In Germany I had long talks with some of their leading politicians, bankers, and financial experts, whose figures and statements I checked by consultation with our own Ambassador and political observers. It was not without a thrill of cold emotion, and dark remembrance, that I stood for the first time in the Reichstag and saw all around me those men who had been the propagandists of hate against England, the supporters of the War Lords, the faithful servants of the Kaiser and his Chancellors, up to the last throw in their gamblers’ game with fate, when all was lost. There was Scheidemann, the Social Democrat who had voted for all the war subsidies until the hour of defeat, when he voted for the new Republic. There was Stresemann, the leader of the People’s Party, and an avowed Monarchist, in spite of all that had happened. There was Bernsdorff, the intriguer in America, up to his neck in conspiracy with dynamiters and Sinn Feiners and spies. These men filled me with distrust. Their new profession of good will to England had a hollow sound. Yet these, and others, spoke with the utmost frankness about Germany’s condition, and for their own reasons did not hide the desperate menace of that gamble with national finance by which they hoped to postpone the inevitable crash. I was more deeply interested in the mentality of the ordinary German folk and their way of life. A strain of pacifism seemed to be working among them, and they were sick and saddened by their loss of blood in the war, terrible in its sum of death. But the very name of France inflamed their passion. “We are all pacifists,” said one man I met. “We want no more war—except one!” The humiliation of the French occupation on the Rhine, the continued insults of the French press, above all, the presence of Moroccan troops in German cities, instilled a slow poison of hate into every German mind. It made me afraid of the future....
XXII
In the spring of 1921 I lay on the deck of the steamship Gratz, 7,000 tons, once Austrian and now flying the Italian flag, bound from Brindisi to Constantinople. With me as a comrade was my young son.
Our fellow passengers were a strange company, mostly Jews from America, Germany, and Greece, going to sell surplus stocks, if they could, to merchants in Pera. They talked interminably in terms of international exchange, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, drachmas, and kronen, and raised their hands to the God of Abraham, because of the stagnation of the world’s markets. There was also a sprinkling of dark-complexioned, somber-eyed men of uncertain nationality until we came in sight of Constantinople, when they changed their bowler hats or cloth caps for the red fez of Islam. One of them was very handsome and elegant, with a distinguished but arrogant manner. I tried to get into conversation with him, but he answered coldly and in monosyllables until we passed the narrows of the Dardanelles when his eyes glowed with a sudden passion, and he told me he had fought against the British there, below the hill of Achi Baba. It had been a great victory, he said, for Turkish arms.
There were some queer women aboard, international in character, given to loud, shrill laughter and amorous ogling. One of them, a buxom creature of middle age, drank champagne at night in the smoking saloon with one of the American Jews, enormously fat, foul in conversation, free with his money, who seemed to covet her favor, and was jealous of a young Turk who, unlike others of his race aboard, was as noisy as a schoolboy and played pranks all day long up and down the ship.
A young British officer, now “demobbed,” was resuming his career as a commercial traveler in woollen vests and socks. He showed me his diary. Before the war he had made as much as £3,000 in one year, as commission on business with Turkish merchants in Constantinople, Stamboul, Smyrna. He spoke well of the Turks’ commercial honesty. Their word was good. They had always paid for orders. A simple soul, this young man who had been a temporary officer in the Great War, believed that trade was reviving and that Europe would recover quickly from the effects of war.
There were others on board who did not think so. “After Austria—Germany,” said the fat American Jew. Lying on the sun-baked decks I listened to conversations by these students of international business, as, for two years and more, since the war, I had been listening to the talk of men and women in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria-Germany, Canada, and the United States. It was always the same. They had no certainty of peace, no sense of security, but rather an apprehension of new conflicts in Europe and outside Europe, a fear of revolution, anarchy, and upheaval of forces beyond the control of men like themselves of international mind, business common sense. But here, on this boat, there was talk of peoples and forces not generally discussed in these other conversations to which I had listened, in wayside taverns, in railway trains, in wooden huts on the old battlefields, in the drawing-rooms of London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and New York.
“The Angora Turks have got to be reckoned with.” ... “Greece is out for a big gamble.” ... “The Armenians have not all been massacred.” ... “The East is seething like a cauldron.” ... “It’s the oil that will put all the fat in the fire.” ... “The Bolshies have got Batoum.” ... “Mesopotamia means oil.” ... “Russia is not dead yet, and make no mistake!” ... “My God! This peace is just a breathing space before another bloody war.” ... “It’s a world gone mad.” ... “What we want is business.”