Testament of Youth, page 66
In those days our eyes were still held Europewards by the political and social aftermath of the War, and few prophets foresaw the possibility of an even more profound clash nearly ten years later between oriental aggressiveness and occidental timidity.
One afternoon, in the hall of the Palais des Nations, I encountered the representative of the Daily News, whom I had met once or twice at the League of Nations Union. On hearing that I was going on to Germany and Austria he promised me some useful introductions, but added immediately: ‘What are you doing wandering about Central Europe after that notice I saw in The Times?’
‘Oh, I don’t allow such personal things to affect my work,’ I replied, with a nonchalant bravado that I was far from feeling, for now that G. had gone, and the compelling influence of his presence no longer absorbed and flattered me week after week, the conflict between work and personal relationships which marriage would bring had begun to perplex and harass my thoughts more than ever. To escape for the moment from this perturbation, I plunged furiously into the activities of Geneva, which for me, that chilly September, were by no means light; I was again representing Time and Tide, and had undertaken, with Winifred, to do the Press and publicity work for the Union, which involved sending continual small articles to headquarters in London for distribution to the provincial Press. Several of these described the Mosul boundary dispute, which Fehdi Bey had just brought before the Council. ‘The Turks are here,’ I told G., ‘discussing Iraq, and politely but fundamentally disagreeing with Lord Parmoor.’ One or two of these Council meetings threatened to leave politeness very far behind, and an electrical outburst was once only just averted by the error of a translator, who in the heated controversial confusion inadvertently described the debated territory as ‘le Vilayet de Parmoor’.
On one of our last days in Geneva we heard the Third Committee of the Assembly, with M. Politis as chairman and Dr Beneš as rapporteur, discussing the Protocol, in evening dress, until long after midnight, and it seemed to me deeply significant that a conference in which several Great Powers were taking part should have been dominated by Greece and Czechoslovakia.
‘To-morrow may or may not be a memorable day,’ ran a letter to G., in which I endeavoured to season hope by the stern salt of a realism that was to prove prophetic; ‘the Protocol is to be presented to the Assembly, but one can never be sure whether these League things are going to make history or not . . . There is such immense enthusiasm here; then the delegates return, to be soused with cold water in their own countries.’
In the end the completion of the Protocol was delayed by a Japanese amendment which nearly wrecked the proceedings. We had left Geneva on our way to the Saar Valley before Mrs H. M. Swanwick, as one of the British delegates, delivered the final speech summing up the progress made by the Assembly towards Arbitration, Security and Disarmament, and thus broke the tradition which had hitherto insisted that ‘lady speakers’ and ‘lady delegates’, however expert their knowledge of other subjects, must interest themselves first and foremost in the humanitarian activities of the League.
From Geneva we journeyed to Bale through the sudden mellow warmth of a perfect autumn afternoon; ‘sunlit woods splashed with orange and yellow ochre,’ I described to G., in a letter written in the train; ‘the lake blue-green and smooth as glass; mountains like giant shadows crowding to the shore; the summit of Mt Blanc glowing like a pink topaz in the misty sky. Wonderful world; only wish you were here with me and could see it.’
In a hand-case we carried impressive introductions from the International Federation of League of Nations Societies to the French authorities in the Ruhr and the Quakers at Essen. The League officials had been less helpful - ‘everyone on the Secretariat pretends they know nothing about the Ruhr,’ I had complained to G.; ‘I suppose they still feel injured because Reparations have not been referred to the League’ - but they had given us one or two letters for presentation in the Saar Valley, and Miss Sara Wambaugh, the American expert on plebiscites whom we had met at one of the committees, had advised us to enter the Ruhr from Düsseldorf, which, as one of the first sanctions provided for by the Treaty of Versailles, was itself neither in the Ruhr nor the Rhineland.
On the whole our experimental journey had aroused sympathetic interest in Geneva, and we had been presented, as we had hoped, with a good deal of useful advice from various international experts. Among these were an eminent professor and his French wife, who invited me, on my last evening, to a small dinner-party at the International Club, which included the secretary of the American Foreign Policy Association and a Jugoslav member of the Secretariat. Conversation had turned, inevitably, upon national characteristics; the English, it seemed to be generally agreed, found more difficulty than any nation in getting on to friendly terms with others on the Continent, for while Latins, and even Americans, could reach the subject of politics, or their own souls, in five minutes, the English thought it bad taste to discuss religion, or politics, or their feelings, or themselves, or other people; and after all, inquired the Frenchwoman pertinently, ‘what else is left?’
When he was in London, announced the Jugoslav, he began an important conversation with a distinguished Englishman, and twenty minutes later found himself still discussing the weather. But after all, I thought - though I was too shy to say so - there are other things besides the weather that we do discuss publicly in England - our health, for instance, and our friends’ health, and sea-sickness, and babies’ illnesses, all of which are really much less suited to polite conversation than politics or religion.
