Paris at the End of the World Page 10

  Early in 1915, Australian poet Leon Gellert spent seven weeks on a ship off the Greek island of Lemnos, waiting to go into battle on the Gallipoli peninsula. He vented his frustration in the poem “Dreams of France.”

  Oh, France, that I had ever dreamed of thee!

  I thought to help thee bear the brandished lance,

  But, lo, I sail the blue Aegean sea!

  Sweet thoughts of thee still stand before mine eyes,

  While I lie fettered in this stagnant cage;

  Unseen by me the golden Grecian skies,

  Forgotten is the Grecian Golden Age.

  Drear and dank this stale Ionian bark

  That plods its path along Aegean ways.

  As much as he sounds like a Mediterranean cruise passenger moaning about the itinerary, the poem does express the sense of entitlement felt by Australian volunteers. They’d been promised a war, and they were bloody well going to get it, or know the reason why. Archie would have arrived in Europe with a similar belief that in return for his service, he was owed some excitement before he returned to the stodginess of life as a Sydney grocer, weighed down with the responsibility of a wife and family.

  20

  Die Fräulein

  Careless talk lets vital secrets out.

  You never know who’s listening

  To what you talk about.

  PROPAGANDA SONG, World War II

  The war forced Germany, France, and Britain, three countries intimately connected by bonds of family, culture, and language, into a messy divorce.

  As Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, had been German, many of their children married into European royal families, taking their Germanophilia with them. In 1917, George V of Britain changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor—a decision in which he lagged behind commoners in France, Australia, and the United States. In Australia, the town of Germanton had already become “Holbrook,” and German Creek “Empire Vale.” The German shepherd dog reemerged as an Alsatian. Schmidts became Smiths and Brauns were transformed into Browns, although Hollywood character actor Gustav von Seyffertitz may have overreacted when he took the name “G. Butler Clonebaugh.”

  Britons lamented the disappearance of German sausage; a postcard circulated showing a large frankfurter wrapped with a black bow of mourning. In the United States, pretzels no longer appeared in bars. In a tradition revived in 2003 with “freedom fries,” Americans rebaptised sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”

  The wurst is over

  Professional terminology was thrown into chaos. How was one to forget that the leading news service was Reuters and a major banking family Rothschild? Baedeker produced the most reliable travel guides; X-rays were Roentgen rays; the test for syphilis was named for its inventor, Wasserman, and its treatment for its discoverer, Ehrlich. In botany, the fuchsia bore the name of its discoverer, Leonhart Fuchs, and the classic blue iris was actually Iris germanica. In music, Mozart’s opus numbers were preceded by the letter K for the man who catalogued them, Ludwig von Köchel. The works of Johann Sebastian Bach could not be discussed without reference to the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or catalogue of Bach’s works.

  In the short term, concert halls just dropped Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert from their programs, but a long history of German interest in music from all nations could not be erased. British composer Edward Elgar, for example, owed his reputation to an early vogue for his work among German audiences. He toured Germany, where he was lionized. Elgar never renounced that support, unlike France’s Camille Saint-Saëns, who, in Le Figaro of November 14, 1914, disowned it.

  I haven’t forgotten that German artists often interpreted my work, that German theatres presented my opera Samson, that I accepted German decorations. Of all that, I’m aware. But so what? From now on, a river of blood and mud will separate us. I have no sympathy for people who treat as “scraps of paper” the treaties they have signed, who carry off to Leipzig the priceless treasures France and England have entrusted, who massacre women and children, who offensively advertise their intention to seize three- quarters of Europe. Some years ago I wrote, “Once I loved Germany; now I fear it.” Today we hate it, we execrate it, and with good reason.

  While France made the same cosmetic adjustments to the language as other nations, a second problem was more deep-rooted. Just as Anglo-Saxon families favored French maids and cooks, the French traditionally hired governesses and nannies from Germany. Countless German ladies, middle-aged, unmarried, and plain, joined French families as fräuleins. The type was so familiar that Abel Hermant could nail her in a thumbnail sketch.

