A Book of Railway Journeys Read online

  No sooner had we settled into our compartment, than Chiang bustled off, to carry on the process of face-making among the car-boys. “My masters,” he undoubtedly told them, “are very important personages. They are the friends of the Generalissimo and the King of England. We are travelling to the front on a special mission. You had better look after us well, or there might be trouble.” The car-boys, no doubt, knew just how much of this to believe; but their curiosity was aroused, nevertheless, and they all came to peep and smile at us through the corridor window. We may have undone Chiang’s work a little by winking and waving back. But perhaps we were not unimposing figures, with our superbly developed chests—padded out several inches by thick wads of Hankow dollar-bills stuffed into every available inner pocket. This seemed a dangerous way to carry money, but traveller’s cheques would have been useless in many of the places to which we were going.

  The Manchurian frontier, 1911. Porters, clearly marked, transfer baggage that includes umbrellas, canes, and golf clubs between the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway and the American-equipped by Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway.

  This train was in every way superior to those running on the Canton–Hankow line. In peace-time it would have taken you through to Peking. Nowadays it went no further than Cheng-chow: the railway bridge over the Yellow River had been blown up to check the Japanese advance. There was a handsome dining-car, with potted plants on the tables, in which we spent most of the day. This dining-car had only one serious disadvantage: there were not enough spittoons. Two of the available five were placed just behind our respective chairs, and the passengers made use of them unceasingly, clearing their throats before doing so with most unappetizing relish. In China, it seems, children learn to spit when they are two years old, and the habit is never lost. True, the New Life Movement discourages it, but without any visible effect. Even high government officials of our acquaintance hawked and spat without the least restraint.

  Our journey was quite uneventful, despite the usual prophecies of air-attack. The train ran steadily on through the golden-yellow landscape. The snow had all disappeared, and the sun was hot; but it was still winter here, the trees were leafless and the earth bare and dry. All around us spread the undulating, densely inhabited plain. At a single glance from the carriage-window, one could seldom see less than two hundred people dotted over the paddy-fields, fishing with nets in village ponds, or squatting, on bare haunches, to manure the earth. Their gestures and attitudes had a timeless anonymity; each single figure would have made an admirable “condition humaine” shot for a Russian peasant-film. What an anonymous country this is! Everywhere the labouring men and women, in their clothes of deep, brilliant blue; everywhere the little grave-mounds, usurping valuable square feet of the arable soil—a class-struggle between the living and the dead. The naked, lemon-coloured torsos, bent over their unending tasks, have no individuality; they seem folded and reticent as plants. The children are all alike—gaping, bleary-nosed, in their padded jackets, like stuffed mass-produced dolls. Today, for the first time, we saw women rolling along, balanced insecurely as stilt-walkers on their tiny bound feet.

  We arrived in Cheng-chow after midnight, two hours behind time. The moon shone brilliantly down on the ruined station, smashed in a big air-raid several weeks before. Outside, in the station-square, moonlight heightened the drama of the shattered buildings; this might have been Ypres in 1915. An aerial torpedo had hit the Hotel of Flowery Peace; nothing remained standing but some broken splinters of the outer walls, within which people were searching the debris by the light of lanterns. All along the roadway street-vendors were selling food, under the flicker of acetylene flares. Chiang told us that Cheng-chow now did most of its business by night. In the daytime the population withdrew into the suburbs, for fear of the planes.

  A few yards down the main street from the square we found an hotel with an intact roof and an available bedroom. The proprietor warned us that we should be expected to leave it at 8 A.M.; during the daytime all the hotels were closed. Chiang bustled about, giving orders to everybody, admirably officious to secure our comfort. The beds were unpacked and erected, tea was brought; with his own hands he steadied the table by placing a piece of folded toilet-paper under one of the legs. Where would he sleep himself, we asked. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Chiang replied, modestly smiling. “I shall find a place.” He seemed positively to be enjoying this adventure. We both agreed that we had got a treasure.

