by Rebecca West
This was the most persistent, the most vivid strain in the German character. It reconciled the German Austrians to admitting the Hungarians to equality within the empire by the Dual Monarchy, for the Hungarians also hated the Slavs and would not forget to use their independent power in harrying the Croats and Serbs within their borders. ‘You look after your barbarians,’ the Hungarian statesman, Andrassy, assured the Austrian Chancellor, Beust, ‘and we will look after ours.’ A great part of Austrian internal political life was given to naive assertions of the German Austrian’s inalienable right to enjoy every sort of favouritism at the expense of his Slav fellow-subjects. When it was ordained that German civil servants working in Czech districts must learn Czech, thus putting them on a parity with Czech civil servants, who were obliged to know German, all German Austrians revolted and their representatives obstructed all parliamentary business till the ordinances were withdrawn. This is the only positive feature in the political life of nineteenth-century Vienna. That age was not noble anywhere, since then the ignorance of townsmen, who must inevitably be very ignorant unless they are very learned, lay as a thickening shadow on human thought, but in Vienna it was even less noble than in the rest of Europe. There was manifest a clericalism that was seven-eighths political obscurantism of a childish type; the class greed of a bureaucracy far too numerous for the country’s resources; a liberalism that represented nothing more than the opposition of the industrialists and bankers and lawyers to the landowners; and a Christian Socialism which was anti-Semitic and dedicated to the protection of the Spiessburger, the mediocrity who despises the working man but has not the wit to attach himself to the more fortunate classes, and cries out to be hoisted up into a position of privilege by party action. This latter was Nazism without that audacity which is its only handsome attribute. The automatism with which the Habsburgs carried on their inherited tradition of external order made them control this movement so that it never had a leader more objectionable than the famous Mayor of Vienna, Dr Karl Lueger, who, though he was barren of any ideas save hatred and greed, acted within the limits to which the bourgeoisie then confined themselves. But the dynamic force of that and all other Viennese movements was loathing of the Slavs.
So much I had read in books. But in Yugoslavia I saw with my own eyes the German hatred of the Slavs: as a scar on the Slav peoples, in the chattering distraction of Croatia, and the lacerated moral beauty of Bosnia; as an abscess on a German soul, when Gerda looked on the seven thousand French graves at Bitolj and wounded a husband who had treated her with infinite tenderness by saying sourly, ‘To think of all those people giving their lives for a lot of Slavs’; as a womb swollen with murder, in the German war memorial at Bitolj. For the first time I knew the quality of the parties to this feud. I saw the solemn and magnificent embroideries of the Slav peasant women and knew what degeneration of skill and taste was represented by the bright little flowers and hearts on the Austrian belts that the skiers like to bring back from St. Anton. I saw the Serbs, who make more sombre expeditions than open-air meals at little restaurants in the Wienerwald, who go in pilgrimage to the Frushka Gora and see defeat itself in the person of the Tsar Lazar, laid in a golden shroud: it is headless, as defeat should be, since it is a frustration of personality, but its hands are preserved, as is fitting, for it is the hand that is the sign of humanity, that distinguishes man from all other animals, and it is conflict with defeat that divides human beings from the natural world. I saw the Serbs, to whom the subjects of the Habsburgs could certainly teach nothing. Twice the Serbs drove their would-be teachers out of Serbia, and being vanquished the third time, not so much by arms as by sickness and famine, fled through icy mountains to the sea, rested for a little space, then fought them a fourth time, and were victorious. Such is not the proper relationship between pupil and professor. I saw in Yugoslavia many people such as the mother of the idiot child at the tomb of Sveti Naum who said to us, ‘I don’t know what to say to God about this, there’s so much to say, I don’t know where to begin, it’s such a strange thing to have happened,’ and the old woman who walked on the mountain road in Montenegro, asking the skies, ‘If I had to live, why should my life have been like this?’ There were others, such as Militsa, who is a poet and a scholar and a woman of the world, yet recognizably the sister of these women, to prove that they were not merely exhibiting a pristine excellence preserved by the lack of use, that their subtlety was no superficial bloom which would be brushed away by their first contact with modern civilization, that their stuff was of the sort that can achieve what is most cause for pride among human achievement. I knew that few Austrians had shown the degree of sensibility that would enable them to instruct such people, and that it would not have mattered if there had been few or many of them, for they would have recognized that people like these have no need to be instructed by other human beings, but can learn for themselves.