  She’s an alert young woman, a bit short and plump, strapped into a corset, and dressed in the latest style, simple, but with a hint of poor taste; a bit old fashioned. On her head is that nameless thing known in most languages as a hat. Very blonde, naturally. A nasty look in a bland face. A cunning look, as if of a conqueror. When she walks, she doesn’t advance—she captures terrain.

  Exposé of supposed German espionage

  As soon as war broke out, the satirical magazines decided, with little or no evidence, that all fräuleins were either propagandists for the Teutonic way of life, brainwashing their charges, or outright spies, or possibly both. La Baïonnette ran a striking cover by Fabien Fabiano of a mild-looking fräulein with her ear to a door.

  Fräulein Spy

  In a cartoon, another is asked by a friend, “So you’re a governess in Paris? Who do you work for?” She replies, “The Wilhelmstrasse.” An elaborate double-page spread shows a German nanny ordering a terrified French child to grovel before a beefy Wagnerian heroine in long braids and a crown, while behind her a confederate is sweeping out the treasures of European fantasy—Puss in boots, Pierrot, Don Quixote, Santa Claus.

  Evidence of spying among fräuleins was sparse, but propagandists made up for that in speculation, as they had done in fabricating stories of atrocities in Belgium. These claimed Germans systematically cut off the hands of children, while their officers indulged in drunken mass rapes. There was no reliable evidence of either. “The invasion of Belgium,” noted one historian, “with its very real suffering, was nevertheless represented in a highly stylized way that dwelt on perverse sexual acts, lurid mutilations, and graphic accounts of child abuse of often dubious veracity.”

  These tales appeared even in such staid technical journals as the Annales des Maladies Vénériennes—The Annals of Sexually Transmitted Diseases. One described Belgian girls kept in stalls like domestic animals for the pleasure of “a squad of hussars.” In another, officers supposedly chose the fifty prettiest girls of a town and locked them in a barn with fifty soldiers. Any who didn’t submit were eviscerated. An even more fantastic report in the Chronique Médicale claimed that a German officer took over a church, herded in all the available women, barred the door and celebrated a profane mass, drinking champagne from the sacred vessels. After this, he orchestrated an orgy. Any woman who resisted had her throat cut or was crucified, following which the Germans locked the door on their victims and set the church on fire.

  Well-meaning journalists were often taken in, particularly since propagandists were skillful at setting the scene. Marie Louise Mack, an Australian amateur, bluffed her way into occupied Belgium in 1914 and described what she saw in her book A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War. Though she encountered nothing more terrible than German rudeness and officiousness, her imagination made up for it.

  I had been used to think of the German race as tinged with a certain golden glamour, because to it belonged the man who wrote the Fifth Symphony; the man who wrote the divine first part of Faust. Oh, Beethoven, Goethe, Heine! Not even out of respect for your undying genius can I hide the truth about the Germans any longer.

  What I have seen, I must believe!

  They took me to the church. On the high altar stand empty champagne bottles, empty rum bottles, a broken bottle of Bordeaux, and five bottles of beer. In the confessionals stand empty champagne bottles, empty
brandy bottles, empty beer bottles. Stacks of bottles are under the pews, or on the seats themselves.

  The sacred marble floors are covered everywhere with piles of straw, and bottles, and heaps of refuse and filth, and horse-dung. The Madonna’s head has been cut right off. They have set fire to the beautiful wood-carving of our Saviour, and burnt the sacred figure all up one side, and on the face and breast.

  A dead pig lies in the little chapel to the right, a dead white pig with a pink snout.

  And now we come to the Gate of Shame.

  It is the door of a small praying-room. Still pinned outside, on the door, is a piece of white paper, with this message in German, “This room is private. Keep away.” Inside are women’s garments, a pile of them tossed hastily on the floor, torn perhaps from the wearers.

