II The Uncertain Peace
Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius, activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. A new generation of youth has grown up since the beginning of the war. Boys of ten at that time of history are now twenty, and not much interested in that old tale. Girls who were twelve are now mothers of babes. The war! Bother the war! Let’s forget it and get on with life. In that youth is right. It is not in its nature nor in moral health to dwell on morbid memories. But it is hard on those whose service is forgotten—so soon. In England—ten years after—there are still 58,000 wounded soldiers in the hospitals—and in France great numbers more; but they are hidden away, as a painful secret of things that happened. Only now and again the sight of their hospital blue in some quiet country lane, near their hiding places, shocks one with a sharp stab of remorse. We had forgotten all that. We hate to be reminded of it.
Fading Memories
Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of their experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in France and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought, or where they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport under shell fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place where the waggons were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was blown to bits, where old Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something has passed a sponge across those tablets of memory—things that happened afterwards. Now and again at Divisional banquets officers try to revive the spirit of those days and exchange yarns about trench warfare and days of battle. It is queer how they remember only the jokes, the laughable things, the comradeship, the thrill. The horror has passed.
Something else has passed; the comradeship itself, between officers and men, between all classes united for a time in common sacrifice and service, annihilating all differences of rank and social prejudice and wealth at the beginning of the war. It seemed then as though nothing could ever again build up those barriers of caste. The muddiest, dirtiest, commonest soldier from the slums or the factories or the fields was a hero before whom great ladies were eager to kneel in devotion and love, to cut away his blood-stained clothes, to dress his wounds. In the canteens the pretty ladies slaved like drudges to give cocoa or any comfort to “the boys” from the front. In the trenches or in ruins under shell fire young officers wrote home about their men: “They’re too splendid for words!... I am proud to command such a topping crowd.... They make me feel ashamed of things I used to think about the working man. There is nothing too good for them.” The British Government thought so too, and promised them great rewards—“homes for heroes,” good wages for good work, “a world safe for democracy.”
The Barriers of Class
Ten years after, the classes have fallen apart again. The old hostilities between Capital and Labour have been revived with increasing bitterness in many minds. The old barriers have been rebuilt in many countries. For a time, even in England, there was a revolutionary spirit among the men who had served, and a sense of fear and hostility against those who had said that nothing was too good for them. “Our heroes” became very quickly “those damned Socialists,” or those “dirty dogs” who are never satisfied, or those lazy scoundrels who would rather live on the “dole” than take an honest job. The men who had saved England were suspected of plotting for her overthrow, subsidised by Russian money and seduced by the propaganda of a secret society inspired by the spirit of Anti-Christ.
Ten years after the closing up of ranks, the surrender of self interest, and a spiritual union, England is again seething with strikes, industrial conflict, political passion, and class consciousness. There are still a million and a quarter unemployed officially registered in Great Britain, and half a million more not on the registers and worse off. Instead of “homes for heroes” the working people in the great cities are shamefully overcrowded. In the agricultural districts of England young men who fought in the Last Crusade and marched with Allenby to Jerusalem, or those boys who left their fields in ’14 for the dirty ditches in Flanders—for England’s sake—are getting twenty-five shillings a week, upon which a single man can hardly live and a married man must starve. And ten years after they poured out their blood and treasure without a grudge, without reservation, first in the field and last out of it, the old “quality” of England or their younger sons are selling up their old houses to pay taxes which are extinguishing them as a class, depriving them of their old power and prerogatives, and changing the social structure of the nation by an economic revolution which is almost accomplished. On both sides there is bitterness, a sense of injustice, and an utter disillusion with the results of victory.
