predatory beast.
Now in 1923 prices were already a billion times the pre-war figure and still rocketing. These were the days spoken of by Haggai the prophet, when “he that earneth wages, earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes”: by Monday a workman’s whole last-week’s wages might not pay his tramfare back to work. The smallest sum in any foreign currency was hoarded for it would buy almost anything; but nobody held German money five minutes. Even beer was an investment for presently you got more for the empty bottle than you had paid for it full.
The salaried and rentier classes were becoming submerged below the proletariat. Wages could rise (even if always too little and too late); but interest and pensions and the like, and even salaries, were fixed. Retired senior officials swept the streets. The government official still in office had to learn to temper his integrity to his necessities: had he tried to stay strictly honest a little too long, he would have died.
When the solid ground drops utterly away from under a man’s feet like that he is left in a state of free fall: he is in a bottomless pit—a hell. Moreover this was a hell where all were not equitably falling equally together. Some fell slower than others: even peasants could resort to barter (you went marketing with your poultry, not your purse); and many rich men had found means of hardly falling at all. There they were still, those Walther von Kessens and the like, tramping about solidly up there like Dantes in full view of all the anguished others who were falling. People who could buy things for marks and sell them for pounds or dollars even rose.
A hell where justice was not being done, and seen not being done.
Consumption has always to be paid for. Their war had been very conspicuous consumption but in Germany there had been virtually no war-taxation to pay for it on the nail. Thus there was nothing really mysterious about this present exhaustion into outer space of every last penn’orth of new value as fast as it was created: this was a kind of natural, belated capital-cum-income levy— though levied now not equitably by any human government but blindly, by Dis himself. Of this rationale however the sufferers had no inkling. They could not understand their suffering, and inexplicable suffering turns to hatred. But hatred cannot remain objectless: such hatred precipitates its own THEY, its own someone-to-be-hated. In a hell devoid of real ministering devils the damned invent them rather than accept that their only tormentors are themselves and soon these suffering people saw everywhere such “devils,” consciously tormenting them: Jews, Communists, Capitalists, Catholics, Cabbalists—even their own elected government, the “November Criminals.” Millions of horsepower of hatred had been generated, more hatred than the real situation could consume: inevitably it conjured its own Enemy out of thin air.
On the heels of that hatred came also the inevitable reacting love. All those egos violently dislodged from their old penumbral settings were now groping desperately in the face of that dark enveloping phantasmal THEY to establish a new “footing,” new tenable penumbral frontiers of the Self: inevitably they secreted millions of horsepower of love that the actual situation also couldn’t consume, and therefore precipitating its own fictive WE—its myths of Soil and Race, its Heroes, its kaleidoscope of Brotherhoods each grappling its own members with hoops of steel.
Its Freikorps, its communist cells: its Kampfbund, with all its component organisms: its Nazi movement.
After the official cease-fire in 1918 fighting still went on for a time in the lost Baltic provinces that the Armistice had raped. These freelance wars were a more amateur and even obscener carnage for they were an ill-armed and merciless Kilkenny-cats all-against-all, where fanatical bands of Germans in a state of bestial heroism fought with Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Bolsheviks, British—even Germans of the wrong kidney. It was one way of staving off this generation’s Nemesis of “Peace.”
Otto’s young nephew, Franz (the “ten-year-old tow-haired Franz” of Mary’s pre-war memories), had a best schoolfriend called Wolff; and in 1918 Wolff had enlisted in those wars when not quite sixteen.
There Wolff had vanished; but these were wars fought without benefit of war-office and published no casualty lists. Even now no one could say for certain that Wolff had been killed.
Wolff’s younger brother Lothar (for one) would never believe it. Before the débacle this Lothar had been sent to the same fashionable cadet-school as Wolff and Franz (their father the gaunt old Geheimrat Scheidemann was a retired colonial governor, an ex-colleague in Africa of Goering père). But come the inflation the Scheidemanns had not the same solid resources as the von Kessens, nor foreign investments like the Goerings. The old widower was too arthritic now to work: he let lodgings in his big flat near the “English Garden” in Munich, but there was not much left nowadays under any of those lofty ornate ceilings of his except hard-lying lodgers, several to a room.
Eighteen-year-old Lothar who was supposed to be studying law thought himself lucky to have landed a part-time desk-clerk job at the Bayrischer-Hof hotel in Munich where most of the clerks and waiters were sons of just such middle-class families as his, and were nowadays virtually their families’ sole support. At the Bayrischer-Hof, too, some at least of Lothar’s meals were provided. But no one could expect so good a job all to himself, and Lothar shared his turn-about with a fellow student. On his off-days he lived chiefly on memories of his hotel meals, dining in retrospect. One night when he was supperless like this he dreamed he had been sacked, and woke screaming: other times he dreamed of his brother Wolff—the wild one who had vanished—and woke in tears.
This morning at the hotel Lothar had had a windfall: a young Englishman who had spent the night there asked him to change an English ten-shilling note.
Lothar had changed it out of his own pocket: no one would be such a fool as to put good English money in the till. He buckled it safely inside his shirt. He had changed it into marks for Augustine quite fairly at the rate current that morning; but even by midday it was worth ten times as much.
So Augustine with his pocket full of marks caught the mainline train for Kammstadt where he had to change, and soon after his departure Lothar came off duty.
Habitually Lothar spent most of his time off duty at a certain gymnasium near the Southern Station. The neighborhood was a bit medical, but convenient for the Teresienwiese Sportsground with its running-tracks. He went there for physical training and to meet his friends as in Sparta of old; for the company he met here was indeed a noble sodality, the very flower of German youth; and Lothar was proud and humble to be accepted as one of them.
He found here that decent, modest, manly kind of idealism as necessary to youth everywhere as desert watersprings. “True,” thought Lothar, “we are come here to exercise only our brute bodies; but in fact how innocently do Body and Spirit walk hand in hand! How much more often the Eye of Horus” —their private name for that rare hawklike eye that pierces to the spiritual behind every material veil—“is found in the faces of simple athletes than of philosophers or priests!” Lothar himself was intelligent enough but had found it only a hindrance in this company; and he had the more need for friends now that his brother the noble Wolff was gone.
So Lothar with Augustine’s half-Bradbury still safe inside his shirt betook himself to his gymnasium; and at the first whiff of all the delicious manliness within its echoing portals he snorted like a horse. The abiding smell of men’s gymnasiums is a cold composite one, compounded of the sweet strawberry-smell of fresh male sweat, the reek of thumped leather and the dust trampled into the grain of the floor and confirmed there by the soapy mops of cleaners; but to eighteen-year-old Lothar this tang meant everything that the wind on the heath meant to Petulengro and he snorted at it now like a horse let out to spring grass.
Today Lothar began with a few loosening-exercises, starting with neck and shoulders, then the fingers, and ending with ankles and insteps. After that he hung from the wall-bars, raising and lowering his legs to strengthen the abdomen; for that muscular wall is of the greatest importance, since not only does it control the body’s hinge on which everything else depends but it also protects the solar plexus with its sacred emotions.
At the far end of this bare hall filled with the echoes of young men’s staccato voices the wall was painted a light green with a broad off-white band at the height of a tennis-net, for solo practice. Lothar was fond of tennis, but alas in May 1919 when von Epp was “cleansing” Munich someone had stood Reds against it so now the brickwork (particularly in and close to that white band) was too badly bullet-pocked for a tennis-ball ever again to return off it true. Thus if the arms and shoulders of some quill-driver like Lothar needed building up he had really nothing more interesting to turn to than dumb-bells and Indian clubs. Today moreover when he came down off the wall Lothar found the vaulting-horse crowded and also the parallel bars; so he went straight to the mat of the small pug-nosed world war sergeant who taught them all jiu-jitsu.
Jiu-jitsu (or Judo), being the art of using unbearable pain for the conquest of brute force, has an irresistible attraction for young imaginations, boys’ almost as much as girls’. Lothar was obsessed by it these days. Since it is the technique of unarmed self-defense the instructor taught you how to take your enemy unawares and break arm or leg before he can even begin his treacherous assault on you: how to fling spinning out of a window a man big enough to be your father, and so on. Lothar was slightly, almost girlishly built but he had a quite exceptional natural quickness of movement, and lately at political meetings or the like he had sometimes had occasion to use that natural quickness and these acquired skills outside and in earnest. At grips with some older and angrier and stronger but helplessly-fumbling human body he had then been astonished to find how deeply his aesthetic emotions could be stirred by his own impeccable performance. The aesthetic satisfaction of that culminating moment could be almost epileptically intense: Lothar was not uncultured, but surely no poem nor even music had ever offered him one tenth part of this.
O happy, happy youths—hungry and happy!
“Isn’t life wonderful!” thought Lothar, toweling his lean body in the changing-room that afternoon: “What a dispensation of Providence that we, the German Remnant, should have found each other in this predestined way and grappled ourselves so tight with our comradely love!” For with the secret enemies of Germany ever ceaselessly at work tension these last few weeks was everywhere mounting: surely any minute now the storm must break ...
But then suddenly Lothar remembered that this was a Thursday, and at that his heart leapt. At weekends most of this same sodality went out from Munich, drawn by the silence and the purity of the ancient German forests, to sing ancient German songs together as they marched down the rides between the echoing tree-trunks: to meet in secret deer-haunted glades to perfect their formation-drill: to practice in that pine-sweet air such quasi-military pastimes as “the naming of parts.”
Such times as Captain Goering himself was coming the whole band of brothers wore death’s-heads in their caps, and carried arms.
Schloss Lorienburg was built on a precipitous tree-clad mound in a bend of the stripling Danube. Under the small window of Otto’s office, in its deep embrasure, there was a nearly sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet or so into tree-tops, so that everything nearby was hidden from where he stood. All he could ever see from here was the far distance dimmed and diminished by its remoteness—today, a horizonless pattern of small dark patches that were forest a little darker than the canopy of cloud, and small patches a little lighter and yellower than the cloud that were rolling withered winter fields under a thin scumble of rime: the high Bavarian plateau, stretching away into purple immensities under a purplish slate sky.
Otto could not see the river for it was almost directly beneath him. He could not see the village, crowded between the river and the hill’s foot. He could not even see the valley, but he could hear—though faintly, through the two thicknesses of glass—the melancholy mooing of the little daily train as it wound its way down the branch line from Kammstadt; and that recalled him. The unknown English cousin was arriving on that train—cause of all his unease.
Bavarian Otto had served in Bavarian Crown-Prince Rupprecht’s Sixth Army during the war, being posted to the 16th Reserve Regiment of Foot. It was at Bapaume he had lost his leg, to an English mortar-shell. Nearly all the time it had been the English he was fighting—Ypres, Neuve-Chapelle, the Somme. So what was it going to feel like, meeting an Englishman again for the first time since the Western Front?
Relatives of course are in a special category: indubitable bonds transcending frontiers connect them. Not that this was a close kinship, it was merely the kind that old ladies like to keep alive by a lifetime of letter-writing. In fact, these Penry-Herberts were really the Arcos’ relatives rather than their own. It was some niece of someone in the Arco tribe who had married a Penry-Herbert, generations ago: but the Kessens and the Arcos were themselves related many times over, so it came to the same thing in the end—and even the remotest relationships ought to count.
Moreover, this was the younger brother of that little English Backfisch—he had forgotten her name, but she came to stay at Lorienburg the summer before the War, and rode in the bullock-race.
Somebody had told him, too, this boy was quite a promising young shot. His grandfather of course had been the world famous shot—even in his eighties still one of the finest in Europe: Otto’s own father had felt it a great honor when invited to Newton Llantony for the snipe ... or would that have been this boy’s great-grandfather? It was getting difficult to remember how quickly the generations pass. Indeed what Otto found hardest of all to envisage as he faced the wintry prospect beyond the window was that the little brother that girl had so prattled about in 1913 was now a grown man—the master of Newton Llantony—and yet had been too young to serve in the War.
Beneath his clipped correctness of manner Otto was a devout Catholic with tinges of mysticism.
Most Imperial German officers those days were avowed Christians. Perhaps they found in the code of their Officers’ Corps the closest earthly simulacrum possible (in their eyes) to the selfless ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, and in “Germany” an identical name under which to worship God. Be that as it may, Man, among all God’s vertebrate creatures is in fact the only species which wages war—man alone, in whom alone His image is reflected—and how could that awful monopoly mean nothing? War, surely, is a pale human emblem of that Absolute of Force; and human power, a portion of His attribute incarnate in us His earthly mirror-images: fighting, His refiner’s furnace to brighten the gold and burn away the material dross.
Otto’s present deep conviction that all this is the true teaching about war had come to him more slowly, perhaps, than to many; for he had seen the “dross” burn (some of it) with so very lurid a light. But in the end it had come even to him ineluctably, for it seemed to derive honestly from his own experience of himself and those around him in four years of war. For instance, at Bapaume when his leg was shattered three willing volunteers in turn had carried him from the front line, succeeding each other instantly as each was shot: a thing no man could easily forget, or ignore.
Because of his pride in his calling Otto was personally humble but he was not one whose convictions once formed were easily shaken or complicated. He had not argued all this out with himself step by step but had reached much the same frame of mind as if he had: he believed that for every man war is the essential means of Grace.
Whatever a cripple could do, working secretly, towards the rebuilding of the proscribed German Army, Otto was doing. But hostilities were suspended now, Germany so shattered and the civil crowd so rotten that it might be many years before war could be resumed; and suddenly he was moved by a deep pity for this young English cousin such as he felt for his own German nephew Franz. He must needs pity that whole generation everywhere whose loss it was that the last war had ended just too soon: for the next might come too late.
Presently one-legged Otto left his office and made his way with difficulty (the stone treads being sloping and uneven) down the stairs. Reaching the courtyard, he caught sight of his brother Walther who was crossing it towards the Great Gate. In spite of Walther’s abnormal size and massive strength he walked lightly and springily like a cat; it was all on the ball of the foot, his was a hunter’s gait rather than a soldier’s ...
It was typical of Walther’s courtesy (Otto thought with affection) to feel he must go to the station himself to meet even so young a guest.
Meanwhile in the crowded one-class branch-line train from Kammstadt Augustine was agog with interest. These peaceful fenceless fields! These forests, that looked cared-for as chrysanthemums—so utterly unlike wild natural English woods! These pretty pastel-colored villages with pantile roofs, onion-top churches ... all this, rolling past the half-frosted windows—all this was Germany! Moreover these friendly people in the compartment with him ... they looked almost ordinarily human but were they not in fact all “Germans”—even the quite small children?
The old peasant opposite Augustine had the kind of belly which made him sit with knees wide apart, and he was smoking a decorative hooked pipe which smelled like fusty hay. His face was brimming over with curiosity: earlier he had tried to talk to Augustine but Augustine’s Swiss-taught school German could alas make little of this slurry dialect even with the words tapped out for him on his knee. The old man’s wife, too, had a kindly wrinkled face with intensely wild humorous eyes ...
How happily Augustine could spend the rest of his days among such simple, friendly people! He had no feeling here of being in enemy country. But for want of a better vehicle he could only project his love on a broad and beaming smile.
The little train, raised high on trestles above a stretch of frozen flood, hooted a warning to itself as it neared a bend. With a warm forefinger Augustine melted himself a further peephole in the window-ice.
From under the voluminous black skirts of the old peasant-woman opposite there came the faint, drugged crooning of a half-suffocated hen. A moment later the woman’s whole nether person began to heave with unseen poultry. She leaned forward and slapped at her skirts violently to reduce them to silence and stillness, but at that the vocal hen only woke up completely and answered the more indignantly; and then others began to join in. She glanced anxiously towards the Inspector—but luckily his back was turned ...
What lovely people! Augustine began to laugh out loud, whereon the old woman’s eyes flashed back at him with pleasure and merriment.
Last night Augustine’s express from the frontier had reached Munich after dark: that was how it happened that his first night on German soil had been spent at the old Bayrischer-Hof hotel. Since then it has been rebuilt, but Augustine had found it a majestic yet rather worn and despondent hostelry those days. As he had stood signing himself in that evening it had struck him that all the clerks and waiters there seemed distraits—as if they had something rather more important on their minds than running hotels. This surprised and rather charmed him: he sympathised with them, for—coming of a class which practically never used hotels—Augustine disliked and despised them all. No wonder the characteristic stale hotel-foyer smells here seemed to irk their clean young noses: these diluted, doctored alcohols, the coffee-sodden cigar-ends: the almost incessant rich eating which must go on somewhere just upwind of this foyer where he stood so that even its portières smelt permanently of food; and the nearer, transient smells of brand-new pigskin suitcases and dead fur, of rich Jews, of indigestion and peppermint, of perfumes unsuccessfully overlaid on careless womanhood.
Later on it had greatly surprised this novice traveller, too, to find on his machine-carved bed a huge eiderdown in a white cotton cover but no ordinary top-sheet or blanket to tuck round him. And it had surprised him yet further to find, half-hidden by the washstand, such mysterious scribbles on the bedroom wall ... for there, among mere lists of names, he thought he had made out this:
A.D. 1919 February 27
With six others, innocent hostages ...
(then something
undecipherable, and then:)
ADELIE! FAREWELL!!!
Authentic dungeon-scribbles—in a hotel bedroom?—But then Augustine had taken more particular notice of the date. “1919?” Since the war? “1919?”—Why, that was surely the Golden Age when the young poet Ernst Toller and his friends had ruled Munich! The thing was impossible.
The message was scrawled in a difficult Gothic hand ... he must have read it wrong—or else it was a hoax.
In the morning Augustine had perforce to pay his bill with English money. He had only tendered a ten-shilling note but the German change he was given appeared to be noughted in billions! What a joke! That pleasant-looking, dark-eyed young desk-clerk with the speed and dexterity almost of a conjurer had whipped billions loose out of his pocket, flipping them like postage-stamps ...“Lothar Scheidemann” the desk-card named him; and the name as well as the face somehow fixed itself in Augustine’s memory.
Augustine would have liked to talk to him, for he looked certainly educated; but on a second glance decided—N-n-no: perhaps rather too formal and detached a chap for any such casual approach.
Now, in the train, Augustine took out his new German money to count those incredible noughts yet once more. It was quite true: today he was indeed a billionaire! It made his head swim a little. But then through his peephole in the frosted window he sighted a familiar flight of mallard: these at least were in normal non-astronomical numbers even in Germany, and his brow cleared. Involuntarily he crooked his trigger-finger, and smiled ...
“Lothar Scheidemann, Lothar Scheid ...” the train wheels repeated; and Augustine’s smile faded. For there had been something in the eyes of that attractive young clerk he couldn’t quite get out of his mind. Then suddenly the train passed off its trestles onto solid earth again with a changed sound.
At Lorienburg station the engine of Augustine’s train halted on the very brink of the swift unfrozen Danube and stood there hissing. Augustine climbed happily down and followed the other passengers across the tracks.
