Part 22
That reminiscence, however, only leads me to the fact that after the Armistice I again transferred to _The Daily Chronicle_ and remained with them until Lloyd George’s policy of reprisals in Ireland filled me with a sudden passion of disgust and led to my resignation from the paper which supported it.
I think every journalist must now admit that the English press, with very few exceptions, fell to a very low moral ebb after the Armistice. The “hate” campaign was not relinquished but revived with full blast against the beaten enemy. A mountain of false illusion was built up on the basis that Germany could be made to pay for all the costs of war in all the victorious nations, and a peace of vengeance was encouraged, full of the seeds of future wars, at a time in the history of mankind when by a little spirit of generosity, a little drawing together of the world’s democracies, even a little economic sanity in regard to the ruined state of Europe as a whole, civilization itself might have been lifted to a higher plane, future peace might have been secured according to the promise of “the war to end war,” and at least we should have been spared the squalor, the degradation, the bitterness of the last four years. But the English press led the chorus of “Hang the Kaiser,” “Make the Germans pay,” “They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!” and all the old cries of passionate folly, instead of concentrating on the defeat of militarism now that Germany was down and out, the economic reconstruction of Europe after the ruin of war, and the fulfilment of the pledges that had been made to the men who won the war. For, as we now know, and as I foretold, the German people could not pay these colossal, unimaginable sums upon which France and Great Britain reckoned, and the whole argument of these “fruits of victory” was built upon a falsity which demoralized the peoples of the allied Powers, and kept Europe in a ferment. The English press (apart from a few papers) refused to bear witness to the real truth, which was that the Peace of Versailles was impossible of fulfillment, that Europe could not recover under its economic provisions, and that the victor nations would have to face poverty, an immense burden of taxation, a stagnation of trade, the awful costs of war, with no chance of getting rich again by putting a stranglehold on the defeated peoples.
For four years following the Armistice I become a wanderer in Europe, Asia Minor, and America, as a student of the psychology and state of this after-war world, trying to see beneath the surface of social and political life to the deeper currents of thought and emotion and natural law set in motion by the enormous tragedy through which so many nations had passed.
Everywhere I saw a loosening of the old restraints of mental and moral discipline and a kind of neurotic malady which was manifested by alternate gusts of gayety and depression, a wild licentiousness in the crowded cities of Europe, a spirit of restlessness and revolt among the demobilized men, and misery, starvation, disease, and despair, beyond the glare and glitter of dancing halls, restaurants, and places of frivolity.
In France the exultation of victory, which inspired a spirit of carnival in the boulevards of Paris, crowded with visitors from all the Allied nations, did not uplift the hearts of masses of peasants and humble bourgeois folk who returned to the sites of their old homes and villages of which only a few stones or sticks or rubbish heaps remained in the fields which had been swept by the flame of war. With courage and resignation they cleared the ground of barbed wire and unexploded shells, and the unburied bodies of men, and the foul litter of a four years’ battle, but they faced a bleak prospect, and behind them and around them was the vision of ruin and death. For a long time they were without water or light, stone or timber, for the work of reconstruction, or any recompense for their losses from the French Government which looked to Germany for reparations and did not get them. I talked with many of these people in their hovels and huts, marveled at their patience and courage and was saddened because so quickly after war they mistrusted the friendship of England, and the security of the peace they had gained. Their hatred to the Germans was a cold, undying fire, and beneath their hatred was the fear, already visible, that Germany hadn’t been smashed enough, and that one day she would come back again for vengeance.
In Italy there was violence, bitterness, poverty, and revolt. The nation was demoralized by all the shocks that had shaken it. The microbe of Bolshevism was working in the brains of demoralized soldiers. The very walls of Rome were scrawled with Communistic cries and the name of Lenin.
In Rome I accomplished a journalistic mission which, in its way, was a unique honor and experience. This was to interview the Pope on behalf of _The Daily Chronicle_ and a syndicate of American newspapers. Such a thing seemed impossible, and I knew that the chances against me were a million to one. Yet I believed that some plain words from the Pope who, perhaps, alone among men had been above and outside all the fratricidal strife of nations, and had been abused by both sides as “Pro-German” and “Pro-Ally,” would be of profound interest and importance. It was possible that he might give a spiritual call to humanity in this time of moral depression and degradation. I pressed these views upon a certain prelate who had the confidence of Benedict XV, and who was a broad-minded man in sympathy with democratic thought and customs.
He laughed at me heartily for my audacity, and said, “Out of the question!... Impossible!” He explained that no journalists were allowed even at the public audiences of the Pope, owing to regrettable incidents, and that my request for a private interview couldn’t be considered.... We talked of international affairs, and presently I took my leave. “It is no use pressing for that interview?” I asked at the door. He laughed again, and said, “I will let you have a formal reply.”
