sidelines. The Storm Troopers of 1933 well outnumbered the troops of the German army. They were recruited from street corners and given clothing, food and a sense of identity, when the Government signally failed to provide all three. England had luckily rid herself of such bands with the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. America escaped them-the Civil War was a far more official affair. Ulster suffers them to the day I write. Much that I then saw in Germany reminded me of Ireland during the worst of the Troubles, which coloured the daily papers of my childhood.
We could hardly move in the square. Everyone was shouting and jerking their right arms into the Nazi salute. The Storm Troopers wore brown shirts, breeches and jackboots, the Sam Browne leather crossbelt of British officers and the peaked cap of American baseball players. Germans bathe voluptuously in the warmth of crowds, losing their identity and insecurity. They love and honour uniforms, they instinctively obey rank. I stood on the pavement, tucking my Trinity scarf into my lapels against the cold. I remembered the story about the extras in a German war film, lunching in the AGFA studio canteen, automatically dividing into actors playing officers at the head of the table and other ranks below the salt.
The Brownshirts were of course nothing like the clean-cut stern-faced ranks of the party photographs and posters. In common with the rest of mankind, Storm Troopers came in all sizes, skinny and paunchy, lanky and dwarfish, adolescent and middle-aged. People in the crowd were singing snatches of the _Horst Wessel Lied,_ the Nazi anthem written by a Berlin pastor's son who went to the bad and got himself killed in the streets, and achieved like many other stupid people only martyrdom. The tune's one virtue seemed to me a capability of being sung by absolutely everybody, like _It's a Long Way to Tipperary._
They tramped in columns of four, at their heads drummers and flags. The swastika had been familiar enough in German streets since the summer of 1920, when it was suggested to Hitler as an emblem by his dentist, and run into a flag on a housewife's sewing-machine. As Gerda half-saluted and half-waved, I noticed her eyes wide and brilliant in the gaslight. 'You see,' she said excitedly, stimulated by the show and infected with the surrounding emotion, 'now we can start taking pride in our country again.'
My only feeling was pain that foreigners behaved in so exaggerated a manner. It occurred to neither of us that the force embodied in that procession would shortly leave Europe strewn with corpses like autumn leaves, as casually to be gathered and burnt.
We pushed our way through the onlookers. I bought Gerda some chocolate. We sat at the back of the cinema and she let me hold her hand, which soon became very damp. She stared at the Hollywood musical with the same innocent admiration as at the marching Storm Troopers. Anonymous and unseen in the darkness, she became unnaturally-or perhaps naturally-girlish. It may have been
Then something happened, an incident so trivial and unhurtful in its gruesome context that it invited only forgetfulness. But hair-triggers fire heavy charges in the human mind. Perhaps it saved a ripe soul from the Nazis.
The Nazis disapproved of _Blondie of the Follies._ It was American, it was bourgeoise, it was degenerate, it had the fingerprints of Jews all over it. They had a well-tried technique for exhibiting such displeasure. In summer, they loosed moths which flew into the limelight. In winter, they let free mice or rats. We were in for a different demonstration. Two men in raincoats, to which they had added swastika armbands, jumped to the stage with its screen amid the potted palms, and ripped the material to ribbons with sheath-knives. The projector flickered out. The house lights went up. Everybody fell dumb. Once visible, the pair appeared as barely grown boys, who contented themselves with flinging jeers at the heads of the audience and made off. Within a month or two, such cinematic entertainments were to be banished from German soil, until Betty Grable arrived on the heels of the American Army.
I turned to see what Gerda had made of it. She was in tears, biting her knuckles, shaking with anger. 'Oh! The swine,' she cried in disappointment. 'The swine, spoiling my evening.'
'Perhaps we can get our money back,' I suggested, taking the practical view.
'Why did they want to do that? _Why did they? _I was so enjoying it.'
'Let's go and have some coffee instead.'
'It was all so innocent, so nice. Why did they want to spoil it?' she repeated furiously.
'The film doesn't fit in with their politics, I suppose.'
'What have politics to do with going to the cinema?' she demanded. 'I've been looking forward to this evening, ever since I first thought you were trying to ask me.'
We had a cup of coffee and went home. Naturally, we never got our money back. But Gerda remembered the evening. She laughed when I reminded her last summer, in the little gravel and shrub garden of her house near the Zoo at Wuppertal, a town now as bright and glittering in the smokeless air as Wordsworth's London, the Wupper between banks of well clipped municipal grass beneath the Schwebebahn as sweetly flowing as Edmund Spenser's Thames. Wuppertal has become so clean and odourless she says it is like living in a convalescent hospital.
5
The big black dog became a monster with eyes of firelit emeralds, the white steep-roofed cottage which it guarded dazzled us for a second then reeled into the darkness. We sped through a cramped village with an angular, elegantly spired church and past farmhouses cheerlessly black, countrymen the world over turning their backs on the night. On a hill I caught the turreted outline of a schloss, ahead wet bare trees, snow falling thinly between them and swirling on the ground as it never did in England, broad sheaves of telephone wires undulating gently from post to post as far as we could see. It was about eight in the evening of Monday February 27, a fortnight after my excursion with Gerda. Jeff Beckerman was taking me for a night out in Cologne. The distance was about thirty miles, the road running south along the River Wupper through Solingen, a town famous like Sheffield for scissors and knives. The autobahn still lay in the mind of Germany's new ruler, with a lot of other things.
Jeff Beckerman laughed. 'You're scared.'
'I'm not used to motoring,' I said shortly. My father could never have owned a car, even when Mr Morris of Oxford was putting wheels under the British masses.
'She could do a hundred miles an hour, if the road was good.'
I watched uneasily as the speedometer needle hovered round sixty. Jeff drove a car which I had never heard of before nor seen since, a Cord L29 Phaeton which he had shipped extravagantly from America in contempt for the Bugattis and Bentleys, the Delahayes and Alfas, which fulfilled the need for mobility and cutting a dash among Europe's young bloods. It was long and white, its silvery headlights a foot across, its running boards merging into a pair of front mudguards as elegant as an actress's eyebrows. I am a mechanical ignoramus, but I gathered that it was designed by a man called Erret Lobban Cord to be propelled through the front wheels, and that our whitewall- tyred spares were strapped either side of the enormous flat bonnet because these front wheels had a tendency to fall off.
'Berlin was _fantastiche, _utterly _fantastiche.'_ The word had just superseded _wunderbar_ in Jeff Beckerman's conversation. 'Berlin's nothing like Wuppertal. It's nothing like the rest of Germany. It's like America, only more like America than America could ever dare-you get me? Berlin's _real. _The skin's torn off, you can see the raw flesh and nerves underneath. I had the feeling that no one was playing a part, not the girls in the cabarets, the pimps and the crooks, they _revel_ in what they're doing. Even the whores put their heart and soul into their job.'
My employer did not spend much time in Wuppertal. He preferred leaving his brewery to Herr Fritsch, the grey- faced elderly manager in his pince-nez and 'butterfly', as the Germans called a wing collar. Jeff was interested in Germany, in the bouncy way he was interested in women or his car. He regarded his exile as an educative jaunt before returning to New York and getting down to the serious business of making a million. 'What about our brown-shifted friends?' I asked. 'Didn't they spoil your fun?'
'Why should they, old man?' Jeff often used this expression which is sprinkled on English conversation like salt, but always getting it a little wrong by putting the emphasis on the end, sounding slightly sneering. 'You don't have
