Europe-Whither Bound? Part 10

The grievances of the Tyrol were very strongly stated at a Munich dinner-party, a Bavarian count averring that that part of the Tyrol which had fallen to the dole of Italy was too strongly affiliated to the part which remained in Austria. It was recognized, however, that Italy was now friendly to Germany, and that no good part was likely to be achieved by doing anything to alienate Italian sympathy. The French, however, begin to count on some Italian support when the Austro-German idea is put to the test. The experimental plebiscite taken in the Tyrol was said to have been arranged from Munich. Its astonishing success from a German point of view at once encouraged the intrigue.

There was not much alarm on the subject of the "sanctions" which France threatened to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened--in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ability to collect a huge indemnity. The fifty per cent tax they regarded as an absurdity. "It is possible to ruin Germany, but it is not possible to enslave her," was the common opinion.

"But in the event of the complete ruin of the rest of Germany, would it not be to the advantage of Bavaria to accept the idea of a separate State?" I argued.

"If France deprived Germany of coal by occupying the Ruhr basin and by allowing the Poles to hold Upper Silesia, Bavaria would have to look out for herself and make what arrangements she could," I was told. But it was an unwilling admission.

In the French scheme of things that is when Bavaria's moment comes. At one stage this May it seemed as if that moment were near, but now that Germany has accepted the alternative plans of payment of reparations, and the British Prime Minister has intervened on her behalf to stop the Polish annexation, the moment does not seem so near. But a great effort will doubtless yet be made to detach Bavaria from the rest.

Meanwhile, Bavaria took advantage of the intrigue to keep a territorial army of a kind undemobilized. The reich could demobilize it at will, but allows itself to appear helpless through Bavaria's independence.

The situation was not helped by the arrival of a young British staff-officer, who said that the British Government sympathized with Bavaria, believing that she needed what troops she had to keep off Bolshevism. Eventually the pressure in Germany became so great that Bavaria gave a verbal promise to disarm--though to what extent that promise will be carried out must remain doubtful. Her militia is some protection for herself in case of a political conspiracy such as that of Korfanty in Silesia, but is no menace to any other neighbouring power.

Bavaria affects to be in deadly, daily fear of Bolshevism. "Under the shadow of the sanctions, Communism was developing strongly," said one.

Speaking of the Russians, "Perhaps we shall all come to it," said another.

A rich Munich Jew, a cinema merchant, wanted to adopt a Vienna orphan.

He wrote to Vienna for a Jewish male child, well-authenticated as an orphan; he did not want the parents to come and sponge on him in later years. The child was brought to Munich. Presently application was made to the police for an extra milk ration on account of the boy.

Then the police discovered the new arrival. "What!" said they, "living here without a permit! Application for permission to reside must be made at once."

Application was made and permission was refused. The reason given was that the housing shortage in Munich was too great. But some one was at pains to find out the real reason. It was that the boy was a Jew, and who could say--in twenty years, educated in the best inst.i.tutions of Munich--he might become a Trotsky or a Bela Kun or Bavarian Eisner.

"But why not a Disraeli?" said some one who listened to the story.

Permission was eventually granted.

One attempt has been made to seize Munich for the proletariat, and the comfortable Bavarian realized that whilst he has a never-failing stomach for good brown beer he has no stomach for revolution. The great city is a monument of bourgeois enterprise. Business is more than politics, and social conviviality than either.

S---- drove me out to the valley of the Iser, "Iser rolling rapidly."

We went to Grunewald, we pa.s.sed Ludendorf's villa, curious credulous Ludendorf, who took Winston Churchill at his word when the later penned his appeal to Germany in the "Evening News" to save Europe by fighting the Bolsheviks, and prepared a plan whereby the German army was reconst.i.tuted in the strength at which in 1918 it was dissolved. We surveyed from the hurrying car a fine park-like country, rich and calm, and sensibly remote from Europe's centre. It was a lovely springtide, and new hope fallaciously decked Southern Germany, as if all trouble were over and all had been forgiven. We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. It was nearer to the Germany of Queen Victoria's time. That is quite true.

England has gone on and become more European; her pa.s.sion for individual freedom and self-expression has steadily developed, whilst Germany has remained submissively under the yoke of authority and discipline. Germany, with all her learning and her industry, her unstinted application, and her good parts, has become dull. There was an enormous amount of dulness, genuine uninspired dulness, in the Germans in the war. You can identify it now when you visit Germany in peace.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

XII. FROM BERLIN (I)

Old men and war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets enc.u.mbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs--can this be Berlin, Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum _en bloc_. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the City of Westminster called Soho. The horse has come back to Berlin to make up for loss of motors, and needs more scavengers to follow him than the modern munic.i.p.ality can afford.

Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than before. The leisured cla.s.s is smaller. All the workshops and factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares.

