Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

He smiled through his spectacles, took hold of my wrist as I went down on one knee, according to etiquette, hauled me up with a firm grip, and led me to two gilt chairs, side by side. “Now we can talk,” he said in French, and he sat in one chair and I in the other, in that big room where we were alone together.

In a second my nervousness left me, and we had what the Americans call a heart-to-heart talk. The Pope did not use any fine phrases. He asked me a lot of questions about the state of Europe, the feeling in England and America, and then spoke about the war and its effects. Several times he called the war “a Scourge of God,” and spoke of his efforts to mitigate its misery and relieve some of its agonies. He alluded to the abuse he had received from both sides because of his neutrality and his repeated efforts on behalf of peace, and then waved that on one side and entered into a discussion on the economic effects of war. He saw no quick way of escape from ruin, no rapid means of recovery. “We must steel ourselves to poverty,” he said, and alluded to the great illusion of masses of people, duped by their leaders, that, after the destruction of the world’s wealth, there could be the same prosperity. He spoke sternly of the profiteers, and in a pitying way of the poverty-stricken peoples. “The rich must pay,” he said. “Those who profited out of the war must pay most.” His last words, after a twenty-minutes’ talk, were a plea for charity and peace in the hearts of peoples.

All the time he was talking, I had in the back of my mind the doubt whether I might publish this conversation, and whether, indeed, he knew my profession and purpose. I could not leave him with that doubt, and asked him, with some trepidation, if I might publish the words he had spoken to me. He smiled, and said, “It is the purpose of this conversation.”

I hurried back to my hotel, and wrote a full account, and then desired to submit it for approval to the prelate who had obtained this great consent. But he waved it on one side, and said, “You can write what you like, and publish what you like, provided it is the truth. We trust you!”

I did not abuse that trust, and my interview with the Pope was quoted in every newspaper in the English-speaking world, and created a very favorable effect.

The raid on Fiume by d’Annunzio was a passionate assertion of Imperial claims denied by the Great Powers which have made a peace regarded by Italy as a robbery of all its rightful claims, but this new manifestation of militarism was offset by the capture of factories by Communist workers and the hoisting of the Red Flag in many industrial towns. Beneath the beauty of Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, I saw the ugly shadow of revolution and anarchy.

I went from Trieste to Vienna, and saw worse things in a city deliberately doomed by the Allied Powers—a city of two million people which had once been the capital of a great Empire, the brilliant flower of an old civilization, and now was cut off from all its old resources of wealth and life. In slum streets and babies’ crêches, and hospital wards, away from the wild vice and gayety of great hotels and dancing halls crowded with foreigners and profiteers, I saw the children of a starving city, stricken with rickets, scrofula, all kinds of hunger-diseases, and so weak that children of six or seven had no hardness of bone, so that they couldn’t stand up or sit up, and had bulbous heads above their wizened bodies. The women could not feed their babes for lack of milk. Men like skeletons in rags slouched about the streets, begging with clawlike hands. Ladies of good family could not buy underclothing or boots. Professional men, aristocrats, Ministers of State, lived on thin soup, potatoes, war bread, and the very nurses in the hospitals were starving. The Austrian kronen became worth hardly more than waste paper, and despair had settled upon this great and beautiful city.

I went on to Germany, deeply curious to know what had happened in the soul and state of this people after their tremendous struggle and their supreme defeat. I found there an immense pride of resistance to the consequence of defeat, an utter repudiation of war guilt, an intense vital energy and industry by which they hoped to recapture their lost trade and economic supremacy in Europe, a friendly feeling toward England, a deadly hatred toward France. Outwardly there was no sign of poverty or despair. There were no devastated regions, like those in France, no tidal wave of unemployment, like that in England. All the great engineering works, like those of Krupp which had provided a vast output of artillery and munitions for a world war, had adapted their machinery to the purposes of peace, and were manufacturing railway engines, agricultural machines, typewriters, kitchen utensils, everything that is made of metal, for the world’s needs. It was staggering in its contrast to the lack of energy, the commercial stagnation, the idleness and debility of other war-tired peoples.

But, again, I tried to see below the surface of things, and I saw that this feverish activity was not based on sound foundations of material life, but on a rotten financial system and unhealthy laws. The workingman was underpaid and underfed, and the victim of a system of slave labor. The professional classes were in dire poverty, and what money they earned and saved lost its value day by day, because the German Government was deliberately inflating its paper money by racing the printing presses with issues of false notes which had no reality to back them. German export trade was capturing the world’s markets, but only by underselling to a rate which gave no real industrial profit. And whatever wealth Germany made, or could make, was earmarked for reparations and indemnities which, when the day of reckoning came, would make a mockery of all her efforts, reveal the great sham of her paper money, cast her into the depths of ruin, and mock at the demands of France and her Allies for the payment of those debts of war upon which they counted for their own needs and escape from ruin.