The Americans had been slow to realise that they had a new war on their hands, a propaganda war. They had set up a little radio enterprise, using a German device by which you plugged in on your telephone line and got programmes. In the badly damaged telephone exchange they had set up their R.I.A.S., operated by amateurs, anti-Nazis who had been barred from the German radio for a dozen years. They had only three studios, too small for either an orchestra or an audience; but they had given the facts about what was happening in the outside world, and gradually the Germans had found it out and got into the habit of listening. General Clay, scrupulously courteous to his Soviet allies, had forbidden any American publicity under his control to argue with them or to say anything impolite about them. For almost two years the American radio had endured incessant Soviet attacks without making any reply except to tell the news as it happened day by day. The staff chafed under the restriction, but it was a military order and had to be obeyed.
The tone of R.I.A.S. was what the Germans called menschlich, that is, human; it favoured no race, no creed, no party; its music was listened to by all the various kinds of people in Berlin. Russian soldiers were forbidden to listen to it, but even the officers broke that rule. They heard Russian music, including some which had been banned by their government because of its sentimental and unmilitary tone. R.I.A.S. made friends, and its reputation spread—it spread even to Washington, D. C., to the great marble building on the hill where penurious congressmen were persuaded under heavy pressure to give it a little more money.
V
In the days of the military rush through Germany, Lanny had met a Russian-speaking sergeant in the American Army who had been interrogating Russian prisoners in the same way that Lanny had been interrogating German prisoners. Boris Shub was his name, and now he showed up as a civilian in the Information Control Division of Military Government in Berlin. He remembered meeting Lanny, and they enjoyed exchanging reminiscences of those days of glory. Shub had been at the little Prussian town of Kloetze near the River Elbe when the American and the Soviet armies had met and stood at salute while the bands played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and the ‘Internationale.’ He had seen the spontaneous friendliness of the two armies, the eager curiosity of the Russians about everything their American Allies had. Even though they could not talk they could smile, and learn the names for things, and swap souvenirs. On Sunday there had been a formal ceremony at the square; the Red Cross girls had served coffee and doughnuts, and the bands had played a truly international programme of music: ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’, the Red Army song called ‘Meadowland’ and even the German Army song ‘Lili Marlene’, which had been, as Shub phrased it ‘on the international hit parade of World War II’. Even the English were included, for the Russians had learned to sing ‘Tipperary’—translated, of course, and it sounded odd with Russian words.
Shub told of the new attitude which the Soviets had revealed. The first signs had been the treatment accorded to the Russian prisoners who had been captured by the Germans in the early days of the war. In the first tremendous sweep of the mechanised Wehrmacht great numbers of Russian troops had been surrounded; some had surrendered because they did not want to fight, but greater numbers had fought gallantly and had given up only when their ammunition was exhausted. They had been liberated by the American Army and came pouring toward the Elbe.
There were three hundred Russian officers who had been in an internment camp. They wanted to rejoin their own army; they waited for permission, but no permission came, and the Soviet officer in command refused to visit them or pay any attention to them. The civilian refugees whom the Germans had put at forced labour wanted to go back to their homeland but were afraid. They inquired anxiously of the Americans and were told that they would have to go. The Americans inquired of the Soviet authorities and were told that everything would be all right and the refugees would be well treated.
So they went, and they were dreadfully treated. Some escaped and fled back to the American zone, where Shub met them and heard their stories. In the four months immediately following V.E. Day more than five million Russians were repatriated from the Axis lands. Many had to walk hundreds of miles under the guard of soldiers with tommyguns. They were packed into freight cars like cattle and nailed up for the journey. The officers were stripped of their insignia and many of their uniforms. They were forced to answer questionnaires containing a hundred and fifty-three questions about every aspect of their lives. Some were taken away and never heard of again.
A greater number were housed in the concentration camps where formerly the German prisoners had been kept; the camps were unspeakably filthy and dilapidated, and semi-starvation and disease were rife. Ultimately these prisoners were distributed to slave labour in mines and forests in northern Russia and far-off Siberia. The average sentence was from three to five years at hard labour, and every prisoner was required to sign an agreement that he would never reveal what had happened to him or her.
Some who escaped showed up in Berlin, in Paris, and other places where Shub interviewed them. From his notebook he gave Lanny stories of half-a-dozen typical cases—and these were brought back in due course to Edgemere, New Jersey. There was the testimony of a Russian soldier who prior to his plight had served as chauffeur to a Soviet major-general named Grachev; he had driven the general from Dresden to Moscow, and on arriving in Moscow on the twenty-seventh of April, 1946, he had witnessed the following scene:
‘Near the All-Union Agricultural Exhibit a column of women moved toward us, the flank guarded by soldiers armed with rifles. When we drove alongside the column my heart sank. The women wore skirts made of sacks, canvas blouses, and wooden shoes. Their hair was covered with grey rags. That’s the way all of the one hundred and fifty to two hundred women were dressed.
‘“Who are they?”’ I asked.
‘“Traitors to the Motherland”,’ I was told. ‘“Repatriates. There are lots of them here. They are doing reconstruction work—building”’.
