Read The Gale of the World Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
The Gale of the World (2 page)
Taking long strides, forcing himself against fatigue to pass other figures in the shabby, half-starved London masses moving almost automatically on wide pavements to bus-stop and
underground
station, Phillip missed the turning and found himself in a narrow passage between Piccadilly and Regent Street. He saw the name-plate on the wall with a shock: Man-in-Moon Street: he had come too far: and hastening down the short passage, turned west and soon recognised where he was by the bombed church on the south side of Piccadilly and the gap before him where the V1 rocket, fired from Holland, had fallen. Over the ruins hung the wraith of the moon in full shadow of the earth. He hurried up another lane in gathering darkness, lit by one solitary street-lamp, and there was the dugout entrance to the Swallow Dive. Down steps of frayed linoleum, porter sorting envelopes.
“Any message for me?”
“None that I know of. I’ve only just come on duty, sir.”
“Have you seen Sir Piers Tofield recently?”
“I have,” replied the porter, “very much so.”
“Was he all right?”
“In a manner of speaking, in that he’s not dead, so far as I know.”
“What’s happened?”
“Did you notice any glass in the gutter when you came in? Anyway, the police took most of it away as evidence. And,” he added, “the bold, bad bart’s Aston-Martin.”
“Did he have an accident?”
The porter put down the letters, and looked at Phillip. “You’re a friend of Sir Piers, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know his little ways,” and the sorting of letters was resumed.
“Do tell me what happened.”
“It’s none of my business, but between ourselves, your friend was asked to leave this club last night, and I understood the lady with him insisted on takin’ ’im home, and Sir Piers didn’t want to go, so to settle the argument, he fired a burst into the engine. And up come the police, and round to Vine Street went Sir Piers and the lady. Haven’t you seen the evening paper?”
“I’ve only just come up from Devon.”
“You might find something about it in here.”
Banner-line across page one,
LAST PLEAS AT NUREMBERG
He turned pages, and found
‘BANDIT’ BARONET FREED ON BAIL
“He won’t come here tonight,” said the porter. “My orders are not to let ’im in, tommy gun or no tommy gun. Not after last night. Sorry, sir,” as Phillip gave him half-a-crown before
hurrying
away up the steps. He must eat; nothing since breakfast.
Food was short, rationing of Utility clothes still in force, London partly in ruins. Sitting at the dinner table of the Barbarian Club he heard with deepening aloofness what the others were saying. Why all this farce of a trial of war criminals? Why hadn’t they been shot out of hand, or strung up as the Russians had done? He shut himself away with the paper, reading a report of the last day of the Trial.
Row of white-helmeted military police behind them, defence counsel a solid phalanx in front, defendants in two rows, pale under Kleig lights, smartly groomed, uniforms specially brushed and pressed.Reichsmarschal Göring, two stone lighter after six months in prison, called on to speak first by Lord Justice Lawrence.
Göring’s voice quiet, “Only motive behind actions ardent love for his people and its fortunes, freedom and life.” Complained the
prosecution
accepted as truth every statement supporting indictment, rejecting as perjury all evidence refuting it. “One day history will justify that we never wanted war. What Germany did in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Greece bears no comparison with what occupying powers are doing in Germany now—dismantling industry, confiscating money of millions, interfering with the people’s freedom.”
Rudolf Hess cadaverous, craggy-brow’d, ashen face, deep sunk eyes like two black holes, pouring out spate of words, often incoherent, spoken at such speed he often had to pause for breath. Nudged by Göring and Ribbentrop to shut up. “It was my pleasure that many years of my life were spent working under the brightest sun which the history of my people had known for a thousand years. I regret nothing.
If I was now at the beginning, I would act as I did, even if at the end I knew I would meet death on a funeral pyre.”
The old waiter, flat-footed and exhausted, who sometimes wore the ribands of the Boer War and the 1914 Star, was waiting.
“Mutton hotpot is off, sir. There’s whale-meat casserole.”
“No thanks. I’ll have the sausages and mash.”
“Sausages all gone, sir. There’s the main dish available. Hotpot à la Carlton.”
“What’s that?”
“Mainly offals, sir.”
“I’ll have Carlton hotpot, please.”
