Part 6
It failed to work. It was all very well for the Communists to hand out tickets for bread, clothes, boots, education and operas to all those who were registered for service to the State, but those who presented the tickets found that there was not enough bread to go round, that no clothes or boots were forthcoming, that education is a poor thing on empty stomachs in schools where the teachers died of starvation, and that the opera, beautiful as it continued to be, was not nourishing after a day of hunger. The workers fled from the factories because they could get no food. In the fields the peasants resisted the soldiers who tried to requisition their grain for the cities. Transport broke down. Grass grew on the railways. Horses and cattle died for lack of fodder. Typhus was rampant for lack of soap, medicines, decent conditions of life. Then famine struck the Volga region after two summers of drought. Twenty-five million people were threatened with death by actual starvation, and all over Russia there was hunger, fear, and despair.
From the famine districts the roads were black with fugitives moving to districts where they hoped to find food, while, from those very districts, people were trekking away from barren fields. Parents abandoned their children. When I went down the Volga the people were eating dried leaves, chopped straw and clay. The children were dying. The old people awaited death. And far away in Petrograd and in Moscow the factories were deserted, the hospitals were stone cold for lack of fuel, and there was not a single man or woman who had any comfort of body or soul.
Communism had failed. Its failure was proclaimed by Lenin himself. Russia was _in extremis_ after a war which had broken the machinery of its life and a revolution which had failed to fulfil any of its promises, except equality—in misery.
That downfall of Russia was the worst thing in Europe, and was the cause of some of its general poverty. Trade was cut off from a hundred million people. Their purchasing power had been extinguished, so that neighbouring countries could not sell to them. Their own sources of wealth had perished, so that neither wheat nor oil nor flax could be exchanged for manufactured goods. The wealth of the world was so much less.
At that time the new Baltic States were unable to support themselves on any decent standard of life. Their children also were underfed. No trade came into the port of Riga, which once had been busy with the world’s merchandise.
In Poland there was the spiritual warmth of national independence, but not much else. Misery was widespread. Food for the army was taken from the people. Commerce was stagnant, industry at a standstill. Germany was not buying from Poland. Poland could not buy from Germany or Russia. Underneath its new military ardour there was desperate need in the homes of the workers.
THE AGONY OF AUSTRIA
In Austria there was utter hopelessness, and the health of the people was breaking down. The Reparations Commission, under Sir William Goode, established to exact indemnities, saw the folly of such action and became a Relief Mission to save the life of those people, the most charming and brilliant and civilised in Central Europe, before they sank under the doom pronounced upon them by a Treaty of Peace which had left them with the capital city of a great Empire from which the Empire had been lopped. I went into the Austrian hospitals, homes, babies’ crèches, and children’s clinics, and saw little Austrian children so weak from under-nourishment that they could not sit up in bed and crippled with rickets. Children of three and four had no solid bone in their bodies, but only gristle. Where their arms were crossed at night there were deep sunken hollows. Sixty-eight per cent. of the Austrian children were in a state of semi-starvation in the year that followed war.
THE GERMAN PEOPLE
In Germany it was not so bad—but bad. For the last year of the war the people had been reduced to the bare limits of food supply. After the war, when the blockade was maintained until the signature of peace, the children went without milk and fats and there was general shortness of provisions, not amounting to actual starvation, but weakening the working men and women. Factory workmen told me that they never ate meat, and existed on bread and potatoes. It was enough for life, they said, but not enough for physical strength. They felt tired. Women fainted in the tramcars. There was stinting and scraping in every home, except those of the “profiteers,” who by some genius of finance were making a good thing out of the fall of the mark.
Coming across Europe like that, and seeing the spreading track of financial and commercial ruin, the lowering of the standard of life in many countries where it had been high and splendid, the loss of purchasing power for anything but the barest necessities, and all the new frontiers and customs lines between new States and old States, checking the free interchange of goods, slowing down world trade, an observer like myself was staggered by the gravity of this state of things. It seemed to me that we were all heading for disaster. I was convinced that all those fair promises of quick prosperity, German reparations, revival of British trade, stabilising of international exchanges, would be utterly falsified unless there was a new co-operation among the countries of Europe on lines of economic commonsense, and a truce to the policy of demanding from the defeated countries immense sums of money beyond their ability to pay. It seemed to me very clear that if Germany went down into real economic disaster the whole of Europe would go down too, and that what was wanted most was not payment of fantastic reparations but a return to the normal exchange of goods and energy. I was afraid for England.
