The World of Yesterday (51 page)

But the ball on the roulette wheel of diplomacy went on rolling this way and that, at a slow and nerve-racking pace. This way and that, back and forth, black and red, red and black. Hope and disappointment, good news and bad news, and still there was never a final outcome. Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that
infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

I had a task ready to hand. For years I had been steadily accumulating material in preparation for a major, two-volume account of Balzac and his work. However, I had never found the courage to get down to such a huge, long-term project. Now my lack of courage in facing current events gave me the courage to start it. I went to Bath—Bath because that city, where much of England’s glorious literature, above all the works of Fielding, was written, soothes the eye more reliably than any other city in England, giving the illusion of reflecting another and more peaceful age, the eighteenth century. But what a painful contrast there was between the landscape around it, blessed with gentle beauty, and the growing turmoil of the world and my thoughts! Just as the month of July had been more beautiful in Austria in 1914 than any I can remember, that August of 1939 in England was glorious. Once again the soft, silken blue sky was like God’s blessing over us, once again warm sunlight shone on the woods and meadows, which were full of a wonderful wealth of flowers—there was the same sense that all was at peace on earth while its people armed for war. And once again, such madness seemed incredible in the face of those meadows flowering on in luxuriant bloom, the peace that the valleys around Bath breathed as if enjoying it themselves. The delightful scene was mysteriously reminiscent of the landscape of Baden in 1914.

And once again I would not believe it. I prepared, as I had before, for a summer trip abroad. The PEN Club Congress was to be held in Stockholm in the first week of September 1939, and my Swedish friends had invited me as an honorary guest, since I no longer represented any nation. My kind hosts had a timetable planned ahead for me which would occupy every midday, every evening, every hour in the next couple of weeks. I had booked a passage by sea long ago. And then the threatening
announcements of imminent mobilisation came thick and fast. By all the dictates of reason, I ought at this point to have packed up my books and manuscripts in a hurry before leaving Britain, a country likely to be at war, because as a foreigner in England I was likely to be seen as an enemy alien if war came, and then I would be threatened by every imaginable curtailment of my freedom. But something odd in me refused to obey the dictates of reason and save myself. It was half defiance—I was not going to take to flight again and again, since Fate looked like following me everywhere—and half just weariness. “We’ll meet the time as it meets us,” I said to myself, quoting Shakespeare. And if it does want to meet you, I told myself, then don’t resist. Close as you are to your sixtieth year, it can’t get at the best part of your life anyway, the part you have already lived. I stuck to that decision. There was also something else I wanted to do as soon as possible, to put my life in order. I was going to marry for the second time,
9
and I did not want to lose a moment, in case I was separated from my future wife over a long period by internment or some other unpredictable measure. So that morning—it was 1st September, a public holiday—I went to the registry office in Bath to apply for a marriage licence. The registrar looked at our papers, was very friendly and efficient, and like everyone else at that time he understood our wish to marry as quickly as possible. The ceremony was set for next day, and he picked up his pen and began writing our names in the register in handsome, rounded characters.

At this moment—it must have been about eleven o’clock—the door of the next room was flung open. A young civil servant hurried in, flinging his coat on at the same time. “The Germans have invaded Poland. This means war!” he cried out loud in the quiet room. The word fell on my heart like a hammer blow. But the hearts of our generation are used to blows of all kinds. “It doesn’t
have
to be war, not yet,” I said, with genuine conviction. The young man’s reply sounded almost bitter. “No!” he shouted
forcefully. “We’ve had enough! We can’t let this start all over again every six months! There has to be an end to it now.”

Meanwhile the other civil servant, the registrar who had begun writing out our marriage licence, thoughtfully put down his pen. After all, he said, we were foreigners, and in the case of war that automatically made us enemy aliens. He didn’t know whether it was still all right for him to marry us in such circumstances. He was sorry, but he would have to get instructions from London. Then came two days of waiting, hoping and fearing, two days of the most anxious suspense. On Sunday morning news came over the radio—Britain had declared war on Germany.

