Fire In The Ashes Europe In Mid Century

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Fire In the ashes: Europe In

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FIRE IN THE ASHES

FIRE IN THE ASHES

Europe in Id-Century

1955 lleodoreH, White

NEW YORK WILLIAM SLOANE ASSOCIATES Publishers

Copyright 1953 by Theodore H. White

Printed in the United States of America

by H. Wolff, New York

All rights reserved

Published simultaneously in the Dominion of Canada

by J. McLeod Limited, Toronto

Library of Congress Catalog Number: $3-10166

Designed by Marshall Lee

To my mother

MARY WINKELLER WHITE

acknowledgment

I cannot possibly thank all the people who have helped in the
making of this book, but among them are a few whose aid has
been such as to make them almost a part of it. Mere mention of
their names cannot in any way repay what they have done, nor
does it mark the measure of my gratitude.

Thanks go first to my chief sources of information, fellow mem-
bers of the Press Corps around the world; most especially Preston
Grover of the Associated Press, Robert Kleiman of U. S. News
and World Report, and David Schoenbrun of Columbia Broad-
casting System. My thanks and warm affection go to Dr. Max
Ascoli and the Reporter Magazine for assignments which have
been the core of my work, and, more importantly, for the refine-
ment they have brought to my thinking. I should like to thank
several devoted officers of public information among them chiefly
Major General Charles T. Lanham, U.S. A., Sidney Fine, Benjamin
Bradlee, Donald Mallet, Comte Pierre de Leusse and a few others
whose anonymity serves them best.

Anna Wood, who has stuck by me from page one to page five
hundred and one, has contributed to this book in more ways than
I could list; and Nancy Bean, my wife, has been the indispensable
editor and emotional sustenance from beginning to end.

All the mistakes, errors, and mis judgments are my responsibility
alone and are in no sense attributable to the wise and gentle peo-
ple above mentioned who have helped me.

T. H. W.

Le Lavandou, France, July, 2953

contents

PART

1

i by way of introduction to Europe 3
ii the end of an alliance 19
in a world we tried to build 44

PART ^

iv dramatis personae 75

v the mystery of France 79

vi the story of Pierre Bertaux 102

vn Germany: spring in the ruins 130

vin the story of Willi Schlieker 167

ix England: no flags for the revolution 189

x the story of Joe Curry 216

xi through three looking glasses 234

PART e>

xn the making of Europe 257
xin the basin of freedom 285
xiv Communism the challenge 318

xv America abroad 356
xvi decision at Washington 384
index 399

PART

1

by way of introduction to Europe

The pilot who, all through the night, has flown his plane over
the Atlantic, urged on from tail wind to tail wind by the invisible
whirlpools of pressure in the air, has known for some time that he
is approaching Europe. The green luminous circle that quivers on
his radarscope has begun to grow a bud which soon will swell
into a finger pointing toward the east. Long before the dark cliffs
rise above the sea into the dawn, the pilot knows he is approaching
the rim of another world.

As the plane reaches the coast, the rolling sea winds clash with
the coastal breezes and the plane is carried imperceptibly higher
and higher into the air as if to give it proper eminence to show
Europe stretched out before the traveler from the west. From
whatever angle of the compass the plane comes in off the Atlantic
to home on Europe, the Continent unfurls in the same way. First,
the coast, its high, rocky cliffs of chalk and stone falling every-
where to the long, sweeping sea. Next, the slotted indentations in
the harsh coast out of which the rivers flow to the sea. Beyond
the cliffs and harbors the land smooths out, carpeted by tiny
meadows and farms which drape themselves over the low inner
ridges. Then, finally, come the valleys and within them the rivers,
like guidelines, that lead the voyager up their course to the great
cities where history is made. However you approach Western
Europe, this pattern repeats itself the sharp coast, the rivers urg-
ing men out to the ocean, the inland fields, the cities. Down these
rivers and through these cities, as down the rivers and through the
off-shore islands of Britain, passed our fathers to make America.

Today it is only thirteen hours of flight to come home by air
from America to Europe, and in our years almost as many men
cross the great ocean by wings as travel it by boat. They leave

FIRE IN THE ASHES

New York at djjgk, arrive in Europe by morning and are abroad
in its streets and strange languages, finding in the sound of each
city some echo of the memories and myths they have brought with
them. Few of them linger in the air to look down on the old Conti-
nent from above, to perceive that great natural unity of mute
geography upon which, like flesh on a skeleton, the politics of the
Continent have been shaped.

For the airman, the rocky heart of Europe is the Alps, a moun-
tain mass higher than the highest mountains of the United States,
crowded together in a single rugged outcropping on a patch of
land no bigger than Louisiana. From these Alpine highlands the
rivers of Europe fall off on every side, clasping people together
in nation-families and separating the individual nations one from
the other. These rivers clasp together France, Germany, the Low
Countries and Italy, the four great communities which, with the
people of England, an offshore island, and of Spain, a high bridge
to Africa, give Europe its particular character.

From the air, each nation-family falls into a natural pattern.

The rivers that fall to the west the clockwise spokes of the
Rhone, Garonne, Loire and Seine open an entry into the fairest
and most fertile of European lands. This is France, the vast green
mass that is the threshold of the old Continent, almost as large as
Texas, so prodigiously rich in soil and climate that she alone of the
old states can feed herself and spare food for her neighbors. In
the days when muscle-power was the only source of energy and
food bred muscle, France was automatically the first power of
Europe and the world.

The rivers that fall off the northern shoulders of the Alps skein
Germany the Rhine, the Weser, the Elbe, the Oder tumble over
Germany's southern highlands, then over its sandy flat northern
moorlands to the North Sea. They course through serenely beauti-
ful country all out of harmony with the violent history of its
people. But this land is poor. The wealth of Germany, unlike
France, lies not in the soil but under it a wealth that came alive
only a century ago when coal replaced food as the great source
of energy, and Germany began that expansion which still rests
uncontained.

Between the French and German watersheds lies another family
of nations, the Low Countries. Here, the mouths of the Meuse,

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO E XT R O P E J

the Scheldt, the Rhine open like slits into deeper Europe to make
the Low Countries inevitably portal countries. They are centers
of commerce and industry dependent in doom and prosperity on
the destiny of their more powerful neighbors.

Italy dangles off the southern edge of the Alpine mass, twice as
long as Florida, sun-baked, ridged with bare mountains, over-
grown with villages of quiet, honey-colored homes. One great
river dominates Italy, the Po, flowing deep and sluggishly across
Italy's northern plain, cradling Italy's strength and greatness. But
as one flies south farther from the Alps and the Po, the cities thin
out, the land grows drier, the shanties more scabrous until, below
Rome, Italy is no longer Europe but some Levantine or Oriental
appendix overcrowded with people and history. This is Italy's
problem simply that the burden of people and history are too
much for her tired resources to support.

Finally, there is England, standing apart from these countries
in geography as in spirit. It is an island pushed into commerce as
the Low Countries were by its position, and veined like Germany
with the energy of coal that made her the first giant of the mod-
ern world.

Down below on the ground, Europe dissolves quickly into head-
lines of clash and confusion, into the dates and frontiers of history
books, into the jangling pattern of strife, politics and detail. This,
too, is visible from the air. An hour out of Paris, flying toward
Frankfurt, the airman's eye picks up beneath the soft green fuzz
of winter wheat a crisscross of shaded sterile angles and lines, gray
eyelets pocking those endless acres which, to the groundling, seem
smooth, rolling and unruffled. These are the trenches of the First
World War, hundreds of miles of them signaling each battle and
every contested ridge with the clusters of shell craters that will
always, for centuries, tell the airman that the soil beneath the
wheat has been churned deep here.

But the airman sees other things just as sharply as strifeand
these other things are invisible from the ground. He sees, for ex-
ample, the kinship of civilization that has a hundred common faces.
He sees, for example, the glow of electricity. Each city speaks for
itself in light all through the night. Thus London, without boast-
ing, proclaims its position as Europe's first capital by the through-
ways illuminated with green-blue arc lights that make it die most

FIRE IN THE ASHES 6

radiant city of the Continent in the dark. The street lights of
Brussels are equally brilliant, but they cover a much smaller patch.
Paris, by night and from the air, is, in contrast, conspicuously
feebler the main roads of the city and the expressway that circles
Paris are bathed in a golden-yellow glow, softer and gentler to
look at, but a sign that in Paris the city fathers must pinch their
pennies. As one flies south in Europe, vitality falls off and the
lights at night mark the degree Italy is dim, so is Spain, the lights
of Belgrade in Yugoslavia are the dimmest of all. Switzerland, how-
ever, is a-sparkle with lights as brilliant as the lights of Britain or
Belgium. And Germany's Renaissance in the years since the war
might have been traced from the darkness of defeat, through the
convalescent era of dim strings of bulbs flickering in canyons of
ruins, to the blaze of illumination and neon that lights its major
cities today.

All these civilizations are kindred civilizations. The airman need
only follow the one great east-flowing river of the Alpine water-
sheds, the Danube, to see how clearly it enters a contrasting
civilization. Between Vienna and Budapest the Danube passes
through the Iron Curtain to flow off toward Asia. Beyond that
point, the lights of the cities are a dim and sickly yellow. Beyond
that point, in the dark, the highways are long, pale slashes over
the countryside. Only the rarest cone of radiance trails across them
from the headlights of the automobiles which, all through the
West, flicker and interweave and pass each other as the individual
drives his automobile where, when and how he pleases.

The American traveler whom the airplane sets down so abrupt-
ly comes to a Europe which is more foreign to Americans today
than it has ever been in all our history.

Americans before 1914, indeed, Americans almost down to 1938,
knew Europe far better and with more instinctive understanding
than they do now. Europe lived as we did, was housed as we were,
worked as we did. Americans who crossed the ocean went not
from one civilization to another but from one home to a second.
Europeans and Americans read the same books, were taught the
same sciences, saved, planned and lived on a level of material com-
fort much the same. Within the past thirty years, however, history
has thrust Europeans and Americans both as individual human

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE J

beings and as great communities further and further apart. There
have been the revolutionary changes in the American way of life;
the amazing growth of arts, cultures and material comforts; the
choking off of the immigration which refreshed the European
roots of American life with new arrivals for so long. On the other
side of the Atlantic have come the wars, the social pounding and
jostling that have followed them, the revolutions, the upheavals,
most of all the inflations which have made Europeans today so
different not only from Americans but from Europeans of yester-
day.

The result has been to make Europe stranger to American
understanding than ever before in our linked histories. No amount
of individual touring in the greased and gilded grooves of Euro-
pean hotels-museums-festivals-casinos can replace the old under-
standing of yesterday, any more than the statistics of our
economists and the war plans of our generals can substitute for it.

This separation of European and American civilizations hap-
pens, moreover, at a moment when America is finally more inti-
mately involved in European affairs than ever before in our
national history. This is not a theoretical involvement, either. A
quarter of a million American soldiers, drafted from home in
time of peace, are sprawled across Europe in bivouac and barrack.
One hundred thousand of the finest men in America's army are
strung out between the Rhine and the Thuringian ridges, on the
alert day and night. They sleep with combat packs beside them,
helmets by their pillows, rifles and ammunition stacked in com-
pany quarters, their tanks, guns, trucks, ammunition carriers ready
to roll on an hour's notice. Each of them knows what he must do
what bridges his company must blow up over what strange for-
eign streams as he falls back, what roadblocks must go in where,
what ridge of what strange German kreis will probably hold his
foxhole. Even in sleep, his ear is cocked for the sound of the siren
that tells him Europe's peace is disturbed and he must fight.

These men are the flesh of America's pledge that Europe's
destiny is ours, the sacrament of the great structure of diplomacy
that guards the peace of the world. If a Russian soldier moves to
cross the border of Norway, if a Bulgarian fires a shot across the
borders of Turkey, if an East German platoon raids a county in
West Germany, then every one of these men is committed to

FIRE IN THE ASHES 8

battle. With them are committed not only those who dwell in
Western Europe, but 150,000,000 Americans wherever they sleep,
or work, or play between the Atlantic and the Pacific. A diplo-
matic revolution has twined them all together in indissoluble alli-
ance.

This relationship seems as strange to Europeans as to Americans.
Without American aid and support, Europeans five years ago
would have starved, and most of their states crumbled to chaos;
American involvement was inevitable. But few Europeans have
made up their minds whether it is a happy thing or a bad thing,
whether it must be permanent or should be transitional. While to
Americans the relationship has seemed like an ugly burden, suck-
ing taxes, demanding manpower endlessly, the dirty curse of
greatness, most Europeans have seen it differently. They see the
relationship as a major triumph of American diplomacy which it
is. They see it as a series of shrewdly calculated American master-
moves which have led them down a road they never chose, at a
pace they never set, to an end they can only dimly discern. They
are restive under the relationship, weighing at every season and
every budget the comfort of American aid against the burden and
strain American strategy imposes; they are unsure whether in the
long run the one may not outweigh the other.

This restiveness of Europe will be, perhaps, the greatest prob-
lem of American diplomacy in the coming year. The victories of
the Atlantic Alliance in Europe have been won under American
leadership; they have been won, however, not alone but in a part-
nership to which the Europeans have contributed mightily. The
numb, still years in which Europeans docilely submitted to Amer-
ican leadership have passed. Now, with the revival of energy, with
their awakening from their postwar torpor, they are irritated and
irritable with all the unhappiness of the convalescent. And, like the
convalescent, they find most irritating of all their own weakness
and helplessness in the strange new world which has changed so-
much in their absence.

For five hundred years, until the end of the Second World War,
the nation-states of Europe enjoyed the luxury of rivalry or part-
nership, war or alliance, at their convenience. Until the twentieth
century was a generation old, these rivalries and partnerships pro-

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE g

duced the history of the world. Alternating between long stretches
of unbroken achievement and bursts of murderous explosion, each
more prodigal and each more intense, the quarrels of the Euro-
peans spread wider and wider around the globe until finally the
whole world was blown apart every time the people of the Alpine
watersheds and their offshore island set to quarreling.

In all this long period, Europe stood for two things in the minds
of other men. She stood, first, for the act of creation she made
the music and the letters, generated the ideas and tools that armed
the wars, equipped the science, laid down the factories and
charged the revolutions that have touched every single man
wherever he lives anywhere in the world. She stood, secondly, for
power brute force, the ability to kill efficiently, uncompromis-
ingly, in well-disciplined, cohesive phalanxes of men at whatever
point in the world this force might be needed.

Today, all this is over. The wars of this century have wasted
and ruined Europe at a time when newer people all around the
world were growing in power. Though Europe is still a prodigious
body of energy its 300,000,000 people produce almost as much
coal as America, more ships, half as much steel, have twice as many
spindles and looms its primacy is over. Its engineering skills, its
learning, its art, its creators are still elevated far above any com-
parison with the underprivileged half -barbarian civilizations across
the seas. But the genius of creation that once belonged to Europe
alone is now shared by other, new peoples. Europe stands caught
between two descendent civilizations whose ideas, though bor-
rowed from Europe, have come to strange fruit in strange soil. It
stands not only between these two strange civilizations, but lives
as a ward of one of them, its power of decision purely negative
in the clash between the two.

It is not that Europeans seek to recapture again this solitary
greatness and power. After the storms and passions of the thirties
and the war years, Europe is still panting, hollowed out from exer-
tion and spent emotion. The sound of drums in European ears,
the shrill of bugles, the great flaming words with which East and
West challenge each other, rather than exciting the Europeans,
disturb them. This feeling, indeed, is one of the common qualities
that sets Europeans apart from Americans and Russians. The
United States and Russia constantly want to act, to do, to make

FIREINTHEASHES 1O

history and Europe has had a bellyful of history. Europe wants
rest, quiet and forgetfulness. But even this it cannot have in the
world of today, for it is helpless to calm the world.

This sense of powerlessness is the incubator of all European
restlessness this sense of being swung about by the actions of
strange men in distant places. Where, to Americans a generation
ago, it seemed grotesque that Americans should die because some-
one had flung a bomb at a prince in the Balkans, it seems grotesque
to Europeans today that they might be summoned to die because
an American lad swooped to blitz a power station on the Yalu.

The years since the war in which this sense of helplessness deep-
ened and developed might well be called the Years of the Pause.

For two decades previously, one great man after another had
made European history revolve about his comings and goings, his
speeches, sins, ambitions. Since the war there has been nothing
but the blurred image of faceless men, scurrying from conference
to conference wherein nothing ever seemed to be settled. A com-
mon grayness suffused all the men elevated to power in postwar
Europe drab prime ministers, fussy foreign ministers, cold little
police chiefs, pickle-faced economists with their dry statistics and
bulging brief cases have mumbled where once great men thun-
dered. No dramatic encounters have marked this period. Instead
of Munich and Godesberg, Teheran and Yalta, the Europeans read
each morning of some new conference in an interminable session
of negotiations in which nothing ever changed within the drone.
The dog races, the price of butter, the new tractor, the problem
of where to go on vacation have all been more interesting and
urgent to Europeans than what came out of the councils of state.

Thus it is that a long parade of nameless people wander through
my memories of this period, people who somehow ring a truer
echo of life in Europe out of trivia than any of the statesmen to
whose speeches I have listened and whose deliberations I have
reported.

I remember a midsummer afternoon at a cafe on Omaha beach
when the miracle of D day was seven years past. Out from the
shore about a mile and a half were the slashed and broken chunks
of concrete breakwater, their gray stone mottled with green sea
moss; half a dozen sunken ships; some antiaircraft guns still in

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE 11

place on the breakwater, rusting like broken pipestems in a junk
yard. On the soft red sand of the beach a dozen-odd landing craft
still remained, thrown high up by the tide, full of sand, weeds
and faded poppies. It was lunchtime and the beach was utterly
deserted, for even the fifteen workmen dismantling the wreckage
for scrap had left. The owner of the cafe complained to me. She
had invested all her savings in opening this cafe at Omaha beach
because she was sure that neither Americans nor Frenchmen
would ever forget D day and would come every summer to visit
the beach and hence her cafe. But no one had come, no one, she
said. She could not understand it, no one wanted to remember.

Two middle-aged ladies were sitting at the table behind me that
day, the only other customers of the meal. They had come, they
said, because when the Americans liberated Paris, a young Amer-
ican lieutenant had slept in their house. He had brought coffee,
soap, food, butter when all Paris hungered at the mention of them.
When he had moved off with his company they had asked him
what they could do to repay him. He said there was nothing they
could do for him, but if, someday, they ever got a chance to visit
Omaha beach and the cemetery that was going to be built there,
would they put some flowers on the graves of a few friends he
had left behind. They said they would, and so, seven years later,
they took a bus from Paris to put flowers on American graves,
not because they remembered history and the Liberation, but be-
cause they remembered coffee, food and human kindness.

I remember one evening during the French elections of 1951
when I went to watch the meetings in the Third Sector of Paris,
the grisly slums of Belleville and Montmartre where the Commu-
nists have ruled unchallenged since the war. I dropped in at a
meeting of the Socialists, who, I had heard, were the stiff est oppo-
sition to the Communists in the sector. Their speaker was a stout,
bald-headed little man, whose stiff cuffs, shiny cuff links, crisp
bow tie and gleaming pate all glistened In the yellow lights of the
school auditorium where the meeting was held. He launched into
his speech with no ringing invocation of liberty or denunciation
of communism. Instead, clearing his throat, he summoned his audi-
ence to remember that in the first government of Liberation, when
prostitution was outlawed in Paris, he had been the only member
of the Cabinet (he repeated the phrase several times before plung-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 12

ing to his climax) to vote against the outlawing of the fancy ladies.
And now, he went on, look at what had happened since the
abolition of prostitution in legal houses, the whores had filtered
into the streets to ply their trade unregulated, embarrassing all the
neighborhood mothers who were trying to raise decent families.
He made his point well, and the women who sat sternly in their
faded housedresses nodded their approval. They could understand
prostitution better than communism, and the speaker squeaked
through to a seat in the National Assembly.

There are others, too many to list, who recur in memory, all of
them trying to ignore or thrust out of mind the problems of an
anguished world. There was the British physicist who had worked
on the atomic bomb during the war, and who, after the war, in
revulsion, had taken a post in a British school teaching mathe-
matics to boys. His hobby was cybernetics, and he said to me,
"Oh, I know you Americans are way ahead of us in cybernetics,
but I've built a calculating machine that can do something yours
won't do. When I feed data into our machine that it can't handle,
it beeps a musical note. And we've learned how to feed data into
our machine so that when things get really tough it plays 'God
Save the King.' "

This feeling of being apart from politics, of standing outside of
decision, has been general all over Europe, in every country. I
remember going one evening with curiosity to a theater in Diissel-
dorf to see a hall of Germans watch All Quiet on the Western
Front; Hitler had never let them see the picture fresh when it first
came out. The audience sat silent all through the film until the
company of troops on the screen sprawled resting under a tree
after their bleeding at the front, and Kropp, the little corporal,
suggested that the way to run a war was to sell tickets to a huge
stadium in which everyone could watch the generals, the officers,
the cabinet ministers and the statesmen who had made the war,
fight it out in person. At this the audience broke into a storm of
laughter and applause, and then was moodily silent as the film
went back to the war itself.

And yet though Europeans try and have been trying for eight
years to thrust out yesterday's memories and tomorrow's prob-
lems, they cannot. Fragments of yesterday's passion and sorrow
come back to push and pull and draw them back to today's de-

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE 13

cisions. There is, for example, one of the great chiefs of the French
Resistance who survived the Occupation to serve eminently and
successfully in a key post of France's postwar government. From
his Cabinet seat, he secretly helped the Zionists smuggle arms
through France to Israel in the war between the Israelis and the
Arabs. The man was a devout Catholic and, when the story be-
came known to several people in Paris, a friend asked him why he
ran such political risks. "I'll tell you," said the Cabinet Minister,
"it goes back to the Resistance against the Germans. I came into
Paris for instructions one day and my net gave me the address of
a dirty little hotel on Montmartre where I could make my rendez-
vous safely. The clerk booked me in and then took me upstairs to
a room with two beds. One was for me. In the other an old Jew
was trying to go to sleep. I had just fallen asleep when the clerk
rushed in and whispered to me. Tull the blanket over your head
and pretend you're sleeping. The Gestapo are raiding here tonight,
but don't worry, they're not after you, they're just raiding for
Jews.' Then the Germans came into the room and dragged the old
man from the bed. He screamed and howled; he clutched the
sheets, the bedstead, the chairs. As they dragged him out, he was
struggling, and he must have seen my leg sticking out from under
the blanket. He grabbed it, trying to hold himself against the
Germans. And I remember reaching with my other leg and push-
ing down on his hand to break his grip, I can't forget pushing that
hand away from me; I'll never forget. I suppose that's why I let the
Israelis bring arms through France."

The Years of the Pause are now ending. It is obvious that new
leadership in both America and Russia is now wrenching the
whole course of world affairs into new patterns and perspectives.
What is less obvious is that in this wrenching process Europe, for-
gotten through the postwar years as a factor in power, must con-
tribute as greatly as either of the two new titans. Having now
recovered from their wounds of war, and having seen this recov-
ery reach a plateau and stagnate, the Europeans, however much
they wish to drowse and be quiet, are being forced once more,
against their will, to consider great decisions.

Two events within Europe in these coming years rival events in
America and Russia in their dimensions. Both these events, para-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 14

doxically, are events that were conceived, launched and nursed
to their present pregnant power by American diplomacy. In the
days when America's whim was Europe's imperative these twin
movements seemed no more than the idle fancy of America's pro-
consuls in Europe. But now, rooted deep in European life, they
have passed beyond the control of American diplomacy and chal-
lenge each other to see which shall shape the future of the old
Continent.

These two events are the Birth of Europe and the Renaissance
of Germany. Intertwined and locked together since their first
stirring in conception, they move today in naked rivalry, each
racing the other to realization; for whichever triumphs first will
make of the other its servant.

The desire ofjEun^^

that has, Imunted generals and priests,_merchants and wanderers
for all the hundreds of years since Rome ruled Europe and made
it one. It is a vision of such grandeur and scope, and we have come
so close and so swiftly to realizing it in the past few years, that
it is impossible in our generation to tell what it may eventually
mean for mankind. The vision has always been there; what has
fleshed it out in the past few years has been the coming together of
two great forces in the torn and tattered states of Western Europe.
The first of these forces has been fear sheer, brute, quivering fear
of the Russian state which might at any moment strike and with
its juggernaut weight crush any of the old West European states
standing alone. This fear alone would not have been enough, even
as the age-old idealism of the visionaries had never been enough,
had it not been for the second force: American pressure. American
diplomacy has insisted, year-in and year-out, in every capital of
Europe from Oslo to Rome that the dream of union must clothe
itself with flesh and institutions now; American diplomacy sup-
plied the plastic of wealth and promise of arms to bind the Euro-
pean states together. It has been argued that American pressure
on Europeans to unite has been too primitive, too impatient, too
mechanical, too unfeeling in the single-minded insistence with
which it has tried to force age-old enemies to forget their feuds
and become brothers. It may well be that historians will read
American pressure as too unrelenting and too swift, and will make
it responsible if the dream of European Union fails. But there is no

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE 15

doubt that without American diplomatic pressure and insistence
this dream would still be a paper nothing or the stuff of student
debating contests. Instead, it is already a half -reality. It is a power
which can already tax, dispose, order, create and regulate the
greatest industries of Western Europe over and above any na-
tional frontier of law. Six nations have already signed a compact
which may, tomorrow, clothe the men of half a dozen different
states in one uniform, under one flag, and send them out to die
under one command. And the elected political delegates of these
six states have already drafted the constitution of a new com-
munity, called simply "Europe," in which supreme powers will be
taken from the old national parliaments and lodged in one great
new suprasovereign, subordinate to an assembly elected by all
the people of Europe.

The Renaissance of Germany is something as profound and
powerful in its movement of the coming years as the Birth of
Europe. By the time this book is published, Germany will have
enjoyed her first free, national elections in twenty years. Its gov-
ernment will enter the councils of Europe not as the object of
other people's will, but as a proud and independent nation with a
voice of its own. Here, too, in the Renaissance of Germany as in
the Birth of Europe, the United States was the moving force. It
was the United States that summoned Germany back to greatness,
that fed and clothed her, equipped her with government and lead-
ership, struck the chains from her will.

Were it not for the Germans, Western Europe would already
be united the fear of Russia, the pressure of America, the questing
idealism of both religion and common sense would almost cer-
tainly, by now, have brought the scattered states of Europe to-
gether in an effort to regain their standing in the world. But the
West Europeans looking east toward the Communist world see
not only Russia, but Germany too. Germany is an unknown quan-
tity. For fifty years this continent has revolved around the desper-
ate urge of the Germans to make their neighbors conform to
Germany's nightmare vision of what was right and just. More
bitter than ever, half-healed from wounds they brought on them-
selves, the Germans are today being summoned to enter a new
community in which, by the logic of power, they must be the
prime movers. Which way will they move? What will they do

FIRE IN THE ASHES l6

with their new and ever-growing power? How deep is the tissue
of decency in the new German Republic? How much vitality is
left to the terrifying German ideas which have brought the Con-
tinent to its present broken and enfeebled state? Caught between
the power giants of East and West, seeking to regain some grip
over their own destiny, the European statesmen know that the new
Europe, in order to become a power giant of rival size, must in-
clude the resources and energy of a freely consenting Germany.
Germany, they know, cannot be left out of either the Atlantic
Community or European Union, for to leave Germany entirely
independent and free to her own devices is to invite her again to
play East against West to inevitable disaster. Yet they know that if
the Germans are swept again by one of those sea-tides of emotion
which so violently seize them, then the new Union of Europe is
useless; better it were that it had never been born.

Perhaps the single most important question of the new Europe
is thus what the Germans have learned from their own history as
they are invited to a new loyalty, and the future of Europe de-
pends on whether the Germans choose to accept the new world
struggling to be born or whether they choose to wreck it.

The approach of these new movements cuts the years that have
passed from the years that come as sharply as if a page were turned
and a new chapter opened. It is not that these movements and
growths have been swelling in a vacuum. Through all these years
the morning newspapers of the Europeans have dutifully recorded
each dry morsel of negotiation and event in studious detail. But the
Europeans, preoccupied with the daily tasks of feeding their
families, sheltering themselves, putting together the roads, fac-
tories and bridges destroyed by war, have not been listening. The
coming years are the years in which they must decide where they
stand and what they are to do about the new world in which
they live.

The decisions of the Europeans about these movements and the
fate of these new movements affect not only their own lives but
the lives of everyone else in the world, Americans most of all.
Even in its present weakness, Europe speaks for enormous power,
the power that hangs as a balance between the strength of America
and Russia. With Europe's 300,000,000 people and their industries

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE IJ

added in friendship, the American perspective is one of expansion.
With Europe subtracted or hostile, the American perspective is
one of contraction in a spiral of gloomy isolation.

Upon Europe's decision in the next few years rests the rela-
tionship of the Western world to the Russians. It is, after all, the
Europeans, not the Americans, who live next to that huge Byzan-
tine state which combines the most modern techniques with the
oldest form of despotism. As if by instinct, without deep thought,
Europe has rejected in every state of the West the gospel of com-
munism without finding any other gospel to match it in vitality.
Until now, Europe has given a brave "No" to the Russians, yet
it is unsatisfied with the answer, for America has failed to draw
from it an equally steadfast "Yes."

The decision of Europe will determine not only the clash of the
West with communism, but also the clash of the West with the
boiling civilizations of Asia and Africa. For Europe was not only
the creator and power of the past five centuries. It was the hinge
upon which the world turned. It was the pivot that linked the
advanced civilizations of the Atlantic America as well as its own
member states to the different civilizations of India, of the Orient,
of Africa, of Southeast Asia. With the hinge rusty and broken,
unable to bear the weight of these growing civilizations, they
creak and grate one upon the other and upon ourselves.

There is no easy title for the period now beginning. It is alto-
gether natural, however, that there should be none. The names of
great centuries and epochs in human history are always given to
them by their remote descendants. Few men realized while they
lived it that the age of Augustus was the high point in a thousand
years of history. When XX Legio Valeria Victrix left Britain in
A.D. 403, none of its men realized that the golden eagles of Rome
would never return to the island, or that they were part of the
decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Certainly no Renaissance
man knew he was living in a century that other men would call
the "rebirth," just as his great-great-great-grandfather had no
knowledge that he was part of the Middle Ages. Thus we do not
know what to call our time, what label to give the remarkable
and extraordinary events that we not only witness but live.

This book is written in the belief that whatever name is given
to our age, the choice will be shaped by the events that take place

FIRE IN THE ASHES

18

or fail to take place in Europe in the next few years. It is a book,
therefore, about many things:

about the struggle of America and Russia for the loyalty of
the hearts and the riches of the lands in all the countries of Europe.

about what has been happening in the years between Ger-
many's defeat and resurgence, and how that resurgence has come
about.

about Europe between the departure of the American troops
in victory and their return five years later in peril, how we Amer-
icans have become involved and what we have won.

about the struggle of the Europeans to refresh their enterprise
and skills in the ebb tides of a contracting world that threatens to
leave them stranded and dying far from free water.

But also, more than anything else, it is about Europeans and how
they live today, what bothers them and preys on them in these
years as they try to reach decisions that will affect us all.

II

the end of an alliance

Long before the war in Europe ended in May of 1945, it was
clear there would be no peace.

The quarrels of the victors had begun almost as soon as it was
obvious they would be victorious. To be sure, they had bickered
all through the "war, but that quarreling had been normal to any
military coalition; it had blistered over supplies, deliveries, re-
quirements, timings and where, how and when the West and
Russia would apply the crippling blows to the Germans. The
Allies had never diverged over ultimate goals the destruction of
the Fascist Powers.

By early 1945:, however, as Germany visibly began to crumble
under the combined weight of her enemies, it became obvious that
the conquering alliance was showing strains and fissures that ran
deeper than the military issues of the war itself. At first glance the
strains seemed curiously similar to those that had split the vic-
torious alliance of the First German War they seemed to revolve
fundamentally around the distribution of spoils. And again, as after
the First World War, any objective approach to the discussion
of spoils was complicated by the almost adolescent embarrassment
of the United States, one of the three senior partners in victory, to
discuss spoils as spoils.

The rules of American politics, cloyed with the sticky and per-
sistent idealism which is at once America's strength and weakness,
made it Impossible to approach the subject as the two other grand
partners,, Brkaia and Russia, would have preferred. The Britons
and the Russians had, indeed, made a modest attempt to accommo-
date each other as early as the fall of 1944 in the old-fashioned
way. When Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden had journeyed to Mos-
cow In autumn of that year, they had found Messrs. Stalin and

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2O

Molotov in an uncommonly jovial mood. One night, late after
dinner in the Kremlin, as the cups went around, a rare mood of
hilarity settled over the great statesmen and their advisors. Jug-
gling the map of Europe about, Stalin declared that Russia's in-
terest in Rumania was at least "ninety per cent." To which Mr.
Churchill replied that, if so, Britain's interest in Greece was "one
hundred per cent." Stalin then countered by saying that if Russia
reduced her interest in Rumania to seventy-five per cent, it would
be only fair if Britain reduced her interest in Greece to eighty
per cent. The evening closed, as one Briton present said, on a note
of good feeling and a sense of clean fun; it was not until the British
delegation was homeward bound in flight that several of its mem-
bers began to wonder whether the Russians had really been serious
about the conversation.

Whether or not the Russians were serious, both Britain and
Russia acted as if they had been Rumania was to be for Russia
and Greece for England. What upset the arrangement was the
Americans. When Mr. Vyshinsky journeyed down to Bucharest
the following February to take possession of the prize deeded to
Russia in Moscow, and did so with all the ruthlessness and hy-
pocrisy of which he is such a master, the Americans let it be
clearly known, first, that it was naive to make any bargain behind
America's back and, secondly, that Americans did not like such
bargains.

This obscure incident must, almost certainly, have been one of
the initial shocks to Russian diplomacy, if Russian policy in the
outer world can be called diplomacy. Here, in their eyes, must
have been undoubtedly the substance of a cold and logical deal.
The Red Army had conquered Rumania, had paid for it with
thousands of lives, was operating a massive military supply system
across its communications net in the assault on Germany and had,
furthermore, purchased a free hand there, by offering the West-
ern Powers a free hand in an area similarly important to them.
What must have been baffling were the grounds on which the
United States refused to consider such a deal. The American at-
titude was based not on a bargaining position but on something
else. The Americans seemed to object not so much to the deal it-
self as to the behavior of the Russians in Rumania, to what the
Russians were doing inside Rumania. And their objections came

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 21

wrapped with strange words like "liberty," "democracy," "freely
chosen governments."

This strangulation of bargaining by words was to be the par-
ticular condition that set apart the peacemaking after World
War II from any other settlement of modern times. Ultimately,
this condition multiplied the titanic clash of real interests between
the two partners into insolubility. Rumania itself was only the first
detail in the clash, leaving little more residue than an initial abra-
sion of mutual trust which might be abraided that much more
easily in the events that were to follow so swifdy. This trivial
impasse might have been dismissed as a bit of Anglo-Russian
clumsiness compounded by philology; what made it so grotesque
was that the philology was more than the words. It was the echo
of two systems, two bodies of ideas which, with the best will in
the world, could not be measured in common terms. At Versailles,
a generation earlier, the clash of the victors could have been de-
scribed in words which all of them would have agreed as defining
the substance, if not the justice, of the argument. It was impos-
sible to find such words in 1945.

The Conference of Yalta, in February of that historic year, at
which for the last time the great war masters met in person, was
scarred with this grating of bargain and meaning. Where the
great men could agree, they agreed on finite, measurable things:
the Curzon line that separated Russia from Poland was a line on
a map; the deal on Russia's strength in the United Nations could
be pinned down in an agreed number of seats; the deal on the
Pacific War could be pinned down with a fixed date for Russia's
entry and a fixed, all-too-clear price in Manchurian bases.

But the other problems that were to cause such bitter dis-
pute in the months to come were all left dangling in the air,
suspended in ambiguities, because no words could bridge them.
Poland was to be "reorganized" on a "democratic" basis with the
"inclusion" of "democratic" leaders from Poland itself and from
Poles abroad. No one defined "reorganized," "democratic," "in-
clusion." The key words for Germany were "disarmament," "de-
militarization," "decentralization." No one could later agree what
the words meant. Russia and the United States agreed that repara-
tions should be paid, but neither could agree on how much or

FIRE IN THE ASHES 22

what kind, so the figure of twenty billion dollars itself an ab-
stractionwas taken as a "basis" of negotiation.

The great men had no sooner reached their capitals than the
bargains of Yalta began to come unstuck, not only privately in
the bitter cables of the leaders themselves, but loudly, publicly,
and to the anger and excitement of millions of ordinary people.
Poland was the first of the bargains to dissolve; it dissolved pre-
cisely over the definition of words and the meaning of the bargain
of Yalta; within four months of the departure of the conferees,
the new President of the United States had summoned Harry
Hopkins from his deathbed, and sent him all the way across the
world to try to explain, if possible, to Stalin in person exactly
what the United States had meant in the Polish bargain.

Poland more than any other issue of dispute struck the tone
of intercourse that was to paralyze understanding. The United
States had finally, reluctantly, acquiesced in abandoning Rumania
to the untender mercies of the Red Army because Rumania had
been a willing partner in Nazi adventures and had enthusiastically
helped ravage the Soviet Union. But Poland was something else.
It was to preserve Polish independence that the West had origi-
nally gone to war, and the Poles had fought gallantly side by side
with the Allies on every front. For six long sessions in the sanc-
tums of the Kremlin, each of them stretching on to midnight or
beyond, Stalin and Hopkins wrestled with each other. Poland,
said Stalin, must be "friendly," "strong" and "democratic" be-
cause twice in one generation Poland had been the gate through
which the Germans had marched to ravage Russian soil. Hopkins
agreed on that. But when Hopkins and Stalin tried to pursue the
agreement to understanding, their lips made words but no mean-
ing came forth.

At their second session Stalin tried to explain what Russia meant
by the Yalta agreement to "reorganize" Poland. This meant, said
he, that the committee of Communist Poles the Red Army had
formed at Lublin and brought along with it to help administer the
Poland they were fighting in would be retained as the Polish gov-
ernment. It needed only to be molded or pulled about a bit by
the inclusion of a few other Poles taken from the list submitted by
Great Britain and the United States perhaps four or five. Molo-
tov, a man more experienced in dealing with the West, whispered

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 2J

in Stalin's ear and Stalin corrected himself to a more precise meas-
urement"four, not five," out of eighteen or twenty Cabinet
members.

At their fourth meeting Hopkins tried to press home what was
truly bothering the American people and to explain what "demo-
cratic" meant to Americans a free press open to all parties, parties
open to all people, all people entitled to vote, to speak freely, no
man subject to arrest or imprisonment without trial. This was
what America meant when she said she wanted a "democratic"
Poland. Stalin nodded a yes, yes to that but obviously could not
get the point, for, at the following session, Hopkins tried to boil
the dispute down to a precise test of clarity. Fourteen Poles had
been arrested without trial, said Hopkins, on the charge that they
possessed illegal radio sets; they had been detained and had dis-
appeared; this had enraged Americans; the United States wanted
them released. Here at last was something both could understand
and talk about, and understanding Hopkins at last, Stalin said,
"No." Stalin did not expand on his "No," but it was not necessary.
'His Yalta bargain had given him Poland to be made "friendly"
to the Soviet Union; this meant control; control meant police.
Fourteen individual Poles were not an abstraction, they were of
the essence in his political thinking. As it happened, these indi-
vidual lives were of the essence in American thinking too.

Such clashes whether over matters of deep substance like the
disposition of Poland and Rumania, or the release and care of
American prisoners of war liberated in Eastern Europe had be-
come commonplace between the Allies by the end of the war
and had generated a bitterness that covered almost every point
of their relations. But this bitterness, unavoidable in the clash of
wills and the confusion of understanding, was amplified even
further by the atavism of Russian suspicion so abnormally de-
veloped by the Communist state.

A morbid, almost hysterical suspicion of Western intent ran
from top to bottom of the Soviet world. It had begun while
Roosevelt was still alive. Roosevelt had returned from Yalta no
more than a month when he received a cable from Stalin, signed
personallv, accusing him of bald treachery. The American Em-
bassy in Moscow had informed Stalin that our secret service agents
in Switzerland had learned that Field Marshal Kesselring, the Ger-

FIRE IN* THE ASHES 24

man commander in Northern Italy, was willing to lay down his
arms to the Allies on that front. The Soviets were invited to take
part in negotiations with the Germans at a session to be arranged
in Italy after preliminary secret contact with the enemy in Swit-
zerland. Stalin reacted as if jabbed by a needle. He wired Roose-
velt claiming that the English and Americans had already begun
negotiating with Kesselring, had promised Germany easy peace
terms, had permitted the Germans to transfer three divisions from
the Italian to the Russian front all of which was untrue. Roosevelt
replied with a stiff and nasty note which cooled the Soviet dictator
off. But the interchange was a laboratory specimen of Soviet re-
actionto begin with a fact, rooted in truth, and then to coat the
fact so thickly with lies as to infuriate anyone not bred in Soviet
mythology.

Suspicion in the Soviet state is self -generating and self-accelerat-
ing. No one knows precisely by what mechanism the Soviet press
is guided at home. That it is rigidly controlled is, of course, one
of the common facts of knowledge; but how much it, in turn,
controls the thinking of the men who control it no one can meas-
ure. A whisper of suspicion from on high, a gout of irritation
seeping out of the Politburo to the Press Control must, in the
Soviet world, be amplified, exaggerated and repeated by thousands
of skilful and ambitious men until it reaches an echo that drums,
deafens and freezes the thinking of the very men who started it.
Already before the Yalta Conference, the American Embassy in
Moscow had begun to report the alarming ugliness of suspicion of
the Russian press. By the end of the war, six months later, Russians
from end to end of the intercontinental war-fronts were soaked
in this suspicion.

I remember years after the war telling an American Army of-
ficer of how swiftly and suddenly the tide of suspicion had come
upon us in our posts in Asia. In the spring of 1945 I had been
stationed in Chungking, and a group of friends an American, a
Chinese, a Briton, a Frenchman, a Russian had taken to lunching
together regularly once a week to exchange views. In the closing
months of the war, our luncheons had been very gay with wine
in celebration of the victories whose salvos came rumbling in from
Europe. Our luncheon the week before Germany collapsed was
the gayest of all until suddenly Fedorenko, the Russian, deep in

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 2

his cups, burst into a tirade. "Gold! Gold!" he yelled from his
corner of the table. "Gold! What do you Americans find in
Germany? Gold! Gold! The Germans surrender to you and they
leave you their gold but what do we find? War! They surrender
to one side and they fight on the other. We know what you're
trying to do, but it won't succeed, no one can take our victory
from us." The incident shocked us, for Fedorenko was one of
the friendliest officers of the Russian Embassy, a brilliant man with
a flawless knowledge of Chinese and Oriental affairs, and we had
always, hitherto, treated him as one of us.

When I told this story years later to my army friend who had
finished his war all the way across the globe leading an Ameri-
can regiment to junction with the Russians along the Elbe, he
said it had been the same way in Germany. After his troops had
come to the river, my friend crossed to pay a courtesy call on
the Russian divisional commander opposite him, a bull-necked,
barrel-chested man, and had been invited to lunch at the Russian
headquarters. There the Russian commander had launched his
tirade: "Why are you digging in against us?" he snarled. "We
know what you're doing, where you're putting your artillery and
tanks. Why? Why are you preparing for war? We will not be
frightened. We are not afraid." Ironically, from the window of
the room, the American officer could look out and see Russian
troops entrenching with pick and shovel on the river bank. He
tried to explain that not even Dwight D. Eisenhower could per-
suade an American GI to pick up a trenching tool and dig in
during that week of victory. But it was useless, the Russian was
not convinced.

The real story of postwar Europe begins, thus, in this atmos-
phere of suspicion and confusion, at the Conference of Potsdam
where, for the first time, the chiefs of state approached the root
problem of Europe. What to do about Germany? Germany lay
stretched all about them in a state of chaos that it had not known
since the end of the Thirty Years' War three centuries before.
Seventy million people were being pressed and pushed back into
the confines of a country that had been shorn of almost twenty-
five per cent of its territory and had seen the rest ravaged. The
best of its manpower was in prison camps. Its cities were rubble

FIRE IN THE ASHES

26

heaps. Its bridges were broken, its roads torn, and the victims of
the Germans were trudging homeward across these roads taking
their human revenge as they went. Victorious troops were herd-
ing hundreds of thousands of dusty Wehrmacht veterans into
barbed wire rings, while the generals and statesmen were staking
out military zones.

Nothing had been settled before Potsdam no decision had been
taken on how to dismember or how to centralize Germany in
order best to control it; no frontiers had been set for it; no form
of government considered; no measures of punishment settled.
The chiefs of state approached the great prize gingerly for none
knew exactly what he wanted. They approved a control mecha-
nism of four senior generals, one from each conqueror, to admin-
ister Germany while they made up their minds. And they marked
out more clearly the zones roughly agreed on at Yalta. Where
they sensed each other's deeper resistance, they retreated once
again to bargains rendered meaningless by words, agreements
carefully couched in ambiguous reservations that could be read
either way in any translation. Thus the Russians were pleased that
the borders of Germany and Poland were recognized as some-
where on the line of the Oder-Neisse Rivers, while the West
carefully noted that there was to be no final settlement of the
frontiers until the peace conference. The Russians noted that the
accords guaranteed them ten billion dollars' worth of reparations,
but the West noted that this was not to be pumped out of Ger-
man production until Germany could support itself again. It was
obvious that Germany was to be the subject of long and compli-
cated negotiations. The heads of state were in a great hurry to get
home Stalin to deal with the reconstruction and convalescence of
his sorely wounded country, Mr. Attlee to launch the cautious
social revolution for which a generation of British Socialists had
waited, Mr. Truman to the termination of the war against Japan.
So, after fifteen days of almost fruitless talk, the conferees accepted
the ingenious suggestion of the American Secretary of State that a
Council of Foreign Ministers be set up to deal regularly with the
recurring problems of a new world at other times and other places
and home they all went.

It is difficult now, before all the pertinent documents and mem-
oirs are publicly available, to judge the importance of the blunders

THEENDOFANALLIANCE 2J

of each of the powers from Potsdam on. The contemporary
American citizen, who can be compelled to accept the huge ob-
ligations of power only by being kept in a constant state of nerves,
sees the events of the postwar world as a long chain of blunders
in American diplomacy. The future historian will probably record
that the first, the outstanding, the overwhelmingly important
blunders were made by the Russians. And that American diplo-
macy in Europe, despite some initial confusion and several minor
fluffs, capitalized on these blunders, outwitted the Russians and
won.

The initial Russian blunder began at Potsdam. There, without
committing the Western Powers to any binding agreement on
Germany, the Russians set out on a course of action which if it
were emulated by the Western Powers, as it was certain to be,
would give Russia the shabby end of the bargain. The real weight
of Germany the energy, drive, industrial skills and overwhelm-
ing portion of its peoples and resources was as securely in the
grip of Western military power as were the puppet lands of
Eastern Europe in the grip of the Red Army. To seal the Western
Powers out of Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany could only,
inevitably, provoke the Western Powers to seal the Russians out
of Western Germany, which was the real prize. In effect, the
Russians thrust into the hands of the West that which they sought
most to gain.

This blunder of real decision was multiplied by a blunder of
manners. Exhausted by their own victory, unprepared to use force
against their recent allies, the Russians persisted in a nastiness of
tone and temper which was worse than useless if it was not to
be backed by force. Unable to wring any major concession from
the Allies in the next twelve months, they contented themselves
with pinprick annoyances and suspicions on all the thoroughly
minor matters which were in negotiation with the Allies. Slowly
and aggravatingly, in conference after conference, at every fringe
of contact with the West, the Russians rubbed the West raw, ex-
hausting its patience and willingness to concede on each minor
point of dispute, before ever approaching the main settlement on
Germany where the West held every card in the deck except the
trump of Berlin.

Russian tactics were as blundering as their manners. Though

FIRE IN THE ASHES 28

their strategy has remained transparently simple throughout the
postwar years to wit, to split the Western Alliancetheir tactics
seemed fashioned for directly contrary ends. Their initial preoc-
cupation with the exclusion of France from any say in the settle-
ment of Europe failed, and failing, thrust the French into almost
total diplomatic dependence on the United States. Their initial
attempt to divide Britain and the United States failed by the gross-
est miscalculation. Imputing to the new Labour government all
the mythological imperial sins of the Tory diplomacy of Mr.
Churchill, they thrust it, too, into union with America in the first
formative months, when its diplomacy might have entertained
compromise. Having bullied the French and the British into closest
partnership with America, they then frightened all other nations
of the West into the association that later became the North At-
lantic Treaty Organization. Instead of dividing the West, they
unified it, creating by their own actions that which they feared
most.

To judge what the Russians gained and lost in Europe in the
first postwar year, one must pluck the long list of Russian de-
mands out of the wild confusion of Russian propaganda. While
Russian propaganda flailed away with rhetorical tom-toms, Rus-
sian demands were advanced in terms of hard things.

They wanted, first of all, a specific zone of influence on their
borders and a share in the Mediterranean. They asked for control
of the Dardanelles, they demanded control of Tripolitania, control
of Eritrea; they requested that Turkey detach several vital sliv-
ers of her territory from her flag and give them to the Soviet. They
wished to make Yugoslavia their Mediterranean bastion and de-
manded that the city of Trieste and the headlands of the Adriatic
be given to Tito, as well as Austrian Carinthia. They wanted, in
another area, most quietly but most insistently, a share in the oil
of the Middle East and enough control in Northern Persia and
around the Caspian to pad the security of their own Baku oil fields.
They wanted, in Germany, huge reparations and physical control
in the Ruhr. On a global scale, they wanted a large loan from the
United States and a share in the control of Japan.

The Western victory stands out most clearly in the following
summary of the bargaining: the Russians got neither the Dar-
danelles, nor Turkish territory, nor Middle Eastern oil, nor a

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 29

buffer on the Caspian, nor Tripolitania, nor Eritrea, nor Trieste,
nor Carinthia, nor West German reparations, nor the Ruhr, nor
an American loan, nor a share in Japan. What they got, of the
specific demands they advanced and the West could offer was:
one-third of the captured German Navy, one hundred million
dollars' worth of reparations from Italy, three votes and the right
of veto in the United Nations.

The unhappy alliance of Potsdam, its members still bound in
solemn oaths and contracts to each other, stumbled through the
first year and a half of peace in a series of four great meetings of
the Council of Foreign Ministers. These conferences had, as their
rough outline, a general agreement that the lesser spoils and con-
quests of their common victory must be settled and organized
before they could approach the central problem of Germany.
They confirmed a settlement that might have been predicted by
a neophyte and might have been closed in a week. Wherever the
Red Armies stood, the Russians were permitted to organize and
manipulate governments to their own taste; wherever the West
had stationed its forces, it was allowed to organize and manipulate
governments to its taste. The vast tier of East European states
thus fell to Russia as spoils of war. American and Western influ-
ence was excluded from them as completely as Russian influence
was excluded from Japan. By the end of 1946, the pattern of Eu-
rope as it exists today was sealed in an interlocking set of treaties
except for Germany and its appendage, Austria.

The victorious alliance had been late in coming to grips with
the German problem, the intractable, irreducible centerpiece of
European politics. Not until the summer of 1946, a year after Ger-
many's defeat, did it become clear how violently divergent were
their attitudes to the beaten enemy. The scene was Paris, the
setting the Third Conference of Foreign Ministers, convened to
discuss the peace treaties with the lesser enemies.

Mr. Molotov opened the debate with a carefully publicized
statement in Paris on July 1 1, directed primarily at German public
opinion but obliquely designed to bring the West to serious bar-
gaining. Adopting an unusually conciliatory tone, Mr. Molotov
declared that the Soviet Union did not want to destroy Germany
but to make it work. Mr. Molotov called on everyone to admit
that the levels of German industry (which the Soviets had previ-

FIREINTHEASHES 30

ously insisted on restraining at impossibly low levels) were too
restrictive and must be raised. He attacked those who wished to
raze the Ruhr and insisted it be fostered and encouraged to work
in peace. Then he got down to business. What he wanted was a
thoroughly centralized Germany, rigidly controlled by the Four
Power Commission set up at Potsdam, in which the Russians
would sit with the right of veto. For the Ruhr, Germany's mighty
industrial center, Mr. Molotov wanted an even stricter system of
supervision to pump out reparations goods. Eventually, a German
government would grow under this Four Power tutelage, and if
it proved trustworthy, a peace treaty would be made in a number
of years.

A few nights later, in private after-dinner conversation at the
Russian Embassy with Mr. James Byrnes, the American Secretary
of State, Molotov made things even clearer over a few drinks. All
he wanted, said Mr. Molotov, was a share in the Ruhr and a guar-
antee of delivery on the ten billion dollars of reparations promised
Russia. Later, much later, the Russians were to be willing to settle
for much less. But then it was to be too late.

It took eight weeks for an official American reaction to develop
to Molotov's position. When it came, it was delivered not in
Paris at the forum of foreign ministers, but in Germany, directly
to the German people, and was one of the turning points of post-
war history. This was the famous Stuttgart speech of Mr. Byrnes.
The flashy, yellow-kerchiefed troops of the American constabu-
lary lined the streets at Stuttgart station when Byrnes arrived, and
armored cars stood guard at every intersection. In the opera house
of the town, a handful of the highest German dignitaries of the
humiliated country sat tremblingly tense in the front rows when
he rose to speak.

Mr. Byrnes' speech was, in tone, more minatory and less con-
ciliatory to the Germans than Mr. Molotov's; it contained a more
vivid evocation of the war just past, the sins of the Germans, the
determination of the Americans never to let such crimes happen
again, and their willingness to persist in sacrifice to preserve peace
and victory. But, proceeded Mr. Byrnes, America too wanted the
swiftest centralization of German economic life and government;
she too was against any further reduction in the German standard
of living. Moreover, America was adamantly set against any Ger-

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 31

man reparations to be paid out of Germany's production so long
as German production could not support Germans; and finally,
America did not accept the Oder-Neisse line in the East as the final
frontier amputating Silesia from the body of German politics.

The whole inner meaning of the Stuttgart speech was, how-
ever, summed up in one of its opening phrases: "It is not in the
interest of the German people," said Mr. Byrnes, "or in the in-
terest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or
partner in a military struggle for power between the East and
the West." In that uncertain way history has of opening every
great chapter with a negative, Mr. Byrnes had introduced the next
chapter. Every intelligent German in the audience understood Mr.
Byrnes instinctively. The speech was an invitation to every Ger-
man to take precisely the attitude deplored, to become either pawn
or partner in the struggle between East and West; they had been
invited to participate in judgment at the dispute of the conquerors.
German diplomacy had been given its perspective for the next
decade.

The divergence of American and Russian positions on Ger-
many was now clear. The Russians still thought of Germany as
booty; having chopped away East Germany from West Germany,
they now wanted to press for a further share in the riches of
Western Germany which the Atlantic Powers held. The Ameri-
cans thought of Germany as a burden; they wanted now to lessen
the burden by making Germany operate; they wanted to increase
German health, not in order to get more out of Germany, but to
end the downward spiral and sickening disorganization of her
economy, which was retarding all European recovery. On this
note of divergence, having only just approached the German
problem, Mr. Byrnes ended his stewardship of American diplo-
macy in December, 1946. Fifteen months before he had begun his
report to the American people after the First Conference of For-
eign Ministers with the melancholy words, "The First Conference
of Foreign Ministers closed in a stalemate." He did not bother to
make a report on the last of the meetings he attended in Decem-
ber. Instead, in his memoirs, he wryly recorded the quip of
Georges Bidault, the witty history professor who had become
France's Foreign Minister. By this time the Council had degener-
ated into a debate that dragged each argument around and around,

FIRE IK THE ASHES 32

inflexibly, caught in a groove from which there was no escape.
M. Bidault observed that the Council was now a merry-go-round
and asked his colleagues' indulgence since he "was now going to
ride his own horse around and say something about coal"

It was General George Catlett Marshall who decided to get off
the merry-go-round. Until Marshall succeeded Byrnes in the lead-
ership of American diplomacy, all decisions had been made in the
frame of the fictitious yet legal alliance that still bound the West
to the Russians. From January of 1947 on, American decisions
were made not only apart from the alliance, but in recognition
of the open and increasing enmity between the two halves of the
old alliance. Indeed, the entire strategy which has propelled the
Western world ever since was conceived and drafted in the first
fifteen months of MarshalPs two-year incumbency of office.

Marshall, a man in whom the powers of logic are coupled with
dignity and force to an extraordinary degree, found himself
caught in a situation in which effective diplomacy was impossible.
Effective diplomacy rests on power, and by the beginning of
1947, the United States and her Allies were powerless. In May of
1945, the Army of the United States had stood in Central Europe
with a force of 3,500,000 men, organized into 68 veteran divisions,
supported by 149 air groups of planes, supplied by one of
the most elaborate logistical systems ever flung over the globe.
Some 47 divisions of Allied power braced this force on the
Western Front. By March of 1946, ten months later, the Amer-
ican forces had dwindled to 400,000 men, with homeland reserves
insufficient to keep them at strength. The Air Force had dis-
appeared. By June of 1946, while Mr. Byrnes and Mr. Molotov
were negotiating the lesser peace treaties, redisposition of both
American and Russian troops had taken place. The Russians had
moved their divisions north to the critically sensitive German
flatlands and so overmatched Allied strength that our intelligence
reports gravely doubted whether, if a clash came, our troops
would be capable of making an effective retreat to the North
German ports where they might be evacuated without catas-
trophe.

By July of 1946, when Molotov and Byrnes entered on the first

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 33

dispute over Germany, American strength had dwindled even
further.

The United States Air Force homeland reserve of trained crews
and squadrons that could be flown to Europe in an emergency
was down to 90 bombers and 460 fighter planes. James Forrestal
records in his diaries that only 175 pilots of these planes could
be considered really first class. The illusion of American power
rested almost entirely on the atomic bomb; yet this was the period
when the exodus of American scientists from the nuclear en-
ergy projects had reached its high point and the assembly of
atomic bombs at Los Alamos had come to a halt. Our Allies were
similarly enfeebled. The British, burdened with war both in
Greece and Palestine, had by 1947 cut their armed forces from
4,700,000 to 1,247,000 men, of whom only two divisions were
stationed in Germany. The French had reduced their forces to
two divisions in Germany and their Minister of National Defense
was a Communist.

George Marshall, a soldier by training, was never for an instant
unaware of the relationship between power and purpose. He en-
tered on his term of diplomacy conscious, as were few other men
in the Western world, that the Russians massed 40 divisions of
combat troops in combat position in Central Europe with over
100 divisions behind them in reserve, while America's forces stood
at two divisions and its homeland reserve counted no more than
six ready battalions. The instinct of survival made the first order
of the day the recapture of a balance.

Marshall had been in office no more than six weeks, however,
when another fact was pressed home to him: that the balance to
be recaptured was not only military but, even more urgently,
social and political. On the morning of February 24, 1947, without
warning, the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Inver-
chapel, called on Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the
State Department to inform him that Great Britain was pulling
out of Greece and Turkey. Great Britain at this moment was not
only garrisoning Germany and feeding starving Germans with
British money, but also holding down garrisons in North Africa,
in always-restive Egypt, in turbulent Palestine, in Burma, Malaya
and Hongkong. She was also caught in an economic crisis of
crushing weight. The cost of British support of Greece and Tur-

FI&E IN THE ASHES 34

key, said the British, would in the coming year be $250,000,000,
which the British could not possibly afford. The customs of Brit-
ish political life bring the budget to its annual decision each April.
America, thus, had only five weeks of thought before the British
should announce to the world that they were shucking off the
burden of Greece and Turkey, letting the Balkans and Eastern
Mediterranean come unstuck.

More was involved in this British announcement than imminent
danger in a distant flank zone. The basic assumption of American
diplomacy had hitherto been that the United States, though the
undisputed leader, was nevertheless a partner in a coalition of like-
minded and powerful allies. This assumption was now about to
be shown false. The British decision to abandon Greece was only
the first in a series of sharp dramatic jolts that were to demonstrate
that the strength of Western Europe as a community had been
ebbing over a period of decades. The spasm of war had tempo-
rarily hidden this erosion by those same exertions which speeded
and deepened it. But in early 1947, a year and a half after the war
had ended, the erosion could no longer be concealed. The United
States found itself not in a combination of power but in an associa-
tion of decay that made no social or political balance with the
Russians possible until it was corrected.

Nineteen forty-seven was the year that Europe almost disap-
peared from world affairs. One violent blizzard had gummed up
the delicate mechanism of the overstrained British economy, par-
alyzed her business, made her people shiver in unheated homes
like medieval peasants, set in motion the events that led to the
end of her imperial pretensions. The drought of the following
spring and summer months ushered in the dismal era on the Con-
tinent, There, blazing, rainless weeks produced the finest wines
in a generation of memory and the worst food crops in a longer
period. By the fall of 1947 Europe was as close to destitution as
a modern civilization can get; she could not grow enough food
and she could not find the money or goods to buy food elsewhere.
That was the fall in which the Italian and French foreign offices
found themselves quarreling over four shiploads of American
relief wheat already on the high seas. Bread rations in both coun-
tries were down to 250 grains (half a pound) a day to meet their
rationing commitments, and both insisted they needed all four ships.

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 35

With the judgment of Solomon, the Americans split the four ships,
giving each two but the margin was that thin.

Twice during his first year in office General Marshall sat down
with the Russians to negotiate the problem of Germany, once at
Moscow in the spring and once in London in December. Neither
of these wordy bouts brought any conclusion or meeting of
minds, but by then they had failed in importance as the alliance
that had authorized them had faded and broken. By then, Marshall
had set in motion those events and policies that were to separate
the West from the East, perhaps forever.

The first of these policies, the Truman Doctrine, was an in-
stinctive, almost reflex action. Three days after the delivery of
the Inverchapel message to the State Department, the State De-
partment and the White House had called in and persuaded the
leaders of Congress (except for Mr. Taft) that the burden Britain
was dropping must be caught by the United States. Demanding
and eventually receiving $400,000,000 for the military and eco-
nomic support of Greece and Turkey, the American government
announced that its power was now, with a single bound, com-
mitted around the globe, one thousand miles beyond the Russian
flank as far as the Black Sea and the Caucasus.

The Truman Doctrine was not, however, enough. Returning
from his spring conference in Moscow, Marshall doggedly in-
formed Washington of his conviction that Russia would not
negotiate as long as we in negotiation could not win their respect
for our force. It was impossible to discuss Europe with the Rus-
sians so long as Europe was quicksand. Europe had to be made
firm before one could build on our side a bridge across to the Rus-
sians on the other. Europe had to be organized. In the busy spring
weeks of 1947 while the technicians in Washington were translat-
ing the Truman Doctrine into the specifics of advisory groups,
technical assistance, ships of supply, distribution mechanisms, the
Marshall Plan was being slowly shaped in theory. On June 5, the
idea, the policy, the techniques had matured enough in Marshall's
mind to permit him to go to Harvard University and there at a
commencement address to invite Europe, as a community of na-
tions, to submit to the United States a program of community
needs that might make them healthy again, which program the
United States would then consider as a basis for vast and con-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

tinued aid. Within this program of European revival, as certain
as seed in the womb, the revival of German health and strength
was implicit.

With the launching of the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Western
world set forth on an entirely new course. By the end of 1947 the
divergence of East and West had become so clear that further con-
versation was impossible. When next Marshall met Molotov in
London at the Foreign Ministers' Conference of December of
1947, Molotov had recognized it. Molotov took off in flights of
fantasy, mixed with fact and suspicion, in such language and with
such vituperation that it was clear, as indeed it had been for sev-
eral months, that no further basis of negotiation existed. At the
last session of the London meeting Marshall unburdened himself:

"The United States hoped," said Marshall across the table to
Molotov, "that there would emerge from this conference the be-
ginnings of a united and self-respecting Germany. . . . The
United States had even higher hopes for an Austrian settlement.

"We have failed to reach agreement on a treaty for Austria be-
cause the Soviet Union has demanded for itself properties and
special privileges in Austria in an amount and to an extent which
far exceed any rightful claim and which far exceed what a free
Austria can afford.

"As regards Germany, we have been unable to agree on what
we mean by Germany . . . Three of the delegations agree that
boundary commissions be at once established to examine frontier
questions. The Soviet Union rejects this proposal. So we neither
agree on what Germany is to be, nor do we agree on establishing
commissions to study these vital boundary problems.

"In examining the discussions on economic principles, we have
progressed only agreeing to procedures without substance . . .
The Soviet Union has refused to furnish vitally necessary informa-
tion with respect to reparations removals. Thus we have been
asked to reach agreement while information essential to such
agreement is withheld by Soviet representatives. . . . The Soviet
Union demands reparations for itself and Poland of ten billion
dollars at 1938 values which is at least 15 billion dollars to-
day. ... It was accepted by all at Moscow that full agreement
on economic principles was essential to the establishment of po-
litical unification. . . . We are unable to agree on what shall be

THEENDOFANALLIANCE 37

the area of the German economy; we cannot agree how to make
German resources available to Germany as a whole, a condition
prerequisite to the revival of German economy. . . . The sim-
ple fact is that the present division of Germany has been caused
by the policies and practices of the occupying powers themselves.
Only the occupying powers can create German unity in the pres-
ent circumstances. That is why the United States has consistently
pressed for certain fundamental decisions by the occupying pow-
ers themselves as the absolutely essential first step for the achieve-
ment of a unified Germany. Three delegations at this conference
have registered their willingness to take these decisions here and
now. The Soviet Union alone refuses to agree. In view of these
facts, it seems impossible at this time to make practical progress
. . . and I suggest that the Council of Foreign Ministers might
now consider adjournment of this session."

It adjourned. It met only once more seventeen months later in
the late spring of 1949 at the pink stucco palace of Anna Gould
in Paris. By then the Council was no longer a forum of discussion
but a formality to settle the technicalities of the Berlin blockade,
Marshall's statement had marked the end of the period of talk.
Talk had been obsolete for almost a year anyway because great
new events were under way in the Mediterranean, in Asia, above
all in Germany and Western Europe. And the Russians, too, were
shifting gears.

The initiative in Europe all through the great Year of Diver-
gence, 1947, had been in American hands, leading first to the
Truman Doctrine and next to the Marshall Plan, but this initiative
had not been without Russian response.

None of us in the Western world will probably live to learn
and understand precisely how policy is determined in the Soviet
Union. In the absence of any certified information, every observer
must therefore take the few available facts and fondle them like
the shards of an antique civilization, trying to fit them into some
general theory or doctrine that governs them. Russian policy in
the great Year of Divergence must be examined in the same way,
each fact fitted into the mythology of Marxism.

In the dogma of Marxism, certain laws are immutable. One is
that the contradictions in the capitalist states must inevitably

FIRE IN THE ASHES 38

bring them to trade rivalry, friction, enmity and war. Another is
that the end-phase of all capitalism is imperialism which, when
it ripens to rot, falls before the revolt of colonial peoples and in
its collapse brings down the society of the ruling country in chaos.
These dogmas could be draped about the events of 1947 and
stretched to fit.

Thus, the long decay of Western European states was expected
and normal. In fact, it had been obvious to the Russians before it
became obvious to the Western world. By Russian theology, this
capitalist decay was foreordained by the laws of history, like
Armageddon before salvation. Well before Britain cut Turkey and
Greece adrift, the Russians had sat in anticipation of the crumbling
of Britain's imperial influence. The Truman Doctrine snatched
away the fruit of this collapse and also physically installed American
air power so deep along the flank of the Russian land-mass as to be
able, at some future date, to devastate Russia's vitals unless coun-
tered. Though the Truman Doctrine was probably a surprise,
Marxist dogma could explain it. By dogma, the capitalist-imperial-
ist states snatch prizes one from the other, and, further, capitalist-
imperialist states are inescapably pledged to the destruction of
worker-revolutionary states which, by definition, the Soviet
Union is. The Truman Doctrine was thus a mortal threat, but
understandable.

The Marshall Plan was more difficult to explain. By dogma,
the leading capitalist-imperialist element, namely the United States,
should proceed during the period of decay to gobble up and
subjugate the lesser decaying states. But the Marshall Plan had
curious qualities which did not quite fit into this dogma. Taken
at face value, the Marshall Plan proposed that rather than ending
their existence in a tangle of rivalries and contradictions culminat-
ing in chaos, the capitalist states should cooperate, which Marxist
theory declared impossible. It was impossible for any Russian
thinker, commentator or statesman to have accepted this notion at
face value, simply because the very thought, in Marxist theology,
was blasphemy, sacrilege or worse, punishable by disgrace or
death.

Nevertheless it was very perplexing.

This perplexity showed itself at every level It showed in the
initial reaction of the tempered Communist leaders of the East

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 39

European satellites, who twitched irresistibly at the thought of
American largesse to their shattered economies. It showed in the
first clandestine reactions of Communists in Western Europe.
One of them, in a rare burst of criticism of Russia, complained to
me, "The trouble is that the West has learned so much from Marx
that it doesn't act the way it used to before it learned from Marx.
The Russians don't realize how much the Western states have
changed since the days that Marx knew. Our enemies have read
our books what is Truman, after all, but a Prudhomme with an
army?"

But the perplexity showed most of all, at the highest level, in
Moscow and resulted in one of the most mysterious episodes
of postwar history: Mr. Molotov's visit to Paris in June of 1947
to discuss the Marshall Plan. Within the Politburo, as in any group
of men, there must be at least two or more ideas, two or more
factions, two or more tactical approaches to any problem. And,
since Russia's great problem is the United States, there must be
at least two or more ideas of how to handle her, whether tough
or soft, conciliatory or uncompromising, brutally frank or de-
ceptively friendly. Discarding dogma, the facts could be read
to satisfy either approach. Clearly, by the Truman Doctrine,
America had proclaimed open enmity to Russia and communism;
equally clearly, Marshall had offered American money and goods
to the Russians as well as the other Europeans. (Marshall had de-
fined his offer of aid to Europe privately as "everything up to the
Urals.") Was America bent on enmity? Or was she holding out
the olive branch?

Whatever the discussion in Moscow, its upshot was that Mr.
Molotov arrived in Paris on June 27, 1947, with a delegation of
some threescore Russian experts and economists, no mean token
of interest, to join the Foreign Ministers of France and Britain in
discussing the plan. Six days later he had left in bitter disagreement
and the rupture of 1947 was complete. What happened in those
six days is one of the muddiest episodes of the postwar period.
Sources and statesmen of the highest authority, participants of
the greatest integrity, tell directly contradictory stories. One
Western statesman who visited Moscow in mid- June of 1947 saw
both Mikoyan, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Trade, and Molo-
tov, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs. He found Mikoyan

FIRE IN THE ASHES 40

eager to participate and Molotov eager to stay out; whereupon,,
according to his account, Stalin with his peasant suspicion sent
Molotov to implement Mikoyan's policy, and Molotov wrecked
it. One American most deeply involved in the intricate negotia-
tions insists that the American Embassy in London urged Ernest
Bevin, Britain's Foreign Secretary, to force the Russians out, lest
the American Congress repudiate any plan giving handouts to<
Russia. Other equally eminent participants say flatly no such
pressure was applied. All agree, however, on one point: that
Molotov's rupture of the conference was, from a Russian point
of view, pure stupidity. Had he remained, no American Congress
would ever have been persuaded to approve the Marshall Plan.
The story of the discussions as it is borne in the official records,
however, reads thus: Molotov began the first day with unex-
pected enthusiasm, advancing the thesis that it was right and nor-
mal for war-ravaged countries to expect American aid. He then
explained the Russian attitude: that each nation submit to Amer-
ica its individual shopping list and America meet the bill. It was
on this technical issue, on the second day, that the other two
Foreign Ministers broke. Mr. Bevin and M. Bidault clung to the
original American proposal that Europeans first explore the mesh-
ing and common use of common resources before turning to
America to meet their residual needs. Molotov would have none
of this; he argued it was foreign interference in Russian affairs.
Some observers present at the conference believe that in his in-
sistence on the least possible degree of American supervision and
coordination of aid, Molotov was inspired more than anything
else by the restiveness of his satellites, by the possible intrusion
of American agents and American diplomacy in such unsteady
Communist Republics as Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
Moreover, as it became clear that European reconstruction could
not be taken without Germany's revival, Molotov argued that the
disposition of Western Germany was being lifted out of the
frame of four power decision where it belonged. He was quite
right, of course, but failed to admit that Russia had already re-
moved Eastern Germany from just that same frame. In great
anger, therefore, on Wednesday morning, Molotov departed from
Paris, leaving the Western Powers to begin that task which, even
without the Russians, was of staggering complexity.

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE 41

Neither Molotov's report in Moscow nor the conclusions drawn
from it will probably ever be known to us. What followed, how-
ever, was a rapid and definitive stiffening of Russian attitude,
internally and externally, which seems, in retrospect, an entirely
new policy.

The smiling face of the Russian dictator began to change.
Down to 1947, a long procession of Americans had visited Stalin,
all reporting the geniality and amiability of the little father of all
Marxists. To Hopkins, to Byrnes, to Bedell Smith, to Elliott
Roosevelt, to Harold Stassen, Stalin had turned the same jovial
countenance. The last American visitor to receive the genial treat-
ment was George Marshall. At Moscow, after the breakdown of
the spring conference of 1947, Marshall had been invited to a final
dinner and chat with Stalin, and the dictator had tried to cheer
Marshall by telling him he must not be discouraged by these little
skirmishes before reaching the main lines of settlement. But from
mid- 1 947 on, Stalin no longer appeared, at least to Americans,
in the old, familiar role. In fact Stalin received only two more
Americans between 1947 and 1953: Ambassador Bedell Smith,
who tried hopelessly to settle the Berlin blockade with the un-
yielding master of the Russians, and Ambassador Kirk, who was
granted a perfunctory audience.

Soviet toughening was more clearly visible outside Russia than
within. In September, the Russians organized the Cominform,
which replaced the Comintern as the administrative arm of Rus-
sia in control of Eastern Europe and the Communist parties of
the West. Simultaneously, a series of purges in Eastern Europe
began to strip the dupes and the non-Communists from the gov-
ernments of the satellites and to liquidate them. By early 1948,
the process had climaxed in the Communist coup d'etat in Prague.
In Asia, too, a marked increase of Russian aid to the Chinese
Communists, hitherto negligible, was noted.

The purges, the organization of the Cominform, the changed
attitude to China were not the only areas where Russia suddenly
stiffened. In their new sensitivity and harshness, the Russians could
not ignore what was happening in Germany, the turntable of
European power. For Western Germany, before their very eyes,
was about to be transformed from a charred and miserable wil-
derness to be quarreled over as booty into something else entirely,

FIRE IN THE ASHES 42

a major ally of the West and, thus, potentially, a major menace
to the Soviet Union.

The United States Arrny had begun to organize Western Ger-
many long before the United States government had any clear
idea of what should be done with it. While the State Department
thought vaguely forward about such great problems as a cen-
tralized or dismembered Germany, about the borders and confines
of Germany's territory, the proconsuls of the United States Army
proceeded to govern Germany on their own, shaping a new so-
ciety as they went. The Army's mission was to keep Germany
pacified, hold it in submission, feed it, make it work, and do all
these things at the least possible cost to the American taxpayer.
While the civilian statesmen, for whom the uniformed proconsuls
developed an easy contempt, talked theory and policy, the Army
had to act, every single day.

It was not until the middle of 1947, when the Marshall Plan
was conceived and General George Marshall had rehabilitated
the State Department enough in Army eyes to merit attention,
that broad diplomatic policy in Germany and Army policy in
Germany began to mesh. The Army wanted to make Germany
a going concern as quickly as possible in order to cut the burden
of subsidy out of Army appropriations; the Marshall Plan wanted
to revive all European industrial life to new historic highs, and
this was impossible without Germany. Ugly, distorted, its streets
full of homeless refugees, its currency a paper nonsense, Ger-
many, once the anchor of Europe's economic life, had become its
crazy, unbalanced vortex. A sweeping reorganization of Western
Germany was necessary to cleanse and purify the madness.

Two things were clearly in order: first, to create some native
German instrument of government to pull order out of anarchy;
second, to purge its business life of inflation so that men could
toil productively. In the spring of 1948, after the final breakdown
of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London in December, the
Western Powers proceeded to both tasks at once. A conference
of the six Western Powers in London invited the Germans to
elect delegates to a constitutional convention which would create
a new popularly elected government for all West Germany. Si-
multaneously, they proceeded with the purging of German fi-

THE END OF AN ALLIANCE

nances by a brutal repudiation of all paper money in circulation
in Western Germany and the substitution of a new, hard, soundly
controlled money.

These were the measures that provoked the famous Berlin
blockade. The Russians, despite their own total exclusion of West-
ern influence from every square yard of their dominance, could
not bring themselves to believe that they were to be as totally
excluded themselves from a share in the power and control of
West Germany, the monster progenitor of their sorrows. To
reopen discussion and provoke talk, the Russians knew only one
method: force. This they invoked in the Berlin blockade, and
when it failed, they had shot their bolt in Europe. By then, Eu-
rope and America were embarked on a new adventure of such
magnitude and complexity that men scarcely noticed that the
war had come to an end with no peace made.

Ill

a world we tried to build

The world we tried to build with the launching of the Marshall
Plan in 1947 is one whose terrible problems, unquenchable yearn-
ings and blinding aches would have been just as perplexing had
communism never been invented or Russia never existed.

It is a world in which we sought and still seek that men live
in political liberty with the hope each year and each decade of
greater opportunity and greater comfort for themselves and their
children.

If the excitement of this great American adventure has been
hidden from the citizens who supported it, it is because its vic-
tories and defeats were measured only in the dusty ledgers of
trade, its captains were economists, and its soldiers were dollars.
Its history is written in millions of words and figures that concern
themselves exclusively with the making, getting, buying, selling
and payment of the world's goods.

Politics have always been shaped by the bitter struggle of
ordinary men to get and have things. The difference is that in our
decade all the great governments of Europe have convulsively
seized huge areas of economic enterprise once left to individuals,
and the tedious problems once settled by the myriad solitary de-
cisions of calculating businessmen are now the stuff of public
debate and government action. Governments are judged by their
citizens today on the price of butter and fish, the rents on land
and homes, the levels of wages and hours.

Not one government in Western Europe in the years since the
war would have had the slightest hope of surviving this judgment
of its citizens in freedom and without blood had it not been for
the almost unimaginable sum of 27 billion dollars which the
United States has given it in economic aid alone. The United

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 45

States did this for the simplest reasons: because it knew that if
these governments fell, the defense and welfare of the United
States would be in peril; and because it knew that if Europeans
threw these governments out they would, quite likely, have
thrown out liberty, too, and forever.

The United States had already given away over ten billion dol-
lars to Europe by the time, in 1947, it decided that this aid should
be linked to a plan with specific long-term objectives. Technically,
in terms of finance, the first objective was to make Europe eco-
nomically self-supporting and independent of American charity
by 1952. Politically, it was to heal the European societies so that
by 1952 the Russians would be forced to recognize them as
healthy and stable, thus worthy of respect and negotiation.

Unfortunately, apart from these great objectives, the Marshall
Plan lacked a logical series of clear and foreseen steps to arrive
at its end-goals. There were many reasons for this, of course.
There were the pettiness, weakness, jealousies and exhaustion of
the European governments with whom it dealt; there were the
human, uncontrollable prejudices of hundreds of millions of free
men on both sides of the Atlantic who could not be disciplined
but had to be persuaded; there was the burden on its actions of
constant Congressional passion and suspicion. But, finally, most
importantly, there was the simple inescapable ignorance of men
addressing themselves to a job so new, complex and huge that no
previous experience provided any education or clue to solution.

Western Europe in 1947 was mortally ill.

To the roving eye there was nothing that made this mortal
illness apparent. It was hot. Rainless, golden, scorching days had
followed one another from early spring until weeks and months
beyond the wheat harvest, and this heat did, indeed, produce
the impression of a high, debilitating fever. But the illness was
more than a surface fever, and graver than the failure of the crops
upon which Europe's wheat and bread depended. It was a con-
dition of history.

Economists defined this condition as bankruptcy. Every gov-
ernment of Western Europe was pledged to provide its citizens
with the minimum decencies of life. But these obligations could
not be met, for Europe's resources were exhausted, or had failed,

FIRE IN THE ASHES 4

and they were dependent on a massive and continued flow of
American food, fibers, fuel and goods for which they could no
longer pay. A hemorrhage had opened in the central financial
reserves of each European nation as governments attempted to
meet their obligations, and gold and dollars were gushing out
with no seeming possibility of stanching. The United States Army
had pumped half a billion dollars into Germany for relief and it
was gone. The French had received a billion and a quarter dollars
in 1946 and it had vanished. UNRRA had distributed over a bil-
lion dollars' worth of aid and it had disappeared. The three and
three-quarters billion dollars loaned to the British in 1946 was
disappearing at a dizzy rate. Everywhere, each day, each month,
gold and dollars drained away to pay for Europe's subsistence
needs with the absolutely inevitable prospect that by the end of
1947 all would be gone. During one six-day period in August of
1947, the British Treasury saw no less than $237,000,000 of its re-
serves claimed by the inexorable bookkeeping of world trade.

Even the economists achieved eloquence in describing the situa-
tion: "Europe's dollar resources are running low," wrote the re-
port of the European claimants for Marshall Plan aid. "If the flow
of goods from the American continent to Europe should cease,
the results would be calamitous. ... If nothing is done, a catas-
trophe will develop as stocks become exhausted. . . . Life in
Europe will become increasingly unstable and uncertain; industries
will grind to a gradual halt for lack of materials and fuel, and the
food supply of Europe will diminish and begin to disappear."

History was finally catching up with Europe; suddenly, she
was exposed as a curiosity unique in all time. Here was a com-
munity of 300,000,000 men who had developed a civilization so
unbalanced that they could not possibly survive as a civilization
on their own resources. The vital margin of their food supply,
almost all the fibers they used to clothe themselves, the tea at
breakfast, the evening coifee, rubber sheathing and copper wires,
liquid fuels all of these products that Europeans not only en-
joyed but could not live without came from overseas on the
cycling tides of trade. The entire culture which seemed so com-
pletely European, from the coffee with schlag of Austria to the
hot red tea of England, depended on the world being one. For a
century the community had unthinkingly relied on invisible

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 47

strands of trade which brought these necessities to the home ports
in return for what Europe could ship out; these strands had
seemed once as rugged and strong as bonds of iron. Now they
were cut. With the strands cut, Europe threatened to sink, or
rather to plummet, directly out of modern civilization.

The Marshall Planners had no blueprint for righting the situa-
tion, but they had something else an image. This image was a set
of habit patterns and customs, imperfectly remembered from
another age which might best be called the Golden Yesterday.
Europe had thrived in the Golden Yesterday, and though the
Marshall Planners knew the Golden Yesterday could not be re-
stored, somehow they felt they must recapture its vitality.

The Golden Yesterday, if it is to be given a precise date, began
in the year 1815, at the moment the last string quivered with the
last chord of the last minuet of the Congress of Vienna when the
statesmen of Europe, having disposed of Napoleon, settled down
to the longest period of peace that Europe had known since the
days of the Romans. What followed thereafter has no parallel
in all history. What followed was an expansive burst of conquest
generated from four or five small nation-states on the rim of the
European peninsula which ended a century later with all the great
globe tributary to them.

Consider the globe at the beginning of that period. America
was a wilderness which had been peeled back only as far as the
Allegheny Mountains. Russia was a nation of serfs, ruled by a
mystic, that stretched in various degrees of barbarism from the
Pripet marshes to the boglands of the upper Amur and the Pacific
Ocean. China and Japan were empires sealed from the world,
each permitting the Western "savages" access to their shores at
only one strictly regulated port on their respective seaboards.
South America was a series of colonial outposts, indented in
jungle, held in the grip of a decayed Empire. Africa was literally
unknown. But by the end of that period, the whole world had
been so linked together that the price of bread in England de-
pended on the wheat yield in the Ukraine and the doom of the
Amazon rubber trade was wedded to the plantation boom of the
East Indies, all the way across the globe. Railroads laced every
continent from end to end, and from every great port of the

FIRE IN THE ASHES

world a tight sailing schedule made every other port a regular
partner in transport. For the first time the world was one; Europe
had made it so and took a fee for her achievement.

The tides of trade that bathed this world coursed in channels
as fixed and permanent, it seemed, as the circling of the moon.
Men moved along these trade currents from country to country
without passports, without visas, their wallets full of folding
money that no currency regulation checked, and their minds
crammed with ideas that no officialdom sought to investigate. All
the fruits of Western civilization-science, law, medicine, learning
moved with these tides. Back and forth, from outer land to inner
land, from backward land to advanced land, goods moved with
such an ease, such an "automatic" simplicity dictated by need
and supply that even now, half a century later, our imagination
is compelled to imitate and revive it. For the Marshall Planners,
the contrast of this globe of yesterday and the globe of this mid-
century was mesmerizing. They wished to recapture its fluid, easy
cycling health; the trouble was that the world had changed so
much.

The heart of yesterday's globe was Europe and, more precisely,
that northeastern corner of Europe where coal fields veined the
ground with energy. The belt that starts in England's midlands,
continues through the French and Belgian fields to the Ruhr and
ends, with a jump, in Silesia, was the working heart not only for
France and Britain, Germany and Belgium, but for Asia, Africa
and America, too.

But if these coal fields were the heart of the world's sudden
unity, the auricles and ventricles that pumped this heart were
found in one country alone: England. The phrase "payable by
draft on London" summed up the entire system. It meant that
anywhere in the world a check on a London bank was a command
of a standard measure of goods and services. The English were
the first of the Europeans, and thus the first people of the world,
to see the world as one; their banks and markets had become the
clearinghouses of the globe. Their pre-eminence rested not only
on the subtle skill of London's bankers and bill merchants in esti-
mating the credit, the value, the good faith of any enterprise from
Patagonia to Kamchatka, but also in the infinite skills of judgment
and convenience that Englishmen offered throughout their island.

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 49

Liverpool, for example, seemed only a dirty city by the Mersey,
but there men first learned to buy and sell cotton they might
never see, grown in Georgia, Egypt or India and physically in
transit at the. moment of sale to Tokyo, Turin or Manchester.
The traders of Liverpool fixed the grades and prices of all the
world's cotton in one great market open to all the world's buyers.
What the Liverpool brokers did for cotton, other Englishmen did
for wool and bristles, copper and tin, peppercorns and sardines,
insurance and shipping, investment and buccaneering. This domi-
nance of world trade was enforced not so much by guns and ships
which were important as by skill and wisdom. It lasted because
it was convenient and useful The pound was not only as good
as gold, the pound decided what gold was worth.

In the Golden Yesterday, England was a captain both wise and
strong. The wonderful value of the British pound nourished and
was nourished in turn by the healthiness of nineteenth-century
trade. England was both a market for and a seller of anything.
England's customers never had to worry about getting pounds as
America's customers worry today about finding dollars, because
the English were constantly offering pounds to buy overseas
more and more things that they needed wheat, lumber, cotton,
meat, wool. Countries abroad bought English tools, coal, cloth,
engineering with the pounds they earned by their sales. As
Englishmen first, and the rest of Europe later, developed their
insatiable appetites, an upward rhythm of expansion developed
and seemed without horizon. The plains were cleared in Argen-
tina and America, the forests were felled around the globe, planta-
tions rose where jungles had matted fruitlessly. As Europeans
drew riches from the world, they expanded their production ex-
plosively to repay in manufactured goods. Between Napoleon's
defeat and the mid-nineteenth century, production of iron in
Europe quintupled; it doubled again between the mid-century
and the Franco-Prussian War; tripled again between that war and
the turn of the century; doubled again between the turn of the
century and the outbreak of the First World War. All other pro-
duction soared too: railroads doubled, tripled, quadrupled their
mileage in single decades. The export of cotton cloth went up ten
times, from England alone, between 1840 and the First World
War; coal production in England multiplied by fourteen times in

FIRE IN THE ASHES 5

the course of the Golden Yesterday, so powerful was the demand
of the world for the fruit of Europe's energy.

England began the century as Europe's prime industrial power
and remained so for two generations. But in an age when the
phrase "technical assistance" was unknown, she had taught her
techniques to everyone else, unthinkingly, easily and to her own
ultimate perplexity. Englishmen blew in the first blast furnaces of
Belgium, of France, of Germany. English engineers traveled as
far as Russia to open the first blast furnace there. The English
engineered the first railways of France and Germany; their sci-
entists discovered how to make useful the phosphoric iron ores
of France's Lorraine and planned and directed the first penetra-
tion of the deep coal seams of Germany's Ruhr. All Europe
learned the tricks which the magic English imagination had con-
ceived. Sometime between the Franco-Prussian War and the turn
of the century, England's place as the world's greatest industrial
power faded; in the new world, America, and, in the old world,
Germany, first overtook and then surpassed her in sheer industrial
weight and efficiency.

But if other powers overtook the British in the making of things,
none ever overtook, or even tried to overtake, the lead the British
had in the trading of goods; nor, in Europe, did any power try to
replace the British as the pointsman and middleman in Europe's
relation with the great globe outside. The Germans in 1914 had
four times the gold reserves of the British, and the French twice
the gold reserves, but Germans and Frenchmen paid their bills
and sold their goods around the globe "payable by draft on Lon-
don." The pound remained the measure of value.

The key to Britain's dynamic relation with the outside world
was in the British sense of investment. They did not call it "Point
Four"; it was simply enterprise. Where they could not find what
they needed for themselves and Europe, they created the resources
or opened them by investment. English capital was risk capital,
but capital risked with the wisdom and knowledge of the world.
It opened packing houses in Argentina, tea plantations in India,
rubber plantations in Malaya, mines everywhere, ranches on the
pampas and prairies. It underbraced these investments with other
investments to keep the world opening waterworks, electricity
plants, breweries, tramways, factories, shipyards all across the

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 1

globe from the Whangpoo in Shanghai to the Charles in Boston.
Other European nations France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland
followed in the footsteps of British capital, occupying and com-
peting where the British had penetrated. And as British capital
felt the hot breath of competition from others, it abandoned old
areas and moved to new ones.

This great racing cycle of money chasing opportunity, oppor-
tunity meeting need, resources blossoming as need fostered them,
reached its height in the decade before the accident of 1914. By
then, England had invested 18 billion dollars around the world
(about 50 billion dollars by present-day American prices), the
French had invested 9 billion, the Germans 5.8 billion. As the
French and Germans had followed the British, their investments
were concentrated chiefly in the backward areas of Europe, in
the Balkans and in Russia. Here, their investments were caught
and wiped out by the First World War, an episode from which
those countries have never recovered. The English, luckily, had
been pushed out to investment beyond the seas; here they were
safe for another generation.

The Golden Yesterday was no more than a memory in the days
that followed the First World War. The circulation of trade was
sorely wounded; Russia ripped herself and the resources of the
Siberian wastes out of the old cycle entirely. Japan, under the
incubating heat of war, grew an industry that pressed competi-
tively on the most sensitive nerves of the European trading system.
Most important of all, the United States burst in such an upwelling
of energy that no nineteenth-century rules seemed to fit the titanic
forces which gushed from the American continent.

Europe now seemed to fit into a pattern of trade that was bent
into a triangle. At one corner of the triangle stood the United
States, at the second Europe, at the third the backward and colo-
nial regions of the world. The backward and colonial areas sup-
plied the United States with what America lacked at home coffee,
rubber, tin, cocoa, tea, wool. The United States shipped out to
Europe food, oil, cotton, sulfur and machines. Europe could not
pay for what she got from the United States directly, but the
third leg of the triangle took care of that; Europe would ship to
the backward and colonial areas textiles, autos, chemicals, ma-
chines and government services. With what these earned Europe

FIRE IN THE ASHES

could partially meet her bill in America; the revenues on her old
investments and her shipping services roughly closed the gap.

The great depression of the thirties closed in all too swiftly on
this triangular pattern. Like men in a city about which a siege ring
slowly tightens, the European communities began to grate on each
other. The trade they did with each other, on which their internal
efficiency and much of their wealth depended, began to beat
sluggishly as quotas, tariffs, currency regulations threw up arti-
ficial barriers among them.