Another expert, a well-known international lawyer who afterwards became a Liberal M.P., invited us both to luncheon, and sent us away forewarned and forearmed with the results of his experience in various European countries. But even his advice with regard to the occupied territories concerned me less than my discovery that he had been in the British Intelligence Service in Italy during the War. He had known the headquarters of the 11th Sherwood Foresters very well, he told me, and had even seen Edward’s grave at Granezza, which he had visited the year after Winifred and I went to the Plateau. From him I gathered that it had been a regiment largely composed of Hungarians - always braver and fiercer fighters than the Austrians - which had broken through the British lines on June 15th. Neither the Austrians nor the Italians, he said, had ever really wanted to get on with the War; they not unnaturally preferred ‘sitting on the top of a mountain and making sketches’.
6
At Bale I collapsed suddenly and ignominiously from the stress and agitation of the preceding weeks - which had been increased by an accidental delay in G.’s telegram telling me that he had arrived safely at Quebec on the way to his American university - and had to spend a day in bed at a small station hotel before going on to the Saar through Alsace-Lorraine. ‘Of us one has gone East and the other West,’ G. had written in a letter which was then on its way to me from the United States, and for the rest of that autumn, in Germany, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, there echoed continually through my mind the sad appropriateness of Coventry Patmore’s lines: Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There’s any hope, it is so far away.
Next morning I started off with Winifred through Alsace-Lorraine, feeling light in the head and very uncertain about the feet. In the train between Bale and Strasbourg an Alsatian banker, red-bearded and keen-faced, with light, sensual eyes, instructed me, in return for my tolerant acceptance of the pressure of his hand upon my knee, about the economics of Mulhouse and the geography of the Vosges. He had been obliged to serve against his will, he told me, with the German Army in the War; Alsace-Lorraine was a tragic land in those days, with its families divided between the two Armies, and near relatives often fighting against one another.
‘Over there,’ he explained in his soft, cultured French, waving his hand towards the blue-green curve of the Vosges, which sloped away to the horizon from the rich fields below the left-hand window of our carriage, ‘is a summit where no less than thirty thousand men were killed in the War, because the Germans and the French kept entrenching themselves beneath one another and setting off mines. And very soon we shall pass the Castle of Sélestat, which before the War was a thirteenth-century ruin, inhabited long ago by one of the great barons. Since the ruin was beginning to fall to pieces the people of Sélestat wished to restore it, but as they could not afford to do so themselves they conceived the bright idea of giving it as a present to the Kaiser, so that he might restore it for them. The Kaiser graciously accepted the gift, but instead of restoring the castle he rebuilt it in the best Prussian style, thereby turning a mediæval ruin into a modern German atrocity. And he made Sélestat pay for it too, by levying an income tax on the town!’
In the afternoon we reached Saarbrück without trouble at the frontier, and found it to be a large commercial town of the type of Leicester or Nottingham. The Saar Valley, we had been told, was now virtually a department of the French Foreign Office. The collieries had been handed over to France for fifteen years by the Treaty of Versailles as compensation for the Lens coal-fields destroyed during the War, and were controlled by the Minister of Public Works in Paris, but the League’s clear intention that the chairman of the Governing Commission should be changed periodically had never been fulfilled, and France dominated not only the economic but the political life of the valley. Though Saarbrück was the centre of sixty-seven coal-pits, it appeared less black than the Pottery districts familiar to me in childhood; no powdering of soot spoiled the autumn-tinted plane-trees which fringed the wide streets. The Saar, a grimy-looking river about the size of the Trent, carried its traffic of coal-barges straight through the middle of the town.
Immediately after tea we started out to look for the Canadian member of the Saar Governing Commission, to whom the Administrative Section of the League Secretariat, and the secretary of the Canadian League of Nations Union, whom we had met in Geneva, had given us introductions. After much seeking we located him in the Uhlankasern, a spacious barracks which before the War had been the headquarters of a crack Uhlan regiment, and was now used for Government offices. To our surprise he gave us an interview at once, and told us, with a benevolent confidence which seemed to regard as irrelevant both our sex and our youthful appearance, more about the Saar administration in an hour than we had been able to learn in two years from lectures and pamphlets.
The treaty had indeed created an impossible situation, I gathered, for the five unfortunate Commissioners who, in the name of the much-abused League, had somehow to control the territory until the plebiscite of 1935. What would have happened if Northumberland, for instance, had been isolated from the rest of England, deprived of her collieries by a foreign Power, surrounded by a ring of alien officials, and administered by five Commissioners of different nationality who knew neither the population nor one another? These Commissioners, it seemed, were regarded by the inhabitants as their oppressors, but they themselves appeared less certain whether they were the oppressors or the oppressed. Local prophets had intimated to them on their arrival that within a month they would find a watery grave in the dirty depths of the Saar, and though they had mustered sufficient tolerance and tact to defend themselves against this undesirable fate for nearly five years, the barge-covered river flowing past the main Government building provided a constant reminder that life was short and the fate of man uncertain.
Behind the officially oppressed, on the other hand, there was obviously power. The treaty that divided the Saar territory from Germany proper by an artificial barrier could not thereby prevent something more than telepathy from existing between the five political Parties in Berlin and their counterparts in Saarbrück; nor was it to be expected that a population of which six-sevenths practised Roman Catholicism would forget, or be forgotten by, their religious princes across the border at Speyer and Trier. The coal strike of January 1923, which coincided with the occupation of the Ruhr, had been officially settled by the Governing Commission and the Saar Labour leaders on the night before it was supposed to take place; but next morning it occurred just the same, and the Saar had not yet completely recovered from the effects of those hundred days.
