The New Germany Part 3

Here are two notices from the advertis.e.m.e.nt columns of the _Lokal Anzeiger_, which seem to me to contrast the real Spartan and the Junker:

"To all old soldiers of the Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau Fifth Pomeranian Infantry Regt., No. 42. Regimental Comrades! From day to day the impudence of the Poles increases. From day to day they seize more German land and more German food. From day to day they come nearer to--they claim more of--our Old Pomerania. All you brave old 42nd who ever undefeated have defended German soil against more formidable foes, rejoin your beloved regiment to defend your homes against the ungrateful Poles to liberate whom so many of your comrades died. Report to Headquarters, Stralsund. Conditions of service are pay, allowances, etc., as on active service with 5 mks. extra daily, and a fortnight's notice. Obedience required to military regulations and to those in authority, with whom are a.s.sociated councils of delegates. Signed F----, member of Soldiers' Council, First Lieut.

K----Regimental Commandant."

Note the signature of the representative of the Soldaten-Rat preceding that of the Commandant.

In those days even Frei-Corps recruited in this manner had their Soldiers' Councils. And it was the remains of this Council organisation that prevented these Corps from being used to overthrow the Republic in the _coup-d'etat_ planned when the treaty was signed.

Compare now the appeal of the Junker--a _Vortanzer_ no doubt at many a Court Ball and a flunkey still.

"Officer of elegant appearance and engaging manners with experience of polite society, seeks employment. Would undertake to supervise restaurant."

Moreover, as a result of cla.s.s war, the students, hitherto always the Young Guard of revolution in Germany, have this time taken sides with what may well be called reaction. In the various volunteer corps--the "Noske Guards"--that are used for fighting the revolutionary troops and the workmen, the largest and best elements are young ex-officers or N.C.O.'s and students.

I remember when a workmen's meeting was broken up by a picket of the Reinhard Corps noting that the privates almost all wore pince-nez. The workmen called them mercenaries and murderers, but it was absurd to accuse fine young men who looked like Balliol, with a leaven of Blues and Bloods, of selling themselves for eight shillings a day and extra rations. These Spartans and their ideals will be heard of again unless Germany is given a square deal and a fair field.

And the other half of the fine fellows I've met in Germany were Spartacists--fighters for the ideal of progress. For this ideal has had in Germany as many devotees as the other. No country had so large a radical and revolutionary political element as Germany before the war. In no country did the economics and politics of Socialism occupy so many minds. Sovietism is only a rough Russian realisation of German ideals. The rebellion under Spartacus of revolted gladiators and escaped slaves, which challenged for years the imperialism and militarism of Rome, does give some idea of what these men are and what their cause is.

The handsomest and most intelligent man I've met in Germany was a Spartacist, a film actor by profession. The last time I saw him--with a rifle slung over his shoulder and stick bombs in his belt--he explained what he was fighting for. German militarism, he said, had revived, encouraged by the Entente att.i.tude; the present Government was as much in the hands of reactionary officers as any during the war. The war had crippled militarism, but only real revolution, the council system, could kill it. He was glad he had escaped the war, so as to have a life to offer to the right side. The next day he was taken and shot.

Now, I do not intend to convey that the Germany of to-day is a fighting country. It is quite the reverse. But a section of idealists at each extreme has decided that they are bound to die for their ideals as Spartans or Spartacists. That they will die in vain is inevitable. If only because there is no Sparta and no Spartacus. There is no German land where such an ideal as that of the reactionary "Spartans" can now be realised, not even in rural Prussia; and there is no Spartacus to command and control the "Spartakists" of Germany.

But there is another reason also--that there are too few young Germans left.

On a Sunday morning I went to the Academy of Singing to hear old German music. One number on the programme, "A Scottish Ballad of a Lost Battle," proved to be a translation of Lady Lindsay's "Lament After Flodden." Sung to a plaintive eighteenth century air, with the thin far-away accompaniment of lute and spinet, it was like an echo from the lost battles and lost beauty of all time. With bowed heads and tear-filled eyes, men and women sat silent long after the last heartrending refrain had died away.

In the afternoon I went out to the "Greenwood" of Berlin, a district of pine woods, hills, and lakes, where the young people of Berlin used to flock for picnics and water-parties. The Berliners are noisy in their enjoyments, and on Sunday afternoons before the war the woods of the Havelland would ring with shouting and singing and laughter, with feasting and flirting, as though Pan himself held festival.

