Berlin Diary (74 page)

I got my first night’s sleep in a week, and felt a little better. Breakfasted at noon at the Café de la Paix with Joe [Harsch] and Walter on café crème and brioches, and the sun on the terrace was warm and soothing. At one we went down the street to Philippe’s, where we had a nice lunch, the first decent one since arriving.

Then Joe and I made a little “Sentimental Journey.” On foot, because there are no cars, buses, or taxis. We walked down through the Place Vendôme and thought of Napoleon. Pushed on through the Tuileries. It made my heart feel a little better to see so many children about. They were playing on the seesaws. The merry-go-round was turning with its load of children, until an irate
agent
for some reason (to curry favour with the Germans?) closed it down.

It was an exquisite June day, and we stopped to admire the view (my millionth, surely!) up the Tuileries to the Champs-Elysées, with the silhouette of the Arc de Triomphe on the horizon. It was as good as ever. Then through the Louvre and across the Seine. The fishermen were dangling their lines from the bank, as always. I thought: “Surely this will go on to the end of Paris, to the end of time… men fishing in the Seine.” I stopped, as I have always stopped a thousand times, to see if—after all these years—I might witness one man at last having at least a bite. But though they jerked their lines out continually, no one caught a fish. I have never seen a fish caught in the Seine.

Then down the Seine to Notre-Dame. The sandbags had been removed from the central portal. We stopped
to observe it. Inside the Cathedral the light was too strong, with the original rose window and the two transept windows out. But from up the river as we had approached, the view of the façade, the Gothic in all its glory, was superb. We went round behind. The grace of the flying buttresses that support the upper part of the nave!

Then I turned guide for Joe. Took him to the near-by Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, the oldest in Paris, then down the little street past the Hôtel Du Caveau, in whose cellars we had had some nights in my younger days. I showed him, a little farther down, the
bordel
across the eighteen-foot-wide street from the police station. Apparently the whores had all fled, like almost all of the good people of France. Then up past the Cluny, which was closed, stopping at the statue of Montaigne with its eloquent quotation about Paris being the “glory of France.” We stopped for a beer at the Balzar, next to the Sorbonne, a pub where I had spent so many nights in my first years in Paris after 1925. Then, since this was a “Sentimental Journey,” naked and unashamed, we hit up the Boulevard Saint-Michel, then up the rue de Vaugirard to the Hôtel de Lisbonne, where I had lived for two years when I first came to Paris. The Lisbonne looked as dirty and dilapidated as ever. But, according to the sign, they’d added a bath. No such sign of civilization when I lived there.

Then the Panthéon, from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and then through the Luxembourg Gardens, as lovely as ever, and crowded with children, as ever, which cheered me up again, and the statues of the Queens of France around the central pond, and at the pond the kids sailing their boats, and the Palace off to one side, and a pretty girl sitting under the statue of the Queen so-and-so who reigned, I noticed, as we took our eyes
off the beautiful thing, in 1100 and something.

And then Montparnasse, with aperitifs on the sidewalk of the Rotonde, and the Dôme across the street as jammed with crackpots as ever, and in front of us a large table full of middle-aged French women of the bourgeoisie, apparently recovering from their daze, because their anger was rising at the way the little
gamins
(
elles sont françaises, après tout!
) were picking up the German soldiers.

And then a walk back, with a drink at the Deux Magots across from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, whose solid tower seemed more comforting today than ever before, and down the rue Bonaparte past the bookshops, the art shops, so civilized, past the house where Tess and I had lived in 1934. Across the Seine again, and Joe wanted to stroll in the gardens of the Palais Royal, which we did, and they were as peaceful as ever before, and as still, except for the German planes roaring overhead.

And thence to our hotel, filled with German soldiers, and outside, on the boulevard, a long column of German artillery roaring by.

B
ERLIN
,
June
26

Returned from Paris. We left there at seven a.m. and drove through the “battlefields” (more accurately, the destroyed towns where what fighting there was in this war took place) to Brussels. The German officers and officials said they wanted to have one last square meal before returning to the
Vaterland
, so I took them around to the Taverne Royale. We stuffed on hors d’œuvres, steak, mountains of vegetables, and fresh strawberries and cream, washing it all down with two bottles of quite good Château Margaux.

En route to Brussels we passed through Compiègne, Noyon, Valenciennes, and Mons—all well smashed up. But except in the towns I could see no evidence of any serious fighting. Abandoned Allies’ tanks and trucks here and there, but no sign along the roads that the French had offered serious resistance. The French and Belgians in the towns still seemed numbed, but not particularly resentful, as one might have expected. As elsewhere, they acted extremely civil to the German troops.

An attaché of the German Embassy in Brussels accompanied us as far as Louvain, and the reason soon became evident. In Louvain we were driven straight to the charred remains of the library. As we stepped out of our cars, it just
happened
that a priest came up on a bicycle and greeted us. It just happened that he seemed to be on good terms with the German Embassy official. The two of them then related the story the propagandists had given me some weeks before on the same spot—namely, that the British had fired the library of Louvain University before their retreat.

