A Train of Powder (37 page)
Authors: Rebecca West
But surely there was no need to fear that the story would take such a turn again, for millions of Germans had now the opportunity to spell out for themselves a faith that came from reality, and that would bind them to it. The resistance of Berlin and East Germany was continuing, and even in Switzerland it still seemed good. That was a severe test: the genius of that country chooses neutrality and conformity and a quiet life, and only those who never saw a bombed city will sneer at the choice. But even in this sunlit town by this blue lake, where the unholiness of unnecessary rebellion was brilliantly apparent, the moral compass twitched and told us that not here, but in a ruined city to the north, and on the now coarsely husbanded plains running to the east, there was more sacred territory. There the Germans and the Russian peoples were enlaced in the darkness cast by an absurd political relationship, like snakes sleeping through the winter under a rock. But they were not sleeping; the entangled coils were sliding back and forth in contact that was an argument. Dumbly they were discussing what government should be, which is to say that they were discussing what life is.
Prewar Germany had not thought enough about government and life. It had produced an enormous number of books on these subjects, but just as there are some events which become experience and many more which do not, so there are some books which become experience and many more which do not. But that the discussion had been inadequate is proved by the simplicity with which the Germans granted the Nazis licence to perform operations which inevitably degenerated into tyranny and massacre. Western Germany was the heir to prewar Germany, and very like it, and the fears that might be felt about its future would have been lightened had Western Germans been able to share in the experience of Berlin and East Germany. But they had hardly more chance of coming within range of that revelation than if it had been made in Iceland or Madagascar. Few of them could travel into the area; and the constant arguments between the Western Allies and the Russians in Berlin, and the censorship of news from Eastern Germany, made all journalism concerned with those parts tedious to all but specialists. Years must pass before the ferment settles down and any true and convincing works of art are precipitated.
It seemed a fresh proof of the idiocy of Potsdam that it prevented the man in the greenhouse at Nuremberg from learning the lesson Berlin might have taught him. But it was that same idiocy which gave Berlin the power to teach. The Berliners were given two experiences of totalitarianism, which demonstrated that
it
was its principle which was wrong, and that no matter who applied it the result would be pain; and it was the second experience, which gave them a chance of contrasting totalitarianism with the democratic system represented by the Western Allies, which counted, because they were then shut up by Potsdam in a small circle of privation with little else to think about except this contrast and its consequences. Rarely in any age has its peculiar problem been investigated under conditions more likely to lead to the discovery of the truth, and less favourable to the diffusion of that truth.
But destiny cares nothing about the orderly presentation of its material. Drunken with an exhilaration often hard to understand, it likes to hold its cornucopia upside down and wave it while its contents drop anywhere they like over time and space. Brave are our human attempts to counteract this sluttish habit. Brave were the economists who met together and tried to set the world’s ledgers straight; brave the Western Germans who inscribed the neat pattern of industry on a patch of earth known to be specially unstable; brave the Berliners and East Germans who set about understanding the problems of the state when international action had wrecked the state to which they naturally belonged; brave the mediocre Fritzsche who tried to put down how happenings looked to people who had never quite known what was happening; and brave the men who, in making the Nuremberg trial, tried to force a huge and sprawling historical event to become comprehensible. It is only by making such efforts that we survive.
In the summer of 1952 the detection of a Soviet agent in London uncovered a hidden well of emotion in the British people. On June 13, in King George’s Park, Wandsworth, some officers of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police surrounded two men who had been sitting for over half an hour on a bench and were then on their way out to the park gates, and they told them that they were suspected of committing offences against the Official Secrets Act, and must come to the local police station. One of the pair was a young man of twenty-four, William Martin Marshall, a radio telegraphist in the service of the Foreign Office, and a native of Wandsworth. Through the bare preliminary reports and the blurred press photographs the fact stuck out that William Marshall was gangling and vulnerable, over six feet and still a child, the kind of child that climbs out of its perambulator and crawls onto the railway line. He made no reply to the police officers. The other man was a stocky, balding, impassive, middle-aged Russian named Pavel Kuznetsov, who gave them the not at all disarming answer, “It is up to you to prove your suspicions,” and at the police station claimed that he could be neither detained nor searched, and produced a certificate of diplomatic immunity showing that he was a third secretary at the Russian Embassy in London, but pointed out that it did not give him his proper rank. He had recently been promoted to second secretary.
