When he was in London, announced the Jugoslav, he began an important conversation with a distinguished Englishman, and twenty minutes later found himself still discussing the weather. But after all, I thought - though I was too shy to say so - there are other things besides the weather that we do discuss publicly in England - our health, for instance, and our friends’ health, and sea-sickness, and babies’ illnesses, all of which are really much less suited to polite conversation than politics or religion.
Another expert, a well-known international lawyer who afterwards became a Liberal M.P., invited us both to luncheon, and sent us away forewarned and forearmed with the results of his experience in various European countries. But even his advice with regard to the occupied territories concerned me less than my discovery that he had been in the British Intelligence Service in Italy during the War. He had known the headquarters of the 11th Sherwood Foresters very well, he told me, and had even seen Edward’s grave at Granezza, which he had visited the year after Winifred and I went to the Plateau. From him I gathered that it had been a regiment largely composed of Hungarians - always braver and fiercer fighters than the Austrians - which had broken through the British lines on June 15th. Neither the Austrians nor the Italians, he said, had ever really wanted to get on with the War; they not unnaturally preferred ‘sitting on the top of a mountain and making sketches’.
6
At Bale I collapsed suddenly and ignominiously from the stress and agitation of the preceding weeks - which had been increased by an accidental delay in G.’s telegram telling me that he had arrived safely at Quebec on the way to his American university - and had to spend a day in bed at a small station hotel before going on to the Saar through Alsace-Lorraine. ‘Of us one has gone East and the other West,’ G. had written in a letter which was then on its way to me from the United States, and for the rest of that autumn, in Germany, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, there echoed continually through my mind the sad appropriateness of Coventry Patmore’s lines:
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There’s any hope, it is so far away.
Next morning I started off with Winifred through Alsace-Lorraine, feeling light in the head and very uncertain about the feet. In the train between Bale and Strasbourg an Alsatian banker, red-bearded and keen-faced, with light, sensual eyes, instructed me, in return for my tolerant acceptance of the pressure of his hand upon my knee, about the economics of Mulhouse and the geography of the Vosges. He had been obliged to serve against his will, he told me, with the German Army in the War; Alsace-Lorraine was a tragic land in those days, with its families divided between the two Armies, and near relatives often fighting against one another.
‘Over there,’ he explained in his soft, cultured French, waving his hand towards the blue-green curve of the Vosges, which sloped away to the horizon from the rich fields below the left-hand window of our carriage, ‘is a summit where no less than thirty thousand men were killed in the War, because the Germans and the French kept entrenching themselves beneath one another and setting off mines. And very soon we shall pass the Castle of Sélestat, which before the War was a thirteenth-century ruin, inhabited long ago by one of the great barons. Since the ruin was beginning to fall to pieces the people of Sélestat wished to restore it, but as they could not afford to do so themselves they conceived the bright idea of giving it as a present to the Kaiser, so that he might restore it for them. The Kaiser graciously accepted the gift, but instead of restoring the castle he rebuilt it in the best Prussian style, thereby turning a mediæval ruin into a modern German atrocity. And he made Sélestat pay for it too, by levying an income tax on the town!’
In the afternoon we reached Saarbrück without trouble at the frontier, and found it to be a large commercial town of the type of Leicester or Nottingham. The Saar Valley, we had been told, was now virtually a department of the French Foreign Office. The collieries had been handed over to France for fifteen years by the Treaty of Versailles as compensation for the Lens coal-fields destroyed during the War, and were controlled by the Minister of Public Works in Paris, but the League’s clear intention that the chairman of the Governing Commission should be changed periodically had never been fulfilled, and France dominated not only the economic but the political life of the valley. Though Saarbrück was the centre of sixty-seven coal-pits, it appeared less black than the Pottery districts familiar to me in childhood; no powdering of soot spoiled the autumn-tinted plane-trees which fringed the wide streets. The Saar, a grimy-looking river about the size of the Trent, carried its traffic of coal-barges straight through the middle of the town.
Immediately after tea we started out to look for the Canadian member of the Saar Governing Commission, to whom the Administrative Section of the League Secretariat, and the secretary of the Canadian League of Nations Union, whom we had met in Geneva, had given us introductions. After much seeking we located him in the Uhlankasern, a spacious barracks which before the War had been the headquarters of a crack Uhlan regiment, and was now used for Government offices. To our surprise he gave us an interview at once, and told us, with a benevolent confidence which seemed to regard as irrelevant both our sex and our youthful appearance, more about the Saar administration in an hour than we had been able to learn in two years from lectures and pamphlets.
