If Hitler Comes (11 page)

Dorman and I gazed miserably at the green island, so soon to be submerged. It was poignantly symbolic. For a moment the ghosts, Francis Thompson's, appeared, and the run-stealers flickered to and fro. But then the music crashed out, and two flesh-and-blood figures moved into that holy place. One was that poor, aged Duke of Mercia who somehow had
consented
to be made Lord President of the Council and Chief Regent, representative of the vacant Throne. I recalled, with a slight shock, that not many years ago he had been proud to be President of the M.C.C. Perhaps his old eyes did not see what we saw, and he thought he was strolling about at lunch-time during the Eton and Harrow match. But now beside him stalked Herr Hitler.

Two figures, then, alone in that great green expanse. No, there were three, for a little dark man appeared out of the crowd, running, gesticulating, shouting. Hitler stood still; the old Duke stumbled on into his dreams. The man was waving something, it was a gun. He fired twice, and Adolf Hitler rolled heavily on to the turf.

In the next few minutes was concentrated the first stunning impact of the long-delayed blow which put an end to the liberties and happiness of England. It was an execution, carried out with swiftness, precision and a certain solemnity.

The Black Guards behind Hitler shot the assailant dead. A large force of Brown Shirts appeared from nowhere, and formed a square round the pitch, facing the spectators with levelled revolvers. Reichswehr men occupied the pavilion, where machine guns were seen trained from the scoring box. A bevy of nurses fluttered over the Führer's inert body, and bore it off to a waiting ambulance. The leader of the Hitler Youth stepped in front of the young aristocrat who was supposed to be commanding the Young Englanders, and briskly ordered them to march off the field. Messengers sped to and fro, as though on appointed errands.

I watched in dumb amazement. It was like being at the Aldershot Tattoo, except that it was disconcerting to be looking down the barrel of a Brownshirt's revolver. We were all standing up, but a peremptory voice told us to sit down again. Göring was at the microphone, and for a silly moment I likened him to a headmaster who was at last about to punish the whole school. Then I reflected that he had been named as Hitler's successor.

His guttural English throbbed across the arena as the
loudspeakers
, pointing different ways, caught up the words, “A terrible outrage has been committed,” they boomed. “A cowardly attempt has been made on the life of our Führer. We cannot tell yet whether he has been mortally wounded. The crime must be avenged. The German nation assumes this duty. The necessary measures will be taken.”

Is it true that the Field-Marshal glanced at a piece of paper in his hand to make sure that he got his English sentences right? I was too scared to notice. At any rate, it would only
have been the last touch of absurdity in this gigantic and hideous charade.

The band struck up something like a dead march, and the German occupants of the tribune began to move out across the green space, empty now except for the huddled body of Isaac Cohen. The British notabilities hesitated, and at length, led by the Prime Minister, retired into the interior of the pavilion. Goebbels, as he passed, savagely kicked the corpse of the Jew. The Duke was left alone. Sublime in his grey top-hat, he stumbled off in the wrong direction, and was hustled out at the Nursery End by a party of Stormtroopers. The band played “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied”, and omitted to play “God Save the King”.

“Keep your seats.” It was Himmler now at the
microphone
. “No-one may leave before examination by the
authorities
.” The Hitler Youth, without the least hesitation, assumed the task of shepherding the great crowd, one by one, through only four exits, where each individual was questioned at length by a Gestapo man. The news soon spread that there was a fleet of black marias outside to take those the Nazis disliked to gaol.

A good quarter of Britain's well-known figures were present on the ground—trapped. Judges, bishops, generals—for all we knew the prisons were ready to snap up any of them. It was very different from that party at Bush House, with its champagne and Wagner. The sun beat down, and, rank on rank, the people sat nearly motionless, waiting to be
marshalled
to the exits by fourteen-year-old boys.

No special consideration was shown to the Press. We wanted to rush off and telephone our stories, but Dr. Schultz appeared and distributed a typewritten statement which
announced
that no messages for oversea would be accepted that day beyond the official communiqué which had already been transmitted.

What was in that communiqué? We were not told. We did not even know whether Hitler was dead. We did not know whether to wish he were. We could only guess at what was happening outside in London, our London, beyond the tall houses of St. John's Wood.

There was no panic. That is to say, people did not brave the machine guns and make a rush to the turnstiles. They waited, and either wept or sat quite motionless.

After a while the microphones announced that the Führer, by the intervention of Providence, had not been killed but only wounded in the arm. A sibilant murmur came up from the crowd. I suppose they were muttering to each other “A
frame-up”, and then telling each other “Hush!” I thought at once of Elmer Rice's
Judgement Day
.

I saw my old friend von Holtz, breathing rather heavily, with set face. I could not resist a feeble jest. “Surely,
this
is the most notable event of the London season,” I said; but he looked away without answering.