Three days later, to my immense surprise, I received, without any other word, a card admitting me to a private interview with H. H. Benedict XV, at three-thirty on the following afternoon.
I knew that I had to wear evening clothes, and on that hot afternoon I entirely wrecked three white ties in the endeavor to make a decent bow, and then borrowed one from a waiter. Hiring an old _carrozza_, and feeling intensely nervous at the impending interview, I drove to the Vatican. My card was a magic talisman. The Swiss Guards grounded their pikes before me, and their officer bowed toward a flight of marble steps leading to the private apartments. I was passed on from room to room, saluted by gentlemen of the Pope’s bodyguard in impressive uniforms, until my knees weakened above the polished boards, my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and my waiter’s dress tie slipped up behind my right ear.
Finally, in a highly self-conscious state, I reached an ante-chamber where I was kept waiting for ten minutes until a chamberlain came through a little door and beckoned to me. As I passed through the doorway, I saw a tiny little man in white robes, waiting for me on the threshold.
He smiled through his spectacles, took hold of my wrist as I went down on one knee, according to etiquette, hauled me up with a firm grip, and led me to two gilt chairs, side by side. “Now we can talk,” he said in French, and he sat in one chair and I in the other, in that big room where we were alone together.
In a second my nervousness left me, and we had what the Americans call a heart-to-heart talk. The Pope did not use any fine phrases. He asked me a lot of questions about the state of Europe, the feeling in England and America, and then spoke about the war and its effects. Several times he called the war “a Scourge of God,” and spoke of his efforts to mitigate its misery and relieve some of its agonies. He alluded to the abuse he had received from both sides because of his neutrality and his repeated efforts on behalf of peace, and then waved that on one side and entered into a discussion on the economic effects of war. He saw no quick way of escape from ruin, no rapid means of recovery. “We must steel ourselves to poverty,” he said, and alluded to the great illusion of masses of people, duped by their leaders, that, after the destruction of the world’s wealth, there could be the same prosperity. He spoke sternly of the profiteers, and in a pitying way of the poverty-stricken peoples. “The rich must pay,” he said. “Those who profited out of the war must pay most.” His last words, after a twenty-minutes’ talk, were a plea for charity and peace in the hearts of peoples.
All the time he was talking, I had in the back of my mind the doubt whether I might publish this conversation, and whether, indeed, he knew my profession and purpose. I could not leave him with that doubt, and asked him, with some trepidation, if I might publish the words he had spoken to me. He smiled, and said, “It is the purpose of this conversation.”
I hurried back to my hotel, and wrote a full account, and then desired to submit it for approval to the prelate who had obtained this great consent. But he waved it on one side, and said, “You can write what you like, and publish what you like, provided it is the truth. We trust you!”
I did not abuse that trust, and my interview with the Pope was quoted in every newspaper in the English-speaking world, and created a very favorable effect.
The raid on Fiume by d’Annunzio was a passionate assertion of Imperial claims denied by the Great Powers which have made a peace regarded by Italy as a robbery of all its rightful claims, but this new manifestation of militarism was offset by the capture of factories by Communist workers and the hoisting of the Red Flag in many industrial towns. Beneath the beauty of Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, I saw the ugly shadow of revolution and anarchy.
I went from Trieste to Vienna, and saw worse things in a city deliberately doomed by the Allied Powers--a city of two million people which had once been the capital of a great Empire, the brilliant flower of an old civilization, and now was cut off from all its old resources of wealth and life. In slum streets and babies’ crêches, and hospital wards, away from the wild vice and gayety of great hotels and dancing halls crowded with foreigners and profiteers, I saw the children of a starving city, stricken with rickets, scrofula, all kinds of hunger-diseases, and so weak that children of six or seven had no hardness of bone, so that they couldn’t stand up or sit up, and had bulbous heads above their wizened bodies. The women could not feed their babes for lack of milk. Men like skeletons in rags slouched about the streets, begging with clawlike hands. Ladies of good family could not buy underclothing or boots. Professional men, aristocrats, Ministers of State, lived on thin soup, potatoes, war bread, and the very nurses in the hospitals were starving. The Austrian kronen became worth hardly more than waste paper, and despair had settled upon this great and beautiful city.
I went on to Germany, deeply curious to know what had happened in the soul and state of this people after their tremendous struggle and their supreme defeat. I found there an immense pride of resistance to the consequence of defeat, an utter repudiation of war guilt, an intense vital energy and industry by which they hoped to recapture their lost trade and economic supremacy in Europe, a friendly feeling toward England, a deadly hatred toward France. Outwardly there was no sign of poverty or despair. There were no devastated regions, like those in France, no tidal wave of unemployment, like that in England. All the great engineering works, like those of Krupp which had provided a vast output of artillery and munitions for a world war, had adapted their machinery to the purposes of peace, and were manufacturing railway engines, agricultural machines, typewriters, kitchen utensils, everything that is made of metal, for the world’s needs. It was staggering in its contrast to the lack of energy, the commercial stagnation, the idleness and debility of other war-tired peoples.