  “Perhaps” is the operative word. Was the room anything more than a place where clothes were kept for distribution to refugees? Could the Germans really have emptied all those bottles themselves? And why store them in a church? No matter. As the propaganda theorist Harold Lasswell explained, “a handy rule for arousing hate is ‘If at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity.’ It has been employed with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.”

  21

  The Scholar

  And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,

  That one small head could carry all he knew.

  OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Desertted Village, 1770, describing the village schoolmaster

  Where will you go?” friends asked as I headed for London on the track of Archie’s time in England. “The Imperial War Museum?”

  “Eventually. But not right away.”

  They looked skeptical. “You’ve got another source, as good as the Imperial War Museum?”

  “Better,” I said.

  The farther north you go in suburban London, the less you feel you’re in Britain. In the 1930s, European refugees settled on these tree-lined streets in Victorian apartment blocks, known as “mansions.” Squint and you could imagine yourself back in Simmering, Licht-enrade, or some other district of Berlin or Vienna. Conductors on buses about to enter this alien world of delicatessens, kosher butchers, watchmakers, and old men in cafés playing chess would yell jokingly, “Next stop Swiss Cottage. Passports ready, please.”

  The Sage of Golders Green

  The sense of another country intensifies in Golders Green, of all these suburbs the most mittel European. Although the tide of new arrivals from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon has diluted the sense of a corner of some foreign field that is forever Dusseldorf, the presence of a vast cemetery and crematorium stand as reminders of why so many people crossed the Channel to make a new home here.

  Neil is from emigrant stock; his family fled pogroms in Russia to settle here in the 1880s and take up the very European trade of tailoring. The stamp of that culture has long since faded, however. Tall, upright, bearded, brusque, Neil could only be English. In his theatrically modulated voice I hear Rex Harrison as the sea captain who haunts the coastal cottage of Gene Tierney in the film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

  In one respect, however, Neil’s roots remain deep in European soil. He’s an example of that respected, even revered individual, the scholar.

  Such people study for the pleasure of acquiring information. They may use what they discover as material for writing or teaching, but most are driven by the pure urge to know. To pass a bookshop without browsing, to visit a house without looking at its books, to meet persons of adventurous ways and not coax them for anecdotes would never enter their head.

  Scholars choose professions that leave them free to wander off for weeks on end. For Neil, that was performance. Busking his way across Europe as a young man fed his tireless intellectual curiosity. Back in Britain, he formed a small acting group called Phantom Captain that directed the spirit of inquiry into theatrical projects: a musical based on particle physics, for instance, and Loaded Questions, a show that carried the scholarly impulse to surreal extremes by consisting entirely of questions.

  In his early seventies, he still performs. In 2010, he could be found doing street theater at the Shanghai Expo, for which he invented Krikitai Chi, a tai chi–like slow-motion version of cricket without bat, wicket, or ball.

  Occasionally he appears as a solo act, often in bizarre personae. For one festival, he dressed as a tramp in scuffed shoes, shapeless felt hat, and seen-better-days suit and hung a sign round his neck advertising “Lick You All Over—One Pound.”

  Looking at a photograph of this bedraggled creature—ever the scholar, Neil documents everything, even his humiliations—I asked, “How did it go?”

  “Quite well for a few hours. Everyone seemed to get the joke. But then one woman actually gave me a pound and demanded I do as promised.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Put it this way. By the end, I felt I’d fully explored the possibilities of the role.”

  We were talking in Neil’s study, halfway up the rambling apartment he occupies with his wife in Golders Green. The number of levels remains a mystery: the upper reaches are inaccessible to all but Neil, the staircase walls lined by shelves jammed with books and the landings piled with objects too bulky to place elsewhere.

  I stumbled over one of these on my way to the bathroom: a life-size bust of a young woman, shoulders draped in a real lace shawl. Next to it was another head, of a beaming man with flowing mustache, topped with a Chinese cap, also real.

