Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (91 page)

Just before we reached the top, the director spoke to me.

‘You have been in Germany before?’ he inquired contemptuously.

‘No-o,’ I stammered, ‘I haven’t,’ and then, desperately impelled to seek for some human response beneath that official frigidity, I suddenly added: ‘But I nursed some German soldiers in the War.’

‘German soldiers!’ he exclaimed. ‘You mean - prisoners?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘at Etaples. Very badly wounded ones, mostly.’

This experimental information had been the mere impulse of shamed nervous tension, but had it been most carefully calculated, it could not have proved more effective. As we stood in the observation tower above the administrative offices, and looked down upon the vast area of dark, smoky factories, five miles long and one mile wide, with their myriad chimneys sharply black against a lowering sunset sky, the alarming director became positively communicative, and pointed out to us the square where the Essen riots had broken out, and the tree-shaded park which had once been used for testing munitions, and the immense dining-hall which during the War had fed forty thousand employees each day. Later, he took us through the spacious workrooms that had once been used for the manufacture of field artillery, and showed us how swords were now, literally, being turned into ploughshares in their modern guise of typewriters and surgical instruments and household pipes and cinematograph machines.

Two days afterwards, on October 11th, we went on to Berlin, without as yet knowing that twelve hours earlier, in London, the dissolution of Parliament had followed the carrying of the Liberal amendment to the Conservative vote of censure on the Labour Government for its management of the Campbell case. We found Berlin very cold; a bitter wind was blowing and the pale leaves were falling fast.

That we felt particularly sensitive to the cold was not surprising, for owing to the complications of the French Régie - the railway system in the occupied territories, where the military authorities had a disconcerting habit of annoying the population by changing the times of trains without making any alteration in the official time-tables - we arrived in Berlin with only a rug, a typewriter and a very small tea-kettle. Since none of these possessions was particularly useful in helping us to dress, wash or get warm in the cheap and chilly
Pension
to which our diminishing funds had now reduced us after the expensive inconvenience of the occupied areas, our feelings of sympathy towards the long-suffering inhabitants of the Ruhr surpassed even the emotions stirred by the melancholy recital of the Quakers at Essen.

Next day, after much expenditure of time and money, we managed, with the assistance of the English teacher who had found us our
Pension
, to get into touch with Dortmund, the last station in the Ruhr territory, and recover our boxes. We unpacked them thankfully and wrapped ourselves up in the warmest garments we possessed, for through our
Pension
in the Kaiserallee - the West Kensington of Berlin - seeped a profound, passive gloom which challenged vitality even more effectively than the cold October wind racing along the half-lit evening streets. This
Pension
must once have been an ornate private house; for its great rooms were impressive with heavy furniture and richly embossed ceilings, but now the elaborate stonework on the outside was falling, unchecked, into decay, while a Bloomsbury boarding-house atmosphere at its worst reigned within. Meals, as I told G., had to be eaten at a general table ‘with elderly derelict German ladies who talk only grumpy German’, and were dominated by a food-obsession which revived in my memory our rationed days in the summer of 1918. At each of the main meals we were instructed by the maid-servant whether to take one portion of meat or two; considerable agitation occurred if, being allowed two, we took only one, and whenever we went out to supper, our portions of meat and cheese were brought next morning to our bedroom on the supposition that we should eat them with our breakfast. Returning to the
Pension
at night involved a process similar to that of entering a triple-guarded prison; we were given one key for the courtyard door, another for the front door of the building, and yet a third for the door of our bedroom, and each keyhole had to be found and fitted in utter darkness. Such elaborate precautions, we soon discovered, were due to the outbreak of petty pilfering which had followed the period of inflation.

Here, we thought, as in Cologne, we had gone back to wartime conditions, but our English friend told us that we could not now imagine what war had meant to Berlin. All through it, she said, she had worked in a Berlin office, and during the later years had been obliged to go straight to bed when she came home on winter evenings, as there had been no heat, no light, no candles, and nothing to eat. To-day, though demoralisation had followed poverty and inflation, and a people accustomed to spending in billions had lost the habit of saving and tended to squander the stabilised mark, Germany’s distress and bitterness were psychological rather than economic.