The treaty had indeed created an impossible situation, I gathered, for the five unfortunate Commissioners who, in the name of the much-abused League, had somehow to control the territory until the plebiscite of 1935. What would have happened if Northumberland, for instance, had been isolated from the rest of England, deprived of her collieries by a foreign Power, surrounded by a ring of alien officials, and administered by five Commissioners of different nationality who knew neither the population nor one another? These Commissioners, it seemed, were regarded by the inhabitants as their oppressors, but they themselves appeared less certain whether they were the oppressors or the oppressed. Local prophets had intimated to them on their arrival that within a month they would find a watery grave in the dirty depths of the Saar, and though they had mustered sufficient tolerance and tact to defend themselves against this undesirable fate for nearly five years, the barge-covered river flowing past the main Government building provided a constant reminder that life was short and the fate of man uncertain.
Behind the officially oppressed, on the other hand, there was obviously power. The treaty that divided the Saar territory from Germany proper by an artificial barrier could not thereby prevent something more than telepathy from existing between the five political Parties in Berlin and their counterparts in Saarbrück; nor was it to be expected that a population of which six-sevenths practised Roman Catholicism would forget, or be forgotten by, their religious princes across the border at Speyer and Trier. The coal strike of January 1923, which coincided with the occupation of the Ruhr, had been officially settled by the Governing Commission and the Saar Labour leaders on the night before it was supposed to take place; but next morning it occurred just the same, and the Saar had not yet completely recovered from the effects of those hundred days.
In Germany proper, as we later discovered, there was no attempt to disguise the extent of the power behind the Saar Valley; the antagonism aroused by the occupation of the Ruhr seemed only a drop in the ocean of bitterness directed against the Saar provisions, which so unhappily made the League of Nations the scapegoat of the treaty. The League, the Germans complained to us incessantly, would listen to protests from the natives of mandated territories, but would not hear petitions from the inhabitants of the Saar Gebiet, who apparently seized, instead, every trivial opportunity that presented itself to make their disapproval of the situation unmistakable to the French. At the station bookstalls, we found, French newspapers were unobtainable, and though the language had been compulsory in all the schools up to 1914, no one would admit that he could speak it. When Winifred, one afternoon, inquired in French at a grocer’s shop for methylated spirit, the
shopkeeper brusquely replied that he had none.
‘Where can I get some?’ she demanded, producing her empty bottle; and the man, examining the label, exclaimed, ‘Why, this bottle comes from England!’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I am English’; and he answered immediately, ‘Wait one moment and I will find you some spirit at the back of the shop.’
The morning after our interview with the friendly, white-haired Canadian, a car, complete with Government official, arrived at our hotel from the Commissioners to take us for a tour round the valley. Remembering my native Black Country, I had never dreamed that the rural districts between the small colliery towns - Saarlouis, and Brebach, and Volklingen with its immense slag-heaps and soaring skeleton-like structures of steel - would be unsurpassed for sombre loveliness by any other part of Germany. From the scattered pits and villages, dark feathers of smoke drifted across mile upon mile of flaming hills, where every tall tree was afire with the burnt-sienna and scarlet of autumn. The disputed earth, so rich with coal below, was thick with forest above - a terrifying, unbroken forest of giant beeches and firs and pines, where the narrow road between the upright tree-trunks plunged into a twilight so deep that our driver had to turn on the lamps of the car.
What a pity it seemed that the next meeting between the Governing Commission and the Saar inhabitants could not take place in this acacia-bordered forest! The stately trees, looking down with their brooding contempt upon the pigmies who possessed them, would surely suggest a quiet permanence, a grave reality, beside which Europe’s political quarrels would seem but a little whirl of angry dust. Man, the most destructive of animals, might approach those dominant trees with his axe, but a hundred years hence the forest would still survive his commercial aspirations, and scorn his international disputes.
7
At the frontier between the Saar Valley and the wooded Rhineland with its deep rose-red earth through which we were travelling north to Cologne, a conversation occurred which illustrated once more the unpopularity of the French language in Occupied Germany. As soon as we reached Merzig, the frontier station, a German official burst into our carriage and attacked us with a stream of voluble instructions, of which every sentence appeared to end in ‘absteigen’.
‘Ich verstehe nicht!’ I reiterated helplessly; and the official inquired malevolently, ‘Sind Sie franzosisch?’
‘Nein, englisch,’ I responded promptly. ‘Parlez-vous francais?’
‘Oui, mademoiselle,’ he replied at once, having apparently no objection to speaking the prohibited language with someone who was not a Frenchwoman, and he inquired of Winifred what one of her cases contained.
‘Seulement des vieilles chapeaux,’ she informed him cheerfully, forgetting such trifles as foreign genders in her relief at having overcome the obvious dislike which our appearance had originally inspired in the Customs officer.
‘Chapeaux sont toujours vieux, mademoiselle, jamais vieilles! ’ exclaimed the official delightedly, and as an appreciative tribute to our imperfect French, he released us from the obligation of unfastening our boxes at all.
