CHAPTER II
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL (continued)
The secretariat of the Conference had its headquarters at the Belle Vue Hotel. The Conference itself was held in the Volkshaus, the headquarters of the Socialists. This fine building in the heavy German style comprised within itself an hotel, a theatre, a restaurant, a lecture-hall, and any number of Trade Union committee rooms. The funds for its building were supplied by the members of the Party and the Municipality jointly. If this were the only building of its kind in Switzerland it would be remarkable; but I very much doubt if there are a dozen cities of any size in the whole of Central Europe which have not a similar Labour Temple. Some of these buildings are very fine indeed, and can lay claim to a certain architectural distinction. Their numbers put to shame the British Labour Movement, which has not a single building set apart for the social uses of all its members.
Similarly with their newspapers: The Daily Herald is the only daily newspaper in Great Britain which can claim to represent organized Labour in the slightest degree, and the Daily Herald is not the property of the Labour Party, which has no right to dictate its policy nor control in any way its activities. In Germany alone, before the war, there were more than sixty Socialist dailies.
The necessity of frequent meeting obliged all the British delegates to remove from the charming pension, to which some of their number had gone, to the Belle Vue Hotel. This public palace could tell strange tales if its walls could speak. Some day a writer will appear who will tell the true story of this modern Babel; but he will have to wait until this generation is dead and gone before he publishes it, or else commit suicide when it appears! It housed the most extraordinary medley of princes and peasants, dukes and dockers, ex-kings and Socialist presidents ever collected in one building since the Great War turned the world upside down! In the wake of these illustrious or dangerous personalities crept that indigenous growth of the centre of diplomatic life and political activity, the political agent or spy.
Unaccustomed to the society of this individual I never sought him. Unaware of his existence before the war I never recognized him. He may have spoken to me. It is possible he extracted enough information from me to fill several sheets of a report and earn his squalid wages; but the fear of him never obsessed me. It was painful to observe how suspicious everybody was of everybody else. Nobody dared to speak freely. You realized that your companion, whoever he might be, was making reservations and preparing an escape when he was talking to you. Nervousness showed itself in every gesture, fear in every glance.
To be an object of suspicion oneself is not pleasant. To have to be frightened of everybody else is disgusting. I refused to do it. I would avoid nobody. I would speak to everybody who wanted to speak to me on serious business. I wouldn’t pay any attention to his nationality beyond the inquiry necessary for an intelligent appreciation of his conversation. So far as I was concerned there was nothing to hide. What I felt and thought about the political situation I was prepared to say from a public platform, and did so, not only in this Conference, but later in Zurich, at the Women’s Conference held there in June. I had come to Switzerland on a mission of reconciliation, and it was obvious from the first hour that the personal touch and warm human sympathy were more needed and would be more warmly appreciated than any number of Conference resolutions.
A friend—one of those well-known friends possessed by everybody, who always hasten to tell one the unpleasant things—told me that I was in the reports of the spies of every Legation in the city. “Splendid!” I said. “It will give them something to think about, and will keep them all guessing.”
I made four separate journeys from London to Berne between January and July of 1919. On various occasions during that period I heard a great deal about myself that I had never known before! I was a dangerous Bolshevik! I was a spy of Clemenceau’s! I was a British agent! I was an active pro-German! I was an anti-German pretending to sympathize with Germany! I was aiding and abetting the royalists of the ex-enemy states! I was an anarchist in disguise! I was in the American Secret Service! I was a pro-Turk! I was a friend of Karolyi’s! I was a secret Communist posing as a moderate! I was a pacifist!
Of all these stories only the last was true. And in these days, when I hear pacifists defend the methods of Bolshevism, I want to have a definition of that word before I desire to be classed under it.
Poor little spies! They have to earn their salaries, so this is the sort of thing they say. A chance phrase in their hearing, and you are promptly labelled. You take tea with a charming princess who speaks a little English, and wants to practise on you, and you are in some Royalist plot! You talk to a polished French diplomat with a Scottish ancestry, as I talked with Lieutenant Gilles of the French Embassy, and you must be in the pay of the French! You entertain a sweet English lady who is the very lonely wife of a German attaché and you are a pro-German! You seek knowledge from some authoritative person on one of the thousand questions in which you are interested, not knowing that he is the agent of one Government, and the spy of another Government reports you his confederate!