It was this occupation of the Ruhr—the threat of its happening, the entry of the French troops, and the results of it—which poisoned the relations between England and France, flung Germany back into the arms of her Nationalists, and thwarted all efforts of international good will in the spirit of the League of Nations. It kept the wounds of war open and salted in Central Europe. It checked the economic recovery of all nations dependent upon Germany as buyers and sellers. France failed to get her reparations, and instead of building up security the policy of Poincaré made a future war between the two nations almost inevitable by stirring a cauldron of boiling pitch. It turned the justice of the War into an injustice of peace, with the Germans as the victims of injustice. For how could they pay reparations if their industrial heart was strangled? And how could they submit to a military tyranny over their great working population from an enemy which had professed to fight the war for liberty and democracy? How could any peace be justified which enabled a foreign army, after war, to hold up the chief industries of a great country, to destroy the machinery of its life, to coerce its workers at the point of the bayonet, to expel them when they refused to work under their military command, to take their money, to fling out their furniture, to imprison their working chiefs, to cut off their food supplies, to prevent their intercourse with their own folk, to deal with the passive resistance of proud and hungry men as though it were a crime against France, to use their whips in German theatres, to terrorise the inhabitants of a great district, to break their spirit by a thousand tyrannies, insults, humiliations and brutalities? That was how the Germans argued, and the argument stands in the soul of Germany as a memory that must one day be wiped out in blood. I think France under Poincaré was unwise in giving to Germany that sense of injustice and that cause of vengeance. I think France under Herriot thinks so too, although it cannot forget, as none of us can forget, the abominable acts of German officers and men during time of war in France and Belgium.
The argument on the French side was logical enough, to a certain point, where its logic broke abruptly. France, as its mind was expressed by Poincaré, said: “These people have not paid us. They are not trying to pay us. They are in wilful and flagrant default.”
They paid no attention to the German reply that they had paid all they could—enormous sums—and could pay no more without utter ruin. In any case, they did not yet know the fixed sum of their debt, and the figures France demanded were beyond the capacity of any nation on earth.
“Very well,” said the French, “we will take pledges for future payment. We will send the bailiff into the house; we will hold the Ruhr until Germany realises the inevitable and makes better arrangements to pay. Meanwhile, whether she pays or not, we shall weaken her power of recovery, postpone the time when she is able to challenge us again, and hold her by the throat for the security of France. Excellent plan, both ways! Perfectly justified in law and equity.”
Where France failed in logic was in the combination of two ideas which were mutually destructive. She might gain military security (for a time) by weakening Germany and keeping a grip on her jugular vein, but she could not gain reparations at the same time and by the same method. Above all, her logic on the point of security would fail at some future date—twenty years, forty years, sixty years, when the German people would be strong enough to fight for the liberty of their life, by the mere weight of increasing population inspired by passion and armed with new weapons. France would have done better to seek the security of world opinion in support of her just claims instead of risking this lonely adventure against the judgment of her friends. That, I think, was the verdict of the Dawes Report. It was certainly the verdict of British opinion among moderate-minded folk, long before the Ruhr episode had ended in the financial downfall of Germany and explosive passion.
The German Separatists
What further excited the bitter hatred of the Germans was the effort of French generals and political agents to detach the loyalty of the Rhineland from the German Empire by encouraging bodies of “Separatists,” who proclaimed a Rhineland Republic. Led by a very doubtful but plausible gentleman named Dr. Dorten, whom I met in the early days of the British occupation, these “Separatists” were mostly youths of the disorderly class and men of criminal type supported by a few sincere fanatics. Many of them were in the pay of the French. Their movement was regarded as black treachery by patriotic Germans, and when the French troops stood by the Separatists while they seized public buildings and murdered German police, previously disarmed by French orders, fury was unrestrained among the German people. French policy, in this matter at least, was a blunder, because from the first the Separatist movement had no basis of reality nor any chance of success. It was an illusion of French politicians who let their wish be father to their thoughts.
“The Black Horror”
Another cause of hatred in Germany, amounting to a mad rage which made them see red, was the use of coloured troops in the French zone of occupation. Under the name of “The Black Horror,” German propaganda exaggerated and falsified the hideous aspects of this last humiliation to their pride. It was asserted that masses of African negroes had been let loose in the Rhineland to assault white women and brutalise white men. The French denied that they were using any black troops, and this was perhaps technically true, although I saw with my own eyes Seneghalese negroes on the banks of the Rhine. But they were not fighting troops. They were transport men, lorry drivers, and ambulance drivers, in the blue uniform and steel hat of the French poilu. I saw the inhabitants of Bonn shudder and sicken at the sight of them. But it was true that the French did employ large numbers of Moroccan soldiers in German towns. They were not black, they were not even “nearly black,” and in race they belonged to the same Mediterranean peoples from which the French themselves have sprung. But that made no difference in German psychology, and I sympathise with their detestation of being controlled and put under the menace of Moroccan troops who, whatever shade their colour and historical ancestry, do not belong to our European type of civilisation, such as it is, and should not be put in military power over European populations. The British use of Indian troops in the white man’s war, and the American use of black battalions, were, in my judgment, similar errors which may cost us dear. But it was more than an error to use Moroccans in time of peace among German citizens who resented their presence as a shameful insult. These things are beyond argument. They belong to the realm of instinct. It was handing the Germans another cause of hatred.