Looking for Trouble, page 15
I went upstairs to the office of Die Zeit, pushed my way through a hall filled with unsmiling party workers (mostly boys in their early twenties) and asked for Herr Ulrich. I hadn’t seen him since our trip to Aussig, and wanted to collect some material on the elections. But the man at the desk told me that he was away—“indefinitely.” His whereabouts seemed to be a mystery, and I wondered if he had suddenly become frightened at the magnitude of the drama and decided to wash his hands of the whole affair. I never saw him again.
One afternoon, a day or so before I returned to England, Professor B, a Czech to whom I had been given a letter of introduction, took me to tea at an outdoor restaurant on a hill high above Prague. It was one of the most beautiful spring days I have ever seen. The slope in front of us was white with cherry blossoms, and to the left the ancient towers of Hradschin Palace rose towards the sky like a fairy palace; far below, the River Moldau glistened in the sunshine like a strand of golden hair.
The Czech professor talked about the difficult days we were living through, and expressed an almost childish faith that since democracy was right, it was bound to triumph. “But, life will not be easy,” he sighed. “I find myself staring at the cherry blossoms very hard this year, wondering whether I shall see them again next spring.” He lapsed into silence, then shook his head. “I think not,” he said.
The following spring, shortly after the Germans marched into Prague, I heard he had been sent to a concentration camp.
4
Who Wants a War?
A few weeks after the Czech crisis, Martha Gellhorn (now Mrs. Ernest Hemingway) and I went into a public house in Birmingham to try and get an idea of what the ordinary people in England were thinking. It was a typical English pub in the working-class district, with grey, colorless walls, a dartboard in one corner and two cheap racing prints over the bar.
It was about six o’clock in the evening and soon the room began filling up with factory workers, their wives and girlfriends. There was an air of reserve that made it difficult to get into conversation, but, finally, an elderly gentleman sitting in the corner, in a long, yellow dust-coat made a comment on the weather and we eagerly jumped into the breach and told him we were Americans who were touring about England. “Is that so?” he replied. “I’ve never talked with Americans before.” We thought the ice was broken and sat back, eagerly waiting for him to ply us with questions, but he lapsed into silence and we suddenly realized the conversation had ended.
The public house grew crowded: everybody knew everybody else; it was “Good evening, Bill,” and “Nice to see you, Jim,” and then each retired to his own little group and talked in low, modulated voices. The calm was nearly upset, though, when the door opened and a stranger appeared carrying a large valise. He stood in the middle of the room, opened the suitcase, and took out an array of ties. Instantly the air was charged with hostility. The woman next to us said it was an outrage for salesmen to come and disturb people, when all they wanted was to be left alone to enjoy a nice, quiet drink. Fortunately, the barmaid intervened and told him to go away, and the room soon regained its normal composure.
By this time the atmosphere was thawing, and the group next to us allowed us to join in their conversation. We succeeded in turning the talk to politics, and the charwoman, who worked in a café, said she wouldn’t live in a Fascist country, “not for a thousand pounds a month.” In England, she explained, people respect each other’s rights, but as far as she could gather, foreigners weren’t the same. She had seen them in the moving pictures, with “everybody in uniform, marching, and waving flags.” “But if they like it,” she added, “it’s not up to us to criticize; we should stop at home and mind our own business.”
Her husband, an ex-sailor, backed her up in that. He said he had travelled all over the world, and England was the only place to live in. He longed to reminisce on his experiences in China, but his wife had evidently heard the stories before and kept the conversation well in hand. The British Government, she explained, was the best government in the world. “No one would be foolish enough to start a war against us, because we always win.”
“That’s right,” the sailor interrupted. “Twist the lion’s tail once too often, and you’re for it.” The third man in the group, a worker in an electrical plant, shook his head morosely. “When I read the papers,” he said, “sometimes I have my doubts.” The other two were exasperated. “Now, be sensible. Whoever heard of England getting beaten?” The little man shook his head and sank into silence, thoroughly squashed.