The Great Reaction
Ten years after the beginning of the war there is no sense of security in Europe or the world. “The war to end war,” as it was called, has done nothing of the kind. Beneath the surface of the present peace there is a lava of hatreds and resentments which bode ill for the future peace of the world. There are larger standing armies in Europe now than in 1913. There are more causes of quarrel, and none of the old quarrels have been extinguished—those racial rivalries, those national ambitions, that commercial competition. The war settled no argument for more than a period of exhaustion. The idea of a “world safe for democracy” is falsified ten years after by a swing-back to extreme forms of nationalism and autocratic government through the greater part of Europe excepting the British Isles and France. The German Republic, established after annihilating defeat, is only biding its time for the return of monarchy, and its present government is anti-democratic. Parliamentary institutions, the safeguard of democracy, have been overthrown or contemptuously treated in many nations. Italy, Spain and Hungary are under military dictatorships. Russia is governed by a new-fangled tyranny under which there is no liberty of speech, conscience or economic life. Turkey, powerful again, is ruled by a committee of generals. Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, are in military alliance with France which, under Poincaré, ridiculed the possibilities of peace based on the goodwill of its neighbours, and relied for safety on a supreme army and the rule of Force.
The Peace Treaty
The Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the terms of peace upon Germany and her Allies after their complete surrender, was the direct cause of all the troubles that beset us after the war. It violated the hopes of all moderate minded people, who believed that the world, after its frightful lesson, was ready for a new chapter of civilisation in which militarism might be overthrown as the greatest curse of life, and in which the common folk of nations might be made secure in their homes and work by a code of international law and arbitration. The statesmen who presided over the Peace Conference—Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George—had the fate of the world in their hands. Waiting for their decisions, their new plan of Europe, was a world of emotionalised men and women, ready and eager then, for a little while, to respond to a generous idealism which would lift all peoples above the morass of hatred and misery into which they had fallen. The German and Austrian peoples, starved and defeated, without a rag of pride left to cover their humiliation, fierce with anger against their war lords—their Junkers and their politicians of the old brutal caste—were ready also, for a little while, to join hands with the world democracy in a new order of life. They were conscience-stricken, ready to make amends, resigned to an awful price of defeat—provided they were given their chance of recovery and the liberty of their national life. They clung desperately to the words of President Wilson who, before their surrender, had in his Fourteen Points and other messages to the world outlined a peace which would be generous to the defeated if they overthrew their old gods, and would be based on justice, the rights of peoples, and the commonwealth of nations rather than upon vengeance and hatred.
Fair words, holding out prodigious hopes of a new and better world! But when the terms of the Peace Treaty were made known they struck a knock-out blow not only to German hopes but to all the ideals of people who had looked for something nobler and more righteous by which the peace of the world should be assured. It was a peace of vengeance. It reeked with injustice. It was incapable of fulfilment. It sowed a thousand seeds from which new wars might spring. It was as though the Devil, in a jester’s cap-and-bells, had sat beside Clemenceau in his black gloves, and whispered madness into the ear of Wilson, and leered across the table at Lloyd George, and put his mockery into every clause. In that Hall of Mirrors at Versailles the ideals for which millions of men had fought and died—liberty, fair-play, a war to end war, justice—were mocked and outraged, not by men of evil, but by good men, not by foul design, but with loyalty to national interests. Something blinded them.
The Territorial clauses of the Treaty, based theoretically upon “the self determination of peoples,” created a dozen Alsace Lorraines when one had been a sore in Europe. The old Austrian Empire was broken to bits—that was inevitable—but Austria, with its great capital of Vienna, was cut off from its old source of life, condemned to enormous mortality—which happened—and many of its people were put under the rule of their ancient enemies. The Austrian Tyrol is now the Italian Tyrol. Austrian property and populations are now in the hands of Czechs and Slovaks and Serbians. Hungary was parcelled out without consideration of nationality or economic life. Lines were drawn across its waterways, its railway system and its roads. Its factories, forests and mines were taken from it. Many of its folk were handed over to Roumanians and other hostile peoples. The German colonies in Africa were divided between Great Britain, France and Belgium, although it is a biological necessity that Germany should have some outlet for the energy and expansion of her population if another war may be avoided. The Danzig corridor was made between one part of Germany and another. Greece was given an Empire in Asia Minor and Thrace, over Turkish populations which she could only hold by the power of the sword at the cost of a future war—which she has already fought and lost, abandoned by the Governments which yielded to her claims.
