If Hitler Comes (8 page)

It turned out, when war came, that there were only three determined conscientious objectors in the whole congregation. Smithers, who went off cheerfully with his class late in 1940, spoke of them without bitterness; but even at that stage I fancied he was a little less certain about his religious bearings. Back after Nuremberg, he resumed family life at Tanner’s End, and it never occurred to me to ask him how his church was getting along. But one day some event of New Zealand interest took me to the neighbourhood, and I recognized the ugly group of buildings I had visited so long before. The notice board showed that my acquaintance, the Rev. M. Brownlow, was still pastor, and that Divine Service was still held at eleven and six-thirty on Sundays. But a great banner was flapping against the grimy Gothic windows, bearing an announcement quite out of keeping with my recollection of the practical Christianity of Mr. Brownlow and his flock. It said that the subject of the sermon next Sunday evening was “Will the Second Coming be next year?”

I asked Smithers about this, at the first opportunity. “Yes,” he said, “things are different now at North Street. Our
congregations
are no smaller, and we sing the same hymns and hear much the same prayers. But you could hardly call us Radicals to-day. Some of us are still great admirers of Dr. Evans, but Mr. Brownlow says that in the past we have tended to identify the Gospel too much with some particular programme of social reform. He says that it is time to lay more emphasis on personal holiness. Some of us don’t care much for the Apocalyptic teaching he goes in for nowadays, but others do. I believe the Church means more to us to-day than it ever did.”

“And the debating society?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “we
use the schoolroom on Wednesday nights for a
prayer-meeting
.”

So much for the democratic spirit, as nurtured by faith. Just as the fiery Socialists had become Greyshirts, or were simply disillusioned, so the more bourgeois Radicals were taking refuge in a purely personal religion. Henceforth, from bus tops I looked with special interest at the blank façades of Nonconformist chapels. I took them to be the monasteries in which frustrated democrats found, I hoped, a true
consolation
.

But what of the worldlings in positions of greater influence, who bore a much heavier responsibility for the tragedy of the age? Some of them, as I have said, gyrated, gaily or desperately, in the inner circle of Herr von Holtz’s London Season. They were the simple turncoats, into the workings of whose minds it would be unprofitable to enter. But there were several thousand others who had supported the elaborate superstructure of English life, who had been tricked or not, as it might be, into approval of the Peace of Nuremberg, and who remained loyal at heart to the old standards and the old ideals. These were the Army men, the original Civil Servants, the dons, the leaders of local industry up and down the provinces, the country gentlemen—in short, that great body of Englishmen who, more truly than most of their fellows, had what I might call a moral stake in the old order. These were the greatest sufferers in mind and spirit. It was not only that many of them had the intelligence to see that their own future, and that of their children, was barren and perhaps painful; it was that they knew they had been doorkeepers in the Temple while the Ark, by stratagem, had been defiled.

Their human consolations were a mockery.

They had the opportunity to approach that brittle, unreal world that represented “modern thought” in London. They could listen every day to the hypocrisy of the Nurembergers in high places, to the twittering exponents of “neo-Fascism” and “neo-Teutonism”. It was only to them to follow the neurotics of Mayfair and “go Viennese”, as a self-deceptive preliminary to “going Prussian”. But mostly they preferred to do what remained of their business quietly, and then to go home or to the club to talk absently of unimportant things, or play bridge. Every turn of the day brought them against
some fact, some symbol, some situation that put them in mind too poignantly either of the world that was passing away or of the world that was being born.

Humour saved many immediate situations, but Mr. Punch was already a peace casualty. Reminiscence satisfied the very old, and dissipation attracted the young. In some circles there was a short phase of
fin de siècle
nastiness which was
heaven-sent
material for Dr. Goebbels. Much worse, there was a loosening of the moral fibre in almost all places where the example should have been set. There were, of course,
countless
splendid people who maintained their own integrity, but even they learnt to be suspicious of others. Peculation reared its head where it was undreamt of before—in local
government
, in Whitehall itself. Crimes of violence increased. “We have cut ourselves off from nearly all our traditions,” a
penetrating
friend of mine remarked, “and so we have to start again from the moral level of the Balkans.” In fact we had become familiar with the spiritual atrophy of Nazism before we had submitted to its discipline.