If the system worked at all, it worked only because the British
still had the strength and skill to gear Europe into the outside
world. Britain still bought huge quantities of goods from conti-
nental Europe; and the continental Europeans could change
pounds they earned in London to dollars or gold and thus trade
with the great globe beyond. The pound was the crutch on which
Europe limped in its trade, and the British kept the pound a solid
medium of exchange because they still controlled a world-girdling
empire rich with rubber, tin, cocoa and wool, because British ships
and services still earned dollars, beeause Britain's investments over-
seas still brought dividends.

The Second World War finished what the First had begun.
Russia tore another chunk off the eastern side of Europe the
belly side that provided so much of its food. Asia, Africa and
South America developed home appetites in war prosperity and
began to consume many things they used to sell to Europe, or,
simultaneously, they learned to manufacture things at home they
once had bought in Europe. The United States quickened its in-
dustrial and technical development, producing at a price and a
pace with which the Europeans could not possibly compete.

Europe still needed food, fuel and raw material from overseas
to live. She had less of these at home than at any time in genera-
tions and needed more of them from aliens than ever in her long
history. There were three ways for Europe to pay for what she
needed. First, there was the commercial export of her traditional
manufacturesbut her goods were high priced, her customers had
learned to make them at home or to buy them more easily in
America. 'Secondly, there were her services but her sunken and
crippled merchant marines no longer dominated the world's sea
lanes, and her skills in governing subject peoples had been repudi-

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 53

ated by half a dozen distant revolts. Third, there was her income
from generations of previous investment abroad but these had
been reduced or liquidated to pay for the war. Before the war
Europe paid for twenty per cent of all she bought abroad with
dividends on her investments. By 1949 these dividends paid only
four per cent of what Europe needed to buy abroad.

And there was a final condition. Wars and revolutions all
around the world, the great movements of colonial peoples with
their new hungers, jostled the Europeans, crowded them in the
market place, stealing from sources of supply that had once been
exclusively theirs. All of them wanted more more food, more
paper, more clothing. They drove demand up so that the price of
everything that Europe sought overseas was now rising almost by
the day.

It took almost two years for Europeans and Americans to real-
ize that Europe was not only incapable of resistance to the Rus-
sians, but that she was engaged in a desperate ordeal of survival
that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. The tides of trade
in which Europe lived had vanished. Like a whale left gasping
on the sand, Europe lay rotting in the sun.

Every event, big and little, seemed to conspire to force Europe
to dependence on America. America had wheat and fodder, cotton
and sugar, coal and copper, sulfur and zinc, ships and machinery,
trucks and pipe. Europe could find some of these goods elsewhere
but not enough. America held the vital necessary extra margin
of supply. Certain goods did not exist, in stark physical fact, any-
where else in the world but in America. And whether as the vital
margin or the total supply, Europe needed dollars which she did
not have to pay for the goods. The old captain of the Golden
Yesterday, England, had always done business on a two-way basis.
Her customers could always earn enough pounds to buy in Eng-
land by selling to England. But the new captain, America, was so
enormously rich and needed to buy so little abroad that her cus-
tomers could never earn enough dollars to match their needs. The
gap between what Europe could earn in dollars and what Europe
needed to buy with dollars became known, immediately after the
war, as the Dollar Gap.

The "Dollar Gap," with its companion phrase, "the Cold War,"
is probably the most ominous expression of postwar European

FIRE IN THE ASHES 54

history. The story of the Dollar Gap is one of the inner cords
woven through all Atlantic diplomacy down to the present. It has
been measured in specific terms as about $11,500,000,000 in a bad
year like 1947 to $2,200,000,000 in a good year like 1950; here,
between two billion and three billion dollars a year, the Dollar
Gap still remains, closed only by American aid. The Dollar Gap
is an, economists' term, but it is a master phrase that covers the
cost of baby's diapers, the amount of milk in children's diets,
the absence or presence of oranges on the table. The story of the
Marshall Plan, and of Europe's struggle to survive even today, is
the story of the struggle with the Dollar Gap.

In the Golden Yesterday the Dollar Gap would have been a
meaningless phrase.

In those days gold settled all problems. The "automatic" sim-
plicity with which goods moved so wonderfully from supply to
demand, from distant resource to distant consumer, was only
matched by the "automatic" simplicity with which they did not
move when the consumer could not find the gold to pay for them.
When the sum of a nation's working citizens could not provide
enough goods to pay for the sum of a nation's needs, some people
simply went without. The "automatic" market simply squeezed
down and out all those individuals whose earnings could not cover
the price of what they wanted.

Thus, a century ago, if France and America had found them-
selves in the same position as they found themselves in 1947,
France would simply have imported less cotton or no cotton.
This would have reduced so sharply the amount of cotton goods
in the country that rising prices would automatically have made
it a luxury. There would have been no sheets on the beds except
in the homes of the very rich, no diapers for babies, no aprons for
women, and the price of a simple work shirt would have so sky-
rocketed as to limit a workingman to one a year. Several hundred
thousand textile and clothing workers would have been unem-
ployed. But the unemployment would have helped too, for the
destitute would have consumed so much less cotton, coal, gasoline,
meat, travel that France's need for dollars to buy cotton, wool,
coal, petroleum would have begun to diminish. The spiral of un-
employment and poverty would gradually have carried France's

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD JJ

needs down to the point where trade balanced. The Dollar Gap
would have disappeared, provided France could live peacefully
with millions hungry, unemployed, barely clothed, while a lucky
few still enjoyed the precious comforts from abroad. In England,
Germany and Belgium, of course, the situation would be even
worse, for Frenchmen do, after all, grow their own food while
the others must import it or starve.

All these things would have happened again in 1947 and no
Dollar Gap would ever have furrowed the brows of the Atlantic
economists had not the morality of the world so changed. The
Dollar Gap which still haunts Western Europe and America exists
because people today will not sit by quietly as they are broken
to misery. Today's Europe is a much better place to live in than
it was a century ago, because consciences are so much quicker,
because no modern government can easily deny a fair share of
comfort to previously silent citizens.

No government freely elected in postwar Europe, with or with-
out the challenge of communism, could have let the "automatic"
adjustments of the Golden Yesterday settle their problems in
hunger, violence, unemployment and sickness. They were elected
by men and women intoxicated by dreams of tomorrow, anxious
to vomit forth not only the deprivations of war but the memories
of the prewar depression. The people had been told by radio, in
the press, by their leaders so often during the grim years that
tomorrow would be better, that no government could have per-
mitted the "automatic" adjustment and survived.

Instead of "automatic" or "natural" adjustment to the movement
of world commerce, therefore, almost all the European countries
tried to plan their adjustment through a system of controls. These
control mechanisms did not have to be invented after the war.
The war had left a heritage of currency controls, rationing con-
trols, exchange controls, export-import controls. The earlier de-
pression years had provided a tradition of tariff controls, quota
controls, allocation controls. The Dollar Gap simply arrived on
the stage of politics and riveted them in place. Since Europe was
dependent on America for both comfort and survival, the dollars
that commanded these necessities had to be controlled in each
country. Once dollars were controlled, dozens of other controls
became necessary too. The flow of dollars had to be controlled

FIRE IN THE ASHES 56

not only between Europe and the United States but, in the scram-
ble for them, between European nation and European nation.
Finally, dollars had to be controlled down to each solitary citizen's
purse and bank account so that every member of the community
got his fair share of the cotton, the petroleum, the bread, the meat
that dollars could buy.

To be fair, it must be recorded that the Dollar Gap was not
solely responsible for the controls. Controls were buttressed in
some countries and notably in England, the key by theories
that had slowly gestated for a generation before the war. The
general family of all these theories is socialism, which is the belief
and hope that by proper use of government power men can be
rescued from their helplessness in the wild cycling cruelty of
depression and boom. No one can accurately judge how much of
the glue that made controls stick came from the Dollar Gap and
how much from socialism. But, in general, the emotional heat of
Socialist faith gave the inevitable controls imposed by the Dollar
Gap the strength that made them binding. For Europeans, and
particularly for the English, socialism is as much a folk-reaction
to a folk-dread as it is a reasoned program. Unemployment in
Europe is second only to war as an emotional kinetic; for to the
people who live in the wilderness of Europe's ancient cities, unem-
ployment breeds terror and panic comparable only to the folk-
terror of Asian peasants at famine. There are teen-age mill girls in
Lancashire, whose parents were only teen-agers thirty years ago,
who talk of the 1922 collapse of employment in the spinning mills
the way Chinese peasants in Honan talk with ghostly fear of the
famine of 1893 which their grandfathers knew.

Controls since the war have changed habit patterns down to
the ground. The dollar shortage in England was such, and re-
mains so today, that every Englishman who goes abroad, if he is
honest with his controls, goes almost as a pauper. He must travel,
if he wants to travel, only in those fixed channels dictated by the
ledgers of British trade, not by sun, climate, memory or wistful
yearning. The Englishman cannot visit America on pleasure at all,
for dollars are hoarded for meat and wheat. But even if he elects
to go across the channel to Europe he is tethered. For travel in
Europe he receives only 40 pounds (f 120) to cover all his spend-
ing. He may spend them if he chooses in one glorious burst of

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 57

steak, wine and champagne on an Easter week end in Paris. Or he
may bicycle down from the Channel to the Riviera, knapsack on
back, sleeping in hostels, stretching it over a month. Subtly, im-
perceptibly, currency control has changed the image of the Eng-
lishman in continental eyes. The Englishman is no longer the aris-
tocrat of voyagers and the Promenade des Anglais at Nice no
longer murmurs with the sound of gentle Mayfair voices. The
Englishman in Europe now is the clerk, the student, the school-
marm, the penny-pinching person one meets on the shabby,
raveled underside of tourist life. The Dollar Gap and its controls
have made him so.

It was this kind of Europe, stiff and rigid with controls, bank-
rupt, helpless with hunger and confusion, that the first Americans
found when they came to Europe to launch the Marshall Plan
and summon her out into a new world.

The most common questions Americans ask in Europe are: Did
the Marshall Plan succeed? Did the Marshall Plan fail? Where did
the money go?

The answer to the question is subject to as many different varia-
tions as the answer to: Did we win the war? We certainly did not
lose the war, yet we certainly won no peace. The war was a record
of victories and blunders that gave us the world as it is today, a
world much better than one in which we would have lived de-
feated. The Marshall Plan likewise did not fail, yet Europe has:
still not found out how to fit into the structure of the new world.
If the Plan had failed, Europe today would be a continent in which
liberty was extinguished except for a few fortunate enclaves, a
continent living in an ugliness of spirit so different from today's as
to make it another civilization. The Marshall Plan succeeded as
the war succeeded in that we did not lose. It succeeded in the
sense that a base was preserved from which men can try again.
Its triumphs and conquests were prodigious, but no more so than
its blunders and shortcomings. Only in another generation will the
final balance be struck.

In April of 1948, seventeen European nations plus the Free State
of Trieste gathered together in Paris to form the Organization of
European Economic Cooperation, or OEEC, an international co-
ordinating body that would represent all the European partners in

FIRE IN THE ASHES 58

the Plan. To these eighteen states, the Marshall Plan gave through
the Economic Cooperation Administration, or EGA, between
April 3, 1948, and January i, 1952, the sum of $12,285,200,000.
(Since then, under its successor agency, the Mutual Security
Agency, or MSA, another two and a half billion dollars has been
given, and more is on its way.) Three nations took over half this
sum between them. England got two billion eight hundred million
dollars, France, two billion six hundred million dollars and Ger-
many, one billion three hundred million dollars. (Each of these
nations, it should be remembered, had already received stupendous
sums of aid from the American people, the British a loan of three
and three-quarters billion, the French a loan of one and one-
quarter billion, and the Germans almost one billion in United
States Army relief.) Italy received over one billion dollars of aid,
the Netherlands nearly that much, but the other states tapered
off swiftly with lesser sums down to Trieste which received only
33 million dollars of American money in four years, and Iceland,
low man on the totem pole, with 27 million dollars.

It was difficult to make so vast a quantity of money seem real.
Those who wished to minimize it said it was far less than America
spent on her liquor bill over the same period of time. Those who
wished to demonstrate how large it was said it was more than the
United States had spent to govern itself in the first fifteen years
of this century. Some tried to chop it into measurable bits by say-
ing that every day it lasted, the United States was spending ten
million dollars every twenty-four hours to sustain Europe. But,
finally and fundamentally, it could be understood only as ships
bearing goods that Europe could no longer order with her own
money.

In the winter of 1950, when Europe's pulse had revived from a
flicker to a beat, and the Plan was in full flood, I checked the
movement of ships to one country, France, alone. On that day,
the S.S. Godrun Maersk, three weeks out of Baltimore, came but-
ting through the heavy seas of the Channel to dock at Rouen and
unload Marshall Plan tractors, chemicals, synthetic resin and cellu-
lose acetate. Sixty miles down river from Rouen, at Le Havre, on
the same day, the S.S. Cafe Race also out of Baltimore checked in
with another load of general cargo. And on that same day, five
hundred miles to the south, the S.S. Gibbes Lykes pulled up the

A WORLB WE TRIED TO BUILD 59

narrow twisting ship's channel of Marseille with 3,500 tons of
Gulf Coast sulfur. In the next three days ten more American ships
weighed in around the rim of France. Into their dirty holds the
Marshall Plan had stuffed tires, borax, aircraft parts and drilling
equipment on the S.S. Samuel Stranger; farm machines, chemicals,
oil on the S.S. Ehondda; 2,500 more tons of sulfur on the S.S,
Shirley Lykes. And, of course, cotton on the S.S. Geirulo, S.S.
Delmundo, S.S. Lapland, S.S. Cotton States, S.S. Velma Lykes;
with such cotton one hundred and seventy thousand French tex-
tile workers held their jobs. By that date, in February of 1950,
over one thousand ships had unloaded Marshall Plan cargo in
France alone. To keep all Europe going, at any given moment of
the day or night, there were an estimated 1 50 ships either bringing
Marshall Plan cargo to Europe on the high seas or unloading it in
her ports.

Another way of trying to trace the money was to follow not
where it went but how it went. Of the $12,285,200,000, almost one
billion (849 million) had gone simply to pay for hauling the cargo
across the ocean. Another 360 million had been used for unfreez-
ing Europe's trade by a device called the European Payments
Union. Some of the rest could be tracked down in physical goods,
ploughing, rotating, generating energy, like the tractors on Euro-
pean farms each bearing the red-white-and-blue shields that
marked them as fruit of the ERP, or European Recovery Pro-
gram; but most of the rest could not be traced except in yellow-
ing vouchers in the General Accounting Office of the United
States government.

The General Accounting Office broke its records down into
two kinds of shipments, agricultural products and industrial prod-
ucts. They took equal sums, roughly more than five billion dollars
each.

Of the five and one-quarter billion that went into buying Amer-
ican farm produce, about three billion dollars went for food. Most
of the food was wheat in the form of grain or flour, but the food
bill also covered the pantry requirements of every curious Euro-
pean taste right down to the last $20,000,000 budgeted for horse-
meat. The other two billion dollars of farm produce was split,
three-quarters for cotton and one-quarter for tobacco to keep
nervous Europeans smoking.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

60

Of the five and one-half billion that went into industrial prod-
ucts, $1,600,000,000 or about a third went into energy shipments,
either coal or petroleum. Two billion went into raw materials
which meant nonferrous metals like copper and zinc, plus pulp,
timber, woods, chemicals. A final $1,900,000,000 went into ma-
chinery and vehicles.

A sum of money so huge ceases to be money. It becomes a force
in its own right, that spends itself, that creates its own magnetic
fields, that grows out of its own vitality the organs, tentacles,
fibrils and limbs needed to match its growing responsibilities.

The Marshall Plan began its life in Europe in June of 1948 in a
wing of two borrowed offices on the second floor of the American
Embassy in Paris. Crammed into alcoves and under and over each
other were dignitaries with hundreds of millions of dollars at their
fingertips, whose immediate battle was to win a telephone, a
wastebasket, a desk for one's private secretary. But as personnel
poured in from America, it grew and expanded, flooding over
from building to building, sprawling over downtown Paris, with
its own buses, snack bars, house mothers and social life. With it a
new American community developed. Professors of economics on
leave from their universities came in with every plane; so did the
bankers and businessmen drafted to save American civilization; so
did publicity agents, animal husbandry men, malleable iron ore
men, insecticide experts, guitar players, and finally a special osteo-
path to unkink the knots from the weary muscles of the master-
men. It spread over Europe in each country a regional outpost,
called a Country Mission, was established with its finance, trade,
agriculture and public relations specialists.

The superior direction of the vast operation, called the Office of
the Special Representative of the President, or OSR, was soon
installed in the Hotel Talleyrand. The Hotel Talleyrand, a laby-
rinthine maze of cubicles, pens, partitions and squeaking old
corridors, was the home in which the great Talleyrand had once
conducted his love affairs while simultaneously, as Victor Hugo
said, luring the princes and statesmen of Europe thither, "as a
spider into its web," and then destroying them one by one. Now,
in 1948, it was to be the office of Mr. Averell Harriman, who ar-
rived with the rank of Ambassador to take over command, Mr.

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 6l

Harriman was the Special Representative, a man who as Chief of
Lend Lease Operations had given away more money than any
human being in world history and who was already a past master
in the art of handling public billions. Here, in the gilt and green
private sanctum of his office, beneath a bust of Benjamin Franklin,
another American with a shrewd sense of the buck, Harriman
made the great decisions. Downstairs in the technicians' offices
and at the snack bar that served hot dogs and ice cream for Amer-
icans who had no time to luxuriate on French food, the lesser
thinkers made their comment. And in the evening policy-makers
large and small would wander out of the Hotel Talleyrand across
the great Place de la Concorde, glistening with huge American
automobiles, to the bar of the Hotel Crillon where Europe and
the world were pulled apart, remolded, put back together again
every evening in conversation by experts fresh out of Muncie,
Indiana, and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Conversation at the Crillon Bar was like no other bar-talk.
"They say they want to know how much wheat France is going
to be able to export, so they ask how many tractors will France
need to raise that much wheat. . . . Well, we get to work and
produce a figure and we give it to the commercial boys and they
say how many of these do you think France can make herself,
then somebody else says well so many and somebody else says
when? and there you are. . . . You take Turkey, that's really
fouled up. I figure they could raise maybe a million tons of wheat
there, but somebody else says there's no water. So we figure we
could irrigate the land, and somebody else says how are you go-
ing to move that million tons of wheat out of there? By mule cart?
Then after you get through figuring how to put in the machinery,
the irrigation and the railways, you find out they've got 800,000
wooden ploughs there and if the wheat market goes down it'll
squeeze those peasants out and they're liable to blow up the ma-
chinery and the railways. Every time you touch something it gets
tangled up in something else and you have to spend all your time
untangling it. I tell you this Europe is really a mess. Gargon, two
more drys over here. . . ."

Men, caught up in the excitement, came and went so fast that it
was difficult to keep track of them. In its first year the vital Pro-
gram Review Division of the Plan, the watchtower division that

FIRE IN THE ASHES 62

was supposed to study all European requests for funds and tie
them to one continental strategy of recovery, had had no less than
three chiefs. The important Industry Division, supervising the
reconquest of European efficiency, had three chiefs. So had the
no-less-vital Trade and Payments Division, whose chief function
was to watch the Dollar Gap. Within the first year the Chiefs of
Mission in England, France, Germany, Holland, Austria, Greece
and Norway had left their posts and returned or gone on to some-
thing else. The top-level command of the Plan, Averell Harriman
and Milton Katz, stayed with it; so did the junior-level technicians
who were caught up in its deep enthusiasm. But in the middle-
command range seats changed like a game of musical chairs.

In those early days the personalities of the Plan stewed, bubbled
and melted down to that curious amalgam of types that has been
making American decisions overseas for fifteen years: enlightened
businessmen, seeking a burst of adventure or impelled by patriot-
ism and convinced that, by God, American business could put the
world to rights; New Dealers who saw the Plan spreading Amer-
ica's New Deal all around the globe; college professors on summer
leave, translating theory to practice and collecting material for
future lectures and learned monographs in which all the mistakes
would be illuminated by hindsight; and government officials, the
permanent floating corps of civil servants searching for better job
ratings to be found in Europe, from which they could return to
Washington and prominence.

They came in all sizes, with many visions. Some stood on the
mountaintop, surveying the world with lofty understanding and
saw themselves touching it here and there with a wand to make it
fruitful. I remember having lunch with one of the chiefs of the
Program Division of the Plan during its days of high exuberance
and asking him what we were going to do about India. He pulled
his pipe out of his mouth and barely broke the stride of conversa-
tion to say, "Now if there's a big famine, we'll have to buck it
through to Congress and let Congress handle it, but if it's a small
famine we'll handle it out of our own funds without any trouble."
Others were more perplexed by the dimensions of the task. I re-
member visiting one professor of economics who had had a three
months' assignment as advisor to the Plan during summer leave
from his university. I visited him to say good-by just as his leave

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 63

was up and his desk, normally piled with reports, documents, sur-
veys, papers and recommendations, was clear at last, and he was
sitting with his feet on the desk.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm thinking," he said, "just thinking. You know, this is the
first time I've had a chance to think about this thing since I came
here, we've been so busy. We ought to have more time to think."

Underneath a frantic surface activity the Plan developed.

The basic idea was as simple as it was valid, as true in the Plan's
beginning as it is now: Europe had to become productive.

The analysis behind this idea was shared by Europeans and
Americans alike. To sell enough to earn her way in the world,
Europe had to produce efficiently and cheaply enough to make
the rest of the world eager to take her goods again. This analysis
had been implicit in the Plan ever since that day in June, 1947,
when George Marshall stood under the green elms of Harvard
and explained that the problem was not the visible destruction of
the war but the longer, slower, deeper obsolescence and deteriora-
tion of Europe's productive machinery. Europe's physical plant
had to be overhauled, rebuilt, re-equipped and modernized from
the ground up.

Certain contrasts between European performance were in 1947
and still are today so large as to be stupefying. Four hundred and
fifty thousand American miners produce each year more coal than
the 1,600,000 West European miners put together. The average
American worker stands at his factory bench backed by seven
horsepower of energy supplied him by machines, forklifts and
mechanized hand tools; the average European worker is backed
by only two and one-half horsepower. The most efficient automo-
bile plant in France is the nationalized Renault works which, with
53,000 factory hands, produces 170,000 vehicles a year, 100,000
of which are the tiny four horsepower sedans that seem like toys
to Americans. But General Motors with 320,000 productive work-
ers produces 3,000,000 automobiles, the smallest of which is larger
than the largest Renault product; these workers also produce
refrigerators, locomotives, aircraft engines, arms, household appli-
ances too numerous to mention. Or, to put it another way, a
worker at General Motors gets out, in the course of the year, six or

FIRE IN THE ASHES 64

seven times as much automobile products as an equally skilled
French worker; the average General Motors worker hence gets
paid as much for an hour's work as most Renault workers get paid
for the work of a day. When, in 1948, the Marshall Plan was
launched, there was not one single continuous strip-steel mill in
continental Europe, while there were over twenty such modern
mills in the United States. Since cheap strip and sheet steel mean
cheap refrigerators, cheap automobiles, cheap tinned foods, cheap
washbasins and sinks, most Europeans lived and still live without
these things.

Both the OEEC, the council of the European partners in the
Plan, and the Americans therefore agreed that the great goal was
to make Europe productive again, so that her manufactures could
go out into the world in tremendous competitive quantities to earn
Europe's keep once more. They likewise agreed on the emergency
measures of the summer of 1948 the in-pumping of relief food,
fuel and raw materials to meet the present chaos and to stabilize
the peril long enough for long-range planning to begin. It was here,
in the longer-range planning, that thinking became more difficult.

Certain measures were obviously necessary in everyone's eyes,
Europeans and Americans alike. Americans and Europeans agreed
that each individual country had to throttle inflation before fruit-
ful activity could begin. They agreed that the Marshall Plan had
to finance huge investments in new electricity generating plants,
new coal mechanization, new oil refineries, new kinds of farming
equipment. But these were not enough, either technically or po-
litically, as a master strategy. Gradually, within the first year of
the Plan's operation, this new master strategy came to clothe itself
with the symbolism of a United Europe.

Thinking out of the sweeping continental glories of American
geography, where the coal of the lower Lakes mixes with the iron
ore of the upper Lakes without a single frustrating barrier, where
the cotton of the South moves north without a single tariff inter-
posed, Americans began to feel that only by getting such a circu-
lation coursing through Europe could they make it healthy again.
If the tariffs, quotas, currency restrictions, subsidies and import-
export licenses that chopped up Europe's internal trade could be
wiped out, then European industries would be led by each other's
competition and cooperation to such efficiency as would match

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 6j

the world's best. It was ridiculous, thought Americans, that Ger-
man life should be frozen for lack of freight cars while Belgian
workers less than one hundred miles away should be idle in
freight-car-making plants simply because Germany did not have
the right kind of currency to order freight cars in Belgium.

For the Americans, the dynamic, exciting way to make Europe
come alive was to force it to think in new, competitive terms in a
Europe where old national barriers should be smashed. The Amer-
icans thus declared that they would not consider individual shop-
ping lists from individual countries. Here are five billion dollars,
said Mr. Harriman to the OEEC in its first year; this is the pie T
you must cut it among yourselves. In the excitement of anticipa-
tion, the Europeans accepted the invitation as if it were entirely
normal, instead of entirely new, and for the first time, in arguing
and squabbling over the division of American aid, they bared, each
of them, all their economic plans and secrets to all their neighbors
in the first true step to European cooperation. Step by step, the
Marshall Plan tried to force the Europeans together much of
America's aid to certain nations was made conditional on the
promise of those nations to make an equivalent amount of aid
available to their nearby neighbors in goods they lacked. Session
by session, the European nations meeting at OEEC forced each
other to lift quota restrictions on the movement of goods between
them, first on fifty per cent of all trade within Europe, next on
sixty per cent, ultimately on seventy-five per cent. By 1950 the
Marshall Plan had subsidized a scheme of European trade pay-
ments called the European Payments Union which, in effect,
linked all European currencies together in one new international
currency. By then, too, the Marshall Plan had found a word for
its goal: integration. Europe was being integrated.

Integration was vitally important for pure commercial and in-
dustrial efficiency, and among the great triumphs of the Marshal!
Plan has been its success in forcing Europe as far as it has come
today on the road. But not all Europeans liked integration, and
chief among these were the British. The British had an alternate
point of view which challenged and still challenges the American.

The problem, said the British, lay not within Europe but in the
outside world, and chiefly in America. The Europeans could not
solve their problems by taking in each other's washing nor by

FIREINTHEASHES 66

setting up a free flow of trade within their own confines. Such a
free flow, the British admitted, would greatly increase the indus-
trial and commercial efficiency of the old powers, but it would also
let their currencies leak and flow among each other so that the
weakest and most anarchic in the European partnership could
drain away the reserves of the strongest and best governed. The
British were willing to be integrated, but only if the Americans
also would let themselves be integrated. If the Americans were
willing to reduce their tariff barriers and permit European goods
to circulate freely in the Atlantic Basin, if the Americans were
willing to reduce their immigration walls and let Italian, Dutch and
Belgian unemployed seek work in America, then the British were
willing to do all these things too. The problem, said the British,
was not only one of a European deficit, but of an artificially pre-
served American surplus. This British reasoning has persisted ever
since, until its final formulation under the Tory government
of Mr. Churchill as a pursuit of "Trade Not Aid."

Such debate continued for the first year and a half of the Mar-
shall Plan down to the spring of 1950, as Americans and Europeans
groped their way toward the solution of Europe's problems. The
spring of 1950 was a good time to look at the Marshall Plan. It
is difficult now, looking back over the world through the emo-
tional ache of the Korean War, to remember the image of Europe
that spring. The Plan seemed at last to be working. Europe was
not only at peace with the ending of the Berlin blockade, but
seemed, finally, after a generation, to be working toward that
upland plateau of sun and prosperity for which it so longed. Every
production target of the Plan had been met and surpassed. Over-
all European production was forty-five per cent higher than in
1947 and twenty-five per cent higher than in the last prewar year.
England's reserves of dollars and gold were showing their first
healthy growth since the war, and moreover, the British were ex-
porting fifty per cent more than ever before in their history. In
France the sickening nausea of inflation was fading and prices
were steadying, even falling. By 1950, five years before the most
optimistic forecast, German production had reached the prosper-
ous level of 1936. The relief shipments of the Plan's early years
were giving way to the materials and equipment of industrial re-
construction. The OEEC had settled down to the unglamorous

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 6j

but fruitful spadework of industrial planning. The infamous Dol-
lar Gap was being squeezed to its postwar low of two billion dol-
lars. Happy days seemed close at hand, and the individual triumphs
of the Plan stood out crisp and brilliant.

In every country in Europe there was some outstanding project
to which a Congressman or visiting delegation of distinguished
Americans could be taken and told, here is the Marshall Plan at
work. In Sardinia, the Plan was draining the ageless malarial
swamps that had withered its population with disease. Clean ma-
laria from Sardinia, someone had said, and you have prepared an
immigration outlet for two million Italians under their own flag.
In the Netherlands, Marshall Plan financing was poldering off the
Zuyder Zee with new dikes, preparing to raise 128,000 acres of
fertile farmland from the sea. In Turkey, Marshall Plan ploughs,
tractors, railways were changing an Asian way of life. Scores of
geologists and explorers were chasing around the African empires
of the European partners in the greatest treasure hunt in history,
seeking new raw materials for a busy world. In France, Marshall
Plan money was financing long-overdue mechanization of French
coal mines and the giant task of electrification of a nation by hy-
dropower; by 1950, four times as many tractors ploughed French
farms as before the war. The muddy sockets of two huge steel
mills, one north of Paris and the other in the blast-furnace country
of Lorraine, were being hollowed out to hold American equip-
ment being built across the Atlantic to give France the Continent's
first continuous strip-steel mills.

Though a balmy, easy sense of euphoria and achievement now
began to rise all across Western Europe and drench the public
pronouncements and statements of all the captains of the Plan,
within the Hotel Talleyrand, at the planning level, contentment
was neither widespread nor solid. As the emergency seemed to
dissolve, as the planners could relax for a longer, second look at
Europe and savor their experience, they recognized that before
them lay stubborn, persistent problems as yet unsolved.

The two chief problems fell very neatly into the two purposes
the plan had originally set for itself in 1948. The first purpose had
been to make Europe productively efficient so that it could sup-
port itself by selling to the world again; the second had been to
earn, politically, enough loyalty to the democratic way of life

FIRE IN THE ASHES 68

so that the Europeans should turn a deaf ear to communism.

To make Europe productively efficient, the Marshall Planners
had bet heavily on two tactics: integration and liberalization of
trade. But by 1950 enough knowledge had been acquired by the
Americans to realize that European business life was not going to
be shaken up simply by opening its crisscrossing frontiers to
trade. European business life and its productive efficiency were
strangled in a jungle of intertwined cartels and habits that were
even worse than the government regulations and barriers at which
Americans had leveled their fire. They were protected in their
ridiculously old-fashioned habits, not so much by government
dictate as by the cartels, combines, and associations they had
formed privately to fix prices, control competition, control sup-
plies; these combines were built to shelter the most obsolete and
inefficient eighty-year-old plants from the cost competition of the
newest plants of European engineering, which were excellent.

No European government had an efficient antitrust law; in fact,
most governments permitted industries to patrol and police their
own cartel rules. In France the Marshall Planners learned sadly
that the "groupements" or industrial advisory groups through
which American aid was distributed by the French government,
were no more than the official sharing agencies of the cartels them-
selves. The great new continuous strip-steel mill which the Mar-
shall Plan had awarded to the French steel industry in Lorraine,
it was learned, was to be controlled entirely by the French steel
cartel. In Italy the Marshall Planners were trying to raise the
standards of Italian farming by urging Italian farmers to use
chemical fertilizers. But chemical fertilizer was too expensive for
threadbare Italian peasants, because in Italy it was made by obso-
lete processes in obsolete plants. Yet new plants could not be built,
for the great chemical cartel of Italy felt that new plants mak-
ing cheap fertilizer would wipe out their investment in and profits
from old, inefficient plants. The planners had thought that the
lifting of government trade barriers alone would bring fruitful
competition; they had never realized the depth, the extent, the
frightful weight of European business combines opposed to
competition. Now, in the spring of 1950, they pondered whether
and how to bring American weight to bear against them.

The problem on the second, or "political," front was more im-

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD 69

portant. The Americans at the Hotel Talleyrand, who felt that
a new approach was needed, called the original approach of the
Marshall Plan "logistical." The logistical approach had relied on
technical figures if so much new steel capacity was put in, then
so many new tractors or automobiles might be built, so many
more machines might be exported from so many more new fac-
tories which might, together, close the Dollar Gap. This logis-
tical, or mathematical, victory would then become so apparent in
physical well-being that Europeans would independently come to
forswear communism, espouse democracy and all would be well.

Some of the opponents of the logistical approach called it the
"trickle theory," or the theory which held that if enough is
poured in at the top, something will trickle down to the bottom.
The trickle theory had, thus far, resulted in a brilliant recov-
ery of European production. But it had yielded no love for
America and little diminution of Communist loyalty where it was
entrenched in the misery of the continental workers. The rich
and well-to-do rolled about once more in automobiles that were
beginning to crowd the streets, they took their vacations in lux-
ury, they ate well. But the workers had barely held their own;
they lived in stinking, festering slums, dressed in shabby second-
hand clothes. In Italy and France a working wage still averaged
fifteen dollars a week. It was pointless to explain to the workers
that without the Marshall Plan they would have been entirely
unemployed, that they might have starved or died, that the Plan
had saved them. The workers could see only that what had been
saved was the status quo, that the recovery had preserved their
discomfort and given its fruits to the privileged. In the slums the
Communists held on to their voters even through the happiest days
of the Plan.

By the spring and summer of 1950 the planners had come to
recognize these great problems and were preparing a new attack.
I called on one of the new chiefs that June and found him full
of vigor, charged with enthusiasm. "The object of the exercise,"
he said, "is to win people over to democracy. Up to now the
stuff has been helping only the people who've got to be with us
anyway, the people who can't go over to the Russians even if
they want. The loyalties we should be fighting for are those of
the people who are in doubt, the poor and the workers, the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 70

slums of France and Italy that the Commies have captured and
we've got to get back. That's who we're going after now."

The Plan did indeed make the beginning of an attempt, urg-
ing wage raises on the recipients of its industrial bounty, prod-
ding lethargic governments to rebuild slum housing. But it was
late. The five billion dollar appropriation of its first year had
been spent, and the four billion dollar appropriation of its second
year allotted. Congress had offered only two billion dollars for
its third year appropriation, and the leverage of the Plan over
European society was correspondingly reduced. Much might,
however, have been done, for two billion dollars is a great deal
of money; it might have built thousands of houses, thousands of
new schools, pried open scores of cartels, forced up wages in
thousands of European factories.

Indeed, all this might have happened, but for one great event
the Korean War. The Korean War changed everything, and all
the Western world turned to one new objective defense and
rearmament. The original Marshall Plan had stipulated that not
one penny of its largesse might be used by a European government
for military purposes or to support such nonproductive enter-
prises as the war in Indo-China. Eight months after the Korean
War broke out, the United States government informed the Eu-
ropeans that every penny of Marshall Plain aid would be allotted
on a basis of how much it contributed to the Western defense
effort. Originally, American aid had had as its sole purpose the
reshaping of Europe's peaceful life by making a more fruitful
community of men. From 1950 its overriding purpose was to arm
Europe. By 1952, eighty per cent of American aid was given in
military weapons and the other twenty per cent in defense sup-
port.

Though the Marshall Plan continued in name down to the be-
ginning of 1952, historically it came to its end the week the
Communists attacked in Asia. It had lasted two years and had
made a brave beginning; it had brought Europe to that point of
convalescence where it might support the heavy charge of arms
imposed by the new crisis. But when war came the Plan had only
begun to understand and come to grips with the deeper persistent
problems of European life. When the Plan was ended it left those

A WORLD WE TRIED TO BUILD Jl

problems, still unsolved, to Europeans, whose primary responsi-
bility they still remain.

In 1952 the pretense that the Marshall Plan was engaged in re-
viving the society of Western Europe was finally dropped and the
Plan was merged with its companion enterprise the Military De-
fense Aid Program, or MDAP, in the Mutual Security Agency,
or MSA. The MSA continued to dwell in the old Hotel Talley-
rand, but iron grills now barred its entrances, military guards
watched its portals, and to enter one must have been carefully
scrutinized and have shown a security pass. The summer of 1950
thus marked both the high point of the Plan and its departure from
the page of history with its work unfinished. An anonymous bard
at the Hotel Talleyrand penned its epitaph:

ERP in nineteen-fifty,
Is something spick and span and nifty,
Brightly polished, simonized, integrated, harmonized.
The Marshall Plan is obsolete,
Our 1950 model's neat.
New chrome plating strikes the eyes,
With the legend "Harmonize."
Nineteen nations lift their voices
3lendid noises
larmonize."

In loving chant and sple
"Bread and Guns to Ha

Reconstruction, Integration,
Dollar Shortage, Liberalization,
Off with these old-fashioned ties!
Now's the time to harmonize.

PART

2

IV

dramatis personae

In Western Europe live approximately 300,000,000 people gov-
erned and separated by twenty-five different nation-states that
range from the Vatican City (population: 940) to the United
Kingdom (population: 50,368,455).

A tourist guide to the life of these people records with equal
enthusiasm a wild array of interesting facts about them: the fact
that French policemen have a mania for hustling and speeding the
driver to whirl through traffic faster and faster; that the best
herring and cream in Europe is served in the legislative dining
halls of the Saar; that English epicures have invented a substitute
for heavy sweet cream which requires only cream cheese, milk,
sugar and a drop of kirsch; that one can buy a custom-tailored
suit cheaper in Spain than anywhere else on the Continent; that
the Roman arches, arenas and ancient temples of Southern France
are more magnificent than any ruins in Rome itself.

What the tourist guide does not record is that although all
these facts are distinctly related to the political process, there is
one brutal and simple standard for deciding what facts in Europe
count in current history and what do not. This standard is based
solely on the name of the country involved, for in European
politics there are only two kinds of country.

There are the Big Three France, England and Germany. And
there are the others.

Only France, England and Germany have, in themselves, the
internal potential of decision which may alter the march of great
events. The leaders of France, England and Germany are no more
brilliant or able than the leaders of Holland, Belgium, Italy or
Sweden. Indeed, when the chiefs of the lesser states sit in council
with chiefs of the great states, they frequently by sheer person-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

ality overshadow the Frenchmen, Englishmen and Germans with
whom they gather. But the leaders of these other states can only
comment, whereas the leaders of the Big Three speak out of tra-
ditions that goad them to act, whether they will or not, as history-
makers.

The others cannot be ignored. As industrial producers, as geo-
graphical buffers, as zones of dispute, as contributory influences,
they bring enormous impact to bear on specific situations.

The Saarland, a state of a million people living on a patch of
coal and woodland, set like a wart on France's northeastern shoul-
der, poisons the angry pride of both France and Germany and
abscesses all the greater problems of those two countries.

Trieste, a city of broad clean streets and majestic Teutonic
buildings at the headwaters of the Adriatic, is spotted on SHAPE'S
maps as one of the weakest links in Western defense, because here
the conflicting emotions of Italian and Yugoslav peasants are
locked in stalemate, and defense cannot be planned in the area
until these emotions compromise.

Belgium with its 8,700,000 people, its powerful army, its mus-
cular industry seems like no problem to anyone, but its very vi-
tality drains and strains the economies of its neighbors so that
any economic conference in Europe ultimately grapples with the
Belgian problem.

The Vatican is a state no larger than a city park, but every
foreign office in the world knows how potent and prodigious is its
silent influence on the hearts of men.

Yugoslavia with its 17,000,000 people is far more important
than its half -million-man army suggests because it is radiant with
an heretic set of ideas which disturb the Russians more than guns.

What brackets all these lesser states together as chanters of the
chorus is the prime political fact that they cannot of themselves
offer a solution to any great problem, nor can they obstruct a
solution once the great powers of the world have agreed. In
Europe, only England, France and Germany can attempt to do
this.

Except for Italy, these states are not necessarily sad because
they are denied greatness. Most of them, by their very resignation
from world decision, have been able to offer their citizens more

DRAMATIS PERSONAE JJ

happiness than the Big Three. The Saar, freed of both French
and German burdens of arms, refugees, occupation costs, colonial
war, is the most prosperous enclave in industrial Europe, offering
its citizens more new homes per capita than any other state on the
Continent. Some of the lesser states in Europe, like the Swiss and
Swedes, are lucky geography plus a century of tradition have
permitted them to stand apart. The other lesser states cannot stand
apart, because they know that in any convulsion of world pol-
itics they are inevitably embroiled. They can only watch, offer
advice, ask or donate aid or support and sigh reluctantly once
decisions are taken.

England, France and Germany are different. They are person-
alities of power. They cannot be controlled, choked or bribed
without an upheaval that shakes world power. They are the states
that can vote themselves out of the Atlantic Alliance and, by this
single act, destroy it. If they quarrel with each other, all strategy
crumbles. If they are healthy, then all their lesser neighbors will
throb with good health too, and if they are caught with inflation
or depression, the contagion likewise ultimately infects all their
neighbors. If they can be brought together in common purpose
they might make a force almost equal to the United States or the
Soviet Union. Since the war it has been the cardinal aim of Amer-
ican foreign policy to bring and keep these three great states to-
gether and in harmony with our purposes against the Russians.

The men who speak for these countries, therefore, are those
who make the story of Europe, not because they are greater men
than the leaders of lesser countries, but because they speak with
the resonance given them by peoples of greatness. The utterances
and acts of most of these leaders Churchill, Monnet, Attlee,
Adenauer, de Gaulle, Eden, Ollenhauer, Schumacher, Schuman,
Mayer, Pleven, Butler, Bidault are the stuff of public record, as
crisp as yesterday's headlines and as certain of memory as to-
morrow's history books. But their power is not self-produced;
their power rises from millions of their fellow citizens, all of them
bearing a natural, hereditary responsibility that does not rest on
a Monacan, a Luxembourger, an Austrian, a Frisian or an Italian.

If we can see what perplexes these people and what they seek,
we can see how the struggle in Europe is shaped. And if Willi

FIRE IN THE ASHES 78

Schlieker in the Ruhr, Pierre Bertaux in Paris, Joe Curry in
Yorkshire, claim more attention in this book than de Gasperi,
Spaak, van Zeeland, Tito or Franco, it is because they speak for
Germany, for France and for England they are membranes
through which the forces of history filter and show themselves.

the mystery of France

Every country is a mystery composed of the lives of many
men. Yet none is more sealed to the understanding than the mys-
tery of France.

For a full generation the spectacle of French politics fretful,
whining, querulous has become so commonplace, the hysterics
with which French politics twist from turning point to turning
point of decision without deciding anything has become, indeed,
so normal that they have long since lost interest for anyone but
a student of psychopathia politica. Frenchmen, like strangers, re-
gard the politics of their country with the cynical detachment of
total contempt.

The mystery of France is simple to describe. Here lies the rich-
est and most beautiful land of Europe. Here live some of its most
illuminating minds. Here are men of courage and great tradition,
toilers of dogged diligence and consummate craftsmanship. Yet
nothing comes of this human material, France wastes and abuses
all the talents she possesses.

France, larger than England and Western Germany put to-
gether, is a jeweled country. Its fields roll in fragrant beauty from
the English Channel to the Mediterranean, six hundred miles from
north to south, six hundred miles from east to west. The great
wheat plains of the Beauce that sprawl over the heart of the coun-
try about Paris, tender green in spring and golden dry in mid-
summer, are among the lushest in the world; many a wheat farm
on the Aisne is more fruitful than the richest of America's mid-
continent. The meadows of Normandy and the uplands of Gas-
cony are speckled with fat cattle. Down the cleft in France's
central mountain bulge runs the swift-flowing Rhone opening
on a triangle of sun-washed, subtropical fruitiand, vegetable land

FIRE IK THE ASHES 80

and wineland. Beneath French soil lie some of the most formidable
deposits of iron ore in the entire world, substantial coal though
not enough enormous reserves of bauxite for aluminum, potential
pools of oil and natural gas as yet untapped. OS the Alps, the
Pyrenees, and the Massif Central plunge rivers with stupendous
force to give France more natural hydropower potential than
any other country in Europe. And what France lacks at home,
she can find abroad, for her overseas empire, since the dwindling
of the British, has come to be the largest colonial domain in the
world. France is the envy of every nation in Europe, and the
Germans, with that nostalgia of Germans for things which are not
theirs, recite as a definition of happiness: "Frohlich wie der liebe
Gott in Frankreich"~"Happy as Dear God in France."

In this country, moreover, live forty-two million people of
extraordinary skill, application and tradition. Second only to the
British, they have provided the ideas and thinking of the modern
world. The energy of the nucleus was first explored in France,
the power of rushing water was first converted to electric energy
in the French Alps, the medicine of the twentieth century de-
scends from its beginning in French science. The genius of French
art cramps the brush of every painter in the world today in imi-
tation. French taste in clothes robes the women of all the world;
French taste in food is the absolute definition of man's culinary
achievement. Lastly, the individual courage of Frenchmen is un-
questioned. Even now after the slaughters of the Second World
War one cannot stand on the wild, torn slopes of Verdun before
the great mausoleum of dead men's bones without imagination
boggling at French bravery.

Yet all this adds up to nothing. Courage, brilliance, skill com-
pounded with riches, land and sun come to fruit today in France,
as for a generation, in bitterness, poverty and a paralysis of with-
ering indecision.

This is the big mystery. But the mystery is a mosaic of lesser
mysteries. Why, in a France that produces all its own foods,
does butter cost twice as much as it does in a Britain that lives
in a siege economy hauling butter from thousands of miles over-
seas? Why could the France of 1939 furnish 115 divisions to do
battle whereas France today had such difficulty in furnishing an
undermanned twelve? How have the Germans been able to erect

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 8l

out of defeat a solid, enduring government that has lasted four
full years, while the victorious French have had so many changes
of leadership in that period that not one Frenchman in a hundred
can count the number of his Cabinets? Why should the resources
of a nation so great provide an average working wage for her
citizens of fifteen to twenty dollars a week, while a pound of meat
costs 80 cents, a pair of baby's shoes four dollars, a black market
apartment rental $150 a month? And why, finally, should the
French, conscious of all these mysteries, after eight years of the
most determined wrestling with them, have only succeeded in
tangling things more than ever before?

The first quick impression at the surface of French politics is
confusion.

But this confusion is only a many-faceted reflection of one
central fact, the great and dominant fact of French life: that
Frenchmen are divided against each other, distrust each other,
execrate each other and are more cruel to each other than any
other people in the democratic world. Other modern nations are
divided too, but the others have been pressed, decade by decade,
by the pounding of change and war into homogeneous groups.
The Germans defeated twice, smashed twice, ruined by infla-
tion twice, brutalized by barbarians of their own choice have
been fused into, and remain, a community. The Russians have
been whipped, cramped and drugged by a dictatorship into an
even tighter community. Americans and Britons have arrived,
out of their own history, at so peaceful a kinship that for the
vast majority of citizens the divisions of politics are almost im-
material.

But France is different. Frenchmen are divided in so many
ways, with so many cross sections of cleavage, lacerated by so
many feuds new and old, that they cannot find any way to gather
in groups large enough on issues clear enough to make decisions.
All political alliances in France are formed against something, not
for something, and they are impotent because they combine men
who hate each other only a shade less than they hate their enemy
of the moment. French life does not divide; it splinters. Frenchmen
splinter on whether to revile the Church or to cherish it, on
whether to socialize the country further or desocialize it. The rich

FIREINTHEASHES 82

hate the poor, the poor hate the rich; the rich are divided between
Catholic and non-Catholic; the poor are divided between Commu-
nist and non-Communist; the city workers are divided against the
country peasants; and in every village and neighborhood, fresh
memory of wartime resistance and collaboration divides and sub-
divides these groups all over again.

These divisions breed paralysis and paradox. The only way so
many disparate people can live together at all is to grant to each
group an almost total liberty and thus liberty is more complete,
the air freer, the individual human more unfettered in thought
and expression even if more perplexed in France than anywhere
else in the Atlantic Basin. This liberty has its counterface: a total
social indifference to the hurts and aches of anyone outside one's
own individual circle. There is less mercy between Frenchman
and Frenchman than in any Christian country of the West. Or-
ganized charity, in the sense that it has developed in America and
Britain, is all but unknown. What there is is a fig leaf of fancy
balls and glittering receptions for the fashionable folk of Paris at
which they can salve conscience and parade new clothes. The out-
standing individual act of charity by a Frenchman since the war
was the gift of five million dollars by a French merchant to found
a new college but not in France. The gift was given to Oxford,
in England.

This suspicion, mistrust and indifference of Frenchman to
Frenchman breeds a brilliant and dangerous courage in the indi-
vidual man which, when compounded in a community, breeds
weakness and cowardice. It breeds lastly a crowning paradox: all
Frenchmen passionately love France and hate all other Frenchmen
for bemeaning her.

All these divisions come to their natural political negation in
Paris, in that great Roman temple called the Palais Bourbon which
holds the French National Assembly.

The Palais Bourbon sits on the Seine, looking out over the
gray space of the Place de la Concorde, as if brooding over the
many memories of blood and wild excitement that have crowded
across that most beautiful of city squares for almost two hundred
years. Until two years ago, two signs one of which is now gone
no more than twenty feet apart on its gray walls told more

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 83

vividly than any essay of the attitude of the French to their
sovereign Republic. One was a row of white marble plaques, in-
cised with gold lettering, giving the names of four French youths
who, at that point, in the glorious days of the August, 1944, in-
surrection against the Germans, had given their lives that France
might be free again and her Republic flourish. Now and then, in
devotion, Frenchmen still thrust spring flowers into the crevices
of these marble plaques to honor their sacrifice. The other sign
was a blue enameled plaque with white lettering which said
simply: "Defence D'Uriner" "Do not urinate against these walls,"
exhorting Frenchmen not to stain their sovereign's shelter with
dishonor. Perhaps because the sign so amused strange visitors, or
perhaps because it was no longer necessary, the French in the
winter of 1952 removed the blue and white plaque and only the
sockets of its studs are still visible. But the range of emotions
the two signs spanned remains still as true as ever.

Within the National Assembly, 627 men make the laws of
France, impose its taxes, conscript its soldiers and decide its role
in the great- world. The easiest way of understanding how the
differences that bud in the villages harden into bitter fruit in this
sovereign body is to sit in the gallery of its windowless chamber
and look down at the deputies on their red plush benches spread
in a half-moon about the speaker's rostrum. Only a long and
dreary catalogue could list all the factions, splinters and purposes
proclaimed in this hall. But if one disregards several dozen free-
wheelers in factional coteries, along with the Arab deputies in
their tarbooshes and flowing robes, and the Negro deputies sent
by the dark peoples of Africa, then one finds that the people of
France have succeeded in packaging their differences in six dif-
ferent party-packages of deputies of nearly equal size, each hold-
ing a few more or a few less than one hundred seats. Within each
of these groups, to be sure, there are further differences but since
anarchy must end somewhere party discipline, the hope of spoils,
the distaste or outright hatred for neighboring parties who sit
nearby keep them bound together under the cautious control
of their leaders.

The six parties should be read from right to left. Farthest right
are the Peasant-Independents, the repository of all French reac-
tion, swayed chiefly by two men: the stubborn, parsimonious

FIRE IN THE ASHES 84

ex-village mayor, Antoine Pinay, and the bobbing acid little ex-
Premier Paul Reynaud. Next, comes the Rally of the French Peo-
ple, the party created by General de Gaulle and now abandoned
by him, a collection at once of some of the finest and most
despicable men in French life. Following them come the Radical-
Socialists, a party supported by businessmen and peasant small-
holders. The Radical-Socialist is the great republican party of
France's yesterday; it is studded with able names, yet is unable to
decide whether to go forward or backward. The MRP (Move-
ment of Popular Republicans) which comes next, was born out
of the wartime Resistance, is frankly Catholic in origin and in-
spiration, and is committed to a program of social reform at
home and European Union abroad. Its two great leaders, Robert
Schuman and Georges Bidault, have dominated French diplomacy
and hence that of Europe since the war. The Socialist party to
the left of it has become in France a middle class and white-collar
worker party which, like its onetime rival, the Radicals, coasts
on the memories of past greatness without a doctrine for the
twentieth century; since the death of Leon Blum it has produced
no great leader. Finally, there is the Communist party, a seamless
phalanx of party hacks, rigid, inflexible, destructive, under a dis-
cipline that traces directly back to Moscow.

Since even the listing of these names and doctrines is confusing,
most people who deal with the Assembly of France sort them out
in a more convenient way. They draw a margin down each side
of the Chamber and mark off the Gaullists (erroneously) as the
extreme Right and the Communists as the extreme Left; these
two parties have in common nothing but their kindred desire to
destroy the present parliamentary system of France, though for
different motives. The other four parties then divide up quite
normally into two halves, a Right and a Left, like Republicans and
Democrats or Labour and Tory, except that each of these halves
is split. The splitting line in each case, in each half, is religion.
The two conservative parties are the Radical-Socialists who boast
that they destroyed the power of the Catholic Church in France,
and the Peasant-Independents, devoutly wedded to Church and
village cure. The parties of the mild Center-Left are the MRP
and the Socialists, the MRP wishing to remarry social reform to

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 85

the Christian-Catholic faith, and the Socialists coupling their so-
cial reform with unrelenting enmity to the Church.

This description of French politics becomes really complicated
only when one lets the clutch in and tries to engage the gears.

It is immediately obvious that no possible majority of votes
can be found in the all-powerful Assembly, unless at least three
parties with profound differences among themselves get together;
to make sure of a stable majority, four must get together. To
make a marriage among four groups with such ancient and flaring
hatreds requires an enormous, an incredible, standard of personal
flexibility among the party leaders who sit together, quarrel, fall
out, sit together again. It means a doling out of Cabinet portfolios
to men of such divergent political credos that at times the French
Cabinet seems like a horse with twelve heads, each head riding off
in a different direction. When the Schuman Plan, the greatest
event in French foreign policy since the war, was announced, it
was proclaimed not only as the ending of the millennial feud
between Frenchmen and Germans but also announced that it
would open all of French Africa to German industry, too. Within
a week after this historic announcement, the Minister of Over-
seas France, who controls French Africa and who had apparently
been too busy to read the papers that week, held a press con-
ference. He was asked what he thought of the suggestion and
he said that the Schuman Plan did not include the opening of
Africa to the Germans. Not only were the Minister of Foreign
Affairs and the Minister of Overseas France members of the same
Cabinet at the time, but they happened also to be members of the
same party.

To produce any Cabinet at all in France, a majority can be
formed in only one of two ways: either a national catastrophe
must force divergent parties together, or their leaders must bar-
gain out their various individual interests and claims to patronage
until a weak compromise is reached, setting up a temporary part-
nership. Each new twist of eventsa gust of inflation, the threat
of war, the annual budgetwrecks the temporary compromise,
destroys the voting partnership in the Assembly, and the Cabinet
comes tumbling down. Since the Liberation of France in 1944,
the National Assembly has chosen no less than twenty-two Cab-,
inets from among its members, the longest-lived enduring for

FIREINTHEASHES 86

thirteen months, while several collapsed within a few days. As
Cabinets come and go, as partners of yesterday become enemies
of today and kiss and make up in the next Cabinet reshuffle, the
images of public men become blurred and confused. They flicker
on and off so quickly that Frenchmen get political eye-strain
watching them. It is thus very natural that the two men who
have had the greatest individual impact on French politics, do-
mestic and foreign alike, since Liberation, were never elected to
public office and have never been members of the National As-
sembly. They are, of course, General Charles de Gaulle and Jean
Monnet.

No one in the entire world is more keenly aware of and sensi-
tive to this formula of madness than the members of the National
Assembly themselves. For no one can sit in the gallery of the
French Assembly and listen to its speeches week after week
without being astounded by the eloquence and vitality of its
debate. The British House of Commons can, occasionally, when
Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan are lacing each other with
majestic fury, match it. But by the rules of the House of Com-
mons, members may not clap, hiss or boo the speaker so that
when Britons in Parliament are stirred, their emotions vent only
in the deep rumble of "Hear, Hear" or "No, No" a great angry
roaring like a cage of chained lions. The French Chamber on any
day of great debate offers something more like the sound of
storm, with thunder cracking, lightning forking and catastrophe
always imminent. Every major party will donate at least one
speaker to a great debate and any number of free-lancers will
follow them to the rostrum, each explaining his position in such
pure and graceful language, turning aside barbs and darts from
the floor with such precision and logic that the Journal Officiel,
the Assembly's official record, is one of the most exciting continu-
ing publications of European civilization. Nowhere else in any
country in history have the words of men so illuminated the
condition of their countrymen as in France's National Assembly.
Yet it gives the members little pride. For each flight of eloquence
is cancelled out by conflicting eloquence, and in the end France
is left either leaderless or with a government that can lead only by
doing nothing.

The itching, gnawing frustration of the deputies of the National

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 87

Assembly, condemned to live with each other, is aggravated by
a particular historical condition that makes them perhaps the
most sorrowful body of lawmakers in the world. It is a con-
dition that springs from the war. The present crop of French
deputies are not nimble graduates of the baby-kissing, wine-bib-
bing, hand-shaking escalator of politics, although they practice
such customs with fervid good will, too. Most of the parliamen-
tary leaders and at least half of all the deputies are men who
challenged death as patriots of the Underground and Resistance,
to drive the Germans from their country and make France great
again. Georges Bidault, twice Prime Minister, eight times Foreign
Minister, presided over the Council of National Resistance in
Paris, dodging the Gestapo from lodging place to lodging place
down to the last soul-scorching week of Insurrection. Rene
Pleven, twice Prime Minister, four times Defense Minister, en-
tered the Resistance immediately after the collapse of France in
1940, fled to Africa and there organized the uprisings of the Free
French. Jules Moch, sometime Defense Minister, sometime In-
terior Minister, fought in the maquis of the Pyrenees, and his
son, caught fighting in the maquis of Vercors, was murdered by
the Gestapo. The Gaullists on the Right and the Communists
on the Left count scores of heroes who survived the perils of
Resistance and Insurrection; some members of the Assembly still
carry on their arms the tattooing of German concentration camps.
These are heroes who risked their lives to make France great
again, and instead of bringing France to greatness they have
brought her to paralysis, instead of giving France glory they
have given her dust.

One must look back and trace the course of events from the
moment of Liberation to see why these brave and brilliant men
in the Assembly have failed.

When Liberation came to France in 1944, what emerged, it
seemed, was a new kind of France. The shame and squalor of
the French collapse in 1940, followed by reflection and suifering
during the long German Occupation, had ended in a general
contempt and loathing of every face and institution of the old
France which had fallen so miserably to Hitler. The three great
underground parties that towered over liberated France the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 88

MRP (or Catholic Left), the Communists and the Socialists-
were all of them parties more revolutionary than reformist, sworn
to take France apart and make her new again. Together, they
commanded an immense popular majority of all French voters
who cheered and urged them to action; in the early postwar
Assemblies, they had so huge a margin of seats in their partner-
ship that, for once, firm, clear majority leadership seemed pos-
sible. This majority of the Left in the French Parliament lasted
only twenty months, but in its first sixteen months it pushed
through a revolution which France has never since digested.

All three parties agreed that France was to be remade a new
system of social security would guarantee every man against
sickness, baby subsidies would support each family budget, un-
employment and accident would be covered by insurance, work-
ers would participate in the control of all the plants they worked
in. France had been crippled by an ancient, obsolete industry
that failed every test of national usefulness before the war; there-
fore, declared the Liberation parties, they were to be nationalized.
The coal mines, railways, gas companies, electricity companies,
banks and insurance companies, airlines and steamship companies,
most of the arms industry, and France's biggest automobile works
were all nationalized between the summer of 1945 and the spring
of 1946. Having in previous generations already nationalized all
telephones and telegraphs, the potassium mines of Alsace, the to-
bacco and match industry, the French government became the
biggest employer of labor in the nation. To mesh and coordinate
these powerful socialist industries with the industries of private
enterprise, a brilliant national plan, the Monnet Plan, was drafted
to channel investment and reconstruction toward those targets
which would make France the equal of any other Western na-
tion and give her people the soft decencies of life. The old press
had been corrupt and evil, said the parties of Liberation; it had
been an institution of lying sheets bought by great moneyed
interest or bribed by foreign powers. Thus, down with the old
structure of the press. Most of the nation's printing presses were
quickly nationalized and all newsprint came under control; every
team of Resistance journalists emerging into freedom received
the same grant of capital from the government, the same allotment

THEMYSTERYOFFRANCE 89

of newsprint, the same right to print on government presses. Now
France was to have a press of absolute freedom.

When they had finished their reforms, the Liberation parties
had created a government which monopolized basic transport, all
forms of power and energy, all the channels of credit, dominated
every avenue of public information.

Such a revolution, it seems in retrospect, should have brought
the alliance of the three Resistance parties to maturity as a solid,
permanent governing body of free France. Quite the contrary
happened, for almost at once a fissure opened between the parties
of the Resistance. This fissure was caused by the Communist party.

The Communists had emerged from the Occupation as the most
powerful organized force in France. Controlling its own shock
troops, possessed of its own arms, in control of the great national
labor unions, the party was led by hard and monomaniac men
who knew exactly what they wanted. Moreover, it was adored
by millions of Frenchmen, who might otherwise have been hostile
to communism, for its courage and resolution in the dark days
of the Underground, Even before the Germans were driven from
France's cities, the Communists had begun to organize to take
power. What frustrated them was that other men in France knew
exactly what they wanted too, and though the Communists were
the largest organized group in France, they were not the only
organized group and the others, combined, outweighed them.
In each village and city of France as Liberation crackled across
the country like a chain of sputtering firecrackers, the armed mtn
of the Resistance raced each other for the levers of power, the
Communists winning in some areas but losing in most. Added
together, the Communist minorities in every region made them,
on a national scale, the largest single power unit in France. But,
on a national scale, power could only be exercised by the Assem-
bly in Paris and there the Communists were trapped. In Paris
power was exercised, indirectly but fundamentally, by the huge
conquering armies of America and Britain. As these armies flooded
through and beyond Paris they left its control and government in
the hands of that shrewd, brilliant and self-intoxicated soldier,
Charles de Gaulle, whom the Communists could not remove ex-
cept by a civil convulsion the Allies would not have tolerated.

Nothing could be done in France over the opposition of the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 90

Communists, but the Communists could do nothing alone. Since
all three parties of the Liberation agreed that France needed a
revolution, the energies of the Communists could flow for a while
in the same direction as the energies of its partners in the Libera-
tion government without too much friction. But the Communists
could not dominate their partners. For a year and a half the Cab-
inets of France included individual Communist ministers, as Vice
Premier, as Minister of National Defense, as Minister of National
Economy or as Minister of Arms Production. In some of these
posts, such as that of National Economy, the Communists con-
tributed remarkably to the swift and willing return of French
workers to their mines, factories and farms; in others, as in Arms
Production, they so colonized key offices with their party hacks,
that even now no one can guess just how many covert and silent
enemy agents remain embedded at key points. In the five rustling
Cabinet reshuffles of that honeymoon period, one constant re-
mained: the Ministry of the Interior, with its police control over
French cities, and the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs were always
denied the Communists.

The revolutionary majority of the Left remained in power
until May of 1947, long after it had ceased to become revolu-
tionary and had bogged down in the technical and unexplored
complexities of making socialism work. In May of 1947 the Com-
munists were expelled or quit the government of France. The
reason was simple. By 1947 the great Dollar Gap had caught up
with the destiny of France and the bread failure of the spring
months had forced France, like all of Europe, to turn to America
for help. This situation held two mutually exclusive conditions.
The United States would not give aid to any government which
rested on Communist support. And the Communists would not
support any government which also depended on American sup-
port and the influence that went with it. So they left, and as they
left, the whole tone of government in France altered; the projects
of reform and revolution lay half-finished on the statute books
in illogical confusion, while all the dreams and promises of Lib-
eration rested unfulfilled. The voters of France, perplexed and
embittered, knew they had been cheated, but did not know
precisely whom to blame.

The next five years, from 1947 to 1952, gave the special quality

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 91

of confusion to the government of postwar France. Having lost
the support of the Communists, the two remaining partners of the
early revolutionary governments had to move across the center
aisle of the Assembly to find new votes for a governing majority
on the Right. These votes could be found only among the con-
servative Radical-Socialists and little clusters of Peasant-Inde-
pendent deputies. But these deputies could be won only by brib-
ing them with place, patronage and little privileges in the sharing
out of sovereignty. The new coalition now no longer had com-
mon aspirations, for some wanted to continue the reforms of
Liberation and the others wanted to undo them. They had only
a common peril, the need of defending democratic liberties from
the Communists on the Left and, they believed, from General de
Gaulle's new counterparty on the Right.

Agreeing only on the peril, they could agree on nothing else.
The mass of social reforms and nationalizations thrown together
so swiftly in the first few months of revolution required the cool-
est and most logical thinking to make them work. But the new
Center coalition government now placed the great enterprises of
nationalized industry and nationalized finance and credit under
the direction of their businessmen deputies of the conservative
parties, who understood their mechanisms as little as the Marxists
who had nationalized them. The nationalized industries became
like orphans left with a surly and irascible uncle who could not
make up his mind whether to choke or nourish them. The Center
coalitions could not agree on the purpose, the financing or the
burdens of the new system of social security; they could not
agree on how new voting laws should be written, whether or
not Catholic schools should get state subsidies or how people
should be taxed. As they feuded and compromised among them-
selves, each party had constantly to yield at every reshuffle to some
demand it had once categorized as pure evil, until finally its voters
became confused, disgusted and apathetic. When no compromise
could be reached on how the burdens or benefits of the state
should be shared, the coalition parties simply took no decision,
which meant that matters were automatically settled by another
shot of monetary inflation, the most insidious and wicked of all
taxes.

These governments continued in this paralysis until 1952, mak-

FIRE IN THE ASHES Q2

ing only those decisions, such as rearmament and war in Indo-
China, which were inescapably thrust on them by the outside
world. By 1952 that indefinable change of political climate which
was sweeping all Western democracies over the imaginary center
line which separates Right from Left was operating in France too.
In February of that year, a sickening gust of inflation, filling
every French family with a sense of indefinable dread, coincided
with the crumbling of the Gaullist party to give France for the
first time in twelve years a government under Antoine Pinay
which by its own choice was of the true Right. By the time M.
Antoine Pinay a short, frail man whose balding head, sharp
pointed nose and little mustache make him look like the French
version of Mr. Everymantook the helm early in 1952, the en-
tire climate of France had changed. The free press of Liberation
whose journalists had survived and outfought the Gestapo had
succumbed to the implacable logic of profit-and-loss accounting,
and the major organs of the French press were now back in the
hands of the same men who had run them before the war. M.
Pinay was whooped into office with a clamor and a bang and
hailed as the embodiment of all the sturdy, enduring virtues of
the simple French villager which had survived the adventures of
the mid-century. Though M. Pinay's government lasted only nine
months, it was succeeded by another government of the Right,
leaving France to contemplate her current paradox: though the
overwhelming majority of Frenchmen vote for parties of the
Left to protect their revolution or to push it further, technically
the only possible governments in France's present divided Assem-
bly are governments of the Center or Right, which repudiate
that revolution.

It is impossible to make sense out of France by considering her
parliamentary politics apart from those moods and attitudes
which cannot be captured by dates, events or figures.

Some philosopher with an equally profound knowledge of
human beings and economics may some day be able to describe
adequately the disease of inflation, which is the creeping sickness
of Western democracies. If he does, he will almost certainly
choose France as his model of horror. Inflation has underlain
every mood and change of French politics since the war, dis-

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 93

solving all decencies, all moralities, corrupting the noblest, ob-
sessing the conversation of all French families with francs, with
price numbers, with worry.

The peculiar characteristic of French inflation is that it has
lasted for almost forty years, more than a full generation; it has
been a pestilence that progresses in spurts of panic and slower
lapses of seeming stability. Inflation as it has happened in Ger-
many, twice in one generation, has come swiftly, like a quick
ravaging plague, and been cured twice by savage repudiation. It
is healthier when inflation comes like this, for all men are wiped
out at once by a common disaster, and they are united in fear.

When inflation happens slowly, as in France, over a genera-
tion, it slowly changes all habits and morals. Money is no longer
money as it is in England or America, and all the patterns of
thrift, planning, decency, good taste that go with solid money
become stupidity. When people realize that money is meaning-
less they become vulgar or selfish or wicked and divide against
each other. Old standards wither. ("They are such vulgar peo-
ple," I have heard a French lady of good family say. "They never
ask the price of anything they buy.")

The quick, foxlike men leap ahead as they ride inflation's crests;
the sharpster, not the producer, succeeds. Those who do what is
best for the community who save, who plan, who put aside are
wiped out; those who grab, thrive. Inflation makes a life in which
the grasshopper, not the ant, is the hero of the parable. The old
people suffer most, for their savings and all their accumulations
are reduced to nothing; no insurance policy more than ten years
old in France is worth as much as a ten-year-old automobile. The
widows of the soldiers killed in France's wars receive a pension
of 85,000 francs a year, once sufficient to live on, but now worth
only five dollars a week. Inflation eats the honor out of a career
of honor; a French captain knows that if he dies in Indo-China
his wife will get 117,000 francs a year, or eight dollars a week,
and that in another five years these francs may not be enough to
buy a loaf of bread a day. Ever since the Liberation the people
of France have hoped that the process might be stopped, turned
back, so they could make plans; each government except for those
that nursed at the Marshall Plan's breast in its boom years has
betrayed these hopes; the political appeal of men like M. Pinay

FIRE IN THE ASHES 94

and the French Right is that they promise to stop inflation, even
if it means unemployment and the end of French growth.

The warping of a community by inflation is almost indescrib-
able. Take housing: since somehow men must be protected against
inflation and must be protected first in their homes, rent controls
must be slapped on. Since rents fixed in terms of paper francs are
soon reduced by inflation to nothing, landlords will not repair
and will not build. No houses get built, and a growing popula-
tion is crammed and stuffed into falling, disease-burdened slums*
Since it is unwise to save to build a house four or five years hence,
because by then inflation will have melted the money until it
will not even lay a foundation, then buy an automobile and freeze
the money. Since it is unwise to buy bonds or stocks which lose
their value, buy gold and thus three billion dollars' worth of gold
is buried in French gardens, hidden under mattresses, stashed in
socks. Since the best thing that can be done with money is to
spend it quickly, then spend, spend in the high, luminous, grisly
luxury of Deauville and Cannes, spend in the shops along the Rue
St. Honore and Rue de la Paix, build a summer bungalow along
the Riviera because you will never build a home where you
live. Spend fast because if you save you will end up like the
old widows in black, or like those who have no money to spend
anyway.

Inflation intertwines with another condition of French life.
Since you cannot by diligence, application or planning acquire
any security with your savings, you must acquire another base.
If you are a Frenchman, you try to guarantee not your money
but your status by a system of special privileges. More and more
this status becomes as important as a property right in itself. If
you have three children, you can get a special card as a "Pere de
Famille Nombreuse" which entitles you to half-fare in the sub-
way, on the railway, at museums. If you work in the coal mines,
your status as a coal miner entitles you to free coal. If you work
in the electricity works, your status entitles you to cut-rate cur-
rent. If you work in a factory with a well-run union, your status
entitles you to send the children to the factory's summer camp;
if the union that runs it is Communist and you are not, too bad;
If the union that runs it is Catholic and you are not, too bad.
Everyone has a special status which he tries to crystallize by law

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 95

or custom in the production of wealth. The veteran has a special
card which gives him special rights; a member of the Legion of
Honor has special rights. Even the destitute have special rights.
All those who are over sixty-five, all those who are incurably
sick, all those whose income is less than $300 a year get a special
card called the "Carte des Economiquement Faibles." Possessors
of this card pay no taxes on houses or radios, they are given free
medical care and free legal aid and may, once a year, make a trip
anywhere in France at half -fare.

Those who denounce this system of special privileges and status
are frequently those who benefit most, for to each man his status
is justice and the other man's status is privilege. The businessmen
of private enterprise spend hours denouncing the French national-
ized railways for the manner in which the government's special
cards allow millions of privileged Frenchmen reduced rates on
the already-low passenger fares. But when it comes to a discussion
of freight rates, they protest. The French government railways
charge the same rate for hauling a ton of goods a mile, whether
it be a low-cost, mass shipment, flat-valley haul or a winding,
twisting, expensive, ill-frequented run into the mountains. This
equalizes transportation costs all over France, making cheap haul-
age on the Paris-Lyons run more expensive than it should be,
while old factories in the mountains, miserably placed for com-
mercial efficiency, are subsidized by artificially low rates. Over and
over again, the railways have sought permission to alter the rate
structure so that freight charges will reflect freight costs. But this
would, of course, make the low-cost rail hauls so competitive that
private trucking would go out of business and make production
in the mountains so expensive that mountain factories, too, would
go out of business. At this, the business critics of the passenger-
rail system protest that rate changes would be disruptive and
wicked. The government, which reflects the votes of everyone
and must run the railways to please everyone, therefore lets every
individual sink the taproot of status into the railway system, and
the system runs a chronic, constant deficit.

Yet a third major emotional mood suffuses French politics, a
mood which flows from the treason of Occupation collaboration.
All except the very pure in France live with a little yellow stain
of treason somewhere within them. The pure were that handful

FIRE IN THE ASHES 96

who from the very moment of collapse in France refused to accept
defeat, Vichy and Hitler. They were joined later, gradually, then
more swiftly, finally in a rush, by more and more Frenchmen who
came to revile Vichy, Petain and Hitler. Somewhere between the
ten per cent of the pure who fought from the very beginning, and
the ten per cent of the vile who clung to fascism until the very
end, is all the rest of France. The grades and distinctions of pa-
triotism and treachery are blurred everywhere.

The great majority of Frenchmen cherished liberty even while
they tasted defeat and turned against the traitors as soon as it was
possible or safe to do so. But in the ebbing of memory it is difficult
for any Frenchman to fix for himself or for another when he took
the first act of Resistance, at what point and by what act in a
country where ninety per cent first submitted and ninety per cent
later resisted, an individual marked himself out permanently as a
traitor. This blurring of standards has grown as memory has
faded, and all through the after-war years it has permitted real
traitors, both big and little, to creep back with greater and greater
ease into French public life. Thus there was only a mild discom-
fort, an undefined malaise in French hearts when, as Premier,
M. Pinay, once a Vichyite, later a Resistant, let himself be publicly
photographed in vacation rendezvous with his old friend, M.
Pierre-Etienne Flandin, a great enthusiast of Adolf Hitler, a hard-
core Vichyite, deprived by law of all civic rights for collaboration
under Occupation. Nor did they find it too strange that one of his
closest economic advisors was a French industrialist, chief of a
large American automobile producing company in France, who
served a two-year jail sentence after Liberation because he had so
completely put the services of his industry and France to the use
of the Nazi war machine. It is not that Resistance had lost its glory
nor that the Collaboration had taken over. Resistance is still the
name of magic in French politics, and the purest of its heroes-
men like Rene Pleven or Georges Bidault or Jean Monnet are
among the fixtures of French political life. It is only that in order
to govern France in freedom they must call on the support of men
who betrayed it.

It is unfortunate that Frenchmen and strangers alike are accus-
tomed to judge France by what happens in the narrow arena of

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 97

politics. It is unfortunate because if one's gaze is fixed on the forum
of ants where French politicians debate their country's fate with-
out ever coming to decision, the vitality and grandeur of all the
unquenchable nonpolitical processes of France are ignored.

In their individual, everyday, working lives, the will of French-
men to live and flourish not only persists but pushes the nation
forward, completely apart from politics. The politics of French
agricultural subsidy and protection may be ugly and squalid, but
six times as many tractors now plough the fields of France as be-
fore the war, and in some of the wheat counties around Paris
where one family in ten had had a tractor before the war, now
only one family in ten ploughs with a horse. The fields gleam neat
and clean, shorn under the slick new combines, and in the mead-
ows the cubes of mechanically baled hay dot the green like yellow
dominoes. Politics ruined the French aviation industry for a year
and a half after the war as the Communists colonized it with their
agents, but individual French plane designers, who had been cut
off from the development of world plane design for five years
previous, survived both their isolation and the Communists to
take off their drawing boards and put in cold production a new
jet pursuit, the Mystere, which matches the best British and Amer-
ican engineering. French dressmakers who had thought that with
the war the fashion center of the world had passed from Paris to
Hollywood and New York found within three years after peace
that they could again impose a New Look, an Old Look, a
Wandering Waistline all around the world from Dallas to Delhi
and Melbourne to Milwaukee.

There are other more human measures of vigor and revival too.
One of the great and ignored facts about France is that the French
are having babies again. After a forty-year period in which French
population declined decade by decade, in which the tottering old
man and the withered old crone had become the community
silhouette, France has now achieved the largest birth rate of any
major West European country, Italy included. Whether because
of the social security's baby subsidy system or simply out of the
individual determination of French couples to refresh the nation,
the French birth rate is now twenty per cent higher than before
the war, promising a regeneration of vigor in a country directed
too long by old and tired men.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

Even in that most maligned of all areas of enterprise, the na-
tionalized industries, the French, outside of politics, have achieved
much that borders on the spectacular. To hear the politicians in
the National Assembly shriek with indignation as they discover
that the budget of the nationalized railways provides for the pur-
chase of meat for the cats of lonesome night watchmen at level
grade crossings, one might think that the French transport system
was covered with cobwebs and directed by fools. Yet by 1952
the French railways system which had been shredded to bits by
Allied bombing was the finest in Europe. It had repaired and
rebuilt 2,250 blasted bridges, installed the finest roadbeds of the
Continent, was running on meticulous time schedules, offered the
cheapest transport in Europe per ton-mile or passenger-mile.
Moreover, it had increased its ton-mile capacity by fif teen per cent
while decreasing its personnel by twenty per cent from prewar
levels. By 1952, similarly, the French Nationalized Electricity
Company had not only changed the face of the land with its dams
and canals, but was producing twice as much power as at France's
prewar peak, in an electric grid that forked power back and forth
from the Mediterranean to the Channel, from the Alps to Paris
at the flick of one master switch in one central control.

The talent, the devotion, the individual aspiration and courage
of Frenchmen persist in the same measure as at any time in her
history of greatness. And it is this that so tantalizes all men who
deal with France or French affairs. If only the talent and the re-
sources could be harnessed and directed to one end, then France
would be in the Atlantic Alliance, as it was from 1914 to 1918,
the cornerstone of all effective policy. If only the materials of
greatness could be kindled, France might flame and warm all her
citizens again with security and comfort.

So studying France, contrasting her frantic and ineffectual lead-
ership with the promise of her people and resources, many for-
eigners have declared that France is suffering from nothing more
serious than a case of nerves.

It is true that France is suffering from a case of nerves, but the
truth ignores the fact that the nervous instability arises from cer-
tain cold, material situations which no magic wand or easy formula
can erase. The explanation of France's parliamentary indecision,

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE

99

of her crippling inflation, of her dishonored promises is, very
simply, that the governments of France have accepted for France
burdens too great for her capacity to meet.

The burdens of France are enormous. Someone has quipped that
most of France's troubles rise from her effort to pay for three
kinds of war at once yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's. She
is paying for two wars of yesterday in pensions and annuities to
veterans, widows, cripples, orphans, in the annual tax demands to
rebuild the 1,500,000 homes either partially or completely de-
stroyed by the Germans, in the physical effort to restore the
public works blasted to bits as the liberating armies swept over
French soil chasing Germans.

France is also paying for today's war in Indo-China. Indo-China
has taken from France twice as much as the Marshall Plan gave
her, more than has been spent to repair the last war's devastation.
Indo-China costs not only money but men; it absorbs one out
of two regular noncommissioned officers of her army, and two
out of five of her commissioned officers. The war has continued
for seven years. It has cost 35,000 men killed and missing, and
43,000 wounded; the number of officers killed or permanently
disabled equals the number of graduates for the past four years
from St. Cyr, the French West Point.

Finally, France is paying for tomorrow's war in her effort to
brace the front in Europe. Alone among all the partners in the
Atlantic Coalition, France has been singled out as the country
spending more on arms 12.3 per cent of her national income
than NATO's economists thought wise.

These three burdens alone are enough to give France a task
of titanic proportions. But there are two others equally as heavy.
One of these is the effort to master the Dollar Gap by moderniz-
ing or replacing the archaic, unproductive, generations-old fac-
tories and obsolescent processes of her industry. This has required
a tremendous disgorging of national funds for investment in dams,
railways, coal mines, assembly production. Since French private
capital has stopped investing, these funds must be raised by taxa-
tion or inflation. The last of the five great burdens is to wring out
of industry or the budget the great sums of money necessary to
keep solvent the new social security system of hospitals, medical

FIRE IN THE ASHES 1OO

care, summer camps, accident and unemployment insurance which
the Liberation created.

All these five burdens the payment of three wars, the invest-
ment in remaking French industry, the cost of social security
bear upon French resources with intolerable weight. It is estimated
that forty per cent of all the national income of France is taken
from its citizens by their government just to meet these burdens.
Under a dictatorship like the Soviet Union, protests against such
burdens are met simply by using secret police to muzzle the cries
of misfortune and sacrifice, while the dictators, like surgeons,
operate on the bound bodies without anesthesia. In a democracy,
where liberty prevails, the sacrifices and burdens result in wailing
and groaning which translate into votes that must be heeded.

Over and over such lucid men as Pierre Mendes-France rise in
the French Assembly to tell their colleagues that France must
make a choice; they tell her she must choose where and how she
will be strong, for she cannot be strong at once in Asia, in Africa
and in Europe. Over and over again Frenchmen tell each other
that they must strip one or another of the many burdens of their
country, or else must decide who will bear the weight of the
burdens or who will be stripped of his privileges in the com-
munity. But Frenchmen in their division, in village as in Parlia-
ment, cannot decide which of the many claims to the greatness
they have inherited around the world must be abandoned, or how
to finance these claims except by inflation which corrupts the
nation.

All the seeming instability of France rises, finally, from her
inability to reconcile herself with reality. The French are as
capable in the simpler arts of government today as they have been
in the past. In twenty thousand villages and towns across the coun-
try village councils order their local affairs judiciously and wisely,
putting in new water systems or new swimming pools or new
roads. In any major branch of French national government in
Paris, brilliant civil servants direct affairs, analyze events, draw
blueprints with exquisite intelligence. Even in their restless,
rustling Cabinet reshuffles, a certain common sense prevails so
that year after year the same men Rene Pleven, Georges Bidault,
Robert Schuman, Rene Mayer and half a dozen others shift their

THE MYSTERY OF FRANCE 101

seats but preserve a common shared experience and knowledge of
affairs.

Where France breaks down is at one point only: at the point
where France must make new decisions. Each breakdown of a
government, each new crisis inviting the formation of a new
Cabinet is studied by foreign statesmen and Frenchmen alike in
the hope that this is the moment when the French will decide how
to organize their brilliance and resources and how to approach
their burdens. Sometime, ultimately, everyone tells himself, the
French must recapture their glories and importance, whether in
the frame of a newer, greater Europe or in the frame of a smaller,
nationalist France.

It might happen tomorrow or at the next crisis or in a few
years. For eight years the world has been waiting for the French
to make up their minds. And it still is.

VI

the story of Pierre

Each man tells some essential part of the story of his country
with the story of his life. A few, the great leaders, recite with their
lives the story of command and decision that has shaped their
fellow citizens' lot. Others tell how these distant decisions have
pressed them unwillingly to do what they did, or endowed them,
unconsciously, with good fortune. In between are the men who
have both acted and been acted upon, who are the links between
high politics and the impulses of their fellow citizens.

Pierre Eertaux is such a man. In his life is refracted all the story
of France, that tortured country so rich in promise and human
brilliance which so abuses its promise and wastes its talent.

I first met Pierre on a sunny morning while waiting for a riot
that never happened.

The Communists were clotted on one side of the Church of
Alesia, drifting and milling in the mob-herd, their mass color
flecked with the flower patterns of women's dresses and the white
of shirt-sleeved men. The Gaullists crowded on the other side of
the church, more sedately dressed in dark business suits, their
women more soberly tailored than the Communist women. Be-
tween them stood the troop columns blue uniformed city police,
brown uniformed army Gardes Mobiles, helmeted men of the
black Security Companies. The occasion was the renaming of
Paris' ancient Porte d'Orleans. It was now to be called Porte
Leclerc in honor of General Leclerc, Paris 7 wartime liberator, and
General Charles de Gaulle had been invited to preside at the re-
dedication. The Communists had sworn they would not permit
him to do so and called a counterdemonstration a mile away up
the avenue. Between Communists and Gaullists the government

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 103

had flung a barrier of armed men, proclaiming that both its
enemies should enjoy the right to gather in the streets but that they
must not fight and blood must not flow. It was all France in minia-
ture there, straining with hating groups, knotted about the Church
of Alesia.

My journalist's pass let me slip through the police cordon, and
as I approached the radio command car at the base of the church,
I noticed the presence of the Minister of Interior, Jules Moch.
Moch, recognizing me, said something to the guards and they
passed me into the command post.

Pierre was in the cluster of men about the Minister and we fell
to talking. I did not catch his name but liked him. Tall for a
Frenchman, wiry but not thin, his hair curly and black, his eyes
brown and very youthful, he seemed to be one of the Minister's
aides or secretaries, a type more at home in the cafes of St. Ger-
main-des-Pres than here, at a command post, waiting for a riot
to break.

What caught my attention, however, was not the exquisite
precision of language in his talking, but the casual and coldly wise
dictums he passed in comment on the mob. No, there would be no
trouble or bloodshed today, he said. It's the women who usually
make trouble in a riot and look, the Communist women have their
children with them. No, the Gaullists aren't ready to fight either.
Besides, we have more troops, more manpower than either of the
two mobs, and we have guns, too. It was a huge show of force, so
much power in such overpowering quantity and quality that no
one would be tempted to test it. The government had 15,000
troops ready for this affair, with Security Companies summoned
from as far off as Brest and Lorraine. Everyone in France was
guaranteed his freedom of speech, and so much power had been
gathered to back up this freedom today that no use of power
would be necessary. (It turned out, of course, that Pierre was
right not a blow was struck, no blood was shed that day and
never again did Gaullists and Communists try to face each other
for a showdown in Paris' streets.)

Someone called Pierre away on an errand and before he took
leave I said I'd like to talk to him again. He gave me his card and
suggested I call at his office. I looked at it: "Pierre Bertaux" it said,
"Directeur General, Surete Nationale."

FIRE IN THE ASHES 104

Bertaux. This was Bertaux, the cruel and brilliant Bertaux*
Everyone in France knew the name, and most trembled at it. Men
of the Left shuddered, for Bertaux was the man who had broken,
in blood and violence, France's worst strikes since the war. Men
of the Right froze. Bertaux, said the Right, was not malleable, you
could not trust him, you could not deal with him. The card said
it all Pierre Bertaux, chief of the Surete Nationale, director of
France's secret police and her internal security forces, the ruth-
less chieftain who had come out of the Resistance to break the
back of the Communist party and reduce its once terrifying in-
surrectionary strength to the impotence revealed that day at the
Porte Leclerc.

I called on Bertaux at Surete headquarters a few weeks later in
the summer of 1949, but it was some years later before I was to
know him well. By then the politicians had put the knife to him
and he had been removed from command of the Surete and left
functionless as a "prefet hors cadre" a general without command.
We used to talk then in his house in the Paris suburbs. In summer
we sat in the rambling garden where he was trying to make Vir-
ginia dogwood flower in Northern France. In winter we would
sit in his study, a large comfortable room with a huge fireplace,
lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling, stuffed with literary
curiosa. The works of Lenin flanked Diderot's encyclopedias,
primary textbooks that French children used seventy years ago sat
next to volumes of German poetry. The latest copies of the
Reader's Digest were jumbled with the current effluvia of the
French intellectual Left. In the garden and study Pierre told me
the story of his life and France.

"I am peasant in origin," he said when he began his story.

"All of France is forever peasant at its base and the word you
must start with is the Roman word for peasant: 'paganus.' Taga-
nus' is the best word, for it means both pagan and peasant.

"In France there are only cavaliers and peasants. The cavalier
rides across history on his horse and the peasant bows his head and
is silent. He waits. The cavalier makes his ruins and rides away,
but the peasant lives in the ruins and makes them grow again. He
is always there, primitive, closed to himself, the most mysterious
person in the world, French.

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 105

"We tell our children in school of the Gauls, men with blond
hair and blue eyes, we teach them about the Romans and the
Franks. But these were the conquerors and the conquerors were
never more than a handful on top and the base of France never
changed: the base is dark, anarchic, peasant, Iberian. Frenchmen
do not know themselves or each other for there is always this
crust, this rind on their lives. You have the impression of contact,
you think you know the Frenchman, but when you press, the
crust yields, it does not break. Every Frenchman has a little wall
around him. He says, 'Nobody bosses me around,' or he says, *Ni
dieu, ni maitre' "no god, no master.' The French dislike great
men, they have known too many cavaliers, they like small people.
You look at this government today and you say 'chaos' which is
true. But it is what the French want, this anarchy.

"So. My people were peasants from Lorraine, on the border of
Germany and the Low Countries. Wars always happen there, the
archives are always burned and so my family has no history.
History in our family begins with the rifle barrel my grandmother
used to blow on the coals in the fireplace; the peasants had taken
the rifle barrel from the Russians who had come chasing Napo-
leon back into France in 1815. My grandfather had history, too.
He was captured by the Germans in the war of 1870 and they con-
demned him to death, just as I was captured in this war and con-
demned. It's always the Germans for my grandfather, Les Prus-
siens, for my father, Les Boches, for us, Les Fritz.

"My father was the one who broke from the peasants. I remem-
ber himhe came directly out of the fields, a dark man, with
brown eyes, dark hair, a Spanish complexion, a furious temper.
My father grew up after the Franco-Prussian War and you must
remember how the Church and the state were quarreling then
over who should control the schools. When the state took the
schools away from the Church and made public schools, they
opened a new world to thousands of peasant boys, for the govern-
ment wanted thousands of young men to train as teachers. For
young peasants who wanted to learn, the schools opened a way
out of the fields. This was the way my father went, but even after
he became a professor he never forgot the fields every summer
in vacation he would go back to Lorraine and plough with the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 106

horses. Wherever he lived there was a garden where he worked
with the earth himself.

"I was born in 1907 when he was teaching at Lyons, but I begin
to remember things only later when he was teaching in Rouen and
the war broke out. I was seven years old then so I can't remember
much about that war. But I remember little things do you know
that Rouen was the first town ever bombed from the air? I was
sleeping in my mother's room that night and suddenly I woke
up because the house was shaking and my mother was holding me
in her arms against her nightdress.

"I don't remember how the war ended except that there was
not the slightest trace of joy or celebration when it was over.
Only everyone saying, 'Enfin, c'est fini.' My cousins from Lor-
raine who had been staying with us because the Germans occupied
Lorraine went back right away and my cousin, Marcel he was
just my age was blown up a year later when his plough hit a
shell in the field he was working."

From as early as Pierre Bertaux can remember, his parents had
planned for him a life of scholarship. They did not know or care
how a man enters any other profession; for them the key to all
honor was admission to the Ecole Normale Superieure. All over
France even today, thousands and thousands of families consecrate
their children to the Ecole Normale Superieure in the same way,
and each year in France two or three youngsters still die of over-
work and overstrain as they prepare for the bitterly competitive
examinations that give entrance into this school for greatness.

The Ecole Normale Superieure is one of France's two refineries
of genius, the other being its twin, the Ecole Polytechnique. Both
were created by the great Revolution a century and a half ago,
both have contributed to France's leadership over the past century
and a half as powerfully as Eton and Harrow, Cambridge or Ox-
ford have done to Britain's. Each year from thirty to thirty-five
boys are admitted to the Ecole Normale (about two hundred are
admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique), to be marked as men of
distinction. For the rest of their lives, Normaliens and Polytech-
niciens are a fraternity, a blood brotherhood almost as close-knit
as the brotherhood of West Point men in American life. From the
moment the boys receive the magic admission to the Ecole Nor-

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX lOy

male they live in a club of fellow geniuses. All Paris' libraries are
thrown open to them, all university lectures and research facilities
are free to them, no academic discipline governs them. Mostly, the
young men refine each other's spirits in long, windy sessions of
evening talk, while each chooses the specialty that will be his life's
work and investigates it on his own.