The resurrection of Poland, by which one of the greatest crimes in history was blotted out and national liberty given to the peoples of Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stand to the credit of the peacemakers, although these new nations have no security in the future if Europe relies upon force rather than law. Other frontiers drawn carelessly across the new map of Europe will be blotted out in blood if ever again the passions stirring from the Rhine to the Volga rise against the barriers imposed upon them in this uncertain peace.
The Fantastic Figures
But it was on the economic side of the Treaty and in its interpretation that the statesmen of the Allies seemed to be stricken with insanity, which infected many of their peoples until recent months. Germany, they insisted, had to pay all the costs of the war, for the damage she had inflicted and the ruin she had caused. Theoretically, that was just if one took the view that every German peasant, every German mother in a cheap tenement, every German worker on starvation wages, every little sempstress, or University student, ten or twelve years old when the war began, shares the responsibility of those war lords and militarists who challenged the world in 1914.
Practically it was not only unjust but idiotic, because it was impossible, as everybody now acknowledges. It is almost beyond the scope of mathematics to calculate the losses of the Allies in the war. The British Government spent more in four and a half years of war than in two and a half centuries previously. Could Germany pay that back? England advanced two thousand million sterling to her Allies, and borrowed nearly a thousand millions from the United States on behalf of her Allies. Could Germany pay all that? France had borrowed vast sums from her peasants and shopkeepers which she debited against Germany; she owed Great Britain nine hundred millions sterling, she had to restore the great track of ruin, with all its destroyed homes, churches, farmsteads, châteaux—thousands of villages wiped off the map so that hardly one stone remained upon another—at a price which has loaded her with increased burdens of debt far in excess of actual cost because French contractors desired enormous profits. It was right and just that Germany should repair that damage in the war zone, every brick of it and every stone. But could she do so in money payments, in addition to all those other claims? Could she pay also for war damage in Belgium, in Poland, on the high seas, wherever her guns had reached? Italy had great claims against Austria. Could Austria, brought to the edge of ruin, amputated, lopped of all sources of wealth, pay that bill of costs? Could Germany, the chief debtor, pay for the British unemployed in the “devastated districts” of England and Scotland, whose ruined trade was due to the war? All that, and then the pensions of wounded soldiers and the widows of dead men and orphan children? It would have been splendid if that were so. It might have been just even to bleed the working folk of Germany, the younger generation, the old women, the wounded and cripples even, the victims and heirs of their war lords, to the last pfennig in their purses, if it is justice that the individuals in a nation and their children and children’s children are responsible for the guilt of their Governments. But, justice or injustice apart, the absurdity, the wild impossibility, of extracting all that vast tribute from the defeated enemy in terms of transferable wealth, ought to have been manifest to the most ignorant schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Yet it was the illusion passionately professed by many great statesmen, by sharp-witted business men, by bankers and financiers, and by the gullible public who took their word for it, in France, Great Britain, and the United States.
The Golden Lie
Or was it just one great lie to deceive the people of the victorious nations and to keep them quiet by golden promises which the liars knew in their hearts could never be fulfilled? One is tempted sometimes to think so. It is now so transparently clear that not even the richest and most powerful nation in the world of commerce—the United States of America—could pay one tenth of the sum expected from Germany after her overwhelming defeat, and the ruin of her world trade, without overwhelming financial disaster, that it is incredible that the greatest statesmen of the Allies and all their experts and advisers could ever have believed in such mad economics. Year after year there were assemblies of financial gentlemen who solemnly sat round tables estimating Germany’s capacity to pay. Year after year they reduced their estimates until they were brought down to 6,600 millions, and then by easy stages to 2,200 millions, while Europe sank deeper into economic misery; while British trade declined; while Austria starved; while France grew desperate for these payments; while Russia was famine-stricken; while Germany poured out paper money which became worthless, until her bankruptcy could no longer be concealed.