Martha and I motored through the Midlands as far north as Newcastle and back to London again. We picked our people at random—in pubs, tea shops, at ARP meetings and dockyard restaurants; we talked with farmers, factory workers, waiters, mechanics and shipbuilders. And always we got the same reaction. “War! Who wants a war?” They seemed to take it for granted that “foreigners” were always squabbling among themselves, but the fact that these squabbles might involve them wasn’t even a possibility to be discussed. Malcolm Muggeridge summed it up in The Thirties, when he wrote:
Public events, however portentous, trouble little the great mass of mankind, who feel with reason that they are powerless to influence them, and in any case must endure their consequences. An aching tooth is more woeful than Hitler, a cold in the head of greater concern to the sufferer than the annexation of Albania. What turns a Foreign Secretary grey and haggard in a few months, leaves unperturbed the half-million who assemble to watch the Derby.
Martha had come to England to write an article for Collier’s Magazine. Her editor, three thousand miles away in New York, was alarmed; he saw a civil war raging in Spain; he saw the French Army manning three frontiers; the German Army elated after its absorption of Austria; and the Czech Army digging in its third line of defense only twelve miles from Prague. He saw the British Isles, once immune from attack, now transformed through the development of aircraft into one of the most vulnerable targets in Europe. “What is the reaction of the British public?” he cabled. “Are the people alarmed? What do they think of Fascism, or Aggression, or the possibility of war?”
Martha was at her wits’ end. “I can’t cable back ‘War! Who wants a war?’ ” she said indignantly. And yet even in the armament manufacturing towns such as Sheffield and Newcastle, the people we saw showed no apprehension. Oh yes, they were making armaments and a fine thing it was for unemployment. But use them? On whom?
To direct questions such as “Would you fight for Czechoslovakia?” we received a confusion of replies. The waiters in a café in Leeds said they would fight if the Government had signed any obligations, but had the Government signed obligations? they asked. Several textile workers at a nearby table, all ex-servicemen, interrupted to say they wouldn’t fight on foreign territory again; but this brought a sharp retort from an elderly waitress, who said it was a shame to give Americans such an impression. “Of course the boys will fight,” she said, “for King and Country.”
But it was all a far-away drama, and the reason it was far away seemed due to the extraordinary faith which the ordinary man appeared to have in the “experts” who ran the country. Over and over again we had it carefully explained that it was difficult for outsiders to judge the situation, because negotiations were private. Things, we were told, were never as bad as they seemed in the papers, for the Government always had “an extra trick up its sleeve.” People appeared to be confused as to why Mr. Eden resigned, the general opinion being that he was “a fine man with high ideals.” Mr. Chamberlain was also a fine man because he was pledged to do everything to keep the country out of war, and Mr. Churchill was fine because he made good speeches.
In fact, everything was fine that June 1938, three and a half months before the German Army crossed the Czechoslovakian frontier. Martha was infuriated by the complacency. A tall, blonde girl with a brilliant gift for writing and a passionate concern for the underdog, she refused to take the woes of the world lightly. The fact that the working man in England was not stung to fury (as she was) by the treatment of his brothers in Spain or the doom of his brothers in Czechoslovakia struck her as shameful.
Soon our trip began to take on the mild form of a lecture tour. The sentence “War! Who wants a war?” became like a red rag to a bull, and with a burst of exasperation Martha told them about Adolf Hitler, his mighty armies and his hosts of bombers. But they only looked at her with mild surprise, as though she were a little queer in the head, and by the time we reached Lord Feversham’s house in Yorkshire, on Sunday afternoon for tea, her indignation knew no bounds.
She had scarcely said hello before she was telling Sim Feversham (then Under-Secretary of State for Agriculture) that the people in the country could think of nothing else but racing and the weather. Sim found it funny. To begin with, he thought our trip very odd. “Fancy going round to the pubs and asking people what they think. You two are a couple of warmongers. Just trying to upset the country and stir up trouble.”
