Читать книгу A Toast to Tomorrow - Cyril Henry Coles - Страница 5

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Klaus Lehmann went by stages from Aachen to Darmstadt. He passed through Cologne on the 18th of December, 1918, that was the day the British troops marched in. No German would care to see the Army of Occupation come in, and Lehmann’s heart was as heavy as any other man’s as the Leinsters’ pipes sounded in the Cathedral Square.

At Darmstadt aerodrome he found a number of German war planes waiting to be surrendered for demolition, but very few men about, only just enough for a maintenance party, and to hand over to the British with sufficient ceremony. Klaus drifted on to the aerodrome and leaned against the corner of one of the sheds, looking gloomily at nothing in particular, since that seemed to be the only occupation of such men as were to be seen. Presently he was observed—one of a group of mechanics, after obvious discussion about him, went into a building which looked like an officers’ mess, presumably to report. In due course a long, thin officer emerged, and walked towards him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Klaus with perfect truth.

“What is your name?”

“Lehmann.”

“Rank?”

“I have no rank now,” said Klaus with mournful resignation.

Several regiments of the German Army had mutinied and torn the badges of rank from their officers’ uniforms. The flying man jumped to the conclusion that Klaus’ case was one of those which called for tact, so he introduced himself in the correct manner. “Flug-Leutnant Becker, sir,” he said, saluting.

Klaus returned the salute casually. “Anything happening here?”

“No, sir, nothing. What should happen? We are waiting for the Allied Commission to come and burn the planes.”

“Of course, of course. I cannot think why they do not take them over instead of destroying such valuable machines.”

“They have so many already that they don’t know what to do with them,” said Becker bitterly. “Why should they bother with ours? Will you not come along to the mess, sir?”

“Thank you. Any news?”

“No, none. Only Goering’s escapade. Of course, you have heard about that, sir.”

“Richthoven’s successor. No, what’s he doing?”

“Refuses to be demobilized or to surrender his machines in spite of orders from High Command. I don’t know where they are now.”

“Good,” said Klaus judicially. “A little more of that spirit and we should not have lost the war.”

“There was plenty of that sort of spirit,” said the flying man reproachfully. “It was motor spirit we were short of. Many machines were grounded because there was nothing to put in their tanks.”

“I know, I know. Your morale was excellent,” said Lehmann hastily. “When I said that I was thinking of other branches.”

The Flight-Lieutenant thought it advisable to preserve a sympathetic silence. The two men had just reached the doorway of the mess when they heard the distant roar of aeroplanes approaching, and turned to look in the direction from which it came.

“The victorious Allies, I presume.”

“No, sir, ours! They must be Goering’s lot,” said Becker excitedly. Five planes drew nearer as they spoke, circled the aerodrome, touched down and taxied up to the sheds. “Excuse me, sir,” said the Flight-Lieutenant, and sprinted towards them while Lehmann followed more slowly in time to hear a man in the leading machine shouting, “Got any petrol?”

“No, sir, none,” yelled Becker in reply, at which the new-comer signalled with his arms to the other four pilots, they all switched off their engines and quiet descended again on the aerodrome. The men climbed out of their machines and their leader strolled with Becker across the grass towards Lehmann. He was a big man with a booming voice, and Klaus distinctly heard him say, “Who the devil’s that? One of the demolition squad?”

Becker apparently gave some satisfactory explanation, for when they met the stranger was cordial. Becker introduced them.

“How d’you do?” said Goering, shaking hands. “Met you before somewhere, haven’t I?”

Klaus’ heart leaped up, but all he said was, “It is possible,” in guarded tones. He was not, of course, prepared to tell complete strangers about his troubles, but Goering disregarded the reserve which Becker had respected.

“What were you in?”

Lehmann felt a little annoyed. The question was natural enough, but it was a sore point with him. “Oh, I just made myself useful here and there,” he said.

Goering stared, then an idea struck him. “Oh, I see! Intelligence, eh? Do you still have to be so hush-hush about it now it’s all done with?”

“Is it?” said Klaus, and left it at that.

Goering looked at him with something approaching respect; as for Becker, his round eyes and awestruck expression were almost comic. “Well, well,” said the Flight-Commander, “I know you fellows did awfully good work. I couldn’t do it. Give me action.” He glanced over his shoulder at the motionless aeroplanes, his face darkened and he relapsed into silence. As for Klaus Lehmann, his brain was busy. It seemed there was no need to tell people things about one’s self; if one just preserved an enigmatic silence, people would always find an explanation for themselves, believing it all the more firmly because the idea was their own.