Future historians will be baffled by that psychology. They will hunt desperately for some clue to the mystery of that amazing folly which took possession of many people. They will call it perhaps the Great Financial Hoax, and argue that it was a deliberate deception on the part of the world’s leaders, afraid to confess to their nations that after all their sacrifice there would be no “fruits of victory,” but only heavy taxation, to pay for the costs of war which could not be shifted on to enemy nations. I do not think it was quite as simple as all that. I think in the beginning that sheer ignorance of the most elementary economic laws led men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George to over-estimate the power of a nation like Germany to transfer wealth in money values to other nations. They did not understand that all transferable wealth—or nearly all—can only be obtained by a trade balance of exports and imports, and that the potential energy of a nation, its factories and plant, its public buildings, bridges, organisation and industry, are not transferable except by a balance over exchange of goods. They were so hopelessly ignorant of international finance that they actually did believe that they could “squeeze” Germany of vast sums of money which could be divided among the Allies for the settlement of their immense bill of costs, without damaging their own trade or allowing Germany to trade unduly in the markets of the world. One British statesman promised his people that Germany should be squeezed like an orange until the pips squeaked. French statesmen, like Poincaré, dazzled the eyes of their people with golden visions. They balanced their budget by the simple method of assuming that all that war debt would be paid by Germany when pressure was firmly applied.
It was only later, when the politicians began to get a clear notion of economic laws, by the painful lessons of reality and disillusion, that they began to deceive their peoples and keep up the bluff. They were afraid to tell the truth after all those falsities. In France, long before the entry into the Ruhr, French economists, business men and senators confessed privately that France could never hope to get anything like her claims against Germany, and some of them, more candid than others, shrugged their shoulders and said: “We dare not tell the people—the shock would be too great.” The French Press kept up the conspiracy of this deception, audaciously and persistently throwing the blame of delay in getting German payments upon Great Britain who did not stand by them in exerting “pressure.” In Great Britain, dependent upon export trade for her main source of wealth, and seeing the deadly stagnation of Europe and its increasing loss of purchasing power, the truth of economic law was more quickly perceived, and its statesmen shifted their policy and forgot their golden promises more rapidly and with more public candour.
The Downfall of Idealism
Looking back upon the years after the war, one sees that the idealism, which for a little while might have changed the face of the world if there had been great and noble leadership, fell with a crash in many hearts because the interpreters of the Peace Treaty were appealing not to the highest but to the lowest instincts of humanity; to greed rather than justice; to vengeance rather than reconstruction; to lies rather than truth. If only there had been one great leader in the world who had cried: “We were all involved in this crime against humanity, although Germany’s guilt was greatest; let us in the hour of victory put vengeance on one side and so shape the peace that the common folk of the world will have a better chance of life,” I believe that in the time when the agony was great and the wounds were still bleeding the hearts of people would have leapt up to him. They would have responded if he had pleaded for generosity to the defeated nations, if he had refused to punish the innocent for the guilty, if he had asked them to forego the pound of flesh demanded in the name of Justice, to forget the horror of the past, to escape from it together, to march forward to a new chapter of civilisation not based on standing armies, balances of powers, and cut-throat rivalry, but upon new ideals of international law, business, common sense, and Christian ethics.
People will say—do say—“It would have been weakness to let the Germans off. They deserved to be punished. They would have made a peace of terror, if they had had the chance of victory. There is Justice to be considered. Justice demands its due, or God is mocked.”
That is all true. It would have been weakness to let the Germans off, but the surrender of their Fleet, the destruction of their Army, the enormous sum of their dead was not a “let off.” They were broken and punished, in pride and in soul. They would have made a peace of terror? Yes, that is certain, and they would have aroused, intensified and perpetuated a world of hate by which later they would have been destroyed. Their war lords would have made a worse peace than this of ours; but that is no argument why we should have imitated their methods and morals.
The League of Nations
There was one institution created by the peacemakers which held out a promise of a better relationship between nations than that of military alliances and armed force divided into an uncertain Balance of Power. All that was wrong in the Peace Treaties might be put right by the League of Nations. The seeds of war sown by the Treaties might be made to blossom into the laurels of peace by the League. Although the Supreme Council set up by the Allies for the enforcement of its military provisions might act on purely nationalistic lines, the League of Nations would build up the international moral sense, and establish a Court of Appeal by which injustice, aggression, and the war spirit could be extirpated between all nations subscribing to its code of laws, and the spirit of arbitration.