There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines of goods are run out in hawkers' barrows and auctioned on the pavement, measures of cloth for suits, overcoats, soaps, stationery. Trams, 'buses, railways all are used to the last seat and standing-room. And the working people are thinking about their work and their wages and their homes and their beer--and not about the peace treaty and the latest move of France for their destruction.

It is sad to see the broken-down old fellows as porters at the railway-stations, panting with heavy trunks, and the same type among gangs of navvies repairing the roads. They ought to be seated at home with pipe and newspaper and easy slippers instead of earning a living still as a drudge. It is a convention to give your bag to a porter at a station, and in Germany you usually give it to a man much older and weaker than yourself, and you are moved to help him to carry it as in his infirmity he struggles along. What a contrast to the stalwart porters of Prague, or Rome, or Brussels. Poor wights! It is they who are paying for the war. Sightless soldiers led by little children come selling you sticking-plaster in the restaurants. Germany is too poor to care for them. It is they who are paying for the war. The drab, many-headed middle cla.s.s of Berlin with its poverty-stricken breakfast-table, the old black bread of the war and no sugar and paper table-cloths; the women going about the streets with great bundles on their backs; the people making their 1918 clothes still do--they are paying somewhat. You see Hugo Stinnes and his like with a suite of rooms at the "Adlon," or driving luxuriously along the Unter den Linden, the Kaiser way, without the dignity of a Kaiser. They are not paying very much.

Most active-thinking people are to-day working for the reconciliation of Europe, and the greatest obstacle to reconstruction lies in a resentful, half-crushed, and continually hara.s.sed Germany. Berlin has been made a heart of ill-will, and the heart must somehow be changed.

Some will no doubt say it is Paris that has the ill-will towards the peace of Europe--change the heart of Paris and all will go well. But even if France embarked on a policy of friendly tolerance towards Germany it would be long ere Berlin was converted. However that may be, it was naturally with a hope of sharing in the long task of reconciliation that the present writer visited Germany. Many Englishmen have a soft spot in their hearts for the Germans; perhaps it is the instinct of race, or it may be merely good sportsmanship:

I am not one of those Who will not shake Fritz hand Now that the war is done.

as a soldier-poet has expressed it.

I was told of a young German who set in front of himself the goal of a reconciled Europe. I would work to the same end in London. It only remained to find a similar devoted type in Paris to work from the French end, and we should have a triumvirate that might achieve the impossible. G.o.d can use the foolish of this world to confound the wise--the wise being mostly engaged in stirring up new quarrels.

Somehow the desirable Frenchman ready to devote his life to that cause was not forthcoming--and that deficiency I suppose was symptomatic of the disease. For my part, I have made my journey of Europe and taken a good look at that which it is proposed to reconcile. At the end I came to Berlin and Paris, the two main centres of the modern world. In Germany naturally I sought the German who was ready to work unstintedly from the German side for the same cause.

I had never met him, but I pictured an idealist, one who had suffered in the war and felt the folly of it all, who deplored the egoism of nations, and had found a way to devote himself to humanity as a whole.

I was mistaken! It is our weakness as a nation to think of a foreigner merely as a sort of Englishman who does not speak our tongue or know our conventions. So was it with me, and I soon found myself up against a real live German, a man of a type you would not find either in London or Paris. It was a disillusion. Here was a man unsuited by his national nature for the part for which he was cast. One could not see in him the potentiality of a helper of Europe. The German as a German is in a troubled mental state. Small wonder! Because of the psychology of my friend in ---- I quickly began to surmise that the German at present has not got the spirit to save Europe. Perhaps he has not the ability to save himself.

My German helper was a tall, handsome young man with an open countenance and an engaging smile. He had done war-service for the Fatherland on several fronts in several capacities. Among other things he had been Commandant of a prisoners-of-war camp where British officers were really kindly treated and a most pleasant relationship existed between the command on the one hand and the prisoners on the other. He showed me photographs of himself with British officers, and he mentioned it as a matter of pride that these fellows asked for "Deutschland uber alles" to be sung one night, and they stood reverently to attention through the performance. This was followed by "G.o.d save the King," which the Germans honoured in the same way. It was explained to me that "Deutschland uber alles" does not mean "Germany over everybody else," but "Germany first of all!" as one says "My country, right or wrong." The prisoners must, if they were genuine Englishmen, have felt rather low-spirited. W----, however, saw in it evidence of what a happy family party Germans and English could be, if they liked. He was undoubtedly pro-English, had been to Oxford, had perhaps a quiver of an Oxford accent in his English; he had studied England, as Germans do, and made considerable research among us. His wife was openly and unreservedly friendly. He, however, was cautious, and corrected his wife when she said too much or went too far. It had been a great blow to them when England came in to the war, a personal and a national blow. They could not have believed it possible. And they imagined throughout the war that their friends in England did not share in the wild anti-German feeling and must at least pa.s.sively be pro-German. Of course, it was not so. They deplored the extraordinary lapse in tone in the "Morning Post" and "The Times." "'The Times'