  “Shop window dummies?”

  “Ah, no. The remains of an experiment, actually.” Neil brushed the dust from the man with the mustache. “This is supposed to be me. They’re wired for sound. When they’re working, one can have a conversation with them—or at least appear to. I thought of using them in a theater piece, but it never quite worked out.” He pointed up the flight of stairs toward the bathroom. “Watch the chain. It’s a bit tricky.”

  When I got back to his study, the coffee table in the middle of the room was piled with card folders, brown manila envelopes, and ring-back binders.

  “These are a few World War I things I thought might be useful.”

  The term “primary source” has a special magic for the researcher. A clear Xerox copy or scan of an old and faded document may be easier to read, but there is no substitute for the original. To feel the texture of the paper and smell the dust is to hear the scratch of the pen that wrote it, the clack of the typewriter, the thump of the rubber stamp, and, through them, to achieve a psychic contact with those who created it.

  A museum might give me access to superior copies of what Neil showed me. But they were no substitute for the real thing. Respectfully I opened a plastic envelope.

  Popular Songs of the A.E.F, a tiny booklet on cheap brown paper, barely larger than a playing card, published by the YMCA in 1918. On the yellowing water-stained cover, I could just read the words “Give me the man who goes into battle with a song in his heart.”

  A song in your heart—in the mud of the Somme? What bloody fool said that? And yet, to read these titles is to feel a link no history can convey. “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” For soldiers far from home, songs, even as sentimental and trite as these, have always been the ultimate repository of emotion. “Strange,” mused Noël Coward, “how potent cheap music is.”

  A second envelope contained another booklet. My First Week in Flanders by Lieut. the Hon. W. Watson Armstrong, 1/7th Northumberland Fusiliers. Privately printed in London in 1916. Water-stained also, though printed on better paper than the YMCA booklet. Lieutenant the Hon? Only the children of viscounts, barons, and earls may style themselves “the Honorable.” I leafed through it.

  One shell, which burst a yard or two off me, killed two of my men and injured another. The two men displayed great heroism in their dying agony. One of them, Bob Young, as he was carried away, minus his legs, called upon an officer, who was almost overcome by the sight, to be a man; and I was furthe
r told that he died kissing his wife’s photograph, and with the word “Tipperary” on his lips. . . .

  Next, a phrasebook without cover. Phrases appeared in English, then in French, then in a phonetic version. At random, I opened it at “Care of the Wounded.”

  “I feel very tired.” Je suis très fatigué. Je swee tray fateegay.

  “I am cold.” J’ai froid. Jay froah.

  “I am suffering very much.” Je souffre beaucoup. Jer soufr bok-koo . . .

  Minus his legs, he called upon an officer to be a man . . .

  Neil said, “And I thought this might be of interest.”

  A battered lump of a book, its thick brown cover, chipped at the edges, bore the label:

  Salmon’s

  Popular Series of

  Patriotic Post Cards

  The binding had long since ceased to contain its bulging contents, a collection of colored postcards, each glued down to a page. I knew of Salmon of Sevenoaks as a major postcard publisher. I was holding a sample book carried by one of its salesmen. He’d have shown it to stationers and tobacconists who wanted to order cards.

  I eased off the elastic band that kept it together. Cards spilled out, some detached from the page: the symbolic figure of John Bull in top hat and Union Jack waistcoat, with a truculent bulldog at his side; languid youths playing tennis or billiards when they should be at war; a cringing but sneering kaiser, mustache drooping, pickelhaube on his head. Archie might have seen these cards in the newspaper kiosk on a drafty railway station as he endured the hurry-up-and-wait of military life. There he is. A tall, diffident man in a khaki greatcoat and flat military cap. Cautious eyes: asking a favor of a stranger never comes easily to Australians. Would you have a cigarette, mate?