Year Zero (34 page)

Some Conservatives found this development profoundly disturbing. The MP for Penryn and Falmouth wrote a letter to Churchill's parliamentary secretary: “I am more and more suspicious of the way this lecturing to and education of the forces racket is run . . . for the love of Mike do something about it, unless you want to have the creatures coming back all pansy-pink.”
¹⁴

Cyril Connolly, an old Etonian esthete with Francophile tastes, started his literary journal
Horizon
in 1940, determined to keep the flames of art and culture going even as—in his phrase—the lights were dimming over Europe. Soldiers and sailors were encouraged to subscribe at heavily reduced rates. Connolly too believed it was time to climb down from his high-minded perch and bring culture to the people.
Horizon
found its way into a surprising number of khaki backpacks. In June 1945 Connolly wrote an article explaining why he voted Labour. It was not because Labour politicians supported the arts more readily than Tories. The contrary was more often true. But he voted Labour because every human being should be entitled to a civilized life: “To make England a happy country, there must be a leveling up which socialism alone will provide.”
¹⁵

One of the most curious films made in wartime Britain, or at any time really, was
A Canterbury Tale
, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, one a conservative English genius, the other a Jewish Anglophile born in Hungary. Too odd to be well received when the movie first came out in 1944,
A Canterbury Tale
tells us a great deal about the yearnings of that time, which were spiritual as much as political. An English soldier and an American GI find themselves thrown together by chance with a young English woman in rural Kent. The woman, a shopgirl from
London, is accosted at night by a mysterious stranger known as the “glue man,” who is in the habit of secretly tipping pots of glue over women's hair. It doesn't take them long to unmask the glue man as a highly cultivated local gentleman farmer and magistrate. His aim, it turns out, was to stop young women from wasting their time going out with soldiers instead of immersing themselves in the glories of English history and the English countryside. All four characters end up in Canterbury, as modern-day pilgrims, each receiving a kind of personal blessing.

The glue man might easily be seen as a crazy pervert. Yet, though undoubtedly eccentric, he is also an idealistic, almost saintly figure, trying in his peculiar way to articulate why England is worth fighting for. The film shows an idea of England, particularly of rural England, that is intensely patriotic, and romantic, a Tory version of Blood and Soil, perhaps, except that it dissolves the traditional barriers of class. When the young woman tells the glue man that she was never accepted by her fiancé's parents because they were of good family and she was just a shopgirl, he answers that such categories mean nothing any more in “the new England,” which in the movie is a metaphysical place, its landscape a source of spiritual feeling. That would be like an earthquake, says the young woman. We
are
in an earthquake, the glue man replies. This earthquake, to the glue man, was more than just social or political; it was a religious epiphany in the green fields of England.

The socialism of Clement Attlee would seem to be far removed from Powell and Pressburger's Tory romanticism. Attlee, a quiet pipe-smoking solicitor's son, was not a romantic in any sense. Yet his politics weren't as far removed from
A Canterbury Tale
as all that. British socialism had strong Christian antecedents, steeped in the improving traditions of the Victorian age, with aesthetic links through arts and crafts to the idea of a pristine rural England. “Jerusalem,” William Blake's hymn to “England's green and pleasant land” among the “dark satanic mills,” is an expression of patriotic religiosity, of Christ turning England into a version of heaven. Blake was a dissenter. His hymn was often sung on working-class marches
against their oppressors. Socialist Britain was sometimes referred to as the New Jerusalem. The spirit of the Powell-Pressburger movie, set in the sun-dappled fields of Kent and ending in Canterbury Cathedral, is strikingly similar to Blake's vision.

In the month leading up to the July election, Churchill and Attlee laid out their very different patriotic visions of England. Churchill tried to land the first blows by accusing the Labour Party of being in thrall to foreign notions “abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.” He growled that this “Continental conception of human society called Socialism, or, in its more violent form, Communism” would inevitably lead to a police state; that a socialist government would “have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.” This would never work “here, in old England, in Great Britain, in this glorious island . . . the cradle and citadel of free democracy.” For the British, said Churchill in the rousing tones of his finest wartime speeches, “do not like to be regimented and ordered about . . .”
¹⁶

Regimentation was all very well in times of national peril, Churchill went on: “We all submit to being ordered about to save our country.” But once the war is over, proud Britons would cast off those self-imposed shackles and burdens and “quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.”

This was Churchill's laissez-faire notion of the green and pleasant land. It misfired badly. For once, now that peace was at hand, Churchill was tone-deaf to the sentiments of his people. There was “a good deal of bewilderment” among British soldiers abroad, according to the
Guardian
: “The transformation of Mr Churchill, the national leader, into the Churchill of the ‘Labour Party Gestapo' speech has puzzled men everywhere.”
¹⁷

In response, Attlee, too, accused his opponent of taking his ideas from dubious foreign sources, in Churchill's case a Viennese economist named Friedrich Hayek who had left his native country in the 1930s and blamed Continental totalitarianism on the follies of central planning. Churchill had been reading Hayek's seminal book,
The Road to Serfdom
. “I shall
not waste my time,” said Attlee in his radio broadcast, “on this theoretical stuff which is merely a second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor . . .”

