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but very prettily made. And they went through their exercises with
great grace and beauty. One incident only marred the day’s
proceedings. A little girl had written to Vienna complaining that her
teacher ate all her food. She was brought before Baroness Einam.
The teacher, a red-faced girl of over-fed appearance, feeling herself
wronged, rushed at the pale child as if to strangle her. The girl was
stubborn and refused to make amends. What was done to the little
Bolshevik I don’t know. But it was gratifying to the organizers of the
scheme, and very interesting to us to discover that the kindly Swiss
peasants grew so attached to the little Austrians that when the time
came for them to go home they offered to keep them all until the next
Austrian harvest.
We drove home through the lovely Swiss scenery in the cool
evening air. But what obtrudes on the mind to spoil the memory of
that drive? The six luckless idiots, with vacant faces and staring
eyes, the disfiguring goitre thickening their poor throats, we counted
on the roadside before we were out of sight of the little mountain
town.
CHAPTER V
THE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN AT ZURICH
(JUNE, 1919)
I left the Conference that day in the company of one of the most
brilliant of living Germans. He had never been optimistic about the
Peace. He was more than half in sympathy with the militarist point of
view although a sincere internationalist. It was not any fighting
proclivity which had shaped his opinion. He hated violence for the
vulgar, futile thing it is. But an inherited capacity for facing realities,
and a cultivated habit of looking squarely at facts, led him to severe
criticism of those he contemptuously spoke of as idealists. He was
an idealist himself after a fashion; but his ideal was not of the
complexion of that exemplified in the conference of women. He had
no use for democracy. He spoke openly of the stupid, ignorant thing
which, he alleged, most people really believe it to be if they were
honest with themselves and the rest of the world. He differed from
those who acknowledge frankly the weaknesses of democracy, but
who, recognizing its inevitability, hope that with education and
organization it need not to all eternity be the victim of the cunning
and the corrupt. He believed democracy to be the predestined victim
of power till the end of time. His ideal was the domination of mankind
by a few great empires, commonwealths, call them what you will,
British, German, Russian and American. The small nationalities he
regarded as a nuisance. He was bitterly hostile to those British
delegates who contemplated complacently the break-up of the
British Empire. He would have applauded the dissertations of Dean
Inge on “the squalid anarchy of democracy,” laughed to scorn the
idea of an entirely independent India, Egypt, Ireland, and through all
his pain at the destruction of the German Empire, pleaded for the
preservation of that of Great Britain.
For the “strong men” of England he had the warmest admiration.
To my astonishment, before I knew him properly, he expressed an
equal regard for M. Clemenceau. “What!” I exclaimed, “the man who
is doing his best to ruin Germany? Or, at least, to benefit France in
such a way that only the ruin of Germany can result? You astonish
me!”
“But why not?” he replied. “In Clemenceau there is a man who
knows what he wants and means to get it; who looks for the
attainable and means to attain it. When did you read from
Clemenceau a speech full of delightful and impossible pledges and
promises? Has Clemenceau disguised the real objects of this war
under a cover of fine and deceptive phrases? All he cares about is
France. He would stop at nothing to advance the interests of France.
One can understand a point of view like that. It is cruel. It hurts
Germany. Very well. That is sad for Germany; but, at least, with such
a man we know where we are and what to expect. If that is nothing,
it is better to expect nothing and get it than to expect much and be
disappointed. Clemenceau knows that in strangling Germany he will
satisfy the immediate demands of France. That is all he cares about.
This is the present. The future is far away, indefinite. New events will
shape and govern that. For the present it is France, only France, all
the time France; and for the rest? N’importe! It is an intelligible point
of view.”
There was a long pause during which I marvelled for the
hundredth time at the amazing facility for languages of the cultivated
European.
“It is not the Clemenceaus and the Ludendorffs of the world, but
your Wilsons, your Lloyd Georges, your idiotic idealists who are
bringing it to ruin.” He glanced at me to see if I were offended.
“Please go on,” I murmured. “You interest me deeply.”
“Your idealists have promised the people impossible things,
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, for instance, Lloyd George’s wonderful
phrases, Asquith’s war-time speeches, the Russian manifestoes,
numberless ministers of religion with no more knowledge of
international politics than the Bibles they thump. They have told the
stupid masses that this is a holy war; that the peace will be based
upon justice: that nothing but good is intended the German people, if
they will only get rid of their blood-stained Kaiser. The same sort of
amiable idiots in Germany believe this sort of thing. All Germans,
with the exception of a few so-called pan-Germans, are intoxicating
themselves with the thought that liberty is born anew; that militarism
is dead for ever; that with the new German democracy the Allied
democracies will make a fair and democratic peace. Pathetically
relying on the Fourteen Points, they are pre-figuring a glorious future
for free Germany, its place in the sun assured according to plan, a
member of the great Society of Nations which shall maintain the
peace of the world. Poor deluded wretches! What an awakening
there will be!”