On the low station “platform”—so low it hardly deserved the name of one—a tall truculent young Jew was chaffing with a group of farmers, gesticulating with the duck he held by its fettered feet. These farmers, like the ones on the train, all seemed to wear a kind of civilian uniform: thick gray cloth trimmed with green, and huge fur collars. One was affectionately nursing a hairy piglet in his arms: another, a murmuring accordion.
But now a burly, almost gigantic figure was making a beeline for Augustine. His little corded and feathered “Tyrolean” hat bobbed high above the crowd. He wore the same kind of uniform the peasants wore but newer and better cut: strong as it looked—that acreage of heavy close-woven cloth—the muscles of his massive shoulders seemed almost bursting it. He walked with the gait of someone who likes to be out-of-doors walking all of every day ...
Behind him followed a small dark man with a monkey face, some sort of servant who seized Augustine’s luggage. So this must be Cousin Walther—the Freiherr von Kessen come in person to meet his guest!
It must be ... and yet it surprised Augustine to find his host wearing such obviously German clothes. Somehow he hadn’t thought of the Kessens as being Germans, the way those peasants were. Surely gentlemen were much the same everywhere: a sort of little international nation, based more or less on the English model. However, he soon found that the Baron talked excellent informal upper-class English, except that his slang was ten years out of date.
Walther shook Augustine warmly by the hand, then captured his arm and whisked him through the tidy village, inquiring the while after English relations most of whom neither of them had ever met and at the same time answering jovially the soft, respectful greetings on every hand: “Grüss Gott, Herr Baron ...”
“Grüss Gott, Zusammen!”
“ ’ss Gott z’sammen!” It sounded almost like “Scotch salmon!” the abbreviated way this Bavarian baron said it, Augustine thought—and smiled. How spick-and-span everything was here, he noticed. The butcher’s window did not look very well stocked by English standards, but it was orderly as a shrine: in comparison, what slatterns the English were!
Augustine wished his boisterous cousin would give him time to look about him at all these wonders—he was almost having to trot. Indeed it was a mystery how the man managed to keep his own footing so securely on this icy ground, for rounding a sudden corner in the village by a chemist’s Augustine himself skidded altogether and cannoned into an old Jew peddling laces, so that both of them nearly fell. Just then, too, descending the side-street and missing the pair of them by a hair’s-breadth, something shot by like an arrow. This was a youth on skis. The skis—to their detriment—rattled and sparked, almost uncontrollable on the iron-hard surface (for there was no proper snow at all), and it was only by a miracle of sheer balance that the skier managed to swerve just clear of an ox-cart in the middle of the cross-roads. Then he shot away down a steep bye-road towards the frozen water-meadows.
Walther was just beginning to explain “Ahah! The eldest of my young devils, Fr ...” when something else followed, but this time something more like a low ricochetting cannon-ball than like an arrow. It was a small toboggan with two little girls on it rounded out to packages with extra clothing, the two pairs of pigtails standing straight out behind them with the acceleration of their transit. They too just managed to skid past the slowmoving ox-cart. But they failed to make the counterswerve: the toboggan hit a pile of gravel icebound into concrete and somersaulted.
The two children rose into the air and landed on their heads. The wonder was they weren’t clean stunned, or even killed. But no—for they got up; though slowly, dazed. They were obviously quite a lot hurt and Augustine’s tender heart went out to them. The knees of both were wavering under them. Then one began lifting her fist uncertainly towards her eyes ... but at that Walther in a brutal voice shouted something mocking, and instantly both stiffened.
They hadn’t seen their father was there watching them till then; but now they didn’t even stop to rub their bruises. They managed to right their toboggan—giddily, though without quite toppling over again—and dragged it away (though still moving as if half-drunk) after their brother and out of sight.
“Little milk-sops: they make me ashamed,” said Walther; but he sounded quite proud and pleased, as if expecting to be contradicted.
Augustine said nothing: he was too deeply shocked. He had omitted to take stock of his cousin’s face when they first met and now needed all his eyes for the going; but from that voice, that behavior, that massive bulk, he assumed now it must be very like an ogre’s, or some gigantic stony troll’s.
That icy sunk lane leading up from the village, the lane the skis and the toboggans had just traversed, was very steep; but Walther took it still at the same breathless speed. Augustine began to suspect his cousin (who must have been more than twice his age) of trying to walk him off his legs; but Augustine had got his second wind now and could hold his own.
Ultimately the castle on its mound was approached from the high ground behind it along a raised causeway lined with linden-trees, ending in a wooden bridge. Just where you reached this bridge there stood on one side of the way a little closed summer beerhouse shanty—rather decrepit, and with a deserted skittle-alley full of dead leaves. But on the other side stood a life-size crucifix, skillfully carved and realistically painted; and this crucifix looked as if it was brand new—its newness astonished Augustine more than anything else he had seen here yet.
The heavy ironbound gates in the massive gatehouse stood open. Times were quieter now and they were only closed at sunset, Walther explained: all the same, some of the iron sheathing on them also looked brand new and this was surely almost as odd an anachronism as the new crucifix. In the porter’s cubbyhole a lynx-eyed old woman sat permanently knitting. She rose and curtseyed to them, but her dropped hands did not even cease their knitting while she curtseyed.
The first court of the castle they now entered had long byres built against its high crenellated walls and from the nearest of them there came a gentle lowing, the slow clank of headchains. The cobbled yard itself was as clean as a drawing-room floor, the dung stacked tidily in masonry tanks that steamed in the frosty air: “Still, what a queer approach to one’s front door!” thought Augustine. He was used of course to lawns and wide carriage-sweeps leading to gentlemen’s houses: to rhododendrons and begonia-beds, with the facts of country life tucked well out of sight.
In the second court there did seem to be some attempt at a garden but now all the beds were covered with spruce-boughs against the frost ... but surely it could never get much sun in here even in summer, for nowhere was the court surrounded by less than fifty-foot lowering walls ...
“Herunter!” Walther suddenly bellowed against Augustine’s ear: “The little imps of Satan!—Rudi! Heinz!”
Augustine looked up. High overhead against the sky, almost like tight-rope performers there on the narrow unprotected cat-walk of the battlemented wall which formed the castle enceinte, two six-year-old boys were riding little green bicycles. At their father’s shout they wobbled wildly, and Augustine gasped; but somehow they dismounted safely. Walther called out again in rapid German and they scuttled into a turret doorway.
Then Walther turned to Augustine: “That is something forbidden. They shall be punished.” The bull-like voice sounded calm; but the iron hand which still gripped Augustine’s upper arm was actually trembling; and the face ... surprisingly, Walther proved to have just an ordinary, anxious, human parent’s face—not at all a stony troll’s. The features were small and fine and by no means commanding. The brows beetled a bit but the brown eyes under them peeped down at Augustine almost timidly: “Don’t you agree? I mean, would not even an English father also forbid?” When Augustine non-plussed said nothing he added rapidly: “Not that I’m a fusspot—but if their mother knew ...”
The main house itself now towered in front of them. There were four stories of stuccoed stone and then four more of steep pantiled roof with rows of dormers in it all boarded up. On the topmost roofridge was fixed a wagon-wheel, supporting a tattered old stork’s nest. Augustine took this all in at a glance, for today he was still absorbing everything with the unnaturally observant eye of first arrival somewhere totally strange: not till tomorrow would he even begin to notice less.
Now Walther opened a wicket in an imposing, church-size door (remarking lugubriously: “Twins! It is fated that they will die together!”) and Augustine found himself ushered into a darkling, stone-vaulted space. This seemed to be a kind of above-ground cellarage or crypt, for it had no windows and immensely stout squat pillars upheld the weight of the castle overhead. Between these in the halfdark were parked a Victoria and a wagonette, together with two horse-sleighs and various other vehicles. Right at the back there was a pre-war vintage Benz—as cobwebby as a bin of port, and evidently long out of use.
Again, what a curious front-entrance for a gentleman’s house! But it was indeed from here, apparently, that the main staircase led.
This narrow, twisting stairway too proved to be merely massive and defensible between its whitewashed stone walls: the stairs themselves were treaded with solid tree-trunks roughly squared with the adze.
At the first floor a heavy, wormy door opened straight off these stairs. It offered none of the flattering perspectives for entrances and exits social architects use—yet how magnificent the hall that hulking door opened into! Augustine caught his breath, for the sight was so unexpected. Not only was this hall quite vast in size: its length stretched nearly the whole width of the house: its proportions seemed to Augustine quite perfect—a most civilized room!
The floor was flagged with squares of some pale yellowish stone so shiny they reflected the chalky blues and faded crimsons of the primitive unvarnished portraits hung on the white walls—reflected even the dove-grey that the many doors opening off it were painted, and their delicate fillets picked out in gold leaf. Some of these stone floor-tiles were cracked and loose, clinking under them as they walked ...
“Adèle!” roared Walther so that the painted rafters echoed: “Here is our guest and cousin!”
Walther flung open the double doors at the far end of the hall, and stood aside in the outrush of hot air for Augustine to pass. A rather faded lady in her forties rose from an escritoire. She had very bright blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a slightly pursed mouth which only just knew how to smile; but in general her pale sandy face seemed to Augustine of a rather unmemorable kind. She thrust her hand firmly into Augustine’s, English fashion; for she guessed he would be embarrassed if he thought he ought to kiss it.
Once the greetings were over, and the introductions (for there was a girl there too, and some middle-aged brother of Cousin Walther’s who seemed to be lame), Augustine began looking about him again. It seemed to him sadly incongruous with the room’s simple hexagonal shape and the delicate Adamsy traceries of its high coved ceiling that the place should be quite so crowded with furniture and knicknackery.
The walls were thick with pictures: amateur watercolors, mostly, and photographs. Most of these photographs were inclined to be old and faded; but there was one big enlargement in a bright gilt frame surmounted by a big gilt crown and this frame looked new, while the photograph itself looked also pretty recent—at any rate post-war. It showed an outdoor group centered on a rather dishevelled old gentleman in baggy trousers, with a grey beard and steel spectacles ... certainly not the Kaiser, even in retirement; and yet the frame looked unequivocally regal ... the background was some mammoth forest picnic: there were some forty or fifty children in their Sunday best—but also a bit dishevelled, the thing must have ended in a most un-regal romp!
In a firm but old man’s hand it was signed: “Ludwig.” But of course—“Ludwig of Bavaria!” Thinking of “Germany” one tended to forget that Bavaria had remained a sovereign state-within-a-state, with her own king (down to the revolution five years ago), and her own government and even army. Moreover Augustine remembered hearing that this peaceable-looking old gentleman had carried to his recent grave a Prussian bullet in his body: a bullet from the war of ’66, before there was any “Germany”—a war when Prussia and Bavaria had been two sovereign countries fighting on opposite sides. To an Englishman, used to long perspectives and slow changes, this was indeed History telescoped: as if King George V had been wounded at Bannockburn.
“Germany”: that formidable empire which had lately so shaken the whole world—its entire lifetime then had lasted less than a normal man’s, a bare forty-eight years from its cradle to its present grave! Even the still adolescent U.S.A. was three times “Germany’s” age. Everything here confused one’s sense of time! There was something Victorian about Augustine’s hostess, Cousin Adèle, with her lace and her chatelaine; but equally something of an earlier, sterner century too ...
There was something at least pre-war even about the young girl standing behind her. That cold and serious white face, with its very large gray thoughtful eyes. The carefully-brushed straight fair hair reaching nearly to her waist, tied back in a bunch with a big black bow behind her neck. The long straight skirt with its shiny black belt, the white blouse with its high starched collar ...
But he mustn’t stare! Augustine lowered his gaze deliberately; and behold, curled on the sofa in an attitude of sleep but with his bright eyes wide open, lay a fox.
They dined that night off wild-boar steak, grilled (it tasted more like young beef than any kind of pork), with a cream sauce and cranberry jam. There was spaghetti, and a smoky-flavored cheese. They drank a tawny Tyrolean wine that was light on the palate but powerful in action. Augustine found it all delicious: there wasn’t much “starving Germany” here, he thought.
Franz (the young skier) had shot the boar, he learned, marauding in their forests—though Heaven knows where it had come from, for they were supposed to be extinct hereabouts. Baron Franz—Lothar’s former schoolfellow, Mary’s “ten-year-old, tow-haired little Franz”—was now a lad of twenty. He was very fair, and smaller than his father but with all his father’s energy of movement. His manner towards Augustine was perhaps a little over-formal and polite as coming from one young man to another, but in repose his face wore permanently a slightly contemptuous expression. This the father’s face totally lacked and it made Augustine’s hackles rise a little in the face of somebody quite so young, quite so inexperienced in the world as this Franz—his own junior by three years at least.
The only other male person present was that rather dim ex-officer with a game leg, Walther’s brother. He swallowed his food quickly, then shook hands all round murmuring something about “work to do” and vanished. Augustine ticketed him “Cheltenham” and thought no more about him; thus he missed the quick glance of intelligence that uncle and nephew exchanged, Franz’s almost imperceptible shrug and shake of the head.
At dinner the conversation was almost entirely a monologue by Walther. The mother and that eldest daughter (the younger children were in bed, presumably) hardly spoke at all. Augustine had failed to catch the girl’s name on introduction and no one had addressed her by it since, so he didn’t know what name to think of her by; but he found himself peeping at her more and more. It never entered his head to think her “beautiful” but her face had a serenity which promised interesting depths. Her eyes hardly roamed at all: he never saw her glance even once his way; but already he surmised she might be going to prove rather more sympathique than that cocky brother, once she opened out a little.
She looked always as if she were just going to speak: her curving upper-lip was always slightly lifted and indeed once he saw her lips actually begin to move; but it proved to be only a silent conversation, with herself or perhaps some absent friend. In fact, she “wasn’t there”: she seemed to have shut her ears entirely to what was going on around her. Perhaps she had heard them all before too often, these stories her father was interminably telling?
Walther had begun his harangue with the soup, asking Augustine how many seats the Socialists held in the new British parliament elected last winter. From stopping his ears inadequately when at Mellton Augustine had a vague idea the Socialists had temporarily outstripped the Liberals who had suckled them, but that was the most he knew. He tried to convey without downright rudeness that he neither knew nor cared; such things were none of his business.
Walther looked incredulous. “Ah!” he said earnestly: “Their leader, that Macdonald: he’s a jail-bird, isn’t he? How can you trust him? England ought to take warning by what happened here!”
And so the tale began.
Five years ago, on the night of November 7th, 1918—almost the actual eve of the war’s ending—Walther and some fellow-members of the Bavarian parliament had met in the blacked-out Park Hotel. Bavaria had reluctantly to make certain constitutional changes (such as instituting the formal responsibility of the royal ministry to parliament) as a gesture to the American, Wilson: so these legislators had met to discuss the next day’s necessary measures. Most of the Center Party deputies were there, except those away with the army or stricken by ’flu.
Another problem they had discussed was the coming demobilisation. But everything was already taped, it seemed: the plans were ready and the men would go straight into jobs, so his friend Heinrich von Aretin assured the company. Industry would need all the labor it could get, in the switch to peace-production. But then someone (said Walther) casually mentioned a socialist mass-meeting happening out on the Teresienwiese Sportsground that very hour ... Eisner, the demagogue from Berlin, was addressing them ... and Gansdorfer, the blind farmer ...“Hetzpropaganda.” But it seemed that too was taped: the police were confident, and Auer (one of the Socialists’ own leaders) was assuring everybody there’d be no sort of rumpus. Indeed only Aretin had seemed even faintly anxious: “How little even we knew then of the unscrupulous Socialist mentality!” said Walther pointedly. “You are aware what happened, of course?”
“What?” asked Augustine, half polite, half curious. To Augustine, who elected to ignore public events anyway, the events of 1918 already seemed centuries ago—lost in the mists of time; but even now Walther could hardly pronounce Eisner’s name in a normal voice—the rabblerousing animal Eisner, from Berlin, with his straggling beard and floppy black hat like a seedy professor of pianoforte ... marching into the city that night with lorry-loads of all the hooligans of Munich at his heels! It was red revolution, of course ...
“They tore off my uniform in the Odeonsplatz,” said Walther. “I was lucky to get home safely in borrowed mufti, I can tell you! And the dear old King chased from his bed: Bavaria is to be a republic, forsooth, after a thousand years of Wittelsbach rule! And Ei ... that Kurt Ei ... Ei ... Eisner, with a gang of Galician Jews like himself for his cabinet—lunatics, lamp-lighters, jail-birds, Judases ...”
Having reached this surprising (but in fact literally truthful) peroration Walther had to pause for the moment for breath and for his blood to cool; and Franz at once slipped into the breach, speaking suavely and rapidly, hoping to head him off: “The careful demobilisation-plans—torn up, of course. No one any more did what he was told. Even years afterwards ... Papa, do you remember how we found a gang of deserters still living in the forest years afterwards, when we were out with the Bristows? you were shooting particularly well that day,” he added cunningly.
As the conversation seemed now to be taking a turn towards sport Augustine pricked up his ears. But it all sounded very un-English. Indeed he soon jumped to the conclusion that here in Germany people shot wild-boar, roe-deer, foxes and wandering cats indiscriminately, from platforms built high among the trees like an Indian tiger-shoot.
Augustine in turn tried to describe the hides which at home he used to dig in the half-frozen tidelands: waterlogged mudholes where he was happy to crouch for hours waiting for the honking of the wild geese in the dawning half-light.
But the dinner-table talk of gentlemen ought to be on serious subjects, not sport! Walther was itching to get back to politics. The bolshevik danger was after all world-wide and Augustine’s indifference truly alarming.
A few polite inquiries about Augustine’s journey soon gave Walther his cue, for he learned that Augustine had spent last night at the Bayrischer-Hof. “I hope,” said Walther, “they made you more comfortable than they made me, the last time I was a guest there?” An almost audible sigh and a shifting in their chairs went round the table. Franz’s diversion had failed! Papa was off again. “That of course was February 1919—the time when Toni had just shot the animal Eisner; whereupon the Red Guards ...”
“You ought to meet our joint eminent kinsman, Count Toni Arco-Valley,” Franz told Augustine, desperately. “He’s been in prison of course for the last four years or more, but I’m sure Papa could get you a pass ...”
“The Red Guards arrested me,” Walther swept on, frowning at Franz. “They dragged me—your Bayrischer-Hof Hotel was their headquarters in those days, four years and nine months ago, and I was locked up there with the others: six of us, innocent hostages. They told us we should all be slaughtered at Eisner’s funeral—a human sacrifice on their hero’s pyre!”
“Prison, did you say?” Augustine asked Franz: “The chap who actually shot Thingummy only prison? How didn’t he get killed?”
“Toni was killed,” Walther said coldly, resenting the interruptions more and more: “Or so they thought: five bullets instantly in his neck and mouth, kicked halfacross the street ... but to return to myself in the Bayrischer-Hof ...”
But Cousin Adèle was clearing her throat rather like a clock that is going to strike, and now she spoke for the first time: “Toni counted the bullets as they hit him,” she said, speaking English slowly and distinctly but without expression, her eyes on Augustine: “They were using his own revolver, and he tried to remember how many shots were left in it.”