Such was the England awaiting Herr Hitler. He might well have come as arranged in the last week of May. He might well have been satisfied to look down on distracted London from the roof of Bush House, while the plane-trees were in young leaf, and murmur: “I had no idea it was so beautiful.” But bigger changes were on the way, and he was patiently awaiting them. One by one, as spring melted into a golden summer, his policemen stepped confidently ashore at Harwich and Gravesend.

H
ITLER
paused, and by his own standards he was right. The fruit even now was trembling on its rotting stalk; let God, or some other agency, blow, and it would inevitably fall into his lap. Time, he must have thought, was his almost fanatical ally.

Yet can it be that Hitler’s was not the ultimate wisdom? Is it “wishful thinking” that makes one hark back already to those lines of Tennyson’s that people used to quote
complacently 
about the Finns, about the “banked-up fire” which even a hopeless fight for freedom will leave glowing for future deliverance? For in those brief despairing months there was at least one spark of determined heroism in
England
, which even grew into a tiny flame. Hitler came and quenched it—how easily! … but not, perhaps, for ever.

It is with diffidence, almost with shame, that I write of my acquaintance with Stephen Mallory in those days. He never openly summoned me; but I know in my heart that he represented a challenge which I had not the courage to accept. I had a thousand excuses, of course, as we all did, including the bravest of us. I was a New Zealander; I was a mere journalist, not supposed to mix in politics; I had my wife and child to consider; I had few gifts to place at his disposal; and in any case, since it was impossible to resist the trend of history, one must try to adapt oneself to it. I knew that these were only excuses, and he knew that I knew it. But he said nothing; because he was finding just the same moral cowardice among men who had gaily gone off to France three years before, quite ready to lay down their lives for freedom.

Mallory has not yet emerged as a figure in history. He had no chance to lead an active revolt behind the barricades. To the Nazis he was an obscure agitator, soon put out of the way. To newspaper readers only his death was
remarkable
, and even that, alas, would not have seemed so a couple of months later. But to those Englishmen who, silently, came under his ever-widening influence he stands as an inspiration as well as a reproach, and one of the last things I recall before I was expelled the country is his name chalked boldly, under cover of night, on the railway arches of Limehouse.

Stephen Mallory. Wild hope suggests that the name may one day be a war-cry, and a triumphant one. It is whispered to-day in gaols and concentration camps, and wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of freedom. It is sometimes shouted by those about to die.

No doubt a legend has already grown up round it. Deeds, I expect, are attributed to Mallory which he never did, or could have done. Yet the legend does but express his
significance
to British patriots, which is profound. A country has no claim to resurrection if, with its political forms, its spirit too has entirely perished; but the memory of Mallory, and of the little band of heroes he inspired, may be enough to ensure the spiritual survival of England.

It was a spiritual battle he fought. The joy of grasping material weapons and making a last heroic stand against the
oppressor was not his. He had not the rude task of a
Hereward
the Wake; indeed, I doubt if he was fitted for it. The foes he fought were moral evils, in and around him, and, as we have seen, they advanced with a rapidity and
insidiousness
which paralysed most of his countrymen. But he did not give in, and it was the smallest of his fears that his struggle would be ended, like that of fighters on a humbler plane, by a German bullet.

Mallory, it must be confessed, was no democrat. Rather, he was
fascigeant
, believing that Britain, suddenly finding herself plunged into such a state of shame and self-pity as marked the Weimar Republic, needed the counterpart of the National Socialist movement to restore her self-respect. But it was a Christian Fascism that he envisaged, a movement that would redeem the pagan brutality of Hitler’s régime, and set forth as its first principle a respect for the rights of others. He saw the very shame of Britain as a likely
foundation
for this purified nationalism. There was to be no talk of stabs in the back, of international Jewish machinations, or of a gallant war lost on the home front. To the moral surrender the whole country had been party, the people as well as the leaders. No-one was to blame but ourselves; and the rearmament we needed was “moral rearmament”, though that phrase had been emasculated by a pseudo-religious revival much advertised before the war began. To this end Mallory would have adapted some of the methods of the Nazis and the Greyshirts, as General Booth captured from the devil the good tunes. He had thoughts of red shirts, like Garibaldi’s, and he believed in his heart in the Party-State. But no-one troubled to assess him as a candidate for the job of Dictator of Britain, and no-one paid the least attention to his theories, which were based on some half-forgotten reading in political science at Cambridge. It was simply his burning patriotism which made those who came in contact with him uncomfortable, ashamed, or, in a few cases, resolved to fight and die for freedom. Nor did his theories matter. The immediate and belated task was to “stop the rot”, and persuade people that all was not yet lost.

