THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Can't you shed your title the way people do with their awful christian names?' asked Elizabeth. 'Or sell it to the Americans like all the nicest country houses?'

'Archie, you really ought to sack Watson,' David advised. 'He'll give you a recurrence of your duodenal ulcer.'

'I don't eat at home very much. I'm far too busy.' Archie reached towards the cluster of wine bottles. 'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' he repeated. frankly admit, that for a while I simply couldn't take Hitler seriously. I'll admit that I thought him perfectly justified reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, for instance. But wasn't I one of many, who asked why he shouldn't be allowed to move his soldiers about his own back yard? And after all, he was doing a lot for the unemployed, which nobody was here.'

'Do you ever hear from your friends there, Jim?' David asked.

I shook my head. I stopped writing to Gerda when I married Rosie. 'I shouldn't care to provoke a letter returned _Empfдnger unbekannt.'_

''Addressee Unknown' has terrifying implications,' Archie commented sombrely. He went on, 'It was Spain which changed my mind about Hitler.'

'Darling, it was such a pity that you never got there,' Elizabeth told him sympathetically.

'I couldn't help developing an ulcer.'

'It must have been terribly frustrating, it all going on and you having to lie on your back in Swanage instead.'

'I almost enlisted,' he told her irritably. He had recounted the story that evening in the expectation-which he should have known to be perfectly ridiculous, it being Elizabeth-of impressing my young lady. 'I'd got as far as Paris. That's why Spain decided me more than Abyssinia. Because it was possible to get involved onself. After all, two thousand of us in Britain joined the International Brigade. And five hundred of us won't come back. Thank God the whole thing seems almost over.'

'According to George Orwell, it was all a tremendous fiasco, even for a war,' I observed.

''I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain',' he quoted W H Auden, raising his glass. 'Then of course there's the German Jews.'

'Our Freud which art in Hampstead,' said David.

We were interrupted by Watson in his tail coat. He had become fatter and even ruder, and I thought in many respects resembled Mussolini. 'All right, is it?'

'Divine,' Elizabeth said.

'You haven't cleared away the cocktail things,' Archie told him sternly.

'I can't do everything, can I?'

'I don't think any of us want any more.' Archie pushed away the half-eaten dish. 'You may serve the pudding.'

'There ain't none. I've some fruit.'

'Open a couple of bottles of Cliquot,' Archie commanded. He added as Watson withdrew, 'Do you know what I heard yesterday? When Halifax went to Berchtesgaden a couple of months ago, he was greeted at the front door by Hitler in that usual ridiculous get-up of brown jacket and dress trousers. Our lordly cabinet minister mistook him for the footman. He was within an inch of handing over his hat and stick. Think how the course of history might have been changed!'

'Hitler would have sent his Air Force to blow us up between the soup and fish, I expect,' said Elizabeth.

'London may not be so beautiful as Paris or Prague,' said Archie, who had travelled to both. 'But like any Frenchman or any Czech I don't want wakening at dawn to the crash of bombs. That's why I was incredibly relieved by Munich.'

'Like everyone else,' I said. The iron-crossed wings of Hermann Gцring's Luftwaffe overshadowed Europe. No one had experienced mass aerial bombardment, but after Spain everyone could imagine it. The German Air Force was the atomic bomb of the 1930s.

'It's Wednesday!' Elizabeth jumped from the table to switch on the radiogram beside the fireplace. 'I mustn't miss Arthur Askey.'

'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' Archie declared once again. 'I now commit myself to standing up to Hitler, whatever the cost. With Russia, all the better-if Europe hadn't been so neurotically afraid of Communism, Hitler would never have got where he has. If not, alone with France.'

'And America?' I suggested.

'America is only interested in the World Fair on Flushing Meadow,' Archie said irritably.

'What about this champagne, boy?' asked David.

'I expect Watson's forgotten.' Archie reached his long arm for the bell. 'The question remains, what exactly can one do.'_

'Get your blood group registered,' suggested David practically. 'They're going to need the stuff by the gallon.'

'With Spain, it was easy. One simply volunteered.' Archie often seemed genuinely to believe that he had fought on the hard-baked, blood-soaked ridges of Catalonia.

'Volunteer as an air raid warden.' I told him. 'Or a fireman. I saw in today's paper that the government wants a hundred thousand of them.'

'I'd volunteer for the Army, but what's the point when the Government are moving towards the utterly oppressive step of conscription in peacetime? Which I and every other socialist should have imagined unthinkable in this country.'

'What's the matter?' called Watson from the doorway. 'I'd like to listen to the wireless myself, you know.'

'The Cliquot, Watson.'

'You didn't mean it, did you? I didn't think this was a champagne dinner.'

'You'll find some brandy in the cocktail cabinet,' Archie told David. 'Help yourself.'

'Darling, I can't hear the jokes,' complained Elizabeth, her ears directed to _Band Waggon_ on the London Regional.

'I'm having a serious political discussion,' Archie told her severely.

'You know that I've never been in the slightest interested in politics.'

'That's what some unfortunate French aristocrat protested at the guillotine. 'Which is precisely why you are here', said the executioner, strapping him down.'

Archie's tart reply sprang from her teasing about Spain and his ulcer. Elizabeth stood up, pouting, and strode from the room saying, 'I'm going to powder my nose.'

She left Archie sitting gloomily at the table. I knew that he would be instantly sorry for provoking her. I had been living in the flat almost four years since Rosie died. I had discovered that Archie's was the tenderest conscience of any I dared to probe. In a way, he turned this conscience into a talent, by which he might make a political career. David handed him a balloon glass well filled with brandy. By way of making conversation, I said, 'Have you seen that travel poster put out by the Reich Tourist Office? A beautiful coloured picture of a schloss, and underneath, _Come To Mediaeval Germany._ Either the Nazis have absolutely no sense of humour, or they flatter us with an uproarious one.'

'Can't you turn that rubbish off?' Archie scowled at the radiogram.

David obliged and sat down on the sofa, picking one of the yellow jacketed volumes from the low table before the fire, which had _The Times,_ the _Daily Worker, Apollo, Punch_ and other periodicals laid out in club-like precision. 'What's this bloody rubbish?'

'The Left Book Club', Archie told him shortly. 'You get a couple of books cheap on current affairs every month. Surely you've heard of it? It's been going two or three years now.'

'Who are the doctors prescribing such intellectual tonics?'

'Well, there's Harold Laski-'

'Of course,' said David.

'And John Strachey.' Archie swallowed some brandy. 'He was at Eton. They've fifty or sixty thousand members, you know.'

David sat frowning, flicking over the pages. 'What sort of people would those be, I wonder?'

'Not intellectuals particularly, but people who regard themselves as intellectuals. Schoolteachers, university