The Fox in the Attic

“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.

  21

  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 kn
own 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.

  22

  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 suspende
d 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.