Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  More closely concerned with the quarrel than these distant countries, the representatives of Spain and Sweden brooded anxiously over the Council table, the one looking for any chance of conciliation that offered itself, the other permanently ready to voice the fears and anxieties of the smaller nations. As those anxieties increased, M. Branting, the tall, dignified Swede, with his white head and flowing moustache, came more and more to resemble a lost Viking chief inadvertently strayed into the wordy councils of the New Diplomacy, where the simple and obvious solution of an international problem disappeared into the depths of verbosity as a diamond might vanish in a reedy whirlpool. In rotund contrast was the Spanish Ambassador from Paris, Señor Quinones de Leon. Large, expansive and calm, his inward perturbations seemed as incapable of changing his countenance as of ruffling the scanty hairs upon his big, round head. Probably he was meditating upon the coming Spanish Revolution - which exactly a week later was to put General Primo de Rivera at the head of the Directory in Madrid - instead of giving an unburdened mind to the troubles of Greece.

  The hostile stab and clash of the chief verbal duel inevitably passed between Professor Salandra of Italy and M. Nicolas Politis, the Greek representative, but the issue was joined continually by M. Gabriel Hanotaux of France, M. Paul Hymans of Belgium, and the chief British delegate, Lord Robert Cecil, whose inclusion in the new Baldwin Government, which had succeeded that of Mr Bonar Law on May 22nd, was said to indicate a recognition of the importance of the League to British foreign policy. Viscount Ishii of Japan had also a leading part to play as President of the Council, but the bombardment of Corfu and the loss of fifteen Greek lives cannot have seemed a great matter to one whose country staggered under its death roll of half a million in the tremendous earthquake which had destroyed Tokio and Yokohama on September 1st. A small elderly man with melancholy eyes and a dark, kindly face as deeply lined as old parchment, he presided over the stormy Council with shoulders bent beneath the weight of overwhelming calamity. As the sufferings of Japan penetrated even through the solemn impassivity of the oriental demeanour, the burning discords of Europe seemed to dwindle into insignificance beneath the shadow of a great and dignified sorrow.

  To the eyes of the casual observer, Dr Salandra, once Prime Minister of Italy but now representative of the unbending Mussolini, seemed incongruously unsuited to either his own fierce statements or the sinister designs attributed to Italy by sections of the international Press. With short, thick-set figure, brown face and dark twinkling eyes, he resembled the humorous uncle in a stage comedy rather than the menacing diplomat; his double chin and large bald head with its fringe of white hair lent him an air of benevolence quite out of harmony with his uncompromising language. Still on the active side of middle age, his slender, spectacled opponent, M. Politis, seemed the incarnation of modern Greece laying its appeal before the League. In a clear, unhesitating voice, solemn as a doctor’s diagnosis, he presented his country’s case without anger or fear, laying bare the essentials of the situation with a skill even more conspicuous than that of the Italian in covering them up.

  Of the three remaining Powers who heard him, the attitude of only one was unmistakable. So this really is open diplomacy, we thought excitedly, as in the packed committee room with its glass walls, through which we could see the spiky palms and the scarlet salvia in the Palais garden vivid with light in the ecstatic autumn sunshine, Lord Robert Cecil rose to demand the public reading of Articles 10, 12 and 15 of the Treaty of Versailles. In the tense, expectant silence the chief interpreter began to read, in English and in French, those three articles from the first twenty-six of the treaty which formed the Covenant of the League of Nations. The air was electric with a dramatic sense of testing and of crisis as the familiar words brought home - probably, to most of that audience, for the first time - the full significance of the League in the international relationships of a tortured post-war world:

  ‘The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In the case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled . . .’

  A breathless moment followed, and then Lord Robert, his sprawling shoulders suddenly erect, stood up again and put into words the essential, unpalatable truth which streams of diplomatic eloquence had done their best to submerge: ‘If these articles are disregarded, the whole foundation of new Europe will be shaken!’

