BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Moral Climate
Scum of the Earth. By Arthur Koestler. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
ARTHUR KOESTLER, who is a Hungarian, began to make his reputation in this country during the Spanish prelude to the war, when he acted as correspondent for the News Chronicle. That reputation, based on the vivid descriptive powers of a born journalist, was enormously strengthened a year or two ago by the publication of Darkness at Noon, a novel dealing with the Moscow trials and showing psychological insight and philo- sophical depth of a quite exceptional kind. His new book is an autobiography, and combines the best qualities of the journalist and of the novelist—brilliant objective " reportage " and probing analytical introspection. It is, of course, an exile's book, and, as the title indicates, it is a bitter book. But the bitterness is justified, and it is even a tonic. There are exiles who whine and exiles who despair ; there are exiles who float securely on the flood of universal distress ; there are also exiles who merely schweigen, keep quiet. But an exile who has fought and suffered for liberty and democracy, who has been subjected to the indignities and horrors of prisons and concentration-camps, who has been snatched from execution and driven to attempt suicide—all for the faith we too are now fighting for—why should he keep quiet or whine or despair now that he is on our side of the barricades? He has the right to speak and to speak fearlessly, and we have the duty to listen to him and to honour him no less than any of the heroes who risk their lives in this grim struggle.
From a book which is essentially a day-to-day record of the author's life from the days preceding the outbreak of the war until he escaped to England rather less than a year ago, three general themes may be abstracted. The first is the scandalous treatment of political refugees in France, which began before the war, was intensified during the war, and ended with the handing over of these refugees to the Gestapo—one of the basest acts of treachery in history. The fate of the ordinary political refugees from Nazi tyranny was bad enough, but the final depths of tragic misery were reserved for those remnants of the Inter- national Brigades who had fought in Spain and whom the author met iri the Leper Barrack at Le Vernet : " once the pride of the European revolutionary movement, the vanguard of the Left."
They had beer the material for the first experiment since the Crusades to form an army.of volunteers which would fight for a cosmopolitan creed. . . . Not unlike the Crusaders, the volunteers of the International Brigades had a disputed reputation and were looked upon in passionately contradictory ways, and probably even future historians will have difficulties in forming an unanimous judgement. Not unlike the hordes of Godfrey of Bouillon and Peter the Hermit, the Crusaders of the anti-Fascist mystique were in the majority men of good faith, with a mentality com- pound of the incoherent and partly contradictory elements of en- lightenment and sectarianism, brotherliness and intolerance, charity and ruthlessness, enthusiastic self-denial and mercenary selfishness. . . . One half of the world adored them as heroes and saints, the other half loathed them as madmen and adventurers. Actually they were all these; but above all they were the militant vanguard of their creed. And, as in the case of their predecessors, their creed was cynically exploited by those wno pulled the wits behind the scenes. The heroic horde was but an unconscious tool of power-politics and when it had played its role was sacri. ficed in an immense holocaust the memory of which would linger on for centuries and make any appeal to ideals or lofty aspirations stink in the nostrils of the common man.
This is strong language, but it is fully justified by the facts, which are described objectively enough by Mr. Koestler. Nor can France be given all the blame. We looked on in democratic self-righteousness, and even the " comrades " of these unfor- tunate men betrayed _them. " Not one of them was allowed to enter the Fatherland of the Proletariat, the country which had acclaimed them in hysterical hero-worship, which had boasted of having abolished unemployment and of having work for all" The second general theme which runs through this book is an acute analysis of the state of mind in France which was respon. sible, not merely for the treatment of these refugees from France, but for the ultimate betrayal of France herself. The author calls it " Chinese-Wall psychosis." The Maginot Line, like the Chinese Wall, was designed to protect and preserve a highly developed and stagnant civilisation, a civilisation of bread and wine, against the intrusion of a new civilisation of steam and steel. It was " a last grandiose effort to preserve the nineteenth- century idyll in the midst of the utterly unidyllic twentieth," and it meant that " France no longer wanted to save the peace be any constructive effort ; it wanted to be left in peace—and this psychological nuance made all the difference, and it ' sealed her fate." Communism in general, and the Front Populaire in par. ticular, were regarded by the ruling class and the peasants as a new menace inside the wall, and to such people even Hitler might be acceptable as a "guarantee of security." This theory is supported by observations gathered over a wide field, and there can be' little doubt of its substantial truth. Its importance is that it explains the support still given to Vichy, even by . large section of the working classes ; and the author warns us that " the view that Hitler's defeat will automatically bring forth France's regeneration is based on an optimistic disregard of soda: and psychological realities."
The third aspect of Arthur Koestler's book is constructive. He has been an active Communist, but like many other demo. cratic Socialists, he has never been able to accept the regime os Stalin. He is pretty well disillusioned with all parties by nos; but he does not despair of humanity. He believes that there is an alternative to tyranny, and to totalitarianism and to plutocracy which has never yet been tried—a planned democracy. "01 course, it cannot be produced in a laboratory. A new movement will have to arise in a new moral climate where the Means justify the End, and not vice versa. The creation of this climate —that is what I imagine I am fighting for." Mr. Koestler is no
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