It Cannot be Stormed Read online

‘Whether it is Communism or not,’ said Ive, raising his eyebrows, ‘is all one to us; I thought it was communistic to repudiate individual terrorism?’

  ‘Give it to the capitalist system for all you’re worth,’ said the deputy, who suddenly discovered that he had always been in sympathy with the farmers.

  ‘You do not understand us,’ said Ive, ‘your battle is not our battle.’

  Moreover, Ive was realising that artistic demagogy—demagogy with a superstructure of ideology, as it were—must be a more effective means of propaganda. But at this stage of the battle propaganda was not the important point. It might even be harmful. For although all their hopes were centred in the Movement, it was also full of dangers. The Movement must not develop into a party. Its energies must be directed, not restrained. Actually the ideological aspect had had its basis from the outset in the actions of the farmers, although it was not the decisive issue (it did not become that until later). For it was not only their farms, not only their property, which had to be preserved, the entire farmer class, as a representative part of the whole nation, must be saved from extinction. Stability must not be sacrificed for the ephemeral. Work could not be regarded as a commodity in this case, for all their work was for the farm—how could it then be regarded as a commodity? In fact what might be applicable in the town and for workers and masters, did not apply in this case. The farmer was worker and master in one, and at the same time he was neither—he was a farmer. But wasn’t business on a large scale said to be more profitable than business on a small scale? That too did not apply—none of these things applied.

  At Grafenecke von Eckernförde, the district where there were large estates, things were even worse than in the rest of the farming province. Grafenecke was taking no part in the farmers’ battle. It was not against it, certainly, but it simply could not take one side or the other. Possibly, large estates were too closely entangled in the capitalist mesh; their troubles were not the farmers’ troubles, at least not completely.

  ‘You are thinking on capitalist lines,’ said the workers of the small towns to the farmers.

  The farmers said: ‘We used to put all our profits into the farm. It gave us a proportionate return. Today we are putting more than our profits into the farm; we work all the year round, and at the end we are left with a loss. We might as well have taken the money to the bank and spent the whole year looking out of the window; we should have been no worse off. Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we sell our farms and live on the proceeds? That would be thinking on capitalist lines, we are thinking of the farm. The farm is not a factory, and our work is not a commodity.’

  The gentleman at the Treasury-office had said: ‘You do not think on economic lines.’

  The farmers said: ‘Even before the war we made no more than two percent profit: that just enabled us to keep the farm going. Today we are throwing away our capital. Why are we doing it? We can live without selling or buying; shall we prove it to you? But we sell and we buy. Because we cannot separate the farm from the people. We do not want to live on an island; we live with the people; we are ourselves the people, we ourselves represent political economy. But what are you doing with our money?’

  The gentleman at the Treasury-office had replied: ‘Reparations.’ That was understandable, losers have to pay the cost.

  ‘And what are the French doing with the reparations?’ asked the farmers.

  ‘They are paying their debt to America.

  ‘And what is America doing with the money?’

  ‘She is giving us credits.’

  ‘But that is nonsense,’ said the farmers, ‘what if we paid no reparations?’

  ‘Then they would cut off our credits, and would not take our goods.’

  ‘And when we pay, we pay in goods, and we glut the market.’

  ‘That is the problem of transfer.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  And the gentleman at the Treasury-office explained to them.

  ‘So our learned professors are sitting there and racking their brains to find a way for us to pay out our capital without using up other people’s capital? And they are being paid for that? Out of the money you are taking from us?’

  ‘Revision of the Treaties!’

  ‘Meanwhile our farms are ruined and your political economy as well. It’s all madness,’ said the farmers. ‘You always said that the war was madness; is what’s going on today any less mad? We’re not going to risk our skins for madness. But perhaps you would like to? But of course your machinery of administration was always well behind the lines!’

  ‘What actually do you want?’ asked the gentleman at the Treasury-office.