Pierre Bertaux was one of the lucky few. At the age of eighteen,
in 1926, he was admitted to the Ecole Normale as the youngest
member of his class and decided to become a Germanist. The
choice seemed normal to Pierre, for his father, a border country
man, had been a Germanist, too. Pierre's father had dedicated him-
self to making Germans and Frenchmen understand each other
after the First World War. Jakob Wassermann, Thomas Mann,
Heinrich Mann and all the great men of German letters had stayed
at the Bertaux home in Paris when Pierre was a boy. And Ger-
many fascinated Pierre.

In 1927, when Pierre Bertaux was just nineteen, the Ecole
Normale sent him off to Germany to work on his thesis, and when
Pierre arrived to enroll at Berlin University, he found he was the
first French student at the University since the war. Berlin in the
twenties, sitting at the gateway of Asia, with all the best of Ger-
man life sparkling and tossing in its cold dry air, thrilled young
Pierre. It is difficult now, he says, to look back at Germany across
the Hitler years and remember the seductiveness of Berlin life in
the late twenties, how like an island it sat in the middle of Europe,
detached from the earth in a fever of brilliance.

An entire generation of Frenchmen fell thrall, as did Pierre, to
this fascination. The number one student in Pierre's class at the
Ecole Normale was a young Frenchman who loved Germany so
much that when he was captured by the Germans in the Maginot
line, he not only became a collaborator but adopted German
citizenship and died fighting for Germany at Stalingrad as a
Wehrmacht officer. Germany ate its way through half of Pierre's
class at the Ecole Normale Lautman was trapped by the Gestapo
in the Underground and was murdered by Germans; Nizan was
killed fighting the Germans at Dunkerque; and it was only luck
that the Germans did not succeed in killing Pierre, too.

All that, however, was another Germany and far in the future.
As a literary scholar, Pierre selected for his thesis the life of

FIRE IN THE ASHES 108

Holderlin, the purest of Germany's lyric poets, and back and
forth, in the years that followed, Pierre traveled between Paris
and Berlin. It was 1934 when Pierre made his last visit to Berlin
to finish his thesis on Holderlin, sneaking into the German capital
without a visa, hiding in the nursery room of some friends, writing
on a kitchen chair at the children's table beside the window. In the
street below he could see the storm troopers marching by singing
the "Horst Wessel Lied," and then he would turn back to the
other Germany of Holderlin, wondering whether that Germany
would survive.

When Pierre returned to Paris in 1934, having finished his thesis,
there were many openings for him, as there are for any young man
who has finished his apprenticeship in ideas at the Ecole Normale.
He was chief assistant to a friend running for election to the As-
sembly in the Ardennes, and thus experienced a grass-roots ap-
prenticeship in politics. He was summoned to direct the news
broadcast of the French Radio and served there for a year. Next
the Under-Secretary of State for North Africa appointed him as
his personal emissary in Tunisia, and Pierre learned about empire.
When Jean Zay, later to be shot by the Germans, became Minister
of Education, Pierre was chosen as his chief executive officer.
These were interesting jobs, but always, as every sentient man in
Europe, Pierre had the sense of things rotting, life withering, war
gathering. Europe was about to explode and Pierre did not want
to be in Paris when the cavaliers trampled France again. Thus, in
1938, he requested a university appointment in the provinces, and
in the fall of that year he was named Professor of German at the
University of Toulouse, the pleasant city which is the intellectual,
industrial and political center of southwestern France.

"The war," says Pierre, "came as I always dreamed it would.
The papers and politicians said it would be a short and brilliant
war, but I remember when I was mobilized in September, march-
ing to the station in Toulouse with my pack, a little fellow on the
street called, 'Don't wear yourself out with this now remember it
will be a long war and you'll get tired before it's over.'

"I had the reserve commission of a lieutenant and since I was a
professor of German they sent me to the intelligence section in
Gamelin's great headquarters at La-Ferte-sous-Jouarre. Our sec-

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 1OQ

tion chief, an old major of the reserves, had been called back from
civilian life and he had a completely infantile delight in wearing
the uniform again. In the last war he had written the communi-
ques of Marshal Foch's headquarters and his first act in our new
section was to tack up on the wall the last communique Foch had
issued on Armistice Day in 1918.

"That was some headquarters we had at La-Ferte-sous-Jouarre.
You know they say victory sterilizes the imagination well, the
French Army had been completely sterilized by the victory of
1918. Some of our agents got hold of the table of organization of
a German panzer division and it came to me for analysis. You
couldn't read it without realizing that the German panzers were
not planned for infantry support but for deep break-throughs and
penetrations of thirty or forty miles a day. But senior staff officers
laughed at me. I was a reserve officer, they said, and naturally
without the education of the War College in Paris. But if I had
had the good fortune to have studied at the War College I would
have learned there that no break-through can penetrate a front
deeper in one day than half the width of the breach. This was an
iron rule established in the 1914-1918 War and my theoretical
analysis, they said, was nonsense. That was our headquarters.

"In April of 1940 they shifted me to Paris to direct the German
broadcasts beamed at the enemy. So I was in Paris when the end
came in June. There were thousands of Parisians who hoped, as
I did, that the Army would stop and fight in Paris, for Paris is a
wonderful place to fight. What if the Sainte Chapelle or Notre
Dame were destroyed tant pis for the ruins, but Paris would have
been proud. By the night of June 1 1, the government had already
left and my broadcasting section too. That night the city was full
of movement, cars racing away loaded with baggage, smoke from
burning papers, people drifting in the streets waiting for the Ger-
mans. Our German broadcast usually went out at midnight and
when I came to the station the mechanics told me the radio net
over France was fading. Radio Strasbourg was dead, Radio Lyons
was dead, we were ordered to take Radio Paris off the air at mid-
night sharp. I asked them to give me fifteen minutes more; what
difference does it make if Paris goes silent at midnight or mid-
night-fifteen, I asked. They agreed and so I sat down with the
microphone in my hand and for fifteen minutes I talked to the

FIRE IN THE ASHES HO

Germans in the night, in German, about France. I told them not
to think that just because they were coming to Paris tomorrow
they would win. We are leaving, that's true, I said, but we're com-
ing back and you can't hold it because all you have is force and
force isn't enough. Someday we'll have more force than you and
we'll meet here again. Other people have taken Paris and lost
France, and even if you get to the Pyrenees don't think you've
taken France, because France will last and we'll be back.

"The next morning a friend and I got into our Citroen before
the Germans came into the city and we left, driving, driving south
and west to Bordeaux and Toulouse and home. In Toulouse they
demobilized me, my post at the University was waiting for me,
and in the fall I was teaching again."

By November of 1940 Pierre Bertaux had joined the Resistance.
It was an entirely natural act. Pierre had been visiting in the town
of Clermont-Ferrand and had joined an old friend for a drink on
the terrace of a cafe. As they talked, Pierre asked his friend
whether anybody still had contact left "over there," "over there"
meaning London. His friend said, why yes, he had himself, and
when Pierre journeyed back to Toulouse that night he, too, was
in the Resistance. Pierre cannot remember now what made him do
it; he supposes it was because of his children. He had one little
year-old boy and there was soon to be another. No one knew how
long the Occupation would last, but if it lasted long no man, he
felt, could hope to shape his child's mind one way when all the
power of the state would be shaping it another. The children
would grow up little Fascists unless he did something. Therefore,
if he could make France free againgood. But if he were killed
that would not be too bad, for then it would be impossible for the
children to love the state that had killed their father, and they
would be committed from childhood.

The first net that Pierre organized in Toulouse was ridiculously
amateurish. It included a local filling-station operator, an Italian
refugee who kept a bookstore and several young boys. They
wrote letters in invisible ink; they tried to map German coastal
fortifications; when they finally secured a radio they ranged the
directional antenna on London using a map from a schoolboy's
geography book. Not until the spring of 1941 did they make any

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 111

real link with General de Gaulle in London and not until Sep-
tember of 1941 could they arrange for their first parachute drop.
That was an exciting moment, Pierre remembers, waiting in a
clearing in the woods before dawn with flashlights hooked up to
an old automobile battery to guide the plane in and then chasing
out to see what the parachute had brought. It brought pistols,
plastic explosives, incendiaries, but no machine guns, which was
what the net wanted most. Pierre's wife wanted to use the para-
chute silk for the layette of the baby she was expecting, but for
security's sake, regretfully, they decided to burn it. Yet someone
must have talked about the drop perhaps a boy who could not
keep himself from boasting. And on December n, 1941, before
dawn, the police came to Pierre's house and arrested him.

Pierre was the first man of the Resistance arrested in Toulouse
and in those days the Resistance carried no honor. It was only
later, when the war was won, that everyone claimed a Resistance
record and insisted that the Republic had never died in their
hearts. But in that first year of defeat it was otherwise, for France
was broken in spirit and good people thought of the first handful
of Resistants as trouble-makers. Petain and Vichy were France; to
be against them was to be a traitor in time of trouble; to work for
the Resistance was to be an English spy. The Minister of Educa-
tion stopped Pierre's professorial salary seven days after his arrest
and left Denise, his wife, expecting her baby in a few weeks, desti-
tute. Not more than twenty people in Toulouse would speak to
Denise after Pierre's arrest, for what he had done was not "chic";
and those who did befriend Denise refused to defend Pierre's ac-
tion but simply called him mad.

A French military court tried Pierre as a British spy. Pierre's
lawyer wanted to make a flaming defense, confessing all, invoking
the glory and honor of France and the nobility of Resistance. But
Pierre insisted that such a defense, though it would give the lawyer
an attentive audience for his eloquence, could only result in
Pierre's own death. For if he confessed to the act, the Germans
would force the French military court to execute him, but if he
lied and denied all, then the court might make believe it believed
the denial and let him off with a lighter sentence. The Military
Advocate-General demanded that Pierre be shot forthwith as an
example to all other traitors, but the court decided that a three-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 112

year jail sentence would do. This pleased everyone except the
Advocate-General, who was furious and still insisted on life im-
prisonment as a minimum. Later, when Pierre became governor
of the Toulouse region on Liberation, the Advocate-General, still
a colonel of the French Army, accused Pierre of persecuting him
for "purely personal reasons."

Pierre was transferred from prison to prison and life proved
more enjoyable than he might have imagined, for, when he could
keep from worrying about his wife and babies, he found that
here was life with no decisions to make, no responsibility, nothing
but quiet and time to think. The most pleasant of the camps was
the last, a huge jail in Dordogne where Pierre was penned with the
common criminals and gypsies. Here, in the evenings, Pierre would
recite to the gypsies tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for the
crafty gypsies loved to hear about the crafty Ulysses. Here, too,
Pierre learned about the world of the common criminal from the
great jewel thief, Pierre-Paul Leca, never dreaming that this prison
friendship would in later years cost him so dearly. Leca was a
great patriot and had his own theory about France's defeat in
1940. "France was rotten," he used to say, "she never had a chance.
The Army was rotten, the bourgeoisie was rotten, the people
were rotten. It's only in the underworld that men know what true
honor is; you in the legal world can sign papers and hold people
to contracts. But we in the underworld can sign no papers. A man's
word is his honor and I tell you even the underworld was rotten
before the defeat. You couldn't even trust the word of a crook
you trusted."

They sprung Pierre from jail at the end of 1943. By then the
victory of the Allies was written clearly enough for all to see and
the Resistance had become honorable. It was not too difficult, thus,
for Denise to arrange with the officials of Vichy a commutation
of sentence which let Pierre slip out of jail in December and be
spirited away quickly to the southwest, back to the old Toulouse
region, where all through the winter and spring months he hid in
the foothills of the Pyrenees.

By early 1944 the life of the Resistance had changed too. Pierre's
own net had grown and expanded. It was now no longer a band
of amateurs; it had arms; its codes were developed; its call signal
from London was "the leopard's claws are varnished." All through

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 113

the Toulouse region were other Resistance nets, both larger and
smaller, of every shade of patriotism, ambition and political aspira-
tion. The Germans, it was obvious, soon must lose. But who would
replace them? And even as the groups prepared for the final in-
surrection, they stalked warily one about the other, maneuvering
for position of leadership on the final day of freedom. Communist
nets, Gaullist nets, independent nets all cooperated, but cooperated
with a sense of mistrust and rivalry that grew each day as Libera-
tion drew near.

All the Resistance nets of France were, by this time, loosely co-
ordinated from Paris where the National Council of Resistance
sat in clandestine session, drawing up plans, appointing secret
officials for Liberation government, balancing the claims of con-
flicting groups for authority and leadership in their regions of
planned insurrection. It was Paris that decided that the insurrec-
tionary Commissioner of the Republic for Toulouse would be
Louis Finistere, 1 as the Communists demanded, but that the Deputy
Commissioner should be Pierre Bertaux, a nonpolitical Resistant.

Even down to the middle of August, when the battle was about
to be joined, when the Allies had already taken the beaches and
were plunging to Paris, the Resistance still lived to total secrecy.
On the night of the twenty-first, a courier brought word to Pierre
in the mountains that all chiefs of the regional Resistance nets
were to meet that night in town. Even then Pierre could recog-
nize only two or three names and faces among the fifteen men
whom he met at the rendezvous. Each had a secret assignment
and only Finistere, the Commissioner-designate, knew them all;
only he had been informed that Bertaux was to be second in com-
mand. The meeting dissolved without setting a date for the insur-
rection, although each man knew that it could now be only a
matter of days.

The Germans triggered the action. By late afternoon of the
twenty-second, the movement of the Wehrmacht out of Southern
France had begun to pour troops through Toulouse on foot, by
truck, by train. By evening one could hear the occasional crack
of a pistol shot, then later the whine of a sniper's rifle and during

1 This is not his real name. The man chosen on Communist demand has since
broken with the Communist party and it does little good to publish his name
now as a Communist ally.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 114

the night machine guns began to splatter in the city. Pierre rose
before dawn, pocketed his pistol and made his way on foot to the
insurrectionary headquarters. No sooner had he arrived than a
courier rushed in saying, "Finistere is dead . . . they shot him
. . . they shot him." The report, as it turned out later, was untrue,
for Finistere, though he had been shot by a German patrol in the
night, was still alive. He had been gravely wounded, however,
and on that morning of insurrection he lay in a coma in a Toulouse
hospital. But for Pierre it was the same as if Finistere had been
killed. No one but Finistere knew all the plans; no one but
Finistere knew that Bertaux was Deputy Commissioner of the Re-
public. Yet now Finistere was in coma and speechless, Bertaux was
the man upon whom the authority of the French Republic had
been settled by order of Paris, and the sole instrument of his au-
thority was the pistol heavy in his pocket.

For several hours Pierre wrestled with his problem, and then,
finally, when it became clear that it was he alone who had to act,
he set out to find two young men of his own net and do whatever
had to be done.

"We set out on foot, all three of us," says Pierre, "to walk to the
main square where the prefecture is. The prefecture is the seat
of government; I was the authority of government. Across the
street from the prefecture is the police headquarters, and there
men crowded in the police courtyard, men in shirt sleeves, men
without neckties, men unshaven, all in confusion. I walked into
the courtyard very slowly. I was afraid. A man rushed over to me
and I recognized him; he was one of the men I had met that other
night at the meeting of insurrectionary leaders. He recognized
me, too, and said his group was waiting for orders. What should
they do?

" Tinistere is shot. He's in the hospital. Unconscious,' I said. 1
am his deputy appointed by Paris. I am the Commissioner now/

"He took it as simply as I said it.

" 'At your orders/ he replied, 'the police are with you. What do
we do next?'

"I looked across the square at the prefecture and it seemed very
logical so I said, 'Next, we take the prefecture.'

"The four of us walked across the square. Myself, with pistol

THE STORY OF PIERRE B E R T A IT X llj

in pocket, my two boys and Sirinelli that was his name, I learned
the chief of the Resistance group in the police. I had never been
in a prefecture before, but I walked in and went directly up the
stairs. A pale little man was sitting behind the desk in a big chair,
the Vichy prefect. 'Who are you?' he asked as I walked in.

" 'I am the Commissioner of the Republic,' I said. Who are
you?'

"He told me he was the prefect of Toulouse, that he was glad
to see someone with authority, and rushed around his desk to
shake my hand. I refused it; I walked around him behind his
desk and sat down in his chair. That chair was important, from
the moment I sat down behind that desk, I was government. I
questioned him: Waterworks operating? Electricity plant oper-
ating? How much food on hand in the city? How much gasoline?
When I finished, I told him that he was a prisoner of the Re-
public, that he was to go home to his apartment and stay indoors
until summoned. When he left it was 11:30 on Sunday morning,
August 23, 1944, my two boys were standing guard outside my
office, and I was the Commissioner of France in Toulouse.

"That morning! Outside my office, in my office, on the down-
stairs floors were the committees, the groups, the organizations,
the leaders who came and went, everybody asking everybody
else all day, Who are you?'

"The first person was a boy of twenty-three, his shirt open at
the collar, handsome, excited, wearing the bars of a colonel on
his shoulder. 'Who are you?' he said when he found me behind
the desk. I told him and he stood back in surprise. Who are you?'
I asked. He was Ravanel, I learned, the commander of the Force
Frangaise de Flnterieur for the region; he had just made himself
a colonel that morning and for him all the world was romance; he
was young, excited, happy and here was insurrection. Another
self-made colonel came, a third colonel, deputations came. Every-
one was giving orders; German troops were still in the city, the
Vichy Security Corps was still armed in their barracks, the FFI
were racing around shooting, and the FTP, who had the most
arms of all, were completely out of control. The FTP belonged
to the Communists.

"From the countryside other Resistance groups were coming

FIRE IN THE ASHES

in. From north of us in the district of Lot, the Communist Re-
sistance groups, supposed to be the toughest of all France, were
coming down. From the east of us, in the Tarn, the tough Gaul-
lists were moving in. Everybody had guns to shoot each other,
and the Germans had guns too. The newspaper plant was seized
by two groups at once and each started to publish a newspaper
that same day, one Communist, one Republican. Ravanel and I
tried to take over the radio station that evening. But Communist
FTP's had already seized it and they threw us out, firing as we
drove away. I did not want to fight them at that time.

"We settled down that first night in Toulouse in chaos. I slept
inside the prefect's office on the floor with my two boys. Eighty
hostile Communist FTP's slept in the anteroom and corridors out-
side my office, bedded down on their mattresses and cots, sup-
plied with their own food parcels for a long stay. I kept my
pistol with me and before I locked the door I informed the peo-
ple outside that if anybody tried to open the door that night,
I would shoot.

"The next morning all the Resistance groups, big and little,
FFI and FTP, Communist and non-Communist, gathered for a
meeting in my office to decide what we should do. The Germans
had left in the night, and the only enemy strength left was the
Vichy Security Companies. It was a tense meeting. I had the
title and authority from General de Gaulle, chief of the Pro-
visional Government of France. But the FTP had most of the
guns. They had expected Finistere, the Communists' choice, to
be the Commissioner; now it was me.

"We argued; they insisted that the Vichy Companies be dis-
armed, I insisted I did not want to provoke bloodshed by fighting
in the streets. There were many people in the room, knots of
people waving hands at each other, yelling. One man in a corner
caught my eye, a man with a hard face, broad nostrils; he looked
tough but good; he smelled solid. I said to him quietly, 'Who are
you?' He told me he was Colonel Georges of the Lot department.
I knew Colonel Georges by name for he commanded the Com-
munist FTP's up there, mostly coal miners, and tough. But I felt
I could trust him. 'Will you bring your men down to the city
to keep order at my command?' I asked. He said he would if

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX

Ravanel's armed FFI would agree peacefully that Georges' FTP
should come in with their guns. Then, and only then, I felt I could
compromise. I agreed to use my authority as the Commissioner
of the Republic to disarm and disband the Vichy Companies, if
the Communists would place Colonel Georges and his Communist
FTP's under my direct orders. To this they agreed.

"Neither Georges nor I gained any credit for this. Later when
Paris was again the capital, the government criticized me for dis-
arming Vichy's Security Troops without their permission. And
the Communists threw Georges out of the party because he had
cooperated with me in taking over. But we did it peacefully. Paris
was far away and Toulouse was ripe for bloodletting; we had to
make our own decisions. All over France that summer, men were
making decisions by themselves, without Paris. There were eight-
een regions of Liberation and everywhere, except in Marseille
where the Communists got control, Frenchmen who knew noth-
ing about politics took the government in their own hands and
held ita labor union leader here, a doctor there, a professional
man somewhere else.

"For weeks, all through the summer of 1944, 1 was alone. Power
is a terrible thing. When you have absolute power you are iso-
lated. No one but police tell you anything. That's why a 'corps
elu' call it an assembly, a parliament, a congress is so important.
Even if it is only a consultative assembly it is important, for when
its members talk you find out what goes on in people's minds. But
the most terrible thing about power is not this, nor even the
power to kill. The terrible thing is the power to pardon, to have
to sit at night with the dossier of a man condemned to death and
decide whether to let him be killed or not be killed. This power
to pardon crushes a man.

"You ask when the Liberation and insurrection were over? It
wasn't over on any one day. It's like a man falling sick you fall
sick and you remember that day. Then it takes weeks slowly to
recover; one day you start eating solid food, another day you
start sitting up in bed, another day you feel you can get up and
walk, then finally you are well. The insurrection in Toulouse
happened on August 20, 1944; it was weeks and months after that
day before law came back."

FIRE IN THE ASHES Il8

It took almost two years before law and control from Paris re-
turned to southwest France, creeping in as the people withdrew
from the forum of action.

Pierre remembers the first step in the return of law as early as
October, 1944, only two months after the insurrection. The Lib-
eration Committee in the village of Lisle-en-Dodons had captured
a French informer a dirty, disgraceful, squalid traitor who had
given away to the Gestapo dozens of French patriots to be shipped
off to die in German prison camps. The village Liberation Com-
mittee thirsted for vengeance, insisting the informer be shot in the
village square where they could savor his death. But since the
traitor was held in the Toulouse prison where Pierre was Com-
missioner, this decision was his. There was not the slightest doubt
of his guilt and Pierre, examining his dossier, knew the informer
had to die. Yet he felt the man should die quietly at dawn, in the
prison, not in a carnival in the village streets. This decision infuri-
ated the villagers, and Pierre's police told him that if the prisoner
were not handed over for village execution there would be a riot,
perhaps bloodshed.

The night before the execution the village Committee of Lib-
eration called on Pierre a delegation of solid, middle-aged, family
men. They had been thinking it over, they said, and had decided
that after all it was not good to kill the traitor in the square, be-
cause it would be bad for the children to see a man bleeding and
dying in the streets. As they talked, Pierre scratched notes on his
pad and, when they were finished, slipped the paper across his
desk to ask whether this really was how they felt. They said yes.
Whereupon Pierre asked them to sign their names to it and they
collapsed like pricked balloons. As fathers they did not want their
children to witness a bloody execution, but as political leaders
they did not want to deny the villagers their vengeance and had
hoped that Pierre would take sole responsibility for the execution.
At five in the morning the informer was shot in the Toulouse
prison. The village boiled with anger when people found they had
been cheated, but they could do nothing, for their leaders had
consented to the return of law.

The law crept back gradually because people needed it. But
Paris control returned more slowly. It was over a year later, in
December, 1945, before Toulouse felt the first tug of Paris re-

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 119

straint. A sugar riot had taken place in Toulouse that month and
a great warehouse of sugar had been stormed. Pierre, as Commis-
sioner, had sent first one company of police and then a second to
stop the riot, but none had come back to report. At four in the
morning, therefore, Pierre drove to the warehouse to see what
had happened and found all quiet. In the entry of the warehouse,
however, he found a large basket full of parcels of sugar. There
were fifty-four parcels and on each was marked the name of one
of the policemen sent to keep order; the rioters had shared the
sugar with the police and each policeman had marked a package
with his name before going back to the barracks to sleep. That
morning Pierre dismissed each of the fifty-four who had accepted
sugar. And only two days later came the order from Paris: rein-
state each of the fifty-four pending a full judicial investigation!
Paris had begun to govern again; only on authority from Paris:
could a policeman five hundred miles away be fired.

Between the Liberation and the end of 1945, for a period of
almost a year and a half, France had had no real national govern-
mentand France was governed better than for many a decade.
For centuries before, Paris had drawn to itself all the brains, all
the scholars, all the leadership of France until the beautiful capital
city suffered from cerebral congestion, and the rest of France was
a political desert. The design of a village schoolhouse, the opening
of a new waterworks, the erection of a new bridge anywhere in
France rested upon decision in Paris, hundreds of miles away, as
it rests again today. But under the Occupation and during the
Liberation, when Paris could not function as capital of the nation,
the brains and talents of France were scattered all across the
country and the great provincial cities Lyons, Marseille, Bor-
deaux, Grenoble became regional capitals in their own right, cen-
ters of proud men making their own decisions.

Toulouse, where Pierre Bertaux governed as Commissioner of
southwest France, was no exception, and it was with unbelievable
excitement and enthusiasm that the people whom Pierre led pro-
ceeded to rule themselves. Before the war local criticism of affairs
had to wait for a national election to voice itself in a new selection
of deputies to be sent to Paris. Now, Pierre found, a critic could
be silenced by putting him on a regional committee and telling
him to cure what was bothering him.

FIKE IN THE ASHES 12O

Such a system could not last long, for by the end of 1945 the
men of political talent and ambition were gathering again in Paris.
It was clear they could not govern France from Paris as before,
if regional governments divided authority with central govern-
ment everywhere beyond Paris' suburban borders. Prewar depu-
ties in Paris had been accustomed to thinking of themselves as
big men, the givers of favors and dispensers of patronage in each
little department from which they came. The deputies could not
now control the new officials in the Liberation regions, each of
whom directed half a dozen or more little departments in an area
as large as an American state. The ministers of government disliked
the regional governments, the civil services disliked them, and the
Communists disliked them most of all because it was the regional
governments like that of Toulouse which had frustrated their bid
for power in the hot days of insurrection and revolt. The Com-
munists, in France as elsewhere, wanted a strong central govern-
ment. In those days the Communists sat in the French Cabinet
and their bitterness was unrelenting.

In the spring of 1946, therefore, on March 31, the national gov-
ernment in Paris announced the dissolution of all regional govern-
ments, and with that the war, for Pierre, had come to an end.
He no longer had an apartment to live in; he was in debt; he was
tired. With Denise and his children, Pierre rented a cottage in the
Pyrenees and went off for a long summer of rest in the mountains
until fall should come and he might return to Toulouse to teach
German.

It was only a few weeks before the school session resumed
when Pierre found that, after all, he was not to become a school-
teacher again. During the early days of the Resistance a stranger
fleeing from the Germans had come south to the Toulouse region
and fallen in with Pierre's net, where he worked on a plan for
the sabotage of the electric power net in the Toulouse area. That
man was Jules Moch, and now, in after-war politics, Moch was
suddenly a Socialist chief of great importance. In September of
1946 Moch had just been named Minister of Public Works and
Reconstruction and, casting about for an executive officer, he
recalled Bertaux. A telephone call from Paris to the Pyrenees lo-
cated Bertaux out hunting in the hills. Before Pierre realized what

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 121

was happening, he found himself on a train to Paris, dressed in his
country clothes, a hamper of food with him and a boxed cat as
company.

The Ministry of Public Works was an exciting ministry in those
days, for its job was the repair of all war devastation in France.
So successfully did the Ministry go about its tasks that Jules Moch
rose to be a power in national politics, and Pierre Bertaux, too,
came to general attention. But 1947 was the year that the Commu-
nists were expelled from the French government and by late sum-
mer it was clear that there would be trouble in the streets of
France. Recalling Pierre's clash with the Communists in Toulouse,
it was suggested therefore that he be sent south to be the prefect,
or chief authority, "of the great hub city of Lyons.

"Lyons in 1947," says Pierre, "was wider open, better pene-
trated, more skilfully organized by the Communists than was
Prague in the coup of 1948. The Communists controlled the city
council, occupied the strategic buildings, dominated the streets
and terrorized the police. When they wanted, they could throw
10,000 rioters in the city's streets. A few months before I came,
in May of 1947, a housewives' demonstration had broken out,
spontaneously, over bread rationing and the Communists had
capped it. This was their standard technique. The party's orders
everywhere in France were that party activists must move in on
any riot lasting for more than two hours, take over leadership
and channel it. If they were slow or missed their chance, local
Communist leaders could be removed for the blunder. The Lyons
riot in May was typical the Communists shepherded the house-
wives to the prefecture, broke in, seized the prefect bodily and
carried him to the radio station. Then, over the government radio,
he was forced to declare that all outstanding bread tickets were
cancelled and bread was free of the ration.

"I replaced that prefect in September and the Communists gave
me my first riot two weeks after I arrived with Denise and the
children. This one started at the Labor Exchange and they
marched to storm the prefecture. We deployed the guards with
machine guns and when the rioters charged us, gave them tear gas.
When they had fled, I called in their leaders. They came to me
with their eyes streaming tears and I told them how things would
be run in Lyons:

FIRE IN THE ASHES 122

" 'Here on my desk is a telephone,' I said. 'On your desk at
the Labor Exchange there is a telephone too. You can see me
any time you want just by lifting the telephone and asking. But
you did not ask to see me, you came by force. I live in this house
with my wife and children and you have no right to storm in.
If I came with police troops to storm the Labor Exchange you
would have the right to resist. So I resist when you try to force
me. Next time, remember the telephone.'

"It took several months to reorganize the police, but by the time
the Communists pulled the general strike in December of 1947
we were in control of the streets again. Lyons is the bottleneck
for the rail and road traffic between North and South France; if
the Communists could block it, they could cut France in two,
which is what they tried to do. They pulled the switches on the
railroads; they covered the highways with four-pronged spikes
to puncture tires; they tried to seize the telephone exchange. But
we survived. The trains were a bit slow, but they ran; the expresses
never stopped; the roads were kept clear; they damaged the tele-
phone exchange, but we repaired it very quickly; we held the
radio station and twice a day I could broadcast to the people that
all was well. We outlasted them.

"The last big strike was the coal strike in 1948 a bloody one.
In our district the Communists tried to flood the mines by stop-
ping the pumps, so our troops went down, 2,500 feet underground,
to pull the Communists one by one away from the pumps and
save the mines from flooding. We managed it without killing, and
when the mines were cleared and the pumps going again, the
strike was over.

"By this time, the situation had changed in Paris, too. Moch
had become Minister of the Interior and responsible for all the
internal security of France he wanted me back in Paris, to be
chief of the Surete Nationale.

"So there I was in 1949, police chief of all France. It amuses
me even now to think of it me, a professor, a man of the Left-
police chief! My friends would say to me, 'You, you Pierre, a
Normalien. . . . You, Pierre, on the side of the cops!'

"Yes, yes, it was a paradox. But I said, good, let's take it that
way. If this is where history has brought me, so be it Bertaux and
the cops, me and the flics. For it's time to peel away the old

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 123

legends and look at society as it really is. Society is like a body
with needs of the spirit and needs of the flesh, and one isn't any
more important than the other. It's more fashionable to be a
psychiatrist and deal with the mind than to be a urologist and
deal with filth, but someone must examine products of the body
to be sure the toxins are efficiently carried away. It's more honor-
able to be the chef in the kitchen than to be the swill collector who
empties the buckets, but the kitchen needs both. There's nothing
more important for the world than that democracy should work.
To work, it must understand its problems and learn how to dis-
pose of the toxins in the system. Police are the men who deal
with poisons, they are the sewer cleaners. They keep democracy
healthy by cleaning out crooks and traffic violators, by catching
thugs and arsonists, but also they must deal with totalitarians and
terrorists. We talk so much about democracy being made of
liberty and equality. But liberty and equality rest on two things
we ignore the police and the judges. The police must be efficient
to preserve liberty; the judges must be incorruptible and honest.
"When I think about democracy, I come in through the back
door, the garbage door, I come with the police. It is an old tra-
dition of democracy to despise police, to laugh at them and hate
them. The police know this. They have been despised so long,
many of them have become despicable. Cops have a sense of in-
feriority that is enormousit goes even to their highest com-
mandersall of them surly, suspicious, who feel life cheats them
out of honor. They are recruited from average men, commanded
by average men, and they lack pride. But and this is a big but if
you handle them right, make them proud, then they become proud
people, for cops are simple men. They can be more greedy, cor-
rupt, more full of hate than any people I've ever known. Yet,
under proud direction, I found they could be more devoted, more
faithful and decent than anybody else I've ever worked with."

When Pierre arrived in Paris to take command of the French
Surete Nationale at the beginning of 1949, the great strikes of
1947 and 1948 were fading into history, but the organized power
of the Communists and their threat to the state remained almost
as great as ever. The party's peak postwar membership of 1,000,000
had shrunk to 800,000, but it still controlled the greatest labor

FIRE IN THE ASHES 12 4

unions of the nation, its largest chain of daily newspapers, im-
portant arms caches and a band of zealots ready to kill and die
for it. To oppose the party as chief of France's internal security,
Pierre had the secret services of the Surete Nationale, a corps of
55,000 to 60,000 police and security guards, scattered over the
country, plus certain convictions and ideas that had come to him
first in Toulouse and later in the strikes in central France.

Bertaux's basic principle was a simple one: that if a government
is prepared to act, to use the terrible force of state intelligently
and skilfully, there is no reason why any democracy should be
destroyed by such a coup as destroyed the Czech Republic in
Prague in 1948. In Lyons, fighting the riots of 1947, Bertaux had
learned certain tactics of civil strife and order which he now
proceeded to generalize over France. Of these the most important
was the rule never to permit police power to be dispersed. The
tradition that each bridge, each powerhouse, each telephone ex-
change must be guarded was one, Bertaux felt, which could lead
to disaster. For, if the government tried to defend only the hun-
dred most important nerve centers in France against a Commu-
nist insurrection, it would pin down and immobilize 100,000 men.
Moreover, with a Communist party as deeply infiltrated among
the workers as was the French Communist party, external guards
were almost useless, for, as Pierre had learned in Lyons, while
guards watched buildings from the outside, saboteurs could cut
wires and wreck equipment from within. In Lyons, Pierre had
learned to keep his own forces concentrated and mobile, always
at command and never to commit them against a mob unless they
had absolute crushing superiority.

French security, today, is organized roughly on these Bertaux
principles. The first line of defense is, of course, the civil police
in any city; the ultimate reserve of defense is the Army. But
between these two lines is the emergency reserve of the Companies
of Republican Security, some 12,000 men organized in 60 com-
panies of 200 each. These, companies were organized by Bertaux
to live, as they live now, in a state of constant mobilization.
Scattered over the nation, they are mobile, ready for instant con-
centration anywhere. Traveling in their own trucks with their
own rolling kitchens, their own bedding and camping gear, they
travel at a route-speed double that of the French Army on the

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 12$

move. They are trained to handle mobs in the street without
killing; linked all across France by their own short-wave radio net,
equipped with helicopters and ground-to-air communication for
observation, they are so organized that if any local situation
threatens to get beyond local police control, the Companies of
Republican Security can be concentrated anywhere in over-
whelming numbers within twenty-four hours long before the
Army could get out of bed. They are used only as a last resort,
never committed until the last minute when the Communists
have shown their hand. When they are used, with their radios,
tear gas, helmets, riot guns and superior communications, they act
with lightning speed and crushing force.

Force, however, is not enough in dealing with Communists,
and here Pierre disagrees with the American approach to the
problem. "You Americans are wrong," he says, "in trying to force
your methods on our country. You believe in theology, in sorcery,
in witchcraft. For you, communism is a sin, and the Communists
are witches to be burned. The fact is they are very simple, ordi-
nary people. For fifteen years the Communists have pulled to
their ranks the finest young people of France. France is such an
old country, so much is rotten in it, and the Communist argu-
ment is so simple to make an omelet, they say, you must smash
eggs. So year after year the generous, the noble, the bold, the
brilliant youth of a full generation has been drawn to it and been
led by it to the final abomination which is communism. For the
error of original decision in joining the Communists is so slight
and the final consequences are so terrible. They, the young men
of communism, are the truest victims, and the job is not to perse-
cute them but to liberate them."

To cope with Communists, says Bertaux, you need not only
force but understanding. Communists can be stopped by force,
but they can be wiped out only by understanding.

The first thing to be grasped about French communism, says
Bertaux, is how rigid and mechanical the French party is. To
begin with, its thinking is sterile. Since the death of Lenin, says
he, communism has had no thinkers at all, for Lenin was a genius
and, like a great tree, nothing has been able to grow in com-
munism beneath his shade. If one reads Lenin carefully, one can
always divine what the Communists plan next. On Pierre's book-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 126

shelf at the Surete the collected works of Lenin were always
present.

Beyond that, one must understand Communist machinery of
action. There are many parts to this machinery in France. There
is the outer layer of fellow travelers and sympathizers, millions
of non-Communists who listen to Communist propaganda and are
caught. These are the voters. Within this husk lie the party mem-
bers, hundreds of thousands of them who pay dues but who may
or may not follow the toughs and the leaders at the moment of
insurrection. Within these, in turn, lie the hard-core zealots no
more than 10,000 in all France, men who are ready to go down
in the street and die for the party at any moment. They are not
many, but in a state of governmental decomposition or paralysis
they would be enough, for scores of thousands might follow them.
Fifteen hundred Communist toughs could seize Paris if a govern-
ment were unprepared to defend itself. And, finally, there are the
most dangerous men, the crypto-Communists. The crypto-Com-
munists are the agents of Russia, people who have no visible con-
nection with the party; they may be businessmen, doctors,
engineers, Russian nationals, mercenaries. Some are recruited
through the party, but most have no apparent connection with it.
In France many of Russia's most trusted agents are men who
collaborated with the Germans.

All this machinery lies under the control of the Russians, but
this control is never an easy one. Nothing could be more danger-
ous for the Russians, Bertaux believes, than a successful Com-
munist revolution in France that might become its rival, like
Tito's. A Communist party powerful enough to paralyze France
and wrench her from the American alliance serves Russian pur-
poses better than a Communist France which is strong enough
to be independent. Between the two, therefore, between Russia
and the French party there is always an element of doubt and
suspicion, always a reluctance of the French party to tell its last
secrets to Russia and always a Russian compulsion to penetrate
every last cell, everywhere, with party spies and agents loyal to
Russia first, not to French leadership. Even the highest function-
aries of the French party live under this surveillance; they do
not know which of their bodyguards is on the Russian payroll,
reporting every movement to the international control organs.

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX

For two busy years Pierre Bertaux sat in contemplation of the
Communists from the chambers of the French secret service.
During those years, as normal life returned, as the Marshall Plan
began to revive French economy and industry, as the French
police tightened their security measures, the Communist party
began that long steady decline in organized power which con-
tinued until the end of 1952, when the French economy became
stagnant and Communist influence revived. Year by year the
circulation of their newspapers fell, their union membership
dropped off, their party dues-payers declined until now they are
estimated to be less than 400,000.

But he who deals in secrecy and suspicion cannot come away
unhurt. Yet it was not the Communists who ultimately trapped
Bertaux, but France's internal politics.

In France, the Ministry of the Interior is the police ministry,
and in France, as in America, police are the easiest means of pay-
ing cheap political favors in government. The police must be ever
pliable, accommodating, ready to fix tickets, drop charges, hush
scandals. Within the Ministry, moreover, a senior bureaucracy of
almost irremovable police officials has grown up with the years
whose power lies in their fat dossiers of unpublished intelligence
and investigation. For several generations French democracy has
choked on such officials whose secret powers of blackmail have,
in the past, terrified even their political superiors.

Into this swamp of ancient institutional intrigue, strode Bertaux
with the harsh and biting standards of the new officials cast up
by the Resistance, the men who had sworn to make France pure.
While the peril of communism dominated French politics, Bertaux
could act ruthlessly. In his first year as chief of French security,
Bertaux could and did fire between 2,000 and 3,000 officers, high
and low, for graft, incompetence and unreliability. But by 1950
the peril had abated and Jules Moch, Bertaux's political sponsor,
had moved from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of
Defense.

Bertaux's enemies within and without the police bureaucracy
were by this time numerous. In one of his earliest investigations,
Bertaux had muckraked to light a scandal which revealed some of
France's most eminent generals as the source of leakage of infor-
mation to the Communist rebels in Indo-China. The scandal had

FIRE IN THE ASHES

been hushed but it had left an area of bitterness. Many men waited
for Bertaux to expose a flank of weakness-or for a tool to present
itself with which to strike at him.

They had not long to wait. Suddenly, on June 30, 1950, after
Moch had left the Ministry of the Interior, an embittered ex-police
official whom Bertaux had dismissed for incompetence and expense-
account padding presented to the government a bizarre and fan-
tastic set of documents. In them he charged that Pierre Bertaux,
chief of the Surete Nationale, rather than being a paragon of
virtue, not only was an intimate friend of gangsters, but had used
his Resistance net in Toulouse to cover a vast enterprise of rack-
eteering. Moreover, said the official, Bertaux had personally master-
minded the fabulous theft of the jewels of the Aga Khan's wife,
the Begum, on the Riviera in 1949. Only one shred of information
supported all these charges: the great jewel robbery had been
organized by none other than Pierre-Paul Leca, Bertaux's wartime
prison mate in Dordogne, and in chasing Leca, the police had
discovered in Leca's personal notebook the name and telephone
number of Pierre Bertaux.

The new Minister of Interior pooh-poohed the charges. The
highest court of France set up a judiciary investigation of the
accusations. It was no surprise to anyone when a year and a half
later the court returned its findings clearing Bertaux of all charges
and allegations. Bertaux, in his term of office, had broken up more
gangster bands of France's highly organized underworld than
any previous Director of the Surete. But before then, in the spring
0/1951, it had been suggested to Pierre that while the Charges
were being investigated it were best that he leave the Surete to

other direction.

For two years, thereafter, Pierre lived in honored semiretire-
ment as a u prefet hors cadre," the equivalent status of general
without command, until the final explosion. Then, in the summer
of 1953, when the jewel robbers were at last brought to trial in
the sunny, peaceful little town of Aix-en-Provence, the blow was
struck. The disgruntled police official whom Pierre had fired three
years before was brought to the stand and startled the court with
the old charges, amplified and embroidered with new detail. By
the rules of French law, such court testimony is immune from

THE STORY OF PIERRE BERTAUX 129

libel action so long as the witness can claim that he sincerely be-
lieves his charges to be true.

Taking the stand in rebuttal, Bertaux swept the court with the
eloquence and precision of his refutation. Then, closing his tes-
timony, he described Leca in terms of a Corsican Robin Hood,
explaining that Leca, though not an honest man, was, by the
underworld code of the prison where he and Bertaux had been
friends, a "man of honor." Never, since their days in jail, said
Bertaux, had Leca sought a special favor or asked aught of Pierre
as Chief of the Surete.

It was the phrase "man of honor" that brought Bertaux low.
For, in the eyes of the current Minister of the Interior, the phrase
"man of honor" implied inferential tolerance of underworld activi-
ties. No man of such high rank as Bertaux, said the Minister, could
permit himself such words in public. Specifically repudiating the
accusations made against Bertaux, the Minister suspended him in
rank for use of the phrase and L' Affaire Bertaux became, as it is
today, unfinished business in the politics of the French Republic.

For Pierre, the future is obscure as he considers whether the
coming years should be spent in government, politics, journalism,
or scholarship.

"I think mostly about politics these days," said Pierre recently,
"for politics is where medicine was three hundred years agoa
science of guesswork and hope. Yet somehow there must be a
way of making politics exact, of linking thought and action, of
finding an analysis so that freedom remains healthy and works.
For France cannot go on this way, it must change or it will perish.
It would be silly to sit by idle, not ever trying to save freedom,
nor even thinking about saving it,"

VII

in the

I had been driving down from the north all morning, and as
I turned through the traffic toward the Rhine bridge, I noticed
there, just as the bridge approach curled up, a tall, frail figure
posed in the melancholy appeal of the hitchhiker. I slowed for
him and when he scrambled in beside me I noticed that he was
not frail but gaunt, a husky man fallen on evil days, and thin.
He carried a knapsack on his back and clung to a battered brown
suitcase over which he had folded an old oilskin raincoat.

"Where are you going?" I asked him in German.

He replied that he was going to Bad Godesberg and then, shift-
ing easily to English, he said, "What is your language? English
or French, I speak both."

I said I was an American and asked him how he came to speak
two foreign languages. He replied that he was a schoolteacher
who taught English, French and history. That is, he went on,
I used to be a schoolteacher before the war and now, next week,
I will be a schoolteacher again.

"Oh?" I asked, inviting him to go on.

"Yes," he said, "in Bad Godesberg there is a job waiting for
me and next week I begin." He was looking forward to it, he
said, because all during the war he had been an officer at the
front and then, after the war, they had classed him as a Nazi.
Because he was a Nazi he had been barred from teaching for
three and a half years, and all that time he had worked as a farm-
hand near Dortmund, taking care of chickens, sleeping in the
barn and tutoring the farmer's children in the evening. But now,
finally, he had been denazified and cleared for teaching again.
The school he was going to in Bad Godesberg was a school for
teen-age boys, where he would teach history.

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 1J1

By the time he had told all this we were across the bridge and
weaving through the traffic of Cologne, trying to find the auto-
bahn that would take us south to Bonn and Bad Godesberg.
We came out finally by the riverside just beneath the eminence
on which sits Cologne's famous cathedral It was the first time
I had seen it and I commented on how lucky it was that the bomb
damage all around and so close had left it almost unmarked.

"Would you like to go in?" he asked. "It's a long time since
I have seen it and I will tell you about it if you want." We
stopped, climbed the bank and entered the great nave. From inside,
the cathedral was aglow with the sunlight streaming through the
windows of colored glass, washing the hushed interior with
blues and golds, reds and yellows, so light and airy and graceful
that it seemed a fairyland. We wandered about in silence for a
few minutes and I commented on how different it was from
the French cathedrals of Notre Dame or Metz with their somber,
heavy, almost Teutonic majesty. This cathedral was all motion
and sunlight; I had not expected to find anything so graceful in
Germany.

My traveler knew all about the cathedral. "Yes," he said, "if
you wish to think of it that way, you can. For as everyone
knows," he went on, "it was Frederick the Second who began
the cathedral and some people said Frederick the Second was not
really German, but Sicilian. I myself do not think so," continued
the schoolteacher, "for though he was born in Sicily, his grand-
father was Frederick Barbarossa which gives him half -German
blood, and his mother was Constance of Sicily. Now Constance
of Sicily was half -Norman herself, and the Normans are of blood
which is entirely Aryan. So when you consider it, Frederick the
Second had three-quarters Nordic blood, and is German too.
This is German, part Gothic, a little 'romantisch.' "

When we took up our ride again, he seemed lost in thought.
I tried to draw him out of his quiet.

"What will you teach your boys in history class about the last
thirty years?" I asked.

"How frankly do you want me to talk?" he replied.

"Say what you want," I said, "you'll never see me again and
I don't even know your name. Tell me how you'll teach your
boys about Hitler."

FIRE IN THE ASHES 132

He began his story haltingly, and then gradually as he forgot
me he began not to talk but to recite, staring straight ahead
through the windshield down the ribboning autobahn, as if he
were master of an imaginary class of listening adolescents. It is
only half an hour's drive from Cologne down the autobahn to
Bonn and into that half -hour he compressed thirty years.

It had all begun after the First World War when the German
people did not know they were defeated. The leaders of the
German people did not understand their own nation, they did
not know how much the people loved their country. Best of
the leaders was Stresemann, but the Allies would not listen to
him; Stresemann tried to explain that the German people needed
dignity, but the Allies would not recognize Germany as a great
nation and they gave him nothing. Stresemann had no force so
the Allies would not listen to him.

Then came Hitler. He made Germans proud again. He ended
unemployment, everyone had jobs. He built the great autobahns
which will last forever. He had force and the Allies of the First
World War gave him what he wanted because he was not, like
Stresemann, a beggar. Hitler's greatest success came at Munich,
when everything Germany wanted Hitler got for her peacefully.

The German people thought Hitler wanted peace down to the
last week before the war, and when the war came they were a
little bit frightened because they did not want it. But when Hitler
broke through the Maginot line, then every German knew he
was a genius.

After that came the mistakes.

"I would not hide these mistakes from the boys," said the
teacher peering out the window into space. "I would make them
learn carefully the three great mistakes of Hitler.

"First, Hitler should have been content with the great peaceful
agreement of Munich.

"Second, Hitler made the mistake of fighting a two-front war.
This every German schoolboy must learn, Germany must never,
never fight a war on two fronts. In this big mistake Hitler made
two littler mistakes: he underestimated the force of the Russians
and overestimated the force of the Italians.

"But the third mistake is the one for which Germans can never
forgive Hitler. This was to keep fighting the war for months

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 13?

after he knew he had lost. Thus, he let the armies of the enemy
enter on the soil of Germany and they destroyed it; many thou-
sands of Germans died in those last few months just because Hitler
wished to preserve his power for only a few more months.

"From the peace, also, we have learned much," he continued
to his class of imaginary disciples. "We see now that the con-
querors who were supposed to teach Germany democracy do
not mean democracy either. They show us now that in only one
thing Hitler was right, that the world respects force. We find
now the Russians are just as savage as Hitler, and the Americans
and English are savage too, only they are savage in a gentlemanly
way. They did not fight us to make democracy, but because they
wanted to crush Germany forever. Germany must find a new
way, only we do not yet know what the way is."

He had timed his story well, for we had come now to Bonn
and there a turning separated my road from his. He got out,
hitching his knapsack on his back, lifting the brown suitcase
from the back seat. I stopped him as he got out, for I prickled
with a desire to hear more.

"Tell me," I said, "won't you teach your boys about the con-
centration camps and what happened in them?"

He turned back to me. "Yes, I will teach them that too. I will
teach them that the concentration camps were a shame to Ger-
many. But you must remember that what is told about them is
a great exaggeration. You Americans saw the camps at the end
of the war and then, for several weeks, the food supply in Ger-
many had broken down. The men in charge of the camps did
not know where to find food for the prisoners, so naturally when
you found them they said they were starving and the pictures
you took of them made them look very thin.

"Auf Wiedersehen," he said, extending his hand to me in thanks
for the ride, and then was gone.

It was February of 1949 when I bade good-by to my school-
teacher, and neither he nor I then knew that while we were
talking Germany was passing the unnoticed midway mark be-
tween her total defeat and that volcanic Renaissance which is the
hinge on which the story of after-war Europe turns. History
moves too slowly to permit the daily news dispatches to cap-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 134

tnre the swift excitement of such a story as Germany's. Only
scholars, generations hence, with their priceless gift of retrospect,
will see in this story all its drama of rebirth and resurrection, the
uncurling of life from the numb winter of defeat.

The day I met the schoolteacher was just three and one-half
years from that week in 1945 when, having ravaged the continent
of Europe from end to end, having murdered some ten million
people in the helplessness of captivity, having by combat cost the
lives of another ten million people in the summertime of their
manhood, having sacked the thrift, enterprise and creation of
generations, the German state disappeared from existence. Dis-
appearing, it had left a people shorn not only of strength but of
pride and will, out of whose windows there hung in limp sub-
mission bedsheets, tablecloths, white petticoats and shirts in in-
dividual admission that in every village and home along the con-
queror's course defeat was personal and tight as skin.

For three and a half years, until the season in which I met my
schoolteacher, winter hung over the land. It was a tiny land, as
it remains today, for mighty Germany has been shrunk by disaster
to a morsel smaller than half of France. In those Winter Years
one-third of what was left was wrenched away by the Russians
and riveted into another civilization. What remained of Germany
was not even a land; it was a conglomerate of three separate zones
stuffed with 48,000,000 people wedged together in a sliver of
territory so narrow that a five-hour ride across its waist could
take you from border to border. A businessman's drive from New
York to Baltimore covers as much distance as separates the French
frontier of Germany from the Red Army's advance posts on the
Thuringian ridges.

Here and there in this Germany of 1945 lay little pockets of
unscarred village and hamlet, bypassed by encircling armies or
ignored by marauding bombers, their brown and gray church
spires rising like accusing fingers to the sky from the sturdy,
field-stone houses of the peasants. But the roads that ran from
village to town, from town to city were torn and ruptured by the
passage of war; tanks had disemboweled the roadbeds, artillery
and planes had shattered the bridges. And the roads led to cities,
one more appalling than the other rubble heaps of stone and
brick, rank with the smell of sewage and filth, dirty with the dust

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 135

of destruction working its way into clothes, linen, skin and soul.

The forlorn people who lived in the ruins in those Winter Years
could feel little beyond hunger. The clear German skin which
glows so pink and ruddy in health shrunk sallow over shriveled
bodies, or puffed over the unhealthy putty of children bloated by
hunger edema. By April of 1947 even the conquerors' statisticians
admitted that the daily German ration had fallen to 1,040 calories,
or thirty-three per cent below the scientific calculation of the
minimum necessary to sustain life. Allied health teams stopped
Germans on street corners and weighed them bodily to confirm
these figures, and found the nation decaying. White-faced men
and women collapsed at their jobs for lack of food. Dignified
people sought jobs as clerks or servants in the offices of the oc-
cupying armies because in the barracks of the conquerors they got
one hot meal of stew a day, which kept them alive. The United
States government appropriated money to give every German
school child one hot meal a day in his classroom. When Germans
could think of anything beyond food they thought of clothes;
the leather jerkins of German workingmen and their black leather
boots had frayed and cracked; the ugly woolen stockings of Ger-
man women were thin and holed; children played in the streets in
the cut-down Wehrmacht jackets and pants of their fathers. The
search for shelter was a nightmare; for this country, forty per
cent of whose homes had been smashed, was being forced to ab-
sorb and shelter eight million refugees thrust back into it. For a
German the perspective of ambition was the search to find for his
family two rooms with a toilet and running water, and, if this
were found, he dreamed cautiously of a home where the toilet
would not be in the kitchen where the food was cooked, but in a
real toilet compartment of remembered privacy.

Values withered. Girls roamed the streets, sleeping with the con-
quering soldiers for a candy bar, a cake of soap, a tin of Quaker
Oats, coming home to once-chaste beds dirty with disease. Money
was meaningless, cigarettes were currency; two cartons of Amer-
ican cigarettes bought a set of Meissen china, three cartons bought
a Leica camera, two cigarettes were a tip. Businessmen became
pirates. Families dissolved.

By an enormous, instinctive act of national resolution Germans
put thinking out of their minds and concentrated on simple things:

FIRE IN THE ASHES 136

how to find a job, and how to work. For only by working could
one find food, find clothes, find a roof. Even work was difficult;
Germany could make only a strictly limited quantity of steel, of
aluminum, of sulfur, of copper. She was forbidden to make again
the vast range of intricate machinery in which lay her commercial
strength; she could not build airplanes, could not fly airplanes,
could not synthesize rubber or gasoline. One worked at what came
to hand. In the Ruhr workmen stood in sullen silence and watched
the dismantlers surveying for removal of generators, rolling mills
and steel ovens. Krupp sat in his prison and British engineers care-
fully paced the jungle of his Essen works marking with white
chalk the machine tools, the drop forges, the presses to be taken
away. At the Bochumer Verein, which had made both submarine
assemblies and the finest crucible steels, the newest and most
efficient shops were dismantled. In what was left, Bochumer engi-
neers explored new crafts with irrepressible ingenuity. They
added two musicians to their technical staff and learned to cast
enormous silvery bells of alloy steel Protestant bells with one
particular distinctive pitch of tone, Catholic bells with another
distinctive tone. On the collar of the bells they molded the words:
"God Is Love." But still there was not enough work for the hands
available, and men drifted around the country seeking employ-
ment. Men accepted work no matter what the wages or hours,
for if they did not there were millions more hungry, empty men
waiting for the chance.

In this Germany of the Winter Years there were no politics.
There was no time to think of politics, and all Germans had been
numbed by politics anyway. Millions of them had filled out all the
questions in the Allied "Fragebogen" and had been measured for
the stain of Nazism, classified into Category I, II, HI or IV of
participation in crime. They were through with politics of any
kind. There was only work and individual survival.

The Winter Years continued, leaden month dragging after
leaden month, until the events of 1948 and 1949, when slowly,
almost unnoticeably, things began to change. It was as if the silent
addition of the effort of millions of hard-working, desperate toil-
ers had come to fruit just in that moment when international poli-
tics split open to give Germany the opportunity which only a few
months before seemed inconceivable. The Russians and the West

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 137

tore their alliance irreparably apart and the Berlin blockade burst;
simultaneously the Western Allies decided to return their Ger-
many to German management. Spring broke through the frost
in hundreds of thousands of little lives; ex-Nazi schoolteachers,
like my hitchhiker, found themselves denazified and free to teach
again; in the Ruhr workers struck and refused to dismantle the
installations that were their promise of livelihood; Germans gath-
ered in groups, protested Allied acts. Politics were about to begin.

Four years later, by the summer of 1953, Germany could look
out into a world in which she was not only the strongest and
healthiest of European states, but in which she was courted by her
conquerors who competed for her favors. Four years later the
greatest German problem was whether or not to accept the invita-
tion of the Western world to sit in its councils in dignity and
equality.

How had this come about?

The answer lies in the intertwining of two stories quite separate
in impulse, and origin the story of the Germans themselves, and
the story of their conquerors. Both must be followed simultane-
ously.

The story of the Germans themselves is simple, for it springs
from the biological urge of the Germans to thrive again, to be-
come masters once more of their own destiny. It has been the most
constant, deep and natural pressure in European politics. All the
detailed complexities of German politics, party votes and Cabinet
reshufflings are framed by this primordial urge. The differences
among German parties and leaders have been differences of tactics
and timings; there has been no divergence among them on the
great goal of resurgence and recovery.

The story of the conquerors is as difficult to tell as the story of
the Germans is simple. There were three conquerors, in fact, and
a guest conqueror (France) to complicate matters. When these
conquerors met in Germany in 1945, they totally expunged the
sovereignty of the German state, its power over its individuals,
and quartered that sovereignty among themselves.

The trouble was that none of these conquerors except for the
French, who were powerless knew exactly what they wanted to
do with this sovereignty. The two major victors, Russia and the

FIRE IN THE ASHES Ij8

United States, were the most confused and, in their confusion,
while they made up their minds, they left the direction of Ger-
many to their respective armies, the Red Army and the United
States Army. The Red Army, like any other organ of the Com-
munist state, is a tightly controlled, highly disciplined expression
of Communist policy. The United States Army is its very oppo-
sitean expression of a people in arms, a body with its own
leadership and rationale, intelligent and loyal, but politically un-
controlled and undirected. If the Red Army, in its frightening
mechanical rigidity, was the constant, the United States Army was
the dynamic, the moving, the creative element in postwar Ger-
many. The story of Western Germany since the war, therefore,
begins with its chief protagonist, the Merlin of the ruins, wearing
the uniform of an officer of the United States Army.

When on March 30, 1945, Major-General Lucius D. Clay an-
swered the telephone in his office in the old State Department
building across the street from the White House, he had little
premonition that its message would announce for him a role in
modern German history outmatched only by that of Bismarck,
the creator, and Hitler, the destroyer. The ringing phone that
morning informed Clay that he was to proceed to Europe, at once,
to become General Dwight D. Eisenhower's deputy for the mili-
tary government of Germany.

The call came as a surprise to Clay. Until that morning Lucius
Clay a lean, dark-haired, gray-eyed officer of the United States
Army whose extraordinary gift of clarity in expression and
thought had only recently been noticed had had no experience
whatsoever with Germans, no wish for anything but a combat
command and had heard not an echo of forewarning gossip. But
Lucius Clay was one of those men like George Catlett Marshall,
Omar Bradley or Dwight D. Eisenhower, who after a lifetime of
obscurity in the peacetime Army (Clay had spent twenty-two
years in rising from second lieutenant to captain) had, under the
pressure of war emergency, shown such skills and talents as to
rocket him to the eminence of statesmanship. A variety of wartime
army assignments, all on the fringe where America's civilian life
meshed with the needs of its demanding Army, had, by 1945, given
Clay the reputation of being equal to the impossible. The govern-

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS *39

ing of Germany, it was obvious in early spring of that year, was
going to be a task of extraordinary complexity and difficulty.
Therefore, it was to be Clay's.

Like a good soldier Clay accepted his assignment. He called on
his proper army superiors and then on Mr. Byrnes, then the War
Mobilizer and Deputy to the President of the United States. Mr.
Byrnes accompanied Clay on a brief visit to President Roosevelt
who, only a few months away from death, was too sick to tell him
what America wanted in Germany even if he knew. He called
on Mr. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, who was to be his
ultimate successor in Germany, called on Secretary of War Stim-
son and on Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and
then he took off to govern Germany.

General Clay did not bother to call on the State Department,
that branch of the United States government which is supposed
to be steward of our relations with foreign powers, nor did the
omission occur to him until several years later. "As I look back,"
Clay wrote after his retirement from the Army, "I find it amaz-
ing that I did not visit the State Department or talk to any of its
officials." In retrospect the bald statement is not quite as startling
as it sounds, for even if Clay had called, he would have learned
nothing; the State Department had no program for Germany.

Years later I heard one of the State Department's wisest diplo-
mats muse aloud about the problem. The United States, he said,
has a corps of experts, a body of doctrine, a national tradition to
fit every country that enters into our affairs except one Germany,
the nation with whom we have warred twice in this century. In
the State Department, in all the great universities, in every big-
city press corps there are men who have made a life-study of or
who nurse a cherished interest in either England, France, China,
Russia or Latin America. They have beaten out ideas which serve
as the commonest coin of our schoolboy learning-the "Open
Door" for China, the "Good Neighbor Policy'' for Latin Amer-
ica, "Lafayette-we-are-here" for France, "Our British cousins"
for England, and the phrases of deadly rivalry with the Soviet
Union. But, although a few devoted scholars have excited some
students in universities with an interest in Germany, though a few
specialists in the State Department receive the German desk as
an assignment of duty, though a few soldiers study its battle for-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 140

mations and a few businessmen trade with it, Germany had never
fascinated Americans generally nor inspired them to explore it.

The State Department thus had neither the wisdom nor guid-
ance to offer Clay even had he called. Its experts were, to be sure,
working on a secret policy paper, too secret even to be shown to
Clay, the man who was to direct policy. This was the paper later
coded into the Joint Chiefs of Staff Order No. 1067, about which
Clay was not to hear until after his arrival in Europe. Other State
Department experts had been working in obscurity during the
war years with subordinate French, British and Russian experts in
London, in a committee called the European Advisory Commis-
sion, whose job it was to develop ideas for the occupation of Ger-
many as soon as she should be defeated.

But neither JCS No. 1067 nor the memoranda of the London
Committee had any real, valid relationship with the task that con-
fronted the United States Army and Lucius Clay, when, at last,
in May of 1945, Germany lay bloody and still before them. The
thinking behind these policy papers started with a fundamental
and erroneous assumption: that Germany would surrender to the
Allies as a roaring, powerful, living state, the wheels of its industry
humming with power and its ruthless administration still rigidly
in control. The job, as foreseen during the war years, was how to
slow those roaring wheels, how to trim the power out of German
industrial might, how to remove and liquidate the evil men who
directed its government.

The situation the United States Army found in Germany was
so totally different as to make such policy directives irrelevant.
Not only was there no government to dismantle and purify, there
was nothing remotely resembling government; there was not even
disorder; there was complete chaos and anarchy. Germany was a
country without mail or telephone services; 754 sunken barges in
the United States zone alone choked navigation on the Rhine; 885
railroad bridges dangled meaningless across spanless voids; no one
could count the broken highway bridges; its fields, in midsummer,
were deserted; its hospitals bursting with cripples lacked the most
primitive drugs and anesthetics; in the American zone only 1,200
factories out of 12,000 still worked.

Policy, suggested by civilians far away, ordered the Army to
reduce, dismantle and erase the threat of Germany forever. But

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 141

to the Army's eyes the task seemed already accomplished. Far
more difficult, indeed almost impossible, was the parallel task of
keeping Germany alive and preventing it from lapsing into hope-
less despair and disease. It was all very well for the State Depart-
ment to agree with shivering French and Belgians that Germany's
once-prosperous Ruhr mines should deliver 25,000,000 tons of coal
in three months, to repay some tiny measure of Hitler's exactions
from those invaded lands. But what if, as was the case, the once-
fabled Ruhr mines were producing only 3,000,000 tons of coal
each month in all? What then? No one in Washington had any
answers, and the United States Army was on its own.

Most senior officers of the United States Army have been
brought up to go by the rule book. Always, in their education
and training, some rule book defines their authority and mission.
But in Germany the given rule book simply did not make sense.

The rule book for Germany had several chapters. Chapter one
was the Yalta agreement which had divided Germany into four
geographical zones for Russia, the agricultural east; for Britain,
the industrial northwest; for America, the scenic south; for France,
two Rhineland pockets. Yalta ordained that once the sovereignty
of Germany should be expunged, it would be replaced by the
authority of a Four Power Allied Control Commission sitting in
Berlin. Chapter two of the rule book came from the Potsdam
agreements. Beneath the Control Commission the Potsdam accords
authorized a number of centralized German agencies in no sense
a government which would operate the machinery of German
affairs as the Control Commission ordered them. In each zone the
military commanders would make sure that these orders were
followed and implemented, either by their own troops or by local
German authorities prodded by bayonets. So far, so good, but all
this was abstraction.

What was not abstract was more difficult, and nothing was more
difficult than the put-and-take of the German economy. There
were three separate links to the put-and-take, and they did not fit.
The first link was the definition of reparations. The Russians in-
sisted that the Yalta agreement had not only clearly promised
them ten million dollars' worth of reparations, but that the Pots-
dam agreements had defined the package. This package consisted
of all the equipment and installations removed from the Eastern

FIRE IN THE ASHES

1 4 2

Zone which Russia held, plus one-quarter of the much vaster
equipment and installations to be removed from Western Ger-
many which the Atlantic Powers held. The second link in the
put-and-take said that all reparations and removals were to be
calculated so as to leave Germany only enough productive power
for industrial self-sufficiency and nothing that would make her
militarily potent. But the third link seemed to say that no repara-
tions at all should come out of current German production until
the Germans should have earned enough by their exports to pay
for their imports, because, clearly, if Germany could not support
herself she would be a burden on the charity of others.

It did not take long to show that the Red Army interpreting
the put-and-take one way and the United States Army inter-
preting it another could not possibly cooperate.

In the Eastern Zone the Communist Army measured with the
first link of the Potsdam chain, savagely exacting reparations out
of revenge for its own ravaged lands. With complete surliness of
manner and suspicion of intent, the Russians slapped down on the
17,000,000 Germans of the Eastern Zone a wall of secrecy and
terror while they performed the operation. This first spasm of Rus-
sian looting passed swiftly. By midwinter of 1945-1946 the looted
entrails of German factories crowded the railway sidings and
marshaling yards from Berlin all the way back to Moscow where
they rusted uselessly in the open air. By spring of 1946 the Russians
had decided that it was best to leave installations in place, make
them work in Germany, with Germans, and take reparations out
of production.

This change in Russian decision brought direct conflict with the
United States Army which, in Western Germany, measured with
the second and third of the Potsdam links. Potsdam, according to
American reading, said that nothing was to be taken out of current
German production so long as Germany could not support herself
and was dependent on American charity. The United States Army
had to wheedle $500,000,000 a year of relief supplies for Germany
out of its reluctant Congress. Its job was not only to keep Ger-
many quiet but get it off the back of the American taxpayer as
quickly as possible. Thus, no reparations from current output.
Russia should have only her promised share of the plant equip-

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 143

ment rendered surplus in the Western Zone as German industry
was stripped down to agreed levels.

Thus, one year to the week from the moment of Germany's
surrender, reparations provided the immediate cause of the first
open breach between the conquerors. Since Russia ran her Eastern
Zone as a sealed enclave, since Russia pumped equipment and
reparations out of it without informing other Allies of what was
being 'stripped, since the Russians throttled off the normal food
supplies of East German farms which feed West German cities, it
was obvious that the early calculations of what industrial level all
of Germany as a whole should be permitted were meaningless.
Western Germany would have to have more, rather than less, in-
dustry if she were to earn enough to replace the loss of East Ger-
man food. The British concurred in this American analysis because
the Ruhr which the British occupied was the most heavily indus-
trialized belt of Europe and needed food. It seemed silly for the
British to waste their own slim hoard of dollars buying wheat and
meat for their defeated enemy, while the enemy was forbidden to
earn those dollars by his own exertions. On May 3 of 1946 General
Lucius Clay announced that, except for advance plant, he was
suspending all further delivery of promised reparations to the
Russians so long as the Russians would not operate their zone, as
promised, as part of a United Germany.

Self-sufficiency for the Germans had now become, for the
United States Army, a goal in itself. While in Paris, London, Mos-
cow and Washington, Messrs. Molotov, Byrnes, Bidault, Bevin and
Marshall argued about what should be done with Germany, the
United States Army did it. Each practical measure adopted for
achieving self-sufficency generated its own momentum until,
finally, the original purpose of dismantling and disarming Ger-
many, along with the subsequent desire to get Germany off the
back of the American taxpayer and abandon her, was lost in single-
minded consecration to the task of making Germany self-sufficient
in and for herself.

Step followed logical step. Obviously, a few basic measures were
necessary to make Germany an operating concern: Germany had
to be decompartmentalized and the zones abolished; Germans had
to be invited back to the levers of control which they understood
better than anyone else; they had to be given a sound currency so

FIRE IN THE ASHES 144

that business could revive; they had to have a government which
could efficiently synchronize the myriad impulses and efforts of
its individuals.

In May of 1946 General Clay suggested to Secretary Byrnes that
he invite the other occupying powers to merge their zones with
the American for greater efficiency. If they were unwilling, said
Clay, let the British alone be invited into a bizonal merger. Byrnes
assented and invitations were issued. Only the British accepted the
invitation. General Clay's office worked out the organs of dual
control and lo, the skeleton of a German state called Bizonia
emerged by the end of 1946, complete with courts, judges, tax and
regulatory powers over German economic life.

General Clay urged broader action. When General Marshall
flew back from his spring conference at Moscow in 1947 where
he had unsuccessfully pressed Stalin to raise the industrial levels
of Germany, he was inclined to agree with Clay. New directives
were issued, Clay and the military governors of the other Western
Allies met, re-examined Germany's industrial potential and Ger-
many's industrial ceilings rose.

When, in December of 1947, the Four Power Alliance of the
war ruptured permanently at the meeting of Molotov and Marshall
in London, Clay, who had attended the session, sat down once
more to discuss the matter with General Marshall. During a long
luncheon at Ambassador Douglas' residence, Clay reviewed for
Marshall, Ernest Bevin and several other dignitaries the measures
that might be taken to put Germany on the road to recovery. Two
of them seemed inescapable. The first was currency reform. Since
the Russians were using in their East Zone a set of plates for print-
ing paper marks identical with those of Western Germany and
no agreement with the Russians was possible, it seemed obvious
that inflation could be purged only by repudiating the old currency
and substituting a new one. The second measure was even more
important: to get maximum efficiency out of West Germany,
Germans had to be given broader control of their own affairs,
more responsibility, more initiative in short, a new national gov-
ernment. Clay flew back from this conference and, in the spring
of 1948, took the first steps to achieve both measures.

Up until then Lucius Clay had been for the Russians only the
American general who denied them reparations. The events of the

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 145

spring of 1948 currency reform and discussion of a new West
German government convinced them that the issues were larger
than reparations. What was at stake was the nature of the new
Germany, the possibility that the new Germany might become
not disputed quarry but the spearhead of a new and hostile alliance.
The Russians retaliated in the only manner they knew by the
blockade of Berlin, an attempt to squeeze America to compliance
by starving three million Germans.

Currency reform was merely the public pretext for the block-
ade. Ten days after the blockade was imposed, General Clay drove
to visit his opposite number, the Russian Commander in Chief,
General Sokolovsky.

"How long do you plan to keep it up?" he asked.

Sokolovsky replied, "Until you stop your plans for a West Ger-
man government."

Europeans, criticizing American political attitudes, frequently
claim that Americans are a people nursed on statistics, who believe
that when they have measured any given situation or divided it by
percentage points or classified it and enumerated the classifications,
they understand it. This may be valid criticism, but if it is, then
the technique of measurement applied to the Berlin blockade must
be recorded as the most exceptional triumph of measurement over
a political dilemma in modern times. Politically, there was no solu-
tion of the Berlin blockade short of war. But if one measured it,
suddenly a way out developed. To supply the two and one-half
million people of West Berlin, a minimum of 4,000 tons of food
and fuel a day was necessary. With a slide rule one could divide
this up into so-and-so many plane loads that must necessarily arrive
every twenty-four hours at West Berlin's two airports, Tempel-
hof and Gatow. After that it was only a problem of getting the
planes, filling them, flying them around the clock.

Something like one hundred American C^y's with a total carry-
ing capacity of 250 tons a day began the airlift into Berlin. By
December a third airfield in the French sector at Tegel had been
built; scores of C54's each carrying ten tons of payload had been
rushed out from America; that month Berlin's airlift passed the
4,000 ton mark of minimum necessity. The fleet grew as British
and American Air Forces poured in planes and personnel. It passed

FIRE IN THE ASHES 146

the 5,500 ton mark in January. By spring, when the Russians called
it quits, the planes were winging in with as much as 13,000 tons a
day, or sixty per cent more than the old ground-haulage figure
of 8,000 tons a day for rail and water; by then West Berlin's food
ration was not only higher than East Berlin but higher than before
the blockade.

The planes made a beautiful sight all through the winter of
1948-1949, coasting down the long runways of West German
fields between the golden glow of field lamps, their green and red
winglights glinting, the plumes of their exhaust blue and white
in the night. All through the day and night they droned, descend-
ing one a minute on the runways of Berlin, turning around, going
back for more, their pilots briefly resting, tired, in the muddy
alert shacks, smoking, playing Red Dog and poker, crabbing, talk-
ing of rotation but very proud. Because the airlift involved so
many human beings and was clothed in such vivid drama, it acted
profoundly in the psychology of the Occupation as a turning
point. It was not simply that the American pilots, as Americans
everywhere, enjoyed the thought of dumping bags of candy for
Berlin's children over the roofs as they came in to land. It was
that in Berlin, Americans and Germans stood together, both be-
leaguered, both under attack, both facing a common enemy. Emo-
tionally, they were allies. It was a change in attitude difficult to
define. I remember arriving at Berlin during the airlift and notic-
ing a curious change in phraseology. When, at a bar in the Ruhr
or Frankfurt, one heard Americans use the pronoun "they,"'
"they" almost invariably referred to the Germans, still the enemy
to be watched and controlled. But at a bar or over dinner in
Berlin when one heard "they," "they" almost invariably referred
to the Russians. The Germans were included in "we."

Both the airlift and Clay's master plan for a West German gov-
ernment came to a climax in the month of his departure. On May
12, 1949, the first trucks and trains passed from the Western Zone
through the Soviet Zone, to enter Berlin peacefully, and the block-
ade was over. On that same day General Clay flew down from
Berlin to Frankfurt to receive the delegation of the German Con-
stitutional Convention, bringing him for approval their final draft
of the new German constitution.

This constitution was to be the title deed of the new German

C E R M A N Y : SPRING IN THE RUINS 14-7

state and in its final draft it provided for a strong, centralized Ger-
man government. Here was a question of enormous portent, a
political question that could not be measured in tonnages. The
approval of the constitution was General Clay's last act as procon-
sul. Dutifully, as a good Army officer, he tried to find out from the
War Department whether the United States wanted a strong and
centralized or weak and federalized Germany. It was a Platonic
question, one for philosophers. The Army replied that it had no
strong feelings one way or the other and that Clay should go ahead
and do what he thought right. Dutifully again, Clay tried to find
out what advice the State Department had to give him. State, still
as perplexed by Germany as on the day of Clay's departure in
1945, had none. Judiciously, therefore, acting on his own as he
always had, General Clay as chairman of the military governors, sat
down with German representatives that busy afternoon and
worked out a compromise. The compromise provided for a Ger-
man government not too strong, not too weak, an efficient consti-
tution that was to function better than any other in postwar
Europe a machine ready to be driven, although no one knew
which way.

Thus, having finished his proconsulship, General Clay flew back
to Washington, retired from the United States Army, entered
American business and politics and waited for the verdict of his-
tory to judge whether he deserved well of the Republic or not.

The departure of General Clay, as he himself had long reported,
was overdue. Only the blockade and threat of war had kept Ger-
many under the stern control of a military occupation and an alien
general. Already the forces Clay had set in motion had quickened
and begun to throb with the strength of millions of Germans
becoming once again aware of nationhood. They were ready and
eager to resume their own story in their own way.

All through the winter of 1949, as the airlift had droned through
the leaden skies to Berlin, a gathering of seventy elderly men had
simultaneously droned on in seemingly endless talk in a quiet gray
building commandeered from a girls' normal school by the banks
of the Rhine in the suburbs of the little town of Bonn. These were
the constitution-makers of the new Germany.

They were not an impressive assemblage. As they sat about the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 148

blondwood desks and tables which had once been school furni-
ture, or as they strolled on the ragged lawn by the river's edge
where several dirty yellow sheep baaed as they fitfully cropped
the straggly grass, they seemed like the faculty of a provincial
theological seminary. Of the seventy men, thirty-seven were en-
titled to the academic title of Herr Doktor, and seven were Herr
Professor Doktor. Eighteen were government civil servants, and
fourteen were municipal or local officials. The oldest was seventy-
four, the youngest thirty-five. No one during the airlift winter
paid much attention to them, but they were the most important
men in Germany, for they were the end-fruit of American policy,
the progenitors of the new German state. They had been chosen in
local elections by forty-eight million West Germans to frame the
Constitution of the Republic which the United States invited them
to make. Their existence had provoked the Berlin blockade.

For eight months from September of 1948 to May of 1949, the
seventy constitution-makers, lodging in the shabby overcrowded
rooming houses or ill-lit hotels of Bonn, worried their task
until they had arrived at a document of one hundred and forty-
nine separate clauses as the skeleton of their new state. This docu-
ment guaranteed to all Germans every form of individual liberty
and personal freedom; it accepted the perspectives of defeat and
outlawed future German national armies, forbade conscription,
permitted any future German government to yield sovereignty to
any future European union. It balanced state rights against federal
government, giving the states an Upper House (or Bundesrat)
with powers similar to the American Senate, and giving the Lower
House (or Bundestag) broad powers of taxation and control of
foreign affairs to make it a strong, efficient, centralizing body. Its
most interesting feature was an invention of the scholars who
wrote it. Reviewing Germany's sad earlier experience with un-
stable parliaments, they set out to cure parliamentary instability
by a technical trick. By the new constitution, no German Chan-
cellor can be overthrown by a parliamentary majority unless that
same majority proposes and votes to power a new Chancellor it
likes better. This constitution has since given Germany a more
stable government than any other European country except
England.

More important than anything the constitution wrote or did,

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 149

however, was the living spectacle of the constitution-makers dis-
cussing Germany as Germany. Here, finally, after the years of
silence was a forum in which Germans could discuss their future,
not as supplicants to enemy legates, but as Germans with each
other. It brought the still feeble beat of German life to a rhythm,
and its fragmentation to a focus. The German political parties,
which had hitherto operated only on the level of individual states,
came clear like crystals forming in a colloidal solution.

The Christian Democrats, who had sent twenty-eight delegates
to the Constitutional Convention, were a party of religious and
predominantly Catholic inspiration. Their party was one of com-
promise that ran from moderate Right to moderate Left. The
Socialists, who had sent thirty delegates, were predominantly
working class, predominantly Protestant, fiery, intemperate, anti-
Communist but anti-Occupation too. The others were splinters:
the Bavarian party, it was clear, was a sectional party, the Dixie-
crats of South Germany. The German party, also sectional, was
limited to the plains of northern Saxony. The Free Democrats
were also a party of the North, nationalist, Protestant, whose ideas
ran the entire gamut from McKinley to Taft. The Communists,
spokesmen of Russia, were a negligible force. The Catholic Cen-
trists had retained only a fraction of their prewar strength as
spokesmen of the Catholic liberals.

Personalities emerged. There was Konrad Adenauer, a stiff old
man, who walked as if his legs were hinged by rusting joints, an
elder of seventy-three years dressed in starched collar, crisp pants,
wearing an air of imperturbable, grave and unruffled dignity. No
other personality could match him in the Constitutional Conven-
tion except Carlo Schmidt, the Socialist phrase-maker, a huge,
burly, rumpled man of extraordinary wit and cleverness. But
Schmidt, it was clear, was only the Bonn delegate of an even more
extraordinary personality, Kurt Schumacher, who lived in Han-
over and ran the Socialist party as if he were its Moses and its
members his Children of Israel. Boss, High Priest, Theoretician,
Tactician, Speech-maker, only Schumacher equaled Adenauer in
impact on the nascent German state.

The new state came into being quickly, easily, with no con-
fusion or fumbling, no grinding of the gears or any crisis. On
August 14, 1949, three months after General Clay's departure.

FIREINTHEASHES 1 O

elections were held under the new constitution, returning a gov-
ernment dominated by a coalition of three parties the Christian
Democrats, the German party, the Free Democrats, all of them
led by Konrad Adenauer. The opposition was the Socialist party.
As a benison to the new Republic, military government was abol-
ished and replaced by three High Commissioners, one each from
America, Britain and France. To replace Lucius Clay, the United
States government named as High Commissioner Mr. John J.
McCloy, who was to conceive his task not only, as Clay had, to
revive Germany but also to beseech her friendship.

Early in 1950, a few months after the new Federal Republic of
West Germany had been established, I passed through Bonn,
which I had not seen since the Constitutional Convention.

Bonn crackled and snapped with vitality. Blue and white signs
pointed the way to Federal Ministries of Economics, of Refugees,
of Justice, of Interior, scattered through half -wrecked buildings
and still intact barracks of the old Wehrmacht. The old girls'
normal school where the constitution-makers had once worked
was bursting at the seams, A black-gold-red banner, Germany's
national flag, snapped from its flagstaff. The old baaing yellow
sheep were gone from the lawn and the lawn spread smooth and
green to the river's edge. The trim gray building had shot out a
long new office wing to the south that housed the German legis-
lators. Between the old building and the new wing, German archi-
tects had designed a parliamentary chamber of stunning beauty.
Its two protruding walls were sheer glass that opened on the
grandeur of the Rhine; its furniture of green and black leather
glistened; its lobbies were antiseptically clean and busy men rushed
through them at a dogtrot, each carrying his bulging brief case.
When Parliament was not in session, files of school children led
by their teachers serpentined through the corridors, visiting the
new capital of Germany.

The new government passed laws, imposed taxes not very
heavy by American or British standards controlled its own police,
staffed its own border guards, even had its own intelligence service
permitted for internal security. Its president welcomed the min-
isters of foreign powers, and its spokesmen traveled to Paris to join
in the deliberations of the Marshall Plan's European Council. It
sounded, thundered and made noises like a sovereign body.

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 151

But, as every German knew, it was not yet sovereign.

Every three weeks a symbolic act took place to demonstrate
to the Germans how incomplete was this sovereignty. Bonn sits
on the flatland of the Rhine's west bank, just as the Rhine opens
out of the majesty of the Wagnerian hills. Across the river from
the gray, rectilinear capital of the new German Republic rises a
tall and forest-covered hill atop which a snow-white mansion looks
out over the deep, beautiful valley. This snow-white mansion is
the famous Petersberger Hof, where in bygone days, Adolf Hitler
summoned Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier to the
craven capitulation that preceded Munich. The Petersberger Hof
was now occupied by the three members of the Allied High Com-
mission, charged with the supervision of the new Republic. The
three High Commissioners possessed the power of veto over any
law of the Bundestag, the power of decree, the power to suspend
any act of any member state of the new Republic. Therefore,
every three weeks, the aged Adenauer, now the new Chancellor
of the Republic, flanked by three brief-case-carrying aides, would
drive up the hill to the three Commissioners and be received by
them. There he would explain the acts and bills of the Parliament,
there he would listen to the Commissioners' complaints, exhorta-
tions and instructions. In other circumstances, the little act would
have been humiliation and Adenauer himself was occasionally
heard to mutter of "The Unholy Trinity" on the hill. But it was
only four years after the bitterest of wars and a total defeat; the
humiliation could not conceal the essential German triumph that
now the conquerors were dealing with one man who spoke for
Germany, planned for Germany, winced for Germany and re-
sisted for Germany.

Down in the flatlands, at the Bundeshaus, politics revolved
fundamentally about these symbolic visits. Just how should the
spokesman of the new Germany deal with the conquering Allies?
The two great parties, Socialists and Christian Democrats, split on
the question. Both agreed that the ultimate goal to be won from
the Allies was independence and equality, complete and untram-
meled. But Adenauer's instinct was to go slowly, to take each
grant of freedom as it was offered, ask for more, submit when
refused, then wait, then ask for more again. The Socialists' in-
stinct, perhaps only because they were the opposition party, was

FIRE IN THE ASHES

to press faster, to insist instantly on new and greater powers, to
use the leverage of Germany's growing strength to bargain and
demand that full equality which ultimately the High Commission
promised to yield anyway. The Socialists, whose beating drums
sounded frighteningly like rabid nationalism, were thus, auto-
matically, one of Adenauer's greatest sources of strength in his
diplomacy on the hill. If Adenauer refused or balked at Allied
instructions, then down in the flatlands of German politics his
political strength was enormously inflated because he had re-
sisted in the name of Germany. But up on the hill it was all the
easier for him to win his points from the High Commissioners by
pointing to the vigor of the opposition and his need of hold-
ing Parliament in line under his own friendly leadership. Then he
could return, and gravely-always gravely and without emotion-
display to the Bundestag what he had won.

This curious charade continued for almost a year and then,
again, politics made one of its sharp and dizzy turns.

On June 25, 1950, halfway around the globe, the North Koreans
launched their attack against the South Koreans. Overnight the
world was on the edge of war. At that moment the Allied Armies
of Occupation in Western Germany counted seven slim and weak
-divisions. In Eastern Germany were some twenty-two Soviet
divisions plus supporting units, or almost three times as many Red
Army soldiers, better equipped, better trained. In Eastern Ger-
many, moreover, the Communist counterpart of the Western
German Republic had begun to recruit a small but menacing
skeleton army corps of Germans in training, equipped with tanks
and artillery. Backing them were satellite armies of ominous pro-
portions. No Atlantic soldier reading the map of Germany could
do else but shudder. The line had to be braced swiftly, galvan-
ically, with power. The only pool of easily available manpower
was in Western Germany, and it was superb soldierly material too,
as sad experience had demonstrated. If Western Germany was to
be held, if anything east of the Rhine was to be held, then German
manpower, said the Western generals, had to be rushed into uni-
form. In December of 1950 the senior powers of the Atlantic
world gathered in Brussels, nominated D wight Eisenhower as their
commander in chief and instructed the High Commissioners to
iraise, uniform and arm German soldiers once again.

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 153

Now, at last, the realities of politics had changed. One could not
recruit German soldiers as mercenaries. They had to be furnished
freely by the German people if they were to fight. There was a
bargain to be struck. If the Allies wanted German troops, what
would they give? The three High Commissioners returned from
Brussels in late December of 1950 and summoned the old Chan-
cellor to the Petersberger Hof to hear their invitation. It was the
last time he was to be so summoned; he was to appear on the hill-
top only once more in the next year and a half and then not as a
supplicant but as a luncheon guest. A year later the empty offices
of the Petersberger Hof had been reconverted into a tourist hotel.

Ever since the beginning of 1951 and the Western invitation to
the Germans to bear arms, the Germans have written their own
story. For Germany, although still legally bound by volumes of
Occupation laws and treaties, is no longer the inanimate object
of other men's diplomacy. The community of Germans is, as it
always had been in Europe, a power made of men with their own
genius, wills, aspirations, hopes and decisions. Nor is this power
ever static. It flows and changes and grows so swiftly that each
of yesterday's binding contracts, measured so meticulously to
yesterday's relation of forces, is obsolete almost before its ink
is dry.

The story of these contracts, and the impact of Germans on
other peoples and other peoples on Germany is, from 1951 on,
another story to be told in another chapter. Within Germany the
story of the Germans is almost entirely their own.

No traveler making the seasonal circuit of Europe's political
centers has failed to describe how swiftly the face of Germany
has changed since the ending of the Winter Years. Once set on its
upward course in 1949, Germany changed from month to month.
People in the streets filled out visibly. Their clothes changed from
rumpled rags to decent garments, to neat business suits, to silk
stockings. Cigarettes disappeared as currency, then became avail-
able everywhere, then, finally, were sold from slot machines on
every corner. Food returned, food as the Germans love it, with
whipped cream beaten thick in the coffee, on cake, with fruit. The
streets changed face as buildings rose, as neon signs festooned them,
as their windows shone with goods. For a number of years I have

FIRE IN THE ASHES 154

visited Frankfurt twice a year, staying at the Park Hotel opposite
the railway station. On my first visit I could look out of the win-
dow on a hot day and still smell the dust of rubble rising from the
ruins up and down the street, ruins all down the curving Bahnhof
square, ruins on every side of the railway station. At each visit
thereafter, some patch of rubble was cleared, some new construc-
tion sprouted into the sky, some long stretch of broken cobble-
stone yielded to smooth asphalt until, finally, on my last spring
visit I woke and heard the sound of hammers under my window
and looked out to see the last red walls of the last red ruin on my
street crumbling under the wrecker's sledge, to be cleared for
what new hotel or new office building only the next visit will
reveal.

The revival offered its most dramatic contrasts in Diisseldorf,
the capital both of Ruhr industry and the British Occupation of
that province. Down Koenigsallee, the beautiful main street of
the city, luxury shops blossomed year by year to offer the steel
barons and coal merchants the delights they have always enjoyed.
Today, the cigar stores of Koenigsallee and Flingerstrasse offer
the greatest collection of yellow, black, tan, brown, half -white
stogies in Europe, gathered from Brazil, Manila, Havana, Ham-
burg. The Konditorei decorate their shop-fronts in midwinter
with bananas and oranges, pineapples from the tropics, cheeses
from Denmark, champagne and Burgundy from France, grapes
from Italy, hams from Scandinavia. Gradually, as this happened,
the British Occupiers of Diisseldorf began to wonder who had
won and who had lost the war. The first season it became obvious
that the German ration had passed the British ration, a group of
British women, wives of Occupation officials, demonstrated in
the main streets outside British military headquarters to protest
that the Germans they had defeated were eating fatter than British
soldiers' families, who themselves were eating better than Britons
back home. But no housewifely protest could stop the surge. It
was the next season that Americans, visiting Cologne and stop-
ping at one of its larger hotels, noticed that its dining room was
divided in two halves one for the British Occupation officials,
living on the dull, juiceless, meat-thin rations of the Ministry of
Food; the other for German civilians, eating rich, heavy, stomach-
filling German food. The American visitors preferred to sit on

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 1>5

the German or conquered side of the dining room, rather than
on the side of the victorious British.

Revival throbbed on all the roads and arteries of communica-
tions. Bridges went up and spans were sutured. On my first visit
to Germany, in an early Winter Year, the smooth concrete paths
of the autobahns were dominated by vehicles of the Occupation.
The Army's olive-drab trucks purring in convoy formation, the
American jeeps wasping in and out, the glittering, shimmering
sedans of the American families with white Occupation plates
made the wheezing old German sedans, the bumbling old Ger-
man trucks so frequently overturned, so frequently wrecked,
so frequently waiting idly by the road in breakdown seem like
strangers on their own roads. But each succeeding visit has shown
the roads reconquered by Germans, even though there are now
three times as many Americans and troops in Germany than on
my first visit. New Kapitans, Opels, Volkswagens, Porsches,
Mercedes-Benzes whiz by, obscuring from sight American sedans
in the procession of the autobahn; huge German double and triple
trailers with their trailing black exhaust becloud the occasional
American convoys. Rhine barges, furrowing the busy waters, are
new again, spick and span in gleaming brass fittings, and red, white,
green coats of paint. The railways run on time, efficiently, the
dining cars proud with white stiff linen and solid plentiful food.