But, again, I tried to see below the surface of things, and I saw that this feverish activity was not based on sound foundations of material life, but on a rotten financial system and unhealthy laws. The workingman was underpaid and underfed, and the victim of a system of slave labor. The professional classes were in dire poverty, and what money they earned and saved lost its value day by day, because the German Government was deliberately inflating its paper money by racing the printing presses with issues of false notes which had no reality to back them. German export trade was capturing the world’s markets, but only by underselling to a rate which gave no real industrial profit. And whatever wealth Germany made, or could make, was earmarked for reparations and indemnities which, when the day of reckoning came, would make a mockery of all her efforts, reveal the great sham of her paper money, cast her into the depths of ruin, and mock at the demands of France and her Allies for the payment of those debts of war upon which they counted for their own needs and escape from ruin.
In Germany I had long talks with some of their leading politicians, bankers, and financial experts, whose figures and statements I checked by consultation with our own Ambassador and political observers. It was not without a thrill of cold emotion, and dark remembrance, that I stood for the first time in the Reichstag and saw all around me those men who had been the propagandists of hate against England, the supporters of the War Lords, the faithful servants of the Kaiser and his Chancellors, up to the last throw in their gamblers’ game with fate, when all was lost. There was Scheidemann, the Social Democrat who had voted for all the war subsidies until the hour of defeat, when he voted for the new Republic. There was Stresemann, the leader of the People’s Party, and an avowed Monarchist, in spite of all that had happened. There was Bernsdorff, the intriguer in America, up to his neck in conspiracy with dynamiters and Sinn Feiners and spies. These men filled me with distrust. Their new profession of good will to England had a hollow sound. Yet these, and others, spoke with the utmost frankness about Germany’s condition, and for their own reasons did not hide the desperate menace of that gamble with national finance by which they hoped to postpone the inevitable crash. I was more deeply interested in the mentality of the ordinary German folk and their way of life. A strain of pacifism seemed to be working among them, and they were sick and saddened by their loss of blood in the war, terrible in its sum of death. But the very name of France inflamed their passion. “We are all pacifists,” said one man I met. “We want no more war--except one!” The humiliation of the French occupation on the Rhine, the continued insults of the French press, above all, the presence of Moroccan troops in German cities, instilled a slow poison of hate into every German mind. It made me afraid of the future....
XXII
In the spring of 1921 I lay on the deck of the steamship _Gratz_, 7,000 tons, once Austrian and now flying the Italian flag, bound from Brindisi to Constantinople. With me as a comrade was my young son.
Our fellow passengers were a strange company, mostly Jews from America, Germany, and Greece, going to sell surplus stocks, if they could, to merchants in Pera. They talked interminably in terms of international exchange, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, drachmas, and kronen, and raised their hands to the God of Abraham, because of the stagnation of the world’s markets. There was also a sprinkling of dark-complexioned, somber-eyed men of uncertain nationality until we came in sight of Constantinople, when they changed their bowler hats or cloth caps for the red fez of Islam. One of them was very handsome and elegant, with a distinguished but arrogant manner. I tried to get into conversation with him, but he answered coldly and in monosyllables until we passed the narrows of the Dardanelles when his eyes glowed with a sudden passion, and he told me he had fought against the British there, below the hill of Achi Baba. It had been a great victory, he said, for Turkish arms.
There were some queer women aboard, international in character, given to loud, shrill laughter and amorous ogling. One of them, a buxom creature of middle age, drank champagne at night in the smoking saloon with one of the American Jews, enormously fat, foul in conversation, free with his money, who seemed to covet her favor, and was jealous of a young Turk who, unlike others of his race aboard, was as noisy as a schoolboy and played pranks all day long up and down the ship.
A young British officer, now “demobbed,” was resuming his career as a commercial traveler in woollen vests and socks. He showed me his diary. Before the war he had made as much as £3,000 in one year, as commission on business with Turkish merchants in Constantinople, Stamboul, Smyrna. He spoke well of the Turks’ commercial honesty. Their word was good. They had always paid for orders. A simple soul, this young man who had been a temporary officer in the Great War, believed that trade was reviving and that Europe would recover quickly from the effects of war.
There were others on board who did not think so. “After Austria--Germany,” said the fat American Jew. Lying on the sun-baked decks I listened to conversations by these students of international business, as, for two years and more, since the war, I had been listening to the talk of men and women in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria-Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was always the same. They had no certainty of peace, no sense of security, but rather an apprehension of new conflicts in Europe and outside Europe, a fear of revolution, anarchy, and upheaval of forces beyond the control of men like themselves of international mind, business common sense. But here, on this boat, there was talk of peoples and forces not generally discussed in these other conversations to which I had listened, in wayside taverns, in railway trains, in wooden huts on the old battlefields, in the drawing-rooms of London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and New York.