  ‘We don’t want you,’ said the farmers, and departed. And shortly afterwards a bomb exploded.

  ‘Bombs are not arguments,’ wrote the Berliner Tageblatt.

  But events proved that bombs were arguments. Ive observed this with delight. He observed the remarkable, spiral progress of the Movement, of all movements. In this case it began with the farm, went through the whole gamut of thought, reason and passion, to end again with the farm. Frequently, when he was writing, he would stop with a smile, realising that he had thought in the very same way a long time ago, had had the same idea and rejected it; now it was taking possession of him again, equipped with a wealth of chaotic experience, matured, clarified, tested, and firmly established. Yet it was still the same simple idea, only carrying greater weight. Epochs are built up in this way; this process is the foundation of life itself. The farm represented life, the continuity of life, subject to every phase. There came a time when the farmer no longer wanted to be a farmer: he called himself a landowner, or an agriculturist. Something entered into his life which was not of the essence of the farm, not of the essence of his work, and yet was both profitable to the farm and pleasant. The temptation was small at first and insignificant and yet it expressed the whole situation. Prosperity meant cheapness, that was clear. It was ridiculous to waste hard work on preserving objects that could be replaced cheaply. Old chests decayed, old cupboards, which had served for hundreds of years, gave way at the hinges. Then one day there was a bright green carpet in the house, a linen cupboard and an expanding bookcase; a stiff, grand drawing-room with an upholstered sofa and a plate-glass mirror. There was a lustre scintillating with hundreds of cut-glass pendants, a precious possession which the wife at once swathed in a dustsheet, for the labour of keeping it free from dust and cobwebs would have been robbed from the farm. Then there was electric light; and the telephone and the suction cleaner and the milk-separator, and later the wireless. Did the farmer regret all this? He did not, because the farmer had become a landowner, he was modern, he had to be modern. He had his club and his union and his banking account, and all this he had won for himself, and it was useful and pleasant.

  ‘A stupid farmer,’ a good landowner would say of a bad landowner, and he would talk of international markets and take his money to the bank. Poetry was forgotten; the old costumes, the old festivals, dances, and songs disappeared; the girls no longer sat at their spinning-wheels in the evenings, chatting with the boys; they went to the establishment decorated with paper, garlands, down the street, and danced to the music of the gramophone.

  Poetry was forgotten, and the townspeople regretted it deeply. The townspeople wrote affecting books about it and founded societies for the preservation of the national costume. The movement was patronised by a titled lady, and the schoolmaster introduced it into the village. There was a grand carnival, but the next day the costumes were hung up in the wardrobe, for no girl could stand at a chaff-cutting machine in those wide skirts? When the young people of the town rose in revolt against bourgeois customs, groups of them would go to the village—for, if they would had nothing to do with bourgeois customs, they were all for rural customs—to play and sing to the farm-people to the music of their fiddles—not violins, mark you. That was very nice but it was not rural. All this talk about back to the land that the townspeople were
indulging in was right. The landowner, or the farmer, if you like, knew exactly how his land was constituted, where there was gravel in the soil, or marl or lime, that was important in deciding what manure to use, and indeed was only to be learnt by long experience; he knew exactly from what direction the storm came and where it would end; knew where it was a good thing to regulate the stream and where not. He left the undergrowth in the wood, although it prevented the trees from growing straight; for singing birds nested in the undergrowth and caught the insects, and the finest timber forest with the smoothest tree trunks is ruined if it harbours bark-beetles or tree-hoppers.