Mallory was less than forty years of age. He stooped slightly, had lank, black hair, and sharp features that were not too prepossessing. It was, however, impossible to deny the lively brilliance of his eyes. He had had a distinguished academic career, had been called to the Bar, and had
published
an authoritative work on the economics of the steel industry. Rich and well-connected, he had soon found his way into the House of Commons, where he had sat under the
quaint banner of National Labour. But he never made his mark in Parliament, for he was an indifferent orator. He had been connected with a number of societies whose aim
included
a more determined effort at economic planning. He had been useful, during the war, at the Ministry of Supply, though, if the doctors had let him, he would have enlisted.

He opposed the Peace of Nuremberg, and crossed, with a crowd of others, the floor of the House. But in the months that followed he busied himself with plans of Anglo-German economic co-operation; and the hopelessness of it all must have been borne upon him only by degrees. At any rate, it was some time before he settled down as a confirmed critic of the Government’s foreign policy, acquiring the art of the Supplementary Question, and spoiling a good deal of Sir John Naker’s fun. Not until the Treaty of St. James’s was signed did he look around him and realize, with sickening force, that among the debaters and the arguers, the elder statesmen and those who cried “Ichabod”, he alone, apparently, had received the call to win the British people back to the
responsibilities
of nationhood. And this, he knew, was not a matter of asking questions in Parliament.

I first made his acquaintance early in June, when Australia and New Zealand began a tentative approach towards the United States. He sought me out and invited me to lunch at the Reform Club. He wanted to know more about feeling in the Antipodes than the controlled Press could tell him, and he asked me what would be the effect on opinion there if the United Kingdom were ever to renounce her alliance with Germany and face up to the consequences, whatever they might be. The most outspoken anti-German had never before, in my hearing, done more than suggest resistance to further Nazi encroachments, and I sat back in surprise. “The effect”, I could only say, “might be magical, but so would the cause.” “No,” he said. “I am quite serious. It would surely not be miraculous if England were to exert her utmost efforts to throw off a foreign tyranny. Even now there is time.”

One night a little later he outlined his plan in greater detail to a party of us gathered in his chambers in the Temple. A strong Government was to proclaim martial law, disband the Grey shirts, and put an end once and for all to the deliberate German-fomented attacks on Jews and Socialists. If necessary, this was to be done with machine-guns. Properly executed, the manœuvre might throw the Germans off their balance. They might hesitate and threaten, and in the meantime the second part of the plan could be brought into operation.

The Navy was intact and so was the small Regular Army of 200,000 men. They should be adequate for the immediate defence of the country from actual invasion, even though the German military missions now knew their organization from A to Z. The real danger was from the air, and here we must rely mainly on passive defence. The air-raid shelters were still in existence, for the preservation of human life, and until the system of wardens could be re-established the police could take over the responsibility of the A.R.P. It took time for air attacks to do any irreparable damage to a country’s
organization
; and if we made up our mind to it we could proceed quite calmly to this second part of the plan.

“And what, then, is the second part of the plan?” I asked. “Simply”, he said, “to deport, imprison, or shoot every
German
policeman in England.

“Then”, he went on, “the struggle begins and grows. Say what you like, the world would be in the melting-pot again. Canada would be back in the fray once more—what, in such circumstances, could hold her back? The spectacle of such a gallant last-minute fight would grip the world; I think we should hear no more of a revolution in India. And what of the United States? Goebbels has already been foolish enough to show the beginnings of an anti-American Press campaign, and to talk mysteriously of the combined might of the British and German navies. America must see that this is her last chance as well as ours. And so is it Italy’s, and Turkey’s, and Scandinavia’s. Since the overthrow of Stalin there is no chance of a new German-Russian alliance. Once overcome the initial difficulties, and the rest would be easy.”

