Shooting Stars (18 page)
Authors: Stefan Zweig
In those moments, facing invisible but now imminent death while the blizzard attacks the thin walls of the tent like a madman, Captain Scott remembers all to whom he is close. Alone in the iciest silence, silence never broken by a human voice, he is heroically aware of his fraternal feelings for his country, for all mankind. In this white wilderness, a mirage of the mind conjures up the image of all who were ever linked to him by love, loyalty and friendship, and he addresses them. Captain Scott writes with freezing fingers, writes letters at the hour of his death to all the living men and women he loves.
They are wonderful letters. In the mighty presence of death all that is small and petty is dismissed; the crystalline air of that empty sky seems to breathe through his words. They are
meant for individuals, but speak to all mankind. They are written at a certain time, they speak for eternity.
He writes to his wife, asking her to take good care of his son, the best legacy he can leave her, and above all, he says, “he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him into a strenuous man.” Of himself he says—at the end of one of the greatest achievements in the history of the world—“I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know—had always an inclination to be idle.” Even so close to death he does not regret but approves of his own decision to go on the expedition. “What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home.”
And he writes in loyal comradeship to the wife of one of his companions in misfortune, to the mother of another, men who will have died with him when the letters reach home, bearing witness to their heroism. Although he is dying himself, he comforts the bereaved families of the others with his strong, almost superhuman sense of the greatness of the moment and the memorable nature of their deaths.
And he writes to his friends, speaking modestly for himself but with a fine sense of pride for the whole nation, whose worthy son he feels himself to be at this moment. “I may not have proved a great explorer,” he admits, “but I think [this diary] will show that the spirit of pluck and the power to endure has not passed out of our race.” And death now impels him to tell one friend what manly reserve and his own modesty has kept him from saying all his life. “I never met a man in my life whom I loved and admired more than
you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I had nothing.”
He writes one last letter, the finest of all, to the British nation, feeling bound to give a reckoning of what he did for the fame of the country on the expedition, blaming only misfortune for its end. He enumerates the various accidents that conspired against him, and in a voice to which the echo of death lends pathos he calls on “our countrymen to see that those who depend upon us are properly cared for”.
His last thought is not of his own fate, but of the lives of others. “For God’s sake look after our people.” The remaining pages are blank.
Captain Scott kept his diary until the last moment, when his fingers were so frozen that the pencil slipped out of them. Only the hope that the pages he had written would be found with his body, as a record of what he had done and of the courage of his countrymen, enabled him to make such a superhuman effort. The last thing he wrote, his frozen fingers shaking, was, “Send this diary to my wife.” But then, in cruel certainty, he crossed out the words “my wife”, and wrote over them the terrible “my widow”.
For weeks their companions had waited in the hut. First confidently, then with some concern, finally with growing
uneasiness. Expeditions were sent out twice to help them, but the weather beat them back.
The leaderless men spend all the long winter in the hut, at a loss, with the black shadow of the disaster falling on their hearts. Captain Robert Scott’s achievement and his fate are locked in snow and silence during those months. The ice holds him and his last companions sealed in a glass coffin; not until 29th October, in the polar spring, does an expedition set out at least to find the heroes’ bodies and the message they left. They reach the tent on 12th November, and find the bodies frozen in their sleeping bags, Scott with a fraternal arm round Wilson even in death. They also find the letters and documents, and dig the tragic heroes a grave. A plain black cross on top of a mound of snow now stands alone in the white world, hiding under it for ever the evidence of a heroic human achievement.
Or no! The expedition’s achievements are wonderfully and unexpectedly resurrected, a miracle of our modern
technological
world. The dead men’s friends bring back the records of the expedition on disks and films, the images are developed in a chemical bath, and Scott can be seen again walking with his companions in the polar landscape that only the other explorer, Amundsen, has seen. The news of his words and letters leaps along the electric wire into the astonished world; the king bows his knee in memory of the heroes in a British cathedral. And so what seemed to have been in vain bears fruit again, what appeared to be left undone is applauded as mankind’s efforts to reach the unattainable. In a remarkable reversal, greater life comes from a heroic death; downfall arouses the will to
rise to infinity. Chance success and easy achievement kindle only ambition, but the heart rises in response to a human being’s fight against an invincibly superior power of fate, the greatest of all tragedies, and one that sometimes inspires poets and shapes life a thousand times over.
