“It is not the Clemenceaus and the Ludendorffs of the world, but your Wilsons, your Lloyd Georges, your idiotic idealists who are bringing it to ruin.” He glanced at me to see if I were offended. “Please go on,” I murmured. “You interest me deeply.”
“Your idealists have promised the people impossible things, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, for instance, Lloyd George’s wonderful phrases, Asquith’s war-time speeches, the Russian manifestoes, numberless ministers of religion with no more knowledge of international politics than the Bibles they thump. They have told the stupid masses that this is a holy war; that the peace will be based upon justice: that nothing but good is intended the German people, if they will only get rid of their blood-stained Kaiser. The same sort of amiable idiots in Germany believe this sort of thing. All Germans, with the exception of a few so-called pan-Germans, are intoxicating themselves with the thought that liberty is born anew; that militarism is dead for ever; that with the new German democracy the Allied democracies will make a fair and democratic peace. Pathetically relying on the Fourteen Points, they are pre-figuring a glorious future for free Germany, its place in the sun assured according to plan, a member of the great Society of Nations which shall maintain the peace of the world. Poor deluded wretches! What an awakening there will be!”
All this was in Berne during the International.
We left the Zurich conference hall together and discovered a little café famous for its good tea and delicious pastries. Not a word did we speak for many minutes. I was filled with awe at the spectacle of his misery. The ordinarily smiling brown eyes were black with pain, the pain of a suffering dumb animal. He lit a cigarette. The silence continued. I felt like an intruder gazing in at the windows of a man’s stricken soul; but to retire would have been unsympathetic. So I stayed and poured out the tea and waited in silence for the speech that I hoped might come.
“How can you sit there looking so fresh and beautiful? How can the sun go on shining and the birds continue to sing when the world is really dark and black and sunk in rottenness?” was the beginning.
“You feel it more than you expected?” I asked, reminding him of the Berne conversation.
“It is so much worse than I expected. I did not expect much, God knows. But this thing—it means famine, anarchy, war in Europe for twenty, thirty, forty years!” I waited patiently.
“Germany is to pay the uttermost farthing for the damage she did to civilians, which is not unreasonable; an enormous amount of the war damage, of which I do not complain; but also incalculable sums for the mischief for which she is not responsible, or only in part, which is wrong. At the same time practically all the means by which she is to make the money are to be taken from her—ships, minerals, colonies. She is to be disarmed and her deadly enemy is to remain fully armed. Any fool can see where that will lead. And the worst is not told. The slow starvation of Germany, the lynch-pin of European civilization, will mean incredible moral decline and spiritual degradation. Millions of people will think food, talk food, dream food, steal food, lie for food, bribe, corrupt and even murder for food. What man would see his wife and children die of hunger whilst food was to be had? Masses of disbanded soldiers, for whom there will be no work, will enlist for adventures, will quarrel, fight and kill, either for subsistence or in the service of the enemies of their country, having no choice, if they are to live. The new states will be insolent, ambitious, tyrannical, unscrupulous. Instead of one big war there will be twenty little ones—war never ceasing, war for crude material things. Art, music, literature, the drama—these will decay. First class artists will go to America where they can be paid. Grass will grow in decayed cities and ignorant peasants will instal themselves in the seats of power. We shall have restored the age of bigotry and superstition. Central Europe will not merely be Balkanized; it will be atomized. Our horizon will decline to the level of each man’s immediate family, if he has a conscience. He will have no horizon but himself if he has none. And as for your ideals”—here he paused—“the failure of Wilson has made faith in them impossible to revive for decades, if ever again. Faith in the pledged word of public men, faith in idealism, faith in religion—this is dying or dead. And our idealists have killed it, not the men who never professed more than the crudest material objectives in this war. Wilson and Lloyd George between them have damaged the world’s moral currency infinitely more than the Treaty of Peace has damaged the financial currency of Germany; and the world is poorer by the loss of the one than of the other, grave though that is.”
As the passionate words fell from his lips I felt humiliated to the very dust for the failure that I felt myself to embody. Weeping in a public place is not a habit of mine or I might have wept. But if my friend saw no tears, he must have felt the sympathy, for as we rose to go to the University he said:
“But justice and sanity owe much to you. I am grateful for your speech of this morning. It will have no effect. It will accomplish nothing. But it is good to know there are some with the courage to speak what they believe even when it is on behalf of a beaten foe. And the German women will be grateful for your protest against the blockade.”