Germany is alive and vigorous again to the sight, to the ear,
to the touch. Nor is this only a matter of appearances, for statis-
tically the profile of German effort now traces the outline of
an industrial power again equal to England, and greater than any
other in Western Europe.

Economists estimate that Germany's gross national product has
increased by seventy per cent since the year 1948-1949; that her
industrial production is two-thirds again higher than it was in
1936, Hitler's peak peacetime year; that her wage-earners are now
numbered at an all-time high. Germany's exports have multiplied
by seven times in the five years since currency reform; her Dollar
Gap should vanish in 1953; her credits in the European Payments
Union stand at almost half a billion dollars, higher than any other
of the Marshall Plan countries.

Each set of statistics bears its own story, but none reflect the
phenomenon of Germany's Renaissance better than the figures of

FIRE IN THE ASHES 156

her steel production. In 1946, the year after Germany's collapse,
she poured 2,500,000 tons of steel; in 1947, 3,000,000 tons. Those
were the years in which the Allies had sworn that Germany should
never produce more than 5,600,000 tons again. At the end of 1947,
when the Western Allies lifted Germany's limit to 1 1,100,000 tons,
their experts assured them it would take at least five years for
Germany to reach the distant level of 10,000,000 tons. By 1949,
however, the Germans were pouring 9,000,000 tons of steel and
had drawn abreast of the French. In the fall of 1950 the Western
Allies tore up the 11,100,000 ton limit and urged Germany to go
all out in producing steel for the Western defense effort. At that
time Western engineers gave their solemn opinion that the old,
outmoded plants of the Ruhr could not be overhauled to produce
more than an outer technical maximum of 13,500,000 tons. By the
end of 1951 Germany was producing 13,500,000 tons and was
racing after Britain, the leading steel producer in Western Eu-
rope. In 1953 the Germans let another notch out of their belt
and poured 14,500,000 tons, in some months equaling and sur-
passing British production. German engineers now figure that if
business holds good they can pour 18,000,000 tons in the next
twelve-month period, to make them the senior steel producer of
Western Europe. At that point they will be pouring more than
the Ruhr ever produced before, or just slightly more than three
times as much as the Allies swore, seven years ago, she would ever
produce again.

All other statistics crackle with the same energy. Coal produc-
tion in Germany has jumped from 60,000,000 to 100,000,000 to
125,000,000 tons. The production of radios doubled Germany's
prewar production by the spring of 1951, and by the beginning
of 1953 Germany was producing almost twice as many automo-
biles as in 1936. Starting in the rubble and disaster of defeat, the
Germans began to build houses. Slowly at first, as the cramped
economy put itself together again, then more swiftly German
craftsmen began to house their countrymen until, by 1951, Ger-
many was building over 400,000 dwelling units a year, or more
than the total number France had built in the eight years since
Liberation. Germany's home-building rate per capita is, indeed,
the only major European housing effort that can match America's.

Phenomena such as these beget questions: How do the Ger-

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 157

mans do it? Where does this strength and this drive come from?

There are a number of answers.

What has been done in Germany has been done in first instance
by the Germans themselves. Now, looking backward, many truths
are obvious that were unknown in the first days of German de-
feat. The dissolution of an entire nation is a social impossibility;
the wreckage of Germany that so stupefied Germans and con-
querors alike in 1945 was the wreckage of buildings and stone.
But it was impossible to destroy the skills in the fingers of Ger-
man workmen, the knowledge of German engineers, and the
managerial know-how of German industrialists without the phys-
ical extermination of the German people, obviously a moral im-
possibility. The social capital inherent in the accumulation of
years of human experience is, economically, a vaster asset than all
installations of pits, turning wheels and rails. There is no nation
whose physical equipment is so great that its people's skills are not
an even greater part of its wealth. If all American industry were
leveled to the ground, America would still be the greatest in-
dustrial power on earth because of her social capital. In Germany
the social capital of skill and knowledge remained undamaged.

Almost as important, we know now, was the tremendous accre-
tion of strength to German industry during the war years. The
piles of broken brick in the factory yards, the twisted girders, the
silent mines, the roofless manufactories appalled the eye in 1945.
But in these rubble heaps were still rooted the enormous instru-
ments of production which had powered Hitler almost to victory.
Germany's inventory of machine tools had stood at 1,281,000 in
1938. But when she emerged from the war, deep in her ruins theie
were 2,216,000 machine tools or almost twice as many as prewar*
During the worst year of bombardment-- 1944 only six per cent
of German machine tools were put out of operation and most of
these were repaired and put back to work almost at once. The
Germany that emerged from the years of defeat was a Germany
in rags, in cold and in hunger but a Germany in which all the
infinite skills of her greatness were only dormant, the tools of
her craftsmanship only silent, waiting to be uncovered from rub-
ble, oiled, greased and put to work.

To make this productive machine operate as Germans were
sure it could, certain social obstructions had to be cleared, and

FIRE IN THE ASHES 158

this task the United States Army performed, more efficiently,
more speedily, more wisely than any democratic German gov-
ernment could possibly have done with full authority of its own.

Now, in the years of Renaissance, when Allied interference irks
German pride, it is commonplace for Germans to talk of how
stupid, how unjust and how extortionate was the Allied Occupa-
tion of Germany. Quite the contrary can be argued that an essen-
tial element in Germany's recovery was supplied by the guidance
of the hated Occupation Annies and by the Americans, most of all.

Military government was cold and severe, completely removed
from the political passions and influences that hobble all govern-
ments elected by their own people. The economists of the Military
Occupation could decide what was right and logical, and order it
done without having to win the consent of a debating parliament,
torn and swept by the pressures of special interests and ordinary
people. No native government could have preserved order and
repaired ruins with its people starving on 1,000 calories a day, but
the Occupation Armies held Germany still on starvation while
necessary things were done first. No elected government could
have wiped out and dispossessed millions of merchants by cur-
rency repudiation; the United States Army could and did, thereby
giving Germany a new currency which is the soundest in Europe.
The skilful and brilliant economists attached to the Occupation
had an army at their disposal to impose their thinking; when they
decided that the orgy of speculation and traffic in luxury materials
threatened the new German mark, they could and did force
the Germans to impose trade controls at the right moment, just in
time to catch the post-Korea turn of world trade and give Ger-
many the solidest trade balances in Europe. Though the Ruhr
magnates howled that the breakup of their trusts was ruining
German business, the Allied shake-up of the Ruhr cartels, without
fundamentally destroying them, shook new and imaginative young
German businessmen, more vigorous and capable than their stolid
elders, to the top.

Other nations, being free and responsible, bore the burden of
defense; Germany, being conquered, paid only Occupation costs.
France, with an economic strength half that of Germany, pays
four billion dollars a year to support the armies of the West. But
Germany pays less than two billion dollars in Occupation costs,

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 159

and, at that fee, is defended by alien troops who make no call on
her young manpower. More than ten per cent of England's na-
tional product goes into her defense effort and most of this comes
from the engineering industries which are Britain's chief export
earners. But no German production goes into arms; all of it is
shaped into civilian wares, which can be shipped overseas to cus-
tomers who might otherwise buy British.

Detached, impersonal, logical, the Occupation Armies and their
economic advisors pursued their objective: to make Germany
self-sufficient. They pumped in some four billion dollars' worth
of aid to start the process; then they cleared the way for the Ger-
mans to enterprise, and German businessmen did the rest.

These years of revival have done more than fill the trade chan-
nels with goods. For, as the revival has freed Germans from the
daily drudgery of the ration lines, from the hollow sense of hun-
ger, from the endless spirit-quenching hunt for a pair of shoes,
for a job, for a hovel to sleep in, it has given Germans time to
think. It has released them from individual preoccupation, each
man with his own misery, to a contemplation of themselves as a
people, which is the beginning of politics.

But, though revival has healed the flesh, it has healed the spirit
more slowly. What has happened to the flesh can be measured
in figures and made clear; what has happened to the spirit, in the
darkness of the defeated mind, can be measured by no one, Ger-
man or alien.

On the surface, at Bonn, where the legal parties gather to vote t
German politics have a deceptive simplicity, almost comparable
to that of British politics. But beneath this surface strange incal-
culable forces are at work in a peculiar, unfinished groping process
which will not emerge clearly until its consummation. It is only
natural that this should be so, for no nation has been more greatly
disturbed in the past generation than Germany. Germans have
been flung about between triumph and despair, rejected and
wooed, their governments overturned and denounced; they have
been pressed and urged physically by one compulsion after an-
other, within elastic borders that expand and contract and expand
and contract again, until it is difficult for anyone to say what is
Germany and what is not.

FIEE IN THE ASHES

Consider the many strange groups and new forces in Germany,
rolling about like cargo unlashed on a ship's deck in a storm:

Eight million refugees form one-sixth of the population of West
Germany. One of the greatest triumphs of West Germany since
the war has been her ability to absorb this horde of human beings
into her smashed dwellings, and keep unemployment down to one
million and a half citizens. But these refugees are people who have
lost all, and, though they are German by blood and tongue, they
warm themselves with memories of Silesia or Pomerania or Su-
detenland and the homes they have fled. They are people who
have been forced down, down, down in an inexorable process of
proletarization-the East German factory owner has become a
plant manager, the factory manager a foreman, the farmer a farm-
hand, the merchant a clerk. Even in West Germany they are
strangers and outcasts, unwanted and unloved. But they are citi-
zens; they vote; they speak; they listen for voices that offer them
hope and future. How will they vote on war and peace? On roll-
back or containment? On status quo or reconquest?

Consider four million German women, women without men
because the men they did marry or the men they might have
married were consumed in Hitler's wars. Consider each of them
nursing in the solitude of a lonesome room her own neurotic long-
ing and how, in the past, strange men have come to power on just
such voting neuroses as this.

Consider, more ominously, the progeny of the Nazis. It is not
the hundreds of thousands of fatherless children bred by the Nazis
out of the broodmare bodies of concupiscent Hitler-Maidens
still in school, still learning that their only father was Hitler who
are most important. Beyond them, and more important, are the
hundreds of thousands of young men who knew and tasted glory
in officers' uniforms as the Wehrmacht carried the swastika all
across Europe, and who are now excluded, totally, from any share
in a society they once dominated. It is the hundreds of thousands
of middle-aged men whose careers and ambitions first flourished
under Hitler who cannot forget the banners, the youth-hikes, the
solid substance of prosperity they first learned to enjoy under
other and different standards.

Consider, then, the new influences at work on the great mass

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS l6l

of Germans trying to learn, or decide, what to do with their
strength.

Consider the Church, more powerful today in Germany than
at any moment since Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the doors
of the cathedral of Wittenberg. The Russians, in shearing off
Eastern from Western Germany, have sheared away the ancient
beds of German Protestantism and left a Germany in which the
Catholics of the Rhineland and Bavaria for the first time in a
century have the power to guide German destinies. Nor is this
Catholic leadership in Germany a simple, solid force as embodied
in the devout Konrad Adenauer. It is a force of many strains run-
ning from the most archaic to the most enlightened. It is not
only political but intellectual, and in postwar Germany, modern
Catholic thinkers provide the same film of ideas for German poli-
tics that American liberals provided for the New Deal and British
Fabians for the Labour government. The Church belongs to the
West, both liberal and archaic strains lead Germany to the West.

Consider, then, the uncharted influence of the Americans, not
the America of baseball teams and PX's, youth clubs and women's
clubs, but the more serious and lasting implantations of American
spirit. American radios and broadcasts blanket the air of Ger-
many so that, in the evening, the best picture of world affairs
comes to German ears from American editing. Americans brought
to Germany the doctrine of the free press. General Clay intro-
duced German newspapermen to the technique of the press con-
ference, and at first shyly, but then ever more seriously, German
newspapermen have learned that the press conference is a device
for the citizen to summon government to account. All Germany
is dotted with little halls and buildings called Amerika Hauser,
outposts of American culture, perhaps the most successful of our
laboratory experiments in spreading America's message. In the
evening, even now seven years after defeat, these halls are crowded
with sweaty, tired, work-lined Germans who come to hear re-
cordings of American music, witness American documentary
films, study American technical magazines, read American books.
How much of what they absorb do they carry home to create a
German democracy?

It is impossible to judge precisely either these influences or the
weight of the political groups at Bonn, the surface of German

FIRE IN THE ASHES 162

politics. In Bonn there gather 402 elected Bundestag members,
ninety-five per cent of them chosen from parties who are, as far
as we can tell, sincerely democratic in our sense. They are demo-
cratic today because we, in the early days of the Occupation,
created these parties, purified their leadership and then presented
them to the German people as the only alternates of choice.
Considering the process by which the Germans came to choose
these people, Bonn is a remarkably successful experiment. Bonn
is far more democratic in instinct and procedure than we had any
reason to hope after the savagery and acquired habits of the Nazi
interlude. It is also vigorously and independently German enough
to act as a true steward of German interests, erring neither on the
side of slavish puppetry or demagogic nationalism.

But the rivalries of the parties at Bonn do not embrace all the
alternate choices now open to the German people. Today they
possess choices not only within Bonn, but beyond and outside it.
By the time this book is in print, the world will have witnessed
a German election to replace the present Bundestag at Bonn with
another, empowered to act for a four-year term. In all likelihood
the present parties gathered in Bonn will again harvest a vast
majority of all the votes cast, but in all likelihood it will also
show, for the first time, the true alternatives with which the Ger-
mans fumble in indecision.

A German newspaperman once explained these alternatives to
me better than anyone else. "All that you see here in Bonn," he
said to me, "is the good Germany, the democratic Germany. This
is the best in Germany. But there is another Germany which is not
democratic, which is now submerged. This is the Germany that
voted for Hitler and voted for Hugenberg, the Germany that
loved the Kaiser and fought for him. This you did not bring to
Bonn. Not until that Germany is lined up on one side and all
the men of Bonn are lined up on the other side will you see which
is stronger. The trouble is, I can't tell you where to look for the
other Germany because it is not located in one city or in one
region or in one group. Germany is divided up into little bits in
every German's heart; part of every heart belongs to this Ger-
many, and part to old Germany, and a little bit to Hitler. You
have to wait to see which wins."

Many men have tried to find a name for this other Germany

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 163

in the past few years. Those whose memories are still sensitive to
suffering call it the Neo-Nazi Germany. Others call it Nationalist
Germany. Many democratic Germans, among themselves, call it
Restoration Germany. By Restoration Germany, they mean not
Hitler Germany, nor the dead German Republic, but the Ger-
many that goes back to the generation beyond the Kaiser's Ger-
many of order and established authority, the Germany of author-
ity vested in Church, authority vested in parent, authority vested
in trade-union bureaucrat, authority vested in schoolteacher and
faculty. Yet even Restoration Germany fails to cover all the kinds
of Germany with whom the men at Bonn must reckon someday,
at the polls and within their own hearts.

The Germany that will oppose Bonn is the Germany that
wishes, simply, to seek its own destiny in its own way, for its
own interests, making believe that the war, and all its hideous
crimes, had never happened, or if it happened, that it was an
accident brought about by other people for whom they are not
responsible. Nor does this other Germany believe its own or
any other democratic liberties are serious values to be fought for
if they tangle and obstruct power politics.

The years of revival have quickened this other Germany, too,
along with the Germany of Bonn. It has been generally assumed
that if Germans-or any other people for that matter eat, dress
and house themselves well, they become automatically peaceful
and decent people. Yet the records offer no guarantee that simple
prosperity can erase ambition and greed from men's souls. The
Germany of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm was entering upon a
Golden Age of well-being before its adventures of 1914 ushered
in the Age of Sorrow.

The naive and the cynical, reacting each in their own fashion,
find it either frighteningly disconcerting or entirely natural that,
in the years of the revival since 1949, the other Germany should
have grown so swiftly and deeply in its appeal to the German
spirit.

This other Germany cannot be traced by votes, for the laws
and powers of the Bonn government forbid and dissolve parties
and groups who summon Germans back to old tribal loyalties. It
can be traced only by episodes and incidents, and each year the
episodes and incidents come more frequently and seem to strike

FIRE IN THE ASHES 164

deeper. The episodes span the entire range from triviality to sig-
nificance: the French will note that a border post of German
customs guards is suddenly heard in the dark of night singing the
"Horst Wessel Lied." Diplomats will note that as a new German
Army is planned in the embryo German War Ministry, an office
purge forces out the best young men of the old officer corps and
that suddenly those German officers who tried to assassinate Hit-
ler in July are stigmatized as traitors. The British will seine up
through their Intelligence a plot in the Ruhr that links both Nazis
and respectable Germans together in a conspiracy to wipe out all
the structure of Bonn.

The activity and power of this other Germany seems to come
and go in shapeless waves. It was noticed first in 1949, coincident
with the uncovering of the first clandestine organization of Ger-
man Army officers, the Bruderschaft. It spurted suddenly in the
election campaign of 1949, in the contest for the new Bundestag.
When thoroughly democratic candidates began to vie with each
other for the ultra-nationalist vote, they went so far that Konrad
Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher squelched the rivalry by an un-
written agreement to hold their young men in check. It ebbed, so
far as observers could tell, in the events of 1950, and then, in the
spring months of 1951, took shape again, regionally, on the wind-
swept moors of Lower Saxony, Hitler's old stamping ground.
There, in provincial elections, the ranting, arrogant Socialist Reich
Partei harvested ten per cent of all votes under the leadership of a
roaring proto-Nazi, Ernst Otto Remer, whose chief claim to fame
was that he had butchered off the finest of the German officers
who had tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The government of
Bonn, in the spring of 1952, outlawed the Socialist Reich Partei,
driving it underground, and for a while, once more, there it was
quiet. The quiet persisted until early in 1953, and then the urge
showed itself once again, indestructible, natural to its roots,
stronger than ever.

The current wave of episodes is broader in range than any
that have preceded it, for they reach further to the Right, where
the true Fascists coddle their hatreds, and further to the Center,
where they nibble at the supporters of the legal parties, now
represented in Bonn. A German Free Corps (Freikorps Deutsch-
land), organized of ex-Army officers and ex-Nazis, has been re-

GERMANY: SPRING IN THE RUINS 165

vealed In operation and outlawed by Bonn. Its purpose was the
outright overthrow of all democratic institutions and the imple-
mentation of the oaths of loyalty imposed by Hitler. Such crack-
pots as the German Free Corps can be handled by Bonn's police
and laws. What worries the men of Bonn more are the personali-
ties and planning involved in the plot exposed by the British in the
beginning of 1953 in the Ruhr. Here for the first time real con-
spiratorial strategy was revealed an effort to capture the Ruhr
provincial organization of the Free Democratic party, one of the
member parties of the governing coalition in Bonn. Here for
the first time thoroughly respectable men, considered pillars of the
Bonn government and its parties, leaped to the defense of con-
spirators proven to be in liaison with hard-core Nazis who had
long since fled to refuge in Spain, Argentina, Scandinavia and
other points of exile.

Up to now this other Germany has been formless and almost
programless. It has had no leadership, no Hitler or Barbarossa. It
does not seem to offer Nazism any more, for very few, even
among the other Germans, would dare offer again to their citi-
zens the idiot immorality of Nazism which proved so disastrous
a failure. It still lacks the big money which financed Hitler to
power; so far only one of the Ruhr industrialists, the younger
Stinnes of the coal fortune, has backed the movement seriously.
Most Ruhr industrialists are cautious, backing all the Bonn parties
judiciously and impartially for political insurance.

What the other Germany wants is more tacit than explicit; it
wants a Germany whose boundaries are determined by history
and tradition. Immediately, it wants the Saar and reunification;
beyond that it wants the lost provinces under the Polish flag;
beyond that it murmurs of anschluss with Austria; beyond that,
already, its journals and pamphlets talk of Africa and Germany's
lost colonies. And it is prepared to use any methods to achieve
these ends and to do business with anyone who can help, West
or East. The cohorts and troops of the movement are as yet un-
shaped. No storm troopers in jackboots parade the streets; no
assassins are yet organized for murder. Its support comes from
a resonance in German memory. Its growth can be traced,
crudely, in the samplings of public opinion which show month
by month the growth in percentages of Germans who believe

FIRE IN THE ASHES l66

that there was more good than bad in Hitler. Until last year only
a minority of Germans believed Hitler did more good than bad.
The last official polls as of this writing show that now a majority
of Germans so believe and this majority is most pronounced
among the young, in the age group between twenty and twenty-
four.

It would be as great a folly to underestimate the forces of good,
the inherent strength of the men marshaled at Bonn, as to over-
estimate the forces of evil, the men gathering against it. By the
test of history, Nazism and Nationalism failed, and millions of
Germans have been convinced by the evidence of thek eyes and
the scars on their bodies that they must find another way. These
are the men who support Bonn. Thousands of Germans emerged
from the purgatory of Hitler's concentration camps convinced
that the shame and the wickedness of Germany could never be
erased except by their own personal devotion and consecration to
new ideals. Scores of such men sit in the Bonn Bundestag, knowing
that if they fail, their lives and honor are at stake. They will fight
the other Germany.

It is now, when this book is published, after their national elec-
tions that the two Germanys will begin to test each other. It may
be that the Bonn parties will be strong enough to continue their
rivalries in democratic frame; it may be they will be forced
together in coalition to defend their positions and the new Ger-
many against the old. It may be that the old Germany will creep
into the skin of the new Germany, infiltrate Bonn and subvert it.
Whatever happens, there, within Germany, lies the key to to-
morrow's Europe.

VIII

the story of Willi Schlieker

Germany is energy.

Sitting on the flat plains between the great powers of the West
and the Slav powers of the East, the Germans have learned always
to respond to pressure on them with count erthrust. To preserve
their lives, they know they must work harder and think quicker
than most of their neighbors. The energy that the pressures of
history generate in Germany, the talent and ability that guide
these energies, have been Europe's greatest problems for a century
now fructifying Europe, now blasting her to bits.

Fundamentally, this unquenchable energy is human beings. One
of these is Willi Schlieker, who., in his brief life, can tell almost as.
much of Germany as a history book. Nobody knows which way
Willi is going, not even Willi. But wherever he is going, he is
moving -fast.

We crossed a half-ruined, tumble-down courtyard, picked
our way over the puddled rain water on the cracked concrete and
then tramped heavily up a flight of creaking, wooden stairs. My
companion, a young and leanly-intelligent British political officer,
muttered something in German to a blank-faced man at the door
and off he went down the passageway. He came back, his face still
blank, and told us to follow him down the shabby, musty little
corridor until we came to a door which opened on a room, even
darker and mustier than the corridor. A man stood waiting for
us there.

"Hello, Schlieker," said my companion, "here's someone who
wants to talk to you." He made the introductions briefly and
Willi Schlieker asked us to sit down. They chatted for several
minutes together and while they talked I looked at Schlieker.

FIRE IN THE ASHES l68

He was a man of medium height and stout dimensions. Once, it
was obvious, this man must have been as solidly muscled as a tank,
but now the chunkiness had softened to a pudding of flesh that
bulged and rumpled his suit with odd stretchings and creases. It
was not healthy flesh, for Schlieker was pale, almost saffron-
colored. There was energy in him still, I could see, by the way he
balanced his weight so gracefully from foot to foot, but it was
nervous energy.

I listened to the conversation, not catching all the words but
sensing an undercurrent of strain, the Briton's voice politely chal-
lenging, probing, and Schlieker's voice dryly parrying, on the
defensive, vigorous but under restraint. The British officer finished
quickly with Schlieker and then, in that crisp, sure voice of a
Briton in command, said, "Well, Willi, I've got to go now. Mr.
White has a lot of questions to ask. See if you can help him out."

It was not quite a command; in January of 1949 the days of
commanding Germans in defeat were over, Yet it was the voice of
Occupation. This was Dtisseldorf, capital of British Occupation
of the Ruhr; I was American; and Willi Schlieker was German.
He was permitted to resent the voice of Occupation, but his re-
sentment must be hushed.

The resentment was easy to understand. For three and a half
years, ever since the collapse of Hitler's Germany, people had been
questioning Schlieker. The Russians had arrested him, questioned
him, then used him. The Americans had hunted him down and
questioned him to exhaustion. The British had arrested him, ques-
tioned him, used him and cast him out. The French had arrested
him, questioned him, released him. He was tired of questioners.

I wanted to ask Schlieker questions too, and for the same rea-
sons. Willi Schlieker had been the boy-genius of Hitler's war
machine, the young man who, at the age of twenty-eight, had
been the boss of all the Ruhr's iron and steel production, the co-
ordinator and master of the Third Reich's war arsenal. Willi knew
more about the Ruhr than anyone else, and since the Ruhr was
the very essence of German power, people came to him for an-
swers. I, too, wanted to know about the Ruhr, for in that winter
of 1948-1949 it was a land of mystery.

Under the fog and clouds of that dreary winter, the twisted and
majestic symmetry of the Ruhr's industrial towers stretched away

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 169

in the valley's wooded hills and gentle meadows, half -dead, half-
alive, perplexing Germans and conquerors alike. The Ruhr is such
a small place to have left so deep a scar on Europe's history. It
is no larger than metropolitan New York; a three-hour drive along
the curving autobahn from Diisseldorf to Dortmund embraces all
of it. In that season the drive showed a Ruhr in all the tantalizing
contrasts of ruin and revival. The gray mounds of rubble, the
broken brick and dangling girders, the gutted homes and tene-
ments with their rooms opening on cold air, like the slit cells of a
beehive, cast a shadow as of death. But by night one could sense
the Ruhr alive and see it glow with effort far away somewhere
a giant coke-wafer could be seen pushed blazing out of its oven
to fall in a cascade of flame into some waiting car, to glow and
then fade out. On and above the horizon the pink radiance of a
cluster of blast furnaces illuminated a cloud patch, which bright-
ened suddenly with the white flare of hot iron as the molten metal
was tapped and ran from the hole. Elsewhere, in the distance, a
caterpillar of bucket cars traced the contours of a steel mill as it
crawled with molten white metal showering sparks in the night.
By night it was clear the Ruhr was still alive. That was the year
the Allied Occupation gratingly shifted its gears to stop strangling
and begin encouraging the Ruhr. I wanted to find out how much
of the Ruhr's old strength and magic was left.

Schlieker loved to talk about the Ruhr, as he still does, and as
he began to talk, my questions stopped, for he knew more answers
than I had questions to ask. He is one of those men enchanted by
the making of things, by the organization of affairs, and the en-
chantment is drenched in a deeper, peculiarly German intoxication
with the romance of steel-making. Just as some Frenchmen talk
with magnetic force about the mystery of making and cooking
foods, until the listener feels he is hearing of sacred rites, so do
some Germans talk about the Vulcan's kitchen where steel is made,
where it is cooked and poured and baked and sauteed, where it
is patted and rolled and cut and quenched, where it is mixed with
the spices and sauces of metallurgy, vanadium, molybdenum, man-
ganese and tungsten to come out the master-metal of man's des-
tiny, bars of silver-gray tensile strength and force. Schlieker was
one of these men; he could talk about steel with more romance
and love than any man I have ever heard.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

For two hours he talked to me about the Ruhr. He told its history.
He led me up to that imaginary mountaintop where the visionaries
stand and described how the Ruhr is all one single piece. He fitted
together with his words the fragments of the industry which I
had seen in profile from the road-the stretching ridge of coal tipple
following coke oven, following blast furnace, following steel mill,
following fractionating column over and over for thirty miles
against the sky. He explained how the kinked and twisting pipe
mains and the interlacing wires bind it together in a single indivisi-
ble unit, coke oven feeding gas to mill, which feeds low caloric
gas back to coke ovens, which feed other gases to drop forges; he
described how the gases of the blast furnaces feed power stations
which fork electricity back into steels mills which pour their own
surplus current back into the one great power grid that binds
the Ruhr together. He described the men who run the Ruhr, the
managerial dominance of a tribe of slashed-cheek engineers and
businessmen whose closed and primitive aristocracy and pride no
upheaval yet had been able to erase. And Schlieker declared that
the Ruhr was indestructible because heavy industry once founded
can never be dismantled.

Every now and then I shook myself out of fascination to look
around me, and returned to the conversation more fascinated by
the contrast of setting and words. For if Schlieker stood on some
distant mountaintop in imagination, talking of German industry
with lofty command, he lived, physically, in squalor.

The room in which we sat was the shelter of a broken man, for
it was half-office, half-living room. It was true, I knew by the
records, that Schlieker had once bossed all the Ruhr for the Wehr-
macht. But Schlieker's domain had now been reduced to a gray,
damp flat where offices, bedroom, living room and presumably
kitchen all radiated off the one short corridor on the second floor
of i Breitestrasse, Diisseldorf. That living room was a curious
place a very dark, very crowded, yet essentially neat rectangle
of space. The office side consisted of two desks back to back with
one telephone teetering on a shuffled heap of papers. The other
half was home two shabby easy chairs and a shabbier old sofa.
It was no more shabby than any other living room in broken
Germany, but the shabbiness was punctuated and stressed by the
refinement that Willi had tried to bring to it. In the half-light of

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER iyi

the room two or three vases of flowers crisp red and fresh-
stabbed the dinginess with their purity of color. Above, on the
wall, two rich paintings glowed with the medieval golds, browns
and reds of madonnas and saints. The splotch of luxury added by
flowers and paintings seemed only to accent the grayness. Yet
when Schlieker spoke, the room fell away and there was only
Willi in the room, deftly balancing his heavy frame, talking, ob-
livious of setting.

That meeting was almost five years ago. I asked Willi Schlieker
many questions that day and have been asking him questions on
every visit to Germany, year after year since then. Now, how-
ever, I no longer visit Willi in Breitestrasse. Today when I come
to the Ruhr I must telephone through a chain of secretaries to
reach him, and Willi has many other places to meet me. He may
send his car a shiny, compact Mercedes-Benz convertible to find
me, and occasionally, in the evening, we roar across the Rhine
bridge up to Meererbusch. Meererbusch is the swank suburb of
the Ruhr, where Germany's captains of industry nest at night
much as Detroit's captains of industry do at Grosse Pointe. In
Meererbusch, Willi's new home, Am Wilier, shines like a jewel.

I always think of the old flat at i Breitestrasse when I visit Am
Wilier in Meererbusch. I think of the cooking smells of the old
place, the telephone jangling in the living room, the flowers in the
shabby dinginess. At Am Wilier the living room is a long, ex-
quisitely proportioned L-shaped room; one end of the L is paneled
with bookcases crowded with the most recent serious best sellers
of Germany, England and America. The other end is a huge
double-paneled glass wall which should be a bookcase but is not;
it is a wall of flowers in every glorious color. In the afternoon one
can look out through the flowers of the glass wall to a huge garden,
where flower beds burst in scarlet, blue and purple, all year around.
Set in the green lawn is Willi's new swimming pool. In the eve-
ning Willi flicks a switch and the wall panels light up to flood the
flowers like an imaginary greenhouse. We eat with fine silver,
from shell-pink plates, of fine food. Willi has come a long way,
as has Germany, in the past five years, and he has come all by
himself.

Willi once more is a man of mark in Germany, and he is sought

FIRE IN THE ASHES 172

out by many men as a fountain of wisdom, which he is. It was
not always so, for when I first met him Willi was a man of mys-
tery, reported by British Political Intelligence in charge of Occu-
pation as "possibly the most dangerous man in the Ruhr." In those
days, if you were well-connected, one or two high American
officials might let you glance fleetingly at the five-page, single-
spaced report on Willi which the British had made available to
them among other secret biographies of dangerous men in the
Ruhr. Lately Willi has enjoyed himself in his new prominence by
discomfiting both British and American intelligence agencies.
When people ask about him, he occasionally hands them a copy
of that old five-page secret report or briefs them on all the facts
it contains. The first time this happened British and American
security officers went into convulsions trying to find who had
leaked such a report for publication; half a dozen careers hung in
balance as security risks until they learned that Willi himself had
handed out the document. No one knows how Willi put his hand
on it, or what else he knows.

The intelligence report is a dull account of Willi's birth, family
and employment record; it compresses his dazzling rise to emi-
nence in Hitler's Third Reich into twenty lines, reports his turbu-
lent postwar career, gives his Nazi party number and gives the
pro and con of whether Willi was a true Nazi or a nominal Nazi.
It discusses his postwar associations, his flirtations with the So-
cialists, his decision to make a business of his own.

Willi, however, is far from dull. His story, as I have heard him
tell it and watched it happen, is Germany's story of energy, abil-
ity and will, as irrepressible as the force of life.

The first man in Willi Schlieker's life was his father, a tall, burly,
embittered Prussian from Altmark whom life had whirled around
and brought to rest in the waterfront slums of Hamburg, where
Willi was born. A locksmith by trade, the elder Schlieker had
tramped all over Europe on foot as a journeyman, from Norway
around to England before he came back to final employment at
the shipyards of Hamburg.

Willi's father had been a Socialist. But disillusionment with
socialism had made him bitter. When the Kaiser's Empire perished
and the milky-thin social-democracy of the Weimar Republic

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 173

replaced it, Willi's father first saw his Socialist dreams come true
and then found them empty. The old Schlieker abandoned social-
ism, turned inward, grew more silent and when he retired on pen-
sion finally withdrew totally into himself, keeping bees in his yard
and saying little.

Willi's mother, a Catholic, died when he was six years old, just
when his father was growing bitter* On her deathbed she pleaded
with his father that he let Willi be baptized in the Catholic faith
and his father agreed that when the boy was twenty-one he might
choose his own faith. Thus Willi was left to grow up almost by
himself in the grim, dreary blocks of waterfront tenements of
Hamburg in the topsy-turvy twenties. Only one man lifted
Willi's imagination from the Hamburg slums his schoolteacher,
a man named Albrecht, a rare person who loved students. Al-
brecht was a doctor in Sanskrit, an amateur astronomer and an-
thropologist, a scholar of Goethe. In the summer time Albrecht
would take his students tramping over the hills and forests of Ger-
many. Willi reached high-school age in the late twenties, when the
bronzed youth of the Wandervogel in their tawny shorts were
wandering and camping all over Germany. Albrecht led Willi to
South Germany, hiked with him across Bavaria and Thuringia,
showed him the old masterworks of Catholic architecture, and
Willi, who was a bright pupil, decided he would become an art
historian, specializing in Catholic art and baroque architecture.
Willi must have been a teacher's joy as he hungrily absorbed all
the strange thinking of Germany in the twenties. Willi, who was
to be Hitler's chief armorer, was a teen-age pacifist; he wrote one
long essay on the sinking of the Squalus in America, furious that
men should die in preparation for war. He wrote another longer
schoolboy essay on the Kellogg Peace Pact, using everything he
could find especially the speeches of Senator Borahto prove
why war must be outlawed. Willi might have gone on to be a
paunchy, beer-drinking, very gemiitlich Herr Doktor Professor
at some German university had it not been for the depression.

But in 1930, when Willi was only sixteen, his father lost his job
and, because he had to live on unemployment relief, shipped Willi
off to work as a farmer's helper. For six months Willi worked on
a farm for food and board and no pay.

When Willi came back to Hamburg in 1931, he had left the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 174

world of ideas far behind. In Hamburg, a bustling city of mer-
chants, sailors and traders, commerce is the main thing. Here Willi
found a job as apprentice to an export-import house at five dollars
a week to learn how the world made and shipped, bought and
sold goods. He was nineteen when that job ended, crumbling
in the depression, and he, too, was on unemployment relief. It
was then that Willi made contact with the Nazis. "I was hungry,
I was nothing but hungry," he now explains. Unemployment relief
gave him $2.50 a week to live on, and he had to pay $1.75 of that
a week for his lodging. So it was quite natural, says Willi, that
when a friend found him a job as a typist working for the Nazi
S.S. in Hamburg, he took it.

Though Willi's life flowed imperceptibly but inevitably into
the stream of Nazi change, it was, like most German lives, accom-
panied by the tiny halts and hesitations provoked by conscience
and discretion. Willi lost his job wish the S.S. within a year for
voicing too freely his opinion about the Rohm purge. He found
another as a clerk in the Nazi supreme court in Munich and lost
that one too, under circumstances that were later to help him
greatly. Willi purloined some papers in a case under consideration
by the Nazi court because the principals involved were old Ham-
burg friends of his, and the major charge was that one of the mem-
bers of the family had married a Jewess. For this Willi was fired,
but the Hamburg merchant family was grateful and helped Willi
find another job. This job carried him to Haiti as a salesman. Willi
lived in the West Indies for three years, first selling German ce-
ment and machinery there, then working for a British firm and
learning American and British business practice.

When Willi came back to Germany in 1938, he gaped at how
much it had changed. Germany had been hungry when he left.
The Hamburg he remembered was one where men sat in parks
all day looking at nothing, or on street benches idly playing cards,
where every open place, every square, every street was cluttered
with shuffling, rotting unemployed. In the afternoons, any after-
noon of those days, the idle would rusde together in demonstra-
tions or parades, carrying banners, their hollow voices shouting
slogans. By 1938, when Willi came home, Germany had a new
face. No one loitered in streets or parks; Germany worked and
nobody marched in the streets without orders. Across the coun-

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 175

tryside the new autobahns stretched in long ribbons of concrete;
in the cities at night the factories gleamed working the night
shift. Hamburg was thriving and WillTs friends, even the ones he
remembered as most democratic and anti-Nazi, all said it was good,
it was going well. So Willi stayed.

Will! had left Germany a boy, but came back a man, full of
vigor and self-confidence. Without any difficulty he succeeded in
snatching for himself the Eastern European Agency of a large
Ruhr steel exporting house. Within less than a year he had capped
this coup with another: he sold the Rumanian government an
entire new bridge across the Danube. But Willi had little time to
savor his triumph as a merchant-adventurer in the Balkans, for
by then, back home, war had been declared and by 1940 the
amount of steel that Germany could spare for commercial export
had dwindled to nothing. So once again Willi came home.

By now even the big men of the Ruhr knew that Willi Schlieker
was a hustler and he was hired by the biggest of all the Ruhr trusts,
the Vereinigte Stahlwerke. His job in their raw materials depart-
ment was to cut through the mad chaos of paper regulation and
allocation quotas of the Hitler war effort and get them the raw
ingredients they needed for steel-making.

Of all the major warring powers, the Germans, for the first three
years of their war, were perhaps the most bizarrely inefficient in
production control. During those years Hitler could afford to filter
his dilettante commands down through echelon after echelon of
ignorant Nazi zealots to the technicians of the Ruhr arsenal. By
the end of 1941, however, as the cold terror of the Eastern Front
suddenly made the war a mortal venture, the Nazi war machine
began convulsively to tighten and men of talent began to move
up. Among them was Willi Schlieker; by mid- 1942 Willi had
lone-wolfed raw materials for Vereinigte Stahlwerke so efficiently
that the government drafted him as deputy coordinator of the
tank production program. In Berlin, to which Willi now moved,
he came to the attention of Albert Speer whom Hitler in the same
year named boss of every phase of German industry and produc-
tion. Speer, who now sits in the prison of Spandau serving a life
sentence as a certified war criminal, was an architect, an amateur
at war and a genius untrammeled by conscience. He recognized
Willi, then only twenty-eight, as a fellow genius, and by the

IN THE ASHES 176

beginning of 1943 he had chosen him to be chief of all iron and
steel production, direction, allocation and control, not only for
Germany, but for all occupied Europe. By then, too, Wifli had
decided to take out a Nazi party card-No. 8,759,242.

The older industrialists, the stodgy civil servants, the veteran
party members might laugh at "Speer's Kindergarten" as they
called the fanatically efficient young men of the Arms Ministry.
But Willi was too far above routine to worry about them. He was
excited by the job. It was not money or comfort that made him
happy, for his salary was only 20,000 marks a year ($7,500) and
his home a one-room flat in Berlin. But Willi had power; every
forge, every blast furnace, every rolling mill in continental Europe
lay at his feet; under his offices on Friedrichstrasse, where he
worked seven days a week, was a concrete bunker impenetrable
by the heaviest bombs; in his bunker were teletype machines and
long-distance lines that linked him to every headquarters of Nazi
power and command; his eighty-odd staff members lived in bar-
racks nearby to be close to him; the countries of Europe were
provinces of his empire Willi would fly to Italy once every fort-
night just to currycomb the Italian steel industry and keep it on
its toes.

The machine that Willi built, Allied investigators say, probably
kept Germany in the war a full year after the date when she might
otherwise have collapsed. The first two years of Hitler's domestic
war effort had been nonsense, made tragic for the world only by
the crumbling rot of will with which the Western Allies met it.
Hitler launched his war in Europe when his arsenals were pro-
ducing only thirty tanks a month, and got away with the gamble.
Hitler flicked his war production about as the whim took him,
ordering, canceling, guessing, exhorting without reference to fact,
figure or statistic. In the summer of 1940 Hitler decided he had
enough small-arms ammunition in stock and thus suspended small-
arms ammunition production so that when Willi first came to
Berlin in 1942 he found that the Wehrmacht was shooting off
400,000,000 rounds of bullets a month in Russia, and production,
starting again from scratch, was only back to 1 15,000,000 rounds.

Germany's war production was a scramble of sharpsters, hus-
tlers, bribers and special interests. Men bribed priority and con-
trol officials; factory plant managers ignored them to turn out

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 177

commercial steel for commercial customers at fat war profits. The
first day Willi sat at his desk in Berlin as boss, he found one neatly
butchered rabbit and two cans of precious coffee delivered to him
by a priority claimant to sweeten the claim. But worse than the
corruption that infused the entire Nazi system was the confusion.
The armed services of Germany would order irrelevantly and
irrationally what they needed. Each producer might demand pri-
orities on twenty different kinds of special steel to fill one order,
although his total needs to fill the order might be less than ten
tons in all.

Willi, with the simplicity of a bright young man, did the sim-
plest of all things. He put German heavy industry on a punch-
card basis. Each item ordered by the Army had to be ordered
through Willi's office and each order had to be accompanied by
punch cards breaking down the end-item requirement of 1,000
tanks, say, into so many tons of broad-gauge armor plate, so many
tons of chain, so many tons of light-gauge steel, so many tons
of tubing. All the rolling capacity of Europe's steel mills were
similarly broken down into their monthly productive capacity
of special categories of steel Running a million punch cards a
month through his filing machines, Willi made a balance sheet.
On one side were the war's requirements listed in tonnages of
each type of steel; on the other side, Europe's capacity that month
to produce what tonnage of the needed kinds of steel.

The Speer Ministerium took over German production in early

1942 just as the bombings of the Ruhr began to hit hard. The
measure of its success was that as the bombings grew, so did Ger-
man production, until on the very eve of defeat when the rest of
Germany had collapsed within, the Ruhr was producing more than
ever before in the seven years of war. As the long Eastern Front
stretched, widened and became a junkyard cemetery of German
effort, production became the key to survival. Give me 600 tanks
a month, shrieked Hitler to Speer, and we will abolish every
enemy in the world. The Army General Staff echoed Hitler
600 tanks a month, 600 tanks was the magic figure. By the end of

1943 Germany was producing 1,000 tanks a month and it was
not enough. By November, 1944, when the Western Allies had
already made their first breach of German soil, Germany was
producing 1,800 tanks a month and it was not enough. Production

FIRE IN THE ASHES 178

rose and soared, but each new high that the Speer Ministerium
reached was overmatched by the multiplying effort of the fac-
tories of America and Britain. By mid- 1944 airplane production
had reached a peak of 3,750 aircraft a month; yet it was not
enough.

Willi, looking backward, has told American bombing experts
over and over again that they never succeeded in putting more
than a minor dent in Germany's heavy steel production. What
hurt were such blows as the bombing of gasoline plants, for by
the time Germany was producing 3,750 aircraft a month she
lacked the fuel to train pilots, or even keep her already trained
pilots in the air. What hurt even more was the bombing of the
railways. The Ruhr, says Willi, ultimately collapsed not because
of the bombing of plants, mills and mines but because the railway
exits were so clogged with blowouts, breaks and burned-out loco-
motives that they could not carry away the 30,000 tons of finished
goods the Ruhr produced every day. The Ruhr strangled finally,
in January and February, 1945, on its own production; it did not
cave in under blast.

Willi knew early, as early as the fall of 1943, that the war was
lost. He knew it, he says, by simple mathematics. Every month
the steel mills of Europe produced 2,700,000 tons of rolled steel
for his allocation. More than half of that had to be yielded to the
ordinary every-day needs of human beings for tin cans and gadg-
ets, for repair of railway bridges, for construction of new fac-
tories and bunkers, wires and communication. For his war Willi
could take away each month only 1,150,000 tons of rolled steel,
out of which he had to make at the end each month, 1,800 tanks,
1,200 field guns, 600 heavy guns, 25 submarines, 3,700 airplanes,
plus ammunition and trucks. Everyone wanted more and more of
these items, but they had to come out of a total steel quantity that
stayed fixed, for Willi, under bombing, could not build new steel
plants as America did. One day Willi got everyone in Army pro-
curement around one table to try to settle their demands. When
each man had boiled the demands for his service down to the
minimum, Willi found that if he met their requests not even
350,000 tons of steel a month would be left to make shells, and
by that time the Eastern Front alone was using more shells than
that. In the winter of 1944, before the Second Front was opened,

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER

when Germany was making 450,000 shells a month, a group of
young Wehrmacht officers arrived in Berlin from the Eastern
'Front to plead with Willi for more shells. Willi asked them just
what they needed, and when they had figured it out, it came to
550,000 tons of shells a month to hold that front alone. By then
Willi knew that Germany's total steel capacity had reached its
ceiling, that the Second Front was about to break, and that defeat
was inevitable.

Yet Willi stayed. He stayed to the end. In the twitching last days
of his life, Hitler decided that he would fight to the end from the
Redoubt of Bavaria and the Tyrol, and ordered Speer to draw up
economic plans for resistance from the Redoubt. On April 21,
Speer ordered Willi to fly south to organize arms production
there. But Willi would not leave. He telephoned Hitler's Fiihrer-
Bunker to say that he, Schlieker, chose to remain in Berlin to the
end.

That night Willi was very nervous, for the end was near, and
he decided to drive out to the estate of some friends in the coun-
try. He drove through the darkness that night, April 21, without
lights, for the British were bombing Berlin as he left. Thus, in the
dark, Willi smashed directly into an army truck and was hurled to
the side of the road with half his ribs broken. All that night and the
next day Willi lay by the side of the road, half -senseless, dream-
ing, thinking, he now recalls, how curious it was to die by the
side of the road at the age of thirty-one, being the biggest boss of la-
bor in Europe and the largest steel producer in German history a
success story, ending in a gutter in defeat.

Some wayfarers found him the next day and delivered him to an
army hospital He was semiconscious when they carried him in
and remembers through the haze that people examined his identity
papers and an old doctor said, "This is Schlieker of the Speer
Ministerium. Best let him die. Let's not make ourselves more guilty
when the Russians come by having him here." But Willi is very
tough and he would not die. Besides, one of the younger doctors
did not agree with the older doctor and helped him to live. In eight
days he was well enough so that his friends could come and carry
him away to their country estate.

Willi's friends installed him in a large room on their first floor,
on a clean white bed near a window that looked far out over the

FIRE IN THE ASHES l8o

clear countryside. There Willi lay quietly until the next day when,
precisely at noon, looking out through the window over the sunny
fields toward the village beyond, he saw a huge black puff of
smoke rise quietly from the village, then another, then another.
He lay helplessly in bed and watched the Russians shell the village,
and knew that for him the war was over.

Out of the disaster Willi emerged with his skin and a new wife.
For the friend at whose house Willi was staying took fright as the
Russians came and fled like a rabbit before their advance. But
his wife, Marga, would not leave Willi there helpless, and she re-
fused to go. She stayed with Willi through the next two weeks
of madness, and now she is his wife.

It took hours for the Russians to cross the field from the village
to the house, and Willi was dragged down to the cellar where all
the peasants of the village crowded for shelter. It was 4:30 in the
morning when the Russian troops came into the cellar. They were
combat troops and even Willi admits they were good; they looked
at the huddled people and one of them said, a We are not like
Goebbels and Hitler; you are safe." Then they went away. But
after the combat troops came the clean-up troops, and by mid-
morning Russians, drunk and sober, European and Asian, were
pouring through. They did not hurt Willi, or Marga, who sat on
the bed beside him, because, says Willi, Russians are madmen, but
to the sick and the children they are respectful. It was not safe
to stay, however, so the next day Willi, hobbling on two sticks
and helped by Marga, made his way into the forest. They lived in
the forest, sleeping on the ground for seven days. When they
came back from the forest to the big house they had left, they
found it empty, stripped of its furniture, silver, beds, clothes,
everything. On foot and homeless, therefore, Willi and Marga
set out for Berlin, riding on a railway flatcar loaded with rails
that the Russians had already begun to rip off the Hamburg-
Berlin double-track system.

The Berlin they came to in May of 1945 was as quiet as death.
People were hungry, says Willi, that was all, and they were dying
of starvation. Through the streets, parents carried little wooden
boxes they had made to encofiin their children. There was no
cooking oil, no fat, no butter, no meat, only bread and the bread

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER lol

was always wet and soggy. Berlin lived a jungle life which reached
its climax in the final days of June as the Russians stripped the city
clean before the other Allied troops should enter and help occupy
it. It was during these same days that the Russians arrested Willi
and threw him into confinement along with several hundred other
people, in a moist, stinking cellar where he would stay until they
made up their minds what to do with him.

The Russians, it turned out, were like everyone else. Each of
the conquering powers wanted to put its hands on Willi, to ques-
tion him, to wring some punishment out of his body because he
had made Hitler's machine tick and turn so efficiently. But as soon
as people began to talk to Willi they found how useful he was,
and instead of exacting vengeance they used him. The Russians
made him, very shortly, director of what was left of the industrial
empire of the Flick concerns in their Eastern Zone, and Willi had
an office again.

The Americans found Willi working for the Russians in Berlin,
and sought him for cross-questioning. Experts writing the U.S.
Strategic Bombing Survey wanted to talk to Willi more than any-
one else except Speer, for these were the two men who could best
measure the effect and precision of United States bombardment of
the Ruhr. They were fascinated by him, but the United States could
not use Willi's services because the American Zone of Occupa-
tion had much scenery but little industry. So they introduced
him to the British, who governed the Ruhr and did need him. In
February, 1946, therefore, Willi was flown out of Berlin to ad-
vise the British Occupation Authorities on the operation of the
Ruhr which he had directed so well against them during the war.
Since Communist morality is so flexible a thing, the Communists
of West Germany and of Britain could now attack the British
Army for employing a notorious Nazi, which they did with great
gusto, ignoring the fact that Willi had just quit the employ of the
Communist Army.

Willi's job, said the cold employment description, was to "ad-
vise on production planning and office organization on the basis of
his ministerial experience." Actually, as the British honestly de-
clare, it was he who pulled the Ruhr together in 1946 as he had
before in 1942 and 1943. Once again the Ruhr producers were
milling around in simple, selfish greed, hoarding steel, black-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 12

marketing steel, producing special steels for high profit, ignoring
demand for basic steels for reconstruction. The Ruhr in those days
was leaderless, for all its top men had been arrested as Nazi col-
laborators. Soon, however, when the zeal of conquest slackened,
they would all trickle back from denazification camps to look for
plants to command once more, as they always had.

Willi had been a well-hated man in the Ruhr from the days of
his first eminence when, as a young upstart, endowed with all
the power of the Third Reich, he had pushed the proud barons
of the German steel industry into the frame of priorities and con-
trols that the Wehrmacht needed for production. He was even
more hated by the Ruhr barons after he worked for the British,
for he imposed on them a new set of statistical controls, directing
their orders and allocations at British behest for reconstruction
and repair. As the tight thongs of Occupation loosened, as the
Ruhr slipped rapidly back to German leadership and German
direction, Willi's days as boss were numbered.

By the beginning of 1947 Willi's many enemies had closed on
him. A local German court which, Willi claims, was inspired by
some of the oldest Nazis in the Ruhr, convicted him of being a
Category III Nazi, a minor criminal offender. Therefore, by the
rules of British Occupation, Willi had to be dropped from the
employ of the occupying armies. For months he was a cause
celebre in the Ruhr as Germans and Britons discussed the precise
shade of his guilt. There was no doubt that Willi was a Nazi, but
his card number showed him as a latecomer to the movement.
Certainly Willi had clung to the Nazi regime down to the very-
end and had made it function with incredible efficiency, but Willi
claimed that he had served Germany out of patriotism not fanati-
cism. There was no doubt that the Speer Ministerium in which
Willi had been so important was one of the most heinous and
wicked employers of slave labor in the entire German Reich, but
Willi insisted that he had always fought for better food for the
laborers for "it was silly to let them die for lack of food." Though
Allied courts sentenced Willi's captain, Speer, to life imprisonment
for his part in the hideous camps, no .one could prove that Willi
had had any other interest during the war except to make things
out of steel efficiently. Willi was neither pro or con slave labor;
he was simply, in his own eyes, a producer.

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 183

It took almost two years for Willi to clear himself of the Nazi
charge lean months in which he and Marga lived on 250 marks
($80) a month, while he tried to earn his way as an industrial
advisor and small-time trader. It was not until the spring of 1948
(he had been arrested and released by the French, too, during this
period of wandering) that Willi was unblocked as a Nazi, oddly
enough on the appeal and intervention of some German Socialist
chiefs who recognized his talent for pushing the tycoons of the
Ruhr about. In July of 1948, in the very week that he was cleared,
Willi began a new career. With 2,000 marks as capital (which his
wife Marga had raised) he bought an old trading name, Otto R.
Krause & Co., the Dusseldorf outlet of a famous East German
firm of the same name, and set up his business. On July 29, 1948,
he opened the doors on the shabby office at i Breitestrasse, in the
ruins just off Kasernestrasse, a stone's throw from the gloomy
Gothic mansion which housed the old German Steel Trust. There
he prepared to buy and sell steel in commercial quantities, to
hustle on his own account.

That was when I first met Willi, in Breitestrasse, smarting, ach-
ing, itching to show the world. The businessmen laughed at him
for, said they, "You're smart when you're working for Speer with
the whole state behind you, and you're smart when you're work-
ing for the British with the Occupation behind you. But can you
be smart by yourself, Schlieker, can you make money?" Willi
wanted to show them; he wanted to show the men he had bossed
that he could do as well as they, boss or no boss. "I'm thirty-eight
years old now,'* Willi told me several years after I first met him.
"I am going to stay at this until I am forty, then I will see whether
it's worth doing something else."

By then, though Willi's office was still in Breitestrasse, he was
well on his way to being a rich man. His postwar career was se-
curely launched.

Willi brought to the art of the businessman the perspectives he
had first seen from the height of German war production. All the
infinitely complex tangle of Ruhr cokeries and rolling mills, feuds
and jealousies, mines and blast furnaces, was a pattern that Willi
had once seen from on high. Willi knew better than any man not
only how the Ruhr fitted into the broader life of all German in-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

dustry, but how It was linked and meshed with the huge, outer
patterns of world trade. He understood what moves governments
as they prod and push industry to compliance with the graphs of
office economists and the concepts of political necessity. Willi
could sniff a turning wind in business or in politics and swing with
it quickly, before any of the older, stodgy businessmen of the
Ruhr knew the turn was approaching. His career since the war
has been a series of successes in catching these turns, riding with
the spin, dropping off just in time to catch the next one, always
increasing his wealth, power and importance.

Willi's decision to settle for a meager livelihood as industrial
advisor and small-time trader of iron and steel goods after his
expulsion from the Occupation was underlain with a shrewd
gamble: that the worthless paper marks which were then the
currency of Occupied Germany someday must be wiped out,
and that the thing to clutch was not money but hard goods. So
Willi tried to accumulate not marks but stocks of steel and iron.
When the currency was wiped out and the early speculators of
postwar Germany were ruined, Willi sat secure on his little pile
of undevaluable steel and iron bars and was already a junior capi-
talist when he opened his new venture. There was nothing illegal
in what he had done; it was simply shrewd. Later the Bonn gov-
ernment tried to raid Willi's house when he was off on a trip, to
find ways of clipping him for an extra income tax or to turn up
some special skulduggery. They found nothing; Willi had cheated
no one, he had simply outfoxed everyone.

In his first year of business Willi did quite well, averaging about
250,000 marks a month of turnover in steel. The next year he
caught another trend sales to the Communist world. The large
cartels and old established firms of the Ruhr were trying to freeze
Willi out of major deals in West Germany, but the Russians and
East German Communists were clamoring for steel, and Willi was
ready to deal with anyone. In the summer of 1949, when the
temporary downward slump of world trade forced Britain off
sterling and made steel momentarily surplus in the Ruhr, Willi
moved fast to fill contracts for the Russians and the East Zone.
Within nine months he was the biggest "black trader" in Ger-
manyfrom midsummer of 1949 to spring of 1950, he sold the

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 185

Russians 70 million marks' worth (18 million dollars) of steel and
turned a personal profit of a million dollars. By the midsummer of
1949 WiUi had a monopoly on steel sales to the Russians and did
about half the business between the Communist world and the
Ruhr. For this he was temporarily blacklisted by the American
government, a charge from which he extricated himself by an un-
challengeable answer: that every time he had made a shipment to
the Russians he had informed the Americans, and they had not
protested.

On the next turn, the outbreak of the Korean War, Willi was
the fastest man in Europe off the start. The old-line Ruhr masters
thought that now, at last, they had Willi because the war had
made steel the scarcest commodity in the world. They would give
him no steel to sell the Russians and no steel to sell anyone else.
But for Willi the steel scarcity brought its own opportunity. Now
everyone was clamoring for steel, steel at any price, and he
quickly saw that steel was short in the Ruhr only because the
Ruhr was short of coke without which steel cannot be made.

Therefore, Willi set out to get coke in order to get steel His
infinitely detailed knowledge of industry recalled to memory
some of the most obsolescent coking ovens in Germany, idle for
lack of the proper coal to make coke. But in the United States
coking coal was surplus. No one had ever previously thought of
going all the way to the United States to buy coking coal for
the coal-rich Ruhr, but Willi thought of it now. He bought
coking coal in America for ten dollars a ton and paid fifteen dol-
lars a ton to ship it to the Ruhr. By midspring of 1951 the gamble
paid off, for Willi was bringing 72,000 tons of American coal to
the Ruhr each month, making 50,000 tons of coke, and with his
50,000 tons of coke he could demand an equivalent amount of
steel in return. Now Willi was master again free to sell steel at
the peak of the gray market in New York, or at the peak of the
scarcity in Germany itself. Everyone else tried to copy him in
hauling coking coal from America, but, with his headstart, Willi
had captured the market, and by 1952 he alone was responsible for
forty per cent of the Ruhr's coking import from the United
States. No one talked any longer of squeezing Willi out. Willi
was in.

FIRE IN THE ASHES l86

Willi's office is now sheltered in the handsome eight-story
yellow-sandstone building he has built for himself just off Kaserne-
strasse. You come up by soundless elevator to the top story to
wait in an anteroom, where huge bowers of lilacs and vases of
potted plants flamboyantly recall the more modest flowers of
other days. Willi's private office is lace-curtained and done in
rich browns and greens. On his smooth flat-topped desk is a
sampling of the world's opinion the German papers, of course,
along with Le Monde of Paris, the Neue Zuricher Zeitung of
Switzerland and the New York Herald Tribune. On the wall
hangs a huge chart of the Atlantic Ocean, with three flags stuck
in it. The three flags are his ships, which he bought in England,
pennants of a new business, for Willi now owns his own shipping
line: Reederei Willi Schlieker, with its own flag a bisected field
of black and white, initialed W on black and S on white.

Willi's excellent taste is, unlike his business practice, quite re-
strained, his preference in colors running to brown. His board
room opens from a long alcove off his private office, and there
a dark walnut table with sixteen dark brown walnut chairs about
it rests on a dark green rug. Willi wears brown too. He has lost
the fat of the defeated years and is now chunky, solid, relatively
thin again. His brown suit is matched by a brown tie and soft
brown suede shoes. A pearl stickpin glows softly on his tie.

Willi's enterprises now cover all Germany and are beginning
to reach out around the world. From his handsome new office
building he directs, in addition to his vast steel-trading firm, a
recently launched housing development, a nationwide net of
scrap iron collection, a new pipe and sheet steel mill he has built,
plus another cold-rolled strip steel mill he has acquired. His new
shipping line has interested him in Hamburg again, where he is, at
this writing, preparing to open a shipbuilding concern.

A levelheaded businessman might be cautious after four years
of such swift expansion, but Willi's excitement carries him from
project to project as if each were a new adventure. His new pipe
mill is Willi's answer to the monopoly on pipe and tubing in the
Ruhr. When he decided to make pipe in 1951, he quietly acquired
a tiny, run-down steel mill, so old as to be considered junk. Then,
in the green meadows beside the old mill, Willi threw up a new
plant, crammed it with new machinery so fast that no one knew

THE STORY OF WILLI SCHLIEKER 187

what was happening, and five months from the day he broke
ground he was turning out seamless steel tubing.

Only ten miles away in one of the gentle hollows of the Ruhr's
rolling apron, Willi has another steel plant. There his workers turn
out strips of shimmering steel one-tenth of a mfllimeter thick.
These strips fill no primordial world shortage, as does the piping
he makes at his tube plant, but they satisfy Willi quite as much,
for his interests are as broad as German life. Willi covers these
thin strips with a special coating to serve a growing German in-
dustrythe canning of whipped cream. Germany's citizens now
like to purchase individual portions of schlagsahne for their every-
day coffee, and Willi makes thin strip for canning their whipped
cream just as efficiently as he made heavy strip for their tanks.

WilH works hard, very hard these days, for work is his delight
and the source of his enthusiasm. Also he has to work hard, for all
his many firms, by now doing very big business, depend on his
one-man direction. In 1951 the iron and steel trading corporation
alone did a business of $70,000,000. Willi is up early in the morn-
ing, into the office early, then quickly out inspecting or directing
or conferring. He races his Mercedes-Benz through the Ruhr with
a hard, desperate intensity and when he comes home tired and
exhausted, he is ready to turn in early. After dinner at eight Willi
is usually ready by ten to give way to the sleep that will power
him the next day.

Willi is not yet forty, the age he set as quitting age. He has come
a long way from the motherless boy of the Hamburg slums, but
his memory of them is still fresh. When he walks through the new
housing he has built near his plants he says, "Better than workers'
housing in Hamburg where I lived.'* He has come a long way from
the broken boy-genius of 1945, but he has not pushed the memory
of the war and the war machine out of mind either. Now that he
is rich he allots a small pension to the wife of his wartime boss,
Speer, because Speer is still in jail as a war criminal.

In the evening Willi muses a great deal. What he wanted five
years ago, he told me once, was "a base where I can stand and they
can't hurt me"; he has the base now. What he does next he does
not know; in business, of course, there is a new vista opening up
now that Germany may soon be permitted to make arms again, for
Willi knows how to make arms better than any man in Germany.

FIRE IN THE ASHES l88

He has toyed with the idea; if opportunity comes he will probably
move quickly. But beyond business Willi is unsure of what comes
next. Perhaps music, perhaps politics. German music has been
stilled for a long time, and occasionally the thought comes that he
and Marga might be music patrons. Politics, of course, is interest-
ing too. But Willi has not found any political party in new Ger-
many he can join yet. "Everyone is waiting for a party," says
Willi

IX

no for the reyolution

Any American who goes to England carries with him a baggage
of memories that he has inherited from the centuries. Most of
these memories are suffused with the soft green haze of country
England from whence the ancestors of Americans came that
country England of moor and heather, of rose and garden whose
images have been etched in our minds by every schoolbook from
Shakespeare to Browning.

This England, to be sure, is still there. One can see its fields rip-
pling and billowing like ocean swells, cut by hedges and walls into
farms, pastures and parks almost too well-tended for rugged Amer-
ican taste. The city of London broods over this England, and
beyond London are the stately country homes, the cottages of
hewri stone, the villages of cobbled streets surrounded by fields of
heavy wheat and pastures of fat sheep. This storybook impression
of solid, nourishing roots in the earth is, however, entirely false
and hides one of the most stubborn facts of Atlantic politics. Eng-
land is a miracle of man's imagination, a daily denial of realities.
No other country in the world is posed more delicately or peril-
ously on the edge of perpetual disaster and collapse; no other
country so completely unable to support its own weight supports
so great a part of world politics and causes so many men to listen
when she speaks.

The England that lives always ten paces from chaos and accepts
this condition as normal is not the country England of our
memory, but the city England of world politics. City England
is not so much London, that monster agglomeration of 8,000,000
people in a jungle of brick, stone and paving, as the faceless towns
that jostle one another across the central bqlt of the island.^ Of
Great Britain's 50,000,000 people, eighty per cent live in cities

FIRE IN THE ASHES 1QO

and towns, and these cities and towns are crowded one on another
so densely that within their country, smaller than Oregon, live
more people than live in all of the United States west of the Mis-
sissippi. A century of industrial history has clotted these cities to-
gether in patterns: the steel cities Sheffield, Rotherham, Birming-
ham and their suburbs black, smoking, gray, sulfurous, hour
after hour, sprawled about the Trent; the wool cities about Leeds,
wet, dismal, chilly in the Yorkshire winds, so cramped, say the
local chroniclers, that a squirrel can run for twenty miles out of
Leeds without descending once from the rooftops; the cotton
cities, on the western lip of the low hills of the Penninesthe red
cities, of red brick, of red factories, of red cottages, that follow
one another monotonously into the cotton capital of Manchester
which dominates a larger urban agglomeration even than London.

All these cities were created by the world of yesterday, and to-
day their citizens live in pawn to a world which tomorrow may
leave them starving. Their island the green fields and meadows to
the contrary notwithstanding cannot feed, clothe, fuel or make
comfortable even half their number. All English politics start from
this one fact. All Britain's movements in the world diplomatic,
military, economic, political are magnetized by this fact.

The real England, city England, begins at the wharves. At the
West India docks of London Port lies the S.S. Triberg, three
weeks and ten thousand miles out of Vancouver in North Amer-
ica. Deep into her hold reach huge vacuum pipes sucking wheat
endlessly aloft to the top of the ten-story red-brick granary. It
takes four days for the roaring suction pipe to suck all the ten
thousand tons of wheat out of the Triberg, letting it spill in cas-
cades of red and gold grains to be cleaned, dusted and collected in
the bins where it lies heavy and fragrant, waiting to be milled into
London's bread. Every single week eight such ships must weigh
into the ports that rim the island of Great Britain to deliver the
yearly four million tons of wheat that England must bring from
over the seas to feed her people. Without them there would be no
bread. Along the wharves of the Thames are other ships and other
warehouses ships full of heavy, perfumed hogsheads of tobacco;
of huge wine butts out of Bordeaux; of yellow, raw timber from
Rumania, Russia and the Balkans. Surrounding them are the wares
leaving Englandscores and hundreds of shiny new automobiles,

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 191

crates of intricate machinery, cases of Scotch whisky, textiles, re-
frigerators, radios, engines. What comes in and goes out must
balance, for if it does not, English life will come stuttering to a
dry, choking halt.

To feed the British, half of all Britain's food 12 million tons
must be unloaded at the wharves each year; to fuel her industry
and move her trucks and automobiles, 28 million tons of oil must
be piped out of the tankers; to clothe her people, 750,000 tons of
wool and cotton must arrive. To pay for this food, oil and cloth-
ing, the British must export what the skill of their fingers can
produce coal, textiles, metallic goods, engineering equipment. To
make these things, in turn, a further staggering tonnage of raw ma-
terials must arrive automatically and uninterruptedly every single
week from overseas. Half of all Britain's iron ore, f our-fifths of
her timber and wool, nearly all her copper, lead, tin, zinc, alumi-
num, all her oil, rubber, cotton, sulfur, tobacco, tea and coffee
must come from abroad. No nation in the world is balanced more
precariously on the shifting tides of trade. In war the best of Brit-
ain's blood and courage, and in peace all her skills of diplomacy
and persuasion are devoted to keeping the trade lanes open.

No great community in the world reacts more quickly and un-
controllably to the slightest ripple of events in the outer globe
than does Britain, because on this island converge two great sets
of uncertainties.

On the one hand is the uncertainty of the market, the old and
well-known uncertainty of commercial chance. Uncertainty any-
where in the world makes the British wince. The cotton men of
Lancashire know how to make dhotis for India, coolie cloth for
China, sarongs for Batavia, organdies for Burma, white shirtings
for fellaheen. But when there is trouble "up-country," as the Lan-
cashire merchants say, trouble with Mossadegh in Iran, White
Flag rebellion north of Rangoon, trouble with Indonesians revolt-
ing near Batavia, Egyptians rioting on the canal, then somewhere
in Lancashire a mill closes down, covering the lint-fuzzed spindles
with brown paper against the day when "up-country" reopens
again. These little cycles of trade gather, too, in greater move-
ments of decades and generations that bleach life out of entire
cities. There was a time just before the First World War when
the spinners and weavers of Lancashire made eight billion yards

FIRE IN THE ASHES 192

of cotton, cloth a year and shipped seven billion of these yards
around the world. Today they export less than a billion yards of
cotton cloth, and for decades, one by one, the mills have been
growing silent and closing down. When one stands on the Pen-
nines with an oldtimer, looking down on such a spinning town as
Oldham, his melancholy is understandable as he says, "I remem-
ber when from this hill the smokestacks down there looked just
like a trayful of pencils." The uncertain market is not always
cruel, of course. As the world's needs change and the British
react to meet the need, new industries flourish and new, cleaner,
fresher cities thrive. The market spreads the blight through Old-
ham, through Nelson, Strines, Wigan, Bolton and Blackburn where
cotton once was king, but as the market calls for jet planes, for
scientific instruments, for new research, little country towns like
Cheltenham blossom a hundred miles away, fresh and sparkling
in the green country. Yet no one who depends on the distant
market is ever secure. Let Australia impose import restrictions
as she did in 1952 and, while the merchants try to find alternate
outlets, 10,000 automobile workers in Birmingham and Coventry
go on short time.

The uncertainty of the market is at least a century old. The
other uncertainty is much younger it is the uncertainty of supply.
In the days when England alone had a modern industry and the
pound sterling was the world's single measure of value, the re-
sources of the freshly discovered globe were hers to pick and
choose from. But in a world that is expanding its demands every-
where, supplies have begun to run short, or are sealed off by poli-
tics. England has built her sulfur plants to run on the pure sulfur
of the American Gulf Coast; when the American government and
American industry clamp down on the export of sulfur because
of American need, the British chemical industry staggers. Food
was cheap in the days when England was changing from country
land to city land, and farmers everywhere poured their surpluses
into her island. Food is scarce now and is eaten at home, as meat
in Argentina, or as rice in the Orient. Everywhere the revolutions
and changes of Asia, of Africa, of South America demand of
the world more newsprint and pulp, more wheat and oil, more
rubber and iron ore, reducing the amount Britain can claim as
tier own.

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 193

Britain lives at the meeting place of the world's uncertainties.
Yet she wishes not only to survive, which is difficult enough, but
to remain great, to prosper not only as a larger Belgium or a larger
Switzerland, but to stand as one of the great powers with a surplus
of energy large enough to shape the world and impose British
policy on it.

To achieve this purpose the British have only three natural re-
sources: the sea, coal and their genius. The sea is important. The
great oceans and Britain's sharply dented coastline give her the
enormous advantage of cheap water-borne transport from the far
ends of the earth almost to the threshold of British factories; the
sea evens up much of the advantage of the landlocked, continental
giants with whom Britain competes. The coal resources of Britain,
even though badly wasted by neglect and a generation of misman-
agement, are still important. They are a prime, native source of en-
ergy which, if only they can be exploited efficiently once again,
guarantee her forever the power to keep the wheels turning.

But most important of all is British genius.

The genius of the British is a difficult thing to transcribe in the
cold accounting of power politics. Yet to ignore how greatly it
multiplies the British is as impossible as to ignore how the perverse
genius of the French divides and reduces them. For genius in
England is not only the individual flowering of the human mind,
but also the coming together of these minds and personalities in a
kinship of community which no other free state can approach.
This kinship is the source of Britain's fundamental political
strength the ability to hang together and respond to leadership in
such a way that the whole effort of the nation may be devoted to
one end, without terror, without police.

Continental Europeans know of this genius and respect it, but
they have only very circumstantial explanations of why the British
are different from other Europeans. In England, say some of the
Continentals, men retain their dignity as men. Every country of
the Continent (except Sweden and Switzerland) has been invaded
by rude, physical turbulence the shriek of the wounded, the f ur-
tiveness of the refugee, the tramp of the conqueror which Eng-
lishmen have never known. Each country on the Continent (again,
excepting Sweden and Switzerland) has known its government
to be violently overthrown at least once, and some three or four

FIRE IN THE ASHES

times since the beginning of the century. The citizen has seen
authority humiliated, despoiled, made squalid, replaced every-
where on the Continent; he has watched troops in alien uni-
forms come as conquerors, to occupy buildings and lay down
rules. He has cringed against a wall as enemy police have passed
and has winced at the real or imaginary feel of enemy fingers
on his cheek. Each individual has been broken a bit in the proc-
ess and his respect for authority has withered as his fear has
increased. Englishmen have never known this. No policeman in
England carries a gun; authority needs none. A French diplomat
in Budapest once tried to explain to me how people who hate
communism in Europe nevertheless grow to accept it: "Europe is
different from England," he said. "Europe is part of the Land of
Humiliation. The Land of Humiliation reaches from the Bay of
Biscay all the way across Asia to China. Every man has been vio-
lated at least once and usually many times. Humiliation is no
longer strange to Europe, but the British have never known it and
they keep their dignity."

As intriguing as this explanation is, it is unsatisfying. For the
political genius of the English does not result only from their
miraculous escape from the disasters that have overtaken other
people. It starts mysteriously far down in the roots of everyday
life, and their attitude to politics is the ultimate fruit of a kinship
that begins far below the level of politics. This kinship begins, I
think, in the simple ability the British have to associate. They asso-
ciate (despite their reputation for aloofness) more easily than any
other people in the world, whether in London, village, mill town
or suburb. They associate to bird- watch, to raise clothes for mis-
sionaries, to grow flowers, to play cricket, to trade, to put on plays
long before they associate to defend individual political interest
or that of the nation. Two sociologists recently decided to plot
how much of British life is covered by simple neighborliness and
clubbiness. They chose as the object of their survey the little in-
dustrial (furniture-malting) town of High Wycombe, in a con-
stituency of closely balanced politics. High Wycombe with about
35,000 people is thirty miles from London and has the same rela-
tionship to the great capital as New Rochelle, say, has to New
York. The 35,000 people of High Wycombe, the two sociologists
found, had managed to cluster together in the following group-

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 195

ings. There were some fifty-one general clubs-old folks clubs,
legionnaire clubs, air force clubs, clubs for model-makers, chess
players, amateur drama, amateur symphony orchestra, singers,
masquers, camera faddists, clubs for radio, squash, billiards, bad-
minton, ping-pong, politics, books. There were beyond that forty-
odd football clubs and twenty cricket clubs, plus hockey, netball,
tennis, bowling and swimming clubs. There were also nature-
lovers, gardeners, beaglers, sailing, bicycling, motorcycling and
fishing clubs. Beyond that there were thirty-five churches in High
Wycombe, each with their diffuse penumbra of aid societies,
choirs, Sunday schools, charity endeavors, Bible classes. There
were in addition to all these the local unions and local factory
sporting clubs. And since London is only about an hour's drive
away, an even broader array of more specialized and distinguished
clubs and associations await High Wycombians who want to com-
bine yet further.

England is made of towns and people like this men not so
much herded together as woven together. Their differences with
each other may be generations old, frozen on cleavages of class
and status. But they know, almost instinctively, how to gather
for common effort. When an enemy threatens, they gather sternly
as home guards and fire-fighters. When a queen is crowned, they
gather in rejoicing to roast oxen in the country, to decorate their
neighborhood streets in the city, to put up commemorative
benches for the old folks, to challenge the neighboring village
to a tug of war, to build bonfires. They have somehow acquired
a trust in each other that rises tier by tier to their trust in govern-
ment and willingness to let it lead.

The ultimate expression of this attitude to politics is the House
of Commons. Grave differences separate Government and Oppo-
sition by far more than the width of the green carpeting between
their respective benches. But these are differences without hatred,
differences that permit the men on one set of benches to laugh in
a deep, rolling, healthy laughter at the quip of a speaker on the
opposite benches that touches them to the quick; that permit a
man to nod quiet assent to some particularly clever thrust of the
opposition without being regarded as a traitor by his fellows. In
the French Assembly, when far Left and far Right fire away at
each other, one feels certain that M. Duclos in power would

FIRE IN THE ASHES

murder and garrote M. Reynaud and M. Barrachin, and M. Bar-
rachin or M. Reynaud might do likewise to M. Duclos if they
had the chance. But though men dispute in the British Parliament,
they do not hate; they are gathered in a common cause, which is
not to destroy but to provide leadership.

Leadership in England carries with it a special reverence, even
when it is unimaginably dull or open to the most human criticism.

In no other country could a failing giant present himself day
after day before the eyes of an alert opposition and come out
so unscathed in personal dignity. No one comments on how
different is the Churchill who leads the Tories of today from the
Churchill of 1940. Sir Winston of today is an old man, whose
hearing is failing; dependent on and almost suffocated by cronies
of other days, almost timid and sometimes hostile to new faces,
his great brilliance is more and more obscured by the darkness
of age and the forgetfulness of senility. Only rarely does a news-
paper, public speech or gossip column in Britain fasten on these
human frailties. Political debate still limits itself to the quality and
purpose of leadership offered, attacking Churchill's deeds or ap-
plauding the rare greatness of his utterances.

It is these people, then, with these problems in an unstable
world, under this kind of leadership, who have accomplished in
the seven years since the war one of the most amazing and deep-
flowing revolutions in the history of man.

The place where this revolution has come to focus is called
Whitehall.

Whitehall is the name of a broad thoroughfare which runs flank-
ing the Thames for little more than half a mile, from Trafalgar
Square to Westminster Abbey. It is one of those curious place
names which, like the Kremlin in Moscow or the Forbidden City
in Peking, are supercharged by history with a symbolism that per-
sists beyond episodes and centuries. Whitehall, in history, means
the government of England, and if you walk briskly, you can tra-
verse it from the black lions of Nelson's monument at one end to
the green apron of park between the Abbey and Parliament at the
other in just less than ten minutes.

You will see very little of the revolution as you walk, for the
revolution has been almost invisible to the naked eye it has borne

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 197

no flags down its pavings, shed no blood, scorched no buildings.
The commuters and clerks sitting on the upper decks of the bright
red buses that roll through Whitehall pass daily before the win-
dow of the palace from which a king of England once stepped out
on a specially built platform to have his head chopped off. This
revolution has chopped off no heads. The blackened five-story
buildings that follow one another down the northern side of the
avenue are black not with flame but with the peaceful soot of old
age. Admiralty, Treasury, Board of Trade, Colonial Office, Home
Office, Foreign Office and War Office follow one another in the
same order they did half a century ago, halting before the same
smooth and verdant lawn of grass that separates them from those
abiding twin witnesses of change, the Houses of Parliament and
the Abbey where the sovereigns of Britain are crowned. It still re-
quires no more than two blue-coated bobbies to keep the peace on
Whitehall's famous little appendix, Downing Street, where, at
Number 10, the Queen's First Minister lives.

It is as difficult to detect the change inside the buildings of
Whitehall as from outside; Gladstone and Disraeli would feel quite
at home in the offices and easy chairs within. Gaslights, it is true,
have given way to electricity, but the halls are just as dim. Ele-
vators now rise through the wells of marble stairs, but they are
slower than a quick-footed man can climb. The same coal fires
burn in the same coal grates of the offices of Her Majesty's more
distinguished servants, the same passageways twist in and out to
bewilder strange visitors.

Little, indeed, has changed at Whitehall except its meaning
and function. In the past fifteen years Whitehall has gathered in
its thousands of dingy cubicles, in tighter space, more power over
the lives of ordinary human beings than has the government of any
other free country. Whitehall controls not only the safety, the
politics, the education of the nation as all governments do, but
nearly the sum totality of the citizen's lifealmost everything, in-
deed, but his thoughts. Whitehall decides how much meat, how
much butter, how much sugar, how much cheese every English
family shall eat each week. Whitehall insures against unemploy-
ment and sickness, provides orange juice for babies, wigs for bald
pates. Whitehall can dictate to any owner of real estate in England
how he shall use his land or deprive him of his land; Whitehall

FIRE IN THE ASHES 198

sits in judgment on every farmer as he farms his acres, fixes the
price of his produce and, if it chooses, can turn the farmer off
his acres for farming them badly. Whitehall controls and channels
all investment in England and says where and how it shall be
made. Whitehall owns and controls all the mines, all the railways,
the total power system of the island nation; it buys most of its
foods and much of its metals abroad; it sets its credit, determines
or allots its scarce materials, effectively decides how many new
homes shall be built each year. Whitehall determines whether or
not Englishmen may go abroad for vacation, and how much they
may spend when they go.

No other capital in the tradition of democracy has ever held so
much power over the lives of so many individuals; no other nation
has ever voted into one single dot on the map of one city such
immense control and stayed free. Yet the English have, and it is all
concentrated here in the ten minute walk between the Lions of
Nelson and the bell towers of Parliament.

The measure of any revolution's power is how quickly and
deeply it is accepted by the people whom it has disturbed. By this
measure the revolution in Britain has passed its tests, for in the past
two years it has been reluctantly confirmed and accepted by the
party that fought it, tooth and nail, for the fifty years of this half-
century. Two years of Tory government, after six years of La-
bour adventure, have proven that no power now exists in the island
nation which can undo or reverse what has been accomplished by
the quiet revolutionaries of the postwar years.

Since the men who brought this revolution to England are the
men of the Labour party, England's story since the war has been
mostly theirs.

The British Labour party is the newest and youngest great gov-
erning party in the free world. It was born on February 27, 1900,
at Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street, London, where several
score men and women gathered together to "devise ways and
means of securing an increased number of Labour members in the
next Parliament." They were men of various strains of faith:
Christian Socialists whose conscience would not let them rest;
Marxist Socialists, infected by doctrines from overseas; Fabian So-
cialists irritated by the intellectual untidiness and disorder of the

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 199

system in which they lived; trade-union leaders spurred by the
hunger of their men. What bound them together was a sense of
revolt at British life and a consciousness of rot within the Empire
which, at that time, still stretched around the globe as the greatest
constellation of power in world politics.

The rot and decay out of which the Labour party was to grow
in the next fifty years had already, at the moment of its founding,
been festering for a century. It did not show itself as true misery
of life, as Europeans and Asians understood it, for at the turn of
the century Englishmen had a much higher standard of life than
any other Europeans, a standard not even remotely comparable
with the subhuman standards of southern Italy. It was a moral
decay, a comparative rot, that could be translated into political
force only by a close-knit, highly civilized people whose con-
science was unable to accept the vivid contrasts of wealth and
poverty which a century of world dominance had brought to their
island.

Though Englishmen did not quite understand the uncertainties
of the trade cycle, the mechanism by which those uncertainties
were evened out had already become abhorrent to the founders of
the Labour party. The mechanism was the simple flexibility of
old-fashioned business life. When a market collapsed or when a
slump hit, adjustment was made simply by cutting down produc-
tion and sacking men and women. You hired when times were
good, paid as little as you could, fired when times were bad, re-
employed when the world called on Britain for more goods again.
The system depended on millions of marginal floating workers
who could subsist under the poundings of up-and-down, who
were content with tea and bread and jam when things were good,
and just tea when things were bad. What the fathers of the Labour
party proposed was to iron out the cycles, press out the uncer-
tainties, give voice to millions of English men and women ready to
demand a better life for themselves.

It was twenty years before the new-founded Labour party
could make the British people give ear to their story. It was then,
after the First World War, that the rot developed from the ob-
scenity of comparative standards into a grisly, stinking visible
thing in the streets of England, so vivid that not only the working
class but England's middle class began to listen to Labour's story.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2OO

Mostly it was unemployment that made the British listen, for
unemployment came and settled over England like a blight. Dur-
ing the twenty interwar years, fourteen per cent of all British
workers were permanently unemployed; in the bad years twenty
to twenty-five per cent were jobless. The figures were bad enough,
but their persistence made them terrible. For if one out of four
people was out of a job, then no one was safe and the fear of indi-
vidual rejection crept into every home, nagging every bread-
winner and every young man looking at the future. Unemploy-
ment was not the short, sharp, spasmodic terror it was in the
United States and Germany in the pit of the depression years; it
was permanent, an illness with no turning, a pestilence that could
make entire regions like South Wales (coal) or Jarrow (shipbuild-
ing, eighty per cent unemployment, 1930) names that bespoke a
new kind of death.

The roots of the curse lay, of course, in the great outer world.
British industry which had led the world all through Victoria's
reign had been outstripped. The industries of other powers had
borrowed the techniques Britain had lavishly offered them, had
chosen only the best, and gone on to perfect and elaborate them
beyond Britain's power to compete. By the time the Second
World War broke out large and vital stretches of British industry
had fossilized. Almost all the skills of spinning and weaving are
developments of old British craft and invention. But by the begin-
ning of the Second World War the British textile industry was a
house of antiquities, ninety per cent of whose power looms were
hand-operated. (In the United States more than ninety per cent
are machine-operated.) The individual genius and astounding
fertility of the solitary British mind still persisted. Englishmen con-
ceived radar, the jet plane, brilliantly explored tfee atom, discov-
ered the first antibiotic. But it was, by and large, other peoples
who benefited from British discovery. The British still made the
finest textile machinery in the world, but they exported it to such
countries as India which used the machinery with cheap labor to
compete with the work of Lancashire weavers.

If one had the eyes to see, the rot could be and still can be seen
in the flesh of human beings walking the streets. One comes off the
Yorkshire moors down the low, humid slope of the Pennines into
Lancashire, into the slums of red-brick cottages, each cottage buik

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 2O1

edge to edge as if laid out with a child's ruler, the rectangular
boxlike image of its neighbor. Here, in these towns, the cotton in-
dustry was born almost two hundred years ago. In two hundred
years that industry has made of the millworkers, physically, almost
a race apart. The men in the streets are thin-faced, long-nosed,
pigeon-chested males; the beshawled women are short, pygmy-
like, starch-stuffed feminine goblins who stand only chest-high to
a full-grown American. Bred out of a century of dampness, beer
and suppers of bread and jam, they are almost as distinct ethnically
as a separate tribe.

From the unemployment and decay of the interwar years the
British went directly to the war against Hitler. The war was not
only a time of action, but of the simmering of ideas. For millions
of young Britons in camp, aboard ship, overseas, in the desert, in
the jungle, it was a time when there was nothing to do but talk,
think or read books. Out of their thinking, talking and inner specu-
lation came a decision as clear-cut as any given by a democratic
election in this century. It was the mandate of the general election
of 1945 to the Labour party to socialize Britain.

The men who received this mandate were perhaps the most lack-
luster crew of leaders to captain a revolution since revolution
captured the imagination of men. Only yesterday, as outcasts, vi-
sionaries, street radicals, they had seemed to threaten bloodshed
and riot. Ernest Bevin, a hard, solid, hefty man, had first become
famous for crippling Mr. Churchill's intervention in the Russian
Civil War by leading his London dockworkers to strike against
the shipment of arms; he now in 1945 became Labour's Foreign
Minister. His successor and bitter rival, Herbert Morrison, had
been a belligerent pacifist in the First World War, but in Labour's
long growth to power had become a solid, powerful executive of
great administrative talent. Sir Stafford Cripps had once been so
wild a radical that the Labour party at one time expelled him from
its ranks as too Red for its tastes. But now, in office, a common
drabness settled over all of them, a drabness that seemed perfectly
to reflect their leader and Prime Minister, Major Clement Attiee
a slightly built little man with a balding pate and precise dry voice
who still looks like the social-service worker he once was, but who
conceals beneath this rabbit-like exterior a determination of iron
and an inflexible power of decision. Only one of Labour's senior

FIRE IN THE ASHES

2O2

ministers preserved any of the fire with which Labour spokesmen
had won Englishmen to their support. That was Aneurin Bevan, a
silver-haired, ruddy-faced, burly ex-miner from South Wales, a
man of dancing wit, silvery voice, remarkable eloquence and un-
restrained exuberance. Beneath these men was a solid phalanx of
new parliamentarians; mostly trade-union leaders, but sprinkled
with intellectual junior ministers and several brilliant scholars and
journalists who seemed more fit for a university faculty or for the
pulpit than for the clash and battle of partisan politics. It is diffi-
cult to imagine these men as insurrectionaries, staying up until
two or three in the morning over a bottle of brandy in a smoke-
filled room plotting conspiracy or attack, or lying on the cold
floor of the Smolny waiting for the agitators to storm the Winter
Palace and report insurrection had swept the crest. Yet they
changed history.

The chief instrument by which the Socialists changed Britain
was their morality. Socialist morality started off with the single
principle that in a modern state it was wrong, indeed sinful, to
allow unemployment, hunger, sickness and cold to weigh upon
millions of ordinary citizens while the few should be cushioned
through thick and thin in wealth, opportunity and comfort. Their
chief legacy was the decision that the state is responsible for the
security and welfare of every member of society, and that the
state, similarly, is responsible for seeing that its wealth as well as
its burdens is shared fairly among all its citizens. What the Social-
ists changed was the social climate of England; they failed to
change the underlying reality of industry and enterprise or solve
Britain's dilemma in the disturbing world.

The morality acts of the British Socialists were the quickest,
easiest and perhaps the most successful of all their bold ventures.
Every British citizen now found himself insured by the new Na-
tional Health Service against every form of sickness and disease
insofar as medical science could meet the guarantee. The rupture
and flat foot, the pregnancy, the infected tooth, the strained eye,
the accident or disaster were all woes which the state now shared
with the individual family. Children in their cradles and later in
the schoolyards became the special wards of the state; for them
there was orange juice at a time when fine hotels had none to
serve their richest customer; there was milk, f airly rationed, when

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 203

strawberries with cream were just a memory; special stores sold
special baby foods against special ration books, guaranteeing the
same scientific dietetic selection for the poor as for the rich.

This morality, however, was expensive. To pay for the new
schools, new houses, national health, baby grants and the subsidies
to keep food cheap required huge sums of money. To be specific
it has cost the British government about one-third of its annual
income or upwards of four billion dollars a year. To pay for this
the welfare state thus presupposes a sweeping transfer of wealth
from those who have to those who have not, by a taxation so
merciless as to make American taxation negligible by comparison.
The normal British tax rate on a $5,000 yearly income is $1,470
and goes up from there. It goes up so sharply and steeply that by
now even the most hard-shell Socialists know that it can go no
further. Where before the war Britain could count some seven
thousand people who kept incomes of 6,000 pounds (then worth
approximately $24,000) or over after taxes, the Britain of today
counts only sixty people who still retain 6,000 pounds (now worth
$16,800). And if the British government should decide to cream
off every cent that these sixty individuals earn over $16,800 a
year, the net result of the confiscation would bring the British
Treasury less than $1,500,000 to add to its revenue. This taxation
has been, in its effect, as revolutionary as the social climate it
was created to support. There are, perhaps, no more than 500
families left in all England today who can send two sons to a good
university at the same time without drawing on their capital. Nor,
after two years of Tory government, is there any prospect of
lightening this tax burden to any appreciable extent.

All these are abstractions. But the abstractions translate down
into the flesh and blood of men and women who have lived
through the change and thrived, or been broken by it. There comes
to mind a long series of British individuals reacting to the change
with varying degrees of dignity, delight, horror or cowardice.

On one of my trips to London I called on an old friend whom
I had last known as one of the more important servants of the Em-
pire in Malaya in 1940. He had lived then in a great mansion in
Singapore, with servants softly padding about opening doors,
serving whiskies, passing cigars and brandy. The years since have
brought him promotion, advancement and respect, and he has

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2O 4

reached the peak of his career in a position which in Washington is
equivalent to that of Assistant Secretary of State. In his office in
Whitehall he makes decisions on which the life and future of
Britain depend. But in the evening he comes home to an old house
he has rented in a London suburb with half an acre of garden be-
hind it. There 1 found him with abounding energy and in aston-
ishing good humor, bringing the same drive and intellect to bear
on the problems of kitchen socialism that, officially, he shed on the
decisions of war and peace. The revolution had come upon him as a
challenge and he had met it so. In his garden he raised all the po-
tatoes and greens the family used through the summer; before egg
rationing was abolished he had put up a chicken run, installed
chickens, given up his official egg ration, gambled on feeding his
chickens enough from kitchen scraps to get four or five times the
eggs his family was entitled to purchase by ration and won. He
put in two beehives in his first year and took out 7 1 pounds of
honey to supplement the sugar ration. We ate well at his home and
his teen-age daughter served the table.