All this was in Berne during the International.
We left the Zurich conference hall together and discovered a little
café famous for its good tea and delicious pastries. Not a word did
we speak for many minutes. I was filled with awe at the spectacle of
his misery. The ordinarily smiling brown eyes were black with pain,
the pain of a suffering dumb animal. He lit a cigarette. The silence
continued. I felt like an intruder gazing in at the windows of a man’s
stricken soul; but to retire would have been unsympathetic. So I
stayed and poured out the tea and waited in silence for the speech
that I hoped might come.
“How can you sit there looking so fresh and beautiful? How can
the sun go on shining and the birds continue to sing when the world
is really dark and black and sunk in rottenness?” was the beginning.
“You feel it more than you expected?” I asked, reminding him of
the Berne conversation.
“It is so much worse than I expected. I did not expect much, God
knows. But this thing—it means famine, anarchy, war in Europe for
twenty, thirty, forty years!” I waited patiently.
“Germany is to pay the uttermost farthing for the damage she did
to civilians, which is not unreasonable; an enormous amount of the
war damage, of which I do not complain; but also incalculable sums
for the mischief for which she is not responsible, or only in part,
which is wrong. At the same time practically all the means by which
she is to make the money are to be taken from her—ships, minerals,
colonies. She is to be disarmed and her deadly enemy is to remain
fully armed. Any fool can see where that will lead. And the worst is
not told. The slow starvation of Germany, the lynch-pin of European
civilization, will mean incredible moral decline and spiritual
degradation. Millions of people will think food, talk food, dream food,
steal food, lie for food, bribe, corrupt and even murder for food. What
man would see his wife and children die of hunger whilst food was to
be had? Masses of disbanded soldiers, for whom there will be no
work, will enlist for adventures, will quarrel, fight and kill, either for
subsistence or in the service of the enemies of their country, having
no choice, if they are to live. The new states will be insolent,
ambitious, tyrannical, unscrupulous. Instead of one big war there will
be twenty little ones—war never ceasing, war for crude material
things. Art, music, literature, the drama—these will decay. First class
artists will go to America where they can be paid. Grass will grow in
decayed cities and ignorant peasants will instal themselves in the
seats of power. We shall have restored the age of bigotry and
superstition. Central Europe will not merely be Balkanized; it will be
atomized. Our horizon will decline to the level of each man’s
immediate family, if he has a conscience. He will have no horizon but
himself if he has none. And as for your ideals”—here he paused
—“the failure of Wilson has made faith in them impossible to revive
for decades, if ever again. Faith in the pledged word of public men,
faith in idealism, faith in religion—this is dying or dead. And our
idealists have killed it, not the men who never professed more than
the crudest material objectives in this war. Wilson and Lloyd George
between them have damaged the world’s moral currency infinitely
more than the Treaty of Peace has damaged the financial currency
of Germany; and the world is poorer by the loss of the one than of
the other, grave though that is.”
As the passionate words fell from his lips I felt humiliated to the
very dust for the failure that I felt myself to embody. Weeping in a
public place is not a habit of mine or I might have wept. But if my
friend saw no tears, he must have felt the sympathy, for as we rose
to go to the University he said:
“But justice and sanity owe much to you. I am grateful for your
speech of this morning. It will have no effect. It will accomplish
nothing. But it is good to know there are some with the courage to
speak what they believe even when it is on behalf of a beaten foe.
And the German women will be grateful for your protest against the
blockade.”
It was not the full International, but the special Council appointed
by it which met at Lucerne in July of 1919. This time my position was
that of a representative of the Press, and not a delegate. I had an
honorary commission from a London daily newspaper to report the
proceedings of the Conference. I am afraid my report was not too
sympathetic. Everybody felt the same thing in some degree. Far too
much time was wasted on petty national squabbles. The old fight on
responsibility for the war was taken up with renewed lustiness.
French and Germans yelled at one another, like children in a street
squabble, with the old vituperativeness. Meantime the crime of Paris
had been committed, and the world was shrieking from its gaping
and undoctored wounds. A problem presented itself to me: How to
make a genuine International out of men so filled with national hates
and envies that they were at one another’s throats for the slightest
word! Of course, I am sure they said a great deal more than they
meant. They always do at Socialist conferences. Nobody could stay
for five minutes in any Socialist Party I know, if he believed that all
the abuse and violence of language used by members against one
another were intended to be taken at their face value. But it seemed
pitiful that the old vice of talking and saying nothing should have
possessed the International at such a tragic time in the world’s
history. Apart from the awfulness of the Peace, the persecution of
the Jews and the Hungarian counter-revolution should have
absorbed the attention of any body of enlightened Socialists sitting in
conference.
Lucerne is not a good place for a congress. It is too beautiful. The
delegates wanted to be out amongst the mountains or to be dipping
their hands into the lake as they rowed lazily on its still surface. The
most inveterate lover of eloquence could not get up any enthusiasm