Albert Speer, former Armaments Minister, did not defend
himself
but devoted his statement to the horrors of the next war. “The war ended with radio-controlled rockets and aircraft developing the speed of sound, submarine torpedoes which could find their own targets, atom bombs, and chemical warfare. Through the smashing of the atom the world will be in a position to destroy one million people in New York in a matter of seconds.” For the rest, a few were unrepentant. Funk and Saukel broke down while protesting innocence. Frank and Fritsche admitted guilt. “I did not know of Hitler’s crimes,” sobbed Funk, former Reichsbank President. “Had I known of them I would not be here.”
Ribbentrop put the blame for the war on Hitler. “Foreign policy was determined by another before I knew of it” he averred, while some of his fellow-prisoners removed their head-phones. “I devoted twenty years trying to prevent a war by removing the evils of Versailles. Never did this policy embrace plans for world domination.”
A member coming into the room sat beside Phillip. He was a professor, appropriately dressed in short vicuna jacket and striped trousers. His head was large and partly bald, he had eyes that stared as though he had meditated much. Half-Spanish,
half-Italian
, he had been naturalised British for many years, and fought as a young man in a county regiment during the Great War. Since then he had become a physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the leading ‘back room boys’ of Professor Lindemann, the ‘grey eminence’ of Churchill during the war.
Phillip’s upheld paper had been casting a partial shadow on an unused space of tablecloth. An electric light in another direction overlaid the shadow with a second shadow from a silver
flower-bowl
in the centre of the table. The double shadow was darker,
he vaguely wondered why before lowering the paper out of consideration for the professor next to him.
Frank, former Governor-General of Poland. “Hitler is the chief accused here. We turned from God, and were doomed. It was not technical hitches and shortages which lost us the war; God pronounced judgment on Hitler and his system, which we, our minds turned from God, served. More and more it degenerated into a political adventure, without truth or conscience.”
“But the terrible deeds committed by our enemies, which are still going on, particularly in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and the Sudetenland—all these atrocious crimes against humanity, which have been carefully kept out of this trial—have long ago expunged any guilt our people may have incurred.”
The flat-footed waiter, sensitive, delicate, aware of life’s end—everything was beyond him—put a plate before Phillip, having first polished it with a napkin; then he brought a small casserole dish of offal stewed with grey potato slices.
“I don’t think I’m very hungry. Would you mind?”
“I can take it back, sir.”
“I’ll have it,” said the professor. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”
“No, really, thank you. May I have some sandwiches please?”
When the waiter had served him, the professor said, “I suppose you farmers live on the fat of the land, and regard the townsman’s food as uneatable? You were wise to foresee what was coming, and buy land before the war, Maddison.”
Phillip raised his paper. “I was wondering why a shadow can darken a shadow. See, on the tablecloth. It looks blue, while the shadows all around look grey.”
“Two sources of light are deprived simultaneously,” replied the professor, munching vehemently.
“Like this trial, according to Frank. Atrocities induce atrocities —all those civilians burned by our phosphorus bombs on German towns—all those Jews burned in revenge.”
There was no reply, so Phillip returned to the paper.
Rosenberg, the Nazi Philosopher, and Streicher, the Jew-baiter, both protested personal innocence while blaming Hitler for
mass-murders
and atrocities. Kaltenbrunner, ex-chief of the Security Police, denounced anti-Semitism as barbarism in which he had no part. Von Schirach, Nazi youth leader, appealed to the tribunal to declare
German youth guiltless of the excesses and degeneracies of the Hitler regime.
Only Seyss-Inquart, Hitler’s aide in the rape of Austria, remained faithful to his idol, declaring: “I served him and remained loyal to him. I cannot today cry ‘Crucify him’ when yesterday I cried ‘Hosannah’.”
Finally, Lord Justice Lawrence expressed the appreciation of the Tribunal to both prosecution and defence counsel. Revealing that some of the German defence lawyers had received threatening letters from Germans, he said they would have the protection of the Tribunal and of the Allied Control Council.
The waiter brought sandwiches which seemed to be made of flavoured wood-paste of the kind the Germans were living on. Phillip felt suddenly exhausted. The voice of Osgood Nilsson across the table saying the whole trial was a farce, everyone knew the Boches were bloody-minded sadists and butchers, thieves and gangsters.
