Читать книгу The Scene is Changed - Ashley Dukes - Страница 12

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Of the German disorders that followed the Armistice we saw nothing, for we were ourselves following the retreating army through the Rhineland at a disrespectful distance, and the arrival of our troops automatically preserved order in the occupied zone. But within a few weeks news came from Berlin of the Spartacus movement, in which Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg tried to arm the workers and seize power for communism. The Mother Superior was much perturbed about the activities of Red Rosa—"one of those hot-blooded Polish females" as the parish priest declared. Rosa must have been very prim compared with their vision of her. In that winter, while we skated round the nunnery moat or rode across the plains hunting hares, in the intervals of parades and educational lectures for the troops, Germany was plainly agonizing in mind as well as body. This was the background of literature and the theatre, and one might have expected that the drama of the streets would drive the drama altogether from the stage; but actually the will to expression was too strong to be stifled. New writers pressed forward to seize the stages which had functioned with German thoroughness during four years of war; the organization was all ready for them, and understanding audiences and critics were ready too. There was no spirit of defeated chauvinism such as the Nazis have since pictured and invoked. The people wanted to hear what New Germany with its saddler head of the provisional government had to say, and Europe wanted to hear it too. Whatever political blunders had been or were to be made, the feeling of that time was one of stubborn hope. Nie Wieder Krieg, never again, was the watchword oftenest heard passing from mouth to mouth; and we who were still in soldiers' uniforms echoed it as heartily as any German civilian in his threadbare suit.

As a German-speaking officer I was bound to be assigned some sort of special duty, and there was even talk of a regular commission with field rank and years of prospective service on the Rhine. Luckily at this moment a temporary post came along, and made the authorities forget about the matter. I was to be appointed commandant of Elsenborn Camp near Aix-la-Chapelle, a bleak place, 2000 feet up, which had been the concentration point for the original invasion of Belgium. The divisional general added that I could sleep in Ludendorff's bed, some disarmed German officers in charge of stores would join me at meals, the hotel up there was said to have a good cellar, and one could shoot small deer in the forests but I must take an armed bodyguard if I went out with the keepers. I thanked him and went into his staff office, where a bargain was made that this command should carry with it short leave at my own reasonable discretion, and a pass by rail or any other form of transport to Cologne. No motor vehicles could be relied on to reach Elsenborn in winter, so I set out mounted for this elevated spot, accompanied by two junior officers and a detachment on limbered wagons. The camp was only two feet deep in snow when we arrived, but four feet deep soon afterwards, so that we were cut off for the best part of a week and then provisioned by pack mule. Otherwise the place was as described, Ludendorff's bed was comfortable, one of the Germans played chess, and the host produced Marcobrunners and Jesuitengartens of mature years and character. I mounted a guard which presented arms impeccably by day and was dismissed after dinner. The few deer I shot at made off indignant and unharmed.

At the first melting of the snows (and there are several meltings in the Rhineland) I took my accumulated leave and made a playgoing visit of ten days to Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne in our zone and Coblenz in that of the French. The city of Charlemagne was disappointing as a theatre town, and Coblenz had only an uninspired playhouse; but the chief theatre in Cologne included in its repertory practically every play of merit written in Germany since 1914. One of them certainly was Der Bettler by Reinhard Sorge, a dramatic poet who fell at Verdun. It was the first expressionist drama, and perhaps the best because it never left the plane of poetry. The subject was modern but yet timeless, just one of those German domestic dramas that in prose can be so boring; the verse irregular and strong, seldom lyrical, always dramatic. The staging showed an understanding of the expressionist mind; across the proscenium hung a fine gauze, that now familiar device for preventing the diffusion of light on a subdivided scene. Symbolic arrangements of pieces of furniture and a stove, café seats on a raised terrace, a high window and the shrubs of a garden, formed the subdivision. The lighting moved from one part of this scene to another, leaving all the unlighted part invisible. In 1919 this was most impressive, and it would be so to-day. A work of rare interest was being directed and played as it should be.