  I slept very badly that night, dozing only in five-minute snatches until dawn. From the station-sidings came the mournful wail of locomotives, mingling with cries of the nocturnal street-hawkers and the constant shuffling and chatter of people moving about downstairs. Through a window beside my bed I could see the ragged bomb-hole in the roof of the next-door house, and the snapped beam ends poking up forlornly into the clear moonlight. Why should the people of this town assume that the Japs would only attack during the daytime? Tonight, for example, would be ideal... And I remembered how Stephen Spender had told me of a very similar experience he had had during a visit to wartime Spain. Meanwhile, in the opposite bed, Auden slept deeply, with the long, calm snore of the truly strong.

  W. H. AUDEN AND

  CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD.

  Journey to a War

  WAR

  Hitler’s train

  Late on the evening of September 3, 1939, Hitler exchanged the elegant marbled halls of the Chancellery for the special train, Amerika, parked in a dusty Pomeranian railroad station surrounded by parched and scented pine trees and wooden barrack huts baked dry by the central European sun.

  Never before had Germany’s railroads conveyed a train like this—a cumbersome assemblage of twelve or fifteen coaches hauled by two locomotives immediately followed by armored wagons bristling with 20-millimeter antiaircraft guns; a similar flak wagon brought up the rear. Hitler’s personal coach came first: a drawing room about the size of three regular compartments, a sleeping berth, and a bathroom. In the drawing room, there was an oblong table with eight chairs grouped around it. The four remaining compartments in Hitler’s coach were occupied by his adjutants and manservants. Other coaches housed dining accommodations and quarters for his military escort, private detectives, medical staff, press section, and visiting guests. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hans Lammers, and Heinrich Himmler followed in a second train code-named Heinrich. Göring’s private—and considerably more comfortably furnished—train, Asia, remained with him at Luftwaffe headquarters near Potsdam.

  The nerve center of Hitler’s train was the “command coach” attached to his own quarters. One half was taken up by a long conference room dominated by a map table, and the other half by Hitler’s communications center, which was in constant touch by teleprinter and radio-telephone with the OKW and other ministries in Berlin, as well as with military headquarters on the front. Hitler was to spend most of his waking hours in this hot, confined space for the next two weeks, while Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, valiantly kept the stream of importunate visitors to a minimum. Here General Wilhelm Keitel introduced to the Führer for the first time his chief of operations, Major General Alfred Jodl, a placid, bald-headed Bavarian mountain-warfare officer a year younger than Hitler, whose principal strategic adviser he was to be until the last days of the war. (Jodl was to be called upon by the Americans in the postwar period for his advice on the defense of western Europe, then hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg.) Jodl took one of the chairs in the middle of the long map-table, while Keitel regularly sat at one end and Colonel Nikolaus von Vormann, the army’s liaison officer, sat next to the three telephones at the other.

  Trains played a vital part in Hitler’s war. Here the Führer receives Admiral Horthy, Regent of Hungary (left),at his headquarters, where Horthy was detained while six divisions marched into Hungary.

  In the train, as at the Chancellery, the brown Nazi party uniform dominated the scene. Generally speaking, Hitler’s adjutants were the o
nly others who found room there. Even Rommel, the new commandant of the Führer’s headquarters, could not live in this train. Hitler hardly intervened in the conduct of the Polish campaign anyway. He would appear in the command coach at 9 A.M. to hear Jodl’s personal report on the morning situation and to inspect the maps that had been flown in from Berlin. His first inquiry of Colonel von Vormann was always about the dangerous western front situation, for of 30 German divisions left to hold the three-hundred-mile line, only 12 were up to scratch; and against them France might at any time unleash her army of 110 divisions. But contrary to every prediction voiced by Hitler’s critics, the western front was curiously quiet. On September 4, an awed Colonel von Vormann wrote: “Meanwhile, a propaganda war has broken out in the west. Will the Führer prove right after all? They say that the French have hung out a banner at Saarbrücken reading We won’t fire the first shot. As we’ve strictly forbidden our troops to open hostilities, I can’t wait to see what happens now.”

