A Train of Powder Read online

  It might seem that it would never be very interesting that somebody had started a brisk business in potted plants. But this was Germany, this was 1946, and it was as if one were in a lock, and saw the little trickle of water between the gates which meant that the lock was opening. The war had burned trade off Germany as flame burns skin off a body. This greenhouse was on the outskirts of a large town in which it was impossible to buy anything at all except foodstuffs, except in the second-hand market; there was no way of acquiring even such necessities as shoes or kettles or blankets or chairs or tables. This had come about automatically when the civil structure of Germany collapsed and the transport and postal and power systems ceased to operate. It was obviously the aim of the Allies to restore German trade, for they had rejected the Morgenthau Plan for the reduction of Germany to a needy agricultural state; but at present the power of buying and selling consumer goods was exercised only by the occupying forces within the enclaves of PX and the English and French equivalents. But here in this greenhouse the trading genius of the Germans was reasserting itself in what was probably an amusing and impudent way. For it seemed likely that this greenhouse had been kept going during the war in defiance of Hitler’s rules and regulations, and that it was now defying the Allies’ rules and regulations, since certainly they could not wish that German fuel and labour should be used for flower-growing.

  This greenhouse was of the spacious type to be found in old-fashioned private gardens, halfway to being a winter garden, where the owner could stroll with his friends under the golden flowers of a Maréchal Niel climbing rose and inspect his collection of lilies; and it was plainly inconvenient for commercial use. It looked as if there must be at least a couple of gardeners at work here, but there was only one man to be seen, who was closing a light at the other end of the greenhouse with a clumsiness which was explained when he stumped off on two crutches to another light. He had lost a leg. The twitch and roll, twitch and roll of his walk, recalled another difference between the British and the German lot. The Nazi government had shown a monstrous cruelty to its own people in two respects. They did not dig out their dead from the ruins after air raids. It was for this reason that all German towns stank on hot days in the summer of 1946, and that sometimes there would be seen on the rubble lit lanterns and wreaths, set out by mourners who were observing an anniversary. Neither did they make the proper effort to furnish artificial limbs for their war casualties, and an appalling number of one-armed and one-legged men were to be seen in the German streets. But surely post-Nazi cruelty was at work here. It seemed reprehensible of the other gardeners to have left this one-legged man to close up the greenhouse with only a child of twelve to help him.

  But nobody was working in this greenhouse except this one-legged man and the child of twelve. He had been one of the gardeners at the Schloss before the war, and he had lost his leg on the Russian front, towards the end of the campaign. When he came out of hospital it had become known that the Nazi leaders were to be tried at Nuremberg, and that many Americans and some British and French would stay in the town for a long time. He had gone to the owner of the Schloss and suggested that the greenhouse should be used for raising potted plants to sell to the victors, and had been told that he might do what he could with it. It had not been used for a long time, and there were only a few plants in stock, but he got hold of as many others as he could find in the district, and started propagation at once, and got the winter heating going on wood from the grounds. To run a greenhouse furnace on wood must demand vigilance by night and by day; and to this man it meant hobbling and perilous bending. He had got quite a lot of cyclamens in flower at the end of May, but it afflicted him sorely that he had had only a few to satisfy the Christmas market. He betrayed a deep regret that the trial was not going on over next Christmas, so that he could have a chance to sell a really large number of his cyclamens. This was not altogether because he wanted the profit on them; it was also because he knew that they were good, very good, though not, he mentioned with disquiet, so good as some he had seen in Dutch nursery gardens. He was not an unhappy man. He was certainly in a state of continual physical discomfort, for before he could perform any task with his hands he had to manœuvre himself into a position where his balance was firm; and the child could help him only out of school hours. But he had escaped to another dimension where pain had no power over him. He had escaped into his work.

  There are, of course, countless workmen in other countries who, like this man, are industrious to the point of nobility; but there was something different and peculiarly German and dynamic in his self-dedication. In these other countries a good or a bad workman will enjoy his leisure, take pride in proving his worth in his trade-union branch, and will be prepared to argue that he and every man ought to be many-sided. But this grower of potted plants saw himself simply as a grower of potted plants, and was more than satisfied with that limitation; indeed, it was to him not a limitation at all, it was enfranchisement. He would have had no sympathy with a British workman’s innocent desire to win a football pool and leave his job and escape in the holiday of independent means, or with the French workman’s recurrent impulse to break the bars of the rigid industrial system in which he feels himself imprisoned and escape into a strike. He did not want to escape from his greenhouse, he wanted to escape into it. This did not necessarily demonstrate that he had a more agreeable character. Indeed, it might be alleged that he wanted to take shelter in his labour only because he and his kind had shown an exceptional disability to make the rest of life agreeable. But it gave him as a grower of potted plants a certain advantage over other growers of potted plants with different ideas of liberation; and when he spoke it was not to pass the time of day, not to relax in gossip after the long working hours, not to inform himself how it was going with his former leaders, but to ask questions relating to the exploitation of this advantage. He wanted to know how many trials were likely to be held in Nuremberg now that this one was finished, and whether as many Americans and British and French officials would be here to conduct these others; and it was plain that though he was aware that he would be told that the number would be less, he longed to hear that it would be not much less. He inquired whether any of the English people now here would be likely to stop off in Holland on the way home and would be able to send him Dutch seeds. He would have had more to say, but the greenhouse was getting dark. Above it the gabled and turreted Schloss was steeply and mysteriously misshapen against the stars, and scores of yellow windows told where the conquerors would sit among smoke and talk away the night.