At Trier, with its soaring spires of a dozen churches, we were joined by a plump, voluminous pastor who was soon telling us, in slow but comprehensible English, that he acted as chaplain to Krupps’ workmen in Essen. Before the War, he said, Krupps’ had employed a hundred and twenty thousand men, but now that they were obliged by the treaty to make agricultural implements and railway machinery instead of armaments, they had dismissed nearly a third of their workers and there were about forty thousand unemployed in Essen alone. When we reached Cologne we should have been glad, for all our experience of independence, to retain the pastor’s benevolent company a little longer, for we immediately encountered, in the demeanour of porters and taxi-drivers and hotel servants, a hostility which reminded us that we, the self-righteous British, had become to Cologne exactly what the French were to the Rhineland and the Saar.
By the time that we reached this British-occupied territory, our collection of introductions had already acquired that snowball-like tendency which later, in Czechoslovakia and Austria, developed the proportions of an avalanche and threatened to overwhelm us. Life in Germany had by now become one rapid and exhausting sequence of journeys, interrupted by incessant, head-racking conversations, usually in bad French or worse German, with strangers excitedly teeming with political information, which had to be immediately recorded in the form of diaries or memoranda, and which reached its final metamorphosis in the shape of articles forwarded to the League of Nations Union or direct to newspapers.
Pastors and professors seemed especially anxious to impress our inquiring minds with interviews and demonstrations; one Lutheran cleric from a poor parish took us over the slums of Cologne, and told us as we passed between the dark, decaying houses that even the once wealthy parishes were no longer able to maintain their clergy, who had often to become workmen or harbour-hands in order to support their families. A second pastor from St Goar in the Rhineland - a small, bearded man with an emaciated, saint-like countenance which reminded me strangely of the Bavarian whose death from hæmorrhage I had watched in the German ward at Étaples - wept piteously as he related stories of the French oppressions in his parish. Yet a third, who was attending a Church conference in Cologne, induced us to take a tedious train and tram journey to his parish near Solingen, the Sheffield of Germany, and talk about the League of Nations to a friendly but critical audience of razor-makers at his shabby, spacious house. There he introduced us to his patient, beautiful wife, who seemed almost exhausted by the constant battle with stringent economy and the care of three thin but riotous little sons. Her eldest child, a daughter, she told me, had died during the blockade; she had been a delicate baby and it had not been possible to obtain sufficient milk.
Finally, an English-speaking woman professor from Cologne University took us militantly in hand, and treated us to a long and bitter dissertation on the blind incredulity of our country during the War. England’s propaganda, she insisted - quite correctly - had had to be far more malevolent than that of France and Germany, the conscription countries, because Englishmen would never have been persuaded to change their habits and join the Army without some exceptionally strong appeal to their sentimental emotions.
Battered and exhausted by the open criticism, the latent hostilities and the unmistakable sufferings of this fierce, unhappy city, we managed to rescue from the turmoil of activities one quiet Sunday for observation and thought. At morning Mass in Cologne Cathedral we stood unobserved beneath the high, pallid windows amid the packed congregation of shabby, heavy-eyed men and women, their sunken faces stoically devoid of emotion as they sang in harmony with the exquisite music which rolled through the vibrating arches above our heads. As I stood in that pale crowd of Germans, all singing, it seemed incredible that the world could have been as it was ten years ago; whatever evil was here, I wondered, that Edward and Roland had died to destroy? What enemy could there have been whose annihilation justified the loss of even one soldier? It was best, after all, that our dead who were so much part of us, yet were debarred from our knowledge of the post-war world and never even realised that we ‘won’, could not come back and see, upon the scarred face of Europe, the final consequences of their young pursuit of ‘heroism in the abstract’. How futile it had all been, that superhuman gallantry! It had amounted, in the end, to nothing but a passionate gesture of negation - the negation of all that the centuries had taught themselves through long æons of pain.
When night came to end that melancholy Sunday, the Hohestrasse was filled with a moving crowd, steadily walking and talking but never laughing, like a troupe of shades newly released from some Teutonic inferno. The cloud of depression upon the city seemed heavier even than in daytime, but the street at least was free, and the unlimited exercise of one’s own feet seemed the only luxury that had not to be paid for at a famine price in this new era of the Rentenmark. No lights illumined the opaque darkness of bywa
ys and alleys; even in the Hohestrasse the lamps were few and dim, and the Cathedral loomed, a black, immense shadow, against the starless night. The atmosphere in which these oppressed men and women moved so quietly to and fro was the apprehensive, unilluminated atmosphere of London during the War; only upon the great steel bridges across the Rhine, a hundred lights gleamed like jewels against the deep cobalt of sky and water. Along the Embankment passed a little company of girls from the League of Youth, marching and singing; they glanced at us with that half-defensive malevolence which we had learnt to expect, as though they were sure of being insulted and had made up their minds to get in the insult first.
‘I wonder how we should like being a conquered people,’ I wrote the next day in my diary. ‘It makes me miserable to be in the midst of a whole population who feel bitterly towards me . . . War, especially if one is the winner, is such bad form. There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation. Modern war is nothing but a temporary - though how disastrous! - forgetfulness by neighbours that they are gentlemen; its only result must be the long reaping in sorrow of that which was sown in pride.’
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 68