There are others who react differently. One Tory M.P. with a
distinguished record and illustrious parliamentary career ahead of
him was swept out of office by the 1945 vote. He decided then
simply to quit; packing his bags, leaving his home with his wife
and family, he gave up his British citizenship and went off to live
in America, a country where he could enjoy the fortune left him
by his American grandmother. But most men of his class, even the
very wealthy, have no American grandmothers with American
fortunes. They stand and watch the change with somber detach-
ment, like the moody man who drove with me down the long
row of noble clubs on Pall Ma.Il. "Waiting lists still on good clubs,"
he jerked out, "not so long as they used to be though. Too expen-
sive. Seventy-five pounds for a good club. Who can afford it? Not
much point anyway, Food's no better than any place else. All ra-
tioned. Fifty years from now they'll all be gone. Best part of Lon-
don life, you know. Don't see how they can keep up. Suppose the
first step will be closing the dining rooms. Probably put in 'snack
bars/ " He dropped the last word into the conversation as if he
were lifting a bug between thumb and forefinger and dropping it
into the gutter.

I remember spending an evening in 1949, during the height of

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 205

Socialist austerity, with a friend who was trying to convince me
that visitors to London saw only what was fashionable and unim-
portant and missed what was coarse and critically important. We
were sitting in the bar of a Mayf air Hotel, in that corner of stylish
London where most Americans naturally congregate. The bar was
almost empty; at the other end of it sat a tall Briton in dinner
jacket nursing his whisky; sitting beside him was his lady. We
watched them in the bright-lit silence for a full ten minutes; now
and then the polished leather of their stools creaked as they shifted,
but they said nothing.

"I can't explain it to you here," said my friend, "these people got
hurt. Come and I'll show you something else." After a long half-
hour in the subway we came up again into a long, still street be-
tween a row of silent warehouses, through which we passed before
coming to a housing development.

"This is Wapping," he said. "The local Labour government
built these houses. Not bad?"

They weren't. The windows were larger than usual in an Amer-
ican public housing project, the courtyards had more grass and
more playground space. Under a light two teen-age girls were
giggling loudly to attract the attention of two teen-age boys who
were reading a large poster which said, London County Council
Technical Colleges, Schools of Art, College of Commerce, Eve-
ning Institute.

"Night schools all free," said my friend. "Let's go down to the
pub." The pub was in the center of the Council and we heard
singing before we got there. One man with a concertina, laughing
as he played, sat near the bar while a teen-age boy sang in a high-
pitched tenor voice. Several old women with very bad teeth, quite
fat and dumpy, sat in chairs about the wall and in the middle
young people danced and sang, their arms locked. "Ten cents will
buy you half a pint of beer and a whole evening of this," said my
friend. "They like what's happened." The noise carried quite far
and dropped warm over the acres of slumbering flats.

What finally laid the Socialists of Britain low in the year 1951,
and wrenched the government from their hands, was that they ran
out of ideasor, at least, out of ideas vigorous enough and clear

FIRE IN THE ASHES 206

enough to show the people how Britain could recapture greatness
in a changing world.

The British had bought the fundamental Socialist idea: that
never again would the converging uncertainties of a cycling world
be adjusted by the automatic cruelty of unemployment, hunger
and rejection* They had accepted the discipline of Socialist regu-
lation in the belief that sometime, at the end of the adventure,
Britain would become strong and powerful enough to rise above
the uncertainties. But after six years of hard work, devotion, good
order and red tape, here was Britain still cycling from trade crisis
to trade crisis.

The theories of British socialism had been worked out by intel-
lectuals over a period of fifty years before the Socialists came to
power, and they had all been worked out as if Britain, an island
power, was a vast and self-contained continent. If morality was
the mother of British socialism, then planning was its father. But
somewhere along the way the idea of "planning" had become con-
fused with the cliches of nationalization, a confusion which per-
sists in every European Socialist party. By the old dogmas of So-
cialism, if an industry is nationalized, then the workers working
for themselves ignite with enthusiasm, and productivity soars.
By the corollary of the dogma, a government that controls the
basic industries directs them to operate on lines drawn by a long-
term plan, so that they move ahead by direction and control ever
onward and upward, immune from the swings of boom and de-
pression.

With this sheaf of operating ideas, the British Socialists moved
in their first five years to control British industry. They swiftly
proceeded to nationalize the Bank of England (the archenemy of
Socialist mythology and an institution that had proven its obso-
lescence some twenty years before). Next, they nationalized the
coal mines, the basic resource of England and its sickest industry;
they then proceeded to take over all railways and road trucking
companies, all the cable and wireless system, all the airlines, the gas
industry, the electricity system, and wound up in 1949 by nation-
alizing the British steel industry. Simultaneously they slapped on
the most rigid control of all land use and land values in Britain
and equally rigid control of all investment, public and private.

There was no doubt that the new system worked; it worked

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 207

very well indeed. Recovery in England started more quickly and,
until 1950, hit higher goals than in any other country of Western
Europe, except for one or two Scandinavian countries which, like
Britain, were also governed by Socialist parties. But it did not
work as the fathers of socialism had dreamed socialism would
work; nor did it work well enough to guarantee Britain against
the buffeting and beating of an unstable world.

What had happened was that the simple credos of Britain's
turn-of-the-century socialism, a compound of hunger-Christian-
ity-and-Marxism, had never measured the complexity of the hu-
man soul, the modern state or the massive needs of a true rev-
olution.

Nationalization could be ordained, for example, by law, but not
the rosy dream of worker-ignition that was supposed to follow on
nationalization. The Union Jack rose over steel mills, gasworks,
railways, electricity plants. And afterward everything was as it
was before. Productivity in Britain increased, but it increased
no more rapidly than in that archcapitalist state, America. The
workers called no bloody, nationwide strikes in mines, steel mills
or gasworks as they did in the nationalized industries of France,
but neither did they invest their benches and pits with the enthusi-
asm and devotion which Socialists had thought would follow
automatically on the magic of nationalization. The workers look-
ing up to pit boss, mine engineer, plant manager, found his face
exactly the same the day after Vesting Day as the day before. The
plants belonged to the people, but the people operated them
through the same managerial bureaucracy as private capitalism
had. Where labor relations were good in private industry, as in
the steel industry, they remained good under Labour, and the na-
tionalized steel firms did not even bother to change their letter-
heads or boards of directors. Where labor relations had been bad,
as in the coal industry, they remained bad after nationalization
and no amount of extra rations, extra soap, extra meat or extra pay
could wipe away the human suspicion that festered in the dark
pits. In was the spirit of the worker that counted; if his spirit
could be quickened and British production spurt then all the un-
certainties of Britain in an outside world would be solved by his
superior fertility and effort. But if his spirit remained f undamen-

FIRS IN THE ASHES

208

tally unchanged-as it did-then crisis, too, would persist un-
changed.

Nor did a series of nationalizations automatically add up to a
plan, as the Socialists once had hoped. The Socialists tacked one
nationalization upon another, one new guarantee of security upon
another in their first explosive efforts to reorganize Britain. But
not until the summer of 1947, when the dollars and gold gushed
out of Britain's reserves so crazily that it seemed only a matter of
months before the island would be unable to buy its food and raw
materials abroad, did the Socialists get around to planning. It was
then that Sir Stafford Cripps was given control of all Britain's eco-
nomic life and ordered a survey from his civil service which
showed that, beaten back to live on its own resources, Britain
could provide her citizens only with a starvation daily diet of 1,600
calories. And it was then, finally, that a central Planning Board
was set up.

A planning board, so conceived and so organized, inevitably had
two characteristics. First, since it had been created under the pres-
sure of the Dollar Gap, most of its planning was geared not to
domestic British life, but to the recurring trade crises overseas.
It was a planning whose chief targets were the moving, vague,
fluctuating figures of foreign trade. Secondly, it was set up as a
Board of ^Civil Servants, out of that tradition which makes the
magnificently efficient permanent British civil service the first in-
strument of command of any British government. As a govern-
ment might tell the General Staff of an army, "Plan us national
defense," so Labour instructed its civil servants to "Plan the na-
tional economy." But civil servants are, in essence, men who make
regulations and apply rules, not men who draw policies and inspire
revolutions. Thus, instead of a plan, the Socialists got controls and
regulations very efficient, but not the stuff of inspiration.

The failure of the civil servants to give Britain a plan was not,
in any sense, their fault. By the code of British politics, civil
servants must hold themselves as ready to regulate socialism for a
Labour government when the people demand it by a Labour vote
as to deregulate it when people demand it by a Tory vote. The real
creative work of any society must be done not by its paid civil
servants but by its elected political spokesmen. The men who came
to power to act for Labour had entered with an accumulated capi-

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 209

tal of ideas; when they had spent these, they were too busy in ad-
ministration to create new ideas to meet the new problems they
had found.

Labour had come to power to effect a social revolution, unaware
of the complex industrial and political revolution needed to sup-
port that social revolution. The political instrument it found at
hand was the British House of Commons, but the House of Com-
mons had never been designed for the kind of changes Labour
tried to make. The tradition of the Commons is that of a gentle-
manly meeting place where men of wisdom debate policy, but it
is not a working assembly and provides neither its majority nor
minority party members with the working tools for complex
study. A member has no office or secretarial staff of his own, as an
American Congressman has; morning after morning, night after
night, one can see the younger members in the open comers of
public alcoves of Parliament's basement laboriously scrawling
long-hand answers to their constituents' letters. Parliament has no
elaborate permanent committees with trained staffs to hammer out
problems to working conclusions as the American Congress has.
Moreover, the members of Britain's House of Commons are
grossly underpaid. An M.P. is paid a salary of less than $60 a week
(from which taxes are deducted) which is insufficient to buy him
bed and board in London during the sessions and still support his
family at home in the provinces. Most parliamentarians without
private incomes are frantically engaged in outside activity to make
a little extra money. They have little time for thinking, less time
for the leisurely contemplation of great and intricate problems and
are moved mostly by morality and common sense which is highly
commendable but in the twentieth century not enough.

Labour had overwhelming control of Parliament during its first
five years of power, yet it made no effort at all to reorganize Par-
liament into a new and effective tool of the revolution it was
trying to consummate. Nor did it attempt to create any forum,
academy or clearing place of ideas where it could examine its
own program and the new problems that arose. Labour, for ex-
ample, had come to power determined to give India its freedom
and so, in an act of historic statesmanship, it did. But it had never
previously dispassionately examined the fermenting problems of
the Moslem Middle East and thus, during the five years in which

FIRE IN THE ASHES 21

it might have altered completely the course of events in the ex-
plosive crescent, it did nothing. Labour theorists had devoted re-
markably little attention to the problems of education and schools
in their long preparation for power. When they came to power
they attempted with a touch here and a touch there to reshape
what they found, but they had no basic ideas, and at the end they
left almost intact that cruel system of public education which
separates English children at the age of eleven into those few who
shall go on to higher education and become leaders and those
whose education shall be terminated at fourteen and who shall,
thenceforth, become hewers of wood and drawers of water,

By 1950 these shortfalls and shortcomings of socialism were evi-
dent to no one more than to the humanitarian leaders of the British
Socialist party. But it was not until their last year in office that
they invited any true re-examination of ideas and policies, and by
then there was little time left to furnish forth a complete new,
workable doctrine for the British people. The great trading crisis
of 1951 was soon to be upon them. When it came, Labour, divided
in itself, raised a confused voice, and the British turned Labour
out and summoned the Tory government of Mr. Churchill to
power.

The clearest reading of British politics and of the Tory govern-
ment which directs England today comes from the civil servants
of Whitehall. The civil servants of England are men of far greater
importance and continuing power than any servants of the Amer-
ican government except the Chiefs of the Pentagon and the Jus-
tices of the Supreme Court. They sit in everlasting judgment and
attendance on the ministers chosen by a political parliament to
guide them in the administration of England.

One could summarize a dozen conversations with them by this
analysis which they all share: in a modern government, they say,
policy is set by forces beyond the control of politicians. Politicians
come to office fresh from their election rounds, bearing with them
the phrases for which they were cheered and the promises they
belled from the platform. The Tories campaigned across England
promising Englishmen good red meat again, promising houses to
be built out of the welkpring of private initiatives, off ering the
taste of greatness. Although the Tories earned less votes than

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 211

Labour at the polls, they won the government and then the facts
were explained to them.

On the Friday after election Mr. Churchill, the new Prime
Minister, named Robert Austen Butler Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer and thus Britain's virtual industrial dictator. On the next
day Mr. Butler lunched with the two senior civil servants of the
Treasury who had, during the election weeks, wrung out of their
lesser staff two basic twenty-page memoranda on Britain's recur-
ring emergency. The two civil service papers explained just how
grave was the situation in that fall of 1951, and just what the few
possible courses of action were. On Monday, having been briefed
in reality by his civil servants, Mr. Butler lunched with Mr.
Churchill and explained reality to the Prime Minister, and that
week the government of Mr. Churchill brought all steel sales
under strict licensing control, slapped on the most rigid import
control since the war. It took, in short, the action the Civil Service
said it had to take and which, on civil service instruction, the
Labour government would have taken too.

No red meat followed the Tory victory, because the entire
world is short of meat, except for those who can pay in dollars,
and England is short of dollars.

No sudden liquidation of the vast National Health Service fol-
lowed Tory accession to power because Mr. Butler, who holds
the purse strings, is as passionately devoted to the social services
as the Labour M,P.'s themselves and knows that the nation is too.

For years the Tory opposition had attacked Labour foreign
policy for Britain's failure to urge and lead the European states to
unity, but only a political micrometer could distinguish any
difference between the new Tory foreign policy and the old
Labour foreign policy, not only in Europe, but in the Middle East,
Far East and Commonwealth, too.

The Tories came to power bearing the tradition of strong na-
tional defense with them. But within four months of their electoral
victory, the Tory spokesmen at the great Lisbon Conference of
the NATO powers told their Allies that whatever their wishes
they could afford no greater arms effort, because of England's
financial troubles, and thereafter proceeded to cut England's arms
and defense program more swiftly and deeply than the previous

FIRE IN THE ASHES 212

Labour government had dared, even under the pressure of its
vociferous Left.

The intricate structure of control and direction of industry that
the Conservatives promised to sweep away persists in all its basic
branches; all capital investment is still controlled and regulated by
the same committee of Treasury specialists. Every British house-
wife still carries in her ration purse the same brown ration book
that has been doling out her butter, cheese, margarine, meat and
sugar for fourteen long years. Coal is still rationed. The state still
does most of England's major overseas shopping, buying the na-
tion's wheat, meat, butter, sundry foods, cotton and nonferrous
metals. Allocation by license and end-use control still channels
the flow of materials through industry as the state wishes.

The urge to rip British life out from under this cross-lacing of
control still throbs in thousands of clubs across England where
true-blue, old-fashioned Tories congregate. But the urge spends
itself and dies within the Conservative party itself, without affect-
ing policy. Those who must direct the Conservative government
know that any changes they can make will not affect the substance
of decision forced on them by the same world that perplexed
Labour's leaders; they know that the only changes permitted them
are on the margin of procedure. In trying to apportion Britain's
over-all resources differently from Labour, they have found they
can advance one project only at the expense of another. Thus,
in the Tories' first year of government, enough materials were
shaken out of the licensing system to build approximately fifteen
per cent more homes than in Labour's last year, but factory-build-
ing, consequently, dropped by about seventeen per cent. Their
attack on food subsidies has brought the government's contribu-
tion to each family's grocer's bill down from 410 billion pounds
to 109 million pounds for the coming year, but at this point food
costs begin to rise in Labour and Tory families alike, and farmers'
subsidies are shaved where it hurts Tory votes most.

This cautious approach of the Tories to the changed England
they have inherited is sometimes described as a policy of "fiddling
with the fringes." Yet to the surprise of most Tories and to the
even greater surprise of Labour politicians, "fiddling with the
fringes" has proven popular, and two years after their elevation
to power by the thin margin of sixteen parliamentary votes, the

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE tEVOLtftiON 215

Tories, at this writing, seem stronger than when they entered.

This popularity has been won not by a crusade to undo the
work of socialism, or re-establish the England of private enter-
prise. Indeed, at this writing, almost two years after the Tory
victory, the Tories have succeeded in repealing only one major
measure of socialism, the nationalization of iron and steel; and no
one is yet sure whether private industry can or wants to reabsorb
the vast properties offered back to them. More importantly, the
long debate on repeal has left the country unstirred, arousing nei-
ther violent opposition from the workers, nor violent enthusiasm
from the masters. I visited Birmingham, a dark and smoking city in
England's steel country, during the debate on steel. Unions and
management alike were unmoved by the controversy. The local
chief of the iron and steel workers union said, "I don't give a damn
who owns the thing so long as they treat us fairly. There's a hell of
a lot of fuss in London, but it's not up here in the trade, I deal with
the same people under nationalization as I did before, and as far as
labor relations are concerned, the position hasn't changed in any
way, shape or form. Frankly, the union would rather the industry
stay nationalized because it's easier to get a nationwide policy that
w^ay. But we won't strike if they denationalize it. All we want is
for them to stop making steel a shuttlecock of politics in London."
In almost the same words the old industry managers in town say
the same thing. "No," said one of them, "we're not hot under the
collar about denationalization. Things haven't changed much
really, you know. The same people sit on the boards of directors.
Stewart and Lloyds' and United Steel even use their old letter-
heads and stationery. We did a good job before nationalization,
ive did a good job after nationalization. If s a political scrap, you
know, it doesn't affect us much.' 7

The popularity has been won chiefly because the Tories, in ac-
cepting, as the people have, most of Labour's changes, have tried
above all to make the changes more comfortable. Held rigidly in
place by the pressures and strains of the outer world, the English
are grateful when a thong in the necessary discipline is loosened
here and a lacet there. They were grateful when, six months after
the Tory election, they were told they need no longer carry per-
sonal identity cards around with them wherever they go. They
-were grateful to the party in power when tea was derationed, even

FIRE IN THE ASHES 214

though Labour's leaders tried to explain that they, too, would
have derationed tea under similar circumstances. They were
grateful when the ministers decided that eggs might come off the
ration although it meant less eggs for some and more eggs for
others. Even though food costs creep up monthly, the same house-
wife who complains, "It's two bob more a head for everybody in
the family every week," hastens to add, "but you see more in the
shops now." As the Tories attempt to ease control by a loosening
here and a loosening there, someone, to be sure, pays a price; there
is only so much to go around in England, and if some get more,
some must get less. This, indeed, has happened and many British
families can now no longer claim the meager meat ration of 33
cents a week allowed them by the book, because their purse has
already been emptied for more costly, more essential things. But
in the broad millions of British life, these families are still a small
minority and no one in the Tory government contemplates letting
Britain adjust to her limited resources in the old way, dividing
again into the many poor and the few comfortable.

The careful, exploratory way in which the Tories have tried to
modify the revolution they inherited is, when seen in the proper
perspective, only a continuing demonstration of the ancient pat-
tern of British politics. Two great parties compete, as they always
have, for the loyalty of Englishmen. One is the party of experi-
ment which changes its name from generation to generation as it
recruits the power of new social groups and carries new ideas over
into deed. It has been called, from age to age, the Barons, the
Roundheads, the Whigs, the Liberals, and today it is called the
Labour party. The other party changes its name less frequently
and for over a century has been known simply as the Tories. But
though its name seems changeless, the party of the conservatives
changes just as much as the party of experiment; English con-
servatives are always the residuary legatees of all once-radical
ideas now become respectable, of all once-revolutionary changes
become normal.

When the party of experiment runs dry of ideas, the party of
the conservatives always returns to administer its reforms, con-
solidate its changes, tidy up the scene, which is what is happening
now* England's chief problems lie, for the moment, outside of

ENGLAND: NO FLAGS FOR THE REVOLUTION 215

England, not within England. It may be that no one can solve Eng-
land's problems in the outside world, but no Englishman can
bring himself to believe it. If a settlement of world affairs solves
England's problems in a greater world prosperity, the conserva-
tives may continue to manage English affairs until all the changes
now so fresh have become old-fashioned. If the world spirals
down in disaster either economic or military, they will continue
only until the party of experiment, under whatever name, comes
up with fresh ideas and a fresh solution.

the story of Joe Curry

The British are quiet people.

The roads of history are stre*wn 'with the wreckage of great
states and empires which have underestimated the British by try-
ing to read Britain's strength and purpose from the surface pomp,
the mmnbled eloquence, the archaic glitter. Underneath are mil-
lions of sturdy, determined, undemonstrative men and women
like Joe Curry, solid as rock and just as enduring.

Joe Curry does not look like a revolutionary. Certainly, he does
not think of himself as such. But he and millions of men like him
in mill, mine and factory have pushed England along through
these living decades to the transformation that has made her a
land more changed from her past, yet more true to that past, than
any other in Europe.

When Joe Curry came back to Doncaster in the fall of 1952,
a large sunlit office awaited him in the gray, ivy-covered mansion
of the National Coal Board. As he walked down its corridors peo-
ple said, "Good morning, sir," and drew back shyly, in deference
and respect.

This Doncaster had quite a different feel from the Doncaster
that Joe Curry had first seen twenty-five years ago when he
stepped out of the dark station, tired, hungry, threadbare and with
but two coins jingling in his pocket. Not that the face of the town
had changed the same buildings turned the same soot-smeared,
greasy faces out on High Street, under the same gray skies. Tues-
days and Saturdays the market still boiled and bubbled in town-
hall square. The Danum, the big hotel for commercial travelers,
was still as cold and drafty as ever. Even the people looked the
same solid, stocky men with the stamp of the worker's life in

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY %2iy

their bearing; round, stout women with kerchiefed heads, busy at
their shopping.

The change that had come to Doncaster was invisible, and Joe,
himself, was somehow at the center of it. The car, the office, the
waiting secretaries were only part of it; the deputies and admin-
istrative assistants attendant on Joe's instructions were only a
detail in the change. The change, if it could be traced, was some-
where in the hearts and lives of 140,000 coal miners in the pits
and villages of England's largest coal field, who were watching,
waiting, to see what Joe Curry, the new chief of labor relations,
was going to do. Some there were, but only a few, who could
remember Joe in the pits with them, stripped to the waist, sweat-
ing, hacking coal off the face. In nearby Bentley, Joe was sure
that he could walk down the streets and someone would say,
"Why, Joe, how's it going with thee, Joe?" "Pretty well," Joe
might answer. "How's it going with thee?" And the answer would
come back, "All right, but not as bloody well as thee." But there
were others who would not call Joe Curry "thee." They were the
young men who knew Joe Curry only by reputation as the new
man sent up from London to take over labor relations in England's
richest and most turbulent coal field. "Poacher turned game-
keeper" they called him, thinking back to Joe's old days as a labor
leader, summing up the suspicions and dreams that mingle in the
gathering places where British workers talk about the revolution
they have won.

Joe Curry knows both the suspicion and the dream, for he
grew up with the suspicion and he bled and fought for the dream.

It had all seemed much simpler that cold December day twenty-
five years ago when Joe and his brother, drifting, black-listed
miners, climbed off the coach from the North Country with three
shillings and sixpence each in their pockets to look for work in
the Yorkshire coal field. Behind him Joe had left father, mother,
two brothers, three sisters and a girl eager to marry him, all wait-
ing to see if Joe could find a job in the mines of the mid-country.
Behind, also, Joe had left the memory of the General Strike, with
its blood and hunger, and all the bitterness of the ancient ex-
hausted mines of Durham. In those days the hate and the dream
went hand in hand. The hate was generations old in every miner's
heart and included all the masters and all their ways; the masters

FIRE IN THE ASHES 21

were the men who let you work only when they wanted to, who
paid you as little as they could when you did work, and then
dumped you when they didn't need you longer. The dream was
fresher and simpler: to take the mines away from the masters,
nationalize them, socialize them.

The dream has been won now, for the mines are nationalized.
But the suspicion remains. And the dream can only work when
the suspicion goes. It is Joe Curry's job to see what he can do
about the suspicion. He knows it well.

The suspicion was already old in the home of every miner when
Joe Curry was a boy, growing up in the village of High Spen
fifty years ago. High Spen is too small to appear on any map, but
lies just three and a half miles south of Rowlands Gill, which in
turn is fifteen miles off from Durham City. Men like to say that
when Joe Curry was a boy, just after the turn of the century,
such villages were flush and prosperous, as English miners dug
250,000,000 tons of coal each year and shipped nearly 100,000,000
tons out of that to a world that had not yet learned how to use oil.

Joe remembers High Spen differently. One gaunt, black skele-
ton of a colliery rose in the heart of the village, another rose on
the village fringe, and everyone worked at coal One muddy street
ran down the center of High Spen, flanked by rows of two-
roomed, hewn-stone cottages where the miners lived. When Joe
was born into a family of four children, two rooms housed them
ail; not until much later, when the family had grown to fifteen,
including nine children, a brother-in-law, a cousin and two orphan
boarders, did it expand into the luxury of four rooms. In Joe's
early youth such houses had no water; across the street and down
its length ran a cold-water pipe, with one tap for every five houses,
and the mothers drew the family water in buckets. Such houses
had no toilets either. Families, in groups of four, shared common
outdoor privies, where each family had its own seat in the bench
of holes that opened on the ash midden.

Englishmen had been digging at the coals of Durham almost
two hundred years when, in 1903, Joe Curry was born, for Dur-
ham coal, the first coal dug in England in the early days of in-
dustry, is good coal, perhaps the finest gas coal in the world. Those
two hundred years had akeady given the miners of the North

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 219

Country bodies different from those of other Englishmen short,
enormously powerful, heavily muscled men they were, like Joe's
father whom Joe describes as "not tall, but tall across." Joe's father
worked in the mines, as his father had before him, and his father's
father before that. Joe's father, like all the miners, was a man's
man, which meant that he met the standards of High Spen he
worked hard, drank hard, gambled hard and was master in his
own house. "They were strong men," says Joe remembering now.
"Many of them worked all day and boozed at night, sometimes
coming home in the morning with little or no rest, just in time to
get into their clothes to work it off in the pits, and then came home
at night to work it on again."

Joe's mother was a miner's woman with a miner's family of nine
children to wash, cook and care for. When the boys were grow-
ing up and started to work in the pits, Joe's mother was up at two
in the morning to send the first shift off to work, up at five to send
the next ones out, up again to send the children off to school, after
which she had to prepare for the men off the first shift, and cook
and feed them. Men were hard on women in mining towns, and
when a boy went down to the pits he was a man and he, too, could
be hard on his women. Joe was only a boy when he first went
down the pit, but when he came home at night, he felt like a man
sitting in his chair saying, "Mother, get me a glass of water." It
was only when Joe, at sixteen, had had pneumonia and spent long
days at home recovering, watching his mother work, that he real-
ized how hard it was for her, caring for the swarming family.
Joe, reformed by this experience, made less demands on his mother
and would often help with some of the household tasks, though
other miners thought that softish for a man.

"She wasn't an educated woman," Joe says of his mother, "but
she was the finest woman in the world. A beautiful woman she
was, dark, strong, attractive and well made. She had an under-
standingshe knew something was wrong and she knew something
had to be done for improvement. She never went beyond being
a worker in any cause, but she was always reading, she was the
first woman in High Spen to join the Woman Labour Party's Co-
operative Society. 'Twas her sounded the tune of socialism in our
family,"

FIRE IN THE ASHES 22O

Joe went down the pit at the age of fourteen, as nearly every
bov in High Spen did, A draper in the village offered him a job
at ten shillings a week in his shop, a mighty good wage, but the
pit was in Joe's blood.

He learned mining the way every miner did in those days. He
went down with Ms father that first morning, very frightened
but anxious to hide it. The overman looked him over for a minute
and then called another boy who had been down the pit for all
of three months. "You take Joe," said the overman to the second
boy, "and show him what to do." That was all there was to in-
struction in mining.

Pony-driving was boy's work in those days and in fifteen
minutes Joe was a pony-driver in the mine, with strange echoes
and rustling sounds settling all around hin>. Now, with all his years
of knowledge, Joe says that every sound in a mine has its mean-
ing, and a mine that is totally still is dangerous. A good working
mine breathes and murmurs underground, but that first day, there
in the darkness, Joe was frightened. There would be the groaning
of a roof movement, the sound of a stone jumping, the dry scratch-
ing of a rat as it rattled along the roadway. Alone with the pony
Joe shivered.

The way up from pony boy to collier followed the flow of the
coal The colliers dug and dumped the coal into tubs; the tub-
putters, burly men who manhandled the loaded wagons, pushed
the tubs out to narrow passages where little Shetland ponies could
get in to haul. The pony boys led them to larger tunnels, where
larger ponies could pull the tubs. The big ponies drew the coal
on to the rope haulage which carried it up the drift whence it
rose into sunlight and commerce. A boy might work on the pony-
line for months; then, in a quiet moment he would help the tub-
putter push the empty tubs back to the face; he would linger at
the face and watch the colliers hacking coal from the seam. When
he wasn't busy, he would sneak up to the face alone and say to
them, "Let me try." The men would look around and say,
"Where's the deputy?" If the deputy was far enough away, the
older men would let the boy heft a pick to help them hack the
coal. Without knowing it a man graduated into a miner, his
muscles hardening to iron, his body cramping into the cut, his

THE STORY OF JOE CTJRRY 221

back twisting in the Durham seams, often no more than 18 inches
thick, cutting, hewing, taking the coal.

Coal-cutting was work. But in High Spen, the union was re-
ligion. From the time a lad went down as pit boy, he was expected
to pay his sixpence a week to the union, and he did. Weeks when
there wasn't any food in a miner's house, a miner paid his dues.
The years when Joe was growing from boy to man, from pony-
driver to face-worker, were the years after World War I when
the unions of England were first feeling their strength and flexing
their muscles. The men were coming home from France, spent
with four years of trench war, full of new questions, wanting new
thingsmore pay, better working conditions, more respect. And
what they wanted of the coal industry, the coal industry could
not give. The coal mines of England were aging, as were all of
England's old industries. They were unable to meet the harsher
competition of the continental mines, unable to find an outlet for
the millions of tons of coal once shipped overseas to a world that
now dug its own coal or used oil.

The Curry brothers, like hundreds and thousands of miners all
over England, felt change whispering in them. Even when they
were youngsters, kicking tin boxes around in the street, Joe and
his older brothers would walk miles in the evening to hear Socialist
speakers at miners' meetings. Sometimes Joe and his brothers
hadn't the slightest idea of what the men were saying, but they
knew it was important. Hour after hour they sat at union meet-
ings, listening to reports and discussions; other nights they went
to the Club and Institute Union whose hall offered a library of
books for workers. Long before they could vote Joe and his
brothers were in politics, tramping from village to village, can-
vassing votes for Labour candidates for local or national office.

Joe's first strike came soon after the war. The pit Joe worked
in belonged to the Priestman family and had never had a strike
before. The Priestmans were f airly decent among the hard masters
of the North Country; they took a good profit but gave their men
consideration. Joe and the men went out in the summer of 1921,
not in anger, but because striking was in the air. Joe cannot even
remember now what the strike was about.

The strike lasted thirteen weeks and a "bloody, glorious time"
it was, with nothing to do but look at the sun and the open sky.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

Bv the rime the strike was settled, Joe had another Interest.
He had met a girl named Ruby on a merry-go-round at a village
fair. Ruby was the only daughter of a miner's family and she
knew what a miner's life offered, but she loved Joe and was willing
to wait until he could afford a home. "Don't get married, Joe,"
said some of the older union men. "It'll be a trap and you should
get on with the union work." But Joe thought differently, and
for the next five years he was quiet. He paid his dues and loyally
attended the meetings, but his extra time went into courting Ruby,
until the year of the General Strike.

No whistle blew the workers of High Spen awake on that May
morning in 1926 when the General Strike began. No whistle blew
in any coal town of the North, for there was no one at work
even to blow the whistle. Everyone had known for weeks the
strike was coming and that it was to be big, the biggest thing a
generation of English workers had ever tried to do.

The long slump of English effort had finally, in 1926, brought
England's mining industry face to face with ruin. The seams that
had powered the world's first industry were old and hollowed out
with generations of digging; their costs were high; overseas, men
dog coal more efficiently. According to the masters there was only
one way out: to cut the wages of the men and make them work
longer hours. For months masters and unions had talked about
the matter with no agreement and both sides hardened. Backing
the masters was the Tory government. Backing the miners were
other workers, millions of them. As the miners' unions stiffened
against the wage cuts, the other unions of England, in their massive
Trades-Union Congress, lined up in support, promising that if the
miners had to go out, every other union in the country would
back them up. If the miners went out, all England would go out-
spinners, weavers, printers, steelmen, dockmen, craftsmen, rail-
waymen, busmen everyone who worked for a living. General
strike it would be, the long-awaited master stroke of organized
labor.

In High Spen, as in every other working village and working
district of the land, Councils of Action were set up "Soviets"
the Tories called them. These Councils of Action were, in fact,
shadow governments with their own police forces organized in

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 223

flying picket squads that patrolled the country's life and move-
ment. Only those trucks which received Council of Action per-
mits because they carried food and emergency supplies could
pass the patrol picket squads on the North Country highways.

No strike in England had ever been so well prepared before as
the General Strike of 1926. But the leaders, unaware of what they
were doing, did not prepare for a revolution, and so they were
doomed to lose. Looking back on the General Strike a quarter of a
century later, the men who led it, now sober, middle-aged officials
or parliamentarians, still do not know whether it was naive or
brilliant. For a general strike that closes an entire country down
must be centrally organized and centrally directed. Whoever
directs it successfully dominates the country and is, in effect, its
government. If a general strike is victorious it is, therefore, a revo-
lution. The General Strike of 1926 was called out over a wage
dispute and the revolution was far from the minds of its leaders.
It failed because its leaders did not understand the implications of
their own deeds. It was the last great strike that England has ever
had.

There were two parts to the General Strike, first the violence
and then the hunger.

The violence came everywhere as it did to the Currys in High
Spen swiftly, with short-lived sharpness. For Joe it was no more
than a brutal clubbing over the head in a moment caught off
guard. It happened this way: two of Joe's brothers had been
assigned by the Council of Action to patrol the highways; they
clashed with a potato truck cruising the road without a Council
of Action pass. Joe's two brothers, along with a number of others,
including Will Lawther, now Sir William Lawther, the President
of the Miners' Union, were caught by police and swiftly brought
to trial at the town of Gateshead. On the day of the trial miners
from all the neighboring villages, Joe among them, gathered,
marching with lodge banners flying, their bands playing, their
women and youngsters tailing along in the procession of protest.
They invaded Gateshead, flooded its streets and courthouse square,
demonstrated, and having made their protest, started away. Joe
was at the head of his column on the way home when down at
the rear he heard the sound of women screaming. He had just
turned to run back when suddenly in front of Mm there was a

FIRE IN THE ASHES 22 4

policeman and before Joe could dodge, a club was swinging down
on his head, and then blackout.

Joe came to on the couch of some people he never saw before
or since. They were friendly to the strikers, as were all the North
Country people. They had dragged him unconscious from the
road. They bathed his head, bandaged him, warned him that the
police were out over all the roads looking for rioters, that he
must stay with them until dark. When dark came, the young man
of the family took him out the back way, over the back fields,
around the police blocks on the road. Other people put Joe on a
bus back to Rowlands Gill; there he crouched on his hands and
knees under the seat as police stopped and searched the bus for
rioters. Finally in the darkness before dawn Joe made his way to
Chopwell, to Ruby's house and safety.

That was the end of strike violence in the High Spen area, as
it was almost everywhere in England. Once the government called
force into being, the unions were bound to lose, for they had only
two choices either to seize the country by force or to crumble
when the government struck back.

In High Spen the miners could protect themselves. One of their
chaps, who had been a bugler during the war in France, was ap-
pointed signalman. When the patrol wagons of the police ap-
proached High Spen, the bugler blew his call Then the miners
poured into the streets, their pickshafts stacked neatly against the
wall like rifles and they lolled about talking as if they were dis-
cussing the races, or the weather, or women, while the police
lorries rolled through. Very peaceful they looked, but the pick-
shafts meant that they were ready to fight to defend their own.
Defense, however, wins neither wars nor strikes, and men knew
they were beaten.

The General Strike was over in ten days, as union after union
aU over England went back to work, the labor leaders nursing
their wounds and pondering the lessons they had learned. They
had lost on the picket lines. But they had learned that government
is an instrument of power that can be used either way. This learn-
ing was to flower only much later, after the Second World War,
when Labour won the government and made its own peaceful
revolution.

For the miners the hunger began when the violence ended; other

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 225

unions went back to work when the General Strike collapsed,
but the miners stayed out. In High Spen they stayed out six full
months and would have stayed out for twenty years, says Joe, if
it had been only a question of spirits. But it was a question of
hunger. The local government fed High Spen's children a hot meal
each day at school; it set up a special kitchen for pregnant women
where, if they came, they might get hot soup; it continued public
assistance to families with many children, and there, if the father
stood around while the children ate their scraps, he might find a
bite of their leaving. But for most of the men there was nothing
to eat all day, every day, except an occasional bowl of soup at the
union's soup kitchen. When the children's shoes wore out, the
miners opened a cobbler's shop and learned how to repair shoes.
First for the children, then for expectant mothers, then for other
women, then for themselves. Sometimes they gave singing con-
certs, charging a penny or two admission to raise funds to keep
going. But, finally, when winter came and it was cold, there was
no other way but to admit the strike was over and they were
beaten.

The morning the strike was over the men of the Curry family
trooped to the pit with the other miners. At the entrance the man-
ager met them. "No work for you here today or forever," he said
to every man in the Curry family. Joe, his brothers and his father
waited for weeks in High Spen, not knowing what to do, and then
they realized, as did thousands of other black-listed miners all
over England during those months, that now they were men with-
out jobs, or homes, or futures they were to be wanderers. Week
after week they walked from mining village to mining village,
crossing England from coast to coast. Once, in the winter of 1927,
Joe and his brother found jobs in the Eccles pit, in Northumber-
land. But no sooner had they brought the family after them in an
old truck than the black list caught up with them and they were
wanderers again.

It was then that the Currys gave up the North Country alto-
gether and came down to Yorkshire. The coal beds of south York-
shire about Doncaster were new beds and in the nineteen-twenries
they alone would hire new men. From Wales, from Scotland,
from the North Country, hard men, black-listed men, desperate
last-ditch strikers drifted down to Yorkshire to seek work there.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

Joe and his brother arrived in Doncaster late in 1927 and found a
Welsh lady who took them into her home, feeding them out of
charity until they found work. For three weeks they trudged
about the pits in Doncaster's suburbs looking for work and then
they did it the rough way. One morning they cornered the under-
manager of the Bentley pit in his office and closed the door firmly
behind them. "Now you know there's no work here, lads," said
the undermanager, "you'd best go quietly." But the Curry broth-
ers explained that there was no use their going quietly, for they
were hungry, and the family in the North was hungry, and
neither they nor anyone else would leave that office until they got
work or were overpowered and ejected. "Is it that bad, lads?"
asked the undermanager. They explained again that all they
wanted was a chance to work. The same day, at two in the after-
noon, the Currys were underground cutting coal again.

Yorkshire was good to the Currys and, their passion spent in the
General Strike, they settled down quietly. In a few months Joe's
mother and father and the other children followed them down. A
year later Joe's five-year courtship of Ruby ended in marriage,
and he began a different kind of life.

From the General Strike until the war in 1939, solid, placid years
followed one on another. Doncaster was not a coal-patch town
like High Spen, but a vigorous, healthy Yorkshire working town
with quick, alert politics. It was years before Joe was able to be-
come part of it, busy as he was with his work, his family and his
union meetings. But by 1937 the Labour party had put Joe up
for the Sprotborough Parish Council, and a year later he had be-
come its chairman. By this time, too, Joe had gone ahead in the
union; most days he was down in the pit cutting coal; in addition
he negotiated on the Union District Committee with the colliery
managers or other employers 1 representatives. Labour elected him
to various public authorities, and by 1941 he sat on the West
Riding Magistrates Court.

Joe Curry was thus a man of solid local substance, if not of
fame, when the war came to England. War did not come to Don-
caster as it came to London, Coventry, Birmingham and the burn-
i0g T bleeding towns of the Midlands. Only occasionally did a
night-raiding plane, aiming for Hull or Sheffield, disturb the peace

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 22J

of Doncaster, summoning air-raid wardens like Joe to rush to
their posts. War came to Doncaster through the change in the
pits around it. There it found Joe and took him out, and changed
his life forever.

For the miners of England the war was an escape. As the na-
tion's factories expanded and all England called for manpower,
the men bound to miners' wages and miners' sunless jobs began
one by one, and then in scores and thousands, to desert to the
clean above-ground jobs that were offered everywhere. By 1942
the drift from the mines had become so serious that Mr. Church-
ill's government established a Ministry of Fuel to control all the
mines of England and the men who worked in them, lest the
fiery core of Britain's industry grow gray for lack of fuel. Men
were forbidden to leave the pits without permission; young men
were drafted into them; the industry across the country was
divided into regions, and in each region a panel of three men
one for labor, one for the masters, one for the mining engineers-
controlled the pits. In Yorkshire the labor director was the secre-
tary of the Yorkshire Miners' Union, W. E. Jones, and Jones in
turn insisted that his deputy be young Joe Curry. One day Joe
was in the pit, his hands grained with coal dust and his finger
muscles cramped about a pickshaft, and the next he was in an
office, with a telephone, a typewriter and a secretary. It was the
secretary that scared Joe most. "I learned later," said Joe, "that she
was terrified of me. But I was scared to death of her, more scared
that first day in the office than the first day in the pit."

The mines looked different from above ground, and Joe had to
learn about mining in a new way, considering the men in their
thousands, studying how many worked in one pit and how many
in another. The problem was not only to keep the men from
moving out, but also how to move them around so as to get the
most out of those who stayed. The coal faces screamed for more
men, and Joe's job was to gather men scattered in old, poor pits
and bring them to work in richer, more bountiful pits. But miners
are stubborn people who do not like to be moved, and though a
war was going on in Europe, they felt their old private war with
the masters had never ended. Stronger than ever now, while Eng-
land screamed for coal, they settled old grudges with lightning
strikes and quick stoppages. The Ministry needed men like Joe

FIRE IN THE ASHES

Curry to talk to the miners, men who had called for strike at pit-
head meetings of their own, men who knew that now was not
the time to strike and knew how to say it in the words of miners.
Joe did well, and in South Yorkshire the men began to listen to
him.

By 1944, when Jones left the Ministry of Fuel, Joe Curry was
ready to take his place as regional labor advisor; two years later,
in October of 1946, Joe was ready to leave Yorkshire and go to
London when summoned. In London, Labour was now the gov-
ernment, socialism was being made and the King had proclaimed
in the ancient words "Le Roy Le Veult" that on New Year's Day
of 1947, the mines would no longer belong to the masters but to
the nation.

Generations of dreams had gone into socializing the mines of
England, but the new Labour government that proclaimed the
dream to be reality had neither plan nor program. Seven hundred
thousand miners, one thousand pits, more than one billion dollars
of invested capital had accumulated over the years in England's
greatest industry, but no one had explored how they should be
put together under socialism.

In May of 1946 the Labour government had set up an organiz-
ing committee of nine men, later to become Britain's National
Coal Board, to plan the reorganization of the resources on which
all England's welfare rests. But the Labour government was busy
with many things and many great adventures at the moment.
"Here are the mines," It said in effect to the committee. "Do what
you want, tell us what you need, we'll finance your schemes, off
you go."

Off they went, nine men and two secretaries in frantic travel by
coach and plane around England to survey their domain, while
in London, almost overnight, staff and experts and secretaries
began to gather. la the heart of fashionable Mayfair the govern-
ment had cleared one of London's more stylish apartment build-
ings, Lansdowne House, to make office space. Filing cabinets for-
ested the bathrooms, typists pounded away in kitchens, Lord
Hyndley, chief of the Coal Board, installed himself in what was
formerly the apartment of Snake-Hips Johnson, the jazz band
leader.

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 22Q

Joe Curry arrived in the midst of this hubbub in London, in
the fall of 1946, to learn his job as everyone in socialism was learn-
ing theirs. His office was a cubbyhole in the first floor of Lans-
downe House, overlooking a tiny triangle of grass and garden.
His title had great ring deputy to the chief of the Coal Board's
labor relations, who was Ebby Edwards, the grizzled old union
chief. But, in fact, it was different. In all the vast, rambling con-
fusion of the Coal Board, few people noticed that only two men
in the whole new Socialist apparatus had ever been working
miners down in the pits themselves Ebby Edwards and Joe Curry.
The mines, everyone assumed, belonged to the nation and that
was enough to satisfy the miners. There were other more im-
portant problems on the Coal Board's mind than labor relations.

These other problems were indeed imposing and difficult; they
had been generations in reaching their ugly complexity. For
thirty years coal owners had let their mines run downhill. The best
and easiest coal had been taken out; the workings were ancient,
obsolete, inefficient; mechanization was twenty years behind time;
haulage was antique; the pits were too many, too costly, too small.
It would be a fifteen- or twenty-year task, estimated the engineers,
to reorganize and modernize the mines of England, but mean-
while coal had to be taken out at any cost and so, on with the
work. First nationalization, then reorganization. Thus, on Janu-
ary i, 1947, the miners who had gone down in private pits on the
night shift at ten o'clock came up at six in the morning to check
out of nationalized mines. In South Wales the new shift sang
hymns as they marched to work; in other districts they sang the
Red Flag.

Within three weeks of Vesting Day the Coal Board learned
where its real problem lay. Nature provided the occasiona vast
low-pressure area in the mid-Atlantic came swinging down over
Scotland and England on January 23 of 1947, to lacerate England
with her worst blizzard in living memory. As the snow piled up,
life stilled. Trains stopped, factories stopped, electric power ran
down. England had no reserves of coal for power; trains could not
haul coal to the cities; miners could not even get through the
snowdrifts from home to pit head. The thin margin on which
English life had run for decades was worn through. There was no

FIKE IN THE ASHES 2 3

reserve coal, no energy. And there was no reserve coal because
men did not want to dig it.

Mining depended on men, and surveying their enterprise, the
directors of the Coal Board learned that there were less men min-
ing coal in England than for over half a century. To get coal the
Coal Board would have to find men; it would have to win them
away from the clean, well-paying above-ground jobs of Socialist
full-employment and make them want to dig.

From 1947 to this season and as far in the future as one can see,
the problem of England's mines will be to find enough men, and
once having found them, to do something to their spirit to make
them want to stay and dig. Ten per cent more coal, say the econo-
mists of England, and England's basic trading problem would be
solred, and that ten per cent could easily be taken out of the
mines, without any new engineering, if only the miners wanted
to take it. But something lingers in the miners' minds, bred out of
generations of bitterness and cruelty that no edict of socialism
can cure. Miners* pay packets are fat these days. Around Don-
caster many of the white-collar workers are so envious of miners
who earn twelve and fifteen pounds a week that they vote Tory
out of jealousy. The pits offer clean showers, milk, good food,
fresh opportunity. Houses are better; the rations of the miners
have been the best in England for seven years. Yet the spark has
not come. The miners work, to be sure, better than they did under
the old system, but miners come to work when they want and
are absent when they want. Lightning strikes still come and go,
costing England more than a million tons of coal a year. For
England to be great and solid again, the mines must work not as
the old masters worked them but as the Socialists claimed they
could and would work once they belonged to the nation.

For six years Joe Curry wrestled with the problem from his desk
in London, a pit-head oracle for the white-collared engineers,
technicians, administrators, economists and scientists of the Coal
Board. "Joe," they would say, "what does a miner do with his
dirty laundry?" or "Joe, can we put this kind of appeal in their
pay packet?* 1 or "Joe, what would the lads in the pit say to this?"
Joe answered questions for six years before the Coal Board decided
that he was needed more in Doncaster than anywhere else. Don-
caster is the center of die Northeastern Division of England's Coal

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 231

Board; here in this region more and better coal is dug than any-
where else in England; here in this region the men are tougher
and harder than other miners. Absenteeism is higher than in any
other region in England one out of every five face-workers in
the northeast region was absent every day in 1952. Here suspicion
has lasted longest, for here in the Yorkshire beds thousands of men
beaten and black-listed by the General Strike, the hottest and most
fiery of the coal workers of other regions, drifted to find employ-
ment in the twenties. They still remember. Joe Curry knows, for
he is one of the men that came that way.

As director of labor relations for the Northeastern Division of
the Coal Board, Joe Curry is responsible for more big pits (114
in all) and more miners (140,000) than fall under the direction of
any other division of the National Coal Board. He has come a long
way from the days when he learned about socialism in his mother's
kitchen at High Spen and since his head was cracked by the police
of Gateshead. Dressed now in a neat, gray business suit, his sandy
hair now less thick and bushy, his ridged eyebrows vigorously
protruding over green-blue eyes, Joe is still cast in the miner's
mold. He is short, chunky, possessed of the enormously power-
ful shoulders of a pit worker, walks with their sturdy, heavy-
footed gait. Only Joe's ideas have changed; he has seen socialism
made; now he wants to make it work. His problem now is not the
masters, it is the men, his mates, and how to ignite them.

"You can't ignite them overnight," Joe says. "All you can do
is plant the spark and fan it and let it smolder; it will smolder a
long time before it burns up into a good, strong fire.

"It's true the men aren't working like they used to. God grant,
they'll never have to do it again. Those days when you had to
count every penny in the packet and when you lost a penny it was
sorrow, those days are gone. Ah yes, in those days the miners
were disciplined. They were disciplined by fear and hunger and
economic compulsion; a manager who took a man's job away
destroyed him. When I was growing up, you saw grown men
who couldn't find work waiting for little brothers and sisters to
give them food. It broke them. The young fellows of twenty-four
or twenty-five in the pits now don't remember those days, and the
older ones can live like men for the first time in their lives.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

"I look around me here in Doncaster. It's not so long since I
saw people Ill-nourished, ill-clad, their homes sparsely furnished.
Now you see them well-dressed, well-fed. You go into their homes
and they have decorations, pianos, carpets, radios, some of them
are getting TV sets. It's all changed.

"We worry about absenteeism; I know it's bad. But think of
the lads. Everything is OK, and they're lying in bed snug and
warm next to the wife in the dark, when the alarm tinkles and it's
four o'clock, time for the shift. What's the thing you want to buy
most in the world that hour of the day? Another hour of sleep.
And they ask who are they hurting if they take another hour's
sleep, or stay in bed that day? It isn't as if they were paid by the
week and they'd be cheating someone if they came late; they get
paid by what they take in coal and if they don't cut coal that day,
it's their own time, What they need is a new loyalty, something
to belong to.

"They call this work of mine personnel management. I hate the
bloody term. That's one the efficiency experts brought in, it's not
a human term. What's got to be done is not big things but a lot
of little things. The average pit manager thinks of his problem as
work attendance. But you've got to think of this thing as men.
Nationalization is just a soulless machine to the men up to now.
If only the average pit manager could see how you have to go
through the mass to the individual, to make the men feel that the
Coal Board is in the pit there with them. If the manager only
thought the men were as important as the engineering, as the
firedamp, the drainage, the haulage, the ventilation. When a man's
out you don't just dock his pay. You've got to talk to him when
he comes back, not scold him like a child, but ask him was he sick?
was the wife sick? did something happen to him? If the manager
knows of a family with a bright young lad growing up in it, he
ought to go around and talk to the lad's family. He ought to tell
them about the opportunity for the boy in the industry, the
schools we have now, the place in management waiting for him.

"It's not the intentions that count with the men, it's their see-
ing that the Board thinks of them as human beings, their seeing
that the industry listens to their ideas, that the Board offers redress
for anything that goes wrong, and if there's a doubt, the benefit
of the doubt goes to them. But you can't do it by appeals. For ten

THE STORY OF JOE CURRY 233

years England's been appealing to the miners for Dunkirk, for
the Middle East, for Italy, for the Invasion of France, for the
Dollar Drive. They're tired of appeals and they say, 'Let t'buggers
come down t'pit themselves and see how it is.'

"What they've got to do is feel that they're part of the mines,
and they've got to be loyal to the mines. I speak, whether I like it
or not, with a mind that's been broadened. I won't go back on
anything I thought or said when I was twenty-four. There's been
no change in my principles or intentions. I've just been forced to
see things differently."

XI

If no simple story can be traced through the complicated years
that followed the breach between the Atlantic world and Russia
in 1947, it is because classic diplomacy has decayed and all but
disappeared.

Classic diplomacy was an art of a world that is dead, a pro-
fession practiced by a handful of men who were specialists in
esoteric matters that ordinary citizens could not understand or
were not greatly interested in. It was a routine of measured notes,
conversations and formal calls, a charade of receptions, dinners
and entertainment in which gentlemen, secure in their knowledge
of what their governments sought, could bargain intelligently and
secretly with other gentlemen equally secure in their knowledge
of what their governments sought. The passions and pressures of
furious domestic politics rarely annoyed them, either at home or
abroad. Before the people entered the scene, in that long yester-
day from Talleyrand and Metternich down to Bismarck, Gray
and Izvolski, a modest intelligence and a strong army were enough
to give a man a reputation as a successful diplomat. When, after
many years, his dispatches and memoirs were published, it was
possible to reconstruct a simple account of how events had been
shaped.

Today, all this has changed. Foreign aff airs are the central prob-
lem of politics for every country in the world. They touch into
every home by the blood tax of war, or the money tax of peace.
In every country of the West, therefore, foreign affairs are now
fundamentally directed by Congress and Parliament, Assembly
and Bundestag. Diplomats still draft notes, press the seals of red
wax on treaties, advise their chiefs in what order and rank im-

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 235

portant guests should be seated at table. But essentially most dip-
lomats are now clerks and their secrets are clerks' secrets.

Moreover, the frame of diplomacy has changed. Nations no
longer deal with each other, except on the most trivial matters,
as individual with individual. They deal with each other in great
groups and associations, in agglomerations of force, in communi-
ties that collide and grate and bump. As much diplomatic effort
must be spent within, holding these communities together
whether Atlantic, or Communist, or Moslem, or Latin- American
as is spent outside them, as their leaders try to deal with hostile
or rival communities.

Both changes have erased the old mysteries in which diplo-
macy once shrouded itself. All that is important in the years since
the war is public knowledge so public, so overwhelming in de-
tail, that instead of the obscurity of secrecy ordinary citizens are
now blinded by the obscurity of total detail. No excitement can,
therefore, be distilled from stripping the facts out of the secrets
that diplomats whisper to each other over the green-baize tables
of negotiation. The major facts have been worn bone-smooth in
the many meetings at which men have met and wrangled since
the war.

What excitement is left comes from guessing how the domestic
political prejudices in each country will collide with the political
prejudices of every other country, when they interlock in the
new communities of association abroad. The excitement comes in
watching negotiators trying to write a sound proposal that will
please their voters at home without sounding too outrageous to
foreign negotiators who, like them, are burdened and wince under
contrary pressures in their homes.

Great events and crises sometimes sweep around the world like
tidal waves, urging the new communities to common effort and
common creation. But ultimately each country is moved by its
own impulses, generated from the grass roots, conditioned by dif-
ferent nursery rhymes and remembered traditions, based on un-
spoken assumptions never formalized in documents of state. The
tidal wave may momentarily jostle these impulses together or sub-
merge them, but when it recedes these impulses rise again, true to
their own sources deep in their own peoples.

The Western world has experienced three such tidal waves of

FIRE IN THE ASHES 236

decision since the war the first in 1947 when it decided to break
with the Russians; the second in 1950 when it decided to rebuild
its defenses; the third in 1953 when it pauses to ponder whether
it should accept the overtures of the Russians who seek to resume
the conversation interrupted six years before.

During these six years the Western world has been forced into
two new kinds of association, one within the other. The larger is
the Atlantic Community of NATO, the smaller is the Union of
Europe within NATO. Each has been shaped by overmastering
world tides. Now, as the tides change or recede, the permanent,
persistent impulses of the peoples forced into these communities
reassert themselves. The future both of NATO and European
Union depends to a large extent on the contending magnetisms
and purposes of the United States and Russia. But they depend
just as much on the impulses that rise naturally in Englishmen,
Frenchmen and Germans as they look out on the world and its
changing tides.

The sentinels of British foreign policy keep their guard post in
the ugly, ornate, grime-frosted building just across the street from
the Prime Minister's residence in Whitehall. Across their desks,
red-ribboned packages of dispatches bring them daily tidings of
menace and turmoil. Yet even as they open these dispatches, the
professional diplomats of Britain know they will enjoy, in reply-
ing to them, an advantage which is the envy of all foreign diplo-
mats. This is their knowledge that behind them stands a united
country, whose major impulses are so clear that they have never
once needed expression in a formal document since the war. In
England, partisan dispute festers only on details of foreign policy,
not on its major purpose.

This major purpose, under Tory leadership as under Labour
leadership, is Britain's desire to retain complete independence, not
to be hammered into the status of satellite in any association of any
kind, and to go on from there to recapture her old freedom of de-
cision in the world. The British cannot adjust themselves to a
world in which there are only two magnetic fields of power, the
United States and the Soviet Union. There must be a third of equal

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 237

magnitude, and in their Commonwealth they hope to create it.
They propose, no matter what, to remain great and remain Britain.

The pursuit of this purpose is complicated by two grim prob-
lems.

The first of these is physical security. Physical security is no
abstraction for the British, no distant menace from across the
oceans. Many of us in the United States are already obsessed with
worry about the defense of our continent from the thrust of
bombers raiding over the pole or from oceans half the world away.
Our radar pickets sweep the sky thousands of miles north and
hours of jet-flight away from Detroit and Toledo. But Britain's
radar pickets have no such range. From the time radar on the East
Anglian or Kentish coasts picks up the first pip of an enemy jet
until the time that jet is over London is no more than twenty
minutes twenty minutes in which the operator must make iden-
tification of plane and course, then telephone Air Control, Air
Control telephone the alert fields, the alert fields scramble the
fighters into the air, the fighters hurtle to 30,000 feet, search out
the enemy and bring him down. Twenty minutes is the maximum
possible margin of British safety. Each night millions of British
women, children and men sleep with only this thin film of warn-
ing against death, and they know it.

For the British, trying to meet this danger, the only possible
logic is to wed themselves to the strength of America and join an
Atlantic Alliance which pushes the picket line of radar as far into
the heart of Europe as possible.

But there the complication begins. Britain's second problem is
economic survival. The British know they can starve in peace just
as surely as under wartime blockade. They live in a world that
challenges them with two kinds of danger at once. And though
the Atlantic Alliance may be necessary for military security, it
may be the crippling last-straw burden in their struggle for eco-
nomic survival. Without the Atlantic Alliance, Britain stands
naked and alone in an angry world. But with the Atlantic Alliance,
the British are forced to accept the trading rules and patterns set
by America, which, over and over again, force her to near chaos
and disaster.

Britain's long-range strategic goal is therefore relatively simple:
to retain the military alliance with America as its base of strength,

FIRE IN THE ASHES

but to struggle out of its implications toward political and eco-
nomic independence. But this imposes on Britain tactical problems
that are immensely difficult. She must keep the American partner-
ship intact, yet without submitting to American strategy when she
feels it unwise; she must applaud America's drive to European
Union without letting herself be trapped in that Union; she must
restrain or disagree with America without being left to face the
Russians alone in a divided Europe. Last year the British Broad-
casting Company scheduled a series of five weekly talks on the
nature of British foreign policy in the world today. The eminent
speakers were scholars and parliamentarians, both Labour and
Tory. None wasted kind words or praise on America except to
say that she was strong and she was necessary.

These basic British impulses have been refined into an unex-
pressed but conscious policy by all the events of the postwar
world. Every two years since the war in 1947, in 1949, in 1951
the British have experienced a monotonous but terrible trading
crisis, bringing them to the edge of bankruptcy. These would be
merely dreary ridges in international bookkeeping were it not for
the way they have influenced British thinking about the world and
their strategy in it.

The convertibility crisis of 1947 confirmed the suspicion the
British have always had of America's best intentions. On loaning
the British 13,750,000,000 in 1946, the United States insisted that
the British make their pound sterling freely convertible into gold
or dollars a year later at anyone's demand. The British declared
this was unwise, but, intoxicated with the aroma of the huge loan,
they finally submitted. Came the day when they had to meet this
promise, in July of 1947. First slowly, then in a rush, traders and
merchants all over the world who held English pounds demanded
that the pounds be cashed for gold and dollars. From August 7 to
14, England cashed $i 15,000,000 to redeem its pounds; in the next
six days she bled $237,000,000 more. At which point Britain broke
its promise and made sterling inconvertible again to avoid bank-
ruptcy. They had been right in their predictions, America wrong*
The jaundiced examination the British have given every American
proposal since then springs from the convertibility crisis,

The devaluation crisis of 1949 taught Britain other lessons and
further refined her attitude. This crisis was born in the spring of

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 239

1949 when a slight downturn in American business dried up the
markets of tin, cocoa, rubber, wool, which are the chief dollar
earners of the sterling area, and simultaneously choked England's
own dollar earnings from automobiles, textiles and whiskies. Again
a run on sterling began, and Britain's reserves were drawn low.
This time the run could be stopped only by devaluing the pound
and off ering it so cheaply that the world's traders would be lured
to seek it for its very cheapness.

Devaluation left two residues in British foreign policy. The first
was the morbid realization that Britain, like the rest of the Western
world, hung like a cork at the end of a fishing line, to be swung
about every time American business snapped; it left the British
with an almost hysterical fear of their dependence on an economy
whose liability to slumps automatically carried Britain with it.

The second residue was more important. It was this same de-
valuation crisis that finally shook the British out of Europe and
made them from that time on turn their back on all projects of
European Union however importunate the Europeans and de-
manding the Americans. The final devaluation of sterling in 1949
had been forced on the British against their will; all through
Europe merchants who held pounds in the summer of 1949 had
begun to offer these pounds unofficially to any buyer at any price
and had, in effect, cut the value out from under the pound before
the British did so officially. Now this was strictly illegal. At the
tables of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation
in Paris where the Marshall Plan powers met, all the European
Ministers of Finance and Foreign Affairs held up their hands in
horror at the black-marketeering of their merchants. But these
European governments lacked the mechanism or courage to sup-
press black-marketeering; nor did they really want to; nor did the
United States insist that they abide by the rules of controlled trade.
When the British devalued the pound with abrupt brusqueness,
they did so convinced that any understanding with Europe which
involved common controls was impossible. And their island's sur-
vival depended on the efficiency of controls. Ever since, the British
have stood sympathetically aloof; they have blessed all projects of
European Union but for Europeans only, not for Britons. Britain
will go it alone.

The third and last of the trading crises, in 1951, finished the re-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

finement of British attitude to the world. But that came after the
war In Korea in 1950, and its story falls later in the chapter. By
1950, Britain's attitude to Europe and America was already clear.

England is the senior ally of America in Europe for the often-
repeated reason that the English, if they are attacked, are the only
people who will certainly fight to defend their liberties whether
they stand alone, or with America behind them. England has done
so before and will do so again.

But France is the second ally of the Atlantic Basin because al-
though in a war much could be held, nothing could be won with-
out her. Nothing could be won militarily without France because
France holds the most valuable real estate in Western Europe. If
France, as a rear zone of military maneuver and support, were neu-
tral or hostile, no possible military line of resistance short of the
English Channel could be drawn to meet an attack from the East.
Equally, nothing can be won in peace without France. Such is the
magic of France's name and culture, so vigorous are the intellects
that flower in France that everywhere in the world France casts an
absentee vote of the spirit.

This France, however, cannot be held in the Atlantic world as
other countries are by troops of occupation, by bribery or ballot-
stuffing. It can be held there only by the French themselves, freely
assenting to the sacrifices in blood, money or sovereignty required
of them.

In retrospect, the most brilliant and most imaginative foreign
policy of the European states has come out of France. This has
been the drive to European Union, born in Paris, shaped in Paris
and sealed in Paris. If France has not received the honor and credit
due her for leadership in this bold adventure, it is only because no
serious observer can tell whether this same drive to European
Union may not die in Paris, where it was born, and no one can
measure how deeply the French people themselves support their
leaders who have given Europe new banners to follow.

France offers the world a picture the very opposite of England.
The words of English diplomacy are fuzzy, confusing and, all too
often, meaningless; the vigor of English diplomacy springs from
the way Englishmen understand each other and stand united in
purpose without need of wordy persuasion. French diplomacy

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 241

speaks in lucid, clear analysis, but it speaks for a people divided
from village roots to sovereign assembly. Even France's diplomats
are divided; it is doubtful whether ten out of a hundred of the
professionals at the Quai d'Orsay are wholeheartedly agreed that
their government's support of European Union makes sense.

Deep down inside France many contrary impulses stir its citi-
zens as they look at the outside world.

There are those Frenchmen, almost a quarter of the population,
who, stirred by the mythology of communism, have infected mil-
lions more to regard America as the evil in the world; automati-
cally, they detest and denounce anything America praises or
proposes.

There are millions of others, crossing all party lines, for whom
foreign affairs begin and end with the Germans. They are the men
who have seen the Germans come into their villages to kill their
friends, who have grown up in towns where the public square,
in which they have played as children and courted their girls, is
dominated by one lone monument of sorrow to the dead in the
German wars. They have learned on the knees of their grand-
fathers and from their history books that all France's strength has
been wasted by a century of German aggression.

Then there are those who remember the heroes of French glory,
from Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc through Napoleon to Cle-
menceau, whose throats choke when the tricolor passes, whose
hearts skip when a frontier post in Indo-China is isolated, who
wish only that France stand great and alone in her own imme-
morial tradition.

There are, finally, those who believe that France must merge
herself in a greater union and greater loyalty called Europe. Some
have been forced to this conclusion by fear and the conviction that
French liberties cannot be defended unless France multiplies her
power by association. Others have been led to the belief by re-
ligion and the mystic vision of Christian brotherhood. Still others
believe that neither France nor any other country in Western
Europe can offer her citizens a decent livelihood cramped in the
frame of small, economically obsolete nation-states.

What is remarkable is that the French people, with all these con-
flicting and clashing emotions, have held still for so long and per-
mitted men with but one policy that of European Union r per-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 4 2

sist in offering France as the first state in the greater union. The
French have not yet given their final assent to the proposals of
their own leaders, but they have let themselves be led.

Partly, the French have done so out of apathy, because they can
see no solution for the political chaos of their own divided state.
But more importantly, because year by year since the war events
have led them to realize that the only other alternatives open to
them are internal decay or frank submission as satellites to Russia
or America. Events more than deep conviction have refined and
shaped French policy since the war.

The French did not re-enter the great world in 1946 as a nation
bearing arms and power. They were invited back. One of the
brilliant triumphs of Western diplomacy over Soviet stupidity
was Anglo-American insistence, in the face of violent Soviet oppo-
sition, on the participation of France as an equal in the deliberation
of the victors. Had the Russians chosen, they might have altered
the story of postwar Europe by cultivating France. In those early
postwar days when France was governed by an overwhelming
Left- Wing majority, when the Communists sat in the government
and were the most powerful single force in disorganized France,
the interests of France and Russia were identical. The French, like
the Russians, had suffered bitterly from the German armies. Their
instincts were the same as the Russians: to sack, strip and dismantle
Germany in order to pay for the reconstruction and reform of
their country. But the Russians, instead of earning French grati-
tude by supporting them on issues where their interests meshed
reparations, Ruhr control, dismemberment of Germany sought
instead each opportunity to humiliate the French and, by treating
them as puppets of Britain and America, forced them, in practice,
to behave so.

Being thus driven into the Atlantic world, the French realized,
as did the British, that in this new world the dominant voice would
be that of the United States. Unlike the British who instinctively
looked forward to the day when they might face America in
equality, as friends and partners, the French all broken from the
war felt that a partnership of France and America would be a
union of the horse and the sparrow, a package of clay pot and iron
pot. France thus sought to expand her power by association, and

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 243

obviously there was but one power with which to associate in
Europe the English.

There is something almost feminine in any French approach to
London, The French in 1946 knew themselves to be weak, emo-
tional, but desirable. The British were strong, true victors, not
nominal victors, yet incomplete. Both France and Britain had un-
dertaken great new planned economies. These economies seemed
to dovetail: the French had food, the British fuel and the greatest
needs of each might be filled by the other. Around the world their
interests were parallel in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in at-
titudes to America and Russia.

But the marriage of France and Britain was not to be. One of the
French ministers most intimately associated with the negotiations
of the early postwar months said, "It's little things that hold up big
things take the personality of de Gaulle, for example. De Gaulle
had spent four years in England saying yes to Winston Churchill
when the man's nature shrieked to say no. When he became Pre-
mier of France he didn't want to say yes to the British any longer,
he just had to say no." Despite de Gaulle, their Premier, French
politicians persisted in their wooing of the British. Had there been
any serious response, de Gaulle might have been overcome in his
own Cabinet. But the British, though cordial and polite, though
they went on signing treaties of alliance and unimportant protocols
of commercial exchange, would have none of marriage. They
were British; they could not link their destiny with that of a de-
feated land. It is idle now to speculate what might have happened
had the United States tried to force this marriage on Britain and
France as vigorously and sternly as later we tried to force the
marriage of France and Germany. All Europe might have changed.

Being thus rejected by the Russians and snubbed by the British,
the French spent the next three years, from 1947 to 1950, in total
dependence on American will. Each major event around the globe
seemed to force France to dependence on the one positive out-
going diplomatic force in the world of freedom. The Dollar Gap
crushed France and made her a supplicant, as all other West Euro-
pean countries, on Congressional favor. Unrest in Africa and vio-
lent war in Indo-China seemed insoluble without American under-
standing and support. Until the spring of 1950, France's confused

FIRE IN THE ASHES 244

impulses cancelled each other out and French diplomacy expressed
itself only as marginal comment on American action.

It was not until May of 1950 that a French Cabinet could offer a
French program to the world: that of European Union. The idea,
as we shall see in another chapter, had long been electric in the
air, but not until then did a French government, the first among
European governments, take the idea and clothe it with authority
and program. Since then it has magnetized all European politics
about it, summoned to its support all the resources of American
power and persuasion, lain at the root of every negotiation and
every gathering among the Atlantic Powers and between the At-
lantic Powers and the Russians.

It Is commonly argued, criticizing the French, that for them
European Union is a method of solving domestic problems which
they cannot solve themselves, that it thrives on French apathy and
is supported not by the conviction of Frenchmen but by their
despair. All this is quite true, but it subtracts nothing from the
courage or wisdom of the French statesmen who proposed the
idea, for in history a policy of desperation is quite as valid as a
policy of confidence. If it is true that no nation-state in Western
Europe can thrive in its old compartment and offer its people the
hope and comfort of the greater power states of the world, then
French wisdom must get credit for having first recognized the
situation and offered a solution.

For the Germans, foreign policy began late, but it began at
home. It began with two sharp facts that still ulcerate the pride
and dignity of Germans every day of the week: Germany is occu-
pied and Germany is divided.

German foreign policy has sought to end first the Occupation
and then the Division. This foreign policy is quite as simple and
clear to every German as British foreign policy Is clear to every
Englishman. But the Germans differ bitterly among themselves on
the method of reaching the goals.

All through the Winter Years down to the establishment of the
Bonn government in 1949, Occupation took precedence over Di-
vision as the chief weight in German policy. No individual Ger-
man could ever, at any moment, escape the Occupation. Germans
drove on their own highways under traffic regulations fixed by

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 245

alien armies; when they turned the tap in their homes, the water
tasted of chlorine dictated by the hygiene field manuals of
Occupation armies; their children studied from textbooks written,
published and approved by alien conquerors. No impulse existed
in Germany greater than to conduct their own lives as they
wished.

From 1949 on, as the Occupation atrophied and the German
Renaissance began to flush the country with health, Division and
Unity superseded Occupation as an emotional pressure in the
German mind.

From 1949 on the Occupation became increasingly a symbolic
rather than a real grievance. As the Bonn government grasped ever
more competently the tools of control that slipped from Allied
administration, the Occupation became not so much a political
as a technical problem of foreign affairs. For most Germans, liv-
ing as close as skin to the Russian armies, do not yet want the
troops of the Atlantic Powers physically removed from their fron-
tier posts. Politically, it is German purpose to keep the defense
troops of America, Britain, France and Belgium in place and in
posture for the time being, and to deal with them as the French
or the British deal with American troops stationed in their coun-
tries. Germans do not want to see American soldiers pack up and
go. But they want to make sure that Americans in Germany live
by German rules that their Coca-Cola, as was suggested, be taxed
as German beverages are taxed, that their hunting trophies be
weighed and checked by German game wardens, that their rail-
way fares be paid as Germans pay their railway fares, that their
PX coffee be prohibited from dodging German taxes through
black-market channels. Lastly, they would like to see that portion
of the Occupation cost of these armies which Germany still bears
removed and assumed entirely by the governments which com-
mand the troops.

Division, as an ulceration in German pride, has, however, never
ceased to fester and suppurate. This desire of the Germans to be
reunited is, today, the most explosive, unpredictable political emo-
tion in Central Europe. In the partition of Germany by Russian
and Atlantic troops more than in any other single European con-
dition, lies the threat of turbulence, the possible wrecking of every
project, alliance or plan Atlantic diplomacy has conceived.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

This Is so because no German, of any strain of political faith
from purest democrat to most evil Nazi, can accept the partition
of his country" as permanent. He cannot accept it out of pride, out
of conscience, out of logic. Seventeen million Germans live under
the puppet tyranny of a Communist government. Each year be-
tween 200,000 and 500,000 of them slip across the frontiers from
East Germany to West Germany as refugees to tell their hideous
tales of pillage, barbarism and desolation. It is as if all England
north of the Trent, or all France west of the Garonne, were under
the iron occupation of an alien power. It is as if all Americans liv-
ing beyond the Alleghenies knew that New England, New York,
Virginia and the Carolinas were policed by men of strange tongues
and obscene morals, who day and night continued to arrest their
cousins and brothers, friends and families. Such a people have no
greater objective in foreign policy than their territorial wholeness
and integrity. No morality, no treaty, no understanding is binding
that stands in the way of the purpose.

Nor, it should be noted, do Germans think only of East Ger-
many under the Russians when they yearn for German Unity.
They think also of the Saar which is held by France, and the fact
that the Saar, relatively peaceful, is one of the most prosperous
enclaves in all Europe and has flourished under paternal French ad-
ministration does not abate German passion even a tiny bit, for in
the Saar live Germans like themselves.

One other major impulse moves the Germans as they look out
on the world. This is the impulse to draw a line across that past
which has brought Germany so much sorrow by a new act of as-
sociation with other nations in a European Union. This impulse
probably awakes more genuine enthusiasm among young Germans
than among the people of any other European state except Hol-
land and Italy. It moves some Germans because they wish to make
an end of the wars that have ravaged their country; it moves others
because they fear, as do Germany's neighbors, the still-throbbing
subterranean barbarism of many of their compatriots and want to
manacle it forever in a larger union where it will be suppressed.

But where the impulse to European Union clashes with Ger-
many's single-minded pursuit of Unity, the impulse flickers and
fails. If European Union is to be fruitful, meaningful and lasting
for Germans, it must have as one of its major purposes the reunit-

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 247

ing of their country. If to reunite their country, the Germans must
abandon European Union, they will choose to abandon European
Union.

When the Communist armies of the Orient invaded South Korea
in 1950, a tidal wave of panic swept the whole world and momen-
tarily submerged the separate impulses of England, France and
Germany. In that moment of peril nothing seemed more important
to any of them than that their lives be defended. Thus, between
1950 and 1953, mighty achievements were written in Europe as
NATO took up arms and as the organs of European Unity were
fashioned to protect one and all. Yet, as year by year, the peril
receded or changed in character, as the strain of the great rivalry
began to tell first in the West then later, but more profoundly, in
the Communist world, the old national impulses reasserted them-
selves. Each nation began to examine the world again in its own
dissimilar interests.

The British, after the Americans, were the quickest power to
add hard military strength to the Atlantic Alliance after the Ko-
rean War. The North Atlantic Treaty had been as much theirs in
concept as America's, and it was thus that they consented in 1950
to place their troops, in peace, under the command of an alien
American general. Within this frame they burdened their budget
with new arms and moved their best forces onto the Continent
until, by 1953, they had more armored strength in Central Europe
than anyone else except the Russians and substantially more than
the Americans.

But no sooner had the British made this effort to guarantee their
physical security than they realized that in so doing they had ex-
posed themselves to the cycle of trade and imperiled their eco-
nomic survival. By 1951 Britain was in the strangling clutch of
another of her biennial trade crises. The post-Korean boom in raw
materials, the dizzy acceleration and consumption of American
industry suddenly rocketed the price of everything Britain had to
purchase in the world to impossible heights. Again her financial
reserves went into that familiar, sickening downward spiral which
is always arrested just this side of disaster by stricter controls,
greater deprivations, Spartan throttling of imports from overseas.

FIRK IN THE ASHES 248

By the time the economic crises of 1951 had been mastered by
the new Tory government, two new refinements had been added
to British thinking.

The first was economic and is shared by Tory* and Labour lead-
ers alike. It is the conviction that economic partnership with
America under present terms is impossibly difficult, for both in
boom (as in 1951) and in slump (as in 1949) American industry
squeezes the juice out of British economic life. This conviction
rests on the thesis that the source of British troubles is the perma-
nent scarcities in a world of growing demand. Britain's effort
must, therefore, be focused on the expansion of basic resources.
This means, at home, an effort to dig more coal and to raise more
grain and meat on her moorlands and highlands. But more impor-
tantly, it means that abroad Britain's efforts must be devoted to
expanding and developing the resources of the Commonwealth.
Only the globe-girdling belt of British colonies and communities
with their 600,000,000 people and measureless undeveloped raw
materials can offer Britain that base for future independence and
greatness which she instinctively seeks.

The second refinement of policy rising from the crisis of 1951
was the practical conclusion that, under American leadership, the
Atlantic Alliance might become an inflexible suffocating burden.
It took no more than four months of power for the new Tory
government to inform the Atlantic Council gathered at Lisbon in
February of 1952 that, henceforth, Britain would do less rather
than more than she had committed in the panic year of 1950. Bal-
ancing, as they always have, their problem of security against their
problem of survival, the British are now convinced that the first is
closer to solution than the second. For the British the tidal panic
of 1950 had run out by the summer of 1952; it has been their influ-
ence in the Atlantic Community and in Europe that has chiefly
prepared the way for the relaxation of 1953.

The French like the British reacted to the panic of 1950 with a
galvanic military effort which, in the next three years, more than
doubled their effective force of arms and nearly destroyed their
economy in so doing.

But the French, unlike the British, were faced not only with a
trading crisis as the boom brought by Korea swept over the world;

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 249

they were faced with two other complications even graver and
more portentous.

The first of these was Indo-China. Until the end of 1949 the
French had fought a relatively casual action in Indo-China, bloody
and expensive, yet considered more as a colonial police sweep
than as a major war in which the prestige of France was at stake.
But the same Communist triumph in China that made Korea a
bloody trap for Americans made Indo-China, in 1950, a bloody
trap for the French. In the fall of 1950 the Annamite revolution-
aries of Indo-China, now supplied by freshly-victorious commu-
nism in China, succeeded in wiping out the entire border chain
of fortresses and frontier defenses that the French had erected to
keep the Chinese and the native rebels apart. In a stroke the guer-
rilla forces of rebellion were transformed into a frontal army
which has grown year by year in size and skill, drawing each year
more and more strength in men and money from the French home-
land. Thus, each year as the Atlantic Allies have needled France
to do more on the Central European front of communism, France's
strength and capacity have been drained inexorably out to Asia
until now the French know they must either resign from their
effort in Europe or resign from their effort in Asia, because they
cannot maintain both.

The second complication was Germany. In the French impulse
to European Union before the Korean War, the Schuman Plan
had been an act of forgiveness to their old enemy. The French
saw European Union as a community growing under their leader-
ship by slow and gentle progress toward a goal decades away. The
Korean War did two things. It flushed the German Renaissance
along at a pace of such vigor and power that it became obvious,
as men negotiated European Union, that Germany, not France,
would swing the greater weight in this Union. The Korean War
also thrust European Union forward at a faster pace than the
French ever intended. Since rearmament was necessary and since
German soldiers were necessary, the French found themselves, at
the end of 1950, the reluctant sponsors of a European Union
which required both Germans and Frenchmen to serve under the
same command, same flag, in the same uniform.

It was all very well to launch European Union with the Schu-
man Plan, to pool the iron and coal resources of the Continent.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 5

This could be explained to French voters as generosity coupled
with shrewdness, for by the Schuman Plan they would gain as
much as they yielded. But generosity has its limits. Frenchmen
could not forget that Germany had paid back in reparations to all
the Western Powers for all the damage done by German armies
only some $500,000,000 or less than one per cent of the ruins they
had caused, and the Germans had received four billion dollars of
Western aid over the same period. The Germans had killed in cold
blood tens of thousands of Frenchmen, yet less than 300 Germans
had been executed by the West as war criminals and less than 800
were still imprisoned for all the crimes of Hiderism. The Germans
had stripped 80,000 machine tools from French factories during
the war, and had restored less than 8,000.

Each month that negotiations over Union dragged out, French
enthusiasm cooled. German strength and power were rising. But
if Indo-China were constantly to drain the best French officers
and the best French noncoms to Asia, and if the British were to
withdraw (as they were doing) from all participation in new or-
gans of European control, then inevitably the Germans would be
the dominant power, both staff and line, in the new European
Army. The European Army, indeed, seemed something which a
French phrasemaker would entitle "Alone in Europe with the
Germans." And at this point, by 1953, the French have stalled in
a complex of contrary indecisions.

For the Germans alone, the Korean War brought quick, com-
plete and unconditional profit. Within three months of its out-
break, the most onerous restriction on German industryits steel
limits-had been swept away, to be followed by the annulling of
practically every other. The post-Korea boom drew German in-
dustry back into the world markets at such prices that it was able
to re-equip huge sectors of its run-down plant. Most of all, it re-
stored to Germany her bargaining power. From the moment in
December of 1950 when the Western Allies decided they needed
German soldiers, the Bonn government was effectively free to
pursue a true foreign policy the insistence on a quid for every
quo, an insistence on satisfaction of its essential needs in return for
German troops.

The first impulse of the Germans in this bargaining was to seek

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 251

the formal ending of the Occupation. The negotiation of the for-
mulas necessary to end the Occupation (called "contractual rela-
tions," not "peace treaties") was completed by May of 1952.
These, though not yet ratified and still without the force of bind-
ing agreement, have already in substance returned German gov-
ernment completely to German hands.

The second German impulse for the reunification of their
landgave the West relatively little trouble all through the period
from 1950 to 1953. This was due to neither German indiiference
nor Allied shrewdness, but chiefly to the intransigence of Russian
diplomacy. The Western Allies had only to say as they did over
and over again that they favored the reunification of Germany,
provided free elections were held in both East and West Germany
as a precondition, to provoke the Russian refusal that was certain.
There is no doubt that any free election in East Germany would
repudiate communism; the Russians know this too. Therefore, up
to now, the Russians have consistently refused such elections, pre-
ferring to hold on to their conquests in East Germany and let
Western statesmen make what they will of West Germany.

The foreign policy of Western Germany has been shaped by
this Russian attitude.

Until the summer of 1953, the best way out of their dilemma
has appeared, to most West Germans, the way which Atlantic
diplomacy offered them. If truncated West Germany were to
speak with the force that could persuade the Russians to yield
back Eastern Germany, she needed a new and greater base of
power and the only base offered was the Union of Europe asso-
ciated with the Atlantic Community.

The summer of 1953 has, however, changed this West German
attitude, for the Russians, since the death of Stalin, have displayed
an indecision of purpose in Germany so great and so apparent as
to tantalize even the most devout German supporters of Western
diplomacy. Shifting their proconsular staff in East Germany three
times since the death of Stalin, alternately savaging the Communist
economy of East Germany with Stygian demands and then relent-
ing with completely unprecedented softness of manner, the Rus-
sians have provoked not only the startling uprising of Berlin and
East German workers, but also the vastest confusion and antici-
pation in Bonn leadership.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 252

Until the spring of 1953, the diplomacy of Konrad Adenauer
had the solid backing of the majority of West German citizens,
and upon this diplomacy rested all Allied planning. No shrewder
record of statesmanship has been written in Europe than the pol-
icy pursued by the aging Chancellor of Germany, emerging at
the age of sixty-nine from years of disgrace under Hitler, with
no more imposing previous experience than that of Burgomeister
of Cologne. Adenauer has acted with such dignity that none of
Germany's bitterest enemies can accuse him of duplicity. Yet, at
the same time, he has prepared a platform from which any, even
the most disturbingly dangerous, German ambition can, in the
future, be pursued with ease.

The diplomacy of Adenauer and the West has appealed, essen-
tially, to two strains of Germans who together, up to now, have
made a majority. These two strains can be roughly summarized
as the Germans who saw European Union as a means and the
Germans who saw it as both a means and an end. Neither Adenauer
nor his majority have ever regarded Eastern Germany as lost; they
accepted only the fact that Germany was powerless to free her
eastern marches without enormously powerful allies in the West.
But one large school of Adenauer supporters saw the policy of
European Union only as a device to gain those allies who might
be useful in reconquering the East and defending what was already
free. The other saw his policy not only as a means of amplifying
German strength but also as an end in itself a new community
which might mollify the ugly harshness of German history in a
larger social, cultural and religious union with gentler and more
humane standards.

Whether the policies of Konrad Adenauer can carry Germany
forward through the elections of 1953 on to the consummation
of the European state depends, more than anything else, on the
reading the Russians finally make of the German problem. Up to
now Adenauer has been flanked by enemies from the Socialist Left
to the Nationalist Right who have held that he underestimates
German strength. Where Adenauer has insisted that Germany is
not strong enough to go forward alone, they have held that Ger-
many is. Adenauer's enemies have insisted that only by bargaining
on her own can Germany swing her weight back and forth be-
tween East and West, and peel the Russians back from the eastern

THROUGH THREE LOOKING GLASSES 253

provinces of the nation. To which Adenauer has always been able
to reply that there was not the slightest trace of Russian willing-
ness to bargain, or even to consider the acid test of free elections
throughout Germany. This answer has always been sufficient to
hold Germany in place in the Western scheme of things because
the Russians have been up to now so adamant. Should the Russians
suddenly decide it serves their purpose to soften on German Unity,
to trade back Eastern Germany in return for a guaranteed neutral,
but whole, Germany, they may be able to split the Adenauer
majority in two and reduce him and his wretched coalition to a
minority.

It is impossible to believe that the Russians with their network
of agents and Communist party zealots have been, or are, unaware
of all these contrary impulses playing back and forth within the
Western world. Yet, by the time Joseph Stalin died, it must have
been obvious that despite these contrary impulses, something was
happening to force them together in two great associations of
hostile power the organs of European Union and the organs of
the Atlantic Community. It must have been equally obvious that
Russian intransigence and the stubbornness of the supreme dicta-
tor had provided the glue and the force to make such new group-
ings stick. For six years, the Western world had been permitted
to move forward, uninterrupted, organizing that complex of power
and politics which brought the Russian advance in Europe to a
halt. No conversations with Moscow, no serious negotiations had
impeded the work; indeed, each new clash of arms or words had
speeded it.

Nineteen fifty-three is thus a cut-off year. Now, at last, fresher
intelligence in Moscow, shrewder minds, since they are uncom-
mitted by past blunders, are permitted to re-examine the Euro-
pean scene. There they find, as before, the old contrary impulses,
the old diversities and the old hatreds. Yet they find them capped,
or almost so, by new institutions which, if they become perma-
nent, may forever deny Russia the opportunity she so casually let
slip six years ago. To disrupt them Russia must act fast and with
new tactics. Let us look at these institutions and see how much
vitality they have, within and without, to face whatever the
Russians may do next.

PART

XII

the of Europe

The dream of Europe is so old that no one knows who first
dreamed it.

The dream begins somewhere in the days of the Romans. For
the Romans, when they disappeared from history, left not only
those gaunt and sun-bleached ruins which stretch like giant skele-
tons casting shadows over little mortals from Scotland to Timgad,
but also an afterthought of unity which glowed all through the
centuries of darkness that followed their passing.

This memory of Europe-as-one has haunted Europeans ever
since. From Charlemagne through Napoleon to Hitler, soldiers
and madmen have tried to hammer Europe together, in Caesar's
image, slave to their single will. Scholars and statesmen, men of
good will, wild idealists and scheming intriguers alike have found
their thoughts shaped by this memory. Philosophers and financiers,
poets and wanderers have been unable to rid themselves of it.

But Rome left more than a memory. It bequeathed to Europe
the same sounds for the same meanings, the same tincture of law,
the same code of honor and respublica. This common culture and
thought persisted all through the dark ages in an interchange of art
and learning across all national boundaries down almost to our
own days. For centuries, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Flemings, Ger-
mans, Italians, Spaniards found it natural to pay their dues and
give obeisance to a distant church in Rome whose Pope might be
an Englishman, Frenchman, German, Spaniard or Italian. Until
yesterday few Europeans thought it strange that Leonardo da
Vinci, born in Italy, should come to die as a retainer of the French
king and be buried by the banks of the Loire. Nor did anyone
find it strange that Handel, born in Lower Saxony, should come to
live in England and refashion the island's music. Not until this dec-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

ade, looking back, has anyone marveled that during the wars of
Napoleon and England, 'the greatest scientist of England, Sir
Humphry Davy, should be invited by the French to Paris, be
given his passport by the English government, and cross the chan-
nel to lecture on his scientific findings in an enemy country, and
then return home, no less honored and respected than before.
The dream and the common culture have always been there. But
never until our time has the compulsion to union been great
enough to force action. Until our time, the nations of Europe rose
so powerfully above the barbarian lands that neighbored them or
lay across the oceans that neither prosperity nor security required
Europeans to bow to common laws and leadership. In our time,
in a world of rival, emergent giants none of the little states of
Europe (except possibly England) can hope to win a livelihood
out of the world by itself, and not even England can guarantee
alone the safety of its citizens. This simple thought, occurring to
thousands of Europeans at the same time, has brought Europe for
the first time to sober consideration of Union. The dream is not
n ew only the effort to achieve it is new.

The Union of Europe, as an active force in the power politics of
today, was begun with two distinct projects launched in the
pivotal year of 1950-. (A third was to be added later, but that was
not until 1953.) The first project was born out of hope, before the
Korean War, the hope that Europe might be united economically
for the welfare of its citizens; it was called the Schuman Plan. The
second was born out of fear, after the Korean War; its purpose
was to unite Europe in a community of defense, with its own
European Army, to guarantee the safety of its citizens from Rus-
sian attack. These two separate projects have interlocked ever
since and in their interlocking they have now strengthened, now
weakened one another. But they were as distinct in origin as hope
and fear, and they have separate histories.

Long before 1950, to be sure, the scenery of Europe had been
crowded with schemes, organs, councils, committees and treaties
which, all of them, paid lip service to the ideal of United Europe.
Professors in universities lectured to their students; students
burned their passports at frontier boundaries; thyroidal women
lobbied their legislators; people of every class and faith demanded

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 259

their governments hasten to make European Union. In 1949 twelve
European governments set up a nonsensical body called the Coun-
cil of Europe in the town of Strasbourg in France. But the Council
of Europe was an advisory gathering that could talk, yet do
nothing; it was the sounding board of men without jobs, political
figures outcast in their own countries who could recapture the
Illusion of their own importance by making bold statements to
other distinguished out-of-office statesmen in a foreign forum. It
was a boneyard of great names -out-of-office Spaak of Belgium,
out-of-office Churchill of, England, out-of-office Reynaud of
France. Each charmed the others with his wisdom, but they bore
no responsibility. The Council of Europe had the same relation to
the real mechanics of European politics as the Good Government
League used to have to the politics of Boston, Massachusetts.

The men who did hold office and who bore responsibility
moved very much more carefully when European cooperation
was urged on them. In 1948 they signed the Brussels Pact, the little
defense coalition that preceded NATO, but the Brussels Pact in-
vited little more than old-fashioned staff conversations between
generals. In 1948, similarly, they had been forced by American
pressure to gather together in the Organization for European
Economic Cooperation in Paris, where they had to divide the bil-
lions of Marshall Plan aid.