It was a strange morning. We retreated in silence from the radio that had thrown the bombshell of that message into the room. A message that would outlast centuries, that was going to change our world entirely for ever, and with it the lives of every one of us. A message meaning death for thousands who heard it in silence, meaning mourning and unhappiness, despair and a threat to us all. It might be years and years before any creative impulses could return. War was here again, a war more terrible and far-reaching than any conflict had ever been on earth before. Once again an era had come to an end, and a new era was beginning. We stood in silence in the room, which was suddenly deathly quiet, and avoided looking at each other. Carefree birdsong came in from outside, the sound of the birds’ casual love-play carried to us on the mild wind, and the trees swayed in the golden light as if their leaves wanted to touch tenderly like lips. Our ancient Mother Nature, as usual, knew nothing of her children’s troubles.

I went into my room and packed my things in a small suitcase. If what a highly placed friend had told me was true, we Austrians living in England would be seen in the same light as Germans and must expect the same restrictions on our movements. I might not be able to sleep in my own bed tonight. I had gone yet another step down in the social scale. For the
last hour I had been not just a foreigner in this country but an enemy alien, forcibly banished to some place that did not appeal at all to my anxious heart. For a man who had been exiled from his home long ago by a Germany that branded him anti-German because of his racial origins and his ideas, could there be any situation more absurd than to be forcibly classified now, in another country and on the grounds of a bureaucratic decree, as a member of a community to which, as an Austrian, he had never belonged anyway? With a single stroke of the pen, the meaning of a whole life was turned upside down and meant nothing. I still wrote and thought in German, but all my ideas, every wish I had, belonged to the countries now in arms to fight for the freedom of the world. All other links, all that had been and was now past, everything was torn apart, broken to pieces, and I knew that I would have to begin again—yet again!—after this war was over. For the personal cause to which I had lent the force of my convictions for forty years, the peaceful union of Europe, had been wrecked. What I feared more than my own death, war waged by everyone against everyone else, had been unleashed for the second time. And a man whose impassioned efforts had gone into promoting human and intellectual reconciliation was made, at this moment which of all moments called for a steadfast joint stand, to feel useless and alone as never in his life before, suddenly thrust into outer darkness.

Once again I walked down to the city of Bath for a last look at peace. It lay quiet in the noonday sunlight and seemed just the same as ever. People went their usual way, walking with their usual gait. They were in no haste, they did not gather together in excited talk. They looked casual and composed, in proper Sunday mood, and for a moment I wondered: “Don’t they know what has happened yet?” But they were English, they were used to concealing their feelings. They didn’t need drums and banners, noise and music, to fortify them in their tough and unemotional resolution. How different it had been in
those July days of 1914 in Austria, but then again, how different I myself had been at the time, young and inexperienced, not the man I was today, weighed down by memories! I knew what war meant, and as I looked at the crowded, shining shops I saw a sudden vision of the shops I had seen in 1918, cleared of their goods, cleaned out, empty windows looking back at you wide-eyed. I saw, as if in a waking dream, the long lines of careworn women waiting outside food shops, the grieving mothers, the wounded and crippled men, all the mighty horrors of the past came back to haunt me like a ghost in the radiant midday light. I remembered our old soldiers, weary and ragged, coming away from the battlefield; my heart, beating fast, felt all of that past war in the war that was beginning today, and as yet kept its horrors hidden from view. And I knew that yet again all the past was over, all achievements were as nothing—our own native Europe, for which we had lived, was destroyed, and the destruction would last long after our own lives. Something else was beginning, a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?

The sunlight was full and strong. As I walked home, I suddenly saw my own shadow going ahead of me, just as I had seen the shadow of the last war behind this one. That shadow had never left me all this time, it lay over my mind day and night. Perhaps its dark outline also lies over the pages of this book. But in the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.