Martha said she was going to stir up more trouble by talking to his peasants. “In England we call them farmers,” he said. “I know,” retorted Martha. “That’s what you call them.”
An hour or so later we were tramping across the fields to one of the cottages on Sim’s estate. The door opened and a very old man appeared.
“Good morning, Geoff,” said Sim amiably. “How are you?”
The old man was delighted to see his master. “Oh, good morning, m’lord,” he said, bowing several times. “Good morning. Won’t you come in?”
Sim shook his head. “We’ve just walked over to ask you a few questions. These two girls have been driving around England warmongering. They think there’s going to be a war. Now, you don’t think there’s going to be a war, do you, Geoff?”
“Oh no, m’lord. No, m’lord.”
“You think things are all right, don’t you, Geoff?”
“Yes, m’lord. Yes, m’lord.”
“You don’t think Hitler wants a war with England, do you, Geoff?”
“No, m’lord. No, m’lord.”
“In fact, you think all this talk is rather silly, don’t you, Geoff?”
“Yes, m’lord. Yes, m’lord.”
Martha couldn’t stand any more. She stamped back across the fields, Sim following behind, grinning from ear to ear. “Just try coming to my country some day,” she exclaimed. “You won’t get all that bowing and scraping, and imagine putting those ideas into that poor old man’s head! When the war does come, your corpse will be found bobbing about in the river and we’ll know who did it. But you can rest assured I won’t give him away.”
A year and a half later Geoff “turned.” I ran into Sim just before he left with his regiment for Palestine, and he told me that soon after Munich, Martha’s “peasants” began to regard him with the gravest suspicion. When he said goodbye to Geoff, the old man remarked: “It’s too bad to see you in a uniform, m’lord,” then glared ferociously. “But I suppose we must pay for our mistakes. Isn’t that so, m’lord?”
Sim told me to be sure and inform Martha. “It will please her a lot. Do you think she thinks we are going to get beaten?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t.” For I remembered how, on the way home, Martha, still infuriated, had remarked: “And the worst part of it is, their skulls are so thick, you can’t crack them. If the world comes to an end tomorrow, and there’s only one person left, I know it’s bound to be an Englishman!”
Part IV
Bargain Time in Europe
1
The Candles Start to Flicker
When you walked down the Champs-Élysées you noticed, suddenly, the way the sun streamed through the chestnut trees; you watched the fountains at the Rond Point shooting into the air like a stream of diamonds; and you wandered along the banks of the Seine, wondering, with a fear that clutched at your heart, how long the glow of Paris would stay undimmed.
Only a few days before, on August 15th, the news had been flashed around the world that the German Army was mobilizing. Already the decorations, put up in July for the visit of the King and Queen of England, were being replaced by red, white and blue posters, calling on the people to prepare for the national defense—“pour sauvegarder la patrie.” Newspapers brought out extras every few hours and politics absorbed the minds of everyone from statesmen to couturiers. Peace was dying. In their hearts people knew it, but the actual fact was so appalling they clung desperately to hope. They kept a vigil in the death-chamber, clasping the patient’s cold hands and refusing to admit, even to themselves, the growing pallor of her face.
The agony of that long illness was terrible to watch. It lasted over a year, but the anguish of Europe was never again so acute as during those summer months when every type of medicine—hope, treachery, idealism and compromise—was feverishly injected into her veins in a desperate attempt to keep her alive. Her recovery at Munich was an artificial one. After that she went into a coma and a year later died.
I had given up all idea of returning to America and joined the staff of the London Sunday Times as a permanent “roving” correspondent. During the next year my job sent me to many countries and many capitals, and I watched the lights in the death-chamber go out one by one, until the sheets were pulled up over the corpse’s head and the European continent reverberated to the roar of bombers. That pre-Munich August, when despair was sweeping France, I stayed once again with the Baroness X in her flat off the Champs-Élysées where I had written my Spanish articles.