In the years 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918 the little island of peace that is Switzerland, surrounded on all sides by the stormy tide of the World War, is the ongoing scene of an exciting detective story. The envoys of enemy powers, who only a year before used to play friendly games of bridge together and visit one another’s houses, now pass in the country’s luxury hotels as if they had never met before. A whole flock of inscrutable characters steal in and out of their rooms: parliamentary deputies, secretaries, attachés, businessmen, veiled or unveiled ladies, all of them on secret missions. Magnificent limousines bearing foreign emblems of distinction draw up outside the hotels, to disgorge industrialists, journalists, virtuosos and people ostensibly travelling for pleasure. But almost all of them have the same task in mind: to find something out, to act as spies. And the porters who show them to their rooms, the chambermaids who sweep the rooms, have all been urged to keep their eyes open and be on the alert. Organizations are working against each other everywhere, in restaurants, boarding houses, post offices and cafés. What is described as propaganda is half espionage, what purports to be love is betrayal, and every openly conducted business deal done by these arrivals hastily passing through has a second or third deal hidden behind it. Everything is reported, everything is
under surveillance; no sooner does a German of any rank set foot in Zürich than his enemy’s embassy in Berne knows it, and so does Paris an hour later. Day after day, agencies large and small send whole volumes of reports both true and fictitious to the attachés, and the attachés send them on. All the walls are transparent as glass, telephones are tapped, correspondence is reconstructed from waste-paper baskets and sheets of blotting paper, and in the end there is such pandemonium that many of those involved no longer know whether they are hunters or hunted, spies or spied on, betrayed or betrayers.
But in those days there are few reports on one man, perhaps because he is too unimportant and does not stay at the grand hotels or go to the cafés, does not attend propaganda lectures, but lives with his wife in a cobbler’s house and stays out of the limelight. His lodgings are on the second floor of one of the solidly built houses in the narrow old winding Spiegelgasse, across the River Limmat, a house with an arched roof, dark with smoke partly because of time, partly because there is a little sausage factory down in its yard. His neighbours are a baker’s wife, an Italian and an Austrian actor. His landlady knows little about him except that he is not very talkative, just that he is a Russian with a name that is difficult to pronounce. She deduces, from the frugal meals and well-worn clothes of the couple, whose household belongings hardly fill the little basket they brought with them when they moved in, that he left his native land many years ago and does not have much money, or a very profitable occupation.
This small, stocky man is inconspicuous, and lives in as
inconspicuous a style as possible. He avoids company, and the other lodgers in the house seldom see the shrewd, dark look in the narrow slits of his eyes. He seldom has visitors. But at nine in the morning he regularly goes to the library and sits there until it closes at twelve. At ten past twelve exactly he is home again, and at ten past one he leaves the house so as to be the first reader back in the library, where he sits until six in the evening. However, as the news agencies pay attention only to those who talk a lot, they are not aware that solitary men who read and learn a great deal are always the most dangerous when it comes to instigating rebellion, so they write no news stories about the inconspicuous character who lodges at the cobbler’s house. In socialist circles, he is known to have been the editor of a small radical journal for Russian émigrés, and in Petersburg as the leader of some kind of indescribable special party; but as he speaks harshly and contemptuously of the most highly regarded socialists, calling their methods erroneous, as it is difficult to get to know him, and he is not at all accommodating, no one bothers much about him. At most fifteen to twenty people, most of them young, attend the meetings that he sometimes holds in the evening in a small proletarian café, and so this loner is regarded as just one of those emigrant Russians whose feelings run high on a diet of much tea and long discussions. But no one thinks the small, stern-voiced man is of any significance, not three dozen people in Zürich consider it important to make a note of the name of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who lodges in the cobbler’s house. And if, at the time, one of those fine limousines racing at top speed from embassy to embassy had accidentally knocked him
down in the street and killed him, the world would not know him by the name of either Ulyanov or Lenin.
One day—it is the 15th of March 1917—the librarian of the Zürich library has a surprise. The hands of the clock say it is nine in the morning, and the place where the most punctual of all readers in the library sits every day is empty. The clock face shows nine-thirty, then ten; the tireless reader does not come in and will never visit the library again. For on the way there a Russian friend hailed him, or rather assailed him, with the news that the revolution has broken out in Russia.