To-day a few girls were there wandering sadly through the silent woods, pale ghosts of dead delights, and there was no sound but the sighing of the pines--

"Sair moaning in ilka green loaning, The flowers o' the forest are a' wede awa'."

CHAPTER III

THE COUNCIL REPUBLICS

The first result of the failure of German Liberalism and of the Weimar a.s.sembly was that revolution and reaction came into active collision with each other in the provincial capitals.

These two conflicts ran concurrently, and collision in the provinces was a necessary consequence of collision in the capital. Moreover, when the revolution had failed twice to a.s.sert itself by force in Berlin, it stood little chance of surviving in Bavaria, Brunswick, or Bremen. Such spontaneous and sporadic appeals to force met by organised police measures and prosecutions only prevented the Socialist party from reuniting, and forced German politics into a duel between the propertied cla.s.ses and the proletariat, in which the latter had no prospect of success.

This duel started in Berlin in the December and January conflicts which were settled in favour of the Government, and its subsequent continuance in the provinces had the same result.

The outbreaks in the coast ports and the coal districts of Westphalia were remote, and their unexpectedly easy repression by flying columns only confirmed the Government in a policy of coercion. The outbreaks in Munich and the south were outside the political orbit in which the Government was moving. If the spread of the general strike from the west to Saxony, which broke Germany in two and cut Berlin off from Weimar, was more serious, yet the Maerker column soon succeeded, in removing any danger to Weimar and in reopening communications with Berlin. These outbreaks were not formidable enough to force the Government to depart from its policy of suppressing not only revolts, but the revolution.

But the general strike and street fighting in Eastern Berlin during March although it was intentionally exaggerated so as to impress Paris with the Bolshevist danger, did for a few days imperil not only the Scheidemann Government, but the whole Parliamentary system. Both were consequences of the coalition which by giving the Government a cla.s.s basis had made it quite incapable of going halfway to meet the revolutionary demands for recognition of the Council System and for socialisation. At first, party ties had held the moderate ma.s.s of the Social-Democratic workmen; but as time pa.s.sed and the middle-cla.s.s mentality of the men in power became more and more marked, dissatisfaction with the Government and defections to the Opposition grew rapidly. Even _Vorwarts_ admitted there was cause of complaint.

In vain did the Government poster the streets with pathetic protests that "socialisation is already here," and issued manifestoes pointing to its legislative achievements--Eight-Hour Day, Unemployment Benefit, Land Settlement, what we should call "Whitley Councils" in coal-mining districts, War Pensions, and Repeal of War Measures. These had already been put in force provisionally by the previous Government, and did not amount to much any way. In vain did the Government profess its intention of pushing through the two Bills approving, in principle, nationalisation of coal mines and potash deposits; for no one wanted nationalisation except as a step to socialisation. The workmen felt that the Government was, as one put it to me, "a revolution profiteer." It had perverted the purposes and pocketed the profits of the revolution. They felt that Weimar, as another one expressed it, was only a "soviet of profiteers" and would produce no socialist legislation.

The revolutionary opponents of the Coalition saw their opportunity, but their leaders could secure no combination or concerted action.

Nothing, indeed, was more surprising than the incapacity of the Germans to a.s.sociate and organise for a political purpose.

The general impression one got was that Germany had so grown to look on political responsibility as the function of a specialised cla.s.s that they never could consider anyone outside that cla.s.s as capable of replacing any member of it. We see something of the same sort of helplessness growing up in England, where it is becoming increasingly difficult for the man in the street to conceive a Cabinet formed from outside a small clique of the ruling cla.s.s. And the German revolutionaries of the Opposition showed themselves as incapable of making use of their opportunities as did their Liberal opponents in the Government. The game was in the revolutionaries' hands in the early months of the year if they could have combined. But the different disturbed districts declared war on the Government at just such intervals of time as allowed them to be conveniently beaten in detail by very small forces. Each district again was divided into all manner of dissentient organisations in different stages of development. In some the Councils were really representative, in others they had co-opted themselves; while there were as many kinds of revolutionary corps as of Councils.

In Berlin alone there were some ten different corps. A leader of one of the last insurgent parties to hold out, told me, during an attack by the Government troops, that it was not the great disparity of numbers and munitions that had defeated him, but the difficulty of getting the revolutionaries to work together.

Moreover, the issue between reaction and revolution in Berlin was fought out in two different and quite distinct conflicts, that were invariably confused by the foreign Press. One took the form of strikes the other of street fighting. The general strike was the resistance of the Workmen's Council organisations to suppression by the middle-cla.s.s Ministry. The street fighting was the resistance of the remains of the old revolutionary forces to suppression by the new Frei-Corps "mercenaries" of the reaction. The two developed concurrently though with little connection.