They were a long time coming to the row on which I was sitting. It was blazing noon, and one felt slightly sick, and the grass looked so green with, in the middle of it, the one dark crumpled figure that no-one seemed to clear away. For a moment I dropped off to sleep, and woke expecting to hear the click of the ball on the bat and a polite murmur of “Well played, sir.”

Dorman, who was sitting beside me, was calmly surveying the scene with a pair of field-glasses. He turned them here and there, sweeping across the sea of unhappy faces, until they lighted upon the crumpled solitary object in the middle of the field. “Looks like a Jew,” he muttered, and then he turned to me. “You know, Fenton,” he said, somewhat excitedly, “when they publish the name and circumstances of that poor wretch I'm going to do a little detective work on my own. I should like to know how he got hold of that revolver in these days—and whether he was the sort of man who could distinguish live cartridges from blank ones.” “Shut up, you fool,” I whispered. “You can't play Lord Peter Wimsey here.” I glanced round. There, behind us, sat the comfortable Dr. Schultz, blinking through his spectacles like a West Country rector at the Oxford and Cambridge match. He made no sign.

“Row C 16, please.” It was our turn. Two hours after the process had begun there must still have been three-fourths of the crowd left waiting. Sixteen of us trooped meekly to the designated exit I bade farewell to Dorman.

“Charles Arthur Fenton,” repeated the Gestapo man seated at the table, and in a moment an underling had turned up my name in an enormous book. “
So!
Correspondent of the
Wellington Courier
. Messages unfriendly in tone. Contacts with the late Stephen Mallory. Well, Mr. Fenton, I don't think I need detain you—now; but you know how to be careful, don't you?”

He handed me a thing like a disembarkation card, which I surrendered to an S.S. man at the gate. I drew a deep breath when I got outside; and then I realized that this was foolish, for I was not walking into the freedom I had known.

A special single-sheet edition of the Sunday papers
confirmed
my worst fears. An official statement said that, owing
to the increasing anarchy in Great Britain, which had
culminated
in a dastardly attempt on the Führer's life, the German Government had been obliged to take temporary control of the country. The Evans Ministry was suspended from office and a state of emergency amounting to martial law was proclaimed. For greater security 200,000 more
German
troops and police had landed at East Coast ports. Certain arrests had been made.

I knew that the Terror had come.

E
LIZABETH
and I spent that evening in miserable silence in our Hampstead flat. Conversation, we found, was only a sharing of terrifying conjectures, and though we both made a pretence of reading we found that we could neither of us keep our minds on our books. There was no going out, for the authorities had imposed a curfew at eight o’clock with a warning that anyone found out in the streets after that hour would run the risk of being shot without trial as a disturber of public order. There was little traffic for the same reason, but occasionally a high-powered car roared by up the High Street, and once, hearing the noise of motor-cycles, I looked out and saw a lorry with a party of men huddled on it and an escort of motorized troops going northwards. The late news on the wireless announced that the Germans had taken over the whole administrative machinery of the country and had occupied every fortress, warship, dock, and public
building
. We neither of us felt any surprise; any smaller
achievement
would have been unworthy of Hitler’s record of efficient crime. Our main concern was with a question not touched on by the wireless and one that everyone must have been asking that night. Had there been, were there going to be, many arrests?

“It would be so unnecessary,” said Elizabeth. “He’s got us all where he wants us, and now’s his time to become a
comparatively
mild and likeable tyrant.”

“Impossible!” I said. “He hasn’t got it in him. Revenge is
sweet, and anyhow he can’t afford to take risks, as the case of poor Mallory shows. Didn’t I tell you about all those black marias outside Lord’s? Why, he might have taken the
Archbishop
of Canterbury for a ride in one of them, for all we know.”

I described my interview with the fellow at the turnstile, and we agreed that I must have got ticket-of-leave while on good behaviour. We discussed the chances of my being able to cable worth-while messages again, and wondered whether my paper, in despair, would summon us back to Wellington. “Let’s see what Dorman thinks about it,” I said, and picked up the telephone. But after I had dialled the number I heard only the operator’s voice repeating flatly what she must have said over and over again that evening: “Sorry, but no private calls are allowed this evening. We hope to have the regular service established again by to-morrow.”