“In the Bayrischer-Hof ...”
“One bullet knocked over a wisdom-tooth,” Adèle persisted. “His throat was full of blood. He was choking, and they were kicking; but he dared not move because if they knew he was not yet dead they would have tore him in pieces and suddenly he very much wanted to live.” She was crumbling a piece of bread nervously as she went on: “They dragged him into the courtyard of the Ministerium and there left him as dead; but not before he heard someone say that Eisner was dead first, and he rejoice. After a time a bandage was put round his neck but presently again someone tore it off.”
“Then the police picked him up,” said Walther resignedly, “and Sauerbruch, the great throat-surgeon ... but that Toni of all people should have done it! A boy of twenty nobody had ever looked at twice!”
Instantly memories of his own twentyishness at Oxford flashed across Augustine’s mind and he recalled touchy old Asquith’s visit to the Union. Shooting politicians! In England it was inconceivable. “Was it a conspiracy?” he asked: “Was he detailed for the job?”
“No conspiracy—just Toni,” said Adèle, her brow puckered.
“There were people he told,” said Walther, “but they never dreamt of talking him seriously.”
“Such as, he told the maid in his flat to run a specially hot bath because he was going to kill Eisner that morning,” said Adèle. “Then, as he waited in the street for Eisner to pass, a friend stopped and asked him to dinner. ‘Sorry!’ say Toni, ‘I shall be engaged—I’m going to shoot Eisner.’ His friend looked only a little startled.”
“Eisner left the ministry on his way to parliament and passed Toni quite slowly, with a crowd following him,” said Walther. “I understand that Toni carried a map to hide his revolver.”
“Eisner’s staff were close all round that awful man!” said Adèle. Then her voice went suddenly gruff: “Toni kept saying to himself ‘I must be brave, I must not shoot any innocent man—only Eisner!’ Then at two meters’ range he shot him; and a second later comes the beginning of to be shot himself.”
To end the long ensuing pause Augustine asked Walther how he had escaped “being slaughtered on Eisner’s pyre.” He was told the police had somehow got hold of the hostages and transferred them to Stadelheim Jail: “There we had quite a welcome—‘Prosit, Servus!’ And lanky Poehner—later he was Chief Commissioner of Police for Munich, but then he was the prison governor at Stadelheim and he did his best for us, every privilege. As well as myself there was General Fasbender, Fritz Pappenheim, Lehmann the publisher, Buttman, Bissing and both the Aretins—all the élite of Munich! We had most interesting talks. It was far worse for our poor wives, without news except rumors that we’d been shot already.” The look of love and reverence with which he now glanced at Adèle astonished Augustine on so middle-aged a face: “Ah, she was the heroine then!—My Adelie, my Sunshine!”
At that the expression on Adèle’s faded sandy features scarcely altered but a faint flush mounted half way up her neck. Even Walther had never known the lengths she went to, that awful time, less than five years ago. The twins had been babies then, scarcely weaned ... and all—for what?
But already Walther had begun to laugh: “Ha! Heini Aretin—that was very funny! Somehow his wife got news of his danger sent to Haidenburg—smuggled a note to the village priest in a prayerbook. Whereon the Haidenburg innkeeper comes to Munich, barges his way with his big shoulders into the so-called ‘Central Council,’ bangs his fist on the minister’s desk and says he can’t have his brewer shot or where’s he to get his beer?—Heini owns the Allersbach brewery, you know. After that they decided to let us go. They saw that anyhow Poehner would never let them kill us.”
Walther was drinking the Tyrolean wine copiously (it came from his last bin, broached in Augustine’s honor) and his neck had begun to sweat.
Augustine’s own head was getting a little dizzy. All this—it was straight from the horse’s mouth indubitably, but it sounded so unreal! The sort of thing which happened to people in “history,” not people today, not real people. Anyway it was surely over now ... well—if only those crazy vindictive Frenchmen in the Ruhr ...
Meanwhile Walther rambled on with great seriousness and much emphasis. Eisner had seized power in November 1918: but his “Red Guards” (Walther related) were sailors from the Kiel mutiny, Russian ex-prisoners and such-like riff-raff: their maraudings hardly endeared Eisner to the peasants, and he had little following outside Munich itself and industrial towns like Augsburg. Thus, after a few months of office, in the January Bavarian elections he had only won three seats! But he intended to cling to power. For as long as the could he prevented the new parliament from meeting; and then, for its opening session, prepared a second coup-d’état: he packed the public gallery with his armed communists. He was on his way to that very session when he was killed.
Proceedings began—but where was Eisner? Then the news of his death reached the Chamber. Instantly a fusillade from the gunmen planted in the gallery: two members killed outright, Auer wounded, the blind Gansdorfer escaping down a drainpipe.
The Munich mob went mad. Walther’s own arrest ... the Red Reign of Terror: March, April ...
Then May Day 1919 at last, the blessed Day of Liberation! At long last General von Epp’s valiant forces from outside advanced on Munich to free it from Bolshevism. At that point Walther turned a beaming gaze on his son: “Our brave young Franz here ...” But Franz at once put on so glittering a frown that his father looked non-plussed, and began to mumble: “Von Epp enters the city ... the dear white-and-blue flag again! Bavaria a republic still, alas—but decent people in control: von Kahr, Premier ...”
Just then Augustine’s brain having long stopped listening gave an unexpected and uncomfortable lurch. He pushed his wine glass resolutely from him: this wine was too potent, the people across the table were beginning to slide past like a procession starting off. So he chose that passing girl opposite for an experiment: fixed his eyes resolutely on her and with a big effort willed her to a halt.
That crystal and yet unfathomable face of hers was like a still pool ... Augustine found himself acutely wishing his eyes could pierce its baffling surface, could discern the silent thoughts that must all this while be gliding to and fro in the lucid maiden mind beneath, like little fish ... but no, not the flick of a tail could he descry tonight, not a freckled flank, not a fin!
Girls’ minds ... Of course, when they know you’re watching they’ll deliberately send all the little tiddlers in them dimpling to the surface, start fretted rings of ripples which meet and cross and render everything opaque! But in unsuspecting tranquillity like this they’re transparent ... or so at least they should be.
Girls’ clear minds ... In tranquillity like this how lovely they often are to watch! First, a whitish motion, deep in the bottom-darkness: an irised shadow on the shining gravel ... then suddenly, poised beautiful and unwitting in the lens-clear medium, that whole dappled finny back of some big thought—as blue as lead ...
But this girl’s mind? Here surely it must be that the thoughts swum altogether too deep: lurking in the darkness of some unnatural shadow, perhaps, hiding in some deep pit.
While Walther’s mind? Hoo-hoo! Just old dry bones shaken endlessly under one’s nose in a worn-out basket that cried “Look! Look!”
Augustine just managed not to hiccup—but indubitably he was now more than a little drunk.
Augustine was startled by a sudden silence. Walther’s voice had tailed off and stopped. Walther was looking from face to face. That young Englishman with so much to learn—conceited flushed young fool! Obviously his attention had wandered. But then Walther looked at his own wife as well, his two children: their attitudes also were politely attentive and their faces blank.
Walther so much loved them! He had learned at his own painful costs how the world wagged—and Gott in Himmel wasn’t it the very world they too would have to live in? Yet whenever he tried to tell them they shut themselves in their shells like this and stopped their ears. Their own dear papa had suffered these perils and done these deeds—not some stranger ... Ah, if only he had been born a poet with winged words hooded on his wrist ready for the slipping! But Walther had been born instead proud heir to the long line of Knights of Lorienburg—so damn all snivelling low-born poets!
Walther took a deep breath and tried again: “The Red rabble that faced von Epp that spring, four-and-a-half years ago—just imagine! It appointed for itself a self-styled poet in command, the Jewish scribbler Toller.”
“Toller ...” In all Walther’s rigmarole that name had come to Augustine as the first tinkle of the Germany of his supposings, the “real” Germany he had come to see: the Germany of Toller, Georg Kaiser, Thomas Mann, Werfel, Einstein, the world-famous architect Mendelssohn. Here at last, perhaps, was the moment for knowledgeable comment: “Ernst Toller?” said the rather fuddled Augustine helpfully: “Surely one of the greatest German dramatists of all time!—A feather,” he added acutely, “in Munich’s crown.”
There was a stilly pause. Franz’s gasp was audible, while Walther looked vastly startled—as if Augustine had suddenly used improper language in mixed company. “Indeed? I have not had the privilege of reading the young scoundrel’s works,” he said presently with cold distaste.
Augustine had not read them either: he was only repeating Oxford tattle, where it was known that Romain Rolland had praised them, and Bjorn Bjornsen.
Augustine hadn’t of course had any intention of giving offense. But now Adèle rose. The girl rose too: she passed quickly round the table, trailing her finger negligently along the edge: then she held and kissed her father’s frowning forehead and vanished from the room behind her mother.
On that, Augustine found himself actually wondering for one brief moment what impression he might be making on them.—Lord, he supposed he had better watch his step ... he must make things right with Walther, straight away.
Suddenly though he realized that Walther also was bidding him good-night.
Augustine’s bedroom was a large low one opening off the stairs, with white walls and dark furniture. It was heated by an iron stove standing out in the middle and the wood was crackling so merrily when he went to bed that a foot or more of the long iron flue-pipe glowed redhot. Augustine wrestled in vain with a window in the hope of letting out some of all this heat. He was not used to a heated bedroom and it made him somehow afraid to go to sleep. Thus he lay awhile in his bed awake, watching the flue-pipe glowing in the dark.
As the wine receded his mind began to race, rather like an engine with a slipping clutch; but presently its chaotic involuntary plungings began to take shape as a new poem:
Oft have I stood as at a river’s brim In girls’ clear minds to watch the fishes swim: Rise bubbling to their eyes, or dive into places Deep, yet visible still through crystal faces ...
He was rather pleased with that beginning, at first—its detached attitude was so adult. But then he grew disgruntled with its idiom. Why didn’t his few poems, when they came, arrive spontaneously in modern idiom—the idiom of Eliot, or the Sitwells? They never did ...“Oft ...” This idiom was positively Victorian. Victorian idiom ... ? “Idiom Makyth Man,” Douglas Moss had once said; and the recollection gave him now a most uneasy feeling.
In the night-silence he could hear someone in the far distance somewhere playing a piano. It was too powerful for a girl’s playing, these swelling thunderous chords were a very Niagara of lacrimae rerum. It must be Cousin Walther, not in bed yet—or else unable to sleep.
Augustine began to wonder about people like Walther. Were they actually the way they talked—unreal creatures, truly belonging to that queer fictive state of collective being they seemed to think was “Life” but which he thought of as “History”? Or were they what they looked—real people, at bottom just as human and separate as Englishmen are? Was Walther the freak he seemed? Were all the others here—indeed, all Germans—like him? Perhaps he’d be nearer the answer when he got to know the girl better ... or even Cousin Adèle. For Women (he told himself sagely and now very sleepily) are surely, surely always the same, the whole world over,
In every time ...
In every clime ...
Every time ...
Clime ...
Climb ...
Augustine found himself climbing a long, long rope to get to his bedroom. He was at Mellton and very reasonably he had had the staircase taken out—Gilbert was on it—and put on the lawn. It was somewhere out there on the lawn now, with Gilbert still mounting it.
Presently a queer, high-pitched howling mingled itself with these dreams. It was shriller and more yappy than a dog’s and almost too heartless to sound sorrowful. It came first from the big hall: then presently something passed his half-open door and the howling began again, above.
*
Squatting in her thick dressing-gown high in the middle of her hard huge bed of dark carved wood, by the shaded bedside light of a focused reading-candle, the girl (this was Mary’s “wide-eyed little Mitzi,” of course, and she was now seventeen) sat writing a letter. Her face looked very different now in spectacles—much livelier than at dinner: kinder, and cleverer too; and her head was cocked on one side with one cheek almost on the page, like an infant child’s ...
She wrote to Tascha every night, in her big straggly writing that she couldn’t read herself. If she missed even one night Tascha thought she had stopped loving her and sent Mitzi a keepsake damp with reproachful tears (Princess Natascha was a Russian girl of her own age with a deep contralto voice and lived in Munich).
Mitzi paused and laid the letter on the quilt beside her. Then she hunched up her bare bony knees inside her nightgown against her bare soft chest and hugged them extravagantly, considering: what should she say this time?
Papa at dinner had been awful again, but that wasn’t news ...
Usually the words came with a run, even when nothing had happened. Nothing much ever did happen, at Lorienburg ... but today there had surely been a real event—the arrival of this young Englishman in a house where visitors were rare.
It was difficult to guess what he was really like, inside his outside; hard to know if he would turn out to be nice inside or not. Hard enough to imagine what the mere feeling of being any Englishman must be like, that unknown breed, without distinguishing between them. As for his “outside”... he talked German haltingly and with a rather unpleasing accent (rather like that Swiss tutor who once looked after Franz). But when he talked his own English his voice was quite different: she hadn’t thought of “English”—that dour schoolroom task—as capable of ever sounding like that! An honest, feeling voice: one you could trust not to laugh. His clothes had an extraordinary smell: a wistful smell, rather like wood-smoke—no, peat ... his shoes were curiously silent: they must have rubber soles.
The sudden howling in the hall just outside her door sent momentarily a goose-shiver down her spine. She jumped out of bed and went to investigate. As soon as she opened her door the howling stopped abruptly. She whistled, softly; but the little fox didn’t come to her, instead she heard his almost soundless stealthy padding towards the stairs. For a moment she stood, listening: he went up, not down.
The night was turning colder still.
After she was back in bed and settled again wholly within the warmed spot in it she faintly heard the howling resumed; but now, high in one of the desolate uninhabited stories overhead where nobody ever went.
The obvious thing was to write to Tascha about him—the unknown English cousin “Augustin.” His coming was important. But it was almost a heard voice within her that kept warning her: “No, Mitzi: better not!”
*
When Otto left the table he went to his office and for some hours worked on the papers he had abandoned earlier. Then he looked at his watch: it was time to put through his call to Munich.
It had begun to snow. Outside the pane a succession of flakes like white moths fluttered through the beam of light.
But when he asked for his number they told him there were “no lines to Munich.” So he asked for his call to be kept in hand; but they told him no calls for Munich were being accepted tonight.—Were the lines down?—They didn’t know, but they could accept no calls.—But this is to the Minister himself, Herr Doktor ... There was a pause, and then another voice answered, coldly, that regrettably that made no difference—no calls were being accepted.
Kahr’s orders, presumably; or General Lossow’s? Or perhaps actually Colonel Seisser’s (he was now police chief). What were they up to, then, those Munich triumvirs? Otto hung up the receiver, and his brow was wrinkled. The snow was falling faster but clearly this wasn’t a question of faulty lines: something was happening in Munich tonight!
As he creaked along the dark passages on his way to his room he wondered what it was, this time; there were so many things it might be. The situation was so tense it could only break, not bend; but there were half-a-dozen places the fracture could occur.—Still, no use worrying. He put his keys under the pillow, then oiled his revolver and put it in a drawer. Then he undressed, unstrapped his leg and laid it on a chest, and hopped to his bed.
But once in bed the pain began again: extraordinary how difficult it is to lie comfortably in bed with only one leg!
“No calls to Munich accepted ...” On second thoughts he got out of bed again, hopped to the drawer, fetched his revolver and put it under the pillow with his keys.
When Otto heard the howling he wondered what ailed Reineke; for surely the mating season was three months off as yet?
*
Indeed there was only one person in the whole household seriously perturbed by that faint, high-pitched howling when it sounded from the desolate upper regions.
This was Franz. As soon as he was sure where the sound now came from he slipped a dark coat over his pajamas, blew out his light and quietly opened his door. The hall outside was pitch-black. He listened: no one else was stirring. As he stealthily felt his way up the stairs in the dark his bare feet were even more noiseless than reynard’s own had been.
Here, in the curving walls of the stair-pit, the howling echoed eerily. On the first half-landing he passed Augustine’s room—the last room inhabited. The door must be ajar; for he could hear Augustine muttering in his sleep. So, as he passed it on his way up, Franz felt for the English cousin’s door and quietly closed it; for least of all did Franz want him rendered inquisitive about those floors above.
In Munich tension had risen all that day—to fever-level. Everyone knew that von Kahr (who had lately been appointed a dictator in the old Roman, caretaker sense) was holding a meeting that evening at which fatal decisions were expected. Kahr wanted Prince Rupprecht on the throne of his fathers: an independent Bavaria, perhaps. The meeting was private but all the bigwigs in Bavaria had been invited and several from outside.
The situation was indeed so tense it could only break, not bend: no wonder those young clerks and waiters at the Bayrischer-Hof had seemed to Augustine that morning to have something more important on their minds than running hotels! At the gymnasium too all nerves had been on edge today: even the pug-nosed instructor was so distrait he nearly broke Lothar’s pliant back in a new lock he was teaching him.
Lothar himself was not consciously aware of nervousness or foreboding, but he was moved by a sudden overweening upsurge of the love he felt for all these his friends and for that incomparable brotherhood to which they all belonged. Presently a gust of it almost swept him off his feet as he stooped in the changing-room tying his shoes.
On that the lace broke, and while he knotted it his mind’s eye contemplated this signal image: Germania, a nymph chained white and naked to the cruel Rock of Versailles. Her soft skin was ravened and slobbered by the sated yet still gluttonous Entente Powers; but it was being even more cruelly mauled and torn (he saw) by the talons of her hungry secret enemies—the Bolsheviks, the Berlin government, the Jews ... the hooded Vatican and her Bavarian separatist brood. But just then in the nick of time Lothar’s boyhood hero and present commander the brave young Hermann Goering (that nonpareil among Birdmen!) swooped down in shining armor to save her—with Lothar at his side.
Before that picture Lothar’s heart quite brimmed over with love; and while the mood was still on him he slipped his precious ten-shilling note almost surreptitiously into the Party chest.
In the throng behind Lothar as he did this his comrade the massive (though rather muscle-bound) Fritz nudged young Willi, and pointed: “Watch out!” he whispered hoarsely: “The artful little bourgeois scab—what’s he trying to pull?”
Fritz’s indignant croak was meant to be confidential, but it had come out louder than intended. At once his suspicious eyes blinked and he glanced round anxiously over his huge, humped shoulder: for Fritz was working-class (his father being a skilled burglar), and he feared that most of these bourgeois wet rags here already looked on him as no better than a Red. Who knows? That perishing little twister young Scheidemann! With his foreign Valuta he might have wormed his way in with the Top Ones here already ... in which case poor clumsy Fritz had put his foot in it proper.—Look! Even Willi the pariah was edging away from Fritz now ... or was it Lothar Scheidemann Willi was giving the cold shoulder to?—Which?—God’s Mother, which?
(Willi was edging away from both, probably; for with a “Roman” nose like Willi’s for sole birth-certificate it was surely only prudent for a young Trooper to tread a bit delicately.)