“I wonder,” said Phillip, looking across to Nilsson, “I wonder if, when the history of this war ever comes to be written
impartially
, it will be learned, for example, that the art treasures found in German salt-mines were put there to be out of the way of the Allied bombing?”
At this the professor sitting beside him jumped up, exclaiming, “I refuse to sit at the same table with you! I shall complain immediately to the Committee! I come here to eat my dinner in peace!” and explosively left the room.
Phillip followed him downstairs, ready to explain that he was sorry he had spoiled the other man’s dinner. In the hall the professor was making for the library and silence room. The door closed behind him. Phillip hesitated to follow him there. Leaving the club he hurried across Pall Mall and walked rapidly through St. James’ Square and so to Piccadilly and the Swallow Dive.
“No message for you, sir.”
Up the stairs again and out of the cellar, back to the
half-light
of Regent Street, feeling himself to be hurrying from nowhere to nowhere down the subway steps to the Underground.
“South Kensington, please.”
A Le Mans Bentley parked outside the Medicean Club. He went up the stairs, remembering his visit there during the phoney war—Melissa and her painting of the night of phosphoric waves and fish and seals on the East Coast, the last bathe before the war. Still a painter’s studio, thank God, same two bars, pianist and
drummer, candlelight, quietude, laughter. O’Callogan declaring he had turned his studio into a refuge from the war in which art would lose its heart, so at least let it remain a refuge from
formlessness
and the tyranny of what was coming. Here Apollo would rule, and give the boot to Mars if any of his myrmidons tried to get in!
Good intentions. Irish lyricism had wilted, the painter had not painted, the Great Vacuum had arrived with riff-raff splurging on canvas imitations of Picasso and selling their daubs to rich and foolish Yanks. One phoney went about London in a Rolls with buffalo horns across the front of the roof, a Cockney with a fudge-up dialect supposedly from Greenwich Village —he having helped Al Capone (he declared) to blast New York’s bootleggers from their headquarters in the Bowery.
Overcome by so much fake, so much untruth, O’Callogan, the London-Irish painter, hadn’t painted. Who could paint in this bloody war, he had repeated amidst raised glasses and the thud of bombs, until he believed it and was finished.
Phillip looked around the curtain at the top of the stairs, but could not see Piers. At the far end of the room O’Callogan stood talking to an officer in uniform standing upright, reading a book. He was, apart from this detail, the picture of military rectitude. And vaguely familiar—where had he seen him before? No, it must have been someone else.
In fact it was someone Phillip had seen in hospital during the war; but without the parade ground stiffness which was due to the spine being held rigid, under the uniform, within a steel corset. The facial complexion was pink, the waxen effect emphasised by a wide ginger moustache below a very straight nose grafted on a face which had partly perished in the heat and flare of a
flamethrower
in the Reichwald, after the body had received the
disruption
of a mortar shell.
Sitting beside this living effigy, on a stool, was a girl with short black hair, rose-pink complexion, and when she turned his way, large and dark-blue eyes. She was smiling—at him? Had he met her somewhere? He felt weak. Was this the beginning of mental disease—a split mind? When she turned her head to speak to her Madame Tussaud companion, Phillip crossed the floor to a table at the other end of the room, near the piano where sat the same blind pianist with apparently the same fag hanging from his lower lip, as during the last visit there, in the middle of the war, with Piers on overseas leave before embarking for the Far East,
and the ‘forgotten’ Fourteenth Army. Less substantial than shadows, weak saline in the sea.
The drummer, aged and white-haired like himself, bowed his head. He at least was real. “Glad to see you back, sir!” Carnation in button-hole of frayed but clean dinner jacket with no
breast-pocket
, relic of the ‘twenties, when one put a handkerchief in one’s cuff, later a middle-class solecism. That jacket was a relic of
pre-war
upper-middle class grandeurs of S.W.1, before the
black-market
boys came out of the East End, when young ladies still ignored, at least in public, the commonplace four-letter words. The disintegration had come after the bombings, following a we’re-all-in-this-together-boys camaraderie in the Medicean Club: the blitz pulled people together when it didn’t bury or tear them to bits. Thereafter the wide boys, the spivs, had taken over.