THE BRITISH ILLUSION
The British Government, after the Armistice and the uncertain Peace, had behaved for a while as though victory had re-established her old strength. Superficially, indeed, and in moral prestige, among the nations of the world, the British Empire had emerged stronger than before the war. The menace of the German fleet was at the bottom of the sea. New territories in Africa had come under British dominion. British spheres of influence had been extended through Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia. But those new “mandates” were a source of weakness and not of power. They were very costly at a time when there was no money to spend on new adventures in Imperialism. At least the vast sums of money poured into Mesopotamia and other Eastern territories on extravagant administration and development could not be justified to British taxpayers confronted by a staggering bill of costs for war purposes which drained the old reserves of wealth. British statesmen, not yet taught the elementary lessons of economic law, behaved with a kind of splendid madness, as though a new Golden Age had arrived in which their people would possess an Oriental Empire such as Alexander had carved out of the old world. They forgot, or did not know, that poverty and something like industrial ruin was creeping over English life. They did not realise that after a devastating war they could not call upon the last reserves of manhood to support military adventures in far lands. They did not understand that the effects of war in Europe from the Rhine to the Volga, and beyond, had so lowered the purchasing power of the defeated peoples, the neutral countries and the new States, that Great Britain, for a long time to come, would lose many of her old markets for the export trade upon which her life depended, as well as the shipping of the world’s merchandise from port to port which had been so great a source of her old wealth. Winston Churchill, with his restless imagination and wide-reaching Imperialism dreamed dreams of British rule extending from the Cape to Cairo and from Tooting to Tibet. Even Lloyd George, for a little while, was intoxicated with the magnificence of the victory in which he claimed a chief share, not to be denied in history in spite of some blunders and a feud with the Army Chiefs.
THE LESSON OF REALITY
Then, quicker than in France, all this illusion was smashed in the face by reality. The British nation became aware of its dwindling trade, the stagnation of its industry. Unemployment began to creep up in a steady tide, until two million men were out of work and existing only on Government “doles.” Factories were closing down or working half time. The Mersey, the Clyde and the Thames were crowded with ships without cargoes, and all the ports were filled with seamen without berths. After demobilisation ex-officers as well as men could not find jobs to do. They tramped the streets in search of work, wearing out their boots and their hearts. They played piano-organs, moved in dismal processions with banners flying the words “We want work,” shook street collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. The Trade Unions were hard and selfish. They refused to admit untrained labour to their ranks. Without Trade Union tickets men who had saved the country were turned away at the factory gates. Labour put up a fierce fight to maintain the standard of wages and of life which had been established in time of war—no longer possible in time of peace with failing markets and a world in ruin. One cannot blame them. None of us likes to reduce his standard of life and go back to miserable conditions of stint and scrape. Strikes and lockouts beat them down, but did not relieve the strain or increase the nation’s wealth. Things looked very serious below the surface of English life. There was a bitterness in the minds of men who had been promised great rewards for heroic service, and now found themselves destitute, in overcrowded slums—where were the “homes for heroes”?—maintained on a miserable “dole” that just saved them from starvation but was not enough for decent life. There was for a year or so a danger of revolt, a spreading of revolutionary ideas, among men like that. Russian Communism put a spell upon many minds who knew nothing of the agony in Russia but were stirred by the Bolshevik doctrine of equality and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
When Germany failed to pay the immense reparations which had been demanded from her the British Government was faced with the necessity of balancing its yearly Budget without those payments, and, unlike France, which still banked upon them, or like Germany, which created false money by inflation, determined to sustain the national credit by taxation and sound finance. It put the most tremendous burden upon the nation that has ever been sustained by any people in modern history. It was accepted with a resignation and courage which will stand for ever to the credit of the British folk, and especially to the credit of those who paid at the cost of all that was dearest to them in life apart from national honour and family blood. Income Tax, Super Tax, and Death Duties fell upon the people who lived on inherited wealth with a terrifying ferocity. There are only two and a half million people in Great Britain who pay any Income Tax at all, and only eighty-five thousand who are subject to Super Tax, but it was from that small minority that the Government demanded the revenue necessary for the upkeep of its services. It caused, and is causing, a social revolution which is changing the whole aspect of English life. The old aristocracy are abandoning their houses, selling their estates, becoming shabby genteel, losing their old splendour, prerogatives and power. To pay their Income Tax and Death Duties they are eating into their old capital, selling the old pictures on their walls, abandoning old mansions haunted by the ghosts of history in which their pride and spirit dwelt. They have done this not without anguish, not without a sense of tragedy, not without bitterness, but with an acknowledgment of inevitable necessity. Bloodlessly the revolution in England is being accomplished, though the hard road has not yet been travelled to the end.