But this evening there was to be not much time for prudent little maneuvers like these. For while Lothar was still dreaming about Germania and Willi was still debating in his mind who to stand next to at roll-call it was announced that the troop had special orders tonight. They were to cross the western sector of the city in twos and threes by different routes and to rendezvous at the Drei Katzen—an obscure but spacious beerhouse just off the Nymphenburger Strasse past the Löwenbräu. There the “Hundred” they were enrolled in would mobilize, with certain other “Hundreds,” and be told what to do.
Nothing more was said to them now than just that: no word about Kahr’s meeting at the Bürgerbräu beyond the river, on which all day all surmise had centered: yet there was something electric in the air, and everyone knew that at last this was no routine assignment. At once all prudent little maneuvers were forgotten quite, for at once all the jealousies and suspicions which inspired them had vanished like smoke. You could almost hear the click as those “hoops of steel” settled into place, binding all these ardent young men together into one body like well-coopered barrel-staves.
As dark fell they had set out: in twos and threes, as ordered. Larger numbers might attract attention: to go alone would be imprudent, for it was at any time none too safe after dark in certain streets near here for these known Galahads alone—even partly armed, as they were tonight. The Reds had been driven underground—the treacherous beasts ...
Thus the uncouth but sterling Fritz lingered in the doorway for his friend Lothar (who had a quick hand and a cool head in a scrimmage, as Fritz well remembered), and the two linked arms; whereon they both of them felt almost frightened at the intensity of the comradeship each other’s touch engendered.
Arm-in-arm like that they had moved off, keeping well to the middle of the roadway, well clear of doors and alleyways. Each had one hand on the bludgeon in his pocket, each with his weather eye searched the shadows his side. They were confident even without having to look round that the trusty Willi was following a pace or two behind and guarding their rear.
But there were no Reds on the streets this bitter evening: only other young men like themselves moving purposefully in twos and threes; and heavy covered lorries, which roared along the streets in increasing numbers and skidded round the icy corners with crashing gears.
Crossing the Stiglmaierplatz, however, our Lothar and Fritz and Willi had several reminders that (Reds apart) theirs was by no means the only “patriotic” private army in Munich those days. There were other—and potentially hostile—loving “German Brotherhoods.” The Löwenbräukeller they saw was full to the gills with men of the Reichskriegsflagge, with steins in their hands and their danders up, roaring their heads off ... well, these (as Willi, who had an insatiable curiosity about such things, pointed out to them) were Captain Roehm’s own men now, since the show-down—and Roehm seemed to be a grand chap, it was he indeed who had put our own leaders on the map! So, on Willi’s instructions the three young musketeers hailed Roehm’s men in passing. But in that uneasy alliance under old Ludendorff’s titular presidency called the “Kampfbund” these two were almost the only component parts which could fully trust each other. Those “Oberland” men outside the Arzbergerkeller—Weber’s crowd ... ? Well (said Willi) these ... and perhaps Rossbach’s henchmen too ... these might be trustworthy up to a point, but there were others—the “Vikings” for example—who were an altogether different kettle-of-fish. The “Vikings” resembled Captain Goering’s gymnasium brotherhood only in their love for their country and hatred of its government and of public order: they were too Catholic and monarchist by half to stomach the blasphemies of a Ludendorff or a Rosenberg. These would be Kahr’s men and Prince Rupprecht’s if brass-rags were ever irrevocably parted with those two.
These “Vikings” were Commander Ehrhardt’s chickens. Ehrhardt, of course, was already famous: a veteran of the guerrilla fighting that raged for two whole years after the 1918 “armistice” in the lost Baltic provinces, it had been he too who had led the Naval Division in the Kapp Putsch on Berlin. And Rossbach as well was famous: he also was one of those young veteran outlaws of the Baltic shambles who had gone to ground in Bavaria when cowardly Berlin disowned their private wars. Lone warrior-patriots of the lost lands in the East, such as prove lodestones to angry young men any time, anywhere! What a godsend, then, it had been to an unknown unglamorous little H.Q. bellhop with his own splinter-party to build when at last he had been able to counter the attractions of such heroes as these with the prestige of his young Captain Goering! For Hermann (the old African governor’s handsome son) had been the ace of Richthofen’s famous wartime “Flying Circus,” and now had all the panache on him of his Pour le Merite (Germany’s V.C.).
By the time they had reached the Drei Katzen and reported, that too was filling up: older men, mostly—ex-soldiers; but all their own men however, except for a small and rather secluded, unwanted knot of “Vikings” (who seemed all eyes and ears).
Two hours later they were still at the Drei Katzen, waiting—with steins in their hands now and their danders up, roaring their heads off—when a car drew up outside with a squeal of brakes. Hermann Esser was in it (Esser the young journalist and scandal-buster). He looked wildeyed and feverish tonight. They crowded round him: Esser had come straight from the Bürgerbräu and he gave them the news: thirty-five minutes ago precisely the balloon had gone up! They cheered till the building shook. Then Esser gave them their orders: to march in parade order right through the heart of the city to the Bürgerbräu. It was “action” at last!
As Lothar’s company with banners flying and drums beating swung down the Brienner Strasse by lamplight—with guns in their hands now and their danders up, roaring their heads off—people poured everywhere out of the sidestreets: men women and children marched with them and behind them and in front of them and all round them, cheering wildly for the “Revolution”—though just whose revolution most of them scarcely knew. Was this the Catholics’ monarchist and separatist one, or ... whatever the Kampfbund themselves were after?—Cross or Hakenkreuz?—Either meant mud-in-the-eye for Berlin: thus both were almost equally attractive to Bavarians after fifty years of Prussia calling the tune.
So they traversed the Königsplatz in style, with one proud little boy just in front of the marching column doing handsprings, handsprings—handsprings all the way.
It was a cold night all night in Munich—that exciting night of Thursday November the eighth—but still no snow there; and bitter and windy was the “Kahr-Freitag” morning which followed.
At Lorienburg, when Augustine had gone to bed last night the room had been too hot; but by morning his bedclothes had slipped off, the stove was dead and the room down to freezing-point. There was ice in the jug on his wash-stand.
Here at Lorienburg moreover there had been quite a heavy fall of snow in the night. This morning the sky was still as slaty-gray as before, but with all that whiteness outside indoors it was appreciably lighter than yesterday. As Augustine on his way to breakfast entered the hall he found the few touches of color in it picked out by the snowlight: the blue tablecloth on the little round table, a green chair, the gold scroll-work on the big black settle. The ancestral paintings looked brighter than yesterday, and the pale cafe-au-lait stone floor-tiles glistened as if they were wet.
Then came a brief flicker of shadow over everything as a cloud of snow slipped silently off the steep roof: not in one heavy lump as when it melts, but more like a slowly falling cloud of smoke. Augustine turned, and through the window saw it drifting away like smoke on the almost imperceptible breeze. Someone (he noticed) had left a bottle of beer on the sill overnight: it had frozen solid and then burst, so that the beer still stood there—an erect bottleshape of cloudy amber ice among the shattered glass!
As he turned again from the window Augustine caught sight of two little girls. They were half hidden in the embrasure of a door; but he recognized them as the tobogganers by the bumps on their foreheads, glistening like the floor-tiles. He smiled at them; but they didn’t smile back: they were too intently watching something, with shocked expressions.
It was only by following their eyes that he caught sight of the twins also, Rudi and Heinz. Those perilous trick-cyclists were crouched now under a tall Gothic bread-chest, withdrawn as far as possible from sight; but they couldn’t quite hide that they were wearing heavy brass-studded dog-collars and were chained by them to the legs of the chest with long dog-chains. Ashamed—not at all of yesterday’s crime but acutely of today’s punishment—they glared out at Augustine with unruly and unfriendly eyes.
With her back to him, and squatting on her heels so that the long fair tail of hair hanging down her back was actually touching the ground, that older sister who had so interested him last night was dipping hunks of bread in a bowl of coffee and feeding them. Intent on scowling at Augustine one of the boys got a crumb in his windpipe and choked, coffee and other liquids pouring from nose and eyes. In a paroxysm of embarrassment Augustine tiptoed past with averted head, hoping against hope the girl would not look round and see him.
At breakfast there was an atmosphere of suppressed excitement mounting. It bewildered Augustine, who knew nothing of the night’s mysteries.
At six that morning Otto had got up and again tried to telephone to Munich; but still “no lines.” He had then rung the railway-junction at Kammstadt and learned that during the night no trains had arrived from Munich and no news either. What could have happened? Services elsewhere, they told him, were normal. This narrowed the field somewhat; for if Berlin had marched on defiant Munich—or Munich on Berlin, for that matter ... or if Kahr and Lossow had loosed the Freikorps mobilized on the Thuringian border against Bavaria’s leftist neighbors ...
No: this must be something confined—for the moment—to Munich itself. And since Kahr was in control in Munich, surely something Kahr himself had started: that could only be one thing, the thing everybody expected Kahr to start.
Walther thought so too, when he heard the meager facts: it could only mean ... and now Walther was finding the suspense unbearable, waiting for the expected news in front of his untouched coffee dumb.
Franz also looked pre-occupied; but withdrawn, as if his anxiety was his own and something neither his father nor even his uncle shared (nor he theirs). Yet it was Franz alone who remembered to ask Augustine politely how he had slept (had the little fox woke him? No?), and to pay him the other small attentions of a host. Franz was heavy-eyed, as if he himself had not slept at all, his expression more contemptuous than ever.
“Heavens!” thought the simpleton Augustine, looking from face to face: “What hangovers they’ve all got!”
It was at that moment Mitzi entered the breakfast room, followed by her two little sisters. She too seemed curiously inattentive; for she would have collided with a displaced chair if Franz, polite as ever, had not whisked it out of her way.
“Dreaming again!” thought Augustine.
At breakfast Augustine found himself noticing how strangely Mitzi spread her fingers—like antennae, like feelers—when stretching out her hand for something small such as a spoon, or a roll off the dish. Sometimes it would be the little finger which touched it first, whereon the others would instantly follow. But even at twenty-three he was still at an age when, as in childhood, there are things which can be deemed too bad to be true. Thus this bad truth was bound to be slow in forcing an entry into so young and happy a head as his—the truth that already, at seventeen, those big gray eyes of Mitzi’s were almost completely blind.
“Listen!” said Otto.
Churchbells—no doubt of it! Faint but wild, the churchbells in the village below had begun ringing. Hard upon the sound came Walther’s foreman forester, his dark hair powdered with fine snow off the trees, panting and jubilant with the news he carried. It was the expected news of course (the first news always is). Solemnly Walther filled glasses and passed them round. “Gentlemen!” said Walther (everyone had already risen to his feet): “I give you—The King!”
“Rupprecht und Bayern! Hoch!” There was a tinkle of broken glass.
“What fun!” thought Augustine, and drained his glass to King Rupert with the rest and smashed it: “What nonsense—but what fun!”
Neither Augustine nor anyone else noticed that Franz smashed his glass with the drink in it untouched.
The first wave of rumors which spread nearly everywhere across the Bavarian countryside that Friday morning spoke, quite simply, of a Wittelsbach restoration. No one quite knew whence the news came or exactly what had happened: only that there had been “a great upheaval” last night in Munich and now Prince Rupprecht the Field-Marshal was to be king of Bavaria (his father, the ex-king Ludwig III with his Prussian bullet in him, had died two years ago).
No one was surprised. Kahr was back at the helm these days with special powers, and everyone knew Kahr was an open royalist who was maneuvering to declare the Bavarian monarchy restored the first ripe moment. Presumably his recent deliberate defiances of the federal authorities in Berlin were no more than moves in that separatist game. Lately moreover there had been no lack of know-alls to whisper, knowledgeably, that now it was only a matter of days. Last Sunday at the big Totengedenktag march-past in Munich it was Rupprecht who had taken the salute, not Kahr and not the Minister-president! Everyone had commented on that.
So now it was only the expected which had happened. Mostly, people were jubilant. Churchbells rang and villages were beflagged. In the past people had tended to laugh a little unkindly at the late ex-king’s concertina-trousers and his passionate interest in dairies; but in Bavaria fanatical republicans had always been few. Even since the republic villages still used to be beflagged and churchbells rung, children dressed in their holiday best and fire-brigades paraded, for ex-king Ludwig’s “private” visits. When Ludwig died two years ago Munich gave him a state funeral. It turned into the warmest demonstration of public affection you’d have found anywhen in all that “thousand years of Wittelsbach rule.”
Thus today there were only a few who wore long faces: but those were the very few who allowed themselves to wonder What next? For surely this must make the present open breach with Berlin final, must make wastepaper of the Weimar constitution? An independent Bavarian kingdom, then ... but where do we go from there? Other German states had their would-be separatists too; as well as royalist Bavaria there was red Saxony; there were rebellious reds in Hamburg; and at Aachen there were those despicable paid stooges of the French who even talked of an “independent” Rhineland.
But Walther von Kessen was not among these longfaced, long-sighted ones as in bubbling spirits he saw to the hoisting of flags, ordered the firing of feux-de-joie, plotted processions and ox-roastings, planned thanksgiving Masses with the village priest, even bruited a memorial obelisk on the Schwartzberg. Moreover Augustine had caught the infection and was bubbling too: possibly the drinking of toasts (no heel-taps) in plum-brandy at breakfast contributed to his care-free attitude of “Ruritania, here we come ...” Presently he waved his glass and asked “M’Lord Baron” for a boon: surely so happy an occasion should be celebrated by granting a pardon to all poor prisoners in the castle, chained in durance vile?
For several seconds Walther gazed at him pop-eyed, as if Augustine had gone stark mad: for Walther’s mind had been far away, and in any case he was somewhat unused to fooling. But at last the light dawned—and then, Walther was delighted. How very charming of Augustine! What an appropriate sentiment and how wittily expressed! Walther indeed was quite astonished: for the first time he felt for his young English cousin something that was almost affection, and clapped him on the shoulder till the dust flew. Then he commanded that the boys’ dog-collars should of course be undone (“That was your meaning, wasn’t it? I have divined rightly?”) and sent the two little sisters happily scurrying to see to it.
For the fact was that Walther was only too glad of this excuse for an amnesty. It was forced upon him that in this exemplary punishment he had let his sense of fitness run away with him: the boys were taking it harder than he had expected. There was nothing naturally cruel in Walther—only a belief that in punishing children one ought to be imaginative as well as stern: that the modern parent doesn’t go on just unintelligently beating his children for ever.
Thereafter Walther had to go about his feudal festive occasions with Otto: so the three young people, feeling excited and pent-in, went down to the courtyard, Franz and his sister arm-in-arm, out into the keen cold air. The courtyard was deep in snow. The ramparts on its surrounding walls where yesterday the boys had bicycled were now covered in a slope of untrodden snow, the crenellated twiddles of the parapet smoothed out by snow. A snow-hush was on all the world this morning, in which the distant sounds of loyal merriment—the churchbells and the sleigh-bells and the gunshots and some far singing—floated unaccompanied: the only near sound was the tiny (indeed infinitesimal) shriek of the snow you trod.
They passed through the Great Gate. Below them, white snow blanketed the treetops and the village roofs, the church-tower rocking under its bells; and all the forests and fields beyond were also a dead white under the dun sky. In all that whiteness the tints of the painted crucifix outside the castle gate took on a special brilliance: the crimson gouts of blood that trickled from the snow-covered crown of thorns and down the tired face: the glistening pinks and ivories of the emaciated naked body with its wisp of loin-cloth: the blood and blue-white snow round the big iron spike driven through the twisted, crossed, riven feet. Under the cross but quite unconscious of it stood a group of small mites who had just toiled up there from the village with their toboggans: red caps and yellow curls, shell-pink faces intoxicated with the snow, they stood out against the background colorlessness as rich as butterflies, they and the Christ together.
Here Franz halted the trio and they stood in contemplation. “Grüss Gott,” the children whispered.
Augustine peered inquisitively down through the tree-tops towards the half-hidden village celebrating beneath. But Franz and Mitzi, their arms still linked, stood with their two smooth yellow heads close against the crucified knees. Franz’s face was working with emotion. Instinctively Mitzi at his side turned towards him and with her free hand felt for and stroked his shoulder. As if that released something he began speaking: his face was averted from Augustine but his voice intended for him ... this English Augustin even though English was young and so must understand him!
“Papa,” said Franz (and each word was charged with its peculiar tension), “is a monarchist: we are not, of course.” He paused. “You see, Papa is a Bavarian, but I am a German.” With a careful but unconscious finger he was pushing the snow off the spike through Christ’s feet. One after another the children on their toboggans and bobsleighs dived head-foremost into the trees below, leaving the three alone. “Papa lives in the Past! We live in the future, I and Mitzi.”
“... And Uncle Otto,” Mitzi added quietly.
“Uncle Otto too? Yes, and no ... not without reservation ...”
At that, Mitzi drew a sudden, startled breath.
As they passed in through the great gate and saw the house again Augustine glanced up at the roof, for from the tail of his eye he seemed to have caught a flicker of movement there. That open dormer on the fifth floor: yesterday surely it had been boarded up like all the rest?
“All the same,” Franz was saying as the trio reentered the garden court, “to me, this morning’s news is good news ... so I think ... for now things will begin to move.” Just then the twins appeared in a doorway, watching them. Augustine stooped to make a snowball, but these little fellows looked so solemn they might take it for a deadly affront. “Kahr—Rupprecht—they are themselves of no importance,” Franz was explaining. “Gustav von Kahr is merely the Finger of Fate: ‘Fate’s Little Finger,’ if I may be permitted the trope. Supposing it possible to harness too-great forces to too-small ends, today he has released in Germany disruptive powers he will not be able to control. And certainly no one in Berlin will be able to control them now Walther Rathenau is dead.—That was why the great Rathenau had to die,” he added in a curious husky parenthesis, his eyes suddenly large and gloating and horribly human.
“But if things do get quite out of control ... what is it you’re hoping to see happen?” asked Augustine, idly amused.
“Chaos,” said Franz, simply and somberly. “Germany must be re-born and it is only from the darkness of the hot womb of chaos that such re-birth is possible ... the blood-red darkness of the hot womb, etc,” he corrected himself, sounding for the moment very young—a child who had only imperfectly learned his lesson.
“Golly!” murmured Augustine under his breath. This queer German cousin was proving a rather more entertaining character than he had suspected.
But just then Augustine’s attention was distracted from Franz, for Mitzi stumbled over something in the snow. Franz was still holding her by the arm but had ceased to pay much heed to her, so that now she almost fell. “Whoa there, hold up!” cried Augustine blithely, and slipped from his place to take her other arm.
Usually Augustine rather avoided touching people, if he could: girls, especially. So that now he had deliberately taken a girl’s arm it was somewhat a strange experience to him. True, it seemed quite devoid of any electrical discharges; but it was embarrassing all the same. Thus at first he found himself gripping the limp, sleeved thing much too hard. Then he would have liked to let go of it again but found he didn’t know how, gracefully, and so had to keep hold of it willy-nilly. All the while he was acutely anxious lest Mitzi should take him for one of the pawing kind.