While they were still thirty yards from the mess, a figure appeared in the doorway, a square solid figure which Goering appeared to recognize, for he paused in his stride and said to Becker, “That fellow there! Is that Lazarus?”

“That is Squadron-Leader Lazarus, sir. He has been in command here since Squadron-Leader Fienburg left last week.”

Goering muttered something which the tactful Becker thought it wiser not to hear, and walked on again. Becker dropped back a little and Lehmann joined him.

“Look out for squalls,” muttered Becker.

“Why?”

“Can’t stand each other. Always squalls.”

“Good evening, Goering,” said Lazarus from the doorstep.

“Evening, Lazarus,” said Goering, without attempting to salute. “Got any petrol in this dump of yours?”

“You will address me as ‘sir,’ ” said Lazarus, his long nose reddening.

“Oh, suffering cats, they’ve started already,” said Becker under his breath.

“I asked, sir, whether, sir, you had any petrol, sir,” said Goering impertinently.

“What for?”

“To put into the tanks of my machines. Not to wash in, though to be sure it gets the grease off,” said the Flight-Commander, staring at his superior’s rather oily complexion.

“A painful scene,” murmured Klaus sympathetically, to which Becker only replied, “You wait.”

“I have no petrol,” said Lazarus, “and if I had you would not get it. Your machines are grounded by order of the High Command.”

Goering stated what he considered to be the appropriate ultimate destination of the High Command.

“I cannot hear this,” said Lazarus, who had the infuriating quality of becoming cooler as the other became more heated. “Your agitation is understandable, Flight-Commander, though your expression of it is unfortunate in the extreme. The Allied Commission is expected to arrive here this afternoon—at any time now,” he added, glancing at his watch. “You will be good enough to control yourself and not give the enemy an opportunity of saying that a German officer does not know how to behave in defeat.”

“You lousy pig-faced Jew,” began Goering, but the doorway was empty. “Some day,” promised Goering, “you shall pay for that.” He stalked in at the door, disregarding entirely his enthralled audience behind.

“Will they meet again inside?” asked Klaus.

“No. The skipper will go to his room, to await, with dignity, the Allied Commission. Goering will go to the bar, to drown his sorrows. I suppose we ought to do what we can for these other fellows,” said Becker, referring to Goering’s fellow pilots, who were coming up. “It is a bad day for them, you know.”

“Can’t we get them away before the—the bonfire starts?” suggested Klaus, who was beginning to feel that he had known Becker for years.

“Doubt if they’d go. Like all great performers, a trifle temperamental—all bar one, that is.”

“Who’s that?”

“Udet. Sh, here they come.”

About an hour later the Commission arrived, to be received with the utmost formality by Lazarus, while Goering and his men simmered in silence. The machines were taken over, receipted, entered up in triplicate, and destroyed by fire, after which the Commission went its way again in two staff cars and an Army lorry. Becker and Lehmann, united by the comradeship which arises between strangers sheltering in the same doorway from the same storm, looked at each other.

“What happens now?”

“Heaven knows. I can’t stand a lot more,” said Becker, who looked white and shaken. “Those machines——”

“I know,” said Klaus, and took him by the elbow. “A foul sight. Come and have a drink.”

They found the rest of the party in the bar, talking in quiet tones and covertly watching Goering, who was sitting by himself on a high stool with his elbows on his knees, glowering at everyone and drinking heavily.

“What are you going to do now, Kaspar?” one pilot asked another.

“Oh, go back to my bank, I suppose, that is if there’s any money left in it to count. Funny, being a bank clerk again after all this. What about you?”

“Back to school, I expect, I was a schoolmaster in Berlin. I shall probably get a job somewhere, money or no money there will always be small boys. What does it matter?”

One of them was evidently a good deal older than the others, a quiet man with resolution in his manner. “Someone,” he said in low tones, “ought to speak to Goering. There will be a frightful scene if he goes on drinking and brooding like that.”

“You do it, then,” said Kaspar. “Life isn’t particularly sweet just now, but I don’t want to end it by being brained with a bottle by my Flight-Commander.”

The quiet man nodded, picked up his glass, strolled across to Hermann Goering, sitting alone, and asked him if he had any orders for them.

“None,” said Goering sullenly. “You can go and take orders from the French now. They might find you a job burning aircraft elsewhere, there are still a few left to destroy.”

