George was able to get everyone to Genoa—the port where, sixteen years earlier, he and Nick Messolonghitis had thrown themselves on the mercy of a harried American vice-consul—and on May 4, 1940, Annelise, Grace, and Joan boarded the SS Manhattan, the ship they had shared, four years earlier, with the American athletes on their way to the Berlin Olympics. It was supposed to sail at eight o’clock that evening, but after dinner George went back to the dock, suspecting the ship might still be there. It was, although the gangplank had been taken up.
A friend on deck kindly went below and summoned Annelise to the porthole, which was just at the level of the dock but some eight feet away. There, separated by those eight feet which were already just as effective and as irrevocable as eight thousand miles, we stole a half an hour from the semi-eternity of separation which had already begun.
At last the ship began to move, and soon “there was only a very tiny arm, waving with frantic despairing cheer, to indicate the particular cubby-hole of floating steel to which I had entrusted my only treasure of reality and permanence.”37
VII.
On May 6, while on his way back from Genoa, Kennan heard radio reports of increasing tension in the Mediterranean: “I reflected with smug satisfaction that my family must by that time be somewhere west of Gibraltar.” On the eighth, in the train to Berlin, he got into a conversation with a German American, now a Nazi, full of boasts about Germany’s strengths and the weaknesses of the United States. Kennan consoled himself with the thought that if his country did harbor strengths, they would be of the kind that his traveling companion would be “unable to comprehend anyway.” On the tenth he got word that the long-expected German invasion of Holland and Belgium was about to begin: “I rode to the office breakfastless, clutching my shaving articles.”
On the fourteenth he dined with a German friend who would be off the next day to join the army. “As a reasonable and patriotic and loyal man, it was the only honorable thing to do, and I understood him. A sense of it being the end of all things hung over us, but our training stood us in good stead; we had a few drinks, and we were a gay little company.” On the seventeenth—the Norwegian national holiday—Kennan took his dogs for a walk, let them chase rabbits in vacant lots, and came home “in complete depression, reading of the advance of the German armies in Belgium and France, and wondering how I could adapt myself to a world where Europe lived under the domination of Germany.”38
Early in June, with France on the verge of defeat, rumors began circulating that the Italians were about to declare war. Kennan walked to the Italian embassy on the afternoon of the tenth, joining a cheerful, indifferent, obedient crowd the German authorities had ordered up, “like the Moscow proletarians bound for a parade.” On the veranda were some of the staff, with their wives. The women were dressed as though for a garden party. “I knew most of them and slunk around in the crowd to avoid their seeing me.” The sound trucks boomed out Mussolini’s speech from Rome, and the Germans, understanding nothing, applauded politely. Later that evening Kennan sat with American friends on his own veranda, drinking highballs and listening to antiaircraft fire in the distance, while another more distant radio voice—Roosevelt’s—proclaimed that “the hand which held the dagger had thrust it into the back of its neighbor.”39
Four days later, equipped with a German permit, Kennan traveled into the Netherlands to reestablish communications with American diplomats there. The train passed boxcars taking prisoners of war east. Their pale faces and bewildered eyes made him wonder whether the day had not passed when free peoples made the better soldiers. Now, in an age of the machine, slave peoples had the advantage, for it was the machine that counted, and “the machine—in contrast to the sword—was best served by slaves.”
As the train entered Holland, a Nazi businessman and a Dutch fifth columnist were congratulating each other. “I had to grip the cushion of the first-class compartment to keep from butting in and attempting to blast some of the complacency and hypocrisy of the conversation.” In the end, Kennan could not resist, warning the Dutchman that
he would indeed have a hard time creating a Dutch national-socialist movement: for either it would be truly Dutch, in which case it would be only an unsuccessful competition for the German movement, or it would be pan-Germanic, in which case all the values of Dutch nationalism would be sacrificed and the adherents, instead of being superior Dutchmen, would only be inferior Germans.
At the moment, though, the contradiction meant little. In The Hague, he found a German military band playing to a sizable audience of “placid, applauding Dutchmen,” not far from a place where German bombs had wiped out most of a city block. In Rotterdam, shops were open, trains were running, and the streets were crowded with busy people. But suddenly, “with as little transition as though someone had performed the operation with a gigantic knife, the houses stopped, and there began a wide, open field of confused bricks and rubbish.” Meanwhile, “the imperturbable Dutch rode along on their bicycles as though nothing had happened.”40
Two weeks later Kennan was off to occupied France. War damage in Belgium was greater than in Holland, but there was no evidence anywhere of much resistance. With no other way to get to Paris, he offered to hitchhike, complete with diplomatic pouch, perhaps remembering his 1924 trip. But since the only vehicles on the road were those of the German army, embassy officers frowned on this idea and instead lent him a car with enough gasoline to get there, in the company of an American ambulance driver who had been caught behind the lines by the Blitzkrieg.
The devastation south of the Belgian frontier was horrendous. All the towns were damaged, and several of the larger ones were “gutted, deserted, and uninhabitable.” The odor persisted, in places, of decomposing bodies. German sentries guarded the debris, as though it mattered now who stood before shattered houses and stinking corpses. French refugees were “seared with fatigue and fear and suffering.” One girl, riding atop a cart in torn dirty clothes, made a particular impression on Kennan: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love.” She had seen the complete breakdown of her own people. But she could also see German soldiers, handing out food and water at crossroads, setting up first-aid stations, transporting the old and the sick. “What soil here for German propaganda, what thorough ploughing for the social revolution which national-socialism carries in its train.”
In Paris, though, the Germans seemed strangely at a loss: the city was intact but dead. Policemen stood on the corners, without traffic to direct or pedestrians to guard. At the Café de la Paix, six German officers sat at an outside table with “no one but themselves to witness their triumph.” It was as if Paris had been “too delicate and shy a thing to stand their domination and had melted away before them just as they thought to have it in their grasp.” When the Germans came, its soul disappeared, leaving only stone. “As long as they stay—and it will probably be a long time—it will remain stone.”41