President Wilson comforted himself for any little defects which might have crept into the Peace Treaties by this new instrument of idealism which he had helped to create with a very passionate enthusiasm. It was his great gift to the world and, as he hoped, the fulfilment of the promises he had made to the world in his messages before and after the ending of the war, appealing so poignantly to the secret hopes of humanity that when he came to Europe as the great arbitrator of its councils, he was received as the leader, spokesman, and prophet of the New World which was to be built out of the ruins of the Old. The rejection by the American Senate of all that he had done killed Wilson. It also destroyed all immediate hopes of European recovery based upon the League as an instrument of reconstruction, co-operation and peace. It was one of the great tragedies of history. Yet, looking back now upon the reasons of the American refusal to enter the League of Nations, it is clear that it was not entirely due to the personal antagonism which President Wilson had aroused by certain defects of character—his autocratic methods, his rejection of good counsel, and his mentality in the beginning of the war, nor to a national selfishness on the part of the American people, desiring to withdraw rapidly from responsibilities which they had incurred by their entry into the war. From the American point of view, at that time, the war had proved more than ever the supreme good fortune of the United States in being remote from the hatreds and quarrels of that mess of races in Europe out of which their people had escaped in the past. They did not understand Europe. They had no direct interest in its national rivalries. They could not control or abate its passions. All opponents of the Wilson policy regarded it as a calamity that the United States should surrender its geographical immunity from the evil heritage of the Old World and deliberately involve its future in that arena of ancient feuds. By entering the League of Nations it seemed to many that the people of the United States would be dragged into new wars in which they would have no direct or indirect interest, and that they would have to support and enforce the maintenance of European frontiers, re-drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of passionate resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling up of territories which had taken place under the benignant name of “mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French rule in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in Asia Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new combination of powers which one day was bound to be challenged and resisted? Above all was the New World to enter into military alliance with France and Great Britain to support a policy of domination in Europe which could only last as long as the German people and their Allies were suffering from war exhaustion—a one-sided pact which would make for the tyranny of certain powers, or at least their military supremacy over other nations of the world? That would be a surrender of the whole spirit of the American people, who believed their destiny to be that of free arbitrators, and not partisans, in the future of civilisation; friends of liberty and democracy everywhere, and not allies on one side of a line. They had come into the war, they believed, as crusaders for that ideal, defenders of liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the thought that the ideal should be narrowed down to the future defence of one group of powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress the democratic liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among others, they rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson to France in agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or merely selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the League of Nations.
This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was immediately apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed by the greatest economic power in the world. The exclusion of Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary from its deliberations and decisions made it seem—to hostile observers—an instrument designed merely as a partisan body, upholding the opinions of the victorious Allies and giving a sham morality to their policy.
That was unfair, because the Assembly, and its work behind the scenes at Geneva, in which forty-three nations were represented, did very quickly develop a spirit of international co-operation and law rising above the low moralities of national selfishness. The representatives of the League included large numbers of men who were passionately inspired with the purpose of restoring order into the chaotic conditions of Europe after war, healing its wounds, creating good will in causes of quarrel by methods of arbitration and persuasion, for the commonweal of peoples. The work and spirit of Geneva was one source of light in a world of darkness, in those dreadful years from which we have just emerged, and for that reason it raised a standard of idealism round which millions of men and women in many countries—even in the United States—rallied as the one hope of the future.
It may be said without exaggeration that for the six years following the war civilised humanity has been sharply divided into two camps of thought—those who believe in the spirit of the League of Nations, with its message of international co-operation and its faith in peace by arbitration; and those who have no faith at all in this idealistic purpose, and who believe in Force as the only method of international relationship and the settlement of quarrels. Those two camps still exist. The argument between them still goes on, and will never cease until civilisation gives allegiance to a new code of law.