  As I listened there came to me, with a dark dismay and yet with the deep thrill of a worth-while contest, the suddenly complete realisation of all that the original post-war decision to range my insignificant self on the side of the forces working for peace and understanding was to mean in reluctant awareness of diplomatic tradition and intrigue, as well as in a growing bitter knowledge that men deliberately refused to perceive the obvious even when such perception was to their own advantage. Still optimistic in spite of the War, I had believed that statesmen needed only to realise the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them, only to be shown the path of peace in order to tread it; now, in spite of that momentary sense of a common purpose in the Assembly, I knew that most of them were too cynical, too suicidally wedded to expediency, to adopt the pure, lucid policy of simple wisdom. All too clearly, the conflict for internationalism as a creed was going to be longer and sterner than we had imagined in the first vigour of anti-war reaction.

  And yet those great nineteenth-century treaties remained to show that progress had happened, had occurred in despite - and perhaps even because - of men like these, I reflected, contemplating the nervous face and hard, restless eyes of M. Hanotaux, the small non-committal Frenchman with the perpetual frown and the little, grey, pointed beard which gave an appearance of crafty slyness to his lined countenance. He would have been glad, we all realised, to support the uncompromising Salandra, whose country’s occupation of Corfu could hardly have been uninfluenced by the predicament of the resentful Ruhr, but he feared to antagonise the Little Entente with its definite views on the rights of small States. It was less discouraging to watch the volatile movements of M. Hymans, the fragile, graceful Belgian with the abundant white hair and keen expressive eyes beneath black brows, who was so frequently in consultation with Lord Robert Cecil. In a gathering of individuals whose beauty was the last consideration which had brought them together, his romantic appearance provided an agreeable momentary diversion from the antagonisms of Europe.

  During those early days, the habit of treating the League as negligible had not reached its present stage of propagandist efficiency even in those newspapers which were later to find its perpetual disparagement a remunerative ‘stunt’, and the world really seemed to care that the Council should emerge with credit from the Greek-Italian crisis. Although Corfu was soon afterwards evacuated, and the question of the League’s competence to intervene in the dispute was avoided with sufficient deftness to prevent Italy from carrying out her threat to leave it, the confident hopes which had rested on Geneva were cruelly disappointed when the final settlement was handed over to the Conference of Ambassadors and Greece was made to pay £500,000 to Italy. Winifred and I had to return to England for her sister’s wedding before the crisis was over; at home we read numerous attacks upon Lord Robert Cecil for his bold disregard of diplomatic circumlocution, and on September 15th I wrote to tell Winifred that an eminent don whom we both knew had just sent a letter to The Times, ‘all about members of the L.N.U. having to “reconsider” their attitude towards the League and not being likely to be willing in the future to give their time and money to an organisation which is only capable of coming to “lame and lamentable” conclusions! He does think his time is valuable, that man! I suppose a little thing like Gilbert Murray’s time is of no account!’

  By November the Greek-Italian dispute was still provoking such inveterate enemies of Geneva as the Du
ke of Northumberland and Mr J. L. Maxse to make furious attacks on the League, but during that autumn the limelight of publicity shifted from South-Eastern Europe to the Franco-German boundary owing to the new menace of separatist movements in Bavaria and Saxony. Although the cessation of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the new committees created by the Reparations Commission had now relieved the fierce tension which followed the Essen riots in March, every country was paying in loss of trade and falling exchanges for the French occupation. The fear of complete political disruption and economic collapse in Germany diverted Europe’s interest even from the new experimental republicanism of Mustapha Kemal in Turkey, and caused Lord Birkenhead’s expressed approval of ‘glittering swords’ in his Rectorial address at Glasgow to be received somewhat coldly by an anxious England which would gladly have seen them all turned into ploughshares. Even quite moderate left-wing French opinion was now, it appeared, shocked and disturbed by the consequences of the Ruhr invasion; ‘France,’ M. Guyot had written in L’Ère Nouvelle in December 1923,

  ‘is isolated in a system of thought which Europe refuses to share. Poincaré prides himself on his immobility, whilst the tide of facts mounts further around him every day . . . Reason applauds the rock-like stand of this Lorraine attorney, but “our nerves and our blood, everything in us that makes us live, revolt against the feeling that we are remaining stationary while the whole world around us is moving.” Shall France move on up the high road along which all is life and movement, or shall she stand fast - and perish?’

