When the Wall Crumbled

THE DEVIL IN FRANCE--Lion Feuchtwanger--Viking ($2.75).

SCUM OF THE EARTH--Arthur Koestler --Macmillan ($2.50).

These are two records of personal suffering written by two anti-Nazi-intellectuals caught in France by the war. Feucht-wanger--author of Power, The Ugly Duchess and other notable novels--was a peace-loving, contemplative Jew of 57. Except for the stench of Naziism in his nostrils, he had no interest in politics, little sense of events to come.

"Nine years ago," he writes, "I was sitting in my house in the Grunewald in Berlin. I had my books around me. . . . I was content. I had not the remotest idea of ever moving from that house. Six years ago I was sitting in my tranquil, white-stuccoed house in Sanary, in the south of France. I had my books around me. ... I was content. I had not the remotest idea of ever moving from that house."

In August 1939, Koestler was also living in the south of France and working on his brilliant novel about the Russian blood purges, Darkness at Noon. He had never loved France quite so much as then, never been so "achingly conscious of its sweetness and decay." He was a young (36), Budapest-born journalist, a Gentile, a man of political action. He had been a trenchantly pro-Loyalist newspaper correspondent in Spain, where Franco forces had caught him and led him through the streets of Malaga in chains. He had been a member of the Communist party for seven years, had left it in disgust 18 months before the Stalin-Hitler pact.

Jittery France put both Feuchtwanger and Koestler in internment camps. The difference of their treatment is epitomized in the two books' titles. Feuchtwanger's "devil in France" was the crass indifference, apathy, venality, incompetence of French officialdom. His camp guards were friendly, often respectful--and always bored. The bulk of his fellow internees were "nonpolitical" or nearly so: Jewish scholars, doctors, lawyers, artisans, tradesmen; Saarlanders who had sided with France in the days of the plebiscite, fleeing into France when they lost; ex-members of the Foreign Legion, a few of whom had lost an arm or leg in France's service.

Koestler found himself behind the barbed wire with Croat peasant partisans, Spanish syndicalists, Czech liberals, Italian socialists, Hungarian and Polish Communists, German undergrounders, Russians of various political shades whose only common denominator was that they hated Stalin and denounced one another to the French Surete Nationale. All these were "the scum of the earth." Nearly all "bore the physical or mental marks of torture and persecution in the countries from which they had escaped, and for a more enlightened [French] administration these marks should have been regarded as the stamp of their bona fides and loyalty." But they were indesirables, a polite word for scum, and in their prison camps they were worse-fed, worse-housed, worse-treated than France's enemies, the interned German nationals.

A month after the outbreak of war, Koestler was arrested in Paris, taken eventually to the grim concentration camp of Le Vernet, near the Spanish border, where huts 90 ft. long and 15 ft. wide, without lights, heat or any movable furniture, housed 200 men each. At night the guards got drunk and beat up the prisoners for diversion. The hygiene was worse than in Dachau and Oranienburg, the food worse than in Franco's dungeons. A sadistic, falsetto-voiced lieutenant struck men in the face with his riding crop, once had a kettle of boiling water poured over the feet of a prisoner who failed to salute. In a few months friends in Britain succeeded in having Koestler released.

Feuchtwanger was also interned during the invasion of Poland, but was turned loose in a few days, with apologies. After all, France had promised him asylum. After the German break-through at Sedan, promises were drowned in panic; Feuchtwanger was dumped into a camp near Avignon, an abandoned brickyard where the inmates ate on bricks, sat on bricks, slept on bricks and straw, got brick dust in their eyes and lungs, and for exercise tossed bricks from hand to hand and stacked them in piles which they later tore down in order to build others. At word that the Germans were coming down the Rhone, the prisoners were jammed into reeking boxcars and moved by fits and starts to Bayonne. There the commanding officer met a rumor (false) that the Germans had wheeled east, would be in Bayonne in two hours. So the dreadful train made another fitful journey back across the Rhone to a tent camp at Nimes.

Luckier than some fellow refugees who committed suicide or were handed over by the French to the Gestapo, Koestler and Feuchtwanger escaped from France--Koestler to slide happily into the British Army as a private, Feuchtwanger to gaze in wonder, from his Manhattan hotel window, at the lights of a bustling city at peace.

"Deep down in my heart," Feuchtwanger writes, "I know that I have not the slightest understanding of the causes of the barbaric turmoil in which we are writhing." He does not stray from his personal record into political analysis, into national autopsy. Koestler does, and he manifests an extraordinary feeling for social evolution and retrogression, for individual and class motivations and states of mind.

Others have noted what he calls France's "Chinese Wall psychosis"--blind trust in the Maginot Line--but Koestler traces the roots of the malady to the 19th Century. France was a rich country, rich in the good earth that the conservative peasants loved. It was a land of Bread and Wine, an idyllic island in an age of Steam and Steel.

"The French General Staff did not want to be bothered with any newfangled ideas. But they could only get away with it because the Chinese Wall was indeed the projection of the nation's deep-felt wish to be left alone. De Gaulle's conception of an offensive army might have saved the peace by giving the Polish and Czech alliance a real meaning. But at that stage France no longer wanted to save the peace by any constructive effort; it wanted to be left in peace--and this psychological nuance made all the difference, and in fact sealed her fate."

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