His senior pilot continued to look at him calmly, without speaking, till Goering lifted his head and his almost insane expression softened.

“I beg your pardon, Erich, I am beside myself to-night. No, I have no orders to give you any more—at least, not yet.” He paused, and drew a long breath. “There will come a day when we shall meet again, and there will be orders to give and men to carry them out and machines to—to carry them out in.” He slipped from his stool and stood erect against the bar, a magnificent figure of a man in those days, with his head thrown back, defiance replacing despair. “They think they’ve got us down, but we shan’t stay down,” he cried. “Germany shall rise again and we with her, we’ll have the greatest Air Force in the world. Then let them look out, these beastly little people who burn aircraft they are unfit to fly!” He turned to find his glass and staggered. “Drink to the new German Air Arm, invincible, innum—” he stumbled over the word—“innumerable, unbeatable. Hoch!”

His men cheered him and Goering smiled once more. “We’ll have no Jews in it next time, boys. No oily Hebrews for us. I’ll see to that, because I shall lead it myself. Then it’ll all be all right. You’ll see.”

“Rather distressing, what?” said Becker to Lehmann while Goering was being helped to bed. “I think he’ll probably pull it off, too, one of these days. I shall be too old to serve then, I expect. I do dislike that braggart manner, though, don’t you?”

“A trifle hysterical, perhaps,” said Klaus. “One could not wonder if that were so.”

“No worse for him than for the rest of us, but Goering was always like that. One of those get-out-of-my-way-blast-you fellows. Now, Udet is different. Udet——”

It was made plain to Klaus that Udet was something quite exceptional, but not all Becker’s enthusiasm and friendliness could make Lehmann feel that the Air Force was where he belonged. Perhaps Goering’s wild guess was correct, and he had belonged to German Intelligence. If so, he had no idea what steps he could take to establish contact, it would be necessary to wait until somebody recognized him and fell on his neck with ecstatic cries of “Ah! The famous X37! We thought you were lost to us.” A pretty picture, if a trifle improbable. None the less, he went to Berlin to look for his lost background.

Here he found for the first time people looking to the future instead of the past, which is a pleasant way of saying that everyone was furiously talking politics. This bored him unendurably because he never got a clear idea of who was who and what they wanted, nor why they had split into such violently opposing parties since they were all Socialists. He gathered by degrees that one party was led by Ebert, the saddle-maker from Heidelberg, and they were moderate in tone, not so much red as a hopeful shade of pink. Then there was Karl Liebknecht, who called himself Spartacus, whose party was as red as raw beef and demanded a soviet republic immediately, a working-class dictatorship with all necessary violence. Between these two came a rather nebulous minority party who also wanted a soviet republic, but were prepared to be a little more genial in their methods. Klaus’ private opinion was that they all made his head ache, but that Ebert’s Social Democrats were faintly less offensive than the others. Klaus was addressed on the subject one day early in January, by the elderly scarecrow from whom he bought his daily paper.

“That there Spartacus,” said the old man, “regular upsetting firebrand. Wants to turn everything upside down as though they wasn’t bad enough already.”

“Just so,” said Klaus.

“Him and his Rosa Luxembourg! Huh!”

“Oh, quite.”

“And them left-wing minority lot, neither soap nor cheese as they say. Minority’s all they’ll ever be, in my opinion.”

“It sounds probable,” said Klaus, only deterred from walking away by the fact that he had nowhere particular to walk to.

“Ebert’s the man for me,” said the paper-seller. “Parliamentary democracy on the votes of the whole community. What could be fairer?”

“What indeed?”

“I only hope that when we has the elections at the end of the month they gets in with a thumping majority. Show them rowdy Communists where they gets off, that will.”

“Yes, won’t it?”

“Something we’ve never had before, that is, parliamentary democracy on the votes of the whole community. I says to my old woman——”

Klaus drifted off, for something had just occurred to him as strange. A democracy based on universal suffrage was something Germany had never had before, yet to him it had seemed so natural as to go without saying. Where, then, had he been brought up? Was it possible that he was not a German after all? No, that was an absurd idea.

The next man he talked to, or rather, who talked to him, was a young workman waiting for a tram, to whom Liebknecht was the builder of the New Jerusalem and Rosa Luxembourg a greater Joan of Arc.

“I think I will go back to Aunt Ludmilla in Haspe for a little while,” thought Lehmann. “I will if I don’t get that post office job,” for his money was running short and he was looking for work.