  Poetry was forgotten (if it had ever existed); but was it nothing that the owner of the farm stood at the threshing machine and let the golden corn run through his fingers? Was it nothing that the nine-hundredweight sow won the first prize at the agricultural show in Neumünster? The farm flourished, and one could consider building, buying machinery, or a new cart, or—for one moved with the times—reorganising the pigsties, hygienically, with tiles and shining metal rails, if that proved a good plan (but it did not prove a good plan; a pig that is a pig doesn’t like hygiene). The farm prospered and everything was clear and simple and good. All the talk of the flight from the land was rubbish, up here at any rate. How is the farm to subsist if the sons divide their patrimony? The younger sons did not flee from the land, they helped to support it. They became for the most part proletarians, which was unfortunate; but what old Bismarck had done for agriculture, the young Kaiser was probably doing for the workers and, for the rest, let each one look out for himself. The landowner too, has his troubles, his misfortunes, his hard times, when the harvest is spoiled by hailstorms, or drought burns up the corn, or there is disease among the cattle. Prosperity means cheapness, and when the international markets are bad we still have the tariffs. It was a good thing to have a big and widespread organisation on which one could depend when interests clashed. The bourgeoisie, industry, trade, each had constructed its apparatus, and now agriculture had done the same, and all were interdependent. The farmer realised that he was an important member of the State and that his production was the basis of economy. On every side he saw the same reasoned order founded on standards of utility, developing nearer and nearer to perfection. Everyone had a direct participation in this order and in everything that was created within it; everyone came under the direct influence of the wholesome impulse to share in the task. If ideas were lacking, the human mind strove perpetually to create new and more complicated images, and wherever there was injustice it was soon replaced by progress, a single, forward impetus. The hand of order reached to the furthest corners of the world; a powerful, inspiring spirit had conquered the earth, had erected the great and glorious edifice, and pervaded it from its foundations to its dizzy heights. Unceasing progress seemed to be the essence of this spirit and perpetual change its medium. Inexhaustible energies were transforming the towns into towering citadels, were attacking the atom and using all their scientific skill to disintegrate it. The rich treasure-house of the elements was sending its rays flashing to the darkest recesses, a stupendous, transfigured squandering of strength, which could only be curbed at an ever further receding point. The earth seemed to have become a plaything of the creative spirit, and the great task was to discover the rules of the game. Every form of energy was producing to excess, so that it was more important to study the laws of production than to produce, necessary check was to be kept on the flood of overproduction. It seemed as if the released energies were reacting against themselves; more and more violent shocks shaking the scales, and over-weighting first one side and then the other.

  On the one hand the dynamic forces tossed events into a dense entanglement, while on the other they laid bare an expanse of empty chambers in which gases assembled and smouldered; here and there destructive explosions tore at the steels walls, and the sparks from one ignited yet another. The same mysterious power which winged this great period to victory or to defeat, repeated the process in powerfully concentrated form with all its cruelty and splendour in the Great War. The campaign, which began with beating of drums and armies marching forward to fulfil themselves in glorious victories, led at last through uncontrolled dissipation of energy to complete exhaustion. Those who had thought they could control the war were now controlled by the war. The values, which seemed to have been created for eternity, failed when oppressed by bloodshed and faced with death, and the simple question as to the meaning of it all remained unanswered. If the individual was reminded of the futility of his industry, the certainty grew nonetheless of a fuller and maturer strength, developing with all the miracles of growth, directing the mind to the invisible, teaching men to see every phenomenon with new, as it were, spiritual eyes. The old order was still there, but the energy which had directed it was no longer subject to its laws. Life in its manifold forms, imprisoned within this order, fettered by the gigantic, wasteful machine, might attempt to master fate, but every attempt failed. Thus it seemed that the only thing to do was to complete the circle, to grope one’s way back to the starting-point, to the indestructible basis, which once had been the beginning and was to be the beginning again.

  Prosperity had vanished, and the only cheap things were the explanations of the professors and politicians, cheap and mass produced, but not good; one is entitled to require of an explanation that it be comprehensible, but for a long time now science had consisted of mysteries, and politics of secrets, inaccessible to the ordinary intelligence. Masses of figures and incomprehensible words gave an air of importance to the problem, but nobody could check the result to see whether it was right or wrong. This atmosphere begat a wild empiricism and there were few buildings that did not house laboratories with retorts and test tubes. The mixed brew bubbled away in the vessels, spreading its fumes in thick clouds over the country.

