Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

While corruption permeates the upper and middle levels, robbery and crime are widespread among the working-classes. Thieving has become a normal quantity in daily life; crimes of all kinds are common. Official figures were published in Cologne during July 1920, showing the large increase in criminality throughout the district as compared with the previous year. Serious crimes had increased by 45 per cent., housebreaking 44 per cent., robberies in shops, warehouses, etc., 95 per cent., minor robberies 85 per cent. Every man’s hand is against his neighbour; suspicion and fear poison the whole spirit of communal life. Hunger, and the general sense of demoralisation born of defeat and downfall, are responsible in the main for the increase in petty thefts. Railway wagons and warehouses containing food are robbed systematically. War is not a good school for enforcing the catechismal injunction about keeping your hands from picking and stealing. An invading army takes what it wants where it can find it, and the habit once acquired is not easily lost.

Every class of society in Germany to-day feels that, bad as things are, much worse probably has yet to come. A sentiment akin to despair is widespread. The business community, confronted with an economic situation quite hopeless in its outlook, give way in many cases to helpless fatalism about the future. Restraints are thrown off, and despair expresses itself frequently in wild extravagance. With the sword of an indefinite indemnity hanging over them, wealthy Germans feel that a spell of riotous living in which their capital disappears is preferable to handing over the latter to their enemies. The working-people, confronted not only with food shortage, but with the abnormal cost of clothing and other necessaries, grow more and more restless. All this is a dangerous temper, not only hostile to economic and social recovery, but a premium on revolution. If Allied policy is directed to creating this temper, then it must be congratulated on a success not always conspicuous as regards its efforts in other fields. The policy pursued, however, has its dangers. A hungry country, balancing the possible advantages of revolution, can pay no indemnity nor make reparation for damage done. One or two axioms in this matter are self-evident. If Germany is to pay her indemnity, she must work; she cannot work unless food and raw materials are forthcoming in adequate quantities; with her finances in ruins she cannot begin to reorganise them unless told what definite charges she has to meet; if she is to carry out her obligations, she must have a stable government which commands confidence at home and is treated with some consideration abroad. It is quite easy to pursue a policy which will make the fulfilment of all or any of these conditions impossible. But how far a deepening of the present confusion will serve the ends of the Allies, let alone promote the cause of peace, is a mark of interrogation hung in menacing fashion to-day over the welter of Europe.

CHAPTER X
CERTAIN CITIES AND THE SAAR BASIN

A fine spring morning, ten days’ leave, a motor car, the open road calling us to new sights and fresh adventures—in such good case we left Cologne one April forenoon for Wiesbaden. The plum blossom was over, but the apple blossom was in great beauty all the way. Why, one asks, cannot English roads be planted with trees whose shade is a blessing to the traveller in the summer months? And again, what happens to the fruit on the myriad trees which grow along the highways of Germany? Are German little boys endowed with virtue of such abnormal quality that they survive the chronic temptations to which they must be subjected in the matter of pears, and apples, and plums? Even the ingenious theory that the apples are cooking ones, designed if stolen to inflict adequate punishment on youthful stomachs, cannot explain away these innumerable orchards and long avenues of fruit trees. The Rhineland is a garden of enchantment when the blossom is in flower. It is a hard saying that any sight on earth can be more beautiful than an English spring at its best. And yet, with memories of an April in the Rhineland, I am bound at least to hesitate.

Thanks to the absence of smoke, there is nothing to sully the purity of the air. The vivid green of the fields, the yellow splashes of mustard, the varied tints of tree, and bush, and blossom—all this melts and glows together in the clear sunlight. Wherever the road touches the great river, the beauty of deep flowing waters is added to the scene. The Rhine maidens themselves must surely be at play in the sunshine as the Rhine sweeps by hill and vineyard. Their laughter and joyous song can be heard by fancy’s ear. Forget the presence of road, railway, and villa, and on that piece of jutting rock Siegfried must have talked with the three sisters and mocked their entreaties about the ring. The great world of Wagner’s music is connected in a special sense with the Rhine. The elemental beings with whom he peopled its banks and waters are more in the picture than prosaic tourists of our own type. Withal, who are we to grumble at the latter-day comforts of motor cars and broad highways which bring these delights within our reach? So we picnicked by the roadside in great contentment of spirits while a lark sang overhead. Wisely was it once written, “there will always be something to live for so long as there are shimmery afternoons.”