The strikes that were always breaking out everywhere for no apparent reason culminated in the Berlin general strike of March. This general strike was forced on the reluctant Majority Socialists by the Independents, themselves propelled by the Communists. For these two latter controlled the Executive Committee of the Berlin Councils. But though the Majority Socialists did not oppose the general strike, they did their best to make it a failure, and when, after three days, the Communists pressed for its extension to water, gas, electricity, and food supply in order to support the fighting Spartacists, the Majoritarians withdrew, and by the end of the week the strike was declared off. The Majority Socialists' proposal for unconditional surrender was rejected, that of the Independents for surrender on conditions of amnesty accepted, and the conditions were agreed to by the Government. Thereupon the Left of the Communists, including the brilliant Clara Zetkin, took the opportunity of this crisis and of the party caucus (Parteitag) then sitting in Berlin to secede to the Spartacists.

The loss of their Left wing was, however, more than compensated to the Independents by the movement leftward in the ranks of the Social-Democrats, the supporters of the Government. And this leftward trend was accentuated by disapproval of the action of the Government in bombarding whole quarters of Berlin and in shooting wholesale its political opponents. This rapid response of the Council system to a trend in public opinion was in strong contrast to the irresponsive inertia of the Weimar a.s.sembly, which remained representative only of a nationalist mood, and remote from the whole Socialist movement.

The Ministry had to give to the political pressure. Already before the strike it indicated concessions as to industrial socialisation and const.i.tutional sanction of the Councils, and these were elaborated and established by negotiations at Weimar with missions sent from the Central and Executive Councils. These concessions were in principle very considerable, and much more than could ever have been imposed in practical application on the Centrum supporters of the Government. The result of this crisis was therefore to prepare the way for a reconstruction of the Government on a moderate Socialist basis, between a Centrum-Conservative opposition to the Right and a Communist to the Left. This would have represented the true balance of political power at the time; and the fact that it would not have had a majority at Weimar would have been only a formal difficulty.

But this, the natural, solution was made impossible by the extraordinary severity with which the armed resistance to the Government was punished. For this severity made it impossible for even the most moderate Independents to join the Government. And this fighting was not a development of the strike, but of the campaign carried on by the Government with volunteer flying columns against the revolutionary corps throughout Germany.

Of these corps, of which there were many in Berlin, the most important were the Republican Guard and the Marine Division. The former had from the first supported the Government, while the Marine Division of Kiel sailors had already been in collision with it in December. The other corps were all more or less in opposition, and some were mere camouflage for bad characters. Until these corps were dispersed the const.i.tutional Government had no complete control of Berlin apart from their "Council" rival, the Executive Committee. A first step was made towards their suppression by the arrest of sixty ringleaders; whereupon the Marine Division and the other corps prepared for resistance, with the a.s.sistance of the Spartacist irregulars and a rabble of roughs and rascals. These were joined later by about half the Republican Guard, which had come into collision with the Frei-Corps--the Government volunteer contingents. The strikers, however, took no part in the fighting.

The strike was declared on a Monday; Tuesday pa.s.sed in preparations by the regulars and plunderings by the rabble, and on Wednesday the garrisons of Government buildings in the east central district of Berlin were attacked and besieged. They were hard pressed, but held out, being supplied by aeroplane until relieved by an offensive of the Government's troops on Thursday afternoon. For some hours a tremendous bombardment was carried on round the Alexanderplatz and neighbouring streets, but the damage to property though considerable could only have been as little as it was if at least half the "hows" and "minnies" had been firing blank; for the benefit rather of the correspondents than of the insurgents. The insurgents' positions were eventually made untenable by aeroplane observation and bombing. During the following days they were driven, with terrific fusillades and some fighting, through the east end into the suburbs, where the bombardments were continued for no obvious reason for several days.

Berlin will long remember those Ides of March. So shall I, not because of Thursday's fighting--you could generally get your fill of such fighting in Germany those days--but because on that Thursday I got a real lunch. It was a good lunch--oysters, veal cutlets, and pancakes.

It was given me by a banker, and cost just about four shillings a mouthful. I know, because I counted them. And in the cellars of the same house were families living on 5 lbs. of bad potatoes and 5 lbs.

of black bread a week.

The banker and I were enemies, and I was nominally and nationally engaged in starving him; though, as members of our respective Independent Labour Parties, we were politically working in the same cause. And a few streets away men of one race and one cla.s.s were killing each other respectively in the names of Law and Liberty. Such was European civilisation in the year of Our Lord 1919.