Whereon in a curiously emphatic—indeed almost tragic, and yet unhurried voice, Mitzi ignoring him began to talk to her brother about their uncle. Perhaps (she admitted) Franz had been right in his “reservations”; for one had to admit that Uncle Otto did not, in his every endeavor, show signs that he sought absolute chaos and ensued it. Indeed, the work he was doing for the Army ...
“I’m afraid that is in fact so,” said Franz, frowning. “Our uncle has not, I regret, so clearly understood the philosophical pre-necessity of chaos before creation as we have, you and I and ... and certain others.” Now that his brain was active and his emotions engaged, Franz’s habitual conceited and contemptuous expression had given place to something a good deal simpler and nobler: “Hence arises our uncle’s mistake—to be working too soon for the re-birth of the German Army, when he ought to be working first rather for the re-birth of the German Soul. He sets too much store by cadres and hidden arsenals and secret drilling: too little by the ghostly things. He forgets that unless a nation has a living soul to dwell in the Army as its body, even an Army is nothing! In present-day Germany an ‘Army’ would be a mere soulless zombie ...”
“Hear-hear!” Augustine interrupted: “Naturally! This time the soul of the new Germany has to take unto itself a civilian ‘body’ of course—and that can’t be an easy pill for soldiers like old Otto to swallow.”
“The soul of Germany take a civilian body?” Franz looked startled, and there was a prolonged pause while he turned this strange idea over in his mind: “So! That is interesting ... you carry me further than I had yet traveled. You think then that our classical Reichswehr, with its encumbering moralistic traditions, will prove too strait an outlet for so mighty an upsurge of spirit? So, that the re-born Soul of Germany will need to build for itself some new ‘body’ altogether—some ‘body’ wholly German, wholly barbaric and of the people? Is that your thought?”
Now it was Augustine’s turn to look startled. In some way they had got at cross-purposes but just how? And where?
But before he could gather himself to answer Franz had begun again: “The ghostly things: those must indeed not be lost sight of. Do you know what General Count Haesler said even thirty years ago?—Not? I will tell you. It was in an address to the Army: ‘It is necessary that our German civilization shall build its temple upon a mountain of corpses, upon an ocean of tears, upon the death-cries of men without number ...’—Prophetic words, profoundly metaphysical and anti-materialist: an imperative to the whole German race! But how to be fulfilled, please, Augustin, excepting through the Army?”
So Franz continued, yet even while he was speaking his words were growing faint in Augustine’s ears—fading, as at a departure, into silence. For suddenly and when least expected the magic moment had come. That soft, living arm in the thick insulating sleeve—Mitzi’s arm, which his fingers had almost forgotten that they held—had warmed ... had thrilled. Now it seemed to be rapidly dissolving between his tingling fingers into a flowing essence: an essence moreover that felt to him as if it hummed (for it was indeed more a feeling than a sound, this humming) like a telegraph-wire on a still evening. Then all at once his own trembling hand which did the holding began too to dissolve away in this “Essence,” like a sandcastle in a rising tide. Now there was direct access—a direct union between the two of them through which great pulses of Mitzi’s soul seemed to be pumped up his arm, thence gushing into his empty chest, his head, his singing ears.
Augustine turned himself and stared down into Mitzi’s face, wild-eyed. What must she be thinking about this extraordinary thing which was happening between them? For it was surely happening to her arm and his hand alike—it was happening to them both, to the very separateness of their being. Her enormous soul was pouring every moment more deafeningly in and out through the steaming gates of his, while the whole world clanged about them. Yet Mitzi’s expression was cool and calm and unfathomable as ever: her incredibly beautiful face perhaps even stiller ...
“Beautiful?”—Why, this young face out of the whole world was the sole incarnate meaning of that dumb word “beauty”! In the whole world’s history, the first true license for its use! Her inscrutable face under his gaze was so still it hardly seemed to breathe. Her wide gray eyes neither met his nor avoided them—seemed to ignore them, rather.
“Her wide ...” It was then at last that the truth about those purblind eyes struck home to him! Struck him moreover with a stab of panic—for pity as well as fear can attain the mad intensity of panic.
Evidently Franz was expecting an answer. Augustine had quite ceased hearing him talking yet now heard him stop talking, sensed his expectancy. So Augustine hurriedly searched his ears for any unnoticed words which might be lingering there, like searching sea-caves for old echoes.
“Well: surely lately we’ve had enough of all that in all conscience!” he said at last, half at random.
“Enough of all what?” asked Franz, puzzled.
“Of ... well, corpses and tears and what’s-it.”
“How ‘enough,’ when Germany is not yet victorious?” Franz countered, now even more puzzled still by this queer English cousin.
Already by mid-morning more detailed rumors about what had happened last night in Munich were reaching Lorienburg. But once these stories began to contain even a scrap of truth they began to sound quite incredible. For now the name of General Ludendorff came into them—and what part had he in Rupprecht?
The legendary Ludendorff! For the last half of the late war he had been supreme arbiter of a German realm that stretched from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf. On the collapse in 1918 prudently he had withdrawn to Sweden for a while (leaving it to Hindenburg to get the defeated armies home unaided): but he had reappeared lately, and had immured himself in a villa near Munich at Ludwigshöhe, where he practiced ancient pagan rites (it used to be rumored) and kept pretty queer company: succoring conspirators, baiting the Jesuits from time to time, and abusing the Bavaria he lived in. Yet now Rumor was saying that today the great Feldherr had come out of his retirement like an Achilles from his tent: that he had thrown in his lot with Rupprecht: that the Bavarian restoration had grown to a “National” revolution.
Rupprecht (said Rumor) was to be not only Bavarian king but German Kaiser, and Ludendorff and Rupprecht were to march on Berlin shoulder to shoulder! Otto and Walther looked at each other completely disbelieving, for how could two such sworn enemies ever join forces? Was it conceivable for His Most Catholic Majesty to begin his reign by countenancing in any way the discredited Ludendorff—a professed anti-Christian, an unblushing Prussian, a parvenu moreover whose forbears were hardly any of them even noble? It was inconceivable that Rupprecht would accept an Imperial crown at Ludendorff’s hands. Yet Ludendorff’s name persisted, even when the stories grew more circumstantial. Other lesser names too began to be added: Colonel Kriebel (Ludendorff’s Kampfbund leader) and Major Roehm of von Epp’s staff, and even some egregious pocket-demagogue of Roehm’s who (it appeared) also tagged in somehow with the Kampfbund: all these were in some way involved. There seemed no doubt that Ludendorff was indeed playing a big part: rather, it was the part played in all this by Rupprecht which seemed as time went on to grow more and yet more nebulous. Indeed, was Rupprecht even in Munich? And where was the Cardinal?
At last someone declared that since last Sunday’s “Unknown Soldier” parade Prince Rupprecht had positively never left his castle in Berchtesgaden. Had he been made even King of Bavaria at all, then? Once that was doubted, someone else was positive that the restoration wasn’t even scheduled to be triggered for three whole days yet.
These counter-rumors too flew fast. Down in the village, whoever it was had been pealing the bells got tired of it and stopped. Up in the castle, Walther put what was left of his plum-brandy back in the cupboard and locked it. There seemed to be reasonable doubt whether anything had happened, or even was going to happen. At least, anything fit to celebrate: Walther had no desire at all to celebrate Ludendorff’s pranks. He’d save his liquor for Monday ... if Rupprecht really was to be made king on Monday (the “emperor” idea he had dismissed wholly from the start).
All this passed quite unheeded by Augustine: his mind was too full of Mitzi. For Augustine had fallen in love, of course. As a well-made kid glove will be so exactly filled with hand that one can’t even insert a bus-ticket between them, so the membrane of Augustine’s mind was now exactly shaped and stretched to hold Mitzi’s peerless image and nothing more: it felt stretched to bursting by it and couldn’t conceivably find a hair’s-breadth room for anything else.
Augustine navigated now whenever he crossed a room. I mean, like the yachtsman working along the coast who takes some point on his beam to steer by instead of looking straight ahead—some bold headland, or rock-girt lighthouse—and fills his mind with that cynosure: keeps taking new bearings on it, and reckoning his changing distance from it. This was very much the way Augustine now shaped his course across any room that had Mitzi in it. Even when his back was turned to her the very skin under his clothes seemed aware of the direction Mitzi lay: just as the body through its clothes can feel the direction of the sun’s rays falling on it.
Augustine was now twenty-three: but had he ever been in love like this before? Certainly not ... at least, not since his kindergarten days.
Presumably the whole party had luncheon presently, but Augustine was too deeply besotted to be conscious of such things any more. Afterwards however came something that he had to take cognizance of: Mitzi vanished, and reappeared dressed all in furs. Franz too appeared, looking handsome and mediaeval in a long sleeveless belted sheepskin jerkin (he liked his arms free for driving, he said). Then Walther insisted on lending Augustine his own fur coat, a magnificent sable of dashing but antique cut—and much too large for Augustine, which caused great hilarity. Finally Adèle produced a sealskin cap for him, and as she fitted it to his head with her own hands her face suddenly went young again: fleetingly it was almost as if Mitzi herself peeped out of it.
Apparently it had been arranged a long time ahead that this afternoon Augustine was to be shown to some neighbors. These were the Steuckels, who lived very comfortably in a large villa at Röttningen ten miles away. Originally it had been planned for the whole Lorienburg family to descend on Röttningen in force, but in view of the dubious political situation surely Dr. Steuckel would understand ...
—Anyway, now it was to be just the three young people alone.
The Steuckels (Augustine was informed) were not nobility; but they were distinguished intellectuals (a class, Walther explained carefully, which he considered deserving of every respect). Dr. Steuckel owned an old-established Munich publishing firm of high repute, which—like the even more famous Hanfstaengl outfit—specialised in Fine Art; and he controlled an exhibition-gallery and picture-business as well (pounds and dollars!) in a very good position on the Promenadestrasse. That was Ulrich Steuckel of Röttningen, of course—“Dr. Ulrich”: his brother Dr. Reinhold (the eminent Munich jurist) had once been like Walther himself a Centrist member of the Landtag but now (also like Walther) by his own wish kept out of party politics. He still knew everybody, though.
Dr. Reinhold was particularly able ... here Walther digressed to describe one of the previous season’s meetings of “Gäa” (a serious and distinguished circle whose proceedings began with an authoritative lecture on some worth-while subject and continued with brilliant informal discussions over veal sausage and free beer). Walther himself had been present on that occasion but had hardly dared to speak, whereas Reinhold Steuckel had covered himself with glory by totally confounding the lecturer over some technicality of monetary theory—the lecturer being no less a person than Dr. Schacht himself, the great Dr. Hjalmar Schacht. “People are saying,” Walther now digressed, “that Schacht will shortly be called on to direct the financial affairs of the nation ...”
But at that point Mitzi started off down the stairs, whereon Augustine (to whom in any case the name of Schacht meant nothing) instantly closed his ears against Walther and followed her hot-foot.
When they reached the courtyard Augustine realized the reason for all these furs and this wrapping-up. They were to travel perched high on a light one-horse sleigh, sitting abreast there the three of them as open to the weather as three birds on a branch.
Augustine’s heart leapt; but Franz chose to sit in the middle between them, alas, since he was driving.
As soon as the little monkey-faced man let go of the horse’s head and the sleigh moved off—even while still at a walk—Augustine was assailed by a curious giddy, swimming feeling; for the sleigh began slipping about, like a car in an uncontrolled skid. Instinctively Augustine’s motoring foot felt gingerly for a brake, his motoring hands clutched for a steering wheel. The sleigh was yawing about behind the horse like a raft on tow. But horse-sleighs, Augustine soon found, don’t mind yawing and skidding: they are not intended to behave like staid vehicles on wheels: they don’t even need to stick to the road. As soon as they were free of the perils of the causeway Franz left the road altogether. He turned aside into the fields at a canter, his sleigh sliding and pitching on its squeaking runners in the rushing clear cold air, taking his own beeline across this open unfenced country like a hunt.
Once Augustine was able to persuade his muscles to relax, and to acquiesce in this helpless-feeling motion as a baby’s would do, he found his mind also relaxing (in sympathy) into a state that was almost infantile. He felt an overwhelming desire to sing: not any proper song with a regular tune, but just to warble aloud in Mitzi’s honor much as a bird sings when it is in love—much as Polly had “sung” that day they had driven down to Mellton. Moreover, when he had slammed his ears tight shut in Walther’s face just now Walther’s last meaningless syllables had got caught inside: “Schacht! Schacht! Doktor ... Hjalmar ... Schacht,” Augustine began to carol. Then he stopped, to comment in his ordinary speaking voice: “‘Hjalmar’! What an ineffably ridiculous name! I bet he parts his hair in the middle—eh, Franz?”
But Franz paid no attention: his mind was all elsewhere, was in the past ... von Epp’s crusade of four years ago to turn the Reds out of Munich ...
Papa last night had wanted to make a great fuss over coupling Franz’s name with it all as if it wasn’t a matter of course that Franz had volunteered! Hadn’t he been already a trained cadet by then, and turned sixteen?—No younger than his friend Wolff; and by then the dedicated Wolff had already been away fighting in the Latvian marshes for the past six months. There had been plenty of others from Franz’s cadet-school too with von Epp. Even Wolff’s little brother Lothar—ex-Governor Scheidemann’s other boy—had wanted to join, and they’d have taken the lad if Lothar hadn’t looked so obviously only a child ... Lothar’s voice hadn’t broken even.
Why then had Franz minded it so last night when Papa blurted ... after all, it was not true any more to say that ... that whatever-it-was had happened to “him”: it had happened to a boy: the very sixteen-year-old boy as it chanced that he used to be—but he wasn’t that boy now.
Toller ... last night those two had both spoken Toller’s name (the Reds’ young commander); and that had touched something on the quick.
There had been that day when the Reds counter-attacked unexpectedly and for a few hours Franz had found himself Toller’s prisoner ... The loathsome taste of imminent death bitter on his lips whenever he licked them (and he had kept on licking them as he stood there with tied hands expecting it): was that the sensitive spot?
If not, what else?
After their Spring campaign—the gun-booms and the bomb-bangs, the excitement and the fright—May Day 1919 had been the final day of triumph for the White forces, the day of victory and glory. There had been a cock-a-hoop triumphal march into Munich under arms, down the broad but battered and littered Ludwigstrasse, across the Odeonsplatz—goose-stepping between the Residenz and the stately Feldherrnhalle and down the narrow canyon of the Residenzstrasse, past the Max-Josefs Platz to the gothickated Marienplatz beyond. There had been a Te Deum and an open-air Mass: the Red Flag has been hauled down and the “dear white-and-blue flag” of old Bavaria had been hoisted over the city again.
That surely was the end: after May Day, volunteers such as the schoolboy Franz had hoped to go straight home. But there had been work still to do, it seemed: Munich had not only to be freed it had to be cleansed ...
That “cleansing”... suddenly Franz’s hands on the reins trembled and the galloping horse threw up its head and snorted: for suddenly twenty-year-old Franz was sixteen and living that boyhood whatever-it-was over again.
The triumphal May Day was over: Munich entirely in “white hands” but seething still ...
Mechanically Franz’s hands still guided the sleigh with his sister and Augustine in it, but he was scarcely conscious of it for in his reverie he was transported backward in time to an enormous hostile Munich tenement-building on the far side of the river Isar right beyond the Bürgerbräukeller: it was the gray small hours of the morning, and Franz was quite alone there, and lost.
This young cadet had never been in such a place as this before: he had scarcely in his life before even seen the urban poor. But now he was left alone here, alone in this dark would-be-clean but old and rotting and hence stinking wet warren of endless decaying dark corridors and broken stairs and stuffed-up windows: surrounded in the darkness by innumerable woken waspish voices repeating “Toller!” in different tones—and rude things about him (little Franz) and fierce blood-curdling threats.
Franz had been sent here with a patrol which was searching for Toller; for this was the sort of place Toller might be expected to take refuge in. Most of the other Red leaders had been caught and shot by now or clubbed to death; but Toller had hidden himself, the dirty Jew! The patrol had brought Franz along because he alone had ever seen Toller face-to-face.
That of course was the day Franz had been Toller’s prisoner: the day the Reds had surprise-attacked in front and then armed women from the local munitions-works had suddenly taken the Whites in the rear as well, and while most of the Whites had managed to escape to Pfaffenhofen Franz had stuck loyally close to his commandant, until ... Hey, presto! The canny White commandant himself had escaped from the little town solo on a railway-engine and Franz and the few who had remained with him were taken.
At last they had been brought before the bloodthirsty Toller: a slim, small-bodied young student-ogre with big brown dramatic eyes and wavy black hair. They thought that now they would surely be shot. But instead Toller had said something sentimental and a huge navvy had untied the blond, childlike Franz and given him his own hunk of sausage: whereon Franz had burst into tears under Toller’s very eyes and Toller had turned all his prisoners scot-free loose—the dirty Jew!
So now, in the gray dawn that as yet had scarcely penetrated indoors, they were searching this place for Toller the fugitive; and Franz was there to identify him, if he were found.
“Open! Open!” The doors seldom opened quickly enough, and again and again the sergeant had to kick down these doors. Doors entering on rooms with sagging, gravid ceilings and with lamps hastily lit. Entering on dark rooms filled to the peeling walls with beds. Collapsing rooms, filled with threadbare beds laden with whole bony families—whole families which night after night had bred on them those innumerable bone-thin children now smelling, in the darkness, of urine and of hate.
All the same, they had not found Toller; and presently for some reason Franz had been left alone like this in the darkness to guard the stairs while the rest of the patrol moved on elsewhere ...
Just at that point in his recollections Franz turned the horse’s head towards the forest. All at once the sleigh plunged in among the trees down a broad ride, and Augustine in his snow-bound loving ecstasy gave loud utterance to a hunting-cry. At that happy, wholly animal sound a tremor passed across Franz’s quailing, hunted face: for now in the paling darkness countless shadowy figures in their ghostlike nightclothes were hustling him and again hustling him, and the tide of them had begun to carry him away—in a twinkling that woman had snatched at his rifle and underfoot the child had writhed and bitten him and his falling gun had gone off lethally right among them, the women and the children—a deafening bang, and then the howling ...
Augustine failed to notice that tremor, for he was leaning right forward so as to be able to see past good old Franz and steal a glance at Mitzi.—Aha! At the happy, noble, British animal sound he had just emitted her parted, frost-pink lips had smiled.
Augustine leant back again in his place, content.
Mitzi had smiled ... but surely the smile lingered on her lips rather overlong? Indeed in the end it seemed frozen to a mere physical configuration, no pleasure nor humor remaining in it.