Where Churchill saw the abolition of wartime planning and controls as the quickest route to those sunny English fields, Attlee believed that wartime controls should be extended to build the New Jerusalem. The common good should not be left in the hands of private individuals, out to swell their personal profits. Indeed, he argued, “the war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”
¹⁸

Attlee, like so many Europeans of his time, put his faith in government planning. This was more than an opportunistic exploitation of conditions made necessary by war. Distrust of liberal economics, blamed for the booms and busts and high unemployment rates that caused so much political turbulence in the 1930s, had existed for many decades, on the right as well as the left. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's first minister of economics, was a planner who believed in a state-directed economy as much as Attlee. In East Asia, so did the Japanese “reform bureaucrats,” more national socialists than social democrats, who cooperated with the Imperial Army to wipe out Western-style capitalism. Planning the perfect society was one of the twentieth century's great faiths.

Plans for a makeover of Britain had already been devised in the early years of the war. The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services calling for a National Health Service and full employment was published in 1942. A system of secondary education for all was outlined in a paper published in 1943. Social insurance followed in 1944, and a document on housing policy in 1945. But the overwhelming popular mandate to carry these plans out came in July 1945, when not only Britain but much of Europe was exhausted, virtually bankrupt, and in ruins, the perfect landscape for dreams of doing everything over.

•   •   •

THE WORD FOR NEW JERUSALEM
in France was “
progressisme
.” Left-wing ideals, infused with a great deal of patriotism, inspired former members of the resistance just as they had British socialists. Communists, social democrats, even many Gaullists, did not fight Vichy and the Germans only for the love of the traditional
douce France
. They had political ideals for which so many of them gave their lives, and wanted them to be implemented after the war, preferably by the ex-resisters themselves. The National Council of the Resistance, dominated by the left, was designed to be a kind of government-in-waiting.

This is how Stéphane Hessel, a young Jewish
résistant
who had survived the Gestapo's torture and Buchenwald, remembered it sixty-six years later: “In 1945, after a horrendous drama, the members of the National Council of the Resistance dedicated themselves to an ambitious resurrection.” The Council, in words that echoed Attlee's program exactly, proposed “a rational organization of the economy that makes sure private interests are subordinated to the common good.” New plans would have to be made to ensure universal social insurance. Coal, gas, the big banks, electricity would be nationalized. All this, Hessel recalled, to “emancipate the common good from the dictatorship created in the image of fascist states.”
¹⁹

Hessel was not a communist. He had joined de Gaulle's forces in London and was parachuted into occupied France in March 1944, an act of extraordinary bravery, especially for a Jew, even with false papers. (He was betrayed and arrested in July.) But Hessel's political ideals were certainly well to the left of de Gaulle's idea of France. De Gaulle was viewed by the French left much as Churchill was by many people in Britain, a great man of his time, no doubt, but a reactionary obstacle to progress. Marguerite Duras, who had been part of a left-wing resistance group, described de Gaulle as “by definition a leader of the Right.” De Gaulle, she wrote, “would like to bleed the people of their vital strength. He'd like them to be weak and devout, he'd like them to be Gaullist, like the bourgeoisie, he'd like them to
be
bourgeois.”
²⁰

She wrote this in April 1945. The feeling would persist, and grow even stronger, as colonial wars in North Africa and Indochina became ever grimmer. But de Gaulle, although undoubtedly a conservative, and quick to block the former resistance from taking political power, knew that compromises with
progressisme
had to be made. It was under de Gaulle that the Renault motor factories and five big banks were nationalized in 1945, as well as coal, gas, and public transport. And it was to de Gaulle, in December of that same year, that Jean Monnet, a technocrat from Cognac who had spent much of the war in Washington, D.C., presented his plans for modernizing the French economy. His schemes to put the state in charge of industry, mining, and banking were typical of the faith in planning. Planning, and yet more planning, was the way to a better future, not just because it promised greater fairness, but because it would prevent Europeans from embarking on a catastrophic war again.

And so it went all over Europe. Arthur Koestler, that consummate European survivor, a Jewish ex-communist who had escaped from a fascist jail in Spain, wrote with considerable misgivings that “if we are in for an era of managerial super-states, the intelligentsia is bound to become a special sector in the Civil Service.”
²¹
Even though the resistance organizations failed to become the political force they had hoped to be, many of their left-wing ideals were indeed carried out. Social democratic governments were elected in the Netherlands and Belgium. Land reforms in Sicily, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland made smallholders out of millions of peasants, often at the expense of unpopular minorities such as the Germans in East Prussia and the Sudetenland. In the Soviet zone of Germany, the social democrats were trying, in vain as it turned out, to make common cause with the communists.

There was, in fact, a strong pan-European element in all of this; New Jerusalem as a European rather than just a national idea. Major Denis Healey, later to become an important cabinet minister in several Labour governments, landed with the British Army in Sicily and Anzio. His explanation for the left-wing leanings of his fellow soldiers was “contact with the resistance movements and a feeling that a revolution was sweeping
Europe.”
²²
Healey had been a communist, but broke with the party in 1939 over the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But a cold splinter of his old communist heart was still in evidence in 1945 when he told the Labour Party conference to help socialist revolutions in Europe. Labour, he insisted, should not be “too pious and self-righteous when occasionally facts are brought to one's notice that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist.”
²³

In the case of Cyril Connolly, his Francophilia and love of European culture, as much as his political views, led him to conclude that only a united Europe would serve as a barrier to another suicidal conflict. “Every European war is a war lost by Europe,” he wrote in
Horizon
in December 1944, and “a war lost by Europe is a war lost by England; a war lost by England leaves the world poorer.” Never again, to him, meant “a European Federation—not a nominal federation, but a Europe without passports—a cultural entity where everyone is free to go where they like . . . If Europe cannot exchange economic nationalism for international regionalism it will perish as the Greek City States perished, in a fizzle of mutual hate and distrust under the heel of an invader.”