I said to myself quite often, as I wrestled with the material of this book, that now what was well would at last happen. For the old Turkey had gone and its successor had no interest in Empire, and Russia was a Union of Soviet Republics, and the Habsburgs were fallen; and the treaties of Versailles and Trianon and St. Germain had set the small peoples free. Freedom was for these people an ecstasy. That I knew to be true, for I had seen it with my own eyes. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, they were all like young men stretching themselves at the open window in the early morning after long sleep. To eat in a public place in these countries, to walk in their public gardens, was to fill the nostrils with the smell of happiness. Nothing so fair has happened in all history as this liberation of peoples who, during centuries of oppression, had never forgotten their own souls, and by long brooding on their national lives had changed them from transitory experience to lasting and inspiring works of art. It is not even imaginable what they would have achieved, had they been given time to acquire the technique of self-government, for though there are free peoples, and these have contributed largely to civilization, they have been free because they were fortunate, and have not, like the Slavs and the Finns and the Baits, learned that wisdom which ‘is sold in the desolate market where none comes to buy, And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.’
It surprised me that many Englishmen and Americans, who professed to be benevolently concerned with the future of man, were not in the least exalted by this prospect. The left wing, especially, was sharply critical of the new states and all that they did. This was inconsistent in those who believed, often to a point far beyond the practical, that the individual must be free to determine his own destiny, and it was partly due to a theory, so absurd that not even its direct opposite has any chance of being true, that nationalism is always anti-democratic and aggressive, and that internationalism is always liberal and pacific. Yet nationalism is simply the determination of a people to cultivate its own soul, to follow the customs bequeathed to it by its ancestors, to develop its traditions according to its own instincts. It is the national equivalent of the individual’s determination not to be a slave. The fulfilment of both those determinations is essentially a part of the left programme. But the liberation of an individual or a people may lead to all sorts of different consequences, according to their different natures. The nationalisms of Hungary and Ireland have always been intense, but Hungary has always been industrially ambitious and resolute both in maintaining a feudal land system and in oppressing the aliens within her frontiers while Ireland, though she desires to annihilate Ulster, wishes to be a peasant state with industries well within manageable proportions. It was extremely probable that all the countries liberated by the peace treaties would tend to be liberal, since their populations had long been in active revolt against the absolutism of Russia, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary, and indeed, considering the difficult conditions they had inherited, their practice kept close to liberalism. Nevertheless the left wing regarded these new states with the utmost suspicion, and if they visited them im
mediately allied themselves with the opposition parties, even if these were extremely reactionary. Thus I was often surprised, when I spoke of Yugoslavia to Bloomsbury intellectuals, themselves free-thinking and Marxist, to find them expressing the warmest sympathy with the Catholic Croats, even those of a far more reactionary cast than Matchek’s followers.
Any discussion of these points was complicated by the tendency of these intellectuals to use the words ‘nationalism’ and ’imperialism’ as if they meant the same thing. It is fair to say that three out of four times that English and American authors write of French nationalism they are thinking of French imperialism; these are two distinct strands in the life of France. Napoleon was a French imperialist, but he was completely detached from French nationalism, which was natural enough, as he was not a Frenchman; and Charles Peguy was the flower of French nationalism, but was actively hostile to French imperialism. But not all talk on this subject rose even to the high level of this confusion. As the state of Europe grew worse innumerable people, most of them Americans sighed, ‘Ah, it’s the fault of these small nations,’ and had not the faintest idea what they meant when they said it. They cannot have thought it was really the small nations that were shaking the mailed fist, and indeed when they were pressed they fell back on allegations that the small nations had impeded the free flow of European trade by the tariff barriers within which they enclosed themselves. But the Scandinavian and Baltic countries offered no ground whatsoever for this justification, and if the Balkan countries had never formed a Danubian federation, it was because Italy, with the intention of keeping these countries weak so that it might some day seize them, saw to it at conference after conference that they were forbidden to form any such association.
All this campaign against the small new states was inchoate, and uninformed to a point well below the general level of the people who took part in it. They must have had some prejudice against them; and this I found astonishing, for if there is an assurance in the Europe of our day that sometimes life goes well, a promise that some day it may go better, it is offered by these countries. I cannot but think it exhilarating, from the point of view of both the Turks and the Slavs, that the Turkish tax-collector no longer beggars the peasants on the Skoplje hills and plains for the benefit of a pasha whom the Turkish peasant also had no cause to love, and this was but one example of the supersession of the disagreeable by what was at least more agreeable, which I assumed was desired by all reasonable human beings. But I remembered, and both the art of the Byzantine frescoes and the speculation that underlies all but the most trivial of Slav conversations confirm my remembrance, that human beings are not reasonable, and do not to any decisive degree prefer the agreeable to the disagreeable. Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. This fight can be observed constantly in our personal lives. There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom. Sometimes we search for peace, sometimes we make an effort to find convenient frontiers and a proper fulfilment for racial destines; but sometimes we insist on war, sometimes we stamp into the dust the only foundations on which we can support our national lives. We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are consistently bad artists when we paint ourselves, we prettify our wills and pretend they are not parti-coloured before the Lord. We pretend that the Thirty Years War disappointed the hope of those who engineered it because it brought famine to Central Europe, famine so extreme that whole villages were given over to silence and the spreading weed, so extreme that bands of desperate men waylaid travellers and ate their flesh. Yet perhaps these engineers of war did not like villages, and felt queasy at the thought of a society enjoying wholesome meals. It seems that, choked with our victory in the last war, we now have an appetite for defeat. The new states were full of life, Yugoslavia shook its clenched fists and swore it meant to live. Therefore England and America and France turned away, for what lived disgusted them; they wanted a blanched world, without blood, given over to defeat.
