Vienna was its bulbous head, a great capital of over two million people without the means of life. He described the dance of death there, the starvation of women and children, the misery of the mean streets, the ruin of the intellectuals and the professional classes. In the hotels and restaurants and café concerts, foreigners were gathering like vampires to feed on the mortality of that old centre of civilisation. Austrian Jews and international gamblers, making paper fortunes out of the fluctuations of paper money, guzzled and gorged in an orgy of vice with girls who sold their smiles for the sake of a meal or an evening’s warmth.
The old palaces of Vienna still stood, the great mansions and cathedrals and churches and art galleries and museums remained as the heritage of a splendid past, but the life that made them had gone. When they began to crumble there would be no money to repair them. No man or woman could follow the pursuit of beauty and truth, painting or music or science, as in the old days. They must either get back to the land, and grub a sparse life out of the soil, or starve to death. So it was with other countries, the little new nations of the Baltic, the great Empire of Russia.
He’d not been into Russia—it pulled him tremendously, he must get there somehow—yet out on the frontier he’d met the refugees, and heard their tale of misery. In Russia civilisation was passing, had almost passed.
He would have to go to Russia before long to see the truth of things. There was a famine coming which would destroy millions of people. Disease was already rife, amounting to pestilence. Again, there, the only people who could live at all were those who stayed close to the soil, and were desperate in defence of their own produce.
Was Europe, a large part of it, going to return to the Peasant State? That might happen. That would be something to cling to, though not civilisation as it had been built up through centuries of struggle. But worse than that might happen.
He’d been to Berlin and other German towns. What was happening there? An immense industry of a people over-strained by war, crushingly defeated, beaten to the earth in pride, but desperate to regain their place in the world and defend their national existence. They were working with an astounding energy, adapting their immense genius to the necessities of this peace and its penalties. Krupps’ which had made great guns, were now turning out sewing-machines, reapers and binders, cash registers, razors, anything of metal for the markets of the world. But the indemnities put upon them by the victors made all their energy fruitless. The mark was dropping in value week by week. Every time they paid their indemnities it dropped lower with a rush. The printing presses poured out new marks. That enabled them to undercut their rivals in every market of the world, but at the same time they were bleeding themselves to death.
Meanwhile France was putting on the screw, goading the Germans to hatred again, making them vow vengeance, some time, some day, in the future, however far ahead. France was ready to ruin the whole world rather than let Germany get up again, and the whole world, and England first, would be ruined, if Germany were to go the way of Austria and plunge over the precipice into national bankruptcy.
There were evil forces at work everywhere, forces of cruelty, and greed, and stupidity, and hatred. The men of the Old Order were keeping a grip on the machinery of Government, arranging new balances of power, making new alliances for an “inevitable” war. Hostile to them, were those out to destroy all civilisation, at any cost, the revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, the fanatics allied with the murderers and the cave-men of life.
In between those two extremes, poor patient people, desiring peace, were bewildered by the non-fulfilment of all their hopes after so much sacrifice, and in their ignorance turning this way and that, to false gods, to those who appealed to their lower passions, to those who doped them with the greatest falsehoods. There was no truth-teller to whom the masses would listen. No high and noble leadership, but only corrupt and unclean men, holding on to power, or little men, honest in a little way, clinging to their jobs.
Other forces were at work, biological, evolutionary, and mysterious forces, which no man could understand or govern. There was a new restlessness in the soul of humanity. Some great change was happening, or about to happen. The old checks and balances had become unhinged, in the minds of men, in the spirit of peoples, in great races. The coloured peoples of the world were stirring. Some yeast in them was rising. Some passion of desire. India, Egypt, Africa, Mesopotamia, were seething with the spirit of revolt. He had been in the East. He had seen something of it. The white races would have to take care. There were other races waiting for their place. Japan and China were changing in “the unchanging East.”