THE PRICE OF WAR
More crippling in its effects upon the nation as a whole was the taxation of capital in trade and industry. At a time when it was most necessary to limit the costs of production and to stimulate the adventure of trade, the business world was crushed under a burden of taxation which limited its reserves, put heavy charges upon the cost of manufacture, and reduced the capital available for new enterprise. The price of war, and of victory, lay with an almost intolerable weight upon the spirit of the British people, even before they had to shoulder the burden—rejected by every other nation—the payment of War Debt to the United States of America, amounting to £35,000,000 sterling every year. With an export trade less than 75 per cent. of what it reached before the War, with a population which had increased by nearly two millions in spite of all the slaughter, with new and ruinous expenses, and with a higher standard of life demanded by the labouring class, the people of Great Britain breathed hard, became very anxious, faced up to realities, and saw, with almost blinding clarity of vision, that their own national life depended upon the peace and recovery of Europe, including that of Germany and the defeated peoples. This realisation changed their whole attitude of mind towards the problem of peace. It made them draw farther and farther away from the French policy of Poincaré, which was based upon the prevention of German recovery and “security” by military force. But above all these financial considerations England believed in fair play even to a defeated foe, in generosity rather than vengeance, and in future peace by conciliation rather than by a military combination which one day would be challenged in another “inevitable” war, more ghastly than the last. All that sounded like weakness and treachery to the mind of France. The Entente Cordiale was strained and broken....
PHYSICAL RECOVERY IN EUROPE
In many ways the recovery of Europe was more rapid in its fundamental needs of life than seemed possible after the devastation of war. Human energy, faith and hope repaired the material damage of war in an almost miraculous degree. Walking day by day across the battlefields of France and Flanders it seemed impossible to me and to all others that the ground upheaved by high explosives, criss-crossed with deep trenches, and sown with unexploded shells would return within the lifetime of the present generation to harvest fields and pleasant pasture. It was incredible that all those villages blown off the map, so that there were only rubbish heaps to mark their site, should be rebuilt within half a century with new walls and sheltering roofs for the people who had fled from them.
I never expected to see a new city of Ypres, or to walk past shop windows in Arras, or to see a harvest gathered on the outskirts of a new Peronne. The infernal track of war from Belgium to Switzerland, littered with dead bodies and the wreckage of battle, could not be wiped out, I thought, from the eyes of living men. But that has happened at least along some parts of the line ten years after. There are red roofs and busy streets in Ypres and Arras. The fields are smooth and green around Peronne. There are houses at Passchendaele. It is difficult to see the scars of war in Amiens. It is hard to find trenches and dug-outs or places where monstrous battles happened beyond the Menin Gate of Ypres or down by Lens, beyond the Vimy Ridge. Peasants dug out the unexploded shells. The trenches silted in or were ploughed in. The Belgians were as busy as bees when they returned to the hive. French contractors hired Poles and Czechs to supplement their French labour and made enormous fortunes in the reconstruction of destroyed towns at the cost of the French Government, which accepted all their claims until an orgy of corruption broke all bounds. In East Prussia, destroyed by Russian cavalry, little red houses were put up even more quickly because of German industry. In Italy many wounds were hidden and healed. There is still much work to be done, especially in France, most terribly mutilated; but, ten years after, the work of reconstruction by the energy of men and women, desperate in their desire to blot out the years of agony and get back to peaceful labours and their old home life, is a splendid victory over the forces of destruction. Life triumphs over death, as always in history.