At first Lenin can’t believe it. It is as if he were numbed by the news. But then he hurries off, taking short, sharp strides, to the kiosk by the banks of the lake, and he waits there and outside the editorial offices of the newspaper hour after hour, day after day. It is true. The news is true, and with every passing day, so far as he is concerned, will become, magnificently, even truer. At first it is only the rumour of a palace revolution, apparently just a change of ministers; then comes the deposition of the Tsar; the appointment of a provisional government, the Duma; freedom for Russia and an amnesty for political prisoners—everything he has dreamt of for years, everything he has been working for over the last twenty years, in a secret organization, in his prison cell, in Siberia, in exile, it has all come true. All at once, it seems to him that the millions of dead demanded by this war did not
die in vain. Their deaths no longer strike him as senseless, they were martyred in the cause of the new age of liberty and justice and eternal peace that is now dawning. Lenin, usually a man with such icy clarity of mind, a coldly calculating dreamer, is quite carried away by the news. And how the hundreds of others who sit in their little emigrant rooms in Geneva and Lausanne and Berne tremble, rejoicing at this happy turn of events: they can go home to Russia! Not travelling on forged passports, not entering the Tsar’s realm under false names and in mortal danger, but as free citizens of a free country! They are already getting their scanty possessions ready, for the newspapers print Gorky’s laconic telegram: they can all go home. They send letters and telegrams off in all directions to say they are on their way back. They must gather together, they must unite! Now they must stake their lives once again on the work to which they have dedicated themselves since their first waking hours: the Russian revolution!
But after a few days they are full of consternation: the Russian revolution that made their hearts rise as if on eagles’ wings is not the revolution they dreamt of, is not a Russian revolution at all. It was a palace revolt against the Tsar, instigated by British and French diplomats to prevent him from making peace with Germany, not a revolution of the people calling for peace and their rights. It is not the revolution they lived for and were ready to die for, but an intrigue of the parties favouring war,
the imperialists and the generals who do not want to have their plans upset. And soon Lenin and those who think like him realize that the message promising them a safe return is not for all who want the real, the radical revolution of Karl Marx. Milyukov and the other liberals have given orders not to let them in. And while the moderates, the socialists who will be useful in prolonging the war, men like Plekhanov, are helpfully conveyed back to Petersburg by Britain in torpedo boats, with an official escort, Trotsky is kept in Halifax and the other radicals outside the Russian borders. At the borders of all the states of the
entente
there are blacklists of the names of all who attended the congress of the Third International in Zimmerwald. Lenin desperately sends telegram after
telegram
to Petersburg, but they are either intercepted or never delivered. What they do not know in Zürich, what almost no one knows in Europe, is very well known in Russia: how strong and energetic Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is, how purposeful and how murderously dangerous to his enemies.
The despair of those powerless radicals barred from Russia is unbounded. They have been planning their own Russian revolution for years and years, in countless General Staff meetings in London, Paris and Vienna. They have considered, assessed and discussed every detail of its organization. For decades in their journals they have weighed up against each other the theoretical and practical difficulties, dangers and opportunities. Lenin has spent his whole life considering this one complex of ideas, revising it again and again, bringing it to its final formulation. And now, because he is kept here in Switzerland, this revolution of his is to be watered down and
wrecked by others, the idea of the liberation of the people, which is sacred to him, is to be put to the service of other nations and other interests. In a curious analogy, it is in those days that Lenin hears of the fate of Hindenburg in the first days of the war—Hindenburg, who has also manoeuvred and planned for his own Russian campaign, and when it breaks out has to stay at home in civilian clothing, following the progress of the generals called in and the mistakes they make on a map with little flags. Lenin, otherwise an iron-willed realist, entertains the most foolish and fantastic dreams in those days of despair. Could he not hire an aeroplane and fly to Russia over Germany or Austria? But the first man to offer his help turns out to be a spy. Lenin’s ideas of flight become ever wilder and more chaotic. He writes to Sweden asking for a Swedish passport, saying he will pretend to be a mute so as not to be obliged to give information. Of course on the morning after these nights of fantasy Lenin himself always realizes that none of his crazy ideas can be carried out, but there is something else that he knows even in broad daylight—and that is that he must get back to Russia, he must put his own revolution into practice, the real and honourable revolution, not the political one. He must go back to Russia, and soon. Back at any price!
Switzerland lies embedded between Italy, France, Germany and Austria. The route through the Allied countries is barred
to Lenin as a revolutionary; the way through Germany and Austria is barred to him as a Russian subject, belonging to an enemy power. But, absurd as it may seem, Lenin can expect a friendlier reception from Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany than from Milyukov’s Russia and the France of Poincaré. On the eve of America’s declaration of war, Germany needs peace with Russia at any price. So a revolutionary making
difficulties
there for the envoys of Britain and France can only be a welcome aid.