But when the governments tried to go beyond such limited
organs, when they tried to satisfy American insistence that Euro-
pean Union was essential for regeneration, they ran into trouble.
Strange and wonderful names and projects stuttered from the pens
of bureaucrats turned dreamers. The most illuminating of all these
was something called Fritalux. Fritalux was to be a great economic
union of France, Italy and the Benelux countries. Someone sug-
gested that the name Fritalux sounded like a Mexican potato chip
so the name was changed to Finebel, to cover the same country ini-
tials. But whether as Fritalux or Finebel, the scheme would not
work. It would not work because the economic life of the partici-
pating countries was wedged about Germany as a centerpiece and
without Germany the fragments fell apart. Germany dwelt, still,
in the outer purdah of rejection and the old enemies could not yet
bring themselves to forgiveness or reconciliation. Thus, in the
winter of 1949-1950, without any announcement, at a quiet dinner

FIRE IN THE ASHES

260

at the French Foreign Office at the Qual d'Orsay the foreign min-
isters decided to let Finebel die.

"Europe," as a concept like "peace," had thus been heavy on
Europe's mind for a long time before the moment of the decisive
act. The moment, to be precise, was the last week end of April in
the year 1950. The place was a thatched-roof cottage in the village
of Houjarray, twenty-seven miles outside of Paris. The man was a
short, dumpy individual whose balding head, solid face and sharp
nose expressed untold generations of French peasant descent. His
name was Jean Monnct, and that Sunday afternoon he had invited
four young aides to come to his cottage to talk about an idea he
had been quietly nursing for some time. This idea, which was to
be known in a few days as the Schuman Plan, had several striking
novelties: first, that European Union could be achieved only by
creating a supersovereign Authority to which its member states
would yield totally federal powers of action in whatever matters
required common action; secondly, that this European Union must
include Germany, and that France, as Germany's most ancient
enemy, should make the first gestures of reconciliation; thirdly,
that the Union should begin by striking at the roots of the suspi-
cion where they dug deepest into Franco-German hatred in the
Ruhr. The Plan would lift Germany's Ruhr and France's rival
Lorraine out of the supervision of national governments to be
subordinate to a new supranational High Authority which should
have the power to govern, tax, order, condemn or create all enter-
prises of coal, iron and steel in France, in Germany and in any
other European country that cared to join the new pool. Monnet's
young men thought it was a fine idea.

If a United Europe is created in our time, then Jean Monnet
will probably be revered centuries hence as its patron saint. This
majestic little man, tart of tongue, brusque of manner, never
elected by any vote to any public office, has remained the most
mysterious major public figure of modern times because of the
peculiar nature of his art. His art is the brokerage of ideas, in
which he is certainly Europe's, and quite possibly the world's,
greatest dealer. This art is far more difficult than that of the intel-
lectual who spins the ideas. Monnet's skill lies in recognizing a
valid idea, knowing the men to whom it can be sold, sensing the
time when they need it, and then locating the technicians to make

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 262

the ideas work. Monnet has been practicing this craft for some
forty years; he has sold ideas in turn to Clemenceau and Lloyd
George, Chiang Kai-shek and T. V. Soong, Churchill, Roosevelt
and de Gaulle. In his time he had been, by turn, one of the shrewd-
est cognac salesmen of the world, the boy-wonder of France's
World War I war effort, a powerful international civil servant, a
banking wizard, a brilliant World War II industrial mobilizer and
a great patriot before he settled into peaceful eminence as chief of
France's postwar national plan, which bears his name.

It was Monnet's position as the Chief National Planner of
France that gave him the base from which he could insert his new
idea into European politics. Housed in a gray four-story building
on the Left Bank of Paris, divorced from the turbulence and
shrieks of everyday French politics, Monnet with a devoted staff
of thirty brain trusters sat in constant, thoughtful analysis of infla-
tion, taxation, defense, foreign policy and the future. Governments
came and went in France. But Monnet remained at the Rue Mar-
tignac permanently, explaining to each new set of ministers exactly
what had to be done, as a schoolmaster instructs each new set of
bright and aspiring students. His prestige and influence on the
Cabinets of France rested on his personality, his mind and the
knowledge that he alone, divorced from partisan politics, was
thinking about France as France.

Europe might have been created anyway, for too many minds
and too many forces were all pushing Europeans in the same direc-
tion. The accident of French politics, however, made it happen
that Monnet's idea should germinate at just that moment when it
should find the most support in the crew of perplexed men who
made France's Cabinet. At that moment the Foreign Minister of
France was Robert Schuman, its Premier, Georges Bidault, its De-
fense Minister, Rene Pleven. Each of these three key men had a
peculiar vested interest either in Franco-German friendship, in
European Union or in Jean Monnet.

Robert Schuman, the Foreign Minister, was the most important.
This benign and grandfatherly old man is as curious a political
specimen as the history of Europe can throw up. A bachelor, with
an oval, gnomelike face, he is devoutly Catholic, the most religious
man in all his religious party, the MRP. Moreover, he was born
in the border country of French Lorraine, in the days when French

FIRE IN THE ASHES

262

Lorraine was German territory under the Kaiser's flag. He was
brought up to speak German, had studied in German universities
and did not become French until the Treaty of Versailles restored
the tricolor to Lorraine. Then, as a local Lorraine politician, he
was elected to the French National Assembly and served through
the intenvar years as one of its most inconspicuous members. The
surge of Catholic revival in postwar France made the party that
Schuman joined in 1945 the MRP the only permanent partici-
pant in all postwar French governments and elevated Schuman
successively to Finance Minister, Premier and Foreign Minister,
a post he held from 1948 to the end of 1952. As Foreign Minister,
Schuman had one passionate dream: to end the timeless feud of
France and Germany, to blend the two cultures and societies in
which he had been nursed in Lorraine.

When, therefore, on Monday, May the first, after driving into
town from his Sunday discussion at Houjarray, Jean Monnet
visited the Foreign Minister to explain his scheme for a. Franco-
German coal-steel pool, he found Schuman an attentive listener.
Schuman had just returned from a visit to Bonn, the capital of the
new German Republic, where, as the representative of punitive
France, he had met a frigid reception. A sensitive man, Schuman
was seeking some token to offer Germany as an earnest of his
good will Schuman liked Monnet's project, accepted it, offered to
give it his name and bring it before the Cabinet. Thus was chris-
tened the Schuman Plan.

The Premier of France at that moment was Georges Bidault.
Bidaolt, a dapper, brilliant, witty little man who had been a his-
tory professor before the war had done more to shape the doc-
trines of liberal Catholicism that generated the MRP than any
other thinker. Of these doctrines none is more important than
European Union. But Bidault had served during the German Oc-
cupation with exquisite daring and utterly reckless courage as
chief of the underground Council of National Resistance and he
had emerged from the war with two emotional residues. The first
was the memory he bore of comrades tortured and killed by the
Germans during the Occupation. "Many things change with time-
Germany is something that never changes," Bidault had publicly
observed in 1946 when he was Foreign Minister. The second
residue was his religious conviction, shared by his whole party,

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 265

that Europe must be reunited under the high arch of Christendom.
Bidault's bitterness against the Germans had faded somewhat with
the years; his belief in European Union had grown. When Schu-
man brought Monnet's proposal to the Premier, the Premier was
ready to accept it and let it become France's official policy.

There was only one other hurdle in the Cabinet to be cleared
the Army and the Defense Ministry, bearers of a tradition of battle
with Germany that went back three hundred years. But the De-
fense Ministry at that moment was headed by Rene Pleven, a
burly, practical businessman from Brittany whose personal devo-
tion to Jean Monnet was complete. Pleven, in his youth, had once
held a job in one of Monnef s business enterprises. Now, in his
maturity, he still remembered Jean Monnet as the master. When-
ever Pleven, in the various reshuffles of French politics, fell from
the Cabinet, Monnet cleared office and desk space in the National
Plan Building to house the displaced Minister. If Monnet thought
the coal-steel pool was a good idea, then Pleven did too, and the
Defense Ministry would go along.

Thus, eight days later, on May 9, 1950, Foreign Minister Schu-
man summoned the press of the world to the gilt and cream Salon
de 1'Horloge in the Foreign Office to hear his announcement that
France would launch Europe now. France invited Germany and
all European states to join in freely electing men to a supranational
High Authority which would have sovereign power over their
most basic industries.

One must see European business life as it is to understand how
revolutionary the Schuman Plan sounded in May of 1950.

All of Western Europe can fit into less than a quarter of the
United States, snuggling comfortably, with room to spare, in the
states bounded on the south by the Ohio River and on the west by
the Mississippi. But this quarter-size continent has been cut up
by so many artificial national barriers of tariffs, quotas, licenses
and currencies that normal commercial and industrial exchange
has been an obstacle race. For a century each nation has tricked
its freight rates to cheat the traffic of its neighbors; for a genera-
tion national regulations and discrimination have throttled enter-
prising producers and deprived them of the continental markets
and competition that might have made them efficient. Behind these

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2-64

national barriers have grown up the feudal autonomies of cartels
and trusts, sharing among each other a fixed portion of this na-
tional market, their production only remotely urged to competi-
tive efficiency, their customers forced to accept dictatorial prices
and terms.

The Schuman Plan proposed to drive a breach through these
walls. Of all the offending industries textiles, automobiles, food,
industrial equipment, machinery none was more offensive to
common sense than the coal and steel industry, and it was the
coal and steel industry the Schuman Plan proposed to tackle. Coal
and steel in Europe mock by their very distribution the artificial
barriers of nation and flag. The largest iron ore reserves of Europe
lie in French Lorraine. Only one hundred and fifty miles north
lie the finest beds of coking coal in Europe in Germany's Ruhr.
Industrially, they fit together like nut and bolt, like the coal of
Pennsylvania and the iron ore of the Upper Mesabi. But the bitter
hatred of Frenchmen and Germans had divided them by invisible
walls: by cartel rules, by customs, by double pricing so that one
price was charged within the possessing country and a penalty
price was charged outside, by quota allocations, and by pure
national jealousy and omeriness. ' - " ""

The Schuman Plan now declared that in the jungle of European
commercial life it would clear channels for iron and coal to flow
free of all customs, free of all discrimination, simply as efficiency
required and supply and demand dictated. Within the Plan, to be
sure, were buried the elements of a cold-blooded bargain. French
heavy industry has always, historically, been starved for coking
coal, and Hitler, in the days of his hegemony, turned France's
supply of German coking coal on and off like a faucet, starving
or feeding French Lorraine as he chose. Since the war, as a victor,
France had wrung coking coal out of Germany by main force
and had joined with the other victors in shackling Germany's steel
production at a limit of 11,100,000 tons a year. The businessman's
bargain in the Schuman Plan was simple: Germany would make
her coal available to all Europeans, including Frenchmen, on terms
of commercial equality. France, in turn, in an act of unprecedented
generosity, would intercede with the Allies to lift all controls from
German steel and heavy industry so that she would be free to
compete once more as a free nation.

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 265

But the structure built to seal this simple bargain was much
more elaborate than required for the mechanics of iron and steel
alone. The Schuman Plan, as it unfolded in negotiation, envisioned
the creation of a new, germinal community that would grow to
shelter much more than coal and steel. Sovereignty, the funda-
mental power of regulation and control over heavy industry,
would be removed forever from each national parliament or gov-
ernment. It would be transferred to a High Authority of nine
men nominated by their governments, but, once nominated by
their governments, these nine men would be responsible to an
Assembly chosen by all the contracting powers jointly. Together,
the Authority and Assembly would be suprasovereign. It would
hold true power over men wherever they dug coal out of mines,
wherever they tapped the furnace to channel hot iron gushing
from the tap, wherever they spun the rollers and squeezed the
steel, white-hot and glimmering, into given shapes. It would be
able to tax these activities, wipe away any national tariff or quota
on their product, police their prices and rates, require govern-
ments to eliminate any freight rate it thought discriminatory. It
could underwrite investment, build housing for the workers, be
able to open the books of any businessman dealing in steel and
coal, prevent, with powers modeled on those of the American anti-
trust laws, any combination of producers or merchants persisting
in their ancient restraint of trade.

Moreover, whenever it acted in any of these functions, no
national government could interfere with it. In itself, the High
Authority of the Plan was sovereign above the powers of the
states, as the American government is sovereign in its constitu-
tional limits above the individual American states. In the minds
of Monnet and Schuman, as in the minds of the Belgians, Dutch-
men, Italians, Luxenibourgers and Germans who worked out the
details of the compact, this High Authority was only the begin-
ning. Coal and steel were only the first step. The perspective
drawn then, and the perspective that remains today, is for an
Authority which constantly widens its powers until all economic
life in Europe is regulated, not by individual states, but by the
supranational Authority. Only then will Europeans have the
opportunity to think in the giant, expanding terms of modern
technology which is the base of human welfare and comfort.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

266

Today in Europe the High Authority of the Community of Coal
and Steel is already a reality.

Much nonsense has been written about the making of the com-
mon market in Europe, as if it alone were the guarantee of human
welfare. At Luxembourg today, where the Schuman Plan is di-
rected, its leaders insist on underlining that it is not a guarantee.
It is the opportunity; it is up to Europeans to seize and make the
most of it.

The second shove to European Union was given six months
later in October of 1950, when France proposed to the world that
Europe pool not only its coal and iron but its flesh and blood in
an enterprise called 'the Community of Defense which should
have an army of its own, a European Army.

The European Defense Community, or EDC, began with
Korea. In the military panic that followed the outbreak of war, the
State Department of the United States became convinced of the
soundness of a view which the generals of the Pentagon had long
argued without success. It was that if the Russians were to be
fought in Europe, the most useful people to organize in arms
were the Germans who had once almost destroyed the Russians
singlehanded. By late summer of 1950 both French and British
statesmen learned, to their consternation, that the United States
government proposed to arm the Germans at once in order to
bolster the handful of Western troops in Central Germany. The
British wavered on the proposition, now against, now for. But
when Robert Schuman arrived in New York in September of
1950, he found that after some indecision Ernest Bevin, the For-
eign Minister of Britain, had finally decided that the Americans,
in the cold calculation of military arithmetic, were right. Faced
with a solid Anglo-American determination to arm the Germans
once more, the Foreign Minister of France was in quandary.
Under pressure, he agreed at once to strike the limits off Ger-
many's steel production and let her produce all the furnaces could
pour, provided it went to Western defense. But to agree to the
arming of a nation which had thrice ravaged France in the mem-
ory of living men, was something else again. Schuman, with his
great compassion for the Germans, had led the French to the
unprecedented generosity of the Schuman Plan, an offer which

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 267

had struck the manacles from German muscles and implicitly for-
sworn the reparations which were France's due for the destruc-
tion Germany had done to her. The Schuman Plan could be
explained to Frenchmen as an act of common sense, for one could
bring the delinquent back to decency only by giving him a decent
opportunity to earn a decent living. But it was something else to
give a delinquent Germany arms again so swiftly after she had so
shockingly abused them. Schuman insisted that the proposal for
arming Germany had to be brought back for consideration by the
French Cabinet and the whole French Parliament.

The dilemma that faced both Americans and Frenchmen in the
next six weeks was one of those poignant and terrible problems
in which right and logic are so evenly divided that protagonists
starting from sound but differing premises can reach equally sound
but contradictory conclusions.

The American case was simply that the French had appealed
over and over for American troops to come and fight in defense
of Western Europe. Congress had just promised to send four more
American divisions to help those defenses. But our generals, the
men responsible for the lives of our troops, insisted that these
alone were not enough to resist the Russians or protect their own
lives. In those days it was impossible to foresee the Russian re-
sponse in Germany, or to envisage the elaborate machinery which
SHAPE and NATO would build up to give us armed superiority
in Central Europe, without the Germans. If the generals' gift of
foresight was weak, their logic was implacable. If the French
would not put up another twelve divisions of troops to brace the
line against the Russians which physically they could not do-
how could they deny the Americans the right to recruit from
Germany the necessary dozen divisions to brace that line?

The French answer, swelling out of honest emotion, clothed
itself in sound logic. No French minister raised the memory of
evil that Germans had done in the past, nor did the new French
Minister of National Defense, Jules Moch, cite the memory of his
son who had been captured and murdered as an underground
resistant during the German Occupation. They were perfectly
willing, said the French, to have Germans fight Russians and die
in defense of France after all, Germans had always made the best
mercenaries in the Foreign Legion. But what the Americans pro-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

268

posed was something else again, something unheard of in history
a one-way army, a German legion built to march only East, never
West. Given Germany's history, it was unlikely that any new
German Army would be a docile tool of Western policy. From
Bismarck through Rapallo to the Pact of 1939, Germany had
grown powerful by swinging its weight back and forth between
Russia and Western Europe. Who could guarantee that in five
years Germany would not stand as arbiter, the balance wheel be-
tween two world blocs, playing one against the other for its own
advantage? Who could guarantee that even if Germany remained
loyal to the West, she would not send her National Army plung-
ing across the dividing line between West and East Germany to
recover her lost territories, thus dragging all the rest of the At-
lantic Alliance with her in that war against Russia the West was
trying so desperately to avoid?

The French could not say "No" and could not say "Yes."
Therefore they said "Europe."

Rising to the rostrum of the crowded National Assembly in
the late afternoon of October 24, 1950, speaking in his usual high-
pitched, strong but melancholy voice, Rene Pleven by now
Premier of France presented the Pleven Plan. By the Pleven
Plan, Germans would be brought to arms again, but there would
be no German Army, German General Staff, German divisions;
neither would there be French^ Belgian, Italian or any other kind
of divisions and armies in Europe. Instead there would be a great
new European Army in which all the troops of all the European
powers would be scrambled, this army subordinate to one supra-
national Authority, controlled by one great European parlia-
ment, chosen as the Assembly of the Schuman Plan was, by all
the states of Europe. Where the Schuman Plan had proposed to
submit only coal, iron and steel to an international sovereign, the
Pleven Plan proposed to submit every man in Western Europe
to a new international loyalty. The new sovereign would write
the defense budget of every country in Europe, train youths in
international schools as brother officers, organize them In the
"smallest possible unit of command" so as to get the widest mixing
of tongues and nations, and when necessary, summon them to
die in defense of their common brotherhood. It was the first time
in history that any nation had offered to give up control of its own

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 269

army, its own lives, its essential power to act and tax, its flag and
its glories to a new master, as yet unborn.

When Rene Pleven stepped down from the rostrum to the
mixed reception of his thunderstruck fellow colleagues, he had
changed the politics of Europe. He had scrambled all its elements
together in a tangle which has ensnared the intercourse of nations
ever since. He had scrambled the strategy and logistics of the
generals with the idealism and dreams of its visionaries; he had
altered Germany's position in the world, wrenching her not only
out of the frame of East-West negotiation but also out of every
context in which the Western Allies had discussed Germany
among themselves. Most of all, he had taken two crystalline and
separate problems one military, the other politicaland fused
them together.

It was eight months before the final fusion or confusion, as
some would have it took the form in which it has ever since pre-
sented itself.

A month after the Pleven proposal, the United States, unsure
whether it wanted European Union or German troops most, con-
sented at the Brussels meeting of the NATO powers to an ex-
ploration of the Pleven proposal. But at the same time, through
NATO, it insisted that Konrad Adenauer be invited to explore
with Allied generals how to raise German troops at once in Ger-
many. These explorations began simultaneously in two parallel
sets of discussions, one in Paris, one at the Petersburger Hof in
Germany. From January to July of the next year, these discus-
sions went their separate ways, Kke a two-ring circus, with spec-
tators bobbing their heads back and forth to find out what was
going on.

The discussions in Paris pleased the French, for these were
framed by the political principles of the Pleven Plan. A delegation
of nondescript Germans arrived in Paris early in February, 1951,
to be installed in a shabby four-room suite at the Hotel d'Orsay,
where entrance to their offices were made through a toilet. The
delegation, headed by a tired old sexagenarian named Dr. Roedig-
ger, was faced with a French delegation captained by such a man
of skill as Herve Alphand, the Foreign Office's slickest negotiator.
The French dominated the Paris discussions. They outlined their
image of the European Army German regimental units of 3,000

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 7

or 4,000 men each would be recruited under international officers
and trained under an international flag. As these Germans became
combat-worthy, the French and other European powers would
convert regiments and divisions into international units too. Final-
ly, when the Germans filled their quota, all the French Army in
Europe would enter the European Army too. Then the new flag
would be raised, and the new army would be entirely subordinate
to the sovereign international defense community.

The Germans would hear nothing of such a proposal. They
felt that regimental combat units were only bits and pieces of
strength, in no sense an army. As a proud and resurgent people,
asked to bear arms, conscious of their bargaining power, they de-
clared it monstrous that Germans should be recruited as Foreign
Legionnakes, internationally commanded from the word go, while
the French clung to their army until the day when it should be
incorporated as a compact mass to become the crowning striking
force of a European Army already dominated by a French staff.

The Germans preferred the proposals of the Petersburger Hof
conferences, which focused on the military nature of Germany's
contribution. These discussions pleased the United States Army
too. The United States Army wanted German troops, flesh and
blood soldiers, quickly, not a long philosophical discussion about
the creation of a new superstate. Philosophers might talk at Paris,
but soldiers talked at the Petersburger Hof. From the dustbin of
history, Konrad Adenauer retrieved two Wehrmacht generals,
Speidel and Heusinger, to speak for him. These generals-in-mufti
arrived promptly on the morning of January 9 at the Peters-
burger Hof with their scheme of Western defense and Germany's
contribution to it. After four months of talking at the Petersburger
Hof, it turned out that what Germany wanted was some 250,000
troops as a starter, to be recruited over four years, complete with
a German General Staff and a German war industry, responsible
to a German War Minister who would associate them with other
European troops in a coalition whose type was familiar from wars
gone by. The force the Germans envisioned was twelve heavily
armored divisions, the equipment to be contributed and paid for
by the United States, of course, until the Ruhr could once more
resume the manufacture of arms,

By early summer of 1951 the scenery of Europe was so tangled

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 271

with contradictions that no man could describe precisely what
was happening. The talks at the Petersburger Hof offered a neatly
packaged symbol of the confusion. The French delegate to the
military discussions was General Jean Ganneval, but General
Ganneval was also the senior French general on the Military Se-
curity Board set up some years before to make sure that Germany
did not rearm surreptitiously. Mornings, General Ganneval would
cross the Rhine and sweep up the mountaintop to the Petersburger
Hof to discuss with the Americans, the British and the Generals
Speidel and Heusinger how Germany should be rearmed. After-
noons, he would drive down to Coblenz to the Military Security
Board where he met with another set of generals to discuss with
them how Germany should be kept disarmed.

By mid-July of 1951, a full year after the American government
had decided that German rearmament was essential to American
defense, it surveyed a Europe in which tables were piled high with
documents and memoranda, estimates and constitutions, but in
which nothing remotely resembling a European Union or a Ger-
man Army seemed to be forming. It was at this point that a single
individual took a lone decision, and by this decision shaped all
American policy in Europe. He affirmed that European Union
and German rearmament were, as the French suggested, equally
and inseparably interwoven in the need of American security. He
was then the most eminent soldier in the United States Army and
his name was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The intervention of General Eisenhower in the making of
Europe was the climax of an American attitude which had been
slowly forming since the war.

Americans had, for many years, been loftily instructing Euro-
peans in the virtues of their own great Union of States, and
chiding Europe on the stupidities of its rivalries and separatisms.
During the war several American brain trasters had even toyed
with the idea that, come Liberation, it would be best to sweep
away all the currencies of the Liberation countries and replace
them with one new common European currency issued by the
United States Army. But these attitudes did not add up to policy,
and as kte as 1948 the enabling act of the Marshall Plan contained
not a single pre-echo of the demands for European Union which

FIRE IN THE ASHES 272

later were tacked on every proposal made in Washington for
export to Europe.

It was the Marshall Plan that hardened American conviction
that Europeans must unite. The Marshall Planners faced a prob-
lem. To deal with eighteen-odd European nations gathered in the
OEEC, each with its contradictory problems, was baffling, waste-
ful and inefficient. To deal with them individually was impossible.
Italy could not solve her unemployment problem unless other
European countries let her citizens migrate. Belgians complained
that their azalea and lace merchants were going bankrupt because
England forbade the import of azaleas and lace. Dutch artichoke
farmers wailed that German restrictions choked their traditional
market in the Ruhr. Everyone complained that French inflation
was infecting all European trade. The Marshall Planners had no
desire to arbitrate these petty and obscure European disputes.
They wanted to speak to a leadership to whom they might say,
"This is what America will do. Now, what will Europe do?"
Over and over, the Americans prodded the Europeans to give
the OEEC more power, more authority and a single, vigorous,
executive head. When visiting Congressmen asked the Marshall
Planners what they were trying to do, they would answer, "We're
trying to pull them together, we're trying to integrate them."
"Integration" was a convenient word and each successive delega-
tion asked sternly, "How far have you got with integration now?"
as if expecting the Marshall Plan to pull out of its desk drawer a
draft constitution for Europe and a design for a European flag.

By 1949, in the second appropriation of the Marshall Plan,
Congress, without debate, set the unification of Europe as one of
the major purposes of the Plan. The Schuman Plan, when an-
nounced in 1950, soon became the favorite foster child of Amer-
ican influence in Europe,

But the Korean War injected a second purpose into American
policy in Europe. This was the rearmament of the Germans. The
perilous military imbalance of forces in Central Europe made
German troops appear, momentarily, as the quickest and easiest
increment to Western strength. This correspondent has tried since
1950 to find out how, when and where the American government
decided to rearm the Germans. The decision is certainly one of
the most important in history; yet it has never been the subject

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 273

of public debate or analysis, although, like most American foreign
policy decisions, it will probably be a subject of long post-
mortems. By September of 1950, however, it was American policy
to arm the Germans, and by December of 1950 the Germans had
been officially invited to the muster.

The first half of 1951 thus found American purpose in Europe
utterly schizophrenic. It wanted European Union. And It wanted
German troops. There seemed to be much talk, little progress, and
Washington's patience frayed. Early In July of 1951, therefore,
Secretary of State Dean Acheson cabled the American legates in
Paris that, in effect, he had had it. He had been In consultation
with Mr. Jessup and the two suggested that, to please the French,
conversation about the constitutional structure of the European
Defense Community should continue uninterrupted. But that
while the talk went on, so should the recruiting of German troops,
which should be begun at once.

To American diplomats in Europe, zealously nursing the Schu-
man Plan through its weary round of ratifications, the suggestion
seemed most unfortunately timed. The Germans had already seen
the limits on their steel Industry struck away as soon as the
Korean War broke out. If now they were to be given In addi-
tion national armed force immediately, they might think twice
before ratifying the Schurnan Plan.

The proposal from Washington seemed to strike a blow at the
very heart of the theories of European Union that had developed
among Americans In Europe and particularly in the Paris em-
bassy. For, though European Union was explained to Congressmen
and others sometimes as a noble and altruistic venture, sometimes
as a practical economic solution to European business difficulties,
there was much harder-headed American thinking involved than
that. European Union was a way to control Germany. For Ger-
many had been even more dangerous to America than Russia has
been in this century and might become so again. European Union
was a diplomatic device to make use of the enormous energies
of the German people, yet so harness them politically that they
might not turn on us. The Germans understood this, but they
liked the Schuman Plan, for it had been presented to them as an
act of generosity (which it was), releasing them from the servile
state of vanquished enemy to honorable equality In democratic

FIRE IN THE ASHES 274

union. Now, if the Germans were to be given troops and released
anyway, it might be better in their eyes to have honorable inde-
pendence untrammeled by any union.

At this point General Eisenhower intervened. Eisenhower had
come under various influences as Commander in Chief of SHAPE,
where he served twelve Allied governments. He had found his
job, as he put it, "a can of worms." He had learned, as had the
Marshall Planners, how exhausting it is to deal with a dozen differ-
ent governments each with its own traditional area of sensitivity.
Like the Marshall Planners he yearned for the beautiful simplicity
of dealing with a package of nations called Europe. Moreover, he
had come under the influence of two extraordinarily persuasive
personalities. The first of these was Jean Monnet, who had been
introduced to Eisenhower by a mutual friend, John McCloy, the
American High Commissioner in Germany, a staunch supporter
of the Schuman Plan and strong European Union man. The second
was David K. E. Bruce, the most accomplished American Am-
bassador to air his talents in Paris since Benjamin Franklin. Bruce,
an experienced diplomat, politician, soldier and businessman, was
also an amateur historian and art-lover, a man of exquisite civiliza-
tion and firm courage, who possessed as clearly and vividly the
convictions of United Europe as did Jean Monnet.

Under the influence of Bruce and Monnet and under the pres-
sure of his job at SHAPE, Eisenhower had become by early July,
1951, what the cynics call a "hot-gospel" European Union man.
Speaking now with the heavy responsibility of commander of
American and Allied forces in Europe, Eisenhower flatly rejected
Acheson's proposal that Germans be recruited forthwith. Eisen-
hower pointed out that if it was true that Europe could not be vic-
toriously defended without the Germans, it was equally true that
the Germans could not be invited to bear arms over French objec-
tions. For strategically and geographically the French were even
more necessary than the Germans for defense of the Continent*
If the Germans were to be armed, they must be armed, said Eisen-
hower, in a way that would strengthen rather than weaken the
association of powers in the Atlantic Alliance. This meant a Euro-
pean Army, or it meant nothing.

From then on European Union was Eisenhower's baby. A twist
of French politics aided Eisenhower in breaking the dealdlocked

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 275

negotiations. The French elections of June, 1951, had been followed
by the usual Cabinet crisis and negotiations were in the hands
of caretaker civil servants, not Cabinet members. Chief among
these civil servants were Jean Monnet and Herve Alphand. Now,
under the twin pressures of Eisenhower and Bruce, the French
negotiators consented to a radical revision of the carefully quali-
fied original Pleven Plan. The French negotiators now agreed that
equality meant that Germans should have units just as large as
French Army units (called "groupements" to avoid the ugly word
"divisions," which the French Assembly would not countenance),
and that from the moment of the ratification of the treaty, all units
French, Belgian, German, Italian, Dutch should come under the
same international control. Eisenhower's soldier staff at SHAPE
then hammered out the military structure of the new compact its
divisional sizes and tables of organization, its air and armor com-
plements, its command staff. Brace's brilliant civilian staff ham-
mered through the political structure of the compact the nature
of sovereign assembly and authority, of ministerial control and
supervision, of budget and taxes. In Germany, the American High
Commission subjected the government of Konrad Adenauer to
the same kind of pressure. No opposition was encountered in Italy,
always enthusiastic for any kind of European Union; the Belgians
and Dutch governments protested feebly at the draft compact,
which cut so much out of their authority over their own citizens,
but these were small states and they were steam-rollered.

It would be pleasant to write that the making of Europe has
come upon her people like the sun after a storm, that they have
danced in the streets, raised flags to their housetops, held their
babies up to see the faces of the bold men who proposed this
revolution.

But it is not so. Perhaps no event in history has been accepted
so cautiously by those who wished it most. It has been accepted
as men accept surgery performed on their bodies, not out of joy,
but because they feel it necessary and can see no way, honestly,
to escape it.

Only rarely in my traveling in Europe have I heard people bring
up the subject of Union outside of those capitals where politicians
congregate.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 276

Once, when I was in Germany, I visited the University of
Heidelberg and stayed to chat with the officers of the student
council Of the four student officers, three had been soldiers in
the Wehrmacht during the war. They were clean-cut, attractive
young men and one of them still limped from his war wound.
They were, all of them, disillusioned with politics and shrugged
at the parties that the new Germany had thrown up. One of them
volunteered he would never fight again for anything, not even to
free East Germany from the Russians.

I asked him, "Isn't there anything you want to do in Germany,
any purpose you think is important?" He said, after long thought,
a Yes, Europe. I think there must be a Europe. These little coun-
tries are old-fashioned. Europe is something to work for." "But
why," I asked, "why are you so enthusiastic, why don't other
Europeans talk like that?"

They thought for a while and one of them said, "I was an officer
in the war. I fought from Normandy to Budapest, I was in France
and in Poland. Germans are the only people who have ever seen
how this continent can work when it is all one. And it can work.
We know what it can do. It must work."

I have heard occasional businessmen talk like this too. One was
an American. He had come to Europe to manufacture ball-point
pens when the ball-point pen seemed the greatest invention in
writing since the stylus. He moaned about doing business in
Europe: "Did you every try to do business in nine currencies
and make them balance in dollars? I have Finnish marks, German
marks and Danish marks. I have French francs, Belgian francs and
Swiss francs. I'm bankrupt in one currency, even in another and
rich in several others, and they're all blocked and I can't balance
them off. You go crazy trying to figure out whether a profit in a
blocked currency is really a profit, or is it a loss, and what does a
loss in a free currency mean?" I asked him why he didn't quit.
But he wouldn't quit. "You can do things in Europe you can't
do even in America. The ball-point pen was a flop in America; it
was no good, no one researched it or engineered it. But in Europe
I have nine factories, with nine kinds of engineers and nine kinds
of brains working on it. The pens I make here are better than any
I make in America, and it'll be better yet. No one can touch the
Finnish know-how in plastics; we're putting in Finnish plastic

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 277

extrusion machines in all our plants. The Dutch know all about
inks. The French are magnificent on styling; they know more
about anodizing aluminum in any shade or color than anybody
else in the world. The French figure out the most ingenious ma-
chines for making parts; then I give them to the Germans who
make the machines sturdy and simple. My chief shop practice
engineer in France is a girl from Israel; my chief research engineer
is a German; the physical research on the nature of inks and
vacuum is being done for me at the University of Leyden in Hol-
land. When you put these brains together, nothing in the United
States can touch the pool. If I could make this Europe work, the
sky'd be the limit."

The most ardent advocates of European Union that I have
found in Europe have been politicians. Politicians are usually men
of more than average intelligence trying to do what their voters
want them to do, and most of them are frustrated almost to despair
by the compromises they must make between logic and popular
passion. In the past three years in Europe, scores of politicians have
climbed aboard the bandwagon of European Union for the two
reasons which make it most promising: they think they can clean
up some of the nastiest technical frustrations of their trade, and
they believe they can win votes by so doing.

One Belgian parliamentarian who has long sat in both the embryo
and active organs of the new Europe put it this way: "What makes
politics at home isn't going to make politics in Europe. In all our
countries religion is terribly important. It binds together inside
every Catholic party in Europe, both leftists and conservatives,
simply because they are Catholics. It forces together conservatives
and Socialists just because they are non-Catholics. But when you
come to talk about Europe, you leave religion at home that's a
matter of state politics; let the states argue about Catholic schools
or free schools. In Europe people can sort themselves out of differ-
ent lines. Spaak and Dehousse who are both Socialists in Belgium
find their best allies in the European Assembly in people like
Brentano and Teitgen who are Catholics at home in Germany and
France. It's too early to see how it will work out, but if Europe
is made, it will have new politics and the old parties will have new
labels. Maybe we can even get at new problems and settle them in
new ways."

FIRE IN THE ASHES

At present, three concrete projects of Union are under examina-
tion by the Europeans. One is the Schuman Plan, already binding
and in operation. The second is the European Army, already
signed but awaiting ratification. The third is the European Consti-
tution, already drafted but not yet signed. Each is another face
of the same concept and the same urge.

In each, the same six nations France, Germany, Italy, Belgium,
Holland, Luxembourghave compacted their unity. In each of
these compacts, the six have agreed to remove from the power of
their individual governments certain sovereign powers and trans-
fer them to a supranational Authority which, henceforth, shall
exercise them without obstacle or hindrance as the Federal Gov-
ernment of America exercises the powers granted it. Each com-
pact sets up an Executive Authority to act for Europe as a whole,
subordinates it to an Assembly of the people of Europe and regu-
lates it with an independent High Court.

At present, each of the linked enterprises stands at a different
stage of maturity or conception.

The Community of Coal and Steel, embodiment of the Schuman
Plan, is akeady in operation. Its laws and taxes are binding on
160,000,000 diverse peoples who have never, since the time of
Caesar, known the same laws. It moves solidly forward, but very
slowly, simply because not even the men who conceived it had
previously imagined how crusted and stiff were the arteries of
Europe with the controls and obstructions packed into them by
generations of national rivalry and abuse. Like doctors operating
on a patient for a mild surgery, the High Authority of the Schu-
man Plan has found the patient upon examination to be just as
gravely ill as the most pessimistic forecast. None of the simple
plans have proven quite as easy to put in practice as early predic-
tion supposed. To give every European industry fair and equal
rates on the Continent's railroads has meant ploughing through
national rate systems thick as encyclopedias to ferret out each par-
ticular device each nation used to cheat, gouge, extort and impede
the traffic of a competitor. The stripping of tariff barriers has
suddenly threatened old coal mining villages in Belgium and
antiquated cartel-protected plants in central France with the
competition of more modem and efficient producers. Can they be
allowed to collapse overnight, can their citizens be thrown out of

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 279

work without giving a three or five year transition period? To
wipe out cartels means that they must first be investigated a long,
probing, delicate process. And what does one do when one finds,
as one does, that in southern Germany one coal cartel has supplied
all the coal at its own fixed price for fifty years and that there
exists now in the entire area not one independent coal merchant
whose competition can be revived, or through whom the con-
sumer can be offered a fair chance at the market?

Yet the magnitude of the task has not discouraged the High
Authority of the Schuman Plan. In a Europe rotted by cynicism
and trembling in indecision, a visit to Luxembourg where the
Coal-Steel Community has made its first headquarters is, even to
the most jaded political tourist, something of inspiration. Here in
Luxembourg are men who have passed both the dream and the
plan stage and who are excited by their own action. Luxembourg
is where a High Authority of nine men Germans and French-
men, Italians and Belgians, Dutchmen and Luxembourgers all sit
around one table talking to one purpose under the chieftainship
of Jean Monnet who has ceased to be French and has become
European. Luxembourg is where officials of the Community casu-
ally make appointments at six o'clock in the morning because that
is when they begin work, where a onetime French railway chief
and a onetime German railway chief jointly explain to a visitor
with loud laughter how their respective railroads once tried to
cheat each other. Luxembourg is a place where the measure of
entirely new problems is found; the simple problem of language
is enormously complicated as the Community requires one-quarter
of its staff simply for translation and interpretation. But the once-
feared problem of taxes to support the Authority proves as simple
as counting on an abacus board. The industries of six countries
have begun without a murmur to pay their dues at the rate of
$50,000,000 a year to their new master, which promises to use
the taxes to reinvest in and make fruitful their industries.

The progress of the second enterprise of European Union,
the Defense Community and European Army, is more difficult to
read. It was conceived in peace for an imminent war which has
not happened. On paper it is a most elaborate and detailed docu-
ment. Each of the governments of the contemplated Union has
already signed and sworn to support it. But for many reasons their

FIRE IN THE ASHES

280

ratification hangs fire. Unlike the Schuman Plan which dealt with
such simple quantities as coal and steel, the European Army
scheme deals with the complex organization of men in armies, to
be trained and to die. It has become too complex in detail for ordi-
nary" people to understand its critical essence, and thus the poli-
ticians who support it have difficulty rallying popular support.

On paper the European Army sets up a Continental Defense
Force which shall consist of 40 standing divisions 14 French, 12
German, 1 1 Italian, and 3 from the Low Countries. They are to be
so mixed together that no corps will consist only of troops of one
nationality. Its men are to wear one uniform, have one flag. Men
will be commanded by officers of their own nationality only up
to division level From division level up, officers will be scrambled
in nationality, and the supreme staff will be responsible to no indi-
vidual nation but to the Community of Europe. The High Com-
mission that commands this Army will preside over a government
controlling a tax system and budget large enough to maintain the
Army, establishing international military academies for training
its officers, procuring and producing the arms and equipment of
this European Army wherever in Europe the facilities, the steel
and the ingenuity offer the best buy.

Many things have gone wrong with the timetables and sched-
ules of this Army, nor are the soldiers of SHAPE any closer to
seeing German troops in arms than they were three years ago.
There are many reasons for this. The urgency of peril is over, in
largest part because of SHAPE'S own military achievement which
makes German soldiers far less necessary now than they seemed
in the Korean crisis, and in lesser measure because of Russia's ap-
parent disinclination since Stalin's death to seek a test of arms.
Again, the changing world has affected French and German atti-
tudes deeply. The Germans, seeing the change in Russian attitude,
wonder whether the unity of their country might not be speeded
more by negotiation with Russia than by that gesture of defiance
toward Russia which is involved in the Defense Community. The
French, drained by their war in Asia, suddenly conscious of the
burden of their African Empire, wonder whether the strain of
the overseas lands may not reduce their strength and contribution
in the Defense Community so greatly as to make it inevitably a
Community under the leadership of German generals.

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 281

No serious criticism exists anywhere in the six countries pow-
erful enough to undo the Community of Coal and Steel. Doubt
and second thought pucker everywhere at the prospect of the
Defense Community.

The third project of European Union is called, technically, the
European Political Community (EPC) but is more generally
spoken of as "the Constitution." The Constitution is perhaps the
most exciting of all three efforts so far made to bring the dream
of Europe home to its people. Alone of the three projects, it pro-
poses to draw its charter powers not from the governments of the
compact but by direct elections from the people of these coun-
tries in their homes.

Like the European Army, it bears the markings of American
fashioning. D wight D. Eisenhower from his headquarters at
SHAPE was the first man publicly to invite the Europeans to make
a Constitution of Union, and the first official governmental invi-
tation to Europe to write such a constitution was issued in Wash-
ington in the fall of 1952. Unlike the European Army, however,
these American markings are superficial, for the Constitution was
conceived and fought through by European leaders in devoted,
creative enterprise all through the winter of 1952-1953, to meet
their own needs.

These needs, fundamentally, were to create a sovereign political
authority to pull together not only the Coal-Steel Community
and the European Army but all the other projects and schemes
that pullulate in European minds today. Moreover, all these
projects, to thrive, must sink taproots not into parliaments but
into the people themselves. The Constitution of Europe, as drafted
and presented to the people of Europe by 55 legislators sent from
their respective national parliaments, provides, therefore, for organs
capable of infinite expansion, yet deriving their powers directly
from free popular vote. A European Executive Authority will be
chosen by the President of Europe as his Cabinet. This President
will, himself, be chosen by the vote of the two legislative chambers
of Europe. The upper chamber will be a Senate of 87 members,
selected by the various national parliaments. The lower chamber
of 238 members will, like the American House of Representatives,
represent not the states but the people, who will vote directly for
men of their choice. A High Court consisting of the men already

FIRE IN THE ASHES 282

chosen as the common High Court of the Schuman Plan and the
Defense Community will be its supreme judicial authority. A
Council of National Ministers, one for the Cabinet of each country
in the compact, will be the transmission belt bearing the directives
of the European Executive back to their national governments and
interposing, with limited rights of veto, over actions of Europe
that go too far.

On paper the Constitution of Europe adopted by the Constitu-
tional Convention and presented to the governments of Western
Europe in March of 1953 at Strasbourg is a cumbersome, intricate
document with little of the spare simplicity of the document that
made America a Union of States. Better constitutions might have
been drafted by half a dozen theorists in the privacy of their
libraries and studies. The significant strength of the Constitution
is that it was drafted by practicing politicians who wished to pro-
duce not a perfect document but a document adequate for the
problem, yet loose enough to permit them to go back and cam-
paign before their voters and win.

The intense opposition to the Constitution and it is deep even
among great advocates of European Union rises from the very
fact that its authors are so grimly determined to carry it to popular
judgment and that their chances of winning approval, if they
can get it to a popular vote, are even.

Those who seek the Union of Europe but oppose this draft
Constitution of Strasbourg advance two chief arguments against it.

The first is that England is absent. The English in their with-
drawal from Europe and their insistence on association without
participation have exerted a powerful force even in the councils
from which they are absent. Without England, say many conti-
nental advocates of European Union, the six-nation Europe of the
Constitution becomes a "little Europe"; it becomes a Europe in
which Germany is the strongest and dominant partner; it becomes
a Europe in which the Protestant voice is submerged by an over-
whelming Catholic majority. Such a Community, they say, divides
Europe into two halves rather than uniting it.

Rather than an efficient and small Europe, their second argu-
ment runs, it is better to have a looser, more inefficient Europe,
organized in a series of interlocking yet overlapping functional
communities. There might be several interlocking Europes an

THE MAKING OF EUROPE 283

agricultural Europe that included Denmark and England plus the
unifying six; a defense Europe from which the English would ab-
stain; a cultural Europe in which all would join; a transport Eu-
rope in which even the Swiss might join.

To the observer who follows the progress of European Union
day by day, its pace seems discouragingly slow. Its champions en-
courage each other, in their serious moods, by saying that it was
nine years before the American Articles of Confederation were
fused into the American Constitution; in a jocular mood, they
tell each other that it requires eighteen months of pregnancy to
produce a baby elephant and "Europe" is something more massive
and difficult to make than a baby elephant.

Nothing, however, in this correspondent's memory measures
the progress of the movement more vividly than the faces and
moods of two contrasting scenes I witnessed, separated by only
two years.

The first was in Paris in the spring of 1951, when the final docu-
ments of the Schuman Plan were presented for signing in the
Salon de PHorloge of the French Foreign Office. After having
traveled through the winding tunnels of technical diplomacy, it
lay embossed in parchment, awaiting the signatures of the famous
men who sat around the table. First Konrad Adenauer signed, stiff,
erect, unsmiling. Next Robert Schuman signed a man grown and
shaped under the same tongue and same flag as Adenauer in the
long-forgotten days when the Kaiser's Reich seemed the most
durable strength in Europe. Then Count Carlo Sforza of Italy
signed his last important diplomatic act before his death. Count
Carlo Sforza had begun his diplomatic career in the tum-of-the-
century years when the young Sforza might win renown because
the senile Emperor Franz-Josef at a court ball in Vienna had
actually stopped and flatteringly inquired of him, in Italian?
whether he liked the weather. Sforza had been a distinguished
diplomat ever since. No public audience watched the signing of
the EDC, except for the little secretaries of the Quai who peeped
out shyly from behind the red velvet curtains to stare at the great
men. Thereafter, everyone repaired to the reception hall to sip
champagne and wonder what it was that had happened. Treaties
had been made and signed in this fashion for hundreds of years.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 284

The second scene was in Strasbourg in March of 1953, in the
hall of the House of Europe, as the Constitution of Europe was
finally" brought to vote before the Constitutional Convention. The
Assembly Hall and its galleries bristled with vitality. A German
delegate looked up and said, "My God, do you know who those
people in the galleries are? They're my constituents; it costs 12
marks for the bus ride here, and 1 2 marks to stay here for a day,
and they lose a day's pay. This is serious!" An automatic transla-
tion system spewed out the arguments over the Constitution simul-
taneously in English, French, German, Italian and Dutch. The
delegates spilled over into the sun-drenched lobbies bargaining,
cajoling, explaining. No ministers of government, no man who
had known Europe before the First World War raised his voice.
New men, snuffing power in the prospect of a new forum, domi-
nated the floor. They had made a constitution and they planned
to fight for it. Their Europe was to be made not by diplomats but
by people. As they met, the cabled dispatches bore the tidings of
Stalin's death, and they were angry that the news of death over-
whelmed the news of the birth they were trying to bring about
in the border town on the Rhine. By a vote of 55 to o ('with five
abstentions) they passed their Constitution and in the morning
they woke to find the greater news from Russia had squeezed their
action into a paragraph.

"Do you know what Louis XVI wrote in his diary the day the
people stormed the Bastille on July 14?" asked one of the consti-
tution-makers. "He wrote 'rien' nothing. But something had
begun and it was the French Revolution. So they say we have
done nothing here. But it has begun. We will take it to the people
and they will make the revolution."

XIII

the basin of freedom

In politics, those things we cannot see are always more im-
portant than those we can. This is because the most stubborn and
important facts are ideas that exist in people's minds and not the
way those ideas express themselves in guns and concrete, buildings
and roads. This is why the biggest political fact in the Western
world is the most difficult to describe.

The name of this idea is a dull alphabetical label, NATO, an
addition of four initials which stand for the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.

Much of NATO is, to be sure, hard, tactile and visible, showing
itself in a thousand faces. Just six miles outside of Paris the western
speedway of St. Cloud throws off a dark ribbon of cobblestone
that deposits you before a gray building called SHAPE, outside
which snap the flags of fourteen nations in brilliant reds, golds,
blues, whites, greens. This is a part of NATO. But NATO is also
six noncoms in the early hours of the morning, monitoring spitting
radios and clicking teletype machines in one room that centralizes
a web of invisible lines that make the Atlantic Basin, from Wash-
ington to Istanbul, from the North Cape to Sicily, one net of in-
stant communication. NATO is an airfield in northern France with
the pilots of six nations scrambling into the air, flying French,
British, American jets, listening to the command of an Englishman
who takes orders from a Belgian who is under control of an
American, and all getting up to combat height within two minutes
to attack the imaginary enemy. It is also a white, hushed building
on a hill above the Seine, carpeted with thick brown felt where
permanent delegates of 14 nations, supported by an international
staff of 150 economists, soldiers and diplomats sit in constant
session, totting up the plans and powers of 365,000,000 people.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

NATO is the Reception Hall of the Elysee Palace with the red
and blue uniformed chamber orchestra of the Garde Republicaine
playing Mozart under the glistening chandeliers beneath Gobelin
tapestries, while all the great men of the West-Edens and Schu-
mans, Plevens and de Gasperis, Ridgways, Alexanders, Achesons,
Harrimans, Wilsons, Butlers-stalk about sipping champagne and
nibbling petits fours from the flower-burdened buffet tables. But
it is also the wind-swept bridge of an American aircraft carrier
operating at night in the North Sea with a polyglot screen of for-
eign destroyers in front of it; the admiral orders the screen to
close up in combat pattern ahead of him, and on the radarscope
he can see the luminous pips turn slowly and fall precisely into
combat pattern. "And," says the admiral later, "do you know it
wasn't until morning that I could look out and tell what national-
ity they were, but they were all right there in place during the
night."

NATO is all this-but these are only its outer faces. At its heart
NATO is an idea, an idea which has taken years to flesh out into
the imposing facrof its present dominance in world politics. This
idea is that somehow, in a way no one can quite describe, there
grew up about the Atlantic Basin a civilization which is like no
other in the world. In this civilization the individual man and lib-
erty are the measure of political value. Together the people on
both sides of this great ocean (less than a sixth of the population
of the world) makes a community in the greatest sense, bred out
of traditions, religions and technology that none of the other
major civilizations of the world share. It has taken centuries of
internecine bloodshed to make them realize that they are one. Not
until now, when desperately challenged by other counterattack-
ing civilizations, have the men who live around the Atlantic real-
ized that they must band themselves together to defend, each
people with its lives and substance, the lives and substance of every
other member. It is an alliance like no other in history, for at its
base lie no objectives of spoil or conquest. All the rest of the globe
may be bargained over, but NATO itself was not erected for bar-
gaining. It was erected for defense of the heartland of freedom
and a heritage which only too late was realized to be common
property. It is within NATO that America finally came of age in
world affairs, pledging herself for the first time, by a revolutionary

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM ^^

act of statesmanship, to sacrifice men and treasure not at her owft
will and timing but whenever any member of the Community of
the Atlantic should be wantonly attacked.

Like all great ideas, the vision of NATO did not come full
blown to a single prophet, contemplating the world in solitude
from his mountain cave. It grew out of the minds of many men,
burdened by responsibility in a period of trouble. But since its
story must start with a time, a place and a name, the moment when
the concept was first uttered can be fixed on the evening of De-
cember 1 6, 1947, in the flat of Ernest Bevin, England's Foreign
Minister, at 22 Carlton Terrace, London.

The sixth meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers had just
ended. Mr. Molotov had that afternoon said NO in a hundred dif-
ferent ways to the ministers of the West, covered them with scorn
and abuse for the last time, and left.

On that day, the great wartime alliance which destroyed fascism
had finally come to its end. That evening, Ernest Bevin invited the
Secretary of State of the United States, General George C. Mar-
shall, to a quiet dinner at his homejust the two of them. Bevin had
an idea. He had become convinced that at no time in the future
could anybody look forward to a day when the Russians would
deal in any other terms but force. He was convinced that there
was only one way for the West to survive. The Western Powers
had to work out some sort of union that would put Western
Europe together and then back it with the military strength of
the United States and Canada. Later, Bevin had the word-smiths
of the Foreign Office work out the idea in a polished diplomatic
phrase calling for such a "mobilization of energy and spiritual
forces as would inspire confidence and energy within and respect
elsewhere." But in the beginning it was a simple idea, the kind of
idea that comes to a shrewd, hard man who has been organizing
for thirty years of his life. Ernie was a union man; he had got off
his seat on a two-horse dray thirty-seven years before to organize
the transport workers of Bristol, and had been organizing ever
since dockers, truckers, warehousemen, unions, parties, con-
gresses. When things got tough you organized. Ernie was a genius
at organization and had organized the biggest single labor union
in the entire world in his lifetime. Now that he was Foreign Sec-

FIRE IN THE ASHES

retary, the way out of a problem still seemed to be in organization.

Marshall liked Bevin's idea. But, he warned Bevin, he was in no
position to do anything about it right away. He had his hands full
pushing the Marshall Plan through Congress; Congress was in no
mood to offer blood and manpower at the same time as money.
But go ahead with organizing Western Europe, Marshall said to
Bevin, and we'll see what we can do to help in Washington. On
the boat trip back to New York, Marshall tried the idea out on
several of his aides as weU as his Republican advisor, John Foster
Dulles. By the time they got off the boat in New York, Dulles,
too, thought the idea was a good one. By New Year's Day in
Washington, at the seasonal rounds of eggnog and highballs, the
idea had begun to circulate: the British had proposed a new kind
of alliance, a complete break with American tradition,^ one
whereby America pledged itself to a permanent military alliance
guaranteeing the safety of the western half of the European
peninsula. Most people at the State Department liked the idea
that is, if Congress could be persuaded to buy it.

Congress was in a particularly propitious mood early in 1948.
The Republican oracle on foreign affairs, Senator Arthur Vanden-
berg, had just spent a year recasting the Monroe Doctrine to meet
the needs of this century. At first glance there seemed little con-
nection between the Monroe Doctrine and the proposed European
Alliance. But, one hundred years before, the Monroe Doctrine
had proclaimed America's intention of defending the entire West-
ern Hemisphere against outside attack. The changing values of a
postwar world had made it necessary to rephrase this lordly pro-
nunciamento in more democratic form, and after several years of
negotiation, by the end of 1947, Pan-American defense had been
set up as a cooperative enterprise of equal partners. This was a
substantial achievement, and Senator Vandenberg who, as the
chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, had largely
captained it was rightly proud. Therefore, when Secretary of
State Marshall explained Bevin's idea to Senator Vandenberg,
Vandenberg replied immediately that it was a very good idea. It
seemed a logical and complementary regional agreement to the
one he had just masterminded with South America.

It took only fifteen months to produce a finished definition of
die Atlantic Pact troublesome, intricate months disturbed by

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 289

Communist aggression abroad and the quadrennial fury of an
American presidential campaign at home. In Europe, Bevin went
ahead to organize with remarkable swiftness the association of
France, England and the Benelux powers in a treaty signed at
Brussels in the spring of 1948 and known, at that time, as Western
Union. By April he had finished his job and, growling by cable
to Marshall, he demanded: Where were the Americans? The
Brussels pact, said Bevin, was a delusion in its very military posture
if the United States did not mean to back it up by force. Other
European voices were added to the cables from London. The
Communists had just seized Czechoslovakia. What would the
Americans do, cabled Foreign Minister Bidault from Paris, if the
Russians were to march tomorrow? What would the Americans
do, cabled Prime Minister Spaak from Brussels? Stalin sent a
menacing note to Norway, demanding morsels of her land-
Would America back them up in refusal? cabled the Norwegians.
But Washington was where the burden of decision lay, and in
Washington matters could but move slowly. The making of any
treaty is a complicated process requiring the nicest attention to
detail, the most careful wooing of the political support that must
ultimately approve it, the most skilful cultivation of public opin-
ion by well-timed speeches, well-planted stories, well-planned
leaks to the proper pundits. Moreover, this was an especially com-
plicated treaty, raising many new questions. The practical heart
of the matter would have to be America's guarantee to come to
the aid of any power in the Community attacked by an aggressor.
This required clearance with the soldiers of the Pentagon. The
Pentagon said the treaty had to be made broad enough to provide
for global retaliation against the enemy, anywhere, with any
means, instead of a constricting contract which permitted Amer-
ica to meet the enemy's attack only at such point as the enemy
might choose to attack. There was an even knottier constitutional
problem: only the President and the Congress of the United States
have the right to declare war. By the Constitution, no treaty can
be written that commits America to battle unless the people
through their Congress assent. Finally, there was a problem of
practical politics: 1948 was a presidential election year and no
group of generals or State Department civil servants felt bold

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 9

enough to write so profound a change into American life until
the people should have chosen their new leadership.

From the spring of 1948 down to the beginning of 1949, com-
mittees revolved about committees in Washington, as all the
various layers of interest, American and global, were consulted.
State met with Pentagon to elaborate a draft of the American
point of view; Marshall and Lovett sat with Vandenberg and
Connally; Vandenberg and Connally pushed an empowering reso-
lution through the Senate; State Department negotiators met with
the Ambassadors of Britain, Canada, France and the three Benelux
countries to bridge the gap between European and American
opinion. By January all the proper formulas had been correctly
phrased, including the key formula which bound all powers to a
declaration that:

". . . an armed attack against one or more of them . . . shall
be considered an attack against them all, and consequently they
agree that . . . each of them . . . will assist the Party or Parties
so attacked by taking forthwith . . . such action as it deems
necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and main-
tain the security of the North Atlantic area."

With this, the definition of the Treaty was complete. There re-
mained the final task of inviting in the flanking powers of the
Atlantic Basin, those lesser states necessary to guard the long sea
lanes between both halves of the Free World. Norway, Portugal,
Iceland, Italy and Denmark all received invitations and accepted.
Ireland and Sweden were invited but declined. Two years later,
two more states were added, Greece and Turkey. But, on April
3, 1949, twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty in
Washington, and for the first time in history, the peoples of the
Atlantic recognized their kinship and pledged themselves to its
common defense.

The central problem of the Atlantic Alliance is a hard physical
job that involves killing and fighting. It is to prevent, by force,
the Russians from breaking through the political line drawn across
Central Europe to occupy and annihilate the countries west of it.
This is a problem of map and terrain, of men, of materials, and of
spirit.
t The map divides its advantages in Europe about equally be-

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 291

tween the Atlantic Alliance and the Russians. The area of Russian
Occupation in Europe is a huge, almost trapezoid protrusion into
the west from the homeland about 650 miles from the borders of
Russia itself to the Elbe, and up to a thousand miles wide from
north to south. As a buffer belt, it is one of the most stupendous
defenses in depth ever acquired by any nation's diplomacy.

Nonetheless, it has its weaknesses. All along its southern fron-
tier from the Swiss Alps to the Black Sea it is ringed by moun-
tains occupied by hostile peoples. It has no outlet to the sea except
Albania, which on the outbreak of war could be pinched off in a
matter of days by Western police action. This long southern
flank is rendered doubly vulnerable because within these Russian
lines and under various Communist flags live millions of people
who would betray communism and the Russians to come over to
the West at the first military opportunity.

It is the western frontier of this protrusion into Europe that is
the warhead of the Russian torpedo. Here the Russians sprawl
across Germany from the Alps to the North Sea on 550 miles of
front. Here are massed their best troops. These troops are, at one
point, only 90 miles from the Rhine line; they are only 40 miles
from the city of Hamburg, the most important western port of
entry into Central Europe. They are closer to Paris than Minne-
apolis is to Chicago. From their positions the map invites them out
of Germany in two directions. The map invites them first, across
Germany's flat northern plains and strategic autobahns, toward
the Low Countries. This is the route that every raider from the
East has taken on the charge into France, since Attila the Hun
first led his horsemen to the Marne. Farther south, the map also in-
vites them on another axis down several traditional corridors
through the central German hills, directly across the narrow waist
of Hesse, which Americans defend today, to the Rhine. From the
advanced Russian lines to the Rhine crossings is an easy four-hour
drive.

To offset these terrain advantages, geography has also set sev-
eral obstacles for the Russians. The first is the Rhine river, a deep,
swift-flowing stream that can be defended brilliantly by troops
well dug in and prepared to die. More importantly, the Russians
are penalized by sheer distance. If they struck forward out of
their German lines, they would be operating over 800 miles from

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 9 2

their main base of industry and support, through thousands of
villages of hostile peoples, across narrow communications. The
logistics of a Russian offensive in Western Europe are immensely
difficult.

We have no idea of how the Russians view their huge military
problem. With the Soviets, secrecy is a source of strength in itself.
The mystery with which they shroud the substance of their mili-
tary strength not only protects that strength but brings a bonus
of exaggerated and distorted fear to the hearts of their enemy. At
SHAPE, the military headquarters of West European defense,
they tell a story about a man whom we shall call the Red-Pencil
Colonel. Until recently, the Red-Pencil Colonel masterminded a
desk in the Intelligence Section where, day after day, arrive intel-
ligence reports on the Soviets from most of the military and secret
service agencies of the Atlantic Powers. This raw data usually ar-
rives in a jumble of encouraging and discouraging news items,
mixed without evaluation. The Red-Pencil Colonel would read
these reports slowly and thoughtfully and then carefully underline
with his red pencil each item that reflected some new growth of
Soviet strength, some ominous change, some new spurt in mili-
tary technique. The reports that passed out of his desk, after his
scrutiny, thus screamed in red underlinings of Soviet strength and
power, while, by contrast, Soviet weakness and blunders escaped
the eyes' attention,

Reading reports so preparedboth in secrecy and for publica-
tionthe Western world has the tendency to see every Red Army
soldier as ten feet high, every Russian general as a genius, and
every Russian division as a crack armored force. This is not so.
This frame of mind is, moreover, very dangerous, for even with-
out exaggeration the Russians are so powerful a military force
that it is just barely possible to manage them without wrecking
our entire peacetime lives. To amplify their real strength with
fear can be as crippling as to underrate it with complacency.

If we cannot guess, for we do not know, what Russian strategic
thinking Is, we do know that their strength is measurable in crude
but substantial form and we know their major resources and
weaknesses. In the simplest military terms, we know that Russian
strength lies not in immediate impact force but in the tremendous
war reserves of a domestic life, permanently policed, permanently

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM

organized, permanently geared for swift conversion to war. Our
difficulty lies not in countering their present hitting power but in
doing so without wrecking our own social systems by the kind of
permanent mobilization in which the Russians live. We know
Russian weaknesses too: militarily, their chief problem is trans-
portation, or the delivery of their fighting forces in time to the
line of combat. Politically, further, we know that they count
among their forces thousands of men who hate their system and
its leadership. The Russian soldiers, in the last war, proved, at
times, the bravest fighters and, at other times, the quickest desert-
ers and surrenderers.

All the facts that this writer has been able to learn about the
Red Army in the past five years can be summarized in a few
pages. The Russians have in uniform at present about 3,900,000
men, of whom about 2,500,000 are ground forces. This is about
half the troops now in the uniforms of the Atlantic Alliance. To
this limited Russian force-in-being must be added over a million
satellite troops in Eastern Europe of very doubtful value, plus the
foot soldiers of China's Red Army in Asia. But all these depend
for guidance, morale and arms on the Soviet system itself, and to
counter these the West may call on the Yugoslavs and Japanese
in time of trouble.

The ground forces of the Soviet Union are organized, so far as
is known to Western intelligence agencies, into some 175 combat
divisions and 40 or 50 specialist divisions (chiefly artillery and
antiaircraft). There seems to have been little change in the global
size of this force over the past five years. Most of these divisions
run to between 10,000 and 11,000 men when activated, while the
cavalry and antiaircraft divisions among them call for as few as
5,000 men. At present, the home divisions within Russia seem to
be substantially below strength and only the frontier divisions in
Germany and the Far East stand at full strength.

These Russian divisions have a fantastic amount of real estate to
guard-one-fifth of the earth's land surface. In Europe alone they
must be prepared to overrun or repel Allied forces on an arc of
5,000 miles from the White Sea in the sub-Arctic, down through
the Baltic, at the front in Germany, down along the long line of
the Balkans and in the Caucasus. In addition, other troops must
stand guard over the restive Moslems in Central Asia, while yet

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 94

more must man the ramparts of the Far East against any combined
Japanese-American threat to Siberia. The vast manpower of the
Russian General Staff is never poised, therefore, at any one spe-
cific objective on its long frontier but must be deployed care-
fully and skilfully, ten divisions here, five divisions there, another
cluster in yet another geographical area in patterns which are
highly secret.

Of all the dispositions made by the Russian General Staff, none
is more dangerous to the West than the concentration which
called the North Atlantic Alliance into being-the twenty-two
Red Army combat divisions stationed with their ten artillery and
ack-ack support divisions in Eastern Germany, readily available
for a push on the home countries of the Community. This for-
midable force of 300,000 men is the most highly mechanized of
all Russian formations and its equipment, being the best crafts-
manship of Russian arsenals, is very good indeed. The disposition
of this force follows very closely the suggestion of the map. Two
striking armies of four divisions each are stationed close to the
warhead in two revealing pockets. The Third Shock Army sits
near Magdeburg, deployed as if to cut across the North German
plains on the rush to France and the Low Countries; it faces the
troops of England and the Low Countries. The Russian Eighth
Guards Army sits near Weimar, behind the glowering Thuringian
ridges, cocked to sweep across the open basin of Lower Franconia
or down the Fulda Gap. Their objective in time of war would be
Frankfurt and the Rhine crossings, and here the slender waist of
Germany must be defended by American and French troops.
Behind these two hammer fists at the front are the other four
armies of Russian occupation, deployed near the meshing points
of the great autobahn which give them easy flexibility in pouring
their forces down either avenue of attack as opportunity develops.
Behind these, in turn, lie some eight other Russian divisions guard-
ing communications in Poland (two), Austria (four) and Ru-
mania (two). Supporting this force, in turn, are the troops of the
satellites and the deep reserves of the Soviet homeland.

If this force could seize Western Europe, it could extinguish
liberty forever in its homelands, .more than double the Soviet
Union's industrial capacity and reduce America to a garrison state
beyond the Atlantic.

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM

In 1948, while the Soviets were attempting to strangle Berlin
by blockade and while the protocols of the North Atlantic Treaty
were being worded in Washington, the shadow of this Soviet
force darkened all of Europe.

In those days, the Red Army in Central Europe might quite
literally have marched out of its garrison dormitories in Germany
and in a fortnight have taken all of Western Europe; it would
have met no more than token resistance and very little of that.
Western defense forces in Germany consisted of something under
200,000 badly organized men. Two British divisions armed with
wartime Churchill tanks already obsolete, and supported by an
archaeological collection of decrepit trucks and transports,
guarded the North. Three very weak French divisions, some of
them armed with old Sherman tanks that had been bought as
scrap from Belgian junk dealers after the war, held the center. In
the South, the equivalent of two American divisions, deployed
and trained to police Germans rather than fight Russians, were
scattered and lost over three hundred miles of front. The lines of
communication of both British and American troops ran south
out of Bremen and Hamburg, so closely parallel to the front that
a Russian raid might have scissored them in forty-eight hours,
leaving them isolated from supply.

Behind this fragile crust of strength, the reserves of the West-
ern world consisted of a possible Belgian division in Belgium, one
possible British division in England and six battalions of combat
ready troops in the United States one full month away. The
French could muster as their contribution to the strategic reserve
but two understrength divisions, one of whose regiments em-
ployed as armor old German Tiger tanks for which spare parts
were no longer available. That was all. Except for London, no
city in Western Europe boasted even the most primitive air de-
fenseall Paris was guarded by two antiaircraft batteries. The
United States Air Force in Europe consisted of two combat
wings; the French Air Force boasted 30 Vampire jets (already
obsolete) and several squadrons of old propeller-pushed World
War II pursuits. Russian fighting strength in Europe outweighed
Western fighting strength by more than three to one. "All the
Russians need to get to the Channel," observed one American
military statesman at the time, "is shoes."

FIRE IN THE ASHES 2 9

To counter this enemy strength, the West had but one weapon
-the Strategic Air Force of the United States, laden with atomic
bombs. During the years of crisis, the sole deterrent to Soviet
impulse was the vast investment of free minds and free energy in
the exploration of the deadliest of sciences. But already the Rus-
sians were at work creating their own Strategic Air Force and
fashioning their own bombs.

This is now history. The politics of the entire world have
changed because all this is like a remembered nightmare. Billions
of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men, incalculable thought
and effort have been invested by the Atlantic Community to
create one new fact, among the half-dozen most important facts
in the world today. This fact is as simple as it is important: in
Central Europe today, the power balance has shifted from the
Russians to the Atlantic forces.

Stripped of words and propaganda, the Atlantic effort in
Europe has reached the point where, in Germany, along those
dark ridges and thin streams where our patrols pass Russian pa-
trols in the dark, we can mass a heavier weight of armor and
men than the Russians. At the critical German front, we can mass
500,000 men against the Russians' 300,000. Two hundred million
West Europeans no longer go to sleep nightly in the knowledge
that tomorrow the Russians could rumble through their streets.

Our line of battle in the critical central area counts six Amer-
ican divisions, four and two-thirds British divisions, five and one-
third French divisions, three Belgian divisions, one Dutch division,
two-thirds of a Danish division, plus another division of odds and
ends. This force is backed by another fifteen divisions in various
states of readiness. South of the Alpine turntable are nine Italian
divisions braced by the equivalent of a division and a half of British
and American troops ready to bottle up the mountain passes from
Austria to Trieste. Beyond that, down around the Mediterranean,
is the Yugoslav Army loosely tied to our strategy, plus eleven
Greek and twelve Turkish divisions under coordinate command.
By the end of 1953, at their present rate of progress, the North
Atlantic countries will be able to provide their common command
with almost one hundred divisions ready or mobilizable in thirty
days.

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 297

It should be said immediately that the word "division" is the
fool's gold of the amateur strategist, and the generals who com-
mand the forces of the Atlantic Alliance wince whenever anyone
attempts to count their divisions. "Division" is a word that may
mean anything from America's magnificent Big Red One, at the
very fringe of hostile contact and perhaps the finest self-contained
fighting force in the world, to the two French divisions freshly
formed in 1952 with barely thirty per cent of their effectives and
the Greek and Turkish divisions hardly stronger than regimental
combat teams. The fighting value of every unit varies widely, de-
pending on all the treacherously complicated factors of supply,
training equipment, leadership, morale and reserves of ammuni-
tion. It is, therefore, vital to note that though the increase in cal-
culable division strength in the past two years has been more than
substantial, fighting strength has grown even faster in the im-
measurable improvement of all the many other factors that go to
make a fighting army.

The Atlantic armies are based and in position. No longer are
the troops scattered in hopeless garrisons, helter-skelter through
Germany. They are poised on a known line, with presited posi-
tions and deployment areas, with avenues of attack and with-
drawal surveyed, engineered and zeroed in. No longer must
American supplies move down the dangerously vulnerable north-
south routes from the North Sea to Bavaria. They are beginning
now to enter by the safe ports of the Bay of Biscay, deep in the
French rear, and then move horizontally across France to Germany
over an enormous American communications system that deposits
supplies in massive, awesome dumps all through the Rhineland and
Germany's Black Forest. British supplies, similarly, follow pro-
tected channels from east to west across Belgium and the Low
Countries to the North German plain. The generals can now face
front with their rear protected.

The Atlantic armies are now, moreover, armed and equipped.
Four million tons of American military supplies, plus 503 planes
and 82 warships, had arrived in Europe between the beginning of
NATO, in the spring of 1949, and January of 1953 enough to
make of every army in Europe (except the English who equip their
own soldiers) a fighting composite of American hardware and
native flesh. Europeans in NATO complain that the biggest single

FIRE IN THE ASHES

298

failure in the military plans of SHAPE is the lag in delivery of
American arms, the slow crawl of production and delivery which
still leaves nine billion dollars' worth of arms appropriated for
foreign military aid tangled in procurement and production. But,
though American shipment has not completely met American
promise, what has actually arrived has already changed the char-
acter of the Atlantic forces from pulp to armies. America's divisions
in Europe are the best equipped of American history, bristling with
guns and spearheaded by the new automatic-sighting M47 tanks
that handle like kiddy-cars at the touch of a joy stick. The French
no longer operate wartime Shermans but M46's equipped with
ninety-millimeter guns. The British have replaced their wartime
Churchills with new Centurions, their ancient desert ordnance
with the newest trucks. Belgians, Italians, Dutch, Norwegians,
Turks, Greeks all inch slowly forward to planned goals as they
pick up American arms landed on their wharves.

The Atlantic armies are, finally, commanded. NATO need only
be contrasted with the puny Anglo-French Alliance of 1939,
which was expected to stop Hitler, to show how much has been
learned. The Anglo-French Alliance of 1939 envisaged the deliv-
ery of a single packaged product on the shores of France after the
outbreak of war, this package to consist of six British expedition-
ary divisions wrapped in military cellophane, lacking any basic
supply, support or maintenance system. NATO has never talked
in terms of such packages; its purpose from the beginning has
been to arm an entire community, with all its territory, to make
it bristle with present guns and present reserves, centrally com-
manded in peace as in war. A single command looks at an area
of operation quite differently from the way a coalition staff looks
at it. It sees all its member countries as one single apron for the
deployment of its planes and fields; thus, one new NATO field .is
being finished each week in this year, 1953, in Western Europe.
By early 1954, over 100 of the 158 fields needed by SHAPE in
Western Europe will be operational, and the squadrons of eight
different nations will use them under a command that can flick
their planes north, south, west or east instantaneously. Invisible
channels of sound already lace the air: Norway .is linked by
NATO's own cable and high-frequency circuits to Aberdeen in
Scotland; submarine cables of NATO crisscross from France and

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 299

Italy under the sea to Africa; Paris is in voice communication with
Air Control at Fontainebleau; a score of VHF circuits link both
these centers of command with Metz and forward combat posts;
Lyons is linked by NATO lines with Chambery for defense of
the Alpine turns.

Under the Standing Group of NATO, which sits in Washing-
ton, operate the field commands. Two of these commands are
naval SACLANT, whose headquarters at Norfolk, Virginia, is
charged with the defense of the sea-lanes between Europe and the
American continent, and CHANNEL command, a smaller coun-
terpart, which protects the sea-lanes between Britain and the Con-
tinent. The great field command, of course, is SHAPE, the busi-
ness front of the Community, that controls all forces on the
mainland of Europe. SHAPE'S subordinate Northern Command
(the weakest link in the structure) defends the Scandinavians and
patrols the Kattegat out of which Russian submarines must pass to
penetrate the Atlantic. The Central Command of SHAPE holds
the German front with two Group armies, one Franco- American
in the South, and the other British-Low Countries in the North.
Each of these Group armies, moreover, is provided with its own
tactical air force. A Southern Command is responsible for Italy's
Alps and patrols the Mediterranean. Attacked today, the men who
sit in the clean gray SHAPE headquarters in Marly Forest outside
Paris could dissolve their offices overnight, slip away to secret
underground war headquarters, and exercise operational control
over troops stretched out on a 5,ooo-mile arc of contact with the
enemy.

SHAPE'S generals would not welcome the challenge of war at
any time, but if it came now it would throw into mournful, al-
most disastrous, relief half a dozen weaknesses about which
SHAPE'S generals have ululated long and unsuccessfully to their
civilian superiors.

The first of these weaknesses in the still-unfinished structure of
Western defense lies in the air. Air power in the strategy of
SHAPE is critical, for SHAPE is not geared to attack; it is built
for defense. It must wait until the Russians move before it can hit
back and when it hits it must strike at the weakest point in Russia's
strategy her communications. Western Europe is safe behind
SHAPE'S guard only so long as the Russian homeland reserve

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3

cannot be delivered in overwhelming numbers against it. One
German military estimate-and the German knowledge of Russian
fighting is deep and extensive-is that to deliver another sixty di-
visions in sixty days to the central front, the Russians must have
from six to eight crossings over the Oder and Theisse Rivers. To
give our ground troops a fair chance to recoil in good order be-
fore the first Russian shock while our own reserves gather, our
Air Forces must be able to slice and keep slicing these Russian
communications wherever, as at marshaling yards and river cross-
ings, they are vulnerable. This our Air Forces cannot do at the
present moment. They lack, flatly, anywhere near adequate num-
bers of planes and men. Superlative progress has been made in
international coordination of command, of language, of scram-
bling of squadrons and flights. All that can be done to organize
men and build fields has been pressed. But, in the rush to build
ground strength and divisional cadres, planes and the pilots to fly
them have been neglected. By the end of 1953 SHAPE'S tactical
air force will still be far from its goal of 4,000 planes (although
most will be modern jets), which is the minimum requirement. But
against this we know the Russians can mobilize up to 8,000 planes
(of which half are probably jets) out of their 20,000. To be really
safe, SHAPE'S generals feel they must have at least 5,000 planes,
and unless this canopy is provided in good time, our troops would
have to fight outnumbered in the sky.

The second of SHAPE'S command weaknesses is political
SHAPE is a community command, unlike a Russian command
which can dispose of satellite divisions across the map as expenda-
bles. A hybrid of many tongues and men, SHAPE must rely on
cooperation as much as on the imperative to do its wilL Yet this
is difficult because high command falls most naturally to those
with experience, and except for the British and Americans, none
of the NATO partners can name a single general who has com-
manded a full field army in battle. Inevitably, Americans and
Britons outweigh all other partners in key positions of control,
arousing resentment among all the non-English-speaking powers.
SHAPE is, therefore, constantly forced to seek not simply the
best officers in the best posts but also the proper admixture of na-
tionals to harmonize wounded pride with military efficiency.
SHAPE works at the problem; progress has been slow but

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 301

encouraging. SHAPE has established its own NATO Defense
College to train international officers, for, in the words of
SHAPE'S brilliant commander, General Alfred Gruenther,
"There are only two kinds of wars Indian wars and coalition
wars. All wars of the future are coalition wars and we have to
learn how to fight them." But until time and experience train men
of the right kind, SHAPE'S command problems must remain
plagued by pride, personality and national prejudice.

A third weakness and a vital one is summed up in the one
tedious word "supply." In the face of a full Soviet assault our At-
lantic troops might be able to fight for two weeks or a month,
might be able to withdraw and then hold the Rhine for six weeks,
but then they would run out of fuel, ammunition, guns and troops.
When NATO's Permanent Council thinks of the day-to-day
problems of fighting a war it thinks primarily in terms of reserves
of oil and shells, of syringes and carburetors, of manpower that
can be phased into the line on D day plus three, D day plus ten,
D day plus thirty, D day plus ninety. For it knows that the Rus-
sians, thanks to their perpetual state of civil and military mo-
bilization, have all such reserves stacked up hip-deep and rolling
in the interior of their police state.

The supply problem leads directly to the last of SHAPE'S big
worries "flexibility in the field." In its emergency early years,
SHAPE'S job was to tack together, in bits and pieces, whatever
manpower it could scour up to form a crust of opposition at the
front, called the "couverture." The emergency job is done, and
SHAPE'S task now is to fuse these parts into one new flexible
force. An army's purpose is not to sit still but to move as a fluid
constellation of impact and firepower, instantly responsive to one
central direction. In specific terms, it means that American troops
must be ready to move overnight up to a threatened French sec-
tor, or that French troops must, if necessary, be raced toward the
Belgian frontier. When such troops move, intermingling and
separating as direction dictates, they must know they will receive
the same kind of support, the same type of artillery fire, find
ready the ordnance shops and supply depots that can keep their
weapons and tanks firing, find proper medical and hospital serv-
ices to care for their wounded. The generals, whatever their uni-
forms, agree on these things. But the roots of each nation's army

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 2

go deep into generations of national tradition; parliaments and
cabinets must assent whenever any national army is wrenched
about to fit a new pattern, whenever any change in equipment for
the sake of standardization requires a revision in the nation's in-
dustry. Generals know that troops must train in swift movement
and that base installations must be built to permit this movement.
But each simple move involves complex national sovereignty and
budgets. Who pays for the housing, feeding and fueling of such
national troops on the march? Who pays for the farmer's cow
killed or the village bridge weakened-the maneuvering troops, or
the nation that plays host to them?

The balance between strength and weakness, between accom-
plishment and short-fall is debated feverishly in all the lobbies of
SHAPE and NATO. It is pointed to with pride, or pointed to
with alarm, depending on who the audience and who the speaker.

Yet when all is said, the stupendous fact of real power cannot
be obscured: the Russians could not now take us, as they could
have in 1948, with the garrison they man in Eastern Germany. If
the Russians should wish to attack they must mobilize all the
forces of the homeland for their effort. War in Central Europe is
no longer an adventure for them, it is a desperate gamble. At the
point of contact, the Atlantic Powers marshal more and better
hitting power than is immediately available to the Soviet 'Union.

The operative word here is "immediately," and it accounts for
the contradictions in all public accounts of NATO's work. No
officer at SHAPE deludes himself into thinking that SHAPE'S
forces could resist, without swift reinforcement, an all-out on-
slaught of the Soviets. Our shock troops in Europe are more nu-
merous than the enemy's, but if the Russians mobilized for war,
the SHAPE command could only survive if our mobilization were
as swift and massive as theirs. It is this that makes the Western
generals behave so frequently like schizophrenics. They have, on
the one hand, the natural human itch for praise for work well
done. But, on the other hand, they know that if they pause for
praise, parliaments and peoples will relax instantly, slash budgets,
strip down taxes before the necessary planes and pilots are sup-
plied, before the war reserves are in warehouses, before the al-
most-finished creation of their devotion receives its capping, final

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 303

increment of strength. Their duty then, as they see it, is to moan
rather than boast, to exhort rather than comfort and to flog re-
luctant civilians along the path of duty, however great the strain
and unwilling the flesh.

It is here that the problems of NATO leave the desks of gen-
erals and come before that civilian judgment called statesmanship.
For, although generals behave in their tradition of duty when they
urge ever greater effort, civilian statesmen know that complete
security against the Russians can never be possible unless the At-
lantic Community is willing to force its citizens into the same
strait jacket of discipline and drugged effort that the Soviet state
imposes on its citizens. Somewhere along the way historic judg-
ments must be made: not only how much the Western way of life
can be permanently burdened by arms without crushing it to ex-
tinction, but also where these arms should be gathered, which of
the many danger points in our life has greater priority on them,
and how such strategic advantages as our arms have brought us in
Europe shall be capitalized.

The Russians, too, are burdened by just such problems, for their
resources of war are even smaller than ours; Russian resources
appear greater only because they are multiplied by internal terror.
While we have been deploying and strengthening in Western
Europe, the Russians have been faced with a major decision. Their
problem has been whether or not to attempt to preserve their
1948 superiority over us, whether the cost of the effort b*e worth
the probable result. The response of the Russians has presented,
indeed, a fact almost as significant as our own growth to strength
in Central Europe. The Russians have not budged. They main-
tain today in Eastern Germany the same twenty-two divisions
they maintained in 1952, in 1951, in 1950, in 1949, in 1948, all the
while our strength has been trebling. They have, it is true, re-
equipped their forces as have we with fresher weapons from So-
viet arsenals. They have expanded the number of runways in
Eastern Europe and lengthened them to take care of new jets.
They have borne down on organizing the satellite armies. And,
most of all, they have concentrated on the communications net,
the transfer points of their mixed-gauge railways, the motoriza-
tion of their armies to cut down on the delivery time necessary

FIRE IN THE ASHES 34

to bring home divisions to bear on the central front. But basically
the Soviets have stood pat.

Their decision comes out of no sweet desire for peace; nor can
it possibly be to the liking of the Russian generals on the German
front, who, like any generals, must have howled like wolves to
the Kremlin for increase. It can only have been a central political
decision taken in Moscow which recognized that in the frame of
the Cold War the Atlantic Powers were pressing an irresistible
advantage. The Soviet Union could not prevent this Atlantic suc-
cess without stripping other enterprises more vital to it elsewhere
enterprises of domestic expansion at home, or military expan-
sion as in Korea. Faced with the fact of Atlantic dominance in
Central Europe and the crude but effective community organiza-
tion of the Atlantic states, the Russians have thus been forced to
shift tactics. Since they cannot shake Europe and the Alliance
apart by force or the threat of force, they must now attempt to
seduce it into disunion or magnetize it apart by politics and eco-
nomic war.

It is here, as the Russians try to mount a new and different re-
sponse to the Alliance, that the problems of the next chapter in
the Community's history begins. Even while the soldiers are la-
boring to rivet together the final structure of their achievement,
their civilian masters must begin to wrestle with the problems at-
tendant on their success. And it is here, as the soldiers say at
SHAPE, that the problem moves "downtown."

"Downtown," as the officers at SHAPE use the word, means
the cream-colored annex to the Palais de Chaillot, sitting in its
green park overlooking the Seine River in downtown Paris. Here
are housed the 150 senior civilians who form the Permanent Sec-
retariat which supports the Permanent Council of the North At-
lantic Treaty Organization. "Downtown" is, however, much
more than this corps of international civil servants; "downtown"
is the symbol of the political authority to which, in our kind of
system, the soldiers must remain forever subordinate. The soldiers'
problems are stubborn and difficult and, if war comes, are tran-
scendent. But the problems of the civilians who must guide
NATO are even more difficult and, if peace is to persist, even
more important. The slow growth of NATO from its idiot in-

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM

fancy to the beginning of common sense, along with all its hope
of maturity, can be traced in the effort of the civilians who di-
rect it to grapple with its two chief political problems: how to
understand each other and how to understand their soldiers.

The problem of mutual understanding in any alliance is as
old as the first memories of history. One scholar among NATO
chieftains likes to begin the story of its troubles with the phrase
"Once upon a time" and continue with an account of the Con-
federacy of Delos. Two thousand years ago, the free and demo-
cratic states of Greek civilization, linked by a common culture
and religion, but separated by the then vast distances of the
Aegean Sea, found themselves menaced by an Oriental dictator-
ship, the despotism of Persia. To defend themselves against the
menace they bound themselves into a league of free nations called
the Confederacy of Delos. The politics that wrecked the Con-
federacy of Delos are as vivid today as when the archons of the
city-states wrestled and debated them as live issues. For it became
immediately apparent that there was a fundamental imbalance in
the Confederacy. Its mainspring and leader was the great democ-
racy of Athens; its lesser members were the Greek city-states of
Ionia, no less proud, but infinitely weaker and living cheek-by-
jowl with the enemy on the frontier of Persian power. Between
the Athenians and the lonians there was no clear area of under-
standing except that both were in peril. They could not agree on
how supreme commanders should be appointed, how contribu-
tions should be made to the common treasury, or on the measure-
ment of the Persian peril. Its members argued whether Athens,
which contributed two hundred ships to the Confederacy, should
have only the same single vote as the tiny states which contributed
but one. Athens insisted that it was her decision alone whether
the little states might trade with the Persian enemy, or whether
neutral states should be blockaded for such trade. The lesser states
argued that the success of the Confederacy lessened the peril and
thus its burdens might be reduced; Athens argued that only con-
stant exertion and effort kept the Persian peril contained. The
Confederacy of Delos died, finally, when the weight of Athens
pressed its lesser allies down to the servile position of puppets.
After that, Athens and the little Greek states alike decayed to im-
potence to be finally swallowed, not by the Persians whom they

FIRE IN THE ASHES

feared, but by unknown and unexpected enemies from other

quarters.

Since the day of its foundation, the North Atlantic Community
has been acting as if it were a rehearsal of the Confederacy of
Delos in modern dress, America cast as Athens and the European
states as the lonians. The thread which runs through all the meet-
ings of the Community's great senior bodies is the struggle over
how its members shall share the burdens which all know to be
necessary but none know how to apportion. Each decision taken
by civilians to meet their soldiers' measure of the peril reaches
back to the roots of their domestic politics, for they require that
young men be conscripted, that exhausting taxes be levied, that
disturbing controls be slapped on at every level of industrial life.
When the governments divide in the Atlantic Council, they di-
vide because each common burden weighs with different force in
different member countries. When they divide, they usually di-
vide in a complex system of strains which sets the United States
and Canada, who are rich and strong, against the Europeans, who
are poor and weak. This built-in rift in the Community is infi-
nitely difficult to settle because justice and common sense are so
equally divided in debate.

The European case is, in essence, that while both Europeans
and Americans are commonly pledged to defend liberty, it is
folly to defend liberty by crushing the European citizen under
such a weight of armor as to make him believe that liberty is not
worth defending. Europeans argue that America is rich, unscarred
by previous wars, and therefore best able to support the defense
against peril. They argue that America can produce 12,000 air-
planes and 12,000 tanks a year all the while throwing off re-
frigerators, chrome-plated autos and a million new homes for the
comfort of its citizens. But when the British switch to arms, it
means less toys for her children, less metallic exports to pay for
the food she must import from abroad. When Americans spend
fifteen per cent of their national income on arms, there is enough
left so that ordinary Americans may eat steak once a week, go on
vacation and buy a new suit twice a year. But when France tries
to spend twelve per cent of her national income she must pare
away at the living flesh of medical care, old-age pensions and
schools, or bury the twelve per cent in the even more wicked de-

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 307

vice of inflation. What use are arms in the hands of men too
disaffected to fight? ask the French.

The American reply is, in essence, that America has two alter-
native strategies which it can adopt. One is a strategy of trans-
Atlantic Alliance to shelter the whole domain of the free world.
The other is to go it alone, defending her continent by transpolar
bombing to keep the Russians at long range. She adopted the
strategy of the Atlantic at the request of the Europeans, who live
in the reach of Russian guns. America has been the quickest and
firmest of all powers in meeting its commitments to NATO, has
summoned her people to enormous exertions. She insists she has
the right to demand an equivalent effort of her Allies abroad. To
which the Europeans always reply that what appears to be equiva-
lent effort to Americans is always a greater proportionate strain
in countries like their own which are so much weaker.

This problem of how the great burdens should be shared has
always, inevitably, twined itself with NATO's second problem-
how to deal with the soldiers. It is the soldier's duty to impress on
his civilian government the exact military measure of the enemy
and how much is needed in troops, organization and hardware to
counter it. But when the civilians study the soldiers' requests, they
must know what the soldiers are talking about whether it is the
enemy's immediate capacity, total capacity, or apparent inten-
tions. Before the civilians agree, they must know how the burden
assumed will bear on the economy and politics of each country
involved. The story of NATO, on its political side, has been the
slow groping process by which its members have tried to come to
grips with each other and with the soldiers at the same time.

NATO began in the spring of 1949 in a total fog in which there
twirled in absolute confusion a number of imposing committees
that circulated like roadshows between Paris, London, Washing-
ton. In this fog, lesser committees of soldiers, known as Regional
Planning Groups, measured off the various sectors of defense, as-
signed them, north, south and central. Each little committee
assumed that all the might of the Red Army would come to bear
on its sector alone, and so calculating, they all made their requests
for troops. When added together their demands reached the total
of 307 divisions for Europe alone, or something like three times

FIRE IN THE ASHES

308

the Allied strength at the height of World War II. Meanwhile,
the committees of Finance Ministers, Foreign Ministers and De-
fense Ministers who are the governing bodies of the Atlantic
Community had continued in their blithe assumption that the
American war surplus stocks would be sufficient to arm the entire
defense effort, with perhaps an extra injection of five billion dol-
lars of American aid to prod the project ahead. NATO's first
shock came when the confrontation of civilians and military
showed that the gap between the soldiers' demand and civilian
provision was of the order of 200 billion dollars. Ever since, the
story of NATO, year by year, has been the slow whittling down
of the soldiers' estimates of divisions needed for Western defense
from 307 to 96 to 70 to 60, and the subordination of their esti-
mates to what the Community can afford to pay.

The present common-sense approach of NATO to its compli-
cated problems was not conceived at any single meeting, at any
single conference, by any single decision. A series of jolts pro-
pelled NATO from its early madness of irresponsible committees
into an organization which now, however primitive, points to the
way ahead.