So even the telephones were to come under surveillance. We sat digesting the implications of this new evidence of our helplessness when suddenly I heard the approaching roar of one of the police cars coming up the hill again. But this time it stopped, and looking out of the window in the late summer dusk I saw that it had halted immediately outside our block of flats. I turned to warn Elizabeth, but she was beside me. “No!” she said in a breaking voice, “it can’t be you they want.” We stood in breathless silence listening. In that silence the ring of the bell in the flat below sounded almost as loud as our own. We heard the door open, and then a muffled sound of raised voices and a trampling of feet. I went out of our flat and tip-toed to the stair-head, whence I could see on to the lower landing. I could hear both a man’s and a woman’s voice raised in expostulation. They were cut short by a sharp order in a guttural voice. There was the horrid sound of blows, a piercing shriek from the woman, and a deep groan. Then the stalwart form of a Brownshirt
appeared
backing out of the front door. He and another were carrying out the body of our neighbour, Harry Wolffman, a spruce Jew in the clothing trade, whom I had met often enough on the stairs. For one moment the light on the
landing
fell on the unconscious upturned face with a streak of blood across the forehead, and then they had stumbled down the staircase with their burden. For a moment longer I heard the heartbroken sobbing of his wife, and then a German officer left the flat, slamming the door behind him. I drew back, feeling a coward as I did so, lest he should look up and see me. I went back to the flat, finding that I had left the door open, and that inside Elizabeth lay with her face
buried in the cushions of the couch. But she recovered from the horror quicker than I, and went down to see what she could do for Mrs. Wolffman. Presently she brought up a sobbing, shivering woman who could do little but cry “Why do they take him? What has my Harry done? He is so kind a man, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He refuse to give money to the Greyshirts, yes. But that was business. Never would he plot against their Hitler.” Elizabeth soothed her at last, gave her a sleeping draught, and put her in the spare room.

We looked out from our window on to the panorama of a darkling London. Lights twinkled everywhere; it might have been the gay city of before the war. “My God,” I said, “if they’re coming after the small fry like this, what can’t be happening down there?” Then we drew the curtains and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning I was called from my bed by the
telephone
. A crisp German military voice spoke. “Mr. Fenton of the newspaper
Vellington Courier
? You haf a frent Jack Dorman, of the newspaper
Brisbane Star
, no? This Dorman is in arrest of vords against the Führer hafing sboken. He gif your name to sbeak for him. You vill to the State Emergency Court at Voodside Bark report, blease.” When I had recovered my breath I asked at what time I should report, and was told that a police car would fetch me that morning. I must be ready for its arrival.

I broke the news to Elizabeth, and, though we were both scared, neither of us could believe that Jack Dorman had said anything to implicate me. Although his messages to his paper had been, I knew, models of discretion, he had spoken his mind in privacy with a wholly Australian pungency. He belonged to the “tough” school of correspondent, and was not prone to mince his words. I told Elizabeth that if they had been going to arrest me they would not have given me any warning, instancing the fate of poor Harry Wolffman, whose wife still kept to her room this morning. Elizabeth pretended to be reassured, and I to be calm, but we neither of us liked to look at the other.

The police car arrived soon after breakfast. A smart young Brownshirt saluted me with “Heil Hitler” to which I meekly replied, and escorted me down to the car. I climbed into the back; the Brownshirt got in beside the driver and we set off. Beside me in the back sat another civilian. He was white and silent, and we neither of us exchanged any conversation.

At Woodside Park was situated the huge private mental home which the German police had inspected soon after their arrival. A sentry was posted at the gate, and stopped the
car on our arrival. After a word from our Brownshirt, we were admitted into the grounds, and deposited at the front door of the huge brick edifice. I was taken straightway down an echoing corridor patrolled by more sentries, and shown into a small and comfortless waiting-room. There, I was told, I must sit until someone came to conduct me to the tribunal. There was no sign of my late companion in the car. He had been taken in charge by two armed guards, and I judged that his case was worse than mine. There was an extraordinary silence in the little room. Outside I could hear the tread of the sentries and the sound of distant voices. Once I heard, or thought I heard, a muffled cry, but a door slammed and there was silence. I looked out of the window into the
neglected
grounds. There was nothing to be seen but a pile of newly turned clay in a far corner of one of the lawns.

After a long time—it was only about an hour really, I suppose—the door opened and the same young Brownshirt appeared. “Please to come,” he said abruptly. I followed him down the passage, and up a staircase, into a long room with windows down the side. It might once have been a ward; now a few benches and a long table at one end had turned it into a court. I was told to take my seat on one of the benches. Behind the table sat three men in the black uniform of the S.S.; two were middle-aged and were consulting papers, the third was a youth of not more than twenty-two with fair curly hair and blue eyes. He was leaning back idly flicking the polished side of his boot with a riding crop and appeared supremely bored with the whole proceedings. He favoured me with a brief stare when I came in, and resumed his lounging attitude, whistling softly “Du schöne Violetta”.

Then the door behind me opened again and into the room was half-pushed and half-carried what was left of Jack
Dorman
. His clothes were torn and dusty and he was dragging one leg as if it was broken. When one of his guards seized him roughly by the shoulder he winced and shuddered as if his whole body was sore. But when he saw me, his white face broke into some semblance of its old devil-may-care smile. “Good of you to come, Fenton,” he said hoarsely. “Sorry to drag you all this way.” “Silence,” shouted one of the middle-aged judges, and a guard struck him over the mouth.