So also the stricken peoples staggered up from the bog of misery into which they were deep sunk after war. The land saved the cities, and the peasants found the source of life in the kind earth again. One nation above all helped them to tide over the lean years and live until they could reap new harvests. Without that rescue, millions more would have died and Europe would have been swept by pestilence and famine. The people of the United States did a work of charity on behalf of the starving folk of Europe, more especially in the rescue of the starving children, which absolves them, if they need absolution, from the charge of utter selfishness and indifference to the sufferings of that Europe from which they drew back in a policy of isolation.
It is one of the paradoxes of recent history that while the American people, hardened against the Wilson ideal of co-operation with Europe, drew away from the League of Nations as an accursed thing with which they would have no part or lot, and reasserted the Monroe Doctrine with a new interpretation of narrow exclusiveness, they gave with their left hand, nearest to the heart, what their right hand refused. Publicly they said, “Let Europe stew in its own broth.” Privately they poured out their dollars in charity for European relief.
THE “A.R.A.”
Early in the War the American Relief Administration, organised by Herbert Hoover, fed day by day many millions of people in the areas of enemy occupation. A great deal of these food supplies were contributed by Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries, as it is only fair to say, but the American contributions were enormous, and the organisation by American officials was a model of efficiency and zeal. As soon as the War ended, the A.R.A., as Hoover’s administration was universally known, extended its operations and intensified its appeals to the charity of the American people on behalf of the stricken populations on both sides of the war zone. The American Government supported this work by immense subsidies of surplus stocks, which perhaps was good business as well as good will. But the good will was there, and it was reinforced by a volume of generosity which welled up from an almost inexhaustible source of private charity. The A.R.A. sent its officers and its food trains into Austria, Germany, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Serbia, Hungary, Armenia, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and many other countries. It established feeding centres and kitchens in the most necessitous cities and areas. It measured millions of children by a rough-and-ready system which showed the standard of under-nourishment and vital debility. It rushed food out to the innocent victims of war’s cruelty, and helped, prodigiously, to save the world’s childhood, without distinction of race, religion or politics. It was a divine work, inspired by God’s love, after four years of hate and horror. In Europe other societies, like the Save the Children Fund, the Society of Friends, the Imperial Relief Committee, and the International Red Cross, did splendid work too, with less means and out of increasing poverty, on behalf of all this mass of human suffering left as the heritage of war, but the A.R.A. was the most powerful crusade of rescue, and by its far-reaching aid did undoubtedly give the stricken peoples time and chance to recover their power of self-subsistence after a period when physical weakness, moral despair, and the ravages of war had deprived them of the means of life above the hunger line.
It was when famine took possession of the most fertile territories of Russia that the A.R.A. did its greatest work. In the United States of America, as in England and France, the cry for help that came out of Russia, so long cut off from human intercourse, so long hidden by closed doors behind which lay the tragedy of a great people, many men and women, shocked to their inmost soul by stories of Bolshevik atrocities, refused to listen to the voice of charity. Many were certain that any food or help sent to Russia would be used by the Communist leaders to save themselves from destruction or to support the Red Army and the Reign of Terror. In any case, as some of them said, why feed Russian peasants who have adopted the pernicious philosophy of Bolshevism, or submitted to it; and why feed Bolshevik babies who will grow up to threaten the civilised code of decent peoples? Let Russia pay the penalty of its atrocious crimes.
There was no country in the world where there was a greater loathing of Bolshevism than in the United States. It was to the majority of American citizens, as it is still, the Unspeakable Thing, because it denied the rights of private property, declared war upon Capital, and conspired for the overthrow of all Governments based upon the Capitalist system. So much the more wonderful then is the charity of those people who, with that enormous prejudice in their minds, heard the voice of charity.
THE RUSSIAN FAMINE
I went into Russia with some of the first officials of the A.R.A. and travelled with them to the Volga region, where twenty-five million people were threatened with starvation and starving. It was Governor “Jim” of Indiana—Governor Goodrich—whose wise, temperate and humane report was a document which helped to save those millions. I read it as he had written it in a slow-going train from Kazan to Moscow on the way back from dreadful scenes, and I gave the homage of my heart to that serene-eyed man who, with one lame leg, travelled through Russia on a diet of apples, went fearlessly into typhus-stricken places, and saw all things with a great pity, sound commonsense, practical judgment, large humanity.