VI
Lanny had been able to listen to the Peace Programme on a short-wave set in the R.I.A.S. office. He made it a rule to telephone Laurel once a week and learned that all was going well. That new miracle of nature which he had helped to achieve was thriving perfectly; she was actually two weeks ahead of Dr. Gesell’s schedule—that professor at Yale University who had devoted many years of study to the progress of the normal human infant and could tell you at what week the creature should roll over, at what week it should begin to crawl, and so on.
Lanny felt a strong pull in the direction of home. He told the R.I.A.S. people he had given them all the advice he had in him. He would go back to Edgemere and tell the people of America what he had learned in Berlin and the urgency of the problem of the ‘cold war’. He would visit Washington and do what he could to stir up the officials in the State Department so that R.I.A.S. could have permission to answer directly the day-and-night attacks which Radio Berlin was making upon it. Theoretically, to turn the other cheek to the blows of an assailant was an ethical action, but there ought to be a time limit on such a procedure, and two years seemed enough.
Lanny didn’t visit the Riviera this time. He had a telephone chat with Beauty and learned that all was well there. Happy was the family whose annals were brief. He was flown to the London airport in a British plane and stayed over a day in order to have a good evening with Alfy Pomeroy-Nielson. Russians and Germans were important, but British were important too; they were making one of the great social advances in the world’s history. They were proving that Marx had been right and that Lenin had been wrong: the Anglo-Saxon peoples could achieve socialism step by step, and without violence or the overthrow of government. ‘The inevitability of gradualness’ had been one of the slogans of the Fabians, and now in their plodding, undramatic way the British people were making over their world.
Immediately after the war the Labour party had put forward a programme: the socialisation of five basic industries—
coal, electricity, transportation, steel, and the Bank of England. They promised socialised medicine, so that no sick person in Britain need go unattended, and they promised to regulate the prices of food so that no person in Britain need go hungry. They had printed that programme in pamphlet form and seen to its public distribution, and they had swept the elections on that basis. Now they were proceeding to carry out their promises, strictly and precisely, one by one.
Alfy, as a newly elected Labour member and son of an old-time supporter of the party, was in the midst of these exciting events, and he told about them with un-British enthusiasm. In less than two years more than half the programme had been carried out, and the rest was going to be carried out to the dotting of the last i and the crossing of the last t, and in spite of all the clamour of Tory opposition. Said the onetime R.A.F. officer, ‘It’s the first time that this has ever been done in history—I mean, that a political party has kept all its promises to the electorate. Do you know of any other case, Lanny?’
Lanny thought and said, ‘The Bolsheviks would claim that they kept Lenin’s promises, but they didn’t. Lenin promised that the state would wither away, but you see it growing like Jonah’s gourd’.
‘And besides, they killed millions of people’, said the other. ‘We haven’t killed a single one—unless some Tory peer has died of indignation’.
The British government was a unit; the prime minister was under the control of Parliament. But the United States appeared to have a government at war with itself, and Alfy wanted Lanny to explain this mystery. An odd situation indeed, in which the President was a Democrat and the Congress Republican; and even if the Democratic party carried Congress, the President would still have his hands tied, because the Southern legislators who called themselves Democrats usually voted Republican. The South was a generation behind the rest of the country in its economic development, and therefore in its economic philosophy. Its politicians called themselves Democrats because the Republican party had fought and won the Civil War; but when it came to questions of finance and business they were in the age of Harding and Coolidge, or even of McKinley.
VII
Lanny had a chance to find out what the Tory peers thought about all this. It was his social duty to report to Irma on the welfare of their newly wed daughter. When he called Wickthorpe castle he learned that the couple were in town. Cedric Masterson, Earl of Wickthorpe, took seriously his legislative duties, even though what he said and how he voted no longer made much difference. When Lanny called the town house Irma said, ‘Oh, come to lunch, won’t you, Lanny’? And he replied, ‘Okay’. There were husbands who would feel a certain embarrassment at meeting the former husband of a wife, but in such matters Ceddy prided himself upon being what he called ‘mod’n’, and Irma was ‘mod’n’ also, even to the pronunciation of a language which had changed in the course of its journey from London to Chicago.
So Lanny went to the stately town house and had a meal served by a stately butler and a footman whom he knew well and greeted as old friends, for Lanny and Irma had been tenants and intimates of Ceddy for some time before the marital shift had taken place. He had nothing but pleasant news to report about Frances, a blissfully happy bride and busy idealist, certain that she was helping to prevent the next war. His lordship remarked that she would do better working in a munitions factory; he was convinced that the Bolsheviks meant world conquest and would settle for nothing less.
So they talked about politics, and how the British Empire was going to the demnition bow-wows, and how America was going to have to carry the whole world on its shoulders, financially speaking, and would the American people stand for that? Britain was being taxed until it was just about ready for the poorhouse.