‘This country frightens me,’ I thought, remembering how, on the journey from Düsseldorf, we had got into conversation over tea with a young German officer who had served on the Russian Front during the War. He seemed quite surprised to learn that England and France had suffered at all, and expressed his hatred of the French with a cold cynicism more dreadful than passion. England, he confessed, had been regarded as the chief enemy in 1914 (‘because Sir Edward Grey made war upon us without any reason!’), but now France was the object of revenge.

‘One day,’ he exclaimed exultantly, ‘we will make war upon them and treat them as they have treated us! I am longing for that war!’ And we couldn’t persuade him that we were not Quakers when we said that we thought the world had had enough of destruction and death.

‘Oh, life!’ I silently petitioned the future, as we crossed the silver sword-sweep of the Elbe in the gathering twilight. ‘Oh, life, if I do finally decide to marry G. and have a family - and I’m not absolutely certain, yet, that I really want to do either - please grant that I have only daughters; I’m afraid, in the world as it is, to have a son. Our generation is condemned, condemned, and the League, and all that it stands for, is only a brittle toy in the hands of ruthless, primæval forces!’

It was, of course, a futile prayer, based upon the supposition that another war would resemble the colossal infantry-massacre of the last. I did not then realise that the menacing future, which was to make my first-born the son that I had dreaded, would dedicate its diminishing resources and its keenest scientific brains to developing even more maniacal forms of aerial warfare, which, if employed, would descend with annihilating impartiality upon the innocent heads of sons and daughters alike.

From our
Pension
, in the persevering quest for material with which to combat those militaristic tendencies, we went forth through the grim streets of dilapidated buildings to a new series of interviews - interviews with the secretary of the
Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund
; with the Socialist von Gerlach; with the great Bernstein, whose grave, bearded face reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of himself in old age; with the Matron of a women’s hospital in the northern quarter of the city, which had been obliged through loss of endowments to close a wing once used for permanently crippled children.

Throughout Germany, we were told, the Conservative Parties were declining in power except in Bavaria; the Nationalists and Communists were losing favour, and Stresemann was trying to get the pro-Dawes Plan Nationalists into his Party. The worst period of the economic and financial crisis was past; the more intelligent Germans were ceasing to wish for a war of revenge, and desired only peace and stability; one year of ‘sensible’ politics among the
Entente
countries would destroy in a weary and broken people the desire for retaliation. A war-psychology had continued for so long because of the Saar provisions and the Ruhr occupation, combined with the ‘war-guilt’ clauses of the treaty, but now Germany was ready to accept the idea of international arbitration through a League of Nations, though her attitude towards the existing League was warped, not unnaturally, by scepticism and fear.

One afternoon I walked with Winifred through the length of the Tiergarten to the Reichstag and Unter den Linden; along the empty, wooded park the yellow leaves whirled and eddied in the persistent wind, falling like showers of paper coins upon the sculptured monarchs in the Siegesallee. Looking down the Allee to the Victory Column of 1870 with its aggressively gilded goddess, and beyond it to the wide steps of the Reichstag dominated by the statue of Bismarck, it was possible - as it was now possible nowhere else in Berlin - to understand how the upstart vainglory of pre-war Germany had infuriated other nations; a vainglory, as I wrote to G., ‘now cold and empty; the mere shell of that which once, if not great, was at least impressive’.

We stopped for a moment before the statue of Frederick the Great of Prussia, that arch-Nationalist, with the thin lips and protruding eyes, whose
Testament Politique
- which embodied his belief that ‘Reason of State’ should overrule law and international obligations - I had read while studying my Special Subject at Oxford.