Once Mitzi’s childhood cataracts had been removed the only vision she ever had when without spectacles to give things some semblance of shape (those spectacles which might never be worn in public) was a sort of marbled mingling of light and shade. But this morning she had woken plagued with dark discs floating across things—discs which even the spectacles could not dispel; and now these swimming discs, or globules, had begun to coalesce in a queerly solid black cloud, curtaining totally one part of the field. Now too that black cloud had begun to emit minute but brilliant blue flashes along its advancing edge ... for it was advancing, every now and then the cloud jerked forward a little further and blocked out a little more of the field (moreover, in such an absolute way!).
Six months ago without even this much warning one eye had wholly collapsed, ceased to be a sense-organ at all. “The retina had detached,” they said. But that was the eye which had always been the weaker, quite apart from those cataracts in both of them; and the doctors were so full of comforting assurances about the remaining, stronger eye! Until now she had completely believed them; but was after all the same thing now happening to her “good” eye too? In a matter of hours or minutes—hastened perhaps by the jolting of the sleigh—might she find herself for ever afterwards stone blind?
That was the sudden premonition which had made Mitzi so suddenly abandon that smile of hers and leave it lying derelict on her lips, discarded and forgotten while she prayed:
Mary, Mother ... Oh Mary, Mother ... Heart of Jesus ...
So the sleigh glided on with them, and slid—all three swaying together, these three separate identities bundled up in one bundle: a trio, pressed flank to flank in such close physical communion as almost to seem physically one person. On and on through the whiteness and the blackness of the endless snow-burdened forest.
In the ears of all three of them similarly the silvery music of their sleigh’s sweet bells echoed off the endless equidistant serried boles.
It surprised Franz when at last they arrived at Röttningen to find Dr. Reinhold there. The eminent jurist was a busy man and seldom came to his brother’s house; but now Franz heard his unmistakable throbbing voice as soon as they entered the hall.
It seemed to come through the open library door where Dr. Ulrich had just appeared to greet them: “Two shots!” the exciting voice thrilled in tones rich with pathos: “Straight through the ceiling! Phut-phut! Surely a remarkable way of catching the chairman’s eye at a meeting ... and indeed he caught every eye, balancing there erect on a little beer-table—all those grandees in full fig, and him in a dirty mackintosh with his black tails showing under its skirts—like a waiter on the way home. In one hand a big turnip-watch, and a smoking pistol in the other ...”
A subdued buzz of appreciation was audible from the library. In the meanwhile Franz had been trying to murmur his parents’ excuses, but Dr. Ulrich seemed in a towering hurry and wouldn’t stop to listen to them—he would scarcely let the Lorienburg party get their furs off before he shepherded them in front of him into the already crowded library and pushed them into chairs. “S-s-s-sh!” he admonished them excitedly: “Reinhold was there, he saw everything! He left Munich before dawn and has just got here by way of Augsburg. They’re all in it—Ludendorff, Kahr, Lossow, Seisser, Poehner ...”
“You muddle everything, Uli! It’s all that Hitler!” said Reinhold plaintively, “I keep telling you!”
“... and Otto Hitler too,” Dr. Ulrich added hurriedly: “One of Ludendorff’s lot,” he explained.
“Adolf ...” his brother corrected him. “But not ‘and Adolf Hitler too’! As I’m trying to explain—only you will keep running in and out—little second-fiddle Hitler entirely stole the show! Ludendorff, today? Kahr?” he continued with ironical disdain, and snapped his fingers: “Pfui!—For months those two have both been stringing this Hitler along, each trying to use that empty brain and hypnotic tongue for his own ends: now Hitler has turned the tables!”
“It must all have been richly comic,” someone remarked comfortably.
“But on the contrary!” Dr. Reinhold was palpably shocked. “How can I have conveyed to you any such idea?—No, it was deeply impressive!—Macabre, if you like: a mis-en-scène by Hieronymus Bosch: but in no way comic!”
Once more everybody settled down to listen. “The hall was packed—by exclusive invitation only, for a pronouncement of Great Importance. Everybody who was anybody was there including our entire Bavarian cabinet—and Hitler too of course, he’d somehow been invited ...”
“When was this, and where?” Franz whispered to Ulrich, aside.
“Last night. Munich.”
“But WHERE?”
“S-s-s-sh! The Bürgerbräukeller: Kahr had engaged their biggest hall.”
“We all knew what we’d been summoned for, of course—more or less. It would be monarchy, or secession—or perhaps both ... federation with Austria, even. But Kahr seemed in no hurry to come to brass-tacks. He droned on and on. That tiny square head of his—for anthropometrically he’s a veritable text-book Alpine, that old boy, and his little head sank lower and lower on the expanse of his chest till I truly thought it would end up in his lap! Nothing about him looked alive except those two little brown eyes of his: from time to time they’d leave his notes and take just one peep at us—like mice from the mouths of their holes! Eight-fifteen—eight-twenty—on and on—eight-twenty-five—still endlessly saying nothing—eight-twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and then—you should have seen Kahr’s look of outrage at the interruption—that inexplicable Phut! Phut!”
Reinhold paused dramatically, palpably waiting till someone asked him, “What happened then?”
“Silence, at first—a moment of utter silence! But the watch in Hitler’s hand was fully as significant as his pistol. On the very stroke of eight-thirty—at the very moment he first pulled the trigger—the door burst open and in tumbled young Hermann Goering with a machine-gun squad! Steel helmets seemed to appear instantly out of nowhere: at every door, every window, all over the hall itself. And then Pandemonium broke loose! Shrieks and shouts, crashing furniture and smashing beer-jugs ... punctuated by that short sharp ululation peculiar to women in expensive furs ...
“Hitler jumped off his table and began pushing to the front, revolver still in hand. Two of Goering’s strong-arm boys half-lifted him onto the platform, and Kahr was shoved aside. So there he stood, facing us ... You know those piercing, psychotic, popping eyes of his? You know that long, comparatively legless body? (‘Incidentally you’re another Alpine, dear boy,’ I thought: ‘You’re certainly no Nordic ...’) But oh the adoring gaze those brawny pinhead gladiators of his kept turning on him from under their tin skull-cups, those ant-soldiers of his (and there seemed to be legions of them, let me tell you, there last night)!
“Now in a moment it was so quiet again you could hear Hitler panting—like a dog circling a bitch! He was profoundly excited. Indeed whenever he faces a crowd it seems to arouse him to a veritable orgasm—he doesn’t woo a crowd, he rapes it. Suddenly he began to screech: ‘On to Berlin! The national revolution has begun—I announce it! The Hakenkreuz is marching! The Army is marching! The Police are marching! Everybody is marching!’” Dr. Reinhold’s voice rasped harsher and harsher: “‘This hall is occupied! Munich is occupied! Germany is occupied! Everywhere is occupied!’” In his mimicry Dr. Reinhold glared round the room with quivering nostrils, as if daring anyone to move in his seat. Then he continued: “‘The Bavarian government is deposed! The Berlin government is deposed! God Almighty is deposed—hail to the new Holy Trinity Hitler-Ludendorff-Poehner! Hoch!’”
“Poehner?” said someone incredulously: “That ... long, stuttering policeman?”
“Once—Jailer of Stadelheim!—Now, Bavaria’s new prime minister!” said Reinhold with ceremony: “Hoch!”
“And Ludendorff ... so Ludendorff is behind it all,” said someone else.
“Ye-es—in the sense that the tail is ‘behind’ the dog,” said Reinhold: “Commander-in-chief of a thrice-glorious (non-existent) National Army—Hoch! It’s Lossow who’s to be minister of war. I tell you, when Ludendorff at last came on the scene he was in a smoking rage: it was perfectly obvious Hitler had bounced him—he’d known nothing about the coup till they got him there. He spoke honeyed words, but he looked like a prima donna who’s just been tripped into the wings.”
“And Egon Hitler himself?”
“‘Adolf,’ please ... our modest Austrian Alpine? He asks so little for himself! Only ...” Reinhold stood exaggeratedly at attention—“Only to be Supreme Dictator of the Whole German Reich—Hoch! Hoch! HOCH!”
Someone in Reinhold’s audience made a more farmyard noise.
“My friend—but you ought to have been there!” said Reinhold, fixing him with his eyes: “I couldn’t understand it ... frankly, I can’t understand it now so perhaps you clever people will explain it to me? Hitler retires to confer in private with Kahr & Co.—at the pistol-point I’ve little doubt, for Kahr and Lossow were flabbergasted and palpably under arrest—while young Hermann Goering in all his tinkling medals—all gongs and glamour—is left to keep us amused! Back comes Hitler: he has shed his trench-coat now and there his godhead stands revealed—our Titan! Our New Prometheus!—in a slop-shop tail-coat nearly reaching to his ankles, das arme Kellnerlein! But then Hitler begins to speak again: “November criminals” and “Glorious Fatherland” and “Victory or Death” and all that gup. Then Ludendorff speaks: “On to Berlin—there’s no turning back now ...” “That’s spiked Kahr’s separatist, royalist guns pretty thoroughly,” I thought: “and just in the nick of time! Prince Rupprecht is right out of it from now on—he’s missed his cue ...” But no! For then the notoriously anti-royalist Hitler chokes out some intention-ally only half-audible laudatory reference to ‘His Majesty’: whereon Kahr bursts into tears and falls into Hitler’s arms, babbling about ‘Kaiser Rupprecht’! Ludendorff can’t have heard what Hitler said or Kahr said either—fortunately, for he’d certainly have burst asunder ... but as it is, everyone shakes hands all round ... then State-Commissioner Baron von Kahr speaks, then Commanding-General von Lossow, then Chief-of-Police Colonel von Seisser—all licking the Austrian ex-corporal’s boots! All pledging him their support! Not that I’d trust one of them a yard if I were Hitler ... any more than I’d trust Hitler’s new-found reverence for royalty if I were Rupprecht.
“So much for the stage and the professionals: in the audience we’re all jumping on our seats and cheering ourselves silly. ‘Reinhold Steuckel, you level-headed eminent jurist!’ I kept telling myself. ‘This isn’t politics, it’s Opera. Everyone’s playing a part—but everyone!’”
“Grand Opera—or Opera-bouffe?” asked someone behind the speaker.
Reinhold turned right round in his chair and looked at his interrogator very seriously: “Ah, that’s the question! And it’s early days really to know the answer,” he added slowly. “But I think it’s what I hinted earlier: something not quite human.—Wagner you say? You’re thinking of that early, immature thing of his, Rienzi? Perhaps. Yes, the score is recognizably at least school of Wagner ... ah, but those ant-soldiers—all those sinister, animated insects and those rabbits and weasels on their hind legs ... and above all, Hitler ... Yes, it was Wagner, but Wagner staged by Hieronymus Bosch!”
He said all this with such compelling earnestness, enunciating those last words in so sibilant a whisper, that a chill hush fell on the whole room. Dr. Reinhold had not gained that courtroom reputation of his for nothing.
Dr. Ulrich kept bees, and the little honey-cakes which were being served (with liqueurs) were a speciality of the house: “Famous!” his guests exclaimed: “Wonderful—delicacies of the most surpassing excellence!” It quite shocked English Augustine to hear men sitting around and all talking so excitedly about food.
“Hitler would adore these cakes of yours, Uli,” said someone.
“But Herr Hitler adores anything sweet and sticky,” said someone else: “These little beauties would be wasted on him.” The speaker smacked his lips.
“That must be why he’s got such a pasty complexion,” (it was only Dr. Ulrich himself, it seemed, who had hardly heard of Adolf).
“Does anybody know just when Hitler clipped his mustache?” Franz asked his neighbor suddenly. But nobody did ...“Because, the first time I ever saw him it was long and straggling.”
“No!”
“He was standing on the curb, haranguing. And nobody in the street was listening: not one. They walked past him as if he was empty air: I was quite embarrassed ... I was only a boy, then, really,” Franz added apologetically.
“That must indeed have been most embarrassing for you, Baron,” put in Dr. Reinhold sympathetically. “What did you do? Did you manage to walk by too? Or did you stop and listen?”
“I ... couldn’t do either,” Franz confessed: “It was all too embarrassing. I thought he was someone mad, of course: he looked quite mad. In the end, rather than pass him I turned back and went by another street. He’d a torn old mackintosh which looked as if he always slept in it yet he wore a high stiff collar like a government clerk. He’d got floppy hair and staring eyes and he looked half-starved ...”
“A stiff white collar?” interposed Dr. Reinhold: “Probably he slept in that too. What the title of ‘Majesty’ on the lips of his pawnbroker means to an exiled monarch at Biarritz, or the return of his sword to a vanquished general, or his dinner-jacket to an English remittance-man on the Papuan beaches—that clerkly collar! His inalienable birthright as a Hereditary Life-member of the Lower Middle Classes—Hoch!”
“It can’t have been my lucky day,” Franz pursued, smiling wryly. “There was another prophet in the next street I turned along, too! And he was dressed only in a fishing-net: the chap thought he was St. Peter.”
Augustine liked Dr. Reinhold: intellectually he was obviously in a different class altogether from Walther and Franz (surely it was symptomatic how much Franz himself seemed to alter in Dr. Reinhold’s company!). So now Augustine slipped out of the seat he had been planted in, made his way over to Dr. Reinhold and began talking to him without more ado about a boy at his prep-school who hadn’t just thought he was God—he knew it. The boy (a small and rather backward and inky specimen) knew it beyond any shadow of doubt. But though he was Almighty God in person he had been curiously unwilling to admit it openly when questioned in public—even when taxed with it by someone big and important, with a right to a straight answer even from God (some prefect, say, or the captain of cricket): “Leighton Minor! For the last time—Are you God or aren’t you?” He’d stand on one leg and blush uncomfortably but still not say Yes or No ...
“Was he ashamed of His Godhead? Considering the state He’s let His universe get into ...”
“I don’t think it was that: n-n-no, it was more that if you couldn’t spot for yourself something which stood out a mile like that it was hardly for Him to make a song about it—altogether too self-advertising ...”
Dr. Reinhold was delighted: “But of course! Incarnate in an English boy how else could God behave? It’s how you all do behave, in fact.” Then he inquired of Augustine in the meekest of voices: “Mr. Englishman, tell me please because I should be so interested: are you God?”
Augustine’s jaw dropped.
“You see!” cried Dr. Reinhold triumphantly. But then he turned to Franz and said in tones of contrition: “Introduce us, please.” And thus—rather late in the day—Reinhold and Augustine formally “met.”
The German clicked his heels and murmured his own name, but Augustine just went straight on talking: “Sometimes we had to twist his arm like anything to make him own up to it.”
“Himmel!” Dr. Reinhold regarded his new friend with owlish anxiety: “Considering ... who He was, wasn’t that just a tiny bit unsafe?” Then he clapped his hands: “Listen, everybody! I want you to meet a young Englishman whose idea of a wet-afternoon’s harmless amusement for little boys is twisting the arm of ... of Almighty God!”
“He’d better meet Hitler then,” said a square woman sourly.
“It isn’t as if the Kampfbund themselves took Hitler seriously,” said someone. “He’s not one of their big men.”
“It’s all Putzi’s fault,” someone else was saying, “for bringing him to people’s parties: it has given him ideas.”
“He ruins any party ...”
“Oh no! When he talks about babies he’s really rather sweet ...”
“Putzi Hanfstaengl was with him last night looking like Siegfried,” Reinhold murmured: “Or rather, looking as if he felt like Siegfried,” he corrected himself.
“It isn’t only under the Hanfstaengls’ wing: nowadays some people actually invite him ...”
“Then they deserve what they get. I remember one dinner-party at the Bruckmanns ...”
“What—the famous occasion he tried to eat an artichoke whole?”
“Even two years ago in Berlin, at Helene Beckstein’s ...”
“At Putzi’s own house—his country cottage at Uffing ...”
“The formula is much the same everywhere these days,” said a rather squat actor-type, rising and moving down center: “First: a portentous message that he’ll be a bit late—detained on most important business. Then, about midnight—when he’s quite sure that his entrance will be the last—he marches in, bows so low to his hostess that his sock-suspenders show and presents her with a wilting bouquet of red roses. Then he refuses the proffered chair, turns his back on her and stations himself at the buffet. If anybody speaks to him he fills his mouth with cream puffs and grunts. If they dare to speak a second time he only fills his mouth with cream puffs. It isn’t just that in the company of his betters he can’t converse himself—he aims to be a kind of social upas, to kill conversation anywhere within reach of his shadow. Soon the whole room is silent. That’s what he’s waiting for: he stuffs the last cream puff half-eaten into his pocket and begins to orate. Usually it’s against the Jews: sometimes it’s the Bolshevik Menace: sometimes it’s the November Criminals—no matter, it’s always the same kind of speech, quiet and winning and reasonable at first but before long in a voice that makes the spoons dance on the plates. He goes on for half an hour—an hour, maybe: then he breaks off suddenly, smacks his sticky lips on his hostess’s hand again, and ... and out into the night, what’s left of it.”
“How intolerable!” exclaimed a youngish woman, angrily. She had an emancipated look rather beyond her years.
“At least there’s this about it,” said Dr. Reinhold thoughtfully: “No one who has once met Herrn Hitler at a party is likely to forget it.”
“But they’ll remember him with loathing!”
“Dear lady,” he answered sententiously, “there’s one thing even more important for a rising politician than having friends; and that is—plenty of enemies!”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does. For a politician rises on the backs of his friends (that’s probably all they’re good for), but it’s through his enemies he’ll have to govern afterwards.”
“Poppycock!” said the sensible young woman—but too sweetly, she calculated, for it to sound rude.
Suddenly Mitzi, forgotten in a corner, gave a startled, poignant cry. But in that buzzing room almost nobody heard it—not even Augustine, for Dr. Reinhold had just offered to show him Munich and Augustine was just saying with alacrity “When shall I come?”
“Tomorrow, if you like,” Dr. Reinhold smiled. “But no—I was forgetting the revolution ... better give that a day or two ... say, early next week?”
Thus Augustine was one of the last to notice Mitzi’s curious behavior. The room had dropped almost silent, for after that cry she had stepped forward a pace or two and was now standing with both groping hands held straight out in front of her. The tears of final defeat were running down her face.
“Is that child drunk?” asked the sensible young woman, loudly and inquisitively.
But in almost no time the now stone-blind Mitzi had got control of herself again. Hearing the question she turned and laughed, good humoredly.
There had surely been something a little brittle and heartless about that party at the Steuckels all through (or so it seemed to Augustine and even Franz too looking back on it afterwards): the talk was all just a trifle noisier than need be, the attitudes more striking: there was an evident bravura and a bravado about all these people. For these were in fact all people somehow, some way, riding the Great Inflation. Thus in their manner they reminded one rather of skaters caught far out too late in a thaw, who know their only but desperate hope lies in speed. The ice is steaming in the sun and there can be no turning back. They hear anguished cries behind them but they lower their heads with muffled ears, they flail with their arms and thrust ever more desperately with their legs in their efforts to skate even faster still on the slushy, cracking, sinking ice.
Anything rather than get “involved”: whereas Lothar and his lost like pursued “involvement” as if that were in itself salvation.