Lanny had known the Earl of Wickthorpe since his blooming, pink-cheeked youth. Now he was middle-aged and his fair hair was getting thin on top, but he was still a vigorous Englishman who walked all over his estate every day when he was at home. His conversation, however, was extremely depressing. ‘It’s what you asked for, Lanny, and I hope you like it’, he said. ‘I belong with the dinosaurs and the dodos, and I’m getting ready to pack up and join them. If it wasn’t for Irma’s money I would have been taking in boarders long ago’.
Lanny had a hard time to keep from grinning over the idea of the Earl of Wickthorpe taking in boarders; but he knew it was no joke. He knew that one of Britain’s peers was running a ’bus line and doing his own driving, and that another with his wife was selling fish. Irma’s income came from street railroads in the American Middle West, and she was supposed to pay about eighty-five per cent. of it in the form of income tax to the Washington government. She had resorted to the device which had become so popular among Americans of her class: the setting up of a foundation which would be tax free and would spend her money for purposes that could be made to wear a humanitarian aspect.
She had two secretaries working at the castle, classifying and editing the papers of her father, the late J. Paramount Barnes, the traction magnate. They were going to compile a life of this historic character, and it wasn’t necessary that the book should be good or that anybody should read it when it was published. Lanny didn’t have to ask tactless questions in order to understand that these secretaries were running errands for the countess, doing her shopping, attending to her correspondence, and performing other duties proper to social secretaries. Lanny could guess that the tutors of the two sons of Ceddy and Irma might likewise be considered as performing humanitarian services; even the gardeners were keeping up the grounds on which the J. Paramount Barnes Foundation was lodged. There was no law to prevent a foundation spending its money abroad, where the United States Internal Revenue Service might have difficulty in checking up on it.
VIII
Ceddy had some eight hundred peers in Britain, but not all of them took their duties seriously—which was just as well, since the chamber set apart for their use could not have accommodated a third of them. Ceddy would write a speech, study it, revise it a dozen times with painful care, and then deliver it and release it to the newspapers; but, paper being scarce, they would print only a paragraph or two. Ceddy, however, had plenty of paper, because Irma’s foundation paid for it, and also for printing. He had accumulated lists of names of important persons all over the world and would send them a pamphlet setting forth his idea that Britain was being led to certain bankruptcy by men who thought of nothing but garnering votes from the discontented classes. To handle all this he had an office on his estate with a manager and a secretary, and Irma’s foundation paid for all of it.
In the dear dead days beyond recall Lanny Budd’s marriage had been broken up because Irma had become an admirer of Adolf Hitler, taking him for a man who believed in order and the rights of private property, especially in large quantities. To be sure, he had called himself a Socialist—a National Socialist—but he had been like those Southern senators who called themselves Democrats and voted Republican. So all through the late war Irma and her new husband had been pacifists; they had been perfectly willing for Hitler to take Europe and advocated accepting his promise to respect the British Empire and let it alone.
But now the world kaleidoscope had been shaken again, and Irma and Ceddy were declining to trust ‘Soso’ Stalin and any of his promises. Thus Lanny Budd, much to his surprise and somewhat to his embarrassment, found himself in political agreement with them. In the mail forwarded from Edgemere had been some of the customary letters rebuking him for the stand he had taken on the Peace Programme. One of these was from a grower of avocados and winter vegetables in a place called Pahokee, Florida; it consisted of a list of names: ‘MacArthur—Chiang-kai Shek—the French in Indo-China—the Dutch in Java—the oil men in Persia and Arabia—the Turks—the Greek Nazis—de Gaulle—the Pope—Franco—Salazar—Lanny Budd’! Yes, that was the company he was keeping; and now the Earl and Countess of Wickthorpe!
Lanny, of course, might have compiled another list, beginning with Stalin and including all the variou
s torturers whom Stalin had put to work: Dzerjinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, the various chiefs of the Gaypayoo and the Cheka and the N.K.V.D. and the M.V.D.; the killers of the Katyn forest and the Red Army chiefs who had stood outside Warsaw while the Nazis slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews and a hundred thousand Poles; the men who were holding ten or twenty million prisoners in concentration camps, the map of which made northern Russia and Siberia look like a sprinkling from a pepper box! Oh yes, it would be easy to say, ‘You too’! and go on making faces and calling names over the back fence of the world. What was a man to do who desired that the power of America be used to bring freedom and order to the tormented human race? Was he to say, ‘A plague on both your houses’ and retire to Pahokee, Florida, to grow avocados and winter vegetables? Should he go and join the lotos-eaters of Tennyson?
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind …
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.
IX
Lanny was flown the familiar route by way of Iceland and Newfoundland. From Gander Airport he was flown in an Army plane directly to Washington, and in the seat beside him was an assimilated lieutenant colonel, coming home on leave. David Krichevsky was an electrical technician attached to the Signal Corps, and as he had been born in Russia and spoke Russian he was one of a large group assigned to restore and service two cables which ran between Berlin and the American zone of Germany. This was through Soviet territory, so Krichevsky had a day-by-day view of that ‘cold war’ which the Reds were waging against their recent allies. They wanted to drive the Americans out and shut off those communications, and they were resorting to a system of persecutions, sometimes going as far as kidnapping and murder.