A Train of Powder by Rebecca West Page B

girls on a pile of bricks. One was rhythmically squeezing his girl’s waist and the other was stroking his girl’s bosom with a slow, massaging movement, therapeutic rather than voluptuous, which suggested that he might at one time have been in the Royal Army Medical Corps, while they carried on a repetitive argument about football. The girls’ faces were quite blank, as if they belonged to some contemplative order of prostitutes. A young Russian soldier stood near them, watching them as if there was a long chance, on which he was not counting but which he had to admit existed, that they might do something novel and unexpected. Behind him was the door into the Führer-bunker, which he was delighted to open for visitors even before they produced cigarettes. Like his comrades, he enjoyed company.
    A steep staircase descended fifty feet to the rooms in which Hitler and Eva Braun, Goebbels and his wife and six children, had died. These rooms were extremely disconcerting because of their proportions. Hitler’s Chancellery, like all the buildings for which he was responsible, was vast because it was the result of a soiled and limited flight of the imagination. A man who sold patent medicine at a carnival, and was an abortionist and a fortune-teller on the side, might, if he had been granted power to build as he would, have remembered pictures he had seen of Egyptian temples and Roman palaces and, not remembering them clearly enough, have given orders for such huge, featureless constructions. But the thirty rooms in the bunker, though Hitler had had the resources of Germany to lavish on it, were in shocking contrast with the swollen halls above them. For an air-raid shelter it was perversely sordid. The rooms were small squares, the size of bathrooms in an ordinary suburban house, with a central passage cut into three sections about the size of a compartment in an English railway train, which served as the general dining room and sitting room and the conference room. The walls were coated with some substance resembling lamp black, on which many soldiers had since the end of the war written their signatures. This was the time of Chads, when the English people’s reaction to shortages was expressed on every blank space by drawings showing a bald head with a single up-growing hair poking over the top of a wall, with the legend, “What, no soap?” or sugar, or whatever it was that was most drearily lacking. Here a British soldier had drawn a Chad who looked over the wall and said, “What, no Führer?” These signatures and his drawing came out ghostly white on the black wall. It was as if one stood in a train that was quietly running into hell.
    The Russian soldier pointed to the Chad and laughed. He did not know what the Chad was saying but he knew that it was meant to be funny, and he wanted everything to be funny, and he imagined he was helping things along in that direction by laughing. The courteous German presence nodded his head and smiled at him, to show his good will, and said, “Look, this is very singular. This curious cupboard place was called the Hundebunker, the dog bunker. Hitler’s bodyguard used to sit here, and so it might just have been a nickname, but I think not; it is so oddly shaped a room that I think it really was designed for some pet dog. And you will see it is far more generously planned than any of the accommodation for human beings.”
    Suddenly it became very unpleasant to be in this insanely devised rat hole, where six children had been murdered by their father and mother, for no particular reason, since surely the Goebbels must have had relatives to whom they could have confided their family. It seemed good to run upstairs into the garden, pushing past one of the British soldiers and his girl, who were standing against the bunker door being photographed by his comrade. The Russian soldier followed and, wagging his head and smiling, repeated something over and over again. He was saying that he