The first series of jolts came to a climax at the Brussels confer-
ence of NATO in December of 1950 when, in the first panic of
the Korean War, as American troops were flung back in disorder
by China's Communist armies, it was recognized finally that com-
mittees could not conduct battles. It was then that all the Regional
Planning Groups were abolished, that a single military headquar-
ters, SHAPE, was set up with a chain of command over all At-
lantic troops on the Continent, that the target of effort was
boiled down from 307 divisions to 96 and General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a flesh and blood individual, was named SACEUR, or
Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

The second series of jolts climaxed in the Lisbon conference of
NATO, early in 1952. Until then, the leadership of NATO had
lain in the hands of its soldiers, and chiefly in the magic person-
ality of Dwight D. Eisenhower, with no civilian authority strong
enough or wise enough to summon the soldiers to account. At
Lisbon, finally, the soldiers were forced to answer to a body of
civilians why they wanted the troops they said they needed and

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 39

to yield to the civilians the decision as to how quickly how much
of their request could be met.

At Lisbon, the governments gathered in NATO established a
Permanent Council of the North Atlantic Treaty. This Council
of fourteen civilians was then housed in Paris to sit in permanent
session, supervising the work of the soldiers while constantly
communicating with their governments on day-to-day adjust-
ments and problems that rose in the great Alliance.

The Lisbon conference did not so much abolish the end goal of
96 divisions in Western Europe as postpone that goal. The civil-
ians pledged themselves to raise 50 divisions in the following year
and agreed to decide future targets only when current targets
had been met. (This figure has since been raised, cautiously, in
953 to a target of 56 ready divisions in Western Europe.) At
Lisbon, finally, the old concept of a Soviet timetable of attack and
war was set aside. The favorite American date of the year of peril
-i954-was abandoned. Instead, implicitly, the conferees recog-
nized that perhaps never would there be a showdown year with
the Russians, that the Atlantic world was entering into a long pe-
riod of balancing of power with the Communist world and that
success or failure would rest on a long-term test of wisdom and
equilibrium.

Now, at last, in the year 1953, the Atlantic Community has
come to recognize military goals as fluid, changing objectives.
For the spring of 1953 marked not only the maturing of SHAPE
as a military field command, but also the maturing of two devel-
opments long cultivated by the West, yet, until now, too vision-
ary to enter into the hard calculation of combat.

The one is technical it is our entrance into that era which one
of our most eminent American generals has called the era of
"atomic plenty." The swift and secret attack by American scien-
tists simultaneously on the problems of nuclear field weapons and
of the amazingly accurate NIKE guided missiles came to success
only in the fall of 1952. The impact of this success on SHAPE
thinking has been profound but is, as yet, immeasurable. Today
American generals estimate that three medium bombers could
dump the same devastation on a given front as required 2,700
bombers in the breakthrough of Saint L6 in 1944. At SHAPE,
all plans and requirements for field forces, reserves, buildup,

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 1Q

composition of tactical air force-are being freshly restudied for
the change that must be wrought in them by the addition of these
new resources.

The second development which has shaken all SHAPE'S pre-
vious military calculations is political. This is the startling uprising
of the Berlin workers in June of 1953. The Red Army of Occu-
pation in East Germany reacted to the uprising with extraordinary
technical efficiency, moving three full divisions into Berlin within
twenty-four hours, a feat wringing respect out of professional
soldiers no matter what their uniform. But this enormous drain
upon an occupation force of only twenty-two divisions, by an
unorganized and unsupported uprising of unarmed workers, has
revealed a paralyzing weakness at the base of Russian strength.
Hitherto, it has been assumed at SHAPE that the Red Army's
divisions faced forward, while the policing of Germans in the
rear could be handled adequately by the Volks Polizei and Bereit-
schaften of the Communist East German government. It is now
obvious that the East German government cannot guarantee the
security of the Red Army's rear, and that the Red Army's twenty-
two divisions in Germany (as its eight divisions in the satellites)
are insufficient to fight forward and police their rear at the same
time. For the first time SHAPE can consider defense strategy in
terms of a forward counteroffensive, with support ready and
available behind the enemy's lines.

Politically, we live still in what may be called the post-Lisbon
transitional era of the Atlantic Community. Twice each year this
Community sends its leaders to gather in Paris for the meeting of
the North Atlantic three ministers of state from each of the
fourteen members plus planeload after planeload of accompany-
ing experts. Motorcycle escorts screech through Paris as the be-
flagged limousines purr up the rise to the Palais de Chaillot. The
hotels of Paris bristle with strange uniforms as the Military Com-
mittee of the Alliance gathers to present the Council with its ob-
servations; two-star and three-star generals flick in and out of the
Committee rooms bearing bulging brief cases full of top-secret
data, dancing attendance like office boys on the yet more im-
posing four- and five-star generals who will present their thinking
to the civilian chieftains sent by the people. For three or four days

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM Jll

the ministers sit together studying the report of their military
committee, examining the account books of Western Defense,
scrutinizing the progress in the field, prying at each other's wills
and resistance as they decide what to do next.

Yet these meetings are not nearly as important as the method
and understructure of the organization they top. The full council
meetings of the great ministers are called only to review and
settle the problems that have been refined for them by the Perma-
nent Council, which, with the i5o-man corps of international civil
servants of NATO's Permanent Secretariat, has sat in year-round
supervision and interrogation of parliaments, congresses and sol-
diers alike. Each summer the soldier staffs of NATO, both at
SHAPE and in Washington, start their preparation of next year's
military targets what new airfields they need next, what pilot
training programs are required, what divisions must be activated,
what support troops must be trained. Simultaneously, NATO's
Secretariat has prepared for each member government a ques-
tionnaire several inches thick, pressing it for details of performance
toward last year's targets, its proposals for expansion and contri-
bution in the coming year, its suggestions for broad NATO de-
velopment. When all these questionnaires are in, the Secretariat
of NATO assembles an over-all picture giving the sum of military
effort of all fourteen powers, their weaknesses, their failures in
the previous twelve months, their proposed global effort for the
coming period. When this civilian compilation has been com-
pleted and placed beside the military requirements set by the sol-
diers at SHAPE, the inevitable gap between military demand and
civilian response is apparent, and the ministers of the Atlantic
Council have a clear problem to wrestle with.

If this were the only function of the Secretariat they would, of
course, be no more than a group of military bookkeepers. But
there is much more to their operation. Lightly, almost impercep-
tibly, NATO's Secretariat has cast an international restraining
authority over each nation's sovereign impulses. Long before the
ministers gather for political adjustment of their differences, the
Secretariat, acting for the Community, has summoned individual
powers to account. It has examined the books of a small Scandi-
navian power and thanked it for its promised increase of one
division next year, but persuaded it that, militarily, the Com-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 12

munity would prefer to see the increase of strength come not in
a divisional formation but in the specialist, supporting troops
which SHAPE'S generals need for flexibility of action. Long be-
fore the soldiers at SHAPE have clearly traced the problems of
1954 and 1955, the Secretariat will have singled out such a prob-
lem, say, as spare parts, and pointed out that in another three
years, when American deliveries of new equipment to the Alli-
ance cease, the Alliance will break down unless the Europeans,
now, create the industries to supply needed spare parts for the
American tanks, guns, planes and radar. Simultaneously they point
out that this burden of maintenance, added to current military
obligations, will by 1955, at the present rate of military growth,
equal the outer maximum which economists say Europe can sus-
tain. And what then?

The shadow authority of NATO's Secretariat extends even
over the United States, gently intruding in American affairs in
a way that only Congress ever exercised before. In September of
1952, for example, the United States replied to NATO's question-
ing with a 250-page document reporting all our military secrets
with the exception of atomic energy and strategic bombing policy.
For eleven days, NATO's experts pondered American replies,
analyzed them, clarified them by queries to American technicians.
Then, still unsatisfied, the Secretariat summoned the Permanent
Atlantic Council delegates of the United States to the Palais de
Chaillot to answer some twenty points which it considered ob-
scure or confusing.

In the Council room of NATO's headquarters four long tables,
covered with the usual green baize cloth, were arranged in a
square. At one side sat the American delegates like witnesses in a
witness box. Facing them was the secretarial staff of NATO. To
their left a table was reserved for other delegates from other na-
tions, for in NATO any nation has the right to sit in judgment
on the policy of any other. For the two interrogations of the
Americans in 1952, French, British, Italians, Canadians, Danes and
Norwegians sent examiners. Then came the questions:

"You say," asked one examiner, "that the United States expects
the Korean War to be over by July i, 1953. Why?"

"You say," asked another expert, "that the United States plans

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 313

to spend so-and-so much as its contribution to the infrastructure
of pipelines, airbases, communications demanded by SHAPE. Do
you plan to appropriate it as a separate item or are you going to
reduce the foreign aid program pledged to us individually by
that amount?"

"We asked you," demanded another, "to tell us just how many
divisions you have in America available for duty in Europe in
time of war and you replied 'zero/ What does that mean? Does
that mean you are going to use the home reserve of American
troops independently or that we can expect to have them at
SHAPE'S command on request?"

"How about the answer to that minesweeper question?" asks
another. "We asked how many minesweepers America would turn
over in a crisis to clear the access channels to Europe and you
said 'zero.' Does that mean you will operate them independently
or that you really have none?"

"How about America's measures to control inflation?" asked
little Denmark, and was completely dissatisfied with the answer of
the giant's spokesman.

To Americans fresh out of home such questions seem like vio-
lent intrusions on pride, for no one but American Congressmen
have ever had the right to summon the American government to
account. Yet NATO's control over America is the gentlest ex-
ercised over any government, for all governments must submit
to this examination and most are treated more harshly. Only
America, when pressed, can infrequently refuse to answer. Only
America can consistently hold out, if she wishes, against the in-
frequent i3-to-i vote in Council and make it stick. Sometimes the
British can resist a i3-to-i Council vote and occasionally the
French, too, dare outface the Alliance. But no smaller power can
do else but give in to a i3-to-i adverse vote; for them NATO is
more than a community; it is a new kind of government.

For five years, in Paris, the Communists have cast around for
words to smear the effort of the Western world to organize itself.
Each word has been chosen by the Communists in an effort to pack
the phrase with contempt. Western Europe has been called les
pays colonises, or les pays marshdlises; the Communists' ad-
versaries have been denounced as "the americanized press," or

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3H

the "americanized governments"; the process has been deftly-
ridiculed by calling it the "coca-colonization" of European civili-
zation. Recently, at last, even the Communist press has been
wrenched about to use a new word we have forced on it the
word "Atlantic." The policy of the West is now called "the At-
lantic policy." This, in a fundamental sense, is a victory, for now
communism recognizes a new field of force, a new, if primitive,
source of political energy.

It would be pleasant if NATO could relax now with this force
in being and its dearly purchased triumph of military equilibrium
in Europe. Yet the Atlantic Community is only at the beginning
of a new chapter, probably even more difficult than the old. For
it is only by comparing NATO, the governing body of the At-
lantic world, with its adversary, the government of the Com-
munist world, that its weaknesses become apparent.

The Russian dictatorship possesses the matchless advantage of
being able to deal with an entire family of problems at the same
time. The same Politburo decision that ordains an army-in-being
ordains the factories and resources to provision it; ordains swift
turns between peace offensive and malevolence; balances arms,
propaganda and resources, between Europe and the Orient, be-
tween politics and arms, with a silent shifting of gears. The Rus-
sians, globally and politically, are mechanically flexible.

What cramps the Atlantic Powers is lack of flexibility. When
the Atlantic Community acts, fourteen different powers must
agree at the same time to a common decision. When a startling
peril confronts them as did the crises of 1948 and 1950, they can
call into being the mighty array of military force that SHAPE
now commands. But as each new problem arises in the long bal-
ancing contest between the Soviet and the Western world, a new
travail must be endured as the fourteen nations attempt to strike
a common attitude.

Today, NATO is frozen about the decisions of 1948 and 1950.
These decisions rightly saw the Atlantic Basin as the centerpiece
in world strategy and moved to secure it; since then, the Atlantic
Community has rigidly dedicated itself to the creation and equip-
ment of military divisions in Western Europe. Its success has
stimulated new Russian political tactics, for the Russians react

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 315

politically as well as strategically; yet NATO, living in its post-
Lisbon state, is prepared to cope with none of them.

New problems tumble one upon the other in a cascade that no
one is yet prepared to sort out. There are the geographical and
political problems of Asia and Germany. The central position of
power in the Atlantic is secure, but meanwhile in Asia, in Korea,
in Indo-China, in Malaya, the Communists have mounted a vast
flanking operation. There can be no strong and healthy France in
Europe so long as she is mired and sickened by the infection of
war in Indo-China; there can be little even-tempered consideration
of policy in America, so long as men die in Korea.

Germany is as difficult a problem as Asia great as have been its
sins, as troublesome as its Occupation has been, its very health
has contributed to the revival of Western power. Germany trem-
bles half in, half out, of the Atlantic Community, unable to de-
cide whether, ultimately, to throw its weight with the Community
or stand aloof. The larger Atlantic Community cannot be healthy
until its leaders have decided on a common attitude to Germany.

The struggle of ideas is equally beyond NATO's present power.
NATO possesses body, limbs, organs but no soul. It keeps books
but raises no fresh flags or banners. Its propaganda staff consists
of forty-one people (including clerical staff) busy filing press
clippings or recording the progress of arms for the world's jour-
nals; its entire budget for molding opinion and explaining itself
to the world is a trivial $60,000 a year, or one-fifth of the cost
of a jet plane. Even more sadly, one must record that no multipli-
cation of budget or personnel would do NATO's public informa-
tion service any good, for there exists in NATO no central core
of thinkers, turning over the ideas of freedom to refresh its dy-
namic. No serious body of analysis studies the Russians and the
Communists in any but military terms, and nothing in NATO
provides people with the living image of the free, expanding, fluid
society which it is the armies' purpose to guard.

It is here, in political direction, that NATO is sadly wanting.
Each nation cautiously shares in NATO a tiny portion of its secret
intelligence on the Russians, and the ultimate product is a fuzzy
blur in which the enemy's purposes are never seen clearly, and
our own purpose frays as a result. British and Americans divide
in NATO on the measure of the menace is it over or is it increas-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 1 "

ing? Has it ceased to be military and become political, or is it an
ever-growing military peril? Americans and French divide vio-
lentlydo the Russians now plan to upset the economic world in
which we live, precipitating us into cycles of depressions, while
increasing their own welfare, comfort and economic capacity, as
the French hold? Or is their purpose to build and build and build
simply to erect a military machine that can crush freedom in one
blow, as the Americans hold? All these theses cannot be correct,
but if either the British or French or American thesis is the right
one, then the Community must take a radical new reading of its
purposes in the next few years. Yet it is not prepared to do so, it
fumbles while it should decide.

The Atlantic is an area in which people live who are set apart
from all other peoples by one underlying concept that of the
free man, his body free from arbitrary arrest, free from arbitrary
tax, free to speak, free to gather, free to think. It is this civilization,
challenged from within and without, that its member states have
joined to protect. Yet they have not even arrived at the definition
of their common enmities. Are other peoples with different con-
cepts of life enemies because they are different, or enemies because
they are organized by Russian control for potential assault on our
homes? Is China an enemy because she is Communist, or is she an
enemy because she has become the instrument of Russian diplo-
macy? Is the civilization of the Middle East dangerous because it
wishes to change its relation to the Atlantic Community, or be-
cause it flirts with Russian purpose? There are many communities
in this coagulating world, only one of which is sworn to destroy
Atlantic civilization, the Russian. There are the civilizations of the
Moslems, of the Dark Africans, of the Chinese, of the Indians, of
Southeast Asians. Toward each, in the new diplomacy of great
communities of men, our civilization must have an attitude. Yet
NATO is still too confined to consider them.

There remains then a final set of problems: the attitude of
NATO's peoples to each other. NATO's vigor has risen from a
military threat, and its directors have rigidly limited their deeds
to the legal words of the compact. Therefore, when such a dis-
aster as the floods of the Lowlands desolate the homes of a mem-
ber country, each member reacts individually shipping sandbags,
clothes, medicines to the stricken land, but the great executive

THE BASIN OF FREEDOM 317

machine of the Community, NATO, lies inert, unable to think or
act swiftly enough for any other purpose but war. Again, though
the European members of NATO recognize that the first upward
surge of their recovery is over and that a chill stagnation of in-
dustrial expansion has succeeded it, NATO can do nothing.
Though NATO was built to erect a barrier behind which the wel-
fare of each nation would increase in peace and safety, it cannot
find the authority to examine what next step must be taken to in-
crease that welfare.

The Atlantic Community has, in short, won its first victory-
it has created that field of power that finally inspires as Ernest
Bevin once hoped "confidence . . . within and respect else-
where." But this has been a negative victory it has been a victory
of defense, a triumph of resistance. Wars are not won by defense,
nor are souls won by men who are simply "against." With the
equilibrium of 1953, NATO has arrived only at the end of the
beginning. The tasks that knock for admittance to discussion are
those of creation, of imagination, of going forward. It is what
comes next that counts.

XIV

communism-the challenge

Americans are so frightened by the evil in communism that they
fail to see that the greatest danger is not the evil but the attraction
in it. Only Americans live in a society in which communism can
seduce no healthy mind. Most of our senior Allies and the myriad-
man countries who live outside our Alliance are made of people
who stand transfixed by fear of communism and its sinister charm
at the same time.

The magic appeal in the Communist faith is simple. It is the
belief that pure logic applied to human affairs is enough to change
the world and cure it of all its human miseries. It is buttressed by
the belief that the processes of history are governed by certain
"scientific" laws, which automatically guarantee the triumph of
communism when the situation is ripe, if only its protestants have
the courage to strike and act.

This simple credo carries an almost irresistible attraction to two
kinds of people everywhere in the world: first, to small coteries
of able and ambitious young men hungry for the ecstasy of lead-
ership, and, secondly, to larger masses of miserable ignorant people
who have just begun to hope.

To both these schools of converts, the fatal flaw in the Com-
munist faith is neither apparent nor important. This fatal flaw is
embedded in the nature of human beings whenever they gather
politically. Human beings tend to be illogical. The logic of which
communism boasts is never certain, therefore, of success in any
political operation unless simultaneously it imposes so rigid a
discipline as to make ordinary people mere bodies in the sequence
of their masters' planning. Logic cannot succeed if its premises
are to be shaken over and over again by vagrant human emotions
allowed freely to express themselves in all their passion and frailty.

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 3 1 9

Any political organization which sets out to be totally logical thus
calls for total discipline; total discipline inevitably requires police,
and police bring terror.

But the weakness of communism lies less in the calculated im-
morality of terror than in the inevitable internal appetite of the
discipline. The discipline feeds on itself; it shrinks the area of dis-
cussion and decision into ever narrower, ever tighter, ever more
cramped circles. Fewer and fewer men have less and less access
to the raw facts which are necessary for wise judgment. The dis-
cipline they control and impose inevitably sneaks back to weaken
them, to blind or deafen them into stupidity and error.

To those who come to communism out of ambition or out of
misguided intelligence, this flaw is not immediately apparent.
Each of this type of convert cherishes the illusion until too late
that the ever-shrinking circle of discipline will leave him safe at
its center of creative leadership, rather than crushed and tortured
as discipline contracts about his own soft human body. To the
second category of converts, those who come to it out of hunger
and ignorance, this flaw in communism (even if it could be ex-
plained to them) seems unimportant. They have always been
excluded from decision and control over their own lives. Com-
munism promises them simply "more"; they are ready to believe.
The hungrier and more ignorant they are, the more difficult it
is to explain to them that their own hopes and welfare are directly
dependent on the freedom of creative minds, with which they are
unfamiliar, to think independently of all discipline.

To the Western world, so challenged by communism, this flaw
in the adversary presents a grotesque problem. Communism's
prison-logical system of human organization grows in strength
decade by decade even as its leadership becomes less and less
capable of wise and sensible decision. For all its dynamism and
strength, the Communist world falls into blunders with increasing
frequency, blunders which are only rectified by great wrenchings
of policy that shake the world with disaster. To deal with com-
munism, one must recognize both its strength and its blunders
clearly.

Communist strength today is radiant with power at two levels.
It possesses, in Russia, a base of physical force adorned with every
instrument of compulsion and combat, still in flood tide of ex-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 2

pansion, carried on by the momentum of those warped geniuses
who made the Russian revolution. It also possesses, still, the fire
and power of a missionary faith, seducing men's minds everywhere
with the simplicity of its logic. Its achievements and physical
strength within its Russian base marry with its evangelical kinetic
outside Russia to give it the sweep and appearance of an irresistible
tide. Yet, by its own internal laws, as its area of control and suc-
cess spreads, its discipline must become ever tighter and ever more
constricting. And this process, extending and deepening, not only
on the periphery of satellite and associate states, but ever more
ruthlessly at the center in Moscow, has already begun to addle the
thinking, fuddle the judgment, provoke the unrest, and produce
those inevitable blunders which give the Western world its op-
portunities.

Such an event as the death of Stalin, by shaking the superstruc-
ture of discipline, by admitting for a brief moment the clash of
several opinions and the consequent opportunity for a slightly
larger area of discussion at the summit, has given the Communist
machinery of politics a momentary opportunity to review some
of its errors. But, unless communism ceases to be communism,
the process of discipline calls for a new tightening of control, a
new struggle to apply the logic of a single man to a world of dark
and uncertain phenomena.

There are both opportunity and danger in the momentary situa-
tion, but before one can take comfort from these opportunities,
one must first measure how great have been the triumphs of com-
munism and how forbidding is their portent.

The place to begin this examination is, of course, Russia. This
is because the most remarkable Communist success since the war
has taken place not in China, nor Eastern Europe, but in Russia
itself.

One stark fact protrudes like a monument through the fog of
secrecy and propaganda with which the Russians surround every
restless stirring in their system. Ostrich-like, the Western world
has consistently refused to face this fact squarely. This fact is the
stupendous industrial and technical progress of the Soviet Union
since the war. Never in the entire history of the Russian people
have they known a swifter period of industrial achievement or a

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 321

longer unbroken movement forward than that since the year 1945*
Since the war, Soviet industry has grown in heft at a rate never
equaled in any other society. Since 1945 the Russians have almost
doubled their prewar production of coal (up from 166 million tons
a year to 301 million tons), their production of steel (up from iS
million tons to 34 million tons), of oil (up from 31 million tons
to 47 million tons) and nearly tripled their production of electric
power (from 48 billion kilowatt-hours to 116 billion kilowatt-
hours). This increase, it should be stressed, is the increase only as
measured against the best Russian records of the prewar years
which means that the actual increase has been much greater be-
cause before the Russians could reach these peaks, they had to
repair war devastation greater than that of any other nation ex-
cept Germany.

Russian basic industry still measures at only one-third, roughly,
the size of American basic industry, producing a third of our
steel, a sixth of our oil, a fourth of our kilowatt-hours, three-fifths
of our coal. It is the trend, however, that is disconcerting; only
seven years ago these proportions read one-fifth of our steel, less
than a tenth of our oil, less than a fifth of our electricity, less than
a third of our coal. Since then, our industrial base has expanded
as never before in our history; yet the Russians have narrowed
the gap, not only relatively, but in a few cases absolutely. If we
project the growth curves of our industry and Soviet industry t
assuming there will be no great depression, there seems little dan-
ger that the Russians will overtake us in this generation. But our
grandchildren may have to face the disconcerting possibility that
in the world of tomorrow, Russia could be the world's prime
industrial power and America the second.

This perspective is ominous. But set against the pattern of life
in Western Europe, it is more ominous still. Western Europe-
France, Italy, Germany, England and the Low Countries is a
population bloc of 207 million people; this is the same as that
of the Soviet Union. At present the Soviet Union produces half
as much coal (301 million tons against 530 million tons), three-
fifths as much steel (34 million tons against 51 million tons), half
as much electricity (116 billion kilowatt-hours against 196 billion
kilowatt-hours) as Western Europe. Although a great gap still
exists between the two, the drama arises from the spectacular

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 22

stride and rhythm of Russian production. Since the war,^ Western
Europe has progressed at a pace swifter than at any time since
just before World War I But Russian efforts make West Euro-
pean progress seem puny. The British, for example, are the greatest
coal-producing power of Western Europe; they have not yet
recovered their prewar level of production. After seven years of
desperate effort they have now set as the target of their effort,
to be reached over a period of twelve years, an increase of 20
million tons annually. Since 1950, in a single two-year period, the
Russians have increased their coal production by a total of 40
million tons annually. The great steel-making powers of Western
Europe-England, France, Benelux and Germany-with all the aid
and prodding of the Marshall Plan have succeeded in adding only
eight million tons of new steel capacity to their economy since
the war. The Russians alone have added more than twice that
amount of capacity and plan almost to double their present total
by the end of this decade. If Russia's industrial planning goals are
metand, in view of the record, there is little reason to believe
they will not be by 1960 she will have pulled abreast of West
Europe in basic industrial production.

Up until now in the political rivalry of communism and free-
dom, freedom has been sold in Western Europe not only as a
good in itself but as a more fruitful way of acquiring the comforts
of life. For thirty-five years the contagion of communism has
been limited in Europe by the knowledge that the Russian worker
lives at a sub-barbarian standard of life. While the gap between
Russian and West European standards of life is still huge, the
possibility, although not the certainty, exists that within another
fifteen to twenty years the masters of the Soviet world can, if
they wish, close this gap. When and if the closing of this gap be-
comes apparent in material goods, the politics of Europe will
change as a tide changes; if comparative poverty becomes the
price of freedom, freedom will fight from defense positions.

To Americans, the growth of Russian industry seems laden
with many threatening prospects the prospect of an enormous
increase in military strength and power; the prospect of vast Rus-
sian patronage of the backward world by the production and
political sale of capital goods in which Russia specializes and which
the backward world needs so much; the prospect of commercial

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 323

dumping in world markets to cause the prices of grain, of gold,
of timber, of rubber, of raw materials to fluctuate wildly. The
West Europeans, too, see all these prospects, but one other worries
them more. It is that the Russians will sluice their vast productive
increases into a proportionate increase in the consumption goods
available to ordinary citizens, and that having done this, they will
lift the Iron Curtain to amplify the appeal of communism to the
workers of stagnant or slowly expanding West European lands.

In the fall of 1952, shortly after the announcement of the cur-
rent Russian Five Year Plan, the French government asked several
of its economists to draw up some statistical comparisons between
French and Russian standards of life, as they appeared likely in
the last year of the plan, 1955. By 1955, said the answering report,
the Soviet Union will be abreast, in per capita averages, of French
production. Each Soviet citizen will enjoy, statistically, 1,384
kilograms of coal as against 1,250 for the Frenchman. He will have
only 206 kilograms of steel as against 232 kilograms for the
Frenchman, but after deducting twenty-five per cent from the
French steel total for exports to pay for France's vital imports,
the Russians will enjoy more steel per capita, too. In 1955, France
will still retain a lead in electricity at least 850 kilowatt-hours,
possibly more, per head as against 756 kilowatt-hours per head
in the Soviet Union.

The report made even more striking comparisons for those
fruits of industry that actually reach the citizen and affect his un-
thinking politics. By 1955, it appears, the average Russian will
have, statistically, at his disposal twice as much grain as the average
Frenchman (870 kilograms against 350), twice as many potatoes
(600 kilograms against 300), more fish (13 kilos a year against 9.5),
more table fats (17 kilos against 14), more cotton cloth (28 yards
against 16), as many shoes (three pairs every two years). He will
still have less sugar (20 kilos a year against the Frenchman's 26),
and far less meat (24 kilos against 47 kilos). By as early as 1955
or 1956, was the prediction, Russia might, if her masters politically
wanted to, offer her citizenry standards of living roughly equal
to those of the French.

Let it be said at once that most other economists consider such
calculations outrageously gloomy. Such calculations assume that
Russia's agricultural planning targets will be met and Russian

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 2 4

planning almost always breaks down in agriculture. SucTi calcula-
tions also leave out of account not only the quality of produce
but also such essentials as fruits, vegetables, hospital care, vaca-
tions, milk and those thousand-and-one unplanned service com-
forts that go to make what we in the West consider a decent stand-
ard of living. Moreover, even though Russia by all calculations
will pull abreast of Western Europe in basic industry by 1960,
and assuming the profit goes to the citizens instead of to the war
machine, the effort to convert this basic industry into a consumer
industry will have to be prodigious. In any advanced Western
country like America, England or France, far more people are
involved in processing the basic goods of industry than in creating
them, and far more subtle skills are involved. Russia is geared to
produce generators and dams, not fractional horsepower motors
for Mixmasters, record players and vacuum cleaners. Russia is
geared to produce steel for guns and tanks, not for houses and
canned foods. Russia is geared to produce crude textiles in enor-
mous quantities to be sold by the yard to peasant women willing
to cut and sew them; she is not yet geared for the vaster effort of
ready-made clothes.

Yet the argument of just how far off the French survey is in its
judgment of the intersection year is a narrow one. If, as most
economists believe, it cannot possibly come before 1960, it is cer-
tainly possible that standards of living in Russia may overtake
standards of living in such countries as France or Italy by 1970.
After 1960 it will be only a matter of political decision on the
part of Russia's masters as to just when, and in what way, they
take advantage of their economic strength whether to pour it
into a stepped-up military effort to overawe the West, whether
to pour it into buccaneering to wreck the world market, or
whether to pour it into comfort goods for ordinary people to
disrupt the politics of Western Europe by contagion of 'demon-
stration. And it is precisely here, in all likelihood, that the major
problems of Russian foreign policy lock with the central internal
struggle now going on in Moscow.

Of all those areas which Russian secrecy guards, none is more
jealously sheltered than the inner area of decision-making where
personalities, ambitions, rivalries and emotions clash in just this

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 325

kind of problem. Like subterranean monsters, Russia's masters
grapple with each other in the deep, beyond the range of sight, and
only an occasional stinking bubble breaking to the surface tells us
that a struggle is going on at all. Because our own political think-
ing is almost hypnotized by the clash of personalities, and we lack
any such information from Russia at all, we are thus reduced to
primitive fascination with detail the counting of place and posi-
tion of leadership as the members of the Politburo line up on
Lenin's tomb in the Red Square, an examination of the lines in the
suet-like folds of Malenkov's face, the remembered rudeness of a
Stalin to a Molotov in the presence of a stranger.

This fascination with secrets at the summit is pointless, for here
all our instruments of intelligence fail. Moreover, it is dangerous
because it diverts our attention from the great peripheral areas of
Russian4ife where social pressures accumulate. Eventually, these
pressures do lock in the Kremlin's darkness, but at their birth, at
the grass roots of life, no censorship can conceal them. And these
forces are so broad, all-embracing and profound that even Russian
documents must reveal, along with the great facts of economic
triumph and recovery, the complementary facts of an internal
political struggle, developed and incubated by this economic
progress.

This internal struggle does not seem to be so much a struggle
of personalities viz. Malenkov versus Bulganin versus Molotov
although the clash of personal ambition must be important. Nor is
it even a struggle of rival organs of powerviz, army against state
against secret police against party. In its coarsest form, the struggle
seems to be one of generations. On the one side are ranged several
decades of Soviet leadership cut off by a dividing line of age near
the forty-year mark. On the other an inchoate, confused, but
potent body of men, ranging down from the forty-year mark,
press up against this old leadership. The issue, as expressed in party
speeches, is one of doctrinal orthodoxy, of hard-shell primitives
against younger, questioning revisionists. Even in the cannibal
morality of central Russian politics, issues are important; but when
issues are joined in Russia, not only policy is at stake, but the
lives of the men who divide over them. The issue at stake within
the Soviet Union seems to be, basically, how and what the Soviet
people shall do with their growing power and resources.

FIRE IN THE ASHES 326

The chief body of evidence for this assumption comes from the
proceedings of the last full-dress gathering of Russian leadership,
the Communist Party Congress of 1952. One need only match
this last Communist Congress in Moscow against its predecessors
to see how sharply age and change is working in Soviet society.

The Russian revolution was made by young men. Lenin, at the
age of forty-seven, directed the entire apparatus of revolt. But
Lenin was the old man. His chief lieutenants were Stalin, thirty-
eight, who created the machinery of secret police and terror, and
Leon Trotsky, forty, who forged the Red Army out of nothing.
Molotov was but a stripling youth of twenty-seven, yet already
old enough to be noticed by Lenin as a coming man. The early
Congresses of both party and state in the first decade of Soviet
existence were dominated by men who, in American cities, would
be considered the Junior-Chamber-of-Commerce age group. The
last Communist Congress in which all these revolutionary fathers
participated, in 1924, was an assembly of men eighty-two per cent
of whom were less than forty years old.

Since then, the party has slowly changed. As it matured under
the various Five- Year Plans and as its leaders grew older, the per-
centage of the young under forty dropped until it was only
seventy per cent. But the great purges of 1934 and 1936 butchered
off those aging revolutionary founders who were Stalin's con-
temporaries and rivals. Stalin packed the party with his own hand-
picked young men, and by the 1939 Congress the percentage of
young men under forty was up to eighty-one per cent again. This
generation of Stalin's boys has remained in power from 1934 until
today longer than any other governing group in power in the
modern world, longer even than the New Dealers, who were
their contemporaries, held power in Washington. The change in
the profile of Soviet leadership as this group has slowly aged is
traced in the records of the Communist Congress of 1952. Only
twenty-three per cent of the delegates to the last Party Congress
were under forty. Never before in the prewar party had the
middle-aged made up more than a third of the delegates, but at
the last Congress they were three-quarters of the Assembly.

Nor is this monopoly on power by one homogeneous age group
the only characteristic revealed by the last Congress. Until the
outbreak of the war against Germany, the Communists had

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 327

stressed, not only theoretically, but in actual practice, the work-
ing-class and peasant origins of their party leadership. Thus,
proudly, they recorded that in 1924, sixty-three per cent of their
delegates were of working-class origin; in 1927, seventy-one per
cent; in 1930, again seventy-one per cent; in 1934, sixty per cent.
Then, abruptly, just before the war, such social backgrounds were
dropped from the records. Instead, the Russians now describe
background only in terms of education. Today, as the record of
1952 shows, sixty per cent of the top leaders of Communist Russia,
gathered in their Congress, have received a college education and
another twenty-five per cent have had a secondary education
sufficient to classify them as intelligentsia. In their own Marxist
terms, the men of the Communist Congress of 1952 were a far
more "bourgeois" body than either the British Parliament or the
French Assembly, possibly even more "bourgeois" than the United
States Congress. Of the 709 delegates to the Communist Congress,
no less than 282 were graduate engineers, another 68 were agricul-
tural engineers, 98 were teachers or professors, 18 were econo-
mists, 1 1 were doctors, seven were lawyers.

The profile of the new Communist leadership that emerges is
quite different from that of the rough, hard-bitten, earthy men
who brought the revolution to power under the cruel and brilliant
leadership of a handful of intellectuals. What emerges is the out-
line of a group of men, predominantly middle-aged, who entered
into power after Stalin had wiped out the founding revolutionary
fathers in the purges of 1934 an -d w ^o have clung to power ever
since. If one substitutes the term "businessman" for the Russian
word "engineer" or "economist," what emerges is a governing
class dominated by the Russian counterpart of the Western busi-
nessman-producer. They are men engaged in building a material-
istic society in which the critical values are success and production,
in which no labor unions exist to restrain them and in which gov-
ernment and police are their tools and hand-servants. It is not at
all surprising to find that the most conspicuous name cast up after
the death of Stalin should be a representative of this group, Georgi
Malenkov, a man of fifty-one, trained as an engineer by the revo-
lution, summoned to power by Stalin after the 1934 purge. Nor
that the new ten-man Politburo should include about the same

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3 2

proportion of businessmen-engineers-producers as President Eisen-
hower's Cabinet.

Though the political values of these men are different^ in the
most barbarian way from those of Western businessmen, it is al-
most impossible not to be amused by how closely their cultural
values resemble those of our Victorian forefathers and how much
they scorn all those forms of art and spirit which in the West are
usually associated with the Left and revolution. Like the dynamic,
grasping Victorian man of affairs, Russian men of affairs frown
on "fancy" and "arty" experiments. In their music they like clear
melodies, not modern dissonances or harmonies-woe to the com-
poser who fails to soothe their tired minds with sweet, familiar
song. In their art they spit contempt on all those forms of modern
experimental design and color which they call "bourgeois formal-
ism." They like pictures that tell stories. Though Picasso may^be
the pride and joy of the French Communist party, Russian artists
know well that their art cannot range beyond the homiletic paint-
ings of the school of Sir Edwin Landseer on the one hand, or the
poster-craft of Madison Avenue advertising on the other. In short,
the leaders of the Russian Communist party are Philistines and
what they dislike is subversive.

Like the Victorians again, these men have easily acquired a taste
for the privileges of luxury and comfort that go with aristocracy.
Since communism is now a full generation old it has had time to
develop a system of elite complete with special privileges, that
runs with monotonous repetition from end to end of their sup-
posedly classless world. This correspondent first noticed the pat-
tern in the primitive wartime capital of Chinese communism at
Yenan which, even in its then egalitarian state, already provided
the leaders with the cleanest and neatest caves, the best food, the
warmest clothes. It had even learned how to divide the pitifully
tiny supply of milk so that babies of important people would not
go without. The pattern has repeated itself, ever since, in every
Communist capital I have been able to visit. In Belgrade, in 1949,
the elite lived in the once-fashionable streets of the Dedinje dis-
trict, with its gardened mansions, shopped at special stores where
special luxuries were available at special prices. In Budapest, in
1948, the elite lived in the fancy suburban houses across the river
in Pest, where once the bourgeoisie played in comfort, while along

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 329

the luxury row of Warczi Ucze, the leather-makers, glove-makers,
custom tailors seemed still to be doing a thriving business though
no ordinary worker could afford to shop there on his salary. At
the Leipzig fair, in 1950, the chief international trading mart of
the Communist world, the booths glowed with wares offered
for the aristocracy of communism gleaming, brass-fitted pleasure
speedboats, superb crystalline glassware, ornate ostentatious Zis
convertibles sent from Russia, as luxurious and chrome-bright as
American Cadillacs.

Those who have visited Moscowthis correspondent has not
report that the entire system of special privilege reaches an apex
there. To Moscow are shipped the Czech ornaments, the Chinese
silks, the Hungarian telephones that Russian trade extorts from its
satellites; the first seasonal consignments of Israeli oranges are
speeded to Moscow from Odessa by plane. For the generation in
command, the spoils of success include chauffeured automobiles,
modern apartments, servants, television sets. The salary after taxes
of a plant manager runs between ten and twenty times the salary
of his workers. The rewards may not be opulent in themselves,
no more perhaps than a $20,000 salary might be in the United
States. But set against the everlasting squalor of the people who
provide the rewards, in a supposedly classless society, the differ-
ences are staggering. And, when one reaches the very upper levels
of Soviet consumption the inner circle of the party or the peak
stars of movies, letters and ballet there consumption reaches a
level that few of the heavily taxed wealthy of the Western world
can any longer enjoy.

Greed and ambition work on individuals in Russia in the same
way they work outside Russia. Edward Crankshaw, the great Brit-
ish student of Russian affairs, offers for examination several quota-
tions from a recent and very popular play in Moscow called
Beketotfs Career. Beketov, the villain, is an engineer in a provincial
factory trying to sabotage production so that the plant director
might be dismissed and Bekejov step into his shoes. Beketov ex-
plains it all to his wife. \ >?

"Think, Masha, in a year or two if all goes well, we shall get to
Moscow . . . Moscow, Masha, Moscow. ... I might, who
knows, become a department head . . . not so bad, Masha, not so
bad . . . and then, why not, a deputy minister! Think, Masha

FIRE IN THE ASHES 33<3

a flat on the Gorky street, a private villa on the outskirts some-
where outside by the reservoir. . . . And you, Masha, with your
beauty will dazzle the world. ... I can see us together at a great
reception. ... I stand a little apart and feast my eyes on you,
surrounded by ministers and vice-admirals. If I close my eyes I
can see you now . . . you are wearing a long velvet dress the
color of a ripe cherry. You have golden bracelets, glittering on
your wrists. And here, Masha, just a litde above your heart burns
a diamond rose."

The play was not written to criticize Beketov's ambitions; flats
on the Gorky street, villas in the country, velvet gowns, golden
bracelets, diamond roses are all accepted as normal for those who
succeed in Russia. What the play attacked was simply the vil-
lainous methods by which Beketov hoped to reap these normal
rewards.

Russian leadership at the top conservative in taste, dictatorial
by training, increasingly accustomed to comfortdoes not want
to be disturbed from below. Yet, increasingly, one senses in Rus-
sian statements and Russian press comment that a disturbance
grows. It was the last Russian Communist Congress in 1952 which
traced the silhouette of the disturbance most clearly. The dis-
turbance rose not from a political group but from an entire gen-
eration whose sin seemed to be a simple human desire to share
some of the wealth they had laboriously produced. This genera-
tion, it appeared, though brought up under the discipline of police
terror, still itched with human desires and wants that challenged
the leaders who wanted to continue to propel Russia to further
power by a logical direction of their unslackening exertion.

The clearest description of this generation comes from the
major political event of the Congress the long, philosophical
monograph of Stalin, his last legacy to his party. Most of the old
mythical enemies had disappeared from Stalin's speech; there was
no longer any denunciation, as in by-gone years, of "Right devia-
tionism" or "Left deviationism," of Trotsky, or Bukharin, or the
White Guards. Instead, Stalin's target of denunciation was square-
ly and simply a faceless group of men described as "certain com-
rades" and then precisely defined as the young people who had
grown up under the Soviet system. It is these, said Stalin, who,
having known only "the colossal attainments of the Soviet power,"

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 33 1

feel that the state should now share with them the long-promised
wealth of communism. It is these "certain comrades" who ad-
vance the perilous idea that capitalism in the West has changed its
nature and become "progressive." It is the young who believe that
capitalist states may actually have begun to content themselves
with "average profit" and that thus one may hope to avoid war.
All these mistakes were denounced by Stalin not only as error but
as sin. The capitalists are still hell-bent not only on "average
profit" and "super-profit" but on "maximum profit," said Stalin.
It is not possible to permit the people now, at this moment, to
taste the produce of the machinery they have so sweated for
communism is still a long way off. It is not possible, said Stalin, to
relax and permit the peasants of Russia to trade and exchange on
the free market, as is their irrepressible desire. The free market
must be wiped out. It is not possible to let the millions of peasant
families finally organized in collectives begin to think that their
collective land belongs to them, even in a collective sense. The
land belongs to the state.

It is impossible to strain out of the obscurity of Stalin's speeches
a precise profile of the tension whether it was a pressure within
the party of younger leaders for more power as well as more
spoils for themselves personally, or whether it was a pressure from
the people outside seeking relaxation, expressing their pressures
through junior members in the party. Yet, in the words of suc-
ceeding speakers, it seemed a multiplication of both.

The second major pronouncement of the Communist Congress
was the speech of Georgi Malenkov, the present Premier. Malen-
kov's speech had all the earmarks of a document drawn up in
haste, by a man covering his own uncertainties, substituting facts
and generalities for specific analysis. Malenkov did not attack the
"young" as such. Picking up the Stalin line, he seemed to be
wrestling less with a conspiracy within the party against the state
than with the erosion of the party by human nature. His re-
current theme of the softening and slackening of the party is
tasseled with phrases like "rottenness," "decomposition and putre-
faction," "morbid diseases." The party, as described by Malenkov,
is infected with people using party position for personal profit,
individuals personally corrupt or simply pursuing careers. Suc-
ceeding speakers echoed Malenkov. Where Malenkov had hauled

FIRE IN THE ASHES 33 2

the corruption of the party in Ulianovsk to light, Krushchev fol-
lowed to expose the corruption of the party in Rostov. Mgeladze
described with horror a situation in Georgia all too familiar to
American politics the party machinery was becoming simply a
cloak for old mountain clans, whose cliques and families were
packing the best positions and dominating local affairs.

The chief action of the Congress was another tightening of the
discipline, which had been tightening consistently for thirty years
and which was, nevertheless, now challenged once more. The
party laws had previously given one member "the right" to spy
on another; now espionage of each member upon another was
made "a duty." Dangerously, each subordinate was made responsi-
ble for reporting on the sins, errors and weaknesses of his superiors
as if no man anywhere in the state could be trusted; simultaneously
the masses were urged to denounce the cadres. Finally, the senior
machinery of the party was reorganized, its Politburo, Central
Committee and Secretariat all devalued and reshuffled.

The acts of the Congress were perhaps the last major architec-
ture of state drafted by Stalin. They laid the base for a new and
ruthless defense of the old orthodoxies, the foundation for a new
series of purges which seemed to be only beginning when death
abruptly erased the power of the aged dictator in March, 1953.

What has happened since Stalin's death is too fresh for sober
judgment and may take years to be fully understood. In the con-
fusion of his succession, however, one fact already stands out with
striking sharpness it is how great and contrary must have been
the pressures playing within the Russian state even under his direc-
tion and bloody discipline. Within less than twenty-four hours
after his death, the detailed reorganization of party and state he
had ordained the previous October was dismantled. Within
another month even the machinery of terror had been disgraced
and its freshest victims, previously caught in a senile impulse of
anti-Semitism, released. Within the next three months a whole
series of measures were ordained to relax the discipline of state-
intellectual, economic and political and appease the pressures
from below. In the same period a new facade was erected for
Soviet foreign policy, behind which even its fundamental strategy
seems in the process of changing.

No one knows who is responsible for these decisions. All that

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 333

can be assumed from the outer episodes of Russian evolution since
Stalin's death is that the struggle over policy continues not only
among individual leaders but among the rival organs of power
(or combinations of power) they control. The swift triumph of
Malenkov over Beria; the curious appeal of the victorious group
to, and their use of, the municipal Moscow Soviet; the careful
insistence of the victors on the collective nature of their leader-
ship and repudiation of any personal ambition or virtue mark only
the first round in a struggle that promises to be long drawn out.
All that is known is that the remaining contestants for power are
drawn from a generation of middle-aged men pressed from be-
neath by that generation of the young first described by Stalin
in the fall of 1952. Whatever rivalries now simmer in the Kremlin
will probably, therefore, end with the victory of the man or men
who can most successfully mobilize from beneath the support and
the energy of the younger generation. It was thus that Stalin,
twenty years ago, mobilized their generation when young to wipe
out their elders, his contemporaries.

Externally and internally, therefore, the new leaders may find
that their needs coincide. On the Communist borders of Europe
no mobilization of force can recapture the military superiority
of yesterday when Western rearmament had not yet won its
present dominance in Central Europe. A relaxation of Soviet mili-
tary pressure might seduce apart the coalition that the policy of
Stalin created against Russia; it might even plunge the coalition
into a spiral of depression. Internally, too, such a relaxation is
politically wise, for the ultimate victor in the political struggle will
probably be the one who can give the under-generation its first
taste of comfort.

To re-establish leadership and reimpose unquestioning discipline
takes time. During this period, for an indefinite number of months
or years, the Western world may find itself face to face with a
more relaxed Russia than for many years. This relaxation offers
both opportunity and danger. It is an opportunity to solve specific
East-West disputes by dealing with men in the Kremlin who, for
their own purposes, need peace abroad for a time. It is a danger
if the Western world accepts the relaxation without counterac-
tion, letting itself go slack at home, both socially and militarily.
For if the Western world cannot organize its economic and po-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 334

litical resources for another and vaster push forward, the Russians,
as their economy and welfare expands, may win politically what
they can no longer win militarily.

However much the political struggle within Russia may mollify
the manners of Russia in the outer world, there is nothing that
promises any withering of that essential Communist faith which
considers us a world in decay and pledges the faithful to seek
our doom. Whatever tactical evolution it goes through, Russian
foreign policy is unlikely ever to diverge from that purpose which
has held firm ever since 1945 to disturb, divide or disrupt any
effort of the Western world to brace itself for the challenge of
tomorrow.

It is important, therefore, to look coldly at the techniques and
record of this foreign policy since the war. Western amateurs of
politics have frequently held that the postwar epoch has been
marked by a series of brilliant, Stalinist master-moves which have
designed the sweeping expansion of communism over the globe.
But if one breaks Russian foreign policy down, area by area, it
becomes immediately clear that neither brilliance nor foresight
was involved, and that Russia, rather than having made the most
of the opportunity offered it, has made the least. If one divides the
areas of Russian operation into Eastern Europe, the Far East and
Western Europe, one can see clearly how little wisdom or Russian
direction contributed to the triumphs which so menace us.

The record of Communist triumph usually begins with Eastern
Europe, the first area in time and geography to be added to the
Communist world outside of Russia.

Eastern Europe is a collection of eight states in which live one
hundred million people of odd races and tongues who, since the
beginning of history, have lived in fear of and under attack be-
tween the explosive forces of Germany and Russia. From the
moment the Western world was forced to join Russia in alliance
against Hitler, the West's ultimate victory was mortgaged by the
geography of war to yield the one hundred million people of
Eastern Europe to the Russians. They lay on the way from Mos-
cow to Berlin, and, if victory was to be won, they would have

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 335

to fall to the Red Army, which they did. Nothing could pre-
vent it.

The postwar politics of Eastern Europe began when the Rus-
sians proceeded to organize this purely military conquest. In 1945
it might have yielded them either an enormous increment of
political-military strength, or remained mere satellite real estate.
It has remained real estate.

Out of the lands of Eastern Europe, the Russians have won: a
buffer belt of great technical military importance which at its nar-
rowest is two hundred miles deep; an increment of industry that
adds some thirty per cent to their industrial strength but which
burdens them with fifty per cent more population; and, finally,
between sixty-five and seventy divisions of puppet satellite troops,
whom they must equip and who are offset by the defection of
Tito's army.

No conquering army could have failed of these targets; even
the Japanese, in their organization of Occupied China during the
war, did better. What the Russians failed to do, as they might
have done, was to make of these lands a basin of political infection
for all the West European nations facing them, to make of their
people, not bitterly hateful puppets, but allies, at least as reliable
as those American diplomacy has created in the Atlantic Basin.
By presenting the most repellent of all political wares in the show
window that fronts on Western Europe, the Russians urged mil-
lions of Europeans back to acquiescent loyalty to their own sick
systems. By pressing savage industrialization programs on their
satellites, the Russians have reduced their economies to misery and
prodded them to hopeless revolt. Everywhere in Western Europe,
Communist agents and zealots now must sell communism on the
basis of abstract Communist theology, while in every slum in
which they chant their message, some moody refugee from Com-
munist Hungary, East Germany, Poland or Rumania can testify
to the brutality of its actual practice.

The blunder was, of course, inherent in the fatal flaw of com-
munismits need to impose discipline. For the Russians did not
enter these lands entirely unloved; nor did they find stony soil in
which to plant their gospel.

No episode returns to my memory of Eastern Europe with
greater clarity than an incident of a visit I made to Hungary in

FIRE IN THE ASHES

1948. For the Hungarians, 1948 was the Indian summer of their
recovery. Men had recuperated from their war wounds, the
women were gay, the fiddlers loud, the night clubs thronged, and,
most important of all, the first good postwar harvest had been
gathered in. That fall the Russians chose to begin both the col-
lectivization of the land and the purges. Two Communist escort-
interpreters drove me out into the country to visit one of these
new collective farms.

We arrived at the farm late in the evening, and the old chairman
of the collective greeted us with a big bottle of vodka, a plate of
red peppers and salt, and a hearty welcome. I wanted a picture of
exactly how they had made the "revolution" in that village.

The old man started at the very beginning, with the land. The
land had belonged to the manor lord. The peasants had lived in
the ramshackle muddy [/-shaped stable compound, where pigs
wallowed in the mud, geese cackled and farm animals evacuated. It
had been that way as long as they could remember. Then Marshal
Tolbukhin's Red Army drove through, pushing the Germans be-
fore them, and established its headquarters a few miles away. It
was only a few days after Tolbukhin had set up camp that Ber
Julio returned one day from a visit to headquarters.

At this point I interrupted and asked, "Who was Ber Julio?"

"Ber Julio?" said the old man. "You don't know Ber Julio? Ber
Julio was the man who made the revolution here."

"But who was he?" I asked.

"Oh, he was one of us," said the old man. "Ber Julio was always
interested in politics; he was even a member of the Small Peasants
Party before the war. He was a fine man, was Ber Julio, with big
black eyes and a wonderful, beautiful black mustache. How he
liked to talk! He was always talking. He came back that day from
Tolbukhin's headquarters and called us all together, right here. He
got up on a table and he said, 'Comrades, this is the greatest day of
our lives. Now the land belongs to us and we are going to divide
it!' Everybody was there, the men, the women, the children; some
of the women even brought their chickens along so they shouldn't
be stolen, and some men carried their pigs, too. Ber Julio sat in the
courtyard on a chair in front of the table; there was a red-check
table cloth on the table, and he told us just how we were supposed

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 337

to divide the land, how we should make a list of families who
needed land and then how we should measure."

I interrupted again for the story seemed a gay one, and I wanted
more detail. "Well, where is Ber Julio now? Let's call him here
and have Ber Julio tell us exactly how they divided the land."

At this a hush fell over the table, swiftly broken by a clatter of
excited and angry Hungarian in which Ber Julio's name was re-
peated over and over.

"What's the matter?" I asked the interpreter. "What's going
on?"

Nothing was the matter, said the interpreter, nothing. Ber Julio
just wasn't here today. But where was he, I persisted, where could
I find him and talk to him. At this there came more Hungarian,
equally excited, and finally the interpreter turned and said, in
white embarrassment, "It's difficult to talk to Ber Julio he's been
arrested."

My face must have shown astonishment, for again a flow of
angry Hungarian burbled around the table, this time directed
against the interpreter. The man flustered, paled, expostulated in
Hungarian to the others and then turned to me and said sharply,
dropping a black curtain over the conversation, "Ber Julio is not
important. You have asked to see collective farms. Let us tell you
about the collective farm and the houses we are building."

Ber Julio, thus, had been arrested within three years of the time
he brought the "revolution" to his village from Marshal Tol-
bukhin's headquarters. How many hundreds of thousands of other
Ber Julioes have been arrested in the years since then, no one can
count. Since 1948 police budgets have jumped in every state in
Eastern Europe from an increase of fifty per cent in Bulgaria to
an increase of four hundred per cent in Poland, where it equals
two-thirds of the military budget. Estimates of those imprisoned
or exiled to forced places of residence range up to a million. West-
ern attention has been fascinated by the phenomenon of the self-
cannibalizing coalitions which the Russians set up as government
in all the Eastern European states. Each of these coalitions was
first devoured from within by those who controlled the apparatus
of Communist discipline, and then the discipline, in turn, devoured
and murdered the Communists themselves, until now the entire
original leadership of the Czech, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Hungarian,

FIRE IN THE ASHES 338

and Albanian Communist parties is gone, and that of the Polish
has been severely punished. But the names of the sincere men,
innocent dupes, shabby careerists and merciless vendettists selected
by the hangmen at the top run only to hundreds; it is at the base,
where Ber Julioes in countless thousands have disappeared, that
the Russians have thrown away a loyalty they might have had.

If this thrusting-away of all normal native sources of friendship
was the most serious general blunder imposed on the Russians by
their mechanical compulsion to discipline, the sharpest single de-
feat it brought was the loss of the Yugoslav state.

Since the breach between Russia and Yugoslavia, scores of
Yugoslav officials from Tito down have offered fragments of the
story. Yugoslav editors complained about the insistence by Rus-
sian news agencies that they print dull Russian copy instead of hot
Yugoslav copy; Yugoslav trading agencies told how Russia forced
on Yugoslavia shoddy and faulty equipment at prices two and
three times world market prices; Yugoslav planners described Rus-
sia's insistence on acquiring Yugoslav natural resources and key
communications on terms that would shame the most reactionary
imperialist oil company. But none of these tales is as illuminating
as the original Tito-Moscow correspondence which opened the
breach.

The issue was joined, squarely, on none of these lesser matters
but simply on discipline. Only after almost three weeks of
wriggling defensive correspondence could Tito bring himself to
make his first countercharge. "If you were to ask us," wrote Tito
to Stalin, "if there were anything with which we were not satisfied
on your part, then we would openly say that there are many rea-
sons why we are dissatisfied. What are these reasons? It is impos-
sible to mention all the reasons in this letter, but we will mention a
few. First, we regard it as improper for the agents of the Soviet
intelligence service to recruit in our country, which is going to-
ward socialism, our citizens for their intelligence service." What
Tito was trying to escape, precisely, was the tightening of the
circle of discipline about him, as his own party had tightened it
about so many others.

By contrast, the most amazing thing in all the Russian letters was
not their insistence that all satellites should submit to Russian dis-
cipline (said Stalin in reply, ". . . It is only natural for Soviet

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 339

workers to talk with Yugoslav citizens, to ask them questions and
to gain information, etc."), but how this discipline and the narrow
channels of its intelligence blinded them. For the ultimate Russian
judgment was that their final appeal to the Yugoslav people to
overthrow Tito and destroy him would be successful. Blinded by
their own misleading information, they lost.

What is equally importantfrom their experience with Tito
the Russians learned but little. The heresies for which Tito was
blasted out of the Cominform excessive nationalism, opposition
to collectivization, conciliation of rural "kulaks," suspicion of
Russian trading motives were denounced as sin in 1948. Only in
1953 did the Russians begin to realize that Tito, not their own
intelligence net, had been correct in political appreciation of East-
ern Europe.

From 1948, after the breach with Tito, the Russians proceeded,
in Eastern Europe, to impose the most rigid programs of heavy
industrialization while simultaneously exhausting the satellite econ-
omies either by reparations (as in Rumania, East Germany and
Hungary) or by outright trade thievery (as in Czechoslovakia
and Poland).

All this was very logical by the theory of Communist industry.
Statistically, the results read beautifully as satellite after satellite
wrote new records in steel production, electricity production and
coal mining. But in human terms the adventure added up to a
series of blunders which were not evident through the layers of
their own misinformation until the spring of 1953. For the greater
the effort invested in mills, mines and equipment, the less effort
remained to provide ordinary people with food, clothing and
shelter, until finally the resentment of hungry, tortured people
who could not eat statistics vented itself in the disturbances of
the spring and summer of 1953.

Beginning in the early winter of 1952-1953, with the recrudes-
cence of guerrilla resistance in Poland (quiet since 1948), spreading
in May with the rioting in Czechoslovakia, bursting out uncontrol-
lably in Poland and East Germany in June and July, the fermenting
resistance forced a total revision of Russian policy of occupation
by midsummer.

Nothing is more eloquent, perhaps, of both Russian shortsight-
edness and Russian cynicism than the experience of Matyas Ra-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 34

kosi, puppet dictator of Hungary. Having extorted, in May of
1953, a spurious ninety-eight per cent vote of support for his dic-
tatorship, Rakosi took off for Moscow to parade his triumph be-
fore his masters. From this trip he returned to find himself, six
weeks after his electoral triumph, removed from office, stripped
of honor and dignity, and all his policies repudiated. Whereupon
his successor puppets proclaimed the imminent liquidation of col-
lectives, repudiated the heavy industry program, amnestied thou-
sands of "kulaks" and enemies of the regime-exactly as Tito did
three years earlier.

The Russians in Eastern Europe, in short, have gained no more
than the minimum advantage mortgaged to them in advance by
war. This minimum advantage they have squandered by terror and
ruthlessness, to make of their prize one of the greatest handicaps
communism in the West must overcome today, and one of the
more promising opportunities for Western counterthrust in the
future. There, where the Red Army and police are most firmly in
control, they are politically least potent, and communism least
challenging.

The Communist victory in China, too, is usually regarded as a
magnificent triumph of Stalinist leadership, the greatest single
burst of Russian expansion since Yermak Timofayevitch brought
his horsemen to water in the Amur in 1581.

Centuries hence it will probably be seen differently, for the his-
torian of the future will be able to set it against its proper back-
ground of time. This background of time begins with the extraor-
dinary nineteenth century, during which the states of Western
Europe succeeded, in less than one hundred years, in bringing
Asia, Africa and, in fact, the whole world, with its many tongues
and traditions, into single submission to Atlantic civilization. To
the historian, the unique quality of this expansion will be quite
apparent; so will the fact that withdrawal by the Atlantic Powers
from these areas was inevitable under the stress of geography and
the nature of human beings. It was quite impossible, he will realize,
that the Chinese could remain forever placid as foreign gunboats
patrolled their rivers, foreign troops quartered in their chief cities,
foreign officials ran their postal systems, foreigners directed their

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 341

universities, set their customs and collected their taxes, while
Chinese sat by humiliated and excluded.

Revolt was inherent in this situation. But the historian will also
see how this natural revolt coincided with another revolt almost
perfectly tailored to fit the Communist faith. In Asia, the Commu-
nist faith finds people sharply divided into numberless hordes of
ignorant and hungry, a thin layer of time-descended, antique vil-
lage gentry who govern and a tiny few who possess modern learn-
ing and education. To the hungry and the ambitious, communism
offers opportunity which, in those eyes that have never seen lib-
erty, seems fresh and golden. For the able young men it offers
jobs, careers, achievement. To the hungry, communism offers no
less than they had before and perhaps more. Communism kills, tor-
tures, executes and mangles in Asia, but the hungry have always
known this at the hands of their governments. To counter the
hungry hordes and the ruthlessly ambitious young men there
exists no solid middle class as in Europe, nor even a substantially
prosperous working class that has tasted liberty. There exists, as
a counter to both, only the millennial old layer of village gentry
who have forever controlled law and order in those gatherings of
huts which stretch endlessly across the horizon of Asia, village
touching village as far as the eye can see.

The Russians did not invent this situation in China; they came
upon it ready-made and only after thirty years of error did they
finally succeed in profiting by it. The revolt in China grew from
the impact of Communist faith upon a rotting society, not by the
discipline or control of Russia.

The Chinese Communist party, as it stands today, is, indeed,
the result of a conflict with Russian leadership. The Russians, like
the Atlantic Powers, experimented for years with a succession
of warlord adventurers who seemed to them, momentarily, to
represent the tide of change. It was the Russians, not the Amer-
icans, who first created Chiang Kai-shek as a man of fame, giving
him the captaincy of the early Nationalist Armies and an honorary
Vice-Presidency in the Comintern. The original Communist party
of China, organized in the early 1920*8 by the Russians, perished
in 1927 when Stalin ordered it to obey Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang
Kai-shek annihilated it. Stalin discarded Chiang Kai-shek only
after Chiang had first discarded him. What was left of the Chinese

FIRE IN THE ASHES 34 2

Communist party after this disaster was then ordered by Moscow
to concentrate its activity in the large cities of China's coast to
agitate among the workers of dock, mill and factory.

By this time, however, many Chinese Communists had become
embittered by the mechanical way in which adventurers sent
from Russia disposed of their lives and destinies. A minority fac-
tion of the Chinese Communists, therefore, split with the docile
majority of the party and declared, with prescient shrewdness,
that China's revolutionary future lay in the villages of the hun-
gry peasant population; the enemy's weakness lay in the weak
and crumbling landlord-gentry, not the tiny but modern, urban
middle class which might resist. This faction was excoriated,
anathematized and cast into outer darkness by international com-
munism long before the word Titoism had been invented. But it
survived, while the original, official Communist party of Russia
was hacked to death in the streets of the cities by Chiang's police.

This splinter-party not only survived; it became the progenitor
of Asia's revolution, and its leader, Mao Tse-tung, is now the mas-
ter of China and the men of his choice and early companionship
are Red China's overlords.

Neither in original concept nor in military aid did Mao's move-
ment owe anything to the Russians. Not until six years after the
breach year of 1927, when Mao's riflemen had carved a Commu-
nist Republic in South China out of tens of millions of peasants,
did the Comintern in forgiveness come to its support with espio-
nage, arms and advice. But this advice proved as disastrous as the
earliest Russian advice to the Chinese Communists, for it led to a
premature attempt by Mao's hit-and-run guerrillas to go over to
positional warfare. When, as a result of this advice, Mao's guer-
rillas were driven out in 1934-1935 in the foot-retreat from South
to North China known as the Long March, Mao turned in fury on
the chief military advisor sent from Moscow and placed him un-
der arrest, in which captive condition he remained for six years
until he could take flight back to Moscow.

The strain between the Chinese and Russian brands of commu-
nism, which began at the moment of Mao's seizure of Asian lead-
ership in 1927, persisted through every verifiable turning of this
association down to the final sealing of the Russo-Chinese Alliance
in 1950. Through this discord, it should be noted, Russian analysis

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 345

persisted in an underestimate of Chinese Communist strength and
power as gross as was Chiang Kai-shek's.

This underestimate shows most clearly in the Yalta agreements,
perhaps the most misunderstood of all modern historic documents.
By the Yalta agreements, Americans and Russians made the coldest
kind of bargain, snipping off slivers of China's living domain, with
American consent, to hand to Russian imperialism. It was a deal
that had only one possible interpretation. By recognizing Amer-
ica's power to dismember China, Russia implicitly recognized
America's mastery over and sphere of interest in all the rest of
China (much as they probably hoped, by the same bargain, that
America recognized Russian suzerainty in Eastern Europe). Those
who refused to recognize the deal were the Chinese Communists.

The underestimate shows again in the looting of Manchuria.
When the Russians rushed into Manchuria in the last week of war,
they stripped it of its industrial vitals as savagely as they attempted
to strip Eastern Germany. Removing machinery and equipment
valued by the Chinese at $2,000,000,000 (by the Americans at
$800,000,000), the Russians left industrial Manchuria a smoking
wasteland, its factories a wilderness of empty sockets. It is difficult
to conceive that Russia, if she had believed that China would soon
fall under her leadership, would have ravaged a base which might
have speeded China's regeneration by a decade.

The underestimate shows again in the last reliable report of Rus-
sian-Chinese Communist clash supplied by British sources in that
critical year of the Asian War, 1948. In July, 1948, the Chinese
Communists called a supreme military conference in southern
Hopei to debate and decide the prospect that lay before them.
Manchuria was about to fall; Chinese Communist troops were al-
ready far south of the Great Wall, poised to strike at Chiang's;
scattered troops in the central valleys. The Russian military dele-
gates this time advised caution. They declared it was too soon to
strike, that Chiang was still too powerful to be overthrown with-
out three or four more years of guerrilla operation. Against this
view, Chou En-lai, now China's Premier, took the floor to insist
that now was indeed the time one final push and all would fall
Chou's party listened to Chou, not the Russians, and fourteen
months later all China floated the red banners.

It was only then, after a generation of fumbling, that the Rus-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 344

sians found their opportunity. They had, in all likelihood, delayed
the triumph of the Chinese Communists by a full decade. But how-
ever late they formally recognized the power of Communist China
(Russia recognized her only three months before the British gov-
ernment), they found in the new situation an opportunity almost
impossible to fluff. The new Chinese revolution had come to
power with fanatic hatred of all things American, resulting from
America's prolonged and bungled intervention in China's civil
war. All the Russians had to do was to keep the hatred boiling.

Moreover, the very nature of Chinese Communist leadership
called for just the kind of operation that Russia was now able to
mount. Mao and his brethren within China had been remarkable
social engineers, coldly efficient organizers of manpower, gifted
with a political understanding of their own country of which
other Communist parties, slaves to Muscovite direction, were bar-
ren. Yet in the outer world of the twentieth century, where dif-
ferent tools and techniques from any known in peasant China are
employed, the Chinese Communists were almost amateurs. No
group of leaders had ever been more swiftly whirled out of total
ignorance and destitution to command so powerful a force. Until
his 1950 visit to Moscow, Mao Tse-tung had never been outside of
China and had spent most of the previous quarter-century in hill
villages among the most primitive of his countrymen. Chou En-lai
and Chu Teh, his two most prominent deputies, had both spent
only the briefest student years in Western Europe twenty-five
years before, to which Chou had added a several months' con-
valescent stay in Russia during the Sino-Japanese War. Only four
years before their intervention in the Korean War, all of them had
been forced to trudge in sandaled feet, as refugees, from their
cave capital at Yenan before Chiang Kai-shek's advancing armies.
And now they led the most powerful community in Asia. Russia
needed only to warp their untutored minds and cultivate their nat-
ural suspicions to use them for her purposes in the outer world.

Russia's championing of China in the United Nations and the
outer world is ordained thus not only by Communist brother-
hood but by essential imperial policy, too. For if Russia makes her-
self the only middleman between China and the West, all Chinese
thinking can be distorted and twisted to Russian purpose. Within
this isolation it is possible to drench not only the public Chinese

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 345

press but the inner understanding of her leadership with Tass re-
ports, Russian diplomatic reports, Russian espionage reports. To
keep China mentally isolated from the West until the mechanical
discipline of Moscow can manacle, physically, the organization of
Chinese communism is vital for Russia. And war in Korea, for the
Russians, must have offered not one but two virtues. Not only has it
drained Western strength month after month, but more than that,
it has kept China dependent on Russian aid and thus on Russian
diplomacy.

The expansion of communism in the Far East is thus not the
triumph of Russian calculation, but the triumph of Communist
faith in an overripe social situation in which the West let itself be
trapped on the losing side.

Here again the immediate perspective is one of hope and danger.
For if the internal logic of communism demands ever greater,
ever tighter discipline, Russian instruments of discipline must be
at work as they are everywhere in the world of communism,
squeezing, prying, grasping at the central machinery of Chinese
communist control. Yet no advantage can be taken of that fact so
long as the Chinese are isolated and must be fueled, armed and
munitioned by the Soviets. It is unnatural to believe that a man
like Mao, who so often proved himself right when Stalin was
wrong, should now at the zenith of his power suddenly adopt the
cloak of humility in the presence of Stalin's successors. Yet there
is little chance of any breach between Peking and Moscow until
Mao, himself, feeling his strength, conscious of Russian ambition
and blunder, finds an opportunity to think for himself.

The burden this imposes on the West is emotionally staggering.
It has already required war, bloodshed and sacrifice of our youth,
month after month, in an attempt to convince Chinese communism
that it has stupidly called into being superior and hostile force. And
the truce we have won in Koreawhether offered on Mao's own
initiative or suggested by the Russians is meaningless unless it is
linked to greater strategy. This strategy requires only that when
the war is finished we must turn quickly and shrewdly, our wounds
still aching, with sorrow in ten thousand homes, to offer Mao Tse-
tung an exit out of the Russian world into a larger and freer one
where he can make his own decisions and act in his own interest.

FIRE IN THE ASHES

It is, however, in the third and last area of Russian enterprise
abroad Western Europe that the contradiction between com-
munism's stultifying mechanical discipline and the kinetic, ex-
pansive power of its faith shows clearest. In Western Europe,
communism, stripped of its police garments of secrecy, operates
open to our examination. And it is probably in France that the im-
posing resources of communism, are most clearly wasted by politi-
cal stupidity.

The French Communist party is the most valuable piece of
property Russia owns within the Atlantic world. In many ways it
is a frightening thing. It is not a band of wild-eyed, ranting street
radicals, nor a convocation of visionaries, nor yet a parcel of
chivied and harassed clerks. It is a solid, powerful organization
whose leaders are not hunted little men but powerful adminis-
trators, endowed, as all members of the Communist elite, with
their substantial luxuries automobiles, bodyguards, chauffeurs,
villas in the suburbs, good food and great prestige. Under different
names, the party owns impressive blocks of Paris and provincial
real estate. It is the greatest publishing enterprise in all France,
owning and controlling more daily newspapers (sixteen) than any
other publishing group, and distributing half a dozen of the na-
tion's largest weekly magazines. It directs a dozen-odd training
schools over the country, specializing in all techniques from con-
trol of labor unions to the tactics of street battle in a riot. It has a
paid, internal, full-time bureaucratic staff of 14,000 functionaries
who are as devoted to the preservation of these jobs and their live-
lihood as desk men anywhere. Beyond that it knows that within
and without its own paid staff, it can command a core of hard
men, the so-called "durs," who number perhaps 10,000 zealots
ready to go out and die in the streets at its command.

Moreover, it is a fighting organization. Year by year, since the
early fluid days of Liberation, the Communists have perfected the
tactics of riot and street-bloodshed until they are as elaborate as
any field manual produced for the United States Army. Com-
mando squads are drilled and trained by Communists in every ma-
jor city of France; they have mobilization procedures which
gather zealots at collection points in industrial slums and factory
districts and commit them to action in converging columns on any
given point. Their tactics are refined down to the precise selection

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 347

of riot areas (usually, in Paris, a large subway intersection is
chosen, for subway exits and entrances make the best sally ports
and escape vents); their street weapons are perfected to the point
where Communist pikestaffsspike-studded staves are fixed at a
length ten inches longer than a policeman's club.

Probably no other Communist party in the world has carried the
theoretical study of insurrection and street violence to the same
degree as the French Communists. But what one technique can
achieve, another technique can counter, and in the past five years,
the French police system has elaborated a drill-and-routine system
for meeting street violence which beats anything the Communists
can oppose.

Yet what cripples the Communists most in their riots is not only
this police system but even more the political blindness with which
their own discipline directs Communist force. Violence is a tech-
nique which, in the theory of insurrection, can succeed only when
it is supported by vast masses of ordinary people who fall in be-
hind it. And here, at this juncture of political acumen and me-
chanical tactic, the French Communist party finds itself manacled
by Russian discipline.

The most remarkable demonstration of political stupidity by
French Communists was the mechanically successful riot called to
protest the arrival of General Ridgway in Paris on May 27, 1952,
The Communist rioters were given as their street-slogans the lies
of American germ warfare in Korea, and Ridgway was labeled the
Germ-Killer. The zealots marched into the streets, did brilliantly
and were beaten. The rest of Paris stood apart from the riots, calm
and unruffled.

The stupidity of the Communists, from a political-insurrection-
ary point of view, lay in the choice and timing of their issues. On
the very day that the Communists summoned the miserable slum-
denizens of Paris to riot against Ridgway, a choice issue had just
been offered to them on which hundreds of thousands of Parisians
might have joined them in the streets. That day was the day on
which the pacts of the European Army were signed at the Quai
d'Orsay, and a French government agreed to German rearmament.
Given the age-long hatred of Frenchmen for Germans, given the
remembered cruelty of yesterday's Occupation, uncountable num-
bers of Frenchmen would have backed the Communists in bloody

FIRE IN THE ASHES

protest. But much as they might have wished, the discipline of in-
ternational communism deprived French Communists of this explo-
sive opportunity. Only a month before the riots, the Russians had
diametrically reversed their previous policy and called on the world
to permit a German National Army again. Since Russia was now
in favor of a German National Army, French Communists had to
be, too. And so they had to go into the streets on an issue that was
a lie and could find no support except from their zealots. They
shed blood and were beaten at a moment when, had they been free
to choose their own policy, they might have brought down a
French Cabinet.

This political isolation is the greatest problem of the French
party today. For, like the Russians, the French Communists have
concentrated on organization, technique and discipline to the ex-
clusion of new political thinking. The party is not permitted the
initiative of imagination which is so necessary to make a fresh ap-
peal Thus, it rests on its base, grows fossilized, moves only me-
chanically, improves only technically. It retains hard, operational
control of the greatest labor union federation in France, but this
federation, the CGT, has fallen from 6,000,000 dues-payers in 1946
to 1,500,000 today. The party still retains probably half a million
card-holders out of a postwar high of a million. But even these
card-holders no longer come willingly to party headquarters to
pick up their cards each year; instead the zealots must go from
house to house to woo laggard members, inviting dubious back-
sliders to cell headquarters for a party of cakes and wine, at which
cards are slipped into their hands with great ceremony. Although
the party is still the largest publishing enterprise in France, the
circulation of its chief official daily, UHumanite, has fallen from
a postwar high of 600,000 readers to 175,000.

Communism in France is stagnant; it has nothing new to say; it
earns no new members. How then is it possible that this fossil
force can still, in any election in France, earn twenty-five per cent
of the votes of free and intelligent Frenchmen? How is it that in
the spring of 1953 the Communists could win enough votes to
give them the mayoralties of hundreds and hundreds of villages,
towns and cities in the most libertarian of European nations?

The answer brings us to the irreducible core resources of com-
munism. The resources are not embodied in guns and tanks, in or-

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 349

ganizations or pikestaffs. They lie in the permanent opportunity
that such countries as France, Italy and Greece offer to any revo-
lutionary party as it was offered in China. The sickening social rot
in these countries, the filthy, tumid slums of the poor made even
uglier by the extravagance and luxury of the rich, have created in
the course of a century a class of men who are permanently dis-
affected from Western European society. One-fourth of France,
one-third of Italy, has no confidence that the democratic process,
liberty, reason, Church or God will give their children good food,
good schools, good clothes, sunlit rooms. The metropolitan area of
Paris an urban agglomeration of 5,000,000 people has built, in
the eight years since Liberation, only 3,500 low-cost housing units,
while the minimum estimate of need in the area is for 20,000 such
units every single year. In the city of Paris, for the past three
years, one out of the city's twenty wards (arrondissements) has
accounted for half of all new housing built; this arrondissement is
Passy, where live the rich, the comfortable, the fat who can afford
to purchase space in the clean, new, privately financed buildings
going up. But in those arrondissements which are unofficially
called workers' quarters, eighty-two per cent of the housing is
over ninety years old, built before the American Civil War. In
these arrondissements, where the majority of Parisians live, it is
believed that as many houses have been condemned as inhabitable
or collapsed of decay as have been built since the war; the city
government refuses even to divulge such figures of decay and con-
demnation out of shame. The estimated hundred thousand young
couples in Paris who have no home of their own, and no hope
of getting one, expect nothing from anybody. The health charts of
Paris trace inescapable patterns; if one superimposes the charts of
distribution of tuberculosis, malnutrition and overcrowding in
Paris' electoral wards over any political map of the city, these
wards where misery is highest coincide precisely with the wards
the Communists carry.

Over a period of twenty years, the French Communists have
wriggled their way into the leadership of the disinherited. But
these legions of hopeless men are not of their creation; they have,
in France, much deeper roots. From grandfather to father to son,
French workers hand down tales of a century of rioting and clash
with the cops. The flic is the natural enemy of the worker in a

FIRE IN THE ASHES 3JO

hundred industrial slums across France; he has been the enemy
since the Paris Commune of 1870 and probably longer than that.
Such men have heard from their fathers, who have heard from
their fathers, how lampposts can be torn down and cobblestones
torn up to make barricades to stop a police rush. This mass of one-
quarter of a nation which, for a hundred and eighty years, has
been ever in pursuit of a revolution and been ever denied its fruits,
has now fallen under Communist leadership, much as a medieval
fiefdom might be seized by a strange, rude baron when its rightful
legatees were too weak to defend it.

The Communists may stand isolated as they do now in French
politics not only from the nation as a whole, but from the sub-
merged quarter of the population too. Workers no longer pay
dues to the party with the same regularity; they may refuse to
strike on political issues in Russia's interest which cost them a day's
pay; hundreds of thousands of them have stopped buying the
Communist papers. But when voting day comes, they trudge to
the polls and vote Communist because it is the party of the slums,
the party all the gars vote for. They may loathe and despise indi-
vidual party leaders and party thugs. But no other party offers
the single thing they want most: to kick the system apart, to turn
it over, to change it. They may read in their papers that other
workers in Poland, Czechoslovakia or East Germany riot bloodily
against comrnunism-in-power as a new system of exploitation
but they do not believe it. Among such men, the missionary impact
of Communist faith meets little resistance; they may or may not
know that the change communism brings will deprive them of
liberty. But that does not matter to them yet; their muscles, anger
and devotion are ready to be mobilized by anyone who offers
change.

As they won Eastern Europe by the automatic fortune of vic-
tory, and won China by the subterranean working of the native
Asian revolt, so the Communists have inherited these people in
Western Europe in a game of no-contest. What is remarkable is
that Russian leadership has been able to turn these resources to so
little profit. In part this failure has been due to the active, positive
wisdom of the Atlantic Powers in the Atlantic theater of opera-
tions. But in equal part it is probably due to the manner in which

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 351

the logic of Communist discipline committed Communist policy,
until now, into the hands of Joseph Stalin.

Now that Stalin is dead, it is possible to see his role in events
more clearly. In his time, the world lived in the presence of an au-
thentic genius. But it was a genius of hideous malevolence, and it
is one of the paradoxes of man's chronicle that the Marxist faith
which sprang from total repudiation of the individual's value and
importance should finally become slave, as no other faith in his-
tory, to one sole personality and that personality, Joseph Stalin.

What was positive about Stalin's genius were his qualities as
executive and administrator, first recognized by another diabolical
genius, Lenin. It was Lenin who discovered that he possessed in
Stalin, among the scores of noncommissioned officers of Bolshe-
vism, a man who commanded gifts of organization granted to few
men in any era, and it was under Lenin that Stalin was first per-
mitted to organize a party, a secret police, a state and a machine.

Only after Lenin's death, however, did the talents of Stalin
come to full fruit as he proceeded to captain that stupendous de-
velopment of Soviet resources which still, even in our hostile eyes,
must evoke awe. The Stalin reflected through the fragments of
gossip of scores of men who have met and talked with him is a
man whose mind grasped facts and sorted them out with the im-
personal efficiency of a calculating machine. Over and over again,
foreign visitors reported with astonishment the range of his factual
knowledge on steel production in America, on meat production
in Argentina, on bauxite development in Bosnia. Stalin's fascina-
tion with and mastery over the supreme elements of industrial
management are now celebrated forever in the steel mills, coal
mines, planes, guns and concentration camps that he caused to be
erected over the vast, seemingly measureless expanse of Russia.

This genius of organization, however, had severe limitations.
Like most executive types, Stalin's weakness lay in policy making.
As long as Lenin lived in vigor and was braced by the other
coruscating Bolsheviks of the early revolution, Stalin was used as
the hard, merciless executive arm. But he was excluded from the
higher circles of policy-making and decision from the weeks of in-
surrection in 1917, in which Stalin consistently misjudged the po-

FIRE IN THE ASHES 35 2

litical situation, to the season when Lenin himself was brought
low by paralysis and death.

Lenin himself guessed wrong in his belief that organization was
a mechanical thing which could safely be entrusted to Stalin. Or-
ganization has a life of its own, a dynamic rhythm and greed that
forever seeks to tighten, to expand, to perfect. And it was in the
expansion of the organization of communism that Stalin, its mas-
ter, moved slowly out into the world of policy-making, where his
errors were written into the bloody sorrow of our generations and
concealed only by the fantastic myth-making machinery the or-
ganization threw up to protect his prestige.

Perhaps no statesman of any time has a record of so many mis-
calculations, of such magnitude, over so long a period of time as
Joseph Stalin. Through them all runs a single thread, a single ele-
ment of error. They were all political, not organizational, mistakes,
and all showed themselves wherever Stalin came in contact with
the outer world. Wherever his police and administrative machin-
ery could impose discipline and control, the success of this un-
taught mountaineer was uncanny. Where he made his errors was
always in the judgment of the free impulse of human beings, of
how they might react, how they might express themselves beyond
the areas of his police control. Trapped by its own machine, his
thinking was suffocated by the incense of his slaves.

Stalin's errors of judgment run from his first intervention in
Russian foreign policy the misjudged Bolshevik invasion of Sta-
lin's native Georgia in 1921 -through every major turning where
the changing world posed a new problem for the Russian state.
Stalin erred, first, in China when, but for his insistence on support-
Ing Chiang Kai-shek, who betrayed him, the Communists might
then have taken over the Chinese revolution in 1926 and 1927.
Over the advice of all the older Bolsheviks whom he had by then
humiliated, Stalin insisted that the Chinese Communists commit
themselves to Chiang's leadership. The Comintern was still so
directing Chinese Communists, even after Chiang had already
begun to execute them in Shanghai.

Europe was closer home than China, but here, too, the dicta-
tor's inability to judge the movement of politics beyond his ap-
paratus of control brought disaster. Germany was the chief scene
of Stalin's mistakes in Europe. The first of these were the instruc-

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 353

tions of Stalin to the German Communists through the late nine-
teen twenties and early thirties which made them de facto Allies
of the Nazis in wrecking the structure of the Weimar Republic.
If Communist preparation for Fascist triumph in Germany sprang
from Stalinist ignorance, his next mistake in Germany sprang from
sheer duplicity, also ignorant. This was the Nazi-Soviet Pact of
1939, an incredible misreading of the mind of the Nazi 61ite, which
brought to Russia the worst war in her violent history.

Such mistakes show themselves at almost any point beyond Rus-
sian borders where a particular Stalinist judgment can be isolated
and analyzed. It shows over an arc of the world stretching from
Sinkiang (where Stalin chose and was betrayed by a murderous
little warlord called Sheng Shih-tsai) as far as Yugoslavia (where
Stalin continued to believe that the royalist partisans of Mihajlovic
were the true instruments of Soviet wartime purpose long after
Tito's Communist partisans had exposed their treachery and ab-
sorbed or wiped them out).

All these previous blunders, except the Nazi-Soviet Pact, were,
however, reduced to nothing by his misjudgment of the world
since 1945. In 1945, Stalin stood victorious in Europe and Asia,
allied to the United States in friendship. He possessed the grati-
tude and respect of the power most able to help the ravaged Soviet
Union, a power which, by equal token, was the only possible
threat to his regime. And then, completely misreading the instinct
of America and the free world, he threw this friendship away in
that stupid sequence of events and behavior which has made of the
American people the greatest enemy of the Soviet world. By his
own actions, he summoned up the united hate of the most pow-
erful nation in the world.

Throughout his career, Stalin displayed to the world only one
consistent political tactic, the constant refinement of a single in-
stinctto divide, by slyness, suspicion and treachery, any group of
enemies who formed against him. His entire pilgrimage through
politics, from the first record of Bolshevism triumphant, is marked
by the same pursuit of association, division, isolation and destruc-
tion of his enemies. And though the highways of modern history
were strewn with the bones of his victims, Stalin never ceased to
invite his enemies to walk first down the road of alliance and
friendship before splitting and murdering them. Nor, until the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 354

Atlantic Community shook loose from his embrace, had any man
or state taken the hand of Stalin in partnership and survived ex-
cept as slave.

There is an almost monolithic purity in the way Stalin refined
the same tactic over and over again the tactic of the sly, suspi-
cious peasant moving from man to man in the village, whispering,
gossiping, seducing, smiling, as he turns each man against his
brother, now by threat, now by promise, now by temporary part-
nership in crime. To destroy his first great rival, Trotsky, Stalin
split away from him his most eminent contemporaries in the Polit-
buro, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Having isolated Trotsky (later to
murder him) with their help, he sought new allies to destroy
Zinoviev and Kamenev. Having isolated Zinoviev and Kamenev
(later to murder them) with the aid of Bukharin and Rykov, he
proceeded to devour Bukharin and Rykov. Finally, after having
killed all rival Russian leadership in cold blood, he turned his
talents to broader scenes.

It was in the outside world that this peasant cunning failed, for
it could work only in a state where suspicion and intrigue are
magnified and controlled by prisons and police discipline. Suc-
cessfully, Stalin wrote his Nazi-Soviet pact to divide the capitalist
countries of the West against each otheronly to find himself one
of the greatest victims of his maneuver. Diabolically, he tried to
incite Bulgarians against Yugoslavs to divide their potential
strength in his new postwar empire of Eastern Europe. Cunningly,
his agents tried to divide the Politburo of Yugoslavia against itself
from within and Stalin lost Yugoslavia. Even at the very end, in
his last pronouncement to the Communist Congress in Moscow in
1952, he described his world strategy in the same old terms the
eventual breaking off of Germany and Japan from the "regime of
the United States," the eventual hope that capitalist England and
capitalist France would "be forced to tear themselves out from the
embraces of the United States and enter into conflict with them."

But by then it was too late. The world had caught on to his style
at last and was organized to resist. At this point, Joseph Stalin
died.

The legacy Stalin left the world of communism is twofold. It
consists, first, of the mighty expanding base of Russian power, a

COMMUNISM THE CHALLENGE 355

state whose strength multiplied faster under Stalin's lash than any
previous society in history. It consists, secondly, of the political
missionary faith of communism, much weaker, though still potent,
than when he took leadership after Lenin. Everywhere this faith
fell under Stalin's police discipline it withered or crystallized into
a God-cult, but wherever it could operate freely, as in China, it
showed itself still explosive and kinetic.

Dimly, the Atlantic world has recognized the twofold nature
of the challenge and has attempted to cope with both. It met the
challenge of Russian power with magnificent audacity in time of
danger and, by its great Alliance, threw up that shield of power
which shelters it now in Europe. But the necessary effort to meet
the challenge of Russian power was organized so quickly, in such
emergency, that it disrupted entirely the first, groping efforts of
the Atlantic world to answer, with the Marshall Plan, the deep
illnesses and sicknesses of Western Europe which make it so vul-
nerable to the Communist faith.

It is here, now, in this chapter of history, that the new masters
of Russia must be reviewing the Atlantic Alliance as it lies before
them. It must be obvious to them, as it should be to us, that Russia
has gone as far as force will carry her, and that where the pressure
on us is still alive, it is carried primarily by the missionary faith,
not by armies. If now the outer world can be lulled or soothed
into stagnation, with all its social tumors and cancers still poisoning
its health, the faith may succeed where the armies and intrigue
failed. If the Atlantic world conceives of its challenge simply as a
challenge at arms and now relaxes with its temporary advantage,
while the Soviet Union continues in its broad and disciplined ex-
pansion, its very success at home may regenerate the withered
faith abroad. But it can do so only if the Atlantic world sits still
which is the problem all the free states of the great basin face, and
America, its leader, most of all.

XV

America abroad

The first American Embassy I ever visited hugged the side of a
hill above the Yangtze, thousands of miles away from Europe, in
the now-forbidden city of Chungking, in China.

It was almost fifteen years ago when I first climbed that hill,
before either America or Europe had been caught in the Second
World War. The only war going on then was the war between
the Chinese and the Japanese and this was a war I could watch in
comfort from the embassy balcony. One climbed the slime-cov-
ered stairs in the cliff of the south bank of the Yangtze, squeezed
through the hot alleys, and came out finally on the crown of an
umber ridge where sat our embassy. From its gardens and balcony,
looking down on the gray city across the river below, one might
watch what was happening as from an imperial box in a Roman
amphitheater.

All through that summer of 1939, the Japanese Air Force
bombed Chungking, and from the embassy we could watch the
planes coming in formation and see the bombs dropping. Then,
after an interval, we could hear the cmmp-crump-thud as the
salvos boomed from the red flame and black smoke rising in the
city. But we were safe. We were safe because the American flag
flew over the embassy and the flag was protection. We could look
down from our heights into the yellow Yangtze and see our gun-
boat, the TutuilcLy lying bare and white in the current, deserted by
every other craft. The Tutuila was safe in mid-stream because she,
too, bore the canopy of a huge American flag. We were all safe,
sitting there drinking Martinis on the rim of death, because we
were Americans.

I remember sitting on the embassy porch one day with some of
our military service attaches, and one Marine officer said, after the

AMERICA ABROAD 357

daily spectacle was over, that, by God, Japanese bombing was
sure ragged and some day they were going to drop one short or
over and it would land square on the embassy whether it was
meant to or not, and then there'd be an incident. He said if we
were smart we'd move the embassy from this hill to the second
range back inland where if the Japs hit us it wouldn't be a mis-
take, they would mean it. Somebody else said, No, we couldn't do
that because how the hell would the Chinese get all the way over
there to talk to us, and that's what we were supposed to be doing,
talking to them.

At which the Marine officer turned and said, "Look, what we've
got, they need. If they want it badly enough, they'll come to see
us no matter where we put the embassy."

Almost a century of American diplomacy lay embodied in that
wisdom, and none of us then knew how, even at that moment, that
diplomacy was changing under our eyes. Down in the city, even
under the bombings, lived six other Americans with whom our
government had, ostensibly, no concern. Two economists advised
the Chinese on the causes and cure of inflation, the first in an al-
most numberless procession of American economists who have
been advising the world ever since on the causes and cures of in-
flation. Then there was a sturdy, happy engineer called Dan
Myers, who knew all about machinery and its maintenance; he was
industrial purchasing advisor to the Chinese government. William
Langhorne Bond, who, through twenty years of civil and interna-
tional war, created the first modern airline on the continent of
Asia, was the fourth. The fifth was Colonel Claire Chennault,
United States Army, retired, private advisor to the Chinese Air
Forces on the tactics, training and employment of military pur-
suits. The sixth was a balding, middle-aged little fellow with the
attractive and happy garrulousness of a country storekeeper. He
purported to be a merchant of skins and hides and was the first
secret American agent I ever met. His special skill was in cracking
Japanese radio codes, and our government had lent him to the
Chinese government to work on their intercepts of Japanese mes-
sages. He was an extremely witty man, but had been exiled by
whatever embryonic secret services we then had to Chungking,
because of his talkativeness. At that time, we were not yet at war
with Japan and therefore the embassy and all the embassy officials

FIRE IN THE ASHES

studiously ignored him, for, although half the gossipy town knew
all about him, his mission was supposed to be ultrasecret. When old
"Osborne"-which was the name he used-talked of his boyhood
in an Indiana town, in the sunlit days of the early century, or told
the adventures of his bearded grandfather who was a Union vet-
eran and the town drunk, it seemed wonderfully adventurous to
all of us that he should now be here in the mysterious Orient
cracking Japanese radio codes for Chiang Kai-shek.

