The Fox in the Attic (14 page)

Then, through the front ranks of the crowd, a blur of field-gray and steel helmets as the first men began to pass. Many were without packs: some even without rifles: their uniforms were still caked with French mud. Someone in the crowd tried to cheer—for this was their menfolk's homecoming, home from the war, home to be demobilized; but the solitary cheer ended in a fit of coughing and nobody took it up.

The men marched in close formation, in small parties that were token platoons, detachment after detachment, with wide spaces between, so that the dead sound of marching came in waves, rising and falling regularly, like sea-waves on shingle—only varied by the sullen rumbling of a baggage-wagon like boulders rolling.

A small child, pushed forward a little in front of the crowd, stood motionless, a bunch of wilting flowers held out in front of her in a chubby fist; but no soldier accepted it, no one even looked at her, not one smiled: they did not even seem to see the crowd. They marched like machines dreaming.

Even the officers—the first these five chaotic weeks to appear on the Munich streets in uniform—wore that empty basilisk look, marching with men they hardly seemed to see; but at this sight of
officers
there rose from the onlookers here and there a faint and almost disembodied growl ... someone behind Otto on his new crutches jostled him aside and pressed right forward out of the crowd, right past the child too: a big elderly woman with a massive bosom and a huge protruding stomach, upright as a ramrod from carrying all that weight in front: a flaunting hag with a lupus-ridden face and hanging dewlaps, wisps of gray hair under a railwayman's peaked cap. Deliberately she spat on the ground just where a young major was about to tread. But he seemed to see nothing, not even that. For a moment it looked as if she was going to attack him; but then, as if appalled, she didn't.

If there was any expression at all on any of these wooden military faces it was a potential hatred: a hatred that had found no real object yet to fasten on, but only because nothing in the somersaulted world around seemed real.

God! That German soldiers should ever have to look like that, marching through a German crowd!

*

Why had God chosen to do this thing to His German Army—the very salt of His else-unsavory earth?

Otto bundled his papers into the safe and locked it, for that obsessive dead sound of marching made work impossible: then hoisted himself to his feet, facing the window.

In England the ending of the war had come like waking from a bad dream: in defeated Germany, as the signal for deeper levels of nightmare. The symbols and the occasion had changed but in Germany it was still that same kind of compulsive dreaming. The ex-soldier, expelled from the crumbled Gemeinschaft of army life, had stepped out into a void. The old order had shattered: even money was rapidly ebbing away from between men, leaving them desperately incommunicado like men rendered voiceless by an intervening vacuum: millions, still heaped on top of each other in human cities yet forced to live separate, each like some solitary predatory beast.

Now in 1923 prices were already a billion times the pre-war figure and still rocketing. These were the days spoken of by Haggai the prophet, when “he that earneth wages, earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes”: by Monday a workman's whole last-week's wages might not pay his tramfare back to work. The smallest sum in any foreign currency was hoarded for it would buy almost anything; but nobody held German money five minutes. Even beer was an investment for presently you got more for the empty bottle than you had paid for it full.

The salaried and rentier classes were becoming submerged below the proletariat. Wages could rise (even if always too little and too late); but interest and pensions and the like, and even salaries, were fixed. Retired senior officials swept the streets. The government official still in office had to learn to temper his integrity to his necessities: had he tried to stay strictly honest a little too long, he would have died.

When the solid ground drops utterly away from under a man's feet like that he is left in a state of free fall: he is in a bottomless pit—a hell. Moreover this was a hell where all were not equitably falling equally together. Some fell slower than others: even peasants could resort to barter (you went marketing with your poultry, not your purse); and many rich men had found means of hardly falling at all. There they were still, those Walther von Kessens and the like, tramping about solidly up there like Dantes in full view of all the anguished others who were falling. People who could buy things for marks and sell them for pounds or dollars even rose.

A hell where justice was not being done, and seen not being done.

