Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (90 page)

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 byways 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.’

8

From Düsseldorf, a bright, clean town adorned with golden dahlias and purple asters, where the depression that crushed the great German cities seemed to weigh more lightly and it was a relief once again to be less ferociously hated than our fellow-conquerors, we went into the Ruhr and spent a dark, rainy day in Essen.

After so much lecturing and writing about this tormented industrial area, to enter it in the flesh renewed the queer, painful elation of adventure that had sprung from foreign service in wartime. Its family resemblance to our own Black Country was far more striking than that of the Saar Valley, I thought, as we passed through Grossenbaum and Duisburg and Mülheim, with their huge factories of iron and steel, and their stacks of tall, grey chimneys standing erect against the dull yellow sky.

At Essen the American Quakers received us enthusiastically, and regaled us for over an hour with grim details of unemployment and inflation, and the bitter poverty of the stricken middle classes. Since the inflation period neither professional nor industrial workers had had any savings with which to face unemployment, and now they lived more simply than anyone from England would believe possible, with scarcely any meat or butter, and potatoes as their staple diet. It was true, said the Quakers, that the black apprehension of the previous year, with its fear of bread riots and revolution, had diminished since the London Conference; the long tale of expulsions and arrests and imprisonments was almost over, but the small irritations and indignities, which were so much more characteristic of the day-by-day occupation than its occasional terrors, continued to oppress the Ruhr population, and though the evacuation of Dortmund had been proclaimed, the French were still in possession of the town.

Would we care, the Quakers finally inquired, to be taken over Krupps’ Works before we left? Receiving our surprised and eager assent, they dispatched us through the damp, sombre streets with a young German who introduced us to one of the Krupp directors, and left us, expectant but a little intimidated, at the door of his office. The director, a saturnine, unfriendly man with an arm paralysed as the result of a war-wound, abruptly bade us follow him, and led us through a series of long, dark passages to the doorway of a lift.

As he pushed back the gates with his uninjured hand I looked nervously at his stiff figure, his useless arm, his grim, implacable face. Hostile and resentful, he quite obviously regarded us with hatred. Here were these inquisitive, officious, domineering English again, and this time, what was worse, merely two young women; and yet, to please those Quakers from America - the only country left on earth which was still rich and still generous - he was required to waste his time in showing them round the Works! The silence in the slowly ascending lift was like an ultimatum.