“The Angora Turks have got to be reckoned with.” ... “Greece is out for a big gamble.” ... “The Armenians have not all been massacred.” ... “The East is seething like a cauldron.” ... “It’s the oil that will put all the fat in the fire.” ... “The Bolshies have got Batoum.” ... “Mesopotamia means oil.” ... “Russia is not dead yet, and make no mistake!” ... “My God! This peace is just a breathing space before another bloody war.” ... “It’s a world gone mad.” ... “What we want is business.”
Then back again to dollars, pounds, lire, marks, drachmas, kronen, roubles.
They ate enormously at meal times, and took snacks between meals. The fat American Jew at my table ate greedily, forgetting his fork sometimes, and mopping his plate with bits of bread. He bullied the stewards for bigger or tenderer helpings. He spoke Russian, German, and American with equal fluency, but an international accent. At night there was card playing, outbursts of song, gusts of laughter, popping of champagne corks, whisperings and chasings along the dark decks, a reek of cigar smoke, no silence or wonderment because of the beauty through which our boat was passing.
The Ionian Sea, merging into the Adriatic, was so calm that when our ship divided its waters, leaving behind a long furrow, the side of each wave was like a polished jewel, and reflected the patches of snow still on the mountain crests (though it was May, and hot) and the fissures in the rocks. It was unbroken by any ripple, except where the boat stirred its quietude by a long ruffle of feathers, and it was so blue that it seemed as though one’s hand would be dyed, like a potter’s, to the same color, if one dipped it in. With this sea, and the sky above, we went on traveling through a blue world, except where our eyes wandered into the gorges of those mountains along the coast of old Illyria, where the barren rocks are scarred and gleam white, or when they were touched by the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset and glittered in a golden way, or became washed with rose water, or all drenched in mist as purple as the Imperial mantle which once fell across them. All day long the ship was followed by a flight of sea gulls skimming on quiet wings and calling plaintively so that we heard again the sirens who cried to Ulysses as he sailed this way through the Enchanted Seas.
We steamed slowly through the Gulf of Corinth, so narrow that if any boulder had fallen from its high walls it would have smashed a hole in our ship. Small Greek boys ran along a foot path, clamoring for pennies like gutter urchins beside an English char-à-banc. Then we lay off Athens, but in spite of a special Greek _visa_ from the consulate in London for which I had paid a fee, I was not allowed to land. Through my glasses I saw, with a thrill of emotion, the tall columns of the Parthenon. At our ship’s side was a crowd of small craft rowed by brown-skinned boatmen who kept up a chant of _Kyrie! Kyrie!_ (Lord! Lord!) like the _Kyrie eleison_ (Lord have mercy!) of the Catholic Mass, touting for the custom of passengers, as they did three thousand years ago, with those same shouts and waving of brown arms, and curses to each other, and raising of oars, when ships came in from Crete and Mediterranean ports with merchandise and travelers.
So we passed into the Ægean Sea, and saw on our port side, like low-lying clouds, the Greek islands in which the Gods once dwelt, and the old heroes. We drew close to Gallipoli, and I thought of heroes more modern, lying there in graves that were not old, who had done deeds needing more courage than that of Ulysses and his men, and who had faced monsters of human machine guns more dreadful than dragons and many-headed dogs, and the Medusa head. The trenches were plainly visible--British and Turkish--and the old gun-emplacements, and the Lone Tree, and the barren slopes of Achi Baba where the flower of Australian and New Zealand youth had fallen, and many Irish and English boys.
“Quite a good landing place,” said one of the passengers by my side. I looked at him, suspecting irony, and remembering the landing of the Twenty-Ninth Division, and the Australian troops, under destroying fire. But this elderly Jew said again, in a cheerful way, “A nice cove for a boat to land.”
We went on slowly through the narrow channel, until in the morning sunlight we saw the glory of the Golden Horn and the minarets of Constantinople. It was then that half the passengers put on the red fez of Islam, and paced the deck restlessly, with their eyes strained toward the city of the Sultan.
The fat American Jew touched me on the arm and spoke solemnly, with a kind of warning. “For those who don’t wear a fez Constantinople won’t be a safe place, I guess. They say there are bodies floating every morning at the Golden Horn--stabbed in the back. I’m keeping close to Pera.”
The first view of the Golden Horn was as beautiful as I had hoped, more than I had imagined, as we rounded the old Seraglio Point and saw in the early sunlight of a May morning the glittering panorama of Constantinople.