Consumption has always to be paid for. Their war had been very conspicuous consumption but in Germany there had been virtually no war-taxation to pay for it on the nail. Thus there was nothing really mysterious about this present exhaustion into outer space of every last penn'orth of new value as fast as it was created: this was a kind of natural, belated capital-cum-income levy— though levied now not equitably by any human government but blindly, by Dis himself. Of this rationale however the sufferers had no inkling. They could not understand their suffering, and inexplicable suffering turns to hatred. But hatred cannot remain objectless: such hatred precipitates its own THEY, its own someone-to-be-hated. In a hell devoid of real ministering devils the damned invent them rather than accept that their only tormentors are themselves and soon these suffering people saw everywhere such “devils,” consciously tormenting them: Jews, Communists, Capitalists, Catholics, Cabbalists—even their own elected government, the “November Criminals.” Millions of horsepower of hatred had been generated, more hatred than the real situation could consume: inevitably it conjured its own Enemy out of thin air.

On the heels of that hatred came also the inevitable reacting love. All those egos violently dislodged from their old penumbral settings were now groping desperately in the face of that dark enveloping phantasmal THEY to establish a new “footing,” new tenable penumbral frontiers of the Self: inevitably they secreted millions of horsepower of love that the actual situation also couldn't consume, and therefore precipitating its own fictive WE—its myths of Soil and Race, its Heroes, its kaleidoscope of Brotherhoods each grappling its own members with hoops of steel.

Its Freikorps, its communist cells: its Kampfbund, with all its component organisms: its Nazi movement.

After the official cease-fire in 1918 fighting still went on for a time in the lost Baltic provinces that the Armistice had raped. These freelance wars were a more amateur and even obscener carnage for they were an ill-armed and merciless Kilkenny-cats all-against-all, where fanatical bands of Germans in a state of bestial heroism fought with Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Bolsheviks, British—even Germans of the wrong kidney. It was one way of staving off this generation's Nemesis of “Peace.”

Otto's young nephew, Franz (the “ten-year-old tow-haired Franz” of Mary's pre-war memories), had a best schoolfriend called Wolff; and in 1918 Wolff had enlisted in those wars when not quite sixteen.

There Wolff had vanished; but these were wars fought without benefit of war-office and published no casualty lists. Even now no one could say for certain that Wolff had been killed.

Wolff's younger brother Lothar (for one) would never believe it. Before the débacle this Lothar had been sent to the same fashionable cadet-school as Wolff and Franz (their father the gaunt old Geheimrat Scheidemann was a retired colonial governor, an ex-colleague in Africa of Goering père). But come the inflation the Scheidemanns had not the same solid resources as the von Kessens, nor foreign investments like the Goerings. The old widower was too arthritic now to work: he let lodgings in his big flat near the “English Garden” in Munich, but there was not much left nowadays under any of those lofty ornate ceilings of his except hard-lying lodgers, several to a room.

Eighteen-year-old Lothar who was supposed to be studying law thought himself lucky to have landed a part-time desk-clerk job at the Bayrischer-Hof hotel in Munich where most of the clerks and waiters were sons of just such middle-class families as his, and were nowadays virtually their families' sole support. At the Bayrischer-Hof, too, some at least of Lothar's meals were provided. But no one could expect so good a job all to himself, and Lothar shared his turn-about with a fellow student. On his off-days he lived chiefly on memories of his hotel meals, dining in retrospect. One night when he was supperless like this he dreamed he had been sacked, and woke screaming: other times he dreamed of his brother Wolff—the wild one who had vanished—and woke in tears.

This morning at the hotel Lothar had had a windfall: a young Englishman who had spent the night there asked him to change an English ten-shilling note.

Lothar had changed it out of his own pocket: no one would be such a fool as to put good English money in the till. He buckled it safely inside his shirt. He had changed it into marks for Augustine quite fairly at the rate current that morning; but even by midday it was worth ten times as much.

So Augustine with his pocket full of marks caught the mainline train for Kammstadt where he had to change, and soon after his departure Lothar came off duty.

Habitually Lothar spent most of his time off duty at a certain gymnasium near the Southern Station. The neighborhood was a bit medical, but convenient for the Teresienwiese Sportsground with its running-tracks. He went there for physical training and to meet his friends as in Sparta of old; for the company he met here was indeed a noble sodality, the very flower of German youth; and Lothar was proud and humble to be accepted as one of them.