Mallory always grew excited as he pictured the pieces of a jigsaw world thus neatly falling into place again. But it was not the mechanics of anti-Nazism that excited him, it was the passion and faith that must first lie behind it. He did not want another war about a map; he wanted to uncover again the underlying moral pattern of human society, which no tyranny could permanently disperse. Ways and means, he thought, lay always at the disposal of a resolute will; and there was an inner rottenness in Hitlerism which would cause its swollen bulk to begin to disintegrate as soon as it was met, at any point, with a determined resistance. The immediate problem was not military or political; as he put it: “If God grants us the courage to raise the sword He will teach us how to wield it.”

Mallory looked eagerly around the group—composed of some of the unconverted whose loyalty and discretion were unquestioned but whose determination and courage were not.
By this time, as I knew, he had formed the nucleus of his movement—a score of men of various callings who were all now busily at work, as he was, preaching the gospel of national self-help. He called them merely Patriots; he formed no party and collected no funds. One of his theories was that of the Fascist Party-State inverted; at the ultimate crisis, he believed, a nation could save itself only by the spontaneous functioning of its natural parts. Given an army and a police force, a civil administration and a labour movement still intact, whose leaders believed in the national cause and could communicate their faith to the rank and file, then, he said, the merest word from some central rallying point would be enough to start the struggle with every chance of success. There were historical instances of this, which Mallory was fond of citing—the Risorgimento, Primo de Rivera in Spain, or (a perverted example) the rise of Hitler himself—and in each of these the inner conviction of the patriots, and not their strategical situation, was the deciding factor. It was morally impossible, according to Mallory, for the largest imaginable foreign force to hold down an unwilling and determined Britain.

Against this theory someone instanced the apparent
powerlessness
of the Czechs, who, of all Hitler’s victims, had the reputation of professing the fiercest patriotism. There were the Poles, too, who had preserved their proud national spirit for centuries, without ever succeeding in building a durable State. There were the Finns, who fought the hardest in defence of their freedom, but gave way in the end; and there were the Austrians and the Danes, whose cultural achievements on the fringe of Germania had shown what a purified Teutonism could become, but who had been conquered in a day. The methods of the Gestapo seemed unchallengeable.

“Only because they have never been challenged,” replied Mallory. “The neighbours of Germany, however great their courage and national pride, have always acknowledged a kind of divine right of German arms. The huge German race was dominant in Central Europe long before it achieved political unity; and this dominance found mystical expression in the theoretical Holy Roman Empire. The surrounding races were part of the German scheme of things, and if that scheme came to involve the establishment, by violence and cruelty, of an immense
Mitteleuropa
, they felt in their hearts that they must ultimately submit to it. But with ourselves, it is different. We are outside the German system, and we have imperial traditions of our own. Just as Germany is
indestructible
, so are we. The presence of German policemen on British
soil is an aberration of history so monstrous that the smallest effort of will could put an end to it—that is the first thing. But we also have our responsibilities on the Continent, counterbalancing those of Germany. After the war is resumed and won we must see to it that the vassalage of Germany’s neighbours becomes an honourable and creditable one again, working for the good of civilization as a whole.”

Mallory was no League of Nations man, or abstract political thinker. He divided the weak from the strong, and knew his
Lebensräume
. He was not poles apart from the Fascists, and had once contributed an article to Mosley’s
Action
. In the early days of the Hitler régime, had he had the direction of British foreign policy, he would have gone far to strike a bargain with Germany over respective spheres of influence on the Continent and overseas. He would almost certainly have been accused of belonging to the “Cliveden Set”; and he would not have admitted, until it was proved up to the hilt, that it was both useless and immoral to negotiate with the Nazis. But the time arrived when his conscience spoke, with the single voice of patriotism and Christian justice. Like many others, he came to realize the error of Nuremberg, but, unlike them, he did not despair. He still believed in the politics of power, but he thought the power was as much in British as in German hands. It was latent, but it was there; and it lay in the spirit of the race, co-existent with the race itself, which any resolute political engineer could transform into successful action.