  When, exactly a month after the trial of Hitler and Ludendorff for leading the separatist movement in Bavaria had begun in Munich, I went north at the beginning of April 1924, to carry out a lecture tour for the League of Nations Union among the small towns on the Scottish Border, practically every audience asked for an address on the Ruhr occupation, although both Council and Assembly had hitherto carefully avoided the subject. The situation in Germany seemed a curious comment, I thought, as I moved from town to town between the snow-covered Cheviot and Lammermuir Hills in the bitter cold of that pipe-freezing spring, on the Centenary Debate which had just been held by the Union at Oxford: ‘That civilisation has advanced since this society first met.’

  By the time that I had lectured at Ayton and Duns and Norham and Coldstream on Reparations, and passive resistance, and the similar ‘incidents’ in the Saar Valley under the pro-French Governing Commission, and the trial of the Krupp directors, and the epidemic of unavailing Notes between the Allies and Germany, and the collapsing mark which had descended, in September 1923, to 800 million to the £, I began to feel that I should never really speak effectively on these complicated topics until I had been in the occupied areas, sensed their bitter psychology, and seen at least the external aspect of post-war hostilities for myself. Winifred, as it happened, was spontaneously coming in her own lectures to the same conclusion, for though she was speaking that year for feminist organisations as well as for the League of Nations Union, her attention had been diverted from such topical events as the Second Reading, on Leap Year’s Day, of Mr Adamson’s Equal Franchise Bill, and the Six Point Group’s mass meeting in March to demand Widows’ Pensions, by a correspondence with Gerda von Gerlach, the daughter of a conspicuous Berlin Socialist who had been the first German girl to go to Somerville after the War.

  ‘One [letter] from the von Gerlach girl,’ Winifred wrote to me from Yorkshire on April 16th, while I was still in the north, ‘to say that her father has got safely out of Germany, and that if the elections go right he may not be tried for high treason even now. Poor things! What a hell of a time most European countries give their best citizens - the Liberals in Hungary, the anti-Fascisti in Italy, the pacifists in Germany, the liberty-loving in Russia - and all for what? I can still see the little von Gerlach girl leaning across the table at Pinoli’s with her big tear-filled eyes and her fierce little voice. “Oh, you in England don’t know what Europe is! How can you? You’re so safe!” I thought of her as I came up in the train yesterday riding along the side of a tranquil sunset over this dull, placid, strangely untroubled country that lies from London to the Humber—

  And much it grieved my heart to think

  What man has made of man!

  ‘Am I growing hysterical? Sometimes I look into the sunset and see only the blood spilt from bodies that might have been godlike and wept from hearts that have at least potential divinity. We could be so happy. There is such beauty, and such kindness . . . even in this unbeautiful place the crocuses, late flowering this year, and the very small buds upon the hawthorns have an almost disquieting loveliness. If only the birds would sing loud enough to drown the cry that rises from the folly, folly of people in this stupid planet!’

  But we knew, with our heavy memories of the past ten years, that for us no beauty of spring flowers could blind us to the tears of the bereaved, no song of melodious birds extinguish the heartbroken mourning of the conquered, and when we both returned to London at the end of April, the opening of the Wembley exhibition, with its meretricious architecture and its exploited workers, seemed a vulgar display of national self-satisfaction when contrasted with the sorrows of prostrate Germany. So we decided to pool our savings and go that autumn to the occupied areas and bankrupt countries of Central Europe, in order to learn for ourselves what the War had meant to those peoples whose agony had been even more cruel and more prolonged than our own.