With a blandness which later excited the Soviet Embassy to a protest, the police searched Kuznetsov, as they tersely put it, “before this information could be checked.” Twenty-five pounds were found on him in pound notes, and some documents, which were interesting but not what the police had hoped for, since none of them led back to the man in Foreign Service employment with whom he had been arrested. Again, through the bare preliminary reports a fact stuck out. Kuznetsov was not behaving as a man of his position would have been expected to behave in this predicament. He was guilty of indecision and inconsistency. He complained to the police that he had been arrested when he was walking in a park, which is no offence against the law. Then he simplified his complaint; he had been arrested when he was walking in a park with a man whom he did not know. In Marshall’s presence he persisted that they had been strangers till that day. But when his statement was read back to him he withdrew the amplification and went back to his first complaint: he had been arrested when he was walking in a park. Then he returned home, to his apartment in a converted Victorian house in a fading part of West London, where he lived with his pretty wife and his little son.
With Marshall the matter was much more straightforward. In his wallet they found a copy, written in his handwriting, of a confidential document which he had been given for the purposes of his work, and in his diary they found Mr. Kuznetsov’s telephone number, and two groups of initials which looked like notes of the appointment which he had been keeping when he was arrested, and of another which he had arranged to keep in the same park at a future date, July 8. Both these appointments were bracketed with the words, “Day off.” Marshall was employed at Hanslope Park, the out-of-town establishment which the Foreign Office maintains fifty miles north of London in Buckinghamshire. The boy also made a long statement in which he named seven other occasions on which he had met Kuznetsov during the last six months, and claimed that these were merely incidents in an innocent friendship, in which no question of loyalty was involved. But the police charged him under the Official Secrets Act with having communicated to Mr. Kuznetsov information useful to an enemy, and of obtaining secret information.
During the twenty-five days that passed between Marshall’s arrest and his appearance at the Old Bailey, it became evident that Marshall had excited far more public sympathy than any other person ever charged in Great Britain with espionage, Many Britons of unquestionable loyalty held the opinion that, if he were a traitor, it was because he had been subjected to intolerable persecution, which must inevitably have stung to reprisal all but the oldest and wisest. This opinion was based on a single passage in the statement he made at the police station.
It appeared that William Marshall was the son of a bus driver, and had, on leaving high school at the age of sixteen, gone to a nautical college in Wales, and been trained as a radio telegraphist. He had no success in finding employment when he had completed his course; and, indeed, he must have looked fragile cargo to send to sea. On being called up for military service, he joined the Royal Signals and was sent out with them, first to Palestine, then to Egypt, where he was stationed in the heat and the flies and the political unrest of Ismailia, a lakeside town between Port Said and Suez. Out there he heard that there was such a thing as a Diplomatic Wireless Service, in which he might get a job. When he returned after two years he was given a government grant to continue his studies in radio telegraphy, and then was taken into the Diplomatic Wireless Service. At first he was sent back to Ismailia for some months, and there was an odd incident on his return. He had been told that he was to eat in the officers’ mess of the regiment with which he worked in liaison, and he had presented himself for dinner in a sweatshirt and flannel trousers, both very dirty. After he had appeared in this guise for three nights he was sent down to the sergeants’ mess, where they could be trusted to deal more forthrightly with this breach of etiquette, which was also, in the climatic conditions, an offence against hygiene. As he was a dandy, and as the instinct of all other men of his sort in these circumstances had been to smarten themselves up for the evening meal, this was strange; and some of the men in the sergeants’ mess, though not in the officers’ mess, had put it down as probably “a piece of bloody Communist rot.” It is to be observed that it is not the conduct of a man working under normal Communist instruction in the underground, or even of a man who would be chosen for underground work. He was then recalled to England to work at this out-of-town establishment of the Foreign Office at Hanslope Park. At the end of 1950 he was offered a post at the British Embassy at Moscow; and it was by the passage which described what happened to him next that he won the sympathy of the British public.