Franz felt he never wanted to see the Steuckels again—he was done with all that sort.
They got back to Lorienburg soon after dusk, just as the new moon was setting.
Naturally it was not till the first shock to them of Mitzi’s disaster had begun to wear off and they were alone together late in the evening that Franz told his father and uncle the story of the Beer-hall Putsch.
“What stupidity!” said Walther. “It almost passes belief.”
“So our ‘White Crow’ has managed to push his nose into the big stuff at last,” said Otto. “Well, well!”
“You said once he had served under you during the war,” said Franz. “What on earth was he like as a soldier?”
“As a lance-corporal?” Otto corrected him a trifle pedantically: “He was a Regimental Messenger, which rates as a one-stripe job ...” Then he considered the question conscientiously: “adequate, I suppose—by wartime standards: he hasn’t the stuff in him for a peacetime Regular N.C.O. of course.” Otto set his lips grimly.
“Who are you talking about?” asked Walther absently.
“After the war,” Otto continued, “Roehm’s intelligence outfit at District Command found him a job as one of their political stool-pigeons—spying on his old messmates for pay, not to put too fine a point on it. That started him: now, he seems to consider himself something of a politician in his own right—in the beer-hall and street-corner world, he and his fellow-rowdies. But it’s Roehm still pulls the strings, of course.”
“Oh, that chap of Roehm’s?—Yes, I’ve seen his name on the placards,” Walther remarked.
“But in the regiment?” Franz persisted.
“I can’t really tell you much,” said Otto a little haughtily. “He did what he was told. He ... he wasn’t a coward, that I’m aware of.” Otto paused, and then continued a little unwillingly: “I never cottoned to him. Damned unpopular with the men too: such a silent, killjoy sort of cove. No normal interests—he couldn’t even join the others in a good grumble! That’s why they all called him the ‘white crow’: in anything they all took part in, Lance-corporal Hitler was always the odd man out.”
“I don’t much like your Captain Roehm either, what I’ve heard of him,” said Walther.
“Able fellow,” said Otto: “A fine organizer! He’s invaluable to the Army.—But it’s that snort of his, chiefly: though he can’t help it—nose smashed in the war. But it makes him seem a bit abrupt, and he’s conscious of it.—Don’t call him ‘my’ Captain Roehm, though: he wasn’t in the regiment.—We had his young friend ‘Gippy’ Hess for a time,” Otto suddenly grimaced: “Frankly, in the List Regiment we were a pretty scratch lot, all told.”
No one commented: they both knew it had been quixotic of Otto to accept that wartime infantry posting.
In the pause which followed Otto’s mind must have reverted to his “white crow”; for “... half-baked little backstreet runt!” he muttered suddenly—and with surprising feeling, for an officer, considering that Hitler had been merely an “other ranks.” Franz eyed him curiously. Clearly there’d been some clash.
Meanwhile the telephone kept ringing. Munich was still “no lines” but all that day rumor had succeeded rumor: rumors that the Revolution was marching on Berlin, rumors that the Revolution had failed, and that Ludendorff and Hitler were dead. Dr. Reinhold of course had left Munich for Röttningen before dawn that morning: he had known no more than the next man what had happened after that Bierkeller scene.
*
Lothar had been there, in Munich; but Lothar’s excitement that momentous night had reached such a pitch that in his own memories afterwards of what had happened there were inexplicable blanks. Scene succeeded scene: but what had happened between them, just how one thing led to another, seemed subject to total non-recall.
Years later Lothar could still vividly remember the mounting elation and the rhythmic, stupefying effect of the Nazi march down the Brienner Strasse, the crowd growing like a snowball ... that absurd tumbling urchin ... the woman smelling of carbolic soap who sprang forward out of the crowd and kissed him ... that other woman who marched beside him and kept thrusting a crucifix under his nose as if he was a condemned criminal bound for the scaffold.
But the whole troop was bound for the Bürgerbräu, surely (where the Revolution was), by way of the Ludwig Bridge? How was it then that the next thing he could remember he was somewhere different altogether and quite alone?
Scene Two.
It was dark. Lothar was in some enclosed place, and the darkness was only relieved by the murky trailing flames of torches held by hurrying hooded monks. It wasn’t a gun Lothar was carrying now, it seemed to be a pick. No Fritz, no Willi—none of his friends were here with him; but one of those hooded faceless figures was padding along ahead of him, guiding him and hastening him on. The air was warmer than the chill night air outside but close and dank—a sort of earthy, cellar-warmth. The smoke of his guide’s torch made him cough, and his cough echoed—these were vaults ... there was a damp smell of mold, a smell of bones ... this was a place of tombs, they were deep underground, these must be catacombs ... they were treading in a deep, down-soft dust that muffled sound—it must be the dust of bones.
The small Nazi working-party they came to were older men mostly—none of them ones Lothar knew. From a different troop. They worked by the light of the monks’ torches in reliefs of sixes, for there was no room for more to wield picks and shovels at one time and anyhow the dust hung so heavy on this dead underground air that one soon tired.
The thickness of the masonry they were digging through seemed endless. Lothar found it hard to believe this was just some bricked-up vault: for who would have bricked up an entrance with masonry more than four feet thick? When at last they did break through, however, the whole thing was plain: for this they were entering was no ecclesiastical crypt any more, but the cellars under the barracks next door. Efficiently sealed off and sound-proofed from the barracks above, moreover: the reason being eight thousand rifles hidden here from the Allied Disarmament Commission—and theirs for the taking!
“Von Kahr himself signed our orders—the old fox!”—“Eh? Surely not!”—“Yes indeed! Our officer had to show them to the Prior ...”—“But surely he’d have intended this backdoor for royalist uses; and no doubt that’s where these simple monks think the rifles are going even now!”—“But Kahr has joined us with Lossow and Seisser, hasn’t he?”—“Ye-es ... or so Herr Esser said: but he’s such a slippery cove, Dr. Kahr ...”—“The old fox! But he’s trapped at last ...”
Eight thousand rifles, well-greased, neatly racked—what a sight for weapon-hungry eyes! Re-inforcements of friendly Oberlanders arrived, and a living chain was formed to pass the guns from hand to hand, along the tunnels, up the torch-lit steps, along the corridors and cloisters—all the long way through these dark and silent sacred places out to where Goering’s plain vans were waiting in the street ...
It went on for hours.
Scene Three.
Lothar was dripping wet and had lost his boots. It was early morning. He was agued with cold so that he could hardly speak ...
Lothar must have swum the river, but he had little idea why he should have had to swim: presumably the bridges were closed—or he had thought they might be ... or else, perhaps someone had thrown him in.
But he had to reach Captain Goering, had to tell him ...
In the gardens below the Bürgerbräukeller brownshirts were bivouacked, but it was perishing cold and no one had slept. Dawn was breaking at last, still and gray with an occasional lone flake of snow, as Lothar picked his way among them. In the entrance-corridor of the Keller was huddled a civilian brass band, the kind one hires for occasions: they had just arrived, they were in topcoats still and with shrouded instruments. They were arguing: they looked hungry and obstinate: their noses dripped. They were being shepherded unwillingly into the hall where the meeting had been, now full of brownshirts camped among the wreckage; but the bandsmen were demanding breakfast before they’d play to them—and at that word Lothar’s saliva-glands stabbed so violently it hurt like toothache.
Then someone took pity on the shivering Lothar and pushed him into the cloakroom, telling him to help himself. The place was still littered with many of last night’s top-hats, furs, opera-cloaks, uniform-coats, dress-swords ...
“They were all in too much hurry to bother,” said a sardonic voice: “All the upper-crust of Bavaria—and when we said ‘Scat!’ they were thankful to run like rabbits. Take your choice, comrade.”
The speaker was a portly little brownshirt with a kindly, humorous face. In private life he was an atheist and a tobacconist, without reverence for God or man; and now he was drunker than he looked. It tickled him to wrap Lothar in a fur-lined greatcoat with the insignia of a full general on it. If Lothar had noticed those badges of rank, as a good German the very thought would have burned him to a cinder—like the Shirt of Nessus; but now his new friend was pouring a hot mugful of would-be coffee into him, and he noticed nothing. Lothar must see Captain Goering—and at once—about those rifles ... But no one seemed to know whether Goering was even in the building. However, some of the other high-ups had just got back from a reconnaissance in the city, someone said: they were in a room upstairs ... Hitler, General Ludendorff ...
So Lothar, warmed a little at last, wandered off upstairs unhindered. The length of this vast greatcoat almost hid his stockinged feet, but he was just as wet underneath as ever and left wet footprints everywhere on all the carpets.—He must find Captain Goering ...
In the half-darkness of an upstairs corridor Lothar met a hurrying orderly and stopped him imperiously: “Where are they? I have to report!”
“This way, Excellency,” the man said, saluting (but Lothar was too pre-occupied to notice, for those rifles might have reached God-knows-whose trusting hands by now). Then the orderly led him through a little anteroom where piano and music-stands had been shoved on one side to make room for a chin-high pile of packages, and opened a door:
“... be hanging from the lamp-posts in the Ludwigstrasse,” a cracking, nervous voice was exclaiming within.
On the threshold, Lothar checked himself in dismay. Goering wasn’t there; and clearly this wasn’t a Council of War at all, for there were only two people in the room and by their dress both seemed civilians. In a thick and fragrant haze of tobacco-smoke a stout old gentleman all puffy dewlaps and no neck sat stolidly sipping red wine and pulling at his cigar alternately: he was staring at Lothar—but only as if his gaze had already been fixed on the door before it opened—with dull, stony, heavy-lidded eyes. Under his scrabble of gray mustache the open, drooping mouth was almost fishlike, and he had dropped cigar-ash all down his old shooting-jacket. Beyond him Lothar glimpsed some nondescript with his back turned, gnawing his fingernails and violently twitching his shoulders as if some joker had slipped something down his neck ...
A waiting-room! But Lothar had no time to waste—he must find Captain Goering at once and tell him those monastery rifles were useless, they’d all had the firing-pins removed.
Lothar retreated, leaving the door ajar. But in the ante-room the orderly was already gone, and Lothar paused—at a loss.
“Tonight we’ll be hanging from the lamp-posts in the Ludwigstrasse!” The interruption had been so brief that these histrionic words seemed still suspended on the stale air.
“Nevertheless we march,” the seated one replied flatly and with distaste.
In the ante-room Lothar stood rooted—he knew that voice (why hadn’t he known the face?): it was General Ludendorff. Then of course the other ... this wasn’t at all his platform voice, but it must be ...
Inside the room, Hitler turned: “But we’ll be fired-on if we do, and then it’s all up—we can’t fight the Army! It’s The End, I tell you!” Then, as if he had forgotten who he was talking to, he added, ruminating: “If we appeal to Rupprecht, perhaps he’d intercede?”
For their impromptu Revolution was already running on the rocks. Hoodwinked by the “earnest of good faith” of those useless rifles, Hitler had let Kahr go; then Kahr, Lossow and Seisser—the all-powerful triumvirate—once safely out of his hands had turned against him. Prince Rupprecht had unequivocally refused to rise to Hitler’s fly—not with Ludendorff’s big shadow darkening the water; and that had decided Kahr. Lossow had been virtually arrested by his own city commandant till he made clear his obedience to Berlin. Seisser too had dutifully bowed to the will of the police-force he commanded. So now the Kampfbund was to be put down by force unless it surrendered.
Government re-inforcements had been pouring into Munich all night, and the “Vikings” had already deserted to them. The Nazis held the City Hall—for what that was worth—while Roehm with his Reichskriegsflagge had seized the local War Office and now couldn’t get out of it again; but all other public buildings were in the hands of the Triumvirs. They held the railways, the telephones, the radio station—indeed no one in the Nazi camp had even thought of securing those vital points, there can seldom have been a would-be coup-d’état so naïvely impromptu and unplanned.
Troops were reported to be massing now in the Odeonsplatz, with field-guns ...
Lothar peeped in again unseen. The general still sat his chair as heavily as a stone statue sits its horse and his eyes were still set in the same stare, though lowered now to the carpet just inside the door.
General Erich Ludendorff was only fifty-eight: not quite the “old gentleman” Lothar had taken him for, but nevertheless his mind like his muscles was becoming a little set. Nowadays pre-conceived ideas were not easily shaken and if they were tumbled they left a jagged gap: Kahr’s double-crossing Ludendorff could take, for the man was a civilian and though a protestant was in the Cardinal’s pocket one could only expect of him the moral standards of ... of cardinals: but a world where a Lossow—Commander-in-chief of the Bavarian Army— could break his “word as a German Officer” was a new world altogether for Ludendorff!
The old order was ended for the old war-lord, and he knew it; but his puffy features were quite without expression, as if their soft surfaces had no organic connection with nerve and muscle and bone and brain within, and he sat staring without visible surprise at those wet footmarks on the carpet—the marks of two naked feet where lately a German general in full-dress uniform had stood.
“Eh?—We march,” said Ludendorff again. His voice remained firm as a lion’s, and this time it was unquestionably a command.
But when Ludendorff had said “We march” (as he presently explained) he hadn’t meant it in the military sense. No soldier would try to capture Munich—or even to relieve Roehm beleaguered in the War Office—by doing as Ludendorff now proposed: by marching three thousand men through the narrow streets of the Old City in a kind of schoolgirl crocodile sixteen abreast. But a clever (and desperate) politician might.
A military operation would cross by the Max-Josef Bridge in a flanking movement through the English Garden—some tactic of that kind: but what would be the use? That fellow Hitler (thought Ludendorff) was right: they couldn’t fight the Army. But suppose that instead, in all seeming confidence and trust like friendly little puppy-dogs, their whole companionage paraded peaceably right onto the points of the Army’s bayonets ... would German soldiers ever fire on inoffensive brother-Germans? And once contact was made, once the officers saw their old war-lord Ludendorff in front of their eyes and had to choose, was it conceivable they would prefer to obey the unspeakable Lossow who had turned his coat twice in one night? Barely an hour ago the streets were still placarded with Lossow’s name linked with ours ...“And once the Army obeys my orders again, the road to Berlin lies open!”
Lothar was so bewildered that he stood listening outside dumbfoundered and dripping among the bales of bank-notes which half-filled the ante-room, and scarcely noticed Captain Goering as the latter strode suddenly past him and entered the room beyond.
Goering listened to Ludendorff’s plan; but then his eye met Hitler’s. These two had rather less faith in the magic of the “old war-lord’s” name and presence nowadays than the “old war-lord” had himself. Ludendorff had been slipping—didn’t the old boy realize how much he had slipped these last few years? That flight to Sweden in ’18, and all those antics since ...
Goering suggested instead a retreat on Rosenheim—to “rally our forces” there, he hastened to add. But Ludendorff fixed this bravest-of-the-brave with his stony look: Rosenheim was all too convenient for the Austrian frontier! Hitler also turned his blue stare on Goering: for reasons best kept to himself, escape into his native Austria held no attractions for Hitler.
Goering dropped his eyes and did not press it. But the suggestion all the same tipped the scales in Hitler’s mind, for any alternative was preferable to “Rosenheim”; and he turned to Ludendorff’s plan after all. Hitler’s own “magic” at least was new; and if that called out anything comparable with last night’s cheering crowds they would march behind such a screen of women and children that no one could fire on them!
A coup-d’état by popular acclamation? Maybe it was a forlorn hope. But at least it meant, for Hitler, sticking to the one technique he was yet versed in—the technique of the public meeting.
Blindly Lothar wandered away, not knowing whether he was mad or sane, awake or dreaming. Goering ... he had a message for Captain Goering, something about some guns.
One thing, the arch-plotters agreed, was essential: if this gigantic confidence-trick of Ludendorff’s was to work the marching men themselves must have no inkling that Munich was in “enemy” hands, for they must positively radiate friendliness and trust. No one must know the real state of affairs outside the innermost circle. So, shortly before eleven, a briefing-parade for officers was held in the fencing-school and there the supreme leaders, beaming, put their next subordinates “in the picture,” assuring them that everything in the city was going like clockwork under the capable management of their obedient allies, Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, and all ranks should be so informed. Today the Kampfbund would parade ceremonially through the city, merely to “show the flag” and to thank the citizens for the warmth of their support: they would then take up a position for the night outside somewhere to the north, and wait there for regular troops to join them ... and after that—Berlin!
Officers and men alike, that’s what they were told.
Lothar never did get to Goering; and the Oberland adjutant he at length reported to about the defective rifles, being fresh from that “enlightenment” in the fencing-school, took it not at all tragically. He burst out laughing: “Kahr—the old fox! He just can’t change his habits, that’s all ... I admit though I was surprised when he volunteered those rifles!” But it didn’t really matter, he explained to Lothar, for everything was going swimmingly: they could collect and fit the pins this evening at the latest, and meanwhile it was only a parade the arms were wanted for.
Lothar was thoroughly bewildered; and Hope that wiry young woman awoke anew. Could he have been quite wrong about what he thought he had heard upstairs? For this was evidently the latest news, and this was “official”—straight from the horse’s mouth ... but yet ...
The adjutant stole a doubtful look at Lothar’s dumb-foundered face. What ailed the boy?—As for all this about the rifles, the men mustn’t know they were armed with guns which couldn’t be fired: could this lad be trusted to hold his tongue or had he better “disappear”—be put under arrest for something, perhaps?
But just then Putzi Hanfstaengl’s giant frame began to be made manifest—feet first, like a proper deus ex machina; for he was coming downstairs from the council room (something seemed to have wiped the grin off his handsome great jaws for once—till he emerged into public view). So the adjutant whispered to him; whereon Hanfstaengl turned, and his powerful pianist’s fingers gripped Lothar by the arm: “You’re coming to the city with me, my lad!” he said.
Lothar hardly reached to his breastpocket, but Putzi lowered his face almost level with the bedraggled, hollow-eyed youth’s to add confidentially: “I must have an escort—to protect me!”
Dr. Hanfstaengl was such a famous tease! Lothar blushed; and then, in spite of the turmoil in his head, climbed into the car after his new master as proud as Punch to be in such important company. There he tried hard to sit upright in the back seat with proper military stiffness; but before they had even reached the bridge he was sound asleep. Thus Lothar’s friends Fritz and Willi both took part in the famous march but not Lothar, who slept like a log for hours.
When Lothar woke at last he found himself on a floor somewhere. It was the sound of two voices talking urgently which woke him, one of them unmistakably philosopher-editor Rosenberg’s. Lothar’s head was on a bundle of galley-proofs, and his eyes opened with a start only a few inches from the turn-ups of Rosenberg’s bright blue trousers and dirty orange socks with clocks. So he must somehow be in the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter, he guessed.