The sun flooded the balcony and the shrill voice of the concierge broke the early morning stillness, just as it had the year before. The only difference was that now the concierge no longer spent her time bargaining; instead, she discussed the political situation. One morning I overheard her arguing with the baker. He was grumbling that France’s internal affairs were a mélange of stupidity; no one ever seemed to agree, while Germany, on the other hand, made lightning decisions. This brought a sharp retort from the concierge, who said, naturally, it was bound to be so; Germany was Hitler, but France was a lot of people. She rebuked him for putting the blame on internal affairs. France’s difficulty was not due to the falling birth-rate or the devaluation of the franc, or even the friction between Left and Right. France’s difficulty, she said fiercely, was the same as it had always been: her geographical position. I couldn’t hear the baker’s reply. Probably he agreed, for it was the terrible repetition of history that haunted the French more than anything else. The scarred battlefields of the north had not even had time to heal and now the German Army was marching again.
I had never seen those battlefields and one morning I took a train to Amiens with Tommy Thompson, who had come to Paris on leave. We hired a taxi and drove to Vimy Ridge, and then to Bapaume and across the old Somme battlefield. I was startled to find how fresh the wounds of the last struggle had remained. For miles we drove through a battered and desolate countryside. With the world on the threshold of a new war, the old war seemed to move out of the pages of history like an angry skeleton. Along the main road there were still signs warning the public not to trespass beyond certain limits for fear of unexploded shells and grenades. Further on there were crumbling machine-gun emplacements and rusted barbed-wire stakes stuck in the ground as firmly as on the day when some hand had placed them there two decades ago.
Along Vimy Ridge the ground was pitted with shell-holes and gouged by huge mine craters. Over one hundred thousand men had died on the hill before it had finally been captured by the Canadians in 1917. It was grim walking up the Ridge, but when we reached the top the skeleton vanished and tragedy turned into a bitter comedy. It was a sunny day and the slope was crowded with sight-seers. Families had brought picnic lunches with them and settled themselves comfortably in shell-holes which offered shade from the sun. Guides were busy conducting parties of tourists into the damp, twisting underground tunnels where the soldiers had fought for five francs a head. Nearby, a luncheon-stand did a thriving business in beer and snacks.
Tommy got into conversation with our taxi driver, and discovered he had fought in the first battle of Vimy Ridge. He regarded the scene with a certain ironical amusement. It was all right for people to bring picnic lunches, he said. When he had been in the trenches he and his friends had often joked that one day people would pay money to see where they had fought. But what wasn’t all right was that only twenty years later Europe should be standing on the brink of another war. But he shrugged his shoulders: “It is always the same story; France against the Boches.”
For weeks that scene haunted me. The shrug of the taxi driver’s shoulders and the look on his face was symbolic of the despair that swept the country. During the next two weeks I motored from Paris to Saint Jean-de-Luz, along the Spanish frontier and up the Riviera to the gay and noisy port of Marseilles. I talked with people all along the way, and on looking over my notes, the reaction was always the same: war must be prevented. Over and over again, people repeated the phrase that Hitler was only bluffing, and if France stood firm the catastrophe could be averted. I suppose one should have taken warning from this psychology. France must stand firm, not because France was firm, but in order to prevent a war. The whole policy of the country was built on the hypothesis that Hitler was bluffing. But what if Hitler wasn’t bluffing, what then?
Every week French statesmen repeated their solemn assurances to Czechoslovakia; it was all part of the game. Most people, myself included, accepted this show of strength on its face value. When I got back to Paris I was shocked to hear Sir Charles Mendl, the press attaché of the British Embassy, say he didn’t believe the French intended to fight for Czechoslovakia. “But how can they go back on their pledge?” I protested. “I don’t know,” replied Sir Charles. “But I’ve lived in this country for twenty-five years and it doesn’t ring true. I don’t believe they’re going to fight.”