He found here that decent, modest, manly kind of idealism as necessary to youth everywhere as desert watersprings. “True,” thought Lothar, “we are come here to exercise only our brute bodies; but in fact how innocently do Body and Spirit walk hand in hand! How much more often the Eye of Horus” —their private name for that rare hawklike eye that pierces to the spiritual behind every material veil—“is found in the faces of simple athletes than of philosophers or priests!” Lothar himself was intelligent enough but had found it only a hindrance in this company; and he had the more need for friends now that his brother the noble Wolff was gone.

So Lothar with Augustine's half-Bradbury still safe inside his shirt betook himself to his gymnasium; and at the first whiff of all the delicious manliness within its echoing portals he snorted like a horse. The abiding smell of men's gymnasiums is a cold composite one, compounded of the sweet strawberry-smell of fresh male sweat, the reek of thumped leather and the dust trampled into the grain of the floor and confirmed there by the soapy mops of cleaners; but to eighteen-year-old Lothar this tang meant everything that the wind on the heath meant to Petulengro and he snorted at it now like a horse let out to spring grass.

Today Lothar began with a few loosening-exercises, starting with neck and shoulders, then the fingers, and ending with ankles and insteps. After that he hung from the wall-bars, raising and lowering his legs to strengthen the abdomen; for that muscular wall is of the greatest importance, since not only does it control the body's hinge on which everything else depends but it also protects the solar plexus with its sacred emotions.

At the far end of this bare hall filled with the echoes of young men's staccato voices the wall was painted a light green with a broad off-white band at the height of a tennis-net, for solo practice. Lothar was fond of tennis, but alas in May 1919 when von Epp was “cleansing” Munich someone had stood Reds against it so now the brickwork (particularly in and close to that white band) was too badly bullet-pocked for a tennis-ball ever again to return off it true. Thus if the arms and shoulders of some quill-driver like Lothar needed building up he had really nothing more interesting to turn to than dumb-bells and Indian clubs. Today moreover when he came down off the wall Lothar found the vaulting-horse crowded and also the parallel bars; so he went straight to the mat of the small pug-nosed world war sergeant who taught them all jiu-jitsu.

Jiu-jitsu (or Judo), being the art of using unbearable pain for the conquest of brute force, has an irresistible attraction for young imaginations, boys' almost as much as girls'. Lothar was obsessed by it these days. Since it is the technique of unarmed self-defense the instructor taught you how to take your enemy unawares and break arm or leg before he can even begin his treacherous assault on you: how to fling spinning out of a window a man big enough to be your father, and so on. Lothar was slightly, almost girlishly built but he had a quite exceptional natural quickness of movement, and lately at political meetings or the like he had sometimes had occasion to use that natural quickness and these acquired skills outside and in earnest. At grips with some older and angrier and stronger but helplessly-fumbling human body he had then been astonished to find how deeply his aesthetic emotions could be stirred by his own impeccable performance. The aesthetic satisfaction of that culminating moment could be almost epileptically intense: Lothar was not uncultured, but surely no poem nor even music had ever offered him one tenth part of this.

O happy, happy youths—hungry and happy!

“Isn't life wonderful!” thought Lothar, toweling his lean body in the changing-room that afternoon: “What a dispensation of Providence that
we
, the German Remnant, should have found each other in this predestined way and grappled ourselves so tight with our comradely love!” For with the secret enemies of Germany ever ceaselessly at work tension these last few weeks was everywhere mounting: surely any minute now the storm must break ...

But then suddenly Lothar remembered that this was a Thursday, and at that his heart leapt. At weekends most of this same sodality went out from Munich, drawn by the silence and the purity of the ancient German forests, to sing ancient German songs together as they marched down the rides between the echoing tree-trunks: to meet in secret deer-haunted glades to perfect their formation-drill: to practice in that pine-sweet air such quasi-military pastimes as “the naming of parts.”