  ‘Seek knowledge and make changes,’ said some, bustling about with their pots and crucibles, and melting down Marx and Hegel to produce the philosopher’s stone. Others stirred up the blackened remains, mixing them according to a new recipe, and set fire to the powder, fancying in the magic illumination of the Bengal light that they had produced a conservative-revolutionary compound.

  This was undoubtedly a great period for our valiant Grafenstolz; for him the world was completely veiled by the powers of good and evil which swayed it, and if this was all a figment it was one that did not daunt his fiery spirit. Leave me alone,’ cried a voice within him, and he made a stand against the super-national powers and against the democracy, which was a fiction of the newspapers, and against the fiction of the Constitution, the free Republic.

  ‘How should I know, I am only a stupid farmer,’ said Hamkens, when the gentlemen of the Board of Agriculture, asked him what he thought of the effect of the great rye subsidy. ‘I cannot know that, you can ask Privy Councillor Sering, for he doesn’t know either.’

  Actually the privy councillor did know, for he wasn’t a stupid farmer. Privy councillors always knew, and if what they said was not done, then of course they had been in the right, and, if it was done, then it had been done in the wrong way. It was always wrong, not only for the privy councillors but for the farmers.

  At first the farmer decided that one thing was not right and had to be altered, then more and more, and for every hole that was mended two new ones appeared; for everything was interdependent, and what had once proved to be a blessing proved now to be a curse.

  ‘Everything must be changed,’ said the farmers.

  They said: ‘We have tried everything, barter, intensive production, speculative production: we have tried associations and federations, they have all in their turn served the farm, but they are no use to the farm any more. We must begin at the beginning again!’

  The farm was the only thing that remained, the permanent centre of their thoughts.

  ‘You must leave us alone,’ said the farmers, ‘for if you destroy the farm, you destroy us with it.’

  This happened
just when the bright green carpet had lost its shiny pile, and the grey foundation of sackcloth was showing through the worn patches; when the children were using the glittering glass pendants from the lustre as playthings, when the linen-cupboard was standing in the shed, to be used as a store-place for the food-sacks. Once more it was worth while to put hard work into a good piece of furniture, everything was worth while again that was done for the ultimate good of the farm.

  ‘You must leave us alone,’ said the farmers, and for a long time it had been not only the taxes, not the dues, not the failure of the commercial treaties, which made them say this. It was the knowledge that they were in the right in making a stand against a seething, stinking, rapacious tide; it was the desire to begin afresh, starting from the eternal farm, at the end of an era, a wonderful era, a powerful era, but past and over now! Away with the rubbish and the lumber that blocks the way, and away with those who would preserve it, not even themselves knowing why. Who would preserve an order which no longer has any sense in it except those who are too timid to risk a new order? It had been proved that bombs were arguments: all the worse for those who did not understand their language. Farmers, stolid figures, for whom life meant hard, obvious labour, whose minds turned naturally to natural things, like Claus Heim, were now playing about with dangerous grey powder, were critically weighing concentrated destruction in their rough hands.

  They were hob-nobbing together in the exciting atmosphere of conspiracy, and their low-toned, quiet words dealt with explosive-power and fuses. In the no-man’s-land of night-time they crept like patrols through the deserted streets of the enemy town; and if one of them ran away, like the young farm-owner, of whom Hinnerk made such fun, it was not because he was afraid, but because a message had been brought to him that the cow was calving. There were explosions all over the place, not only in Holstein; and it was farmers who were causing the explosions, who were meeting together without the summons of a leader, who visited each other and helped each other. Certainly there were people from the town too, people of the type of Hinnerk, who could smell powder fifteen streets away and who started explosions because they enjoyed explosions (and considered themselves lucky into the bargain that they were furthering a good cause thereby).