Coblenz, which we reached in due course, is a shabby city magnificently situated at the junction of the Rhine and the Mosel. No town in the Rhineland lies so nobly, overlooked as it is by the great rock of Ehrenbreitstein. The river front of Coblenz is second to none in the whole course of the stream. Yet the town itself is cramped and curiously dirty for a German city. It gives the impression of a poor place which has dropped behindhand in the race. Even the American occupation and the presence of the Rhineland High Commission have not galvanised it into life. Since the ratification of peace the Rhineland High Commission, one of the costly bodies set up by the Treaty, is technically the governing authority in occupied Germany. England, France, and Belgium are all represented on it, but by one of the ironies of the situation, though the Commission has its headquarters at Coblenz in the American area, America, being independent of the Peace Treaty, holds aloof. The wish to provide Germany with a civilian administration was no doubt excellent in theory, but the Germans are somewhat puzzled by the anomalous position of a body of this character alongside armies of occupation, and still more suspicious as to the flavour of permanence which civilian administration suggests. The Commission produces large numbers of ordinances, of which it is very proud, but it is not paper regulations, however excellent, but the power to enforce them which matters in a country under military occupation. That power rests not with the Rhineland High Commission, but with the armies. To the armies the Commission must turn when it wants anything done.

Administration, to be satisfactory, must correspond with the real facts of any given situation. The Allied Armies are in Germany as conquerors, and by right of conquest only. No civilian government set up under such conditions can be in a sound position, for civilian government is rooted in the consent of the governed—a consent which is certainly not forthcoming in this case. The long term of military occupation imposed by the Peace Treaty is open to very grave objection. Five years coupled with conditions under which Germany could have made a real effort to pay her indemnity would have been reasonable. Fifteen years, the period provided for in the French area, is very like an attempt at annexation. Security is never achieved through a régime of alien domination, and the temper bred in turn by alien domination destroys all hope of security. Occupation for a short period was not only inevitable but desirable. Prolonged for years, it is oppressive and mischievous. This being the case, the presence of foreign gentlemen in frock coats and top hats will not sweeten the unpalatable fact of occupation to the Boche. The officials of the Rhineland High Commission, many of whom are soldiers, appear sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes; a blending of garments typical perhaps of the anomalies which beset the Commission in doing its work.

Meanwhile, Coblenz must benefit by the foreign influx into the town. The Americans fly a colossal flag over the famous fortress which crowns the summit of Ehrenbreitstein. It is quite the largest flag in the Occupation. The Stars and Stripes are no less conspicuous over every public building in American occupation. If the technical position of the United States in Europe is a little uncertain at the moment, at least there is no doubt about her flag. We English adopt a different policy, and are not given to making our flag too cheap—a fact for which some of us are grateful. There is a great deal to be said for the Zulu custom of not allowing your most sacred things to be spoken about.

At Coblenz we left the river to attack the high land lying between the Rhine and Wiesbaden. We first went up the valley of the Lahn through Ems and Nassau. Both towns, watering-places of a conventional and familiar type, were at that season of the year deserted, but Ems, with its memories of the Franco-Prussian War and the intrigues of Bismarck, has a painful interest of its own. The Germans, with their mania for monuments, had commemorated the spot where the French Ambassador in 1870 received an answer from the Emperor William which was the prelude to hostilities. Is this slab one, I wonder, that Republican Germany will care to preserve when ridding itself of other souvenirs of the Hohenzollerns?

Beyond Nassau we struck up a great plateau with wonderful views, and so along what is known as the Bader Strasse to Schwalbach and Wiesbaden. The high land we crossed was a continuation of the Taunus mountains, at the feet of which Wiesbaden lies. The colouring was wonderful in the evening light as we motored along the ridge of the hills. Field and forest were bathed in a bath of blue; blue mist like some enchanter’s garment hung over the far distance. The rolling country at our feet was fertile and well cultivated, but the sense of space and distance and of mountains beyond redeemed any sense of sophistication which must result from a too obvious agriculture. Beech woods abounded, woods just caught by that moment of the spring when the delicate green buds begin to open on the lower branches of the trees, while all is brown above, and under foot lies the old gold carpet of last year’s leaves. Spring that week was in the brief but exquisite phase when she resembles a primitive Italian picture; all the coming beauty foreshadowed but none of it clearly expressed. Only here and there was the brown of the buds touched by the green of the young leaves. The call had, however, gone forth. Up every hillside, among the russet company of the woods, April waved her white ensign of cherry and blackthorn. I am glad to have travelled along the Bader Strasse on such a day in the fourth month of the year.