460
PARTISAN REVIEW
a prosperous and peaceful valley, two friends, former army officers,
have settled after a lost war. Below them, a quiet diligent people tills
its fields in peace; farther on a rude yet hospitable, strongly traditional
people of shepherds wrings a difficult living from the vast steppes
that pasture their sheep. Still farther on is a dark impenetrable forest
region, interspersed with marshes and swamps that have never been
fully explored; a region ruled by a demoniac figure, the Chief
Forester, who is engaged in a huge conspiracy to conquer the shep–
herds and peaceful peasants in the sunny world outside his domain.
His agents, sly and crafty, succeed in penetrating everywhere:
This showed the masterly manner in which the Chief Forester injected
fear in small doses, which he gradually increased, finally achieving the
paralysis of resistance. In this confusion he played the part of a sup–
porter of law and order, but while his lesser agents fed the fires of
anarchy in the guilds of the shepherds, the initiated managed to penetrate
into the councils and courts, yes even into the convents, and were wel–
comed there as masterminds to deal with the mob. Thus the Chief Forester
resembled an evil doctor who promotes the illness in order later to perform
an operation
he
had in mind from the start.
The Chief Forester
hated
the
plow, the wheat, the vine, domestic animals. . . . His heart
was gladdened only when moss and ivy grew over ruined cities, and bats
fluttered in the moonlight in the cracked vaults of the cathedrals.. . . He
was cloaked in fear, and I am convinced that the secret of his strength
was to be found in that far more than in himself. He was effective only
when things began to tremble of their own accord.
The Chief Forester gradually conquers the peaceful population
through cunning and terror; his rule wore "the mask of order."
Then follows the bloody and horrible campaign of the Chid
Forester against the peaceful people of the country. His hordes con–
quer everything; they accomplish the "lowest and basest acts of
which men are capable.... In order to inspire fear, they packed the
corpses of the slain into barrels and boxes and sent them to their
families." There is even a description of a concentration camp:
"These are the cellars on whose foundations the proud castles of
the tyrants are built . . . stinking holes of a most horrible kind, in
which a rabble, eternally damned, finds horrible pleasure in the
degradation of human dignity and freedom." At the end the old world
collapses, the hordes from the swamps and forests are victorious, the
flames of destruction engulf the monuments of culture and beauty.
The two friends flee over the sea to the country that had been the
enemy in the last war, and as the ship leaves port, they listen to a
song from the shore:
Because no help from man can come,
God is the help we call upon.