But probably you are more interested in the fighting; so, if you like, I will take you two excursions through it. We will start the first on Thursday afternoon, when the insurgent soldiers and Spartacists were trying to force their way westward from their base in the east end, across the Spree, past the Schloss, to the Linden, and the Government troops were trying to drive them eastward. The main battleground was the Alexanderplatz, from which radiate the main thoroughfares leading east.

At the west end of the Linden all is much as usual. Instead of the omnibuses laid up by the general strike long German farm carts drawn by ponies are carrying pa.s.sengers perched on planks resting on packing-cases. Lorries with mounted machine-guns patrol up and down, and machine-gun pickets guard all important buildings. As we go east the roadway empties and the traffic on the pavements thickens into hesitating groups all facing eastward, or knots encircling some political discussion. Further on the roadway is blocked by artillery of the Luttwitz Volunteer Corps going into action--field-guns, trench mortars, and minenwerfer, the latter towed behind lorries loaded with the missiles, great brown conical cylinders 4 ft. high. Here, too, is the first cordon, and the game of "pa.s.ses" begins.

The main rules are not to revoke by playing a pa.s.s from the wrong side, and not to put on a higher card than is necessary. I take this trick with quite a low card, the Foreign Office pa.s.s. At the next cordon I try quite a good card--a pink Weimar Press pa.s.s with a photograph, but he won't have it. I go one better with a British pa.s.sport, Royal Arms and all, but he trumps this by shoving his rifle under my nose and saying, "Be off!" I have still a special pa.s.s from the Kommandantur, and, best of all, a visiting card with "Noske"

scribbled on it, but the game is over here. These Government volunteers, boys of eighteen or nineteen, shoot from the hip or anyhow, and are all on hair triggers.

We try round another way. A soldier with a rifle at the ready comes down the middle of the empty street scanning the windows. "Window shut," he shouts, aiming at one. A red poster proclaims that anyone loitering will be shot at. We are now in the danger zone. A lorry hurries forward, the bottom spread with brown stained mattresses. The noise becomes bewildering--the _crack_ of roof snipers and the _rap_ of the machine-guns are incessant. A field-gun is banging away round the corner, and that heavy boom is a minenwerfer sh.e.l.ling the Alexanderplatz.

The main struggle has already pa.s.sed into the roads radiating eastward, which the insurgents are barricading hastily, while others on tugs retreat south down the Spree. But of this fight we can only see the aeroplanes swooping a few hundred feet over the roofs and bombing the machine-gun nests. An insurgent plane engages for a few minutes, but retires outnumbered. The battle is over; though fighting will go on for days as the troops drive the insurgents from one street to another through the eastern quarter out into the suburbs.

And now it is the following Tuesday, and I will take you for our second excursion into the insurgent camp at Lichtenberg--the most easterly suburb of Berlin, where the main body still holds out. This morning's Government bulletin has told us that the victorious Government troops have cleared the whole East End, except Lichtenberg, which is encircled with a "ring of steel." That several thousand insurgents have barricaded all approaches and are sweeping them with field-guns. That they have destroyed hundreds of tons of flour. That they have shot sixty--a hundred--two hundred prisoners. That others have been torn in pieces by the mob, which has taken wounded from the ambulances and clubbed them to death. That no one in a decent coat can venture on the street without being murdered. That in consequence of these "b.e.s.t.i.a.l atrocities" anyone found with arms will be shot. But we've read war bulletins before!

On our way we pa.s.s a convoy of prisoners, hands handcuffed behind their backs, armed motor-cars before and behind. A young soldier blazes off several shots to scatter the crowd, at which a well-dressed woman remonstrates, but she is at once arrested and put with the convoy.

Here we are at the Warschauer Brucke over the Spree, where there is an imposing concourse of steel-helmeted troops and guns, and a cordon.

We pa.s.s this after being searched for arms, and across the bridge come on a lot of guns and machine-guns firing fiercely down the Warschauer Stra.s.se, though there is no audible reply or visible reason. After watching the sh.e.l.ls holing houses, we start working our way round to the south through empty streets, keeping close to the house-fronts and taking cover when bullets whisper a warning. At last crowded streets again, and through them to a broad avenue crossed by shallow trenches and ramshackle barricades--the much-bulletined Frankfurter Allee. Here an insurgent picket takes charge of us and undertakes to bring us to the secret Headquarters.

"But where are your field-guns?" we ask.