What frustrated the League in its work and decisions, after the withdrawal of the United States, was the interpretation of the Peace Treaties by the Great Powers, and the economic folly which took possession of European statesmen. The League as one half of the Peace Treaty found that its other half thwarted it in every possible way. The left hand worked against the right. It was useless for the League of Nations to press for the economic co-operation of Europe when the Supreme Council and the Allied statesmen enforced decisions which enlarged the area of ruin and thrust stricken people deeper into misery. It was futile for the League to discuss disarmament when France was building up a system of military alliances, creating a Black Army, and lending enormous sums of money to Poland and other States for maintaining their standing armies. It was almost hopeless for the League of Nations to offer its services for arbitration and to talk high moralities about international justice when, to avenge the murder of some officers by unknown assassins, Italy bombarded Corfu, killing innocent children; and when Italy and France were secretly conniving with the Nationalist Turks for a war against Greece, which was abandoned in its agony to the horror of Smyrna.
The France of Poincaré
France, under the leadership of Poincaré, scoffed from the beginning at the League of Nations, although supporting it over the Corfu incident, and although one representative, M. Léon Bourgeois, was a loyal friend of the League idea. After the refusal of the United States to ratify the pact of security for France against another war of German aggression, followed by the withdrawal of Great Britain, the France of Poincaré saw no safety except in the power of her Army in alliance with other forces which she could link in a military chain around her defeated enemies. No one ought to blame France for that philosophy, in view of her agony and her future peril. But it resulted inevitably in actions which checked the recovery of Europe, aroused all the old hatreds, filled the defeated peoples with a sense of profound injustice, and raised the old devils of national pride, vengeance, and belief in force which for a time had been banished to the houses of the German Junkers and had lain low in German hearts. It was the cause of increasing friction, spasms of passionate ill-will, between France and England, and a long campaign of scurrilous abuse in the French Press which poisoned the old Entente Cordiale, wiped out the memories of war comradeship, and was a tragic and painful chapter in recent history.
France under Poincaré demanded her pound of flesh from Germany, including the lifeblood of the German people in the arteries of its economic health. Germany could not recover nor, before recovering, pay. Afterwards, when the Ruhr was invaded, their chief source of wealth and of payment was strangled. The French objects of “security” and “reparations” were in hopeless antagonism, and defeated each other. There could be no reparations, on a large scale, if French security demanded the expulsion of those who directed and worked the Ruhr and its railways. There could be no “security” for France in the long run if, instead of German reparations, she goaded the German people into nationalism and a war of vengeance by every means, fair or foul. While the policy of Poincaré was dominant, Europe sank deep into despair, and the nations most stricken by war saw no hope of revival.
The first three years after the world war provided terrible proofs of the disaster which had happened to humanity in that deadly struggle. Those who wish to convince the future generations of the devastating effect of modern warfare upon highly organised nations, as a frightful warning, must summon up the picture of Europe in 1919, 1920 and 1921. I saw it from end to end, and it haunted me.
The Russian Revolution
On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family of nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were ruling over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken, crushed in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia. They had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their men had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been taken from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high places, inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of revolt amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against men with whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel; peasants like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions and hatreds which they did not share. They turned to rend their own leaders and made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the explosive forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of tyranny by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its present representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man who loved his people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of democracy, united for a time to overthrow the Government and all its powers. Revolution, bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast leapt up in peasant minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but was swept on one side like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his crowd took command, and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-sounding, theoretically righteous, based upon the principles of equality and brotherhood and peace, put a spell upon the simple minds of the Russian folk. All opponents, critics, doubters, were destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and his friends, having taken command of the new machinery of Government by Soviet committees, were in supreme power over a people unarmed, half-starving, and submissive to those who had broken their old chains. It was some time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters which enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers published the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools taught economic history according to Karl Marx and world history according to Soviet philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in which discipline was more severe than under the Grand Duke Nicholas. The prisons were filled with people of all classes who came under the notice of the secret police. Execution became a habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as bad as that of the French Revolution of 1793.
For a time the people as a whole were keyed up to a new enthusiasm for what they believed to be a democratic system of Government by attacks from the “White Armies” of the old Royalists, financed, armed and organised by foreign powers, and especially by France and Great Britain. As Republican France had risen against the armies of the emigrés, so Soviet Russia rallied against the armies of Koltchak, Denikin, Wrangel and others, and defeated them overwhelmingly. After that the Reign of Terror abated somewhat, internal revolt died down, and the gospel of Communism was seen at work in conditions of peace.
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.