‘I have just put down the
Testament Politique
,’ G. was writing to me, as though by telepathy, only a week later, ‘and I turn to think . . . of you reading it to enlighten you on the War, of you telling me of it in the punt on that day down stream on the Cher.’

This letter reached me in Vienna, where I was still observing, even more realistically than I had gathered from the academic study of international relations, the desolation into which Central Europe had descended through following too blindly the theories of Frederick. The logic of history lay, I now realised, upon the side of internationalism all the time. Could the new generation be taught to perceive that logic before the hatreds and passions generated by the last war led a tired and tormented world into yet another?

9

The next few weeks, in Czechoslovakia and Austria and Hungary, passed swiftly and busily away. In Prague we found the pursuit of political truth - almost a contradiction in terms, it seemed, as soon as one reached the disintegrated units of the old Hapsburg Empire - continually complicated by the grievances of the German minority, and afterwards clearly remembered only that we had stood on the bridge over the Vltava, and followed the funeral procession of Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of
Quo Vadis?
who had died in Switzerland during the War, through the streets of the city on its way to Poland.

Ruined but unresentful Vienna - that ‘great wheel turning in the air’, as C. A. Macartney was shortly to describe it - received us with such open and friendly arms that we had to spend only the night hours of our month there in the cold and economical
Pension
in the Dorotheergasse, where a quarrel between landlord and tenants as to who should put in central heating resulted in the virtual absence of warmth during that bright and freezing November. But Vienna so much preferred our literary to our political selves that even the downfall of the British Labour Party in the Zinoviev Letter Election hardly entered into one conversation, and seemed less important to our cultured, agreeable entertainers than the publication of Winifred’s second novel,
The Crowded Street
, just before we went on to Budapest. Here, at last, where the Danube, slow-flowing and pompous, ran darkly grey between banks powdered with snow, we found the League of Nations popular on account of its financial reconstruction scheme and the Hungarian loan.

At the end of November, with our money and energy alike exhausted, we went back to London. What, I wondered, as the express from Vienna began its journey to Ostend by a route only just reopened after the Ruhr occupation, had really emerged from the three months spent in the sorrowful region that we were now re-crossing? What was the true value of the huge collection of ‘facts’ that we had amassed? Wherever, from Paris to Budapest, our investigations had taken us, the unanswerable case of one country was immediately contradicted in the next; the minority population which constituted the oppressed of one State became the oppressor as soon as it crossed the border. How near, in that fog of grievances, resentments, conflicting statements, selected statistics, ‘logical’ arguments and furious propaganda, had we ever come to anything approaching reality?

‘If Jesting Pilate were to return to-day and to visit Central Europe,’ I wrote later in an article accepted by the
Nation
, ‘he would be moved to ask his unanswerable question not once but many times. In the occupied territories . . . sincerity is unavailing, and conscience loses its power as a guide. You may go into Germany filled with a lofty zeal to discover and to tell the truth, but you will come out again sorrowfully realising that this is the one thing you cannot do. You will seek and you will not find; you will ask, and much will be given unto you, but never that which you demanded. The proverbial well is too shallow a hiding-place in which to look for the imprisoned Truth. In the Saar Valley, at least, she is buried in nothing more accessible than the bottom of a coal-pit.’

It was of those occupied territories especially that I found myself thinking as twilight shrouded the melancholy land of our former enemies, and at midnight I awoke from a brief doze to see, once more, the lights reflected in the black expanse of the Rhine at Cologne, and the Hohenzollern Bridge, like the skeleton of some immense prehistoric beast, darkly astride across the river. In earnest, energetic, self-satisfied Czechoslovakia, in vivacious, passionate Hungary, in resigned, easy-going Austria, where every political conversation at the numerous and agreeable tea-parties to which we were invited had glided by imperceptible but rapid stages back to the all-absorbing topics of books and music, there appeared to be literally no answer to Pilate’s question, but in Germany the after-effects of war were visible and tangible; its misery and humiliation existed in grim independence of dogmatic opinions ingeniously expressed.