I admit there are some points that bother me. None of the near-by buildings, some of which are only fifty feet from the library, suffered any damage at all. Even their windows are intact. The Germans and the Belgian priest kept harping on this as proof that no German bombs could have hit the library. On the other hand, I notice two small shell-holes in the tower, which still stands. And incendiary bombs dropped on the library wouldn’t have disturbed the adjacent buildings. True, if many had been dropped, some would have missed the target and set the near-by houses on fire.

The priest, who said he was one of the librarians, explained that the priceless manuscripts were kept in fire-proof vaults in the basement. He then claimed that the British had started the fire in the basement and had actually
set fires going in the fire-proof vaults. He and the Germans kept emphasizing that it was obvious from the looks of the charred remains, girders and all, that the fire had been started from the basement. But this wasn’t obvious to me.

Approaching the German border towards sundown, we avoided the Maastricht-Aachen road because the German Embassy in Brussels had told our Germans that the Reich customs people there would be very strict with us; and our two cars were loaded down with booty purchased with marks forced on the French at the thievish rate of twenty francs to one mark. The German officers and officials had raided Paris, buying suits, Scotch woollens for making suits, handbags, silk stockings, perfumes, underwear, etc. We drove around for hours trying to find a lonely customs post. The nearer to the border we approached, the more nervous the Germans became. An officer of the High Command—one of the most decent Germans I know—kept pointing out to me how embarrassing it would be for him, in uniform, to be caught red-handed bringing in so much booty. He said his fellow officers had been abusing their opportunities so scandalously that Hitler himself a few days before had issued a blunt order to the customs guards to seize everything found on returning officers or men. I finally offered to take the blame, if it came to a showdown, and explain to the customs people that the booty was all mine.

The little valley east of Liège was green and cool in the late afternoon, and there was little trace of the war except for one destroyed village and the blown-up bridges of the main railroad line to Aachen. Finally we arrived at the German border. Our chauffeur, a private, who had certainly bought his share of the booty in Paris, became so nervous he almost ran down and
killed the customs officer. But our High Command officer spoke convincingly and fast, and we got through with our plunder.

Arrived in Aachen just in time to catch the night train to Berlin. Stiff and cold from fatigue and lack of sleep, I slumped into my upper berth and fell immediately into a heavy slumber. This was about ten p.m. About eleven thirty I was awakened by a furious shrieking of the sirens. By the noise, I could tell we were in a station (Duisburg, I later learned). The siren had hardly stopped before the train got off with a tremendous jerk and gathered speed so rapidly I thought some of the curves would surely derail us. I was now fully awakened and not a little scared—to be perfectly honest. Above the noise of the train, I could hear the British bombers flying low, then diving still lower, and obviously trying to get us. (Kerker said next morning he
saw
them from the car window.) Apparently the British in the end gave our train up as small fry, which it was. I felt no bomb explosions, at least. The sound of the British planes died away. Our engineer slowed down the train to a reasonable speed. I went back to sleep.

B
ERLIN
,
June
27

To sum up:

Make some reservations. That it is too early to know all. That you didn’t see all, by any means. And all that.

But from what I’ve seen in Belgium and France
and from talks I’ve had with Germans and French in both countries, and with French, Belgian, and British prisoners along the roads, it seems fairly clear to me that:

France did not fight.

If she did, there is little evidence of it. Not only I, but several of my friends have driven from the German
border to Paris and back, along all the main roads. None of us saw any evidence of serious fighting.

The fields of France are undisturbed. There was no fighting on any sustained line. The German army hurled itself forward along the roads. Even on the roads there is little sign that the French did any more than harry their enemy. And even this was done only in the towns and villages. But it was only harrying, delaying. There was no attempt to come to a halt on a line and strike back in a well-organized counter-attack.

But since the Germans chose to fight the war on the roads, why didn’t the French stop them? Roads make ideal targets for artillery. And yet I have not seen one yard of road in northern France which shows the effects of artillery fire. Driving to Paris over the area where the second German offensive began, an officer from the High Command who had missed the campaign kept mumbling that he could not understand it, that up there on that height, dominating the road and providing wonderful artillery cover with its dense woods, the French must have had the sense to plant a few guns. Just a few would have made the road impassable, he kept repeating, and he would order us to stop while he studied the situation. But there had been no guns on those wooded heights and there were no shell-holes on or near the road. The Germans had passed along here with their mighty army, hardly firing a shot.

The French blew up many bridges. But they also left many strategic ones standing, especially over the Meuse, a great natural defence because of the deepness, the steepness of the valley, and its wooded cover. More than one French soldier I talked to thought it was downright treachery.

At no point in France and at only two or three in Belgium did I see a road properly mined, or, for that
matter, mined at all. In the villages and towns the French had hastily thrown up tank-barriers, usually of blocks of stone and rubbish. But the Germans brushed them aside in minutes. A huge crater left by an exploded mine could not have been brushed aside in a few minutes.

D. B. in Paris, having seen the war from the other side, concludes that there was treachery in the French army from top to bottom—the fascists at the top, the Communists at the bottom. And from German and French sources alike I heard many stories of how the Communists had received their orders from their party not to fight, and didn’t….