And what, pray, is expressionism? the reader may reasonably ask, for it is some time since this word was current in the theatre. The answer is simpler than the dramatic critics, who signally failed to understand the movement, would have the public believe. Expressionism is, or should be, one form of the poetry of the stage—the writer's form which seeks to give the essential rather than the detail of drama, and so to help the actor to give the essential of acting and the director and the scenic artist to give the essential in presentation. The aim of expressionist drama is clearly allied to that of imagist verse and impressionist painting; but the name itself became specially attached to middle-European dramatic writing in the years between 1917 and, say, 1927. I should say that expressionism perished because few who practised it were poets themselves, and of the others too few understood how to contribute to the general poetry of theatre. When the dramatic history of our century comes to be written this movement may appear much more important than it appears now, a few years after its decline and virtual abandonment by dramatists. These nameless characters of the expressionist imagination, the Mr. and Mrs. Zeros or other numerical figments, played their part in a fermentation of the creative mind which was the possible forerunner of a new dramatic poetry. And in its wildest extravagances the actor and the director found stuff to work upon.

At first I felt a certain shyness in attending these evenings at the Cologne theatre, which was seldom patronized by foreign officers in uniform. The middle-class audience which promenaded in the intervals, slightly paler and more haggard than the Munich audience of old, stared at me as none but promenading Germans can ever stare. An official of the management approached and asked me deferentially whether I represented the Zensur of the British authorities, and when I replied that I was there for pleasure he begged a thousand official pardons. Editors and dramatic reviewers put me at my ease, and I met people not only in Cologne but in Bonn among the university staff. I returned to my camp on the frontier with experience of half a dozen new and vital plays and a library of expressionist drama up to date. Signs of spring were appearing, and we became busy as an overnight halt for horses and mules brought by road from France to supply the Rhine Army. Hundreds of these were making their last journey, having been marked for civilian consumption. With them rode young officers, innocent of war, who ate and drank, slept and passed on. Beginning to feel like an innkeeper, I applied for early demobilization, and even for a consular post which I did not seriously want. Divisional headquarters, as I had hoped, was sufficiently impressed to recall me to battalion duty so that I should hand over to a possible successor. I returned by way of Cologne, where they were now playing Von Morgens bis Mitternachts by Georg Kaiser. The opportunity of seeing this play was welcome, for it seemed the most characteristic prose work the expressionists had produced, and so the best to translate for the English-speaking stage.

At the nunnery, all was changed except the benevolence of the nuns; the Army of the war was visibly dissolving, and on the horse lines my old roan and his groom were the only survivors. They were to remain a few weeks longer, for it was typical of routine that I should now be given short leave to England. This included a day or two in Cologne each way (with more playgoing) and a protracted journey by the Boulogne express, which lived on the reputation that it had once been three days late. The spell of leave itself was very welcome: one of the contacts I renewed was with the Stage Society which had just given The Beaux' Stratagem by Farquhar. The consular post came to nothing, but I was offered interesting work by the successors to Baedeker in the English publishing world. One of their projects was a handbook to the Western Front, Belgium and Northern France; and the queer association of history and art, architecture and war made an appeal to me. I must have been back in Germany in full spring, for the Rhine valley was all fruit blossom from Cologne to Coblenz, and Bonn was once more a university town with youth in its veins. Like schoolboys at the end of term (for that is what it means to be on the verge of demobilization) another major and I rode to the Rhine one morning early, stabled our horses and took ferry to the forbidden and neutral zone of the Siebengebirge, where we walked from wooded height to height in the deepest solitude I have ever known on mountains. Next morning early I was awakened by my orderly with my final Army orders, which were to proceed to the Crystal Palace by way of Rotterdam.