  3

  It was necessary, and really necessary, that a large number of persons, including the heads of the armed and civil services, should go to Nuremberg and hear the reading of the judgment, because in no other conceivable way could they gather what the trial had been about. Long, long ago, the minds of all busy people outside the enclave of Nuremberg had lost touch with the proceedings. The newspaper reports inevitably concentrated on the sensational moments when the defendants sassed back authority, and to follow the faint obtrusions of the serious legal issues which made their way into the more serious journals would have taken the kind of mind which reads its daily Scripture portion and never misses; and that kind of persistence carries one irresistibly to the top of the grocery store, and no further. The high positions fall to people with pliant minds, who drop every habit if it is not serviceable to their immediate aims, and thus it was that the most influential classes in 1946 knew little or nothing about the Nuremberg trial.

  It was unfortunate that since the European railway systems were still disorganized the only way open to Nuremberg was by air. This would always have presented a tough transport problem, for planes carry so few passengers, but it was made worse by demobilization, for a great many pilots had been liberated to civil life. Hence, though Nuremberg is normally between three or four hours distant from London by air, those who wanted to be at Nuremberg on Monday, September 30, had to leave London in a serie
s of flights that began on the previous Tuesday, and had, unless they were very distinguished, to undergo a journey through Kafka territory. They did not simply get a plane ticket and a laisser passer and a passport visa; they had to apply for their army papers at the offices of the German branch of the Foreign Office and Allied Control Commission. There was nothing to grumble about in this; for obviously people could not be allowed to wander about in recently occupied territory without proper identification papers and definitions of their permitted scope, but it was equally impossible for the officials in Germany to scrutinize these papers, because they had too much to do in coping with other problems created by the travellers.

  One party had to go to Nuremberg by way of Berlin, where grave young men welcomed our plane in the belief that it contained a quite different set of persons. It was apparent that in England there was a superb system for dispatching visitors to Germany, and in Germany a superb system for receiving visitors from England, but just at that moment they had ceased to have any connection with each other. The grave young men irritably told the two correspondents among the passengers that they had better get on the next plane to London and start afresh, for they had no idea how to get them from Berlin to Nuremberg. They had no time—and this was true—they really had no time, to look at the correspondents’ army orders, which contained an answer to that perplexity. The correspondents thought it wise to get into an automobile that was waiting for someone else, and since the driver was one of those eccentrics who in all branches of the services in Germany were replacing the more normal types as they were demobilized, he fell in with the fraud, not humorously, but because, he said carefully, like a hypochondriac, making a change now and then did everybody good; it didn’t do to keep in a groove. Let such disorganization never be mocked. It is inevitable.

  It was an excellent automobile for occupied Germany. It whizzed along the long sandy road beside the smiling suburban lakes, and then the individual horror of bombed Berlin suddenly declared its character. Different towns have different modes of desolation. There was at first sight no rubble here, and few waste lots, but mile after mile of huge hollow houses, winnowed by the wind and rain, mere diagrams of habitation. Piranesi, after a lifetime spent drawing the well-fleshed architecture of the Romans and their Renaissance descendants, was smitten in his later years with madness and drew buildings as majestic but stripped to the bare brick and dedicated to the harsh necessity of being prisons. Berlin had suffered just that change. It had boasted many gross avenues, lined with gross houses, grossly ornamented. The shells of these houses still stood. Often it could have been imagined that the whole house still stood, though stripped of all ornament, to serve some utilitarian purpose, to be a better workhouse or barracks. But the glassless windows looked inward through the roomless ruin to the other glassless windows on the farther side and showed the empty sky beyond, in a maniac stare.

  It was not easy to know what the Berliners were feeling. The women walking in the streets wore better winter coats than we in England had seen for years. The theatres were open. There was an Oscar Wilde season; the photographs showed that the dresses were beautiful. But of course no individual and no institution was the same in this city which, while London had been chastised with whips, had been chastised with scorpions; and one was always being disconcerted by coming on a familiar form without its familiar content. The lower parts of the wrecked buildings were being restored as shops, and quite a number of them were being opened as bookshops. German bookshops had rarely, if ever, pleased like the best English and French and Finnish bookshops, but they had been the outlets of an immensely powerful and efficient publishing trade. Now, however, they merely contained Allied propaganda and a certain number of other volumes which offered some German authors a uniquely disagreeable form of fame. Each bookshop exhibited a great many copies of a few works by unknown German authors, and it was obvious that when these booksellers had started work again under licence from the Allies they had been forced to restock their shelves by exhuming remainders of books which had been published before the war, had fallen flat, and had therefore been warehoused. Such a remark as, “I say, old man, I see your study of Angelus Silesius all over the place these days,” must have been suffused with an offensiveness which it would have lacked anywhere else in the world.

