THE GREAT NEUTRAL.
I am the Neutral Journalist who wanders round Europe. I am absolutely impartial. I am absolutely trustworthy. My perfect integrity is vouched for at the head of all my articles. Pleasant it is to come over to London, sell one set of articles to the Boom Press and another to the Gloom Press, and then sit down with smiling face and begin an article for Germany: "I sit in a hovel amongst the ruins of Fleet Street, with the wreck of the armoured fort of St. Paul's in view. I hear a stir outside. A wild mob of conscientious objectors is beating a recruiting officer to death. Such things happen hourly in defeated Albion." My series of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham—all in ashes—has proved so successful that I propose to cover all the large towns and construct a Baedeker of ruins.
Yet I pride myself more on my work for England's Press. My German articles have all to be in the same vein. Only the Boom Press exists in Germany. But in England one can vary one's view and do artistic work. You must have read my story of the struggle for the last sausage in a Frankfort butcher's shop—how the troops intervened and the crowd attacked them, and how ultimately 1,400 civilians were mown down with machine guns—and the sausage was eaten by the General Officer commanding the Army Corps that suppressed the rising. You must also have seen my description of the Kaiser—his white hair, bent shoulders, deathlike look as he passed, protected by his Guards from the wild fury of the Berlin mob. Of course I have another Kaiser, the bright smiling man whose youth seems to have been renewed by the War, who waves his hand to the madly enthusiastic crowds waiting round the Palace for a glimpse of their divinity.
You must have read my secret interviews with distinguished Germans, who whispered to me that Hindenburg had thrown down his sword and declared that if the useless slaughter did not cease he would march on Berlin. I have told you their promises of bloody revolutions and fierce risings. Also I have given you interviews with other distinguished Germans, who confided to me that now Germany could turn out one submarine and one Zeppelin every week-day and two on Sundays, and I have thrilled you with the details of the great trade war which will come directly peace is declared, when Germany will win back all her wealth by selling everything fifty per cent. below cost.
How my dinners vary in that strange Teutonic land! I pay twenty marks for two tiny slices of fish, a thin piece of indigestible potato bread, and a section of rancid sausage. At other times I spend two marks and get a delightful meal which could not be procured in a London restaurant for five shillings. I walk through Berlin and see scarcely a cripple or a wounded man. I let you know that ninety-five per cent. of German wounded, owing to the skill of German doctors, go back to the Front in a week. To other English readers I confide that all the maimed, wounded and blind are sent into the very centre of Germany. There are huge districts without a whole man in them.
Did you ask for the actual facts? I will give you one—and it is this: the only persons in Germany whose waist-measurements have increased in the War are the neutral journalists.