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.
3
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 onl
y 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.
4
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 le
ft 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.
5
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.