actually refers to us as 'Huns.' At least, it can be said of our Press, high or low, it never nicknamed its enemies. French were always French, English--English, Russians--Russians. It was beneath the dignity of the war to call our enemies names." He was amazed at the ignorance concerning the Germans, and the credulity of such as those who believed they boiled their dead to make lard. I told him of the German Amba.s.sador's reception in London, Dr. Sthamer, how he was received by certain people in Society and many were well disposed towards him, though at first he had difficulty in getting things done for him by the British working cla.s.s.

"And you, you'll go anywhere in Germany, and every one will be only too ready to help you, to do your washing and clean our boots and the rest," said W---- reproachfully. "We are so good-natured."

He had forgotten that the Germans failed to ingratiate themselves with the London working cla.s.s by dropping so many bombs in the East-end and terrorizing whole districts. He forgot the children who had been killed. He did not know the air-raids had had much effect.

"They had an unfortunate psychological effect."

"Well, you don't forgive us."

"On the contrary, the generality of Englishmen forgive Germany now she is down."

My friend perceptibly winced at the word "down." I had used the wrong word. But it is true enough.

"We know the Quakers are our friends, and the pacifists," said he. "We are thankful for their friendship, but we need to win over the other people. Make the business people feel that the Versailles Peace is bad business, and the Imperialists that it is bad for Empire."

"They know that already, that it is not good for business and not very good for the Empire. What we have to get over is something psychological--the belief in 'the dirty Hun,' the belief in German trickery and spite."

He had never heard of that sentence which is a motto in Carmelite Street, "They'll cheat you yet, those Junkers," or "Once a German always a German."

There is a genuine belief among the English ma.s.ses that the Germans are cheating us, that they are pretending to demobilize and keeping a large army in secret readiness, pretending to be unable to pay "reparations,"

not taxing themselves, faking their figures.

W---- and several others whom I met in Germany put it in the foreground of the work to be done for re-establishing Germany in the comity of nations, that it should be proved that Germany was not responsible for the beginning of the war. It is still the theme of innumerable articles in the Press. The German mind has not grasped the fact that no intelligent European blames Germany exclusively. Now that the hot mood of war is past we are all ready to recognize that we were all in part to blame. We all founded our security on armies and navies, the nation that produced the "Dreadnought" most of all. We were all living and picnicking and unfortunately quarrelling in the great cordite warehouse of European militarism, and one day it blew up. If we had not been so well prepared it could not have happened so. If the Kaiser p.r.o.nounced the dreadful atheism of "Let the guns speak," he really did so after the event.

In debating this matter the German mentality disclosed itself in the Germans with whom I conversed in Berlin. I had a suspicion that one of them might have said England began it, if I had been other than an Englishman. Edward the Seventh who arranged the _entente cordiale_ had evidently something to do with it. As I am a known warm friend of Russia he could not say Russia began it. His mind turned to a more obscure nation.

"To think that Europe should thus have been ruined and all those millions of lives lost," said he. "Just for stupid little Serbia."

I am afraid I could not agree to that. The devil began it. What does it matter now? n.o.body cares. The present and the future hold the potentialities of happiness rather than the past. To discuss the past you'd have to raise the dead on both sides.

England is not interested in history, but she is interested in actuality.

Mr. Lloyd George has said that the German is not being taxed by his Government in the proportion that the British are taxed by theirs--far from it. Figures have been given in the Press. And they have not been refuted by Germans. The Germans hold that they are being taxed so heavily that a maximum has been reached. W----, who was well-off before the war, has lost his income now, has taken a staff-post at the Ministry of Trade and gets 20,000 marks a year. He ought to pay a heavy income-tax on that. Yes, but it is only eighty pounds a year in English money, and he has a wife and two children to keep on it. There are tens of thousands of professional men in the same plight. Some of the very rich arrange matters to avoid some of the heavy dues. And as regards the working-cla.s.s, it is notoriously hard to raise money from them by direct taxation.

"Then it is said that you are running your railway and postal services at a loss. And that is obviously true. England has raised her rates and made her public pay. She thinks Germany should also."

To this it is replied that Germany does not believe in obstructing the ready movement of people and of intelligence in her country. She thinks it bad policy to charge highly for railway fares and letter postage. What is gained by extra charges is more than lost through business being hampered.

"These are points which you educated Germans should elucidate through the British Press," said I. "The idea that Germany escapes taxation is a very unfavourable one in England. It is much more important than the rights or wrongs of the old war."