These men had all been invited to Chungking by the Chinese
government because the Chinese sensed intuitively that there was
somehow locked in the minds of such men part of the magic which
had made America great, magic which these men could transplant.
These men had no collective name; in those days they were just
"advisors"; there were just sk of them, and the United States gov-
ernment washed its hands of them completely.

In the years since then I have watched this original corporal's
guard of American individuals grow and grow, swell and swell, by
scores, hundreds and thousands across the face of the earth into
one of the most elaborate and amazing tools any diplomacy has
ever known. The older Foreign Service officers and diplomats of
the State Department have been all but submerged in the tide.
Even before Pearl Harbor, the American government had begun
to deposit on the steps of the Chungking embassy American tech-
nicians with diplomatic passports, who were in no way different
from the private advisors who had come before. But they were
agents now of official purpose and their missions to reorganize
trucking on the Burma Road, or teach Chinese peasants how to
inseminate cows artificially with bamboo rods, or how to refine
vegetable oil were now official missions. In the fifteen years since
then, such men have grown to legions. Some represent the United
States government, some act for American private enterprise, but
they seem almost interchangeable as they go about their tasks re-
organizing coalpits in Belgium, mines in the Congo, fishponds in
Indonesia, blast furnaces in Lorraine, malaria control in Sardinia.
Each man in his own sincere, tedious or inspired fashion has
brought some fragment of the American secret with him. Yet no
foreign government and no other society has been able to put these
fragments together as America does; none has succeeded in cap-
turing the mystery of the American way.

AMERICA ABROAD 359

The American Embassy in Paris today is as different from the
old embassy in China as imagination can conceive. In the year
1952, the American Embassy in Paris was responsible for 2,500
American officials and employees in the Paris area, who, with their
wives and children, made an overseas community of 7,500 Amer-
icans, all involved somehow in American policy in Europe. Of
these 2,500, only 129 were Foreign Service officers of the State De-
partment, and of these, only 3 1 were permanent career diplomats
trained to speak for the United States abroad. The others were ex-
perts on labor relations, on social security, on inflation, on trade
and payments, on communism, on atomic energy, on biology, on
radio, on press, on films, on aviation, on artillery, on radar, on oil.
They were clerks, stenographers, administrators and technicians
who maintained the instantaneous teletype and voice circuits that
linked the Paris embassy not only to Washington but to nine other
capitals across Europe. In a single month the telegraphists in the
embassy basement might transmit as many as 4,000,000 words of
information to the United States government in Washington (the
equivalent of two and a half volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brit an-
nica) and might receive half that many words in incoming reply
from all over the globe. To shelter its multifarious activities the
United States government had become a major owner of Paris real
estate, owning no less than seven large office buildings, seven pri-
vate residences for dignitaries, plus a warehouse on a suburban
island crammed with 15,000,000 dollars' worth of stockpiled equip-
mentstationery, desks, chairs, typewriters, teletype machines,
filing cabinets, adding machines, trucks, radio equipment and
projection equipment.

In the years since the end of the war, the American "expert" has
become in the outer world as much a stock character as was the
British traveler of the nineteenth century, or as 2,000 years ago the
Roman centurion must have been in conquered Greece. Americans
flood around the world as scholars, engineers, soldiers, economists
and craftsmen, displaying the arcane skills and wisdoms of their
civilization. They come to lecture in European universities on
their latest publishable findings in nuclear theory, and they come
as security agents to scrutinize and train other peoples in the pre-
vention of leakage of nuclear knowledge. The American govern-
ment recruits labor organizers who exhort European unions to

FIRE IN THE ASHES

organize; it recruits businessmen who exhort European business-
men to compete. Garment cutters of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers come to show French clothing workers how Americans
cut clothes. Private emissaries come to show Belgians how to dig
coal, to teach Italians how natural gas is drilled and capped, to
teach Englishmen how to operate modern refineries, to show In-
dians how to use the plough. The vast phrase "technical assistance""
by which they are grouped only dimly sums up their meaning in
the nations where they go. When one reads the list of requests for
American "technical assistance" as they pile up at the State De-
partment, at the MSA, in the U.N., or at UNESCO, one has the
impression of distant governments gathering in council late at
night by smoky lamplight, scratching out a Sears-Roebuck order
form for two microbiologists, one public-health expert, two
agronomists, one deep-sea fishing expert and a sheet-steel man, as
if such men were interchangeable parts created by some mys-
terious social machinery which, when installed in their country,
would generate the same mysterious energy as it does in the
United States.

Strangers are fascinated by these Americans. Where a genera-
tion ago people laughed at the British servant of empire traveling
through desert or jungle carrying his tin washtub and dinner
jacket, they now regard Americans with astonishment. Americans
bring with them not the tin washtub and dinner jacket but a com-
posite of all the villages and towns they left behind in America to
create wherever they rest their own villages-in-exile. Thus there is
an American community life in Paris, in London, in Athens, in
Rome, in Bonn and all the outposts of American dispersion in
Europe, the Middle East and Asia. At their PX's, supported by the
sprawling United States Army around the globe, they may buy in
special overseas American money everything the hometown
American department store sells from Kleenex, to Him, to Kiddi-
craft toys. In the large communities, the PX provides special laun-
dries to do American washing and garages commissioned to main-
tain American automobiles at American prices. In Germany and
various other outposts, the community provides first-run, fresh
Hollywood movies, and all across Europe an American radio net
provides the canned programs that Americans enjoy at home. At
the American office buildings, at the American snack bars, at the

AMERICA ABROAD

3 6i

PX, the community newsstands offer the nourishment of Amer-
ican thinking-either the Stars and Stripes or the New York Her-
ald Tribune of even date, or the overseas edition of the New York
Times twelve hours later. Americans of the dispersion vibrate on
home wave-lengths. Time and Newsweek are available in overseas '
editions on the same day they are available back home. The Sat-
urday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal, the Atlantic and
Harper's, True Story, Saga, Argosy, True Detective, True Crime
and Real Western follow only a few days after they appear in
Odessa, Texas.

The members of this community are frequently maligned people,
for they appear in the daily dispatches only when it is noted that
they can buy cigarettes at ten cents a package, whiskey at $1.75 a
bottle, that they get a full month's vacation every year, two
months' home leave every two years, housing allowances and
special tax-free gasoline. Yet they are, by and large, clean-cut,
honest, hard-working people, very American indeed, in Paris,
the personnel officer of the Marshall Plan refused to hire any
American who wore a beard, not specifying whether beards
were un-American or unhygienic, insisting only that Americans
abroad had to have "face validity." These Americans cling to the
homey seasonal celebrations. For Christmas and Thanksgiving the
Post Exchanges go into contortions of ingenuity to bring turkey,
cranberry sauce, plum pudding and all the trimmings up to the
counters in time and in quantity for the holiday yearning. The
Fourth of July is the major community event when the Am-
bassador, or High Commissioner, or commanding general usually
invites all the permanent members of the dispersion to a recep-
tion. Indeed, one of the best measures of the explosive growth of
the community abroad is the Fourth of July celebration. In Paris,
the embassy's reception, a garden party, on the morning of the
Fourth demands a full eight months of the Ambassador's meager
annual entertainment allotment just for the fruit punch, Coca-Cola
and thin sandwiches he must provide to the Americans who now
live in Paris or happen to be passing through.

These Americans, with a few, loud, inevitable exceptions, are
what would be called at home "nice people." They are, as a group,
exceptionally honest people; since the war they have distributed
some 27 billion doUars in Europe, yet no scandal has been exposed

FIRE IN THE ASHES 362

remotely comparable to those which have rocked Washington
and our great cities in recent years. Most of them have come over-
seas earnestly wanting to help. They bear skill and wisdom which
they freely offer to share. Moreover, the foreign nations where
they dwell have sought and even begged that they be sent.

Yet, when all is said, they are, in varying degrees, hated, dis-
liked, mistrusted, or accepted in either humiliation or restraint by
the peoples of other countries. Where they have done their best
work, they are, at most, respected. But nowhere are they met with
that simple fondness and liking, that reflex friendly smile which
greeted Americans abroad fifteen years ago. Though the strangers
know they need Americans, they accept them out of reason and
logic, not with any outwelling of that old and once-famous "reser-
voir of good will" we had around the globe. The days when an
American newspaperman could travel through Central Asia and
come to a mud town and find the school children lined up waving
banners saying Welcome Traveling American Journalist are just
a memory.

Why?

To answer the question one must withdraw a bit and set these
new American emissaries against the long history of America's
infiltration into the world.

The penetration of American mores, habits and cultures began
almost half a century ago, long before the Readers Digest became
(as it is today) in its English, French, Spanish and Scandinavian
editions either the largest or second largest monthly magazine of
its type in England, France, Spain or Scandinavia. The influence
of America began to seep into Europe about the turn of the cen-
tury, at an unnoticed subterranean level at a time when the high
avenues of culture seemed one-way streets bearing European
knowledge of medicine, mathematics, science, art and letters in a
contradictory flow into America. It was about then, at the turn of
the century, that German children began to dress up as cowboys
and Indians with feathered headdresses made in Niirnberg to
celebrate Fasching while French children dressed as cowboys and
Indians to celebrate Mardi Gras; it was about then that "My Old
Kentucky Home" and "Way Down Upon the Swanee River" 1
came to be among the best-known songs in Holland, about then

AMERICA ABROAD 363

that British newspapers began to use their front pages, as American
papers do, for news and not for advertising.

The tide of American cultural penetration has risen ever since,
flowing on decade by decade, invading European kitchens with
Pyrex and Scotch tape, spreading Coca-Cola in nine different
languages from Oslo to Casablanca, pocking the Canebiere in
Marseille with pinball alleys, jukeboxes and nickel slot-machines.

Hollywood's role, since the First World War, has been incal-
culable. In town after town, city after city, all through Western
Europe, Hollywood, month after month, draws more customers
to see the dreams it throws on the screen than any body of native
movie-makers. Hollywood has filled average Europeans with the
same dreams as average Americans of the penthouse, of shiny
convertibles, of well-furnished homes; it has filled their nightmares
with the same symbols of the smoking pistol, the ominous ringing
of the telephone, the stab of violence puncturing the course of life.

Where legend, commerce and Hollywood had pioneered, the
United States Army occupied. The war threw 3,500,000 Amer-
icans down inside Europe. It made American techniques standard
in auto maintenance, in airport direction, in water sanitation. The
United States Armed Forces Network, blanketing the air with jazz
and broadcasts, had for a while the largest listening audience in
Europe and has probably taught more Continentals the use of idio-
matic English than all the schoolhouses in the Continent. The war
left behind too many legacies to count; it left behind hundreds of
thousands of tons of cast-off army clothing which clothed European
men for years, and it also left behind hundreds of tons of Amer-
ican X-ray equipment, which changed the practices and tech-
niques of European doctors in every hospital that had use of them.
The American armies of occupation have carried on where the
armies of the war left off teaching Germans and Frenchmen to
make and serve hamburgers and hot dogs American style, inducing
English mothers to dress their children in the same kind of snow-
suits that the children of American airmen in the neighboring air
bases wear in winter.

The war, in a completely different way, created a void in Eu-
rope's letters and publishing as great as the void in Europe's eco-
nomics. Into this void rushed American magazines and books,
while American news agencies inundated European newspapers

FIRE IN THE ASHES

with their instantaneous copy from around the world. American
columnists were and are syndicated and quoted in Europe as
Pertinax, Genevieve Tabouis and the "leaders" of the Times of
London were rarely quoted in their greatest days. This penetra-
tion of letters not only ranges from texts on steam engineering
and polymerization of long-chain molecules through Hemingway,
Faulkner and Mickey Spillane, but right down to the level of the
first lip-moving child reader. The only censorship law in liber-
tarian French journalism is one that gives the Ministry of Justice
power to supervise the imitation-American comic books that have
flourished in France since the American Army passed through.
I once called on the supervisor of comic books at the Ministry
of Justice and he led me through his files-stack after stack of
Sioux Boy, or Texas Jack, or Les Aventures de Richard Casey,
cover after cover with the American images of the slouching cow-
boy, the negligeed woman, the space ship. He insisted I record
that France was against censorship, that censorship was wicked,
but "we must protect our children, we have the right to protect
their minds."

Thus, long before the host of new American experts descended
on Europe, the Europeans had felt American culture pressing it-
self on their minds. They knew what was happening; many re-
sented it; but the changes were irresistible and were being ab-
sorbed by Europeans at their own rate and digested into their own
systems by their own metabolism. The new postwar diplomacy
of America brought change to Europe in another, different form;
it brought men who insisted that Europeans rewrite their tax laws,
who insisted that European troops be trained so, armed thus, and
deployed yet a third way; it brought proconsuls who could, in
many of the continental countries, by a twist of the screw, break
or unbreak any of the governments they dealt with. The Amer-
icans of the new dispersion were like nothing ever seen before in
diplomacy; their mission was no longer limited to reporting, de-
fining and communicating; their mission now was to transform
and influence strange peoples. But no one, least of all the Amer-
icans, knew what kind of change it was that America sought.

Perhaps the most instructive adventure in honest bewilderment
during the long American intervention in Europe was the produc-
tivity drive of the Marshall Plan. Productivity is a mother-word

AMERICA ABROAD 365

that covers one of the more exciting areas of economics just how
much a given worker with a given set of tools will turn out in a
day. Fifty years ago at the turn of the century, American and
European workers turned out roughly the same amount of prod-
uct a day and standards of living in the two civilizations were
roughly the same. Today, with variations for different industries,
an American worker will produce anywhere from three to five
times as much as his European counterpart.

Productivity was always one of the Marshall Plan's key words.
But it became overwhelmingly important when the Korean War
forced the Atlantic world into its rearmament effort. Economists
pointed out that America with 150,000,000 people turned out
about $300,000,000,000 worth of goods a year, whereas Marshall-
Plan Europe with 260,000,000 people then turned out only about
$150,000,000,000 worth of goods. But if Europeans could produce
as efficiently as Americans, they would have been producing
$450,000,000,000 worth of goods. Thus, ran the reasoning, if we
can goose up European productivity, there will be an increase
large enough to meet increased military and civilian needs at the
same time. In the fall of 1950, therefore, the Plan charged ahead
with the productivity program. In the next two years, one thou-
sand American experts came to Europe to show how it was done.
No less than ten thousand European specialists in production were
sent to America by the Plan to see for themselves how it was done.
And yet, no spurt took place, no sudden rise in wealth, nothing
but the slow creeping advance that had been going on since the
war.

By that time, Americans in Europe began to peel away various
cliches that had blinded them. People had said that Europe could
not produce because she lacked a mass market; yet American shoe
manufacturers pointed out that England, Germany, France and
Italy each had between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 people and no
American shoemaker makes shoes for that big a single market.
The experts threw away the easy answer that Americans were just
different, for the men who worked in American auto plants, coal
mines, clothing shops were descended from recent European
stock-Scots, Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians. It was true that the
quality and quantity of American resources were matchless coal
seams five feet thick, the world's best wheat fields, adjacent to the

FIRE IN THE ASHES 366

world's best cotton fields, adjacent to the world's best oil fields
were all linked together by one of nature's most extensive internal
waterway systems. But, though this gave America a decided
advantage, it was not enough to explain the spread that tripled
American productivity. Europeans complained that they had
suffered devastating inflation and two ravaging wars, but none
had been as badly ravaged as the Soviet Union. And there lay
the ugliest fact of all, as unforgettable as an aching tooth, that
the Soviet Union was increasing her productivity far faster than
Western Europe.

After much exercise at the problem, Europeans, too, began
to discard old cliches. The French invented a word for the most
offensive of their cliche-coiners. They called them the "N'y-a-
que's." A "N'y-a-que" was a specialist who came back from
America mouthing the phrase "// n'y a que faire" which meant
"All we have to do." According to these men, all that had to be
done was to install f orklifts, or pipe Muzak into the plant cafeteria,
or design a new materials-flow system. But after listening to a long
train of returning "N'y-a-que's" report their discovery of the
American secret, the French finally decided there was no par-
ticular little secret that was the clue to the big secret. The main
clue was there for everyone to see and every visitor reported it-
Americans just worked differently, there was an indefinable spirit
that made Americans work harder, more efficiently, better, more
together. It was the spirit that was the clue.

There was another thing Europeans learned upon their investi-
gations which surprised them no less than the Americans to whom
they reported. It was that Americans possessed no ingenious de-
vice, or machine, or shop practice which their own best engineer-
ing minds had not already thought of; many of the finest American:
processes and machines had, in fact, been invented in Europe..
Indeed, most returning European engineers could state, honestly,
that there was usually one plant in their own country's industry
that was equal to the finest America could offer. The difference
was that in America the best technique was usually standard all
through the country, while in Europe the best technique was ex-
ceptional and was applied as a splendid oddity in an industry that
as a whole was archaic.

The best answers of all came from the American experts in the:

AMERICA ABROAD 37

productivity drive, most of whom were practicing American
businessmen and good Republicans. Over and over they singled
out for condemnation two facts:

First, they denounced the fossilization of European industry.
The general dictum at the end of any swing through a European
industry would go like this: "They've got the boards of these
plants loaded up with marquises and counts, and all of them are
tied together in one big combine. They're so god-damned cartel-
ized they wouldn't know how to go out and get business even if
it was there. They buy from one cartel and they sell to another,
and you can't shake them loose because they don't want to be
shaken loose because they can always turn a profit in the same
old-fashioned way because their cartel protects them no matter
what."

Second, they were appalled by the waste of labor in European
plants. "If I wasted labor," said one of the Americans, "the way
these people waste labor, I'd be bankrupt in a week. They don't
know how to use men at all; they pay them dog's wages, and to
tell the truth they aren't worth more than that for the kind of
work they put out. They've got three men doing every job I use
one man for back home."

None of these American business experts ever worded the
burden of his findings in terms of theory, but what they meant,
most simply, was that the changes through which America had
lived since the turn of the century had never happened in Europe.
As Americans, they had either advocated or denounced all the
reforms which had been shoved down the bitterly protesting
throats of entrenched privilege in America over the decades and
could not explain them to Europeans. But, finally, they had come
to accept as completely normal the American industrial-commer-
cial system created fifty years ago by the wave of turn-of-the-
century trust busting which had rescued American industry from
the fossilization of European cartels. They had even accepted the
overwhelming development of American labor unions which has
made American labor the most expensive single ingredient of pro-
duction. Honed to a fine-cutting edge by the grindstone of com-
petition, held rigidly in place by the demands of monolithic unions,
the American businessman had developed something he calls the
science of "management." But, in trying to sell management in

FIRE IN THE ASHES 368

Europe, he found it unsalable because the pressures that had in-
cubated management in America were lacking.

The productivity drive, launched with such fanfare in the fall
of 1950, was already dead by the beginning of 1952. By then, a few
Americans had begun to realize what it was they were really
trying to do; they were trying to shake Europe up, remold her,
reshape her drives and purposes. They were not merely trying to
peddle techniques as they had originally believed and as the Euro-
peans still believed; they were trying to instill in Europe some-
thing of the spirit which had remade America, and remakes her
again, every generation. But by then the original leverage of the
Marshall Plan in European life was gone, for we were no longer
giving out chunks of four or five billion, dollars a year; what we
were giving was less than what our strategy demanded Europe
contribute to the common defense. To bring about the changes we
sought would have required a completely new American program
conceived with the same vigor and the same resources as the
original Marshall Plan. For what we wanted, fundamentally, was
a revolution.

It is only a rare American who realizes that in his lifetime he
has lived through such a series of changes in American life that
amount to a peaceful revolution as stirring in its way as the
Russian or Chinese revolution. And even rarer is the American
who realizes that this revolutionary essence in our life is, or must
become, the chief arm of our foreign policy to meet that revolu-
tionary faith which is the chief arm of Russian foreign policy.

American purpose overseas is quite simple to achieve peace
and security. But in the chief area necessary for American security
Western Europe the fiber of life has rotted and weakened so
that it can resist the Communist message only with difficulty.
Vaguely, and with some success, we have tried to help or compel
the European governments to give their citizens those comforts
and benefits of everyday life which Americans at home increas-
ingly enjoy. But this has been done usually in terms of specifics
of financial advice, military equipment and training, engineering
and techniques. Yet all these specifics and techniques are only the
visible end-product of a generation of social upheaval and experi-

AMERICA ABROAD 39

ment in American life which, when it is not duplicated In Europe,
causes our techniques to fall on barren ground.

Most Americans accept the faith of America wordlessly, for
they live by it. America is, at its heart, the fluid society. It is the
restless, unceasing desire of Americans that opportunity remain
forever open, that society never lock in layers and classes of fixed
privilege and fixed entry.

This has always been the faith of America. But this generation
of Americans has kept its rendezvous with destiny by keeping
opportunity open even through the growth, complexity and con-
centration of twentieth century science, industry and communi-
cations. Americans have done so in myriad interlocking experi-
ments with their system by the stabilization of the cycle that
once made farming a gamble and not a way of life, by the power-
ful intrusion of labor unions on American production and society,
by government fostering of research, science and education, by
the spread of arts in every form all across their continental ex-
panse; by the leveling brutality of their income tax, by the con-
stant application of research and invention to the ever-expanding
industrial capacity of a nation which has doubled its heft in thirty
years, by new roads, new schools, new systems of social security.
None of these changes were achieved easily; most were torn out
of the country in fury and contention. But all have flowed from
the inner spirit which holds that people must remain fluid, that
society must remain open, that no group or groups must be able
permanently to cling to yesterday's privileges in society because
it profits by them and fears what comes next. It is this faith in the
opportunity of tomorrow, more than anything else, which has
kept America from any infection of communism. And it is this
faith, totally lacking in some countries of Europe or unable to
express itself effectively in others, which we have been trying,
without realizing, to spread in Europe by the injection of tech-
niques and "expertise."

The contrast between the Russian and American expansion in
the modern world is one of direct opposites. The Russians sell an
idea, above all their idea of the revolution and the logical state.
Then, having penetrated with their idea, they follow to consoli-
date with their techniques, cold, brutal and bloody. But Amer-
icans bring their techniques first, the logistics and mechanics of

FIRE IN THE ASHES 37

their system, and they leave its mothering, begetting idea to follow
naturally behind.

Over and over for the past fifteen years I have watched strangers
studying American ways, as if by dismantling an American com-
bustion charger they could learn how to make themselves as warm
as Americans. And over and over I have seen Americans trying
to show them how the combustion charger works without explain-
ing that the trick is not in how the metal parts of the combustion
charger fit together but how the combustion charger is used so-
cially, and to whose benefit. In every possible different context,
I have watched puritan and conservative Americans thus trans-
formed by their efforts abroad into radical symbols of disturbance.

A classic example was the experience of General Joseph Stilwell
in China. The government of Chiang Kai-shek wanted guns and
planes and wanted only to learn how to use the guns and planes.
But Stilwell insisted that they must learn to fight, which is quite
different from learning how to shoot a gun or fly a plane. Learn-
ing to fight, he said, meant that Chinese officers must stop selling
their soldiers' ration for private profit, that soldiers must not be
kicked, beaten or have their ears cropped, that they must be well
fed and clothed, that their leaders must be brave and daring. This
was the important thing in fighting. He could not get the idea
across, and thus Chiang's armies, for all their guns, could not fight.

Our experience in Europe has not been quite as dramatic, for
no democratic government in Western Europe is remotely com-
parable in mentality to the medieval Chinese Nationalists. Yet,
even in Europe, an American, behaving true to American stand-
ards, finds himself a radical. The last chief of the Marshall Plan
in France was a tall, blue-eyed Bostonian Republican and rather
conservativenamed Henry Parkman, whose duties required him
to deal with a French Cabinet including three different shades
of Socialists. His final months in Paris were scarred by a con-
tinuing wrangle with the French government, and the substance
of that wrangle was public housing. It was the conservative Amer-
ican who kept insisting that the French government must use some
of the Marshall Plan financing to push decent housing for its slum-
sheltered Communist-voting citizens, while the French, all the
while paying lip service to their progressive party names, wriggled
and dodged to avoid the obligation.

AMERICA ABROAD 37 1

Like all peoples, the Europeans hate being disturbed by outside
forces except as they themselves invite these forces and transmute
them into native political doctrine. But caught thus and eroded
by the long-rising tide of American mass culture while suddenly
pushed about to specific action by American spokesmen on mis-
sion, Europeans have felt somehow suffocated, trapped and help-
less. The less able such countries have been to resist American
pressure, as in France and Italy, the greater the number of those
who hate us. The better able they were to resist, as in England
and Belgium, the greater the number of those who still respect us.

What has baffled Europeans is that they see their need for
America; they see the techniques of America; but the purpose
and inner essence of American society finds no expression in
American policy abroad.

The British, perhaps, show the result of this experience more
clearly than any other Europeans because, first, they are the clos-
est kin to Americans in language, tradition and institutions, and,
secondly, because they have been subject less than any other
nation in Europe to the invasion of American experts or the push-
ing around of American advisors. Yet, even so, the British like all
other Europeans have seen the magic of America purely through
its techniques; they have been hypnotized by forklifts in Amer-
ican factories, by automatic looms in weaving mills, by American
shop practice in cadence, layout and hand tools. When either
British Socialists or British Tories discuss educational reform in
Britain which is long overdue they protest immediately that
they have no intention of "Americanizing" education. "American
education" is a mocking term among British intellectuals. They
know American education as Hollywood shows it with drum
majorettes twirling the baton, the football team charging out onto
the gridiron from under the stadium, the fur coats, flags and coeds
dancing in technicolor. Or they see it as refracted into a distorted
image of terror by Congressional investigators and supercharged
patriots. But only a few technical specialists and odd Amer-
icanophiles are aware of the larger purpose, of the tradition, the
extent, the promise of the vast American system of public schools,
universities, scholarships, accessibility, research. Yet, nevertheless,
while sneering at American education and all its ways, Britons
recognize that, still, there is something important in it. It is the

FIRE IN THE ASHES

selective nature of this recognition that is illuminating. Out of the
whole battery of American educational experience, British edu-
cators are nearly unanimous in selecting two, and only two,
schools to be imitated in the overhauling of British learning. These
are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California
Institute of Technology. The impact of the postwar years has con-
vinced them that in technology, only in technology, is buried the
essential American message.

Europeans have, over the past five years, submitted to incessant
prying, pushing and prodding by Americans. They try desperately
to placate such Americans by agreeing to create a payments union
that can link their currencies, to equip a division and place it as
directed under American command, to stimulate the production
of one commodity or embargo trade in another.

But every minute they do so they sense a smoldering, unex-
pressed indignity working within them, because America still
keeps asking for more and remains forever unsatisfied. Europeans
cannot recognize, for Americans never explain, that what Amer-
ica seeks is not simply technical innovation but something else.
What America seeks are changes in spirit and society, of revolu-
tionary profundity, that will meet the challenge of the black revo-
lutions of this century. For where change has been imposed by
dictate, as in the American Occupation of Germany, or brought
about by native power, as in Turkey and Britain, the fiber of re-
sistance to the challenge is healthiest. Where it has misfired, or
crawled too slowly, as in France and Italy, it is weakest.

In theory, the burden of bringing America's influence to bear
on the world should fall upon the Foreign Service of the State
Department. These professional diplomats-by-career stand to the
new recruits of the American community abroad as regular army
officers stand to civilians recruited for war emergency. Out of
approximately 15,000 Americans employed by the government in
Europe, only 260 are men who have been trained professionally
and chosen officially as permanent career Foreign Service officers
to speak for the United States abroad. Theoretically, they should
be in command, applying the policy of the elected Congress and
directing the new machinery of experts and reserve recruits in its
application.

AMERICA ABROAD 373

Actually, nothing could be more remote from the truth, and
few fragments of current affairs tell better of the built-in handi-
caps of United States foreign policy than what has happened to
the once-proud Foreign Service of America in the years since
the war.

The Foreign Service officers of the United States are recruited
much as army officers. There are, at present, 1,496 such officers
scattered around the globe. In taking their oath of office as young
men, they accept a life and career that may send them scuttling
from the jungles of Africa to the arid wastes of the Middle East,
to the ricelands of Asia. Service in Paris may alternate with service
in Leopoldville, Aden, Santiago de Chile, Calcutta, Trondheim or
Melbourne. When they move, they move with wives and chil-
dren, who grow up far from home in strange languages, subject
to strange diseases and the neuroses of homelessness. All this they
accepted with their oath of office; their job is to observe, to under-
stand and to report accurately and coldly to the United States
wherever they are ordered to go. There is no wealth to be gained
in this career, certainly not enough to make up for two years in
the malarial wastes of Accra, the steaming, fetid streets of Cal-
cutta, the prison confinement of Moscow. At the end of his career,
a Class I officer may earn $12,500 a year which is reduced to very
little by the extra expenses of his position and constant travel.
When he retires, if he has served well, he expects only two things
a pension, and a certain amount of dignity and honor because he
has served the Republic well.

Today, it may be flatly stated that few men who serve the
United States do so with less honor, less respect, or less reciprocal
loyalty from their fellow citizens. In the decade in which the
foreign affairs of America have become the most important prob-
lem in politics, the officers of the Foreign Service have become
the favorite whipping boys of public debate. Variously described
to the public as homosexuals, cookie-pushers, or just plain bun-
glers, they have been most publicized as that branch of the Amer-
ican government most infiltrated by Communist agents this
despite the fact that not one verifiable Communist or fellow trav-
eler has yet been turned up in investigation of the Foreign Service.

To someone who, as this correspondent, has watched them for
fifteen years in all the capitals that stretch between Peking and

FIRE IN THE ASHES 374

Paris, no picture could be more ridiculous, or more directly at
variance with the truth. In these years I have come across not one
homosexual in the Foreign Service of the United States; I have
found some fools and bunglers, but no more, proportionately,
than in the United States Army or the United States Congress.
Most of the Foreign Service officers I have known have been hon-
est, competent people in whom has been rooted a conservatism of
instinct so deep and so unyielding that their chief weakness as an
instrument of the American purpose has been a stodginess and lack
of imagination the very opposite of the radicalism falsely imputed
to them.

In the years since the war, under attack, the native caution and
conservatism of these men with a few brave exceptions has
deepened until now it has reached a level of timidity which gives
the American people a Foreign Service of eunuchs. Not only has
the long attack almost completely demoralized them in their daily
routine, and reduced their influence and impact on foreign powers
with whom they must deal, but it has done so during that period
when world affairs have forced every foreign ally to look to these
men for daily guidance in American policy.

The beating the Foreign Service has taken is not, of course,
accidental. It flows from the nature of the turbulent world in
which America must live. For thirty years two of the major prob-
lems of American foreign policy were states and societies in boil-
ing change Russia and China. The Foreign Service, back in the
pre-Roosevelt days of a Republican State Department, therefore,
began to train among its younger officers specialists in the par-
ticularly intricate problems of those countries. Since both these
countries were moving at a furious pace to ends no man could see,
the specialists so recruited were among the more brilliant and
venturesome young men who entered the Foreign Service twenty
years ago. Both in Russia and China, these men achieved such emi-
nence as scholars and communicants of the strange cultures they
lived in that they evoked the jealousy of the foreign offices of
every other 'nation dealing with China and Russia. In China, as a
matter of fact, the Russians were so impressed with the China
Language Service program of the American State Department that
in 1943, m mid-war, they began to imitate it.

In both Russia and China, events then proceeded to pose prob-

AMERICA ABROAD 375

lems for Americans which are among the most tragic and difficult
of our history. In the long debate on our attitude to these coun-
tries, the reports and attitudes of the Foreign Service officers have
since been published, aired, investigated and disputed, not for what
they were-clinical professional reports on the progress of a dis-
easebut in order to determine how much the reports themselves
were infected with the disease. It was as if Americans, tortured
and frantic with the growth of a cancer they could not arrest,
turned with savage blindness to wreak their vengeance on the
doctors who had failed to cure it.

What has happened to the China Service officers of the Foreign
Service has been an object lesson to every other career diplomat,
whether a junior aspirant or the father of a family waiting for his
pension and retirement.

The basic burden of the reporting of the China Service in the
critical years was that, in the inevitable clash between the Chinese
Communists and Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang would be the loser. This
correctness in judgment has resulted, however, not in honor either
collectively or individually to the China Service. China has gone
Communist. In some fashion the men of the China Service were
held responsible. The China Service, therefore, no longer exists.
Of the twenty-two officers who joined it before the beginning of
World War II, there were in 1952 only two still used by the State
Department in Washington both had had the luck not to be in
China during the war, or anywhere near the center of Chinese
politics previously. Most of the rest were still serving the Amer-
ican government, but not in Formosa, Japan, Central Intelligence
or anywhere else where their intimate knowledge of a China with
whom we were desperately at war in Korea might be useful.
They were scattered all around the globe. One with ttventy-five
years' duty in China was in Vancouver; another with twenty-two
years' duty in China was in Athens; another with eighteen years'
duty in China was in Guayaquil. At the moment of writing
this book in Europe, all the postwar chiefs of the China desk of
the State Department who have not been dismissed are stationed
in London, in Paris, in Bonn, or in Rome and are pleased with
their obscurity. But while America pondered the meaning of each
Chinese Communist gesture and statement in the truce talks of
Korea, the men who for years had been assigned to observation

FIRE IN THE ASHES 376

of Chinese Communist leadership, and who had brilliantly suc-
ceeded in entering their inner councils during the war, were
completely ignored at a time when their advice was needed most.

The Russian experts of the Foreign Service have suffered noth-
ing like the indignity of the China experts. But the frigid official
farewell to their most distinguished chief, George Kennan, when
he was allowed to depart from the service, the humiliation and
vituperation visited upon Charles Bohlen before his confirmation
as Ambassador to Moscow only underscored what many Foreign
Service officers have always believed: that it is dangerous to write
seriously, or clearly, about an explosive subject. The cautious offi-
cer now feels that each report should be drafted so that no matter
what Congressional committee reads it ten years hence, or what
public controversy is aroused in later post-mortem of affairs, the
report should be virgin of any strong, hence dangerous, opinion.

One of the most able of the political appointees added to the
diplomatic service since the war was chatting with me once about
a Foreign Service officer whom we shall call Lew, and who served
as his deputy in the small but not unimportant country where they
were stationed. I had known the Foreign Service officer many
years before in Asia as a particularly forthright and perceptive
man. His chief asked me, "You're a friend of Lew's, aren't you?"

I said, "Yes."

"Well, I can't make him out," was the reply. "He writes per-
fectly brilliant reports on the situation, all the facts are in, but
somehow he never says what we should do, and I never know
what he really thinks."

I mentioned the conversation to Lew and Lew laughed, dug me
in the ribs, and said, "We've learned, haven't we?"

In one Central European country I met a young man of twenty-
six who had just joined the Foreign Service, and he held me fasci-
nated for an hour with his description of a new and dangerous
situation I had not heard of before. I remarked that I certainly
hoped the State Department knew about it. "Well," said the young
man, "my chief is So-and-So." Here he mentioned the name of a
fine professional diplomat who had been attacked in Congress and
the press quite frequently over the years. "I like old So-and-So,
and I think he's wonderful. But I don't want to write this in my
report to him. They'll probably keep on investigating him for

AMERICA ABROAD 377

years, and when they go through his files at the Department, if
my name is at the bottom of a report addressed to him on a sub-
ject like this, they 11 link my name with his. That won't do any
good so I'm not putting this on paper. I'll tell him when I see him
next time."

During the course of the past seven years the candor and thus
the value of the professional Foreign Service officer of the State
Department has been reduced almost to the vanishing point. It has
been reduced, moreover, at a time when, as we have seen, Amer-
ican influence was creating in the Americans-in-dispersion in the
community of exiles and experts one of the most promising and
elaborate new diplomatic instruments ever devised. It has been
reduced at a moment when, as we have seen, the boldest and most
revolutionary approaches are needed in Europe and the world to
accomplish America's purpose of revitalized societies. But bold-
ness is now the rarest of qualities in professional American diplo-
macy, for to be wrong is dangerous, and to be both wrong and
out of step with Congress is disastrous.

The boldness which has, occasionally, broken through the
timidity of the State Department since the war is almost never the
kind of professional boldness which we expect of our generals in
time of war. It is the boldness of the gifted amateur, of the man
whose entire career is not at stake if a trenchant memorandum he
writes now is published ten years later for hostile scrutiny. Thus,
the boldest of American enterprises in Europeits push toward
European Union owes nothing at all to the professionals in the
State Department. Its two godfathers were General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, invulnerable in his prestige to Congressional sniping,
and David K. E. Bruce, American Ambassador to France. But
Bruce was not a State Department professional; he was a Virginia
gentleman, who had acquired considerable fortune in private busi-
ness as well as much political judgment as a member of the legis-
latures first of Maryland and later of Virginia. Bruce entered upon
his stewardship of the American Embassy in Paris with the wise
and simple belief that because America was the kind of country
it was, and because he was America's Ambassador, things should
happen, American influence should be felt, actively, in creating the
kind of world Americans sought. Of Bruce's two chief lieutenants
in the diplomatic push that rammed through the Schuman Plan

FIRE IN THE ASHES 378

and brought the European Army and Constitution as far as they
have come, one was a young Treasury official similarly invul-
nerable to the hazards of a diplomatic career. The other was a bril-
liant twenty-nine-year-old Foreign Service officer whose friends
thought him too young and devoted to his mission to realize how
far he was sticking his neck out.

At any mention of the European Army, one can arouse among
the professionals of the Foreign Service the best informed and
most intense discussion both pro and con of whether the Bruce
captaincy of European Union was wise or not. But, although no
one has seen their recent dispatches, it is quite safe to bet that only
the rarest few have gone beyond the coldest reporting of fact,
injecting neither misgivings nor enthusiasm into their accounts.
No Congressional committee ten years hence will be able to charge
the great majority of them with strong opinion one way or an-
other; their dispatches are neutral. They have found it best only
to list the facts, not weigh them, which is what the American tax-
payer paid to train them to do.

What has cramped the State Department's professional diplo-
mats, baffled our allies and reduced the usefulness of our wan-
dering experts and proconsuls is something peculiar to the new
diplomacy of the twentieth century which Americans at home
only vaguely understand.

The new diplomacy which America practices is a multiplication
of two things of the orthodox instruments of power on the one
hand, by the dynamic social ideas which beget them on the other
hand. In this newer diplomacy, the older tools and servants of
foreign policy are, whether they wish to be or not, bent to the
service of an expanding, penetrating system of political ideas. The
pressures that America exercises, fundamentally, on Europe are not
pressures for specific gains or objects (although they always shape
up this way in negotiation) but the pressures of a home commu-
nity continuously overflowing and spilling with radiant, change-
making energy.

In America, therefore, the true source of foreign policy is
neither the President, nor the Pentagon, nor, least of all, the State
Department, It is the people themselves, expressing their voice
through Congress. While the President, the Pentagon or even the

AMERICA ABROAD 379

State Department may be allowed to advise Congress or act In a
critical emergency, in the last analysis it is Congress, day-in, day-
out, that decides how American influence overseas shall be cast.

It must not be thought that the Congress of the United States
is a distant comptroller of events at long range. In these days of
twelve-hour transatlantic flights and easy Congressional junkets,
Congress is just around the corner from Europe. In the first seven
weeks after the Congressional recess of 1951, no less than 150 Con-
gressmen visited Paris either on committee, junket, vacation or
sharpshooting. During one period in December of that year, the
Paris Embassy was warden to fifty Congressmen in the same week.

Before these Congressmen all the world trembles. Both foreign
dignitaries and Americans-in-dispersion abroad look forward to
these visitations in somewhat the way villagers of medieval Europe
must have received their seigneurial lords in a mixture of tongue-
tied dread and hushed servility. At Paris, every visiting Congress-
man is met at his plane, his room is booked, he is supplied with
French francs, given a map of Paris and an information kit. As
soon as he arrives, he is provided with his PX card entitling him,
too, to ten cent cigarettes, cheap liquor and gasoline coupons. If
a Congressman wishes to pick up a few souvenirs for family or
constituents, the embassy lends him one or two young ladies to
help him hunt perfumes, parasols or costume jewelry. If necessary
it will shop for him independently whether he wants a shrunken
Indian head, an African drum or a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph.
If he is lonesome, the embassy has several chaste and comely young
secretaries who know Parisian theaters and night spots and will
accompany him of an evening. In case of emergency, when a rare
Congressman, strained by his exertions, relaxes too jovially with
unaccustomed French wines, the embassy has at hand several stal-
wart young Army officers to accompany him on the night rounds
so that no chance encounter on the Place Pigalle results in hurt
to the Congressman or affront to the dignity of the United States.

Whether present in the flesh or not, Congress is master. No
paper is prepared in any outpost, and no proposal is ever received
from any intelligent foreign chancery without forethought of
how it will sound when translated to Congress. Long before Con-
gress has reconvened in January, the overseas branches of Amer-
ican operation are already preparing "presentation'* hearings. In

FIRE IN THE ASHES 380

some outposts overseas personnel rehearse mock scenes before
Congress, with amateur staff actors playing the role of Congress-
man Taber or Congressman Reed or Senator McCarran to dream
up the nastiest possible questions. Some Congressional committees,
not content with the formal presentations, keep permanent men
overseas checking on American operations. The Swiss government
on one occasion arrested as a spy one of Senator McCarthy's
agents who was alleged to have made an abortive attempt to trap
an American diplomat in an indiscretion.

Everyone who does business with America knows that Congress
is the true source of American decision. Some foreign powers now
bypass both State Department and President in order to make their
appeal directly to Congress. Though none has gone so far as the
Chinese Nationalists or Franco's Spain, most of our major allies
keep men in Washington whose job is chiefly to lobby and to en-
tertain American Congressmen. The emotions of individual Con-
gressmen can result in a hundred million dollars more or less for
their strained budgets; they must be cultivated.

Given the freshness with which the American Congress has
come to the scenes of world action, its record of statesmanship is
imposing. The two most positive expressions of American dy-
namismthe Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Pact were
both expressions of Congressional determination and understand-
ing. Congress' instant support of the two swift emergency gestures
of the Executive the Truman Doctrine and the intervention in
Korea were, again, illuminated with wisdom.

Yet it is from Congress, too, that the greatest weaknesses of
American policy abroad spring. For where Congress is strong is
in the forthright act, the clear response to a clear issue clearly pre-
sented. Usually, it acts correctly. But where Congress creates
weakness is, paradoxically, where it should be strongest in the
expression of American philosophy of which it is the embodiment.
And in the multiplication factor of modern diplomacy which
multiplies the instruments of diplomacy by the social pressures be-
hind them Congress frequently comes close to crippling Amer-
ican purpose overseas.

Congress has been at war for some eight years with the execu-
tive leadership of the Presidency. For some fifteen years before
that it was led, frequently over its bitter protest, through a pro-

AMERICA ABROAD 381

gram of social reform which many of its members, to this day,
accept in practice but denounce in theory. In its surveillance and
suspicion of the Executive overseas, it now insists that the Execu-
tive conduct itself in a way that will satisfy a range of Congres-
sional opinion that can only be satisfied by the blandest generali-
ties. The instruments of American diplomacy overseas are hobbled
by their fear that an experiment may arouse Congressional vitu-
peration, and that a blunder, honestly made, may become the sub-
ject of Congressional inquisition. They must, in dealing with
aliens, limit themselves to the hard, specific demands of strategy
that can be justified before Congress; they cannot unless they are
led by rare men like Bruceincubate or underwrite any of the
changes, social, industrial, political or educational which might for-
tify the naked techniques they offer instead. A Soviet Embassy is
a seat of political infection; its political agents operate in intimate
touch with and influence not just Communist parliamentarians but
local revolutionaries and revolutionary parties. No American
would urge that his embassy abroad engage in agitation and ma-
nipulation of political passions as the Russians do. Yet, even within
the limits of decency, most American Embassies appear dumb and
stuttering. An American Embassy cannot urge on or explain to
other peoples just how American society is shaken up and reshaken
each generation because the Congress of the United States finds
such philosophy controversial. It can sell America only by pic-
tures of white New England churches, which are safe; or with
forklifts and cat-crackers, which are neutral; or lure Europeans
with the "smell of frying bacon," which must substitute for the
American message.

It is not only this split between Congress and Executive which
weakens policy. American policy is weakened even more by the
behavior of Congress or rather Congressmen, as individuals at
home where Congressmen consider their action unlinked to the
broader struggle going on in the world. No amount of carefully
orchestrated American propaganda can hide from other peoples
what Americans do at home; no censorship shelters American poli-
tics in their little follies. Yet these little follies, however small,
when amplified and rebroadcast abroad speak louder than the
Voice of America. When a Congressman like Senator Joseph Mc-
Carthy suggests that the most important American Ambassador

FIRE IN THE ASHES

abroad be given a lie-detector test, or when, by threat of Con-
gressional investigation, he wrings an accord from a Greek ship
owner, or when he sends two youths, entirely untrained in foreign
affairs, hunting through Europe on a ten-day trip to discover
subversion among men on the firing line against communism his
impact on European thinking and American foreign policy is
greater than any Ambassador in its service.

Always, at every turn, the men directing policy overseas return
to worry about Congress. It may be an economist who says, "We
spent five years trying to get Europeans to export more to Amer-
ica and when finally the Danes started to sell cheese in America,
Congress slapped a quota on them. Now how can I go back and
explain to the Danes that Congress had a hassle over oleomarga-
rine, and because they repealed the oleo tax the Wisconsin dairy
people got hurt; so in order to sweeten things up, they promised
to give the Wisconsin Congressmen a better break on cheese,
which is why we had to choke off foreign cheese. Or how can you
explain that sort of thing to people who make Sheffield cutlery in
England? Or garlic growers in Italy?"

It may be an American public-information specialist who says,
"You can't substitute propaganda for the kind of things America
used to mean to the world. They used to think of us as a big,
happy country. Americans always had this saucy attitude to life
and the Europeans loved it. But now we act scared, we act
nervous. No amount of propaganda can make us attractive."

Whoever speaks, of whatever facet of American policy, his
theme is the same that no action taken overseas has a fraction of
the importance of the behavior of Americans at home, among
themselves, as they speak through their Congress.

No sudden change has followed the replacement of one admin-
istration by another in the command of American foreign policy.
In Europe the drive for Union that Dwight Eisenhower sponsored
as general is being pursued with the same vigor (albeit in greater
difficulty) under his Presidency. The gradual slowdown of the re-
armament program which had begun at the Lisbon Conference in
1952, under Churchillian influence, has continued through the
spring of 1953 in Paris with the approval of the new American
Secretary of State. The slow conviction that America must open

AMERICA ABROAD 385

Its gates to European trade, first recognized in the declining days
of the old administration, has been hardened under the new and
runs into the same Congressional opposition.

What has changed, however, and changed fundamentally, is the
opportunity. The death of Stalin, the first tactical tentatives of the
new Russian leadership have changed the rivalry of the West and
communism from the rigid contest at arms in which we are so
close to overtaking themto the more hopeful, yet more difficult,
contest of political judgment and shrewdness. To maneuver,
American policy needs a complete flexibility, for it must be fast,
shrewd, cold and imaginative. It needs, first, an Executive un-
blinded by its own propaganda, endowed with wisdom, courage
and boldness. But it needs, beyond that, a Congress 'willing to let
its Executive lead where it cannot go itself and a Congress self-
disciplined enough not to destroy, by its domestic behavior, the
spirit that supports its actions overseas. It is not too much to say
that the future of the world lies less in the struggle within the
Kremlin than in the struggle within the American Congress.

X VI

decision at Washington

One day in Paris the scholarly Ambassador of a very minor
power told me a story.

He had collected the White Papers, Blue Books, Yellow Books,
Orange Books and all the published notes and dispatches of the
diplomacy that had led to the First German War in the summer of
1914. He had wanted to trace, day by day, the negotiations of the
last six weeks before that great accident. For the First World War,
he insisted, was an accident that might have been avoided, while
all the horrors that have since followed have flowed inevitably
from that accident as flame from fire. The Ambassador had been,
therefore, naturally disappointed in studying the clocked, and
dated cables that went Vienna-Belgrade, Belgrade-St. Petersburg,
BerHn- Vienna, Vienna-Paris, Paris-London, London-Berlin to find
that, even with a generation of hindsight, he could not pick out
the man or the decision or any precise moment-of-no-return when
the war might have been stopped before it was triggered off .

But he found something equally exciting. It was an omission.
For, if his researches were correct, said he, in all the published
cables of foreign ministers, sovereigns, ambassadors and chancel-
lors not a single European diplomat had mentioned the United
States, speculated on its strength, or wondered about its attitude.
Not only that none of the published records of those last twilight
weeks recorded the intervention, remonstrance, or initiative of any
American emissary in the six great capitals to assert the "will of
America in the century which she was to dominate.

The Ambassador told this story in a moment of exasperation,
adding, "But that was only thirty-five years ago! And now
now we cannot plan, we cannot think, we cannot breathe with-

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 385

out asking first, before anything else, what will America do? What
does America want? What can we do about them?'*

The Ambassador was not unfriendly. He represented, indeed,
one of those nations on whose automatic support America instinc-
tively counts. What exasperated him was that he and his country
were no longer fundamentally independent. They had been
dragged by this century's events into an association that made
them, willy-nilly, members of a community from which they
dared not break and in which leadership was irrevocably Amer-
ican.

It is with similar exasperation that Americans sometimes look
out on the world. They are annoyed like the Ambassador because
they can no longer act independently and dare not break from the
community they lead. They are upset because they cannot face,
alone, a world of ever larger social-and-power agglomerations.
Powerful as America is, she cannot ignore the fact that decisions
are no longer made by single nations; decisions are made by a di-
plomacy of communities of nations, in action and in contest with
other communities.

Let us look at these communities.

The two major blocs of power in the world are the Atlantic and
Russian-satellite blocs. But beyond these are other sharply defined
communitiesthe Moslem Community of nations with particular
problems and aspirations of its own, the Latin-American Commu-
nity, the Africans, only now emerging into an awareness of their
own kinship, the community of peoples called India, called South-
east Asia, the Japanese, and the Chinese.

At this writing, America is no longer at war with the Chinese but
is still greatly threatened by the Russians. It can count on the sup-
port only of the Atlantic Community and the Latin-American
Community. All other civilizations and communities hang in the
balance, in various degrees of disturbance and ferment, between
ourselves and the adversary.

The simple listing of community names suggests the strategy
imposed on the Atlantic world.

Defensively, it is to preserve and strengthen the unity of our
community and defend it from Russia's effort of disruption.

OS ensively, it is to swing the communities-in-between firmly

FIRE IN THE ASHES 386

to our side and then, ultimately, go on to divide the adversary's
community from within and leave him isolated.

For Americans, in this strategy, Europe is the key.

It is the defense key because it gives us a line of resistance that
starts 3,500 miles east of Staten Island and multiplies our military
strength with powerful allies.

It is the offensive key because Europe is an association of powers
who still wield far greater influence than ourselves in the changing
civilizations of Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, whom
we hope to swing to our side.

The defense approach to strategy requires, above all, that
Europe be kept content within the Atlantic Community, immune
to the seduction and intrigue of Russian diplomacy. This brings
us, therefore, to the two current problems of Europe which press
like twin nightmares on the day-to-day operation of American
diplomacy across the Atlantic.

The first of these is the recurrent economic stagnation of West-
ern Europe; the second is the German problem.

The first complicationEurope's economic stagnation is the
most inviting area of vulnerability to Russian attack. Nothing is
more eloquent of Russian thinking than the stability of their gar-
rison strength in Central Europe since the war. It is questionable,
looking back, that the Red Army's garrison divisions were ever
deployed for attack at a preconceived date. It is more likely that
they represented an insurance policy, a guarantee in the Russian
mind that if an accident happened they would be able to strike
swiftly and mop up easily, or, at any rate, jump off with an advan-
tage while their home reserves rolled in for a second and finishing
blow.

The NATO effort to purchase a counterinsurance policy was
as necessary in our counterstrategy as was the Russian garrison in
theirs. But this effort has been so costly and the emotion needed
to force it on the taxpayer so intense that it has diverted the
United States from the original interrupted purpose of American
intervention in Europe in 1947, which was the Marshall Plan
whose goal was originally set as the reorganization of European
economic life. It is usually forgotten that the Marshall Plan expired

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 387

in quiet, halfway through, as we have seen, without ever having
finished its tasks.

Western Europe thus lies vulnerable today not so much to Rus-
sian military aggression as to Russian political-economic aggres-
sion. At this writing, the Organization of European Economic
Cooperation reports that production in Western Europe, after
rising ten per cent a year from 1948 through 1951, has been sta-
tionary since the beginning of 1952 and is sustained chiefly by
the American boom and the domestic arms effort which is so un-
popular politically.

Although the full political impact of a rising standard of living
in Russia may be twenty years away or even further Russia's
growth has given her powers of economic disruption which are
immediate. Though Russia's masters may be unable to give their
growing population for many years much more than their present
meager pantry supplies, they may find it quite profitable politi-
cally to dump wheat on the world market, selling it cheaply to
England, Germany or the other major European importers, at
once, to cut them away from America. Though millions of ordi-
nary Russians do not even dream of driving their own automobiles,
Russia's masters may well buy up oil they do not need. They may
find it profitable to take Persian oil at the Persian Gulf in their
own tankers, swapping it for cheap textiles or capital equipment,
in order to break the Anglo-American petroleum control of the
Middle East. Other raids in the world market are equally possible.
They would be disturbing in any situation, but in a Europe that
marks time, socially and economically, as it does today, these raids
could be devastating.

The second problem within Europe Germany is diplomati-
cally even more perplexing than economic stagnation.

Since 1947, all American diplomacy in Europe has been erected
on the assumption that Germany was permanently split and that
Western Germany could thus be brought to mesh its strength in a
greater dynamic West European Union. The rigid counterdiplo-
macy of Joseph Stalin made this assumption valid and permitted
us what success we have so far won. But it now lies in the power
of Stalin's successors to undo our diplomacy by undoing his.
Should they offer to give up Eastern Germany on condition that
Western Germany repudiate association with the West through

FIRE IN THE ASHES 388

European Union, they might be able to undo all our work over-
night.

This prospect of a Russian offer on Eastern Germany haunts
our statesmen. But what is usually ignored is how deeply inter-
twined this problem is with the problems of Europe's economic
health. The Germans, whether split or united, will probably swing
to the power bloc that offers them the greatest opportunity to
thrive and earn a living. Germany's amazing recovery has taken
place in the post-Korean boom, when both devastated Germany
and the entire world clamored for hard goods. But the Germans
have not yet been forced to face a buyer's market, or meet the
competition of the more efficient heavy industries of England and
the United States. The slight downturn of 1949 in world trade
found the Ruhr eager and avid to sell and trade its goods with the
Russian world; a major depression might twist all German com-
mercial aspirations in that direction. The Germans are a people
not yet naturally and traditionally convinced of democratic values;
while many Germans cherish freedom, many would willingly
sacrifice it for other benefits. Behind the dignified fagade of the
Bonn government these contrary impulses clash. The problem of
the division of Germany is technically manageable as long as the
Western world is booming, for Germany reunited, no matter what
compact is signed on paper, will gravitate to the most inviting and
most vigorous of the rival blocs. In a depressed Europe and a de-
pressed world, however, Germany, even staked down by our half-
million troops, will be tugged politically and emotionally away
from us.

If these twin problems Germany and economic stagnation-
are intertwined, certain strategic measures are obviously necessary
to meet them at once.

The first is so necessary even from a domestic point of view that
it needs no laboring. It is that our economy be so managed, at
whatever cost, that no nineteen-thirty-style depression recur. A
depression of this depth is the only thing absolutely certain to rip
apart the entire structure of resistance to a Communist-dominated
world.

The next is the encouragement of a system of trade which lets
Europeans both trade in our markets and share in the resources of
the trading world which at the moment is dominated by America.

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 389

It is impossible to keep Western European industries from ex-
changing what they produce with the Soviet world if they cannot
squeeze through the tariff barriers of the United States to earn the
dollars they need to buy our goods.

Yet, again, a third measure is the support of the movement to-
ward European Union. This movement is important not so much
because the German troops it promises may be useful militarily,
but because it is the only authentic structural change yet proposed
that may rock West Europe off dead center.

European Union, it should be stressed, is not an iron-clad guar-
antee of dynamic forward motion; it is only the opportunity. The
use Europeans make of the opportunity depends mostly on them.

But the United States can help. It can help, technically, by un-
derwriting on the American capital market the investment loans
of the Schuman Plan already adequately underwritten by its High
Authority, or it can help by tax concessions to American investors
in such foreign bonds as are deemed in the national interest. It can
help, even now, with money. Though the first enthusiasm for the
Marshall Plan is over, the United States will be appropriating bil-
lions for foreign aid for years to come. At the moment, this aid
is rigidly linked to military purpose. Yet if Congress would per-
mit, once more, a flexible approach so that the sum might be used
either for military or civilian aid, we might be able with far less
money to do more good. For now, with the experience of the
Marshall Plan behind us, we know where the bottlenecks are which
must be smashed, where the Communist political strongholds are,
what the argument is about, and we could earmark our grants,
politically, not for relief, or for budget-balancing, but for specific
social and structural reforms.

If these are the burdens on American policy, burdens equally
grave lie upon Europe. For the Europeans are as responsible for
the present peak of strain in the Atlantic Community as are the
Americans.

Europeans have a tendency all too human to blame all their ills
and failures on American leadership, as if the perils and problems
which America crudely forces them to grapple with were of
American confection, not the ugly face of reality. Sometimes their
petulance has the same ring as that of a sensitive adolescent forced

FIRE IN THE ASHES 390

by a coarse parent to do his ugly, unpleasant, but necessary home-
work.

Much can be overlookedeven the European attitude toward
the Korean War. Though nothing in postwar history, except the
Marshall Plan, more swiftly raised American prestige in European
eyes than our defense of Korea, no other American action was
more swiftly transformed into a source of emotional criticism of
America. Many Europeans look on the American effort in Korea
as a twentieth-century reproduction of the Northwest Frontier
between India and Afghanistan a far-off frontier, held on a skir-
mish line between civilization and barbarism, which can be
manned for decades with adventure-seeking regular officers and
the sodden outcasts of industrial unemployment. For them, MIG
Alley is the equivalent of the Khyber Pass. Although European
soldiers fought on the front lines in Korea, no European ap-
preciates the extent of American involvement, nor does he grasp
the fact that thousands of Americans, drafted from the age of
eighteen, fought daily in defense of a land which was not theirs,
that the United States was strained emotionally and physically by a
major war, and the dead returned with each ship from the Orient.
Europeans focus generally, in their thinking, on the ugly phe-
nomena the Korean War produced in American domestic poli-
tics, or on the exaggerated military burdens which American
emotion demanded of them.

American diplomacy can and must overlook this attitude if
the Community is to survive; it must overlook many other Euro-
pean failings and faults.

What American diplomacy cannot overlook, what it must hold
Europeans primarily responsible for, is to provide the initiative
and will to make of their own resources a new life. If the chief
burden of America's diplomacy in Europe is to aid Europe to-
ward the expanding, fluid society, the chief duty of the Europeans
in this strategy is to make themselves healthy, to tear down what
Is ancient, or has become useless with age, and go forward to make
opportunity for each of their individuals.

This is the essential drama of Europe, for there is fire in the
ashes of the old civilization. America can fan it to flame or smother
it, but the flame cannot be fed from America, it must blaze from
its own sources.

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 391

The offensive approach to world strategy begins in Europe, too.

The offensive approach must start with what is held the At-
lantic Community and the Latin-American Community and go
on to acquire the friendship and support of the other communities
that lie between ourselves and the Russians.

In most of these in-between communities, the Atlantic Com-
munity relies for immediate negotiation and bargaining on French-
men, Britons and Belgians, who are or have been established
abroad in positions of power, or are about to withdraw from them.

Neither we nor the Europeans have ever as foreigners thor-
oughly understood these in-between civilizations.

These neutral blocs are usually included in the phrase "Free
World" which is both misleading and dangerous. Almost all the
people in these other blocs, steeped in poverty, hunger and dis-
ease, deprived of education and decision, are incapable of thinking
informedly about the twentieth-century world, or of choosing
their own governments. Anyone who thinks that world problems
(which baffle even the educated West) can be wisely decided by
the free vote of illiterate and superstitious peasants whose ho-
rizons reach no farther than the village well is the victim of self-
delusion. Governments are imposed on these people and they
persist and succeed, perish and disappear only as they draw loyalty
and give opportunity to the ambitious few with the acquiescence
of the hungry many. To millions in these countries, communism
masquerades as true progress. The people of these countries seek
chiefly that the governments imposed on them appear to be gov-
ernments of their own, not governments of alien white men, and
that these governments bring some tiny visible advantages to their
daily life. Among such people, communism can take hold but
only if we, by ignoring reality, permit it.

Much of Western political thinking is irrelevant for the in-
between countries. Freedom, as it developed in the West, was a
unique growth that went hand in hand for two centuries with the
development of science and industry. Most of the peoples of the
backward world in their lust to create a modern technology are
willing to skip freedom, in order more quickly to have the tech-
nologies that freedom fostered. Freedom may develop among
them later, as it works down from the top to an increasingly edu-
cated, increasingly well-fed citizenry. But for this generation,

FIRE IN THE ASHES 392

freedom, as we conceive it, does not weigh too heavily in their
choice. What they want is to be governed efficiently by men of
their own tongue and training and led, however slowly, toward
some of the wonders of modern civilization of which village gos-
sip whispers.

The problem in the in-between communities is, therefore, one
of transfer of power, a transfer of power from the hands of At-
lantic government to the hands of efficient native leadership, fol-
lowed by such astute maneuvering as will make these native lead-
ers see that there is more to be gained by friendship with the
Atlantic world than friendship with Russia. Such a transfer has
taken place effectively in both India and Japan. It is being bungled
in the Middle East and large regions of Africa.

Basic strategy must be to keep India and Japan with us, to soothe
and smooth the transfer in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast
Asia, and then, finally, come to grips with China in a political-
economic effort to magnetize her away from Russia where her
national interests diverge from those of Moscow.

This strategy, imposed on us by the world, must shape the tac-
tical approach to each concrete problem.

To begin with, there are two wars in Asia to be settled, of which
one, the Korean, now that the truce has been signed, approaches at
this writing the stage of final negotiation.

The second, inindo-China, will be far more difficult to settle.
Examined coldly, it must be at once apparent that a healthy
France in Europe is of far greater importance to the Atlantic
Community than a sickly, sullen France bled white by war in
Asia. If, then, France desires, as the majority of the French As-
sembly seems now to desire, to negotiate directly with the Com-
munists in Indo-China, or if it means that Indo-China must be split
in two as most countries on the Communist border are, then it is
to our interest that this be done. For what we may lose territorially
in Indo-China, we will gain in Europe by creating a France better
able to lead the drive to European Union she launched.

Moreover, an Indo-China settlement permits us to move closer
to another strategic objective in Asia. It not only liquidates a
colonial domain repulsive to the Southeast Asian communities but
brings about a general peace. And only peace in that area will

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 393

permit the natural strains between China and Russiaencouraged
by usto reassert themselves. -

Nor, if we know what we are doing, is the German problem,
though the most difficult in Europe, entirely bleak.

Our interest in Germany is first to encourage her internal de-
mocracy over a period of years, and next to incorporate her
strength in a European Union which she cannot dominate by
brute force.

But, while it is still necessary that German social and industrial
strength be geared into a broad, expanding European Union, it
is, in our present position of military strength, no longer imme-
diately urgent that German troops be armed and put on the line
at once. We have advanced swiftly toward both objectives of
German rearmament and European Union in the past years. We
are therefore in an enormously powerful position to wring Rus-
sian consent to the more important goal, European Union, at the
expense of the latter, German arms.

Moreover, the entire context of international affairs strength-
ens our bargaining hand. For the Russians, it is clear, are under
greater strain internally and in their fermenting satellites than we
might have hoped for several years ago. Never since the war have
the Russians expressed such eagerness to sit down and talk with
the West as in this year of tidal decision, 1953. It was to wring
this respect and attitude from the Russians that all American
diplomacy in Europe was so ably conceived five years ago.

So thoroughly have the Russians lost in Central Europe that it
now appears they are willing to offer settlement on a basis which
is almost as great a gamble for them as for us-the neutralization of
a reunited Germany as a buffer between the East and West. Such
a settlement, however, achieves none of the vital purposes of Amer-
ican diplomacy, for it again opens the opportunity for Germans
and Russians to connive and concert together as they have done
so often in the past. Our diplomacy has won a position in Europe
strong enough to repudiate such a settlement, while simultane-
ously trading little for much in the interlocking of interests be-
tween East and West.

What appears to worry the Russians, fundamentally, is the
specter of an armed Germany as spearhead of an Atlantic coali-
tion. By postponing the arming of Germans, or yielding on it

FIRE IN THE ASHES 394

altogether, we can exact an enormous price. We can exact, in
the first instance, the reunification of Germany by free elections
which is necessary to bring the Germans wholeheartedly into
European Union. We can advance, and possibly ultimately get,
the next proposal on our program which is the promise of free
elections in Czechoslovakia, the only people of democratic tradi-
tion in Communist grip.

The yielding on the rearmament of Germany may to many
Americans seem a huge concession. It does, indeed, require the
most skilful adjustment of our diplomacy so that the Constitution
of Europe and the other organs of European Union do not falter
or collapse because the European Army is allowed to lapse. But
a reunited Germany, bound in social and industrial union with
the rest of West Europe, under the surveillance of England and
America, is a far more valuable quantity than a split Germany,
with twelve divisions, trying to bargain her way out of our em-
brace by a separate understanding with the Russians.

There are tactical and interim solutions to almost every prob-
lem on the map of Europe. But only provided we realize that this
struggle is to be a long one; that peace is not to be had by one
climactic settlement but rather by a myriad of small ones, made
and revised from year to year; and that no rigid military posture
or investment in arms is adequate in itself.

American diplomacy comes to the world's stirring politics bear-
ing two traditions that have confused and contradicted each other
from the beginning of our country's history.

One is the tradition of the crusade, and the other the tradition of
the deal.

It is the crusade we usually learn about in our history books
the brave words of "Unconditional Surrender," of "Fifty-four
Forty or Fight," of "Freedom of the Seas," "Millions for Defense,
Not One Cent for Tribute." The deals are less often honored. Yet
it was a deal with a ruthless dictator that added the Mississippi
Valley to the original revolutionary states, even as that dictator
prepared to wipe out liberty in Europe. It was a deal that stretched
the northern border of our country to the Pacific along the forty-
eighth parallel although the nation had screamed "Fifty-Four
Forty or Fight." It was a deal which settled the most unfortunate

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 395

war in our history, in 1815, when three of the best poker-players
of Congress sat down to undo the war the "War Hawks of Con-
gress" had screamed into being. Only after the death of Abraham
Lincoln and the seizure of power by the Congressional zealots of
Reconstruction did victory, total and unchallenged, complete and
uncompromising, become the major attitude of American diplo-
macy in the world. And only the ever-swelling power of America
in a world that could not stay her made this attitude possible.

Today, America stands more perilously poised than ever be-
tween the alternatives of the crusade and the deal, at a time when
our power is, for the first time in a century, limited by powerful
enemies. The alternatives of crusade and deal reach deep into
American domestic politics, too, for they aggravate the sputtering
institutional rivalry between our Congress and our Presidential
leadership. Since, in the emotional language of American politics,
"crusade" is a far more appealing word than "deal," by corollary,
the Congress of the United States has always been in favor of the
crusade, while the President and his Executive officers have been
forced, whatever their profession of faith, over and over again into
the deal.

Of the crusade as a foreign policy little need be said. Its strategy
is clear. It means war with Russia at the earliest opportunity. But
its implications are obscure. All crusades, from the first adventures
that bore that name, have begun at home, venting their wrath on
victims closest at hand who may be real, fancied or completely
innocent objects of suspicion. The crusade must then prepare
the instruments of attack at a cost incalculably higher than the
present huge burdens of defense and seek the opportunity to
strike. It must strike not knowing whether it will carry allies with
it on the strike or not. Under whatever name the crusade mas-
querades, "Rollback," "Liberation" or "preventive attack," it
cannot be had cheaply. We might eventually win, but our cities
would, in the process, become rubble heaps, our children die and
our entire economic life collapse.

The alternative, the deal, seems superficially to carry immortal
shamethe tolerance of the evil of communism.

Yet the deal need not smell. It is only shameful if it is ap-
proached naively, or in the spirit of friendship to be pledged with
the enemy. If it is sought, however, on the only terms that the

F IRE IN THE ASHES

39 6

adversary might consider as an interim solution in a long-range
struggle until a new relation of force-dominance gives one or the
other of us permanent advantage-it can be both shrewd and ad-
vantageous. For the Russians believe, by their inflexible mythol-
ogy, that we are a world doomed to rot from within, while we
know we are not. For them, in their thinking, time, relaxation and
stagnation are certain to erode us into impotence. Yet we, by our
thinking, know that the power not only to survive but to thrive
and build a better world lies in our hands. By their thinking, the
other communities that lie between the Atlantic and themselves
must eventually fall, by their laws of history, into the world of
communism. But, if we are wise enough, we can make this dogma
as false as their dogma of the classless society. Their rigid laws of
history and politics see no vigor left in our philosophy of liberty
which makes them that much more vulnerable, at every contact,
to penetration by the acids of our free culture and thought. Our
philosophy even when engaged in crusade must brook the con-
stant internal penetration of their ideas and their faith. Their
philosophy cannot be penetrated by our ideas and faith except by
prolonged contact and the education of negotiation. The deal-
made of the myriad little deals is the easiest way of exposing them
to the seepage of questions and perplexing alternatives which ulti-
mately, we hope, will erode their system of politics, at home and
abroad, into impotence.

Starting off from these assumptions, each adversary believing
he will outwit the other, we can make slow adjustments, wisely,
carefully, successfully, provided we do so under certain conditions
of thinking and practice.

The first should be the realization that at no given date will it
be ever possible to arrive at any one settlement of all the issues be-
tween ourselves and communism in Russia. What separates us is
so vast, so many-sided, so difficult even to phrase in common terms
that never can there be, in the future, a great peace conference
after which all is sweetness and light. The deals to be made are
little deals, separate, individual adjustments at points of greatest
mutual irritation. The last time a war of conflicting faiths rolled
over Europe in the seventeenth century it took thirty years of a
butchery which reduced Central Europe in places to cannibalism
before mm arrived at a tolerance of what they felt were each

DECISION AT WASHINGTON 397

other's abominations. Only then, without ever having settled the
issues on which they went to war, did the antagonists abandon
their crusading and resign themselves to adjustments on a day-to-
day basis, permitting each ruler domestically to impose his religion
on his own people in his own way. The issues of faith between
ourselves and the Russians can never be settled; only external irri-
tations can be adjusted. But they are important.

The second condition is that a program of arms be continu-
ously maintained throughout the long process of bargaining, a pro-
gram that does not jerk from impotent slackness to intolerable
economic burden imposed by emergencies. Without such a base in
arms, the adversary might find victory so cheap and tempting as
to make impossible any reasonable adjustment.

Yet another condition is that America accept the fact that the
chief vulnerability of the Atlantic Community now lies within
socially, politically, economically. To armor this vulnerability our
allies must be urged and helped to change as we have changed in
this half -century. Not all these changes will be in America's image,
and many will be the subject of bitterest controversy both where
they occur and within our Congress. Yet our allies must change
if they are to go forward. The corollary of this approach is that
if the burden of arms becomes too heavy for them to bear, we
must not force them to carry so much that the burdens will crush
the necessary social changes we seek.

A fourth condition is that American leadership, acting within
the broad purposes laid down by Congress, be free to do so with-
out impossible daily Congressional interference. For what the
Executive must do is not only to think clearly and vigorously; it
must adjust this thinking to match the maneuvers of the adversary,
of the communities-in-between and of the allies we already hold
within our community. If cannot make these adjustments if, at the
same time, it must conduct an equally burdensome strategy of
compromise and foreign relations with its own Congress.

There is a last requisite which is the most important. It is that
America remain, or recapture, the image of freedom and the
promise of prosperity. For, whenever the edges of liberty are nib-
bled in America, or whenever Americans fumble at home in their
progress to a better and more vigorous life, millions of people
trembling between rival attractions are shaken loose into Russian

FIRE IN THE ASHES 398

hands. No maneuver of the enemy in the long period of negotia-
tions that may now be likely could hurt America in the outside
world as much as political squalor or economic chaos in the home-
land.

Which is why, now, for the first time in fifteen years the story
of America's security lies chiefly at home. And why this corre-
spondent, after fifteen years of following that story abroad, is
coming home.

Le Lavandou, July,

index

Acheson, Dean, 273, 274

Adenauer, Konrad, 149, 151-152, 164,
252-253, 269, 283

Africa, 392; importance of Europe in
future of, 17

Albania, 291

Allies, postwar agreements and dis-
agreements of, 10-32, 35-37, 39-41

Alphand, Herve, 269, 275

Anglo-French Alliance of 1939, 298

Asia, 392; importance of Europe in
future of, 17

Atlantic Alliance. See North At-
lantic Treaty Organization

Atomic bomb, dependence on, 33

Atdee, Clement, 201

Bavarian party, German, 149

Belgium, 76

Berlin, airlift, 145-146; Russian block-
ade -of, 43, 145; uprising of East
Zone workers, 310

Bertaux, Pierre, 102-129; as chief of
Surete Nationale, 122-128; as in-
surrectionary Commissioner of Re-
public of Toulouse, 114-120; in
Ministry of Public Works, 120-
i2i; as prefect of Lyons, 121-122;
in Resistance, 110-114

Bevan, Aneurin, 202

Bevin, Ernest, 40, 201, 266, 287-289

Bidault, Georges, 31-32, 40, 84, 87,
262-263

Birth rate, French, 97

Blum, Leon, 84

Bohlen, Charles, 376

Bond, William Langhome, 357

Books, American, influence of, 363-

364

Britain. See Great Britain
Bruce, David K. K, 274-275, 377-378
Brussels Pact, 259, 288-289
Bukharin, 354
Butler, Robert Austen, 211
Byrnes, James, 30-31, 139, 144

Carinthia, 28-29

Cartels, problem of, 68, 367

Caspian Sea, 28-29

Catholic Center party, German, 149

Channel, 299

Chennault, Claire, 357

Chiang Kai-shek, 341, 352, 370

China, 340-345, 392; alliance with
Russia in 1950, 344-345; American
assistance to, 356-358, 370; Com-
munist movement in, 342-344; con-
flict with Russian leadership, 341-
342, 352; prospective developments
in, 345; revolt against Western
domination, 340-341

China Service of U.S. State Depart-
ment, 375-376

Chou En-lai, 343, 344

Christian-Democratic party, German,
149-150, 151

Chu Teh, 344

Churchill, Sir Winston, 196, 211, 259

Clay, Gen. Lucius D., 138-147

INDEX

Coal, role in development of world
trade, 48; under Schuman Plan, 260,
264-266, 278-279

Cominform, organization of, 41

Communism, American political cam-
paign against, 69-70; nature of, 318-
320

Communist party, French, 84, 88-91,
102-104, 115-117, 1 20, 121-127, 346-
351; Chinese, 341-345; Eastern
European, 337-338; German, 149

Russian, 324-334 (See also Soviet
Union); change in character of
leadership, 326-328; conservatism
in taste of, 328; disturbances and
revisions, 330-333; luxury as reward
of power in, 328-330; prospects in,
333-334; under Stalin, 351-355;
straggle within, 325

Confederacy of Delos, 305-306

Congress, U.S., as source of decision
in foreign policy, 356-383, 397

Connally, Thomas T., 290

Controls, economic, after Second
World War, 55-57

Council of Europe, 259

Council of Foreign Ministers, 26, 29,
30-32,36-37,42

Crankshaw, Edward, 329

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 201, 208

Crusades and deals in American
diplomacy, 394-398

Currency, British, control of, 56-57;
convertibility crisis of 1947, 238; de-
valuation of, 238-239; former status
of, 49-52

Curry, Joe, 216-233; entrance into
politics, 226-228; on National Coal
Board, 228-233

Czechoslovakia, 394; Communist
coup d'etat in, 41, 289; rioting in,
339

Dardanelles, 28
Denmark, 290

Devaluation of British pound, 238-
239

400

Diplomacy, present-day, 234-235
Dollar Gap, 53-57, 67
Dulles, John Foster, 288

Ecole Normale Superieure, 106-108

Economic aid, American, 44-46, 58-
60, 70

Economic Cooperation Administra-
tion (ECA),58

Economic crisis of 1947, 33-35, 45-47,
238; background of, 47-57

Economic situation, in France, 99-
100; in Great Britain, 248

Edwards, Ebby, 229

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 138, 152,
271-275, 281, 308, 377, 382

England, 5 (See also Great Britain)

Eritrea, 28-29

Europe (See also European Union);
Communist influence in, 346-351;
Eastern, Soviet record in, 334-340;
economic aid from America, 44-46,
58-60, 70; economic crisis of 1947,
33~3 5 45-47; economic history, 47-
57; nation-families of, 4-6; post-
war military strength of Western
Powers and Russia in, 32-33; rela-
tionship to America, 6-8; status in
world, 8-10, 13-14, 16-17; vulner-
ability to attack by Soviet Union,
290-292

European Defense Community
(EDC), 266-281

European Payments Union, 65

European Political Community
(EPC), 281-283

European Recovery Program (ERP) ,

59

European Union, 14-16, 257-284, 389;
British attitude toward, 239; Con-
stitution of, 281-283, 284; Defense
Community and European Army,
266-275, 279-281; French attitude
toward, 240-241, 244, 249-250; Ger-
man attitude toward, 246-247, 251-
253; historical background, 257; as
Marshall Plan objective, 64-65, 272;

INDEX

Pleven Plan, 268-271; preliminary
discussions of, 258-260; progress of,
283-284; reactions to, 275-277;
Schuman Plan, 258, 260-266, 278-
279

Flandin, Pierre-Etienne, 96

Foreign policy, American, 356-398;
British, 236-240, 247-248; French,
240-244, 248-249; German, 244-247,
249-253; Soviet, 253, 334-355

Foreign Service of U.S. State De-
partment, 372-378; China Service,
375-376; in drive to European
Union, 377-378; inefficiency in-
duced by Congressional criticism,
376-377; misconceptions of and at-
tacks on, 373-375; personnel of,
373; Russia Service, 376

France, 4, 75-129; in Atlantic Alli-
ance, 240, 248-249; attitude toward
European Union, 240-241, 244, 249-
250; collaboration, after effects of,
95-96; economic aid to, 46, 58, 67;
inability to meet financial burdens,
99-100; inflation in, 91-94; Libera-
tion and insurrection, 114-117; na-
tionalization of industry, 88-89;
natural resources of, 79-80; post-
war achievements in, 97-98; re-
establishment of national govern-
ment, 120-123; regional govern-
ment after Liberation, 1 19^-120; Re-
sistance in, 110-114; response to
rearming of Germany, 266-267;
Russian alienation of, 28, 242; spe-
cial-privilege status in, 94-95

Communists in, 346-351; decline
in membership, 348; in Liberation
and insurrection, 115-117; nature
of, 346-347; opportunities for ex-
ploitation, 349-350; political blun-
ders of, 347-348; postwar strikes
led by, 122; power broken, 123-126
Politics in, 79, 81-92; since Lib-
eration, 87-92; parties, 83-85; Na-
tional Assembly, 82-87

401

Free Democratic party, German, 140-

150

French, character of, 104-105
Fritalux or Finebel, 259-260

Ganneval, Gen. Jean, 271

Gaulle, Gen. Charles de, 84, 86, 89,
in, 243

German party, 149-150

Germany, 4, 75-78, 130-188; under
Allied High Commission, 151-153;
attitude toward European Union,
246-247, 251-253; Eastern Zone,
141-142, 251-253, 291, 294, 310; eco-
nomic aid to, 46, 58; Federal Gov-
ernment of West Germany estab-
lished, 149-150; future strategy for,
387-388, 393-394; political parties,
149; postwar Allied plans for, 25-
26, 29-31, 40; prewar Soviet blun-
ders in, 352-353; rearmament pro-
posal, 152-153, 266-268, 272-275,
393-394; unity as major objective,
244-247; Winter Years of, 134-137;
World War II, 175-180

Allied military government, 42-
43> W-^o; Constitutional Conven-
tion, 42, 146-149; currency reform,
42-43, 144-145; self -sufficiency as
goal for Western Zone, 143-145

Renaissance of, 14-16, 153-166;
factors in, 157-159; industrial de-
velopment, 155; nationalist move-
ment, 162-166; political elements,
159-162

Great Britain, 75-78, 189-233; in At-
lantic Alliance, 236-240, 247-248;
attitude toward European Union,
239-240, 282; Civil Service, 210-
2 n; dependence on trade, 190-192,
237-239, 247; development of
world trade by, 48-51; economic
aid to, 46, 58; economic needs of,
248; educational system, 210, 371-
372; General Strike of 1926, 222-
225; inability to maintain military
commitments, 33-34; political

INDEX

Great Britain (cont.)
strength, factors in, 193-196; in
postwar agreements, 19-20; Tory
government, continuation of social
reforms by, 210-215; "trade not
aid" program, 65-66; unemploy-
ment between world wars, 200-201;
Whitehall, 196-198

Coal industry in, 216-233; basic
problems of, 229-233; labor unrest
in 1920'$, 221-225; nationalization
of 228-229; working conditions in,
230; World War II, 226-228

Labour government in, 198-210;
achievements of, 202-203; deficien-
cies of, 205-207, 209-210; national-
ization, 207-208; Parliament as tool
of, 209-210; personnel of, 201-202;
Russian alienation of, 28; Planning
Board, 208-209; taxation, 203
Greece, 20, 33-35, 290
Gruenther, Gen. Alfred, 301

Harriman, Averell, as head of Mar-
shall Plan, 60-62

Heusinger, General, 270-271

Hitler, Adolf, 132-133; incompetence
of early war production, 175-176

Hopkins, Harry, 22-23

Housing, in France, 94, 349, 370; in
Germany, 156

Hungary, 335-33 8 > 339~34<>

Hyndley, Lord, 228

Iceland, 290; economic aid to, 58
India, 209, 392

Indo-China, French burden of war
in, 99, 249; solution to problems in,

39 2 ~393

Industrial expenditures, in France, 99

Industrial potential of Germany,

postwar reduction of, 136, 141-143;

raising levels of, 144; upsurge of,

in I95o's, 155

Industrial power, British decline in,
200; development of, 48-50; dis-
crepancy between European and

402

American, 364-368; postwar levels

of, 63-64, 66; of Soviet Union, 320-

322

Inflation in France, 91-94
Investments, European, before First

World War, 50-51
Ireland, 290
Italy, 5, 290; economic aid to, 58, 68

Jessup, Philip C., 273
Jones, W. E., 227-228

Kamenev, 354

Katz, Milton, 62

Kennan, George, 376

Korean War, effects of, 247, 249,
272; on Germany, 152-153, 250; on
Marshall Plan, 70-71; on Russo-
Chinese Alliance, 345; on United
States, 390

Krushchev, 332

Labour party, British. See Great

Britain, Labour government
Lawther, Sir William, 223
Leca, Pierre-Paul, 112, 128-129
Lenin, Nikolai, 326, 351-352
Living standards of Soviet Union

and Western nations, 322-324
Lovett, Robert, 290
Low Countries, 4-5

McCarthy, Joseph, 380, 381-382
McCloy, John J., 139, 150, 274
Magazines, American, influence of,

363-364

Malenkov, Georgi, 327, 331, 333
Manchuria, Russian looting of, 343
Mao Tse-tung, 342, 344-345
Marshall, Gen. George C., 32-36, 41,

144, 287-290

Marshall Plan, 44-45, 57-71, 259;
achievements of, 66-67; expendi-
tures under, 58-60; initiation of,
35-43; objectives of, 63-65, 67-70,
272; productivity drive of, 364-
368

INDEX

Mendes-France, Pierre, 100

Mgeiadze, 332

Middle East, 28-29, 209-210, 392

Mihajlovic, General, 353

Mikoyan, Soviet Minister of Foreign
Trade, 30-40

Military expenditures, of France, 99

Military strength, of Atlantic Alli-
ance at present, 296-298; of Soviet
Union at present, 293-294; postwar,
of Western Powers and Soviet
Union, 32-33, 295-296

Moch, Jules, 87, 103, 120-122, 127,
267

Molotov, V. M., 22, 30-31, 36-41, 287,

326

Monnet, Jean, 86, 260-262, 274-275,

279

Monnet Plan, 88
Monroe Doctrine, 288
Morrison, Herbert, 201
Movies, American, influence abroad,

363

MRP (Movement of Popular Repub-
licans), French political party, 84,
88, 91, 261-262

Mutual Security Agency (MSA),

58,71

Myers, Dan, 357

Nationalization of industry, in
France, 88-89, 91, 98; in Great
Britain, 207-208, 213, 228-233

NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty
Organization

Nazi-Soviet Pact, 353, 354

Netherlands, economic aid to, 58, 67

New York Herald Tribune, 361

New York Times > 361

Newsweek, 361

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), 28, 236, 247, 285-200,
296-317; authority of Secretariat,
312-313; Brussels Pact, 259, 288-
289; commands of, 298-299; exist-
ing and future problems, 313-317;
final draft and signing of, 289-290;

403

France in, 240, 248-249; germina-
tion of, 287-288; Great Britain in,
236-239, 247-248; military strength
of, 296-298; organizational struc-
ture of, 310-312; political prob-
lems of, 304-307; prospects of,
302-304; strategy of, 307-310;
weaknesses of, 299-302
Norway, 290

Oil fields of Middle East, 28-29
Organization for European Econom-
ic Cooperation (OEEC). See Mar-
shall Plan

Paris, American Embassy in, 359, 361,

379; fall of, 109-110
Parkman, Henry, 370
Peasant-Independent party, French,

83-84, 91

Pinay, Antoine, 84, 92, 96
Pleven, Rene, 87, 263, 268-269
Poland, postwar conflict over, 21-23;

revived guerrilla resistance in, 339
Portugal, 290

Potsdam Conference, 25-27, 141-142
Productivity drive of Marshall Plan,

364-368; reasons for failure of, 368-

37 2

Radical-Socialist party, French, 84,

9i
Railroad transportation, in France,

95,9*

Rakosi, Matyas, 339-340
Rally of French People (GaulHsts),

political party, 84, 91, 92, 102-103
Reader's Digest ; foreign editions, 362
Remer, Ernst Otto, 164
Reparations, East German, 142-143;

Italian, 29; West German, 29, 30,

142-143
Revolutionary essence of American

productivity and expansion, 368-

37 2
Reynaud, Paul, 84, 259

INDEX

Ridgway, Gen. Matthew, French
demonstrations against, 347-348

Rivers of Europe, 4-6

Roedigger, Dr., 269

Roman culture and thought as com-
mon heritage of European states,
257-258

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 23-24, 139

Ruhr, 28-29, 30, 141, 168-170; heavy
industry during war, 177-179; na-
tionalist political conspiracy of
1953, 165; production in i95<>'s, 185;
re-establishment of industry under
British occupation, 181-182

Rumania, postwar conflict over, 20-
21

Russia, See Soviet Union

Russian experts of U.S. State Depart-
ment, 376

Rykov, 354

Saar, 76-77, 246

SACLANT, 299

Sardinia, 67

Schlieker, Willi, 167-188; as chief of
wartime iron and steel production,
176-179; as industrial trader, 183-
187; re-establishment of Ruhr
heavy industry under British occu-
pation, 181-182

Schmidt, Carlo, 149

Schumacher, Kurt, 149, 164

Schuman, Robert, 84, 261-263, 266,
283

Schuman Plan, 249-250, 260-266; coal
and steel, pooling of, 264-266;
progress under, 278-279; ratifica-
tion of, 273-274; suprasovereign
Authority and Assembly, 265-266;
traditional European commercial
patterns, 263-264

Sforza, Count Carlo, 283

SHAPE, 299

Sheng Shih-tsai, 353

Smith, Bedell, 41

Socialism, 56; in France, 88-92; in
Great Britain, 196-210, 228-233

404

Socialist party, French, 84, 88, 91;
German, 149, 151-152

Socialist Reich Partei, German, 164

Soviet Union, Berlin blockade, 43,
145-146; bargaining with, as future
strategy, 393-394? 39<$~397; chal-
lenge of, 16-17, 355; China, pro-
gram in, 340-345; Communist
Party Congress of 1952, 326-327,
330-332, 354; Eastern Europe, rec-
ord in, 334-340; France, program
in, 346-351; Germany, program in,
138, 141-145, 251-253; industrial and
technical progress in, 320-322;
leadership of, 324-334; living stand-
ards in, 322-324; military strength
of, 292-294; postwar agreements
with, 19-26, 29-31; postwar blun-
ders of, 27-29, 242, 335-34<> 353;
response to Atlantic Alliance, 303-
304; response to Marshall Plan, 37-
43; under Stalin, 351-355; vulner-
ability of Western Europe to at-
tack by, 290-292; Western Europe,
policy toward, 253

Spaak, Paul-Henri, 259

Speer, Albert, 175-176, 179, 182

Speidel, General, 270-271

Stalin, Joseph, in breach with Tito,
338-339; evaluation of, 35i~355; in
leadership of Russian Communist
party, 326, 331; postwar relations
with Allies, 22-24, 41

Stars and Stripes, 361

State Department, U.S., Foreign
Service of, 372-378; and policy for
Germany, 139-140, 147

Steel production, in continental Eu-
rope during German control, 176-
179; ECA aid to, 67, 68; in Ger-
many, 156, 185; postwar, 64; un-
der Schuman Plan, 260, 264, 278-
279; Soviet, 321

Stilwell, Gen. Joseph, 370

Stimson, Henry L., 139

Stresemann, Gustav, 132

INDEX

Stuttgart speech of James Byrnes,

30-31

Sweden, 290
Time, 361

Tito, Marshal, 338-339, 353
Trieste, 28-29, 58, 76
Tripolitania, 28-29
Trotsky, Leon, 326, 354
Truman Doctrine, 35
Turkey, 28, 33~35> <57> 290

United Kingdom. See Great Britain
United States, Army, government of
Western Germany by, 42-43, 137-
150; control of NATO over, 312-
313; economic aid to Europe, 44-
46, 58-60, 70; forces stationed in
Europe, 7-8, 32-33; in formation
of NATO, 288-290; Germany,
postwar plans for, 14-15, 25-26,
3031, 40; importance of Europe
to, 16-17; in postwar agreements,
19-23, 3031; Truman Doctrine
and Marshall Plan initiated, 35-43
Influence of, 356-383; advisors
and experts, 357362; Congression-
al, 378-382; cultural penetration,
362364; postwar productivity
drive, 364-368; revolutionary es-
sence of, 368-372; State Depart-
ment, 372-378

Strategy for future, 385-398; in
Asian wars, 392-393; crusades and

405

deals, 394-398; gaining support of
in-between communities, 391-392;
on Germany, 387-388, 393-394; re-
organization of European econom-
ic life, 386-387; support of Euro-
pean Union, 389

UNRRA, 46

U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union

Vandenberg, Arthur, 288, 290
Vatican, 75, 76

Western Powers, adoption of Mar-
shall Plan by, 3543; Russian efforts
to split, 28

World trade, dependency of Great
Britain on, 190-192; development
of, 4751; Marshall Plan objectives,
63-65; after Second World War,
5256; between world wars, 5152

World War II, in England, 227-228;
in France, 108-114; m Germany,
175-180; postwar agreements, 10-
3*

Yalta Conference and discussions fol-
lowing, 21-23, 141. 343
Year of Divergence (1947), 33-41
Years of the Pause, 10-13
Yugoslavia, 76, 338-339, 353

Zay, Jean, 108
Zinoviev, 354

Soviet Dominated Eurovc

11

5158