  His heavy special train, Amerika, had left for Upper Silesia on the ninth. It finally halted in a railway siding at Illnau. The pleasing draft in the corridors ceased, and the temperature within the camouflage-gray walls and roofs rose. The air outside was thick with the hot dust-particles of mid-September. His secretary Christa Schroeder wrote plaintively:

  We have been living in this train for ten days now. Its location is constantly being changed, but since we never get out the monotony is dreadful. The heat here is unbearable, quite terrible. All day long the sun beats down on the compartments, and we just wilt in the tropical heat. I am soaked to the skin, absolutely awful. To top it all, there is hardly anything worthwhile to do. The Chief drives off in the morning leaving us condemned to wait for his return. We never stay long enough in one place. Recently we were parked one night near a field hospital through which a big shipment of casualties was just passing... Those who tour Poland with the Chief see a lot, but it’s not easy for them because the enemy are such coward-shooting in the back and ambushing—and because it is difficult to protect the Chief, who has taken to driving around as though he were in Germany, standing up in his open car even in the most hazardous areas. I think he is being reckless, but nobody can persuade him not to do it. On the very first day he drove through a copse still swarming with Polacks—just half an hour earlier they had wiped out an unarmed German medical unit. One of the medics escaped and gave him an eyewitness account... Once again, the Führer was standing in full view of everybody on a hummock, with soldiers streaming toward him from all sides. In a hollow there was this Polish artillery; obviously they saw the sudden flurry of activity and—since it’s no secret that the F. is touring the front—they guessed who it was. Half an hour later the bombs came raining down. Obviously it gives the soldiers’ morale a colossal boost to see the F. in the thick of the danger with them, but I still think it’s too risky. We can only trust in God to protect him.

  DAVID IRVING,

  Hitler’s War

  A London evacuee

  We said goodbye at home, after a breakfast I had barely touched, and then again in the school playground before the lines were formed. I saw her once more, standing with other mothers on the corner of Devas Street as I passed, stiff in my new clothes, stiff card in my lapel, gasmask clumsy against my body, and the hard handle of the suitcase burning my fingers. She waved, and smiled. I smiled back, equally forlorn, and then the curved wooden wall of the goods-yard hid her, and I turned to face the station.

  I was two months short of my fourteenth birthday, and I had had one holiday in my life: a day at Southend. The country to me was the scuffed grass of Blackheath, the tin urinals of its Fair-Day; or Victoria Park with old men careful over model boats, and grit in sulphur-tasting drinking-mugs chained to the foot of a broken-nosed cherub. My father was dead two years, and there were three other children. Only the rich went to Bognor.

  So, as the train left Bromley-by-Bow Station, I had started my longest journey, far longer than that never-forgotten day-excursion to cockle-and-eel land. And I was scared and appalled at my loneliness, sitting there in a carriage full of children and comics and the smell of oranges. I watched the shuttling slums with a sudden desperate love, staying longest at open windows: a hand shaking a duster, a canary in a cage, a shirt-sleeved man reading a newspaper. These were my people, my sights and my sounds. I loved every scruffy plane tree, every blatant cinema, every hoarding shouting News of the World and Lifebuoy Soap.

  London children about to be evacuated to the country.

  A familiar sight on main line platforms at the beginning of the war.

  We were bound for the West Country, but I felt no sense of adventure. The suburbs came and went with their prissy superiority, their sharp hedges and clean paint. The real country took over from tamed copses and golf-courses, sports-clubs and allotments; and it came with the late afternoon, sending its woods and farmlands out to meet us, darker out of darkness, an animality made manifest in cows, bulls and horses, no longer story-book and domestic, but free and strangely savage.