Two days later the Spartacists revolted and there was savage fighting in the streets, flaring up and passing, leaving crumpled bundles, which till that moment had been men and women, lying in the road or crawling painfully to shelter. Ebert’s Government called up the remnants of the old Imperial Army, and a fortnight of hideous terror followed in Berlin till the revolt was put down with the strong hand. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg died at the hands of the police on their way to prison. Klaus Lehmann’s headaches became so insupportable that he could not have taken the post office appointment even if it had been offered to him, so he went to Haspe again. Here the great news was that Hanna had become engaged to the postman, and under the fallen leaves in the garden were snowdrops showing white. Here it was only as a rumour of half-real happenings that Ebert won his elections and there was established the well-intentioned Constitution of Weimar.

Eventually Klaus obtained a post teaching mathematics in a school at Dusseldorf, where for a couple of years he was not unhappy. He was earning enough to keep himself and to take the old lady presents when he went home—he had learned to call it home—to Haspe at week-ends and in the holidays. Hanna married the postman, fat smiling Emilie took her place, and the world was not too bad till the mark began to fall in value.

“I cannot understand it,” said Fräulein Rademeyer. “The price of everything is rising so rapidly that one’s income cannot keep pace with it. I think it is very wicked of people to be so greedy and charge so much.”

Klaus tried to explain that the currency was being inflated so that German goods might sell more easily abroad, but the old lady would not have it.

“Nonsense. All I know is that once I was comfortably off on the money my dear father left me, and now I am growing poorer every day. Now you tell me they are doing this so that the foreigner may buy more cheaply. Why does the Government wish to benefit the foreigner at the expense of its own people? Nonsense. They ought to be turned out of office.”

“Perhaps there will soon come a turn for the better,” said Klaus hopefully, but he was wrong, for things went from bad to worse. Early in 1922 Fräulein Rademeyer’s income dwindled to vanishing point, and she sold the white house in Haspe with most of its contents and moved into Dusseldorf to share Klaus’ lodgings. The sale took place during the holidays, so Klaus was at Haspe to see it through and to stand by Ludmilla Rademeyer as the auctioneer’s men carried the old-fashioned furniture out on the lawn in the cruelly bright sunshine. The old lady sat very upright in a chair under the verandah and watched proceedings, although Klaus begged her to come away.

“I wish you wouldn’t stay here,” he said. “Come to the doctor’s house and rest there till it is over, it will be too much for you.”

“I would rather stay, or these people will think I am a coward. Besides, what does it matter? It is only old furniture, and the people who loved it are all dead except me.”

“Who cares what people think?”

“I do, my dear, one must set a good example.”

Klaus bit his lip.

“How curiously shabby the things look, my dear, I had no idea that tapestry was so faded. It is time they were turned out.”

Her voice was perfectly steady and her face calm, but the thin hands in her lap were twitching, and Klaus turned away his head so as to avoid seeing them. He caught sight of the old doctor making his way round the crowd, excused himself, and went to meet him.

“How’s she taking it?”

“Very well. Too well. I’ve been trying to persuade her to come away to your house, but she won’t, she only sits there and gets older every moment.”

“I’d like to put her under chloroform,” grunted the doctor.

They were fairly comfortable at first in Dusseldorf, though every day saw prices higher and food and clothing scarcer, but the real blow fell when Lehmann’s school closed because the parents could no longer pay the fees, and Klaus found himself unemployed. This was the time when the mark soared to an astronomical figure, and people took attaché cases to collect the bulky bundles of worthless notes which constituted their wages. Klaus tramped the streets looking for work, occasionally getting a week’s employment sawing timber or loading bricks, while Ludmilla, when his back was turned, trotted out and sold her mother’s watch or the gold cross and chain she had worn for her first communion. They moved into cheaper rooms, and then into cheaper ones again, and Klaus almost reached breaking-point the day he went to look for her and found her patiently scrubbing his shirt in the communal wash-house.

“But, my dear boy, it’s the only place where there is any hot water. One must be clean.”

“I will not have you there,” he stormed, “among all those rough women. I can wash my shirt myself.”

He said “my shirt,” you notice, not “my shirts.” As for the rough women, he need not have worried. Apart from a tendency to call a spade a spade not one of them would ever have used a word deliberately to distress or embarrass Ludmilla. Still matters grew worse. There followed the communal kitchen, the soup-kitchen, and the bread queues, the gnawing hunger and, as the winter came on, the cold, and even Ludmilla’s courage sank.

“I think I have lived rather too long,” she said.