On December 31 I flew to Moscow. I was a misfit at the Embassy from the start. The people were not in my class and I led a solitary life. I kept to myself and spoke to as few people as possible. I did my work as well as I could and just waited for the time to go home. I was disgusted with the life at the Embassy and began to take an interest in the Russian way of life. I was impressed by the efforts of the Russian people and their ideals. They seemed to be building a society which gave the biggest scope to human endeavour. But they have a long way to go. When I came back from Moscow in December 1951 I was as friendless as when I arrived there.
These sentences exercised a liberating force on the British public mind. Just as the translation into English of Freud’s works broke down a taboo among the well-mannered, who thereupon began to acknowledge frenetically that they detested most, and not infrequently all, of their relatives, so these sentences in young Marshall’s statement suddenly unsealed the lips of an even larger section of the community, which, it appeared, could not abide diplomats. It was evident that most Englishmen and Englishwomen thought that no young man not born into that vicious tribe could possibly endure a more horrible experience than having to spend a year abroad at an Embassy among ambassadors and secretaries and attaches and the like. He had been committing offences against the Official Secrets Act, had he? Well, no wonder. Horrible visions haunted them. Some saw a vast palace in Moscow, where the parquet floors were so highly polished that the gilded furniture seemed to float on a tawny lake, and anybody might slip and fall down. There would be in any case lots of little tables standing about to trip over, with things on them that would break. In the most superb room of all, under chandeliers dripping pompous irradiated stalactites which would permit nothing to go unseen, is a table surrounded by lackeys not only fearsome in powdered wigs and frogged liveries but proud, very proud, and showing this pride by a lifting of the eyebrows and dilatation of the nostrils. This table is covered with an exquisite tablecloth, on which it would be easy to spill things, and laid with wineglasses and silver obviously far in excess of all reasonable requirements, obviously in hopes of trapping outsiders who do not know the rules of the game.
At this table sit a number of persons who are, with one exception, all diplomats and diplomats’ wives. Oddly enough the diplomats are all in morning dress, as terrible in their striped pants as an army with banners, while their wives, fit mates for these arrogant tyrants, with noses running down in a straight line from their foreheads, like the Greek statues, are in full martial décolletage, with diamond tiaras. The one exception is William Marshall. Delicate and overgrown, he sits ill at ease and ignored. Suddenly a tremor runs through the assembly. The stripes of the pants of the shuddering diplomats waver like lines on a television screen, and the tiaras on the haughty heads of their shuddering wives emit flashes of prismatic brilliance. The lackeys sneer in perfect time; they have often rehearsed it. Marshall has used the wrong fork. Or rather, Marshall has used the wrong fork again. Small wonder that the wretched boy’s eyes go to the window, where, in spite of a snowstorm, male and female Russian comrades are to be seen, driving tractors and building hydroelectric dams, not in striped pants, not in tiaras.
Such was the picture of Marshall’s life in Moscow as many Britons saw it. It illustrates the operation of the time lag in popular myth-making, for of course it is true that had Marshall had to come to close quarters with typical diplomats of the past, such as Lord Castlereagh, who represented England at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, he would indeed have been made to feel himself “a social misfit.” There is also some contemporary justification for the public attitude, since many diplomats are rude, and must necessarily be so. The present complexity of international affairs taxes human intelligence to its limits, and often beyond. Hence the policy of any Foreign Office is bound to be frequently wrong. Its diplomats are, however, bound to defend it; they would be not worth employing if they found themselves able to go about admitting that their country and organization were wrong. But there is very little to be done in the way of defending a position which logic and accomplished fact indicate ought to be abandoned, except by showing insolence toward the attackers. It would be very hard for any diplomat to keep up an argument claiming wisdom for the advice that was given to the late Mr. Ernest Bevin when he was Foreign Secretary, without lapsing into discourtesy. Diplomats, therefore, suffer an occupational risk of rudeness. Yet William Marshall’s case cannot have been as he stated it and as the public imagined it.