But as the clouds of sleep began to clear Lothar realized these people too were both talking and acting as if the Revolution had failed. While he talked, Rosenberg was cramming clothing into a broken briefcase on his desk as if for a hurried departure (doubtless preferring brighter and looser neckwear than that usually worn by politicos on lamp-posts). For a second or two the stained tail of a crumpled purple shirt trailed across Lothar’s face; but he shut his eyes and listened and lay still, his temples bursting with sweat. For what he heard next was even more incredible still. That whole briefing parade had been one deliberate, colossal lie! Indeed, the men “had had the wool pulled properly over their eyes,” said Rosenberg’s companion approvingly. The march was on, and they were all going like lambs to the slaughter! Rosenberg himself was so certain it would end in a massacre that he for one wasn’t waiting to see it. Putzi Hanfstaengl too (one gathered) had gone home to pack ...
Even the leaders who were marching had made their arrangements—or arrangements had been made for them, whether or not they knew it. There would be a car waiting for Hitler (Rosenberg’s companion said) in the Max-Josefs-Platz with engine running: he could nip down Perusa Street to it—if he survived that far. Goering too had sent someone home to fetch him his passport ...
Now Rosenberg was choosing his own passport—choosing it, he seemed to have a whole drawerful of them.
When the two men left at last Lothar was not far behind them. He thought of Fritz and Willi and all his other noble friends going unwittingly to their deaths and his bowels yearned.
But then once again something black descended like a blind over Lothar’s power of reason. It was simply not possible (he told himself) that the Movement had been lied to deliberately by its leaders like that. Hitler loved his men, he would never knowingly lie to them this way and lead them into danger; and as for the heroic, gallant Goering ... let alone General Ludendorff!—No, if these leaders had indeed had evidence of the Triumvirs’ treachery they hadn’t believed it because they were too noble to believe; and it was just this noble incredulity the beastly triumvirate had banked on, to lure the Army of Light into the depths of the city so that when the jaws of the trap closed the slaughter might be all the more complete.
Devils! Lothar bounded down those office stairs four at a time, as if every bound trod underfoot a triumvir. Somehow he must find Fritz and Willi—somehow he must warn them ...
And warn Captain Goering ...
But as he neared the route the city seemed solid with police, and half the streets were closed.
Five years ago almost to the day Kurt Eisner too had marched into Munich—with flying beard and floppy black hat like a seedy professor of pianoforte, having half the hooligans of Munich at his heels—and so come to power.
But November the Seventh 1918 had been unseasonably warm: perfect Putsch weather. Eisner had the advantage of surprise too, for he marched first and announced his revolution afterwards. There was little risk of organized opposition since the troops were still at the front and the whole city numbed by defeat.
On November the Ninth 1923 the prospects were chill and gray. It was unseasonably cold—bitterly cold, with a biting wind now and occasional flurries of snow. When the march at last began the buglers with their chapped lips found it difficult to blow. Fritz and Willi shivered in their cotton shirts with no tunics and their chins were raw: the moment they stopped singing their teeth chattered. The “cheering crowds of spectators” could be counted in twos and threes, and were chilled to the bone.
It had been past twelve when the march moved off from the Bürgerbräu and a few yards down the hill it had halted again. Peering over the heads in front, big Fritz could see there was some sort of scuffle going on down at the Ludwig Bridge. It was apparently the police-cordon there making trouble—the wooden-heads! But then a mixed bag of fifty or more leading Munich Jews padded past the waiting column and on down to the bridge at the double. A wave of laughter followed them; for whatever their past dignities (and many were elderly, prominent citizens), today they were all dressed only in underwear and socks: they’d been locked all night in a back room of the Bürgerbräu like that. Captain Goering himself, with his elfin humor, must be taking the situation in hand. Indeed Goering must have threatened to drop all these hostages in the river to drown if the police didn’t show more sense; for almost at once the column began to move forward again, and at last the river was crossed.
Four hundred yards into the Old City however they halted a second time. This time it was their own leaders who halted them, wanting to make quite sure everyone was fully “in the picture” in case of misunderstandings. Any soldiers or armed police they might meet (they were told) would be patrolling the city “on behalf of our revolution, understand! In the Odeonsplatz maybe we’ll find a detachment of regulars drawn up apparently to face us: with guns to their shoulders, even ... but don’t be nervous, that’s just to cow any hostile rowdies in the crowd lining our route so sing ’em a rousing chorus, boys, and give them a hearty cheer as we draw level with them ... Oh, and just in case of accidents in these crowded streets we’d better not march with rifles loaded.”
When the marching column reached the Marienplatz they found the city hall festooned with swaztika flags, and in the open square in front they were cheered by a small but milling crowd. That crowd had just been whipped up by Julius Streicher in his juiciest vein. Indeed that was why Hitler had sent Streicher on down there ahead; for here, potentially—if Streicher had really done his stuff—was the human screen Hitler needed.
If only enough of these cheering citizens would tag along with the marchers from now on, keeping between the moving column and the guns ... If only it hadn’t been so beastly cold today ...
But the wind was indeed too bitter. Struggling to reach the Marienplatz Lothar could make little progress against the solid mass of citizenry hurrying away.
As the procession moved off from the Marienplatz again Ludendorff took his place in the van, on foot, in front of the standard-bearers even. On that, Hitler and one or two other notables and would-be notables jostled their way to his side: they had convinced themselves by now that there would be no shooting, that the trick would work.
The Odeonsplatz was their objective, for that was where the troops were said to be waiting for them: that was the psychological point d’appui. From the Marienplatz two routes converge on it, like the uprights of a capital “A” with the short length of Perusastrasse for a cross-stroke, and that bit of pseudo-Florentine nonsense the “Feldherrnhalle” loggia in its tip. The route they chose was the left-hand one, the Wein-and-Theatinerstrasse; and the leaders were already half way along it before seeing that the far end was indeed blocked solid by a small detachment of soldiery—with guns.
Here at last, then, straight ahead, were those bayonets Ludendorff was to deflect with the magic of his presence! Those triggers no German finger could pull ...
We have only to march straight up to them, straight on ...
(Was conviction weakening?)
How far have we got? Tramp, tramp ... just ahead lies the corner of Perusastrasse—the last side-turning, before ...
“Look,” said someone excitedly to Lothar in the thinning crowd, “there’s Ludendorff!” The fabulous, the Army’s idol, walking straight towards those Army guns in his old shooting-jacket ...“And that beside him’s Hitler, his faithful friend; and God-knows-who ...”
Tramp, tramp, and flags waving and a band somewhere tootling and the men singing, tramp, tramp ...
And most of the remaining spectators, cold and bored, remembering their lunches and turning away to go home.
Thirty yards more ...
In the throes of their fore-knowledge the leaders now felt their feet going up and down like pistons, as if they were not really advancing at all, tramp, tramp. No, it was the muzzles of the guns which were all the time moving nearer.
Twenty yards more ...
Hitler keeps his eyes fixed sternly ahead, yet out of their corners can’t but be acutely aware of the delicately-nurtured schoolgirl wheeling her bicycle at his very elbow. “She’s trying in vain to match her stride to my stride ...” Quite easily, though, she matches the men’s voices in song with her suprisingly deep contralto.
Fifteen yards ... Ten ... and now on the right the opening of Perusastrasse is bearing irresistibly down upon us, an open mouth ...
“My God I’ll give up politics! Never again ...”
It came like the sudden inexplicable unwilled lurch of a planchette at a séance, that sudden unanimous swing of the whole group of leaders into a right-wheel turn—away from the guns, straight into the shelter of that side-street! It was so sudden that the girl taken unaware fell over her bicycle and tore her stockings, and that was the last they saw of her.
The whole cheering follow-my-leader crocodile followed, of course—without a thought, without a worry, singing their heads off in the honor of the troops whose guns at point-blank range were still trained on their defenseless flank as they wheeled. They still hadn’t an inkling of what they were now right on the very edge of.
For the leaders the respite was brief: in a very few yards this short cross-street would reach the open Max-Josefs-Platz. To the left, then, would lie the narrow canyon of Residenzstrasse—the other, perhaps less well-guarded route to the Odeonsplatz ... the route in any case they now had to take ... Ah, but had they? For also from this Max-Josef Square a broad, broad boulevard led back totally unmenaced straight to the river again: the primrose way of retreat.
A primrose-yellow car was parked there, by the monument. As they neared the corner it was young von Scheubner-Richter (Ludendorff’s right-hand-man) who recognized it as Hitler’s—and he sucked in his cheeks. Straightway he locked his arm very firmly in Hitler’s. He’d see to it the old general wasn’t left in the lurch.
But now somebody had ordered another halt, another rifle-inspection: officers were to make quite sure again that every breech was empty.
That primrose-yellow car was trembling slightly—so its engine was running, ready! Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter at Hitler’s side stood still and tightened his comradely grip. Meanwhile, in the ranks behind, Willi was yawning with the cold and his stiff fingers fumbled on the bolt. Was there no end to inspections? He was getting horribly bored. Fritz blew on his fingers, and cursed—he had broken a nail. Were all revolutions as dull as this one? It was a relief to them all when the march started again.
But the tense troop of police waiting among the statues in the Feldherrnhalle had heard that echoing rattle of bolts as hundreds of breeches at one time were flung open for inspection, and drew their own conclusions. So the rebels were loading: they meant with their vastly superior numbers to rush it. And the police were so few ... but that last hundred yards of the Residenzstrasse was a Thermopylae—fifty men could hold it against five thousand, if they were resolute.
At the corner of the Square Willi had thought he caught a glimpse of young Scheidemann near that purring yellow car. He seemed to be trying to signal to them, and Willi nudged Fritz—but this chap looked so doleful it surely couldn’t have been Lothar!
Funny, though, how empty the streets were, suddenly: what had become of all those cheering spectators who had filled the Marienplatz? As the troop in front wheeled left there was not a single civilian who followed it into the Residenzstrasse—only one funny little dog in a winter waistcoat of Scotch plaid, looking important.
When Princess Natascha (for that girl with the bicycle was Mitzi’s Russian friend) had picked herself up, the head of the procession was already out of sight and Perusastrasse chock-a-block with them; but she guessed they would turn left again up Residenzstrasse. She had better get to the Odeonsplatz ahead of them if she wanted to see the fun; and indeed she was determined to miss nothing, for the lonely young exile was impervious to cold and quite intoxicated with the singing and the marching and the general community and exaltation of the thing. She mounted her machine and bicycled up the few remaining yards of the Theatinerstrasse as if the troops in front of her just didn’t exist (and they were in fact very few).
“Damn her!” muttered the officer in command. “She’s right in my line of fire!” So he let her through, and thus Tascha found herself the only civilian in the whole empty center of the Odeonsplatz with every window looking at her; but she wasn’t embarrassed at all, it wasn’t her nature to be. Pedaling hard, she gave a wide berth to the one armored car stationed there, but it took no notice. Good! The top of Residenzstrasse was open, she’d ride down and meet them: she could hear already the tramp of the approaching marchers, and as she got to the corner she caught the gleam of their bayonets. But just then a troop of armed police appeared out of the Feldherrnhalle and stretched right across the street in front of her, right to the Palace wall. An absurd thin line; but she had to jam her brakes on, and dismounted close behind them. Tramp, tramp ... between the policemen she could see the procession coming now: Nazis with fixed bayonets and Oberlanders without, side by side, sixteen abreast, a veritable horde. This pitifully thin string of policemen could no more halt them than the winning-tape halts a race, they’d be trampled underfoot if they didn’t skip jolly quick. Tramp, tramp ... she was dancing in time with it. What a juggernaut!
No one was singing now, and she heard a voice among the marching leaders suddenly cry out to the police: “Don’t shoot—it’s Ludendorff!” and then a policeman fired.
It had seemed a juggernaut; and yet when that ragged unwilling volley at last rang out it melted clean away.
At the sound of that first shot Hitler dropped so violently to the ground (accelerated moreover by the stricken weight of Ulrich Graf on top of him) that the arm locked in Scheubner-Richter’s was dislocated at the shoulder. This saved his life, however; for a second later young Scheubner-Richter collapsed dead in his stead, his chest wide open. Almost all the leaders, their nerves already keyed to snapping-point, had flung themselves down instantly like Hitler, performing the old soldier’s instinctive obeisance to the flying bullet: this briefly exposed the dumbfoundered men behind them—till they too collected their wits enough to fall flat as well: thus it was they who chiefly suffered, not the leaders.
The reluctant police were mostly pointing their carbines at the ground; but that saved no lives, for the flattened bullets bouncing off the granite setts only made the uglier wounds. After those few seconds of nervous gunfire there were many wounded. Moreover there were sixteen men stone dead or dying: the street darkening before their eyes, their souls at their lips.
The whole world was flat, the living among the dead, except for Ludendorff. For generals tend to lose the instinct to lie down as well as the agility; and the old war-lord’s magic was worth just this much still, that no one did aim at Ludendorff. He had stumbled and nearly fallen, but then with his hands in his jacket pockets he continued his stroll without one glance back at the dying and wounded and frightened men behind him, straight through the green line of police (which opened to let him pass). He seemed deep in thought. As he passed Tascha she heard him murmuring, “One, and nine, and two ...” Then he was gone.
No one fired twice—but it was enough. As soon as the noise ceased all who were able sprang to their feet and vanished. They were headed by the little dog in the plaid waistcoat at full speed, but Hitler—unhit, though stumbling from the pain and awkwardness of his shoulder—lay a good second in the race.
The sound of the firing had carried right to the rear of the column, and the rest of the parade too instantly dismissed. The police stood aghast. At that moment a dozen men could have rushed them; but there weren’t a dozen.
Stretcher-bearers appeared.
In front of Tascha lay Ludendorff’s young von Scheubner-Richter: his lungs had burst from his chest. Poor Max-Erwin! She’d met him at parties: he’d had so much charm ... and beside him lay someone else whose brains spattered the roadway for ten yards round. Weber, the Oberland leader, had staggered to his feet and stood leaning against the palace wall, in tears. Young Hermann Goering with two bullet-gashes in the groin was trying to drag himself behind one of the stone lions in front of the Residenz palace.
The street was bright with blood. As soon as the fumes of the carbines cleared you could even smell it; and at that something mad seized Tascha. She jerked into the saddle and bicycled wildly down the street, wobbling her course between the dead and dying. Tascha’s one object was to get plenty of splashes of blood on her bicycle-wheels (Hitler’s if possible: surely she had seen him fall?). But in point of fact even before Tascha had mounted, Hitler, legging it, had reached the Max-Josefs-Platz and been hustled into that waiting yellow car and was gone. Lothar caught a glimpse of him climbing into the car—he held his arm queerly extended, as if carrying something. So Tascha had to be content with quite anonymous blood: it was mostly Willi’s, as it happened.
Ludendorff continued his way unhindered across the empty square. As soon as he had added together the digits of this fatal year 1-9-2-3 and registered that their sum was 15 his mind went suddenly blank. He continued to march straight forward like a mechanical toy—quite without object, merely without impediment, plod, plod ...
He had already turned into the Brienner Strasse like that, plod, plod, when all at once he halted, thunderstruck—his brain suddenly springing into action again. But of course! Fifteen was the same total 1-9-1-4 added up to!—Fifteen! Ten and Five: applied to the alphabet these digits gave the letters “J” and “E”—the first two letters in JEhovah ... yes, and in JEsus too! Thus both years were auspicious years for both Germany’s joint enemies—the JEws and the JEsuits!
1914 ... the “JEhovah-JEsus” year when the noose of International Jewry-cum-Papistry had first closed so tight that Germany had been forced to strike back—in vain. Now, 1923 ... No wonder we’ve failed!
But at that moment a policeman dared at last to address him, politely requesting His Excellency’s attendance at the station. At the station however they were not quite so polite. A one-eyed wooden-faced sergeant looked up from his ledger and asked this distinguished client his name and address and made him spell it. The constable looked at his superior in surprise: why, surely Sergeant knew that face—and knew how to spell Ludendorff? Hadn’t Sergeant lost his eye (he always told them) in the ill-fated “Ludendorff offensive” of 1918?
The little dog in the waistcoat at last found his master again—an elderly, frock-coated, elegant citizen with so neat a spade beard it deserved a prize (he slept with it in a net); and they both rejoiced. Willi meanwhile sat on the pavement outside the post-office in the Max-Josefs-Platz, applying a tourniquet to his own copiously-bleeding leg, his head in a whirl. Tascha had the misfortune to have her bicycle stolen while she was being sick in a ladies’ lavatory, and hurried home on foot to write her letter (in two-inch script) to Mitzi.
The public health department cleaned up the messy Residenzstrasse with wonderful speed and thoroughness: is was the sort of job they excelled at. The police put on ferocious airs as if one and all they habitually ate Kampfbund kids for breakfast, and made numerous difficult and dangerous arrests (such as Willi, who was too giddy to stand up). Then one by one the shops and restaurants on the route of the march re-opened (the others elsewhere had never closed) and all was as before. Lothar slipped quietly home for a quick change and was back as his desk at the Bayrischer-Hof, shaved and in a neat gray suit, without anyone quite seeing him arrive (at the Bayrischer-Hoffew were even aware any disturbance had taken place).
Meanwhile the police had already raided that gymnasium. There they found Augustine’s ten-shilling note in the till, and showed it to the Press. Once again that note turned out a windfall; for wasn’t it proof positive the Nazis were in foreign pay?
Ludendorff was (rather unflatteringly) released on bail, and carried his dudgeon home with him to Ludwigshöhe. Goering’s brownshirt friends found Goering in a rather bad way, behind a stone lion outside the palace, groaning: they took him to a Jewish doctor, who patched him up with infinite kindness (a kindness Goering never forgot) and hid him in his own house: so Goering did get in the end to Rosenheim and thence into Austria as he had all the time intended. There he found Putzi Hanfstaengl and others who had arrived before him: not Rosenberg, though, who after all was hiding in Munich. Nor Hitler, of course: Hitler in a depressed state was driving about Bavaria at top speed without the least idea where to go. Finally he fetched up at Uffing of all places—at the Hanfstaengl country cottage, which was bound to be searched sooner or later—and was hidden in the attic where they kept their emergency barrel of flour.
Most of these things had happened before the Steuckels’ party had even begun; but true news travels slowly, and the party had dispersed before the upshot of the Putsch was known. When a full and authentic account of it all did at last reach Lorienburg with the next morning’s papers it caused little stir there for the only politically important fact in it was already surmised—that Kahr’s planned restoration of Rupprecht had after all not come off.
Moreover a miss-fire like this might mean that it had to be put off for quite a while. That led to some desultory abuse of Ludendorff, whose clumsy, amateurish interference had upset all von Kahr’s delicate timing. Ludendorff would now be totally discredited for keeps: there was at least that much to be thankful for. And that silly little Hitler too: like the frog in the fable he had tried to play a role too big for him and burst. After this we’ll hear no more of Hitler—and that too’s a good riddance! I expect when they catch him he’ll just be pushed back over the Austrian frontier as an undesirable alien.
As a proved incompetent, Exit the White Crow!
Thus it was all soon forgotten. For the Kessen family had now something on their plates even more important than politics, for once: a family problem—what to do with Mitzi now she was stone-blind.