  7

  Between 1922 and 1925, my numerous meetings for the League of Nations Union gave me acquaintances belonging to every social class from earls to dustmen, every shade of religious conviction from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science, and every type of political opinion from true-blue Diehard Toryism to blood-red Bolshevist Communism. Among the many and varied men and women who acted as my chairmen, one of the few with whom my connection outlasted the occasion of the meeting was Mr - now Sir - Percy Harris, an industrious member of the London County Council, a former M.P. for the Harborough Division of Leicester-shire, and at that time Liberal candidate for South-West Bethnal Green.

  Before I went down to the Party headquarters in the Bethnal Green Road to address his small gathering of poverty-stricken but extremely vital and intelligent Liberal women, Mr Harris invited me to supper at his flat in Westminster, and shared with me, in the belief that I should speak more effectively for the knowledge, some of his earnest hopes and anxieties for the crowded working-class constituency which he had represented on the L.C.C. for fifteen years. This first expedition of mine to Bethnal Green occurred in the autumn of 1922, only a short time before the famous meeting of the Carlton Club engineered the long-anticipated downfall of the Coalition Government. A few days after I had heard the secretary of the Six Point Group breathlessly announce the resignation of Mr Lloyd George to the small audience of feminists which assembled at the Group’s office for fortnightly lectures, Mr Harris wrote to ask me if I would act as his secretary during the coming election.

  At that time I still belonged to no political Party, for my interest in politics was chiefly international; I knew that I was not a Conservative, but beyond this somewhat elementary certainty my Party loyalties remained undefined. I had, however, been agreeably impressed by Mr Harris’s disinterested and benevolent understanding of the poor people in Bethnal Green; it seemed unlikely that they would find another Parliamentary representative who combined so long an experience of their needs with such human and intelligent sensitiveness to their psychology, so I agreed to give all my spare time for the next few weeks to helping him in his election campaign. I could not actually become his secretary because at that time my two weekly days of teaching prevented the acceptance of full-time work, and in the end Winifred, whose own engagements were for the moment less rigid, took over the secretaryship and spent the greater part of the next month in the crowded and dusty office half-way down the Bethnal Green Road.

  As October slipped into chill, murky November, the excitement of the first General Election in which I
had taken an active part excluded all other interests, and every evening found me rushing for the first ’bus that would take me from Bloomsbury to join the dramatic, turbulent contest in the East End. Mr Harris, who was being opposed by a conventional Conservative and an equally typical Communist, described himself as the Liberal and Labour candidate, and on his behalf I acquired a new facility in the rapid composition of enthusiastic arguments and speeches with a vague Radical-Socialist bias. Long, damp afternoons of canvassing, attended by strident platoons of small boys, in the mazy darkness of unlighted winter slums, culminated each evening in an adventurous walk down the vivacious Bethnal Green Road, with its open-air stalls, its flaring gas-jets, its coster cries and its thronging, voluble population of Cockneys, Jews and Poles, to some riotous meeting in an elementary-school room or municipal hall.

  From confused memories of earnest, conscientious speeches made by Mr Harris and Winifred and myself in determined resistance to Tory and Communist interrupters amid the concentrated fumes of Cockney tobacco, one large eve-of-the-poll meeting emerges at which the chair was taken by the Rev Stewart Headlam, the veteran Fabian who shared with Mr Harris the representation of South-West Bethnal Green on the L.C.C. The sitting-and-standing crowds in the hall, largely drawn from opposing Parties and now almost beside themselves with partisan excitement, were waiting to heckle the candidate, and had little patience to spare for a portly and somewhat prosy speaker sent down by Liberal headquarters. It was some moments before he could take advantage of a brief interval of comparative silence to open his speech.