They would not interfere, therefore, with the marginal activity that ran parallel to the continuous national effort which I was chronicling. From time to time out of the text there emerged little black figures which postured on the white paper beside it, achieved a group which was magical, an incantation to death, and ran back again into the text, which carried on its story of the main and legitimate historical process.
Till then there had been a certain detachment between these irregular abandonments of the legal process and the large movement of history. The black little figures rushed out of the text and made their magic mark in the margin and disappeared; and the stout column of the text continued as before, only betraying by a later variation from the expected that the magic had been efficacious. The development of the nineteenth century was certainly affected to a slight degree, almost invisible save to the specialist eye, by the assassination of Prince Danilo of Montenegro, and to a more marked degree by the assassination of Prince Michael of Serbia; and when Alexander and Draga were murdered and Peter Karageorgevitch came to the throne, the map of Europe seemed to have been repainted in brighter and more discordant colours. But Danilo’s death did not make my great-grandmother cry; I doubt if my grandfather was ever reminded by discomfort that Prince Michael of Serbia had left this earth; I did not eat different food or wear different clothes because of Alexander and Draga, or think different thoughts. The attentat at Sarajevo had a totally different effect. Its magical operation on the text was immediate. I and nearly all women in Europe wept times without number, said again and again, ‘Ah, that is because of the war,’ and learned to eat against hunger, to dress for warmth, to think not for amusement but to find the clue out of the maze. We were marked by an impersonal event as deeply as by any of the classic stages of the personal life. And after the darkness of the contending armies cleared from Europe it could be seen that the map had been painted yet once more, in colours still more brilliant, which were also harmonious.
It might have been that the eye of the future should see Europe for some space of time as a pale West like a fading fresco painted by genius, a troubled and writhing German people, a barricaded and preoccupied Russia, and a chaplet of shining small countries, delighting in life as intense as human society has ever known. But there was an intractable element that would not be satisfied with this dispensation.
The Sarajevo attentat represented three of the dominant factors in history. Princip was inspired by nationalism; the Austrian officers who let Princip have his way were imperialists; the parties to the other attentat, which was not committed because Princip forestalled it, were children of ‘Apis,’ lovers of slaughter for its own sake. But there was one important factor in modern times which had no share in the attend, and no part in the satisfaction that followed the peace, though it had had no part in the satisfaction that preceded it—the mindless, traditionless, possessionless section of the urban proletariat which had sent Luccheni as its representative to murder the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, but which, largely owing to the site of the crime, had no say in the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Its interests were therefore not specifically raised by the war that ensued, and they were curiously neglected after it. The new age was eager for reforms and was not niggardly in paying for them, but it made no drastic reorganization of the social system. This was partly due to the supineness of the left wing. They are the proper people t
o make any revolution; it is their trade. But they were too busy discussing the distant Bolshevist experiment in Russia to have the time or energy to work out their local salvation. This gave the revolutionaries of the right wing their chance.
Mindless, traditionless, possessionless, Mussolini came to power. Italy was predestined to be the first country in the world to hand its destiny over to a member of this class, for though France had a large urban population it had an inveterate tendency not to be mindless. Great Britain had strong traditions, and the United States had possessions, while Italy had many peasants who had been industrialized for a generation or so without becoming cultured, had lost the tradition of its small states without acquiring a new national one, and was very poor. Mussolini was its predestined leader, for while he had not sufficient intelligence to lift him out of this class, he had not too little to acquire some knowledge of the theory and practice of social revolution from an apprenticeship to the left. If he had achieved his rulership in times of peace he would have sought to commit some act of violence that would provoke a war; since his hour came when the whole world was sick with a surfeit of armies that programme was manifestly ill timed, so he had to find some method of applying violence to peace-time. He retrieved, whether from the half-comprehended talk of a clever comrade or by skimming a volume in the threepenny box outside the bookshop, the Code of Diocletian; and being either unaware or careless that Diocletian had perished of despair in his palace at Split, because he had failed to check the descent of ruin on the Roman earth, he enforced that Code on his country. This was a comical venture. For Diocletian had some excuse for seeking to stabilize by edict the institutions of an empire that had lasted for over a thousand years, but it was imbecile to attempt to fix the forms of a country that had been unified for less than a century and was deeply involved in a world economic system which was no older than the industrial revolution.