  We arrived at early evening, standing on the platform, tired under the first stars, breathing a different air. Always the memory of that smell: of grass and animals and manure and apples and hay—a cloying, heady scent to a city-child: the breath of a Pagan God. And, although I did not know it then, it was the presence of this God which was to awake in me a nature stifled by concrete and stone and asphalt, which before had stirred only spasmodically at a freshet of leaves in a backyard, the whirr of a racing-pigeon. A bronzed, loose-limbed, freedom-loving God, who was soon to do battle with One who spoke of original sin and eventual judgement, and who pointed not to the flourishing virile oak, but to a different kind of tree.

  CHRISTOPHER LEACH

  from B. S. Johnson (ed.),

  The Evacuees

  The Final Solution

  The day was clear; a cold, early February sun hung weakly in the sky. I glanced at the long lines of people. Among us were many different nationalities, but we were all Jews, and all shared the same suffering. Spring was coming, and like some strange flock of birds we were proceeding to another stopping place. Our flight had been long, continuous, terrible. Out we went through the main gate. We trudged under the sign surmounting the wire fencing: Bergen-Belsen. I had come in, puzzled about what possible new evil those words could represent and now I was leaving, sickened with the knowledge. Death itself meant little at Bergen-Belsen—it was the suffering that went before that made it so awful. Krepierenslager. That was the proper word.

  We stood silently outside the gates, waiting for the full transport to be formed. It was late in the morning before we finally started marching away from Bergen-Belsen. I was marching with shadows, not people. Two thousand of us, shambling a few miles to the railway siding. The SS men hit us incessantly with clubs and whips. From time to time they would separate a particularly weak person and beat her senseless and leave the body in the snow, as an example to those following. “Fast! Fast!” they shouted constantly. There was one Kapo who took it upon himself to manhandle our group. He was tall and wore a white turtle-necked sweater which he kept adjusting upon himself. He had carved a short, heavy stick with a bulbous end, which he swung viciously about, striking girls in the back. One blow was enough to drop a person. If a girl lay on the ground more than a few seconds, he kicked her and walked on.

  There were almost as many men as women marching with this transport. I was struck by the similarity between them and us. We all looked alike. The men were as thin, as weak as we were, and not one of them raised a hand to protest the beatings. They slogged along, heads bent low, as if dragging great weights behind them. I found myself thinking about my benefactor and wondering if he had been reduced to the state of these men. Did he still live?

  There was something new waiting for us at the railway siding: most of the trucks were high-walled and open, without roofs. Luckily, I was shoved into one of the few closed freight trucks, with about seventy other people. Most o
f the men were put into the open trucks. It was close and incredibly filthy in our truck, but at least the rain and snow would not come down on us. When the doors were slammed shut, a wave of panic swept over the prisoners, and a high wailing and shrieking started. In the semi-darkness we were terrified by our own numbers. Some people went berserk and bit each other in a rage. I pressed myself against a wall, and listened in horror as the sounds of their tussling filled the car. They writhed and screamed and even growled, for many minutes. And then, slowly, the madness subsided and all was quiet. I felt the tension lessen; we relaxed and waited.

  I tried to think where we might be going... another ammunition factory, Stefa had said. It was not to be Hassag-Pelcery, that was certain. I supposed it must be some place in Germany, but where? I did not know where the central industrial area of Germany was. I hoped it was closer to the advancing armies, if indeed they were advancing. The Germans did not seem to be aware of any difficulties. They beat us as savagely as ever, and they were as cruel and harsh as ever. If the Germans were truly in danger of defeat, it seemed to me that they would try to treat their prisoners as well as possible, so that they might not be punished for cruelty. At last the train got under way, and I fell asleep.

  This transport was conducted in the same way as the one into Bergen-Belsen. The train stopped about three times that day. Storm troopers banged on the doors, and demanded to know how many dead there were. Then they jumped in and threw out the bodies. Once I got a look at the tracks. The right-of-way was littered with corpses. On the second morning, without warning, the Germans suddenly began firing into the car with machine guns. The wood splintered and ripped as shells exploded and ricocheted, and the car was filled with the cries of the wounded. A piece of wood struck my cheek and stunned me for a few minutes. After the attack we could hear the Germans laughing. A few seconds later, as they moved on, we heard them fire into the adjoining car.