Of course, if the economic policy of the Treaty is ever realised and we artificially stimulate the production of Germany and strangle its consumption, we shall, if the country recovers, and is resigned to work under such conditions, run a real danger of a dumping of a most dangerous character. The semi-servile employment of the Germans could under such conditions be used to fight the efforts of our workmen for economic freedom; just as the semi-servile enlistment of Hessians and Hanoverians was used to fight the efforts of our American colonies for political freedom. But this policy, if policy it is, depends on whether and when Germany is sufficiently recovered to work again.
When we measure the exhaustion of Germany on the one side against the enormity of its burdens on the other, it is difficult to believe that it can ever recover in the near future. German economic life has had to endure three crushing blows—the war, the revolution, and the peace. It was financially ruined by the war, industrially ruined by the revolution, and economically ruined by the peace terms. Little need be said as to the financial ruin caused by the war. In its general lines it is the same as that suffered by all belligerent peoples; in its details it would require a book to itself. War losses reduced the industrial, agricultural, and mental producing power of the male population by about a fifth, which may well be doubled to cover the reduced productivity of the remainder due to physical anæmia and political agitation. The productivity of the soil was reduced by over a quarter, owing to want of labour and fertilisers. Livestock was reduced by two-thirds. Deadstock, including industrial plant, railway rolling stock, shipping, buildings, etc., was all much more reduced in value than with us, owing to the greater material concentration of Germany on its war effort. The State was bankrupt even in the opinion of the most optimistic. But all this was remediable, even rapidly remediable, as soon as the people recovered their vitality. And then came the armistice which for nine months blockaded and bled the patient. If one were to enquire which of the particular bleedings most contributed to his relapse into his present condition of coma one would choose the taking away of the 5,000 locomotives. The tie up of internal transportation that followed did more than anything else to injure the economic vitality of the country.
German unity was economic rather than political in its origin and dates from the Zollverein and the railway system. Germany was made a nation economically by railway construction in the '`forties'; though, unfortunately, the attempt to realise this unity politically on a liberal basis, in 1848, failed. Even in the present Constitution, we can recognise the degree to which the railways are relied on for binding the country together across the mediæval barriers of provincial frontiers. It was to some extent realisation of its political importance that made the German railway system the pride of the country; and it was the manner in which this system met the extraordinary demands of modern warfare that enabled Germany to exploit strategically to the full its internal position and fight a war on four fronts. And now the condition of the railways is a striking illustration of the economic and political conditions of the country.
Here is an account of a journey from Berlin to Munich undertaken last Easter.
In peace time, if you wanted to go to Munich from Berlin there were half a dozen trains daily which did the journey in seven or eight hours, and provided reading cars, eating cars, and sleeping cars at a rate no more than an English third-class fare. Even after the war one train daily only took eighteen hours, and the second-class carriages, though very crowded, were comfortable enough. So, when I was warned that if I wanted to see the Russian Communist régime in Munich at work I must lose no time, it seemed worth spending Easter week examining whether Russian Bolshevism can take root in Germany. As a matter of fact, I got just twenty-four hours in Munich, the rest of the week going in travelling.
The first difficulty was a strike of bank clerks, so that I had to leave short of money. The next was that owing to the coal strike all passenger trains in Saxony had stopped running, and the only route open was round by Frankfort. The Spa night express was, of course, running; a long train of sleepers for the Allied officers and official or officious personages, and a few ordinary carriages. Thanks to some British Tommies, for whom a first-class carriage was reserved, failing to turn up, I got a seat, and so comfortably enough to Cassel about dawn. There I found that the suspension of passenger traffic had been extended, and that a hundred miles of dead country lay between me and Würtemberg, where trains still ran. Fortunately, a party of prisoners from England were being sent south on a goods train, and I got leave from the Red Guard to join them. The station officials objected strongly, but the prisoners, some of whom had been reading The Daily News, overruled them.
And so, bumping slowly along on a wooden bench all day, discussing, cooking and card-playing with the prisoners, past stations with names reminiscent of pre-war high living. Leaving the goods yard at Frankfort about ten that night, I was lucky enough to run across a motor-bus just starting for Darmstadt, in Würtemberg, and got there about one in the morning with a jolly party of South Germans. Three hours on a waiting-room bench, and then at dawn on Easter Monday a train south into Baden, and then from Heidelberg east through Würtemberg.
All this country seemed to have suffered little from the war and to be wonderfully happy and prosperous. The change came again in the afternoon after crossing the Bavarian frontier and climbing slowly up on to the Swabian plateau. Down in Baden it was full spring, with fruit trees in bloom and warm sunshine. Here was winter, a bitter east wind and snow flurries, bare uplands and dark pine woods.
After passing Ulm were the first signs of the winter of discontent, some telegraph poles sawn through. And finally, just when a bed at Augsburg after two nights up seemed assured, we were all turned out about eleven at night at a miserable Swabian village called Dinckelscherben. There was fighting in Augsburg and all access to the town was barred by the Würtemberg troops there.
It was freezing hard, with a bitter wind, and I joined a forlorn party of some score travellers who wandered about knocking vainly at the doors of the big farms that made up the village—no Swabian farmer opens to a stranger at midnight these days. The only beerhouse was packed two deep with travellers from an earlier train, but took in the women on our threatening to storm it. The rest started off to tramp the rails to Augsburg, seventeen miles away; but as this meant abandoning my provisions I broke into a hayloft and bested the rude Swabian boor. The bauer by daylight was somewhat less of a Swab and gave me milk for my porridge, the first I had had for three months. He also produced at a price a queer little shay, with a half-broken Ukrainian, swerving erratically about beside a long pole, in which I drove over the plateau to Augsburg, getting there about noon.