The proceedings were mostly in German, and consisted mainly of one of the judges muttering over the contents of a typewritten document to the others. Dorman was kept upright between his guards before the table. I was conscious of feeling alternately burning hot and deadly cold as I contemplated his
agony and my helplessness. Suddenly my name was called and I stood up. The young man addressed me in a drawling Oxford accent almost too perfect to be believed.

“Mr. Fenton, I am Captain Hasslacher. These are my colleagues on the State Emergency Court. Will you please tell us what you know of this man?”

I said that to my knowledge he was a good and careful correspondent of an important Australian newspaper. Captain Hasslacher smiled. “The
Brisbane Star
an important paper? Come, Mr. Fenton, we must not exaggerate, or we may be considered a partial witness. That would be most unfortunate for us and for the defendant. What do you know of his private life?”

I said that I knew he was a bachelor, living alone, and that as far as I was concerned his honesty and reputation were above reproach.

“But his conversation, Mr. Fenton. Just a little—shall we say, rash, was it not?”

Mr. Dorman, I said, was an Australian and as such was inclined to use rather more forcible expressions than were customary in this country. I was quite sure that these were no more than the idiom of his nation, and had no undue political significance. Captain Hasslacher raised his fair
eyebrows
and pursed his lips. “I’m afraid we have information that some of the expressions he has used about prominent personages are
quite
inexcusable,” he said playfully. I could only repeat that they had not been used in my presence, and that from my knowledge of Dorman’s character I did not think he was likely to have used them. Captain Hasslacher laughed. “I’m afraid you are inclined to be partial after all, Mr. Fenton,” he said and turned to his colleagues. There was a brief conference and then the central figure addressed
Dorman
sternly in German. When he had concluded Captain Hasslacher said: “He explains, Mr. Dorman, that your
vocabulary
will be improved by a brief stay in our brand-new holiday camp at Godalming. You will meet such nice people there. That is all.” He sat down with a charming smile, and I think I have never hated any man more.

Dorman was hustled out. I caught a muffled “Thanks” as he passed me, but he was obviously dizzy with pain or lack of sleep and looked likely to faint at any minute. Then my Brownshirt friend touched me on the shoulder and I was escorted out of the building, down the drive and into what seemed the comparative freedom and sanity of a deserted suburban road.

I stumbled blindly on into a world of errand boys and
perambulators, past an old lady dropping a letter into a red pillar-box marked “G.R.”, and into a little L.C.C. park where children were playing. I slumped heavily down upon a seat, opposite the railed-in pond. A boy, hands in pockets, went whistling by. The sun shone on the water. “From troubles of the world I turn to ducks.”

Elizabeth would be waiting. Heavens, I must ring her up. No, of course, the telephones were not available. I ran out of the park gates, down a tree-shaded street, until I came to shops and tramlines. I wanted a taxi, but there was none in sight. I caught a bus. It was the wrong one. Altogether, it took me three-quarters of an hour to get home.

In battle, though it be in a smiling countryside, there is drawn somewhere that invisible line, so vividly described in
War and Peace
, which separates the known world of camps and comradeship from unknown sufferings and death. Now such a line cut across these commonplace London streets, with their butchers’ shops and knots of women shoppers—a line beyond which lay the way to those echoing corridors down which Jack Dorman had been dragged. Before long every man, woman and child of those everyday crowds would be conscious of it, night and day.

When I did reach home I told Elizabeth of my experiences and of my belief that Dorman’s rash remark at Lord’s had got him into this trouble.

“You see,” I said to Elizabeth, “they can’t let a man like that loose. This story of Hitler’s being wounded in the arm is transparent enough, but it would never do to have it demolished completely with any actual evidence.”

“Then why haven’t they just deported him?”

“I suppose it is that he has made some enemies with his tongue, and they are taking advantage of the situation.”

“Oh, Charles darling, what enemies have
you
made?”

I laughed, but not very convincingly. “I have been very very discreet,” I said, as my mind raced back over all my indiscretions.

Then the telephone bell rang. Elizabeth picked up the receiver before I could grasp it. She turned still paler. “No, no,” she said quickly, “I don’t think he’s in.”

“It’s Dr. Schultz,” she said, with her hand over the
mouthpiece
. “Oh, they’ll take you. I know they will.”

“I’d better speak to him,” I said, and took the receiver from her.

But Dr. Schultz’s tones were kindly. “So you are at home, Mr. Fenton,” he said. “How fortunate. I give you the ring to assure you that correspondents can once again by cable
send their messages. Now, a suggestion please. Your friend, Mr. Dorman, I worry about him. I think he will not like the climate of Godalming. So fine a man, he should be released, you don’t think?”