In thirty-three years of life I had hitherto successfully avoided visiting the Crystal Palace, which is one of several English equivalents of Coney Island. Not even the great Saturday evening firework displays of Messrs. Brock had drawn me there. But as a gateway to civilian freedom this glassy structure, originally set up in Hyde Park for Victoria's Great Exhibition, glittered with a fantastic glamour. Just twenty years later I was to see its original cement foundations, close to Knightsbridge, laid bare by mechanical diggers and cranes filling sandbags with earth in readiness for the second German war. But for the moment my dream was the Crystal Palace and demobilization was my Bank Holiday. I saw it refulgent before me as we rode for the last time through the German forests on the way to the station. My groom was to take back the roan; it was hard to part from this animal who had been mine for three years and had once been wounded under me but retrieved from the Base. I celebrated the last night in Cologne by going to the opera-house instead of a theatre, and afterwards went round to talk with the English players under Esme Percy who had by this time started a stage of their own in the city and were performing plays by Shaw and others. Next morning a mixed crowd of officers and men of all units, unknown to each other but united by the wish not to be soldiers any more, sailed down the Rhine towards Holland. We sang a great deal and drank very little, although the propensity of the English for drinking aboard river steamboats is well known. When Germany was left behind and the windmills came into sight on the flat river-banks, we raised a cheer.

Holland seems to me a country permanently unmemorable, however often it is visited. This time we were not to be rewarded even by seeing galleries of great pictures, for the cities themselves were out of bounds. I recall dimly a railroad journey to the Hook, where the Harwich boat was alongside; and much more vividly the North Sea passage on a still moonlit night and the view of the Essex coast at dawn—strangely unlike the view of Kentish cliffs seen hitherto by soldiers on short leave. There cannot have been one of us aboard who did not feel the finality of this experience, the laying down of arms and taking up of a life that was either unknown or almost forgotten. The boys in their early twenties were entitled to feel happiest about it, for despite certain deficiencies of education they could start from the beginning; we in the thirties had no illusory belief that 1919 would be in the least like 1914. And so we berthed in Harwich, came to London in the early morning, and by noon were forming lines at tables in the Crystal Palace to receive our papers. It was a pleasure, that evening, to get into civilian clothes.

Now that it is closing, I see that this chapter is itself rather expressionist, giving as it does the essential and not the detail of a half-year suspended, as it were, between war and peace. In retrospect also I see the Germany and her stage of this time midway between Munich as I had known it and Berlin and Salzburg as they were to be seen a few years later. At a revolutionary time—for 1919 was so in every country more or less—the stage was making new and positive gestures of its own. I had the good fortune to see them in their full significance, because in Germany the theatre was a genuine reflection of a people's dramatic will; it was not, as in post-war Soviet Russia or in the total state of to-day, an instrument of policy. It was still too early for some of the best dramatic writing that came out of this time of struggle, though Toller's Die Wandlung and Fritz von Unruh's Ein Geschlecht were already written, beside Sorge's play which has been described. But the stage was not waiting for only dramatists; acting and especially direction were making gestures of their own. The style of the Burgtheater was now completely outmoded and a byword among the profession—very much as "ham" acting is a byword to-day. The work of directors began to be described as stilisiert or konstruktivist, and schöpferische Leitung (creative direction) was something more than a new theatre fashion. It was odd to be returning to a country where such developments had scarcely been heard of, and manifestly impossible in the mood of 1919 to enlist any but the most limited English sympathy for a movement of German origin.

The effect of it all was to give me a strong urge toward constructive theatre criticism—not dramatic criticism as the London reviewers understand it, narrating the plot of the play at length and adding a few words about the acting at the end, but illumination of the stage in its capacity as a bearer of works of art. Had the New Age still existed in its old form I would have written for it weekly; but Orage had turned it into a Social Credit organ, and he himself emigrated first to France and then to America. The New Statesman gave me space for a few articles, and Desmond MacCarthy, as always, showed himself sympathetic to the new idea. Other colleagues in criticism like William Archer received me kindly and took care that I had work to do. In this first civilian summer I rose at six every morning and set about the task of furnishing new material for our stage; the first play was to be Georg Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, and in my rosy imagination there were many to follow. Revisiting the hills of my native Somerset, and driving a gig around its villages on a first properly-arranged honeymoon, I persevered with this project which was to be realized in due measure.