In Germany proper, as we later discovered, there was no attempt to disguise the extent of the power behind the Saar Valley; the antagonism aroused by the occupation of the Ruhr seemed only a drop in the ocean of bitterness directed against the Saar provisions, which so unhappily made the League of Nations the scapegoat of the treaty. The League, the Germans complained to us incessantly, would listen to protests from the natives of mandated territories, but would not hear petitions from the inhabitants of the Saar Gebiet, who apparently seized, instead, every trivial opportunity that presented itself to make their disapproval of the situation unmistakable to the French. At the station bookstalls, we found, French newspapers were unobtainable, and though the language had been compulsory in all the schools up to 1914, no one would admit that he could speak it. When Winifred, one afternoon, inquired in French at a grocer’s shop for methylated spirit, the shopkeeper brusquely replied that he had none.
‘Where can I get some?’ she demanded, producing her empty bottle; and the man, examining the label, exclaimed, ‘Why, this bottle comes from England!’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I am English’; and he answered immediately, ‘Wait one moment and I will find you some spirit at the back of the shop.’
The morning after our interview with the friendly, white-haired Canadian, a car, complete with Government official, arrived at our hotel from the Commissioners to take us for a tour round the valley. Remembering my native Black Country, I had never dreamed that the rural districts between the small colliery towns - Saarlouis, and Brebach, and Volklingen with its immense slag-heaps and soaring skeleton-like structures of steel - would be unsurpassed for sombre loveliness by any other part of Germany. From the scattered pits and villages, dark feathers of smoke drifted across mile upon mile of flaming hills, where every tall tree was afire with the burnt-sienna and scarlet of autumn. The disputed earth, so rich with coal below, was thick with forest above - a terrifying, unbroken forest of giant beeches and firs and pines, where the narrow road between the upright tree-trunks plunged into a twilight so deep that our driver had to turn on the lamps of the car.
What a pity it seemed that the next meeting between the Governing Commission and the Saar inhabitants could not take place in this acacia-bordered forest! The stately trees, looking down with their brooding contempt upon the pigmies who possessed them, would surely suggest a quiet permanence, a grave reality, beside which Europe’s political quarrels would seem but a little whirl of angry dust. Man, the most destructive of animals, might approach those dominant trees with his axe, but a hundred years hence the forest would still survive his commercial aspirations, and scorn his international disputes.
7
At the frontier between the Saar Valley and the wooded Rhineland with its deep rose-red earth through which we were travelling north to Cologne, a conversation occurred which illustrated once more the unpopularity of the French language in Occupied Germany. As soon as we reached Merzig, the frontier station, a German official burst into our carriage and attacked us with a stream of voluble instructions, of which every sentence appeared to end in ‘absteigen’.
‘Ich verstehe nicht!’ I reiterated helplessly; and the official inquired malevolently, ‘Sind Sie franzosisch?’
‘Nein, englisch,’ I responded promptly. ‘Parlez-vous francais?’
‘Oui, mademoiselle,’ he replied at once, having apparently no objection to speaking the prohibited language with someone who was not a Frenchwoman, and he inquired of Winifred what one of her cases contained.
‘Seulement des vieilles chapeaux,’ she informed him cheerfully, forgetting such trifles as foreign genders in her relief at having overcome the obvious dislike which our appearance had originally inspired in the Customs officer.
‘Chapeaux sont toujours vieux, mademoiselle, jamais vieilles! ’ exclaimed the official delightedly, and as an appreciative tribute to our imperfect French, he released us from the obligation of unfastening our boxes at all.
At Trier, with its soaring spires of a dozen churches, we were joined by a plump, voluminous pastor who was soon telling us, in slow but comprehensible English, that he acted as chaplain to Krupps’ workmen in Essen. Before the War, he said, Krupps’ had employed a hundred and twenty thousand men, but now that they were obliged by the treaty to make agricultural implements and railway machinery instead of armaments, they had dismissed nearly a third of their workers and there were about forty thousand unemployed in Essen alone. When we reached Cologne we should have been glad, for all our experience of independence, to retain the pastor’s benevolent company a little longer, for we immediately encountered, in the demeanour of porters and taxi-drivers and hotel servants, a hostility which reminded us that we, the self-righteous British, had become to Cologne exactly what the French were to the Rhineland and the Saar.
By the time that we reached this British-occupied territory, our collection of introductions had already acquired that snowball-like tendency which later, in Czechoslovakia and Austria, developed the proportions of an avalanche and threatened to overwhelm us. Life in Germany had by now become one rapid and exhausting sequence of journeys, interrupted by incessant, head-racking conversations, usually in bad French or worse German, with strangers excitedly teeming with political information, which had to be immediately recorded in the form of diaries or memoranda, and which reached its final metamorphosis in the shape of articles forwarded to the League of Nations Union or direct to newspapers.