  The cafes too were open, and they were crowded; the crowds were neither munching sausage nor forking up cream cake; they were sitting over glasses of pale liquid which obviously had not cheered them, staring at the traffic, a spectacle which could not cheer them, for it consisted solely of Allied automobiles bearing Allied personnel about the business of occupation. And shopping was still going on in streets where, in the good old days of the boom under the Weimar Republic, shoppers plump with power slowly strolled before huge plate-glass windows so inordinately stocked with goods that the vice of overshopping appeared before the mind not less disgusting than overeating; but now the shoppers never looked right or left of them, they hurried to the street corners, where there were screens plastered with announcements of goods offered in barter, and hurried on hungrily if they did not see what they hoped.

  Most of the business of clearing up bomb damage was, for some obscure reason, done by ageing women. Looking down the road at the foundations of a fire-gutted building which had just been blown up, one saw a gang of them shovelling the bricks into hand carts. A superintendent would shout something jocular at them as he left them, and they would halt for a minute and scream mocking answers and then stand grinning in the sunlight, their grey hairs falling stiff as bootlaces round their leathery faces, their bodies a mixture of bones and crumpled stuffs like unrolled umbrellas, their lean hands hardly more like flesh than their tools. They were a true occasion for love.

  In bombed cities the misadventures which overtake works of art are always extremely poignant, because obviously they are not to blame. It was possible to argue that nobody need weep for the citizens of Berlin, because they did not know enough to come in out of the rain, even when it turned into blood; but nobody expects a statue to know when to come in out of the rain, so pity could be freely extended to the statues of Berlin, which have had as extraordinary misadventures as any statuary in the world. At the end of the Unter den Linden was the Brandenburger Thor, with the Reichstag beside it, and in front of it the Tiergarten, a vast wooded park, far more thickly wooded than any park in New York or London or Paris. In this area sculpture had been given its head under the Kaisers, and it had proved that commissions to artists need not necessarily be stimulants to art. Opposite the Thor, by the Reichstag, there was a huge column commemorating the three victorious wars waged by the Germans in the nineteenth century, the wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. Nearby were two massive statues of von Moltke and General Roon, and a still more monstrous statue of Bismarck, with a number of women round the base, with breasts like artillery pieces. Not far away, in a part of the Tiergarten always full of nannies and children, because a prosperous residential district lay near, was the Sieges Allee, a gorgeous chaplet of dynastic piety. Sculptured in marble white like the icing on a wedding cake, the Margraves of Brandenburg and their descendants the Hohenzollerns stood in family groups in odd raised marble enclosures like open opera loges. There were enough of them to line a long promenade, and in the surrounding glades was a rose garden presided over by a statue of one of the Hohenzollern empresses, wearing scrupulously finished marble clothes, even to a marble hat and a marble veil. There was also a statue of a nude girl riding a horse, more naturalistic than nature but very pleasant to come on in a walk under the tall trees.

  All these statues except the two women, the empress with the marble hat and the girl with none, were picked up and moved by Hitler. He did not want anything to remind the people of the Hohenzollerns or their servants or their victories. The vast column commemorating the three wars he moved into the Tiergarten, almost a mile down the avenue, and he set down the statues of Bismarck and Moltke and Roon round it; and he transferred the S
ieges Allee to an unfrequented part of the park. It may be argued that the German people showed culpable negligence in not taking this act of extravagance and folly as a warning and rising against Hitler. Even if the Germans did not know about the concentration camps they must have known about this transfer of statuary. Should an American President move the Washington Square Arch to Brooklyn and the Lincoln Memorial to a playground in Georgetown, or a British Prime Minister move the Albert Memorial to a public garden in Hammersmith, and did so for political reasons, even if the mass of the population did not suspect anything, the people who worked round him would, and restrictive action would be taken.

  The statues gained by the change. They were set deeper among the trees, they lost their smugness, they looked as if they were part of the setting of a romantic drama. But at the end of the war they had suffered a further change which lifted them out of their poor place as artifacts into Lear’s kingdom of loss. The trees of the Tiergarten had in 1946 been nearly all destroyed. Some were burned in the air raids, others were hit by Russian artillery during the battle for the capital, most of them were cut down by the freezing population during the first winter after the war. Now the great park was nothing but a vast potato patch, with here and there a row of vegetables and a plot of tobacco plants. From this naked land rose the statues in starkly inappropriate prominence. Above them the column of the three victorious wars was surmounted by the French flag, since this was in the French Sector, and the horizon was bounded by riddled cliffs which were once splendid villas and apartment houses. But, as well as this landscape-wide humiliation, they had suffered more private troubles. The charge that the Red Army is illiterate was forever disproved. The pedestals of Moltke and Roon, the bellies of the women who sprawl round the base of the Bismarck memorial, were scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers.